My Chipotle order

How healthy is your Chipotle order?  Mine has much salt from two salsas.

http://www.chipotlefan.com/index.php?id=nutrition_calculator

Nutrition Facts
Amount Per Serving
Calories 445	Cal from Fat 110
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 12g	18%
Saturated Fat 3g 13% Trans Fat 0g
Cholesterol 65mg	22%
Sodium 1520mg	63%
Total Carbs 48g	16%
Dietary Fiber 4g 16% Sugars 10g
Protein 37g
Vitamin A 0% • Vitamin C 0% Calcium 0% • Iron 0%
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
INGREDIENTS: Fajita Veggies,Steak (4oz),Tomato Salsa,Corn Salsa,Lettuce,Rice

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Evolution of an Idea

The evolution of an idea, from conception to obsolescence.  This all seems to me to apply to programs and systems, processes and methodologies, whether technical, managerial, national or personal.

Fire conceives.  From the void which is everything old, ideas are consumed and reconfigured in a furnace of progress; the entire idealized extent burns brightly.

A surrounding context (the white page) gives rise to an idea (the black dot).

Winds change.  Cool reason hammers and blows hot molten concepts into shape; swirling variation crystallizes initial implementation.

The idea is greater in scope than is immediately implemented, so the implementation starts small (the thin black line coming out from the black dot).  Before long the central concepts are worked out, as a concept prototype (the top of the diagram).  This could be considered a stage-gate, at which some ideas are winnowed out.

Rivers progress.  Expansion changes nature in quantity and quality, as the implementation carries a greater and greater load; floods into the plain of technical debt.

The idea grows in complexity, at first proceeding rapidly (distance traveled from the dot, vs. thickness which is effort or time).

At this point the prototype can take actual customers, and expand its scope (from the top of the picture, to a diagonal line from the center to the lower left corner).

Mountains stand.  Inflexibility rocked by earthquakes, but nature does not change; a new idea springs from the nature of the old.

Eventually the system becomes too large to reliably expand (the diagonal line from the center to the lower left corner, another stage-gate), and all effort is spent just to maintain what is in place.

It’s at this point that someone realizes that there’s a better way to do things: the project has become a surrounding context in its own right, and gives rise to a new idea (the white dot), which incorporates some aspect of the original environment neglected by the first idea.

At first, people attempt to tack on the new perspective to the developed original idea (the thin white line coming out from the white dot). Eventually they transition to an entirely new system (another black dot), and abandon work on integrating the new idea into the old idea’s implementation (another stage-gate).

primary doggerel

Whose pri-mar-ee?  Sing with me:
Though it should be Mitt Rom-nee
Better Huckabee than Hillary.

(I’d have gone with Billary but for the alliteration.)

real

mind thine own measure
for all things their truths
wise crowds deicide

How I Chose My Major

I did not take philosophy as a major because there was so little you could do with it. Be a philosopher, or be a teacher, neither of which paid well. I did not take psychology because I did not care enough about others’ problems to spend a career counseling. My study of medicine tends to produce vasovagal syncope. Law is in part about writing procedures, and there is independent evaluation of your work in a very real sense. But though that evaluation strives to be impartial and objective, the underlying laws themselves are aligned with social truths for the commons, rather than universal truths independent of people. The day-to-day details of business utterly bored me.

I asked myself what I had been doing my whole life that I could build a career on, and my still small voice said computers; so I selected Computer Science from a list of college majors. I was lucky to have had an answer, and I’m glad “Programming”, as opposed to “Science”, was not an option. A friend quit the program in his sophomore year because he had spent his time during high school using a computer instead of programming it, and apparently the leap to science was too great. Finally, in the first week of my sophomore year, in the first week of my Digital Circuits class, my still small voice saw AND and OR gates and said “You could do this for the rest of your life.” So I changed my major from Computer Science to Computer Engineering that week.

My father was wary when I mentioned I changed my major, but impressed that it was from science to engineering in the same field. “Isn’t that harder?” he asked; I replied maybe, but it depends on your talents. As it turns out, I enjoyed the filter of practice that kept engineering solutions from inelegance and complexity for the sake of scaling and corner cases. (The best-scaling solutions tend to be elegance applied concurrently, anyway, rather than torturous manipulations of algorithms in pursuit of low-order scaling factors.) And I had no intuition for Electrical Engineering: I just muddled through the simultaneous equations of analog circuits by rote.

I had the same kind of epiphany upon seeing Euler’s identity for the first time. That was tempered by realizing that the professor inspired me more than mathematics in general.

carol of the bells

mad racing voices
violent arpeggios
harsh fear and anger

militant

draw the line
at the constitution
and use force

happy doggerel

Joanie loves Chachi
and little cute Opie
hi ho Tuscadero—
Fonzie jumped the shark

afterimage

this time tomorrow
all but a memory
a brilliant impression
flowered and faded

commencement

change is void
through which matters flow
learn and grow