Scree

noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.

The Fukushima disaster continues

Published August 22, 2013 · All posts on Aug 22

…if you manage to bust a fuel element, the best outcome is that huge amounts of radioactivity escape into the air and blow over Japan, just like before. The worst outcome is when two of these things get too close, perhaps because in pulling one out it breaks and falls against another one in the tank. Because then you suddenly have lots of fission, a lot of heat, a meltdown, possibly a big blast like before, and the destruction of the entire cooling pond. Or else the water boils off and the whole thing catches fire.

~ From, «http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines/alert-fukushima-worse-than-chernobyl-now-in-crisis»

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Where did the term “Software Engineering” originate?

Published August 19, 2013 · All posts on Aug 19

Just in case you thought it was fairly new, it’s probably(*) older than you. Here’s a deep link, to a down-the-rabbit-hole discussion. Seems most sources attribute a 1968 conference, while the author of this message from the Software Craftsmanship group has dug up an ACM article from 1966.

* …and probably significantly older than you since the average age of the entire world population is definitely less than Software Engineering’s 47 years (and counting.)

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Why is estimating so hard?

Published August 18, 2013 · All posts on Aug 18

It turns out that we don’t know the procedure. We haven’t got any clue to just how difficult the procedure is. We aren’t computers. We don’t follow procedures. And so comparing the complexity of the manual task, to the complexity of the procedure is invalid.

~ Uncle Bob Martin from, Clean Coder Blog

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Manage your energy, not your time

Published August 15, 2013 · All posts on Aug 15

“Manage your energy, not your time.” This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it’s one that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle in the 21st century. Yet, living “manage your energy, not your time” is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around a year to fully grasp its meaning. Since then, I’ve turned my life upside down and changed my routine dramatically.

~ Leo Widrich from, The Four Elements of Physical Energy and How To Master Them | Lifehacker

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All your base are belong to us!

Published August 14, 2013 · All posts on Aug 14

The rubbish and recycling bins, from the company Renew, were set up to identify and remember people’s smartphones, and thereby the movements and habits of their owners, as they walked by – kind of like how web pages monitor site traffic.

~ Lisa Vass

You are aware that you are all carrying personal, individually identifiable, tracking devices, right?

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Inflation, deflation or discontinuity?

Published August 13, 2013 · All posts on Aug 13

After a while, a period of stagflation is reached. Population catches up to the new resource, and job opportunities for young people become less plentiful. Wage disparity grows, with wages of the common worker lagging behind. The cost of government rises. Because of the low wages of workers, it becomes increasingly difficult to collect enough taxes from workers to pay for rising government costs. To work around these problems, use of debt grows. Needless to say, this scenario tends to end very badly.

~ Gail Tverberg from, Inflation, Deflation, or Discontinuity? | Our Finite World

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Reality based martial arts?

Published August 12, 2013 · All posts on Aug 12

Of course, we all think our OWN martial art system is the best, or we wouldn’t be doing it, right? That said, I always tell my own students to have a healthy respect for other martial arts for what they do, or attempt to do, if within their own context, they are doing it well. I often point out differences in how we execute a throw, for example, or a punch, comparing it to judo, aikido or karate techniques. Different, same or indifferent. Here’s why and how. I explain, discuss and then quantify and qualify. We do it this way because we are concerned with an armored or gear-protected assailant. The other guy may do it this way because it’s primarily a sport done in shorts. The roundness of an aikido throw really is good at teaching disbalancing and force redirection, more so than the shorter, simpler throw we do, which may seem more practical, but it’s basically the same. And so on.

~ Wayne Muromoto from, 70. “Reality-based” Martial Arts Not So Reality-based? – The Classic Budoka

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Tipping must die

Published August 11, 2013 · All posts on Aug 11

If there’s no tipping, then how will the servers be motivated to do a good job?

When you step back and think about this for a second, it’s actually kind of hilarious. The person asking this question would have a full-time job as a software developer, or lawyer, or journalist, or doctor, always working to a pay rate that was negotiated ahead of time. We would never suggest that a code jockey or surgeon would be motivated to do better work by the thought that their clients, if pleased with the service, might toss in a few extra dollars.

~ Jay Porter from, «http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-3/»

Hear! Hear! You should go read that whole series by Porter.

Then you should start talking about how we should include the cost of providing service in the price of the menu items, or include a line-item percentage service charge on the bill. Pay EVERYONE who works in the restaurant a fair, living wage.

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Network Theory applied to altitude sickness

Published August 10, 2013 · All posts on Aug 10

They then mapped out the correlations between the various symptoms, creating a network. An increasingly standard tool in network theory these days is cluster detection–the ability to spot parts of a network that are more strongly linked together than others.

~ «http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512986/network-theory-approach-reveals-altitude-sickness-to-be-two-different-diseases/»

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) is a common problem among visitors at high altitude, and may progress to life-threatening pulmonary and cerebral oedema in a minority of cases. … These results challenge the accepted paradigm that AMS is a single disease process and describe at least two distinct syndromes following acute ascent to high altitude. This approach to analysing symptom patterns has potential utility in other clinical syndromes.

~ [1303.6525] Network analysis reveals distinct clinical syndromes underlying acute mountain sickness

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Organizational skills for the win

Published August 7, 2013 · All posts on Aug 7

When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. … [T]here’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there.

~ James Hague from, Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry

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What it means to be mortal

Published August 5, 2013 · All posts on Aug 5

We, like all living things, want to live on — we want to project ourselves into the future, we have this will to live. And yet, unlike other living things, we have to live in a knowledge that this will is going to be thwarted, that we’re going to die. And so we might have to live with this sense of personal apocalypse — the worst thing that could possibly happen, will. This is what it means to be mortal.

~ Maria Popova from, The Philosophy of Immortality – The Marginalian

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Work mind and vacation mind

Published August 4, 2013 · All posts on Aug 4

They are two different things, and yet, what if we could have the vacation mind while working? We’d have to toss out the lazing around and the margaritas, but the mindset could be the same. The result would be a saner way of living, where we aren’t “working for the weekend” or looking forward to the little vacation time we have, but instead are happier throughout the week.

~ Leo Babauta from, The Practice of Work Mind & Vacation Mind, Simultaneously – Zen Habits Website

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Craftsmanship

Published August 2, 2013 · All posts on Aug 2

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value…

~ Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship from, http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org

Over time, the ideal of craftsmanship was cordoned off to just the technical arts. Physicians and legislators no longer thought of themselves as craftsmen, but as philosophers and natural scientists who were more concerned with the theoretical as opposed to the practical. Such a shift is a shame, for the principles of craftsmanship truly do apply to every man, whether he makes furniture or crunches numbers.

~ Brett McKay from, Applying the Ethos of the Craftsman to Our Everyday Lives | The Art of Manliness

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Try to ask a doctor or any engineer to do a crappy job in order to reduce costs. Engineers can change product’s materials to cheaper ones, they can change product’s final characteristics, but they don’t change their level of attention and their process of doing things the way they think it’s right. Doctors can perform simpler or different procedures by patient request, impacting somehow on the final result, but the attention, caring and cleanliness will be the same.

~ Caio Fernando Bertoldi Paes de Andrade from, Perception that high quality equals Rolls Royce

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Sonder

Published July 29, 2013 · All posts on Jul 29

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — sonder
Urban Dictionary: sonder
sonder – Wiktionary, the free dictionary

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

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