Posts

Dr. Drang recently shared two date commands he uses for: i) calculating how many days have passed since a given date, and ii) another that returns the day of the year of the current date. I was mainly interested in the first one because I often have to do that calculation.1 Because the script can also compute the days remaining until a future date, you can imagine how handy it can be. For instance, if I’d like to know how many days until the day I start my vacations, I just run the script with a future date and it’ll return a negative result in days. Or if I’d like to know how old I am in days. ...

A Ph.D. thesis is one of those things that has a life of its own. Last January, I had the opportunity to write a two-page abstract of my thesis for publication in Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis. It has been published and is now available on the web along with the PhD thesis. ...

Today in “This American Life” I was listening to an episode about hidden truths. It was really interesting to find out about a secret letter that the prime minister of Britain writes to every commander of a nuclear submarine. It supposedly contains instructions on what to do if the nation has been wiped out and if the commander should retaliate or not. It poses a mystery on what the contents are, even more so because every time there’s a new prime minister in office the letters are destroyed unread. ...

photo credit: mkorsakov via photopin cc All too often I see people who simply talk too much.1 Wether what they speak is nonsense or even meaningful things, there’s a limit to how much one can tolerate. By talking too much – and too often – we miss out on many things. We don’t let others speak (which to my understanding is common courtesy), and worse of all we lose our capacity to empathize with others. We can’t read faces well while uttering words out of our mouths continuously. Loosing that feedback is what prompts us to speak without pause and with no care for what the people around us may feel. It’s what turns you into a prick. We’re just too focused on ourselves to care about others. ...

photo credit: Pablo Moroe via photopin cc. Before Darwin it certainly was very difficult to be an atheist or a nonbeliever – that is, an intellectually fulfilled one.1 At least that’s how Richard Dawkins usually puts it and I quite agree with him. It was not that the scientific method2 didn’t exist at the time, it was that the mystery of life was too big a mystery to even consider tackling through the ways of science. Yet that was what Darwin did. ...

In the latest Generational podcast episode Aaron Hillegass told Gabe that he wrote his Objective-C book with his ten-year-old in mind. I found this to be quite interesting and truly inspiring. By writing the book “for his son,” he made sure anyone could actually read and understand it, but also he was deeply motivated to get it right. I wouldn’t want my son to read a crappy book. ...

This post is in fact a Day One entry. I treat my Day One journal as a sort of personal blog. A blog with a readership of one – at least in the present. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, I write about my life and for my kids, which are too young to read. I hope they read this in some distant future. I think that the things I might forget are probably the things they’ll want to know about. That is why I write. ...

photo credit: chiarashine via photopin cc As is often the case, ideas come about in the most unexpected moments. Lately, I’ve found myself taking notes while walking to work, while waiting for a coffee in front of a bending machine, or like now while getting dressed for work. It’s become a habit of mine to write what I think, when I think it. My iPod touch has enabled that. I could well have pen and paper with me at all times, but I’m not used to that and nothing beats the digital format. ...

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent via photopin cc I read the other day an email that desperately needed some editing. Writing without editing is pretty much the same as speaking with little attention to what we are saying. The great advantage of the written form over the spoken one is that you can go back an edit. Not editing what you write is both a poor use of the written form and a sign that you don’t care much for the person that will read your message. ...

I love to cook – or one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is – because it’s a manual activity that, quite often, lets my mind wonder about. While cooking I can think about my problems,1 about the future, about a world different from this one. I can hear my thoughts in a undisturbed way. It is like a moment of pristine inspiration. Me and myself. Nobody else. ...