r-bryan

We couldn't agree more!

My wife and I have been reading aloud to each other for years. We worked through Anthony Doerr, Dumas, Eco. Eight or so of Louise Penny's Gamache books. Currently on book 5 of Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Since I'm learning French, I'm on my third Jules Verne (in French). Just to prove to myself that I'm not over the hill - I was born in the first half of the previous century.

Why does a carpenter cut the end off a 10-foot board to get a required 9ft-2in, thereby wasting 8% of the input and incurring dumpster charges? Suppose the architect's design specified the cutlist, to be transmitted to the board "factory", which would cut boards to the required lengths, tagging them with RFID serial numbers indexed to the design, stacking them so the first ones to be used are on the top, and truck to the site without passing through Home Depot?

Methinks Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment finds some empirical support here.

Oh FFS why is print-vs-debug being debated as either/or? Both can be valuable, depending on the circumstances. It's clearly both/and.

Well dang, we are not restricted to git as the only place we can put historical metadata. You know, discursive comments, for starters?

I once worked with a company that provided IM services to hyper competitive, testosterone poisoned options traders. On the first fine trading day of a January new year, our IM provider rolled out an incompatible "upgrade" to some DLL that we (our software, hence our customers) relied on, that broke our service. Our customers, ahem, let their displeasure be known.

Another developer and I were tasked with fixing it. The Customer Service manager (although one of the most conniving political-destructive assholes I have ever not-quite worked with), actually carried a crap umbrella. Instead of constantly flaming us with how many millions of dollars our outage was costing every minute, he held up that umbrella and diverted the crap. His forbearance let us focus. He discretely approached every 20 minutes, toes not quite into entering office, calmly inquiring how it was going. In just over an hour (between his visits 3 and 4), Nate and I had the diagnosis, the fix, and had rolled it out to production, to the relief of pension funds worldwide.

As much as I dislike the memory of that manager to this day, I praise his wisdom every chance I get.

Yeah, basically the oil companies pumping up fossil fuel to burn, but we get a single use of it as plastic before it goes to the incinerator.

A little stoichometry suggests that, ignoring oxygen, hydrogen, and energy input, the cited worldwide market for C2H4 would be satisfied by just about 1 gigaton of CO2. So if "we need to process gigatons of CO2 annually", that ethylene's gonna pile up.

Earth escape velocity is 11.1 km/s, which is Mach 32 at sea level. They have some more engineering to do, maybe even invent something better than carbon fibers.

"Always be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."

OK, but I'd rather prevent/cure the dementia.

I can highly recommend Epsilon (emacs-like) from lugaru.com.

Be an engineering mentor for your local high school robotics club. From personal experience, I can guarantee that you will come upon aspects of engineering where you are a rank newbie, yet wish you had even a little competence. It's exhilarating when external and internal motivations coincide to push you to develop new skills.