Categories
Participation

Warriors Basketball & The Urge to Participate

I’m taking some quotes from a basketball story and an essay from my teacher, Adi Da. The Golden State Warriors are a basketball team that I enjoy watching because their style of passing and cooperation on the court is fun to watch.

Quotes are from the article: The Charcuterie Board That Revolutionized Basketball

“There’s a makeup in every player who’s ever played,” Kerr says, “that if you get to touch the ball and you get to be a part of the action — whether it’s as an assist man, ball mover, shooter, dribbler — the more people who are involved in the offense, the more powerful it becomes.”

Kerr had played four seasons (and won two titles) under Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and had admired how the Spurs’ passing helped foster a selfless, team-first culture.

“It wasn’t just play your best five guys to death,” Kerr says. “It was play everybody. You go deep into your rotation, even if it means losing a couple of games in the regular season, just empower everybody. It’s kind of the beauty of basketball, the old cliché about the total being greater than the sum of its parts — I believe in all of that.

Here’s a short essay from the booklet, Prior Unity, The Basis for A New Human Culture, by the World-Friend, Adi Da, page 61

The Urge to Participate

The fundamental urge in humankind-as-a-whole is to participate – not to be shut down, not to be thrown back on themselves, not to be treated merely as consumers who want this, that, and the other thing.

People want the opportunity of participation.

All over the world, the energy of participation is what should be tapped.

Instead of addressing everybody in terms of their problems, their “self”-interest, their consumer mentality, their egoity, address them as people who are patterns of energy wanting to participate.

The human world is an energy of participation.

Therefore, it needs a pattern by which people can participate.

The pattern must be provided.

Categories
tech

Summary of The Coming Software Apocalypse Article

A small group of programmers wants to change how people code—before catastrophe strikes. — from the Atlantic Magazine

  • Basic Premise: Code is getting too complicated–how to make it work better for humans?
  • Example: Problem with 911 calls going out due to simple counter bug
  • Software is “eating the world” but unexpected complications create havoc
  • Engineering is 1950s state of thinking: simple failures.
  • Problem with code is that the complexity is invisible.
  • Example of hackers remotely taking over a self-driving car.
  • John Resig, creator of javascript, tech lead at Khan Academy, wondered why learning programming is so tough. He watched a talk by Bret Victor in Montreal in 2012, (Inventing on Principle), about how programming is broken, and how to fix it.
  • Khan Academy has become perhaps the largest computer-programming class in the world, with a million students, on average, actively using the program each month.
  • Bret wants to work with images instead of abstract text.
  • Programming should be visual like WYSIWYG programs.

Example Pic:

Demo of WYSIWYG program
Demo of WYSIWYG program: slider on right controls animation on left.
  • Airplane engineering has dealt with complexity by writing SCADE product family (for safety-critical application development environment)
  • Think: MDE (model driven engineering), so you write logical templates, not hand-written code.
  • Documentation is another area where what people want can differ from the code that gets created.
  • “Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered,” he wrote in an article. “But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.”
  • Programmers tend to be pragmatic and distrust the theoretical, ivory-tower stuff, which also works against programming improvements.