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Nat Geo’s air crash investigation series gives a good deal of idea behind what went wrong behind an air crash or failure. I was watching one of the episodes which was about the rudder malfunction of Northwest Airlines Flight 85 and how the pilots kept such a large plane in control and landed it safely. All the pilots in that plane continued to fly the plane by adjusting the engine thrust and ailerons to fly to the nearest airport and land safely.

As per the captain’s account it was a very tough thing to fly such a large plane manually. The captain is also a flight instructor so he had a sound understanding of the dynamics of the plane. When interviewed he said “Learning to fly manually is an art, sadly that is a dying art“. Increasingly planes are being designed and manufactured to fly themselves most of the times. This makes the lives of the pilots so easy that most part of the journey is assisted by the machines. But when the machines fail or not designed to handle failures, can humans take over?

What happens to other professions where there is an ever increasing assistance provided by the computers and machines? The result must be the same; when something goes terribly wrong; then there will be a disconnect between the man and the machine. From that point onwards it will be just trial and error handling if there is no deeper understanding of the system.

I read this article on leaky abstractions longtime ago. The author states that if something non trivial is abstracted then the abstraction will be leaky and put us in a spot. This article also prompted me to dive deeper into something if I am learning new. It is really tempting to hang on to the hello world examples & the new hello world of GUI “To do lists” and get away with a feeling that I have got a fair exposure. If I just learn that but not spend enough time to understand the internals, then I would be in a bad spot someday when I least expect.

Image: bk images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

I got a forward from one of my peers a month ago. Even though the video is just an hour long I was putting this away for a weekend. After watching this video I realized that I made a mistake of putting this away for a long time. This talk definitely made me think every problem differently. Bret Victor has also come up with reactive documents, he believes that most of what we do with computers were designed to be done on paper and we are not using the power of electronics.

Some of the quotes I captured from the talk in my own words.

When you have to compile, run and see what you have built chances are high that you won’t discover that a shimmering effect can be provided by just changing the radius of a circle. 

If the feedback loop is longer; thinking something and seeing it much later does not bring any connection.

If creater needs to know about time, then need to know how to control time.

When we write program for the computer to do, why are we simulating in the head what a computer should do; instead ask the computer to do.

The languages were designed when there was batching through punched cards. No one wrote a program and was able to immediately see the output.

Ideas are precious, seeing an idea die hurts

One of my peers sent the following to my team as his take away from the talk.

Injustice, responsibility, moral wrong.. these are not the words we normally hear in technical field. We hear these in association with social causes. So things like censorship, gender discrimination, environmental destruction.. we all recognize these things as moral wrong. Most of us won’t see a civil rights violation and think that it is an opportunity. I hope not. Instead, we have been fortunate to have people throughout history who recognize these social wrongs and sought as their responsibility to address them. So this activist lifestyle where a person dedicates themselves to fighting for a cause they believe in. And the purpose of this talk is to tell you that activist lifestyle is not just for social issues. As a technologist, you can recognize wrong in the world. You can have a vision of a better world to be. You can dedicate yourself to fight for that principle. Social activist fight typically by organizing, you can fight by inventing.

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Ever wondered that some of the live wires at the office or school were not those kind when they just joined the place. It was something like they were waiting for a tipping point and their activities became live. I randomly selected a ted talk, How bacteria talk. Bonnie Bassler a biochemist, has observed that bacteria cannot turn on their behaviour until there is enough of them. But how does all the single cell animals know how many of them are around? The answer was that each type of bacteria releases a certain signature chemical molecule into their environment, based on the amount of that specific molecule a bacterium receives, they can determine the population density. This is called Quorum sensing which is also evident for insects where we think they could be intelligent but may be that they just rely on the density of their peers around to do certain tasks.

How can this apply to human behaviour? I have been lucky to move to different places and teams almost every year, which has made me observe teams get started and get going. In one of the teams I have been, we did not know that we had good number of musicians to form a band until we had some event coming in the office. The event allowed the release of signaling molecules from individuals searching for people with similar interests.

This is also true to interests in technologies and pursuing hobbies. As the workplace gets bigger it is more difficult to network and find the right group to be in unless there is enough quorum sensing. Just by someone in the team holding a regular weekly get together for a random topic can spark interests and get people to come together and switch to top gear. I observed that a group’s knowledge and skill level gets amplified if there is effective sharing, effective sharing happens only when people come together, people come together only if something is happening and something happens only if someone takes an initiative. We must make sure our workplace is conducive for quorum sensing to make the best use of everyone’s strengths and skills.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net