David > Recent Status Updates

Oh the tropical diseases! And polio, measles et al that afflicted the natives 500 years prior.

So many questions they want to answer, like: where did these people(s) come from? Why did they disappear so abruptly? How were they influenced by Mayan culture & when?

Just talking about mocking frameworks (java & c#). Similar to gmock for c++.

Just finished about nuclear dev w Edward Teller. Will the hydrogen bomb be seen as a scourge or a savior? May need a lot more time distance to see what happens.

Windrip's been elected but not yet inaugurated. Already he starts to try to sway power his direction. Interesting the descriptions that seem so apropos in our current time, such as the 'Manhattan peasants' concerned with dull razors and lack of meat meals.

Lots of excellent description of the terrain they will explore and the tools that will be used.

In the midst of a chapter about science and scientific reasoning. My agreement with the arguments does little (I suspect) to sway others who see things in the light he presents as the opposing view.

Windrip just got nominated for president and a number of people around Doremuss are saying they will vote for him. This after some false humility and made-up contradictory statements on his behalf at the convention.

Seems to have all the arguments I'd hope to read in a book like this - we never get artifacts only stories, and the 'evidence' that might be offered consists of things that can be faked (e.g. videos, crop circles, disturbed dirt, etc). The specific stories about abduction or alien encounters make good examples of how there can seem to be some unusualness but still a mundane explanation.

Numerous interesting references to different kinds of groups using improv activities to improve empathy - doctors, musicians, scientists.

UFOs covered, with background info about reports that were exaggerated or misquoted or just entirely made up that seem to be the basis of many of the beliefs about aliens.

He just finished a big section on health care and the crazy exec salaries and the cost differentials between the US and other countries (Canada, esp.), now he's starting on the (higher) education system and the amount of debt it's causing people.

Latest bits have been about vacations, sick time, job development, infrastructure, and related 'investment' kinds of topics, including early child care workers, too.

Much of the last section (ch. 2 of part 2 I think?) is recounting stats I've heard and read in other places - how the richest single family of the US (Waltons of Wal-Mart) own as much wealth as the poorest 130 million (yes 130,000,000) people in the country, and how much money the rich like the Kochs are spending to buy elections now that we have Citizens United. Depressing.

There were lots of suggestions about naming tests with nomenclature for the various types, then info about matchers and their differences between implementations.

Latest chapter recounted the underwhelming efforts of the SEC to investigate Lehman bros. activity before they declared bankruptcy. Despite signs that they misrepresented their balance sheets to mislead investors and analysts, and the feeling by private investigators that laws were broken, nobody was prosecuted.

Enjoyed the preface with recollections of his young life, and the start of the book with an encounter with William F. Buckley (not the famous one), a cab driver who knew lots of pseudo-science but not much 'real' science.

chapters 4 & 5 on testability from a dev's perspective and programming by contract. One interesting note was about the level of abstraction of the language used modifying how much testing at the dev level needs to be done, e.g. if the language (like Ruby) takes care of exceptions for out of range arguments, no code has to be written for such cases.