My Future Past

Livin' the dream - and only the dream?

2012-01-16T17:16:00.000-05:00

We've all heard of those people who have a tremendous drive to follow their dream, who put a great deal of energy into accomplishing or experiencing a specific thing. We may even know one or two - the olympic athletes, the entrepreneurs who build big businesses from the ground up. It occurred to me today to wonder how well they handle the rest of their lives.

One of the themes of this blog has been that if you put effort into doing things that energize you, you'll have more energy, not less, to put into everything else. And by "everything else" I mean difficult things like the Kafkaesque dealings with faceless bureaucracies, or handling conflicts at work. But is it possible that some people's passions just provide respectable cover to hide from the difficulties of day to day life? It's no mistake that the term "workaholic" was modeled after the word for a chemical addiction: this lifestyle is often an escape, an excuse not to spend time on one's relationships or health or any of a number of other difficult but necessary things. Those things get swept under the rug, using the socially acceptable excuse that work doesn't leave enough time to deal with them.

I have only my own gut feeling to go on, but I'd guess that most of the people who are focused on their dreams sweep little under the rug. But the possibility is there. I could draw an analogy to evolutionary biology: for every successful adaptation, there's a mimic that rides on the coattails of that success. Monarch butterflies are poisonous to their predators, so viceroy butterflies adopted the same coloration pattern to cash in on the predators' aversion without having to go to the trouble of making themselves poisonous. Here, people doing what they love usually deal very well with the problems everyone finds draining, but there are probably always a few workaholics and Olympic athletes who use their visible drive to allow their private lives to be a mess.

Former Cell Phone Alert Panic Syndrome

2012-01-13T17:35:00.000-05:00

BE-DOOT BE-DOOT. BE-DOOT BE-DOOT. That's the default alert sound for one of my old cell phones or PDAs - probably the Palm or iPod Touch. I heard it while I was walking around on a different floor of my office today and I momentarily freaked out. What appointment was I missing???

I get a strange nostalgia when I hear the noises of electronic devices that I don't use anymore.

See also: phantom cell phone vibrate syndrome.

Threaded commenting now available in Blogger

2012-01-12T12:50:00.000-05:00

It was only last year that blogger.com's programmers revamped the comment moderation system, along with the rest of the UI, for those of us who write Blogger blogs. As of yesterday, they've added another great feature for busy blogs: threaded commenting.

You've probably seen threaded comment sections even if you don't know what the term means off the top of your head. Threading allows you to post a comment in reply to another comment, causing your comment to appear indented a bit and positioned below the one you were answering. The old way was just a long chronological list of comments, forcing people to use the text of their comment to address it to a specific topic or fellow commenter. That's fine when there are just a few comments, but after a dozen or so, it gets difficult to keep track of separate sub-conversations. To see what it looks like on this blog, go to the comments on my post "Hello, 2012", where I replied to one of my own comments.

If you write a Blogger blog, the feature may already be up and running on your blog. If you don't see it, click the link above and check the two settings they point out. There may be some issues if you have custom HTML in your template, but if all you've done is customize the layout and options on a standard template like I did, it'll work.

Enjoy the conversation!

Isolation: a big fat metaphor

2012-01-06T17:50:00.000-05:00

I was watching a Browns game the other day and one of the players got a penalty for making a rude gesture. In the NFL, safety equipment and rules almost prevent players from hurting each other, and they definitely proscribe them from expressing themselves. They're isolated. (Unsportsmanlike conduct, my ass. Sports is an emotional activity. If I were down on that field, I'd be swearing the air blue. Until I got a bone broken.)

Your commute to work in a car: ditto. We're in boxes, isolated, held apart by hardware and laws. It's more than a little dehumanizing. I find myself stereotyping and disrespecting my fellow drivers in ways I never would face-to-face. The escalation of safety equipment in modern cars makes you feel invulnerable - my 2004 economy car has eight airbags.

Exception 1: the experience of driving a small convertible. You cannot help but be in touch with your surroundings. A few months ago my wife bought a Miata, and driving it home from Michigan to Cleveland was a revelation. The roar of a semi mere feet from a 2500-lb car is unforgettable. To be honest, it made me feel alive.

Exception 2: the Dutch experiment with removing all signs and markings from the roads of a town. How would you feel about driving around without the safety net of speed limit signs and police cruisers to keep other drivers from endangering you? It turns out that what happened in Holland was that drivers signaled their intentions, made eye contact, and generally watched out for each other and for pedestrians. They negotiated their own rights of way. Nobody got penalties for making rude gestures; there was no system to rebel against. Everybody wants to get where they're going safely, and they made it happen.

(Bonus points: what conclusion am I trying to get you to draw by not telling you the "moral of the story" in this post?)

People learn best what they figure out for themselves

2012-01-05T17:13:00.000-05:00

The title of this post has been a piece of my "working wisdom" for so long that I've forgotten where I picked it up. Many thanks to whatever thoughtful soul told me that in the mists of my past. I know it's true - but why?

An easily understood example comes from the sensory experience of wine tasting. You can be told that "corked" wine (a bad bottle) smells like wet cardboard. Or you can be told that burgundy smells "barnyardy". But you won't really get it until you smell it with your own nose in a wine that really shows it. Many of the common descriptors in wine tasting were a mystery to me until I experienced really clear examples of them.

In teaching, there's a subtle difference between handing out conclusions and letting students draw their own. (I haven't done much teaching, but I spent 12 years in college, so I think I'm qualified to talk about it at least a little.) It's almost sleight of hand, a piece of verbal trickery designed to get people to draw a particular conclusion without saying it outright. Being told, or taught, something directly is like being handed a map with two stars on it. You may see where point A and point B are and how to get from one to the other, but you'll have a tough time making the trip without the map in hand. Experience the trip, though, and the memories of the physical path will be burned into your neural pathways. Your brain will remember the solved problem of how to get from A to B.

In his counseling circles, Parker Palmer makes a distinction between "open, honest" questions and leading questions. In that context, there is no cut-and-dried factual answer, so to lead the learner is to impose your own interpretations and conclusions on their experiences. That would be pernicious enough by itself. But more insidiously, it narrows the field of inquiry, steering the learner away from interpretations that might be helpful.

What do I think about it? I think that when you mentally process a new idea, you have to decide how worthy it is for space in your brain. In the case of received wisdom, when someone else tells you what they learned, you can always make excuses and say you might have come to some other conclusion if you'd been there. As a result, you don't feel a terribly strong need to remember it. With direct experiences, it's harder to rationalize away your own observations. And you remember - because you did the work yourself.

Hello, 2012

2012-01-02T15:35:00.001-05:00

I took a break from posting here at the end of 2011 - my energies were directed elsewhere. I plan to get back to this blog in 2012, and not only that, but my blogging group as well, the Lake Erie Moose Society. I'd like to see more new members; I love talking to our regulars, but it's natural for people to come and go. It helps everyone to have a variety of perspectives, and I always like to meet new people. So I'm going to be a little more proactive in asking my fellow bloggers how Heidi and I can make the meetings more useful and fun, and I'm going to take some steps to bring the group some exposure to new crowds.

Here's to a better year. Onwards and upwards, always.

Albums: two by We Were Promised Jetpacks

2011-11-04T17:30:00.000-04:00

Here I'm going to depart from my usual album review format where I discuss a single album that I've been listening to for years. Instead, I'm going to talk about the new album by We Were Promised Jetpacks, In the Pit of the Stomach, and how it's different from their first, These Four Walls.

Here's the song that got me hooked on the band, Moving Clocks Run Slow from These Four Walls:

The lyrics are catchy nonsense (is it about special relativity?) and the vocals and drums are up front in the mix. The sound is spare, the pace propulsive. It has groove.

I bought the new album because WWPJ played at the Grog Shop on November 1st. Here's Medicine from In the Pit of the Stomach (not a live version):

The sound of this song, and most of the rest of the album, is grander, more epic. The rest of the mix has been brought up alongside the vocals and drums, and there's just more going on. More layered guitars, more effects, everything. It feels like the difference between a live record with four guys making disciplined noise and a studio album where full advantage was taken of the multitracking. Sadly, the new one doesn't play as well against background noise: in my car, I can't hear enough of the detail to really get a feel for the song; instead I want to listen to it on the good stereo at home. The popping, high-dynamic-range songs on Walls never needed that.

In the Pit of the Stomach feels more mature to me than These Four Walls. Maybe this is the sound of a band growing up: graduating from playing in bars to playing in studios. Sadly, they didn't play Moving Clocks Run Slow at the Grog. It was a great show anyway.

Cleveland Beer Week capsule reviews

2011-10-24T19:12:00.001-04:00

Cleveland Beer Week is over. We have now entered Cleveland Water Week. Seriously, that was like running a gauntlet. In chronological order:

My wife attended the opening ceremonies, "Grains Versus Grapes", though I did not. (The link to the main Beer Week page above has the official descriptions of all the events.) It's a simultaneous pairing of food with both beers and wines. Alice reports that there were some flaws with the execution of the event: it wasn't clear that there was both a beer and a Cava served at different stations to start, and nothing was said about the wine and beer for each course until after the course was over. She'd have preferred to know why they were chosen to go with the food.

The next day, Buckeye Beer Engine trucked in a mess of oysters and served them with Rogue beers. The oysters were pretty good and we got flights of Rogue beers on tap, which is a special treat. My wife stayed to watch the Illini play football while I went on the Magic Hat Liquid Hunt. It was a bar crawl with a scavenger-hunt theme. We walked three miles west on Detroit Avenue through the city of Lakewood, stopping at ...um... four bars along the way. It was a little blustery but a good time and I'd never been to any of the bars. The organization at the start of the event left something to be desired - trying to process hundreds of people through an already crowded bar was not the brightest idea. (Why take tickets in the *back room*? Why not the foyer?)

On Tuesday, I had the great privilege of meeting Larry Bell of Bell's Brewery, whose beers I've been drinking since probably before I could do so legally. The occasion was Bell's Eccentric Cafe On Tour, a six course beer and food pairing at the Beer Engine. The food was made by the chef who mans the Touch Suppertruck, and the courses ranged in quality from quite good to sublime. Several of the pairings were very good, and made me see some of Larry's beers in a new way. (I never liked the Oarsman Ale much, but now I appreciate it.) The only hiccup was timing: during one of the intermissions between courses, the Q&A went on too long, and it upset the kitchen's ability to get courses out. The event started at 7 and we didn't get out until after 10:30.

Friday came, and with it an event Alice had missed in previous years: Ales On Rails. Beer is served on a train traveling south to Akron along the Cuyahoga; there's a new beer every half hour and a boxed meal. Our group had a good time, but I'm glad we bought tickets for the cheap car, because we had space to move around. The more "luxurious" cars were prettier but more crowded. In the end, I was disappointed that we couldn't see out: when the train got underway at 6:30, it was almost dark outside.

Finally, on Saturday, we went to Brewzilla. I was on the fence about going because I had heard that in previous years the crowds were intense. I needn't have worried - or perhaps the warning served to reduce my expectations. We had a great time. There were 60 or so tables, each serving samples of four beers; a ticket system for servings kept rampant consumption in check. I discovered some beers I'll definitely be looking for in the future: Liefmanns Cuvee Brut and Goudenband were outstanding. The food was just OK, but I had taken the preemptive step of eating a heap of french fries at happy hour beforehand. Oh, did I mention that before the event I had Bell's Batch 10000 on tap at a local bar? I did.

It was a great week - but not the sort of thing I could do all the time. A friend of mine takes beer week off as vacation every year, and I can see why. Between the main events and all the little side celebrations at local bars, it's a great opportunity to broaden your beer horizons and taste some special offerings.

Fonts and their meanings

2011-10-04T17:21:00.000-04:00

Much has been said about the need for a "sarcasm font". What does a font tell you about the tone of what's written in it, or the personality that chose it? Here's a pictorial guide.

Comic Sans:

Old English:

Copperplate: (note - copperplate is the font on my personal card.)

Courier:

Harlow Solid Italic:

Papyrus: (my company used to have a safety poster about forklifts written in this font. really.)

Showcard Gothic:

Stencil:

Do you have any to add?

Swans at the Beachland Ballroom, 9/23/11

2011-09-27T17:13:00.000-04:00

Swans are a band. I'm somewhat at a loss to describe them in more detail; Allmusic has a lot of words about them at this link here. I'm just sitting here opening and closing my mouth like a fish.

I can't say I wasn't warned. The opening act, Sir Richard Bishop, graciously accepted some applause during his set and muttered, "Swans are gonna **** your faces off." And they did.

Swans' set started out loud. It got difficult to talk over the looped synthesizer, but we didn't see anybody on stage so we weren't sure they were actually playing yet. A guy stepped out and started hammering repetitively on some hanging bells, adding to the noise. And another guy. And another - six total. It was arrhythmic, throbbing, and glorious. It droned.

Drone music is usually soft, like late afternoon in a meadow, or like bread that's fallen into dishwater. Not like this. Swans are to drone music as the Navy's active sonar is to whale speech. Actually that's a very good analogy.

Confetti fluttered down from the cieling of the Ballroom. It had probably been there since New Year's Day, if not longer. Every square inch of my clothing vibrated, including the soles of my shoes. I wouldn't have been surprised to look down and see an outline of dead skin cells on the floor around me. I felt physically lifted up like a puppet on strings. With every follicle on high alert, the sensory overload wiped out all my thoughts and pushed my consciousness into my body. My beer went warm.

God help the poor bastard who was trying to put on a show in the Beachland Tavern in the same building. (It was the Schwartz Brothers. Glen Schwartz was one of the early guitarists for the James Gang, and he's kind of a savant. I figure he either thought the noise was just in his head, or else he went ballistic and preached hellfire from the mic all night.)

Go see Swans. Bring earplugs.

How did they know???

2011-09-26T17:15:00.000-04:00

I regularly caused consternation among the nuns at my Catholic grade school. During one religion class, we were being taught what "AD" and "BC" meant for calendar dates. I raised my hand and asked how the people back then knew what to call it. The teacher reiterated, "it's After Death and Before Christ, Jeffrey. Now moving on..." And I said: no, no, back in 100 BC, how did they know to count the years backwards? Did they know Christ was going to show up in 100 years??

The class erupted, of course. This was a head-scratcher. Nobody really had the presence of mind to tell me that they probably called the years something else back then. I guess it's hard to see out of such an ingrained way of looking at things.

And now I have my answer: over at The Renaissance Mathematicus, thonyc tells us that the use of "AD" started around the year 525, and "BC" came into use in the 1600s. Apparently beforehand, they had numbered the years by the reigns of the popes.

And that's your history lesson for the day.

The Permanent Floating Cocktail Party

2011-09-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

A strange thing has happened in the Cleveland meetup.com scene: there are a dozen or so groups with similar themes throwing large social events practically every day of the week; the same people show up to every single one; and you can't tell them apart. It's like a permanent floating cocktail party.

Author Larry Niven once wrote of a "permanent floating riot club" that developed shortly after the invention of teleportation in a fictional future society. Once any kind of disturbance broke out anywhere in the world, word got out, and immediately thousands of people teleported there to break things and loot the place. It got to the point where there was always a disturbance somewhere, and there was a steady flow of people joining and leaving this flash mob, so it became a full-time riot moving from place to place.

That's kind of what's happening here, but with drinking instead of looting. And the Internet instead of teleportation (which, admit it, is almost as good). Cleveland has a beer group, several wine groups, a spirits group, a happy hour group, a nightlife group, a "social" group, a 20s and 30s group, a 30s and 40s group, a "party connection", etc - this is nowhere near an exhaustive list and I don't mean to single anyone out. My point is that most of them make little or no attempt to differentiate themselves. To further blur any distinctions between them, events are usually cross-posted to multiple groups.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? What should we expect from a meetup group?

The value of meetup.com is that it's a filter: the people who come to meetups are the ones who are open to meeting new people. In contrast, if you just go to a bar here and try to make new friends, you might get suspicious looks and cold shoulders. For the most part, I think that's still true in the Permanent Floating Cocktail Party, though I'm no longer new here so it's hard for me to say from personal experience. Some of my friends, though, have had bad experiences: territorial behavior, gossip, that sort of thing.

And this shows us something interesting: the party has gotten large enough that it's no longer intimate; some people have begun to treat other attendees as though they were random strangers. There's a strange transition that happens when a group gets to a certain size: you sense that you'll never know some of the people in it, so you present a persona, a public face, that establishes a reputation for you among the people that you do know. You start treating people less carefully, because they're just part of the scenery that you're projecting yourself on. That is clearly happening in Cleveland.

My wife fumes with indignation that there's more than one wine group. She takes it as a personal affront that anyone might find hers wanting in some way, and she says that the other groups' themes are feeble. I keep telling her that meetup groups don't really have to have themes, though it's a nice way to bring new people in. What really makes a group a distinct thing is the personality of the organizer, which sets the tone of the group. The organizer determines what kind of behavior is acceptable, what kind of activities will take place, and in general how rigid or freeform the events will be. In the Permanent Floating Cocktail Party, events are very freeform and the organizers make little effort to use the force of their personality to set a tone. That's one thing that my wife does very well, and it sets the group she co-organizes apart from the others.

Most meetup groups, to be clear, don't involve alcohol or parties. They're strongly focused on their themes, like book clubs or exercising or blogging. That's the outsider's view of meetup.com: that it's a way for geeks to find each other and share their obsession in person. The vast majority are small and meet infrequently, and that's what their members want. In that context, these giant themeless social nights are pretty odd.

When it's all said and done, you can go out any night that your schedule is open and have a drink with some strangers who will be willing to chat. The event itself won't have a lot of personality, and you might encounter some high-school-like behavior, but it can be a lot of fun. You never know who you'll meet, and in an unscripted live encounter, anything can happen.

The hatchet man

2011-09-11T19:15:00.000-04:00

This post is fiction. My objective was to bring together three story elements in 500-1000 words.

Harald didn’t recognize the bartenders. He hadn’t been to Newark Airport in over a year but he remembered this bar having long-timers. That might have been too much to hope for in a place full of fungible employees selling disposable distractions to captive audiences most of whom will never return.

Tourists obstructed the place like arterial plaque. He picked a quick path to an empty stool. Down the center of a high countertop for laptops, a philodendron wound between the spindles of a decorative railing. It was real. Somebody must have been working here long enough to keep this plant alive, he thought, unless travelers have been pouring unfinished Guinnesses into its pot.

The low railing provided a symbolic separation from the person across from you, but it wasn’t enough for privacy. It was there to keep a self-entitled road warrior from pushing his laptop straight back into somebody’s fries. Across from Harald, a birdlike man in purple divided his attention between a small spiral notebook, a wrap sandwich, and the contents of his pockets, darting from one to the next without any apparent plan or smoothness of practice but without tension.

“Joe? Joe Calcioni?” Harald tilted his head with the question. When the man’s face came up, Harald was sure, and he extended his hand. “Wow ... Harry ... I haven’t seen you since high school,” he said. A little blood drained from Harald’s face at that. Joe had been a friend of a friend, and that friend had snapped, as males between the ages of 18 and 20 are prone to psychosis. He hadn’t used guns like some action movie revenge fantasy. He had killed like an animal, rabid, with the superhuman strength of rage and an axe from a fire extinguisher kit. Harald had seen his friend that day, through the windows between the office and the hallway, but their eyes had not locked.

There had been a lot of funerals. And no reunions.

Blinking hard, Harald released Joe’s hand. “So, what brings you to Newark? Are you coming or going or just on your way through?” “Going. I live in Philadelphia but I was in New York for work.” “Me too, Trenton. Environmental consulting for the state government. I live in Chicago now.” Harald took a sip of beer and the great purple bird nodded, the heavy contents of his breastpocket swaying from his shoulder like a sling. Joe had always loved baggy clothes. He’d wanted to look like that singer Bryan Adams but lacked the swagger. “A lot of us moved away. I kept track of a few people and they all went to college out of state and never looked back.”

Harald considered that. “My first year in college is pretty hazy. I was, ah, living in a state not conducive to memory. But I met a girl, kind of a modern hippie, a big environmentalist. I like numbers so I went into engineering. You would not believe some of the post-industrial wasteland this state has to heal.” Harald shook his head, and Joe said, “You ever work with Vertical Power?” “Yeah! They had a big layoff last year though, no big new jobs.” Joe pursed his lips and touched each of his pockets. “What?” said Harald. “How do you know Vertical?”

Joe cleared his throat, looking down. “That was my gig. The layoff. I’m with a human resources services firm. Outplacement.” Harald straightened, his eyes widening. “You’re a hatchet man!” He had practically yelled it. “Hey. I come in to patch things up after the cutting’s already been done. My job is triage.”

The two regarded each other. Cuts echoed forwards from the bodies of their friends through the economy and the Earth.

“Maybe we should plan a reunion.”

Science, justice, and living

2011-09-11T11:35:00.000-04:00

I'm a scientist, and as such, I'm a big believer in using evidence and reason to understand the world. But I admit it's not the only way. Our legal system doesn't rely solely on rigid rules, and neither should we in our daily lives.

A recent Ars Technica opinion piece talked about why physicists so often try to speak authoritatively about subjects far from their actual expertise, and come across as jerks in the process. The basic problem is that physicists (and many other technical types) believe that they are experts in the most fundamental, most important kind of knowledge, and in addition they're experts at using logic to defend almost any position. This dovetails nicely with my last post and the comments on it.

One of the points made over and over again by Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness was that it's a mistake to ignore other kinds of knowledge, for example what you might call intuition. Or spiritual knowledge. Or social insight. You get the idea. What makes physicists look like jerks is the implicit value judgement that these sources of information are inherently inferior to the firsthand observational knowledge of the natural world that physics is based on. For many years I was that guy: I couldn't tell you how many times I was called arrogant because I refused to take anything but what I called "facts" seriously. I know now that "facts" excludes a whole lot of truth.

Science and justice:
Our legal system was born out of the historical period when empirical rationalism was the leading theory on how to guide people's actions. That is in contrast to, say, taking theological recommendations as was done in earlier ages. So the justice system and our Constitution were designed to influence our society like an engineer would design road widths to influence the flow of traffic through different areas. For example, we decided that drugs are bad for society, so we outlawed them and put punishments in place for those who use them. It's all theoretically based on cause and effect, though of course some laws are better supported by evidence than others.

But the legal system isn't a machine, impartially reshaping everyone who comes through it. There is a non-rationalistic, non-empirical element built in: the jury. The jury is there to enforce what you might call poetic justice.

Science and living:
What does this have to do with our lives, the choices we make every day? I've always tried to live my life according to principles, making an informed choice about the best way to live and then sticking to those choices. When I learn something new, I revise my choices. It's all very scientific. But I've been thinking lately that it needs an element of poetic justice. A truth other than the factual kind, a truth from my inner life in addition to those from the way I've come to see the rest of the world. My wife has described me as the "king of self-denial", and it's true, I have immense restraint when it comes to doing what I *think* is best as opposed to what I want in the moment. I've never trusted my impulses.

The thing is, I'm now coming to distrust my very scientific informed choices. When I look back, I can see that a lot of them were just retroactive rationalizations for following a subconscious impulse. That impulse might have been to avoid something feared, to approach something desired, or to strike at something hated. But all those impulses were hidden. To make a close analogy, as the Ars piece noted, during training in rhetoric one argues towards defending a predetermined position; this position may not be the one you would choose, or even one you think is right, but its assignment to you was hidden from the audience. The point of the exercise in rhetoric is simply to lay down logical arguments to support it. It's a deeply unscientific, even antiscientific, practice, and I think we do it all the time to defend our actions retroactively. We do what we want, and then afterwards we come up with a story about why we did it.

If we're acting on our desires anyway, why not bring them out of the subconscious and into the light? Why not see our motivations for what they are, and give ourselves a chance to decide which of them to give in to? Our rules for having a good life may say one thing, but our sense of poetic justice--or maybe just poetry--may have something else to say.

The benefit of the doubt

2011-09-06T17:48:00.001-04:00

"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."

You've probably heard that one. Here's a corollary:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can adequately be explained by ignorance."

When you find yourself in a serious disagreement with someone, first give them the facts as you see them. Stick to what you've observed firsthand, not your interpretations or hearsay. You'd be amazed at the people you can find common ground with just by sharing your experiences. Second, if they agree that you saw what you said you saw but they still don't agree with you, silently decide for yourself whether or not they're just dumb. If you think they are a smart person, you may reluctantly conclude that they are malicious.

Now here's the tricky part: do them the favor of turning this procedure around on yourself. Listen to the facts as they see them - carefully restrict them to their own firsthand observations. Give their observations the same weight as your own in your interpretation of events. If after careful consideration of ALL the facts you still disagree with them, then silently decide for yourself whether or not you are just not as smart as they are. If you think you're not dumb, but you can't come to some kind of agreement with them, you might be malicious.

I like to trot this one out during election season, but it never works.

To name something is to begin to kill it

2011-09-05T13:00:00.000-04:00

I have a group of good friends who've gelled over the last several months. Having noticed this, I'm tempted to say to them, hey, we're the somethings - something we have in common - but I'm resisting. To name something is to create expectations for it, set patterns for its evolution, and to limit it.

There's a saying that the vitality of a form of expression is in inverse proportion to the number of books that have been written about it. Think of the difference between hip-hop and rock in the early 1980s. Hip-hop had barely entered the public consciousness--it had only recently been named so people who weren't familiar with it could talk about it--whereas rock had been the subject of hundreds of books. Hip-hop was thriving with its practitioners trying new things practically every week; rock was moribund, more a commercial enterprise than an art form.

What does my group of friends have to do with a couple of musical genres? These things are all communities of people trying new things, all of them creating something in some way, and watching what the others do, to form a larger composition - a genre, a group of friends, a scene, an academic discipline, anything.

To name such a thing is to put the first knife into it. Other blows will follow. There will be an "elevator speech" that those in the know use to describe it to the uninitiated. And there's a little prestige that comes with recognizing a thing that can be named - seeing patterns and showing them to people makes you look smart. After conversations about the new thing, there will be articles, documentaries, books. Those introduced to the thing at each stage will then seek out what they were told this thing is, but what they look for is only what the thing was yesterday. They want the thing to freeze so they can experience it the way they were told it was. With each of these blows, the thing becomes less vital, dies a little. They start at virtually the moment the thing comes into existence.

I want my group of friends to be flexible and adaptible. I want us to be able to let people in and let people go, to try doing things together that we've never done, to find new ways of expressing ourselves and new channels of communication. I'm frankly scared that if I even so much as stand up and announce that we are a group, then even that will limit us. I can live without the pride of claiming that tiny burst of prestige. Maybe I'll just let us be. Just being seems to be working out for us so far.

Blogger's new UI: coming to your dashboard soon

2011-09-01T13:19:00.000-04:00

Blogger is beginning to roll out its new user interface to users, one batch at a time. Previously, the new UI was only available by logging in to Blogger In Draft. I don't see too many differences between the final version and what I originally saw. And of course this doesn't affect the way your blog looks to its visitors, only the way Blogger looks to you when you're writing posts.

Over the last few months I've seen new versions of other Google products, such as Calendar, Docs, and of course Google+. Some I like, some I don't. Overall, Blogger's changes are an improvement, though I do think they went a little crazy with the whitespace.

Two Mazdas. Three, actually.

2011-08-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Alice and I test drove two cars. They were both stick-shift Mazda3 models, but they couldn't have been more different. Or more different from the Mazda3 I already own.

We're looking to trade in Alice's Nissan 350Z (Esmerelda, aka the Bluebird of Happiness, aka the Barbiemobile). On Friday she went to a dealer to test drive a Miata, but the car was sold - to someone in Minnesota - while she was driving there. Miatas are hard to find these days. But there was a loaded stick-shift Mazda3 on the lot, and knowing how much I like mine, she test drove it. Why? It isn't the car she wants long-term, but it would bring our costs down and eventually become my car when she does find what she wants.

That's how we found the first 3. We went back together Saturday to drive it together. This car was a 2010 sedan like the photo above, with every option they offer: dual zone climate control, nav, heated leather, everything. They redesigned the car in 2010, giving it a really goofy grille, but this car is dark gray so it's not obnoxious. I loved it, and I'd be thrilled to have it as my daily driver. But Alice felt conflicted. Its suspension and power just didn't measure up to the 350Z. So we walked away.

We walked next door, to an actual Mazda dealership. Our hope was that they would at least have a new Miata that we could test drive. And--I shouldn't have been surprised--they didn't. But they did have a Mazdaspeed3. This was a 2009 hatchback, pre-redesign, a much better looking car in candy-apple red. Alice drove it and loved the suspension and extra power, but it didn't have any of the luxury features the other car did. If what we bought was eventually going to be my car, the speed3 didn't suit me as much as the 2010, because honestly I don't care about power. And the salesman's starting point of price negotiation was several thousand more than the other car. Almost the sticker price of a new one. We felt insulted.

That's our dilemma. The 2010 has luxury and up-to-date technology throughout, and it's cheaper. The 2009 has all the sporty character Alice wants. The thing is, the speed3 is a boy-toy. Driving a red hatchback wouldn't project the image she wants, so eventually it would be my car, and I'd rather have the other one. So on Monday we're going to go back for the 2010 car. She won't mind driving it for a while, and we'll have more time to find that elusive affordable sporty car.

Happy hour at Momocho

2011-08-20T15:52:00.017-04:00

These Brief Reviews of Brief Meals posts focus on the after-work food available on the near West side of Cleveland.

Momocho is a "mod mex" restaurant and bar; for the year or two I've been coming there, their happy hour has reliably offered one food special: half price taquitos. They're excellent, filling, a bargain, and there are fifteen or twenty kinds to choose from. You can also get margaritas at a reduced price - most recently, the one on special was the traditional recipe. It was predictably excellent, with plenty of lime and not too much sugar. Some margaritas make me feel like I've chugged a rum and Mountain Dew; not this one.

Momocho is chef Eric Williams' main haunt; he's also a partner at the Happy Dog, and you'll see many of his sauces in both places. (This does cause me a little cognitive dissonance.) The bar is bright, lively bordering on the noisy side, and really popular. I once arrived at 5:10PM on a Thursday and couldn't get a seat. The staff is professional and friendly without being intrusive - they've usually got their hands full. The vibe is of groups of people there for some occasion, maybe a rare after-work gathering or starting the night with food before moving on to clubbier venues. Friendly with a dash of nervous laughter.

I've had several of the taquitos offerings (it's a dish of filling, with sauces and tortillas on the side) and never been disappointed. Last week I had the one with ground lamb shoulder; it's supposed to have mint, but that was probably drowned out by the mole sauce. About halfway through, I realized what it reminded me of: the Irish bar classic shepherd's pie. Without the mashed potatoes, of course. Besides that one, I can recommend the machaca and carnitas; I know I've had others, but I can't remember which.

I'm always surprised at how good Momocho is. The cucumber margaritas are a revelation. It's even cheap. And you can't ask for more than that after work.

Infinite Monkeys Post

2011-08-19T14:44:00.000-04:00

Everything in this post, starting after this sentence, was generated by accepting suggestions from Google Scribe; I also used it in my last post.

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This is like automatic paintball painting and surreal imagery. Trying to make sense. Maybe just go with the flow. What will it suggests next? Passenger in a automatic car pretty scary. Cannot type what I want when machining doesn't suggest it, dammit. Feel like a pinball in a machine. Constraints like haiku. Does it add anything to the results? Humor maybe. Enough of this.

Ingredients

2011-08-18T21:55:00.036-04:00

My wife has been accused of viewing a restaurant's menu more as a list of ingredients than as a list of finished dishes. She often asks them to make something special for her. Here's the thing: I'm kind of the same way about technical results. When a coworker gives me a report with some experiments and the conclusions they've drawn, I'm likely to go straight to the data and come up with my own conclusions. Data, of course, are the ingredients of a technical argument.

(I can't help it. All my training and inclinations drive me to take observations and generate abstractions from them. I will not be satisfied with someone else's abstractions if I get a chance to see the data. Trust plays a role here, as does the fact that people learn best what they figure out for themselves. As for Alice, she might order "off the menu" simply out of personal preference, but trust might have something to do with it too. She might look at a menu, see a parade of bad combinations, and simply lose faith in the ability of the kitchen to produce something good without her guidance.)

The work of the chef and the work of the scientist are not so different. I've always said that mine is a creative job. They call us "knowledge workers". We start with the elemental and construct something novel. Ingredients become new forms of sustenance, or new areas of human knowledge.

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I'm writing this post in Blogger In Draft, with the "Google Scribe" feature on. As you type, it offers suggestions on what word you might be in the middle of typing, or might want to type next. It is the strangest damn thing I've ever experienced. It feels like someone is constantly interrupting me, or trying to finish my sentences. I'm tempted to use it to write a blog post about nothing, just by letting it dictate the next word and see what the infinite monkeys produce. They're developing self-driving cars--in fact, Google is part of the effort--next, will we get automatically generated art?

The Blackout Party (it's not what you think)

2011-08-15T17:08:00.020-04:00

Last night I went to a party to commemorate a disaster. On August 14, 2003, the northeastern United States suffered cascading power failures that left tens of millions of people in the dark for days. To the best of my knowledge, no one at our party blacked out.

The restaurant/bar Melt has been holding a Blackout Party every year on that date, turning off the lights and TVs and serving dark beers in the dark. Well, it wasn't very dark at 5PM with the windows open, but it was cozy anyway, and everybody looks better by candlelight. Good thing, because we waited two hours for a table. The company of good friends and the availability of Stone's Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale (yes, they really named it that), made the wait a pleasant one.

I'm surprised to learn now that the power failures initiated in the Cleveland area; I wasn't living here at the time. Apparently trees had grown too close to several important power lines, and when they were asked to carry extra capacity, they came into contact with the trees and failed.

(Here's something sciencey: the extra current the wires were carrying caused them to heat up like resistors, which caused them to expand, in turn causing them to droop, which brought them into contact with the local foliage, which shorted them out to ground. You gotta watch out for thermal expansion.)

Having just spent a hard day hacking back bushes in my yard, I can testify to how much effort it takes to keep Ohio's greenery under control. Still, it sounds like First Energy kind of fell down on the job that day.

Where was I? In August of 2003 I was living in the Chicago area, hard at work renovating our first house. We had frequent power outages, some of them long enough that we became concerned for our elderly neighbors, but we weren't affected by the Big One. Perhaps Chicago had earned immunity eight years earlier with a deadly heat wave. To the best of my knowledge, nobody commemorates that dark week.

Why music?

2011-08-05T17:13:00.002-04:00

When you were a teen, you probably had songs that you listened to over and over, laying in your bed or huddled in the corner wearing headphones. You weren't the only one. Did you ever wonder why music is so popular with young people?

Well, what is our music about? Mostly it isn't about our schoolwork or our jobs, our laughter or our arguments, the safe things that occupy our everyday lives. It's about more ... I think the right word is "intense" ... feelings. Love. Anger. Ecstacy, delirium. Scary stuff, it makes you act in ways you normally wouldn't. I've begun to think that music is our way of getting used to those raw states of mind so we're prepared for them when they happen to us.

Why would we need that? Here's my guess: we are, as a culture, notoriously blind to our own emotional and even physical states. Our minds are swimming with distractions created by consumerism; we're manipulated by advertising and fantasies in our media that are all constructed to maintain this capitalist world. All that outside influence has a toll: we may not have the time and the mental clarity to understand our own bodies and feelings - or we may simply give in to the distractions in order to escape from the hard work of figuring it out. So we're unprepared to deal with lust, territorialism, fear, shame, and all the rest. Music takes all those raw states and presents them safely, as entertainment. Repeated exposure makes the messy stuff less frightening when it hapens to us.

(Want a laugh? When we have these intense feelings, we think: I know what that is - and we start communicating in song lyrics.)

Here's a related thought, about adulthood. I just got over appendicitis, and during the recovery I was repulsed by the idea of having a beer or a glass of wine. Alcohol is about experiencing a different state of mind. When I feel sick, I don't want alcohol, because I'm already away from normal - I want to be normal again. So maybe music functions to familiarize us with the scary aspects of our ordinary state of mind, and alcohol serves to take us away when it gets boring.

I busted a gut

2011-07-29T17:00:00.004-04:00

I am in the process of recovering from a ruptured appendix. After a whirlwind eight-day tour of Michigan, including sleeping in five cities in five nights, I arrived home with a stomachache. Little did I know.

I went to Michigan for a professional conference in Traverse City--ICT2011, which I liveblogged a bit over at my Google+ account except, whoops, I forgot to make most of the posts public--and I took the opportunity to visit family on the way there and back. Let me just say to any employer sending someone to a conference: don't send them alone. When your employee is trying to make technical small talk with strangers in their field, the awkward silences are depressing. Send a coworker along.

My last stop was in Williamston, to help my dear old friend Cat move to Grand Rapids. The task of packing a house she'd lived in for 12 years proved overwhelming, so her boyfriend and I unstuck the gears. I awoke early Sunday morning with a stomachache, which I thought meant I'd eaten a bad burger the night before. I drove home uncomfortable, laid down to rest, and covered myself with a blanket. And ran up a fever. I felt slightly better as the day wore on, and we couldn't decide if I had food poisoning with a possible hernia (a painful spot on my right) or appendicitis. Early Monday morning, I had a crescendo of pain so intense I could only breathe in gasps. We went to the hospital.

They took out my appendix that day, noting that it was perforated before they got to it. That means the bacterial soup inside it had a chance to attack everything else in my gut. The doctor said the outsides of my intestines looked "pretty pissed off". I replied "I can relate".

The day after the operation I was swollen taut with inflamed intestines. I couldn't even stand up straight for fear of the tension bursting my incisions. They hit me with three different antibiotics in the hospital and gave me a fourth to take home. It's Friday and I still can't button my pants, though I did manage a half day of work from home yesterday and another today. Occasionally I get painful cramps that interrupt my ability to concentrate, and of course my digestive tract is not finished rebooting itself, but I hope to be able to return to the office Monday.

Moral of the story: do not mess with rapidly escalating abdominal pain associated with a low fever. Get to a hospital.

Does Google+ solve a problem I don't have?

2011-07-11T12:12:00.002-04:00

I recently joined Google+. Why? Everybody says it's supposed to compete with Facebook, but I like Facebook. Why grind out another profile, track another feed, curate another presence? And how do we know Google+ won't disappear like Google Buzz and Google Wave did, like cigarette butts flicked out of car windows on the information superhighway?

Pros:

I use a lot of Google products (gmail, calendar, docs, blogger, etc). Plus might actually allow me to share/social-ize some of the things I do in those services.
I have an Android phone; see bulletpoint above.
I generally like Google's user interfaces.
Google doesn't rearrange the furniture as often as Facebook, and they never do it with the purpose of catching my privacy settings off-guard like Facebook does.
Google clearly means it this time. Buzz and Wave got a lot of hype, but they felt isolated from the rest of Google. This time, all of Google's UIs are being revamped to be consistent with each other and to be integrated into Google+.
Facebook is successfully becoming what AOL tried to be: a self-contained, closed system, a substitute for the broader Internet. That's not good. I already feel like I'm fighting Facebook, and as this trend continues, it's going to get worse.
Google is actually going to rename my beloved Blogger to make it part of Plus. If I didn't get on board, I'd just feel resentful about it.

Cons:

I now have to decide where to share things. Which service should I put this status/photo/link in? One, or several?
I have to build this network from the ground up, and a lot of the people I enjoy interacting with aren't on it yet.
This is unfortunately not one of Google's better UIs. In my limited time with it so far, I'm finding it pretty counterintuitive. They're trying to reduce clutter by hiding navigation tips, but for a first-time user of a novel service, that's a problem.

So, I'm on the plus bus. We'll see where it goes.