Review: Dreaming In Code

I read the book Dreaming in Code on Joel Spolsky's recommendation (I need to remind myself that he pronounces his name as Spole-skee, where the first syllable rhymes with "pole". I keep saying "Spall-skee"). Not his direct recommendation exactly. He didn't call me and say "Hey, Champ, read this book, it's good for you!".

Of course, he mentioned it on his blog, even as he hadn't read the book himself. He had been interviewed by author, Scott Rosenberg, though Joel has a minor cameo in the book.

I suppose I should briefly summarize the book as, unlike movies, you're not likely to read the book. Basically, it tracks the creation of Chandler, a personal information manager, something like Outlook. Indeed, it was called the "Outlook killer". The company was OSAF which has "open source" somewhere in its name. The founder was Mitch Kapor who made a ton of money with the creation of Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet program from the 1980s.

Mitch was looking for lightning to strike twice. Indeed, his story vaguely reminds me of a Star Trek episode called The Ultimate Computer, which is about Richard Daystrom inventing a computer called the M-5, which will control starships during battles. Dr. Daystrom's back story includes winning some award like the Nobel Prize of the future. He had been a child (or early twenties) genius making breakthroughs in computing, and this was to be his new breakthrough.

There's some subtext. Daystrom is black (I don't want to say African-American as it's not entirely clear that "America" still exists), and his situation may reflect other bright people of color in the US of the day, but even so, his story has some universality, the desire to reclaim genius, to show the first time wasn't a fluke. Why that's important to folks, who knows? You see it often in sports as coaches strive to achieve greatness all the time, and you see it with filmmakers too. But just plain old genius?

Well, Kapor wanted to create Chandler, and gathered together talented individuals to make it happen. He thought it would only take two years to make it happen, but that was like 2002, and it's now 2007, and I've never heard of Chandler until I read the book.

Rosenberg had to be disappointed with this project, because a non-fiction book, to be entertaining, needs to have some structure that we normally associate with fiction. We want a beginning, middle, and end. I'm sure, by 2005, he was thinking, that this book is already 2 years behind schedule (as was Chandler, of course), and he had to release the book.

The book doesn't merely focus on the key players, but tries to explain software development and its history. For example, there's a mention of the halting problem, which is pretty geeky, but standard stuff for a computer science major with a decent background. Rosenberg compares that to dealing with recurring events in a calendar program.

My question is: who is the target audience for the book? As a software engineer, I'm interested in the software development process. From what I could tell, they suffered from too many cooks. Different people had different ideas, and everyone was good enough that they could make some justification for their ideas. There was some woman named Mimi (I think), who did UI design. One common theme of UI design is that many such designers don't know that much about programming. This allows them to "think outside the box", but also means they don't always consider the feasibility of certain ideas.

Most books don't want to delve that deep into the tech-geek process, hoping there will be some readers who like computer geek stuff that might read it. I dunno. It would have helped if Rosenberg could have followed some humdrum project at a so-so company. Whether he could have gotten permission to do that, I don't know.

The point is that great programmers don't always lead to great code, especially when there are varying opinions.

The complaint I have with Dreaming is similar to Aardvark'd, the documentary tracking several interns at Spolsky's Fog Creek Software as they build Copilot.

To be fair, that documentary didn't even try to appeal to software types (although you think they would). They went for the up close and personal approach, trying to chronicle the individuals involved, rather than how they developed code.

I'll be reading Founders at Work, also recommended by Joel and see how that turns out. Since it's a series of interviews, it won't have a story arc. Instead, it will be about common themes or interesting nuggets.

Adult Swim

Tony Kornheiser recently wondered, on his radio show, about the need to send a Washington Post sports reporter all the way to Australia to cover the 12th FINA World Championships. At the time, Michael Phelps had just broken the world record in freestyle, and would in successive days, break his own record, and a few others, the most recent in butterfly.

Let's face it, sports radio commentary, a radio genre that's exploded in the last 5-10 years, focuses on three sports: football, basketball, and baseball, in roughly that order. Occasionally, they cover golf, because the sports pundits play golf and because of Tiger Woods, who essentially put an African American face on what many had perceived as a white sport (of course, he was far from the first African American to play golf at a high level, but he's the first that's dominated the sport--yes, yes, he's half-Thai, but that's not mentioned a great deal).

Here are some sports that are almost never covered: tennis, auto racing, hockey. And of course, there are sports that are really never covered, like cricket, soccer, some college-only sports like lacrosse and field hockey. The only time these sports get a mention is when a scandal occurs, such as the Duke Lacrosse team scandal. And even then, there's nary a mention of the Pakistani coach, Bob Woolmer (from South Africa), getting strangled after Pakistan had lost to unheralded Ireland.

Much of this ignorance reflects the thinking of sports pundits. They believe they are the surrogates for the average American fan, who also don't like these sports. And more than likely, they actually don't like the sports at all, barely following it, not knowing who's who. Occasionally, they pronounce a few names semi-correctly like Belgian tennis player Justine Henin-Hardenne.

You would think that a guy like Mr. Tony would love to promote some obscure sport he loves and talk to the world about it. But if he hasn't been following it for twenty years, he's basically not interested, mostly because he feels he adds little to the table (although he would claim that he doesn't know half the football that Joe Theismann does, but still, he can't say he knows as little about football as he does about, say, soccer).

It seems like we've heard about Michael Phelps forever. I've known his name far longer than I've known what he looks like. Unlike other athletes, I don't know what his voice sounds like. I know little of his personal life. He's not dissected on radio like Barry Bonds or Terrell Owens. He's a white boy in a white sport.

But he is local, born in Baltimore, and having trained in Maryland. Heck, he's even swam in the pool at the University of Maryland Natatorium (quite an impressive facility given the utter crap it was when it existed in Cole Field House--UNC, I believe, routinely paid Maryland not to swim there away meets at Maryland).

Michael Phelps could be a total ass for all I know. "Nigel", the guy that Tony talks to, claims he had met Michael once, and needed a ride back from some event, and he refused, despite being a sports personality. Whether this really happened (it sounds plausible, despite the Nigel persona, which may or may not be real), I can't say. Phelps is tabula rosa to me, a blank slate.

Even so, he's had to go to Australia, mind you, on the other side of the world, adjust to the time differences, and manage a whole week of knockout performances, winning six golds so far, and breaking several world records in the process. Of course, Mr. Tony would rather talk about Sanjaya and how awful he is, and his hair, because he only reflects the American public's affinity for American Idol.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Tony's obsession with American Idol is practically unprecedented for a sports pundit. He spends easily a third of his time, more these days, discussing non-sports topic. You don't hear, say, Mike and Mike in the morning do anything like that. Indeed, with Mike Golic playing the "man" role, watching American Idol would be anathema to what they do. And the sports listeners would cringe at how much discussion the show gets. They love sports, not some guy with poofy hair singing Gwen Stefani.

His penchant for covering non sports events gives his show some breadth that most sports talk shows lack. I listen to some late night sports commentary on the radio coming home from work, and it's painful to listen to. Still, I'm not really up for the pop-music that's on and sometimes NPR isn't covering stuff that interests me.

What's particularly impressive about Michael Phelps's achievements is that he times it so well to the big championships. How many records have been broken in key championships or in the Olympics? I suppose it's useful to do that, because those accomplishments get airplay, more so than if it had occurred in some smaller non-event. This lack of coverage may indeed influence athletes who try to gear up for the big events and swim their best in them.

I suppose that shouldn't be surprising. After all, isn't this what athletes in other sports do? Gear up for the big game? The Superbowl? The Final Four? The NBA Championships? Why not try to do your best in the big games?

But the key is this. He's trying to break records too. In a team sporting event, the goal is merely to win. Kobe isn't planning to go for 100 points during the playoffs. Indeed, there's some question as to whether he could even approach such a record with playoff caliber teams. Even in golf, a tough sport if there ever is one, Tiger doesn't care to break scoring records. Since each course is unique, and the majors are played on difficult courses, he's less likely to break a scoring record. He just needs to win.

But in sports like swimming or track and field, breaking records seems to be par for the course. There's honestly no good comparison with the sports Americans appreciate most, and so there's no real appreciation for the accomplishments either.

Does it say something that, other than NASCAR and hockey, predominantly white sports don't appeal to Americans? Perhaps because Americans aren't particularly good at these sports? But this is not true in swimming, and unlike the cancer surviving story of Lance Armstrong, who perhaps single-handedly raised the awareness of the Tour de France so that a network like OLN would even think of covering it, and fans would consider watching it, and heck, people would consider buying a Trek bike so they too could begin to appreciate road cycling.

Sports like swimming and racing seem to lack the kind of drama needed for fans to be rabid. It's pure speed. There's not much strategy, at least, nothing visible to the average eye. And it's over in a few minutes. You can't sit and watch these events for a few hours. This may explain why people only crave such events once in a few years, as in the Olympics, and even the Olympics have waned in popularity now that there are hundreds of competing channels to watch. When only four channels existed, the Olympics had a captive audience.

So sorry Michael Phelps that Mr. Tony doesn't care for you (or Nigel, for that matter). Best of luck, and don't be an asshole.

On Baseless Advice

All over the web, there are articles on this or that. What foods you should be eating. Exercises you should be doing. How to be happy in life. And on and on. These articles are written with very little in the way of authority. No papers are cited. No studies are done. Indeed, it seems they merely copy their well-worn advice from someone else.

Yet, advice like this abounds. The four food groups were suggested by some governmental group. Then, it became a pyramid. Needless to say, they suggested foods that were commonly available in the US. After all, why mention fruits that could only be found in obscure parts of Asia.

People seem to get paid to do this, as if they had never written a research paper in their lives, and yet they feel supremely qualified to tell you what to do. Now, as with most people, I take such advice with a grain of salt. If it makes some sense, I might follow it.

I'm just surprised how common it is.

Idol Worship

Everyone knows that American Idol is a huge hit. So huge that it's been exported all over the world. Pop Idol (the British version), Indian Idol, Vietnamese Idol.

I was never much into the Idol fad. Still amn't (aren't, isn't, ain't?). But I've been listening to The Tony Kornheiser Show, better known as the Tuesday Morning American Idol Quarterback Show and it's got me intrigued.

Why does this series succeed? First, why don't I watch it? There's something about watching reality TV shows that seems to reduce us to blithering idiots. Or at least, that's the sense I get when I think I want to watch a reality show. That, and I simply don't watch that much TV to begin with.

But Tony Kornheiser is a bright guy, and he watches it, so there must be some appeal.

Here's the gist of it, best I can figure. First, there's the mass appeal that anyone can try out. William Hung, noteworthy for his awful singing which still ended up landing him something of a music deal, got his start on American Idol. He started off in the initial round where good and bad are mixed together, just to show you how awful awful can be.

Once you get past that stage, then each week (or perhaps more often than that), singers pick a song and sing it. The usual panel of judges consists of the acerbic and British Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Paula Abdul. They either praise or insult the singer depending on the performance. But the key is this. They don't decide who stays or goes. They hope to influence the vote by commenting on the quality of the singings. The audience, that's you and me, get to decide. You call in a special number, one for each singer.

Now, there are many factors a singer has to consider. How well do they sing? What songs best suit their personality? Do they sing in a style that might be too similar to someone else who is a better singer? If they sing a popular song, and almost always they are singing a cover of some song, then how will audience members react to their rendition of the song? How close should it be to the real thing? How much should they create their own version?

But the real key is this. Most singers sing well, but not fantastically. The format forces you to pass judgment on singers based on how well they sing. This is in contrast to, say, judging them on their ability to write a good song. Performance and personality are important.

If the singers were all uniformly excellent, then the average person might not be able to distinguish good and bad. The key is for the person watching to be able to hear the differences. And moreover, you must draw the distinction between one singer and another. And they all sing in a particular style. Thus, operatic singing wouldn't fly because the average American doesn't care to listen to opera, even if it was sung well.

This is the theater of the decently good, not of the highbrow extreme good, such as concert pianist, where a listener would strain to tell the difference between two performances. This isn't about the songwriting and how to write a catchy song people will like. Comparatively speaking, songwriting is hit and miss. One could reasonably argue that a good singer can sing well even if you care for the song.

So I was thinking, why is American Idol more successful than, say, Iron Chef? One problem with Iron Chef is that sound and images travel across the air. You can judge someone's singing and the way they look by watching television. On the other hand, you can't actually taste the food that the cooks are making. You never get that immediate reaction where you're eating the same food that the judges are eating.

I was wondering how difficult it would be to even approximate this? The closest I could imagine, and it's a stretch of the imagination, is a cooking robot. Somehow, you'd have the right ingredients, and then you'd download a program, and it would start to cook. When it was done, you'd eat. Now, if this were even remotely possible, you would never have to eat out. Fine foods could be made at home.

Let me sum up with why I think American Idol works, even as I don't watch it. First, the audience gets to participate. As much as Simon Cowell seems to rule the roost, the average person votes. As a communal activity, you can go to websites or have Idol parties where you actively compare notes with others. Should Sanjaya stay or go (he's Bengali, did you know that)? Is Melinda really all that modest? Will LaKisha win it all? Why don't the guys sing any better? Why aren't there any punk singers? Opera singers? Folks singing Broadway tunes?

And by slowly eliminating singers, it creates a sport out of it, where you, the viewer, get to pick. Who wins? We'll slowly find out!

And that creates a kind of uncertainty that you find with sports. Those who don't follow sports wonder why anyone cares about sports. It's just some random scores. Here, 90-77. Game. Why aren't you excited? Because you care about how the game unfolds. You want your team to win, but they're down by X points. Will they come back? I remember watching a Redskins game where they were down by like 12 points, and nothing was happening. There were maybe five minutes left and the announcer goes "They better hurry if they expect to do anything".

But they had done nothing all game long, and were going nowhere fast. Then, one deep touchdown, then another, and they were leading. Just when you thought it was a foregone conclusion, when a loss was imminent, and they come back. This happens rarely in sports, but when it happens, it's exciting, because you didn't expect it to work out that way.

American Idol isn't quite there, but it's good enough. You follow breathlessly waiting to see if the person you picked moves on. And they provide enough up close and personal segments that you get to "know" the person.

Or at least, that's how I think it works.

But now I figure there's more than meets the eye, and why even a bright guy like Tony can be swept under the spell of what seems like an idiotic premise.

Playing Doctor

There's a physical therapy room in the basement of the building that I work. For all intents and purposes (a redundant phrase if there ever was one), it's a doctor's office.

A doctor's office (at least in the US) is almost always set up the same way. There's a waiting area. There's a reception desk. There are (almost always) women working, which means answering phone calls and occasionally responding to the people waiting.

Then, you are called to go inside, and if you're lucky, you get to see a doctor right away, but that kind of luck is rare. Instead, you're likely to wait for some period of time and then briefly see the doctor, and then be sent on your way.

I recently read an article where a doctor claims that it takes doctors something like 30 seconds to decide what is wrong with you. Imagine that! 30 seconds! Part of the problem is that a doctor has lots of patients, and so he can't spend hours trying to figure out what's wrong with you, but it seems sad that the diagnosis is made so quickly.

The other problem is that doctors, for the most part, think their patients are idiots. If they can't understand the highly technical terms they use, then they must be idiots. In this NPR segment, a patient had said that she felt like things were exploding in her body. Of course, they thought she was a bit nuts and went with their own diagnosis. It turns out that her body was occasionally releasing bursts of adrenaline (due to some malady), and that felt like explosions to her.

She only got treated correctly when she said that although she has had similar symptoms prior to this, this felt different, and it let the doctor think of other avenues.

But that's a topic for a different day.

Despite how little time doctors spend with you, you spend a bunch of time waiting for them. And there's not many new ideas on how to keep you occupied.

First, there's the question "why?". If I have an appointment at 8, why must I wait 30 minutes? Much like the airports, explanations are not forthcoming. Does the reception desk say "sorry, Dr. Smith came in late today, so we're all behind schedule, or the previous two patients came in 20 minutes late, so we're behind". Instead, apparently, no news is good news.

OK, so let's go beyond that. Fine. Patients and doctors can't show up on time, and you're expected to wait without explanation. What have the doctor's office done to make this wait more pleasant? Magazines? But why are all the magazines for women? I've never understood that. The worst places for that are barbers (er, hair stylists) where women's magazine abound. What about a news magazine? Or sports? I mean, come on.

But what else?

There's a complete lack of imagination when it comes to making patients, who are expected to wait, comfortable. Heck, this happens at restaurants too! You'd think restaurants would want to have too many seats than too few, though the cooks would also have to be increased to handle the load.

The next big change for customer service is handling ubiquitous waiting. How companies do this should lead to improved customer experience. Alas, it's sad how no one even bothers to try.

Do Programmers Need Line Chefs?

If you ever watch Iron Chef, you'll see that the chefs are not competing by themselves. Each typically has two assistants, called line chefs, who are assistants. They are capable enough of doing most tasks. The main chef mainly directs their work. (It's perhaps a mistake to refer to them as sous chef, because the sous chef manages the line chefs, while the executive chef may not even be in the kitchen, having to handle office work).

I was wondering whether programmers might not benefit from this kind of apprenticeship. The main coder would offer up a design, and there would be assistants to do various subtasks. The question is how well the division of labor would occur. One could imagine the main coder doing too little work, and pushing all work to the assistants. But if it worked well, it would seem to be an interesting way to pass information on.

By Georgetown

Two years ago, Illinois played Arizona in the NCAA men's division 1 tournament, known more colloquially as March Madness. They were down 15 points with a little over three minutes to go, and it seemed, a one-loss team was about to get their second loss. Bruce Weber, who had just began coaching Illinois, during the huge coaching merry-go-round that saw Roy Williams leave Kansas for UNC, then Bill Self leave Illinois for Kansas, then Bruce Weber leave Southern Illinois for Illinois. This was magic pulled out of a rabbit's hat. Some Illinois kept coming back, kept scoring points, and eventually, inexplicably, won that game.

Last year, George Mason took on powerhouse UConn. It was classic David vs. Goliath. Mason would take a lead, then see UConn claw back, eventually tying it, forcing it to overtime. When a big-time team like UConn forces you into overtime, that's usually it. Thanks Cinderella, your dance is over. Please take your coat and see your way to the exit. Except this Cinderella put up a fight, threw punches, and kept scoring. And UConn, was felled by the proverbial stone, this one orange, thrown by the kids who could.

Watch enough basketball games, and you begin to get a rhythm of how most games go, how games where one team is able to keep a ten point lead tend to lead to victory. As time clicks to 8 minutes, the team with a significant lead can often see victory within grasp. And so it was with the Tarheels and the Hoyas.

Let's take stock, and look at the situation. College basketball is played in two twenty minute halves, with numerous events causing the clock to stop and start again.

9 minutes 56 seconds. Deon Thompson of the Tarheels makes it 73-65. Jeff Green (Georgetown) misses a two point layup, with Wright making the rebound. Danny Green (Tarheels) misses a 3 point jumper. Jeff Green rebounds. Hibbert (Georgetown) misses two point shot. Deon Thompson gets the rebound, but Sapp (Georgetown) misses a 3 pointer, then Hansborough (UNC) rebounds, and Hibbert eventually misses a 2 pointer, then Ginyard (UNC) rebounds, and a foul is made by Rivers. Two free throws later, and UNC is up 75-65.

The time is 7 min 19 seconds remaining. 2 minutes and 37 seconds elapsed, with Georgetown having four attempts to score, and coming out with zero points.

This doesn't get any prettier, at least, not right away. DaJuan Summers (Georgetown) misses a two pointer. Hibbert misses a two point tip shot. DaJuan misses a three point jumper. Then, it's UNC's turn. Danny Green misses a three point jumper. Wright misses a two pointer. Jeff Green (Georgetown) makes one of two free throws. Georgetown is down 75-66, by 9 points, and there is 6 minutes 2 seconds left.

In nearly four minutes of play, Georgetown has scored 1 point and UNC 2 points. Ten shots were attempted. None made. Ineptitude? Good defense? You decide. Either way, it's drama.

5 minutes 36 seconds and Jessie Sapp (Georgetown) makes 2, and it's 75-68, now a 7 point game. Ellington (UNC) misses a three pointer. Jeff Green makes a two pointer, and it's 75-70. Five point game with a little over five minutes to play. Five points is a nervous lead, especially with five minutes to go. Hibbert is teetering at three fouls. Five and he's out.

Hibbert makes two more points at 4 minutes 22 seconds (score: 75-72), but then must foul at 3 minutes 48 seconds, his fourth. Wright makes both free throws. UNC has been deadly accurate in free throws all evening, eventually making 29 of 34.

Then Georgetown makes two free throws of its own, and it's 77-74 with 3 minutes 15 seconds to go.

Patrick Ewing Jr cuts the lead to 1 by making a two point layup. It's 77-76. But Hansborough, the talented UNC center is fouled by Ewing, and the lead goes back to three, 79-76.

Sapp makes a two pointer to get it back to 1 point, but Hansborough makes two more, to bring the lead up to 3. There's one minute 41 seconds left. Jeff Green misses a two pointer. So does Hansbrough. There's 48 seconds left. Will the three point lead hold? Should Georgetown go for two now, and hope to make up the difference sometime later.

Jonathan Wallace, with an arm in the way, wants it tied, and lets fly from deep. Game tied, 32 seconds to go. It's 81-81.

In ten minutes time, UNC only scores 8 points, while Georgetown scores 16 points, and there were times where Georgetown looked like it would catch up, but kept missing and missing, and UNC would inch ahead and inch ahead, but just not enough.

Overtime was basically a disaster for UNC. UNC would score three points. Georgetown 15 points. An exercise in futility. This team which had scored 50 points in the first half sputtered to a halt, almost through it's own fault.

I was rooting for Georgetown. My brackets have them winning it all, but being down 10-11 points with 10 minutes to go, and I thought there was no way. And Georgetown kept having opportunities, but kept being unable to take advantage. And you know what? I didn't notice that UNC was also not taking advantage. But then, I felt, at any point, they could explode, or at worse, just keep pace, and let that ten point lead be the cushion to victory.

Hibbert, the center that plays a key role for Georgetown was at three fouls much of the way, and even when he picked up his fourth, he managed key blocks and rebounds to keep Georgetown in it. And when they tied, it seemed momentum had changed, and when the lead was 2, then 4, then 6, then 10, and you knew UNC had blown it, that the team that was once John Thompson the third's father's was now his own.

Thompson, junior, the dad, Big John, as they call him, looked forlorn with ten minutes to go. Sorry, son, the road the final four is tough. A few bad calls, otherwise, it'd be all yours boy. But miraculously, Big John saw Little John's team keep in it, and make plays, and cut the lead, and cut the lead, until the final thirty seconds, when Georgetown tied it. And even then, UNC held for the last shot, and lofted a three pointer. And it went.

And went.

And clanged off the back iron.

And there were two seconds left to try to win in regulation.

And then it was overtime.

And then it was Georgetown.

And Big John smiled.

Georgetown was back. Back to the final four. Back in good hands. Back where he had left her so long ago.

It wasn't the miracle of Illinois, nor George Mason's miracle boys over UConn, but it was good. In a tournament that's not had its share of excitement, this was a win worth savoring.

The Jock and the Geek

We're already know that sports commentators are jock wannabes. They grew up admiring athletic "heroes" and hoped to be good at sports, only to discover they were better at writing than rebounding, better at telling a quip than catching a deep pass. In many ways, these are the geeks of the sports world, able to quote game scores from a decade ago, when they, as a child, were raptly paying attention to the big game.

And there's that occasional jock, the athlete that actually made it into the pros, before injury, or old age, simply drove him to do something else, like commentary.

Somewhere, in all of this, someone figured, yes, Sonny Jurgensen, former QB of the Washington Redskins, should be hawking Sun Server solutions. In radio commercials, he utters so much technical jargon that Patrick Stewart would be impressed. And Mike (Greenberg), sports journalist and metrosexual, and Mike (Golic), former defensive NFL dude, peddle Slingbox, allowing them to watch their recorded TV content across the Internet.

Seriously, folks, this is jockdom promoting geekdom. When did that happen? And does it work? The kids who got their hineys kicked by the jocks are now being advertised to by those guys? Oh, but they aren't exactly the same guys, right? Wouldn't it be something to be bullied by Joe Montana and then buy something from him. And was Montana really a bully? I mean, with all that nice 80s hair?

I'm waiting for American Idol winners to start selling server technology or DB technology. Meanwhile, thank you Lebron for telling me I should use Vista.

So Frickin Expensive

A few years ago, I was visiting the University of Washington, the one in Seattle. In particular, I went to visit one Mr. Stuart Reges (the "Reeg" as I like to call him--no, not really, I hardly know the guy). He was an instructor revamping the way intro computer science was being taught at U-Dub, which is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Indeed, as I made the trek to visit him in his office (and drop by a former instructor's office, whose class I hadn't taken in nearly 20 years), I was, alas, somewhat interrupting a meeting with him and Martin Stepp.

He and Marty were in the process of writing a book. You see, Java had become all the rage. Java tends to force object-oriented programming. You can't declare functions outside of a class (you can make it static, I suppose). There are all sorts of roadblocks to prevent you from easily writing "C" in Java.

Not to say you can't work your way around these, but that this kind of procedural programming would just make for icky Java programming.

So many authors took the OO plunge and promoted an idea called "objects first" where objects were taught plenty early. To be fair, this is not an easy task. OOP implies inheritance, and inheritance is hard to teach if you haven't hit the basics of loops, conditional statements, parameter passing. Still, many a book tried it.

UW decided to change to Java around 2002 or so, and they too opted for objects first since this was the approach being advocated. They moved away from C++. Now, you can avoid objects first in C++. Just teach C first, then head into OO land with C++. It's a heady transition, because you think one way to write stuff procedurally, and another to write it in an OO style.

UW then did something (I gather) that was utterly amazing for a computer science department. Realize many a university had either made this transition to Java or were contemplating this change. You'd think most universities have already made the leap, but the extremes aren't really up for it. MIT wanted to ditch Scheme, a popular intro language they had used for twenty years (and some feel, perfectly good to teach from) for a more "modern" language, say, Python. They aren't that gung-ho over Java. The other extreme are so-so computer science departments who just don't want to change. They taught C++ and mastered it in the early 90s, but don't want to bother learning Java. Too much work, don't you know.

The departments that made the switch to Java just did so. No questions asked. But apparently, UW surveyed the students and found that they didn't quite master OO principles as well as the C++ students had. And the department wanted to rectify situations.

I suppose somewhere Stuart Reges enters the picture. He suggests that what's needed is to go back to a procedural way of teaching. OO is too hard to learn right away, and objects first is shown to be a failure (at least, in his estimation).

Somewhere else, Marty joins the picture. Now, Marty's an Arizona kid, so what's he doing up in Seattle? After graduating, he joins the evil empire and works for M$ (I say this somewhat facetiously). A year or so afterwards he says adios, and goes to teaching, which apparently, he has a good deal of experience (at least, TA-wise).

This is all backstory to my eventual point.

The two wrote a book, and the book is frickin expensive. It's nearly 90 bucks! I mean, seriously! Why on earth does it cost this much when a typical technical book is half the length. Something is dreadfully wrong when textbooks have to cost twice as much as their technical brethren.

Stu, Marty, I know you guys can't help it. If you had your druthers, you'd sell it for forty bucks, and you might even double or triple your sales because the average Joe might buy it, instead of the few students who do actually buy it. Heck, I'd like to read it, but I'm not spending 90 bucks to read it!

Now, what I really want to see is someone write a book that is one or two books down the line. Oh, but everyone wants to write an intro book. Heck, I want to write an intro book, but what's really needed is a CS 3 book.

What's that? OK, here's some background. Every university numbers its courses differently. Traditionally, computer science departments believe it takes only two courses to teach intro programming. First semester is syntax and control flow. Second semester is data structures. These are called CS1 (for "computer science 1") and CS2 (you get the idea), respectively.

But first, Stuart is right about OO programming. It is hard to teach, and it does take time. What Java saves, it takes away in other issues (say, JAR files). But there's something more. Software engineering.

In the end, intro books can't teach you that much about programming. It's much like a basketball book teaching you dribbling, scoring, the basic rules, and layups. It ain't gonna be enough when it comes time to playing high-powered bball, where you need to do crossovers, and such.

The problem with writing that kind of book for programming is the average writer of a book isn't a software engineer. They'd be totally guessing as to what it takes to write a book that teaches you how to program. Marty would, I imagine, be able to write such a book because he worked at Microsoft.

But here's the issue. Who'd buy it? You see, here's the other half of the story. Many computer science professors also haven't been software engineers. Even those who teach software engineering. There's something ironic about that. And furthermore, there's enough CS profs who find programming, much like a non-techie CEO, as monkey work. Anyone can do it! But only a few can do it well.

So even if such a book might be valuable, it would only be valuable for there here and now, and you'd have to convince departments who are still stuck on CS1 and CS2 that they should have a CS3 and a CS4, that programming has become tougher, and it requires more than trivial programming exercises to get any good.

Now, that's the book I really want to see.

But I still wouldn't pay ninety bucks for it.

Do The Needful

The British have long had a relationship with India. Initially, it was trade, then a few outposts. By the mid 1800s, the British controlled most of India and would give that up only a century later. In the meanwhile, many Indians learned English of a British variety, but combined with translations from their mother tongue into English. This creates English that is, to American ears, rather bizarre.

The interaction people are likely to have with Indians are with offshoring teams. Perhaps the caste system syncs well with the British class system, or perhaps Indians simply imitate the British English, but it leads to a kind of formalism that is odd.

Let me start off with the phrase that set me off today: please do the needful.

Now, this sounds like, oh I don't know, having sex? Wanking off? (To use a Britishism).

Let met actually put it in context. The better translation, albeit very informal is, "Can you take care of this?". Thus, "The server is down. Please do the needful." is really "The server is down. Can you take care of this?".

Then, there is the phrase "the same" as in "Please find affixed a document. Please comment on the same". The same referring to some previously mentioned item. Now, apparently, the British used to use this phrase "the same" in this context. However, it has fallen out of favor and sounds old-fashioned to a Brit. Nevertheless, it continues to survive to this day in Indian English.

When an Indian is puzzled, he (or she) is likely to say "I have a doubt", but the use of doubt, in this case, means something that is not understood, or is confusing, rather than to question the veracity of something. Thus, you might be reading some software requirements that don't make sense, so you say "I have a doubt" or "Can you clarify my doubt?".

Email is more informal than regular mail, so most people have dispensed with formalities. However, Indians follow a standard based on written mail, and often close their email with "Thanks and Regards" where typical email simply ends with the person's name, if even that.

I suppose the funny thing is that making fun of this would only amuse me. It's the way typical Indians write (from India). Many Indians who come to the US eventually learn to be far more informal, and remove such phrasing from their language.

I am told even a simple question like "How are you?" is typically greeted by "Fine. How are you?". The answer "I'm good" is seen as typically American, and something the average Indian doesn't say.

Now, I should be fair. Americans have their own issues with the English language. The one that I've blogged about is excessive use of superlatives. Thus, when someone does something good (or even satisfactorily), you say "That was awesome!", or even more "This is best thing ever!". Ever is often attached to emphasize just how awesomely great something is. Except it loses its punch because every new shiny thing has this superlative attached.

I have a friend who likes to use "worst pain ever" a little too frequently.

Some of Indian English is pretty much British English, thus, bonnet for hood, trunk for boot, flat for apartment, trousers for pants, indicators for turn signals, and so forth.

I just ordered a book on differences between British and American English (two, in fact). I'd love to see the Indian English version. Alas, Wikipedia will have to do for now.

Oh I forget that the verb "to do" has a slang meaning of "to have sex with", thus to "do the needful" almost sounds like you should "do the needy".

I'm sure there must be some American phrases that drive others crazy. I can already think of adding "ism" and "ize" and "ify", thus verbifying a word is an Americanism to Americanize stuff.

Next time you've forgotten to do something you promised, please read the same, and do the needful.

OK Go, On Treadmills

OK Go hit not only with one, but two viral videos. The first, A Million Ways, was imitated quite frequently, typically by high school students. It didn't require anything special to do, just slavish attention to detail.

OK Go followed that up with Here It Goes Again where they performed on treadmills. This uped the ante. It was cooler than their first video, but nearly guaranteed that few would imitate it with the fervor of their first video.

Yet, here's a high school rendition of that, the trick being to get the right kind of treadmills to do the dance. Although the original video is now about a year old, it's taken that long for an imitation to make it out into YouTube. The quality, both of the video and the dance, isn't great, but given the degree of difficulty, you have to give props to the guys for making a credible attempt.

Data Miner 49er

If you have a contest, they will compete.

A few months ago, I started participating in Yahoo Answers, somewhat off and on. I realized there was only one topic I knew well enough to answer questions: tennis. Most of the time I go there, I find the dumbest questions ever. In classes, they tell you there's no such thing as a dumb question, but it seems like there is. And plenty of it.

But what causes people to answer such insipid questions? The thought that they may gain points and move up the ranks of Yahoo Answers gurus. I thought I was decent at it, but was I answering every day? No. Did I have expertise in more than one topic? No. So there was bound to be someone who knew a lot more.

Wikipedia, that grand experiment of social networking creating content mimicking encyclopedias, is mostly written by a small group. That is, something like 1% writes more than half the content. I may not have the numbers right, but that's about a ballpark figure.

How important is information? With so much of it proliferating around the world, there's starting to be people with an odd skill. Using a combination of RSS feeds and search engines, there are those who have the ability to find "interesting" articles. Flickr, the Web 2.0 poster boy photo site, also ascribes interestingness, a Bush-like phrase if ever there was one, to photos, but more than likely based on how many views it gets, and how many people tag it as favorite. Flickr doesn't reveal the algorithm used to pick interesting photos so people don't try to game it.

However, social news sites like reddit and digg, much like Wikipedia, rely on a handful of people who are obsessive-compulsive about finding interesting articles. Since anyone can do it, even a teen can get into it, and get a bunch of "karma", the currency of goodness at these social sites, the gaming aspect that makes people want to compete in finding articles that people care about.

The reddit community, once a geekish set that looked to interesting topics on programming, has become very American left-leaning, anti-war, anti-Bush. Of course, there's the occasional interesting photo, the transgressions of authority (police harassing "innocent" folks are typically big news), and even a few geeky articles here and there. Sports columns don't really make it to the top.

Does this kind of skill mean anything in the information age? The skill of being a human data miner, finding articles of interest, and having others vote on its relevance? People do it for free now, but would someone pay? To some extent, it already happens as Netscape wanted some diggers to work for them, but is it enough of an industry to hire thousands or millions or is such data acquisition the purview of the very few for the entertainment of the geekish many?

We move into a new era of "information", and the question is what information jobs will look like in the years to come.

Tony's Back

Mr. Tony had been on sabbatical, you see. Seems like they decided he should co-host Monday Night Football. Now, wait, that doesn't mean as much as it used to. Monday Night Football was the brainchild of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle who envisioned playing a game on prime time, that is, 8 PM on the East Coast.

Football fanatics who thought football was over once Sunday concluded were salivating on Monday after work to get back and watch the featured game. There was no other team competing for the attention of rabid fans everywhere.

But this past year, ABC decided to swap, taking its Monday night crew and making its Sunday night crew and letting the ESPN gang take over MNF. That's when they hired Tony Kornheiser, who had once tried out for the role that was given, rather disastrously, to Dennis Miller. Kornheiser, whose used to running a one man show, found himself sharing the booth with insufferable Joe Theismann and bland Mike Tirico. Trying not to create riffs, he didn't insult Theismann, and lost much of his bite.

Since he was travelling while doing MNF, he decided to give up his local radio talk show on SportsTalk 980. When he came back, rather than pick up the program, he decided to continue the program on Washington Post radio. After all, he started his career as a print sports journalist, and garnered most of his fame while at the Washington Post.

To be honest, the radio station is awful. You'd think they would mimic NPR. Sure NPR is a bit snooty, but I can listen to NPR and enjoy it. You can imagine the announcers leading mild Internet protests, sipping lattes, and hugging trees, but at least they don't sound like annoying people you hear on talk radio. Washington Post radio almost sounds like dropouts from DJ school, and is completely grating to listen to.

To be honest, the one thing that saves them is Tony Kornheiser. But how would Tony be with a new cast and crew. Already SportsTalk 980 had suffered some issues. ESPN decided to have its own radio station. The main casualty was Bram Weinstein, the "Mike and Mike" show, and the Dan Patrick show. SportsTalk 980 had to scramble to get other shows, moving the Sports Reporters to the morning, moving The John Thompson show earlier, adding a Brian Mitchell show (where he sounds like second fiddle to his own co-host).

Tony was able to bring Nigel over, but he was two new co-hosts. One of the guys sounds like one of the computer guys who show up on the Kojo Nnamdi show. His voice and sense of humor and sense of rapport just don't line up that well. He's no Andy Polley! There's also some woman who is there, and she sounds horribly grating. I thought this was disastrous, but the good news is that Tony talks so much, has so many other guests, that her few outbursts are tolerable.

Tony's show has always had two personalities: the sports side, and the non-sports side. What made it work was that he would spend a fair bit of time on the non-sports side, whether it be his kids, some anecdote about John Feinstein, or the latest in the Sopranos or American Idol, he would break up sports by talking about other stuff.

Since his move, he's cut down on his sports announcing, which is too bad, though certainly fans have appreciated his talks about American Idol. I liked his balance when he would do sports more. Oh well, such is the change for the new Tony. I still like to listen in the morning, but it would be better if he had better sidekicks.

Irish Eyes

Many holidays whose very name originates with "holy day" seem derived pagan rituals as if Christians had co-opted the holiday for themselves. Consider a few examples. What do most Americans do when they celebrate Christmas? Get a Christmas tree! A tree! Then, they decorate the tree! Oh sure, you get divinity scenes, but really. A tree is a physical object, and you can imagine it originating with some sort of nature worship.

Or Easter? Here's a holiday that has some religious significance. Apparently, on Easter, Jesus came back from the dead. But that's pretty deep stuff. Crucification. Resurrection. What's the imagery we have for Easter? Bunny rabbits. Easter eggs. Soo cuute!

Or Halloween. Halloween seems really pagan, but really, it does have some religious significance. An alternate name for Halloween is "All Hallow's Eve" which is also know as "All Saints' Eve". Indeed, November 1 is known as "All Saints Day", though it's hardly known in the US. November 2 is known as "All Souls' Day" which seems to be closer to what Halloween is all about, a kind of celebration of the dead. There is some belief that this holiday originates with pagan rituals too.

But St. Patrick's Day, held each March 17. How many people observe this (at least in the US, where I'm writing this) with any religious fervor? Ask anyone about this holiday and many will say it's all about Irish songs, wearing green, and of course, excessive drinking. Perhaps like many Judeo-Christian-Islamic holidays which are rather downbeat, people prefer to embrace fun holidays. Heck, what's a little (or a lot) of drinking?

And the pinching thing for not wearing green? Where did that come from? Too weird.

I was also thinking about holidays in the US. The standard vacation for Americans is two weeks. But there are two additional weeks (0 days, really) for holidays. These holidays are bunched up at the end of the year. Typically, two for Thanksgiving, two for Christmas, one for New Year's Day. That leaves four more days.

Three of the four days are typically Memorial Day in May, Independence Day in July, Labor Day in September. There's a huge gap between Jan 1 and Memorial Day, so usually companies want to observe some holiday in between.

A favorite is Martin Luther King's Birthday because he symbolizes the civil rights struggle in the US. But his observed birthday is quite early in the year, usually two weeks into January. There is President's Day, which was a combination of Washington and Lincoln's Birthday, though no one particularly thinks of that as really important (it's in mid-to-late February). There is Good Friday, the Friday before Easter, which is in April, but that's kinda late in the year.

A great holiday that sits right in the middle is, yes, St, Patrick's Day. Mid March. Perfect!

Except it's not for a variety of reasons. First, it's a holiday most associated with one country, Ireland. Well, that's fine, if you're in Ireland, but in the multicultural US, why pick Ireland? What about the Italians, the Chinese, not to mention African Americans, Latinos. Worse still, as a holiday, it's a bit too religious and not religious enough, being a Christian holiday (like Christmas), but most associated with, well, guzzling beer. It's nowhere near as uplifting at MLK, nor as historical to the country as President's Day. And there's been historical issues with gay and lesbians wanting to join the St. Patrick Day parade, where they've been restricted in many communities.

So another St. Patty's Day comes and goes, and as a party day, perhaps it only rivals New Year's Day, and perhaps even more excessive.

Think about next time you imbibe that green beer.

Don't Know Much About History

I don't read history much. Indeed, my fill of history is the same as it is for many Americans. That's right, movies. Recently, I watched David Fincher's Zodiac. I didn't know much about this Bay Area serial killer. Not exactly a topic that comes up much in history courses. So what I learned comes films like his, and of course, reading follow-up reviews.

Or 300. What sounds like a hitting average in baseball or the ultimate in bowling is really based on Spartans who helped defend Greece against invading Persians. Sure, a few liberties were taken. Make the enemy stand nine feet tall. Downplay the homoerotic aspects of Spartan life. Make Spartans seem like the ultimate warriors.

Even so, reading material surrounding 300 gave me insight into history I knew little about. Sure, I knew about the warrior state of Sparta, but not much more than that. I didn't know about the lifelong training or how a city-state like Sparta could evolve.

While I don't plan on seeing 300, reading about the history is indeed fascinating.

So I don't know that much about history, and any film is likely to take licenses to make it more dramatic, to delineate good from evil, or to give us a rooting interest. I can live with that, provided someone is willing to fill in the real details later. It may not be the best way to learn history, but it's the way that's working for me.

The Host

It's not often a director tries to do a modern day Godzilla, but that's essentially what Bong Joon-Ho has done. Now, I don't recall if I've ever seen the original Godzilla, though my recollection is that the creature is spawned from nuclear blasts, and then terrorizes Tokyo. There's some subplot involving a scientist sympathetic to the creature, I think.

Unlike, say, King Kong, where the beast was very much a character, perhaps even the antagonized protagonist, the monster, which appears like some oddish lizard, is very much a monster. It seems to grab people and pluck them into some location in some sewer. For some reason, Asian sewers are much larger than American ones.

People have likened the film to Little Miss Sunshine because of similar family dynamics: an irascible grandfather, what appears to be two brothers and a sister, and the daughter of one of the brothers. She gets kidnapped by the creature and the family, once they find she's alive, mounts a rescue.

Bong is able to mine some comedy out of this as well, especially in an early scene, when pandemonium strikes and people are running all about as they are wont to do in a monster flick. Father, Gang-Gu, grabs daughter and they run. Using slow-mo effects, the father runs and then the daughter comes into focus, except it's some gawky girl in glasses, and hey, that's not his daughter, then her father comes running aside.

Or in a scene that resembles Korean New Orleans post-Katrina, the family is in what amounts to be something like a gymnasium, and are distraught at the daughter who they think has died. The outpouring of misery which starts as touching becomes vaguely ridiculous. The college-educated brother blames his brother for not protecting his daughter, the overhead view of the four family members bickering while crying has got to be a directorial comedic triumph.

For some reason, the film also reminded me of Pan's Labyrinth, for the little girl's pluck in dire circumstances, and the kind of ick that you would think would terrify girls, but which both these film's heroines put up with. Not nearly as gritty as Pan's Labyrinth, The Host is much more light-hearted. In its way, there's even element of Cellular, the high concept film, that asks, how much can you do with a cell phone as your primary plot point.

Through it all, there is political commentary, including the disregard of Americans for the environment, to families that must steal food just to survive. Its ending is a bit surprising and touching too, taking a direction that doesn't feel too cheap nor too forced.

Go watch The Host. It's a hoot.

The Fairer Sex

What do you think about sex? If you're perhaps a healthy not too horribly unattractive person, you admit to yourself that, yes, sex is important to you, that as much as you like watching movies, eating dinners out, going out shopping, that sex is kind of a deal-breaker. No sex means no relationship. It's petty, but kind of a biological imperative. You don't try to explain those urges. Indeed, you feel it's your right to claim a little sumthin sumthin.

You may wonder where I'm heading with this.

I have a friend and he said he was possibly getting a new addition to the family. Now, usually when someone says that, well, they probably don't mean a kid. In this case, my friend and his wife planned to get a dog. Now, they already have a dog and a cat. The dog, based on the name, is female. They're not so concerned with the gender of the other dog. One of them they're considering is male. The other is female.

Heck, the ads for the dogs claim one of the dogs is a tad overweight. Who would have thought? And owners, I suppose, try to keep their pets in shape. I suppose that's important.

But the one thing that pet owners generally don't care about is whether their pets are doing the nasty. I know. Such an 80s term. The "nasty". Something rather Janet Jackson about that.

I mean, most owners that get two pets generally worry about the loneliness of the pets. They need friends. But sex partners? A little conjugal visit? Not so much.

Indeed, if pets were to proliferate like proverbial bunnies, the country would be in trouble, overrun by unwanted pets. Thus, many pets are neutered (or I suppose the PC term may be spayed, and the less PC term, snip-snipped).

So how important is sex to the well-being of pets? And is the well-being of pets important? Why do people have pets after all? For their own well-being. So if people wouldn't do without sex, why should pets do without?

I'm sure I don't understand this topic at all, never having been truly a pet owner (I did live with a friend's pet cat once). It just occurred to me today, and I thought I'd raise this issue up with my faithful readers.

Almost Famous

They say (these mysterious "they") that thousands of blogs are being created each day. Imagine that! Skipping all the splogs (you know, nasty spam blogs! Stealing my precious, precious thoughts), there are millions of blogs out there. You would think, with so many people rambling about this and that, no one would actually pay attention.

Certainly not Aaron Swartz!

So I must say, Aaron's name resides at the periphery of my mind, that I probably had seen him before I had known about him. I had bought Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks because I had thought it would be about the Fog Creek interns, and perhaps about the Fog Creek Software Development Methodology, the secret sauce that makes Copilot run.

And then, there was this peculiar detour. It was Paul Graham land, and we were introduced to another group of lads, this time building one of those social networking websites of sort, something called reddit.

But you know, where was the money in that? I mean, c'mon, Copilot is where the money is! Joel Spolsky! Genius!

And amongst the Y Combinator awardees (you have to admit, Y Combinator has got to be the most seriously geeky company name you could think of) was Aaron Swartz. Now, put in a lineup, and I wouldn't be able to tell him from anyone else. I mean, I might be able to distinguish him from, say, Yaron Guez fella ("owned!") through a process of elimination even though their names kinda sound the same, right? Aaron. Yaron.

Who would have thought that I'd be sitting and reading reddit on a daily basis. No RSS feeds for me, no thank you. I'll let the wisdom of crowds direct my choices, plus a one line summary that is the "extreme" version of the elevator pitch. You've got one line to get my interest ("Best line evah!") before I decide whether to click on the link.

But getting the attention of Aaron's like getting the attention of Oprah, right? I mean, surely he's not looking up every reference to him on the Internet. I mean, he's an important guy. Web pages to work on. Pet projects. Chessboxing.

Oh, but look, he commented on my blog. Mine! And that makes me famous. That's right. Me. I'll never clean this blog again. Say, Aaron, did you know your boy, Paul Graham used to hang out with Robert Morris? Yes, that Robert Morris. He, of the Internet work of, when was it, 1988? Robert was a grad student at Cornell, the son of a security expert, and liked hacking around, so he wrote a worm, and lo and behold, it got out of control.

The computer science department at Cornell kicked him out. This was one of those cyber crimes that people had no idea how to handle. So Robert had to do some community service. I believe he had to teach some programming. Solid punishment that. But it's OK, he probably taught them COBOL and said, people, you'll thank me in 12 years (12 + 1988).

But I figure writing a blog entry like this is only going to work a few times, and yet I lack a really funny joke to end this ("what do you know, a talking muffin!").

So I end with a challenge. Write that next piece of wunderbar software, the one that changes people's lives, the one that makes people say, "What will Aaron think of next?" or "I see your Swartz is as big as mine. Now let's see how well you handle it."

And truly great things will happen.

It is your destiny.

Why Homework Divides Us

One topic that seems to divide parents, perhaps even more so than corporal punishment (i.e., spanking), is the necessity of homework. I can imagine how this happens. Little Jane and little Johnny come home, and they complain that they hate homework. The parents see how miserable they are, and so who's to blame? The school or their kids? More than ever, parents side with their kids, blaming schools for torturing their kids.

So there's been a move to eliminate homework, that what kids need more of is play and to learn naturally, because of course, learning naturally is what kids do best. Were it not for the mind-numbing work school provides that beats the joy of learning from our kids, we'd have a bunch of little Einsteins running around.

Indeed, this view is perhaps very stereotypically American. I suspect Asian parents would laugh at this, claiming that American parents are weak, letting their kids bully them into doing something that they don't want. Happiness, after all, is the main goal, the main hope that everyone wants for their children. Except this thought, as universal as it is in the US, is not so universal in the world. Asian parents often prize their kid's ability to adapt to society as a bigger goal than hedonistic happiness.

I know I sound biased, ready to dismiss this idea out of hand. But not true. I'm actually willing to give the idea a try (if I had children).

But here's another point that's silly. Most of these parents when confronted with the idea that their kids won't learn and will contribute to the stereotypically stupid Americans claim that all we need to do, much like balancing the budget by removing "pork", is to give meaningful homework.

And this is what I quibble with. What if your kid simply doesn't want to think very much. Are your kids really being pelted by things that are rote and dumb them down? Maybe you should take the next step. Maybe your kid isn't so keen on learning new things, no matter how attractive that idea may seem. After all, the main premise of learning is that you have to master something that is initially very confusing.

Yet, parents seem to lack any better ideas on how to make HW more interesting to their kids. They place the blame on schools, and then they decide let's just remove HW altogether. Ultimately, I feel, they let their emotions rule. They want to be good parents. They see their kids complaining. They side with their kids.

Fine, then home school your kids. Put your money where your mouth is. I understand that we need more creative educators, but frankly we don't pay educators enough to do that. Whereas parents have a great parent kid ratio, schools lack this ratio, and thus kids are at a disadvantage if they don't get support.

You know what advice they tell people to become better writers? Write! Of course, they mean write intelligently. Get good feedback. Begin to learn what works and what doesn't work.

You want to know what it takes to be a good programmer? Program! Make errors. Learn to overcome errors. Cut and paste errors. Stupid typos. Missed logic. Sometimes we learn by failure until our brain finally figures this out or figures that out. Some figure it out quicker than others, but it comes with time and yes desire to focus on what it takes to get better.

The funny thing is that we don't have this attitude with sports, mostly because people can opt out of sports. Thus, Pistol Pete Maravich, whose dad, Press, made him practice hours a day, was able to make shots no one else could. But had his classmates been "forced" to do this, they may have cried what torture they were going through, how it was unnecessary to practice, how it is draining their love of sports.

In this scenario, we might rightly conclude that the kid simply doesn't like sports. But we don't seem prepared to make the same conclusion of our kids when we say maybe the kids don't like to learn. They want to play all the time, be happy all the time, be absolved of all responsibility.

But this isn't the conclusion parents want to hear. They want to believe in a utopia where their kids will learn if the environment is just right. And I don't doubt, with a lot of hard work, one can make such an environment, but don't think that the solution to the problem is simply stop giving homework.

You know, kids also complain they are beaten up in classes, that other kids make fun of them. Why is nothing ever mentioned of this? That kids are cruel to other kids. That they make fun of others to make themselves feel better about themselves. And yet, ask some of the brightest kids what it was like growing up, and many will tell you these stories of other kids who were cruel. Does this mean being the victim has benefits after all? Why don't teachers monitor this?

Oh but that's no fun to discuss.

HD Radio

Where did this name come from? HD Radio? High-def? I mean, come on. Radio is inherently an aural medium, meant for the ears?

What's usually meant by, say, HD TV is high definition, which means higher resolution, more pixels, etc. It's also implied that high-def means digital, that is, the information is passed as 0's and 1's rather than as analog signals, and presumably with enough error correction so you don't miss anything.

This is where HD radio is "HD". It's digital. It's sent out as bits, and can, in principle, like the CD, give you high quality experience compared to vinyl.

Why not CD-quality radio? Or simply, digital radio?

Sigh.

March Madness 2007

When people think of the purity of amateur sports, they think of college basketball, and they think of the NCAA Men's Tournament, dubbed "March Madness". The media loves a story like George Mason, a team many felt was undeserving of a tournament bid last year. This team that could knocked off three former champions in UNC, Michigan State, and UConn.

Of course, college basketball, much like college football, is big business. For the next few weeks, office pools will spring up throughout the country making people care about the Winthrop, Davidson, VCU, or more likely, a big school alma mater. Outside the periphery are people who don't care. That's perfectly legitimate.

There's a sense that college athletes should be students first, and athletes second. If there were a viable way for the NBA to create leagues comparable to the minor leagues for post high-school students, many kids would likely opt out of college. Of course, many colleges, with administrators who often feel a passion for sports that they don't feel for education, would lament losing college sports, which they feel encourages alumni to give money and feel a kinship with all other alumni.

Indeed, many of these kids would never see the inside of a college were it not for basketball. John Thompson, Jr., who is the elder Thompson (his son is the current coach of Georgetown), argued that any kind of awareness of higher education was good for these kids, even if they never got a degree. If they found success in pro sports, they would surely educate their children, much as John Thompson the 3rd headed off to Princeton, much like James Brown (the football announcer, not the "I feel good" guy) went to Harvard when he had his choice of universities who wanted a college player with Brown's skill.

But somehow television is able to create this mythos around college basketball. If there's any certainty to the tournament, it's that there will be upsets. Teams that you wouldn't expect to win come from nowhere and defeat better known teams, and suddenly the thoughts of how these teams got to this place, with millions of dollars paid to coaches, but none to the players, is hidden.

And more than likely, I'll be going along with the frenzy, wondering how my skills of prediction will fare this year and not thinking about why there isn't the same passion devoted to education.

I would occasionally tell my students, back in the day, about how it would be nice if there were this pressure on them to succeed, to hear other students boo when they don't give it their all, to call them bums and worse, all because they so desperately wanted them to succeed. Sports, perhaps more than anything else the university does, pushes success and rising to the high expectations. Unlike sports, however, education doesn't have the clarity of vision of sports.

Most athletes probably understand what they can or can not do. Education, on the other hand, is a much more mysterious process, where confusion reigns supreme. Students often lack the tools to make themselves better students. They don't see what the bright students do, unlike, say a star athlete when he makes a dunk, or she makes a no-look pass. When Pete Maravich would practice for hours, he knew what he wanted to achieve. Not always the same for those trying to get a degree.

I've filled out a bracket. I'll catch a few games. And for a few weeks, I'll probably put this thought of education somewhere else.

And maybe I shouldn't.

When Worlds Collide

OK, technically nothing so melodramatic as "worlds". I was surfing the web as I am wont to do looking up stuff about Brian Postow, a fella I once went to grad school with (with whom I went to grad school). I suppose we taught a few classes together as well.

Somehow this lead to one Mr. Aaron Swartz reminiscing about the first time he posted to Usenet. The discussion, so I'm lead to believe, is about Beakman's World vs. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Somehow, in this first post, he references Brian Postow, and I know it's the same guy because of the machine he posted from. This was 1994 mind you, over 10 years ago. To be fair, Aaron's post is from 2002, nearly 5 years ago, so he probably only vaguely recalls this journey down memory lane.

I don't really know Aaron at all except that he's one of the reddit guys and I read reddit daily. I suppose I saw him in the Aardvark'd video when the documentary took a Bizarro twist and began to (briefly) chronicle the Y Combinator guys in the early stages of reddit.

I'm sure Aaron didn't know Brian from anyone, nor did Brian somehow make this connection, but here I am to unify these two gentleman in ways unforeseen.

And for what purpose?

Only that it amuses me.

That is all.

Hear Me Roar

At one point, I found I wasn't really listening to women singers. For some reason, like women comedians, they weren't doing it for me. But lately, All Songs Considered have been having some women singers that have been pretty good.

In particular, my last two acquisitions by women singers, Cortney Tidwell and Heartless Bastards (the lead singer is a woman) have been pretty good. I'm sure that my listening still favors men to women by maybe 10 to 1. I wonder how typical that is. I'm sure male dominated bands outnumber women bands by similar ratios, so the odds may simply work out that way.

Well, this is going to be short, as I have little to write =).

Mais Non, Mason

George Mason was the Cinderella team last year. They didn't win their conference's tournament. Naysayers said the CAA didn't deserve a second bid.

Then, Mason went and beat three teams that had recently won the NCAA tournament in recent years, by knocking out Michigan State, UNC, and Connecticut, only to lose in the final four to eventual winner, Florida. The UConn game, in particular, was amazing. While the Patriots leads the game, Connecticut managed to tie the game, and people figured they were going to win. After all, that's what the big boys do. They got knocked down, but odds are, they win if they can get back up. And yet, Mason stuck it out, punch for punch, and dominated UConn, refusing to get rattled by the team with superior talent but not superior heart.

This year, which featured one senior, did not do so well, and it came down to needing to win their conference tournament if they were going to get into the big dance, and then George Mason looked like the Mason of old, making it to the finals despite 14 losses in the season. And with three minutes left, they had a five point lead. A good experience team would have held that lead.

But VCU would have none of that. Eric Maynor would score to tie and key steals would eventually let VCU take the lead, and then George Mason would fall back 4 points, then 6 points, and then time simply wouldn't be there. Jim Larranaga knew he didn't have the team last year. Had they won, more than likely, Mason would have lost early. This was not likely to be a team that was going very far.

Tony Kornheiser points out that there's not much likelihood that any team will pull off a Mason this year. Getting to the final four for a mid-major is indeed an incredible feat, rarely seen, and Larranaga milked it for all it was worth with chants like "CAA stands for Connecticut Assassin Association" and they were going to knock of Jim Calhoun's team.

Tony's probably right. Teams like Davidson and Winthrop are trying to be the next Mason, but really, an elite eight appearance is as much as a good mid-major team is likely to hope for.

I suppose we can hope against hope that it will be great again. I, for one, like the underdog stories. I've heard radio commentary that claims the opposite, that audiences prefer to see the big teams do well, and it shows by the numbers, where as sports commentators love underdog stories.

And the great news is, especially in the first weekend, you're going to get these upsets. People's brackets are going to be messed up.

This year, though, it won't be George Mason messing up the brackets. These Patriots had their chance, but for a few minutes, and the excellent play of one Eric Manor of VCU, it's going to be VCU that represents the CAA and tries to see if they've got enough magic to propel them a round or two.

How Jared Fared

From time to time, I check in on the blog of Jared Richardson. I met Jared at a No Fluff, Just Stuff traveling tour about a year and a half ago. Jared has written a book on what it takes to "ship it", the phrase software developers utter when they're ready to ship their product (often to comic effect, far before it's ready to go).

Apparently, Jared was tagged and not in the usual Flickr way, but in something akin, it seems, to spinning the bottle. One must reveal five facts that few people know. It seems Jared spent sometime out in K-town, or Knoxville as everyone else calls it. Now, I spent most of my formative years (basically the years before college) in Oak Ridge, which is a stone's throw from Knoxville. Both were mentioned in a Simpson's episode where the gang (Bart, Nelson, Milhouse, and Martin) decides to head to Knoxville to attend the World's Fair. In the meanwhile, Lisa spends time with her dad, and then has to figure out how to get Bart back to good old Springfield.

Having grown up near Knoxville, I would say I was completely sheltered from the town. I didn't have a car growing up, didn't have friends who thought about visiting Knoxville much, and didn't know much of its history. My brother has, since then, figured out a little more, and we've visited some parts of the "old town".

Knoxville's fame, outside of the World's Fair, probably comes from U.T. which, in Volunteer country, is University of Tennessee, not University of Texas. Neyland Stadium competes with the stadium at the University of Michigan for how many people it can hold (a little over 100,000 last I heard).

Despite the wild success of women's basketball, Knoxville has always been about college football. Only recently has Nashville become the home of the Titans (and Vince Young) has the state seen professional sports (oh yeah, I guess there is the NBA Memphis Grizzlies).

Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, though his family left when he was quite young. And yes, Johnny Knoxville was also born in Knoxville, though Knoxville, as you might guess, wasn't his birth name.

What's fascinating about nearly any place you go is that many other people are living there too, living out their lives, with experiences that may or may not mirror your own. I would occasionally think, when I was in college, about how many other lives are passing by as the same time, but at some other displaced location on the campus, or in hundreds of other campuses across the country, and then also back in time, the sum of experiences that have walked the hallowed grounds that I have walked (well, hallowed blacktop, anyway).

College, especially, try to create a sense of place, typically through athletics, but even other means (say, through arts) to draw people together, even as the experiences may be completely divergent.

So even if Jared and I share a common place, it may not be all that common, and certainly I wouldn't have thought of it had I not met Jared, and had he not had a blog, and had he not been tagged, and had he not dredged this memory of life in Knoxville up.

How has Jared fared? Pretty well, it seems.

Bollywood Trends

In many ways, Bollywood still aims at a lowest common denominator, escapist fare that the average Indian can watch and be entertained by. Serious dramas, while they exist, are not that popular, and certainly, movies that aim to be different or baffling are hardly made (to be fair, there are some arty directors).

Because India is fairly puritanical by Western standards, you won't see a great deal of things that come in Western cinema. For example, kissing is almost unseen in Indian cinema. Only recently, within the last year or so, you get to see a kiss that might last a few seconds, and often lacking some deal of passion. It's intriguing because the dancing and clothing are suggestive.

Despite actresses wearing provocative Western clothing, people seem to realize these are films and that women are expected not to imitate the women shown in these films. It's intriguing because these films talk about women in love with men (and vice versa) even as India (really the subcontinent, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) is one of the few countries of the world where arranged marriages are still quite common.

Here are some of the conservative attitudes that simply don't extend in film. Single women, especially under 20, are expected to not be alone with men. Certainly, having unmarried women and men living together is very uncommon. It goes without saying that premarital sex is also much more uncommon among Indians. Because of arranged marriages, the importance of having one's potential mate be acceptable to parents is of paramount importance. One is expected to have quite close relations with one's parents.

I was talking to a coworker who said he had a relative in the US (an uncle), but he had basically cut off contact with his family and not even attended his father's funeral. Basically, such alienation usually means such a person is disowned.

The conservatism goes to other issues. Beer and alcohol, so common in the US, Europe, and Asia, is considered semi-taboo in India. The general perception is that alcohol leads to wild uncontrolled behavior and certainly one wouldn't drink in front of children. Restaurants often segregate the parts that serve alcohol so that families don't see people drinking alcohol.

Women are expected to be even more conservative. Women should not smoke, nor drink. Now, even as I'm saying a bunch of things that seem to Western standards very restrictive, Indians perceive this as creating a society that is free from some of the worries Westerners have. Indeed, this predominantly Hindu society has aspects that would be far more acceptable to Christian conservatives (minus the religion part) here.

To be fair, young men seem to be pretty polite as a whole, which may have to do with the hierarchical society, where lower castes tend to have to be polite and accommodate higher castes.

The one avenue that Bollywood is willing to push the limit is that women can dress sexy, be somewhat independent, and can give the impression that love conquers all. Parents seem missing in the few films I've seen (well, there is the mother in Krssh!).

Nudity, for example, is still highly taboo, both men and women. Revealing clothing is still not permissible (a bare midriff is fine, but showing too much bosom is a no-no). On the other extreme, you don't see much violence either. Although Western films are shown in India, I wonder if the violence is edited out. Some stuff, say, Scorsese's films are so luridly violent that one could hardly imagine it being shown in India.

I imagine, for example, a film where there is a city boy and country girl that meets, but due to their relationship (maybe she tries to pick up Western habits), she is eventually stoned to death by her villagers for behaving improperly. Are they willing to make a film like that which criticizes very conservative attitudes? As Indians tell me "in the cities, things are progressing", what's being left out is that the countryside, where more conservative Indians live, represents what many people think of as true India.

Indeed, it's not the case (I believe) that the people who live in cities look at the countryside with disdain, as they might in the US, where liberals in large cities look at rural America with disdain. The countryside represents a kind of ideal India, even as India is being transformed by technology.

As much as I'm told that things are changing, my own experience is that it's not changing as fast as people would say, though certainly it's probably quite quick by Indian standards. I believe the reason I'm told this (though I've hardly traveled enough to be certain) is because those who are trying to be modern stick out so much that one tends to overcount them.

To be fair, do movies affect the way people dress or act?

When Hollywood was in its heyday, during the 40s and 50s, actors lead lives that were seen as exotic. They got married and divorced. They lead hedonistic lives. The rest of America did not follow this lifestyle, though by the time the 60s and 70s rolled around, they did.

Will Bollywood transform India? Right now, it seems that it can transform it somewhat, but because parents still control much of what their children do, you expect that the changes are going to be slower.

Now, this begs the question. Do the changes make sense? If India becomes more Westernized, will people lament that women are now not marrying, leading independent careers, acting more sexy, forcing men to have to learn how to meet women? I think if you ask the average Indian about trying to go on a date with a woman, it would petrify them. They wouldn't know how to act or what to do. In a sense, men in their 20s act a bit more like men in their pre-teens in the US, hanging out with other males, and girls hanging out with other girls. People like the system as is, and it means they have a strong sense of family and to do right by the family.

Thus, family values, this "Christian" value is seen much more strongly in a Hindu society, and that the film industry, so popular in India, is possibly trying to erode this, with questionable success.

The key, I think, will actually be the Internet. You know what the Internet meant for many males in the US. Yes, porn. Will India attempt to block this porn? How will it deal with this (even as many of the models are going to be white or black or Southeast Asian, but not Indian?).

India is old and new at the same time, and it will be interesting to see how it deals with all the societal pressures it feels from the outside, and from within its own film industry.

What's Your Sign?

In 2003, Bong Joon-ho directed a film called Memories of Murder about a serial killer in Korea that killed women in a rural town. Initially, the film seems very much about the simpleton village cops assigned to the case, who use violence to extract confessions. A city cop is assigned to the case and he seems far more meticulous, and it seems certain that he will eventually discover who the criminal.

The crimes took place in Korea, so most Americans do not have a historical memory of this event. Indeed, you can watch the film as fiction.

As the film progresses, you begin to discover that they aren't any closer to finding the killer, and even the city cop, so sure his superior training will discover the culprit begins to crumble when that certainty becomes far less so. His frustration causes him to resort to some of the same tactics his country cops use, and in a bit of irony, it's the country cop that must stop the city cop when he threatens someone that has been found to be innocent.

The film winds up twenty years later (the incidents occurred in the 80s) when the cop who is no longer a copy passes by the fields where the bodies were initially found, and decides to take a look. He meets with a little girl, who says that she met someone who said he was there because he had done something a long time ago. Intrigued, he asks her what he looked like. She said, he looked ordinary.

Ultimately, that film details the frustration of trying to solve murders, and really is at the heart of David Fincher's Zodiac. Set in the late 60s, the Zodiac sends puzzles and messages about the various murders he's performed.

It's mostly about the cops who try to find the killer, and Robert Graysmith, a puzzle addict and cartoonist for the local paper who becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Apparently, reality and good narrative are often at odds with one another. Ostensibly, the film is also about the struggle to find who did it, but rather than handle it like Memories of Murder, Fincher offers us a suspect, even if there's evidence to show the guy didn't do it.

Fincher was noted, like Kubrick, for taking many takes, upwards of 70. He had said the one thing he hated most was earnestness in acting. This must have been a chore working with Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr., whose now making a habit of playing substance abusing characters (see A Scanner Darkly). Pun intended.

Indeed, even though it was Gyllenhaal who complained about the numerous takes, you'd have to imagine that it was Downey who Fincher had to keep from acting too smug.

The film clocks in at two hours and forty minutes, and although it never quite feels overly long, it doesn't move at a quick clip either. It's actually fairly funny for a Fincher film, though not wild guffaws, nor even the witty bon mot. At one point, Gyllenhall (playing Robert Graysmith, who eventually wrote a book on the subject which the movie is based on) asks "Do you like it when they call you 'Shorty'?" and he replies "Do you like it when they call you 'retard'?" and he goes :They don't call me that!" and he goes "Sure.".

Fincher has a talent for inserts. To show time elapsing, he has the construction of the Transamerica building, perhaps the most well known structure outside of Golden Gate of San Francisco. This is done in time-lapsed, and clearly is an intriguing CG effect, given that it was likely they did not have any original footage. There's a scene where bits of handwriting are written as if the screen were windows. Fincher has an overhead view of a car, as it turns around, in some homage to Hitchcock.

Fincher gives us a view of the 70s that feels somewhat authentic, but without the glaring effects, like another Gyllenhaal film, Brokeback Mountain where gaudy hairstyles and remote controls tell us it's the 70s at the Texas household of his wife and her powerful affluent father.

He bookends the film with Hurdy Gurdy Man. The creepiness of this song is also used in another film that start Bryan Cox called L.I.E. about the kid of a negligent father who befriends a pederast, played by Cox. In Zodiac, Cox plays Melvin Belli, a famous lawyer of the day, who also happened to be in a Star Trek episode. This comment is thrown in offhandedly (I had thought Belli was played by Martin Landau, but then I recognized Cox's voice), and it turns out he played Gorgan in And The Children Shall Lead, one of my least favorite Star Trek episodes, noted only for the amusing name of the Chinese kid, Tsing Tao.

The lead suspect posited by Zodiac is also a pederast, so it lead me to wonder if there's anything in particular about Hurdy Gurdy Man that would make it be used in both these films. But the lyrics seem rather simplistic, and offer no deep or creepy insight.

As a narrative, Fincher has made a compelling film, but it shows that reality can often mar a narrative. Graysmith, for example, wasn't the only one who was obsessed with this mystery, but it would have been distracting to offer a second protagonist who was also engrossed by the story, even though that's what happened in reality.

For some reason, I felt that the should have had Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film. But maybe, Hoffman has been in too many films like this where he plays the baddie.

I'd rate this as a B+, intriguing for Fincher's restraint, trying to tell the story of the need to know the truth, rather than the kind of racheting doom that he's more known for (see Panic Room), and making for an interesting telling of a period of time I was unaware of ("I am not Avery"), but perhaps not as gripping as it could have been.

Whole Burgers

Supermarket killed the local mom-and-pop food locale. Or something like that. Once upon a time, you might get your food by going to butcher here, or some farmer dispensing veggies there. Who knows? This was far before my time, and all I've known are supermarkets.

Supermarkets are big business, and unlike, say, Macy's or Nordstrom's, there aren't many supermarkets reaching for the high end. Indeed, places like Shopper's reach for the low-end. Whole Foods and places like it (Trader Joe's) are trying to reach for the more discriminating market, in particular, folks for a hankering for organic foods. The idea is that supermarkets sell cheap, inferior food, while places like Whole Foods sell higher quality food.

Burgers used to be like supermarkets. If you asked someone what they thought about burgers, they'd refer you to McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's. Not exactly stellar examples of burgers.

Now there's a market for high-end burgers, which sounds almost ludicrous, like high-end hot dogs or high-end soul food. But people would tell you that a backyard burger made on some Memorial Day weekend was far better than a burger you'd get at the golden arches.

But here comes Five Guys, a chain in the DC area, or Fuddrucker's, or Cheeburger Cheeburger.

I decided to give Urban Burger a try. Apparently, there is some chain by that name, but this one is an offshoot of Urban BBQ. There's some irony in the name Urban Burger, since it's situated in one of those mini strip-malls that seem to dot the suburban landscape. Somehow, Suburban Burger doesn't quite cut it, sounding like soccer moms, and cookie cutter housing for the 2.5 kid family. Urban sounds hip, rough, edgy. Something you'd want in a burger, right?

Of course, any reasonable burger place has to realize not everyone likes beef, nor chicken, nor even meat, and so Urban Burger gives you all three (beef, chicken, veggie) as choices, and a choice of sauce, and toppings. The burgers are physically bigger than the ones you find at Five Guys, but then, they cost more too. You're likely to spend about 7.50 on a burger, then add drink and a side, and you're over ten bucks.

I had an Angus burger topped with a two-alarm chili, which as far as chilis go, was pretty mild. Still, compared the Urban BBQ, which is a tiny place, Urban Burger is more spacious, so I could spread out a copy of the Post, while watching some sports out of the corner of my eye.

You know how it is. Another week and there's March Madness.

I'm not what you'd call a burger guy. I eat Five Guys, and it's fine. I don't feel the need to go out when I'm not with company. I might do the same with Urban Burger, though it falls more in line with what I want in a burger (more choices or non-burgers). I know there's the mantra to do one thing and one thing well, but I want a few choices, even at a burger place.

So if you're ever up in the Rockville area, give it a try. There's even a wine and beer store nearby that's open on Sundays, as I got some Dogfish Head there (a bit pricey, alas). You can't beat being able to buy alcohol on a Sunday.

The Pursuit of Intellygence

The plot of Gattaca is basically this. Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, in a future where genetic engineering has split the society into castes, those who have genetic engineering to whom everything is given, and the rest who have lowly jobs. In such a society, Freeman wants to be an astronaut, to go out into space, but his lot in life won't let him go. Yet, he is so driven that he will do anything to make it out there.

The story is basically about desire vs. innate ability, and in this film, it's argued that desire can win out over all. This is highlighted by a (yes) swimming race between Vincent, and his brother, and how he managed to win because he was willing to give it his all to win.

And this became the debate that some coworkers and I had. It amounted to whether desire was more than enough to beat innate intelligence. Before I discuss the merits of the debate, I should tell a story. One fellow said that he had seen a documentary about Einstein, a man he claimed had average intelligence, but superior desire, and therefore, his drive helped him to great accomplishments. Thus, drive could always win.

Having said that, Einstein's IQ has been estimated but apparently never measured, and numbers range from 160 to the mid 200s, which means brighter than the public to genius.

The problem is what is intelligence, and we never quite addressed what intelligence was. Roughly, it seemed to be "how fast can someone learn X", which is itself nebulous. But he felt convinced that with great desire, comes great ability.

My other coworker felt that there were innate abilities, and that even if he worked the rest of his life, he could not accomplish as great a thing as someone else.

There is some issue, of course, to why a person with more innate abilities (again, if it could be measured) should be less motivated than someone with less. Indeed, it even begs the question of whether being the best is a worthy goal or not. I recall a story of Gandhi, who had been married as a teen. He was a well-educated man, being a lawyer, but his wife was not. Furthermore, despite his attempts to educate her, she refused to learn, perhaps believing it was not right for a woman to develop her mind.

There have been some recent studies that show that people who believe intelligence is malleable, that you can be smarter, are more likely to become smarter (again, by some criteria of measurement, say, taking standardized exams).

Now, I've done some teaching, and there are people who do learn things more quickly than others, and because it takes less effort, they make more progress, but to be fair, they may indeed take more effort all along, but that once you have enough basic knowledge (more precisely, a way of learning new things), then that can save a bunch of time. Thus, having a well-organized mind, and being patient enough to extrapolate ideas makes it easier to accomplish things. And having a good memory.

Desire isn't enough because desire can be misplaced. You can spend a great deal of time trying to be good at something, but due to bad training, you end up hurting yourself. And this assumes that there are no distractions, such as family, disease, lack of money, shame, etc.

It does seem like many smart individuals (again, by some criteria of intelligence) that I've met agree with this notion. They are smart, while others are dumb. They treat it as some kind of rigid quantity that isn't malleable, but that's probably because, from most observations, it doesn't seem like it is malleable.

Indeed, effort is always given a premium in sports. For example, coaches preach giving 110%. They believe that winning and losing is only a matter of desire. They don't like to say that someone else is simply physically better and more talented. And there is something to be said. After all, sports is not just physically talent. There's also playing smart, fighting on when you're tired, and so forth, so one can try to maximize effort, even if, in the end, it's still not enough.

In the end, something gives. That may be desire, itself. Another film that sides on innate talent is Amadeus where Salieri has given his life to music, and yet, the impish brat, Mozart is so much more talented. He can act rude, and impertinent, but he's a genius. All Salieri can do (at least in the play) is to destroy genius.

While the coworker who believed in desire eventually gave way, the issue is that if the amount of work it takes is too much, people often do stop. You almost need an irrational belief to keep trying something to the exclusion of others to try and make progress, and in this process, you may harm other things, such as meeting people and working as a functioning member of society (again, that may not be that important).