What I'm reading 5/23-5/30

2016-05-30

"What does it mean, to see the world's narrative retreat into the distance? To know that nothing more is expected of you, or your children, or of your children's children, than to fade away quietly and let some other heroes take their place?"
"Before it was heroin it was oxycontin, and before it was oxycontin it was meth. Death, and overdose death in particular, are how things go here."
"The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what's worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that."
"And yet this isn't seen as a crisis, except by statisticians and public health workers. Unlike the AIDS crisis, there's no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There's no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There's no sympathy at all."

"This is a part of the country where little kids dream about growing up to be storm chasers."
"One town. Sixteen years. Four big, powerful tornadoes. It's a hell of a coincidence."
"Devastating EF4s made up 1.37 percent of all the tornadoes that hit the U.S. from 1994 to 2012. Just 0.14 percent were incredible EF5s."

"It doesn't make any allowance for the possibility that someone could erroneously diagnose racism or sexism or some other form of bigotry in another person's ideas. The only real way to resolve the dispute, once the callout has been made, is through an apology or a confession."
"What is college about if not the opportunity to explore new ideas and consider new ways of thinking about the world? These actions are contrary to the entire notion of higher education."
"The premise of the modern American university is that no one should be protected from ideas. Some ideas may be wrong, but we can't tell that they're wrong unless we are free to debate them."

"If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn't matter how popular or admired that person has been."
"What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him."
"In such an environment, every political figure confronts a stark choice: Get right with the leader and his mass following or get run over."

"In Chicago, homicide rates correspond with segregation. While many areas have few or no killings, the South and West Sides are on par with the world's most dangerous countries, like Brazil and Venezuela, and have been for many years."
"The homicide rate in Chicago is just a little higher than in New York when guns aren't involved. But when it comes to shootings, both fatal and not, Chicago stands out, suggesting a level of armed interaction that isn't happening in New York."

"Note the return type List[Future[Profile]]. This makes sense given the type signatures, but seems unwieldy. We now have a list of asynchronous values, and to work with those values we must then use the combinators on Future for every single one. It would be nicer instead if we could get the aggregate result in a single Future, say a Future[List[Profile]]."

"Any existing Clojure function that takes a single argument and returns a truthy value is a valid predicate spec."
"A key design constraint of spec is that all specs are also designed to act as generators of sample data that conforms to the spec (a critical requirement for property-based testing)."

"While theoretically anonymous, these marketing personas are surprisingly accurate. Marketers likely know your age, gender, occupation, education level, marital status, and—if you have GPS enabled on your phone and are logged into apps that track you—where you live, work, and travel."

"Like any organic movement it's only a matter of time before it is gussied up, stripped of political meaning and sold back to us."
"It's now possible to edit out the shit and difficult parts of life and leave in those posts about success and happiness."

"The only number which the release engineer has control over is COMPATIBILITY, which needs to be incremented if a new line of compatibility is added. The RELEASE number is incremented for every release."