CNN or The Onion?

Throwing Down

Tonight was the first meeting of the weekly ceramics class I decided to take in order to humanize myself to Ilan and Lauren (little do they know I'd still kill them to save a computer!). I got into ceramics in high school after I stopped complaining about the mandatory art class and decided to give it a try -- this is the last time I can recall an authority figure being right about forcing me to do something. (Authority didn't even get to enjoy the feather in its cap -- I never really got to thank my ceramics teacher for exposing me to something I will love for the rest of my life, and anyway the bulk of her daily experience was yelling at people for making marijuana paraphernalia).

There are basically two pottery aesthetics. One is "make something that has thin walls and is functional. Spend as little time glazing as possible (i.e., dip it in the glaze instead of painting it on). Now make 11 more exactly identical things", and the other is "I just carved a frog into into the side of my pot!". Obviously I belong to the first school, with the additional qualification that the identical bowls (mugs are probably more useful, but the handles are annoying) look like they were made by a machine.

On the other hand, the rest of the class is very human:

(Carol, the instructor, spots me throwing away an attempt at a bowl)

Carol: Wait, did you just throw away that ball of used clay?
Me: Well, wedging it again would be a pain in the ass -- it's $20 for 25 pounds, right? The replacement cost of this small piece can't be more than a few dollars.
Carol: Oh, that's not really how I think about it ... for me it's more like "I can use that clay to make another pot".
Me: Hmmmm, so I guess this is a bad time to ask whether I can pay someone to clean my wheel for me?

I didn't want to get into it at the time (as with the gym, after awhile you learn that correcting people in the pottery studio is a waste of time), but life truly is too short to re-wedge slimy used clay. Does she have any idea how many vodka tonics people buy even though they're about to leave the bar and aren't really even in the mood?

The Luddites Have a Point (or Do They?)

David Bradley writes:

What scares me is the pride with which many of the people who claim they don’t understand “computers” brandish their ignorance

One reason for this is people don't think learning technology is a legitimate intellectual activity. Many people envision the problems of computer science to be more complex versions of "how do I install this printer?" They can follow the instructions if they have to, but they'd prefer to just ask their grandchildren.

Which is a shame because the reality is that there's a whole world of ideas out there. Understanding, say, object-oriented programming or the idea behind a relational database is analogous to reading Hamlet or Mill. People don't brag about not having read Hamlet.

But anyone can read Hamlet -- you just pick up the book. On the other hand, how can you learn about object-oriented programming? Well, the wikipedia article is gibberish*, every book is too technical -- I'm out of ideas.

People get more exposure to math and science, but it's taught in a similarly unpleasant and inaccessible way. For example, any high school calculus student can tell you that the integral of x is (x^2/2) because "it's the anti-derivative". None are likely to know why differentiation and integration are inverse operations.

One problem is that to really understand this stuff you have spend a lot of time working out, e.g., what a "real number" is. This is a) is pretty boring, and b) unnecessary if all you need to do is use the equations in physics.

This is a shame though, because like computer science, math and science contain some accessible and compelling ideas. Unlike computer science though, there are a few good popularizations of math and science that require no background. The most prominent example is probably Godel, Escher, Bach, but more straightforward books like The Elegant Universe are pretty good as well.

Takeaways:

1. Someone should write a good popularization of applied computer science!
2. Everyone who's good at technology should stop pretending the boring stuff is so fucking interesting! Despite what my 16 year-old self would tell you, building your own computer is not fun. It's a time consuming cycle of experimentation and googling. (and pirating DVDs is a waste of time!).
   
   So I guess the luddites have a point in that a lot of perceived technological "expertise" is really just familiarity with the boring and arbitrary implementation details that computers unnecessarily expose to us all the time. I.e., it seems like one could reasonably say "I'm not interested in learning to install a hard drive for the same reason I'm not interested in learning to change my oil."

* Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses "objects" and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as information hiding, data abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance. It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s. Many modern programming languages now support OOP.

The Power of Less

Ilan and I have been experimenting with Fresh Direct.

Delivery Guy: Where do you want the boxes?
Me: (Excited) Put them on the island, I guess? (Inside: I had no idea you offered this level of service!!!)
Delivery Guy: No problem -- whoa, it smells good in here!
Ilan: Yeah, this is our first time ordering from Fresh Direct; do you have any tips?
Delivery Guy: What? Oh, yeah, I accept tips.

Needless to say, it took some maneuvering to get out of this pickle (IRL it was me who asked if he had any tips -- you run out of things to talk about!).

Anyway, buying groceries is a balancing act:

1. You want to buy a lot at once so you don't have to transact as frequently
2. You can't buy so much that it will rot before being consumed
   

Of course the latter depends on how good the grocery is -- red cabbage goes bad more slowly than avocados, but it's also consumed more slowly and so you can buy about the same amount of each.

There are only a few groceries that are both tasty enough and last long enough to buy in enough quantity that it's worth the pain in the ass. Here they are:

• Jumbo carrots
• Pickles
• Apples
• Grapes (to freeze -- these are only necessary if you're planning on caddying or having sex and want to eat them afterwards)
  

I find videobox commenters only moderately more intelligent than Matt Yglesias

I gave him a 2 carton box as a "gag gift" first

Pop quiz: what's the most rational way to dispose of unfinished Atlas soup of the day? Counter-intuitively, the answer isn't "out the window" (spit take, I know). It's "flush down toilet" (but if you said "out the window", we really have no quarrel. ("Carefully put the top on the container and put it in the trash", on the other hand -- I've been watching you.))

Guess where I am!

The Doha International Airport Premium Lounge as Branding and Social Networking

If you ask a woman on the street about the Doha International Airport Premium Lounge, she'd probably say: "Oh, that's just full of businessmen who are interested in being productive and making their flights". Wrong!

This common attitude is all based purely on the Lounge's BRAND, you idiots! People in there are actually just relaxing and socializing while their laptops charge. Oh, you idiots think they have have unlimited Milanos because they're the most nutritious snack?

Business Lounge / Waterfall crossbranding experiment

Every building in Hyderabad looks either like a run-down 1980s-style condo (whose construction has just finished), or a 50 (100?) year-old lean-to covered with advertisements for mobile phones. Arriving at 4am was cool because I got to see all the municipal workers releasing the stray dogs into the city that they had earlier collected from across the country (seriously, what is with all the stray dogs.)

Everyone at the hotel was standoffishly obsequious -- one of their favorite moves was to ask "May I enter?". Of course you can enter! a) how else is my tea / DVD player going to get into the room, and b) do you really think that I'm being so anti-social as to walk away from the door like this without implicitly inviting you in? I guess they think it's a form of pampering, but really it just makes the whole situation even more alienating. I felt similarly uncomfortable when they forced me (in mock mortification) to expand at length on the at-bottom-irreducible reason I wanted to send the lambchops back (after about 45 minutes of interrogation, I muttered something that the waiter summarized as "Ah! Fatty and not much meat?")

My kindle broke just as a Jim Cramer conspiracy theory reached it's climax (obviously). Now the screen's all dark and line-y and the "famous authors" screensaver only fades partially. So now I can't make Emily Bronte's disgusting fucking face go away when I want to read something:

Fortunately, when I purchased the device, I negotiated a deal with Amazon, whereby, if it broke, I would have the option to purchase another at full price.

I spent some time cataloging and organizing the personal productivity blogs I read -- converting them from a per-sub-category grouping (Personal Finance, "Lifehacking", GTD Systems, Email Workflow Optimization, Google Reader Strategies & Tactics) to a grouping by quality (best blogs in the "A" folder, second best in the "B" folder, &c) and then back again.

This kept me occupied for a few hours, until, kindle-less, I lit a Dunhill and forced myself to pop in the Battlestar Galactica pilot / miniseries DVD.

Battlestar Galactica is terrible, or, alternatively, if you like plotlines in which central characters' (who obviously can't die this early in the series!) lives depend on whether they're saved before a countdown reaches zero, quite consistent. I actually found the pilot reasonably engaging -- the Ender's Game-style premise (earth barely wins the first war against space bad guys and then the second war starts), the idea of a (as it turns out incompetent) man-made artificial intelligence attacking us, the peculiar political power vacuum situation caused by 99% of civilization getting killed, etc.

After the show got picked up however, they went into "lets milk this motherfucker" mode and started giving you constant updates about all these terrible characters instead of advancing the fucking plot. I get it -- every character is "the best we've got" despite his personal problems! Here is the plot of one episode:

• The "Starbuck" character (edgy female pilot -- the best we've got) is asked to train some new pilots.
  
• The pilots are pretty bad, but probably okay for beginners.
  
• "Get out of here guys, you'll never be pilots!"
  
• It is revealed that earlier Starbuck unintentionally contributed to the death of her boyfriend by letting him pass flight school when he really wasn't ready. Maybe this is why she's being so hard on the recruits!
  
• Commander Adama: Starbuck! Stop letting your personal life interfere with your work! Let Zac go -- it wasn't your fault! (You're the best instructor I've got!)
  
• "Okay guys, you're back in training!"
  
• (Cylons attack, Starbuck is shot down, ticking timer until she runs out of Oxygen -- audience on edge of seat re: whether she'll die!)
  

And so forth, right down to the last meme (the last meme, of course, being the idea of the spaceship's captain meticulously working on a model ocean-ship in his spare time). But obviously I ended up watching the whole first season, and then, when I ran out of disks, reading episode summaries on wikipedia (and, occasionally the Battlestar wiki). Why? Because I wanted to find out what was going to happen, and which humans were Cylons!

Let this be a lesson to you Young Writers: it's much easier to make the audience want to find out what happens next or how some mystery gets resolved than it is to make them want to find out what a character will say next or how he feels about something, etc. (In another episode, Adama gives his son his father's good luck charm lighter right before the son is about to fly on a crucial mission and the son promises to bring it back -- AHHH MY EYES!)

Once I ran out of BSG content with which to vortex, I had that same nightmare two nights in a row and flew back to NYC. (It was the one where I'm responsible for the music at a party filled with cute poor hipster girls. I can barely keep up if I manually control my iPod the whole time, but they keep saying "just put on a playlist with some ambient hip-hop!").

Fortunately, I found the perfect present for Ilan right in the Qatar airlines duty free shop:

If You Don't Like What The Numbers Are Saying, Get Some New Numbers

TechCrunch speculates that Apple and Google could replace Citigroup and GM in the Dow. It's a pretty incoherent post, but the point made at the end, though sad, is important:

Some might say that the Dow Jones, with the limited amount of funds to track, is inaccurate and insignificant compared to the reach of the S&P 500. But still, it is the Dow that most Americans know and follow.

I don't believe that "most Americans" know or follow the Dow, but I do know that simply swapping out the underperformers for better performers undermines any scant remaining legitimacy the Dow might retain as a broad, American economic indicator.