Valeev is by no means the worst offender

Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:
:
:Writing isn't really too much of a problem, although I confess,
:I find writing in "passive voice" to be a bit of a nuisance. I'm
:not entirely certain if there's difference is between writing
:specs and writing up a "materials and methods" section...both
:strike me as dry enough to ignite with a single spark...but I've
:never written (to my knowledge) specifications. For a million
:dollars a day however, I suspect I could force myself. :-)
:

I have written such things. Talk about making your eyes roll back in
your head!

On Mar 2, 9:30*am, Deirdre Sholto Douglas
wrote:
The most difficult thing for me to do was writing specs; I wouldn't have
worked as a writer even if they paid me $1 million/day.

For a million dollars a day however, I suspect I could force myself. :-)

It would be *even more* reason NOT to work for someone else. Because
in order for someone to justify paying you a million dollars a day,
you have to be doing something that is so frickin valuable that they
can't afford to have you either (a) doing it for someone else or (b)
doing it for yourself. In case (b) you'll be getting all the million
dollars doing whatever it was that would have made it worth paying you
that much AND all the profits they would have gotten from doing so.

That's the[1] (AFKA-)Prince Doctrine[2]. It's a Law of Physics. That's
why it's here.

Notes;
[1] AFKA = Artist Formerly Known As
[2] Expounded on the Tonight Show about 10 years ago, when someone
boasted about how much another artist was making (under contract by a
record label).

Rock Brentwood wrote:
On Mar 2, 9:30 am, Deirdre Sholto Douglas
wrote:
The most difficult thing for me to do was writing specs; I wouldn't have
worked as a writer even if they paid me $1 million/day.
For a million dollars a day however, I suspect I could force myself. :-)

It would be *even more* reason NOT to work for someone else.

Sigh! You missed the point completely. If you do something that
isn't fun to do, you will do a poor job.

snip

/BAH

Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:

jmfbahciv wrote:
Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:
jmfbahciv wrote:
snip

Do you like writing?
Depends on the sort of writing...I'm not overfond of longhand
on paper any longer and anything remotely calligraphic I leave
to my daughter. If you mean creatively, I lack the imagination
to write anything fictional...I can record facts and reality well
enough and don't dislike doing so, but I'm not a hardcore diarist.
I was thinking about reports and tech papers, etc. The most
difficult thing for me to do was writing specs; I wouldn't have
worked as a writer even if they paid me $1 million/day.

Writing isn't really too much of a problem, although I confess,
I find writing in "passive voice" to be a bit of a nuisance.

It was a FRPITA.

I'm
not entirely certain if there's difference is between writing
specs and writing up a "materials and methods" section...both
strike me as dry enough to ignite with a single spark...but I've
never written (to my knowledge) specifications.

hmm...I wouldn't know. A spec, depending on its flavor, had to
contain details. If it was a spec before the hard/software was
made, then the audience was one's peers and managers. If it
was a spec about something you're making or just made, then the
audience is the people who will use the stuff. The latter one
would be our doc writers' input who munched the stuff and
produced English. This transformation sometimes made the tech
details wrong. For instance, some English-type writer decided
that the CPU could not be the entity that did things because
only people were the ones that did them. So the sentence
would be so awkward and so long that anybody reading the text
for information would have had to do lots of thinking to
sort out the useless words. You probably wouldn't have those
kinds of problems because your audience are peers who already
know the "definitions" of all the words you use.

For a million
dollars a day however, I suspect I could force myself. :-)

Not me. I wouldn't have any fun doing it so I'd produce
material that wasn't of the highest quality. We were known
for our good documentation about the stuff we shipped.

/BAH

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:
:
:Writing isn't really too much of a problem, although I confess,
:I find writing in "passive voice" to be a bit of a nuisance. I'm
:not entirely certain if there's difference is between writing
:specs and writing up a "materials and methods" section...both
:strike me as dry enough to ignite with a single spark...but I've
:never written (to my knowledge) specifications. For a million
:dollars a day however, I suspect I could force myself. :-)
:

I have written such things. Talk about making your eyes roll back in
your head!

Before my company hired professional editors, there was a lot of humor
in the docs put in by engineers who played a lot. Our debugger was
called DDT; the chemical symbol was printed in the margin of the
text that described its commands, etc.

/BAH

Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:

jmfbahciv wrote:
Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:
I don't know if it's "more interestingly", but it's certainly
"more likely"...particularly if one is working with living
entities with their own agendas. Microbes can be such
notional wee things. :-)

I said "more interestingly" because most efforts stop and
tidy up after something works. IOW, no more work at finding
something that works. But that may not be the case in a
science lab. It certainly is the case in business.

It's infinite regression...every answer raises more questions and
every time something works, it merely becomes a new building
block in making something else work. The remarkable, wahoo-we-
did-it! success in 2001 is 2009's Student Methodology.

I can spend weeks/months up in my lab trying to convince my
critters to behave in a given manner, which means I have to
understand their natural behaviour and exploit it...in the pro-
cess of gaining that understanding I'm going to hit a lot of
roadblocks and discover a multitude of things which don't
work. But, let's say after a time I solve the problem and I
have a sample.

I trot my sample down to the beam and the measurements
invariably raise more questions: Why didn't they do insert
desired behaviour here? Why did they do insert unexpected
behaviour here? Is it an artifact? Introduced by the beam?
The atmosphere? The processing? Or is it supposed to be
there? Can I explain it as a natural attribute? Can I replicate
it?

What beam? Or perhaps I should ask a different question. If
you can see the behaviour in the lab, why do you have to use
this beam device? I'm guessing that you use this beam to
get hard data recorded.


Now, I get to do it all over again and hope the bugs behave the
same way...sometimes they don't, if they don't I have another
problem to solve (which occasionally results in new answers,
but is more likely to result in new questions). Back to the beam
and more measurements...cross fingers and hope the results
are within range of the earlier ones....if so, they still need to
be explained in terms of the system...if they're different the
discrepancy needs to be accounted for.

Measurements...ignore my previous question. Are you measuring
distances or amounts?


Even if everything works, I might still need to find a different
method if I can't explain _why_ it works. It's a bit different
than business in that regard.

Yep. JMF would fix a software bug; in some cases, it could
take him years before he understood why his fix worked.

/BAH

jmfbahciv wrote:

Deirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:

I trot my sample down to the beam and the measurements
invariably raise more questions: Why didn't they do insert
desired behaviour here? Why did they do insert unexpected
behaviour here? Is it an artifact? Introduced by the beam?
The atmosphere? The processing? Or is it supposed to be
there? Can I explain it as a natural attribute? Can I replicate
it?

What beam?

The X-ray beam down at the Advanced Photon Source.
http://www.aps.anl.gov/About/APS_Overview/

Or perhaps I should ask a different question. If
you can see the behaviour in the lab, why do you have to use
this beam device? I'm guessing that you use this beam to
get hard data recorded.

You can't "see" where the elements are, only where the
bugs are.

Now, I get to do it all over again and hope the bugs behave the
same way...sometimes they don't, if they don't I have another
problem to solve (which occasionally results in new answers,
but is more likely to result in new questions). Back to the beam
and more measurements...cross fingers and hope the results
are within range of the earlier ones....if so, they still need to
be explained in terms of the system...if they're different the
discrepancy needs to be accounted for.

Measurements...ignore my previous question. Are you measuring
distances or amounts?

Amounts. Although one of my colleagues was measuring
distances between atoms, so there are those doing both.
And we're also looking at the "where"...where is the element
in relation to the microbe? The beam allows us to "map"
things.

http://www.aps.anl.gov/Science/Highl...4/20041029.htm

(You can ignore the text if you like, I was merely using the
URL to take you to the picture.)

Deirdre

jmfbahciv jmfbahciv@aol wrote:

eirdre Sholto Douglas wrote:
:
: I trot my sample down to the beam and the measurements
: invariably raise more questions: Why didn't they do insert
: desired behaviour here? Why did they do insert unexpected
: behaviour here? Is it an artifact? Introduced by the beam?
: The atmosphere? The processing? Or is it supposed to be
: there? Can I explain it as a natural attribute? Can I replicate
: it?
:
:What beam? Or perhaps I should ask a different question. If
:you can see the behaviour in the lab, why do you have to use
:this beam device? I'm guessing that you use this beam to
:get hard data recorded.
:

I suspect she's referring to 'beam microscope'. These are little tiny
buggers and you've got to look at them with something that can
actually see them. You can INFER things from watching macroscale
effects, but at some point it's probably necessary to actually examine
the sludge itself.

Or perhaps she's subjecting the poor wee things to a high-power beam
(like from a cyclotron) to 'modify their behaviour'. I mean, wouldn't
that modify yours? :-)


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw