The computer is both a blessing and a curse for it makes possible calculations once beyond the reach of human endurance while at the same time also making them virtually beyond the hope of human verification.
— Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human-
Recent Posts
- An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming, 3rd ed
- Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
- From Dawn to Decadence
- Notes towards a set-objective language.
- To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
- You are correct: westerners care more about Boston than Baghdad
- Why the law is slow, impersonal and obsessed with details
- Anatomy of Movement
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Category Archives: History
From Dawn to Decadence
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a prophetess with a particular curse. Her prophecies of tragedy are inerrant, but they are never believed. She is forever doomed to see each tragedy twice, knowing that without the curse, her prophecies could have … Continue reading
The Psychology of Computer Programming: Silver Anniversary Edition
I’ve had a Kindle DX for about 3 or 4 years now. In fact I’ve had two, I broke the first one by dropping it from a bench top. And I’ve been very happy with it. But it’s funny that … Continue reading
Posted in Books, History, Software Engineering
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War and Peace and War
Grand theories of history never quite go out of fashion. The impossible complexity of human society so cheerfully refutes our understanding that we have to fall back on intuitive pattern-matching to make sense of it (after a while, this becomes … Continue reading
If you rely on refereed material …
Then a lot of stuff that happened just 10-15 years ago didn’t happen at all. Some of my research is done “Just In Time”. I think of something I want to refer to, then I hit up IEEE Xplore and … Continue reading
Posted in History, IT and Internet, Studies
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An interview with Watts Humphreys
Grady Booch spent 18 hours talking to Watts Humphreys about his life and life’s works. Definitely worth a read — set aside a few hours.
On a Hero
As far back as Frederic Bastiat’s Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That which is seen and that which is unseen), economists have been aware of the difficulty of getting people to look past the immediate and highly visible, through to widely distributed, hard to distinguish, long-term effects of decisions and policies.
This […] Continue reading
Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, History, Life, Science
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Quiet milestone
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Australia being connected to the internet.
On the night of the 23rd June 1989 Robert Elz of the University of Melbourne and Torben Neilsen of the University of Hawaii completed the connection work that bought the Internet to Australia. It was a 56kbps satellite circuit, and the Australian end used […] Continue reading
Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, History, IT and Internet
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Any AFL heavies in the audience?
Brother John Pye was a well-known, widely respected Catholic missionary who died last week, aged 102.
Brother Pye spent 16 years on the Tiwi islands in the NT. He brought Catholicism to the islanders with what was perhaps modest success. The other religion he introduced — Australian rules football — was much, much more successful.
Ever since […] Continue reading
Posted in Cross Posted from Club Troppo, History, Sport-general
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