The Phantom Duo

Hey everyone, I know that it has been a long time since I have posted last and I am really sorry about that. This story comes to us from The Daily WTF. I don't know if this is just a ghost story or if is true, but regardless it gave me the chills.

For as long as David B could remember, stories of The Phantom Duo were a popular pastime around the water cooler. Of course, no one had actually worked with them, but everyone knew someone who knew someone that did. And the tall tales told why.
As the story went, The Phantom Duo were corporate boogeymen who reported to no one. They’d scour the project charter, looking for healthy, on-time, and on-budget projects that they could latch-on to. Once they were assigned to a project, it was too late: anything they’d touch would crash and burn, taking everyone else with it. Obviously, since anyone who worked with The Phantom Duo would no longer be working, only hearsay and rumor supported the legend.
For the most part, The Phantom Duo served as a light-hearted response to why projects fell behind. “Yes, we’ll hit that milestone a little late,” project managers would often say, “but at least we’re safe from the you-know-who.”

The Gateway of Youth

Look at a young child at play, what does one see? Is it not happiness? How about pure laughter? Emotion so strong that one can see straight to the innocence of their soul; and a smile so strong that it has the power to leap off the child's face and attach to the face a passerby? What could be greater in this world than that? Then look at the same child a few years later, when they are in their teenage years. What does one see in them now? Where did the joy go? Where did the pure sweet innocent laughter and voice run away to hide? Sadly Joan Didion implies in her story, “On Going Home”, that childhood bliss is a dream; a dream shattered by the onset of reality.

The Too True Story of the Nail in the Fence.

Nail In The Fence:
 There once was a little boy who had a bad temper. His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.
The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down.
He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it; and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.
The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry, the wound is still there." A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one.

My Note:
Sometimes I am harsh, and more hurtful than I intend.  Anger and fear cause some of it.  Sometimes it happens because I want to be funny (even at someone's expense).  Other times it happens because I want to help someone -- and I choose to be direct -- regardless of how they will "feel it" when I deliver the message.
Please forgive me if I have ever left a hole.

If programming languages were religions....

Okay, so I actually didn't write this one myself, but I saw it on another website and thought it just had to go here.

Bear in mind that this list is just a joke. It is meant to be humorous, if you take offense, then I am sorry.

C would be Judaism - it's old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

The Truth of Life

Plato once wrote, “Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another, and he will contemplate him as he is” (68). One would look at that quote and agree with Plato in saying that a person can eventually learn to reconstruct any doubts and misgivings and turn them into truth and reason. In this paper I will attempt to explain how this works, and how in real life we are kept from wonderful experiences only because we are afraid of the unknown. 

What is in a mantra, and why do we have them?

You know, earlier I was helping a friend with some programming questions he had, and as I always eventually do. I shared some programming mantras that I live by while programming. Then I thought to myself, just what is in a mantra? Why is it that we ever were hear that word, it is almost treated with some spiritual respect? So I decided to look up the meaning of the word. What I found did not really surprise me.

People know many things, and half of them are wrong.

So I have been reading a new book by Orson Scott Card. The book is called "Hidden Empire" it is a sequel to his Empire book. Empire was an amazing book about the possibility of another civil war in America. The book brought up a lot of good points that shows how we could very easier head in that direction.

In reading Hidden Empire, Card gives very insightful messages before each chapter. These messages come from the thoughts of the current President in the book. One of these passages really stuck out to me.

"People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we'd have reason to be proud of our intelligence.
   What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not.
   What is faith? A belief we hold so strongly that we act as if it is true, even though we know there are many who do not believe it.
   What is opinion? A belief that we expet other people to argue with.
   What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct."

Card's writing normally floors me with how crisp and intelligent it is, but this just take the cake. Since this blog is all about things that make us think, I thought this would be the perfect venue for it.