The Gripping Hand

One of my favorite operators in C++ is the ternary operator, rarely used in practice.  I was first exposed to it my first or second year of college and immediately liked it.  It was just such a quick and elegant way to express something that could take up four or five lines of code.

I'm not quite sure where I was going with this now, because I really wanted to talk about The Gripping Hand concept in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye".  Possibly because ternary operator makes me think of ternary logic, and this "gripping hand" concept kind of deals with that. 

I think humans tend to be a bit binary in how we think (on one hand we have A, on the other hand we have B).  So this idea of the Gripping Hand was novel and interesting to me in the book.  Basically, the aliens in the novel have three hands; two hands for detailed work, and one heavy "gripping hand" for the strong-arm stuff.  Because these aliens have three hands, their logic follows suit: on one hand we have A, on the other hand we have B, but on the gripping hand, C.

One of my classmates from USC, who you could say is one of those engineer-types who needs the ideal, perfect solution, asked me which job offer of two he should take.  "Job A makes more money and is stable, but Job B is innovative and unstable.  I'd get to program with Job B."  He liked neither offer enough to pick one on his own.  "So go hunting for more jobs," I said.  Not that he liked that idea any better, but hey.  I guess even the Gripping Hand argument can't win all the time.