November 2009 – Page 4

Month: November 2009 (page 4 of 4)

ACLU interviews with former Guantanamo detainees

These men were captured under various circumstances, held at Guantanamo Bay without charge, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime.

Is purity ever really a virtue?

November 3, 2009 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Humans have a strange obsession with purity — it’s often accepted that the more “pure” something is, the better it is. By way of Simon Willison, I saw this quotation from Mark Pilgrim about HTML:

Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

It made me really think about the utility of the concept of purity. I think that placing a high value on purity is in nearly all cases a case of intellectual laziness. An obsession with purity allows you to avoid critically evaluating factors that might otherwise go into making the best decision. For example, let’s say I’m writing an application using Ruby on Rails and I need an XML parser. Some would argue that I should only use “pure Ruby” XML parsers and leave it at that, but that’s not helpful. Impure parsers may be faster, or offer more features. On the other hand, pure Ruby parser may be easier to deploy. But the discussion should center on those competing benefits, not on the abstract concept of purity.

If you look at the history of purity as a virtue over the course of human history, you will certainly find that any fixation on it has been unrealistic at best and disastrous at worst. Reject purity. It’s overrated.

Could we have “stages” for programmers?

November 2, 2009 / Rafe / 9 Comments

There is a very interesting practice in the restaurant industry, where chefs do unpaid work at a restaurant in hopes of learning (and perhaps in hopes of getting a job there). The term for these placements is stage — pronounced as the French would — “stahge”. Here’s one chef’s account of a stage he’s doing. You can learn a lot more about how a stage works in this three part series by Dean McCord.

It seems stages come in two forms — part time work over a long period of time or a short, full-time unpaid stint in a kitchen. Ultimately the fact that these programs work is a testament to how chefs see each other. Clearly chefs put a very low premium on secrecy — they’re not worried about competitors finding out about next week’s specials. And I think it also depends on the fact that chef skills translate well from one kitchen to another. A chef who has mastered the fundamentals can begin contributing in a new kitchen relatively quickly.

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of approach could work in software development at all. Would you be willing to take on a part time programmer who wanted to learn from how your company develops software? If you were between jobs, would you spend a week or a month working on someone else’s project free of charge in order to learn and potentially get a job? Would you take a week of vacation to work with developers you really admire? Would your boss let you? And finally, do you think you could offer a developer who came in cold to work on your project for a week meaningful work that left them feeling like they gained something from the experience?

Health care costs in the United States

November 2, 2009 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Here’s the bottom line:

If you leave everything else the same — the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need — but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

The implications of eating meat

November 1, 2009 / Rafe / 9 Comments

Today’s New York Times op-ed page features a piece by Nicolette Hahn Niman, wife of the founder of Niman Ranch, one of the big names in sustainable livestock. Her goal is to push back against the argument that to be an environmentalist you have to stop eating meat in general, and beef in particular. Her argument is, in short, that the real problem is eating food (meat or vegetable) that’s not sustainably raised is the real problem when it comes to climate change.

For the past few months, I’ve definitely tried to cut back on the red meat. Industrial agriculture is cruel to animals and terrible for the environment, and eating beef is bad for your health, regardless. I haven’t cut it out completely because I love beef, but I have tried to be significantly more thoughtful about when I eat it. This piece argues that you don’t have to feel especially guilty for the occasional steak indulgence.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held