Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: observations

  • What exactly does a human being do?

    Today I was brainstorming possible events or activities in a person’s life. Why? I was trying to create a reference page of normal events/situations which could be settings for dramatic things to take place. I have done this for several other parts of life as a springboard for brainstorming.

    If you think about it, life is not that complicated. There’s only so many activities that I normally engage in. To be fair, I am not a very active person and I am single (ie. unattached) and live with my mother. I would imagine that there’s no more than 100-200 activities that describe my life (most of it anyway). The activities listed below probably account for 95% of my day. That’s all it is.

    Most of the activities are common to all humans across the globe. Sure, the activities of different people might have slight variations. For example, if you were a musician, you would probably spend time rehearsing with your instrument, going to group rehearsals, performance, etc. That is an example of specialized activities on the job. A U.S. president probably has to perform certain specialized tasks that most humans rarely have to do, but chances are, this list includes 95% of the activities that even a president or a pope would do.

    The list below doesn’t capture the magic and poetry and sadness of life itself. For example, I can say that listening to music throughout the day gives me a lot of joy. Listening to music keeps me going; I do it while working on intellectual tasks or even trying to sleep. I would like to say that I love reading books and discovering new authors, but honestly in my mid-adult years, I have very little time to do the activities I love the most.

    I imagine a video game designer for the Sims has already made a map of human activities like this. It is surprisingly easy to compile this list, and I suspect that the majority of these activities can be programmed fairly easily (the movement part at least).

    It occurs to me that I do a lot of things in bed. I do a significant amount of thinking and meditation there, along with reading and of course sleep. Sometimes I do some writing (or at least note-taking).

    One has to wonder how this list would be different 50, 100 or 200 years ago. Instead of doing stuff online, maybe you’d go a library

    I also spend a lot of time doing things on my computer desk, including this blogpost. But I also drink and eat on it. Here goes my list:

    Solitary Activites

    Solitary moments

    • taking a walk through the neighborhood
    • driving in a car
    • swimming
    • riding a bicycle
    • taking a shower
    • sleeping
    • thinking/dreaming in bed
    • exercising/weights

    Meals at Home

    • eating dinner together with housemates or visitors
    • or alone
    • snacking while doing something else (working, watching TV, web surfing etc).

    Internet usage

    • research for purchase
    • read daily news
    • learn about new concept or product
    • research people
    • social media following friends and celebs
    • posting on social media/generating content

    Entertainment

    • watching TV/movie
    • reading book
    • goint to an arts event — concert, play, movie
    • Participating in a multiplayer video game

    Personal Hygiene

    • Brushing Teeth & flossing
    • Urinating/defecating
    • Taking shower, washing hair
    • Washing hands and face.
    • shaving

    Solitary Chores

    • preparing meal & washing dishes
    • paying bills, planning finances
    • cleaning room & organizing
    • checking mail
    • walking dog, feeding dog
    • getting gas
    • washing clothes, drying, folding and putting away.
    • picking up trash/taking out trash

    Outdoor Work

    • Yardwork. Mowing the lawn.
    • Taking out/bringing in the trash.
    • Picking up the mail/dropping off the mail.
    • Simple home maintenance (Decorating the door and yard. Cleaning the outside)

    Relaxing

    • listening to Music (maybe with others)
    • taking a walk (walking the dog)
    • Playing with the dog
    • playing a single player game (on the phone, etc).
    • reading
    • watching tv
    • gardening (relaxing chores)

    Hobbies

    • Join a club or group or church; attend meetings
    • Buy equipment to pursue the hobby (do research, learn skill, etc)
    • Learn the activity by self or with others
    • Do solitary activities related to the hobby

    Learning

    • Follow a tutorial
    • Try by doing
    • Try, test, try
    • Asking Somebody to explain
    • buy training
    • buy and read a book
    • Read the manual
    • attend a class or seminar

    Writing

    • email to personal friend
    • blogposts/essay
    • fiction
    • write a complaint
    • post and/or share on social media

    Driving/On the Road

    • Routine car trip within town
    • Being caught in traffic
    • long trip to another city
    • stopping at rest stop (for food, restroom, drink)
    • finding a parking space.
    • Waiting for someone in the parking lot

    Human Interactions

    Occasional Social events

    • birthday parties
    • thanksgiving
    • christmas parties family
    • xmas party friends
    • xmas party work
    • Eating out with friends or family (& dates?)
    • School Reunions

    Family Activities

    • driving people to places
    • birthday parties for family members (small or big)
    • family meeting (for big announcements & decisions)
    • attending educational events of children (plays, award ceremonies, graduation, etc).
    • having dinner with people
    • holiday togetherness, parties
    • Babysitting for children
    • calllng family/friends

    Social Activities within the household

    • repairman visits home to repair something
    • package delivery
    • home health care
    • exterminator visit/air conditioner repair
    • inspection/insurance inspection

    Personal errands (usually requires going offsite)

    • go to restaurant to pick up or dine in
    • visiting dentist or doctor for routine exam
    • reporting somewhere for a medical test
    • reporting somewhere to receive a license/permit/document
    • visiting the library to check out or return items or to attend special event
    • bring car or bike to repair shop for maintenance
    • Work out at a gym
    • using mass transit; interacting with strangers
    • Helping a neighbor with routine maintenance

    Shopping Tasks

    • finding a parking space (all types)
    • Directed shopping at stores (buy a specific item). Hardware store, shoe store
    • Undirected shopping (supermarket, Bookstore, clothing store, thrift shop, shopping for clothes, buying gifts for other)
    • Box store shopping (combines directed shopping + browsing). This includes shopping for food

    Telephone or Video Call Events

    • Making plans with friends and family
    • texting with people to make plans
    • Discussing a personal or logistical problem
    • Introductory call with a new friend or date
    • Call to RSVP or cancel something
    • Catching up with old friends or family
    • multiperson video call (mainly for reunions of family/friends)
    • Calling a business to make an appointment
    • Calling a business to ask a question, complain, check on an order
    • receiving a call from a spam caller
    • receiving a call from a stranger who wants to arrange something (a sale, event, etc)

    Exercise & Sports (physical activity which often involves interactions, but also a certain number of repetitive tasks which may be done alone)

    • playing one-on-one with someone (handball, pickle ball, golf)
    • gym repetitions: lifting weights, stair master, treadmill,
    • “practice” — swimming, hitting tennis balls,
    • team sports — done more for the social aspects than the exercise aspects. Flag football, basketball, indoor board games, poker, massively multiplayer online games
    • One on one indoor. Chess, card games, adult-child games,

    Participating in Events (artistic or otherwise)

    • Signing up or auditioning
    • Rehearsing for the Event; Attending meetings, etc.
    • Notifying friend and family about the event
    • Performing at the Event

    Vacation activities (occasional)

    • traveling for several hours to a destination
    • relaxing outdoor activities: hiking, going to the beach.
    • playing games/sports outside (pickle ball, volleyball, basketball
    • nightlife activities — restaurant, club, concerts

    Full-Time Professional Activities (which for certain people and at certain times of life, one does for long stretches of time)

    Technical work/problem solving

    • programming/formatting
    • Research something on the web
    • Asking someone for help online
    • Calling someone to ask for help
    • computer maintenance

    Work-related activities. This might vary radically according to the nature of each job

    • Filling out HR paperwork for onboarding
    • meetings to prioritize tasks and assign them to people
    • Informational meetings about goals and policies
    • Training activities (usually offsite and paid for by employer and faciliated by someone else)
    • gathering information in order to start a task.
    • dealing with both internal and external “customers” and sharing knowledge and expertise
    • asking others for help
    • direct contact with customers/customers/patrons where courtesy is a priority.
    • Writing reports (as output, compliance notes). This includes presentations.
    • CYA emails. Emails to express concerns about something (and noting it officially).
    • Performance Reviews. (Not that time-consuming, but a source of anxiety).
    • Giving presentations at meetings.
    • Organizing things/cleaning things. Moving equipment or objects to the right place.

    Normal intermittent tasks

    • looking for work
    • applying for job
    • renewing license
    • making online payment of recurring bill
    • paying taxes
    • minor repairs
    • being sick/recuperating

    Legal/court events

    • Serving on jury duty
    • renewing driver’s license
    • being stopped by the police; receiving a ticket
    • Reporting a crime
    • Being arrested
      • being caught by the police and driven to jail
      • booked for the charge
      • going to jail, waiting to get bailed out
      • finding attorney; waiting for plea bargain
      • appearing in court as defendant
      • being sentenced, reporting to prison?

    Activities frequent when young

    • playing outside
    • hanging out with other people at someone’s house
    • going to and from school
    • classes with teachers
    • doing homework at night

    Going to a University

    • Traveling to campus
    • Orientation
    • going on outings with classmates
    • going to class
    • doing lab work
    • attending Parties, dances
    • Studying alone
    • studying with partner or with a group
    • Taking tests
    • Watching/participating in a protest

    Major Life Events

    Major Public Events (Two levels: first for the person directly involved and second for those witnessing the occasion)

    • birth
    • religious ceremonies: baptism, first communion, confirmation
    • marriage
    • divorce (usually not public or ceremonial)
    • baby shower/wedding shower
    • big birthday party/surprise party
    • big wedding anniversary
    • funeral
    • graduations

    Major Private Events

    • Having Sex
    • Sickness — Flu, Covid, etc
    • Injury — Going to Doctor or Emergency room or staying home.
    • Breaking Up with Somebody
    • Getting Fired from Work/Quitting a Job
    • Being robbed or beat up
    • Committing an indiscretion or even a crime
    • Learning about the death or major illness of a friend or family member
    • Losing a job
    • Getting in a car accident

  • Shallow Puerile Thoughts #1 (Dec 2021)

    See also: Jan 2022 (View all)

    I’ve changed to blogging whenever the mood hits me to writing monthly topics and then incrementally adding to it until the end of the month. So far I’ve done Robert’s Roundup of Ebook Deals (monthly), Linkdumps (2x a month), Musical Discoveries (monthly), RJ’s Geeky Explorations (monthly). Now I’ve decided to add another category — Shallow Puerile Thoughts. It’s just going to contain incidental observations about nothing which don’t belong in my other monthly categories. Listen, I’m just starting out, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing! I may end up developing these ideas into something more substantial. Hopefully it will be a combination of aphorisms and idea fragments.

    ***

    Movies and TV shows rely way too much on flashbacks and end up simply burdening the current narrative. It is an attempt to offer clues about motivation or explanation; instead, it simply feels like it is jerking the viewer or reader around by selectively revealing details. Most stories are good enough to stay in the present. These time jumps merely delay action or insights into the present time, which is all that matters. (True for literature too — I call this the “italics effect.” I really hate sections entirely in italics in a novel or novella. The italics is to denote an event removed in time, but most of the time I can skip these things. Indeed, when I’m watching movies with these kinds of flashbacks, I frequently get lost and am unable to tell the difference between what is supposed to be Past 1 or Past 2 or present or Future 1. Don’t make things difficult for the audience!

    ***

    Larry David revealed several secrets of living: Pee Before You Leave and (one other, I can’t remember). Here’s my rule for living: Go out of the house only once a day. In other words, combine all your errands and outings as much as you can. I don’t mind going out for exercise to to walk the dog, but in general, the goal is to maximize the days where you don’t have to put on your shoes and get caught in traffic.

  • The Man Who Needs No Introduction

    A few years ago I was on a  panel at a conference, and someone asked how  I ought to be introduced. “Just say I am a Houston writer.”

    I wasn’t being coy; I genuinely hate introductions – giving them, receiving them and having to sit through them. They are as annoying as the warnings at the front of DVDs.

    There are many reasons to hate introductions. They are  too long.  They mention unnecessary details. In this Internet age, most of us could look this information up if interested. In many instances, the biographical sketch is already on the program or  panel description, so you are simply repeating  well-known information.

    A less important complaint is that these introductions dwell on accomplishments and pedigrees. At one point in my life  I found it interesting that someone got a degree  from Harvard or Stanford, but now I no longer do.  Going through a prestigious academic  program makes it more likely that the speaker has been exposed to the latest research; on the other hand, it also means that the person has probably absorbed certain ideas about education and entitlement and probably had little difficulty pursuing an academic career. Successful academics got tenure because they  already received these distinctions.  When you attend a lecture, you don’t need to be persuaded that the speaker will be interesting or important  — you are already there!

    Other people have started businesses or charities, written books, started Internet trends, written  new web applications. I don’t mean to dismiss those kinds of accomplishments. They seem to point to external signs of success or  external validation. To be honest, I have no way of knowing whether these accomplishments are truly impressive or just routine milestones along a certain career path. Most of the time, I don’t care because  the only thing important to me is what will be said during the talk.  Even if I did care about these accomplishments, I want to hear the speaker describe them in his own words.  The talk is all that matters.

    I work in writing and publishing; I am aware of how many perfectly interesting and gifted people are ignored or overlooked because of happenstance (indeed, I count myself in that category). Perhaps I haven’t achieved my “true” potential (whatever that means), but I have embarked on some interesting projects. Some of these projects  have succeeded; some have failed; some are ongoing or deferred, so there is no way to judge the value of these projects right now.  There are some projects which I never fully realize for practical reasons. Either I lacked the time or money to execute it or was distracted by another project or some personal crisis  prevented me from dedicating the necessary time to it. Sometimes in the middle of doing something, I realize that the project was not worth finishing; perhaps someone had already done it (and done it better), or perhaps some part of the project was outside my level of talent or interest.  The biggest constraint for a writer is time and money; how do you work on your projects without bankrupting yourself in the process?  How do you balance the day job with the outside projects? Logically, it makes sense to work on projects one at a time, but practically  that almost never happens – especially if you keep stumbling on new subjects of interest.  Alas, nobody said the writer’s life was going to be easy.

    It’s hard for many to pretend that social position doesn’t matter when it comes to exchanging ideas. A few years ago I attended a TED talk in Houston. It wasn’t awful or anything, but the speakers were profoundly unexciting. The speakers were  competent academics, most of whom had boring and predictable (but well-researched) ideas (See note at bottom). One was a medical researcher pontificating about science.  I wouldn’t say his presentation was awful, but it really didn’t go anywhere; the audience applauded wildly (I have never seen this kind of fervor  for a speaker). It reminded me of the phenomenon where people who normally have no love for classical music suddenly fall in love with a movie about classical music. In that case, you don’t really love classical music; you are simply expressing appreciation for the idea of  classical music by saying you like the movie. All the speakers were applauded by the audience not for the content of their presentation, but because they had achieved some level of distinction in  their field.   It is basically the celebration of academic success.  Horray, success!

    I’ve run a few panels and given a few talks; though I’ve given some good ones, I’m always surprised at how many  remarkable people turn up in  the audience — some of whom never manage to ask a question.  Some of the unconference techniques are better at facilitating the exchange and dissemination of ideas among these types.  I attended an energy conference two years ago; the  best part was a catered lunch  where everyone sat at the round table and had a chance to ask questions of 2 experts assigned to that table.   Attendees could just float from one table to another and discover on their own who was talking about subjects they found interesting. Sure, sometimes it is necessary or even ideal  to sit through an hour long talk because of the subject matter; for some subjects, you need almost 30 or 40 minutes just to lay the foundation for what you are about to talk about.    In that case, the introduction just further delays the main point of a talk.

    For various reasons, I have stopped attending workshops or panels in person. Instead, I  watch a lot of lectures on Youtube or listen to  podcasts.  I’ve always found it easy to skip speaker introductions — just cue Youtube to the right place. One of the most mind-blowing lectures I have ever seen was a one hour talk about climate change solutions by  atmospheric scientist Marc Jacobson.  (I must have watched it three times).  Unfortunately before he speaks,  Jacobson is given 18 minutes of introduction by two people who are dull speakers and have practically nothing interesting to say. But who needs people to prepare you for what Professor Jacobson has to say?

    Yesterday, at an environmental justice conference, the introducer to an well-known investigative journalist departed from routine by relating a charming anecdote about being arrested together with this same journalist at an environmental protest.  I love offbeat and personal introductions; writers and artists often do such things.  Something 3 to 5 minutes is perfectly adequate — the shorter, the better.

    At the same environmental  conference,  the keynote speaker received a long and adulatory introduction from one of his department underlings.  That isn’t necessarily a problem,  but unfortunately the underling (a noted scholar himself) went into excruciating detail about this speaker’s accomplishments and bibliography — all of which could easily be found on wikipedia. In fact, the keynote speaker gave an outstanding talk — he surely deserved those  accolades — but ultimately what mattered was not  that Book X  won an award or that the speaker met Bill Clinton but that his presentation had compelling points to make.

    I mentioned elsewhere that panels can have a  more interesting dynamic than single-person lectures.  You are exposed to multiple  perspectives,  and  audience members  are less deferential to a panel than to  a single speaker. If you think about it, a single speaker wields way too much power; he towers behind the podium and determines with the clicker which Power Point bullet points will be seared into  everybody’s  retinas. Sure, with panels you have people jostling to make remarks and that is frustrating, but rowdiness can be part of the fun.   Often after a talk, I chase down an  audience member  who said  something unusual or  ask a panel member a follow up. I   find such encounters enormously  rewarding — note that I did not  need a  formal introduction to decide that a particular audience member  was interesting or worth listening to.

    Here are three reasons why introductions can be so appalling.

    First, intros often feel compelled to acknowledge their funding source.  This lecture was made possible by a grant from the Blubbertibubb Foundations, with hotel accommodations at the Hilton Hotel. It is part of a Distinguished Visiting Curmudgeon Lecture series which was created in 2002 under the auspices of the Archeology department in conjunction with the American Society for Jugglers under the leadership of department chair William H. Tralfaz who came up the idea for the series during a university-wide inititiative to have more stuffy eggheads visit this  campus. Who cares! Who cares! Who cares! Who Cares!

    I realize that sometimes an introduction needs to contain something about the funding source (especially if the benefactor is a 90 year old philanthropist sitting in the front row of the lecture hall).  Hey, it’s ok to give the occasional shout-out — as long as it’s no more than 10 words long! You can easily convey this same information on promotional flyers, handouts and even the opening slide.

    I mentioned this in another piece that ” If you cause 100 people to wait an extra five minutes, that means you are destroying 500 minutes of human time.” Every minute of the talk better count, and unfortunately intros never do.  Think about it — how many times do you reminisce about a gloriously long-winded introduction to  a talk  and not the talk itself?  My guess is you never do — although maybe you recall the annoying sensation of having to wait for the speaker actually to start speaking.

    Second, for high-profile speakers, often the dean (or even the university president!) will  insist on sharing the stage. My general rule is that almost anything that a university president has to say as an introduction is  ceremonial and mainly geared towards providing a good photo-op for  students and parents. Let me rewrite every single introductory speech so that it accomplishes that purpose in as painless manner as possible:

    Hi, I’m President Nagle of Pendelton State University. I can’t wait to hear this talk. It’s gonna be great! I asked  PSU prof Vincent Strudwick to say some  words before the talk begins. See ya!

    The Dean can give a variation of the same speech. Here’s another idea. If you’re sitting onstage just for the sake of appearances, try to have enough courage to refrain from talking.   Making an appearance does NOT mean you are obligated to make a speech.

    Third, another rationalization for making long intros is  that it reduces the need for the featured speaker to spend time  plugging his books.   Presumably it seems gauche for the featured speaker to do a sales pitch, and so the person making the  introduction can take care of the crassly commercial sales pitches.  As  sympathetic as I am  to this motive, good speakers already know how to insert casual and non-irritating  mentions of their latest books. Yes, I as an audience member probably would like to hear the title of the speaker’s latest (or most important) book, but often it suffices  to see the title listed on a slide.   Actually, if  a speaker is engaging enough,  I’m probably going to look up his books anyway.

    Finally, I want to express admiration for what is called the “cold open” in show business. It can work tremendously well. My favorite example of this was a joint presentation by Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow at 2002 South by Southwest (summarized here).  My memory of the event may be a little foggy (and I sat in the back of the room), but remember no intros at all — two  cool and well-informed people just started jabbering  away on topics of interest. It blew my mind because 1)both guys were talking fast and extemporizing, 2)clearly their thoughts were original and interesting (and well-thought out), and 3)neither person seemed to care about selling their personal  brand or pimping their book-like projects. They were just having fun.  And the audience was having fun too.

    I wish more people would do that. Imagine that Socrates were going to speak at your university. Which kind of opening would engage you more:

    OPTION 1: INTRODUCER

    Socrates is a controversial philosopher who has been gaining a lot of fame in intellectual circles. The Athens Times wrote that “Socrates is a bold and impressive thinker who has devised a new method for testing the validity of philosophical ideas” and the oracle at Delphi said there was no man who was wiser than Socrates. But Socrates is best known for being portrayed satirically in the comic  plays of Aristophanes.  Recognized for his heroism in saving the life of Alcibiades, Socrates is also a war hero and  is best known for a philosophic method of inquiry called  the “Socratic method.”  Socrates has a reputation for asking unusual questions and has been in heavy demand as a speaker and teacher.  Indeed he has already attracted a lot of intellectual disciples and has at times been accused of corrupting the youth. So far, Socrates has not written any books, but books are already being written about him.  Thinker, rabble-rouser, provocateur or buffoon — you can decide. So now I present to you….Socrates — making his first appearance at Pendelton State University.

     

    Or maybe we can skip the formalities and let Socrates do a cold open:

    OPTION 2: SOCRATES

    “Is it always better to tell the truth to someone close to you even if you know it causes pain?”

     

    So I ask you: Which kind of beginning    would engage you more?

     

    ****************************************

    A funny thing. After giving a lukewarm assessment about TEDX Houston, I later learned that one of the talks by Brene Brown, (a  UH Professor  for Social Work) had become extremely popular. That’s good because really it was the only talk with a memorable idea as the thesis. Of course, she speaks from the Ivory Tower (news flash: all professors come up with interesting ideas!), but fundamentally I enjoyed the talk because of what she said, not because of the academic credentials she had accumulated.

     

  • The only text messages you’ll ever need to send

    Text messages — who needs them?  Although I’ve always been an early adopter, I find that I almost never send text messages. More generally, I haven’t yet gotten a smartphone and don’t really feel like I’m missing out.  It’s funny. A lot of people get into sending clever text messages or participating in a threaded chat on their iphones,  but I’ll have none of that.

    Here are the only text messages that I have sent or ever will send:

    • Arrived home.
    • The panel will be at  Ballroom B. (This actually is the first text I ever sent).
    • Ok/thanks.
    • Meeting has been changed to 9:45 AM
    • Still alive.
    • Class is cancelled.
    • Running late. Expect to arrive at 2:25.
    • Please order me the Kung Pao Chicken
    • Feel like talking?
    • Feel like playing tennis?
    • Yes, I’ll attend.
    • Call me.
    • Call me  ASAP.
    • Do you have a stapler?
    • Address is 6121 Winsome Apt 7B.
    • Can you pick up the kids?
    • Do you already own this (include photo of product at store)
    • I’ll remain here until 11:00 PM.
    • Don’t forget to feed the dog.
    • Joanna isn’t here yet and not answering her phone. What’s up?
    • How much does it cost?
    • Can’t talk.   Too Busy.

    You’ll notice that the text messages listed above have a single purpose and impart usually one fact.  Texters should stick to these kind of task-oriented messages. The shorter you make  the text, the more likely people can misunderstand or take something the wrong way. You can’t express feelings except in a stereotypical way — you might as well just send an emoticon.  Also because text messages have a tendency to pile up, you can miss one message and totally miss out on the texter’s intentions.  True communication shouldn’t be this confusing and unwieldy.

    I used to do chat via yahoo and skype. I still do occasionally, but for the most part, I find that it is a time-consuming and grueling way to conduct a conversation. Probably the most common text I send via skype is “Do you want to talk by telephone?” Typing and waiting for other people to type replies requires a lot of effort and patience. And I speak as someone who is perfectly comfortable typing thoughts rather than saying them.

    Actually, skype is good when crossing time zones and doing brief technical interviews. The interview subject or technical support person can drop links into a chat window and paste troubleshooting information. That’s a situation where it works.

    Before the Internet became big and affordable, web chat allowed you to communicate in real time with people far away.  Sure, it was fun. I enjoyed chatting with former students in Eastern Europe. Sometimes we had in-depth conversations via web chat. But that was on a computer and back in the days that Internet phone calls still weren’t practical. I won’t deny that text chat sometimes brought web conversations in unintended directions, but for a the most part it was nothing more than a lousy substitute for voice chat.

    Text messages can help in certain contexts, especially situations where there is no free wifi access or where the noise level is too loud.  I was once at a nightclub where the noise level was so loud that I would never be able to hear the person calling; Text-messaging was the perfect solution. The ability to share photos and start group threads on texting platforms is helpful. But phones are an inferior device for typing and reading  (and storing) texts. Maybe it’s ok for making plans, but a phone call can resolve a lot of the details much faster than  text messages can.  Also, texting isn’t an appropriate way to have a deep  conversation or  communicate anger or love.  I debated whether I would include two other messages on my list: “I love you” and “I’ll pray for you.”  I understand that some people may prefer using these kinds of phrases often, but for me it is way too perfunctory a context to  make these expressions. If you love somebody, dammit there are better ways to express it than by  a text message. (If I recall correctly, a driver  in the famous anti-texting video who texted before causing a fatal car crash had been sending his girlfriend the text,  “I love you.”)

    You will notice that most of these text messages I listed here require only one or two followups (if that much!)  You want to receive text messages only when you think there is a time-sensitive reason to be interrupted from your job or nap. Interruptions are not really good things.  The bell or beep announcing the arrival of a text message might seem inconsequential and not really distracting, but to have any kind of extended chat means having to sit through a parade of unending beeps that announce yet another uninteresting message.  Sure, if both parties are in different places and have time to kill, then it’s a pleasant diversion.

    Text messages might be part of a successful dating/courtship ritual — although I’m way past high school and college dating situations where I might experience this phenomenon first hand.   I’m not talking about sexy poses or lewd messages. I’m talking about photos or videos or the occasional joking remark.  I once had an ill-fated long distance relationship before the time of webcams and camera phones. Phone calls were still extraordinarily expensive; I’m not saying that anything could have saved the situation (probably not), but photos and video  might have given things more immediacy. It might have given one  person better insight into the other person’s thought processes. Instead, she and I were talking to one another on a 35 cent per minute international phone line even though  I’m not sure we were really   communicating.  But compared to a bland text message, a voice conversation is practically a psychotherapy session.  A phone call can convey attitude and emotional level.

    I’m all in favor of people having several different tools to help them communicate. The more, the merrier. My problem with texting is that it’s a last resort method of communication which nowadays people are starting to use as  a first resort.  The historical curiosity about text messages is that they grew independently  from email and web chat because phone providers refused to make them interoperable. They started out as single platform and only later became interoperable with other phone platforms (but generally not web-based ones).   Texting is also  used as a bonus promotional feature to encourage people to buy more expensive cell phone plans.  Texting — like snapchat — is designed for ephemeral conversations. I doubt people would want to save their phone chat sessions or that phone providers would make this easy.  Sure, there are privacy reasons why you might want texting sessions to disappear, but the user should always have this  option to save.  I have a hard time believing that most  texting sessions are interesting enough even to be worth saving. And if something is not interesting enough to save, why bother doing it at all?

    September 2021 Update. I actually did buy a smartphone 3 months after writing this post. But it’s funny how rarely I have sent text messages or shared multimedia over the years. Only on one occasion would I have called text-messaging to be indispensable. In February 2021 a winter freeze caused power outages everywhere, and cell phones were still barely able functional. You couldn’t make or receive phone calls, but it was still possible to send and receive text messages because they were so low bandwidth and asynchronous.

    Here’s a new acronym I invented when you think it is better to handle the matter with voice rather with text. TITASPEED: Texting Is Too Awkward; Speech Produces Easy Effective Decisions.

  • A Slight Detour about Annoyingly Soapy Hair

    I often wonder if anything I say or think or write is original. Sometimes I will think of an allegedly great idea, but before I get too excited, I google a few keywords nervously — to see who beat me to it.  Google is  the ultimate humbler of humanity.

    Today, though, I think I will blog about a subject, and I sincerely believe I am the first to do. (Feel free to prove me wrong!)   And yet what I am about to write about is so familiar and prosaic to each of us that no one would bother to.

    This morning I was taking a quick shower — and not thinking about chocolate —  and when I stepped onto the bathroom floor, I dried myself thoroughly  and began to assemble the necessary tools for shaving. But I happened to brush my hand against my head — only for a millisecond, mind you — but long enough to surmise  that I hadn’t completely  rinsed the  shampoo suds from my hair. I immediately felt  the gooey mess and heard the wrinkly sound of lather. Yes, it was true, my hair was only half-rinsed; so now I would need to return to the shower to finish the job.

    It was only somewhat annoying, a slight detour in my day. It meant that drying myself would no longer be as satisfying as the first time, and the cool sensation of leaving a shower refreshed would be tempered by the paranoia that maybe my head of hair is not completely rinsed. (It has happened a few times; I return to the shower a second time and think that I rinsed everything out, and then to my horror discover that I had omitted one of the sides from this second cautionary rinse).

    As I started to shave, I began calculating. I probably commit this kind of washing miscalculation once every 10 or 15 days (that’s 25 times a year!) I would say I have a good 70 years of 1750 washing miscalculations for my lifetime (assuming 1 shower a day).  Out of the 7.1 billion people on this earth, let’s guess conservatively that they commit this same washing miscalculation 20 times a year. Let me see: that equals:

    140 billion times in a year that people are stepping out of the shower without realizing that they have forgotten to rinse their hair.

    That’s a really big number.  Think about it: despite the fact that everyone is doing it, there doesn’t appear to be any web pages by or about people who have made this mistake. Don’t believe me? Try here or here. (Actually here or here does produce something relevant though not particularly meaningful or lasting). The event is so mundane that it has never occurred to anyone to write a separate article about this phenomenon.

    One way to look at the thing is to say that this experience is something so vague that a search engine couldn’t possibly help you to find people’s descriptions of it. A friend and I were remarking at how useful search engines are for looking up and verifying facts. Sure. But that doesn’t imply that Google is actually useful. It’s like the paradox of not being able to verify the spelling of a word because you need to spell it correctly to look it up. Many of life’s questions are so  vague and imprecise that search algorithms are practically useless. Even our proper names are no longer unique enough  to find what we need. I’m sure AI and natural language processing will improve, but so will the amount of  random garbage on the Internet, and so will the challenge of sifting through things. Many are so alarmed by the NSA and the Echelon System that it might not occur to ask whether the NSA is actually equipped to sort through all the noise.

    Decline of the Search Paradigm

    In 2009 I attended  an education panel hosted by 4 undergraduates  attending elite institutions.  It was ironic, because the audience was packed with probably about 100 teachers or geeks. Most of the audience members  felt that we had a good grasp of reality and Internet reality, but we still were curious about how college students were learning in this Internet-addled age. The students on the panel  talked about collaboration, how they used social networking tools and how Internet changed the way they learned. It was fascinating; several talked about how it was changing the study of literature;  another talked about the awesomeness of getting help from someone thousands of miles away.

    During the talk one student mentioned how useful the Internet was in giving them suggestions about books to read and references to consult, I called out rather indecorously, “How do each of you find new authors to read?”

    The students, slightly annoyed at my interruption, but willing to answer, said, “I just google it.” The other three students chimed in with the same answer,  “Just google it” —  and then they continued their prepared remarks.

    10 minutes later was question time, and I jumped up to the front of the line to ask a follow up.  “You said that google helps you to find out about new authors or musicians or artists. Can you explain?”

    All four of them looked at me as though I were a crank. “Well, it’s not too hard really. Just go to the search box and type something. Then follow the links.”

    “Excuse me, but what exactly do you type in the search box?”

    “The name of the author.”

    “And how do you know what name to type?”

    The panelists shrugged. “Just follow any web page.””

    I understand that the Internet can help you locate more information about a topic, but only when you know what you want. But how do you know what you want?

    Being adept at devising a search term   (such as “best American author” or “recommend a 20th century novel” + American) will  get you only so far.  But lately I’ve noticed that even google’s sturdy algorithm is being weakened by dictionary sites, spam sites and commercial interests. When every company is trying to optimize for search results, then it is possible to programmatically manipulate the results. Some kinds of inquiries don’t yield anything meaningful; it’s not always easy to think of a unique combination of words and phrases to get the results you need. With facebook, stackexchange, quora  and other social media, you can receive lots of tips; but then again, people are responding to your questions; you are not finding these things out on your own, but relying on a certain number of people hanging out at these places who would be willing to provide some scaffolding for the edifice of your education.

    Perhaps it’s an obvious point, but the  topics which occupy most people’s attention are not necessarily the most helpful. Several of my conservative friends link to superficially optimistic articles about climate change, but who would seriously think that the URL most likely to appear on top of search results  (presumably from search-optimized CNN or NYT) would  also be the most authoritative  or accurate?  Even if we discount outright propaganda, the things displayed  by search engines may be neither relevant or important. Remember: there are probably more websites about the Gilligan’s Island TV  series  than the movies of  Ingmar Bergman.

    It’s ironic that the things pressing for our attention at any given moment can also be the most transitory.  Let’s see, current events today  talk about the LAX shooting, the final day of the Virginia governor’s race, the abortion lawsuits, the new Hyundai, refinancing with lending tree, What does the fox say?, the Obamacare website, the new Netflix titles. All screaming for your attention today, and then 10 years from now will disappear.  Perhaps this is a loss for  us all, but  the lesson to be learned here is that the things which appear to us so urgent today can easily disappear without a trace.

    It’s commonly assumed that search engines are good at looking up names and titles and dates. But suppose I wanted to find the name of a novel whose title and author escaped me.  One of my favorite novels was Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine.” But what if I forgot the name of the author and title and tried to google it using some keywords? I remember the novel used a lot of footnotes, wasn’t particularly long, was clever, had a scene about drying one’s hands in the bathroom, had another scene about shoelaces and had a long series of digressions and ruminations about mundane things. If I typed “novella  literary hand dryer clever mundane  digress American  bathroom shoelace ruminate footnotes” into google and bing and wolfram alpha, one might feel confident that someone somewhere has used many of these words to describe  Nicholson Baker’s  novel.  My search query may be overlong, but it contains lots of distinctive words; even if a single web page is unlikely to contain ALL of these words, a good search engine should be able to compute the web page which is likely to be most relevant to these words.

    So here’s the search results for that query.

    search-google-mezannine
    bing-mezannine

    Bing results are similar;

    I don’t expect Google or Bing to get it exactly right, but we’re not even coming close. The search engines just provide awful and misleading results (and I’m not even including the ads).  Although shortening the list of keywords does  bring more interesting results, it is still nowhere close to the answer.

    I will admit that my search term isn’t exactly the best. To vary my approach a bit, I chose a more generic search term  Best American novel in the 1980s, and received decent relevance in results (although not THAT good).

    recommend-good-novella80s

    When I recited those  same keywords for the Nicholson Baker book over the phone  to a literary friend,  he  correctly guessed the author (though not the book itself). If you were in a classroom with 20 well-read people, I suspect you would get better answers. If you asked on a site like Goodreads to name the book where a lot of people would see it, I suspect you’d get  the right answer. This question seems esoteric, but for a moderately erudite  audience, it is not esoteric at all.

    409px-Richard_Dawson_Family_Feud_1976

    But search engines are not particularly good at these fuzzy  kinds of questions. Even in cases where a search engine can match a fuzzy question with an answer, the ordering and prominence is determined by how well the site was optimized for search engines — and also whether the company paid for ad placement.  If anything, Google can find pages where the wording of your question appears prominently — like a forum or a stack exchange site. But if the way you phrase the question doesn’t parrot the way other people do, you are out of luck. In other words, in 2014 the ability to get useful search results depends mainly on how good a Family Feud contestant you are.

    We used to believe Google was so amazing because 1)back then there were significantly fewer web pages and  2)Google presented lots of results. Do you remember when you could set Google to display 100 results on a single page? Even if Google didn’t bring the answer to your query, it nonetheless provided up to 100 different paths you could explore to find it.  Perhaps at one time those Ivy league students on the panel could pick a random link in search results  and follow things. But whenever I start from a search result, I have this uneasy feeling that it’s all one huge conspiracy to trap you inside a gigantic and self-contained  network of advertising and promotion. On mobile devices it’s even worse — it becomes harder to tell the difference between ads and organic search results. Human laziness will make you choose whatever pops up in the first three results, no matter how commercial it seems.

    Comparatively speaking, searching for proper nouns is  easier than searching for concepts or abstract phrases.  (That is why I end up going to wikipedia more times than not… I want to find some neutral site that doesn’t have a secret agenda to destroy someone’s reputation or laud him as a captain of the industry.  But wikipedia waters down everything.  It almost seems proud of the fact that nothing on the site is original or insightful).

    I remember once  talking to a translator in Albania. We had a delightful conversation, but he playfully scolded me for simplifying my language when talking to him.  “Why is that bad?” I asked him. “Isn’t accurate communication the goal of teaching?”

    “Not really,” he replied.  “The thing which most interests the translator are those  hard-to-translate or untranslatable expressions. These “untranslatables” are the most valuable part of the language and  often the key to the cultural peculiarities of the people who speak it.”

    I’m not sure I agree. But surely whatever is  hard-to-express inside a language  has value .. and certainly those linguistic qualities which make a web page easy for a search engine to parse also make it less interesting.  It’s clear to me that search engines fail to provide relevant results fairly often — for various commercial and linguistic reasons. Perhaps human vanity fools us into thinking that our experiences are unique — rather than the more likely fact that Google isn’t providing  an accurate picture of the world’s experiences and thoughts. Instead of expressing wonder at the ability of Google to turn up interesting results, we should be lamenting the fact that Google continues to lead us down well-known paths of stupidity.

    Notes

    I am less excited by the fact that search engines have given special prominence to Wikipedia because of its commitment to the  “neutral point of view.” (NPOV) Enshrining the NPOV means that wikipedia page will exclude a lot of  analyses and points of view; it shudders towards the obvious and noncontroversial. Even if that is better than commercial search engines, I can’t help but wonder if Wikipedia just helps to flee from one watered down path to another.

    2022 Update. I am happy to report that my original search query about accidentally stepping out of the shower with soapy hair produces more meaningful results. 8 year later, search results produce What seems to have changed is that search results are dominated by major media sites, with little to no articles on indie sites.

    2025 Update. Wow, a lot has changed since 2022. I asked Copilot AI and Perplexity the following question:

    Guess the title and author of an English-language novel with these clues: 1)It was published between 1985-1995, 2)it contains a scene where the character is drying his hands in the bathroom with an electric hand dryer, 3)it is humorous and contains many footnotes, and 4)All the action of the novel takes place during a very small time frame (30 minutes or less).

    The answers were shockingly on point: Copilot said in the first line, “It’s almost certainly The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker” and then explains how it satisfies the four conditions. Perplexity hemmed and hawwed and guessed If On a Winter’s Day a Traveler, then, it realized that the date was wrong and suggested that it “appears” to be describing The Mezzanine. This is great news — but I have to wonder how commercialism will intrude on AI answers in the future.

     

  • “That Fish has been fried”–definition and explanation

    “That fish has been  fried”  is a slang phrase used in the context of  an Internet thread. It expresses (in a terse & fish-fry1colorful way) the speaker’s opinion that a thread is growing tiresome, tedious or repetitive and that the speaker is leaving it for that reason.   In no way does it imply that the speaker believes that the issue has been settled or the previous commenter’s argument was correct or should prevail. Often it’s quite the opposite. A person who utters this phrase may be convinced that his viewpoint is still valid or logically unassailable, but may simply be tired or weary of arguing.

    Although I believe the phrase has negative connotations, I don’t believe it should only have negative connotations.   The phrase should remain  ambiguous enough to retain a neutral meaning. Here are some possible connotations:

    1. Both sides have already  presented their respective opinions in some detail, and past this point, the only rational thing to do at this point  is to “agree to disagree.”
    2. One side has simply not done their research or is making too many unproven assertions.
    3. One side is unusually shrill or derogatory, and rather than trying to engage, the other side has decided that it’s best just to leave the thread alone.
    4. One side is too tired or has more pressing matters (Like living, working, etc). I’m a writer and if I have strong feelings about a subject like capital punishment, I’d rather write a long blogpost  to express my opinions than continue some unending Facebook thread about the topic.
    5. The time it would take for one side to disprove the misconceptions of the other side would be considerable.
    6. The context of the thread makes it inappropriate to continue this debate.  It may be off-topic (i.e., a capital punishment debate on an Elvis Costello forum for instance). Or the discussion may just involve too many arguments or people or vantage points to allow for  a coherent debate. Even in a context where the person threw out the question in the first place, the forum itself may not be particularly well-suited to longer and more sustained arguments. Who wants to read something with 400 responses?

    I have written before that it is often difficult for reasonably educated people to disengage  from Internet conversations.

    How to use this phrase correctly:

    Because this neologism is still new, I think the best way to use it  in the context of a thread would be to simply write the phrase with a hyperlink:

    It’s not my intent to create extra web traffic to my site. But since I coined the phrase and defined it most thoroughly, it would be easier for people  just to link to this page rather than to explain what it means.

    Of course,  when one person declares that “this fish has been fried,”  others may disagree with this assessment. So others may choose to continue this thread. But it broadcasts a message to others that the thread might be ready to end. Rather than encouraging censorship or suppressing speech, my hope is that the expression of this phrase will simply  create initial momentum for people to move on and get on with their respective lives.

    I debated several variants to this phrase. “My fish has been fried” “The fish is fried, etc.” I like “that fish” (rather than “my fish”  because it is objectifying (i.e., depersonalizing) the discussion and “has been fried” because there is no point in trying to fry the fish again.

    Anyway, world,  here it is! Hope it helps!

    Postscript: I will know that this idiom will have finally entered the vernacular when people start using it on me….

    Postscript 2. It probably is impossible to force a slang word into vernacular.  Challenge accepted!

    Postscript 3. I just realized that my neologism is a snowclone with endless variations (“That banana’s been stretched,” “that kernel’s been popped,” “That bone’s been chewed,” etc). The customizability of this phase attests to its flexibility and usefulness.

  • Chance Encounter with a Genius (or Two)

    Surprised and saddened to learn about the suicide death of Aaron Swartz, hacker par excellence.

    It just so happens that I met Aaron once. The meeting was short and trivial, certainly no big deal. I was at Bruce Sterling’s End of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive party, talking to random people. I think it was 2005 (or maybe 2004). I had  been using a cocktail party question that year, “What’s your passion?” (or maybe it was “what’s your thing?”, I can’t remember).

    At parties like this I pretty much end up talking to everybody for at least 3 minutes; I even ended up talking to Cory Doctorow – who, hilariously enough, had laryngitis! I was vaguely aware of the people who attend SXSW (who’s a blogger, who’s a coder, who’s a designer, who’s a business person, etc). I certainly knew who Mr. Swartz was; he was the guy who invented RSS feeds, python guy,  attending Stanford and helping Larry Lessig with various creative commons/political projects.

    He also seemed horribly out of place there. Now SXSW can generally be intimidating, and half the people there are socially dysfunctional, so there is no shame in being a wallflower.  When you’re 18 or 19 (as Mr. Swartz was), you tend to be uncomfortable and resort to your geek  persona  (whether it be coder, music collector, political junkie, literary snob, etc).  Aaron wasn’t really socializing – perhaps he had merely run out of steam or was tired. Who knows? So I swept in, introduced myself and asked him my cocktail party question.

    In response to this kind of question, most people would hem and haw and then say something off the wall. I didn’t care what kind of reply you gave; I just needed something to start the conversation. But with Aaron, after I asked the question, he just fell into silence. Clearly he was flummoxed; it was a combination of believing that the question was childish and thinking that it was hard to boil his passions down to a single statement. I started talking a bit, and then after a minute or so, he gave a reply that was abstract, but inelegant. Something like, “My passion is emergent technology and how to harness it for businesses and organizations.”

    That sounded good enough to me (“emergent technology” was the buzz phrase of the conference, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t particularly original, although coding geniuses were never really known for being profound or eloquent). After that, the conversation just dwindled away; I tried to ask him some more questions, but he didn’t want to continue; maybe he didn’t like small talk, or perhaps wanted to talk to the girl next to him. No biggie, some people are like that. Besides, he was the youngest person in the room (and he looked REALLY young), so he gets a pass.

    Aaron was adopted by the copyright reform group, and he soon found himself working with various projects highly visible in the geek world. He was also a moderately interesting blogger who was on the cutting edge of web technologies. And then what happened?

    He dropped out of school to work for various Internet companies. He went into political activism (which I’ll be blunt – doesn’t come naturally for most geeks).  There comes that point where every wunderkind has to manage and survive and accept that his  personal world has limits. That’s called “learning about the real world.”  Before it happens and you have settled into some comfortable bit of manageable mediocrity, it’s easy to get into trouble.  It’s easy to do fun and stupid things (Yes, I had that phase  once upon a time too).

    Some might call it a “fall from grace.” I would not be so melodramatic, but simply describe it as adapting to one’s circumstances.  But maintaining a full time job just doesn’t sound as cool as the things one did at the university. The youthful world of hacking and breaking a few rules no longer attracted attention. Even your peers (if they even knew who you were) regarded you as “old hat”.  Suddenly getting a salary and maintaining a full time job seemed uninteresting and pointless and also very hard.

    Also, there were the legal problems. Aaron tried some wacky trick of downloading zillions of academic articles from a site behind a paywall. It’s the kind of thing you  know you shouldn’t do, but the challenge of doing so plus the certainty that professors don’t REALLY want their articles behind a paywall only encourages you to do it.  One thing ingrained in programmers is looking for ways to circumvent the system,  and that’s what he did. And succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

    As it happens, the journal database and DA wanted to throw the book at him. Aaron was in a heap of trouble.  Surely, it’s likely that this thing would have been plea bargained to community service at some point, but the process can be grueling and demeaning. In a way, his infraction would command respect and awe; at the same time some of his friends might say he had gone over the deep end, and people who did not know him would automatically assume the worst. Things like filling out job applications and applying for credit cards and renting an apartment would require a complete disclosure. Suddenly you have a past that you ought to be embarrassed about.

    I honestly have no idea what drive him to the edge. It’s likely that the charges aggravated his state of mind – though if he had reasonably good coping skills, he would have been able to deal with it.  Idealists tend to lose in a big and grandiose way.

    The tragedy of his life is that he lacked perspective.  He was a brilliant programmer who had received lots of breaks early in life. He could learn new technologies effortlessly and was eminently employable.  He had lots of friends in big places and an overall good reputation. I tend to doubt that the charges drove him to suicide (although it must have convinced him of the utter absurdity of this world).  Perhaps his lack of perspective came in part from being a victim of his early successes and being trapped by his own high expectations.

    This case reminds me somewhat of the death of  author Daniel Foster Wallace.  A philosophical postmodernist author with a generally good reputation and slightly older than myself. I was not in love with this author (I found his prose style ponderous), but I had read selected things he wrote and found them great.  This guy was manic-depressive, but at the same time had managed to win lots of awards. He had also gotten published, made some good money and found some tenure track jobs (which are practically impossible to find in the humanities, much less creative writing).  A few years before his death, Wallace  gave a pretty wild commencement address, and let me quote a significant part:

    By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

    But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

    Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

    But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

    I’ll give Mr. Wallace the benefit of the doubt and say that he was exaggerating the horrors of mundane life to make a point  to his audience (as inappropriate as it was for a commencement address).  But  I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast between his academic success and his sense of  suburban anomie.

    Mr. Wallace, did you realize that many people are homeless? Many are out-of-work. Many have to struggle just to make ends meet. Many don’t have health insurance or even the ability to seek treatment for psychological disorders. Even among writers, many would kill for the opportunities Mr. Wallace received.     Many lone geniuses struggle with making ends meet and  winning a modicum of respect  in an indifferent or absurd world.

    Both Mr. Swartz and Mr. Wallace  were sick and probably lonely people.  But both still had the intellectual potential and social resources to make a rich and fulfilling life. They had talent and good physical health, and yet they threw it all away for a runaway feeling.  What a loss! And what a waste!

    Perhaps genius does not recognize or accept the urgent necessity of coping with disappointment. Ordinary people have to deal with disappointment all the time.  It  does not have to strike a mortal blow unless you are willing to realign your view of what you need to do to remain a part of it.

    Postscript. I remain amazed at how much media coverage this person’s suicide has received (CNN, PBS, NYTimes, Slashdot, etc). Granted,  there was politics involved, and the crowd Aaron hung around with were tech-savvy and media-savvy.  I find it interesting how many people  have focused on the criminal charges and not on the aspect of personal tragedy. The question should not be: “Why did the DA’s decision to press charges cause this person’s suicide?” but  “Why did this well-liked and multi-talented individual decide — after getting a bum rap —  that there was nothing else to live for?” This is one live lost, but he is hardly the only person lost in this manner and hardly the most significant.  I have always felt that you don’t need to be a genius to have your voluntary exit from life be mourned by all.

    Postscript 2 (2019).  About two years ago I wrote a much longer version of this blogpost (like, 3 or 4 times as long) which I will publish eventually in full form. I just wanted to point out that when I wrote this in early 2013, I was really hurting financially and in a pit of poverty that would bring anyone into despair.  Things only become worse as the year went on. 2013 was absolutely hellish. That partly explains my anger — yes anger — I felt about these  two brilliant people who had so many gifts and privileges giving up so easily.  Aren’t humans made  of sterner stuff (even when we are grinding our teeth in despair)?

    Postscript 3 (Feb 2024). Just remembered that I never finished this blog post (11 years later!). Ha, ha, ha; I even had trouble remembering how to find this blogpost. I did a substantial rewrite in 2016-2017, and I’ll probably put finishing touches on it by the time it appears in my 2025 essay collection (titled Noncrappy Things from my Blog)

  • So bored with time travel

    The sci fi thriller Looper will be released on DVD on December 31, 2012, but apparently Netflix mailed it to me 2 days early. I wonder: has someone got hold of a time machine?

    Generally with a few notable exceptions, I am tired of any time travel movies or TV shows. Although paradoxes can be fun, they often seem annoyingly self-indulgent.

    The main problem is that plots are too easy to manufacturer. They go like this:

    1. Character A  travels into the past and performs X.
    2. Oh, no! The space-time continuum has been disrupted!
    3. Character A must try to fix the disruption by performing Y (or Z, etc)
    4. Oh, no!  Performing Y has caused another disruption in the space-time continuum.
    5. Repeat step 3 as needed.

    Pardon me for stating the obvious, but the movie genre by itself has no inherent chronology.  It’s just footage spliced and organized in an arbitrary fashion. I think actors have this sense as well. They say their lines out of order, and don’t think too hard about it. They just live for the moment.

    To experience what it must be like to be a time traveler, all you need to do is to act inside a movie.

    Postscript: Here’s another musical take on the issue.

    Postscript 2: Now that I’ve seen the movie, I wish I could go back in time to warn myself never to see the movie. Seriously, it wasn’t a bad movie; it actually was pretty interesting, but I’ve seen so many elements of this movie already. I regard the movie as mainly  a love story between a man and his gun(s) where nothing can be allowed to come in its way — except an annoying child with powers greater than yours.  Here’s a challenge: make a time travel movie without a GUN anywhere. Or better yet: make a movie where a person travels in time for no apparent reason other than to have fun and meet  chicks (or watch a concert or two).

    Postscript 3: It is decided: I will travel back in time and prevent myself from even writing this post.

    Postscript 4. It is done. Any postscripts after this one will disappear after the time line has been fully restored.

    Postscript 5: For reasons I cannot explain here, I need to undo my previous action.

    Postscript 6: Any postscripts after this one are fake and can safely be ignored.

  • Hook Up Hysteria, Abstinence, Absolutism and Snap Judgments

    (Here’s a post I wrote 2 years ago and forgot to publish).

    You don’t actually have to read the original article,  but the complaints on CNN  about the alleged outbreak of hookups are more insightful (and funny).

    I had taken Matt to be making fun of the way these articles about the “hookup culture” are set pieces that have been written the same way for decades. The articles always take the same same basic phenomenon (college kids having sex with people they barely know while drunk), wildly overstate its prevalence, and write from the perspective of (invariably female) students who aren’t interested. Invariably the article presents the “hookup culture” as some novel phenomenon, despite the fact that people have been writing the same article for decades.

    The “date” is dead as a phenomenon on college campuses, but there are scads of students who engage in romantic, non-hookup dating. Invariably these articles ignore those couples in favor of interviewing (female) students who complain that all the guys are interested in is hooking up. The possibility that the interviewees are unrepresentative is never explored.

    This article is a perfect example of the genre.

    ***

    This is one ridiculous piece of journalism. It makes me think back to the tripe that the Vanderbilt Hustler used to put forth back before I recently graduated, I reference the Hustler because Ms. Boyle used to write some of the most jaded and noxious columns in the editorial section, and this piece wreaks of that similar stench. Raging at Vanderbilt? I went to Vandy, I was in a fraternity, and I drank and partied quite a bit, most undoubtedly more than others, but Vanderbilt is one of the more tame campuses you are likely to find. Furthermore, the hook-up culture is pervasive. That they would pick a small private school where the average cost of attendance is over $50,000 per year as a microcosm of university life is ludicrous. Next, that they would reference one student taking a stand against hooking up and incorporate "true role models" like Lady GaGa, illustrates the short-sighted nature of this article. Who the heck cares what someone chooses to do or not do? It’s none of my business. All I know is that decrying the hook-up culture on college campuses does nothing to put an end to it. There’s drinking to be done in pretty much any college, and drinking promotes bad decisions. However, it’s a lifestyle that some, like myself, chose, and to tell you the truth it’s really pretty lame to hear this tired old rhetoric time after time. Seriously, what utter garbage

    ***

    The report states: "An April 2010 study from James Madison University in Virginia revealed more college women tend to want a relationship out of a hook up compared with men who prefer to stay independent." Note to James Madison University – you actually needed to conduct such a study to find this out??!! Note to everyone else – make sure you don’t attend this university!!

    ***

    Of course the article most certainly not written by a dude….

    ***

    If you find inspiration from Lada Gaga to maintain your celibacy, YOU’RE A COMPLETE IDIOT. Period.

    ***

    Wow imagine going to school to learn….wow!!!!

    ***

    this poor girl just committed social suicide

    no she didn’t. haven’t you seen any John Hughes movies? she’s going to hold out. the cool jock is going to try to woo her. then he’s going to change his ways and they’re going to fall in love.

    ***

    Dating can be expensive, especially if you’re a guy and you have traditional women expecting you to foot all or most of the bill. If women want to go on dates, about they invite us and pay for it. As a college student living on a budget, I’d rather spend my five bucks at a frat party and get laid. As long as you’re protected, it’s a lot of fun. For every chick who gives up on hooking up, there are thousands more who welcome it. Gotta love freshman girls.
    Plenty of time to go on awkward dates and $80 dinners (appetizers, main course, wine, dessert for 2) after college when we actually have jobs (if we get lucky with this recession).

    ***

    I’m deeply, deeply disappointed that the link to Lady Gaga declaring her celibacy is dead.

    ***

    Over the years I’ve grown sick of these kinds of articles and the false morality they profess, as well as interviews with alleged experts. I think an article can and should be written about the topic, but you can do without delving too deeply into lurid  details and  actually offer  insights about what dating on campus is actually like. I have less of a problem with abstinence per se than those who are promoting it and shouting down those who refuse to see things in black and white.  Abstinence is not really an abstract decision but something arising from your situation and the people involved. The problem with “abstinence” is that people tend to regard it as a good in and of itself. But of course it’s not intrinsically good (except for ministers and monks).   It’s not a bad thing either; I regard it as neutral.

    I once faced a dilemma about a dating profile on eharmony.  A woman’s profile was moderately interesting (and curiously, one of the few without a photo). But her profile sounded more interesting than 75% of the others on eharmony. She was 33 or 35 or 37 or something like that, and she specified in her profile that she was dedicated to the idea of “No Sex Before Marriage.”  The question become: should I respond to this ad?

    I hemmed and hawed. Frankly, the thought of  meeting a woman who refused the very idea of  sex before marriage did not particularly bother me  (I mean, I had already been celibate for quite some time, so a year of no-sex dating would not be an undue burden). On the other hand, I had complex views on the subject and merely because I agreed to contact her/go out with her did not imply that I necessarily agreed with her point of view: it would merely mean  that I would be willing to make an exception in her case. At the same time,  her statement of principles would compel me to state my own principles prematurely. I could easily anticipate a first date consisting only of a discussion of why she promoted no-sex-bef0re-marriage and why I had reservations about it.

    I didn’t want to have that kind of conversation, especially on a first date. It  was (to put it crudely) a dick-shriveling topic. It took the excitement out of the romantic pursuit; it turned the focus away from attraction and romance towards religion and condemnation. Practically speaking, I probably talk to lots of women who are determined not to have sex before marriage; they just don’t wear this belief on a sign!  The fact that this woman on eharmony was announcing it on her profile meant that she was establishing it as a filtering mechanism towards all future husbands. Maybe her intent was simply to ward off casual dating, but it served also as a signaling device. If the woman had absolutist positions regarding sex, just imagine what her positions would be about politics/art/career/ the environment.

    Frankly, if I had met this person at a party and I never knew about her beliefs, I might have gotten to know her better. Who knows? That’s the  thing about online dating. In many instances, I acknowledged that my own criteria weren’t correct, but sometimes you have to make snap  judgments.

    At college I dated a lovely girl whom I surprised one day …. lighting up a cigarette!   She had been hiding her habit from me because she thought (accurately as it turns out) that I was very anti-smoking. It’s true. I almost never would view a smoker as a potential life partner. But when I discovered her subterfuges, I realized that my unspoken rule about smokers just didn’t matter in this case.  This girl  was a great person in every other respect; it would be folly to exclude her from my affections just for that . (As it turns out, her religious beliefs made her oppose premarital sex as a matter of principle, so I guess abstinence  really does exist on campus).

    Online dating is one example of the follies of snap judgments. But there are many instances where initial impressions mislead. Looking for a job is a classic case of this. A perfectly qualified person can have a lousy interview or lack sufficient number of  buzzwords on the resume, and still turn out to be a great employee. I’m currently hiring voice talent for an audio play, and frankly, I’m not sure whether my criteria for choosing a candidate will result in the best qualified candidate getting the job. In fact, they all look good in their own way.

    Two years ago, I decided that I would no longer apply for any technical writer positions in the fossil fuel industry.  I had been reading a lot about climate change and remain convinced that the fossil fuel industries were contributing to the problem in a huge way. But now that I have set my core principle of values, how do I implement it? Practically speaking,  I find that many kinds of companies in Houston are embedded with the oil and gas industry in some way, and it  is often  hard to draw the line. What if a company merely provided software for the fossil fuel industries? What if a company merely provided IT services? What if a company were providing safety inspections for an oil rig and needed someone to write the safety manual? What if  a company designed software which could be used by oil companies, but also on many other kinds of projects? What if a law firm wrote and reviewed leases for oil companies, but that was only about 40% of their business? These are real-life examples where the ethical dimensions are not clear cut.

    The problem comes when your discriminating principles don’t allow exceptions or flexibility.   I almost never read genre fiction; frankly I find science fiction to be a bore – although I’m occasionally surprised. Intellectually, I know that a certain percentage of writers in any genre are doing amazing things; in fact I almost delight in stumbling upon someone in a genre who is actually writing outstanding things. Literary genres are a marketing construct; do I really despise “chicklit” as much as I assume? (For the record, I greatly enjoyed Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City”). Legal thrillers, spy novels, YA. I don’t know what these terms actually mean – and I guess my problem is more with the low ambitions of people who write for these genres. At the same time, we need labels to separate things into different piles, or else we would go insane!

    When you buy something like a cell phone, you are dealing with a known set of features. The options may be ridiculously complex, but essentially we all know what 2 MB Camera or “free weekend minutes” mean. But when you are selecting a book or an employee or a romantic partner,  you are dealing with a infinitely complex set of features.  I haven’t read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice yet but it’s hard to deny his central argument that  the endless number of options can be paralyzing for the consumer. Instead of giving him more freedoms, they give him more stress. 

    The irony is that most of these differences are minor. Often when I buy software or devices, I end up agonizing over features or specifications which I rarely notice or use after I make a purchase. I need to buy a laptop, a subject that I am generally familiar with.  But there are dozens of brands and dozens of cost-reducing or cost-increasing features which I need to sort through.   I need to read customer comments  and also consider how this laptop might run in Ubuntu. I also  need to consider where exactly I will buy this product and the general reputation of the brand (and distributor).

    Then again, I can simply visit a local computer store and buy something. Ugh!  I have $800 to spend. What’s the best thing in the store? I can take the thing home in 2 hours, and as long as I don’t fret too much about better and cheaper products for sale at other stores, I’ll be fine. I like how online stores   use faceted Search  to let the user feature out certain products (“8 gigs or more” or “Between 100-150$”). At the same time, this sort of precise filtering leads manufacturers to cheat a little. So a laptop may have 8 gigs of RAM but have a crappy CPU (something the consumer wouldn’t know enough to look for).  I can go onto a Slashdot page and hide all the results which were ranked 3 stars or lower. This basically guarantees that all the comments I see are interesting and relevant. But it also means that I am missing a lot of insights because – let’s face it, the best comments rarely get the karma love they deserve.

    Taking shortcuts is necessary because frankly we rarely have enough time to consider our options as closely and carefully as we would like. Maybe it was for the best that I chose to filter out smokers on match.com; I didn’t want to face the time burden of distinguishing between smokers who were not health conscious and the rare pretty and liberal and generally health-conscious woman who still smoked but was trying to quit. I was once dismissed by a match.com woman who wrote a polite but pointed reply saying, “My ex was a clueless playwright. I have no interest in dating artistic types anymore.” 

    Ouch. I guess it feels different to be on the receiving end of a snap judgment. I have been trying to promote an author’s ebook and I find curiously that many decent critics rarely review ebooks or even indie-produced ebooks.  It must be a book by a well-known publisher. Is that fair? No. (Indeed, I would argue that that it makes these people less effective critics).

    It’s possible to waste a LOT of time reading a mediocre book. But how allergic are you to mediocrity? If you wanted, you could read nothing but Nobel Prize winners (and maybe National Book Award winners if you tire). Using that criteria exposes you to a lot of interesting and profound literature, but is that enough? It exposes you to only a small number of literary types. You end up missing  so many things, so many different ways of looking at the world.

    I used to be extremely fussy about what I read.  But  this fussiness presupposed that my initial impressions (based on packaging and book reviews and literary awards)   guaranteed  quality (or at least, what seems to be quality to me).  A book cover can signal many things about what a book is about, but a bad book cover doesn’t signal anything. Anyway, the ultimate goal of reading is to read a good book, not  something with a good cover or critical reviews.

    One curious result of this ebook revolution is that there are now oodles of free and low-cost ebooks, most of which are crap. But there are also lots of high quality free titles out there – as long as you’re willing to look and take  chances. Yesterday I downloaded about 50 free titles from the free page for Amazon. I regularly go to Inkmesh to download the free Nook titles (my preferred device).  Truthfully, I don’t read most of these free titles, and even the ones I read I barely finish. But I’m grateful to have access to these kinds of freebies.

    Time, time, time. Everything  boils down to time.  Lately I have been ripping a lot of CDs, both from the library and from CDs I bought. I read consumer guides to music, and even though I enjoy flipping through these things, one can’t regard them as gospel.  For example, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau has reviewed a LOT of music. Most of the albums he assigns an A or A- letter grade to are pretty good, but he overlooks a lot of good stuff (and even mocks them sometimes).

    I often will put on hold music CDs  which have been recommended to me by  critics and find them unremarkable. At the same time, I will randomly pick random albums off the shelves and discover remarkable things just as often (see this, this and this)

    Dating is supposed to be a serious choice. Hook ups are supposed to represent a failure to exercise good judgment and yes, taste. Alas, I have spent way too much time refining my tastes in all realms, even dating….and am I the better for it? I don’t know. I don’t know.

  • More nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize

    So the winner of this year’s  Nobel Peace Price is …. the EU? What the heck? Who’s going to be awarded the 2013 peace prize — the Nobel Peace Prize committee itself?

    The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 will be awarded to the word “peace”  … for its undeniable power to help people express their ideas more easily.

    For 2015 the Peace Prize will be awarded to “Life” for demonstrating  temerity not to shirk from terrifying nonexistence and to  infuse people with the desire to live and let live.

    For 2016 it will be awarded to the “smile” for its unsung role in promoting peace and cooperation.

    For 2017 it will be awarded to “paper” without whom the leading peace treaties would never  have been possible.

    For 2018 it will be awarded to “war” — which frankly has gotten a bad rap these last few centuries — but whose contrast helps us to value what peace itself is.

    For 2019 it will be awarded to “myself” , the place where all peace has to start.

    For 2020 it will be awarded to “traffic lights” for its crucial role in preventing collisions and disputes.

    For 2021 it will be awarded to “Rainbows” for suggesting a kind of society which unifies all kinds.

    For 2022 it will be awarded to “wimps” who are brave enough to embrace the path of nonconflict against intimidation and aggresison.

    For 2022 a joint award will be given to   “cannabis” for promoting the cause of indifference to conflict.

    For 2023 it will be awarded to “Martin Luther King” because there’s nothing wrong with repeating oneself sometimes.

    For 2024 a joint award will be given to “mouthwash and underarm deodorant” for helping people to get closer.

    I realize that with this year’s  award, the Nobel committee has made a clever  and interesting point about the benefits of international bodies. But the main purpose of awards is  to identify and reward extraordinary individuals. You are squandering this real value of an award when you try to reward  institutions  rather than individuals. Individuals are the ones who actually  fight for these concepts. They are outgunned and underfunded. Their individual struggles matter, and awards can help expose these struggles  to a wider audience and raise the status of these people in their own society. Peacemakers, contrary to what you might think, rarely make the news; they rarely work with a sizable PR budget, and frankly they don’t often “win” (even if ultimately their point of view ends up prevailing over the long term).

  • Do I have the right to gripe?

    A few minutes ago I posted video links to the 2010 Sea Level Rise conference.  I love the fact that I had listen/watch video lectures and panels which previously were never available. We are lucky to live in such an age of easy availability.

    But….

    Why do these embedded video players for viewing these lectures never seem to have the ability to fast forward to a later part of the lecture? Not having this feature makes it almost impossible to plan time for these things.

    For example, the first talk is 90 minutes long. Suppose I want to listen only to 30 minutes now and listen to the rest later. The way the player streams the content makes that impossible. This seems like such an obvious feature to ask for, and yet it’s surprising how few recorded video players have it.

    It’s interesting how often the format/presentation prevents you from viewing or reading something. Most scientific papers are produced as PDF papers. For the most part I never read PDF documents; I’m more used to reading on the web; reading a PDF is painful. Actually that problem has been solved recently with the ipad. now reading PDFs on the ipad are a delight. So much so that I now use the pdf annotation program iAnnotate to mark up my draft PDFs. Over the last week I have marked up a PDF for a technical book while in bed, on an airplane, in an airport, at a restaurant. I am so used to editing directly to the computer screen that I forgot how relaxing it is to edit something without a computer fan whirring in the background.

    And if you wonder whether I am annoyed at the thought of having to type/edit this blog post directly from my monitor, you would be right.

  • That triumphant feeling

    I gotta say: the feeling of finishing a short story and publishing it on the WWW is not unlike having 10 simultaneous orgasms. Of course, males are limited to having only one orgasm at a time, but a person can dream…..

  • Juicing Up

    Tomorrow I’ll be traveling to Austin in preparation for Sunday’s Wiener Dog Race.

    image

    In preparation for my trip, I am charging my iPad and my Zune and my miniature mp3 player (long story). Also, I need to charge my camera battery and my cell phone. Now that I think about it, I am in the process of charging my laptop. Also, I’m drinking a caffeinated drink. Yes, it will keep me up a little, but there are some days you are meant to stay up most of the night.

    Our gadgets make us more powerful and more vulnerable.

  • Q&A about Ebooks

    (Here are some Q&A about ebooks which I wrote up for someone which I am reposting here).

    WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE DO YOU FIND ARE INTERESTED IN EBOOKS? IS THERE A TARGET AUDIENCE?

    Before answering any questions, I think I should define what an ebook is. There is honest disagreement, but I define an ebook  as a digital file which  with the aid of software tries to simulate the experience of reading a print book on a portable device.  My ideal ebook reading device  would be something you can comfortably read for an hour or more  1)in bed, 2)at a restaurant table and 3)on the subway. Note that you can read in many different ways and with many different devices. But would you be comfortable reading on a PC/laptop/PDA/phone for an hour or more?  My bed/restaurant/subway criteria is a pretty good one. 

    I find that all serious readers are "interested in ebooks", but only wealthy people and gadget freaks and fans of public domain literature crave ebooks. Over the years, the target market has become more mainstream (especially since Amazon has spent a lot of time and money promoting the Kindle). Devices that cost more than $200 will seem like a "risk" to many people, especially if they don’t perceive it as saving time.  The target market crowd is now probably women over 40 who like the convenience of being able to obtain a best-selling title almost immediately.

    The education sector is massively interested in ebooks. It is a real cash cow, and publishers have been complaining that e-ink devices don’t let them do the fancy multimedia they need to justify the $120 price tag for their textbooks. Ipad does address that, and for that reason, I predict that within 5 years all college students will be using a device like the iPad (and probably the iPad itself) for class. The real struggle here is that many multimedia developers and instructional designers produce content in flash and iPad doesn’t support Flash. That is a real train wreck waiting to happen for the educational textbook market.

    WERE PEOPLE WARY ABOUT EBOOKS (AS THEY ARE IN MANY OTHER NEW TECHNOLOGIES), WHEN THEY WERE FIRST INTRODUCED?
    Cost is the biggest obstacle .. not only the cost of the device but the fact that used books already cost next to nothing. It makes little sense to pay $12 for an ebook if a used print book can be bought online for $2 + 4 shipping. (This market oddity is temporary and will disappear in less than 5 years). People worry that they may not use the ebook reader as much as they would have thought. (I personally am a real ebook fanatic, and yet I still do 95% of my reading on print books). People worry about locking in their purchases to a single device; there is no guarantee that the device will be even working 5 years from now. I personally can say that it often takes at least a decade to get to a particular book I own. If an ebook breaks down after 5-7 years anyway, that means a lot of the ebooks I buy will never be used.

    The biggest complaint I hear is that current ebooks are not interesting to look at. People feel this way because the Internet is already so richly designed and so cool to navigate through.  The Internet  gives readers higher  expectations about what a book ought to look like.  For the last 4 years we have been using e-ink devices (whose main appeal was low battery use). Unfortunately, the low energy requirements for e-ink limited what kind of software and specifically what kind of interface you could use.

    I think we need to differentiate between different consumers. Heavy readers worry about saving books for a long time. Heavy gadget freaks worry about digital rights management (DRM) and being dependent on a single platform. The average consumer worries mostly about price and upkeep (both in time and money).

    DO EBOOK WRITERS APPROACH THEIR WRITING DIFFERENTLY THAN THEY WOULD FOR A PAPER BOOK?
    It would seem easy to say yes here, but in general I don’t think it’s true. All kinds of writers try to make their writing portable, and those who like hypertext/multimedia/intertextuality have already moved to the Internet (as I have). If you look at attempts to harness the power of the internet in writing 5 years later, they seem awfully gimmicky.  I think blogging has caused writers to radically change the way they write .. but that is not ebooks.

    As for me, I am always thinking of images which can accompany text. I know of some multimedia books/magazines that embed sound/flash/multimedia, and that is cool and expensive, but most writers don’t have the time or patience to mess around with that.

    Revision is a lot more casual process for ebooks than paper books. If you make a typo, well, get it fixed; it’s not a tragedy (and recent purchasers will download a corrected version). If you make a typo in print, it looks really bad and chances are all readers will always have a defective copy.

    IS IT ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE AN ALL-IN-ONE DEVICE LIKE THE IPAD REPLACES EBOOKS LIKE THE NOOK AND THE KINDLE?

    Yes, but there’s still  room for two kinds of devices. If low-end dedicated devices sold for about $50-60 (and that day is not too far away), I think people would be comfortable with having a throwaway device just for reading and a higher end device for doing work. Right now I still have a lot of programs on my PC/laptop which I still depend on and that would never work on an iPad.  Google apps lets you do a lot of fancy tasks completely on the web, but we’re not anywhere near that point (at least 10 years). Some have talked about keeping all ebooks on the "cloud," and I think that idea will come sooner rather than later (certainly within the next 5 years).

  • A moratorium please!

    Ok, I’ve had enough. Can someone please declare a moratorium on the use of creepy O Fortuna music on all political ads & car commercials &  sports events & video games & comedy skits & movie promos!

    If I never hear this melody again, I shall die a happy man.

    I am so weary of it that I don’t think even a parody of it (or even another parody) could ever be enjoyable.

  • Fun Quotes

    “An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.” Nabokov . See also Marc Slocum’s brilliant idea to use fragments from Nabokov’s unfinished manuscript for a mashup. (Too bad no one followed up on it).

    “If I had to live my life again, I’d do everything the same, except that I wouldn’t see The Magus.” Woody Allen.

    “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein.  (More quotes).

    Here’s an interesting article from the Financial Times about the Greek financial problems:

    …the Greek Finance Ministry had warned of “complete collapse” if the whole system…was not rethought…”Prices and value move in an atmosphere of imminent catastrophe,” he wrote.  “In Greece for a while now all the foundations of a healthy economy have been overturned.  There can be no stability, neither in economic equilibrium nor in monetary or financial affairs.”

    …While the Italians…were genuinely worried by Greece’s financial crisis, it was the Germans who needed to be persuaded.  Initially, Altenburg’s advocacy of the Greek position was not well received even in his own Ministry.  But then the political stakes were suddenly raised…

    …In Athens people expected the Finance Minister to win substantial concessions from the Germans.  In actual fact he was in a very weak position.

    …It was not that the Greek financial crisis could be ignored; nor that the Greek Finance Minister lacked the wit or intelligence to present his case.  It was simply that no Greek politician carried enough weight to be heard seriously in Berlin.

    Actually, this is not from the Financial Times at all, but from this  book (click the link!) (Thanks, Marginal Revolution).