Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Here’s a story from Canada’s leading newspaper about the surprising connections between the tropical region around Iguazu Falls, which I visited in December, and Canada, where I’ve been since Friday.

People said that London was a center of theater and music but this is my second night here and there doesn’t seem to be much action in town.  Perhaps it was not London, Ontario to which folks referred.  Anyway, in between test-flying Diamond Star N505WT, I’m reading The Pencil by Henry Petroski, 354 pages that demonstrate conclusively that at least one area of history has been justifiably ignored.

It turns out that, before setting off for Harvard College, Henry David Thoreau devoted quite a bit of time to figuring out how to blend graphite powder and clay into a pencil that could compete with the best English and French products.  He and his father were very successful pencil merchants in the 1840s.  As cheap German imports made the business less profitable the Thoreaus moved into supplying graphite powder for electrotype printing.  In 1853 Thoreau’s friends asked him why he’d stopped making pencils.  He responded “Why should I?  I would not do again what I have done once.”

Computer nerds are stereotyped by the public as a bunch of meek cubicle-dwellers who sit quietly staring at screens, taking orders from MBAs 6 levels up in a bureaucracy, until their jobs get outsourced to some villagers in India.  Though we might regret the U.S. government’s decision to grant citizenship to people who hate Americans we can be grateful to Maher Mofeid Hawash, the Intel programmer sentenced today for his efforts on behalf of Al-Qaeda (Mr. Hawash was attempting to enter Afghanistan in 2001 and fight directly against American troops… imagine Rambo with a copy of K&R).  Mr. Hawash picks up the struggle to reform the public image of computer nerds taken up by Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer engineering professor who was, in addition to a naturalized American citizen and member of the American Muslim Council, a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A few more guys like this and Hollywood will start making films about action heroes with day jobs coding Java.