A team will argue. One man will not.
One person can’t be good at everything, we are admonished, typically by people who don’t want to work that hard. Bollocks, I say. One person can be good at everything. Not at the same time, of course, and I doubt that one person can be really superb at everything.
Here is the crux: When a project is wholly controlled by one person who doesn’t answer to anyone else, that person will do everything he thinks important, and only what he thinks important.
He wouldn’t undertake such a project without a clearly perceived need and a clearly conceived answer to that need. As with commissioned development, there may be several project reboots and re-conceptions. Prototyping clarifies perceptions and reveals technical limitations.
Eventually, he will be satisfied and will reveal a work with such coherence of design and execution that bureaucracy cannot hope to compete.
A problem here is that we live and learn. Throughout the project he refines his technique, and the work is better in quality. This is a strong argument for sticking with what you know in development.
Sometimes, our virtuoso will look at his handiwork, and see this in it. And do it again, from scratch, but very quickly. And then we get a cut diamond.
Why do I keep saying “he, his ” rather than “he/she, his/her” or the grammatically grotesque “they, their”? Because, like music, only men create great software. If you disagree you have only to point me in the direction of just one virtuoso software development by a woman, and if Google knows about it I will make a correction and a commitment. In the meantime, I assert that “he” is factually correct.
As ever, Scott Adams tells a home truth in the guise of humour:
The person I’m thinking of is not stupid and this has made me wonder how anyone can vacillate between being intelligent and, as Adams puts it, failing the Turing test. The conclusion I have reached is that this happens when people are well out of their sphere of expertise - so far out of it that they don’t even know the extent of their ignorance. I’ve noticed that under these conditions, people resort to aphorisms and herd behaviour.
Not long after this thought crystallised, it came to me that this is very likely a standard fallback behaviour, not just for primates, but for any animal that could remotely be described as intelligent.
This observation is very interesting in the context of my existing notions on the nature of intelligence. I’ve always defined intelligence as the capacity for analysis in the absence of precedent. More recently I have wondered how to factor in the inclination to analyse.
The capacity for intelligence is (IMHO) intrinsic to any large layered neural network with feedback channels. However, this is true only to the extent that the potential for huge bulging muscles is inherent in every man. Couch potatoes utterly fail to bulge, except possibly around the middle.
Regular exercise is required to procure even slight bulging. Or cerebration.
Gym junkies like working out.
Intelligent people enjoy analysing things. I say “analysing things” rather than “thinking” because you can think about doughnuts, boobs and beer with very little in the way of analysis.
The application of intelligence is an inherently time-consuming activity. Mammals invented dreaming as a way to cope with the fact that you can’t do a thorough analysis while something is trying to eat you.
When decisions must be made under fire, it greatly helps to have thought the situation through in advance. When this is not possible, due to unforeseen circumstances, it becomes necessary to fall back on more general precedent. This is no more or less than the adaptation of solutions to similar problems on the basis that they worked and have already been thought through.
When there is no precedent, behaviour is erratic and unpredictable. This is itself a survival behaviour: the unpredictability of one’s confusion can throw a spanner in the other party’s works.
The grandfather paradox is no paradox at all, it seems to me. Any sequence of events that is impossible has a probability of zero. Even if such a sequence begins, it must end as a possible sequence. You get lost, and fail to visit grandad. The weapon fails. The weapon fails catastrophically and you kill yourself instead. You are seduced by a totally hot and kinky chick and your priorities change. Anything with a non-zero probability is more likely and will happen instead.
Nearly all the consequences of time travel are implausible. Just about the only one that isn’t involves you arriving to tell yourself how to effect the time travel. This is the only way you can simultaneously be the first person to do it and observe someone else do it first: re-entrant reality.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Multiple vehicle accidents in which one of the vehicles was a car and the other a motorcycle are always reported as motorcycle accidents, distorting the statistics. The logic used to rationalise this deception is that in a car-motorcycle accident, typically it is the motorcyclist who is injured. On this basis, any car-truck accident would have to be classified as a car accident, but no, they’re always classified as truck accidents. Government statistics are rarely out and out false but they are frequently structured to support an agenda.
Most alleged motorcycle accidents are actually scooter accidents. They are used to inflate motorcycle accident statistics in support of anti-motorcycle prejudice.
Lets take a look at something directly lifted from a Queensland government “motorcycle safety” website.
Motorcycles account for only four per cent of Queensland registrations, yet motorcycle riders accounted for 20 per cent of road deaths in 2007.
This grotesque misuse of statistics is logically flawed in a way that betrays the contempt in which our government holds us. It is a blatant attempt to manipulate the reader into concluding that motorcycles are five times more perilous than cars. Let me change it slightly to show how asinine a statement it is:
Pedestrians account for zero per cent of Queensland registrations, yet pedestrians accounted for [some non-zero] per cent of road deaths in 2007.
By the same faulty logic, walking is infinitely more dangerous than driving a car. But if you remove the pedestrians, you still have fatal collision accidents, whereas if you remove the cars, you don’t. People do walk into each other, but generally they just apologise and carry on. Clearly the problem is cars.
The same page says “About half these fatal crashes involved no other vehicle” which leads nicely into my next section, though curiously their age distribution analysis contradicts my assertion that younger people are the primary risk (strongly supported by Hurt) with recent Queensland data indicating that the high-risk group is 30-39. I won’t waste space on the whole table, because none of the figures are credible – the accident distribution must be considered as a fraction of the riding population in each age group. Considering these figures as a fraction of the total population doesn’t tell us anything meaningful. I doubt the authors are incompetent statisticians. More likely their work was biased by their prejudices or has been deliberately misrepresented in support of an agenda.
Bikes aren't dangerous, people are.
If we believe the Queensland government, half of motorcycle rider fatalities in 2007 were single vehicle accidents. Other studies have shown that catastrophic equipment failure is very rare, and from this it follows that half the 2007 bike fatalities were a consequence of rider error.
The threat is testosterone, not petrol. Single-vehicle motorcycle accidents generally involve big bikes at silly speeds. When first I wrote these words, this was purely personal observation, but it is borne out by several studies, most famously the Hurt report. My assertion that testosterone is the problem agrees strongly with the extreme underrepresentation of women in bike accidents of all types (also from Hurt).
Back to my opinion: thrill-seekers, inclined to risk-taking and aggressively competitive behaviour, are attracted to big bikes. But the bike is not the problem. If you take away their bikes these people just buy hotted-up cars, and still manage to wrap themselves around trees.
Multiple vehicle accidents involving large motorcycles predominantly involve riders new to large capacity bikes. I have been riding a big bike for three years now and the diminishing likelihood of my having an accident is reflected in diminishing insurance costs. Trish worries "it's so powerful" but power is controlled by the throttle. At idle you get five horsepower.
In my experience, big-bike accidents involve young people taking absurd risks because they have no sense of mortality. However, there is one class of older rider at risk: men who reach middle age and decide to buy a Harley. They get on a big bike directly through the Q-Ride program (or equivalent) but don’t really have the experience necessary to handle all that power, nor do they have the under-attack mentality or the experience with early identification of threats such as driver inattention, blind spots etc. This matches both the Queensland government information and the Hurt report: Hurt finds that while there are far fewer accidents in general on big bikes due to their association with greater experience, big bike accidents are often lethal – and the government report shows a spike in this age bracket, the only one in which you get inexperienced riders on big bikes.
Everyone has heard of this stuff, but you don’t get good at it till you practice, and you don’t practice till you’ve had the crap scared out of you at least three times. In a soldier, this is called being a veteran. You get a thousand-yard stare and a nervous threat-scan on a bike too.
Bikes aren't dangerous, scooters are.
Scooters have terrible steering geometry, small wheels (lower gyroscopic stability), small brakes and little power. So if something happens as you wobble along, you can’t turn to dodge, you can’t stop and you can’t zoom forward out of danger.
People who ride scooters typically wear inadequate armour. I frequently see them in shorts, thongs and a singlet with an open-face helmet.
Because you can operate a scooter using a car licence, scooter riders do not even undergo basic motorcycle training, much less motorcycle safety training basic and advanced. They do not go to a racetrack to practice high-speed manoeuvres, and they lack the under-attack-from-car-drivers mentality that protects seasoned bike riders.
Most of the "motorcycle" accidents used to inflate motorcycle accident statistics are scooter accidents.
You have no protection on a bike.
I have no protection on a pushbike either, but no one worried when I rode one of those in traffic. In point of fact I was at much greater risk because I was always travelling at a different speed to motor traffic and therefore constantly being overtaken. Also, bicycle helmets were unheard of at the time.
I have no protection as a pedestrian. Everyone uses roads on foot and without safety equipment, yet crossing the road does not fill you with fear. Why? Because you manage the risks with observation and common sense. I do the same thing on a bike - and this is why experience greatly reduces the risk for more experienced riders.
On a motorcycle I wear a full-face helmet, steel-capped boots, heavy denim reinforced with Kevlar strips and a leather jacket so rugged it's practically body armour. No protection my fat fanny. I’m heavily armoured.
As mentioned above, scooter riders compound their incompetence and inadequate equipment with a near absence of protective clothing.
Feeling safer makes people careless. It’s called Volvo-driver syndrome. The flip-side of this is that feeling mortally threatened makes people take a great deal of care.
Cars are a menace, bikes are not.
Cars pose a threat to biker safety. Therefore, use of cars should be restricted.
Everyone dies. Some people live first.
I used to go mountain climbing. No-one waggled a disapproving finger and went on about the risk; people thought it sounded exciting. My safety depended completely on having the right equipment and the right attitude. Things did go wrong, and because I had The Right Stuff, as they say – experience and appropriate safety equipment – it was never a big problem, even if I did occasionally provide exciting holiday shots for Japanese tourists.