Re-posting an interesting idea.

Re-posting
http://robotmonkeys.net/2010/07/22/bullet-train-hopping/

Jonathan writes:

"Jianjun Chen in China proposed an interesting idea for eliminating station dwell times for trains. In his/her design, each train has a detachable boarding shuttle mounted on the roof of the train. Passengers who wish to disembark leave the main passenger compartment of the train, and enter the shuttle. Meanwhile, embarking passengers board an identical shuttle already located at the station. As the train approaches, the shuttle mounted on the train, disengages so it can slow to a stop at the station, while the shuttle is grabbed and mounted onto the moving train."

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44717&src=eorss-iotd

You can see Santa Cruz (and the rest of redwood country) on this map.

A manifesto in the form of a sequence of seemingly unrelated ideas

• Programming is a social activity. Sure there are cases where you are working with a fixed set of libraries you know well, and you're trying to generate something interesting within this vocabulary of thought, but most industrial coding seems to consist of cobbling various libraries together.
  
• Computing is a social activity. (no explanation needed)
• (completely unrelated) Things that only the "dorky kids" did in my generation are the exact things "all the kids" seem to be doing in subsequent generations.
• Programming is the fundamental activity people do with computers, much like "driving" is the fundamental activity people do with cars
  
• Learning to program only *seems* hard because we try to force students from zero to programming-literacy in one college semester, then fail them if they fall behind on the interesting stuff that depends on that basic literacy. Imagine if we spent a year slowly teaching programming for every year we taught kids about reading, writing or arithmetic.
• Analogy between modern professional programmers and ancient scribes.
  
  • Elite group of educated scholars
  • Write using needlessly difficult technology (either "C" or "All caps and no punctuation")
  • Mostly write things like "So and so owes the king 15 sheep" / modern day business software
• Analogy between programming and other basic intellectual tasks.
  
  • Perhaps in the future being a "professional programmer" will be as weird as being a "professional writer" or a "professional mathematician" today
  • But, likewise, everyone will need to do a little reading/programming/arithmetic
  • There may be many "high school programming teachers"
• Printing press analogies
  
  • Looking at computers and the internet to day and getting interested in them as "fascinating machines" is like looking at the first printing presses and becoming obsessed with the screw mechanism.
    
  • Omitting the rest of the analogy

San Francisco bay from Mountain View