Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: observations

  • “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).