Adam Keys is Thinking

Best obituary ever:

A shame, then, that he is now, in the words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot.

Alex The Parrot was adopted by a scientist who wasn’t, at the time, involved in linguistics. But, in teaching Alex to speak, she ended up teaching him things like counting and basic recognition of objects. Over the years, this evolved into all manners of experiments on what kind of cognition Alex was capable of.

By the end, said Dr Pepperberg, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from. He could answer questions about objects’ properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things - and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologise if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators.

Animals are just amazing.

Newton’s Third Law of Physics: All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Newton’s Third Law, applied to software: To make something generic is to make the simple things complex.

Particle Tree has an excellent article on Fitts’ Law. That’s the one tells designers to put the Dock and Start Menu on the edges of the screen. You definitely want to check it out, if only for the terrific images used as demonstration.

Of course, if you’re more about the math (bad news, UI design is a lot of math) you could read up on Fitts’ Law on Wikipedia.

Paul Graham’s latest essay returns to ideas for which I first noticed him. Holding a Program in One’s Head asks what kind of intellectual exercise software development is (spoiler: one that requires focused and uninterrupted thinking) and then suggests guidelines for effective programmer working spaces (small teams, distraction-free workspaces). See also: Test #8 on the 12 Steps to Better Code.