comeupyoufearfuljesuit.com

Throws CaveatException

jmags — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:21:54 +0000

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.

Throws LacunaException

jmags — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:37:56 +0000

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.

Sensitive Crimes in a Punt

jmags — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:47:13 +0000

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.”

Emitter

jmags — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:33:35 +0000

So I decided that my existing side-projects were all too mercenary and that I needed to do something goofy. The goofy thing I decided to do centers around generating random text using Markov Chains. I’m learning Javscript as I go, and when I was ready to have it generate text from the probability table I wasn’t somewhere where I could connect to the internet, so I didn’t know how to generate random numbers. Just to test the generator I arbitrarily set it to retrieve the first word from the list of possible words. For various implementation reasons, this will give you the input text, unless certain kinds of repetition occurs.

As an input text, I used the last two paragraphs here, because I thought it would be funny, and a little meta. After all this explanation, this will probably be a little disappointing, but the point is I got this:

and I thought it was totally hilarious.

Fusion

jmags — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:54:44 +0000

Here, brought to you by conversations I had with my dad and computer glitches, are location markers for diners in Northampton, MA on a map of Paris.

Parrying His Own Tweets

jmags — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:53:45 +0000

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.

Here’s to Them

jmags — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:34:51 +0000

To nobody’s surprise, The Stranger’s Child stayed good until the very end. It also had some cards up its sleeve until that point as well, which isn’t necessarily a thing that I go for (I’m not reading Encyclopedia Brown, am I) but in this case it underscores something important about the book, and (in my experience) about Hollinghurst.

Unlike The Stranger’s Child, I’ll just come right out and tell you what I’m on about: the book is all about absences. Not content to have gaps in the narrative which inquisitive characters fill in during subsequent pages, the missing elements are promoted to full-blown lacunae, about which the characters struggle between themselves. Because this is the substance rather than a parlor trick, it’s actually deeply satisfying.

Because if its subject (hidden artifacts leading to a revised literary biography for a fake poet), I couldn’t help but be reminded of Possession. This is sort of amusing to me, as I first read Possession for the class in which I also read The Swimming Pool Library.

Personal Assistant

jmags — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:27:33 +0000

Here’s Yoshi helping my pack up after a day at Temboo.

More Authoritative Statements on Literature from Joaquin

jmags — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:05:33 +0000

Here is an innocuous household object rendered creepy by the magic of Instagram.

So my forearms are a train wreck, but I’m now a blue belt. I guess I’m provisionally excited about that. For a while now I’ve been going to either sparring or curriculum classes, but not both. I think I’m going to be assiduous about covering more bases in the immediate future. It’s certainly less expensive than going out instead.

I’m about halfway through The Stranger’s Child and it’s as good as I expected. It also throws into stark relief the element missing from all of those Austen and co. novels about people sitting around in fancy houses doing nothing: booze! Maybe instead of gimmicky bullshit like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its ilk, someone should intercut those old books with scenes of people getting drunk and making it. In the final analysis, I’d probably still find them incredibly boring, but you can’t really get much worse than the source material.

The Steady Beat of Your Drum

jmags — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:58:21 +0000

So I finished Wuthering Heights today, and the last quarter of that book is a total dog. I will note that by that time there were few enough pages that the whole thing didn’t just collapse under its own weight, so it’s still better than Great Expectations, and you should just ignore my mother.

I think I’m finally off this stupid old-book kick. I don’t know what I was thinking letting it go on that long. Moby Dick is awesome, but it isn’t awesome enough to justify reading 2/3 of Great Expectations. I’m all set for the new Hollinghurst novel, The Stranger’s Child.

It’s actually quite strange to me that it has taken so long for me to get around to reading another Hollinghurst novel, because I adored The Swimming Pool Library back at Hampshire. I think that the problem may have been that I studied it very closely for a paper (reading it maybe 4 times through in a month, and certain sections more than that) and I burnt out for a while. I was reminded of him by a couple of press stories recently, and I’m actually looking forward to working back through the rest of his oeuvre.