Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2011 January

# (4) 06 Jan 2011, 02:51PM: After-Action Report: Asheville, North Carolina, is a radiant place to visit. The gorgeous downtown is the most walkable I've ever seen, even a vegetarian can't help but eat very well, and the beer is tremendous. (My tasting notes on the Gouden Carolus: "SO AWESOME".) Havoc Pennington's recent blog post details Asheville's niceness and disadvantages just fine so I won't blubber on. Oh yeah, except that it is fricking weird to so often be the only nonwhite person in the restaurant, and unpleasant to see monuments put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

I stayed with my friend David Forbes, whom I met at Foo Camp. When Southern hospitality meets an Indian-trained guest, you get amusingly recursive apologies. David's big flaws are that he does not like olives or The Dispossessed. Also he is orally and literarily verbose with an appetite for conflict, but those qualities he has turned to his advantage as the lead investigative reporter for the local alt-weekly. A relentless realist, a kind host, a thoughtful writer, and a good friend.

David, here is an incomplete list of the songs you could hear me singing, usually in the shower:

several US Presidential campaign songs from Oscar Brand's CD, especially "Little Know Ye Who's Coming," "Rock-A-Bye Baby (Daddy's A Whig)," "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!," "The Union Wagon," "Grant, Grant, Grant," "Get on a Raft with Taft," "If He's Good Enough For Lindy," "Marching Down to Washington," "Buckle Down With Nixon," "I'm Feeling Good About America," and "Why Not The Best?"
"Down by the Riverside," traditional
"Union Maid," Pete Seeger version
"Banks of Marble," Pete Seeger version
"Tom Cruise Crazy," Jonathan Coulton
"Skullcrusher Mountain," Jonathan Coulton
"Ol' College Try," The Mountain Goats (this is the one you asked me to stop singing as we were walking to dinner because it was too depressing)

Incomplete list of songs I quoted at you at dinners: "Heatseeker Boy," Moxy Früvous; "Everything You Know Is Wrong," Weird Al Yankovic; "Genesis 3:23," The Mountain Goats. That last one is off "The Life Of The World To Come," the Bible-related album I mentioned, but in general Darnielle lurves Bible allusions. That and ultra-vivid psychological and physical descriptions, and melancholy. I also was about to quote at you from Neutral Milk Hotel's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea."

Writers I remember mentioning to you: Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking), Hugo Schwyzer, figleaf, Robin Einhorn. And David Foster Wallace's commencement address with the line "This is water. This is water."

In technology, I mentioned Dreamwidth (the LiveJournal alternative), DonorsChoose, and Firesheep and HTTPS Everywhere.

And thanks again for hosting me. Come up to New York sometime.

# (2) 10 Jan 2011, 11:17AM: What's Obsolete & What's Still True?:

In India the number of institutions and organizations installing computers is growing at a rapid rate. This is a welcome sign. More and more of our workers in factories and offices will now turn the monotonous and routine jobs over to the computer, and thus will be cured of the nervous tension which they suffer unconsciously day in and day out. These workers, thus rendered healthy, will be an asset to the country and will devote themselves to more challenging tasks which need the ingenuity of a human brain.

From Essentials of Computer Programming in FORTRAN IV, Nripendra Nath Biswas (Indian Institute of Science), Radiant Books, Bangalore, India, 1975. Page vii; second paragraph of the preface.

My mother knew FORTRAN; she used it, she tells me, in a night job doing data entry at a nuclear power plant. Her FORTRAN teacher said she was awesome and encouraged her to go into programming fulltime; she declined because she didn't want full-time daytime work, or already had a day job. I wonder how my life would be different if I'd grown up with punchcards.

...Where do we write these statements and how does the computer read them? It is quite obvious that writing these statements on a piece of paper and holding it in front of the computer will not solve the problem. (At least not right now. The computers of future generations will surely acquire this capability.)... -p. 33
Considerable research is under progress to improve the capability of a programming language, so that it can itself correct certain types of errors. Even then it is obvious that a programmer will need a more rigorous knowledge of the language to write a computer program than the knowledge of French that an English speaking tourist needs when shopping in Paris... p. 52

Je voudrais un silver bullet!

Filed under: Work

# (3) 13 Jan 2011, 09:55AM: Do Your Choice! I Have No Job!: Leonard & I are watching Battlestar Galactica from the beginning -- we'd started watching at season 3 while it was airing. Leonard says that the worst sin on BSG is not doing your job. Maybe the reason Saul Tigh is such a drunk is that he's playing a drinking game around the words "job" and "choice." This is not a show about the nature of humanity, or reconciling with enemies. This is a show about diligence under constraint, like Project Runway.

(The "no choice" thing is another sign that this isn't Star Trek, because if it were, William Adama would automatically be the villain.)

This came to a head last night:

What's Adama's least favorite thing at Safeway?
Anything that's President's Choice.

Filed under: Comedy

# 19 Jan 2011, 09:10PM: Least Useful Con Report Ever: Am barely back from Boston. In old newspaper speak, "slugs" were phrases referring to stories, unique identifiers a few words long, just for that day. I have slugs rattling around, stories to be told or written: Grendel's on Sunday with the Mystery Hunt winners, Acetarium, realizing that one is the cool older fan, hearing "O'Reilly books!!" said sarcastically, the opposite of beer goggles, etc.

# (1) 20 Jan 2011, 12:49PM: Clothed For Submissions: At my first WisCon, Ellen Kushner's aid led to a new shirt in my wardrobe. It's dark and velour and has a mild V-neck. Leonard calls it my T'Pol shirt, after the Vulcan from Star Trek Enterprise.

I wore it to Arisia, where Julia and her friends surprised me. I thought the shirt was black, but their color impressions ranged from gunmetal to brown to purple. Julia today in IM said:

your velour top is velour, color uncertain
should we call that color Ellen Kushner Grey?

My immediate response:

Many works of speculative fiction shift raiments to the background of the story. Few put these crucial elements of worldbuilding where they should be: center stage. What clothes will wear us as we change our politics, our culture, our technology, and our way of life? What will be the fabric of our brave new lives?
John Joseph Adams presents a new anthology:
MATERIAL VELOUR, COLOR UNKNOWN
What's inside that magic wardrobe?

[This is a what-if, an imaginary story. Not a real anthology, not even a fake anthology. No, I'm not about to do a sequel to Thoughtcrime Experiments. However it would be hilarious if someone thought this idea were a goer.]

Filed under: Comedy

# (4) 20 Jan 2011, 08:06PM: Listen All Of Y'all It's a Self-Sabotage: We learn from surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations. I recently had a surprise that taught me about my own competence. In response, I wrote a new Geek Feminism post: "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, and tricking yourself".

Then there was the guy who was interviewing me to work at his startup. As we walked, he offhandedly mentioned his current project at his day job: a PHP web app needed to be able to turn user markup into HTML. "And you've already checked whether MediaWiki has something you can grab, right?" I asked. He stopped in his tracks. No, he had not thought of that.
I need to stop assuming that everyone else knows more about the tech than I do.

I also made a RECURSION DINOSAUR graphic, Sarah.

# (1) 22 Jan 2011, 09:18AM: May Already Exist: Variation: Google Platitude. It analyzes your recent SMSes, your emails, and the galvanic response of your skin to choose a cliché relevant to your mental state, and displays that to you and your circle of friends.

"Sandy's current mental location: Once burned, twice shy"

If you turn off Google Platitude out of privacy concerns, it doesn't actually turn off, it just spitefully sets your status to "If you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide".

Filed under: Comedy

# 24 Jan 2011, 11:18AM: Atul Gawande, "Better": I keep recommending in-person that people read Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, so I ought to write about it too. I describe it, tongue-in-cheek, as a secular self-help book. Gawande, Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, This American Life, my ex-boss -- who else gets lyrical about process improvement?

"Process improvement" is such a dry term for it. As Gawande puts it, success and improvement require diligence, ethics, and ingenuity. Mom points out that these match up against three old-school Hindu virtues:

Diligence = karma
Doing Right = dharma
Ingenuity = atma

That last might seem strange except for Gawande's definition. From the introduction:

...ingenuity -- thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflections on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.

This book enraptured me, in my late twenties, thinking about capability and courage, the way I didn't even realize science fiction, procedurals, and competence porn enraptured me as a teen. This is the opposite of ER. As I've mentioned in terms of systems thinking and interpersonal responsibility, I used to think that medicine was about heroics, not hygiene -- godlike individuals with huge responsibilities, not teams, not scientists who are good at changing their minds.

And as I get older, I understand diligence and perseverance better, and have a greater capability for them. I appreciate food or software or prose more when I've tried my hand at making it; I appreciate consistency, stamina, grit more when I've seen them from the inside.

Atul means "a lot" or "very," my mother says. I read aloud several portions of Better to my mother. I read aloud his commencement address on becoming a positive deviant. The book version is better than the speech he spoke.

The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.

And I read aloud to her the incidents Gawande observes so vividly, the moments one person tries to persuade another. A doctor and a patient, a vaccinator and a resister. Mom says the prose is so beautiful it reminds her of Kannada. I liked every case study in Better, but the ones that stick with me described a Karnatakan polio vaccination drive and two cystic fibrosis clinics. They marry "How can I provide for this right thing to be always done?" with Trollope-level interpersonal power struggles.

In a job interview the other day, after the interviewer praised me for a moment of candor, I said, "I'm not an engineer, but I have an engineer's honesty, I hope." What's that Lincoln line that Obama quoted? I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. (Clever playing with "bound," there.) The joke I make about my Indian parents is that it would have been okay for me to turn into a doctor, because a doctor is an engineer of the body. Conversely, then, if engineers are like doctors, then who am I to them? A hospital administrator, a lab director, a nurse, a paramedic, a journal editor, a public health officer, a research assistant, a med school counselor, and Michael Crichton?

Filed under: Reading

# (1) 31 Jan 2011, 12:31AM: The Long And The Short Of It: If you enjoyed Babysitters Club and have more than an hour, Baby-sitters Club The Next Generation #6: Byron and the God of California will reward your readership. It reads like Ann M. Martin, plus profanity and sex.

If you have less time, check out The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window by Rachel Swirsky:

It was then that I knew what she would say next. I wish I could say that my heart felt as immobile as a mountain, that I had always known to suspect the love of a Queen. But my heart drummed, and my mouth went dry, and I felt as if I were falling.

Science, magic, betrayal, gender, a wooden robot, academe, empathy, and change, constant change. This is what speculative fiction can be!

And if you have only a minute, a recent 101-word Anacrusis might be to your taste, on procrastination, linguistic scientist-adventurers, cognitive hazard, or specfic litcrit.

Filed under: Reading