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May 4, 2008: The Five Stages of Pundit Grief

Denial

"Wow. I'm shocked Yahoo wasn't more reasonable. The stock will probably go down at least $5 on Monday. It is surprising that Ballmer walked away instead of trying a hostile bid at $33," said Walter Price, a senior portfolio manager at RCM fund management company in San Francisco, which had 21 million Microsoft shares and 2 million Yahoo shares as of the end of December.

Anger

Ms. [Laura] Martin also had harsh words for Yahoo’s management’s "unbelievable" actions. "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders’ interest,” she told the news service. She also told Reuters that she expects several shareholders lawsuits to be filed against the company on Monday.

Bargaining

"Had there been a full deal on the table, a hostile deal, at $34 or $35, we would have had to take a look at it," Bill Miller, a portfolio manager for Legg Mason, told The New York Times. "Our number was higher, but it doesn’t mean we would have rejected it."

Depression

Microsoft’s disappointing numbers, which sent its stock down 4.5 percent in after-hours trading, will only put pressure on the software behemoth to raise its bid.

On Wednesday, Steve – as in Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive – cavalierly suggested that the company doesn't need Yahoo and can go it alone. (That's untrue, by the way. If Mr. Ballmer doesn't win Yahoo, his failure will be seen as a major management blunder, and shareholders could raise questions about his leadership.) He has also threatened to start a proxy contest by this Saturday unless Yahoo reaches a deal with them.

But Mr. Ballmer's tough talk now appears to be pure bluster ahead of what he knew was going to be a bad quarter.

Acceptance

"We believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal," Ballmer said in a statement.

Posted by Evan Goer on May. 04, 2008 at 9:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008: I've Been Recursive Meme'd

Here are your rules. (You've seen this one before, this is just a 'recursive' version)

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to Garunya's blog (your tagees will post to mine, etc.) once you've posted your three sentences.

The Five Chosen are:

• Auros
• Jay
• Adiv
• Dru
• Zak

And my three sentences:

"The tale of Gawaine's journey through the Wirral in dead winter, at the end of the year, to keep his vow; his adventures at the castle of Sir Bertilak, a genial and generous host of handsome appearance and normal colouring in whom Gawaine does not recognize the Green Knight, have nothing to do with Arthur. It is a tale of old magic whose meanings are disputed but related with such visual brilliance and emotional force, reading it is like experiencing some thrilling nightmare. Its leading feature is description."

From The Mystery of King Arthur, long ago borrowed from my friend Wendy's parents. (Okay, technically speaking, the closest book was the manual for FrameMaker / Mac OS 9, but that's all sealed up in the box, and seemed like a pain to get at.)

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 22, 2008 at 8:20 PM | Comments (3)

April 17, 2008: Mac Tricks and Tips and Apps that are Real Good and Stuff

Dru recently won a shiny new Mac. Now he's wondering about tips and tricks and what he should do with it. I was going to add my advice as a comment to his LJ, but then I realized, hey -- this comment is getting so long, it's totally turning into a free blog post! Ahem.

Dru complains about the menu at the top. I hear you man, it took me about two weeks to train myself to look there, and not at the window itself. Also, closing windows (often) does not close the app. Strange but true.

Tip #1: Yes, you can use a two-button mouse with a Mac. This very minute I am using the Microsoft Wireless Lasermouse 6000, with two buttons, two side buttons, and a clickable scroll wheel. Say what you will about Microsoft, they make some fine peripherals. And no, I haven't been struck by lightning.

Tip #2: You can convert every file you open in a mac to PDF for free, via the Print menu.

Good mac resources: a bit hard to find, as most mac forums out there are too fanboyish. (Something's wrong with your Mac? No, something's wrong with you!) The only forum I know of with any sense of perspective is Ars Technica's Mac forum. There are a number of big-name Mac blogs out there but most of the ones I've tried subscribing to are vastly overrated. The only other Mac web resource I like is the Macrumors Buyers Guide, which gives you some idea of when the next hardware update is coming, based on historical data.

Software apps. For geeks, the three big ones would be MacPorts (UNIX package manager), XCode (Mac dev environment), and Quicksilver (app launcher plus so much more). Dru is already aware of these, so I'll move on to my favorite software, almost all of which is Mac-only.

• Angband: free rogue-like game, incredibly addictive. Not Mac-only, though.
• Connoisseur: holds your recipes! How awesome is that! Isn't that why every household was going to rush out and get a personal computer, back in 1980?
• Delicious Library: holds your book collection. An attractive app, but not terribly useful. It is good if you loan out a lot of books, otherwise it has no real function other than to reduce your OCD.
• Keychain: comes with the OS, holds your keys and passwords. Most people don't even know it exists -- I didn't figure it out until a couple years into owning a Mac. I like it just fine, but since Dru is a security professional, there are a number of powerful third party apps.
• Mail: The default Apple Mail has some drawbacks, but one big bonus is that it works with Spotlight, Apple's search framework. DANGER WILL ROBINSON: Mail uses a proprietary format for email, so you might be locked in (compared to say Thunderbird which uses mbox). Actually, it's a sort of bastardized Maildir, so it's pretty straightforward to convert. Thanks, Sam Kingston!
• NetNewsWire: excellent free RSS reader.
• OmniFocus: a very powerful GTD app.
• OmniGraffle Pro: for diagrams. Like Visio but in my opinion much nicer to use.
• OmniOutliner Pro: an outlining program. There are a lot of good outliners available for the Mac, but this one is my personal favorite. Though I use it less now, because of OmniFocus.
• Plaxo: Plaxo is not Mac-only. And a lot of people hate Plaxo because way back in the day they were pretty spammy. However, Plaxo syncs my address book and calendar between my work and home machine, which is just too danged useful to give up. I should note that, Plaxo has borked my calendar and addressbook twice in the past, but it's been good for the last few months. To be perfectly honest, it's a love/hate relationship.
• SuperDuper: Great app for cloning and backups. Leopard now has Time Machine, which obviates some of the need for SuperDuper. But Time Machine can't do everything SuperDuper can, like making a bootable clone.
• Spaceward Ho!: excellent old-school space conquest game, with hilarious cowboy sound effects.
• TextMate: a GUI text editor that happens to be elegant and yet highly customizable and UNIX friendly at the same time.
• Transmit: a very good GUI FTP client.
• TurboTax: well, this is available for Windows too, but in any case, it's indispensable. See, for nearly a decade, I did my taxes all by hand, just like my father before me. But every year they got more complicated. I'm actually pretty good at elementary school math, but checking and double-checking all my tax forms was just getting tedious. Finally, I said to myself, "Man! It would really be great if someone would invent some kind of machine that was, like, really, really good at doing arithmetic and looking things up in tables. That would be just swell!" So. TurboTax. A good idea. And works great on the Mac.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 17, 2008 at 7:59 PM | Comments (12)

April 6, 2008: Poisoning the Minds of our Youth

Still going through all the boxes of stuff from childhood. Right now I'm going through college notes, homework, papers, and tests.

I have no idea why I saved this stuff. Maybe I was thinking that if I became a professor at a teaching college, I could reuse some of the homework and exam questions? But ten years later, these papers were all clearly written by Someone Else. Even if for some reason I wanted to throw my career away and jump back into science, I'd have to start all over anyway. Educational value of these N cubic feet of paper? Basically zero.

Still, there some gems in there. One of my favorites is actually an appendix from our frosh lab manuals, A Guide To Technical Report Writing:

One of the most common criticisms of technical reports is that they are not written in a sufficiently brief and concise form. To write succinctly is often difficult. Writing in a rather loose and informal style is much easier, but it simply cannot be tolerated in scientific writing today for some very good reasons. The editor of the Astrophysical Journal wrote the following paragraph:

The present accelerated growth of this Journal in common with the other scientific journals, makes it imperative that authors (in their own interest) exercise utmost restraint and economy in the writing of their papers and in the selection and presentation of material in the form of tables, line drawings, and halftones. In spite of the obvious need for such restraint, the Editor regrets that authors continue to write in the relaxed style common a century ago; moreover, the temptation to reproduce large masses of IBM printouts and tracings from automatic recording equipment appears too great for most authors to resist. The Astrophysical Journal will enforce stricter standards in the future with respect to these matters.

The present change for publication in the leading physics journals is over $70 per page. Thus, it is important that you learn to write your reports in such a way that unnecessary words are eliminated and data is reduced to a minimum. This generally calls for some rewriting.

You don't say!

Well, one thing is clear: no honest-to-goodness bad writer could possibly string together so many unnecessary passive phrases, nominalizations, repetitive words, and other stylistic blunders -- so what is this piece really all about? My theory is that it's actually a meta-commentary about scientific prose. Like Alan Sokal in the famous Sokal Hoax, the author is trying to raise the community's awareness of the problem by mocking it at a fundamental level. The piece even goes so far as to advise students to learn the principles of good writing by "read[ing] reports and articles appearing in various engineering and scientific journals, such as The Physical Review." Such acute, insider wit can only come from someone who has been seething inwardly about this issue for years. (The prim little tone of admonishment is just the icing on the cake.)

Unfortunately, unlike the Sokal affair, nobody ever came forward to admit that A Guide To Technical Report Writing was a joke. Thus, a hapless freshman physics major skimming through their lab notebook might actually have believed that it constituted real advice! So while I appreciate our nameless author's cri de coeur about the state of scientific writing, I'm not sure it was worth the risk of confusing the students.

Then again, the odds that the students actually read that part of the lab notebook are slim to none. I know I didn't.

Homework Problem for Next Class: Rewrite the first paragraph of the excerpted piece to say the same thing, using 50% fewer words, thus saving serious $$ when you publish said paragraph in the Astrophysical Journal. Show your work.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 06, 2008 at 9:05 AM | Comments (3)

April 2, 2008: Fool Me Once, Can't Get Fooled Again

Yesterday, an ominous message appeared in my inbox from one of our key engineers, via our bug tracking system:

Didn't get my visa. Moving back to Calgary. :(

CLOSED / WONTFIX

Oh, crap!

Okay, I realized that it was April 1st and all. And having to pack up and move back to Canada all of a sudden? That sounds fishy too. On the other hand, closing all your bugs WONTFIX, that seems awfully serious. That couldn't be a joke... could it?

My friend Jay says I shouldn't have been fooled for a second. "Dude, engineers never voluntarily update their bug states. That was your red flag right there."

Ten years working in the Valley, and still so naive. Sigh. Live and learn.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 02, 2008 at 10:11 PM | Comments (5)

March 27, 2008: Back Off Man, I'm a Scientist

Forget driving. Forget voting. Forget your first real job. Forget moving into your first apartment. Forget true love and true heartbreak. In this country, you know you've finally become a real grown-up when your parents finally force you to take away all your boxes of crap.

Oh, I managed to hold them off for a decade, but finally my folks decided that they were redecorating. Which in 20- and 30-something circles is known as "playing the nuclear option." Fortunately, their timing was pretty good, since I was already on a quest to find my long-lost college diploma. See, my insurance agent told me that he could get me a "Scientist" discount on my car insurance, as long as I could provide proof that I had a Bachelor of Science degree.

Don't get me wrong -- I protested that I wasn't a working scientist, far from it. I told him that these days I couldn't do a path integral to save my life. I told him about the thermometers I dropped in undergrad lab, about the spontaneous magnet quench back in grad school -- the head grad student gave me the evil eye for that, but that totally wasn't my fault! I told my agent that I had decided for the good of humanity to stay as far away from the lab as possible. "I do English...y stuff right now," I told him. "One of the proudest moments in my career was when a software engineer chastised me, saying, 'I don't know what your degree is in, English or whatever, but I have a degree in Mathematics.'" (That's when you know you've really made it as a tech writer.)

But my agent said all that didn't matter, just send him a Xerox of the degree and voila. So thanks to my folks, and the estimated 65 grams of fine particulate dust I inhaled during the arduous search process, I am now saving some serious $$ on my car insurance! Who needs that silly lizard anyway? Does he have a Bachelor's degree... in SCIENCE?

Anyway, I'm glad to see the ol' diploma doing some good again. People say college is overrated, and that's probably true -- unless you're a Scientist like me. After all, another 1,350 years of driving, and this baby just about oughtta pay for itself.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 27, 2008 at 8:01 PM | Comments (2)

March 21, 2008: Can Has Niece Plz?

Welcome, Nesya!

There are a bunch of pictures of my adorable, bright, active little baby niece. But this one is my favorite.

Note that the picture is distorted by perspective; Nesya is actually noticeably smaller than the cat.

For now.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 21, 2008 at 4:52 PM | Comments (9)

March 18, 2008: Yes, I Will Link to You, Just See if I Don't

Chad Orzel has a complaint about LiveJournal culture:

[P]eople in LiveJournal land have never really grasped the concept of the permanent link. Possibly because the default settings for the software make it fairly difficult to find the correct URL, or maybe because that have that little feature that automatically inserts a link given only a username. Whatever the reason, LiveJournal people tend to just link to the front page of whatever journal they're pointing to, and it drives me nuts.

...

Why this particular behavior is so prevalent on LiveJournal, I have no idea. Regular blogs long ago got used to the idea of linking directly to archive pages, and while linkrot is still a problem (particularly since both Blogspot and Movable Type are prone to trashing site databases), they're almost always good for a few weeks or a month. LiveJournal has never gotten the memo, though, and it's maddening. If I go out of town for two days, I don't even bother trying to follow links in most LiveJournal posts, because none of them go anywhere useful.

Hear, hear! And while we're out saying mean things about the linking habits of LJers, allow me to air my pet peeve about LiveJournal culture: what's with the whole, "May I link to this please?" You just posted a page on the public Internet for Pete's sake. Linking is what pages on the public Internet are for.

The weirdest aspect of this little cultural tic is that unlike most other blogging systems, LiveJournal already offers built-in security settings, settings that enable you to mark posts as "private" so they're unreadable and unlinkable for the outside world. Thanks to LiveJournal's design, no LJ user ever has to post on the icky public Internet if they don't want to.

Anyway. Asking "May I link to this?" is mousy and lame. Show a little testicular/ovarian fortitude and just link already.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 18, 2008 at 10:39 PM | Comments (12)

March 3, 2008: Two Levers Labeled 'Hope' and 'Fear'

Chad Orzel, one of my favorite science bloggers, is trying to answer the question, What should everyone know about science? He suggests these three themes:

1. Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts
2. Science is an essential human activity.
3. Anyone can do science.

While #1 and #3 both seem sound, I think #2 defines science far too broadly. To blockquote:

2) Science is an essential human activity. You'll often hear people who study art and literature wax rhapsodic about how the arts are the core of what makes us human-- Harold Bloom attributes it all to Shakespeare, but you can find similar arguments for every field of art. Great paintings, famous sculptures, great works of music (classical only, mind-- none of that noise you kids listen to)-- all of these are held to capture the essence of humanity.

You don't hear that said about science, but you should. Science is essential to our nature, because at its most basic, science consists of looking at the world and saying "Huh. I wonder why that happened?" Science is applied curiosity, and there's no more human quality than that. ("Bloody-mindedness" is a close second.)

I know #2 sounds good. First, it's flattering, particularly for those of us who were trained in a scientific field or who simply just like science a lot. Second, it's a good hard stab at all those nasty tweedy humanities professors who preen about how scientists don't know anything about literature and art, but who can't themselves even be bothered to learn the frickin' Second Law of Thermodynamics. Sheesh!

But -- science isn't "applied curiosity." Most things with vertebrae have applied curiosity (balanced by applied cowardice).

When I think about the nature of science, I'm reminded of something Brad DeLong said about the The Law of Large Numbers: "This is the principal insight of the science of statistics. It is an important insight. It is a powerful insight. It is also not an obvious insight -- that's what makes it powerful and important." The Law of Large Numbers (and related insights) are powerful, important, and non-obvious precisely because our minds do not naturally think in these terms. It takes training.

Greek logic is less than 3000 years old. Modern science is about 400 years old. Modern statistical methods are even younger than that. Meanwhile, storytelling has been with us, oh, ever since we had language. Singing possibly longer.

Or another way of putting this is: tell the average citizen, "All studies indicate that wearing a bicycle helmet drastically reduce incidence of head injuries," and at best you'll get a vague nod. If you want that same person to actually wear a helmet, you need to tell them something like this: "Dude, I just saw this bike messenger flip over his handlebars, slamming his head into the curb -- and the guy simply got up and walked off, with a big old chunk out of his helmet." Whoa.

Perhaps what makes this confusing is that you can harness science's power without being all that scientifically inclined. I mean, John Hagee drives a car and flies in airplanes and everything. In fact, science is so powerful that "it works, bitches" despite the fact that it's so new and so shallowly rooted in our primate skulls. Of the entire spectrum of human behavior -- all the appalling things and all the wonderful things too -- science might well be one of the least "intrinsic" behaviors we have.

As for what all this says about us as a species, that's well above my pay grade.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 03, 2008 at 11:21 PM | Comments (7)

February 12, 2008: The Evil Overlord Constructs a Literary Conspiracy Theory

Jennifer Pelland, talented short story writer, tireless chauffeur for various snot-nosed VPXers, and all around Good Egg, finds herself freshly irritated by the literary vs. genre divide:

I emailed a literary review journal based at my alma mater to see if they'd make an exception to the "we don't review genre fiction" rule for an alum, and was told that no, they only reviewed "literary" fiction.

I meant to chime in with some hopefully soothing words, "Don't worry, 'literary' as that journal defines it is really a genre," aka the Key Lime Pie Theory of Literary Fiction. But one of Jen's commenters, apintrix, already had an interesting take on that:

[Pierre] Bourdieu's theory, in a nutshell, is that part of what has defined the discourse of "literature" or the literary since C19, as well as "high art" more generally, is a resistance to commercial or market pressures-- the genius aesthetic, basically. The more your art is separated from the market, the more "pure" and "literary" it is. There's something to that idea, I think, beyond it being "just another genre"; particularly because one of the central oppositions in the "literary field" is precisely between literary and genre fictions, which Bourdieu might say are "genre" because they cater to particular markets, and are explicitly heteronomous between the field of actual capital and cultural capital.

(The name "Pierre Bourdieu" rang a bell. As it turns out, David Brooks mentions him in Bobos in Paradise, which I'm embarrassed to admit I even read, let alone found amusing in parts, so let's please just pretend I didn't say any of that. Good? Good.)

Anyway, as apintrix observes, it's interesting that "... 'genre' fiction appropriates the language of the market and of industry -- authors 'working hard', being 'productive', all this stuff -- while in literary fiction you're more liable to see language like 'inspiration' or 'transcendence'." That does seem like a fundamental difference, not to mention a fairly new idea. Our ancient literary predecessors were certainly concerned with winning popular acclaim and economic success. If this has changed, I suppose the only fair thing to do is to blame Rousseau.

Ultimately, I think this is related to the argument sketched out in James Miller's Is Bad Writing Necessary?, which discusses the tension between deliberately opaque writers like Theodor Adorno and deliberately transparent writers like George Orwell. To the Opaques, the fact that the Transparents have more popular acclaim and influence outside the academy "fuels their suspicion that plain talk is politically perfidious -- reinforcing, rather than radically challenging, the cultural status quo."

As quoted in Miller's original article, Katha Pollitt has a scathing response:

When intellectuals on the left write in a way that excludes "all but the initiated few," [Pollitt] remarked, what almost inevitably results is "a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom."

The parallels between Literary Fiction and Opaque Non-fiction are striking. To what Pollitt said, I can only add that if I were The Man, Evil Overlord and Oppressor of all that is Radical and True, I could think of no better allies than those who exhort their colleagues to remain safe in a self-constructed academic ghetto. After all, shooting radical writers is messy and counterproductive. The optimal strategy is to convince them to endlessly chase their own tails.

Posted by Evan Goer on Feb. 12, 2008 at 7:19 PM | Comments (2)