I just saw a Pepsi commercial that claims that "56% of people think that Diet Pepsi has more cola flavor than Diet Coke."

Considering that the "null hypothesis" would be "50%", that's one of the least impressive endorsements I have ever seen on television.

(Sure, since we don't have access to the full details, that may be a test that had more than two options. But still... as endorsement goes, that is tepid.)

The second part of the answer, and the one most often missed by non-techies, is the fact that the content in question is an integer — an ordinary number, in other words. The number is often written in geeky alphanumeric format, but it can be written equivalently in a more user-friendly form like 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625. Giving a private party ownership of a number seems deeply wrong to people versed in mathematics and computer science. - Ed Felten, Freedom To Tinker

While there is some truth to this, it also borders on the deceptive to non-techies. It's true that the AACS LA is trying to lay claim to a number, but it's what a mathematician would call trivially true; all copyright claims are for number (or, more accurately, sets of numbers).

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”?

The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.

So, Fox cancelled Drive.

I watched the first episode, but now I'm not going to watch any of the others. It's no Firefly, but it is something I'd like to see where they go with it; there's a lot of potential there for a good four or five seasons.

What mystifies me is why Fox bothers with this stuff. Clearly, they want a show that will be a top 10 hit overnight. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Equally clearly, almost anybody off the street could have told you that this wasn't going to be such a hit. Even people like me who liked it could have told you that.

In my continuing series on why software is special, motivating writing a book about it, this post discusses how software is chaotic.

Here I refer to the mathematical definition of chaos, which I will define as: "A chaotic system is one in which small changes in the initial conditions can cause large and unpredictable changes in the system's iterated state." This is based on the mathematical definition(s), but simplified for our purposes. It's not just a word, it's a quasi-formal concept.

Do you live in civilization?

Like so many such questions, the answer entirely depends on your definition of "civilization"; once you've accepted the definition, the answer is obvious. Another of my favorite examples is "Is X art?"; once you accept the definition of art, the answer is usually obvious. It's the accepting of a definition that's the interesting part, not the question itself. Often it's not even meaningful to try to say which definition is "better" or "worse", it's just a matter of what each given definition captures and highlights.

In 2007, with a well-loaded Linux desktop installation, my /usr/bin is 257 megabytes, with debugging off and dynamically-linked libraries not contributing to that count. My particular copy of the Linux kernel 2.6.19 with certain Gentoo patches has 202,381,268 bytes of C code alone. If I'm computing this correctly, at a constant 100 words per minute (5 chars/word), that's 281 24-hour days just to re-type the C code in the kernel.

I've gone on before about how distrustful of metaphors I am, and it seems like every year I'm getting more distrustful of them. Either deal with the thing as it is, or just give up understanding it. Metaphors lead to the beginning of understanding, but no farther.

Programmers aren't immune to the metaphor sickness, and if there's one metaphor you can expect to see trotted out at the earliest available opportunity, it's the "programming as construction" metaphor. This metaphor has been skillfully deconstructed many many times before, but I'm going to deconstruct it from the opposite angle... what if construction was like software engineering?

I've chickened out on going to see The Last Mimsy. Subsequent reviews make me fairly convinced that the scriptwriters completely missed the point of the original story, or simply didn't care, and took the opportunity to turn a story of wonderment into yet another polemic about how the world is doooooomed. (Sure, in the movie it's saved in an utterly unbelievable way, but since that's not going to happen in the real world, it's just another Doomed World story, in the vein of Spielburg's AI.)

A heads up on what's coming with the Programming Wisdom series: Since it's both a "book" and a series of "blog posts", some of the writing priorities are different than they might otherwise be.

The next few posts are primarily intended to motivate the work, so as standalone pieces they are less than compelling, although they still have some interesting points, I think. After the next three or four posts, it starts getting meaty.