Lesson Learned

By Evan — — Miscellany

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fancy-schmancy audiophile by any means. But I have concluded that even for my very very low standards for casual office music listening, $4.99 headphones do not cut the mustard.

Of course, once you get above the $15 range, headphones come with a dizzying array of specifications for impedance, noise cancellation, frequency response, you name it. I thought I left all that nonsense behind when I took my last systems engineering class.[1] Cutting through all the technobabble, the only real question about headphones is: do I want to look like a refugee from the 70s, or do I want to jam small plastic objects deep into my ear canal? Choices, choices.

BONUS Lesson Learned: Just because a book has time travel, and dinosaurs, and interplanetary warfare, and Martians does not mean that it will end up being any good.[3] My friend told me this before I borrowed the book, but I ignored his warning. Serves me right.

1. In retrospect, my parting words to the fine, hard working members of the Engineering department were ill-advised. Of course, I wasn’t serious; I mean, I don’t even have the power to damn someone’s progeny unto the seventh generation[2], and even if I did, it all seems excessive. Nowadays I’d say, second generation at best.

2. That authority rests with Pat Robertson.

3. Of course I’m sure there are people out there thinking, “A book with time travel, dinosaurs, interplanetary warfare, and Martians — that sounds like the dictionary definition of a horrible book!” Just another painful reminder to the rest of us: if you are in fact dead inside, you really can’t be helped.

Can We Please Get Some ‘Quality of Service’ Around Here?

By Evan — — Tech

Let me go on record to say that I agree with the telecoms that network neutrality should be abolished. After all, it isn’t AT&T‘s fault that the original architects of the Internet chose to design the Internet in a manner that prevents AT&T from maximizing its revenue and delivering increased shareholder value. Hell, AT&T fought the invention of the packet-switched network all the way. So, let’s cut them a break, eh?

First, the telecoms really do deserve to be able to extract more rent from Google and my employer and other ingrates who have figured out how to make large amounts of money using their precious infrastructure. ‘Cuz how fair is that? It’s like, I build a road for all kinds of people, and then you use that road to make a fortune in the lucrative asparagus-shipping market, and all you do is pay me a pittance for road maintenance. What a bastard you are! Of course the telecoms could try to extract this money directly, which would obviate the need to shell out all that extra cash to Washington lobbyists and PR firms and whatnot. But trust me, that money is well-spent. Just think how embarrassing it is to call up your top customers and say, “Look, I realize that you’re buying a lot of my stuff, and I realize that under ordinary circumstances this would mean you should get a bulk discount… but see, the thing is, I’d actually like to charge you a lot more than anyone else, because, well, you can afford it. Right? Guys?” Even a stone-cold telecom exec can’t stomach making that sales call. They pay telecom executives well, but not that well.

Second, the telecoms also face a deadly threat from their users. Current pricing models for DSL and cable assume that users only make occasional requests for bytes. The telecoms can “guarantee” a certain minimum download speed to all their customers because on average, no one customer is actually using anywhere near the bandwidth that the company agreed to deliver. That model was a swell idea a few years ago, but now things have gone crazy. Cray-ZEE! People are downloading giant video files! Listening to streaming audio! Watching streaming video! Playing MMORPGs! Joining peer-to-peer networks! Bandwidth usage is going, up, up, up. And the telecoms can’t just raise rates, because ordinary people tend to get really angry when you start charging them more for the same service, particularly when the service has historically always decreased in price.

So the only sensible solution is to enable the telecoms to filter out and degrade quality for certain websites as necessary, so that the telecoms can A) extract higher rates from wealthy businesses on the high end and B) stamp out bandwidth-sucking startups and other wastes-of-time on the low end. This requires abolishing the basic standards on which the Internet was founded, but hey, you gotta break some eggs to make them omelets. Well, okay, that’s not the only sensible solution. Sam has an alternative plan — he says, “Maybe they can charge the NSA for our phone records if they’re hard up for cash.” That’s my Sammy, always thinking outside the box!

That’s Not Gypsum You’re Smelling, That’s Brimstone!

By Evan — — Tech

Must I thus leave thee, Paradise? — thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades?

Platform Engineering’s fall from grace has been ignominious indeed. At the height of our powers, we had a commanding view of the campus from the top floor of Building A. Then they moved us down to the second floor of Building A. Then the second floor of Building B, Building A’s poor cousin. And finally, tomorrow we move across the street to the newly-reclaimed Building E. Somebody up there hates us.

A couple of weeks ago, several of us went on an exploratory mission to Building E. The place was gutted — walls stripped to the studs, pipes exposed, workers welding, the smell of gypsum everywhere. We trooped up the stairs to check out our floor. Ryan opened the stairwell door, looked out at our floor, closed the door, and said, “It’s raining in there.” We thought Ryan was kidding, but sure enough, water was streaming down from a ceiling pipe and pooling on the new carpet. The puddle was large enough to comfortably support several full-grown koi. As we gawked, a construction worker with no hard hat snapped at us, “This is a hard hat area.” Nothing to see here, move along…

Anyway, it could be worse — at least they didn’t shuffle us off to the satellite campus at Mission College. I mean, we’re not total losers.

You Don’t Need No Fancy Math or Nuthin’

By Evan — — Science

(Update: Peter Woit responds in comments, and is quite the gentleman. A textbook case of Internet Jiu-jitsu. Curses, foiled again!)

Over at Jacques Distler‘s place, a discussion is boiling over the trackback policy of arXiv.org. According to Jacques, arXiv’s current policy restricts trackbacks to the blogs of persons who are “active researchers”. This raises a couple of problems. First, the criterion of “active researchers” is slippery at best.

Second, a mathematician at Columbia named Peter Woit is upset because he is not on the approved trackbacks list. Woit is a vocal critic of string theory, and he has tangled with a number of high-energy physicists, including Jacques, over this issue. Physicist Chad Orzel had this to say:

When you get down to it, I’m with Sean Carroll on this: Peter Woit’s criticisms of string theory often border on the unhinged, but he’s not a complete crackpot. He has strong opinions, and expresses them strongly, but then, there are well-known and apparently respected string theorists who make Woit look like Miss Manners when it comes to interacting with those they don’t agree with. There’s no reasonable basis for banning Woit on the grounds of general jackassery.

The line between “gadfly” and “crackpot” is a fine one. And it raises the question: do we who are outside the field even have a chance of figuring out whether Woit is getting a fair shake? Just as an example, here’s an old discussion between Jacques and Peter (warning: acromonious math exchange). Amazing stuff, eh? I couldn’t have followed that even when I was at the top of my game — and certainly not now, when my physics knowledge has decayed back to early undergraduate levels. (Never mind physics, I can’t even remember the fundamentals of sed. Jesus.)

Now, you might think that given the rarified nature of the subject, we laypersons would have no way to determine who, if anyone, has crossed the line. Silly you! This is the Blogosphere! We can pass judgments about anyone and anything. It turns out that for this case, you don’t need any mathematics. Here’s Woit responding to one of the commenters at Chad Orzel’s site:

Aaron, Since I gather that your job depends on Jacques’s good will, you might want to consider that you have no credibility here arguing his side of this case.

Case closed! Crackpot and jackass.

On a more serious note, the arXiv folks are faced with these two unpleasant options:

  • Shut off trackbacks entirely. This would be an easy choice if trackbacks had devolved into uselessness, but according to Jacques, the great majority of the trackbacks arXiv receives actually are useful and informative.

  • Have some sort of trackback moderation policy. Which means playing into the hands of the conspiracy theorists. You can always try to modify the moderation system to make it more “fair”, but the hardcore trolls will never be satisfied.

The sad truth is that by the time a site is routinely receiving more than fifty comments per post, the comments section has always devolved into a cesspool. Always. The sole exception is Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light, and that’s only because Patrick and Teresa have been ruthless about disemvowelling trolls from the beginning. Endure endless cries of arbitrariness and censorship, or shut off direct feedback entirely? I don’t envy arXiv their choice.

Money Down the Drain

By Evan — — Tech

Goddamnit. I wasted almost ten minutes today figuring out why s/</&lt;/g wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. Duh.

How I was allowed to graduate college without having sed fundamentals burned into my brain, I will never know.

A Biologist, a Physicist, and and Engineer Walk Into a Bar…

By Evan — — Science

I would have liked to contribute to the bad physics joke contest that I was complaining about the other day… but unfortunately I only know mathematician jokes and engineer jokes. Any physicists that appear in those jokes are incidental. Yes, this is a weird oversight in my education. Frankly, I think I deserve at least a partial tuition refund.

Anyway, in light of recent events, I thought I would share one of my favorite engineer jokes that at least involves a physicist. And hunting!

A biologist, a physicist, and an engineer go duck quail hunting. Suddenly, a single quail gets flushed from the undergrowth.

The biologist, being very familiar with natural quail behavior and quail flight patterns, takes careful aim… BLAM! He just misses, a little to the right.

At almost exactly the same time, the physicist quickly calculates the distance, the velocity of the bullet, the velocity of the quail, corrects for wind and air resistance… BLAM! He just misses, a little to the left.

The engineer starts jumping up and down excitedly. “We got him! We got him!”

But wait! There’s a sequel to this joke!

Miracle of miracles, our hunting party succeeds in downing a duck quail. They return to the campsite, where their philosopher friend has been waiting for them. Triumphant, they show the philosopher the quail.

The philosopher looks up from his book. “Hmmm, well, how do you know it’s a quail?”

The biologist is taken aback. “Well, just look at the morphology,” he says. “It’s got quail feathers, a quail beak, quail wings…”

The physicist doesn’t quite know what to say either. “I guess we could take a DNA sample from the bird and run it to the lab…?”

The engineer just shrugs. “We went hunting for quail. Therefore, it’s a quail.”

Thank you! I’ll be here all the week!

As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances

By Evan — — Writing

Good news / bad news. The good news was that I scored tickets last week to see a Margaret Atwood interview in the city. The bad news was that the interviewer chose to spend his time asking endless variations on, “What does it mean to you to be a Feminist Writer?” and “What does it mean to you to be a Canadian Writer?” God forbid he might have taken a few precious minutes away from compartmentalizing Atwood to, you know, talk about about her books.

Not that Atwood didn’t try her best to steer the interview back on track. First, she mentioned in passing that when her first novel came out way back in 1969, interviewers liked to pepper her with Caveman Era questions about being a Feminist Writer. (“Do you like men?” “Do men like you?”). We all chuckled at this, but the subtext went right over the interviewer’s head. So Atwood tried talking about movements in general: “It’s a mistake for a writer to be part of an ‘ism’, because eventually you’ll write something that makes the people in the ‘ism’ really upset.” No dice there, either. Finally, Atwood tried a bold gambit: short-circuiting the interviewer. Look, she said, “women deserve equal rights under the law and equal pay for equal work.” End of discussion. The whole evening had the polite tension of a bad date. Someone should have called out, “Dude! She’s just not that into you.”

To be fair, Atwood was a bit more responsive to the “Canadian Writer” line of questioning. One part that I remember — she was talking about how hard it is for Canadians to define their own identity, in large part due to the torrent of media coming from the United States. Apparently, some years ago a Canadian radio show solicited listeners to help complete the phrase, “As Canadian as … “, the equivalent of “As American as apple pie.”[1] The winner of the contest was, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

If the interview had any real value, it was as meta-lesson: by putting up with incredibly boorish behavior without losing her temper, Atwood managed to personify the Canadian national character for nearly two hours. Believe me, it’s not just Atwood — it’s a Canadian phenomenon, and I have the data to prove it. See, years ago, I worked for a couple[2] of weeks as a customer service rep, assisting a mostly Canadian customer base on the phone. Unfortunately for the Canadians, I was working for one of the Most Evil Software Corporations Ever, Computer Associates. If you work outside the IT industry, you might not even have heard of this particular evil software conglomerate, so I’ve included a handy ranking of software companies for your reference:

1. Google (by definition)
2. The Omni Group
3. Pixar                    ^
4. Flickr                   |
5. SGI                      |
                            |     
...                        GOOD 

...                        EVIL 
                            |
660. McAfee                 |
661. IBM Global Services    |
662. DoubleClick            v
663. ENCOM
664. Computer Associates
665. Diebold
666. those guys who create zombie networks 
     and rent them to the Russian mafia

Back in the day, Computer Associates had a small-business tax software product with a mostly Canadian customer base. Every tax season, Computer Associates mailed out floppies (yes, really) containing tax updates. This system was working fine until one day, the company got the bright idea to take everyone who had been receiving tax updates and force them into paying for an “upgrade program”. Oh, and they also “forgot” to tell all their customers about the changed policy.[3]

So imagine you’re a Canadian small business owner around tax time. You’re waiting for your tax updates, and they’re not arriving. Finally, fighting a rising sense of panic, you call Computer Associates. After waiting on hold for anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, you reach a cheerful customer service rep who informs you that you need to pay extra protection money if you want to be able to file your taxes on time this year. The difference in reactions was astonishing: nearly every Canadian said something like, “Oh, geez, that’s not so good,” while every USAian reacted by screaming. (Naturally, it was the screamers who got escalated up the chain and who got free updates.)

Where were we? Oh, right, Margaret Atwood. Well, she did the best she could under the circumstances, and I guess that’s that. I really should have gone up to her afterwards and asked her about this fascinating Canadian character trait, this preternatural calm that resists all provocation. I once asked a Canadian physics grad student about it, and he nodded and said that it was probably due to dealing with the Canadian government on the phone. That explanation seems too mundane; my theory is that it’s some sort of Canadian superpower, caused by increased radiation exposure near the polar regions. But really, it’s anyone’s guess.

1. Yes, yes, we all know that apple pie is really German.

2. As in “exactly two“.

3. This brings us to Goer’s Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice, when money is involved.”

Yes, We Do Have Better Things To Do

By Evan — — Writing

Today our group had a lunchtime debate on the meaning of the word “couple”. Does it mean “two and only two”, or can it mean “three or four”? The debate spilled over into email, which is never a good sign. One coworker wrote:

The first link Ryan posted also explained the difference between saying “a couple of” vs. referring directly to a couple in the context of two people acting as a couple. “couple of” and “couple” have two different meanings. This is why English sucks.

Which is totally unfair. All languages have words that change meaning when the context changes. Most languages have words that change meaning when the grammar changes slightly. And some languages have words that change meaning with pitch — yikes!

Of course with the bait this obvious, it would have been silly for me to respond with a vigorous defense of the English language. Not to mention that I actually agree with my coworker’s conclusion, if not his reasoning. Fortunately, another coworker came up with an ironclad rebuttal:

Along the same lines you could claim that Perl sucks, which is
obviously wrong.

And Mike wins the thread! Personally, I’m in the camp that believes “a couple” means strictly “two”. Although I suppose it can mean “three” for very small values of three.

Whither Punching?

By Evan — — Culture

In what seems like a blink of an eye, Chuck Norris has become a true Internet Phenomenon. Is he a “straight-talking, no-nonsense American hero“? A Jungian archetype? A deity? There are no easy answers.

One thing does seem clear: much of this misplaced adulation stems from Norris’s ability to deliver devastating roundhouse kicks to the face. This, good people, perfectly encapsulates the long, slow decline of values in America today. What is with this emphasis on solving problems with violent kicking? Why do the youth of America think that the right thing to do when you’re angry is to lash out and kick someone? In short, whatever happened to punching?

Fortunately, Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog has attempted to correct this imbalance with his wistful-yet-uplifting Ode to Punching. It’s good to know that some folks in this country still have their priorities straight, and I’m sure we can all look forward to some equally powerful works from this formidable young talent in the very near future. Ode to Stabbing! Explosions: a Retrospective! Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Bludgeoning! That said, if Chris happens to be planning a series on the ancient Japanese art of Kancho, let’s just say I’ll take a pass.