Unicycling feels like flying
when someone asks me if i can teach them how to ride the unicycle i always say no
but i can show u how to teach yourself
och!, they say, u're just playing wordgames now
no, i'll respond, i'm not
in learning how to ride, u will reach a stage of incredible frustration and irritation because u think u should be able to ride and yet your body can't yet
at that time, the normal instinct is to turn around to a 'teacher' and say: "help me"
in unicycling (as in life really) this is impossible
there is nobody who can help u thru that part of the learning curve
and eventually u realise that u must'nt look outside yourself for help, u need to look inside yourself for help
and that, to me, is the very essence of unicycling
everything u do after that moment of realisation is just for fun post by GILD to rec.sport.unicycling
Geeky humor of the day:
<monochrom> In this universe, by the trick of historical accident, stock hardware are imperative with cheap goto's, so recursion and FP look slow unless you aggressively optimize.
<monochrom> In a parallel universe, Alonzo Church's paper was an overnight worldwide success, and von Neumann was never born. Stock hardware is what we know in this universe as graph rewriters, geared towards pure FPLs. When finally someone invented Fortran, it was ridiculously slow because every assignment "x := x + 1" was translated to a function that copies the other 999 global variables unchanged. Later it became acceptably fast, only after someone invented data-flow analysis to figure out "w00t, these other 999 variables are unchanged, no need to copy them!"
<monochrom> So in other words, in the parallel universe, we say to each other "while-loops are inefficient unless you do dataflow optimizations, but of course all respectable compilers do it --- though imperfectly."
