In my mind it gets worse when the procedure is identified: A difficult shoulder surgery by an orthopedic surgeon gets refused because it might be result in a mediocre outcome and lower his 'success' rate. The patient can't get the surgery because no surgeon wants to 'risk' his success rate numbers.
(1) I read a book, which helped quite a bit: "Contact, the first 4 minutes" by Leonard Zunin. Still available on Amazon, or perhaps at your local library. Lots of good tips.
I (now) have fun interactions with people in (for example) grocery store lines, thanks to the tip that in these circumstances that you should comment on something immediately visible, so you have a shared starting point/reference point. I'll point to a People magazine or National Enquirer-type rag and say "I miss the days when there headlines about Elvis in a flying saucer", which will provoke a laugh and (often) a comment. Of course, I'm talking to people my age (in their sixties) so they remember that too. Adapt as needed to make it age-appropriate.
It also lays out strategies for how to connect in less transient situations.
As others have said, practice is very helpful.
I was painfully shy and spoke haltingly as a young adult. I'm now very comfortably extraverted.
"non-human animals are widely known to have language". I remember reading years ago about Koko the gorilla being taught sign language, but that Koko was incapable of seeing the sign for 'fire' without having a fear response. McCarthy didn't spell it out in the article more than to say:
"The simple understanding that one thing can be another thing is at the root of all things of our doing. From using colored pebbles for the trading of goats to art and language and on to using symbolic marks to represent pieces of the world too small to see."
I infer from this that a more sophisticated (or, in your words, specialized) definition of language that is of interest to McCarthy includes abstraction. I can talk about fire without arousing fear in a fellow human because they understand I'm not announcing the immediate presence of fire, I'm talking about it abstractly. As far as I know, no non-human animals are known to have the ability.
I wonder how many software engineers, and how many of the GoF (Gang of Four) who wrote the software book that popularized patterns in the software world, actually read and thought about A Pattern Language. I'm sure some, but in my mind the subtitle "Towns, Buildings, Construction" examines patterns that are large in scope, medium in scope, and small in scope. One of my personal complaints about software patterns is that there are so few that are 'large scale'.
Doing good science around this kind of stuff is extremely difficult ...
My personal experience with Psychodrama and Gestalt in the late '70s and early '80s was that for someone like myself who was very much 'in my head', it was an opportunity to acknowledge my own repressed anger. But in retrospect, it was/is also behavior rehearsal for bad behavior in the rest of my life. More effective was modern Somatic Experience techniques where the impulse to respond in anger is explored with a lot of inner attention and slow-motion movements of pushing away and/or striking back. I would call it more grounded and more present. There is dissociation that occurred for me with so-called cathartic anger.
The variation in 'venting' adds to the complexity of the conversation. Physical venting vs naming sources of anger/frustration. Based on my personal experience, physical venting is far less effective than verbal venting, and of course verbal venting is massively variable. Naming the exact source of frustration strikes me as more likely to be usefully defusing than just shouting that someone is an f-ing a*hole. I can imagine the inclusion of humor, for example, would have a huge impact.
I'm glad it helped your grieving process, and a big yes to the reality of "this is hard to study".
I have an intuition that catharsis as part of a grief process might be quite different (more useful) than in situations where the anger arises out of other circumstances.
The keyboardio keyboard I'm typing on (A Model 1) puts substantially less stress on my hands and wrists than any other keyboard I've used. As someone who has had repetitive stress pain in my wrists, I consider it - well, not beyond price, but certainly worth a few hundred dollars when it avoids surgery and enables me to pursue a HIGHLY lucrative profession full time. Each person's hands are different, so maybe you do fine with an inexpensive keyboard, and my keyboard won't suit everyone, but it's a fairly straightforward explanation the way I see it.
I worked on an air-defense system upgrade (ground and airborne radar integration) 1981-1986 where we installed 8" floppy drives. At the time they were being installed, they were already obsolete. The backstory on this includes (A) The goal is to have the system be operational at least 20 years. (B) the procurement cycle is about 10 years long from "we need this" to "it's operational". You want to decide on your hardware at about year 3 in the procurement process. (C) You know your hardware won't be supported by commercial vendors for this length of time, so you need to develop an Integrated Logistics Plan (ILP) that includes complete troubleshooting, maintenance and repair processes (manuals written from scratch). We were replacing card readers with 8" floppy drives. Wee! The systems described here far outlived the planned-for 20 years being operational.
There's a despair that overcame me when the data we were processing changed date/time format in the middle of a file. It was a file for one day's data! Data on 5 minute intervals for 3 thousand data sources. Received in an email, no less. (Long story). But date/time format changed. The initial load was garbage. As many know, some countries use mm/dd/yy and others dd/mm/yy. I just wanted to cry when I dug in and saw the change. Instead, I hacked a little more on our lowly ETL script to check for this circumstance. This was just one example of an ongoing stream of data weirdness, as ETLers everywhere know.
In an early startup, (< 4 engineers in my case) I can't imagine using anything but a skanky script at the outset. We went broke before we needing a framework. Needed more engineering time on other things.
I'm a developer who worked for 35 years and never became a manager. I wouldn't say I fit into any of these classifications. I worked in the defense industry for 5 years, then switched to commercial software. I worked with several different languages in companies with very different products. I was constantly learning, but never thought of myself as a 'super developer'. I learned new languages and new product areas: C/Bash for a company building ethernet hardware in the '80s. (A full TCP/IP stack ran on the board). Switched to a company building software for the Mac. (C and Pascal). Did contract work for modem companies. Learned Perl (Bleah) when working for an Internet Advertising company. Learned Ruby on Rails working for a company that was doing analysis on Air-conditioning systems in skyscrapers in order to save the building operators money and energy. I stayed very interested and involved. Did my best work when my manager could carve out a project that I could work on by myself and be done in 3 months or so, without needing any supervision.
"Management skills" is a huge misnomer in my mind. I wasn't management material, and not especially good on a team, because I'd get angry when people disagreed with me. Peter Drucker said the most important part of being a manager was having character. Not something one can acquire in any easy way. I got a lot of therapy to deal with my own anger, so that helped.
The main thing I was thinking (I don't use Python myself) was that it's super-popular right now, and fits in the realm of 'a scripting language'. I'm loathe to recommend bash for what I hope are obvious reasons, and I have worked in and detested Perl. I prefer Ruby for small bits of scripting this and that, but chose Python because of it's popularity.
I agree, 3 or 4 at a time is probably too much, I may have misremembered (I can't find the recommendation in any Weinberg book at my fingertips). But six months of solid work on 2, then six months of work on another two is an idea.
I highly recommend "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, by Gerald Weinberg. An orthogonal piece of advice that I got from a different book of Gerald Weinbergs' is to learn 3 or 4 Very Different languages simultaneously, to grasp the enormous difference between them all. In 2021 I'd recommend C (lowest level other than assembler: 1st caveat, I haven't looked at Rust) and then at least one Lisp-family language that has Lots of Insane Silly Parentheses, which Paul Graham argues is the most powerful language (by far). I'd also choose Smalltalk and Python. Caveat 2: Every programmer will have an opinion on this list, but the main point is to get exposed to the diversity of languages. Also, I'd recommend listening to a lot of talks by Alan Kay. There is lots of fun and interesting stuff to learn from lots of different people, but Alan Kay has focussed on how do we develop stuff that is radically simple, radically powerful, and completely accessible to children as a tool for learning and exploration. His notion of 'object-oriented' (a term he invented) is completely different from how the term is used today.
I knew vim well before I read this advice, so didn't need it myself, but think it's worthy: Go through vimtutor, then use the native vim for you platform that also has a GUI, so when you get frustrated you can 'fall back' to using menus. Over time replace your menu-fallback stuff with "hand on the keyboard" techniques. It was soooo frustrating in the early going with vim. Very distracting from what I was trying to do. (Presumably true for most of us.)
Sandy Metz, a Ruby lecturer, also advocates 5 line functions. I'm keen to have functions limited to 24 lines, because as someone with significant vision challenges who uses large fonts, that's as many lines as I can get on a screen, and I want to see the whole function at once.
But I also think it's worth asking "what language are we in"? When I'm writing in C, I'm going to be maxing out that 24 lines, because it's sufficiently low level that seems appropriate. With powerful languages like Python and Ruby, you can accomplish so much with 3 lines of code, maxing at 5 doesn't seem terrible. With Java (yuck, not a fan), one of the problems is there's so much boilerplate for every function that it just seems like the screen is filled with non-informative blah-blah-blah.
This is kind of an anti-answer, sorry about that. I confess, after 40 years of software development, I was done with the technical world. In the three years I've been retired, I've sailed a lot, done woodworking, made music (guitar, piano, voice, played a lot of chess, exercised, and hung out with my wife and the kid I mentor. If I had more time, I'd improve my Spanish. I have travel plans, too. Does he really need to make more money? Has he no other interests?
"In-depth" interviews and news reports seldom even scratch the surface of complex subjects. Thinking that a man who has spent years working with architecture, even if he's not a licensed architect, can explain his rationale in such a short span is, frankly, laughable.
Well, seeing how the building is going to be when built, and knowing the reasoning for the design is two different things, yes? He may have given an interview, but this is hardly a full explication of the reasoning behind the decisions. We have to know the reasoning before we can agree or disagree with it. It's not as if this is some "oops, I hadn't thought about the lack of windows."
I've stayed in a couple in the U.S. that had no windows, both built in the modern era, which perhaps accounts for the difference. Both with Jesuit roots.
One of the things that I'm betting is true here is that most of us don't have any _detailed_ information about the building. Charlie Munger says: I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.” Whether he always adheres to this or not, I don't know, but as someone who has become one of the wealthiest men in the world, I have to believe he has excellent judgement.
As for windowless rooms: Monastics live in windowless rooms. Teenagers sometimes prefer shutting out all natural light. Most of the work environments I worked in for 40 years didn't have windows where I could look out. Everybody that lives in this dorm will have some level of choice as to whether to be there or not. The building is not windowless, it has (many) windowless rooms. Part of the tradeoff is that each student gets a room of their own. Sharing a space with someone you don't like sucks, I can say from my own experience.
The place I heard the quote is the opening statement by Hal Abelson in the course he co-taught with Gerald Sussman and is now part of MIT Open courseware. Not quite sure when it was taught, but the text SICP was written in 1985.... He goes on to say also the word Geometry derived from metron to measure and Gaia, the earth, and that Geometry was developed in Egypt to restore boundaries to land after the annual flooding of the Nile. But it's really the beginning of our efforts to formulate our concepts of space and time.
Hmmm ... In 1982 I heard a talk by Edsger Dijkstra given at my company. As he stepped up to the overhead projector he said "I asked for 20 feet of blackboard, and I got this ..."
As a (former) presenter, I found myself constantly struggling to figure out how to get what I wanted to say onto a slide. I'm going to say, I want a projector that can project on to a wall 10 feet high (although I'd probably only use the top five feet) and 15 feet across. I personally have bad eyes, and don't want to resort to anything less than really easy to read text size. It's not just powerpoint, but the physical infrastructure that becomes standard support for powerpoint that becomes the enemy of deep, complex ideas.
Current saw stop units do have an over-ride switch so that if you know you're going to cut questionable wood, you can disable the safety mechanism for a series of cuts. (The safety mechanism comes back on if you power the table saw off, then back on.) But of course you don't know advance for sure if the piece of wood in hand will trigger the safety mechanism or not.
Not everybody's cup of tea, but our ability to be 'present' is highly variable, both person-to-person, and one person over time. I'm a somewhat daydreamy sort of person, so I work to bring focus when I'm using power tools. As a hobbyist I walk out of my shop when I get tired, emotional, or otherwise distracted, but that's not an option for everyone.
I confess I found it dismal that the first problem was to learn the multiplication tables. If I'm looking for a book to excite anyone, that's not where I start. I get that those operations quickly become important in algebra and number theory, but that's hardly the essence of mathematics. All that said, I'm not sure where I'd start for secondary students, but the interest generated by watching _ideas_ emerge in 3blue1brown videos is a stark contrast to this kind of start.
Yup! Same thing with the ridiculous verify-my-identify questions. One I encounter all the time is the local community college, which let me use spaces in my answers on creation, but not at entry time. Grrrr.
Definitely a 'Your Mileage May Vary' moment here. On guitar, I used to 'slog' rather than 'power through' a song. It took weeks before it came close to sounding like music. Now I start with a couple (tough) bars (think Doc Watson, Deep River Blues) and that bit sounds like music in a day or two. Plus, I find muscle memory develops much more quickly when I play the same bit over in a short time span.
It turns out, they use a variation on the transparent aluminum referenced in "Star Trek, the Voyage Home", which can be magnetized or not, based on control from the tricorder.
I agree with questioning the sanity ... There are likely all sorts of advantages and disadvantages that might exist at this level of granularity. For example who is on the inside at the start of the first curve of the race? Are the start and finish lines in exactly the same orientation (direction) and (as somebody else mentions) is everybody at the same distance from the starting gun? Speed of sound is finite. Call it a tie!