Category: Science, Nature, & Technology

The Two Cultures originally referred to the schism between the sciences and humanities. However, I’ve noticed a similar schism in computing between users and programmers, which makes it hard to teach programming to beginners.

In computer user culture, each piece of software is a tool for getting something done … Each app on a user’s computer, tablet, or smartphone is a self-contained digital tool with a specific purpose.

In contrast, in computer programmer culture, each piece of software is an agent with whom one can hold a conversation, via either programming or chaining together shell commands. … Learning to use these programmer-centric tools is like learning to speak new artificial languages

I don’t have a magical solution to this issue. I just want to highlight the fundamental cultural disconnect between programmers, who routinely talk to their software via decades-old command-line interfaces, and ordinary users, who exclusively use modern GUIs.

Source: Philip Guo – The Two Cultures of Computing

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.

Source: Science Isn’t Broken | FiveThirtyEight

A signal received from the New Horizons spacecraft shows that it survived its historic encounter with Pluto.

Source: New Horizons: Spacecraft survives Pluto encounter – BBC News

When the Cascadia fault line ruptures, it could be North America’s worst natural disaster in recorded history.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries.

Source: The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest

Ideally, it’s so good that it barely needs to be in the first place.

Two redundant processors, typically sourced from different vendors, based on different designs. The code running on each processor has to be developed by two teams working in isolated conditions. The output of both processors has to agree or else the safety relay faults.

Source: How Is Critical ‘Life or Death’ Software Tested? | Motherboard