Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A father wrote me asking for advice on where to send his son for an undergraduate Computer Science degree.  I mentioned Olin College or a smaller liberal arts school with a good CS program so that the kid would have some friends who weren’t CS majors.  I cc’d Shimon Rura, a graduate of Williams College, for some perspective on the liberal arts school choice.  Shimon was a powerful advocate for Williams (aside from the high cost) and also said some interesting stuff about Olin:

“What has really blown my mind are the people I’ve met from Olin.  I’ve met them at geek events I’ve organized, such as BarCamp Boston (an ad-hoc tech conference) and DevHouse Boston (a weekend of free-form hacking).  They’ve all had great ideas for fun/useful stuff to build, and have been able to work in teams to build the stuff they envisioned.  Though they were always younger (around 19), they were clearly able to work among and talk with people much older.  And they were not novices; they answered a lot of technical questions.  Plus they showed up early and helped make sure all the equipment worked.  If I had to hire a software engineer right out of college, I would look at Olin graduates.  The best graduates, however, would probably want to start their own company rather than working for someone else.  Since the most difficult task in starting a company is finding good co-founders, attending Olin would provide a young programmer with a big head start.”

Perhaps we should not abandon all hope of a useful undergraduate CS education…

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One of the hackers/company owners at the conference I attended in California said something that interested me:  “When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person’s name into Google.  If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it.”

This employer assumes that any competent programmer has left some trace of him or herself in version control trees of open-source software, question and answer forums, and other repositories accessible to Web search crawlers.

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Greetings from sunny Santa Cruz, where traffic moves at an average speed of about 5 mph on the freeways (took 2.5 hours mid-day to drive down here from Berkeley, 75 miles away).  One fellow here said that car accidents account for 4 percent of U.S. GDP and that the cost of an accident was the single largest component of the per-passenger-mile cost of driving.

Thoughts?  Sources?

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/nhtsa_static_file_downloader.jsp?file=/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/NCSA/Content/PDF/810837.pdf tells us that approximately 43,000 Americans were killed by car crashes, but doesn’t calculate the cost.

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The Stata Center at MIT, an office building for computer science researchers, has been in the news recently due to a spat between MIT and the architect.  What’s it like to work in the building?  Here’s an excerpt from a mailing list discussion… (reproduced with permission from the author, who continues to work in the building and wishes to remain anonymous)

The Stata Center sux big hairy green rocks from the coast of Maine.  Far too little storage space (while there are vast volumes of what is presumably architecturally interesting open space — that are unreachable by humans), every group walled off into pod spaces, most support staff are stuck out in open space rather than the offices they had in Technology Square [Ed: the former location of the lab; a vanilla 1960s box of an office tower; referred to as “tech square” or “NE43”], most grad students have to sit around in open space areas (rather than having offices — shared offices, but at least with closable doors and some amount of personal storage), many grad students are offered lockers — as in, the sort they have in high schools — to store their stuff in.  Graduate students tend to take over various conference rooms to hack in (on their laptops).

The building is so convoluted that people not familiar with it need trained native guides to find their ways around — hardly inviting to visitors.

The research pod areas are bad in two ways: lack of natural communication between groups even on the same floor (amplifies the tech^2 problems of vertical communication), and lack of a natural way to expand and contract office space used by a group as the research funding ebbs & flows.

I was always told that What We Wanted was something with -somewhat- more
public space than tech^2, and openable windows. What we got, instead, was
an Architect’s Signature Building. It sucks.

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Folks:  Friends of mine are blessed with 13-year-old triplets.  Two of the 13-year-olds want to learn some computer programming.  They are non-nerds.  Their mom asked me what would be the best computer language for them to start with.  [As an aside, I should note that being asked questions like this is probably a sign that one needs to get out more…]

To start the discussion rolling, my first thought was Visual Basic.  The learners have Windows machines and VB will enable them to control what is happening on their desktops.

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A friend recently purchased a vacation house and is furnishing it.  He sent me an instant message: “I made up a nice AR15 and put it in the new house in a wall safe. A house is not a home until the rifle is there.”

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Some ideas for the Google millionaires… http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/nyregion/24chambers.html is a story about Robert E. Chambers, the “preppy killer” who murdered Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986.  He is back in the news for a new brush with the law.  What struck me most was the line “Shawn Kovell, 39, who fell in love with him shortly before his trial for the Levin killing”.  The guy was convicted of murdering a teenage girl and served 15 years in prison, yet apparently is so charming that he was able to hang onto a girlfriend the whole time.

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Gentle readers,

I’m trying to write up a Christmas gift guide for photo.net.  I’d like to find a camera phone to recommend.  As our readers are photographers first and talkers second, I want a camera phone that looks just like a point and shoot digital camera.  It should have an optical zoom lens and 5-10 megapixel resolution.  Somewhere in there should be a phone so that photos can be mailed to friends.  I think Samsung has made some of these, maybe for the Korean market (e.g., SCH-B600).  Is there anything like this on the US market or possibly an unlocked GSM phone?  It doesn’t have to be the world’s best phone, just adequate.

Thank you in advance.

Philip

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Everyone I met in Turkey hates American foreign policy.  Nobody I met in Turkey hates Americans.  How is this possible?  It seems that George W. Bush is the Jesus Christ for our [American] times, taking all of our sins upon his shoulders.  The Turks with whom I spoke blamed George W. personally for all of the harm done by the 300 million people here in the U.S.  As far as I can tell, George W. never does anything except ride as a passenger from speaking venue to speaking venue.  Therefore, the things of which the Turks are complaining must have been done by at least some of the rest of us, yet W. personally gets 100% of the blame.

George W. does not simply follow Jesus.  He is Jesus.

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