Mini Mort

My earliest mortifying moment came when I was quite young. In fact, I don’t remember the experience, but my mother is rather fond of the retelling of it…

My parents met inside a computer. My dad was tutored Fortran. Three years later, after their marriage and my birth, they still worked in that computer—yes, literally, inside the computer. (And no, this is not a Zoolander reference.)

Back in those days, computers filled entire rooms—rooms that were equipped with false floors in addition to the standard false, tiled ceilings. The floor was tiled to allow workers to get under the computer and fix wiring problems. The tiles had holes in them so that the room’s dedicated air conditioners could pump cool air in through the floor to keep the computer from overheating. The sheer volume of heat that these machines generated required a tremendous cooling capacity, and the consequent flow of cool air generated a lot of noise.

Descriptor Disaster

I have a new job teaching. I get to interact with students and help them learn new topics and ways of thinking. I love it.

Yesterday in class, I held a small discussion on how to design alarm clocks. I was trying to help the students learn how to identify the difference between requirements (what results are needed) and specifications (particular approaches to gain the results).

As part of this discussion, we talked about how the alarm clock needs to wake a person up. This is a requirement. A buzzer, on the other hand, is a specification. Other ways of waking a user up might include a radio, blinking lights, MP3 player, or throwing water on someone.

In the process of generating ideas about potential approaches to waking people up, a student piped up “it could shake the bed.” Great idea! Not wanting to spend much time writing so we could continue to discuss options, I turned around at the whiteboard and wrote a succinct summary: