The first is novelty. Bombings in Boston don’t happen very often. In countries torn by sectarian violence and in which each sect has bottomless supplies of suicide bombers, bombings are common. So as time goes on it slips further and further down the bulletin.

We call it “the News” and not “the Usuals”, because what gets published is what is unexpected or rare. Headlines like “Grandmother makes it home safely for thousandth time” and “99.99999% of humans not murdered today” are unlikely to see life anywhere but on The Onion.

The second is similarity. We care more about people who are like us. I cared deeply about the death of my grandparents. I cared more about their death than I did about the aftermath of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And people were then dying in wars in Africa in countries I had never heard of and which I cannot, to this day, reliably point to on a map.

This is not a new observation:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened.

The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

That’s Adam Smith, in a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments (written before Wealth of Nations), discussing the oddities of human sympathy. Basically, it relies on similarity and proximity.

What most bugs me is when people decide to play morality calculus poker. Oh, you lost two people in a bomb blast? We lost 50. Oh, you lost 50 people in a bomb blast? Last week 100 were hacked to death down our way. Oh, you’re mad about machetes? How about the time …

I use the word “calculus” deliberately, because it reveals a defective mode of thought: that lives can be added and subtracted; that they can be integrated to an area under a blood-soaked curve to determine who has “won” the morality olympics in a kind of more-affronted-than-thou dick-waving contest. I find the whole process of debiting and crediting deaths to be utterly odious. Deaths cannot be subtracted from deaths. Evil is not deductible from evil. Two wrongs don’t make 50 rights.

Incidentally: Mao Tse Tung “wins” the moral calculus olympics. By a wide margin. And if you remove human agency and leave it up to mere events, he in turn is dwarfed by moderately dangerous diseases and so on up the line until you arrive at the fact that no religion, no ideology, no government, no empire, no economic system, no weapon, no army, no dictator and no president have ever killed more people, more horribly, than the passengers of fleas and mosquitoes. And death need not even a byproduct of parasitical life. The spasms of the restless Earth can kill millions in minutes.

So let’s just accept that Americans and westerners will care more about Boston. And that probably hardly anyone in Syria cares about either of them. And that right now people are dying in Africa of malaria at around 5-600 people per day who aren’t in a position to share some dumb bullshit on Facebook.

I see your moral calculus and I raise you the fact that the world sucks and you don’t have to be spiteful pricks about it.

Eventually I gave it away in favour of programming computers. But law can be fascinating in its own right. Software development has more in common with legal thinking, and vice versa, than either might realise or care to admit.

There is one place where the law excels, however. It is institutions and norms. When you are drawn into a court, you are drawn into a mechanism that has in Common Law countries (broadly, the English-speaking world) been evolving for most of a thousand years.

And the law, as an institution, as a system, has learnt many lessons about itself. To outsiders law can seem fusty and rooted in its ways. This is not a coincidence, because lawyers are inducted into an institutional memory that recalls failures of justice over a span of hundreds and hundreds of years. They are never forgotten; they are renewed constantly with each generation of lawyer. We in software could learn from the lawyers in this regard.

Consequently, the legal system is slow, impersonal and obsessed with details.

Which brings me to this horrid mess.

Why the law is slow

All of the major events in the PyCon saga happened in the space of about 3 days. There’s been some side commentary about how this is a product of the modern Twittering age. It’s not really: it’s a product of humans. We act in passion as it seizes us.

A mob of twitterati is still a mob and mobs are not a new phenomenon. It wasn’t so long ago that “lynch mob” was more than just a metaphor. The problem with mobs is that once formed, they tend to zoom off and quickly cause great harm.

Righteousness — the belief that the moral correctness of belief and action is so pressing and important that it transcends mere law and custom — is dangerous when it rests in an individual. When it seizes the hearts and minds of a mob, it is a direct threat to everyone in its path. Go check the criminal code of your state or country — don’t be surprised to learn that riots and mobs are one of the few occasions where police can be authorised to use lethal force.

What’s changed is the geographical dispersion of mobs. What used to be localised to single towns now exists in a virtual town that crosscuts the world. Happily this reduces the chances of actual physical outcomes. But it doesn’t change the dynamic of mobs.

Passion’s greatest enemy is time. Time dissipates passion, saps its strength. The law is slow because of its structure, but lawyers also know that studying events from a distant time reduces the blinding effect of passion. This is a lesson that the law has learned the hard way, over and over. And it is a lesson well-learned. Passion has its place in the law, but it is tamed and corralled. It is servant, not master.

Why the law is impersonal

So the law strives to be passionless and to take its time.

It also strives to be impersonal. The law carefully avoids connection between the officers of court and the persons in dispute.

I think this is the root of hatred for lawyers and judges. They consciously refuse to align themselves to warring tribes. They act and think bizarrely — they are neither comrades in arms nor dastardly enemies. To the passionate, a lawyer or judge is instead a strange alien who has floated down to decide their fate. Machiavelli counselled the Prince to always take sides, because no matter how a dispute turns out, winners and losers both will try to punish neutral parties who didn’t support them. And so it is for judges and lawyers.

But the law must be impersonal if it as at all to work. In this case, most of the commentary has been by folk aligning themselves into tribes, the pro-Adria and anti-Adria (falling pretty close to being a 1:1 match with sex). The sackings were made by persons involved at only one step from the issue; the disputants themselves have appealed not to law or mediation but to a public anxious to take sides.

What does this do? It makes matters worse. Where you had one mob, now you have two. And the power of homophily to drive out dissenting views is of course formidable. Thomas Schelling’s coin segregation model shows how very small gradients in preferences can lead to a totally polarised population in a short period.

The law’s path out of such messes is to involve the uninvolved as officers of the court.

Why the law is obsessed with detail

Lawyers sometimes appear to be obsessive-compulsive about pulling the cloth of a case into ever finer threads.

But that is, in fact, their job. A legal case is a graph of facts and laws. Lawyers must ensure that they have checked every node of the graph, because you cannot know in advance what will decide the case. You may speculate, sometimes with enormous confidence, but you cannot know. The lawyer’s duty is to check.

Small, subtle, even infinitesimal differences of fact or law frequently turn out to massive consequences. Again, each lawyer’s shared institutional memory involves hundreds of such examples.

In the PyCon saga, taking events “in the vibe” will lead to misjudgement in all directions. And that’s exactly what is happening in the pro- and anti- camps. Different people are picking out different facts, or emphasising them differently, or sometimes having different facts.

In law the facts must be exhaustively worked out. And then the legal rules which apply for those facts are exhaustively worked out. It would not surprise me if a court of law could spend a day on the question of exactly when Adria posted pictures to twitter, more days on exactly what was said to whom and so on and so forth. Why? Because to the law, A then B could easily lead to an utterly different outcome to A then B then C, or A then C (with an assumed B) and so on. Events, facts, orderings matter and need to be nailed down with great care and examination.

What is there to learn?

Stop using Twitter. Would you write a computer program by asking for requirements 140 characters at a time? Writing code 140 characters at a time? Running tests one at a time, 140 characters at a time?

Or perhaps, more fairly: stop relying on Twitter. For any discussion of consequence, it neatly recreates all the worst things that lawyers and judges have learnt over hundreds of years to carefully avoid.

When your decisions have heavy consequences, such as depriving someone of their livelihood, it is even more important to keep your head and take your time. One thing I learnt in student politics is that no matter how damning the first evidence you’re shown is, and no matter how badly you want to believe it or disbelieve it, wait — wait! — for the rest to come in before taking precipitous action.

I’m not saying that you need to study law, or become a lawyer, or keep a lawyer on retainer. But the steady, passionless, impersonal, detail-obsessed nature of legal reasoning is a powerful tool in itself.

When someone asks you for your opinion of the current blowup, the safest answer will always be: “ask me tomorrow”.

Some time ago I bought, read and reviewed Lon Kilgore’s Anatomy Without a Scalpel. It’s a decent book, helpfully focused on strength trainees, and the chatty text makes it a relatively easy read.

Anatomy of Movement is simply much better. The drawings are crisp, the explanations are concise and there’s more coverage on the major areas of movement. Little dashes of humour in the drawings add a light hearted sense of fun.

Each chapter follows a common structure: landmarks, movements, major elements or joints, connective tissue and muscles. Each chapter rounds out with clever diagrams demonstrating how muscles cooperate to perform certain common movements.

I will keep this review mercifully short. If you are an athlete or coach who wants to bone up on your anatomy, this is an excellent book.

Highly recommended.

First things first. This isn’t my first outing with a Weinberg book. Back in January I dropped a big batch review of books, including Weinberg’s The Secrets of Consulting (excellent) and More Secrets of Consulting (sadly, like most sequels, not as good).

I decided at the time that a slow saunter through this Weinberg fellows’ catalogue would be a fun expedition. Not all at once, mind you. There is something about Weinberg’s writing that somehow is just ever so slightly off for me. When I am reading it I enjoy myself and I feel like I am learning lots of useful insights. But when I’m done it is difficult to express what, if anything, I have just learned.

However it’s sufficiently entertaining, and Weinberg sufficiently influential, that I think that picking up one of his books now and then will probably be a wise move in the long run. He’s certainly a prolific writer, and some of his particular series (the Quality Systems series for example) are considered to be “cult classics”.

What’s it about?

That’s hard to answer. The book comes to us, almost unchanged, from 1971. It’s worth noting that by sheer coincidence the book was published immediately after what was to become a vital historical moment in the computer industry: the development of Unix. By convention, Unix is considered to have been “born” on the first of January 1970. When Weinberg was writing the book, Unix basically didn’t exist. Today Unix and Unix-like operating systems power billions of computers and devices.

This leads me neatly to what most programmers will note about the book: its fascinating anachronism. When he released the Silvery Anniversary edition in 1996 (itself already another world — the web had barely begun to make its mark in 1996), Weinberg didn’t rewrite any chapters or update any examples, leaving them as they were in the 1971 original. Consequently many of his discussions revolve around how quirks in the PL/I language interact with human behaviour; or the social dynamics of submitting cards to a batch processing centre. At the time Weinberg was witnessing the first stirrings of “online terminals” and timesharing systems. These are the systems which have almost totally supplanted the entire technological paradigm that Weinberg was so keenly observing.

In my father’s book collection are many fascinating curios of bygone eras. He owns, for example, a travelogue of a visit to Indonesia, written before the outbreak of World War II. Flicking through such books is like studying prehistoric insects fossilised in amber. It inserts you into the absolute unalikeness of times that and modes of thought that have almost entirely perished from the earth. The past really is, as they say, a foreign country.

But in saying all this, I’m only really addressing myself to the second half of the title (“… Computer Programming”). Weinberg also talks about the psychology, which — given that only 2 or 3 generations at most have passed through the industry since the first edition was written — is unlikely to have changed.

This is where is Weinberg’s book is at its strongest. To be sure, psychology is itself an evolving field, and Weinberg’s main references are textbooks and papers written in the 50s and 60s. But his gift for folksy insight nevertheless entertains and sometimes instructs.

Some Quotes

On tradeoffs:

Many managers still seem to want everything, and fail to understand the importance of asking for intelligent trade-offs in order to get the best product they can. It’s as if they think all you have to do to manage the New York Yankees is tell every batter to hit a home run, and every pitcher to strike the batter out.

On communicating objectives:

There is a certain danger in communicating objectives: objectives can change estimates!

On the fungibility of labour in complex design tasks:

Notice that two months would probably be the minimum time for this program to be produced with programmers of this ability, for it is doubtful whether nine programmers can do anything useful in less than about two months, considering the time it will take them to get organized. If we have to have the program faster, we shall have to hire a better man for the job.

On Parkinson’s Law:

The reason work can expand to fill the time allotted is the existence of other goals whose importance relative to scheduling is not made clear.

Conclusion

It’s customary in these reviews for me to end with a remark on whether I recommend a book.

In this case, it’s hard to say. I think most software types would profit in reading it, if only to get some flavour of what changes and what is eternal in our industry. But if, for example, you’re looking for an up to date treatment of the subject promised by the title … perhaps you ought to look elsewhere.

I used to have one at RSVP, for about ten minutes. Then I learned they have a feature where not only can you be blown off, you can be blown off with a sterile automated reply.

No thanks.

Anyhow: they have onsold my email to a weight loss scammer.

I don’t much care whether I authorised them to do this in subclause 5AA(xxi)-B of the click-through when I signed up.

It’s scummy slimebag behaviour.

Fits the Fairfax Media M.O., I suppose.

So, in conclusion, RSVP suck. Use anything else.

This is the essence of today’s announcement by the Prime Minister that she is going to parachute Nova Peris into the #1 spot on the ALP’s Senate ticket. The electoral calculus means that this will guarantee a Senate place for Peris.

Why?

First, and foremost, Labor want their own token blackfella.

I use that insulting language because I believe it is that insulting. They’re not interested in the person who will be a Senator of the Commonwealth, just the symbolism of it.

It’s been a rough few years for Labor in indigenous politics. The Liberals pre-selected an indigenous candidate and he was elected to Parliament. Then the 2011 Northern Territory elections caused a tectonic shift in NT politics.

Aboriginal voters abandoned Labor and voted for the CLP. The Northern Territory’s Legislative Assembly’s indigenous members are almost all CLP members. The symbolism is very unsettling for Labor, who have always considered aboriginal issues to “belong” to them.

So. They want their own. The Prime Minister pretty much belled the cat when said:

It would be the first time that our political party has put forward an Indigenous Australian in a winnable position at a federal election.

Yyyyeeeeeep.

Who?

Here’s the truly, truly insulting part. The real teeth-kicker. And what proves that Gillard is more interested in symbolism than substance.

They’re going to parachute in Nova Peris. Peris is a former Olympic Athlete, “famous” for being the sole aboriginal player in the 1996 Women’s hockey team which won in Atlanta (nobody seems to care about her former team mates). And that’s it. That’s the highest achievement of her life: being part of a winning team nearly 20 years ago.

If you’ve ever met Peris, you’ll know that she is not A-grade Senate material. I mean, I don’t like Trish Crossin. But Crossin is a smart and experienced Senator. Peris is, frankly, going to be an embarrassment.

If Julia Gillard wanted to select an indigenous woman for the Senate, there was a candidate right there, already trying to win pre-selection.

Marion Scrymgour.

Marion Scrymgour is smart and has Cabinet experience. Marion Scrymgour would be an adornment to the Federal Parliament.

Ah. But Marion Scrymgour isn’t “famous”.

And Marion Scrymgour has her own ideas. She occasionally speaks them aloud. Gosh, how embarrassing it would be if the brand new token actually harboured ambitions to help her people.

Yours Sincerely, The Prime Minister

This is nothing new. Both parties at a federal level regularly treat Territorians worse than live cattle. But the gall, the gall, to parachute such an unimpressive dud into the Senate simply for the symbolism so boils my blood that I find it difficult not to want to kick things.

I wish a thousand poxes on the house of Labor. I hope that the earth opens up and swallows their Victorian and NSW headquarters. I hope that their ministers are struck mute. I hope that they are called out for this breath-taking insult. And most of all I hope that they are reduced to a smoking ruin at the next election, forced into the wilderness to consider their sins.

For someone who describes himself as an amateur weightlifter, this is an unhappy state of affairs.

The first half of the year was occupied with getting my left knee in working order. The rest of the time has been spent trying to diagnose what in the blue blazes is wrong with my shoulder.

The pain and discomfort move around and vary from day to day; though it can be reliably provoked in a number of ways. Basically I am unable to train around it. This is troublesome.

The Enemy Within

The first hypothesis was possible bone problems in the shoulder. Ruled out by X-ray.

The second hypothesis was an AC joint problem. An MRI ruled that out.

The third hypothesis was bursitis. A non-responsive cortisone shot ruled that out.

The nascent fourth diagnosis was a fracture; which might have been lurking in a number of places.

Today I got results back from a combined “bone scan” and CT study. The bone scan test involves injecting a mildly radioactive marker chemical and seeing if it accumulates anywhere. This test was looking for fractures, so the marker chemical was phosphor, which is involved in the maintenance and repair of bones.

The fracture diagnosis was ruled out. Three things did turn up:

First, there’s some bone activity in the end of the left Acromion. This is exciting news … except that the very same activity is taking place in the non-painful shoulder as well. Plus it’s very mild.

Second, there’s some indication that the connection between my top ribs and the spinal column might have problems. This … might … explain the pain. Or it might not. I’ve been referred to a physiotherapist to explore this option. Later on we might try a diagnostic shot of cortisone.

The third thing that was discovered was, to me, the most distressing news. “… low-grade degenerative disease involving the C6/C7 discs, particularly anteriorly”.

This is fancy book-larnin’ talk that means the bony bit at the bottom of my neck is starting to look bad. The advice is firstly, to strengthen the muscles of the neck to take more of the load. Secondly, stop putting compressive loads on those two discs.

Anatoly Pisarenko, patron saint of non-blubberous superheavyweights, demonstrates that you can wear anything you damn well please — so long as you squat heavily and upright.

This means I will need to give up my favourite exercise in the whole world: Olympic-style back squats. The Olympic-style squat involves resting the bar high on squeezed trapezius muscles and squatting with an upright torso. This transmits most of its force through … you guessed it, the C6/C7 discs. I’ll probably need to switch to Powerlifter-style low-bar squats instead, as they rest the bar lower on the back. Bah.

But the core mystery endures. I’ve been in some sort of pain or discomfort since July. And the end is not in sight.

Here’s the thing. Your Gates archetype is famous because of selling into the mass consumer market. Journalists have heard of their product because they too are part of the mass consumer market. So they are famous because they happen, by coincidence, to sell a product that many people buy.

Selling a mass market product is really, really hard to turn a seriously juicy buck on. For two big reasons.

First: it’s hard. Every business is hard. Selling into a mass market is just the same sort of hard multiplied by hundreds of millions of people who have no rational explanation for why they will happily pay $4.30 daily for a coffee but who will refuse to pay $5 monthly for random-app.example.com.

Second: the consumer market’s importance is vastly overstated. This really in-hindsight-blindingly-obvious-fact comes to me courtesy of Hayek in his lecture, The Conditions of Equilibrium between the Production of Consumers’ Goods and the Production of Producers’ Goods, originally published in Prices and Production.

Most of the actual stock of capital in the economy is not in the hands of consumers. It is tied up in the “structure of production”.

Any one product might be seen as the output of a complicated graph which is its “structure of production”. But at any one point of time, most of the value of the structure is not in the consumer product. It’s in the rest of the structure in various stages of digestion.

That is, almost all the money and value and machinery and work in progress and untransformed goods ad infinitum are not on the shelf at Wal-Mart. They are distributed across the economy.

So. Why are you, the software entrepreneur, trying to sell a mass market product, at what will probably be a low-per-unit gross profit, when almost all the easily-available money is flowing between businesses? Especially if you tot up the hit-driven nature of consumer software versus the very high opportunity cost of not doing freelancing or taking employment.

Because of sample bias. You want to be rich, and all the rich software-y people you’ve heard of are involved in the mass market. Try reading a Rich List some time (from any country). Count how many in the top 100 you’ve ever heard of. Notice how few of them made their zillions selling directly to consumers.

That is not a coincidence.

Today’s rant inspired tangentially by this blog post and this story about selling a mass consumer product.

It was probably a nasty shock to discover that I was not really useful for hoisting heavy things. Sorry, sis.

But I did get some reading done. Herewith my notes.

If you are daft enough to buy it, please use the affiliate link; I deserve money back for wasted time. Avoid.

You can read almost all of it on his blog, but I figure $10 for the convenience of reading it on my Kindle was worth it. Recommended for anyone doing business online.

The advice ranges from quite high level stuff (partitioning at an architectural level) down to the nitty-gritty (don’t use select * — someone please tell WordPress programmers this blinding insight). Still, it’s probably useful as a reference book.

The 3rd makes an important improvement: gone are the case studies. Being SEI case studies, they were heavy on US avionics projects from the 1970s and it was hard (some decades later) to relate to.

It’s important to note that the book covers broad ground. It’s not just architecture-as-a-set-of-options. That is, it’s not a catalogue of design alternatives that prospective architects should consider. To be certain, that’s part of what the book covers (through “architecture tactics” and the more commonly-recognised concept of a pattern language).

But it also discusses the broader context of software architecture. In that respect it would be a useful part of the library of a “proper” software architect. Bear in mind, however, that it is meant to be a text book. It can be read straight through, but doing so can be a bit tiring (trust me).

My only problem with the book is the contributed chapter 27, “Architectures for the Edge”. It’s a blob of hand-waving waffle that adds precisely zero value to the book, you may safely skip it.

The “Core Protocols” are a strange group-therapeutic approach to team work. The problem is that the good (structured, mindful focus on working together in teams) is mingled with the batshit crazy (calling professional reservation of emotion “bigotry”, ra-ra Tony Robbins bullshit about how UNTAPPED RESOURCES OF GREATNESS LIE WITHIN).

Sprinkle thick lashings of overwritten blather, a very annoying layout and endless proselytising and I … I just couldn’t finish it.

If you’ve ever been mired in one of those tedious HR seminars about “personality colours” or you had a highschool teacher with a hardon for de Bono’s “six hats”, then you’ll recognise the form.

It’s still a passable read, but I wouldn’t have gone out of my way for it.

The thinking is that a visual callout, including the cover image, will attract more clicks than the inline links (I learnt from Tested Advertising Methods that having a picture outperforms any headline).

As before, the font I’ve used is Dijkstra. Don’t like it? Think it looks too much like SimCity 2000-plus-obnoxious-web-2.0-linear-blending? Too bad. Dijkstra was a legend and SC2k was great.

I don’t expect to retire on Amazon affiliate clickthrough money (I’ve made $18 in the past 6 months), but insofar as it offsets my book buying habit, it’s a nice thing.

I’ve gone back through my archive and added callouts for books that I’ve reviewed, as well as any mentioned in passing.

Lastly, I’ve removed the “Book Review” badge from individual reviews, I think the callouts will show what’s what.