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From On Old Age by Cicero:

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.

Related post:

Gutenberg + Readability

Behold the architectural splendor of the Houston Public Library building that opened in 1976:

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.

In 1926, Houston completed construction of a new public library. This building has been restored and reopened to the public this month. My wife and I visited the library yesterday and I took a few photos.

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.

[click to continue...]

I’ve created a Facebook page Endeavour Selections. I’ll include links to non-technical posts from this blog, some old and some new.

https://www.facebook.com/EndeavourSelections

I’ve been thinking about unsung heroes lately, the behind-the-scenes people who make the world go around. I’d like to tell some of their stories here, but they probably wouldn’t want that. They’re not “the crazy ones” romanticized by pop culture. They’re the sane ones who take responsibility.

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.

This week Seth Godin wrote a blog post that include this gem:

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.

Science

Why are scientific retractions increasing?
Detecting rings around exoplanets
How tire pressure sensors work

Work

Doing a job

Math

A primer on Bezier curves
Number of cycles in a random permutation

Programming

Seven habits of effective text editing
Scott Hanselman’s tool list for Windows
Unix tool tips
Impractical programming

History

The Billy Possum
Revisiting Alan Turing

Humor

“There never was a time when those that read at all, read so many books by living authors rather than books by dead authors. Therefore there was never a time so completely parochial, so completely shut off from the past.” — T. S. Eliot

via I Read Dead People

Posts related to T. S. Eliot:

Historical sense
Calendars, Connections, and Cats

Posts on old books:

Firsthand knowledge
Applied topology and Dante

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.

If you’re not interested in a subject, do cartoons make it more palatable?

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.

Computing

The abstraction-optimization tradeoff
Dictionary of algorithms and data structures
How to write unmaintainable code

Education

English as a foreign language
No, you cannot be a professor
Prof or Hobo? quiz

Science

Open source cancer research
Lightest material on earth
Mars Rover Curiosity

Applied math

Using math to build better stents
Aerodynamics of a soccer ball
Math and modern architecture

“When are we ever going to use this?” What a great question! This is a teachable moment. Too bad most teachers blow it. Instead of seizing the opportunity, they reprimand the student for asking. At least that was my experience.

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.

Related posts:

Business literature
Just-in-case versus just-in-time

I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn’t realize that “plumber programmer” is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team.

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:

Related posts:

Where does programming effort go?
Your job is trivial (but I couldn’t do it)

Rich Hickey argued in a recent talk that simplicity is objective but easiness is subjective. Something is simple if it is singular: it does one thing, it is made of one thing, etc. Something is easy if it is close at hand, i.e. familiar.

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.

Related post:

A little simplicity goes a long way