Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Teaching hasn’t completely derailed my freelance life — I published this piece on radar for cars in the Boston Globe on Monday. (Teaching does slow my penchant for posting on this blog).

The first piece I’ve published since my Nieman year came to an end is in The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly. Parallel bars,, looks at some of the things holding back parallel programming techniques, and what advances might be on the horizon. The comments gave me some pause, and I was glad this piece had input from my editor, who studied parallel programming in college. Many of the comments were unusually granular, suggesting that people with high levels of programming expertise came upon it via links, and were expecting something from a programming journal. I was amused by the person who thought Dennis Ritchie was a household name; of the four programming legends in my little quiz, I would expect only Grace Murray Hopper to have any name recognition, mostly because she was often held up as an example of women programmers in the general media.

I wrote Mister Act, a little piece on identity and human nature, about two months after we moved to Cambridge. The most interesting bit for me was how quickly I shifted my habits; I really don’t say anything to parents whose kids call me by my first name. It probably helps that doesn’t happen very often — in my experience so far, most kids don’t call adults anything at all. MIT’s Sandy Pentland came to give a seminar at Lippmann House this week. He said his research on human behavior patterns suggests that people usually do things just to go along with those around them. I seem to fit that — people can have the kids call them what they want to be called. Some of the comments on this piece suggest that it readers didn’t get that point.

I would’ve liked to have talked with a developmental psychologist to see whether any research had been done on the topic, but I didn’t find one in the time I had available to me.

Catching up on some overdue posts… I interviewed Fred Brooks, a pioneering software thinker (and doer), for Computerworld.

Brooks may be old school, but his new book, The Design of Design, offers well-polished, concise essays that even the most egregious multitasker will be able to follow. We talked about some of his ideas in the Q&A, but there’s almost always good stuff that doesn’t make it. The last thing to go in this one were his comments about the state of writing amongst American-born graduate students in computer science:

We still get graduate students who have difficulty writing plain English paragraphs. I get some students with English as a second language who write better than some of my American students.

Writing something other than code still matters for programmers.

My feature-writing swan song heading into my Nieman year appears in the current issue of Fast Company (an issue filled with vibrant business writing). Take us to the river looks directly at why the big music labels aren’t dead yet, and might be getting better. It also provides an indirect glance at the future of my industry, and any other industry enduring the digital onslaught. I would love to revisit this piece in two years; I suspect it will be worth twice as much space (if we still have ’space’ in two years). I don’t know that it will yet be a happy story for musicians, but it’s clear that the Internet has yet to prove a boon for most of them.
I like the piece, of course. It also was blessed with faint praise from the usually vitriolic Bob Lefsetz. The Billboard writer Glenn Peoples stopped short of calling it a puff piece and found some things to praise in it. (I found out about Peoples’ comments when someone I know who reads him misread Peoples’ sarcastic use of ‘fantastic’  to describe the piece, and wrote me to tell me it really was fantastic.) About what I would have done when I was a trade reporter, unconcerned by how the nuances that matter to trade writers affect the eyelids of readers who don’t care a lick about the subject.

A piece I wrote on E-Ink and its challenges gets a mention in Dan Bloom’s This ink is for reading, a look at PrimeView, the company that bought E-Ink. PrimeView grew out of a company that got its start making toilet paper in the 1930s. There’s a real spirit of innovation there.

Microsoft continues to edge closer to the cloud. The next version of Office will feature what is in effect the cloud version 1.0 of perhaps the world’s most popular, profitable desktop software application.

We’ll see more ‘cloudifying’ of Office stories over the next few years. Microsoft will almost certainly continue adding more cloud features to Office. I wonder when my editors will start using the new cloud features to collaboratively edit my stories.

Some of my recent work looks at forgotten things that can haunt us. For instance, the emotions of techies when projects fail to meet expectations. Or how parking makes us insecure. Then there’s my most recent piece, on those ubiquitous Achilles’ heels, the mechanical key.

The week ends on a happy note, as I got word I had stories win two Honorable Mention awards in the annual American Society of Journalists and Authors competition. My essay on Trickle-Up innovation for Fast Company, As the World Turns, was the runner-up for Outstanding Business & Technology Article, while a story I wrote for CIO, How Facebook and Twitter are Changing Data Privacy Rules, was runner-up for Outstanding Trade Article.
I should be thrilled. But I have won something in the ASJA competition three years running, so being runner-up feels like a letdown, even though I didn’t expect to win anything. I am suffering from ‘counterfactual thinking,’ which holds that I am comparing myself to whoever won first, rather than being happy I’m on the podium. I will try to flip this around and get some glow to bask in.

The Boston Globe Ideas section ran Genesis, the Soap Opera, my Q&A with John Coats, author of the recent book “Original Sinners.” It weaves in stories from Genesis with stories from his life that reflect those in Genesis. He’s attempting to reclaim the book of Genesis for everyone, not just believers. I mostly enjoyed the book, and did see some of myself in some of the stories (though his yarns are better than mine).

It’s a good read, fun and rich and earthy, and thought-provoking. I might post some of the stuff I had to cut, since I found it difficult to cut.