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True story from about a decade ago: I was sitting around a lunchroom table with a group of Indian tech workers. A new person had just arrived from our company’s office in Chennai, India, and he was getting acquainted with the “onshore” staff. Their way of breaking the ice was to go around the table, each man telling his name, position, and language(s). The web developer would introduce himself and say, ” I am Anand, I specialize in XML, javascript, CSS” The systems administrator would then chime in with something like “Ravi, I work in UNIX, Powershell, Perl” And so on it went, around the table, six or eight guys with varying skills and responsibilities. Finally it was my turn. I smiled and said, “I’m Brian Donohue, I work in the QA area and I also do some technical writing, and my language isoh damn itEnglish?”

I'll confess: I preferred G+ and wrote about it (before they started taking it apart).

A wise and insightful set of observations. I offer that praise, of course, only because the Reindeer reflects my own experience in working with that odd codebase known as "English." I once encountered a question at a LinkedIn group I follow, which asked: "How do you prefer to write -- with pen and paper or computer?" And my answer was, "neither." I further explained that a typical 1,500 word piece gets "written" when I'm out walking, sitting in meditation, or hitting golf balls at the driving range. Very often, the "scribbling" part is done with a pocket audio recorder, so that the typing becomes more a secretarial act than a creative one (editing, however, is an entirely different story).

Perhaps the only area where I might differ from the Reindeer is in the matter of handling distractions. For me, the "cow in front of my train" can often become part of the thought. This piece, for instance, developed from such an interruption (someone drawing my attention to the Goswami rant that became the main subject of the essay). Sometimes, I have found, distraction can itself be focus disguised.

Now, as for the topic here: if the experience of watching someone code (or write, paint, or even dig a ditch) is an opening into the creative process of the work, then it's worth the watch. That is to say, it's more likely to be a waste of time than a learning experience, but the one good encounter may be worth the ten bad, as long as you can quickly recognize the difference.

A long time ago, in the mid-80’s, I got my first corporate job. I was going to be employed by one of the biggest real estate firms in NYC, working in a gleaming midtown tower and doing Important Things in a suit and tie. The shirt whose buttons could withstand my pride had not yet been invented. To celebrate before I started, I went home to bask in the glow of accomplishment amid family. In short, I imagine I was thoroughly insufferable.

Anyway, shortly before I left to return to New York and begin my corporate career, my old man took me aside. “Brian, congratulations again, and I mean that,” he said, smiling. “I just want you to understand one thing before you start. The company will ask for your loyalty — demand it, in fact. It will give you none in return. The company will ask for your sacrifice, and give you none in return. The company will ask for your trust, and give you none in return. How much of these things you give the company will depend on you and your judgment. Just don’t expect anything back except the paycheck. Do your best, but expect nothing in return from the company.”

Stupidity, typically, is not a product of Nature but of impudence. It has little or nothing to do with intellect: some of the most obtuse idiots I have met in my life have had above-average IQs.

But first, a word about discipline: any discipline — of the body, the mind, a student, a child, an animal — that strays from the purpose of liberating and fulfilling its potential is no longer discipline but despotism. This betrayal of discipline, this loss of purpose, is in many respects the defining error of our age and culture — in education, government, the workplace, our markets, and our media. Natural discipline is more about possibility than limitation; it affirms and supports freedom and rejects oppression and punishment. If a path of discipline that you are involved with contains a trace of punishment, guilt, or imperiousness, then I would encourage you to leave that path immediately; for it is not discipline.

If you're a student you have to research and write; try the same thing in your personal life as well. I've written a little on the tl;dr phenomenon: the point is not so much to swim against the current of society but rather to follow the flow of your own native ability. In any event, avoid at all costs the solution to which so many become slaves (Adderall).

Whatever language it is in which you specialize, know that to stop doing it and just watch it for a while will not make you lose it. It will, however, deepen your understanding of yourself. Spend this time in this extraordinary place in debugging yourself. Thus, if you'd like to "practice fundamentals," here is a place to start.

Seems like this guy has some work to do on the self-image of the old man. But I've already registered my ideas about all that online.

It's a holographic universe, so if we play the game with sincerity but not seriously, we'll be fine. Or not.

Lao Tzu, who seems to have a line for every human inanity compressed into his 81 little poems, said (in my translation):

"There is no greater disaster, no blinder ignorance
than not knowing when you have enough."

Hills and valleys, poetic images and wistful metaphors delivered with Shakespeareian bemusement over a cup of Earl Gray in the ready room, near the end of another episode's close shave with some Cosmic Anomaly or other. Perhaps Q is there as well, whispering: "the trial never ends, Jean Luc..."

Agreed - I've written at some length on this topic (see the footnote); and the BMI is not helping at all. Geeks here may find my approach to this question excessively new-agey and such, but the point is merely that weight loss is not a superficial undertaking, even if you consider it from a purely mechanical positivist perspective.

No it's not a proof of god, just a proof of Nothing. And Nothing is something, when you are ready to use it.

I'm fairly sure Commander Data would have come up with some more engaging compositions; this stuff could be placed in an online dictionary beside the word "dull." I suspect that in the next few generations the algorithm will be as abused in applied practice as email, texting, and video have been in our time. Still, if it goes well and the corporations stay away from it long enough for it to develop naturally, the algorithm could become a faltering forward step in human evolution. I am admittedly not confident about that, but it is a good target for hope.

Well, yeah, he could be. But for that to be, you must become the fool who would persist in his folly. Go so deeply into that darkness that only dark remains. Then it's all a great, purgative laugh.

I was just writing about this last week. One of my points is that there simply isn't enough information given in the series (most notably TNG and Voyager) to draw any inferences, let alone conclusions, That's what I mean by my desire to see "the real drama" of those ST stories -- what's really going on in the Terran system that makes that Wall St. goon awoken from his cryogenic sleep such a stranger there. It's such a fascinating notion, this amaterialistic global economy, that a completely new series could be made about it, but as presented it's all too vague.

Having written extensively on this perennially misunderstood yet profoundly influential genius, I can only add a vote of support along with a recommendation that the public also be given some teaching on the enduring meaning and influence of this man's music. For this is a composer who can be located in history but also rediscovered in contemporary culture. Beethoven and Chopin are the first modernists of the keyboard: as a young man I constantly heard Chopin's voice and his revolutionary technical inventions in the pop/rock of my era -- in Emerson, Wakeman, Simon, Joel, Manzarek, Wright -- and in the jazz of Zawinul, Tyner, and Evans. The phrasing, fingerings, use of dissonance and legato, the focus on loose, small-scale forms and structures...an entire year of coursework could be devoted to such a study.

Oh, I did worse than that! I tried to prop up an entire cosmology with the same metaphor.

My response to all this was written a month ago, so I wouldn't call it a "replacement," just a statement of principles that could form part of a fresh foundation. What I focus on in that piece is probably what's really driving the complaints of these psychologists -- that Big Pharma is being allowed to shape the biomedical model to fatten its own purse rather than support any forward movement toward mental health in western society.

When it comes to mental health, our science is at an infantile or at best adolescent level of development. Next month, it brings us a new bible of pathology — the DSM-V, which will tell us again how many ways we can be sick, yet with no guide as to what mental health actually is or how it might be strengthened. That, it appears, must become a common effort — crowdsourced, if you will. One of the founding documents of our nation insists that government allow us the “unalienable right” to seek happiness; but no state or institution can actually deliver it.

It might as well be, for if it can be healed with a pill then it rates as mental illness; if not, it's all between your ears and get over it.

As I mentioned in a footnote to this piece (which I was writing while this all started), the Anonymous twitter feed had suspected a hack well before the AP delivered its confession. So if stock traders had been following Anonymous, they might not have had time for their panic sell-off. And BTW: what does it say about the stability of our markets and the people running them that such a report should cause them to melt down?

Tell me about it, I had that flu a month ago. But I had a serendipitous out-of-box thought about diverting myself with old TV, specifically NCC-1701-D.