Chuck Connell:

A few years ago, I studied algorithms and complexity. The field is wonderfully clean, with each concept clearly defined, and each result building on earlier proofs.

Now I work on software engineering, and this area is maddeningly slippery.

While new machine architectures are cool, the real limiting challenge in computer science is the problem of creating software.

Software engineering has an essential human component.

Sometimes these people tell us the right information, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes people lie, perhaps for good reasons. Sometimes people are honestly trying to convey correct information but are unable to do so.

This observation leads to Connell's Thesis:

Software engineering will never be a rigorous discipline with proven results, because it involves human activity.

Michael Lopp, on his book Managing Humans:

This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff.

I.M. Pei:

Building doesn't mean success. Building ... three or four masterpieces [is] more important than fifty or sixty buildings. ... Quality, not quantity.

Christopher Alexander:

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

Paul Graham:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals.

Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science

Navigate the mind-expanding universe of Gödel, Escher, Bach with MIT OpenCourseWare:

What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome. You will be responsible for most of the reading as lectures will consist primarily of motivating the material and encouraging discussion. I advise everyone seriously interested to buy the book, grab on and get ready for a mind-expanding voyage into higher dimensions of recursive thinking.

Check out the video lectures.

From the archive, on Hofstadter:

What do we mean when we say "I"?

Freeman Dyson:

After Gödel, mathematics was no longer a single structure tied together with a unique concept of truth, but an archipelago of structures with diverse sets of axioms and diverse notions of truth. Gödel showed that mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter which set of axioms is chosen as the foundation, birds can always find questions that those axioms cannot answer.

Dr. Nanochick on the Geek Test:

I feel truly geeky because I can think of something that should have gotten me geek points that wasn't on the list -- owning the "Real Genius" DVD and reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

Don Tapscott:

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

Marge:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

J. Peder Zane:

Upon graduation, we must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help us keep our wobbly jobs. Crunched, we have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.

The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. The Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills.

When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.

The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.

The Impending Demise of the University

Steven Johnson:

Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade.

Not all these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have learned firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be. But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Bruce Sterling:

Poor folk love their cellphones!

Dan Kennedy:

Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide.

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

Benjamin Kunkel:

Never mind losing your virginity -- what is it like to live with someone? Proust seems to have recognized that domestication, as the technologists call it, was harder to describe than initiation.

Most internet users in wealthy countries now pay for web access at a flat monthly rate, and many popular mobile phone subscriptions allow you talk yourself hoarse without incurring surcharges. And if flat rates allow us to be always on, every day more "content" piles on with us.

Even now, I guard my solitude jealously enough that I have never owned a mobile phone—a fact that may end up ensuring me more solitude than I like. When I am forced to admit to a fresh acquaintance that I have no mobile number to offer, suspicion of eccentricity or poverty is the most generous response I receive; sometimes I get a look of frank alarm. But it seems I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn't resist fielding or placing.

Lee Siegel:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Kunkel:

It would be nice to feel that the gratifying shallowness and diversity of digital life can be balanced with fidelity to great and challenging writing and art, that our chatting won't get in the way of our attempted masterpieces. There is no giving up the internet now.

No one is stopping you from stopping yourself. It's just that many users of digital communications technology can't stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online.

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

Matt Knox:

It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

On Walter Benjamin:

Long before Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

William Fleisch:

"Comeuppance" uses game theory and evolutionary psychology to explain why people find pleasure in both the happy and tragic lives of fictional charact... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Lingering

Alain de Botton:

It is hard to have a conversation with a stranger for more than a few minutes before needing to ask, "What do you do?" - for herein lie clues not only to monetary status, but more broadly to one's entire outlook and character.

We may know the sliver of the working world that we ourselves occupy, but the wider picture grows obscure.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Matthew Crawford:

Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real.

On the time of Jane Austen:

The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments. Sewing was something to do (during the long hours at home) that often had great practical utility, and that wasn't greatly mentally taxing, and could be done sitting down while engaging in light conversation, or listening to a novel being read.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor

Alain de Botton:

For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But from a broader historical perspective, this optimism is an anomaly.

We find ourselves divided between a plausible expectation that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same.

It isn’t that love and work are invariably incapable of delivering fulfillment—only that they almost never do for too long.

Recently:

It seems very important as an adult to have a good relationship to your own envy.

Also:

The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy.

Eric G. Wilson:

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss?

From the archive:

This is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

The Consolations of Pessimism

Louis Menand:

We're all highly self-conscious ants, because that's what it means to be a modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program. Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.

I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other's work, seemed like a great place to be. I don't think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other.

Jim Jarmusch:

Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Richard Sennett:

It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication. The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged.

Matthew Crawford:

The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

Show or Tell

James Boyle:

For at least 10 or 15 years, educators went gaga over ”the computer.” Sleek, modern, progressive, competitive, it represented everything they imagined the future to be and thus it came to stand for all those things, generally without achieving them. The computer embodied all the values of sophistication. Merely to have it, was to have them: like a lion’s claw necklace that conveys the courage of the beast to the wearer. Eventually, familiarity began to undermine the fetishism. When your students’ cell phones have vastly more processing power than the Apollo 11 computer, and are mainly used for texting, it is hard to retain your reverence.

Because politicians like to seem modern, they try to update the metaphor. The US stimulus package contains 7bn dollars of subsidies for broadband connections. We see the economic advantages of a network -- the lowering of barriers to entry, dramatic improvements in information flow, lower transaction costs -- and we associate those advantages with the thing along which the network’s bits flow. But here’s the problem. The information superhighways of the mind are not just wires.

What we ought to be doing is trying to understand where the architecture of information in our society has been a success, where government investment has yielded remarkable social and economic benefit.

Now would be an ideal time to invest in the architecture of openness.

What the information superhighways aren’t built of ...

Alex Pang:

Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment. Tinkering is a bit like jazz.

Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The counterculture is one important influence on tinkering; so is computer hacking, with its casual contempt for established authority, deep respect for arcane technical skills, and refined love of imaginative jokes.

Consumption encourages you to just react; the more thoughtlessly the better. Tinkering forces you to reflect, to learn from your experience, to think about why something has worked or failed, and to consider the possibilities before you.

Tinkering to the future