A zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.

Andy Hunt (agile manifesto)

There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck

An old joke about a horse-trainer serving a mad Russian tsar.

One day the tsar insists that the trainer must make his favourite horse talk within the year or face execution. The trainer instantly agrees to make the horse talk. When his friends warn him that he has taken on an impossible task, he replies: A lot can happen in a year the tsar might die, I might die, the horse might die. Or the horse might talk.

Be the hero of your life, not the victim; no longer choose a life that looks good over a life that feels good. Give up on some goals so you can care about others. Be honest even if that means you aren't universally liked.

Paraphrased from an article on Thought Catalog by Brianna Wiest, November 16th 2017

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, Edward O. Wilson, 2014

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. This is the art of leadership at its best: the art that conceals art.

Lao Tzu (Laozi), Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11. 6th C. BCE

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

Margaret Atwood - The Globe and Mail, January 13, 2018

"8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?"

The Joel Test

Microsoft's x-buildings

Science is an accretion of provisional certainties.

New Yorker

Your car is Japanese. Your Vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebabs are Persian. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your diamonds are African Your numbers Arabic, your letters Latin.

Article by one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas, on how "Agile" has lost its way.

For example, compare Deloitte's 2016 'Agile Landscape' with...

The original values from the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development":

• Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
• Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
• Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation, and
• Responding to Change over Following a Plan

What to do:

• Find out where you are
• Take a small step towards your goal
• Adjust your understanding based on what you learned +Repeat

How to do it:

When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal."

Goethe

"Look, Leonard; we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good."

Columbia Records label head Walter Yetnikoff

The surprising reality of er, reality:

Using Python to drive innovations in the world of VB and C#

SQL Server on Linux

Life is our reaction to the basic insecurity which constitutes its substance. Hence it is an extremely serious matter for a man to find himself too much surrounded by apparent securities. A consciousness of securities kills life.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

If we have data to make decisions with, lets use the data. If all we have is opinions, lets use mine.

Eric Fleischman

What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens.

Epictetus: Discourses

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Ernest Hemingway

Sentimental Facebook Version...

Not only is this sentimental, but its also a good example of anthropomorphic projection: the wolves are given human characteristics, groupthink and modes of communication.

A wolf pack: the first 3 are the old or sick, they give the pace to the entire pack. If it was the other way round, they would be left behind, losing contact with the pack. In case of an ambush they would be sacrificed. Then come 5 strong ones, the front line. In the center are the rest of the pack members, then the 5 strongest following. Last is alone, the alpha. He controls everything from the rear. In that position he can see everything, decide the direction. He sees all of the pack. The pack moves according to the elders pace and help each other, watch each other.

Real version from BBC's Frozen Planet, 2011...

A massive pack of 25 timberwolves hunting bison on the Arctic circle in northern Canada. In mid-winter in Wood Buffalo National Park temperatures hover around -40C. The wolf pack, led by the alpha female, travel single-file through the deep snow to save energy. The size of the pack is a sign of how rich their prey base is during winter when the bison are more restricted by poor feeding and deep snow. The wolf packs in this National Park are the only wolves in the world that specialize in hunting bison ten times their size. They have grown to be the largest and most powerful wolves on earth.

I'd vaguely heard of Uber before today. Now I've downloaded the app. Bloody brilliant. Massive own-goal by taxi drivers.

— Daniel Barnett (@daniel_barnett) June 11, 2014

Yet another example of a historic profession -- with all its attendant ceremony, apprenticeship and apparent barriers to entry -- failing to adapt and probably in danger of being rapidly superseded.

Do we still need the 'knowledge' when we've got Google Maps and Siri?

In recent movie history, Gattaca may have taught this best -- in a mass media kind of way -- but this comes close, and is much more concise.

Shame it's an advert flogging unpleasant sugar water.

1. The art of letter writing is fast dying out...1871

2. Claims of supernatural powers