John Colosi
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NCAA Basketball Brackets

4/7/2015

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The guy who won the overall Yahoo! Tournament Pick'em contest (Robert's Rad Bracket, #1 out of tens of thousands) picked 54 games right, and so he got 9 games wrong.  But all 9 of those misses basically came in the first round of the tournament (because he had Iowa State winning 2 games, even though they lost to UAB in the first round).  After the first round of games, Robert was probably even in the bottom half of his own small pool of friends.  But he didn't miss another pick.  After the first round, Robert won every possible game remaining.  With Duke's win last night, he made 30 straight correct picks.  The unadjusted odds are on the order of 1 in a billion.
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What must that be like?  It has never happened to him before.  It will never happen again.  Like throwing a fist full of coins in the air, and having them all land heads up.  It must have been a moving religious experience that he'll analyze and interpret for the rest of his life.  As if he played a specific and important role in the machinations of the cosmos.  How nice for him.

Incidentally, my wife named her bracket "B. A. Barackets" because she thinks she's so clever and whatnot.  And of course she took first place in our pool of friends, because the cosmos' plan for me is to eat crow for a couple weeks.
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The Technical Interview

5/4/2014

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The fundamental principle of the interview is to distinguish between people who can make it work, and people who can make it right. These are different disciplines entirely, and take different skills. The former move mountains.  The latter build airships.  And both are necessary from time to time.

But while airships can be impractical, moving mountains can be dangerous and destructive and expensive to cleanup. So when a team is really working well, they're finding solutions that are elegant as well as practical. That can not only be done, but done right.
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The worst ideas are the ones that work, but work poorly. So the best engineers must say: I know it will work, that's why we shouldn't do it.
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Fermi Paradox #1

4/15/2014

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The Fermi Paradox, is a famous question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi.  "Where are they?" he said.  If the Universe is 14 billion years old, and we're a young civilization on a young planet, then where are the hopelessly advanced cultures?  Where are the hyper drives and the Dyson Spheres and the quantum super-positions of chocolate and peanut butter.

A guy named Stephen Webb wrote a book about the answers for Fermi.  He does a great job of grouping different kinds of answers, and exploring them.  And in truth, that's the best part of the paradox.  Wondering what the answer is.  Wondering why we are so apparently alone.

One resolution for the paradox, one affliction that may descend on every sufficiently advanced culture, is the death of boredom.  They become sufficiently entertained. Perpetually sated. And so they lose their adventurous spirit. Or learn to quell it without any real adventure.  The aliens, wherever they are, live in, and are consumed by, virtual worlds and virtual pleasures.  They enter an echo chamber of old ideas and predictable stories.

When will this happen us? When will humans begin spiraling into the abyss?  I think it started around 1983.

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Death by Specialization

10/12/2013

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I interviewed a guy who worked for a government contractor.  His company was a billing company.  They billed for services provided by other companies.  The service they provided was billing.  But, if the billing required prorating an amount, they outsourced that task.  They would send redacted data to a third company that would prorate the amount and bill accordingly.  So this guy's company provided full fiscal year billing only.  Another company provided the actual service.  And still another company provided billing for partial years.

I remember being stunned.  I'm a liberal guy.  I know that the government provides services I need.  There are potholes to fill and shipments to search and food to make safe.  Those are important things.  But there is a vastness, a complexity to the U.S. federal government that is plainly fearsome.  No wonder dollars get lost when it takes three or more companies to handle a single financial transaction.

We might reasonably ask a few questions.  How much do the people pay for services and how much do we pay to administer those services?  Why is billing so onerous that it requires this kind of specialization?  Should we limit the amount of specialization in the system?

Maybe that's counter-intuitive, but I think there's something generally unhealthy about a system where entities handle such a small, focused job.  The result is that people aren't handling services as much as records.  These folks are billing, but they don't really know what they're billing for.  They're just sending out pieces of paper with a number on it.

The same thing happens when you call customer service.  You have to decide which department to talk to, and sometimes you'll hear something like "I can't answer that question, let me transfer you".  Those folks are specialized to handle a particular problem.  No one person knows the system front to back.  And God help you if your Tivo won't talk to your cable box.  Which of those two giant companies is going to stand up and help you sort that out?

Consider the Mars Climate Orbiter that burned up on entering the Martian atmosphere.  One company wrote the lander software using metric units, and another wrote the mission control software using non-SI units.  The result was catastrophic.  By comparison, the software for the Lunar Excursion Module on Apollo 11, written 40 years earlier, was incredibly flexible and resilient.  It wasn't written by a conglomerate of corporations, but by a few individuals, who could see and understand things end-to-end.

I know I'm comparing apples to oranges here.  The world is complex and we can't go back.  But it is possible to limit our exposure to this layered complexity.  In software design, we should be encouraging engineers to work in verticals, understanding a feature from UI to persistence layer.  To have that engineer own the feature from design to deployment.  And it would be nice if customer service meant servicing customers, instead of answering a specific kind of question.

Imagine if doctors had to handle a patient from entrance to exit, fill out the forms, bill the insurance.  I know we would need more doctors if this was the case.  But I guarantee there would be less paperwork.

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Where's Beamer?

9/30/2013

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This site shows tracking information for a handful of Sharks around the world.  I've been following Beamer for a little while.  He was up near Portland, Maine for a time (go Sea Dogs!) but he's been swimming south for the last couple months.  Recently he went past Bermuda, and now he's heading south, toward the Puerto Rico Trench.

Sometimes I'll stop myself in a meeting and wonder for a second about Beamer.  Where he is.  What he's doing.  Last night I woke up and stumbled through the darkness to get a glass of water.  And in that same moment there was a 200 pound Blue Shark named Beamer weaving his way through black ocean.  That's where he is.  All the time.  Right now.  It's weird isn't it?  The variety of life's experiences.

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The Lines of Progress

9/17/2013

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During the Cold War, barbed wire and an electric fence divided Eastern Europe from the West. In addition to separating people, the fence also split the population of Red Deer. But deer migration paths are a learned trait, taught to each generation by the last. So Red Deer in the region still refuse to cross the old lines, even though the fence has been down for decades now. And so the Iron Curtain still exists in some sense. It lives on in the minds of deer.

A lesson, I think, on ripple effects. Those waves get into the strangest places. But also on the importance of leveling old walls. Especially the ones in your head.

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