My Lame Superpower

If I had to choose a lame superpower, it would likely be the ability to displace inefficient walkers. Like, a simple Darth Vader hand motion to just push them to the side of the road. Clearly this is just a limited form of telekinesis, and the real thing is way better, but that's why it's a lame superpower and not a full-fledged superpower.

Which brings me back to inefficient walkers. Man, I really hate these people. Bear in mind that I have absolutely nothing against slow walkers. I personally enjoy walking slowly, taking in the scenery, digesting lunch, chatting with a friend, whatever. But I am always conscious to not impede the progress of everyone else.

Here are some warning signs that you're an inefficient walker:

* You dart into an opening between people, and then slow down 50%.

* You are holding hands with people on both sides, and the road or path you are walking on is less than 500 meters wide.

* You enter a moving walkway that moves slower than grandma manages with her walker in a boulder field, but you choose to stand directly in the center, thereby allowing no one to pass.

Ah, to be a lame superhero. If only.

What's your lame superpower?

Comments

Why Korean Is Hard For Native English Speakers

A couple of days ago, as an experiment, I wrote my first blog post ever in a non-English language . It was an attempt to explain some of the reasons that Korean is hard to learn for native English speakers, so I figured I might as well try to write it in Korean. Those of you who actually read Korean can see how awkward the attempt was =). In any case, the post came from an email conversation I had with The Korean from Ask a Korean , a fantastically well-written blog about all things Korea from the perspective of a Korean who moved to the United States during high school. Since I tend to geek out on language things, I figured I might as well post part of that conversation. An edited version follows. --------- Out of the languages that I've attempted to learn so far, Korean has been the hardest. I've done a lot of meta thinking about learning Korean, and I think there are a number of reasons it's difficult for non-Koreans (and especially Westerners) to learn: 1) Obvi...

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther...

Pushing Python Performance With Parallelization

TL;DR: For certain types of programs, you can take advantage of idiosyncrasies in the Python interpreter and the host operating system to create real shared memory between processes and get some pretty good parallelization. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. As a developer, you've probably heard this before, and what it means basically is that you shouldn't waste time optimizing code unless it's already doing what you want it to do. We also live in an era of seemingly unlimited resources with AWS/Google Compute, and often the easiest way to get higher throughput in your programs or service is just to pay for more instances. But sometimes it's fun to see what sort of performance we can get on a simple laptop (and save some cash at the same time). So anyway ... I've been working on this thing, and it took too damn long to run, and I needed to run it lots and lots of times ... so, it was time to optimize. Basic optimization has two main steps: 1) P...

thedarren

Search This Blog