I really think that Joseph Gotlieb - your first link - is grasping at straws. For brevity's sake I will address his first objection even though I feel others are just as shaky.
[Objection #1: According to the interview, Gregory Perelman bristled at being addressed as "Grisha" by the media (Gregory/Grisha being similar to Robert/Robbie in familiarity). This could not possibly be true because he signed his own emails as "Grisha".]
This is a pretty big stretch. The Russian language defines 3 tiers of familiarity/address: a nickname for family/friends, a full first name for acquaintances of the same age, and a full first + patronymic name for everyone else. (This is similar to a French person being offended by an overly familiar "Tu" when a "Vous" is appropriate). Moreover, it is not uncommon anywhere to use a nickname in correspondence with friends and colleagues and a full name in more formal situations.
The forum discussion - your second link - is nothing more than a reference to Richard Feynman's auto biographical anecdote about the Nobel prize, followed by a bit of general bitching about journalists. One poster casts doubt on how Perelman and the interviewer connected (seems perfectly plausible to me that a Russian-Israeli journalist would connect to a Russian-Jewish scientist through his mom, whom he lives with, via the St. Petersburg jewish community). It really doesn't prove or even suggest anything of importance.
As far the claim that Russian bloggers couldn't track down the person who interviewed Perelman, well, I just spent a minute on google and found this: http://cursorinfo.co.il/news/novosti/2011/04/28/zatwornil/. Apparently, the Israeli paper was able to find the interviewer... not particularly surprising given that he had moved to Israel in the 90's.
> This is a pretty big stretch. The Russian language defines 3 tiers of familiarity/address: a nickname for family/friends, a full first name for acquaintances of the same age, and a full first + patronymic name for everyone else. (This is similar to a French person being offended by an overly familiar "Tu" when a "Vous" is appropriate). Moreover, it is not uncommon anywhere to use a nickname in correspondence with friends and colleagues and a full name in more formal situations.
Perelman signed his _papers_ "Grisha Perelman". That's about as formal an occasion for a mathematician as it gets. The paper is the claim for posterity. It's what the next generations of mathematicians will read. It's not impossible to imagine a mathematician who'd sign his mathematical papers as "Bob Green", but then be strongly offended by being so identified in the media, but it's very, very unlikely.
Also, "Grisha" is no more a nickname than "Bob" or "Bill" (that is, they all can be considered nicknames, but aren't usually what we mean by a nickname in its more common sense). They're familiar forms. It's not unheard of for a Russian scientist to adopt their familiar form as the preferential first name, even in formal situations, in English-language cultures. E.g. Misha Verbitsky, Sasha Razborov... you can easily google many more examples.
Obviously I disagree with you about the first link grasping at straws. In particular, mekhmat vs matmekh alone is damning. This difference between the names of the two most prestigious math departments in Moscow vs St. Petersburg is legendary. It's next to impossible for an alumnus of mekhmat to refer to his alma mater as matmekh or vice versa.
> Apparently, the Israeli paper was able to find the interviewer... not particularly surprising given that he had moved to Israel in the 90's.
They didn't find him in the sense that they weren't able to contact him, as they explain; I didn't mean to claim that the name or the person were nonexistent.
I don't know about this. My father is a scientist, and while he signs his correspondence as Sasha, he publishes under Alexander. As for метмах vs. матмех - it could easily be Perelman having a dyslexic moment, or the journalist misquoting. All these "clues" are so nitpicky... not worth a conspiracy theory IMHO.
You are right about nicknames though. I used it in a colloquial sense but the correct term would be a familiar form.
There is one big problem with JS's paradigm of Smart and Gets Things Done that I never see addressed. It's right there in the title. If a programmer Gets Things Done, what does Smart add to the equation? Say you have a cat who habitually walks all over your keyboard and bangs out perfect code, every time. Do you really care?
No one would praise a program that takes 2 steps to do something that can be done in 1 step. So why does Smart and Gets Things Done get so much credit? I'd understand Gets Things Done and Gets Along much better.
If you've ever dealt with code that Gets Things Done but is not Smart, you'll know why it's in the title. There are a million ways to skin a cat with programming, and you can pick a stupid(er) way or a smart(er) way. I'd much rather work with the person(s) who pick the smart(er) way.
The "perfect code" part of your comment above implies smartness. Dumb people don't write "perfect code".
That reminds me I once came along code written like this:
function MakePrintable(nr as Int)
{
Str as string
if nr=1 then Str="1"
if nr=2 then Str="2"
if nr=3 then Str="3"
...
if nr=27 then Str="27"
if nr=28 then Str="28"
if nr=29 then Str="29"
return Str
}
This code worked in the program it was used in (it Got Things Done), but in a dumb way (lazy? ignorant?).
I admit this is a rather extreme example, but it provokes the universal feeling when you look at gravely suboptimal code: "What did the programmer think when he wrote this? Didn't he know that ...., it's so obvious!"
I guess it depends on your definition of "done". If something is sorta slapped together in a way that is hard to read/debug or non-performant, to me that's not "done". So perhaps it's a matter of semantics.
Joel addresses why he titles that in the book. People that aren't smart and get things done usually do "stupid" things, that someone else will have to come along and clean up. Here's a link to the post that discusses it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html
Oh I get that (did read the whole thing) however conversely, couldn't it then just be titled, "Smart" with an explanation further down that smart people know that they have to get things done or else it's just talk? I mean, you can redefine and contextualize anything, but I think if you promote a slogan as strongly worded as Joel's quote below, you have the responsibility to make it complete without a further explanation.
The #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:
Smart, and Gets Things Done.
That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night.
He wants us to memorize a short slogan, and that slogan, in programming speak, is buggy and wasteful (wasteful in the sense that I described above, and buggy in that a smart gets-things-done a-hole will single handedly kill your project). Gets Things Done and Gets Along on the other hand is complete in and of itself.
There are a lot of smart people who worry so much about getting things perfect, or doing things in a too-general way (i.e. "architecture astronauts") that they never actually get anything useful done, or they take far too long to get things done. These people often lack pragmatic business sense.
You can argue that it's a matter of semantics whether "getting things done" implies "smart" if you start defining "done" to mean more than what most people assume from the word, but it's definitely not true that "smart" implies "getting things done" even if you start to stretch meanings. There are plenty of people who are really smart, but who do not get anything practical done.
Smart people solve difficult problems that less smart people either (a) couldn't solve or (b) would take a relatively long time to solve. This is what smart people "get done". If you're lucky they'll even write the code for the majority of the system by way of proving to you that their idea works. (By definition it is easier to implement a skeleton solution than it is to explain the idea to someone who wasn't smart enough to originate the idea.)
People who merely "get things done" are conscientious in their attitude to work but do not have the spark of intellect that would help them identify quicker ways of getting a task done. This lack of spark also means that they will frequently say that problems are impossible to solve (or prohibitively time consuming to solve), whereas in fact a smart person would identify it as a problem that they could solve.
Example from my own experience within a government accountancy department:
- The person who merely "gets things done" happily spends two weeks each year calculating the cross-charging amounts between all the departments and eventually produces the correct figures.
- The smart person does the same task in 30 seconds using pivot tables and lookups in Excel.
I've seen several and they are underwhelming. Those photos of glowing curtains of color are taken from space, here on earth they just look like dim green glow (brief explanation below). You are not missing anything, I promise you.
Most of the energetic particles from the Sun are deflected around the Earth by the magnetosphere, but some get trapped. Electrons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field (the magnetic mirror effect) are accelerated along the magnetic field toward the Polar Regions and then strike the gases into the upper layer of the atmosphere, called the ionosphere. In the ionosphere, the speeding electrons collide violently with gas atoms. This gives the gas atoms energy, which causes them to release both light and more electrons. In this way, the gases of the ionosphere start to glow producing the spectacle that we know as the auroras.
Variations in colour are due to the type of gas particles that are colliding. The most common auroral color, a pale yellowish-green, is produced by oxygen molecules located about 60 miles above the earth. Rare, all-red auroras are produced by high-altitude oxygen, at heights of up to 200 miles. Nitrogen produces blue or purplish-red aurora.
I really hope that anyone reading this doesn't heed this advice. I used to live in a smallish city in Canada where aurora borealis was a common nighttime event and every time I've been back and seen them again I've appreciated and been wowed by them more. The hubble telescope can produce for more detailed and composed pictures of the stars but they are nothing compared to the time I spent star gazing in the Atacama desert in Chile here on Earth. By not seeing the aurora borealis you definitely are missing something. Exactly how much is what you need to see by experiencing it for yourself.
Agreed. I saw the Aurora Borealis once whilst flying from the US to the UK - I happened to wake up and look out the window at just the right time and was absolutely mesmerised, just stared and stared until our heading changed and it was no longer in sight. I thought it was absolutely beautiful.
For those of us waiting to learn what happened, the title is baity and misleading. A more accurate headline would be: "Rightscale outage: some speculation and customer service suggestions for Amazon".
At the time of writing Amazon has not yet posted a root cause analysis. I will update this section when they do. Until then, I have to make some educated guesses.
That pretty much sums it up. Well, that plus some contradictory lesson learned, such as The biggest problem was that more than one availability zone was affected, followed by, must have live replication across multiple availability zones.
Similarly awful is (usually) my youtube experience over DSL :(
However: just now watching eyepatchentertainment's test broadcast I find it remarkable. Sharp picture. Perfectly synced sound. Smooth scroll of live comments. Unknown fps, but it has no jerkiness to video.
I worry for what this will do re" jacquesm's ww.com.
Looks like youtube-live will be setting the standard for streaming vid.
[Objection #1: According to the interview, Gregory Perelman bristled at being addressed as "Grisha" by the media (Gregory/Grisha being similar to Robert/Robbie in familiarity). This could not possibly be true because he signed his own emails as "Grisha".]
This is a pretty big stretch. The Russian language defines 3 tiers of familiarity/address: a nickname for family/friends, a full first name for acquaintances of the same age, and a full first + patronymic name for everyone else. (This is similar to a French person being offended by an overly familiar "Tu" when a "Vous" is appropriate). Moreover, it is not uncommon anywhere to use a nickname in correspondence with friends and colleagues and a full name in more formal situations.
The forum discussion - your second link - is nothing more than a reference to Richard Feynman's auto biographical anecdote about the Nobel prize, followed by a bit of general bitching about journalists. One poster casts doubt on how Perelman and the interviewer connected (seems perfectly plausible to me that a Russian-Israeli journalist would connect to a Russian-Jewish scientist through his mom, whom he lives with, via the St. Petersburg jewish community). It really doesn't prove or even suggest anything of importance.
As far the claim that Russian bloggers couldn't track down the person who interviewed Perelman, well, I just spent a minute on google and found this: http://cursorinfo.co.il/news/novosti/2011/04/28/zatwornil/. Apparently, the Israeli paper was able to find the interviewer... not particularly surprising given that he had moved to Israel in the 90's.