Tony Nemo

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

A vanquished competitor loses confidence, sometimes for days. Sometimes the defeat can have even more severe consequences. If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.

Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter.

High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners, and to vanish at the first hint of trouble.

Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”

A weaker lobster will quit trying, accept his lowly status, and keep his legs attached to his body. The top lobster, by contrast—occupying the best shelter, getting some good rest, finishing a good meal—parades his dominance around his territory, rousting subordinate lobsters from their shelters at night.

What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt? We make many assumptions about nature—about the environment—and these have consequences. Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The black serpent, chaos, has a white dot in its head. The white serpent, order, has a black dot in its head. This is because chaos and order are interchangeable, as well as eternally juxtaposed.

Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.

“In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.” No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted.

Eco-activists, even more idealistic in their viewpoint, envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the disruptions and depredations of mankind. Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, AIDS, Black Plague.

If Mother Nature wasn’t so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates.

Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources. This response is really what everyone calls stress, and it is by no means only or even primarily psychological. It’s a reflection of the genuine constraints of unfortunate circumstances.

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society—on a scale of one to ten, for the sake of argument.

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted.

Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster. Serotonin flows plentifully. This renders you confident and calm, standing tall and straight, and much less on constant alert. Because your position is secure, the future is likely to be good for you. It’s worthwhile to think in the long term.

Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms.

I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.

тобто страх - це показник низького рівня серотоніну. коли 'внутрішній калькулятор' оцінить людинку вище, то організм вважатиме себе в безпеці і те, що видавалось страхом ставатиме новими можливостями. для того, щоб почати: сон, сніданок, спорт.

Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away. So now the mall is tagged “too dangerous to approach”

They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.

коли ти впевнений що можеш вкусити, що складніше себе стримати, ніж навпаки, то випадків, ле ця агресія стане в пригоді менше (я так розумію, бо цю здатність вкусити - видно і проявляється вона інакше)

eople who refuse to muster appropriately self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as much as those who genuinely can’t stand up for their own rights because of a more essential inability or a true imbalance in power.

those who start to have will probably get more.

But standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you’re not only a body. You’re a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically.

Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. Y

You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon. You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it.

That can all occur practically or symbolically, as a physical or as a conceptual restructuring.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children.

Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead.

Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating.

Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair.

Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy. Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.

No amount of genius can overcome obsession with detail

Shaders are also very isolated programs in that they're not allowed to communicate with each other; the only communication they have is via their inputs and outputs.

Shaders always begin with a version declaration, followed by a list of input and output variables, uniforms and its main function. Each shader's entry point is at its main function where we process any input variables and output the results in its output variables

GLSL types

GLSL Vector Container A vector in GLSL is a 1,2,3 or 4 component container for any of the basic types just mentioned. They can take the following form (n represents the number of components)

Components of a vector can be accessed via vec.xwhere x is the first component of the vector. You can use .x, .y, .z and .w to access their first, second, third and fourth component respectively. GLSL also allows you to use rgba for colors or stpq for texture coordinates, accessing the same components.

The vector datatype allows for some interesting and flexible component selection called swizzling. Swizzling allows for the following syntax:

We can also pass vectors as arguments to different vector constructor calls, reducing the number of arguments required:

ins and outs Shaders are nice little programs on their own, but they are part of a whole and for that reason we want to have inputs and outputs on the individual shaders so that we can move stuff around. GLSL defined the in and out keywords specifically for that purpose.

ins and outs 2 Each shader can specify inputs and outputs using those keywords and wherever an output variable matches with an input variable of the next shader stage they're passed along. The vertex and fragment shader differ a bit though

If we want to send data from one shader to the other we'd have to declare an output in the sending shader and a similar input in the receiving shader. When the types and the names are equal on both sides OpenGL will link those variables together and then it is possible to send data between shaders

Uniforms Uniforms are another way to pass data from our application on the CPU to the shaders on the GPU

To declare a uniform in GLSL we simply add the uniform keyword to a shader with a type and a name. From that point on we can use the newly declared uniform in the shader. Let's see if this time we can set the color of the triangle via a uniform

If you declare a uniform that isn't used anywhere in your GLSL code the compiler will silently remove the variable from the compiled version which is the cause for several frustrating errors; keep this in mind!

If you work by yourself, don’t expect to spend less time than that (maybe 15 hours a week for 14 weeks).

That’s quite an ambitious goal because much modern software relies on techniques considered advanced just a few years ago.

Consequently, I chose the topics for this book to cover what is needed to get started with real-world programming, not just what is easy to teach and learn.

If you need a technique to get basic work done right, I describe it, demonstrate concepts and language facilities needed to support the technique, provide exercises for it, and expect you to work on those exercises.

This book is aimed to serve those who do want to write or understand nontrivial programs.

working with friends forces you to articulate your ideas, which is just about the most efficient way of testing your understanding and making sure you remember.

Remember: programming is (among other things) a practical skill that you need to practice to master. If you don’t write code (do several exercises for each chapter), reading this book will be a pointless theoretical exercise

And please don’t be too impatient. Learning any major new and valuable skill takes time and is worth it.

for helping me hide away from distractions to get writing done during the summers.

Each chapter is a reasonably self-contained unit, meant to be read in “one sitting” (logically, if not always feasible on a student’s tight schedule)

Learning to ask the right (often hard) questions is an essential part of learning to think as a programmer.

but please don’t underestimate a simple statement like “This is often useful.” If we quietly emphasize that something is important, we mean that you’ll sooner or later waste days if you don’t master it.

If you haven’t done the drills, you have not “done” the book.

characterize our approach as “depth-first.” It is also “concrete-first” and “concept-based.” First, we quickly (well, relatively quickly, Chapters 1–11) assemble a set of skills needed for writing small practical programs. In doing so, we present a lot of tools and techniques in minimal detail.

We focus on simple concrete code examples because people grasp the concrete faster than the abstract.

You must run before you can walk!

Nobody should be satisfied with “because that’s the way it is” as an explanation.

More importantly, an understanding of ideals and reasons allows you to generalize from what you know to new situations and to combine ideas and tools in novel ways to address new problems. Knowing “why” is an essential part of acquiring programming skills.

Successful commercial programs with hundreds of thousands of lines of code are based on techniques that we illustrate in a dozen 50-line programs.

The fastest way to understand real-world code is through a good understanding of the fundamentals.

More generally, a textbook or a course must lead students through a series of subsets. We consider it our responsibility to select topics and to provide emphasis. We can’t just present everything, so we must choose; what we leave out is at least as important as what we leave in — at each stage of the journey

only through complete understanding of a problem and its solution can you express a correct program for it, and only through constructing and testing a program can you be certain that your understanding is complete.

Please don’t underestimate the importance of the notion of type safety. Types are at the center of most notions of correct programs, and some of the most effective techniques for constructing programs rely on the design and use of types

o deal with input, a program usually contains some data, sometimes referred to as its data structures or its state. For example, a calendar program may contain lists of holidays in various countries and a list of your appointments.

Most of the rest of this book could be seen as discussing that last category: how do we express a program as a set of cooperating parts and how can they share and exchange data? These are key questions in programming.

Inputs to a part of a program are often called arguments and outputs from a part of a program are often called results.

Our job as programmers is to express computations • Correctly • Simply • Efficiently

Please note the order of those ideals: it doesn’t matter how fast a program is if it gives the wrong results. Similarly, a correct and efficient program can be so complicated that it must be thrown away or completely rewritten to produce a new version (release).

Remember, useful programs will always be modified to accommodate new needs, new hardware, etc. Therefore a program — and any part of a program — should be as simple as possible to perform its task.

we must concern ourselves with the structure of code. Paradoxically, concerns for structure and “quality of code” are often the fastest ways of getting something to work. When programming is done well, such concerns minimize the need for the most frustrating part of programming: debugging;

Our main tool for organizing a program — and for organizing our thoughts as we program — is to break up a big computation into many little ones. This technique comes in two variations: - Abstraction - Divide and Conquer

Without structure, you are (metaphorically speaking) building with mud bricks. It can be done, but you’ll never get to the fifth floor (mud bricks lack the structural strength for that).

The most basic building block of programs is an expression. An expression computes a value from a number of operands. The simplest expression is simply a literal value, such as 10, 'a', 3.14, or "Norah". Names of variables are also expressions. A variable represents the object of which it is the name.

Sometimes (as an lvalue) length refers to the box (object) and sometimes (as an rvalue) length refers to the value in that box.

C++ offers the notion of a symbolic constant, that is, a named object to which you can’t give a new value after it has been initialized. For example:

Consequently, we prefer not to use literals (except very obvious ones, such as 0 and 1) in most places in our code. Instead, we use constants with descriptive names. Non-obvious literals in code (outside definitions of symbolic constants) are derisively referred to as magic constants.

And by the way, 299792458 is one of the fundamental constants of the universe: the speed of light in vacuum measured in meters per second. If you didn’t instantly recognize that, why would you expect not to be confused and slowed down by other literals embedded in code? Avoid magic constants!

To handle cases where the value of a “variable” that is initialized with a value that is not known at compile time but never changes after initialization, C++ offers a second form of constant (a const):

Note that a<b<c means (a<b)<c and that a<b evaluates to a Boolean value: true or false. So, a<b<c will be equivalent to either true<c or false<c. In particular, a<b<c does not mean “Is b between a and c?” as many have naively (and not unreasonably) assumed. Thus, a<b<c is basically a useless expression.

The rule (for the types we have presented so far) is that if an operator has an operand of type double, we use floating-point arithmetic yielding a double result; otherwise, we use integer arithmetic yielding an int result. For example:

C++11 introduced an initialization notation that outlaws narrowing conversions. For example, we could (and should) rewrite the troublesome examples above using a {}-list notation, rather than the = notation:

The {}-list-based notation is known as universal and uniform initialization

cout<< "Please enter a length followed by a unit (c or i):\n"; cin >> length >> unit;

However, please remember that one of the ideals for code is simplicity, rather than complexity. You don’t demonstrate your cleverness by writing the most complex program. Rather, you demonstrate competence by writing the simplest code that does the job.

a selection based on comparison of a value against several constants. Such selection is so common that C++ provides a special statement for it: the switch-statement.

// The most common error with switch-statements is to forget to terminate a case with a break. // you can just drop through into next case