Steve Reads

I got to work today at 7:15 a.m., took half an hour for lunch, and worked until 6:30. Tomorrow I’ll be going in 15 minutes earlier (the only reason it was 7:15 rather than 7 was that I alloted myself too little time to get ready before I left for work), and probably will work until 8 or so. There’s a big project due Wednesday, and I’m not even sure I can get it done by then.

Fortunately it appears that there will be a decent-sized snowfall on Tuesday night, so perhaps I’ll be able to stay home from work and everything will be right forever, or at least until I come back to work and need to finish it even more promptly.

Through a series of links starting at the Bookslut, I discover that the New York Times Book Review is moving away from reviewing fiction: since it’s a newspaper, goes the reasoning, the Review should be focusing on non-fiction. And of the fiction it does review, it will focus more on mass-market fiction (less literary fiction) so that “[m]ore attention will be paid to the potboilers.”

The Book Review and the Times Magazine are basically the only reasons I maintain a subscription to the Times. Looks like it’s time to boycott until they wake up.

Norman Geras has posted the results of his “favorite movies of all time” poll, to which 150 people replied. Rather predictable results, which isn’t a bad thing or a good thing — just kind of a  . . .  thing.

It’s interesting, perhaps, to compare these results with the Internet Movie Database’s top-250-films list (based on a much larger sample) — and, for that matter, with the IMDb’s 100-worst-films list. Then there’s the American Film Institute list which — unsurprisingly — focuses on American films. Roger Ebert’s Great Movies list is more cosmopolitan, and all his reviews are worthwhile; they provide a mini film education on their own.

They’re all worth reading as guidelines, not — of course — as gospel. If you’re looking for a good film to rent some night, I doubt you can lose by picking any of the top 10 from any of these lists.

We’d like to report the results of today’s experiment. This experiment involves getting to work shortly after 7 a.m. and playing Jurassic Five’s album Quality Control at high volume to an otherwise empty office, then getting down to a menial task for hours.

Results have been positive in the “booty-shaking” department. We’ve noticed especially invigorating effects when Jurassic Five is combined with coffee to produce a “buzz.” We had heard about these “buzzes” from the youngsters, but had never succeeded in producing them under blinded clinical conditions.

This line of research is promising, and we hope to submit stronger results to the Journal of the American Rump-Shakin’ Association (JARSA) quite soon.

Awesome awesome awesome. My good friend Britta and I attended our second book-club meeting this evening, to discuss All Quiet On The Western Front. The discussion flowed really well, and the discussants were uniformly intelligent. Notable among them were two women who just graduated from college in May yet are really worldly; one of them spent a lot of time in Nicaragua and is just really charming as hell. Plus she’s gorgeous. A guy really wonders how to ask someone out to coffee when their next scheduled interaction is at the end of February. But ohhhh, how he wishes  . . . 

Earlier today, I froze my butt off to attend the Chinese New Year parade in Boston’s Chinatown. It was a lot of fun: people dressed up as dragons (or maybe lions; I heard varying stories) marched down the street and poked their heads into all the local restaurants to wish them good luck in the upcoming year. More dragons danced on the stage at the top of the street, tossing fruit out to the audience; my friend Sarah caught a couple of oranges. Apparently in China, the New Year festivities fall at the beginning of spring, so handing out fruit is a sign of impending fertility.

I’m amazed: I probably told 10 people over the past week about my Chinese New Year plans, and to a person they told me in response some variant of “Eat a moon cake for me.” Today I told the aforementioned Charming Intelligent Worldly Gorgeous Girl, and she asked, “Did you eat a moon cake?” The moon cake is some conspiracy, I swear.

The moon cake wasn’t all that good, but the coconut bun — literally a hot-dog bun slathered in butter, sugar, and coconut, then baked for a short time, and recommended by my friend Seth — was out of sight. After wandering around looking for a bakery (they’re not hard to find, it turns out, and they all have English translations for their items) and trying to find a warm place where I could stay and wait for Sarah, I found one bakery and — per Seth’s suggestion — bought two coconut buns. Then I stood inside the bakery and looked out at the cold (on days like this, the cold is somehow visible — the sun looks like it’s angry and wants to beat someone up), licking butter and coconut off my fingers and noticing that my body didn’t like all this temperature variation: lots of cold, then lots of sticky heat going down my gullet. It was mad at me. But it forgave me eventually, after a huge steaming bowl of noodle soup.

So: another fantastic Sunday. My life continues to rock.

I was just listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition, on which Liane Hansen was interviewing U.N. weapons inspector David Kay. I had to run over to the computer to write down Kay’s remarkable evasion before I forgot it: he said that Iraq clearly had the “intention to continue to pursue WMD activities.”

Let’s reread that. They had the intention to continue to pursue WMD activities? What constitutes a WMD activity? Is that the same as building WMDs? And they had the intention to continue. All right, that’s a little bit of content: “continue” means that Iraq used to be pursuing these “activities.” Did those earlier pursuits go anywhere? The statement is so meaningless that you hardly know what it implies; but it contains the term “WMD,” so it’s likely to scare some people.

So all Hussein had was the intention. Not the means, nor any actual plans. Just the intention.

And then we have this from President Bush during his

Siva Vaidhyanathan notes the transition from the 2003 State of the Union address, when Bush said quite definitively that

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents also could kill untold thousands. He has not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them, despite Iraq’s recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

Notice how David Kay’s vague language comes closely on the heels of Bush’s. I doubt this is a coincidence. Paul O’Neill goes on 60 Minutes to attack the Bush Administration, and within a couple days retracts his comments, clearly under pressure from the Administration. Now Kay is on NPR giv[ing] an appearance of solidity to pure wind, mere days after he’s resigned from the WMD investigation. This is straight out of the Bush playbook.

Bush’s change in language is hugely significant. This is the president who prides himself on being plain-spoken and honest; when he wants us to believe that there are 500 tons of nerve agents in Iraq, he tells us that there are 500 tons of nerve agents in Iraq. So what does it mean that he’s now talking about “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities”? If our tough-talking Texan president can’t do any better than that, what does it mean?

I think it means that it’s getting harder and harder to fool the public, and Bush knows it.

Further evidence that the web is a very good place to be if you know where to look: enfant terrible Chris Genovese’s discussion of whether the brain updates its internal model of a process in a way that Bayes’ Rule would predict. Chris gives a nice overview of why we should care, why the newspapers probably got it wrong, a first-order explanation of why it’s reasonable to believe that the brain would behave in this way, and why the question merits more study. Definitely worthwhile reading.

This idea isn’t very well-formed, so I’ll just throw it out there and let people make suggestions.

First, someone pointed me the other day to displayRSSVersion, displayWithStylesheet(foo) (which renders the page according to the CSS sheet at URL foo), etc. The ones I’ve listed are focused on how the page is displayed, but I’m sure there are all kinds of behaviors that we could expect out of a web-page object.

I’m only just now learning downtown Boston’s geography, because — as a former Cantabrigian and current Somervillian — I am legally forbidden to cross the Charles River. But now that I work downtown, I’ve received a waiver from Somerville and can freely roam Boston.

This will probably make you laugh, but: I just discovered how close the Downtown Crossing and State Street T stops are. You can step out of Downtown Crossing and walk to State in three to five minutes. Which is why I find it kind of puzzling that the two stops aren’t connected underground, in the same way that Downtown Crossing and Park Street are. That was a wonderfully convenient connection which only happened within the past year, so now I hope that State and Downtown will connect. At that point, the Green, Red, Orange, Blue and Silver lines would all be connected at the Downtown-State-Park stop. Wouldn’t that be great? As it is, if you want to go from the Red line to the Blue line, you have to take the Red line to Downtown Crossing, then hop on the Orange line to State Street and get on the Blue line (or take the Red line to Park Street and transfer to the Green line, take it to Government Center, and get on the Blue line there). It would be ever so much more convenient if they were all in one place.

I found a situation today in which it would have been much much easier to have vim on hand than the available Windows tools (notably Notepad and Wordpad). I was helping my roommate’s boyfriend in his job search, and IE was acting up: clicking on a particular set of links within a job-posting page didn’t work (the JavaScript app was buggy, I think), so I had to go into the HTML source, copy out the URL for each job, and open that URL manually. Each URL was embedded inside a JavaScript function call that looked something like

foo('URL', arg1=a1, arg2=a2, ...,argN=aN)

With a tool like sed, I could have just done some regular-expression magic on this: the single sed command sed "s/foo('([^']*)/\1/g'" would grab all the URLs of the appropriate form. (I may have the details slightly off, but that’s about it.) Windows has no such pattern-matching facility. Microsoft Word has some rudimentary matching, but it’s nothing like a full regular-expression search.

Or within vim, I could just go to the source code directly, go to the first ', then select all the text up to the next '. Again, trivial. It would have saved me at least 10 minutes of effort today. It’s a very basic thing to ask for, actually: the ability to select text, combined with the ability to search for a pattern. Shouldn’t you be able, in Microsoft Word, to “select all text up to the next occurrence of the word ‘foo’”? Seems like a reasonable demand to me. You may complain about the Unix syntax, but syntax isn’t the issue here: it’s pure functionality that Windows lacks.

Or yesterday, using Microsoft Word at work, I found myself really needing regular expressions: I had copied in a whole lot of seven-digit numbers, and I wanted to quickly make them all pretty by putting commas around digit groups. This would have been trivial in Perl:

perl -p -i -e 's/(\d)(\d\d\d)(\d\d\d)/\1,\2,\3/g'

It may seem obscure, but it’s like mathematics: it’s a notation designed to compress the maximum amount of meaning into the fewest characters. And once you’ve used one Unix command, you’re quite often ready to use a lot of others: the Perl, sed, and vim syntaxes (syntaces?) all use more or less the same commands to substitute one pattern for another. (Which you’d expect, given that geeks who grew up on the first two developed the third.)

The big secret with Unix, I’ve discovered, is that there may be an enormous fixed cost, but once you’ve learned the tricks they’re yours forever and your marginal-cost savings are huge. Over a lifetime, the accumulated ten-minute savings here and there amount to a lot.

But again, if people don’t get it, there’s not much one can say that will make them get it. They’ll just have to learn it on their own.

I’ve been thinking recently that it would be handy for this site’s readers if they could be notified whenever someone had posted to a given thread. But now I realize that we’ve already got a better way to take care of that: the RSS feed. That feed contains all the comments for every post, so anyone subscribing to the RSS feed will know right away when a post has new comments.

I’d recommend syndicating the RSS anyway. It’s just a much more convenient and efficient way to read lots of sites at once.

All right, I have a spare moment before lunch to write down this great paragraph. Context: a matriarch rules over this Indian family’s house, and the 10-year-old mischievious girl in the house can’t stand her. Since the matriarch tries so hard to keep the mosquitoes from the humid outside outside, the mischievious 10-year-old — during her insomniac walks around the house — often opens the windows: first the screen on the inside, then the leaded glass, then the shutters.

With that context, here goes:

And if the flies buzzed in through the opened netting-windows, and the naughty gusts through the parted panes of leaded glass, then the opening of the shutters let in everything else: the dust and the tumult of boats in Cochin harbour, the horns of freighters and tugboat chugs, the fishermen’s dirty jokes and the throb of their jellyfish stings, the sunlight as sharp as a knife, the heat that could choke you like a damp cloth pulled tightly around your head, the calls of floating hawkers, the wafting sadness of the unmarried Jews across the water in Mattancherri, the menace of emerald smugglers, the machinations of business rivals, the growing nervousness of the British colony in Fort Cochin, the cash demands of the staff and of the plantation workers in the Spice Mountains, the tales of Communist troublemaking and Congresswallah politics, the names Gandhi and Nehru, the rumours of famine in the east and hunger strikes in the north, the songs and drum-beats of the oral storytellers, and the heavy rolling sound (as they broke against Cabral Island’s rickety jetty) of the incoming tides of history. ‘This low-class country, Jesus Christ,’ Aires-uncle swore at breakfast in his best gaitered and hattered manner. ‘Outside world isn’t dirtyfilthy enough, eh, eh? Then what frightful bumbolina, what dash-it-all bugger-boy let it in here again? Is this a decent residence, by Jove, or a shithouse excuse-my-French in the bazaar?’

I just love that. And while we’re at it, the single sentence at the end of Chapter One seems a great motto for someone who’s already committed too many words to the aether to take them back: “No secrets any more. I’ve already nailed them up.”

Of course, that sentence gives me chills more because I’m pretty sure Rushdie wrote it while on the run from the fatwa. That’s courage; what I have here is shit, by comparison.

I started reading Salman Rushdie’s book The Moor’s Last Sigh last night, and I’m so glad that I did. What a fantastic novel. I’ll have more to say about it when I don’t have a big project at work breathing down my neck, but suffice it to say that the book is just wonderful.

I was in the middle of reading Richard Posner’s Antitrust Law, but it just wasn’t holding my attention; my mind would wander off every few seconds, and I probably reread every sentence four or five times on average. So I switched to Rushdie and was completely engrossed from the beginning. If you’ve not already read Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children, you’re really missing out. If you like Love In The Time Of Cholera, especially, Midnight’s Children is for you. And even though I’ve not yet finished Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past, I’m hearing echoes of it in The Moor’s Last Sigh. When I have more time, I’ll sample a paragraph from Last Sigh that loops and spins and dives and takes you on a tour of India, then back to one character’s swearing father. It’s hilarious and huge, all within one paragraph.

More book love soon.

Every now and again you come upon a bit of writing that makes you exceedingly aware of the drool creeping down your chin. Cosma Shalizi’s essay on some connections between plant biology and cellular automata is, for me, one such piece. Following one of his links to an earlier explanation of cellular automata bears similar fruit, and (parenthetically) a description of Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science as “a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity.”

I continue to recommend Shalizi on the much heralded Laniel Short List. This list doesn’t exist yet, but just you wait.

 . . . comes from my friend Stephanie, observing the affection ‘twixt her husband and me: “Dude love. You can’t beat it.”

A lot of people attack me for talking out of my butt, particularly on the subjects of philosophy and my distaste for large-scale system builders. My point throughout is that I don’t believe that humans are very good at coming up with the right “first principles” from which to argue ethically. E.g., I believe that the Bill of Rights was a fantastic experiment with arguing from first principles, but that it’s a failure unless tempered by real experience (i.e., case law).

But I’ll accept the premise that I should read more system-builders before scorning them. (Note that there’s a deadlock built somewhere into there: for various reasons, I’m reluctant to read people like Hegel, so somehow the goal is to figure out whether I ought to read Hegel before I’ve read Hegel.)

One way that my readers can convince me that I ought to read these people is if they humor me for a moment, and adapt to my biases. I’m biased, in particular, toward philosophies that can give me good answers for low-level questions. So I have a list of questions, and I’d like my philosophically-minded readers to tell me how the systematic philosophers can help me resolve them. If systematic philosophers can give me better insight into the problems that motivate me, then I’ll be more likely to read systematic philosophers.

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Not that the web will lack copies of Bush’s State of the Union address, but I include it below just because I can. I figure the more text copies there are of this man’s crystallized vacuity, the better.

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When you see Bush deliver his State of the Union address tonight, remember how brilliant an extemporaneous speaker our last president was:

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Everyone’s linking to Drudge’s MP3 clip of Dean’s speech in Iowa last night (Dean placed “a distant third” — everyone is using the phrase “a distant third,” so why shouldn’t I?). Dean sounds scary. But I swear that MP3 is a fake: the primal yawp at the end of the speech is very un-Dean. I can accept that the rest of the speech is Dean — it sounds like he’s blown out his vocal cords over weeks of campaigning, but it sounds like Dean. The cheer at the end sounds like it’s been edited in.

Before I believe that that’s Dean, I’ll need to see a video clip. Has anyone seen such a clip, either on the Net or on television?

Update: Those who commented on this post have confirmed pretty reliably that it was Dean screaming.

Update 2: I’ve cached an MP3 of the Dean scream, pulled off the Drudge archive. Thanks to Art McGee on the pho list for pointing out the new URL.

It is highly upsetting to note that the breathtakingly gorgeous girl from Mystic River is 17 years old. Uncle Jesse from “Full House” might say, “Have mer-say.”