Or “Why Donald Trump cannot make America Great again” ***
This afternoon, I pushed my tired body to Five guys at around 3:30 pm. I assume most people know Five Guys is a high end national burger chain, loosely similar to In-N-Out
As I was enjoying my salty, greasy meal, three people sat down next to me. I can’t pin them down better than to say they were Asian. They might have been Hmong or maybe Japanese. The exactly ethnic group is not that important.
They appeared to be grandpa, father and son. The son was probably around 9 years old. My failing ears perked up when they started quizzing him about factorials. My memory is factorials crept into mathematics in high school, not 3rd grade. Another topic of conversation was grandpa asking his grandson if he has a girlfriend yet.
A few minutes later, two young professional type women with no children in tow sat down at another table. I’m not quite sure of their topic, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t bivariant regression analysis. STEM? Right.
*** unless immigrants save us.
Somewhat related, and maybe worthy of its own post. Most people here know I made a nice living for maybe 25 years doing computer programming for “corporate america” and eventually myself (findanisp.com)
I watched a TED interview with a very significant person in computers – the reclusive Linus Torvalds – he is the mind behind Linux, the “UNIX Like” operating system underneath most computers and cell phones (Linux Is Not UNix)
http://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linux
The interviewer eventually asked the audience “are any of you coders?” – this being held in Silicon Valley, almost every hand went up. Linus then went on to differentiate a very simple example of “bad code” vs “good code”. The snippet was how to remove an item from a forward linked list – “Computer Science 101”. Judging by his discomfort, I surmise that he was looking at a room full of blank stares.
I have no education in Computer Science. I do not write operating system kernels or compilers. People who hired me would generally throw any resume with a computer science major in the trash. I vaguely remember writing a bidirectional link list routine once, but no memory why.
Colleges teach computer science majors skills that nobody needs. It is not shocking that Linus is living in his own world – what he did was very important work, but he couldn’t code an app to do something useful for people if his life depended on it, which he freely admits.
What is my point? Why does everything need a point?
Two things stumble out of my brain:
1) Asians are phenomenal at anything they undertake. Their culture seems to enhance the competitive aspects of the personality and character.
2) Efficiency and less total instructions are the hallmark of folks who write Operating Systems, firmware and such. I wrote in assembler for a time. That is tedious at best and I bet Linus is way better at it than I am.
Linux is okay and works best in PC and Server applications. Unix seems to be more of a true multiuser environment. It handles hundreds or maybe thousands of users and does it really well. I don’t have experience with Linux in multiuser mode.
My favorite was VMS on a DEC machine. I also had respect for RT-11.
All that and I am an engineer, not a computer scientist.
Are you engineering that bridge to the 21st century?
I read that the Cavaliers are in the playoffs. Dan Gilbert is going to have a mess on his hands if they win the title. The NBA finals start June 2nd, and Dan Gilbert promised the RNC they could have Quicken Loans Arena to start construction a month ahead of July 18th. He made that promise encore he got LeBron James back.
If the Cavaliers don’t sweep the Detroit Pistons, Justin Bieber is out – has to cancel the show because Game 5 will be at the Q the same day of the Beebs’ concert.
I suspect LeBron wins out over the construction – just a guess though.