the tweney review

This BusinessWeek interview with Linus Torvalds contains a very interesting point: Torvalds compares the open-source way of developing software to the scientific method. Programmers put ideas forward; they’re critiqued publicly; and, if they stand up to scrutiny and to repeated testing, these ideas are incorporated into the overall body of work; other people then build on that framework.

Seen in this light, open source isn’t as novel as it might have once seemed. Of course, this view also makes it much more radical, because it’s not so much a system as an attitude–a mindset of skepticism, curious inquiry, and empiricism–and that can be much more thoroughgoing.

“I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people’s results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it — but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.

“Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. “

“Oedipus, as you know, was the tragic king who killed his father, then married his mother — a sequence of events that seldom turns out well.” -Bob Costas, commenting on the 2004 Athens Olympics opening ceremony

NASA Technology Transfer Bulletin #A101-753B explains it all for you.

I just had a short article about the upcoming Perseid meteor shower published in the San Francisco Chronicle. This was a fun piece to do–I got to talk with NASA scientists, enthusiastic amateur astronomers, and even dropped in on a stargazing party in the Los Altos hills, where I got to scope out some nebulae and double stars. The meteor shower promises to be a good one, too–peaking Wednesday night/Thursday morning of the coming week (between 2 a.m. and dawn on the morning of August 12).

Good advice on how to be creative:

“If I was just starting out writing, say, a novel or a screenplay, or maybe starting up a new software company, I wouldn’t try to quit my job for a year and make this big, dramatic heroic-quest thing about it.

I would do something far simpler: I would find that extra hour or two in the day that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make them productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magical, life-transforming things happen eventually. “