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12 February 2003 |
JHK: It seems to me that what we are doing is we are buying a lot of stuff from other people by basically running up tremendous unprecedented amounts of debt. That can only go on so long.
JJ: But you know we aren’t complete dolts in all of this. For example, we don’t manufacture our own computers. They are made mostly in Taiwan but they aren’t designed in Taiwan.
JHK: We hand them a set of blueprints and they make the stuff for them.
JJ: There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things. Is it more necessary to be able to design computers or is more necessary to be able to manufacture computers. I think that it is necessary to do both. I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do the better. But I don’t think that you can dispose of the constructive and inventive things that America is doing—and say oh we aren’t doing anything anymore and we are living off of what the poor Chinese do. It is more complicated than that. There is the example of Detroit which you noticed yourself was once a very prosperous and diverse city. And look what happened when it just specialized on automobiles. Look at Manchester when it specialized in those dark satanic mills, when it specialized in textiles. It was supposed to be the city of the future.
JHK: We have an awful lot of places in America that don’t specialize in anything anymore and don’t produce anything in particular anymore.
JJ: Well that’s better than specializing.
[via ?]
9:35:38 AM 
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Space Syntax are a consultancy company, focusing on "functional performance of buildings and urban areas by addressing the design factors that influence performance most", which often means how people wayfind through buildings and public spaces. This is their re-design for Trafalgar Square's social space.
Via Hugh Pearman on the NYC WTC rebuild competition: The battle for Ground Zero. (And whilst we're on the subject of post-singularity architecture, see this post-Sept 11 laboratory in high-rise safety.)
9:35:08 AM
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It's not a real project until commitments are made to defer some capabilities. Doing everything at once is not an option.
9:34:14 AM
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Developers should read...
I still write my tests before my code. Why? [...]
The other reason is, as the phrase goes, I've become "Test Infected". My tests have now caught so many bugs, small or large, that it feels rash to write code without writing the tests first.
9:33:42 AM
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After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman asked NASA officials what risk of failure each mission carried. NASA engineers said about 1 in every 100 flights was likely to experience a catastrophe. NASA managers put the risk closer to 1 in 100,000.
Technical people tend to assess risk based on individual components, which can behave unpredictably in the hostile environment of shuttle launches and reentry. Engineers know that solutions to problems often create other problems. Managers tend to look at the big picture, and base their assessments of safety partly on the previous number of safe flights flown.
In the Columbia investigation, managers say they discounted the damage done by a piece of foam to the underside of Columbia's wing during liftoff because such damage had happened many times before -- and those shuttles had all come back safely.
"Each time it ran a risk and succeeded, the institution learned the wrong lesson," said Charles Bosk, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies why organizations fail. "Instead of saying, 'I was lucky,' you say, 'Maybe that wasn't so risky after all.' "
[...] "You don't want the hubris of imagining we can overcome everything," Bosk said, "but without that hubris, you can't create the enterprise. How do you instill a spirit of adventure, and at the same time have the humility to recognize all the things that could go wrong? One doesn't go very well with the other."
9:32:59 AM
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How software is written for the shuttle. Not your average development process.
9:31:39 AM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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