free variable

Thanks, sweetie.

Many media accounts of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s recent death have rightly emphasized his remarkable literary output and his courageous opposition to one of the most tyrannical regimes the world has ever seen. However, I’ve not yet seen one that has mentioned that Solzhenitsyn also survived Stage II testicular cancer under Soviet medicine in an era when such a diagnosis was a death sentence even in the best hospitals of the free world.

You might enjoy “A World Split Apart”, Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address. May his memory be eternal.

The Green Bay Packers, no longer able to keep newly-unretired quarterback Brett Favre from reporting for training camp, have issued a statement about Favre and their intentions for him. The release is not kind to the quarterback and looks to me like a transparently craven attempt to maintain some trade value for a disgruntled player, but one image stands out in a morass of clumsy public-relations cant:

As a result of his decision, we invested considerably in a new and different future without Brett and we were obviously moving in that direction. That’s why this wasn’t easy. Having crossed the Rubicon once when Brett decided to retire, it’s very difficult to reorient our plans and cross it again in the opposite direction - but we’ll put this to our advantage.

One wonders where Packers president Mark Murphy acquired his cultural literacy. The entire point of crossing the Rubicon is that one can’t cross back. (Perhaps, after Murphy is done playing in the Rubicon, he will re-tie the Gordian knot.)

Whether or not the management team of an American football franchise were aware of the provenance and implications of the Rubicon idiom, it seems unlikely that comparing themselves to Caesar is rhetorically wise. Very few press releases imply that the writers will be hailed as victors in the near-term but establish a dictatorship and then be brutally murdered by former allies.

Ack

I recommend to everyone — but especially to my friends finishing dissertations, and doubly especially to those in Computer Science — Olin Shivers’ amazing acknowledgments section from the scsh manual, which I first encountered as a young Scheme nerd a long time ago. (Philip Greenspun’s gloss on Prof. Shivers’ acknowledgments is pretty delightful as well; scroll ahead to the second block quotation and prepare to be amazed.)

Irrationality

Speaking of acknowledgments, I make brief and jocular reference to the “preface paradox” in the draft preface of my dissertation. This is one of my favorite paradoxes (originally due to David C. Makinson). The basic idea is that a writer believes every individual claim in a manuscript is true (or else he or she would not have committed them to paper); however, some writers claim that their work inevitably will be found to contain some errors. As a consequence, writers are in the curious position of believing the conjunction of every claim in a book and believing the negation of the conjunction of every claim in a book. Whether or not this is irrational is — I guess — an open question with a few plausible solutions.

According to Gina Trapani, writing for Lifehacker, Ubuntu honcho Mark Shuttleworth is interested in improving the Linux desktop experience:

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he’s out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years.

Trapani then asks whether or not a “better-looking” Linux would motivate switchers:

Everyone loves eye candy on their desktop — Apple’s record-setting Mac sales can attest to that — but is looks is the main hurdle for Linux adoption amongst Normals?

This is notable, since it exemplifies a pervasive way to completely miss the point. People don’t use Apple’s computers because they’re pretty or feature “eye candy.” People use Apple’s computers because they work well. Design is not about how something looks; design is about how something works.

Read the rest of this entry »

I caught this breezy, entertaining story about the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album on All Things Considered last night. That baby is 17 now, which — as reporter Chana Jaffe-Walt helpfully points out — makes me very old.

I almost feel bad for the kid — whose real name is Spencer Elden — because his over-the-top teenage ennui is permanently captured in the NPR archives. It doesn’t help that Jaffe-Walt assumes a near-mockumentary tone throughout the whole piece. It really doesn’t help that Elden is nostalgic for an era that he never knew and calculatedly overwrought about it to the point of self-parody:

These days, Elden says, his peers concentrate on “playing Rock Band on Xbox, like, that’s not a real band! That’s the difference between the ’90s and kids nowadays; kids in the ’90s would actually go out and make a [real] band!”

But overall, life is good, he says. When he’s not being repressed by video games and computers, Elden blasts music — mostly techno — and carries around a big bag of angst, mostly around the fact that he is “so over” high school.

“Same people, same teachers … going to your locker, worrying about stupid girls … I wanna get something going, I wanna travel,” he says.

Andrea points out that if Elden is disappointed by doing the same thing every day, he is likely to be unimpressed with life after high school in its many forms. I was grateful that no one interviewed me on national radio when I was a teenager, but I’m mostly just impressed at how little things change: everyone wishes that they were a teenager at a different time, as if that is the precise circumstance that would make young adulthood more bearable.

You see, when Elden was being photographed in a swimming pool, I was a teenager. I think I had Nevermind on cassette. Elden is nostalgic for an idealized version of my adolescence!

I find his nostalgia wholly hilarious, since I spent an awful lot of time jumping through hoops in school, mired in tedium or trivia, and worrying about girls (some of whom, no doubt, were “stupid”). Most pointedly, when I was a teenager, I thought that everything (and especially “youth culture”) would have been better, more interesting, and more authentic had I only been seventeen years older.

Yes, my friends and I gathered our actual musical instruments and congregated in various formations in basements to make noise — but, had we access to Rock Band, we sure as hell would have played it, too. I know this because what we had instead was Jeopardy! on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which involved typing in responses (in the form of a question) with a joypad — and we played that by choice.

Instead of posting angsty rants on MySpace, we published them at Kinko’s. When I was a teenage “independent publisher,” I often spent more than half of my after-school income making photocopies. Now I spend a few dollars a month on web hosting and don’t lose money or irritate friends if I don’t accurately estimate my readership numbers every time I write something new.

When I wished that I had been a teenager a short generation earlier, part of the appeal was the prospect of being able to hear punk rock bands like the Sex Pistols or the Clash while they were still young and relevant, still performing, or still alive, depending on the group. In the Sex Pistols’ 1976 song “Anarchy in the U.K.,” Johnny Rotten snarls “I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.” I can think of no better single-sentence summary of the mindset of teenage angst.

I suppose this is why the Core Animation book I pre-ordered from Amazon in March remains unshipped a week after its expected release date and why Amazon sent me a panicked “we have no idea when this will ship — do you still want it?” message.

In cheerier Pragmatic Programmers news, I watched some of their Erlang screencasts on a recent plane trip and am glad to endorse them. They’re certainly not a substitute for Armstrong’s excellent Erlang book, but they’re a nice taste of some very cool features of the language. I learned of these via DF, whose one-sentence summary of Pragmatic’s products hits everything I love and loathe about them. (Seriously, Bookman makes my skin crawl, and it’s only the beginning.)

(Confidential to readers who appreciate the idea of evaluating technical books on both content and typography: have I got a treat for you, and soon!)

This ersatz lomography technique seems like a good way to liven up a sort-of-boring photo of an interesting subject. Here’s this photo “before” and “after.”

I’ve just received an advance copy of K. Mooch’s eagerly anticipated Time-out for Contingency (first mentioned here); I’m glad to be able to share this delightful excerpt with you:

In subsequent pages — which I do not reproduce here for reasons of space and copyright — Daddy demonstrates that, even given a transitive reachability relation between possible worlds, assuming the possible permissibility of placing one’s feet on the table introduces a contradiction. My full review is still pending, but I am already sure that this book will quickly come to be regarded as the Iliad of Kripke-inspired children’s fiction.

Pioneering sound designer and electronic musician Delia Derbyshire apparently had a stash of hundreds of unreleased recordings in her attic when she died in 2001; their existence became public knowledge this week. The one that will probably get the most nerd attention is this glitchy excerpt, which Paul Hartnoll describes by saying that it “could be coming out next week on Warp Records.”

I think Hartnoll is only slightly hyperbolic with “next week”, but seriously, listen to that short track. Does it sound like it’s 40 years old, or does it sound like Artificial Intelligence? It could easily be early Autechre or pre-RDJ Aphex Twin.

Think about the pop-culture climate of the day: #1 pop songs in the late 1960s included such innovative, groundbreaking compositions as “Hello, I Love You” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Consider also that Derbyshire wasn’t using synthesizers: just manipulated sounds (from tape), electronic oscillators, and various filters and signal modulators. The article quotes Hartnoll again, regarding Derbyshire’s retirement from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: “I think she got a bit disheartened and a bit bored with it all when the synthesizer came along and it all became a little too easy.”

Pretty much.

RIYL: electronic lapels, Stockhausen on AFX and vice versa. If electronic oscillators and musique concrète are too modern for you, why not build a cornemuse?

We have been quite happy with our most recent car, a Pontiac Vibe (aka “Toyota Matrix”). It gets reasonable mileage; comfortably seats two adults, a dog, and a toddler (along with all of the attendant stuff); and has been painless to maintain. One of the best things about the Vibe, though, is that it is a remarkably well-designed car. Here I refer not only to the main user interface—which places necessary functionality within reach of the driver, labeled unambiguously—but also to the layout of the car’s interior.

The only design complaint I have with the Vibe relates to the headlights, which turn on automatically at dusk. (They can also be turned on manually.) This seems to me to be a worse design choice than either obvious alternative: namely, all-manual headlamp adjustment or always-on headlamps (perhaps with a “manual off” option).¹ I think this is the case because it tries to be too clever and fails.

The situations that demand headlamp use are fairly common, including darkness, overcast weather, and precipitation. By contrast, situations that contraindicate headlamp use are rarer: very dense fog comes to mind, but I can’t think of many others.² In a car with always-on headlamps, one only has to worry about the rare case: how to disable the headlamps when their use makes the situation worse. In a car with fully-manual headlamps, one only has to worry about the common case. (In practice, I’ve found quickly develop a reflex to turn the lamps on and off with ignition when regularly operating such a vehicle, like our older car.³)

In a car with dusk-activated headlamps, one has to worry about both cases. The low-light sensor doesn’t trigger in most rain or snow (and the lamps don’t turn on with the windshield wipers, which might also be sensible), so the headlamps are effectively manual in this case. (This also holds more generally; conditions outside might well be dim enough so that one would prefer headlamps, but not dim enough to activate the automatic lamps.) Because the times when manual intervention is necessary crop up arbitrarily, what should be a reflex instead becomes an attention-demanding, multi-step process.

Worse still, it isn’t possible to turn off the Vibe’s headlamps if the car believes that they should be on. Instead of providing an intuitive, manual solution that inspires habit and reflex or an automatic solution that requires zero effort at all in the overwhelmingly common case, the Vibe headlamp design assumes that it knows better than you do when the headlamps should be on and offers no provision for overriding its advice. At least it isn’t also controlling my pod bay doors. By being too clever, this design is actually more user-hostile than two substantially “dumber” alternatives.

Of course, the don’t be too clever principle isn’t merely confined to automatic headlamps. Countless designs fail spectacularly because the designer has incorrectly assumed that there is only one reasonable way to expect the product to behave or to interact with it. (Note that correctly assuming that there is only one reasonable way to interact with something is one of the hallmarks of excellent design — and perhaps the hardest to get right!) At least in the case of the Vibe, I can put a small card over the light sensor (which is on the dash) and get my always-on headlamps. There’s no such luck when some web application capriciously disables my “Back” button.

POSTSCRIPT: Apparently, the 2008 Vibe features always-on headlamps. I guess you can’t please everyone, since the internets are full of people complaining about this feature and asking how to disable it.

¹ I’m not alone in this concern; it seems that many people are interested in disabling the automatic lamp functionality.

² Perhaps some situations that might arise in the commission of practical jokes, espionage, or crimes—in which stealthy vehicle operation is at a premium—count, but I imagine that these aren’t on the radar in the design meeting.

³ I discovered that I’d lost this reflex—unfortunately, only the “turn the lamp off” part—when going back to the older car after a few months with the Vibe. Thank goodness for AAA.

The Canon Canonet GIII QL17 is a classic rangefinder from 1972. It was designed to use mercury batteries that are now unavailable in the U.S.¹; substituting contemporary batteries results in metering errors that change over the life of the battery, according to Wikipedia:

The lightmeter uses a PX625 mercury battery, which is now discontinued. The alkaline version can be used, but the different electric tension, different discharge curve, and absence of electronic compensation circuit, induce a defective exposure metering, between a 1.5-f-stop at the beginning of the life of the alkaline battery, and a 1.5-f-stop underexposure [at] the end.

At first glance, it seems absurd, or at least quaint, that someone would put up with inconsistent exposures and the absence of modern amenities in order to use this camera in 2008. (And people do make a lot of nice pictures with the Canonet even today.) However, when one considers all of the crap that people have to put up with to use a 2007-vintage, $10k Leica M8 digital rangefinder, worrying about a stop or two here and there suddenly doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

¹ This decades-old restriction on mercury batteries looks awfully prescient now, since we’ll need to ensure a ready supply of mercury for light bulbs in the next decade. Good show, lawmakers!