… any woman who wants to be in a STEM field should be able to get as far as talent, hard work, and desire to succeed will take her, without facing artificial barriers erected by prejudice or other factors. If there are women who dream of being in STEM but have felt themselves driven off that path, the system is failing them. And the system is failing itself, too; talent is not so common that we can afford to waste it.
Now I’m going to refocus on computing, because that’s what I know best and I think it exhibits the problems that keep women out of STEM fields in an extreme form. There’s a lot of political talk that the tiny and decreasing number of women in computing is a result of sexism and prejudice that has to be remedied with measures ranging from sensitivity training up through admission and hiring quotas. This talk is lazy, stupid, wrong, and prevents correct diagnosis of much more serious problems.
I don’t mean to deny that there is still prejudice against women lurking in dark corners of the field. But I’ve known dozens of women in computing who wouldn’t have been shy about telling me if they were running into it, and not one has ever reported it to me as a primary problem. The problems they did report were much worse. They centered on one thing: women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field.
Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”
Correspondingly, young women in computing-related majors show a tendency to tend to bail out that rises directly with their comprehension of what their working life is actually going to be like. Biology is directly implicated here. Women have short fertile periods, and even if they don’t consciously intend to have children their instincts tell them they don’t have the option young men do to piss away years hunting mammoths that aren’t there.
There are other issues, too, like female unwillingness to put up with working environments full of the shadow-autist types that gravitate to programming. But I think those are minor by comparison, too. If we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.
Eric S. Raymond, “Women in computing: first, get the problem right”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-15.
May 12, 2018
QotD: Women in I.T.
March 24, 2018
James May doesn’t trust Sat Navs | Q&A extras | HeadSqueeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 27 Sep 2013Don’t trust the Sat Nav! Speaking from experience, James thinks we shouldn’t blindly trust a machine. Get a map!
February 27, 2018
The notion of “uploading” your consciousness
Skeptic author Michael Shermer pours cold water on the dreams and hopes of Transhumanists, Cryonicists, Extropians, and Technological Singularity proponents everywhere:
It’s a myth that people live twice as long today as in centuries past. People lived into their 80s and 90s historically, just not very many of them. What modern science, technology, medicine, and public health have done is enable more of us to reach the upper ceiling of our maximum lifespan, but no one will live beyond ~120 years unless there are major breakthroughs.
We are nowhere near the genetic and cellular breakthroughs needed to break through the upper ceiling, although it is noteworthy that companies like Google’s Calico and individuals like Abrey deGrey are working on the problem of ageing, which they treat as an engineering problem. Good. But instead of aiming for 200, 500, or 1000 years, try to solve very specific problems like cancer, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases.
Transhumanists, Cryonicists, Extropianists, and Singularity proponents are pro-science and technology and I support their efforts but extending life through technologies like mind-uploading not only cannot be accomplished anytime soon (centuries at the earliest), it can’t even do what it’s proponents claim: a copy of your connectome (the analogue to your genome that represents all of your memories) is just that—a copy. It is not you. This leads me to a discussion of…
The nature of the self or soul. The connectome (the scientific version of the soul) consists of all of your statically-stored memories. First, there is no fixed set of memories that represents “me” or the self, as those memories are always changing. If I were copied today, at age 63, my memories of when I was, say, 30, are not the same as they were when I was 50 or 40 or even 30 as those memories were fresh in my mind. And, you are not just your memories (your MEMself). You are also your point-of-view self (POVself), the you looking out through your eyes at the world. There is a continuity from one day to the next despite consciousness being interrupted by sleep (or general anaesthesia), but if we were to copy your connectome now through a sophisticated fMRI machine and upload it into a computer and turn it on, your POVself would not suddenly jump from your brain into the computer. It would just be a copy of you. Religions have the same problem. Your MEMself and POVself would still be dead and so a “soul” in heaven would only be a copy, not you.
Whether or not there is an afterlife, we live in this life. Therefore what we do here and now matters whether or not there is a hereafter. How can we live a meaningful and purposeful life? That’s my final chapter, ending with a perspective that our influence continues on indefinitely into the future no matter how long we live, and our species is immortal in the sense that our genes continue indefinitely into the future, making it all the more likely our species will not go extinct once we colonize the moon and Mars so that we become a multi-planetary species.
February 21, 2018
Transistors – The Invention That Changed The World
Real Engineering
Published on 12 Sep 2016
February 15, 2018
QotD: Computer models
How can one be certain about outcomes in a complex system that we’re not really all that good at modeling? Anyone who’s familiar with the history of macroeconomic modeling in the 1960s and 1970s will be tempted to answer “Umm, we can’t.” Economists thought that the explosion of data and increasingly sophisticated theory was going to allow them to produce reasonably precise forecasts of what would happen in the economy. Enormous mental effort and not a few careers were invested in building out these models. And then the whole effort was basically abandoned, because the models failed to outperform mindless trend extrapolation — or as Kevin Hassett once put it, “a ruler and a pencil.”
Computers are better now, but the problem was not really the computers; it was that the variables were too many, and the underlying processes not understood nearly as well as economists had hoped. Economists can’t run experiments in which they change one variable at a time. Indeed, they don’t even know what all the variables are.
This meant that they were stuck guessing from observational data of a system that was constantly changing. They could make some pretty good guesses from that data, but when you built a model based on those guesses, it didn’t work. So economists tweaked the models, and they still didn’t work. More tweaking, more not working.
Eventually it became clear that there was no way to make them work given the current state of knowledge. In some sense the “data” being modeled was not pure economic data, but rather the opinions of the tweaking economists about what was going to happen in the future. It was more efficient just to ask them what they thought was going to happen. People still use models, of course, but only the unflappable true believers place great weight on their predictive ability.
Megan McArdle, “Global-Warming Alarmists, You’re Doing It Wrong”, Bloomberg View, 2016-06-01.
December 12, 2017
Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now
Tom Scott
Published on 27 Nov 2017It’s not your imagination; hold music on phones really did sound better in the old days. Here’s why, as we talk about old telephone exchanges and audio compression.
Thanks to the Milton Keynes Museum, and their Connected Earth gallery: http://www.mkmuseum.org.uk/ – they’re also on Twitter as @mkmuseum, and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mkmuseum/
September 14, 2017
The art of leadership and other secrets
In Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer remembers the late Jerry Pournelle, including a helpful leadership tip he once shared:
I didn’t meet Jerry until 1999, but I’d known his son Alex in high school. The Pournelle family asked me to go with them to Kansas City in August 1976 to the science-fiction convention at which Heinlein, the central American sci-fi writer of the 20th century, received his lifetime achievement award. (But I had to be at college that week.)
But Jerry, one of the great Southern California Cold Warriors, had a remarkable number of careers, starting as a teenage artillery officer during the Korean War, which deafened him in one ear. (At the lunch table, he’d choose his seat carefully to position his one remaining good ear next to his guest.)
He once recalled a question from the Army Officer Candidate School test:
Q. You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?
The right answer is:
A. “Sergeant, erect that flagpole.”?
In other words, if the sergeant knows how to do it, then there’s no need for you to risk your dignity as an officer and a gentleman by issuing some potentially ludicrous order about how to erect the flagpole. And if the sergeant doesn’t know either, well, he’ll probably order a corporal to do it, and so forth down the chain of command. But by the time the problem comes back up to you, it will be well established that nobody else has any more idea than you do.
He also quotes Dave Barry’s breakdown of Pournelle’s monthly columns for Byte magazine:
In 1977 Jerry paid $12,000 to have a state-of-the-art personal computer assembled for him, supposedly to boost his productivity. By 1980 that led to his long-running “Chaos Manor” column in Byte magazine in which he would document his troubles on the bleeding edge of PC technology. As fellow word-processing aficionado Dave Barry explained jealously, Jerry got paid to mess around with his computers when he should be writing:
Every month, his column has basically the same plot, which is:
1. Jerry tries to make some seemingly simple change to one of his computers, such as connect it to a new printer.
2. Everything goes hideously wrong…. Sometimes there are massive power outages all over the West Coast. Poor Jerry spends days trying to get everything straightened out.
3. Finally…Jerry gets his computer working again approximately the way it used to, and he writes several thousand words about it for ‘Byte.’
I swear it’s virtually the same plot, month after month, and yet it’s a popular column in a magazine that appeals primarily to knowledgeable computer people.
I like to imagine Steve Jobs circulating “Chaos Manor” columns to his executives with scribbled annotations suggesting that some people would pay good money to not have to go through all this.
August 27, 2017
August 5, 2017
What are binary numbers? – James May’s Q&A (Ep 11100) – Head Squeeze
Published on 5 Jul 2013
James May asks “What are binary numbers, and why does my computer need them?
Watch James getting confused here: http://youtu.be/8Kjf5x-1-_s
Binary: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Binary.html
Counting in base 10: http://mae.ucdavis.edu/dsouza/Classes/ECS15-W13/counting.pdf
March 15, 2017
QotD: How may I interrupt you next?
Q: What do Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Samsung all have in common?
A: Their business models involve interrupting you all day long.
Individually, each company’s interruptions are trivial. You can easily ignore them. But cumulatively, the interruptions from these and other companies can be crippling.
In the economy of the past, companies made money by being useful to customers. Now the biggest tech companies make their money by distracting you with ads and apps and notifications and whatnot. I don’t mean to sound like an alarmist, but I think this is the reason 80% of the adults I know are medicating. People are literally being driven crazy by a combination of complexity (too many choices) and the Interruption Economy.
There are days when my brain is flying in so many directions that I have to literally chant aloud what I need to do next in order to focus.
[…]
I’m wondering if you have as many distractions in your life. And if you do, can the chanting help you too? The next time you have a boring task that you know will be subject to lots of interruptions, try the chanting technique and let me know how it goes. It probably won’t cure your ADHD but it might help you ignore the tech industry’s distractions until you get your tasks done.
Bonus question: The economy has evolved from “How can I help you?” to “How can I distract you?” Can that trend lead anywhere but mass mental illness?
My hypothesis, based on observation alone, is that the business model of the tech industry, with its complexity, glut of options, and continuous interruptions are literally driving people to mental illness.
Scott Adams, “The Interruption Economy”, Scott Adams Blog, 2015-07-07.
February 28, 2017
When the great AI singularity happens, you’ll be sorry you called Siri a bitch
Amy Alkon views with disdain a Quartz article on sexually harassing, inter alia, Alexa and Siri:
Quartz Seriously Wants To Know: Are You Sexually Harassing Your Phone?
There’s an unbelievable piece up at Quartz, reflecting a gone-mad sector of our society — ultimately driven by radical academic feminism (though typically not admitting or crediting its nutbag roots).Feminism was supposed to be about women wanting equal treatment. Now, as I like to put it, feminist no longer demand that women be treated as equals but as eggshells.
This article is a case in point. “We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment,” is the headline. […]
First of all, if I could have Siri in either a bitchy drag queen voice or an Indian accent (from India, that is), which I love, I would. French or Italian or Eastern European would be fun, too. Because Apple’s rather boring about this — probably to serve an increasingly humorless and humor-attacking public — I think I have it on the British guy right now.
But I hate Siri and never use it.
The point is, you can change Siri to a man and harass the fuck out of it. I yell profanity at automated telephone systems when they repeatedly won’t accept my answer — both because I’m kind of immature and because there was this (probably mythic) idea out there that swearing would trigger a live operator to come on.
And per these evolved sex differences — we go for different Achilles heels in men and women when we’re attacking them. That’s because men and women are biologically and psychologically different, and men are more likely to be leaders, for example, and women are more likely to be caretakers.
Though male brains and female brains are mostly similar, these evolved sex differences lead to some differences in our psychology and how we present ourselves in the world (including the roles women versus men tend to have).
January 29, 2017
Once upon a time, in hacker culture…
ESR performs a useful service in pulling together a document on what all hackers used to need to know, regardless of the particular technical interest they followed. I was never technical enough to be a hacker, but I worked with many of them, so I had to know (or know where to find) much of this information, too.
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
This is knowledge every fledgling hacker used to absorb through their pores. It’s nobody’s fault this changed; the obsolescence of hardware terminals and the RS-232 protocol is what did it. Tools generate culture; sometimes, when a tool becomes obsolete, a bit of cultural commonality quietly evaporates. It can be difficult to notice that this has happened.
This document is a collection of facts about ASCII and related technologies, notably hardware terminals and RS-232 and modems. This is lore that was at one time near-universal and is no longer. It’s not likely to be directly useful today – until you trip over some piece of still-functioning technology where it’s relevant (like a GPS puck), or it makes sense of some old-fart war story. Even so, it’s good to know anyway, for cultural-literacy reasons.
One thing this collection has that tends to be indefinite in the minds of older hackers is calendar dates. Those of us who lived through all this tend to have remembered order and dependencies but not exact timing; here, I did the research to pin a lot of that down. I’ve noticed that people have a tendency to retrospectively back-date the technologies that interest them, so even if you did live through the era it describes you might get a few surprises from reading.
There are references to Unix in here because I am mainly attempting to educate younger open-source hackers working on Unix-derived systems such as Linux and the BSDs. If those terms mean nothing to you, the rest of this document probably won’t either.
October 13, 2016
If we’re living in a simulation, do we even want to break out?
I have no expertise in this area, but it appears to me that if the “Silicon Valley billionaires” are right and we are living in a simulated reality there are only two likely options. First, we’re (if you’ll pardon the simplification) “players in the game” — whether we’re aware of it within our simulation or not — and we can leave the simulation in the same way a World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2 player can log off and resume life in “meat space”. Second, most or all of us are actually NPCs and there’s no way to leave the simulation because (some|most|all) of us have no objective existence outside the simulation we currently occupy. If the second option is true … and mathematically it’s the one that’s overwhelmingly likely if we’re actually in a simulation, then there’s little point in discovering that it’s true, as we’ll all cease to exist when our home simulation is turned off.
August 22, 2016
QotD: Terry Pratchett and the hacker mentality
I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings.
Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld series of satirical fantasies. He is — and I don’t say this lightly, or without having given the matter thought and study — quite probably the most consistently excellent writer of intelligent humor in the last century in English. One has to go back as far as P.G. Wodehouse or Mark Twain to find an obvious equal in consistent quality, volume, and sly wisdom.
I’ve been a fan of Terry’s since before his first Discworld novel; I’m one of the few people who remembers Strata, his 1981 first experiment with the disc-world concept. The man has been something like a long-term acquaintance of mine for ten years — one of those people you’d like to call a friend, and who you think would like to call you a friend, if the two of you ever arranged enough concentrated hang time to get that close. But we’re both damn busy people, and live five thousand miles apart.
This weekend, Terry and I were both guests of honor at a hybrid SF convention and Linux conference called Penguicon held in Warren, Michigan. We finally got our hang time. Among other things, I taught Terry how to shoot pistols. He loves shooter games, but as a British resident his opportunities to play with real firearms are strictly limited. (I can report that Terry handled my .45 semi with remarkable competence and steadiness for a first-timer. I can also report that this surprised me not at all.)
During Terry’s Guest-of-Honor speech, he revealed his past as (he thought) a failed hacker. It turns out that back in the 1970s Terry used to wire up elaborate computerized gadgets from Timex Sinclair computers. One of his projects used a primitive memory chip that had light-sensitive gates to build a sort of perceptron that could actually see the difference between a circle and a cross. His magnum opus was a weather station that would log readings of temperature and barometric pressure overnight and deliver weather reports through a voice synthesizer.
But the most astonishing part of the speech was the followup in which Terry told us that despite his keen interest and elaborate homebrewing, he didn’t become a programmer or a hardware tech because he thought techies had to know mathematics, which he thought he had no talent for. He then revealed that he thought of his projects as a sort of bad imitation of programming, because his hardware and software designs were total lash-ups and he never really knew what he was doing.
I couldn’t stand it. “And you think it was any different for us?” I called out. The audience laughed and Terry passed off the remark with a quip. But I was just boggled. Because I know that almost all really bright techies start out that way, as compulsive tinkerers who blundered around learning by experience before they acquired systematic knowledge. “Oh ye gods and little fishes”, I thought to myself, “Terry is a hacker!”
Yes, I thought ‘is’ — even if Terry hasn’t actually tinkered any computer software or hardware in a quarter-century. Being a hacker is expressed through skills and projects, but it’s really a kind of attitude or mental stance that, once acquired, is never really lost. It’s a kind of intense, omnivorous playfulness that tends to color everything a person does.
So it burst upon me that Terry Pratchett has the hacker nature. Which, actually, explains something that has mildly puzzled me for years. Terry has a huge following in the hacker community — knowing his books is something close to basic cultural literacy for Internet geeks. One is actually hard-put to think of any other writer for whom this is as true. The question this has always raised for me is: why Terry, rather than some hard-SF writer whose work explicitly celebrates the technologies we play with?
Eric S. Raymond, “The Delusion of Expertise”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-05-05.
July 28, 2016
Canada’s National Heritage Digitization “Strategy”
Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s plans for digitization are so underwhelming:
Imagine going to your local library in search of Canadian books. You wander through the stacks but are surprised to find most shelves barren with the exception of books that are over a hundred years old. This sounds more like an abandoned library than one serving the needs of its patrons, yet it is roughly what a recently released Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy envisions.
Led by Library and Archives Canada and endorsed by Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, the strategy acknowledges that digital technologies make it possible “for memory institutions to provide immediate access to their holdings to an almost limitless audience.”
Yet it stops strangely short of trying to do just that.
My weekly technology law column notes that rather than establishing a bold objective as has been the hallmark of recent Liberal government policy initiatives, the strategy sets as its 10-year goal the digitization of 90 per cent of all published heritage dating from before 1917 along with 50 per cent of all monographs published before 1940. It also hopes to cover all scientific journals published by Canadian universities before 2000, selected sound recordings, and all historical maps.
The strategy points to similar initiatives in other countries, but the Canadian targets pale by comparison. For example, the Netherlands plans to digitize 90 per cent of all books published in that country by 2018 along with many newspapers and magazines that pre-date 1940.
Canada’s inability to adopt a cohesive national digitization strategy has been an ongoing source of frustration and the subject of multiple studies which concluded that the country is falling behind. While there have been no shortage of pilot projects and useful initiatives from university libraries, Canada has thus far failed to articulate an ambitious, national digitization vision.
