…I would like to inform it that when I search for “preprandial beverage,” I expect it to give me the Wikipedia entry for
apéritif.
Kthxbai.
Author: stevereads
This is really out of my butt, but I do wonder:
* A lot of couples would really like to split the childcare more evenly.
* It would really be ideal, toward that end, if both members of the partnership could work part-time and take care of the kids the other part of the time.
* But there’s very little meaningful part-time work in this country.
* Part-time work is made even less of an option because health insurance largely only goes to full-time employees.
* But under health reform, you’ll be able to get health insurance through an exchange, if your employer doesn’t offer it to you. (Note to self: look up the details of who’s eligible to buy on the exchanges.)
* So some couples won’t need to send one partner into full-time work, because they’ll be able to get health-insurance with only part-time labor.
Obviously this isn’t a full solution, and obviously there are benefits to full-time labor that part-time labor still won’t be able to match. But at the margin, at least, I suspect this will lead more than a few couples to split the childcare. Which is a good thing.
Perhaps this is a far-fetched idea, but let’s toss it out anyway: it occurs to me that I probably don’t have time in my schedule to get a master’s degree in computer science, but I’ve wanted for a long time to get one. I don’t have time because, as it is, I routinely work at my job until 8 or 9 at night. As I get more proficient at what I do, I expect I’ll work less, but at least for a while there’s just no way that I could do a job *and* get a master’s *and* be a reasonably good boyfriend *and* take regular trips up to New Hampshire to spend time with my girlfriend’s kids. Oh, *and* sleep.
So. That having been determined, I should spend the next few months/years building up master’s-level proficiency on my own. I should read books, watch videos, and write a lot of code on my own. A good master’s program will build a lot of theory as well, which means a lot of math. Historically, I’ve not been very good at learning math at an abstract level — but if I can code it up (e.g., writing a crypto algorithm), I can probably internalize it quickly.
Can anyone recommend a curriculum for my self-taught computer-science master’s degree? Recommend books? Recommend the sort of programming projects that one would encounter in a good master’s program?
These are books that I had inexplicably not read. I don’t know how that even happened. I certainly knew them by reputation, and I’d certainly known where many of the cultural allusions — the Red Queen running with all her might and yet still not moving, impossible things before breakfast, the Jabberwocky, etc., etc. — came from. There’s still lots of cleverness that I didn’t know about, like this bit:
> “[…]The name of the song is called “HADDOCKS’ EYES.”‘
>
> ‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested.
>
> ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is CALLED. The name really IS “THE AGED AGED MAN.”‘
>
> ‘Then I ought to have said “That’s what the SONG is called”?’ Alice corrected herself.
>
> ‘No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The SONG is called “WAYS AND MEANS”: but that’s only what it’s CALLED, you know!’
>
> ‘Well, what IS the song, then?’ said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
>
> ‘I was coming to that,’ the Knight said. ‘The song really IS “A-SITTING ON A GATE”: and the tune’s my own invention.’
This is a terrific introduction to the use-mention distinction, I gather. Though normally when people talk about the use-mention distinction, they’ll differentiate between “Mount Everest” (a string containing 13 characters) and Mount Everest, a mountain in Asia. Here Carroll is making the split more decisive: the use is one thing (the song’s name), and the mention is entirely another (a string that doesn’t look at all like a representation of the song, if that makes sense). It’s clever, and not a little bewildering. I’d love to hear how much of it little Alice Liddell could process when Carroll was spinning his tales for her.
Nothing really *happens* in Carroll’s books. Alice ambles about, weird things happen, animals speak paradoxically to her, and that’s that. These are still very fun reads, though.
I love the packaging on the particular Oxford World’s Classics edition of [book: Alice in Wonderland] and [book: Through the Looking-Glass] that I read, but I think the endnotes are useless. Most often they point you to a reference that Carroll *may* have been making in the text, but most of the time I strongly doubted that he *was* making such a reference. Even if he had been, the endnotes pull you away from the text to make a point that does absolutely nothing to improve your understanding. It’s not as though [book: Alice in Wonderland] needs an exegesis on the level of [book: Ulysses]. So I’d advise buying this lovely edition, then ignoring the endnotes altogether.
I bought an iPhone a year and a half ago. This made me really want to develop an iPhone app — something I’ve not yet done, but which I intend to start very soon. [1].
Now, the thing about the iPhone’s UI, which I don’t think you can fully grasp until you’ve actually used one, is that nearly everything — at every scale — works as it should. There is not a single sharp corner left in the product; everything has been rounded for your pleasure. The first place you see this is when you scroll to the end of a long list. When you hit the end, the iPhone doesn’t jarringly stop there. Instead, it bounces you, as though you just ran into a rubber wall on the way to catch a fly ball in the outfield.
It turns out that there is *nothing* jarring in the iPhone. If you’re rocking out to some tunes and a call comes in, the iPhone doesn’t just turn off your music and start ringing. Instead it gradually fades out the music, then starts ringing. When you’re done with the call, it gradually fades the music back in. Nothing about the product will ever put you ill at ease. That’s why I say you have to use it to understand this: in principle, written out like that, it seems like most products should and do behave like that, right? But they don’t. Getting all the details right — every detail, at every scale — is apparently so difficult that virtually no one does it. You really don’t notice how rare it is until you find yourself absolutely pleased with the iPhone, in a way that you’ve never been pleased with a piece of consumer technology before.
Having decided to do iPhone development, my terrific employer very graciously offered to buy me a MacBook Pro. The first couple days were a little difficult for me: I do a lot of command-line stuff, so I needed to get MacPorts or Fink going. And I had to get used to all the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.
With that out of the way, I fell into the same feeling of comfort with OS X that I have with the iPhone. The first step was realizing that every piece of the Mac UI is exactly as it should be. The second step, having gained such confidence in Apple’s UI design, was to ponder how I would do something in OS X, then ask, “If everything worked as it should, how would I perform this task?” It turns out, uniformly, that OS X’s UI always behaves the way it should. This gives you the confidence, as a friend pointed out to me last night, to go forth and try new things, and to really engage with the product in a way that you wouldn’t with some (forgive me) Microsoft piece of shit.
The first time this really took hold for me was when I asked whether I could plug my iPhone headset into my MacBook Pro and use it there the way I use it on my iPhone. For those who don’t know, the iPhone headset has a little clicky piece that performs two functions: it’s the microphone through which you carry out phone conversations, and it’s a control device for iTunes on the phone. Click the microphone once to pause the music you’re listening to or hang up the phone call you’re on; click it twice to advance to the next track. (It probably does other things as well.) If Apple designed its products the way you should expect (but which you’ve come *not* to expect from any consumer-electronics company), you should be able to pause iTunes on the laptop, advance to the next track and so forth using the iPhone headset. It turns out that you can do exactly that. And I’m not even using an Apple-manufactured headset: I’m using an incredible pair of Sennheiser MM 50 earbuds. It must just be that Apple requires single clicks to issue a certain signal and double-clicks to issue another, which both the iPhone and the MacBook Pro are programmed to respond to in the same way (namely firing off an event in iTunes). I don’t trust any other company to manage this amount of integration.
Stephanie and I discovered yesterday that there’s an app called Keynote Remote that lets you control Apple’s presentation software from your iPhone via WiFi. This is integration that everyone can use, and of course it helps Apple: the more Apple products you buy, the more value you get out of any one of them.
I’m probably going to buy a Time Capsule, which (so I gather) is so thoroughly integrated with OS X that you never even have to think about backing up; it just does it automatically. I gather that you could use other remote-backup devices in place of a Time Capsule (I believe the Time Machine software works with any number of devices), but — again — experience shows that Apple has integrated its devices spectacularly well; why would I want to use anyone else’s? Yes, I know that this is Kool-Aid drinking, but it’s Kool-Aid drinking based on a lot of positive experiences.
The final step in Apple fanboydom is to proselytize, which I unashamedly do now. But it’s proselytizing to those who could actually get a lot out of the product. Take my girlfriend, for instance (not literally; I enjoy dating her). She needed to make a movie on her ThinkPad, running Vista, so she used the built-in Microsoft Movie Maker. She spent a large fraction of a day trying to convert from the QuickTime-formatted movie that nearly every point-and-shoot camera generates to something that Movie Maker could process. Having never used iMovie, I nonetheless knew its reputation as the product you use when you want to make movies. So I brought the MacBook Pro up to New Hampshire one night, we plugged her camera into the USB port, and within a minute she was editing video. 24 hours later, she had bought a MacBook Pro of her own. People want to get shit done; they don’t care that Microsoft lacks QuickTime support because it wants to screw one of its competitors.
As a friend pointed out: Apple knows that you want to look cool. Even if Microsoft had made it easy to import .MOV files into Movie Maker, you know that it would have botched the execution after that; you would not look cool when it was done. It would offer you “wizards,” which would lead to very boring videos resembling animated PowerPoint. And those wizards would somehow, miraculously, not make your life any easier. They’d be a needless abstraction piled on top of a crummy user experience. Apple would fix the user experience so you wouldn’t *need* the wizard.
A coworker was giving me some good-natured ribbing the other day about using a Mac. He, like me, grew up during the Mac-versus-Windows wars of the early 90s. News flash: those wars are over, and the Mac has unquestionably won. I would be shocked if anyone who’s considered the matter actually believed that Windows was more usable, or more technically well-assembled, than OS X. (Though I’m fairly certain that Windows is easier to manage for enterprise installations than either OS X or Linux. But that’s not the realm that my coworker was arguing in.)
If there is still an OS battle going on, it is Linux-versus-Mac. But that battle has nothing to do with UI; again, no one could seriously assert that Linux’s UI is better than Apple’s. If there’s a Linux-Mac battle, it’s a battle over the open Linux model versus the closed OS X model. Windows is not seriously in competition with OS X for its end-user experience; it succeeds because it has succeeded. Windows is the Martha Coakley of operating systems: you hold your nose and use it because you have to, not because you want to.
[1] — One thing I’ve realized about my work style, and maybe about work styles more generally, is that I need to get something utterly trivial but functional done ASAP, and can move from there to getting something real working. As of now, I know nothing about iPhone development, so the field seems vast and intimidating. The point is to kill that feeling of intimidation as fast as I can. The way to kill it is to just get something, anything, done in the platform so that it no longer seems beyond my grasp. Had I used this technique in college, I think I would be a far better mathematician than I am.
Stephanie’s and my Bahamasair flight from Stella Maris to Nassau was half an hour late yesterday (I’ve decided to use the phrase “Bahamian efficiency” from now on), so I had time to examine the airline’s new statement of principles on the check-in room’s wall. Their principles, in order, are
* Safety
* Security
* Regulatory compliance
* Quality
A few paragraphs down, the airline affirms that these are their principles, *regardless of how the airline behaved in the past*.
First of all, you have to arch your eyebrow a little bit at the presence of “regulatory compliance” in that list. I have a number of principles, which I adhere to inconsistently, but “abiding by the law” is one that I don’t feel it necessary to list; I take that one for granted.
Secondly, the regardless-of-the-past clause seems like the sort of thing you write while walking away from the smoking hulk of one of your aircraft. “Fresh start,” you say to yourself while dusting the soot off your clothing and bandaging your bloody calves. “Yessir, Bahamasair is a *new company*, starting right now … not that we had much choice, given that our only plane is disappearing beneath the North Atlantic even as we speak. STILL, though! New company. Yep.”
We made it back to Nassau in one piece. I’m pretty sure the Stella Maris-to-Nassau plane was the smallest such vehicle I’ve ever traveled on: I had to fold my body in half to fit under the ceiling on the way to my seat. If you’re a ten-year-old child, though, you will have no problem at all flying in a Bahamasair plane.
(I wish the Bahamasair principles document were on the web, but it sadly appears not to be.)
“I Reject Affordable Health Care For All Americans … AND I VOTE.”
Version 1 here is what I started with. Version 2 comes from a colleague, version 3 from another colleague.
Version 4 just makes things a little more succinct.
I enjoyed watching this simple function get cleaner as the days went by.
#!/usr/bin/python
import random
import string
def random_str_1(n):
“””
Generate a pseudorandom string of
length n.
“””
out_str = “”
letters = [‘a’,’b’,’c’,’d’,’e’,’f’,’g’,’h’,’i’,’j’,’k’,
‘l’,’m’,’n’,’o’,’p’,’q’,’r’,’s’,’t’,’u’,’v’,’w’,’x’,’y’,’z’]
for i in xrange(n):
out_str += random.choice(letters)
return out_str
def random_str_2(n):
“””
An improvement, using the fact that Python
strings are iterables that iterate over their
characters.
“””
out_str = “”
letters = ‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’
for i in xrange(n):
out_str += random.choice(letters)
return out_str
def random_str_3(n):
“””
A further improvement, using an existing
library attribute.
“””
out_str = “”
for i in xrange(n):
out_str += random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase)
return out_str
def random_str_4(n):
“””
Adding a bit of concision.
“””
return “”.join([random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase)
for x in xrange(n)])
def test_all():
“””
Not really much of a unit test. Just confirms that
each of the generated strings is as long as specified.
Doesn’t test that strings are sufficiently random.
“””
methods = [random_str_1, random_str_2, random_str_3, random_str_4]
for n in xrange(40):
for method in methods:
out_str = method(n)
assert len(out_str) == n
Sorry to be so negative, but really: people just shouldn’t be getting pissed about the absence of a public option, for at least three reasons:
1. Even with a public option, we always would have needed to address subsidies for those with low incomes. People are welcome to chime in with other information here, but the public option does not address affordability at all. It addresses the quality of insurance. Subsidies were always the bigger deal.
2. *We got coverage for 32 million people*. We got *affordable* coverage for 32 million people. We got coverage that *saves 32 million people from health-care-related bankruptcy*. Liberals of a certain stripe have gotten monomaniacal about their preferred policy, rather than focusing on the end goal — which is *to help people who couldn’t afford good health insurance to afford good health insurance*.
3. Now we have something that we can fix. Before we had nothing. New entitlements don’t disappear, as David Frum has now-famously pointed out. Entitlements get better. So let’s make this one better.
This has been, in some ways, a great hour for the Left. In other ways, it has revealed them to be monomaniacal public-option fetishists. Now is not the time to continue the fetish. Now is the time to consolidate our gains and *keep moving forward*. You want a public option? Great! You’re closer to a public option than you were a year ago. So go get it. Donate to candidates who support it. Call Bernie Sanders’s office and ask what tactical advice he’d give. Don’t act like an armchair quarterback and complain that the big bad U.S. Congress with its big bad traitorous liberals didn’t give you what you wanted.
If this health-care-reform thing happens, people will find Reasons Why It Happened. Look at what happened when Scott Brown won in Massachusetts: people tried to look for a Large Trend or whatever that explained why the Republicans were taking over. Brown won with 52% of the vote — certainly a solid lead, but not exactly a landslide. Many things could have caused a three-percent swing in votes. Coakley could have been a better candidate, for instance. But once Brown won, journalists had to opine on What It All Means — because it had to Mean Something.
Now here we are on the eve of what looks like the greatest progressive victory since Medicare. I, for one, am incredibly excited. I’m excited both because 32 million of the least fortunate Americans will have a safety net beneath them that’s a bit stronger; and because I hope that this will energize progressives toward future victories.
So now the press will have to come up with explanations. Health reform succeeded because Nancy Pelosi is one of the greatest Speaker in House history, for instance. The Republicans failed because the Tea Party movement, while important, was ragtag and ill-focused. Etc.
But we were all alive over the last year. We saw where this could have failed any number of times. It could have failed if House Democrats had fallen apart after Scott Brown’s victory, as it looked like they would. It could have failed last summer if the Tea Party thing had freaked people out more than it did. Had it failed at any of those moments, the press would be looking for reasons. Nancy Pelosi would still be the Speaker, but now she’d be the worst Speaker in House history — squandering a massive lead, etc., etc. Flip a few Congressmen the other way, and suddenly the narrative changes massively.
I’m not saying that this victory — should it happen — is entirely arbitrary; of course it’s not. What I *am* saying is that, if it were as inevitable and foreordained as the narrative will make it out to be, then no one would have panicked over the last year.
I like simple explanations as much as anyone else. I like, for instance, the Larry Bartels model that predicts presidential elections on the basis of macroeconomic factors like the unemployment rate. So far as I know, there’s no such model predicting victory in this health-reform debate. The only explanations that people can advance are post-facto ones.
Which doesn’t bother me a bit, in this case. My side looks like it’s going to win. (If it doesn’t, I will do the appropriate amount of crow-eating.) If this will have any effects, they will be positive effects for my side. Victory is like that.
What I’m curious about is how long-lasting the effects of a victory — any victory of this magnitude — are. It’ll help us, but for how long?
What would people like to attack after this? Financial-system reform?
Steve Reads 
