Just Published: 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

O'Reilly Media has published 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know. My colleagues Kathy MacDougall and James Leigh also wrote for this book.

This is a new style of "collective wisdom" books from O'Reilly. An earlier one was aimed at software architects.

I was pleased to see that O'Reilly used one of my quotes at the top of their home page for the book ("Clever Code Is Hard to Maintain...and Maintenance Is Everything").

The tips I wrote for this book were:

• Clever Code Is Hard To Maintain
• The 60/60 Rule
• The Fallacy Of Perfect Execution
• The Fallacy Of Perfect Knowledge
• The Fallacy Of The Big Round Ball
• The Web Points The Way, For Now

Check it out if you do project management. There's some good stuff in there.

The Death of the Copenhagen Interpretation?

Wow. A climate researcher in the UK has had the guts to propose a new geometry for space-time that provides a new way of answering pesky questions in quantum mechanics. This article in Physorg (see also the article's full text) provides a good overview.

I don't know if I still have the math to slog through it, but it looks to be worth the effort.

Called the Invariant Set Postulate, the proposed law offers a geometry of space-time that resolves long-standing difficulties in quantum mechanics, including complementarity, quantum coherence, superposition and wave-particle duality. Quantum description of gravity may even be possible. Wow. That is an amazingly out-of-the-box contribution.

For the faint of heart, here is a key quote: "The Invariant Set Postulate appears to reconcile Einstein’s view that quantum mechanics is incomplete, with the Copenhagen interpretation that the observer plays a vital role in defining the very concept of reality."