Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Salvatore Stolfo , a top cybersecurity guy, presented to us yesterday. One of the hacks he described his team performing -- an ethical hack, mind you! -- was to secretly turn the Cisco IP Phone into a listening device that can forward everything said in an office to a hostile party. I told my wife about this, and noted, "And we have those phones on our desks!" "Are you going to get rid of them?" she asked. "Nah, a professor only says something worth eavesdropping on about once a decade, so it would be a complete waste of time to hack our phones."

"Handoffs are similar to giving a bicycle to someone who doesn't know how to ride. You can give them a big instruction book on how to ride the bike, but it won't be much help. Far better that you stay and help them experience of feeling of balance that comes with gaining momentum... Before long your colleague knows how to ride the bike, although she can't describe how she does. This kind of knowledge as called tacit knowledge, and it is very difficult to hand off to other people through documentation." -- Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Implementing Lean Software  Development

The very popular Django web framework was created by programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World ? The hometown newspaper of the  sixth most populous city in Kansas is the birthplace of this very significant piece of technology! Also, here's the "summit" of the highest "mountain" in Kansas:

I've been using git for close to four years now, and still I get error messages like "the following files have changes staged in the index" (I was trying to remove files from the repo) and have no idea whatsoever what the problem is.

"The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world -- immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline. A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time -- but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization."-- Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics

The effort to make Islam a race, so that any objection to any Islamic doctrine can be denounced as "racism," continues apace: on the episode of The Blacklist I was watching last night, a character declared he was "half Muslim." That, of course, is a complete absurdity, like being "half atheist" or "half born again." Islam is a belief system, and someone either embraces it, and is a Muslim, whatever their biological inheritance, or doesn't embrace it, and isn't Muslim, even if both of their parents were Muslim. The idea of being "half Muslim" is something that any serious, believing Muslim would find repellent. But the SJWs don't care about their "pet" groups: homosexuals, transgendered, Muslims, etc. Those groups are just props used for progressives to advance their agenda... which is that progressives should be in charge.

"If your approach to mathematics is mechanical not mystical, you're not going to go anywhere." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb