Lambda the Ultimate

Previously on LtU.

I missed it the first time, thanks for (re)posting it.

Great inspirational stuff. THanks for posting again.

I saw this talk a few years ago and this part really stuck with me:

[...] And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!

While it doesn't seem like a good idea to go around questioning peoples' research in that way (it doesn't seem to give you many friends!), it certainly is a good thing to ask yourself once in a while: "am I working on an important problem of my field? if not, why not?"

Hamming wrote a book that goes deeper into the topic of his talk: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1997. Very highly recommended.

That would be a Good Idea for a web site. (Anyone with spare capacity on their hands?) A Big Thought Friday web site. Where you invite users to Think Big Thoughts in a envitonment where chilling little thought "it won't work" put downs are held back by the moderator until monday.

I agree, except I believe that all of the little "it won't work" comments are absolutely essential to the process of engineering. The best scientists and engineers that I know are pessimists. They can list a million reasons that something will fail, yet in discussing these, they usually say, "but we can get around that by..." and both convincing themselves that it can work, and recognizing and eliminating lots of sources of failure before they happen, which is crucial.

Outstanding article, by the way. I've forwarded it around.

And now... the slides!

I've had a problem with the working harder is like compound interest statement since I first read this. To me that also means that if you happen to slow down just a little, the net effect is a huge drop in progress. But, from my personal experience, I don't remember ever being so disappointed with my progress just because I worked a little less hard than usual.

Nearly two years later, I finally found an affordable ($130) copy of Hamming's textbook. I'll post a review on my blog when I've finished reading.

It was never my privilege to meet Dick Hamming, but an older colleague once described his experience working down the hall. This man (my colleague) was a strong software engineer, but was not a researcher or a scientist. As best I can reconstruct it:

Dick would come wandering down the hall, step into my office, and write enthusiastically on my whiteboard, explaining all the while what it was he was thinking about. I would nod and say "hmm" at various points, mostly not understanding a word of it. It was quite an amazing experience.

And judging by my colleagues tone during his description, it was perhaps awe-inspiring and a bit frightening in a low-grade sort of way. From the description I got, Hamming was probably explaining the foundations of error correcting codes.

John Cocke behaved similarly, though his soliloquies generally included a fair bit of colorful vocabulary. Most people found him intimidating, but I think that John may have loved nothing more than a well-founded, knock-down, drag-out, bare-knuckles technical argument. Ignorance was tolerated if corrected, but stupidity was like waving a flag before a bull: you were sure to be gored.