Some Notes On Movie Reviewers I Like and Technologists Whom I Fear Will Bring About the End Humanity As We Know It

Kyle

Couple more items to share from the last week or so…

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Manohla Dargis writes the funniest movie reviews this side of the AV Club. In fact, I think in the case of The Other Boleyn Girl, her review tops Tasha Robinson‘s. Then again, the latter is definitely my least favorite AV Club regular. (C’mon, she doesn’t even like The Big Lebowski.) A.O. Scott’s your man if you want to be reminded of just how wonderful the cinema can be, but if you’re looking for tongue-lashings, it doesn’t get any better than Ms. Dargis, at least in my book.

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Everyone should take a quick look at Andrew C. Revkin’s commentary on the “Grand Challenges for Engineering” report unveiled at a AAAS meeting a couple weeks ago. Revkin’s main point is that many of these challenges are really “opportunities waiting for shifts in policy and/or spending.” I think his line of thinking is related to my standard job/scholarship interview riff on why one might bother complementing a nuclear engineering degree with technical communication, editing, and writing tutoring work: because most of the nuclear industry’s serious problems are more rhetorical than technical.

I kinda shivered when I saw that Ray Kurzweil was on the committee that came up with these goals (the reverse-engineering of the brain thing is obviously at least partly his). Prescient and brilliants as he may be, and as bitchingly realistic as his keyboard sounds are (believe me, I’ve got an SP-76), the guy scares the hell out of me. Listen to Bill McKibben! Kurzweil’s thinking is dangerous.

…Seriously, go out and buy Enough right now. You wanna talk about clear thinking? McKibben has done something I didn’t think was possible: drawn an unambiguous line in the technological development sand without the usual neo-Luddite hand-wringing.

Ambivalence

Kyle

First, some Sunday Judgment bonus content: ambivalent does not mean apathetic. It means you have mixed emotions, not none. That drives me crazy.

Here are two stories I’m ambivalent about:

(1) “Nielsen Looks Beyond TV, and Hits Roadblocks” — This article kinda scares the hell out of me. On the other hand, I think a more holistic picture of exactly what media people are consuming will help us better vote with our dollars and eyeballs. In the end, I think it’s good news for fans of good content. For instance, I think Aaron Sorkin suggested that Studio 60 would have had a better shot at sticking around if Internet viewing (and re-viewing) stats had been more important to NBC. If it means Aaron Sorkin shows will have a better shot at surviving, I’m all for it–pretty much regardless of the consequences, I think.

(2) “Fewer Youths Jump Behind the Wheel at 16” — Part of me was thinking “what the hell is wrong with these kids?” But part of me was thinking that a little un-romanticizing of this rite of passage, and the main activity that goes with it, is probably just what the atmosphere needs.

Sunday Judgment V

Kyle 1 Comment

I don’t have much ire left after two straight grumpy posts, so I thought in this installment we could just all meditate on an increasingly divisive issue: “‘They’ as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.” It sounds as if Randall Munroe is “all for it,” as is my friend Scott, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who studies developmental linguistics. I don’t think it will ever sound right to my ear though, so I guess I’m doomed to further hours of toil figuring out ways to avoid “he or she” without being sexist or unnecessarily pluralizing the whole sentence. If you’re able to embrace the singular they, though, more power to you.

Speaking of xkcd and language, I highly recommend LimerickDB.com, which Munroe created and which has some hilarious stuff in the Top 150. (I should probably warn you that some of the content there is sexual–though also textual.)

I also recommend this delightful little riff on semicolons from the New York Times. I missed it originally; thank goodness my friend Liz sent it along. I especially like the little celebrity interviews. It is hilarious, though, that they mispunctuated the title of Lynn Truss’s book (see the correction). I guess they’ve never heard the joke.

(N.B.: The they in each of the two proceeding sentences is meant to refer to the author and various editors of the piece collectively and is not an attempt at singular they usage in response to the gender-ambiguity of the author’s name. Just to be clear.)

Mostly Talk

Kyle

I went to see Girl Talk on Thursday with some friends. I was excited about the show–I don’t go to enough of them anymore–but something just felt wrong.

It’s not that I’m against mashup artists–far from it. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my old bosses gave me a copy of West Sounds before I’d really gotten into Kanye, and I’m consequently always a little sad when there’s no “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” sample along with sped-up Aretha in the real “School Spirit.”

No, my trepidation had a more specific cause: I wasn’t sure what a mashup artist had to offer as a live performer. I like going to see DJs, and I think they can be gifted musicians both solo and as part of a larger act (DJ Dummy is one of my favorites; don’t tell me he’s not a performer). Even if you can’t or don’t tear it up on the ones and twos, it’s still not an insignificant musical skill to be able to tell what people are feeling at any given time and to choose the next tune accordingly.

But if you’re only performing your own mashups (a limited repertoire, surely, and perhaps one that lacks the next perfect track for this place and time), and your instrument is your laptop, why do I want to come see you? I was worried that this Gregg Gillis guy was basically gonna just get up on stage and push play. This was before I’d heard about his penchant for “exhibitionist antics,” which could have at least been funny.

The reality was worse. I have no idea what he did, because every jackass from the WUD music committee (and probably a good number of their friends) was up on the stage in the Great Hall dancing (some of them hilariously, but still), so every once in a while you just got a glimpse of Gillis’s laptop-lit face. And he barely, if ever, said a thing.

I had a good time dancing with my friends, but, as a live music performance, this show was seriously disappointing. I wish we’d gone to see Galactic and Chali 2na (aka “The Verbal Herman Munster” from J-5), who were also in town. (And this is coming from a guy who once walked out of a Galactic show midway through the second set because the band had gotten wrecked during their break and went from killin’ it to basically screwing around on stage. Most of the audience was too wasted too notice, so the band didn’t catch any hell for it.)

In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer was a little more generous. It also seems he may have had a run in with the woman who was obviously the drunkest dancer on stage, about whom my friend Steve remarked, “She’s got one dancing speed: intercourse.”

“The Proof” That I’m a Nerd

Kyle 1 Comment

Well, once again, one of my Saturday posts is just going to be me telling you about whatever Julie Rehmeyer’s written in the Science News “Math Trek” feature this week. This time around, it’s Sophie Germain. She’s a really interesting figure in the history of math (and especially the history of gender bias in STEM fields), so I encourage you to check out the story for that very good reason on its own merits.

That said, I felt particularly compelled to point this article out because one of the interviewees is a bit hard on Legendre, Germain’s supposed mentor. I spent the entire frustrating day Friday solving a neutron transport problem using a method that Legendre is in small part responsible for, albeit very indirectly (the P-N method expands the angular neutron flux in Legendre polynomials), so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity stick it to him in my pathetically insignificant way. (I wonder what portion of all blog content has that general M.O.? You gotta assume it’s a pretty decent chunk.)

Anyway, if you check out that article, you’ll see that it involves Germain’s efforts to tackle Fermat’s last theorem. And I can’t mention Fermat’s last theorem without pointing you toward my favorite episode of Nova: “The Proof.” Seriously, if you want to find out (or be reminded) that math can be full of drama and intrigue and heartache, please check it out.

Here’s a little taste. I admit that it doesn’t make thrilling reading, but I swear these guys are captivating when they tell the story. I don’t know who any of them are (well, except Wiles, and only because he proved the theorem), but it’s fascinating to watch people with such a depth of passion talk about their trade. Honestly, sometimes it’s even funny. You’ve gotta picture this as a series of talking heads interviews being cut in and out of:

JOHN COATES: The name of the lectures that he announced was simply “Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms.” There was no mention of Fermat’s last theorem.

KEN RIBET: Well, I was at this conference on L functions and elliptic curves, and it was kind of a standard conference and all of the people were there. Didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary, until people started telling me that they’d been hearing weird rumors about Andrew Wiles’s proposed series of lectures. I started talking to people and I got more and more precise information. I have no idea how it was spread.

PETER SARNAK: Not from me. Not from me.

JOHN CONWAY: Whenever any piece of mathematical news had been in the air, Peter would say, “Oh, that’s nothing. Wait until you hear the big news. There’s something big going to break.”

PETER SARNAK: Maybe some hints, yeah.

ANDREW WILES: People would ask me, leading up to my lectures, what exactly I was going to say. And I said, “Well, come to my lecture and see.”

KEN RIBET: It’s a very charged atmosphere. A lot of the major figures of arithmetical, algebraic geometry were there. Richard Taylor and John Coates. Barry Mazur.

BARRY MAZUR: Well, I’d never seen a lecture series in mathematics like that before. What was unique about those lectures were the glorious ideas, how many new ideas were presented, and the constancy of its dramatic build-up. It was suspenseful until the end.

The Hacker Within IV

Kyle

Today’s subject: Emacs matlab-mode, THW III update

Just a quick one right now. I needed to take a look at a MATLAB function today but didn’t want to have to look at it in MATLAB to get the syntax-highlighting right. Check out this link if you’ve had the same problem and want a matlab-mode customization in Emacs.

Also, someone on the Internet was wrong: me. Special thanks to Rob Kennedy for catching a bug in my SQLite sample application. Turns out I’d made a similar error in my “real” application using SQLite as well. Score one for the idea of blogs as a productivity tool, at least if you’re lucky enough to have smart friends and readers.

Sounding Board

Kyle

Editors have Chicago. Pop music fans have Marsh. Medical Physicists have Attix. Nuclear scientists have Knoll. Chefs have…well, some book by Julia Child, according to the only chef I read:

In the end–as it so often does–it came down to Julia. Julia Child’s recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched our dough around and over it.

(Turns out he doesn’t mention the actual title, which is a bummer for this little riff I’ve got going, but I spent like fifteen minutes finding the passage in Kitchen Confidential and wasn’t about to waste all that effort.)

Writing Fellows have Bruffee.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
“The Philosophy of Niels Bohr,” Aage Petersen (in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume)
“Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace (in Consider The Lobster)
“What Have We Got to Lose?” Douglas Adams (in The Salmon of Doubt)

The Hacker Within III

Kyle 2 Comments

Today’s subject: SQLite

I’m a novice programmer. As such, I often find that a lot of the sample code and documentation I find online goes over my head. I can’t be the only one for whom this is true.

Thus, I thought I’d post a little sample application I wrote that demonstrates some of the basic functionality of SQLite, the “self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.”

We’re using SQLite to track materials data in our GENIUS application, but this sample program, which I wrote for practice, creates two music-related tables: an iTunes-like table of song information and a table of phone numbers of Madison-area clubs (stored as arrays of integers to demonstrate how to handle blobs).

It doesn’t do much and certainly shouldn’t be used for any real applications, but I nevertheless hope that you find this program helpful if you’re trying to learn SQLite. I try to explain things as completely as possible, but I didn’t want to annotate the arguments for every function call, so you’ll need to consult the SQLite documentation as well. Finally, special thanks to the author of this example, which I unfortunately found much too late.

New Wisconsin Engineer Online

Kyle

While I’m no longer an editor at Wisconsin Engineer, I still try to keep abreast of its goings-on, so I wanted to mention that the February issue is now online. I was interviewed for one of the articles, which experience was a bit strange. It’s funny going from having darn-near final say on an article’s contents to none at all.

By the way, did you know that Wisconsin Engineer is three years older than the self-proclaimed “oldest technology magazine in the world” (Technology Review)? I buy their claims against Scientific American and Popular Science, but for a different reason–those are science magazines, not technology magazines. But Wisconsin Engineer, established 1896, is a technology magazine through and through. Take that MIT.

Sunday Judgment IV

Kyle

Today’s subject: the naked this.

My copy editing habits for any particular usage issue tend to go in cycles:

  1. Depend on logic, intuition, and sound before taking time to do research on the issue or to realize it’s even an issue at all.
  2. Research the issue or be told about it by someone else.
  3. Develop or steal a means of explaining the issue and its prescription, and abide by it with dogged consistency.
  4. Chill the hell out and go back to basically doing whatever functions well and sounds best, only this time armed with argumentative material accumulated in steps (2) and (3).

This whole cycle is a pretty good illustration of the common know-the-rules-before-you-break-them phenomenon.

I just arrived at step (4) regarding the “naked this,” a subclass of the often deadly ambiguous antecedent. The naked this (and its fraternal twin the “naked that“) is a pox on much college writing. It happens when the author doesn’t realize he or she has expressed a complex series of ideas and then ambiguously referred to one of them as “this.” Often times, “this” idea has never been discretely and explicitly defined at all. I’ll refer you to the MIT Online Writing and Communication Center for a couple of examples.

A moment of clarity regarding my overzealous enforcement of the naked this came for me when reading Lance Williams’s most recent coverage of the Roger Clemens circus in SI:

The YouTube clip and the 60 Minutes interview, the infamous press conference at which he and his lawyer Rusty Hardin dramatically presented a recorded phone conversation with McNamee that proved maddeningly inconclusive, the statistical analysis of his pitching career that landed with a thud, the tour of congressional offices so he could meet with the politicians who would be posing Wednesday’s questions–none of this helped, and much of it hurt, his cause, and to a degree that has yet to be calculated (emphasis added).

When a naked this follows a list, it’s assumed that it refers to the items in the list. Williams could certainly have clothed this this, but he needn’t fear indecent exposure charges for choosing not to.

Thus, my editorial judgment for today is this: stick with the rule of thumb that most every this or that should be paired with a noun (in the Clemens example, “none of this nonsense” or “none of these boneheaded moves” would work), but there’s no need to be too draconian about it in cases where there’s no risk of ambiguity.