management of the absurd

is an excellent book by Richard Farson, subtitled Paradoxes in Leadership (isbn 0-684-83044-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The more important a relationship, the less skill matters.

Any technique loses its power when it becomes evident that it is a technique.

People need to know they are dealing with a genuine person, not someone who is "managing" them.

It is only when the balance of power is relatively equal that truly candid communication can and should take place.

When we really listen, so that we understand the other person's perspective, we risk being changed ourselves.

Every management act in some way redistributes or reinforces power.

Ex-convicts are better able to rehabilitate prison inmates than is the prison staff. Ex-drug addicts are more successful in getting other addicts off drugs than are psychiatrists. Students learn more from each other than they do from their professors.

The introduction of highly participative systems tends to bring attacks on the stronger members, often the leaders, while more hierarchical systems bring attacks on the weaker members.

The way to judge your effectiveness is to assess the quality of the discontent you engender.

Scale is the enemy of creativity... Only prisons housing fewer than twenty inmates are likely to be rehabilitative.

The big change... held; the little ones have been much easier to resist.

We learn not from our failures but from our successes - and the failures of others.

By and large, organizations are simply not good at changing themselves. They change more often as a result of invasion from the outside or rebellion from the inside, less so as a result of planning.

Planning may not be effective at assessing the future, but it can be a good way to assess the present.

Strengths and weaknesses come dressed in the same clothing.

Children look at things we turn away from. Sometimes just pointing at what is going on is a valuable way to break through a barrier.

When people feel responsible for handling some situation in which they are, in fact, largely helpless, a dangerous combination of feelings is created: responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse.

Training makes people more alike... Education... tends to make people different from each other.

Slack

is the title of an excellent book by Tom DeMarco. This second snippet (here's the first) continues my tactic of rereading good books several times. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Talented managers are ... all sense organ, constantly attuned to the effect their leadership is having on their people ... Managers without such talent find themselves relying on formulas and "principles" of management. They reason, "This thing I'm trying to do should work; the fact that it isn't working probably suggests that I'm doing it half-heartedly." And so they do more of whatever they've been doing.

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier.

In my experience, standard processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center.

The power you've granted is the power to err. If that person messes up, you take the consequences. Looked at from the opposite perspective, it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.

When there is neither time nor staff to cope with work that runs more slowly than expected, then the cost of lateness is paid out of quality. There is no other degree of freedom.

... voluminous documentation of everything that will hold still for it.

Successful change can only come about in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for... the organization's culture... If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.

Quality Software ManagementVol 4. Anticipating Change

is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-32-3). This is the second (or is it third?) snippet review for this book (here's the first). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Ultimately what helps you most in managing system size is courage and realism.

Without action things will only get less visible over time.

Human systems don't change unless the individuals change, one at a time.

Growth is always non linear.

... the incidence of test failures is directly proportional to the square of the size of the crowd multiplied by the rank of the senior observing official [Augustine's Laws]
The dynamic behind this law is simple: A large crowd of high dignitaries means that the event is planned according to external, not internal, events.

It is easy to look at this diagram and believe that you're seeing a defined process. You're not. What you're seeing is an optical illusion.

"model" is just another name for a guide to anticipating the future.

Cultural changes have a much greater potential impact than process changes because one cultural change - such as driving fear out of the workplace - can affect hundreds of process changes.

Feedback works on continuity. The pieces in the model cannot be too large (or response will be slow), and they must be stable (or response will not be predictable).

Error prone modules are born error prone and stay error prone.

local optimization, global pessimization

A well known UK company, let's called them B&O, sells bidgets and odgets. B&O sold me a bidget a few years back. They did a good job. I like the bidget they sold me. It works well. B&O rings me know-and-then to ask if I'm thinking of buying another bidget or my first odget.

Recently B&O rang me and I mentioned I was indeed thinking of buying an odget to go with my bidget. The B&O person on the other end of the phone sounded very pleased and arranged for a B&O salesman to visit me to provide me with an odget quote. On the designated day, at the designated time, the B&O salesman, let's call him Stan, arrived.

Stan didn't know that someone at B&O had spoken to me on the phone and arranged for Stan to provide me an odget quote. So I explained, for a second time, the odget I was thinking of, and where it would go and how big it would need to be. Stan said that he could quote for the odget, but, being honest, there was no point. Since the odget I was after was not a regular odget B&O would simply subcontract the work to a builder, and then charge me the builder's cost plus a fat markup. Stan said I'd be much better off hiring a builder myself.

Stan explained that the people at the B&O office get a cash bonus each time an odget quote is made to a prospective customer. Stan further explained that they got this cash bonus regardless of whether the customer actually bought the odget. Predictably, the people in the B&O office work hard to get quotes out. They send B&O salesman out to any and all jobs regardless of how likely the job is to result in actual work. Stan said if a B&O phone-handler phoned me to ask whether I'd received a quote, he'd very much appreciate it if I said no I hadn't because I'd changed my mind and didn't want an odget.

Top marks to Stan. No marks to B&O.

The evolution of useful things

is an excellent book by Henry Petroski (isbn 0-679-74039-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Can any single theory explain the shape of a Western saw, which cuts on the push stroke, as readily as an Eastern one, which cuts on the pull?

A French book of advice to students recognised the implicit threat involved in using a weapon at the table, and instructed its readers to place the sharp edge of their knife facing towards themselves… Such actions, coupled with the growing widespread use of forks, gave the table knife its now familiar blunt-tipped blade.

Round chopsticks would tend to twist in the fingers and roll off the table, and so squaring one end eliminated two annoyances in what is certainly a brilliant design.

The stories associated with knives, forks, and spoons also illustrate well how interrelated are technology and culture generally.

Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention.

The very properties of the material that make it possible to be shaped into a useful object also limit its use.

Engineering is invention institutionalised, and engineers engaged in design are inventors who are daily looking for ways to overcome the limitations of what already works.

It is not the form follows function but, rather, that the form of one thing follows from the failure of another thing to function as we would like.

When sewn into a garment, a piece of thread can be thought of as a continuous and flexible ghost of a needle.

It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".

Being wrong

is an excellent book by Kathryn Schulz (isbn 978-0-06-117604-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

One extremely good way to become wedded to a theory you just idly expressed is to have it contradicted... from noncommittal to evangelical in a matter of milliseconds.

We take our own certainty as an indicator of accuracy.

The instant an implicit assumption is violated, it turns into an explicit one.

When we ask people to look for something specific they develop a startling inability to see things in general.

The genius of statistics was that it did not ignore errors, it quantified them. [Laplace]

In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today's global population, the word 'er' meant "to move", "to set in motion", or simply "to go."

It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies.

the stakes of our mistakes.

Realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time.

"fallor ergo sum" (I err, therefore I am) [St Augustine]

When other people reject our beliefs, we think they lack good information. When we reject their beliefs, we think we possess good judgement.

As with so many systems, the strengths of inductive reasoning are also its weaknesses. For every way that induction serves us admirably, it also creates a series of predictable biases in the way we think...
When a framework serves us well... we call it brilliant, and call it inductive reasoning. When it serves us poorly, we call it idiotic, and call it confirmation bias.

Being wrong can be funny; other people being wrong can be very very funny.

Without some kind of belief system in place, we wouldn't even know what kinds of questions to ask, let alone how to make sense of the answers.

Adapt - why success always starts with failure

is an excellent book by Tim Harford (isbn 978-0-349-12151-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Cross the river by feeling for stones [Deng Xiaoping]

Accepting trial and error means accepting error.

Darwin, a meticulous observer...

The art of success is to fail productively.

Complexity is a problem only in tightly coupled systems.

Make sure you know when you've failed, or you will never learn.

What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. His method for dealing with this could be summarised as three 'Palchinsky principles'

• seek out new ideas and try new things
• when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable
• seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along

If we are to take the 'variation' part of 'variation and selection' seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable.

When John Nagl served in Baghdad in 2003, he found that while his young inexperienced soldiers had the authority to kill, he - a major with a doctorate and a decade of experience - didn't have the authority to print his own propaganda pamphlets to counteract the clever PR campaign that the local insurgents were running.

Speciation - the divergence of one species into two separate populations - rarely happens without some form of physical separation.

Tight coupling means the unintended consequences proliferate so quickly that it is impossible to adapt to the failure or to try something different.

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old fashioned cash registers. 'EPOS lets people at head office run the business', explains John Timpson. 'I don't want them to run the business.'

John Timpson describes one instance where he couldn't buy half-price happy hour drinks at a hotel bar, because midway through giving his order, the hour ended and the bar's computerised sales system refused to allow the half-price offer to be applied.

Timpson's company training manual describes the twenty easiest ways to defraud the company, making it clear that the company understands the risks it is running and trusts its employees anyway - and many people respond to being trusted by becoming more trustworthy.

A central point of the corporation, as a legal structure, is that it is supposed to be a safe space in which to fail. Limited liability companies were developed to encourage people to experiment, to innovate, to adapt - safe in the knowledge that if their venture collapsed, it would merely be the abstract legal entity that was ruined, not them personally.

Fail better. [Samuel Beckett]

hunger is the best source

I've previously blogged about being taught ITA spelling at primary school. About how it causes me spelling problems. I was reminded of this when speaking to Geir Amdal at the excellent Agile Coach Camp in Oslo. Geir showed me this wonderful blog post with lovely twist on the famous quote:

Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon

It reminded me of something my Mum used to say to me when I was little:

Hunger is the best source.

For many many years I didn't understand what she was saying. I was seeing the word sauce as source. She was actually saying:

Hunger is the best sauce.

Food tastes better when you're hungry. Reflecting on my confusion I realize I'm actually quite proud of this mistake. This was a long time ago remember. I was a small boy at the time. Even then, it seems, software was calling me.

The lady tasting tea

is an excellent book by David Salsburg (isbn 0-8050-7143-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

It was a summer afternoon in Cambridge, England, in the late 1920s. A group of university dons, their wives, and some guests were sitting around an outdoor table for afternoon tea. One of the women was insisting that tea tasted different depending upon whether the tea was poured into the milk or whether the milk was poured into the tea.

What I discovered working at Pfizer was that very little scientific research can be done alone. It usually requires a combination of minds. This is because it is so easy to make mistakes.

Galton discovered a phenomenon he called "regression to the mean."

The numbers that identify the distribution are not the same type of "numbers" as the measurements. These numbers can never be observed but can be inferred from the way in which the measurements scatter. These numbers were later to be called parameters - from the Greek for "almost measurements."

Bliss invented a procedure he called "probate analysis." … The most important parameter his model generated is called the "50 percent lethal dose," usually referred to as the "LD-50." … The further you get from the 50 percent point, the more massive the experiment that is needed to get a good estimate.

If you are willing to settle for knowing the two parameters of a normal distribution within two significant figures, you need collect only about 50 measurements.

It is better to do mathematics on a chalkboard than on a piece of paper because chalk is easier to erase, and mathematical research is always filled with mistakes. Very few mathematicians work alone. If you are a mathematician, you need to talk about what you are doing. You need to expose your new ideas to the criticism of others.

In the deterministic approach, there is a fixed number, the gravitational constant, that describes how things fall to the Earth. In the statistical approach, our measurements of the gravitational constant will always differ from one another, and the scatter of their distribution is what we wish to establish in order to "understand" falling bodies.

No test can be powerful against all possible alternatives.

In the near disaster of American nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania in the 1980s, the operators of the reactor had a large board of dials and indicators to follow the progress of the reactor. Among these were warning lights, some of which had been faulty and presented false alarms in the past. The prior beliefs of the operators were such that any new pattern of warning lights would be viewed as a false alarm. Even as the pattern of warning lights and associated dials produced a consistent picture of low water in the reactor, they continued to dismiss the evidence.

Kolmogorov called a sequence of numbers collected over time with successive values related to previous ones a "stochastic process."

Precision Listening

At the ALE conference I did a lightning talk. On my first slide I quoted this from Jerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management Volume 1: Systems Thinking:

As consultants, we've found that the quickest and surest way to classify organizations into similar patterns is by the way people think and communicate.

On the second slide I quoted Jerry again (from the same book):

No other observation skill may be more important to software engineering than precision listening.

I was reminded of this a moment ago when someone cold-called me. I honestly don't remember what the person's name was or what they were selling. What I do remember is how the conversation started:

Hello, Jon Jagger speaking.

Hello, can I speak to Jon Jagger please.

Do you recognise this pattern? This response is pure waste. It does nothing but waste my time. After this response the one thing I know for sure is that they're not listening to me. And if they're not listening to me why should I listen to them?

the alchemist

is an excellent book by Paulo Coelho (isbn 978-0-7225-3293-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

"This is the first phase of the job," he said. "I have to separate out the sulphur. To do that successfully, I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master Work.

"But arms cannot be drawn unless they also go into battle. Arms are as capricious as the desert, and, if they are not used, the next time they might not function."

"I had to test your courage," the stranger said. "Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the Language of the World."

"It is not what enters men's mouths that's evil," said the alchemist. "It is what comes out of their mouths that is."

"Tomorrow, sell your camel and buy a horse. Camels are traitorous: they walk thousands of paces and they never seem to tire. Then suddenly, they kneel and die. But horses tire bit by bit. You always know how much you can ask of them, and when it is that they are about to die."

"There is only one way to learn," the alchemist answered. "It is through action."

In the brain of me

Here's a video of the SkillsMatter talk I did on Thursday, titled "Stuff I'm starting to know now that I really wish I'd known 20 years ago". Its loosely based on the theme of Making The Invisible More Visible, one of my entries from the book, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. I completely botched what I was trying to say about courage. What I was trying to say was that courage is not the absence of fear.

My other SkillsMatter talk was based on Do More Deliberate Practice my other entry in the 97 Things Book.

This was the first run of quite a lot of new material so I was quite nervous, but I felt most of it went very well. Here's some of the feedback.

• Fun, informative, useful
• An interesting brain dump
• Entertaining and enlightening
• Very good. Thoughtful and interesting
• Great content - very interesting
• Great laid back presentation
• Interesting ideas and great presentation to go with it
• Well planned presentation, not just your standard powerpoint
• Very good talk. Inspiring
• Very interactive and well explained
• Clear explanations, good analogies, funny
• Fantastic
• Very good. Passionate speaker. Good insights

Synectics

is an excellent book by William J.J. Gordon (isbn 978-0060324308). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The word Synectics, from the Greek, means the joining together of different and apparently irrelevant elements.

Abstraction breeds more abstraction and more generality instead of leading to tough yes-no tests.

Words like intuition, empathy, and play are merely names put to complex activities in the hope that the naming of the activity will in fact describe it.

Human beings are heir to a legacy of frozen words and ways of perceiving which wrap their world in comfortable familiarity.

Synectics theory agrees with the conviction that a man does not know even his own science if he knows only it.

"All the crappy solutions in the world have been rationalized by deadlines."

He refused to recognize the fact that his search for the perfect problem was a way of avoiding failure in solving a less perfect one.

Invention is akin to painting for in practice, the element being constructed has the capacity to tell the builder what the next step should be. In invention this is much more critical than in engineering because the inventor is always attempting to do something new.

When this forgetfulness is formalized into a methodology, it reinforces the rejection of the commonplace.

Organic functions are unfinished, cylical, and self-reproductive... Synthetic functions are complete and more obviously subject to decay.

Conventions as abstractions from reality constitute a virtually complete and unassailable pattern, whereas the commonplace is infinitely repatternable.

The child who asks: "What's that funny noise?" is told the noise is thunder in such a way that speculation is supposed to stop... But naming the noise does not describe it. It does not answer the question, it kills it.

Why do car drivers brake?

Recently I wrote a small blog entry Why to cars have brakes? It's getting a lot of hits. Well, a lot for me. So naturally in my quest for even more hits here's a follow up...

Imagine you're in a car. Driving along. Why do you brake? I'm not asking what happens when you press the brake pedal? That's too easy (the car stops). I'm asking why…?


.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Here are two reasons:

Reason one: because there's danger ahead

This corresponds to a failing test. More specifically, it's when a test runs and asserts. A red. Perhaps there's a queue of traffic ahead (often a problem on the orbital car park known as the M25). Perhaps the road is closed off because workmen are working on it. Or maybe the local council has been meddling and the road is now a one-way-but-not-the-way-you-want-to-go road. Whatever the reason, something is not as expected.

Reason two: because you've arrived!

This corresponds to a passing test. A green. Wherever it is you're going, you've got there. Nothing unexpected happened. No traffic queues. No closed off roads. No meddling local council. Incredible!

In my entirely unscientific sampling almost everyone answers with the first reason. The second reason is not nearly as common. I find this interesting. I think maybe it's a reflection of the thinking statically vs thinking dynamically thing again. A perception that tests are most useful when they fire red. That tests which run to completion without incident are not so useful. But they are. Maybe more so.

Brakes help me stop. And stopping implies I'm already moving - I'm already going somewhere. But where? If I don't know where I'm going why am I moving at all? If I don't know where I'm going I'm just as lost as if I don't know where I am.

Tests are useful not just because of the I-didn't-arrive effect when they fail, they're also useful because of the I-did-arrive effect when they pass.

Another reason passing tests are really useful is the elves. But the elves will have to wait for another time.

why do cars have brakes?

I don't remember where I was when Kevlin Henney asked me:

Why do cars have brakes?

but I do remember his answer as a definite light-bulb moment. What's your answer?

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
A very common answer is

to stop

or some variation thereof. In other words, to brake. It reminds me of the noun-verb thing again. Lights light. Irons iron. Compilers compile. Brakes brake. But that was not Kevlin's answer. Kevlin's answer was:

So you can drive faster.

His answer feels paradoxical which usually means there's a deep truth. Brakes allow you to stop when you want. Brakes allow you to stop where you want. Software tests are like brakes. They help you drive faster.

I'm also reminded of the P.W.Bridgman quote at start of chapter 6 of Jerry Weinberg's Introduction to General Systems Thinking:

...it is better to analyze in terms of doings or happenings than in terms of objects or static abstractions.

Thinking about brakes allowing you to stop is thinking statically. Thinking about braking allowing you to drive faster is thinking dynamically.

If you liked this post you might like the follow up Why do car drivers brake?.

Test-gunpowder-pudding driven development

I was rereading chapter 3, Systems and Illusion in Jerry Weinberg's excellent An Introduction to General Systems Thinking yesterday. On page 56-57 Jerry writes:

If I say: "The exception proves the rule" in front of a large class, there will be a division in understanding... Some will believe I have uttered nonsense, while others will understand "The exception puts the rule to the test"

I've read the book four times. I'm a slow learner but this time something clicked and I immediately understood the earlier passage:

...the exception does not prove the rule, it teaches it.

Jerry goes on:

"Proof" in its original sense was "a test applied to substances to determine if they are of satisfactory quality."

I was struck by two thoughts when I read this. One was the parallel with testing. Of a test as a "proof". The other was the word original. I realized that when I hear the word "proof" I have a strong association with its noun meaning rather than its verb meaning. I tend to think of a proof as a finished proof that completely proves something. It's the noun-verb thing I've blogged about before. I wondered if there were any old dictionaries online so I could get a feel for how the generally accepted meaning of the word proof might have changed over time. There is. http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters has two Webster's dictionaries. The 1828 dictionary came back with:

Proof [noun] 1. Trial; essay; experiment; any effort, process or operation that ascertains truth or fact. Thus the quality of spirit is ascertained by proof; the strength of gun-powder, ...

The 1913 one came back with:

Proof [noun] 1. Any effort, process, or operation designed to establish or discover a fact or truth; an act of testing; a test; a trial.

and a modern dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/proof said:

Proof [noun]. 1. The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.

I find the difference fascinating. The 1828 and the 1913 definitions define the noun as the process whereas the modern one defines the noun as the evidence resulting from the process.

Jerry continues:

We retain this meaning in the "proofs" of printing and photography, in the "proof" of whiskey, and in "the proof of the pudding." Over the centuries, the meaning of the word "prove" began to shift, eliminating the negative possibilities to take on an additional sense: "To establish, to demonstrate, or to show truth or genuineness."

At first I didn't understand the bit about "eliminating the negative possibilities". I think it's partly to do with my ITA spelling at school. But I am persistant. Slowly it came to me. The word that did it for me in...

"Proof" in its original sense was "a test applied to substances to determine if they are of satisfactory quality."

...was the word if. To determine if they are of satisfactory quality. The proof was an act. There was the possibility of failure.

I started thinking about the word proof a bit more. I googled the phrase "the proof of the pudding". If you think this phrase is pretty meaningless then you're right - it's a shortened version of:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Again it's about the possibility of failure. It reminds me of the scene in the film The Cat in the Hat (another film Patrick and I love watching) where the Cat has just made some cupcakes (with the amazing kupcake-inator). He tries one and says:

"Yeuch. They're horrible. Who want's some?"

I love that line. I also googled the word proof as related to alcohol content. The history behind the phrase is just wonderful. In the 18th century spirits were graded with gunpowder. Imagine you're buying some spirits. How would you know if an unscrupulous merchant had watered it down? You couldn't tell just by looking. What they did was pour a sample of the solution onto a pinch of gunpowder. If the wet gunpowder could still be ignited then the solution had proved itself. Don't you just love that?

So let's hear it for pudding and for spirits and for gunpowder and for tests. And for the possibility of failure.

The war of art

is an excellent book by Steven Pressfield (isbn 0-446-69143-7). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius's shadow is Resistance.

The enemy is a very good teacher [Dalai Lama]

The human being isn't wired to function as an individual.

The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.

Rationalization is Resistance's spin doctor.

Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.

That's when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.

The professional knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now. [Goethe]

The Self wishes to create, to evolve. The Ego likes things just the way they are.

We humans seem to have been wired by our evolutionary past to function most comfortably in a tribe of twenty to, say, eight hundred.

How do you make toast?

I'm doing two days consultancy in Cornwall. Yesterday for the folks at Research Instruments in Falmouth and today for the folks at Absolute Software in Redruth. Both are really great places to work and it's a joy visiting them.

I'm staying at the Penventon hotel. My usual breakfast routine is tea, porridge, and toast. They have a big silver toaster. You put your slices of bread into the front, it pulls them in slowly, applies a lot of heat, and then drops them down a shute.

Yesterday they came out mostly black.

I tried scraping them with a knife. I won't bother next time. They never taste good when you do that. All I did was create black dust for someone to waste time cleaning up. They didn't taste good. I didn't eat them.

I was reminded of the joke:

How do you make toast?

You burn bread and scrape the burn off.

Today I put my toast in the same as before. The toaster slowly pulled them in, applied heat, and dropped them down the chute. The slices were under toasted this time. So I put the slices in again. The toaster pulled them in again, applied heat again, and dropped them down the chute again. Just right. No knives. No scraping. No black dust. No cleaning up. I added marmalade. I ate them. Lovely.

Bad captcha

I had this yesterday. I doubt any human could read that! As my friend Niklas Bjornerstedt tweeted

captchas are getting so hard to read that only robots will be able to solve them soon

The logic of failure

is an excellent book by Dietrich Dorner (isbn 0-201-47948-6). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The English psychologist James T. Reason thinks that this kind of error is the result of a general propensity for "similarity matching," that is a tendency to respond to similarities more than differences.

The effectiveness of a measure almost always depends on the context within which the measure is pursued.

A rule such as … is too general to be useful, and measures based on it will be wrong much of the time.

We often overlook time configurations and treat successive steps in a temporal development as individual events.

Go make yourself a plan,
And be a shining light.
Then make yourself a second plan,
For neither will come right.

People look for and find ways to avoid confronting the negative consequences of their actions.

If we never look at the consequences of our behaviour, we can always maintain the illusion of our competence.

The results also support the idea that activity may foster an illusion of competence.

Other investigators report a similar gap between verbal intelligence and performance intelligence and distinguish between "explicit" and "implicit" knowledge.

Mistakes are essential to cognition.

We humans are creatures of the present.

It is impossible to do just one thing alone. Any action in one area affects others.