Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-07-10

“Many years ago when I was but a wee clod-kicker in high school, I had amazing conversation with a pretty blonde girl in english class about the ‘news.’ She stated proudly that she didn’t pay any attention to current events…bragged actually. I was flabbergasted. She reasoned that since she had no plans to do anything about what she read, why bother. I had no retort beyond stunned indignation. All these years later she now appears as a wise woman in my memory. If only I could resist having my emotions hijacked by stories like this one. Why be angry? I’m not going to do anything about it.”

So that nets us an estimate — to pull a number out of the air — of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.” — George Bernard Shaw

“I sometimes think it would be better to drown children than to lock them up in present-day schools.” — Marie Curie

“Nearly 12 years of school … form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life. … It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. … I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer’s mate, or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father to dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural; it would have taught me more; and I should have done it much better.” — Winston Churchill

“Not one of you sitting round this table could run a fish-and-chip shop.” — Howard Florey, 1945 Nobel laureate in medicine, to the governing body of Queen’s College, Oxford, of which he was provost

Sean McGavic is unsure of his actual parentage. He knows he was adopted with almost no waiting period for a fee one-tenth of what it would have cost to adopt a baby boy at the time of his birth. He knows his adopted parents (Martha and a local Florida politician named Claude McGavic) opened an import-export company five months before his adoption and closed it two days after. He knows a one-armed, retired magician’s publicist from New York included him in his will shortly before dying, and he suspects—through a series of clues too long to print in their entirety, but involving local Florida corruption case, a mysterious doll, and nearly $1,000 in DNA tests—that he might have been rescued as an infant from Argentina’s Dirty War.

This is not art imitating life so much as strange loops of attraction and repulsion, running from Karel ?apek’s R.U.R. (the 1920 Czech play that bequeathed us the word robot) to, of course, The Terminator, the blockbuster franchise whose third installment gives the book its title. (Rid deliciously quotes Manfred Clynes, the researcher who created the term cyborg: “Schwarzenegger playing this,” Clynes said unironically, “dehumanized the concept completely.”)