CRYPTOCHAOS

In his third month as Mayor, the one-time political science major had occasion to describe his philosophy of government at a New York Post forum on crime. His passage from the liberal beliefs of his younger years was complete.

Freedom does not mean ''people can do anything they want, be anything they can be,'' he said. ''Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.''

In New York, he seemed to announce, that lawful authority was his.

This popped out of a re-reading of articles around the "Broken-Window Theory" that Rudy Giuliani put to use as mayor...

It’s really funny, honestly, but kids, Java isn’t cool. It hasn’t been cool for a long time.

Slashdot even posted “The Struggle to Keep Java Relevant,” which … wow. Not only is Java not cool, but it’s not even relevant any more. Now, that article is … odd, because “relevant” apparently means “used by people with piercings,” which is an odd metric, but still!

My suggestion to the team was that they put their creation story on the landing page. If I could read about the moment they had their cool idea, they would have given me two valuable gifts–the emotional energy to keep working at understanding their idea and the beginnings of an intellectual understanding as well.

The essence of sketching is selectivity. With forward sketching you rough out some issues in code you are about to write, usually discussing them with a group of people with your team. Your aim is to use the sketches to help communicate ideas and alternatives about what you're about to do. You don't talk about all the code you are going to work on, just important issues that you want to run past your colleagues first, or sections of the design that you want to visualize before you begin programming.

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”

A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.”

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. 

These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.