Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2007 November

# 01 Nov 2007, 03:14PM: Grab Barg: You'd think that a night that involved hearing a gunshot and visiting a strip club would include gun violence threats AT the strip club, but no! They were separate incidents.

A few weeks back, around two in the morning, I entered the Times Square subway station and people thought we heard a gunshot and we all fled. Forever later, I was waiting at Queensboro Plaza for an N train, decided to go down to the street to get a cab, had no luck, and ended up waiting in the lobby of Scandals as the nice valet and front desk woman called me a cab.

The lesson: if you are going to stay past midnight in Hoboken, don't try to take public transit back to Queens. Just stay the night.

Some links and other miscellany, in addition to my del.icio.us subfeed:

Indian-American Bobby Jindal is going to be the first Indian-American governor of a US state. I wish I could feel happier about that.

My old boss Heather Gold is talking with Lawrence Lessig this month about his new anti-corruption career. Larry Lessig! I'll be on the wrong coast to see that, but maybe you won't!

Colbert is very, very good in the "The Saint" episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. The first time he showed up I made a little Colbert Report joke but he really disappears into the character, as a good improv guy should, and portrays a believable angry, sad, obsessed man. I wonder whether this script especially spoke to him, and whether his own Catholicism played any part in his choice to play a man who's been (indirectly) hurt by the Church. It was great to see his range.

Hilarious religious dialogue, via Jed Hartman.

Leonard's subtlest William Gibson reference ever.

# (2) 05 Nov 2007, 11:22AM: Ask The Hardest Polite Question You Can: Last week was a tough week for some kings of finance. The heads of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch jumped, or were pushed, out of their jobs. In the months prior there were rumblings at lower levels, including the "resignation" (who knows?) of a financial services executive who had come to speak to our class at Columbia back in the spring.

He gave a good presentation about becoming more than just a tech person, becoming a strategist and a leader. He may have mentioned ambition, how much you have to want that brass ring to do the work that it takes to get it.

I thought hard to find a question for the Q&A. I raised my hand and he called on me.

"How do you measure your own success?"

That's where it took a turn. He didn't talk about money he's made, or jobs he's created, or people he's mentored. He said that he wasn't sure about calling himself a success. He found great fulfillment in the challenges of his work. Once, years back, when his family was settled in a house and in their lives on the East Coast, he'd gotten a job in Detroit, and he'd uprooted his family (including his college-age child) to move them to Michigan. His wife left him.

So, he said, he didn't know whether he'd succeeded or not, how to measure that.

I said: the measure is, would you do it all over again?

Someone said "whoa." The executive thought, and the room was silent, and he said he didn't know.

I've heard classmates reference that exchange, months later. They are grateful to him for his honesty. I wonder what they'll remember me for.

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership

# (3) 07 Nov 2007, 03:09AM: Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Making Out: Once upon a time, I watched that OK Go treadmill video once a day for a week because it cheered me so. I'm currently there with times Stephen Colbert has broken character, set to "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen. Evidently "Don't Stop Me Now" is a popular montage tune on YouTube, mayhap inspired by that scene from Sean of the Dead.

In the comments, we see hordes of teenage girls noting that it's only n years till they can legally schtup Stephen Colbert. And indeed when we get to see Colbert's genuine smile it's quite winning. And this video is three and a half minutes of just those endearing moments, so of course it's cracktastic and attracts those gals. Maybe there are fanboys among the SQUEE! contingent too, but in their Twitter-length comments they'd have to justify why Colbert would divorce his wife AND TURN GAY for them at their 18th birthdays, and that takes a little longer than 140 characters.

The vid does not drive me to YouTube-comment-posting levels of lust; nonetheless, I enjoy The Colbert Report quite a bit. Certain episodes ("American Pop Culture: It's Crumbelievable" and the Decemberists shred-off) I've watched several times, and I maintain that "The Word" is changing how people understand Powerpoint. But I did not seek out the literary criticism, fan homages, fan music videos (aww), and fiction about Colbert written by amateurs until a few days ago. My reasons and findings: forthcoming.

If you don't know about slash and other fan fiction variants, or even if you do, there's no better intro than essays by Teresa Nielsen Hayden (whom I still haven't met!), such as: "Fanfic": force of nature; Squick and squee; Namarie Sue; and finally Punditslash. There is also a relevant xkcd cartoon in which the critical impulse turns into the creative impulse in four panels.

In case you think all slash is wrong, let me introduce you to the Very Wrong Slash community on LiveJournal. But what makes slash "wrong"? In the immortal Arrested Development distinction of "hot wrong" vs. "regular wrong," slash is only regular wrong if the author can't make her borrowed characters' actions believable. And it's easier to write fiction that's hot wrong using borrowed characters, because subversive and hot is like metahumor -- it works best when it's subverting something you have always taken for granted, not just taking a newly introduced idea one step further. And that varies by reader, like any taste or kink.

Example: I found this explicitly sexual Goofus & Gallant slash a little unbelievable, and it didn't overturn my mental furniture. In contrast, the moment I saw the name "Alton Brown" I said "Oh my God" aloud.

Alton grasped the edges of the counter, then moved his left hand along as if looking for something. He pressed a hidden button under the lip of the counter, and a shallow drawer concealed above the other drawers popped out. In it were .... could it be? Mike stopped [redacted] for a moment in sheer astonishment. Labeled in Alton's neat handwriting were half-a-dozen small screwtop jars: chocolate-cayenne, raspberry coulis, pineapple-mint, unflavored, cinnamon-clove, ginger-mango. There was also a stash of gloves and a beautifully polished marble french rolling pin, the kind that tapers. Alton cleared his throat. "Um, I've never liked the feel of the glycerin-based lubes, so I infuse my own silicone lube. I was.... I was hoping you'd like....." His voice tapered off, but this time it wasn't uncertainty, or ONLY uncertainty. It was invitation.

See, that helps you calibrate your standards for wrongness. Test yourself on this premise: alternate universe slash where Sarah Vowell, the casts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, and Tina Fey attend a high school where Jerry Seinfeld and Will Ferrell teach. Or crossover Colbert Report-Harry Potter fanfic (no sex, mind) where the Stephen Colbert persona is the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Might it be hot-wrong in some nonsexual sense of the word "hot"? It's certainly funny.

Author's Note: I'm not sure if this counts as a fanfic, a parody of a fanfic, a fanfic of a parody, or all of the above. Whatever it is, I just had to write it.

Slash folks sometimes argue over which pair of characters belongs in a couple -- which is the One True Pairing? Troi/Riker or Troi/Worf? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or Stephen Colbert and Tad, his building manager? (Self-conscious Mahabharata slash could have some fun defining Draupadi's OTP.) What pair feels right?

But that feeling of OTP rightness fits, in good slash, with the elegant subversion that makes it pleasurably wrong. Erin Ptah's wonderful and Pratchett-influenced "The Thing With Feathers" is an example. The way she borrows Colbert and Stewart, they belong together -- yet she rearranges the reader's universe, disorienting and reorienting my experience of The Colbert Report.

Some people write RPS, or Real Person Slash, about celebrities. I find this more icky because now the writer is objectifying a real person. The layered nature of reality on The Colbert Report allows writers to play with RPS and Fake Person Slash in the same story, so some FPS lands in the RPS community and it gets weird. Weirder, anyhow. And that's as close as I come to the reflexive anti-fanfic stance I've seen in a few folks: Fan fiction is cheating, since you're not making up the characters or their universe. And you're stealing someone else's work, and you shouldn't publish it, and probably it's stupid for you even to be writing it, much less reading it.

It makes me happy to read good fiction, fan or pro. And it's edifying, although what I've learned about The Colbert Report will be in a future post. But is all of fanfic stealing, cheating, regular wrong?

Nope. Maybe it's my generation and the affordances of technology, including how we determine what is important or relevant. But smarter theorists than I, not least The Presidents of the United States of America, have long noted that all work is at least a little derivative. We emulate role models, we pass along memes, and we share. OK Go borrowed most of those treadmills.

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# (4) 12 Nov 2007, 01:50PM: Boston Visit and Greyhound Game Theory: On Saturday I took a Greyhound bus to Boston to visit Julia and Moss, who have a new place in Cambridge, Mass. Another objective: to get a day's head start on reuniting with Leonard, who had just spent a week and a half near Boston on business.

I found the one-day trip wonderful and intend on returning; what I saw of Boston I liked (what a civilized bus terminal they have!) and of course Moss and Julia are a powerhouse. And Greyhound has a deal where if you buy your round-trip ticket online, Boston-NYC roundtrip is $30.

However! A ticket from Greyhound using that special fare is not, despite the date and time and bus number printed upon it, a specific boarding pass for that bus. It is a general pass that can get you on any bus on that route, for something like a year after the purchase date. So if you arrive a half hour early for your bus, as the ticket suggests, and there's a bus right there and there's room, you can get on that bus! But that means that the bus is first-come, first-served. Should you arrive on time at 9am and find a huge line in front of you, even if your ticket says 9am and theirs don't, they'll get on before you. If the bus runs out of room, you'll have to take the 10am bus. A fellow behind me in line at the Port Authority was vocally unhappy about this with a Greyhound employee, who didn't sooth him terribly well.

And yet! I recently noticed a sidebar notice on Greyhound's web site, in the middle of the purchase process:

Reserve your seat and preboard the bus for only $5.
Available on select schedules only at select terminals.
Reserve Seating can only be purchased in station at the designated ticket line. Customers must be prepared to board 20 minutes prior to schedule departure. See ticket agent for details.

And indeed the not-terribly-amiable Greyhound employee at Port Authority mentioned this $5 reserved-seat upgrade to the disgruntled passenger, so he and a few others who overheard her took her up on it. I assured the people behind me that, despite how very much it sounded like a scam or entrepreneurialism on the part of the Greyhound agent, it was legit. The new VIPs clustered in a new, separate line; they'd board the next bus before our line did.

But then we wondered: what are the game-theoretic implications of this ticketing system?

If the people in line behind me do it, and I don't, I lose out, so I have to do it.
By induction, everyone has to buy the upgrade to get on the next bus. If everyone does it, no one benefits (except that Greyhound makes $5n). Prisoner's dilemma?
But there is a limit on the number of seats on the bus! So only 60 people can be sold reserved-seat upgrades for the 9am bus, and everyone else has to wait for the next (10am) bus.
So I should convince people ahead of me in line to buy the upgrade, so fewer seats are available to the people behind me.
But the people in front of me have a lower incentive to buy them....unless they fear those behind them. Time to scaremonger?

I didn't buy an upgrade and I made it onto the next bus anyway. Thoughts?

# (1) 13 Nov 2007, 10:50AM: Just Read And Recommended: Books on the inadvertent themes of the US public school culture and acclimating ourselves to otherness.

John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars, available for free online. A pleasant, fast-paced, and funny if sometimes jarring read. Hollywood agent Tom Stein gets tapped to introduce aliens to Earth.
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. An imagination of how and why Columbus did what he did, and how our history might have been different. Card and Scalzi (at least in the book of his I've read) both love the "everyone lays their logic and advantages out on the table" conversations, which gets tiresome in a House, M.D. kind of way but does avoid the "everything's subtext" New Yorker-fiction problem. Also, in the New Yorker-style stories we often say that nothing happens, but really we're saying that there's internal character change that doesn't translate into change in their relationships or the external world. In Card and in Agent to the Stars, character change is muted compared to the changes they implement in the world, and it all happens quite fast -- partially because no one communicates nonverbally and communication signals never get interrupted by the beautiful noise of emotion or symbolism.
Schooled by Gordon Korman. Capricorn Anderson, at thirteen, lives on a commune with his grandmother. When she falls and breaks her hip, he has to go mainstream while she recovers, which means a tremendous culture clash at his new home and school. Less zany than the 1980s Korman -- instead of a troublemaker with a straight-man sidekick, Cap is just an earnest kid buffeted by amoral, well-meaning, or malicious strangers.
As in Jake, Reinvented, Korman's retelling of The Great Gatsby, he's interested in how student mobs inside schools treat their leaders and outsiders, and what switches their attitude towards a particular newcomer between adulation and scorn. (This is not to mention the actual mob psychology he examines in Son of the Mob and its sequel.) Both Korman's No More Dead Dogs and Schooled also feature stubborn truthtellers and alternate among their points of view and those of their peers and authority figures. Were Korman to take a darker turn he'd write Avi's Nothing But The Truth, the scary realistic docu-style drama about a kid who becomes a political football because of a classroom misunderstanding.
Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder. Kidder does documentaries. This one studies a fifth-grade class in a Massachusetts industrial town over one school year. Moving, insightful, empathy-inducing, and sort of incomplete in the way good documentaries feel. You get to know the people and you know their lives are continuing, so you wish you could keep following them to know what happens. This is the Truman Show fallacy.

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 13 Nov 2007, 01:31PM: Reasoned Discussion? On The Internet?!: A few weeks ago I noticed a short negative mention of Dreaming in Code by Bryan Cantrill and he noticed my notice (per that entry's comments). Author Scott Rosenberg responded with questions about Cantrill's critique, Cantrill elaborated, and today Rosenberg replied in more depth. After the first connection it was all quite civilized (cf. Rosenberg's 1994 piece on how flamewars die when objects of hostility show up to talk), and how nice is that?

# 13 Nov 2007, 03:30PM: Medium-Term Plans: Leonard and I have decided that we'll stay in New York City through the end of 2008. I'm now looking for a tech project management job in Manhattan or environs, so if you have a position or a lead please let me know.

Till now, I've been trying to concentrate on my master's degree and on some personal projects. One of them: learning programming basics, with an emphasis on Python. How am I to manage technologists if I don't have personal experience in at least the bare basics of their craft?

Surprisingly enough, van Rossum's Python tutorial is for people who already know how to program. I looked at a few introductions to programming for non-programmers and saw more than one recommendation (example) of How To Design Programs. It has more exercises than How to Think Like A Computer Scientist, and I already knew the basics of Scheme from my intro-to-intro-to-CS class at Berkeley. But I do want to learn Python, so I've implementing my exercise solutions mostly in Python, using IDLE, with a few stops in DrScheme for the cute GUI bits that make use of DrScheme's teachpacks. Thanks to my husband and to Magnus Lie Hetland, and of course the Python documentarians, for encouragement and reference material.

However, after the intro to data structures part of How To Design Programs, I began to run into more substantial burdens in the dual-language approach. I'm on functions that consume and produce lists now and haven't done much in Python for the last several weeks. So I'll be getting back into that in December. Being able to read and write code in some modern language is, after all, the point of the thing.

When I was at Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky helped me learn how to learn programming. It's not like history, he explained. When you read a how-to text, you have to do all the exercises and then some, playing around till you learn the abstractions by bumping into all their edges. So the abundance of exercises in HTDP is exactly what I needed.

I've also figured out how to focus and program for hours straight: turn off the Internet (I used lovely Unix toolness to How to Design Programs onto my laptop so I can read it anywhere) and sit with a friend who's also trying to focus and program. Michael Rehse and Fureigh have been great partners for this. Also good for general Sumana productivity: specific daily schedules, not just to-do lists, but task lists with time estimates.

With these career plans, I've laid out some tracks in front of me. Now I just need to stoke my engine.

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership

# (1) 14 Nov 2007, 12:42PM: Software For You: As of this week, Miro 1.0 is out. Miro is a neat program that lets you download YouTube and Google Video clips to your hard drive so you can watch them whenever you want. You can also use it to subscribe to video podcasts like the TED talks, a PBS kids' show, Google Tech Talks, a cooking show, or a zillion others.

For a few months this summer, I did testing for Miro and updated the channel guide. I'm going to do more of that before the year is out. In fact, my goal is to learn enough Python to submit at least one patch by December 31st. So far, one of the best compliments I've gotten this year is, upon submitting a bug report, being told "good catch".

Open source is more open when people can capably and freely move from being users to being contributors. I want to contribute to Miro to help others and to help myself. Mel makes an interesting point about the face-saving culture; I am trying to gain cred so that I have a reputation to protect in the future.

# (1) 15 Nov 2007, 11:01PM: What Slash Taught Me About "Stephen Colbert": You might think that I began reading Stephen Colbert fan fiction because the writers' strike is keeping his show off the air.* But it was two weeks ago that I started seeking it out. I'd had two or three recent dreams where Colbert was trying to teach me something -- math, management skills, ethics. What did that mean? I turned to The Colbert Report fanfic to help my conscious mind understand the themes in The Colbert Report that my subconscious was chewing on.

For background: like other fans, I didn't watch Colbert's show when it started out. This, despite a very friendly and funny call from a Report staffer when I worked at Salon Premium, back when the Report was just starting in 2005. He asked for a free subscription, a perk Salon and probably most major media outlets give their colleagues. We joked about Adam Carolla's car-like name and I wished him luck. But I wasn't watching. I thought The Colbert Report would be a one-trick pony and rather boring until that White House Correspondents Dinner speech.

Then I started tuning in and didn't stop. The Daily Show is parody but The Colbert Report is satire, the thumbnail conventional wisdom goes. "What's happened to The Daily Show?" one asks as Colbert looks comparatively hotter. "The Secret Agenda of Stephen Colbert", one speculates as his show nails not just the forms but the underlying conceptual dysfunction of reigning ideologies.

But that's all stuff you can get from watching the show, or reading nonfiction commentary. The Daily Show/Colbert Report fanfic brings subtexts to the surface. Sometimes it's just porny fanservice slash, fulfilling Wally Holland's critique. Or HOT fanservice. But sometimes you get psychological meat.

Erin Ptah specifically aims in her fiction to humanize the superficially despicable character that Colbert plays. Ptah comments:

He's clueless in a way that is (usually) charming. He's well-intentioned. He craves attention and approval. He's fragile and plagued by self-doubt. He always tries to do his best. He has a streak of childish innocence.

The theme of attention-seeking and approval-seeking resonates with me, and I hadn't expected it. The real Stephen Colbert is the youngest of eleven children and lost his dad and two brothers when he was a child. He freely admits a huge attention-seeking drive, but he'll act silly on stage without fear of embarrassment. The Colbert persona is a tremendous narcissist and that may be the only urge of his that he isn't in denial about. The real Colbert is aware enough to declare how lucky he is in an interview with Larry King: "[My character has] got a tremendous ego. I get to pretend I don't."

Once I really start thinking about how Colbert constructed an attention-hungry persona that screens his private, attention-hungry self from exposure -- because being authentic 100% of the time may turn you grey (cf. Jon Stewart) -- I want to digress a lot. His mask reminds me of customer service habits that prevent burnout, and the doubly-indirected attention-seeking reminds me of Anna Fels's insights on attention as a necessary component of mastery. But you get my point. There's a lot here. Another pervasive lesson in the Colbert character is the undermining of authority's assurances. It's always Opposite Day, so his blessings and curses are inimical to real-life value. What Ptah calls well-intentioned cluelessness goes hand-in-hand with pretzel logic:

"Well, there you are!" Stephen replied, triumphantly. "Only a man who was petrified of finding out he was gay would avoid having sex with men!"

How more succinctly could we put a neocon's wiretapping rationalizations than in this Colbert Report ad slogan? "I'm looking over your shoulder, but only because I've got your back." Well-intentioned cluelessness all the way.

You see the character's innocence come through when his character breaks. The fanfiction, as a rule, either shows Stephen or "Stephen," and so doesn't explore the space in between; Ptah's "The Thing With Feathers" is an exception (explicit example with implicit discussion throughout).

The best discussion, then, is a fan video: "Don't Stop Me Now/Don't stop me/'cause I'm having a good time!" Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" juxtaposed with three and a half minutes of Colbert breaking character. The character breaks are almost never outbreaks of seriousness when he's forcing jollity. It's his genuine pleasure breaking the serious mask.

And that's how you know he is having a good time. He wears the character lightly, breaking at least a little bit once an episode or more. It's great to see him smile for real! There's a lesson: the power of a genuine smile. And it makes you wonder how anyone could see those breaks and not recognize them, see the show and not know it's a parody.

Speaking of which, disturbing comments on a behind-the-scenes clip. People express their shock that it's an act. Liar! they cry. Or -- and I quote -- "HAHA! colbert exposed!there u go stupid liberals"

Amazing.

And as for the character always trying to do his best, and probably failing, he's not alone in that. For a fan fiction piece that explores this, I recommend Ptah's "Expecting" -- at the very least you should see the trailer.

So, if Colbert is showing up in my dreams as a teacher, what are my lessons? In some ways they're the same lessons I learned from sitcoms: be straightforward and honest to avoid drama. Low-probability embarrassments will happen, so get over it. Be kind to outsiders. But in sitcoms we learn to be kind and honest to others; Colbert is telling me to be kind and honest with myself.

* Leonard and I made muffins yesterday morning and I brought them to the Writers Guild picket line in midtown. Gawking report: John Oliver looked exhausted and a standup comic whose name I can't recall gave me a smile. Then, near Rockefeller Center, I saw paparazzi surrounding a car and asked a gawker who was in there. She finished snapping her cameraphone shot and turned to say triumphantly and definitively, "Celine Dion!"

Filed under: Comedy Reading

# 16 Nov 2007, 11:19AM: Recent Math/Science Triumphs Include: Finally getting to recursion in How to Design Programs, just after doing a 3-D distance calculation and discovering that my Pythagorean theorem intuition still held (the distance from zero in exercise 9.1.3 is the square root of the sum of x squared, y squared, and z squared). Now to do Return On Investment calculations, which involve much more guesswork.

# 20 Nov 2007, 05:46PM: Cornucopia: Headed to the comic book store to pick up MAD Magazine and found new trades of She-Hulk and Ex Machina, yay.

Filed under: Reading

# 24 Nov 2007, 12:19AM: Wow: We didn't do a thanksgiving ritual yesterday, and I think that was a mistake, because this evening I got really aggravated over the kind of things I probably won't remember in a few weeks. However, I have now seen and liked the entire run of Firefly and know that my sister enjoys Cranium and Fluxx.

# 24 Nov 2007, 10:51PM: The Other Shoe Drops: Garry Kasparov jailed. Putin doesn't so much care for protests, rallies, etc. a week before elections. So, beaten and jailed for "organizing an unsanctioned protest and resisting arrest." Bitter laughter ensues.

# (1) 26 Nov 2007, 04:18PM: Health And Art: I hate owing more than one blog entry to someone. One seems reasonable, two seems sloppy. So here's the first of a couple responses to my old pal Zed Lopez -- improvisateur, author of the kind of thing that becomes an email forward, and Clarion grad.

Responding to part of a post of mine, Zed stated that mental health always increases one's creative choices. I would submit that there are particular artistic realms or methods that get harder to explore, or less attractive, the happier and saner one gets. "Health doesn't mean you can't visit those [old dark] places," Zed writes, but really? Maybe I should just take Zed's word on that, because he has way more experience in life and art, but just physiologically there are sensations and emotions I've had that I can't even remember now, much less access for use in stand-up or writing. I'm sure it's not a zero-sum game between artistic mojo and life function, but I bet the tradeoff will cause some friction with one's agent during the transition.

It is possible to realize that your urge toward artistic accomplishment arose from feelings of worthlessness, or otherwise from a bad place, and realize you don't actually want to pursue the same artistic endeavor in the same way. The incompatibility between ambition and contentment speaks to this, but there's such a thing as healthy ambition and unhealthy ambition. Contentment isn't incompatible with the former.

Maybe this is my comic-book understanding of Buddhism coming through, but ambition = desire and desire is by definition a lack of contentment. Yeah, I'm gonna say that's too simplistic. Evidently there are people who are basically happy with their lives and find some drive other than the need for therapy that pushes them to make neat stuff. Maybe the urge to awesomeness, or "I could do better than that" exasperation. OK, that I could believe.

Brendan: was that last para transparent?

Okay. The harder one in a few days.

Filed under: Comedy