Videos I’d Like to See

By Evan — — Tech

Earlier this summer, the Google Chrome team produced a video where they went around asking regular citizens what a browser was. Turns out that about eight percent of the people know the answer, while the rest have no idea.

Cue mockery, laughter, sadness, feigned outrage, and even the occasional reasonable response.

I’ve never liked Jay Leno-style man-on-the-street video interviews; it’s easy to make regular people with no TV experience look bad. But one thing is clear: this video has legs, and the “8 percent” figure will probably be cited in blogs and articles and conferences for years to come. If this ends up driving home the point that hectoring ordinary people to “get a better browser” is a waste of time, then it’s hard to argue with the overall merit of the project. Remember kids: users do not change their defaults. That’s why it’s all about the Benjamins distribution deals.

Here is the video I would like to see. The scene: a succession of sleek Silicon Valley or NYC webdev offices filled (in no particular order) with beanbags, contemporary art, and twentysomethings with messenger bags. The questions:

  1. Why do we have seasons?
  2. Why is the sky blue?

Okay, I’ll admit that I’m cheating a little on Question #1, since I’ve already seen the famous 90s era video of new Harvard graduates flubbing that question. Unfortunately I can’t find that clip on YouTube or any other major video sites. Chalk this one up to the Vast Harvard Conspiracy (Truth Suppression Division).

As for Question #2, I only have my instinct to go on, but I suspect the results would be equally dismal. Note that we’re looking for layman-friendly answers here. References to Rayleigh scattering are admired but not required.

The Zen of Structured Data

By Evan — — Web

A disciple came to a temple to speak with a master ontologist.
“Master,” the disciple said, “teach me how to describe all existence!”

The master handed the disciple a pebble. “First, start by describing
this small stone.” The disciple went away and sat under a bridge by a
stream. For six days and nights he struggled to create a taxonomy for
the pebble. On the seventh day, he returned to the temple.

“Master,” the disciple said, “I have devised the perfect taxonomy for
this small stone.” He unrolled an entire scroll at the master’s feet,
covered on both sides with arcane markings, graphs, and code.

The master then struck the disciple on the head with a stick. The
disciple was then enlightened.

Perhaps today IS a good day to talk about Star Trek!

By Evan — — SF

Ok, enough waiting — if The Avocado thinks it’s time to jaw about Star Trek, by gum, it’s time.

  • Agreed with Timothy Burke, the movie was pretty goddamn excellent. Consistently exciting and usually very funny.
  • I was surprised and delighted that they left Old Spock alive at the end instead of killing him off. As Burke points out, having Old Spock in the universe creates all sorts of problems: he has foreknowledge of all kinds of threatening species and problems that the folks in the 23rd century didn’t know about, plus he’s a brilliant scientist from 130 years in the future. Frankly, I think these are excellent problems for a science fiction saga to have, and I only hope they don’t forget about these problems around the time movie #3 or #4 is ready to go.
  • Also, a big thank-you to the Star Trek scriptwriters for not destroying the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • The scene in the elevator between Spock and Uhura was excellent. I want to know more about Uhura, and why she would want to deal with the reality of dating Spock — as opposed to the abstract appeal of dating Spock that fandom has been chewing over for forty years.
  • Bad biology: The giant red worm/insect is awesome looking, but why is it red? And wouldn’t it freeze to death? And why go after Kirk, when it already has a substantial meal?
  • Bad engineering: What’s with the crazy system of pipes and water in the engineering room? Is this a shout-out to Galaxy Quest? “Why are there chompy-crushy things in here! There’s no reason we should have to run through chompy-crushy things! Who designed this? It makes no sense!”
  • Bad physics: I’m actually not too offended by the ridiculous black hole physics. Star Trek has consistently treated black holes as magical plot devices, so this is okay. (Though if the black hole was powerful enough to collapse a planet, why did they have to bother drilling to the core?)
  • Worse physics: A supernova that “threatened the galaxy?” Oo-kay. And did the supernova happen to Romulus’s star or a neighboring star? If the former, there would be no time to evacuate the planet. If the latter, you would have a few years to evacuate everybody. And what exactly a black hole would do to reverse / disperse a supernova?
  • Eye-gougingly bad physics: Look, transverse velocity exists, even when you are jumping from a magical flying dragon 23rd century shuttlecraft.
  • Loved the TOS sound effects.
  • It seems that modern SF franchises subscribe to the “the timeline wants to heal itself” philosophy of time travel. You can make massive changes — kill people, blow up Vulcan, even! — but incredibly unlikely events will conspire to land the entire TOS crew together anyway, in nearly the same state they were in the other timeline. See also the Terminator franchise, where you can’t kill John Connor’s mom because you’ll just end up spawning John Connor, and you can’t avert the apocalypse, you can only move it around in time.
  • Despite screaming “FIRE EVERYTHING!!!” with gusto, Nero was not, shall we say, the most interesting villain Star Trek has ever seen. I’m not sure we needed a great villain for a movie that’s basically about getting the band back together.
  • On the other hand: “Hi Christopher. I’m Nero.” Hehe!
  • If you can get Kirk and Spock on the Narada, why not transport a bunch of armed & armored Starfleet security guards as well? I’m pretty sure “Cupcake” and his buddies could have helped, at least. (In the Star Trek universe, if your enemy is able to transport soldiers over to your ship, you are usually in deep doo-doo.)
  • It’s interesting to compare the edited trailer dialogue to the lines in the full movie — usually the trailer’s dialogue wins. For example, Nero’s line in the trailer is, “James T. Kirk was a great man… but that was another life.” The full quote in the movie is wordier and not nearly as punchy.
  • Also, the trailers’ music is better than the movie’s music. Unfortunately, the trailer music is not for sale to the public at any price (I checked).
  • The final shot before opening credits (Nero’s ship crippled, a little trail of hopeful little shuttlecraft creeping away) is brilliant.
  • I want to know more about Future Iowa. What are those giant looming barely-visible buildings? What is that giant artificial gouge all about?

Sorry, My Amicus Briefs Only Work Against Chaotic Evil

By Evan — — Tech

Commenter Harry Lewis, on the Google Books settlement:

The proposed settlement includes a “most favored nation” provision. The parties agree that IF the Authors and Publishers ever come to terms with another party who is scanning books, Google has to get the same deal. That is an anti-competitive provision that will make it impossible for anyone else ever to underprice Google. If the Court adds its signature to the deal, it is sanctifying the creation of a monopoly.

Driven by despair, or perhaps fragile hope, my old classmate Sam Mikes responds with poetry:

The law condemns the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the common
but lets the greater villain loose
who steals the common from the goose.

One thing is clear: Brewster Kahle is going to need all the help he can get if he’s going to slug it out with Google. So what are our most prominent knights of the commons doing to assist us in our hour of need? I sauntered on over to Larry Lessig‘s place to see what he thought about the original settlement in October.

Oops, looks like Lessig’s in the tank.

Maybe the EFF… hmm, no. They’re a little more measured, but they don’t seem all fired up to go after Google either.

Being a Paladin of the law is tough work, I guess.

Time for Some Good Old-fashioned Embezzling

By Evan — — Miscellany

Today I received the following mail from Amazon:

Dear *****@goer.org,

Greetings from the Amazon Honor System.

We wanted to let you know that we have initiated transfer of the
balance of your Amazon Honor System account to your checking account.
It may take your bank several business days to record the transfer.

$1.40

Here is the receipt for the transfer:
------------------------------------------
Date: 07-Apr-2009
Amount: $1.40
Last Digits: ****
------------------------------------------

Your Amazon Honor System balance will be automatically transferred to
your checking account every 14 days. You may also transfer the funds to
your checking account manually if your account balance is at least $1.00.

To view your account summary at any time, visit:
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/fx-account/your-account

Thank you for participating in the Amazon Honor System.

Best regards,

Amazon.com Customer Service

At first, I was like, “whaa-a?” But then I remembered — oh yeah, the Amazon Honor System! It was all the rage six, seven, eight years back. Remember how all those warbloggers in late 2001 had these plaintive little buttons in their sidebars, “Hi, $username! Please donate to this blog!” (I was like, whoa, freaky! How is this blog talking to me?)

Well, all good things come to an end, and it looks like the payment system that helped launch the blogosphere as we know it — thanks Amazon! — is finally shutting down.

I had to scratch my head to remember why I was getting a notification from Amazon. I mean, I’m not a pathetic warblogger — I can actually afford to pay for my website my own damn self. But then I remembered… the infamous Save Ken Lay campaign of 2002! Against all odds, it turns out that people were not immune to Linda Lay’s heartfelt plea about her husband’s plight. These generous souls managed to scrape together a grand total of $1.40 to help Mr. and Mrs. Lay in their hour of need. I think we’ve all learned a lesson here: never underestimate the power of the Internet to help people come together and make the world just a little brighter.

Unfortunately, it appears the Lay family’s hour of need is long past. So I think I’ll be spending that money on beer instead.

Pop Quiz: Good Parenting

By Evan — — Personal

You are a software engineer with a wife and two young children. Your coworker “Evan” has invited you out for beers at The Faultline after work. The last two times you had to take a raincheck. This evening might actually work, except you’re supposed to get home early to play with the kids before bedtime.

Do you:

  • A) tell Evan that you can’t make it this week, but next week for sure
  • B) apologize to your family and promise to make up for it with extra play time at this weekend, cross your heart and hope to die
  • C) growl, “You kids gotta learn about the cold cruel world sometime!” and slam the door on the way out

Hint: there is a right answer!

Thank Gods for the iPhone App Store

By Evan — — Tech

Thanks to Jax Schumann, I just learned that there is now a Cylon Detector iPhone app available:

Friends. Family. Coworkers. Everyone around you has one thing in common: They might be a frakking cylon.

With the iPhone Cylon Detector, you will know the truth.

This is an outstanding development. Previously, the only known reliable methods for identifying Cylons were:

  • Dismantle a nuclear warhead and use the enriched radioactive material to construct a lab-sized Cylon detector.
  • Have sex with the Cylon and check to see if his or her spine lights up.

This iPhone thingy seems a lot easier.

Why “Never Let Me Go” is Boring As Hell

By Evan — — SF

Jen Pelland has read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and she is unimpressed:

I’ve made it to the halfway point, and I still have no idea why people are being raised as organ donors. Why? Because the book is both claustrophobic in its focus, and the POV character is disinterested in the world outside. The claustrophobia comes in the settings. Part 1 takes place entirely on the grounds of the boarding school, and Part 2 takes place (so far) strictly at the protagonist’s post-school home. We don’t get to see what’s happened to the rest of the world that’s made them so desperate for organs that they’ve turned people into cattle. And the POV character (and just about all the other students around her) are given opportunity after opportunity to ask questions, but they don’t. Worse, they then spend time privately mooning over why they didn’t think to ask that question that they really wanted to have answered. What do they do? They worry about grades, teachers, and sex.

Bo-ring!

This is supposed to be science fiction! You’re supposed to tell us all the cool stuff that’s happening in this crazy world you’ve invented!

I read Never Let Me Go a year back, and it bored me too — I barely finished it. That said, it seems unlikely that Ishiguro wrote Never Let Me Go specifically to piss off SF readers. The simpler explanation is: Ishiguro was trained to write in a genre that cares only about well-turned sentences and phrases, and doesn’t give a rip about plot or pacing. Therefore, the book is boring.

Also, keep in mind CLONING! and ORGAN HARVESTING!! are very very intrinsically exciting to someone who’s never bothered to read any of the thousands of SF stories that have already covered this ground. So it doesn’t occur to Ishiguro to go further — to him and his audience, these subjects are already very daring. We can deduct points for lack of curiosity and laziness, but I doubt we can chalk this up to malice.

Comparing Never Let Me Go to, say, The Road, the latter comes off far better. Like Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy hasn’t bothered to read any of the thousands of post-apocalyptic SF stories out there, and so he ends up writing a novel that doesn’t really tell an SF fan anything new about the apocalypse. But McCarthy at least has a plot — not a very fast-moving or complicated one, but at least there’s some there there. His characters actually do stuff. Even better, McCarthy does a fine job fleshing out his nasty post-apocalyptic world. We don’t find out how exactly the apocalypse happened, but we at least have a good sense of how this world works and how people try to live in it. So we at least get something readable, even if it makes us want to drop off a pile of books at McCarthy’s house with a note saying, “Please Read.”