Knowing and Doing

I was listening to some music from the 1970s yesterday morning while doing some academic bookkeeping. As happens occasionally, the lyrics of one of the songs jerked me out of my bureaucratic trance by echoing my subconscious:

I need to be three men in one
To get my job done
I need a thirty hour day
Two jobs with double pay

I need a man to go to work
A man to stay at home

That's William Bell in his 1977 R&B crossover hit "Tryin' to Love Two" [ YouTube ].

I love only one, truly, but... University work has been unusually busy the last couple of weeks, and now we enter April, which is always a hyperactive month on campus. Add to that regular life — tax season and plans for May travel and wanting to spend time with the one I love — and I empathize with Bell wanting to be two or three people all at once. A doppelgänger to attend all my extra meetings would certainly be welcome some days!

At times like this, though, it's good to remember how lucky I am that this is the biggest predicament I face. So: hello, April.

Someone sent me this image, from a slide deck they ran across somewhere:

I don't know what to do with it other than to say this:

As a person named 'Eugene' and an admirer of Mr. Wilder's work, I smile every time I see it. That's a clever way to reinforce the idea of gene expression by analogy, using actors and roles.

When I teach OOP and FP, I'm always looking for simple analogies like this from the non-programming world to reinforce ideas that we are learning about in class. My OOP repertoire is pretty deep. As I teach functional programming each spring, I'm still looking for new FP analogies all the time.

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Note: I don't know the original source of this image. If you know who created the slide, please let me know via email, Mastodon, or Twitter (all linked in the sidebar). I would love to credit the creator.