Tech

Senate Technophobia, 1930 Style

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In 1930, U.S. Senator Carter Glass (Virginia) introduced the following resolution:

Whereas dial telephones are more difficult to operate than are manual telephones; and

Whereas senators are required since the installation of dial telephones in the Capitol to perform the duties of telephone operators in order to enjoy the benefits of telephone service; and

Whereas dial telephones have failed to expedite telephone service; therefore, be it

Resolved that the sergeant-at-arms of the Senate is authorized and directed to order the Chesepeake & Potomac Telephone Co., to replace with manual telephones, within 30 days after the adoption of this resolution, all dial telephones in the Senate wing of the United States Capitol and in the Senate Office Building.

The resolution passed.

(source: Visions of Technology, edited by Richard Rhodes)

Millennial Boyz

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I’m on a mission from Lex. On Thu 12 Jul at 5:34 PM CDT, he wrote me:

> Are the Millennials Different?
>
> I know you are a fan. Any response must be cross-posted on CB!

I can think of nothing better to do on a fine Bastille Day evening — having missed the concert by virtue of being 400 miles to the southwest — than consume modest quantities of ethanol in the form of Boulevard Lunar Ale and compose a rambling post for infliction on the readership here. By way of my usual thinning out of my prospective audience, graze on over to Arcturus for what has become known as the Baby Boomer Apocalypse post, which will 1) impart what I think is the most important aspect of Strauss & Howe’s model and 2) very likely cause you to decide you’ve got better things to do than read the rest of this.

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Photography News

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Item 1: Microsoft’s new photo-search technology looks like a big deal.

 
 
 

Item 2: This is great. A guy puts a small digital camera, cleverly modified to take photos at one-minute intervals for 48 hours, on his cat. The cat wanders off and returns with photos of all kinds of things his owner never knew were going on.

A cat is perfect for this experiment, because it is big enough and has a wide enough range of behavior for its travels to be interesting, yet also small enough that it can be allowed to roam. I assume it’s only a matter of time before people start putting cameras on birds and even smaller animals.

“Requirements Kill”

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A commenter on the post immediately preceding this one links to his own thoughtful essay on project management. This kind of thing may be old hat for the PM gurus here but it’s meat to me. You might like the essay if you, like me, are interested in the dynamics of managing big technical projects, and particularly if you are interested in how projects fail.

Intelligence and Thuggery

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Highly intelligent people often have problems in predicting the likely behavior of thugs.

In his 1982 book Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design–a work whose relevance is considerably broader than might be imagined from its title–Gerald Weinberg briefly discusses a contemporary book called How Real is Real?–An Anecdotal Introduction to Communications Theory. Although he finds value is many aspects of this book, Weinberg strongly objects to a passage in which the author (Paul Watzlawick) suggests ways in which communications theory could have been used in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. Watzlawick suggests that the authorities should have used “Erickson’s confusion technique” as follows:

Utilizing the same channels of delivery as the abductors, it would have been relatively simple for them to deliver to the mass media fake messages, contradicting the real ones but similarly threatening the life of Patricia Hearst if they were not complied with…Very quickly a situation of total confusion could have been set up. None of the threats and demands could have been believed, because every message would have been contradicted or confused by another, allegedly coming from the ‘real’ abductor.

Weinberg responds:

It’s very difficult for me to believe that Watzlawick ever thought critically about this idea for fifteen seconds, but its naivete is typical for this genre of speculative systems writing.

…and goes on to suggest that a good way to consider the possible real-world consequences of ideas like this is to imagine a movie (specifically, a thriller) based on the situation and the proposed actions, and to imagine how the plot might develop.

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