Don't bother with this one - the latest post (The Return of Magic) is promoting a load of unscientific woo (The Telepathy Tapes). The author seems to seriously mean the title of the post literally.
Basically his whole "return of magic" premise seems to be rooted in his listening to "The Telepathy Tapes" and it confirming/supporting some of his latent beliefs. But the Telepathy Tapes is utter nonsense and self delusion based on wishful thinking and the "Autism Parent" movement.
I think you may just be used to Python still relying on functions for string processing, where Ruby has methods on the String class for manipulating strings.
It seems to me that Python still has these holdovers from when it was not fully object-oriented, where a lot of string and data structure manipulation is done with language-level functions rather than methods on the objects, which can be quite confusing.
No, in Ruby lambdas are lambdas (and are a special type of proc); the longhand way to create a lambda is to call Kernel#lambda and pass it a block (though modern Ruby has a special shorthand syntax for lambdas, as well.)
Blocks are sort of like anonymous function literals that are not first class, one (but no more than one) of which may be attached to a function call.
Not just high heels, but also many boots have sharp protrusions (e.g. lace hooks on some hiking boots and work boots, metal decorations on goth and cowboy boots)
Many shoes have hard, sharp parts that could damage the slide, even to the point of complete deflation. There is no time to assess whose shoes would be safe and whose not, so the blanket rule is "no shoes".
