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Metamorphosis

Eventually, things change.

I’ve been at Temboo for over 5 years now. I have had a lot phases over the course of them. Sometimes things were good, and sometimes they were very, very bad. I almost left last week, but was convinced to stay by a gradual shift in my role. Basically I’m going to stop breaking things and start making them.

In my recent post about Temboo’s recent all-hands I mentioned that this was a direction that I needed to go in. At that point it seemed like that was going to mean Markov Garden, and whatever projects with which I decided to follow it up. What’s different about doing programming at work as well is that my mind is already going to be engaged that way. Programming is something where you need not only knowledge, but mindset. It’s a lot easier to write code today if you were doing it yesterday. This will be a good facilitator.

Another good thing that this means for Markov Garden is that I don’t have to feel like it’s a portfolio project. While I don’t think that I found that aspect of it particularly onerous, I’m interested to see what it will feel like to come back to it as just an example of personal expression.

At any rate, that’s what’s going on. It’s pretty crazy, really.

April 11th, 2012

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Sci Fi Lullaby

Moebius, who was either the greatest sequential artist of all time or the second best after Herge, died today. In addition to his mastery of his craft, Moebius had an incredibly fertile imagination. As our dreams as a society, and a world, become smaller and pettier we would do well to remember how it felt to look at frightening but beautiful and compelling futures.

March 10th, 2012

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More Tables

Another picture of the HTML representation of the probability table.

Hopefully this makes a little sense. The word in bold is the current word, the word in the left column is the previous word, and the list of words on the right are words that follow, and the number of times that they occur. Thus we see that “Machiavelli was absent” occurs once in the text, while “Machiavelli was sent” occurs twice. This also means that I’m consuming front matter in which I am not actually interested, so there is more tinkering to be done.

February 16th, 2012

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Here Goes

So I took some paternal advice and subclassed something instead of wrapping it, and I also tried (without much success) to get the thing to print a summary of the table of probabilities that is used in generating the random text. At any rate, this used Plato’s Apology as input.

Translator: Benjamin Jowett and not far from death. I am almost ashamed to confess that immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you are mistaken: a man is able to pay, and not to do anything that might pervert the course of his triumph, when he concludes this part of a kind of voice, first began to come forward in public and advise the state. I will tell you. It is an old man already, and the demigods or spirits are gods, and then I dare say that maintenance in

February 7th, 2012

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Throws CaveatException

So I’d like to clarify something about the previous post: When I said the problem was linguistic, I did not mean that the solution to the sample question was linguistic. It’s still a programming question (and, in fact, deeply prejudiced towards a particular language), but the point is people without a certain kind of linguistic framework can’t be taught to solve it.

January 29th, 2012

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Throws LacunaException

I found this old Jeff Atwood post (yes, it’s because it was linked from so-called “Hacker News,” okay?) about the apparent intractability of teaching programming, based on an academic paper. The upshot is that 1) some (and perhaps a majority of) people are simply incapable of coming to grips with programming and 2) these people seem to derive almost no benefit of any kind from programming coursework.

An example of a question that can be used to determine if someone will get anything out of studying program is presented:


Read the following statements and tick the box next to the correct answer.

int a = 10; int b = 20; a = b;

The new values of a and b are:

  • [ ] a = 20 b = 0
  • [ ] a = 20 b = 20
  • [ ] a = 0 b = 10
  • [ ] a = 10 b = 10
  • [ ] a = 30 b = 20
  • [ ] a = 30 b = 0
  • [ ] a = 10 b = 30
  • [ ] a = 0 b = 30
  • [ ] a = 10 b = 20
  • [ ] a = 20 b = 10

So people throw out a whole lot of explanations for this in comments and inevitably devolves into “teachers suck” because everyone on the internet is such a fucking precious snowflake, but I’m not going to get sidetracked by that, because then I’ll just get depressed and never get to the point.

Which is: the reason this information confuses people is that they think that variable assignment is confusing because it’s a mathematical abstraction, but this isn’t true. Variable assignment, and a number of similar concepts that you need to wrap your head around in programming are confusing because they are linguistic abstractions, and linguistic prejudices are confusing and difficult to override (or, as is apparent here, even identify) because they develop than people tend to think they would, and so much work goes into preserving them. Understanding computers requires one to assume intuitively (although not consciously) that meaning is pretty arbitrary, which is arguably the single most important step to understanding (again, often in a pre/non/sub-conscious way) how to interact with the rules whereby meaning is generated.

January 28th, 2012

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Sensitive Crimes in a Punt

So since my recent reference to it, I have been hankering to reread “Motifs.” It’s true that I often find myself thinking this, but I often fail to get around to it, plus it’s a pretty rich vein, as evidenced by the fact that I came away with some new stuff this time around.

In the past I have tended to focus on the stuff that can be traced fairly explicitly to “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The consciousness divided between perceiving and obscuring, the shattered shield, that sort of thing. This time I was more caught up in the processes of retrieval and ritual. When I was at Hampshire I sort of dismissed Benjamin in favor of Adorno, and I think that even at NYU, where I (along with everyone else) really embraced Benjamin and sort of understood his cultural turn, stayed leery of the stuff that evoked the past too enthusiastically.

Now that I’m an old man I sort of see where some of what he was getting at has to do with the fact that it’s easier to create your own culture in rituals when you have fewer external factors to deal with. Feeling straitjacketed by circumstance, I wonder if there is some sort of madeleine that I might require as well. There’s something to understanding that there was a nature that one was invoking.

Of course, you don’t want to go too far along that path. Just as you’re about to to say “There did I live” about the “breakers, rolling the images of the sky” you get to the stuff about photography and remember that Benjamin was a sentimental Luddite. Still, it’s good to let yourself get to the pretty part and not focus too much on stuff like “Even though chronology places regularity above permanence, it cannot prevent heterogeneous, conspicuous fragments from remaining within it.”

January 17th, 2012

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Parrying His Own Tweets

One of the stops on my busy Thanksgiving sojourn was Matthew’s, where he and his mother attempted to coerce C’s experiences into a narrative about how texting is rotting the delicate minds of the youth of America, and god only knows what else. During the discussion I took it upon myself to point out that adults weren’t any less susceptible to the compulsions of constant phonography, but because that was orthogonal to what they were trying to get C to say it only held anyone’s attention as fleetingly as a “LOL” sent via text message.

I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.

This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.

–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.

December 3rd, 2011

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Posted in Culture, Identity, Reality As Such | 1 Comment »


The Stupid Past, The Stupid Future

I gave up on reading Great Expectations. The sanctimony overcame the quirky humor, and I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of what was going on any more. Now I’m reading Wuthering Heights, mostly because of Hark, a Vagrant. It’s way better, although every single character is totally fucking loathsome. Almost as bad as Austen, in that regard.

Speaking of loathsome, the previously observed race to the bottom of the Facebook-UI-emulation barrel continues apace with Gmail and WordPress’ control panel being the latest things that I use to become completely fucking horrible. It’s enough to make me hope that rich fucks do in the global economy completely so I’ll be too poor to see it get any worse.

November 7th, 2011

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Related: Orwell on Language

As you know, allegations of “Newspeak” are so popular these days that the word has been effaced into a synonym for “NUH UH!” Here are some clarifying details from the man himself. As suggested by the title, reading it reminded me strongly of the previous post, especially in regards to conflating rights and using one’s position of privilege in society to inflict humiliations on others. There were a couple of other things that this essay made me think of, and I’m sure old George would have objected to both strenuously.

The first is “Myth Today,” which is basically a more detailed analysis of the same topic. When Orwell says “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible” he seems pretty convinced that people who distort language are acting in consciously bad faith. Barthes definitely thinks that the distortions of mythic speech can convince people that they are being truthful when they repeat it, which of course makes the problem more complex and more difficult to solve.

The other association, which is one I often reflect on when I hear about the antics of. . . whatever we should be calling right-wing sociopaths these days*, is Freud’s claim in The Interpretation of Dreams that the unconscious knows no negation. This is a little vague, but what the main thing to take away from it here is that it doesn’t recognize contradictory impulses. Mythic speech, especially the mythic speech of the present day, is packed with incompatible claims (e.g.: the bizarre right-wing allegiance of ultra-religious types and capitalist plutocrats). Today’s right wing movements are pure infantile id. They want and want and want, and will accept no explanation.

* I don’t like “Tea Partier” since that’s more of a symptomatic fad, and “conservative” while disagreeable, at least implies a consistent ideology rather than a Doctor-Doom like impulse to destroy everything just for the sake of destroying it.

October 4th, 2011

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