Recent Reads

Two books I recently finished and want to mention:

Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
Ken Kocienda (Picador)

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Mary Norris (Norton)

They have some interesting parallels:

• Neither author is primarily a non-fiction writer, but one writes code and the other is a copyeditor, so the right words in the right places are their craft.
• Both books are indeed about craft. It’s more than a job.
• Both books start out in a way that initially threw me, but later serves as important context.
• Both end with the death of a person in the story, for Kocienda it is Steve Jobs, and for Norris it is a fellow copyeditor at The New Yorker, Lu Burke. 
• Both copyediting and coding, in these stories, are a combination of individual work and, quite importantly, team effort. 
• Both tasks are, on the surface, guided by rules, but yet there is a huge human and creative element in both of these jobs which make them more than a task (thus, craft). 
• I was sad to reach the end of both. 

My favorite chapter in Kocienda’s book was about figuring out the iPhone keyboard, which really was uncharted territory. My favorite chapter in Norris’ was about dashes. I won’t give any spoilers, each book is a journey worth taking. 

One section I will recreate here is Kocienda’s seven items which he uses to describe and summarize the Apple development process (pp. 247-248). I think they work really well for writing, or at least academic writing: it’s craft. Kocienda helpfully includes examples in each item, stories from the previous chapters, I will omit those. 

1. Inspiration, which means thinking big ideas and imagining about what might be possible.
2. Collaboration, which means working together well with other people seeking to combine your complementary strengths.
3. Craft, which means applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better.
4. Diligence, which means doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures.
5. Decisiveness, which means making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate.
6. Taste, which means developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
7. Empathy, which means trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs. [For academic writing, I feel this is about the audience.]

Book Review: Kindred, by Sykes

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, is hands-down the best of books about Neanderthals that I have read, and I’ve read a few. Although Dr. Sykes benefits from having the most recent information, she masterfully deals with that information, contextualizing it wonderfully for the reader in terms of reassessing older work (carbon dating adjustments, early archaeological practices or lack thereof), situating individual sites within the larger picture, trying to understand what hasn’t been found or what didn’t survive over more than 40,000 years ago in the archaeological record, and how what we know would have been lived experience for Neanderthals. If you have any interest in Neanderthals, human evolution, ancient peoples, or archaeology, get this book. 

I have only two minor items that I wish she had engaged with more. One is the extinction of the Neanderthals, which is of course THE big question. She does point out it’s difficult to know exactly, and that, given the dates we have, it isn’t certain that the last Neanderthals were in southern Spain. She also points out how, over their 400,000 year run, they survived many eras of climate change, so reducing their extinction to one item and where that one item is climate change is not a sufficient answer. 

The other item is that I wish she had a few more maps, but specifically for Neanderthal's existence over time with the aforementioned climate change. She does have a fantastic map inside the front flap, and she also has an evolutionary tree inside the back flap. But I find evolutionary trees somewhat lacking and problematic in that the X-axis is, well what is it, really only the Y-axis has a clear unit (time). If similar enough species are meeting, they’re mating. That’s why islands are so interesting for evolution, you don’t meet anyone off-island (I mean like Darwin and the Galapagos, or Hawaii). Geography plays a huge role here. As does time and climate change: early humans move into an area, over millennia the climate changes, a glacier moves between what are now two groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, they no longer meet, and eventually you have Neanderthals and Denisovans (in theory). Evolutionary trees are not the best way to display the information: although they have time they lack geography, and geography is a key component of the story, of the outcomes in the data. 

Overall, it is a great book, and there were two items that particularly interested me. 

Mousterian- and Keilmesser-making Neanderthal knappers lived at the same time, used both Levallois and Discoid for flake production and hunted similar species. Nonetheless, they held totally different ideas on what a biface was, from how it should be made to resharpening methods. Clearly there was a cultural border of some sort, but unpicking whether it was to do with populations who never came into contact, or something more subtle, remains a significant challenge. (p. 117)

Image by Tom Björklund, between pp. 208-209.

To me, especially after reading another great prehistoric humans book on the origin of Indo-European languages, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Dr. David Anthony, strongly suggests not just different cultures, but different languages. 

The other suggests a route to music and rhythm, although this is not a new idea for Neanderthals (for instance with Dr. Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals but also Dr. Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music).

They would have heard how a cobble with good structure calls out when struck; felt with their body the right angle and force to hit a core just so. (p. 136)

Great books, all of them. 

"The Years We Had Contageous Deseases"

What we're going through now is indeed unusual, but only in terms of its scale and scope. We're better prepared to deal with it in terms of health technology than previously (for instance we have ventilators, but not enough in the right places). The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919 is mentioned a lot as an example, but that overlooks the much smaller-scale but yet constant contagious afflictions that affected people and destroyed lives year after year. Before vaccines, antibiotics, and a better understanding of human health, death was more of a presence in many countries compared to today. Remember polio? No? Good, you don't want to.

For a child in the first decade of the new century, 1900-1909, to make a list titled "The Years We Had Contageous Deseases", reminds us of what it was like to some extent. (The quoted child happens to be the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King, from Doubleday, 2019, p. 127)

I'd also recommend The Ghost Map, by Johnson, 2006.

US Maps in R

A really great read (it's a chapter) about the use of maps in R (at least, US maps specifically), from Kieran Healy's Data Visualization. What are you trying to show with your map? What is your data? Is it spatial? Or, maybe it's actually about population, so why is Montana bigger than Connecticut?

There are some great projections, there's the standard geographical one, and the weird "geography squished into population size" one (Figure 7.1, lower left), and the electoral college/population one isn't bad depending on what you are trying to do (Figure 7.1, lower right), although I end up liking the one that makes all the states the same size, each a square (statebins, in section 7.3). (Of course, what is a state? They are not all comparable at all! What is Washington, D.C.? Why not Puerto Rico? Etc.!)

No post about maps is complete without XKCD's heatmap comic and another on map projections, as well as a link to the segment from The West Wing about map projections which everyone should watch.

UK Tabloids and Royalty

Really interesting and depressing comparison of headlines of the Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle (as an American, we have no royal titles, so I'll just label them princesses as in "married to princes" but they have titles and such) and the racism and perhaps classism of the British tabloid press (perhaps it's even intersectional). The point is to show this happens at all, and hey, here it is. Shameful. But what is to be done about it?

"Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters"
Subtitled, Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

Morrowind's Creation

Great read over at Polygon, "Morrowind: An oral history" by Alex Kane (and some great accompanying artwork by Ben Bauchau).

"I like to tell people that if you ever fell through the world in Morrowind, or got stuck on a piece of geometry, that was my fault." -Erik Parker
YES I HAVE DONE THAT - me. (Falling through the world is kind of cool, but you don't want it to happen too often.)

There are a lot of good quotes in there, a nice long piece that is probably best read over a few sessions.

"I’ve worked on games that I will never see again, and I spent years of my life on them. They will never be seen by another human ever again. And that sucks. They just go away, or you can’t play them because you don’t have the console anymore." -Mark Nelson

I haven't worked on any games, but this resonated with me (not because of academic papers) but because this is somewhat of a problem when it comes to video game canon, which is a longer story.

Some MMO/Gaming Blogs, and Leveling

I've run into some gaming blogs and posts I've quite enjoyed recently.

1. 18 Years Later, Why Are People Still Playing Ultima Online? The comments are where the heart of it is, although they go a bit off in the middle, stick with it.

2. Raph Koster's Website, and two of those pages, A UO Postmortem Of Sorts and Popular Posts.

3. The Ancient Gaming Noob, and two of his pages on in-game economies: Yelling and Selling in Waterdeep and, relatedly, Charting the Relative Natures of MMO Economies.

I want to pull a quote from Koster's UO write-up:

We also wanted to get away from levels...

For quite some time, I've felt that leveling is ridiculous. It's a useless, sparkling hamster wheel. In WoW and EQ2, the designers had to come up with ways to deal with it--eventually in EQ2, there was the "mentoring" system, where higher-level characters could mentor down in level to the level of a lower-level character for the purpose of grouping (thus the name mentoring). In ESO currently, they have essentially done away with leveling although it is still very much a part of the game. What I mean is that, your level is meaningless in terms of encounters--everything is, behind the scenes, scaled to max level--and so levels are meaningless for grouping (which itself isn't even needed much of the time). Yes leveling is still relevant for skills and gear, but it's just a shiny carrot.

(Edit: I just caught this post from Koster, Do Levels Suck? Really nice thoughts there.)

So I thought about it, and went back in my mind to the cannon for the mechanics of much of the fantasy-based computer gaming today: AD&D (let's be real here, 1st edition, which wasn't even called "1st edition" at the time since it was the only edition). This is true for single-player, single-player party (like Wizardry or Icewind Dale, or even multi-boxing in an MMO), multiplayer, and MMO scenarios. What was leveling like in D&D?

It totally made sense for players. No, wait, it was also horrifically problematic within the storyline of the game itself. Why?

Because elves. (Blame the elves, poor things.) Remember? They could live for hundreds of years, so in theory they could gain level after level, hundreds of levels beyond the capabilities and lifespans of their original human companions. Thus, the longer-lived races (like elves and dwarves) were level-capped, while short-lived humans had no level caps. This made absolutely no sense within the fantasy world, it was completely and solely because it would lead to 200 year old elves who were also level 200 magic users and would be like demi-gods, and that would imbalance the game. Of course there's a big "if" on that last one: only if DMs allowed it, which they didn't have to. Remember, in D&D1, IIRC in the DM's Guide, there was a paragraph at the back (or maybe the front) saying how these are not rules, they are just guidelines.

So one on hand, the origin of today's leveling (which probably has a history beyond AD&D, and does make some sense within lived experience) is terribly flawed. Yet it could have been dealt with differently (how many people actually played characters forever and would have actually run into level caps?).

And today's leveling has another issue, which is that every level is the same. At higher levels you need more XP, but the things you do give you more XP. It's not exponential, it's just linear.

This is part of a larger discussion in game design about where the skill lies and how to get more skill. Is it like Halo, entirely within the player? Does it mostly lie in the character, like WoW? Is increasing skill dependent on time (levels), or perhaps spending money (pay-to-play)?

I think it could be done differently. They never level up in the other fantasy game canonical source, Tolkien's imaginary worlds, although Gandalf is old and powerful with an intentional connection between age as experience and power as level. Skills could erode over time partially, or parts of them could and other parts could be maintained, or re-learning forgotten skills could come with a discount compared to learning them the first time.

Marshmallows

A great take on the children, restraint, and marshmallows experiment over at Math Babe's blog. She does great work and everyone should learn from her.

Not Ok, Cupid

Regarding the recent Ok Cupid "study", there's a nice piece about both it and the horrible Facebook study you can read over at Kottke. One thing I like is that it essentially discusses the community in which FB posters exist, which is something I found an important and overlooked issue.

"It's not A/B testing. It's just being an asshole."

Silver's "The Signal and the Noise"

There are some errors in Silver's (excellent? interesting? occasionally vexing?) book from a little over a year ago, The Signal and the Noise, about prediction and Bayesian theory. The two I noticed are strange, because they are very basic. (Other people have noticed these errors.)

On page 269, the book says how 20 x 20 is 4,000, when it is actually 400. This is pretty basic. Would Silver make this kind of error? Was he rushed? Did he and the editors miss it? Did someone else ghost write parts of the book? If this error is here, what are the errors that I didn't notice?

There is also an error or two with the arrows-length illusion image on page 367. For one, the description is not clear, and it seems that Silver is describing the illusion in the wrong way (that is, he says the one that appears to be longer appears to be shorter). However I measured the lines of the arrows in my printing, and indeed the one which is supposed to appear longer via the illusion is indeed longer by a millimeter. It looks like a printing error, where the lines may have been the same length, but when the arrow heads were added, they were added compactly to the "will look shorter" line but were not to the "will look longer line". The thickness of the added arrow heads is just enough to throw the whole illustration off. So not only does Silver's description get it wrong, but then the illusion isn't an illusion, one is actually longer than the other.

This really undermines the entire book, since I'm reading it to learn about things I don't know, and if Silver can't get right the things I do know then I know I have no idea if he is getting right all of the material I don't know.

Unrelated to these errors, I did like this review: http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/20/nate-silver-confuses-cause-and-effect-ends-up-defending-corruption/

Reading Links (Mostly Wikileaks)

David Pogue about Corning's Gorilla Glass, very cool. (The odd man out in this listing.)

2600 objects to Anonymous' DDoS'ing in the whole Wikileaks thing.

Glenn Greenwald has some good and accurate coverage of the Wikileaks madness.

• Time magazine's errors
• The actual facts about what has occurred
• And more

The New York Times has a nice piece on European reaction (bemusement and surprise) to the American fuss over Wikileaks.

Honestly I haven't seen any surprises at all from the relatively few leaked documents. It's not like the documents have outed the identity of any undercover CIA agents, that would be the Bush administration who did that.

People and Change (Time)

From Grandin's Fordlandia, p. 224.

[Ford] was twenty-two when, in 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote "the unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit "showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks).

Time is relative! (Yes I mean time of day, not the passing of, but that's relative too.)

The Death of Newspapers

I love a tired out headline! But I have discovered why newspapers are dying, although I don't have robust timeline data and this may not be why readership is declining (but really if you can access it online easier...).

I was reading Lessig's Remix, and he says how newspapers generally get 1/3 of their income from classifieds, and how the market for classifieds has been decimated by Craig's List (ok ok, craigslist). I don't know of many businesses that can withstand losing 1/3 of their income.

Then I also saw this piece in Salon, about the firing of Dan Froomkin from the Washington Post, which was a pretty good explainer about the death of newspapers.

Note that newspapers are not the same thing as journalism. The people who work for newspapers may or may not practice journalism, but the two are not the same thing. Newspapers can suffer financially but that doesn't mean that journalism is dying.

Uncle Alfred in the NYT!

Well, it's not an interview, but he is mentioned up front in a non-lampooning manner in Saturday's column by Maureen Dowd. Cool!

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

The Atlantic Monthly, 1945.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

The Information Future's Past

Recently, Paul Otlet has gotten some press as a forgotten information future pioneer (from 1934, no less), however, I just discovered that he actually wasn't that forgotten. Going through some articles I had used in my dissertation, I discovered Otlet referenced in a 1994 JASIS article by Donald Case, who is referencing a 1992 article by Buckland. 

Case also references a 1964 article in The Atlantic by Martin Greenberger that you simply must read. And, even better The Atlantic has made it available online. How smart is that? (Very.) A snippet, and remember, this is 1964:

The range of application of the information utility extends well beyond the few possibilities that have been sketched. It includes medical-information systems for hospitals and clinics, centralized traffic control for cities and highways, catalogue shopping from a convenience terminal at home, automatic libraries linked to home and office, integrated management-control systems for companies and factories, teaching consoles in the classroom, research consoles in the laboratory, design consoles in the engineering firm, editing consoles in the publishing office, computerized communities.

Wow! Spot-on. Awesome. Apparently this piece did indeed influence later information society embodiments.

Nielsen and Sampling

For years I have heard nothing good about Nielsen's sampling. We have seen recently how Nielsen completely disagrees with Hulu's own numbers. I have seen an industry exec slam Nielsen at a panel. But now I have some idea of why, even if it's from a 1992 book -- Henry Jenkins comes through yet again, in his important Textual Poachers (pp. 29-30).

As Eilieen Meehan (1990) has suggested, despite the myth of popular choice that surrounds them, the Nielsen ratings reflect only a narrowly chosen segment of the television audience--a "commodity audience"--which can be sold to national advertisers and networks, but which reflects neither mass taste nor the taste of an intellectual elite. 

Given the current diversity of channels (in the broader sense, not just "television channel") compared to "the big three" era (poor PBS, never counted), this approach won't work. Is it Nielsen's current approach? I don't know. But it's food for thought.

Hitler DMCA Meme

I will not pretend to be a master of "the Hitler meme" from the movie Downfall, although I have seen a few. This one, from the EFF, is absolutely amazing. You must watch it. All of it. 

There are many amazing lines, here are two:

Screw them. If they don't run Windows, who cares?

and

Those YouTube people are pussies.

The video is, of course, posted on YouTube...

All Your Hovercraft Are Belong To Eels

Sometimes there are things you should know about the internet. Or, the business version. 

Recent Reads

A few fun recent reads, as April draws to a close.

Clay Shirky takes it to some idiots who should know better. This is my favorite kind of piece. I only hope I will never be on the receiving end of one...

TimeWarner may spin off AOL, finally. A strong starting point to the article, by Tim Arango, "an untangling of what many consider one of the worst mergers in American corporate history." Ha! Synergy, take that. I read Nina Munk's Fools Rush In, which was a blast and so, so sad. (Aside, there are actually a lot of books with that title, which explains why all/most of them have subtitles.)

Also, two amusing post by Tycho over at Penny Arcade (post one and post two), bemoaning online discourse, although to use the word is to sully it. (Oh now look I'm writing like Tycho.)

Wait wait, what in the world is that? As I edit this post, there is a tab up above, "Monetize". Posting, Settings, Layout, Monetize. What does Google think this is, 1999?