Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2008 December

# (4) 07 Dec 2008, 05:25AM: On Family, Career, and Skill: On the plane from Heathrow's infinite Terminal 5 to JFK, I saw bits of It's a Wonderful Life and The Dark Knight, and all of Mamma Mia!. I pay a different kind of emotional attention to films on planes; cruel irony, that I cry more while more dehydrated.

There have been a billion riffs on It's a Wonderful Life since 1946, but none quite like the "what would Gotham be like without Batman?" question mused and forced by the Joker in Dark Knight. More particularly, the prisoner's dilemma the Joker forces on his captives was prefigured in the bank run Potter forces and George Bailey staves off at the Building & Loan. However, since Nash wasn't publishing his game theory work till the fifties, Capra probably wasn't shouting him out specifically. The Nolans, in this decade, might have. Potter is lawful evil; the Joker considers himself true neutral, though chaotic evil is a better match.

I watched Mamma Mia! perhaps as methadone for my withdrawal from the land of Bollywood musicals. It's frothy amusement, but as Meryl Streep helped her daughter dress for her wedding, I sobbed, because I basically eloped and didn't give my mother the chance to make that memory with me. I took that, I stole that from her.

How could I not have felt that before?

Some stuff is just domain knowledge. A sufficiently intelligent person with a working memory can learn it from a book. Some is mastery, skill. Programming, sex, living somewhere, writing, traveling, enjoying a party. A skill gets better with deliberate practice -- 10,000 hours is the figure going around (note that 11 months of 40-hour workweeks gives you 12,320 hours). Skill mastery demands patience. You can't just be a whiz, the way memorization made me a whiz at a domain like English spelling.

It turns out that getting along with my family, really showing loving kindness and empathy and learning about them as people, is a skill I hadn't known I needed. Getting better at general social skills helped. And making the choice to get better helped. I chose to go to India for Thanksgiving mainly to try out choosing to go, not being asked, for the first time. Sometimes constraints liberate me, but only if I forge my own chains. I'm somewhere in the first fraction of my 10,000 hours, despite having lived with my mother, father, and sister for years, because only deliberate practice helps.

Given my age and predicted lifespan, I have more than twenty 10,000-hour chunks left to go. What will I choose to master? How much time have I really put in to learning to be a good spouse? I've gotten to travel, change jobs, make choices that George Bailey felt he couldn't, but what monument am I shaping? Will I make something of my life that's worthy of my time, that could draw tears from a stranger in an airplane, that's commensurate to our new President's call to action?

Yes. In my search for a new venture to join or start, for profit or non, I'm making a positive, tangible choice. I could get just another project manager job, but I'm going for something equal to my energies and talents. I'm looking for someplace where I can bring my leadership, writing, public speaking, rolodexing, and investigative skills to bear, along with the secretarial and technical basics. I will work with people I can learn from, emotionally and intellectually. I will help make services, sites, or products that delight people. I will make something, and make people happy.

Including myself.

As a kid I didn't quite get why "The Inner Light" was so moving. The last time I saw it was in 1994. Zach Putman, the other Trek geek from my eighth-grade class, came over to my place and we watched the whole marathon -- "Relics," "The Inner Light," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "The Best of Both Worlds," a documentary, and the last episode of Next Generation -- in my living room. It was good and all, but top five?

Tonight I happened to hear that flute theme again, and grokked it. Envy for the other life Picard got to live in twenty minutes -- the life so short, the craft so long to learn. A childless, solitary man given a community and a family. Regret that he'll never see that family or world again. Angels from the stars place the protagonist in a fable, a new life where everyone knows him: It's a Wonderful Life inverted.

# (1) 10 Dec 2008, 08:43AM: Heisting It Forward: Blogging, and reading blogs, got me my husband, a job at Fog Creek (and thus my move to New York), and friends such as Brendan, Gordon, Andrew, Claudia, and Zed. Watching John Rogers's new TNT heist dramedy Leverage is the least I could do for the blogosphere. I like it. It panders to my political and technological biases.

# 11 Dec 2008, 04:35PM: That's The Story I Heard: All our music -- ripped CDs, Creative Commons stuff, ripped tapes, and Amazon MP3 purchases -- now lives in the MythTV media center that Leonard built, making for about 3 days of music. I recently used the MythMusic documentation to create playlists and install pretty visualizations. Our party soundtrack now leaves out Patton Oswalt, Steve Martin, and Frank Zappa.

The most insane stuff in there might be something by Frank Zappa or PDQ Bach or Barcelona or Weird Al or They Might Be Giants or Lawsuit or Dengue Fever or Moxy Früvous, or the odder bits from Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, or Steven Schultz's rock opera Stalin Claus Superstar, or Van Morrison's contractual obligation album, or video game music, or wizard rock, or A Prairie Home Companion joke show segments, or songs by Leonard's friends Jake Berendes, Jeremy Bruce, et al. But the most insane song on that drive is actually Cab Calloway's song about chicken.

It was the dish for old Caesar
Also King Henry the Third
But Columbus was smart
Said you can't fool me
A chicken ain't nothin' but a bird

Filed under: Comedy

# (6) 15 Dec 2008, 09:42PM: You may be aware that Indians, like so many others, have an expansive sense of hospitality. Admire one of your host's items of property out loud at your own peril; s/he may give you it, or a similar object. In my parents' circle, a visit isn't complete until the guests have taken some colored powder -- turmeric and kumkum -- and anointed their heads.

And of course there's the food thing.

Another Indian-American woman I once met described a meal at an aunty's as like one of the legendary battles at Kurukshetra -- a plate a foot wide and an inch deep, piled with food, and refilled as soon as she made any headway.

My mother and I visited a sort of grandmother a few weeks ago. She insisted that we have a single dosa -- it happened to be lying around, already prepared, she claimed. We laughingly demurred, then cheerfully agreed to split it. She gave us each a dosa, then went into the kitchen, then gave me another dosa while I was eating my first. We cracked up.

When Leonard visited India, I taught him a few Kannada words. Hesaru, name. Santosh, happy. Thoomba, very. Snana, bath. And jasthe, saku, beda: too much, enough, don't want. But it is as though Kannada doesn't even have those words; people go ahead and ladle rice and broth onto your plate as though the sounds you've made have no meaning.

But it's all with a smile, because it's all about demonstrating love and prosperity.

On my recent trip to Mysore, as a visitor from afar, I sometimes visited four or five homes in the course of a day. This led me to decline food even more desperately, in the interest of my own safety. And it led me to grasp some troubling game-theoretic implications of this custom.

If I plan on visiting other hosts the same day, I need to refuse food even if I am hungry, to ensure that I have enough appetite to eat later. Thus, a host who wants to feed me has an interest in keeping me from visiting the next house on my schedule.

Social schedules change often in my parents' India. So I have little confidence in my own knowledge of whether I am visiting more houses later. Since food is available at home but appetite is, in the short run, a nonrenewable resource, the more dangerous scenario is the one where I have eaten my fill and suddenly must confront a new host, an aunty or uncle hungry to feed. Thus, the safer course for me is to always refuse food as vociferously as I can -- again, even if I am hungry.

Sometimes hosts offer tea instead. Don't be fooled! Black Indian tea with milk and sugar will arrive, accompanied by a sweet or salty snack that is barely optional. And jet lag requires carefully titrated doses of caffeine to treat; hundreds of milligrams at unpredictable intervals wouldn't help.

A Russian textbook once advised me that the only sure way to get Russians to stop peer-pressuring booze upon you was to say, "I am an alcoholic." I worry that telling Indians "I am a binge eater" would only result in getting adopted.

# (6) 16 Dec 2008, 04:46AM: Logistics Query: What's your rule of thumb for sending December holiday cards and parcels? Do you try to get them out by, let's say, 5 business days prior to the 25th? Do you assume it'll take 3 working days to get to major cities on your coast and 5 to get elsewhere in your country, and 8 to get to other countries? I know this is the sort of thing hip people ask on Twitter.

# 17 Dec 2008, 08:29AM: Happy Holidays from My Favorite Cause:

Learn more about this video and support EFF!

# (1) 18 Dec 2008, 06:16AM: How I hesitated / Now I wonder why: Wally Holland's commentary on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which is one of my top media memories of 2008.

# (6) 18 Dec 2008, 07:38AM: Gig-Hunting & Travel: My luck has turned. Last year around this time, my job search sputtered. Now, I've been consistently impressing possible bosses -- and, more excitingly, possible partners for cofound-y relationships. I have four strong leads in New York City alone.

What's different? I have a master's in tech management, a year of experience with the title Project Manager, a stronger network, and more confidence.

On a macro scale, my timing coincides with a terrible economic slowdown, but that means the competitive field will clear and good labor will be cheap. There will always be money for good ideas, whether from angels or customers. Even in New York City, hit hard by the Wall Street crunch, I'm finding lots of entrepreneurs excited because their nimble operations will be able to undercut lumbering giants.

I find the NYC tech scene surprisingly lively, given that so many presentations and launches one sees are just dumb boil-the-ocean ad crap. Still, innovative work is happening elsewhere in stronger hacking ecosystems. I'd gone on my Portland/Seattle trip assuming that I'd have an easier time finding a startup job there than in New York, but the strength of my connections here are leading me to opportunities that I couldn't have found in one whirlwind week in the Northwest.

More worrisome to me is my week-to-week timing. I'd been meaning to visit Boston and San Francisco in December to grow opportunities there, but jet lag and New York appointments have kept me in New York till the end of this week, and people's availability declines so precipitously in the second half of December that it's not worth it to go before January. Bleh.

Still, now is the time for me to plan big chunks of travel, so I can block out those weeks and plan potential work around them. So I'm going to try to avoid making any commitments here till I can visit San Francisco and Boston in January. Predictions I put down now so I can be embarrassed when I have to correct them: I expect the startup opportunities I discover there will include more revolutionary/elegant technology, more social benefit, and a longer time to profitability.

People who live in the Bay Area and Boston metro area: What are good weeks in January for me to visit you?

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership

# (2) 19 Dec 2008, 11:24PM: Cynical Aha: I was discussing social media, social networking apps, and what have you in a job interview*, and mentioned that I don't really see the immediate value. Sure, you might be able to build tenuous community or brand approval, but it's the rare Facebook app whose popularity or usefulness will actually convert to value for its sponsor. You can precisely track clickthrough, but not the fuzzy connection between enjoying the app and caring about who paid for it.

While discussing this with Michael R. today, I realized: that's the point. Marketers and ad agencies must LOVE that they can spend and charge to build Facebook apps, and BS about brand recognition when asked whether it's effective. They get to import the conversion uncertainty from the analog world into the digital world.

* Incidentally, it bothers me to call these things "job interviews" when they're discussions that might lead to cofounding a nonprofit or being a CEO in a subsidiary/shell corporation. A pithy replacement is solicited.

# 21 Dec 2008, 04:11PM: On Reporting: How do reporters manufacture the news? I don't mean the investigative stories, but the other 95% of the content in magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, & newsish websites. When I was a kid, I thought that reporters somehow just kept up with current events by keeping in touch with important and interesting people, and thereby found stories to write about. These days I see that sort of story and think My 3 friends = trend piece.

Reporting carries sheer epistemological challenges. Part-time or newbie writers haven't built their networks or domain knowledge yet. All reporters face a world of six billion people and tight deadlines. To help reporters find sources, Peter Shankman founded HARO. For a few months this fall, I received the Help A Reporter Out email thrice daily, and saw instances of several models of reportage. In HARO I also saw writers at all the stages of network development, and of story development.

Primarily, I saw writers who already had a topic in mind, whether assigned by an editor or chosen on their own, and asked for sources who know a lot about it. Some sent out a survey-style set of questions right away instead of getting the source's contact information and then starting a conversation. So they had somehow observed enough to come up with a general idea for a story, some incongruity or trend to explain, and simply needed to flesh it out.

I also saw writers who asked for press releases and pitches. They specifically ask publicists for that sort of "news," including low-res photos of the advertised products. Some writers say they want anti-procrastination tips, tips for simplifying the holidays, diet tips -- filler that anyone could find in two minutes using Google. Instead of planting a seed and growing a story, they want plastic pellets to drop into their injection molding rigs. Roald Dahl's automatic grammatisator would put them out of work.

I take my cues on news industry critique from Scott Rosenberg and his crowd. Scott, do you have any particular opinion of HARO? And do any of my other readers have tales of being contacted by reporters who obviously had or had not done their homework on the stories they were reporting?

# 22 Dec 2008, 08:37AM: On Shyness And Parties: Thanks to Tor for hosting a holiday party last week! Leonard, some friends and I went. I met people so notable that they have Wikipedia pages! Indeed, how can anything be more star-studded than that. In case you want proof we were there, we can provide photographic proof.

We had a good time, and that helped me articulate some tips for helping a shy person be comfortable at a party:

Ensure that he has a few friends there he can talk to.
Start conversations on your own to find interesting people. Then, if you find someone interesting, get the conversation onto a topic you know your shy friend will like, and introduce him.
If the party's at a bar, take care of logistics: getting drinks from a bartender, finding the party in the back room, etc.
Look for quieter and less crowded areas and let your shy friend know about them so he can move there.
Be ready to leave the moment he is.

Sometimes people come to parties I'm visiting and I see that they aren't talking to anyone and look unhappy. In such cases I often go over and introduce myself and start a conversation. I'm assuming that such people wish to be in conversations but fear to start them. Anyone have insight to share?

# 22 Dec 2008, 08:59AM: Movies, TV, Music, And More! Well, Actually, That's It: Previous entry aside, Leonard and I have been staying in from the cold and experiencing media.

Music: Dar Williams's latest CD, Promised Land, has a song about the Milgram Experiment! Timely. And I'm on my way to filking Cab Calloway:

You can stop listening to Weezer
Claim Star Wars memories are blurred
But you still can't hide all those smarts inside
A geek ain't nothing but a nerd

Movies: The original The Day The Earth Stood Still from 1951 starts off looking enough like every other 1950s sci-fi movie that I expected to be bored. But it's not a B-movie, it's an A-movie, and it confronts the profound Otherness of the alien. It also reveals the profound Otherness of an era when a single mother might possibly be okay with the mysterious guy who just moved into her boarding house taking care of her son for a day. Resemblance note: Leonard thought the professor looked like Malcolm Gladwell.

I had to leave the house to watch Quantum of Solace, which was a quite adequate sequel to Casino Royale but not as shattering. How nice to see a really expensive globe-spanning action movie where Bond didn't sleep with every single woman he met. Casino Royale's opening music video made the argument that death is a matter of chance, and that becoming a spy might make you think you can put your hands on the wheel of fate and turn it to your will, but you're wrong and your actions will have disastrous and unforeseen consequences. The music video in Quantum of Solace had an all-flesh-is-grass theme transmuted into shifting sands: all your foundations will disappear beneath your feet. Such stylish cynicism.

TV: Last night we finished Babylon 5. Well, except that now we're going to watch the TV movies and whatnot. Bab5 is a tremendous accomplishment and I only wish stupid real-world obstacles hadn't gotten in the way of its realization. How great could it have been if they'd known all along that they'd have five seasons? Or if Claudia Christian had stayed on as Ivanova for the last year, instead of leaving because of contract confusion? I now agree with everyone who said that seasons two, three, and four are strongest, and would argue that the show's strongest when it is creepiest.

Now Leonard and I have to have the discussion where we seriously compare Bab5 and DS9. Hoo boy.

We've been watching Sarah Haskins's Target: Women religiously (2:12 to 2:30 reliably makes Leonard belly laugh) but I've also gotten him into Ben Ehrlich's Viral Video Film School. These are both segments on infoMania from Current, so we tried the most recent episode of the whole show and liked it fairly well. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are about pinpointing the ridiculous and meditating upon it, while infoMania only does that kind of media critique in its genre-specific segments. Conor Knighton, the host, is more about snarky drive-bys. In that, infoMania is more like a video-enabled Suck than anything else.

Filed under: Comedy

# (2) 25 Dec 2008, 12:31AM: Merry Christmas: ... from a household of boxes and cookies.

# 25 Dec 2008, 11:17PM: Yay Bay: I'll be visiting San Francisco, the East Bay, Silicon Valley, and related areas January 13-23rd of next year. And I'll make sallies towards Boston in early and late January; yay Greyhound. Barrages of planning emails begin now.

# 27 Dec 2008, 04:55PM: After "Sleeping in Light": Some assorted thoughts on Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine, collected from household discussion over the past seven months. Contains spoilers.

Past by-the-ways: a nitpick, another nitpick of first season writing, and Vorlon silliness, and another J. Michael Straczynski-Trek connection. We also won't go over the constant Sagan quotes or the possibility that Paramount lifted the idea for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from JMS. I don't know how credible that rumor is but I can see why people think that.

A few character notes: we took to calling Zack Allan "Earth's Londo." At one moment in season 2, we imagined Garibaldi musing, "I need a smarter henchman." And G'Kar went through more change in a single season than Worf went through in ten years.

Earth in Star Trek never seriously flirted with xenophobia, although a few isolationists show up here and there. In Bab5 Earth's government turns hella xenophobe fascist. Earth's government spirals into fascism in "Point of No Return" and it made me feel physically sick. "Illusion of Truth" too. Despite Eddington's arguments and the events of In the Pale Moonlight, the Federation as depicted in DS9 does not have a dark core and good nearly always wins. As JMS points out again and again in his contemporaneous Usenet posts, Bab5 is It Can't Happen Here. If I'd seen B5 before teaching Politics in Modern Scifi I'd feel torn about using it; it would be unfair to force undergrads to watch it all in one semester, but I wouldn't want to spoil it for them.

As with Arrested Development, Leonard and I enjoyed the series thoroughly but yearn for what might have been.

Thanks to all the folk who nagged me for years to see Babylon 5, thanks to the Lurker's Guide maintainers, and thanks to Hulu for putting the first two seasons online so I could get into it. Could The Wire be next?

# (1) 28 Dec 2008, 12:09PM: Ludemes: It turns out that the big splurgy Christmas gift Leonard and I are giving each other is a dinner tonight at Per Se, a fancy-dancy restaurant here in New York City. It's run by the same folks who run the French Laundry in Yountville, California. I share his hopes:

Given what happened to Ed Levine when he ate at Per Se after comparing its cost on his weblog to Grey's Papaya (follow-up), I can only hope that I'll be presented with a genius dish based on Pac-Man, or a Beautiful Soup-themed soup. I'll take pictures.

My bit of wisdom: it pays to systematically check OpenTable the week between Christmas & New Year's, especially if there's been a huge economic meltdown causing formerly rich people to cancel their reservations.

In the interim, I've been trying Nintendo Wii games that Leonard got us: World of Goo and Wii Music. No Now You Don't (Player Two), but fun.

Wii Music is like Dance Dance Revolution with virtual instruments and some freeform improvisation. We can accompany "Do Re Mi" with vibraphone, trumpet, jazz drums, and a barking dog suit and somehow the game makes it sound nice; the player just controls when an instrument plays a note, not what note it plays. And we can save a video and watch our Miis nod sagely at each other during their jams. If you think Rock Band is too game-y and doesn't provide enough instruments, try Wii Music.

I enjoy the games and lessons but find them a little frustrating. In the "Pitch Perfect" game, for example, distracting background music makes it a little harder to discern which Mii is playing a wrong note, or which three notes would combine into a certain chord. The last task of each level involves moving players around on a sort of drum machine-style timeline to make them match a certain melody and rhythm, but you don't get any instructions on manipulating the Miis. The handbells game doesn't come with instructions, either. Leonard and I have come to use the word "ludic" as a derogatory epithet for these sorts of frustrations. No instructions? Ten songs are locked until you complete a lesson? It's ludic!

World of Goo is hella ludic. I've now stopped playing twice in frustration, and will probably do so once per island till I finish. You move little balls around to form structures -- bridges, towers, ropes, etc. Was Lemmings like this? Like Tetris or DDR, it gets into your daydreams. I think I woke up this morning thinking about how to shore up a wobbly bridge. Or about my dream that Salon laid me off.

World of Goo is only ten bucks and basically two guys made it. Amazing! Game experts: this is this year's Portal, right?

# (1) 28 Dec 2008, 04:24PM: Square One TV Paean: If you ask geeks what influenced them in their formative years, the responses cluster around some well-known loci: Star Trek, great science teachers and permissive school computer labs, a particular BBS, LEGO, authority figures who let them obsess.

If you ask fans of sketch comedy how they got to love it so much, you hear about Monty Python, SNL, skits with siblings and friends from the same block, camcorders, Mel Brooks, and stuff I'm too much of a philistine to know about.

It turns out a single TV show got to me on both those counts. Square One TV.

When I was in elementary school in Pennsylvania - so I couldn't have been eight yet -- I remember turning on the TV and seeing a girl explaining to detectives that their radius was all wrong. The gorilla could have traveled 30 miles an hour, yes, but only for a few minutes at a time. For longer durations, he only could have gone five miles an hour. She took their compass and drew a new circle on the map, a smaller one, one they could brute-force search or narrow down further with heuristics.

They didn't say it like that, of course. Mathnet (a Dragnet filk with detectives who made heavy use of geometry, algebra, probability, and pattern-matching) explained whatever it needed to, but never with grownup jargon.

I realized that when I found Square One TV clips on YouTube, years after I gave up Square One so I could watch Star Trek: The Next Generation just as religiously. [Obligatory ephemeral links to S1TV clips.] I wince a little watching those old low-budget sketches -- think fake 24 pilot from 1994. But the songs and Mathnet hold up well.

Watching all these old skits reminds me: Others describe S1TV as a sketch comedy show about math. It is! And I didn't realize it until last year because I didn't think about the sketches as much as I thought about Mathnet.

S1TV's sketches were inventive and wacky, with big old filks and parodies and off-the-wall references in every episode. "Angle Dance" parodies a slew of new-wave pop; comedy sketches include an offhand Gettysburg Address quote and an actor suggesting, "I could internalize more." Mathnet was more superficially staid, with its Dragnet procedural plots and dialogue, but check out the over-the-top snobs in Monterey Bay.

My favorite Mathnet story arc, starring ingenue actress Eve Addams in a production of "Anything Went," ended with a five-minute song-and-dance version of the classic parlor scene. My sister and I memorized that song. Audio available here; video seemingly vanished. Listening now, Leonard says the rhymes are ridiculously bad ("rally by/alibi") even by the standards of Broadway musical. So be warned.

Square One TV was wacky. And sometimes it broke the fourth wall, as in asking: "45% of this show is over now. What percentage of it is left to go?" Zany and referential in a way I didn't notice in Sesame Street, because I was too young to catch it. Square One prepped me for Animaniacs.

Sometimes Square One TV was mean, meaner than I expected or expect from a kids' show, which raised the stakes and drew me in. The Mathman segments include a lot of sad endings: Mathman just not thinking long enough before saying yes, or Mathman ranting so much about math use that he ran out of time and got eaten. The sketch "Common Multiple Man" isn't very kind to its title character, and the songs "Less Than Zero" and "Ghost of a Chance" aren't about the loser winning in the end. As a kid, I found "Ghost of a Chance" haunting (ha), partly because I'd expected all along that the pizza delivery guy would triumph.

Happy Dog the Happy Dog would be pleased.

Sometimes the math was hard or uncomfortable! No one explains in the "Oops!" on fractions how you should actually add fractions with dissimilar denominators; the character just demonstrates a mistake and then fixes it. There's a similar moment when someone figures out the area of a triangle. And some questions, like about the percentage of the show remaining, an announcer asks you and doesn't answer.

Most profoundly, sometimes the lesson wasn't just about math, but about assumptions and problem-solving. Mathcourt skits review how people get real-world statistics wrong. In every episode, the Mathnet detectives fail, get stuck, backtrack, estimate, revise (as in the gorilla speed scene). They often play "What Do We Know" to systematically review their situation and come up with new leads. Change Your Point Of View is exemplary in this respect.

It's nice that the show depicted black men and women as architects, Archimedes, a Roman sax player, science teacher Ms. Snodgrass, head of computing Debbie, and so on, although police chief James Earl Jones was probably a no-brainer. And Kate Monday is the female cop providing the missing link between Cagney/Lacey and Dana Scully. She's a sensible, tough but sensitive detective who keeps her kooky partner grounded. Monday's also the reason I want to wear ties with my suits.

I learned about math as a means to an end, about problem-solving as a fluid process, about what kinds of humor I liked, about recursion and breaking the fourth wall. And I learned math too. So awesome. I wish it were all on Hulu or DVD so I could foist it on people, and so Nandini and I could watch it together again.

Filed under: Comedy