emerging.org

Man, they’re fun. This recent SPY call (summarized best here) is a pretty interesting thing. Does it mean someone’s got inside info on a terrorist strike? (Could be, there’s rumors of the same option call happening in 9/2001, but no real details, in true conspiracy theory style.) Is it a hedge fund trying to cash out what it can now to appease investors?

I’ve got an even weirder idea - what if it’s actually someone with a much broader interest and ability looking to artificially depress the market, or at least supress it until the 21st of Sept? If enough fear is spread, and the market holds steady, then there could be a huge influx of demand right afterward. What if someone bought in heavy on the 20th and sold heavily on a large upswing on the 25th? Get a load of that conspiracy theory - maybe it’s someone who considers the idea of losing a billion nothing at all. And all this noise is just to cause a market swing in their favor, after the crazy option call expires!

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to think about - we’ll see what happens in any case!

This is a broad one. I’m not sure how to zero in on the root of what I want to discuss. I think the issue is lost efficiency, and the root cause is sloth, and the subject: engineers. I’d like to make a case that there’s a large underlying flaw in the industry thought processes, and through that, the people in it. This could be a book, but I don’t want to write a book, I want to write a short post. It makes sense in my head, but let’s see if I can get there through some process of reason rather than just a easy-as-pie prejudice.

Where do we start? There’s a lot of waste in the computer science field, a discipline that claims to have a focus on efficiency. This is ingrained in us almost from day one, to greater or lesser degrees. Raise your hand if you were shown bubble sort in CS101, followed by a lecture on how much better quicksort is. How about those exercises in assembly (do they teach that anymore?) to avoid a memory reference when a register would do?

This is all well and good, even if everyone promptly graduates, forgets all of this, and decides to go off and help develop the next javascript-based OS, like YouOS, GoogleOS, etc. It’s not about absolute gains made in efficiency, it’s about relative gains. Yeah, your sorting algorithm used to manage data in your Web 2.0-based OS isn’t going to be as fast as one hand-coded and running on bare metal. There’s a trade-off there. The important thing is that reasonable steps are made to be efficient given the tools at hand.

In this regard, software engineers do a decent job at making things fast enough, even if not everyone is uniformly capable of doing so. My issue is with the fact that this is as far as most engineers take their focus on efficiency.

Let me define the scope here, so the question of ‘how far should the focus go’ can have meaning. Really, it’s simple - more than just SQL code should be analyzed and optimized for efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of output energy to input energy, so if you can do more with less, do so, regardless of the task. Energy applies to much more than that function displayed on the screen - the whole world runs on energy. If there’s going to be a focus on efficiency, let’s focus on efficiency, not just where it requires minimal effort to apply. (Let’s be specific: don’t just think about efficiency when you’re sitting in an office chair.)

Here’s an example - if it’s OK to spend hours reworking a set of functions and data to make better use of the system’s L2 cache, in order to make a possible small gain in speed (don’t get me started on benchmarking methodology), it should make just as much sense to ride a bike to the store instead of hopping in the F250. If page reload and resize speed get focus in the name of efficiency, then by all means, stop wasting all the energy invested in building, shipping, charging, and throwing out the latest stupid USB gizmo idea, cell phone, etc.

I could go on, but the specifics don’t matter - the idea is, if you care about efficiency, be efficient. Drive less. Don’t order lots of crap. Get a smaller house, insulate it. Install CFLs. Whoops. Specifics again. If you really only do care about bragging rights for speeding up that inner loop, that’s fine, but call it what it is (code masturbation?), it’s not a focus on efficiency. It’s an interest in code optimization. It’s a microscopic view of the much larger field of resource optimization.

I think the reason software appeals to so many is that it’s so accessible. It really doesn’t take much in the way of scientific rigor compared to the ‘hard’ sciences. Repercussions for poor choices and poor science are light compared, to, say, a bridge design that is found to be insufficient halfway through construction.

I’m not saying software should be hard; nearly infinite flexibility is what makes software so potentially powerful. My concern is that it’s too common for software engineers to fail to extrapolate what science they practice on the screen out to the larger world. If they did, their sense of the world would be better for it. Their sense of science would be better for it. In applying a better sense of science to a better view of the world, science itself would be better off. I think that would be a good thing.

This is a pretty alarming article. “Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’” is a great title. A title like that gets people reading.

I’m not sure where to start with it, though. I really don’t want to complain - the article does bring up some good points that people should think about, although it gets there in a fairly misleading way.

First off, humans in general aren’t the most efficient vehicles - that’s not exactly news. We can do a lot of different things, although not very effectively compared to a specialized device. In terms of calories (or whatever energy unit) spent per mile, a car should be a more efficient way of getting you to the store. For this to be a ‘newsworthy’ calculation by a leading environmentalist casts some doubt on how reputable the source is here.

Also, the premise of using beef as the human energy source is disingenuous. It’s old news that beef is one of the most energy intensive foods consumed. Was the intent here to create the most unbalanced statistics for the report? Or was it to cause the most alarm - what could cause more fear than hinting that we might lose our precious cows? Even, and especially, the organic cows? Ouch!

It’s always good to consider the energy requirements of everything we do - there’s another article coming on that topic, don’t worry. But consider these factors responsibly, there’s no need to mislead people!

Consider the other side of the equation here - put simply, people who have a surplus of calories in their diet will hold onto that surplus as long as they can. That’s fairly hard-wired into our brains. If there’s a lot of extra food, we’re going to eat it. Calorie restriction diets might prove to be the best way to live to 120, but 99% of us won’t do it willingly. (Count me out!)

So what do you end up with? Easy - you get people ingesting extra calories every day. After a while, a calorie surplus becomes (surprise!) fat. Lots of fancy diet plans try to get around this fact, but if you take in more energy than you use, over time, the body stores it as fat.

When the fat builds up, people go to work it off. This energy is almost entirely wasted - all of that beef was sliced up, frozen, shipped, cooked, eaten, and stored as fat, only to be lost on a treadmill. (Unless you work out at one of those neat gyms in Hong Kong.) This isn’t going to change. So why not walk places? If you’re going to overeat, and need to burn off the energy anyway, why not put it to actual good use?

If you’re interested in efficient energy usage, and can accept the fact that the food is going to be consumed anyway, let’s just focus on putting it to good use. Walking to the store is a pretty good way to start.

All of this assumes that there’s no magic formula to make everyone go vegan - that would go a long way in avoiding the energy issue. I don’t think that’s possible, though - even if there is, vegan cheese is proof that it’s a very long way off.