Alan Jacobs

People will often cite hard work and a high degree of motivation as the secret to success in these areas. And while I certainly won’t disagree with that, I think this Zen-like comfort with knowing a little, with being a beginner, with kinda sucking, is the deciding factor in the end. They’re often persistent, and hard working, and all that, but mostly they’re okay with a process that makes them always feel a bit dumb. Such people seldom read manuals, in part, because they’re not bothered by not having Total Information Awareness before they begin. Such people imagine that they will botch the job before the bike is eventually fixed, and they’re okay with that. Every good chess player has suffered through years of humiliating slaughter at the chess board, and had a good time doing it.

And all of this is a very, very good sign in someone “learning to program” – not because knowing French or mastering the Queen’s Gambit means you have the right kind of brain, but because programming requires, above all, a quiet, peaceful attitude toward the feeling that you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Keeping drugs, and particularly vaccines, potent in tropical climes is a challenge. Heat tends to damage them. Such medicines have therefore to be passed from one refrigerator to another, along what is referred to as a cold chain, until they arrive at the clinics whence they are to be deployed. Fridges, however, are expensive. They also require electricity, which is not always available—or is available only unreliably—in the poorer parts of the world. As a consequence, breaks in cold chains are reckoned by the World Health Organisation to destroy almost half of the vaccines produced around the world.

Some vaccines can be freeze-dried, which helps. But even treated thus, their lifetime out of the fridge is limited. Ways of keeping drugs and vaccines stable at tropical temperatures would therefore be welcome. And David Kaplan of Tufts University, in Massachusetts, thinks he has found one. Put simply, he and his colleagues have worked out how to pack medicines in tiny silk pouches, in a manner that makes them almost indifferent to heat.

thingsmagazine:

Below Piccadilly Circus

In May 2007 a small group of religious leaders met, in the EU headquarters in Brussels, with the three most significant leaders of Europe: Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and at the time president of the European Council, Jose-Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament.

The meeting was one of those semiformal occasions at which little is said, and a great deal of time taken in saying it. Concerned at the return of antisemitism to Europe within living memory of the Holocaust, I decided that the time had come to break protocol and speak plainly, even bluntly.

I gave the shortest speech of my life. Sitting directly opposite the three leaders I said this. “Jews and Europe go back a long way. The experience of Jews in Europe has added several words to the human vocabulary – words like expulsion, public disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, auto-da-fe, blood libel, ghetto and pogrom, without even mentioning the word Holocaust. That is the past. My concern is with the future. Today the Jews of Europe are asking whether there is a future for Jews in Europe, and that should concern you, the leaders of Europe.”

It took less than a minute, and after it there was a shocked silence. We adjourned for lunch, and over it Angela Merkel asked, “What would you like me to do, Chief Rabbi?” I did not have an easy answer for her then. I do now. It is: reverse immediately the decision of the Cologne court that renders Jewish parents who give their son a brit milah, even if performed in hospital by a qualified doctor, liable to prosecution.

There’s an asteroid the size of Montana heading toward Earth and if it hits us, the planet is over. But we’ve got one last-ditch plan. We need a team to land on the surface of the asteroid, drill a nuclear warhead one mile into its core, and get out before it explodes. And you’re just the liberal arts major we need to lead that team.

Finally, a bridge you can trust

In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic “God particle” last week, is being largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.

Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.

Photo by James Charlick of the library in an abandoned house, via BoingBoing

There is another wild card to take into account in history: the way that something which once seemed so important to everyone can suddenly seem of no significance at all – and then all the worries are rapidly forgotten, as if they had never been. Let me point you to one of the most long-lasting examples: the Christian ban on menstruating women from participation in the sacraments or even from approaching the altar.

This prohibition, which seems so bizarre now, is first to be encountered in the writings of Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria at the beginning of the third century. An honourable exception – one of very few – to this unexamined consensus was Pope Gregory the Great, writing soon after launching his mission to England under the monk Augustine in 597. Alas, the pope’s open-mindedness was probably conditioned by his evident irritation with the Christians already in Britain before Augustine arrived; they not only predated but resisted Augustine’s authority. These native Christians were rigorous about menstruating women and it was their independent-mindedness that provoked the pope’s liberal ruling. The consensus began to fade in the 16th-century Reformation, at least among those Protestant churches whose worship was less centred on the sacraments than was the case in the Catholic church, but the prejudice survived half-expressed in the more ceremonially minded parts of Lutheranism and Anglicanism until the 1950s and it could still be encountered in 1970 in a regulation of the Catholic church excluding women lectors from the sanctuary during their menstrual periods. Now western Christendom at least has forgotten an issue on which church leaders were near-unanimously agreed, almost without discussion, for 1,700 years. Any lessons to be drawn from that?

Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you’d be a fool to think they won’t do the same as Twitter has. They just may not be as far along. I had an interesting conversation in Amsterdam last year with the founder of SoundCloud, who asked me to use his platform for podcasting. That’s like asking a guy with a gambling addiction to put down a bet. I said no. At some point they will screw their users and developers as Twitter was already doing. I’ll pay for my own hosting and use software I can run myself.