Entries from November 2005 ↓

I stopped using Microsoft Word about a year ago, partly because of an instinctive loathing for anything with the word “Microsoft” in it, and partly because of what it has become: a bloated and baroque wannabe desktop publishing tool. It wasn’t always this way. Office made Microsoft an obscene amount of money as it slithered onto pretty much every office and personal computer out there. The problem that Gates & Co faced was that, pretty soon, everyone who wanted this thing already had it. That’s the downside to monopolistic software ubiquity: eventually, you have to figure out how to convince people who are quite happy with what they have to buy the same thing again. And again. And again.

There are basically two ways to do this: make your product better, or make it bigger. They chose bigger, and Word slowly accumulated such a bewildering array of features that Microsoft couldn’t quite figure out where to put them. The menus got longer and more bloated, and some of the new stuff leaked out of the menubar entirely and onto the ever-proliferating suite of toolbars. Toolbars became the sole access point for many of the new features, which is bad bad bad, because toolbars are terrible primary UIs: it’s impossible to jam enough information about feature function into a 32×32 icon, so your users are inevitably reduced to memorizing the meaning of a bunch of obscure and gnomic pictures.

You ask Microsoft engineers about this, and they always fall back on the same refrain: our customers were asking for all this stuff. We’re just doing their bidding. I’m sure this is true, as far as it goes, but part of a designer’s job is to figure out what not to put in your product. The kitchen sink approach to product design is just a form of intellectual sloth. You have to think about your stuff holistically: sure, this feature would be nice, but how would it affect the thing as a whole?

Anyway. Microsoft is working on a new version of Word that radically overhauls the UI, in an effort to make things easier to find. But it’ll still be an unwieldy behemoth.

Another unpleasant byproduct of this feature bloat is filesystem bloat. A Word document that contains nothing but the text “Hello World” takes up 20K on your disk — over 19,000 bytes. A plain ASCII document with the same text takes up four bytes. Four. Sure, disk space is cheap, but the idea of using 20K to save a two-word file is just aesthetically abhorrent.

So I’ve gone ASCII.

Composing in plain, uninflected ASCII has many charms. You don’t get all the WYSIWYG goodness of a word processor, granted, but you do get a clean compositional experience, where the focus is purely on content. Writers are terrible procrastinators, and most of them would much rather play with fonts or rotate their text 90 degrees or color it mauve or make it blink and cast shadows than figure out how to get rid of all those goddamn adverbs.

But, more than that, ASCII is the most portable format out there: it’s the digital equivalent of pen and paper. There will always be ASCII. When our successors start picking through the bones of the apocalypse, they won’t need any kind of propellorhead Rosetta stone to decipher the ASCII documents they find. On the other hand, the huge impenetrable morass of the Word file format (essentially a mini filesystem) will thwart their best crypto-linguists for a long, long time.

There are problems with plain text, of course. Eventually, you do need to produce a formatted document, with margins and page headers and italics and all that good stuff. Historically, the way you do this is with markup, plain-text markers that define the presentational characteristics of a document. You feed marked-up text to some post-processor, which then generates presentable text.

Markup has a long and storied history, but it came into its own with advent of HTML, which is essentially a dumbed-down subset of SGML that mixes content and formatting directives into one unsightly glob. The purists sniffed and turned their noses up, but HTML caught fire and spread, and now it’s everywhere. It’s probably the most successful document format in history.

But, again, it has its problems: it’s ugly to look at and hard to work with. Things have improved somewhat with the arrival of CSS, which helps to separate presentation from content, but you still wind up with stuff like this:

  <p>Hello <i>world</i> How <b>are you</b>?</p>

Blecch. No one wants to look at that. Thankfully, there are alternatives. I use John Gruber’s excellent Markdown, essentially an intermediate markup language that allows you to compose HTML without all that notational ugly. A Markdown version of the text above would look like this:

  Hello _world_! How **are** you?

Much better. And, when you run it through Markdown’s interpreter, you get a clean, valid HTML document.

But that doesn’t quite solve the problem. You have a nice-looking web page, yes, but nothing on paper yet. You can’t just print out HTML. There has to be another step.

That step turns out to be a massive pain in the ass. I’ve spent the better part of six months looking for an efficient, automated, and effortless way to turn an HTML document into something printable. In the meantime, I’ve been loading my stuff into Word and using templates and macros to convert it into the appropriate format. Which is a painstaking manual process that forces me to mess with Word. Again: bleccch.

But I think I’ve finally figured it out. I discovered this wonderful utility called html2ps, which converts HTML into postscript, an ancient language that defines the way text should appear on a printed page. I also found an OS X utility called pstopdf, which converts postscript into PDF documents.

All of which means I can do this:

  markdown doc.txt | html2ps | pstopdf -o doc.pdf -i

… and suddenly I have a printable PDF doc. Hallelujah! I can produce an HTML document, a postscript document, and a PDF document, all from the same source. This is the Holy Grail I’ve been questing after for lo these many months. I feel like Sir Galahad. A geeky sort of Galahad in a kind of cramped digital Camelot, but still: Galahadish.

Jose Padilla was imprisoned in 2002, and for about a month you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about dirty bombs, a specimen of which Padilla, according to the government, was planning to plant in some major American city. The media, an organism which ingests bullshit then spews hyperbole, sketched out scenarios of an America choked with radioactivity, where mutant babies with three arms and six asses (each of which requires a separate diaper) stump through city streets consuming live kittens and transforming good and upright citizens into socialists.

Three years later, Padilla is finally being charged. But not for wanting to plant dirty bombs. He’s now accused of conspiring to send money and men overseas to “murder, kidnap and maim” others. In his press conference, Torturer General Alberto Gonzales demurred when asked about the dirty bomb charge. Can’t talk about it, he said. Not allowed to. It’s the rules, you know.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone, I suppose. In fact, you could make an argument that it’s small potatoes compared to news of the burgeoning torture apparatus growing up under our noses. But I think that would be a bad argument. The real story here is the lengths the Bushies have gone to in order to deny this man his day in court.

You’re not allowed to hold American citizens without charging them of a crime, but that’s what the administration did to Padilla. He was imprisoned without formal charges for a month, until it looked like a judge was about to rule that practice unkosher; at which point they quickly classified him as an “enemy combatant.” Enemy combatants don’t have rights like normal people, we’re told, because they’re bad evil meanies, and that’s that.

The courts didn’t quite know what to make of this nuanced legal argument, and they batted the matter back and forth for three years: is it really ok for our government to erase someone’s basic civil rights by calling them names? The case was about to go up the Supreme Court, where it would get the national attention it deserves when — lo and behold — Padilla is charged with crimes completely unrelated to the ones he was initially arrested for.

All of which goes goes to the point I’ve been repeating, ad nauseum, for the past year. We are not in danger of finding ourselves ruled by a government that views civil rights as annoyances to be skirted or, better yet, eliminated: we are, in fact, ruled by that government. Tomorrow is here. The 2006 mid-term elections may be some of the most important we’ve held in a long, long time.

Update: It turns out that at least some of the administration’s motives here are tied up in torture: their evidence (and pretty much their entire case) comes from two men, Al Qaeda officials both, who’ve been held in secret detention centers for a couple of years, where they’ve apparently been subjected to various medieval excruciations. The Bushies know that torture-extracted testimony won’t wash in court.

What’s striking about the Times article on the subject is the tone of the typically anonymous “senior administration officials” who are spilling the beans here. They’re not saying that they don’t want the torture stuff to come out in court because they feel bad about it, or even acknowledge that it was wrong; they’re just saying that they don’t think they can get away with it.

Again: not especially surprising.

Is it just me, or do DVDs have the most annoying user interfaces on the planet? I have yet to pop in a DVD, any DVD, that doesn’t annoy, bewilder, enrage, or sadden me, and scandalize my effete and finely-tuned UI sensibilities.

The problems are myriad, and endemic. First and foremost, there’s no standardization: although every DVD menu has pretty much the same stuff in it, the menu options are scattered across the surface of the screen and hidden in the weft of the invariably overproduced background image. Figuring out how to move between the various options is nightmarish, because the menu items don’t often line up, vertically or horizontally, so there’s no way to know what where the cursor’s going to go when you hit an arrow key. And I’m being charitable in using the word “cursor” to describe the ridiculous position marker these menus generally have; often, they just turn the selected item a slightly lighter/darker shade of the same color, transforming the the entire process of menu selection from Point and Click to Squint and Guess.

And there’s more to hate. Much, much more:

1. Waiting through a cutesy/melodramatic/interminable intro whenever you pop in the DVD.
2. Having to navigate back to the main menu to get to the next episode in a TV series collection, instead of just pressing a next button.
3. Going to the freaking Language Option screen to turn on the commentary track. How is that a language option?
4. Having to remember that you can’t actually use numbers to navigate to scenes in the scene selection screen, despite the fact that the scenes are numbered.

And on and on and on. To my mind, the whole DVD UI mess is a prime example of the triumph of artistic design over common sense and human factors. It’s what happens when you let the art department call the shots. It’s also a testament to the power of inertia. Somewhere back in the depths of DVD history some intern decided that the best place to turn on commentary was the language options screen, and it’s been settled policy ever since.

We need a revolution. We need Lord Jobs or Demiurge Ives to step in and throttle this sad mutant creature and create something new and rational and beautiful, from scratch. It can be done.

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I joined an online writer’s workshop called Critters a couple of months ago, and the critiques I’ve been getting back so far have been fantastic: insightful and smart and immensely helpful. To my surprise, though, I’m finding my reaction to other people’s work to be just as valuable as their reaction to mine.

I’ve been attending workshops, on and off, for the past six years, but they’ve always been flesh-and-blood affairs. I sat across from non-virtual people and communicated with them using sounds pushed up from my larynx to my mouth and then manipulated into various phonemes through the combined efforts of my jaw and my tongue. I’ve never been very good at this form of communication. My talk-muscles are wired to a part of my brain that was exposed to space microwaves as a child, and hasn’t been the same since. My write-muscles, however, are attached to an entirely different region, and seem to work just fine.

The upshot of all this is that I’m getting a lot more out of writing down my critiques than I ever did from speaking them. I’m realizing new stuff about the deficiencies in my own work, and about the nature of stories in general.

Last week I critiqued a story that had a lot of nakedly expository sections, where the author spent a good deal of time telling us about the characters’ mental state, motivations, hopes, dreams, etc. But there were also instances where he let their actions do the talking, and I felt like those bits gave me a much better insight into the characters’ minds. I’ve talked about the whole issue of showing vs telling before, but, as I thought about this, it finally occurred to me exactly why it’s often best not to spell everything out. This is what I wrote:

Because then we get the crucial insight filtered not only through the character’s regret (which gives it more power) but through our own consciousness as well. That’s the value of letting us come to our own conclusions. We attach our experiences to the character’s regret, which thickens the feeling in our mind and makes it more real to us, more personal. And you get all that for free.

It’s all about connecting to the core human experience. Language just doesn’t have the power to get down into our id; the best it can do is nudge us in a certain direction by invoking experiences buried in memory, or something deeper than memory. That’s the power of metaphor and symbol, of image and fantasy and myth. They stimulate the secret places that the literal can’t get to.

The trick is in finding out how to speak the strange ur-language of the id, of cutting away all the scar tissue of adulthood to get down to the base set of experiences that matter. Pablo Picasso once said that it took him most of his adult life to learn how to paint like a child. I didn’t understand what he meant before, but I think I do now.

I heard a report the other day about the toll that malaria is taking on the third world: sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. It kills a million people a year, and sickens around four hundred million more.

I had no idea malaria was still such a huge issue. It’s not a first-world disease, so the big drug companies don’t pay much attention to it. There’s a lesson here about the wisdom of ceding drug research and production to the cutthroat vessels of pure capitalism. We need filthy-rich angels like Bill Gates (I can’t believe I’m using the words “angel” and “Bill” and “Gates” in the same sentence) to dump gads of money into the cause to raise it out of obscurity and back into the public eye.

But the stark contrast between the landscape of illness in sub-Saharan Africa and places like the US also brings up another question: what, exactly, do we gain by killing the diseases that keep killing us?

Malaria isn’t much of an issue anymore, not in the United States. Nor is consumption, or bubonic plague, or polio, or many of those early killers that have fallen victim to the field of medicine. But every disease we defeat seems to open a doorway to the next one. For every polio, there’s a cancer. For every malaria, there’s an Alzheimer’s. And waiting behind all of these is the simplest, most inevitable killer of all: mortality.

Which got me thinking about old age, and mortality, and senescence. Why, exactly, do we die? We’re basically a bunch of reproducing cells. As long as we keep feeding them, they should keep making perfect new versions of themselves. Why don’t they?

I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. The infrastructure just fails. Underneath the skein of constantly regenerating cells, there’s some crappy base foundation that doesn’t regenerate, that simply ages, and falters, and dies. We’re beautiful machines built on faulty hardware; or

2. It’s an evil plot hatched by genes. Richard Dawkin’s book The Blind Watchmaker makes the argument that the dominant lifeform on the planet is not us, but rather our genes. We’re just the visible manifestation of a genetic war that’s been going on for billions of years. We’re complex ordnance devised by tiny twisted strands of DNA. Our mission is to survive long enough to procreate and spread ourselves and our genetic overlords across as much of the planet as possible, and then die. Immortality would be a disaster for genes. They need us to spawn and die, spawn and die, so that they can mutate and adapt and make better and better flesh-bots. So if we manage to survive for too long, they kill us. It’s planned obsolescence in its most brutal form; or

3. It’s just another disease: the first disease. It infected life soon after life appeared on earth, at the amoeba stage, and has plagued us ever since, passed down from species to species, generation to generation. It’s been obscured and preempted by other maladies over the eons, more efficient killers that have also proved to be more susceptible to our healer’s efforts. Death has been with us so long that we accept its inevitability without question. But it’s just another illness. It can be cured.

This last possibility is especially intriguing. What if we do eventually recognize it as a disease, and make it go away? What if Pfizer starts selling anti-death pills?

What’s waiting for us on the other side of mortality?

The thing that we need to understand about Big Brother is that he isn’t fictional: he’s not a villain from our past or a bogeyman in our future. He’s here and now: he’s a constant and burgeoning possibility. Every government has within it the makings of a police state. Just add a dab of magic fascist pixie powder and bang! out pops the eye of Sauron.

Actually, it’s not that easy, really. The only way to get a true dictatorship going in a country as large as ours is by acquiring information on pretty much everyone, and then using it against them. But a government intent on bootstrapping the apparatus necessary for this kind of operation can’t do its work alone: it needs the help and the tacit cooperation of the people whose secrets it’s trying to acquire. It needs its victims to believe that the accumulation of massive databases of personal information is not only harmless but also essential to their continued happiness and well-being.

The easiest way to get the ball rolling here is to manufacture an enemy: some sort of threat to our freedom and our most cherished civil liberties so terrible and so insidious that the only way to defeat it is to strip away our freedoms and our most cherished civil liberties.

The PATRIOT act is at the vanguard of this effort. It rolled easily through congress right after 9/11, and has been steadily, quietly eating away at our basic rights ever since. Imagine throngs of hapless citizenry standing in thigh-deep water going about their business while schools of piranha/leech creatures anesthetize and then devour their legs, feet-first, bit by bit, so that eventually they’re chin-deep sputtering just over the waterline and don’t quite know how it happened. That’s us.

This smacks of paranoia, and it may well be. But you have to agree that our government is doing all it can to at least appear Big Brotherish. One of the provisions of the PATRIOT act allows law enforcement to issue information-gathering devices called National Security Letters. These can be presented to libraries, hotels, airlines, etc, which are then required to divulge all manner of information on the people whose records they maintain. Unlike wiretaps, say, or subpoenas, the FBIs can issue these things without asking permission from any sort of oversight body, and they can do it to anyone: they just have to claim you’re somehow associated with terrorists. And we’re not just talking about names and phone numbers here:

The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

But it gets better. All of this information is stored in databases, forever, and the content of these databases will soon be widely available:

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. … Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.

Note the word “unannounced” in the paragraph above. Then note the words “state”, “local”, and “tribal”, followed closely by the phrase “private sector entities”. Our government is now in the business of collecting information about our private lives and disseminating it to anyone they see fit.

No problem! you say. I’m not associated with any terrorists. But, then again, maybe you are. It all turns on the meaning of the word “associated”. It could mean, oh, let’s say, just hypothetically, being on vacation in the same city as some bad guy.

Oh wait! That’s not hypothetical at all! It turns out that about a million people visiting Las Vegas during a four-day period at the end of 2003 were unwittingly associated with a terrorist the FBI thought might be hiding somewhere in that city:

An interagency task force began pulling together the records of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in the city. Grigg’s unit filtered that population for leads. Any link to the known terrorist universe — a shared address or utility account, a check deposited, a telephone call — could give investigators a start.

No terrorists were found. The leads led nowhere. But the data are still in FBI databases, just sitting there, like a million ticking time bombs.

Entities presented with National Security Letters aren’t allowed to refuse, or take their case to the courts, or anything. They have to give up the information; it’s a criminal offense not to. It’s also a criminal offense to tell anyone that they did so, and the FBI doesn’t have to tell anyone about it either. They do issue a grudging report to congress once a year, with an incomplete tally of the number of NSLs they’ve issued. The last report showed that number increased 10,000 percent in the last year alone.

The good news is if you feel that your privacy has been unjustly compromised by one of these NSLs, you can always lodge a complaint. Of course, the process of doing so is complicated somewhat by the fact that there’s no way for you to know that it’s happened.

“We do rely upon complaints coming in,” [Inspector General Glenn A.] Fine said in House testimony in May. He added: “To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that’s a legitimate question.”

To rephrase, then: if you (a) are not a terrorist, (b) are not related in any way to a terrorist, (c) have problems with us secretly gathering your personal and private information and storing it in databases and showing it to anyone we feel like showing it to, and (d) have supernatural clairvoyant powers that enable you to divine that this is happening to you, then, by all means, lodge a complaint.

If this wasn’t so terrifying, it would actually be really, really funny.