And here’s a parody of it that came out today:

This reminds me of a standard question that Don Rubin … asks in virtually any situation: “What would you do if you had all the data?” For me, that “what would you do” question is one of the universal solvents of statistics.

Emphasis added.

I had not heard Don Rubin’s question before, but I think I’ll be asking it often. It reminds me of Alice’s famous dialog with the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Related post: Irrelevant uncertainty

Thank you everyone for following and for providing feedback.

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Some people are asking why go to college when you can download a college education via iTunes U.

First, you would have no credentials when you’re done.

Second, you almost certainly would not put in the same amount of work as a college student without someone to pace you through the material and to provide external motivation. You’d be less likely to struggle through anything you found difficult or uninteresting.

Third, you’d have no feedback to know whether you’re really learning what you think you’re learning.

The people that I hear gush about online education opportunities are well-educated, successful, and ambitious. They may be less concerned about credentials either because they are intrinsically motivated or because they already have enough credentials. And because of their ambition, they need less accountability. They may need less feedback or are resourceful enough to seek out alternative channels for feedback, such as online forums. Resources such iTunes U and The Teaching Company are a godsend to such people. But that doesn’t mean that a typical teenager would make as much of the same opportunities.

Rather than write a long post, I’ll restrain myself and simply say that I’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.”

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Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. … Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. … The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular.

Emphasis added. From Heretics. Text available online from Project Gutenberg.

He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

Emphasis added.

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You can hear someone on the video say “Are we looking at the right building?” just before the building starts to collapse.

More on the implosion from the Houston Chronicle.

[If the video doesn't show up in your blog reader, go directly to my blog page or to the Houston Chronicle link.]

In our own fevered, changing, and precarious age, where all is in flux and nothing is accepted, we must survey with respect a period when, with only three hundred thousand soldiers, widespread peace in the entire known world was maintained from generation to generation, and when the first pristine impulse of Christianity lifted men’s souls to the contemplation of new and larger harmonies beyond the ordered world around them.

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. … One significant change generates a total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment … In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we do not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.

His resignation to poverty was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them.

Family Handyman, February 2011, page 76.

Here’s a similar instance of lorem ipsum text on a French wine bottle.

Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. …

Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.

Source: Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories.

Here is a recording of O’Connor reading her story A Good Man is Hard to Find. I don’t find her at all hard to understand. The recording was made 13 years after her first encounter with Engle, and perhaps her accent had moderated. Or perhaps my ears are simply accustomed to Southern speech.

1. Coming full circle
2. Music in 5/4 time
3. Daylight savings time is a mess
4. Why did we do this?
5. Thomas Jefferson and preparing for meetings

The music post was from 2009, but it still gets a lot of hits.

If you’re interested in the non-technical posts here, check out the Facebook page for the blog. There I announce new posts of general interest and link to some previous posts.

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• Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.
• Cases shall be easy to open.
• Batteries should be replaceable.
• Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.
• Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.
• Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.
• Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.
• Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.
• Circuit boards shall be commented.
• Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.
• Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.
• If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.
• Screws better than glues.
• Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.
• Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.
• Metric or standard, not both.
• Schematics shall be included.

I don’t like calling this a “bill of rights” because of the moral and legal overtones. The things in this list are not rights. They are generally desirable characteristics, and that’s what desiderata means.

Calling the list a maker’s bill of rights is a little curious. It’s a list of things that some consumers look for in suppliers, namely consumers who call themselves “makers.” But suppliers are literally makers: they make things that makers want to open and tinker with.

• Welcome to Shanghai. Tomorrow will be even more beautiful.
• 1,746 days until the Shanghai World Expo.
• Sexual equality is a basic policy in our country.
• Eat Dove chocolate.

Nor, again, do I now miss the bodily strength of a young man … any more than as a young man I missed the strength of a bull or an elephant. You should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do it with all your might.

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Contrast with the Houston Public Library building that opened in 1926:

Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison. There are slightly more interesting views of the new library. However, both photos represent what comes to mind when I think of each building.

See also Houston Public Library, 1926.

When you visit the library, now known as the Julia Ideson building, the staff recommend you begin your tour on the third floor to see the ceiling.

Then on the second floor you’ll see something like this.

The reading room opens next week and so I could only photograph it from outside.

The children’s library also opens next week and so I could only photograph it through the door.

Finally, here is a meeting room.

My photos of the building’s murals and tapestries turned out poorly and so I’ll spare you from seeing those. (I’ve hardly ever used a camera. Someday I’d like to learn how to take decent photos.) You can find more photos of the library, current and historical, on the web site for The Julia Ideson Library Preservation Partners.

In 1976 a new library opened next to the 1926 building. The contrast between the buildings is stark. No historical society will ever lobby to preserve or restore the new Houston library building. It’s just a typical, bland, modern box. The old library feels like a library. The new library feels like an office building. The old library makes you want to stay and lose yourself in a good book. The new library makes you complete your transaction and leave.

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https://www.facebook.com/EndeavourSelections

Here’s to the sane ones who do mundane work with love and hold the world together.

Here’s to the sane ones,
the responsible, the mature,
the unsung heroes,
the pillars of society,
the ones who see what needs to be done and do it.
They’re not fond of recognition,
and they know the world is a messy place.
You can snub them, make fun of them, or ignore them.
About the only thing you can’t do is live your life without them.
They make the human race survive.
And while some may see them as the boring ones, we see love.
Because the people who are humble enough to serve
are the ones who hold the world together.

I’m not saying we don’t need “crazy ones.” We do. But we also need responsible ones. It’s not just talkers who “make a dent in the universe.” It’s the behind-the-scenes doers too.

I’d love to see someone take this and make a video like the Apple commercial, or a poster like this one using the text of the commercial.

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice.

Also this week, Venkatesh Rao wrote a thoughtful article about how the middle class lives on financial autopilot and how he’s becoming more deliberate in spending his money.

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via I Read Dead People

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Gargoyles are decoration for drainage. Gothic churches channeled water away from their walls to prevent erosion. The spout often emptied through the mouth of a sculpture.

These spouts are called gargoyles, from an old French word gargouille meaning “throat” (it is related to the English words “gargling” and “gurgling”). Other forms of grotesque sculpture used to decorate churches are commonly referred to as “gargoyles” but, strictly speaking, they are not, because they have no practical function.

Source: The Secret Language of Churches & Cathedrals

Photo licensed from The 3D Studio.

My guess is that cartoons may help keep your attention if you’re moderately interested in a subject. If you’re fascinated by something, cartoons get in the way. And if you’re not interested at all, cartoons don’t help. The cartoons may help in the sweet spot in between.

No Starch Press has given me review copies of several of their Manga Guide books. The first three were guides to the universe, physics, and relativity. I’ve reviewed these here and here. Recently they sent a copy of the newest book in the series, The Manga Guide to Biochemistry.

I’m much more interested in physics than biology, so I thought this would be a good test: Would a manga book make it more interesting to read about something I’m not very interested in studying? Apparently not. It didn’t seem that the entertaining format created much of an on-ramp to unfamiliar material.

It seemed like the information density of the book was erratic. Material I was familiar with was discussed in light dialog, then came a slab of chemical equations. Reading the book felt like having a casual conversation with a lawyer who periodically interrupts and asks you to read a contract.

Someone more interested in biochemistry would probably enjoy the book. Please understand that the title of this post refers to the fact that I find biochemistry uninteresting, not the book. If I had to study a biochemistry book, the Manga Guide to Biochemistry might be my first choice. At times I’ve found biochemistry interesting in small doses, describing a specific problem. But it would be nearly impossible for me to read a book on it cover to cover.

O’Reilly’s “Head First” series is similar to the Manga guide series, though the former has more content and less entertainment. I enjoyed the first Head First book I read, Head First HTML with XHTML & CSS. Maybe I enjoyed it because the subject matter was in the sweet spot, a topic I was moderately interested in. The cartoons and humor helped me stick with a dry subject.

When I tried another Head First book, I was hoping for more that same push to keep going through tedious content. The books clearly had the same template though with different content. What was interesting the first time was annoying the second time, like hearing someone tell a joke you just heard. So at least for me, the Head First gimmick lost some of its effectiveness after the first book.

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Why would someone not explain how their subject is used? Often because they don’t know. Or they don’t know how to articulate what they do know. But teachers are supposed to know things and be good at articulating them. That’s their job.

Sometimes the student asking how a subject is going to be used is just a lazy whiner. He’s not asking a sincere question, and he will not find a sincere answer satisfying. But maybe the student is genuinely curious. Or maybe there’s at least a drop of curiosity in the whiner. Or maybe someone else sincerely has the question that the whiner insincerely asked.

I am not saying that content needs to be more practical. Attempts at being more “practical” have often been shortsighted. Many subjects that have been discarded as impractical are actually quite practical. We’ve just grown impatient, unwilling to wait for long-term benefits. I’m saying that more teachers should know and articulate the value of what they’re teaching.

It’s more difficult to convey the value of things that are not immediately useful, but it’s also more important.

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As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people don’t want to see or think about. And it’s crucial.

Thomas Guest made a couple diagrams that illustrate this. Managers draw software diagrams with big boxes and little arrows. The boxes represent software components and the arrows represent the code that connects them together.

This gives the impression that the boxes are the hard part and the arrows are easy. The opposite is probably true. Thomas says if we drew the diagram so that the size of the components is proportional to the effort, it might look like this:

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I think this is a useful distinction, though simplicity is a little harder to pin down than the talk implies. Simplicity is relative and requires context. Rich Hickey’s context is programming languages, and in that context it may be fairly objective to say one construction is simpler than another because it does less.

For example, Hickey says one complication of Lisp is that it uses parentheses for function calls and for grouping. It would be simpler if one symbol did one thing. Mathematica does something like this. Parentheses are for grouping only. Function calls are delimited by square brackets. The square brackets are inconsistent with standard mathematical notation, so they’re not as easy (i.e. familiar), but they are simpler.

Mnemonics often complicate things to make them easier. For example, consider this mnemonic for pi:

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.

This sentence is easier for most people to remember than 3.14159265358979.  But the sentence is also more complex. A computer can represent the number in 8 bytes but the sentence takes 94 bytes of ASCII, more in Unicode.

Sometimes complex is better than simple, better in some context. It’s easier to memorize coherent sentences than numbers. But imagine if we got so excited by this mnemonic that we decided to represent all numbers by sentences. This would be amusing for a little while but would quickly become painful.

Some things are objectively simple but inhuman. Counting seconds since some event (e.g. Unix time) is much simpler than our system of keeping time with days, weeks, months, and years. But our human experience is profoundly influenced by the rotations and revolutions of our planet. Even weeks, which have no astronomical significance, seem to be aligned with human nature. So we keep our complex calendars while our computers count seconds.

I believe Hickey’s main point is that we need to reevaluate what we believe is simple. Maybe what we think is simple is complex but familiar. Maybe there is something new that is objectively simpler would become even easier once we’re used to it. (In particular, Hickey would like for us to try his programming language.) Once you practice thinking this way, you’ll see that many familiar things could be made simpler.

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A little simplicity goes a long way