That’s how natural selection works in the jungle: sometimes the strong survive, sometimes they get bitten by a snake.

Nelson Rushton (My Thesis Advisor)

[A] calculus (plural calculi) may refer to any method or system of calculation guided by the symbolic manipulation of expressions.

Calculus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have zero doubt that given enough time, open source clones will begin to approximate what we’ve created with Stack Overflow.

Coding Horror: Code: It’s Trivial

Root out hubris and kill it.

What San Francisco/Silicon Valley can learn from the Twittering company: Zappos « Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm

XBRL is what a corporate financial statement would be like
if it were created by a mutant, alien accountant
bitten by a radioactive XML spider.

Openvest Linked Financial Data (3)

It’s an answer to the question, with the added benefit of being true!

Me

That’s like losing an arm wrestling match to oatmeal! How do you do that?!

Heard on the radio

randomness is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance

The Black Swan : page 120

You know, this idea was a loser in 1989, but it just might work today.” Experience with stuff that didn’t work can be way more valuable than experience with ideas that worked at the time. This would be how Ruby got its yield keyword. Matz knew about a language called CLU, invented in 1974-5 by Barbara Liskov and her students (Yes, she is the Liskov of the Liskov Substitution Principle). Matz borrowed yield from CLU. Was CLU a success in 1975? Perhaps not in the popularity contest. But knowing about this “old failure” allowed Matz to use its ideas in a new way to help make Ruby a “new success.

2009-01-21/old.md at master from raganwald’s homoiconic – GitHub

One news agency, noting its (the newest presidential limousine) 8-inch-thick doors, said the limo can withstand a “direct hit from an asteroid”.

Obama’s New Ride: Heavily-Armored 2009 Cadillac Limo – FOXNews.com