Tootfinder

Halifax mural festival

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Estrogen? Hot drinks will suffice!
"""
Naturally, cold water cooled. For that reason it was used in mania and frenzy, sicknesses of heat where the spirits were in ebullition, solids tightened and liquids were heated to the point of evaporation, leaving the brain of the patient ‘dry and brittle’, as anatomists regularly demonstrated. Reasonably enough Boissieu includes cold water among his list of refreshing cures: baths were the foremost ‘antiphlogistic’, purifying the body of any excessive igneous particles to be found there. Taken as a drink, it was a ‘dilutive procastinant’ that diminished the resistance of fluids to the action of solids, thereby indirectly lowering the general heat of the body.
But it was also said that cold water brought heat and that hot water cooled. Such at least was the thesis defended by Darut. Cold baths chased the blood from the periphery of the body and pushed it ‘with increased vigour towards the heart’. As the heart was the seat of natural heat, the blood was warmed there, all the more so as “the heart, which struggles alone against all the other parts, makes renewed efforts to expel the blood and overcome capillary resistance. What results is a greater intensity of circulation, the division of the blood, the fluidity of the humours, the destruction of congestions, an increase in the strength of the natural heat, of the appetite of the digestive forces, and the activity of the body and the mind.” A symmetrical paradox operated regarding hot baths: blood was attracted to the extremities of the body, as were the humours, sweat, and all forms of liquid, both beneficial and harmful. The vital centres were therefore deserted, the heart slowed and the organism thus began to cool down. This fact was confirmed by the ‘fainting, lipothymia… weakness, nonchalance, lassitude, and lack of vigour’ that generally accompanied excessive bathing with hot water.
But there was more. So great was the polyvalence of water, so great was its aptitude to submit itself to the qualities that it carried, that it sometimes lost its efficacy as a liquid and acted as a desiccant instead. Water could Prevent dampness. In part, this was the old principle of similia similibus, but in another sense, and by the intermediary of a visible mechanism. For some, it was cold water that brought dryness, as heat kept water humid. Heat dilated the pores of the organism, distended its membranes, and allowed humidity to impregnate them as a secondary effect. Liquids made their way through heat. For that reason, the hot drinks so widely used in the seventeenth century risked becoming a danger, and those who took too many risked relaxation, general dampness and a weakness of the whole organism. As these were traits commonly associated with the feminine body, as opposed to the dry, virile solidity of the male, the abuse of hot drinks could lead to a general feminisation of the human race: “Not without reason, the reproach is made to the majority of men that they have softened and degenerated, taking on the habits and inclinations of women – the only thing lacking is a physical resemblance. The abuse of humectants could accelerate the metamorphosis, and render the two sexes almost identical both physically and morally. Woe betide the human race if this prejudice ever spreads to the masses: there will be no more labourers, artisans or soldiers, as they will have lost the strength and vigour necessary for their profession.” [Pressavin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

"Let us return to 2000: a few days before Joel Spolsky published his Test, Mark Lucovsky gave a talk titled “Windows: A Software-Engineering Odyssey” at the 4th USENIX Windows System Symposium in Seattle, Washington. He was a member of the original Windows NT team from 1988 to the mid-2000s. The PowerPoint slides of the talk are still available online, and I seriously recommend you take a look at them.
Because part of the “odyssey” was, you guessed it, source control."
…

Twenty Years Is Nothing
In a previous edition of this magazine, we argued that English was so pervasive in our industry, nobody even questioned its use anymore. The same can be said of Git. It is difficult to imagine that merely twenty years ago, the landscape of source control tools was more diverse, and the choice of one such tool was much more complicated than today. Actually, Git was not even on the map yet. Before debating whether the hegemony of Git is good or bad, let us go back in time for a little while.