Be the Worst

Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has a stock piece of advice for young musicians, which is Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in. Be the worst guy in every band you’re in. Before starting my career in information technology, I was a professional jazz and blues saxophonist. As a musician, I had the good fortune of learning this lesson early on and sticking to it. Being the worst guy in the band means always playing with people who are better than you.

The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler

Why do people get dizzy if spun around?

There is fluid in your inner ear canals that keeps your equilibrium in check, which keeps you balanced. As you move your head, the fluid moves around and it takes the fluid time to level out.

There is a widely told joke in the computer industry that goes like this: A man is flying in a small airplane and is lost in the clouds. He descends until he spots an office building and yells to a man in an open window, "Where am I?" The man replies, "You are in an airplane about 100 feet above the ground." The pilot immediately turns to the proper course, spots the airport, and lands. His astonished passenger asks how the pilot figured out which way to go. The pilot replies, "The answer the man gave me was completely correct and factual, yet it was no help whatsoever, so I knew immediately he was a software engineer who worked for Microsoft, and I know where Microsoft's building is in relation to the airport."

Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper

On the picture Microsoft staff 1978.

The Backspace key has its origin in typewriters where a typist would, for example, type a lowercase letter A with acute accent (á) by typing a lowercase letter A, Backspace and then the acute accent key. Since then the functionality has changed, but the name remains the same.

An anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and never when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though, know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible. An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and pecking.

"Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley

Black side of Newton

Usually we talk about Isaac Newton as a good man, but according to our today's moral norms he was a kind of tyrant.

For 30 years Newton was a Master of the Mint and his decision influenced many people lives. For example, coin clipping at those times was punished by dead penalty and all such cases were attributed to him. Thus he had hang to hand hundreds people a big fraction of which just tried to feed their families. So despite his huge contribution to science, he was quite a cruel person. This kind of behavior can give us a clear picture of "humanistic" environment that was common in those ages, that even so brilliant person considered such treatment to be usual.

The biblical proscription against usury goes all the way back to Moses. The rule was simple: you couldn't charge interest on a loan to anyone in your tribe. Strangers, on the other hand, paid interest. This isn't a matter of ancient biblical archeology; the edict against interest stuck for thousands of years, until around the time of Columbus.

It's worth taking a minute to understand the reasoning here. If money circulates freely within the tribe, the tribe will grow prosperous more quickly. I give you some money to buy seeds, your farm flourishes, and now we both have money to give to someone else to invest. The faster the money circulates, the better the tribe does. The alternative is a tribe of hoarders, with most people struggling to find enough resources to improve productivity.

Obviously, there's another force at work here. When I make an interest-free loan to you, I'm trusting you and giving you a gift at the same time. This interaction increases the quality of our bond and strengthens the community.

Seth Godin