A while back I wrote a post called Top 10 Reasons Ghosts Don’t Exist. It remains, without question, the most popular thing I’ve written on this site. Thank you to everyone who has read it!
I recently re-read my own article and found my arguments to be a bit weaker than I remembered, and this meant that I had to go back to the drawing board and bolster my thoughts. With that in mind, I decided I’d throw a few more reasons onto the pile to make my point even clearer.
Pretty interesting arguments made here, though I think an overlooked point is that the “fast” programmers are younger and, hence, cheaper. A couldn’t afford to be top heavy with people edging up on retirement. Yes we all wish it, but it isn’t possible.
My dad used to say, “Slow down, son. You’ll get the job done faster.”
I’ve worked in many high-tech startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. I am now 52, and I program slowly and thoughtfully. I’m kind of like a designer who writes code; this may become apparent as you read on 🙂
Programming slowly was a problem for me when I recently worked on a project with some young coders who believe in making really fast, small iterative changes to the code. At the job, we were encouraged to work in the same codebase, as if it were a big cauldron of soup, and if we all just kept stirring it continuously and vigorously, a fully-formed thing of wonder would emerge.
It didn’t.
Many of these coders believed in thefallacy that all engineers are fungible, and that no one should be responsible for any particular…
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Posted in People, Technology
Tagged agile, coding, people, programming, science, slow, technology
I’ve been experimenting with some alternative password management schemes lately, which got me to thinking: what will replace passwords? They’ve been around a very long time, and yet remain largely unchanged as a mechanism, despite their ubiquity. They’re a little like toilet paper: they’re antiquated, they’re a pain in the ass if you use them too often, and they usually aren’t strong enough. Think of all of the things that have advanced so much in society over the last one thousand years, and passwords are still just some junk you remember. So what can be done about the fact that the only thing protecting out secrets is only as good as toilet paper?
Posted in People, Science, Technology
Tagged computers, human behavior, internet, passcodes, passwords, science, security, technology, the future
Everyone knows that ghosts are faked by our imaginations, but now you can make real ghosts in a lab! And they’re infinitely more real than anything ever reported before, since actual ghosts don’t exist at all.
November 8, 2014 in Paranormal, Science, Uncategorized
Tagged experiment, fake, ghosts, rationality, science
I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction literature lately. Like many geeks, I’ve spent years enjoying it in small doses in movies and on TV, but going right to the source of the genre, so to speak, has been an enlightening experience. I’ve been very surprised at how much of the material in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” has been (flatteringly) ‘adapted’ over and over again for the last 25 years. And a read of Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”, a Vietnam-era classic, makes one feel as though war is the same no matter what year it is. But the age of originality in science fiction isn’t over.
So What You're Saying Is... 