Chad Clark's Open Journal : 2006-06-16

1) Joel Spolsky remembers meeting Bill Gates.

Joel Spolsky has an interesting story about his first experience meeting
Bill Gates at MicroSoft.  This is really worth reading.  He explains how it
is valuable to have someone who really can understand the technical details
running a technical company.

Plus it really is an amusing story.

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

2) Book review: Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel

I do not think I am alone but I might be in the minority by having a secret
soft spot in my heart for the LISP programming language.  I remember
finding myself in awe when I noticed that the syntax of the language is
clearly a representation of a parse tree for the language.

I read the first several chapters of Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp.
(I have not yet read the several chapters of example code.)

I very much recommend this book.  It really is a practical book rather than
another academic book on LISP.  The book can be found in it's entirety on
the internet for free over at http://gigamonkeys.com/book.

This book comes up because itconversations.com has posted a 50 minute
interview with Peter Seibel.

Around 35 to 38 minutes in he talks about plank roads.  These roads had
an investment boom/bust in the 1840's much like the dot-com boom/bust at the
end of the 1900's.

Near the very end (about 50 minutes in) Peter mentioned that he has a normal
contracting rate and a reduced rate for LISP related work.

You can find the MP3 over at:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1044.html

3) Trans-fat monkey diet increases body weight and abdominal fat.

NewScientist reports of a six year study of 51 monkeys fed different amounts
of trans-fat but the same number of total calories of fat. (Total calories
was also equal.)  The group monkeys eating trans-fat in place of mono-
unsaturated fats gained more body weight and had "30% more abdominal fat".

The article states that the trans-fat heavy diet "is comparable to people
who eat a lot of fried food".  Of course this was not a human study but we
often draw inferences across species based on studies like this.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9318&feedId=online-news_rss20