Octopodial Chrome

Bruce Webster has some interesting thoughts on modifying the Cravath model for the technical field. The Cravath model is the standard big-company practise of having partners, directors, senior managers, managers, senior associates & associates who are rated annually, with the lowest performers being asked to leave and the highest performers being promoted. In many ways the model is good, but one problem is that it doesn’t really work for technology because technologists generally don’t wish to manage and generally don’t do well in management; Webster proposes a parallel track of associate engineer, engineer, senior engineer, technical officer, senior technical officer, executive technical officer and chief technical officer.

It’s a pretty good idea, I think. I’m not certain how a technical officer would keep his skills current, but it’s probably very doable. And it certainly makes more sense than putting engineers into management.

Have you ever considered how much you pay to store all the stuff you have? I’m ashamed to say that I still have stuff in my loft that hasn’t moved since I moved in. I have videocassettes that I’ll never watch because I’ve not hooked up my VCR. I still have the VCR too. I have a giant brewpot which I never use because it’s 15 gallons and I do 6½ gallon boils. I have books that I was going to get rid of by selling on eBay or Craigslist—but there were no takers. Yes, that’s right: no-one else on the face of the planet wants them, and yet I keep them still.

Methinks this weekend is time to clean house.

Surgeons at Denver Children’s Hospital are cutting out the hearts of infants disconnected from life support after their hearts stop beating but before their brains stop functioning. They are then transplanting them into other children.

A more grotesque and evil procedure is hard to imagine. It’s disgusting. It’s indefensible.

The excuse, of course, is the transplantation: they really just want to save lives. So instead of waiting for actual death to occur, they wait until the heart stops. The same criterion is being pushed for with adult donors as well.

This is pure evil. Those responsible should be tried, convicted and executed for murder.

It’s also illustrative of how widespread organ transplantation coarsens a society. It’s one thing for someone living to give an organ (e.g. a kidney or part of a liver) to another; it’s another thing entirely to desecrate a body, rendering a man down for parts like some animal. But men are not animals, and we are more than the sum of our parts.

I hope that if my own organs failed I would have the moral strength to resist the appeal of buying my own life with another’s death.