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Nick Gall's Weblog
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Saturday, June 19, 2004 |
Surly but not rebellious.In our meeting with HP's Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Winkler, Mike told us about the following advice for charging customers, which he attributed to Michael Blumenthal, CEO of Sperry, later Unisys:
How do you know when you are charging customers enough money? When they are surly but not rebellious.
Hillarious advice. And so true. I can only find one site that mentions the "surly but not rebellious" tag (click title). Any others out there?
5:13:20 AM 
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Friday, June 18, 2004 |
Wireless Playground Rules.I love this Sprint ad for some reason. I wish I could find an image of it on the web. The best part is the image of some 7-8 year olds reading at the sign with rules on a chain link fence surrounding the playground. I got the text from Hoi Polloi (click the entry title), who likes it too.
Opening headline: “What if the rest of the world were like the wireless industry?”
(This reminded me of that famous joke: “what if Microsoft designed automobiles?” so I read on.)
Inside 2 pages: There is no copy, save the "Playground rules” sign on a fence that 4 kids scrutinize. It reads:
Rule 1: You have to guess how many minutes you’re going to use the ball –for the next two years. Don’t guess too high or too low, or you’ll be sorry.
Rule 2: Whoever is new on the playground is more special. It’s just the fact. Therefore, new kids get the new things. Old ones don’t.
Rule 3: There will almost never be anything cool and exciting to play on. If there is, it’ll be really tricky to get it to work.
Rule 4: If you don’t like the rules, try another playground. It’ll be exactly the same.
6:37:24 AM
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Thursday, June 17, 2004 |
Neurath's Boat and Theseus' Ship are Dissipative Structures.[This entry was edited on
August 5, 2004 to remove the text of M.R.M. Parrott's email to me. See my comments for
details.]
A while back, I made the
connection between Neurath’s Boat and the Ship of Theseus. I thought the lack
of connection elsewhere on the Web was interesting. Only a site by M.R.M.
Parrott mentioned both terms, but there is no mention of a connection.
I
guess I forgot to post this discovery back in January (surprise). I’m posting
it now because I’ve made another interesting connection, IMO. Both metaphors
are examples of dissipative
structures (aka dissipative systems): A dissipative [structure] is characterized by the
appearance of stability, but is continually changing. A simple example is a whirlpool: a
similar shape is maintained, while water is continually moving through it. More
complex examples include lasers, Bénard
cells, and even life
itself. The term dissipative
structures was coined by Ilya Prigogine.
Thus this seemingly
paradoxical boat (or ship) is simply a dissipative structure whose compositional
materials are continually flowing through it (albeit at a much slower pace than
a whirlpool). Of course this means that it is both the crew and the boat that
are the dissipative structure, unless the boat is imagined to be autonomic,
i.e., self repairing.
As you philosophers are well aware, this
coincidence of opposites (a
term coined by Nicholas of Cusa—see “NICHOLAS OF
CUSA (1401-1464): FIRST MODERN PHILOSOPHER?” for an excellent overview, “One can identify at least sixteen Cusan
themes that have a peculiarly Modern ring to them and on the basis of which
Nicholas has been deemed to occupy a special relationship to Modernity.”)—stability and change—permeates all
our concepts. For an excellent essay on the roots of this fundamental unity of
opposing aspects and how it has been transformed and extended to myriad
contemporary dichotomies see EARLY GREEK THOUGHT AND PERSPECTIVES FOR THE INTERPRETATION OF
QUANTUM MECHANICS: PRELIMINARIES TO AN ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH. I am also in the process of connecting
all of this to the concept of a limit (thanks to
Keith), which is a kind of attractive fixed
point (related to a fixed point), which is a kind of attractor, which comes full
circle back to dissipative structures.
7:03:24 AM
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Saturday, June 12, 2004 |
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Friday, June 11, 2004 |
Another nail in the coffin of OMG's MDA.Saw this excellent article blogged by metamodel (itself an excellent resource). IMO, It very politely and constructively demolishes any hope that the OMG's Model Driven Architecture effort (especially PSMs--Platform Specific Models) will achieve any major benefits. I put my money on the more decentralized and federated approach of Domain-Specific Models (aka Domain-Specific Languages) (here's an upcoming workshop on the subject).
10:59:10 AM
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Wednesday, June 09, 2004 |
The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.Nice summary of an interesting NY Times article a while back, which I meant to blog but didn't. Paul Kelly says it as well or better than I could, so here's his intro paragraph. The rest is highly worth reading. I'll see if I can get a link to the full NY Times article instead of the link to the pay-per-view archive.
This might also be entitled "the endless pursuit of happiness."
NYT Mag story by Jon Gertner about the work on "affective forecasting" by the psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson and the economists George Lowenstein and Daniel Kahneman. Can people accurately predict the outcomes of decisions which are supposed to make them happier? It turns out not. Things that are supposed to make us happy--dream job, dream house, dream car--don't as much as we hoped. Conversely, things we think of as disasters--death of a loved one, a disability--don't turn out to be as bad as we imagine. The implications for economics are obvious: how much does economic behaviour depend on this psychic "defect"? A lot, it turns out, and this has been known since the time of Adam Smith. Simply put, if you are comfortably off, the effort you expend trying to improve your situation is based on a delusion. It requires too much effort for too little payback. You are better off just as you are.
9:46:06 AM
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Tuesday, June 08, 2004 |
Tight coupling means tight tolerances.Most discussions of tight/loose coupling focus on the degree of information sharing across the interface. Here's an additional perspective that came out of a discussion with my colleague, Tom Murphy.
The tradeoff between tight and loose coupling is the trade off between efficiency (performance) and "robustness". Tightly-coupled systems are more "fragile" in that they "break" when a input is not "within tolerance," e.g., did not arrive fast enough, has an error in it. The "tight" in tightly-coupled actually refers to "tight" tolerances for errors. Loosely-coupled systems have loose tolerance for errors (more and/or bigger).
The most robust systems impose tight tolerances on output, but impose only loose tolerance of imput. By doing so, such systems "amplify correctness." In other words, they are anti-entropic amplifiers.
3:55:01 AM
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Saturday, June 05, 2004 |
Every single notion receives a separate name from each group.In an article for MIT's Technology Review, Raymond Kurzweil quoted Norbert Wiener regarding the importance of the interdisciplinary approach to innovation. It really struck a chord with me, so I have excerpted as much as I could find on the web (click the title to this entry for the source). What hit me the most were three things. First, how true it is that the same concepts are being reinvented many times over across different fields. Second, that the key obstacle to sharing of insights across fields is the differences in vocabularies. Third, that the richest source of innovation is in unifying across disciplinary boundaries by understanding two languages and synthesizing them into a new unified language.
This reinforces my focus on synthesis (and related concepts such as spanning layers, cooperation, coordination, symbiosis) as the key driver of major evolutionary changes in everything: biology, science, technology, governance, economics.
From the Introduction to Cybernetics:
For many years Dr. Rosenbluth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin.
Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy.
These specialized fields are continually growing and invading new territory. The result is like what occurred when the Oregon country was being invaded simultaneously by the United States settlers, the British, the Mexicans, and the Russians- an inextricable tangle of explorations, nomenclature, and laws.
There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.
It is these boundary regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand.
Dr. Rosenbluth has always insisted that a proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look.
We had dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding.
6:35:27 AM
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Friday, June 04, 2004 |
That's quite a throw.In tracking down uses of the expression "God is a verb" (which I got onto while tracking down use of the term panta rhei "all is change"), I came across an interesting page ("In the Beginning Was a Verb") that made the etymological connection between symbol ("throw together") and devil ("throw apart"). Given my recent entry on dialectic, which concerns the ability to join together (sunagoge) and split apart (diariresis), (See WHY PROMETHEUS SUFFERS: TECHNOLOGY AND THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS for an interesting discussion of Phaedrus.) I found the symbol/devil variation fascinating. Its easy to see why the antithesis phase of dialectic (using modern thesis, antithesis, synthesis nomenclature) would be associated with the devil, since it is viewed as the destruction of or the opposition of the thesis phase.
Of course I had to go off and find other words from the same root: ballein "to throw". So here they are. Its amazing to see the branches that have grown from this root.
throw up: anabolic
throw apart: diablo
throw in: emblem
throw beyond: hyperbole
throw over: metabolic
throw alongside: parable
throw forward: problem
throw together: symbol
anabolic - "pertaining to the process of building up (especially in metabolism)," 1876, from Gk. anabole "that
which is thrown up, mound," from ana "up, upward" + ballein "to throw."
http://www.etymonline.com/a5etym.htm
devil - O.E. deofol "evil spirit," from L.L. diabolus, from Gk. diabolos "accuser, slanderer" (scriptural loan-
translation of Heb. satan), from diaballein "to slander, attack," lit. "throw across," from dia- "across,
through" + ballein "to throw." Jerome re-introduced Satan in L. bibles, and Eng. translators have used both in
different measures. In Vulgate, as in Gk., diabolus and dæmon (see demon) were distinct, but they have merged in
Eng. and other Gmc. languages. Playful use for "clever rogue" is from 1601. Meaning "sand spout, dust storm" is
from 1835. Devilry is from 1375; deviltry (1788) is a corrupt formation from it. Devilled "grilled with hot
condiments" is from 1800. The Tasmanian devil so called since at least 1829, from its propensity for killing
young lambs (other voracious fish or animals have also been named devil). Phrase a devil way (c.1290) was
originally an emphatic form of away, but taken by late 14c. as an expression of irritation. Devil's advocate (
1760) is L. advocatus diaboli, one whose job it is to urge against the canonization of a candidate for sainthood.
Devil-may-care is attested from 1837. Devil's books "playing cards" is from 1729, but the cited quote says
they've been called that "time out of mind" (the four of clubs is the devil's bedposts); devil's coach-horse is
from 1840, the large rove-beetle, which is defiant when disturbed. "Talk of the Devil, and he's presently at your
elbow" [1666].
http://www.etymonline.com/d3etym.htm
emblem - c.1430, from Fr. embleme "symbol," from L. emblema "inlaid ornamental work," from Gk. emblema (gen.
emblematos) "embossed ornament," lit. "insertion," from emballein "to insert," lit. "to throw in," from em- "in"
+ ballein "to throw."
http://www.etymonline.com/e2etym.htm
hyperbole - 1529, from L. hyperbole, from Gk. hyperbole "exaggeration, extravagance," from hyperballein "to throw
over or beyond," from hyper- "beyond" + bol-, nom. stem of ballein "to throw." Rhetorical sense is found in
Aristotle and Isocrates.
http://www.etymonline.com/h6etym.htm
metabolism - in physiology sense, 1878, from Fr. métabolisme, from Gk. metabole "change," from metaballein "to
change," from meta- "over" + ballein "to throw." Metabolic is first attested 1845 in this sense, from Ger.
metabolisch (1839). The word is attested from 1743 with the lit. sense of "involving change."
http://www.etymonline.com/m5etym.htm
parable - c.1325, "saying or story in which something is expressed in terms of something else," from O.Fr.
parable, from L. parabola "comparison," from Gk. parabole "a comparison, parable," lit. "a throwing beside," from
para- "alongside" + bole "a throwing, casting," related to ballein "to throw." Replaced O.E. bispell.
http://www.etymonline.com/p2etym.htm
problem - 1382, "a difficult question proposed for solution," from O.Fr. problème (14c.), from L. problema, from
Gk. problema "a problem, a question," lit. "thing put forward," from proballein "propose," from pro "forward" +
ballein "to throw" (see ballistics). Problem child first recorded 1920.
http://www.etymonline.com/p10etym.htm
symbol - c.1434, "creed, summary, religious belief," from L. symbolum "creed, token, mark," from Gk. symbolon "
token, watchword" (applied by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles' Creed, 3c.), from syn- "together" + stem of
ballein "to throw." The sense evolution is from "throwing things together" to "contrasting" to "comparing" to "
token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine." Hence, "outward sign" of something. The meaning
"something which stands for something else" first recorded 1590. Symbolism is 1892 as a movement in Fr.
literature that aimed at representing ideas and emotions by indirect suggestion rather than direct expression; it
attached symbolic meaning to certain objects, words, etc.
http://www.etymonline.com/s15etym.htm
Here is the Indo-European root information:
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
Appendix I
Indo-European Roots
ENTRY: gwel-
DEFINITION: Also gwel-. To throw, reach, with further meaning to pierce. Oldest form *gwel1-, with metathesized
variant *gwle1-, contracted to *gwl-.
Derivatives include devil, emblem, metabolism, parliament, problem, symbol, ballet, and kill1.
I. Words denoting to throw, reach. Variant *gwl-, contracted from *gwle-. 1. Suffixed zero-grade form *gw-n--.
a. ballista; amphibole, arbalest, astrobleme, bolide, devil, diabolic, embolism, emboly, epiboly, hyperbola,
hyperbole, metabolism, palaver, parable, parabola, parley, parliament, parlor, parol, parole, problem, symbol,
from Greek ballein, to throw (with o-grade *bol- and variant *bl-); b. ball2, ballad, ballet, bayadere, from
Greek ballizein, to dance. 2. Suffixed o-grade form *gwol()--. bolometer, from Greek bol, beam, ray. 3. Possible
suffixed o-grade form *gwol()-s-. boule1, abulia, from Greek boul, determination, will (< "throwing forward of
the mind"), council. 4. Suffixed full-grade form *gwel-mno-. belemnite, from Greek belemnon, dart, javelin.
II. Words denoting to pierce. 1. Suffixed o-grade form *gwol-eyo-. a. quell, from Old English cwellan, to
kill, destroy; b. quail2, from Middle Dutch quelen, to be ill, suffer. Both a and b from Germanic *kwaljan. 2.
Suffixed zero-grade form *gw-yo-. kill1, from Middle English killen, to kill, perhaps from Old English *cyllan,
to kill, from Germanic *kuljan. 3. Full-grade form *gwel-. belonephobia, from Greek belon, needle. (Pokorny 2.
gel- 471, 1. gel- 470.)
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE181.html
But see: http://www.finucane.de/archive.htm, which claims ballein is not indo-european.
5:01:40 AM
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004 |
MDO == Aspect Oriented?I saw this "Vision Statement" on the web site of an MIT professor of engineering, Olivier L. de Weck:
The success of Engineering Systems is mainly determined during conceptual design, where quantitative methods are immature. Some high capital investment systems (such as new automobiles, aircraft or satellites) fail economically or technologically due to an inadequate understanding of their underlying architecture. Also, it is observed that many engineering systems are not utilized according to their original intent or specification. One hypothesis is that the likelihood of system success and longevity can be increased by extending quantitative methods, such as multiobjective optimization, to the conceptual phase of system design. The vision of Prof. de Weck’s research program is to build a rigorous methodological bridge between System Architecture and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO), allowing systems to satisfy multiple criteria, while exhibiting desirable lifetime properties. Of particular interest are the challenges posed by families of systems/products that are built from a common platform.
Sounds like engineering systems and IT systems have some of the same basic needs: more mature (quantitative) design methodologies, flexible use beyond original intent, multidisciplinary designs. MDO seems focused on the same concerns as aspect-oriented design in IT systems.
5:27:20 AM
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