21 January 2008 by John.

In his book The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin gives a few details of Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s decidedly low-tech life. Souter has no cell phone or voice mail. He does not use email. He was given a television once but never turned it on. He moves his chair around his office throughout the day so he can read by natural light. Toobin says Souter lives something like an eighteenth century gentleman.

I find it refreshing to read of someone like Justice Souter with such independence of mind that he chooses not to use much of the technology that our world takes for granted. I also find it encouraging to see examples of people who do not reject electronics entirely but selectively decide how and whether to use them.

I once had the opportunity to see a talk by the father of computer typography, Donald Knuth. Much to my surprise, his slides were handwritten. The author of TeX didn’t see the need to use TeX for his slides. While he cares about the fine details of how math looks in print, he apparently didn’t feel it was worth the effort to typeset his notes for an informal presentation.

I also think of the late computer scientist Edsgar Dijkstra who wrote with pen and ink, even when writing computer programs.

If you’re reading legal briefs by sunlight, your thoughts will not be exactly the same as they would be if you were reading by fluorescent light. If you’re writing computer programs by hand, you’re not going to think the same way you would if you are pecking on a computer keyboard. (And if you do use a computer, your thinking is subtlety different depending on what program you use.) Technology effects the way you think. The effect is not uniformly better or worse, but it is certainly real.

To shake up your thinking, try going low-tech for a day.

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21 January 2008 by John.

During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!

This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.

Wald assumed that the bullets were fired randomly, that no one could accurately aim for a particular part of the bomber. Instead they aimed in the general direction of the plane and sometimes got lucky. So, for example, if Wald saw that more bombers in his sample had bullet holes in the middle of the wings, he did not conclude that Nazis liked to aim for the middle of wings. He assumed that there must have been about as many bombers with bullet holes in every other part of the plane but that those with holes elsewhere were not part of his sample because they had been shot down.

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