Gifted Slacker

From here:

But your generation is I think a little like my (boomer) generation, so persuaded of its specialness that it cannot bear the idea of compromise.

I’m not sure whether it’s a completely negative tendency or not. It’s something to keep in mind, anyhow.

I’m building my own blog-type software in Ruby on Rails as a learning exercise, and to have a web-publishing and writing tool that better suits me. It’s taking me longer than I’d hoped to get things put together right, so I’m breaking down and posting this now.

I’ve come up with a sort of roadmap for improving my software development skills. Most of my professional experience is with Lotus Notes and VB/C#.NET and I’ve wanted to move away from that in a big way, for a long time.

Going back to school has given me the ass kicking I needed to get started. In December I wrote a social feed reader and recommender in PHP, and in April I wrote a skills brokerage Facebook application in PHP. Early in January I started writing software for my dissertation in Python, read a lot and tinkered a little with Ruby, and for the last few weeks I’ve been reading The Rails Way and hacking on my publishing application.

I am now very comfortable with Python, afraid of PHP, and really digging Ruby and Rails.

What was that about a plan?

Sorry for the digression. Here it is:

1. By the end of 2008:
   • Finish The Rails Way and Agile Web Development with Rails. And launch my web-publishing project in the next couple of months (between the upcoming move and extensive travel, it will probably be mid-September before it’s up).
   • Improve my meager Java skills by creating a GWT front-end and grafting it onto a Rails application, and perhaps some other more Java-ish project. I need to find recommendations for Java
2. In 2009:
   • Wrap up loose ends from 2008
   • Master statistics and probability focussed on topics relevant to text classification and data mining.
   • Brush up on the functional programming stuff I’ve forgotten since college and learn advanced functional programming. In the course of this, write a significant application (read: not a classroom exercise or school project) in Lisp, Scheme, Arc or something similar.
   • Build a reading list of theory and practice of language design and implementation. Study it and implement something cool (not saying what at this point; cool is a moving target).
3. And beyond:
   • Keep abreast of changes in all of the above areas.
   • Explore a new language or two every year.
   • Take technical and creative writing classes.
   • Take some computer science and math courses I missed in undergrad.

Notebooks Fetish and Purpose:

The notebook, to me, is an idea, an all-encompassing repository for my quirky consciousness as it winds its way forever upriver. It’s a continuously evolving incubator, inherently messy, fragmented, idiosyncratic, loquacious, forgetful, quixotic, and occasionally (okay, often) full of half-witted and badly expressed notions.

Elegance:

the most elegant answer to the problem is the simplest one that meets all of the necessary constraints, and is implemented in a readable manner.

Despite nearly 400 years of scientific revolution, Biology has been unable to deliver on crucial problems like effective cures for viral infections or cancer. Some of our best progress, like antibiotics, has been due to chance and random experimentation. You start a clinical trial for a hypertension drug and suddenly - whoah - all your subjects have hard-ons! Viagra is born. To be sure, chance plays a role in all endeavours, but Physics and Chemistry have a comprehensive theoretical basis powering systematic improvements, whereas Biology has been largely confined to kludges. Wanna treat cancer? Here, blast the patient with radiation and poison and hopefully the cancer will die first. They’re brilliant kludges, and I’m happy to have them, but it’s a far cry from the precision we’ve had elsewhere.

That’s from an excellent essay by Gustavo Duarte.

A short, not-so-sweet explanation of the root cause of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapse (via MR, Econlog, and others):

What went wrong? The illusion that the companies were doing virtuous work made it impossible to build a political case for serious regulation. When there were social failures the companies always blamed their need to perform for the shareholders. When there were business failures it was always the result of their social obligations. Government budget discipline was not appropriate because it was always emphasized that they were “private companies.” But market discipline was nearly nonexistent given the general perception — now validated — that their debt was government backed. Little wonder with gains privatized and losses socialized that the enterprises have gambled their way into financial catastrophe.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous of my freedom. I feel that my connections with and obligations to society are at present very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which I am serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful, and only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

H. Thoreau
10 January, 1851

Yes, stealing from Wikipedia is still plagiarism. Apparently Stacy Conradt of mental_floss finds it too difficult to include a link to her source material. In this post she posted a sampling of events from this Wikipedia page, and she didn’t even bother to paraphrase them all.

The mental_floss blog is worthless entertainment, but that doesn’t excuse this sort of thing.

I wonder if she’ll cop to it or change the post or ignore this (I posted a comment pointing out the issue).