I just read Michael Olesker’s piece: “The sad, sad state of college English” in the Baltimore Examiner. Sometimes I need a reminder of how bad things are to frighten me into doing even better.
I’m here today to make the bold claim that language is just another technology. And that many people would rather leave technology to the experts.
No… That’s wrong. What was I thinking?
I’m actually here today to make the even bolder claim that literacy is not that important. Literacy is just a symptom of mindfulness and careful thought. If you have those things, who needs literacy? Literacy is a side-effect. It’s completely unnecessary to a rewarding life of the mind.
No really.
I spend a lot of time reading and writing. And, it isolates me from people. Couldn’t I spend all my waking hours talking to people about those things I read and write instead of being alone? Isn’t it possible that all those people talking on their phones are discussing theories about - what are the cliches? - Rocket Science or Brain Surgery? Weren’t we all going to learn by watching TV in the future?
Hmmm…
I started out here thinking it was nice that I would never write something like: “Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sixteenth Chapel”. Or: “Christopher Columbus discovered America while sailing in Spain”. But: why is it necessary to read those things? And: is a poor writer simply making a typo because they are out of practice? We’re not facing absolute proof that the marginally literate are mistaken here - could be that maybe it’s just not their strongest communications medium(?)
This is an old idea for me. I remember learning that Nancy Reagan was involved in literacy campaigns (How did I learn that? Probably saw it on TV) Which I felt a similar need to criticize on principle. There is something too trite going on there: A play of demographics - Some statistic showing correlation between literacy rates and GNP growth in a range of countries. People are expected to have reading and writing skills. That doesn’t explain why wisdom cannot infect us - like an epidemic - solely through word-of-mouth.
Now I think maybe I was right when I said that language is just another technology that people would rather leave to the experts. That theory would explain why most people are not using language to become smarter. There’s no reason why they couldn’t teach each other - share what they know - without the aid of a single written word. Would you estimate that it is faster to read it in a book or hear someone say it. When someone won’t read a badly written instruction manual, don’t they typically ask for help? Or maybe that’s a bad example - maybe the help they seek is not explanation but assistance. I’ve seen enough material on different “learning styles” to know that people take the idea seriously: It’s okay if you learn better by listening to lectures or talking things over.
It also occurred to me back when I was learning electrical engineering that so many people were living their lives taking advantage of electronics technology they couldn’t begin to fathom: Computer chip-driven appliances that I needed coursework in Logic Theory, Semiconductor Physics, Circuit Design, and Control Theory to even begin to understand. I knew then that people had the motivation and the wherewithal to delegate that knowledge - even to ‘offshore’ it to other countries. And, what would they be doing instead - With all that freed up mindspace?
Now let’s talk about my personal problems.
It’s easy to laugh at poor language mechanics. “Sixteenth Chapel”, indeed. Or my personal favorites “Taken for granite” and “Deep-seeded”. Plausible guesses that pass the spell-checker but suggest a blind-spot in the idea someone would be motivated to communicate. (Like… Why don’t they just STFU? Instead of exposing their own ignorance?) Spoken, these gaffes can be excused as simply misheard. But uh… They’re still superfluous. Your editor would scratch them right out. If you’re lucky enough to have an editor.
I’m quite comfortable with my language mechanics. I can spot errors in a text (and I read a lot of un-proofed advance copies from my old bookstore). I have at least one friend who enjoys sharing a conversation with me about the idiocy of errant apostrophes. I feel no fear breaking rules in the service of a higher grammatical goal: Pushing the envelope for effects of ‘voice’ and ‘tone’. Or something. I was told that a single noun wasn’t a full sentence…
Balls!
Posted in writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:50:00 GMT
I discovered the program Audacity on Sourceforge. I didn’t realize there was such a powerful audio editor available for free. I also found it quite intuitive within a few hours of using it. It handles every audio format I use (“ogg vorbis” causes a lot of trouble wherever I go), and it feels a bit like using Photoshop (maybe it’s the infinite-undo).
One of the exciting things I learned about it today was that it knows “nyquist”. Nyquist is a music synthesis language based on Lisp. Oh boy: I really needed to start learning another computer language - although I did actually spend about seven hours learning Lisp nineteen years ago - I should be okay, huh?
With Nyquist you can define any arbitrary network of wave function generating components to mimic an analog synthesizer. But, it also apparently includes MIDI-like instrument description. And naturally, it includes all the capabilities of any serious computer language - think of all the math you would need to do with waveforms and such. That is all the power of a proprietary setup like Garage Band and Virtual Instruments.
I don’t really like using graphic user interfaces sometimes. Of course, I want to see graphics when the information I’m working with is graphical. But a lot of what I do isn’t graphical at all. I wind up using a lot of programs in a GUI environment that have not provided ways to manipulate the data on screen at all. You pull down a menu, make a selection, and then type numbers into a box. The secret is, I won’t know what numbers go in the box because the program doesn’t list numbers as a result - it draws graphics. I suppose it is the hardest part about programming - and quite tedious, I’m sure: Drawing a figure is easy, but enabling a control in that figure takes a bit more work. This entails closing the loop by allowing the figure to supply the numbers.
Posted in programming, music-synthesis, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:57:00 GMT
Today I went out for a walk and stumbled upon this mural. I think it’s art, but it could be an advertisement. Is there really any difference? It’s in a strange place - an alley. You can’t really step back to regard it all at one time. I decided to try stitching together a panorama in Photoshop. It came out okay - well, you an judge the results for yourself.
To be more precise, this is the alley that goes behind the Whole Foods on P street. The wall belongs to a hardware store or something.
If this is a work of art, it is a parody of advertising, and I think that’s what attracted me the most. That, or the vivid colors. But, if this really is an advertisement, it engages in stealth - Guerrilla marketing at its most vivid. You should be able to see the logos if you look closely. I’ve seen that logo applied all over town, and I never bothered to figure out why. It could be an energy drink for all I know. The most cynical (yet creative) phase of advertising has bent over backwards to meet the most mocking parody.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:13:00 GMT
I have finally come to the last few pages of “Nixonland”. It has been quite a chore at times: Blow-by-blow accounts of the ‘68 and ‘72 political party conventions are fascinating in their way. I can’t knock it, but my interest flagged regularly. I guess I thought the book would end much later than it does, and I was fooled into thinking it would therefore move a little faster to cover all that ground.
Still, I didn’t know that much about Nixon’s early career - and his involvement in the McCarthyite communist witch hunt. And all the bad things about Nixon I did know were largely second hand. Or worse - just vague memories of other people’s opinions.
The book isn’t really about Nixon, though… It’s about a brand of cynical politics that polarized a nation. In many ways it reminds me of the tales of the early days of computer security: People could legitimately wonder why anybody would deliberately attack a computer network. In retrospect it seems naive to forgo paranoid levels of protection. When you can’t even identify the cause of a problem, or you’re too embarrassed to disclose that anything even happened, it’s hard to concentrate on normal business.
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:06:00 GMT
Friday afternoon I rode the bus down to Gallery Place to watch the new James Bond Movie. I got there just in time for one of the early showings - plenty of seats to be had even after the first few minutes of previews. I brought along “American Lightning” to read just in case I had to wait for a later showing of the movie, and read some of it on the bus down.
A quick note on being alone in movie theaters: I used to think it was extremely pathetic to go to a movie by yourself - Now I find it preferable. My lifetime of movies more or less started with being taken to the movies by my parents, then joining up with groups of friends, and then finally as something to do on a ‘date’ - even though this was usually with a movie-obsessed friend. But my position is reversed now: One day nobody would go to see “Barton Fink” with me, and had the time, the motivation and the opportunity, so in I went, solitary man sitting in a dark room full of people. Although that wasn’t the day I changed my mind - I found it somehow embarrassing that day - I eventually understood that I prefer to watch movies by myself. People may disagree with me about this, but I always thought there was something weird about “spending time together” paying attention to something else. I’m happy to discuss what I saw on the screen… But can we please not refer to the viewing as genuine togetherness? Togetherness sounds like fun to me, but I hardly ever achieve that when I’m around other people. And, don’t say that there is something wrong with me… I knew that already.
I have to keep fighting off the temptation to criticize the trend in mainstream entertainment… I rather enjoyed “Quantum of Solace”. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not so important - I didn’t expect it to. There is a lot of shooting and plenty of stuff blows up. Part of me worries that the plot is too flimsy. In many ways what we have here is a post-modern pastiche: Moral certainty is out the window. Disobedience is okay as long as your boss is wrong? Isn’t it? That seemed to be the lesson I got from the movie.
Give the people what they want: “Quantum” is to be understood as a sequel to “Casino Royale”. It might have been nice to watch them back to back - my mistake, I’ve got a DVD player, after all - because I forgot who some of the supporting characters were. It’s been two years since I saw the last film. But, the major element in a franchise is repetition: Give it just enough variation to be interesting, but don’t stray too far into the unknown. Car chases and fist fights are just interesting enough to make you forget you’ve seen it all before in a hundred other movies. The Daniel Craig version of Bond has a new martini recipe, even though we see him down more whiskey.
I read a bit of Bond criticism lately. I agree in principle: A formula that made some sense in the context of the cold war, blatant sexism, too many gadgets. But there is also the alchemy of this bumbling hero whose idea of infiltrating is being captured. How do they do it? My earliest memories (much younger and impressionable then) are of Bond as a tough customer and a brilliant escape artist. Neither were true on subsequent viewings. We - and by ‘we’ I mean pre-teen boys - could be ushered into a gadget culture that had yet to become reality. We were the recruits. “Quantum” has the coolest mobile phones and computer screens you can imagine - or you can’t imagine anything else after seeing them. So the relentless push of techno-futurism continues to the present day.
Okay, stop me… This has taken two days of on-again, off-again writing to become virtual mulch. I had four of five important things from the movie I wanted to discuss and I keep getting distracted. Maybe this isn’t the right time…
Posted in film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:35:00 GMT
It’s more nostalgia, isn’t it?
Scanner Time
I looted a scanner from my old workplace when it closed. Let me explain how I rationalize that action.
The thing is a combination printer/scanner - At first it was thought that I would be scanning a lot of artwork for the website so I got one. But eventually, they started sprouting up around the office like toadstools - we had network gear, so it might have made more sense to have one really good printer and scanner networked, but that’s not what happened. Stuff got bought in dribs and drabs. The purchasing mavens waited until my department got a new PC (I think it may have been for my desk…) to get a new printer.
I never really used the scanner part that much for work - I wound up getting most of what I needed online. But, on the other hand, it was really annoying to have to go down the hall to use the vintage Mac in the advertising office every time I needed to scan something.
One day I had a serious paper jam. That was when I discovered how hermetic the printer mechanism was. With the exception of a couple flaps, there was no access. I believe that to access the printer mechanism would require dismantling the scanner part - removing it from above the printer. Or something like that. Nevertheless, I managed to pull the diagonal wad of copy paper out. But I caused some subtle damage with the shuttle - that carriage for the ink cartridges that rode back and forth on a rod. From then on, there was a point near one end of the rod where the cartridges would stutter, leaving a vertical line running down the left edge of the paper. It would leave a rainbow from the narrow gaps where C, M, and Y never printed from the stutter. Black, begin further to the left had its stutter outside of the printing range. I had all the clues I needed, but no reliable way to fix it. And it was bargain basement junk anyway.
It worked that way for months and months. Not exactly production quality, but I didn’t do production.
Then one day it died completely.
I drew that face on post-it note, stuck it to the printer and started sending my print jobs somewhere else.
Paul Crowley Youngstown Ohio
This photo is a remarkably good one considering. It belongs to a collection of very crappy photos from the 1980’s. When I lived in Gaithersburg, I used to ride my bike down to the railroad tracks. As a teenager, I wasn’t particularly sure what I wanted to take photos of. I was just scanning around for something interesting. And, what looks interesting to the eye is not necessarily interesting printed. Any marginally good photographer has learned to compensate for this. I’m tempted to call it “pre-emphasis”. All image creation has to be artificial. Viewers won’t see what is there if it is simply recorded - they have to be shown something emblematic to see truth, but they can just as easily be manipulated into seeing something false in the process. Photos are no substitute for ‘being there’, and to think that they can be is clearly naive. But it’s also possible that you haven’t discovered that for yourself yet.
So here we have the young, naive me, snapping away at railroad tracks, trains passing by, track-maintenance equipment, and the extremely nondescript track-side architecture… Then one day I take an actual portrait. Albeit a corporate logo, ‘signed’ by a bystander three states away. Was he even in Ohio when he made his mark? Or was he tramping the rails like some depression-era hobo? I have no doubt that the graffiti struck me that day as particularly literate and legible. It is indistinguishable in mode from an artist’s signature, as if Paul here was taking credit for the thing. Did they fabricate those rail cars in Youngstown somewhere? Did Paul do this at the factory. I doubt it, but it’s a poetic thought. The mark is fresher than the paint job, that much is easy to see.
Maybe this isn’t the first good photograph I ever took, but I think there is a good chance that it is. I recognize it as a photo I would take today, given the opportunity. It shows the industrial decay that I forget even interested me that long ago. If anything, I’m not so different now because I haven’t been paying close attention.
Posted in photos, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:59:00 GMT
Clusterstock: America Discovers That Bailout Will Be Used To Pay Wall Street Bonuses
After some time spent reading the comments on this article, I realized that it relates to my earlirt post Profits And Altruism. You don’t put money in a tip jar so that some drug addict can come along and steal the jar - so why should taxpayer bailout money be poured into financial institutions so that some executive can take an enormous bonus?
The problem with a lot of on-line arguments is the disconcerting sense that the participants are not actually arguing with each other. And, this is such a complicated topic that unstated assumptions play a major role. Add to that the fact that someone firing off a quick comment is not going to be able to address the full scope of what they intended to talk about anyway.
So, I’d like to try my hand at it in this slower format:
There have been a number of misunderstandings about the Wall Street Bailout. How much money is it, really? (I’ve heard the $700 billion figure mentioned a lot…) Where does the money actually go? (CEOs awarding themselves bonuses?) and finally, Did the government get any equity / Were there any conditions tied to the money?
I noticed that the defenders of the Street took the vague argument “those guys were expecting those bonuses” and fleshed it out with some nuance: The bad guys who created the mess have already been fired (I’m not sure where the proof is - I just take their word for it?), and there is a formula used to calculate bonuses for the rank and file investment bankers which includes factors for individual performance, unit performance, and firm performance. That’s all well and good, but don’t you think the fact that the firm had to be bailed out is a big negative on that ‘firm performance’ term? Avoiding the disaster of a firm “too big to fail” may be warranted - stability of the markets is a good thing for everybody, especially the poor - but everybody may have to accept some sacrifices for that stability. Good individual performance ought to be rewarded, and many people commented that the rewards are largely in equity - equity that tanks with the firm’s stock price, so they really are being penalized despite the stated value of their bonus. That might argue against direct punishment… Had there not been many excellent performances throughout the firm, the whole thing would have been an unmitigated failure much earlier.
Another argument among the defenders of the Street was that those payments fuel the economy. Granted. But, how that money is apportioned makes a lot of difference. They don’t dump cash out the office window (there’s a cartoon somewhere of Alan Greenspan doing this when the Fed couldn’t lower rates any further) - but does that mean the bonuses are necessarily being awarded fairly? Of course not. If we the people have an interest in making sure there is fair play, but we don’t get to see behind the curtain, people are obviously going to be a little worked up over it.
Here’s an idea: take that $700 billion and split it evenly among the taxpayers: What’s that per person in the US? For something in the neighborhood of 200 million taxpayers? I calculate roughly $3500. Why don’t they do that? The big firms would fail, but everybody would suddenly have some money to keep spending or even invest. Some people would use it to make payments on their mortgage or car loan. Other people would see a new opportunity. People who had a lot of money already wouldn’t notice much difference. Isn’t that the reason we got those economic stimulus checks? Paying off debts with your windfall isn’t sexy - it destroys wealth in the same sense that credit creates wealth in the first place - but it results in a more orderly shrinking of the economy, not an abrupt collapse.
If these big firms fail, and the premise is that they were “adding value” to the economy - creating wealth - then where has that value gone? People had jobs for a while. They worked hard, got paychecks, but eventually the all the excess value in the firm got sucked out and sent somewhere else. If you accept that the creation of wealth is a non-zero sum game, then the corresponding destruction of wealth during these catastrophes is also a non-zero sum game - only the sum happens to be negative in this case. It may not be so bad if the participants were well compensated for their time and effort - that’s one component in the removal of wealth from the firm. Seen as a whole, a failed firm isn’t necessarily a total loss if people benefited to a certain degree over a period of time. Perhaps there was a way for the firm to survive longer by reducing the amount of wealth it let people take home month after month. Then again, maybe none of them would have stayed for long.
BBC just reported that Treasury Secretary Paulson has decided that the bailout money will not be used to buy “toxic assets”, but be used instead to buy stock in those companies. They are also presenting a story about the global economic downturn in “rubbish” (for a second I thought they were saying that the downturn was rubbish - a lie)l However, the Chinese have stopped buying waste paper to recycle into boxes since they’re suddenly not able to export as much.
Posted in economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:19:00 GMT
Wikipedia: Nomothetic And Idiographic
I can no longer remember where I saw a remark on these two words. One of the non-fiction books I’ve been reading, no doubt: It was definitely a remark about academic modes in History vs. Economics. But as you can see from a quick search, these words can also be used to refer to personality types(!)
From the Wiki: “In sociology, the nomothetic model tries to find independent variables that account for the variations in a given phenomenon… The idiographic model focuses on a complete, in-depth understanding of a single case.”
I’m not sure what all the fuss is: This feels merely like a difference between general and specific; the tendency to generalize and the tendency specify.
Posted in economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:44:00 GMT
I’m wearing my new glasses. Of course, it feels strange. My prescription didn’t change much in all the years since my last exam, but moving to a new prescription always causes a little field distortion. I feel like I’m in a slightly different universe with an even less Euclidian geometry. I had to walk around a bit downtown for a bit before I could really say that I was happy with them.
Before picking up the glasses I went to CVS for some divider tabs to put in a binder. I wound up with a cheap battery powered LED book-light. I have often wanted a book-light, and I think getting light from LEDs is a brilliant idea - since they’re not just red and green the way I always remember them. You can even get replacement light bulbs that contain an array of LEDs and use even less power than a flourescent bulb. In addition, I’ve been wanting a small notebook to keep with the espresso machine for recording ephemera regarding how much coffee I’m using, how much money I’m spending on it, and anecdotal evidence about the quality of the output.
After the glasses, I went around the corner to print some photos at Penn Camera. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision - I mentioned it earlier today - but, all of the sudden, it seemed like a really good way to road test my glasses, looking at detail on a computer screen, then looking at the same details on a print. The prints came out fast - only 15 minutes - but I still needed to kill some time, so I took a walk around the neighborhood, meandering through the 2-block radius of the store: L St, K St, 19th, Pennsylvania Ave; H to 18th, Eye to Farragut Square, then back around to the photo shop. Along the way, I realized that the real test is to see if I could read while walking. I do that all the time - it’s important that I don’t get a headache or start vomiting while I dart my glance back and forth from the book to my surroundings.
I didn’t fall down, or vomit, or anything, but still… everything on the periphery is a bit wobbly - this makes some sense when you consider that they have to looking straight ahead during the exam. There is obviously going to be some uncertainty about the effects of a prescription away from the line of sight. I know from studying optics that they don’t bother to grind the exact shape because they couldn’t do it cheaply enough. Paraboloid lens grinding is for billion dollar space telescopes. And they mess those up too.
I was daydreaming about some way they could use a temporary lens material to simulate your glasses - something just to verify the prescription before making the real lenses. Can real lens be melted down or something? Probably not, because that would allow them to recycle your old pair.
Posted in DC-roaming, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:42:00 GMT
It never fails: Every time I resolve to blog more I actually wind up blogging less. Maybe I should promise to blog less to begin with. Somehow, I don’t think that would work too well. This pitiful little entry will have to do for now, while I think up more interesting things to say…
My new glasses are ready at HourEyes. Nobody called. Today, I called, and there they were, waiting for me. Bad timing, though: my friend Sam was going to take me out to lunch the next time I was down around K Street, but she’s not working on K Street today.
One of the other things I can do in that neighborhood is go to Penn camera, so I loaded up a USB drive with a few good photos that should be printed. They are also photos with a lot of black that I wouldn’t have printed on an ink-jet printer - they need to be done on real photo paper instead. Maybe I won’t print them all, but it would be nice to return home with a couple prints to help me calibrate my eyes to the screen… That is, be sure I’m not going to get something wildly different on the paper from what I see when I’m editing them at home.
I had a programming idea while I was in the shower. Class inheritance and operator overloading is so easy in Ruby that I though I should be able to add an operation to floating point numbers to calculate the value of two electronic components wired in parallel. Then, as with some fancy circuit analyzer package, I could do my own charts of electronic circuit responses, like monte-carlo variations or frequency response in linear circuits. I didn’t think it all the way through, though: Getting software objects to combine with an arithmetic-like syntax is easy enough, but passing in a frequency parameter to such an expression is not so easy. I’ll need to be able to pass in the expression using internalized symbols along with a value substitution or frequency parameter. It’s got something to do with blocks, maybe, but then I’m going to need a circuit object to read in the expression and “simulate the interconnection” of the components… I lathered up with soap standing in the tub, and then the water cut off.
Probably be back in a few seconds, right?
No. They’re back at it, screwing aroung with the plumbing on the second floor. I waited until after my roommate left for work, which is how it happened that I was taking a shower at 10am, and not 7am. I heard the tell-tale hammering on pipes. I screamed at the top of my lungs and banged first on the wall, then on the tub, apparently no one heard - or they just ignored it. I’m pretty sure they don’t speak English, anyway.
But they did this yesterday afternoon - a Sunday - and when I looked, it was just one little sink in for the whole floor. Clearly, they must have a bathroom, with a sink and a toilet, and the corresponding need to shut off my water, but why couldn’t they install all the valves they needed in one session, then never turn the mains off ever again? I said it out loud: “Some day they’re going to shut that thing off while I’ve got soap in my eyes!”.
The prophesy has been fulfilled.
Posted in ontology, programming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:25:00 GMT
