Your story, well told by Corey Rosen¹

It was a fairly easy read and I finished it in about an hour. The goal of the book is to teach you how to tell a ‘personal story’ in a genre most closely associated with the The Moth. Overall I recommend the book - especially if you struggle to find “interestingness’ in your life or if you have something that happened to you that you wish to share with others. It includes specific techniques and worksheets to help you ideate and then structure your story. It pulls techniques from the field of writing, improv, and acting and teaches them in a very practical and straightforward way.

Trouble In The World

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”

San Francisco Things

Not every war involves violence - or even people. Some do. These are some of them.

1. Great Emu War
2. Egg War
3. Pig War

Second Language Acquisition is the science of how one acquires the ability to both understand and produce a language that isn’t one’s native language.

The success rate of CPR is quite complicated. Nonetheless we have some interesting facts.

1. Overall survival from OHCA has been stable for almost 30 years
2. The aggregate survival rate, is between 6.7% and 8.4%
3. 5% of patients resuscitated with conventional CPR and more than 20% of those resuscitated with extracorporeal CPR were diagnosed with brain death
4. OHCA victims who receive CPR from a bystander or an EMS provider are much more likely to survive than those who do not
5. The most powerful criterion associated with survival from OHCA is ROSC in the field. Failure to restore a pulse on scene indicates that the patient will not likely survive to hospital discharge, irrespective of the subsequent sophistication of in-hospital care

Source

1. Sasson, C., Rogers, M. A. M., Dahl, J., & Kellermann, A. L. (2010). Predictors of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Circulation. Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, 3(1), 63–81. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.109.889576
2. Sandroni, C., Cronberg, T., & Sekhon, M. (2021). Brain injury after cardiac arrest: pathophysiology, treatment, and prognosis. Intensive Care Medicine, 47(12), 1393–1414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00134-021-06548-2

In Seeing Like A State ¹ the author discusses how the state necessarily “makes legible” its people and resources — and in doing so necessarily loses information. The author in particular focuses on what is termed " high modernism" which is defined as the ability to design and operate the state. the book then becomes primarily around failed state planning. These are some thoughts I have about the content. It isn’t a summary but more of some weakly held thoughts.

As a general rule, we try to not believe things without sufficient evidence. What defines sufficient evidence is complicated. ¹

However, not everything can be discovered via direct comparison, randomised trials, or similar efforts.

Software Engineering is its own discipline and trying to directly transplant, e.g. medical research techniques aren’t conducive to generating understanding. "It needs to be studied with tools that borrow as much from the social and cognitive sciences as they do from the mathematical theories of computation."

Sometimes things are so useful, or so obvious, that you won’t find research supporting the claim. For example, no evidence that parachutes actually prevent death from falling exists. ² In fact, in one study, it was shown that parachutes do not reduce injury above a normal backpack. ³

All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features
Now put your PR up

Up in the day, we just broke release
I’m doing my own little thing
Decided to skip and now you wanna see
Cause another feature depended on me
I released a change, he released a change
Don’t pay it any attention
Just marked it deprecated, for three good years
Ya can’t be mad at me

Intro

A common piece of programming advice is only have a single return statement. This is sometimes called the ‘Single Return Law’. It is even codified in some coding standards such as MISRA C ^{1 2}.