Strong evidence that I should work there someday
Google, that is.
Archive for January, 2006
Just because you read it in a book?
There are people, including my wife and me, who think an entertaining vacation must include a day or two of driving out into a desert in a rented sedan, following a hand-drawn track on a sketchy mimeographed map, bumping along washed-out logging roads and beside precipitous drops—to stare at the ground and pick crap up and take it home with us. Rocks, fossils,mainly. Most times we manage to find the place, and park the car in the middle of the exactly-car-sized dirt road, and set to. Stare at the ground, put some stuff in our pockets, and head back to the hotel before search parties are required.
Now, we are pure amateurs. Our enjoyment comes from no driving need to discover Important Things, nor from avarice, nor EXXXtreme Thrill-seeking[!]. What we are in fact seeking in our travels is the density of the world. We search for the unremarked, the fraught.
To walk, for example, in the noonday sun along the edge of a ranch fence in the Mojave Desert, just 500 yards from both a high-traffic Interstate and a disused railroad track, and in twenty minutes fill a box with snowflake obsidian: Who knew it was there? Arguably almost nobody.
To drive five miles along muddy ranch roads (yes, with permission) on Sandra Day O’Connor’s childhood stomping grounds to reach a public pasture of a park where you can pick among the cow pies for fire agates: Who knew it was there? Almost nobody.
To park at a fishing stream in a state park in Ohio, and trudge a few hundred yards up towards the dam, and there face a rock wall where any easily-grabbed handful of the soft clay seam will contain hundreds of perfect casts of brachiopods, trilobites, bryozoa. And there to drop a perfect brachiopod, one of your prizes, and have it crack open on a rock and discover that inside the cast of the shell are a million shining calcite crystals? Who knew those Ordovician fossils were also geodes, little caches of antique light?
And more specifically, who knew about that particular obsidian, that particular fire agate, those particular brachiopods? Nobody at all. They were in the ground ’til we found them. And also right there in plain sight. Unremarked.
Interestingly, we do not display these wonders. We tend to leave them in boxes, often in the same wrapper we used to pick them up. As if the exotic Piggly Wiggly bag is an annotation of the time and place, nearly as important as the stuff itself.1 You might think that’s weird.
What we collect is not specimens, but their implications, their connotations. We do not aim at completeness; there is no such thing. Indeed, the point is to capture a fragment the illimitable. The junk in our boxes is not there as a scrapbook of nostalgic memories; they’re pieces of little-known dense contexts.
They’re esoterica. The object itself is less important than its chain of meaning.
And so it is also with books—using the term very generally. We have many, many books (though we’re trying to cut down a bit). We’ve specialized. For the last five years or so, we’ve essentially stopped buying new books entirely, except for programming books and the usual interesting stuff at book sales (that’s cutting, trust me).
Instead, now we are surrounded (alarmingly, in fact) with old books. Which, you will ask? The classics? The canon? First Editions? Pay attention much? Scroll up, and re-read, and come back here when you get it.
What we have here are about 4000 books of (1) Privately Printed kookery, (2) cheap pirated volumes translated badly from the European originals, (3) bound magazines, and (4) lots of other things lost like that. Books that exist in fewer than 1000 copies. Books that have never been checked out of the libraries where they were housed. The ubiquitous, but rare: the unremarked.
By weight and volume, the thing we have most of is magazines. There were a lot of magazines published in the last 150 years. Not just your common staples like Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s, Munsey’s, Scribner’s and Graham’s, but also your more exotic Arena, Mother Earth, Magazine for Mothers, and Unpopular Review. We have a few examples of many (like The Radical), and many volumes of some (say, The Knickerbocker).
Right next to my left foot is a shopping bag with four volumes I picked up at John King the other day. Three bound six-month volumes of the Eclectic Magazine, and one interesting bound volume of Chapman’s Magazine. In the latter are works by Robert W. Chambers, and Joel Chandler Harris, and folks like that.
And mixed in among the authors you recognize are twice as many pieces by those you won’t. Articles and stories and poems by people the editors considered to be worthwhile contributors, some of the world’s best (established or new) thinkers, authors, theologians, politicians.
And when you read all that work, you must be struck by its similarity to the Famous Authors interleaved. Editors were not fools: they tended to pay for work of a certain quality and voice. Right next to Washington Irving’s amusing but lyrical travel piece, you will find some other author’s amusing but lyrical biography. Serialized novels in one magazine might include chapters of Dickens or Holmes, but in the same issues a novel of similar quality by a now-forgotten “lesser” author.
Who knew all this treasure was in there? Nobody, apparently. When it comes to some of the scarcer magazines, the only reference to the volumes you will find will be a library card catalog or a bookseller’s price list.
By way of Danny Yee, I have just been reading an Inside Higher Ed piece on Franco Moretti. And there’s the ongoing seminar/event at the Valve. I am reminded of the Genre Evolution project here at the University of Michigan.
But it’s all about the books. Not the magazines.
So this is me drawing a map to the abandoned mines, for you historians and literary types: Go to the magazines. For every piece of classic and important writing you know from books—the stuff that’s been vetted and culled and revised and reprinted over many decades—there are five or ten or a hundred times more pieces that fell by the wayside. They never made it out of the original magazines.
So, 19th-C literary scholars: have you read The Quod Correspondence? Me, I have it right here.
I am still reading the Valve seminar myself, and have not yet got my copy of Moretti, but I still think this is the lesson you should glean from Moretti’s work, and related work like the Genre Evolution project: The process of selection is inherently random. Contemporary readers read the whole magazine through, didn’t they? They read their Chambers, and their Machen, and their Irving, and their Holmes, and their Dickens; and they read the other people, the ones you never heard of. These “lesser” (meaning “lesser-known”, not “worse”) authors were presented in their first publications as peers of the greats you know.
How did they become “lesser”? You think it was because of quality? Quality when: then, or now? Whose standards will you use?
Maybe it’s time to take a little trip along the lesser-traveled roads. It will be bumpy, and perhaps a bit thrilling. But I can tell you a place to find some wonderful things. Who knew they were there?
Well, we do here. And I suspect the authors themselves did, too. Because they would have read one another’s work in the magazines.. Not in books. Though you do.
1 When I was 5 years old, my family traveled to Hawaii. A few years ago, in sorting out my father’s effects after he died, we came across a handkerchief of his with something in it. Green Hawaiian sand, as it happens. Clearly, the handkerchief was as important as the sand.
Who are these people? Friends of yours? Now this really pisses me off to no end!
No way David Lo Pan would’ve lost The Ultimate Showdown. Unless maybe he did that thing with the big needle already.
Heaven for geeks of my age, via Heaneyland.
Left as an exercise for the student: Searching for solitaire
Simply put: What is Solitaire, and what are the best ones?
Every computer user knows at least one Solitaire game. You might prefer Klondike, or Canfield, or maybe one of the hundreds of lesser-known versions. Spend some time looking around, and familiarize yourself with the basic design pattern that represents “a solitaire game”.
What does it include?
- One or more decks of cards, perhaps with certain cards (Jokers, or low-value cards) removed.
- Two or more “stacks” in a tableau — generic positions where cards can be placed.
- Some rule for how to initialize the game: shuffling and initial placement. These involve what cards are face up, face down, whether they are known or hidden.
- A “round loop” that describes a set of one or more shifts of one or more substacks of cards between locations, possibly including moving some cards from the hidden undealt stack to a stack where they can be “used”. Allowed moves within a round may be governed by a complicated set of constraints involving position, suit, value, precedence and how many cards may be moved.
- A win condition, typically involving a particular state of cards being in particular order in particular stacks. For the purposes of this exercise (and possibly without loss of generality) the win condition may be taken as a single specific ordering of the entire set of cards in play, over the set of stacks.
[Did I miss much?]
So.
Limn the set of solitaire games. Present a formal, nonbrittle language in which any solitaire game may be written. By being nonbrittle, your language will allow random samples of the set of all feasible solitaire games to be made by simple aggregation (filling in words without the need for backtracking at any point), and will also allow one game to be transformed into another by local changes (substitution, deletion, swapping and insertion of words).
Bad solitaire, good solitaire. Present a suite of reasonable quantitative measures that will capture the complexity, difficulty, and entertainment value of any given solitaire game.
hint: Think about sudoku games. What makes a difficult game? What makes an entertaining game?
Transect sampling
Driving through southern Michigan and northwestern Ohio yesterday, having run through the last disc of Victorian Britain, I had to resort to the radio. Scan scan scan.
Near Detroit, this resulted in several Urban Contemporary (or whatever the genre is called these days) hits, quite a bit of talking about politics, some of the “only alternative” genre [when did "The Only New Music" come to imply "...That You Heard in 1995"?], a couple of Classical stations, one or two large-format Christian ones, a couple of “College” stations that are in fact national NPR affiliates, and one Old and one New Country station. Maybe a Latin one in there somewhere.
In Findlay, which is down south of Toledo, we have a very different mix: Classic Rock has appeared and come to dominate; the one or two College stations sound like college kids are running them; no Classical; no Latin; five or six Country stations of various denominations; Christianity as staticky rumbly witnessing, preaching and ranting, not as polished national networks.
Suppose you sampled the complete radio offerings along cross-country transect. Say the entire length of US 6. What you would do is record every channel a standard car radio could receive, full-time, continuously in time and space.
How would you measure the diversity of the results? How might that measure be distributed? What would you expect? What might surprise you? What patterns, in other words, would arise?
And to get back to my thoughts from around Findlay, Ohio yesterday: where along the path might you expect to hear modern American-style Country [what do they actually call the new music video stuff?] sung in a foreign language?
I found myself wanting to hear it in Arabic. Or Farsi. Or French, even. I find the music catchy and the lyrics cunning — containing some of the best of modern light verse — and not at all hackneyed if you try pay attention. The best candidate for export (since rap), in other words.
I await the multilingual result with interest. And I am curious to know where along my transect it will first appear.
How to provide medical benefits without raising taxes
My mom’s monthly generic prescription costs, as of October 1 2005: $11.
The same prescriptions, yesterday: $39
“The first generation of children…”
“… who will not outlive their parents.”
I am sitting here listening to this shite [such a useful word] on Michigan Radio. There is, I have just been told by an actual physician, an obesity emergency among the young people of our state. She is telling the interviewer in a serious and alarmed tone that children are dying over this horrible immoderation.
You know, it would be reasonable—and even frightening—if only I knew no history. Hyperbole like this does not grow more palatable as one gets older.
It just pisses you off more, until you get shrill.
If the doctor in question is being serious, then she ought to be sent back to get an actual undergraduate degree. Because obviously she wasn’t paying attention, neither in history class nor in statistics, nor epidemiology. Given the lower extremes of intellectual quality of the pre-med students I have encountered through the years, that would be unsurprising. But irregardless (as she might say), she shouldn’t be on the fuckin’ radio spouting such nonsense.
Even if it’s in the cause of a serious and real problem.
If on the other hand the doctor is using intentional exaggeration to drive home her point, then she ought to be made to read the exact same words from historical tracts, when they were applied the last times to childhood drinking, childhood tobacco use, childhood masturbation, childhood disobedience, and childhood in general: that the [large-scale geopolitical unit]’s children are worse now than ever before.
Yes, sure, we’re fat. Fat, rich people. Lazy ones, too. And many of us will die for reasons associated with that latter, I expect, rather than the former.
But regardless of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola’s sins, and the swelling tide of Liberal Temperance growing in this here Global Union of Democracy we’re infecting the world with: this is still one of the first generations of children who will, on average, outlive their parents.
I would like to take this moment to propose that there is a horrifying stupidity emergency among the nation’s physicians. They act and speak as if they were scientists, when in fact they are the shoddiest of mere engineers: they work primarily on hearsay and received wisdom, camouflaging their incessant cavalcade of gross mistakes and tacit compliance with marketeers under the guise of constant emergency and our imminent demise. I say that they should all be assigned a professional intellectual conscience, a constant companion who advises them not to make any decision or utterance that is not informed with direct experiment or real statistical evidence. No prescriptions without real, specific cause; no admonishments or blandishments without proof the hearer is a representative example from the clinical trial they’re invoking; no insistence on treatment without a detailed exposition on not only the risk of death, but the risk of unnaturally continued life.
They might, at least, learn to keep their mouths shut and let things run their natural course more often. And might even bring about less of the very morbidity that their ignorance encourages in their patients.
So, Doc, you think I’m painting with a broad brush? You think you’re more careful, more conscientious, more effective than I’m implying?
Talk to the lady on the radio.
To earn my bread, at last
The fact that it’s a new year really has little to do with this outburst, except that the new year has broken the back of the old year’s demanding schedule. It gives me a chance to visit things left by the wayside in the tumult that came before.
I’m here, again.
Regular visitors will know that I tend to riff on design and how I think it happens. I often chime in with head-shaking noises when people promote hackneyed visions of The Future With Software Agents, or Molecular Engineering, or operating systems, or planning. For well over 20 years I’ve been seeing and saying that the process of design—not merely of teapots and software and pharmaceutical lead compounds and seat cushions, but the deeper chain or practices and assumptions that binds science to engineering—is changing.
But not to something new. I realize today that what I really mean to say is more along the lines of, “Don’t be surprised when you wake up one morning and somebody you’ve been ignoring has eaten your lunch.” This is what I try to say to the University, to the software industry, to entrepreneurs, to manufacturers, to pharmaceutical designers, to programmers, to project managers, to conservationists and farmers, to lawyers, to basic researchers. Not that they’re wrong, but rather that their best-practices certification is about due to run out. I would rather say, and sometimes manage to mumble, a more nuanced refrain: “Everybody knows” that’s true, do they? Really? Every everybody?
And to save you the trouble of reading all the clap-trap I intend to set down, here’s the one real thing that I expect to be saying over and over again: We have to be more willing to build things before we understand them.
We already do build such things, surely. But in thinking and talking and teaching and legislating about them, we’re constrained by (among other things):
- the mythology of linearly separable reductionism
- the cultural divide between applied and theoretical science, and science and engineering, and modelers who depend on analytical forms vs. statistical ones
- the clash between legal and technical kinds of truth
- blinding specialization in science and engineering training, and inward-looking silos among practitioners
- modeling hubris, and the cult of mathematical tractability
- pedagogy recapitulates history
It’s come together for me, over the last few weeks. And now it’s time to write a little bit of it down. While I have a chance.
I hope to write a reasonably coherent mass of crap on the subject. Here’s the draft of the sections, which may vary as appropriate, and is in no special order:
- Information overload, the neurasthenia of our time
- All your singularities: Irrationality and the 2½th Culture
- What makes an “advanced” topic?
- Complexity is simple, complicated is hard
- Ways of seeing, and ways of making
- On the survival rate of plans, models, and their enemies
- Reliability, agility, flexibility, adaptability, robustness and opacity
- Indirect specification and ex post facto models
- How do you know when you’re done?
Always getting things backwards, am I
…our fatal tendency to set up something of our own
contriving in the place of nature.
In a half-sentence, the story of why I am in such a pickle, academically. Because as a biologist who wants biology to become engineering, and an engineer who wants engineering to become more like biology, I’m always contriving complex and inexplicable things. Or perhaps wishing people would try to contrive things they don’t understand. Which is the way nature does it: understanding ex post facto, if at all.
Yet backwards as that seems, it’s backwards like a fox. Or something.
Go read these, and the rest of Cosma’s reviews, and buy some books while I set to writin’ an’ cipherin’ on the subject.
Folklore survey: Pork and Sauerkraut?
New Year’s Day. It’s what you eat. Pork and sauerkraut, that is.
“For luck”, it is said. At least by strict tradition. In my family. And my wife’s family. And among many of the families in most of the places we’ve lived. Though predominantly those of Germanic—and Slovak—ancestry.
You?
Not the omen you were looking for
The loud thump and flutter, as you sit at the kitchen table a few hours before the New Year begins. The awkward appearance of a washed and tumble-dried young Cooper’s hawk, rising up from below like a ruffled muppet with a cold hand stuffed suddenly up his butt, perched teetering on the bird feeder about four feet from your chair.
His head-clearing cussing expression. His sharp amber eyes not quite focused on you. Or her head, her eyes.
He leans over, checking for onlookers, and asks through the pane, “What the hell is that window doing there? Fucker. You got mice? Birds in there? Well crap. Never mind. Why do I even bother?” Or maybe she.
And away we go. He. Or she.
What is one to do with such a paltry omen? I am holding out for an improved type: one of your better kind, with a jaguar spirit guide, or an interesting cloud that looks just like something important. Will even settle for a windblown carnival handbill catching on my legs, or an ominous (hear that, ants? ominous, not merely infestational) and inexplicable behavior among the ants. Perhaps a message—of the clear kind, not the ambiguous type one can see anywhere—in the residue of my cereal bowl.
We’re keeping the lines open until a suitable candidate comes along.
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