I studied physics in university, and at one point asked a professor if I should learn German, because it seemed all the key texts of early 20th century physics were written by German-speaking physicists in German journals such as Annalen der Physik. But my prof assured me that was not needed, insisting that my own native language would serve me well. And he knew German, so his advice seemed sincere.| command center
(Here's another resurrected post from April 30, 2012. Answers in a followup.)| command center
There has been recent discussion about the reproducibility of scientific results, with some unflattering conclusions. One study suggests only a 62% reproducibility rate.| command center
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now know it was. It's a bit of a time capsule now, and I was able resurrect it. Importing into Blogger was a bit of an ordeal that informs some of the points raised here, but other than that I make no comment on the contents beyond apologizing for the tone.| command center
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French| command center
I spent a few days a while back in a board meeting for a national astronomy organization and noticed a property of the population in that room: Out of about 40 people, about a third were women. And these were powerful women, too: professors, observatory directors and the like. Nor were they wallflowers. Their contributions to the meeting exceeded their proportion.| command center
The other day I was talking with a friend (yes, I have friends) about the way communication of ideas has changed. The Internet is the obvious advance, but what used to happen when an important new idea needed to be disseminated? As an example of how things used to be, I told him the story of Bohr's famous train trip.| command center
Some days, things just don't work out. Or don't work.| command center
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012.| command center
Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native byte order really does matter to the execution of the program, it's almost certain to be dealing with some external software that is either wrong or misguided. If your code contains #ifdef BIG_ENDIAN or the equivalent, you need to unlearn about byte order.| command center
An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"| command center
[We open in a well-lit corporate conference room. A meeting has been running for a while. Lots has been accomplished but time is running out...| commandcenter.blogspot.com
This is my closing talk (video) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being launched as an open source project. The text is interspersed with the slides used in the presentation.| command center
In May 2009, Google hosted an internal "Design Wizardry" panel, with talks by Jeff Dean, Mike Burrows, Paul Haahr, Alfred Spector, Bill Coughran, and myself. Here is a lightly edited transcript of my talk. Some of the details have aged out, but the themes live on, now perhaps more than ever.| command center
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else.| command center
(Another resurrected post from the my old Google+ stream, which appeared on or about Dec 6, 2011.)| command center
(Another resurrected post from the my old Google+ stream, which appeared on or about Sep 4, 2012. Thirty years of age isn't too far off now.)| command center
(Here's the next resurrected post, this time from Jun 8, April 30, 2012.)| command center
A while back, Google Plus (google+?) lost its public face, removing from public view too much material. But Google, for all its faults, also has virtues, and it let me capture all my posts using its "takeout" feature before plus went negative.| command center
A recent dig through some old papers uncovered this CERN memo from 1973 describing controls for the Proton Synchrotron being built at the time. I visited the control room some years later and saw the controls in action, installed on a room-hugging curved console reminiscent of a NASA mission control room. I was so impressed by the devices I asked for a copy of the documentation, written by (one assumes) their designers, F. Beck and B. Stumpe.| command center
Here follows the original "manifesto" from late 2014 proposing the idea for what became Upspin . The text has been lightly edited to remove...| commandcenter.blogspot.com
Comments extracted from a code review. I've been asked to disseminate them more widely. I should say something about regular expressio...| commandcenter.blogspot.com
I've been trying on and off to find a nice way to deal with setting options in a Go package I am writing. Options on a type, that is. The p...| commandcenter.blogspot.com
The Upspin project uses a custom package, upspin.io/errors , to represent error conditions that arise inside the system. These errors satis...| commandcenter.blogspot.com
Two long-buried caches of photographs came to light last year. One was a stack of cellulose nitrate negatives made on the Scott Antarctic ex...| commandcenter.blogspot.com