Oddly Influenced

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.XKCD, Always try to get data good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it.Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883.Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, The Russian RevolutionCreditsImage of a cow being given a physical exam ("bright or dull") courtesy Dawn Marick.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.Paul McCauley has used the idea of eidolons in more than one series. (Two that I know of.) The most recent is in his "Jackaroo" series of two novels and a few shorter pieces. The first of the novels is Something Coming Through. Here's a review. "Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was" is a short story that I think stands alone. I quote from the second Jackaroo novel, Into Everywhere, but I wouldn't read it first unless you're a fan of Gene Wolfe and like figuring out the backstory yourself. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 1995Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, 1972. CreditsWorker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman Monument from C.K. Leung, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Although I don't dwell on it in this episode, Scott uses the Soviet collective farm as a big example of a failure of Seeing Like a State.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.The Mastodon companion to this podcast: social.oddly-influenced.devCreditsSatellite image of Brasilia courtesy Axelspace Corporation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

MentionedOne of Glenn's talks on engineering.The first part of Hillel Wayne's interviews of people who've "crossed over" to software from "real" engineering. It's really good.Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969Fredrick Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, 2010David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It", 1986. The Neal Ford talk about constraints was taken down from YouTube because Protecting Intellectual Property by removing a whole talk that uses a short clip is far more important than Mr. Ford's ideas.Glenn's other recommendations:What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History, by Walter VincentiEngineering and the Mind’s Eye, by Eugene S. FergusonDefinition of the Engineering Method, by Billy Vaughn KoenA number of Henry Petroski’s books shed valuable light on the actual practice of engineering:To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful DesignInvention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to ThingDesign Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in EngineeringSuccess through Failure: The Paradox of DesignTo Forgive Design: Understanding FailureEngineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (this is quite different from the others, but by telling the real, non-idealized tale of how so many great bridges were built — including several disastrous failures and many other near failures — this book was instrumental in helping me understand how inaccurate the common stereotype of engineering really is)CreditsImage of double effect distillation chemical plant via Wikimedia Commons. User:Luigi Chiesa, CC BY 3.0. Cropped by Brian Marick.

Mark SeemannblogtwitterCode That Fits in Your Head, 2021The booksPeter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. Goodreads description. Or: free at the author's site.Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011Also mentionedRead Montague, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, 2006Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain, 2021George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", 1956Rich Hickey, "Hammock-Driven Development" (video), 2010Peter Watts, Echopraxia, 2014Poincaré's 1904 essay on creativity is described (with extensive quotes) in this article. The original source for the essay is his book The Foundations of Science, starting on page 179, a chapter titled "Mathematical Creation". The book is freely available for Kindle and in other formats via the Wayback Machine.Jamis Buck, Mazes for Programmers: Code Your Own Twisty Little Passages, 2015Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software, 1996. Free at the author's site.CreditsThe image of Theseus, the spaceship in Blindsight, is from a page from Peter Watts' website. The image is not marked Creative Commons, though the whole novel is, so I'm hoping Mr. Watts won't mind.

DDavid Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, 2021Dr. Anna O’Brien, Cows have distinct social classes and 'Boss Cows'Aimi Hussein and Racheal Bryant, "The secret life of cows: Social behavior in dairy herds" (PDF)Ian Welsh, "The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred"Paul Feyerabend and Bert Terpstra (editor), Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, 2001John T. Jost, A Theory of System Justification, 2004. Which I have not read, but I have listened to a podcast conversation with him.James Suzman, "Why 'Bushman banter was crucial to hunter-gatherer's evolutionary success", derived from his book Affluence Without Abundance, 2017Peter Freuchen, Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, 1961 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975CreditsImage of a veterinarian succussing a Holstein cow courtesy Dawn Marick, DVM, MS, DACVIM(LA).

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011People mentionedEinar W. Høst

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2001David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000CreditsPicture of a Kula ring gift item, Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997The 1968 Software Engineering ConferenceAn objection to the trading zoneFauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, 2002.Eric Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere", 1998-2000CreditsRoulette wheel image from Flickr user k-bot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, 1997Wikipedia on academic genealogy@made_in_cosmos had a tweet about tradition that I mentionedPaul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, 1998Context-driven testing website and bookThe Agile Fusion workshop descriptionPeople mentioned: Lisa Crispin, Ward Cunningham, Janet Gregory, GeePaw Hill, Simon Peyton-JonesCreditsAn image from an undated review of a staging of "Fiddler on the Roof". DuckDuckGo claims it's CC-licensed, but I can't tell. I'm gonna risk it.