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

Robot household cleanup and RFID

What if every thing in your house that wasn't trash had an RFID tag?

Your household swarm of cleanup robots could potentially pick up every item. If the item doesn't come with an RFID tag, it goes in the trash/recycling/etc. (telling these apart might be hard). If it does come with an RFID tag, there's a household database that tells your robots where the thing goes when it gets put away.

I suppose this wouldn't solve all the problems with "program robots to clean your house" but it sure seems like a big first step. (It might be worth testing any proposed solution to the "robots clean your house" problem with the "the baby just defecated on the floor" thought experiment)

(food items would be an interesting issue, the RFID tag would have to have some sort of expiration information, and when the food gets thrown out / composted/recycled, the RFID tag has to be removed for later reuse. Things like shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes present similar issues.)

P.S. If any readers find similar ideas posted elsewhere, please post links to the more interesting write-ups in the comments section.

The right approach, I think

http://www.oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

Having glanced through the websites of several "ubiquitous computing" research groups, I think that the Oxygen project at MIT is the closest I've seen to "something on the right track" Partly I occasionally track / glance at what's happening in this field because I think it could become an interesting thing to be involved in in the future. Partly I keep looking at it because I have this sneaking suspicion that, when we start getting to pervasively embedded small computers, HCI will start looking like a robotics problem. And partly I'm interested in how the network connectivity for pervasive computing might work : perhaps the distributed robotics and ad-hoc network people have a head-start on some of the issues that might come up.

Should be of interest to some

Particularly of interest is the discussion of the "software as object" focus

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Central Valley Airport

Why I think it would be reasonable to construct an international airport in California's Central Valley (pending the construction of at least the Central Valley portion of the California High-Speed Rail project)

1. Its flat (so you can arbitrarily scale it up with new runways) Of course the current solution to overcrowding at SFO and LAX is to increase runway space at outlying airports like SJC and Ontario -- one of which is already in the central valley, while the other one is along one of the proposed high-speed rail lines (albeit the part of the line least likely to be built soon -- most sensible discussion thinks high speed rail will connect to CalTrain/Metrolink, and CalTrain will take care of the San Jose --> San Francisco leg)
2. High speed rail will make a hypothetical Central Valley Airport accessible from the current major metropolitan areas (not useful if you're flying to LA, but what's an extra hour of train ride if you're going to Singapore?)
3. One of the parts of the Schwarzenegger agenda I actually sort-of-agree with is the (unstated) intent to push urban/suburban growth into the Central Valley, most likely along the CA-99 corridor. The housing bubble stopped this somewhat, but the infrastructure/empty housing is in place, and a chain of UC campuses stretching from Davis to Riverside could spur job growth.
4. Part of me secretly wants to teach at UC Merced. I predict that, as time goes on, UC Merced will rapidly become a top engineering school, (making it even harder for me to do this). High speed rail and a massive airport would make it easier for an urbanite like me to live there.
5. Unrelated, but I'd like to curse the Southern California software industry for locating primarily in the public transit deadzone of Santa Monica. Although I'm told that there is a new Expo Line they are building between downtown and Santa Monica. I'd like to remind everyone that the massive Southern California megalopolis is "train scale" and not "car scale."

(edited later to add)
One of the drawbacks to this plan (and plans involving "Central Valley growth" in general) is that the Central Valley is already being used for agriculture (and is fairly unique agricultural land). According to Wikipedia,

"The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002."

Presumably some of it can be diverted from agricultural use, but it could radically change our food production if it were to entirely convert over to sprawl.

On band.

I was sitting home sick, watching youtube videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxANVR07GVI

(who does their videos, by the way? Pete would probably know.)

when I came across
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EltW4w2W_Ys and I started thinking about my "high school band" days, and how our sound always sounded so *mushy* and I had the recurring thought "If the band's seating is 100 ft across, and sound travels at 1000 ft/sec, the clarinets should hear the trombones be off by 1/10th of a second -- or, at 120 bpm, 1/5 of a beat."

I mean, I'm sure skilled musicians (not me at the time) compensate for this in a variety of ways : but any form of compensation you could have only "works perfectly" for at most one spot (2 spots if the band is aligned precisely along a line). It seems like the "best" you could do is "everyone plays off the conductor's baton" (information from this travels at the speed of light) and for a listener at a large distance, l, from the center of the band, to whom the band is aligned perpendicularly, hears different instruments as if they were at most

sqrt(l2 + 2500) - l

feet apart, which, as l gets large, behaves sort-of like (1/(2*l)])*2500. Or, better yet, pick the spot (the king's chair?) at which the sound has to be perfect, and align the entire band along the rim of a semicircle with that spot as the center (somewhat close to what bands and orchestras actually do).

But still, the time delay to to sound travel when you're sitting inside the large band/orchestra means that musicians can't really react to each others sound they would in a small ensemble. In essence, they have to rely on the (centralized?) conductor for synchronization. Which is probably yet another one of the many reasons why groups that do real improvisation tend to be small.

Also, that guy with the monocle in the elite box off to the side? He's probably hearing one of the worst orchestral performances of his life.