I just want to say that the world would be a better place if people from Australia had no good reason to care about the internal politics of the United States.

https://twitter.com/haruki_zaemon/status/1554973263138557952

If the post WWII international order had worked out as well as it should have, the EU would be currently staging "an intervention" to smack some sense into the USA.

If you are the slightest bit interested in geological things, you must visit Iceland. For example, what seemed to me to be their equivalent of Old Faithful erupts about every 10 minutes.

https://twitter.com/Volcanologist/status/1554834656976965634

Also: at least pre-Covid, if you were flying from North America to Europe, it added little expense to stop over at Iceland for at least a few days. I made a habit of that.

Also: there are a lot of sheep, which was a big plus for Dawn.

Here's an interesting thing. We know that that Jan6 text messages from Secret Service agents were lost. Then we learned that the same was true of SS administrators. Today we learned the same is true of Department of Defense administrators.

And yet: the past does not exist.
... ...
That is: this is not the first transition between Administrations. Previously, how often were records (required to be preserved by Federal law) lost? What happened to the people who lost them? Etc. Etc.

I have seen no news source address such questions.
...

For my podcast episode on Fujimura's idea of packages, I was planning on contrasting "the proto-oncogene theory of cancer" to the TDD bandwagon. I'm feeling unsatisfied with *just* that, as it's somewhat ancient history. A bit boring.
... ...
I've been thinking that at least some of the dynamics Fujimura identifies apply to why Elixir did better than Erlang and why Elm has done better (?) than Haskell.

Especially in the Elm case, I feel on shaky ground.
...

I once taught "CS397BEM: Being Wrong" as a summer class at @IllinoisCS. The theme of the course was that lots of solutions to problems produce new problems. Starting example was the immune system and autoimmune diseases. Students did class presentations.
... ...
From those presentations, it seemed to me that only one student (hi, Dragos!) really got it.

It's been maybe 25 years. Maybe I should try again.

To get listed in Apple Podcasts, I had to "soft launch" my podcast a while back. Consider this the formal launch of a podcast about "how people have applied ideas from *outside* software *to* software." Please retweet.

podcast.oddly-influenced.dev Mostly I want to interview other people about how something they read triggered an Aha! moment that led them to change the way they did software. And how that worked out for them.

I'm reading about /Molecular Cloning: a Laboratory Manual/ (molecularcloning.com), a book first published in 1982 that hit a sweet spot: both a cookbook of techniques available to novices, plus... ... "written in such a way that if they read it carefully and understood it, they could actually troubleshoot". We've had similar things - I was fond of @jbrains' /Junit Recipes/ (manning.com/books/junit-re…), ...

South Carolina bill outlaws websites that tell how to get an abortion
More states could follow, setting up a battle over the future of online speech across the country.

washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

This implies the bill has been *passed* when it has only been *introduced*.

1/4 In this case, the bill is newsworthy because it has enough organizational oomph behind it that it is likely to pass, although the article doesn't discuss that *at all*.

But I have a pet peeve about this sort of story.

2/4

In /Crafting Science/ (goodreads.com/book/show/1115…), Fujimura points out that recombinant DNA technology transformed cancer research in part because of top-down push (funding agencies, commercial interests).

I'm writing a script about how jUnit was essential for the success of TDD. Perhaps what I'm now reading adds another wrinkle:

TDD succeeded as it has *because* it carried a theory alongside its technology.

... but it failed to reach its potential because there was no large-scale institution that made it an obvious problem-solving choice.

Oh God, the #Jan6thHearings is fucking it up. People want linear narratives:

This happened. Then that happened. Ooh, this other thing happened at the same time! Are they connected? Let's discuss!

Why. Are. They. Not. Telling. A. Story??? I was just complaining to Dawn about how the long paper I'm rereading to summarize for the podcast (marick.fastmail.com/random_content…) is organized around the final theory rather than around the history. It darts back and forth over the history, which. is. confusing.

I recommend "Agora" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(fi…) a film about philosophy vs religion toward the end of the Roman empire. We tend to forget how quickly Christianity got taken over by zealots. (It wasn't just the 30 years war, justification of slavery, and, um, today.) I really want to do a deep dive sometime on how Christianity became so obsessed and violent about the Donatist heresy, Arianism, etc. It is completely incomprehensible to me why it mattered: given that surely God would clarify such topics to the virtuous in heaven.

So here's my theory. The Founders created a Senate modeled after the Roman Senate. Look at the history of the Roman Republic: the Senate was at first good, but when it started to suck, it *really* sucked and had become so static it could not adjust to changing needs.
1/3 The Founders – educated men – understood that and *deliberately* used "Senate" to signal to people that the institution was destined to ossify and fail: it was their sign that we should be ever-ready to discard it Traditions when it had outlived its usefulness.
2/3

Comments on the Supreme Court. A response essay by a lawyer I've never heard of, but who is apparently famous enough to have a symposium named after him. balkin.blogspot.com/2022/05/conver…

A quote follows. 'I think it is telling that all of us seem to be fully comfortable with the idea of term limits. It is getting harder and harder to find anyone who genuinely defends either as “necessary” or even “proper” the truly exceptional national American practice of “full-life” tenure.

The case against the Supreme Court of the United States vox.com/2022/5/3/23055… via @voxdotcom ...
It's interesting that the author of the "send abortion decisions back to state legislators" draft is *also* author of two decisions dismantling protections of the Voting Rights Act, and is a supporter of gerrymandering.

How, in US law, did it become acceptable to think that rights had to be "deeply rooted in American history and tradition" (per the leaked Alito decision). That's straight from Edmund Burke, who was a *British* (or Irish) political theorist who modern conservatives like.

1/7 But Burke himself has nothing to do with American history or tradition! As far as I know, he had no influence on the writers of the Constitution (see homagetotacitus.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-comp…). The Founders were Lockeans.

2/7

Bedtime reading for last night was beginning of Snyder's /Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning/. (Tip: bad idea, restful-sleep-wise.) He has an interesting take. This article has a conversation with him: theatlantic.com/international/… One of Snyder's theses is that Hitler was not an ethnic nationalist because he was not a nationalist: he considered nations an aberration, one - like all abstract concepts! - created by the Jews. This perhaps should adjust my thinking about Putin, Orbán, and their US admirers.

Was reminded of my days as a technical editor for a magazine. Here's one editing trick you as a writer can use: format the piece with a really wide margin on one side. As you read, jot a few words or a sentence for each paragraph in the margin. Later*, read down the margin.
... ...
Do the notations flow logically from one to the next – do they tell a story**? (Especially common are ones that break the flow with an irrelevant topic.) Think about how you could cut out the notations and perhaps rearrange them to work better. Maybe even physically do that.

Why in the name of all that is holy did Apple give their streaming service and their TV hardware the same name? (Apple TV). When Apple's *one page* instruction manual for the latter doesn't work, you're screwed. You can't search. OK, I hate to be demanding, but those of you who recommended I buy an Apple TV device: how is it actually better than the crappy UI that came with the Samsung TV?

Prompted by @danluu, it occurs to me that, in the early days of Agile, we (very much including me) talked a lot about "the high tech adoption curve" of /Crossing the Chasm/, but: we applied that individualistic/product model to organizational culture. With poor results.

1/9 The model: exampler.com/testing-com/wr…

That model was originally derived from diffusion of farming techniques to individual farmers: basically, one-family businesses. (I'm too lazy right now to provide a link.)

2/9

At the end, I link to an interesting article about what I think of as the "thingification of estimates". There's a fact you want to know. It's not measurable, so you estimate it based on other facts (some of which are also not measurable, so you...) You end up with a causal tree: So there are two sources of error:
1. Measurement error
2. An incorrect understanding of how a predecessor measurement/estimate contributes the the estimate you want. 2/8

"The rush to find a conspiracy around the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins is driven by narrative, not evidence." foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab…

I personally find it freeing not to have to have an opinion about the origin of Covid19 because... 1. We already knew there were dangers from both zoonotic transmission and lab leaks. The origins of Covid19 don't change the need to deal with both.