The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? — Captain Ahab
Reading Emily Dickinson
I’ll read one [Emily Dickinson] poem every few months — and if it’s one of those baffling ones, that’s all it takes to humble me into putting reason back in the tool box, and sitting still until a more appropriate tool presents itself.
Aside
My margarita saw its shadow. You know what that means? Six more margaritas . . .
Overheard
Which is More Valuable: Collaboration or Competence?
The title of this post makes a good interview question. Usually, the candidate will say something to the effect of “they’re both valuable” to avoid the possibility of slipping up and choosing the one that the interviewer believes is less valuable.
Let’s say we need to get a picture painted. We could say, “Picasso — you’re our best guy in this area. We’d like you to paint the picture for us.”
Or we could say, “Picasso — work with the steering committee to get that picture painted.”
You could make a case for either approach, but you can’t do both. So which is more valuable?
Personally, I think collaboration is overrated. It leads to the knowledge of experts and novices being given equal weight.
There’s a reason why pilots don’t invite passengers into the cockpit to get their opinions on how to fly the plane . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Aside
I’m always glad to find that something everyone says is good is really not that good . . .
Famous Last Words
The idea of last words is funny to me, because the whole notion of “last words” suggests they matter. Which they don’t, of course, but this hope we carry that there will be some wisdom or some insight at the last moment, other than “Oh, fuck it, fuck this fucking shit” is so sadly human, I just love it.
Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves. — Walter Anderson
Cat and Dog
Underrepresented Minorities in the UC
The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.”
Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t.
| Ethnicity | 2011 Fall |
|---|---|
| African American/Black | 130 |
| Mexican American/Chicano | 325 |
| Other Hispanic/Latino | 150 |
| Native American/Alaskan Native | 33 |
| Pacific Islander | 11 |
| Chinese | 936 |
| Filipino | 108 |
| Japanese | 68 |
| Korean | 250 |
| Other Asian | 45 |
| South Asian | 324 |
| Vietnamese | 142 |
“Keep it Simple,” Nobel Prize Winner Advises
I soon was taught that [Linus] Pauling’s accomplishment was a product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning. Equations occasionally crept into his argument, but in most cases words would have sufficed. The key to Linus’ success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry. The \(\alpha\)-helix had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children.
We could thus see no reason why we should not solve DNA in the same way. All we had to do was to construct a set of molecular models and begin to play — with luck, the structure would be a helix. Any other type of configuration would be much more complicated. Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness. Pauling never got anywhere by seeking out messes.
Chinese Parents vs Western Parents
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
Don’t Check Asian
Asian kids are putting a different race on their college applications to boost their chances of getting into the top schools.
Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.
That’s a rather modest strategy. Identifying yourself as white does give you a little bit of a boost but to really improve the odds, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and check the Black or Hispanic box. Or Eskimo. Eskimos are kind of Asian-looking.
Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.
Here in California, state colleges and universities are prohibited by Proposition 209 from considering race in the admissions process. As a result, the student body at UC Berkeley is more than 40 percent Asian, up from about 20 percent before Prop 209 was passed in 1996. (The California population is 13 percent Asian.)
Other top schools that don’t consider race in admissions also have a high percentage of Asian students. Cal Tech is about one-third Asian. (As a private school, Cal Tech is not subject to Prop 209, but chooses not to consider race.)
Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.
Draw your own conclusions. We are being overrun by the yellow horde!
Indonesian Kids Appreciate the Value of Education
The conventional wisdom in America is that you have to be rich to get a good primary education.
The real problem is that American kids will not cross a collapsed suspension bridge to get to their school on the other side of the river, like Indonesian kids will . . .
I’m Addressing the Shortage of Women in Technology
I keep hearing that there aren’t enough women in technology, like this is a problem. The most obvious explanation is that women don’t want to work in technology. If they want to work in other fields, fine. If they want to raise their kids, even better.
I did some tutoring for a girl taking AP Computer Science. She’s a junior in high school and wants to be a veterinarian. Afterwards, she told her dad, “If I decide not to be a veterinarian, maybe I’ll be a programmer.”
Don’t let it be said that I’m not doing my part to address the shortage of women in technology, even though I think it’s baloney . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
My Favorite Poem
Five little monkeys jumping on the bed.
One fell off and bumped his head.
Mama called the Doctor and the Doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”
Theories Have Four Stages of Acceptance
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
Johnny Otis, 1921-2012
Overheard in the Men’s Room
