I quit twice. The first time in disgust, the second time over ethics. I think what I did was typical of a computer guy, but would be considered unusual for a lower form of life, like for example one of our many useless MBAs.
disgust: We had purchased an IBM mainframe to replace our aging UNIVAC 1106. With an MIS Department of nearly 200 people, management nonetheless decided to convert all our Univac Fortran to IBM Fortran using translation software. I was the only guy in the department who knew both languages and I knew it was impossible. This because the Univac Fortran programmers had made all sorts of performance tweaks or extended the capabilities of the language by making use of their knowledge of the underlying hardware and of the idiosyncrasies of the compiler. Six bit byte, 36 bit words, positive and negative zero (it was a one's complement machine) and using common blocks to create de facto records (struc's). The project was obviously doomed to fail even though only about 2000 lines of code were involved! I later heard it went from $400K to $800K and took two years instead of one. And all they really needed to do was have someone who knew both languages freehand translate from one to the other: three months work at the most.
ethics: I was present (in my role as webmaster) at a meeting where it was decided not to put out a press release because it was bogus. A couple of days later our corporate overlords had released it anyway. Our share price went up about 600%, then settled back down to where it started. Our CEO and his father, on the board of directors, made a bundle. I quit. Last I heard the SEC had recommended a class action suit.
You're right. Apart from learning them in high school I've never seen any Canadian use deca, or hecto. Decameter, hecotometer? Nope, just meter and kilometer.
BTW often Canadian newspapers use mysteriously precise estimates in the metric system. Some guy at the scene of the crime will be reported as saying that something "was 4.5 meters away". People here still use feet and miles and pounds in their mental estimates and in daily speech. Then the newspapers change 15 feet to 4.5 meters. A recent, common one was that the tsunami was about 9 meters it height. Wow! very precise estimates from people in fear and running for their lives. What they actually said was that it was about 30 feet high, which is about 9 meters.
True, true. Funnily enough the mass/weight distinction causes ordinary people so much trouble that in law courts they sometimes explicity refer to a mass pound. I think they have a name for it (legal pound?) but I am not sure.
I guess in ordinary parlance 100 pounds of potatoes is a scalar, an amount of mass, and not the vector force associated with it.
Just to clarify, a kilogram (mass) of lead will weigh (force) slightly more than a kilogram of aluminum, because the aluminum displaces more air and is therefore more buoyant? Is that right? or is it the other way around?
Same for drinks, who cares about your pint? Do you really think we order 350ml Beer?
There seems to be some misperception. For one thing I grew up with the metric system (I live in Quebec, Canada). I was remarking upon two things. Why the 1000 g Kg, originally a derived unit, became the standard in MKS (partly I say because it is an intuitively useable unit for the innumerate consumer (innumerate partially defined as people who have difficulty estimating amounts, sizes, distances, etc., or "women" as they are sometimes called), and then I mused upon naturally evolved, traditional systems of measurement. I chose as my example the former British/current American system, which is the only other system of measurement I know of. The Japanese of course, have their own traditional system of units, which I know little of, and different regions of Europe evolved conflicting standards over the centuries. Hence the imposition of the metric standard.
Anyway, not being from England, it is not my pint! And I would not only have one of them. I'd more likely have seven. And I'd probably have to drink it in 500 ml glasses not pints, since my preference is Weizenbier and I doubt it comes in pints anywhere. In Quebec we import it from Germany.
p.s., I rather like/., but I don't think I should be posting here. Although I am a computer programmer my background interest is psychology, (hence my suspicion that you will find that the basic units which evolve in any culture are "useable" amounts of something). I was amused to find this uncontroversial idea got me moderatedtroll! Hehe. I'll have to stick to posting about programming methodology from now on (no wait!, damn, that partially comes under cognitive psych. I had better remain silent).
p.p.s., I have never heard of anyone using the CGS system except astronomers, and that was a while ago. Does anyone know if anyone still uses it?
I was proposing one idea of why the kilo makes more sense than the gram as a base unit. The derived units are still needed.
I might suggest another reason why the kilo and not the gram came to be the basic unit. The standard kilo is less variable as a standard than a gram. If a piece of dust lands on the standard kilo it will have proportionately less effect on its weight than if it lands on a gram.
This provokes another idle thought. Why use such a remarkably dense substance as the standard? Perhaps because it has a much smaller surface area than, say, a kilo of aluminum. So there is much less chance of a bit of dust landing on it, or a few thousand atoms being brushed of it.
There are two common systems of units, mks... and cgs... . The mks system is now more often referred to as the SI.... In any case, what you're referring to is utterly trivial and/or irrelevant...
To a scientist or engineer it is trivial, however to a (European) cop, or to someone buying butter it is not so trivial. Reporting the perp's weight in grams would not be sound practice. For everyday use the base unit needs to be visualisable/imaginable on a human scale.
Half a kilo of butter, or a pound of butter is a reasonable purchase. Grams just don't cut it. What am I getting if I ask for 80 grams of salami? Well I guess I can visualize it and some Europeans buy it that way, but the average everyday user of a measuring system is nearly innumerate. They want to buy one or two or maybe a half of something.
One of the nice things about the British system of measurement (which pretty nearly only the Americans use officially, though with a few changes) is that the units are exactly the sort of thing you often want about one of. A pint of beer, a gallon of kerosene, a bale of hay, a pint of milk if you live alone or a quart or a gallon depending on the size of your family, half an acre of land, etc. (yes, yes, I don't think a bale is an Imperial measurement).
The metric equivalents never seem to be just right, but we'll just have to live with them
Well here we have someone who is incapable of writing properly, though no doubt his punctuation is correct. He has three separate major issues mixed up in his head and has nothing but ill informed opinion on each. (1) blogs (2) Google as a web search engine (3) Google digitizing books. This is combined with his desire (4) to self promote, especially that antediluvian statement:
after more than 40 years of working in libraries... I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control--a mechanism by which all the world's recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world.
and (5) his desire to show that the old man is still a "hep cat", and "with it", with phrases like "burned at the virtual stake".
Here is a howler:
My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe this particular project will give us anything that comes anywhere near access to the world's knowledge.
Well, allow me to retort! You are probably wrong and you certainly don't have a clue about Zipf's law or social network theory, or just the fun of publishing in a less self important way that writing some crusty rant in the Los Angeles Times.
You are right. I wrote half a dozen press releases for a company one year, which meant writing dozens of drafts of a 20 to 30 line press release. But the press release is boilerplate at the beginning and end. There are really only five to fifteen lines of new text.
So, here's how it goes: the writer goes back and forth to management and marketing for tweaks to get the "spin" just right. Basically, most people read a press release quickly and cursorily and so the intention is to be technically accurate but give the wrong impression.
Many people are in the habit of bullshit detecting company announcements (Having written them it becomes second nature). So putting out the deceptive info in a more natural* way (like an online chat session) might fool a few more people, but it doesn't make them any less deceitful. I can just see Mike Nash, sitting there at the terminal, or more likely looking over the shoulder of the flunky who is doing the typing, telling him, after consultation with the little crowd of marketing and legal people, what carefully prepared texts to cut and paste into the conversation.
yep. In Quebec people who have an engineering degree often put "engineer" on their business cards. They actually aren't supposed to unless and until they have completed a rather elaborate program of work (recorded in notebooks) under the supervision of a P.E. (professional engineer).
Sort of like a lawyer has to finish law school and then pass the bar. The ones who go to work in corporations without passing the bar aren't really lawyers.
Except for the Hassidic, or "orthodox", Jews. Many of them won't even make eye-contact with Gentiles.
Is that true? Is it a requirement of their faith?
Several years ago I was driving beside another car at night in a snow storm and its headlights were off. Very dangerous. So I beeped and pointed at the lights. No response. I tried again. No response. Then I looked closer and saw 4 hassidim staring fixedly ahead, absolutely ignoring me. I have often wondered if they thought I was being hostile.
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain "hard-core" pornography, or what is obscene, by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . "
So, same thing with bad code.
It was possible, even easy, to have included pointers and recursion in FORTRAN II in the late 1950's. They were deliberately excluded, on the theory that they were too complicated for the end user (engineers and scientists).
Anyway, why shouldn't FORTRAN have been a general-purpose programming language as well as biased towards scientific calculations? They aren't mutually exclusive. Forget abstract data types, why couldn't they have at least added records to the language in the 60's when the need for them became obvious? Think of the millions of man hours that would have saved by not cramming variables into Common blocks and computing the length of the "record" by multiplying each variable by its size in bytes in the underlying hardware (and try porting that from a 6 bit byte machine to an 8 bit machine).
I think the reason was that FORTRAN became the language for the grad student who was only going to learn one language in his life. After his mind closed (growth of brain ceases at around age 25) he wasn't going to learn any damn fancy new features like while-do or lists. Real men use gotos and arrays for everything. New features were added to the language so incredibly slowly that many a young mind was ruined by 25 (hehe).
You wouldn't believe the weird outbursts I've heard from two middle aged professors of engineering about the superiority of FORTRAN. The true motive of the outburst is always easy to understand: an unwillingness to be exposed to anything new in case it exposes them as being not as robotically intelligent as they imagine themselves.
Fortran stunk for business use, and Cobol stunk for math uses.
In the late 70's I took turns writing COBOL and FORTRAN for the Marketing and Engineering departments of a telecom company (Teleglobe Canada). With a mad logic, programs for engineering were always written in FORTRAN. It wasn't deemed so, it simply was obviously so and never questioned, regardless of the application. So for the Engineering department's business related work, project planning, budgeting, etc. M.I.S. wrote, maintained, did the data entry for, and scheduled FORTRAN programs, and for Marketing M.I.S. wrote, maintained, did the data entry for, and scheduled COBOL programs.
This is a long way around of saying that I did the same, or very similar, work in FORTRAN and COBOL at the same time in my life (as an impressionable teenager) and FORTRAN (a very poor language) was streets ahead of COBOL for business apps. Very roughly, source code was around 1/4 as long in FORTRAN. By the time I was experienced, I averaged 70 lines of code a day in either language (a strange mythical man month metric that is) so the COBOL projects cost a fortune.
The key moment came when I needed a queue of queues. In FORTRAN IV you could fudge an array of "queues" (although with limited "core" memory on a Univac 1106, reams of large static arrays were no picnic), but it was simply not practical in COBOL.
I loved the fact that everything was pass by reference
Actually, FORTRAN IV, on some computers of the day (I think IBM 360/370 using FORTRAN's G or H), used pass by "value and result" rather than pass by reference. There were so many differences amongst the dozens of dialects of FORTRAN out there in my day (late 70's) that portability was nonexistent and I changed languages.
I heard they had an HP 65 programmable calculator (the original PC (!)with a card reader) on that mission and that they actually had to use it as a backup. Can anyone confirm this?
The fast seduction site is very interesting. I mean the extent that people will go to systemize a body of knowledge! acronyms, theories, etc. about picking up girls and closing the deal.
Hehe, apparently Tolkien gave Lewis's mannerisms to Treebeard.
About Lewis and Tolkien, Kinsley Amis (author of Lucky Jim, etc.) and the poet Philip Larkin were students of both Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford. Here are a few quotes from Amis's Memoirs.
On Tolkein's subject:
Nevertheless, resist it as we might, the syllabus of the Oxford English School forced itself upon us both and on others: lectures to attend, essays to write and above all books to read, texts, plays, poems. No enthusiasm was aroused. All Old English and nearly all Middle English works produced hatred and weariness in everybody who studied them. The former carried the redoubled impediment of having
Tolkien, incoherent and often inaudible, lecturing on it. Nobody had a good word to say for Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, Cynewulf and Cyneheard.
And on Tolkien and Lewis as lecturers:
To digress for a moment: lecturers at Oxford, and doubtless elsewhere, could be divided into the hard and the soft, like cops. The hard men gave you information, usually about language, Old and Middle English, strong verbs, vowel shifts and fearful old poems like
The Dream of the Rood, and the Owl and the Nightingale, and what they gave you was likely to reappear in the relevant parts of the final examination. The hardest lecturer I ever heard, and the worst technically, in delivery and so on, was J.R.R. Tolkien, but you sat through him because his explanation of the anomalous form 'hraergtrafum' was likely to be called for as the answer to a 'gobbet' on the paper. The soft men offered you civilised discourse with perhaps some critical intepretation and ideas about the past. The only reputable hard-soft merchant was C.S. Lewis, also the best lecturer I ever heard.
This one hurts:
I attended lectures, most assiduously those of the repulsive but necessary
Tolkien mentioned elsewhere,...
That said, Tolkein's subject was the only one in which Amis received the highest possible grade.
Slashdot Mirror
disgust: We had purchased an IBM mainframe to replace our aging UNIVAC 1106. With an MIS Department of nearly 200 people, management nonetheless decided to convert all our Univac Fortran to IBM Fortran using translation software. I was the only guy in the department who knew both languages and I knew it was impossible. This because the Univac Fortran programmers had made all sorts of performance tweaks or extended the capabilities of the language by making use of their knowledge of the underlying hardware and of the idiosyncrasies of the compiler. Six bit byte, 36 bit words, positive and negative zero (it was a one's complement machine) and using common blocks to create de facto records (struc's). The project was obviously doomed to fail even though only about 2000 lines of code were involved! I later heard it went from $400K to $800K and took two years instead of one. And all they really needed to do was have someone who knew both languages freehand translate from one to the other: three months work at the most.
ethics: I was present (in my role as webmaster) at a meeting where it was decided not to put out a press release because it was bogus. A couple of days later our corporate overlords had released it anyway. Our share price went up about 600%, then settled back down to where it started. Our CEO and his father, on the board of directors, made a bundle. I quit. Last I heard the SEC had recommended a class action suit.
Yah, I know. I often complain about people being too precise in their conversions, when they are just doing informal estimates.
BTW often Canadian newspapers use mysteriously precise estimates in the metric system. Some guy at the scene of the crime will be reported as saying that something "was 4.5 meters away". People here still use feet and miles and pounds in their mental estimates and in daily speech. Then the newspapers change 15 feet to 4.5 meters. A recent, common one was that the tsunami was about 9 meters it height. Wow! very precise estimates from people in fear and running for their lives. What they actually said was that it was about 30 feet high, which is about 9 meters.
I guess in ordinary parlance 100 pounds of potatoes is a scalar, an amount of mass, and not the vector force associated with it.
Just to clarify, a kilogram (mass) of lead will weigh (force) slightly more than a kilogram of aluminum, because the aluminum displaces more air and is therefore more buoyant? Is that right? or is it the other way around?
There seems to be some misperception. For one thing I grew up with the metric system (I live in Quebec, Canada). I was remarking upon two things. Why the 1000 g Kg, originally a derived unit, became the standard in MKS (partly I say because it is an intuitively useable unit for the innumerate consumer (innumerate partially defined as people who have difficulty estimating amounts, sizes, distances, etc., or "women" as they are sometimes called), and then I mused upon naturally evolved, traditional systems of measurement. I chose as my example the former British/current American system, which is the only other system of measurement I know of. The Japanese of course, have their own traditional system of units, which I know little of, and different regions of Europe evolved conflicting standards over the centuries. Hence the imposition of the metric standard.
Anyway, not being from England, it is not my pint! And I would not only have one of them. I'd more likely have seven. And I'd probably have to drink it in 500 ml glasses not pints, since my preference is Weizenbier and I doubt it comes in pints anywhere. In Quebec we import it from Germany.
p.s., I rather like /., but I don't think I should be posting here. Although I am a computer programmer my background interest is psychology, (hence my suspicion that you will find that the basic units which evolve in any culture are "useable" amounts of something). I was amused to find this uncontroversial idea got me moderated troll! Hehe. I'll have to stick to posting about programming methodology from now on (no wait!, damn, that partially comes under cognitive psych. I had better remain silent).
p.p.s., I have never heard of anyone using the CGS system except astronomers, and that was a while ago. Does anyone know if anyone still uses it?
that's half a gallon.
80 grams of salami would make a few sandwiches, as long as you put some tomato, pickle, and some really hot mustard on it.
I might suggest another reason why the kilo and not the gram came to be the basic unit. The standard kilo is less variable as a standard than a gram. If a piece of dust lands on the standard kilo it will have proportionately less effect on its weight than if it lands on a gram.
This provokes another idle thought. Why use such a remarkably dense substance as the standard? Perhaps because it has a much smaller surface area than, say, a kilo of aluminum. So there is much less chance of a bit of dust landing on it, or a few thousand atoms being brushed of it.
Anyway, IANAP (physicist).
There are two common systems of units, mks ... and cgs ... . The mks system is now more often referred to as the SI. ... In any case, what you're referring to is utterly trivial and/or irrelevant ...
To a scientist or engineer it is trivial, however to a (European) cop, or to someone buying butter it is not so trivial. Reporting the perp's weight in grams would not be sound practice. For everyday use the base unit needs to be visualisable/imaginable on a human scale.
Half a kilo of butter, or a pound of butter is a reasonable purchase. Grams just don't cut it. What am I getting if I ask for 80 grams of salami? Well I guess I can visualize it and some Europeans buy it that way, but the average everyday user of a measuring system is nearly innumerate. They want to buy one or two or maybe a half of something.
One of the nice things about the British system of measurement (which pretty nearly only the Americans use officially, though with a few changes) is that the units are exactly the sort of thing you often want about one of. A pint of beer, a gallon of kerosene, a bale of hay, a pint of milk if you live alone or a quart or a gallon depending on the size of your family, half an acre of land, etc. (yes, yes, I don't think a bale is an Imperial measurement).
The metric equivalents never seem to be just right, but we'll just have to live with them
after more than 40 years of working in libraries ... I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control--a mechanism by which all the world's recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world.
and (5) his desire to show that the old man is still a "hep cat", and "with it", with phrases like "burned at the virtual stake". Here is a howler:My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe this particular project will give us anything that comes anywhere near access to the world's knowledge.
Well, allow me to retort! You are probably wrong and you certainly don't have a clue about Zipf's law or social network theory, or just the fun of publishing in a less self important way that writing some crusty rant in the Los Angeles Times.
So, here's how it goes: the writer goes back and forth to management and marketing for tweaks to get the "spin" just right. Basically, most people read a press release quickly and cursorily and so the intention is to be technically accurate but give the wrong impression.
Many people are in the habit of bullshit detecting company announcements (Having written them it becomes second nature). So putting out the deceptive info in a more natural* way (like an online chat session) might fool a few more people, but it doesn't make them any less deceitful. I can just see Mike Nash, sitting there at the terminal, or more likely looking over the shoulder of the flunky who is doing the typing, telling him, after consultation with the little crowd of marketing and legal people, what carefully prepared texts to cut and paste into the conversation.
*online chat is more natural, heh heh.
yep. In Quebec people who have an engineering degree often put "engineer" on their business cards. They actually aren't supposed to unless and until they have completed a rather elaborate program of work (recorded in notebooks) under the supervision of a P.E. (professional engineer). Sort of like a lawyer has to finish law school and then pass the bar. The ones who go to work in corporations without passing the bar aren't really lawyers.
Mormons aren't allowed to drink Coke either; nothing with caffeine.
Is that true? Is it a requirement of their faith?
Several years ago I was driving beside another car at night in a snow storm and its headlights were off. Very dangerous. So I beeped and pointed at the lights. No response. I tried again. No response. Then I looked closer and saw 4 hassidim staring fixedly ahead, absolutely ignoring me. I have often wondered if they thought I was being hostile.
You forgot about Biggus Dickus, another notable witness.
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to explain "hard-core" pornography, or what is obscene, by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . " So, same thing with bad code.
I think the reason was that FORTRAN became the language for the grad student who was only going to learn one language in his life. After his mind closed (growth of brain ceases at around age 25) he wasn't going to learn any damn fancy new features like while-do or lists. Real men use gotos and arrays for everything. New features were added to the language so incredibly slowly that many a young mind was ruined by 25 (hehe).
You wouldn't believe the weird outbursts I've heard from two middle aged professors of engineering about the superiority of FORTRAN. The true motive of the outburst is always easy to understand: an unwillingness to be exposed to anything new in case it exposes them as being not as robotically intelligent as they imagine themselves.
This is a long way around of saying that I did the same, or very similar, work in FORTRAN and COBOL at the same time in my life (as an impressionable teenager) and FORTRAN (a very poor language) was streets ahead of COBOL for business apps. Very roughly, source code was around 1/4 as long in FORTRAN. By the time I was experienced, I averaged 70 lines of code a day in either language (a strange mythical man month metric that is) so the COBOL projects cost a fortune.
The key moment came when I needed a queue of queues. In FORTRAN IV you could fudge an array of "queues" (although with limited "core" memory on a Univac 1106, reams of large static arrays were no picnic), but it was simply not practical in COBOL.
Actually, FORTRAN IV, on some computers of the day (I think IBM 360/370 using FORTRAN's G or H), used pass by "value and result" rather than pass by reference. There were so many differences amongst the dozens of dialects of FORTRAN out there in my day (late 70's) that portability was nonexistent and I changed languages.
I heard they had an HP 65 programmable calculator (the original PC (!)with a card reader) on that mission and that they actually had to use it as a backup. Can anyone confirm this?
The fast seduction site is very interesting. I mean the extent that people will go to systemize a body of knowledge! acronyms, theories, etc. about picking up girls and closing the deal.
About Lewis and Tolkien, Kinsley Amis (author of Lucky Jim, etc.) and the poet Philip Larkin were students of both Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford. Here are a few quotes from Amis's Memoirs.
On Tolkein's subject:
And on Tolkien and Lewis as lecturers:
This one hurts:
That said, Tolkein's subject was the only one in which Amis received the highest possible grade.