OK. I’m sick of this dog-shit.  I’m sick to the gills of the last month+ of shit-headed weak-brained arm-chair theory and ‘It didn’t happen to me so it doesn’t exist’ Tech-Gender navel-gazing.

Tech community, hacker community, startup-community: you all get an F——–**20 in pulling your head out of your ass, and doing some thinking on this.

The crimes of science I level against you

• The plural of anecdote is not data, you ass-faces
• People study this shit you dumb dumb fucks
• CITE YOU SOURCES, YOU WADS OF REGURTATED CAT-PUKE
• Grep Your Own Shit

The plural of anecdote is not data, you ass-faces

If you’re theory of ‘How Tech and Gender work’ is based on what you heard over beers at the last conference : U R DOOING RONG. If you’re theory about why women are, or are not, becoming engineers is based on one water-cooler discussion with that guy from Mech-E that *loves* anonymous.  MEEBE YOU THING 2X MOAR SHTFURBRAINS?

Do you choose your programming languages that way? Do you optimize your code that way? If you do, I hope you are still using c++ templates for your website because some diarrhea-breath asshat recommended at your last drinkup Because that is the shit-stupid way you are taking on this discussion.

I’m reading A-B testing SEO optimizing guru’s make conjectures of such data-free navel-gazing stupidity it would get them fired if that used that kind of thinking on the job. If you read it on reddit it’s probably an outliner. It’s probably NOT a good example data-point to decide your whole world-view on, you shit-for-brains re-tweeter.

People study this shit you dumb dumb fucks.

And guess what, you geniuses-in-your-own-navel! You didn’t invent this shit. You, dear 2013 (or later) reader, did not for-the-love-of-darwins-tub-ring INVENT THIS FUCKING TOPIC AFTER PYCON. This shit has been around for decades. BTW, that means ‘tens of years’ for those of you that clearly are so information searching challenged you can’t use google for 5 seconds to bother to find prior research.

People study this shit. They have for years. They are called ‘sociologists’. There are whole departments of them that would be lulzing if they could take a break from studying their shit to look under whatever rock you and your self-congratulatory echo-chamber is currently running PHP-BB on.

CITE YOU SOURCES, YOU WADS OF REGURTATED CAT-PUKE

And like most science you need to read their fucking papers and look for flaws. Don’t just read the title. Read the content. Review it. If you need to make an argument, then Cite that shit. CITE IT. CITE IT, CITE IT, CITE IT Link to it. Tattoo it on your friends and enemies. PRINT IT ON YOUR SELF-RIGHTOUS HANDOUTS. Pull your head out of your Men’s Rights Ass and read some fucking papers. Close your Huff-po rant, and pull open the fucking calculator you jackasses.

Remember kids : Read the paper, look for errors/flaws. But do not bitch about their politics. I don’t care if every one of them is a queer transwoman or a cisgendered male, or if they more politically correct that Bill Clinton on Re-Relection day. What maters if if their fucking data adds up.. ARGUE THE DATA, NOT THE PERSON. It’s called ‘science’ you liver-damaged dorks.

We spent 40 fucking years (that is 4 of those DECADES I taught you about!) trying to teach people you can be smart and productive no matter what you look like, that t-shirts and jeans, and tattos don’t matter. What matters is results, reality, and data. Don’t throw insight away, just because you can’t bother to use your brain evolution gave you, you backwards-looking toilet-lickers.

Grep Your Own Shit

Oh, I hear you Mr/Ms. ‘I Lived in San Fran before it was cool.’ I hear you asking ‘how can I take time off of my Quantiifed Life to bother that?’ How about you quantify some of your own goddamn shit.

Again, if you bothers to think ‘hu? I wonder hows’ I behaives? ‘ and googled for 30 seconds, you can find and take some Fucking tests on your own fucking biases. Consider that you, my friend, might be just another fucked-up human meat-based heuristic intellegnece as screwed as

But above all: Write up your opinions and rebuttles and based on READING AND THINKING about proper FUCKING DATA-SETS and not hearsay-bullshit you heard over dinner.

SCIENCE WORKS BITCHES. FUCKING USE IT.

I’ve getting wary Google for q while. It started google was spying on web data using street view vehicles. Since then Google has gotten worse. They are unifying tracking data. Google has become as bad as Microsoft at the ‘copy and drown a competitor’ game, with knock off’s galore like Bit.ly (Goo.gl), Yelp (Google Places), Groupon (Google Offers) and Evernote (Google Keep).

From what I have seen they are moving towards competing with Facebook on the ‘stalking out users and selling them as cattle.’ behavior. Google has also started treating anyone with a successful web company as a target for ‘imitate and destroy’ tactics. Not the kind of behavior that fits the ‘organize information’ vision, and pretty evil.

Back when Google’s mission was ‘Organize the worlds information’ and ‘do no evil’ I had some trust that they would defend the open web, and treat their users with respect. As they kill unpopular (but useful) services, it’s clear they are focused on profits, not organizing the worlds info.

I’m revoking my trust, shutting down my Google mail and mailing lists, and getting my data flow back in my own hands. Far@FarMcKon.net is the best place to reach me these days. But don’t worry about using my old email. My Gmail account won’t disappear overnight.

I think this ties into a bigger discussion about how the web is no longer peer to peer (and becoming less p2p daily) but that is a topic for another post.

After leaving I took some time off, then spent some time taking took a look around the Philadelphia scene for any interesting opportunities. After talking to several shops I finally found a great fit for my interests and skill.

As of last week I’ve joined on with BuLogics as Chief Innovator. I’ll be once again herding nerds and working to keep the engineering and design team in close coordination with the business folks. Two things I enjoy, and am pretty damn good at.

Part of what set BuLogics offer apart was a chance to have a big influence in their next stage of growth. They are looking to expand and focus their skills a bit more cleanly. It’s hard to pass up such a great opportunity there to help take an organization to the next stage of growth.

Another great side effect of the new position is that I have a lot more flexibility to blog. So you all can look forward to more posts about teams, teamwork, and creating a culture of making both here and over at BuLogics blog.

P.S. also, check out the terrible bio photo :( It’s the only one I had available when they posted that I’ll have to change that soon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the problems Phildelphia’s schools are having, and how various actors in the situation are playing out their role.

Background (Skippable)

The long story made short is Philly is closing a lot of schools. From my simplistic research so far I’m concluding that some school closings do make sense, but that the rash of closings is a last second swerve to avoid budget failure that has been threatening the district for years. Furthermore, the district has been giving out school charters for private schools in some dubious and questionable situations. Some dubious behavior of charters (not *all charters*) and willy nilly granting more charters has undermined the enrollment levels, making it seem smart to close more schools. Again, that is my simplistic research, I’m sure other folks have a better point of view.

As a new dad, I’ve been looking at school districts and pondering when it gets to the point that I abandon the system, and pay higher rates to put a child into a privates school. To me that decision reeks of game-theory, so I’m putting down my thoughts on it to clarify a bit.

To the Game Theory:

From a theory point of view, this could be modeled as a variant of the Stag Hunt game. Lets imagine a game of ‘Stag Hunt’ with thousands of players. Now lets add to those players a distribution of resources that roughly matches the Philadelphia general income, and/or tax base. Finally, we need to add a reasonably high threshold to not joining the game (ie, the cost of private education for a child). Which is odd, since it sets cooperation at a lower and default threshold, and individual action at a higher threshold. I think that becomes a decent model of parents drawing their students out of the district to private schools, lowering the income available.

Then the question becomes, what is the defection rate/system that drives more people to defect? Is there a good way to map/cap general defection from the game? At what point have we undermined the commons so far that every participant is worse off?

General Musing

What amazes me the parents fallacy only their own children’s education is in their interest. As an american you interact and depend on hundreds to thousands of other people for all of your infrastructure. The kindergardener in a crappy school today is going to be a Nurse caring for us in 30-40 years. The kids you are yanking head-start funds from are going to be mechanics, plumbers, and taxi-drivers in 20-30 years. Do you really want to be running around a city or country with these people on the loose? Do you really want to undermined your future quality of life, by setting up an environment of poorly educated people around you to care for you in old age? As much as my own child’s education matters to me, having educated caretakers in old age, and educated co-voters at all ages is hella-important.

It also makes me think I need to find, or invent, a bunch of new terms for real-world game theory.

Reluctant Freeloader: These are people who can’t contribute to the game a fair amount. Think ‘unemployed single dad.’ They are working and contributing what they can, but they don’t have the means to cover their cost.

Woefully Advantaged: This is someone with enough resources they think they can defect from the game without consequences, but really are suffering for it.

N-th turn: Borrowed from computer science. This is a reference to some point in the future (the n-th turn) when the game fails or people lose based on their earlier strategy.

School District Problem: This is a variant of the Stag Hunt problem, as described above.

The madebynathan site suggests adding the script to your ~/.bashrc file. I like to keep my bashrc a bit cleaner, so instead I saved the script as ~/.cp.bashrc so that I can easily remember what chunk of code causes ‘cp’ to work.

Examples

• Pipe anything to the clipboard

$ tail -n 100 /var/log/apache2/error.log | cb
# => Copied to clipboard: [Sun Oct 02 08:02:08 2011] [notice] Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu) configured -- resumin...

• Copy the contents of a file to the clipboard

$ cbf ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
# => Copied to clipboard: ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAnwaNIuOhZzUeR6/xEEudXt3zEh91dawhkkKx8p/+4Bw9...

• Type straight into the clipboard

$ cb This is some unquoted text.
# => Copied to clipboard: This is some unquoted text.

No options, no man pages.

Installing it

If you think this looks handy, add the line

source ~/.cp.bashrc

to your ~/.basrc file. Then save the below code section to ~/.cp.bashrc, and rock the easy xclip magic

# A shortcut function that simplifies usage of xclip.
# - Accepts input from either stdin (pipe), or params.
# ------------------------------------------------
cb() {
  local _scs_col="\e[0;32m"; local _wrn_col='\e[1;31m'; local _trn_col='\e[0;33m'
  # Check that xclip is installed.
  if ! type xclip > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo -e "$_wrn_col""You must have the 'xclip' program installed.\e[0m"
  # Check user is not root (root doesn't have access to user xorg server)
  elif [[ "$USER" == "root" ]]; then
    echo -e "$_wrn_col""Must be regular user (not root) to copy a file to the clipboard.\e[0m"
  else
    # If no tty, data should be available on stdin
    if ! [[ "$( tty )" == /dev/* ]]; then
      input="$(< /dev/stdin)"
    # Else, fetch input from params
    else
      input="$*"
    fi
    if [ -z "$input" ]; then  # If no input, print usage message.
      echo "Copies a string to the clipboard."
      echo "Usage: cb <string>"
      echo "       echo <string> | cb"
    else
      # Copy input to clipboard
      echo -n "$input" | xclip -selection c
      # Truncate text for status
      if [ ${#input} -gt 80 ]; then input="$(echo $input | cut -c1-80)$_trn_col...\e[0m"; fi
      # Print status.
      echo -e "$_scs_col""Copied to clipboard:\e[0m $input"
    fi
  fi
}
# Aliases / functions leveraging the cb() function
# ------------------------------------------------
# Copy contents of a file
function cbf() { cat "$1" | cb; }  
# Copy SSH public key
alias cbssh="cbf ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"  
# Copy current working directory
alias cbwd="pwd | cb"  
# Copy most recent command in bash history
alias cbhs="cat $HISTFILE | tail -n 1 | cb"  

A while back my esteemed partner (with a bit of help from me) helped arrange some events to draw attention to Top Secret Rosies, a documentaty about the first female programmers of ENAIC These first programmers are nearly forgotten by history.

To make a long story short, computer use to be a job title, the title of a mathmatician that ground out the numbers bsaed on the equations given them by a math professor. Everything from stress loads, to mortor-parabola, they did the math that we assume computers do now: hand them an equation, and wait for a table of results. During WWII women (who before then were somewhat seldom hired as computers) we recruited to do top secret maths to help the war effort. A select few of those women in Philadelphia were appeneded to the ENIAC project, to help with those computations, and calculate tables to verify the computers work. Eggheads at the time figured you could just hand the (human)computers an equation, they could type it into the (digital)computer, wait a few hours, and you’d have an answer. Boy, were they wrong! So these fine women became the first programmers, debuggers, and general machine-wranglers in their efforts to coax reasonably sane results from ENIAC.

As men came home from europe after the war, these women were pushed aside. They were cropped out of publicity photos, fired/replaced by returning men, and generally forgotten. If it weren’t for some offhand comments Leanne Erickson heard during an unrelated interview, this story would be almost totally forgotten. Her documentary ‘Top Secret Rosies’ dig into the little secret history of Philadelphia and computing, and draw some attention to the very first programmers of ENIAC, who happened to be female mathmaticians.

If you like Philly, dig secret histories, or just want to celebrate some of the first programmers on the planet, reserve a free ticket to see it on March 20th (5:30 PM at the Comcast center).

People change constantly. If anything, it’s our adaptablity that makes us such an amazing species. As a developer (and a bit of an engineer) the idea of feedback loops and self-balancing systems makes me happy, since they seem intrinsicly beautiful, and self-managing. Not only are humans dynamic, but the universe itself isn’t static. As old as trees, or rocks, or our planet seems, it’s only because we are so small and live so short a life.

One of my most painful experience with this was during my first job out of college. I breezed through college with a A- average, really not applying myself to much schoolwork outside of one or two classes I dug. I knew how to do enough to get an A-/B+ with little work, and I worked that system. I graduated thinking I was pretty damn good, especially if I could do that well with little work. So it was a rude shock when during my first review the head of the software group told me I was not so good, and pointed out 3-4 major problems with the code I had written that month. It was a major blow to my ego, largly because it was true.

After that I got to thinking about feedback, and using it intellegently. I’ve developed the habit to usually assume that everyone ( even the jackasses) are Agent-Correct. Given their knowledge and experience, I am going to trust they are giving an honest ‘trying to fix things’ opinion. Even if that opinion is given in a brash way. I also try to realize when I, or they, ‘Agent-Wrong’ vs. ‘Global-Wrong’. Given their view/information/experience am I wrong to them? Maybe I’m even wrong overall?

It’s amazing what a downer being wrong can be. I am still amazed when someone who cares about me corrects me, and I get defensive. Why do I have such a negative reaction even when I know they are trying to help me? Why do I get defensive and regretful even when intellectually realize they have a good point? It’s weird, and it’s sometime hard to keep those feelings in check. Sometimes wanting to be right can stand in the way of taking feedback, being correct, and becoming actually right.

TL;DR: They removed collision between harvester units to avoid pathfinding failures. A great hack that causes no gameplay problem, and makes the whole system simpler to manage.

So it’s with a sadface :( that I write this post to publicly admit I failed to stand by the ‘Not to Speak or chair all male panels’ pledge I signed on for.  To be fair, the panel was chaired by a woman (the fantastic Phoenix Wang) and it wasn’t a public event.   But nonetheless,  I took a pledge and dropped the ball. Mea Maxima Culpa.  It was a pledge I signed without talking much about, and I completely forgot I agreed to the pledge until the day after the panel. Interestingly enough, I just took a look back at the pledge page, and I can’t read the pledger to see who else may be slipping up, or defecting. Nor did I see any suggestions on how to make up for a slip-up for pledges that forgot their pledge, or who get stuck in a rock/hard-place and must take a panel without a woman member for some extra-ordinary reason.

If anyone has any good suggestions for a proper Mea Culpa for people that don’t live up the the pledge, drop ‘em in the comments. I’ll be picking one of them, or inventing my own, to make up for failing at that pledge.

• power distance (PDI)
• individualism (IDV)
• uncertainty avoidance (UAI)
• masculinity (MAS)
• long term orientation (LTO)

I’ve also gotten into a habit of thinking about how colleges fit into that scale, so I can better understand what they want or expect from a working (or personal) relationship. It’s an interesting and useful lens to use when figuring out how to work with people in an organization that you don’t automatically click with.