muffinlabs.com

WTFLevel - Unexpected Success

colin — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

A couple of weeks ago, I launched WTFLevel. It was an idea that I originally conceived several years ago, but it took a long time before I got around to building it. Other things came first. A huge chunk of my life is filled with parenting, working for Bandzoogle, taking care of our house, etc. But I always try to push myself to have a creative project of some sort that I can work on in my spare time. And I have a huge list of ridiculous things I'd like to work on someday. Lucky for me, I have an awesome partner who supports my projects, even when they drive her crazy.

When it comes to personal projects, I work on things that will make me happy. Broad appeal is never a big factor for me -- if it was, I wouldn't devote time to reviews of books not worth reviewing, and things like random name generators. The Twitter bots I've written are all bots that I wanted to see, and in the past when people have asked me to write one for them, I have always turned them down.

My biggest problem with personal projects is knowing when to let go. I started coding WTFLevel a couple months ago, and tinkered with it endlessly. I probably didn't spend more than 12 hours actually working on it, spread over a couple of evenings, before it was a fully functional website - basically what it looks like now. But then I spent forever fiddling with the layout, colors, etc, and convincing myself that no one would like it and that the concept was lame.

Eventually I gave myself the goal of launching the site in time for Election Night. The day before the election, I forced myself to stop tinkering and I published the site. I posted about it on Twitter and Facebook, and let my friends know the URL.

I was pretty happy with the response. I got a few hundred visits in the first week, and a lot of positive feedback, which was more than I expected. I was glad to have launched it in time for the election - the swearing levels that night were insanely high - only the shitstorm that was Hurricane Sandy has even gotten close. Traffic dropped off a day or two after the election, and I was satisfied that it had been an interesting project that would probably not get too much more interest.

At the end of that week, when the craze had worn off, I was fiddling with some data, and checking the logs to make sure that a change I had made was working properly, and I noticed that the site was getting traffic. A lot of traffic. After a little poking around I discovered that someone had posted the site to metafilter. That was pretty exciting! It turns out that a friend of mine told another friend, who posted it to metafilter, and after that, things got crazy.

Within a couple of days, WTFLevel was posted on theverge, reddit, a bunch of design-related sites, and the NBC News technology blog. In all, the site has gotten around 20,000 visitors, and a lot of mentions on Twitter. @wtflevel currently has well over 200 followers. The traffic has calmed down again, but I've still been getting hundreds of visits a day.

One of the things that has made me happiest is that someone used the public API I wrote up to make an Android App - not bad!

For some people, this wouldn't be a big deal, but it makes it one of the biggest random projects I've ever worked on. Anyway, I'll continue to fiddle with the site, especially once there's a couple months of data to analyze, but so far I've been really happy with how things have worked out. It feels really good to have something take off like this.

Leaderboards on WTFLevel

colin — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

I added a new feature to WTFlevel.com a couple of days ago -- it now shows leaderboards for the top periods of sustained swearing on Twitter. I've included two types of data here -- the top 6-hour timespans, and the top 24-hour timespans. You can see the rate of swearing for that period, as well as the top words used in that time.

A bit about the top words -- I filter out all the swears from this data since the swearing itself isn't necessarily that interesting -- trying to figure out why people are swearing has a lot more value.

Not too shockingly, they are basically the few biggest events of the last month or so -- the election, Hurricane Sandy, and a bit of the World Series as well.

Here's the hour so far (These times are in US Eastern time BTW):

Time: 10pm - 11pm Nov 6th

Rate: 10.72%

Words: romney obama election stupid white black

Here's the top 6-hour span:

Time: 3am - 9am Nov 7th

Rate: 9.72%

Words: obama president romney school morning black

And here's the top 24-hour span:

Time: 10am Oct 28th - 10am Oct 29th

Rate: 7.5%

Words: tomyfutureson sandy giants hurricane future

Finally, I noticed some people on Twitter complaining that I haven't released the list of swears that WTFlevel searches for. I also noticed people swearing a lot trying to bump the rate on the site. Guess what -- those two things are related! Anyway, I think most people are creative enough to guess the top 10 or so swears in the list.

WTFlevel.com: Real-Time Tracking of Swearing on Twitter

colin — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Today I'm launching WTFlevel.com, a website that tracks the rate and magnitude of swearing on Twitter, and displays the data in real-time with a couple of snazzy dynamic charts. I wanted to launch it in time for the election, and I just made it.

PREDICTION there will be a lot of swearing tomorrow and the next day on Twitter.

I have worked on a number of projects with Twitter - there are a handful of bots that mostly entertain people, and a library devoted to building them, along with a few other random unpublished/discarded projects. Anyway, Twitter can be fairly annoying, and I doubt their API will last in its current form for too much longer, but it's still fun to work with their data.

Over time I noticed that people on Twitter swear a lot. I started wondering - do people swear more online than they do in real life? And could you identify trends or useful information in the rates of cursing on Twitter? WTFLevel.com is an attempt to begin to answer those questions.

Using the Twitter Streaming API, I scan tweets for a collection a swear words and other curse-like expressions. I calculate two values from that data: the rate of tweets which contain swears to those that do not contain swears, and also the magnitude of sweariness in those tweets. For example, a tweet with more swears in it has a higher magnitude than one which only has one swear in it.

For fun, I invented a threat level scale, basically a spoof of the Homeland Security threat level, since the notion of color-coded threat levels hasn't been sufficiently mocked yet.

I also tried to keep in mind the DEFCON system which always gave me chills during my childhood. And of course, who could forget this scene from War Games:

The level is assigned according to the current rate of swearing, with a little math tossed in to predict if the rate is increasing or decreasing. The colored bars displayed on the graph correspond to the levels.

I made a decision when I started the project to only look at tweets that are reported as being in English, and to only look for English swear words. This meant that I couldn't get a really good idea of the global swearing status, but I don't really have the knowledge to implement a decent system for tracking swears in other languages. That said, I am really amazed to see that people swear a lot more what is roughly the evening hours in America.

I expected to see a more constant level of swearing through the day. It's not like there aren't reasons to swear in the morning or something. So while I worked on the website, I spent a little time researching the use of profanity in real life, to get an idea of how it compares to online usage. According to Wikipedia's article on Profanity:

Analyses of recorded conversations reveal that roughly 80–90 spoken words each day – 0.5% to 0.7% of all words – are swear words, with usage varying from between 0% to 3.4%. In comparison, first-person plural pronouns (we, us, our) make up 1% of spoken words.

Over two months of monitoring, I found that about 6.97% of tweets had a swear in them. I need to work out the word count for that, but it would seem to be roughly comparable to this analysis. By the way, the article cited by Wikipedia is fascinating.

But I find it really interesting that there's an evening peak in the data. Since we're measuring the rate here, and not the totals, I expected swearing to be at least somewhat constant -- it didn't seem like there would be a reason for there to be fewer sweary tweets in the morning as opposed to the evening. I need to do a little digging into the data to see if I can figure out if there's anything obvious that can explain what is happening here. I might also change the output a bit -- it's interesting to see the current rate of swearing, but it might also be interesting to know how much higher/lower it is than it usually is for the given time of day.

If you like to follow computer programs on Twitter, you can follow @WTFLevel, and get notifications whenever shit blows up or calms down.

Tweets by @WTFLevel

Technical Notes

If you care about how things like this are implemented, then you can check out the WTFlevel implementation details.

More Amazon Reviews

colin — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

About a year ago, during the Occupy movement, I wrote this post about the different ways that people subvert Amazon reviews for art and humor. Looks like people are still at it, and after Mitt Romney's amazing mention of binders in the second debate of 2012, the reviews piled in for Avery Binders on Amazon.

I am so excited to order this binder! My husband said that I've been doing such a great job of cutting out of work early to serve him meat and potatoes all these years, and he's finally letting me upgrade from a 2-ring without pockets to a binder with 3 rings and two pockets! The pockets excite me the most. I plan to use the left pocket to hold my resume which will highlight my strongest skills which include but are not limited to laughing while eating yogurt. The right pocket will be great for keeping my stash of aspirin, in case of emergencies when I need to hold it between my knees.

For any of you who might be considering, like me, purchasing this binder based on the reviews, let me just point out one glaring omission: While this is a lovely, multi-purpose binder, IT DOES NOT COME WITH WOMEN. Presumably one is expected to find women on one's own, or contact women's groups who are supposedly eager to help stock your empty binder with women.

For a first time buyer like myself, I have to say I would rather have waited until I had accumulated a few women before investing in a binder. Just a little warning for prospective buyers.

I was originally going to rate this only 1 star. You see, I'm a big girl and I can only squeeze about 53% of myself into this binder. But then I decided that I'm not going to worry about the other 47%.

I'm proud to say that I'm in this binder. I've spend 20 years working my way up from Walmart mom to soccer mom, and finally, I've hit the glass ceiling. I'm a binder mom! I highly recommend this binder I'm in, but be aware that if you purchase it, you must be flexible and let me put a ham in the oven by 5. Otherwise, my kids might resort to gun violence.

Awesome. See also here, here, here, here, and here. That's just the first half-dozen results for 'binder' on Amazon -- I'm sure there's more.

A Shucking Disaster

colin — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

I like to joke about the Mitchell Corn Palace, but this is video takes it to a new level.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Chatterbot 0.6.2

colin — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

I just pushed a new release of Chatterbot. The main change is mostly transparent -- I've switched from the old twitter_oauth gem to the much nicer Twitter gem. The old gem was great, but it hasn't been updated in years. The Twitter gem is being actively developed, implements the whole Twitter API, and does a very nice job of it.

This will make it a lot easier to extend Chatterbot with new features, such as checking your followers, sending direct messages, reporting spam, and more. You can get an idea of what you can do by checking out the documentation for the gem, and there's a small example in the 'direct client access' section of the Chatterbot readme.

Speaking of examples and documentation, I also spent some time improving the Chatterbot docs.

I also updated the bot authorization process with a few nice things -- when you are setting up a new bot, the URLs for authorizing Twitter will open up in your browser.

Finally, I added a '-r' option to bots. If you run "botname -r", it will essentially reset the most recent tweet id for your bot to a really high value, so that if your bot hasn't been running for awhile, you don't spam people who interacted with you a month ago. Also handy for debugging and setting up your bot.

Even better RVM and Bundler on Dreamhost

colin — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

So, you have a Dreamhost account, and you want to run a modernish Rack-based application on it. You can do it, but it takes a little work. You don't have root access, and you have to use a few tricks, but it can be done.

I had an old post detailing my setup, but recently something changed on my Dreamhost server, and my setup stopped working. I've fixed things and here's an updated process, as a gist so you can fork it and twiddle if needed. The main thing I needed to change was that I started putting my gems in a vendor/ directory when running bundler. This is the RVM/Bundler setup that I use on to run WhalePail and a few other random project sites. None of them are major sites -- they are very low-traffic -- so if you're looking for a really good production setup, this probably isn't it. Anyway, here's the setup process:

First, setup RVM and use it to install a version of Ruby essentially equal to what is setup on Dreamhost -- 1.8.7 for now. You'll also install bundler here:

Second, in your Gemfile you will need to match the version of Rack currently installed on Dreamhost:

Next, you need to setup your config.ru file along these lines:

Once this is all done, you can install your gems via bundler. I've switched to doing a vendored bundle along these lines:

Finally, if you need to run commands in cron, you might want to do something like this:

Here's the whole gist for your gisty convenience.

Copying Loads of Data with netcat

colin — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Recently I had to setup a shiny new database server at Bandzoogle. We've got a lot of members, with a lot of data, so simply dumping the database, and then reimporting it, is simply not an option, but even if it was, that's a problematic enterprise at best. So, to move the data I used netcat, which is one of the cooler things in the world of UNIX.

According to the homepage:

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.

It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

There's a lot of things you can do with netcat, if you remember that it exists -- which tends to be my problem. Generally I'll struggle along with some hackish method of copying files, instead of remembering that I have this nifty tool available.

Anyway, this time I remembered and gave it a go. Basically, I tar'ed up the content on the old server, sent it over the wire to the new server, and untar'ed it there, but all on the fly, and with netcat in the middle. Here's how it looked.

On the new server, I ran this command:

nc -l 12378 | tar -xvf -

That tells the computer to listen on port 12378 for a connection from another machine, and to pipe any input through tar. Then, I stopped MySQL on my database server, and from /var/lib I ran the following command:

tar -cvf - mysql --exclude="/var/lib/mysql/huge_database" | nc dest_ip_address 12378

The first part of this command is to tar up /var/lib/mysql and dump the output to stdout, but to exclude one particularly large database, which didn't need to be on the new server. The output from tar is piped to netcat, which connects to the listening port 12378 on the destination server, and sends the data over. There was a lot of data, so it took some time, but it was significantly faster than sending it via scp, which is what I would normally do, especially because both of these machines are on their own private network. In fact, if they weren't sitting next to each other, this wouldn't have been an option, because the data transfer is completely unencrypted in this setup.

Anyway, at that point I had my data. I put it in place, checked that the permissions were correct, and before too long I had a nice new database server that was ready for work.

MST3k Joke a Thon

colin — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

via io9, it's a joke from every episode of MST3k. Pretty funny.

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, via email

colin — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

I got an angry email last night, in which I was lectured and told I don't understand something. I was fairly surprised -- I barely get any email, and it tends to be on the polite side when I do get it. It actually hurt my feelings, but I have nice friends and they helped me feel better very quickly, and then I decided to turn it into a blog post, because I'm all about the blogging.

First, some commentary. As mentioned on this blog, I run a Twitter bot which responds to people who mention RoboCop, with the phrase "I'd buy that for a dollar!". In case you haven't seen RoboCop, here's a quick quote from wikipedia, just for context:

RoboCop explores larger themes regarding the media and human nature.

In the Criterion Edition DVD commentary track, executive producer Jon Davison and writer Edward Neumeier both relate the film to the decay of American industry from the 1970s through the early 1980s, with the abandoned "Rust Belt-style" factories that RoboCop and Clarence Boddicker's gang use as hideouts reflecting this concern. Massive unemployment is prevalent, being reported frequently on the news, as is poverty and the crime that results from economic hardship.

It's easy to forget that this was actually a pretty damned good movie with some decent themes behind it.

And here's the phrase in use the film. It's used a total of 3 or 4 times, and this is one of them.

That clip is from the fictional television show It's Not My Problem which shows up several times in the movie. The main character, Bixby Snyder, constantly finds himself surrounded by scantily clad women and being lavished with good fortune and wealth, even though he's a total scumbag loser. "I'd buy that for a dollar" is his ridiculous meaningless catchphrase. Importantly, even though the show is clearly awful, whenever it's on screen, people absolutely love it. It's on in mini-marts, at gas stations, etc, and the characters of the film laugh at it constantly.

So, here's the email I got:

Here is my twitter: (removed)

With all politeness, please ensure that I am never plagued by your annoying fucking bots ever again.

And while I have you, did you even UNDERSTAND Robocop? That it was a goddamn satire? That the whole "I'd buy that for a dollar" thing was a jab at how fucking annoying it is when a character is just a catchphrase that people laugh at mindlessly even though it makes no goddamn sense whatsoever in context? And how people mindlessly repeat that catchprase no matter how stupid or facile or fucking ANNOYING it is?

Because I don't think you did

You are repeating a catchphrase which was conceived entirely to satirize catchphrases.

So in conclusion, tell your stupid goddamn program to leave me the fuck alone and go learn how to properly interpret satire

Hey look, it's a textbook example of the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory":

Actually, until I posted it here, it was an audience of one. It's really an example of the Online disinhibition effect. Even though his Twitter profile has no apparent URLs, he was easy to find. He seems like a very nice person who dabbles in writing film criticism online. And yet he was a total asshole to me. So, it fits the mold of the Internet Fuckwad Theory in general.

First things first. If someone asks to stop receiving tweets from my bots, I do that right away. I got this email on my phone late in the evening, and even though I don't like being treated rudely, I still got out of bed blocked him from receiving tweets right away. As mentioned before, I am sorry if my bots annoy you -- please let me know and you'll never hear from them again. I've maybe gotten a dozen requests like this, and all except for this one have been very polite.

Still, I could have done without the lecturing, especially because it's of dubious value, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of the content. Robocop is a satire of modern society, and if anything, it's more apt now than it was in 1987. My newest fan seems to think it's a satire of the entertainment industry or something like that, but I disagree.

RoboCop takes place in a world of extreme dichotomy. Old Detroit is run down, crime-ridden, a truly awful place, but in many ways an extremely plausible vision of the future. Most people are poor and struggling, but the minority with wealth and power (the management of OCP in the film) are doing great. They have flashy cars, expensive clothes, they snort cocaine and party all night long.

There is a plan to replace the entire city, with a corporate-run, utopian "Delta City". It's pretty clear that the corporations will benefit and everyone else will be screwed. And this is the frame through which we see It's Not My Problem -- the show is force-fed entertainment that targets the lowest common denominator. The fact that the phase "I'd buy that for a dollar" is nonsense is actually critical to RoboCop -- if it made sense, then the underlying decay of society portrayed in the film would not be nearly as obvious. My new friend seems to miss that.

Futhermore, television has other roles in RoboCop. Alex Murphy (the cop who is turned into RoboCop) also has a catch phrase and several affectations he borrowed from his son's favorite television cop drama. There's a number of advertisements for products all crazy in some way or another. Frankly, viewers of the film are bombarded with the obvious importance of television and media to the overall structure of the film.

So, back to the criticism of the bot. I'm told that "You are repeating a catchphrase which was conceived entirely to satirize catchphrases," and that I need to "learn how to properly interpret satire". I disagree, and here's why.

This is a bot that has tweeted over 265,000 times in 2+ years. It tweets the SAME PHRASE EVERY TIME. Almost by definition, the output is nonsensical.

Now, let me ask a quick question. Have you signed up to Twitter recently? When you do, you're presented with a list of people that Twitter thinks you should follow. Today, this list looks like this:

That's the top of the list, which frankly is the cream of the crop. After all, there is a President on it. But the next page or two is full of Kardashians, a Bieber, lousy comedians, and stars from MTV shows. Twitter wants me to follow Jose Canseco, who is mostly famous for steroid abuse and not making any sense on Twitter. For the longest time, Twitter tried to convince me to follow Chris Brown. You know what Twitter? Fuck you, I don't follow bullies. They want me to follow Deepak Chopra, whose primary skills on Twitter are plugging his new books and outputting total crap like "Established in Being, perform action."

Currently trending on Twitter at the time of this post: 'NoPantyDay'. Every couple of days, there's a fake 'RIP random celebrity' trend. It's all bullshit.

99% of the content on Twitter is total garbage. It has no intrinsic value. Twitter is the place where celebrities (or their handlers) tweet about their new products and how awesome their lives are. Are there good things about Twitter? Of course, but they're getting harder to find.

So, given the lack of worth in what Twitter is actually offering, does it make @for_a_dollar seem a little different? Maybe almost... satirical?

I've never stated as much, but if anything, @for_a_dollar is intended as a piece of art. I leave it to you to decode the meaning.

Operation Umanaq

colin — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews that I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" – This time, it's Operation Umanaq – a sci-fi spy novel written by John Rankine and published in 1973.

The web is a little light on information about John Rankine. In fact, although he has a Wikipedia page, it says "We know little of his life until 1966" at which point he was almost 50 years old. I think he's still alive incidentally. There is some information on this website, which I think is an ebook publisher run by his son. There's a few PDFs of articles and some details about his writing process, but no book reviews or anything like that.

Incidentally, this website is giving me serious flashbacks to 1999. It's crazy dated, AND YET IT HAS A QR CODE. That's savvy!

Rankine was a teacher and headmaster for many years, and he has written a bunch of novels. He apparently has some fame for writing a bunch of novelizations of the TV show Space: 1999, although I can't find any reviews of them.

Speaking of reviews, there's essentially no information about Operation Umanaq available online. I haven't found a single review, so I guess this will be the first -- which basically makes it extremely qualified for the Books Not Worth Reviewing series.

There are a couple copies of the cover on Flickr, through which I discovered that people collect scifi pulp novels and post copies of their covers online. There's actually a little conflict on that Flickr page -- a commenter claims that the book was illustrated by Dean Ellis. However, other sources list Vincent DiFate as the illustrator.

Here's the summary from the back of the book:

After near bisection at the delicate hand of his ex-girlfriend and an all-stations call from the head of his own security unit labelling him an outlaw, Mark Chevron was a two-time loser. And he had a tenuous line on the biggest operation ever mounted on the face of the Earth, with every man's hand turned against him.

Crossing two continents and reaching deep into the permafrost of the Polar Scientific Complex, he is thrown into the middle of a war waged with one of the strangest weapons in man's history - ICE!

Even though there aren't any reviews of his books to be found online, you can purchase some of them as ebooks, so you can actually buy a copy of Operation Umanaq and read it on your favorite device.

Not that anyone would even wonder before they read the book, but Uummannaq is in Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle. And here's an interesting fact:

In 1972, Uummannaq came to the world's attention when hunters found the best preserved human reamins ever discovered in North America. The "Greenland Mummies" were found at an abandoned settlement called Qilakitsoq, and have been dated to about A.D. 1475 ± 50 years. A six-month-old baby, a four-year-old boy and six women were found in a remarkable state of preservation, having been protected by an overhanging rock. They were mummified by the very dry, constantly sub-zero temperatures. Found with the bodies were 78 articles of clothing, most of them sewed from sealskin. The Intestines of one of the women contained meat, plant remains, and pollen (grasses, dwarf birch, white arctic bell-heather, crowberry, willow, mountain sorrel), plus some wood fragments, and lice.

Operation Umanaq was published in 1973, so perhaps the name had more value at the time.

This book is pulpy, full of typos, has a lot of weird obscure words, and is often formulaic, but at points I found myself really enjoying it.

I found my copy in Raven Books in Northampton, MA, after a week or so of rain. They had fans running everywhere, and it was pretty smelly. I was checking out the pulp books, mostly encased in plastic bags -- a reminder that people collect and treasure these things, even if it has been completely forgotten by the rest of the world. This book caught my eye -- mostly because of the word 'bisection' on the back cover.

Here's a quick synopsis of the setting: It's the 24th century. Earth is still locked in a Cold War, but the players have changed. The planet is divided into two general governments, simply referred to as the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Seemingly the Northern Hemisphere are the 'good guys', and the Southern, based out of Brazil, is evil. But there's really nothing to differentiate them in the book, and the characters aren't blind to this. There are some vague references to the North having more freedom -- and maybe this is true -- but it's not really a factor in the book, and is mentioned only in passing.

The conflict between the two powers has been quiet for years, and "there was even a standing conference on a total amalgamation which would unify the planet for the first time in its history."

One of the few areas where the two sides work together is on 'environmental control'. The Earth has a network of satellites orbiting over both hemispheres, monitoring the weather and temperature of the planet, in order to make things nice for everyone. However, Earth is no paradise -- "Environmental control only made it possible for more human beings to live, under stress." And although things have likely improved over the centuries, they aren't perfect. "The good life was as illusionary as it had ever been. Man lechered after the unattainable. But then if he stopped doing that he would be nothing at all."

Apparently the main environmental concern in the 24th century is global cooling -- there are two 'Polar Scientific Stations', one at each pole, with the job of checking ice levels, and making sure it doesn't get too high by releasing heat with their 'atomic generator plants'.

In the 1970s, people really did worry about global cooling, and plenty of people mention this now as a way to discredit people who worry about global warming. Today the thought of a world trapped in a cold war, and so worried about global cooling that they have nuclear reactors melting the ice caps seems quaint, and pretty hilarious.

As the story opens, Mark Chevron wakes up to an alarm on Satellite N5, a Northern Hemisphere weather satellite orbiting above the 5th parallel. We quickly learn pretty much everything there is to know about him in a few short paragraphs:

Also the bitter question mark was still there. As an assignment for a top rank operator, this mission did not jell. Somebody in the higher echelons had looked over the record of his last mission and judged he needed a rest. "What shall we do with Chevron, then? Post him to a satellite. Even a genius at it can't louse up anything in a satellite."

Facing the door, he was checked again by his own reflection on the inside of his plexiglass faceplate: high forehead, short-cropped brown hair, gray-flecked eyes, unsmiling -- a hard, sardonic face when you got right down to it."

Chevron is a spy who bungled his last mission, and has been sent off to this satellite for some unknown reason. Later, we learn a little more about the betrayal at the core of his last mission:

Chevron felt the line of the fresh scar that crossed from his right shoulder to his left hip as though it had been drawn again with a hot knife. Maybe the department had a case. It had been a failure in concentration that had allowed the opposition to get so close. He had been sidetracked by a personal involvement that he should not have had... he could see the tableau as it had been, with the Iranian girl Paula kneeling by his open case... Mark Chevron, one of the half-dozen top operators in the department, had been taken for a ride by a smooth brown houri hardly out of high school...

She shoots him with a laser, and he would've died except another agent popped in and "bisected her forehead with a single clinical shot." One near-bisection and one actual bisection within moments! Ew. This sort of mistake is the kind that people in Chevron's profession aren't allowed to make. "God, he must have been simpleminded. It would not happen again. But then it should not have happened at all."

Incidentally, this book has a lot of odd word choices. Some of it is because Rankine is British, and uses the occasional odd Anglicism. But some of it is just bizarre. A lot of people are bisected, or nearly bisected, by lasers in this book. Get used to it.

The crew of the satellite is directed to meet for an important announcement, so Chevron puts on his spacesuit and floats over to the "operations globe" -- somewhat hilariously, the station is apparently built like one of those California high schools where you have to go outside to do anything. IN SPACE.

The meeting is to inform everyone that crew member Lois Martinez has killed herself -- and this is the second suicide in a month. Naturally, she was a beautiful woman, so Chevron is sad about it. The station manager is disturbed by the multiple deaths, and no one can really understand why it is happening, so he basically puts everyone on the suicide watch buddy system. Chevron is paired up with Jack Beukes, whom he finds annoying almost immediately. Beukes mentions to Chevron that he has been touring all of the weather satellites, and has noticed an extremely high number of suicides and accidental deaths.

After a little chit-chat, Chevron decides that he has had enough of Beukes, so he sneaks into the shower, pulls out his secret spy phone, and calls the home office to request a transfer. A couple hours later, he is on a rocket to Accra, but not without first sneakily obtaining the suicide victims diary so he can inspect it for clues later. Naturally he reads an entry about himself -- "A solitary man. Stands back. But if he did let himself go, he'd be terrific."

Chevron spends some time surfing on the beach while he waits to meet with his local contact Poldano. Unfortunately, as he leaves the water, he sees some police carrying a stretcher -- and the murdered body of Poldano is on it!

Chevron decides that the murder of his contact is a feint by the Southern Hemisphere to draw attention from some sort of devious plan they have. He wonders if they want to do something at the North Pole, but discards the idea, and decides to break into Poldano's house to see what's up. Once inside, he befriends Zakayo, Poldano's long-time servant. He tells Chevron that Poldano was concerned about the potential onset of another ice age, and that he had been researching the possibility.

Chevron searches the house to see if he can learn anything, and he disturbs an intruder in the process. But, as he captures the intruder he gets a bit of a surprise, and we get to read one of many points in the novel where someone's thought process is described as if their brain was a computer:

Data acquisition network went into overload. Fine silky hair was brushing his chin. SKin was marble smooth. Elasticity factors were all wrong for a male subject. The startled "oh" choked off by his hand was in the alto register. He had gotten himself a female and a taut and nubile one at that.

This is Anne Riley, co-worker and lover of Poldano. Chevron interrogates her, and is brutal -- bluntly revealing that Poldano is dead (she had no idea). He knows that he is being awful -- knowing that he did it just to hurt someone, and thinking of himself as "the louse of all time". The interrogation is brief however, as a trio of Southern Hemisphere agents sneaks into the house. They kidnap Anne, although Chevron and Zakayo manage to kill two of them.

Chevron quickly gives up on recovering Anne, but decides to check out the diving club in Accra, because Poldano was a member. This part of the book is straight out of a James Bond story. Chevron and Zakayo have a drink in the bar and watch the fancy boats in the nearby marina, crawling with scantily clad women.

Chevron realizes that the club is a perfect place to operate an evil enterprise -- it's private and has decent security. Poldano was probably on the scent and that's why he was killed. He realizes that Anne is probably there, about the be interrogated, and when they are done "she could be towed out and dumped in the sea, where piranha would do an identity erasure job at no charge."

In the marina outside the club, he knocks someone out, steals their diving gear, and uses it to swim into the underwater entrance of the club. When he's inside, he just happens to find Anne Riley in her underwear, tied up and stashed in a locker.

Anne and Chevron escape back through the water (luckily Anne was a member of the club and has some diving gear, including a "virginal white" diving suit), and then the trio steal a boat. Anne is a little slow, so Chevron angrily tells her "This is no time to sit on your elegant can" -- the first of many references to can-like posteriors in the book.

The escape is classic James Bond -- they steal a boat, then leapfrog to a bigger and faster boat. Their pursuers are closing in! Luckily there's a channel that all the boats need to go through, and Chevron is able to close its gate and fuse it closed just in time.

They float aimlessly in the ocean for a while, plotting their next move. Chevron continues to be rude to Anne, and she throws a small statue -- one that she had retrieved from Poldano's house -- at his head. A secret recording starts playing! It's Poldano! Very Princess Leia -- EXCEPT THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED IN 1973!!! YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS!

Anyway, the message is from Poldano for Anne, and it tells her that she should try and meet up with Chevron, and gives some hints for him to track down whatever mysterious issue he was researching. It mentions Beukes -- the person Chevron dealt with in the beginning of the story. And then it blows up!

At this point, Chevron decides that they need to abandon the boat before someone comes looking for them. They get to shore in a raft -- which is smart, because shortly after they get off the boat, a flotilla comes along and destroys it.

Rowing the boat to the shore takes all night, and they nearly drown coming ashore. Then they make their way to a cousin of Zakayo. The team borrows a hovercar from him, and just in time -- as they are flying away, they see the police knocking on the door of every house in the neighborhood. So, they are definitely on the run. Not only are they being pursued by the Southern Hemisphere, but since Chevron has 'gone solo', he suspects that he is in trouble with the North too.

At this point we are introduced to Henry Wagener, who basically runs the Northern Hemisphere spy agency -- so he is Chevron's boss. We also meet Raquel Cunliffe, who wriggles her "neat can" on her chair while she complains about how dour Wagener is to her coworker.

Wagener is worried that the South is up to something. He has Raquel reporting to him with all incoming meteorological reports - and they all report that temperatures are dropping. Also, twenty agents have been killed, and there have been a lot of mysterious deaths on the weather satellites. He's being outmaneuvered by his opponents and he knows it.

Meanwhile, Chevron and the gang are in Bathurst, and have been spotted by Cassidy, the local Northern agent, who contacts Wagener and is ordered to keep an eye on him -- but mostly because Wagener assumes Chevron is tracking down a lead. Cassidy maneuvers them into a desert safari -- this makes sense to Chevron, because it's a way to lay low for awhile. There's a classic "inform the reader" scene here, where we learn about the possibility of another ice age. They can't figure out why the South would do this, and they're basically right -- it doesn't make a lot of sense, as the whole world would suffer from another ice age, even if it was worse in the North. There's some curious tension between Chevron and Anne as he reads an article about albedo:

Chevron felt an electrical tingle in the back of his head. For a brief spell, he had a clear picture of her face within centimeters of his left ear. A twist and a heave and he could bring her round across his knees... With an effort which gave an edge to his voice, he closed that avenue to one of many possible futures and said "I know what albedo is. I want to know what Poldano was interested." ... (Anne verbally spars with him) ... Chevron toyed with the idea that he might yet bring her across his lap and see how she reacted to having her neat can whacked.

Meanwhile, Wagener is kidnapped as he leaves his office and replaced with a body double! Not only that, but the security system is based on reading the brain's electrical patterns and 'physiometric patterns', but the Southern double of him has somehow trained to match his brain waves. Wagener is holed up in a nearby hospital, likely to be tortured and have his brain read by a special scanner, and his body double is running the show.

On the safari, Anne and Chevron observe Cassidy using his spy phone as he tries to contact Wagener -- so they know that he is a spy, although Chevron doesn't know which side he is on. Of course Cassidy doesn't realize it, but he's talking to the body-double Wagener, who orders him to eliminate Chevron. Wagener II is pretty happy with how the operation is going -- it will set the north back a millennium.

Cassidy convinces the trio to take a ride in one of the safari's hover cars to consider where they want to go next. They park the car and walk away to a shack for a bit, but that's a big mistake, because Cassidy has programmed it to take off and leave them there! Even worse, it is armed with guns, and once in the air, it starts shooting at them. They take cover, which is just as well because a giant sandstorm is coming in! They're left behind, stranded in the middle of the desert.

Back at Northern Hemisphere spy headquarters, Raquel can tell that there is something wrong with Wagener-- even if the computers cannot. She complains about this to her flirtatious coworker Andy Stafford, who tells her to sit down and tell him everything, "if you can sit in that without making little dents in your alabaster can." She tells him that she is convinced that something is wrong with Wagener, and that it might not even be him. Stafford agrees to dig around a bit. Later, Wagener II calls Raquel into his office to ask about Stafford:

"We're just good friends." Wagener lifted his eyes from his desktop. She got a hard look, but it was no transparency maker, Whatever anybody said, there was something different about the man. Although Wagener had never made an overt pass on the sex side, she knew that he had been aware of her as an erotic object and that he knew she knew and that she knew he knew she knew.

THAT IS REALLY IN THE BOOK

Wagener I wakes up to listen in on some more details of the plan while his captors think he is sleeping. "In a few days now we shall be able to withdraw and nothing they can do will protect them from the greatest catastrophe any civilization has ever suffered, And without casualties on our side. It is a stroke of genius... Nothing can stop us now. I am expecting the signal any day that the polar station has been destroyed. Then we can pull out."

Against all odds, Chevron and pals survive a few days in the desert and manage to find a road, where they are rescued by an archaeological team. In the town of Ghat, they try and rent a car, and Chevron recognizes someone. "Chevron's computer punched out the identification. It was Jack Beukes and no other." Chevron captures him and confirms that he is a spy for Southern Hemisphere Intelligence, and the name of the South's evil plan is finally revealed: "Operation Umanaq". Chevron calls Wagener to fill him in on the details -- obviously not knowing that he is talking to Wagener II -- but Raquel listens in on the conversation, and warns him to be careful, and tells him basically that Wagener isn't trustworthy.

When Wagener II gets the call, he leaves the office immediately, and Stafford follows him, and he discovers Wagener I in the process -- so Raquel was right!

The trio plan a trip to Greenland to visit the Polar Scientific Complex. They make it easily -- almost too easy after everything that has happened. When they get there, they see the sign for Umanaq General Hospital, and since the bad guys seem to be working via the medical system, Chevron gets philosophical:

He said soberly, "That's it, then. The very heart of the enterprise. A brief stop at the hostel for maintenance and we'll take a look at it. Our boat swims freely in the stream and current of this affair."

And as it happens, they're told that they need to present themselves at the hospital for a quick checkup. Anne claims that the Doctor (with a great name -- Fabiola Dent) is a 'biomech' -- so sort of cybernetic human, with a partially mechanical body. Anne and Zakayo both have extremely brief visits with the doctor that involve getting vaccinations that they are pretty sure they don't need. Chevron is skeptical, so he manages to elude the vaccination by hiding a metal plaque under his shirt -- the robotic doctor jabs him there and doesn't notice a thing.

And it's lucky for him, because the vaccination was actually some sort of drug that makes you suicidal! This is the drug that the Southern Hemisphere gave to anyone who detected their plans. Unfortunately, Zakayo stabs himself to death, but Chevron gets to Anne in time, and gives her a nice big kiss to help convince her to stay alive.

He dashes off to confront the head Southern spy. It's a classic spy novel deal. The spy is Dr. Franz Orman, medical director of the Polar Station, and he has a lavish office staffed by nurses in sexy outfits. They get into a fight almost immediately, and Orman has a cybernetic leg that gives him an advantage. They have the classic banter you usually see between villain and hero. Orman tells Chevron that it's too late, and reveals how they've managed things -- the reactors that are supposed to keep the ice levels low aren't operating at full strength, because another spy has managed to set the dials off by twenty percent. So basically, there's going to be an ice age because no one bothered to double-check the thermometer.

Chevron breaks Orman's neck -- but the leg has enough autonomy to move the body so it can keep fighting Chevron -- eeps.

Then, he's off on a running fight through the complex, that involves several bisections of people by laser blast, a fight with a dead spy powered by his cybernetic leg, and a final standoff in the control room of the power station, where a rescued Wagener saves the day just in time by calling in a team of commandos. Chevron passes out (he was shot and injured at some point), and he wakes up in the hospital with Anne at his side. There's talk of him getting a medal for saving the day, and him and Anne are clearly in love.

However, it's not exactly a happy ending. First, it's possible that the North still might have an ice age, or at least some catastrophic weather. And even if it was stopped in time, the Southern Hemisphere was basically willing to make the world uninhabitable in order to 'win'. It's never made clear that their plan to freeze the North wouldn't plunge the entire world into an Ice Age. Basically, it's just a new and interesting form of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Furthermore, you'd have to imagine that after something like this, there would be an actual shooting war, and probably a bad one. The South displayed complete willingness to utterly destroy the Northern Hemisphere, all while pretending to negotiate a peace.

And the North has been completely infiltrated by Southern spies. What sort of security measures will need to be taken to clean them out, and what sort of paranoia will be left behind? And should we assume that the North has also infiltrated the South to the same extent?

There's a point in the middle of the book, while the trio are escaping Accra, where they witness a peaceful, idyllic courtyard. "There was an air of permanence and peace. It was a far remove from the frenetic activity that kept the two hemispheres in their delicate political balance." Anne sees this, and realizes that the Southern Hemisphere is probably much the same, and she wonders why there's any conflict at all. Mark answers her:

She got a reply which she could have given herself. "Aggression is a deep-seated urge. You don't have to be frustrated to have it. However much the historians and the political boys rationalize it with labels, causes one-to-five and all that cock, it's there all the time in the subconscious. If Northern and Southern Hem didn't exist, people would just invent something else. Maybe its healthier the way it is. They can go into a ritual dance every now and then and feel threatened. The only casualties are people like Poldano. So long as it stays that way I guess we have a useful function."

So while the immediate threat is seemingly defused, or at least minimized, and at least Anne and Mark are together, I wouldn't say that this book has a happy ending. In fact, from the point that Wagener commandos arrive to save the day, there's only about 100 words until the end of the book -- so there's barely any ending at all. And the eternal conflict is nowhere close to ending.

Mister Rogers Remixed

colin — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wasn't sure I'd like this, but after watching it, I LOVE IT.

The Current State of Bots on Twitter

colin — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Summary: I did some research into Twitter's policies toward bots, and how they are actually treating them. If you are planning on making a bot that does a keyword search and responds to the tweets it finds, you should probably look for something else to do with your time.

Over the couple months, it's become clear the Twitter has changed their standards to be more strict about on their system. This isn't really too shocking, given their migration from an open network with active community development to a walled garden full of celebrities and promoted tweets. As they have grown, Twitter has adopted a largely unfriendly attitude toward 3rd-party developers.

I don't even intend for anything I write here to sound like a complaint. It's obviously Twitter's right to prevent or allow whatever content they like, and frankly I don't really care. I've really enjoyed writing bots for Twitter, and I love that many people have gotten laughs out of them. I've never made a dime off the work I've done and I never intended to. I've been contacted in the past about writing bots to promote an assortment of products, and I always said no, because that struck me as a form of spam.

For some reason, none of my bots have been disabled, which suggests either that Twitter isn't doing a good job of blocking bots (unlikely), or, that I've done an okay job of not being too offensive or spammish. I hope that's the case.

Anyway, I spent a little time digging through their terms of service to see if I could get some specific details on what is and isn't allowed.

The classic structure for many of the funny bots on Twitter, including my own, is very straightforward: Search the public stream for a keyword or phrase, and when you find it, reply with whatever it is you want to say. It's basic, and it's been around for a long time.

I've heard from a number of users of chatterbot, as well as people with other bots, that Twitter is almost immediately disabling bots that follow this pattern.

I did some research to determine if there is a specific policy change on the part of Twitter to block these bots. First, I reviewed their Automation Rules and Best Practices. They state:

The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature. If you are automatically sending @reply messages or Mentions to many users, the recipients must request or approve this action in advance. For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted.

I was a little surprised to read this, because I know that there have been bots replying to keyword searches for years. However, this rule has been in place at least since 2010, if not longer. According to this May 2011 Wired article:

Twitter relies primarily on human intuition—on people reporting spam via the user pages of the bogus accounts or by direct messages to @spam. Those actions alert Harvey’s nine-person antispam team to investigate the accounts and, if need be, retire the offending bot.

I strongly doubt that this is their current setup. There's no way that Twitter isn't employing some sort of automated system for shutting down spammers. Anyway, what I think this article suggests is that bots are okay -- unless someone is annoyed by them. So, if I had to guess, I would say that Twitter drastically upped the sensitivity level in whatever metrics they are using to mark offensive users. And I would expect this to continue.

Twitter has always been a little arbitrary about this stuff. I'm sure they'll never shut down @BestAt, even though it's in violation of their policies as I read them. And there are certainly some bots that have been launched since the start of the year that are still in operation. I know that Stealth Mountain (code here) is popular and it is still running, even though I think a lot of people are clearly irritated to have their typos corrected. And there's other bots that are still running, in clear violation of Twitter policies. I can only imagine that eventually those bots will be shut down as well.

If you really want to try to write a bot like these, I would suggest following these guidelines:

Don't abuse the system - don't run searches too often, and don't max out your API calls.
Don't be offensive - I strongly suspect that if your first or second tweet is marked as spam, you're going to be disabled.
Have a very clear opt-out policy on your profile page. I intend to add something to Chatterbot to automate this as soon as possible. Twitter technically requires an opt-in for bots as well (This can be as simple as tweeting to the bot, rather than being triggered by a keyword search), but I have a feeling that an opt-out at least counts for something
Don't expect it to last forever. Because it won't.

Deploying to Engine Yard via Ruby

colin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Recently I've been playing with using Goldberg for Continuous Integration. CI is great, and what is also great is having a setup to auto-deploy to our Engine Yard staging server when all our tests pass. This isn't fully implemented yet, but I do have the deploy to EY working. I had to reverse-engineer the command-line script a bit to get this working. Here is how it's done for posterity:

12 Years of a Bad Idea

colin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

A couple of weeks ago, I randomly noticed that I bought my first personal domain name -- jerkvision.com -- 12 years ago on March 27, 2000. That domain isn't really live anymore -- it redirects to muffinlabs.com, but once upon a time it was my personal website, and it looked a bit like this

(I heart the Wayback Machine)

At that point, it was just static HTML, nothing special. I was actually a little surprised to realize that I hadn't had my own personal domain earlier than this. I guess that before that, I stuck to my old RPI website, and maybe one or two random places where I might have had a website.

Anyway, this was right around the time that 'web blogs' and blog engines were gaining popularity, and over the years I've tried a bunch, including:

Movable Type
Wordpress
Drupal 4, 5, 6, and 7

And a couple more I can't even remember.

And now I'm switched to Jekyll, a slightly different system which generates a static site from a collection of files that you maintain by hand. It's a little hackish, but it's definitely coder-friendly, and it gives me a few things I was looking for -- mostly decent comment management via Disqus, a speedier website, and the ability to make random pages without too much effort.

Also, although I like Drupal enough, I also like trying new stuff, so here goes.

Excellent Birds

colin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Happy Friday

Total Recall: The Musical

colin — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

I had been thinking about Total Recall the other day (loved this movie as a kid), and I came across this:

The people who made this have a crazy list of musicals and other cool stuff on their site.

Speaking of Books Not Worth Reviewing...

colin — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

If you enjoy thorough book reviews of books not actually worth reviewing, then I highly recommend B to the F, a blog which is reviewing the novelization of Back to the Future in exhaustive detail. It's great!

How God Made You

colin — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Time for another installment in the series of book reviews which I call "Books That are not Worth Reviewing" -- This time, it's How God Made You -- a Catholic children's book from 1960, written by psychiatrist Robert Odenwald and illustrated by Mary Reed Newland.

I hesitated for some time before writing this review, although it definitely meets the requirements of a Book Not Worth Reviewing. Mostly I felt the need to be sensitive about faith -- I was raised Catholic, and while I'm not one anymore, I know plenty of people for whom faith is very important.

Then one day, a leading candidate for the Presidency of the United States insulted forty-five million Protestants.

I decided at that point that I was probably over-thinking this, and that it was probably okay to critically review a book of Catholic dogma. So I finished my work and here it is.

There's long history of art tied to spirituality and the religious experience. In the western world this is mostly based on Christianity, and historically this means a lot of art by Catholics, based on their faith. There's no shortage of awesome art out there.

And then, there's How God Made You. This book is targeted at young children. It was written by a Catholic psychiatrist and illustrated by a writer of Catholic books for children and adults alike. The process was overseen by a supposedly gay cardinal. It does not meet any of the definitions of great art, or even of memorable art.

Robert Odenwald

The author of the book was Catholic psychiatrist Robert Odenwald. His 1952 book Psychiatry and Catholicism got a mention in a Time article called Psychiatry for Catholics. In the 1950s, it was an open question whether it was okay for Catholics to engage in psychotherapy, since the Church claims the ultimate responsibility to care for the souls of its parishioners. Pope Pius XII addressed the Fifth International Congress on Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology on April 13, 1953 to settle the issue in the favor of psychology. I was surprised to learn that this was ever a problem.

The book was published by PJ Kenedy and Sons, publishers of the Official Catholic Directory, and it seems like Odenwald may have had an agreement to write a series of books for them, because he also wrote How You Were Born and Your child's world from infancy through adolescence.

Odenwald also wrote The Disappearing Sexes in 1965, a year before he died. Here's a Kirkus review of it:

Dr. Odenwald, a psychiatrist (Your Child's World- 1958) deplores the fact that the Vive la Difference between the sexes is not only dying out but destroying the general structure of family and morality. Certain aspects of the equalization of the sexes are to be observed through the dominance of the female, the disappearance of the male and the prevalence of the homosexual. Women, not so much working as earning more money; the pill and the new sexual freedom (we feel he overvalues the effect of the pill as a liberating influence); etc. are part of this talk-think piece. Sometimes the think aspects seem controvertible: do parents really want children as a status symbol in more cases than realized? does "more often" than admitted, a working mother take a job to "improve her bargaining position" at home? is the "unpopularity of breast feeding" (what supports this contention?) a sign of the new defeminization? Dr. Odenwald draws much of his material from currently popular literature, Vance Packard, Jeff Stearn, Betty Friedan as well as his own consultation room and most of these charges against the whole laxity of our culture, the stridency of the female, the slackness of the male, have been leveled before. In any case, it's a rebuttal of the mystique.

Obviously, this book was written a long time ago, but you can see the mindset at work here -- a resistance to change, to feminism, and to the equality of sexes, all wrapped up with a compelling title. Of course, you would expect that from an observant Catholic of the time who had a contract to write dogmatic books. And many of the themes of The Disappearing Sexes are clearly echoed in How God Made You.

Mary Reed Newland

The book is illustrated by Mary Reed Newland, and although the art is not great, everything I've read about her suggests that she was a very nice and well-respected person. She spent most of her life in Monson, MA, a town not too far from where I live, which is probably how a signed copy of this book ended up in a local library book sale a few years ago. She also wrote a history of Monson, and apparently spent a lot of time reading to children at their local library. She passed away in 1989.

If you spend time searching, you'll mostly find mentions of her books, or of speeches she gave to different communities about faith. Newland wrote over a dozen books, almost all about Catholic doctrine or the stories of the Old Testament. Her two most famous books are How to Raise Good Catholic Children, and The Year and Our Children: Catholic Family Celebrations for Every Season, both of which are still in print. She also wrote The Saints and Our Children -- here's an excerpt from that book.

There's also a bunch of copies of a story she wrote about Halloween in Catholic history. Which seems like a fairly hilarious attempt to co-opt the day for her faith, but it's an interesting essay.

While searching, I also found several blog posts from random people talking about her positive influence in their life. I ended up feeling like she was a very nice woman who is really bad at illustrating -- but more on that later.

Cardinal Francis Spellman

This book, like many books about Catholic dogma, has a 'Nihil Obstat' and 'Imprimatur'

The "Nihil Obstat" and "Imprimatur" are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed.

In the Catholic Church an imprimatur is an official declaration by a Church authority that a book or other printed work may be published.

The person in charge of issuing the imprimatur is the 'Censor Librorum'

In the Roman Catholic Church, the Censor Librorum is an ecclesiastical authority charged with reviewing texts and granting the nihil obstat. The Latin Censor Librorum translates as "censor of books." While the title may suggest the function of suppressing books critical or otherwise unpopular with the Church, this is not the function of the Censor Librorum. Rather, it is the responsibility of the Censor Librorum to review texts for doctrinal accuracy. A text that is doctrinally correct (that is, does not contain any statements that contradict Church doctrine) but portrays the Church or Church officials in a negative manner must still be granted the nihil obstat.

For this book, the Censor Librorum was Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York and sometimes referred to as the Pope of the USA. He is probably the first person I've mentioned in a book review who has an FBI file.

There's a lot of crazy articles out there on Cardinal Spellman. The most notorious article, "Cardinal Spellman's Dark Legacy" was published by Michelangelo Signorile in 2002. In it, he calls Spellman "one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church's history". Is that true? I have no idea. No one in the church has ever gone on the record about this, and there's no real evidence to support it other than secondhand stories. However, there are a lot of those sorts of stories.

Spellman was a strong supporter of US involvement in the Vietnam War -- he advocated for involvement in the 50s. He was such a hawk that he apparently baptized bombers, and at a prayer breakfast at the White House, he encouraged LBJ to "just bomb them". His hawkishness was so out of step with the Vatican that he was chastised by the pope. His attitude about Vietnam was caricatured by artist Edward Sorel:

However, that poster wasn't published when it was made in 1967, because Spellman died just as it was finished, and Sorel decided it wasn't appropriate to publish it.

The Book

The text of this book can be summed up in a few sentences: "Hey kid, would you like to know how you were made. Well, God did it, through your parents. Nice, eh?"

But this book is really about the illustrations -- the horrible, horrible illustrations. Many of them are woodcuts, which is undoubtedly a very demanding art form. But not all of the illustrations are woodcuts -- some are simple drawings, there are lots of weird patterns and backgrounds and style shifts.

The worst thing is hands -- they are terrible!

There's also some really weird poses here and there:

My favorite illustration is this progression of people -- children at the bottom, high-ranking clergy at the top -- but what's the SCUBA diver doing here? And why do clowns rank higher than nuns? That's fucked up.

Also, speaking of hands, Mr SCUBA appears to have some sort of lobster claws for appendages.

Of course, some of the illustrations are quite nice. Here's one more or less dedicated to inquisitive children wondering about the stars:

When reading the text, it's clear that this book expects as little thought as possible from the reader. It starts with a basic summary of straightforward Catholic dogma, with the description of all life coming from seeds. God created everything. He made the universe, then plants, then animals, and he did it all for people. Then, he made Adam and Eve, and they made babies. Then those people had babies, etc, etc, until there's a lot of people here. All those people can someday be happy with God in heaven. So, it's the standard story of Creation.

After this comes the "hey, children are curious about stuff" section. "You wanted to know about the sun and stars", etc. Now, you probably want to know about where you came from. The book continues the seed analogy -- you were a tiny seed, carried inside your mother's body "under her heart". Look, here's a picture of what that tiny seed looked like when it was in your mom:

OK THEN.

While you were growing, your parents picked your name from their list of favorite saints. Oh, and your dad made you a bassinet. People were happy when you were born, and after a few weeks you were baptized.

But, backing up, I hope to hell your parents were married!

Obviously, there's nothing here you wouldn't expect out of a book of this nature -- after all, if this book was published today it would probably look almost exactly the same. But there's some odd things as well. The book insists that:

You were probably born in a hospital as many babies are. A hospital is the best place for a mother and a new baby. In a hospital they have all the comforts they need.

Was there a crusade against hospital births in the 1950s? If so, it's news to me. Then, there's a similar admonition about how mothers should breastfeed their children. This is actually a very interesting page:

You may already have noticed that boys and girls have different bodies. Their bodies were made different by God, for the purpose of having babies.

(emphasis mine)

Does the author assume that only boys are reading this book? Are girls reading the book, but are automatically second-class citizens? There's no indications anywhere in this book that it is only for boys. In fact, in other places it talks about growing up to become mothers or fathers. This is all about defining roles -- mothers should stay at home and feed their children, because God says so. This page also relates directly to Odenwald's later book about how feminism is destroying America.

There's also this earlier page about gender roles:

I'm sure that most of this page was basically true at the time, but it must have felt strange to read this book if your life deviated at all from the apparent norm. In fact, this book is full of awkward pictures of white people who follow very traditional roles in every way. And it is those roles, and not some notion of 'how God made you' that resonate throughout the text. This book is a perfect example of where Catholicism (and society as a whole in America) was in the 1950s -- stuck between the traditional roles of the past and the modernization that was inevitable.

Anyway, I scanned the whole book, so here it is for your enjoyment:

If a copyright holder has a problem with that, please let me know and I'll take it down.

LEGO and Gender

colin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

This is interesting for the history as much as for the excellent analysis of what's up with LEGOs these days.

Dungeons & Dragons, the next version

colin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Decent article in the New York Times on D&D and its history and future. Apparently there's a new version in the works, again, hopefully with a lot of fan input.

Here's a fun line about all the rules fragmentation (mentioned in this very blog when I reviewed What is Dungeons & Dragons?):

A result, said David M. Ewalt, a senior editor at Forbes and the author of a forthcoming history of Dungeons & Dragons, has been a fractured fan base. The game is a group activity, he said, and playing together is tricky when players use different rules. “Imagine trying to organize a basketball team, if the point guard adheres to modern league rules, but the center only knows how to play ancient Mayan handball.”

via @peterbebergal

UPDATE Here's a story on IO9 that discusses the assorted versions of the game in detail.

The Umbrella Man

colin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Nice short documentary from Errol Morris about The Umbrella Man, the man who was standing in Dallas on a beautiful day with an open umbrella when JFK was shot.

For years, I've wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

Aliens on Ice

colin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

This is pretty amazing, a re-enactment of Aliens -- ON ICE:

It's Friday night and Aliens on Ice is set to premiere in ninety minutes. You wouldn't know it: the ice is currently occupied by two hockey teams battling over a puck. The stands are packed with screaming fans. Austin may not be a winter sports town, but you wouldn't know it from the vibe in this room.

Anyone who has seen Aliens can follow what transpires over the next 70 minutes or so. It's James Cameron's film on fastforward…and caffeine…and possibly cocaine. The show captures the little details and turns of phrases that fans will know by heart and cast makes creative use of the ice, never standing still when they have to. Ripley's confrontation with the board that accuses her of destroying the ship from the first film is transformed into humorously blunt exchange, with every party involved skating around each other in menacing circles. The colonial marines searching the seemingly abandoned colony of LV421 becomes a showcase for humorously clumsy figure skating. The subtle relationship between Ripley and Hicks becomes gloriously unsubtle when the two share a brief little spin together on the ice.

These guys may not be professional skaters, but they're not bad. Not bad at all. They're certainly not afraid of the ice and they're not afraid of taking risks. When they do stumble, they play it off beautifully and keep moving. They make the "on ice" part of the show look effortless until they make a mistake and then it becomes a newly improvised joke. Using expert skaters as the aliens is a truly inspired choice and seeing the aliens literally skate circles around the clumsy humans is a genuinely thrilling experience.

Public Art of Amazon Reviews

colin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The art and humor from the UC Davis pepper spray incident has certainly made the most of an otherwise awful event. There's no shortage of photoshopped photos:

A lot of people have helpfully reviewed a variant of the pepper spray on Amazon.

I casually used this product to try to disperse a small band of non-violent campers who had locked their arms together. Although initially it seemed to be effective, it took two applications! The worst part is that the next day they multiplied exponentially! Now what?

There's a long history of subversive product reviews on Amazon, and it is a weird and growing form of participatory public art. Way back in 1999, mock reviews of Monica Lewinksky's tell-all book made the news. Back then, there were a lot of questions about how it was even possible for Amazon to let these reviews appear on their site. Shouldn't they be doing a better job of scanning them and removing 'unacceptable content'? But people continued messing with the system, and Amazon was forced to stop anonymous reviews and they probably had to implement some other protections as well.

The best reviews of this genre on Amazon are without a doubt all from Family Circus books. This is where there first concerted effort to subvert the review system started, and I think it is where the best work lies. For example, check out the reviews for What Does This Say?, a collection published in 1995:

Proustian introspection with Munch's visual conundrums, July 29, 2002

Yeats once wrote, "None other knows what pleasures man/At table or in bed." Bil Keane, however, seems to have found in his latest 'Family Circus' opus a treasure-chest of pleasures for each and all of us. There are some who chafe at the seeming repetitive themes within Keane's major works; I would respectfully submit that all great stories are about life and death, love and loss, fear and triumph. If not Keane, then so go Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Callimachus, too, for good measure. It is not originality that spawns thought and wonderment; it is the vessels of those themes (Billy, Grandma, Barfy, PJ) that inspire and enlighten.

Keane, as carrier of these vessels, reminds us of a truth so eloquently immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Some books leave us free and some books make us free." In 'What Does This Say', it is clear that the tome achieves the latter, with gusto and aplomb.

Happiness, November 10, 1999

There is a certain sadness one feels in remembering happy times: turning over the last page of a good novel, and reflecting over the wonders we have just experienced, the characters who have become our friends; discovering old pictures, seeing ourselves in the halcyon throes of youth, silly smiles on our innocent faces; the plangent last notes of a Chopin nocturne, the theme, growing softer and softer now, floating across the room to rest against our face like the rhythmic breaths of a peaceful, sleeping lover. I don't know how: but Keane captures this feeling, this happy sadness - "Oh heavy lightness," as Shakespeare put it. Billy romps around the yard. He runs all over town. His parents are in love. His family is love with itself, each unto each. Can our lives ever be like this? Perhaps not, but we can watch, watch ever single day, and wrap ourself in that happy sadness. And maybe forget, if only for a little while, the way our lives really are, the way they have to be: our heavy lightness. Thanks, Bil Keane, for that, and thanks to Amazon for letting people express themselves. Thank you all.

There is a long history of mocking Family Circus that predates the web. Dysfunctional Family Circus was originally a series of small booklets published in the late 80s/early 90s in San Jose. Apparently they managed to remain anonymous until recently, when they went public after the death of Bil Keane. They succeeded largely because they were anonymous -- it's hard to shut down a publishing operation when you can't find the publishers:

When we had boxes of professional looking 12- or 24-pagers, we left handfuls of them of them in public places around San Jose and the valley. Our influence was Jack Chick, the Chino-based comic-book evangelist whose millions of free pamphlets still turn up like lint at the Laundromat...

We knew what we were doing was semilegal, if that. We weren't just skirting certain sacred rules of copyright, we were making jokes about always uneasy subjects like molestation and incest. For some odd reason, this is the first direction a nihilist humorist takes when disfiguring cartoons about a blameless family.

In an 1999 article for Gettingit.com, David Cassel interviewed Seth Friedman, then editor of the zine roundup Factsheet Five. Friedman said he expected lawyers coming out of the woodwork when he saw the Dysfunctional Family Circus booklets: "We were kind of surprised at the time to hear that there was no legal action coming down. I think the anonymity of it really helped."

The booklets were published for a couple years until the creators moved on to other things. Then in the mid 90s someone else started up a Dysfunctional Family Circus website (that link is to an archive of the site). It ran for a couple years, and people submitted captions for 500 panels. Eventually it was shut down by a request from King Syndicates -- and an apparently amicable phone call between the person running the website and Bil Keane himself. A lot of people were really angry that DFC agreed to shutdown, since it seemed like an acceptable form of parody. Plenty of archives are still available on the web.

Ostensibly, Amazon expects reviews to be pertinent to the product, but any filtering they do is either very basic vulgarity blocking, or it is based on actual requests from the manufacturer of the product. So some of these reviews have been removed, but others have lived on, as seen in this reply to a snarky review of I Had A Frightmare!

As wonderful as this review is, it makes me sad to think about how similarly sarcastic reviews used to be deleted by Amazon--about this very book, in fact -- when some of us wrote them in the early 2000s. But, hey, yours is better than mine was anyway, so more power to you.

The world of Amazon product reviews is its own very bizarre ecosystem. As you flip through them, eventually you find the Top Reviewers page. And you'll find Harriet Klausner, who reviewed 24 books today -- so far! Her grand total for reviews is almost 26,000. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, was listed as one of the "top 15 web generation's movers and shakers" in Time, and there is an entire blog devoted to attacking her reviews -- which seems fair, since she's reading books at a ridiculous rate, and quite possibly plagiarizing reviews.

You have to wonder why anyone would become a prolific reviewer on Amazon. It seems like the main motive is to become a member of the invite-only Amazon Vine program, where Amazon sends you a couple of items you choose each month in return for your reviews of those products. The program has been criticized all over the place for probably being a little too shadowy and underhanded.

Here's some other Family Circus books with good reviews:

Pick Up What Things?
Daddy's Cap Is on Backwards
What Does This Say?, archived elsewhere.
Some copies of reviews snagged before they were removed from Amazon.
An Archive of Family Circus Reviews from all over the internet.

There's also funny reviews on Amazon for speaker cables, the famous Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, a book called Hgiyiyi (written by jjjj), and don't forget Birth Control is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and also Robbing God of Priesthood Children!!.

You also have to wonder why Amazon allows such bullshit products to remain on their site. The speaker cables are particularly heinous, since no one is going to spend $8500 on a cable, especially after reading the mocking commentary. I assume that Amazon figures the funny fake reviews are driving as much traffic as the good actual reviews.

In a twist on this idea, here's the story of people subverting a McDonalds question and answer site in the UK with some pretty awesome questions.

SOPA is bad

colin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

SOPA is bad, that's not exactly a shocking opinion. Dreamhost (where I do all my personal hosting) has a really good blog post about it:

Failure to comply with this would result in web hosts like DreamHost being treated as if we are assisting in a crime, even if our only involvement was acting unknowingly by registering a domain name for a customer. Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even get a say in the matter if we receive a notice to remove a domain. We would be required by law to remove the entire domain immediately and notify you, the customer, after the domain has been taken offline. This could include disabling things like email, jabber, or other supportive services because the law states that domain services must be removed, not just the site, and not just the alleged infringing works!