More on Spoilers
I recently wrote about the unintended consequences of spoiler culture, and I just came across this post which has been making waves around the internets. That post points to a study which concluded that readers actually like to have a story "spoiled" before they start reading.

The U.C. San Diego researchers, who compiled this chart showcasing the spoiler ratings of three genres (ironic twist stories, mysteries or literary stories), posited this about their findings: "once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier - you’re more comfortable processing the information - and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."

Jonah Lehrer apparently goes so far as to read the last 5 pages of the novels he reads, just so he has an idea where the story's headed. He clearly approves of the research's conclusions, and makes a few interesting observations, including:

Surprises are much more fun to plan than experience. The human mind is a prediction machine, which means that it registers most surprises as a cognitive failure, a mental mistake. Our first reaction is almost never “How cool! I never saw that coming!” Instead, we feel embarrassed by our gullibility, the dismay of a prediction error. While authors and screenwriters might enjoy composing those clever twists, they should know that the audience will enjoy it far less.

Interestingly, a few years ago, I posted about this conundrum from the opposite end. Author China Miéville basically thinks it's extremely difficult, maybe even impossible, to write a crime story or mystery with a good ending:

Reviews of crime novels repeatedly refer to this or that book’s slightly disappointing conclusion. This is the case even where reviewers are otherwise hugely admiring. Sometimes you can almost sense their bewilderment when, looking closely at the way threads are wrapped up and plots and sub-plots knotted, they acknowledge that nothing could be done to improve an ending, that it works, that it is ‘fair’ (a very important quality for the crime aficionado - no last-minute suspects, no evidence the reader hasn’t seen), that it is well-written, that it surprises… and yet that it disappoints.

The reason, I think, is that crime novels are impossible. Specifically, impossible to end.

There's a lot to parse out above, but I have two thoughts on the conclusions raised by the original study. First is that there may actually be something to the cognitive benefits theory of why people like this. The theory and methodology of interpretation of text is referred to as hermeneutics*. This is a useful field because language, especially figurative language, is often obscure and vague. For example, in the study of religious writings, it is often found that they are written in a certain vernacular and for a specific audience. In order to truly understand said writings, it is important to put them in their proper cultural and historical context. You can't really do that without knowing what the text says in the first place.

This is what's known as the hermenutic circle. It's kinda like the application of science to interpretation. Scientists start by identifying a problem, and they theorize the answer to that problem. In performing and observing their experiment to test the problem, they gain new insights which must then be used to revise their hypothesis. This is basically a hermeneutic circle. To apply it to the situation at hand: When reading a book, we are influenced by our overall view of the book's themes. But how are we to know the book's themes as a whole if we have not yet finished reading the parts of the book? We need to start reading the book with our own "pre-understanding", from which we hypothesize a main theme for the whole book. After we finish reading the book, we go back to each individual chapter with this main theme in mind to get a better understanding of how all the parts relate to the whole. During this process, we often end up changing our main theme. With the new information gained from this revision, we can again revise our main theme of the book, and so on, until we can see a coherent and consistent picture of the whole book. What we get out of this hermeneutic circle is not absolute and final, but it is considered to be reasonable because it has withstood the process of critical testing.

This process in itself can be fulfilling, and it's probably why folks like Jonah Lehrer don't mind spoilers - it gives them a jump start on the hermeneutic circle.

Second, the really weird thing about this study is that it sorta misses the point. As Freddie points out:

The whole point of spoilers is that they're unchosen; nobody really thinks that there's something wrong with people accessing secrets and endings about art they haven't yet consumed. What they object to is when spoilers are presented in a way that an unsuspecting person might unwittingly read them. The study suggests that people have a preference for knowing the ending, but preference involves choice. You can't deliberately act on a preference for foreknowledge of plot if you are presented the information without choosing to access it.

And that's really the point. Sometimes I don't mind knowing the twist before I start watching/reading something, but there are other times when I want to go in completely blind. Nothing says that I have to approach all movies or books (or whatever) exactly the same way, every time. And context does matter. When you see a movie without knowing anything about it, there can be something exhilarating in the discovery. That doesn't mean I have to approach all movies that way, just that the variety is somethings a good thing.

* - Yeah, I plundered that entry that I wrote for everything2 all those years ago pretty heavily. Sue me.



Recent Podcastery
I like podcasts, but it's depressingly hard to find ones that I really enjoy and which are still regularly published. I tend to discover a lot of podcasts just as they're going through their death throes. This is sometimes ok, as I'm still able to make my way through their archives, but then I run out of content and have to start searching for a new podcast. I will often try out new podcasts, but I have only added a few to the rotation of late. Here's some recent stuff I've been listening to:

• The /Filmcast - I tried this podcast out a few years ago and my recollection is that I found it kinda boring. I don't know what was going on during that episode though, because I find that this is the podcast I most look forward to every week. I enjoy the format, which starts with a "what we've been watching" segment, followed by a short "movie news" segment, and then an in-depth review of a relatively new release. And when I say "in-depth", I mean very long and detailed, often in the 40-60 minute range. It's also one of the few podcasts to really get into spoilers of a new release (they are very clear about when they start the spoiler section, so no worries if you haven't seen the movie). It's something most reviews and podcasts avoid, but it's actually quite entertaining to listen to (if, that is, you've already seen the film or don't care about the film in question). Also noteworthy is that the show features 3 regular hosts, and a guest host - and the guests are usually fantastic. They're mostly other film critics, but occasionally they'll have actual actors or directors on the show as well - people like Rian Johnson (of Brick and Brothers Bloom fame) and Vincenzo Natali (of Cube and Splice fame). What's more, they don't have these guests on to just interview them - they make them participate in the general format of the show - so you get to see what Rian Johnson has been watching that week or what he thinks of various movie news, etc... It's a really unusual perspective to get on these directors, and it's stuff you rarely get in an interview. So yeah, if you like movies (and television, which they often discuss in the first segment and after dark shows), this is a must-listen podcast.
• The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show - No, that's not a typo, but don't ask me why he's repeated his name either. I don't really get it. But I do really like the show so far. This is the only relatively new show that I listen to, and so far, it's been great. You may recongnize Rubin from his work at CollegeHumor, such as the great video series, Bleep Bloop and Nerd Alert. In this podcast, he basically interviews someone in each show. So far, we've got an interview with Anamanaguchi (a band that uses old Nintendos as an instrument), a discussion of Game of Thrones with another CollegeHumor guy, Jon Gabrus, a completely awesome interview of a guy that runs pizza tours in NY, and an interview with the guy responsible for writing/directing all those porn parodies that have been coming out lately (brilliant). I have to wonder how well he can keep up the quality of his guests and the variety of topics, but so far, so good.
• Rebel FM - Video Game podcasts are weird. They often spend a ton of time talking about new or upcoming games that you can't play yet, which is kinda annoying. It's also hard to go back and find an episode where they talked about x or y game (and usually the discussions aren't that enlightening because they're just talking about the mechanics of the game). IRebel FM falls into this category a bit, but what sets it apart is their letters section, which isn't really anything special, but which can be a lot of fun. Somehow, they've become known for giving out sagely advice on relationships and other life challenges. It's just funny to see this sort of thing through the lens of a video game podcast.
• All Beers Considered - I haven't done a lot of exploring around the beer podcast realm, but I like the Aleheads website, so I tend to listen to these podcasts which generally cover various beer news stories and whatnot. It's not something I'd recommend to someone who's not a beer fanatic, but, well, I am a beer fanatic, so I like it.
• Basic Brewing Radio - This seems to be THE homebrewing podcast, and it's got a massive archive filled with great stuff (at least, I've found many episodes to be helpful in my brewing efforts). Some stuff works better than others (really, it's kinda strange to listen to a beer tasting, especially of homebrew that you'll never get to try), but there's lots of good stuff for new brewers in the archives.
• The Adventurenaut Cassettes - There's no real explaining this podcast. It's just really weird, disjointed and almost psychadelic. Good when you're in a certain mood, though.

I really only have 3 or 4 shows that I really look forward to every week, but I'm always looking for more...



Flow and Games
When I read a book, especially a non-fiction book, I usually find myself dog-earing pages with passages I find particularly interesting or illuminating. To some book lovers, I'm sure this practice seems barbaric and disrespectful, but it's never really bothered me. Indeed, the best books are the ones with the most dog-ears. Sometimes there are so many dog-ears that the width of the book is distorted so that the top of the book (which is where the majority of my dog-ears go) is thicker than the bottom. The book Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi¹ is one such book.

I've touched on this concept before, in posts about Interrupts and Context Switching and Communication. This post isn't a direct continuation of that series, but it is related. My conception of flow in those posts is technically accurate, but also imprecise. My concern was mostly focused around how fragile the state of flow can be - something that Csikszentmihalyi doesn't spend much time on in the book. My description basically amounted to a state of intense concentration. Again, while technically accurate, there's more to it than that, and Csikszentmihalyi equates the state with happiness and enjoyment (from page 2 of my edition):

... happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J.S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

In essence, the world is a chaotic place, but there are times when we actually feel like we have achieved some modicum of control. When we become masters of our own fate. It's an exhilarating feeling that Csikszentmihalyi calls "optimal experience". It can happen at any time, whether external forces are favorable or not. It's an internal condition of the mind. One of the most interesting things about this condition is that it doesn't feel like happiness when it's happening (page 3):

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments of our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue - yet these could have been the best moments of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery - or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life - that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

This is an interesting observation. The best times of our lives are often hectic, busy, and frustrating while they're happening, and yet the feeling of satisfaction we get after-the-fact seems worth the effort. Interestingly, since Flow is a state of mind, experiences that are normally passive can become a flow activity through taking a more active role. Csikszentmihalyi makes an interesting distinction between "pleasure" and "enjoyment" (page 46):

Experiences that give pleasure can also give enjoyment, but the two sensations are quite different. For instance, everyone takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food, however, is more difficult. A gourmet enjoys eating, as does anyone who pays enough attention to a meal so as to discriminate the various sensations provided by it. As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention. A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.

As someone who watches a lot of movies and reads a lot of books, I can definitely see what Csikszentmihalyi is saying here. Reading a good book will not always be a passive activity, but a dialogue². Rarely do I accept what someone has written unconditionally or without reserve. For instance, in the passage above, I remember thinking about how arbitrary Csikszentmihalyi's choice of terms was - would the above passage be any different if we switched "pleasure" and "enjoyment"? Ultimately, that doesn't really matter. Csikszentmihalyi's point is that there's a distinction between hedonistic, passive experiences and complex, active experiences.

There is, of course, a limit to what we can experience. In a passage that is much more concise than my post on Interrupts and Context Switching, Csikszentmihalyi expands on this concept:

Unfortunately, the nervous system has definite limits on how much information it can process at any given time. There are just so many "events" that can appear in consciousness and be recognized and handled appropriately before they begin to crowd each other out. Walking across a room while chewing bubble gum at the same time is not too difficult, even though some statesmen have been alleged to be unable to do it; but, in fact, there is not that much more that can be done concurrently. Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of those activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

In other words, human beings are kinda like computers in that we execute instructions in a serial fashion, and things like context switches are quite disruptive to the concept of optimal experience³.

Given all of the above, it's easy to see why there isn't really an easy answer about how to cultivate flow. Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist and is thus quite careful about how he phrases these things. His research is extensive, but necessarily imprecise. Nevertheless, he has identified eight overlapping "elements of enjoyment" that are usually present during flow. Through his extensive interviews, he has noticed at least a few of these major components come up whenever someone discusses a flow activity. A quick summary of the components (pages 48-67):

• A Challenging Activity that Requires Skills - This is pretty self explanatory, but it should also be noted that "challenging" does not mean "impossible". We need to confront tasks which push our boundaries, but which we also actually have a chance of completing.
• The Merging of Action and Awareness - When all of our energy is concentrated on the relevant stimuli. This is related to some of the below components.
• Clear Goals and Feedback - These are actually two separate components, but they are interrelated and on a personal level, I feel like these are the most important of the components... or at least, one of the most difficult. In particular, accurate feedback and measurement are much more difficult than they sound. Sure, for some activities, they're simple and easy, but for a lot of more complex ones, the metrics either don't exist or are too obtuse. This is something I struggle with in my job. There are certain metrics that are absolute and pretty easy to track, but there are others that are more subjective and exceedingly difficult to quantify.
• Concentration on the Task at Hand - Very much related to the second point above, this particular component is all about how that sort of intense concentration removes from awareness all the worries and frustrations of everyday life. You are so focused on your task that there is no room in your mind for irrelevant information.
• The Paradox of Control - Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. To look at this another way, you could see it as a lack of worry about losing control. The paradox comes into play because this feeling is somewhat illusory. What's important is the "possibility, rather than the actuality, of control."
• The Loss of Self-Consciousness - Again related to a couple of the above, this one is about how when you're involved in flow, concern about the self disappears. Being so engrossed in a project or a novel or whatever that you forget to eat lunch, and things along those lines. Interestingly, this sort of thing eventually does lead to a sense of self that emerges stronger after the activity has ended.
• The Transformation of Time - The sense of duration of time is altered. Hours pass by in minutes, or conversely, minutes pass by in what seem like hours. As Einstein once said: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

So what are the implications of all this? There were a few things that kept coming to mind while reading this book.

First, to a large extent, I think this helps explain why video games are so popular. Indeed, many of the flow activities in the book are games or sports. Chess, swimming, dancing, etc... He doesn't mention video games specifically, but they seem to fit the mold. Skills are certainly involved in video games. They require concentration and thus often lead to a loss of self-consciousness and lack of awareness of the outside world. They cause you to lose track of time. They permit a palpable sense of control over their digital environment (indeed, the necessity of a limited paradigm of reality is essential to video games, which lends the impression of control and agency to the player). And perhaps most importantly, the goals are usually very clear and the feedback is nearly instantaneous. It's not uncommon for people to refer to video games in terms of addiction, which brings up an interesting point about flow (page 70):

The flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self. But whether the consequences of any particular instance of flow is good in a larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria. The same is true, however, of all human activities, whether science, religion, or politics.

Flow is value neutral. In the infamous words of Buckethead, "Like the atom, the flyswatter can be a force for great good or great evil." So while video games could certainly be a flow activity, are they a good activity? That is usually where the controversy stems from. I believe the flow achieved during video game playing to be valuable, but I can also see why some wouldn't feel that way. Since flow is an internal state of the mind, it's difficult to observe just how that condition is impacting a given person.

Another implication that kept occurring to me throughout the book is what's being called "The gamification of everything". The idea is to use the techniques of game design to get people interested in what are normally non-game activities. This concept is gaining traction all over the place, but especially in business. For example, Target encouraged their cashiers to speed up checkout of customers by instituting a system of scoring and leaderboards to give cashiers instant feedback. In the book, Csikszentmihalyi recounts several examples of employees in seemingly boring jobs, such as assembly lines, who have turned their job from a tedious bore to a flow activity thanks to measurement and feedback. There are a lot of internet startups that use techniques from gaming to enhance their services. Many use an awards system with points and leaderboards. Take FourSquare, with its badges and "Mayorships", which turns "going out" (to restaurants, bars, and other commercial establishments) into a game. Daily Burn uses game mechanics to help people lose weight. Mint.com is a service that basically turns personal finance into a game. The potential examples are almost infinite⁴.

Again, none of this is necessarily a "good" thing. If Target employees are gamed into checking out faster, are they sacrificing accuracy in the name of speed? What is actually gained by being the "mayor" of a bar in Foursquare? Indeed, many marketing schemes that revolve around the gamification of everything are essentially ways to "trick" customers or "exploit" psychology for profit. I don't really have a problem with this, but I do think it's an interesting trend, and its basis is the flow created by playing games.

On a more personal note, one thing I can't help but notice is that my latest hobby of homebrewing beer seems, at first glance, to be a poor flow activity. Or, at least, the feedback part of the process is not very good. When you brew a beer, you have to wait a few weeks after brew day to bottle or keg your beer, then you have to wait some time after that (less if you keg) before you can actually taste the beer to see how it came out (sure, you can drink the unfermented wort or the uncarbonated/unconditioned beer after primary fermentation, but that's not an exact measurement, and even then, you have to wait long periods of time). On the other hand, flow is an internal state of mind. The process of brewing the beer in the first place has many places for concentration and smaller bits of feedback. When I thought about it more, I feel like those three hours are, in themselves, something of a flow activity. The fact that I get to try it a few weeks/months later to see how it turned out is just an added bonus. Incidentally, the saison I brewed a few weeks ago? It seems to have turned out well - I think it's my best batch yet.

In case you can't tell, I really enjoyed this book, and as longwinded as this post turned out, there's a ton of great material in the book that I'm only touching on. I'll leave you with a quite that seems to sum things up pretty well (page 213): "Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy."

¹ - I guess it's a good thing that I'm writing this as opposed to speaking about it, as I have no idea how to pronounce any part of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's name.

² - Which is not to take away the power of books or movies where you sit down, turn your brain off, and veg out for a while. Hey, I think True Blood is coming on soon...

³ - This is, of course, a massive simplification of a subject that we don't even really understand that well. My post on Interrupts and Context Switching goes into more detail, but even that is lacking in a truly detailed understanding of the conscious mind.

⁴ - I have to wonder how familiar Casinos are with these concepts. I'm not talking about the games of chance themselves, though that is also a good example of a flow activity (and you can see why gambling addiction could be a problem as a result). Take, for example, blackjack. The faster the dealer gets through a hand of blackjack, the higher the throughput of the table, and thus the more money a Casino would make. Casinos are all about probability, and the higher the throughput, the bigger their take. I seriously wonder if blackjack dealers are measured in some way (in terms of timing, not money).



How Boyd Wrote
I'm currently reading a biography of John Boyd, and in light of Sunday's post, I found a recent chapter particularly interesting. Boyd was a Fighter Pilot in the Air Force. He flew in Korea, made a real name for himself at Fighter Weapons School (which was later copied by the Navy - you may have heard of their version: Top Gun), and spent the latter part of his career working on groundbreaking strategic theories. He was an instructor at FWS for several years, and before leaving, he made his first big contributions to the Air Force. He wrote a tactics manual called Aerial Attack Study. Despite the passage of Vietnam and the Gulf War, nothing substantial has been added to it. It's served as the official tactics manual all over the world for over 40 years (actually, more like 50 at this point).

And Boyd almost didn't write it. Robert Coram (the author of the aforementioned biography) summarizes the unconventional manner in which the manual was written (on page 104 of my edition):

Boyd could not write the manual and continue flying and teaching; there simply wasn't enough time. Plus, the idea of sitting down at a desk and spending hundreds of hours writing a long document brought him to the edge of panic. He was a talker, not a writer. When he talked his ideas tumbled back and forth and he fed off the class and distilled his thoughts to the essence. But writing meant precision. And once on paper, the ideas could not be changed. ...

Spradling came up with the solution. "John, don't make this a big thing. We have some good Dictaphones. Why don't you just dictate the damn thing?"

It's a subject I didn't really cover much in my last post: the method of communication can impact the actual message. The way we communicate changes the way we think. Would Boyd's work have been as great if he didn't dictate it? Maybe, but it probably wouldn't have been the same.

Incidentally, I don't normally go in for biographies, but this is an excellent book so far. Part of that may be that Boyd is a genuinely interesting guy and that he was working on stuff that interests me, but I'm still quite enjoying myself.



Communication
About two years ago (has it really been that long!?), I wrote a post about Interrupts and Context Switching. As long and ponderous as that post was, it was actually meant to be part of a larger series of posts. This post is meant to be the continuation of that original post and hopefully, I'll be able to get through the rest of the series in relatively short order (instead of dithering for another couple years). While I'm busy providing context, I should also note that this series was also planned for my internal work blog, but in the spirit of arranging my interests in parallel (and because I don't have that much time at work dedicated to blogging on our intranet), I've decided to publish what I can here. Obviously, some of the specifics of my workplace have been removed from what follows, but it should still contain enough general value to be worthwhile.

In the previous post, I wrote about how computers and humans process information and in particular, how they handle switching between multiple different tasks. It turns out that computers are much better at switching tasks than humans are (for reasons belabored in that post). When humans want to do something that requires a lot of concentration and attention, such as computer programming or complex writing, they tend to work best when they have large amounts of uninterrupted time and can work in an environment that is quiet and free of distractions. Unfortunately, such environments can be difficult to find. As such, I thought it might be worth examining the source of most interruptions and distractions: communication.

Of course, this is a massive subject that can't even be summarized in something as trivial as a blog post (even one as long and bloviated as this one is turning out to be). That being said, it's worth examining in more detail because most interruptions we face are either directly or indirectly attributable to communication. In short, communication forces us to do context switching, which, as we've already established, is bad for getting things done.

Let's say that you're working on something large and complex. You've managed to get started and have reached a mental state that psychologists refer to as flow (also colloquially known as being "in the zone"). Flow is basically a condition of deep concentration and immersion. When you're in this state, you feel energized and often don't even recognize the passage of time. Seemingly difficult tasks no longer feel like they require much effort and the work just kinda... flows. Then someone stops by your desk to ask you an unrelated question. As a nice person and an accomodating coworker, you stop what you're doing, listen to the question and hopefully provide a helpful answer. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (we all enjoy helping other people out from time to time) but it also represents a series of context switches that would most likely break you out of your flow.

Not all work requires you to reach a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in complex tasks like engineering, computer programming, design, or in-depth writing, flow is a necessity. Unfortunately, flow is somewhat fragile. It doesn't happen instantaneously; it requires a transition period where you refamiliarize yourself with the task at hand and the myriad issues and variables you need to consider. When your collegue departs and you can turn your attention back to the task at hand, you'll need to spend some time getting your brain back up to speed.

In isolation, the kind of interruption described above might still be alright every now and again, but imagine if the above scenario happened a couple dozen times in a day. If you're supposed to be working on something complicated, such a series of distractions would be disasterous. Unfortunately, I work for a 24/7 retail company and the nature of our business sometimes requires frequen interruptions and thus there are times when I am in a near constant state of context switching. Noe of this is to say I'm not part of the problem. I am certainly guilty of interrupting others, sometimes frequently, when I need some urgent information. This makes working on particularly complicated problems extremely difficult.

In the above example, there are only two people involved: you and the person asking you a question. However, in most workplace environments, that situation indirectly impacts the people around you as well. If they're immersed in their work, an unrelated conversation two cubes down may still break them out of their flow and slow their progress. This isn't nearly as bad as some workplaces that have a public address system - basically a way to interrupt hundreds or even thousands of people in order to reach one person - but it does still represent a challenge.

Now, the really insideous part about all this is that communication is really a good thing, a necessary thing. In a large scale organization, no one person can know everything, so communication is unavoidable. Meetings and phone calls can be indispensible sources of information and enablers of collaboration. The trick is to do this sort of thing in a way that interrupts as few people as possible. In some cases, this will be impossible. For example, urgency often forces disruptive communication (because you cannot afford to wait for an answer, you will need to be more intrusive). In other cases, there are ways to minimize the impact of frequent communication.

One way to minimize communication is to have frequently requested information documented in a common repository, so that if someone has a question, they can find it there instead of interrupting you (and potentially those around you). Naturally, this isn't quite as effective as we'd like, mostly because documenting information is a difficult and time consuming task in itself and one that often gets left out due to busy schedules and tight timelines. It turns out that documentation is hard! A while ago, Shamus wrote a terrific rant about technical documentation:

The stereotype is that technical people are bad at writing documentation. Technical people are supposedly inept at organizing information, bad at translating technical concepts into plain English, and useless at intuiting what the audience needs to know. There is a reason for this stereotype. It’s completely true.

I don't think it's quite as bad as Shamus points out, mostly because I think that most people suffer from the same issues as technical people. Technology tends to be complex and difficult to explain in the first place, so it's just more obvious there. Technology is also incredibly useful because it abstracts many difficult tasks, often through the use of metaphors. But when a user experiences the inevitable metaphor shear, they have to confront how the system really works, not the easy abstraction they've been using. This descent into technical details will almost always be a painful one, no matter how well documented something is, which is part of why documentation gets short shrift. I think the fact that there actually is documentation is usually a rather good sign. Then again, lots of things aren't documented at all.

There are numerous challenges for a documentation system. It takes resources, time, and motivation to write. It can become stale and inaccurate (sometimes this can happen very quickly) and thus it requires a good amount of maintenance (this can involve numerous other topics, such as version histories, automated alert systems, etc...). It has to be stored somewhere, and thus people have to know where and how to find it. And finally, the system for building, storing, maintaining, and using documentation has to be easy to learn and easy to use. This sounds all well and good, but in practice, it's a nonesuch beast. I don't want to get too carried away talking about documentation, so I'll leave it at that (if you're still interested, that nonesuch beast article is quite good). Ultimately, documentation is a good thing, but it's obviously not the only way to minimize communication strain.

I've previously mentioned that computer programming is one of those tasks that require a lot of concentration. As such, most programmers abhor interruptions. Interestingly, communication technology has been becoming more and more reliant on software. As such, it should be no surprise that a lot of new tools for communication are asynchronous, meaning that the exchange of information happens at each participant's own convenience. Email, for example, is asynchronous. You send an email to me. I choose when I want to review my messages and I also choose when I want to respond. Theoretically, email does not interrupt me (unless I use automated alerts for new email, such as the default Outlook behavior) and thus I can continue to work, uninterrupted.

The aformentioned documentation system is also a form of asynchronous communication and indeed, most of the internet itself could be considered a form of documentation. Even the communication tools used on the web are mostly asynchronous. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, message boards/forums, RSS and aggregators are all reliant on asynchronous communication. Mobile phones are obviously very popular, but I bet that SMS texting (which is asynchronous) is used just as much as voice, if not moreso (at least, for younger people). The only major communication tools invented in the past few decades that wouldn't be asynchronous are instant messaging and chat clients. And even those systems are often used in a more asynchronous way than traditional speech or conversation. (I suppose web conferencing is a relatively new communication tool, though it's really just an extension of conference calls.)

The benefit of asynchronous communication is, of course, that it doesn't (or at least it shouldn't) represent an interruption. If you're immersed in a particular task, you don't have to stop what you're doing to respond to an incoming communication request. You can deal with it at your own convenience. Furthermore, such correspondence (even in a supposedly short-lived medium like email) is usually stored for later reference. Such records are certainly valuable resources. Unfortunately, asynchronous communication has it's own set of difficulties as well.

Miscommunication is certainly a danger in any case, but it seems more prominent in the world of asynchronous communication. Since there is no easy back-and-forth in such a method, there is no room for clarification and one is often left only with their own interpretation. Miscommunication is doubly challenging because it creates an ongoing problem. What could have been a single conversation has now ballooned into several asynchronous touch-points and even the potential for wasted work.

One of my favorite quotations is from Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how the Truth is mangled and torn!

It's difficult to beat the endless nuance of face-to-face communication, and for some discussions, nothing else will do. But as Lindbergh notes, communication is, in itself, a difficult proposition. Difficult, but necessary. About the best we can do is to attempt to minimize the misunderstanding.

I suppose one way to mitigate the possibility of miscommunication is to formalize the language in which the discussion is happening. This is easier said than done, as our friends in the legal department would no doubt say. Take a close look at a formal legal contract and you can clearly see the flaws in formal language. They are ostensibly written in English, but they require a lot of effort to compose or to read. Even then, opportunities for miscommunication or loopholes exist. Such a process makes sense when dealing with two separate organizations that each have their own agenda. But for internal collaboration purposes, such a formalization of communication would be disastrous.

You could consider computer languages a form of formal communication, but for most practical purposes, this would also fall short of a meaningful method of communication. At least, with other humans. The point of a computer language is to convert human thought into computational instructions that can be carried out in an almost mechanical fashion. While such a language is indeed very formal, it is also tedious, unintuitive, and difficult to compose and read. Our brains just don't work like that. Not to mention the fact that most of the communication efforts I'm talking about are the precursors to the writing of a computer program!

Despite all of this, a light formalization can be helpful and the fact that teams are required to produce important documentation practically requires a compromise between informal and formal methods of communication. In requirements specifications, for instance, I have found it quite beneficial to formally define various systems, acronyms, and other jargon that is referenced later in the document. This allows for a certain consistency within the document itself, and it also helps establish guidelines surrounding meaningful dialogue outside of the document. Of course, it wouldn't quite be up to legal standards and it would certainly lack the rigid syntax of computer languages, but it can still be helpful.

I am not an expert in linguistics, but it seems to me that spoken language is much richer and more complex than written language. Spoken language features numerous intricacies and tonal subtleties such as inflections and pauses. Indeed, spoken language often contains its own set of grammatical patterns which can be different than written language. Furthermore, face-to-face communication also consists of body language and other signs that can influence the meaning of what is said depending on the context in which it is spoken. This sort of nuance just isn't possible in written form.

This actually illustrates a wider problem. Again, I'm no linguist and haven't spent a ton of time examining the origins of language, but it seems to me that language emerged as a more immediate form of communication than what we use it for today. In other words, language was meant to be ephemeral, but with the advent of written language and improved technological means for recording communication (which are, historically, relatively recent developments), we're treating it differently. What was meant to be short-lived and transitory is now enduring and long-lived. As a result, we get things like the ever changing concept of political-correctness. Or, more relevant to this discussion, we get the aforementioned compromise between formal and informal language.

Another drawback to asynchronous communication is the propensity for over-communication. The CC field in an email can be a dangerous thing. It's very easy to broadcast your work out to many people, but the more this happens, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the incoming stimuli. Also, the language used in such a communication may be optimized for one type of reader, while the audience may be more general. This applies to other asynchronous methods as well. Documentation in a wiki is infamously difficult to categorize and find later. When you have an army of volunteers (as Wikipedia does), it's not as large a problem. But most organizations don't have such luxuries. Indeed, we're usually lucky if something is documented at all, let alone well organized and optimized.

The obvious question, which I've skipped over for most of this post (and, for that matter, the previous post), is: why communicate in the first place? If there are so many difficulties that arise out of communication, why not minimize such frivolities so that we can get something done?

Indeed, many of the greatest works in history were created by one mind. Sometimes, two. If I were to ask you to name the greatest inventor of all time, what would you say? Leonardo da Vinci or perhaps Thomas Edison. Both had workshops consisting of many helping hands, but their greatest ideas and conceptual integrity came from one man. Great works of literature? Shakespeare is the clear choice. Music? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Painting? da Vinci (again!), Rembrandt, Michelangelo. All individuals! There are collaborations as well, but usually only among two people. The Wright brothers, Gilbert and Sullivan, and so on.

So why has design and invention gone from solo efforts to group efforts? Why do we know the names of most of the inventors of 19th and early 20th century innovations, but not later achievements? For instance, who designed the Saturn V rocket? No one knows that, because it was a large team of people (and it was the culmination of numerous predecessors made by other teams of people). Why is that?

The biggest and most obvious answer is the increasing technological sophistication in nearly every area of engineering. The infamous Lazarus Long adage that "Specialization is for insects." notwithstanding, the amount of effort and specialization in various fields is astounding. Take a relatively obscure and narrow branch of mechanical engineering like Fluid Dynamics, and you'll find people devoting most of their life to the study of that field. Furthermore, the applications of that field go far beyond what we'd assume. Someone tinkering in their garage couldn't make the Saturn V alone. They'd require too much expertise in a wide and disparate array of fields.

This isn't to say that someone tinkering in their garage can't create something wonderful. Indeed, that's where the first personal computer came from! And we certainly know the names of many innovators today. Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page/Sergey Brin immediately come to mind... but even their inventions spawned large companies with massive teams driving future innovation and optimization. It turns out that scaling a product up often takes more effort and more people than expected. (More information about the pros and cons of moving to a collaborative structure will have to wait for a separate post.)

And with more people comes more communication. It's a necessity. You cannot collaborate without large amounts of communication. In Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister's book Peopleware, they call this the High-Tech Illusion:

...the widely held conviction among people who deal with any aspect of new technology (as who of us does not?) that they are in an intrinsically high-tech business. ... The researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work. We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. Because we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business. Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions.

(Emphasis mine.) That insight is part of what initially inspired this series of posts. It's very astute, and most organizations work along those lines, and thus need to figure out ways to account for the additional costs of communication (this is particularly daunting, as such things are notoriously difficult to measure, but I'm getting ahead of myself). I suppose you could argue that both of these posts are somewhat inconclusive. Some of that is because they are part of a larger series, but also, as I've been known to say, human beings don't so much solve problems as they do trade one set of problems for another (in the hopes that the new problems are preferable the old). Recognizing and acknowledging the problems introduced by collaboration and communication is vital to working on any large project. As I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, this only really scratches the surface of the subject of communication, but for the purposes of this series, I think I've blathered on long enough. My next topic in this series will probably cover the various difficulties of providing estimates. I'm hoping the groundwork laid in these first two posts will mean that the next post won't be quite so long, but you never know!



Artificial Memory
Nicholas Carr cracks me up. He's a skeptic of technology, and in particular, the internet. He's the the guy who wrote the wonderfully divisive article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? The funny thing about all this is that he seems to have gained the most traction on the very platform he criticizes so much. Ultimately, though, I think he does have valuable insights and, if nothing else, he does raise very interesting questions about the impacts of technology on our lives. He makes an interesting counterweight to the techno-geeks who are busy preaching about transhumanism and the singularity. Of course, in a very real sense, his opposition dooms him to suffer from the same problems as those he criticizes. Google and the internet may not be a direct line to godhood, but it doesn't represent a descent into hell either. Still, reading some Carr is probably a good way to put techno-evangelism into perspective and perhaps reach some sort of Hegelian synthesis of what's really going on.

Otakun recently pointed to an excerpt from Carr's latest book. The general point of the article is to examine how human memory is being conflated with computer memory, and whether or not that makes sense:

...by the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor. Progressive educators banished the practice from classrooms, dismissing it as a vestige of a less enlightened time. What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination and then simply as a waste of mental energy. The introduction of new storage and recording media throughout the last century—audiotapes, videotapes, microfilm and microfiche, photocopiers, calculators, computer drives—greatly expanded the scope and availability of “artificial memory.” Committing information to one’s own mind seemed ever less essential. The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way we view memorization but in the way we view memory itself. The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just a supplement to, personal memory. Today, people routinely talk about artificial memory as though it’s indistinguishable from biological memory.

While Carr is perhaps more blunt than I would be, I have to admit that I agree with a lot of what he's saying here. We often hear about how modern education is improved by focusing on things like "thinking skills" and "problem solving", but the big problem with emphasizing that sort of work ahead of memorization is that the analysis needed for such processes require a base level of knowledge in order to be effective. This is something I've expounded on at length in a previous post, so I won't rehash that here.

The interesting thing about the internet is that it enables you to get to a certain base level of knowledge and competence very quickly. This doesn't come without it's own set of challenges, and I'm sure Carr would be quick to point out that such a crash course would yield a false sense of security on us hapless internet users. After all, how do we know when we've reached that base level of confidence? Our incompetence could very well be masking our ability to recognize our incompetence. However, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. Most of us that use the internet a lot view it as something of a low-trust environment, which can, ironically, lead to a better result. On a personal level, I find that what the internet really helps with is to determine just how much I don't know about a subject. That might seem like a silly thing to say, but even recognizing that your unknown unknowns are large can be helpful.

Some other assorted thoughts about Carr's excerpt:

• I love the concept of a "commonplace book" and immediately started thinking of how I could implement one... which is when I realized that I've actually been keeping one, more or less, for the past 10 or so years on this blog. That being said, it's something I wouldn't mind becoming more organized about, and I've got some interesting ideas about what my personal take on a commonplace would look like.
• Carr insists that the metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer is wrong. It's a metaphor I've certainly used in the past, though I think what I find most interesting about that metaphor is how different computers and brains really are. The problem with the metaphor is that our brains work nothing even remotely like the way our current computers actually work. However, many of the concepts of computer science and engineering can be useful in helping to model how the brain works. I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but for example: You could model the brain as a binary computer because our neurons are technically binary. However, our neurons don't just turn on or off, they pulse, and things like frequency and duration can yield dramatically different results. Not to mention the fact that the brain seems to be a massively parallel computing device, as opposed to the mostly serial electronic tools we use. That is, of course, a drastic simplification, but you get the point. The metaphor is flawed, as all metaphors are, but it can also be useful.
• One thing that Carr doesn't really get into (though he may cover this in a later chapter) is how notoriously unreliable human memory actually is. Numerous psychological studies show just how impressionable and faulty our memory of an event can be. This doesn't mean we should abandon our biological memory, just that having an external, artificial memory of an event (i.e. some sort of recording) can be useful in helping to identify and shape our perceptions.
• Of course, even recordings can yield a false sense of truth, so things like Visual Literacy are still quite important. And again, one cannot analyze said recordings accurately without a certain base set of knowledge about what we're looking at - this is another concept that has been showing up on this blog for a while now as well: Exformation.

And that's probably enough babbling about Carr's essay. I generally disagree with the guy, but on this particular subject, I think we're more in agreement.



Anecdotal
I'm currently reading Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, by Clay Shirky. There seems to be a pattern emerging from certain pop-science books I've been reading in the past few years. Namely, a heavy reliance on fascinating anecdotes, counter-intuitive psychology experiments, and maybe a little behavioral economics thrown in for good measure. Cognitive Surplus most certainly fits the mold. Another book I've read recently, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, also fits. Most of Malcolm Gladwell's work does too (indeed, he's a master of the anecdote).

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this format. In fact, it can be quite entertaining and sometimes even informative. But sometimes I feel a bit uncomfortable with the conclusions that are drawn from all of this. Anecdotes, even well documented anecdotes, can make for great reading, but that doesn't necessarily make them broadly applicable. Generalizing or extrapolating from anecdotes can lead to some problematic conclusions. This is a difficult subject to tackle though, because humans seem to be hard wired to do exactly that. The human brain is basically a giant heuristic machine.

This is not a bad thing. Heuristics are an important part of human life because we usually don't always have all the information needed to use a more reliable, logical process. We all extrapolate from our own experiences; that is to say, we rely on anecdotal evidence in our daily lives all the time. It allows us to operate in situations which we do not understand.

Unfortunately, it's also subjective and not entirely reliable. The major issue is that it's rather easy to convince yourself that you have properly understand the problem, when in fact, you don't. In other words, our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. As a result, we see things like Cargo Cults. Security beliefs and superstitions are also heuristics, albeit generally false ones. But they arise because producing such explanations are a necessary part of our life. We cannot explain everything we see, and since we often need to act on what we see, we must rely on less than perfect heuristics and processes.

So in a book like Cognitive Surplus, there's this instinctual impulse to agree with conclusions extrapolated from anecdotes, which is probably the source of my discomfort. It's not that I doubt the factual content of the anecdotes, it's that I'm not always sure how to connect the anecdote with the conclusion. In many cases, it seems like an intuitive leap, but as previously noted, this is a subjective process.

Of course, Shirky does not rely solely on anecdotal evidence in his book (nor do the other authors mentioned above). There are the aforementioned psychology experiments and behavioral economics studies that rely on the scientific notions of strictly controlled conditions and independent reproduction. The assumption is that conclusions extrapolated from this more scientific data are more reliable. But is it possible that they could suffer from the same problems as anecdotes?

Maybe. The data is almost always presented in an informal, summarized format (very similar, in fact, to the way anecdotes are formed), which can leave a lot of wiggle room. For instance, strictly controlled conditions necessary to run an experiment can yield qualifying factors that will make the results less broadly applicable than we may desire. I find this less troubling in cases where I'm already familiar with a study, such as the Ultimatum Game. It also helps that such a study has been independently reproduced countless times since it first appeared, and that many subsequent tests have refined various conditions and variables to see how the results would come out (and they all point in the expected direction).

Later in the book, Shirky references an economic study performed on 10 day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. I will not get into the details of the study (this post is not a review of Shirky's book, after all), except to say that it was a single study, performed in a narrow location, with a relatively small data set. I don't doubt the objective results, but unlike the Ultimatum Game, this study does not seem to have a long history of reproduction, nor did the researchers conduct obvious follow-up experiments (perhaps there are additional studies, but they are not referenced by Shirky). The results seem to violate certain economic assumptions we're all familiar with, but they are also somewhat intuitive when you realize why the results came out the way they did. On the other hand, how do we know why they came out that way? I'm virtually certain that if you vary one particular variable of the experiment, you'll receive the expected result. Then what?

I don't mean to imply that these books are worthless or that they don't contain valuable insights. I generally find them entertaining, helpful and informative, sometimes even persuasive. I like reading them. However, reading a book like this is not a passive activity. It's a dialogue. In other words, I don't think that Cognitive Surplus is the last word on the subjects that Shirky is writing about, despite a certain triumphal tone in his writing. It's important to recognize that there is probably more to this book than what is on the page. That's why there's a lengthly Notes section with references to numerous papers and studies for further reading and clarification. Cognitive Surplus raises some interesting questions and it proposes some interesting answers, but it's not the end of the conversation.

Update: I thought of a few books that I think are better about this sort of thing, and there's a commonality that's somewhat instructive. One example is The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz. Another is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The interesting thing about both of these books is that they are written by researchers who have conducted a lot of the research themselves. Both of them are very careful in the way they phrase their conclusions, making sure to point out qualifying factors, etc... Shirky, Gladwell, etc... seem to be summarizing the work of others. This is also valuable, in its own way, but perhaps less conclusive? (Then again, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. This update basically amounts to heuristic, and one based on the relatively small sample of pop-science books I've read, so take it with a grain of salt.)

Again Update: I wrote this post before finishing Cognitive Surplus. I'm now finished, and in the last chapter, Shirky notes (pages 191-192):

The opportunity we collectively share, though, is much larger than even a book's worth of examples can express, because those examples, and especially the ones that involve significant cultural disruption, could turn out to be special cases. As with previous revolutions driven by technology - whether it is the rise of literate and scientific culture with the spread of the printing press or the economic and social globalization that followed the invention of the telegraph - what matters now is not the new capabilities that we have, but how we turn those capabilities, both technical and social, into opportunities.

In short, I think Shirky is acknowledging what was making me uncomfortable throughout the book: anecdotes and examples can't paint the whole picture. Shirky's book is not internet triumphalism, but a call to action. I suppose you could argue that even the assertion that these opportunities exist at all is a form of triumphalism, but I don't think so.



Adventures in Brewing - Part 2: The Bottling
A couple of weeks ago, I started brewing an English Brown Ale. After two weeks in the fermenter, I went ahead and bottled the beer this weekend. Just another couple of weeks in the bottle to condition, and they should be ready to go (supposedly, the impatient can try it after a week, which I might have to do, just to see what it's like and how it ages).

The final gravity ended up at around 1.008, so if my calculations (and my hydrometer readings, which are probably more approximate than I'd like) are correct, this should yield something around 4.5% alcohol. Both my hydrometer readings were a bit low according to the worksheet/recipe I was using, but that ABV is right in the middle of the range. I suspect this means there won't be as much sugar in the beer and thus the taste will be a bit less powerful, but I guess we'll find out.

I ended up with a little more than a case and a half of bottled beer, which is probably a bit low. I was definitely overcautious about racking the beer to my bottling bucket. Not wanting to transfer any yeast and never having done it before, I was a little too conservative in stopping the siphoning process (which was a lot easier and faster than I was expecting - just add the priming sugar and get the siphon started and it only took a few minutes to transfer the grand majority of the beer to the bottling bucket). Next time I should be able to get around two full cases out of a 5 gallon batch.

Once in the bottling bucket, the process went pretty smoothly, and I actually found filling the bottles up and capping them to be pretty fun (the bottling wand seems like a life saver - I'd hate to do this with just a tube). Once I got towards the bottom of the bucket, it was a bit of a challenge to get as much out of there as possible without oxidizing the beer too much. I managed to get myself a quick cup of the beer and took a few sips. Of course, it was room temperature and not carbonated enough (carbonation happens in the bottle, thanks to the priming sugar), but it sure was beer. I didn't detect anything "off" about the taste, and it smelled pretty good too. Maybe I managed to not screw it up! The worst part of the process was really the sanitation piece. Washing and scrubbing two cases of beer bottles, then getting them to dry out (as much as I could - I'm sure some still had some water in them when I was bottling, which is probably bad) was a huge, tedious pain in the butt. That was probably the most time consuming portion of the process. The actual bottling/capping probably took the same amount of time, but that was more fun. It probably took a little over 2 hours in total, which actually wasn't that bad. In the end, I'm pretty happy with my first experience in brewing. Even if the beer turns out terrible or bland, I feel like I've learned a lot and will undoubtedly have an easier time of it in the next round. Speaking of which, I'm looking to put together a recipe for a Belgian Style Tripel. This will be a higher gravity beer and probably take longer to brew, but it's one of my favorite styles and it's apparently not that difficult either.

(Cross posted at the Kaedrin Beer Blog, along with some other stuff posted today)



Mute
Earlier in the year, I had noticed a pile of books building up on the shelf and have made a concerted effort to get through them. This has gone smoothly at times, and at other times it's ground to a halt. Then there's the fact that I can't seem to stop buying new books to read. Case in point, during the Six Weeks of Halloween, I thought it might be nice to read some horror, and realized that most of what I had on my shelf was science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, or non-fiction (history, technology, biography, etc...) So I went out and picked up a collection of Richard Matheson short stories called Button, Button (the title story was the source material for a very loose film adaptation, The Box).

It was a very interesting collection of stories, many of which play on variations of the moral dilemma most famous in the title story, Button, Button:

"If you push the button," Mr Steward told him, "somewhere in the world, someone you don't know will die. In return for which you will receive fifty thousand dollars."

In the film adaptation, the "reward" was raised to a million dollars, but then, they also added a ton of other stuff to what really amounts for a tight, 12 page story. Anyway, there are lots of other stories, most containing some sort of moral dilemma along those lines (or someone exploiting such a dilemma). In particular, I enjoyed A Flourish of Strumpets and No Such Thing as a Vampire, but I found myself most intrigued by one of the longer stories, titled Mute. I suppose mild spoilers ahead, if this is something you think you might want to read.

The story concerns a child named Paal. His parents were recent immigrants and he was homeschooled, but his parents died in a fire, leaving Paal to the care of the local Sheriff and his wife. Paal is a mute, and the community is quite upset by this. Paal ends up being sent to school, but his seeming lack of communication skills cause issues, and the adults continually attempt to get Paal to talk.

I will leave it at that for now, but if you're at all familiar with Matheson, you can kinda see where this was going. What struck me most was how much a sign of the times this story was. Of course, all art is a product of its cultural and historical context, but for horror stories, that must be doubly so. Most of the stories in this collection were written and published in the 1950s and early 1960s, which I find interesting. With respect to this story, it's primarily about the crushing pressure of conformity, something that was surely on Matheson's mind after having just finished of the uniformity of the 1950s. The cultural norms of the 50s were perhaps overly traditional, but after having witnessed the deadliest conflict in human history in the 1940s, you can hardly blame people for wanting some semblance of tradition and stability in their lives. Of course, that sort of uniformity isn't really natural evil, and like a pendulum, things swing from one extreme to the other, until eventually things settle down. Or not.

Anyway, writing in the early 60s (or maybe even the late 50s), Matheson was clearly disturbed by the impulse to force conformity, and Mute is a clear expression of this anxiety. Interestingly, the story is almost as horrific in today's context, but for different reasons. Matheson was writing in response to a society that had been emphasizing conformity and had no doubt witness such abuses himself. Interestingly, the end of the story is somewhat bittersweet. It's not entirely tragic, and it's almost an acknowledgement that conformity isn't necessarily evil.

It was not something easily judged, he was thinking. There was no right or wrong of it. Definitely, it was not a case of evil versus good. Mrs. Wheeler, the sheriff, the boy's teacher, the people of German Corners - they had, probably, all meant well. Understandably, they had been outraged at the idea of a seven-year-old boy not having been taught to speak by his parents. Their actions were, in light of that, justifiable and good.

It was simply that, so often, evil could come of misguided good.

In today's world, we see the opposite of the 1950s in many ways. Emphasis is no longer placed on conformity (well, perhaps it still is in some places), but rather a rugged individuality. There are no one-size fits all pieces of culture anymore. We've got hundreds of varieties of spaghetti sauce, thousands of music choices that can fit on a device the size of a business card, movies that are designed to appeal to small demographics, and so on. We deal with problems like the paradox of choice, and the internet has given rise to the niche and concepts like the Long Tail. Of course, rigid non-conformity is, in itself, a form of conformity, but I can't imagine a story like Mute being written in this day and age. A comparable story would be about how lost someone becomes when they don't conform to societal norms...



Tasting Notes...
Another edition of Tasting Notes, a series of quick hits on a variety of topics that don't really warrant a full post. So here's what I've been watching/playing/reading/drinking lately:

Television

• The only show I watch regularly is True Blood, and even that has been a bit of a bust this season. There are some good things about this season, but it seems like all the side characters are annoying this season. Even Lafayette seems to be getting annoying. You can't keep increasing the number of big character arcs indefinitely, and this season definitely hit the limit and then stomped over it. All that being said, it's still an entertaining show, and last week's cliffhanger was kinda interesting, except that I know better than to trust that it will be conclusive, which is probably a bad thing. Unless it turns out the way I expect, which is kinda ironic. A damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, I guess.
• Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: Mythbusters. Yeah, we've all seen these epsiodes, but putting them on Netflix Watch Instantly is a problem. I didn't know they were on there until Shamus mentioned if off-handedly, and now I find myself watching them all the time.

Video Games

• It turns out that I've played approximately 0 hours of GTA IV since the last Tasting Notes, so I'm thinking that I should just move on to something else. Complaints are, more or less, the same as last time. All the good things about the game are the same as GTA III, and all the new bits only seem to weigh it down. And for crying out loud, it's ok to let people save their games whenever. This is something that I've become pretty inflexible on - if you have static save points that force me to replay stuff and rewatch cutscenes, I'm not going to like your game much.
• In lieu of GTA IV, I've been replaying Half-Life 2 on my PC. It's interesting how great that game is, despite its aged mechanics. It got me thinking about what would make for the ideal FPS game (perhaps a topic for another post).
• Portal is fantastic, but you probably already knew that. Still, for a 3 hour gaming experience, it's just about perfect. I only got stuck a couple of times, and even then, it was fun piecing together what I needed to do... Well worth a play, even if you're not huge into gaming.

Movies

• Machete is brilliant trash. Interestingly, Rodriguez takes the opportunity to address politics and make a point about immigration. This sort of hand-wringing would normally be annoying, but the mixture of polemic with gloriously over-the-top action, gratuitous nudity and violence, is actually pretty well balanced. On their own, those two elements would be cloying or frustrating. Mix them together, and you've got something altogether different, and it works really well. Also working well, Lindsay Lohan in a bit of self-aware stunt casting (I can't really say that the role "transcends" that with a straight face, but it does go further than simple exploitation). Not working so well: Jessica Alba. She's fine for most of the movie, but when it comes time for her to give an inspirational speech, it's kinda embarrassing. Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, and Don Johnson (!?) are great. Robert De Niro and Steven Seagal are kinda sleepwalking through their roles, but they're fine. In the end, it's trashy fun, and I have a feeling it will stick with me more than other trashy summer fare.
• The American, on the other hand, is slow, ponderous and ultimately pointless. A promising start, but rather than build on that, the tension evaporates as the film slowly grinds its way to an unsurprising conclusion. Poorly paced and not much to it...
• Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: Beer Wars. A documentary about beer, featuring a pretty good cross-section of the craft brewing leaders in the US, as well as some interesting behind-the-scenes info about legal side of things and how the laws impact the rest of the distribution chain. Really, it's just fun to see interviews with some of my favorite brewers, like the guys from Dogfish Head and Stone brewing, or the Yuengling owner (who seems to get drunk and spill some beans). If you like beer, it's well worth a watch.
• Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week That I Haven't Even Seen Yet: Mother. This Korean thriller made waves in the film-nerd community earlier this year, so it's on my must watch list. Seems noirish.

Books

• Currently reading: Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. It's quite good so far! For some reason, I'm not reading as much lately, but I'm about halfway through this.
• I can't help myself: four new books into the queue: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale, and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (Thanks to Spencer for those last two!). To many things to read, too little time...

The Finer Things (aka Beer!)

• Brewery Ommegang is probably my favorite brewery in America, and I recently managed to get my hands on some of their more uncommon brews. BPA is a Belgian-style pale ale. Not as hoppy as an IPA, but also not quite as tasty as Ommegang's other beers. An interesting experiment, but not something I see myself turning to very often. Bière De Mars, on the other hand, is great. I think Ommegang's standards are pretty tough to beat, but that one holds its own. It's a seasonal beer and a limited batch; the one I found was from 2008. It was well worth the wait. There are a bunch of other Ommegang seasonals or specialty beers, but the one I really want to find is the Tripel Perfection. The Tripel is probably my favorite style of belgian beer, so I'd love to see Ommegang's take on it.
• Some interesting stuff in my fridge: Saison Du BUFF is a collaboration between three local breweries. This batch is from Victory, but the formula was created by Victory, Stone, and Dogfish Head. I saw a case of the Dogfish Head somewhere, but didn't want to buy it until I tried it out. Also in the fridge: Fantôme Saison (this comes highly rated, but I haven't seen it around until now), and a few pumpkin or Octoberfest ales.

And that's all for now.



A/B Testing Spaghetti Sauce
Earlier this week I was perusing some TED Talks and ran across this old (and apparently popular) presentation by Malcolm Gladwell. It struck me as particularly relevant to several topics I've explored on this blog, including Sunday's post on the merits of A/B testing. In the video, Gladwell explains why there are a billion different varieties of Spaghetti sauce at most supermarkets: Again, this video touches on several topics explored on this blog in the past. For instance, it describes the origins of what's become known as the Paradox of Choice (or, as some would have you believe, the Paradise of Choice) - indeed, there's another TED talk linked right off the Gladwell video that covers that topic in detail.

The key insight Gladwell discusses in his video is basically the destruction of the Platonic Ideal (I'll summarize in this paragraph in case you didn't watch the video, which covers the topic in much more depth). He talks about Howard Moskowitz, who was a market research consultant with various food industry companies that were attempting to optimize their products. After conducting lots of market research and puzzling over the results, Moskowitz eventually came to a startling conclusion: there is no perfect product, only perfect products. Moskowitz made his name working with spaghetti sauce. Prego had hired him in order to find the perfect spaghetti sauce (so that they could compete with rival company, Ragu). Moskowitz developed dozens of prototype sauces and went on the road, testing each variety with all sorts of people. What he found was that there was no single perfect spaghetti sauce, but there were basically three types of sauce that people responded to in roughly equal proportion: standard, spicy, and chunky. At the time, there were no chunky spaghetti sauces on the market, so when Prego released their chunky spaghetti sauce, their sales skyrocketed. A full third of the market was underserved, and Prego filled that need.

Decades later, this is hardly news to us and the trend has spread from the supermarket into all sorts of other arenas. In entertainment, for example, we're seeing a move towards niches. The era of huge blockbuster bands like The Beatles is coming to an end. Of course, there will always be blockbusters, but the really interesting stuff is happening in the niches. This is, in part, due to technology. Once you can fit 30,000 songs onto an iPod and you can download "free" music all over the internet, it becomes much easier to find music that fits your tastes better. Indeed, this becomes a part of peoples' identity. Instead of listening to the mass produced stuff, they listen to something a little odd and it becomes an expression of their personality. You can see evidence of this everywhere, and the internet is a huge enabler in this respect. The internet is the land of niches. Click around for a few minutes and you can easily find absurdly specific, single topic, niche websites like this one where every post features animals wielding lightsabers or this other one that's all about Flaming Garbage Cans In Hip Hop Videos (there are thousands, if not millions of these types of sites). The internet is the ultimate paradox of choice, and you're free to explore almost anything you desire, no matter how odd or obscure it may be (see also, Rule 34).

In relation to Sunday's post on A/B testing, the lesson here is that A/B testing is an optimization tool that allows you to see how various segments respond to different versions of something. In that post, I used an example where an internet retailer was attempting to find the ideal imagery to sell a diamond ring. A common debate in the retail world is whether that image should just show a closeup of the product, or if it should show a model wearing the product. One way to solve that problem is to A/B test it - create both versions of the image, segment visitors to your site, and track the results.

As discussed Sunday, there are a number of challenges with this approach, but one thing I didn't mention is the unspoken assumption that there actually is an ideal image. In reality, there are probably some people that prefer the closeup and some people who prefer the model shot. An A/B test will tell you what the majority of people like, but wouldn't it be even better if you could personalize the imagery used on the site depending on what customers like? Show the type of image people prefer, and instead of catering to the most popular segment of customer, you cater to all customers (the simple diamond ring example begins to break down at this point, but more complex or subtle tests could still show significant results when personalized). Of course, this is easier said than done - just ask Amazon, who does CRM and personalization as well as any retailer on the web, and yet manages to alienate a large portion of their customers every day! Interestingly, this really just shifts the purpose of A/B testing from one of finding the platonic ideal to finding a set of ideals that can be applied to various customer segments. Once again we run up against the need for more and better data aggregation and analysis techniques. Progress is being made, but I'm not sure what the endgame looks like here. I suppose time will tell. For now, I'm just happy that Amazon's recommendations aren't completely absurd for me at this point (which I find rather amazing, considering where they were a few years ago).



Groundhog Day and A/B Testing
Jeff Atwood recently made a fascinating observation about the similarities between the classic film Groundhog Day and A/B Testing.

In case you've only recently emerged from a hermit-like existence, Groundhog Day is a film about Phil (played by Bill Murray). It seems that Phil has been doomed (or is it blessed) to live the same day over and over again. It doesn't seem to matter what he does during this day, he always wakes up at 6 am on Groundhog Day. In the film, we see the same day repeated over and over again, but only in bits and pieces (usually skipping repetitive parts). The director of the film, Harold Ramis, believes that by the end of the film, Phil has spent the equivalent of about 30 or 40 years reliving that same day.

Towards the beginning of the film, Phil does a lot of experimentation, and Atwood's observation is that this often takes the form of an A/B test. This is a concept that is perhaps a little more esoteric, but the principles are easy. Let's take a simple example from the world of retail. You want to sell a new ring on a website. What should the main image look like? For simplification purposes, let's say you narrow it down to two different concepts: one, a closeup of the ring all by itself, and the other a shot of a model wearing the ring. Which image do you use? We could speculate on the subject for hours and even rationalize some pretty convincing arguments one way or the other, but it's ultimately not up to us - in retail, it's all about the customer. You could "test" the concept in a serial fashion, but ultimately the two sets of results would not be comparable. The ring is new, so whichever image is used first would get an unfair advantage, and so on. The solution is to show both images during the same timeframe. You do this by splitting your visitors into two segments (A and B), showing each segment a different version of the image, and then tracking the results. If the two images do, in fact, cause different outcomes, and if you get enough people to look at the images, it should come out in the data.

This is what Phil does in Groundhog Day. For instance, Phil falls in love with Rita (played by Andie MacDowell) and spends what seems like months compiling lists of what she likes and doesn't like, so that he can construct the perfect relationship with her.

Phil doesn't just go on one date with Rita, he goes on thousands of dates. During each date, he makes note of what she likes and responds to, and drops everything she doesn't. At the end he arrives at -- quite literally -- the perfect date. Everything that happens is the most ideal, most desirable version of all possible outcomes on that date on that particular day. Such are the luxuries afforded to a man repeating the same day forever.

This is the purest form of A/B testing imaginable. Given two choices, pick the one that "wins", and keep repeating this ad infinitum until you arrive at the ultimate, most scientifically desirable choice.

As Atwood notes, the interesting thing about this process is that even once Phil has constructed that perfect date, Rita still rejects Phil. From this example and presumably from experience with A/B testing, Atwood concludes that A/B testing is empty and that subjects can often sense a lack of sincerity behind the A/B test.

It's an interesting point, but to be sure, I'm not sure it's entirely applicable in all situations. Of course, Atwood admits that A/B testing is good at smoothing out details, but there's something more at work in Groundhog's Day that Atwood is not mentioning. Namely, that Phil is using A/B testing to misrepresent himself as the ideal mate for Rita. Yes, he's done the experimentation to figure out what "works" and what doesn't, but his initial testing was ultimately shallow. Rita didn't reject him because he had all the right answers, she rejected him because he was attempting to deceive her. His was misrepresenting himself, and that certainly can lead to a feeling of emptiness.

If you look back at my example above about the ring being sold on a retail website, you'll note that there's no deception going on there. Somehow I doubt either image would result in a hollow feeling by the customer. Why is this different than Groundhog Day? Because neither image misrepresents the product, and one would assume that the website is pretty clear about the fact that you can buy things there. Of course, there are a million different variables you could test (especially once you get into text and marketing hooks, etc...) and some of those could be more deceptive than others, but most of the time, deception is not the goal. There is a simple choice to be made, instead of constantly wondering about your product image and second guessing yourself, why not A/B test it and see what customers like better?

There are tons of limitations to this approach, but I don't think it's as inherently flawed as Atwood seems to believe. Still, the data you get out of an A/B test isn't always conclusive and even if it is, whatever learnings you get out of it aren't necessarily applicable in all situations. For instance, what works for our new ring can't necessarily be applied to all new rings (this is a problem for me, as my employer has a high turnover rate for products - as such, the simple example of the ring as described above would not be a good test for my company unless the ring would be available for a very long time). Furthermore, while you can sometimes pick a winner, it's not always clear why it's a winner. This is especially the case when the differences between A and B are significant (for instance, testing an entirely redesigned page might yield results, but you will not know which of the changes to the page actually caused said results - on the other hand, A/B testing is really the only way to accurately calculate ROI on significant changes like that.)

Obviously these limitations should be taken into account when conducting an A/B test, and I think what Phil runs into in Groundhog's Day is a lack of conclusive data. One of the problems with interpreting inconclusive data is that it can be very tempting to rationalize the data. Phils initial attempts to craft the perfect date for Rita fail because he's really only scraping the surface of her needs and desires. In other words, he's testing the wrong thing, misunderstanding the data, and thus getting inconclusive results.

The interesting thing about the Groundhog's Day example is that, in the end, the movie is not a condemnation of A/B testing at all. Phil ultimately does manage to win the affections of Rita. Of course it took him decades to do so, and that's worth taking into account. Perhaps what the film is really saying is that A/B testing is often more complicated than it seems and that the only results you get depend on what you put into it. A/B testing is not the easy answer it's often portrayed as and it should not be the only tool in your toolbox (i.e. forcing employees to prove that using 3, 4 or 5 pixels for a border is ideal is probably going a bit too far ), but neither is it as empty as Atwood seems to be indicating. (And we didn't even talk about multivariate tests! Let's get Christopher Nolan on that. He'd be great at that sort of movie, wouldn't he?)



Tasting Notes...
So Nick from CHUD recently revived the idea of a "Tasting Notes..." post that features a bunch of disconnected, scattershot notes on a variety of topics that don't really warrant a full post. It sounds like fun, so here are a few tasting notes...

Television

• The latest season of True Blood seems to be collapsing under the weight of all the new characters and plotlines. It's still good, but the biggest issue with the series is that nothing seems to happen from week to week. That's the problem when you have a series with 15 different subplots, I guess. The motif for this season seems to be to end each episode with Vampire Bill doing something absurdly crazy. I still have hope for the series, but it was much better when I was watching it on DVD/On Demand, when all the episodes are available so you don't have to wait a week between each episode.
• Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: The Dresden Files. An underappreciated Sci-Fi (er, SyFy) original series based on a series of novels by Jim Butcher, this focuses on that other magician named Harry. This one takes the form of a creature-of-the-week series mixed with a bit of a police procedural, and it's actually pretty good. We're not talking groundbreaking or anything, but it's great disposable entertainment and well worth a watch if you like magic and/or police procedurals. Unfortunately, it only lasted about 12 episodes, so there's still some loose threads and whatnot, but it's still a fun series.

Video Games

• A little late to the party (but not as late as some others), I've started playing Grand Theft Auto IV recently. It's a fine game, I guess, but I've had this problem with the GTA series ever since I played GTA III: There doesn't seem to be anything new or interesting in the game. GTA III was a fantastic game, and it seems like all of the myriad sequels since then have added approximately nothing to its legacy. Vice City and San Andreas added some minor improvements to various gameplay mechanics and whatnot, but they were ultimately the same game with some minor improvements. GTA IV seems basically like the same game, but with HD graphics. Also, is it me, or is it harder to drive around town without constantly spinning out? Maybe Burnout Paradise ruined me on GTA driving, which I used to think of as a lot of fun.
• I have to admit that this year's E3 seems like a bit of a bust for me. Microsoft had Kinect, which looks like it will be a silly failure (not that it really matters for me, as I have a PS3). Sony has finally caught up to where the Wii was a few years ago with Move, and I don't particularly care, as motion control games have consistently disappointed me. Sony also seems to have bet the farm on 3D gaming, but that would require me to purchase a new $5,000 TV and $100 glasses for anyone who wants to watch. Also, there's the fact that I could care less about 3D. Speaking of which, Nintendo announced the 3DS, which is a portable gaming system with 3D that doesn't require glasses. This is neat, I guess, but I could really care less about portable systems. There are a couple of interesting games for the Wii, namely the new Goldeneye and the new Zelda, but in both cases, I'm a little wary. My big problem with Nintendo this generation has been that they didn''t do anything new or interesting after Wii Sports (and possibly Wii Fit). Everything else has been retreads of old games. There is a certain nostalgia value there, and I can enjoy some of those retreads (Mario Kart Wii was fun, but it's not really that different from a game that came out about 20 years ago, ditto for New Super Mario Brothers Wii, and about 10 other games), but at the same time, I'm getting sick of all that.
• One game that was announced at E3 that I am looking forward to is called Journey. It's made by the same team as Flower and will hopefully be just as good.
• Otherwise, I'll probably play a little more of GTA IV, just so I can get far enough to really cause some mayhem in Liberty City (this is another problem with a lot of sequels - you often start the sequel powered-down and have to build up various abilities that you're used to having) and pick up some games from last year, like Uncharted 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Movies

• I saw Predators last weekend, and despite being a member of this year's illustrious Top 5 Movies I Want To See Even Though I Know They'll Suck list, I actually enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, it's not fine cinema by any stretch of the imagination, but it knows where its bread is buttered and it hits all the appropriate beats. As MovieBob notes, this movie fills in the expected sequel trajectory of the Alien series. It's Aliens to Predator's Alien, if that makes any sense. In other words, it's Predator but with multiple predators and higher stakes. It's ultimately derivative in the extreme, but I really enjoyed the first movie, so that's not that bad. I mean, you've got the guy with the gatling gun, the tough ethnic girl who recognizes the predators, the tough ethnic guy who pulls off his shirt and faces the predator with a sword in hand to hand combat, and so on. Again, it's a fun movie, and probably the best since the original (although, that's not really saying much). Just don't hope for much in the way of anything new or exciting.
• Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for reasons expounded upon in Sunday's post.
• Looking forward to Inception this weekend. Early reviews are positive, but I'm not really hoping for that much. Still in a light year for movies, this looks decent.

The Finer Things

• A couple weekends ago, I went out on my deck on a gorgeous night and drank a beer whilst smoking a cigar. I'm pretty good with beer, so I feel confident in telling you that if you get the chance, Affligem Dubbel is an great beer. It has a dark amber color and a great, full bodied taste. It's as smooth as can be, but carbonated enough that it doesn't taste flat. All in all, one of my favorite recent discoveries. I know absolutely nothing about cigars, but I had an Avo Uvezian Notturno XO (it came in an orange tube). It's a bit smaller than most other cigars I've had, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Again, a cigar connoisseur, I am not, so take this with a grain of salt.
• I just got back from my monthly beer club meeting. A decent selection tonight, with the standout and surprise winner being The Woodwork Series - Acasia Barreled. It's a tasty double style beer (perhaps not as good as the aforementioned Affligem, but still quite good) and well worth a try (I'm now interested in trying the other styles, which all seem to be based around the type of barrel the beer is stored in). Other standouts included a homebrewed Triple (nice work Dana!), and, of course, someone brought Ommegang Abby Ale (another Dubbel!) which is a longtime favorite of mine. The beer I brought was a Guldenberg (Belgian tripel), but it must not have liked the car ride as it pretty much exploded when we opened it. I think it tasted a bit flat after that, but it had a great flavor and I think I will certainly have to try this again (preferably not shaking it around so much before I open it).

And I think that just about wraps up this edition of Tasting Notes, which I rather enjoyed writing and will probably try again at some point.



Incompetence
Noted documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has been writing a series of posts about incompetence for the NY Times. The most interesting parts feature an interview with David Dunning, a psychologist whose experiments have discovered what's called the Dunning-Kruger Effect: our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

I found this interesting in light of my recent posting about universally self-affirming outlooks (i.e. seeing the world the way we want to see it). In any case, the interview continues:

ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

It may be smart and modest, but that sort of thing usually gets politicians in trouble. But most people aren't politicians, and so it's worth looking into this concept a little further. An interesting result of this effect is that a lot of the smartest, most intelligent people also tend to be somewhat modest (this isn't to say that they don't have an ego or that they can't act in arrogant ways, just that they tend to have a better idea about how much they don't know). Steve Schwartz has an essay called No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”) that explores these ideas in some detail:

To really understand how it is that no one knows what they’re doing, we need to understand the three fundamental categories of information.

There’s the shit you know, the shit you know you don’t know, and the shit you don’t know you don’t know.

Schwartz has a series of very helpful charts that illustrate this, but most people drastically overestimate the amount of knowledge in the "shit you know" category. In fact, that's the smallest category and it is dwarfed b the shit you know you don’t know category, which is, in itself, dwarfed by the shit you don’t know you don’t know. The result is that most people who receive a lot of praise or recognition are surprised and feel a bit like a fraud.

This is hardly a new concept, but it's always worth keeping in mind. When we learn something new, we've gained some knowledge. We've put some information into the "shit we know" category. But more importantly, we've probably also taken something out of the "shit we don't know that we don't know" category and put it into the "shit we know that we don't know" category. This is important because that unknown unknowns category is the most dangerous of the categories, not the least of which is that our ignorance prevents us from really exploring it. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. In the interview, Morris references a short film he did once:

ERROL MORRIS: And I have an interview with the president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics organization, on the 6 o’clock news in Riverside, California. One of the executives of the company had frozen his mother’s head for future resuscitation. (It’s called a “neuro,” as opposed to a “full-body” freezing.) The prosecutor claimed that they may not have waited for her to die. In answer to a reporter’s question, the president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation said, “You know, we’re not stupid . . . ” And then corrected himself almost immediately, “We’re not that stupid that we would do something like that.”

DAVID DUNNING: That’s pretty good.

ERROL MORRIS: “Yes. We’re stupid, but we’re not that stupid.”

DAVID DUNNING: And in some sense we apply that to the human race. There’s some comfort in that. We may be stupid, but we’re not that stupid.

One might be tempted to call this a cynical outlook, but what it basically amounts to is that there's always something new to learn. Indeed, the more we learn, the more there is to learn. Now, if only we could invent the technology like what's presented in Diaspora (from my previous post), so we can live long enough to really learn a lot about the universe around us...



Internalizing the Ancient
Otaku Kun points to a wonderful entry in the Astronomy Picture of the Day series: The photo features two main elements: a nice view of the stars in the sky and a series of paintings on a canyon wall in Utah (it's the angle of the photograph and the clarity of the sky that makes it seem unreal to me, but looking at the larger version makes things a bit more clear). As OK points out, there are two corresponding kinds of antiquity here: "one cosmic, the other human". He speculates:

I think it’s impossible to really relate to things beyond human timescales. The idea of something being “ancient” has no meaning if it predates our human comprehension. The Neanderthals disappeared 30,000 years ago, which is probably really the farthest back we can reflect on. When we start talking about human forebears of 100,000 years ago and more, it becomes more abstract - that’s why it’s no coincidence that the Battlestar Galactica series finale set the events 150,000 years ago, well beyond even the reach of mythological narrative.

I'm reminded of an essay by C. Northcote Parkinson, called High Finance or The Point of Vanishing Interest (the essay appears in Parkinson's Law, a collection of essays). Parkinson writes about how finance committees work:

People who understand high finance are of two kinds: those who have vast fortunes of their own and those who have nothing at all. To the actual millionaire a million dollars is something real and comprehensible. To the applied mathematician and the lecturer in economics (assuming both to be practically starving) a million dollars is at least as real as a thousand, they having never possessed either sum. But the world is full of people who fall between these two categories, knowing nothing of millions but well accustomed to think in thousands, and it is these that finance committees are mostly comprised.

He then goes on to explore what he calls the "Law of Triviality". Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. Thus he concludes, after a number of humorous but fitting examples, that there is a point of vanishing interest where the committee can no longer comment with authority. Astonishingly, the amount of time that is spent on $10 million and on $10 may well be the same. There is clearly a space of time which suffices equally for the largest and smallest sums.

In short, it's difficult to internalize numbers that high, whether we're talking about large sums of money or cosmic timescales. Indeed, I'd even say that Parkinson was being a bit optimistic. Millionaires and mathematicians may have a better grasp on the situation than most, but even they are probably at a loss when we start talking about cosmic timeframes. OK also mentions Battlestar Galactica, which did end on an interesting note (even if that finale was quite disappointing as a whole) and which brings me to one of the reasons I really enjoy science fiction: the contemplation of concepts and ideas that are beyond comprehension. I can't really internalize the cosmic information encoded in the universe around me in such a way to do anything useful with it, but I can contemplate it and struggle to understand it, which is interesting and valuable in its own right. Perhaps someday, we will be able to devise ways to internalize and process information on a cosmic scale (this sort of optimistic statement perhaps represents another reason I enjoy SF).



Predictions
Someone sent me a note about a post I wrote on the 4th Kingdom boards in 2005 (August 3, 2005, to be more precise). It was in a response to a thread about technology and consumer electronics trends, and the original poster gave two examples that were exploding at the times: "camera phones and iPods." This is what I wrote in response:

Heh, I think the next big thing will be the iPod camera phone. Or, on a more general level, mp3 player phones. There are already some nifty looking mp3 phones, most notably the Sony/Ericsson "Walkman" branded phones (most of which are not available here just yet). Current models are all based on flash memory, but it can't be long before someone releases something with a small hard drive (a la the iPod). I suspect that, in about a year, I'll be able to hit 3 birds with one stone and buy a new cell phone with an mp3 player and digital camera.

As for other trends, as you mention, I think we're goint to see a lot of hoopla about the next gen gaming consoles. The new Xbox comes out in time for Xmas this year and the new Playstation 3 hits early next year. The new playstation will probably have blue-ray DVD capability, which brings up another coming tech trend: the high capacity DVD war! It seems that Sony may actually be able to pull this one out (unlike Betamax), but I guess we'll have to wait and see...

For an off-the-cuff informal response, I think I did pretty well. Of course, I still got a lot of the specifics wrong. For instance, I'm pretty clearly talking about the iPhone, though that would have to wait about 2 years before it became a reality. I also didn't anticipate the expansion of flash memory to more usable sizes and prices. Though I was clearly talking about a convergence device, I didn't really say anything about what we now call "apps".

In terms of game consoles, I didn't really say much. My first thought upon reading this post was that I had completely missed the boat on the Wii, however, it appears that the Wii's new controller scheme wasn't shown until September 2005 (about a month after my post). I did manage to predict a winner in the HD video war though, even if I framed the prediction as a "high capacity DVD war" and spelled blu-ray wrong.

I'm not generally good at making predictions about this sort of thing, but it's nice to see when I do get things right. Of course, you could make the argument that I was just stating the obvious (which is basically what I did with my 2008 predictions). Then again, everything seems obvious in hindsight, so perhaps it is still a worthwhile exercise for me. If nothing else, it gets me to think in ways I'm not really used to... so here are a few predictions for the rest of this year:

• Microsoft will release Natal this year, and it will be a massive failure. There will be a lot of neat talk about it and speculation about the future, but the fact is that gesture based interfaces and voice controls aren't especially great. I'll bet everyone says they'd like to use the Minority Report interface... but once they get to use it, I doubt people would actually find it more useful than current input methods. If it does attain success though, it will be because of the novelty of that sort of interaction. As a gaming platform, I think it will be a near total bust. The only way Microsoft would get Natal into homes is to bundle it with the XBox 360 (without raising the price)
• Speaking of which, I think Sony's Playstation Move platform will be mildly more successful than Natal, which is to say that it will also be a failure. I don't see anything in their initial slate of games that makes me even want to try it out. All that being said, the PS3 will continue to gain ground against the Xbox 360, though not so much that it will overtake the other console.
• While I'm at it, I might as well go out on a limb and say that the Wii will clobber both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. As of right now, their year in games seems relatively tame, so I don't see the Wii producing favorable year over year numbers (especially since I don't think they'll be able to replicate the success of New Super Mario Brothers Wii, which is selling obscenely well, even to this day). The one wildcard on the Wii right now is the Vitality Sensor. If Nintendo is able to put out the right software for that and if they're able to market it well, it could be a massive, audience-shifting blue ocean win for them. Coming up with a good "relaxation" game and marketing it to the proper audience is one hell of a challenge though. On the other hand, if anyone can pull that off, it's Nintendo.
• Sony will also release some sort of 3D gaming and movie functionality for the home. It will also be a failure. In general, I think attitudes towards 3D are declining. I think it will take a high profile failure to really temper Hollywood's enthusiasm (and even then, the "3D bump" of sales seems to outweigh the risk in most cases). Nevertheless, I don't think 3D is here to stay. The next major 3D revolution will be when it becomes possible to do it without glasses (which, at that point, might be a completely different technology like holograms or something).
• At first, I was going to predict that Hollywood would be seeing a dip in ticket sales, until I realized that Avatar was mostly a 2010 phenomenon, and that Alice in Wonderland has made about $1 billion worldwide already. Furthermore, this summer sees the release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which could reach similar heights (for reference, New Moon did $700 million worldwide) and the next Harry Potter is coming in November (for reference, the last Potter film did around $930 million). Altogether, the film world seems to be doing well... in terms of sales. I have to say that from my perspective, things are not looking especially well when it comes to quality. I'm not even as interested in seeing a lot of the movies released so far this year (an informal look at my past few years indicates that I've normally seen about twice as many movies as I have this year - though part of that is due to the move of the Philly film fest to October).
• I suppose I should also make some Apple predictions. The iPhone will continue to grow at a fast rate, though its growth will be tempered by Android phones. Right now, both of them are eviscerating the rest of the phone market. Once that is complete, we'll be left with a few relatively equal players, and I think that will lead to good options for us consumers. The iPhone has been taken to task more and more for Apple's control-freakism, but it's interesting that Android's open features are going to present more and more of a challenge to that as time goes on. Most recently, Google announced that the latest version of Android would feature the ability for your 3G/4G phone to act as a WiFi hotspot, which will most likely force Apple to do the same (apparently if you want to do this today, you have to jailbreak your iPhone). I don't think this spells the end of the iPhone anytime soon, but it does mean that they have some legitimate competition (and that competition is already challenging Apple with its feature-set, which is promising).
• The iPad will continue to have modest success. Apple may be able to convert that to a huge success if they are able to bring down the price and iron out some of the software kinks (like multi-tasking, etc... something we already know is coming). The iPad has the potential to destroy the netbook market. Again, the biggest obstacle at this point is the price.
• The Republicans will win more seats in the 2010 elections than the Democrats. I haven't looked close enough at the numbers to say whether or not they could take back either (or both) house of Congress, but they will gain ground. This is not a statement of political preference either way for me, and my reasons for making this prediction are less about ideology than simple voter disenfranchisement. People aren't happy with the government and that will manifest as votes against the incumbents. It's too far away from the 2012 elections to be sure, but I suspect Obama will hang on, if for no other reason than that he seems to be charismatic enough that people give him a pass on various mistakes or other bad news.

And I think that's good enough for now. In other news, I have started a couple of posts that are significantly more substantial than what I've been posting lately. Unfortunately, they're taking a while to produce, but at least there's some interesting stuff in the works.



Blast from the Past
A coworker recently unearthed a stash of a publication called The Net, a magazine published circa 1997. It's been an interesting trip down memory lane. In no particular order, here are some thoughts about this now defunct magazine.

• Website: There was a website, using the oh-so-memorable URL of www.thenet-usa.com (I suppose they were trying to distinguish themselves from all the other countries with thenet websites). Naturally, the website is no longer available, but archive.org has a nice selection of valid content from the 96-97 era. It certainly wasn't the worst website in the world, but it's not exactly great either. Just to give you a taste - for a while, it apparently used frames. Judging by archive.org, the site apparently went on until at least February of 2000, but the domain apparently lapsed sometime around May of that year. Random clicking around the dates after 2000 yielded some interesting results. Apparently someone named Phil Viger used it as their personal webpage for a while, complete with MIDI files (judging from his footer, he was someone who bought up a lot of URLs and put his simple page on there as a placeholder). By 2006, the site lapsed again, and it has remained vacant since then.
• Imagez: One other fun thing about the website is that their image directory was called "imagez" (i.e. http://web.archive.org/web/19970701135348/www.thenet-usa.com/imagez/menubar/menu.gif). They thought they were so hip in the 90s. Of course, 10 years from now, some dufus will be writing a post very much like this and wondering why there's an "r" at the end of flickr.
• Headlines: Some headlines from the magazine:
  • Top Secrets of the Webmaster Elite (And as if that weren't enough, we get the subhead: Warning: This information could create dangerously powerful Web Sites)
  • Are the Browser Wars Over? - Interestingly, the issue I'm looking at was from February 1997, meaning that IE and NN were still on their 3.x iterations. More on this story below
  • Unlock the Secrets of the Search Engines - Particularly notable in that this magazine was published before google. Remember Excite (apparently, they're still around - who knew)?
  I could go on and on. Just pick up a magazine, open to a random page, and you can observe something very dated or featuring a horrible pun (like Global Warning... get it? Instead of Global Warming, he's saying Global Warning! He's so clever!)
• Browser Wars: With the impending release of IE4 and Netscape Communicator Suite, everyone thought that web browsers were going to go away, or be consumed by the OS. One of the regular features of the magazine is to ask a panel of experts a simple question, such as "Are Web Browsers an endangered species?" Some of the answers are ridiculous, like this one:

  The Web browser (content) and the desktop itself (functions) will all be integrated into our e-mail packages (communications).

  There is, perhaps, a nugget of truth there, but it certainly didn't happen that way. Still, the line between browser, desktop, and email client is shifting, this guy just picked the wrong central application. Speaking of which, this is another interesting answer:

  The desktop will give way to the webtop. You will hardly notice where the Web begins and your documents end.

  Is it me, or is this guy describing Chrome OS? This guy's answer and a lot of the others are obviously written with 90s terminology, but describing things that are happening today. For instance, the notion of desktop widgets (or gadgets or screenlets or whatever you call them) is mentioned multiple times, but not with our terminology.
• Holy shit, remember VRML?
• Pre-Google Silliness: "A search engine for searching search engines? Sure why not?" Later in the same issue, I saw an ad for a program that would automatically search multiple search engines and provide you with a consolidated list of results... for only $70!
• Standards: This one's right on the money: "HTML will still be the standard everyone loves to hate." Of course, the author goes on to speculate that java applets will rule the day, so it's not exactly prescient.
• The Psychic: In one of my favorite discoveries, the magazine pitted The Suit Versus the Psychic. Of course, the suit gives relatively boring answers to the questions, but the Psychic, he's awesome. Regarding NN vs IE, he says "I foresee Netscape over Microsoft's IE for 1997. Netscape is cleaner on an energy level. It appears to me to be more flexible and intuitive. IE has lower energy. I see encumbrances all around it." Nice! Regarding IPOs, our clairvoyant friend had this to say "I predict IPOs continuing to struggle throughout 1997. I don't know anything about them on this level, but that just came to me." Hey, at least he's honest. Right?

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm even doing this justice. I need to read through more of these magazines. Perhaps another post is forthcoming...



More on Visual Literacy
In response to my post on Visual Literacy and Rembrandt's J'accuse, long-time Kaedrin friend Roy made some interesting comments about director Peter Greenaway's insistence that our ability to analyze visual art forms like paintings is ill-informed and impoverished.

It depends on what you mean by visually illiterate, I guess. Because I think that the majority of people are as visually literate as they are textually literate. What you seem to be comparing is the ability to read into a painting with the ability to read words, but that's not just reading, you're talking about analyzing and deconstructing at that point. I mean, most people can watch a movie or look at a picture and do some basic contextualizing. ... It's not for lack of literacy, it's for lack of training. You know how it is... there's reading, and then there's Reading. Most people in the United States know how to read, but that doesn't mean that they know how to Read. Likewise with visual materials--most people know how to view a painting, they just don't know how to View a Painting. I don't think we're visually illiterate morons, I just think we're only superficially trained.

I mostly agree with Roy, and I spent most of my post critiquing Greenaway's film for similar reasons. However, I find the subject of visual literacy interesting. First, as Roy mentions, it depends on how you define the phrase. When we hear the term literacy, we usually mean the ability to read and write, but there's also a more general definition of being educated or having knowledge within a particular subject or field (i.e. computer literacy or in our case, visual literacy). Greenaway is clearly emphasizing the more general definition. It's not that he thinks we can't see a painting, it's that we don't know enough about the context of the paintings we are viewing.

Roy is correct to point out that most people actually do have relatively sophisticated visual skills:

Even when people don't have the vocabulary or training, they still pick up on things, because I think we use symbols and visual language all the time. We read expressions and body language really well, for example. Almost all of our driving rules are encoded first and foremost as symbols, not words--red=stop, green=go, yellow=caution. You don't need "Stop" or "Yield" on the sign to know which it is--the shape of the sign tells you.

Those are great examples of visual encoding and conventions, but do they represent literacy? Why does a stop sign represent what it does? There are three main components to the stop sign:

1. Text - It literally says "Stop" on the sign. However, this is not universal. In Israel, for instance, there is no text. In it's place is an image of a hand in a "stop" gesture.
2. Shape - The octagonal shape of the sign is unique, and so the sign is identifiable even if obscured. The shape also allows drivers facing the back of the sign to identify that oncoming drivers have a stop sign...
3. Color - The sign is red, a "hot" color that stands out more than most colors. Blood and fire are red, and red is associated with sin, guilt, passion, and anger, among many other things. As such, red is often used to represent warnings, hence it's frequent use in traffic signals such as the stop sign.

Interestingly, these different components are overlapping and reinforcing. If one fails (for someone who is color-blind or someone who can't read, for example), another can still communicate the meaning of the sign. There's something similar going on with traffic lights, as the position of the light is just as important (if not more important) than the color of the light.

However, it's worth noting that the clear meaning of a stop sign is also due to the fact that it's a near universal convention used throughout the entire world. Not all traffic signals are as well defined. Case in point, what does a blinking green traffic light represent? Blinking red means to "stop, then proceed with caution" (kinda like a stop sign). Blinking yellow means to "slow down and proceed with caution." So what does a blinking green mean? James Grimmelmann tried to figure it out:

It turns out (courtesy of the ODP and rec.travel), perhaps unsurpsingly, that there is no uniform agreement on the meaning of a blinking green light. In a bunch of Canadian provinces, it has the same general meaning that a regular green light does, with the added modifier that you are the undisputed master of all you survey. All other traffic entering the intersection has a stop sign or a red light, and must bow down before your awesome cosmic powers. On the other hand, if you're in Massachusetts or British Columbia and you try a no-look Ontario-style left turn on a blinking green, you're liable to get into a smackup, since the blinking green means only that cross traffic is seeing red, with no guarantees about oncoming traffic.

Now, maybe it's just because we're starting to get obscure and complicated here, but the reason traffic signals work is because we've established a set of conventions that are similar most everywhere. But when we mess around with them or get too complicated, it could be a problem. Luckly, we don't do that sort of thing very often (even the blinking green example is probably vanishingly obscure - I've never seen or even heard of that happening until reading James' post). These conventions are learned, usually through simple observation, though we also regulate who can drive and require people to study the rules of driving (including signs and lights) before granting a license.

Another example, perhaps surprising because it is something primarily thought of as a textual medium, is newspapers. Take a look at this front page of a newspaper¹ :


Newspapers use numerous techniques (such as prominence, grouping, and nesting) to establish a visual hierarchy, allowing readers to scan the page to find what stories they want to read. In the image above, the size of the headline (Victory!) as well as its placement on the page makes it clear at a glance that this is the most important story. The headline "Miami Police Department Unveils New Pastel Pink and Aqua Uniforms" spans three columns of text, making it obvious that they're all part of the same story. Furthermore, we know the picture of Crockett and Tubbs goes with the same story because both the picture and the text are spanned by the same headline. And so on.

Now I know what my younger readers² are thinking: What the fuck is this "newspaper" thing you're babbling about? Well, it turns out that a lot of the same conventions apply to the web. There are, of course, new conventions on the web (for instance, links are usually represented by different colored text that is also underlined), but many of the same techniques are used to establish a visual hierarchy on the web.

What's more interesting about newspapers and the web is that we aren't really trained how to read them, but we figure it out anyway. In his excellent book on usability, Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug writes:

At some point in our youth, without ever being taught, we all learned to read a newspaper. Not the words, but the conventions.

We learned, for instance, that a phrase in very large type is usually a headline that summarizes the story underneath it, and that the text underneath a picture is either a caption that tells me what it's a picture of, or - if it's in very small type - a photo credit that tells me who took the picture.

We learned that knowing the various conventions of page layout and formatting made it easier and faster to scan a newspaper and find the stories we were interested in. And when we started traveling to other cities, we learned that all newspapers used the same conventions (with slight variations), so knowing the conventions made it easy to read any newspaper.

The tricky part about this is that the learning seems to happen subconsciously. Large type is pretty obvious, but column spanning? Captions? Nesting? Some of this stuff gets pretty subtle, and for the most part, people don't care. They just scan the page, find what they want, and read the story. It's just intuitive.

But designing a layout is not quite as intuitive. Many of the lessons we have internalized in reading a newspaper (or a website) aren't really available to us in a situation where we're asked to design a layout. If you want a good example of this, look at web pages designed in the mid-90s. By now, we've got blogs and mini-CMS style systems that automate layouts and take design out of most people's hands.

So, does Greenaway have a valid point? Or is Roy right? Obviously, we all process visual information, and visual symbolism is frequently used to encode large amounts of information into a relatively small space. Does that make us visually literate? I guess it all comes down to your definition of literate. Roy seems to take the more specific definition of "able to read or write" while Greenaway seems to be more concerned with "education or knowledge in a specified field." The question then becomes, are we more textually literate than we are visually literate? Greenaway certainly seems to think so. Roy seems to think we're just about equal on both fronts. I think both positions are defensible, especially when you consider that Greenaway is talking specifically about art. Furthermore, his movie is about a classical painting that was created several centuries ago. For most young people today, art is more diffuse. When you think about it, almost anything can be art. I suspect Greenaway would be disgusted by that sort of attitude, which is perhaps another way to view his thoughts on visual literacy.

¹ - Yeah, it's the Onion and not a real newspaper per say, but it's fun and it's representative of common newspaper conventions.

² - Hahaha, as if I have more than 5 readers, let alone any young readers.



Interrupts and Context Switching
To drastically simplify how computers work, you could say that computers do nothing more that shuffle bits (i.e. 1s and 0s) around. All computer data is based on these binary digits, which are represented in computers as voltages (5 V for a 1 and 0 V for a 0), and these voltages are physically manipulated through transistors, circuits, etc... When you get into the guts of a computer and start looking at how they work, it seems amazing how many operations it takes to do something simple, like addition or multiplication. Of course, computers have gotten a lot smaller and thus a lot faster, to the point where they can perform millions of these operations per second, so it still feels fast. The processor is performing these operations in a serial fashion - basically a single-file line of operations.

This single-file line could be quite inefficent and there are times when you want a computer to be processing many different things at once, rather than one thing at a time. For example, most computers rely on peripherals for input, but those peripherals are often much slower than the processor itself. For instance, when a program needs some data, it may have to read that data from the hard drive first. This may only take a few milliseconds, but the CPU would be idle during that time - quite inefficient. To improve efficiency, computers use multitasking. A CPU can still only be running one process at a time, but multitasking gets around that by scheduling which tasks will be running at any given time. The act of switching from one task to another is called Context Switching. Ironically, the act of context switching adds a fair amount of overhead to the computing process. To ensure that the original running program does not lose all its progress, the computer must first save the current state of the CPU in memory before switching to the new program. Later, when switching back to the original, the computer must load the state of the CPU from memory. Fortunately, this overhead is often offset by the efficiency gained with frequent context switches.

If you can do context switches frequently enough, the computer appears to be doing many things at once (even though the CPU is only processing a single task at any given time). Signaling the CPU to do a context switch is often accomplished with the use of a command called an Interrupt. For the most part, the computers we're all using are Interrupt driven, meaning that running processes are often interrupted by higher-priority requests, forcing context switches.

This might sound tedious to us, but computers are excellent at this sort of processing. They will do millions of operations per second, and generally have no problem switching from one program to the other and back again. The way software is written can be an issue, but the core functions of the computer described above happen in a very reliable way. Of course, there are physical limits to what can be done with serial computing - we can't change the speed of light or the size of atoms or a number of other physical constraints, and so performance cannot continue to improve indefinitely. The big challenge for computers in the near future will be to figure out how to use parallel computing as well as we now use serial computing. Hence all the talk about Multi-core processing (most commonly used with 2 or 4 cores).

Parallel computing can do many things which are far beyond our current technological capabilities. For a perfect example of this, look no further than the human brain. The neurons in our brain are incredibly slow when compared to computer processor speeds, yet we can rapidly do things which are far beyond the abilities of the biggest and most complex computers in existance. The reason for that is that there are truly massive numbers of neurons in our brain, and they're all operating in parallel. Furthermore, their configuration appears to be in flux, frequently changing and adapting to various stimuli. This part is key, as it's not so much the number of neurons we have as how they're organized that matters. In mammals, brain size roughly correlates with the size of the body. Big animals generally have larger brains than small animals, but that doesn't mean they're proportionally more intelligent. An elephant's brain is much larger than a human's brain, but they're obviously much less intelligent than humans.

Of course, we know very little about the details of how our brains work (and I'm not an expert), but it seems clear that brain size or neuron count are not as important as how neurons are organized and crosslinked. The human brain has a huge number of neurons (somewhere on the order of one hundred billion), and each individual neuron is connected to several thousand other neurons (leading to a total number of connections in the hundreds of trillions). Technically, neurons are "digital" in that if you were to take a snapshot of the brain at a given instant, each neuron would be either "on" or "off" (i.e. a 1 or a 0). However, neurons don't work like digital electronics. When a neuron fires, it doesn't just turn on, it pulses. What's more, each neuron is accepting input from and providing output to thousands of other neurons. Each connection has a different priority or weight, so that some connections are more powerful or influential than others. Again, these connections and their relative influence tends to be in flux, constantly changing to meet new needs.

This turns out to be a good thing in that it gives us the capability to be creative and solve problems, to be unpredictable - things humans cherish and that computers can't really do on their own.

However, this all comes with its own set of tradeoffs. With respect to this post, the most relevant of which is that humans aren't particularly good at doing context switches. Our brains are actually great at processing a lot of information in parallel. Much of it is subconscious - heart pumping, breathing, processing sensory input, etc... Those are also things that we never really cease doing (while we're alive, at least), so those resources are pretty much always in use. But because of the way our neurons are interconnected, sometimes those resources trigger other processing. For instance, if you see something familiar, that sensory input might trigger memories of childhood (or whatever).

In a computer, everything is happening in serial and thus it is easy to predict how various inputs will impact the system. What's more, when a computer stores its CPU's current state in memory, that state can be restored later with perfect accuracy. Because of the interconnected and parallel nature of the brain, doing this sort of context switching is much more difficult. Again, we know very little about how the humain brain really works, but it seems clear that there is short-term and long-term memory, and that the process of transferring data from short-term memory to long-term memory is lossy. A big part of what the brain does seems to be filtering data, determining what is important and what is not. For instance, studies have shown that people who do well on memory tests don't necessarily have a more effective memory system, they're just better at ignoring unimportant things. In any case, human memory is infamously unreliable, so doing a context switch introduces a lot of thrash in what you were originally doing because you will have to do a lot of duplicate work to get yourself back to your original state (something a computer has a much easier time doing). When you're working on something specific, you're dedicating a significant portion of your conscious brainpower towards that task. In otherwords, you're probably engaging millions if not billions of neurons in the task. When you consider that each of these is interconnected and working in parallel, you start to get an idea of how complex it would be to reconfigure the whole thing for a new task. In a computer, you need to ensure the current state of a single CPU is saved. Your brain, on the other hand, has a much tougher job, and its memory isn't quite as reliable as a computer's memory. I like to refer to this as metal inertia. This sort of issue manifests itself in many different ways.

One thing I've found is that it can be very difficult to get started on a project, but once I get going, it becomes much easier to remain focused and get a lot accomplished. But getting started can be a problem for me, and finding a few uninterrupted hours to delve into something can be difficult as well. One of my favorite essays on the subject was written by Joel Spolsky - its called Fire and Motion. A quick excerpt:

Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I've got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don't realize that it's already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can't always make it across that chasm. For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going.

I've found this sort of mental inertia to be quite common, and it turns out that there are several areas of study based around this concept. The state of thought where your brain is up to speed and humming along is often referred to as "flow" or being "in the zone." This is particularly important for working on things that require a lot of concentration and attention, such as computer programming or complex writing.

From my own personal experience a couple of years ago during a particularly demanding project, I found that my most productive hours were actually after 6 pm. Why? Because there were no interruptions or distractions, and a two hour chunk of uninterrupted time allowed me to get a lot of work done. Anecdotal evidence suggests that others have had similar experiences. Many people come into work very early in the hopes that they will be able to get more done because no one else is here (and complain when people are here that early). Indeed, a lot of productivity suggestions basically amount to carving out a large chunk of time and finding a quiet place to do your work.

A key component of flow is finding a large, uninterrupted chunk of time in which to work. It's also something that can be difficult to do here at a lot of workplaces. Mine is a 24/7 company, and the nature of our business requires frequent interruptions and thus many of us are in a near constant state of context switching. Between phone calls, emails, and instant messaging, we're sure to be interrupted many times an hour if we're constantly keeping up with them. What's more, some of those interruptions will be high priority and require immediate attention. Plus, many of us have large amounts of meetings on our calendars which only makes it more difficult to concentrate on something important.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You wake up early and during your morning routine, you plan out what you need to get done at work today. Let's say you figure you can get 4 tasks done during the day. Then you arrive at work to find 3 voice messages and around a hundred emails and by the end of the day, you've accomplished about 15 tasks, none of which are the 4 you had originally planned to do. I think this happens more often than we care to admit.

Another example, if it's 2:40 pm and I know I have a meeting at 3 pm - should I start working on a task I know will take me 3 solid hours or so to complete? Probably not. I might be able to get started and make some progress, but as soon my brain starts firing on all cylinders, I'll have to stop working and head to the meeting. Even if I did get something accomplished during those 20 minutes, chances are when I get back to my desk to get started again, I'm going to have to refamiliarize myself with the project and what I had already done before proceeding.

Of course, none of what I'm saying here is especially new, but in today's world it can be useful to remind ourselves that we don't need to always be connected or constantly monitoring emails, RSS, facebook, twitter, etc... Those things are excellent ways to keep in touch with friends or stay on top of a given topic, but they tend to split attention in many different directions. It's funny, when you look at a lot of attempts to increase productivity, efforts tend to focus on managing time. While important, we might also want to spend some time figuring out how we manage our attention (and the things that interrupt it).

(Note: As long and ponderous as this post is, it's actually part of a larger series of posts I have planned. Some parts of the series will not be posted here, as they will be tailored towards the specifics of my workplace, but in the interest of arranging my interests in parallel (and because I don't have that much time at work dedicated to blogging on our intranet), I've decided to publish what I can here. Also, given the nature of this post, it makes sense to pursue interests in my personal life that could be repurposed in my professional life (and vice/versa).)



Nerdy
I've always considered myself something of a nerd, even back when being nerdy wasn't cool. Nowadays, everyone thinks they're a nerd. MGK recently noticed this:

Recently, I was surfing the net looking for lols, and came across a personal ad on Craigslist. The ad was not in and of itself hilarious, but one thing struck me. The writer described herself as “nerdy,” and as an example of her nerdiness, explained that she loved to watch Desperate Housewives.

My god, people, have we allowed “nerdy” to be defined down so greatly that watching Desperate Housewives - a top 20 Neilsen primetime soap opera with no actual nerd content per se - qualifies as “nerdy” now? That is just wrong. The nerdular act cannot be allowed to be so mainstream.

To address this situation, he has devised "a handy guide for people to define their own nerdiness, based on a number of nerdistic passions." I'm a little surprised at how poorly I did in some of these categories.

• Batman - Not Nerdy. When I think about it, it's not that surprising. After all, I have never read any of the comic books, not even Year One or The Dark Knight Returns, which MGK specifically calls out later in his creteria as not being particularly nerdy. That said, I wonder how watching The Dark Knight 5 times (three times in the theater) in less than a year qualifies.
• Star Wars - Slightly Nerdy. Now this one is surprising. Sure, according to this guide, I'm nerdier about Star Wars than I am about Batman, but only a little. I suppose if he had loosened the criteria or chose a different random fact for the "nerdy" level, I could easily have reached that level, for I have had some experience with the “expanded universe” Star Wars novels. One other gripe is that no self-respecting nerd would defend the idea of Jar Jar Binks!
• Harry Potter - Somwhere between Not Nerdy and Slightly Nerdy. I didn't particularly love Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and my dislike may disqualify me from the Slightly Nerdy level. On the other hand, I didn't particularly hate the novel either, and I had no problem blowing through it rather quickly.
• Magic: The Gathering - Slightly Nerdy. I have to say that I didn't play this game that much, but I really did enjoy it when I did. But it got way too complicated later on, and some people took it wayyy to seriously.
• H.P. Lovecraft - Dangerously Nerdy. Finally! Though I have to admit that I don't qualify for three of the lesser levels... However, I have read several of his stories, which is apparently dangerously nerdy.
• Nerd Television - Dangerously Nerdy. Totally. The two shows I haven't watched much of are the lowest ranked ones. I've seen a significant portion of the other ones, including The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (at this point, even recognizing what Brisco County Jr. is, is probably nerdworthy).
• Star Trek - I think I might be Fairly Nerdy here, otherwise I'm Not Nerdy. It's just that I don't actually remember which one Picard rode the dune buggy in. That probably disqualifies me. I do love TNG though. Could never get into any of the other spinoffs.
• Computer Use - Nerdy. Potentially Really Nerdy, but there are definitely a couple of coding jokes in XKCD that I haven't gotten (but I get a pretty good portion of them).

Again, I am a bit surprised at how non-nerdy I am. I mean, aside from a couple of dangerously nerdy subjects, I'm not very nerdy at all. How did you do?



The PS3, Revisiting Predictions & Other Odds & Ends
The PS3 came yesterday, so I've spent most of the time since then in a Blu-Ray and Video Game induced haze. I was lured out by my brother this afternoon to watch the Eagles playoff game (we won!) and maybe feed myself too. While I'm out, I figure I should at least make some pretense at updating the blog with something...

• Might as well get this out of the way first: The PS3 is actually pretty great. At this point, I've spent most of my time playing Assassin's Creed, which is great so far (though my understanding is that it gets repetitive and that's certainly something I'm starting to see...). I also watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner. The set I got comes with 3 other versions of the movie and like 15 hours of extras (these are in standard definition though), including an almost 4 hour in-depth documentary on the production. I also got Resistance, Call of Duty 4, and The Dark Knight, but have yet to fiddle around with those. The PS3 online system seems decent, though I haven't really done anything with it just yet. All in all, I'm very satisfied with my purchase so far.
• Last January, I made 5 predictions for 2008, and it turns out that I was mostly correct! Neal Stephenson did announce a new novel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I was wrong about the setting (though I admitted that possiblity in my prediction). The WGA strike did end, and for the most part, TV didn't recover much of what they lost. There were few new shows that did well and big ratings drops for existing hits like Heroes. Box Office numbers were a bit skewed by The Dark Knight and Iron Man, but admissions were down (on the other hand, they were only down 4%, which isn't bad when compared to the rest of the economy). I predicted Blu-Ray would pick up ground, but not that Blu-Ray would win so decisively and so early. My DRM prediction seems rather stale - not much has changed in either the music industry or the movie industry. And Barack Obama did win the election. So overall, I'd say 4 out of 5 wasn't bad... but that's probably more because I didn't really go out on a limb with any of my predictions! Not sure if I'll be making any predictions for 2009, but you never know...
• As I have for the past two years, I'm going to do another Kaedrin Movie Awards series of posts for 2008. As I've mentioned before, 2008 hasn't been a particularly great year (perhaps still feeling the effects of the writer's strike?), so I'm still trying to catch up with some films in order to compile my lists. if you have any nominations for the standard awards (see last year for an example) or any arbitrary awards you'd like to see, feel free to leave some comments or send me an email...

That's all for now. I believe I have some evil people to assassinate. Or perhaps I should repel an alien invasion. Or maybe I should just watch The Dark Knight again. Decisions, decisions...



12DC: Day 4 - Eggnog
A family tradition has grown over the past few years. Every Thanksgiving, we have an Eggnog tasting. Nothing fancy or scientific (though perhaps that can be arranged next year!) and we're pretty bad about organizing this. Point of fact, this year, we only had 4 varieties to try out. Last year, however, was a different story. Again, due to poor planning, several people brought several different varieties, which lead us to have 14 different brands of eggnog.


For reference, these are the eggnogs pictured:

• Turkey Hill
• Southern Comfort (Traditional)
• Southern Comfort (Vanilla Spice)
• Organic Valley
• Shop Rite
• Hood (Sugar Cookie)
• Hood (Pumpkin)
• Hood (Gingerbread)
• Hood (Cinnemon)
• Axelrod
• Wawa
• Tuscan Dairy Farms
• Soy Nog
• Borden

Like I said, nothing particularly scientific or comprehensive about the process (heck, we don't even add alcohol), but a general consensus arose. First, "flavored" eggnogs (like Vanilla Spice or Pumpkin, etc...), while tasty and a nice change of pace, were generally considered to be out of the running for the prize. Second, Soy Nog was unanimously declared the worst egg nog evar. This may have had something to do with the fact that it didn't actually have egg in it, and thus isn't really eggnog, but still. And finally, the winner (not unanimous, but it scored a decisive victory), was actually Wawa brand eggnog. For those of you non-East-Coasters, Wawa is a popular convenience store (a la 7-Eleven, but better) and dairy farm, and their Eggnog is great.

Up until this event started, I'd never been much of a fan of eggnog. There's just something unappealing about a substance that is so scary-bad-for-you that you can only consume it for a limited period of the year. But I've grown into it and am looking forward to next year's tasting...



12DC: Day 3 - The Christmas Cactus
What do you use, a tree? Pfft!


The traditional Kaedrin Christmas cactus strikes again. Also striking again, my poor photography skillz! More to come...



Geekout: Alien vs. Predator
A while ago, I ran accross this McSweeney's article that pit Alien vs. Predator in a series of unlikely events like Macramé and Lincoln-Douglas Debating. Long time readers will know that I am a fan of the Alien vs. Predator concept, though the recent films have been awful (Alien, Aliens, and Predator are some of my favorites movies though, and the original AvP comic book was fantastic). In any case, I couldn't resist discussing and debating some of the events listed out, and the result was a pretty amusing (and incredibly geeky) conversation.

The first event under question was Breakdancing. I had picked the Alien for this and thought it was the obvious choice. My friend Roy disagreed, noting:

I think you've failed to take into account the unique physiology of the alien. Those tubes on his back? The tail? Those are going to make dancing very difficult. No backspins for him. I think that the Predator's upper body strength will help him to pull of some awesome moves. And, he doesn't have big pipes or tubes coming up out of his back.

I have to admit that he had a point about the tubes on the Alien's back, but I still felt the Alien was the superior breakdancer. My response:

Point taken, but I still see the Alien having much more agility, thus giving them the ability to move more gracefully than the Predator while break dancing. While their backspins might be problematic, they do have that giant head which would enable them to perform some rather spectacular headstands and headspins. And while the tail could get in the way of a back-spin, it would also give them a valuable 5th pivot with which they could pull off all sorts of crazy moves. Back spins are an important part of break dancing, but there are no shortages of upper body, frontal, side, or sliding moves, and indeed, there seem to be more of those than back maneuvers. When you add in the Alien's unique physiology, you get something that would allow for all sorts of variations and indeed, even totally new moves. Really, I think the Alien would revolutionize the break dancing scene. The predator's upper-body streght would allow for some amazing handstand style moves, but in almost every other way they are less limber and agile than the alien or even most human break-dance experts. Indeed, the alien does not seem to have an absense of upper body strength, so it's not like that gives the Predator a decisive advantage (the way the alien's tail does). I suppose it's possible that not all Predators are as bulked up as the ones in the films, but there is no real evidence of that.

Personally, I still believe I'm right on that one. The next event that came into question was Competitive Hot-Dog Eating. My initial pick was Predator, mostly because of his larger mouth and mandibles (when you look closely, the Alien's mouth is actually quite small). Anyway, Roy had some comments about this pick as well:

Totally goes to alien. Aliens are always hungry. They do nothing but eat and kill. We don't even actually know that Predator's eat meat. They're probably a bunch of annoying vegans. ;P

Once again, I think Roy makes a fair point here, but it's ultimately unpersuasive. My response:

This makes more sense to me, though I do maintain that the Alien's multi-tiered mouth is still significantly smaller and thus represents a bottleneck during any sort of competitive eating contest. Yes, their activities are generally limited to eating, killing, building those crazy hives and reproducing, but I see that as just a further example of why they would not be good at competitive eating. Since that's all they do, they do not have to eat fast. It's hard to tell because the alien and it's motivations are so... alien... and unexplored. The Predators, on the other hand, clearly have some sort of civilization with technological capabilities well beyond our own. It stands to reason that they would have less time dedicated to eating, and thus would need to scarf down more in less time... which means they would be better suited towards competitive eating. Your point about vegan Predators is also taken, but what we know of their culture is that it is based primarily on hunting. While I'm sure there are vegan Predators, I think it's fair to speculate that a race of hunters values and prizes meat.

I thought that was pretty good, but someone else stepped in at this point to defend Roy, noting that:

We know they hunt, yes, but in the hunts we've seen they take trophies, not food. I have yet to see a predator field-dress an alien. I mean, hell, how much meat could be on something like that anyway? It's all chitin and sinew, not really a meal at all, and that's before we think about the effects upon the stomach lining of that acid blood (ulcers like you wouldn't believe!!). No, it's not fair to speculate on their eating habits by looking at their hunts. Their hunts are trophy kills, rites of passage, not a means for survival. Everything we've seen of their society, we haven't been given clue one about their eating habits.

This is certainly an interesting take on the matter. My response:

Interesting point, but I think it's reasonable to make some extrapolations based on their hunting culture. It's reasonable to assume that their hunts as portrayed in the movies are indeed trophy hunts and not a matter of survival or food. This makes sense on an additional level because they're hunting alien species and alien physiology may not react well with their digestive systems (as you mention, the alien would be particularly bad in that respect). However, it's also reasonable to assume that the reason for their hunting tradition is that they were required to do so in the evolution of their species. Yes, I'm extrapolating from human experiences here, but there are humans today who hunt purely for trophies. It's reasonable to assume that the reason the Predator race is so focused on hunting is that they were forced to do so on their home planet. Indeed, in such a case, the act of hunting could take on a more meaningful aspect because of symbolic or perhaps even spiritual reasons. The act of hunting clearly goes beyond survival for them, but it's reasonable to assume that it began as a simple survival technique on their home planet, and grew into a more meaningful practice as the race became more advanced.

This thread went on for a few more posts and ultimately resulted in a stalemate, as we really don't know enough about either culture to say for sure. I still think it's reasonable to say that the hunting culture of the Predators implies a history of hunting and meat-eating.

The next topic under debate was the Wet T-Shirt Contest, which I had originally given a tie. After all, for the most part, we see both the Alien and the Predator without their shirts on, so what's the point of a Wet T-Shirt Contest? However, someone interjected a brilliant point that totally convinced me that I was wrong; the Alien would undoubtedly win this event.

Wet T-shirt: Alien. Preddy has been noted on several occasions to be "one ugly motherfucker."

There is simply no arguing with that one.



The Moon
A few years ago, The Onion put out a book called Our Dumb Century. It was comprised of a series of newspaper front pages, one from each year. It was an interesting book, in part because of the events they chose to represent each year and also because The Onion writers are hilarious. The most brilliant entry in the book was from the 1969 edition of the paper:


Utterly brilliant. You can't read it on that small copy, but there's a whole profanity-laden exchange between Houston and Tranquility Base that's also hysterically funny. As it turns out, The Onion folks went ahead and made a video, complete with archival footage and authentic sounding voices, beeps, static, etc... Incredibly funny. [video via Need Coffee]

Update: Weird, I tried to embed the video in this post, but when you click play it says it's no longer available... but if you go directly to youtube, you can get the video. I'm taking out the embedded video and putting in the link for now.



Keeper Leagues and Unexpected Consequences
It's not a secret that I'm a pretty geeky guy, especially when it comes to certain subjects (movies, SF, etc...). My friends are a different kind of geek though. They're sports geeks. Specifically, they love baseball. About 10 years ago, they started a fantasy baseball league. At the time, the various websites weren't that great, but as the years passed, things started to get more sophisticated... and the league became much more competitive. In true geek fashion, we started getting carried away with various aspects of the league. Every team owner is expected to issue faux-press releases (i.e. pretending to be the Associated Press and faux interviews, etc...) and the league wrote a Constitution. In its current incarnation, the Constitution is 11 pages long. Every year, owners propose amendments in accordance with Article VI of the Constitution, and if 2/3 of the league approves of the amendment, it is ratified and put in the Constitution.

A few years ago, we ratified an amendment that gave each owner "keeper rights." What this basically means is that you can keep three eligible members of your team for the next season. Here's an excerpt from Article IV of the MLF Constitution:

Article IV: Keeper Rights

4. A Keeper Right is defined as the opportunity for a MLF manager to retain the rights of a player for one season

4.1. A player is eligible to be kept if they meet the follow criteria

4.1.1. The player must be on your current MLF roster
4.1.2. The player must have been drafted no earlier than the fourth round of that year’s draft
4.1.3. The player has not been kept in the year prior
4.1.4. The player must have been on a MLF roster by the end of the last game of the MLF playoffs (the end of the MLB regular season)

The rules of keeper eligibility help keep things a little even, meaning that a team that wins the league one year won't necessarily have as big an advantage as anyone else in the next year. You can't keep a player indefinitely and since players drafted in the first three rounds are also ineligible, that ensures that the best players are still open to even the worst team in the following year's draft. And Article IV, section 3 featues an interesting twist: "Trading keeper rights is permitted."

Now, these rules were put into place for many reasons. Some people like the opportunity to take a chance on a young, developing player (in the hopes that they'll be able to keep them for a breakout year in the following season). Some people want to make sure the team has a solid core that can be built upon. And a host of other reasons. However, after three years of keeper rights, some unexpected consequences have presented themselves.

The biggest implication is that team owners who are not doing well will "sell" their keeper ineligible players for more keeper rights and keeper eligible players. Similarly, those who are doing well will "sell" their keeper rights in the hopes of strengthening their team for the playoffs. The reason I'm using scare quotes around the word "sell" is that what this really amounts to are fire sales. Top tier players will often be traded for near scraps because a team that has no hope of winning the league has no use for that top tier player, but they could use a keeper right to help build for the future.

Initially, there was a bit of a learning curve. How much value does a keeper right really have? In the first season, someone traded 3 keeper rights for Albert Pujols, a trade so lopsided that a new constitutional amendment was ratified (titled The Golden Shaft award, it is given to the player who made the worst trade of the season.) However, after a few years, things have changed. Keeper rights have become more valuable, and teams in contention will "mortgage their future" by trading keeper rights for players (this effectively means they can add top tier talent without losing anything that impacts them for the current season). Some people value keeper rights much more than others, and during this season's trade deadline, things got ridiculous.

During the last day before the trade deadline, there were 8 trades involving 36 players and 7 keeps. This is rather obscene. One owner traded his 3 keeps for 8 players (many top tier folks) and made another trade for 5 additional players. In effect, this person replaced most of his team in one day and became an instant league powerhouse (and he is my division rival as well!) Needless to say, this year's "Winter Meetings" will contain much discussion regarding how we can mitigate these fire sales. There are several options available to us:

• Push the trade deadline up a month. Teams that know they are out of contention on July 31 (the current trade deadline, same as MLB) might not know as much in June.
• Make two trade deadlines. One deadline for keeper rights to be traded, one for same keeper status to be traded. The strategy here is similar to pushing the trade deadline up.
• No more keeper rights can be traded. Only players. This option would mean that teams looking to upgrade must give up players to get other players in return.
• Extend players' keeper eligibility to 2 years. If this was the rule a lot of the players moved at this years deadline would have not been traded since they could have been kept for another year.
• Expand on keeper system. Add farm system and extend the number of keeper rights per team. But again keeper rights can't be traded.
• No more keeper rights period.

And I'm sure there are lots of other variants that aren't listed. There will be a heated debate over the winter about all available options, and I'm positive that the Amendments process will be quite interesting this year. On a personal level, I'm not sure where I'll fall. While some of this year's trades were absurd (8 players for 3 keeps is crazy), it wasn't totally unexpected. While it's never been this crazy, there are always a ton of trades right at the deadline. I don't see any way around this sort of volatility in a keeper league. Plus, I kinda like that our trade deadline is 10 times as exciting as Major League Baseball's trade deadline.



Predictions and Information Overload
I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Childhood's End, and I found this passage funny:

...there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder people are becoming passive sponges — absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

I don't think Clarke was really attempting to make a firm prediction in this statement (which is essentially made in passing), but it's amusing to think how much he got right and how much he got wrong. Considering that he was writing this book in the early 1950s, he actually did make a pretty decent prediction when it came to average viewing time per person. In the US, the number is more like 4-5 hours a day (I'm betting that this will be in decline, especially in this year of the WGA strike), but worldwide, it's probably down around 3 hours a day. On the other hand, Clarke drastically underestimated the amount of content made available and also the effect of so much content.

The United States alone has 2,218 stations, which is over 4 times as many stations as Clarke had predicted hours. If we assume each station only broadcasts for an average of 16 hours a day, that works out to be over 35,000 hours of programming (70 times as much as Clarke had predicted for both TV and radio). And this doesn't even count things like On Demand, DVDs, and newer entertainment mediums like the Internet (which includes stuff like You Tube and Podcasts,etc... in addition to the standard textual data) and Video Games.

Which brings me to the other interesting thing about Clarke's prediction. He seemed to think that when that much entertainment became readily available, we would become "passive sponges — absorbing but never creating." But in today's world, the opposite seems true. Indeed, content creation seems to be accelerating. To be sure, Clarke was right in the general sense that massive amounts of data do indeed come with problems of their own. Clarke is certainly right to note that you can only really experience a tiny fraction of what's out there at any given time, and this can be an issue. Ironically, a google search for "Information Overload" yields 2,150,000 results, which is as good an example as any. On a personal level, I don't think this goes as far as, say, Nicholas Carr seems to think, and as long as we find ways around the mammoth amounts of data we're all expected to assimilate on a daily basis (stuff like self-censorship seems to help), we should be fine.



Summoner Geeks
Via Haibane.info, I stumbled across this:


It's pretty funny and I got a little curious about the history of this thing. Apparently a sketch comedy troupe in Wisconsin called the Dead Alewives put together an album featuring a parody of Dungeons & Dragons. The audio skit is pretty funny by itself, and it's been making the rounds on radio and the internet ever since the mid 1990s. In 2000, a bunch of developers at a video game company, Volition (they made Descent, Red Faction, and of course, Summoner), made an animated version, and distrubuted it along with their games (it's in some promotional material and if you win the game, you see it there as well). So it went from an improvisational comedy group, to a CD they made, to the radio, to the internet, got mashed up with visuals from other video games, and has now finally made its way to me (about 12 years later).



Vigilantes
I recently finished watching both seasons of Dexter. The series has a fascinating premise: the titular hero, Dexter Morgan, is a forensic analyst (he's a "blood spatter expert") for the Miami police by day, but a serial killer by night. He operates by a "code," only murdering other murderers (usually ones who've beaten the system). The most interesting thing about Dexter's code is the implication that he does not follow the code out of some sort of dedication to morality or justice. He knows what he does is evil, but he follows his code because it's the most constructive way to channel his aggression. Of course, the code is not perfect, and a big part of the series is how the code shapes him and how he, in turn, shapes it. To be honest, watching the series is a little odd and disturbing when you realize that you're essentially rooting for a serial killer (an affable and charming one, to be sure, but that's part of why it's disturbing). I started to think about this a bit, and several other examples of similar characters came to mind. There's a lot more to the series, but I don't want to ruin it with a spoiler-laden discussion here. Instead, I want to talk about vigilantes.

Despite the lack of concern for justice (or perhaps because of that), Dexter is essentially a vigilante... someone who takes the law into his own hands. There is, of course, a long history of vigilantism, in both real life and art. Indeed, many classic instances happened long before the word vigilante was coined - for example, Robin Hood. He stole from the rich to give to the poor, and was immortalized as a folk hero whose tales are still told to this day. I think there is a certain cultural fascination with vigilantes, especially vigilantes in art.

Take superheroes, most of whom are technically vigilantes. Sure, many stand for all that is good in the world and often cite truth and justice as motivation, but the evolution of comic books shows something interesting. I haven't read a whole lot of comic books (especially of the superhero kind), but the impression I get is that when the craze started in the 1930s, it was all about heroics and people serving the common good. There was also a darker edge to some of them, and that edge has grown as time progressed. Batman is probably the most relevant to this discussion, as he shares a complicated relationship with the police and a certain above-the-law attitude towards solving crimes. Interestingly, the Batman of the 1930s was probably a darker, more violent superhero than he was in the 1940s, when one editor issued a decree that the character could no longer kill or use a gun. As such, the postwar Batman became more of an upstanding citizen, and the stories took on a lighter tone (definitely an understandable direction, considering what the world had been through). I'm sure I'm butchering the Batman chronology here, but the next sigificant touchstone for Batman came in 1986, with the publication of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Written and drawn by Frank Miller, the series reintroduced Batman as a dark, brooding character with complex psychological issues. A huge success, this series ushered in a new era of "grim and gritty" superheros that still holds today.

In general, our superheroes have become much more conflicted. Many (like Batman) tackle the vigilante aspect head on, and if you look at something like Watchmen (or The Incredibles, if you want a lighter version), you can see a shift in the way such stories are told. I'm sure there are literally hundreds of other examples in the comic book world, but I want to shift gears for a moment and examine another cultural icon that Dexter reminded me of: Dirty Harry.

Inspector Harry Callahan is an incredibly popular character, but apparently not with critics:

Critics have rarely cracked the whip harder than on the Dirty Harry film series, which follows the exploits of a trigger-happy San Francisco cop named Harry Callahan and his junior partners, usually not long for this world. On its release in 1971, Dirty Harry was trounced as 'fascist medievalism' by the potentate of the haut monde critic set, Pauline Kael, as well as aspiring Kaels like young Roger Ebert. Especially irksome to the criterati was a key moment in the film when Inspector Callahan, on the trail of an elusive serial sniper, is reprimanded by his superiors for not taking into account the suspect's Miranda rights. Callahan replies, through clenched teeth, "Well, I'm all broken up about that man's rights." Take that, Miranda.

I should say that critics often give the film (at least, the first one) generally good overall marks, praising its "suspense craftsmanship" or calling it "a very good example of the cops-and-killers genre." But I'm fascinated by all the talk of fascism. Despite working within the system, Dirty Harry indeed does take the law into his own hands, and in doing so he ignores many of our treasured Constitutional freedoms. And yet we all cheer him on, just as we cheer Batman and Dexter.

Why are these characters so popular? Why do we cheer such characters on even when we know what they're doing is ultimately wrong? I think it comes down to desire. We all desire justice. We want to see wrongs being made right, yet every day we can turn on the TV and watch non-stop failures of our system, whether it be rampant crime or a criminal going free or any other number of indignities. Now, I'm not an expert, but I don't think our society today is much worse off than it was, say, a hundred years ago (In fact, I think we're significantly better off, but that's another discussion). The big difference is that information is disseminated more widely and quickly, and dramatic failures of the system are attention grabbing, so that's what we get. What's more, these stories tend to focus on the most dramatic, most obscene examples. It's natural for people to feel helpless in the face of such news, and I think that's why everyone tends to embrace vigilante stories (note that people don't generally embrace actual real-life vigilantes - that's important, and we'll get to that later). Such stories serve many purposes. They allow us to cope with life's tragedies, internalize them and in some way comfort us, but as a deeper message, they also emphasize that the world is not perfect, and that we'll probably never solve the problem of crime. In some ways, they act as a critique of our system, pointing out it's imperfections and thereby making sure we don't become complacent in the ever-changing fight against crime.

Of course, there is a danger to this way of thinking, which is why critics like Pauline Kael get all huffy when they watch something like Dirty Harry. We don't want to live in a police state, and to be honest, a real cop who acted like Dirty Harry would probably be an awful cop. Films like that deal in extremes because they're trying to make a point, and it's easy to misinterpret such films. I doubt people would really accept a cop like Dirty Harry. Sure, some folks might applaud his handling of the Scorpio case that the film documents (audiences certainly did!), but police officers don't handle a single case in the course of their career, and most cases aren't that black and white either. Dirty Harry would probably be fired out here in the real world. Ultimately, while we revel in such entertainment, we don't actually want real life to imitate art in this case. However, that doesn't mean we enjoy hearing about a vicious drug dealer going free because the rules of evidence were not followed to the letter. I think deep down, people understand that concepts like the rules of evidence are important, but they can also be extremely frustrating. This is why we have conflicting emotions when we watch the last scene in Dirty Harry, in which he takes off his police badge and throws it into the river.

I think this is a large part of why vigilante stories have evolved. Comic book heroes like Batman have become more conflicted, and newer comic books often deal with the repercussions of vigilatism. The Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, was apparently made as a direct answer to the critics of Dirty Harry who thought that film was openly advocating law-sanctioned vigilantism. In Magnum Force, the villains are vigilante cops. Then you have modern day vigilantes like Dexter, which pumps audiences full of conflicting emotions. I like this guy, but he's a serial killer. He's stopping other killers, but he's doing so in such a disturbing way.

Are vigilante stories fascist fantasies? Perhaps, but fantasies aren't real. They're used to illustrate something, and in the case of vigilante fantasies, they illustrate a desire for justice. The existence of a show like Dexter will repulse some people and that's certainly an understandable reaction. In fact, I think that's exactly what the show's creators want to do. They're walking the line between satisfying the desire for justice while continually noting that Dexter is not a good person. Ironically, what would repulse me more would be the complete absence of stories like Dexter, because the only way such a thing could happen would be if everyone thought our society was perfect. Perhaps someday concepts like justice and crime will be irrelevant, but that day ain't coming soon, and until it does, we'll need such stories, if only to remind us that we don't live in a perfect world.



The Two Days of Christmas
I suppose I could have done a 12 days of Christmas post in the vein of the 4 weeks of Halloween posts, but there's obviously no time left. So here are a few things I've watched, read, or listened to recently in preparation for Christmas.

• Trading Places: Not technically a Christmas movie, but it takes place mostly during the holidays and I watch it almost every year. It's a fantastic movie.
• Linus & Lucy - A Charlie Brown Christmas (Soundtrack) (song)
• Dominick The Italian Christmas Donkey (song)
• Futurama - Xmas Story: The Simpsons have the best Halloween episodes, but Futurama is way better when it comes to Christmas. A Tale of Two Santas is the other brilliant Futurama Christmas story.
• South Park - Woodland Critter Christmas: South Park is probably the king of Christmas episodes, even if they're a little edgy and weird. This particular episode is one of the most bizarre, disturbing Christmas stories I've ever seen.
• South Park - The Spirit of Christmas: These original shorts are the precursors to the South Park tv show. The Jesus vs. Santa one is amazing.
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation: Another yearly tradition around here. The best Christmas lights I've seen, a lighting quick sledding session, what else could you ask for?
• SNL - Delicious Dish with Specual Guest, Pete Schwetty
• SNL - The Lost Ending of "It's a Wonderful Life"
• A Very Venture Christmas

That's all for now. Mery Christmas!



Rhetorical Strategy
Every so often, I see someone who is genuinely concerned with reaching the unreachable. Whether it be scientists who argue about how to frame their arguments, alpha-geek programmers who try to figure out how to reach typical, average programmers, or critics who try to open a dialogue with feminists. Debates tend to polarize, and when it comes to politics or religion, assumptions of bad faith on both sides tend to derail discussions pretty quickly.

How do you reach the unreachable? Naturally, the topic is much larger than a single blog entry, but I did run accross an interesting post by Jon Udell that outlines Charles Darwin's rhetorical strategy in the book, On the Origin of Species (which popularized the theory of evolution).

Darwin, says Slatkin, was like a salesman who finds lots of little ways to get you to say yes before you're asked to utter the big yes. In this case, Darwin invited people to affirm things they already knew, about a topic much more familiar in their era than in ours: domestic species. Did people observe variation in domestic species? Yes. And as Darwin piles on the examples, the reader says, yes, yes, OK, I get it, of course I see that some pigeons have longer tail feathers. Did people observe inheritance? Yes. And again, as he piles on the examples, the reader says yes, yes, OK, I get it, everyone knows that that the offspring of longer-tail-feather pigeons have longer tail feathers.

By the time Darwin gets around to asking you to say the big yes, it's a done deal. You've already affirmed every one of the key pillars of the argument. And you've done so in terms of principles that you already believe, and fully understand from your own experience.

It only took a couple of years for Darwin to formulate the idea of evolution by natural selection. It took thirty years to frame that idea in a way that would convince other scientists and the general public. Both the idea, and the rhetorical strategy that successfully communicated it, were great innovations.

I think Udell simplifies the inception and development of the idea of evolution, but I think the point generally holds. Darwin's ideas didn't come into mainstream prominence until he published his book, decades after he had begun his work. Obviously, Darwin's strategy isn't applicable in every situation, but it is an interesting place to start (I suppose we should keep in mind that evolution is still controversial amongst the mainstream)...



Facial Expressions and the Closed Eye Syndrome
I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, and one of the chapters focuses on the psychology of facial expressions. Put simply, we wear our emotions on our face, and some enterprising psychologists took to mapping the distinct muscular movements that the human face can make. It's an interesting process, and it turns out that people who learn these facial expressions (of which there are many) are eerily good at recognizing what people are really thinking, even if they aren't trying to show it. It's almost like mind reading, and we all do it to some extent or another (mostly, we do it unconsciously). Body language and facial expressions are packed with information, and we'd all be pretty much lost without that kind of feedback (perhaps why misunderstandings are more common on the phone or in email). Most of the time, our expressions are voluntary, but sometimes they're not. Even if we're trying to suppress our expressions, a fleeting look may cross our faces. Often, these "micro-expressions" last only a few milliseconds and are imperceptible, but when trained psychologists watch video of, say, Harold "Kim" Philby (a notorious soviet spy) giving a press conference, they're able to read him like a book (slow motion helps).

I found this example interesting, and it highlights some of the subtle differences that can exist between expressions (in this case, between a voluntary and involuntary expression):

If I were to ask you to smile, you would flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you were to smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you would not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable.

I found that interesting in light of the Closed Eye Syndrome I noticed in Anime. I wonder how that affects the way we perceive Anime. If a smiling mouth by itself means a fake expression of happiness while a smiling mouth and closed eyes means genuine emotion, does that make the animation more authentic? Animation obviously doesn't have the fidelity of video or film, but we can obviously read expressions from animated faces, so I would expect that closed eye syndrome exists more because of accuracy than anything else. In my original post on the subject, Roy noted that the reason I noticed closed eyes in anime could have something to do with the way Japan and the US read emotion. He pointed to an article that claimed Americans focus more on the mouth while the Japanese focus more on the eyes when trying to read emotions from facial expressions. One example from the article was emoticons. For happiness, Americans use a smily face :) while the Japanese tend to use ^_^ (which seems to be a face with eyes closed). That might still be part of it, but ever since I made the observation, I've noticed similar expressions in American animation (I just recently noticed it a lot in a Venture Bros. episode). Still, occurrences in American animation seem less frequent (or perhaps less obvious), so perhaps the observation still holds.

Gladwell's book is interesting, as expected, though I'm not sure yet if he has a point other than to observe that we do a lot of subconscious analysis and make lots of split decisions, and sometimes this is good (other times it's not). Still, he's good at finding examples and drilling down into the issue, and even if I'm not sure about his conclusions, it's always fun to read. There's lots more on this subject in the book (for instance, he goes over how facial expressions and our emotions are a two way phenomenon - meaning that if you intentionally contort your face in an specific way, you can induce certain emotions. The psychologists I mentioned earlier who were mapping expressions noticed that after a full day of trying to manipulate their facial muscles to show anger (even though they weren't angry) they felt horrible. Some tests have been done to confirm that, indeed, our facial expressions are linked directly to our brain) and it's probably worth a read if that's your bag.



The Paradise of Choice?
A while ago, I wrote a post about the Paradox of Choice based on a talk by Barry Schwartz, the author of a book by the same name. The basic argument Schwartz makes is that choice is a double-edged sword. Choice is a good thing, but too much choice can have negative consequences, usually in the form of some kind of paralysis (where there are so many choices that you simply avoid the decision) and consumer remorse (elevated expectations, anticipated regret, etc...). The observations made by Schwartz struck me as being quite astute, and I've been keenly aware of situations where I find myself confronted with a paradox of choice ever since. Indeed, just knowing and recognizing these situations seems to help deal with the negative aspects of having too many choices available.

This past summer, I read Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, and I was a little pleasantly surprised to see a chapter in his book titled "The Paradise of Choice." In that chapter, Anderson explicitely addresses Schwartz's book. However, while I liked Anderson's book and generally agreed with his basic points, I think his dismissal of the Paradox of Choice is off target. Part of the problem, I think, is that Anderson is much more concerned with the choices rather than the consequences of those choices (which is what Schwartz focuses on). It's a little difficult to tell though, as Anderson only dedicates 7 pages or so to the topic. As such, his arguments don't really eviscerate Schwartz's work. There are some good points though, so let's take a closer look.

Anderson starts with a summary of Schwartz's main concepts, and points to some of Schwartz's conclusions (from page 171 in my edition):

As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

Now, the way Anderson presents this is a bit out of context, but we'll get to that in a moment. Anderson continues and then responds to some of these points (again, page 171):

As an antidote to this poison of our modern age, Schwartz recommends that consumers "satisfice," in the jargon of social science, not "maximize". In other words, they'd be happier if they just settled for what was in front of them rather than obsessing over whether something else might be even better. ...

I'm skeptical. The alternative to letting people choose is choosing for them. The lessons of a century of retail science (along with the history of Soviet department stores) are that this is not what most consumers want.

Anderson has completely missed the point here. Later in the chapter, he spends a lot of time establishing that people do, in fact, like choice. And he's right. My problem is twofold: First, Schwartz never denies that choice is a good thing, and second, he never advocates removing choice in the first place. Yes, people love choice, the more the better. However, Schwartz found that even though people preferred more options, they weren't necessarily happier because of it. That's why it's called the paradox of choice - people obviously prefer something that ends up having negative consequences. Schwartz's book isn't some sort of crusade against choice. Indeed, it's more of a guide for how to cope with being given too many choices. Take "satisficing." As Tom Slee notes in a critique of this chapter, Anderson misstates Schwartz's definition of the term. He makes it seem like satisficing is settling for something you might not want, but Schwartz's definition is much different:

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

Settling for something that is good enough to meet your needs is quite different than just settling for what's in front of you. Again, I'm not sure Anderson is really arguing against Schwartz. Indeed, Anderson even acknowledges part of the problem, though he again misstate's Schwartz's arguments:

Vast choice is not always an unalloyed good, of course. It too often forces us to ask, "Well, what do I want?" and introspection doesn't come naturally to all. But the solution is not to limit choice, but to order it so it isn't oppressive.

Personally, I don't think the problem is that introspection doesn't come naturally to some people (though that could be part of it), it's more that some people just don't give a crap about certain things and don't want to spend time figuring it out. In Schwartz's talk, he gave an example about going to the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. Of course, the Gap offers a wide variety of jeans (as of right now: Standard Fit, Loose Fit, Boot Fit, Easy Fit, Morrison Slim Fit, Low Rise Fit, Toland Fit, Hayes Fit, Relaxed Fit, Baggy Fit, Carpenter Fit). The clerk asked him what he wanted, and he said "I just want a pair of jeans!"

The second part of Anderson's statement is interesting though. Aside from again misstating Schwartz's argument (he does not advocate limiting choice!), the observation that the way a choice is presented is important is interesting. Yes, the Gap has a wide variety of jean styles, but look at their website again. At the top of the page is a little guide to what each of the styles means. For the most part, it's helpful, and I think that's what Anderson is getting at. Too much choice can be oppressive, but if you have the right guide, you can get the best of both worlds. The only problem is that finding the right guide is not as easy as it sounds. The jean style guide at Gap is neat and helpful, but you do have to click through a bunch of stuff and read it. This is easier than going to a store and trying all the varieties on, but it's still a pain for someone who just wants a pair of jeans dammit.

Anderson spends some time fleshing out these guides to making choices, noting the differences between offline and online retailers:

In a bricks-and-mortar store, products sit on the shelf where they have been placed. If a consumer doesn't know what he or she wants, the only guide is whatever marketing material may be printed on the package, and the rough assumption that the product offered in the greatest volume is probably the most popular.

Online, however, the consumer has a lot more help. There are a nearly infinite number of techniques to tap the latent information in a marketplace and make that selection process easier. You can sort by price, by ratings, by date, and by genre. You can read customer reviews. You can compare prices across products and, if you want, head off to Google to find out as much about the product as you can imagine. Recommendations suggest products that 'people like you' have been buying, and surprisingly enough, they're often on-target. Even if you know nothing about the category, ranking best-sellers will reveal the most popular choice, which both makes selection easier and also tends to minimize post-sale regret. ...

... The paradox of choice is simply and artifact of the limitations of the physical world, where the information necessary to make an informed choice is lost.

I think it's a very good point he's making, though I think he's a bit too optimistic about how effective these guides to buying really are. For one thing, there are times when a choice isn't clear, even if you do have a guide. Also, while I think retailers that offer Recommendations based on what other customer purchases are important and helpful, who among us hasn't seen absurd recommendations? From my personal experience, a lot of people don't like the connotations of recommendations either (how do they know so much about me? etc...). Personally, I really like recommendations, but I'm a geek and I like to figure out why they're offering me what they are (Amazon actually tells you why something is recommended, which is really neat). In any case, from my own personal anecdotal observations, no one puts much faith in probablistic systems like recommendations or ratings (for a number of reasons, such as cheating or distrust). There's nothing wrong with that, and that's part of why such systems are effective. Ironically, acknowledging their imperfections allow users to better utilize the systems. Anderson knows this, but I think he's still a bit too optimistic about our tools for traversing the long tail. Personally, I think they need a lot of work.

When I was younger, one of the big problems in computing was storage. Computers are the perfect data gatering tool, but you need somewhere to store all that data. In the 1980s and early 1990s, computers and networks were significantly limited by hardware, particularly storage. By the late 1990s, Moore's law had eroded this deficiency significantly, and today, the problem of storage is largely solved. You can buy a terrabyte of storage for just a couple hundred dollars. However, as I'm fond of saying, we don't so much solve problems as trade one set of problems for another. Now that we have the ability to store all this information, how do we get at it in a meaninful way? When hardware was limited, analysis was easy enough. Now, though, you have so much data available that the simple analyses of the past don't cut it anymore. We're capturing all this new information, but are we really using it to its full potential?

I recently caught up with Malcolm Gladwell's article on the Enron collapse. The really crazy thing about Enron was that they didn't really hide what they were doing. They fully acknowledged and disclosed what they were doing... there was just so much complexity to their operations that no one really recognized the issues. They were "caught" because someone had the persistence to dig through all the public documentation that Enron had provided. Gladwell goes into a lot of detail, but here are a few excerpts:

Enron's downfall has been documented so extensively that it is easy to overlook how peculiar it was. Compare Enron, for instance, with Watergate, the prototypical scandal of the nineteen-seventies. To expose the White House coverup, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used a source-Deep Throat-who had access to many secrets, and whose identity had to be concealed. He warned Woodward and Bernstein that their phones might be tapped. When Woodward wanted to meet with Deep Throat, he would move a flower pot with a red flag in it to the back of his apartment balcony. That evening, he would leave by the back stairs, take multiple taxis to make sure he wasn't being followed, and meet his source in an underground parking garage at 2 A.M. ...

Did Jonathan Weil have a Deep Throat? Not really. He had a friend in the investment-management business with some suspicions about energy-trading companies like Enron, but the friend wasn't an insider. Nor did Weil's source direct him to files detailing the clandestine activities of the company. He just told Weil to read a series of public documents that had been prepared and distributed by Enron itself. Woodward met with his secret source in an underground parking garage in the hours before dawn. Weil called up an accounting expert at Michigan State.

When Weil had finished his reporting, he called Enron for comment. "They had their chief accounting officer and six or seven people fly up to Dallas," Weil says. They met in a conference room at the Journal's offices. The Enron officials acknowledged that the money they said they earned was virtually all money that they hoped to earn. Weil and the Enron officials then had a long conversation about how certain Enron was about its estimates of future earnings. ...

Of all the moments in the Enron unravelling, this meeting is surely the strangest. The prosecutor in the Enron case told the jury to send Jeffrey Skilling to prison because Enron had hidden the truth: You're "entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is," the prosecutor had said. But what truth was Enron hiding here? Everything Weil learned for his Enron expose came from Enron, and when he wanted to confirm his numbers the company's executives got on a plane and sat down with him in a conference room in Dallas.

Again, there's a lot more detail in Gladwell's article. Just how complicated was the public documentation that Enron had released? Gladwell gives some examples, including this one:

Enron's S.P.E.s were, by any measure, evidence of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence. But you can't blame Enron for covering up the existence of its side deals. It didn't; it disclosed them. The argument against the company, then, is more accurately that it didn't tell its investors enough about its S.P.E.s. But what is enough? Enron had some three thousand S.P.E.s, and the paperwork for each one probably ran in excess of a thousand pages. It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public. What about an edited version of each deal? Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law School, recently examined a random sample of twenty S.P.E. disclosure statements from various corporations-that is, summaries of the deals put together for interested parties-and found that on average they ran to forty single-spaced pages. So a summary of Enron's S.P.E.s would have come to a hundred and twenty thousand single-spaced pages. What about a summary of all those summaries? That's what the bankruptcy examiner in the Enron case put together, and it took up a thousand pages. Well, then, what about a summary of the summary of the summaries? That's what the Powers Committee put together. The committee looked only at the "substance of the most significant transactions," and its accounting still ran to two hundred numbingly complicated pages and, as Schwarcz points out, that was "with the benefit of hindsight and with the assistance of some of the finest legal talent in the nation."

Again, Gladwell's article has a lot of other details and is a fascinating read. What interested me the most, though, was the problem created by so much data. That much information is useless if you can't sift through it quickly or effectively enough. Bringing this back to the paradise of choice, the current systems we have for making such decisions are better than ever, but still require a lot of improvement. Anderson is mostly talking about simple consumer products, so none are really as complicated as the Enron case, but even then, there are still a lot of problems. If we're really going to overcome the paradox of choice, we need better information analysis tools to help guide us. That said, Anderson's general point still holds:

More choice really is better. But now we know that variety alone is not enough; we also need information about that variety and what other consumers before us have done with the same choices. ... The paradox of choice turned out to be more about the poverty of help in making that choice than a rejection of plenty. Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it's liberating.

Personally, while the help in making choices has improved, there's still a long way to go before we can really tackle the paradox of choice (though, again, just knowing about the paradox of choice seems to do wonders in coping with it).

As a side note, I wonder if the video game playing generations are better at dealing with too much choice - video games are all about decisions, so I wonder if folks who grew up working on their decision making apparatus are more comfortable with being deluged by choice.



The Spinning Silhouette
This Spinning Silhouette optical illusion is making the rounds on the internet this week, and it's being touted as a "right brain vs left brain test." The theory goes that if you see the silhouette spinning clockwise, you're right brained, and you're left brained if you see it spinning counterclockwise.

Everytime I looked at the damn thing, it was spinning a different direction. I closed my eyes and opened them again, and it spun a different direction. Every now and again, and it would stay the same direction twice in a row, but if I looked away and looked back, it changed direction. Now, if I focus my eyes on a point below the illusion, it doesn't seem to rotate all the way around at all, instead it seems like she's moving from one side to the other, then back (i.e. changing directions every time the one leg reaches the side of the screen - and the leg always seems to be in front of the silhouette).

Of course, this is the essense of the illusion. The silhouette isn't actually spinning at all, because it's two dimensional. However, since my brain is used to living in a three dimensional world (and thus parsing three dimensional images), it's assuming that the image is also three dimensional. We're actually making lots of assumptions about the image, and that's why we can see it going one way or the other.

Eventually, after looking at the image for a while and pondering the issues, I got curious. I downloaded the animated gif and opened it up in the GIMP to see how the frames are built. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this thing is either broken or it's cheating. Well, I shouldn't say that. I noticed something off on one of the frames, and I'd be real curious to know how that affects people's perception of the illusion (to me, it means the image is definitely moving counterclockwise). I'm almost positive that it's too subtle to really affect anything, but I did find it interesting. More on this, including images and commentary, below the fold. First thing's first, here's the actual spinning silhouette.


Again, some of you will see it spinning in one direction, some in the other direction. Everyone seems to have a different trick for getting it to switch direction. Some say to focus on the shadow, some say to look at the ankles. Closing my eyes and reopening seems to do the trick for me. Now let's take a closer look at one of the frames. Here's frame 12:


Looking at this frame, you should be able to switch back and forth, seeing the leg behind the person or in front of the person. Again, because it's a silhouette and a two dimensional image, our brain usually makes an assumption of depth, putting the leg in front or behind the body. Switching back and forth on this static image was actually a lot easier for me. Now the tricky part comes in the next frame, number 13 (obviously, the arrow was added by me):


Now, if you look closely at the leg, you'll see a little imperfection in the silhouette. Maybe I'm wrong, but that little gash in the leg seems to imply that the leg is behind the body. If you try, you can still get yourself to see the image as having the leg in front, but then you've got this gash in the leg that just seems very out of place.

So what to make of this? First, the imperfection is subtle enough (it's on 1 frame out of 34) that everyone still seems to be able to see it rotate in both directions. Second, maybe I'm crazy, and the little gash doesn't imply what I think. Anyone have alternative explanations? Third, is that imperfection intentional? If so, why? It does not seem necessary, so I'd be curious to know if the creators knew about it, and what their intention was regarding it.

Finally, as far as the left brain versus right brain portion, I find that I don't really care, but I am interested in how the imperfection would affect this "test." This neuroscientist seems to be pretty adamant about the whole left/right thing being hogwash though:

...the notion that someone is "left-brained" or "right-brained" is absolute nonsense. All complex behaviours and cognitive functions require the integrated actions of multiple brain regions in both hemispheres of the brain. All types of information are probably processed in both the left and right hemispheres (perhaps in different ways, so that the processing carried out on one side of the brain complements, rather than substitutes, that being carried out on the other).

At the very least, the traditional left/right brain theory is a wildly oversimplified version of what's really happening. The post also goes into the way the brain "fill in the gaps" for confusing visual information, thus allowing the illusion.

Update: Strange - the image appears to be rotating MUCH faster in Firefox than in Opera or IE. I wonder how that affects perception.



Groping and Probing
So a few recent installments of Shamus' new comic, Chainmail Bikini, has created a bit of controversy. The comics in question are actually a series of 3 (the fact that there are 3 is a key part of the controversy, but we'll get to that in a moment). Here they are:

• #6 Touch Attack
• #7 Relationship Shy
• #8 Live Action Ramgar Pummeling

The controversy stems from the fact that there is a malicious groping in comic #6. Perhaps due to an ill-advised punchline ("improved stamina"), the discussion turned from one of groping and larping and into one of rape. And we all know how funny discussions of rape can get.

To be honest, I didn't find this particular arc in the comics very funny. However, I didn't find it very offensive either (though I can see why some might think so). Also, while I didn't find it especially funny, I do think it makes an interesting statement about gaming in general.

I don't tend to read web-comics the same way I read blogs. I tend to let several installments build up, and then read them all. So I didn't read this particular story arc until I knew about the controversy, and I must admit to a little bit of observer bias. Knowing there was a controversy colored my reading of the comic, and two things immediately struck me.

First is that while there is an element of one guy antagonizing his buddy, there is also an element of probing. By probing, I'm referring to exploration of the limits of a game and its possibilities. Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You has a chapter on Video Games which covers this concept really well, and I recently wrote about it:

Probing is essentially exploration of the game and its possibilities. Much of this is simply the unconscious exploration of the controls and the interface, figuring out how the game works and how you're supposed to interact with it. However, probing also takes the more conscious form of figuring out the limitations of the game. For instance, in a racing game, it's usually interesting to see if you can turn your car around backwards, pick up a lot of speed, then crash head-on into a car going the "correct" way.

Now again, in comic #6, one character is clearly attempting to antagonize his friend for choosing to role play a woman. However, I find it interesting that he chose to do so in such a way that is consistent with his character (who is a Chaotic Neutral barbarian) and followed the rules of the game (rolling die, etc...). According to the notes that accompany this arc, this sort of thing tends to happen when a campaign is not going well. If the players aren't having fun, they're going to make fun, and in if you're in a role playing game, they're going to do so by making their characters do something a little extreme. They don't do this because they are really extreme people, but because they want to see what happens. In short, they want to knock the game off it's boring rails. In this case, one player's character player groped another player's character. And from the aftermath in comics #7 and #8, you can see that things certainly got interesting. However, you also see that there were indeed consequences for the groping (one player physically assaults the other), and the comments that accompany each comic clearly attest that this is, in fact, a bad thing. To me, it's clear that the character in the comic is engaging in probing, but the comic also makes it clear that in a game that is as open-ended as D&D, it's possible to take things so far, which is why you saw a "real-world" reprisal (scare quotes due to the fact that this is a fictional comic, after all).

The second thing that struck me also had to do with the consequences. The situation immediately reminded me of this post from my friend Roy's feminist blog. He found this german poster which has a picture accompanied by this text:

Warning! Women defend themselves! If you leer at, catcall, or touch a woman, take into account that you might be loudly ridiculed, have a glass of beer poured over you, or be slapped in the face. Therefore, we strongly advise you to refrain from such harrassment!

This is exactly what happend in comics #6 - #8. Well, not exactly. The comics actually take the consequences even further, while further abstracting the situation. Let me elaborate. The poster that Roy is pointing to is talking about real life situations. If you grope some woman at a bar, expect to be slapped in the face (or worse). What happened in the comics? An imaginary character who was role playing his own imaginary character groped another imaginary character that was being role played by yet another imaginary character. No one actually exists in this scenario, and yet there are indeed consequences for the groping. In fact, the consequences were the entire point of this character arc. So when I read comics #6-#8, I immediately saw them as a demonstration of Roy's poster. (Ironically, you could even read into this more, saying that the consequences have actually broken free of the imaginary world of Chainmail Bikini and taken root in the real world - in the form of a long comment thread and multiple blog postings like this one).

Now, if one were so inclined, I can see why this arc would be grating. Personally, it doesn't bother me, but I've never been groped (er, against my will) and I can certainly understand how that could be off-putting (I suppose an argument could be made that there are some other gender issues as well). And as an astute commenter at Shamus' site points out, a lot of why this comic doesn't work as humor is due to the structure of the story:

A lot of why this doesn't work well as humour, and why it's ended up annoying people, is to do with the structure of the comic. I think Shamus really struggled with fitting a potentially amusing gag into the three-panel format, and ultimately didn't manage it successfully.

Here's what I mean. Comic 6 Panel 1 has the line "I'm exploring gender roles within the context of a roleplaying environment". The barbarian's player throws these words back in comic 7 panel 2. It's the punchline of a five-panel gag split over two comics. Structurally, this is a mess. It leads to a lame second gag to fill the rest of comic 7, but more importantly it means some sort of not-quite-a-punchline has to be contrived for the end of comic 6. That's where "improved stamina" comes from. Whatever is said in subsequent comics, it is really hard to read comic 6 in isolation without inferring that the barbarian's player intends to have his character vigorously sexually assault the female character. Because this is the last line of the comic, the additional implication is that we are meant to find this funny in itself. No wonder some people got offended.

Now, imagine doing the same thing over a slightly longer single comic of four or five panels. You would cut the "improved stamina" line for a start - it would serve no purpose any more. Instead, the comic ends on "I prefer to think of it as exploring gender roles within the context of a roleplaying environment". The first advantage of this is that it's a lot funnier. The punchline is where it's supposed to be, not buried half-way through the next comic. The second advantage is that the potential for offending readers is greatly reduced. It no longer reads as though we're meant to find rape or sexual assault funny: the humour is in the elf's player having his pretentiousness deflated in a basically harmless, if tasteless, way.

Shamus himself has noted that this explanation is not only accurate, but a good explanation as to why people are offended by what he essentially saw as a harmless joke. This makes sense to me. He wrote a strip that touched on a controversial subject in a humorous way, but then he was forced to cut it up and insert artificial punchlines, one of which implied more than he thought. From his point of view, the comic is basically the same as before, but just split up a little. All the sudden people start talking about rape and unsubscribing to the comic. I can see why he'd be a bit perplexed by even a reasonable objection to the comic.

I've never been a particularly great writer. When I was in high school, I always excelled at math and science, but never did especially well at english or writing. By college, I was much more comfortable with writing, and part of the reason for that was that I realized that writing isn't precise. Language is inherently vague and open to interpretation, and though there are some people who can wield language astoundingly well, most of us will open ourselves up to criticism simply by the act of experessing ourselves. One of my favorite quotes summarizes this well:

"To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how the Truth is mangled and torn!"
- Anne Murrow Lindbergh

Unfortunately, this simple miscommunication seems to have gotten lost in a thread of almost 200 comments. Some people have quit reading the comic altogether because of some perceived malice or ignorance on Shamus' part, others have taken to turning this into a divisive debate about rape. I don't want to start a holy war here, but when it comes to controversial stuff like this, I tend to give the creators the benefit of the doubt.

I think this whole controversy has brought up some interesting ideas, even if most have reduced it to a debate about rape. For instance, probing in games often takes the form of doing something extreme. My seemingly innocuous example above was turning your racecar around and driving the wrong direction to see what happens when you ram into another car. In real life, such an action would be catastrophic and could result in multiple deaths. Now, does doing something like that speak ill of me (the player)? How does wanton vehicular homicide compare to imaginary groping?

In my limited D&D gaming career, I played a Chaotic Evil thief who stole from his own party (i.e. one of my friends). Why did I do that? In real life, I'd never do such a thing. Why would I be interested in doing it in a role playing game? At a later point, I certainly suffered the consequences for my actions, and I think that's the rub. Playing games is all about setting up a paradigm, and sometimes half the fun is attempting to pull it down and find the holes in the paradigm, just to see what happens. I think that's a big part of why open-ended games like Grand Theft Auto are so popular. It's not the act of stealing a car or murdering a stranger that's fun, it's the act of attempting to derail the game. (Again, I touched on this in a post on game manuals.) In a recent discussion on what people like about Role Playing Games (also at Shamus' site), one of the most prominent answers was that good RPGs "...must give the player lots of freedom to make their own choices." One of the things I really hated about God of War (an otherwise awsome game) was that the character I was playing was a real prick. At one point, he goes out of his way to kill an innocent bystander (something about kicking him down into the hydra maybe? I don't remember specifically.) and that really annoyed me. What happened didn't bother me so much as the fact that I didn't have a choice in the matter. I don't really have an answer here, but I like games that give me a lot of freedom, because once I get bored by the forced or scripted aspects of the game, I can probe for weaknesses in the paradigm, and maybe even exploit them.

Update: I just noticed that Roy has tackled this subject on his blog. He seems quite disheartened by Shamus' post, though Roy wrote his post before the comment I quoted above was posted... My perception was that Shamus just couldn't understand why people were objecting... but once someone actually pointed out, in detail, why the humor doesn't work, he seemed to be more understanding (not only of why people were complaining, but of what people were suggesting by their complaints). But that's just me. I don't want to put words in Shamus' mouth, but as I already mentioned, I tend to give creators the benefit of the doubt.



Halloweeny Links
Kaedrin's own monkey research squad strikes again, with a pseduo-horror/Halloween theme. Enjoy:

• Kernunrex's Six Weeks of Halloween 2007: He of the Chronocinethon is taking a break from exhaustively exploring movies in chronological order, and watching lots of horror flicks in the six weeks leading up to Halloween. I wish I had thought of this (and had time to implement). I think the neatest thing about his schedule is that he sneaks in a bunch of shorts and trailers between his movies (for instance, he's got the classic Simpsons episode, The Shinning and the great SNL Skit: Consumer Probe: Unsafe Halloween Costumes). I might have to do something like this in the near future. Or maybe I'll just go to the 24 Hour Horrorthon in Philly.
• Horror Movie a Day: This guy takes to watching Horror movies with a zeal unseen since, uh, Kernunrex. Crap. Still, this guy watches 1 horror movie a day and posts a quick capsule review.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Celebrating 30 Years of Very Stupid Monsters: What can be more fearsome than the Duckbunny? I dunno, the picture of the Squark kinda looks like Cthulhu if you don't look too close. And have poor vision. Also, with respect to the Giant Beaver (actual D&D monster), this snapple cap that's been on my desk informs me that Beavers were once the size of bears! Ok, I'll stop now. Lots of stupid monsters here.
• The Legend of FacilityFocus: Funny "Underground Guide" for how to enter repair request using UPenn's new web interface, done in the style of an adventure video game walkthrough. Is this horror? Well, as someone whose job involves usability, this is pretty horrific.
• Plush Hellraiser: The Box. You Snuggled It. We Came. I'm mostly linking to this because of the brilliant title, but Widge has some neat suggestions for newly released plush Hellraiser toys.

Ok, so some of those are a stretch on the Halloween theme, but work with me here.



We Could Be Heroes
Just for one day though. Apologies for the missing entry yesterday and the lame entry today. Time is still tight, so I'll just throw out a link to 5 Questions Season Two of Heroes Had Better F#@king Answer.

Unlike a certain show about people stranded on a mysterious island that we won't name, by the end of its first season NBC's hit series Heroes had managed to neatly wrap up the vast majority of its plot threads and running storylines. The cheerleader was saved; the sword was retrieved; and the exploding man was stopped. We didn't watch the finale of the mystery island show that we're not naming, but we wouldn't be surprised if Locke was left speechless by the sight of Patrick Duffy in the shower. Had it all been a dream?

Some questions I have: Will they finally just get rid of Ali Larter's dumbass subplot? Which lame, cliched plot element will they get me to fall for anyway?

Update: The answer to my second question: Amnesia.



Fantasy Football, 2007
As I mentioned earlier in the week, my schedule is pretty tight so my time for writing (and just about everything else) has been drastically reduced. So I'm just going to introduce my 2007 fantasy football team, the Star Wars Kids. I know most of my readers aren't big sports fans, but I can probably dash this off in a half hour, which I actually have enough time for. So I did very well last year, but my team peaked early and lost in the first round of the playoffs.

I was a little worried about this year. First, I had almost no time to prepare for the draft, which isn't usually a good sign. Second, the team I drafted seemed to be relying on a lot of "comeback" seasons (players who had a bad season or two due to injury or due to their team's performance, but who could make a comeback this year). Third, I ended up with a lackluster defense and my bench is a little weak. This is due to my position in the draft. I was last but the draft is a snake, so I had the 12th and 13th pick, but then had to wait for another 2 rounds for my next pick (36 overall). This position has its advantages, but it also meant that when a run on Defense/Special Teams happened, I ended up with scraps. Fourth, as an Eagles fan, I was frustrated by the fact that I ended up with Terrell Owens. He's a great performer, but on a personal level, I hate him. And he plays for the mortal enemy of the Eagles. I also have the Cowboys defense & special teams. Put simply, when the Eagles play the Cowboys, I'm going to be pretty conflicted.

Anyway, after one and half weeks here, it seems that the team I drafted is doing quite well for itself. Many of my gambles are paying off, and I may have underestimated some of my "sure things." So here's my team:

• Tom Brady: (QB) Yes, I had him last year and yes, I was a little disappointed by him. He did a solid job, week in and week out, but he was no Peyton Manning (I don't want to start a holy war here, but while we could debate which is better in real life, Manning has always been the better fantasy QB. ) So if I was disappointed last year, why would I spend a second round draft pick on him this year? Put simply, he's got a real receiving corps now. Last year, he did a good job and he had no good recievers! This year, he's got Randy Moss, Wes Welker and Donte Stallworth. There was perhaps a little bit of a risk here, as Moss hasn't been stellar in Oakland... but, you know, he was playing in Oakland. Who wouldn't do poorly? Anyway, Brady put up huge numbers last week, and it was a good thing too, as my opponent had Peyton Manning (interestingly, they both put up the same amount of fantasy points). As I type, Brady has put up 165 yards and 2 TDs and we're only a couple minutes into the 2nd Quarter of tonight's game. This may be my best pick of the year, though it didn't require much thought. Brady was a sure thing.
• Travis Henry: (RB) This one had me worried. Henry is notoriously injury prone and inconsistent, has had fumbling and substance abuse problems in the past. However, Denver coach Mike Shanahan loves to run the ball, and Henry is a workhorse when he's healthy. Then again, Shanahan is notorious for giving the ball to multiple backs, which is poison for fantasy owners. So far, so good. Henry has put up solid but not stellar numbers. This is about all I could expect, but there's always the nagging fear of injury (or, uh, being arrested or something).
• Edgerrin James: (RB) He had a bad season last year, so this was a bit of a risk. However, everything I've seen says the problem was the team he was on and not him. The Cardinals didn't run much and were pretty awful last year, so it was difficult for James to gain any ground. However, with a new head coach and some other changes, I was betting on big things from James... and so far, things are going well. He's been my top running back in the first two weeks and shows no signs of slowing down.
• Adrian Peterson: (RB) A rookie who was originally scheduled to share the load with Chester Taylor... but when Taylor went down with an injury early in last week's game, Peterson came up huge. Unfortunately, I had him on my bench. Peterson's going to be one of the people I put into the "Flex" position from week to week, so he may spend some time on the bench (especially if Taylor comes back), but he did a reasonable job this week.
• Terrell Owens: (WR) As much as it pains me to admit it, TO is fantasy gold, and I got him relatively late in the draft. He's been one of my top performers and I'm sure he'll remain that way. He's good for double digit touchdowns, and as much as I dislike him on a personal level, I have to admit, I like the numbers he's putting up. I wish I had the fortitude of Bill Simmons:

  Just know that he'll never be on my team. I can't root for him. It's not in me. When TO does something good, I don't want to feel happy.

  I don't like rooting for him either. Makes me feel dirty. But he was a steal when I picked him up in the draft, and he's paid off in spades. *sigh*
• Reggie Brown: (WR) Brown is the uncontested #1 WR in Philly, but he did nothing last week. Nothing. 1 reception for 11 yards. This is absurdly lame, and adds fuel to the "I hate having to root for TO" fire. Why can't I have a hometown player I can actually root for on my team? The last time that happend was 3 or 4 years ago when I had Brian Westbrook (who also happens to be from my alma mater). If Brown, who's riding my bench this week, doesn't do well tomorrow night, I'm not sure I'll keep him on my team.
• Jerricho Cotchery: (WR) Put up mediocre numbers last week, but came up huge this week. Considering that I drafted him in one of the later rounds, I think this was a decent pickup, and he's earned his way to the number 2 WR slot on my team (though I'm pretty weak at WR).
• Dallas Clark: (TE) Has had injury problems and is coming off a bad year, but he appears to be healthy and it's always nice to have one of Peyton Manning's targets on your team. He's put up some pretty solid numbers for me so far, so this late round draft pick seems worth it.
• Cowboys: (D/ST) I hate the Cowboys, but due to a run on D/ST picks inbetween my picks, I really didn't have much of an option for D/ST. The Cowboys did crappy last week, but did a decent enough job today. That's all I can really ask for, though it would be really nice not to have to root for the Cowboys.
• David Akers: (K) Well here's a hometown player I can root for, but the Kicker isn't exactly a premier position. Still, Akers is as solid as they come, and he should be able to put up decent numbers for me.
• Bench: Texans QB Matt Schaub seems to be my best bench player, which would be great if he didn't have the same Bye week as Tom Brady. D'oh! Nevertheless, he might make good trade bait. Or not. We'll see. For backup running backs, I've got the Bells (Mike and Tatum), neither of which is all that great (though Mike Bell is Travis Henry's backup, which could be useful if Henry goes down with an injury). Rounding out the team are Drew Bennet (WR, crappy) and the Cardinals D/ST (also crappy).

So there you have it, the 2007 Star Wars Kids. So far, they've performed far beyond expectations, putting up a league high (tied for first, actually) 107 fantasy points last week. This week, they look even better, putting up 117 points so far, and Brady still has a half game left and Akers plays tomorrow night. There are still lots of things that could go wrong, and I could peak early like I did last season, but I'm still happy with my team's performance. I took a lot of gambles and picked several sleepers, and it looks like they're all paying off... so far.

Update: Greg's draft didn't go as well as mine, but I think he'll make due.



Referential
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how context matters when consuming art. As sometimes happens when writing an entry, that one got away from me and I never got around to the point I originally started with (that entry was originally entitled "Referential" but I changed it when I realized that I wasn't going to write anything about references), which was how much of our entertainment these days references its predecessors. This takes many forms, some overt (homages, parody), some a little more subtle.

I originally started thinking about this while watching an episode of Family Guy. The show is infamous for its random cutaway gags - little vignettes that have no connection to the story, but which often make some obscure reference to pop culture. For some reason, I started thinking about what it would be like to watch an episode of Family Guy with someone from, let's say, the 17th century. Let's further speculate that this person isn't a blithering idiot, but perhaps a member of the Royal Society or something (i.e. a bright fellow).

This would naturally be something of a challenge. There are some technical explanations that would be necessary. For example, we'd have to explain electricty, cable networks, signal processing and how the television works (which at least involves discussions on light and color). The concept of an animated show, at least, would probably be easy to explain (but it would involve a discussion of how the human eye works, to a degree).

There's more to it, of course, but moving past all that, once we start watching the show, we're going to have to explain why we're laughing at pretty much all of the jokes. Again, most of the jokes are simply references and parodies of other pieces of pop culture. Watching an episode of Family Guy with Isaac Newton (to pick a prominent Royal Society member) would necessitate a pause just about every minute to explain what each reference was from and why Family Guy's take on it made me laugh. Then there's the fact that Family Guy rarely has any sort of redeemable lesson and often deliberately skews towards actively encouraging evil (something along the lines of "I think the important thing to remember is that it's ok to lie, so long as you don't get caught." I don't think that exact line is in an episode, but it could be.) This works fine for us, as we're so steeped in popular culture that we get the fact that Family Guy is just lampooning of the notion that we could learn important life lessions via a half-hour sitcom. But I'm sure Isaac Newton would be appalled.

For some reason, I find this fascinating, and try to imagine how I would explain various jokes. For instance, the episode I was watching featured a joke concerning "cool side of the pillow." They cut to a scene in bed where Peter flips over the pillow and sees Billy Dee Williams' face, which proceeds to give a speech about how cool this side of the pillow is, ending with "Works every time." This joke alone would require a whole digression into Star Wars and how most of the stars of that series struggled to overcome their typecasting and couldn't find a lot of good work, so people like Billy Dee Williams ended up doing commercials for a malt liquor named Colt 45, which had these really cheesy commercials where Billy Dee talked like that. And so on. It could probably take an hour before my guest would even come close to understanding the context of the joke (I'm not even touching the tip of the iceberg with this post).

And the irony of this whole thing is that jokes that are explained simply aren't funny. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I find these simple gags funny (that, of course, is the joy of humor - you don't usually have to understand it or think about it, you just laugh). Seriously, why is it funny when Family Guy blatantly references some classic movie or show? Again, I'm not sure, but that sort of humor has been steadily growing over the past 30 years or so.

Not all comedies are that blatant about their referential humor though (indeed, Family Guy itself doesn't solely rely upon such references). A recent example of a good referential film is Shaun of the Dead, which somewhow manages to be both a parody and an example of a good zombie movie. It pays homage to all the classic zombie films and it also makes fun of other genres (notably the romantic comedy), but in doing so, the filmmakers have also made a good zombie movie in itself. The filmmakers have recently released a new film called Hot Fuzz, which attempts the same trick for action movies and buddy comedies. It is, perhaps, not as successful as Shaun, but the sheer number of references in the film is astounding. There are the obvious and explicit ones like Point Break and Bad Boys II, but there are also tons of subtle homages that I'd wager most people wouldn't get. For instance, when Simon Pegg yells in the movie, he's doing a pitch perfect impersonation of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. And when he chases after a criminal, he imitates the way Robert Patrick's T-1000 runs from Terminator 2.

References don't need to be part of a comedy either (though comedies seem to make the easiest examples). Hop on IMDB and go to just about any recent movie, and click on the "Movie Connections" link in the left navigation. For instance, did you know that the aformentioned T2 references The Wizard of Oz and The Killing, amongst dozens of other references? Most of the time, these references are really difficult to pick out, especially when you're viewing a foreign film or show that's pulling from a different cultural background. References don't have to be story or character based - they can be the way a scene is composed or the way the lighting is set (i.e. the Venetian blinds in Noir films).

Now, this doesn't just apply to art either. A lot of common knowledge in today's world is referential. Most formal writing includes references and bibliographies, for instance, and a non-fiction book will often assume basic familiarity with a subject. When I was in school, I was always annoyed at the amount of rote memorization they made us do. Why memorize it if I could just look it up? Shouldn't you be focusing on my critical thinking skills instead of making me memorize arbitrary lists of facts? Sometimes this complaining was probably warranted, but most of it wasn't. So much of what we do in today's world requires a well-rounded familiarity with a large number of subjects (including history, science, culture, amongst many other things). There simply isn't any substitute for actual knowledge. Though it was a pain at the time, I'm glad emphasis was put on memorization during my education. A while back, David Foster noted that schools are actually moving away from this, and makes several important distinctions. He takes an example of a song:

Jakob Dylan has a song that includes the following lines:

Cupid, don't draw back your bow
Sam Cooke didn't know what I know

Think of how much you need to know in order to understand these two simple lines:

1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love
2)And that Cupid's chosen instrument is the bow and arrow
3)Also that there was a singer/songwriter named Sam Cooke
4)And that he had a song called which included the lines "Cupid, draw back your bow."

... "Progressive" educators, loudly and in large numbers, insist that students should be taught "thinking skills" as opposed to memorization. But consider: If it's not possible to understand a couple of lines from a popular song without knowing by heart the references to which it alludes--without memorizing them--what chance is there for understanding medieval history, or modern physics, without having a ready grasp of the topics which these disciplines reference?

And also consider: in the Dylan case, it's not just what you need to know to appreciate the song. It's what Dylan needed to know to create it in the first place. Had he not already had the reference points--Cupid, the bow and arrow, the Sam Cooke song--in his head, there's no way he would have been able to create his own lines. The idea that he could have just "looked them up," which educators often suggest is the way to deal with factual knowledge, would be ludicrous in this context. And it would also be ludicrous in the context of creating new ideas about history or physics.

As Foster notes, this doesn't mean that "thinking skills" are unimportant, just that knowledge is important too. You need to have a quality data set in order to use those "thinking skills" effectively.

Human beings tend to leverage knowledge to create new knowledge. This has a lot of implications, one of which is intellectual property law. Giving limited copyright to intellectual property is important, because the data in that property eventually becomes available for all to built upon. It's ironic that educators are considering less of a focus on memorization, as this requirement of referential knowledge has been increasing for some time. Students need a base of knowledge to both understand and compose new works. References help you avoid reinventing the wheel everytime you need to create something, which leads to my next point.

I think part of the reason references are becoming more and more common these days is that it makes entertainment a little less passive. Watching TV or a movie is, of course, a passive activity, but if you make lots of references and homages, the viewer is required to think through those references. If the viewer has the appropriate knowledge, such a TV show or movie becomes a little more cognitively engaging. It makes you think, it calls to mind previous work, and it forces you to contextualize what you're watching based on what you know about other works. References are part of the complexity of modern Television and film, and Steven Johnson spends a significant amout of time talking about this subject in his book Everything Bad is Good for You (from page 85 of my edition):

Nearly every extended sequence in Seinfeld or The Simpsons, however, will contain a joke that makes sense only if the viewer fills in the proper supplementary information -- information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer. If you haven't seen the "Mulva" episode, or if the name "Art Vandelay" means nothing to you, then the subsequent references -- many of them arriving years after their original appearance -- will pass on by unappreciated.

At first glance, this looks like the soap opera tradition of plotlines extending past the frame of individual episodes, but in practice the device has a different effect. Knowing that George uses the alias Art Vandelay in awkward social situations doesn't help you understand the plot of the current episode; you don't draw on past narratives to understand the events in the present one. In the 180 Seinfeld episodes that aired, seven contain references to Art Vandelay: in George's actually referring to himself with that alias or invoking the name as part of some elaborate lie. He tells a potential employer at a publishing house that he likes to read the fiction of Art Vandelay, author of Venetian Blinds; in another, he tells an unemployment insurance caseworker that he's applied for a latex salesman job at Vandelay Industries. For storytelling purposes, the only thing that you need to know here is that George is lying in a formal interview; any fictitious author or latex manufacturer would suffice. But the joke arrives through the echo of all those earlier Vandelay references; it's funny because it's making a subtle nod to past events held offscreen. It's what we'd call in a real-world context an "in-joke" -- a joke that's funny only to people who get the reference.

I know some people who hate Family Guy and Seinfeld, but I realized a while ago that they don't hate those shows because of the contents of the shows or because they were offended (though some people certainly are), but rather becaues they simply don't get the references. They didn't grow up watching TV in the 80s and 90s, so many of the references are simply lost on them. Family Guy would be particularly vexing if you didn't have the pop culture knowledge of the writers of that show. These reference heavy shows are also a lot easier to watch and rewatch, over and over again. Why? Because each episode is not self-contained, you often find yourself noticing something new every time you watch. This also sometimes works in reverse. I remember the first time I saw Bill Shatner's campy rendition of Rocket Man, I suddenly understoood a bit on Family Guy which I thought was just a bit based on being random (but was really a reference).

Again, I seem to be focusing on comedy, but it's not necessarily limited to that genre. Eric S. Raymond has written a lot about how science fiction jargon has evolved into a sophisticated code that implicitely references various ideas, conventions and tropes of the genre:

In looking at an SF-jargon term like, say, "groundcar", or "warp drive" there is a spectrum of increasingly sophisticated possible decodings. The most naive is to see a meaningless, uninterpretable wordlike noise and stop there.

The next level up is to recognize that uttering the word "groundcar" or "warp drive" actually signifies something that's important for the story, but to lack the experience to know what that is. The motivated beginning reader of SF is in this position; he must, accordingly, consciously puzzle out the meaning of the term from the context provided by the individual work in which it appears.

The third level is to recognize that "ground car" and "warp drive" are signifiers shared, with a consistent and known meaning, by many works of SF -- but to treat them as isolated stereotypical signs, devoid of meaning save inasmuch as they permit the writer to ratchet forward the plot without requiring imaginative effort from the reader.

Viewed this way, these signs emphasize those respects in which the work in which they appear is merely derivative from previous works in the genre. Many critics (whether through laziness or malice) stop here. As a result they write off all SF, for all its pretensions to imaginative vigor, as a tired jumble of shopworn cliches.

The fourth level, typical of a moderately experienced SF reader, is to recognize that these signifiers function by permitting the writer to quickly establish shared imaginative territory with the reader, so that both parties can concentrate on what is unique about their communication without having to generate or process huge expository lumps. Thus these "stereotypes" actually operate in an anti-stereotypical way -- they permit both writer and reader to focus on novelty.

At this level the reader begins to develop quite analytical habits of reading; to become accustomed to searching the writer's terminology for what is implied (by reference to previous works using the same signifiers) and what kinds of exceptions and novelties convey information about the world and the likely plot twists.

It is at this level, for example, that the reader learns to rely on "groundcar" as a tip-off that the normal transport mode in the writer's world is by personal flyer. At this level, also, the reader begins to analytically compare the author's description of his world with other SFnal worlds featuring personal flyers, and to recognize that different kinds of flyers have very different implications for the rest of the world.

For example, the moderately experienced reader will know that worlds in which the personal fliers use wings or helicopter-like rotors are probably slightly less advanced in other technological ways than worlds in which they use ducted fans -- and way behind any world in which the flyers use antigravity! Once he sees "groundcar" he will be watching for these clues.

The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees "groundcar" he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author's reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.

While comedy makes for convenient examples, I think this better illustrates the cognitive demands of referential art. References require you to be grounded in various subjects, and they'll often require you to think through the implications of those subjects in a new context. References allow writers to pack incredible amounts of information into even the smallest space. This, of course, requires the consumer to decode that information (using available knowledge and critical thinking skills), making the experience less passive and more engaging. Use references will continue to flourish and accellerate in both art and scholarship, and new forms will emerge. One could even argue that aggregation in various weblogs are simply exercises in referential work. Just look at this post, in which I reference several books and movies, in many cases assuming familiarity. Indeed, the whole structure of the internet is based on the concept of links -- essentialy a way to reference other documents. Perhaps this is part of the cause of the rising complexity and information density of modern entertainment. We can cope with it now, because we have such systems to help us out.



Beverage Blogging
Last week, I hastily threw together a post on Coke, including some thoughts on Coke vs. Pepsi, the advertising of both brands, and Passover Coke. I've run across several people commenting on my post or similar issues over the past week.

• Diet Coke Zero Prime Plus: Aziz comments on the Coke/Pepsi rivalry and also talks a little about other varieties of coke (Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Coke Plus, Diet Coke with Splenda, etc...)
• The Other Red vs. Blue: Shamus explains why he usually doesn't drink Coke and points out that Coke has the best ads, referring to the GTA parody commercial (which is brilliant).
• Mexican Coke at the Costco: Last week, I mentioned that there is clearly a market for Coke made with real cane sugar, and apparently Costco agrees. They've taken to importing Mexican Coke, which also uses cane sugar:

  Costco has conformed to CA and U.S. rules, such as CRV (the sort-of deposit you pay for the bottle) and "nutrition" labeling, so everything appears to be nice and legal. Of course you could always get your sugar water fix at some smaller grocers or taquerias by buying surprisingly expensive "bootlegged" bottles one at a time, but Costco will let Cokeheads stock up by the case at a relatively low price.

  The Mexican Coke adds another wrinkle into the mix: they come in glass bottles, which supposedly make the coke taste better. I'm going to need to stock up on some regular Coke, Passover Coke, Mexican Coke, and sure, let's throw some Pepsi into the mix, and do a double blind test to see which cola tastes the best. Alas, this will have to wait for next year... [link via Kottke]
• Tall Men: Australia is good at making beer ads: Alex sidesteps the issue and points to a great Aussie beer commercial featuring none other than.... Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man, Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man, Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man!!!!!!! Sorry. It's a Family Guy thing.
• But who cares about Coke or regular beer when you can brew yourself some Skittlebrau!
• Speaking of brewing beer, Johno over at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy has been home brewing beer. I'd really like to try his Belgian ale, which he named Trogdor The Burninator "Consummate V" Belgian Strongbad Ale. Considering the price of good Belgian beer (and Belgian style beers, see below), home brewing might be a good activity for me to try out.

And speaking of beer, I spent the previous weekend in Cooperstown. Sure, we visited the Baseball Hall of Fame Mvsevm, but the highlight of the trip for me was a visit to the Brewery Ommegang. It's a surprisingly small operation, but that makes sense when you realize that it's an expensive Belgian-style microbrew. I'm not a beer expert, but I think I've tried more varieties than your average person, and these are my absolute favorite beers of all time. Ommegang only makes 5 varieties, but they are all fantastic. Alas, you have to pay for that quality, but it's worth it. In any case, the tour ends with a beer tasting and you can buy some beer at a slight discount, which I did, giving me this:


Awesome. Ok, I cheated a little. I already had the normal size bottles on the left, but still, that's an impressive array of beer. Looks like I've got some work to do!



Link Dump: Coca-Cola Edition
I love Coca-Cola. I hate Pepsi. I probably wouldn't feel like that if it weren't for my parents. My brother prefers Pepsi. For reasons beyond my understanding, my parents nurtured this conflict. This is strange, since they generally just bought what was on sale (and we were growing up during the whole cola wars episode, so there were lots of sales). This manifested in various ways throughout the years, but the end result is that our preferences polarized. When I go to a restaurant and ask for a "Coke" and they ask if Pepsi is ok, I generally change my order to something else (root beer, water, etc...) Now, I'm not rude or even very confrontational about it, but this guy sure is:

"I'd like a Coca-Cola, please," I told the waiter.

"Will Pepsi be OK?" he replied.

"No, I'd like a Coke," I said.

"We serve only Pepsi products," he stammered.

"Does anyone ever ask for a Coke?" I asked.

"All the time," he said, "but we serve Pepsi."

"Could you run down to the 7-11 and get me a Coke -- they have plenty over there?" I asked with a smile.

Now, I've seen people say "No, Pepsi is not ok," but asking for the waitress to run down to the 7-11 is pure, diabolical genius. Still, most of us Coke fiends aren't rude about our preferences. Take John Scalzi, who wrote a great Essay on Coca-Cola a while ago, and delved into the advertising of Coke and Pepsi:

I think there really is something to how Coke positions itself. One hates to admit that one is influenced by corporate branding -- it means that those damned advertisers actually managed to do their job -- but what can you say. It works. Since Coke is the market leader, it doesn't spend any time as far as I can see banging on Pepsi or other brands; its ads stick to their knitting, which is making sure that people feel that Coke is part of everyday life -- and at some point during your day, you're probably going to have a Coke. It's inevitable. And hey -- that's okay. That's as it should be, in fact. I don't know that I would call Coke's ads soft sells (after all, they brand the product literally up the wazoo), but I don't find the advertising utterly annoying.

Which brings us back to Pepsi. Pepsi is eternally positioning itself as the outsider -- "Pepsi Generation," "Generation Next," so on and so forth. Always young, always fun, always mildly rebellious, yadda yadda yadda. Since one goes in knowing that Pepsi is a multibillion-dollar corporation, I've always found the rebellion angle amusing (and not just in Pepsi's case -- if you're a company that's big enough to advertise your wares every single day on national networks, you've gotten just a bit beyond being the rebel's choice, now, haven't you?). Being a rebel doesn't really work for me -- most of what is positioned as being a rebel is actually not rebellion, merely sullenness and inarticulateness. And really, I'm just too bourgeois for that at this point in my life. ... Besides, Pepsi can't seem to advertise itself without bringing up the point that Coke exists, and is the better-selling brand.

And it goes on for a bit too. Great article.

This year, I learned about the existence of Passover Coke. The current Coke formula uses corn syrup as a sweetener because it's cheaper than pure cane sugar, but since it's not Kosher to eat corn during Passover, Coke makes some special batches of cola using pure cane sugar. It's only available in limited quantities for a few weeks a year (you can tell because it's got a yellow cap and Hebrew writing on it). I didn't get a chance to do a taste test this year, but Widge did, and he says that people prefer Passover Coke to regular Coke. This, of course, leads him to make the obvious suggestion:

Look. I know it's easier to work with and cheaper and all that good stuff. But let's face it: consumers are trying to get away from the high fructose stuff. I don't pretend to even understand all the health controversy that's going on, I tried to read up on the Wikipedia article before writing this and it mentioned "plasma triacylglycerol" and my eyes sort of glazed over (mmmm, glaze). It sounds like something the crew of Star Trek Voyager would seek out while being chased by cauliflower-headed aliens. But forget all that: it just freaking tastes better. That's all I care about, because if I was really concerned about my health, why would I be drinking Coke?

No offense.

Anyway, it's obvious you can make the stuff. It's obvious there's a market. I know just what to do: make a huge deal about how you believe in consumer choice and the market deciding things and release it as Coca-Cola Prime. Hell, if it's more expensive, charge more for it. Think about it: GET PRIMED WITH COKE. See? I'm giving you a campaign for free!

I'd buy it. Good stuff.



Link Dump: Awesome Pictures Edition
Yes, time is still short these days, so just a few links featuring lots and lots of pictures:

• Geek culture: Sometimes I think I'm a geek. Then I see something like this.
• The Most Beautiful Bridges In The World: Some great bridges here.
• D&D Map: A huge, intricate, hand drawn D&D map from 1982.

That's all for now. Sorry for the lameness of recent bloggery, but again, time is short.



Mental Inertia
As I waded through dozens of recommendations for Anime series (thanks again to everyone who contributed), I began to wonder about a few things. Anime seems to be a pretty vast subject and while I had touched the tip of the iceberg in the past, I really didn't have a good feel for what was available. So I asked for recommendations, and now I'm on my way. But it's not like I just realized that I wanted to watch more Anime. I've wanted to do that for a little while, but I've only recently acted on it. What took so long? Why is it so hard to get started?

This isn't something that's limited to deciding what to watch either. I find that just getting started is often the most difficult part of a task (or, at least, the part I seem to get stuck on the most). Sometimes it's difficult to deal with the novelty of a thing, other times a project seems completely overwhelming. But after I've begun, things don't seem so novel or overwhelming anymore. I occasionally find myself hesitant to start a new book or load up a new video game, but once I do, things flow pretty easily (unless the book or game is a really bad one). I have a bunch of ideas for blog posts that I never get around to attacking, but usually once I start writing, ideas flow much more readily. At work, I'll sometimes find myself struggling to get started on a task, but once I get past that initial push, I'm fine. Sure, there are excuses for all of these (interruptions, email, and meetings, for instance), but while they are sometimes true obstacles, they often strike me as rationalizations. Just getting started is the problem, but once I get into the flow, it's easy to keep going.

Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent essay on the subject called Fire and Motion:

Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I've got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn editor and (10) write code nonstop until I don't realize that it's already 7:30 pm.

Somewhere between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can't always make it across that chasm.For me, just getting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There's something incredible heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it's rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going.

It's an excellent point, and there does seem to be some sort of mental inertia at work here. But why? Why is it so difficult to get started?

When I think about this, I realize that this is a relatively new phenomenon for me. I don't remember having this sort of difficulty ten years ago. What's different? Well, I'm ten years older. The conventional wisdom is that it becomes more difficult to learn new things (i.e. to start something new) as you get older. There is some supporting evidence having to do with how the human brain becomes less malleable with time, but I'm not sure that paints the full picture. I think a big part of the problem is that as I got older, my standards rose.

Let me back up for a moment. A few years ago, a friend attempted to teach me how to drive a stick. I'd driven a automatic transmission my whole life up until that point, so the process of learning a manual transmission proved to be a challenging one. The actual mechanics of it are pretty straightforward and easily internalized. Sitting down and actually doing it, though, was another story. Intellectually, I knew what was going on, but it can be a little difficult to overcome muscle memory. I had a lot of trouble at first (and since I haven't driven a stick since then, I'd probably still have a lot of trouble today) and got extremely frustrated. My friend (who had gone through the same thing herself) laughed at it, making my lack of success even more infuriating. Eventually she explained to me that it wasn't that I was doing a bad job. It was that I was so used to being able to pick up something new and run with it, that when I had to do something extra challenging that took a little longer to pick up, I became frustrated. In short, I had higher standards for myself than I should have.

I think, perhaps, that's why it's difficult to start something new. It's not that learning has become harder, it's that I've become less tolerant of failure. My standards are higher, and that will sometimes make it hard to start something. This post, for example, has been brewing in my head for a while, but I had trouble getting started. This happens all the time, and I've actually got a bunch of ideas for posts stashed away somewhere. I've even written about this before, though only in a tangential way:

This weblog has come a long way over the three and a half years since I started it, and at this point, it barely resembles what it used to be. I started out somewhat slowly, just to get an understanding of what this blogging thing was and how to work it (remember, this was almost four years ago and blogs weren't nearly as common as they are now), but I eventually worked up into posting about once a day, on average. At that time, a post consisted mainly of a link and maybe a summary or some short commentary. Then a funny thing happened, I noticed that my blog was identical to any number of other blogs, and thus wasn't very compelling. So I got serious about it, and started really seeking out new and unusual things. I tried to shift focus away from the beaten path and started to make more substantial contributions. I think I did well at this, but it couldn't really last. It was difficult to find the offbeat stuff, even as I poured through massive quantities of blogs, articles and other information (which caused problems of it's own). I slowed down, eventually falling into an extremely irregular posting schedule on the order of once a month, which I have since attempted to correct, with, I hope, some success. I recently noticed that I have been slumping somewhat, though I'm still technically keeping to my schedule.

Part of the reason I was slumping back then was that my standards were rising again. The problem is that I want what I write to turn out good, and my standards are high (relatively speaking - this is only a blog, after all). So when I sit down to write, I wonder if I'll actually be able to do the subject justice. At a certain point, though, you just have to pull the trigger and get started. The rest comes naturally. Is this post better than I had imagined? Probably not, but then, if I waited until it was perfect, I'd never post anything (and plus, that sorta defeats the purpose of blogging).

One of the things I've noticed since changing my schedule to post at least twice a week is that it forces me to lower my standards a bit, just so that I can get something out on time. Back when I started the one post a week schedule, I found that those posts were getting pretty long. I thought they were pretty good too, but as time went on, I wasn't able to keep up with my rising expectations. There's nothing inherently wrong with high expectations, but I've found it's good every now and again to adjust course. Even a well made clock drifts and must be calibrated from time to time, and so we must calibrate ourselves from time to time as well.

Update 3.15.07: It occurs to me that this post is overly-serious and may give you the wrong idea. In the comments, Pete notes that watching Anime is supposed to be fun. I agree wholeheartedly, and I didn't mean to imply differently. The same goes for blogging - I wrote a decent amount in this post about how blogging is difficult for me, but that's not really the right way to put it. I enjoy blogging too, that's why I do it. Sometimes I overthink things, and that's probably what I was doing in this post, but I think the main point holds. Learning can be impaired by high standards.



Intellectual Property, Copyright and DRM
Roy over at 79Soul has started a series of posts dealing with Intellectual Property. His first post sets the stage with an overview of the situation, and he begins to explore some of the issues, starting with the definition of theft. I'm going to cover some of the same ground in this post, and then some other things which I assume Roy will cover in his later posts.

I think most people have an intuitive understanding of what intellectual property is, but it might be useful to start with a brief definition. Perhaps a good place to start would be Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

I started with this for a number of reasons. First, because I live in the U.S. and most of what follows deals with U.S. IP law. Second, because it's actually a somewhat controversial stance. The fact that IP is only secured for "limited times" is the key. In England, for example, an author does not merely hold a copyright on their work, they have a Moral Right.

The moral right of the author is considered to be -- according to the Berne convention -- an inalienable human right. This is the same serious meaning of "inalienable" the Declaration of Independence uses: not only can't these rights be forcibly stripped from you, you can't even give them away. You can't sell yourself into slavery; and neither can you (in Britain) give the right to be called the author of your writings to someone else.

The U.S. is different. It doesn't grant an inalienable moral right of ownership; instead, it allows copyright. In other words, in the U.S., such works are considered property (i.e. it can be sold, traded, bartered, or given away). This represents a fundamental distinction that needs to be made: some systems emphasize individual rights and rewards, and other systems are more limited. When put that way, the U.S. system sounds pretty awful, except that it was designed for something different: our system was built to advance science and the "useful arts." The U.S. system still rewards creators, but only as a means to an end. Copyright is granted so that there is an incentive to create. However, such protections are only granted for "limited Times." This is because when a copyright is eternal, the system stagnates as protected peoples stifle competition (this need not be malicious). Copyright is thus limited so that when a work is no longer protected, it becomes freely available for everyone to use and to build upon. This is known as the public domain.

The end goal here is the advancement of society, and both protection and expiration are necessary parts of the mix. The balance between the two is important, and as Roy notes, one of the things that appears to have upset the balance is technology. This, of course, extends as far back as the printing press, records, cassettes, VHS, and other similar technologies, but more recently, a convergence between new compression techniques and increasing bandwidth of the internet created an issue. Most new recording technologies were greeted with concern, but physical limitations and costs generally put a cap on the amount of damage that could be done. With computers and large networks like the internet, such limitations became almost negligible. Digital copies of protected works became easy to copy and distribute on a very large scale.

The first major issue came up as a result of Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing service that essentially promoted widespread copyright infringement. Lawsuits followed, and the original Napster service was shut down, only to be replaced by numerous decentralized peer-to-peer systems and darknets. This meant that no single entity could be sued for the copyright infringement that occurred on the network, but it resulted in a number of (probably ill-advised) lawsuits against regular folks (the anonymity of internet technology and state of recordkeeping being what it is, this sometimes leads to hilarious cases like when the RIAA sued a 79 year old guy who doesn't even own a computer or know how to operate one).

Roy discusses the various arguments for or against this sort of file sharing, noting that the essential difference of opinion is the definition of the word "theft." For my part, I think it's pretty obvious that downloading something for free that you'd normally have to pay for is morally wrong. However, I can see some grey area. A few months ago, I pre-ordered Tool's most recent album, 10,000 Days from Amazon. A friend who already had the album sent me a copy over the internet before I had actually recieved my copy of the CD. Does this count as theft? I would say no.

The concept of borrowing a Book, CD or DVD also seems pretty harmless to me, and I don't have a moral problem with borrowing an electronic copy, then deleting it afterwords (or purchasing it, if I liked it enough), though I can see how such a practice represents a bit of a slippery slope and wouldn't hold up in an honest debate (nor should it). It's too easy to abuse such an argument, or to apply it in retrospect. I suppose there are arguments to be made with respect to making distinctions between benefits and harms, but I generally find those arguments unpersuasive (though perhaps interesting to consider).

There are some other issues that need to be discussed as well. The concept of Fair Use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders. For example, including a screenshot of a film in a movie review. You're also allowed to parody copyrighted works, and in some instances make complete copies of a copyrighted work. There are rules pertaining to how much of the copyrighted work can be used and in what circumstances, but this is not the venue for such details. The point is that copyright is not absolute and consumers have rights as well.

Another topic that must be addressed is Digital Rights Management (DRM). This refers to a range of technologies used to combat digital copying of protected material. The goal of DRM is to use technology to automatically limit the abilities of a consumer who has purchased digital media. In some cases, this means that you won't be able to play an optical disc on a certain device, in others it means you can only use the media a certain number of times (among other restrictions).

To be blunt, DRM sucks. For the most part, it benefits no one. It's confusing, it basically amounts to treating legitimate customers like criminals while only barely (if that much) slowing down the piracy it purports to be thwarting, and it's lead to numerous disasters and unintended consequences. Essential reading on this subject is this talk given to Microsoft by Cory Doctorow. It's a long but well written and straightforward read that I can't summarize briefly (please read the whole thing). Some details of his argument may be debateable, but as a whole, I find it quite compelling. Put simply, DRM doesn't work and it's bad for artists, businesses, and society as a whole.

Now, the IP industries that are pushing DRM are not that stupid. They know DRM is a fundamentally absurd proposition: the whole point of selling IP media is so that people can consume it. You can't make a system that will prevent people from doing so, as the whole point of having the media in the first place is so that people can use it. The only way to perfectly secure a piece of digital media is to make it unusable (i.e. the only perfectly secure system is a perfectly useless one). That's why DRM systems are broken so quickly. It's not that the programmers are necessarily bad, it's that the entire concept is fundamentally flawed. Again, the IP industries know this, which is why they pushed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As with most laws, the DMCA is a complex beast, but what it boils down to is that no one is allowed to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright. Thus, even though the copy protection on DVDs is obscenely easy to bypass, it is illegal to do so. In theory, this might be fine. In practice, this law has extended far beyond what I'd consider reasonable and has also been heavily abused. For instance, some software companies have attempted to use the DMCA to prevent security researchers from exposing bugs in their software. The law is sometimes used to silence critics by threatening them with a lawsuit, even though no copright infringement was committed. The Chilling Effects project seems to be a good source for information regarding the DMCA and it's various effects.

DRM combined with the DMCA can be stifling. A good example of how awful DRM is, and how DMCA can affect the situation is the Sony Rootkit Debacle. Boing Boing has a ridiculously comprehensive timeline of the entire fiasco. In short, Sony put DRM on certain CDs. The general idea was to prevent people from putting the CDs in their computer and ripping them to MP3s. To accomplish this, Sony surreptitiously installed software on customer's computers (without their knowledge). A security researcher happened to notice this, and in researching the matter found that the Sony DRM had installed a rootkit that made the computer vulnerable to various attacks. Rootkits are black-hat cracker tools used to disguise the workings of their malicious software. Attempting to remove the rootkit broke the windows installation. Sony reacted slowly and poorly, releasing a service pack that supposedly removed the rootkit, but which actually opened up new security vulnerabilities. And it didn't end there. Reading through the timeline is astounding (as a result, I tend to shy away from Sony these days). Though I don't believe he was called on it, the security researcher who discovered these vulnerabilities was technically breaking the law, because the rootkit was intended to protect copyright.

A few months ago, my windows computer died and I decided to give linux a try. I wanted to see if I could get linux to do everything I needed it to do. As it turns out, I could, but not legally. Watching DVDs on linux is technically illegal, because I'm circumventing the copy protection on DVDs. Similar issues exist for other media formats. The details are complex, but in the end, it turns out that I'm not legally able to watch my legitimately purchased DVDs on my computer (I have since purchased a new computer that has an approved player installed). Similarly, if I were to purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, it comes in a DRMed format. If I want to use that format on a portable device (let's say my phone, which doesn't support Apple's DRM format), I'd have to convert it to a format that my portable device could understand, which would be illegal.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that DRM isn't really about protecting copyright. I've already established that it doesn't really accomplish that goal (and indeed, even works against many of the reasons copyright was put into place), so why is it still being pushed? One can only really speculate, but I'll bet that part of the issue has to do with IP owners wanting to "undercut fair use and then create new revenue streams where there were previously none." To continue an earlier example, if I buy a song from the iTunes music store and I want to put it on my non-Apple phone (not that I don't want one of those), the music industry would just love it if I were forced to buy the song again, in a format that is readable by my phone. Of course, that format would be incompatible with other devices, so I'd have to purchase the song again if I wanted to listen to it on those devices. When put in those terms, it's pretty easy to see why IP owners like DRM, and given the general person's reaction to such a scheme, it's also easy to see why IP owners are always careful to couch the debate in terms of piracy. This won't last forever, but it could be a bumpy ride.

Interestingly enough, distributers of digital media like Apple and Yahoo have recently come out against DRM. For the most part, these are just symbolic gestures. Cynics will look at Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Music and say that he's just passing the buck. He knows customers don't like or understand DRM, so he's just making a calculated PR move by blaming it on the music industry. Personally, I can see that, but I also think it's a very good thing. I find it encouraging that other distributers are following suit, and I also hope and believe this will lead to better things. Apple has proven that there is a large market for legally purchased music files on the internet, and other companies have even shown that selling DRM-free files yields higher sales. Indeed, the emusic service sells high quality, variable bit rate MP3 files without DRM, and it has established emusic as the #2 retailer of downloadable music behind the iTunes Music Store. Incidentally, this was not done for pure ideological reasons - it just made busines sense. As yet, these pronouncements are only symbolic, but now that online media distributers have established themselves as legitimate businesses, they have ammunition with which to challenge the IP holders. This won't happen overnight, but I think the process has begun.

Last year, I purchased a computer game called Galactic Civilizations II (and posted about it several times). This game was notable to me (in addition to the fact that it's a great game) in that it was the only game I'd purchased in years that featured no CD copy protection (i.e. DRM). As a result, when I bought a new computer, I experienced none of the usual fumbling for 16 digit CD Keys that I normally experience when trying to reinstall a game. Brad Wardell, the owner of the company that made the game, explained his thoughts on copy protection on his blog a while back:

I don't want to make it out that I'm some sort of kumbaya guy. Piracy is a problem and it does cost sales. I just don't think it's as big of a problem as the game industry thinks it is. I also don't think inconveniencing customers is the solution.

For him, it's not that piracy isn't an issue, it's that it's not worth imposing draconian copy protection measures that infuriate customers. The game sold much better than expected. I doubt this was because they didn't use DRM, but I can guarantee one thing: People don't buy games because they want DRM. However, this shows that you don't need DRM to make a successful game.

The future isn't all bright, though. Peter Gutmann's excellent Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection provides a good example of how things could get considerably worse:

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server).

This is infuriating. In case you can't tell, I've never liked DRM, but at least it could be avoided. I generally take articles like the one I'm referencing with a grain of salt, but if true, it means that the DRM in Vista is so oppressive that it will raise the price of hardware… And since Microsoft commands such a huge share of the market, hardware manufacturers have to comply, even though a some people (linux users, Mac users) don't need the draconian hardware requirements. This is absurd. Microsoft should have enough clout to stand up to the media giants, there's no reason the DRM in Vista has to be so invasive (or even exist at all). As Gutmann speculates in his cost analysis, some of the potential effects of this are particularly egregious, to the point where I can't see consumers standing for it.

My previous post dealt with Web 2.0, and I posted a YouTube video that summarized how changing technology is going to force us to rethink a few things: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. All of these are true. Earlier, I wrote that the purpose of copyright was to benefit society, and that protection and expiration were both essential. The balance between protection and expiration has been upset by technology. We need to rethink that balance. Indeed, many people smarter than I already have. The internet is replete with examples of people who have profited off of giving things away for free. Creative Commons allows you to share your content so that others can reuse and remix your content, but I don't think it has been adopted to the extent that it should be.

To some people, reusing or remixing music, for example, is not a good thing. This is certainly worthy of a debate, and it is a discussion that needs to happen. Personally, I don't mind it. For an example of why, watch this video detailing the history of the Amen Break. There are amazing things that can happen as a result of sharing, reusing and remixing, and that's only a single example. The current copyright environment seems to stifle such creativity, not the least of which because copyright lasts so long (currently the life of the author plus 70 years). In a world where technology has enabled an entire generation to accellerate the creation and consumption of media, it seems foolish to lock up so much material for what could easily be over a century. Despite all that I've written, I have to admit that I don't have a definitive answer. I'm sure I can come up with something that would work for me, but this is larger than me. We all need to rethink this, and many other things. Maybe that Web 2.0 thing can help.

Update: This post has mutated into a monster. Not only is it extremely long, but I reference several other long, detailed documents and even somewhere around 20-25 minutes of video. It's a large subject, and I'm certainly no expert. Also, I generally like to take a little more time when posting something this large, but I figured getting a draft out there would be better than nothing. Updates may be made...

Update 2.15.07: Made some minor copy edits, and added a link to an Ars Technica article that I forgot to add yesterday.



Samoas versus Caramel deLites
My favorite Girl Scout cookies are unquestionably the Samoas (Thin Mints and Tagalongs are also quite good, but nothing compares to the mighty Samoa). Several years ago, I went to purchase a box and was surprised to learn that they changed the name to Caramel deLites. And they seemed to taste different too! It didn't take long to notice that Samoas were still being sold, and as it turns out, there are two commercial bakeries that are licensed to make Girl Scout cookies. Little Brownie Bakers have the strange names that we are nonetheless familiar with: Samoas, Tagalongs, Do-si-dos, Trefoils, etc... ABC Bakers are much more prosaic and descriptive: Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Patties, Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Shortbread, etc...

Generally, both bakeries are pretty good, but the question is, what are the differences and which are better? Let's take a look at Samoas versus Caramel deLites.



The Caramel deLites are on the left, and the Samoas are on the right. As you can see, the Caramel deLites have a somewhat lighter color to them, and that's partially because they use milk chocolate as opposed to dark chocolate. Wikipedia says they don't have as much caramel as Samoas, but I'm not sure about that. Personally, I think they're chewier than Samoas, and if I had to choose, I'd choose Samoas. But maybe I'm just weird. I asked around, and there didn't seem to be a consensus. Some people loved one variety, others loved the other, most were indifferent.

So I did a test. I put one box of each on my desk, removed any identification, and put a note up that asked people to try one of each and vote for their preferred cookie. This was a single blind test, and the cookies were labeled only A and B. Ok, so it was hardly a stringent methodology and a lot of people knew which were which just by looking at them, but in the end, it appears that Samoas have a slight edge. A sample size of 8 people is statistically significant enough for me, and it came out 5-3 in favor of Samoas. So there, Samoas are empirically better than Caramel deLites. It's scientific!

A couple of us also compared the Thin Mints (which are the only ones I know of that have the same name no matter what baker), but results were mixed. The cookies are clearly different, and the ABC Bakers (the ones with the prosaic names) Thin Mint actually seems more minty, but they're both pretty good. No stats for this one, but anecdotal evidence suggests that people like the ABC Bakers version better. So there you go. They're both good.

Incidentally, if you can get your hands on Edy's® Girl Scouts® Samoas® Cookie Ice Cream, I highly recommend stocking up. It's available slightly longer than the cookies are, but it'll be gone by March, and it's quite possible the greatest ice cream ever created.



Japanese Cootie Shots
One of the things that interests me about foreign films is the way various aspects of culture become lost in the translation to English. In some cases, this is due to the literal translation of dialogue, but in others it's due to a physical mannerism or custom that simply can't be translated. In a post about Lain's Bear Pajamas in the Anime series Serial Experiments Lain, I mention an example of such a gesture that appears in Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Of course, I got the details of the gesture completely wrong in that post, but the general concept is similar. Since Spirited Away is the next film in the Animation Marathon, I got the DVD and took some screenshots. The main character, a little girl named Chihiro, steps on a little black slug and the boiler room man, Kamaji, says that this is gross and will bring bad luck. So she turns around and puts her thumbs and forefingers together while he pushes his hand through (click the images for a larger version).





Now this is obviously some sort of gesture meant to counteract bad luck, but it's a little strange. The dialogue in the scene helps, though the subtitles and the dubbing differ considerably (as I have been noticing lately). The subtitled version goes like this:

KAMAJI: Gross, gross, Sen! Totally gross!
(CHIHIRO puts her hands in the shape of a rectangle.)
KAMAJI (pushing his hand through the rectangle): Clean!

Quite sparse, though the meaning is relatively clear. The dubbed version expands on the concept a little more:

KAMAJI: You killed it! Those things are bad luck. Hurry, before it rubs off on you! Put your thumbs and forefingers together.
(CHIHIRO puts her hands in the shape of a rectangle.)
KAMAJI (pushing his hand through the rectangle): Evil... begone!

I noticed this gesture the first time I saw the movie, because I thought it was stange and figured that there had to be a little more to it than what was really being translated. On the DVD there is a little featurette called The Art of 'Spirited Away' and in one of the sections, the translators mention that they were baffled by the gesture, and weren't sure how to translate it. After researching the issue, they concluded that it's essentially the Japanese equivalent to a cootie shot. Of course, this makes a lot of sense, and it's totally something a kid would do in response to stepping on something gross (this film, like many of Miyazaki's other films, seems to nail a lot of the details of what it's like to be a kid). It also illustrates that the boiler room man isn't quite as gruff as he appears, and that he even has a bit of a soft spot for children. Interestingly enough, this gesture is repeated again by a little mouse (I think it's a mouse), and the soot balls that work in the boiler room, though I don't remember that (I'll try to grab screenshots when I rewatch the whole film)

Again, Spirited Away is the next film in the Animation Marathon, and it's probably the best of the bunch as well. Expect a full review soon, though I'm not sure how detailed it will be. Filmspotting (the podcast that's actually running the marathon) is on a bit of a break from the marathon, as they're doing their obligatory 2006 wrap up shows and best of the year lists.



Merry Christmas
In the future, pine trees will be extinct, and then what will we do for Christmas trees? We'll use a cactus. I present you with this year's Traditional Kaedrin Christmas Cactus:


The picture didn't turn out as well as last year (it keeps coming out fuzzy for some reason, perhaps because of all the extra lights or because of the lighting - hey look, a handy guide for taking pictures of Christmas lights), but it'll do well enough.

Moving on, a few other christmas links for your enjoyment:

• 2005 Advent Calendar
• The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time, including "The Mercury Theater of the Air Presents the Assassination of Saint Nicholas (1939)" and "Christmas with the Nuge (2002)."
• Santa Considering Move to Linux: "If some naughty kid was able to break into my systems and change his status to nice then the whole integrity of the Claus empire would be called into question." Heh. Santa's apparently a Red Hat man, though he might want to look into Ubuntu: Xmas Edition.
• Make-a-Flake: A flash snowflake maker. Longtime Kaedrin readers will remember a year where the site was attacked by bloodthirsty flakes of death.
• 101 Classic Christmas Videos Online: Though I didn't see the classic Spirit of Christmas short that launched South park
• Quick-Open Wrapping: I wish I found this before I wrapped all my presents, but it's neat.

That's all for now. Go forth, and watch your Anime.



It was only a fantasy...
I've never been much of a sports fan, but in recent years I have become a fantasy sports fan. The funny thing about fantasy sports is that it totally distorts the importance of events in games. Take, for instance, last week's Monday Night Football game. We were nearing playoff time in fantasy football. My roommate and I were dominating the league, and had clinched playoff spots. There was one other team with a winning record who had also clinched. And there were 2 teams in contention for the final playoff spot. It's a head-to-head league, and I was playing one of the 2 teams. Due to some bad performances by key members of my team (*cough, cough, Tom Brady, cough*), I was down by 5 points by the end of the Sunday games. He had no players remaining, but I had 1 person playing in the Monday night football game. There's just one problem: he's a kicker - not a position known for high scoring. A kicker gets 1 fantasy point for every extra point they kick, and field goals can be 3-6 points (depending on how far the kick is from). So basically, what you had last week was 4 or 5 people throughout the northeast intensely following and rooting for (or against)... a kicker.

Me: They're in field goal range! Call in Wilkins!
Roommate: Dude, it's second down. I don't think they're going to kick it.

As luck would have it, I lost. However, I was still in the playoffs and I ended up playing the same person I would have played anyway. Alas, it appears that my team peaked early. After going 12-1 during the first 13 weeks of play, I've gone 0-2 in the past two weeks. I lost in the first round of the playoffs. There may still be some hope for placing third place, but I must concede that my season didn't end the way I planned. The main culprit here was injuries, as my top Wide Reciever and another solid Running Back both went down in recent weeks, thus weakening my team considerably. Nevertheless, I bear my team no ill will, and so I'll let the Badgers take a bow:

• Tom Brady: (QB) In some ways, he's been a bit of a disappointment, but in reality, he's done about as well as I could have ever hoped. Quarterback was a tough position to fill this year, what with all the underperforming stars and former stars and rookies and injuries. There were probably only a handful of consistent performers, and a couple of abominable weeks aside, Brady was one of them.
• Larry Johnson: (RB) At the start of the season, there were really only 3 elite running backs to get, and LJ was one of them. I was fortunate enough to get the second overall pick in the draft, so I was able to get him (Ironically, the 3 backs were drafted in opposite order of eventual performance). Overshadowed by the obscenely dominant LaDainian Tomlinson (who has already scored a record breaking 33 touchdowns, and he still has two games left in the season), Johnson was actually my leading scorer.
• Kevin Jones: Apparently, this guy went to my high school. Go figure. In any case, for most of the year, he was my surprisingly productive second back (surprising in that, you know, he plays for the Lions).
• Ahman Green: (RB) He made a nice third back option when I needed him, and managed to fill in well for Jones when the injuries started coming. He spent a decent portion of the season on the bench, and I got him very late in the draft, so I was pretty happy.
• Larry Fitzgerald: (WR) He was supposed to be my premier receiver and did very well until he got injured for several weeks. He came back towards the end of my run, and put up decent numbers. Not quite the spectacular year everyone was expecting from him, but decent nonetheless.
• Darrell Jackson: (WR) Up until last week, he's been one of the steadiest players on the team, consistently putting up high fantasy numbers. Then he got injured and didn't play last week. I started one of his backups, Nate Burleson, but he didn't do anything. Darn.
• Jason Witten: (TE) Tight Ends don't normally put up big numbers, and Witten was no exception. Still, i was expecting more than a single touchdown from the guy. A few years ago he damn near put up a thousand yards with 6 touchdowns (and he had a ver respectible season last year too). No one ever counts on their tight ends, really, and Witten didn't do that bad, but still.
• Jeff Wilkins: (K) Early in the season, this guy was putting up huge numbers. Huge. This is, of course, absurd for a kicker, and it didn't last. Still, he did better than anyone would ever have expected.
• San Diego: (D/ST) The SD defence was quite good this year, and netted me a fair amount of points, considering that I drafted them pretty late in the draft. I started the season with Denver, but SD consistently outscored them, so SD got the call for most of the season, and did a good job
• Miscellaneous: I picked up Brandon Jacobs off the waiver wire and had him filling in for a few weeks during some of the injury-laden times. He makes a surprisingly decent third fantasy back because even though he doesn't get a lot of touches, he gets them where they count: the goalline. Tiki Barber owners must be furious (this is another example of fantasy distorting reality). Kevan Barlow had a similar (but much less consistent) situation going in New Jersey, but pretty much rode the bench for me all year long. Keyshawn Johnson and Isaac Bruce both put up consistent (relatively low, but still decent) numbers and made some appearances at the flex position throughout the year, but neither really did a ton for me. I picked up Tony Romo towards the end of the season, and pretty much regretted not starting him every week (especially the week he threw for 5 touchdowns). But still, how do you start a young, unproven punk like Romo over someone like Brady?

All in all, it was a decent year, even if they did peak a little early and get injured a little too often. I've made it to the playoffs in two of the last three years (and the one year I didn't was due to an uncharacteristic bad draft pick). This is actually not half bad for someone who doesn't pay attention to sports!



Just Do It
In Paul Graham's essay Made in USA, he writes about America's tendencies towards design.

Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We're good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at what we're bad at. We're impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it.

It's amazing how well the "Just Do It" marketing line fits America (the only other tagline that works as well is EA Sports' "If it's in the game, it's in the game" line), and Graham is certainly right about how that affects programmers. I've noticed that there are really two different types of programmers: people who look stuff up, and people who just try it to see if it works. People ask me questions about HTML or CSS all the time. Sometimes I know the answer, sometimes I dont, but most of the time my response is "Have you tried it to see what happens?" HTML is pretty simple, and it's easy to test out various concepts. There's no reason not to, and I'll also note that trying it is also the best way to learn. I'm reminded of this design parable about a ceramics class:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

There are several interesting things about this. First, as Graham notes in his essay, good craftsmanship means working fast and iterating your design. Second, failure isn't a bad thing in this story. In fact, failure is a necessary component of success. In such a scenario, people who work fast and iterate do much better than people who meticulously plan their designs. As Graham belabors in his essay, this works for some things, not not others.

Of course, not all American designs are bad, and Graham mentions the obvious exception:

Apple is an interesting counterexample to the general American trend. If you want to buy a nice CD player, you'll probably buy a Japanese one. But if you want to buy an MP3 player, you'll probably buy an iPod. What happened? Why doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players?

It's because Apple is obsessed with good design ("Or more precisely, their CEO is.") Interestingly, I think one of the reasons the iPod is so successful is that Apple understands the paradox of choice really well. The iPod isn't and has never really been the leader in terms of features or functionality. But it does what it does extremely well, and I think that's partly because the iPod is actually quite simple. If you loaded it up with all sorts of extra features, there's no way you'd be able to keep the simplicity of the interface, and that would make it harder to use, and much less attactive.

In the end, I don't know that I agree with everything in Graham's essay, but his stuff is always worth reading.



The Paradox of Choice
At the UI11 Conference I attended last week, one of the keynote presentations was made by Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Though he believes choice to be a good thing, his presentation focused more on the negative aspects of offering too many choices. He walks through a number of examples that illustrate the problems with our "official syllogism" which is:

• More freedom means more welfare
• More choice means more freedom
• Therefore, more choice means more welfare

In the United States, we have operated as if this syllogism is unambigiously true, and as a result, we're deluged with choices. Just take a look at a relatively small supermarket: there are 285 cookies, 75 iced teas, 275 cereals, 40 toothpastes, 230 soups, and 175 salad dressings (not including 12 extra virgin olive oils and 18 vinegars which could be combined to make hundreds of vinaigrettes) to choose from (and this was supposedly a smaller supermarket). At your typical Circuit City, the sheer breadth of stereo components allows you to create any one of 6.5 million possible stereo systems. And this applies all throughout our lives, extending even to working, marriage, and whether or not to have children. In the past, these things weren't much of a question. Today, everything is a choice. [thanks to Jesper R�nn-Jensen for his notes on Schwartz's talk - it's even got pictures!]

So how do we react to all these choices? Luke Wroblewski provides an excellent summary, which I will partly steal (because, hey, he's stealing from Schwartz after all):

• Paralysis: When faced with so many choices, people are often overwhelmed and put off the decision. I often find myself in such a situation: Oh, I don't have time to evaluate all of these options, I'll just do it tomorrow. But, of course, tomorrow is usually not so different than today, so you see a lot of procrastination.
• Decision Quality: Of course, you can't procrastinate forever, so when forced to make a decision, people will often use simple heuristics to evaluate the field of options. In retail, this often boils down to evaluation based mostly on Brand and Price. I also read a recent paper on feature fatigue (full article not available, but the abstract is there) that fits nicely here.
  
  In fields where there are many competing products, you see a lot of feature bloat. Loading a product with all sorts of bells and whistles will differentiate that product and often increase initial sales. However, all of these additional capabilities come at the expense of usability. What's more, even when people know this, they still choose high-feature models. The only thing that really helps is when someone actually uses a product for a certain amount of time, at which point they realize that they either don't use the extra features or that the tradeoffs in terms of usability make the additional capabilities considerably less attractive. Part of the problem is perhaps that usability is an intangible and somewhat subjective attribute of a product. Intellectually, everyone knows that it is important, but when it comes down to decision-time, most people base their decisions on something that is more easily measured, like number of features, brand, or price. This is also part of why focus groups are so bad at measuring usability. I've been to a number of focus groups that start with a series of exercises in front of a computer, then end with a roundtable discussion about their experiences. Usually, the discussion was completely at odds with what the people actually did when in front of the computer. Watch what they do, not what they say...
• Decision Satisfaction: When presented with a lot of choices, people may actually do better for themselves, yet they often feel worse due to regret or anticipated regret. Because people resort to simplifying their decision making process, and because they know they're simplifying, they might also wonder if one or more of the options they cut was actually better than what they chose. A little while ago, I bought a new cell phone. I actually did a fair amount of work evaluating the options, and I ended up going with a low-end no-frills phone... and instantly regretted it. Of course, the phone itself wasn't that bad (and for all I know, it was better than the other phones I passesd over), but I regret dismissing some of the other options, such as the camera (how many times over the past two years have I wanted to take a picture and thought Hey, if I had a camera on my phone I could have taken that picture!)
• Escalation of expectations: When we have so many choices and we do so much work evaluating all the options, we begin to expect more. When things were worse (i.e. when there were less choices), it was much easier to exceed expectations. In the cell phone example above, part of the regret was no doubt fueled by the fact that I spent a lot of time figuring out which phone to get.
• Maximizer Impact: There are some people who always want to have the best, and the problems inherent in too many choices hit these people the hardest.
• Leakage: The conditions present when you're making a decision exert influence long after the decision has actually been made, contributing to the dissatisfaction (i.e. regret, anticipated regret) and escalation of expectations outlined above.

As I was watching this presentation, I couldn't help but think of various examples in my own life that illustrated some of the issues. There was the cell phone choice which turned out badly, but I also thought about things I had chosen that had come out well. For example, about a year ago, I bought an iPod, and I've been extremely happy with it (even though it's not perfect), despite the fact that there were many options which I considered. Why didn't the process of evaluating all the options evoke a feeling of regret? Because my initial impulse was to purchase the iPod, and I looked at the other options simply out of curiosity. I also had the opportunity to try out some of the players, and that experience helped enormously. And finally, the one feature that had given me pause was video (which wasn't available on the iPod when I started looking around). The Cowon iAudio X5 was giving me pause because it had video capabilities and the iPod at the time didn't. As it turned out, about a week later the Video iPod was released and made my decision very easy. I got that and haven't looked back since. The funny thing is that since I've gotten that iPod, I haven't used the video feature for anything useful. Not even once.

Another example is my old PC which has recently kicked the bucket. I actually assembled that PC from a bunch of parts, rather than going through a mainstream company like Dell, and the number of components available would probably make the Circuit City stereo example I gave earlier look tiny by comparison. Interestingly, this diversity of choices for PCs is often credited as part of the reason PCs overtook Macs:

Back in the early days of Macintoshes, Apple engineers would reportedly get into arguments with Steve Jobs about creating ports to allow people to add RAM to their Macs. The engineers thought it would be a good idea; Jobs said no, because he didn't want anyone opening up a Mac. He'd rather they just throw out their Mac when they needed new RAM, and buy a new one.

Of course, we know who won this battle. The "Wintel" PC won: The computer that let anyone throw in a new component, new RAM, or a new peripheral when they wanted their computer to do something new. Okay, Mac fans, I know, I know: PCs also "won" unfairly because Bill Gates abused his monopoly with Windows. Fair enough.

But the fact is, as Hill notes, PCs never aimed at being perfect, pristine boxes like Macintoshes. They settled for being "good enough" -- under the assumption that it was up to the users to tweak or adjust the PC if they needed it to do something else.

But as Schwartz would note, the amount of choices in assembling your own computer can be stifling. This is why computer and software companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Apple (yes, even Apple) insist on mediating the user's experience with their hardware by limiting access (i.e. by limiting choice). This turns out to be not so bad, because the number of things to consider really is staggering. So why was I so happy with my computer? Because I really didn't make many of the decisions - I simply went over to Ars Technica's System Guide and used their recommendations. When it comes time to build my next computer, what do you think I'm going to do? Indeed, Ars is currently compiling recommendations for their October system guide, due out sometime this week. My new computer will most likely be based off of their "Hot Rod" box. (Linux presents some interesting issues in this context as well, though I think I'll save that for another post.)

So what are the lessons here? One of the big ones is to separate the analysis from the choice by getting recommendations from someone else (see the Ars Technica example above). In the market for a digital camera? Call a friend (preferably one who is into photography) and ask them what to get. Another thing that strikes me is that just knowing about this can help you overcome it to a degree. Try to keep your expectations in check, and you might open up some room for pleasant surprises (doing this is suprisingly effective with movies). If possible, try using the product first (borrow a friend's, use a rental, etc...). Don't try to maximize the results so much; settle for things that are good enough (this is what Schwartz calls satisficing).

Without choices, life is miserable. When options are added, welfare is increased. Choice is a good thing. But too much choice causes the curve to level out and eventually start moving in the other direction. It becomes a matter of tradeoffs. Regular readers of this blog know what's coming: We don't so much solve problems as we trade one set of problems for another, in the hopes that the new set of problems is more favorable than the old. So where is the sweet spot? That's probably a topic for another post, but my initial thoughts are that it would depend heavily on what you're doing and the context in which you're doing it. Also, if you were to take a wider view of things, there's something to be said for maximizing options and then narrowing the field (a la the free market). Still, the concept of choice as a double edged sword should not be all that surprising... after all, freedom isn't easy. Just ask Spider Man.



Link Dump
I've been quite busy lately so once again it's time to unleash the chain-smoking monkey research squad and share the results:

• The Truth About Overselling!: Ever wonder how web hosting companies can offer obscene amounts of storage and bandwidth these days? It turns out that these web hosting companies are offering more than they actually have. Josh Jones of Dreamhost explains why this practice is popular and how they can get away with it (short answer - most people emphatically don't use or need that much bandwidth).
• Utterly fascinating pseudo-mystery on Metafilter. Someone got curious about a strange flash advertisement, and a whole slew of people started investigating, analyzing the flash file, plotting stuff on a map, etc... Reminded me a little of that whole Publius Enigma thing [via Chizumatic].
• Weak security in our daily lives: "Right now, I am going to give you a sequence of minimal length that, when you enter it into a car's numeric keypad, is guaranteed to unlock the doors of said car. It is exactly 3129 keypresses long, which should take you around 20 minutes to go through." [via Schneier]
• America's Most Fonted: The 7 Worst Fonts: Fonts aren't usually a topic of discussion here, but I thought it was funny that the Kaedrin logo (see upper left hand side of this page) uses the #7 worst font. But it's only the logo and that's ok... right? RIGHT?
• Architecture is another topic rarely discussed here, but I thought that the new trend of secret rooms was interesting. [via Kottke]

That's all for now. Things appear to be slowing down, so that will hopefully mean more time for blogging (i.e. less link dumpy type posts).



Gather Intelligence to Be Effective in Interviews, Bounty Hunting
Through following a trail of links long enough that I don't remember where I started, I stumbled upon a post about interviewing. In itself, this is unremarkable. However, at the time, I happened to be watching an episode of Firefly (well, I had it on in the background). Because I am a nerd, I also had the commentary track on, and just as I read about the interviewing anecdote, Joss Whedon (writer/creator of Firefly) began relating something that eerily paralleled the interviewing "secret" in the post referenced above.

The "secret" is to know those who are interviewing you, and tailor your answers to match the type of response the person is looking for. He tells the story of how he interviewed for a principalship at a school in his district, or rather, how a friend helped him prepare:

She drew a rectangle on a piece of paper. “This is the table,” she said. She began to draw small circles around the table — 10 of them. She named each circle. She identified them as the people who would be interviewing me. This was not secret information, this was the panel that every potential principal had to face. The SECRET came next. She pointed to the first circle, “This is John Williams (not his real name). John tends to ask many data related questions. He likes brevity. Keep your answers short to him. Make your point and be quiet.” She pointed to the next circle. “This is Mary Thomas, she’s very child-oriented. She’s very warm and friendly and loves to talk. Answer her questions and orient your answers to how children are affected. Talk a lot with her; elaborate all your points. She’s warm and fuzzy, so use many personal anecdotes.” She continued around the table and when finished, it was like I had the playbook of an opposing football team. I knew the type of questions they would ask. I learned the type of answer each interviewer liked to hear.

This is interesting and, naturally, the advice is not limited to interviewing. (Those that have not seen Firefly but want to might want to bug out here, as Spoilers are ahead). Take Jubal Early. He's a bounty hunter, and he's after one of the people on Serenity. To get to her, he has to make sure the rest of the crew does not get in his way. So before he starts, he listens in on some conversations on the ship, gathering intelligence. As Whedon notes in the commentary:

Early has a very specific way of dealing with every character on the ship. He has listened to their conversation, so he understands he knows enough about them. And he understands that when you're with Mal, you have to take him out instantly because Mal is a physical threat that is very real. And then, you know, he closes up Jayne and Zoe and all the threats ... Kaylee is someone he approaches a different way - through a very horrible form of sexual intimidation. ... Later on we'll see him dealing with Book. And we'll see him dealing with Simon. When he deals with Book, again this guy has to be taken out. which gives us a little insight into Book's character. ... And of course, he deals with Simon with logic, because he realizes that the best way to deal with Simon is to use logic because that's the kind of person he is.

For those who haven't seen the series, some of this might not make sense, but each approach does fit its target. Mal is the captain and he won't stand for an outsider's shenanigans, especially when that outsider threatens the crew. Jayne and Zoe are also physical threats. Kaylee is like a delightful pixie, which makes Early's approach particularly disturbing. Shepherd Book is a priest, though events like the one in this episode indicate that Book has a less than saintly past. Simon is a doctor, and he's very proper, so a logical approach fits him well.

Again, this advice isn't limited to interviewing and bounty hunting. Knowing who you're dealing with is important, and allows you to orient your responses to their expectations. A little while ago, I was promoted to a management position. One of the interesting changes for me is that I'm dealing with a much wider variety of people, and thus I have to modulate my message depending on who I'm talking to. Of course knowing this and doing this are two different things, and I'm certainly no expert when it comes to this stuff. It comes naturally to some people, but not especially to me.

Anyway, not something I expected to write, but the coincidece struck me...



Magic Design
A few weeks ago, I wrote about magic and how subconscious problem solving can sometimes seem magical:

When confronted with a particularly daunting problem, I'll work on it very intensely for a while. However, I find that it's best to stop after a bit and let the problem percolate in the back of my mind while I do completely unrelated things. Sometimes, the answer will just come to me, often at the strangest times. Occasionally, this entire process will happen without my intending it, but sometimes I'm deliberately trying to harness this subconscious problem solving ability. And I don't think I'm doing anything special here; I think everyone has these sort of Eureka! moments from time to time. ...

Once I noticed this, I began seeing similar patterns throughout my life and even history.

And indeed, Jason Kottke recently posted about how design works, referencing a couple of other designers, including Michael Bierut of Design Observer, who describes his process like this:

When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!

[emphasis mine] It is like magic, but as Bierut notes, this sort of thing is becoming more important as we move from an industrial economy to an information economy. He references a book about managing artists:

At the outset, the writers acknowledge that the nature of work is changing in the 21st century, characterizing it as "a shift from an industrial economy to an information economy, from physical work to knowledge work." In trying to understand how this new kind of work can be managed, they propose a model based not on industrial production, but on the collaborative arts, specifically theater.

... They are careful to identify the defining characteristics of this kind of work: allowing solutions to emerge in a process of iteration, rather than trying to get everything right the first time; accepting the lack of control in the process, and letting the improvisation engendered by uncertainty help drive the process; and creating a work environment that sets clear enough limits that people can play securely within them.

This is very interesting and dovetails nicely with several topics covered on this blog. Harnessing self-organizing forces to produce emergent results seems to be rising in importance significantly as we proceed towards an information based economy. As noted, collaboration is key. Older business models seem to focus on a more brute force way of solving problems, but as we proceed we need to find better and faster ways to collaborate. The internet, with it's hyperlinked structure and massive data stores, has been struggling with a data analysis problem since its inception. Only recently have we really begun to figure out ways to harness the collective intelligence of the internet and its users, but even now, we're only scraping the tip of the iceberg. Collaborative projects like Wikipedia or wisdom-of-crowds aggregators like Digg or Reddit represent an interesting step in the right direction. The challenge here is that we're not facing the problems directly anmore. If you want to create a comprehensive encyclopedia, you can hire a bunch of people to research, write, and edit entries. Wikipedia tried something different. They didn't explicitely create an encyclopedia, they created (or, at least, they deployed) a system that made it easy for large amount of people to collaborate on a large amount of topics. The encyclopedia is an emergent result of that collaboration. They sidestepped the problem, and as a result, they have a much larger and dynamic information resource.

None of those examples are perfect, of course, but the more I think about it, the more I think that their imperfection is what makes them work. As noted above, you're probably much better off releasing a site that is imperfect and iterating, making changes and learning from your mistakes as you go. When dealing with these complex problems, you're not going to design the perfect system all at once. I realize that I keep saying we need better information aggregation and analysis tools, and that we have these tools, but they leave something to be desired. The point of these systems, though, is that they get better with time. Many older information analysis systems break when you increase the workload quickly. They don't scale well. These newer systems only really work well once they have high participation rates and large amounts of data.

It remains to be seen whether or not these systems can actually handle that much data (and participation), but like I said, they're a good start and they're getting better with time.



Does Magic Exist?
I'm back from my trip and it appears that the guest posting has fallen through. So a quick discussion on magic, which was brought up by a friend on a discussion board I frequent. The question: Does magic exist?

I suppose this depends on how you define magic. Arthur C. Clarke once infamously said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And that's probably true, right? If some guy can bend spoons with his thoughts, there's probably a rational explanation for it... we just haven't figured it out yet. Does it count as magic if we don't know how he's doing it? What about when we do figure out how he's doing it? What if it really was some sort of empirically observable telekinesis?

After all, magicians have been performing for hundreds of years, relying on slight of hand and misdirection¹ (amongst other tricks of the trade). However, I suspect that's not the type of answer that's being sought.

One thing I think is interesting is the power of thought and how many religious and "magical" traditions were really just ways to harness thought in a productive fashion. For example, crystal balls are often considered to be a magical way to see the future. While not strictly true, it was found that those who look into crystal balls for a long period of time end up entering a sort of trance, similar to hypnosis, and the human mind is able to make certain connections it would not normally make². Can such a person see the future? I doubt it, but I don't doubt that such people often experience a "revelation" of sorts, even if it is sometimes misguided.

However, you see something similar, though a lot more controlled and a lot less hokey, in a lot of religious traditions. For instance, take Christian Mass and prayer. Mass offers a number of repetitive aspects like singing combined with several chances for reflection and thought. I've always found that going to mass was very helpful in that it put things in a whole new perspective. Superficial things that worried me suddenly seemed less important and much more approachable. Repetitive rituals (like singing in Church) often bring back powerful feelings of the past, etc... further reinforcing the reflection from a different perspective.

Taking it completely out of the spiritual realm, I see very rational people doing the same thing all the time. They just aren't using the same vocabulary. When confronted with a particularly daunting problem, I'll work on it very intensely for a while. However, I find that it's best to stop after a bit and let the problem percolate in the back of my mind while I do completely unrelated things. Sometimes, the answer will just come to me, often at the strangest times. Occasionally, this entire process will happen without my intending it, but sometimes I'm deliberately trying to harness this subconscious problem solving ability. And I don't think I'm doing anything special here; I think everyone has these sort of Eureka! moments from time to time. Once you remove the theology from it, prayer is really a similar process.

Once I noticed this, I began seeing similar patterns throughout my life and even history. For example, Archimedes. He was tasked with determining whether a given substance was gold or not (at the time, this was a true challenge). He toiled and slaved at the problem for weeks, pushing all other aspects of his life away. Finally, his wife, sick of her husband's dirty appearance and bad odor, made him take a bath. As he stepped into the tub, he noticed the water rising and had a revelation... this displacement could be used to accurately measure volume, which could then be used to determine density and ultimately whether or not a substance was gold. The moral of the story: Listen to your wife!³

Have I actually answered the question? Well, I may have veered off track a bit, but I find the process of thinking to be interesting and quite mysterious. After all, whatever it is that's going on in our noggins isn't understood very well. It might just be indistinguishable from magic...

¹ - Note to self: go see The Illusionist! Also, The Prestige looks darn good. Why does Hollywood always produce these things in pairs? At least it looks like there's good talent involved in each of these productions...

² - Oddly enough, I discoved this nugget on another trip through the library stacks while I was supposed to be studying in college. Just thought I should call that out in light of recent posting...

³ - Yes, this is an anecdote from the movie Pi.



Art for the computer age...
I was originally planning on doing a movie review while our gentle web-master is away, but a topic has come up too many times in the past few weeks for me not to write about it. First it came up in the tag map of Kaedrin, when I noticed that some people were writing pages just to create appealing tag-maps. Then it came up in Illinois and Louisiana. They've passed laws regulating the sale and distribution of "violent games" to minors. This, of course, has led to lawsuits and claims that the law violates free speech. After that, it was the guys at Penny Arcade. They posted links to We Feel Fine and Listening Post.. Those projects search the internet for blogs (maybe this one?) and pull text from them about feelings, and present those feelings to an audience in different ways. Very interesting. Finally, it came up when I opened up the July issue of Game Informer, and read Hideo Kojima's quote:

I believe that games are not art, and will never be art. Let me explain � games will only match their era, meaning what the people of that age want reflects the outcome of the game at that time. So, if you bring a game from 20 years ago out today, no one will say �wow.� There will be some essence where it�s fun, but there won�t be any wows or touching moments. Like a car, for example. If you bring a car from 20 years ago to the modern day, it will be appealing in a classic sense, but how much gasoline it uses, or the lack of air conditioning will simply not be appreciated in that era. So games will always be a kind of mass entertainment form rather than art. Of course, there will be artistic ways of representing games in that era, but it will still be entertainment. However, I believe that games can be a culture that represent their time. If it�s a light era, or a dark era, I always try to implement that era in my works. In the end, when we look back on the projects, we can say �Oh, it was that era.� So overall, when you look back, it becomes a culture.�

Every time I reread that quote, I cringe. Here's a man who is one of the most significant forces in video games today, the creator of Metal Gear, and he's saying "No, they're not art, and never will be." I find his distinction between mass entertaintment and art troubling, and his comparison to a car flawed.

It's true that games will always be a reflection of their times- just like anything else is. The limitations of the time and the attitudes of the culture at the time are going to have an effect on everything coming out of that time. A car made in the 60s is going to show the style of the 60s, and is going to have the tech of the 60s. That makes sense. Of course, a painting made in the 1700s is going to show the limits and is going to reflect the feelings of that time, too. The paints, brushes, and canvas used then aren't necessarily going to be the same as the ones used now, especially with the popular use of computers in painting. The fact that something is a reflection of the times isn't going to stop people from appreciating the artistic worth of that thing. The fact that the Egyptians hadn't mastered perspective doesn't stop anyone from wanting to see their statues.

What does that really tell us, though? Nothing. A car from the 80s may not be appreciated as much as a new model car as a means of transport, but Kojima seems to be completely forgetting that there are many cars that are appreciated as special. Nobody buys a 60s era muscle car because they think it's a good car for driving around in- they buy it because they think it's special, because some people view older cars as collectable. Some people do see them as more than a mere means of transportation. People are very much "wowed" by old cars. Is there any reason why this can't be true of games?

I am 8 Bit seems to suggest that there are people who are still wowed by those games. Kojima may be partially correct, though. Maybe most of those early games won't hold up in the long run. That shouldn't be a surprise. They're the first generation of games. The 8-Bit era was the begining of the new wave of games, though. For the first time, creators could start to tell real stories, beyond simple high-score pursuit. Game makers were just getting their wings, and starting to see what games were really capable of. Maybe early games aren't art. Does that mean that games aren't art?

The problem mostly seems to be that we're asking the wrong questions. We shouldn't be asking "are video games art" any more than we'd ask "are movies art." It's a loaded question and you'll never come to any real answer, because the answer is going to depend completely on what movie you're looking at, and who you're asking. The same holds true with games. The question shouldn't be whether all games are art, but whether a particular game has some artistic merrit. How we decide what counts as art is constantly up for debate, but there are games that raise such significant moral or philosophical questions, or have such an amazing sense of style, or tell such an amazing story, that it seems hard to argue that they have no artistic merrit.

All of this really is leading somewhere. Computers have changed everything. I know that seems obvious, but I think it's taking some people- people like Kojima- a little longer to realize it. Computers have opened up a level of interactivity and access to information that we've never really had before. I can update Kaedrin from Michigan, and can send a message to a friend in Germany, all while buying videos from Japan and playing chess with a man in Alaska (not that I'm actually doing those things... but I could). These changes are going to be reflected in the art our culture produces. There's going to be backlash and criticism, and we're going to find that some people just don't "get it" or don't want to. We've gone through the same thing countless times before. Nobody thought movies would be seen as art when they came on the scene, and they were sure that the talkies wouldn't. When Andy Warhol came out, there were plenty of nay-sayers. Soup cans? As art? Computers have generally been accepted as a tool for making art, but I think we're still seeing the limits pushed. We've barely scratched the surface. The interaction between art, artist, and viewer is blurring, and I, for one, can't wait to see what happens.



Novelty
David Wong's article on the coming video game crash seems to have inspired Steven Den Beste, who agrees with Wong that there will be a gaming crash and also thinks that the same problems affect other forms of entertainment. The crux of the problem appears to be novelty. Part of the problem appears to be evolutionary as well. As humans, we are conditioned for certain things, and it seems that two of our insticts are conflicting.

The first instinct is the human tendency to rely on induction. Correlation does not imply causation, but most of the time, we act like it does. We develop a complex set of heuristics and guidelines that we have extrapolated from past experiences. We do so because circumstances require us to make all sorts of decisions without posessing the knowledge or understanding necessary to provide a correct answer. Induction allows us to to operate in situations which we do not uderstand. Psychologist B. F. Skinner famously explored and exploited this trait in his experiments. Den Beste notes this in his post:

What you do is to reward the animal (usually by giving it a small amount of food) for progressively behaving in ways which is closer to what you want. The reason Skinner studied it was because he (correctly) thought he was empirically studying the way that higher thought in animals worked. Basically, they're wired to believe that "correlation often implies causation". Which is true, by the way. So when an animal does something and gets a reward it likes (e.g. food) it will try it again, and maybe try it a little bit differently just to see if that might increase the chance or quantity of the reward.

So we're hard wired to create these heuristics. This has many implications, from Cargo Cults to Superstition and Security Beliefs.

The second instinct is the human drive to seek novelty, also noted by Den Beste:

The problem is that humans are wired to seek novelty. I think it's a result of our dietary needs. Lions can eat zebra meat exclusively their entire lives without trouble; zebras can eat grass exclusively their entire lives. They don't need novelty, but we do. Primates require a quite varied diet in order to stay healthy, and if we eat the same thing meal after meal we'll get sick. Individuals who became restless and bored with such a diet, and who sought out other things to eat, were more likely to survive. And when you found something new, you were probably deficient in something that it provided nutritionally, so it made sense to like it for a while -- until boredom set in, and you again sought out something new.

The drive for diversity affects more than just our diet. Genetic diversity has been shown to impart broader immunity to disease. Children from diverse parentage tend to develop a blend of each parent's defenses (this has other implications, particularly for the tendency for human beings to work together in groups). The biological benefits of diversity are not limited to humans either. Hybrid strains of many crops have been developed over the years because by selectively mixing the best crops to replant the next year, farmers were promoting the best qualities in the species. The simple act of crossing different strains resulted in higher yields and stronger plants.

The problem here is that evolution has made the biological need for diversity and novelty dependent on our inductive reasoning instincts. As such, what we find is that those we rely upon for new entertainment, like Hollywood or the video game industry, are constantly trying to find a simple formula for a big hit.

It's hard to come up with something completely new. It's scary to even make the attempt. If you get it wrong you can flush amazingly large amounts of money down the drain. It's a long-shot gamble. Every once in a while something new comes along, when someone takes that risk, and the audience gets interested...

Indeed, the majority of big films made today appear to be remakes, sequels or adaptations. One interesting thing I've noticed is that something new and exciting often fails at the box office. Such films usually gain a following on video or television though. Sometimes this is difficult to believe. For instance, The Shawshank Redemption is a very popular film. In fact, it occupies the #2 spot (just behind The Godfather) on IMDB's top rated films. And yet, the film only made $28 million dollars (ranked 52 in 1994) in theaters. To be sure, that's not a modest chunk of change, but given the universal love for this film, you'd expect that number to be much higher. I think part of the reason this movie failed at the box office was that marketers are just as susceptible to these novelty problems as everyone else. I mean, how do you market a period prison drama that has an awkward title an no big stars? It doesn't sound like a movie that would be popular, even though everyone seems to love it.

Which brings up another point. Not only is it difficult to create novelty, it can also be difficult to find novelty. This is the crux of the problem: we require novelty, but we're programmed to seek out new things via correllation. There is no place to go for perfect recommendations and novelty for the sake of novelty isn't necessarily enjoyable. I can seek out some bizarre musical style and listen to it, but the simple fact that it is novel does not guarantee that it will be enjoyable. I can't rely upon how a film is marketed because that is often misleading or, at least, not really representative of the movie (or whatever). Once we do find something we like, our instinct is often to exhaust that author or director or artist's catalog. Usually, by the end of that process, the artist's work begins to seem a little stale, for obvious reasons.

Seeking out something that is both novel and enjoyable is more difficult than it sounds. It can even be a little scary. Many times, things we think will be new actually turn out to be retreads. Other times, something may actually be novel, but unenjoyable. This leads to another phenomenon that Den Beste mentions: the "Unwatched pile." Den Beste is talking about Anime, and at this point, he's begun to accumulate a bunch of anime DVDs which he's bought but never watched. I've had similar things happen with books and movies. In fact, I have several books on my shelf, just waiting to be read, but for some of them, I'm not sure I'm willing to put in the time and effort to read them. Why? Because, for whatever reason, I've begun to experience some set of diminishing returns when it comes to certain types of books. These are similar to other books I've read, and thus I probably won't enjoy these as much (even if they are good books).

The problem is that we know something novel is out there, it's just a matter of finding it. At this point, I've gotten sick of most of the mass consumption entertainment, and have moved on to more niche forms of entertainment. This is really a signal versus noise, traversal of the long tail problem. An analysis problem. What's more, with globalization and the internet, the world is getting smaller... access to new forms of entertainment are popping up (for example, here in the US, anime was around 20 years ago, but it was nowhere near as common as it is today). This is essentially a subset of a larger information aggregation and analysis problem that we're facing. We're adrift in a sea of information, and must find better ways to navigate.



Link Dump
Time is short this week, so just a few links I found interesting...

• Make Me Watch TV: Collaborative torture. This guy lets people choose what he watches on TV. Naturally, voters tend to make him watch the worst of the worst (though it seems that sometimes people are nice and let him watch an episode of Lost or Doctor Who). After each viewing, he blogs about what he's seen. One interesting thing here is that, if you want, you can "sponsor" a time slot: If you pay him $5 (per half hour), he'll let you override the popular vote and force him to watch the program of your choice. Democracy in action.
• Life After the Video Game Crash: In light of recent bloggery, this article in which David Wong recaps the history of video games (including the beloved Atari 2600) also predicts the coming of another Video Game Crash. Basically, it argues that the next generation gaming consoles offer very little in the way of true innovation and Wong is betting that people will stay away in droves. Regardless of what you may think, it's worth reading because Wong is funny:

  And yet, even with the enormous number of games (Metroid delayed my discovering girls for a for a good 18 months), the gaming experience itself still couldn't keep our interest for more than a few years. Attention waned again, but this time new, fancier systems arrived just in time, offering a new and novel experience thanks to prettier graphics and character animation. And yet those systems (the Sega Genesis and later the SNES), as great as they were, eventually were retired to closets and attics and the sandy carpets of the Pakistani black market. It was a bitter, dark cloud of Japanese expletives that wafted from the meeting rooms at Nintendo and Sega when they realized their industry effectively lived under a curse.

• The World's Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat: Nate Harrison's fascinating 2004 video explores the history of the "Amen Break," a six second drum beat from a b-side of a 1969 single that's been used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music. From there, it spawned subcultures like drum-and-bass and jungle music. Aside from the strange fact that this is a video (there doesn't appear to actually be a reason for this - most of the video is simply a video of a record playing or a guy sitting in a room, for instance), this is compelling stuff. It covers the history of the break, but also some issues about ownership, copyright, and what constitutes art and creativity...

Apologies for the lameness of this entry. I've been travelling this weekend, and I'm exhausted. I've got several of these weekends coming up, so I'm going to try and set up some guest bloggers to post in my stead. I think the next one will be in two weeks or so. Anyway, I'll try to post again later this week...



Wikipedia Meme
Shamus stumbled upon an interesting meme (at Tim Worstall's blog) relying upon Wikipedia's ridiculously comprehensive date pages:

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your blog, including the year.

Like Shamus, I won't limit myself to the numbers above and will instead just list some things I think are interesting about September 13...

Facts

• 1503 - Michelangelo begins work on his David.
• 1609 - Henry Hudson reaches the river that will later be named after him - the Hudson River.
• 1922 - The temperature (in the shade) at Al 'Aziziyah, Libya reaches a world record 136.4 �F (58 �C).

Births

• 1860 - John J. Pershing, American general (d. 1948)
• 1874 - Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian-born composer (d. 1951)
• 1916 - Roald Dahl, Welsh writer (d. 1990)
• 1977 - Fiona Apple, American singer

Deaths

• 1321 - Dante Alighieri, Italian poet (b. 1265)
• 1996 - Tupac Shakur, American rapper and actor (b. 1971)

Philadelphia Film Festival: Adult Swim 4 Your Lives
Well. That was interesting. Hosted by Dana Snyder (voice of Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and featuring a veritable plethora of other Adult Swim creators, Adult Swim 4 Your Lives was a show that defies any legitimate explanation. As such, I will simply list out some highlights, as well as some words that I would use to describe the night:

• The Paul Green School of Rock kicked things off. Yes, Paul Green was the inspiration for Jack Black's character in the film The School of Rock.
• Skeletor singing show tunes (notably the song Tomorrow from Annie)
• In fact, lots of singing was happening tonight.
• Burlesque.
• Beethoven vs. Bach (featuring Camel Toe)
• Evil Monkey Boy (and hula hoops).
• Suggestive dancing.
• Twirling tassels.
• Preview of second season of Tom Goes to the Mayor and a new series, Minoriteam. I got a t-shirt!
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Feature Film (!?) preview.
• Did I mention Burlesque?
• Dana Snyder was either putting on his Master Shake voice all night, or that's really the way his voice sounds. Also, that man is crazy.

Basically the night was filled with Dana Snyder saying (usually singing) wacky stuff, followed by some sort of weird performance (usually featuring elements of the burlesque). It was quite a night, though from what I understand, last year's event went on much longer and was even crazier. Nevertheless, if you're a fan of Adult Swim and if such an event is ever going on near you, I'd recommend it. Unless the thought of watching Skeletor belt out a few show tunes turns your stomach. Then I'd suggest avoiding it.

Update 4.15.06: I've created a category for all posts from the Philadelphia Film Festival.



Introverts and a Curious Guy
Time is short this week, so here's a few interesting links:

• Introverts of the World, Unite!: An interview with Jonathan Rauch, the author who wrote an article in the Atlantic called Caring for Your Introvert in which he perfectly characterized what it means to be an introvert. The reaction was overwhelming, and the article has drawn more traffic than any other piece on the Atlantic website. From personal experience, I can see that it not only struck a nerve with me, but with several friends (including several Kaedrin readers). Some good stuff in the interview:

  The Internet is the perfect medium for introverts. You could almost call it the Intronet. You know the old New Yorker cartoon with a dog sitting at a computer saying to another dog, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Well, on the Internet, no one knows you're an introvert. So it's kind of a natural that when The Atlantic put this piece online, introverts beat a path to it; it's the ideal distribution mechanism by which introverts can reach other introverts and spread the word.

  [emphasis mine] It is very true that the internet is great for introverts and I'd wager that a lot of bloggers and discussion board frequenters are more introverted than not.
• Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell: Bill Simmons writes an awesome sports column for ESPN (it can be entertaining even for people who aren't big sports fans like myself), and every so often he e-mails questions "to somebody successful -- whether it's a baseball pitcher, an author, a creator of a TV show, another writer or whomever" and then he posts the results. A few weeks ago, he went back and forth with Malcolm Gladwell, leading to several interesting anecdotes, including this one which I found fascinating:

  There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

  Gladwell's got a new blog as well, and he posted a pointer to the Dan Goldstein research paper (pdf) as well as Goldstein's blog, where he comments on Gladwell's reference...

That's all for now...



Neutral Emergence
On Sunday, I wrote about cheating in probabilistic systems, but one thing I left out was that these systems are actually neutral systems. A while ago, John Robb (quoting the Nicholas Carr post I referenced) put it well:

To people, "optimization" is a neutral term. The optimization of a complex mathematical, or economic, system may make things better for us, or it may make things worse. It may improve society, or degrade it. We may not be able to apprehend the ends, but that doesn't mean the ends are going to be good.

He's exactly right. Evolution and emergent intelligence doesn't naturally flow towards some eschatological goodness. It moves forward under its own logic. It often solves problems we don't want solved. For example, in global guerrilla open source warfare, this emergent community intelligence is slowly developing forms of attack (such as systems disruption), that make it an extremely effective foe for nation-states.

Like all advances in technology, the progress of self-organizing systems and emergent results can be used for good or for ill. In the infamous words of Buckethead:

Like the atom, the flyswatter can be a force for great good or great evil.

Indeed.



Happy Birthday, Ben
Today is Ben Franklin's 300th birthday. In keeping with the theme of tradeoffs and compromise that often adorns this blog, and since Franklin himself has also been a common subject, here is a quote from Franklin's closing address to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia:

I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present; but sir, I am not sure I shall ever approve it: For, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others.

Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. ... But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister, said: "But I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right."

In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, - if they are such, - because I think a general government necessary for us... I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution; for, when you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?

It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our counsels are confounded like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

There are some people today (and even in Franklin's time) who seem to think of compromise as some sort of fundamental evil, but it appears to me to be an essential part of democracy.

Update 1.18.06: Mister Snitch points to The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, an excellently designed site dedicated to Franklin's 300th birthday...



On the lighter side
You may be familiar with my long-winded, more serious style, but I thought this blond joke would be a welcome change of pace. Best. Joke. Evar. [via Chizumatic, whose lack of permalinks add extra irony]



Merry Christmas

Fry: "There's supposed to be some kind of, you know, pine tree."
Professor: "Pine trees have been extinct for eight hundred years, Fry. Gone the way of the poodle and your primitive notions of modesty." - (Listen to MP3)

In anticipation of the eventual extinction of Pine Trees, here's the traditional Kaedrin Christmas Cactus:


"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night." (sound clip via Can't Get Enough Futurama)

Also regarding Christmas Trees, check out a post from a few years ago: Is the Christmas Tree Christian?



Hurricane Names, Restaurant Critics, and more...
Time is short this week, so here's a few links:

• Hurricane Keyser Soze: What's in a name? Absolutely brilliant commentary on how the National Weather Service names their hurricanes.

  When Hurricane Isabel came ashore here a few years ago, I openly mocked it, and Isabel dropped a 250-year-old tree on my car. Now, was I aware on some level that the hurricane could do this? Sure I was. But I mocked anyway, and who could blame me? The only Isabel I ever knew was the moody, vaguely goth younger sister of a high school friend. Could she occasionally annoy? Sure. Did she prompt the odd argument? No doubt. Were there times that Isabel was irrational? Of course. But drop a tree on my car? Sorry, no sir.
  
  We want to fear these storms. We really do. But I'll be damned if I run from Hurricane Florence. I already have had the experience of being in a mandatory evacuation over a Hurricane named Bob. I didn't want to evacuate. I felt like a grade-A pussy running from someone named Bob. I still feel that way.
  
  So, is it any wonder that thousands of people stayed in harm's way, determined to ride out Katrina? Of course it isn't. ... What we need is a hurricane named, let's say, The Penetrator. You tell me that The Penetrator is coming ashore in 24 hours and I am gone like Keyser Soze. Use the names of famous human predators, like Adolph or Idi Amin or Attilla or Affleck, and people will break out in a mad dash for higher ground.

  Brilliant. [via Ministry of Minor Perfidy]
• The Secret Life of a Restaurant Critic: The Restaurant Critic for the Boston Globe explains her job in surprisingly interesting detail.
• Speed Demos Archive: This is why I love the internet. It's just full of people like this who have way too much time on their hands. These guys have compiled a list of their speed runs - attempts to win a game in as short a time as possible. They've got videos of each one. Just in case you wanted to watch someone defeat Metroid in 18 minutes.

That's all for now...



Link Dump
Not much time this week, so here are some interesting links:

• A little while ago, I wrote about two software projects, one successful, one not. David Foster, who initially pointed me towards this story, has a follow up on one of the projects. The FBI's failure to develop a "Virtual Case File" system was bad enough, and now they're denying Freedom Of Information Act requests made by folks why are trying to figure out just went wrong with the project. My initial reaction was that the project failed due to a lack of discipline. And now the failure deepens as the FBI seeks to deny accountability in the project.
• The Physics of ET Civilizations by Michio Kaku: An interesting take on what constitutes a truly advanced civilization. He claims that we should rank civilizations by their energy consumption:

  In a seminal paper published in 1964 in the Journal of Soviet Astronomy, Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev theorized that advanced civilizations must therefore be grouped according to three types: Type I, II, and III, which have mastered planetary, stellar and galactic forms of energy, respectively. He calculated that the energy consumption of these three types of civilization would be separated by a factor of many billions.

  We're currently living in a Type 0 civilization, but we're moving quickly towards a Type 1 civilization. How long after that could we reach Type 2?
• 10 Ways To Create Content For Your Weblog: Ostensibly written to help us overcome bloggers block, but with such earth shattering advice as "Read, Listen To, or Watch the News" and "read your favorite blogs with the purpose of finding ideas to write about," I can't say as though it's that big of a help. I'll admit I've been in a bit of a funk lately, but this has more to do with a lack of time and energy than ideas. Until I get the time and motivation to write more, lists of links like this seem to be the order of the day.
• Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch: This is old, but it's a great article explaining a much understood group: introverts:

  What is introversion? ... Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.
  
  Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.

That's all for now.



Interviewing
Recent events have placed me in a position where I will be interviewing people for open positions on my team. Not having experience with such a thing, my first reaction was to set the monkey research squad loose on the subject. As usual, they didn't disappoint.

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel Spolsky: I think this is the best article I found. All of Spolsky's stuff is great, and his interviewing style is pretty staightforward: He looks for people who are "Smart, and Gets Things Done". One thing to note about a lot of the interviewing advice on the internet is that it's almost all focused on hiring programmers. In my case, though, I'm not looking for something that technical (though there is some coding involved). I'm looking for someone with usability experience (generally not programmers there) and someone who can work with the business group to write a good requirements document for the programmers. However, a lot of interviewing isn't focused on the technical details of coding, and Spolsky has a few gems in his article. Here's one I found useful:

  Part 6: the design question. Ask the candidate to design something. Jabe Blumenthal, the original designer of Excel, liked to ask candidates to design a house. According to Jabe, he's had candidates who would go up to the whiteboard and immediately draw a square. A square! These were immediate No Hires. In design questions, what are you looking for?
  
  Good candidates will try to get more information out of you about the problem. Who is the house for? As a policy, I will not hire someone who leaps into the design without asking more about who it's for. Often I am so annoyed that I will give them a hard time by interrupting them in the middle and saying, "actually, you forgot to ask this, but this is a house for a family of 48-foot tall blind giraffes."

  There's a lot more to it than just that, but as I'm looking for someone to work with the business group to write a requirements document, it's pretty important that they ask questions and try to get more details. Lots of people like to ask for specific technologies, etc... even though such specifics might not be what they really want. The important thing is to find out what they really want to do, then figure out how to best achieve that goal. I don't know if I'd be as picky about this sort of question as Joel though. I do ask a design question in the interview, but I've only done one interview, and the guy didn't get it. I'll be interested to see if this sort of design quesiton actually does become a good indicator.
• How to Hire Like a Start-Up by Rob Walling: Not quite as good or thorough as Spolsky's article, but still filled with solid insight on the hiring process from a slightly different perspective. His article focuses on hiring fast. In Joel's article, there is only Hire and No Hire. Rob has an extra category: Maybes:

  ...the Rule of Thirds: on a 10-point scale you make money with your 7s, 8s, and 9s, break even with your 4s, 5s, and 6s, and lose money with your 1s, 2s, and 3s. There are no 10s in that list since no one is perfect; the highest possible rating is a 9+.
  
  In every job search there are hires, maybes, and no-hires. Using the Rule of Thirds, 7-9 is a hire, 4-6 is a maybe, and 1-3 is a no-hire.
  
  The only difference between hiring slow and hiring fast is what you do with the maybes; when hiring slow the maybes become nos, when hiring fast you let the maybes proceed to the next round of evaluation.

• Microsoft Interview Questions: A blog that started as a collection of interview questions asked by Microsoft, but that has lots of general interviewing stuff as well.
• The New-Boy Network by Malcolm Gladwell: Now that we've got a good handle on how to interview, Gladwell comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath us. Just how valuable are interviews anyway? Gladwell looks at the situation in his usual thorough manner, and claims that interviewing is a lot more difficult than it seems. Most judgements appear to be based on first impressions and the assumption that people's reactions in one context (the interview) are the same as others (working). However, once he establishes that premise, he goes on to talk about "structured interviewing" with an HR expert:

  Menkes moved on to another area--handling stress. A typical question in this area is something like "Tell me about a time when you had to do several things at once. How did you handle the situation? How did you decide what to do first?" Menkes says this is also too easy. "I just had to be very organized," he began again in his mock-sincere singsong. "I had to multitask. I had to prioritize and delegate appropriately. I checked in frequently with my boss." Here's how Menkes rephrased it: "You're in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?"
  
  "Well," I said, "I would look at the two and decide what I was best at, and then go to my boss and say, 'It's better that I do one well than both poorly,' and we'd figure out who else could do the other task."
  
  Menkes immediately seized on a telling detail in my answer. I was in-terested in what job I would do best. But isn't the key issue what job the company most needed to have done? With that comment, I had revealed some-thing valuable: that in a time of work-related crisis I start from a self-centered consideration.

  Most of the time, we want to believe that we can derive broad trend of behavior from the interview. The structured interviewing process is very narrowly focused:

  What is interesting about the structured interview is how narrow its objectives are. When I interviewed Nolan Myers I was groping for some kind of global sense of who he was; Menkes seemed entirely uninterested in arriving at that same general sense of me--he seemed to realize how foolish that expectation was for an hour-long interview. The structured interview works precisely because it isn't really an interview; it isn't about getting to know someone, in a traditional sense. It's as much concerned with rejecting information as it is with collecting it.

Interesting stuff. As I mentioned, I've not progressed much in the process just yet, but I'll be interested to see how this information plays out.



The Pendulum Swings
I've often commented that human beings don't so much solve problems as they trade one set problems for another (in the hope that the new set of problems are more favorable than the old). Yet that process doesn't always follow a linear trajectory. Initial reactions to a problem often cause problems of their own. Reactions to those problems often take the form of an over-correction. And so it continues, like the swinging of a pendulum, back and forth, until it reaches it's final equilibrium.

This is, of course, nothing new. Hegel's philosophy of argument works in exactly that way. You start with a thesis, some sort of claim that becomes generally accepted. Then comes the antithesis, as people begin to find holes in the original thesis and develop an alternative. For a time, the thesis and antithesis vie to establish dominance, but neither really wins. In the end, a synthesis comprised of the best characteristics of the thesis and antithesis emerges.

Naturally, it's rarely so cut and dry, and the process continues as the synthesis eventually takes on the role of the thesis, with new antitheses arising to challenge it. It works like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth until it reaches a stable position (a new synthesis). There are some interesting characteristics of pendulums that are also worth noting in this context. Steven Den Beste once described the two stable states of the pendulum: one in which the weight hangs directly below the hinge, and one in which the weight is balanced directly above the hinge.

On the left, the weight hangs directly below the hinge. On the right, it's balanced directly above it. Both states are stable. But if you slightly perturb the weight, they don't react the same way. When the left weight is moved off to the side, the force of gravity tries to center it again. In practice, if the hinge has a good bearing, the system then will oscillate around the base state and eventually stop back where it started. But if the right weight is perturbed, then gravity pulls the weight away and the right system will fail and convert to the left one.

The left state is robust. The right state is fragile. The left state responds to challenges by trying to maintain itself; the right state responds to challenges by shattering.

Not all systems are robust, but it's worth noting that even robust systems are not immune to perturbation. The point isn't that they can't fail, it's that when they do fail, they fail gracefully. Den Beste applies the concept to all sorts of things, including governments and economic systems, and I think the analogy is apt. In the coming months and years, we're going to see a lot of responses to the tragedy of hurricane Katrina. Katrina represents a massive perturbation; it's set the pendulum swinging, and it'll be a while before it reaches it's resting place. There will be many new policies that will result. Some of them will be good, some will be bad, and some will set new cycles into action. Disaster preparedness will become more prevalent as time goes on, and the plans will get better too. But not all at once, because we don't so much solve problems as trade one set of disadvantages for another, in the hopes that we can get that pendulum to rest in it's stable state.

Glenn Reynolds has collected a ton of worthy places to donate for hurricane relief here. It's also worth noting that many employers are matching donations to the Red Cross (mine is), so you might want to go that route if it's available...



Mastery II
I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. It's an interesting novel, and there are elements of the story that resemble Vinge's singularity. (Potential spoilers ahead) The story concerns two competing civilizations that travel to an alien planet. Naturally, there are confrontations and betrayals, and we learn that one of the civilizations utilizes a process to "Focus" an individual on a single area of study, essentially turning them into a brilliant machine. Naturally, there is a lot of debate about the Focused, and in doing so, one of the characters describes it like this:

... you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books? As often as not, they're some poor dweeb who doesn't have a life. He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic. A sane person couldn't justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard. Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected. See, in that way, a little of Focus has always been part of the human race. We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.

Debate revolves around this concept because people living in this Focused state could essentially be seen as slaves. However, the quote above reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago called Mastery:

There is an old saying "Jack of all trades, Master of none." This is indeed true, though with the demands of modern life, we are all expected to live in a constant state of partial attention and must resort to drastic measures like Self-Censorship or information filtering to deal with it all. This leads to an interesting corollary for the Master of a trade: They don't know how to do anything else!

In that post, I quoted Isaac Asimov, who laments that he's clueless when it comes to cars, and relates a funny story about what happened when he once got a flat tire. I wondered if that sort of mastery was really a worthwhile goal, but the artificually induced Focus in Vinge's novel opens the floor up to several questions. Would you volunteer to be focused in a specific area of study, knowing that you would basically do that and only that? No family, no friends, but only because you are so focused on your studies (as portrayed in the novel, doing work in your field is what makes you happy). What if you could opt to be focused for a limited period of time?

There are a ton of moral and ethical questions about the practice, and as portrayed in the book, it's not a perfect process and may not be reversible (at least, not without damage). The rewards would be great - Focusing sounds like a truly astounding feat. But would it really be worth it? As portrayed in the book, it definitely would not, as those wielding the power aren't very pleasant. Because the Focused are so busy concentrating on their area of study, they become completely dependent on the non-Focused to guide them (it's possible for a Focused person to become too-obsessed with a problem, to the point where physical harm or even death can occur) and do everything else for them (i.e. feed them, clean them, etc...) Again, in the book, those who are guiding the Focused are ruthless exploiters. However, if you had a non-Focused guide who you trusted, would you consider it?

I still don't know that I would. While the results would surely be high quality, the potential for abuse is astounding, even when it's someone you trust that is pulling the strings. Nothing says they'll stay trustworthy, and it's quite possible that they could be replaced in some way by someone less trustworthy. If the process was softened to the point where the Focused retains at least some control over their focus (including the ability to go in and out), then this would probably be a more viable option. Fortunately, I don't see this sort of thing happening in the way proposed by the book, but other scenarios present interesting dilemmas as well...



Veg Out
Neal Stephenson's take on Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith in the New York times is interesting on a few levels. He makes some common observations, such as the prevalence of geeky details in supplementary material of the Star Wars universe (such as the Clone Wars cartoons or books), but the real gem is his explanation for why the geeky stuff is mostly absent from the film:

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.

Stephenson says the original Star Wars is a mixture of veg and geek scenes, while the new movies are almost all veg out material. The passive vegging out he describes is exactly how I think of the prequels (except that Episode III seems to have a couple of non-veg out scenes, which is one of the reasons I think it fares better than the other prequels). He also makes a nice comparison to the business world, but then takes a sudden sort of indirect dive towards outsourcing and pessimism at the end of the article, making a vague reference to going "the way of the old Republic."

I'm not sure I agree with those last few paragraphs. I see the point, but it's presented as a given. Many have noted Stephenson could use a good editor for his recent novels, and it looks to me like Stephenson was either intentionally trying to keep it short (it's only two pages - not what you'd expect from someone who routinely writes 900 page books, including three that are essentially a single 2700 page novel) or his article was edited down to fit somewhere. In either case, I'm sure he could have expounded upon those last paragraphs to the tune of a few thousand words, but that's what I like about the guy. Not that the article is bad, but I prefer Stephenson's longwinded style. Ironically, Stephenson has left the details out of his article; it reads more like a power-point presentation that summarizes the bullet points of his argument than the sort of in-depth analysis I'm used to from Stephenson. As such, I'm sure there are a lot of people who would take issue with some of his premises. Perhaps it's an intentional irony, or (more likely) I'm reading too much into it.



Link Dump
Time is short this week, so I'll just have to rely on my army of chain smoking monkey researchers for a few links:

• The Singularity: Vernor Vinge's take on the Singularity. He predicts that we'll have the technology to create a super-human intelligence within 30 years, and that once the transition is made, " the human era will be ended." The concept has been around a while (and Vinge has written a pair of novels focusing on those ideas, amongst other things) and this 1993 essay is a good introduction.
• A Gamer's Manifesto: David Wong and Haimoimoi deliver a hearth breaking list of things gamers really want out of their games. Astute readers may remember Wong's brilliant Ultimate War Sim. The manifesto isn't quite as funny, but it does nail the frustrating things about gaming right on the head. And, of course, with all the calls for better AI, they're just begging for the Singularity...
• Interview with Umberto Eco in the Telegraph: The topics include a comparison of Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code (big difference) and whether Eco is the Italian Salman Rushdie (no). Interestingly enough, before I knew what the Singularity was, I had thought that "Abufalafia" (the allegedly "incredible" computer from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) would comprise of just such an intelligence. Alas, once I read the book, I realized it was not to be... [via Johno at The Ministry of Minor Perfidy]
• Zak Smith�s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity�s Rainbow: "The Modern Word hosts a staggering 755 illustrations by New York based artist, Zak Smith, depicting the events and imagery of Pynchon�s magnum opus." Some interesting stuff there... I'll have to add a link to my review. [via William Pittsburg, who apparently wrote the introduction and coded the pages]

That's all for now, perhaps more early in the week...

Update: Added another link and some text...



Sharks, Deer, and Risk
Here's a question: Which animal poses the greater risk to the average person, a deer or a shark?

Most people's initial reaction (mine included) to that question is to answer that the shark is the more dangerous animal. Statistically speaking, the average American is much more likely to be killed by deer (due to collisions with vehicles) than by a shark attack. Truly accurate statistics for deer collisions don't exist, but estimates place the number of accidents in the hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars worth of damage are caused by deer accidents, as are thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, every year.

Shark attacks, on the other hand, are much less frequent. Each year, approximately 50 to 100 shark attacks are reported. "World-wide, over the past decade, there have been an average of 8 shark attack fatalities per year."

It seems clear that deer actually pose a greater risk to the average person than sharks. So why do people think the reverse is true? There are a number of reasons, among them the fact that deer don't intentionally cause death and destruction (not that we know of anyway) and they are also usually harmed or killed in the process, while sharks directly attack their victims in a seemingly malicious manner (though I don't believe sharks to be malicious either).

I've been reading Bruce Schneier's book, Beyond Fear, recently. It's excellent, and at one point he draws a distinction between what security professionals refer to as "threats" and "risks."

A threat is a potential way an attacker can attack a system. Car burglary, car theft, and carjacking are all threats ... When security professionals talk abour risk, they take into consideration both the likelihood of the threat and the seriousness of a successful attack. In the U.S., car theft is a more serious risk than carjacking because it is much more likely to occur.

Everyone makes risk assessments every day, but most everyone also has different tolerances for risk. It's essentially a subjective decision, and it turns out that most of us rely on imperfect heuristics and inductive reasoning when it comes to these sorts of decisions (because it's not like we have the statistics handy). Most of the time, these heuristics serve us well (and it's a good thing too), but what this really ends up meaning is that when people make a risk assessment, they're basing their decision on a perceived risk, not the actual risk.

Schneier includes a few interesting theories about why people's perceptions get skewed, including this:

Modern mass media, specifically movies and TV news, has degraded our sense of natural risk. We learn about risks, or we think we are learning, not by directly experiencing the world around us and by seeing what happens to others, but increasingly by getting our view of things through the distorted lens of the media. Our experience is distilled for us, and it’s a skewed sample that plays havoc with our perceptions. Kids try stunts they’ve seen performed by professional stuntmen on TV, never recognizing the precautions the pros take. The five o’clock news doesn’t truly reflect the world we live in -- only a very few small and special parts of it.

Slices of life with immediate visual impact get magnified; those with no visual component, or that can’t be immediately and viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.

When I first considered the Deer/Shark dilemma, my immediate thoughts turned to film. This may be a reflection on how much movies play a part in my life, but I suspect some others would also immediately think of Bambi, with it's cuddly cute and innocent deer, and Jaws, with it's maniacal great white shark. Indeed, Fritz Schranck once wrote about these "rats with antlers" (as some folks refer to deer) and how "Disney's ability to make certain animals look just too cute to kill" has deterred many people from hunting and eating deer. When you look at the deer collision statistics, what you see is that what Disney has really done is to endanger us all!

Given the above, one might be tempted to pursue some form of censorship to keep the media from degrading our ability to determine risk. However, I would argue that this is wrong. Freedom of speech is ultimately a security measure, and if we're to consider abridging that freedom, we must also seriously consider the risks of that action. We might be able to slightly improve our risk decisionmaking with censorship, but at what cost?

Schneier himself recently wrote about this subject on his blog. In response to an article which argues that suicide bombings in Iraq shouldn't be reported (because it scares people and it serves the terrorists' ends). It turns out, there are a lot of reasons why the media's focus on horrific events in Iraq cause problems, but almost any way you slice it, it's still wrong to censor the news:

It's wrong because the danger of not reporting terrorist attacks is greater than the risk of continuing to report them. Freedom of the press is a security measure. The only tool we have to keep government honest is public disclosure. Once we start hiding pieces of reality from the public -- either through legal censorship or self-imposed "restraint" -- we end up with a government that acts based on secrets. We end up with some sort of system that decides what the public should or should not know.

Like all of security, this comes down to a basic tradeoff. As I'm fond of saying, human beings don't so much solve problems as they do trade one set of problems for another (in the hopes that the new problems are preferable the old). Risk can be difficult to determine, and the media's sensationalism doesn't help, but censorship isn't a realistic solution to that problem because it introduces problems of its own (and those new problems are worse than the one we're trying to solve in the first place). Plus, both Jaws and Bambi really are great movies!



Voters and Lurkers
Debating online, whether it be through message boards or blogs or any other method, can be rewarding, but it can also be quite frustrating. When most people think of a debate, they think of a group arguing an opponent, and one of the two factions "winning" the argument. It's a process of expression in which different people with different points of view will express their opinions, and are criticised by one another.

I've often found that specific threads tend to boil down to a point where the argument is going back and forth between two sole debaters (with very few interruptions from others). Inevitably, the debate gets to the point where both sides' assumptions (or axioms) have been exposed, and neither side is willing to agree with the other. To the debaters, this can be intensely frustrating. As such, anyone who has spent a significant amount of time debating others online can usually see that they're probably never going to convince their opponents. So who wins the argument?

The debaters can't decide who wins - they obviously think their argument is better than their opponents (or, at the very least, are unwilling to admit it) and so everyone thinks that they "won." But the debaters themselves don't "win" an argument, it's the people witnessing the debate that are the real winners. They decide which arguments are persuasive and which are not.

This is what the First Amendment of the US Constitution is based on, and it is a fundamental part of our democracy. In a vigorous marketplace of ideas, the majority of voters will discern the truth and vote accordingly.

Unfortunately, there never seems to be any sort of closure when debating online, because the audience is primarily comprised of lurkers, most of whom don't say anything (plus, there are no votes), and so it seems like nothing is accomplished. However, I assure you that is not the case. Perhaps not for all lurkers, but for a lot of them, they are reading the posts with a critical eye and coming out of the debate convinced one way or the other. They are the "voters" in an online debate. They are the ones who determine who won the debate. In a scenario where only 10-15 people are reading a given thread, this might not seem like much (and it's not), but if enough of these threads occur, then you really can see results...

I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin's essay "An apology for printers," in which Franklin defended those who printed allegedly offensive opinion pieces. His thought was that very little would be printed if publishers only produced things that were not offensive to anybody.

Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Family Guy
It's back! Last week was the first new episode, and things appear to be going well. I remember watching the reruns on the Cartoon Network and cursing FOX for cancelling it. How could they do such a thing?

I have this theory about Family Guy. You see, it's almost too funny. It makes you laugh so much that you forget what was so funny in the first place. And because many of the funny bits are almost completely unrelated to the story (inasmuch as there is a story), it's not like you can remember much by figuring it out from the plot. So all anyone remembers about Family Guy is that it's funny. This apparent amnesia includes the airing date, which during the initial run of Family Guy was all over the place (Sunday, Thursday, Tuesday?). Upon repeated viewings, it becomes easier. Or I'm just a moron who can't remember stuff when he laughs.

American Dad has been less impressive, I think perhaps because it mostly eschews the cutscene/flashback formula of Family Guy. However, I'm an optimist, so I'm willing to give them a chance to flesh it out a bit. I don't think it's as bad as Jeremy Bowers does, but I share his apprehension about Seth McFarlane spreading himself too thin:

I remember when Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, spread himself too thin with the cartoon and the TV show. I don't have a reference for the quality of the cartoon show without the cartoon, but during the run of the TV show, the quality of the cartoon really took a nose-dive. Most Dilbert daily cartoons before the TV show had effectively two punchlines in the final panel, something that once I noticed really made me respect him, given the constraints of the medium. Other cartoons certainly do it when they can, but Scott Adams pulled it off routinely after his first few years. As he worked on the TV show, the punchline count dropped to an average of one, and it was usually of a lower quality to boot. Now that he's back to just working on the strip, its quality has increased again ...

... I don't know how much Seth McFarlane is in Family Guy; sometimes the creative guy drives the whole show, sometimes he just sets up a good thing that can live on without him. But if it is the former, I hope that Family Guy doesn't suffer for the involvement in American Dad, or McFarlane may lose big by having two mediocre (and subsequently cancelled) shows, instead of one good one.

My thought is that McFarlane does indeed drive the whole show (though I'm not sure about American Dad), but I am again optimistic, for some unspecified reason.



Accelerating Change
Slashdot links to a fascinating and thought provoking one hour (!) audio stream of a speech "by futurist and developmental systems theorist, John Smart." The talk is essentially about the future of technology, more specifically information and communication technology. Obviously, there is a lot of speculation here, but it is interesting so long as you keep it in the "speculation" realm. Much of this is simply a high-level summary of the talk with a little commentary sprinkled in.

He starts by laying out some key motivations or guidelines to thinking about this sort of thing, and he paraphrases David Brin (and this is actually paraphrasing Smart):

We need a pragmatic optimism, a can-do attitude, a balance between innovation and preservation, honest dialogue on persistent problems, ... tolerance of the imperfect solutions we have today, and the ability to avoid both doomsaying and a paralyzing adherence to the status quo. ... Great input leads to great output.

So how do new systems supplant the old? They do useful things with less matter, less energy, and less space. They do this until they reach some sort of limit along those axes (a limitation of matter, energy, or space). It turns out that evolutionary processes are great at this sort of thing.

Smart goes on to list three laws of information and communication technology:

1. Technology learns faster than you do (on the order of 10 million times faster). At some point, Smart speculates that there will be some sort of persistent Avatar (neural-net prosthesis) that will essentially mimic and predict your actions, and that the "thinking" it will do (pattern recognitions, etc...) will be millions of times faster than what our brain does. He goes on to wonder what we will look like to such an Avatar, and speculates that we'll be sort of like pets, or better yet, plants. We're rooted in matter, energy, and space/time and are limited by those axes, but our Avatars will have a large advantage, just as we have a large advantage over plants in that respect. But we're built on top of plants, just as our Avatars will be built on top of us. This opens up a whole new can of worms regarding exactly what these Avatars are, what is actually possible, and how they will be perceived. Is it possible for the next step in evolution to occur in man-made (or machine-made) objects? (This section is around 16:30 in the audio)
2. Human beings are catalysts rather than controllers. We decide which things to accelerate and which to slow down, and this is tremendously important. There are certain changes that are evolutionarily inevitable, but the path we take to reach those ends is not set and can be manipulated. (This section is around 17:50 in the audio)
3. Interface is extremely important and the goal should be a natural high-level interface. His example is calculators. First generation calculators simply automate human processes and take away your math skills. Second generation calculators like Mathematica allow you to get a much better look at the way math works, but the interface "sucks." Third generation calculators will have a sort of "deep, fluid, natural interface" that allows a kid to have the understanding of a grad student today. (This section is around 20:00 in the audio)

Interesting stuff. His view is that most social and technological advances of the last 75 years or so are more accelerating refinements (changes in the microcosm) rather than disruptive changes (changes in the macrocosm). Most new technological advances are really abstracted efficiencies - it's the great unglamorous march of technology. They're small and they're obfuscated by abstraction, thus many of the advances are barely noticed.

This about halfway through the speech, and he goes on to list many examples and he explores some more interesting concepts. Here are some bits I found interesting.

• He talks about transportation and energy, and he argues that even though, on a high level we haven't advanced much (still using oil, natural gas - fossil fuels), there has actually been a massive amount of change, but that the change is mostly hidden in abstracted accelerating efficiencies. He mentions that we will probably have zero-emission fossil fuel vehicles 30-40 years from now (which I find hard to believe) and that rather than focusing on hydrogen or solar, we should be trying to squeeze more and more efficiency out of existing systems (i.e. abstracted efficiencies). He also mentions population growth as a variable in the energy debate, something that is rarely done, but if he is correct that population will peak around 2050 (and that population density is increasing in cities), then that changes all projections about energy usage as well. (This section is around 31:50-35 in the audio) He talks about hybrid technologies and also autonomous highways as being integral in accelerating efficiencies of energy use (This section is around 37-38 in the audio) I found this part of the talk fascinating because energy debates are often very myopic and don't consider things outside the box like population growth and density, autonomous solutions, phase shifts of the problem, &c. I'm reminded of this Michael Crichton speech where he says:

  Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

  None of which is to say that we shouldn't be pursuing alternative energy technology or that it can't supplant fossil fuels, just that things seem to be trending towards making fossil fuels more efficient. I see hybrid technology becoming the major enabler in this arena, possibly followed by the autonomous highway (that controls cars and can perhaps give an extra electric boost via magnetism). All of which is to say that the future is a strange thing, and these systems are enormously complex and are sometimes driven by seemingly unrelated events.
• He mentions an experiment in genetic algorithms used for process automation. Such evolutionary algorithms are often used in circuit design and routing processes to find the most efficient configuration. He mentions one case where someone made a mistake in at the quantum level of a system, and when they used the genetic algorithm to design the circuit, they found that the imperfection was actually exploited to create a better circuit. These sorts of evolutionary systems are robust because failure actually drives the system. It's amazing. (This section is around 47-48 in the audio)
• He then goes on to speculate as to what new technologies he thinks will represent disruptive change. The first major advance he mentions is the development of a workable LUI - a language-based user interface that utilizes a natural language that is easily understandable by both the average user and the computer (i.e. a language that doesn't require years of study to figure out, a la current programming languages). He thinks this will grow out of current search technologies (perhaps in a scenario similar to EPIC). One thing he mentions is that the internet right now doesn't give an accurate represtenation of the wide range of interests and knowledge that people have, but that this is steadily getting better over time. As more and more individuals, with more and more knowledge, begin interacting on the internet, they begin to become a sort of universal information resource. (This section is around 50-53 in the audio)
• The other major thing he speculates about is the development of personality capture and parallel computing, which sort of integrates with the LUI. This is essentially the Avatar I mentioned earlier which mimics and predicts your actions.

As always, we need to keep our feet on the ground here. Futurists are fun to listen to, but it's easy to get carried away. The development of a LUI and a personality capture system would be an enormous help, but we still need good information aggregation and correlation systems if we're really going to progress. Right now the problem is finding the information we need, and analyzing the information. A LUI and personality capture system will help with the finding of information, but not so much with the analysis (the separating of the signal from the noise). As I mentioned before, the speech is long (one hour), but it's worth a listen if you have the time...



The Stability of Three
One of the things I've always respected about Neal Stephenson is his attitude (or rather, the lack thereof) regarding politics:

Politics - These I avoid for the simple reason that artists often make fools of themselves, and begin to produce bad art, when they decide to get political. A novelist needs to be able to see the world through the eyes of just about anyone, including people who have this or that set of views on religion, politics, etc. By espousing one strong political view a novelist loses the power to do this. Anyone who has convinced himself, based on reading my work, that I hold this or that political view, is probably wrong. What is much more likely is that, for a while, I managed to get inside the head of a fictional character who held that view.

Having read and enjoyed several of his books, I think this attitude has served him well. In a recent interview in Reason magazine, Stephenson makes several interesting observations. The whole thing is great, and many people are interested in his comments regarding an American technology and science, but I found one other tidbit very interesting. Strictly speaking, it doesn't break with his attitude about politics, but it is somewhat political:

Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I’m afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

I took particular note of what he describes as a "triangular system" because it's something I've seen before...

One of the primary goals of the American Constitutional Convention was to devise a system that would be resistant to tyranny. The founders were clearly aware of the damage that an unrestrained government could do, so they tried to design the new system in such a way that it wouldn't become tyrannical. Democratic institions like mandatory periodic voting and direct accountability to the people played a large part in this, but the founders also did some interesting structural work as well.

Taking their cue from the English Parliament's relationship with the King of England, the founders decided to create a legislative branch separate from the executive. This, in turn, placed the two governing bodies in competition. However, this isn't a very robust system. If one of the governing bodies becomes more powerful than the other, they can leverage their advantage to accrue more power, thus increasing the imbalance.

A two-way balance of power is unstable, but a three-way balance turns out to be very stable. If any one body becomes more powerful than the other two, the two usually can and will temporarily unite, and their combined power will still exceed the third. So the founders added a third governing body, an independent judiciary.

The result was a bizarre sort of stable oscillation of power between the three major branches of the federal government. Major shifts in power (such as wars) disturbed the system, but it always fell back to a preferred state of flux. This stable oscillation turns out to be one of the key elements of Chaos theory, and is referred to as a strange attractor. These "triangular systems" are particularly good at this, and there are many other examples...

Some argue that the Cold War stabilized considerably when China split from the Soviet Union. Once it became a three-way conflict, there was much less of a chance of unbalance (and as unbalance would have lead to nuclear war, this was obviously a good thing).

Steven Den Beste once noted this stabilizing power of three in the interim Iraqi constitution, where the Iraqis instituted a Presidency Council of 3 Presidents representing each of the 3 major factions in Iraq:

...those writing the Iraqi constitution also had to create a system acceptable to the three primary factions inside of Iraq. If they did not, the system would shake itself to pieces and there was a risk of Iraqi civil war.

The divisions within Iraq are very real. But this constitution takes advantage of the fact that there are three competing factions none of which really trusts the other. This constitution leverages that weakness, and makes it into a strength.

It should be interesting to see if that structure will be maintained in the new Iraqi constitution.

As for Stephenson's speculation that a triangular system consisting of libertarians, statists, and terrorists may develop, I'm not sure. They certainly seem to feed off one another in a way that would facilitate such a system, but I'm not positive it would work out that way, nor do I think it is particularly a desirable state to be in, all the more because it could be a very stable system due to its triangular structure. In any case, I thought it was an interesting observation and well worth considering...



Stupendous Badass
Time is tight this week, so just a few quick quotes from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon which struck me during a recent re-reading. The first is essentially a summary of evolution:

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo - which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.

And the next quote comes from the perspective of Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier during World War II:

The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies.

No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men? They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.

Most of you reading this know that the officers who displayed some adaptability (to borrow another phrase from Stephenson) didn't kill themselves, nor were they thrown into prison. They were most likely applauded for their efforts. But Goto Dengo, and the Japanese at the time, embraced a warrior culture where such actions were deeply dishonorable.

It's interesting to consider the second quote in light of the first. In a sense, a war is an implementation of what Stephenson describes as self-replicating organisms "trying to get rid of each other." So the question is what part do honor and flexibility play in the grand evolutionary scheme of things?



Chasing the Tail
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson : An excellent article from Wired that demonstrates a few of the concepts and ideas I've been writing about recently. One such concept is well described by Clay Shirky's excellent article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. A system governed by a power law distribution is essentially one where the power (whether it be measured in wealth, links, etc) is concentrated in a small population (when graphed, the rest of the population's power values resemble a long tail). This concentration occurs spontaneously, and it is often strengthened because members of the system have an incentive to leverage their power to accrue more power.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

As such, this distribution manifests in all sorts of human endeavors, including economics (for the accumulation of wealth), language (for word frequency), weblogs (for traffic or number of inbound links), genetics (for gene expression), and, as discussed in the Wired article, entertainment media sales. Typically, the sales of music, movies, and books follow a power law distribution, with a small number of hit artists who garner the grand majority of the sales. The typical rule of thumb is that 20% of available artists get 80% of the sales.

Because of the expense of producing the physical product, and giving it a physical point of sale (shelf-space, movie theaters, etc...), this is bad news for the 80% of artists who get 20% of the sales. Their books, movies, and music eventually go out of print and are generally forgotten, while the successful artists' works are continually reprinted and sold, building on their own success.

However, with the advent of the internet, this is beginning to change. Sales are still governed by the power law distribution, but the internet is removing the physical limitations of entertainment media.

An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. It's not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California.

The decentralized nature of the internet makes it a much better way to distribute entertainment media, as that documentary that has a potential national (heck, worldwide) audience of half a million people could likely succeed if distributed online. The infrastructure for films isn't there yet, but it has been happening more in the digital music world, and even in a hybrid space like Amazon.com, which sells physical products, but in a non-local manner. With digital media, the cost of producing and distributing entertainment media goes way down, and thus even average artists can be considered successful, even if their sales don't approach that of the biggest sellers.

The internet isn't a broadcast medium; it is on-demand, driven by each individual's personal needs. Diversity is the key, and as Shirkey's article says: "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality." With respect to weblogs (or more generally, websites), big sites are, well, bigger, but links and traffic aren't the only metrics for success. Smaller websites are smaller in those terms, but are often more specialized, and thus they do better both in terms of connecting with their visitors (or customers) and in providing a more compelling value to their visitors. Larger sites, by virtue of their popularity, simply aren't able to interact with visitors as effectively. This is assuming, of course, that the smaller sites do a good job. My site is very small (in terms of traffic and links), but not very specialized, so it has somewhat limited appeal. However, the parts of my site that get the most traffic are the ones that are specialized (such as the Christmas Movies page, or the Asimov Guide). I think part of the reason the blog has never really caught on is that I cover a very wide range of topics, thus diluting the potential specialized value of any single topic.

The same can be said for online music sales. They still conform to a power law distribution, but what we're going to see is increasing sales of more diverse genres and bands. We're in the process of switching from a system in which only the top 20% are considered profitable, to one where 99% are valuable. This seems somewhat counterintuitive for a few reasons:

The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We're stuck in a hit-driven mindset - we think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib�, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want.

The need to figure out what people want out of a diverse pool of options is where self-organizing systems come into the picture. A good example is Amazon's recommendations engine, and their ability to aggregate various customer inputs into useful correlations. Their "customers who bought this item also bought" lists (and the litany of variations on that theme), more often than not, provide a way to traverse the long tail. They encourage customer participation, allowing customers to write reviews, select lists, and so on, providing feedback loops that improve the quality of recommendations. Note that none of these features was designed to directly sell more items. The focus was on allowing an efficient system of collaborative feedback. Good recommendations are an emergent result of that system. Similar features are available in the online music services, and the Wired article notes:

For instance, the front screen of Rhapsody features Britney Spears, unsurprisingly. Next to the listings of her work is a box of "similar artists." Among them is Pink. If you click on that and are pleased with what you hear, you may do the same for Pink's similar artists, which include No Doubt. And on No Doubt's page, the list includes a few "followers" and "influencers," the last of which includes the Selecter, a 1980s ska band from Coventry, England. In three clicks, Rhapsody may have enticed a Britney Spears fan to try an album that can hardly be found in a record store.

Obviously, these systems aren't perfect. As I've mentioned before, a considerable amount of work needs to be done with respect to the aggregation and correlation aspects of these systems. Amazon and the online music services have a good start, and weblogs are trailing along behind them a bit, but the nature of self-organizing systems dictates that you don't get a perfect solution to start, but rather a steadily improving system. What's becoming clear, though, is that the little guys are (collectively speaking) just as important as the juggernauts, and that's why I'm not particularly upset that my blog won't be wildly popular anytime soon.



Stigmergic Notes
I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the concepts discussed in my last post. It's a fascinating, if a little bewildering, topic. I'm not sure I have a great handle on it, but I figured I'd share a few thoughts.

There are many systems that are incredibly flexible, yet they came into existence, grew, and self-organized without any actual planning. Such systems are often referred to as Stigmergic Systems. To a certain extent, free markets have self-organized, guided by such emergent effects as Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Many organisms are able to quickly adapt to changing conditions using a technique of continuous reproduction and selection. To an extent, there are forces on the internet that are beginning to self-organize and produce useful emergent properties, blogs among them.

Such systems are difficult to observe, and it's hard to really get a grasp on what a given system is actually indicating (or what properties are emerging). This is, in part, the way such systems are supposed to work. When many people talk about blogs, they find it hard to believe that a system composed mostly of small, irregularly updated, and downright mediocre (if not worse) blogs can have truly impressive emergent properties (I tend to model the ideal output of the blogosphere as an information resource). Believe it or not, blogging wouldn't work without all the crap. There are a few reasons for this:

The System Design: The idea isn't to design a perfect system. The point is that these systems aren't planned, they're self-organizing. What we design are systems which allow this self-organization to occur. In nature, this is accomplished through constant reproduction and selection (for example, some biological systems can be represented as a function of genes. There are hundreds of thousands of genes, with a huge and diverse number of combinations. Each combination can be judged based on some criteria, such as survival and reproduction. Nature introduces random mutations so that gene combinations vary. Efficient combinations are "selected" and passed on to the next generation through reproduction, and so on).

The important thing with respect to blogs are the tools we use. To a large extent, blogging is simply an extension of many mechanisms already available on the internet, most especially the link. Other weblog specific mechanisms like blogrolls, permanent-links, comments (with links of course) and trackbacks have added functionality to the link and made it more powerful. For a number of reasons, weblogs tend to be affected by power-law distribution, which spontaneously produces a sort of hierarchical organization. Many believe that such a distribution is inherently unfair, as many excellent blogs don't get the attention they deserve, but while many of the larger bloggers seek to promote smaller blogs (some even providing mechanisms for promotion), I'm not sure there is any reliable way to systemically "fix" the problem without harming the system's self-organizational abilities.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

This self-organization is one of the important things about weblogs; any attempt to get around it will end up harming you in the long run as the important thing is to find a state in which weblogs are working most efficiently. How can the weblog community be arranged to self-organize and find its best configuration? That is what the real question is, and that is what we should be trying to accomplish (emphasis mine):

...although the purpose of this example is to build an information resource, the main strategy is concerned with creating an efficient system of collaboration. The information resource emerges as an outcome if this is successful.

Failure is Important: Self-Organizing systems tend to have attractors (a preferred state of the system), such that these systems will always gravitate towards certain positions (or series of positions), no matter where they start. Surprising as it may seem, self-organization only really happens when you expose a system in a steady state to an environment that can destabilize it. By disturbing a steady state, you might cause the system to take up a more efficient position.

It's tempting to dismiss weblogs as a fad because so many of them are crap. But that crap is actually necessary because it destabilizies the system. Bloggers often add their perspective to the weblog community in the hopes that this new information will change the way others think (i.e. they are hoping to induce change - this is roughly referred to as Stigmergy). That new information will often prompt other individuals to respond in some way or another (even if not directly responding). Essentially, change is introduced in the system and this can cause unpredictable and destabilizing effects. Sometimes this destabilization actually helps the system, sometimes (and probably more often than not) it doesn't. Irregardless of its direct effects, the process is essential because it is helping the system become increasingly comprehensive. I touched on this in my last post among several others in which I claim that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. It's not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it's that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one anal