The New York Times has an interesting article today examining the curious fact that certain types of terrorist organizations have an unusually high ratio of engineers among their members. An interesting point to study, no doubt, but what caught my eye was this little blunder:

William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy of Engineering, is, no surprise, no fan of the Gambetta-Hertog theory. “If you have a million coin flips,” he says, “it’s almost certain that somewhere in those coin flips there will be 20 heads in a row.”

This numerical gaffe is a prime example of innumeracy, a favorite topic of mine, and it is doubly bad. First, the New York Times with its old-school print-format hubris regarding fact checking should not have let this slip by unnoticed. Second, the fact that the speaker is not just an engineer, but president of our National Academy, adds insult to injury.

Probability 101

The Wikipedia says that Numeracy is the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts. In today’s world, it should be considered as important as literacy. So let’s try doing some thinking about this problem.

What should first catch your eye in this is the meaning behind “20 heads in a row.” As a programmer, you are instinctively aware that 2 to the 20th power is roughly one million. This means that the chances of flipping a true coin and having it land heads up 20 times in a row is inded roughly one in a million. Does this mean that flipping a coin a million times renders such a streak “almost certain?” Of course not.

If the chance of flipping a single head is one in two, and I flip a coin two times, am I almost certain to see one head? No. If the chances of two heads in a row is one in four, am I almost certain to see a streak of two if I flip four times? Still we intuitively answer no. It seems likely, but nowhere near a certainty. So the task in front of us is to scale this equation up and see if it changes in character as we near one million.

Pinning it Down

Determining how likely this streak is requires a frequent ruse we employ in probability. Instead of calculating the probability directly, we determine out how likely it is not to occur, then subtract that value from one.

We know that the chance of the coin flip happening in the first 20 flips is 1/2^20. We’ll call this number p. Now let’s imagine a sequence of a million coin flips. The chance of a streak of 20 heads not starting at position one is 1-p. The chance of it not happening in the sequence of coins starting at position 2 is likewise 1-p. The same probability is true for every sequence of flips from position 1 to position 999,981, the last possible start of a streak of twenty.

The chances of not seeing a coin flip in every one of those positions is found by multiplying each of their values, leading to the rather unwieldy formula (1-p)^999,981. Unwieldy, perhaps, but your scientific calculator will quickly tell you it resolves to roughly 0.39. So the chances of seeing 20 heads in a row after a million coin flips is more or less 61%. Hardly “almost certain”.

Finding Almost Certain

I’d like to think that “almost certain” is somewhere in the neighborhood of 99%. I’ll leave the calculation as an exercise for the reader, but if your calculator has a log button you will be able to determine that you will need almost five million coin tosses to achieve near certainty. And when you think about it (using your beloved numeracy) that number seems a lot more realistic. Something that has a one in a million chance of occuring would seem to be only somewhat likely to occur in a million tries. Give me five million and it’s a sure thing.

Ironically, the Gray Lady just ran an ode to fact checking a few weeks ago. Apparently that department is short on people with any sort of mathematical fluency. Perhaps they should think about hiring an engineer or two?

Yes, another middle manager in my organization has decided to part ways with my employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Dave Corley has been a key part of Cisco since he was acquired along with the rest of Selsius in 1998. He’s now giving us a friendly handshake and showing himself out after just shy of 10 years service. His departure marks the loss of one more innovator from the team that literally created the voice business at Cisco, a business that now generates billions in revenue per year.

A Little Bit of History

Dave didn’t spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus destined to become a father of VoIP. Aafter graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1975, he found himself at the Naval Postgraduate School writing Heat Transfer Analysis of a Rotating Heat Pipe Containing Internal, Axial Fins, still considered a classic by many. Submarines, not telephones, seemed to hold the key to his future.

A sterling career followed as Dave served as an officer on a trio of nuclear submarines, including the USS Hawkbill, USS Corpus Christi, and USS Parche, serving variously as engineering division officer, weapons officer, and navigation/operations officer, with a rank of Lieutenant Commander on his last two boats.

But all good things must come to an end. The USS Parche went into drydock for a multi-year renovation, and not long after that, Dave’s career in the USN came to its conclusion, retiring from active duty with as Commander. (Later upped to Captain while serving in the reserves.) However, unlike the Parche, which was decommissioned in 1994, Dave still had many years ahead of him, and he settled down in the Dallas suburbs and entered the telephony business.

Corley 2.0

After spending some time with the now defunct Voice Control Systems, Dave hooked up with the crew at Intecom that was to eventually be spun off as Selsius Systems under the leadership of Richard Platt and David Tucker. While at Intecom, Dave worked with Richard and others to develop what is arguably the first commercial VoIP phone system, an achievement that culminated with the purchase of Selsius by Cisco Systems, Inc. in 1998.

When Cisco bought Selsius, they got a company that had a working phone system, but it was not really ready for market. It was still too expensive to manufacturer, the infrastructure was not particularly scalable, and it had a long way to go before it was really managable by enterprise IT departments. There was a lot of work to do.

Dave rose to the task. As a product manager at Cisco, he shepherded Call Manager through several years of major releases, prioritizing features, haggling with development, marketing, and sales, and maintaining a vision that within just a few years, Cisco would own this voice segment.

You really can’t think of a less glamorous job than managing feature lists in a big company like Cisco. Life is an endless series of phone calls, meetings, small victories, and painful setbacks, with very few breaks for catching your breath. Dave oversaw the process of moving Call Manager from a single NT 4.0 server with an Access database to a distributed, redundant server farm using a replicated SQL database. He saw Call Manager progress from limping along with a couple of hundred phones to becoming a system that handles tens of thousands of phones inside Cisco. He worked through complex product integrations, like the deployment of Unity Voice Mail, another product line Cisco acquired around 2000.

When you look back on it today, it all seems inevitable. Cisco now owns the VoIP business, and went from a standing start to sharing leadership in enterpise telephony sales with Avaya. Back in the 90′s it would have seemed impossible for anyone to break into the tightly controlled PBX market, but VoIP opened the door, and Cisco charged in.

Dave’s part in all of this reminds me of the similar role of Lt. General Leslie Groves played in the Manhattan Project. Historians love to write about the enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer, but Groves is the one who oversaw the enormous effort required to get a gigantic bureaucratic enterprise on its toes and sprinting to a successful conclusion. Not glamorous work, but pivotal. In many respects, Dave was the Leslie Groves of Call Manager.

The Linksys Saga

As Cisco’s VoIP business matured, I got the impression that Richard and Dave were becoming restless. My suspicions were confirmed in 2004 when Richard announced that he was creating a new group within Linksys (part of Cisco by then) to build a PBX targeted at the small business market. Apparently Richard and Dave weren’t familiar with Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are no second acts in American life.

The Linksys project was succesfully executed, with Dave in his familiar role, managing features, creating requirements documents, and convening the usual endless rounds of meetings. But unbeknownst to us all, there was trouble afoot.

It turns out that in 2007, Richard Platt reached the point of no return in his quest for job satisfaction. You could characterize Richard as an entrepeneur, or perhaps even a free spirit, but regardless, the constraints of a big company like Cisco apparently wore him down, and he exited on short notice.

Leaving Dave in charge of the group.

Managing Expectations

I’m not going to tell you that entering management at a company like Cisco is guaranteed to drive you stark, barking-dog mad. After all, there are people who take to it with relish – John Chambers seems both sane and happy.

But for some people, it can be a soul-crushing, stultifying existence – divorced from the reality of real work and instead enmeshed in an endless series of political battles, policy altercations, reeducation camps, and regular group recitals of the company song. I couldn’t take it, and at the same time I’m astonished to find that there are people who thrive on it. I’ve mentally divided humanity into two groups: us (people like me), and them (people who are attuned to management). I assume that we are of two different species.

Watching Dave’s experience as a manager at Cisco had me wondering: is he really one of us? He didn’t seem to be enjoying his new position as head of our engineering group. In the past, Dave’s level demeanor was a source of reassurance to me, now that demeanor seemed to have been turned down a notch or two.

My suspicions turned out to have a solid foundation in early May, when Dave announced that he was leaving. Word soon leaked out that he was joining Ripcode, a company that makes a video transcoding engine for the data center. (It’s kind of sad that companies today are restricted to naming themselves using the unregistered portion of the .com name space. Makes for some pretty strange monikers.) Dave knows a bit about building a company, and can no doubt help these guys get their feet on the ground and then go someplace.

Unfortunately, that leaves this ship without its captain.

I’ve bumped into this ad campaign from the sub-branded Visa Signature Card a few different places on the web. The ad trots out a list of “things to do while you’re alive”, (a bit of a tautology, isn’t it – I think they didn’t want to have the word die appear next to Visa in any context,) which includes such gems as Explore the Seychelles, Experience the Magic of Broadway, and the ever popular See California wine country from a hot-air ballon.

I looked at this list, and then went to the Visa Signature Living site to see all 31 items, and I came away with a total meh.

In fact, my blah reaction to this ad campaign has inspired me to create a counter reaction in the form of a contest, which will all be explained in a bit.

Us and Them

This ad just served to highlight a vague feeling I’ve always had, that the modern world is partitioned into us and them. You’re reading this article, so there is an excellent chance that you are a member of the us side of the partitioned set.

Without getting too You Might Be a Redneck If on you, you know you’re one of us if:

• You spend half of every holiday trip home performing tech support on your parent’s computer.
• You spend two hours every day on your RSS feeds and you still can’t keep up.
• Your pets make regular appearances on LOLCat sites.
• When you give your S.O. a surprise birthday present, you accompany it with a Boom!

I’m not comfortable with the terms geek or nerd for the same reason Spike Lee doesn’t like the n-word. I know that people think they can take back a pejorative term and co-opt it to suit their terms, but it doesn’t work for me.

Who We Are

I talked about this with my editor-for-life Jon Erickson, and he dismissed it as a foolish question.

Jon Erickson

“The word is programmers” he proclaimed with finality. (When you’ve been editor-in-chief for longer than most of your authors have been alive, you tend to say a lot of things with either finality or exhaustion.)

But I don’t think that quite works. I look at people who post on sites like Lifehacker, or work at home as writers, or run organic restaurants, and I see people who might not know the first thing about programming, but still live in my world.

And I find that the people in my world are just as diverse as the people in the other world – politically, culturally, personality-wise, they’re all over the map. They’re just one key difference: The Z-Axis.

If we consider them as being spread out on the Cartesian plane, their world is two dimensional. They have an infinite amount of space to live in, but they don’t spend any time in the third dimension. They have no magnitude on the Z-axis. We do.

That doesn’t make us better, it just means we live in our own space. Ever feel that way?

The Contest

So when the ad whizzes who cooked up this campaign for Visa were busy coming up with their list, they were constrained by the fact that they live on the X-Y plane. As a result, I look at Visa’s list and say, yeah, some of those things seem okay, but to be honest, that’s not my life list of high points.

My goal is to engage you, the Z-Axis, to help me come up with a suitable list of life goals that will make our hearts pump a little faster, actually generate some excitement.

I’d like you to send me an email at the vaguely spam-proof address on the right with your suggestions for things that you’d like to do before you die. (There, we said it Visa. Die.) After I get enough contributions, I’ll run a fool-proof survey of some kind to pick the top of the list, and we’ll create the Z-Axis ad campaign to compete head to head with Visa.

Check back regularly, I’ll add to this list as I get contributions. Once I reach critical mass, the survey will kick off.

There are no prizes and no fame for having your choice make the cut, other than any thrill you get for recognition of your awareness of the Zeitgeist. But maybe that’s enough.

The List

This list is a work in progress, it will continue to grow until submissions are cut off.

• Have lunch with Donald Knuth, paid for with the $327.68 check he writes you for finding a bug in TeX.
• Have your startup bought by Google.
• Master Perl 6.
• Buy Google.
• Create the number one click-through site for mesothelioma searches on the web.
• Switch to Linux and never use another O/S or commercial app again.
• Write a book for O’Reilly and get a cool animal.
• Remove Perl from the face of the earth.
• Discover an exploit that allows arbitrary code execution in every copy of Windows XP on earth. Use it for good.
• Solve one of the six remaining Clay Millenium Problems and take home a cool million.
• Break the impenetrable million point barrier on Donkey Kong.

Send me an email with your additions to the list, and please include your name and valid return address!

Visa’s List

Just for comparison’s sake, here is Visa’s list (with apologies to Baskin Robbins):

1. Go on a safari.
2. Do the Grand Tour.
3. Take a wine tour through Italy.
4. See all 28 of the 7 wonders of the world.
5. Eat dinner prepared by a world-famous chef.
6. See a legend up close.
7. Go to the Tony awards.
8. Swim the Blue Grotto in Capri.
9. Watch the changing of the guard.
10. Sing karaoke in Tokyo.
11. Celebrate Carnevale in Venice.
12. Shop the floating markets of Thailand.
13. Enjoy New York City at Christmas time.
14. Show your children the world.
15. Experience the magic of Broadway.
16. Take a private tour of MoMA.
17. Find the Loch Ness Monster.
18. See the monarch butterfly migration.
19. Stay at the ICE HOTEL.
20. Drink a Mint Julep at the Kentucky Derby.
21. Train like an astronaut.
22. Visit an active volcano.
23. Take a week-long spa vacation.
24. See California wine country from a hot-air balloon.
25. Play Pinehurst No. 2.
26. Cruise the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible.
27. Go heli-skiing.
28. Kiss the Blarney Stone
29. Enjoy afternoon tea at Claridge’s London.
30. Explore the Seychelles.
31. Learn how to pair wine and food.

Sorry, Visa, still pretty much meh.