03 JUN 2016 by ideonexus
Liberal Arts Majors in Technical Professions
While we’ve hired many computer-science majors that have been critical team members, It’s noncomputer science degree holders who can see the forest through the trees. For example, our chief operating officer is a brilliant, self-taught engineer with a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has risen above the code to lead a team that is competitive globally. His determination and critical-thinking skills empower him to leverage the power of technology without getting bo...
1 Reminds me of my own career graduating with an English Degree and going into Computer Programming.
23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
It's Raining DNA Outside
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. … It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer...There is DNA everywhere, in seeds in bacterium, it's all around us, this programming for life.
29 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Program Yourself With the Truth
What memes should you program yourself with, now that you have the chance? The second-most-popular answer (after punting) is: With the truth. It's hard to see how there could be any problem with programming yourself with memes that are true. But remember Alfred North Whitehead: all truths are half-truths.
There are several problems with the strategy-meme Program myself with the truth. In the first place, you can't ever know the whole truth of the universe. Your brain doesn't have enough stor... 1 
notes
notes...but it's not that easy.
29 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Advertisers Exploit our Tendency Toward Distinction
Advertisers, politicians, and anyone else who wants your money or support are very interested in programming you with certain distinctions over others and understanding the distinctions you see the world through so that they can take advantage of them. What are you more likely to buy for breakfast: a slice of chocolate cake or a "chocolate-chip muffin"? Calling a round piece of high-fat chocolate cake a "muffin" takes advantage of the distinctions you have around breakfast food and increases ... 1 notes
notesPrompting us to distinguish their products into more positive categories.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
L Peter Deutsch: Everyone Will Need to Become Computer Li...
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have dial telephones. Someone extrapolated the growth rate and said, "My God. By 20 or years from now, every single person will have to be a telephone operator." Well, that's what happe...Folksonomies: education computer science
Folksonomies: education computer science
Just as everyone had to become telephone operators.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Research Subjects Expand Naturally on Their Own
John Washbrook, who was himself a senior academic in the department, took me under his wing and he told me something that very important. He said, "Just start something, no matter how humble." This is not recall; about programming, this is about research. But no matter how humble and unoriginal and unimportant it may seem, start something and write a paper ab about it So that's what I did. it turned out to be a very significant piece of advice.
I've told that to every research student I've e...Folksonomies: computer science reasearch
Folksonomies: computer science reasearch
Simon Peyton Jones tells research students to just start researching, and the subject will extend out before you for exploration naturally.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
L Peter Deutsch on Why Programing is so Hard
One of the things that I've been thinking about off and on over the last five-plus years is, "Why is programming so hard?"
You have the algorithmic side of programming and that's i close enough to mathematics that you can use mathematics as the basic model, if you will, for what goes on in it. You can use mathematical methods and mathematical ways of thinking.That doesn't make it easy, but nobody thinks mathematics is easy. So there's a pretty good match between the material you're working ...Folksonomies: programming computer science
Folksonomies: programming computer science
1 notes
notesProgramming is very alien to anything in the physical world.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Peter Norvig: How Well Does the Program Run When it Isn't...
And think about failure modes—I remember one of the great lessons I got about programming was when I showed up at the airport at Heathrow, and there was a power failure and none of the computers were working. But my plane was on time.
Somehow they had gotten print-outs of all the flights. 1 don't know where—there must have been some computer off-site, i don't know whether they printed them that morning or if they had a procedure of always printing them the night before and sending them ... 1 notes
notesAn important use-case for any software, what's the work-around for when the program isn't running?
