Categorically Imperative

The Dutch chocolate maker Droste has a unique and appealing image on all its chocolate boxes. The image shows a nurse carrying a plate on which there is a box with the same picture on a smaller scale. This is known as the Droste Effect.

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

• S. Kelly-Bootle

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

• F. Brooks

[courtesy reddit]

After a long time of swinging back & forth over whether to use the Blogger plugin for Word, I finally took the plunge in the hope that I won’t waste too much time over posting. After having recently started using FeedDemon for all my RSS subscriptions, I realized how efficient well-designed software can be ; it drastically reduced the time I was spending on switching between many feeds. My only regret is that it uses IE as the default browser framework, instead of Opera or Firefox. Anyway, just glad that I found an aggregator of my taste, after a long time of searching around the web.

The practice of making a hole in the skull using an instrument called a trepan, to get more blood flowing in the vessels . Can it get more wierd than this?
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