Building native iOS apps with RubyMotion
Building native iOS apps with RubyMotion
I was pretty skeptical about this when I first heard about it, but after reading some of the articles about it and watching the project’s 8 minute introduction video, this looks like it might be the real thing.
U.S. Fares Badly in Early Births in Global Study
From The New York Times:
Although American hospitals excel at saving premature infants, the United States is similar to developing countries in the percentage of mothers who give birth before their children are due, the study’s chief author noted. It does worse than any Western European country and considerably worse than Japan or the Scandinavian countries.
You hear a lot of people, especially on the right, say that the United States has the best health care in the world. I think they’re often confusing having the best doctors and hospitals, which we do have, with the best health care, which we most definitely do not.
But for a few brief years, Lyndon Johnson, once a fairly conventional Southern Democrat, constrained by his constituents and his overriding hunger for power, rose above his political past and personal limitations, to embrace and promote his boyhood dreams of opportunity and equality for all Americans. After all the years of striving for power, once he had it, he said to the American people, “I’ll let you in on a secret — I mean to use it.” And use it he did to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the open housing law, the antipoverty legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and much more.
He knew what the presidency was for: to get to people — to members of Congress, often with tricks up his sleeve; to the American people, by wearing his heart on his sleeve.
Even when we parted company over the Vietnam War, I never hated L.B.J. the way many young people of my generation came to. I couldn’t. What he did to advance civil rights and equal opportunity was too important. I remain grateful to him. L.B.J. got to me, and after all these years, he still does. With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why he did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.
Bill Clinton, reviewing The Passage of Power, the next volume in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson.
The Passage of Power
On the evening of November 26, the advisers gathered around the dining room table in his home to draft the speech he was to deliver the following day to a joint session of Congress were arguing about the amount of emphasis to be given to civil rights in that speech, his first major address as President. As Johnson sat silently listening, most of these advisers were warning that he must not emphasize the subject because it would antagonize the southerners who controlled Congress, and whose support he would need for the rest of his presidency — and because a civil rights bill had no chance of passage anyway. And then, in the early hours of the morning, as one of those advisers re-calls, “one of the wise, practical people around the table” told him to his face that a President shouldn’t spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter how worthy those causes might be.
“Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johnson replied.
This excerpt is from the beginning of The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s masterful biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, is the most insightful study of the acquisition and use of political power in the American government I’ve ever read. If history or politics interests you at all, I can’t recommend these books enough.
In 2009, a senior White House official told me that if Obama failed to “deliver justice to Osama bin Laden, then John McCain would ultimately win, as we would be in a never-ending global war against terror and bin Laden.” The capture or killing of Osama bin Laden was a necessary condition for an exit from Afghanistan.
Steve Clemons, Washington editor at large for The Atlantic (via ericmortensen)
President Obama drives Sphero the robotic ball during his trip to Boulder last week.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Really good software engineers are like great musicians. They have practiced their craft, because nothing comes for free, but they also have a spark of something great inside them to begin with that makes them special. And the analogy is especially apt because while there are always tools being created to make it easier for “anyone” to create music, it still takes a special talent to make great music.
It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.