Perl Data Language
The power of Perl + the speed of C

I think they need a short, pithy slogan to really push their message home.
One that is tried and true; that has worked well in the past.
Wait...wait...it's coming to me...ah!

Just say no.

When our kids were around 10 and 12 years old, we started observing a Sabbath.
Sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday: no electric lights, radios, TVs, and--especially--no computers.
We'd never observed a sabbath for any religions reason, but we decided to try this,
partly as an experiment, and partly as an attempt to reclaim our lives from electronic media.

The first time we did it, I expected the kids to go ballistic, but they pretty much rolled with it, and it became a regular part of our household.
It did change our rhythms and activities.
We would read or play (card, board, dice) games in the evening.
People went to sleep earlier.

We kept it up for a year or two.
I can't say exactly why we stopped.
The kids got older; life intervened.

For me, reading a book is a journey through its pages.
Not in some metaphorical sense, but in a very literal, tactile, visual sense.
I associate the words in a book with their position on the page,
and the pages with their (approximate) position within the thickness of the book.
It helps me keep track of what I've read, and place words and passages in context of the overall book.

I never thought about any of this until I started reading eBooks and it wasn't there.
An eBook is just one long (long, long, very long) stream of words.
Some eBooks paginate the words for display, but that pagination is typically not stable:
revisit those words another time and they will likely appear on the screen in a different place.
And those pages--such as they are--have no apparent position within any larger structure.

This is OK for a dictionary or a reference manual, where I just look things up.
But for any serious work of non-fiction, it's horribly acontextual: the book just turns into word mush.

I haven't tried reading any fiction eBooks, so I don't know if they would fare any better.

I kind of don't get this.
I know that accounting can be complex, but underneath it all there has to be transactions.
Credits.
Debits.
Raw data.
If the numbers on the screen don't look right, the first thing I want to see is the raw data.
They do have the data somewhere, right?
Right???

I used to be proud--really proud--to be American.
We had our problems, sure, but
- we didn't assassinate people
- we didn't torture people
- we hadn't started a major war in 40 years
- the government generally obeyed the law, and when it didn't, someone called them on it.
We could hold ourselves out as a model for other countries.

None of that is true any more.

For a long time, I blamed it all on Bush and the Republicans,
but then we elected Obama and Democrats,
and it hasn't helped.

Now I'm weary and ashamed, and I don't know where to go next, literally or figuratively.

Snowden was a character in Catch-22.
He came to a bad end.

You can't make this stuff up.

Sure, I put my name in all the software that I release.

FTA:

As projects surpass one million lines of code, there’s a direct correlation between size and quality for proprietary projects, and an inverse correlation for open source projects.

The article gives numbers: above 1M LOC, defect density increases for open source projects, and decreases for proprietary projects.
Increasing defect density with size is plausible: beyond a certain size, the code base becomes intractable.
Decreasing defect density with size is harder to understand: why should the quality fairy only visit specially big proprietary projects?

Perhaps the way those proprietary projects get into the MLOC range in the first place is with huge tracts of boilerplate, duplicated code, or machine-generated code.
That would inflate up the denominator in the defects/KLOC ratio.
But then that calls the whole defects/KLOC metric into question.

I was on the personnel committee at our church.

We grant 2 weeks parental leave to any employee who becomes the parent of a child (natural or adopted)
and 2 additional weeks to any employee who bears a child.

Women on the committee who had borne children did not think this was excessive.

Flying to Orbit, with an update for SpaceShipOne
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/stories/orbit.html

One of my kids had something like this: not for English, but for physics.
The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework.
Instead, he fobbed the kids off onto a web app.
- go to the site
- get a problem
- solve the problem
- type in the numerical answer
- right answer? go on to the next problem
- wrong answer? try again
The web app allowed maybe 0.5% margin for rounding error, and you got 5 tries before it failed you on that problem.

It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.
All learning is, at some level, an interaction--a conversation--between student and teacher.
Even if it is nothing more than a red check mark or a red X on a homework paper,
you have communicated some thing to some person and gotten some response.
You don't realize how important this is until it is gone.

With nothing but a machine to talk to, it stops being about learning.
It is just about satisfying the machine by whatever means necessary.
In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google.
This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem;
plugging in the numbers that the web app had generated for your instance of the problem would then yield the correct answer.
By the end of the school year, I was telling him that if he didn't want to deal with the web app, he should use google to get his grade,
and if he wanted to learn physics, I would teach it to him.

Automated essay grading is going to be even worse.
There is no point writing prose unless a human is going to read it.
When I want to talk to machines, I write code.

Writing songs, that voices never shared...
-- Paul Simon

There was a time, many years ago, when I filed my own taxes, on paper, using a pencil and a hand calculator. I knew what every number was and how the calculations were done.

It kept getting more and more complicated and time consuming, until about 10 years ago I finally gave up. Now I plug the numbers into a program and it prints out the forms--correctly, for all I know. Even with a program, it is hugely complex.

The tax code has to be complex so that there will be places to hide the loopholes for rich people. I don't make enough money to benefit from the loopholes, but I make enough that I have to deal with the complexity. Every year by the time I'm done with it I'm spitting nails.

How congress broke daylight savings time
A letter to my congressional representatives
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html

Writing a browser: $10M
Writing an OS: $100M
EU bundling fine: $732
Desktop monopoly: priceless