Under The Sun

The Virtue of Engineering Cynicism

Cynics believe there is an ideal that humans choose not to live up to. For engineers, the ideals often are those of rationality: they like their work relationships characterized by the interchange of objective information unsullied by subjective, selfish motivations.

Dave Winer comments that

I think the correct word is skeptic. Or if you’re British, sceptic. And when he talks about programmers telling the truth, that’s something else entirely. “You can’t lie to the compiler.” People with an imprecise understanding of the truth don’t make software. They can’t.

I work in Test Engineering, where sceptisism is developed to a fine artform. We don’t believe any claim about a product unless we can measure it, and we don’t believe our own measurements unless we can trace the uncertainties back to national standards. Interestingly, there seems to be a disproportionally high number of Christians in this field. Perhaps it’s because as professional sceptics we tend to have a realistic view of human — and particulary our own — nature. The Bible provides traceability of our own deviation from the Divine standard.

Apropos of nothing in particular, more than you ever wanted to know about ISO paper sizes (A4 and its friends). I can’t understand why the Americans are so reluctant to adopt a system that is patently superior and used by 95% of the planet.

Courtesy of ScaryDuck, winner of the Guardian Unlimited’s Best British blog competition

From SiteMeter, the most intriguing referral to this site so far is http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=theology+in+pac+man. Not much joy for that seeker here, but perhaps this was what he was looking for:

Pac-Man is based on the biblical narrative, its story the same one Jesus told in a different way. Pac-Man is existence, captured in the bleeps and blips of the electronic board. It is, in short, life.

New education gap emerging in families A new education gap between the rich and the poor may be being created by the Government’s emphasis on home learning, according to a report by the UK Economic & Social Research Council.
I’m sure that there is a gap, but it’s between those families in which parents are interested in their chidren’s development, spend time reading and talking to them and choose to buy educational books and magazines instead of subscribing to another movie channel, and those who just don’t care. There really isn’t anything government can do to close this gap.

Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin escaped criminal prosecution Friday for allegedly punching a conspiracy theorist who wanted him to swear on a Bible that he really did walk on the moon in 1969.

Los Angeles County prosecutors declined to file a misdemeanor battery charge against the 72-year-old ex-astronaut, who said he was defending himself and his stepdaughter when he clocked 37-year-old Bart Winfield Sibrel outside a Beverly Hills hotel on Sept. 9.

Discovery supports astronomers’ paradoxical views of the universe Observations by a radio telescope at the South Pole have shown the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) to be polarised, as predicted by the “inflationary model” of the Big Bang:

If no polarization had been found . . . “Instead of stating that we think we really understand the origin and evolution of the universe with high confidence, we would be saying that we just don’t know,” said Carlstrom, who will announce the discovery. “Polarization is predicted. It’s been detected and it’s in line with theoretical predictions. We’re stuck with this preposterous universe.”

Seen in a Sig: “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” — attributed to Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc., 1989