Journal de Jacques

My calculations say that between expected expenses, required savings and HECS debt payments, I need about 90 weeks to “clear the deck” and get into positive net worth territory.

At which point I need to salary sacrifice like a madman, because my super is way behind the average.

You can see a link to it on the left side (if you’re reading this on my blog, rather than Facebook).

The first thing I like is the style. I take no credit for this: it’s a template that comes with Pages plus some minor tweaks of my own.

The second thing I like is the blurbs. I spent a few days chasing some up before putting the resume into wider circulation. The idea of having “testimonials” embedded in marketing materials is as old as dirt; but so far as I know it hasn’t been used on resumes before. Yet resumes are probably the most intimate and important bit of “brochureware” in a software engineer’s life. It can’t hurt to jazz it up a little with fuzzy subjectivity.

Today’s random thought: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the most important development in the history of supercomputing. It has forced the continuous development of ever-more powerful supercomputers to simulate the decay of weapons that can no longer be actually tested.

Of course, these computers might just be a welfare program for high-performance chip designers. YMMV.

In Australia, the annual State of Origin is a very big deal. Though it only deals with players from NSW and Queensland, it nevertheless divides the country into two camps out loud folks and probably does more to raise the profile of Rugby League in non-Rugby states than anything else.

Perhaps Rugby Union could learn from this. How bout an international series, played annually, called Sphere of Origin? Players born in the Northern hemisphere versus those in the Southern?

OK, so it might be a bit unfair that South Africa, Australia and New Zealand fall into the latter camp, but the Northern Hemisphere does get the use of the whole of European Rugby to choose from.

It could raise Rugby’s profile all over the world.

I predict that, whenever a bold prediction is issued or the matter of prediction the future discussed, at least one person will deride such efforts and say that the future is, strictly, unpredictable.

A lot of progress (and sometimes, regress) in computer science and software engineering seems to come from rejecting, modifying or otherwise modifying the “natural order”. By natural order I refer to the generally accepted, industrial paradigm of how development “is done”.

A lazy student can easily find ‘revolutionary’ projects by simply fiddling with this accepted order.

For example, take the modern imperative/object-oriented paradigm for software languages. Subtract some feature, and explore the consequences. What happens when, for instance, you cannot use getters/setters/properties? I’m not sure, but it’d be interesting to know. What happens if you subtract assignment? And so on. In a way some functional languages changed thinking by subtracting changes in state.

Another thing you can try is to move something from one phase of program life to another, or to collapse phases. Lisp, for instance, allows the programmer to have instructions run at compile-time (ie, macros), rather than simply at runtime. What else can you move out of its natural phase? Take CPU scheduling. Currently this always happens during the runtime phase, but could it be moved? Can there be load time scheduling? Compile time scheduling?

I’m sure that you can think of many other such examples.

How on earth did bachelors cook before the invention of the microwave oven? ’tis a thing of marvel!

Today’s thought bubble is about learning. Recently while studying sets, I found that I had confused the concept of the element of a set (denoted using ∈) and subsets (denoted using ⊂ or ⊆). It made me think that many of my moments of dawning understanding have been marked by the discovery of error.

In psychology, a most useful tool for studying the function of the brain is error. Visual illusions are used to study the functioning of the visual cortex. By tricking it we can tease apart its intricate workings.

So today’s thought is:

Can common errors be used to tease apart the process of learning?

Inspired by sudden discussion in Australia of the relationship betwixt religion and politics:

I don’t mind politicians bring religion to parliament, so long as I can bring atheism to the voting booth.

It’s commonly said that “youth is wasted on the young”. The implication is that the young have the energy, vigour and vitality to do all the things which the older and wiser wished they still could. That we’d relive things and “do it right” this time — dance more, love more, smile more, drink more (or less); in short live more. And probably borrow less.

But this is all backwards. Youth isn’t wasted on the young.

I think that it’s pointless pining for lost youth. Stupidity is part of being young. Wisdom is costly and there’s no way to earn it but to stick around for a while.

So instead of giving youth to the wise, it might be more useful to give wisdom to the young. After all, each is about as impossible as the other. So stuff wasted youth, here’s my new axiom of this ancient curse:

Wisdom is wasted on the wise.