Waterloo is an interesting place to live these days for an ex-quantum-mechanic, mainly because of all that techno-geek BlackBerry money that is being splashed around. When I bike to work I go past the Perimeter Institute in Theoretical Physics at the beginning of my ride, and then go within a stone’s throw of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the end, both of which are making waves these days. All these brainy young things pushing the boundaries of what we know and don’t know, it’s fun to watch.

The main media event recently has been the publication of the book “The Trouble with Physics” by the Perimeter Insitute’s Lee Smolin, which is a criticism of String Theory and its 30-year failure to prove itself as something more than a promising candidate for a theory of everything. Smolin’s book has been widely reviewed, often in conjunction with Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” which argues much the same thing. The title “Not Even Wrong” was a devastating putdown coined by Enrico Fermi of another physicist’s work – the implication being it was so mistaken that you couldn’t even show why and how it was incorrect. My own work was in the relatively mundane work of molecules rather than cosmological elementary particles; that is, it was quantum, but on our side of … Continue reading

It is important that Seymour Hersh exposes the rumblings from various parts of the US government about a potential attack on Iran, but on this occasion I’ve felt for some time that it’s not going to happen. It’s not that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on wouldn’t do such a thing – personally I think they’d do it in a heartbeat if it gained them a few points in the polls – but that they can’t even if they want to. It’s getting close to the end of Bush’s second term, he doesn’t have the personal clout any more, and Iraq is such a complete and utter catastrophe that the response to any further military adventurism would, I think, be swift and damning. Now this wouldn’t reassure me if I was sitting in Tehran, but that’s how it looks from here.

And now someone with some actual knowledge says the same thing. The Yorkshire Ranter is someone who seems to know his military logistics stuff, and also comes from God’s Own County, so he can hardly be wrong, and he argues that the US just doesn’t have the needed stuff in the area to carry out any attack … Continue reading

For family reasons I’ve been looking at university scholarships. There
are those that you get if you have a certain average, and then there
are others that you have to apply for and which usually involve a
mixture of scholarship and "other stuff". And that "other stuff" is
almost always defined as "leadership". Like the Lo Family scholarship
at the University of Toronto
(http://www.adm.utoronto.ca/awd/scholarships.htm#UTscholars):

"Awarded to students who are active as leaders, are respected and considered to be well-rounded citizens in their
school and community…"

Or at Queen’s University, the D & R Sobey Atlantic Scholarship  requires
"Academic excellence, proven leadership and involvement in school or
community activities."
(http://www.queensu.ca/registrar/awards/apply/apply-scholar.html). You
get the idea. Of course there are exceptions (like the lovely John
Macara (Barrister) award at U of T: "Preference given to
applicants who can establish that they are the blood kin of the late
Mrs. Jean Glasgow, the donor of this award.") but most of the time it’s
all about the leadership.

Now
I have nothing against leaders — all successful groups need someone to
take credit for their accomplishments — but … Continue reading

Regular readers may remember that I posted on YouTube a little video of some caterpillars in my front yard a few months ago. I went back there a few days ago and took a look at how many times it had been viewed.

OVER 160,000.

This is obviously a much bigger audience than I will get for anything else I do in my entire life. I’m sure there is a moral in here somewhere, but I have no idea what it is.

Continue reading

Here is a common-sense approach to software development, which I’ll call the checklist approach:

This essay uses shows why the checklist approach fails: why adding useful new features to a software product can make the overall product less useful to end users. This is a phenomenon I like to call  featuritis.

At its simplest, a software product is a set of n independent features (i = 1,…, n). Each feature has a utility to the customer of ui. The overall utility of the software product to the customer is therefore

U = Sum( ui )

This tells you to keep adding features to the software to increase its utility, end of story. Not very interesting.

But software is not quite so simple as this. Each feature has not only a utility, but also a cost — ci. This is the cost to the end user—not the developer—of using or deciding not to use the feature. The cost may include the time taken to find out about a feature, deciding how to use it, whether it is the right feature to use (among … Continue reading