The Third Bit

Nice mini-manifesto from Lev Grossman about storytelling in the 21st Century—more specifically, about the fact that after a long detour, writers are going back to telling stories. Yay!

Writing

Carl Zimmer has a lengthy post on the future of science journalism that’s well worth reading.  I have many of the same misgivings regarding writing about programming; as the cost of entry goes down, so does the signal-to-noise ratio, even among the “professionals”.

Writing

I picked up a copy of Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams Friday—wasn’t in the mood to read any tech stuff, and Gears of the City hasn’t arrived yet—and reading it reminded me why I don’t enjoy “future history” science fiction as much as I used to. In Baxter’s stories, humanity spends the next hundred thousand years spreading to the stars, adapting to ever-weirder environments along the way. Meanwhile, here and now, climate change is happening faster than the IPCC predicted, and the consequences look grimmer by the day. It’s sort of like the “uncanny valley“: if a story is far enough away from reality to be seen as pure escapism, I can lose myself in it, but if it combines real(ish) engineering with brittle Heinleinian techno-optimism, I can’t help but think of the tragedies my daughter (age two) is likely to see in her lifetime, and that kind of spoils the fun.

Later: several commenters have recommended other SF authors (some of whom I’ve read, some of whom I haven’t). I’m grateful for the pointers, but I’m still intrigued by the uncanny valley effect: I’m comfortable with well-written fantasy, or deliberately retro SF, but anything in which technology saves us from our own shortsightedness makes me genuinely angry.  Maybe what I’m really looking for is a near-future SF Grapes of Wrath, which I admit is setting the bar pretty high…

Writing

One of the things I teach my students is that the real purpose of a schedule is to tell you when to start cutting corners and dropping features. The ticker on my web site tells me I have 489 days left in my contract with the university; I signed up hoping to study ways of teaching second-stage novices [1] how to be better programmers, but after four failed attempts to get NSERC funding [2], it’s time to lower my sights. Here are the things I’d like to finish off before my stint at U of T is over:

1. Help Samira Abdi, Jeremy Handcock, and Carolyn MacLeod finish their Master’s theses, and get Aran Donohue, Alecia Fowler, Alicia Grubb, Zachary Kincaid, Jason Montojo, and Rory Tulk through theirs.
2. Publish Practical Programming (the “CS-1 in Python” book that Jennifer Campbell, Paul Gries, Jason Montojo, and I have been writing). It’s currently in beta, and due for release in a month or so; we’d like to do a Python 3 update in a year or so, but that’s likely to slip.
3. Finish the study of how scientists actually use computers. Data from the initial survey is now being processed; we’ll put together a follow-up survey in the next couple of months, write a “popular science” paper for American Scientist in the spring, present results at the SECSE workshop in Vancouver in May, and submit a paper by year’s end.
4. Co-edit a special issue of Computing in Science & Engineering on “Software Engineering and Computational Science”. Andy Lumsdaine and I have four articles lined up, and are looking for two more—if you’d like to volunteer, please give me a shout.
5. Submit a proposal for a professional master’s degree in Computer Science to U of T’s School of Graduate Studies. This is mostly a matter of filling in forms, but that’s kind of like looking at Everest and saying, “It’s mostly a matter of going uphill.”
6. “Finish” a much-improved DrProject. I originally planned to use it as a platform for research, as well as teaching; there isn’t enough time left for that, but I still hope to make it easier for software engineering instructors to introduce students to modern tools.
7. Rewrite Software Carpentry. Tina Yee has translated some of the lectures into MATLAB; the next step is to make the whole thing look like it was written in the 21st Century [3].

Everything else has to go by the boards. In particular:

• I have resigned from my contributing editor post at Doctor Dobb’s Journal. It was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed working with Jon Erickson, but as I said back in October, I’d rather not do it than do it badly.
• The software developers’ reading group I’d planned to start this January isn’t going to happen. I’d really like something to pick up the slack now that DemoCamp seems to have stalled (if only to provide an excuse to get together with former students on a regular basis), but someone else is going to have to organize it.
• After this term, I’m going to stop supervising student projects (except those directly relevant to DrProject and/or Software Carpentry). Next to 10:00 am coffee breaks with the lecturers, this is the part of university life I enjoy the most, but there just isn’t time…
• The Software Project Coloring Book (my attempt to write down everything I try to teach undergraduates about real-world software development) is being put back on the shelf. I have written 35,000 words, but those were the easy bits: conservatively, I’d need 4-6 months of full-time work to finish it off.

On the upside, Sadie got me some biking gear for Christmas, so now I’ll have to shed the twenty pounds I’ve picked up in the last couple of years, and I get to start taking our daughter to music classes every week. To quote a friend, it isn’t what I planned—it’s better.

[1] People who already know how to write programs, but not how to develop applications. I’m specifically interested in undergraduate Computer Science students, and graduate students in other disciplines.

[2] Companies like Nitido, the Jonah Group, Idee, and Rogers have kindly donated a few thousand dollars each to keep things like DrProject going, as have several of my fellow professors, but a $24K grant from The MathWorks is the only “research” funding I’ve been able to raise.

[3] As I said yesterday, I’m looking for a mentor in the Toronto area who can show me how to do this.

Basie, DrProject, Practical Programming, Research, Software Carpentry, Teaching, Writing

On Spec magazine has bought my short story “Still”—it should appear some time in 2009.

Writing

My dad (a former English teacher) sent me a scan of an advertising flyer from Scholastic Canada that includes my latest children’s book, A Bottle of Light. As I’ve said before, it’s only available in school reading programs, not bookstores, but it’s still pretty cool.

Writing

I got my first two copies of A Bottle of Light last week, and immediately handed them off to my nephews (to whom the book is dedicated). About half an hour ago, the postman delivered a (small) box full — w00t! It’s only available through a special reading program that Scholastic is running in schools, rather than regular and online bookstores, but I’m still happy enough to see it to grin a cheesy grin:

Update: thanks to everyone for the congratulations. Unfortunately, “Bottle of Light” is part of what Scholastic calls a directed reading program, which means it’s only available *in* schools — not even the kids can buy copies to take home to read themselves.  The program’s web site doesn’t say much about the pedagogical theory behind this; if I can find out more about their reasoning, I’ll let you know.

Writing

Last year, Dr. Dobb’s Journal ran a series of short articles describing some of 2005′s Summer of Code projects, and we’d like to give this year’s participants the same kind of recognition. Some samples from the last time around are on the new DDJ web site at:

• http://www.ddj.com/184406349
• http://www.ddj.com/184406383
• http://www.ddj.com/184406437
• http://www.ddj.com/184406467

If you’re an SoC mentor or student, please have a look—if you’d like to contribute something similar this year, please write a draft similar in length and format to the examples, and send it with a short bio and photo to the editor, Jon Erickson, at jerickson@ddj.com.

Writing

The second part of a StickyMinds article on Data Crunching is now on-line (the first part went up in February).

Writing

Part 1 of an article on data crunching is now up on the StickyMinds web site. Part 2 should follow in a couple of weeks.

Writing