Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The prime numbers are not spaced evenly along the number line. What is the biggest gap between prime numbers? There is no such "biggest gap." If we take the number, say, 3455324898588757997446990653578956897469994337854, we can always find a gap between prime numbers at least that large! (And I just typed a very large, completely random sequence of digits: this result holds for any number whatsoever!)

Prediciton: "Dev Ops" will soon be replaced as a trend by "Covfefe Ops."

Here are this week's stats: Clearly, that spike was automated, and not real readers. But what is going on? And why do the bots keep visiting "Central Planning Works," rather than fanning out across all posts?

David T. Anderson is the guru of the Kanban movement for managing software projects. But a competent economic analyst he is not. He divides economic activities into those that "add value" and those that are "wasteful." But activities that do not add value to a final product (and are known not to add value) are not the activities of an economic producer at all: they are called "consumption" or "recreation." (The whole idea of "adding value" in production is itself questionable, but let's not go into that.) For instance, he talks about staining a wood fence for a customer: This involved a trip to Home Depot. There was also some preparation work required on the fence: some repairs, some sanding, and trimming plants... To allow access for painting. None of these activities could be described as adding value. The customer does not care that I have to make a trip to Home Depot. The customer does not care that this activity takes ...

I've heard from several professors that they don't like to put their course material in publicly accessible places, because then students will merely memorize that material, and be able to pass the course without any real understanding of what is going on. That's true for a single professor posting her material from the past couple of semesters, which she hopes to re-use again in the next few semesters. But what if an entire department established an open source repository of all of their test and homework material? Then the faculty would have access to a pool of thousands of possible test questions and homework assignments. And what about some student who went and memorized all of this material? Well, such a student deserves an A! In other words, the way to handle the problem of students looking up previous tests and homework assignments so that they can gain an edge in their course is not to try to hide that material (which, as my colleague admitted to me, do...

How much time one should spend building the software the customers want, versus how much time one should spend building tools to better enable one to build the software the customers want, is simply a special case of how "r ound-about " one should make any production process. My friend Howard Baetjer noted this many years ago , but it seems it is still not widely recognized in the software industry.

And just why do so many of my recent posts have "puzzle" in the title?