malvasia bianca

If you are considering building an experimental apparatus filled with liquid hydrogen, you might want to keep the following incident in mind:
Deep within the bubble chamber, the inner beryllium window had shattered along a microscopic imperfection in its surface. Splintering outward, the inner window fragments blasted open the outer beryllium window accompanied by the [...]

It’s been ages since I blogged about learning Japanese, so I figured I’d give y’all an update. I finished the textbook I was using last November, which raised the question of what to do next. I have some manga around and even a couple of collections of essays/stories, but I wasn’t sure I’d [...]

I can’t say I’ve internalized (routinized? inscribed?) Latour’s Laboratory Life yet, but in the mean time I present you with three quotes on routinization, inscription, and facts:
To counter these catastrophic possibilities, efforts are made to routinise component actions either through technicians’ training or by automation. Once a string of operations has been routinised, one [...]

The third volume of The Nature of Order, while very good, didn’t have the same impact on me as the earlier volumes did. Having said that, this bit from the conclusion is giving me something to think about:
And in all this that I observe, when I talk to politicians, to townspeople, to developers, when [...]

For the second time in the last week, I am regretting that I didn’t blog about a work as soon as I finished it. But the series in question is too good for me to completely ignore an excuse to write about it, and I did take a few notes right after I finished [...]

At 4:00pm on the friday of GDC, I attended The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. I went because I loved Mass Effect and because I’m always happy to see the word “iterative” used, but the talk turned out to be an excellent final experience from the conference for a completely [...]

More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already.

My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s [...]

I’ve recently been reading Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature, and have been struck by how well various agile practices fit into his framework. So I want to try to explain his framework (again!), and to explore how agile practices might fit in.
His book begins as a reaction against the split between nature and society, [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book:
Can you be too organized? [...]

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original):
If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, [...]

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original):
As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins to [...]

From Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, p. 102:
Cna yuo raed tihs?
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it whotuit [...]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going.
Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here…
Interesting way to think about [...]

I claimed that my last post was going to be my last Christopher Alexander post for a while, but I lied. I spend some time today reading Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, the first part of which talks about Alexander’s work (up through the carpets book, which isn’t discussed nearly enough; Gabriel’s book dates [...]

One more Christopher Alexander Nature of Order post, and then I’ll take a break. This is a counterpart to my earlier post about living code (I even repeat some of the examples): this time, I’m focusing on the agile processes that might produce that code. Again, thanks to the Agile Open California participants [...]

I wouldn’t have thought that anything could get me more excited today than learning that Harmonix had gotten the rights to make a Beatles game, but then I learned that Google now has the right to sell copies of out-of-print but in-copyright books.
I am extraordinarily surprised, amazed, pleased by this. Books have been very [...]

Today’s Nature of Order experiment: see what the characteristics of living structures might look like when applied to software. Many thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped me think through this; I’ll have a later blog post that talks about agile and living processes.
Levels of Scale
This is certainly present in the hierarchical [...]

When I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus, I was impressed by it, but no more than by several other games from around the same time.
Then at some point, perhaps a year and a half later, I was browsing the web and came across a picture of the game. And I gasped, I shuddered. [...]

I was making my way through The Process of Creating Life last night, and was rather surprised to see Christopher Alexander mention XP! Here’s the quote (p. 198); emphasis and ellipses in the original.
This chapter was first composed as a lecture to the computer science department at Stanford University. After the lecture, I [...]

I’m only a sixth or so of the way through The Process of Creating Life, but the ideas there are really getting my brain racing today for some reason. He gives these beautiful little examples of evolving living structures step by step: looking at those, you (or at least I) say:

What a great paradigm [...]