Skip to main content

Information Overload, Needles, and Haystacks: Part One

So this is a little more subjective than most posts I want to make here, but it still fits better than on either of my other blogs. Do I have too many blogs? That will have to do, until I get around to utilizing more proper and tag-supporting blog software. Anyway...

The internet is a amazing. The myriad of information is just fascinating, and would be overwhelming, if it were possible for any one person to truely grasp just how much data there really is out there. Not only can we not possibly grasp it, but there is no way to really utilize it. We make baby steps, every day, to obtaining more and more of that information. Or, rather, we make steps in obtaining more specialized and exact pieces over a wider selection of that information. The ammount of information we can take in has pretty much maxed, I think. All we can do now, is utilize that limit by being more intelligently selective of what is available for us to take in.

The Needle is something you want, and maybe you know it, or maybe you have no idea. The Haystack is, of course, the internet. How do you find the Needle in the Haystack, especially if you don't know you're looking for it? We need to understand what form the Needly may take, because it could be a lot of things. Is it an informational piece of text, a multimedia entertainment stream, or maybe a small tool you could utilize for your own uses? It could be any number of things, but maybe the most important part of understand what it is, is understanding that you might not know. Convergence of all the types of Needles is a necessity to finding what you want, because so often, we really don't know what it is we are looking for, even vaguely.

Next part will dive into how we bring all these different types together, and more on just how small those needles can get.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro