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jwz, on a thread about Paul Graham’s new essay about Great Hackers: “One can think in Lisp and still realize that actually writing programs in it has no future. (One sometimes cries.)”

“Do you even care what kind of shit is going down in the world?
It’s called Morning Edition. If I don’t get some Carl
fucking Kasell right now, I’m going to choke someone.”

The result of a couple of hours of archaeological excavation:

Fig. 1. Eight years.

(Note that I matriculated nine years ago, but Rice revamped the student ID in 1996 and I was forced to surrender my “classic” ID at that time.)

By the way, the pilot for “Joey” is out
there, if you’re looking to get a jump on the fall season. (Rod: Is
it possible? Not terrible, but actually funny?)

“There isn’t going to be a horse race to cover either in New York or San Diego, but we gave you the airwaves for free 70 years ago. And 357 days a year, you can say who’s up and who’s down—who won the West, and lost the South. But what’s wrong with eight days, not every year but every four years, showing our leaders talking to us? Not a fraction of what they said, but what they said.“

—Toby Ziegler, TWW ep. 3.19, “The Black Vera Wang”. (A choice quote, inserted into my day by a happy TiVo channel selection over lunch.)

(Also, did you spot Richard Schiff at the convention? 10:44 (EDT) during the first night’s NBC coverage.)

J. Bradford DeLong, What the Democrats Will Have Problems Doing. A good read about the hard times ahead for either party. (The times will be harder with one than the other, of course.)

“The most important way to open paths to opportunities is through education. And the Democratic Party will have a very hard time improving American education. One of the big problems with American education today is that we still imagine that we can underpay teachers–we still imagine that for teachers (and nurses) we have this large pool of constrained high-quality female labor to draw on. We need to upgrade the salaries of teachers–and we need to do this while at the same time upgrading the quality of teachers. The Democratic Party can do the former, but it will have a very hard time doing the latter. The latter means that lots of current teachers get fired, and a Democratic Party that has close links with the National Education Association cannot do that.”