Mark responds

First of all, how I even found this blog: Your basic followed links from a friend, followed those links and etc, somehow ended up here a while back and again recently.

Didn't mean to hit quite that hard of a nerve, still not sure why you have reacted so strongly. I didn't make the point I was hoping to make very well, here is what I really meant...

Based upon what I'd read in your blog, it seemed clear, to me at least, that you would never vote for McCain, quite the contrary, I'd expected you to be a rather enthusiastic Obama supporter. So, to read that something caused McCain to lose your vote seemed out of place, given that I never believed he had your vote in the first place. What you wrote seemed more like an excuse to not vote for him versus a reason. In some sense it seemed like you weren't being honest with yourself, when it seems so clear to me that you'd never really vote for McCain anyway.

The point had nothing, in substance, to do with comparing abortion to torture (but not possible to tell from my short comment) and the paradox that seems obvious; given that you embrace abortion, at least to some extent, but have zero tolerance for torture.

If I am mistaken and McCain truly did lose your vote, let me recommend looking to a third party candidate. I haven't voted for a major party Presidential candidate in many elections. There is a profound psychological barrier that causes us to want to vote for a winner, that if more people could overcome, the tight grip of the major two parties could be freed, I can only dream that could ever happen!

First, thank you, Mark, for giving me a second try. I do have strong feelings on these subjects, but you bit the bullet and wrote some more. Between watching Obama speak tonight and your comments, I've had a few more thoughts.

It is true that I have been a Democrat for a while now. A perusal of the posts tagged "politics" on this blog makes that clear. And it's true that I probably would have voted against another Republican administration even before having any specific beefs with their Presidential candidate. If the Democrats had put out a real dog, maybe I would have reconsidered. (Was Edwards a dog for cheating on his wife and lying about it to the press? I don't know.)

I have been listening to the Denver convention speeches off and on. One thing that really surprised me was hearing the critiques of the Bush Administration. They started to really move me, even bring tears to my eyes. It wasn't because I am enthralled by fully funding Headstart (which is nevertheless a good idea). It's because I started to realize that the Bush Administration will really be over. I feel profoundly tired of Bush, not just because he had terrorists in prisons tortured (and whoops, some of those terrorists turned out to be innocent nobodies caught up in random sweeps). My brain gets fried just thinking about the endless list... * Okay, that's totally derailing my train of thought.

I've been positive about Obama since I read this blog post. I preferred him to Clinton in the primaries, certainly. So it's true John McCain would have had an uphill struggle for my vote from the start.

But there's a difference between failing to win my vote and flushing it down the toilet, and that's what John McCain did with his position on torture.

A few months ago I went over McCain's cynical flip-flop on torture. The comparison of his position today (google [mccain torture] for an endless series of articles) and his editorial of 2005, neatly interwoven with lessons from his POW experience, should convince any disinterested observer that he has abandoned his principles on torture.

Why did I care so much? Here's one answer, an old editorial from 2005 that sums it up well, I think. Not torturing people should be a no-brainer for all of us. It's cruel and unusual. It victimizes both the torturer and the tortured. It turns human dignity inside out. And in the case of our prisoners, it's done to people who are completely helpless to harm us.

Not institutionalizing the torture of people should be even more obvious. Not normalizing torture in the public discourse as one option among many for dealing with foreign POWs... how did we even get to this point? It's like waking up one morning to find that the city government has reinstituted human sacrifices to Moloch, or that they're serving human brains at the diner. Every time I write about this, I feel crazy that we are even discussing it.

All that said, why react so strongly when Mark called partial-birth abortion torture and said I would probably find it in my heart to forgive Obama for holding pro-choice positions, even though I couldn't for John McCain? I think it's because I read an accusation that I was being inconsistent into Mark's comment. That is, I care about torture issues when it suits me and ignore them when it doesn't. It's OK If You're A Democrat. I take that personally because I have integrity and I want to be consistent, especially on the thoughts and issues that actually mean something to me.

I will say that I think the issues are different in kind. Torture is a black-and-white moral issue that cuts across political party, moral upbringing, geography. Before George W Bush practically everyone held very strong feelings against it. It is basically a crime against our common humanity. Now something like half hold the same feelings and the other half concoct excuses, but the same moral revulsion is hanging around.

Abortion, on the other hand, pits the life and dignity of the mother against the life and dignity of the fetus. There is a grey area here that is not going to go away (until we can switch on and off our fertility at will, or bring babies to term in artificial womb machines; see Lois McMaster Bujold's sf for more of this bewildering future). People disagree honestly and in good faith about what should be legal and illegal when it comes to it.

Here's Obama's position on partial-birth abortion, close to my own. It's a legitimate compromise in circumstances where people disagree.

On an issue like partial birth abortion, I strongly believe that the state can properly restrict late-term abortions. I have said so repeatedly. All I've said is we should have a provision to protect the health of the mother, and many of the bills that came before me didn't have that.

Part of the reason they didn't have it was purposeful, because those who are opposed to abortion have a moral calling to try to oppose what they think is immoral. Oftentimes what they were trying to do was to polarize the debate and make it more difficult for people, so that they could try to bring an end to abortions overall.

As president, my goal is to bring people together, to listen to them, and I don't think that's any Republican out there who I've worked with who would say that I don't listen to them, I don't respect their ideas, I don't understand their perspective. And my goal is to get us out of this polarizing debate where we're always trying to score cheap political points and actually get things done.
Source: Fox News Sunday: 2008 presidential race interview Apr 27, 2008 (link)

When I read something like that, I understand that it's a messy compromise that has to be struck in our pluralist society. Partial-birth abortion restrictions without exceptions for the life of the mother amount to demanding that other people immolate themselves on the altar of our principles. I don't think it's clear that we can or should make that demand, much less enshrine it in law. I would hardly call this an embrace of abortion, but I'll let it stand. I am not a fan of abortion, but I am a fan of leaving abortions legal.

When I compare issues like the normalization of torture and the legalization of abortion, I see a large difference of kind. If you don't, maybe we'll agree to disagree. Anyhow, that's my take on whether or not Obama would lose my vote for his partial-birth abortion stance, owing to my strong objections to torture: No. But no hard feelings, I was glad to articulate that and think about it.

There's also a question here about whether I am a one-issue voter. Have I lost my objectivity? Am I being narrow-minded? Well, if it comes to that, I feel happy with an Obama vote for many reasons, and unhappy with a McCain vote for other reasons. Mark is right, though, that I might be rationalizing here... maybe I think McCain's age is the real issue, which prejudice might reflect badly on me, but this torture thing provides a good cover for my real motives. Maybe that is less plausible now that you've got an idea of what I think about this.

Instead, I think the torture flipflop provides a window onto his character. It is located in a constellation of similar panders and locksteps by McCain, which make me all the more sure that he has abandoned his principles here. It is simply a catastrophe of misjudgment, magnified by his own experience at the hands of his torturers.

The way I see it, if you need more examples, they exist... but that one is enough for me.

As for voting for a third-party candidate...

From the sky comes a scream, as Homer is crashing right into the Capitol. A few footsteps later, he comes running down the stairs.

Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
[murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]

The next day, Kodos announces the result: "All hail, President Kang."

The field in front of the Capitol has now become a working ground where humans are whipped by aliens and used to carry materials.

The Simpsons family is working too, with Homer and the kids carrying wood, and Marge pushing a wheelbarrow of cinderblocks -- with Maggie on top.

Marge: I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of.
Homer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

I think the best way to fix this is to fix the system so third parties have an easier time getting a foothold, for instance by lowering the vote threshold (5%, as this article on Nader mentions in passing) for parties to qualify for federal public funding of their campaigns. But being in the swing state of Colorado, I just can't afford to risk my vote on electing the Republican by default, not this time around... and besides, I think Obama will do a good job.

Hopefully that is not too much bloviating... we now return you to your regularly scheduled blog. And thanks again to Mark for raising the level of the discourse.




* US attorneys getting fired for political reasons (even during active investigations of the people they were getting fired by!?), refusing clearances to OPM lawyers investigating the executive branch, burning a CIA agent working on nuclear nonproliferation issues, and that to get revenge against someone who called BS on their case for going to war, aides stonewalling in contempt of Congress, the unitary theory of executive power, signing statements defying the rule of law, not to mention the shifting and ultimately groundless arguments for invading and occupying a country preemptively, the Katrina debacle, committing multiple felonies by illegally wiretapping internet and phone traffic in contravention of FISA... and those are just the lowlights that come immediately to mind. Wasn't there some stuff about illegal propaganda from the Pentagon? Illegal hiring practices at DOE? Missing emails not turned over? Abramoff? Using off-the-reservation email accounts... it just doesn't stop...

Keeping it quick

• I've been continuing with Okami. It's very entertaining.
• I biked out to the library on Saturday. I got a few more CDs and those books, then read Stephen King in an easy chair. I headed out just as a thunderstorm was moving in. I had a good time, a little peaceful spot.
  
• I finished Christine. I won't spoil the ending. King got back to form, it is way better than Cujo. But I have a feeling I'm about to see a ton of books (along my chronology, I've got from 1983 till 1989, Misery) that are King working out metaphors for the damage his drug abuse was doing to his family. I don't think it's exactly transparent, but it definitely colors my reading...
• I put up the books I'm reading on my whiteboard at work. I'm kind of relieved to be able to erase Christine when I get in tomorrow, because I have a coworker named Christine and it must have looked a little strange.
• Up next, still doing The Way of the World by Ron Suskind. I also have a Stross book that eluded me, The Jennifer Morgue, which is more "James Bond meets HP Lovecraft". And I picked up the start of a newish series by Lois McMaster Bujold that I just hadn't gotten around to. The series is called The Sharing Knife, and the first book is called Beguilement.
• I watched the Star Wars CG film The Clone Wars tonight. It ends a little abruptly, and for all the exposition, it is actually a little tough for me to locate it in context in the storyline. The graphics were great, the dialog was ok if a little obvious at times. It was mostly fun as a chance to get out with Chuck, who is a guy I know via Sarah's friend Laura (his wife). We should do stuff like that more often.
• I loaned Chuck a few Bujold books: Cordelia's Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, and The Curse of Chalion. Here's to another addict! I had no clue until recently that he reads fantasy.
  
• A dude named Mark (no forwarding address) commented on the last post. I do not know if I consider his comment particularly edifying or not. And my comment back is not so great.
• My basic argument is this: we want a president who will respect the rule of law. The last eight years have taught us how valuable that would be. Whether you agree or disagree on this issue or that issue with the president, you can rest assured that the president will preserve the laws that we have by proxy all agreed upon. The president will not attempt to shirk his responsibilities under the law or rewrite them by illegal action or inaction. The president will not play cowboy politics with people's lives.
• And the president will not torture people, even our enemies. The president will not attempt to move prisoners to so-called law-free zones like Camp X-Ray or give them law-free status like "enemy combatant". I think it's plain that what our soldiers are not allowed to do by the Geneva Conventions, even in situations of extreme duress like "under enemy attack in combat zones", our spies and politicians should not be allowed to do in well-appointed offices in cold blood, before they go out for cocktails and cigars with their lobbyist buddies and friends in the press.
  
• Like I told Mark, the United States needs a moral compass. We need a sense of mission untainted by what the devilish have done in the name of America. For me, torture represents a clear line to draw, and it is just as obvious that John McCain is not willing to draw it.
  

Short

• Series 2 of The Office UK: seriously vulgar, but the episode with the motivational speech was totally off the hook.
• Andrew Sullivan pointed out something very provocative about John McCain's experience as a POW in Vietnam: he was never tortured. Read the link, it's pretty short, if you believe there is any controversy there.
• McCain's flip-flop on the Military Commissions Act, condoning the torture status quo, lost him my vote. There is no place in a sane, civilized world for legalized torture. Period.
  

Media redux

• I think I need to start properly italicizing my book/movie posts. Not following the convention has finally gotten to me again.
  
• Nobody told me Bridge to Terabithia was like it was. I wonder what parents took their kids on opening weekend, only to find out what it really was. For the record, I think it was pretty good, but I'm not sure yet if it was cheating. And the book is probably better...
  
• We watched Dan in Real Life once again. It slays me every time. There is an amazing economy of motion. It's hilarious. It's true. Steve Carell is the man.
• I finally finished The Pearl. I wish people would make their critical Prefaces into Postfaces so there are NO SPOILERS BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS. When you are flipping through trying to find page one, these are the worst possible things to stand in your way. They are like the soundtrack preview just before the DVD main menu. In the immortal words of Frank Costanza:

"HeyHeyHey ComeOn ComeOn! I haven't seen it yet!"

"It doesn't have anything to do with the plot."

"Still, still. I like to go in Fresh."

• So I will not ruin the story. It was exquisitely written. I don't think I've read or heard any Steinbeck since Ms Backen read us Of Mice and Men in the 8th grade. I've never read The Grapes of Wrath, is that unbelievable? Like Stephen King, I am now looking forward to reading the rest of his oeuvre, starting again with Of Mice and Men, which I bought at the library sale.
• Speaking of Mr King, the last we left him, he was writing himself into a book ostensibly about a rabid dog killing people indiscriminately, which I read as a book about his drug addiction destroying his family, and he had republished his long stories in Different Seasons, which contains not one but three stories made into movies. Now he's back on his ground in my opinion, writing in 1983 about a loser teenager named Arnie Cunningham, and his beat-up Plymouth, Christine. I had seen the trailer, so I knew this was about a car gone horribly wrong. I was expecting Cujo with a chrome bumper, I have been pleasantly surprised. And as always, when King is at his best, he isn't doing allegory. He is doing a story that is somehow weightier than its logline. Sure, it's about a demonic car (50 pages in, all signs point that way). But it is about a lot more than that.
• I snuck into the hold line and scored a copy of The Way of the World, by Ron Suskind. Ron Suskind, if you'll recall, wrote two extremely important books about the Bush Administration. I wrote about The One Percent Doctrine earlier, which was an examination of something like the inner workings of the war on terror, and The Price of Loyalty, which was about Bush's domestic policy as seen through the eyes of Paul O'Neill. The only reason I haven't read very far is that I always seem to be about to eat something when I think of reading it. It's brand new and I don't want to get soup, condiments, or salty snack remains on it. From the news reports, this is the book that contains a fairly detailed account of Tahir_Jalil_Habbush_al-Tikriti, an Iraqi intelligence official, forging a document alleging false links between al-Qaeda and Iraq at the request of the Bush Administration. Let me say that twice: in order to prop up support for the then-underway invasion of Iraq, fantasists at the White House planted a document in order to retcon the justifications for the war. And he has the transcripts to prove it. But it also seems to be about the post-9/11, post-Bush future that we will collectively create. I am looking forward to both that future and this book's treatment of it.
• Sarah and I just freed a bunny. It fell down a window well by our basement. It was scared, and would not climb up a piece of lattice we stuck down there. So, I climbed into the window well with a cardboard box, cornered the bunny and got it to go into the box, then lifted it out to safety.
• I had a total score at the library and checked out Okami, a Nintendo Wii game. (I also found a klezmer band interpreting unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie: Wonder Wheel, by The Klezmatics, but if I talked about every great CD I found at the library, this would turn into a great CDs from the library blog. An improvement over the current content...) It is tiding me over until Spore comes out on September 7 (at which point, all bets are off).
• But what a game. In Okami, you are Amaterasu Okami, the Shinto goddess of nature. (Shinto being a nature religion, this puts you at the top of the world.) You have been incarnated as a white wolf who, one hundred years ago, beat back the eight-headed dragon Orochi and sealed it in the Moon Cave, saving the world. Now, Orochi's prison has been unsealed, and the evil miasma of its presence wreaks devastation across the land of Nippon. Your mission is to use the power of calligraphy to restore the natural beauty of the environment.
• This is an older game, having previously come out for Playstation at least, but it really shines on the Wii. The game cries out constantly for you to manipulate it with the power of your brush. Trees bloom, lily pads sprout, boulders slice in half as a result of your drawing. You feed the animals so they love you and restore the land (and also, on a somewhat heart-tugging level, because you are Mother Nature and that's just what you do). The mythology was foreign to me, but it's note-perfect, completely consistent. The dialogue is well-translated and human.
• And the graphics are unreal. Every screen seems like a work of art. It's cel-shaded and fulsome, filled with falling cherry blossoms and stylized splashes. It takes up Japanese iconography, where a few lines represent a mountain, or the blazing sun is the familiar circle surrounded by stripes. The ink, due to the Wii remote's sensitivity to distance, feels like it's dripping on the screen. There are countless little details in the characterization, the landscape... even the menus are full of little touches.
• If anybody asks you if video games are art, tell them to try Okami. It's not just great fun (if a little linear, but like you care, what a story; be prepared for it to be extremely Japanese though), it's over-the-top beautiful. The most interesting thing about its beauty, though, is that so much of it is derived from the interactivity. This wouldn't be nearly as good as a story about Okami, or a movie. The whole point of the thing is that you are the one reshaping and renewing the world, everything responds to you.
• Work has been going pretty well. We are finally coming to the end of our cycle. We're actually in pretty good shape on my portion of the project (I was in charge of a decent-sized piece that I and approximately one and a half people have been working on), so I'm starting to look past what we've got and think about what's next. The delivery ate up a lot of my summer break, so I'm hoping the fall will be relaxing and rewarding for the family.
• My son is back in preschool, so Sarah has more time on her own. I think it is making her think useful, deep thoughts about the future. Whenever she is free to be herself, even for a few hours a day, these ideas bubble up. I am excited for what the future holds as well...
• PS, the bullet points seem to work, so I might stick to them for a while. They help me pretend I am just jotting things down, not inserting 500-word video game reviews into the middle of What I Did Last Week.
• PPS The coolest Olympic thing I have seen so far is the badminton final. That guy was totally amazing.
  

Every Word We Say Is True

It's a little unfair for me to inflict this on you, but I've got to get it out and move on. I wrote the first words for this song in May 2007 and I just can't make anything new without finishing it.

So there is a second draft sitting in the music player at left. I didn't have time to get in fancy instruments or anything. That's life.

Every Word We Say Is True

I've been talking with your ghost. She is friendly, as you know.
On the day you had to go, she started speaking almost clearly.
No, she doesn't have your eyes. I'm beginning to forget that and more.
But if time will not restore, I'll tell myself the lies sincerely.

She's still saying that you loved me.
I'm still saying that I knew.
Every word we say is true.

You've been living in my dreams, black and white and shades of gray,
And our scene is here to stay. Let words redeem, former times pass away.
For illusion though you are, every line I still will trace
When I meet you in that place. I'll see your star. I'll know the way.

Where you're saying that you love me,
And I say I love you too.
Every word we say is true.

We've walked far in foreign lands, talking strange to strangers' ears.
Faces blank, we shroud in years the dead demands of memory.
Our hands approach but never meet. Mirrors touch, but never touch.
I want to hear your voice so much, unbearable, sweet, and free.

If I whisper that I love you
With a love we never knew,
Would you want it to be true?

By the way, I have mixed feelings about punctuating lyrics and poetry. I feel like it eliminates some of the double meanings and possible interpretations, and thus some fun for the reader/listener.

Braindead

Some things I did in the last month:

• Saw my parents on a week-long vacation
• Watched the entire run of The Office, US
• Saw a herd of giraffes at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo
• Ran Alex through a fountain and a pool at the public park
• Bought a bag full of books and CDs with my dad for a grand total of $8. Most of the list:
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• The Green Mile by Stephen King
• A Tolkien Treasury (various)
• The Spy Who Came in From The Cold by John le Carre
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by John Steinbeck
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (by somebody)
• America: The Book by the Daily Show crew
  
• Building Big by David Macaulay
• Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder
• Five Major Plays by Anton Chekhov
  
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• Asterix el Legionario
• and albums by G Love, Counting Crows, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Live, and The Jayhawks.


• Bought a bottle of Leninade
• Finished main development on my first professional software project
• Read most of the extant novels of Charles Stross (still left: Accelerando, Glasshouse, Saturn's Children)
• Watched the mountain stages of the Tour de France, including the magical Alpe d'Huez
  
• Rode bikes with Mom and Dad before breakfast, causing much wheezing
• Sold our 2000 Corolla to a truly desperate college graduate sister, who is moving to San Antonio for a year
• Bought a shiny Ruby Red mid-size sedan: a 2007 Kia Optima
• Found an oil leak in the shiny new Optima
• Took the Optima to the Kia dealer, who services our 5 year/60000 mile factory warranty
• Paid the Kia dealer for service anyway, because our car salesmen neglected to replace the oil drain plug when they changed the oil as a standard practice before resale, causing the leak and requiring a new oil change, which is not covered under the warranty
• Called the car salesmen, who offered to change our oil next time around
  
• Played Zombie Fluxx, a card game with constantly changing rules and zombies
• Ate several kinds of exotic cheese
• Ate my dad's delicious cooking for a decadent week
  
• Sampled several Wii games new to me, like the awesome new Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the lame and difficult Winter Sports, the neato Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the hilarious Excite Truck, and the exciting and difficult Guitar Hero: Aerosmith edition
• Played a few games online with my brother
• Called 1-800-GOOG-411 at every possible opportunity, to get phone numbers, store hours, and addresses
• Visited the Tattered Cover and got a bunch of titles to check out
• Started programming the internet in HTML, Perl/CGI, Javascript, CSS, etc etc etc at http://msg.nfshost.com (still under construction)

My best to you and yours. More to come soon.

Spore arrives

So, I've been on about this for a while. Spore is a game coming out in September that will unleash unparalleled creativity on an unsuspecting gaming populace. It's the game of life, where you pass through successive generations designing yourself, from bacteria to creature, from sentient being to civilization. You model animals, cities, buildings, vehicles, flora in amazing detail, and then, through the magic of Will Wright and his team, your creations come to life. Then, through the magic of Will Wright, they will populate the galaxies of other players, a galaxy with millions of worlds that you can visit, eventually, in your species' spaceship. It is an unfinishable game.

Today a demo of just the creature creator went online. It is completely free to try, and you can construct the crazy animals that will fill the game. Get it here. Repeat, GET IT. Your jaw will hit the floor. Your kids will love it. You will love it. Your dog will love it.

It is a little nerfed; there is a $10 version with all parts and options enabled, which I am certainly buying as soon as they make it to stores (Thursday, I think). You need a halfway decent computer to run the software, but if you've bought in the last couple of years you should be fine (the specs for Vista are pretty fricking ugly though).

If you'd like to see some of my ridiculous creations, they will start filling in here. So far, only ballicus curius has made it to the internet. But I've done a couple more that should be on the way. And let me say, before you even start playing, you can spend hours just making animals.

This is one of the more amazing pieces of software I have ever seen. The technical challenges involved in turning J. Random Player, with help from the computer, into a successful 3D modeler were apparently astounding. I've been getting chills.

Sorry I've been out of the picture. It has not been for the best, but it's that kind of season in life. My software should be done with main development this week, though, so I may be able to take my foot off the gas pedal by next week.

Sarah is in Utah visiting friends and family, with Alex, so I have been all alone in the house. It is very strange. But I have been studying computers and doing whatnot.

My high school's ten year reunion is in a couple of weeks. In some ways, I am sorry not to be able to go. I haven't seen some friends in ages. I don't know why, but lately I keep thinking I will meet some friends to read books with. There is a guy at work who has been interested in my dive into Charles Stross lately, but it's not the same.

So, for the record, Charles Stross is an amazing speculative fiction writer. I read Singularity Sky, which is about as good an introduction as you could get to the Singularity (disparagingly, "the nerd rapture", when we create an AI that can bootstrap itself into godlike intelligence, or alternatively when we create nanomachines that can convert base materials into the stuff of our wildest dreams). Whether you believe all the theories or not (and I am inclined not to), it makes for a great story.

He also wrote a great near future story called Halting State, essentially about a world where the internet is very closely intertwined with real life, as in virtual reality layers that are based on the place on earth you are standing right now. So you could put on your VR goggles and be in a whole new world, essentially. So the story goes, what amounts to a bank in World of Warcraft 3.0 is robbed by a band of orcs. Then a group of hackers and forensic investigators is brought in to figure out what happened, on behalf of the country running the bank. It's hilarious, and I can't give away the terrific story. You should read it right away.

I had another book by Stross about a tech journalist who falls into a brave new world, like a curious shadow of Earth, called The Hidden Family, first in a series. It is great so far, as is Iron Sunrise, the sequel to Singularity Sky.

Sometimes I get like this with an author and I want to read all their stuff, as much as I can find. So far I've done it with William Gibson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neal Stephenson, and Shusaku Endo. Stross is another one of those.

I'm also trying to get further in Godel, Escher, Bach. Every time I check it out, though, someone reserves it right behind me. I am going to break down and just buy it soon.

Hard at work

Well, I've been working hard lately. It is close to delivery time at my work. On the bright side, that means I'm just about the end of my first shipping product. In other words, I was working on this software when it was barely a twinkle in our customer's eye, and my water just broke.

It's been a great experience. I've been getting better with Emacs and the shell, and with a lot of C++ over the last five months. Working with the team and a larger existing code base has also been enlightening. I've found it just takes a while to get up to speed with how things are organized, and the project's standard ways of doing things. I wish I'd had my TAGS file in Emacs months ago though. (It basically finds the proverbial needle in the haystack of code files for you.) Learning to give and take with my teammates and come up with mutually beneficial designs has been great too.

Now, we're working overtime. I am glad that we don't do 50 to 70 hour weeks for most of the year. This is really wearing, it's reminding me of grad school. I get about one day off per week at the moment. We're fortunate enough to get paid, so Sarah and I are probably taking down another credit card or two this month.

Hemingway slipped to the back burner as I read some Isaac Asimov this week. He's a giant in the sf field, writing many well-loved novels. Foundation, which is about the a society whose future has been mapped out by a psychohistorian, is a real classic. There's Nightfall, which is about a planet where night only falls once every couple of millennia.

And there are robots. Asimov coined the word "robotics" and wrote some great stories about them. I finished rereading I, Robot again, which is a collection of short stories about the first robots, and the three laws of robotics. They made it into a movie, I hear, but it was more "inspired by" than "based on" the stories in this book. It's charming and rereadable, and it even has a female lead. Pick it up, 100%.

I also read the first in a trilogy (Robots of Dawn, maybe?), which was a robot murder mystery called The Caves of Steel. It posits a human race, thousands of years in the future, on an overpopulated Earth, that has crowded into massive biodomes, made yeast products the main nutrition, regulated everyone's employment, and started to replace human workers with robots. Although humanity has space flight and has colonized other planets, the agoraphobia and xenophobia of the remaining earthlings is keeping a lid on the society, living out their lives in caves of steel. And that's just the setup. This is a fine, fine book. Its point-of-view feels alien to us air-breathing, outside-enjoying humans, just as it should. The main character's outlook on robots prefigures some of our current obsession with illegal immigrants stealing American jobs, and our mistrust of foreigners. There are some great moral themes as well. This is highly recommended. It might make more sense, though, if you read I, Robot first.

I've been working my way through C++ Coding Standards, which is a list of 100 pithy dos and don'ts by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu. Sutter is the chair of the ISO C++ standard committee, and Alexandrescu is an expert on using C++ to do template metaprogramming (for libraries). Now, in some ways, C++ is a pig, and this book is like the lipstick on the pig. It's testimony on the complexity of the language that a book like this, which is almost completely language-specific tricks, had to exist. But there's another way that C++ is like a pig, and that is that it is liable to eat your foot if you try to ride it, and poke you with its bristles. And this book is like a saddle for the pig, for those of us forced to get on and put that pig through its paces. And, for what it aims at, it's a terrific book.

Ok, I just ran across this video, and it's too cool. This is just one more thing I love about computer science:


Change of subject. We bought a scuba diving game called Endless Ocean. It is very low impact as far as difficulty goes, but it is beautiful and mellow, like interacting with a screen saver.

Last, we preordered Wii Fit from Amazon while they were still taking orders. It arrived yesterday, and boy are my arms tired. Yes, they were weak, but still. The thing, for those of you who don't know, is an exercise game packaged with a balance board, which can sense your weight, center of gravity, balance, pressure, however you want to think of it. It is about one third game and two thirds exercise tool, with yoga and strength training as well as balance games and aerobics. It tracks your weight and activity, and tells you how weak you are. Sarah and I both got a good workout from it. In fact, I'm going to spend the next few minutes working at it again. It offers few advantages over the gym, but it does have one killer feature: the privacy of your own home. And, it does all the tracking for you, and it's fun.

I've got a bike you can ride it if you like

Feeling introspective today. We used a bit of tax rebate money (the Bush legacy) to buy bikes, and today I rode a great many-speed bike (the first bike I've ever bought) for the first time in several years. I think the last time was summer of 2002. I had agreed to look after someone's house and they loaned me a bike to ride across Logan in.

I was a little deceptive there. The first bike I bought was yesterday. We bought a Magna piece of crap from Target. The brakes honked when I used them, so I spent a few hours on Mother's Day trying to tweak them. I finally got them acceptable, then when I rode around the block, the seat tilted forwards and backwards uncontrollably. When I finally wrestled it into submission and started pedaling, the chain broke in half, so I coasted a block with brakes, then walked back to our driveway.

I got very nostalgic about bikes. I rode all over the place in them: from my house to Paul vB's by Sylvester, to Mr. Norris's high school, Thomas Jefferson, out on S 288th St, up and down Normandy Park, to Des Moines, to Mt. Rainier... and then of course, my parents got into biking and we went all over the place: Lopez Island and the rest of the San Juans, the Canadian islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, UW to Woodinville (to a brewery; is Pyramid up there? no, Google tells me it was probably Redhook), the Green River trail, Burke Gilman, the STP... I still remember great biking moments, like heading out to Shark Reef with Tyler and Ian, and pitching over the handlebars after an ill-considered attempt to steer with one hand and drink a Slurpee with the other. There was a brief moment in undergrad at UW where I really missed having a bike, but I didn't act on it (or much else) until it was all over.

It meant something to me to be able to travel around town, to go where I pleased. Maybe part of it was wanting to be alone, too. I don't know how deeply to think about this now.

My parents definitely did us a service by giving us all the opportunity to get into it. I knew all the equipment to buy, for one thing. So we have our pump with built-in gauge, our mirrors, our helmets, our water bottles, our tire patch kit, our trunk-mounted rack for two, our bungee cords. Sarah also wants to take Alex out on the town with this bike, so we got a nice trailer that will double as a jogging stroller.

The new one is a silver Diamondback Wildwood Citi. It's for people who want to go around on the road, the trail, and possibly the path, not really the mountain (and don't want to spend much money). I like the gear shifts in the handles (they're rotaties, which I always liked better than paddles, or especially the analog pull-handle. Best of all, it's got a seat with its own suspension, so it's springy.

I couldn't get very far today, on my first ride in six years or so. So I just went on the trails by our house, got frightened all over again of going downhill through the gravel on my half-road, half-trail treads, and did a little loop until my thighs burned. Then I got home and wobbled upstairs on my weak legs.

I'm excited.

You may not know I'm a Pink Floyd fan (at least until Roger Waters left). Here's the early Pink Floyd (The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, 1967) on the subject of bikes:



We had a Mother's Day for the ages. We started out at The Village Inn for breakfast, but they were announcing tables with a handheld microphone at the servers podium and a loudspeaker. There was a tarp outside with water, and the pre-service church crowd, I don't know how else to explain it. We tried one more place, then ended up at the Farmer's Market that happens every Sunday in Highlands Ranch. We got a delicious cherry strudel and some Jamba juices, then a bag of hickory smoked almonds (speaking of which, they're in the car right now. excuse me...), and some cleverly carved wooden flowers that will always stay lovely, until the paint fades I suppose. Then we did the saga of the bikes. It was touch and go there, but we got it all sorted out. We rounded out the day with Sarah's new favorite, ice cream cake.

I found Book Lust and a cooking book at the Borders outlet this weekend. I am enjoying both, so far. The omission of Lois McMaster Bujold from Book Lust is a bit of a let down, though. Stephen King also doesn't get much play (although he's written tons of terrific stuff).

Folding proteins for fun

There's been a project called Folding@Home around for a while. Basically, a project at Stanford borrows your computer to do heavy computations related to biochemistry: protein folding and misfolding, solving problems.

Well, a somewhat related project called Foldit allows you, the user, to fold protein chains interactively. I've tried it and it's a hoot. Essentially, you are trying to find the most stable state for the protein (highest energy maybe? lowest energy? I don't know the chemistry).

It's a fascinating way to play around with chemicals. It might even be possible for the scientists behind the game to teach protein folding to computers by using human play.

Download it if you like puzzles. The control isn't terrific, but it's plenty good enough for fun.

Catch-22 and Different Seasons

I finished Catch-22 this week (and today I went and picked up the sequel, Closing Time). It's a great, great book. The later chapters are poignant and funny (the thing with Doc Daneeka is probably the saddest), and the ending is great. I don't know if I would've been prepared for it in high school. Or rather, I don't know if I would have been unprepared. It is the kind of book that catches you with your pants down and knocks you on your butt.

It is an over-the-top satire of the vagaries of war (unfortunately, probably not very over-the-top) and the illogic of bureaucracy and war in general. It is also a really good example of how the language of the story can become the story on some level. It wouldn't have been nearly as forceful without stuff like this:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No, then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there is a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

I would've gotten jokes like this, sure, but I don't think I would've groaned as much. The narrator of Catch-22 accepts all they see and say, something like Huck Finn. As I've said before, I wasn't good at standing outside the narrator's head. It's not that I had to be hit over the head with things, but I felt like I had to see things like the narrator did in order to understand the point of the story. This put me at a disadvantage with the unreliable narrators of modern fiction.

Anyhow, reread this if you haven't seen it for a while. It was great. I don't remember a single boring page. Sex, violence, language, and philosophy warnings.

I resumed my Stephen King program. I think I'm up to 1982 or so. I checked out Christine (which I think is about an evil car), and Different Seasons. Different Seasons is about as long as a paperback, and contains four short stories/novellas/novelettes/whatever. Three of them have been made into movies (and I'm not sure about the fourth). They all seem to have minor links between their characters.

The first one was "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption", which was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman took the main roles). It was a great story, just as touching as the movie. It surprised me how much of the language from the story had survived into the movie. Most of the important incidents made it too. Looking back at the movie, I see why they added and changed what they did: somebody had some real brainstorms for the movie. But there are no substantial differences in the feeling of the thing. Make haste to read the story and see the movie.

The second one was "Apt Pupil". Once, I read that good vs. evil is a hoary old conflict for a plot to do. Instead, you should do something closer to good vs. good; that is, oppose characters who want conflicting things for their own good reasons. There are a lot of reasons to do it: the characters will be more realistic, the conflict will be more meaningful, the story will be less predictable.

"Apt Pupil", on the other hand, is pure evil vs. pure evil. It's about a kid who becomes fascinated with the Holocaust and the concentration camps, then recognizes an old Nazi living in his town. Instead of turning the Nazi into the cops, the kid coerces the Nazi into telling him every gory detail. And that's just the beginning of the story. Everything spirals down from there. In a way, I couldn't wait for both of them to get their comeuppance. But it gets pretty horrible along the way.

It was made into a movie with Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro, but I don't think I really want to see it.

Next up in that one is "The Body", which got made into Stand By Me, a movie I might have seen snatches of, but now can't remember.

I also got The Old Man and the Sea. It was on the shelf near Joseph Heller's books. I don't think I have ever read a whole story by Hemingway, much less a novel, so this is another big classic for me.

So many classics, so little time.

In the year 2108

The recent flap over the DNC's new ad which quotes John McCain talking about the length of the American commitment in Iraq, revolves around this exchange:

TIFFANY (questioner): President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

MCCAIN: Maybe a hundred. ... That'd be fine with me

If this were the whole of his comments, it would be tantamount to saying we will never leave Iraq in my lifetime or my son's lifetime. Or anyone else's son's lifetime.

Certain people have been saying that this rips the quote out of context. And it's true that the paragraph is a bit different than the ad makes it seem:

Maybe a hundred. How long—We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.

More moderate, right? Here, McCain seems to hedge a bit and say that if the violence doesn't end (perhaps, return to prewar levels; if you believe the epidemiologists, it seems like we're still way above the prewar level. Here's the article about those studies) then he would support getting out. Here, one might wonder how much American and Iraqi death is too much. A cynic might ask if the violence would become too heavy a burden before or after November 2008.

Fortunately, we don't have to wonder, because again there is more context for McCain's remarks (on January 3, 2008, mind you). Here is the full exchange. It's from a New Yorker blog by Hendrik Hertzberg. The only words I changed from the original rough transcript are "Make it a hundred"; the tape clearly has McCain saying "Maybe a hundred."

Bear in mind that the questioner is an antiwar activist (I didn't know at the time). Whether he's an agitator looking to score points is... beside the point. McCain's opinion, it turns out, is pretty forthright.

Dave Tiffany... [a “full-time antiwar activist”] asked McCain “what you hope to accomplish in Iraq and how long it’s going to take.”

Here’s my rough transcript of what followed:

MCCAIN: The fact is, it’s a classic counterinsurgency. And you have to get areas under a secure environment, and that secure environment then allows the economic, political, and social process to move forward. In case you missed it, New Year’s Eve, people were out in the streets in Baghdad by the thousands for the first time in years. That’s because we provided them with a safe and secure environment. Is it totally safe? No. I talked earlier about the suicide bombs and the continued threats. But then what happens is American troops withdraw to bases. And we reach an arrangement like they have with South Korea and Japan. We still have troops in Bosnia. The fact is, it’s American casualties that the American people care about. Those casualties are on the way down, rather dramatically. You’ve got to consider the option. If we had withdrawn six months ago, I can look you in the eye and tell you that Al Qaeda would have said, We beat the United States of America. If we’d gone along with Harry Reid and said the war is lost to Al Qaeda, then we would be fighting that battle all over the Middle East. I’m convinced of that and so is General Petraeus.... I can tell you that it’s going to be long and hard and tough. I can tell you that the option of defeat is incredible and horrendous. And I can look you in the eye and tell you that this strategy is succeeding. And what we care about is not American presence. We care about American casualties. And those casualties will be dramatically and continue to be reduced.

TIFFANY: I do not believe that one more soldier being killed every day is success. There were three U.S. soldiers killed today. I want to know, How long are we going to be there?

MCCAIN: How long do you want us to be in South Korea? How long do you want us to be in Bosnia?

TIFFANY: There's no fighting going on in South Korea. There's no fighting in Bosnia. Let's come back to Iraq.

MCCAIN: I can look you in the eye and tell you that those casualties tragically continue… But they are much less, and they are dramatically reduced and we will eventually eliminate them. And again, the option of setting a date for withdrawal is a date for surrender. And we will then have many more casualties and many more American sacrifices if we withdraw with setting a date for surrender. Now you and I have an open and honest disagreement. But I can tell you that six months ago people like you, who believe like you do, said the surge would never succeed. It is succeeding. And I've been there and I've seen it with my very own eyes. Do you want to follow up?

TIFFANY: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

MCCAIN: Maybe a hundred. How long—We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me. I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

TIFFANY: By the way, I hope you kick Romney’s butt. That man cannot lie straight in bed.

MCCAIN: I knew there was a reason I called on you.

TIFFANY: What if U.S. soldiers are being killed at the same rate, one per day, four years from now?

MCCAIN: I can't tell you what the ratio is. But I can tell you, I understand American public opinion, sir. I understand American public opinion will not sustain a conflict where Americans continue to be sacrificed without showing them that we can succeed.

TIFFANY: I hear an open-ended commitment, then.

MCCAIN: I have an open-ended commitment in Asia. I have an open-ended commitment in South Korea. I have an open-ended commitment in Bosnia. I have an open-ended commitment in in Europe…

The rest was drowned out by applause. McCain said, “This kind of dialogue has to take place in America today, and I thank you.”

To me, it's fairly clear that McCain doesn't have an exit strategy for Iraq. He has a permanent presence strategy for Iraq. He can contemplate being there in the year 2108, long after he's dead (and long after the next American casualty will be dead). What he can't contemplate is a future where American military force continues to fail in the face of a completely untenable political situation in Iraq.

Don't you get it? We have already had eight long, long years of a President who refuses to contemplate the consequences of failure, who is not living and dying in the reality that the rest of us recognize. The idea that we will have to go through another four years of this exhausts me, it makes my heart heavy.

Finally, here's Josh Marshall, with a very watchable dissection of the flap, with further McCain statements reaffirming his long-term commitment to the occupation of Iraq.

Book action

I read Smoke and Mirrors, another short story collection by Neil Gaiman. There are a few stories that will definitely stick with me, and more that are pretty forgettable. The Cthulhu ones were pretty good, and there's a great murder mystery set in Heaven, prior to Satan's rebellion.

I started Catch-22 on a blustery day at Denver's City Park Lake. I've never read it before. I was in the shade most of the afternoon, working on the first hundred pages or so. It finally got so cold between the tree and the wind that I moved a couple of benches over to the warmth of the sun. I felt much better while I was there, and I developed a nasty sunburn.

Catch-22 is a funny funny book.

Code folding in emacs

I wrote a regular expression today that got my C++ major mode in Emacs to play nice with outline mode. For the first go round, I am just collapsing down to comments. We are using Doxygen so the structure is predictable.

It helped me double-check that I'd done the comments up to our standard, which was useful and productive.

Customizing Emacs has been a bit of a ride, but there is enough material on the internet to do quick fixes. My job isn't really paying me to learn an editor, but I'll spend a little time to get things like this in order.

One thing that's caught me a little off-guard is how little I depend on an IDE to get stuff done at work. I definitely recommend that the programmers out there wean off Visual Studio and Eclipse, and just put a good editor in their toolbox.

I saw The Simpsons' "Worst. Episode. Ever." again tonight. It's a meta-episode about how the Simpsons' writers are running out of ideas, so they have to recycle old plots, make ridiculous running jokes, crappy dialogue, and default to implausible coincidences to resolve the story. It's one of the funniest things they've ever done.

For those who don't know The Lewises, we have about 15 hours worth of Simpsons episodes on the DVR right now. It's the 800 pound gorilla, the monster show, undefeated champion of the world. It's twice as long as Seinfeld and still going. The quality is still running surprisingly strong.

Best. Sitcom. Ever?

The Baroque Cycle finally finishes

Well, it was quite a ride. Quite a ride, indeed. But I finished the Baroque Cycle, the 3000-page (in hardback! It's something like 8 paperbacks) historical novel set in the days of Newton, science and calculus, currency, and the beginning of the modern world.

If you haven't been following along, the story revolves around three larger-than-life characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Newton's schooltime chum and doer of deeds; Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, a kind of bloody-minded adventurer, beggar, and explorer; and Eliza, the woman Jack loves, a master of markets and influence. Behind the scenes, they create the atmosphere in which the greats of the era get things done.

What surprised me most was the lengths to which modernity depended on Newton's project to create a money system that could be trusted. He spent half his life on a project I hadn't even known was important. I used to think that Newton's best years were behind him when he went to work at the Mint. This book certainly put it in perspective for me.

I don't know how to describe it exactly. At the beginning of the book, the world is very chaotic and new. By the end of the last volume (titled The System of the World), Newton and his generation have created systems, and even in a way, systematic knowledge. Newton and Leibniz divide the world between them, all else is technology, that sort of thing.

I watched the modern world come into being, while caring about the poignant and hilarious adventures of this motley crew (and there's a cast of hundreds to care about, if you can). It's hard to believe that so much could get packed into one story, but somehow it did. And it definitely played hard and well as a counterpoint to and illumination of our modern times.

Plus, Monty Python jokes, including an absolute howler in Volume III.

I will definitely need longer to digest it, but it's been an amazing trip. I've been reading these for months, and I haven't appreciated all the subtleties, I'm sure. If you have several weeks to devote to one work of fiction, this would take you to great places. I feel like I can finally get back to reading three books at once, which is more like normal mode for me.

My only quibble is this: I know that the story takes artistic license with the events of the period. So I now have more fictional knowledge about the Baroque era than real knowledge. It's like Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell, which gave me fictional knowledge about Jack the Ripper. So, now that I'm interested in this stuff, I'll have to read a great deal of history. No doubt some fictional knowledge will always be mixed in from now on.

Also like Alan Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, this series is for adults only. I don't actually worry too much about kids reading for the sex, violence, disturbing images, language and adult situations. They're never going to make it past the superb language, the hunks of world knowledge inserted by the author, and the thinking they'd have to do to put it together.

Five Stars.

Google takes over the Internet

Let me bring you up to speed.

Ok, that's not exactly hyperbole. While Google has been essentially the most popular first click on the Internet, it has done so as an honest broker. It has said that pages sink or swim in its search results on the basis of algorithms, not favors for favors. It is a road sign on the (sigh) information superhighway, rarely an offramp or destination.

There are some exceptions. Google has steadily built a stable of productivity applications: Gmail, Gcal (the calendar), Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets (think Word and Excel, less powerful, but collaborative). They also own some content, like Youtube (and Google Video), and of course Blogger.

You can find the bleeding edge stuff at labs.google.com. Google 411 is a fascinating example. You can call a toll-free number from anywhere, 1800 GOOG 411, talk to a robot, search for a business by type, then get connected to the business without putting down the phone. The whole service is always free.

Why is Google doing Google 411? No, no, it's not just to put regular 411 out of business, which it totally would if anyone knew about it. There's a much awesomer reason to do it. While you talk to the robot, your voice data is being collected to train speech recognition algorithms. They're trading information so their robot can listen to you. It's not much of an invasion of privacy, really (if you called real 411, you'd be telling a person what you were looking for anyway). You can even block your caller ID before calling in, if you're paranoid.

Last week, Google stuck a program out there that allows you to use their office products even when you're offline, and seamlessly resyncs your data when you regain your internet connection. Google Docs and Spreadsheets are now competing directly with Microsoft Office...

Trust me, they are doing stuff there you could not imagine.

Until now. Google's system scales better than anything else out there; the amount of data they use and process is mindboggling, and they've created several unique tools to analyze it all efficiently. This week Google opened up its internet infrastructure (in beta), allowing people access to their application servers, Google FS filesystem and BigTable databases. It's called Google App Engine.

They're allowing 500 MB of space free, and a generous amount of bandwidth per month. The level of use they are allowing is free into the future, three applications per person. If you want more space or page views, you'll pay Google some amount of money.

Chances are good that the next great internet application, the next Facebook, will be written on these servers. And best of all, it takes 90% of the thinking out of hosting internet applications. It is Internet programming for the masses, in Python. It costs nothing just to go make a cool project that anyone in the world can see. A lot of budding young programmers will do just that. And Google will buy that awesome application that already runs on their infrastructure, along with the programmers who wrote it.

I decided to be a budding young programmer. To go with my Emacs and Unix obsession, I'm getting back into Python by fooling around with it to do processing for my Netflix prize data. And of course, I'm on the waiting list for the Engine... internet programming is a somewhat hairy world. I am taking my baby steps through Unix first, then onward.

I am on the home stretch of The Baroque Cycle. It's been just about perfect. I'm on the last 200 pages (out of 2500 or so). I'll be sorry to see it go. But, there's a new Neal Stephenson novel coming out in the fall, so I'm right on time. I've also never read Catch-22, so I got that from the library.

Linus and religion

No, not the philosophical kid with the blanket. Incidentally, the complete Peanuts is coming out in permanent book form now. Here's one. It will take over a decade to release them all to the buying public. A full set will cost in the neighborhood of $400.

I grew up with Peanuts. When I have frivolous spending money, I might get a set for my kids. And if anyone out there in publishing land is listening, a DVD ROM set would go straight onto my wish list.

I finished Just For Fun, the autobiography of Linus Torvalds, this week. Linus is the originator and still dictator for life of Linux, the Unix-clone operating system kernel that is free to inspect, copy, and obtain. Linus is an interesting character with an obvious gift for low-level software and the interface between it and hardware that he has planted himself in. That part of the book is quite interesting. In fact, I recommend it overall, although the story is bookended by a philosophy I am about to disagree with.

His exposition of the meaning of life is not so cogent. Essentially, he believes that human behavior comes down to essentially, a hierarchy of needs. The most basic need is survival. The next is social. The last is entertainment. They are not just like needs, they are also something like the stages of human endeavor and motivation.

Aside from leaving off the tops of Maslow's pyramid, which is itself an incomplete story at best, Linus' theory of behavior omits some other important motivators/stages.

There's no good and evil in Linus' world. I leave it to you whether the Carthaginian human sacrifice of children was an example of survival, social, or entertainment. On the good side of religion, there's the Kierkegaardian knight of faith, who follows the moral that is in some way beyond the mores of society. It would take reductionism in the extreme to call, say, Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac to God a product of the survival instinct or the social order, when a major point of the story is to turn exactly those things upside down. Here's the incomparable beginning:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"

"Here I am," he replied.

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.

More stages: the ultimate end of entertainment is corruption and decay. See the Romans, Fox News, any decadent society (pre-bloodbath France). And religious/civil awakening seems to be a spontaneously generating toothbrush for that decay. You can often see the pendulum swing again to a state sponsorship of religion. I'm not sure where power fits into survival, social, or entertainment either.

I suppose it's possible that Linus is carefully couching these stages in terms of progress, so a lot of what I am talking about are the forces opposed to survival, social, and entertainment, but I think he's really aiming at a broader target than that.

Another Dan Lewis original

And another song changes from relentlessly dreary to somewhat bouncy.

I've had most of the words for this song for a couple of years. I played it once for friends and it didn't have a real chorus. The word "stranger" was used repeatedly, which was pointed out to me.

So I realized through the process of this recording that if you want to repeat a word a lot, it has to be in the chorus. Of interest, every verse still has a rhyme or near rhyme for "stranger". So you can kind of guess how it went.

In music as in writing, if your audience says something is wrong, they're right. However, the audience does not always know how to fix it. I don't remember where I picked up that little proverb, but it is so true.

I discovered the guitar solo sound by poking around on the pedal. It reminds me a little of Mark Knopfler's signature sound (of course, he has real guitars and real guitar pedals; if I had to guess, I'd say he was playing on a hollowbody, for one thing). You narrowly missed hearing a guitar sound that was like a car going past you: neeeerrrowm. Repeatedly. I thought it sounded violinish.

The song's not autobiographical. It's the story of one complete relationship, like the seven ages of man (but there are only four verses, I spared you). I enjoy writing songs where you say the same thing over and over again, but its meaning keeps changing. I find a similar delight in The Simpsons' postmodern humor. And here is the Jargon File on hacker humor, which really explains it all:

hacker humor

A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with “GREEN” written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time).

2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory), standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL), and even entire scientific theories (see quantum bogodynamics, computron).

3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive currents of intelligence in it — for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor that combines this trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favored.

6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature, Discordianism, zen, ha ha only serious, koan.

See also filk, retrocomputing, and the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all six of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout science-fiction fandom.

Oh, and it's called "Stranger For Your Love", obviously.

I just realized that the original hook, the reason for the song's existence, a cool sounding bass line, has vanished from the version I've got now... maybe if I had more friends to play music with? I wouldn't create these problems?

More editors

So Emacs 22 got installed at work. I had a heady sense of power, during which I actually got real work done.

As it turned out, there are several chapters in Learning Gnu Emacs that are not important to me at this time, like the major mode for HTML, or Lisp programming (which I already know how to do). So I'm almost done with it. What I really have left to learn are the programming modes and the Emacs object model.

Dean tried to start a rainstorm on my parade. Hi Dean! I still remember getting up early for your C++ class. Good times. I think he's right. The best programmers don't care that much whether they work in vi or emacs. They probably spend the vast majority of their time thinking.

I heard a quote once that SQL was one of the only languages where you do more thinking than typing. I think it's true for me, but in every language I work in, not just SQL. I figure things out for a long time, then type as fast as possible (unless it's the night before something is due; then I just type). Sometimes I worry that I am not getting done all that I could be, if I were frenetic and focused enough to bang out enormous applications overnight.

I don't know if my emacs phase is just a novelty. I have enjoyed not leaving the environment to get all my work done. I don't really feel like I'm context switching to just go to the shell buffer. I feel a little like this was the way it's meant to be.

Lisp as an extension language is good in my book too. I still think Scheme and Common Lisp are probably the most amazing languages I have ever tried to understand, so I guess I am doing all this learning for a variety of mutually self-supporting reasons.

I know enough vi to get around in a pinch, so I don't feel qualified to boo and hiss at vi users. We have some great programmers using vi at my job, too.

But let's also say I am doing an experiment with this tool. I have a crush, we're on our first date. But do we really have a future together? Stay tuned.

New topic, I've been listening to Chris Thile's new band's new album. They are called the Punch Brothers and it is called Punch. (They did another excellent album called How To Grow a Woman From The Ground while Thile was still in Nickel Creek.) It is a chamber-classical-bluegrass album about love, Thile's divorce, and religion. The main music is a forty-minute bluegrass piece called The Blind Leaving The Blind. In four movements. They're all, individually and together, virtuoso players. I can barely wrap my head around it. If you are remotely interested from this description, plunk your dollars on the table (or the computer). They have a Myspace site if you want to hear something awesome first. Or Google videos.

Emacs, Unix, geeking out all over the place

This isn't very exciting to almost anyone, but after months of vacillating, I've finally taken the plunge into using GNU Emacs at work and at home.

My PC has been relegated to the dustbin of history, only turning on for music recording now (and that's only because I can't get the guitar pedal control program working). For me lately, Unix has been it at work and it at home.

What is GNU Emacs, you ask? Well, for you non-programmers out there, you might think of it, at first blush, as a very very very sophisticated version of Notepad. It is first a text editor. On the other hand, there is a joke about GNU Emacs: it's a nice operating system, not such a great text editor. This refers to the fact that Emacs is extensively programmable, and as such has become, over the years, a command shell (windows users, open cmd.exe), a software development tool, a program interpreter, a games platform, and pretty much anything you can think of and program. It even edits text.

Why is it so cool? Well, in the Unix world, there are basically two text editors: vi and emacs. They are fruitful, and multiply, and so there are vim and gvim and xemacs and so on. There are other options, like Nirvana Edit and Nano/Pico and such, but vi and emacs dominate the text editor landscape.

A lot of programmers I really respect use Emacs. One in particular, Steve Yegge, got me thinking when I read stuff like the following. Incidentally, if you're a computer programmer, you could do worse than read his two blogs. He has a somewhat unique perspective as an employee of first Amazon, then Google, not to mention the creator and maintainer of Wyvern, which can be described as a cross between Nethack and MUDs. In other words, whether you agree with all he says or not, he's brilliant. So listen:

Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. Mastering Emacs will make you more effective at writing and editing email, documentation drafts, blogs, HTML pages, XML files, and virtually everything else that requires any typing.

and

The original brilliant guys and gals here only allowed two languages in Amazon's hallowed source repository: C and Lisp.

Go figure.

They all used Emacs, of course. Hell, Eric Benson was one of the authors of XEmacs. All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I'm talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it.

and

In the meantime, Emacs isn't going anywhere, and Emacs-Lisp isn't going anywhere, not for several decades at least, so it will benefit you to learn them deeply. It will never be obsolete knowledge. You might as well start learning it now, and reap the benefits now.

and finally, the quote that always gets me:

Old algorithms don't suck, unless perhaps you count Bubble Sort. Generally, the more tried-and-true an algorithm or data structure is (DFS, BFS, quicksort, binary search, hashing, etc.), the more confidence you have in it. Ideas are fundamental and timeless, but technologies are always replaced.

Lisp straddles the line between a fundamental idea and a technology — which is another reason it took me so long to settle on it. And in many ways I'm still unhappy with it. But I believe it's the best thing out there, and will continue to be so for (at least) my lifetime. (My bet on Emacs fifteen years ago is still paying off.)

I realized that I was standing at the cusp of a unique opportunity in my career: I could make a great bet, hardly risky at this point given three decades of history on this one. The bet would improve my productivity and understanding for years to come. So why not?

Something just got to me in the last couple of days. I decided to get out Learning Gnu Emacs, read the first few chapters, then just decided that it was time. I knew enough to be dangerous, and I'd look up things in the book when I found I wanted to do them. I got myself running at work, my shell in one window and my text in the split screen, and I really didn't look back.

I was practically getting shivers. It was exciting, to see things just working, to get my fingers used to messing around. There is a reason why you just start up Emacs and don't leave the environment for the rest of the day.

I asked our sysadmin to get Emacs 22, which came out more recently than what we had (Emacs 19 from 1997!), and then tried to build it from source myself. That was a little ambitious for Day One, it turned out. But Day Two should get it going smoothly.

This is one of those programmer rites of passage, like customizing your prompt and terminal. I'm sort of getting it at the same time that I really want to get Unix. On those lines, I also got Classic Shell Scripting so I can pursue another decades-old programming tradition.

I even got Linus Torvalds' biography from the library.

The only regret I have is that I'm putting learning operating systems and compilers on the shelf for a little while to get all this done. But I figure that learning the Unix Way first will be worth it. (For the Unix Way, see also Eric S Raymond's stuff: The Art of Unix Programming, How To Become A Hacker, The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO, and of course, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.)

Poor man's guitar setup

So I didn't have much to do tonight, and I decided to take out the strings I bought a few weeks ago, change them out, and (gulp) raise the bridge without professional help.

I changed the strings and took more than hour to shim up my bridge, which it turns out has been too low, causing all kinds of fret buzz and unplayable notes.

The bridge is the piece of the guitar next to the start of the strings, near the bottom. It is a little wall the strings climb over on their trip up the neck. The point of the bridge is to keep the strings from being at the surface of the guitar, where they have no room to vibrate and jangle against the wood surface as they are played.

On the other hand, unless you are doing slide/dobro kinds of things, you don't want the action (the height of the strings above the neck) to be too high. A high action makes it difficult to press down a string on to the neck at a given fret, to produce the note you want, because you have to push harder. It makes it especially difficult to bend strings, which involves pressing down to play a note, then pulling the string sideways to slightly and smoothly increase the pitch. It is fun to do and turns your guitar from a discrete instrument into a continuous instrument, opening up some interesting possibilities.

They, where they equals the leading internet resources on setting up your guitar, want you to put in thin pieces of wood veneers, about 1/32 of an inch each, to adjust the bridge up just right, to get a nice low action without getting all that fret buzz.

I don't have wood veneers, but I was hoping to get some from underneath as I was casting around for an appropriate material, I lit upon the perfect poor man's wood veneer.

I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Are you listening?

Plastics.

I have a bunch of crappy club cards in my wallet, for toy stores and Autozone and a bunch more. By carefully scissoring the long edge of the toy store card, then cutting to fit in the precise length of my bridge (insert an hour of experimenting and annoyance here), I've got it just about perfect.

The only problem was, my worst offending string, the high E, still had an annoying dead region starting about the 11th fret and extending for five steps or so. This is what we in the music business call a major buzzkill. So I turned to the trusty internet again, where I found a suggestion to stick a little material in between the bridge and the offending string, shimming it up still further.

And of course you know what happened next; I just happen
ed to have a debit card from Utah to cut up, and two pieces of it stacked end to end, jammed in between wire and plastic bridge now mar the appearance of my beloved guitar.

But they raised the string up so it plays perfectly (and so it's a little higher than the others, making me feel like I have an intelligent, custom setup), so it's worth looking a little silly.

Poking around

I've been poking around with the Mac, installing MySQL (a database management system) so I can get the Netflix data into the database. I also spent a good half hour figuring out you can use nice/renice to reprioritize processes, and use prepare/execute to speed up MySQL insertions, which is making the Perl script go a bit more smoothly on the 10 million insert statements I need to do to get the data into a table.

I also plugged my pedal into the Mac. I was a bit surprised to find that it was plug-and-play, zero configuration in Garage Band. I have been doing stuff in Audacity, but it's apparently the week to experiment.

If the "Music By Dan" player in the left column is not showing five songs by me, you can also go look at a static Google page with them here. An earlier commenter gave me the impression she couldn't see them.

On Vince's encouragement, I picked up some more Glenn Gould CDs from the library, along with Simon and Garfunkel's albums. Incidentally, their entire concert in Central Park is here. I also got Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You).

On the way home, I was listening to Kathy's Song and it got me thinking, here:

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you

I don't think that I have beliefs exactly. Instead I have one big belief, or one big world of belief that I inhabit. The individual things that make up my world, it turns out, are all connected. They are supposed to hang together, and for the most part they do. They are not gas particles randomly colliding in Brownian fashion. Really they are more like a crystal, albeit with impurities.

I will try to get around to explaining this when I have a few more minutes. But what I want to say about it for now is that pursuing destructive proofs by contradiction (gotchas) of a crystalline belief is like pointing out impurities in a crystal. My wife's engagement ring has a diamond with such an impurity, but that doesn't make the diamond worthless, or make it structurally unsound. As a believing person I am not personally attached to x, y, or z flawed example belief. If you want to destroy a diamond, you have to use another diamond.

Adventures in media

I got my hands on a recording of Glenn Gould doing The Goldberg Variations. I love Bach's music, but I have not (yet) been trained to appreciate the theoretical delights of baroque music. I may get around to it. About the middle of the CD (track 16), there was one that was fast and surprising and crazy. It blew my mind. Normally I listen to albums all the way through, but that one earned a previous track.

I don't normally listen to rap, but I make a few exceptions, and now one of them is the Jurassic 5. I listened to the album FeedBack today. It was very entertaining. If I've interpreted the music and the liner notes correctly, it's a mostly Muslim hip-hop group that spends a good deal of time being upbeat and simultaneously deconstructing gangsta. They keep the swearing to a minimum for the most part, and they have an amazing sound and mind-expanding lyrics.

Unfortunately, they are breaking up (or already have). I first heard of them when another one of those crazy rap-salsa-activist bands that I love (Ozomatli) had Chali2na and Cut Chemist as guests on their self-titled album, way back in my undergraduate days. Once again, I am the last person to the party.

I cackled and howled at a movie tonight for the first time in a while. It was Mr. Bean's Holiday. Go see (rent) this movie immediately. Unlike the voyage to America ten years ago, which was a heart-warming family comedy, this was classic Mr. Bean in France, and it was dazzling. The plot makes as much sense as a Seinfeld episode. Mr. Bean wins a vacation in Cannes, and takes the long way around. I don't think I had a single dull moment. And if you know anything about France, it's that much more perfect. And I should mention that Willem Dafoe has a perfect, hilarious part as a self-important emo director with a film premiering at Cannes.

Out of sorts

I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind words and love. Sarah and I have appreciated you all.

I have been hard at work learning Bayesian networks and inference, in pursuit of the Netflix Prize. Tonight, I'm getting all the rating data in that database. I think I am writing my stuff in Perl. I am also considering getting it onto the PC so I can use Matlab, but that would take a new hard drive.

But other than that, I've been Daylight Savings Out Of Sorts. I slept pretty crappily last night.

I hope to get a little deeper into the saga of Alex as time goes on. Sarah and I have found a lot of misconceptions about autism out there. The most obvious is that Alex doesn't seem to be neurotic like Rainman or other celebrated cases. Instead, his diagnosis of autism comes down to a checklist in the DSM, and a few boxes like "not enough language for communication", "not enough pretend play", "does not attend to unfamiliar adult". There is a broad spectrum of disorder, from truly incommunicable sensibilities back up to where Alex is. I figure that telling Alex's story and our story can break a few stereotypes.

My son has autism

Now that I have your attention, let me bring you up to speed.

Around Alex's second birthday, October 2006, Sarah and I decided to explore preschool for Alex. He had a number of symptoms, like speech delay, flapping hands, spinning stuff, repetitive behavior, low social interaction and communication. We got into an early childhood class where Alex got speech therapy and occupational therapy a couple of times per month, and preschool with other kids with similar issues two times per week.

I was finishing up my CS degree at the time and working on my thesis. If I thought about it at all, I basically believed that Alex was just behind, and time the great healer would catch him up.

Alex has always been smart, if a bit uncommunicative at times. He also clearly loves people and has the most fun interacting with us. These boded well to me, so I put the issues on the back burner.

As time went on, we saw Alex respond to his classroom and enjoy school. Sarah read more about autism, including some books. She read the fascinating Born On A Blue Day, the autobiography of an autistic savant. You can watch an hour-long video about this particular guy here. She also read Jenny McCarthy's book about her autistic son, got hooked up with an autistic parents' group, read another book... you get the idea.

We moved last July, and priority 1 was to get Alex into services. We found a nice team in our town who helped get him into preschool. His class is about 80% "norms" and 20% "others": the autistic and fragile-X and antisocial and non-talking children. For Alex, this is really valuable, to be with lots of kids, many of whom are active and talking on schedule. Also, there are a raft of specialized teachers doing speech therapy and special ed and occupational therapy along with the regular ones. Thank God, the school was right around the corner from our house so Sarah could walk him in the mornings while I was at work.

We also put him in an enormous queue for evaluation and diagnosis at a children's hospital. Depending on the results, we could get greater access to services, or perhaps find out that Alex was catching up quickly enough that no extra intervention was required. It took several months to get him in.

This morning, we finally took Alex in to meet with several doctors. They tested his abilities in various ways, exhausting the entire family with questionnaires and performances, and finally gave us the bad news. Alex is officially diagnosed with autism. Among other things, he now qualifies for specialized care, more subsidized therapies from the state, a Medicaid disability waiver, insurance claims, and so on. Sarah and I can have the opportunity to be trained to help Alex at home.

They also gave us the good news, which is that Alex seems to have normal cognitive abilities. He can speak phrases and understand a lot of things. He can do some things quickly, and, the doctors suspect, would have passed more tests if some fundamental issues with paying attention and following directions had been resolved before today.

What this means to me is that there is a well-developed child who wants to connect to the world around him. I almost said "trapped in a X's body", "struggling to get out", but these don't quite catch my meaning.

What I mean is, it is worth fighting to save my son, to give him a high-functioning, healthy life. It is crucial to do it now, it is worth my blood, sweat, and tears.

Normally, I like to be philosophical about things. It implies that you can take a step back, and that if you have a strong opinion, it's because you've considered a thing from many angles, seen it from the inside and the outside, understood the person or idea you disagree with at its strongest. I also think it means your attitude is intellectual, controlled, and cold. This is a strong attitude if you are looking for the truth.

I find it hard to be philosophical in this situation. The doctors failed to talk around the fact that they thought this was crushing bad news. Like that Simpsons episode where Homer runs into the statue and has his jaw wired shut. They give Marge a brochure on Homer's behalf: "So Your Life Is Ruined".

To me, this fatalism is so... fatal. Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't feel like I can responsibly wish reality away, or curl up into a little ball. I am resigned to the name they gave my son. But in the fight for your son's future, there's just no room for detachment.

Your support, your friendship, your prayers, your love. Any or all of the above will be precious to us, going forward.



P.S. I held this one for a little while so we could tell our families first. All this happened on Wednesday.

new mac, old mac

When Sarah got her dad's Mac, I was bequeathed with her old Mac, a G4 iMac. I have enjoyed putting it to good use. One thing I've had to do is start backing up her files off the computer so I can use the hard drive space for the Netflix prize contest.

This got me thinking about backups. I am using the poor man's backup, the DVD, but I would like to be able to easily back up my PC and Mac, preventing the destruction of about ten years' worth of personal data. A lot of it is crap like shareware I installed, but a good chunk of it is stuff that is creative, or personal history, or both.

I think I need to look into off-site backups for this data. If anyone has a reliable option, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I am rereading my machine learning texts, trying to get back to where I was a year or so ago, in the thick of graduate school, just coming off a data mining course.