Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

What is a Scientist?

I have a clear notion. There are two parts. The first part is a pattern of thought. The second is depth of training in a particular area of expertise. My college degree is in Physics, but only a four-year degree. In Physics a four-year degree is only a fraction of the way to competence, so I am not a Physicist.

There is a pattern of thought essential to a good scientist (or a really good engineer). Of this I am quite certain. You need to be a good observer. You need to be a good skeptic. You need to be thoroughly analytical. This part is easy for me. My father was a good engineer. I read quite a lot, and before college had learned to be a good, skeptical, and analytical observer. The aim in college is to teach you this new mode of thought, and beyond this to transfer some of the wisdom acquired through experience by your instructors.

Of course, following the usual human tendency, I assumed my peers were at least as good at this mode of thought as was I.

In college, I did not need to learn a new mode of thought. The time in college I very much valued, as it seems that the hints from experience offered by my instructors fully sunk home. Those same lessons became so deeply embedded in my way of thought that I could not imagine a true “scientist” applying anything less.

What later I found is that “scientists” very often miss the obvious – or what I thought should be obvious. The lessons from my college professors (in Physics – admittedly the “hardest” science), suggest an analytical path that many scientists do not fully follow. This I have the hardest time understanding. Could it be that not having to acquire a new mode of thought meant I absorbed more from my instructors?

I do not know. By my standards, I am not a scientist. But … I very often come up with (what seems to me) obvious questions, on reading about the works of some scientists. Even more surprising – it seems very often to turn out that my (distinctly amateur) questions lead to interesting answers. How can that be so often true?

I am not a scientist, but perhaps I am a bit more than an intelligent layman. Maybe that long-ago acquired mode of thought made more of a difference than I expect.

If you have no idea (like me) what size KitchenAid mixer is sufficient, and what size is excessive – I can tell you with certainty that a 300 watt mixer will struggle with a kilogram of wheat flour in pizza dough.

I can also tell you that there is something on the underside of the mixer that can lacerate your finger, when you wash off the bits of dough left on the mixer (if mixing a bit too much dough, perhaps).

My second job out of college was at Burroughs – then the second largest computer company in the world, and still growing strongly. Interviewing at Burroughs was fun! I went in at about 9am, and did not emerge until 8pm. In between I got to talk to smart people in many different areas. Later I heard that I might have set a record for the longest set of interviews. After talking to so many smart folk, I was completely convinced that Burroughs was a great choice.

The reality of working at Burroughs in the early 1980’s was a bit more of a mixed bag. There were a lot of smart folk working at Burroughs, in that time. The company had all the potential needed to do great things. Yet … there was something wrong. The company was – for the most part – not doing great things. The Burroughs of that time had inherited a lot of loyal customers, and customers were loyal to Burroughs because of some brilliant work and products done in the past. Somewhere between the 1960’s and the 1980’s … something had gone badly wrong with management.

At the time, I did not have enough experience to know what was wrong, or even to be certain that anything was wrong (though I did eventually have suspicions).

I guess the interviews did me some good. I later learned that I’d landed a position that many folk within Burroughs very much wanted (and this was my second job out of college!).

Burroughs was a very early OEM partner for Microsoft Windows. I got sent by Burroughs to a Windows Developer conference in Seattle in 1984. During a lunch break, Bill Gates sat at our table, and suggested that we send in resumes to Microsoft. I was rather surprised at this. My employer had spent money to send me to the developer conference. For me to jump ship afterward seemed – rather rude. (I was very tempted, but my then-fiancée did not want to leave southern California. Turns out that was a very bad judgment on my part – both in the choice of wife, and in ignoring the opportunity.)

I may have underestimated Bill Gates. I thought his sitting at our table during lunch – and the offer – was essentially random. On reflection … of the tens of thousands of programmers at Burroughs, I was the representative they sent – a kid just out of college. If I were Bill Gates and looking for a useful filter – a guy just out of college who ended up at the Windows Developer conference through the second largest computer company in the world – that would be about as good as anyone could get.

The other way of reading this is that when given the perfect opportunity, you should not trust my judgment.

I find perplexing the gap between the performance record of Sun Microsystems, and the published perceptions of professional journalists. Professional journalists and the stock markets seem to have a low opinion of Sun, and I find this … well … stupid.

Sun started out as a scrappy little company that built kick-ass hardware and software. The smartest techies loved Sun (for good reason), and snuck in Sun hardware whenever possible. By the time of the dot-com boom, enough of those techies had ascended into upper management, and Sun hardware – in large dollar volumes – came in through the front door.

The systems that Sun sold in the late 1990’s were based on the scrappy (and very cool) systems built by Sun in the 1980’s. The per-unit price tags and total dollar volume in the late 1990’s were vastly greater than the 1980’s, but were sold largely on the reputation inherited from those older systems.

By the late 1990’s it was already clear that the big-iron Sparc platform (like all other big-iron platforms) was ultimately doomed. For the most part, the future belonged to arrays on mass-market x86 processors. As usually seems to be the case, the market easily takes a decade to absorb a change in technology, and match that change with a change of direction.

The Sun folk had a problem – very similar to the problem that IBM had with old mainframes. There is a continuing and highly profitable base of customers that use the old technology. Over time that market will slowly shrink. At the same time there are new technologies that need to ramp up, but that if sold to the old customers will not yield the same profits. Pretty much every company that finds itself in this position has trouble. Why would you kill your cash cow for a yet-unproven technology?

By the late 1990’s, Sun was no longer cool. Their technology – while good – was no longer especially interesting.

In the last few years, Sun “woke up” and launched a whole array of interesting new products, all of which look like very good bets for the future. Sales of the new products are growing strongly – though still far less than revenue from older products. The revenue from older products is slowly declining. All very predictable, and – so far as I can tell – progressing well.

What I do not get is the stock price. Sun’s revenues year-to-year are pretty steady – in fact, short of the current economic mess, they showed modest growth. Modest growth – when transitioning to new products from a declining old cash cow – is actually pretty good. Revenues are reasonably steady, growing, and Sun has a whole menu of new products with lots of potential. Sun looks very well positioned for future growth. Yet the stock price is wobbling downward. This makes no sense.

Interesting that you can easily find multi-year stock price data online, but revenue numbers for the same period are harder to get. (Is there somewhere with gross revenue numbers for the past 5-10 years?) Might explain the irrational stock price, in part, if investors are working off incomplete data. Also interesting are the somewhat recent investments in Sun.

I am surprised – and somewhat impressed – that Sun’s board has kept a steady course, in the face of the declining stock price. Given a couple years – time for new products to climb the adoption curve, and time for the current economic mess to resolve – Sun should do very well in the market. Presumably when revenue numbers head upwards, the stock price will (finally) follow.

The recent offer from IBM to acquire Sun makes perfect sense – for IBM. With Sun, IBM would get a raft of very nice products, for a bargain price. The only question was if the Sun board had lost their nerve, and were willing to sell out.

As it turned out – apparently not.

xkcd – A Webcomic – Matrix Revisited

The first Matrix movie was great. The next two – not so much.

Watching the first Matrix movie – at about midnight, and at the point in the movie where my suspension-of-belief was greatest, all the lights went out in the theater. Walked out of the theater, and there were no lights anywhere. Surreal.

(Wait. The movie was fiction. Right?)

As it turns out, the electric company had to shut off the power to the entire block, to do repairs. Perfect timing.

A question for which I do not have an answer….

Where does “capital” come from?

Or more precisely – by portion, and in the present day, where does “capital” come from? Is the bulk of capital currently hunting for a place to invest, from:

• Baby-boomers saving for retirement.
• Trust fund kiddies – or more exactly the trusts that support them.
• Large institutions looking for a place to park their cash.
• Middle-east families, looking for a place to park oil revenues.
• Far-east outfits (of late most especially China), looking to park profits from low wages and high exports.

In proportion, I have no notion where the world’s “capital” comes from. This is a pretty important question, and I have no idea as to the answer, or even if the answer is accessible.

I was never a big fan of the “Farside” cartoons, but there is one I remember:
CATV

Of late, this applies to me too often. My reading list of good sources, in addition to my stack of books to be read, is both of good quality and a bit overwhelming (at times).