a man called Ove

is the title of an excellent book by Fredrik Backman. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

He felt one should not go through life as if everything was exchangeable. As if loyalty was worthless. Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous. Quality: no one cared about that any more. Not Rune or the other neighbours and not those managers in the place where Ove worked. Now everything had to be computerised, as if one couldn't build a house until some consultant in a too-small shirt figured out how to open a laptop.

'They've bumped up the electricity prices again,' he informs her as he gets to his feet. He looks at her for a long time. Finally he puts his hand carefully on the big boulder and caresses it tenderly from side to side, as if touching her cheek. 'I miss you,' he whispers. It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating.

'Now you listen to me,' says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. 'You've given birth to two children and quite soon you'll be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war or persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now.' ...
'I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake, a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well.'
And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he'll ever give her.
'Because you are not a complete twit.'

Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.

Ove has probably known all along what he has to do, but all people are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.

'But serious, man. You do this every morning?' Jimmy asks cheerfully.
'Yes, to check if there have been any burglaries.'
'For real? Are there a lot of burglaries round here?'
'There are never a lot of burglaries before the first burglary,' Ove mutters and heads off towards the guest parking.

'There is no hope for these boys and girls,' the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. 'This is not education, this is storage.' Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position only attracted one applicant, and she got the boys and girls to read Shakespeare.

the reason I jump

is an excellent book by Naoki Higashida, subtitled One boy's voice from the silence of autism (isbn 978-1-4447-7677-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The Reason I Jump unwittingly discredits the doomiest idea of received wisdom about autism - that people with autism are anti-social loners who lack empathy with others. (Foreword)

I very quickly forget what it is I've just heard. Inside my head there really isn't such a big difference between what I was told just now, and what I heard a long, long time ago.

What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory that makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet.

When I see I've made a mistake, my mind shuts down. However tiny the mistake, for me, it's a massive deal. Once I've made a mistake, the fact of it starts rushing towards me like a tsunami. And then, like trees or houses being destroyed by the tsunami, I get destroyed by the shock.

There are times when I can't act, even though I really, badly want to. This is when my body is beyond my control.

When I'm jumping, I can feel my body parts really well... and that makes me feel so, so good. By jumping up and down, it's as if I'm shaking loose the ropes that are tying up my body. When I jump I feel lighter.

It's not quite that the noises grate on our nerves. It's more to do with a fear that if we keep listening, we'll lose all sense of where we are.

My guess is that the despair we're feeling has nowhere to go and fills up our entire bodies, makes our senses more and more confused.

When you see and object, it seems that you see it as an entire thing first, and only afterwards do its details follow on. But for people with autism, the details jump straight out at us first of all, and then only gradually, detail by detail, does the whole image sort of float up into focus.

Numbers are fixed, unchanging things. That simplicity, that clearness, it's so comforting to us. Invisible things like human relationships and ambiguous expressions, however, these are difficult for us people with autism to get our heads around.

I understand that any plan is only a plan, and is never definite, but I just cannot take it when a fixed arrangement doesn't proceed as per the visual schedule. Visual schedules create such a strong impression on us that if a change occurs, we get flustered and panicky.

We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people's unhappiness, that's plain unbearable.

we seven

is an excellent book by the seven mercury astronauts (isbn 978--4391-8103-4). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

By working with the designers and engineers on a brand-new, complicated airplane you learn to ferret out the bugs and problems before they can be built into the system to worry other pilots who will use later production aircraft. [John Glenn]

Looking back on it now, it sounds a bit silly. But it takes little moments like that to build up a person's tolerance of fear and his ability to face the unknown. [Malcomn Scott Carpenter]

When I got back to the States, I served a hitch teaching some younger pilots how to fly. This kind of duty is probably even more dangerous than combat. At least you know what a MIG is going to do. [Virgil Grissom]

A test-pilot is fiercely proud of his profession. [Walter Schirra]

I could not take care of the polyp right away because part of the procedure before they could operate on it was to keep me absolutely quiet for four days and not let me speak… Later on the medics did put me on a week's silent treatment. I had to break it only once when a NASA official called me up from Langley to ask me how my polyp was coming along. I told him he had just interrupted the cure. [Walter Schirra]

In combat, for example, you are thinking about what goes on outside of your airplane… But in test flying you have an entirely different problem. You are concerned about what is going on inside the airplane, and what the aircraft itself is doing. [Deke Slayton]

If you are an amateur in this business, and you just think you are in trouble, you can really get yourself into trouble very fast by doing the wrong thing first. You might be a whole lot better off if you did nothing at all. [Deke Slayton]

In flying, navigation is generally defined as "continuously detecting and correcting infinitesimal errors in the flight path." [Deke Slayton]

The schedule was flexible. We knew that variable factors such as weather, over which we would have no control, could cause delays. [John Glenn]

This panel groups all of the warning lights in one convenient place so we can see at a glance if any problems have cropped up. [John Glenn]

Each part that goes into the capsule has had a prototype tested to destruction to make sure it can stand the rough ride and the temperature changes. The test procedures are extremely painstaking. First, one part is tested; then two parts are linked together and both of them are tested as a unit. The small units are joined into bigger units for further testing, and this process continues until finally the entire machine is ready for a master test. [Malcomn Scott Carpenter]

We adopted three basic principles. First, we would use any training device or method that had even a remote chance of being useful. Second, we would make the training as difficult as possible so that we would be overtrained, if anything, rather then undertrained. And third, except for some wise scheduling of time, we decided to conduct our training on an informal basis. Everyone assumed from the start that we were mature, well-motivated individuals. Everyone knew we were all eager to make good. [Deke Slayton]

The manual went out of date as fast as the capsule grew… In the meantime… we had to work with some early drawings of the spacecraft that had been included in the original specifications. This was a bit like learning how to cook from looking into some chef's garbage pail. [Deke Slayton]

We did not blame any of our problems on such things as gremlins. For one thing, these creatures belonged to another era. [John Glenn]

We also had daily scheduling meetings to keep everyone informed of our progress and up to date on any problems which cropped up. Here is where we reviewed the work being done on the various systems. [Virgil Grissom]

Even though the electronic machines were clever, we did not let them run the show. [Alan Shepard]

trustee from the toolroom

is an excellent book by Nevil Shute (isbn 978-0-099-52998-9). A marvelous tale of courage and friendship. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

At last she asked, 'Do you think my Mummy and Daddy were very frightened when the ship got wrecked?' The adult quality of the question amazed him; children were so much older than you thought they were. 'No,' he said. 'No, I don't think that they'd ever have been frightened. They weren't that sort of people. And you won't be frightened of things either, I don't think.'

He was impressed and somehow amazed by the things he did not know. These men were working as a team, doing things together quickly and accurately, things that he could only guess at. He knew that on their teamwork the safety of the aircraft depended. All his own skill and ingenuity could not assist them by one iota; the most that he could do to help them in their work was to keep right out of their way.

Technical fields, he reflected, of necessity were small; if you were an expert in one subject you could not be expert also in all the others, for no man's mind was big enough. The man who designed the radar presentation that the controller had used to talk them down that morning would not himself have been able to bring them into a safe landing, for he would not have known sufficient about aeroplanes.

Where everything was strange this seemed no stranger than the rest.

He was scared stiff. He sat there in his cricket shirt and braces with Panama hat upon his head under the brilliant sun of the Hawaiian Islands, the bread and the corned beef untasted on the desk beside him, concentrating on doing the one that he had been taught, keeping the tiddly little triangle upon the lubber line.

Towards the morning it occurred to him that anyway he should not keep his grim forebodings to himself. Two heads, or several heads, were better than one. If he shared his apprehensions with other people someone might pull some rabbit out of an unthought-of hat, might make some suggestion that would somehow make Keith's journey to Tahiti safer.

Jack shook his head. 'Ma died last year. She was always wanting to get back to the islands, but she liked the television too, so she was pulled both ways.'

'I tell you one thing,' he said presently. 'I'll leave the little generator set here, in the Mary Belle.' Jack stared at him. 'Leave that here, with me?' 'That's right. This ship hasn't got a motor. She ought to have one.'

'I think when people get older,' he said, 'they kind of get more mellow. They kind of like to give help in return for help they get.'

She had decided in her own mind that he was honest.

She paused. 'Don't refuse him when he wants to do this little thing,' she said gently. 'You've given him a lot of pleasure with your letters and the clock. Let him do this for you.'

surely you're joking Mr Feynman

subtitled 'Adventures of a Curious Character', is an excellent book by Richard Feynman (isbn 978-0-099-17331-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Radio sets were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labelled.

I finally fixed it beause I had, and still have, persistence.

They didn't even know what they "knew". I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.

In this room there were wires strung all over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open. Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked. ... It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons.

I sat with the physicsts, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups.

So you must be always jiggling a little bit, testing out which way seems to be the easiest.

One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not described in the books I got in school - in college, even. These books always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be.

I chose to play a thing called a "frigideira" which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. ... I practiced all the time. I'd walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing.

One day, shortly before Carnival time, the leader of the samba school said, "OK, we're going to practice marching in the street. ...
It was rush hour in Copacabana, and we were going to march down the middle of Avenida Atlantica.
It said to myself, "Jesus! The boss didn't get a license, he didn't OK it with the police, he didn't do anything. He's decided we're just going to go out."
So we started to go out into the street, and everybody, all around, was excited. Some volunteers from a group of bystanders took a rope and formed a big square around our band, so the pedestrians wouldn't walk through the lines. People started to lean out of the windows. Everybody wanted to hear the new samba music. It was very exciting!
As soon as we started to march, I saw a policeman, way down at the other end of the road. He looked, saw what was happening, and started diverting traffic! Everything was informal. Nobody made any arrangements, but it all worked fine.

One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don't take your eyes off the model; just look at her and makes the lines on the paper without looking at what you're doing.
One of the guys says, "I can't help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody's cheating!"
"I'm not cheating!" I say.
"Aw, baloney!" they say.
I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.
When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength - a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength - which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn't have to be good - and that's really what all the loosening up was all about. I had thought that "loosen up" meant "make sloppy drawings," but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.

When it came time to evaluate the conference at the end, the others told how much they got out of it, how successful it was, and so on. When they asked me, I said, "This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!

Agile on the beach

Last week I attended the excellent Agile on the beach conference in Falmouth, Cornwall. I'm really proud to have been the consultant who provided most of the technical-tdd agile training that has helped create 50 new jobs in Cornwall.

I thought Schalk Cronjé's talk was excellent. So was the one Ed Sykes did. And Seb Rose too. The highlight for me was Eben Upton's endnote. Inspiring. I'm going to visit my old secondary school and see if they want half-a-dozen Raspberry Pies. And I'm going to buy one for myself and put Cyber-Dojo onto it. I ran a double cyber-dojo session at the conference and several teachers said they wanted to run cyber-dojos as part of their course - fantastic.