One-Track Minds

By Evan — — Culture

For about thirty seconds on Saturday, I thought there was some kind of Challenger retrospective going on. Then I understood. I caught some of the news on the radio, some on the web… but honestly, Saturday was one of those days that I’m glad I don’t have a TV.

This morning on Forum they devoted one hour to Shuttle. No “experts” this time, just an hour of listeners calling in. Now I live in the Bay Area — the Left Coast — and so I certainly wasn’t surprised to hear caller after caller chime in with, oh dear isn’t it sad about the families, but what about the murderous US plans for hegemony and world domination, blah blah blah? Still, it got a bit monotonous after a while.

Some thinkers like to speculate about whether human mind is like a computer. If this line of thinking is true, I wonder, are some people just not given enough RAM at birth? Are they simply unable to handle more than one resource-intensive process at once?1

Finally near the end of the show a young man called in and said (paraphrasing), “I’m an anti-war activist. I’ve been in all the local marches. I’ve written my Congressman. I vote… And the thing is, I believe war represents one of the worst things human beings can do, while space exploration represents one of the best. Let’s not confuse the two.”

If the anti-war movement had more folks like him… well, there’d be an anti-war movement worth speaking about.

1. Addendum: M’ris informs me that Timprov says, “And some people are given those original Pentiums with the floating point problem.” Too bad that this sort of problem can’t be fixed in the next rev.

Homewrecker

By Evan — — Personal

A friend of mine (whose name shall be left out for privacy reasons) has a serious girlfriend. They’re thinking marriage. His significant other writes me to say:

Oh, yeah, XXXXX is also afraid I’ll dump him for you, thus the marriage proposal 🙂

If only I had thought to warn her about this earlier! This kind of thing happens because of me all the time. Maybe I should rent myself out to women with committment-phobic boyfriends… errr, that didn’t come out quite right…

One cool thing about this particular couple is that neither of them is particularly happy with diamonds, and so they’re considering alternative stones. A ruby, maybe. Good for them! I think it’s pretty clear that diamonds are bad news, and I heartily applaud their decision to be a little less traditional. If you can call a 75-year-old cartel-manufactured sales gimmick a “tradition”.

Anyway, I haven’t been posting much recently, nor have I been doing a good job of updating my Making of the Western Mind class notes. It’s amazing: when you have more free time, so much more of it goes to waste. Well, the notes are posted1, and I’ll be posting more often too.

And finishing the damn tutorial.

And flossing.

1. There’s no direct link to the MOTWM class notes, but if you’re in the 3rd year class, you should have the URL. Or if you need it, you can email me. Or, to be honest, the URL is eminently guessable. You’re smart people.

Vengeful Info-Ninjas

By Evan — — Miscellany

I’ve decided that Cory Doctorow is a brilliant man. Sure, I got a kick out of his opus, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. I mean, who didn’t? But if you really want to move to the next level, I think you need to write a useful article on meta-information. It’s hard enough to write a comprehensible article on meta-information, let alone a funny one.1 I wait only for the day when I can cry, “Unleash the vengeful info-ninjas!” and really, like, mean it. I suppose this would require the purchase of A) a cat and B) a subterranean volcanic lair… but a man can dream, can’t he?

In Other News: Mom informs me that you can in fact sew a seam invisibly. Who knew that sewing technology had reached such an advanced state! Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, I attended Jay’s New Years party (Festivus ’02.) Jay and Shelley were recovering from a nasty case of the flu, so a couple of the other guests and I worked in the kitchen early in order to get all the food ready. I made a double batch of mojitos, which were quite a hit, if I do say so myself. Now according to Hank Steuver of the Washington Post, mojitos are “out” this year. Then again, this is the same Hank Steuver who wrote that horrific article last year entitled ‘Harry’ and the Nation of Dweebs, in which he laments the rise of geek culture and fantasizes about beating up those who are weaker than he is. So really, I interpret his deprecation of my favorite drink2 as a badge of honor.

I also learned how to make salmon paté with no food processor. Just lots of chopping. “Peasant-style,” said one of the other cooks. (Just like great-grandmother in the shtetl used to make.) The pate was pretty good, but we made over two pounds of the stuff. We basically ran out of bread to put the pate on (although one guest was happily dipping tortilla chips into it), leaving us with about a pound of diced fish at the end of the evening. Shelley forced me to take it all home. That’s a lot of fish. I suppose that on the bright side, I hear that fish is pretty good for you. As my old professor Peter Saeta likes to say, “Every floating mass of buoyant hydrogenous precipitates possesses argentine surface properties.”

1. Contrary to Doctorow’s article, there are in fact no “Plam Pilots” currently on eBay… although they do have what looks like a good deal on a “JVC PLAM SIZED CAMCORDER!!!!!!!!!“.

2. Just for the record, I’ve been drinking mojitos for years — before they started appearing in GQ and the like, and way before James Bond saw fit to order one. Thank you.

Gollum For Best Supporting Actor

By Evan — — Culture

…or Andy Serkis, rather.

The Hobbit was the first “big book” I ever read.1 And Gollum made a huge impression on me. I’ve had an image of Gollum in my head ever since, for more years than I care to recount. The Hobbit cartoon? No. That other cartoon? Nope. But now, in 2002, boom, there he is on screen.

Well one thing’s for sure — there will be no precious Oscar for poor Smeagol. Andy Serkis might have done the voice, he might have done the body movements and modeled the facial expressions… but the fat hobbitses in the Academy aren’t likely to award a computer-generated character a real-person’s award any time soon, thank you very much. Not to mention the everyday bias against SF and fantasy in the ordinary media. In the last few days, I’ve listened to no less than two radio interviews with writers talking about the writing process. The first was a twentysomething kid, an up-and-coming writer who mentioned offhandedly, “I used to read fantasy and stuff like that when I was a kid, but…” He now writes “literary”2 short stories about a fictional town in Maine. The second was Carolyn See, a professor who writes and teaches creative writing at UCLA. “My students have to write about real things, real relationships.” she said. “What if one of your students wants to write about — I dunno, Mars?” “They can’t write about Mars,” she chuckled. I was waiting for her to follow up with something like, “unless they write about real people on Mars,” something like that. But she wouldn’t even throw me that bone. They just moved merrily on. Feh.

Anyway, I’m spending my evening drinking wine, listening to This American Life archives, and sewing. Yes, sewing. The washing machine in our complex is pretty rough, and it’s torn apart the seams on the corners of my comforter. I really don’t know how to sew, and all I have is a button repair kit that Mom gave me for Chanukah during my last year in high school. “What’s this?” I asked. “So you can sew on buttons when you go to college!” she said. “Oh,” I said.

But now after all these years, the kit has finally proved useful. It just has a couple of needles and some short lengths of a variety of colors of thread, but that’s enough. Unfortunately the threads don’t really match the comforter so well, and I’ve used up the thread for three colors already. Which begs the question, what happens if I actually lose a button? I might be missing the right color. I guess I’ll just have to go back to Mom… which was what she was trying to avoid by giving me the kit in the first place. That’s OK, I’m not sure I actually know how to sew on a button anyway. I do a mean whipstitch, though.

Just another crazy Saturday night.

1. The first book I ever “read” was You Will Go To The Moon when I was about two. Actually, it turned out I wasn’t so much reading it as reciting the text from memory — it was my favorite book, and my parents must have read it to me about fifty times. I have continued this proud tradition of reading-without-comprehending ever since.

2. As for the whole silly literary-vs.-genre debate, only one thing is clear: as soon as you allow someone to label their favorite group of books as “literary” and your favorite group of books as something else, you’ve lost the battle.

Fashion Emergency

By Evan — — Personal

Karin writes:

To make a long story short, I got bored of studying for the LSAT and after viewing Byron’s latest on storyteller, visited your site. I came upon the journal entry dated Sept. 8, 2002 in which you mention about something about Byron’s raingear and that my role, as his fiancee, is to prevent fashion disasters and all that. Well, as the evidence shows, this is out of my league. I readily admit that I am not woman enough to handle this one. Cute as he may be, he’s on his own when it comes to picking out clothing.

I should state for the record that Karin is currently braving gale-force winds in a rickety wooden Viking ship in the fjords of Norway, so don’t let her attempt to sell herself short fool you. However, even I have to admit that in this instance she has her work cut out for her:

Byron Kubert in bright orange raingear

Vacation From the Vacation

By Evan — — Personal

The bad thing about going on a trip, even a short one, is the food. Oy, all the food. Eric and Susan took me out to dinner for every meal for two days straight. Jason and Megan fed me good beer and tried to convince me to move down to LA. (Megan: “You already have a built-in network of friends… and if Sarah goes to Scripps, more than half your family will be down here…”) My Uncle Mitch went in to work very late just so that he could serve homemade omelettes and bagels and fruit. (I think Uncle Mitch was feeling guilty about taking me 1800 feet up in a pre-dawn hike up Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. “You ready for an adventure?” he said, rapping at my door at 4:30am.1) But the grand prize goes to Derrick, who took the entire day off to hang out and force-feed me home-grilled steaks and bread and cheese and salad and pumpkin pie… for lunch.2

So last Sunday, I drove down to LA with Eric and Susan. I thought we were being clever leaving at 4:30pm — we’d miss most of Thanksgiving traffic. To provide an idea of how brilliant this notion was, it took us over an hour to get from Gilroy to Pacheco Pass, about six miles. Eric said that the drive wasn’t so bad, because he had two people to keep him company in the car. He’s just being polite, though — Susan and I both fell asleep about two hours into the trip.

On Monday I helped Eric move his new furniture out of storage and into his new place in Pasadena or wherever it is (the hell if I know). We got the furniture out without too much trouble3, but the tricky part was getting the furniture into the apartment. We managed to work the couch around the corner of the doorway in the usual manner, but the dinner table wasn’t going to make it. I suggested that we tilt and flip the table over the 5′ patio wall. Eric was a bit dubious, but the idea worked brilliantly, and I was quite proud of myself for coming up with it on the fly. That is until last night at poker, when Jay pointed out that this was the exact same maneuver we used getting his furniture down a tricky staircase. I had completely forgotten about that. “You’re a real mover now,” said Jay. “That trick is buried in your spinal reflexes.”

I also got to see Eric and Susan’s law offices, and met a few of their colleagues. Susan told me later, to my horror, that her female colleagues were asking about me. Suddenly the downside of being “temporarily retired” became crystal clear. “So what does your boyfriend’s friend do?” the attractive young senior associate had asked. Well Susan hemmed and hawed and finally told them that I worked for Sun Microsystems, but she wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing for them.4 She also mentioned that I had helped my old mentor edit his Statistical Mechanics textbook, and apparently both of her friends were quite impressed by this. So for all you naysayers who think that studying physics will never get you chicks — HA.

1. The part that makes me feel guilty was that right near the summit, two 70ish ladies passed us on the way up. They were chatting amiably and not even breaking a sweat.

2. As I grow older, I’ve realized that my ideal vacation revolves around talking and eating. By these standards, this particular trip was an unqualified success.

3. No thanks to the inexplicable doorways in the corridors of the storage place, which only serve to narrow the maneuvering area for large, inflexible, scratchable pieces of furniture.

4. Which was technically true — the way the “notification period” works, I was still an employee on that date, strangely enough.

Sympathy for Johnny

By Evan — — Culture

From the introduction to a recent review of the movie Solaris:

There’s not a single blasted laser battle to be found in “Solaris.”

Despite being produced by James Cameron, who directed the sci-fi classic “Aliens,” the interstellar drama doesn’t feature any slimy creatures or thrilling action, either.

Apart from George Clooney in a space suit, “Solaris” is science-fiction in name only.

Thank goodness the reviewer warns us all about this, so that we’re not fooled in to thinking that Solaris is a science fiction story. With no laser battles, slimy aliens, or thrilling action, how could it be? What is Steven Soderbergh trying to pull? On the other hand, it is my understanding that there is at least one naked space babe in the film, so maybe the movie qualifies as science fiction after all.

Gaaahhhh.

So I caught Jonathan Franzen on the radio the other day, plugging his new collection of essays. I wasn’t too impressed with him a year ago, but I figured I’d listen to the entire interview anyway.1 The show began with Franzen expertly dodging the “Oprah question” by affecting a bored, world-weary air and explaining that he had been misquoted. He then spent the next 57 minutes of the interview being generally morose and opining that Lowbrow Consumer Culture Is A Bad Thing, or if not a Bad Thing, then at the very least Incomprehensible to Jonathan Franzen.

Anyway, I had almost forgotten the interview2, when I ran across a review of Franzen’s essays in The New Republic. The following passage is typical:

In “Books in Bed,” a roundup of sexual how-to guides that elicits the coy admission “I have no objection to a nice bra, still less to being invited to remove one” (down, tiger), Franzen again fidgets to set himself slightly apart. “The last thing I want is to be reminded of the vaguely icky fact that across the country millions of other people are having sex,” he writes, horrified by all that humping going on down along the railroad shacks.

By coincidence, in the radio interview Franzen read the very passage that includes these quotes. I can’t transcribe the whole thing, but one thing’s for sure: the reviewer has taken Franzen’s phrase “I have no objection to a nice bra…” totally out of context. As I read the review more carefully, I realized that the entire purpose of the article was to take little snippets from Franzen and follow each one with a snide and irrelevant remark (“down, tiger”). How does the reviewer take Franzen’s “vaguely icky” comment and turn it into “horrified by all that humping”?3 It was one of the laziest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen in TNR’s pages.

Then again, the writing couldn’t have been that lazy. After all, it accomplished the near-impossible: I now have sincere sympathy for Jonathan Franzen. I didn’t believe him earlier, because after all when you say something outrageous, the standard method for spinning your way out of trouble is to say that you were misquoted or taken out of context. But now I’m thinking, hmmm, maybe Franzen was misquoted, maybe he was, in fact, taken out of context. I mean, he’s not someone who I would invite over for Thanksgiving dinner, but still.

1. Well, I do have a good deal of free time these days.

2. It must be the assault of Lowbrow Consumer Culture on my mind, degrading my long-term memory.

3. From the tone, one must assume that this particular TNR literary critic is some kind of railroad-shack-humping veteran.

Definition of Futility

By Evan — — Tech

I’ve heard futility defined as “doing something that failed earlier in hopes that it will somehow succeed this time around.” However, this process seems to be standard operating procedure in the computer industry. Case in point: I was building a system for Sam, and I needed to install the drivers for the network card. I installed the drivers and rebooted… but for some reason we just couldn’t get on the network. I was baffled, until I looked at the hardware settings and realized that no, the network card still wasn’t installed. Disconcerting indeed! So drawing on my vast expertise as a Windows Network Engineer, I decided to… insert the floppy with the drivers and try the exact same thing again. And the funny thing is, it worked. I mean what was going on there? Were some of the driver files like, hiding? Did they need to cajoled or bribed or threatened into doing their job?

Frankly, I think Windows machines can’t be considered “technology” at all. Their behavior is too mystical and arbitrary. Is the Moon in the Seventh House? Then all is well. Is Jupiter aligned with Mars? Then it’s blue-of-death time, baby. Or maybe my conception of “technology” is out of whack? I like to think that machines should have predictable behavior, but maybe that’s too much to ask.

Anywaay… Sam’s machine is up and running, and Sarah’s is as well. And I only managed to short out one power supply in the process. So yay me! What else have I accomplished in the last few days… well, I’ve been mooching meals off of Mike, Sam, and Nancy.1 Hung out with the family a bit. Saw the new Harry Potter movie, which was entertaining. I think Mike summed it up when Hermione got petrified. “Shoot,” he said. “They’re screwed now — the most powerful wizard in the whole school is out of commission.”2

Aside from that, I’m just trying to keep busy. My poker buddies were unanimous in their advice — when you get laid off, you absolutely must not start sleeping in until noon. So I’ve been setting my alarm clock for 7am, and I’ve been shaving every day. And wearing dark socks with my dark shoes, and white socks with my sneakers. I even played tennis with Mike on Friday, and I have grandiose plans to start running in the mornings. The morning weather on Saturday was fantastic for running — cool and foggy but not freezing cold. Unfortunately I couldn’t find my sneakers that day. Bad luck… or subconscious sabotage? You be the judge.

1. I don’t feel too guilty about this, because Mike and Nancy are really just grateful that Sam has his own computer now and won’t be hogging theirs.

2. And sure enough, shortly thereafter Harry and Ron were surrounded by ravenous monsters and wishing that Hermione was there to save them.

RIFFed!

By Evan — — Personal

Ordinarily I don’t talk much about work here. (I consider it unprofessional.) However, this particular news is worth a mention — I’ve been laid off at Sun. Or in company parliance, “RIFFed” (RIF = Reduction In Force).

I’m actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing. First, I’m young and resilient. I hate to say it, but I’m glad it was me and not some 48-year-old guy with a mortgage and kids in school.1 Second, none of this was a big surprise to me — my group got hit hard (as I figured), and they basically just kept core, veteran engineers (as I also figured). Third, the severance package and my savings will tide me over for a reasonable length of time.2 Finally, and most importantly, this is a good “kick in the seat” to go do something new and interesting. I think I need such kicks every once in a while — without them, I tend to get stuck in a rut.

Anyway, yesterday really wasn’t so bad. My director (who had to break the news to each of us) seemed like he was having a much worse day than anyone else. I was actually quite cheerful, and all my colleagues came by to chat and wish me good luck, which was nice. Well, okay, there was one low point. I was joking around with two longtime engineers, Carlos and Benoit, when a cute young systems engineer poked her head in my office. (She was attached to Benoit’s project, I think.) After a few minutes of banter, the conversation went like this:3

Cute Young SE: Wow, I’ve never seen such a neat, clean office.

Benoit: That’s our webmaster! He’s very neat and organized.4 Someday he’s going to make a great husband for someone.

Carlos: Husband?? No, he’s not ready to go out and get married… he should just go out and have fun!

Benoit: No, it’s time for him to find a nice girl and settle down.

[they argue]

Cute Young SE (noticing me rolling my eyes): C’mon, guys. You can’t just assume he’s interested in girls…

[Carlos and Benoit stop arguing. Cute Young SE turns bright red.]

Me: Well, I think we’ve now hit the high point of my day.

It’s hard enough to ask a cute girl out when you’re an unemployed loser, but when you’re an unemployed possibly gay loser, it’s pretty much a no-go.

1. Not that I think 48-year-olds with mortgages have more right to keep their job than a young punk such as myself. That line of thinking leads directly to the 1950s office (back when they paid unmarried men less than married men). It’s just that… I feel better about it being me rather than them, that’s all.

2. That is, if I can keep my insanely expensive appetites in check. No more Prada underwear, damnit.

3. Paraphrasing, of course.

4. Friends and family will guffaw at this. But actually my office was usually quite neat and organized, mostly because I didn’t keep a lot of stuff in it.

Evolution

By Evan — — Science, Tech

As is my custom, I was taking a walk around the Sun campus after lunch, when I saw something scurrying across my path. At first I thought it was a scorpion, but then I remembered that I wasn’t in Palm Springs, so I looked a little closer. It was a five-inch long reddish-brown… lobster. (Ha, M’ris — I bet that on your list of things to be concerned about when living in California, you never even thought about the vicious and poisonous California Land Lobster! Grrrr! Rrrarrgh!) Now I suppose that it could have been some kind of crayfish. However, I’ve seen crayfish in Maryland and they were much smaller and grayer. So therefore, logic dictates that it must be a poisonous mutant California Land Lobster, evolved specifically to prey on unwary computer engineers. Be warned!

Speaking of evolution, NPR’s Science Friday last show was on the debate in Ohio on whether to teach “Intelligent Design” in high school classrooms. The Intelligent Design advocate was quite slippery, and managed to get avuncular host Ira Flatow very angry indeed. Poor Ira pressed the guy for an answer to the question, “Where are the testable predictions that ID makes?” and basically got nowhere. (Which is not surprising, because ID’s approach to answering outstanding questions in biology is to say, “Because God said so.”)

This is not to say that ID isn’t much more clever than the previous strategy (straight-up anti-Darwinism). Intelligent Design at least couches itself in a veneer of scientific language, and its advocates don’t have to admit to believing in the concept of 10,000-year-old Earth and other such nonsense. ID advocates smartly play to popular opinion and our innate American sense of “fairness” and “equality”. Why not teach both? That sounds fair, doesn’t it? This is what 3 out of 5 Ohioans think, anyway. 1 In a sense, Intelligent Design has… evolved from its predecessor.

The funny thing is that a couple of days before this, NPR News had an interview with a teenage Eagle Scout named Darrell Lambert who is getting kicked out of Scouting because he’s an atheist. The interviewer asked Lambert how he had come to hold his beliefs. Lambert recounted his interest in science at school, closing with simply, “I’m an atheist. I believe in evolution.” You could almost hear the shrug.

Now isn’t it interesting that this bright, forthright young man has associated atheism and evolution? Certainly one can believe in the theory of evolution and still be religious — in fact, during the Science Friday show, a Catholic priest called up and made this very point.2 But for decades, this idea has been anaethma to the Christian Right. Isn’t it ironic that by railing away at “Darwinism” for so many years, the fundamentalists have convinced a number of scientifically-literate people to conclude that they can’t be religious and scientific at the same time? Well, no… actually it’s just depressing.

1. Too bad science isn’t a democracy.

2. For that matter, so has the Pope. See the Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution (October 22, 1996).