This is something I will need to read before tomorrow as our democratic republic has dictated that I owe them this year. Others might find it useful as well. The name says it all:
Category Archives: remainders
The Broken Window Theory
Brilliant article about fixing problems right away or they will inevitably become too large to fix. Choice quote:
“Bill Venners: What is the broken window theory?”
Andy Hunt: Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in. They wanted to figure out what made the difference.
The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn’t touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works.
They did more studies and developed a “Broken Window Theory.” A window gets broken at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It’s left broken. Then something else gets broken. Maybe it’s an accident, maybe not, but it isn’t fixed either. Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in. And you’ve lost the game. It’s all over.
We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project.”
Read more here
Black Holes Are Us
Here is one of those points where science is getting a little bit ahead of our ability to control it. For instance, when the first atomic bomb was tested they did not know if it would start of a chain reaction that would start the whole world on fire yet they exploded it anyway. Now scientists believe that they might be creating black holes in particle accelerators. Cool but very scary stuff.