Tag: Big Idea

What is the point of drama?

The point of writing about the extremes of human behaviour is not to discourage wickedness by pointing out the inevitability of it’s comeuppance: “Don’t do this at home'” is as misleading a description of what writing counsels “Go thou and do likewise.” The awful truth is that the response most great writing about wickedness provokes in us is neither “Yes please” nor “No thanks”, but “You too?” Richard III celebrates, nay, glorifies activities – brother-drowning, nephew-smothering, tyranny imposing – that have no redeeming social value at all. True, he gets his just deserts. But what the first half of the play does is to confront us with the fact that this appalling man is the most vivid, thrilling and inspiring person onstage. Eric Bentley points out that while tragedy does not reflect the audience’s actions (they have not committed murder), it “reflects their souls, and in their souls they have committed murder.” By enabling us to imagine what it is like to see the world through other eyes (including through the eyes of the violent and the murderous), drama develops capacities without which we cannot live together in societies at all.

How Plays Work, David Edgar

If Earth was challenged to single combat, who would be our champion?

Jackie Chan under the condition that the fight takes place in a room full of vases that neither champion wants to break.

Even better if there’s also a ladder in the room and Jackie “Isn’t looking for trouble”.

If Earth was challenged to single combat, who would be our champion? from r/AskReddit

Lessons for creating good open source software, Eric Raymond

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
Plan to throw one [version] away; you will, anyhow. (Copied from Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month)
If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
When the next generation inevitably stumbles for the second time around on the first contention, doff cap and take heed;

* Eric Raymond, via wikipedia

The Hermeneutic Circle

“The hermeneutic circle,” he was saying. “That’s what Dilthey called it. You don’t know what to do with the details unless you have a grip on the structure, and at the same time, you don’t know what to do with the structure unless you know the details. It’s true in life and in literature. The hermeneutic circle. It’s a vicious circle.”

David Denby quoting Columbia professor in the essay Does Homer Have Legs?

Parable of the Mass Transit Commuter

A man gets on the bus. A hobo gets on the bus a stop or so later. The hobo smells unpleasant and is babbling loudly.
The man says to himself, “Please God, don’t let him sit next to me.”
The hobo walks by a couple available seats.
Again, the man says to himself, “Please God, don’t let him sit next to me… Please God, don’t let him sit next to me.”
The hobo stops and settles down in the seat next to him.
“Do you know why I sat next to you?” The hobo asks the man.
The man shakes his head.
“God told me to sit next to you.”

Origin unknown.

Poe’s Law

“Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.”

Wikipedia