Steve Reads

I just saw The Bad Plus opening for Gomez. Serious rockage in both cases. I liked the Gomez album that I have (In Our Gun), but I was most psyched about The Bad Plus; ever since Adam mentioned them and I listened to a couple of their albums, I’ve thought they were the hottest shit. Their songs “The Empire Strikes Backwards” and “Anthem for the Earnest” are both jazzy-avant-garde, but also intensely funky. And as it happens, those were the first two songs they played tonight; I had a big grin on my face almost from the moment I got to the 9:30 Club, for that reason.

Gomez were great, too — very rockin’. They make me think that it must be a tremendous load of fun to be a rock-and-roll star. They’re now up to four albums, at least a couple of which have sold rather well. Their lives probably don’t suck at all. And they’re still joyous musicians.

I’d forgotten how many good tracks there are on In Our Gun; I foresee myself getting obsessed with their stuff in the coming weeks. Fortunately tonight’s show will be on the web. If you pay close attention, you can just pick out my voice; I’m the guy saying “Yeah.”

On the elevator up to work, we get treated to a television, courtesy of The Captivate Network. It’s pre-digested news, most of which is USA Today quality — meaning that by the time we get it, it’s been digested three or four times into the blandest TV pap you could imagine. And they ask poll questions. Today’s was

What sappy summer book are you reading?

I replied truthfully on their website that I am reading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

I don’t think that television was designed with me in mind.

Apparently someone finally noticed that with a beautiful waterfront on the Potomac near Georgetown, it might be a good idea to turn it into something other than a parking lot. I noticed this a while ago, when I tried to take a friend’s friend for a walk along there.

I have a rant about D.C. that this just plays into, but I’ll save it.

I’ve been going kind of buck-wild recently on writing Perl. I’ve become really, really obsessive about it, and I actually think I’m becoming a noticeably better programmer as the days go by. Today I got to work at 8:45, started working at least by 9:15, kept going until 7 p.m., didn’t break for lunch, then came home and finished up something that had been nagging at me toward the end of the day. We had found that a number of files which we’re converting from one system to another were duplicates, so I wanted to write a little Perl script that finds the dups in a list of files and deletes all but one of them. And since I tend to obsess over details, I had to make it clean (or cleanish; those of you with computer-science degrees should bear in mind that I’m just a lowly hacker). So maybe this will be a little Exploration of Steve’s Mind.

The basic tool you’d use to find dups is md5sum(1). This uses the MD5 algorithm to compute a number (called an MD5 hash) for each file that it’s given; with very high probability, files share the same MD5 hash if and only if they’re identical.

So then you could do a shell-scripty thing like so to find all the MD5 hashes for a given set of files:

md5sum [list of files] \ |cut -f1 -d' ' \ |sort \ |uniq -c \ |sort -nr \ |sed 's/^ +//' \ |grep -v '^1' 

This will give you back a list of MD5 hashes, with the files stripped off. I couldn’t think of any way to leave the filenames in while still using the sort -nr trick, so I decided to do the whole thing in Perl. The result is the set of functions in my md5funcs file. The md5sum function itself doesn’t do much more right now than call out to md5sum(1); I figured it was worthwhile to write my own function for this, just in case someday I find a Perl implementation of md5sum and want to replace the shell version with the new one.

sub md5sum { my @files = @; foreach my $filename ( @files ) { md5sum $filename; [some other stuff] } } 

I figured it was better to combine all the filenames into one long string and then pass that string to md5sum(1) en masse so that Perl wouldn’t have to invoke a bunch of external processes. But since we’re calling out to the shell, I decided that I had to write a little function to escape strings for use by the shell:

sub shellEscape { my $inString = shift; my $shellEscapeCharacters = qr/[`\${}() \"'\&]/; $inString =~ s/($shellEscapeCharacters)/\$1/gi; return $inString; } 

There are probably other characters that I’d need to escape, but that seems like a fine list for now. When I asked what seemed like the appropriate mailing list a while back which characters to escape, or whether there was a well-known way to ask bash that question, I got no response. So this is the best hack that I could come up with.

The rest of the functions in md5_funcs are there mostly because I just wanted to break down the problem into chunks. The functions will probably see no reuse in any other problem, so breaking it down this way may be kind of pointless. It seems like a good habit to get into, in any case.

So now this little task is over, and it’s time for me to sleep — perchance to get obsessed again tomorrow.

I’m surprised that I’ve not read Lincoln’s first inaugural in its entirety before now. His second inaugural is, of course, a monument to eloquence and economy of speech, as well as being profound and not a little disturbing. The first inaugural is longer and is certainly drier — and quite a bit less personal. But it’s also a very serious argument presented for the South’s careful consideration. Well worth the read.

I’ve spent a most excellent weekend in Philly with my friends Brian, Alisa, Rebecca (currently blogless? Is this possible?) and Chris. We spent Friday night at Pod, which kicks ass and where I discovered a love for dirty martinis. I learned about it from the Language Log:

However, Tom is a book guy, and he was persuasive. He traveled to Philadelphia and bought lunch for Mark at a trendy restaurant called Pod where food is all Asian and the lighting is all weird and you emerge from lunch feeling sort of shaky having agreed to things you can’t quite recall. And Tom corresponded with me a lot and flattered my ego (extraordinarily easy to do, I discovered: just a few smooth strokes, and I am yours and will follow you anywhere, like a little dog). tom got his way.

but as it turned out, the Crew already knew about it and loved it. So we’d been planning the Pod trip for a couple weeks by the time we went last night. It didn’t disappoint.

We started today at InFusion, which — I’ve just learned — is a “Coffee and Tea Gallery”. This is very true: they have coffee and tea on the walls. I don’t even know what that means.

After some errands, it was off to Monk’s for some really exceptional and homey Belgian food and beer. Then to the Constitution Center, which grabs my little Mr. Smith Goes To Washington lapels and hoists them up onto a pedestal made of raw patriotism. It’s very, very good. Whenever I see museums of American history, I expect them to say, “Look, we have the Constitution! Isn’t it awesome? It’s the most awesomest thing that deliberative democracy has ever seen, and we still rock! USA! USA! USA!” Fortunately the Constitution Center treats it as a living document, with multimedia exhibitions and a neat litle current-events section at the end, where visitors can answer current controversial questions: Should the president have the right to wiretap conversations without a warrant, should the death penalty be outlawed, etc. Today a number of eighth graders (or earlier) had covered those boards with “penis penis penis,” which if you think about it is kind of poignant.

Then on to some frisbee with my buds in the park between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Schuylkill River. And no, I didn’t know how to pronounce that bizarre word either, but after consultation with my friends it turns out to rhyme with “liver.”

And now the night has ended with a really lovely dinner party at Alisa and Chris’s place. And I am tired. I will probably read a few pages of Reconstruction, then fall into the blessed oblivion of sleep.

I am unutterably lucky.

Having now spoken with four or five people whom I successfully encouraged to read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, I’d just like to note: no, I don’t know what it’s about either. Yes, I think it’s an amazing read. Yes, Murakami is a tremendous tease. Yes, I think everyone should read it. And yes, he may in fact be undisciplined, but he has more obvious skill than most authors, disciplined or otherwise.

I hope that clears that up.

The apotheosis of what everyone hates about geeks.

(Via my boss)

The shape of the region in which it’s light or dark at a given moment is fascinating:

What’s it called? And how do I derive it?

I finished up The Plot Against America last night, having bought it Sunday; it’s quite a quick read. Unfortunately, I don’t know that I can really recommend it, particularly when readers could choose from some of Roth’s masterpieces, among them American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, The Human Stain, or Operation Shylock. Something about TPAA seems stilted, in a way that Roth’s other books aren’t. The characters suddenly develop traits and exercise them for no good reason, other than that the story required it. And then there’s a deus ex machina toward the end that’s just not very plausible. Then there’s a 30-page postscript discussion of the historical research on which the book was based, which seems weird and out of place. Such a postscript seems like the sort of thing that Roth would hate; I imagine him arguing with his publishers, “This book stands on its own; why do I need to insult my readers with a postscript designed for eighth graders?”

There’s another interpretation of the book, which is that it’s not about the characters and is more about reminding Americans that “it can happen here.” I can appreciate that, but it feels like Roth wouldn’t allow himself to go all the way with it.

I guess I’m just puzzled about what he was shooting for here.

P.S.: Speaking with my friend Sharon just now, I was happy to note that she shares a lot of my impressions of the book. I always feel a little on edge if I say something bad about an author I revere as much as Roth, so it’s good to get a little support on such things.

The New Democrat Network goes to a lot of trouble to avoid telling you what their initials stand for on their website. They have actually removed references to their expanded name from their site. Only a trip to the Wikipedia answered my question — and thank god, because it had been driving me nuts.

(I discovered the website because I got an email from someone saying “NDN this, NDN that,” but never bothering to explain what the hell that stood for.)

It’s the 35th anniversary of the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. In commemoration, check out the New York Times v. United States decision. While you’re at it, New York Times v. Sullivan is worth the read — as is Anthony Lewis’s book Make No Law : The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, which Adam Posh-Jessek recommended to me a few years ago and which I very much enjoyed. You should all go read them. I’ll sit here and wait.

 . . . is the title of Jack Balkin’s post on today’s developments in the NSA wiretapping case. As the New York Times wrote,

[a government lawyer stated that] “the evidence we need to demonstrate to you that [the NSA program is] lawful cannot be disclosed without that process itself causing grave harm to United States national security.”

The only solution to this impasse, the lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, said, was for Judge Taylor to dismiss the lawsuit before her, an American Civil Liberties Union challenge to the eavesdropping program, under the state secrets privilege.

In the best concise description of what this means, Balkin writes,

If the issue were not so grave, the government’s arguments would simply be farcical. If the federal judiciary accepts the government’s argument to dismiss the case without requiring the government to make somewhat finer grained distinctions about what it can and cannot disclose, it might as well close up shop.

This thing makes me so, so sad. I don’t know what’s happening to my country.

But then Adam tells me that the pendulum always swings back. I hope he’s right.

Our beneficient Google overlords have at last lain their supple palms upon us, and lo: forth from our foreheads has sprung new life, both cleaner and more fulfilling than the old.

(Via Adam Posh-Jessek, who may one day be able to claim a new identity and a new Social Security Number based solely on my Google cred.)

I was stuck without a book to read, because I foolishly left mine at home, so I picked up a copy of The Plot Against America — Philip Roth’s most recent book before Everyman. (I want to say “penultimate,” but I wonder: if that means “next to last,” do we mean “last” in the sense of “final,” or could it also mean “next-to-most-recent”? Everyman is probably not Roth’s final book, so TPAA is probably not his “penultimate” in one sense.) It took me perhaps 20 pages to get totally absorbed in the story, but as with all Roth books I couldn’t help myself soon thereafter. I’m up around page 150 already.

Again I marvel at Roth’s talent for nearly effortless storytelling. Here the story fairly writes itself: Lindbergh runs against FDR, wins, and brings long-simmering anti-Semitism to boil. Jews unwittingly throw the election to Lindbergh.

The funny thing is that I don’t know that Roth really cares much about the story. It’s an extreme situation, which allows him to bring certain tensions out of his characters that we might not see at other times. I’ll have to think about it more, and read more of his books (as well as reread the ones I’ve already read), but I think his point in a lot of cases is that there’s a deep anger hiding under America, and he needs various historical devices to explore it.

More soon.

And here I was thinking that et al., short for et alia, meant “and friends.” Turns out that alia means others, whence we get inter alia (“among others”). I’ve known the latter for maybe a year, but thought that et alia came from a different sense of alia.

I always thought that alia was like “allies” — hence the thought that alia meant “friends.” Interestingly, it turns out that “ally” comes from ligare (“to bind”), whence “ligature” and “ligament”.

I know I should never have been hopeful that a Republican Congress would stand up to the White House, but even still: Specter’s amnesty for FISA violations makes me profoundly sad.

I can do no better than to just recommend that you go and read Cosma Shalizi’s meditation on how caffeine may be a causal factor in the formation of the Enlightenment. Tongue perhaps mildly grazing cheek, but still. It’s great. I couldn’t come up with a title like “Neuropharmacological Foundations of the Public Sphere”; I’m just not that clever.

Some observations, and a suggestion as a result:

1. Editing the Wikipedia is easy.
2. Editing most open-source documentation is comparatively hard.
3. Most open-source documentation is poor.
4. Making open-source documentation easier to edit would probably make it better.

Hence: wouldn’t it be cool if there were a Wikipedia frontend to all open-source documentation? You go to central documentation page, on sf.net or somesuch, find the package you want, find the document you want, and start editing it through a Wikipedia interface. In the backend, this gets converted into whatever the format for the particular open-source document is supposed to be.

Some benefits of this idea:

1. Everyone knows how to edit the Wikipedia, and many people already do so.
2. Wikipedia documents have a well-known structure, which would give open-source docs more structure.
3. If there were something really clever, you could just go to wikipedia.org and edit, say, the readme for Firefox, and it would be translated into an open-source document in the backend. That is, open-source docs would be incorporated into the encyclopedia itself. This would greatly expand their (the documents’) reach, and the number of people who might edit them. As it currently stands, the only people who edit the documentation for the Zope External Editor are users of the Zope External Editor. But the number of people who are competent to edit the ZEE’s docs for typos and style is many orders of magnitude larger. This would be a boon to open-source docs.

This can’t be that hard to code. There already must be lots of tools to convert Wikipedia entries into various formats. It’s more a matter of getting the open-source community on board.

Over the past few years, I feel like the popular discussion — within blogs, and to a lesser extent in the wider media — has caught up to a little bit of what Noam Chomsky was saying in Manufacturing Consent. A little bit. Maybe 30%. We’ve seen the failings of the media pretty obviously since the Bush administration began; we see precisely how the media get played, and in other issues like the creationism whitewash we see how charlatans systematically get the better of the media. Or how the media are complicit in all of this. The world is slowly catching up.

Of course, during all this coverage, the media’s own self-reflection is pretty weak. The media are quite bad at covering even moderately abstract concepts, like “the Bush administration systematically encouraging torture.” They do much better with stories of individual people, which is why we’ve heard so much more about Lynndie England than we have about, say, the various torture memos, and why we’ve talked a lot more about Enron than we have about deep corruption in the way we structure our institutions.

There are a few obvious reasons for this. First, it’s easier to make a compelling dramatic story out of individual people. Second, it’s a very effective way for the people who are playing the media to put everything into a nice box. “It’s just a few bad apples,” goes the story, and once those bad apples are put away, we can stop thinking about it. This is obviously good positioning if you’re trying to cover your own ass.

All of this was in Chomsky. The next big thing we need to realize is what he said about Watergate. Manufacturing Consent is a collection of supposedly difficult test cases which are supposed to prove that the media are an effective watchdog. The big two that come to mind are Vietnam (“the media lost us a war”) and Watergate (“the media took down a president”). I’m thinking specifically of one of Chomsky’s retorts to the latter, namely that the government had been spying on the American Communist Party for 30 years with nary a peep from the supposed watchdog media; but when one of the ruling parties got attacked, the Fourth Estate turned its supposedly all-seeing eye on the ne’er-do-wells.

The moral: pay attention to what they’re not covering. I fear the way that even the media-savvy among us discuss these things. We talk about our government’s destruction of our civil rights with some eye to the bigger picture, and that’s great. We discuss torture the way we should be discussing it, namely from the top (where the corruption starts) down. The next step is to move past the media and dig where they don’t want us to dig.