The Third Bit

I just finished reading Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It’s a rare thing: deeply reactionary, yet (mostly) well argued. Here’s its central complaint:

We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power… But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible… Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men.

Crawford’s believes that removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. The modern knowledge worker is just as alienated from his or her labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of algorithm for judgment may increase profit, but only if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.

Crawford is most definitely not playing the “dignity of manual labor” horn once blown by the Arts & Crafts or back-to-the-land bands: he is coolly scathing when discussing their cuddly inanity. Nor is he any kind of leftist: he views big government and big education as equally complicit with big business in sucking the meaning out of everyday work. Just to take one example, Chapter 6, “The Contradictions of the Cubicle”, is a brilliant deconstruction of how the ever-provisional nature of right and wrong in modern management has turned managers into ersatz therapists. Here is its take on higher education (Crawford himself has a Ph.D.):

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensible to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reasons given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representation and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensible to survival in the contemporary office, as it was in the old Soviet Union.

Like all reactionaries, he does tend to idealize the days of yore: his description of the pride a Rolls Royce panel beater of the 1970s took in producing something distinctively English bears little relation to the reality of the day. But he makes a convincing case that skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and are more personally rewarding.

Crawford’s emphasis on self-reliance, and his love of all things automative, doom him to being labeled a conservative. He isn’t, at least not as that word is currently used in English-speaking countries. Like Andrew Bacevich (whose The Limits of Power I discussed briefly back in June), he thinks we have taken a wrong turn, and need to back up before we can move forward. He doesn’t pretend to know how to do this, but I defy anyone to come away from this book believing that we shouldn’t try.

Later: see also this CBC story by Richard Handler, which includes a link to a video interview with Crawford.

Books

Yet more evidence that Mike Gunderloy must have cloned himself several years ago—how else to explain how much he gets done, and how quickly?  His new Rails Freelancing Handbook is exactly what the title suggests: guidance from a successful freelancer for people who’d like to be one. Chapters include:

1. Is Freelancing For You?
2. Managing Your Business
3. Managing Yourself
4. Managing Clients
5. Managing Your Software
6. Managing Growth
7. Managing Your Office

and an appendix titled “What If It Doesn’t Work Out?”.  Mike’s reputation and integrity are second to none, and his user guide for FogBugz is the best technical documentation I’ve ever read.  This new one’s going immediately to the top of my stack…

Books

Adam Goucher has posted a blow-by-blow — sorry, chapter-by-chapter — summary of O’Reilly’s upcoming Beautiful Testing. There’s lots of good stuff here from lots of smart people — I’m looking forward to it.

Books

Two books that I’ve read and enjoyed recently:

1. Philip Ball: Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. Ball uses the construction of the great Gothic cathedral as a lens through which to examine the intellectual and technical world of Medieval Europe. Like all of his books, there is sometimes more detail than anyone but a fellow enthusiast could want, but that’s a minor quibble—his descriptions of the interplay between half-remembered Platonic philosophy, doctrinal disputes within the Church, the economic boom of the 1200s, and the invention of ever-more-sophisticated engineering practices is fascinating. I particularly liked the chapter that traced the development of the arches and flying buttresses that are the hallmarks of Gothic style: each new idea was a response to earlier problems that in turn created problems and possibilities of its own. There is much here for software architects to mull over…
2. Andrew Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A retired US Army colonel whose son died in Iraq, Bacevich now teaches history in Boston. “Caustic” doesn’t even begin to describe this book: its cold analysis traces the failures of the American military-political complex in the last forty years to Americans’ unwillingness to acknowledge that every bill must eventually be paid. While lip service is paid at the end to the possibility of renewal, Bacevich very powerfully makes the case that the US has already sown the seeds of its own demise. Democrats and Republicans alike are weighed, measured, and found wanting, as is the American public as a whole. There is much here for everyone to mull over…

Books

Books read recently at home, at ICSE’09, on vacation, and back at home:

• Smith: Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design and Ko & Rossen: Teaching Online: A Practical Guide.The most immediately useful books about (re-)designing courses for online delivery I’ve come across so far, though I wish both moved faster and went deeper. I understand that course design (online or otherwise) is as hard to teach out of a book as any other kind of design, but I’m still hoping that there’s something as rich and readable as Programming Pearls or GUI Bloopers out there waiting to be found.
• Blum: My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture. “…the real problem of academic dishonesty arises primarily from a lack of communication between two distinct cultures within the university setting. On one hand, professors and administrators regard plagiarism as a serious academic crime, an ethical transgression, even a sin against an ethos of individualism and originality. Students, on the other hand, revel in sharing, in multiplicity, in accomplishment at any cost.” Like McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing, it would have been better as an extended essay than as a book, but the good points are worth the filler.
• Tropashko: SQL Design Patterns. It’s more a “how to” cookbook than a catalog of design patterns in the traditional sense, and the early sections spend too much time on “here’s how we used to do it back when”, but again, the good points are worth the filler.
• Ernst and Singh: Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. This one’s important, but the people who need to read it most probably won’t. Singh is a professional science writer; Ernst worked as a homeopathic doctor in Germany before becoming the first professor of complementary medicine in the UK in 1993. This patient, well-written book explains how the scientific method and clinical trials work, then looks at the evidence for homeopathy, chiropracty, acupuncture, and herbal medicine. The verdict? With only a handful of minor exceptions, they are no better than placebos (which can be surprisingly effective, even when recipients know they’re getting sugar pills). As with global warming, gender differences in math and science, and many other things, though, many people will continue to pick their facts to fit their beliefs, rather than vice versa.
• Dunn: Everyday Life in Traditional Japan. Stumbled upon in a bookstore in Vancouver; more fun than it sounds.
• Butcher: Turn Coat and Gilman: Gears of the City. Hot buttered popcorn and a roast beef sandwich, respectively.

Books

MIT Press has kindly given me permission to put my first book, Practical Parallel Programming, up on the web.   Many of the specifics are out of date, but I think (at least, I hope) much of the discussion is still useful.

One problem, though: nobody has the electronic source for the book’s hundred or more diagrams.  I spent a couple of weeks sketching them with a pencil and straight edge in the VU library in the summer of 1994; a graphic artist in Boston then re-drew them using a Mac, but those files are long gone.  I could chop a copy of the book and scan what I need as PNGs, but it got me wondering about OCR software for vector images.  If anyone can recommend something, I’d welcome a pointer.

Books

There was a box waiting for me in the mailroom today.  “Oh,” I thought, “That was quick—Amazon usually takes at least a week.”  But it wasn’t Amazon—no, it was my first five copies of Practical Programming, each in its own individual bubblewrap sleeve.  W00t!  And woo hoo!  And don’t you dare say “errata” or “second edition”, at least not yet—I have a moment I’d like to savor.

Thanks again to Jennifer, Paul, and Jason (co-authors) and to Dan Steinberg at Pragmatic—yay!

Books, Practical Programming, Teaching

Our new book, Practical Programming, is now available from Pragmatic (the publisher) and O’Reilly, as well as on Amazon.com — yay! Topics include:

• Basic programming from arithmetic to loops and conditionals
• Using functions and modules to organize programs
• Using lists, sets, and dictionaries to organize data
• Designing algorithms systematically
• Debugging things when they go wrong
• Creating and querying databases
• Building graphical interfaces to make programs easier to use
• Object-oriented programming and programming patterns

Books, Practical Programming

I finished David JC Mackay’s Sustainable Energy-Without the Hot Air on the flight back from Ottawa yesterday. First response: brilliant. Second response: absolutely brilliant. A physicist, Mackay approaches the question of whether the UK can run on sustainable energy sources by doing back-of-the-envelope calculations—hundreds of them. How much precipitation falls in highland areas? How high are those areas? How much energy could that possibly give us? What fraction of that could we plausibly recover? Then turn the page, and he’s doing the same kind of calculations for air travel (which, by the way, is within a few percentage points of being as efficient as it ever could be). He then sketches half a dozen scenarios for sustainability, five relying primarily on one source (wave, wind, biomass), the sixth a balanced mix.

His conclusion? We’re in trouble—big trouble, especially since (as the quotes scattered through the book show) most people are either in denial or prone to indulge in wishful thinking. His book is meant to be an antidote to both.

But that’s not what I like most about this book.  What I like most is that he isn’t just trying to lay out the options, he’s trying to show us what kinds of arguments and plans we should be willing to accept. That’s why I think SEWHA would be a great text for a first-year general science course: it does a better job than any book I’ve read since Epstein’s Thinking Physics (now sadly out of print) of showing readers what practical, numerate thinking actually looks like.

It’s also (to go off on a tangent) reinforced my belief that almost none of what we call “software engineering” is actually engineering. I’ve worked with enough civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers to know how important back-of-the-envelope reality checks are to their disciplines.  Other than figuring out how many servers you need to meet a service level agreement, I don’t know if such reality checks are even possible for software construction.  It doesn’t mean that what we study (and preach) is useless, but as many others have observed before me, “engineering” looks more and more like an inappropriate metaphor.

Books

This time two years ago, most of them would have been computing books; now, they’re a minority. Still looking for a readable, grounded, fast-paced guide to instructional design…

• The Siege of Vienna
• My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture
• Cowboy Angels
• A Splendid Exchange
• With Speed and Violence
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
• Spies Among Us
• Thinking for a Living
  
• Singularity’s Ring
• Out From Boneville
• Anathem
• Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air
• Beautiful Security
• Software Visualization
• Experiments with People: Revelations from Social Psychology
• Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
  

Books