This moment right now is not so bad.

If you're sitting somewhere, reading this, wherever you are, whenever you are, it's not so bad around you.  

Sure, somewhere in the world there are people facing very tough challenges. But they are less worried about their predicament than you are right now. When you are in the midst of the battle, you don't have time to worry. You just do what you have with the resources

The virtues of copper:

“Sleek and shining stainless steel doorknobs and push plates look reassuringly clean on a hospital door. By contrast, doorknobs and push plates of tarnished brass look dirty and contaminating,” she wrote at the time. “But even when tarnished, brass—an alloy typically of 67% copper and 33% zinc—[kills bacteria], while stainless steel—about 88% iron and 12% chromium—does little to impede bacterial growth.”

Ultimately, she wrapped her paper up

I'm not familiar with Yuval Levin (I don't even remember his previous appearance on EconTalk, which I must have heard), but he was on EconTalk recently talking about his new book.

The book sounds interesting enough, and if I had room on my to-read shelf for it, I'd probably add it, but I don't so I won't. But the bits of conversation that emerged centered around three things that really stuck with me.

First was

I'm currently about six months into Invisalign. It took about a week to rewire my brain from feeling that it was weird to be wearing the aligners, to it being weird not to wear them. Now, I actually start to feel a little on-edge when I can't get somewhere to brush and put the trays back in.

And things definitely seem to be moving in the right direction. So far so good.

One thing I

Reading about Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both histories emphasize that part of the successful R&D formula is hiring the best minds you can, giving them resources, and then leaving them alone to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. (Expect that they produce something, but not what or when.)

The closing chapters of "Range" by David Epstein echo this as well. Hyper-specialization is a trap. Great results in the lab can be achieved

It is difficult to comprehend what modern computers would look like without Bell Labs. In some abstract way I was aware of this, but reading Kernighan's new Unix history/memoir really hit that home when he talked about Bjarne Stroustrup developing C++ while he too worked at Bell Labs.

Stroupstrup's name and the fact that he invented C++ was lodged deep in my brain from my high school AP Computer Science class where it was

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical laptop today. Would your laptop support a population of a million users?

This reminds me of an observation, I believe by John Carmack on Twitter although I can't dig up the link now, about how frustrating it is writing software for mobile phones today. They have orders of magnitude more raw power than the machines he was programming for in the Doom and Quake days, but in those days he was much closer to the bare metal. All the intermediary layers eat up all the performance gains in hardware and, paraphrasing, he found himself battling resources constraints as much as ever.

Don't get me wrong: modern languages with conveniences like garbage collection, and running inside a bytecode VM like Java have huge upsides. But raw performance is not one of them. We have made huge advances in raw computing power, but much of that benefit has accrued to the developer instead of the user, because they don't have to be as skilled or optimize their programs as much. This means development is a bigger tent than it once was. But it does explain why computers don't necessarily feel any faster than, say, 10 years ago.

Excerpts from an interview with Tom West and Tracy Kidder, three years after the publication of The Soul of a New Machine:

West: If somebody walks into your office after five minutes of staring at a sheet of paper and asks: "Should we make this register sixteen bits wide or thirty-two bits wide?" you know the answer to this question if you have been through it over and over and over again. So

"Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business."

Tom West
quoted in The Soul of a New Machine (p.131), by Tracy Kidder.

The business always wants to avoid risk. The hidden downside to this is that low-risk businesses also tend to be very un-trusting. This is dissatisfying to people who value autonomy.

If you insist on low-risk, eventually they remove themselves from your labor pool.

Don't ever neglect an opportunity to learn something, even if it doesn't seem all that relevant right now.

Two or three months ago, the metal rod that lifted the stopper in our master bedroom sink rusted away so the drain was permanently closed. So we fished out the stopper and set it aside, but that left a big hole in the sink, perfect for dropping things into. So, figuring it couldn't be that hard, I