It should take less than an hour if we are lucky.
There's something incongruous about basing the estimate of when a task should be completed on an estimate that assumes favorable breaks.
Defining the Use Case correctly is important; illustrated by Jamie Zawinski.
My biography could use a bit of retconning.
Kevin Drum addresses organ harvesting, with a follow up by Kieran Healy.
I don't have anything to add, beyond the fact that the topic makes me rather unhappy.
"Now seven times three is twenty-one." "And how do you know that?" "I just remember it. It's always twenty-one on the computer. I've checked it any number of times." "That doesn't mean it always will be though, does it?" "Maybe not, I'm not a mathematician. But I always get the right answers, you see." -- Issac Asimov
Moebius Stripper presents This is Negligence.
Bad phone support:
Hi, I have two problems: you have put a hold on my credit, and the automated report of my balance suggests that I haven't been credited with the payment I arranged last week.
OK, can you tell me [elided] and the confirmation number?
1234567890-0
Let me go look that up
[Music]
OK, I checked our records - you must have made that payment through our website...
No, I made this payment by phone, speaking to one of your representatives.
But that confirmation number isn't a direct transfer number. You must have gone to the website after speaking to our representative last week...
Could I speak with your supervisor please?
Good Phone Support:
Of course.
[Music]
Hi, this is supervisor, how can I help you?
Hey, are you trying to scam me? You sound just like the front line rep.
It's just the font, sir. The author of this weblog doesn't like underline, which leaves a limited number of voices available.
Oh, OK. I have four problems; you have put a hold on my credit, the payment I arranged last week hasn't been credited to my account, your front line rep is confused because she cannot reconcile my description of the events with the confirmation number I was given, and your front line rep seems to think my highest priority is correcting my description of the events. Which problem would you like to address first?
Let's find your money, sir.
The enemy of my enemy is using me for his own ends.
"To all the kiddies out there: don't smoke. Not 'cause it's bad for you; you do a lot of things that are bad for you, and I'm not gonna lecture you about them. But because eventually you'll want to quit. And it's really f-ing hard."
"I've found that you can't really discuss [blank] with people who feel differently than you do."
Inspired by an expression of that phrase, with Bill Simmons standing in for the blank.
"If we weren't already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?" -- Peter Drucker.
via Paul DePodesta of the Oakland A's.
It reminds me a little bit of Townsend: "Where would the man from Mars locate corporate HQ?"
Task Scheduling using Zipf's law.
Yet another thing to go study later when I have more time.
via Richard Tallent, an essay on candid photography by Len Bernstein.
Then take a look at Memorial Day, Missoula, Montana. You'll have to scroll down, because Gerrold's permalinks are deliberately crippled.
Do not substitute "working without effort" for "working effortlessly".
"The burden of proof lies squarely on the other side of the argument, whichever side that might be." Andrew Edwards
No, I don't believe. I'm somewhere at the other end of the spectrum - I'd be a Bright if I felt any need to identify myself with a tribe.
But I am easily amused, and read the tale of Jonathan Hoag as a child.
Now suppose, for a moment, that you were a world builder, and your game is to create a world where the inhabitants can discover the rules. What evidence do you manifest?
In this space, we know a rule which we call gravity. We have a number of planets lying about, which allow you to observe that the orbital periods are a function of the distance from the sun.
Point the first - without the other planets, how do we discover that T^2 = R^3, and therefore F = z/R^2. Now any force law can produce circles, but only 1/R^2 can produce ellipses.
Point the second - since planetary orbits are not circular ellipses, they confirm that z/R^2 is right.
Point the third - Jupiter has moons, making nice big circles around that planet. Big enough, in fact, that if you pay close attention, you can discover that light has a velocity.
Isn't that convenient?
Via James Randi, a quote making the rounds attributed to White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
The administration looks at the facts, and reviews the best available science based on what's right for the American people.
Of course, my sympathies lie in the other direction.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Kuff is a bit put out: Baseball Prospectus reports that Peter Edward Rose will be reinstated by Major League Baseball.
Assuming the report true, I'm troubled by another example of people choosing to bend rules rather than change them. Is MLB deciding to change rule 21 - to lift the sanctions against gambling? That doesn't seem likely - yet perhaps they've decided that the rule doesn't apply to players who have collected 4000+ hits.
"Peter Edward Rose is hereby declared permanently ineligible in accordance with Major League Rule 21 and placed on the Ineligible List." I'm not sure the Ineligible list has ever meant anything more than "until the commissioner chooses otherwise", so perhaps this is all consistent.
But the sour taste in my mouth reminds me of a legislative branch that cedes its authority to the executive. We've got rules, and we have a system in place for changing those rules. If the rules are broken, or outdated, step one is to revise them.
Ah well, let's not pretend that baseball actually matters.
Inspired by a discussion at Joel on Software: "If you could somehow send advice to your younger self, at the time when you started in University or College, what would that advice be?"
1) When you find a classmate's homework is more interesting than your own, that's a hint!
2) You can probably learn more from sleeping with her for a week than you will in the rest of your years as an undergraduate. She's also a predator. Make this decision when sober.
3) The density of devastatingly intelligent women will be higher now than at any time in the future. Shop carefully.
I wonder how many of my acquaintances can identify the inspirations for each of these (Yes, guys, that's a challenge. Well, probably not #2 - consider that the warmup exercise).
I'd be pretty nervous about sending that advice - on the whole, things have turned out fairly well.
Reportedly by Michael Conlin (somewhere in the MySQL archives - Jeremy Z wasn't too clear where.)
"Figure out what kinds of failures you can tolerate based on how many 9's you get and what kinds you have to design around. From there you can figure out a budget. 99.999% uptime is 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year of total downtime. 99.99% is 52.56 minutes and so on. At some point something will happen, and I've never seen anyone offer more than 5 9's, and IBM charges a lot for that. Then, figure out everything that could cause an outage, figure out how to work around them and give them a budget. Watch how many 9's come off that requirement. "
It's not just the government:
Joe Morgan on July 19th: "Mariners are getting hits in clutch situations while
featuring the hit-and-run, the sacrifice bunt and the sacrifice fly. This is in contrast to the Toronto Blue Jays, who rely mainly on home runs. "
Stevie Ridzik on July 20th: "how can you say "the Blue Jays rely mainly on home runs." when they lead the league in BA-SLG-OBP-OPS-RUNS-RBI and are only 3rd in taters?"
Joe Morgan on July 20th: "Listen to what I say and do not put somebody else's words in my mouth. I said they have a chance of winning because they have a great offense. I'm not sure where you got that. It seems that people want to put words in my mouth. "
The Internet remembers.
It came to me from OffTheKuff, this quote from Joss Whedon:
"The Internet is the one real downside for me because of the destruction of surprise. Some people don't go on it or deliberately avoid spoilers, so they are the people I'm talking to the most. They're the people who want to see it pure, who understand that's the best way to see the story."
While I happily concede the the internet does destroy surprise [bookstores rarely add stock I don't know of in advance, movies can be followed while still in production], it should not be an impediment to story telling.
A good story has to be able to stand up to a retelling; an audience compelled to repeat their attention. If you need the element of surprise, you aren't meeting that standard, and I'll spend my currency elsewhere.
Wow - leveraging panda bacteria for garbage processing.
I'm not even embarassed to admit I wouldn't have even thought of it.
via Rand Simberg
Brian Marick compares scientific progress with software development. Don't argue, just go read it.
It reminds me of an exercise in genetics. Professor Stewart dropped in on our weekly tutorial, and toward the end of the hour proposed a hypothesis for reproduction based on sugars instead of proteins[1]. The class introduced issues and experiments as Stewart refined his hypothesis to take them into account, until the class reached a dead end.
At this point, I remarked that it no longer mattered. The sugar hypothesis was identical in its predictions to the protein hypothesis - so it no longer mattered which model we used. Even if the sugar hypothesis is correct, it is irrelevent - until it makes some new prediction.
Similarly, the actual correctness of a theory isn't particularly relevent until we enter a problem domain where the predictions fail. The Newtownian model of mechanics is wrong - but that didn't prevent a whole bunch of progress. Sine theta doesn't equal theta - but you can reach accurate conclusions from that premise.
[1] That's how I remember it, but DNA is a sugar, isn't it? with a phosphate backbone and nucleotide bases. I wonder if I'm misremembering some enzyme process.
Satire Wire Interviews Ask Jeeves.
-- Jeeves, You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."
-- 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.
I'm thinking part of the trouble here is that the wrong sort of interview was conducted. A locker room interview would have been choice - perhaps in the unique style of Ahmad Rashad. Somebody with sportswriting experience should look into this.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I'm really getting tired of the misuse of the term ad hominem.
"You are an idiot" is not an ad hominem attack. It is an insult (or perhaps it is an astute character assessment).
"You are an idiot, therefore your argument that the sun rises in the east is clearly without merit" is ad hominem. The nature of the fallacy is that the implication is invalid - there is no relationship between the antecedent (the character of the advocate) and the consequent (the validity of the argument itself).
Put more simply - what is true remains true when a fool believes it.
Latin is a dead language, people; stop trying to force it to evolve.
Idiots.
OK, the solution is now available.
Lots of fun with Unicode, especially superscripts and mathematical operators (not all of which my browser renders. sigh).
Six and a half pages in my notebook, most of those after I had the outline of the solution, trying to discover the notation to keep everything straight.
I invented a puzzle when I was an undergraduate (I don't claim to have been the first to invent it), that I thought was pretty cool. I wrote it the problem, and put it away.
Promptly forgetting the solution. Oh, I knew the answer, and it can be solved iteratively, but where's the fun in that.
Last night, after finishing a high level skim of Carver Mead, I pulled the problem out again, and managed to get it to work out.
I hope to publish the solution before I forget it again.
The easy part of OAOO is removing duplication. The hard part is getting all of the ideas in once. It's very easy to elide ideas because - in the problem you are solving right now - two or three things are almost indistinguishable.
Brian Marick is close to discovering this in his thoughts on But Syd.
[more ]It seems the Monty Hall/Baysian/Restricted choice problem is going around again, and dredging up some of the old discussions, like this one by Dean Esmay.
I was introduced to this puzzle some twenty years ago, and I'm still waiting for a convincing explanation of the correct answer.
[more ]Simple but brilliant: "please forward to us any custom applications or spreadsheets you've developed to help you do your job around the limitations of the current system"
Brain Marick writes about communicating requirements.
What's a good requirements document? "an effective communication is a program that provokes desirable responses from the recipient". In other words, it's not a complete description, but more of a compressed thing that, combined with the experiences of the reader, expands into a description of the desired product.
Part of the point is that the accuracy, for lack of a better term, isn't relevent. Two different requirements that produce the same program are equivalent - even if those requirements, in other contexts, could produce different results. Context matters.
Some of this I was explaining last night, before I read Brian's thoughts. When teaching dance, I often experiment with multiple definitions of the same movement, until I find one that, when interpretted by this student (at this time), produces the effect I'm looking for.
Unfortunately, it's not obvious how to quantify something so ephemeral.
Why is it that, as teams get larger, results get worse?
Because good ideas are shared, but bad ideas multiply.
Suppose we have one player, with 3 bad ideas and 1 good one. Add a second, similar player to help him - now each player has two good ideas, and three bad ones. But the team has two good ideas, and six bad ones. Add another player, and we have three good ideas shared. Each player has 50% good ideas. But the team isn't getting any better.
You have to actively hunt the new weaknesses, and destroy them.