Culture

Dude, Where’s My Dude? Dudelicious Dissection, From Sontag to Spicoli by Ron Rosenbaum : Dude, this is some seriously funny reading. The complete history of Dude, from its humble origins as a “aesthetic craze” in New York, circa 1883, to Dude, Where’s My Car? in 2000.

Everybody thinks “dude ranch” came first and was somehow the origin. But whence came the dude in “dude ranch”? Before the dude-ranch dude there was dude as dandy, the dude as an urban aesthete; it was the urbanity of dude that made the dude-ranch dude dude-ish.

This is so stupid, but its a smart stupid. Almost Pynchonian, really. Seriously, its a surprisingly complete article, worth reading if only to experience the whopping 160 or so occurrences of the term “Dude” or its derivatives. [via Ipse Dixit – Thanks Dude!]

Update: Unrelated, but interesting: A brief Googling of Pynchon and Dude turned up this article, also by Rosenbaum, about Pynchon and Phone Phreaking.

I was playing Trivial Pursuit the other day, and I was again struck by the victimology that always seems to play out during such a game. “You get all the easy questions! Its no fair!” At times, that’s probably true, but over the course of an entire game, its a little less clear who is really getting the short end of the stick. Ignoring for a moment what questions are considered easy (if I answer a question immediately after it was asked, was it an easy question?), this sort of victimology is a difficult thing to avoid. I definitely feel that way sometimes, but I’m beginning to come around. Besides, in the end there’s really nothing you can do about it. Nobody said life would be fair.

Obviously, this doesn’t just affect trivia games either. My first programming class in college was extremely difficult. The professor was a stickler for things like commenting and algorithmic efficiency (something we didn’t even know how to measure yet), but he never told us these things. When we did an assignment, we’d get it back, all marked up to hell. “But it works! It does exactly what you said you wanted it to do!” Obviously, everyone hated this man, myself included. Only two As were given out in his class that semester, and I ended up with a B (and I wasn’t too happy about that). Classes taught by other professors, on the other hand, were much simpler. However, during the course of the next year or so, it became abundantly aware to me that I learned a hell of a lot more than everyone else, so when it came time to buckle down and write an operating system (!) I ended up not having as much trouble as many other students.

It didn’t work that way for everyone in the class. While I hated the professor, I never stopped trying. I ended up learning from my mistakes, while others bitched and moaned about how unfair it was. Ironically, even those in the “easy” classes were complaining about how difficult the course was.

So now its occurring to me that everyone feels like a victim. Take a little trip around the blogosphere and you’ll see lots of protestations about the “liberal media”. Then I head over to 4degreez and hear all the complaints about the “conservative media”. Well, which is it? With respect to the media, everyone is a victim. Why is that?

I see both, all the time. The truth is that there are tons of both liberal and conservative media sources. You just have to know which is which and take them with the appropriate grains of salt. Yes, its frustrating, I know, but playing the victim leads to ruin and it prevents you from honing your arguments, making them stronger and more resistant to criticism.

Don’t take this to mean that we should not be criticising the media. We should be, emphatically. Blogs are great for this in that they are fact-checking everyone and their mother, and will often print retractions of their own mistakes quickly and efficiently (alas, not all blogs are that trustworthy).

And really, the media could be doing a whole lot more to help us than it currently does, especially on the internet. On the internet, there are no compelling spacial boundries, no character limits. There is no reason complete interview transcripts or offical documents can’t be posted along with an article. Hell, its the internet, link to other sources and even criticisms. Let us make up our own mind! Traditional media is awful at this, though I have seen at least some examples of this sort of thing around. The only “problem” with that is that the media could no longer misquote people on a whim or creatively skew statistics, simply because they don’t like someone or something (if I had a dime for every time Wolfowitz was misquoted, I’d be a rich man. I know this because the DoD posts full transcripts of briefings, interviews, and press conferences on their site, much to the dismay of the media, who are now getting caught). There are tons of great ideas, none of which would be all that difficult to implement from a technical standpoint.

The media has lots of work to do, and with the increase of informational transparency in our society, they better get going. Soon. In the mean time, if you’re conservative, look at the liberal media as an opportunity for strengthening your arguments. Don’t bitch and whine about the liberal media and dismiss it out of hand. If your liberal, don’t get pissed off that the media isn’t repeating whatever new contradictory conspiracy theory you’ve concocted and take a page out of the bloggers book. Fact-check their asses!

“You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U. S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go to war” – NothingLasts4ever

What a quote, what a world!

“Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still… isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited… and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to….” –

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, page 474.

Human beings tend to remember an uncompleted task better than a completed one, ostensibly because an uncompleted task has no closure, and thus our mind must continually work to acheive closure. This is a drastic oversimplification of what pyschologists call the Zeigarnik effect, and you can observe it in action in schools and restaruants across the world. Make a student take the same test he took the day before, and he’ll probably do much worse. There are all sorts of similar psychological theories and, depending on how liberally you apply them, you observe them in action all over the place.

Which makes me wonder, how will we remember this war twenty years from now? How will Bush be perceived? If things continue to go as well as they have, will history remember that this war was immensely unpopular in the world or the seemingly conflicting and ambigious motives of the US? Bush and the “Coalition of the Willing” experienced several setbacks in the months leading up to this war, but now, in hindsight, they seem small and insignificant. One of the few things I like about Bush is the way he reacted to these small setbacks. He barely flinched and kept his eye firmly on his long view. Perhaps an application of the Zeigarnik effect on a historical level, Bush recognized that people will only remember how something ends, not the events, setbacks and all, that led us there. We’ve had a spectacularly successful start, now we just need to make sure it ends right… [Pynchon quote from War Words]

James Grimmelmann has revitalized the Laboratorium. He started blogging again, and since I mostly missed out on it last time, that makes me happy because its a pleasure to read his stuff. For the past year or so, he’s been experimenting with various forms of writing and new web tools (that dam twiki-web thing that doesn’t seem to work all that well) but has largely neglected the site with updates coming only spuratically. It looks as if he’s going to stick to it this time, though (which is more than I could say for myself!) Do yourself a favour and check him out.

The “return of saturn,” is a popular theme derived from astrology and is often used in literature (among other art, such as music) as a symbol for a period of change in a person’s life. Metaphorically speaking, you could say that James’ Saturn is returning. I’m not sure how old he is, but this may even be true in the asrological sense, not that it would really matter. In any case, I was thinking about that idea when I came across James’ revision, so that’s why I named the post “Saturn Ascends”. And you know how much I love cataloging lifes little footnotes…

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex by Larry Niven : A funny and very graphic (you were warned) description of the physiological problems Superman would face if he were to attempt to procreate. Niven is best known for his Science Fiction novels, most notably Ringworld (and its sequels), but he shows a biting sense of humour in this essay… Also, as an interesting side note, the influence of this article can be witnessed in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats:

Brodie: It’s impossible, Lois could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee he blows a load like a shotgun, right through her back. What about her womb, you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?

TS: Sure, why not?

Brodie: He’s an alien for Christssake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonderwoman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way he could bang regular chicks is with a Kryptonite condom, but that would kill him.

When compared to Niven’s article, the only new thing is the kryptonite condom bit, but its funny nonetheless… Still, Niven’s article is great…[thanks to Jim Miller]

Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman : Feynman’s classic scathing critique of the pseudo-science typified by the “cargo cult” of South Sea islanders:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

You see this sort of thing often, usually done purposely in order to advance a certain agenda. As Feynman notes, one of the classic examples is advertising. “Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food” – well, that’s true. But what’s missing is that no oils soak through food (when operated at a certain temperature, which is an additional misleading implication). To do away with this, Feynman makes a few suggestions:

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

…

If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

These practices are indeed very important, and are often glossed over in the name of brevity or to save money… don’t allow yourself to be fooled by silly correlations and inflated numbers. I’ve found that there are a lot of issues that are quite simply on the outside, but when you dig deep, you find lots of contradicting information, making the issue that much more complex… [link found via USS Clueless in the midst of a discussion of international law, though the entry about “benchmarks” of Macs also seems relevant]

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Evil by Nick Mamatas : Neil Gaiman’s oeuvre, and the genre of horror/fantasy in general, is typically looked down upon as unsophisticated or childish, and the past decade saw a marked decrease in the Horror genre’s relevance.

“9-11 resembled cheap, lazy fiction, and because it did, it made it strange for writers to decide what is valid artistically.”

Horror was beginning to find new voices and new readers even before the attacks on the WTC, but now, after a initial period of doubt, there appears to be a renewed interest in the genre… “The everyday twisted horribly awry is, of course, the state of the nation post-9-11.” Will Horror become popular again because it evokes fear of the magnitude we all felt on September 11? Time will tell. [thanks BJ]

Just to rewind a bit, I think the period of doubt mentioned above is a very important phenomenon, and I can see it happening all over the place. My very own weblog here, for instance, is a good example. I had posted fairly regularly up until September, focusing mainly on Film and various interesting articles on culture and whatnot, but after 9/11 my posting dropped off sharply and has been irregular ever since. The reason for this, I think, was because I felt that there were more important things in life than my stupid blog. It just seemed so futile. There are certainly other factors, personal and professional, that also contributed to the dropoff, but I also think I needed to re-examine my goals here. My post 9/11 entries were scarce, and they began to lean more towards politics, as I became determined to keep up on current events. But I didn’t want to become a warblogger (I still don’t), and this limited my ability to post because I didn’t want every entry to be about the latest bullet flying over in the Middle East. So I’m hoping that I can live up to the demands of My Shifting Paradigm…