Covid-19 testing has been a mixed bag: Singapore and Korea seem to have been able to get on top of things quickly, while the UK… Read More »The onion strikes back: Maggie Koerth on the nested problems of Covid-19 testing
This is a nice illustration of a set of nested problems (a.k.a. “The Onion“) in development from Bill and Melinda Gates’ philanthropic work. Often –… Read More »Bill Gates’ onion
Problems gain (or lose) interestingness as their context and scale changes. Take teaching a kids to read as an example. It’s almost inevitable that a… Read More »The Onion (3): exemplar interesting problem – learning to read
My first post about The Onion looked at interesting problems as systems of networked sub-problems, and suggested that our solutions will mirror this structure. The… Read More »The Onion (2): a model for solving interesting problems
This post is a sketch of a way of thinking about how problems work, and what we need to do to make our solutions (“the… Read More »The Onion (1): understanding interesting problems
Given that you already have far more than most people in history, and are as-good-as-certain to have more stuff than you’ll ever need even if… Read More »Guidelines 2022
Your job, of course, is to solve THE PROBLEM*. The next problem down is that there’s no way you can solve THE PROBLEM on your… Read More »Resource Magnet
Educators, generals, dieticians, psychologists, and parents program. Armies, students, and some societies are programmed. An assault on large problems employs a succession of programs, most… Read More »Alan J. Perlis on Programming and Avoiding the Constipation of Philosophy
This extract comes from a much longer piece on Jerry Neumann’s blog, Reaction Wheel. Highly recommended. A Technological System is a set of technologies that… Read More »Technology (15): Jerry Neumann on technological systems and constellations of innovations
Elon Musk isn’t (just) building cars at Tesla. He started by building a car, but the end was never the car: the end was a… Read More »The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change