Failure is not only an option, but can be a necessity

There is an experienced chess grandmaster who laments that he has lost many ELO points, which are the rating by which Grandmasters are measured.
He says his record in tournaments is: ‎54 wins and 86 draws - and here is the important thing - no losses! He lost many ELO points because he is drawing against, and not beating, chess players with low ELO.
It's quite fascinating that a man's downfall is so well correlated by his *not* losing ANY games. I've never seen anything so strongly scientific in support of the notion that one must take risks or one will, by not losing, lose!
Obviously, the grandmaster needs to take more risks and win more games. Though he will lose more games, his score will go up. It's an uplifting story because no one likes losing but by not losing you can be a greater failure yet!
And as Kasparov says, you learn more from your failures than your successes so a failure can be an investment in the future.
Blimey what a preachy post I've created :-)

Tourettes Phone

My (iphone) phone has Tourettes. It changed "xox" (short hand for, kiss hug kiss) into "Cox" and "Awwww" into "Sewers". Naturally I vomited at this filth belted out by my sweary phone. The "auto-corrects" happen at the very last moment just as one hits "send".
Oh, and the iPhone never learned - sometimes I sign my name as Jim and every single freaking time the damned iPhone wanted to correct "Jim" to "Him" or "Kim" aaargh! And the little x to get rid of the retarded suggestion is so tiny - why can't they make that X bigger so it's easier to get rid of the mental auto-correct? I know why, because trendy designers prefer form over function - a big X might be ugly - the Gods forbid. Designers/marketroids - the b*st8rds! Well here's some news marketroids, that was my last iPhone - little things mean a lot to me!
Actually the main reason for dumping iPhone is that Apple are control freaks and their ecosystem is closed, I prefer freedom - open systems, and Android is free-er. But kudos to Apple for single handedly making Microsoft irrelevant.

Trapped in a ghastly Search Engine bubble

Google and other search engines analyse what we do. And based on that, they hide stuff from us! Everybody only sees a little bubble of what search engines think we will like. It's like having eyesight, but the gods only allowing us to see south east and being oblivious to the rest of the world out there.

I'm a Zumba monkey

Went to my first Zumba dance class. It's a mashup of salsa and other foreign dance styles in a kind of keep-fit dance session, it's enormous fun, especially for a fitness class. Well it's fun unless you're unfortunate enough to see my comically bad imitations of zumba. I just jump about having fun and hope for the best
I'm also the scruffiest dressed in the room. Everyone (everyone else there were chicks) apart from me were wearing all this alien, extravagant multi-layered gym clothing that looks like they're equipped to go rock climbing on the moon, and here's me, shorts and t-shirt. Unreconstructed, unfashionable and unreformed.
I was the only bloke but it's not a gay thing to do. At least I hope not ha ha, well it makes a change from my occasional visit to the chess club which is 100% blokes.

Can a god really create an Adam?

As a software engineer, I'm amazed about the human body and brain. Non-software developers think that software works like magic, like a word processor or operating system or web or phones, somehow software is this spongy stuff that is soft and it works. They have no idea of the complexity, of the difficulty of creating it. Likewise they have no idea how miraculous the brain works or the body works, it just works.
Every year I work on software, my absolute astonishment at the working of a single biological cell, let alone a whole animal, gets deeper. To me software is not magic, I know roughly how it works, at least on certain levels of the stack. But biology???
Now I think about it, this is a powerful argument about god - a god or a committee of gods cannot possibly be smart enough to program an Adam from scratch.
Evolution over billions of years is somehow necessary to arrive at such a solution.