On the lighter side
You may be familiar with my long-winded, more serious style, but I thought this blond joke would be a welcome change of pace. Best. Joke. Evar. [via Chizumatic, whose lack of permalinks add extra irony]
Culture
Merry Christmas
Fry: “There’s supposed to be some kind of, you know, pine tree.”
Professor: “Pine trees have been extinct for eight hundred years, Fry. Gone the way of the poodle and your primitive notions of modesty.” – (Listen to MP3)
In anticipation of the eventual extinction of Pine Trees, here’s the traditional Kaedrin Christmas Cactus:
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.” (sound clip via Can’t Get Enough Futurama)
Also regarding Christmas Trees, check out a post from a few years ago: Is the Christmas Tree Christian?
Hurricane Names, Restaurant Critics, and more…
Time is short this week, so here’s a few links:
- Hurricane Keyser Soze: What’s in a name? Absolutely brilliant commentary on how the National Weather Service names their hurricanes.
When Hurricane Isabel came ashore here a few years ago, I openly mocked it, and Isabel dropped a 250-year-old tree on my car. Now, was I aware on some level that the hurricane could do this? Sure I was. But I mocked anyway, and who could blame me? The only Isabel I ever knew was the moody, vaguely goth younger sister of a high school friend. Could she occasionally annoy? Sure. Did she prompt the odd argument? No doubt. Were there times that Isabel was irrational? Of course. But drop a tree on my car? Sorry, no sir.
We want to fear these storms. We really do. But I’ll be damned if I run from Hurricane Florence. I already have had the experience of being in a mandatory evacuation over a Hurricane named Bob. I didn’t want to evacuate. I felt like a grade-A pussy running from someone named Bob. I still feel that way.
So, is it any wonder that thousands of people stayed in harm’s way, determined to ride out Katrina? Of course it isn’t. … What we need is a hurricane named, let’s say, The Penetrator. You tell me that The Penetrator is coming ashore in 24 hours and I am gone like Keyser Soze. Use the names of famous human predators, like Adolph or Idi Amin or Attilla or Affleck, and people will break out in a mad dash for higher ground.
Brilliant. [via Ministry of Minor Perfidy]
- The Secret Life of a Restaurant Critic: The Restaurant Critic for the Boston Globe explains her job in surprisingly interesting detail.
- Speed Demos Archive: This is why I love the internet. It’s just full of people like this who have way too much time on their hands. These guys have compiled a list of their speed runs – attempts to win a game in as short a time as possible. They’ve got videos of each one. Just in case you wanted to watch someone defeat Metroid in 18 minutes.
That’s all for now…
Link Dump
Not much time this week, so here are some interesting links:
- A little while ago, I wrote about two software projects, one successful, one not. David Foster, who initially pointed me towards this story, has a follow up on one of the projects. The FBI’s failure to develop a “Virtual Case File” system was bad enough, and now they’re denying Freedom Of Information Act requests made by folks why are trying to figure out just went wrong with the project. My initial reaction was that the project failed due to a lack of discipline. And now the failure deepens as the FBI seeks to deny accountability in the project.
- The Physics of ET Civilizations by Michio Kaku: An interesting take on what constitutes a truly advanced civilization. He claims that we should rank civilizations by their energy consumption:
In a seminal paper published in 1964 in the Journal of Soviet Astronomy, Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev theorized that advanced civilizations must therefore be grouped according to three types: Type I, II, and III, which have mastered planetary, stellar and galactic forms of energy, respectively. He calculated that the energy consumption of these three types of civilization would be separated by a factor of many billions.
We’re currently living in a Type 0 civilization, but we’re moving quickly towards a Type 1 civilization. How long after that could we reach Type 2?
- 10 Ways To Create Content For Your Weblog: Ostensibly written to help us overcome bloggers block, but with such earth shattering advice as “Read, Listen To, or Watch the News” and “read your favorite blogs with the purpose of finding ideas to write about,” I can’t say as though it’s that big of a help. I’ll admit I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately, but this has more to do with a lack of time and energy than ideas. Until I get the time and motivation to write more, lists of links like this seem to be the order of the day.
- Caring for Your Introvert by Jonathan Rauch: This is old, but it’s a great article explaining a much understood group: introverts:
What is introversion? … Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.
Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.
That’s all for now.
Interviewing
Recent events have placed me in a position where I will be interviewing people for open positions on my team. Not having experience with such a thing, my first reaction was to set the monkey research squad loose on the subject. As usual, they didn’t disappoint.
- The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel Spolsky: I think this is the best article I found. All of Spolsky’s stuff is great, and his interviewing style is pretty staightforward: He looks for people who are “Smart, and Gets Things Done”. One thing to note about a lot of the interviewing advice on the internet is that it’s almost all focused on hiring programmers. In my case, though, I’m not looking for something that technical (though there is some coding involved). I’m looking for someone with usability experience (generally not programmers there) and someone who can work with the business group to write a good requirements document for the programmers. However, a lot of interviewing isn’t focused on the technical details of coding, and Spolsky has a few gems in his article. Here’s one I found useful:
Part 6: the design question. Ask the candidate to design something. Jabe Blumenthal, the original designer of Excel, liked to ask candidates to design a house. According to Jabe, he’s had candidates who would go up to the whiteboard and immediately draw a square. A square! These were immediate No Hires. In design questions, what are you looking for?
Good candidates will try to get more information out of you about the problem. Who is the house for? As a policy, I will not hire someone who leaps into the design without asking more about who it’s for. Often I am so annoyed that I will give them a hard time by interrupting them in the middle and saying, “actually, you forgot to ask this, but this is a house for a family of 48-foot tall blind giraffes.”
There’s a lot more to it than just that, but as I’m looking for someone to work with the business group to write a requirements document, it’s pretty important that they ask questions and try to get more details. Lots of people like to ask for specific technologies, etc… even though such specifics might not be what they really want. The important thing is to find out what they really want to do, then figure out how to best achieve that goal. I don’t know if I’d be as picky about this sort of question as Joel though. I do ask a design question in the interview, but I’ve only done one interview, and the guy didn’t get it. I’ll be interested to see if this sort of design quesiton actually does become a good indicator.
- How to Hire Like a Start-Up by Rob Walling: Not quite as good or thorough as Spolsky’s article, but still filled with solid insight on the hiring process from a slightly different perspective. His article focuses on hiring fast. In Joel’s article, there is only Hire and No Hire. Rob has an extra category: Maybes:
…the Rule of Thirds: on a 10-point scale you make money with your 7s, 8s, and 9s, break even with your 4s, 5s, and 6s, and lose money with your 1s, 2s, and 3s. There are no 10s in that list since no one is perfect; the highest possible rating is a 9+.
In every job search there are hires, maybes, and no-hires. Using the Rule of Thirds, 7-9 is a hire, 4-6 is a maybe, and 1-3 is a no-hire.
The only difference between hiring slow and hiring fast is what you do with the maybes; when hiring slow the maybes become nos, when hiring fast you let the maybes proceed to the next round of evaluation.
- Microsoft Interview Questions: A blog that started as a collection of interview questions asked by Microsoft, but that has lots of general interviewing stuff as well.
- The New-Boy Network by Malcolm Gladwell: Now that we’ve got a good handle on how to interview, Gladwell comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath us. Just how valuable are interviews anyway? Gladwell looks at the situation in his usual thorough manner, and claims that interviewing is a lot more difficult than it seems. Most judgements appear to be based on first impressions and the assumption that people’s reactions in one context (the interview) are the same as others (working). However, once he establishes that premise, he goes on to talk about “structured interviewing” with an HR expert:
Menkes moved on to another area–handling stress. A typical question in this area is something like “Tell me about a time when you had to do several things at once. How did you handle the situation? How did you decide what to do first?” Menkes says this is also too easy. “I just had to be very organized,” he began again in his mock-sincere singsong. “I had to multitask. I had to prioritize and delegate appropriately. I checked in frequently with my boss.” Here’s how Menkes rephrased it: “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?”
“Well,” I said, “I would look at the two and decide what I was best at, and then go to my boss and say, ‘It’s better that I do one well than both poorly,’ and we’d figure out who else could do the other task.”
Menkes immediately seized on a telling detail in my answer. I was in-terested in what job I would do best. But isn’t the key issue what job the company most needed to have done? With that comment, I had revealed some-thing valuable: that in a time of work-related crisis I start from a self-centered consideration.
Most of the time, we want to believe that we can derive broad trend of behavior from the interview. The structured interviewing process is very narrowly focused:
What is interesting about the structured interview is how narrow its objectives are. When I interviewed Nolan Myers I was groping for some kind of global sense of who he was; Menkes seemed entirely uninterested in arriving at that same general sense of me–he seemed to realize how foolish that expectation was for an hour-long interview. The structured interview works precisely because it isn’t really an interview; it isn’t about getting to know someone, in a traditional sense. It’s as much concerned with rejecting information as it is with collecting it.
Interesting stuff. As I mentioned, I’ve not progressed much in the process just yet, but I’ll be interested to see how this information plays out.
The Pendulum Swings
I’ve often commented that human beings don’t so much solve problems as they trade one set problems for another (in the hope that the new set of problems are more favorable than the old). Yet that process doesn’t always follow a linear trajectory. Initial reactions to a problem often cause problems of their own. Reactions to those problems often take the form of an over-correction. And so it continues, like the swinging of a pendulum, back and forth, until it reaches it’s final equilibrium.
This is, of course, nothing new. Hegel’s philosophy of argument works in exactly that way. You start with a thesis, some sort of claim that becomes generally accepted. Then comes the antithesis, as people begin to find holes in the original thesis and develop an alternative. For a time, the thesis and antithesis vie to establish dominance, but neither really wins. In the end, a synthesis comprised of the best characteristics of the thesis and antithesis emerges.
Naturally, it’s rarely so cut and dry, and the process continues as the synthesis eventually takes on the role of the thesis, with new antitheses arising to challenge it. It works like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth until it reaches a stable position (a new synthesis). There are some interesting characteristics of pendulums that are also worth noting in this context. Steven Den Beste once described the two stable states of the pendulum: one in which the weight hangs directly below the hinge, and one in which the weight is balanced directly above the hinge.
On the left, the weight hangs directly below the hinge. On the right, it’s balanced directly above it. Both states are stable. But if you slightly perturb the weight, they don’t react the same way. When the left weight is moved off to the side, the force of gravity tries to center it again. In practice, if the hinge has a good bearing, the system then will oscillate around the base state and eventually stop back where it started. But if the right weight is perturbed, then gravity pulls the weight away and the right system will fail and convert to the left one.
The left state is robust. The right state is fragile. The left state responds to challenges by trying to maintain itself; the right state responds to challenges by shattering.
Not all systems are robust, but it’s worth noting that even robust systems are not immune to perturbation. The point isn’t that they can’t fail, it’s that when they do fail, they fail gracefully. Den Beste applies the concept to all sorts of things, including governments and economic systems, and I think the analogy is apt. In the coming months and years, we’re going to see a lot of responses to the tragedy of hurricane Katrina. Katrina represents a massive perturbation; it’s set the pendulum swinging, and it’ll be a while before it reaches it’s resting place. There will be many new policies that will result. Some of them will be good, some will be bad, and some will set new cycles into action. Disaster preparedness will become more prevalent as time goes on, and the plans will get better too. But not all at once, because we don’t so much solve problems as trade one set of disadvantages for another, in the hopes that we can get that pendulum to rest in it’s stable state.
Glenn Reynolds has collected a ton of worthy places to donate for hurricane relief here. It’s also worth noting that many employers are matching donations to the Red Cross (mine is), so you might want to go that route if it’s available…
Mastery II
I’m currently reading Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. It’s an interesting novel, and there are elements of the story that resemble Vinge’s singularity. (Potential spoilers ahead) The story concerns two competing civilizations that travel to an alien planet. Naturally, there are confrontations and betrayals, and we learn that one of the civilizations utilizes a process to “Focus” an individual on a single area of study, essentially turning them into a brilliant machine. Naturally, there is a lot of debate about the Focused, and in doing so, one of the characters describes it like this:
… you know about really creative people, the artists who end up in your history books? As often as not, they’re some poor dweeb who doesn’t have a life. He or she is just totally fixated on learning everything about some single topic. A sane person couldn’t justify losing friends and family to concentrate so hard. Of course, the payoff is that the dweeb may find things or make things that are totally unexpected. See, in that way, a little of Focus has always been part of the human race. We Emergents have simply institutionalized this sacrifice so the whole community can benefit in a concentrated, organized way.
Debate revolves around this concept because people living in this Focused state could essentially be seen as slaves. However, the quote above reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago called Mastery:
There is an old saying “Jack of all trades, Master of none.” This is indeed true, though with the demands of modern life, we are all expected to live in a constant state of partial attention and must resort to drastic measures like Self-Censorship or information filtering to deal with it all. This leads to an interesting corollary for the Master of a trade: They don’t know how to do anything else!
In that post, I quoted Isaac Asimov, who laments that he’s clueless when it comes to cars, and relates a funny story about what happened when he once got a flat tire. I wondered if that sort of mastery was really a worthwhile goal, but the artificually induced Focus in Vinge’s novel opens the floor up to several questions. Would you volunteer to be focused in a specific area of study, knowing that you would basically do that and only that? No family, no friends, but only because you are so focused on your studies (as portrayed in the novel, doing work in your field is what makes you happy). What if you could opt to be focused for a limited period of time?
There are a ton of moral and ethical questions about the practice, and as portrayed in the book, it’s not a perfect process and may not be reversible (at least, not without damage). The rewards would be great – Focusing sounds like a truly astounding feat. But would it really be worth it? As portrayed in the book, it definitely would not, as those wielding the power aren’t very pleasant. Because the Focused are so busy concentrating on their area of study, they become completely dependent on the non-Focused to guide them (it’s possible for a Focused person to become too-obsessed with a problem, to the point where physical harm or even death can occur) and do everything else for them (i.e. feed them, clean them, etc…) Again, in the book, those who are guiding the Focused are ruthless exploiters. However, if you had a non-Focused guide who you trusted, would you consider it?
I still don’t know that I would. While the results would surely be high quality, the potential for abuse is astounding, even when it’s someone you trust that is pulling the strings. Nothing says they’ll stay trustworthy, and it’s quite possible that they could be replaced in some way by someone less trustworthy. If the process was softened to the point where the Focused retains at least some control over their focus (including the ability to go in and out), then this would probably be a more viable option. Fortunately, I don’t see this sort of thing happening in the way proposed by the book, but other scenarios present interesting dilemmas as well…
Veg Out
Neal Stephenson’s take on Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in the New York times is interesting on a few levels. He makes some common observations, such as the prevalence of geeky details in supplementary material of the Star Wars universe (such as the Clone Wars cartoons or books), but the real gem is his explanation for why the geeky stuff is mostly absent from the film:
Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: “geeking out” and “vegging out.” To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal – and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.
Stephenson says the original Star Wars is a mixture of veg and geek scenes, while the new movies are almost all veg out material. The passive vegging out he describes is exactly how I think of the prequels (except that Episode III seems to have a couple of non-veg out scenes, which is one of the reasons I think it fares better than the other prequels). He also makes a nice comparison to the business world, but then takes a sudden sort of indirect dive towards outsourcing and pessimism at the end of the article, making a vague reference to going “the way of the old Republic.”
I’m not sure I agree with those last few paragraphs. I see the point, but it’s presented as a given. Many have noted Stephenson could use a good editor for his recent novels, and it looks to me like Stephenson was either intentionally trying to keep it short (it’s only two pages – not what you’d expect from someone who routinely writes 900 page books, including three that are essentially a single 2700 page novel) or his article was edited down to fit somewhere. In either case, I’m sure he could have expounded upon those last paragraphs to the tune of a few thousand words, but that’s what I like about the guy. Not that the article is bad, but I prefer Stephenson’s longwinded style. Ironically, Stephenson has left the details out of his article; it reads more like a power-point presentation that summarizes the bullet points of his argument than the sort of in-depth analysis I’m used to from Stephenson. As such, I’m sure there are a lot of people who would take issue with some of his premises. Perhaps it’s an intentional irony, or (more likely) I’m reading too much into it.
Link Dump
Time is short this week, so I’ll just have to rely on my army of chain smoking monkey researchers for a few links:
- The Singularity: Vernor Vinge’s take on the Singularity. He predicts that we’ll have the technology to create a super-human intelligence within 30 years, and that once the transition is made, ” the human era will be ended.” The concept has been around a while (and Vinge has written a pair of novels focusing on those ideas, amongst other things) and this 1993 essay is a good introduction.
- A Gamer’s Manifesto: David Wong and Haimoimoi deliver a hearth breaking list of things gamers really want out of their games. Astute readers may remember Wong’s brilliant Ultimate War Sim. The manifesto isn’t quite as funny, but it does nail the frustrating things about gaming right on the head. And, of course, with all the calls for better AI, they’re just begging for the Singularity…
- Interview with Umberto Eco in the Telegraph: The topics include a comparison of Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code (big difference) and whether Eco is the Italian Salman Rushdie (no). Interestingly enough, before I knew what the Singularity was, I had thought that “Abufalafia” (the allegedly “incredible” computer from Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum) would comprise of just such an intelligence. Alas, once I read the book, I realized it was not to be… [via Johno at The Ministry of Minor Perfidy]
- Zak Smith�s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity�s Rainbow: “The Modern Word hosts a staggering 755 illustrations by New York based artist, Zak Smith, depicting the events and imagery of Pynchon�s magnum opus.” Some interesting stuff there… I’ll have to add a link to my review. [via William Pittsburg, who apparently wrote the introduction and coded the pages]
That’s all for now, perhaps more early in the week…
Update: Added another link and some text…
Sharks, Deer, and Risk
Here’s a question: Which animal poses the greater risk to the average person, a deer or a shark?
Most people’s initial reaction (mine included) to that question is to answer that the shark is the more dangerous animal. Statistically speaking, the average American is much more likely to be killed by deer (due to collisions with vehicles) than by a shark attack. Truly accurate statistics for deer collisions don’t exist, but estimates place the number of accidents in the hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars worth of damage are caused by deer accidents, as are thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, every year.
Shark attacks, on the other hand, are much less frequent. Each year, approximately 50 to 100 shark attacks are reported. “World-wide, over the past decade, there have been an average of 8 shark attack fatalities per year.”
It seems clear that deer actually pose a greater risk to the average person than sharks. So why do people think the reverse is true? There are a number of reasons, among them the fact that deer don’t intentionally cause death and destruction (not that we know of anyway) and they are also usually harmed or killed in the process, while sharks directly attack their victims in a seemingly malicious manner (though I don’t believe sharks to be malicious either).
I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear, recently. It’s excellent, and at one point he draws a distinction between what security professionals refer to as “threats” and “risks.”
A threat is a potential way an attacker can attack a system. Car burglary, car theft, and carjacking are all threats … When security professionals talk abour risk, they take into consideration both the likelihood of the threat and the seriousness of a successful attack. In the U.S., car theft is a more serious risk than carjacking because it is much more likely to occur.
Everyone makes risk assessments every day, but most everyone also has different tolerances for risk. It’s essentially a subjective decision, and it turns out that most of us rely on imperfect heuristics and inductive reasoning when it comes to these sorts of decisions (because it’s not like we have the statistics handy). Most of the time, these heuristics serve us well (and it’s a good thing too), but what this really ends up meaning is that when people make a risk assessment, they’re basing their decision on a perceived risk, not the actual risk.
Schneier includes a few interesting theories about why people’s perceptions get skewed, including this:
Modern mass media, specifically movies and TV news, has degraded our sense of natural risk. We learn about risks, or we think we are learning, not by directly experiencing the world around us and by seeing what happens to others, but increasingly by getting our view of things through the distorted lens of the media. Our experience is distilled for us, and it’s a skewed sample that plays havoc with our perceptions. Kids try stunts they’ve seen performed by professional stuntmen on TV, never recognizing the precautions the pros take. The five o’clock news doesn’t truly reflect the world we live in — only a very few small and special parts of it.
Slices of life with immediate visual impact get magnified; those with no visual component, or that can’t be immediately and viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.
When I first considered the Deer/Shark dilemma, my immediate thoughts turned to film. This may be a reflection on how much movies play a part in my life, but I suspect some others would also immediately think of Bambi, with it’s cuddly cute and innocent deer, and Jaws, with it’s maniacal great white shark. Indeed, Fritz Schranck once wrote about these “rats with antlers” (as some folks refer to deer) and how “Disney’s ability to make certain animals look just too cute to kill” has deterred many people from hunting and eating deer. When you look at the deer collision statistics, what you see is that what Disney has really done is to endanger us all!
Given the above, one might be tempted to pursue some form of censorship to keep the media from degrading our ability to determine risk. However, I would argue that this is wrong. Freedom of speech is ultimately a security measure, and if we’re to consider abridging that freedom, we must also seriously consider the risks of that action. We might be able to slightly improve our risk decisionmaking with censorship, but at what cost?
Schneier himself recently wrote about this subject on his blog. In response to an article which argues that suicide bombings in Iraq shouldn’t be reported (because it scares people and it serves the terrorists’ ends). It turns out, there are a lot of reasons why the media’s focus on horrific events in Iraq cause problems, but almost any way you slice it, it’s still wrong to censor the news:
It’s wrong because the danger of not reporting terrorist attacks is greater than the risk of continuing to report them. Freedom of the press is a security measure. The only tool we have to keep government honest is public disclosure. Once we start hiding pieces of reality from the public — either through legal censorship or self-imposed “restraint” — we end up with a government that acts based on secrets. We end up with some sort of system that decides what the public should or should not know.
Like all of security, this comes down to a basic tradeoff. As I’m fond of saying, human beings don’t so much solve problems as they do trade one set of problems for another (in the hopes that the new problems are preferable the old). Risk can be difficult to determine, and the media’s sensationalism doesn’t help, but censorship isn’t a realistic solution to that problem because it introduces problems of its own (and those new problems are worse than the one we’re trying to solve in the first place). Plus, both Jaws and Bambi really are great movies!