It’s strange how these coincidences happen. In my last post on The psychology of geeks I included a footnote that was attributed to Bruce Tognazzini, and this morning he pops up in a story published by BBC News: Web wizards weave their magic.
Not surprisingly, he has his own web site, Ask Tog; and it seems he was recently in London, hence the interview with the BBC.
Magic.
In Geeks and Promotion Anil Dash suggests:
There are many kinds of geeks in the world, and I think I tend to know at least one of each variety. But a common personality trait among a lot of the smartest, most creative people I know is that they’re not inclined to do a lot of self-promotion…
I find that most of my friends and acquaintances who create truly visionary works aren’t really against promotion, it’s just not a skill that they cultivate for themselves…
I think part of the reason is cultural, as programmers have always had a mistrust and even a contempt for the suits, for the marketers who just want to pimp a product, developmental realities be damned.
Well the reason may be partly cultural, but it’s also definitely psychological. Here’s an excerpt from The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability and Productivity by Thomas K. Landauer (1995):
Software engineers (another name for programmers and system designers) tend to have different personalities, different approaches to the world, from the rest of us.
Programming attracts twice the proportion of introverts in the general population and three times the number of “intuitive” thinkers (Tognazzini 1992)1. Introverts prefer their own thoughts to social interaction. Intuitive thinkers prefer the products of their imaginations to humdrum reality; they solve problems by visual imagery and insight rather than by plodding logic or investigation. These traits apparently suit people for the largely independent, sometimes lonely work of programming and to creating the intricately complex and abstract structures of software systems. It is unlikely that they help a person understand the majority, who would rather interact with co-workers than computers and who prefer to think about simple, concrete problems.”
1. Tognazzini, B. (1992). Tog on Interface. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Give me the world inside my head any day.
These days some of the most interesting writing, both on and off the web, is about cultural exchange, by which I mean people writing about their experiences as they visit or live in new places. One of my latest weblog discoveries, dervala.net, is a good example.
Dervala is an Irish casualty of the US dot.com bust, and she’s spent the last few months living alone on the shore of Lake Superior, discovering life in the Canadian wilderness. Previously Dervala lived and worked in Manhattan with everything she could possibly want right on her doorstep. Now, she carefully plans her grocery shopping in advance because the nearest store is an hour and a half’s drive away in Sault Ste Marie.
Until recently that is, because Dervala is on the move again. This time she’s on her way to visit her sister in Ottawa, but she continues to write about and post her adventures along the way.
Dervala’s writing is crisp and imaginative, and the thought of her trapped in an office job seems like a terrible waste of good talent. A retrospective trawl through her weblog is an impressively good read.
News from this morning’s Guardian newspaper:
An investigation into last month’s derailment of an inter-city train at King’s Cross has found that the engineering company, Jarvis, failed to file paperwork for maintenance to a crucial set of points.
Jarvis has suspended an engineering supervisor after the accident, in which a GNER train carrying 150 passengers came off the tracks as it left London for Glasgow. Jarvis admitted a rail was missing because of an employee mistake.
A joint inquiry by Network Rail and Jarvis will this week publish findings which criticise a failure of communication between the two companies.
Industry sources say the two firms relied on a “verbal agreement” to carry out overnight maintenance to the track, rather than keeping detailed records. The points ought to have been disabled after Jarvis’s work but Network Rail’s signallers seemed unaware of the issue.
A rail was missing? A verbal agreement? Sometimes it is hard to believe that this is the same country that once ruled India.
Canada has a disproportionately low profile in the UK in my opinion. Australia, which is much farther away, is frequently in the news and kept at the front of British minds, thanks to among other things, the popular Antipodean daytime soap-opera Neighbours. Canada on the other hand is hardly ever mentioned, being judged by the UK’s media and “chattering classes” as too dull.
But perhaps that perception is beginning to change? Not only has the Economist recognised Canada’s hidden depths, but yesterday BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning current affairs show, Broadcasting House, aired an interview (available for the next 6 days; RealPlayer required) with the outspoken mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman. He can hardly be considered dull, having confessed to being afraid of Kenyans boiling him alive.
So thanks to Canada’s emerging liberalism and some of its less tactful politicians (Ralph Klein, the Premier of Alberta, is another that comes to mind), Canada may finally be shaking off its reputation for being boring.
The British will soon need to find another country for that old joke:
Canada’s a fabulously beautiful country. Wonderful place to visit. But not for the whole weekend.
P.S. – The Lastman interview occurs 51 minutes into the programme.
Last week I read that Canadians were cool. Now I know it’s true!
I’ve been busy, which explains that lack of posts recently, but there are a number of items worth mentioning
The first is being broadcast as I write on BBC Radio 4. It's a documentary originally broadcast last May about a farmer who refused to move out of his home when the M62 motorway was built in West Yorkshire in the 1960s. Three lanes of traffic now go speeding past both sides of Ken Wild's house 24 hours a day.
At one point someone says “the purpose of life is death”, and the rest of the half-hour programme makes for equally compelling radio. You should be able to listen to it on the BBC’s Listen Again page, or read about it as Life in the fast lane.
Can you remember the first time you ate spaghetti? The cook and author Nigel Slater can, and from his experience it’s clear that one way to stimulate an interest in food is to eat very badly as a child. Slater is describing his experience each day this week on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and at times it’s very funny.
Update: Gavin Bell of Take One Onion spotted excerpts of Slater’s book published in The Observer.
I read this today, the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States, and it seemed appropriate to just post it:
Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to “bring us together.”
Florence King (b. 1936), U.S. humorist, essayist, social critic.
From Why I Am a Royalist, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye p. 125, New York, St. Martin's Press (1989).
A journalist at BBC News Online, Gary Eason, has written an amusing account of the poor service he received from BT Openworld (see BBC NEWS | Technology | Always on, except when it’s off).
I don’t want to spoil his story, but Eason’s experience reminds me of one of my favourite movies Brazil by Terry Gilliam. Jon Reeves summarised the plot for The Internet Movie Database as follows:
Bureaucracy and ductwork run amok in the story of a paperwork mixup that leads to the imprisonment of Mr. Buttle, shoe repairman, instead of Harry Tuttle, illegal freelance Heating Engineer. Bureaucrat Sam Lowry (prone to escapes to a fantasy world) gets branded a terrorist and becomes hunted by the state himself in the process of correcting the mistake.
What’s the moral of this story? When things start to spiral out of control, start making copious notes.
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