☞ Creating Organizational Edge Cases
Plus, "The Magic of Code" is out next month!
The Magic of Code is Coming Soon
Just a reminder that my forthcoming book The Magic of Code is being published next month! Here’s a website for the book, with some very kind blurbs.
Thanks so much to all who have already preordered. If you haven’t, my publisher is running a preorder sale for all of you, my subscribers, where you can use the code ARBESMAN20 to get 20% off:
So please pre-order it now. Tell your friends and family about the book. Inform podcasters about it. Discuss it online. Post kind reviews of it. Bother everyone you know.
And now to other matters…
Organizational Edge Cases
I was reading this history of Unix by Brian Kernighan when I came across this delightful little fact: Richard Hamming, the renowned mathematician and computer scientist, was the chair of the Computer Science Research Department at Bell Labs. But this department consisted entirely of Hamming and his secretary:
As Kernighan describes it:
He was a department head, but there were no people in his department, which seemed odd. He told me that he had worked hard to achieve this combination of suitable title without responsibility…
I love this. Hamming had constructed himself an organizational edge case. These organizational edge cases can provide flexibility for individuals as well as provide the kind of open-endedness that organizations need to allow for unexpected and undirected thinking. This is a generalized version of the outlier roles in venture capital and other institutions that I’ve previously discussed.
Another example of this organizational edge case is what Polaroid once had. As per Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos, there was a department known as Miscellaneous Research:
This is amazing. Never stop creating organizational edge cases. ■
Check Out the Orthogonal Bet Podcast
I’ve been having some delightful conversations over at the Orthogonal Bet podcast. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with some amazing guests about mythmaking, important lines of computer code, the future of programming, the nature of progress, antimemetics, rest and work, and so much more! Check it out.
The Enchanted Systems Roundup
Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):
🜸 Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science: “Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.”
🝤 When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI: “I rarely see historians and computer scientists (or people who write for literary magazines and people who work in AI labs) having this sort of conversation today.”
🜚 Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the “On The Origin of Species” Manuscript
🝳 Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter: “I don’t know how long this period of alien agnosticism will last, but I do know it’s officially begun. It reflects a broader symptom of our age: as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less.”
🝤 The Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the Obits: “Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.”
Until next time.
It's nice when you can be the edge case, let me tell you!
That was an interesting link about reading people’s obituaries. I tend to that a lot myself. For example the other day I was reading Colonel John Boyd’s obituary from 1997 and I didn’t know that Boyd taught himself calculus. And supposedly Alfred Nobel read his own obituary and the writer didn’t think to highly of them and that is what caused Nobel to create the Nobel prize.