My wife and I have been flipping back and forth between DVDs of Gilmore Girls and The Wire. Sometimes this gets a little confusing…

Lorelai Gilmore	Life always spinning out of control. Makes poor relationship choices. Hates all authority figures.	Jimmy McNulty
Rory Gilmore	Smart, ambitious, wonkish, and idealistic. Dangerous debating skills. Has a lot of growing up to do.	Tommy Carcetti
Emily Gilmore	Community powerbroker. Enjoys the spoils of playing The Game. A consummate streetfighter; never surrenders.	Avon Barksdale
Richard Gilmore	A businessman above all else. Expects high standards from his co-workers. Not afraid to shiv someone who gets in the way.	Stringer Bell
Paris Geller	Smart, ambitious, and efficient. Extremely direct, almost to a fault. Very annoying, particularly when right.	Cedric Daniels
Sookie St. James	Quirky, funny, and earthy. Loves food. Sometimes a help, sometimes a hindrance.	Jay Landsman
Lane Kim	Trying to escape a miserable homelife. Career choice not accepted by family. Should probably avoid dating boys.	Kima Greggs
Michel Gerard	Fastidious and highly fussy. The best-dressed character on the show. Highly dangerous when crossed.	Brother Mouzone
Luke Danes	Street smart and skilled at crafts. A man of few words. A fine partner, but not fun to be around when cranky.	Lester Freamon
Dean Forester	Means well, but not terribly bright. Torn by family loyalties. A patsy for the more powerful characters on the show.	D’Angelo Barksdale
Taylor Doose	Wealthy and successful community leader. Knows the rules inside and out. Always willing to drive a hard bargain.	Proposition Joe
Mrs. Kim	Has a long memory. Loves raking subordinates over the coals. Not someone you want to fuck with.	William Rawls
Jess Mariano	Impulsive and aggressive, but not really a great fighter. Charming only up to a point. Not as quite as smart as he thinks he is.	Bodie
Kirk	Weirdly charismatic. Always trying out new business opportunities. Desperately needs professional help.	Bubbles
Logan Huntzberger	Young, wealthy, surrounded by an entourage. Loved by the ladies. A narcissist and probable sociopath.	Marlo Stanfield
Omar	Nobody on Gilmore Girls is as cool as Omar.	Omar

A couple weeks back I posed this question to some folks at work, and then again on Facebook, and it got some interesting responses. So here it is again: If you could spend two thousand hours diving into any one new hobby or skill, what would it be?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites 10,000 hours as the amount of time required to become a world-class expert in a subject. To be fair, Gladwell’s embrace of this rule might be more breezy than scientifically accurate. That aside, I’m willing to accept 10,000 hours as a gut-level assessment of how long it takes to become a real expert.

What about a smaller time investment, a couple hundred hours or less? Last quarter, I took a basic drawing class at Mission College. Those of you who were art students remember this stuff — ink and charcoal, the prerequisite for every class you might want to take in visual arts, you know the drill. I’d never had any talent for art, but I do like looking at art, and I figured what the heck. Don’t be afraid to try something you suck at, right?

Conservatively speaking, between evening classes and homework, I sunk about 150 hours into that drawing class. And compared to most the kids in the class, particularly the ones who were future visual arts majors, I did suck. But the good news is that after 150 hours, you do get better. I went from being barely able to sketch little plastic toy dinosaurs with vine charcoal to drawing actual human faces. Not that these faces actually looked like the original people. If you’re slightly off on the shape of the nose or the mouth… well, let’s just say that Homo Sapiens‘s built-in facial recognition software is powerful and damned unforgiving. Still, being able to draw any faces at all was way more progress than I expected.

Two thousand hours is an interesting timescale because logarithmically, it sits sort of close to the midpoint between 150 hours (starting to make progress) and 10,000 hours (mastery). It’s the equivalent of taking a full year off to study, or of taking one class at a time for several years. It’s enough time to learn a skill that will impact your life forever, without necessarily making that skill your full time job. It’s enough time to become “pretty good” at just about anything, even if you lack God-given talents in that direction. It’s enough to actually know something.

Nothing about this is mystical. Lance Armstrong has trained for well over ten thousand hours and is a mutant for cycling. Henri Matisse painted for well over ten thousand hours and was a mutant for art. So no, you can’t be Armstrong or Matisse, unless you’re a mutant with lots of free time too. But you can still be accomplished — in playing the violin, in metalwork, in basketball. I think that my two thousand hours is in painting and drawing. What’s yours?

A few months ago, I posted about the Transcriptase and suggested that the issue boiled down to improving professional norms in SF:

In the SF writing profession, the norms are different yet again. Unlike being a cubicle worker, unlike being a steamfitter, in SF it seems the penalty for being an unsocialized loon is pretty close to zero.

Recently in comments, Carl suggests that perhaps we’re forgetting about the “anarchic elan part of the geek appeal and street cred? Don’t need no stinkin’ badges and all that?” I responded,

SF fans do embrace the weird and the anarchic. That doesn’t mean we should run to embrace people who poop in the middle of the street and point proudly, “Lookit! I pooped!”

To which Carl said,

… The problem, if it is one, is that an anarchic ethic gives very little traction for authoritative sanctioning of poopers. I admire the thoughtful reaching for consensus community standards at Transcriptase, but note also that doing so on the basis of individual statements of conscience or appeals to universal standards that obviously aren’t universal or there’d be no issue is also a bit diffuse. Point being that communities constituted on such bases are uniquely vulnerable to poops – a cost of doing business in this fine way perhaps.

Which at first I thought I could respond to with a quick, “well of course they’re vulnerable to poops, they don’t have the kind of centralized authority you get from being a steamfitters foreman or an HR manager.” But after re-reading Carl’s comment, I think he was pointing out something more subtle, something worthy of a more complex response.

So back to poops! Let’s compare how our three different organizations deal with these kinds of messes:

• The steamfitters: the foreman gets in your face, screams obscenities at you, and orders you to clean up the poop.
• A large high tech company: your manager cleans up your poop for you. Several weeks later, the HR department puts on a Performance Improvement Plan, which means that for the next 12-18 months, the company starts building up a case for firing you. During this awkward time period, you, your boss, and the HR department begin rooting for a merger or layoff. That way everyone gets what they want: you still get a severance package, and HR can get rid of you quietly.
• Transcriptase: a bunch of writers point at the poop and say, “Hey, that’s not very punk.”

Unlike the steamfitters foreman or the HR department, the SF community is completely decentralized, so all Transcriptase can do is attempt to appeal to community standards. Transcriptase’s goal is to raise the penalty for being an unsocialized loon from zero to… something. (Of course I say “unsocialized loon” because I agree with Transcriptase. Naturally the unsocialized loons would argue that they’re totally not unsocialized and that help! help! they’re being oppressed, you know the drill.)

I’m guessing that Carl is keenly aware of these issues because he works in academia. As You Know Bob, in academia there are all sorts of groups trying to exercise power by appealing to community standards. And from what I remember from my academic experience in the mid-1990s, these groups could be incredibly annoying even when you almost entirely agreed with them. You could understand why people might poop on their lawn just to rile them up.

Furthermore, the strategy of appealing to community standards is… less broadly useful than it first appears. If the subject is controversial and the community is split 50/50, appealing to community standards will fail — there are no community standards to appeal to. If the subject is utterly uncontroversial, then there’s no point in appealing to community standards — we don’t have to thoughtfully consider the views of the crazy lady shrieking that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s illegitimate child, we can just ignore her. Or as Carl might put it, if we really are talking about a universal standard, then there’s no real issue in the first place. The lesson here is that appealing to community standards can be a useful strategy, but only in a certain narrow range of the Overton Window.

So how to avoid becoming uniquely vulnerable to poops? First, only go with the community standards approach if you’re in the right range of public opinion: “acceptable” or “sensible”. You have to be popular, but not too popular (or why bother). Second, you must assert your authority with quiet confidence. Radicals can gain traction by stirring the pot, flinging some poop. However, if you’re winning and just need to convince the last thirty or twenty or ten percent, you’re not a radical anymore. You’re arguing from a position of (implicit) authority and strength… which forces you to act like a winner, an Alpha. Radical action can be a great strategy, and it’s also more fun and exciting. But it’s not a great strategy when you’re already (mostly) winning.

With all that in mind, I believe that Transcriptase is doing the right thing and is reasonably protected from poops. On the issue of quietly exercising authority, Transcriptase isn’t panicking or running around like when the Parents Television Council finds a new fleeting obscenity on TV. They’re basically saying, “we think this behavior is uncool” and leaving it at that. This is an approach tailor-made for the anarchic world of SF readers and writers. Now where Transcriptase might end up failing is on the first issue of whether they actually do have community consensus. I mean, I think they do, and I hope they do. But who knows? John Ringo sells a poopload of books.

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.

So in accordance with my New Years resolution, I’ve removed all political and news blogs from my news reader — we’re down to all people I know in real life, plus a couple of Internet acquaintances, plus a few more total strangers who are nevertheless chock-full of crunchy awesomeness . This is all well and good in terms of productivity. But right now, the evening after the Iowa caucuses, it’s striking me as a particularly boneheaded move. Go ahead, laugh at the addict pathetically flopping around in the throes of withdrawal; I would love to read what all the chattering chatterheads are chattering about. Must… be… strong!

Anyway, one of the aforementioned strangers who made the cut is Timothy Burke, a professor of History at Swarthmore College (where I spent a semester on exchange back in the mid-90s, an experience that almost certainly saved me from transferring or dropping out). One of Burke’s areas of interest is games and, of course, the history of games. In a recent post, Burke talks about how even the more acclaimed recently-released games offer little in the way of storytelling and open-endedness:

I am more pessimistic about storytelling, however. The truth is that almost none of the current generation of game designers are good storytellers. Even the best of games rarely rise to the level of being proficiently derivative narrative engines. Look at Mass Effect, a game whose storytelling has been widely complimented. The main plot is pretty much a Science Fiction 101 space-operatic mash-up. Galactic civilization, many alien races, ancient progenitors, even more ancient menace which periodically swats down galactic civilization, humanity struggling to claim its place in the stars. It’s more a platform for character development and for interactive participation, which is what the plot mostly needs to be in a game of this type. As such, it’s great. Write it out as a novel and it seems like fairly thin gruel.

And:

The other direction where there could be some kind of evolution in games-for-gamers would be towards more emergent or “sandbox” kinds of gameplay. Designers like to claim that their games already accomodate this kind of design, but that’s largely wrong or misleading most of the time. This is one reason that Assassin’s Creed disappointed a lot of gamers. They expected it to be a very open-ended environment filled with NPCs who had autonomous-agent AI, where the player decided when and how to carry out his objectives. In the end, it was a fairly scripted game with a lot of repetition. Bioshock seems to me to be a good example of where this kind of element is really lacking. It’s set in a huge, interesting world, but the player is riding the amusement-park rails the entire time. Any time you might want to get out and explore, there’s a conveniently impassable obstacle.

These are just snippets from Burke’s piece; it’s worth reading the whole thing to get the entire context. But the basic arguments are the familiar ones, that most game plots are weak and constraining.

I think these familiar arguments are pretty obviously right. Sure, we can point to an exception that really blew us away for one reason or another. Grand Theft Auto, I Have No Mouth And Must Scream, and so on. Burke himself cites Deus Ex. But these sorts of games are few and far between. The gaming experience is not, right now, about superior story or freedom.

At the end, Burke is still optimistic that games could be much more than they are. I am less sanguine. As Burke acknowledges, the reason designers “don’t let their players climb off the amusement park ride and peek behind the scenery” is because it would be hideously expensive to implement.

But there are more worrisome issues than mundane cost concerns. Simply put, I’m not sure our culture knows how to tell the stories that Burke would like us to tell.
I blame Laura J. Mixon for planting this bug in my head. Laura agrees with Burke that games need to have better stories and offer more freedom. Laura is a passionate storyteller, and she firmly believes that professional storytellers are essential for games to really start making progress.

She’s right of course, and yet the core problem is that our storytelling forms are particularly ill-suited for the kinds of innovative games we all want. Short stories, novels, plays, movies — all force you to stay on the rails of the amusement park ride, as Burke puts it. That’s just how we’ve been trained to tell stories for the last few tens of thousands of years. Other than the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, nothing that storytellers produce is anything like what game critics are asking for. (It’s a sad sign that most games praised for their innovative, free-form plots are simply Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, except with far fewer decision points than the paperback versions.)

And no, the answer isn’t “just invent better AI.” I think we know enough about game AIs to populate game worlds with interesting characters. Not novelistically realistic characters, but characters who react to our avatars in interesting ways.

What we don’t know how to do yet is fully unleash those AIs. That is, we can’t populate a town with simple AIs, drop the player in, and let the story evolve. Players want freedom to act, but they also wants to achieve goals, participate in the main plotline, be the hero. How do you make sure that key supporting characters don’t get killed or taken out of the story too early? How do you prevent the game from falling into a state where the player, through no fault of her own, can’t ever win? Or worse, can’t do anything interesting?

I believe that we can’t construct satisfying stories in this manner until we can develop a new breed of storytellers. People who don’t just understand story, but have a deep mathematical understanding of the web of the story’s possibilities, and can tune the myriad AIs accordingly. Not just yarn spinners, but actual story weavers.

In short, we have the computational power, but we don’t quite have the theory — and certainly not the practice. I’m guessing it’ll be twenty to forty years until we get people who are recognizably good at this, fifty to one hundred until they start showing up en masse. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for those people show up, we might as well keep playing around with shaders.

A little over a year after the Smugger Than Thou discussion, Damon chimes in to say:

You people suck at being West Coast elitists. I herby and forthwith look down my Birks
and Vespa at you all.

UTNE, Mother Jones, and without apology, The Economist (ne’er a rag written with less
genuine concern for the human person as such;let’s face it, elite is elite. Only the
material of selfishness changes, not its form.)

And there we have it: the definitive list of magazines for the West Coast Elitist, suitable for strewing over any coffee table. And we didn’t come up with any of it. We do suck. (Certain elitists might still take Jemaleddin‘s suggestion of Variety, but I think this is only permissible if you’re in the movie or television industry.)

In related happy news, my subscription to (quintessentially middlebrow) Newsweek is about to run out. They’re already starting to send me their patented series of sad-sack renewal letters and postcards. That trick even used to work on me, occasionally. But after being subjected to the most insulting op-ed ever written last year, I think I’m pretty much done with Newsweek forever. Even free from NPR, it’s not worth the money.

Yesterday NPR’s All Things Considered had a segment about the falling VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean) rate. The piece included an interview with Steven Lewis, the Chief Medical Officer of Flagstaff Medical Center. According to Lewis, his facility could not offer VBAC to mothers because they could not guarantee the immediate availability of a surgical team, as per ACOG’s (flawed) VBAC guidelines.

The NPR reporter bracketed the segment with a young mother named Audrey Creed. Creed had wanted a VBAC, but had been forced to have a repeat cesarean by her hospital’s policy, even though medical evidence demonstrates that VBAC is safer than planned repeat cesarean section.

Creed might or might not have been aware of this medical evidence. But being no fool, she cuts right to the chase: “That’s what the hospital is there for — to handle emergencies.” Exactly. Not only do dire emergencies occur in non-VBAC labors, but hospitals are more than happy to offer services that substantially increase the chances of an emergency, such as an epidural or induction of labor. Any hospital that claims it can’t handle VBAC safely is admitting that it is not adequately prepared to handle any labor.

So to sum up, Dr. Steven Lewis has just conceded on national radio that his facility is a deathtrap for laboring women. Until Flagstaff Medical Center can offer adequate emergency care for its patients, Arizona mothers should avoid it like the plague.

This is more for the Bay Area folks than anyone else.

From my old friend and professor Bill Fredlund, at the UCSC-affiliated Institute for the Study of Western Civilization:

History of Espionage

Taught by Bruce Thompson, Ph.D.

Join us this summer for a fascinating look into the world of secret intelligence. This course will exhamine how intelligence agencies have operated in crucial phases of modern history, beginning with the Elizabethan era. How they collected and assessed information, employed agents, planted moles, cultivated defectors and the extent to which those efforts had significant consequences.

We will also follow the trajectory of spies, moles and intelligence officers in modern popular culture, from the heroic playboys of John Buchan and Ian Fleming to the disillusioned heroes of Alan Furst and John le Carre.

Class begins Thursday, June 28, Ends August 30, 2007. Tuition: $300.

Call the Institute at 408-864-4060 to enroll.

I took Bill’s legendary Making of the Western Mind series for three years straight. As for his friend Bruce Thompson, I’ve taken two summer classes from him: one about the history of the Cold War and another about the long, complex relationship between France and the United States.

Elizabethan spies. I just can’t wait. Can you?

The trailer for 28 Weeks Later looks incredible. The movie seems all about the scrubbing-down and repopulation of London after the zombie apocalypse. From the trailer, it looks like the movie has a sophisticated take on the politics, sociology, and logistics of how this might happen. I’m really interested in seeing how they’ll do this. One of the reasons I so loved Children of Men is how they handled the setting and the sociology. Somehow it felt like a real apocalypse, not a Hollywood mockup.

Of course the problem is that 28 Weeks Later is a zombie movie, so it all goes horribly wrong and lots of people end up getting eaten by zombies. (And unless I miss my guess, I’m betting the plague spreads to America at the end of the movie, since after all, we can’t end up right back where we started.) This is all bad news for me and my pedagogical interests, because zombie movies scare the crap out of me. Also, retching in the theater is not a good way to endear oneself to the other patrons.

The next best thing is for someone to go see this movie for me and tell me what it’s like. Here I have a secret weapon: my friend Shauna, who knows more about makeup and fashion and whatnot than nearly any of my female friends — and who just a couple of years ago discovered that she loves zombie movies. She’s now seen almost every zombie flick from Night of the Living Dead on up, and she knows the zombie canon far better than I do. Or even you do. Yes you! Really.

So. I’m deploying my friend the ex-cheerleader to see this zombie movie for me because I’m too scared to go. Anyone got a problem with that? The only fly in the ointment is that I’m not sure she’ll be happy with the whole taking-a-notebook thing and the writing-a-book-report thing. Sometimes you’ve just got to call in those friendship chits.

In what can only be described as a colossal marketing oversight, The Reaping is coming out just a little too late for Passover. From the trailer, I gather that the movie is about some poor town in a swampland (somewhere in Florida?) getting pummelled by the Ten Plagues in Full CGI. No doubt The Reaping‘s effects will blow the effects of the original Ten Commandments out of the water, although to be fair, it takes a really long time to render even a simple firestorm scene on a UNIVAC.

Much more interesting is this movie’s theological implications. God sent the Ten Plagues — the gold standard for divine wrath — in order to force the Egyptians to let the Hebrews go. So after three thousand years, the next people to be punished in this horrific manner turns out to be… some poor backwoods community in the swamps? What on earth could these folks have done? Heck, the Nazis didn’t get even so much as Frogs. The movie’s tagline says, “What Hath God Wrought?” but that’s got to be a red herring. My bet is that these new Ten Plagues turn out to actually be Satan’s fault, although that just raises more questions about what Satan is empowered to do, what Satan’s relationship with God might be, and so on. No doubt The Reaping will explore all these issues with great care and insight, in between blowing shit up.

In related news, my sister the rabbinical student moonlights as a teacher at a Jewish high school. To close out a class about Passover, she asked her students to do a short exercise: imagine what the Ten Plagues might be if translated into modern times. My sister was expecting some somber responses, perhaps derived from global warming, nuclear holocaust, prions, etc. Instead, from one group of teenage girls, she got:

• Boils = OMG Acne!
• Slaying of the First Born (Males) = OMG what if all the cute boys suddenly died!
• Hailstorms = well, we’ll keep that one as-is, because OMG frizzy hair!

I think this is proof that the kids are gonna be all right. Happy Pesach!