> One thing I am wondering though is if there is a certain types of literature that the brains reacts in a more positive or less than observation way. For example, does our brain engage more when we’re reading a technical literature review moreso than if it was a novel?
I've often wondered this also. It would be interesting to quantitatively determine the effects of reading fiction versus non-fiction material on the mind.
From what I understand, strokes are caused by the same thing heart attacks are - atherosclerotic plaques, and APs are caused by high blood cholesterol - APs are literally constituted of cholesterol/foam cells. Has the consensus changed?
I've always thought that grandmothers babysitting their grandchildren is somewhat unfair - in effect they're raising kids twice. They should have a rest in their later years.
Interestingly, looking within the Lisp hacker community, individual hackers seem to be doing quite well. It seems as though the language is geared towards empowering the individual. Even though Lisp is hard to learn, once you 'get it' the pay-off seems to be rather large.
I do wonder why such a powerful language such as Lisp has such a small community and number of libraries. There may exist some trade off between the level abstraction and number of users for languages. You may have to 'hang around' long enough before the penny drops and you're a proper Lisper that can use the language productively. What other languages have for them, in my small experience at least, is that you can grasp all the essentials and get a general feel for the language very early on- allowing you to 'hit the ground running'. With Lisp, it takes a while (I started learning a few months ago) to grasp concepts such as macros, closures, and continuations, which really give Lisp its power, and then effectively implement them on the fly. A few bloggers out there write about the 'moment of clarity' that they get once they understand Lisp macros, etc.
I really want to use it more, but I cannot get past the syntax.
For example, method chaining:
The aesthetic of a language is really important to me, and method chaining that allows for lines like this somehow doesn't feel right.