Lettuce eat lettuce

Dang, another thing I’ll have to change in the kitchen now (-_- )

Although switching from Teflon and other non-stick pans and skillets has been nice.

You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.

Sure as hell feels like it!

Read “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, it’s free online.

He lays out a brutal critique of the modern mathematical curriculum in the Unites States but in summary:

We teach mathematics to children as a huge set of rules to memorize and use to get good scores on standardized tests so that they can “get into good colleges.”

We don’t treat mathematics with any reverence or care, like we do with the arts. Math is taught as a bunch of arbitrary brute facts that old wise men came up with centuries ago and we spend all of elementary and high school relentlessly drilling them into students heads no matter how much pain and suffering it causes.

There is no actual exploration of mathematical beauty, or mystery. There isn’t any discussion of the underlying philosophy of mathematics, or how any of the rich and fascinating history of its development as a field. It’s like if we taught music as just a way to write notes on a page in certain time signatures and keys, but never actually let students listen to a piece of music or discuss the great composers or cultural movements of music through the ages.

Of course that seems ridiculous to people, but for some reason when we do that exact same thing with mathematics, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people think it would be strange to do it any other way.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

Magic Earth. Organic Maps as a backup. I’ve found that Magic Earth is the happy middle ground of map apps.

Closed source client, but uses OSM for its map data. European company, so better on the data front.

I tried using Organic Maps as my main navigation app, but there were slightly too many times where it couldn’t find the address, or the navigation got stuck, etc.

My IT job requires me to get to places quickly if they need on-site support. I have to be able to depend on my map app to get me there reliably. Magic Earth does that, Organic Maps is very good, and I keep it around to use in case I have issues with Magic Earth, but at least in my region of the country, it just isn’t quite up to snuff.

People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.