(Photo: Deer, Woodland Park, CO, December 2019. Taken by Andrew Ek)
We just wrapped up our first week (here in Nebraska, at least) of full-scale social distancing. Our kiddo, in particular, has been bummed that she can’t see her grandparents or friends. But on the plus side, she’s been coming to sit next to me and do art projects while I work from home, and has probably talked to all of my coworkers and most of my clients.
I’ve been heads-down on a client project with a pretty hard deadline, so haven’t done any meaningful writing (outside of work) this week. But there are a few things I’ve read that feel worth sharing.
How to Caption Your Movie
This video is pretty charming. It was put together by a group of deaf filmmakers, and talks specifically about closed-captions (and subtitles). Because of my hearing loss, I use captions or subtitles for almost everything I watch (and usually will not listen to podcasts or watch YouTube video tutorials), and have for as long as I can remember. My wife now also uses subtitles or captions for almost everything. Usually it works pretty well, but we do notice when it isn’t.
This video talks about some anti-patterns, and is pretty humorous. As a bonus, almost the entire thing is done in American Sign Language, and it was pleasant for me to be able to ignore the captions and just focus on the presenters.
Data Science?
I signed up for Data Science: R Basics on edX this week on the invitation of a friend (and occasional collaborator) and one of his colleagues. Professionally, some of the software I write produces very large amounts of data. I have techniques for programmatically accessing that data (memoizing, indexing, etc.) without losing too much speed, but don’t yet know much about analyzing.
More generally, my knowledge of statistics is pretty limited. I don’t know whether this course in particular will help resolve that (it appears that it presupposes some knowledge of statistics), but I’m looking forward to having access to whatever skills it does provide. At bare minimum, I’d expect to be able to take some data and visualize it with the help of a domain expert.
Event sourcing? Event sourcing!
I don’t know that this is an appropriate choice for all applications and frameworks, but when I’m writing software that I know is going to grow in complexity (which is most of it), making use of event sourcing, bounded contexts, and CQRS helps me to manage that complexity for a little longer. It’s got higher up-front costs, but when the plan is to write something that will live on for many years, it’s often worth it.
Things to do inside
Since we’re following social distancing protocol as best we can, here are some things we’ve been up to:
Ruth picked up Your Startup Guide to Breakfast Invitations, which suggests a five-to-ten minute activity you can do with small children as a way to start the day. The kiddo seems to enjoy having something set up for her when she wakes up, and we enjoy how she’ll usually take off into imaginative play instead of just wanting to watch TV right away.
But we still watch a little bit of TV. The Masked Singer has been surprisingly compelling, given how absolutely silly the premise is. I don’t know enough about celebrities to be able to guess meaningfully, but I do appreciate how much fun everyone seems to be having.
We go on at least one family walk per day most days. This is good for me, too, since otherwise I might not even leave the bounds of our yard (or even the house).
LEGO blocks have become increasingly present. I found many of my LEGO sets from when I was a kid, and we occasionally acquire more. My two favorite sets of late are this fossil kit and the Ferarri Tributo car set. When the kiddo comes down to work with me during our early-afternoon quiet play time (and my quiet work time), one of the projects she has available is to play LEGOs. So she’ll often choose to take something apart. Then, when it’s time for my break (or for me to be done for the day), we rebuild it.
With full knowledge of a lot of fairly significant deadlines coming up, I picked up the new Animal Crossing game for the family.
I also put together this short thread of board game recommendations, though sadly haven’t had the chance to play any of my own lately:
We also do at least a few video-calls per day with friends or family (or, as mentioned previously, coworkers or clients). The kiddo is still bummed about not being able to see her people in person or go to the stores or places she likes, but we’re making it through as best we can, and hopefully not acting as disease vectors to others.
This Cat
Your Brain is Not a Computer
Most of the work I’m doing professionally these days involves helping organizations find better ways to learn, and helping organizations (and software developers) more quickly and effectively translate knowing into doing. Some of this work involves studying organizational processes, and a lot of it involves learning about cognition and how the brain works.
“The Empty Brain”, by Robert Epstein, dismantles the “brain as a computer” metaphor in a couple of notable ways, and is an essay that I return to once or twice a year.
Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.
But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
It’s worth a read, I think, and has helped me to be more precise in my own language. The author doesn’t spend a ton of time crafting counter-metaphors as a replacement, which I think maybe is both a very difficult task and one that would help the rhetorical punch of the essay. But I’m also not sure that it’s on the author to do such a thing.
Simple Made Easy
Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” is a talk that I also return to a few times per year. The biggest thing it does well, I think, is draw distinctions between “simple” and “easy”, with clear and precise language.
The talk itself primarily concerns itself with programming, but we can generalize here.
Something is easy if it is close-at-hand. In the talk, Hickey uses the example of speaking German or playing the violin — those are task that are difficult for some people and easy for others, primarily as a function of practice. Ease is subjective.
On the other hand, something is simple if it is not interwoven with other things, that is, if it can be considered in relative isolation. A kitchen knife, for example, is simple. Depending on what you are cutting (or the various techniques you might use for cutting), it might not be easy. But it is simple in terms of how many things it interrelates with. Simplicity is thus relatively objective.
(These definitions work a little bit better in a software development context).
In an apartment I once lived in, there were a handful of light switches that controlled almost everything. Depending on how they were arrayed, different banks of lights would turn on or off. If I wanted a certain light on, I sometimes had to flip a few different light switches. These switches were set up this way to be easy (not for me, but for whoever set them up, I assume), but they were not simple. Predicting whether a single light would be on or off required knowing about a lot of things.
Contrast that with the way light switches work in most houses, which is, a single light switch corresponds to a single light (or outlet). It may be more difficult to get the desired lights on (because I need to do more walking around), but it’s definitely simpler in terms of the mental model needed to achieve a desired result.
Having this working definition helps me professionally, particularly when I’m trying to make sense of something. Is my confusion the result of complexity, or is it the result of lack of familiarity? Alternatively, when evaluating my own work, I can ask “Is this simple? Or is it just easy?”
It also ties neatly into theories of cognition.
Then there's the aspect of how do I make it familiar, right? I may not have ever seen this before. That's a learning exercise. I've got to go get a book, go take a tutorial, have somebody explain it to me. Maybe try it out. Right? Both these things we're driving. We're driving. We install. We learn. It's totally in our hands.
Then we have this other part though, which is the mental capability part. And that's the part that's always hard to talk about, the mental capability part because, the fact is, we can learn more things. We actually can't get much smarter. We're not going to move; we're not going to move our brain closer to the complexity. We have to make things near by simplifying them.
But the truth here is not that they're these super, bright people who can do these amazing things and everybody else is stuck because the juggling analogy is pretty close. Right? The average juggler can do three balls. The most amazing juggler in the world can do, like, 9 balls or 12 or something like that. They can't do 20 or 100. We're all very limited. Compared to the complexity we can create, we're all statistically at the same point in our ability to understand it, which is not very good. So we're going to have to bring things towards us.
And because we can only juggle so many balls, you have to make a decision. How many of those balls do you want to be incidental complexity and how many do you want to be problem complexity? How many extra balls? Do you want to have somebody throwing you balls that you have to try to incorporate in here? Oh, use this tool. And you're like, whoa! You know, more stuff. Who wants to do that?
The Hunt for Planet Nine
“The Hunt for Planet Nine,” by Shannon Stirone, talks about two astronomers who are looking for a big planet at the edge of our solar system.
We stood there for a moment and as our eyes adjusted, the galaxy turned on. Clusters of stars became the entire sky. Each speck of light had traveled its own distance; traversed its path through the dark void of space, some from the time of the earliest human civilizations, light that left at the dawn of the invention of agriculture and cities, at the time this mountain was last covered in lava. Mike pointed over the hills to a hazy cone of yellow light that shot up like a triangle from the Earth, explaining it was a rare astronomical phenomenon some people wait their whole lives to see: “That is the zodiacal light. It is the sunlight reflecting off of the dust that’s floating in the asteroid belt. This is the best I’ve ever seen it. Wow.” Across the sky to the right was the arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It was as though a painter had dipped their brush in starlight and clouds and smeared it ever so carefully across the universe.
It’s a long and lovely read about how planets are found and all the challenges therein. It’s also got some deeply reverent language about the universe at large.
Happy Sunday, lovely readers.
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