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Archive for July, 2010

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Faking it

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

About a year ago I took one of those aptitude tests. The test was what all standardized tests are — inaccurate and easily manipulable. One thing I took away, however, was the hypothesis the interpreter of my results had about what I perceived as a strong organizational ability (yes, sometimes bordering with OCD). Perhaps — the person suggested — my ability to keep track of many things at once, never forget what needs to be done and when, and organize things into related categories are all a coping mechanism that I built for myself to compensate for being naturally disorganized. While it’s a long shot, there is some evidence for it — I need to write things down as my scratchpad memory is weak and I have spent a long time perfecting a mechanism for staying organized. But the idea of having a trait be a disguise for a natural lack thereof struck me as interesting.

An aside (while we’re at “faking” things) that I alluded to above: I think a test is either accurate, or can be streamlined, but never both. The latter requires some level of systemization and trivialization, and thus the possibility that smart people will be able to fake the results by reverse engineering the test. The MBTI is a perfect example of that: the algorithm for delivering the MBTI metric is very deterministic which makes the test easily administrable but because of that, it’s pretty obvious what choice will yield a particular MBTI type.

Posted in for reflection, human nature, reductions | No Comments »

Acquired Taste

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I remember disliking alcohol pretty much in any form until I was about 20 (and yes, I have been drinking prior to turning 21, since in some parts of the world such an act is legal). And recently my friend P.P. and I had a conversation about alcohol and he told me he still doesn’t like it (he’s about my age). This prompted me to think about what caused that transformation in me, and whether it is a good one (i.e. one that is beneficial to undergo — and under what circumstances).

I think that alcohol itself performs two roles: it’s a stimulant (which is why most people are drawn to it from a young age), and it’s a carrier of gustatory information. Wine wouldn’t taste as good if it had no alcohol in it, but alcohol itself is pretty disgusting.

I also think, at least for me, alcohol was an acquired taste — a taste which required me to forgo some utility in the short run in order to enjoy a lot more utility in the long run. That is, before I acquired a liking for alcohol, I was in a local maximum; I didn’t like alcohol but I stuck with it and over time, doing that has allowed me to experience a much greater wealth of experiences. I am proud to have a good friend T.C. convince me to keep trying Scotch as right now it’s pretty much the only liquor that I enjoy drinking (maybe except some in cocktails).

What solidified my understanding of acquired taste as something valuable and desirable were many other examples, especially in the past six months, of my tastes changing. I moved away from sweet, milk chocolate in favor of dark chocolate. I started enjoying spicy food (yes, even the chicken wings — mind you, I still dislike vomit sauce with all my might) and this opened up the wealth of the Indian cuisine to me. Finally, some distinct experiences where an ingredient I never liked (such as, for example, celery) found its way in a dish I had, and to my shock I liked how it tasted, made me realize that there are no bad ingredients, just bad ways of preparing them.

Another thing that an acquired taste allowed me to do is to be able to understand myself better. Acquired tastes, having a higher barrier of entry, are usually complex and our enjoyment of them is sensitive to many small changes in their olfactory and gustatory properties: there isn’t much you can say about, say, gummybears, but Scotch you can write manuals about. This forced me to understand what particular components of taste I like more than others.

I’m not sure P.P. will have alcohol any time soon. But there is a glimmer of hope — I did manage to find one drink he did not dislike.

Posted in changes/cyclical, for reflection, human nature, things everyone should do, whatis | No Comments »

I’m OK!

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I noticed some time ago that commercials that depict some person in a dangerous and potentially life-threatening situation (falling off a cliff, jumping into water, etc.) always end with that person getting up and awkwardly saying “I’m OK!”

This looks so contrived and un-creative that it makes me think that there is some law that forces commercials into showing that kind of all-is-good-after-all scene. Maybe that’s in order to ensure the commercials are children-friendly?

Posted in The Daily Badness, discovery, puzzle, reductions | No Comments »

What impact the littlest thing you do may have on your life

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I like the idea of the butterfly effect applied to our lives. Run Lola Run, for example, captures this well with series of snapshots of what happens to the minor characters in the future. For each of the three alternate stories, the snapshots are wildly different. This highlights the randomness of our lives — the littlest things we do may affect our life in significant ways.

This concept is explored often. The most popular examples are random encounters with people which turn into love affairs, and, eventually, one spending the rest of one’s life with that person. It’s hard to argue that what may have seemed like a fairly insignificant event (how many random people do we meet in our lives?) may lead to directional changes in the person’s life.

I received a Facebook message the other day from someone whom I didn’t recognize at first. It was someone that I supervised in summer school back when I was in high school. The message was

It feels like forever ago now that I’m about to graduate from college, but back then 14-year-old me was definitely thinking, “wow, look at that smart kid. I want to go to an Ivy league school, too, one day.” Be careful what you wish for, indeed…

I had no idea that such a small intersection of our paths, something that I don’t recall at all (I still don’t remember what I did; maybe I said something insightful–doubt it–or got into a conversation about something meta), ended up being so life-defining for the other person. I cried.

Posted in changes/cyclical, for reflection, reductions, retrospective | No Comments »

Drinking Age

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

The drinking age is 21 in the U.S. and 18 elsewhere in the world. The somewhat arrogant “come on, every other country does it differently” isn’t particularly helpful, so instead I started thinking about why this could be.

It seems that one of two phenomena is at play: inertia or something fundamental to the fabric of the American society. I think it’s the latter. The drinking age is 21 because if it were 18, a lot of teens would drink and drive. Teens need to be able to drive because the U.S. is primarily suburban. The U.S. is primarily suburban because the land is vast. Land ownership is one of the most fundamental manifestations of a sense of self-worth, and with it, liberty. There are the reasons the Mayflower set sail.

If it’s inertia, however, lowering the drinking age may prove to be beneficial. However, there are two caveats. Some inertia may actually be due to some fundamental reasons in disguise: there is inertia in the above reasoning — why can’t teens be taught to be more responsible (like teens elsewhere seemingly can be)? That could be due to a much slacker education, both in the home and at school, which may stem from a belief that kids should think for themselves (a belief whose side effect is probably slower, though arguably more intrinsic, maturity).

Even if it’s pure inertia, it may still not be worth to change the drinking age. If the value added is lower than the cost of migration, a society may be stuck at a local maximum, which, I’m guessing, is partially a reason the U.S. is still on the Imperial system.

However, it may be true that the perceived value is lower than actual. College presidents, for example, have been vouching for a long time to lower the drinking age because the arguably unnaturally high drinking age causes binge drinking (makes sense why college presidents are involved). There again, if 21-year-olds go on binges, so might 18-year-olds (maybe the binges will be less intense but more kids would probably go on them).

A big problem with the above is that often we don’t know what’s good until we try it, a variation on the “you don’t know you need it until you have it” theme. We can’t tell a good idea from a better one without context, because we find it hard to visualize and evaluate the pros and the cons.

As a meta point, the above chain of reasoning also shows how few things in the world can be understood. There are so many different factors, and each has a depth of its own, to the point where we can flip flop forever simply by adding layers of interpretation to just a single factor.

Posted in The Daily Badness, changes/cyclical, for reflection, reductions | 1 Comment »

Insert Headline Here

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

I read this article and I was immediately struck by a sense of familiarity. Not of the content of the article, but of its structure. I was shocked that it hadn’t occurred to me how many articles follow a very well-defined structure. They can almost be automated.

Here is my analysis of that structure. You can use this to write your own New York Magazine (or other newspaper’s) article!

A brief but Catchy Name Identifying the Subject

A short phrase describing the subject’s uniqueness — preferably with a conjunctive clause that creates a stark contrast with the former — and the impact he’s had on others. And now the twist.

Start a story with a date and a seemingly unrelated person and a few adjectives that help the reader visualize the situation. Mention something pedestrian. And now the sudden suspense moment.

Introduce the second person, ideally speaking something.

A confusing moment ensues, but is quickly explained away. And now the story is weaved in with the headliner.

Introduce the author of the article as a participant, in passing, as we quote somebody. And have them use extreme superlatives to describe the subject.

Start psychoanalyzing the subject, contrasting the good with the bad. Rephrase the twist from the first paragraph.

Back to the story, to make sure that the reader noted that the author actually spent some effort writing the story, ideally went on a journey. Introduce another person to make the story more convincing.

Describe the subject’s physique and some personality traits, again, ideally ones that imply that the author spoke to him. Ask a rhetorical question perhaps?

Finish the initial story so the readers aren’t left in suspension. Use a swearword, of course in a quote.

[Include a picture of the subject that mirrors the description, taken in a setting that seems to confirm every detail presented so far]

…continue for four more pages, pretty much switching between primary story, secondary story, anecdotes, psychoanalysis (ensure both sides are represented — the audience should, however, feel somewhat in awe about the subject — after all, a major magazine like that would not have written about a nobody!)…

End with a terse dialogue, with a witty ending by the subject. Then say something predictive, something positive (but not without a hint of uncertainty).

Posted in The Daily Badness, art, for reflection, reductions | No Comments »

A Universal Language

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

One of the ideas behind Esperanto was supposed to be the abandonment of irregularities, especially the duality between sounds and glyphs. Esperanto was supposed to be a perfectly phonetic language.

As it turns out, no language can stay perfectly phonetic and in popular use at the same time. I think this is because as the language is used, we tend to optimize it, and the optimizations are not based on structure, because that’s not how our brains work. Think about the optimizations as a kind of cache — caches are not structured, they are simply a way to throw some hardware into a problem.

Which brings me to an important question. Can mankind use a single language? Not the way English is used now — English is more of a code than a language — a default option that everyone seems to agree on, due to its prevalence in the world, both geographically, but also culturally (the most impactful culture “producers” have been and are now English-speaking empires).

I think there is something about language and distance — just like you can only naturally interact with about one hundred and fifty people, you can only share culture with people closest to you. Despite globalization, the French have been, are, and will always be very different than the Chinese. Language will reflect that culture (why? Does it have to do with differing natural circumstances in the early history of the nations?) and so it will diverge if the cultures are divergent. It’s clear even on a smaller scale, with various dialects being distinctly different, not just in sounds, but often in syntax and semantics.

However, it may be possible to devise a kind of basis, a fundamental set of principles that everyone agrees on and can communicates basic thoughts with, but then uses the local language on top of that to express more complex thoughts. Something, I think, that Latin was to European languages a long time ago.

Posted in reductions, whatis | 1 Comment »

IE team crashing the CSS standards meeting

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

IE team crashing the CSS standards meeting

IE: Sorry we’re late guys, we didn’t know about the meeting until this morning
Everyone else: Uhmm, we have had this meeting in the same place every week for the past four years
IE: Oh really?
Everyone else: Yes. You know, we’re trying to set some standards so that web developers can write clean code that is interpreted the same way by every browser.
IE: Of course we think it’s a good idea for all browsers to interpret websites the same way IE does.
Everyone else: No, no no no! That would be a very bad idea.
IE: How come?
Everyone else: It’s stupid for one company to set the standard, especially if the standard is not really a standard but a collection of random fuzzy rules that aren’t consistent, are hard to interpret, and consist of hundreds of exceptions.
IE: We don’t buy it. You’re just jealous of our 95% market share.
Everyone else: We are a standards group, we don’t care about your market share. We’ve invited you to these meetings from day one. In fact, didn’t Microsoft push for technology standards in the first place?
IE: Of course, provided that they come from Microsoft.
Everyone else: That’s retarded.
IE: Look, we’re innovating here and you’re just slowing things down. Like when we introduced image effects.
Everyone else: Oh, you mean the Wave effect?

IE: Yeah, isn’t it awesome?
Everyone else: Looks like something from a 1990s website.
IE: Our design group sees nothing wrong with that filter.
Everyone else: Oh, you have a design group now? But, we digress. You’ve got to start complying to some of these standards, complying to both IE and other browsers is a headache for most developers.
IE: What are those standards?
Everyone else: We’ve published them and even sent you a paper copy. What the hell are these proprietary filters doing in your dynamic HTML? filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=20). The notation is awful and does not conform to any of the other style properties.
IE: You’re just pissed because it has Microsoft in its name.
Everyone else: And what about your lenient interpretation of identifiers? Why does Microsoft continue, over and over again, to put so much emphasis on case insensitivity? Every programming language other than… let’s see… BASIC! is case sensitive.
IE: You’ve got to allow mediocre developers to make some money too.
Everyone else: And the conditional comments in HTML? <!–[if lte IE 6]> This is only encouraging people to add IE-specific stuff.
IE: Okay, it seems we won’t be able to convince you guys to embrace innovation. Maybe at least you’ll approve our OOXML standard?
Everyone else: Are you serious? The spec that ignore industry standards like SVG, MathML, XForms and even XML?
IE: There’s no reason a reinvented wheel must be worse.
Everyone else: Oh yeah, how about how within the spec, the same element has multiple conflicting definitions (‘e‘ has eighteen of them!) and some elements are just aliases of one another? It’s almost as the people in your team didn’t even talk to each other when they wrote the spec!
IE: Screw you. We’ll win anyway. We offer the world’s most popular operating system and browser family. Can’t beat us.

Posted in The Daily Badness, fiction, funny, technology | No Comments »

Wit and The Art of the One-liner

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

My three friends and I were driving to a music festival. My friend, seeing a police car parked on the street, instantaneously responded: “There’s my ride home.”

There’s something beautiful about one-liners: a perfect narrative compression of the situation, an almost poetic ability to synthesize while retaining information (I compare poetry to lossless data compression: a way to say to much in so few words). They are closely related to the concept of wit: the ability to comment on a situation with insight and humor. Probably the most extreme — and hilarious — example of that relation were “the battles of the wits” that my friends would engage in: a dialogue where each subsequent response built upon the previous but towered over it in wit. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue consisted almost entirely of one-liners.

Posted in art, clever, funny, reductions, whatis | No Comments »

The power of the scent

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

We routinely undervalue the power of senses other than the two most dominant ones, sight and hearing. Specifically, scent seems to receive fairly weak press. Granted, the mechanics of the sense give it a significant handicap — because of how the scent is propagated (through the chemical properties of matter and not the mechanical or fundamental vibrations), the resolution and the sampling rate is much smaller than in the case of vision or hearing — we can only detect changes in scent something like 2-3 seconds apart, and the number of different “primary” scents is much lower than the possible harmonics or distinct visual objects.

However, precisely because it’s a chemical reaction (and not a mechanical or physical one), I think it has potential to be much more fundamental to us. Scents have much more entropy than sounds or sights, and the mechanisms that interpret them are much more complex than what drives the ear and the eye (which is why we could easily emulate the latter and are still struggling with the former).

Most importantly, scents have the unique property of being able to transport us into places deep within our memories, almost instantaneously. A scent of something can bring back memories so vivid that I literally stop doing anything I was doing just to be able to take in the memory. Too bad we don’t associate more of our past with various scents.

Try to explore the world primarily with those underdog senses, see what you can discover.

Posted in art, comparisons, reductions, things everyone should do | 2 Comments »

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