free variable

Streetlights in fog, originally uploaded by willbenton.

I’ve had the Lensbaby Pinhole and Zone Plate attachment for a while but just tried it out for the first time tonight, on a foggy street scene. It’s pretty cool if you’re seeking a way to make things that look like Boards of Canada album covers; I suspect it will take me a while to get used to just how much light it devours.

I had been interested in making Canadian bacon from a recipe in the brine chapter of Michael Ruhlman’s excellent Ratio, but I’d not been able to source the necessary sodium nitrite locally and was waiting to order it. I guess it’s a good thing I waited, because sodium nitrite is apparently staggeringly toxic: less than a teaspoon is enough to kill an adult, and even the small amounts that make it in to food are implicated in all sorts of other ugliness. It seems like a pretty dumb thing to keep in a house with little kids and a dog whose affinity for the inedible borders on caprine.

I’m far from a food-snob crusader, but I don’t really eat a lot of processed meat (by choice), and reading about one of the main preservatives in processed meats didn’t do much to make me feel bad about that.

You might assume that the brief Wikipedia article on sodium nitrite would be the most horrifying salt-related thing one could read today, but then you would be wrong. Reason editor Katherine Mangu-Ward points out that a bill currently before the New York state assembly would prohibit the use of good old NaCL (and possibly also baking soda — it’s not particularly specific) in food prepared by restaurants. The bill, summarized as “An act to amend the general business law, in relation to prohibiting the use of salt in the preparation of food by restaurants,” begins as follows (typewriter shouting in original):

NO OWNER OR OPERATOR OF A RESTAURANT IN THIS STATE SHALL USE SALT IN ANY FORM IN THE PREPARATION OF ANY FOOD FOR CONSUMPTION BY CUSTOMERS OF SUCH RESTAURANT, INCLUDING FOOD PREPARED TO BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES OF SUCH RESTAURANT OR OFF OF SUCH PREMISES.

It goes on to propose a $1000 fine for each violation, noting that “EACH USE OF SALT … SHALL CONSTITUTE A SEPARATE VIOLATION”¹ and that injunctions to prevent further violations would not “REQUIR[E] PROOF THAT ANY PERSON HAS, IN FACT, BEEN INJURED OR DAMAGED” by the addition of salt to their food. (Fictional New York resident Gene Hofstadt clearly disapproves of such a display of state-sanctioned violence to palates.)

Apparently, one can become a state lawmaker in New York without ever having prepared food. I will avoid the facile cliché of wondering aloud whether there are more pressing matters facing the New York State Assembly, or of whether legislators are capable of identifying limits to the scope of law. I do wonder, though, what foods Assemblypersons Ortiz and Perry eat on their own time, and whether or not either owns a substantial interest in Mrs. Dash.

¹ This language is a fine example of imprecise legislative nonsense. Surely it means “each act of applying salt…shall constitute a separate violation,” but I can’t help picturing the food crimes unit of the NYPD busting chefs once for separate uses of salt, e.g., to kosher meats, to increase the boiling point of water, and to take the edge off of spicy heat.

Here’s a fascinating series of questions designed to determine how consistent one’s attitudes about morality are. If, like me, you don’t appreciate the classic “undergraduate moral philosophy problem” sorts of discussions, you might not enjoy the questions, but they are few and short, and there’s an interesting argument at the end.

I won’t spoil the punchline, but I will say that I agreed with it. In addition, according to the quiz, I am perfectly morally consistent. I might have to print that out and put it in a diploma frame.

When I was little, my dad would sometimes entertain me with miscellaneous software running on the VAX he had in his lab. One of the cooler things was a random maze generator, which probably came from the DECUS archives (we’ve both long since forgotten any details about the author or language) and would fill a whole page with twisting paths. This seemed pretty close to magic to me at the time.

Now that my son is old enough to enjoy mazes, I thought I’d replicate this old program so he could have random mazes of varying intricacy to solve. As far as I can tell, most common maze generation algorithms treat the grid of the maze as an undirected graph with edges between neighboring cells, build a spanning tree, and then place passageways between cells that are immediately connected in the spanning tree. The end result is guaranteed a path from the start to any other node in the maze, because the spanning tree must reach every node. (It’s a little sad that after spending more than a few years of grad school thinking about problems that boil down to graph reachability, this technique seems less like “magic” and more like “obvious.”)

I was able to write a program to build mazes very quickly, and have cleaned it up a bit for public release. You can download the gem package here (use sudo gem install willb-mazegen), or browse the source on github. It will make square-grid mazes to fill a sheet of letter paper, and can make a document consisting of one or many mazes. The code is fairly readable but not particularly fast, but you should be able to generate mazes at least as quickly as a small human can solve them. In the future, I would like to improve performance, optimize the generated PDF (it is currently pretty inefficient), and allow for mazes on non-square grids. (The technique itself is sufficiently general to allow for, e.g., hexagonal or triangular grid mazes, but other aspects of the code would have to change to enable this.)

If you’re just interested in seeing some mazes, here’s a set of twenty preschool-difficulty mazes to download: mazes.pdf. Or you can try this comically ridiculous example (but be warned that it is almost an 8mb file!): hugemaze.pdf.

Enlarged to show texture, originally uploaded by willbenton.

(Click for more photos.)

Against the nagging whine of our better judgement, Andrea and I took Thomas to a monster truck show last night. If you would have told me in 1995 that I would be taking my son to see monster trucks in 2010, I first would have been disappointed that I wasn’t due to be holed up writing aphorisms in a room full of Gauloises and fountain pens. Immediately thereafter, though, I would have laughed to the point of nausea, called you a submoron, and then gone back to feeling superior in that way that becomes largely impossible after one has children, real property, or a job with responsibilities.

The first thing to understand about the monster truck show is that, at least in small venues like the Alliant Energy Center Coliseum in Madison, it is essentially a rodeo with about 50% less abject nationalism and about 85% less action. (There is even a “motorsports clown” to serve as the target of meanspirited and woefully kid–unfriendly japery at the hands of the announcer. I wish I were making this up.) You will, in essence, be watching the same six monster trucks crush and jump over the same row of five cars for about three hours. If that sounds thrilling then you should bear in mind that, unlike the majestic animals of the rodeo, monster trucks have to be backed in to their parking spaces.

I estimate that I spent approximately 75 minutes watching drivers realign their vehicles before backing in to their spaces, which — when one considers the clowning, intermission, breaks for cannon- and slingshot-based t-shirt distribution, and an underwhelming side attraction involving tepid stunts on sportbikes performed by the sort of “bros” who might aspire to appear in spray deodorant ads — leaves precious little time for car smashing, wheelies, &c. The actual repetitive car–smashing and jumping action was performed under the conceit of nominally different “events” whose results were ostensibly decided by audience applause levels, although I had the impression that the whole proceedings were at least as fixed as the 2010 NFC Championship Game.

However, while Andrea and I were practically crippled with boredom after the first few minutes, Thomas was attentive and delighted for the duration of the event — and getting to see near-comic levels of childlike glee absolutely made the experience for us. I might even be willing to go again some day. Really, who would have guessed that a young boy would love seeing large trucks perform the same stunts over and over again?¹ I was shocked.

¹ Except for (1) the myriad publishers who have made “repetitive actions involving large trucks” into a completely saturated yet lucrative children’s video genre and (2) anyone who has ever observed young children playing with or watching trucks, that is.

Awesome and most assuredly not for kids. (via kottke)

(This is merely one of those “briefly-noted” remaindered link posts I have from time to time, but given the common leitmotif I couldn’t resist the urge to allude to the Confessio Augustana in the title.)

Logo abuse

Armin Vit discusses the new Peugeot logo, which represents a dramatic step backwards in execution and looks rather like it was created by the “3D Text” feature in Microsoft Office 97. (True story: at one point in my graduate-school career, I worked on a student project with someone who insisted not only on using Word for scholarly writing, but also on making a “3D” title page for our paper. That was a particularly awful semester.) As an interested layman, I can only speculate that AIGA and other professional societies are requiring identity designers to meet an “awkward gradients and misplaced highlights” quota these days. Either that, or branding agencies are delegating work to enthusiastic toddlers with Office licenses.

Naming abuse

Thomas and I were shopping for a TV antenna a few days ago, and we came across this product, which is billed as a “Quantum Antenna.” This made a lot of sense: in my experience, over-the-air TV reception is definitely a problem domain in which observing an apparatus can change its state. I didn’t buy it, though, since it was expensive and our reception is bad enough as it is without introducing any additional uncertainty.

Tautology abuse

D and B recently brought us a battery of amazings gastronomic delights including some truly excellent blackberry ice cream. I ate some of the latter last night and noticed the following truly excellent copy on the carton:

Yes, with a sentence that recalls Jon Gruden’s booth work on Monday Night Football (“THAT GUY is a FOOTBALL PLAYMAKER, making FOOTBALL PLAYS for this FOOTBALL PROGRAM.”), this carton of ice cream assures me that it is “certified organic by organic certifiers.” My initial reaction was “of course! Who else could do so?” But perhaps I’ve construed the second “organic” too narrowly, and the sentence simply means to indicate that organic certification was performed by a carbon-based certifier. In any case, the ice cream is great.

By the way, if you’re keeping track of Myriad creep, be sure to make a note here.

Like a lot of other fussy nerds, I typically use properly spaced small capital letters when typesetting acronyms. The reason for doing so is simple: large capital letters are designed to appear next to lowercase letters, and are not designed to appear in sequence. As a consequence, strings of large capitals, as might appear in an acronym, are jarring to the reader and can disrupt the color of a page. Small capital letters, on the other hand, are designed to appear next to other small capital letters.

I didn’t think that setting acronyms in this way was controversial, but yesterday John Gruber linked to Toronto author Joe Clark’s mildly-amusing but wrongheaded tirade against the use of small caps in typesetting acronyms. Roughly, Clark’s argument is that:

1. Small caps fare poorly when applied in a host of pathological cases (like camel-case abbreviations, portmanteaus, or other similarly wretched feats of orthographic gymnastics), and
2. Only (putatively) pedantic commentators like Robert Bringhurst insist upon using small caps for acronyms, anyway.

I believe that the first claim is the best part of his argument. Indeed, small caps can be applied in the service of careless typography just as well as ordinary Roman capital and lowercase letters. If someone were advocating the universal application of small caps as a panacea, then Clark would really have a point. However, I’ve not seen any well-regarded commentators recommend slavish devotion to small caps, even when amateurish settings result (Bringhurst certainly does not). The second claim strikes me as irrelevant, and I’m disinclined to address it further here.¹ Judging by his writing elsewhere, Clark takes some delight in the “fusillade of defamatory comments on pipsqueak blogs” that appear in response to ad hominem attacks on Bringhurst; I like Bringhurst’s work a great deal, but decline to join the fusillade.

Of course, it’s far easier to point out the flaws of others than it is to identify something that actually works, and where Clark’s argument really falls apart is in his proposed solution, which we’ll get to after a bit of background. Recall that real small capitals must be designed separately from large capitals; thus, not every typeface has them. You’ve probably seen “fake small caps” before, which are simply regular large capitals that have been automatically compacted by a word processor.² Fake small caps look terrible, and Clark himself points this out in his piece (as well as elsewhere on his site). It is thus at least a little ironic that Clark’s recommended solution to the problem of setting acronyms involves making your own fake small caps and then setting them properly spaced: “What works nicely, though? Knock the size down a point, add a few units of tracking, and equalize spacing.”

¹ Since I started writing this post, Gruber has also linked to a piece that treats the ersatz anti-bourgeois sentiment of Clark’s second point more directly. (I describe this attitude as ersatz because, honestly, it is hilarious to consider the mere prospect of an anti-bourgeois opinion about typography.)
² On this matter, Bringhurst says “Any good set of small caps is designed as such from the ground up. Thickening, shrinking, and squashing the full caps with digital modification routines will only produce a parody.”

Last week I received a greeting card that arrived mutilated and wrapped in a protective plastic bag.¹ The card itself was delightful, but the copy on the bag (pictured below) exhibited the sort of linguistic and rhetorical infelicity usually only found in instruction manuals for discount electronics or in White House press briefings.

We’ve always had great mail carriers, and I am not blaming any of our local postal workers for the shredded card, which was an isolated accident, or for the scattershot collation of words and punctuation on the USPS damaged-mail bag, which they are surely powerless to correct. But the copy is truly execrable, even by the standards of evasive bureaucratic prose.

Note especially the abject misuse of prepositions, odd turns of phrase,² the sentence fragment, the alternately unctuous and passive-aggressive tone, and the final implication that my post office strives to eliminate not the incidence of damaged letters, but the damaged letters themselves. Indeed, I was left wondering whether this explanation would have read any better in its original language.

¹ That gum you like is going to come back in style.
² In particular, “loose in the mails” sounds like it might refer to a common intestinal ailment of Elizabethan England.

I bought myself a fast medium-telephoto prime this year, and got it roughly in the “early Christmas present” timeframe. As it turns out, I was able to use this lens to capture an image of Thomas examining a far more exciting gift that our family received on Christmas Day:

Margrethe Ruth (aka “Maggie”) was born at 12:50 PM on Christmas Day. We are delighted to have another birth to commemorate on this day and thankful for a healthy mother, a healthy child, and a complication-free birth — indeed, one whose apparent effortlessness amazed several trained, impartial observers. (There are some more photos of Maggie on flickr — and yes, I did use a Bogen tabletop tripod as an impromptu hospital-room strobe stand.)

We didn’t expect Maggie to arrive on Christmas, so there were a couple of things we hadn’t planned for surrounding the day. We were glad to hear part of Schütz’s excellent Christmas Vespers on the Sirius classical station on the way to the hospital; a chance to hear early Baroque concert music is always a welcome surprise, and I especially love Schütz. On the other hand, I was rather less enthusiastic about the utter impossibility of finding some place to order a burger after Maggie was born.

Happy Christmas, all.

Kottke links to this NYT article about a “stooper” named Jesus Leonardo who makes a living cashing in winning off-track betting slips that others have mistakenly discarded. It’s a charming story, and the genesis of Leonardo’s stooping — which began when he grew frantic when the result of a race changed after he had thrown away a wager ticket — is ripped from comedy cliché:

“[The manager] said there was nothing she could do about [my discarded ticket],” Mr. Leonardo said. “I was so upset, almost in tears. Finally, she said, ‘Look, if you want to take the garbage home with you and look for your ticket, go right ahead.’”

He did. Although he did not locate his $900 jackpot, he found two other winners in the trash, worth a combined $2,000.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Leonardo, who had been supporting his family and his dream of writing songs by working odd jobs, including painting homes and cleaning windows. “I started thinking, there’s probably winning tickets thrown in the garbage every day.”

But as delightful as it is that he has found an unconventional means of supporting his family, there’s a problem with Leonardo’s story. By his own account, he works more than ten hours a day and makes about $45,000 a year. If we figure, conservatively, that a conventional employer would be paying him approximately 2/3 of his total compensation in salary, then that corresponds to a job with about a $30,000 annual salary. (Let’s not consider whether or not he would be able to obtain equivalent benefits that a larger employer would for the same amount of money.) Furthermore, Leonardo claims that he reports his income to the I.R.S.; since he is self-employed, he is responsible for the entirety of his FICA contributions (were he employed by someone else, they would be paying half of his Social Security and Medicare taxes).

It is remarkable that Leonardo had the cleverness to discover his job and to streamline the process to improve his yields, and I don’t want to diminish that his is a great story of entrepreneurship. But given the parameters above — the long hours, the total compensation equivalent to a conventional job with a roughly $30,000 pre-tax annual salary, and the increased tax liability of being self-employed — one wonders if he wouldn’t have been better off working in retail for a few years (a $10/hour salesperson job translates to about $21,000 pre-tax annually) and then working his way up to a supervisory or management role, where the salaries are greater and the total compensation is likely worth more than 1/2 of the pre-tax salary.

It is certainly possible to work one’s way up from an unskilled salesperson position to a management role — I saw several motivated people do it when I worked retail in high school and college. Like Mr. Leonardo, retail managers work long hours. Unlike Mr. Leonardo, though, they also get paid vacation and sick time. In addition, I suspect that a rather small percentage of a retail manager’s typical day is spent rooting through trash and scanning crumpled sheets of paper.

I think I may have uncovered the point at which “shallow depth-of-field” becomes “too shallow depth-of-field.” Yow.

I found this personal computing polemic in the Guardian mostly forgettable, but the following quote really captures what I can’t stand about Windows:

It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981.

The only thing missing, of course, is the portrait of Stalin. That, and the nostalgia: some people actually claim to miss the trappings of totalitarian communism. But it’s one thing to hoard Vita-Cola; no one is so depraved as to pine for Windows 98.

Here’s a claim chowder–worthy real-time NFL draft reaction (alas, from yours truly):

Last night, I received my preordered copy of Star Trek on Blu-ray. I noticed that this disc included a “digital copy,” which is some code to activate a DRM-enfeebled file that you can install on your computer. I’ve never owned a disc with this feature, and it has always struck me as mildly bogus. Upon seeing it on the disc box, though, I thought it seemed like a nice convenience — after all, we don’t have a portable Blu-ray player, but we do have portable computers. Then I got to the fine print.

Of course, you’ll need to activate the “digital copy,” and you can only do this once (although, if you link it to an iTunes account, you can play it back on any computer that is authorized for that account). Apparently, the digital copy cannot be activated after November 10, 2010 (that’s 51 weeks after the release date of the disc). So buy now, kids! In addition, an all-caps, condensed barrage of text informs me that:

THE DIGITAL COPY CONTAINS A COPY OF THE MOTION PICTURE ONLY, WITHOUT DVD SPECIAL FEATURES, IN STANDARD DEFINITION FORMAT WITH ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRACK IN STEREO ONLY AND IS NOT CLOSED-CAPTIONED OR SUBTITLED.

What a convenience, indeed! If you’re willing to overlook the minor omissions of the digital copy: namely, special features, 3/4 of the resolution on the Blu-ray disc, four audio channels, any concessions to the hearing- (or volume-) impaired, and the flexibility to install it a year from the date of release, then it’s quite a deal. In fact, the only glaring shortcoming of the digital copy is that it doesn’t include a spring-loaded boxing glove with which to punch the viewer in the groin immediately upon installation.

So A and I are preregistering for the upcoming birth of our daughter (pictured, sort of, here). The hospital’s preregistration wizard asks, as the very first question, if the registration is for a maternity visit, and it fills in some later values based on this choice. You’d think that they’d omit the worker’s compensation section from hospital visits related to giving birth, but since they didn’t, you can see some mildly amusing double entendres, none of which apply to us:

“Please give a brief description of where and how this accident happened,” for example.

I’ve had an iPhone for about 16 months now, and I’m pretty happy with every aspect of it that has nothing to do with the wireless carrier. However, some minor complaints are inevitable even in such a well-designed device. Consider, for example, the user interface displayed upon receiving a call. When the phone is asleep, the incoming-call UI looks like this:

To answer the call, you drag the green box from the left side of the phone to the right, just as you would do ordinarily to activate the phone’s screen. However, if your phone is awake — maybe you’re using it when someone called, or you recently put it in your pocket without explicitly putting it to sleep — the interface is different:

Now, years of computer use have conditioned most people to expect the affirmative option on the right in graphical interfaces. But even a few days of iPhone use are sufficient to condition one to drag from left-to-right in order to wake the phone or answer a call. I wonder how often one has send one’s wife straight to voicemail before one develops the necessary reflexes for the more-complex behavior demanded by this pair of interfaces.

I’m indebted to Alan Jacobs for bringing the Letters of Note blog to my attention. This letter in particular, in which a young Australian boy presents his plan for a rocket with “AUSTRALIAN MARKINGS” “to a top scientist,” is thoroughly delightful in its utter catholicity — I suspect almost any boy has made similar plans at some point.