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”).

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.

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.

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.

Notes for photographers

There were a lot of fun challenges surrounding photographing this trip. Usually when I’m going out to take pictures, I can choose two or three lenses to shoot with for a couple of hours, but I needed to bring with everything I thought I might need for a week. I also am typically near a computer shortly after shooting and can check focus and exposure on a large screen. Since I didn’t bring a computer along, my experience was much closer to shooting film.

Lenses

I brought two zooms (a 10-22 and a 70-200), fast normal and telephoto primes, and a macro lens. (The latter is my go-to lens for photographing my kids these days, and I thought I might find some interesting textures to shoot. I wound up not using the macro lens or the tele prime at all.) Although I usually prefer using prime lenses, I shot with the two zooms almost exclusively. Partially this was a matter of where I could get interesting focal lengths, but it was very convenient to not have to drop my tackle to switch lenses on the boat.

If you’re packing photo gear for a similar trip, note that the two focal length ranges I brought along might not be the most versatile. In particular, 70mm on a crop sensor is probably too long to shoot a portrait of a boatmate, but 200mm isn’t long enough to fill the frame with a shy animal. (Fortunately, we encountered some quite brazen eagles.) The 10-22 is capable of extremely dramatic images, but most of its range is not useful for conventional portraits or the sorts of landscape pictures you’re likely to get from a boat. (It will capture a great deal of the starry night sky, though!)

I never felt like I couldn’t get a shot that I wanted because of my equipment, but if I had an unlimited budget and could only pack two lenses, I’d bring a slightly-wide to slightly-telephoto zoom (like a 24-70) for people, and a very long zoom like a 100-400 for wildlife. Either of these will also work well for certain kinds of landscape shots.

Bags and other equipment

Typically when I’m shooting close to home, I carry my gear in a Lowepro Slingshot that Andrea got me for our anniversary a couple of years ago. This is an excellent bag. It is convenient, comfortable, and well-organized, and it has one of the best user interfaces I’ve ever seen in a bag of any kind. Unfortunately, it won’t accommodate lenses much larger than the Canon 10-22 or 135/2.8.

Instead of carrying my Slingshot and a separate case for my zoom, which is possible but unwieldy, I brought a Lowepro Flipside backpack. The Flipside is a backpack that opens on the panel facing the wearer’s back. I suspect it is harder to lose gear from it as a result. I packed a camera with a long zoom, a pair of speedlites, accessories, and four other lenses and had room to spare. The Flipside also has a tripod holder that does an adequate but unremarkable job of hanging on to my small Manfrotto tripod.

I also brought along a Seal Line Baja 30 dry bag. This bag is just large enough so that the Flipside could fit snugly inside sans tripod. Fortunately, we had great weather almost every day and I never had to see how quickly I could isolate my gear.

Finally, this trip was the most hostile environment yet for my Luma Loop. This clever strap absolutely lives up to its considerable hype. If you ever use heavy lenses or need to have a camera accessible when you aren’t just taking pictures, you should check it out.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

I tacked a 15-mile detour onto my 3.5-mile commute home in honor of yesterday’s dailyshoot assignment ("Make a photo that represents your mode of transportation today.") You can tell by looking at the chainrings that my mode of transportation is probably sad that I primarily use it on roads and paved trails.

Click the photo for the flickr page with more sizes (I recommend the larger ones to see chain detail), metadata, and flash nerd info.

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?

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.

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!”

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.

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

Monona Bay (Madison, WI).

There’s a good post at the 37signals blog that details why it’s probably a bad idea for Stack Overflow to take VC (or, at least, why their stated reasons for taking VC don’t make sense), but it seems that the founders must already know that this is the case. In their blog post announcing the funding, the Stack Overflow gang describe it as follows:

So we created Stack Exchange to bring the technology behind Stack Overflow to a much wider variety of sites. We tried charging for Stack Exchange, and that didn’t work so well. So we asked ourselves, “How would the people of 1999 solve this problem?”

And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.

Indeed, this business model sort of made sense to me in 1999. Except then, “make the damn thing free” was called “release your core product as open source and run a consulting business,” and “Stack Exchange” was called “The ArsDigita Community System.” Of course, there are important differences: for example, ArsDigita was profitable. But for a lot of the 1999-vintage businesses that took funding without a plan for profitability, “get some VC somewhere to pay for it” didn’t end so well for anyone involved: founders, investors, or engineers.

(I’m not suggesting that Atwood and Spolsky’s actual business model is “coast on external funding until we can magically discern some way to become profitable.” But if you’re making flippant comparisons to the business climate of 1999, then serious comparisons to the business climate of 1999 should at least have occurred to you.)

Furthermore, a lot of bundles seemingly rely on aggregating a huge number of low-quality programs into one inexpensive package. If I had a decent program that I was hoping to license to end-users, I don’t know why I’d want to put it in a flea market of hyperspecialized, half-baked programs of dubious utility. (This tactic is also antithetical to the sensibilities of the stereotypical Mac user. Indeed, if I had wanted a lot of shovelware that I’d likely never use, I’d just have bought a Vista-ready notebook from Best Buy, since these typically include shovelware preinstalled gratis.)

The truly remarkable thing, though, is that the bundle promoters seem to be embracing this flea market mentality. Take a look at the following image, which I cropped from a bundle-sale web page that someone mentioned on Twitter this morning:

This image of n application icons crammed into a cardboard box doesn’t say “these are quality tools that you will find useful and valuable.” Instead, it says “this box of junk didn’t sell at the yard sale and the weekend is almost over. Don’t look too closely, but you can have it for $20.”

I saw yesterday’s dailyshoot.com assignment as I was making supper. It’s a good thing, because supper — jerk chicken, quinoa with cilantro and lime, and black and white beans — was by far my most photogenic meal yesterday.

Unfortunately, the first book I ever bought from Amazon is pretty embarrassing: on March 1, 1998, I bought a translation of Theodor Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. I had hoped that Adorno’s interpretation of Mahler’s oeuvre would prove useful for some research I was doing at the time. It did not.

(The first audio recording I bought from Amazon was this Norman/Boulez recording of Bluebeard’s Castle.)

What’s the first thing you bought from Amazon?

Last summer, I picked up Fretwork’s recording (Amazon link) of the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, a codex of secular songs published by Petrucci. I was pretty confident that it would be excellent, since I love the Franco-Flemish style and many of the composers represented in the codex in particular. This recording actually surpassed my high expectations on every meaningful dimension: performance, interpretation, and engineering. If you appreciate the works of composers like Josquin, Ockeghem, and Obrecht (or are interested in an unorthodox introduction to this style), then this is an easy buy, even as an undiscounted full-priced release.

A still easier buy is Fretwork’s “English Music for Viols” (Amazon link), which is a budget collection consisting of several reissued releases; my copy arrived earlier this week. Collectors of art music recordings know that “budget” can be applied both as a genuine description and as an ironic twist of marketing. In the case of this set, “budget” is almost an understatement, since this collection spans five discs and lists for $17. The performances are superb and recordings are clear and dynamic.

(If you’re not familiar with the historical styles represented above and are merely interested in some exposure to the viol, I expect that the English consort repertoire will prove less challenging to contemporary ears. Both recordings, however, will reward careful and casual listening alike.)

Two things always strike me about these kinds of arrangements: just how conventional the harmonies and voice-leading are in the best rock songs, and how much polyphony one can squeeze out of a single melodic line with occasional double-stops. Neither of these is a particularly new insight: after all, Duke Ellington’s songs have a great deal in common with Schubert lieder, and Bach wrote plenty of “polyphonic” music for solo violin. (I have even able to name-drop some of the latter while discussing concurrent programming.)

(Via 37signals.)

Just before the draft, we heard the most offensive job interview question we can imagine. Dez Bryant was asked if his mom was a prostitute.

Such a question is unbelievably gauche, but asking about the occupation of an applicant’s parents is out of bounds no matter what that occupation happens to be. (See question #14 here.) Could a player sue for employment discrimination if they were asked an improper question by team X and then fell past that team on draft day?

(Since he’s a football journalist and a labor attorney, one would assume that Mike Florio would have an opinion on this matter.)

I took this picture for Daily Shoot #161, which suggested making a photo with side lighting. The etched crystal worked pretty well. (Click on the photo for its flickr page, with links to larger versions.)

This line of questioning may only be hilarious to those of you who know us, but let’s just say that I regard the prospect of Andrea playing “World of Warcraft” and racking up massive credit card charges in the process as only slightly less likely than the prospect of her using the card to buy plutonium from the Libyans. (Although that’s too bad, since I understand that you can get triple reward points for all purchases of fissile material from state sponsors of terrorism.)

Consider salt, which has had a rough few months: first, it was the target of a bill in the New York State Assembly intending to outlaw its use by restaurants. Now the FDA has decided that we aren’t capable of reading nutrition-information labels and that they must change the public’s taste for salty foods by ratcheting down permissible salt levels in commercially-prepared food over time:

“This is a 10-year program,” one source said. “This is not rolling off a log. We’re talking about a comprehensive phase-down of a widely used ingredient. We’re talking about embedded tastes in a whole generation of people.”

(The linked article is also notable for mentioning that the “director for technical and regulatory affairs at the Salt Institute” is a man named Morton Satin, which is one of the best vocational aptonyms of all time. When it rains, it pours, I guess.)

The difference between this sort of decision — to change the tastes of a generation by bringing several industries under the gradually-tightening yoke of regulation — and most government actions conventionally considered to be “legislating morality” is one of essence, not of degree. In the latter case, by outlawing (for example) dogfighting or prostitution, government actions merely codify overwhelming public sentiment. In the case of salt (or related issues, like CAFE standards for cars or what sorts of light bulbs one should use), policymakers perceive their actions as necessary to override overwhelming public sentiment.

I’m sure this is simply a freak coincidence.

RIYL: Scarcity (in 2008)

Since 1984 hundreds or thousands of papers have been written about program slicing, but in reality it is almost never used. I believe the research in this area has been completely pointless. Probably hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, not to mention enormous amounts of the time of very smart people. This is criminal misuse of resources.

(One wonders what current trend in programming language research we will have come to regard as “completely pointless” in 2020 or 2030.)

If the video is too crummy, just close your eyes for a minute.

Unlike other cable networks and institutions that have commissioned putative documentaries and scholarship based on fringe speculation, EWTN depends on charity rather than on ratings. It is thus even more disappointing that they would resort to slandering a historical figure, especially when such slander is almost certainly intended as an ad hominem argument against Luther’s theology. On the other hand, one should regard fairness presenting in an EWTN-sponsored Luther documentary as only slightly less likely than al-Aqsa TV producing a Maimonedes biopic rich in nuance and affirmation.

(Of course, once the truth comes out — namely, that EWTN is controlled by the Templars and Illuminati and is exclusively devoted to suppressing the facts about the Babylonian and/or extraterrestrial origins of the Vatican — their ridiculous ideas about Luther will be absolutely discredited.)

I applaud this level of attention to detail, although I’m still waiting to see the movie until Cameron releases an ideal version for my preferred viewing scenario, and even Cameron’s arsenal of postproduction manipulations might be insufficiently powerful to create such a version. Specifically, the version I’m waiting for would feature a plot developed by competent adult screenwriters, rather than by a pack of misanthropic teenage syndicalists; this alternate plot could involve characters that weren’t merely irrational and one-dimensional bullseyes or fetishized noble savages. It would also be nice if this putative “plot version” of Avatar were available in a Papyrus-free edition, and on Blu-ray with a DTS 5.1 mix.

I seem to recall a time when people appearing to casually commit misdemeanors in broad daylight could notice me without instantly panicking. Apparently, that time has ended.

I just got an Orbis ring light. It’s pretty cool.

I’d like to focus this post on one person, though, and to share a brief memorial for Anne Moeller, who taught business and programming classes at my high school in Rockville, MD and who was willing to take a chance supervising an enthusiastic but green kid in an independent study term that wound up covering a lot of CS1 and CS2 material. She was energetic, extremely sharp, and did a great job of keeping me honest: if I started to get cocky after finishing a project quickly, she’d respond immediately with a much trickier problem. Over the course of that term, I learned a lot about inductively-defined data structures and perhaps even more about humility. (To the extent that I am able to use them, both skills have served me well since!)

We exchanged a few emails after I went to college, especially towards the end of my undergraduate career, when I decided that there might be something to this computing nonsense after all and wanted to thank her for the experience I’d had working with her. I didn’t send her a note when I finally finished my PhD, but I should have gotten in touch again when I had the chance; I just learned that Mrs. Moeller passed away suddenly last April.

Anne Moeller was a tireless and talented instructor who inspired, challenged, and amazed a generation of students. I’m thankful for her time, efforts, and encouragement, but most of all for her patience with a sixteen-year old kid’s tour around the outskirts of an absolutely fascinating discipline. May she rest in peace.

John Gruber links to Dave Pell’s “My Head is in the Cloud,” which is an amusing reflection on how Pell has abdicated his responsibility for remembering things like phone numbers and birthdays to services like Facebook and Twitter — and on how these services create the illusion that the information they have is exhaustive and all equally important.

I’ve thought about this in the past — most recently when considering my disappointment that my once-notable capacity for remembering birthdays is meaningless when everyone else uses Facebook. However, I suspect that this is as good a time as any to revisit Socrates’ indictment of writing as recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus, which I’ve jocularly referred to in the context of the TiVo’s deleterious effect on concentration:

And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

There are some things to like about social media websites like Facebook and the new memoryless regime that they have inaugurated. In particular, on each of my (irregular and infrequent) visits to Facebook, I appreciate the fact that I essentially have a virtual watercooler featuring both people I see every day and people I haven’t seen for twenty years; I also enjoy the facility with which one can (superficially) keep in touch with old friends who might otherwise be inaccessible (i.e. those who aren’t willing to sign up for their own flickr, twitter, and weblog accounts). However, I’m all too familiar with Pell’s observation that these information firehoses create the illusion that all data are equally important, overwhelming us with irrelevant trivia while leaving us to miss things we might care about because they aren’t represented in a reminder tab somewhere. I don’t believe that these services have turned me and my friends into “tiresome company,” but the notion of being “hearers of many things [who] will have learned nothing” strikes a little close to home.

I’m hoping to have better luck with a W. L. Fuller tapered drill and countersink, which I ordered from Amazon this morning. The Fuller bit costs about 1.5 times as much as the Ryobi one, but as long as it makes more than eighteen holes before catastrophic failure I’ll be happy with it.

I often pass a Savers department store on Madison’s west side. The Savers wordmark has always bothered me, but I haven’t thought carefully about why it has bothered me, because I’m usually driving and thus keeping my eyes on the road. I don’t really care for the aesthetic behind this kind of wordmark, but this weekend I realized what really bothers me is the execution. Specifically, it looks like this wordmark is based on a typeface designed to appear at much smaller sizes. Little details, like the tall “s” and “e” glyphs, could imperceptibly improve color in 9 pt body text but are unsubtle in a 500-pixel-wide logo (as above) and approach caricature in an 8-foot-high sign on the side of a store.

The two settings of “mixer” above are an example of the misused optical size phenomenon; both are set in Chaparral Pro at 168 pt, but the one on top is set in the version of Chaparral designed for captions and the one on bottom is set in the version of Chaparral designed for display use. At the same size, the caption version is almost a parody of the display version. These exaggerations wouldn’t be obvious in a footnote, but they are glaring at more than an inch and juxtaposed against the version designed for display sizes.

The problems with the Savers wordmark go beyond its execution, but it would be interesting to see how much it could be improved simply by starting from a more appropriate typeface.

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’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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In honor of last night’s overhyped but entertaining football-related spectacle, I thought it would be nice to revisit a classic episode in Great Moments In Idiom Misapplication by Sporting Persons. Actually, “brutally murdered by former allies” might apply here, but it would fit better if Jared Allen had started his career in Wisconsin.

I’m really enjoying Chase Jarvis’ awesome “Best Camera” application; it makes it a lot easier to exploit the lo-fi, toy camera aesthetic of the iPhone camera.

Kate Harding in Salon provides an uncompromising and polemical rebuttal to the current Polanski whitewash festival, including this digression on the nature of justice — a concept that is ignored by the legions of petition-happy celebrities:

[Justice] works on behalf of the people, in fact — the people whose laws in every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not — and at least in theory, does not — tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you’ve made.

The difference between what our society tolerates “in theory” and in practice, especially when celebrities of means are the unrepentant perpetrators (ahem), is one of the saddest indictments of the narrowly-targeted injustice that passes for “justice” in this country. One wonders whether the commentators tripping over one another to excuse Polanski’s apparent belief in droit de seigneur are also concerned about the fates of criminals who can’t afford to flee the law and live in luxury in countries without extradition treaties. I suppose poor people don’t make really great movies, but it is still shocking that none of Polanski’s defenders seem able to comprehend the horrific turpitude of his crime. Have any of these people ever had children? Have they ever been children?

I especially dig some of the microcopy on these tapes (e.g. “Use to record (SAVE) computer programs or data”), and am delighted by the reminder of an era in which it seemed that there might be perceptible differences between the products of competing consumer brands in the mass-produced analog media arena. (Although the various claims of high fidelity for tape manufacturers were almost surely nonsensical, it is interesting to recall that — within living memory — the perception of fidelity was still a selling point; it certainly isn’t so today.)

1. It sounds clearly better than previous CD pressings, but I can’t shake the suspicion that I could have done this myself with my old CDs and a multiband compressor. The album still enjoys a reasonable amount of dynamic range, though (at least to my ear, in a decidedly non-ideal listening environment).
2. Perhaps unsurprisingly, listening to the “White Album” front-to-back really makes me want to listen to the “Grey Album”.

http://foo.com/2009/09/article-slug

You’d have clicked there because you wanted some particular article, right? Well, there are an awful lot of values of foo for which the site administrator believes that he or she knows what’s best for you; these sites will redirect your request to a different URL:

http://m.foo.com/

And then your browser will render an enfeebled version of the foo.com home page, optimized for viewing on a tiny, tiny screen. It will not contain the content you’re looking for. In fact, it will offer no clue as to how to get to the content you’re looking for or — if you followed a shortened link (as is common on Twitter) — what that content actually was.

As just one example, if one were to click on the link in this tweet, one might expect to see a candidate for the worst sports article ever (indeed, the linked article must be in the top 25). One would not expect to see the “mobile” home page for the Orange County Register, which — beyond the ad for Tustin Toyota — is almost completely devoid of useful content.

I got this shirt when I worked at the Best Buy in Gaithersburg, MD at the time of the Windows 95 launch. I’m linking to it now in light of Microsoft’s comical offer to provide free copies of Windows 7 to people who host Windows 7 parties.

When Windows 95 came out, it was like Microsoft had just released a new Harry Potter book: there was mass excitement and there were midnight launch events at stores with special crossover branding. Windows 95 promised a “revolution.” Installing it would surely make you smarter, more attractive, and possibly also ambidextrous. Users couldn’t feed the 30+ floppies fast enough!

By contrast, the marketing plan for Windows 7 seems to be “emphasize that it couldn’t possibly suck as much as Vista.” But the prospect of Steve Ballmer showing up in a pink Cadillac is, to be fair, pretty amazing.

Leibovitz has apparently either missed or ignored the negative critical reaction to her woefully gauche “Romulus and Remus” photo for Lavazza. In any case, I am truly impressed by a photograph of two people as striking and attractive as Hamm and Jones that renders its subjects so flat, synthetic, and lifeless. Perhaps this was the aesthetic goal — to render the actors as if they were only apparently in the same place and soul-dead automata. But it is possible to make an evocative photograph that depicts a Mad Men actor in a way that both alludes to the events of the show and isn’t ugly.

UPDATE (9/6/2009): David Hobby calls this photograph “subtle and beautiful.” I genuinely regard this as an indictment of my photographic taste. Also, apparently Leibovitz didn’t even take that Lavazza photo herself. Yikes.

Gillespie, like almost every other commentator today, fails to mention a more obvious way in which Kennedy represents “a bridge back to the past,” albeit one without a guardrail. Kennedy managed to benefit from norms — seemingly anachronistic even forty years ago — that rendered appalling negligence and homicide legally excusable if the perpetrator was sufficiently wealthy and connected. This omission is understandable, since Kennedy’s supporters have long since absolved him and his detractors are surely incapable of hearing his name without recalling Mary Jo Kopechne whether the slain woman is explicitly mentioned or not. But Gillespie does mention another vastly underreported point: Kennedy was a key participant in the deregulation of the interstate trucking and airline industries, which have each had overwhelmingly positive consequences. Gillespie’s summary of these presents a kind and generous eulogy for the late senator:

Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator. But they are exactly the sort of legislation that we should be celebrating in his honor, and using as a model in today’s debates about health care, education, and virtually every aspect of government action.

¹ This really can’t be overemphasized, especially since the “social web” has made nearly everyone into a low-budget cable news pundit. (Fear not: I recognize the rich irony of throwing such stones from a weblog post.)

These ascribed dates were news to me, since I happen to recall that these particular documents were delivered to the UW Graduate School — with not insubstantial processing fees — on consecutive days in mid-December. So apparently it is faster to make a baby human than it is to put a PDF on the web.

(All kidding aside, it is exciting to see my document in the library databases. But the typography in the web edition is much better than in the official one!)

Today, John Gruber links to Real Networks’ announcement that they intend to ship an iPhone client for their Rhapsody music service; note that any concrete app that provides access to a music service probably violates Apple’s iPhone SDK terms in several ways. While I’m sure this announcement is great news for the eight or ten people who use Rhapsody, the interesting part is Gruber’s gloss on the link, in which he suggests that Apple will likely approve the app if it meets technical muster — even though the app probably violates the developer agreement — in order to avoid the appearance of anticompetitive behavior with regard to the iTunes music store.

If Gruber is right — and he certainly sounds plausible here — I wonder if there will become a de facto special class of iPhone applications during the review process: those that are potentially-controversial and well-publicized enough to require more careful examination or more flexible approval constraints. (Real probably assumes that this is already the case, or they wouldn’t be taking their case to the court of public opinion by pre-announcing this product before it is available.) Such a policy would certainly minimize Apple’s entanglements with irritable executive-branch agencies, but introducing yet more inconsistency and privileging some applications over others likely wouldn’t serve consumers or developers any better than the current policy.

Unless you’re a character in an Aaron Sorkin show, that’s just not how national politics work.

The whole post is, I think, pretty well done and worth reading, but the point that many vocal citizens are apparently living in the onanistic and reductive political fantasy world of The American President &c. is one that probably bears repeating as often as possible.

Civic snark

If you live in a monoculture or would like to develop sympathy for people whose views you find distasteful, here’s a great party game.

Here’s a story about “pyramid power” and public policy, in which I compare a goofy science-fair project to the grandiose reveries of bureaucrats. (After that science fair, I went on to get a PhD in a subfield of computer science that I don’t even bother explaining to lay people. As I understand it, the kid who did the “pyramid power” project is now drawing up health care policy for Congress.)

Watch out for the sinister Quaker conspiracy, which makes at least as much sense as other conspiracy theories. (See those in the comments here, and note that, by policy, the fact that I have not deleted comments does not imply my endorsement of their claims.)

Satire

I remain very happy with my series of capsule reviews of fake children’s books. If you must read only a few, see the first set, which introduced the Unhappy Okapi series; the review of Time-out for Contingency, which includes an excerpt; and this review of an “Otis the juvenile garbage truck” story collection, based on actual fake stories that I tell my son. (Note that a variety of flex-printed shirts and other products with Zoltan the jackdaw and Otis the garbage truck designs are available and make excellent gifts.)

Bad math and music

If you know me in real life, you’ve probably already heard the Bruckheimer signal-processing tirade. If not, read and enjoy.

If you’re going to talk about digital audio, please remember that it doesn’t make sense to compare pictures of apples to descriptions of apples.

Christianity

Here are a couple of posts on “Lutheran” abuses of language and music. (The pitiable With One Voice hymnal isn’t the only reason why I left the ELCA some time ago after a long period of increasing discontent, but it sure didn’t hurt.)

A significant subset of my writing about Christianity has been devoted to debunking the bizarre, armchair-anthropologist treatment of traditional Christianity in the mass media; here are a few such pieces:

1. If you have a television show, do me a favor and don’t bother attempting to depict Christian characters.
2. If you’re not even that good at being a football columnist, you probably don’t want to write about your criteria for a new Bishop of Rome.
3. If you’re Jacob Weisberg of Slate, please try a little harder to conceal your contempt.
4. Finally, if you’re the New York Times, no, you have not undermined orthodox Christianity; nice try, though. In fact, you probably aren’t even aware of your underlying fourth-century heresy.

In conclusion

Although it hardly counts as one of my favorite posts, I must include a link to the premier destination for baton-twirling scholarship information on the internet, as well as the aftermath.

Thanks for reading the site, and note that I am always happy to hear from my readers about what sorts of topics you look for here.