Interesting NYT column by Tom Friedman.

The Guardian newspaper of London [published] an online poll asking its readers: “Children aged 7 to 16 are being given the opportunity to learn how to code in schools in Estonia, should U.K. school children be taught programming as part of their school day?” It’s fascinating to read about all this while visiting Shanghai, whose public school system in 2010 beat the rest of the world in math, science and reading in the global PISA exam of 15-year-olds. Will the Chinese respond by teaching programming to preschoolers?

All of this made me think Obama should stop using the phrase — first minted by Bill Clinton in 1992 — that if you just “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That mantra really resonates with me and, I am sure, with many voters. There is just one problem: It’s out of date.

The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules. That’s not a bumper sticker, but we terribly mislead people by saying otherwise.

Why? Because when Clinton first employed his phrase in 1992, the Internet was just emerging, virtually no one had e-mail and the cold war was just ending. In other words, we were still living in a closed system, a world of walls, which were just starting to come down. It was a world before Nafta and the full merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, a world in which unions and blue-collar manufacturing were still relatively strong, and where America could still write a lot of the rules that people played by.

That world is gone. It is now a more open system.

A while back I blogged about Rory Stewart’s remarkable account of his walk across Afghanistan. What his experiences suggested — to me — that the Western adventure in that pre-medieval country is, and always was, doomed to failure. What’s more, our political leaders must know that. And yet none of them ever admits to it. Instead they spout cant about bringing the West’s engagement to a planned and successful end in 2014, when they will hand over responsibility for security to the Afghans they have so diligently and expensively trained.

One significant fly in that ointment is the fact that the aforementioned trainees are heavily engaged in murdering their trainers in the so-called “green-on-blue” attacks which accounted for the deaths of 42 coalition soldiers in the last 12 months alone. Over a longer period, green-on-blue attacks have accounted for 6% of all ISAF (i.e. coalition) deaths. The significance of these attacks is, of course, continually played down — for the obvious reason that it undermines the official narrative. There is, we are told, no common thread and little evidence of infiltration by Taliban agents. The majority of these attacks are allegedly the result of personal grudges.

Unfortunately for the narrative, the US military were so troubled by the green-on-blue murder rate that they commissioned an in-depth study. Its title is “A Crisis of Trust and responsibility: a Red Team study of Mutual Perceptions of ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] Personnel and US Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide Murders”. It’s based on an extensive field study of ANSF and US soldiers to investigate their perceptions of one another.

The report runs to 70 pages. You can find the pdf here, but if you’re busy here’s the nub of the diagnosis taken from the Executive Summary.

So, remind me, why is nobody willing to admit to the obvious truth about the Afghan adventure?

Splendid meditation by Mark Anderson on the meaning of the Mars mission.

As you are no doubt aware, at 1:38 a.m. this morning, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech succeeded in landing a one-ton rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars.  This effort required years of scientific, technical and engineering preparation, resulting in a novel multi-stage process for getting heavy equipment onto the red planet, rife with steps which, if any failed, would likely cause mission failure.

The landing occurred without a single problem, including minutes during the critical last phases of the flight when the spacecraft was out of communications with Earth and ran autonomously.

While this effort will no doubt have a great impact in improving our knowledge of the Mars geology and surface, including habitability for future human missions, and perhaps information on past life in the targeted crater, there is a deeper meaning to this effort:

Science is reality.

At a time when a large and increasing fraction of the U.S. population does not “believe in” science (i.e., objectively provable reality) – or, worse, has bought into the idea that science is just one choice on the reality menu – NASA has again given concrete reason to understand that science works, and that science is not an option, not a theory, not a menu item, but instead represents the finest efforts of human minds in understanding, and addressing, objective reality.

Those on Earth who currently think that science is a political football should take note: not only are you endangering your own reputation, you are endangering the welfare of your constituents, and today, of the planet itself.

Any person or party which mocks science should be considered for what he or it is: a threat to the welfare and future of us all.  Under the influence of political propagandists, misled religious zealots, and truly dangerous television and radio empires (such as Fox (Not) News and Rush Limbaugh), too many people today have been led to believe that science is in some way an option to opinion.

Science is as optional as gravity.  Ignorance is the only real option.

Worth reading in full.

As an engineer, I love stories that discomfit mathematicians (many of whom regard engineers as a species of lower pond-life). So this one from the late Neil Armstrong cheered me up no end.

“Two students, a young man and a young woman, are standing 10m apart. Every 15 seconds, the young man halves the distance between him and the young woman – so how long will it take for them to get together?” The mathematician in the class immediately answers ‘Never – it’s an infinite series and they never actually meet’. The engineer in the class thinks for a moment and then comes up with a different answer: ‘Two and a half minutes’. Why? ‘Because after two-and-a-half minutes, they will be close enough for all practical purposes!'”

Thanks to Ian Yorston for spotting it.

Corny but charming.

From Dave Winer.

And today Neil Armstrong died. And yes, I remember where I was the day he landed on the moon. I was at the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. Thousands of us were watching the landing from a small portable TV on top of a VW minibus. I couldn’t really see what was happening, but I remember the moment, very emotional, a moment of pride and amazement at what we could do. It was one of those “pinch me” moments. I still feel the emotional charge now, 43 years later.

Great talk at Trinity College, Dublin last April. Worth making an “appointment to view”.

“What’s next?” asks Glen Newey on the LRB blog after the Sun publishes pics of Prince Harry in the nude.

The Prince of Wales in Photoshopped congress with a polo mare? Princess Anne on the can? This blogger is hardly one to shield the royals from the blastments of the public sphere. It’s not exactly what John Stuart Mill had in mind in Chapter 2 of On Liberty. There is the argument that the Sun is to liberty what cowpats are to fillet steak, an unavoidable byproduct, however unpalatable, of something there’s good reason to promote (vegetarians may substitute a different analogy). But, of course, you don’t just get the pat itself – you get its producer trying to pass it off as something wholesome. On the subject of plausible half-truths and their exposure, recall Geoffrey Robertson’s immortal observation that Rupert Murdoch is a great Australian in more or less the same sense that Attila was a great Hun.

Lovely blog post. Worth reading in full.

I don’t know who does the covers for the Economist but s/he is a genius.

Consider this one on the issue of August 11-17, 2012.

It shows the German Chancellor pondering a question that must be on every Eurocrat’s mind, but one that nobody dares to speak about: whether to ditch the Euro, and if so how to do it. I’m willing to bet that every Finance Ministry in Europe has a bulging secret file on the subject.

What’s fascinating about the picture is the amount of narrative detail it contains. Here it is close up.

Note the detail. First of all, the ‘strictly confidential’ Cabinet file (though it’s in a Whitehall-style red leather binder; I suspect the German Chancellery favours dark green leather.)

Next to her left arm is an envelope containing the airline tickets to the various capitals that need to be visited bearing the bad news. And the post-it note revealing the increasingly desperate calls from Mario Draghi, the Chairman of the European Central Bank.

And then on the other side, the black coffee and whiskey needed to fortify her for the awful decision she will eventually have to make.

Not many magazine covers can stand this kind of exegesis. I hope that the Economist plans one day to have an exhibition of its best work. Some of us would pay good money for a signed copy of a cover like this.

Here’s a good one. A month ago a guy called David Sacks sold Yammer, the social-networking-for-enterprises company he founded four years ago, to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Mr Sacks then withdrew to spend some time with his money. But boredom got the better of him and so the other day he logged into his Facebook account and wrote this:

“I think Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to and end. In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that (1) has escaped the attention of the major Internet companies, which are better run than ever before; (2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5M, the typical seed plus series A investment; and (3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you’re onto. How many ideas like that are left?”

Now if there’s one thing that gets the digerati of the Valley into a stew it’s any suggestion that their Wonderland might one day cease to exist. So Mr Sacks’s little squib provoked a veritable storm of outrage, scorn and refutation. The response was such as to cause him to qualify his original speculation. “Human creativity has not changed”, he conceded,

“and there will always be new ideas and opportunities. But the question is, how many of those opportunities will be captured by startups versus incumbents? It seems like a statistical fact that when you go from virtually no incumbents to multiple well-run incumbents, an increasing percentage of opportunities will be captured by the latter. That’s the point I’m making about Silicon Valley — we may not be running out of ideas, but we might be running out of big new companies.”

I was pondering this and wondering where to begin (just for starters, had he never heard of Kodak, Microsoft, Clayton Christensen and the Innovator’s Dilemma?) but then I checked again and there was Marc Andreessen, one of the smartest guys in the Valley, rebutting Sacks, and doing it better than I could in a series of snappy bullet points:

There are only a few competent incumbents.

Each of those incumbents can only do so many new things before you get B and C teams screwing up.

Startups continually drain talent out of the incumbents, further impairing their ability to continue to innovate.

As the incumbents become more powerful, they increasingly prioritize stability over change — Peter Thiel’s argument — betting on incumbents over time equals bettting against technological change.

Innovator’s Dilemma — incumbents tend not to cannabilize themselves through disruptive innovation not because they are poorly run, but precisely because they are well run.

Precisely.

(If you’re interested, TechCrunch has a much more extensive list of the comments provoked by Mr Sacks’s pessimism.)