Intermittent Dactylalia

This happens more regularly than I care to admit.

2009-12-17T06:15:14Z

So, no time to cook. I'll just nuke some steam-in-bag broccoli. Of course, that won't be very filling. Might as well melt some cheddar on top. Except that's just thick and greasy. Would it really kill me to make a simple cheese sauce? Okay, got the butter melting for the roux, let's open the fridge and-- hey, I forgot about the half container of sliced portabellas. That'll go great with everything else, just toss those in the butter to saute a bit, dump them out, and start the roux again. Now flour, mustard powder, pepper, just a hint of ginger. Okay, milk... or heavy whipping cream. I'm sure my arteries are willing to make a few sacrifices for deliciousness. When did this transition from "ez cheez sauce" to Cheddar Alfredo? Never mind. Oh yeah, need to start the broccoli. That's going to be important, too.

One of these days I need to learn how to cook, so I can stop doing it accidentally.

Insert clever Whedonverse reference later

2009-04-13T14:22:35Z

I'm going to commit a bit of geek heresy now: Joss Whedon is not a hero of feminism. True, he challenges the dominant portrayal of women as weak and insipid caricatures who exist only to be dragged from one sexually-themed plot/characterization point to the next. But he does so with a portrayal of women as strong and aggressive caricatures who exist only to charge from one sexually-themed plot/characterization point to the next. A different fetish does not negate the act of fetishizing. Nor does the genuinely charming banter his women are provided with as they traipse from rape to heartache to seduction to willful-expression-of-aggressive-sexuality.

It's absolutely an improvement from the status quo, and I'll take what I can get. But it ain't saving the world one hot and tormented martial artist at a time.

You could do better, and you probably ought.

2009-04-09T07:48:29Z

When first I came to Minneapolis from my tiny little town, I would wander the streets and wonder. Ofttimes I'd board a random bus and just ride until it stopped, before walking my way home. I'd stare half-focused out the window, lost in contemplation of the movement and the marvels that passed by, the press of unprecedented crowds that somehow secured a solitude I'd never found even on the prairie. Like many young, introspective narcissists, I felt the need to express my observations in poetry.

The cold black trickery
of the quick flash flickering
as flesh flies and melds
into concrete and chrome.
The dry paper rustling
of a million minds bustling--
each one together,
and together, alone.

Yeah, whatever. I liked that little epigram. About the only thing of mine I ever memorized. In a nutshell, it's all of my writing: full of consonance and pretension, and multiple layers of none-too-subtle meaning. I've always loved to play games with sound and syntax, to tickle eardrum and cerebrum simultaneously (a trick that normally takes an eight-inch surgical probe and some deft wrist-wriggling).

But I really have done it always, or at least as "always" as I can recall. So what were my influences? No one around me talked this way when I was young. I did a great deal of reading, but my formative years were hardly filled with Shakespearean sonnets and the like. In high school I liked to attribute my style, such as it was, to narrative poets like Alfred Noyes:

And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore
Of human joys and wonders and regrets;
To remember and to recompense the music evermore
For what the cold machinery forgets...

Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;
Dissects the common carnival
Of passions and regrets,
And gives the world a glimpse of all
The colours it forgets.

Lovely stuff, if a bit... fluff. Still. Hardly the worst inspiration I could claim. Just a dishonest one. I truly had no idea where I picked up my word-wrangling ways. None, that is, until a few months back when I happened to hear an old, familiar refrain:

"His beak blinks like a blinkin' beacon!"(~4:38 in)

...and it just clicked. Yep. That's me. Not TS Eliot. Not Saint-Exupéry. Not even Gilbert/Sullivan. Rankin/Bass, through and through. Ah, well. It's all in what I do with it, I suppose.

I'll get right on that.

Thankfully, Billy Bob Thornton didn't titter

2008-11-26T00:03:45Z

Am I the only one whose reaction upon seeing Pushing Tin was: "Huh. Amadeus with airplanes."?

Of math and madness and moodiness

2008-11-22T08:15:39Z

The stupidest smart thing I ever did, I did alone and never told.
I was working in a sprawling used bookstore, full of paper dust and character. It was right around the time that I was working up to acknowledging that my "break" from college was a full-fledged drop-out. Nonetheless, I'd hardly given up the sublime sensation of figuring stuff out. There's always been an endless series of questions looming indomitable in the back of my head, hulking continents of uncertainty forming the horizons of my puddle of knowledge. Still, I gamely ply their shores with my tiny rowboat of a brain, delighting in the endless process of mapping and expanding the surface area of my ignorance.

At the beginning of our story, I was reading Feynman's book on quantum electrodynamics (puckishly titled "QED"), and feeling like I understood a great deal more than I probably truly did-- Feynman had a gift for conveying complex concepts in terms approachable even to the layman. Something in his arrow diagrams of particle paths resonated with my very hazy grasp of Einstein's "weights distorting a rubber sheet" representation of gravity. The illustration made sense on a gut level, but I'd never really been able to fit it into my understanding in any structured way. But with Feynman's undimensioned arrows as an example, I tried representing mass as a scalar on an axis perpendicular to the spacial dimensions, and incorporating this into simple force and motion equations... and promptly got a headache. I never finished freshman physics, you see. Bogged down in Calc II. The Nobel Committee is not in the habit of keeping my contact info up-to-date. Still, there was something interesting about this. So I set down QED (inspirational, but otherwise inapplicable) and cracked into a few textbooks. In a few weeks, with just a smidgen of linear algebra, I'd derived gravitation as an emergent vector completely consistent with all my earlier equations.

Of course I assumed I was re-inventing the wheel. Still, it was exciting to independently uncover the understandings I would've learned by rote and lecture had I remained in college. I decided to see how far I could go. Like everyone who's ever seen a scientist on television, I was familiar with "E=Mc²"; but the real nature of energy was still very much "Here There be Dragyns" territory for me. I used physics books only to reference the basic equations I was trying to balance; I wanted to see if I could get there on my own with what I had done so far. It took over a month, and a handful of additional dimensions before I found a system that held together. Mass and energy, vectors that could be translated across dimensions into one another with a tiny bit of math magic. Plug in values and constants, and the results held to the classical conversion equations across the board.

All this time, I kept my project to myself. I assumed that my more educated friends had no interest in re-hashing remedial topics in which I lacked even the basic vocabulary, and that my less-technically-inclined friends would find the entire exercise weird and wearying. And I wanted to see what I could accomplish on my own, with nothing more than my high-school background and the standard equations as a sort of answer key to check my results against. And... one other reason, one I wasn't willing to admit even to myself. When I flipped through the physics books, I wasn't finding anything like my method. Perhaps it meant I was using a longer and more circuitous route that usual deriving these relationships. Maybe, just maybe, I was working at a level above the target audience for my textbook. But... couldn't there be just a chance-- a tiny, insignificant chance, that I was doing something somewhat original? That by innocently applying an esoteric method of analysis, I was seeing familiar relationships represented in a novel way? And could this lead somewhere even more exciting?

After all, there isn't one unique set of "parent" vectors that interact to produce any given "child" vector. Even if we're restricted to parents that remain perpendicular to one another, you can find multiple solutions as long as you're allowed to add dimensions and reverse signs. Which meant that mathematically, gravity had multiple sources. It didn't need to rely on mass/matter, which is after all just a sign-restricted single vector in a system with many. Could this explain the missing matter in the observed universe? And could I explain the various paradoxes of irreversibility with this system? How did quantum effects factor in, if at all? What about... well. Suffice it to say that it was a time of ballooning giddiness, the precise sort of hope-against-hope that lets us happily plan what we're going to do with our hypothetical lottery winnings. Easily explained, and eminently human. Which is to say: stupid.

There is a class of brain teaser we first run across in elementary school, in which we're asked to choose a number, apply a bunch of simple arithmetic processes to it, and achieve a result predicted by the book. What's magic when we're 10 is inane only a few years later; these tricks are all just simple applications of distributivity, commutativity, and other elementary principles of algebra. The original number is factored out, and "predicting" the result is then unimpressive for anyone able to add.

Readers with an IT background may have been snickering at me at least four paragraphs back. Everyone else should start now. By using a branch of mathematics I understood just enough to get myself into trouble, I'd managed to consistently cancel out everything I was putting into my equations. Of course everything balanced. Things will do that when you drop equal amounts of crap on either side. And of course I got valid results when I plugged in constants and classical equations-- all of the garbage I was doing evaporated and left only the familiar, much less arduous relationships in place. I wasn't doing anything wrong per se. You can solve simple physical equations using vector spaces and linear combination. You can also balance your checkbook using quadratics. Textbooks don't provide examples of either approach*, presumably because only morons would attempt them and it's considered gauche in the academic world to give morons tools they'll only use to hurt themselves. I'd spent a few months effectively proving that the basic laws of mathematics continue to function even when wielded by chimps. Which is worth knowing, I suppose. But it wasn't quite what I set out to do.

Back in the bookstore, Mark (our resident Employee With An Actual Degree) would refer to one of our regular customers as "the original intellectual dilettante", with a certain amount of affectionate derision. Every week or two she'd be on a new topic, eagerly absorbing every scrap she could find and giddily sharing choice tidbits from her foraging. I found her delightful, if occasionally exasperating. There was another class of customers who compulsively shared their understandings of the world: invariably male, of a wizened middle age; lurching erratically in the midst of a miasma of public assistance, indifferent hygiene, and tightly-wound desperation. Eye contact was an all-or-nothing affair, and equally unnerving either way. They didn't seem to know one another, but they were united by a disdain for classical education and a fervent belief that they'd unknotted the secrets of the cosmos through fevered readings of popular science topics.

Whether they were disproving theism via their interpretation of Brownian motion's deeper implications, or appealing to chaos theory to advocate anarchy as the only just system of governance, the logic sounded flawless... unless one realized that words have multiple meanings, and metonyms are not magically real. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty applies to teleology only as overwrought literary metaphor, not as compelling argument. But the primary deficiencies of these walking Wittgensteinian straw men were not intellectual in nature. Their analytical engines were plenty powerful, if poorly tuned. Indeed, they demonstrated an interest and ability well above average in their explorations of the world's workings. Their failings were those of grounding: in the basic principles of their subject matter, certainly, but even more vitally they lacked grounding in a peer group-- people to touch base with, calibrate the scales of sanity and establish the base levels of essential concepts as they worked with them. The necessity of consensus is impressed upon us early, but hidden benefit of formal education is opportunity. The vocabulary, the background, and the socio-economic passcodes to maintain access to a group devoted (in effect if not always intent) to continuous cross-checking. Otherwise, as soon as we start fooling ourselves there's nothing to stop us from digging in deeper. Nobody to pull us out of the recursive loops of wishful thinking and self-reinforcing mistakes. These guys were crazy before they were alone, I'm sure. But I'm also sure that all the unchecked hours inside their own heads weren't doing them any favors.

I don't recall having much of a reaction when I realized that I'd wasted months testing (not even proving) whether or not a+b really equaled b+a. It was annoying, but I've always been able to laugh at my own ridiculousness. Eventually, though, I made the connection between my behavior and the bookstore's gutter philosophers. It... hit me hard. And some of the bruises still show. I could handle being another intellectual dilettante, useless but happy. She had partners, enthusiastically sharing her sense of wonder. The crazies had nothing but unwilling audiences for their rantings, and a yearning to be understood that was powerful enough to make them miserable but not enough to change their behavior.

It was ten years back that I figured this out. I never stopped learning, but I never quite lost myself like that again. Haven't finished QED either, come to think of it. I'm still not sure whether I'm more like her or like them. And I'm still not sure which way I'm headed. And that, unfortunately, is the only honest conclusion I've got for this rambling little confession. Check with me again in ten years and we'll see if I can do better.

*Okay, actually you'll see lots of mechanical problems solved with linear algebra, but what I was doing was representing spatial dimensions and physical properties as independent axes and deriving properties and relationships and interactions from them, which led to some really beautiful symmetries and startling possibilities when I included time as yet another axis ("fourth dimension" my ass) and damn it all I really was trying to avoid going on at length here about exactly how I built my imaginary cloud castles. Point being: I have some idea of how linear algebra can be usefully applied, and trust me, what I was doing was NOT it.

Quod Era Disappointum

2008-09-03T07:42:51Z

As I know you all take my off-hand references to books as weighty and profound endorsements, I feel a sense of responsibility to disclaim my earlier enthusiasm for Fred Vargas. The characterization was indeed a series of marvels in miniature. But the author managed something I didn't know was possible: I felt that I really knew the characters, and found what I knew to be agreeable, but I just couldn't bring myself to give a thin half-damn for what was happening to them. The plot was muddled and meandering. The character development was... meh.

A mystery is anything someone wonders at. A secret is a knowable mystery, generally assumed to be known to someone. Seeking Whom He May Devour ended up falling into an unhappy middle ground, a place comprised of equal parts ignorance and indifference. I didn't really know what was going on until the very end. And I didn't care. So there was none of the insight I'd expect from literature, nor any of the catchy visceral interactive hooks I'd expect from standard mystery novels. Just some exquisite artistry, directionless and alone in that space between any places it could have been properly appreciated.

I read Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand, in the hopes that the previous book had been a fluke, or ruined for me by some moodiness of my own. Nope. The mystery here was a bit more involving, and the plot more interesting, but it came at the expense of the intimate portraits that I fell for in the early stages of my romance with Devour. And in the end, it still wasn't all that gripping.

A pity. And as with any infatuation that flames out as suddenly as it flared up, I can't help but feel that somehow my disenchantment reflects a failing in me. For a moment, what might have been effectively was, and it's better to shelve that memory than to tear the pages apart in despair that the "might have" could never truly have been. Time to move on and lose myself in the safety of the first math textbook to catch my eye; take comfort in the familiarity and stability of equations. Still... *sigh*

Piquant undertones

2008-09-03T06:39:01Z

Over the years, this blog has served many purposes: political rants, angsty diary entries, random essays, trouser fixations, media reviewing, meme-sheeping, link-spamming, inexplicable sharing of minutia, and so on. But I've never talked about my cats or my lunch. Today I'm going to break one of those "nevers". I would've broken both at once, but the furry little bastards wouldn't sit still in the marinade.

There's a good reason I don't talk about my meals. Well, there are many, most of which are some variation on "Why would anyone care about the fact that someone else managed to eat with some unremarkable degree of success?". But my meals in particular generally don't lend themselves to comment. I don't cook for myself. At all. It's not an unusual meal that starts and ends with noshing on unadorned bread products or grazing on uncooked, unpeeled, and oft' unwashed produce. Tools and processes beyond "chewing" are suspiciously self-indulgent, to my mind.

That notwithstanding, I'm a better-than-fair cook when I choose to be. I just don't choose to be when it's just for myself. Except last weekend, when for no particular reason I whipped up a lunch so simple yet perfect that I had to photograph it.

That's a pita with humus, sprinkled with paprika and cayenne, covered in slices of cucumber and daikon sprouts (the sweetness and crunch of bean sprouts, plus a delightful radishy sting). The salad is simply arugula and roasted beet slices (as well as the rest of the cucumber, which wasn't bad but just wasn't quite right in this context, and won't be repeated), tossed with olive oil, coarse spicy mustard, flaked parmesan, and toasted sesame seeds. The beverage is store-brand root beer-- hey, I never claimed to be highbrow. The background is my new futon, which I got to sleep on now that I'm getting divorced.

Okay, so it's not exclusively a lunch post. Still, it was a mighty tasty lunch.

Single female; seeks tool

2008-06-27T06:33:20Z

I've got a sort of ingrained disdain for mystery novels, which is really quite ridiculous given how much of my life I've spent buried in books with rocket ships and bombastic blurbs embossed on their covers. I've lately succumbed to taking some guilty pleasure in Raymond Chandler, Andrew Vachss, and Elmore Leonard. On the other hand, the pleasure I'm taking in Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas is absolutely sublime and completely guilt-free.

Camille took her metal-tipped walking stick and her copy of The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft. It was the sort of thing she most liked to leaf through at special moments -- at breakfast, in her coffee break, or whenever she felt her heart sinking. ... It was an exhaustive listing with sections on compressed air, soldering, scaffolding, lifting gear, and scores of similarly promising headings. Camille read every entry from start to finish, including detailed specifications like jumbo weed hog, 1.1HP petrol engine, antirecoil bar, low-vibration solid transmission with reverse thrust, electronic ignition, weight 5.6 kg. Such descriptions -- and catalogs were full of them-- gave her profound intellectual satisfaction (understanding the object, how it fitted together, how it worked) as well as an intense lyrical pleasure. On top of the underlying fantasy of solving all the world's problems with a combined-cycle milling machine or a universal chuck tool, the catalog represented the hope of using a combination of power and ingenuity to overcome all of life's shitty obstacles. A false hope, to be sure, but a hope nonetheless. Thus did Camille draw her vital energy from two sources: musical composition and The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft. Ten years younger and she had also drawn on love, but she had really lost interest in that overused well. Love could give you wings, but it also knocked you off your feet, so it wasn't much of a bargain overall. Far less so than a ten-ton hydraulic jack, for instance.

From this alone, I know Camille better than some people I've worked with for years. And I find her significantly more interesting, her nonexistent status notwithstanding. And this is in translation from the original French.

Well done, genre fiction. Well done indeed.

Inactivist

2008-06-27T05:56:07Z

Over the last few years I've made an effort to stay up-to-date, and dig beyond the headlines of the latest political stories. "A well-informed populace", and all that. Well, I'm done. I've learned a lot of facts, reworked no few of my personal ideologies, and had a great many fantastic conversations. But in the end, it's only made me smug and indignant by turns, and neither of those emotional states is worth the time I've invested.

My political preferences generally lean leftward, but my primary allegiance is to the opposition of pernicious idiocy. And that leaves me without a dog in pretty much any fight you can find these days. For a time it seemed that the answer was to become more involved, try to steer one party or another in whatever direction seemed important that day. As both a farmboy and a liberal, I came pre-equipped with a distaste for large corporations. My grudge against the media and its shallow, fact-free and anti-analyisis approach to political coverage grew exponentially as I educated myself. And, of course, the politicians themselves didn't even bear consideration. But eventually, I realized that none of these was the true enemy of the people.

That would be the people themselves. Jefferson proposes that we "educate and inform the whole mass of the people" to best preserve liberty. That's a fantastic concept, but the whole mass of the people has all the direction and consideration of a hamster on a little wheel, and seems quite content with this state of affairs. I don't believe they are all stupid per se, but there is an overwhelming preference for comfort and emotional reactions over rational consideration. This is nothing new, of course. But I failed to realize just how strongly the average citizen will resist having his preselected positions challenged by a little detail like reality. Neither party has a monopoly on this. Both thrive by poking randomly at the electoral body until they find a spot that triggers a twitch, and then bearing down for all they're worth. This reduces the
political process to a competition comprised of equal parts manipulation and horuscupation. This is a game that's only fun in the abstract for me. In practice, it just makes me tired and sad.

There are many fine thinkers out there writing many fine works on what is going on with our world, and I will miss their insights. I'm grateful for their efforts, and I'll check in on some of my favorites every election season to see who seems least likely to allow us to drive ourselves off of a cliff in the next few years. But even the most discerning analyses serve only to get me fired up, which makes me want to learn more, and to educate others, and... tired and sad. Long trip, short trip, same destination. And at the end of the day, I'd know a little more about the petty cruelties and short-sighted foolishness of a small group of small people who will be replaced with great fanfare by more of the same, more or less. And even though I want to know everything, that's not the sort of knowing that makes me feel good about myself. Or anything else, really.

So! Democracy, a fine thing. Erudite analyses of its particular applications, also. But not for me. If I'm going to invest my attention in unproductive enlightenment, I'm going to pick a topic that makes me happy. I'm thinking cognitive science. Who's with me?

Is it still too early?

2007-12-27T17:38:10Z

One obligatory political prognostication post: Clinton* takes the nomination without significant incident. Her opponent will probably be Romney. I would've said that any Dem would defeat any Repub in the actual election, but the Dems' spectacular uselessness since the midterm elections has enervated their base and implicated them in the administration's failings. So now that's back up in the air, unless something impressive happens in the interim.

My reasoning: Obama might possibly have had a chance in the ridiculously early days when candidates were declaring, but the moronic self-fulfilling prediction of "electability" gave Clinton an all-but invincible imprimatur back when most of us were wondering if folks were seriously talking about this crap a year before the gaddam primaries. Giuliani and Romney are more of a toss-up, but I think the entrenched powers on the Right see Romney as a more familiar and amenable candidate, and that should swing the balance his way.

Edwards and Huckabee** have never had a serious chance. The only reason we hear about them is because the media knows that you don't sell fifty-some weeks of headlines that all say "Leading candidate continues to go through the motions; electorate is appeased".

*Not "Hillary". Yes, I know we had another "Clinton" in the office recently, but I trust we can all figure out who's who with some context clues. People managed to keep G.W. Bush and G.H.W. Bush distinct, after all.

**I'll concede that there is a chance that Huckabee could split the vote of some key demographic (presumably fundies) and thus play kingbreaker. Conventional wisdom says that his pull is social conservatives, which would primarily hurt Romney. I don't see this as probable, and if it seemed likely to the powers that be, I suspect he'd be promised VP or some other plum assignment in exchange for dropping out and endorsing his opponent.

Edit 08Dec2009: Not that it matters, but I feel the total and utter wrongness of this prediction in every specific is worth pointing out.

Let me check my notes

2007-09-17T17:20:31Z

Robert Jordan has been dead for a day, yet my flist is silent on the subject. Clearly, I have some fundamental misapprehensions about the kind of people whose blogs I stalk.

The googles, they do nothing!

2007-06-20T17:33:04Z

My searching skills have failed me.

I remember a list of author-title combinations that can be parsed as one sentence or phrase, with occasionally amusing results. Things like:

"The Joy of Cooking" Irma S. Rombauer
"How to Kill" John Doe

...except, um, more better than that.

If anyone else knows what I'm talking about or has more luck finding it, please point me in its direction.

Edit: My description was unclear, I think. The list is (mostly) of books that create the illusion of the author serving as the object of title's verb. The title isn't always an actual verb, of course. "The Joy of Cooking" has no actual verbs; "cooking" is a gerund, which finishes the prepositional phrase "of cooking", which modifies the noun "joy", which is specified by the article "the". The entire title is really one big noun. Throw the author's name at the end, and suddenly "cooking" is a participle (I think).

Either way, now it looks like a book about "the joy of cooking Irma S. Rombauer", and the only thing more hilarious than a cannibal cookbook is a cannibal cookbook for preparing one very specific person, which in turn can only be funnier if the specific person happens to be named "Irma".

Okay, it's pretty lame, but I remember seeing it and I'll lose my mind if I can't satisfy the finding-urge that presently possesses me.

Final Edit: Thanks to supergee (who almost certainly was the reason I saw this in the first place), I have re-discovered The Man Who Melted Jack Dan.

Slam Dunkin'

2007-04-30T13:50:23Z

So.

"America runs on Dunkin'". At least it has since April of 2006, which is when ad agency Hill Holliday launched the nationwide campaign. It might not seem like it's worth blogging about, I admit. Of course, they blog about it anyway. They're quite serious about it. It looks like everything in a Dunkins that gets near a printing press is going to come out covered in the new slogan-logo (slogo?). Hell, even Slate.com thought the campaign deserved a writeup. Of course, with the exception of a little "OMG Americans are teh fat" crack at the end, said writeup is an unalloyed and unabashed encomium to the brilliance of Hill Holliday. I suspect the writer is hoping for some industry connections once he runs out of people willing to pay him to watch commercials.

Me? I'm not so convinced. First off, it's a pathetic rebus. They start strong with "America" . Can't complain about that. Not sure why America is floating in a sea of eye-raping orange, but I'm sure dozens of people with staggering salaries spent many a meeting and memo debating that very question, and surely expensive decisions can't be wrong. "Runs" is much weaker, however. "Waving torso in a tilted martini glass" might mean a lot to Salvador Dali, but it doesn't immediately say "runs" to me. On the other hand, it beats the hell out of "On" . Goddamned prepositions that denote relative location are the easiest words in the English language to represent in a rebus. If you want to say "house on fire", you put your house image directly above your fire image. This isn't rocket science. And why is it so tiny? If you're overestimating the fine folks of Hill Holliday, you might infer some rebus-related meaning from the peculiar size. "Small on"? "Less on"-- "lesson"? "On shrunk"? Hmmm. We'll move on to the last -- oh, for christ's sake. If we weren't already certain that they'd completely given up on the rebus concept, the fact that they settled for their mini-logo as a stand-in for their name should settle it. The company sells donuts and coffee. The company is named after the act of immersing one product into the other. Would it have been so damn difficult to depict this act in some sort of visual medium? For that matter, if you see double-d's and think "donuts!", you're a less perverted person than I am. Or more perverted, depending on exactly why double-d's make you think about donuts.

So. "Map surrealism lesson boobs". Thank god they provide an answer key immediately below their devilish pictorial puzzle. Either Hill Holliday is admitting that their rebus sucks, or the images were only provided as a courtesy to their many illiterate customers. I'll leave more in-depth consideration of their motivation to future analysts and historians.

Now that we've considered the presentation, let's move on to the substance of their claim. Does America, in fact, run on Dunkin'? I'd say we run on fossil fuels for the most part, though DD's coffee does bear more than a passing resemblance to crude oil. Seems like Nestlé, Kraft, and McDonalds (among others) might be justified in raising a dubious eyebrow at Dunkin's claim to be the nation's preeminent people-feeder, for that matter. Still, a bit of hyperbole is acceptable in marketing. And it is only a bit of hyperbole. With 4.3 billion dollars in 2006 US sales and boasting approximately 5,300 Dunkin' Donuts locations in 34 states, DD is no mom-n-pop operation. In fact, they--

Hang on. 34 states? I seem to recall the flag having more stars than that. I'm not going to raise a fuss about anyone omitting Guam and Puerto Rico. I can even overlook skipping the sort-of-states like Alaska and Hawaii. But they've barely broken 2/3. I'll forgive their execrable slogo, but this level of blatant inaccuracy cannot be allowed to stand.

...There. All better. And yes, I did go through state by state to find the correct 16 secessionists from the United Dunkin' of Donuts. You're welcome.

'void' is not mandatory if 'main' returns a value. Plum blossoms fall.

2007-04-29T08:33:40Z

"Functions all in iambic pentameter"... has there ever been an effort to code in restrictive poetic form?

class SpringGreetsTheWorld {
public static main(String args[])
{ return "Hello World!"; } }

Next time, we'll whip up a villanelle / simple HTML parser.

"Back end" is every bit as full of glory as it sounds

2007-04-29T08:21:07Z

Hey, people-who-code. Isn't it fun when you spend hours of work and the result that reaches the user is 100% the same as it was before you started? And that was actually your goal? Sure, you know that the invisible process in the background is now much 438% more efficient/stable/flexible/standards-compliant/functions-all-in-iambic-pentameter; but it's not the sort of thing that earns enthusiastic praise or occasional oral sex from nearby laypersons.

Does anyone else budget the last 1% of such ephemeral projects for making widgets change color or creating scrolly status bars or blinky buttons, for no reason other than to show people who ask what you've been doing all day?

Make the voices stop: p2

2007-04-11T07:19:27Z

Honesty compels me to admit that this was my second Greasemonkey script. My first was written earlier today, after someone expressed a desire to killfile my comments because:

Raka just strikes me as being another of those people who thinks it's appropriate to try to silence women by vicious attacks, and having run into that kind of online bully before, I'm (a) grateful Raka does not know my real name (b) uninterested in reading anything else Raka has to say.

After I got done laughing, I thought the least I could do to repay such hilarity would be to oblige her desire to make my terrible oppression just go away.

// ==UserScript== // @name typepad killfile // @description remove comments from naughty users // @include http://slacktivist.typepad.com* // ==/UserScript== (function () { trolllist = new Array("Raka", "Alexela", "teh patriarchy"); var comfeet = document.evaluate("//p[@class='comment-footer']", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null); var i, trollnumber; var cstart, cstop, commentator; for( i = 0; i < comfeet.snapshotLength; i++) { cstart = comfeet.snapshotItem(i).textContent.indexOf('\n', 10); cstop = comfeet.snapshotItem(i).textContent.indexOf(' |', cstart); commentator = comfeet.snapshotItem(i).textContent.substring (cstart+1,cstop); commentator =commentator.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, ''); for (trollnumber=0; trollnumber < trolllist.length; trollnumber++) { if (commentator.toLowerCase() == trolllist[trollnumber].toLowerCase()) { comfeet.snapshotItem(i).parentNode.style.display='none'; } } } })();

I'm not going to admit how long that took me. Longer than it should've, but it was a fun learning experience. Now that it's done I see all these bits I want to improve, like making the interface to add trolls more user-friendly (a one-click link after the user's name on the page), or hiding the screened comments with a marker that allows them to be expanded and collapsed, and so on.

But I should probably stop dicking around. So little time, and so much oppressing to do!

Make the voices stop

2007-04-11T06:56:42Z

I am a large, fuzzy, manly man. And like many large, fuzzy, manly men, I often want to see pictures of small, fuzzy, manly animals. So one might think that CuteOverload.com would be just the ticket. Unfortunately, CuteOverload.com is too manly, if by "manly" you mean "gut-wrenchingly idiotic" (a definition that's supported by many manly behaviors, really). The text accompanying the pictures is generally as pointlessly superfluous as Bob Sagat's nutsack. If I can't tell that a picture is of an adorable young animal in awkward repose, no caption is likely to convince me. The blog author isn't willing to settle for irrelevance, though. No, he/she dives straight for utter imbecility.

Breakfast of champyons - "Look at this bewildered kitteh and his mouf all covered..."

Beg pardon? "kitteh"? "mouf"? "champyons"? I've looked all over Babelfish and I can't find the option to translate Retarded Toddler to English. And that's a shame, because I'm going to need it as I wade through the "chick-kons" and "comfertuhbuls" and "REDONKULOUSNESS" (which is inexplicably but invariably capitalized) and " 'tocks" and AAAGH MY BRAIN IT BURNS.

No more could I abide this affront to my dignity in my manly attempts to squee over tiny creatures. So I picked up a copy of Greasemonkey and whipped up a five-minute script. It should've been a 30-second script, but my brain was still recovering from immersion in the aggresively inane text of CuteOverload.

// ==UserScript== // @name cuteoverload inanity filter // @description removes stupid text. Which is all text. // @include http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/* // ==/UserScript== (function () { var entries = document.evaluate("//div[@class='entry']", document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null); var i, ncount, trgentry, inbits; for( i = 0; i < entries.snapshotLength; i++) { trgentry = entries.snapshotItem(i).childNodes.item(1); trgentry.textContent = entries.snapshotItem(i).id; trgentry = entries.snapshotItem(i).childNodes.item(3); trgentry.style.color = '#ffffff'; } })();

It's sloppy, but +90% of the stupid is washed clean away by these few lines. Now I just need to white-out the link tags within entries and fix the harmless-but-annoying compiler errors I get on CuteOverload.com (which is just a big empty frame that holds the page with the real content, http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/). Then I will have contributed something of value to this world.

Stories I've already told too many times

2007-03-06T16:50:51Z

A few years ago, a close friend of mine died and I spent a few days with his family helping to sort out his affairs. As they were leaving, his mother offered me a portion of his ashes. This isn't the most atypical sincere offer I've ever received, but it's in the top ten.

The answer I gave: "Thank you, but no."

The answer that would've been true: "Yes, but only for humorous purposes."

Martin Luther, meet Marx.

2007-01-18T18:52:37Z

Fortune has an article that bemoans the plight of the "lower uppers"; folks who are in the highest strata of income yet below the daunting top 1%. The article says that they "work [themselves] ragged to earn a million or two - or, God forbid, $400,000".

Whatever. Here's the quote that got me: "Lower uppers are doctors, accountants, engineers, lawyers. At companies they're mostly executives above the rank of VP but below the CEO."

What the HELL kind of engineer do you have to be to rake in $400K - $2M? Or accountant, for that matter. Even doctors and most lawyers won't often see that unless they're an owner/partner in a private company, which really makes them a business owner that also happens to be a doctor or lawyer. Or an administrator/executive in a bigger company, which really makes them a corporate executive that also happens to be a doctor or lawyer. You get the point.

Seriously. The jackasses running around in Washington think tanks and Wall Street boardrooms-- jackasses like the one who wrote this article-- are so high off the ground that they can no longer recognize the little shapes scurrying below. They associate making huge money with being smart and hard-working, since they make huge money and like to think that this is due to their own virtuous natures. They rely on edumicated folks like doctors, accountants, engineers, and lawyers. Cultural conditioning (and a natural psychological need to think well of someone you're going to pay to cut you open) encourages them to think of these professions as peopled by smart, hard-working folks. Ergo, they must be pulling in seven-figure incomes. After all, America is a meritocracy, and riches are bestowed upon the worthy.

Sorry, chuckles. The only way you get to pull in that kind of dough is by joining the capitalist clergy, practicing arcane rituals that involve moving enormous sums of money from one place to another and declaring that they have grown in transit, a miraculous transubstantiation that none of the faithful dare question. Business owners and high executives are deacons, lay members who serve as the spine and muscle of Capitaltholicism, bringing the blessings of the Market to the benighted masses below. At the lowest level, the "lower uppers" mentioned by the article? Bootlickers, apologists, and ego-polishers like the jackass who wrote this article; perennial altar boys bent over the altar of smug avarice.

I'm an economic agnostic, myself. I don't really buy into the divinity of the Holy Currency, but I appreciate the benefits of its structure provides. I'll decry its excesses and mock its doctrine, but I don't have an alternative I'm eager to push on anyone. It does concern me, however, that the virtues enshrined in the theology-- hard work, ingenuity, honest competition-- are so rarely demonstrated by the economic episcopate. Malicious hypocrisy annoys me, and zealotry of any stripe tends to amuse and frighten me by turns. When the two combine, bad things start happening.

I'm really very concerned about wire shortages.

2006-12-14T20:09:11Z

A friend of mine posited that humanity supports itself artificially, and that if that support was interrupted our population would drop drastically to a point where we could subsist on a more basic animal-chewing-on-its-environment level. This idea was rudely dismissed by someone long on education but short on consideration, who insisted that human intelligence renders our race impervious to such cataclysmic indignities. This person needs a brief lesson in how the world actually works.

Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court about a modern-day man dropped into the sixth century. This man uses his vast knowledge to give Camelot a crash course on modernization that puts Mao's Great Leap Forward to shame. The book is primarily a commentary on society, entrenched attitudes, and aristocratic cultures. It's good that it succeeds on that level, because the modernization itself is less plausible than the time travel that proceeds it.

The primary limiting factor on development is not research or basic understanding, but infrastructure. It's all well and good to know all about electricity, but you need the material. Plain copper wire is a good first step. Obviously, you'll need copper. You can mine it or smelt it, but either way you need people and tools. Then it must be purified, which requires electrolysis, which requires electricity, which is easily produced when you have a water wheel (specialized carpentry)... and purified copper wire. Let's ignore this problem for a moment. Once you have a nice lump of pure copper, you'll need steel for the draw plates (and many of the tools used in processes already mentioned) to stretch the wire; that's another mining process to get the iron, and smelting isn't optional. Getting steel from that iron requires blast furnaces (specialized masonry) and bellows (wood carving, leather working [which requires livestock and tanning industries], and brass [copper and zinc] or bronze [copper and tin]) and charcoal.

By my count, that's a minimum of sixteen developed industries that are required to make a damn piece of copper wire. None of them are optional, even if you're willing to make a very small quantity of low-quality wire. It's worth noting that no one except for the livestock folks are eating what they make, which means that we need agriculture to be developed to the point where it can support not just the farmers but all these non-food-producers as well. And unless all these fields and pastures and mines and smelters and smitheries and forges and crafstmen and forests and charcoal burners and masons and tanneries are all next-door neighbors, we'll need a distribution network of some kind. Yet more tools and toolmakers.

To make it even nastier, even though this industry can all be primitive by our standards, developing it has to be done in baby steps, since so many steps rely on each other in a circular way-- you need better tools to produce the materials to make the tools you need to produce the materials, and so on. Each improvement in a particular process must be small enough to be supported by the processes that come before it, and it must spread and become standard before it can be used as a base to launch improvements in the next step down the line. This is most obvious in the electricity issue above: purifying copper requires purified copper.

This slow, generational process of improvement has more subtle applications than the simply technological. Economic forces drive development. You don't start making a tool until there's a demand for it, and the demand won't develop until the tool exists to support it. Unless you have an omniscient dictator who can feed and shelter his pet industries while they're producing something that's useless at the moment, each step must be a small incremental improvement that has an immediate application. Wiremaking was originally a process exclusive to jewelry-making, and improvements on the process were undertaken to produce finer product more easily. The tools that allowed these process improvements were themselves made possible as a side-effect of constant small improvements in weapon-grade metals, which always had a market. "They were ahead of their time" is a phrase associated with failure, and for good reason.

Speaking of dictators, it's worth mentioning that specialized industry requires a larger population base, which means cities, which means a government stable enough to provide security and rule of law. This is yet another circular, incremental process: government services are supported by a population that relies on government services to survive and prosper enough to support government services. The balance here is every bit as delicate as it is on the economic side; too much organized power tends to crush its populace, and too little tends to let its populace get crushed by someone else who's willing to organize.

Everything about these processes are interconnected, delicate, and ultimately organic. We've seen the process forced in modern times, attempting to jump-start an infrastructure in one underdeveloped region or another. The results range from "humiliating" to "disasterous". Localized segments of industry and agriculture can make Great Leaps Forward, but the lack of a natural support base leads to instability and inevitable collapse. Japan encouraged and accelerated their own development without imposing a planned design, and achieved great success. It still took them a hundred years, even with the ability to lean heavily on the infrastructure of the rest of the developed world.

Steam engines were known to the Greeks 2000 years ago. Schemes for internal combustion predate Da Vinci. There was nothing wrong with their intelligence. Infrastructure. Takes. Time. If our infrastructure were taken away from us, we could probably recreate it more quickly than it developed the first time (although nothing distracts one from developing metallurgy like starvation, plague, a 40-yr maximum life expectancy, and roving bands of predatory people with goals of their own). On the other hand, we built our infrastructure the first time when metals could be found lying on the surface of the ground, huge forests covered all the continents, and coal and oil could be found in great quantities literally a few dozen meters below the surface.

Humanity's survival at its current level is profoundly artificial. This need not be a criticism. Thousands of years of amazing achievement by individuals and societies have produced a marvelously complex and unthinkably powerful invisible organism whose body exists entirely in the interactions that connect us all. Dismissing its creation as a simple symptom of "intelligence" is arrogant and idiotic. Taking its existence for granted is suicidal.

Authors and books I intend to comment upon further at some indefinite point in the future 1

2006-11-21T20:35:20Z

Earth's Children (series), by Jean M. Auel - The Mary Sue Adventures of Dr. Quinn, Cavewoman: filmed for Showtime late-night soft-core.
Cerebus (comic book series), by Dave Sim - Mostly interesting for the story of its creation, the work itself swings wildly between brilliant and vein-tuggingly awful. Yes, vein-tuggingly. Imagine a small, painless incision, through which someone has hooked one of your more visible veins. Now imagine them tugging on that hook; not in a sharp, tearing manner, but in a persistent and determined way that introduces you to new and altogether unwelcome realms of tactile sensation. That's how bad it gets when it's not being brilliant.
Dorsai (series) by Gordon R. Dickson - So you want to write sci-fi about geniuses-- world-changing, knock-yer-socks-off, walking buckets of brains. There are three standard ways to go about this:
1. Write out the thought processes and dialogue of your cerebral superstars, clearly demonstrating their superior intellects. This is tricky, since you actually have to have some significant head-horsepower at your disposal. You don't have to think as quickly, completely, or correctly as your fictional creations; but you do have to do better than (regular character + thesaurus) - social skills, which is how Hollywood typically manages. Disch's Camp Concentration is a fair example.
2. Focus on the spectacular results of the geniuses' efforts, directly touching upon their process and methods only in vague and oblique ways. Done well, this creates a sense of grandeur, like seeing the distant and hazy outline of something imponderable and awesome (like Herbert's Dune). Done poorly, it creates a bunch of nonsensical mystical claptrap (like everything in the Dune universe subsequent to the original).
3. Place your eminently average yet sociopathically overconfident "genius(es)" in a universe populated with sub-morons. Spawn some implausibly unbalanced situations. Have your protagonist propose a solution that is either basest common sense, or stands defiantly against all rational deduction, induction, and probability. Write that the solution worked marvelously, which proves that your protagonist Just Knew Better All Along. Arthur Conan Doyle, I'm looking at you.
Dickson invariably goes for #3, and is hailed as a giant of the sci-fi world as a result. Huh.
Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan - Picture a boat. A boat that is slow. A slow, repetitive boat following an overfamiliar route, slowly and repetitively, on a boat. A boat that is slow. Then Nynaeve tugs her braid and crosses her arms beneath her breasts. On a slow, repetitive boat.
The Black Company (series), by Glen Cook - It's unkindly reductive to describe Mr. Cook merely as the anti-Jordan. I'm just saying that if they ever shook hands, you would want to duck.

Worthless predictions #487

2006-11-06T17:33:57Z

I don't see the Democrats making the sweep they're predicted to. I think people are mad enough to smash Republicans in the polls, but not enough to change the fundamental voting patterns of the last few years. It doesn't help that the Democrats as a party have the less-than-inspiring platform of "We're not Republicans!", and not much else.

Honestly, I'm not sure why the Democrats want to take power right now. Even if they took both houses by a narrow majority (the best plausible outcome for them), they don't have a prayer of getting anything significant done. The Democrats themselves lack unity (or basic cohesiveness), the opposition are ninjas at shredding them in the media, and the issues that are driving this election (Iraq, immigration, security) are not things that have quick, pleasant, or popular solutions. Scandals are helping the Dems right now, but they're never limited to a single party for long. There's also a chance that the White House might be less than completely cooperative. Even if the party leadership can restrain itself (I give it 50-50, and that attributable more to cowardice than nobility), there will be a perception of vendetta against Bush, which is always unpopular with independents. And God himself couldn't save the party if any-- ANY terrorist attack hit America on their watch. Facts of the matter would be utterly irrelevant. The Republican spin machine could use a Somali cabdriver getting in a fender-bender to basically assure one-party rule for the next decade or so.

Whether or not the country really is in a crisis right now, there's a popular perception that it is. I'd sort of like to see the Democrats sit back, hold on to the seats they have, and make a big unified statement about supporting the country. Every time a piece of Republican legislation comes down that they find objectionable, make those objections... but let it through without grandstanding, without fillibustering, without trying to divide the opposition and force a compromise that lets the Republican leadership get the majority of what they wanted and just enough whitewash to spread the blame if it goes sour.

America-- or at least a consistent yet slight majority of America-- seems to want to buy what the Republicans are selling. So give them a shot. Challenge them to publicly record their predictions, in solid numbers, about the outcome of any given policy. They think Tax Bill A would shift the burden to the middle class and hurt consumer spending and employment? Say so, specifically. they'll either be proved right in a (relatively) non-subjective way, or they'll be wrong-- in which case the legislation was presumably not so objectionable after all.

I strongly dislike the policies and practices of the current Republican party. I have friends that feel the same way about the Democrats. Everybody needs to take a deep breath. Nobody is going to revoke the Bill of Rights, implement martial law, or declare a dictatorship. There's not a lot that either side can do that can't be undone, if it turns out to be unpopular. They can make things suck temporarily for the country, and permanently for individuals. But that's it. And once the consequences are seen, we change and move on. Rinse; repeat.

Is the escalating cycle of fact-free hysterical infighting really preferable?

I'm a convert.

2006-11-06T16:43:07Z

Those of you who know me may be familiar with my enthusiasm for biodiesel. It's technologically mature, energy-dense, relatively clean, and usable in existing vehicles and distribution infrastructure with little or no conversion. That was before I learned about its downside, of course. Some experts predict that the price of vegetable oil (biodiesel = vegetable oil with its glycerin removed) could spike with the increased demand. Apparently, "it takes 7.5 pounds of [vegetable] oil to produce a single gallon of biodiesel".

I mean, wow. Who knew the production was so inefficient? For every gallon of biodiesel you have to go through... well, I don't know how many gallons of vegetable oil 7.5 pounds is, but I assume it's a lot. The way the article phrases it, it sounds like we're pouring truckloads of oil down the drain to squeeze out a few drops of biodiesel.

Well, let's see. How much would one gallon of veggie oil weight? Vegetable oil at STP is about .93 grams per cubic centimeter. That's 9300 grams per liter, at 3.79 liters to the gallon makes 3524.7 grams to the gallon, 453.59237 grams to a pound, so a gallon of vegetable oil weighs... 7.77 pounds.

Um. Huh. So, according to the article, it takes one gallon of vegetable oil to make one gallon of biodiesel. Wow. That's accurate (you lose some mass in the process, but gain back the volume from biodiesel's lesser density of .86g/cc), yet sort of underwhelming.

The real question: did the article's author deliberately switch units to make consumption sound more dramatic, or is he just so bad at math that he didn't realize?

While we're talking about using math to manipulate drama, I should mention that I used the long, suspenseful method of figuring out the weight of a gallon of veggie oil. The easy way would be to take the readily-available weight of a gallon of water (8.33lb) and multiply it by .93. I could explain why this works (mostly works; we're rounding like fiends in both methods), but I trust my that my audience either doesn't need the explanation or quit reading a few paragraphs back.

Lies, Damn Lies...

2006-08-23T16:05:33Z

Rand Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis, has a study that "presents the strongest evidence yet that sexually degrading lyrics in music encourage adolescents to more quickly initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities".

Now, I think of myself as a moderate on many issues. For instance, I'm not in favor of eliminating handguns, but I do want them kept out of the hands of children and idiots. By the same token, I'm not one of those people who thinks that statistics are pointless. I just want them kept out of the hands of children and idiots.

I read through the study's abstract and even the journal article published in The Official Journal Of The American Academy Of Pediatrics, presumably because I'm some kind of masochist. I find nothing to fault with the study design, sampling, or outcome measurements (this does not mean there is nothing to fault, only that my untrained eye failed to find it). Looking at the data they received, I see no reason to object to a correlation between listening to music "containing objectifying and limiting characterizations of sexuality" and accelerated sexual activity.

Of course, RandCo aren't satisfied with stopping there. No, this study somehow proves that the music causes or at the very least encourages sexual behavior, and "recommends that parents set limits on what music their children can purchase and listen to". When you have a correlation and infer causation, we call that cum hoc ergo propter hoc, or, if we're feeling less snooty, the fallacy of joint effect. It's like declaring that Kleenex causes colds, since high consumption of tissue paper is statistically linked to nasal distress.

Could their causation have been proven? Certainly, although it would take some effort. For example, had they identified the raunchy-music-listeners at the outset and forcibly replaced their Brotha Lynch Hung with heavy doses of Raffi, and noted a change in behavior, then they might be on to something. It may just indicate an increase in suicides among frequent listeners of "Raffi in Concert with the Rise and Shine Band", or illustrate the difficulty of seducing someone to the sultry strains of "Bananaphone"; but it's a causal relationship regardless.

So, do they provide any evidence of causation? Well, the abstract notes that the conclusion "is consistent with sexual-script theory". Oh, okay. So you had a hypothesis, tested it once, failed to prove it false, and assumed it was true. I might call that affirming the consequent (though it would be a bit of a stretch).

Alternatively, I can just say that statistics should be kept out of the hands of children and idiots.

Boy, have I needed this for a while.

2006-08-04T13:23:23Z

Thanks to the fine work of the good folks at Penny Arcade, I now have an icon for my all-too-frequent lapses into pedantry: