Category: Leben

Hoffnung

A woman wearing a face mask walks past a mural by Irish artist Emmalene Blake in Dublin’s city centre during level 5 COVID-19 lockdown. The theme of the artwork quotes the title of the Irish rock band ‘Inhaler’ with the words ‘It won’t always be like this’. On Friday, 19 March 2021, in Dublin, Ireland. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Bravo

Berset und Koch im Café du Gothard in Fribourg

Die Präventionsmedizin kennt keine Helden. War sie erfolgreich, beklagen sich alle über zu rigorose Massnahmen. War sie nicht erfolgreich, wird den Verantwortlichen Inkompetenz vorgeworfen.

Apropos Covid-19

Dr. Michael Ryan bringt es auf den Punkt:

Be fast. Have no regrets. You must be the first mover. The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly. […] If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection. […] The greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure.

That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.

–– Dave Grohl

Tiefgang

“Und denken Sie öfter an Ihre Beerdigung”, rät der Mainzer Psychiater Lieb. “Oder zumindest an den 80. Geburtstag.”

Was wolle man da in den Festreden über sich hören? Dass man ein Mensch sei, der immer funktioniert und alle stets zufriedengestellt habe? Oder dass man gut gelaunt mit den Kindern spielte, in schlechten Zeiten Freunde an der Seite hatte und sich im Job mit Freude engagierte, aber noch lieber mit der Frau oder dem Mann spazieren ging?

“Mit diesem Blick”, meint Lieb, “beginnt man zu verstehen, was richtig ist.”

Aus DER SPIEGEL, 03.01.2020

My favorite Knuth story

Attributed to Alan Kay:

When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s] one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a computer programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.

[John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.

And they asked him, “How could you possibly do this?” And he answered, “When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That’s how I learned to program.”