…

Second, to see what rate of progress one can expect in software technology, let us examine the difficulties of that technology. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of software, and accidents, those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent.

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

— Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., in “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering”

In other words, good software depends on being able to faithfully and usefully represent reality.

godellol

Originally uploaded by blue sometimes

The extension of the LOLcats meme to philosophers seems like a logical extension of the tendency of philosophy students to enjoy jokes simply because nobody else gets them. That said, the ones I get are sort of funny. It also sounds like something that Doug and Marco would have thought was funny back in college.

[via Brainiac, who bother to explain LOLcats, in case you're not in on that joke yet. PS: When will you have comments, like Exhibitionist, Brainiac?]

Yes, but Hanlon’s Razor (”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”) says that “#3 is most likely.

by Marco:

I went to my friend Sykes’ surprise birthday party last night. Me and about 20 people sat in the darkened theater until they walked in. “Shhhhh” says Webster. “What’s my motivation?” somebody whispers. “To shut the hell up” I think to myself. Actors.

Stuff like this is why I love working in the MIT neighborhood. On my walk to the T from work, I saw this sign on Vassar Street in front of the Stata Center. It was cycling between a message that the Mass Ave bridge will be closed from 6 am – 3 pm on Sunday, and that the sign had been hacked. Granted, it could have been more clever, especially considering that it’s going to be closed because a new Kevin Spacey movie is shooting there. Still, plain old technical chops and the chutzpah to pull it off go a long way sometimes.

I also shot a little movie, which is up on YouTube.

Ok, this new “type-ahead” feature in the Firefox search bar is crazy. I was starting to type in a search, got no farther than typing the initial “p”, and it suggested “Pagan Suckled in a Creed Outworn”.

WTF!?

In It’s A Wonderful Life, Clarence the angel shows George Bailey how badly the lives of his friends and family would have turned out if indeed he had never been born: Mr. Gower the phramacist is an alcoholic ex-con, Violet Bick is getting arrested in some kind of night club altercation, Mrs. Bailey has been forced to open a boarding house, Uncle Billy is in an asylum, his brother Harry drowned as a child.

But Clarence saves the worst for last.

“What happened to Mary?!” George asks.

“You’re not going to like it George, ” Clarence answers.

“Where is she!?” George cries, shaking Clarence by the lapels.

“She’s about to close up the library!”

At the annual Brattle screening, this never fails to send the bookish Cantabridgian audience into twitters. Oh, no, not the library!

Well, for all you bookish Cantabridgians and bookish Cantabridgian wannabes, and for all you librarians and librarian wannabes, there is now a perfume just for you.

(I know, that was a big lead-up for just a link!)

This is so perfect! The guys from the BBC series “Peep Show” are the UK version of the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC ads”!

Of course, like the US versions, there is the same problem (at least from the point of view of Apple) where “Mac” is supposed to seem “cool” but really is kind of annoying, and “PC”, the hilarious John Hodgeman (or, in the UK, David Mitchell– no, not that David Mitchell), is actually kind of great. Or, as the Guardian says,

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign – the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show – probably the best sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

Unlikely source #1: Second Life. (”your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.”)
Unlikely source #2: cows.

The cows are the bigger problem, but I think it’s also worth pointing out that the Internet is a bigger fossil fuel consumer than people realize, because there is a big out-of-sight-out-of-mind thing going on there. Because you have probably never seen a data center, you probably don’t realize that they even exist. Heck, I’ve been a web developer for almost 10 years, and have only seen the computers I work on once.

This is so great. The Brattle Theater’s schedule, in iCal.