“It’s only wafffferrrr-thin…”
Headline: AFP science writer grasps ineffectually at rhetorical straws.
This image captured by NASA’s Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope shows Mars when it was approximately 43 million miles (68 million km) from Earth. On Sunday, October 30, the Red Planet will be 69.4 million kilometers (43.1 million miles) from Earth — a distance that in galactic terms is less than wafer-thin and will not be equalled until 2018.
‘Tis mid-autumn, when a young person’s heart turns to thoughts of… well, midterms and papers and suchlike crap, apparently. The grading thereof (as many of the people to whom I link are writing now)… and also the taking thereof.
I recall Alex Mallet had a hard time a while back with a midterm. Mine yesterday… an utterly different experience.
[Type type type. Redact redact redact.]
I have never ever been put in a situation where I want to make an appointment to meet with the instructor, sit down, and start off, “I have to tell you that I’m very concerned about your performance in this class….”
But I am. Really. This is a provisional class, taught by a young tenure-track faculty member. We are so far off the playing card here… [well, looks like I'm going to redact that one too].
The worst I can get is a bad grade, some amusing anecdotes, and a half-dozen useful negative examples I can use next time I’m training instructors.
I really, really like this guy. And so, at this eleventh hour, I hereby commit to do my best to help. I will be happy to set aside whatever time it takes to work with him to rewrite the syllabus so it can get back on topic, introduce some kind of thesis to the material he’s trying to present, really bring those pedagogic points home with some killer examples, and generally squash and eliminate the reams of obfuscatory chaff that’s crept in.
Cause I sat in that exam thinking, What in God’s name is this testing?! Writing untested, slapdash, hurried code under pressure? With no theory, no reason, no background, no point? Syntax and object models?!
There. Now I’m in a state. I will unredact a little bit:
There is no excusable situation in which you should be writing code as if it were written for an exam. None. I would fire the HR person who considered using an exam like this, even when trying to place somebody for the meanest little code monkey job. The whole point of professional software development is to make it so that set of conditions never, ever arises: As a developer you should be unhurried, thoughtful, cunning, delighted, engaged, well-armed, always writing tests, always collaborating, and incessantly talking with your customer about their needs.
Every step away from those is a sin, because it takes value away from your customer. So, in a nutshell: we were just tested on our ability to sin. Along many axes at once.
Worse, some of my classmates will end up being managers. They will have had one experience writing code, and if this is all they’ve seen I’m worried they’ll come to expect the same performance and behavior from their own development teams. At best they’ll think, “Oh, I already know how to run Excel.”
They are being trained to become the Pointy-Haired Bosses of tomorrow.
The going rate at the Community College for what we’ve going to do—in the whole semester-long class as it is playing out now—is about $372. Plus gas money.
Noted at we make money not art: Vehicle piloted by a fish:
Seith Weiner has created a vehicule piloted by a fish and propelled by 2 drive wheels, each driven by its own servomotor. The fish steers the vessel by its movements. A camera above the cockpit tracks the movements of the Terranaut (that’s the name of the fish-pilot). Its location is then wirelessly transmitted to a remote processing station where the data is converted into motion commands and transmitted back to the motion controller of the vehicle.
A hypothetical mode of argument for the debate over Intelligent Design
Which I enjoyed.
Normally I would post this at Odd Ends, but today I’m feeling that we need to rattle Jakob Nielsen’s cage a bit, so I’m posting it here (the blog I use for ranting and railing and opining and gruffing and riffing on science and academia and blogging) instead.
Because it’s important to alienate your readers by being diverse. Or words to that effect. So no machine learning, no politics, nothing about the several mad scientists I know, no musing about biological engineering or the future of academia or pictures from old books. None of that heavily tuned and focused single-topic stuff. Something a little different. So you get a little spice from the dramatic change, don’cha know.
Because after all you’re only interested in the one other thing I ever talk about, right?
So, anyway: My lovely wife is sitting crouched and swearing over her laptop in the office, where I am trying to do my Linear Programming homework. She has that posture (”stance”? can one have a “stance” when seated?) one assumes when one is manipulating many fiddly little cut-and-paste operations on a laptop. Vulching and peering, I think is the correct phrase. She should have a jeweler’s loupe on her forehead and one of those enlarging lensy work lights on a creaky metal arm, if you ask me (and she has a couple of each, too, by the way; I should go get them now).
She’s post-processing a book we bought and scanned about a year back, and sent through the Distributed Proofreaders system to be proofread and formatted, and which now has to be stitched back together from hundreds of little files and made ready for republication in Project Gutenberg.
It is this book:
Flowers From a Persian Garden, and Other Papers by W. A. Clouston, “Author of Popular Tales and Fictions and Book of Noodles; Editor of A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories, Book of Sindibad, Bakhtiyar Nama, Arabian Poetry for English Readers, etc.” London: David Nutt, 270, 271, Strand. MDCCCXC.
The man who wrote it, one W. A. Clouston, is little known as far as I can tell. It should be otherwise. He is clearly, clearly, a member of Amelia Peabody Emerson’s extended family. But in real life. I can see by reading between the lines that he wore a smoking jacket in later life: too often, I suspect. At some point I am sure some freckled moustachioed hotel-visiting friend had a long and searching chat in which the possibility that Clouston was “going native”… somewhere… was explored. I know he traded droll jokes with street pedlars (and spelled the word that way) in Kandehar and Shiraz and in old Jerusalem. On more than one occasion he sat at the edge of the oasis in the dusk, when the camels were being saddled and camp was being broken up, listening to the voices of the djinn on the wind, sipping whiskey from a flask he set on a nearby rock, and alternately licking his nub of a pencil to write in his ragged journal, and watching the livid sun set beyond the dunes. He collected dirty jokes, and fairy stories, and the wonders of the Empire, and he traded them with his friends in letters (where are they now?) and privately-printed works in half-Morocco bindings.
This is that guy. You know him. You just thought he was fictional.*
At any rate, having whetted your whatever and piqued your other thing, I should warn you that this book is not forthcoming immediately, for the same reason that my lovely wife is swearing: because of the index. She needs to find every single little page reference, and create HTML links from the page numbers to anchors she is placing in her new electronic hyperlinked edition of the work. It’s fiddly, editorial, and immensely valuable (and it is my hope that you dear reader will go thence and get the book, when I tell you to, and read it and admire it aloud). But in the meantime it is slow going. All the vulching, I think.
And then an exclamation. “Hunh!”
Me: “What?”
Her: “Errata. In the index.”
And yes. There it is. Here’s the salient bit of the index:
…
Langlès (not Lescallier), 93.
La Rochefoucauld, 23.
Lappländische Märchen, 181.
Laughter, 59, 60.
Laylá and Majnún, 283.
Lazy servants, 76.
Learned man and blockhead, 49;
youth, modesty of, 27.
Learning the best treasure, 27;
and virtue, 47.
Le Grand’s Fabliaux, 96, 327, 328.
Legrand’s Popular Greek Tales, 276.
Lescallier, 173–see also Langlès.
…
And in a footnote on page 93 (I am told that at least 40% of the index entries lead to footnotes, and only to footnotes):
This story has been taken from Arab Sháh into the
Breslau printed Arabic text of the Thousand and One
Nights, where it is related at great length. The
original was rendered into French under the title of
“Ruses des Femmes” (in the Arabic Ked-an-Nisa,
Stratagems of Women) by Lescallier, and appended to his
version of the Voyages of Sindbád, published at Paris in
1814, long before the Breslau text of The Nights was
known to exist. It also forms part of one of the Persian
Tales (Hazár ú Yek Rúz, 1001 Days) translated by Petis
de la Croix, where, however, the trick is played on the
kází, not on a young merchant.
A bit of searching makes it clear what “Langlès (not Lescallier)” means: Lescalier didn’t write the book in question; Langlès did.
I admit, I have never seen such a thing. Who wrote the index? Clouston himself, in a later edition? In the first edition, after the proofs were back from the printers’? A third party, undisclosed? We have no idea.
Isn’t it interesting what one can find, when one’s surfing history?
There now. Return to your technical and political discussions. I promise to stay on topic from here on, at least as much as I have in the past.
Idea: A plugin for WordPress that creates a list of links to the blog entries receiving the most recent comment and referral spam hits.
I’ll use it, if you make it.
At Philobiblon: Hooray for the Daily Mail.
Not sure that bloggers can do this. But then again, mainstream media outlets don’t seem willing to.
The Distributed Proofreaders system, an elegant and simple online collective solution to a difficult problem, and a [somewhat] Smart Mob for sure, is five years old this month.
A nice account can be read at at TeleRead.
Celebrate by signing up and proofing one or two pages. It’s fun! Really!
Why isn’t Larry Lessig a hero to humanities professors the way he is to boingboing readers? It seems to me odd, not because overextended copyright is the most pressing issue in 2005 but because it seems like a social/cultural/political/economic issue that recommends itself as well suited to be taken up by academics - starting with the fact that it is right here on their professional doorstep, in effect. Perhaps I’m wrong in my generalization that academic humanists aren’t terribly engaged by these sorts of issues….
One could say the same thing about academic engineers, I bet. Oh, and academic scientists. Who’d I miss?
Notes from Ward Cunningham’s talk on the Crucible of Creativity, from Many 2 Many.
The question that was asked in 1968 [at a NATO scientific committee conference] is just as valid now: “How can we predictably create better software systems?”
This is a recurring question. But isn’t it backwards? Isn’t the problem rather how to discover which software system would be the best in a particular problem domain, and within a particular budget and timeframe?
And: just software?
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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