Entries from August 2008 ↓

Here’s the abstract from a paper about pragmatic programming via scripting languages:

The author recommends that scripting, not Java, be taught first, asserting that students should learn to love their own possibilities before they learn to loathe other people’s restrictions.

This is good advice about teaching people how to live, period.

(via Lambda the Ultimate)

I’m incredibly happy to report that my story, How I Got Here, has just been published in the latest issue of Weird Tales.

I wrote it at Clarion, in the bowels of UCSD’s wonderfully strange Geisel Library, in three days. Usually it takes me weeks to pound these guys out, so this one was a gift. Thanks Muse! Maybe we can do this more often?

And, awesomely, my friend and fellow Clarionite Peter Atwood has a story in the same issue. I read All In at Clarion, and it’s freaking fantastic, so check it out if you get a chance. You can also listen to an audio version here.

Clarion photo from Flickr user gruntzooki used under a Creative Commons license. Originally taken by Tania Mayer.

Fate is a rollercoaster of improbabilities that twists through vistas of the unlikely and the mundane and the absurd before depositing you in the middle of an American Idol concert.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, that’s where I found myself this weekend, in a narrow plastic seat in front of a row of pre-teen girls, all equipped with screams that could slice through a person like chainsaws through butter. And there was much to scream about. David Cook, Syesha, Michael Johns — they were all there, and they all had to be greeted, sustained, and sent off with a more or less continuous assault of glass-shattering, ear-murdering scream.

And that was before the Archuleta event, which happened near the end of the evening. You could hear them preparing back there, limbering their vocal chords, downing energy drinks, kneading their throats. This was the main event. This was The One Who Must be Screamed At. Everything else was just a warmup.

And then he was there, rising out of the stage behind a piano, singing. Or I think he was singing. His mouth was moving, certainly, and his fingers were dancing across the keys, but all I heard was this hellish din, a million needles of sound piercing my skull and then my brain and then my soul, blotting out the world.

I did notice something odd, though, in the midst of all this torment. When Archuleta stopped singing and started talking, the screaming subsided, and seemed to attach itself to the cadences of whatever he was saying. So he’d say something like “Oh gosh it’s so cool to be here,” or “Golly gee how could so many awesome people be here to see me?,” or something along those lines, and at the end of every phrase the screams would burst forth, and shatter me to my knees, and then subside just in time for him to mouth the next goodhearted, inconsequential palliative. Really, most of the time, you couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the screamers didn’t seem to notice:

But that’s pure speculation. I’m sure he was saying very nice things. Plus, the torment definitely wasn’t eternal. It only lasted a couple of hours. So that was nice.

Looked at in a certain way, writing programs is mostly an epic battle against complexity. It doesn’t take long for any reasonably ambitious project to get too big to fit in any one person’s head, and, once it’s reached that stage, it never gets any better. Because complexity is a tide that never goes out. Once you’ve written an air traffic control system, it’s not like the next air traffic control system you write is going to be easier. Just the opposite. It’ll probably be orders of magnitude harder.

But things can be massaged into a state of obscured complexity — which is to say, perceived simplicity — by good abstractions. These days, if you want to establish a connection to a server somewhere, you don’t have to know anything about the details of TCP/IP, or packets, or networks. You just say connect and — poof! — magic happens.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to God. Or gods. There was a time when gods were stand-ins for the bewildering complexity of the world we live in. When the giant yellow ball in the sky disappeared for several terrifying seconds in the middle of the day, or mountains exploded and smothered entire countries in ash, or oceans rose up and drowned continents — it was a lot easier to abstract all of that stuff away behind a vaguely ubiquitous and all-powerful god than speculate on the actual mechanisms that caused it. Or even know that those mechanisms exist.

Before monotheism cornered the market on faith, the relationship between things we didn’t understand and the gods we worshiped were pleasantly direct. You had gods of oceans, gods of war, gods of beauty, storms, death, fertility, etc. So — if the river didn’t swell at the appointed time and your crops withered, you didn’t have to worry much about the mechanics of that cataclysm. You had a god to blame, or curse, or beseech.

And — far more importantly — you didn’t have to face the pitiless amorality of a world that lets things like that happen. When that ancient ruined farmer asked why the river decided to lie fallow a year, I’m pretty sure it would have been easier for him to believe that he’d displeased the river god Hapi. because the alternative is that it happened for no reason at all. The notion of existential meaninglessness is far more terrifying than the anger of invented gods. Gods have intelligence, and will. If they’re good, they can be appeased. If they’re bad, they can be opposed. Either way, you can do something about it. We’re just not equipped to deal with the notion of a giant void of intent at the core of the universe — this well of uncaring absence that we live in isn’t something we can fight, much less defeat. There’s nothing to fight. It’s like declaring war on rain. What good can it possibly do?

Anyway — eventually, the welter of targeted, domain-specific gods (shallow abstractions, all) collapsed into a series of one true gods. And then those monolithic gods began to experience their own, internal contractions, as the puny hu-mans they oversaw began to figure out the whats of their world. We don’t need a god to explain eclipses anymore. We know what makes the ground shake, and we understand that bolts of lightning are massive discharges of static electricity, not divine javelins. Religion is fighting desperately against this encroachment of rational thought into its domain, but it’s a losing battle.

Gods are still relevant, though, and probably always will be, because science and rational thought can’t really help with the why. Why does disease devour so many people every year? Why are there so many homeless children? Why do people starve? Why are there wars? Why do we die?

God answers those questions. Or rather, he doesn’t answer them, he abstracts them away. We aren’t meant to understand all of these horrors as individual, random, disconnected events, he tells us. It’s all part of a plan — a plan that isn’t disclosed to us, that will never be disclosed to us, and that we couldn’t possibly understand even it even if it was. We don’t have to understand it. When our fathers die, and we ask for a reason, god says because I wish it to be so. There’s no need to ask the next logical question, because we’ve left the realm of logic. We’ve entered the divine.

So I guess the analogy I started all this out with is kind of crappy. Divine abstractions aren’t like programming abstractions at all: they’re meant to conceal the things we don’t know, not simplify the thing we do. We needed Helios not because we didn’t want to think about the chemistry of the sun, but because we couldn’t. By the same token, we need a God to tell us that our lives have purpose and meaning not because we don’t want to go to the trouble of finding it ourselves, but because there’s nothing to find. No purpose. No point. No meaning.

Which is to say: the delicate scaffolding of meaning is something we have to invent, and erect, and maintain. And we often to do it through the medium of an omnipotent, all-seeing, inscrutable, irascible god. God may smite us every so often. He may give devils free reign, burden us with laws that contradict our deepest desires, inflict disease and sorrow and death. But he’s there, an oasis of intent in the center of a dark, uncaring void. And he has a plan.

Epicurus:

Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.

There are basically two ways to react to the news that something you vociferously advocated for turned out to be a really, really bad idea: you can either admit your mistake and learn from it, or you can double down. Here’s Tom Friedman doubling down:

It’s been a while since I’ve heard someone so intelligent say so many breathtakingly unintelligent things. Did one of our most high-profile pundits really say “Hey terrorists, suck on this?” Yes, yes he did. Did he just draw a painfully weak, attenuated analogy between economic bubbles and “terrorist bubbles”? Indeed. Can this possibly be the same guy who wrote From Beirut to Jerusalem? Somehow, it is.

(via Eschaton)

Bruce Springsteen, in an interview with 60 minutes:

As an artist, your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.

Twenty years later, and the dude’s still blowing my mind.

I just found out from my friend Z that his company’s content filters have started banning this blog. I wonder what I did to piss off the cyberprudes — to much cursing? Whining? Bush bashing? Goose slandering?

Whatever it is, it needs to stop. Pariahood is bad for my complexion. So, from now on, I’m going to keep the posts limited to a narrow set of acceptable topics:

1. Kittens. Cute widdle big-eyed cuddly kittens, blanketing the world in a furry carpet of soft mewling adorableness.
2. Sports. Not my area of expertise, admittedly, but I have a whole half year of mortifying, psychologically damaging high school soccer experience to draw from.¹
3. Celebrities. Pretty people. Fallen starlets. Incipient adulterers. Impossibly Attractive Actors Who Have Found Love Against All Odds.
4. Clothing Advice. Again, not something I know anything about, but, seriously, how hard can it be? Don’t wear white socks with black shoes. Don’t wear rainbow suspenders. When your girlfriend tells you that the wardrobe you carefully selected for the evening makes you look like a fucking doofus, then you look like a fucking doofus. Accept it, and move on.
5. Cooking. Another area of life for which I am wholly unprepared. But as my mother once said, there’s no cooking problem that can’t be solved with a microwave and mallet.²
6. Home Repair. I’ve become quite adept at changing lightbulbs over the years, a home repair task I succeed at almost 80% of the time. I am also quite good at boarding up the parts of the house that stop working.
7. Automobiles. Here’s what I know about cars: if you put your key in the slot and turn it, the car makes a big vroomy noise, at which point you can press one of the peddles to make it go. There’s another pedal to make it stop, and a big wheel that you can turn if you don’t want to go straight anymore. If any of these things stop working, you need to call someone.

And that’s about it. I’m expecting huge traffic increases as a result of this new policy, as well as sage nods of approval from all the content nannies. Let the capitulation begin!

Anybody who has a nostalgic interest in vintage technology (especially games) should head over to my friend C. Nimbus’s blog, Teleblivion. Some fantastic posts there recently.

Gruber nails it:

I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

Put another way, if you have to ask for better design, you will lose. You need to be in a position to demand it.

I never thought I’d ever hear myself saying this, but sometimes you need dictatorships. Never in government, of course. But often in software. There are some problems that demand a single, guiding hand — one preeminent ego that’s both the progenitor and the keeper of a vision. Because visions tend to become fractured and diffuse when they’re subjected to committee.

The trick is in choosing the right dictator; and in retaining the personnel, and the intelligence, and the power, to depose him when he goes off the rails. As he inevitably will.