huntse

That is a truly spectacular drawing. Astonishing.

Well the claim that Cezanne couldn't draw is pretty obviously contradicted by his sketches, especially when you look at them "in the flesh".

I'm surprised anyone noticed.

Messiaen was obsessed with symmetry and patterns in rhythm (see his explanation of "non-retrogradable rhythms" in "The Technique of My Musical Language"). It's silly to say that he couldn't be aware of the pattern he was creating.

So I have a really interesting job in the front office at a real investment bank. I have worked here for several years and have used (among others) perl, python and C++. I have touched precisely 3 lines of java in all my time here.

Our development cycle is super fast, yet I work on very sensitive applications and infrastructure (real time trading, pricing, risk etc).

Bottom line: Jobs vary significantly in any industry and within any firm.

K is an interpreted language.

...oh, and covered bonds linked to a specific income stream is also not new. XS0271006602 for example is a covered bond linked to the income stream on a chain of pubs in the UK.

Yup having a secondary market is extremely important. That's why it already exists (just like mezz finance, which is what he has reinvented here, also exists). The idea of having an instrument that pays linked to a particular income stream is also not new - covered bonds, asset-backed securities, pfandbriefe etc for example all work this way.

Nothing new here. This "third thing" is mezzanine finance. Mezzanine finance sits between debt and equity in the capital structure and mezz investors choose a variety of risk/reward options making their investment more debt-like or more equity-like.

The coupon stream on mezz notes can be linked to income on specific assets (like covered bonds).

Subordinated debt and preferred shares are examples of mezz finance instruments.

The appendix to Chris Okasaki's "Purely functional Data structures" has to be right up there.

Well to answer your final point, there is never any absolute guarantee, but your best insurance against unemployment is to become really good at what you do. The second best is to make what you do be something commercially valuable. If you combine these two it's very unlikely you'll ever be unemployed for long.

Now to the first point. The most important part of learning is the process itself: ie learning the thing itself is less important than becoming good at learning. Once you have a sound grasp of the basics, the more diverse your curiosity and the deeper the insight you are able to gain into each specific technology, the easier it will be for you to pick up new ones. There's no excuse for ever becoming obsolete. Read widely, maintain your curiosity and keep learning.

Finally, the technologies you have picked may or may not be the way of the future. The future has a way of being unpredictable. Don't be so sure that you know what is going to happen that you close your eyes to what is actually happening.