Rereading Tom Peters’ Little BIG Things.
GREAT how he has chosen the first little BIG thing to be The Loo!
A shiny toilet tells everything.
(Also notice the Discipline that these pages breathe.)
(And yeah, go fix your voicemail message (#2 little BIG Thing).)
All Families Are Psychotic is a journey through the chaotic events of a family get together.
I love these books from Douglas Coupland where the story brings you semi-random from one idiotic hilarious episode into the other. Btw why does Douglas Coupland remind me of Grady Booch? Both seem a bit scruffy outliers in their worlds – is how I would describe it in an instant answer without much further thought. It the same thing that attracts me in Haruki Murakami’s novels – the semi randomness of the events that lead the protagonists(s) through the story. The story is the way.
I believe my family is psychotic, but this Drummond family excels at it. What starts off as a family event around daughter Sarah’s jump into space – she’s an astronaut, develops into a wild road movie, with lots of collateral damage. So take Coupland’s title with a touch of salt, but it’s a great rollercoaster read.
While you are at it also read Coupland’s Player One which has a similar cadence.
I your more have time to shred also read Murakami trilogy 1q84.
While reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, I stumbled upon a quote attributed to computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra that made me pause, not because of what it said, but because of how it was used.
Kurzweil cites Dijkstra as saying: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
It’s a clever aphorism that sounds exactly like something Dijkstra would say. There’s just one problem: the attribution is disputed, and the original source remains elusive.
I dove into the Dijkstra archive at the University of Texas, which contains his extensive collection of EWD manuscripts. Despite searching through his papers, I couldn’t find this exact quote. Wikiquote also lists the attribution as disputed.
Could Dijkstra have said it? Absolutely. Despite being a world-renowned computer scientist, he famously avoided using computers for his work, reportedly owning one only to read email and browse the web. For him, computer science truly was about ideas, not machines.
But the lack of a verifiable source matters—especially in a book making grand claims about the future.
Kurzweil places this quote in a chapter discussing exponential growth, Moore’s Law, and paradigm shifts. But the connection feels forced. The Dijkstra quote speaks to the philosophical nature of computer science as a discipline. It doesn’t illuminate anything about exponential technological progress or the coming singularity.
This seemingly minor misplacement reveals a larger issue with The Singularity Is Near: the blending of rigorous scientific facts with personal predictions that lack the same level of substantiation.
The contrast between Dijkstra and Kurzweil is instructive:
Edsger Dijkstra: An unconventional theoretical scientist known for mathematical rigor and precision. Every statement in his EWD manuscripts was carefully reasoned and documented.
Ray Kurzweil: An unconventional futuristic engineer and inventor. His predictions are bold, optimistic, and often based on extrapolating current trends.
You might expect Dijkstra to be dry and academic, while Kurzweil would be the more engaging personality. But here’s the surprise: the biggest difference between their work isn’t their subject matter or their ambition—it’s humor.
Dijkstra’s writings are filled with wit, self-awareness, and intellectual playfulness. He could be cutting in his criticism, but always with a touch of humor that acknowledged the absurdity of certain positions. This humor wasn’t just stylistic. It was a sign of intellectual honesty and humility.
Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, despite its grand vision and fascinating ideas, takes itself entirely seriously. Every prediction is presented with confidence. Every trend will continue. Every obstacle will be overcome. There’s little room for doubt, irony, or the acknowledgment that futurism is, by nature, speculative.
This lack of humor—and the self-awareness it represents—makes Kurzweil’s predictions less credible, not more. When you can’t laugh at yourself or acknowledge the limits of your knowledge, you risk becoming a prophet rather than a scientist.
Dijkstra understood that computer science required both rigor and humility. He documented his sources, admitted when he was speculating, and never confused his hopes with inevitability.
Kurzweil’s work would be stronger if it borrowed more from Dijkstra’s approach: not just his ideas, but his intellectual honesty.
The misattribution (or at least unverified attribution) of the Dijkstra quote is a small detail, but it’s emblematic. It suggests a book that prioritizes narrative momentum over scholarly precision. That’s not necessarily wrong for a work of futurism, but readers should understand what they’re getting: a compelling vision more than a rigorous prediction.
When reading about the future of technology, it’s worth asking: Is this backed by verifiable evidence, or is this someone’s optimistic extrapolation? Are the sources documented? Is there room for doubt?
Dijkstra would have insisted on all three.
Further Reading:
Related posts:
EWD 35 starts out in typical Dijkstra way.
It is not unusual for a speaker to start a lecture with an introduction. As some in the audience might be totally not familiar with the issues that I wish to address and the terminology, which I will have to use, I will to give two examples as a means of introduction, the first one to describe the background of the problem and a second one, to give you an idea of the kind of logical problems, that we will encounter.
The story that EWD 35 tells is a brief history of the resolution to the scientific topic that brought Dijkstra his fame: the problem of synchronising parallel processes and the invention of the the concept of the semaphore for these types of problems in computing.
Today it is almost impossible to imagine a time in which this problem was still unsolved. Collaborating parallel processes, semaphores and indivisible operations have become a such a commodity in computing. But at that time computing meant sequential processes and parallelism of interacting processes was being looked at for the first time.
In 1959, the question was of whether the described capability for communication between two machines made it possible to couple two machines such, that the execution of the critical sections was mutually excluded in time. In 1962, a much wider group of issues was considered and the question was also changed to “What communication possibilities between machines are required, to play this kind of games as gracefully as possible?”
A side note. The word “required” and “possibilities” here do not cover the meaning of Dijkstra’s original in Dutch “welke communicatiemogeljkheden tussen machines zijn gewenst”. I would say “which communication facilities between machines are desired” – expressing better that Dijkstra is in the mode of designing the thing, thinking up these communication facilities.
Another side note, much of Dijkstra’s beautiful loose writing in Dutch is lost in this straightforward translation to English here. For example, we can translate “Jantje” to “Johnny” but in Dutch we have a completely different image in our head when we see Jantje than we someone, Dutch or non-Dutch, would have with Johnny.
Dijkstra uses the word machines in the paragraph quoted above. The terminology developed further and today we would call these, a bit more abstract, processes.
Further in his article he gives an insight into the potential for his “machines” and sees them simulated on a central computer. We really have to imagine this is a remarkable insight in the future. At that time computer ran single tasks. Running multiple processes at the same time on the same hardware was at best experimental. He makes this remark in the context of alternative ways of having machines collaborate and let them wait on each other by building in wait times in case they need access to the same resource.
However, if we consider now, that will be the majority of these machines will be simulated by a central computer so that any action in one machine can only be performed at the expense of the effective speed of the other machines, then it is very costly using a wait cycle to demand attention of the central computer for something completely useless.
The basic problem Dijkstra extensively examines is best described by Dijkstra in the following sentences. One machine wants to assign a value to a shared variable, after testing its value. For example something like:
if x=3 then x :=4 else x:=5
Another machine is trying to do the same thing, at the same time. What happens if machine 1 tests for the value of x, while at the same time machine 2 changes this value. Or, what happens if they both change the value of x at the same.
Dijkstra indicates a mechanism is necessary which he call indivisible actions. Today these things are indivisible, uninterruptible or atomic operations or instructions.
These two actions, assigning a new value and inquiring about the current value are considered indivisible actions, i.e. if both machines wish to “simultaneously” assign a value to a common variable then the value assigned at the end is one or the other value, but not some mixture. Similarly, if one machine asks for the value of a shared variable at the time that the other machine is assigning a new value to it, then the requesting machine will receive or the old or the new value, not a random value.
Having these instructions is key to the solution of the problem of interaction sequential processes.
In EWD35 Dijkstra then goes on to describe, in a rather lengthy paragraph – but remember this was front end research at that time – the invention of the semaphore in computing.
The programmed wait cycle that exists herein, is of course very nice, but it did little to what our goal. A tiny wait cycle is indeed the way to keep a machine busy “without effect” . However, if we consider now, that will be the majority of these machines will be simulated by a central computer so that any action in one machine can only be performed at the expense of the effective speed of the other machines, then it is very costly using a wait cycle to demand attention of the central computer for something completely useless. As long as the wait cycle cannot be exited, in our opinion the speed of this machine may be reduced to zero, To express this we introduce a statement instead of wait cycle, a basic instruction in the repertoire of the machines, that may take a very long time. We indicate this with a P (to Pass); in anticipation of future needs, we represent the statement “SX: = true” by “V(SX) – with V of “vrijgave” (in English: release) (This terminology is taken from the railway environment. In an earlier stage the common logical variables were called “Semaphores” and if their name starts with an S, it is a reminiscence of it). The text of the programs in this new notation is as follows:
“LXi: P(SX); TXi; V(SX); proces Xi; goto LXi” .
And you hold your breath, watching the birth of modern computing here in EWD 35.
The rest of the article provides the proof that this mechanism holds for any number of machines.
Reading Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra’s EWD’s.
In EWD 32 Dijkstra shares his “meditations” on the state of the Art (or rather Science, as he prefers to say) of Programming. Machine design was ugly, programming as a discipline was undeveloped. This was 1962.
Programmers were hired for applying tricks and Dijkstra loves the development that there is
… the slowly growing group of people who think it more valuable that the man should have a clear and systematic mind.
He goes on to discuss how programmers and machine designers should collaborate to create better machines and programming languages. This was very necessary because Dijkstra believed that at that time, the computer manufacturing industry was taking over computer design from universities. But this brought a commercial angle to computer design that Dijkstra was unhappy with.
They seem to design for the customer that believes the salesman who tells him that machine so-and-so is just the machine he wants.
Dijkstra goes on to share his thoughts on how to improve The Tool – by which he means the programming language, translator, and machine. Nowadays, with so many languages and machines, we hardly think about this tool. We think of tools as tools: a given rather than a thought. And of course, we have massive debates about programming languages, hardware, etc. But some of the concerns have disappeared. Nobody really seems to care about machine design anymore. It has become a commodity. It should be fast and robust. Hardware hardly provides any distinguishing features. If so, it is about size and energy, not about performance and reliability.
But the last one he mentions is an eternal difference, one which we still haven’t landed on. And maybe we never will. Because it is a subjective one. A characteristic you wouldn’t expected in our Beta world of computers and programmers.
As my very last remark I should like to stress that the tool as a whole should have still another quality. It is a much more subtle one; whether we appreciate it or not depends much more on our personal taste and education and I shall not even try to define it. The tool should be charming, it should be elegant, it should be worthy of our love. This is no joke, I am terribly serious about this. In this respect the programmer does not differ from any other craftsman: unless he loves his tools it is highly improbable that he will ever create something of superior quality.
At the same time these considerations tell us the greatest virtues a program can show: Elegance and Beauty.