“Process turns out to be a pretty good substitute for competence. With enough steps, documents, design reviews, and test plans, the proverbial 1,000 monkeys with typewriters really could produce a functional IT system.

“People who enjoy eating sausage and obeying the law should not watch either being made.

“I firmly believe that the interests of the team will be best served if I step down and allow another player to gain additional experience of captaincy in the one-day international arena.

“Katherine McLaine recently earned a doctorate from the University of Texas for her thesis entitled ‘Whose Immortal Picture Stories?: Amar Chitra Katha and the Construction of Indian Identities’. Ironically, that made her the first person anywhere in the world to get a doctorate on Indian comics.

“Like any late bloomer, I was eager to make up for lost time.

“I have a PhD, and I have an uncomfortable feeling everytime I read articles like this.. The feeling isn’t because I am not aware of these tricks and pitfalls. It’s because I don’t truly know them, to the point where they’re drilled into me, second nature. I don’t truly know them because I was never formally taught them. They were just things I picked up in lay reading. High schools should have a class to cover this particular skillset.. But we don’t have such a class. Even though we have known about these skills for decades. The process by which the implications of scientific results percolate through the education system is basically broken.

“Randomness is different from homogeneity.

“When a school district or state contracts to have its students take a standardized test, they also purchase rights to the scores of a “comparison group,” and test vendors are competing in part on just how low a comparison group they can offer.

“In my life as a scientist, the thing I worry about the most is, What are the right controls? You send a paper off for publication, and you’re stricken with doubt: Did I do it? Did I use the right controls?

“Enter the Time Machine browser in search of your long-lost files and you see exactly how your Mac looked on the dates you’re browsing.