Lost in Seattle

I had a dentist appointment today, which, because of this experience, always causes me to get a little anxious. But I like my new dentist and she hasn't hurt me (yet) so my psyche wasn't in too bad of shape.

It was time for my annual X rays, so the hygienist began by dragging out the lead-lined smock and flopping it upon my torso. I realize the smock is supposed to protect me against stray X rays, but it occurred to me as I lay there clenching the sharp dental film with my teeth that, though my chest may be shielded from the dangerous radiation, there is a friggin' X ray gun aimed directly at my head!

After the hygienist was finished, I asked her about this seemingly twisted safety protocol. She laughed and said the apron was designed to protect "vital organs" but that "they" obviously don't think the head is that vital.

She then shared that a recent study by the always-awesome researchers at the University of Washington (Go Huskies!) determined that the amount of radiation leaking from dental X ray equipment is at an all-time low and that the smock was no longer technically necessary. But, she further pointed out, the dental profession is usually pretty slow to change so I should expect to keep donning the lead smock for a while.

Slow to change. Well, I, for one, am happy that they finally got around to using anesthetic.

I don't know where astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been all my life, but he's teh awesome! Watch "Stupid Design."

(via Metafilter)

Members of my new organization at the UW are currently spread out over five different buildings all across the campus. My boss and I are the only ones on central campus, and even we are in separate buildings. A little over 1.5 miles as the crow flies separates the furthermost endpoints of our "empire."

As a result, putting together a simple meeting of just four or five people may result in several miles of combined walking. Scheduling something also requires keeping everyone's "travel time" in mind, and trying to choose a meeting location equidistant from all attendees just to be fair. In short, it's really a pain in the ass.

One practical consequence of this ass-pain revealed itself the other day while I was trying to clean out my email inbox. Normally, I only keep emails that represent something I still have to act on. Anything that's simply informational gets immediately tagged and filed (or deleted), and I shoot for having fewer than 20 items in my inbox at any time. But after my latest purge, I still had over 60 and couldn't figure it out.

I realized that a new category of email message had evolved as a direct result of the distributed nature of my organization. Around 40 of the messages I was hanging onto represented items I needed more information about, but the issue was too complicated (or sensitive) to do over email and/or involved more than one party, so a phone call wasn't possible either. They were, in short, issues that I would normally solve by either the "casual pop-in" or by calling an impromptu meeting.

But in our environment, the casual pop-in isn't practical and meetings are never impromptu. So, the messages just sit there until I happen I run into the relevant parties in another context, or I break down and engage in the overly-complicated process of arranging a meeting.

In two months, however, everyone in my organization will be moving into a single location. I am curious to see how that move will affect my productivity. Being somewhat of a geek, I added a new tag in my email system to identify messages that fall into this "pain in the ass" category, and I will chart and monitor any changes that might occur in that category after we relocate.

Of course, there's also the question of how much simply not overanalyzing this kind of stuff would increase my productivity, but that's not how science is done, dammit!

Ladies and gentlemen, the almost-first African-American U.S. Presidential candidate (1988), the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

My leadership program group ran into him at O'Hare in Chicago and he was gracious enough to pose for a picture with my friend Tony and me.

I'm sometimes frustrated about the low comment traffic on this blog. Of course, it'd help if I actually posted relevant, interesting stuff. But then I might end up with the huge problem of information overload. Take, for example, one of my favorite lefty political blogs, Daily Kos, whereupon, just this morning, seven blog posts generated over 4,500 comments (as of about noon). I had headed over there to read the reactions to Hillary Clinton's concession speech (finally!) but I quickly gave up when I realized I didn't have two spare days to wade through all those bytes.

It's really too bad because often the comments on blog posts are more interesting and insightful than the original article. In fact, four of the seven posts on Daily Kos today were quite content-free and served merely as an open slot for the comment discourse.

I used Cut & Paste Word Count on one Daily Kos post with 654 comments and got a result of almost 75,000. If I remove the metadata (approximately 14 words per comment, or 9156) we end up with close to 66,000 words. Assuming 250 words per printed page, that single Daily Kos post is the equivalent of a 264-page book.

In scrolling through the comments, however, I find that a fairly small percentage of them are insightful. But I'm honestly not going to sift through a mid-sized novel to find them.

The way I see it, there are three possibilities for blogs to exercise better "comment control."

First, Slashdot has an interesting system whereby frequent commenters are awarded points they can then assign to other comments. Furthermore, they can tag comments as "insightful," "interesting," "funny," etc. On the plus side of this rather formal system, registered users of the site can adjust their filters to, for example, display only "insightful" comments rated +2 or higher. On the downside, it's sort hard to break in, there still is a human/semantic factor (who's to say if something is really "insightful" as opposed to "interesting"?), and power can be wielded by a very few with a lot of time on their hands.

Second, over at Metafilter, a pretty solid set of unspoken rules govern commenting. The community self-polices to the extent that excessive "Me toos!" and off-topic snark are met with considerable hostility and usually result in swift moderation. On the plus side, the comments actually end up being largely worthwhile to read. However, the community standards are unpublished and it's is pretty intimidating for newcomers to feel comfortable commenting on anything.

The third possibility is one I have yet to see, but it would involve using something like Bayesian analysis to automagically do what the Slashdot community does. This is how spam filters work, and the algorithms can probably be adapted to do some level of content analysis of comments to give a first pass at "insightfulness" or "interestingness." Flickr has an "interestingness" quotient for photos; I'd like to see something like that available for blog comments.

Comments? (Interesting or insightful ones only, please.)

This one's from my friend Holly over at Self-Portrait As.

OK, let's try it:

1. How would you describe yourself?
Birdie Brain (The Fiery Furnaces)

Hmmmm...

2. What is your motto?
Messiah Ward (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)

3. What do you think about often?
The Dreaming (Kate Bush)

4. What do you think of your family?
Swimming Horses (Siouxsie and the Banshees)

5. What do your parents think of you?
Black Market Baby (Tom Waits)

Oh man, I always knew they weren't my real parents!

6. What do you think of your friends?
Cover My Face (Miranda Sex Garden)

7. What do your friends think of you?
No Man in the World (Tindersticks)

Daaaang. That's harsh.

8. What do you think of your best friend?
Candidate (David Bowie)

My best friend is Barack Obama? Cool!!

9. What is your best friends theme song?
Kingdom Come (David Bowie)

10. What do your coworkers think of you?
Under Pressure (Queen + David Bowie)

I'd say that's about right.

11. What do you like in a guy/girl?
I Let Love In (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

12. What do you think when you see the person you fancy?
Come Here My Love (This Mortal Coil)

Wow... this is getting a little frightening accurate.

13. What do you want to say to the person you fancy?
The Rockafeller Skank (Fatboy Slim)

OK, less frightening now....

14. What is your hobby/interest?
Ol' 55 (Tom Waits)

15. What is your biggest fear?
The Empty World (The Cure)

Back to being a bit frightening again...

16. What is your biggest secret?
Eyeball Kid (Tom Waits)

17. If your heart could talk what would it say?
Save It For Later (The English Beat)

18. What is your theme song?
Oh To Be In Love (Kate Bush)

19. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Be My Wife (David Bowie)

Too bad that wasn't for the next one.

20. What song will they play at your wedding?
Sweetheart Come (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

21. What will they play at your funeral?
Lightning Strikes [Not Once But Twice] (The Clash)

22. What is your mood right now?
Dead and Lovely (Tom Waits)

23. What will you repost this as?
If Music Could Talk (The Clash)

Amazing!

24. What does your future look like?
Untitled (Interpol)

Wow.

That was pretty cool.

I did a guest lecture gig for an Information School class on Saturday. The topic was "online information delivery."

I started out by talking about my film studies background and how my hobby is thinking about ways in which screenwriters have to deal with the problem of "magic" technology (to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke). I've blogged about this before.

The example I always go to is how, in Die Hard, the terrorists can effectively sever the Nakatomi Plaza's communications by cutting some wires with a chainsaw. Had that movie been set just five years later, the screenwriters would have had to account for cell phones. And, sure enough, in Spike Lee's Inside Job -- a more recent film with similar plot elements to Die Hard -- there's a scene of the hostages tossing their cell phones into a bank robber's bag at gunpoint. In that film, the issue of "Well, what if someone just doesn't throw theirs in?" is also dealt with in a fairly graphic manner.

The example I gave in class involved the 1941 film Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Cooper is a stodgy professor holed up in an old house with a group of other stodgy (and much older) professors working on an encyclopedia. It's a 10-year project and they are doing all the research and all the work themselves. Each is an expert in some field. Gary Cooper realizes his entry on "slang" is outdated, Stanwyck's tough-talking nightclub singer and gangster moll, Sugarpuss O'Shea, enters, slang problem solved (oh, and she and Cooper fall in love, naturally.) The film's energy comes from Stanwyck's "ball of fire" entering the cloistered community of the professors and upsetting their stodgy ways. If I recall, the film never even moves outside the old house.

I compared the film's main premise of a small group of experts locked in a house producing a "knowledgebase" (to use a trendy term) with that of the Wikipedia model -- or the web in general, for that matter. How could Ball of Fire be re-written to account for crowdsourcing? Could it be? Has the Urban Dictionary made slang "experts" such as Sugarpuss O'Shea obsolete? Has the Internet made it impossible for stodgy old professors to be swept away by beautiful young dames?

Discuss.

Ray's school sometimes hosts "Parent Education Evenings" whereupon the mommies and daddies assemble to discuss topics or listen to lectures about some aspect of child education.

Last night's event was fascinating. It featured Dr. Patricia Kuhl who is the Co-Director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, and who studies early language and brain development.

Dr. Kuhl discussed a recent experiment she conducted that was designed to determine how many distinct phonemes an infant can detect. Each language, she explained, uses only a small subset of all the possible sounds humans can utter. Infant brains use a sort of statistical analysis on all the speech data they take in and their brains start to develop structures to understand and differentiate only the most frequently-occurring sounds. By around 12 months of age, babies have largely become "language specialists" and begin to lose their ability to differentiate sounds from foreign languages.

The experiment itself involved placing an infant near a loudspeaker that was emitting a repetitive stream of syllables -- for example, "la, la, la, la." The baby was distracted by a researcher opposite the speaker. After a few minutes, the speaker changed to emit a different sound -- e.g. "ra, ra, ra, ra" -- and after a moment, lights illuminated the inside of the speaker and revealed a mechanical monkey playing cymbals (which, of course, I would find absolutely terrifying). This was repeated, and shortly the infant would learn to look behind her at the speaker whenever the sound changed so she could see the funny monkey.

The experiment demonstrated that infants can detect differences between virtually all sounds, but as they age they gradually lose the ability to differentiate sounds that are not common to their native language. Dr. Kuhl referred to the "She-She Test," which used two tonally-distinct phonemes from Mandarin that even she couldn't tell apart but which her Chinese research assistants insisted were as distinct as "ra" and "la" to their ears. Babies raised in English-speaking households can initially tell the difference between "shé" and "shè", but lose the ability over time. Babies raised in Mandarin-speaking households can initially tell the difference between "ra" and "la," but gradually lose that ability over time as well.

Interestingly, Dr. Kuhl went on to demonstrate that exposing a baby from an English-speaking household to just twelve 20-minute sessions of someone speaking to them in Mandarin improved the baby's ability to differentiate Mandarin phonemes almost to the level of infants raised in Mandarin-speaking households, and vice versa.

What I found most fascinating, however, was that she conducted the same experiment replacing the actual foreign-language-speaking human with a video or audio recording of the same person saying roughly the same things, and discovered that babies' abilities did not improve at all compared to a control group. In other words, kids acquire language from personal interaction and speech but cannot do so via technology-mediated means (i.e. television or audiotapes).

So much for Muzzy.

The family ventured downtown the other day to check out the Umi Sake House (happy hour every day!). I spotted a billboard for something like Bud Light, which proclaimed the beer's "drinkability."

Seriously, this is considered a good thing? I just don't get people.

Today I read that as part of general worldwide food shortages (thanks, ethanol!), hops are in short supply thus threatening to turn all beer into "more drinkable" liquids. Now, I loves me some hoppy brew, so this is bad news.

I've never been particularly "manly." It's not that I'm feminine; I'm just not what one would call a "man's man." In fact, at various points of my life, I've actively made choices to avoid doing the "masculine thing." I once, for example, opted to go shopping with a group of women rather than watch the Super Bowl, even though I sorta wanted to watch the Superbowl.

Because of this, I found myself identifying (to a point) with Paul Constant in last week's issue of The Stranger in his article "Am I Man Enough?"

Now that I have Ray, I've been somewhat concerned about the effect that my anti-masculine choices will have on my ability to be a strong male role model for him. I certainly don't want him turning into a troglodyte, but the boy should have a father who knows how to nail two board together at the very least. Or whatever guys know how to do. I just don't know.

Thankfully, Amy steered me to "The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master", which should provide me with some guidance in determining what I need to be able to model for my son.

I was pleased to learn that I already possess a majority of the skills on the list.

I can score a baseball game (#4), swim (#11), tie a bow tie (#16), sew a button (#20), hit a jump shot in pool (#33), make three different bets in craps (#36) [which I've been teaching Ray lately], tie a knot (#69) [several, actually], iron a shirt (#71), and caress a woman's neck (#73).

I don't really know how to buy a suit (#10), throw a punch (#13), speak a foreign language (#18), cast a fishing rod (#26), or find my way out of the woods if lost (#68). I would not trust myself to chop down a tree (#14), start a fire (#51), or do anything with a car other than drive it (#35).

Of items 65-67, I can do the first (throw a baseball) and not the others (throw a football, shoot a basketball).

Numbers 3, 9, 17, 37, 39, 41, 44 are so not problems.

But #53? Uh, nope. Sorry. And #34? Ick!!

Overall, I'd say I'm about 45-30. So I have some work to do.

But I'm confident that when he's old enough, I can coach him effectively on #22.

I'm speechless...

(via Boing Boing)

Sadly, Tom Waits isn't coming to the Pacific Northwest during his recently-announced summer tour, but here he is at a press conference in which he explains the astronomical and alphabetic significance of his tour schedule.

Enjoy, and make sure to watch to the end.

This has got to be one of the most brain-dead Windows XP error messages I've seen (click to enlarge).

It reads:

It crops up if you try to drag an item (an icon, a piece of mail, a block of text) and drop it on a window button in the taskbar. When would you do this? Well, when dragging text from one application to another (which I was doing when I first saw this) and the destination window is minimized. I thought: "I'll just drop it to the window button." But nooooo.

This is a classic example of a developer realizing that a user might want to do something -- in fact, that a user even seems encouraged to do something based on interface clues -- but for some (unknown to the user) reason, cannot be permitted to actually do it. An issue like this crops up in usability testing; in other words, this error message exists probably because a significant number of users actually tried to do this in testing.

So, rather than do the work to build in the desired functionality, the developers crafted an incredibly wordy error message explaining how they'd like you to do what you want to do. How about: instead of popping up the error on the mouse release event, you actually maximize the targeted window, drop the item, and minimize the window again? Which is exactly what happens if you do what the error message tells you to do.

I suppose they could have just left the action alone to fail silently, in which case I wouldn't know that I could (almost) do what I wanted.

It's also the only error message I've seen that uses the word "however," so that's something.

It wasn't really until years after I rejected the discipline known as "film theory" in graduate school that I recognized the parallel to the other great rejection of my life -- that of god.

Fair warning: What follows is a long and rambling post that takes roughly forever to make a point.

I just randomly stumbled across this story while I was eating lunch: FBI Searches Office of Special Counsel Building

As a Detroit native, one paragraph jumped out at me.

I can imagine the staff's reaction: "No, no. Anything but Detroit! We'll do anything you say!!"

This reminds me of a line from The Princess Bride: Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) threatens Fezzik (Andre the Giant) that he'll send him back where he found him ... "Unemployed! In Greenland!!" I used to think that was the epitome of pathetic situations. But now, "Employed in a field office in Detroit!" has superseded it.