What Physics and Computer Science Taught Me About Thinking

Back in the day, as a student, I had the opportunity to study two scientific disciplines. Beyond giving me a solid grounding in each field, these studies actually taught me a thing or two about thinking. These are actually the most valuable pieces of wisdom I got from nearly a decade of higher education.

First, physics taught me that, very often, the way you look at a problem determines how easy or hard it will be to think about it and solve it. When doing physics assignments, I would often spend about 3/4 of the time manipulating the problem statement to find a formulation that made its subsequent resolution straightforward. Very often the calculation ended up being trivial compared to what it would have been using a different representation. I challenged myself to make my weekly writeup fit comfortably on a single sheet of paper without cutting out detail, and I often succeeded.

I learned from physics that it is often best not to rush in to solve a problem. The time you invest in really understanding a problem is typically given to you back several-fold:

• It simplifies the problem at hand;
• It creates new learning in your mind, which will make subsequent similar problems easier to tackle.
  

Second, computer science taught me that there are many ways to skin a cat. Programming is essentially a communication challenge. It is about clarifying initially fuzzy concepts and relations and representing them in code. The way you do this determines how much or how little trouble you're setting yourself up for.

Again, the representation you choose matters, but not quite in the same way that it matters in weekly physics assignments. You're not trying to knock a particular ball out of the park. In a software project you're typically trying to design pieces that will interact together and that you will be using to build larger pieces still.

Of courses the pieces have to "work", but great design means that they have a special quality beyond just being correct: they're easy to understand and use. And they will still be easy to understand in use six months from now, when you return to that code after having been busy with something else. Or when someone else dives into your code.

An operating principle here is to make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. It usually takes work to get there, but it is amply rewarded in the long run.

To summarize: doing physics and computer science, I learned about the value of making the effort to make things simple. (as Mark Pilgrim said: "A lot of effort went into making this effortless")

Now, the great thing about it is that lessons learned about thinking are applicable wherever there is thinking involved, which is a pretty wide domain of applicability when you think about it. In a future post I want to explore how these principles influence the impact and diffusion of ideas, whether they be theories, methodologies, memes, or musical themes.

Canada's Top 10 Digital Thinkers?

Hugh McGuire is wondering who might be "Canada's top 10 digital thinkers - the people who are writing, or doing, the most innovative digital stuff in the country?". Chime in with your suggestions over there.

9 Ways to Face the Perils of Cloud Computing

The cloud *might* go up in smoke.
Are you sitting on it? Be smart.

I like to think I'm pretty cautious when it comes to safeguarding my stuff, but I admit I was taken by surprise when the spiffy, cluefully designed social bookmarking system ma.gnolia underwent a pretty catastrophic FAIL event a little more than a week ago.

Meaning: The service went down. And: the data (about half a terabyte of it) was lost. And: there was a backup, but it went down the drain, too.

What happen? Did somebody set us up the bomb? Actually, no. The file system got corrupted, which in turn corrupted the database backup. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff has admitted his backup system wasn't robust enough.

Larry must have had a hell of a week. This event is of course bad enough for him and for ma.gnolia, but it is also a nightmare scenario for the heavy users who had thousands of links, annotations and ratings in there.

On a personal level, I had been collecting bookmarks there for a social software course that I'm developing. While I hadn't stored a zillion links in ma.gnolia, it's still a disappointment. But really, I should have known better than to assume that the services I rely on were properly backed up and just couldn't melt down or disappear. As Christopher Null writes, "you can't trust an online service any more than you can trust your hard drive not to crash. Sure, the vast majority of the time everything will be fine, but eventually all technology products fail, and even the best safeguards are often imperfect."

From a user standpoint, there are two things to think about regarding incidents like these. The first obvious one is how to recover from such a loss, and the second one is how to guard against eventual occurrences. Let's look at each one in turn.

A. The service died on me! What now!?

It turns out that there might be a couple ways to at least partially recover when your content vanishes.

1. Google and other search engines keep cached copies of publicly accessible web pages. If you're lucky, the googlebot will have crawled and saved a copy of pages with your content. Identify keywords that appeared on your pages or in URLs. Then do a search within the site and click the "Cached" links in the search results. (I found a few of my lost bookmarks that way.)
   
2. The Internet Archive crawls the Web and makes what it found available a few months later through its Wayback machine. You may find some of your older stuff there, though in my experience the archive is quite incomplete (for good cause, if you consider the size of the Web!).
3. Some of the aggregators out there might have picked up your content if it was available as a feed. Here's an example: The excellent Microcontent News weblog had a short life, but the site has been all but dead for several few years. However, Bloglines still has a copy of the feed, as it was left in 2003. (Unfortunately this one was a teaser feed, with only the first sentence of each post; had it been a full feed, the content would be there.) Over at HubLog, Alf Eaton has explained how to get at a feed's historical items using the Google Reader API.
   
4. Some sites republish feeds for fun and/or profit. Even if your original feed is no longer accessible, you may find traces of your content elsewhere. To find it, take a clue from Obi-Wan: Use the Search, Luke.
   

B. How do I protect against an eventual meltdown?

Here are five ways to minimize the impact of a service going down on the ground:

1. Use several services redundantly. For instance, social bookmarking service Diigo has a feature baked in that lets you post to multiple services. If one goes down you still have your links in other places.
   
2. Save local copies to your hard drive. For pictures and videos, you usually start from a drive, so this is a non-issue. But for blogs and social bookmarks, very often the "original" copy is stored with the service you're using. If it offers integral exports, use them. If not, local backup is less practical -- but have a look at #3.
   
3. Produce full feeds of your content and subscribe to them in local or Web aggregators. I'd have to do more research to see which ones keep items for the longest time, but I'm pretty sure that some local aggregators can be set to never throw anything away (If you know of some, please comment!)
4. Use an on-demand archiving service like (the amazing) Webcitation.org, which will keep a copy of any page on demand.
   
5. Make things public as much as you can. Public information naturally tends to get crawled and replicated. The public bookmarks on ma.gnolia have seen a better rate of recovery than the private ones.
6. (extra tip! thanks to Dave in the comments) With some services, you can email your updates to yourself. Just store those emails and you've got a safety copy.
   

Now, to be honest, this is the kind of advice that I read but rarely apply. Getting hit close to home will hopefully make me take one good look at all the services I'm using and to make sure I'm following at least some of my own advice, lest I burn myself again!