“Although Oppenheimer himself never reduced his homemade Hinduism to a catalogue of principal tenets, a distillation of his words and actions might produce a short list of three: duty, fate, and faith. He believed that he had a job to do; that he should do it only because it was his job and not because he was intent on obtaining any particular result; and that following these principles would bring a saving measure of serenity into his profoundly discontented existence. These three precepts were not ornamental but structural: without them he would have been a different man.

“The common claim that the golden spiral occurs repeatedly in nature (e.g. the arms of spiral galaxies or sunflower heads) is incorrect. While logarithmic spirals are common features in nature, they may be of differing pitches.

“I actually like arguing (sometimes a bit too much ;^), so the occasional flame-fest really does nothing but get me pumped up.

At the same time, I’m pretty good at just letting it go. I don’t tend to get too hung up about any particular detail (even if in the heat of a “discussion” I can be very forceful about them). In the end I seldom end up caring really deeply about many of the technical choices: I tend to care much more about improving the general development model than about the details of some particular subsystem. I’ll state my opinions, but even if I’m convinced I’m right, if I’m not actually willing to write the code, in the end I’ll happily be overridden by the people who do write the code.

Part of that is also having to occasionally just admit that you were wrong, and having the ability to send out a “mea culpa” email saying so.

“The latest Scheme proposal, R6RS, has generated a fair amount of controversy. I believe a mistake was made in letting people have the final vote on language features who were not experts in language design and implementation.

“A bunch of people sitting in a meeting, staring at their laptops, is a fat meeting, full of people who are ignoring the most important question: “How do we figure out how to never have this meeting again?” An organization that lets this meeting exist is a rotting organization, where it’s slowly becoming acceptable to sit there and do nothing.

“tribe: c.1250, from Latin tribus, “one of the three political/ethnic divisions of the original Roman state” - Tites, Ramnes, and Luceres, corresponding, perhaps, to the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans.

tribute: c.1340, “allot among the tribes or to a tribe.”

“You should always call a mountain Grandmother, to show respect. Did you know that?

“The Trans-Sahara Highway is one of the oldest transnational highways in Africa and one of the most complete, having been proposed in 1962, with construction of sections in the Sahara starting in the 1970s. Its central section is still little-used though, and still requires special vehicles and precautions to be taken to survive the harsh environment and climate of the centre of the desert.

“According to the incomplete poem Achilleis written by Statius in the first century AD, when Achilles was born his mother Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However, she forgot to wet the heel she held him by, leaving him vulnerable at that spot. It is not clear if this version of events was known earlier.

“When you fix a problem for a user, tell them it’s fixed. Don’t tell them how you fixed the problem, or even give them the details of what the problem is. Tech talk is not interesting to most people, and worse, may make them feel inadequate or patronized.