Tag Archives: science
A recent New York Times article tried to destroy the five-second rule because dropped food will have bacteria on it, instantaneously. Yet for healthy youngsters growing up near the dirt is good, as in the children develop fewer allergies and less asthma. Exposure to real dirt, the kind without harsh industrial chemicals, is probably critical to our immune system development. That’s probably why toddlers are so driven to taste dirt. All those mud pies were meant to be tasted. Not…..
With software we continually improve by removing bugs and adding features. Eventually we get to the point we want to do something dramatically different and we call the last release a terminal release. At that point we don’t spend time on it anymore and it is stable. If you want the next set of improvements, a bigger upgrade is required. Oddly, history has a similar rhythm. The nature of people telling stories in print means they stabilize into the accepted…..
To be a scientist, I was trained to think in a specific way. Namely to make a hypothesis, gather data, analyze the data for a conclusion, and then to confirm or correct your hypothesis, and repeat. Being a human, I make mistakes and encounter situations where prevailing beliefs (mine, a team, an industry) could be discovered to be flawed. When a round of testing shows a hypothesis is in error or produces results we don’t understand we pause. We…..