requiem for C head cam


The evolution of useful things

is an excellent book by Henry Petroski (isbn 0-679-74039-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Can any single theory explain the shape of a Western saw, which cuts on the push stroke, as readily as an Eastern one, which cuts on the pull?
A French book of advice to students recognised the implicit threat involved in using a weapon at the table, and instructed its readers to place the sharp edge of their knife facing towards themselves… Such actions, coupled with the growing widespread use of forks, gave the table knife its now familiar blunt-tipped blade.
Round chopsticks would tend to twist in the fingers and roll off the table, and so squaring one end eliminated two annoyances in what is certainly a brilliant design.
The stories associated with knives, forks, and spoons also illustrate well how interrelated are technology and culture generally.
Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention.
The very properties of the material that make it possible to be shaped into a useful object also limit its use.
Engineering is invention institutionalised, and engineers engaged in design are inventors who are daily looking for ways to overcome the limitations of what already works.
It is not the form follows function but, rather, that the form of one thing follows from the failure of another thing to function as we would like.
It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".


Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity.

Curry velocity

Some people's introduction to curry begins with them ordering the hottest dish on the menu. They discover the dish is beyond their curry-capacity and they can't finish it. Amazingly, they often repeat this behaviour. Lots of curry goes to waste. Dishes are frequently only half-eaten. Curry velocity remains at zero.

Other people's introduction to curry begins with them trying something nearer the cooler end of the Scoville scale. They find the dish is below their curry-capacity. They finish it! No curry is wasted. Their curry velocity is above zero. The next time they may decide to try something a little hotter. But they are in control of the curry, rather than the curry being in control of them.

Being wrong

is an excellent book by Kathryn Schulz (isbn 978-0-06-117604-3). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
One extremely good way to become wedded to a theory you just idly expressed is to have it contradicted... from noncommittal to evangelical in a matter of milliseconds.
We take our own certainty as an indicator of accuracy.
The instant an implicit assumption is violated, it turns into an explicit one.
The genius of statistics was that it did not ignore errors, it quantified them. [Laplace]
In ancient Indo-European, the ancestral language of nearly half of today's global population, the word 'er' meant "to move", "to set in motion", or simply "to go."
It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies.
the stakes of our mistakes.
Realizing that we are wrong about a belief almost always involves acquiring a replacement belief at the same time.
"fallor ergo sum" (I err, therefore I am) [St Augustine]
When other people reject our beliefs, we think they lack good information. When we reject their beliefs, we think we possess good judgement.
As with so many systems, the strengths of inductive reasoning are also its weaknesses. For every way that induction serves us admirably, it also creates a series of predictable biases in the way we think...
When a framework serves us well... we call it brilliant, and call it inductive reasoning. When it serves us poorly, we call it idiotic, and call it confirmation bias.
Being wrong can be funny; other people being wrong can be very very funny.
Without some kind of belief system in place, we wouldn't even know what kinds of questions to ask, let alone how to make sense of the answers.

Adapt - why success always starts with failure

Cross the river by feeling for stones [Deng Xiaoping]
Accepting trial and error means accepting error.
Darwin, a meticulous observer...
The art of success is to fail productively.
Complexity is a problem only in tightly coupled systems.
  • seek out new ideas and try new things


Fail better. [Samuel Beckett]

The conquest of happiness

is an excellent book by Bertrand Russell (isbn 0415378478). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.
Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent every day hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed every evening but which miraculously came to life again in the morning…


The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has.
Events only become experiences through the interest that we take in them.


smell-driven development



