Fri, 02 May 2003
Dave Thomas, exposed
Those of us who know
Pragmatic Dave Thomas have
often wondered, "Who is he, really?" Thanks to a
May 5th New Yorker article
(unfortunately not on line), I now know that he's actually a
Slovenian Lacanian-Marxist philosopher named Slavoj
Zizek.
Evidence, you ask?
When Zizek "sees a tube of toothpaste advertising 'thirty
per cent free' he wants to cut off the free third and put it in his
pocket." When "Thomas" goes to the grocery store, he gets inspired
to write a
code
kata that includes this question: "'buy two, get one free' (so
does the third item have a price?)" "One of [Zizek's] fundamental gestures is this: he will present a
problem, or a text, then produce the reading that you have come to
expect from him, and then he will say, 'I am tempted to think it is
just the opposite." In a
workshop devoted to the question of how to
build software to outlive its creators, "Thomas", one of the
workshop organizers, argued that software lives too
long and we should rewrite it instead of trying to make it live
longer.
(The article describes something Zizek says about elevator
buttons, then says, "Like many of Zizek's
observations, this is the kind of insight
that forever changes one's experience" -- and "Thomas's" argument was
one that made me go "hmm..." at the time and keeps echoing in the
vast hollow within my skull. Frankly, I think the software one was
better than the elevator one, but probably
the New Yorker author thought the latter easier to explain.) Zizek "speaks English... in an accent recalling that of Latka,
the character of indeterminate Mitteleuropean origin played by Andy
Kaufman on 'Taxi'." Need I say more?
## Posted at 13:49 in category /junk
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A Red Letter Day
Yesterday, I attended a talk at U Illinois entitled "Evo-Devo for Cultural
Evolution: Why Memes Won't Do", by William C Wimsatt of the
University of Chicago. I did not come out of it with any
elaborate
analogies
to
software development. A sigh of relief was
heard across the land...
## Posted at 12:53 in category /junk
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