Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some of life’s more complicated moral issues are fairly simple when we use words per their meanings.

Want to stop abuse at fill-in-the-blank? Don’t bring in abusive persons, i.e., abusers.

Want to stop lying? Don’t bring in lying persons, i.e., liars.

Funny how the English language works and answers our own questions.

by Dwayne Phillips

I don’t like the metaphor of the software “stack,” never have. Here is one explanation why.

I wrote some software on a recent Saturday afternoon. I used Google’s Colaboratory, Jupyter Notebooks, Python, String libraries, Regular Expressions, HTML, and a few other things.

I think folks call that a “software stack” these days. The tools build on top of one another where the final result is at the top of the stack, or something like that.

I find the “stack” idea a bad one. I had these tools laid out on the table. I picked up the one I needed at the time and placed it back on the table when I no longer needed it. If the tools were stacked, I would have to unstack the stack, use the tool, return it to the stack, and restack the stack, and…

It is much easier to have all the tools resting on the table. Okay, a “stack” of tools makes a prettier picture all neat and organized and besides, this is just a figure of speech and a metaphor and all that, but an assortment of tools on a table is far more practical.

by Dwayne Phillips

We are here, we want to be there. The words we use to describe these places has much to do with the journey.

• We have a massive project.
• I have to write just ten lines of Python code.

It’s the same. We start at one point and want to reach another point. How we describe those points has much to do with how we describe the journey. And that has much to do with how we accomplish the journey.

by Dwayne Phillips

We can think to the logical conclusion of a concept. We, however, can choose not to go to that conclusions. We rarely do.

• The logical conclusion of free enterprise is slavery.
• The logical conclusion of free speech is hate.
• The logical conclusion of survival of the fittest is murder.
• Many more examples could follow.

It doesn’t have to be. Persons with free will can say, “We do this, but we stop at this boundary.”

Now the arguing commences on where to draw the boundary: we will limit free enterprise at this point via government regulations. No! That is too much or too little regulation. Argument continues.

Regardless of where we draw that boundary today, we have agreed that we won’t go to the logical conclusion.

by Dwayne Phillips

The conferences are cancelled this year. Will we miss them? Really?

I suppose that 2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus. Right or wrong, and we may never know if we were right or wrong in all this, people stayed home. We hid from mass gatherings—I didn’t know that was a real medical term—and worked from home.

This was the year that I was to attend eight or ten conferences. Well, I was to attend them. Most were cancelled. Travel was “banned” at work. Sigh.

Now we should ask the inevitable question about all these cancelled conferences: were they worth the expense anyways?

“The real value of conferences comes from the informal chats, those serendipitous moments in the hallways and at lunch.”—A conference sponsor and a die-hard conference attender.

Well, if the above is true, we should see a downtown in industries that cancelled all their conferences. Right? This will hit us partly this year and surely in the next two years. Right?

What if we don’t see this downtown? Maybe all those conferences were just excuses to get out of the office. Nice travel and nice parties, huh? If we reach this conclusion, will conferences shrink back to the days when the economy wasn’t booming? Will 2019 be the peak of the conference world?

Time will tell, maybe.

by Dwayne Phillips

Consider some rules of the English language. Afterwards, let’s start listening to what is said.

Allow me to digress a few moments into English language and usage.

Fake news is news. Notice the noun “news” is there in the phrase “fake news.” The word “fake” is merely an adjective attached to the noun.

Okay, so “fake news” is a type of news. Do we listen to news? If “yes,” we listen to fake news as well.

We used to see fake news in the National Enquirer where “Hillary Clinton has an alien baby.” Now we have fake news published by everyone in Facebook et al.

There were many messages in those “Hillary Clinton has an alien baby” stories. One was, “This is America. We have free speech. We can even poke fun at our institutions of democracy without going to jail.”

That is a pretty powerful message in the fake news. There are many other powerful messages in that fake news and today’s fake news.

Let us pause to celebrate and listen to fake news. It is, after all, news and it does contain often-powerful messages. Rational adults knew that Hillary wasn’t having alien babies. The rational adults far outnumbered the other type and kept them at bay.

by Dwayne Phillips

We seem to have confused ourselves once again. Perhaps simply asking a few questions would quell all the hyperventilating.

Is it misinformation or disinformation?

I confuse the two. Is either a real word or something a word inventor invented last week because he couldn’t find his dictionary and an appropriate word among the tens of thousands available?

Consider (if you can remember) Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” I guess that would be banned by one of those not-real-information censors.

Entertainers want fiction to be taken as non-fiction. That was the genius of Hitchcock—that the horror could happen to just about anyone on just about any day.

Whatever happened to, “Is this real? It couldn’t be, could it?”

I suppose we ran out of question askers in today’s post-post-modern world Oh wait, did I put enough “posts“ in that?

by Dwayne Phillips

There is something called the “hope nothing” meeting. In it, I hope nothing comes up that causes me pain, effort, and general angst. Hope nothing meetings are pleasant, but can be deadly.

I sit in meetings. People tell me things. Sometimes they tell me things that cause me work. Sometimes they tell me things that cause me grief. Sometimes they simply tell me more than I want to know.

“I hope nothing comes up in today’s meeting,” said me as I wearily sat at the table surrounded by persons with valuable information.

This is the “Hope Nothing Meeting.”

I won’t ask any questions. I will hope the others make simple statements. I will hope the others gloss over any difficulties. I will hope that I can walk out of the meeting on my merry way and not have to deal with unpleasantness.

I will be ignorant.

Hmmm. Ignorance is probably a bad state. These hope nothing meetings are bad for me and everyone else, too.

No one ever said this would be easy. Avoid the hope nothing meetings. Ask. Probe. Contribute. Expect. Act.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes we want to clarify what we have written. Adding to the end (a few words onto a sentence, a few sentences onto a paragraph, a few paragraphs onto a chapter, etc.) works, but is merely an ugly band-aid. Rewrite instead.

I did tripped again this morning. I wrote a sentence that wasn’t clear. I “fixed” it by adding a few words to the end. (This is a summary of https://www.anandtech.com/show/15483/amd-threadripper-3990x-review.)

Original: A look at AMD’s 64-core processor as AMD is taking the top spot in high-performance processors.

Clarified: A look at AMD’s 64-core processor as AMD is taking the top spot in high-performance processors away from Intel.

See how this is better? Gasp. Lazy. Just add a prepositional phrase and it is all better. Not.

Rewrite: AMD continues to surpass Intel in high-performance processors with this 64-core model.

The rewrite is shorter than both. It also emphasizes the two actors (AMD and Intel). It took more effort, i.e., not as lazy. And it doesn’t have that band-aid hanging off the end of the sentence begging to be ripped off and tossed in the trash.

by Dwayne Phillips

Logarithms help represent large and complex items with smaller and simpler concepts. We forget this at our peril.

I used a slide rule in years gone past. It functions on logarithms. These take large numbers and represent them with small numbers. It really is a remarkable concept.

The logarithm concept has been extended to many other fields. Data compression—a good example is the .jpg image file—makes large files much smaller. Much of machine learning uses a single number to represent an entire image or sentence or paragraph.

The examples go on. The examples could go on much further, but we don’t seem to like this. We want all the information at hand. The trouble is, we cannot fathom all the information at hand. It is simply not simple but large and complex, and we get a headache.

Have a headache? Reach for the logarithm or something akin to it in your field.