These are some hard questions my kids asked me when they were very young, with answers below:
I’ve been reading about Col John Boyd’s OODA Loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act — and I realized that some of the thinking based on this theory articulates intuitive reasons I’d had for liking zero defect milestones. Strategies such as “shortening your loop” and “getting inside” the enemy’s loop are those that zero defect milestones facilitate. If “Act” is the process of shipping a release, keeping the software in a shippable state preserves the ability of an organization to change the length of its loop based solely on external schedule requirements, without added constraints due to the accumulation of quality and other technical debts.
In the early nineties, On Technologies released a wonderful product, called Instant Update, which allowed multiple workers to view and edit a shared rich text document. Many authors could edit the document at once, changes to separate paragraphs were resolved automatically, and a simple dialog box let you choose how to resolve each conflict. Each paragraph was marked as to who last modified it when.
Unlike Microsoft Word, which now does some of this (but didn’t then), publishing your changes was as simple as pressing the “Update” button.
In four months Miles will be twice Charlotte’s age. (He will be 10; she will still be 5.) A year ago, he was also twice Charlotte’s age. (He was 8; she was 4.) A year from now, he will have spent exactly one year at twice her age (if you truncate ages to the year), but that year will have been distributed into two intervals, at the beginning and end of a two-year period. See the gray portion of the illustration.
Miles was recently twice Charlotte’s age (and will be again). But there was a time at which Charlotte’s age was twice Miles’s age. (But there wasn’t any time at which Charlotte wasn’t twice as old as Miles.)
A wedding is a coercion operator from a state, to an event that marks the beginning of the state. (The English word “marriage” denotes either.) The advantage of an event over a state, is that it can be used as a reference for other events, symbolizing happiness, community, fertility, ,etc., by placing these other events at the same time and location. This is analogous to time binding in linguistics.