I could not help but imagine how things would have been if the circumstances were just slightly different. Just one more year, he would have gotten a Princeton degree and go work in one of the Wall Street firms. He would have done amazingly well in the corporate environment. He would have made millions in a couple of years. Maybe he would have made a partner at an investment firm, or become a VP. He would marry well. He would have been a good father to his two children.

He was smart. He was driven. He worked hard. He had talent. He would have been a great success. Instead, he is now a small time burglar, and he keeps getting caught and going back to jail. It’s a real tragedy. I hope he finds his happiness in this life.

George Sordini – A .Net programmer. He appears to have been not such a competent one. He went on a shooting rampage and killed many women at a fitness club. He had anger issues, and had problem forming relationships with women, and people in general.

Hans Reiser: A genius programmer, with evidence of significant history of socialization problems. Worked on significant software projects, active in open source community. Wrote ReiserFS. Murdered his ex-mail-order-wife.

Patrick Naughton: One of the early architects of Java. Became a high-tech executive at Disney and Starwave.  Was arrested by FBI and convicted of child sex charges. Quite a bit has been written about him in Salon.com.

Just the other day, I was listening to RadioLab, a podcast program on science. And an episode on parasites was on. There, I learned of this hypothesis: Cats are largely responsible for the occurence of schizophrenia in humans. Probably probably wrong but fascinating nevertheless.

Cats are often infected with Toxoplasma gondii and they live and reproduce in cat’s intestines. When Toxoplasma gondii gets inside rats, it changes the behavior of rats so that the infected rat becomes more likely to become cat’s food. It attacks the rat’s brain and rewires it so that it becomes sexually attracted to the scent of cats. If it can change the behavior of rats, why not humans? Some theorize that toxoplasma infection makes people more attracted to cats. Some theorize that it makes people a little more reckless. It was also mentioned in the radio show that schizophrenia was largely unknown to Europeans until some people started adopting them as pets in the 1800′s.

I’m a dog person. As such, I’m naturally prejudiced against cat people. This bit of unverified information now gives me ammunition to dislike cat people even more. I’m going to look at cat people with even greater suspicion now.

AIG on the other hand, I have very negative feeling about. Being an insurance company automatically gets you -10.  And I generally recall them being assholes.

Trillion dollar here, trillion dollar there. It’s weird. I have not heard these numbers until quite recently. I remember when a million was a big number. Now, a billion feels like nothing. The other day, someone mentioned how the honey production business is a $1.5 Billion industry. And I was like, wow it’s tiny. Yes, it’s tiny.

I just couldn’t find any other way to search through all the old emails at work. I was running a copy of Windows XP just to keep all my archived emails. And it was getting messy.

Coding in XCode is a lot funner than in NetBeans or Eclipse. Time to time I had whole bunch of frustration just getting things to install right. Native GUI looks so much better than this Java thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiTricity

Also a very cool Water Filter

Awesome

The exhibits were super fun also. There was this photographer who did steet portraits of people. There was one picture that looked like a studio portrait of a postman, very crisp with dramatic lighting. It turns out the artist rigged a strobe light with remote control in and took the picture with a telephoto lens in busy times square. It was super funny when I found out  how he took the picture.

http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/permanent-collection/artists/diCorcia/

Head #09, 2001
Fuji Crystal Archive print mounted to Plexiglas
48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Extended loan from the collection of Marlene and David Persky

This mailman was unaware he was being photographed. In New York’s Times Square, diCorcia shot him with a telephoto lens synched with lights hidden under scaffolding. The speed of his shutter and focused brightness of his flash recorded extreme details yet blacked out the activity behind him.

This is my favorite museum in Boston area now. My second favorite is Harvard Museum of Natural History, where they have the bones of Kronosaurus, a huge fish reptile thing. Like a dinosaur whale.

I like DeCordova quite a bit. Nice big outdoor contemporary sculptures.

The Aquarium is okay. I like Museum of Science but I get disappointed each time I go there. Over the years, they seem to be removing more and more interactive exhibits that break easily, and replacing them with exhibits where all you get to do is push a button or click mouse buttons. I am really not fond of their digital fish tank. I fucking hate their digital fish tank.

Museum of Fine Arts is okay. We go there when it’s free on Wednesdays. They are doing some big construction. I hope they finish it soon.

I used to like Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. But not so much anymore. We went there couple of months ago and noticed that there is no life in the atrium garden. I think they were all new plantings, perhaps. I wonder what happened. Did the garden get destroyed recently, or was it always fake?

Few teachers understand that the aim of studying history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart and recite them by rote.

Just as Nature does not concentrate her greatest attention in preserving what exists, but in breeding offspring to carry on the species, likewise, in human life, it is less important artificially to alleviate existing evil, which, in view of human nature, is ninety-nine per cent impossible, than to ensure from the start healthier channels for a future development.

Social activity must never and on no account be directed toward philanthropic flim-flam, but rather toward the elimination of the basic deficiencies in the organization of our economic and cultural life that must-or at all events can-lead to the degeneration of the individual .

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.”

Pretty nice, eh?

I looked up who said it on Google, and it was someone called Jacob Braude. Who the fuck is Jacob Braude?

So I had this idea. Wouldn’t it be funny if one could collect wise and reasonable sounding quotes from some wacky, widely despised, person. Like Hitler, for example. I can’t think of anyone else… I was going to say Stalin, or Mao, or George W. Bush, but there is a significant number of admirers for those people, still. [edit 8/26/09: Just remembered that Hitler still has fairly large following himself. Haha. I read recently that Mein Kampf has become a fad among Business School students in India. Why not? Hitler, after all, was extraordinarily successful at getting people to do some pretty extreme stuff.]

So, I’ll try to collect reasonable sounding quotes from Hitler. Long time ago, I read bits of Mein Kampf at the library. I found it rather incoherent and full of craziness. Maybe I need to read it again.

Ooh. There is a website called Hitler.org. Nice.

Children are a faithful reflection of the adults, except that often their convictions are better and more honest.

-Adolf Hitler

Few teachers understand that the aim of studying history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart and recite them by rote;

-Adolf Hitler