Dead Ink Vinyl

My wife and I just finished watching a very entertaining NOVA episode entitled Ape Genius. The episode highlights the forms of intelligence that apes exhibit and provides a comparison to related human behavior so that we may understand what aspects of human intelligence set us apart from our genetically closest relatives. Why do we have cars, skyscrapers, rockets, and telecommunication while the various families of apes are still in the early stages of developing tools?

The answer put forward by the NOVA program is that humans of all ages want to teach. Memes are passed down from one generation to the next not simply through observation and emulation, but by active instruction.

My wife and I are expecting our first child in late May. My wife has undergraduate and graduate degrees in childhood education, and she’s always loved children. I find screaming or crying children to induce the same reflex as nails dragged across a chalk board. Additionally, my greatest fear as a parent-to-be (aside from the truly tragic) is the feeling of powerlessness when presented with a screaming or crying child when I don’t know why the child is upset or how to make it better. Consequently, I am very eager to learn how to communicate with my child as early as possible so that I can attend to the child’s needs with a minimum of fuss. (Yes, I know that all children scream and cry a lot no matter what. Allow me my three more months of denial.)

All of this has led me to Wikipedia and then Amazon in search of child sign language resources. Sign with Your Baby by Joseph Garcia, which promotes the use of American Sign Language, appears to be the best based on reviews. I’m placing my order now. I guess I’ll provide a review in a year or so to let you know how it goes.

Oh! How so many of the world’s software problems would be solved by listening to this nugget of wisdom from yesterday’s posting by Jacob Nielsen!

Of course, people don’t want to hear me say that they need to test their UI. And they definitely don’t want to hear that they have to actually move their precious butts to a customer location to watch real people do the work the application is supposed to support. The general idea seems to be that real programmers can’t be let out of their cages. My view is just the opposite: no one should be allowed to work on an application unless they’ve spent a day observing a few end users.

Software exists to solve problems. To understand the problems a proposed software application is supposed to solve, nothing beats walking a mile in the user’s shoes. (37signals calls this What’s Your Problem? in their book Getting Real.)

I grew up with Rock, Scissors, Paper as the standard selection method among my family and friends. I was surprised to learn recently of another selection method that is just as easy, but somewhat more interesting: Odds and Evens, which turns out to be a variation of Morra.

There are two points that make Odds and Evens more interesting to me than Rock, Scissor, Paper. First, Odds and Evens has a variation called “Ones and Twos” that provides a selection method for groups of more than two people. As a child, I only knew Eeny Meeny Miny Moe for this purpose. However, after 2nd grade, the “Eeny Meeny” method was easy to cheat.

Cheating brings me to my second point, which I will simply quote from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

An interesting consequence of the expanded version of odds and evens… is that the winner is significantly more random than playing consecutive games of rock, paper, scissors. Since any single player can change the result to any other player, a nonrandom result requires the simultaneous cooperation of all players. While unwitting cooperation based on manipulating human psychology can be achieved with successive games of rock, paper, scissors by skilled players, the difficulty of simultaneously predicting the throws of all other players in a single expanded game of odds and evens is much greater.

I hope I remember this when my children are old enough to need selection methods.