Category: crazy ideas

Do air force combat pilots use a true Sign Language?

As I am continuing to read the book “Language in Space – a window on Israeli Sign Language” by Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler (ISBN 965-311-056-X), the following question arose in my mind.

Combat pilots serving in air forces of the world are used to describe their dogfights by their hands.
Apparently spoken language is not sufficiently expressive to do justice to the nuances of tactical maneuvers performed by pilots during the heat of air battles.

My question: do they use only pantomime, or do their gestures have elements of true Sign Language?
Was any research done about this subject?
Are air force cadets taught, in a systematic way, how to describe dogfights?

Third kind of languages?

I am now reading the book “Language in Space – a window on Israeli Sign Language” by Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler (ISBN 965-311-056-X). The book applies linguistic analysis to the Israeli Sign Language, used by most of the Deaf in Israel.

There are similarities and differences between spoken and signed languages. There are principles, which serve as common denominator between those languages.

As I am thinking about programming languages, I wonder whether they can be regarded as a third kind of languages. In other words, if we apply linguistic analysis to programming languages, what can learn from the linguistic analysis results? An example for a programming language, whose design takes into account linguistic issues in an explicit way, is Perl, especially Perl 6.

One major difference between human languages and programming languages is that humans can freely invent new words, new ways to modify words, and new ways to combine words into sentences. However software developers are constrained by the compiler/interpreter’s limitations and cannot easily break away from those constraints.

For example, to discuss sorting in Hebrew you need only to invent a new meaning for the word “מיון”. However to discuss sorting in a program, you need to develop, find, beg for, or steal a library, which implements the sorting algorithms, which interest you.

Recent programming languages are less constraining than early ones (with the exception of LISP, which was early, difficult to learn but not constraining). Languages like Perl and Python support lists (arrays indexed by numbers) and hashes (associative arrays, which map arbitrary-but-immutable values into other arbitrary values). They also support classes/objects. I wonder if there are more concepts, like lists, hashes and objects, which need to be supported in order to make programming languages feel as unconstrained as human languages.

Microsoft is too big to be able to grow further

Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis
The root problem is that MBAs are taught to grow their businesses.
Shareholders expect their shares to appreciate in value.
Therefore, the top management of every company is compelled to hold to double-digit growth rate even though the company will be greater than the entire Earth in 10 more years.
Everyone is ignoring the reality of the S-curve. If your company already has 50% of the market, it cannot double its share of this market.

One solution is to diversify to other markets. Eventually all markets, which the company can efficiently serve, are saturated. The company then wastes capital on entry into other markets, which it is not competent to serve. The company also gets too big to manage itself efficiently, especially as it is not focused on performing well and efficiently those tasks, which it knows to perform well.

I would like to suggest another direction for advancement for oversized companies. Work on the value added per employee/subcontractor index. Let go of part of the capital, if you do not know how to invest it wisely. Sell off operations, which you do not excel in managing. Streamline and optimize your core operations. Become part of a network of independent companies, which may sometimes collaborate on large projects. Hire new employees only if their contribution raises the value added per employee/subcontractor.

When letting go of capital, disburse it as dividends to your shareholders (in fact, Microsoft paid huge dividend to its shareholders in the last year). In effect, this throws back to them the responsibility to wisely invest their capital investments, as your managers are not better than your shareholders in this task anymore.

Ayn Rand turns over in her grave

According to The Business Experiment and The Wisdom of Crowds, the collective is smarter than the individual.

On the other hand, a condition for a collective to be smarter than its members is that its members think independently and are allowed to reach their conclusions independently. This condition was not met by historical collectives, in which one or few people dictated to the masses what and how to think.

Paul Graham's What Business Can Learn from Open Source

According to Paul Graham’s What Business Can Learn from Open Source, people are more productive when they work at their own hours in their homes. He uses the examples of software startups versus established software companies.

This leads me to wonder how should businesses, which have a lot of capital invested in equipment, manage the work hours of their employees. The employees have to be in contact with the machines at scheduled times, if the machines are to be operated efficiently and economically. Examples: Intel’s semiconductor FABs with their process developing and monitoring physicists and chemists, airline companies and their pilots and airplane maintenance technicians, car assembly plants.

Maybe it is a significant fact that those businesses, which have expensive equipment, do not lock into uniform office cubicles those employees, who deal with the equipment on daily basis. Sailors on a ship sometimes need to be available 24 hours a day to handle emergencies. They work under different weather conditions. They have shore leaves. Shop workers need to be in the shop during its work hours, because it is when the customers come in. However they do not sit in offices or waste time in meetings. They stand and serve customers, reorder the inventory, or whatever. The “expensive equipment” in their case is the shop’s inventory and fixtures which entice customers to leave their money in the shop.

So it seems that it is only those businesses, which do not need to provide their employees with expensive capital equipment, do lock their employees into a 09:00-17:00 day in boring offices and lots of meetings. It is precisely those companies, for which Graham’s conclusions seem to be true. The work done for those companies could be done from employee’s home at his own hours – the inexpensive equipment (such as a PC with one or two specialized peripherals) could be installed at his home. The profession is not necessarily software development. It could as well be a telemarketing operation (heaven forbid).

Nitpicking Larry Niven's "$16,940.00"

In the story, Kelsey is a professional blackmailer. He asking Carson, a “client”, for extra payment of $16,940.00. The money is needed for paying Horatio. Horatio was another “client” of Kelsey until the statute of limitations for his crime kicked in. Now Horatio is trying to blackmail Kelsey to get back all money he paid him.

In the story, Kelsey and Carson find that there is a technical problem for Carson to prepare this amount of money and transfer it to Kelsey. So they decide that if Carson kills Horatio, this will solve the problem.

My nitpicking yielded an alternate end.

Carson contacts Horatio and promises him $20,000.00 if Horatio agrees to wait few more days for the money. Carson gets from Horatio a copy of his blackmail evidence. Carson uses it to blackmail Kelsey into ceasing to get money from him. This way, Carson gets off the hook, Horatio gets back his blackmail money, and Kelsey is a bit poorer.

Will work ethic and a plan get you anywhere you want in the galaxy?

My Exploitative employers vs. lazy employees piece prompted someone to comment in private that there is a catch: Just because
some disabled people are good enough to compete with able bodied workers does not mean that everybody can.

My position is that as long as someone has enough of work ethic, he (or she) can always find something to do, which other people would not do. They might learn faster to do his job and eventually do it better than him, but they are busy with some other job, and do not have the time to master his job. So eventually he gains experience and does the job better than anyone, who might try to replace him after only a brief training.

However, there is a real problem: people with disabilities often get stuck with dead-end jobs, with no built-in career path or prospects for promotion to a better-paying job. What can someone, who knows to work, do then?

  1. Set aside time for his own advancement by ensuring that his current job does not demand more than a normal workday per day.
  2. Form an idea what kind of job and income he wants.
  3. At his free time, study something, which may help him do his dream job.
  4. Volunteer for tasks in either his workplace or for a nonprofit serving his community. The tasks are to be such that they demonstrate his ability to handle a more responsible position. Of course, he needs to perform those tasks well.
  5. Be willing to do some tasks, which are within his ability to do, and which other people hate to do.
  6. Be familiar with the political situation in his workplace.
  7. Establish a network of contacts who will tell him about job openings in other places. Even if he does not switch places, the information will put him at better bargaining position at his current place of employment.

Of course, people do not learn on their own the above advice. How do we reach out to the people with disabilities, who are desperate, are unemployed and do not know how to work and how to make work get them the kind of satisfaction from life that they deserve? How do we point out successful role models to them?

This problem is complicated by the fact that a specific plan, which works for someone, would not work for someone else. Each person needs his own plan, but not everyone seems to be able to plan ahead on his own.

About opposition to the disengagement plan

Full disclosure: I am in favor of disengagement and movement of Jews from Gaza Strip to various areas in Israel.

Today I read in the newspaper about an ingenious public relations trick of the disengagement opponents. They sent to residents in north Tel Aviv an official-looking letter telling them that they must leave their homes and move elsewhere because it is planned to build underground train in place of their homes.

They reasoned that this would cause the recipients to feel the pain of being forced to move elsewhere.

The official response to the trick was angry one, but I think that this time the disengagement opponents did the right thing. They made a point, and their point had better been taken into consideration when arguing about the disengagement plan. Except for faster heartbeats, they did not interfere with the daily routine of the letter recipients. They made proper use of their Freedom of Expression.

They can make even better point, if they display their slogans (in quiet and non-interfering way) near cinemas which show the movie “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy”.

Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith

I saw the movie. The rapid transformation, which Anakin Skywalker went through from being a Jedi into a servant of the dark side of the Force, caused me to feel the unsettling feeling of someone thrown into a new situation in life, which he was not prepared to handle.

There are some moral issues illustrated by the movie, but since they are spoilers, I am discussing them in attached notes.

Exploitative employers vs. lazy employees

There are much more employees, employee-wannabes, former employees and unemployed than employers, employer-wannabes, bankrupt employers and stinking rich former employers.
So the point of view of employees about horrible employers is better known than the point of view of employers about bad employees.

Since I became freelancer, who is responsible for marketing his own services, I was most of the time in situation, in which there is slightly more demand for my time and services than my ability to supply the demand. I made the decision to utilize the “excess demand” (or “excess marketing capacity”) to help other people get work. Since I have a disability, it was natural that I’ll prefer people with disabilities, mostly deafness.

It was in this position that I found that in spite of complaints and rants, when actually offered a job, some people turn out not to be in desperate need for a job, or not to be professional in performing their job, or to have other reasons (besides their disability, if they had one) not to perform their job in the best possible way.

I reached the conclusion that even though people with disabilities are said to have a problem getting a job – those who know to work have a job, and those who do not have a job – do not know to work either (in Hebrew it sounds better, as it uses the same word for job and work).