Things that were not immediately obvious to me

From the 18 August 2010 edition of Roger Ebert’s “Answer Man” letters column:

Q. I have watched and read your reviews for years with great honor. I disagree so strongly with your review of “Eat Pray Love” that it makes me sick. You just don’t get it, and many others like you don’t get it. You do not know at all what it is like being a woman in this day and age (or previously) who did not want to be defined by a man or married off to one. If you think Stephen in the movie was an OK husband, you are out to lunch. He was horrible!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (except on paper to people who do not need emotional sustenance). David was the narcissist from hell that many of us have fallen for… do you not get that??????????? Many of the males of the species are frankly overrated and the women’s movement has proven this (or frankly not sufficiently). I hope your wife will bring you up to speed. (Jeanine Carlson, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist)

Ph.D.

Licensed Clinical Psychologist.

Oh dear.

Now, it’s the Internet, so who knows. FWIW, there is a Jeanine Carlson with these credentials in Falls Church, VA. If she didn’t write this, I pity her. If she did … hoo boy.

The talking gorillas were dreadful conversationalists.

Today we’re going to finish updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment by adding complete support for multitasking. Even though Demine is not going to be doing any background processing, it turns out that a multitasking environment mandates certain changes to the program; some we saw last week, and the balance we’ll see now.

(We’ll be making changes to the project as we left it last week; you can download the final version here.)

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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a “dull boy”. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

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Continuing with our review of Chapter 1 of FM 3-24 — the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual — we now look at the FM’s “Contemporary Imperatives of Counterinsurgency”: i.e., more stuff to consider, that’s (presumably) only come to light recently.

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“I’ll get you. Or time will.”

Continuing with our review of Chapter 1 of FM 3-24 — the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual — we come to some introductory remarks on COIN itself, and a review of its historical principles.

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Let’s indulge in a little geek time. In “Star Wars” the planet Alderaan is (spoiler alert!) blown up by the Death Star. It’s a commonplace to notice that this represents a remarkable technological feat, given the size and mass of planets and the nature of gravity. Today, I want to address the following question:

Everyone knows that it would take a lot of energy to blow up a planet. If Alderaan were entirely composed of explosives, would the detonation of those explosives be sufficient to destroy the planet?

Yes, it’s a silly question, and we’re not going to address it rigorously. I just want to see how far we can get.

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One broken confidence destroyed two reputations.

Editorial note: I don’t think this one quite works, and since I’m fond of the idea behind it, I’m going to go all Director’s-commentary and belabor the point. Whenever you betray someone’s confidence, you make at least two people look bad: The person you’re gossiping about, and yourself. However bad the other person might look, you’ve indisputably shown yourself to be untrustworthy, and people remember things like that.

Today we’re going to continue updating the Demine project for the iOS 4.0 environment: we’re going to begin to add support for multitasking. Even though Demine is not going to be doing any background processing, it turns out that a multitasking environment mandates certain changes to the program, as we shall soon see.

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