free variable

I’ve been blissfully out of the grad school game for so long that I might have to start teaching boxing to bright-eyed masters students to keep them from entering a life of research. But I was recently reminded of the best advice for anyone embarking on a substantial applied research effort (especially a dissertation): build your work around a thesis statement. That is, your main point should be an objective, defensible point that your experiments and prose will support. It should also fit on a single slide in 64-point type.¹

This point seems obvious (after all, schoolchildren are instructed to begin constructing a five-paragraph essay with a thesis statement; why wouldn’t adults do the same for a 200-page monograph?), but it is surprising how many junior and senior grads can’t express the central claim that their dissertation is meant to argue in a single sentence. I first encountered this advice from Olin Shivers’ web site early in my graduate career; it was a big help in focusing my work, even as my own research veered more into analysis than into runtime support as I had originally intended. (Shivers is also responsible for the greatest acknowledgements section of all time, which I’ve linked to earlier.) I was reminded of Shivers’ advice this morning when I read a nice article by his student Matt Might (now at Utah) elaborating on the benefits of a thesis statement, in which Shivers’ influence is palpable but unacknowledged.

¹ This last point is where the thesis statement that appears in the text of my dissertation falls short. Although my thesis statement is one sentence, it includes a great deal of unnecessary detail about specific mechanisms rather than their essential properties (e.g. “type-based analysis” instead of “scalable analysis”).

Lately, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the hyperspecific targeted advertising I receive while using the internet. This ranges from terrifyingly creepy, as in Google ads related to something I just received a message about in my gmail account, to comically incompetent, as in Facebook ads for multilevel marketing schemes that merely include numerous personal details about my life (e.g. “31-year old bald Madison dad who married a far better woman than he deserves nine years ago today and took way too long to complete a terminal degree makes $10,000 in his spare time”).

Amazingly, there’s something still worse than the ever-metastasizing clump of evidence that my personal information and attention are the real products on offer from currently-fashionable internet companies. Here I refer to the completely untargeted ad, as in the regular promotional emails that Borders sends me. I have never purchased a hardcover bestseller from Borders; in recent memory, I think I have exclusively bought technical books, books about photographic lighting, DK Eyewitness Books about robots and knights, and audio recordings of Baroque and Renaissance music. (We’ll construe the latter broadly enough to include DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, which I also bought at a Borders.) Borders knows my purchase history because it is tied to my “Borders Rewards” card, which is the only reason that they have my email address in the first place.

Borders certainly has enough data about me to send me sensible recommendations, or even targeted promotions that I would be likely to exploit. Instead, they drop the same impersonal, coordinated, and clumsy marketing on (I presume) every email address they have. So instead of getting notifications of a new Pragmatic Programmers book or Fretwork album, I get messages from Borders touting the sort of crap I’d never buy: e.g. Dan Brown books, political memoirs, the Twilight series, and Eat Pray Love and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, whatever those are.

Targeted marketing, when done well, has the advantage of being relevant and potentially useful. Advertising that make me weep for my lost privacy is disheartening, but it doesn’t necessarily represent a waste of my time. I can’t say the same, on either count, for lazy, carpet-bombed marketing that reveals that the sender has absolutely not mined my purchases, browsing history, or “friend” network to the extent of its ability. As a concrete example, consider Amazon and Borders. Amazon’s aggressive daily emails encouraging me to buy every product tangentially related to something I looked at yesterday are bad for my wallet (and my soul), but they are at least sometimes interesting. When I see an email from Borders in my inbox, on the other hand, I typically delete it unread.

Google’s query autocompletion feature has produced some mildly amusing results due to what it reveals about search queries in the aggregate. Query autocompletion can be useful, too, if you want probable confirmation of an answer to certain kinds of questions.

As an example, Andrea and I watched the first episode of Season 3 of The Wire on Saturday. As we were watching, I thought “I bet I know what real-world public figure Tommy Carcetti is based on; I’ll check Google.” As it turns out, I didn’t even need to complete the search to learn that I was probably right. I merely had to type “carcetti o” in the search box before seeing that the first suggested autocompletion was what I had intended to type.

I recently spent a week on Lac Seul in northwestern Ontario walleye fishing with my father-in-law and some friends. When compared to the sorts of places in which I have spent most of my life, Lac Seul is notable for having visible stars at night, total freedom from wired or wireless communication networks, and an extremely favorable walleye-to-human ratio. It is also quite photogenic.

Click on any image for details, coordinates, and larger versions, or click here to see all of my published images from Lac Seul (sixteen public images, with more if you’re one of my flickr contacts). I have included notes on equipment (for photo nerds planning similar trips) after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the swash capitals pictured above: from Estupido Espezial and from Comic Sans. You might assume that both of these saw their genesis as elaborate inside jokes within type foundries. You would be half right.

Delightfully, the press release announcing a font package including a swash-enabled Comic Sans includes the following surely spontaneous and heartfelt quotation:

“The new versions of Comic Sans and Trebuchet have a lot of great OpenType features” said Vincent Connare, the original designer of the fonts. “My hat’s off to Ascender for creating swashes and other delightful flourishes that give these fonts a breath of fresh air.”

I have to assume that this statement isn’t something Connare merely “said” so much as something he snickered, wept, or spit out from behind bitterly-clenched teeth. But I suppose that press releases are typically imprecise about the delivery of quoted utterances.

(Ascender press release link via DF.)

I’ve uploaded some photos from the 4th of July weekend weekend in Spirit Lake and Okoboji, including a few photos of WT fishing, one of my brother-in-law¹ catching a lot of air on Big Spirit Lake, and one of my sister-in-law waterskiing bluetooth style.

¹ I suppose Ben and I are technically “co-brothers-in-law,” but this nomenclature has always struck me as unnecessarily pedantic.

I noticed tonight that my iPhone auto-corrects from “provably” to “probably.” The epistemic implications are staggering.

Wolf Rentzsch shares an amusing anecdote about “high-performance” database systems whose developers claim to achieve high performance by eschewing sync calls. Recall that the sync system call is the one that ensures that the bits that you’ve just written to disk actually made it to the disk. It essentially trades the performance afforded by multiple layers of caching in modern disks for the reliability of knowing that no data is still in-flight when the call returns.

Of course, the no-sync approach doesn’t go nearly far enough; I bet these database developers could improve performance still more by avoiding writing anything to disk in the first place.

Daring Fireball links to a report that the installer for the latest version of Adobe Flash is incompatible with OS-level assistive technologies on both the Mac and Windows. So if you need, for example, a screen reader to interact with a computer, the standard Flash installer will just look like an empty window to you. On the plus side, you won’t even have to pretend to read the EULA.

I rarely miss an opportunity to enjoy Flash-related schadenfreude, and am completely in favor of any criticisms of Adobe installers, which generally resemble the sort of software provisioning technology that might have been designed by mid-level bureaucrats in Soviet satellite states. But I’m also reminded of the accessibility concerns surrounding cash machines in the mid-1990s. Isn’t it a little silly to complain that visually-impaired users won’t be able to use the inaccessible installer for the latest version of a browser plugin that exists exclusively to render inaccessible web content?

I’m glad to see that I will have the option to cease subsidizing the heaviest 2% of data users on AT&T’s network. If you would have asked me two years ago — before I got a phone that I actually wanted to use on the internet — I would have regarded a bandwidth cap as anathema, a step backwards even from the endless nickel-and-diming I experienced on Verizon’s data network.

But since getting such a phone — and, so I thought, using its data capabilities fairly heavily — I have never used more than 200 megabytes of cell network data in a month; Andrea has never used more than 100 megabytes. In the last seven months (charted below from my online AT&T bill), I haven’t even come that close to 200 megabytes, If we choose to switch from “unlimited” bandwidth to the new AT&T plans, we will save $30 per month. (We also have 2.5 days of “rollover minutes” for voice, but I suspect that we will have to continue to subsidize heavy voice users to some extent.)

If you bring these two coins to the miniature golf course, you can exchange either for a turn in the batting cages or a few minutes operating a radio-controlled boat. But one of them is also U.S. legal tender for all debts, public and private, while the other has no value for general trade. Can you tell which is which? Was it hard?

I played about an hour of Rockstar’s Peckinpah-inspired Red Dead Redemption last night. My initial impression is that the mechanics are comfortable and fluid and the scenery and atmosphere are really well done. (As you might expect, there is some characteristically unsubtle social commentary as well.)

In fact, the sense of time and place is so strong that I found myself doing very little to advance the story; instead, I just rode around the old West, exploring, sightseeing, and hunting varmints. This dynamic may be familiar to nerds of a certain age. Indeed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d had a similar gameplay experience somewhere before — but where?

For a longer and rather less restrained reaction, see Seth Schiesel’s piece in the NYT. I typically avoid video-game writing in general-interest periodicals, since it tends towards the perversely anthropological, focusing on the writer’s amazement that the same industry that produced Pong now might spend hundreds of person-years and tens of millions of dollars in order to create a single work of interactive entertainment with narrative and pathos.¹

This self-conscious outsider stance and the prose it often inspires are unfortunate because, in contrast to the video-game press, general-interest publications employ writers who can read. Specialist “video game criticism” is a rhetorical shantytown of cliché, infelicitous turns of phrase, and thinly-veiled product placement. Game “reviews” are almost exclusively free of actual criticism but splattered with irrelevant technical details from press kits. (e.g. “This title will redefine interactive entertainment. It runs at 60 frames per second but its closest competitor runs at 59.2 frames per second!”)

However, I may need to reconsider my attitude about game reviews in the NYT after reading Schiesel’s article, in which he actually says, “In the more than 1,100 articles I have written for this newspaper since 1996, I have never before called anything a tour de force. Yet there is no more succinct and appropriate way to describe Red Dead Redemption.” Indeed, if major newspapers could promise me that even one in ten video game reviews would be as entertaining as this breathless piece, I’d read every single one.

Thanks to Art Gillespie for the link to Schiesel’s article.

¹ There are exceptions, of course. The Onion‘s AV Club section is consistently very good, as is Ben Fritz, who occasionally writes about video games at the Los Angeles Times.

Many church bodies cite the size of their roster of baptized members as an indication of their influence or relevance. This has always struck me as a meaningless metric in general, but I only recently realized how meaningless it is for real churches in the US.

As a micro-level example, consider Bethel Lutheran Church here in Madison. (The sample is both hopelessly small and biased; Andrea and I were members there until we left the ELCA in early 2008.¹) Bethel is a large and old church with six pastors and five services every weekend. When we left, Bethel had approximately 6,100 baptized members. But the largeness of the building, staff, and roster were not apparent in the pews; in 2008, Bethel saw weekly attendance of around 1,200.

I don’t have any specialist knowledge about running churches. However, I do know something about building communities around projects and making things that people care about. I can’t imagine regarding a software project as a success if the vast majority of people who tried it relegated it to an unimportant or occasional role; likewise, I can’t conceive of an industry in which one might feel good about having a “customer base” that was, on average, a one-in-five shot to actually use one’s “product” at any given opportunity — or any possible way someone could honestly tout such a customer roster, including the 80% who chose some other product, as evidence of clout, thought leadership, or user engagement.

¹ A full accounting of the story behind this move is another story for another day (and one I hope to tell eventually), but those of you who know me personally know that the move had been in the works for a long time and was in fact about ten years overdue.

Yesterday I saw my son, wearing a bike helmet and a flotation vest, tearing through the closet, looking for another vest to wear at the same time, so he could “be safe when [he] did his stunts,” in particular standing on the bubble mower and riding it down the slide. I explained that skateboarding down the slide on the bubble mower remains dangerous no matter how many lifejackets one is wearing; he settled for a camelbak (which he decided was “scuba gear”) and a length of 1"x3".

For the lad, seeking specialized protective gear is nothing new; in the past, he has repurposed my silicone egg poaching pods as elbow and knee pads before diving off of the couch. Of course, I’m sympathetic to the desire to do stupid stunts, but when I was his age (and older), I just did stupid stunts and didn’t bother finding helmets, egg cookers, or personal flotation devices beforehand. (It actually strikes me as miraculous that I never maimed or killed myself on the impromptu bicycle jump near my elementary school, especially since I didn’t regularly use a bike helmet until after college.)

I suspect that his urge to find appropriate safety gear is a result of the long-expanding protective-equipment fetish in children’s entertainment: it is virtually impossible to find contemporary depictions of people or talking animals doing anything remotely dangerous without a veritable suit of armor. Advertising mascots and muppets alike wear helmets, knee pads, elbow pads, shinguards, and gloves before engaging in any physical activity. Wii avatars won’t even climb on a Segway, whose maximum speed approximates a brisk walk, without padding and masks. In a particularly egregious example, Disney’s “tomboyish” female replacement for Christopher Robin in the Winnie the Pooh universe wears a helmet in order to stroll around an imaginary forest.

It’s probably a good idea to encourage children to use appropriate protective gear, and I’m glad that bicycle helmet use is far more widespread than it was thirty years ago. But if my experience is any indication, the downside to the ubiquitous depictions of safety equipment for everyday and fantastic activities alike is that they encourage children to put too much trust in the gear and do foolish things as a result. As a concrete example, there probably isn’t anything a preschooler could wear to provide a reasonable expectation of safety while skating down the slide.

Unfortunately, skating down the slide is the least of my worries: this morning, as we left the farmers’ market and got to our car on the sixth story of the garage, Thomas looked up at me and said “Wow, Dad, I’m going to need some really good safety equipment if I’m going to dive off of this building!”

Houston Texans linebacker Brian Cushing will be suspended for four games at the beginning of this season for failing a drug test at the beginning of last season. This briefly scandalized some subset of football fans and journalists, since last season was Cushing’s first year, and he had been awarded the AP Defensive Rookie of the Year award. Instead of stripping him of the award, the AP held a re-vote, and Cushing wound up keeping the honor. It’s a ridiculous story that reflects poorly on an individual athlete, on the AP, and on the NFL, but more people have written about this than I have.

The interesting part of this saga from my perspective is that Cushing was caught using human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. I don’t follow baseball, the Olympics, or professional cycling that closely and am thus not an expert on the details of sports doping; I only know of the natural ways that this substance might occur in your body. Specifically, elevated hCG either means that you’re pregnant or that you have testicular cancer. Other tumor markers can be affected by other factors (physical stress, alcohol abuse, etc.), but hCG is very useful since abnormal hCG levels exclusively correlate with pregnancy or cancer. Cushing was not parking in the “expectant mothers” space outside of Reliant Stadium last September, so this suggests that the only natural explanation for his elevated hCG would be cancer.

There are unnatural ways that one might exhibit elevated hCG. As I’ve learned since this story came out, hCG is used to stimulate testosterone production after anabolic steroid use. It seems likely that Cushing may have come by his hCG this way, especially since he was recovering from a preseason knee injury when he failed the doping test (and since he hasn’t died of cancer or given birth in the last few months). Indeed, it is essentially impossible that his elevated test results could be explained without artificial hCG introduction.

The simple physiological facts make Cushing’s recent press conference, in which he denied doping, insinuated that his positive test results led him to believe that he had cancer, and pledged to find a natural explanation for his failed test, all the more ridiculous. Football teams keep millions of dollars worth of imaging devices in their practice facilities and stadiums, and professional athletes routinely receive expensive MRI scans after even trivial injuries, but we are expected to believe that the Texans’ medical staff were unwilling or unable to give Cushing an ultrasound or follow-on blood work? We’re supposed to believe that Cushing actually thought that he had a germ cell tumor — a hyper-aggressive disease that can kill a healthy young man in a matter of weeks if left alone — somewhere in his body but went on to play a season of football instead of seeking treatment?

I’m not sure whether this PR tactic reflects Cushing’s stupidity or his temerity.

We went to the annual “Cars on State” event downtown today. There were a lot of great cars there, including quite a bit of classic American muscle, a DeLorean, a wood-paneled Town and Country, and a surprising number of 40-50 year old British sports cars. It was gray and a little wet, but we had a good time and I took a few photos, some of which are below. (Click on any picture for a precise location and to see larger sizes.)

According to this article in the Christian Science Monitor, an anthropologist at MPI in Leipzig is claiming to have shown that some contemporary humans are the distant descendants of human-neanderthal pairings from 50,000–80,000 years ago.

I don’t know; it hardly seems plausible to me.