Sometimes I wonder if all these people that talk on conference stages are nothing more than self-help gurus. All of these words like "productivity", "cleaner code", "maintainable" etc. etc. are like highly optimized words for our dopamine network. They don't add any value to the domain of software engineering. I first realized this when I flipped through Uncle Bob's "highly recommended" Clean Code and almost screamed in horror at the amount of bullshit that book has been able to infect into the industry. Yes, the words sound nice, but look at the code examples. Just look at them.
It's the "king is naked" effect. Everyone can see it's bullshit but most people refuse to believe it. It's been decades since this crap started and people are still religious about it.
Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very act of polishing a glass, using finer and finer sand until it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light.
> it becomes transparent when the grain of the sand is half the wavelength of the light
That seemed to have intriguing potential as an educational story.
But it felt odd. Briefly googling suggests optical polishing compound grains are almost all 1+ um.[1] But maybe that <1 um tail is key? This[2] shows larger grains, with a tail growing over hours. But lens roughness is already at ~1 nm without the tail, and the growing tail only slightly improves that. On the other hand, perhaps sub-um fragments from the hydrated damaged surface are being entrained by the lap pitch or wax or slurry? Don't know. But it seems a half-lambda grain-size story has difficulties.
Oh well. :) Thank you for this. I wish I could find an online community interested in crafting improved stories for teaching science and engineering. My in-person ones... covided. :/
Sorry, I don't recall the specific details of glass polishing in this story; probably the datum I said does not make sense.
You can find this inspiring story, and many, many others, on Feynman lectures on physics. I'm sure the stories as written by Feynman will be exact and true.
He was the ultimate "do it for somethings own sake" type of guy. He had a ton of curiosity, and just spent most of his life indulging it to the fullest. I mean, we in the modern world are so boxed in with our notions of right and wrong (most of which come from "authority"), newton wasn't like that, the man was equally comfortable studying about the bible, alchemy, as we was studying the natural world, building telescopes and as you said polishing his own lenses.
Newton was the pinnacle of this kind of personality, but frankly this was the common mindset until the 19th century. Science was not a profession, people who did it were on their own dime and their work was basically an expensive hobby. Things change a lot when you have to "publish or perish".
It's the same thing as today, you learn best when you implement systems yourself. For example, I didn't learn web animations until I built my own (internal) library to do it well rather than relying on a third party one.
Yeah, I guess you're right. You can sense much faster progress when the product is made by a single company, rather than by a team within a major company.
It's funny how Microsoft has an absolute beast on their hand with Powerpoint, which has so many obscure and powerful features that their employees must be fuming at how it's all just there, and nobody uses them. Fractals, high-res fish models, it's Turing complete for Pete's sake. They could easily destroy their competition if only they got somebody in charge to do it.
For instance, the PowerPoint integration with Teams is slick, where you can independently navigate and then join the presenter again (at presenter's option). Or teams actually co-edit remotely while lead is presenting, team members are editing on the fly, and others/guests are viewing the presenter's choice of a native presentation or a window or a screen... not to mention any/all of this working on Surface Hub conference room touch screens.
I used to be a Keynote person, then Deckset, then a couple different markdown slide tools ... but for team based work these integrations have pulled me back into PowerPoint "at the office".
I still hate most of these tools though, slide-ware is where knowledge goes to die.
Yeah, imagine if a bridge engineer said the same thing: "You aren't an engineer until your bridge collapses. Congrats!" I am starting to hate tech culture. Nobody cares about correctness and discipline. Mention "math" and everybody spreads like cockroaches.
Just stop already. Nobody notices these kinds of things, and if they're offensive to anyone, that's their problem. It's a math problem as old as the 1800s for gods sake. Stop already. Why, out of everything that is important in this world, would you immediately notice the fucking "man", out of all things?
I literally imagined a man in a 50’s style suit with a briefcase and wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I had to manually untangle that concept to add the realization that women can sell stuff too.
Maybe it has an effect on behavior? I’m not sure of any research behind gendered language.
It's called the Sapir-Worff hypothesis. Pinker called it something like "the most well known hypothesis in linguistics, too bad it's almost certainly false." It's pre-Chomsky, in date and concept.
