The 100 Most Beautiful words

The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English:
source: www.alphadictionary.com/articles/

Ailurophile	A cat-lover.
Assemblage	A gathering.
Becoming	Attractive.
Beleaguer	To exhaust with attacks.
Brood	To think alone.
Bucolic	In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow	A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant	Like a cat's eye.
Comely	Attractive.
Conflate	To blend together.
Cynosure	A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance	A brief love affair.
Demesne	Dominion, territory.
Demure	Shy and reserved.
Denouement	The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude	Disuse.
Desultory	Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous	Filmy.
Dissemble	Deceive.
Dulcet	Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience	Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent	Bubbly.
Efflorescence	Flowering, blooming.
Elision	Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir	A good potion.
Eloquence	Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation	Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient	A softener.
Ephemeral	Short-lived.
Epiphany	A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile	At one time, for a time.
Ethereal	Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent	Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative	Suggestive.
Fetching	Pretty.
Felicity	Pleasantness.
Forbearance	Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious	Fleeting.
Furtive	Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol	To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour	Beauty.
Gossamer	The finest piece of thread, a spider's silk
Halcyon	Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger	Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication	Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio	An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue	To infuse, instill.
Incipient	Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable	Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue	A naïve young woman.
Inglenook	A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance	Blithe nonchalance.
Inure	To become jaded.
Labyrinthine	Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe	A special kind of gift.
Lagoon	A small gulf or inlet.
Languor	Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude	Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure	Free time.
Lilt	To move musically or lively.
Lissome	Slender and graceful.
Lithe	Slender and flexible.
Love	Deep affection.
Mellifluous	Sweet sounding.
Moiety	One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen	A slip of the ear.
Murmurous	Murmuring.
Nemesis	An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing	The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia	A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent	Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest	A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea	A solution for all problems
Panoply	A complete set.
Pastiche	An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra	A half-shadow.
Petrichor	The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora	A large quantity.
Propinquity	An inclination.
Pyrrhic	Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential	Most essential.
Ratatouille	A spicy French stew.
Ravel	To knit or unknit.
Redolent	Fragrant.
Riparian	By the bank of a stream.
Ripple	A very small wave.
Scintilla	A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal	Eternal.
Seraglio	Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity	Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery	Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous	Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious	Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna	A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous	Whispering, hissing.
Talisman	A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation	Tinkling.
Umbrella	Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward	Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial	In trace amounts.
Wafture	Waving.
Wherewithal	The means.
Woebegone	Sorrowful, downcast.

A remark: at least 16 of these words are Greek!
Two of them (  Ailurophile,  Petrichor) have a Greek etymology, but they are are not used in modern (nor ancient ) Greek. They have been manufactured rather recently in English, based on Greek words.
Moreover, 3 words from the rest (Murmurous,  Umbrella) have a distant Greek origin.
The word  Susurrous is present in modern Greek, but its origin is not Greek (it's Latin)

Top 50 Programming Quotes of All Time

50. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."

- Rick Cook

49. "Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

- Alan Kay.

48. "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."

- Edward V Berard

47. "They don't make bugs like Bunny anymore."

- Olav Mjelde.

46. "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."

- Alan J. Perlis.

45. "A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors."

- Waldi Ravens.

44. "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."

- Bjarne Stroustrup

43. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”

- Eric S. Raymond

42. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.”

- Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering

41. “I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.”

- Oktal

40. “Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN’T be like.”

- pixadel

39. “Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.”

- Bill Clinton

38. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."

- E.W. Dijkstra

37. "In the one and only true way. The object-oriented version of 'Spaghetti code' is, of course, 'Lasagna code'. (Too many layers)."

- Roberto Waltman.

36. "FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer."

- Alan J. Perlis.

35. “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”

- Bill Bryson

34. "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."

- Blair P. Houghton.

33. "When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop."

- Alan J. Perlis

32. "The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a non-typed language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language."

- Ron Sercely

31. "Good design adds value faster than it adds cost."

- Thomas C. Gale

30. "Python's a drop-in replacement for BASIC in the sense that Optimus Prime is a drop-in replacement for a truck."

- Cory Dodt

29. "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

- Linus Torvalds

28. "Perfection [in design] is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

27. "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

- Dennis M. Ritchie.

26. "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not."

- Yoggi Berra

25. “You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.”

- Jim McCarthy

24. "PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."

- Jon Ribbens

23. "Programming is like kicking yourself in the face, sooner or later your nose will bleed."

- Kyle Woodbury

22. "Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption."

- Keith Bostic

21. "It is easier to port a shell than a shell script."

- Larry Wall

20. "I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

- Alan Kay

19. "Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry"

- Ted Nelson

18. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”

- Randall E. Stross

17. “If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.’ “

- Mark Minasi

16. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

- Donald E. Knuth.

15. "Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success."

- Tom DeMarco

14. "I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"

- Vidiu Platon.

13. "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."

- Christopher Thompson

12. "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

- Bill Gates

11. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

- Brian W. Kernighan.

10. "People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones."

- Donald Knuth

9. “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.”

- George Carrette

8. “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”

- Larry Wall

7. “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

- Alan Kay

6. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”

- Seymour Cray

5. “To iterate is human, to recurse divine.”

- L. Peter Deutsch

4. "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

- Charles Babbage

3. "Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program."

- Linus Torvalds

2. "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

- Martin Golding

1. “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

source: http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html

Resume overused words

Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn Profiles in the USA – 2010

• 1. Extensive experience


• 2. Innovative


• 3. Motivated


• 4. Results-oriented


• 5. Dynamic


• 6. Proven track record


• 7. Team player


• 8. Fast-paced


• 9. Problem solver


• 10. Entrepreneurial

Map projections

A fact: No map can provide an accurate image of our planet (or any part of it). The reason: there can be no way to accurately simulate the surface of a sphere on a flat surface.

A map projection is any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other shape on a plane. Map projections are necessary for creating maps. All map projections distort the surface in some fashion. Depending on the purpose of the map, some distortions are acceptable and others are not; therefore different map projections exist in order to preserve some properties of the sphere-like body at the expense of other properties. There is no limit to the number of possible map projections.

Many properties can be measured on the Earth's surface independently of its geography. Some of these properties are:

• Area
• Shape
• Direction
• Bearing
• Distance
• Scale

Map projections can be constructed to preserve one or more of these properties, though not all of them simultaneously. Each projection preserves or compromises or approximates basic metric properties in different ways. The purpose of the map determines which projection should form the base for the map. Because many purposes exist for maps, many projections have been created to suit those purposes.

Most of us are familiar with the Mercator projection, though it is fundamentally wrong (Greenland, for instance, appears to be huge -roughly the same size with S.America-while is only one fifth of the size of South America). Another projection which gained some popularity in the 60's was the Gaul-Peter projection. Like the one below:



The American Cartographic Association adopted the following resolution which rejected all rectangular world maps, a category that includes both the Mercator and the Gall–Peters projections:

WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and

WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth's features and coordinate systems, and

WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people's impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and

WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it "look right,"

THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.

Types of Map projections

A. Projections by surface

• Cylindrical (like Mercator and Gaul-Peters)
• Pseudocylindrical
• Hybrid
• Conical
• Pseudoconical
• Azimuthal (directions from a central point are preserved (and hence, great circles through the central point are represented by straight lines on the map)). There are many subtypes like the gnomonic projection, orthographic projection, the Azimuthal equidistant etc.

B. Projections by preservation of a metric property

• Conformal (projections preserve angles locally), like Mercator
  
• Equal-area (preserve area), like Gaul-Peter
• Equidistant (preserve distance from some standard point or line)
• Gnomonic(Great circles are displayed as straight lines)
• Compromise projections ( give up the idea of perfectly preserving metric properties, seeking instead to strike a balance between distortions). Most maps are used today belong in this category. Especially into the subtypes: Robinson projection and the Winkel Tripel projection which is preferred by National Geographic.(like the one in the beginning of the post)

A prayer

A prayer by Eusebius of Caesarea, (c. 263–339 AD) one of the Church fathers and the author of the first "Church History"

• May I be an enemy to no one and the friend of what abides eternally.
• May I never quarrel with those nearest me, and be reconciled quickly if I should.
• May I never plot evil against others, and if anyone plot evil against me,
• may I escape unharmed and without the need to hurt anyone else.
• May I love, seek and attain only what is good.
• May I desire happiness for all and harbor envy for none.
• May I never find joy in the misfortune of one who has wronged me.
• May I never wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until I make reparation.
• May I gain no victory that harms me or my opponent.
• May I reconcile friends who are mad at each other.
• May I, insofar as I can, give all necessary help to my friends and to all who are in need.
• May I never fail a friend in trouble.
• May I be able to soften the pain of the
• grief stricken and give them comforting words.
• May I respect myself.
• May I always maintain control of my emotions.
• May I habituate myself to be gentle, and never angry with others because of circumstances.
• May I never discuss the wicked or what they have done, but know good people and follow in their footsteps.

PC tips comfort

1. Get your heat levels right. There’s nothing worse than being too hot or too cold while surfing the Web or trying to relax at home. If it’s cold outside, a great tip is to turn your heating on before you go out. That way when you get home from school or work, your house is warm and immediately inviting to you. If it’s summer time it’s a good idea to have a fan in your room or office to keep the air circulating so it doesn’t get too stuffy.
2. Air freshener. Computers generate a lot of heat, which leads to a lot of hot air. This doesn’t smell too good. Keep a can of air freshener in your office and use it regularly. I also like to burn scented candles as they help me to relax. Cinnamon is nice. Be careful not to burn candles too close to your computer equipment, though!
3. Get a good chair. It’s important that your chair is not only comfortable, but also ergonomic and functional. By ergonomic I mean a chair that encourages good posture so you don’t develop back problems later in life. Swivel chairs are good if you move around a lot in your workspace so you don’t necessarily have to get up from the chair.
4. Clothes. There’s nothing more comfortable than an oversized hoodie and fuzzy slippers. Buy a hoodie a size larger than what you normally wear and you’ll be amazed at how snug and warm it feels. Also buy big fuzzy slippers that look like bear’s feet. My girlfriend got me some for Christmas with claws on and I can tell you I never take them off at home — they’re just sooo comfortable!
5. Buy a big mug. Get yourself a big mug for your tea or coffee. I have a huge one with Scooby Doo on it that I bought for myself because I was tired of boring old standard mugs. For some reason it’s a lot more comforting to drink coffee from my own mug.

[Lockergnome] Windows Fanatics

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Woman as hazardous material

The modern business plan

From Seth

I'd divide the modern business plan into five sections:

• Truth
• Assertions
• Alternatives
• People
• Money

The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you're clear about the way you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn't partisan, it takes no positions, it just states how things are.


Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis and anything I need to know about how the world works.


The assertions section is your chance to describe how you're going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action.


This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you're going to do and what impact it's going to have.

Of course, this section will be incorrect. You will make assertions that won't pan out. You'll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you'll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don't pan out, is it over?


The people section rightly highlights the key element... who is on your team, who is going to join your team. 'Who' doesn't mean their resume, who means their attitudes and abilities and track record in shipping.

And the last section is all about money. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins and exit strategies.


Your local VC might not like this format, but I'm betting it will help your team think through the hard issues more clearly.

gnomikologikon.gr: The Greek Quotations site

A favorite of mine "ΓΝΩΜΙΚΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΝ", the site with Greek quotations, Proverbs, ancient Greek sayings etc has been transfered to a new address and obviously to a new host: www.gnomikologikon.gr

It contains also some very useful tips for the Greek grammar