The Christmas Bomb Worked

The bomb on Northwest flight 253 was not a failure. It worked quite well.

You see, terrorists aren't trying to kill people, they're trying to cause terror. A packet of PETN the size of a sanitary napkin taped to some guy's junk doesn't need to explode to cause terror, it just needs to get past security, then cause an uproar on the plane.

Oh, Obama will make a few speeches, a few appointed officials will play musical chairs, and we'll have a few more reasons to hate flying. We'll spend a few billion dollars on some new mandated machines at the airports that are designed to sniff out crotch bombs (and give fat bonuses to the execs at the companies that make them). In the end, though, we're as safe as we are now. The next bomb won't be PETN. We'll be expecting that, and it's apparently too hard for the nincompoops Bin Laden manages to brainwash to set off, as proven by this guy and the shoe bomber. Meanwhile, the terrorists are rolling around laughing at the stupid Americans getting their panties in a bunch over a pair of explosive BVDs, whilst plotting for the next way to smuggle bombs into densely populated spaces.

How do we know what the terrorists will do next? Here's an idea: hire Tom Clancy to come up with ways terrorists could attack us, and then hire a few fortune tellers from Detroit's Greektown to cast stones on the likelihood of them being carried out. Build machines to install at the airports to detect signs of these plots. Arrest anyone who fits Tom's character descriptions, and send Jack Ryan to kill Bin Laden.

Or we could listen to reason.

Arlen Specter

Since when does being a moderate Republican make someone some sort of fringe weirdo? Are people so ignorant of their own party's history? It seems that a lot of people are jumping on Specter for not having been a "real Republican". Where does this thought come from?

Up until Ford dropped Rockefeller for Dole in '76, the moderate and conservative parts of the party were pretty evenly matched. Goldwater pushed the conservatives a bit higher in the mid-'60s, but through the '40s and '50s, the moderates were pretty much in charge. Since the '80s, however, the conservatives have been solidly in charge of the party, and the moderates have been pushed further and further into the corner. At some point, the conservative Republicans forgot the moderates ever existed, even though there are still a few of them hanging on.

Moderate Republicans aren't some sort of rebel faction of the Republican party; they're just a few old guys who still like Ike.

Penmanship

Recently, I have been trying to improve my penmanship. In so doing, I realized why I always seemed to have trouble with cursive writing; I don't think my teachers were teaching it correctly.

Look at any turn-of-the-century penmanship handbook, and you will see hundreds of exercises simply to train the hand and arm movements required to write quickly and legibly. Hundreds of identical strokes, all at the same angle, with the same pressure, moving always with the arm, not the fingers. These train the muscles of the arm to produce consistent letter forms, quickly and smoothly, which is essential to penmanship.

This was never taught. Instead, we took the printing we learned in earlier grades, added tails to the letters, and mashed them together. Each letter was distinct, without flow. Strokes were taught only as they pertained to an individual letter; when a letter was broken down into its component shapes, those shapes were immediately assembled back into that same letter, without touching on re-use of those shapes in similar letters.

I see this same problem in software development. A problem is broken down into smaller problems, but these small problems are rarely studied in isolation. We break the problem down, solve the small problems, and re-assemble them. Forgetting that we already solved two-thirds of the small problems elsewhere in the project, we solve the same problem in five or six different ways, some better and some worse, some beautiful, some sloppy and unmaintainable.

What we need to do is solve these small problems. Solve them over and over again, so that we may refine them and practice them. Eleven letters in Spencerian script share the same initial stroke; practicing just that one stroke will improve the implementation of each and every one of those letters. Perfect solutions to common sub-problems, and all problems that share them will improve.

Desserts in the Desert or: Why the English Language is Hard to Learn

You thought remembering when to use "their", "there", or "they're" was complicated? Well, here's a set of words that will really make your head spin. Even if you're a native speaker of English, you probably don't even know about the existence of one of these words, as is made clear by the number of times I have seen the misspelled idiom "just desserts" in the writing of my peers.

I'll start my explanation with two Latin words, serere and servire. Now, serere is a useful word. The root simply means "join", and is used in words such as our "series". Servire also serves us well, as you can see here[1]. This pair of words, after getting thoroughly sloshed on their way through France, have become a confusing mish-mash of English words. Four of these are the subjects of this post.

"Desert" is a rather innocuous word. You probably think you know everything there is to know about it, but you're probably wrong. In fact, there are three homographs---words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings, and may or may not be pronounced the same---here. Taking our old friend serere, we can add de- to the beginning; this gives us "deserere", or "un-join", meaning to leave---desert. An area which is abandoned or deserted by life is then a desert. Luckily, these words do not share a part of speech, so confusion between them rarely occurs.

By now, you're probably wondering where our second Latin root, servire, comes in. This word means "serve", and we can add the same de- to it, giving us "deservire", or "un-serve"; when you clear the table after a meal, you are "un-serving" your guests (or masters, as the Latin for "slave" was servus). Eventually, there came to be a tradition of serving a treat at the end of a meal---a dessert, if you will.

Finally, let's come back around to the misspelled idiom, "just desserts". The correct spelling is thus: "just deserts". In this case, desert is a homophone of "dessert", and also derives from servire, specifically from the word "deserve"; it means "something to which you are entitled due to service". Historically, this would generally be a good thing. You served well, and deserve a reward---your "just deserts". Limiting those deserts to cake and ice cream seems rather droll[2], don't you think?

[1] Yes, that was a pun.
[2] And if you're wandering in the desert, you really ought to eschew sweets.

Introducing a Rather Eclectic Blog

I was chatting with a friend a few minutes ago, and the topic of English spelling came up. I mentioned a story about two Latin roots, and their transformation into a group of English words that are so twisted together in spelling, meaning, and pronunciation that many of us native speakers have trouble with them, without even realizing it. She suggested that I write a book about some of my random knowledge, gleaned from hours of reading books, blogs, and Wikipedia articles late at night. I felt a blog would be a more appropriate format, noting that not many people want to read a book on such mixed topics as software development, plant taxonomy, etymology, and haptic communication. This blog will contain some of my ramblings on these, and other unrelated topics.