Reading a book of lectures by Donald Knuth that I let myself be tempted by in my last spin through Borders. (Note to self: when picking up a book you’ve reserved, it’s completely possible to JUST go to the checkout line and buy that book, and only that book.) Donald Knuth is most famous for writing a set of algorithm books. His lecture set is from a set of lectures he gave at MIT on “Interactions Between Faith and Computer Science”. The book’s entitled ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’.
Observant readers of this blog will see a category for Christianity among my archives. It’s not something I’ve written about much of late, for a variety of reasons. But you’ll occasionally see in this blog that says something about Christianity and what I’m thinking about at the time.
Anyway, as I’m skimming his first lecture, I’m also taking a quick peek at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Thinking about Knuth made me think about the made-up language he used for his algorithm examples which made me think about what new languages are out there that I haven’t heard about of late. An article about build systems (The Buzz About Builds) is on the cover of this month’s magazine, and since I’ve been wrestling with an automated build system at work, I take a quick look-see.
Now I’ll caveat that I’m not all that impressed with this article. I’m three sections in and it hasn’t told me anything of great technical value. A little bit of business background as to why build systems are now getting greater focus in the industry’s great, but isn’t going to help me wrestle with CruiseControl tomorrow. What I do find interesting is a quote that’s at the top of section three, ostensibly about distributed development teams and thus the need for better build systems, is this quote:
We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. —Kurt Vonnegut
Note that I think it’s a lousy quote for distributed development teams. I don’t ever want to be on a team where I can’t “discover[...] what [I'm] doing”. But a very interesting convergence of reading materials. I’ll caveat that I haven’t read the source of Mr. Vonnegut’s quote: couldn’t tell you its context, applicability, etc. But it does pop out to me tonight and intrigue me to find out more. (Will admit to you that I would believe that we could often do God’s will without being aware of it.)
Update: a quick spin around the ‘Net points me to Bokonists being in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and various serious-minded writers speak on its satire of religion. Now on my list of soon-to-reads…
June 24th, 2007
A thank you to my friend, Ken, for reminding me about the Freakonomics blog… A quick peek over there today brought me to a theory positing why retirees build such big houses. After all, rationally, most need less space, and have no real need to restart a mortgage. Worse, as my grandmother is finding out, dealing with a big house when your arthritis is acting up and your afraid of breaking a hip if you fall off of a ladder is no fun at all.
I’ll toss my theory into the ring, though, that a house is not a rational purchase. We don’t buy homes to fulfill our need for housing. We buy homes to fulfill our dreams of what our life could be like, in a particular area, or with a home that’s decorated a particular way or that has a certain kitchen layout. We dream of things that we COULD do in a particular space, not of what we will do with our own particular sloppy habits or lack of time.
The homes that are going up in our area are massive. The signs used to say things like “starting in the low 400s”. I can’t say as I’ve seen one of those in a while, unless it’s associated with a townhouse: the numbers have definitely gone up. This, in what is widely listed as a housing downturn.
We debate about buying a new home, or upgrading our own, for a combination of rational and dream lifestyle reasons. We haven’t yet pinned down where the boundary between those lay, and what rationality versus dreams is worth to us. The rational side says that when our kids get bigger, our house will need a bit more elbow room to handle those growing elbows. I want a bigger seating area near the kitchen, so that we can have people over for dinner and not be pinned up against the glass sliding door. And hey, if we’re going to expand out the back of the house (assuming we did an expansion), I’ve always dreamed of a bigger master bedroom with a nice master bathroom to boot. What’s a little more renovation when you’re only dreaming of the tab?
A few years ago now we had our basement renovated. We quickly discovered that tabs run up: we upgraded the lighting system downstairs, and then realized we needed to upgrade the electrical capacity in our home, and then discovered that to meet the new code we needed to install smoke alarms that were hooked into the electrical system upstairs, and THEN decided that since the electricians needed to run wiring up into the ceilings anyway, we’d have them install wiring for ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. And that was just for the basement. Imagine rearranging a load bearing wall on the back of the house, adding the plumbing and installations to support a true master bathroom rather than our half bath, dealing with moving cabinets and lighting in the kitchen, and then matching things like siding (oh, we want to replace the siding, anyway: might as well throw it in the mix).
All of this to fulfill some dreams of what we MIGHT do in the house. Note that none of my proposed renovations there really does anything to add too much more elbow room to the kids’ living area… we sort of figure them having small rooms will just encourage them to be more involved with the family. 
June 24th, 2007
