Status-Q

The origin of this is unknown but I came across it in the documentation for some project-management software:

One cannot bring a baby into the world in one month by getting nine women pregnant at the same time.

This one is of unknown origin, though I found it in one of Daniel C. Dennett's books.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

"Four students will be grouped together to perform the waltz and they will change partners regularly as soon as one song finishes. This way, the risk of young love will be lowered."

BBC story here.

Why do you do what you do?

I like this story, which I've seen attributed to David Byrne:

A woman is asked why she cuts the ends off a ham before baking it. She explains that her mom always did so. Her mom explains that she learned it from grandma. And grandma says, "Silly, my pan was too short for the entire ham."

Your Status-Q quote for the day comes from Norman Lewis's eTel talk:

The search for acknowledgement is the key to most online activity.

Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account, to see what all the fuss was about. I was more interested in it as a social phenomenon than because I actually wanted to use it. Which probably indicates that I'm getting old. For those who don't know it, Twitter is all the rage amongst the youth of today. You can type out a few words saying what you're currently doing, and anyone interested in watching can keep up to date with your exciting life. Twitter is to instant messaging what blogging is to email; it's chiefly a broadcasting mechanism rather than a conversation. This is very convenient for the youth of today, who would otherwise need to send the same updates to their 15 simultaneous IM conversations. You can send Twitter updates using your mobile, via the web, using an IM client, or a dedicated application, and you can keep track of your friends in a variety of ways including via RSS. To clarify things, here's the 'History of blogging': (Many thanks to Dave Briggs, who found this on Mashable.)

Quote of the day comes from Stephen Uhler of Sun, who, in his talk at eTel, said:

Cellphones have reduced peoples' expectation of the phone system to the point where VoIP is now viable.

He's quite right - it wasn't that long ago that you would have been very surprised, upset even, if a phone call were just to hang up unexpectedly... Now, as a friend and I once discussed, there's a problem. We need a new social convention. When the line drops, who should re-initiate the call? The person who made the call in the first place? The person with the cheapest outgoing charges? We decided that it was probably the person who was on the move, assuming at least one party was mobile. Because they're the ones who will know when they're back in a good coverage area. Of course, we also realised that in an ideal world the service provider, or the phone, would do this for you. "Press 1 to have the call reconnect automatically when possible..."

Moshe Yudkowsky, in his eTel talk, used a wonderful quote from Agatha Christie, who apparently once said:

I never expected to be so poor that I couldn't afford a servant, or so rich that I could afford a motor car.

I liked this parable, quoted on LifeClever.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ""quantity"" group: fifty pound of pots rated an ""A"", forty pounds a ""B"", and so on. Those being graded on ""quality"", however, needed to produce only one pot, albeit a perfect one, to get an ""A"". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ""quantity"" group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the ""quality"" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

There's often a temptation for coders to come up with the cleverest solution to a problem, one which accomplishes the greatest amount in the fewest lines of code, for example, or takes advantage of the most obscure features of the programming language. Such solutions may be intellectually very satisfying, but are often not ideal for other reasons. I really like this quote from Brian Kernighan, which I heard for the first time last week:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Rose pointed me at a nice article about some kids in Humberside trying to bring back some water voles that were relocated to Devon when building work threatened their habitat.

Keisha, 10, said: "I'm worried the water voles will be extinct in Goole because if they move to Devon they might die because they won't know their way round."

The building developers have apparently relented and are returning the voles to Humberside, to the satisfaction of all concerned. Except, I rather suspect, the voles themselves...