Graham

Couple of things I ran into

2009-10-31T22:16:08Z

First, the joke:

As my Dad told me years ago, Sven was part of the felling team in a logging company that worked the old northwest. Nobody could swing an axe like Sven, and he was their best worker.
But, time moves on. And Sven's boss said that they had to all use the new chain saws, or the company would lose out to their competitors. Complaining vociferously, Sven took to the woods with the new saw. And he cut down less than half what he would do with an axe. Sven's boss took him aside and explained that he had to do better. Or he would lose his job.
Well, Sven did better. And after a few days, he was close to his old performance. But everyone, boss included, couldn't help but see how pale and wan Sven got. Clearly, he was pining away over the passing of the old days, even though he would only say that he was just tired.
The boss wasn't a bad guy (for a Normite), so one morning, he went out with Sven to see if he could help. Receiving Sven's grateful permission, he picked up Sven's saw and deftly pulled the cord. Out came that familiar and much-beloved snarling whine, as if it were a badly tuned jet engine, just this side of self-destruction.
Sven jumped out of his skin and yelled, "WHAT'S THAT NOISE!?!?"

from the Old Tools mailing list

And then some food for thought:

I don't think the main cause has anything to do with Math or Science per se. Someone upthread said that there's a profound anti-intellectual trend in America. I agree, but I think it specifically takes the form of A DISDAIN FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS IN ACADEMIC SUBJECTS. This is just as true when it comes to Shakespeare as when it comes to Math.
The life-goal in America seems to be to get a well-paying job in which you don't need to think very much. I doubt this is a conscious goal, and it sounds so insulting that I doubt most people would admit to pursuing it. But in my experience, it is what people pursue -- and our education system trains people for it.
I became very aware of this when I started teaching computer classes. I was teaching applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Most of my students were upper-middle-class, educated, "smart" people. The majority were middle-aged.
Over and over, I heard people say, "I can't do this stuff. I'm just not a computer person." Now to some extent, this is true. These people were born before the Internet and the PC revolution, and their fear of the technology WAS a stumbling block. But the bigger stumbling block seemed to be that these folks couldn't handle basic problem solving.
The apps I taught mostly didn't hold your hand. For instance, if you want to make a photo look a certain way in Photoshop, there generally isn't a button to press. You have to think through the various tools and figure out how to combine them to create the look you want. That said, it's far from rocket science. I found that the moment I stopped giving people a formula that they could learn by rote, their brains turned off. It soon became clear to me that the problem wasn't new technology; the problem was that I was expecting people to use their brains in a way that no one else expected of them.
I started thinking about what these people did all day at their jobs. Gently, I asked some of them about what they did in their jobs. Many of them hand distinguished careers. How could they perform well at work without problem-solving skills? Answer: they don't need problem-solving skills.
It's not always obvious that these people don't solve problems (or puzzles), because many of these people are experts -- meaning that their brains are crammed with obscure facts. Our schools do very well at training people to learn facts*. At least when I went to school, memorization was pushed as a major intellectual virtue. We memorized the multiplication tables; we memorized the periodic tables; we memorized speeches form Shakespeare... Cultural literacy was pushed, too, though not as hard as memorization. No one was expected to really get into Shakespeare, but you were expected to know who he was and to have read one or two of his plays.
(*true, in America shocking number of people can't tell you the name of their congressman or the capital of North Carolina. But these people DO know the facts needed to get their specific jobs done.)
Pop-culture values reinforce fact-based intellectualism. A couple of years ago, if you'd asked people who was the smartest man in America, many would have said "the guy who won all that money on 'Jeopardy.'" (When I was a kid, there were many game shows on that actually required some problem-solving skills. These are almost non-existent. The shows are all about trivia now.) A "smart person" on a drama or sitcom is usually a guy who knows a huge number of facts.
I grew up around (humanities) academics, supposedly the ultimate smart-set. In my experience, they were coasting on memorized facts just as much as people in the corporate world. A professor would read every major German novel written in the 19th Century and all the critical writing about 19th-century German literature. Then he would spend his career passing on facts to his students. His "intellectual" work mostly involved keeping up with academic journals (learning new facts).
(From what I can tell, most G.P. doctors and most lawyers don't have to do much problem solving either. I do know that my doctor seems to be able to make a good living by doing the same formulaic tests over and over.)
Let me be clear that I'm not anti fact or memorization. Facts and rote learning are important. Facts are the building blocks you need. The are the tools you use when you problem solve. Problem solving is the next step. But it's a next step that most people don't take and don't need to take.
I don't think it's laziness. One can get by in our culture without problem-solving, so why bother with it? By get by, I mean that one can make a good living, have a big house, kids, etc. without having to solve intellectual problems.
And -- most important -- one can be a "smart person" (as our culture defines it) without solving problems. Most people want to be smart. They want to be seen as smart by others. Our culture sends a really strong message to them, which is "memorize a lot of facts and you'll be smart." My guess is most people think they ARE doing rigorous problem solving when they see something that needs to be done and have to search through their mental database to find the right fact or the right formula. I guess this IS a kind of problem solving, but it's the easiest kind. It's similar to solving a problem by searching on google until you find the answer.
When I was a kid, there was almost no problem solving in school. How often did the teacher just present us with a puzzle and say, "Here are some tools. Solve the puzzle!"? Almost never. One would think that MOST of education should be about solving puzzles, but in my experience, almost none of it is.
The exceptions (to a point) were Math and Science. But unless you're going into specific fields, you can quit taking Math and Science pretty early on in life. The other courses are easier and it's pretty clear you won't need Math and Science to get by in life. So why waste your time on it?
Meanwhile, the few people who stay in problem-solving fields move further and further from the intellectual norm: I program computers for a living. Which means I solve puzzles eight hours a day. I constantly have to create something from nothing, and I constantly have to learn new skills. Sometimes, I am so mentally exhausted that I can't do my job.
It was when I started discussing this with friends that I realized how different my career was from most of theirs. Sure, they often are exhausted at work. But they CAN get their work done. They say things like, "I was SO sick of filing today" or "Uh. If I have to grade ONE more paper!" But they don't say, "My brain just shut down and I was unable to figure out..."
I know this sounds snobbish. But I am not trying to diss other people or their jobs. My doctor may not do much problem solving, but I am grateful for his help. I am just saying that most jobs involve little or no problem solving. Mathematicians are from Mars.
I have been talking mostly about corporate and academic jobs. In reality, I think there's a lot of problem solving going on in America. It's just outside of the intellectual world. And it follows a long tradition. In America, our main problem solvers are farmers, football players, carpenters, etc. People who build things and who play games MUST solve problems or they fail. It's really weird, because most such people can't talk the intellectual talk. They don't know Shakespeare from Euler. So we don't consider them smart, and they aren't smart in the limited way we tend to define the world.
Meanwhile, the "intellectuals" are barely using their intellects.
posted by grumblebee at 11:13 AM on October 17 [359 favorites]

From Metafilter

Interesting CS problem

2009-09-01T01:40:15Z

I've come across a rather interesting CS problem during work that I thought I'd throw out there. The problem is this: given a finite lattice (L, ⊑) (our problem has a lattice that is also distributive, so you may presume that) and a node x in that lattice, efficiently compute the set S ⊆ L = { y ∈ L : x ⊏ y ∧ ∄ z x ⊏ z ⊏ y }. This is well defined, and starting from ⊥ it is possible to walk the entire lattice easily (which is why we care). If you precompute the lattice you can do this trivially. Is it possible to do so without considering every node in the lattice?

Failing that, can you give me an efficient algorithm for computing the structure of the lattice from a set L and a partial order ⊑ ?

BEING CRAZY IS NOISY | More Intelligent Life

2009-06-19T17:40:08Z

I do not yet understand how to be both crazy and compassionate.
BEING CRAZY IS NOISY | More Intelligent Life

Interesting article in some ways.

Philosophy

2009-05-13T22:23:23Z

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

From Paul Graham's essay How to Do Philosophy

C++

2009-05-11T06:15:16Z

Almost everyone likely to be reading this is going to be totally uninterested. However due to some rash statements I made in my youth that can be found on Usenet if you are sufficiently determined, and the impending threat of the C++0x standard, I thought I might reaffirm my position on the language.

Briefly, it is the most terrible programming language anyone has seriously advocated programming in for the last 20 years.

In around 1995, when I first started programming in C++, it was a comprehensible language, in the sense that one could understand the entire language fairly readily. It had some lame parts to it, and there was some obvious omissions, but was on the whole probably slightly better than hacking an object system onto C manually. In retrospect, Objective C was probably superior, but it wasn't very well known outside of the NeXT world.

Then the ANSI committee got a hold of it. They fixed some of the omissions, for example adding templates, but in most cases the fixes were worse than the disease. In the worst cases, for example with template metaprogramming, the "fixes" were totally incomprehensible even for the most reasonable code. I am ashamed to admit that it took me a number of years to figure this out, and to develop proficiency with other languages to broaden my horizons. If you are curious, Yossi Kreinin has been maintaining a "frequently questioned answers" list, and most of his criticisms are trenchant.

And now the committee is back. C++0x has managed to make a terrible language even worse. It doesn't fix any of the preexisting problems, like the near impossibility of parsing the language successfully or the rampant abuse of implicit calls and template metaprogramming, and adds some even more creatively lame parts like making the management of the variable closure in anonymous functions the programmer's responsibility, having four string types, adding a brand new type qualifier, etc. Not content with being the most difficult language in the world to parse, it is now the only allegedly serious language in the world that requires a symbol table to tokenize.

C++ is nominally for "bare metal" programming (it is certainly inadequate for anything else), but even for that, implicit copies, implicit conversions and the general lameness of the language fight you every step of the way. The language, the language standard, and everything about it and the community is consumed with a focus on the irrelevant at the expense of the larger picture.

Sadly we do not appear to have any competent bare metal languages any more, save C (which has hardly changed at all, and is still lame, but lame in a tolerable way, in a way people can work around). I am honestly considering Ada, which for all its faults has a comprehensible computational model. Perhaps D will save us, but I doubt it; I expect to be programming in C at some point for most of my professional life. Which depresses me, but oh well.

Jesusita fire

2009-05-08T05:45:21Z

Jesusita fire
Originally uploaded by gchpaco

The fire has spread west, and was quite impressive in the background today.

Jesusita fire

2009-05-07T00:54:19Z

The world is on fire. Again. Something like the 4th time in 2 years. Local news reporting and a map showing evac zones.

Truthfully I have trouble getting concerned about the homes there, but the idea of the Mission or the Post Office or the Courthouse going away makes me sad.

I am also experiencing a sudden, intense and difficult to fully rationalize desire for a fiddle.

A new hat

2009-04-20T05:08:27Z

A new hat
Originally uploaded by gchpaco

I finished the hat I started last Thursday. It's quite comfortable, actually, although I've yet to try using it outside. The material is actually a deep blue, not black, but it's so deep it's not easy to photograph well.

Hide glue

2009-04-19T20:47:46Z

I need to stop fretting about the possibility of hide glue joints coming undone if they get wet. I soaked a botched edge joint, exposed it to steam, and it still required a tremendous amount of force to undo. I suppose this qualifies as "reversible" in a strict technical sense, but if I hadn't botched it it would have been even worse.

Freeway hijinx

2009-03-22T09:02:04Z

To whomever decided that not only does exit 1 of the 134 not need an onramp westbound, but that exit 2 doesn't merit any kind of onramp at all and all onramps for exit 3 should involve some kind of massive construction job of the type to be finished in a decade if they're feeling plucky: I hope badgers invade your home and feast upon your reproductive equipment.

That said, to the cop who came up behind me at at least 90 desperately needing to get to somewhere on Fairview in a hurry: thank you for ignoring my speeding arse and going on to do whatever the fuck needed doing at 90 mph at 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday evening but somehow did not warrant turning your lights on.

Freeway hijinx

2009-03-22T09:02:04Z

Today's terrible logic puzzle

2009-03-17T17:13:20Z

A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?

(not original to me, sadly)

Paco

2009-03-14T05:02:35Z

Mom called me today to tell me that Paco was really not doing well. He is horribly thin, mostly unresponsive, and won't blink. He won't even track with his eyes, I think he's blind. He has a terrible time with his balance, won't eat and won't drink. Mom thinks he won't last the night, and we have an appointment with the vet to euthanize him tomorrow anyway. I miss him already.

Watchmen

2009-03-08T04:46:16Z

Saw Watchmen tonight. It is a surprisingly good adaptation of the graphic novel; I was expecting something more hamhanded. Those of you who are squeamish may want to pass; there are a number of rather brutal injuries inflicted during some of the fight scenes. Recommended to everyone else.

More cat worries

2009-03-01T01:05:54Z

My cat Paco, from whom I constructed the screen name I usually go by, has a large build-up of fluids in his abdomen. The fluid is being tested, but the vet says that only happens for cancer or heart failure.

Oog

2009-02-25T08:02:56Z

It is, like, 12 C outside. I have spent the last few hours milling lumber in a T-shirt and am pouring with sweat. Man, that is hard work.

On the plus side, vivianteddybear, your table top is gluing up now.

Problems you bio majors probably haven't had

2009-02-19T23:46:00Z

Octopus survives 5 days on the run; a Kiwi octopus managed to escape from its tank and hide in a drain for five days while they looked for him. A different octopus from the same tank made it halfway up the stairs before being discovered.

gchpaco @ 2009-02-16T16:42:00

2009-02-17T00:42:29Z

Did you know? People in Palm Springs are so bored that they will back up traffic for 40 miles because one cop pulled one dude driving a truck over?

I hate LA.

Estrella war diary, day 0

2009-02-14T13:04:38Z

Things I am very happy to have:

iPhone

Google Maps

Things I am incredibly happy I know how to do at night with no flashlight on a moonlit evening in the freezing cold:

tie a bowline

The things you miss while off at war

2009-02-13T19:15:43Z

It is actually hailing here now. I did not register what it was at first because it has been so long; there was white stuff on my windshield and I couldn't identify what of was at first.

New phone number

2009-02-08T03:51:39Z

I bought an iPhone today. While this is very cool, it did necessitate changing my phone number again. The new one is 805-689-1451.

A sheath for my knife

2009-02-04T07:12:49Z

A sheath for my knife,
originally uploaded by gchpaco.

I fashioned with dr_mrow's help a sheath for the knife I forged on Saturday. When I get some time with a buffing wheel and clean the knife up I'll show it off, but it's protected now.

Holy shit.

2009-01-30T06:09:17Z

My wooden plane
Originally uploaded by gchpaco

I received a wooden smoothing plane from eBay the other day. I'm guessing late 1800s. Body's split a little in a couple places, wedge is fine, pretty good for something maybe a hundred and fifty years old. I notice the steel sharpens easily, and is in pretty good condition. Finally I get a chance to try it out on my bench outside, beautiful results.

Okay, so a given that it's leaving a glassy surface behind. That's the whole point of it. Just for kicks I took one of the thinner shavings in. This plane, which I adjust by hitting it with a hammer, took a shaving two and a half thousandths of an inch thick, if I am reading my caliper correctly. With a minimum of setup.

Oh, I'm keepin' this one.

End grain cutting board

2009-01-19T06:41:53Z

End grain cutting board
Originally uploaded by gchpaco

I've had some indication that people want to see more of the woodworking stuff, so I decided to show off the latest thing I've been working on. This is an end grain cutting board in maple for my brother. The groove running around the edge was requested for juices.

Wait, what?

2009-01-07T05:05:38Z

It turns out I have 8 hammers, with a 9th on the way.

They are, of course, completely different from each other and I will notice immediately if I misplace one. But still.

I wonder if this is how Screamin’ Jay Hawkins felt when they told him he had 55 children (later reckoned to be perhaps as many as 75).