There is a popular children's book series called Hello Ruby by Finnish author Linda Liukas. It teaches kids to think like programmers. Since programming is dead (granted, thinking like a programmer might not be), we need some new books to get kids ready for their potential future. At least I believe office jobs will exist for a couple more decades. Few such books describe corporate jobs, so kids get no edge. Children are taught how to think about computers. Adults are left to find out how a company thinks by getting it wrong. The most valuable thing in a company is talking. Sure, you can argue there is too much talk, and if talking doesn't lead to action, it is wasted. Much of the business literature is, of course, on how to make talking effective. Regardless, the end goal of working life is to talk, and the more valuable the words that come out of your mouth are, the more valuable you are. The big boss talks to the very important people: investors, the board, the pres...
I commute by train a couple of times a week. I catch myself walking to the same coach every morning without even looking at my ticket. The thing is, I never choose my seat; it's assigned automatically. I think I sit in the same carriage and the same seat every time. Is this just some form of selective memory tripping me up? I'm far too lazy to verify this myself, so I let Claude figure out whether I'm hallucinating or whether there's some truth to it. It pulled data from roughly a hundred trips this year. On the 69 typical train configuration trips, I sat in coach 6 or 7 72% of the time. Those carriages have 68 and 55 seats. I usually sit in roughly the same area, and the funny thing is that the same seat keeps coming back: 16 different seats have repeated, and seat 20 in coach 6 and seat 8 in coach 7 have each come up five times. So I was right! At least mostly. The train I typically take has 7 carriages: two for the first classes, one...