Roedy Green:

In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!

You don't want to overdo this. Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way (*). Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.

Neil Postman:

The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine.

Have you seen Revolutionary Road?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

(*) Take note:

Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Scott Aaronson:

A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s? To introduce a talk on "Big Numbers," I invite two audience volunteers to try exactly this.

Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm. Are you ready? Get set. Go.

Have you read Rucker's classic?

A captivating excursion through the mathematical approaches to the notions of infinity and the implications of that mathematics for the vexing questions on the mind, existence, and consciousness.

It is in the realm of infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.

What about Penrose's The Road to Reality?

"What a joy it is to read a book that doesn't simplify (*), doesn't dodge the difficult questions, and doesn't always pretend to have answers."

Granted, it's not for everyone:

The film opens with her visiting a bookshop and fingering a copy of Roger Penrose's book, The Road to Reality. "Don't want to go there," she mutters to herself. Meanwhile, outside, her bicycle is being stolen.

(*) Ah, Lisa:

Grandma: I saw all your awards, Lisa. They're mighty impressive.

Lisa: Aw, I just keep them out to bug Bart, heh.

Grandma: [reproachful] Don't be bashful. When I was your age, kids made fun of me because I read at the ninth-grade level.

Lisa: Me too!

Grandma: You know, Lisa, I feel like I have an instant rapport with you.

Lisa: [gasps] You didn't dumb it down! You said "rapport".

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

Roger Scruton:

An intoxicating drink, which both slides down easily and warms as it goes, is a symbol of — and also a means to achieve — an inward transformation, in which a person takes something in to himself. The religious use of wine and its soul-transforming effect reflect the underlying truth that it is only rational beings who can appreciate things like wine. Animals can be drunk. They can be high on drugs and fuggy with cannabis, but they cannot experience the kind of directed intoxication that we experience through wine, since relishing is something that only a rational being can exhibit, and which therefore only a rational being can do.

At some level, I venture to suggest, the experience of wine is a recuperation of that original cult whereby the land was settled and the city built. And what we taste in the wine is not just the fruit and its ferment, but also the peculiar flavour of a landscape to which the gods have been invited and where they have found a home.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

In Vino Veritas: I'll Drink to That

Jay Heinrichs:

Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony.

1. Argue to teach decision-making.
2. Focus on the future.
3. Call “fouls.”
4. Reward the right emotions.
5. Let kids win sometimes.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

How to Teach a Child to Argue

Charles Graeber:

Like many exceedingly bright people, Marc Weber Tobias has the exhausted air of a know-it-all.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Decius:

It's a good feeling to team up with a group of smart people and produce something useful over the course of a weekend. More hacking less talking.

John Lanchester:

A common mistake of very smart people is to assume that other people’s minds work in the same way that theirs do.

Paul Graham:

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.

Malcolm Gladwell:

They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.

James Suroweicki:

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do.

One lesson of the current market chaos, then, is that it’s hard to get incentives right.

Eric Schmidt:

The "smart people on the hill" method no longer works.

Christopher Lawton:

Amid tighter budgets, more people are trying to save money by cutting their cable cords.

The cable-cutting trend isn't just being driven by pinched personal budgets.

Paul Kedrosky, from this past March:

There have been a number of articles lately about people cutting costs by canceling/cutting cable TV service.

Memestreams is a leading indicator:

I'm about to cancel cable. I'm sure for lots of people, the subscription model is great, even for music, I'm just not one of them.

More Households Cut the Cord on Cable

It seems inevitable that consumers everywhere will eventually demand ubiquitous on-demand mobile streams, whether from Spotify or someone else, making ownership of music less popular and iTunes therefore less important. And in that respect, Apple’s decade of investment in music and current domination of the online music world may become an Achilles’ heel, as Android’s openness and neutrality give it greater flexibility than Apple’s closed system to offer consumers what they want as alternatives arise.

Decius:

Steve Jobs is dead wrong about subscription based services.

Fortune Magazine:

Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music.

Larry Lessig:

Over time, more and more people will opt to pay for music subscription services.

From last month:

Right before Apple finally implemented variable pricing in iTunes it wasn't hard for many to predict that it would backfire badly on the major record labels as they tried to jack up prices. So, it should come as little surprise to find out those predictions appear to be entirely accurate.

Tim Arango, from February:

Many executives say they believe the future of music buying is over the mobile phone, not from buying individual songs but by paying a monthly subscription fee to hear a vast database of music.

In Music, Apple’s Strength Becomes a Vulnerability

Gold Star. Take a moment to consider Matthew Crawford.

Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. Beneath our gratitude may rest envy.

...

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.

Publishers Weekly gives Crawford's new book a starred review:

Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Matthew Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls “manual competence,” the ability to work with one’s hands. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations.

Paul Graham:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Pleasure in making comes from innate necessary rhythms, often slow ones.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Enjoy a spot of tea with Alain de Botton:

I think envy is unavoidable. I think it's an absolutely essential emotion, and so rarely discussed. It's a basic emotion. All of us are unavoidably inadequate, because there's so much that we can't do and that we don't know.

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

About the book, on sale next month in the US:

I wrote The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work to shine a spotlight on the working world. I wanted to write a book that would open our eyes to the beauty and occasional horror of the working world—and I did this by looking at 10 different industries, a deliberately eclectic range from accountancy to engineering, from biscuit manufacture to logistics.

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

We are the heirs of two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human. Thus is born The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Paul Krugman:

Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future — the way I learned it from science-fiction movies — was supposed to be Manhattan squared: vertical, modernistic, art decoish.

What the future mainly ended up looking like instead was Atlanta — sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl, a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions. Bo-ring.

From the archive:

Welcome to the exhibition of rediscovered works by the mid 20th century illustrator A.C. Radebaugh.

From the archive:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Michael Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

Paul Graham:

It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be