David > Recent Status Updates

[...] Esto es un poco ingenuo. [...]

Do you ever get the feeling that your project is doomed, even before it starts?

If you were in a piña colada-making contest, these optimizations may make all the difference.

By tomorrow morning my career could be over.

Not even the head of SIS knew about the most secret of the secret, whose task it was to handle the most sensitive of the sensitive.

[...] Higgs demonstrated that while one could remove the massless scalar particle (aka Goldstone boson) in favor of a massive vector particle (massive photon) in his model, there would also exist a leftover massive scalar (i.e., spinless) boson particle associated with the field whose condensate broke the symmetry in the first place. The Higgs boson was born.

If we had to know all the laws of physics down to infinitesimally small scales in order to explain phenomena at the much larger scales we experience, then physics would be hopeless. We would need a theory of everything before we could ever have a theory of something.

Hostile Takeover

In English they call it "new evidence," which has a very different sound from the Swedish term, "new proof material." He had seen something entirely new, something no-one else had noticed in an investigation that had been marking time for thirty-seven years.

Harriet Vanger seemed to have dissolved into thin air, and Henrik Vanger's years of torment had begun.

The point is that it's easy to be fooled by seemingly scientific context into thinking something real when it's not. The more numbers are given, the more details we see, the more we read big, scientific-seeming words [...], the more likely we are to believe that the thing described is real.

Meditation is a way of thinking. A habit of distance that has the fortunate consequence of being self-reinforcing. One tool in the arsenal of mental techniques that can help you create the right frame of mind to attain the distance necessary for mindful, imaginative thought. It is far more attainable, and far more widely applicable, than the connotations of the word might have you believe.

Our brains aren't stupid.

Nothing. Gray void.
No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.

"I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. If smells like rain... You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. [...]"

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”

[...] the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development.

[The Declaration of] Helsinki says that research must benefit the health needs of the population where it is conducted.

"Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan".

Y como liberadas de todo temor, por la confianza que aquella sílaba obstinada, alegoría de la duración eterna, infundía a los orantes, las otras voces (sobre todo las de los novicios), apoyándose en aquella pétrea e inconmovible base, erigían cúspides, columnas y pináculos de neumas licuescentes [...]

<<¡Tú le escondías las cartas y él te mostraba el culo de los novicios en la cocina!>>.

Omne animal triste post coitum. Adquirí conciencia del hecho de que había pecado.

"[...] ¡porque no olvides que a través de la mujer penetra el diablo en el corazón de los hombres!"

"Y en cuanto a los herejes, también tengo una regla, que se resume en la respuesta de Arnaldo Amalrico, abad de Citeaux, cuando le preguntaron qué había que hacer con los ciudadanos de Béziers, ciudad sospechosa de herejía: «Matadlos a todos; Dios reconocerá a los suyos»."

"Forte potuit sed non legitur eo usus fuisse"

Public disclosure in itself is not espionage, and treating journalism as a crime is extraordinarily harmful to democracy.

When we know everything is being recorded, we are less likely to speak freely and act individually. [...] In response, we do nothing out of the ordinary. We lose our individuality, and society stagnates. We don't question or challenge power. We become obedient and submissive. We're less free.

US-based Blue Coat sells monitoring and content filtering systems for corporate networks, which are also used for government surveillance in countries like Burma, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Maintaining Internet anonymity against a ubiquitous surveillor is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous provider you're using.

"Well, Lobsang, you have now passed my personal Turing test!"