tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84189382060809187982024-02-20T15:30:57.239-08:00What Could Be BetterOne person's ideas, rants, and more, on how the world could be better.lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-60286318149627340452020-06-23T13:40:00.003-07:002020-06-23T13:40:42.881-07:00Let's start using the term Libre in EnglishOver time, I've been increasingly convinced that all software should be <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html">free software</a>. Free as in freedom, not (necessarily) free as in price.<br /><br />Anyway, what's annoying to me is that when I try to find "free software" for a particular purpose, I'm often thwarted by results showing up for stuff that's available gratis, and is thus labeled "free", but isn't free as in liberty. It isn't free as in freedom. It isn't free as in... libre. Now, the spell checker I'm using just complained, because "libre" isn't a word it recognizes. <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libre">Wiktionary recognizes libre</a>, and I've just told my spell checker to add it to its own dictionary, too. And I intend to just start using it more and more. Libre software, rather than free software. Because libre isn't ambiguous in that context. The word "free", on the other hand, is ambiguous; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre">I'm not the first to make this distinction</a>.<br /><br />So in all future software that I release to the world under what's hitherto been called a "free software" license, I intend to call it libre software, first and foremost. Maybe I'll also mention free, to increase the likelihood that people searching for "free software" will find it, but I'll refer to it primarily as being libre. And I hereby encourage others to do so, too.<br /><br />The <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html">GPL</a>, for example, I'll call a libre software license... etc. Heck, I'd almost encourage the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">FSF</a> to rename themselves the LSF... though I suppose lsf.org is taken. Alas. (I'm not linking because what's actually there isn't relevant to the discussion. And it appears certainly not to be gratis, and probably not something I'd consider to be libre, so.... I digress.)<br />
<br />
I'm thinking about this primarily within the context of software, of course. That said, I think this change is probably also useful in other arenas. In general, I think we should just use the word libre more in English. And gratis, too, for that matter. In German, there's <i>frei</i> and <i>gratis</i>, and the meanings of these two words are quite distinct. I want that for English. Libre sounds awkward to me right now, because it's not used much, and so... I intend to start using it more, and hope others will, as well, and talk about libre recipes and gratis food.<br /><br />Let's knock that "obsolete" label out of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for libre, and start using it more and more.<br /><br />Also, I might opt for pronouncing it closer to <span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Gentium, "Gentium Plus", GentiumAlt, "DejaVu Sans", "Segoe UI", "Lucida Grande", "Charis SIL", "Doulos SIL", "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", Code2000, "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;">/ˈliːbɹ</span><span style="color: #202122; font-family: Gentium, Gentium Plus, GentiumAlt, DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI, Lucida Grande, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, TITUS Cyberbit Basic, Code2000, Lucida Sans Unicode, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15.4px;">eɪ</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Gentium, "Gentium Plus", GentiumAlt, "DejaVu Sans", "Segoe UI", "Lucida Grande", "Charis SIL", "Doulos SIL", "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", Code2000, "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;">/ </span>(LEE-bray) instead of <span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Gentium, "Gentium Plus", GentiumAlt, "DejaVu Sans", "Segoe UI", "Lucida Grande", "Charis SIL", "Doulos SIL", "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", Code2000, "Lucida Sans Unicode", sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;">/ˈliːbɹə/ </span>(LEE-bruh), so as to avoid the homophone with the zodiac sign... not that I use that word (or concept) often. Because, again, the goal is to <i>not</i> be ambiguous.<br />
<br />(While we're at it, maybe we should find words to disambiguate other same-word concepts in English? Like how "hot" can mean either spicy or high-temperature? German has <i>scharf</i> and <i>heiß</i>, respectively. Why doesn't English have unambiguous words for these concepts? Not to mention the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love">various types of love</a>.)<br /><br />I'll leave you with this, sans [another "free" disambiguation!] "free":<br /><br />I want to be libre to express what I mean with words that people will understand. Take this for what it's worth, though, because of course this opinion comes to you gratis.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-13588784168040154772019-03-14T23:54:00.001-07:002019-03-15T12:11:30.163-07:00We need pedagogical research on τ (tau) versus π (pi)!After reading a bit of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tau_(2%CF%80)#Suggest_the_article_be_restored">wikipedia talk page</a> (which I may or may not continue to read), I have a thought:<br />
<br />
I'd like to see a relatively-large-scale study done comparing the pedagogical success of "π" (pi) versus "τ" (tau) with students learning the relevant mathematics (trigonometry; perhaps other things?) for the first time.<br />
<br />
Because it seems to me there's a hypothesis that's been proposed: that <a href="https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto#sec-circles_and_angles">τ is a better pedagogical tool</a> for teaching the relevant trigonometric concepts than π is. There's <a href="https://tauday.com/a-tau-testimonial">a bit of anecdotal evidence for this</a>, but anecdotal evidence is at the very bottom of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence">hierarchy of evidence</a>, so it seems to me we can do better.<br />
<br />
So I'd like to see us go up the hierarchy at least as far as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_study">cohort study</a> (the middle of the hierarchy as listed), with a cohort divided into groups that learn π, and groups that learn τ, and see how they do, both initially and over a more extended period of time, in their skills in the various mathematical concepts.<br />
<br />
I can immediately think of 4 main possible outcomes (perhaps there are more?):<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>There is strong support for the hypothesis within the cohort;</li>
<li>There is strong evidence _against_ the hypothesis within the cohort;</li>
<li>There is strong evidence that it makes little difference; or</li>
<li>The evidence is not strong, in any particular direction.</li>
</ol>
<br />
My (admittedly biased) hope and estimation is that #1 would be the outcome, but I'd honestly be happy to learn of #2 or #3, provided I thought the study was well-designed and well-executed.<br />
<br />
For any of the first 3 outcomes, though, it strikes me as something that could settle the debate a bit. And for the 4th outcome, hopefully that would also come with insights into how to improve future research in the area.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm not a researcher, and I'm not particularly learned in pedagogy, especially as relates to childhood mathematics instruction, so... I don't feel prepared to do much with this. But perhaps I could help facilitate it some way? If someone with more relevant skills wants to collaborate with me, I'd be happy to do some work towards putting together a crowd funding campaign, or some such thing.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I hope you all had a nice half-circumference / radius day. Because <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7vhMMXagQ">pi is (still) wrong</a>, and, while I'm failing to find the source for this at the moment (hopefully I will at some point, and can update this post), so is the notion that π became "3.14..." by being the ratio of <i>circumference</i> divided by the <i>diameter</i>. My understanding (based on the source I'm failing to find) is that it was actually defined as the ratio of the <i>half-circumference</i> divided by the <i>radius</i>. So, even Vi Hart's above-linked video is a little bit wrong (though mostly it's just a wonderful work of rant-art). C/2r isn't C/D, it's (C/2)/r... hopefully I'll find the reference to prove it. (Not that it's not also C/D, just that that's not how π was defined in the article that popularized π as a symbol referring to that particular constant.)<br />
<br />
Let's take a new τurn, shall we?<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-35279540280635489602017-08-10T08:58:00.006-07:002022-10-13T08:37:19.101-07:00After PresentI've just learned that there's a timescale other than "CE" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era">Common Era</a>, aka "AD", Anno Domini/After [the] Death [of Christ]) and "BCE" (Before Common Era, aka "BC", Before Christ).<br />
<br />
This new timescale is called "BP", or "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present">Before Present</a>". Where "Present" is defined as January First, 1950, for reasons related to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating">radiocarbon dating</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing">atmospheric nuclear weapons testing</a>, and thus also sometimes backronym'd to "Before Physics".<br />
<br />
This makes sense to me – or more importantly (to me, personally), is pleasing to me (well, the nuclear weapons testing and the changes it brought aren't pleasing to me; what's pleasing is the idea of using that most dramatic set of events as a marker for a new era), because I'm sick of having years reference <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus">Christ</a> – because even if it's using the terminology of "Common Era", it's still referring to a timescale developed around ideas about Jesus. Which pisses me off, as a staunch atheist and moderately anti-religious person. (The latter because I see <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20171020064703/https://www.alternet.org/story/143912/the_top_one_reason_religion_is_harmful">religion as harmful</a> (see also: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/11/17/6_reasons_why_religion_does_more_harm_than_good_partner/">Salon</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=harms+of+religion">scholar</a>, <a href="http://www.argumentsforatheism.com/arguments_atheism_society.html">etc.</a>).)<br />
<br />
So, upon discovering "BP", I almost immediately had the thought that there should also be "AP", or "After Present", or "After Physics". I think I prefer the latter term, and so I hereby declare that "After Physics"/"AP" should be "<a href="https://english.stackexchange.com/a/159124/2524">A Thing</a>". It's been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ABefore_Present#I.27ve_Never_Run_Into_the_Phrase_.22Before_Physics.22">talked about</a> before, but I've not yet found anything "official"-ish that talks about using it as a thing.<br />
<br />
I've also been deeply annoyed for a long time that BCE/CE don't recognize a year zero (0). You can't put years directly on a number line. This is mathematically <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity#Intellectual_stupidity">stupid</a> to me.<br />
<br />
And so, therefore, I hereby declare (for the tiny amount of influence that me as an individual declaring this thing might do) "After Physics", aka "AP" to be a thing, and to be defined as, roughly, the number of years after the midnight that began the day also known as January 1st, 1950 CE. (In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time">UTC</a>, presumably, though one also can presume that in most contexts, that level of detail won't matter.) As such, the whole of the year known commonly as 1950 CE could also be referred to as the year 0 (zero) AP. And thus the year I'm in as I write this, commonly known as 2017 CE, could also be referred to as the year 67 AP. So here it is, August 10th, 67 AP. And on that day, I've declare that this ought to be A Thing. Of course, it won't be A Thing until a lot more people recognize it... but here's hoping that this blog post can start the process of propagating that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics">meme</a>.<br />
<br />
I'd write up a wikipedia page for it, but I suppose that would constitute, at best, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research">original research</a>.<br />
<br />
So, here's hoping other significant sources (scientific journals, major news outlets, what have you) start taking this up at some point, and it can eventually become "official". In the mean time, feel free to link to this post as a way to provide an explanation for what is meant. Or don't. My hope is not for links to here so much as adoption of the term. Hopefully wide adoption, eventually.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-34314538220890641872015-06-03T10:29:00.003-07:002019-03-15T12:15:40.279-07:00On personalized medication selection...<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Content note: depression, side effects, bad medicine, suicide, homicide</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<hr />
</div>
<br />
<br />
I attended a talk last night (Tuesday, June 2nd; 2015-06-02) on <a href="http://exploratorium.edu/support/future-of-medicine">the future of medicine</a>. Doctors <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Hood">Hood</a> and <a href="http://labs.gladstone.ucsf.edu/srivastava">Srivastava</a> gave an interesting presentation about such things as the history of gene sequencers (which Dr. Hood had much to do with), a model for thinking about medical care called "<a href="http://p4mi.org/">p4 medicine</a>", wherein care and treatments are "Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory" (sorry, I'd add an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma">Oxford comma</a>, but I'm quoting that website directly), and a number of other technical and research advancements that are influencing what Dr. Srivastava described as a coming revolution in how medical care will be done.<br />
<br />
And he (Srivastava) spent a bit of time talking about how this has been getting promised for some time now, but that he really felt that it was getting to an inflection point, where the difference between now and 20 years from now would be dramatically greater than the difference between 20 years ago and today.<br />
<br />
I really hope he's right. Because here's my take:<br />
<br />
What we're doing today is primitive enough and problematic enough, in places (and great, in other places, don't get me wrong), that it will be looked back on at some point or other (I'll make no predictions of my own about time frame) as being utterly barbaric and cruel.<br />
<br />
Example from my own life:<br />
<br />
I had a horribly negative reaction to several different anti-depressant medications. In particular, Zoloft, Effexor, and Prozac. They gave me <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akathisia">akathisia</a>. They increased my suicidality (something I've ever struggled with) to the point (this being relatively rare in my life) of actually attempting something, at least once while on <i>each</i> of the above medications (so at least 3 attempts), and a couple more times (5 or 6 attempts, total) after this round of "therapies", which I still attribute in large part to the fact that I had been on them. The effects of these medications (I believe) even had me bordering on homicidal, directed specifically towards my psychiatrist at the time, who, besides prescribing me not one but two other meds somewhat closely related to the first one I had the bad reaction to, with relatively little care taken to making sure I was well supported in avoiding or quickly stopping subsequent reactions, also would literally fall asleep during the course of our 15 minute sessions. Regularly. (And I heard from someone I met during a hospital stay around that time (October of 2000), who was also a patient of his, that he'd done the same to her.) How can someone possibly be giving good care in such a manner?<br />
<br />
Anyway, I could probably go on on the horrors of that time, and in particular my reactions to those specific medications. The point, though, is that my reactions were horrible. And yet, many people seem to report good results with them. There was a big part of me that wanted SSRIs to be completely banned, on the premise that I wasn't the only one to be experiencing this (we <a href="http://www.salon.com/1999/07/19/zoloft/">may have lost comedian Phil Hartman to akathisia</a>).<br />
<br />
And while that (banning a med) hasn't happened with Prozac, Doctor Srivastava relayed (after me asking a question about this) the fact that a number of drugs <i>have</i> been completely pulled off the market, because of things like causing heart arrhythmias or liver failures or some such. Which means that that people who were actually getting solid benefit from the drug (which is a little more questionable in Prozac's case than it seemed to be in some of the other drugs Srivastava was talking about) could no longer get it! This has the potential, with some meds, to have just about as bad an effect from not having meds as those few who have a negative reaction to taking them (deadly disease, deadly med; which death will you get?). But who can weigh the two? Is it worth sparing a few folks from the negative experience, if that costs thousands or even millions of people the chance at a benefit? What if (as I believe is the case with some medications) the negative experience is almost certain to be a fatal one, and yet, the beneficial experience is one that can save lives? <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/91508-morality/">Would you kill one person to save five</a>? Not an easy question to find a satisfactory answer to.<br />
<br />
<i>But</i>, there's a way to address it, I think, that <i>is</i> more prone to a satisfactory answer: Personalized prescriptions. In their talk, the speakers last night mentioned treatments that involved taking cells from someone's skin or blood, turning them into a stem cell line (because <a href="http://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news70">that's doable, these days</a>), possibly modifying them along the way (for example, "teaching" T-cells how to detect a particular form of cancer cells, which they can then destroy with methods already available to them), then re-specializing the line again into the cells for a particular organ type, and re-inserting these new cells (or even whole organs made from them) back into the patient that the cell line originally came out of. Pretty personalized!<br />
<br />
And yet there's an even simpler version of this, that I've been thinking of (and deeply wanting) for a long time now, and which I asked about during the Q&A: It strikes me as obvious that, in gathering the kinds of data they're talking about gathering (whole gene sequences for an individual, as well as numerous other factors), and taking a systems approach to this (an idea that Dr. Hood in particular spoke to), we may at some point find (when correlating this data with other individualized data on patient responses) that there are markers that can help us tell in advance whether a particular drug is likely to cause a particular reaction, positive or negative, in a particular patient. In his response to my question, Dr. Srivastava even took this idea a step further than I'd imagined, in mentioning that the embryonic stem cell lines that can now be cultured from skin or blood cells, could then be used to grow, say, heart cells, and, for the case of medications that create heart problems, you could actually test reaction of the individual patient's cells from the particular organ that matters, with the actual drug... all without actually putting the drug into the patient's body itself. If a negative reaction happens, it happens to cells in a culture dish. (Which hopefully most of us don't consider to be sentient life, and therefore have fewer qualms about damaging – though I must admit, especially once you start talking about growing whole organs in a lab, one starts to wonder where the line is drawn there... I want to mention that quandary, though, without going into it; that's a discussion for another day, I just don't want to pretend it's not one worth having – though I don't believe it was actually mentioned in the talk, sadly.)<br />
<br />
Anyway, one way or another, it strikes me that we have the opportunity to <i>know</i>, with at least a high degree of confidence, whether a particular patient will have a positive, neutral, or negative experience with a particular medication. And if we can know that – either as a stronger probability (changing "1 in 10 have a negative reaction" to "you have markers that indicate a 99.9932% probability of such-and-such reaction"), or as a relative certainty ("in a lab, your cells responded in such-and-such a manner", and note that the decision about which drugs to even test in this way could be shaped by the stronger probabilities, to start with) – then we can choose which patients to give Prozac to, which to give Wellbutrin to, which to give something else to, and who knows? Maybe even which ones to send to a sleep study because they're likely to have sleep apnea, which, if properly treated, might rid them of the depression. (More generally: we might have a better chance of treating or even curing underlying causative conditions, rather than merely treating symptoms.)<br />
<br />
Which gets me, roughly, to the actual question that I asked. While I don't remember my exact wording (perhaps a recording will be released at some point, and you can listen for yourself), the thrust of what I was attempting to get at was this:<br />
<br />
It seems to me that culturally, current health care providers simply have no interest or willingness to even begin to try to do tests like this. What roadblocks are there to gaining acceptance of personalized medicines amongst health providers, and what things can we do to help facilitate the cultural change that may be necessary to go along with all these technology changes, so that we can actually have the revolution in medicine that Dr. Srivastava was predicting for a mere 20 years hence?<br />
<br />
There was discussion, too, about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_of_1_trial">n=1 experiments</a>. Dr. Hood in particular mentioned how many dismiss these as not useful... And of course, as predictors of how an overall population will respond to something, indeed, they often are not! (Though see link for some ways they might have broad applicability, even still.) But in terms of predicting how <i>that one individual</i> might respond to something, it seems to me they're probably the very best way to go! There could also even be considered to be n>1 experiments in the sense of having multiple cultures having the same experiment done to them, and in doing so, figure out some sort of general probability based on not just a single result, even if all the results are on cells from a single patient. And that's to say nothing of the fact that many different experiments could also be done from a single culture line, thus giving a list of likely outcomes for a list of available treatments.<br />
<br />
And I believe that's now set the stage for the thing that I'm really wanting to express:<br />
<br />
What could be better, here, is if medical providers had the tools, time, and inclination to bring more science directly into their practice of medicine. To put quantitative tools to work, whether that's a personal activity tracking device (and/or heart monitor, etc.; these got some discussion in the talk), or blood tests (which, who knows, may someday be done by personal tracking devices! There's certainly been attention on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noninvasive_glucose_monitor">measuring blood glucose levels in such ways</a>, though apparently that's not quite there yet), or DNA sequencing. To start gathering that data, even if we don't yet know what to do with it, because we haven't yet figured out which markers correlate with, say, which responses to a medication. But we'll never know, if we don't gather the data. So, one thing I'd like there to be more of is data gathering around this stuff.<br />
<br />
Now, it's worth mentioning that there are concerns around this. Privacy concerns stand out to me in particular, especially if we're trying to gather large amounts of data, and then share it in ways to allow research to be possible on correlations (and, eventually, causation research) between various markers and various responses. This is something that I hope will be given a lot of careful thought along the way for this. And yet, I think that there are ways to handle such things that will at least be helpful, and... anyway, I hope it's not cheating too much to defer that discussion to another day, as well. Because here's the thing:<br />
<br />
With hard data, and analysis of such data, we can begin to make much better predictions about outcomes for various treatments. We could prescribe Prozac to some depressed patients, CPAP to others, and a small specific dietary change (say, avoiding sucrose) to still others, and have them all respond better than they might to other interventions, because the intervention chosen was chosen based on data specifically about them. We could know who not to give a particular medication for, say, diabetes, because we know that that particular person would have an adverse liver reaction (say). And we could thus instead give them some different medication, which their liver would handle just fine. Or a third medication, which their liver would also handle just fine, but would also be more efficacious for them in particular! Or figure out what <i>specific</i> foods they need to eat more or less of, that would make them no longer need any other treatment at all!<br />
<br />
Stuff like that. So... let's get our data on, shall we?<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-48710073886311949022014-05-25T14:40:00.001-07:002019-05-06T23:33:25.169-07:00On Suicide and Selfishness... (Is suicide selfish?)I debated whether to place this here or on <a href="http://dalindes.blogspot.com/">my personal blog</a>. It's an <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html">essay</a> (in the sense of "trying"; see that heading at the link for more on what I mean), and I don't yet know what I'm going to say in the end that fits the "what could be better" theme. (The post is also (about 5000 words, or 11 printed pages) long; <a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-theory-201-size-does-matter.html">this is intentional</a>; <a href="http://illwillpress.com/5MM22YT.html">you were warned</a>.) But I think I'll have a few suggestions, by the end of this; I have a couple of rough ideas already... in fact, here's one such thought, right off the bat, based on the question I'm starting out with: <b><i>Is suicide selfish?</i></b><br />
<br />
Well, here's my first thought on what could be better:<br />
<h4>
The question of whether suicide is selfish or not deserves more serious discussion.</h4>
<div>
I came to the above conclusion after reading the first couple of hits, and starting to skim the third, for a google search on simply "<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=suicide+selfish">suicide selfish</a>". The <a href="http://www.suicide.org/suicide-is-not-a-selfish-act.html">first</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline-ruoff-/stop-calling-suicide-vict_b_5045441.html">two</a> hits (<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles">for me</a>) were rants against calling suicides (and/or suicidal people) selfish. They were in ways nice to read, as I suppose I'm starting out leaning a bit towards "suicide is not (necessarily) selfish", and each of these was supporting that position. But I'm not actually feeling any more ready to <i>defend</i> that position after reading these articles: I don't feel they really made the point well, and in particular, they didn't dig in to the question deeply enough. And to my mind, it's still a question. The <a href="http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-suicide-a-selfish-act">third hit</a> explored a variety of opinions, pro and con, but it still didn't really help me: I still don't know whether I myself would deem suicide to be a selfish act. So, I want to explore that more.</div>
<h3>
Starting with the personal:</h3>
<div>
Why am I asking this question today? Well, I confessed yesterday to a housemate of mine, who I've increasingly been considering a friend, that I'd had some suicidal thoughts. Said housemate instructed me not to do that, and cited as a reason the assertion that "suicide is selfish". I immediately, though silently, recoiled a bit. I was saddened to hear this opinion. Shamed a bit perhaps. (Hmm, I'll probably need to dig in to shame in this essay at some point... I'll get back to that. [See "Thoughts on Shame", below.]) Anyway, shame or no, it just didn't feel very good to hear these words.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Down_4b6a4f_60341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="an image of a wrist with "hospital" written across it, and "morgue" down the centerline." border="0" src="https://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Down_4b6a4f_60341.jpg" height="320" title="Down, not across" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When one cuts their wrist <i>with suicidal intent</i><br />
(as opposed to just making a suicidal gesture),<br />
the "correct" way to cut is <a href="http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/26962/Down/" rel="nofollow">down, not across</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
See, here's the thing. I'd had a flash of suicidal thought, maybe 30 minutes before this conversation. I'd been chopping vegetables in preparation for my making of the household's dinner [at this household, we share dinner most nights, with a rotation through the house of who makes it - or sometimes it's a bit of a group effort]. Having had a sharp (it was new) knife in my hands, and following an emotionally difficult train of thoughts (the details of which I don't even remember, but I think they had to do with rejections I've received in the past from people I'd dated, some of whom certain recent events have reminded me of), the thought occurred to me of slicing my wrists open ("down, not across"), and continuing to chop (the veggies for dinner) as I bled out. I didn't do this, of course. To have done it <i>like that</i>, I believe, would indeed have been a selfish act. I'd have been bleeding all over the vegetables, for one thing, thus presumably making them unfit for consumption by the household. And then obviously I'd be creating a big clean-up job for my housemates. Not cool. And those little points, of course, would presumably pale in comparison to the emotional pain that would be created by having housemates have to discover the corpse of their beloved (and I do believe that there's love for me here, probably from each of my housemates; it's also one <a href="http://www.behindthename.com/name/david">meaning of my name</a>) housemate, right there in front of them. Or maybe they'd find me while I was still alive, and have to deal instead with figuring out how to get me medical help (as I'd presume they'd default to doing). At any rate, I think it's quite safe to assume that it would have created a traumatic experience for whichever housemate(s) found me. And that, I would agree, is a selfish act. In fact, it brings me to another point for what could be better:<br />
<h4>
People committing suicide would do well to consider the impacts of their suicide on others.</h4>
</div>
<div>
And granted, some do. Some, though, do not, or do too little of it. Or so I'm somehow imagining; I guess I don't really know how much people consider the impacts of their suicides on others. What I do know is that it's certainly something <i>I've</i> spent a lot of time thinking about, and I think that's a good thing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Still, while the above thought also brings up some other problems, which I'll get back to [under "Having a way out"], I first want to share a bit more of my personal context for this exploration. So, I'd had this little bit of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicidal_ideation">ideation</a>, and let it pass, without action (unless you count taking a deep breath and re-composing myself to be "action"). This is something that happens to me <i>almost every day</i>, at least once. Every. Fucking. Day. Well, almost: yes, it is a bit of an exaggeration... but really, only a bit; in the last 35 years of my life (i.e. since I was about 5; I don't really remember whether this started before that, though it wouldn't surprise me), the <a href="http://www.word-detective.com/2011/05/math-vs-maths/">maths</a> say there've been 12,784 days. I'd guess (and it is just a guess, but a fairly informed one) that I've had suicidal (and/or a young child's closest equivalent) thoughts on at least 10,000 of those days. What's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)">that thing about 10,000 hours</a>? Well, <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/22/daniel-goleman-focus-10000-hours-myth/">maybe it's bunk</a>, and certainly there's more to what makes one an expert at something. Just realize that I'm someone who may well have spent 10,000 <i>days</i> thinking, for at least some portion of the day, about suicide. And some of those days it's been a major part of my day – whether having ideation over and over again throughout the day (and, on about 6 days out of my life, even making an attempt), or, like today, as I write this blog post, simply thinking about suicide in abstract terms (usually (though not too much today, it turns out) with little flashes of ideation along the way, while mostly thinking about it in level-headed ways – or at least relatively lucid ones). I've read multiple books on suicide: from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Suicide-Attempted-Methods-Consequences/dp/0786704926/ref=nosim?tag=daveltdtmenterpr" rel="nofollow">Methods and Consequences</a> (which you <i>might</i> be able to find <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/suicide-and-attempted-suicide-methods-and-consequences/oclc/37260884">at public libraries</a>; or just visit <a href="http://suicidemethods.info/">the author's website</a>), to simply memoirs that include discussion of it, e.g. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Unquiet-Mind-Memoir-Madness/dp/0679763309/ref=nosim?tag=daveltdtmenterpr" rel="nofollow">An Unquiet Mind</a> (a bit easier to find <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/unquiet-mind/oclc/32312965">at libraries</a> than the former). I've read blog posts. I've thought about the surprisingly-frequent references in movies. I've talked with friends and lovers – sometimes helping them through their suicidal times, other times having them helping me, and still other times simply discussing the subject. I wouldn't actually call myself an expert on suicide (I haven't studied it in more than a lay person's way)... but I certainly have a significant familiarity with the topic, including (importantly) familiarity with what it's like to be feeling suicidal – or, if "suicidal" isn't something one deems to be a "feeling", then having suicidal thoughts, and the concomitant feelings that so often accompany (and/or create) those thoughts.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And it feels pretty awful, let me just say. Because not only are you sitting there, thinking that your life is shitty enough that you might be willing to end it (a thing that biological imperatives tend to push you away from, it's worth noting; this is a pretty radical (with respect to genetic predispositions) thought), but you (or at least I) layer on top of that this whole stigma about the impacts of actually doing it: how your mother will be sad, your sister might feel ashamed to talk about her brother, your friends who loved you won't understand... and of course the people (whether friends or professionals) who find you, or have to handle your body (either trying to save your life, or dealing with the corpse).... And really, that's just a few of the impacts that suicide can have. There's the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide">copycat problem</a>, the costs (monetary and otherwise) of therapy for traumatized friends and family, the emotional cost of the various pains that drove them to need that therapy, <a href="http://answers.webmd.com/answers/1176251/what-are-the-effects-of-suicide">et cetera</a>, <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/consequences.html">et cetera</a>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The impacts are very real. So I get it why someone might think it's a selfish act. It certainly is an act that can have a heavy impact on others.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that I'm not alone: <i style="font-weight: bold;">People think about the impacts of the suicide they're pondering.</i> Or at least <i>I</i> certainly do. I've spent many an hour pondering what the impact would be. And frequently, that pondering is a part of what stays my hand. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be">conscience that makes a coward of me</a> is not so much fear of an afterlife (as a fairly strong <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)">naturalist</a>, I'm fairly confident there'll be no afterlife that I will experience), but the fear of a different sort of afterlife: the life that continues on, after I'm dead – i.e. the impacts of my death upon the living who survive me. Hamlet (or shall I say Shakespeare?) was right to point out that it takes a pretty big dread to stop a person with the methods at hand (which I don't usually have, but have had, at times), and who is suffering the whips and scorns of a long life of pains. And for me, at least some of that dread is the dread of hurting those I love, who would survive me.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And so (unselfishly?), I bear those fardels another day. (And another. And another. Times ten thousand.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But is it really unselfish to live on? Even as I live, I know the pain that I experience <i>creates</i> pain in others: whether it's those with whom I'm close enough to let them know I'm feeling suicidal, or even just to know (and some can simply see) that I'm in pain: These people worry about me (they tell me so). They, then, experience a type of pain, because of me. I've heard their stories, some of them. I've seen their tears. I've seen it written on their faces, tears or no. And I've seen it written in their words to me. Perhaps it is unselfish that I "grunt and sweat under a weary life"... but it's definitely not without impact on those around me. So there's impact, either way. Whether I commit suicide, or whether I live on, there's impact. Can the impacts be weighed? I don't know how to answer that. I do know that there are times when I think the impact would be less if I were to go, than to stay. Ten days ago, as it happens, I had a time when I was thinking some thoughts about suicide, and I had the thought, which I promptly wrote down in a note to myself (just because I thought it was interesting): "In the long run, I truly believe this will be better for everyone." Of course, I didn't actually attempt suicide at that point (I wasn't really even all that close to it). I was just reflecting on it, and had that thought along the way. Reflecting on it now, I'm <i>not sure</i> if I agree with the thought. It was just something that I was considering as a possible note, for if and when I ever did commit suicide. Something that, I think, would have <i>some</i> truth to it, even if I don't wholly accept it as true, so I imagined writing it down.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I've thought long and hard about suicide notes – whether to leave one, and what to say in one, if I did. For someone like me, who truly does want to be unselfish about things, and is simply struggling to figure out how to do that, it's a hard question. Whatever note one leaves, it'll probably never really capture the intricacies of things. So maybe you don't even try. Maybe you come up with something succinct like the above, and say nothing else. Or, as a guy I knew in high school scrawled in the sand near the site of his self-hanging, a little quip from that same Hamlet speech I quoted above: "to sleep, per chance to dream". Perhaps he had a dread of the afterlife. Perhaps, given that he went through with his life, he hoped to see one. I don't know. And even though I didn't know him all that well, or consider him particularly much of a friend (certainly we hadn't stayed in touch, in the two years between high school graduation and his death), I still wonder what it was like for him. And I know that, no matter what I do or don't say if and when I ever commit suicide, that people will have such wonderings (or, probably, very different wonderings; more on that in a moment) about what it was like for me, about why I did it, etc.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
My wonderings, I think, are different from most, though. I think (given what I've heard from people) that most folks wonder how someone with such promise (<a href="http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/news/1994_Jul_29.DEATH.html">Stith was an olympic-hopeful</a>) could ever come to such a place. I wonder, instead, how others didn't see what I saw, when I got to know him a little bit through being in a drama class with him some 5 years earlier, and through a few minor interactions otherwise: someone who had a lot of pain, under the surface. Maybe I'm wrong to think that; maybe I was projecting my own feelings onto him. Or maybe, as someone who's lived a life filled with emotional pain, I'm more in tune to the hints of it, that we try to hide, and saw an inner experience that those who were closer to him failed to see.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And why do we hide the pain? Oh, many reasons, I expect. One of them being the stigma of it. Which I think maybe brings me back to the shame thing:</div>
<h3>
Thoughts on Shame</h3>
<div>
In <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy">Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)</a>, "shame is <a href="http://blogs.psychcentral.com/emotionally-sensitive/2012/06/understanding-shame/">justified</a>" when there is an actual risk that you might be ostracized from a social group that's important to you. I think of that in terms of anything from a social group who you depend upon for your survival (in this day and age, perhaps coworkers, for your income), or simply who you feel a strong emotional connection to (one example for me is the local polyamory groups, in various cities I've lived in), or even just a single individual: a romantic partner, or close friend. Whatever the "group", though, the interesting thing to me here is that it doesn't matter whether whatever you might do to create the shame situation is something that you feel is right or wrong; what matters is how the "group" will perceive and respond to it. And right now, in our society, I think it's pretty safe to say that shame is justified for anyone seriously considering suicide: because people will distance themselves from you, if they hear that you're suicidal (I've certainly had that experience, anyway). Or they'll effectively threaten a distancing, by telling you that you're being "selfish" – a general trait that's often going against the norms for a group, and thus (I believe) precisely the type of thing that the shame response has evolved to handle: preventing someone from doing things that would cause the group to cast one out. And yet shame is exactly a trigger for suicidal thoughts and feelings, so to think it in the first place ultimately "justifies" having even more such thoughts.<br />
<br />
But how fucked up is it that one who's thinking of checking out (an idea I'm using in the way described in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coercion-Its-Fallout-Revised-Edition/dp/1888830018/ref=nosim?tag=daveltdtmenterpr" rel="nofollow">Coercion and its Fallout</a> [<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/coercion-and-its-fallout/oclc/19992082">library</a>]) – of life, and therefore of whichever group(s) might be relevant – might feel shamed back <i>in</i> to a group that might very well <i>be a big part of causing</i> (or at least extending) the pain that's creating the urge to check out? I don't know, is it just me who sees a bitter irony there? And with the impact of shame that can bring about further suicidal thinking?<br />
<br />
Well, and allow me to talk now a little about a distinction that I make in different types of suicidal thinking: On the one hand, there's someone who's just gone through a particularly tough moment of their life, and is temporarily distraught about something or other, and through their distress, they aren't thinking so clearly, and they're hurting, so they think of suicide. When these cases turn into actual suicide, to me, it's a tragedy. I think most folks would agree with me, here. The "permanent solution to a temporary problem" is sad to see happen, because, well, it was a temporary problem, and now that person won't live to see it resolved, when it pretty clearly could or would have been – or at least would have lost its gravity over time.<br />
<br />
But there's another kind of suicidal person. A person like myself, who, while surely experiencing temporary problems at various times, and having those problems lead to thoughts of suicide, also has a grander difficulty: Through whatever set of circumstances (be it genetic, or because of childhood abuse, or whatever), this person is someone who has a fairly chronic experience of intense emotional pain. Yes, there are times when things aren't so painful. There are times when such a person experiences joy. Maybe those times are even frequent. And it's easy, as an outsider, to look at such a person and see them as happy, and to think of whatever pain they may experience as a temporary problem. But let me tell you, as someone who <i>isn't feeling much pain in the moment I'm writing these words</i>, that the pain is, none the less, a fairly ever-present thing. A persistent thing. And when it's bad, it's really bad. And given the <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/body-sense/201204/emotional-and-physical-pain-activate-similar-brain-regions">connections between psychological and physical pain</a>, and in particular the similarity of brain response to each, I can tell you: chronic pain sucks – even when you're not actively feeling it, because even then, you're aware of it enough that you have to sort of plan for it. You have to <a href="http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/wpress/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/">keep track of your spoons</a>, as it were. You have to actively work to avoid the situations that cause that all-too-painful sense of shame: that self-same emotion that both pushes you to want to check out, and pulls you towards sticking around; towards not being "selfish". And even if you, like me, do a certain degree of <a href="http://betterlikebutter.blogspot.de/2012/08/zero-configuration-software-and-much.html">embracing the pain</a>, and finding the wonderful things (empathy, art, a desire to make the world better, ...) that can come from it... it's still bloody painful.<br />
<br />
So, can there be another way? I think maybe there can. Let's start a new section.<br />
<h3>
Having a way out</h3>
</div>
<div>
There's a fascinating documentary by Terry Pratchett on "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett:_Choosing_to_Die">Choosing to Die</a>". Sadly, the two uploads of it that I'd known about online have been pulled on copyright grounds, but if you're sufficiently interested in this topic, I highly recommend digging deeper and finding a way to watch it. (I found another instance of it on YouTube now. Given the copyright issues [and my presumption that the copy I found, too, will get pulled at some point], I won't link to it; just go find it and watch it if you're so inclined. Briefly, though, Pratchett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and is struggling with the question of whether, when, and how to possibly make the choice for an assisted suicide. This is a decision he is <i>allowed</i> to make, because he has a chronic <i>physical</i> illness. Those with even a history of <i>mental</i> illness <strike>are</strike> <i>were</i> not allowed to use the service. <i>[EDIT: 2019-05-06: looking at the latest from <a href="http://dignitas.ch/">Dignitas</a>, it seems they've changed their policies! Apparently now they will at least consider cases of folks with chronic mental health diagnoses. Interesting!!]</i>)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unfortunately (to my thinking, though I expect many will disagree), someone like me – who has been diagnosed with, among other things, chronic depression (I was first prescribed anti-depressants while still in high school, and given such a diagnosis long before that, I think) – is <i>unable</i> to get services from the "<a href="http://dignitas.ch/index.php?lang=en">right to die</a>" organization that Pratchett explored in his documentary. Dignitas says on its FAQ (I also confirmed it in an e-mail interaction, because other things they say seem like they <i>might</i> have allowed for it in some cases; not so much, it turns out) that those with "mental illness and/or psychological problems" cannot get the type of help that Pratchett was exploring getting. And at some level, I can understand this... They're going for people making informed consent and a rational decision. If decision-making and related abilities are impaired by things like depression (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3132433/">an interesting question</a>, not (to my satisfaction, at least) fully answered), then clearly, there's good reason to be <i>wary</i> of considering a depressed person's decision to die to be an informed and rational one. But can we go so far as to discount this ability entirely? Even if their decision-making ability is impaired, do we not allow them the autonomy to make choices for themselves? I would assert that in cases that are clearly acute (read: temporary), that removing autonomy is worth the cost, if it can get someone through the temporary problem and get them to a happier place, where they truly no longer wish to die. When a condition is chronic, though, <i>even when we consider that chronic is not synonymous with permanent</i>, I would assert that some allowance for autonomy deserves to be given, and that a person deserves the dignity of being able to make decisions about their own life – up to and including a decision to end it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A difficulty comes in, though, when trying to judge between the acute and the chronic. Even a chronic disorder will have acute flare-ups. And I think there's value to society in having an organization which might assist someone to carry out a suicide be careful about who and when they allow themselves to assist. But are there benefits to assisting someone with a chronic mental-health condition? I think there are:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It seems to me that if someone who (because of chronic depression, anxiety, traumatic stress, or the like (or all of the above)) would want to end their life was given a way to do so in a rational, considered, planned way, that this could create all sorts of opportunities to mediate the difficulties of the "selfishness" of this decision, among other problems. Having watched, through Pratchett's video, a person take their own life, by way of swallowing a lethal cocktail, I can say that to watch such an act is not without emotional impact (on the watcher). But the impact is mediated, substantially I think, by a couple of factors: First, we know (we are shown in the documentary) that the decision is one that has been considered over time. We know something about the inputs to the decision. We <i>can't</i>, of course, know the exact details of the mental state of the person, but we <i>can</i> see evidence that they've considered things, that they understand that it will be difficult on those who love them, and that they've considered that impact, regret it, and even made the decision with input from said loved one(s). And we know that a mental health professional has made an evaluation of whether this person is making this decision in a lucid way. We also can see that the loved ones have had time to prepare themselves for this, to say goodbye... and even to hold their beloved's hand (or body) as they go.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Can we do that with a more customary suicide? Generally not. I actually have a close friend who has, in principle, agreed that she might go with me somewhere into the woods or something, to be there with me for my suicide, should I ever come to a considered decision to go that route. This gives me great comfort, in ways: The idea that I might feel some love in the end, and feel close to someone, would be a great relief from the isolation I all-too-often feel in the world (especially when I'm feeling suicidal). Isolation that increases when I'm told that my act would be a selfish one; for if it is a selfish act, then it's clearly one I must do on my own, if I'm to do it at all. And maybe I won't do it... I haven't thus far, despite several attempts. (Side note: Having <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness">learned helplessness</a> around suicide itself is... a deeply depressing state of affairs; it is often some learned (through hard lessons) helplessness that's played a role in making me feel suicidal; to then feel helpless about <i>even ending things</i>, well... that's tough, when I'm at my worst. But I digress.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If I could have an option where I could make a careful decision to end my life, and have that decision be one that's expressed to friends, family, loved ones, and even acquaintances... To give those people a chance to make a plea for me to stay, and give their reasons; for me to carefully consider their pleas; for them to say goodbye, if I stuck to my decision; to request that I return some item that I've forgotten I had borrowed from them; or to return something to me, or give me a chance to change the loan into a gift; to ask me questions – whether it's some secret recipe of mine, or whether there was anything they could have done differently to change my decision: All (or at least many) of the things that the survivor of a traditional suicide might regret their <i>inability</i> to do, given the loss of the person with whom it would need to be done... To my mind, having such opportunities prior to the execution of a suicide would greatly lessen the "selfishness" of the act. And so I deem that the world would be better if more people agreed with the following:</div>
<h4>
People should have a path to suicide that includes consultation with, and input from, those around them, and allows them to tie up loose ends before they go, and to have a "safe" and effective way of dying.</h4>
<div>
If we could settle our estates while living; say our goodbyes and give hugs; let people know that it wasn't their fault (or, perhaps sometimes, that it <i>was</i>, at least in part, but to say so to their face, and face their reaction)... If we could do these things, and have suicide not be a stigmatized action, but merely a thing that some people opted to do, and that those surrounding them could express their agreement or disagreement with, and perhaps try to influence the decision... This, then, would allow a different situation than what we have now:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Right now, if one decides to commit suicide, one is pretty much obligated (that one friend of mine is a rare one indeed – and far enough away, that it might prove impossible to go to her) to go it in complete isolation, without support, without love, and with the very real risk that if their attempt is discovered prior to completion, it will be interfered with, and great efforts will be made to keep the person alive, against their wishes. (While some do make suicidal gestures hoping to be saved, that's not the situation I'm speaking of here; I'm speaking of a genuine and considered attempt to end one's life.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And it's undoubtedly true that some who attempt suicide (even with full sincerity in their intent at the time) end up glad to have failed, I can also say with authority that some who survive are upset by that outcome:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Waking up after the unconsciousness of the crash from an overdose of Adderall, after having written 37 pages of (mostly chicken-scratch-looking) writing about why I had made my decision, and what it meant to me, and then recording a couple of hours of audio (after my body ceased to allow me to write) of me trying to dictate further thoughts, and then eventually of my troubled breathing, when I failed to be able to do even that... well, waking up was a proverbial slap to the face. I really hadn't wanted to wake. I'd had the hope, as I lost more and more control of my body, and felt unconsciousness approaching, that it really would end forever. But then I woke up. I relive this reawakening (on a smaller scale) on many days, when I wake up from regular sleep, wishing I could instead sleep that infinite sleep of death. Dismayed to once again face the light of day, that others claim to take so much joy from. Granted, some days I take joy in it, too, in ways... rarely if ever have I had the simple thought, though, that I'm glad to be alive. When I do feel gladness, it invariably comes from something more specific going on.</div>
<h3>
Wrapping things up</h3>
<div>
I think I'm nearing the conclusion of this "attempt", this essay. There's more I'd like to discuss – about failed attempts (at suicide), access to reliable methods, the problems I see with methods like what Dignitas uses, about the selfishness or not (that's a question I don't have a clear answer to, too) of <i>saying</i> that suicide is selfish, about over-population, and altruistic suicide, and... much much more. And I still don't feel like I have a solid answer to the opening question. But it's time to face the current day that I have in front of me, some 8 or so hours of writing (and related research, and editing) later than when I first woke up into it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Thank you for reading. I'll thank you even more if you consider my thoughts in a thoughtful manner, and, should you be so inspired, write down (or otherwise communicate) your own thoughts, and post them in response (either as a comment; or as a blog of your own, which you may link to or not, as you see fit; or as a personal message to me). Ultimately, I think the key is for us all to talk about this more. To have it out there, discussed, debated, considered... these would, I think, be things that would make the world a better place. And I think they might help to prevent a lot of tragic suicides, actually... and enable some sensible ones.<br />
<br /></div>
<h3>
<hr />
Addenda:</h3>
<div>
<br />
<ol>
<li>2015-05-25: I'd opened more of those search results earlier, and had a few open that I hadn't read yet. I just now read <a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/miriammogilevsky/2012/05/16/what_youre_really_saying_when_you_say_that_suicide_is_selfish">this one</a> and think it's worth a read. It brings me closer to an answer to the question... though still not quite there. Either way, though, it has some useful thoughts.</li>
<li>2015-05-25: Also, I think it's worth noting that the original broadway cast recording of the Sondheim play <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassins_(musical)">Assassins</a> has a track called <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=november+22+1963+assasins+obc">November 22, 1963</a>, which portrays an interaction between John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and addresses some, err, "interesting" thoughts on Suicide, let's just say. I found a copy on youtube (check the link, maybe it'll still be there), or you could get the whole recording – lots of interesting stuff in there, beyond just that track, too... though that one is by far the most powerful, to me.</li>
<li>2015-05-30: Hmm, the <a href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/suicide/understanding-and-overcoming-myths-suicide">fourth hit</a> is pretty interesting! I only wish they'd let me read both pages... oh, <a href="http://bugmenot.com/view/psychiatrictimes.com" rel="nofollow">maybe I can</a>. Indeed, the first paragraph of the second page is profoundly interesting; partial excerpt, with emphasis added: "Friends and family ... often consider [suicide] to be deeply selfish. <i>This is understandable</i> because the bereaved are often convinced that the decedent did not consider the impact of his or her death on those left behind. However, <i>those who die by suicide certainly do consider the impact of their deaths on others</i>; but to them, death is a positive rather than a negative outcome. This is wrong, but nevertheless, it is the view of the person who attempts suicide." I will also add that saying that seeing death as a positive outcome being "wrong" is a value judgement, that seems to be being made as though it were a factual claim. It's probably factually wrong that <i>the perception</i> of the death by those around the deceased will be a positive one, but even that could be in error in some cases: For example, one of the differences in how I think about suicide (and how I thought about Stith's death, for example), is that I often view it with envy and respect. So....... yeah.</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-76259812857394837882013-09-17T22:58:00.001-07:002013-09-17T22:58:23.862-07:00DRY Legislation (Don't Repeat Yourself)I don't know much about the United States Code, really. One thing I do know, or have at least heard, repeatedly, is that it's immense. Individual bills sometimes come in at thousands of pages, and go completely unread by a large percentage of the legislators who vote on them.<br />
<br />
This is the story, anyway. I'm presuming it's accurate.<br />
<br />
And it strikes me, in thinking about this, that probably a large percentage of all those words involve some sort of standard boilerplate-like language that shows up again and again - either across bills, or within a bill. Maybe that's not at all the case, I don't know. But knowing what I know about how I've seen things done elsewhere, I'm inclined to guess that it's likely. It's certainly a common thing in a lot of software I've seen (and some I've written), to express the same things over and over again.<br />
<br />
And in software, it's often a horrible way to go about things. And I suspect the same to be true in the world of legislation.<br />
<br />
It's understandable, mind you... One time you want to say "one time you want to say", and another time you want to say "another time you want to say". They're not identical statements. Yet there's a whole lot of repetition there.<br />
<br />
There's been a movement in the software world to keep code "DRY"... An acronym for "Don't Repeat Yourself". In computer code, this is arguably a lot easier than in English. You have functions, and variables, and a readership who knows how to deal with these sorts of things. So you can do something like (in some arbitrary pseudo-code English):<br />
<br />
1. Let "tywts" mean "time you want to say".<br />
2. One tywts, "one tywts", another tywts, "another tywts".<br />
<br />
There's arguably still repetition there, of course. And in a real code environment, there'd be ways to reduce it further. Still, if you decided you wanted to change things to be "one time you wished you had said", you only have to change it in one place (never mind that the acronym is now obsolete in its lettering; you could fix that, too, but you don't have to). This is one of the major wins with DRY code. And I suspect there are a lot of places in legislation where we could do something similar. After all, the readership of legislation is presumed to be sophisticated, too.<br />
<br />
So make a library of specific definitions - within the body of law, overall, and within specific laws, as needed. An then express ideas in succinct, if slightly cryptic to the lay reader, ways. I think that might be better. At the very least, I think it's worth thinking about.<br />
<br />
And maybe some day we'll set aside 5% of congress's time for a decade or three to "DRY off" the existing laws.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-42291159592192529762013-08-02T14:18:00.001-07:002013-08-02T14:18:53.731-07:00More atheists in Congress... (write your reps!)Apparently, <a href="http://thehill.com/capital-living/cover-stories/232445-in-god-we-trust-">there are some 28 atheists in Congress</a>, only one of which is open about their atheist views.<br />
<br />
Personally, through a wide variety of inputs (perhaps I've written about these? And/or perhaps I will (more) in the future), I've come to the conclusion that only an open atheist is really in the best of positions to be a legislator.<br />
<br />
As such, I've just written to <a href="http://mcdermott.house.gov/">Jim McDermott</a>, my representative in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives">House</a>, the following message (which says a little more about why I hold this position):<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Dear Congressperson McDermott, </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I've been voting for you for the last several years, and I've seen you speak a few times, and generally I must say: I like what you're doing. Which means I'm inclined to want to see you continue to represent me in congress. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
However, there's a point where I'd like to be more represented, where I'm less sure about how well you represent me: </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I'm a staunch believer in evidence and reason for deciding truth, and as such, my reason and the best evidence I've been able to find so far leads me to being a fairly strong believer in the absence of a personal god, or really pretty much any deity, though one does have to carefully define ones terms before one can reasonably have the conversation. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
At any rate, I've further come to the belief that I strongly want those who represent me in government to have a similar position, and take it openly. For I feel there are basically two main possibilities for someone (and particular, someone in congress) who identifies as a religious believer (and specifically a believer in a personal god - which may or may not be you? I'll get back to that): </blockquote>
<blockquote>
1. That this someone either has not looked at, or is ignoring (for whatever reason or reasons), the evidence for non-theistic explanations of the way the world works, and evidence against the existence of a personal god; or<br />
2. Someone who has examined the evidence, and doesn't believe in a personal god, but for whatever reason or reasons (and there are some arguably good ones; cf. a talk on this topic by Daniel Dennett[1]), has chosen to lie about it. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
In the former case, I'd worry about this person's ability to use evidence and reason to make good decisions about how to interact with the world, especially when making policy decisions as my representative in congress. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
In the latter case, I'd worry about the mental hoops this person has to jump through in order to lie to me and others, and about what else they might be able and willing to lie about in the course of their service. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
In either case, I'd much prefer a representative who had examined the evidence, concluded that a personal god did not exist, and was then able and willing to openly admit to this. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Now, according to wikipedia, you're a member of the Episcopal church. According to the same page, you also led a recitation of the pledge of allegiance, rightly (in my opinion) omitting the added words "under God". I've done a little bit of searching, and don't immediately find more information on your actual beliefs in this area... </blockquote>
<blockquote>
So I ask you: </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Are you, privately, an atheist? </blockquote>
<blockquote>
If so, I simply ask you to consider "coming out", and making your atheism public. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
If not, I ask you to consider the evidence (as presented, e.g., by Victor J. Stenger[2]) that exists against the hypothesis that a god exists, and if you find it convincing, to then consider my "if so" statement again. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Either way, if you're willing to speak candidly (either in direct correspondence with me, or publicly) about your beliefs, or if you have in the past and can point me at some record of such, I would greatly appreciate hearing your views. The one thing I will ask you NOT to do is to tell me that you're a believer if in fact, deep inside, you are not. If you will keep your non-belief hidden, I can respect that (to some degree). If you truly do believe, well, I'd again ask you to look more closely at the evidence, and/or I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about it, should you wish to do so. If you disbelieve and explicitly say otherwise, though, then I have real trouble with that. So I ask you not to do so. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
With respect and continued support, </blockquote>
<blockquote>
- David Lindes, a Seattle constituent.<br />
<br />
[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJZQwy9dvE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJZQwy9dvE</a> </blockquote>
<blockquote>
[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God:_The_Failed_Hypothesis">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God:_The_Failed_Hypothesis</a></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Now, I ask you to do something similar. Write it in your own words, to your own representatives (whether in the senate or the house, or ideally both; perhaps I'll follow up with <a href="http://www.murray.senate.gov/">Murray</a> and <a href="http://www.cantwell.senate.gov/">Cantwell</a>, as well). If you'd like to link to this blog post, feel free, but mostly, just write, OK?<br />
<br />
Thank you for reading.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-90973982438843855612013-03-04T01:36:00.002-08:002013-03-04T01:38:17.545-08:00Automatic tool tips need to die.I just noticed a typo when re-reading my post (in preparation for sending it to a friend) about <a href="http://betterlikebutter.blogspot.de/2012/08/zero-configuration-software-and-much.html">software pain</a>, and went to go fix it. And, in the spirit of <i>that very essay</i>, I'm now going to rant about the experience I had.<br />
<br />
Because you see: the effort of doing the edit was impaired slightly by the fact that blogger decided it was time to tell me something about sharing on google+ or something. I don't know, I didn't really read the thing, because I was trying to get something specific done. Anyway, it was popping up a sort of "dialog box" kind of thing, over the editing field, being in my face about whatever new feature it was trying to tell me about. And when I searched on the page for the typo, it seemed to go away for a moment (I guess when the page scrolled, and the CSS-positioning had to get adjusted by some javascript or something), but then it popped right back up. Right over whatever text I was searching for, which... happened to exist in more places than one in the document (it wasn't a misspelled word, just the wrong word, so the string existed elsewhere legitimately). So I couldn't tell if I was at the right place yet (let alone make the edit), because this window kept covering up <i>exactly the thing on the screen that I was trying to look at</i>.<br />
<br />
I find this horribly non-user-friendly.<br />
<br />
If you've got a new feature you want to make me aware of, send me an e-mail about it. I might actually read it, at a time of my own choosing.<br />
<br />
If it's something so dire that using the site can't be done without knowing about it, then <i>don't let me even see the site</i>. Present me with a page and make me make a decision, or acknowledge that I've read something, or whatever it is you're trying to do. This is annoying too, and is often over-used, but... still, it's better than the automatic pop-over thing, and if it's really both <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MerrillCoveyMatrix.png">important and urgent</a>, then it's the right answer. <i>If</i> it's quadrant 1, don't let me do anything else until it's done. But you're making something that, for me, is quadrant 4 into something that's quadrant 3, which gets in the way of me doing something I consider to be quadrant 2... and frankly, that pisses me off.<br />
<br />
If you want to have tool tips for actual tools, where I actually have to hover my mouse over something to see it, that's totally fine with me. (I'd like to have the option to turn them off, of course, but I find that in practice, I usually don't.) And if you want to advertise some new feature or something, that you think I might really like to know about, then I'd even tolerate having a bit of screen real estate devoted to some sort of notice about that. Make it dismissible, and I'll very likely take the time to read it and then dismiss it at some point when I have half a moment, so that I can get my screen real estate back.<br />
<br />
But when you put something that for me is quadrant 4 directly in the way of me trying to get done my quadrant 2 work done, thus making it quadrant 3 (urgent, but not important), you're causing me some pain. If you want to keep me as a customer[0], please stop doing that, lest I <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coercion-Its-Fallout-Revised-Edition/dp/1888830018/ref=nosim?tag=daveltdtmenterpr" rel="nofollow">drop out</a>.<br />
<br />
Much as I dislike supporting Covey[1], I do like to try to stay in quadrant 2 of his urgency/importance matrix when I can. Stop feeding me quadrant 3 stuff, please.<br />
<br />
Oh yeah, and to the rest of the world: I ask you to stop putting up with annoyances like these. if you'd like to understand why, please go read that article on software pain (linked up top).<br />
<br />
<hr />
<br />
[0] To some small degree, I specifically mean <a href="http://www.google.com/">google</a> and the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">blogger</a> platform team. Mostly, though, that was just the particular instance of a broader trend that I've noticed which caused me to write this post.<br />
<br />
[1] For reasons I <a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html">won't bother saying here, right now</a>.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-37677208336378317072012-08-11T15:04:00.003-07:002023-07-24T15:12:21.292-07:00Zero configuration software (and much more)<i>[Preamble, 2023-07-24: Over the years, various problems have come up with folks I mention and/or link to in this article. Some of them, I wouldn't link to or mention today. I'm going to leave this post as-is for now, but I thought I'd just mention that I'm aware of problematic behavior, of various sorts, and... yeah. Please do not construe this post as an endorsement of anyone else's work or personage. It's just the artifact I created 11 years ago, before having heard and/or internalized those issues (though at least one of them I had reason to be aware of in 2012... sigh).]</i><br /><br /><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html">Paul Graham once said</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.</i></blockquote>
Well, guess what: I'm strongly of the opinion that a whole lot of people are doing it wrong. Presumably because the following corollary (my own words, this time) also applies:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If you've been doing it wrong since you can remember doing it at all, you're probably inured to the pain.</i></blockquote>
And I, for one, am of the mind that allowing oneself to become inured to the pain is doing everyone (yourself, and everyone else, too) a disservice, and that standing up for pain-free things is a good thing.<br />
<br />
Now, this could apply to all manner of things -- for example, in a great <a href="http://www.ted.com/">TED talk</a> by <a href="http://danariely.com/">Dan Ariely</a>, some <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html">great observations are made</a> (also viewable <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUdsTizSxSI">on YouTube</a>) about pain treatment in medical settings.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, for this essay (in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/essay.html">this sense of the word essay</a>), I'm going to focus on something that I have more direct experience with:<br />
<br />
Software, and especially the development thereof. Note, though, that while I'm talking about the development of software, on the one hand, I'm also talking about its effect on end users, whether or not those end users are also developers. So the software I'm talking about could be anything from a custom piece of software for some kiosk somewhere (or order-taking software at a restaurant, say – i.e. something that is used by people whose main business it is to do things completely other than dealing with software), all the way to programming languages (which of course have the primary audience of software developers – while also being written by them).<br />
<br />
So...<br />
<br />
I am of the opinion that there's a whole lot of pain in the realm of software (the entire realm, as outlined above) that people just put up with, and that our world could be a whole lot better, if we (all software users, with a bit of special attention on developers, since they have a more direct ability to do something about changing the software itself) would just <i>stop putting up with it</i>.<br />
<br />
That's <b>Step 1: Stop putting up with software-induced pain.</b> So then what? I'll get back to that.<br />
<b><br /></b>
But first: You know, actually, some of Ariely's observations might very well be useful in explaining <i>why</i> we <i>do </i>put up with it. (And I'm of the belief that knowing how and why something happens is one of the most powerful tools available for trying to prevent something from happening – or encouraging it to happen again, if that's what you're after.) For example, he says (emphasis mine -- though it mirrors some hand gestures in the video):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It turns out that because we don't encode <b>duration</b> in the way that we encode <b>intensity</b>, I would have had less pain if the duration had been longer but the intensity was lower.</i></blockquote>
I think that, for most of us, the <i>intensity</i> of pain of dealing with software annoyances is <i>relatively</i> low. So, given the above findings from Ariely, we are able to tolerate it for hours and hours, days and days... months, even years – perhaps in some cases without ever even really <i>noticing</i> (at least in a conscious and <i>remembered</i> way) that it's painful. Because the pain isn't that <i>intense</i> – it's not physical pain, after all, and hey, a lot of us are getting paid for experiencing it (because we're paid for jobs in which we basically have to deal with it), so it probably nets to being a positive experience for a lot of people – we're able to tolerate it pretty well, even if the <i>duration</i> gets to be quite extensive.<br />
<br />
I think for me, though, the pain is more intense. I don't know why that's the case (and I don't <i>think</i> it matters, for the purposes of this essay), it just seems that I react differently to annoyances in software than other people around me. It seems to bother me more than a large percentage of the people I interact with. I don't have any hard data to back that up, it's just an impression I get when I watch people interact with software, and sometimes even ask them about their interactions. Things that drive me bonkers, they'll brush off, even when I ask them if it annoys them. It does, they might even admit, but it's "just the way it is". Ugh. For me, such things are much harder to ignore. It hurts when something is slow, or requires me to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it working the first time, or whatever.<br />
<br />
I consider this to be a virtue of sorts: it becomes one of the things I can give back to the world: <i>experiencing</i> the pain so that I can try to help <i>make the pain go away.</i> In this case, by <i>drawing attention to it</i>, with this blog post. Consider this my little attempt at a bit of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising">consciousness raising</a> (and when you're done with this post, if you still want more consciousness raising, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2jt8291L-s">a bit</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E-Inp6IUcc">more</a> (in two parts) consciousness-raising, on some topics related to each other, but quite unrelated to this essay – what can I say, I have strange (?) tangents of thought, sometimes). Anyway, my attempt at consciousness raising is done in the hope of encouraging others to join me in my efforts at finding and creating fixes and improvements – to software, software development paradigms, etc – that will benefit... well, ultimately, the hope is to benefit anyone that ever uses any software, anywhere, ever. Grand plans. Don't worry, we can start more locally than that.<br />
<br />
Let's call it <b>Step 2: Try to find ways to reduce the pain.</b> While this does especially apply to software <i>developers</i>, I<i> do <b>not</b> limit it to that audience</i>. Anyone reading this is almost certainly someone who uses software to some degree or other (unless someone printed out this page for you, and even then, you're an indirect user), and if we all <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdependence">work together</a> at trying to find solutions, we'll do a lot better than than any of us can do on our own. So I'm writing this for the non-developers, too – and, developers, please: do go and solicit (and/or welcome) their help.<br />
<br />
Exploring further, I notice that Ariely also observes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time, that would have been also less painful.</i></blockquote>
He's talking about taking bandages off of burn wounds. Software is, of course, different. But the principle, here, is this:<br />
<br />
A <i>decreasing</i> level of pain is <i>remembered</i> as less painful than the same <i>initial level</i> of pain just <i>stopping.</i> I.e. the latter case has less "total pain" (the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral">area under the curve</a> of intensity over time), but a higher <i>intensity</i> of pain at <i>end</i> (because the pain suddenly stopped) of what we identify as the experience (which we presumably mark as a separation of experiences when the pain simply stops), and the greater "total" pain is <i>remembered</i> as "less painful". Hmm, I think I'm not doing a great job of explaining it... Here: another TED talk, <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html">Daniel Kahneman on experience versus memory</a> (also <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg">on YouTube</a>), does a better job.<br />
<br />
Anyway, it seems to me that this idea still applies in the world of software pain: If we can find some workaround (as we so often do) for our pain, the intensity of pain decreases, and so we remember it as having been less painful than it actually was at first. Someone who faced exactly the same problem, but failed to find (or gave up on finding) a workaround, would remember it as much worse. Even if you spend extra energy and experience extra pain in trying to find a workaround, you'll still remember that as less painful than the person who gives up! (Moral to this story? Don't give up, I guess. But that's not step 3. Not in that form, anyway. We're not there yet.)<br />
<br />
And let's dig a little deeper into the idea of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workaround">workaround (as described on wikipedia)</a>. The description starts out simply enough:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system.</i></blockquote>
There's something in there, though: A <i>recognized problem</i>! Guess what: If there's a "recognized" problem in something, that almost certainly means it's been "recognized" by more than one person – before it got to the point of having a workaround. That means someone noticed it before, and <i>didn't fix it</i>. Now, I'll grant that there are, at times, good reasons for not fixing a problem as soon as you notice it. I do think, though, that taking that route creates part of the problem. In fact, let's go ahead and define:<br />
<br />
<b>Step 3: Whenever possible, fix a problem as soon as you notice it.</b> The "whenever possible" part is an important piece, of course, and one might even weaken things to say "whenever practicable" or even "whenever practical", which leaves a great deal of leeway to say "it's not practical right now"... which I hope you'll rarely do – and when you do, it's because it's not practical for you to learn the things you need to learn in order to fix the problem, rather than that it's "not practical" to spend some time on doing the fix. Well, and maybe this takes us straight to another step:<br />
<br />
<b>Step 4: When it's not possible to fix a problem as soon as you notice it, make some partial or unrelated fix, instead.</b> The idea here being to fix <i>something</i> (or make some progress toward a fix), because you noticed a problem. While the motivation that the pain creates is still present. Whether that's adding a message to the software about it having a problem, or adding something to a to-do list somewhere (though be careful with that one... it does need to be a TODO list that actually gets looked over and has things checked off of it for this to be enough), to just fixing something else that's been on the back of your mind but un-done, because you don't know how to fix this new thing, but are perfectly capable of fixing something else, and just haven't done it yet. Better to fix <i>something</i>, even if it's unrelated, than to just continue living in the current state of pain that exists, when that's changeable.<br />
<br />
And maybe you even come up with a workaround. After all:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>workarounds are frequently as creative as true solutions, involving outside the box thinking in their creation.</i></blockquote>
So I have nothing against finding whatever way you can to help reduce the pain. A cast doesn't actually fix a broken leg, after all, though in that case it does <i>help</i> the healing process along, by protecting the healing process in some way. If you can shield a developer from pressure by creating a workaround for software that you don't know how to fix, hey, that's useful. Just remember:<br />
<br />
<b>Step 5: When you create a fix or workaround, be sure to share it. </b> It's not helpful to anyone else unless it's shared. And maybe by sharing it, you'll give someone an idea about possibilities for how to fix it. One great thing about open source (and especially these days with social networking and source code getting together on things like <a href="https://github.com/">github</a>) is that sharing is often possible. Sharing is the way to help reduce pain for others.<br />
<br />
Just remember, though, if you're doing workarounds, that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>A workaround is typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution to the problem is needed.</i></blockquote>
So, do try to do the "genuine solution" when you can – in fact, creating a workaround may be specifically be a bad idea, much of the time, because it goes directly in opposition to:<br />
<br />
<b>Step 6. Increase the pain.</b> No, I'm not after people being in more pain. Quite the opposite. BUT, I think increasing the pain temporarily can decrease the pain overall – because, after all, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain#Evolutionary_and_behavioral_role">pain is a signal to us that something is wrong</a>, and that we need to do something about it. The stronger the pain, the quicker we'll respond – on the presumption that we've adapted the stronger pain response to things that tend to be more life-threatening. Well, bad software (usually) isn't life threatening. Not directly. But, I do submit that it causes us harm – if only via the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost">opportunity cost</a> of every moment spent dealing with some ongoing problem, that could have (and might well have) been fixed, if it had only been <i>more</i> painful to start with.<br />
<br />
So, if you're writing a C program, turn on the -Werror compiler flag -- make warnings be errors, so that you're *forced* to fix them, if you want to get a compiled program at all. Stuff like that. Make it hurt more, briefly, so that you'll be more likely to fix it.<br />
<br />
Now, this may all seem like it's in direct conflict with Step 2. Hrm. It probably is, in a way. I did mention this was an essay, right? Well, let's see. I guess that leads us to:<br />
<br />
<b>Step 7. Find cures, not band-aids.</b> Maybe not every single time, but do strive for this.<br />
<br />
<br />
And now...<br />
<br />
I want to get this essay out into the world. I don't feel like it's "done" yet. It's certainly not had all the editing that I <i>could potentially</i> put into it. However: I started it several <i>months</i> ago, worked on it again maybe a month or two ago, and now I'm here again, facing lack of completion, and having lost a lot of the mental threads of where I was. Maybe I could pick them back up. Maybe I'll revisit it at some point, and do so, and make it better. Applying band-aids to it, or... perhaps... I'll find cures! – ways to make it that much better of an essay. For now, though, "<a href="http://www.fredibaker.com/2011/02/03/done-is-good/">done is good</a>" (not the first place I saw that idea, but the first one I found that seems to explain it). Done is good, so I'm putting this out there. I can iterate if need-be.<br />
<br />
I will, though, leave in a few only-very-slightly edited notes from my earlier draft, of things I wanted to include:<br />
<br />
more from the Workaround page on wikipedia:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i></i><i>Typically they are considered brittle in that they will not respond well to further pressure from a system beyond the original design. In implementing a workaround it is important to flag the change so as to later implement a proper solution.<br /> </i><i><br /></i><i>Placing pressure on a workaround may result in later system failures. For example, in computer programming workarounds are often used to address a problem or anti-pattern in a library, such as an incorrect return value. When the library is changed, the workaround may break the overall program functionality, effectively becoming an anti-pattern, since it may expect the older, wrong behaviour from the library.<br /> </i><i><br /></i><i>Workarounds can also be a useful source of ideas for improvement of products or services.</i></blockquote>
Also worth looking at: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kludge">Kluge</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_over_configuration">Convention over configuration</a>. I had a bunch I wanted to say about the latter... I guess in an edit or a follow-up post, maybe.<br />
<br />
I also put aside another quote from Dan Ariely:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>And it also turns out it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain, all of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea.</i></blockquote>
And wrote the following about it... which, I'm just going to leave here, no-longer edited (because Done Is Good, and I want this to be Done):<br />
<br />
If we're dealing with pain day-in and day-out in our jobs, then of course we're taking breaks from it. And surely that reduces our experience (or rather, memory) of the pain.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing: There's still a whole lot of experience of pain! And I, for one, believe that a great deal of that pain is totally unnecessary. And that it's up to us to work on reducing it. Because maybe a few of us have the problem of <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/elliot_krane_the_mystery_of_chronic_pain.html">chronic pain</a> (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6--CMhcCfQ">on YouTube</a>). Which, if you'll allow some stretching of the analogy, is something I think I've ended up suffering from, for one reason or another.<br />
<br />
Anyway, taking a little break from relating the pain, I'd like to emphasize something else from Ariely's talk -- having to do with motivation. Even if we take the stance that the pain I'm talking about is caused by people doing things wrong, we are of course under no obligation to consider that people are getting things wrong <i>intentionally</i>. Leading in to the above quotes, Ariely says (emphasis mine):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Here were <b>wonderful people</b>, with <b>good intentions</b>, and <b>plenty of experience</b>, and never the less they were getting things wrong, predictably, all the time.</i></blockquote>
And while I'm sure that some of the pain comes from inexperienced people, or even experienced people that one might deem to fall short of the threshold of "wonderful" – and even, every once in a while, if there may in fact be some ill intentions – still, I suspect that most of the time, the intentions (at the very least) are good. They're just "getting it wrong". And so my hope with this essay is to impart some ideas on ways of doing things that just might help people (including, perhaps, yourself) to get things right.<br />
<br />
The thing I most hope will be "gotten right" more often as a result of this essay is that more of you, more of the time, will fix problems as you find them, when the pain is fresh – thus (hopefully) preventing others from having to ever experience that pain at all.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-16930364123907071512012-04-15T14:12:00.001-07:002012-04-15T14:12:09.230-07:00Hygiene and smoking...New rule:<br />
<br />
Any Gelato establishment with a sign that says:<br />
<br />
"Due to hygienic reasons, it is not possible for us to let our customers taste the ice cream. Thank you for your understanding. The staff"<br />
<br />
Well, such a place ought also to ban smoking, don't you think? I don't care if they do have a full bar, also. (Wait, why does a Gelato place have a full bar? And why is that sign only in English? Well, I'm guessing I can guess at the latter answer - only Americans expect the option, perhaps. But still...)<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-25900342336989193632012-04-15T14:11:00.003-07:002012-04-15T14:11:51.791-07:00RauchfreizoneTo all restaurants and the like who exist within a locality which has not banned smoking within such establishment (and to the localities: please do), yet which have a smoke free area:<br />
<br />
First off, thank you for at least going part way on being smoke free.<br />
<br />
Would you like a tip on making it even better, though? Since this is a mostly of one-way form of communication, I'll just hope you answered yes to that, and give you this suggestion:<br />
<br />
If you make sure that all the critical sections of your establishment (and especially: entrance, cashier, and WC) are in the smoke-free zone, you'll surely make your non-smoking customers much happier, while costing little to your smoking customers.<br />
<br />
Thanks.<br />
<br />
- David, in Wien. <div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-31444532965915713812012-04-15T14:11:00.001-07:002012-04-15T14:11:41.582-07:00Global transit passesImagine putting money on a card that you could then use at any transit system anywhere on the globe. Different fares would be deducted, depending on the system - and fares in different currencies would somehow have to be figured out. Perhaps disabled and age-based (youth, senior) fare flags could be applied on the card - and either just transfer that data, trusting any authority, or have the authority of one system at least give you a temporary use on a new system until such time as one could b re-certified locally.<br />
<br />
And then, too, perhaps passes would automatically be granted on an as-useful basis: Ride once, pay one-ride fare. Ride again, a few hours later, pay again. Ride a third time in the day, pay a half fair (or whatever it happens to be) to upgrade you to unlimited-rides-for-one-day rate. Ride a couple times the next day, auto-upgrade to two-day unlimited. And then 7-day. And then monthly. And then yearly. Or not... Always paying the lowest possible fare for what you're actually using.<br />
<br />
And maybe, just maybe, if you auto-upgrade in, say, Los Angeles on a Wednesday to a 7-day pass that started on Monday, and then you're in Berlin on Thursday, you'd pay at most the delta in weekly fares (as adjusted for US$ to € conversion) to get unlimited rides through Sunday.<br />
<br />
Or maybe just have the <a href="http://taptogo.net/">TAP cards</a> they use in LA actually work on all the buses in LA. I just had to pay a cash fare on a "big blue bus" #3 to the airport after using my TAP card just fine to board a Metro 33 to get to that 3. Sigh. <div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-20038263837600413822012-01-04T22:37:00.000-08:002012-10-17T16:59:12.028-07:00On Secular TithingWow... How have I not talked about this before?<br />
<br />
Let's start with a story, though:<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, there was a guy who volunteered some of his time as a mentor at an organization called <a href="http://youthinfocus.org/">Youth In Focus</a>. Youth In Focus, or YIF, as its regulars often call it, is an organization that teaches photography to underprivileged youth in the Seattle area -- to help keep them off the streets, to give them something fun to do, to teach them a marketable trade, and, perhaps most importantly, to help build their self esteem.<br />
<br />
Well, one day, this guy found out that because one of the regular donors to YIF had not done their annual donation in a particular year, YIF was going to have to cut half of its program for several quarters. They'd run 3 classes, instead of 6. Oy! This guy was not thrilled with this idea. So he asked the Executive Director one day: What would it take, financially, to *not* have to run the program at only half capacity? The answer: $10,000. At first, he tried to get other mentors excited about doing some fundraising with their friends and contacts... But, for reasons we won't get into in this post, the guy was unsuccessful in getting anywhere close to $10,000 with this tactic. And that Spring quarter, they ran at half capacity. For summer, though, they were able to run full steam. Good thing. Fall, though, was still on the chopping block. And this was not OK with this guy -- it was putting him out of a job as a mentor, and putting a whole lot of kids out of having what he perceived as a very useful class.<br />
<br />
But what could he do? He hadn't managed to get enough traction with the other mentors to make the difference. He wasn't working at the time, and couldn't just donate the funds himself... but... He did have some money around, and he had an idea for something he could do. And he did it: He gave YIF a directed matching donation of $5,000, with the expectation that YIF would use that as incentive to raise an additional $5,000, and run the program at full capacity. And they did raise that extra money, and they did run the program.<br />
<br />
But wait, he's out of work, and he has $5,000 to kick around? How? Why?<br />
<br />
Well, here's the thing. This guy had started something back when he was working that was the thing that made this all possible. He was doing a non-religious form of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe">tithing</a>. Any time he got a paycheck, he would take 10% of the gross amount, and put it in a separate bank account, set up especially for the purpose. Then, sometimes, he could give some of that money to some philanthropic cause. Youth In Focus was the lucky recipient of $5,000 from this account.<br />
<br />
This story is true. And, as you've no doubt guessed, that guy was me. And I want more people to tithe in a secular way. I'm not alone... for example, the Atheist Activist website <a href="http://www.atheistactivist.org/Tithe.html">describes secular tithing</a> as a way to "offer material support - our money and our time - to organizations that do good by advancing the values that atheists hold dear". Yeah, sounds about right. I just want more people to be doing it.<br />
<br />
So, in hopes of promoting the idea further, I've created a facebook group. Not that facebook is the answer, but it was an easy way to get things started. I call it the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/World-Secular-Tithing-Society/201556839863406">World Secular Tithing Society</a>, and I hope you might join. The idea is to spread this idea, and encourage others to tithe -- to their own accounts, and/or maybe at some point to some non-profit that's specifically set up for the purpose of managing the collection of funds from secular tithers and getting it to charitable organizations that serve secular needs in secular ways. Perhaps if some of you join the group, you'd be willing to help me create that non-profit, and make this thing a reality? Or just join... give my posts a "like" now and then, and maybe tell a friend or two. Or twelve. Or 10% of your friends. That might be fitting.<br />
<br />
Anyway, one way or another, won't you help out? Join me in doing this, whether or not you join my group? I believe the world would be a better place if more of us did secular tithing. I hope you'll agree. Thank you for reading.<br />
<br />
<i>Addendum: Shortly after writing this post, I got to a message in my inbox that mentioned the <a href="http://sustainablepath.org/">Sustainable Path Foundation</a>... which seems to be precisely the sort of thing I'm talking about: a secular organization that pools funding together to solve problems in the world. Isn't <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity">synchronicity</a> fun?</i><div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-79471317926291300152011-07-13T10:52:00.000-07:002011-07-13T10:52:01.269-07:00Apple's Mac App Store: Licensing info: needs improvement!This post is about something specific, but the concepts are general:<br />
<br />
<i>When presenting a license to an end user, make it fully accessible.</i><br />
<br />
What does this mean? A couple things, at least:<br />
<br />
<ol><li>Allow text to be selected. I'd like to be able to copy and paste either sections or the whole content to another format, for easier reading, making notes, bookmarks, etc.</li>
<li>Make it easy to print. Sometimes, it's just easier to read things in hard-copy. Especially if one wants to take notes, read things somewhere quiet and distraction-free, or the like.</li>
</ol><br />
There are probably more, too. And certainly <a href="http://www.apple.com/">Apple</a> has other issues with the way they do licensing. For example <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">iTunes</a>. Every single time an update to iTunes comes out -- or at least it seems this way to me -- the user is forced to agree to a license again.<br />
<br />
Presumably, the license has changed only a little bit, if at all. So why do I need to read pages and pages of license agreement each time?<br />
<br />
Well, why do I, you may be asking? Because in theory, clicking "agree" means that I have done so. If they would provide me a summary of changes, this would be <b><i>so much</i></b> easier to do. Better yet, stop presenting it except when it's changed, and try not to change it often.<br />
<br />
I could go on and on, and it's not just Apple... but Apple being a company that I'm a frequent customer of, and having some poor policies in my mind, they're the top of my list right now of annoying licensing practices.<br />
<br />
Steve Jobs or someone: Please put some attention on this, and get your lawyers to work on making this more user-friendly. Don't worry, they won't mind too much: it's more work for them. :-P<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-28732364707785294522011-01-20T13:02:00.000-08:002011-01-20T13:02:01.865-08:00Why skilled support staff is better than outsourcingA lot of places are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing">outsourcing</a> support, these days, or so I keep hearing (and from time to time having evidence of).<br />
<br />
And I just recently had a support experience where the software to support my on-line real-time chat was outsourced, even though the actual support person was not. But as it happens, the experience was problematic in other ways, that I won't bother going into -- another person at the company was able to clear things up quite nicely. My point of telling you all this, though, is just to point out why I came to the following conlusion:<br />
<br />
<i><b>Skilled support staff is better than non-skilled support staff</b></i><br />
<br />
This probably especially applies to outsourced support staff, as I imagine they're most likely to be following a script, rather than actually understanding the problem(s) that customers are facing.<br />
<br />
And here's the reason:<br />
<br />
Someone who actually has a chance of <i>understanding</i> the customer <i>in detail</i>, is going to be achieving "habit 5" from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Covey#The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People">seven habits of highly effective people</a>[1] -- and most importantly, in my mind, not even just the understanding part of it, but that the customer <i>feels</i> understood. Because <i>feeling</i> understood opens you up to then having a good interaction with someone, instead of just battling to try to get your point understood. (Granted, the customer can try to apply habit 5, but in my experience, it's really really hard to do with someone who's trying to read from a script.)<br />
<br />
So yeah, to my mind, having scripted support (outsourcing or no) is a recipe for frustrated customers... which of course means customers who are that much more likely to become former customers, and that much less likely to encourage others to become new customers.<br />
<br />
So, hire the best in your support staff, and train them well -- on the tech side and on communications. It's better for the customer, and, in the long run, better for your organization, as well. <br />
<br />
At least that's how I see it.<br />
<br />
[1] Note: I'm linking to the wikipedia article, instead of a direct link to the book, because, while I think Covey's material is great, I'd really prefer that you didn't buy his book. He's an active member of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints">LDS Church</a>, which presumably means he tithes to (or otherwise financially supports) that organization, and I have a strong desire to avoid helping them out in any way (which is the subject of another post -- I'll try to remember to update this post with a link to it, if/when I ever write it).<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-44791029316901817972010-05-03T13:38:00.000-07:002010-05-03T13:53:18.460-07:00None of us are free, when one of us is chainedLast night, I witnessed a car accident. It was a minor accident, a so called (and literal) fender bender. A large black pickup truck, with Idaho plates, struck a Yellow Cab. My first form of witness was hearing a bang. I turned my head, and looked, and saw and heard a second bang. The cab was rear-ended. Twice, technically.<br />
<br />
I was half a block away, waiting at a bus stop. I started walking towards the incident. The truck was clearly at fault, and I'm a believer in being the type of witness who will go and report what they've seen, to help out a wronged person, whatever the situation. So I walked closer, and got out my phone (the only camera I had with me at the time), and took a couple of pictures, and making mental notes of what had happened. I then switched to video mode, so I could also make some actual recorded notes, via speech, about what I'd seen. While I was recording, the driver of the pick-up truck drove away. It had just escalated into a hit-and-run.<br />
<br />
I crossed the street, to check in with the cabbie (here's hoping that's not a derogative term -- I certainly mean it only as a description of their occupation at the time). I was received with an apparent <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wino" title="wino: noun: a usually indigent alcoholic who is addicted especially to wine, per Merriam-Webster online">wino</a>, asserting that he'd just gotten a ride from down the block. I didn't realize at the time, but was later assured by another witness (my girlfriend, Laura), that this person had gotten out of the pick-up truck. I could go into the speculations we had about why the guy was picked up, but making assumptions about that would be wrong in ways only incidentally related to the main thing I want to talk about here.<br />
<br />
I had photos. I had video. It had been a hit-and-run. Sadly, I did not have the license plate -- I didn't get a clear picture of it (though I did get an unclear picture of it -- I was trying), and I hadn't made any other note of it, other than a mental one of the state.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the wino (there are assumptions here, too, but I'm going to go with that as the best description I can come up with at the moment for this person) was getting up in my grill, which was interfering with my ability to check in with the cab driver, which was my first priority. I told him I had no business with him, and to let me do my think. In clarity of hindsight, I wish I'd gotten more of his story, or perhaps even a photo of him. What I did do, though, was to move on to my 2nd priority: Calling the police.<br />
<br />
So I dialed. 9-1-1. I described to the dispatcher what I had just witnessed. I answered some questions, gave some pertinent details to the "radio" person (i.e. someone actually dispatching details to police, rather than the operator I was initially speaking to), and then was told (by the original operator), after a few more questions, that a car would be at my location shortly.<br />
<br />
And there was. A police officer (whose name and/or ID number, alas, I didn't think to get -- I'll freely admit that I'm not always the most prepared thinker in these situations, though hopefully I'm learning to be better as I go) arrived, talk to the cabbie, talked to me, talked to Laura, got IDs from each of us, looked at my video evidence, etc. Another officer arrived at one point, had a brief interaction, and then went off in the last-known direction of the offending vehicle.<br />
<br />
Another cab driver, apparently (and later ostensibly) a friend to the one who had been struck, arrived on the scene. The police officer got into his cruiser and was making notes. He eventually came back out, gave Laura and I back our IDs, and let us know that we were free to go. The other cabbie at that point asked us where we needed to go, offering to take us, apparently in thanks for our assistance.<br />
<br />
The first cabbie asked for our contact information, and it was agreed (I'm pretty sure -- hopefully the struck cabbie was actually in agreement with this plan; I never actually spoke with him terribly much, alas) that we'd give it to the other cabbie, as we drove. (Meanwhile, the police car raced off with lights going shortly after we pulled away. In pursuit of the driver, who had been caught by the other police car, I hoped... though really, I'm guessing that it's more likely that it was in response to an unrelated call. Who knows?)<br />
<br />
And we did do that. Laura and I each wrote our names and numbers down on a piece of paper.<br />
<br />
Which brings us, almost, to the real point of this story. This second cabbie (whose name I'll keep from reporting here, for reasons which will soon be apparent) and we had a little conversation in the cab, and he thanked us for our help, and we thanked him for his, and he dropped us off at home.<br />
<br />
This morning, a phone call came in. I had stayed up late (for completely unrelated reasons), and so even a late-morning call was (literally) a wake-up call. An unknown number, and I was still half-asleep, so I didn't answer. A little while later, though, the same number called again. And then the same number called Laura. I was starting to be more awake at this point. Neither of us had answered, but clearly they were calling specifically for us, or they wouldn't have called those two numbers in such quick succession. So I sent back a text message, asking who they were, and saying to leave a message. And after sending that, it clicked: I know who this is -- at least roughly: It's either one of the cabbies, or someone from the police (but no, they'd have left a message), or someone related to that incident.<br />
<br />
And so when the phone rang again, I answered it. And here's where the meat of the story comes in. It was the second cabbie, the one who had given us a ride home.<br />
<br />
His English was imperfect, and so are cell-to-cell phone calls (I'd given him my home number, but that currently forwards to my cell phone), so it was a bit difficult to understand what he was saying. With some repetition and some effort on my part to understand him, though, I eventually figured out (and here's the crux of it):<br />
<br />
He wanted me to <em>not</em> report anything further to the police, or, especially, to Yellow Cab. The other cabbie, he told me, had decided that he wanted to just handle it himself. He was unhurt, and it would be less expense and less hassle if this did not go on his record, did not get reported to the cab company, and did not get reported to his insurance. Even though he was clearly not at fault, if the cab company or his insurance found out about it, it would be points on his record, increased premiums, and the hassle of reports to fill out.<br />
<br />
I believe this is <em>wrong</em>. Let me be more specific: I believe that this decision, upon the part of the cabbie, was understandable but unfortunate; I believe that <em>the fact that he was motivated to make this decision</em> -- by what I presume is the very real expectation that it would cost him time, money, and hassle -- is wrong. He should, I deem, have had very little if any reason not to give a full report, and various reasons to give such a report.<br />
<br />
This is my assertion. To have an insurance company and/or a cab company that holds cab drivers (or any drivers) to account for an incident which can clearly be shown to not be their fault: this is an injustice. And this I am railing against, and hence the reason for this blog post.<br />
<br />
And yet I feel somewhat trapped, as I genuinely do believe that if the incident was reported, that it would in fact do harm to the livelihood of this driver. So I don't want to say all I know. What I instead am doing, is writing this blog post. And I implore any readers of this, and I quite possibly myself will, <a href="http://www.yellowtaxi.net/contact.htm">contact yellow cab</a>, and ask them to change their policies, such that incidents such as this one are <em>not</em> something that their drivers are inclined to keep quiet. Because whatever else may or may not be true, one thing is certain: There is a driver out there somewhere who fled the scene of an accident that he (and I did see that it was a he) was at fault for. And for a variety of reasons, this is unacceptable behavior. I don't know if this person was caught or not. I'm guessing not. There are a lot of turns one can make in the minute or two that at a very minimum had transpired between when he left the scene and when I got to the point of talking to the radio dispatcher, let alone however long it took to get the message out. Then again, radio signals travel faster than any vehicle, so there's some vague hope.<br />
<br />
At any rate, I believe that a wrongness exists, and I've come to believe in the idea, from <br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Mann">Barry Mann et al</a>, that "none of us are free, if one of us is chained". This cabbie is chained, figuratively, from the freedom of doing the right thing, and making a report about a wrong that was done. And so I will not take the action of "if you don't say it's wrong, then that says it's right." This is wrong. I encourage you to join me in efforts to "get the message, send it out loud and clear".<br />
<br />
But really, Solomon Burke sings it so much more poignantly than I can write it:<br />
<br />
<object width="500" height="405"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/4hv6sQXI1WY&hl=en_US&fs=1&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/4hv6sQXI1WY&hl=en_US&fs=1&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="500" height="405"></embed></object><br />
<br />
None of us are free. Giving people reasons to avoid reporting wrongs is, itself, wrong. Make it stop.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-31028475731889656632010-04-24T14:21:00.000-07:002011-02-28T21:51:21.313-08:00I wish everyone put -Wall -Werror into CFLAGS in their Makefile(s)Random geeky rant:<br />
<br />
I wish everyone (especially people maintaining libraries for others to compile against) would use -Wall -Werror (and maybe even -pedantic and other such things) in their Makefiles for things. It's really quite simple, just find the line that looks like:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><code>CFLAGS = -g # and/or whatever else</code></blockquote><br />
and add -Wall -Werror to the end of that, like:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><code>CFLAGS = -g -Wall -Werror # and/or whatever else</code></blockquote><br />
Oh, and I've recently learned of another one, to enable "extra" warnings, and a nicer way to put them into your (<a href="http://www.gnu.org/">GNU</a>) Makefile:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><code>CFLAGS += -Werror -Wall -Wextra</code></blockquote><br />
Get your compiler to force the issue of fixing your warnings, so someone else won't end up stuck with them. You know your code better than someone else will, so you'll be much better at finding the right fix to the warning.<br />
<br />
I'd give extra bonus points to anyone adding these to default configurations (default option for <a href="http://gcc.gnu.org/">gcc</a>? <a href="http://www.apple.com/">Apple</a> make these the default for <a href="http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/">Xcode</a>, etc.). There might be downsides to that, but... oy. So many projects have so many warnings, many of which (though I'm sure not all) are likely bugs that could be fixed if people would warn about them.<br />
<br />
<em>[Note: this article was edited 2011-02-28 to add new content, and re-shape some of the existing content.]</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-1756263006787331152010-02-18T13:04:00.000-08:002010-02-18T13:04:35.540-08:00No more Voodoo SysAdmin allowed for Tech Support organizationsIn my past life as a systems administrator and tech support person, one of the terms I remember hearing about was "Voodoo sysadmin" -- which I basically think of as doing something to a system when you're having a problem in a vain and superstitious hope that it'll fix the problem, without really understanding what's going on. (An old acquaintance from that life, Mark Verber, has <a href="http://www.verber.com/mark/sysadm/people.html">an article about Voodoo Sysadmin</a> (among other things) if you want to learn more.)<br />
<br />
This frequently takes the form of "it's acting up" -- "reboot it, and try again". Sometimes, this solves the problem, at least temporarily. A lot of other times, it doesn't solve the problem, but it doesn't do any real harm. Put those two together, and you get a classic recipe for <a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/">superstition: accidental reinforcement</a> (more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition#Superstition_and_psychology">on wikipedia</a>, or in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1860542387/ref=nosim?tag=daveltdtmenterpr">Karen Pryor's book, Don't Shoot the Dog</a>). That is to say, because it works some of the time, you're bound to try it almost all the time, just in case it works. Often, this is mostly harmless, if perhaps wasteful of time. Sometimes, it creates real harm. For example, rebooting a UNIX system that's having problems because some critical file got corrupted may leave you with no way to log back in and fix it, without getting out installation media. Or worse, it may remove the temporary copy of the still-working version of the file that was lying around until the reboot process cleaned it up.<br />
<br />
I fear, though, that I'm getting overly geeky for a point that's more universal, so let's instead go to a real-life example from my very recent past.<br />
<br />
I was having a problem with my iPhone syncing its photos to my Mac. Image Capture was saying "No camera or scanner connected." iPhoto simply didn't have a "Devices" section under which it would show up (until and unless I connected another digital camera, which would show up fine). Aperture 3 wasn't showing it either, though it had had partial success earlier (and Image capture used to work). After a long conversation with Apple (and paying the roughly $75 for <a href="http://www.apple.com/support/products/applecareiphone.html">AppleCare protection on my Iphone</a>, since I was beyond the original 90 days of phone support -- I'd started the call as a Mac call, which was still under warranty), a Senior iPhone Advisor named Kurt told me that there was a known issue wherein sometimes certain images that were downloaded from online, or from e-mail, or maybe even saved from apps on the phone other than the Camera app, would somehow get corrupted (or at least some meta-data about them would), and this corruption would cause a situation wherein the various photo-related apps on MacOS X would simply fail to see the phone as a device with images on it. This was totally what I was experiencing. They're working on a long-term fix for this, and in the mean time the workaround given to me was: <b><i>Email myself any images not created by the Camera application (screenshots, downloaded images, etc.), and then delete those images from the phone</i></b>. Note that this does not involve doing a hard reset on the phone, or rebooting my mac, or, and here's the kicker, <i>resetting all settings on the phone</i>, which is exactly what a previous associate had asked me to do (and all the other things were asked, too).<br />
<br />
Resetting all settings <i>did <b>not</b> help</i>. It did, however, cause me some general annoyance at having to restore things like my ring tone of choice, and enabling caps lock, and that sort of thing. And to re-enter wifi passwords (I'm glad I knew off-hand the main one of those that I care about; I'll have to go and find the others again, as they become relevant). But that's not what really got me. It also <b><i>deleted all of my alarms from the Clock application</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">. Uhm, I rely on those to remind me to take some medications each day. And others to make it to regular appointments. I noticed this a couple hours after I was supposed to have taken a dose of medication that I take daily. Now, I take it daily, and being a couple hours late isn't a big deal for the medication in question. But what if it had been something I had to take on a very regular schedule? Or what if I hadn't noticed that the alarm hadn't gone off, and I just missed it today completely? Or missed the appointment that I have later in the day today? Who's to say what <i>would</i> have happened. I'll say, though, that it <i>could</i> have been bad news, if not for me than for someone else who didn't realize they'd lost their alarms.</span></b><br />
<br />
So, step one was to complain to Apple about this, and ask them to make sure that their associates are all trained to make sure they let a user know that their alarms will go away. Had I known that, I could have made a list of them first, before resetting all settings. I've called Apple, and spoken to another Senior Advisor, and he seemed to take it all fairly seriously, so I have hopes that good things will happen there. Better yet would be to have the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface">UI</a> for resetting settings actually tell you this -- or maybe even be able to turn on and off which settings get reset. This, too, has been suggested to Apple.<br />
<br />
What would <i>really</i> make me happy, though, is for them <i>not to have asked me to do something that was totally unnecessary!</i> Resetting my settings didn't help, and I'm sure that while the guy I was speaking to suspected that it might have, the reality of the situation was that he didn't understand why my phone wasn't being recognized, and thus didn't know if it would fix it or not. Maybe he knew he didn't know, maybe he thought he knew and was wrong. Either way, the fact is the same: he didn't know, and so he went with a superstition-based or "voodoo sysadmin" approach to fixing the problem. He even claims he resets all settings on his own iPhone <i>every week, as a matter of course</i>. If that's not superstition, I don't know what is. If <i>I</i> did that, it would drive me nuts... I have a lot of settings changed. And a lot of alarms -- the important ones of which I think are all back, though I know I had others in there that I'll have to re-create from scratch (ones that were off because they weren't set to repeat, but which I would occasionally turn on for certain things -- now, I'll have to actually re-create them when those situations arise again, instead of just turning them on. I can live with that.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing:<br />
<br />
If there was a concerted effort within the Tech Support industry to try to eliminate all superstitious practices from their support calls, this kind of thing simply wouldn't happen. And I believe it shouldn't have had to happen. Because, as this blog is all about, I believe there is a better way.<br />
<br />
"Eliminate all superstitious practices? Shyeah, right." I know, I know, it'll never happen. See Verber's article (linked above): superstition is part of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature">Human Nature</a>. True. I have no argument there. Still, it's the <i>effort</i> to eliminate them that would bring about the change that I want. As I see it, there would be several main components to such an effort:<br />
<br />
<ol><li>Educate tech support personnel on what superstition is, how to recognize it, and how to avoid being trapped into it.</li>
<li>Teach these same folks alternative ways of doing things so that they can actually find actions to suggest that will be known to be helpful. Now, this will be impossible in some cases, because they just won't have a way of figuring out what's wrong, which brings me to item #3:</li>
<li>Have software (and hardware) developers provide better instrumentation in their products, and analysis tools which can either be used by support staff, or given to end users to run on behalf of the support staff, with results being given back to them in the latter case. Also involved in this is more and better error reporting, and/or more use of any extant error reporting by support staff. Many of these tools could be built in to applications. Others would be separate tools. Either way, more troubleshooting would be helpful.</li>
</ol><div>If Image Capture had given me some sort of message saying "iPhone detected, but the image database looks to be corrupt", or if there'd been a menu option for "Detailed device detection", or a help item for "Why doesn't my device show up?" with instructions on how to run some debug information, or <b><i>something</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">, I would have kept my alarms, had a lower degree of frustration, and possibly even saved both Apple and myself some money, by not having had to buy AppleCare (yes, I get it, that *makes* them money), and not having them have to take the call (this is where they get it back -- I was on the phone with them for a while, bouncing between different people, and calling back the next day to let them know of the problem I had with the service I'd gotten -- that may or may not add up to the cost of the plan, but I bet it came close, at least).</span></b></div><div><br />
</div><div>And so...</div><br />
<h2>In summary:</h2><br />
<dl><dt>Software developers:</dt>
<dd>
Instrument your code, and provide tools for analyzing problems as they're going on. (Example of a fairly decent (if under-technical for the hard cases) version of this: The network connection assistant in Apple's network preferences on MacOS X. It goes through each stage of trying to get online, and tries different things, giving you things to try along any stage that's showing difficulty.</dd>
<dt>Hardware developers:</dt>
<dd>Uhh, I dunno. I'm not a hardware guy. But something like the above. And make sure you work with the software folks to build the tools to make use of the instrumentation you're providing.</dd>
<dt>Tech support managers:</dt>
<dd>Train your people on the perils of superstitious support behaviors, and reinforce them when they go through the admittedly often-more-difficult process of actually trying to figure out what's wrong. (Oh yeah, and this probably means training them how to do that, too, and rewarding them for doing it, and costing you lots of money in more advanced employees. I bet you it's worth it in the long run, though -- actually fixing the problem without negative side effects makes for happier customers, less likely to call back again about the same problem, and more likely to exhibit loyalty to your brand. But that's just speculation on my part.)</dd>
</dl><br />
<div><br />
</div><div>Thank you for reading. I hope this is somehow helpful to someone -- even if only for having listed the workaround to the iPhone connectivity problem, so the next person hitting it can fix it themselves, and save themselves a bit of heartache.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Wishing for a better world,</div><div><br />
</div><div> David</div><div><br />
</div><div>P.S. Oh yeah, and the medical industry could probably do a lot of this, as well. But that's another rant, for another day. See Karen Pryor's book for a brief discussion of this point, when she's introducing the idea of superstitious behaviors.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-37216332112810047632010-02-05T14:44:00.000-08:002010-02-05T15:06:30.599-08:00Date and time stamps in all blog/news articlesThis post was written on 2010-02-05 (That's February 5th, 2010 for those not familiar with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601">ISO 8601</a> -- and please, make yourself familiar with it, and use it -- but that's another post), at around 14:31h Seattle local time.<br />
<br />
I expect that date to appear above the title of this post, and the final time of me publishing it to appear down below. Automatically, and in a fairly easy-to-find way.<br />
<br />
It would be great if all web articles did this. Now, I'll grant you: I've been guilty in the past of occasionally omitting this detail in some web articles of mine, and there are some that need to be corrected to include it. By and large, though, those articles have not been of a news variety, and tended to include only information that I generally considered to be relatively timeless (though really, anything can change, so a datestamp is really still quite desirable). Recently I was reading a news-style article, though, that referred to something having happened "last week". Well, I came across this article from a source other than the front page of a news site. As such, I had no implicit idea if I was looking at an article from today, last week, or several years ago. I was still on the top screen-page of information, in the second paragraph of the article, so I glanced up above, looking for a date, to try to get my bearings. Nothing. I then proceeded to scroll to the bottom, to look for a date. I couldn't find one. I did eventually find one in the meta tags on the page. 2009-12-11. OK, so about 2 months ago.<br />
<br />
Surely it would be better to have this information written plainly at the top of the article (ideal), and/or at the bottom of the article (less ideal if "or", more ideal if "and"). That way, (a) readers who have no idea how to look for a meta tag would still be able to find the information, and (b) readers (like me) who do know how to do that will be able, instead, to just glance up while still mid-sentence and grab a context for what they're reading, and continue without having to be interrupted to write a blog post about how frustrating it is that there wasn't a date. :-)<br />
<br />
So, please, news purveyors, bloggers, and really any content creators, please: provide datestamps, at least, and preferably also timestamps (sometimes that matters -- especially on the day the item was published) on your articles.<br />
<br />
I will endeavor to make sure that all of my future content is done this way, too, and perhaps retroactively add it to some of my old content.<br />
<br />
Thanks.<br />
<br />
(2010-02-05, 14:43h local)<br />
<br />
P.S. (2010-02-05 15:02 local) -- I just e-mailed the webmaster of the site in question. Hopefully they'll fix their site. Yay, reporting problems, so that people might actually have a chance to realize their error and fix them. Though again, that's probably another post.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-27852350669099842542009-10-03T20:32:00.000-07:002009-10-03T20:32:55.707-07:00MUAs and MTAs should talk moreI will not go into great detail, here, though perhaps requests in comments would get me to say more. For now, though, the short version:<br />
<br />
I have come to hold firmly the opinion that Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) and Mail User Agents (MUAs) should talk more.<br />
<br />
For example, it should be possible for me, from my MUA (currently mutt, though I'm thinking of switching to something emacs-based) to flag a particular message as spam in a way that permanently blocks all messages to the recipient that that mail was destined for. Now, obviously (I hope) this only is relevant in cases where one is using a wildcard accept type of rule, i.e. where any username at the domainname in question will get delivered to one particular actual user's mailbox (with perhaps some exceptions going to different users, or, as implied here, being rejected as spam).<br />
<br />
Now, perhaps folks just aren't doing this very much any more, and I should get over the idea that all MTAs everywhere should have this capability.<br />
<br />
For what it's worth, I wish at least <a href="http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html">Gmail for domains</a> would do it... and have something procmail-like, too... or rather, something more elaborate than the current filtering rules, which I find limiting. Though, perhaps I'll give it a go, we'll see.<br />
<br />
(I'm currently in the market for a new mail infrastructure.)<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-40369838802182536142009-09-28T17:57:00.000-07:002009-09-28T17:58:34.227-07:00An End to all SpamThe world would be better if all Spam (which I'll define below) would go away. All of it. Period. Forever.<br />
<br />
Spam, as I mean it:<br />
<br />
- Any e-mail communication which has been sent unsolicited as part of a bulk mailing.<br />
<br />
It could be commercial or not, and still be spam. It could be bulk or unsolicited and <b>not</b> be spam. But if it's bulk and unsolicited, it's spam. That's my personal definition.<br />
<br />
And it should all go away. I don't know how many hours I've spent battling spam -- either as an e-mail administrator in a corporate IT department, or for my own personal mail system. Regardless of the actual number, suffice it to say it was Far Too Many Hours.<br />
<br />
Spammers, please stop.<br />
<br />
And if you get spam (and of course you do), please... PLEASE, I implore you: <b>Do not EVER buy something from a spammer</b>. Don't do it! Buying something from them encourages the practice. And the fewer people, ironically, that buy from them, the more strongly it's encouraged (to a point; read <a href="http://betterlikebutter.blogspot.com/2009/09/dont-shoot-dog-teaching-training-and.html">Don't Shoot The Dog</a> for more on that). So don't do it. Don't.<br />
<br />
And spammers, stop spamming. And companies thinking about spamming, don't.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-14061856936056499812009-09-28T16:57:00.000-07:002009-09-28T17:01:54.740-07:00Don't Shoot The Dog - Teaching, Training, and general psychology<div style="float: right;"><iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=daveltdtmenterpr&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1860542387&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe></div><br />
The world would be better, I assert, if everybody on this planet... or at least every teacher, parent, manager, or anyone else having any influence over others, would read and internalize the book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1860542387?tag=daveltdtmenterpr">Don't Shoot The Dog</a>, The New Art of Teaching and Training</i>, by <a href="http://www.clickertraining.com/">Karen Pryor</a>.<br />
<br />
Seriously, everybody should read it. And internalize it, which probably means reading it numerous times, and playing "<a href="http://www.clickertraining.com/node/155">The Training Game</a>" a lot, and... who knows what all else.<br />
<br />
We frequently get our interpersonal interactions in ways that are pretty ineffective at actually getting things we want, and in ways that the other person (or creature, or whatever) will be happy with, too. And there are a few core concepts, discussed in this book (among other places, I just happen to like this particular presentation of the material), the understanding of which could make a world of difference in how we interact with each other.<br />
<br />
It would make us happier. We'd never hate our jobs again. It would end divorce. It would bring world peace.<br />
<br />
Perhaps these claims seem outlandish. I honestly believe, though, that if a bunch of people read this book, we'd actually go a long way towards each of those.<br />
<br />
So go to your local library or book store, or even order a copy or twelve online if you must, but someway get your hands on a copy. And read it. And find someone to play the training game with.<br />
<br />
First person to send me a private message mentioning this post and giving me a shipping address -- anywhere in the world -- gets a copy sent to them. (If you know me in person, claim it in person, and save me the shipping. :-)<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-63149819299085545852009-09-26T13:48:00.000-07:002009-09-26T14:05:38.641-07:00The world will be better if I share my ideas...I've come, just moments ago, to a conclusion:
The world will be better if I share my ideas (with the world).
This means I'm going to blog here about some ideas that I've long been considering to be more or less "trade secrets" or something. Inventions of mine, in concept, that I think the world should have. And frankly, I'm never going to make all of them happen. And I'm also never (until I die, that is), or at least I hope I'll never, stop having more of them. So sharing some now won't preclude me from making a billion dollars off them later. Well, it might keep me from making a billion dollars off the one I share, because someone else might go do them before I do. But if I'm not going to do all of them anyway, I might as well let that happen, and hope that my life can be improved for having access to the thing I wanted enough in the first place to dream it up.
That said, if I happen to get any readers that are in a position to fund a startup to make some of these ideas fly, I'd be happy if you'd drop me a line before starting something going. Chances are good that I've thought about this (whatever idea it happens to be) in more depth than has made it to the blog, and perhaps for some stock in a startup, I'd be happy to be on an advisory board or something. Or maybe, for some of the ideas, I'd even be up for launching the company myself, with the help of your financial resources (and, then, by hiring the requisite number of Really Smart People to make it all happen -- hopefully, the <a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html">Done, and Gets Things Smart</a> sort of people. Sorry I keep picking on you, Steve).
But really, I think the world will benefit just as much, and probably more, from someone else taking these ideas and running with them, than by helping me to run with them. I'm overburdened or something. (Which goes into a whole different story, which will likely find its way into this blog in some form or other over time. Today is not that time.)
So yeah. Any idea that I don't have an expectation that I'm particularly likely to try to put into practice on my own is now fair game for me to blog about. Here's hoping the world will benefit from it. This all begins with the next post.<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8418938206080918798.post-41257675082944186462009-09-26T13:00:00.000-07:002012-04-08T03:22:46.008-07:00What Could Be Better - an introductionInspired by a multitude of factors, most recently <a href="http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs" title="You Should Write Blogs, by Steve Yegge">Steve Yegge telling me I should</a> (the reading of which can be indirectly attributed to an e-mail from my friend Goose), and next most recently by the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_&_Julia">Julie & Julia</a> (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/">imdb</a>), and third most recently by... oh, I forget. But it's not important.<br />
<br />
The point is, I'm starting a blog. On how the world could be better.
This blog will be a collection of ideas, rants, and other such musings on how I think the world could be better.<br />
<br />
Some will be about a piece of software. Others about photographic equipment. Others on Human behavior. Others on... Well, time will tell. I'll just be writing on whatever ideas I happen to have (and be warned: I have a lot of them), related to making the world a better place.<br />
<br />
It's kind of my life's mission, actually, to show the world that there are better ways to do things. This blog will be a way for me to work towards that mission.<br />
<br />
Thank you for visiting. Your thoughts are welcome, on this or any post. I reserve the right to disagree, agree, or just take them as food for thought. Regardless, they will surely all be reinforcing (more on that later, like as not).<br />
<br />
Oh yes, and one final thing, about the URL of this blog. Like "everything is better with butter" (a sentiment I tend strongly to agree with in many many cases -- though I won't go so far as to say all), I believe there's a lot that could be better in this world -- and sometimes by just a simple addition of something basic. Like butter. So, "better like butter". Besides, all the other sensible variations on "what could be better" were taken.<br />
<br />
Thanks,<br />
<br />
- David<div class="blogger-post-footer">--
Thank you for subscribing to What Could Be Better!</div>lindeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220473720786666093noreply@blogger.com0