Many fans of Science Fiction refuse to acknowledge any Dune books not written by Frank Herbert, despite this ending the series on a massive cliffhanger. They choose to follow Muad'Dib's philosophy, instead: "Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife -- chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'" - DisContinuity, TVTropes Wiki

What is programming? When you first start programming, the answer is painfully obvious: Programming is making the computer do what you want. Duh, right? However, if you have any aptitude for it at all, you will rapidly get to the point where making the computer do what you want really isn't that hard. Oh, you may be betrayed by your environment, your libraries, even your hardware sometimes, and you never get to the point where you are immune to the multi-day debugging sessions, but in general, getting the computer to do what you want ceases to be a challenge.

So if I want to absorb something complicated quickly - or even, when I need to do so, slowly - the efficient way to help me is to write it out first. When you think of it, the time compression between reading and writing is quite astonishing: the thriller that lasts for half a plane journey will have taken half a year to write..... ... Just for an experiment, try listening to the television news while not watching the pictures.

The core point of the entire Programming Wisdom blogbook.

Expanding the points made in Compression and Compression in Languages up to the Methodology level, and beyond.

Wherein the point I was setting up in Compression is made.

Below the fold, a discussion about compression, using this as a clear example of a principle I intend to relate to other programming principles, and indeed engineering principles in general.

The unifying principle of this book is: Everything costs something. Everything worth talking about has benefits. Nothing is free; nothing has infinite value. This sounds very simple and unobjectionable, but experience shows people have a hard time putting it into practice and realizing how pervasive the principle is.

An article on Slashdot about solar panels and the subsequent obvious comments arguing about the impact of these panels vs. fossil fuels got me to thinking: What's the "proper" environmental impact for a human being? We can all agree on the negative extreme. Polluting groundwater with heavy metals or pumping enough pollution into Lake Erie to nearly sterilize it is bad. Hardly requires thought. But as you start getting back away from that, it gets a lot more complicated.

Google video: Beyond Einstein - a presentation on the plans for various satellites to test General Relativity unto destruction. I'd heard about most of them, but this is a fairly good single-source introduction. The video references a NASA website for the project. The video also promises that on Sept. 5, the most likely first satellite will be chosen; the Joint Dark Energy Mission was chosen (as described here). The logic is sound; LISA's design is audacious and the one I really want to see the results from, but probably needs more time to mature.