I wonder … lemme see … plasma tweeters, this, and …

The number of US states Barack Obama claimed to have visited during his presidential campaigning.

My age.

My personal take on Sapir-Whorf is that language doesn’t provide an absolute limit to what you can think about. Instead, it limits what you can think about easily. If the first were true, then how would any new concept make it into language in the first place?

An interesting personal sidelight is that I remember having an absolute internal compass until about the age of 11. That was about the time my family left England - I wonder if I’d internalized the subliminal clues where I lived, and coming back to the US changed the clues enough to disrupt my compass for good?

It fits in with something I read years ago … there’s a “money stream” that flows through organizations, and the closer your position is to being on the banks of the stream or actually within it, the more money you earn. As a programmer, I’ve usually been nowhere near the stream.

There are other problems with being employed as a technical person. Management often considers engineers fungible, so experience is discounted - except when your resume is being considered. I can remember seeing advertisements that required five years experience with software that had only been available for three - if you hadn’t been working on the development team, you didn’t qualify for the position. I also remember a cartoon from some years ago showing a hiring manager reading a resume, with dialogue on the order of, “I see you have ten years of experience with the technology, twenty-four patents, and forty publications. No Master’s degree. The position requires a Master’s degree.” At least this time around, I haven’t seen any ads that state “x months in the position offered” as a requirement.

Then you have the pressure. Not just feature and schedule pressure, but the knowledge that your work may be safety-critical. If you’re programming the anti-lock braking system for an automobile, or the fly-by-wire stability system for an aircraft, you are subject to worries and pressures that someone programming a media player application doesn’t have.

All of which leads up to this picture, which I found here:

This reminds me of my high school days in south Texas. The golf course on the local Air Force Base had signs posted that warned you to use a club to reach for your ball, and not to use your hand … the spot of white you were seeing could be a cottonmouth rattlesnake preparing to strike.

There were no crocodilian hazards on the course, but a group of local high school students did introduce such a beast, borrowed from the local zoo, to the pool at the Officer’s Club once.