Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
…It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.
February 12, 2009
The Values of Science
February 11, 2009
Asking Nicely Works
Panic did some experimentation … a little over a year ago, when they released Candy Bar 3.1 They have a phone-home system for serial numbers — not for any sort of Adobe- or Microsoft-style “activation” scheme, but simply to check whether a serial number is valid or known to be circulating on bootleg message boards and forums. They experimented with different dialog boxes that appeared when a user entered a known-to-be-pirated serial number. One message was staid and serious (“Microsoft-style”, in Cabel Sasser’s words), along the lines of “It appears someone gave you an invalid serial number…”; the other two messages were more personal, along the lines of “Please don’t pirate Candy Bar. We’re a small company making software for you, and software sales are what keep our company going.”
They got better results with the more personal messages — about 10 percent of would-be-bootleggers presented with those dialogs clicked the button and immediately bought a legitimate license for the app. But even the staid, impersonal message had a 5 percent sell-through rate — far higher than Panic expected.
February 10, 2009
Good engineering is necessary, but good design has a more direct impact on helping people do amazing things with computers
…the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart’s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn’t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system’s powerful, language-size command structure? It’s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.
The title this post is something I’ve been saying as part of my personal statement on hirevincent.com for years.
February 9, 2009
No Ducking Way!
I’ve finally found an example of, someone intentionally typing “ducking” on their iPhone,
Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.
Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?
Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).
But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)
Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?
More Terms = More Specific (Assume AND, not OR)
Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.
February 5, 2009
If You Don’t Know How to Help, You Can Still Do Good by Getting Out of the Way
Learning happens when attention is focused. …
If you don’t have a good theory of learning, then you can still get it to happen by helping the person focus. One of the ways you can help a person focus is by removing interference.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
Point Of View is 80 IQ Points
Point of view is worth 80 IQ points … it’s not logic that is powerful. Logic is actually a weak method because it depends on fragile chains of inference. And people have used logic throughout history but mostly in inappropriate context.
There’s nothing illogical about the way the alchemists did things, it was that they were in a context where there logic couldn’t do much. so it’s this notion that the context is powerful, and if you want to be able to be good at solving problems and acting much smarter then you are then you have to find the context that will do the thinking for you.
Most computer scientists know this because it goes under another heading “choose the appropriate data structure before you start tinkering around with the algorithm”. If you choose the right data structure it will have most of the result computed almost automatically as part of its inherent structure.
–Alan Kay, Doing With Images Makes Symbols.
There are many related anecdotes about solving the right problem.
February 1, 2009
“I Deployed More Scheme Runtimes Than Anybody Else on the Planet”
From an Interview with an Adware Author,
Sherri Davidoff
You wrote adware. You bastard.Matt Knox: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtimes than anybody else on the planet.
So are most scheme programs in the wild used for evil? That’s a depressing thought.
January 29, 2009
Flash Hate
I don’t like Flash because it is responsible for the overwhelming majority of my browser crashes. I don’t like it because it consumes memory and (especially) CPU resources on my computer for almost the sole purpose of showing me advertisements, which also translates directly to reduced battery life on my laptop.
…
But it’s interesting to note that it’s quite a technical and ethical challenge to run a browser without Flash.
I’ve written before about how important it is to optimize CPU usage of your website for the mobile world. And this is yet another reason for anyone who is add-supported. People will tolerate advertisements that are just there. But when they kill their work time, or are otherwise malignant, then they will take active steps to stop them. And that means no more advertising revenue.