jzap - Slashdot User

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 11, 2010 @05:30PM from the applied-psychology dept.

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

The Zen of SOA 219

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 16, 2009 @04:30PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

Alex Roussekov writes "The book "Zen of SOA" by Tom Termini introduces an original view to the challenging world of SOA. He refers to the Zen philosophy as a "therapeutic device" helping SOA practitioners to get rid of prejudices and opinions in order to apply a clear mind-set based on real-life experiences and the application of technology knowledge. Each chapter of the book is prefaced by Zen Truism that the author suggests to "revisit, reflect on it longer, and see if you are able to establish a truth from the narrative, as well as from your own experiences." In fact, the book is about a SOA Blueprint outlining a methodology for building a successful SOA strategy. The target audience is C-level Executives, IT Managers and Enterprise Architects undertaking or intending to undertake adoption of SOA throughout their organizations. I strongly recommend the book to all SOA practitioners involved in implementation of SOA." Read below for the rest of Alexander's review.

Comment Re:He's right (Score 1) 567

by jzap on Saturday April 26, 2008 @02:36PM (#23208236) Attached to: Donald Knuth Rips On Unit Tests and More

Yes, he's right in his own context -- single programmer.

In a multi-programmer environment, robustness is king. That's robustness as in maintainability. That comes from readability (comments and style) and, yes, from unit tests, too.

Maintainability trumps performance to a large degree. With a large body of code, it's pretty much guaranteed that some J Random Hacker will have to dig into it to fix a bug or add a feature. The chances that Mr Hacker will break something are greatly reduced by an existing body of unit tests. Plus, JR probably sleeps better, too! --jzap

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