Tea Leaves

Twitter: Having a Loud Conversation

2010-11-14T02:21:00.002-05:00

Many years ago, Dave introduced me to Twitter. Dave is amazingly astute in his ability to spot the trends in the techie world. He told me about Flickr before it was cool, and then Twitter way before it was cool.

I have to admit, I didn't get Twitter. Why on Earth would I tweet about whatever I'm doing. Twitter, honestly, didn't really take off until celebs like Shaq and Ashton Kutcher discovered it was a way to get media attention without going directly to the media.

But that doesn't explain its appeal to the average Joe. The fact of the matter is this. Today's generation of kids, that is, generation Y, the millenial generation, has a "pay attention to me" mentality. 1984 posited a world where "Big Brother" spied your every move under the presumption that you, average citizen, had something to hide and valued that thing you called privacy.

George Orwell might be shocked to see how many people would give their privacy up for a bit of attention. But then, he was a writer who needed attention to get paid, so maybe he could relate.

For non-celebs, Twitter is a conversation in a restaurant, where you're the loudest table in the building. Hi, xxx, how's it going, as you yell to the next table. It's as much name-dropping as well. Sometimes it's a matter of who you tweet to, and who will respond that matters. I've tweeted to folks who have "blocked" me because I'm not cool enough. All in a day's work. All in a day's work!

The point is: why have these public conversations? It's a bit self-indulgent and I say that even as I do it myself. I tweet in the hopes that some random minor celeb way notice and respond. I am that groupie that screams when Justin B brushes his hands through his hair (does he even do this? Not a groupie, I assure you).

People criticize tweeters as having boring lives not worth reading about, but it is a cry from the unattended, who want, so very desperately, to be celebs too.

Rewatching "The History Boys"

2010-10-05T01:25:00.004-04:00

I just watched "The History Boys" on television. There are, I suppose, quite a few flaws in the film. The central conceit, that a portly history teacher with a fondness for giving rides on his motorcycles to his male students and then reaching for a grope during opportune moments, with the grudging acceptance of the boys might be offensive. A reviewer has noted what would happen if it had been an all-girls school. Would there not be outrage?

The eponymous "history boys" from which the film gets its names are from a British boarding school of all-male students. It appears to be 1980s England. The headmaster, balding and unimaginative, has one goal in mind, which is to get as many boys into Oxbridge as possible, and to this end, he's hired Irwin, himself an Oxford man, to coach the boys into writing clever essays that will draw the attention of the readers that admit these men into higher education.

The previous time or times I watched this, I was not teaching, so I didn't think of the film from a teacher's perspective. There is a strong streak of idealism in the film. The kids, with perhaps the exception of the jockish Rudge, all seem committed to their studies. In discussions, they challenge the teachers. When Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, shows up, he offers an alternative view of history than Hector.

Hector is the idealist. He wants students engaged in history because he has a passion for literature. He finds truth in the fiction stories of the great masters. But, he also doesn't want the reverence to literature to overwhelm the students with too great a level of respect. So, he has the students singing songs from musicals and watching classic movies, to make those stories, mass-appealing as they may be, as relevant as the classics.

Irwin, by contrast, is the pragmatist. He sees admission as a game. While his students are technically proficient--they know their history backwards and forwards, their essays are fact-filled and parrot back the books they've read. He challenges them to bring an unusual perspective, to make the essays interesting. The history boys seem keen on this, even as Hector bristles at the notion of history as game.

Mrs. Lintott provides the female voice of reason, counterbalancing the foibles of Hector who, despite his love of teaching, can't seem to abandon his infatuation for his students, with one notable exception.

If the movie uses Dakin as the ultra-hip guy who sleeps with secretaries and seems more than plenty bi-curious, it is Posner, the gay Jewish geek, who is the moral center of the film. Posner knows he has a crush on Dakin, and even Dakin knows this too. Dakin's a bit too cool to get involved, and he feels Posner is a bit too young.

There are perhaps three key scenes in the film. First, Posner has a discussion with Irwin and says that he is homosexual and that he has a crush on Dakin and he knows it can't be returned. In a way, this confession is about Posner, but it is also about Irwin. Irwin wants to sympathize, but he's afraid to reveal who he truly is to Posner, mostly out of deference to the teacher-student relationship. Posner has another discussion with Hector about a story he's read and Hector tells him that novels are compelling because sometimes you have a feeling, one you think is completely personal, and realize that such a feeling is there in written word by a man you've never met, and perhaps by someone long since dead.

Another key scene is Irwin and Hector talking in the hallway shortly after Hector has been told he's being let go because of his indiscretions. Indeed, Mrs. Lintott seems to feel that those indiscretions, as poor judgment as they may be, are perhaps not as severe as they could be, that as a teacher that cares about what he teaches, his contributions to a student's development more than offsets bad behavior. Hector understands that Irwin himself is attracted to the boys and even as the boys think of Irwin as cooler, he advises Irwin to restrain himself, in particular, in his infatuation with Dakin.

To up the ante, Dakin wants to fool around with Irwin, especially after he has found out (like many of his classmates) that he's going to a top-notch college. It's his way of saying thanks. Irwin is uncomfortable at the advances, and eventually gives in to the idea of meeting Dakin. This discomfort is well-acted even if the situation is contrived, but it does touch on potential situations a teacher might find him/herself.

I'll quickly go over the other guys. Akhtar is an Indian Muslim. His character is not fleshed out that much and his inclusion probably says as much about modern British society's diversity than anything else. James Corden plays portly Timms, but is also a character that isn't that well-developed. He's there as the token big guy. Apparently, the actor has gone on to be in a successful British sitcom.

Russell Tovey plays Rudge, the athlete. In a way, his view is the most honest. He doesn't care for book learning at all, despite being in a prep school. He plays the game somewhat, but thinks it's a waste of time. He dislikes the guile needed, and just wants to play sports.

Andrew Knott plays Lockwood, who is not given much of a personality, and is there, one imagines, to be good looking. One other character is the token African Brit, and like Akhtar, doesn't have that much of a personality.

Jamie Parker plays Scripps. He's the Catholic, and is considered a bit of a cipher by best friend, Dakin, who wonders what Scripps does with all this religion. It does seem the writing is a touch lazy for Scripps, and his Catholicism is played, if not for laughs, than not entirely seriously either. His religion is a novelty to Dakin and the film treats it as such.

The two boys that matter most are Dakin and Posner. Dakin, confident and outgoing, ambitious and willing to take chances, and Posner, scared and timid, not sure how to deal with his sexuality, and having a hopeless crush on Dakin. Interestingly enough, Hector never gives Posner a ride, the one guy who might truly be interested in Hector's advances, while the others consider his advances more a nuisance. Hector probably senses how conflicted Posner is and doesn't want the aftermath of any encounter.

The accident that ends the movie is something of a convenience. Because Hector takes Irwin for a bike ride, one that ends in Hector's death and Irwin's injury, Irwin and Dakin never get together for Dakin to "thank" Irwin.

If the movie works, it works at many levels. From a teacher's perspective, it's the total engagement of the students. So often, students are disengaged. They wonder why they are in classes, and they are unable to formulate good questions, take decisive stances. It's a level of maturity few students, even after four years, ever reach. To find such precocity as the students in this film must make teachers giddily happy, even as they recognize the fantasy aspects.

When Hector is going to be let go, he wants to make an announcement to his class, but the boys are trying to be clever and Hector is unable to get his pending firing out in words, and breaks down and cries, realizing the only thing he truly cared about--teaching, was going to be taken away from him. Mrs. Lintott is sympathetic. She sees the headmaster as a bean-counter, one who only worries about placements and test scores, and not about educating the person.

Although the film isn't strictly about Posner, his story is the link between Hector, Irwin, and the history boys. All three are gay. All three find hurt as they suppress their feelings (in a way, the film is old-fashioned, never seeming to take the viable stance that these people might find someone who is also gay to make them happy), infatuated by straight guys, and never able to find a relationship that works.

Of all the history boys, he is most like Hector, and becomes a teacher. And like Hector, he is fond of the boys he teaches, but he restrains himself, and as much as it hurts, he says he's not unhappy either. In a way, the film touches two aspects of teaching. One is the act of teaching itself, the inspiration and engagement to intellectual pursuits, and one is more the seedy underside, the idea that a teacher is in a position of respect and that students are at a challenging time in their lives and may be victims of untoward advances.

For its variety of flaws, so much of the film resonates, from its decidedly too-brainy kids, to the different views of how to teach students, to that idyllic time in life somewhere between high school and college where students are only asked to hang out and learn, and the responsibilities of a job seem so far away.

The Reality of The Social Network

2010-10-03T17:10:00.003-04:00

When it comes to making a movie, film makers have some idea of what makes a movie work. They need drama, that is, they need tension. They need easy-to-understand motivations. They don't need things that are highly technical or highly abstruse. Such things would only put the audience to sleep with nary a sense of the deep issues that they are completely missing.

Facebook started with Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is, like most endeavors, it's too tough to write code on your own. As prolific as Zuckerberg might be, he can only code so fast, and he eventually needs a team that he can trust to do things. The story of Dustin Moskovitz (shown in the picture) and Chris Hughes are untold because, frankly, it's more interesting to make this the story of a handful of people.

Thus, Eduardo Saverin, the business guy, is the guy that is the foil for Mark. Saverin is the conscious of the film, and yet, the film posits that he lacks the vision to make Facebook as successful as it could be, and eventually, either Zuckerberg or Parker or both chose to exclude Saverin (although apparently through lawsuits, he still owns a reasonable chunk of Facebook).

What about Moskovitz and Hughes? What about the other technical folks that were part of Facebook? How did Zuckerberg interact with them? Did they have a sense this could be big? Did they know what it would take to make Facebook big? What did they have that, say, MySpace didn't have? Why did it work? Ultimately, such questions are sidestepped because the answers are perhaps not so pat, not so simple. Was the success of Facebook due to its technical prowess, or was it due to something simpler? Perhaps having a good idea at the right time?

Facebook started a bit like GMail. It ran on exclusivity. But exclusivity isn't be enough. Zuckerberg had created other sites at Harvard and those sites would not have taken off the way Facebook did.

You need a reason to visit the site whether you are exclusive or not. It may be enough to bait the first few users, but honestly, that's far from enough. The site has to be good enough to keep folks coming back over and over. To be fair, many websites could have been great had they had enough users. They could have made great decisions, had there been enough people to start it up, and yet, there wasn't enough. Maybe HarvardConnection (or ConnectU) would have been great. But it's highly possible it would have fizzled.

The Social Network cared primarily about the relationship of Zuckerberg and Saverin and also to the Winklevoss twins (and Narendra). The technical team behind Facebook was mostly pushed aside because, as movie makers, Fincher and Sorkin would have been hard-pressed to make that side of the story compelling. And, did the folks who invented Facebook really understand what made it different and what made it work? Perhaps they did.

To me, the reason it worked was because it flipped the home page around. Instead of the home page being about you, it was about your friends. You could have 100 friends, but all you need is 3-5 really active friends to keep you coming back to Facebook. Once you could add comments or look at your friends pictures or what have you, you have motivation to keep coming back. If it was just about you, you would get bored of yourself. Other sites like MySpace failed to make it easy to notify you when your friends updated anything. It was a huge labor to find out what your friends were up to. And they took advantage of microblogging since real blogging was far too time-consuming.

So while I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed how Fincher/Sorkin told the tale, I know that it misses on a lot of the technical aspects that would have made it more interesting to me personally.

Review: The Social Network

2010-10-02T20:23:00.003-04:00

When I first heard about The Social Network, I didn't think much of it. The commercial didn't seem that good. I knew almost nothing of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. What little I knew was something about how Zuckerberg "stole" Facebook from the original creators and made a fortune. I had thought he had been the savvy business type, a Steve Jobs that took over from lowly Steve Wozniak.

But then I heard David Fincher directed the film and Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. David Fincher has been a notable director, even if his name is not as widely known as, say, Steven Spielberg. Until Fincher directed his first feature, he was best known as one of the directors of Madonna's video.

Fincher got his start in that incubator of talent: the Aliens films. The first had been directed by Ridley Scott, known for his visual style. The second was a hyper-kinetic space romp directed by James Cameron. Fincher helmed the third film and Jean-Pierre Jeunet did the fourth (he also did Amelie). Fincher got notoriety in that most gruesome of cop buddy movies: Se7en about a serial killer who murders based on the seven deadly sins.

Fincher went on to direct other movies like The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac. Fincher is a technician, a director whose cool precision sometimes draws attention to itself. There is a certain detachment, a little like watching a Kubrick film, although Fincher seems more assured in how he wants a scene to look.

I found it a bit puzzling what would draw Fincher to this story. It doesn't seem to follow his usual brand of film, whatever that may be. This is a story of geeks that develop a social networking site that takes over the world.

The story begins at Harvard where Zuckerberg is a computer science major. The opening scene, which is made up for dramatic effect, tries to set the tone for the entire film. In it, Zuckerberg is telling his girlfriend that he wants to join one of the elite houses at Harvard. It helps to know something about how Harvard works.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (I believe) have a house system. Typically, students enter their first year in the dorms, then they join a house where they will stay their remaining years. A house is perhaps more akin to Harry Potter's house of Griffyndor than, say, a fraternity. The house is co-ed and serves as residence, dining hall, and communal gathering place.

Beyond this basic living structure, there are also "final clubs" which are social clubs with eight all-male clubs and five all-female clubs. The all-male final clubs have been around for over a hundred years.

Zuckerberg wants to join such a club and tells his plan to his girlfriend. She seems intelligent. Both trade verbal jabs courtesy of Aaron Sorkin until it's revealed that this girlfriend goes to Boston University, and Zuckerberg has ambitions to work his way up the social hierarchy. He's dumped when she feels it's too much of a burden being his girlfriend and that he's basically an asshole.

Without this opening exchange, it's hard to read much into Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. Looking much like Michael Cera, he lacks Cera's huggable loser quality, but has enough of his geek to make it plausible that this guy could be the programming genius that starts Facebook.

Indeed, Eisenberg's face rarely registers any emotions. He never seems ecstatic, nor sad. His emotions are expressed more through words and he seems a bit emotionally detached, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, and yet, Zuckerberg is ambitious.

Although Facebook's creation is the result of computer programming, Fincher and Sorkin only touch on that aspect. They find enough computer consultants to keep certain parts reasonably accurate. Zuckerberg is shown blogging on LiveJournal. You can see his screen is filled with HTML, although of the most rudimentary sort. LiveJournal likely has a way to edit raw HTML, but most people don't use it (because they don't understand it), and one wonders if Zuckerberg would have edited raw HTML, because there's a bit of tedium to it. Even so, there's some accuracy to this.

There is some historical research that was done to create some of the sense of the early 2000s. I bought my first Mac around 2001 or so. The earliest power cords were round and glowed at the connection, unlike the new magnetic version that allows the cord to slip off without breaking. They were able to find a Mac circa that era in the opening scene when Sean Parker is introduced (who is momentarily unrecognizable, despite being played by Justin Timberlake).

At one point, Zuckerberg says that he's going to fire up emacs and edit the Perl code, and it does indeed look like Perl code, at least, from a cursory glance. Emacs is one of two Unix text editors in wide use (the other being vi or its successor, vim). Zuckerberg talks about keeping the servers up as well.

To show some of Zuckerberg's genius, he is shown sitting in a computer hardware course as the teacher is explaining details of how paging is done though the quantities he uses (256 bytes for a page) seems small. To increase the melodrama, the class is only 15-20 students seated in an auditorium meant for 100. As Zuckerberg leaves the class early to deal with some business related issue, the teacher notes that many students have gave up on the course. As Zuckerberg leaves, he identifies bits of a status register. The teacher makes an inane comment "That's correct--do you see how he got this?", when the answer is "he memorized it". There was nothing to infer. The status register was the way it was defined by the person or people who designed it.

Since this is a plot-driven story, there is a need to prune away enough characters that might otherwise distract from the storyline. There are roughly four main characters other than Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg is an emotional cipher, the everyman that we're meant to relate to is his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, who provides the money to help Zuckerberg, but is put down, even as he makes inroads to join one of the "final club", Phoenix. Saverin is shown as a big supporter of Zuckerberg, and is distrustful of Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, who eventually helps Zuckerberg grow Facebook.

There is a kind of genius picking Justin Timberlake to play Sean Parker. Timberlake, a ex boy-band pop singing sensation, has shown some acting chops. He must have liked the idea of playing an uber geek, but one reason Timberlake may have been chosen is because of his star persona. He can then play Sean Parker not only as a geek, but a cool savvy coding rock star, someone that Zuckerberg becomes enamored of. Perhaps echoing Wall Street (a sequel came out recently too), Zuckerberg must pick between the guy who takes him places or his best friend, and while Zuckerberg does side with Parker, the film leaves it ambiguous about his final feelings to Saverin.

The other two main characters are the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, both played by Armie Hammer. They look something like Nordic gods, and yet Sorkin/Fincher do something clever. Since they are both at Harvard, they are made out to be pretty smart guys (at least business wise). They work with Divya Narendra (played by director Anthony Minghella's son who does not seem to be Indian). Furthermore, the brothers act differently. The leader (I guess Cameron) is more worried about appearances and seems the more patient of the two, and the other is more impulsive, similar to Divya.

Sorkin, in particular, has some fun about the two being twins, making them more "twin-like", i.e., about how they mention they are brothers, almost as if the twins in the second Matrix films had intelligent dialogue.

Roger Ebert, in his review, notes that nearly all the women (except the girlfriend at the beginning) are Asian. Although Zuckerberg is almost seen as being uninterested in women (and for dramatic purposes, he is shown trying to friend the girl that dumped him at the start of the film), his to-be-wife appears as two of the groupie Asian girls that make out with Eduardo and Mark. Fincher uses indirect cues to get his idea across. Zuckerberg is showing wearing the Adidas flip flops into the next stall over from Eduardo, the same one shown during the hearings that interweave through the entire film.

Rather than show Bill Gates in focus, he is shown blurred, wearing a sweater, and a voice impersonator does the talking so unless you're paying attention, you might not know that it's Bill Gates being portrayed (although it's mentioned in a subsequent scene).

Fincher knows he has some difficult material to try to dramatize, and to this effect, he falls on an interesting crutch: music. Many scenes have music over it to add drama to the situation. Fincher also adds tension by cross-cutting time frames, from a hearing, and going back historically.

Fincher employs tilt-shift in a key crew scene, one where the Winklevoss team starts to close on the winning boat, but ends up short. This is a metaphor for how close these jocks came to perhaps creating the next Facebook (though probably not really).

Ultimately, although there are a lot of geek aspects to The Social Network, it is about the desire to be a mover and a shaker in the world, and not about why Facebook ultimately worked.

There are two or three theories that are posited in the film. The Winklevosses mention the first reason: the Harvard name makes the desirability of the social network rather high. Second, there's the idea of putting the social status (single, etc) on. The one real reason isn't given. Facebook inverted what the home page was about.

In LiveJournal, each person's home page is their blog. In Facebook, the home page is basically a feed of all your friends. What keeps you coming back to Facebook isn't what you are doing, it's what your friends are doing. It seems obvious, but many social networking sites didn't get that. To be fair, Facebook looks sleek and clean and not the dirty, gaudy clutter of MySpace.

There are two aspects of Facebook that The Social Network avoids. It doesn't try to explain why Facebook is so addictive. It merely states that it is. It also doesn't get into the group that helped create Facebook. Most of the coders are only in the background. There is a competition (that most likely never existed) where coders must take shots as they try to hack in somewhere.

Even the parties that are portrayed are sexier than reality, done to jazz up the reality that was. We understand, as movie goers, that drama is amped so that viewers don't get bogged down by the day to day mundane details that reflect reality. Zuckerberg is likely a far more personable person than the Eisenberg potrayal, but that isn't seem to be a problem for me.

Though the story is about Zuckerberg, it's Saverin we come to sympathize with. Zuckerberg is more enigmatic. In the end, he seems to worry if he is an asshole. There are few women in the film with anything more than a cursory personality. One is the lawyer that is shown to be on Zuckerberg's side. She reassures him that he is not an asshole, though he seems to be trying hard to be one.

As Zuckerberg stares as the business card that Parker helped him craft "I'm the CEO, bitch", he realizes that Parker is a bad influence and being the CEO, bitch, means he is ultimately responsible for Facebook's reputation. Saverin may have been right, but Parker was, in his way, also right.

The film focuses on the drama of how one person or a small group of people took ambitious steps to work to the most successful social network, and it's in this human drama that the film works, because it's hard to mine drama out of algorithms and code and to explain why social networking was so compelling to so many people.

No Friends for Old Men

2010-06-12T21:38:00.002-04:00

So here's the deal. Most of us work because, well, everything runs on money. You want food? I guess you could grow your own, but that takes a lot of planning. So you spend money and you get food. Need a place to stay because, well, it's hard to just go out in the woods and just live unless you know what you are doing. And the place costs, yes, money.

Then, presuming you live in a society that produces goods and advertises such goods, you begin to covet. I want this, and I want that. And all that costs, yes, money.

For many folks, this money comes in a 9-to-5 job. Of course, there's no such thing as a 9 to 5 job anymore. With jobs occasionally scarce, the idea is work harder for more hours for the same pay. At least you have a job. But the point is, you spend 8 hours a day at work.

How much time does that leave? OK, let's say you have no kids because that's going to take a chunk of time out of your life. Maybe you need to be up by 7:30, wake up, shower, eat, assuming you want breakfast, and then do the dreaded commute. You live in a place that's affordable and work in a place that's not. So you spend an hour getting to work and an hour getting back from work. So maybe 3.5 hours just dealing with the logistics of getting to and fro.

So maybe you're back by 6, and then you have to think about cooking, or perhaps you eat out, or perhaps do a microwave dinner. Maybe you have a significant other. That leaves you 4-5 hours to spend time with them, which isn't insignificant, but is less than the time you were at work.

And perhaps, if you're not a complete recluse, you make friends at work. Humans are a social people, and we are at our most social when we are with other people. The awkwardness of not talking to people when you're around people is so overwhelming that we talk.

But are these really your friends? How much would you talk to these people outside of work? If I were to point out a work colleague, would you say "Yeah, he's a nice guy, friendly". Let's say you say that. Then, I ask, "do you talk to him outside of work". And you say "no". I ask "why not". And you say "I don't know. I guess I'm not that interested. Besides, he's married. Why would he talk to me?".

I was reminded that money makes "friends" of many people. Lately, in my respite between occupations, I've been taking tennis lessons. The guy who runs the company texts me, mostly because I'm worth revenue to his company. He wants to be nice. He wants to be helpful. He's checking up on how I'm doing. Were there not money tied to this situation, he would have no reason to make this effort. Business, you see, makes people friendly.

There's one peculiar exception that plays on the desire to communicate that is separate from work. It's college. If you choose to stay in dormitories, you are now surrounded by many people of a similar socio-economic status. And many dorms encourage roommates. Living with others compels you to talk to them, and usually, people will pick friends or at least make friends with those near them.

How often do people make friends because they just happened to be assigned to the same dormitory? Quite often. That's because it's awkward to go to a random dorm, hang out, just to meet people from that dorm. People want you to be there with a reason. That's why you talk to people at work, and not to people at some other workplace (though, I have seen some people show enough cojones to do just that, mostly because they caught sight of a pretty lass that they wanted to talk up).

As much as people excel in communication when in proximity to dormmates or to co-workers, they fare poorly once distance is added.

Ask yourself who you talk to most? For most folks, it might be a spouse, or a significant other, and then, there's your parents. For as much as you may like or dislike your parents, there's some obligation to talk to them. They have experience in the world. They spent time raising you. You feel bad not talking to them.

Short of folks who hate their parents, this is a pretty normal. No complaints, right?

So now make a list of people you consider to be your friends. Some live near you, and so you could, in principle, go out and do things. Some are just far enough away that getting together is a bit of a hassle. Some are too far away, so the only way to communicate is to use technology.

You would think technology would be wonderful. Phone, texting, IM, email. And yet, there are plenty of people who hate this. And the etiquette works out that you can ignore people using any of those formats. Before answering machines came around, when the phone rang, you picked it up. After the answering machine came around, you'd have phone spammers and then you didn't want to pick up the phone.

Phone spammers ruined the innocence of the phone. But once you had an answering machine, you could let the machine record the message and you could see who it was. And, of course, now that many people have cell phones, you get caller ID and can figure out, for the most part, who is calling you.

So now you see who calls you and you can decide "I don't want to talk to them". Email is pretty much the same. IM likewise. Indeed, the only awkward refusal is face to face. If I come up to you and say "hi", it would be rude of you to ignore me. But every other technological way to communicate and you can feel free to ignore me.

The primary reason this has happened is because face-to-face interaction involves recognizing what the other person is doing. If they're busy, then maybe you don't interact. And there is a limited interaction. You can't have 10 people talk to you at once in person, but on IM, you could. On IM, you can't see what the other person is doing. Maybe they're watching a movie. Maybe they are listening to music. Maybe they are talking to another friend.

So back to your list of friends. How many do you keep in regular contact? How much time do you spend a week? Is the answer zero? Why? Why do you have co-workers you'd never spend time outside of work and spend a non-trivial amount of time with them, but spend zero time with those you consider your friends?

I suppose the answer is partly convenience and partly embarrassment. Some folks don't like to talk. That's it. They'll hang out with you at a movie, or a concert, at some location where there's not much interaction, but to them, that's doing something. But if you have to talk, just talk, well, that doesn't feel right, and so it doesn't happen.

Part of it is embarrassment. What would you talk about? Somehow these questions don't seem to come up when you bump into these folks in real life, and yet, on a phone or on IM, the words become scarce. People treat the phone as a planning device. When do you want to meet? Can I do something for you? And so forth.

So why does this happen? Do you feel bad that the only people you talk to, outside of a handful of people, are your coworkers? We say we value our friends, but do we?

Almost Famous

2010-02-20T14:47:00.002-05:00

I'm watching bits and pieces of Almost Famous, the semi auto-biography of direction, Cameron Crowe. Crowe was a teenager who wrote for Rolling Stone. I wonder what he thought when they picked Patrick Fugit to play himself.

One realizes that acting is, well, acting. It's not real. When you act, it's an idealization of real life, the emotions are bigger. Fugit, alas, can't really act. It doesn't kill the film, but you realize he doesn't have the chops to pull it off. I read somewhere that Crowe had to improvise.

Fugit has this wide-eyed look about him, and lacks the emotional maturity and range to pull of someone that is, by all accounts, a prodigy (a writing prodigy, to be sure).

Kate Hudson pretty much acts circles around him, though her role is to be some idealized female, so it's really important that she can act and it's less of a problem that Fugit looks mostly googly-eyed throughout.

That is all.

Telugu Woman

2010-02-20T09:15:00.002-05:00

American woman, stay away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
I don’t wanna see your face no more

I've heard the song American Woman for a while but never really paid attention to the lyrics. I guess it's about a stalker woman and a guy who wants this woman out of her life. For some reason, this song came to mind when I wanted to title this blog.

Yesterday, I went to the bank. I have several bank accounts, but this is one of those accounts I rarely use, and yet I have enough money residing there that it's always a bit of a pain that I have to deal with this account. Each year, I forget I have this account and I get locked out. Each year, I make a trek to re-open the account at a local branch near my old workplace.

I decided I wanted to pull most of my money from this account and went down to the bank to close out several other accounts and consolidate this account into one. I had to go down to the branch office to make this happen.

As it turns out, the branch office is aimed at Asians, mostly Chinese folks. I talked to one guy, and he showed me my accounts. He told me to talk to another woman who would take care of the account consolidation and closing down of unwanted accounts. After that was done, I still had one issue. I couldn't log into my account online.

The woman that had helped me said that there was a line (well, one other person) and couldn't help me. I was told to go back to the original guy to help out. But, he was busy too. There was an Indian woman beside him that said she could help me, so I went to her office.

As she was helping me get my online account, I asked her if she knew any Hindi. Hindi is the common language of India, but many don't speak the language. She said she spoke Telugu.

Telugu!

I knew that language. Ravi, who used to work at our company, and Vijay, both spoke Telugu. This is a language spoken in Andhra Pradesh in south India. AP (as it's called in short) is known for its spicy cuisine and its Hyderabadi biryani. Hyderabad is the capital of the state and biryani is a rice dish made with meat, typically, chicken.

Like many states in India, AP has its own film industry. Everyone has heard of Bollywood, but that refers to "Bombay Hollywood". Bombay (also called Mumbai) is in the state of Maharashtra where Hindi is mostly spoken. Although it's the biggest film industry, many other states produce films too, including AP, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

Each state has its own superstar, an actor (sometimes actors) so famous that they are living legends. The US hasn't had stars like this since Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The death of a superstar is cause for national mourning. In Bollywood, that star is Amitabh Bachchan, though he is now something of an elder statesman. In Tamil Nadu, it's Rajnikanth. In Andhra Pradesh, it's Chiranjeevi.

South Indian films are often filled with implausible action scene, such as this short clip from a much longer chase scene:

The star on the horse is Chiranjeevi from AP.

I talked to the woman for 20-30 minutes discussing Indian culture. She seemed unusually happy to talk with me, and it was a nice diverting way to spend the afternoon taking care of errands.

Friends and Coworkers

2010-02-12T18:36:00.004-05:00

Wow, I haven't blogged here in quite a while, so for those still following, hi again. I have been spending my time doing tennis blogging and that has taken a bit of my time.

I want you to think about the following. Do you have an SO (significant other)? Do you have family? Do you have friends? Do you have coworkers?

Assuming you are monogamous, you have one SO. Now, pick 3 members of your family. Let's say, your parents, and a sibling. Pick 3 of your closest friends. Pick 3 coworkers.

Ask yourself how often you talk to your SO. Presumably, being your SO, this answer is a lot. You probably see or talk to your SO every day, perhaps for at least an hour.

Now, your coworkers. You might say "I have a job to do, so I have to talk to my coworkers". That might be an hour a day spread over the workday.

Now, your family. If you're reasonably close to your family, you probably talk to them once a week, and if not so close, but not completely alienated, you probably talk once a month. If your family is close to your distant relatives, even those you may not particularly care for, you may be obligated to see them and engage in small talk.

Now, your friends. How you answer depends, I suspect, very much on gender and your personality. In other words, if you are an introverted guy, this introversion, plus a sense of male pride (guys need to be independent) means as close as you may be with your friends, you might not actually keep in close contact at all.

This begs the question. How did you become close friends? One answer, which isn't surprising, is that you went to college with your friends, and you either studied with them, or you lived on campus, and arranged to live with your friends. Your living arrangements forced you to hang out with your friends, which forced your interaction level to be quite high. If your friends are even a few minutes away living in a dorm just over there, your interaction may go way down.

Now, there are those addicted to chat, and such interactions are more than likely, of the girl/guy variety. But I know quite a few people that dislike chat, dislike phone interaction, dislike email. All they like is interpersonal interactions. You can have a long engaging conversation face-to-face that lasts hours, but you'll be hard-pressed to duplicate such interactions in IM. There's just too much typing, thus too much work. And IM always seems like an interruption. You're trying to read a news article, or watch a funny cat video, or heaven forbid, get some work done.

In real life, you know you are talking to a person by themselves. They aren't engaged in something else, or at the very least, they are pausing it for your behalf. When you IM someone, they might be chatting with someone else, or doing any number of other things, and they might be a lot less willing to stop their discussion just to talk to you.

So how does that social dynamic work? You go from hanging out in the dorms where you get to do fun stuff for a period of time every day to ...? Well, once you leave that situation, you might get to everyone doing their own thing. This is one reason many people look to finding a SO to begin with. If your friends, upon going separate ways, won't even bother to talk to you once a week, then how to make up that interaction?

You take a bigger chance and find someone that is committed to being with you that time. Except this kind of relationship is almost always sexual in nature, or has that implication. It seems OK for early teens, bored with life, lacking close relationships to do stuff with their friends: watch movies, eat out, hang out someplace. Some folks are much better at this than others. They value their friendships and invite folks over all the time.

But to invite folks over requires two more skills. First, you should know how to cook. Second, you should be neat. Oh, and third, it helps to like conversation. All of these are skills that a typical geek doesn't have, especially the conversation bit. Even folks that are reasonably neat sometimes place high expectations of neatness on themselves and never feel their place is neat enough, and thus, never have guests over. I know the neatness aspect is a huge problem for me, but I've also hardly been invited to anyone's place.

What about email? I think several things put people off about email. One, the brain seems much more comfortable with the spoken word than the written word. Somehow, there are higher expectations placed on writing than reading. There is also interaction when you speak to someone that makes it feel like a social, human, bonding event.

Although email has become more ubiquitous, and this has lead to people writing short, terse mails akin to text messaging, there's still some pressure by those who fancy themselves writers to write something that is worth reading. Indeed, folks get writer's block and then decide email is a kind of writing and that their lives are a little too boring to read. In the end, no email is sent, and that's kinda sad too.

I've never had a sustained email contact with anyone, well, no more than a few months, which is pretty long in itself. You hear of husbands and wives a hundred years ago who exchanged letters for more than a decade, the experience savored over time. The convenience and speed of email should make that easier than ever, but the convenience and speed of email means there's no need to be that thoughtful. When you had snail mail, and the effort to exchange correspondence was very slow, there was a premium placed on the content put in letters.

I happen to grow up before email and remember sending and receiving the occasional snail mail. There was an expectation for letters to be 2-3 pages long at the very least. I remember my brother sending me many small pages in letters. The thought placed into such letters even over mundane topics was tremendous compared to the lack of thought placed in today's rapid emails.

Recently, a friend began using Google's video chat service. This has the convenience of not having to be installed. True, he has to be motivated to make the "call", but he has done so a few times. The advantage? You can talk! It brings back some of the immediacy of face to face conversation. When you do video chat, you find typing to be a nuisance. Things that you might not have typed, you can quickly ask. I find my brain engaged more in the act of conversation. Things I say, I wouldn't have typed. Why does the brain engage itself in such ways?

Ah, but what about real interaction? I've known some folks that seem to have pretty active social lives. Some of that comes from having roommates. While the notion of roommates is pretty uncommon in the US--everyone wants their own place, it is quite common in India where the inclination of the educated middle class just out of college is to save money. If you ask the recent graduate why they don't live by themselves, they scoff at the idea, exclaiming how expensive it is.

I'd love to see how their salary breaks down and to see whether living by oneself is truly expensive or whether Americans have left themselves to take huge chunks of their salary to living on their own. Perhaps the typical Indian graduate thinks their rent should be no more than 10% of their take-home pay, while Americans plunk down 30% to give themselves independence. I tend to believe it's the second. As an American, we spend too much money on our own housing to give ourselves independence.

I do know some folks that have roommates. Saving money, of course, is one big concern. The second is to have people around, to create a social environment that they may not have had since they were in college. Of course, for every good roommate, there is the potential for bad ones. This is why some folks have multiple roommates, to spread the potential for bad interaction out, and to have allies in case one person is a bad apple.

But such situations seems rare. Extroverts are rare almost by definition. Well, they're rare. They find more solace with doing activities with friends. They look for things to do, get together with friends, and head out. And, given the sexual innuendo that seems to seep in a typical American's life, many of these social occasions are a mix, with guys and girls, but sometimes not. The thing is, only fairly social extroverts seem to have the incentive to go out and do stuff and they seem to mostly hang out with other extroverts.

If I'm making a point, it's that although we are social creatures, there are impasses that prevent people from being social. Conservative cultures like India are culturally more social. There is a premium placed on meeting with people, and even the frowned-upon male-female interaction usually leads to guys doing stuff with guys and girls doing stuff with girls to make up for the lack of dating interaction. The pressure to save money causes guys and girls to live together and add social interaction to their lives. And of course, arranged marriages create that ultimate of connections.

On the other hand, in the US, there is some degree of shame calling people that are merely friends to do things. Many prefer skipping the uncertainty of friendship to the certainty of a relationship. They want several hours of committed time each week, as opposed to and uncertain number of hours with friends. So once that commitment occurs, that reduces the time to meet other people, and they too want to have a commitment. Pretty soon, you have many people in relationships that don't have time to hang out with one another.

Ironically, conservative societies tend to interact better. Why is that? To point to India again, although some couples are more enlightened and look to spend time with each other together sharing common activities, hundreds of years of men and women being segregated with guys doing guy stuff and women doing women stuff have lead to marriages where guys still want to do stuff with other guys and women want to do stuff with other women.

You would think a marriage would mean the guys really don't have time to spend with you, but the commitment deal has already been sealed. I play tennis with some fifty-something guys who seem eager to play tennis every day, meaning they want to spend time away from their wives to hang out with their male friends doing "male" activities. Although it's possible these wives could participate, they seem to avoid these male activities.

On the other hand, those who haven't committed to marriage, i.e., in a dating phase, even in a long-term relationship, feel the commitment of time is there, and spare time should not be willing given up to hang out with friends.

The point is, there's isn't exactly a platonic equivalent of a commitment between friends, which is too bad because I think many people would benefit from regular social interaction outside the workplace.

Early Days of Usenet

2009-12-23T12:12:00.003-05:00

Ever since the early days of the Internet which, by the way, predates the invention of the browser by at least a decade, there has been a form of social networking. In the mid to late 1980s and on into the 1990s, that was Usenet. Usenet was a collection of so-called "newsgroups" which weren't so much news as discussion boards.

Now, many sites have discussion boards. They are now ubiquitous throughout the Web. However, Usenet brought them under one umbrella. You would get a newsreader, which was a client-side software tool (text-based, much like working with vi or emacs) and then you'd pick a few newsgroups you were into. Many of them used naming schemes that classified it. Thus "rec" would refer to recreation and might include sports as well as TV shows.

For example, when I first became aware of newsgroups, sometime in the late 1980s, Star Trek: The Next Generation had just started. Needless to say, due to the number of nerds on at Usenet, a far higher percentage then than now, there were plenty of ST:TNG fans (ST:TNG is an acronym for the show). You'd have at least half a dozen reviewers. Names like Vidiot, Michael Rawdon, Atsushi Kanamori, and, of course, Tim Lynch were the authority figures, folks that wrote about each episode, dissected what they liked and didn't like.

And much as geekdom was not simply isolated to computers and Star Trek, there was also a huge fascination with sex. Usenet groups, legitimate ones anyway, went through this approval process. I believe some guy at Purdue approved each group and there were hundreds of such groups. However, there were also groups that some wanted without approval, and they all fell in the "alt" groups, the most famous of which was, alt.sex.

For a long while, alt.sex was a pretty fascinating newsgroup. People would freely ask questions, discuss their own personal experiences. Alternate lifestyles were fascinating. I recall a guy who was married in an open relationship. Both he and his wife would sleep with other men and women, in 2-somes and 3-somes. Their view outside the normal spectrum showed a world few were familiar with.

Due to the relative anonymity of the Internet, several phenomenon that exist to this day showed up. Most common were "flame wars". A flame was an incendiary post meant to take a highly opinionated position and often to criticize someone severely. These arguments were more emotional than persuasive and people easily became incensed by contrary viewpoints.

Why did this happen? Ask yourself who read these newsgroups? Typically, bored geeky guys that were passionate about a particular subject, say, Star Trek. Once you get hundreds of such people, it's not hard to have at least one person have a view that is contrary to the views of many. Atsushi Kanamori, for example, enjoyed Star Trek a great deal, but he found most episodes of TNG to be tripe. He argued why he thought it was that way, but it seemed 2 of every 3 reviews were negative. Fans of the show argued with him about the awesome-ness of the show, but since he reasoned his argument out in a review, he was often better prepared to retort.

And that was a civil discussion.

I used to be involved in a tennis newsgroup. During the height of Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, Seles got stabbed and took nearly 2 years off from the tour. Ardent Seles fans, who were all male, demanded Steffi return all the trophies that she won saying they were tainted because Seles was not there to challenge her for them. To be fair, Seles probably would have won her share of trophies during that period, but in a way, it's no different than if Seles had been injured and returned slowly to the tour.

The point is, even a newsgroup as potentially boring as tennis, was still filled with passionate people with passionate arguments.

What was interesting about this tennis newsgroup, and honestly, a whole host of other newsgroups, some devoted to fairly erudite topics such as artificial intelligence or arcane subjects in math, was its ability to attract passionate people who loved a particular subject matter together with other people of similar interests.

I used to love following tennis, but it was really hard prior to the Internet. If you watched tennis in the day, you could only get coverage for matches between the French Open and the US Open. This typically included some of the US tournaments (then played on clay). It was rare to see even the early hardcourt season played in Miami and Indian Wells even though those matches had been played for years. The Philadelphia Indoors was a major indoor tournament that was rarely covered on TV. Forget the entire European clay court circuit which was barely reported on.

In those days, it was amazing just to get tennis results. Most local papers didn't bother with tennis scores. At the time, the best place to get tennis scores was USA Today. USA Today may have been called "McNewspaper" for its generally cheery and somewhat controversy-free news reporting, but it also had a sports section that covered sports nationwide and internationally.

Believe me, even tennis scores don't begin to adequately cover what happens in tennis, but in those days, if you were into tennis, then tennis scores were better than nothing. You could, in principle, try to track an individual player week to week and see how they did. All you would have is scores since live coverage was out of the question.

The newsgroup, in those days, was primarily devoted to the pro game. Sure, there was the occasional discussion of how to play tennis, but Usenet's medium was primarily text. In the early 1990s, there was no YouTube. The best you could hope for was to post photos, and even back then, digital cameras were rare, and there was no convenient way to produce slow motion video from which to take digital stills.

Tennis instruction wouldn't take off again til about 2007. By then, YouTube had existed a few years, and people were producing high quality tennis audio and video and able to acquire slow motion video of the pros and begin to dissect their shots. Up until then, information about how to play tennis seemed like a deeply held secret among certain tennis coaches and that information was not widely disseminated, not even in the "Dummies" books that were starting to abound.

Anonymity creates a strange social dynamic. On the one hand, people will say critical things in front of others and not fear any repercussion. I used to participate in a college newsgroup about issues affecting colleges. One person was adamant in his hatred of affirmative action claiming it was reverse discrimination. The African Americans (at the time) tended to ignore what he said so there was rarely intelligent discussion. Liberals just assumed affirmative action was right and conservatives assumed it was wrong, and there wasn't much discussion, just heated arguments.

Thus, behind the veil of anonymity, people behave in ways that are outside the norm. On the flip side, anonymity sometimes lead to people being a lot more honest. For example, suppose a person was having an affair, or they were gay, or a whole host of things that would be seen unfavorably if their friends new (they were sexaholics, etc). They could get to a newsgroup and discuss it in relative anonymity being a lot more open knowing they could leave at any time.

Of course, the flip side also held true. If people couldn't see you, then perhaps you could pretend to be someone you're not. If you were 50, you might pretend to be 20, and so forth. All sorts of social behavior that has evolved over time to let us interact mostly peacefully begin to deteriorate when bad behavior doesn't have to be reined in. That beautiful girl? Ask her to remove her clothes? That "ugly" person? Criticize them for being a lardo.

It's perhaps no surprise that many of the behaviors that spontaneously evolved during that time continue to this day. People still flame. People still pretend to be other people. People still are passionate about topics and find others that are similarly passionate. Sociologists may one day look at this period, near to the cusp of a new millennium, and wonder how the nature of the Internet and anonymity lead to the burgeoning of the earliest form of social networking, and how people began to view notions such as honesty and privacy in surprisingly different ways.

Dallas 362 Again

2009-11-07T07:52:00.002-05:00

I saw Dallas 362 a few years ago on the positive review of Internet critic, Mike D'Angelo. It was just showing this morning on IFC and I caught the last 20 minutes or so.

If memory serves, the story is about a mother and son, originally from Texas, that move to California. The woman, played by a perhaps impossibly beautiful Kelly Lynch, has become a widower when her husband has died as a bucking horse rider, one of those guys that tries to stay on a horse as long as possible, usually merely seconds, before getting tossed aside. She's moved to be as far away from where this happened as possible.

The son, having been transplanted, doesn't fare particularly well. He gets tangled up with a guy named Dallas who is mixed up with the wrong folks. Perhaps in Dallas, the son (Rusty), sees a kind of father figure, or at least, some masculine role in his life. But perhaps, much like the Charlie Sheen figure in Wall Street, he knows that what he's doing isn't right, and the film depicts how he ends up choosing the right path for himself.

Jeff Goldblum plays, well, himself. Perhaps one reason to cast Kelly Lynch is because she's blond and a bombshell, though with the paucity of characters in the film, no one much pursues her. Goldblum's character is the awkward, geeky, nerdy character he generally plays in most films, but it serves as a contrast to Rusty and the film takes time to have Rusty warm up to this guy who is nothing like the self-destructive Dallas.

Mike D'Angelo, himself trained as a screenwriter, picks a scene, where son and mom sit on a bench outside the house having a heart-to-heart. She tells him that she's in love with Jeff Goldblum's character, and wants to marry him, and he tells her that he's genuinely happy for her, and she finally gives him permission to pursue his dream to go back to Texas and do the only thing he's ever been good at, riding horses.

And he realizes that, even if he thought he would leave California and pursue it with or without his mother's permission, he would have to cut off his life in California, one that was bad for him, but the only one he knew. And it's an interesting decision, the contrast of living the honest life that he knows he should. He tries to convince his buddy, Dallas, to leave his wicked ways and join him, and yet, we know, Rusty knows, and finally Dallas knows, that Dallas is just as suited to life in Texas as Rusty is suited to life in California.

During this scene, D'Angelo points out that Goldblum is just about to join in. He's in the background, hangs out a minute, then leaves. Rusty peers over for a second, and the Goldblum is gone. He credits director Caan (who also plays Dallas) with keeping that subtle, not drawing attention to it.

I happen to like a later scene, flashy as it may be. While Rusty and his mom and his mom's boyfriend are having a nice dinner, Dallas has paired up with a guy to rob a local kingpin. That scene is played for tension and intercuts with the life Rusty could be living (namely, being with Dallas) and the life he has now decided is right for him. The scene ends in an absurdist situation where a third character pounces in at a moment that causes Dallas and a guy he has paired with to rob the house, end up accidentally shooting each other and killing one another.

Of course, that scene is played for the tragic ending you know the film feels inexorably drawn to, and while flashy and reminiscent of the tense moments in "Boogie Nights", it's not the one I point to.

Instead, although you are never told this, it's a scene afterwards where Rusty is dazed, devasted and begins to cry. Few films about the tough male bonding ever dig deep at the emotional, homoerotic crux of such relationships. Dallas, for all his faults, was the one guy that, in his way, cared for Rusty, and bad as he was for Rusty, it meant something emotionally to him. It was, in its way, a doomed love affair, improbable because one guy was, at his core, someone bad, and one, at his core, was someone good, as trite as the idea seems.

It reminds me a bit of "Wild Reeds", a French film, which has the daughter of a Communist teacher (communists supported the Algerians during their fight for independence from France) who has fallen for a loner (whose dad died in Algeria, and believes Algerians owe the French for all they've done for them). The two have a very brief tempestuous relationship, one similarly doomed to fail because both are such different people. Lust and love can't overcome their diametrically opposed view of the way the world works.

Perhaps the reason this scene resonates is because few male relations are depicted like this, and perhaps few relationships exist like this. In the process of creating a drama like this, it seems Caan has also given thought to what it's like for someone to have that intense a friend, and the associated emotions that it brings. This hyper-masculinity means the two can never really express what they mean to each other in any but the most superficial macho preening ways.

And yet, in that moment of loss, with Rusty on the verge of leaving California, leaving his friend, he breaks down. The one man he truly cares for is gone, and it has taken his death to reveal just how much he cared. And yet, he's also now a truly free man. He has made the right decision, and he only wishes his friend, whose life was being sucked to self-destruction, had listened to him, had taken that improbable step, a step he was never going to take.

It takes keen observer to create characters that you can tell have a path they must lead, but try to escape it.

By the way, after this movie, IFC is now showing Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, the inspiration to Star Wars. The movie opens with two bickering low-lifes who are wandering across the desert. There is a war and they were mistaken for the enemy, and like Merry and Pippin, have managed to get themselves out of a bind. The two insult each other, even come to strangle each other, when another guy, a warrior of some sort, stumbles across, trying to escape the enemies pursuing him.

Six horses with men come by, finish him off, and then leave, the two men bewildered, happy to be seen as beggars.

It reminds me of the scene of C3PO and R2D2 crossing the desert planet of Tatooine. Of course, C3PO is the fussy English butler, and R2D2 mostly squeals and beeps. They don't have the kind of insulting, bawdy, relationship that the two characters in Hidden Fortress do. And it is funny to imagine Lucas deciding to make the droids behave like these men, bawdy, bickering, rather than polite, effete.

Too bad that Lucas's pilfering of Kurosawa doesn't extend to Kurosawa's clever filmwork. Kurosawa is a formalist, often as interested in the relationship of how characters fill the screen, how they sit and situate against one another. Lucas, far less mannered, doesn't seem concerned with these trifles.

Wait Wait Followup

2009-11-02T10:51:00.002-05:00

Of course, now that I did a full rant, I learned what had happened. Turns out the guy who was supposed to play tennis with me got caught in traffic and that had severely delayed him. He went on to play tennis with someone else that day. We ended up playing doubles and singles the following day.

I'm not sure my observations were incorrect in my previous post, but at the very least, I should apologize for the situation which I misunderstood.

Wait Wait

2009-11-01T08:44:00.002-05:00

In India, the term is so common, it's been given its own name: IST. IST stands for Indian Standard Time. No, it's not the peculiar N + 1/2 hour difference that the entire country of India has with other countries. It's akin to what is called "Clinton Standard Time".

Bill Clinton was known as something of a schmoozer. He loved to talk and charm his guests. So much so that his meetings often ran late, which meant he was rushing to his next meeting, but the rush was superfluous because, well, he was late. And that meeting would run late, and so forth.

IST is this idea that Indians don't show up to anything on time. They can be late as short as 10 minutes to as late as, well, who knows, half an hour, an hour? If the person making you wait is, say, a relative, then you put up with it. Grandma was supposed to arrive at 2 PM, and it's nearly 6 PM and you're still waiting, wanting to get on and do the next thing? Nope, you're hanging out. The thought of taking off and leaving Grandma by herself would be deeply insulting, and so the culture never cures itself of this promptness problem because the person that's late knows they can get away with it. They prey on the kindness of others.

I've heard of Indians who promise they will show up to something and when it happens they "just don't feel like it" and so they don't show up at all. Do they call ahead to inform the folks that they don't feel like it? It doesn't seem necessary. They don't seem to feel that bad about it. Perhaps it's happened to them so much, and they've done it so much, that saying you won't show up, especially to a group event is, even in this modern day of communication, a trifle. What should someone bother?

Now, to be fair, there are enough Indians that are pretty prompt. They know how to get to places on time. But it seems like a foreign trait. Most people that run late feel they have "power". I'm not constrained by a schedule. I don't have to be out there right. This. Minute.

Part of the problem is the lack of ability to estimate time. You need to be somewhere by 7? Many think, oh, it'll only take 5 minutes. Once you convince yourself of that, then it no longer matters if you leave at 6:55 or 7:00, now does it? It's only 5 minutes, right? And much like the snooze alarm, you can always say, well, if 5 minutes late is OK, then 10 should be OK too, right? I think many would be shocked to learn that they need to be in their car at 6:45 moving, because at 6:45, 7:00 seems so far away.

And so sometimes the lies come. It's 7, and they are still at home, so you give them a call, and they don't want to displease you, so the white lie is "I'm on the road now, so I'll be there in a few minutes" and by the time they show up, you realize when you called, that they weren't even in their car. The entire trip time consists of the time between the time you called and the time they arrived.

And because it's so prevalent, a late Indian never (or rarely) apologizes for being late. Sometimes they are almost indignant or shrug it off, and try to convince you to move on, they're their now, let's get started.

What's worse than that is not the lack of ability to estimate time is the thought process that occurs. It seems, any time there is a deadline to arrive somewhere, that's when someone will decide to do something. Oh wait, we need to take care of this one thing before we go out.

I suspect this idea of getting a hundred things done had to do with the nature of slow transportation in India, that once you were out your door, you might not get back for hours, and if you hadn't taken care of something by then, it might be too late, so rather than take care of those things hours ago or the previous day, the deadline of having to leave the house suddenly reminds the person they need to take care of this or that, or they don't want to be interrupted in whatever they are doing.

The idea of completely dropping everything and getting out and to the vehicle and reaching you on time is foreign. Indeed, if everyone is in IST, why bother rushing? The other guy is going to take his or her time, and you have to wait, because the notion of abandoning the person you are waiting for would be cutting your nose off to spite your face, that is to punish someone and yourself as well.

This tardiness, as I mention, not a particularly Indian trait. I'm told it's common in Brazil, and I'm sure in many developing countries. To be held to a deadline is to feel shackled, and so people feel it's OK to slip a little late here or there, until it is an epidemic behavior in society.

So I tell this story because this happened to me. I play tennis with a guy who is routinely late. I think part of his tardiness is this embarrassment that he has to do all these things at home for his wife and kids. He never says that this is the cause of why he's late to play tennis, and then insists, after he's late, that everyone else accommodate him so he can play his 3 hours, even though everyone showed up 1.5 hours earlier. You must wait, he says. It's an incredible amount of selfishness that he merely shrugs off.

The morning group tennis was canceled because it was felt the courts were too wet. But he hadn't played the night before with me. Why not? His new job means he gets back around 8. His cheapness means he doesn't have a cell phone, so he can't call any sooner than 8. I told him I had made plans, and I wasn't going to play tennis, but he had hoped. By 10 PM, it was raining anyway, so it might not have been possible to play.

So at 10 AM, I called him, and asked if he would play at 10:30. Oh, no, that's too soon, how about 11? Fine, 11. So I went out to arrive by 11, and he calls while I'm on the road. "Maybe it's too wet to play?". Too wet to play? Too wet to play?! I told you the morning tennis had been called off because it was wet, and you insisted on playing, and only now, you think it's too wet? You better be out in a raincoat ready to play. If you break your leg and can't play for 6 months, you better be out there! Too wet to play, indeed!

Of course, I said nothing of the kind. I told him I'd check on the court conditions and get back to him. I reached there, and it was wet, but no wetter than the previous weekend, and he showed up then.

Now realize, this guy was ready to show up at 11. So I figured, he's dressed and ready to head out. I should have known.

IST.

Probably not dressed. Probably attending to hundreds of other things, and taking care of them, and not even ready to roll. So when I say it's OK, he has, I'm sure, not even made a move to leave. He's in the middle of other things, don't you know. I will wait, don't you know? It's all about him and his selfishness, and he won't even bother saying why he might be late, because it's a sign of weakness, or it's something no Indian ever thinks about. You don't apologize for your lateness because it's a trifle, a bother. You are too stressed out about people being late! Enjoy life!

So as it became close to being 30 minutes late, and I had made several calls, I left. Funny that he called 4 minutes later. Clearly, he couldn't have arrived at the court, and then gone back home. It meant he was still home and still hadn't left. So I refused to return his calls all day. I hope he was unable to play with anyone that day.

And you have to do things like this, because otherwise, the guy thinks he can do it again. And, of course, being human nature, he'll probably not learn, and continue to do it, and continue to beg to play. The man can't even convince his own son to play. His son doesn't want to be seen with his dad. So he bullies his friends because he can't bully his family. His family knows how to say no, and he's given up.

Are things likely to change? Most likely not. Lateness is a disease, and the cure too painful for most to swallow.

Netflix vs. Redbox

2009-10-19T17:38:00.003-04:00

I've wondered whether the demographics of those who use Netflix differ from those who use Redbox.

Both address the following problem: how do I get a DVD conveniently? Stores like Blockbuster are often not that convenient. Once upon a time, you had to go to the store and rent the video for 2-3 days, and if you didn't get it back in that time, you were fined some amount for each day you had it out.

This lead to users having to make a trip to the video store late, and often making themselves watch a movie they might have ordinarily said no to if they hadn't already plunked down the money.

Netflix came up with a pretty good idea. They figured people don't want to pay late fees. They don't want to have to go to the video store to pick up videos. Since DVDs are pretty small these days and fit in typical mailboxes, why not mail it to them? You pay a monthly fee that gives you 1, 2, or 3 videos a month. When you return it, you get another one.

There is a drawback. You can only get videos as fast as you can return it and have a new one sent to you. Netflix has centers at many different locations so returning it can be speedy. Even so, you expect perhaps 1-2 days minimum turn-around.

Netflix tries to mitigate the delay by letting you create a queue. That way, you can plan ahead, sort the list of DVDs you want. This requires a browser. And, while you're at it, you can rate films so other folks can see what you like. It's a social networking experience.

Redbox, on the other hand, solves the problem differently. They try to be everywhere, in particular, grocery stores. You have to shop for food, right? So head to a grocery store, and rent a DVD for $1 a day. You can keep it as long as you want, but you continually get charged. There's still some incentive to get it back, but the idea is the location is closer to you.

Unlike Netflix, there is (I assume) no online identity. You do not plan ahead. You go, look at the selection, and rent. This is geared to the masses that may not particularly care for an online experience that requires a long-term commitment and planning.

Thus, I can see Redbox being more popular than Netflix even though Netflix appears to have been around a lot longer.

These crowds need not be exclusive, of course. You may decide that, at some period in your life, you have time to watch movies, and then you maintain a Netflix account, but at other times you don't, so you use Redbox and pick up a DVD whenever.

Clearly, the long-term solution is download on demand, although Redbox would still continue to be a viable option for those who only want to pay for what they rent, rather than pay for the privilege of downloading.

So are the kinds of people different? Are Netflix folks typically more well-educated, Internet savvy folks? Or not?

Asian Mart

2009-10-18T14:44:00.002-04:00

I live quite close to an Asian supermarket. This is a fairly new phenomenon, at least, to me. Larger metropolitan areas have always had access to big Asian supermarkets. Smaller towns have Chinese shops that are smaller than a 7-11, perhaps half the size or one third the size.

I just discovered they built a new Asian supermarket a bit further away. Like the one I live by, this one is Korean-run. Of course, Koreans know that their customers aren't solely Korean, so the shop covers a wide variety of Asian countries including: China/Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. And because there's often a large Spanish speaking population, these stores often have a section devoted to products like Goya.

Usually, there are two big strengths over standard supermarkets. First, is the dizzying array of produce. There are vegetables you've never heard of, and at prices that are bargains. Indeed, even products like soy sauce is often sold cheaper at Asian supermarkets.

For a while, these supermarkets looked a bit run-down, much like supermarkets used to look in the 1970s where the goal was to sell quantity and not offer a good customer experience. However, H-Mart, the Korean supermarket has adopted a bunch of ideas from places like Costco. They have their own logo and shopping bags (often Asian supermarkets used generic bags). They have music blaring. At H-Mart, that music is often 80s or 90s music, and not of the Asian variety.

They have food samples for people to try. I had a sliver of a Korean pear. The items are displayed attractively on shelves. Admittedly, the spacing is a bit tight, and it resembles nothing short of a zoo.

I went to H-Mart looking for Pearl River Bridge Superior Dark Soy Sauce. Dark soy sauce is thicker than standard soy. Some recipes call for dark soy, but I couldn't find it at the local Asian supermarket. I think I bought the last one and the only stuff they have is the mushroom flavored dark soy. I've bought that before and it's way too intense. Fortunately, this store had plenty.

Indeed, you can often buy 20 different kinds of soy sauce. Do you want Chinese soy? Or Japanese? Soy from mainland China? Or Hong Kong? Soy from Korea? Soy from Thailand? They have maybe 10 different kinds of fish sauce. You can get Vietnamese brand or Thai brand. You can get various Korean miso, spicy and otherwise.

Oh and if you like beef and like making beef lo-mein? They have pre-cut beef strips. You can get it fairly thin for sukiyaki or pho. You can get it moderately thick. See if you can find that at your local supermarket. Won't be able to find it. A little too much labor for your local supermarket.

Oh yes, fresh seafood. Usually situated in the back, you can see fresh seafood, though it's often not so fresh that isn't starting to smell some, but you can't find that easily at your local supermarket.

This is one nice trend in the US, an alternative supermarket if there ever was one.

500 Flavors of Soda

2009-09-28T22:11:00.001-04:00

500 Flavors of Soda

It's about soda, only it isn't. Watch it.

Links to Recipes

2009-09-28T15:16:00.001-04:00

Recipes on BBC Website

Freshman Orientation

2009-09-27T17:50:00.002-04:00

This is going to start out as a movie review, but it isn't one, so bear with me. There was a movie that came out a few years ago called Freshman Orientation. It didn't get particularly wide release so if you haven't heard of it, no big deal. Indeed, the film was originally released titled Home of Phobia, which may indicate why it didn't get much attention. That title, which is a double entendre, sounds like a bad horror movie.

The new title, Freshman Orientation, at least hints to what the plot is actually about. It follows a freshman who goes to college and wants to, surprise, meet women. The main female interest, in a plot machination that really seems contorted, is forced to join a sorority, the one her mom went to since there's some discount of such if she joins.

The sorority holds a contest where each of the sisters need to make a guy of a certain stereotype fall for them, and then they get invited to a party hosted by the sorority, where they will be unceremoniously dumped. The main female picks the stereotype from a hat (it's "gay" in case the movie title hasn't hinted that to you). The main male pretends to be gay because he's taken a fancy to this girl and will do what it takes to be with her, and hilarity ensues.

Well, not really. It's a not-so-great sitcom.

But let me get to the subject matter at hand. What exactly is homophobia? I can't claim to have a good definition, but the term suggests a fear (or hatred) of homosexuals, which is usually more prevalent among males than females.

Here's my thought. There are plenty of folks that say they are not homophobic. Indeed, they'd give you liberal credentials. They say they're pro gay marriage and so forth. That's fine. Perhaps, in the end, that's all that matters.

But here's the deal. Many young American men grew up at a time when parents were starting to be more homophobic. This came at a time when gay rights was becoming more prevalent (during the 1970s). Many middle schools had, up to that point, required gym for boys and girls and decided, for whatever reason, to "require" showers for boys and girls. Since the facilities were not extravagant, this meant "gang" showers, the kind that some gyms still have today.

This was an awkward moment for many teens who had been raised to have shame about themselves, which makes some sense. After all, left to their own druthers, many children might run around totally unashamed bringing shame to their parents who would be criticized for not placing more restrictions on their children's behavior.

By the 1980s, parents were starting to become even more concerned about their children's welfare. This may have been due to an increased sense of fear. News was being pressured to attract viewers and make money. Sensationalist news was replacing hardcore news. Parents were increasingly called "helicopter" parents who would hover over their children's every move, making sure they got to school safely, making sure they got back home safely. Kids were no longer considered safe enough to wander for hours on their own. Parents feared their kids would be kidnapped and they'd be accused of poor parenting.

Perhaps along with that perception, parents were now concerned that gym showers were a little too much for little Johnny or little Janey to bear. They'd be under scrutiny from potentially gay teens. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Kids complained and then parents complained. This lead to many schools throughout the nation deciding to stop requiring showering.

This seems innocuous, and perhaps it is, but what that also meant was one way of acclimating teens to not be so body-conscious was gone, and so people continued to carry shame. Ironically, athletes who can be quite homophobic are usually not particularly homophobic in this respect. Athletes were still required to shower as part of their athletics.

Whatever the reason, more teens carried this notion of shame with them. Furthermore, even kids that aren't particularly likely to spew homophobic slurs still reacted badly to the notion of the unclothed body (especially males). If you mention that so-and-so might get nude, the reaction is generally "Eww" regardless of how handsome that person might be. It's similar to how some men feel the need to comment on the beauty of women.

Many men feel insecure in their orientation or feel the need to reassure their male friends that they are heterosexual by making saying how hot they are for some female, and by contrast, how male bodies are icky to them. This seems very much a male view, at least in the US. Women don't seem to have this problem. Women are allowed to be more friendly with women, allowed to comment on the physique of other women with impunity. They aren't considered lesbians.

Much of this may have to do with the pressure women have to look good to be attractive to men. They spend a great deal of time looking at how other women present themselves to the public and can admire women who look good. Men, by contrast, often care very little about how they appear, and so they don't spend much time looking at other men. The exception seems to be those who are heavily into fitness and working out so they look good to women. It's so much effort that they grudgingly admire other men who are putting in a similar effort to look good. They can positively comment on how some guy looks ripped because they feel it's worthy of admiration.

So here's the point. I believe many guys who are otherwise pretty pro-LGBT are nonetheless homophobic. Their reaction to other men are not that different from the men who spew homophobic epithets, except rather than give in to their natures, they restrain themselves and say the "right things". Were such guys indifferent to other guys like women seem to be indifferent or even partly admiring of other women, then the idea of being pro-LGBT would be met with an attitude that backs that belief.

Photoblog: Soldiers

2009-09-27T10:01:00.001-04:00

Denver Post Photoblog

I'm a sucker for good photo photography, especially of the photojournalism variety.

Concentration

2009-09-25T15:17:00.003-04:00

Here's a scenario. You are busy doing something. You are asked to spend a few minutes calling up a place, no more than 5 minutes, by a friend or significant other.

Do you do it?

Or do you say "No, I won't do it. I need to get what I'm doing done first, and then I'll take care of it". There are quite a few people in that second camp. Why is that? What is the big deal being interrupted?

Joel Spolsky noted this when he posted the following problem. He imagined two tasks that needed to be done, each lasting 10 minutes. He asked which is better, for a computer to do one task to completion then the other, or to interleave the two tasks. That is, give one minute to one task, then one minute to the other, and so forth.

It may sound identical to you. Both tasks are finished in 20 minutes. Or the second might seem more appealing because each task makes more progress. But consider when both tasks complete.

Start the clock at zero. If you interleave, one task will finish at minute 19, and the other at minute 20. However, if you did one task to completion first, it would complete at minute 10, while the other would complete at minute 20. The average in the first case is a wait time of 19.5 minutes while the average wait for the second is 15 minutes.

This assumes no penalty for switching tasks. In reality, computer tasks pay a small penalty to switch from one to the other. This is called "context-switching". Apparently, for humans, context switching is a very real penalty. Thus, minor interruptions may not be so minor. I find it baffling personally, especially if the time to carry out the task is very little.

The point is this. Some people are definitely inclined not to be interrupted, not even for a few minutes so they can get their task done. I wonder if that is symptomatic of a certain mindset or personality. Is a type A person likely to dislike interruptions and want to be fully engaged, no matter how short the interruption?

What is the thinking behind this behavior?

Change I Want

2009-09-24T18:06:00.002-04:00

OK, so we're embroiled in a health care debate (if you can call it that) because health care costs are spiraling out of control and because millions are uninsured. I was going to discuss whether the attacks on Obama racist (indirectly, they are), but instead, I'll talk about the kinds of changes, mundane as they may be, that I'd like to see changed.

First, Internet bandwidth. I don't really download or stream movies, but one can see how nice it'd be if the bandwidth was comparable to say Japan or Korea which reportedly have 10 to 100 times the bandwidth.

Up-to-the moment reporting of how much electricity and gas I'm using. Why does someone have to come and check meters once a month? I want to know how much I spent cooling my apartment today. I want to know how that money is really being spent? Who oversees this anyway?

More intelligent traffic monitoring. Why am I sitting at a red light when there's no one in the crossroad? Why are lights based on very simple information about who is on the road?

Getting groceries easily. I would like to order groceries, and I know I can, but the cost! Is there some better way to do this?

Companies that pay for auto maintenance. Would be nice if an on-site mechanic did routine maintenance so you wouldn't have to worry about taking it to the shop when something breaks down.

Or perhaps better public transportation. I look at the Metro and it makes a stop every stop. Why isn't there an express that stop every 5-10 stops the a smaller train that visits those 10 stops all the time. You'd need twice the trains, but people would get to where they were going faster.

I'm sure I could think of more things, but there are changes that would affect my day-to-day life more, and yet these changes are much slower to come.

Separation of Concerns

2009-09-23T12:21:00.002-04:00

If you were at a software company and could only have one person, you'd probably want an engineer, someone to build the product. That person might have an engineer's mindset. Get it working, do what's easiest. They may be less concerned about how the user will use the product (I'm assuming there is an end-user).

The problem with this mindset is the lack of someone to see things from the user's point of view. Engineers typically complain when managers pick a feature set because they can be fickle. Managers become idea generators and can come up with and discard ideas quickly mostly because they don't have to implement the feature.

Meanwhile, engineers have to implement stuff, and so they may not be so motivated to implement something that's easy to use because it may be hard to implement.

However, without a separation of concerns, someone who is relieved of the burden of having to implement a feature, then getting a good product, one users will want to use, is challenging.

Thus, it's very common to have someone be the user advocate. The only problem with this viewpoint is that it's easiest to have the prototypical user be the person making the decisions about what features to implement. In other words, the ideas guy typically doesn't want to talk to lots of people to get their ideas because this person thinks his (or her) ideas are the best, and likes the autocratic nature of making that decision.

So there is the dilemma of trying to create a good product, and thus separating the guy who comes up with the features with the one implementing it, and controlling the idea guy from coming up with ideas that don't make sense and aren't really looking at true users.

Entertainment Tonight

2009-09-15T23:26:00.005-04:00

So it's been a while since I blogged, so I'll do this one for Justin.

Let's start off with a supposition that may or may not be true. You work 9-5, but you have enough free time in the evenings to do something. But what is that something? If you were growing up in the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the most common evening activity was watching television.

You didn't have much control over what you were watching. If you had TV prior to cable, you might get 4 channels over the air. If you had cable, then you might have 20-30 channels, the numbers of channels growing as the years passed. However, you had to watch the content live, at least until the advent of the VCR.

The VCR allowed entertainment to expand in several ways. First, it allowed you to record programs that you could watch later. The technology wasn't terribly sophisticated. You could only set the time and duration. The VCR was, as a group, poorly designed, mostly because usability was not something anyone thought about. Get engineers to design something and they'll design what's easiest for them to build, not what's easiest for the users to use.

More importantly, VCRs meant people could also buy and rent videotapes and a whole new industry was born: renting movies. For a time, if you wanted to watch movies, you had to go to the theater. If you were lucky, the movie was popular enough that it would show up on TV and you could watch it there, filled with commercials. When cable came around, channels were devoted to showing movies all the time (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax).

Movies at home were wonderful. Sure VHS tape quality was poor, and the more you watched, the worse the tape became--more snowy, more jittery, but at least you could watch it in the comfort of your own home. This was especially important for parents who lack time to go out and watch movies. Prior to this, going out would require a babysitter to stay a few hours. These days, the paranoia about having other people look after your children seems to have pressed parents to stay home more.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and the entertainment has changed, but mostly in technology. By 2000, videotapes were being replaced by DVDs that were smaller, less resistant to wear, and much higher quality than VHS. Instead of getting DVDs at a local movie store, companies like Netflix were offering DVDs by mail.

DVDs also liberated televisions. Shows like LOST couldn't be made without DVDs (although that's changing now). LOST has a plot so complex that it requires understanding shows that preceded it. Admittedly, soap operas also had a similar structure, but most fans seem happy getting other folks to fill them in on details. There also wasn't a huge puzzle which fans would scrutinize each episode for.

If you look at programs from the 1960s, they had to create one-off shows with few references to past episodes because if a person missed it, they would be, well, lost. Now, fans who miss entire seasons can buy or rent DVDs and catch up on whole seasons, commercial free. Some argue that commercial-free is the only way to watch television.

Netflix meant you didn't have to run to your local video store to get content. You could get it sent to you via mail and return it via mail. You didn't have to feel pressure getting it back to the video store in 2 days or risk getting fined. Netflix charged a montly rate and only controlled how many videos you could have out at any time.

Technology has pushed the concept further. The problem with the original Netflix model was the delay between ordering a movie and getting it. If you didn't feel like watching a movie, you had to return it and wait for another. There was a lack of instant gratification.

Fortunately, Netflix could rely on the biggest game changer of them all. The Internet. Of course, the US lags behind countries like Japan and Korea in sheer bandwidth, but the bandwidth has become good enough to stream videos (in Japan/Korea, you can download videos in minutes rather than hours, so streaming is less of a big deal). That means you get all the benefits of every technology. If you don't like the video you're watching, watch another one.

But the point is this: we're still watching movies and by extension television.

What are the alternatives? Some alternatives are simply what people watch. A subculture of Americans are heavy into anime. Anime has never been widely adopted by the popular media and is the closest thing we have to counterculture entertainment.

There are video games. Video games have been a staple of entertainment almost as long as VCRs have been around.

With the Internet, there's surfing the web. You can watch movies on the Internet, or viral videos, or read articles of interest. You can play games on the Internet, chat on the Internet. The Internet (via web browsers and websites) allow you to devour information of all sorts, from politics to sports to cooking to photography to conspiracy theories to whatever. Still, it's not a very social thing to do. If you're hanging out with a significant other, surfing the Internet means you are doing your own thing. This isn't to say movies are all that social, but it's somewhat more social.

That leads me to the point of this entry. What are the next forms of entertainment? Why do we still gravitate to the entertainment choices we've always made. Why is it like so many other people's entertainment?

I don't have answers to this except that we have a herd mentality, whether we like to admit it or not.

Why India Will Always Be Poor

2009-08-04T10:31:00.002-04:00

India has certainly made strides to be a force in the technological world of the 21st century. However, there will always remain a big part of the population that will be left out of these advances. What is amazing about India is there is such a wide disparity in education and wealth and yet it remains relatively peaceful.

The biggest reason for this is the population of India, which is a billion plus. Its population is likely to overtake China because China is about the only country in the world that can pass a policy to limit the number of children a couple can have. With multiple languages and multiple religions, any attempt to enforce such a policy would lead to riots. You never hear of the Indian army trying to quell civil unrest.

One reason there is a billion people is the agrarian nature of India where more people means more hands to do the physical labor. Another reason is because women have yet to achieve real equality. Real equality would, alas, mean going against something India holds dear. Marriage. Women need the income to live by themselves and be self sustaining. The situation is better for those who have education where women are able to be more independent.

Divorce is another problem. While most family-loving countries would like to avoid divorce, India really does avoid it. In the past, women were expected to throw themselves on a burning funeral pyre of their late husbands or be forever shunned as women that belonged to other men. Men, of course, having made the rules never had this problem, a consequence of thinking of women as property.

Once you have more education, more freedom, more opportunities, women worry more about their career, and less about having children. Thus, the more educated women are, the more likely they will have fewer children. And that in the long run will cut down on the population problem.

Until education is so widespread with an economy to support that many people, you have a population problem. With a billion people, you need a way to employ them. Many will be uneducated, yet many have to eat. If India was in colder climates and not agrarian, they would never have a population they do now. Local farms imply cheap food, especially with no middle men. A country like India has to have cheap food.

Compared to India, Americans spend an enormous money on their food. If Indians had to pay comparable prices, most would starve to death. The pay scale in India goes exponentially downwards. Thus, the poorest person might make a tenth of what an average person makes.

Imagine a person making 100,000 dollars in the US. That's pretty good actually. Most people don't make that money from one income. 1/10 of that is 10,000. You could barely live on that amount of money. You'd share a place, and then rent might eat up 4000 dollars, possibly less if you can live in a small town where it might cost $250 a month to live (by yourself) as opposed to $1000 in a big city. You might be able to get food for a few thousand more, but beyond that, you'd be struggling to buy anything. And imagine living on $5000 or $2000. There are plenty of Indians that are likely living on a tiny fraction of a middle-class worker.

To live, housing must be cheap and food must be cheap. Once this is taken care of, then labor itself can be cheap. Most people couldn't afford a live-in chef because it would use up 50% of their income easily. But if it used up 1-2%, many might find it acceptable. If you could get food and a chef for $100 a month, most people would go for that option, but the food alone would exceed $100 and the chef would expect to get paid a ton.

India survives because of this huge income disparity that takes advantage of what India has in abundance. People.

India has solved its population problem in a funny way. Indians have left India. They essentially go to other countries to live. Where Indians were rare in the US and England in the 1970s, the numbers have sharply risen by 2009. It is a pretty novel way to solve the problem, but the fact remains that there are still a billion people in India.

The one advantage India has is that it's willing to develop so some people get the advantages even as the rest of the nation is poor. Indeed, it's been said that India is really many nations that co-exist. They are divided in language, religion, education, caste and money. Many people identify with their section of India. Their India may be the educated affluent worldly Indians, but that is not all of India, even though it is the part of India that is driving it to the modern era.

The Need for Speed

2009-07-30T13:50:00.003-04:00

Perhaps no sport has undergone such a radical change as swimming. For years, the standard outfit for male swimmers was a sliver of fabric that became known as Speedos after the company that manufactured it. Then, about 10 years ago, new suits came out. At first, these suits covered from the waist down. These suits were supposed be more slippery than the Speedos. Times came down.

Then, full body suits came out, and times fell even more. Recently, Michael Phelps did what had been rather unthinkable. He lost. The winner bragged that his suit reduced his time by 2 seconds. Phelps's coach was furious and floated the idea that Phelps would boycott future events. FINA, the governing body of swimming, wanted to ban these full body suits.

The technology is problematic. With athletes getting paid money to sponsor products, a company may fall in the quest for the fastest suit, and it becomes more about the suit and less about the swimmer. To be fair, few complained when these suits caused record after record to fall, and only because it affects Michael Phelps are we hearing a bit of uproar.

But it goes further than that. These suits are expensive, and it is affecting the pocketbooks of would-be swimmers. Parents are having to shell out bucks to pay for their kids swimwear so they can stay competitive.

Although FINA is willing to have the suits go back to the waist-down variety, I think they should all head back to the Speedo days where the material provided only enough for modesty, and the rest was up to the swimmer. Admittedly, companies like Speedo or Arena that have benefited from these pricey suits would suffer, and they are, undoubtedly, the first to object, much as the health industry has sought to protect its own interests under the cloud of a health care reform movement.

This is undoubtedly the reason FINA did not decide to go back to the small trunks swimmers used to use because then, the competing companies would only have fashion to distinguish themselves, and would lack the profits that several hundred dollar suits have vs the sub hundred dollar swim trunks.

But then, the sport would be back to the people who swim rather than the suits they wear.

How We Communicate

2009-07-25T22:50:00.003-04:00

It's funny. With all the technology to let people communicate better, it only works on a handful of people. Most people find the oldest way of communication, face-to-face, so much more pleasant than any of its alternatives.

I have friends who hate IM, who hate email, who hate the phone. All of them, to one degree or another, interrupt, especially the phone, but even IM. You'll find people who are pretty friendly when you talk to them in person, but get them on the phone, and they are suddenly distant, wondering why you want to talk, etc. Admittedly, these are generally guys, because the stereotype is that women love to gab on the phone and will do so ad naseum.

Face to face communication has one "advantage" over other forms of communication. It limits how many people can interact. In principle, if you have 100 friends, they can all contact you on the phone simultaneously. And that would be interruption. So someone might call you while you are watching TV, or driving. Someone might IM you while you are surfing the web. Although face to face communication is also an interruption, it limits the kind of interruptions that might occur.

Ideally, someone would want to figure out a way of communicating that is as acceptable as real life communication, but we haven't figured how to do that. The only way is to have some sense of what we're actively doing now, and many would prefer not to do that.

And no one has figured that out.

The Curious Case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

2009-07-24T10:09:00.002-04:00

This has been in the news. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor at Harvard University found he was unable to open the door to his own home after a lengthy excursion. With assistance, he tried prying the door open. However, someone believed his home was being broken into and called the police. One Sgt. James Crowley came to the scene to see what was going on.

Depending on whose version you listen to, either Gates was fairly calm and this was a rogue cop that didn't like black folk, or Gates was verbally abusive, claiming racism, refusing to cooperate, and the cop, being calm, finally decided he was a nuisance and had him brought downtown.

For most news organizations, this boiled down to African American professor who had made it in lily-white academia being harassed by cops who can't believe there are well-educated black men.

Whatever.

The point, to me, isn't who is right or wrong, but that these two became figureheads, representing the generic. I believe they call this synecdoche.

NPR, to its credit, did something so simple that it puts most news organizations to shame. And the reason it puts it to shame is because most news organizations are really editorial organizations. They peddle opinions, because actual investigation was too much work. NPR wondered "who is this cop" and just found some background information.

It turns out that he has been involved in racial sensitivity training and had a brush with "fame". He was the guy that unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate Reggie Lewis, a Celtics player that died of sudden cardiac arrest, back in 1993.

Much like Rashomon, which does not really postulate that truth is unknowable, but suggests that people bend truth to make themselves look good, there are good reasons for both Gates and Crowley to take their stances, and therefore good reason that both may have bent the truth to make themselves look good. In particular, if Gates had been wailing like a mad-man, he'd ironically reinforce every stereotype that says African Americans have anger issues and believes the man is against him, and therefore, it's best to peg the nameless cop as the crazy guy, and similarly, many a cop has excused their bad behavior by outright lying and claiming they didn't do anything.

The point is, people form opinions, especially news organizations, and use it as a launching pad to all sorts of race relation rhetoric, but little to actually trying to determine the "truth". The truth, of course, may not matter that much, because it is framed in the context of race relations. Were this a quarrel between two unknowns, we wouldn't care, but because it's Gates, and because the opinion doctors quickly put this out for public consumption, it becomes news.

And it's not really even news.

Why Teaching is Hard

2009-07-21T11:10:00.002-04:00

Teaching is one of those things that can be very hard to do well. The first step to teaching is to know what you are talking about. There are people who are "experts" on a particular topic, but they've never organized their thoughts in a way that would make sense to a newbie.

Teaching is story-telling. It's telling a story that makes sense to you and hopefully makes sense to your listeners. Experts sometimes reach a level of unconscious competence. That is, they know what to do, but they can't explain it. Teaching is about moving that expertise into conscious competence, that is, to explaining what you know in a clear, cohesive way.

OK, but that's not all of it. If you're an expert at something, then you will make assumptions about your audience. This is very important. Without assumptions, you will most likely assume they know as much as you do, and so they may struggle with an explanation. For example, if you know statistics backwards and forwards, you might assume that everyone knows the basics really well, which may not be correct.

Some people try to explain ideas using analogies. That only works if the analogy makes sense to the audience. Some people won't get the analogy you are making. Once upon a time, people figured you knew baseball or boxing and they'd make an analogy figuring, for sure, you had to know this.

This isn't to say analogies aren't useful, but only that you have to be careful about it. Analogies are often good at making something concrete that seemed very abstract otherwise. It takes something that lacks familiarity and makes it more familiar.

The key to effective teaching is to understand the worldview of the people you teach. Because students are individuals, you may have a hard time conveying information that will work for everyone. However, since most students generally have similar backgrounds heading into a class, there are some commonalities.

To discover where students are coming from, you need to talk to them. It's surprising how one-sided communication between teachers and students are. Teachers spouting out information, but not engaged in a dialog where the teachers tries to understand why students get confused. To me, this is still the single best way to learn how to teach. Too often, teachers imagine themselves to be something like TV performers with students as the audience kept at arm's length away.

Indeed, one might argue that the lecture format is not the best way to teach students. At the very least, most of us learn by doing.

To sum up, good teaching requires understand the material, being able to tell the material as a story so it makes sense to yourself and to others, to be adaptive to what the audience needs, adjusting the level of difficulty as needed, and to interact with students to better understand how they view what is going on.

Review: Moon

2009-07-20T10:15:00.002-04:00

Science fiction movies, at least those set in space, have been influenced primarily by three films: Alien, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the three, Star Wars may be the least influential. Indeed, it's hard to call it a true science fiction film. There are elements of "science" in the film, from Death Stars to light sabres, to ATATs and myriad vehicles. However, they are mostly treated as part of the scenery. They look cool, but the society merely uses these advancements without questioning where it came from. Better to call it science fantasy, as it appropriates elements from Lord of the Rings and other ancient tales.

Alien is perhaps the film that is mimicked the most. A crew that is somewhat military in nature works on contract for some nameless faceless mega-corporation that seeks profit through dubious means. In general, these corporations seem to scrimp in some ways (few people are used) and are extravagant in other ways (the ship itself, androids, etc). It depicts the isolation and danger of space and the people that serve as its pawns.

Finally, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the three, 2001 has the best pedigree. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the look of the film still holds up quite well after 40 years. Lacking traditional CG special effects, it's one of few films that depict weightlessness and the slow movement of space.

Although 2001 has been imitated many times, many are afraid to imitate it too faithfully. In particular, Kubrick didn't care that much about the main characters, Dave and Frank. They are ordinary in every sense. You aren't meant to care about their plight. Other characters are similarly shown as less than human, cogs in a military machine.

Indeed, the one character that has personality is not even human. It's HAL. HAL turns out to be quite a menacing character. Designed to be "perfect", HAL gets in a conundrum. He is instructed to lie to the crew about their mission. Only those in suspended animation know the true mission and they stay asleep during the trip. In a perverted sense of logic based on "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a noise", HAL figures if no one is alive to catch his lie, it didn't happen.

All throughout, HAL believes it is perfect, but when Dave disassembles HAL, in a sequence that takes many minutes to complete, HAL slowly loses his mind and desperately begs not to be killed off.

Ever since, such AIs have been used, and it's not clear whether they are there serving human needs (see Aliens) or not (see Alien).

Kubrick would probably be saddened by the amount of homage paid to 2001, a sign of lack of creativity. Smaller SF films seem to prefer the Kubrickian vision of space from Danny Boyle's Sunshine to Duncan Jones's Moon.

The lack of imitation to 2001 lies mostly in character development. In a film ostensibly about the next stage in humanity, the most human character, perhaps a kind of Satan, is HAL. The rest of the humans are made out to be rather bland, perhaps reinforcing the notion that humans need some evolution.

The sequel to 2001, namely 2010, chooses, as many films do, to develop characters. Unlike 2001, where Kubrick only wants you to care about the characters enough to see that they are recognizably human, mostly so you can imagine yourself in their place, and to serve as a contrast to the panoramic weirdness of Dykstra special effects, a scene that is meant to represent a kind of New Age awe, 2010 wants you to care about the characters of the film. It's hard to sell a film where you don't care about the characters, and perhaps that is where Kubrick's genius lies. He's able to grapple a deep issue "where do we come from" without resorting to normal characters.

Moon's trailer reveals what seems to be way too much information, but turns out not to be. Sam Bell, assigned to do repair work on the Moon, for harvesters that provide limitless energy for the Earth (hard to believe, but anyway) is alone, in the last few weeks before he is scheduled to return to Earth and reunite with his wife and newborn daughter. He discovers, while checking out a failed harvester, large tank-like objects resembling Jawas moving vehicles, that there is another man still alive, and surprise, surprise, it's him.

Well, a clone.

This information is revealed in the film's first 30 minutes because to reveal it late means to have spoilers that wouldn't be kept secret.

The film doesn't mind looking less than sleek. The spacesuits still look circa 1960s. The rover still looks much like a rover. A laptop that makes an appearance is humongous. Like 2001, communications is delayed enough that there is no live interaction. Sam's hair is cut by a flowbee-like device. The future still has homages to the past.

Like 2001, Sam is kept company by a HAL-like AI named Gerty who uses smilies to indicate his emotion. Most of the time, Gerty wants to make Sam food.

Moon, in its way, explores what it means to be human. It doesn't explore it too deeply, to be fair. It doesn't intend to be a philosophical treatise. Indeed, the interaction between the clones is not what you'd expect. There are signs throughout that the film wants to fake you out and become menacing, but it never chooses to go in that direction.

The film doesn't answer a lot of questions. For one, if there is AI technology, what's the point of Sam? Given all this money the company could be making, why not run the operation legitimately? Sam isn't shown as being particularly gifted. He's meant to be an ordinary Joe.

Indeed, Sam doesn't fully question life as a clone. Indeed, he barely questions it at all. There are nods to other films too. There is the notion of a megacompany using people to its advantage, as in Alien. There is some similarity to Gattaca where Ethan Hawke plays an ordinary human who imagines he'll go to space. It's almost an inverse of that. There's nods to Blade Runner and their notion of replicants.

So although one feels the plight of Sam, and even to some extent, his relationship to Gerty, the ideas never feel that fleshed out, and the ideas never seem that deep. Indeed, if anything, Gerty should have been a more interesting character. What is the purpose of Gerty? To be the real communications to Earth, instead of Sam. And yet, Gerty is alone, always having to lie to each Sam clone. Gerty has grown to care for each incarnation of Sam. But this isn't fully explored. It's much closer to HAL in 2010 who is talked into self-sacrificing for the good of the human crew.

I'd like more movies to be made like Moon. But it seems thin on ideas and thin on characters too.

A Bit of Humor

2009-07-19T11:25:00.002-04:00

Wow, it's been a while since I last wrote something.

I was watching a short comedy sketch from The Whitest Kids U' Know, a comedy troupe. I generally don't watch them, so I don't know that much about it.

The sketch went something like this. A guy comes to a cube, and asked the person working there how things went the previous night. The guy said he had a pretty quiet night. He hung out with his girlfriend.

Then, the guy asks "did you do your girlfriend"? This is probably a thought that occasionally comes across people's minds but one they don't say in polite company. The guy says he feels uncomfortable answering this question, and in any case, the guy asking is his boss, and his boss never hangs out with him, so why is he asking.

The boss then says he better tell him or he'll be fired. The guy says "this is weird, but OK, OK, yes, yes, I did have sex with my girlfriend". The boss is enjoying the answer to this question, and then asks him to draw what happened.

Now comedy works in a number of ways. There's comedy of recognition. Sometimes it's shameful recognition. For example, some comedians noted that, as kids, one was asked to climb a large rope, and that in the process, this rope might actually turn a person on, given its proximity to certain parts. Most kids imagine they're the only ones that go through this, but once they realize other kids have too (usually as adults), they can mine it for comedy gold.

Then, there is the escalation of some idea way beyond what is perceived as normal.

This sketch heads in that direction. I changed the channel because the routine was getting a little uncomfortable to watch, but switched back out of curiosity. The boss is sketching out on a white board. He is drawing a picture of himself in self-pleasuring. The employee is shocked. He draws a picture of the couple in bed.

He then draws a window, and the employee says "You were watching us last night?", and the boss is telling him to shut up, and he's not done yet. He then draws himself imagining he's sleeping with his employee's girlfriend. "You were imagining yourself with my girlfriend?!".

The boss tells him to shut up, that he's not done. He draws additional people. The employee goes "you invited other people to watch?". He again tells him to shut up and draws a camera. "You filmed us?!". Again, shut up. He draws the word "Internet". "You put us on the Internet?!".

Now the idea for this sketch has at least two parts to it. One is the idea of asking someone something personal, and seeing if they'll react to it. The other is the idea of escalating this craziness by sketching the idea on a board. The sketching part is pretty impressive because you have to imagine how to reveal the various parts. Of course, the employee screaming incredulously helps explain what is going on.

Ultimately, a lot of this edgy humor comes from humor of recognition. It explores darker sides of the human psyche and pushes the notion into absurdity, but almost recognizable absurdity.

If humor succeeds, especially sketch humor, it often keys in on insights of people. To be fair, much of this humor is cultural, and cultural humor may make sense (in a way) in one culture, but not in another.

What seems shocking, in hindsight, is rather clever, requiring a kind of perverted insight.

Simple Pleasures of Tennis

2009-06-22T14:21:00.002-04:00

Haven't blogged in a bit. Thought I'd toss this out.

I got a degree in engineering and computer science which involves a fair deal of math. I've met a lot of people since then that are very bright.

To be good at engineering and such, you need to know math, and to know math, you have to think in a certain way. Mathematical thought isn't easy for everyone, which is why everyone doesn't do it. However, the human mind is clearly able to manage and organize these abstractions.

At times, I must have thought like Mr. Spock. That there was a logical way to intuit the things you needed to know about math. If you worked hard enough, you didn't need creativity. There was an answer. Indeed, those who have avoided math or science often imagine these disciplines to be perfectly logical, reinforced by their high school classes that graded in terms of right and wrong.

Little did they know that such thinking was only for the convenience of the teachers who wanted something tidy and easy to grade.

Some people perceive programming in this way. Occasionally, I would be called up to a hearing over someone who had cheated in their program, mostly by copying some parts of their code from someone else. The case would often be presented to non-technical sorts of people and they had to try to pass judgment whether cheating had indeed occurred.

If they thought computer programs were all written as if there was one magical answer which they class would eventually converge on, that would have been a mistake. Programming is a bit like, say, catering a large event. Two caterers may be given a description of the event, the numbers of people, and so forth. They may be told to make Mexican food and to allow for vegetarians. But beyond that, you would hardly imagine two groups would handle things identically. There might be vastly different interpretations that satisfy the basic requirements. Writing programs is like that. There is some level of creativity in programming.

So people learn basic principles of programming and how to write code that is robust, safe, and extensible. This experience often takes years of practical programming to develop. In the process, one learns to organize one's thoughts, and how to deal with bugs in the code. A certain proficiency in problem solving results, and for some, it leads to amazing productivity.

Now, this skill can be developed in any number of neighboring fields including mathematics.

If an engineer or computer scientist or mathematician were asked how they do what they do, they might be hard-pressed to answer. They would undoubtedly agree that it takes a certain kind of "mathematical maturity", a way to reason about numbers and properties of mathematical elements.

Surely, you are now wondering, what any of this has to do with tennis.

Did the poor man forget what the blog was titled? Writing one title, and blogging on something else completely different?

Here's the deal. You get someone like this, and ask them to learn tennis. It doesn't have to be tennis, per se. Any sport of sufficient skill should do.

And what do you discover?

They have no idea how to proceed to learn the sport. Sure, some are OCD enough that they will read prodigiously on the topic, treating said problem like they do any other problem. With enough research, you can probably get some idea of what to do. The web, after all, is more than just a means to find solutions to your programming problems.

For some reason, however, the people who have tried to learn tennis (or similar sports) haven't always looked for the "right way" to do things. I remember I played table tennis about half an hour a day, five days a week, for nearly a year. I got pretty decent, at least, in a recreational sort of way. But my technique was awful. I hit the ball fine, but over time, it was quirky and therefore not totally reliable.

I could have looked on the web for lessons, but I didn't. I didn't fully realize this until I played tennis and tried to learn it as technically well as I could. I know, roughly, what I need to do on, say, my tennis forehand. I can show you slow mo video and break down the nuances I am seeing. To be sure, I miss at least as much as I see, but at this level, I think I am paying a lot more attention that most would.

Now I had the advantage of already playing tennis before, and with web resources growing ever more plentiful, there's a lot of resources to learn tennis from a technical viewpoint.

Yet people don't.

To give an analogy, there are people that play musical instruments, but because they are too shy, they don't sing. For some reason, plucking strings or pressing notes seems very objective. Controlling one's voice seems more mysterious and it activates a person's modesty meter. It's more revealing of a person to sing than to play a musical instrument, even if both are about music.

If math/science/programming is about how to organize your brain to solve problems, then playing sports is about how to get your body to do things, and much like music, it only comes from a lot of repetition, and repeating the "right things". You can certainly learn sports the "wrong" way and be quite proficient.

I say "right" and "wrong" in so-called scare quotes (I don't like that term because I think it implies I am trying to scare people, and I'm not) because with sports, there's a lot of latitude about what is right or wrong and people often discover, through trial and error, that there are other valid ways to do something. If you watch tennis over its long history, you'll discover a lot of changes in how players hit the ball, some of which has to do with the equipment.

Hitting a ball has evolved over time, and may continue to evolve, as players discover different ways to do the same thing.

But beyond hitting a technically sound stroke, there is the practice. You can think of tennis as a real time physical game. Balls are hit in very similar ways, some higher, some lower, some with spin, some without, some with more power, some with less, some over here, some over there, and you are constantly having to solve these problems in real time.

If players struggle, it's because they often solve a certain kind of problem, say, a flat ball deep, but not too deep, over and over, to the detriment of solving other kinds of problems. While there are the occasional a-ha moments, they aren't usually the same as in math problems where a clever trick can greatly simplify a problem, the right frame of mind making all the difference.

Learning tennis is a little like learning music. Musicians know, even as talented as they may be, that success comes with a lot of practice. There aren't a great deal of shortcuts. Learning a sport is learning to cope with one's own body, to make it do what the conscious mind says it should do and then to move beyond that so it comes without thought.

The body learns things by repetition. It takes a lot of convincing, especially if you've trained it to manage a different sport. Indeed, when people struggle learning a new sport it's because they apply principles from other sports. This makes sense. When someone is learning a new programming language, they often apply ideas from a programming language they already know. Now, as anyone who has learned a few programming languages knows, you can't always do that. You should learn a new language like experts in that language learn new languages. You should imitate them.

And that is also the same lesson about learning any sport. Rather than apply what you know from another sport, you should learn how practitioners of the sports learn it. But so many people prefer to side-step this. They learn it any old way.

Why? Well, they convince themselves, perhaps quite rightly, that they don't care about the sport that much, and so they don't need master it beyond a basic level of proficiency. I find that a bit odd since they have often mastered some other part of their professional lives with great mastery. But, much as playing music and singing music are two distinct skills, so are mastering mental proficiency and physical proficiency.

One reason I like tennis is because it allows me to apply some thought to a physical task. Since tennis is a physical sport, you want to get beyond constant analysis. The game moves too quickly, and you need the body to respond semi-automatically. This is one reason you rarely see a pro make major changes to their stroke. I've seen seniors play on the champion's tour that have made some changes, but nothing dramatic. John McEnroe, for example, isn't going to use a semi-Western grip and hit like Rafa. It's too dramatic a change when he hits the ball perfectly fine.

A player on my level, on the other hand, hasn't developed the same kind of technical proficiency that McEnroe has. That doesn't mean that it makes it any easier for me to make changes. Indeed, one might argue that McEnroe, being more physically gifted might adapt more easily. However, McEnroe has a much bigger downside. Since he hits so well already, he would have to develop the shot so that he could at least match his current level.

Meanwhile, my forehand isn't as good, so I can afford to spend time learning to play better.

In a nutshell, I find that tennis exercises a different part of the brain, in addition to being exercise. I like the strategy, learning to hit different shots, and trying to learn the "right" way to hit a ball.

Where's the Beef?

2009-06-11T11:22:00.002-04:00

Lately, I've been reading various blog posts about some topic or another, and they barely have one point to make. Now, maybe it's just me, but I like to read a few paragraphs that have more insight.

Just to give a concrete example: Article about why the Right fears so much

You would think they would give more than one example of the point they are making. In this case, some Uighurs, all former detainees of Guantanamo, are being sent to Palau. So Fox News says these guys are bad people, and they wouldn't want to visit the island.

But where are the other examples?

Yes, yes, I know it's ironic that I only have one example.

Don't think I didn't notice that.

Review: The Big Lebowski

2009-05-25T09:32:00.002-04:00

This is a classic movie by the Coen brothers that came out after Fargo. Fargo was considered the most accessible of the Coen brothers. The story was fairly straight-forward, involving a guy (William Macy) who wants to have his wife kidnapped so he can get money from her father. The kidnapping goes awry. Frances McDormand plays a sheriff who investigates the crime. The quirky characters, the mildly grisly violence, the Minnesotan accents all lead to a fairly enjoyable experience.

The Coen brothers don't try to be too accessible. You figure they're up to something, but not sure what.

They followed up Fargo with The Big Lebowski. Ostensibly, a film about bowling, it's more about the weirdness in Jeff Lebowski's life. He's not the titular "Big Lebowski". That would be a wealthy man in a wheelchair. This Lebowski is unemployed, mostly drunk, loves to bowl, and prefers to go by "The Dude".

The film is really well shot. The director of photography, Roger Deakins, does a great job with the look of the film.

"The Dude" is a pretty chill guy. He's probably meant to represent Jesus, despite another character in the film named Jesus. He contrasts with the short tempered John Goodman.

Watching the film, two things come to mind. One, David Lynch. Lynch's films are usually strange, but not terribly humorous. The Coen brothers are similarly strange, but usually, there's a sense of humor, as odd as it may be. Two, that there is a lot references going on that I'm missing.

For example, let's go with "The Dude" as Jesus idea. I can't say I know the Bible well enough to point out what certain scenes mean. Indeed, I know I can't do that.

Here are things that are puzzling. There's the rug. Clearly, the Dude likes his rug, but he doesn't mind having a rug from "The Big Lebowski" instead of his own. Why is the rug important?

What's the deal with Maude? She eventually reveals the details of "The Big Lebowski" and whether he's really as rich as he pretends to be. Is she Mary Magdalene?

What is the meaning of bowling in their lives?

"The Dude" doesn't have followers. He doesn't seem to minister to anyone. Indeed, he seems to be in a stupor. His lack of employment is mentioned quite a lot. Unlike his buddy, he doesn't seem to need money, and yet appears to have enough money to live on.

Why does he drink white Russians? He drinks it quite a lot. He smokes joints. He doesn't seem to care for sex, but doesn't mind getting into it. Doesn't seem to want a real relationship. Why does Maude want "The Dude" to be the father of her child?

Despite the weird things that happen to "The Dude", he takes everything in stride. He's not above lying here and there if it suits his needs, although he's a generally positive character.

Is the setting of Los Angeles important? It means "The Angels" and there have been films using "Lost Angels" as a variation.

There is the notion that Jesus went to h*ll after being crucified. Does the story chronicle a version of this story? Is bowling used because the Coens consider it a sport that someone might be punished to play?

Why is "The Dude" always sniffing the milk? He seems concerned that it will go bad, and is always checking for it.

Does everything have a meaning, or are their quirks thrown in, for quirks sake? The Coens are rather literary. They refer to all sorts of things, then tell a strange story taking elements from all over.

Despite the strangeness of the film, if you get into it, it's eminently watchable. If you don't care that the movie has to be about something that makes total sense, then it's enjoyable. I mean, if you can believe that a guy would get into all these weird situations and love bowling, then you can derive pleasure from the film.

By the way, does "The Dude" ever bowl in the film? I seem to recall everyone else bowling, but I don't seem to recall him bowling.

Lazy Reporting

2009-05-05T23:16:00.002-04:00

If you have to pick an area of news reporting with the least integrity, what would it be? Sports reporting, for the most part, is pretty good. The biggest problem with sports reporting is the fact that sports reporters are, at the very heart of it, fans of the sports. They are wow'ed by the best players, and like to hob-nob with the celebrity athlete.

The worst news reporting is entertainment news. Where a good sports reporter might get fame for their quality of writing or sports shows, figures like Bob Ryan or Tony Kornheiser or Michael Wilbon, there's hardly any reputable entertainment news reporters. The ones with the best reputations are most likely film critics. Other than that, the majority of them seem like air-headed suck-ups who fear that a critical word would lead to instant denial of access, and thus, instant death in the industry.

At the very least, athletes are generally compelled to talk to reporters. Actors and actresses are under no such obligations.

That leads to the latest Star Trek film. Rather than continue along the Next Generation route, which has lead to several less than memorable films, J. J. Abrams, who created hit TV series, Lost and Alias and directed the third Mission Impossible film and the less than successful, Cloverfield.

In several interviews, he's already pointed out that he's not a huge Star Trek fan, and has taken liberties with the original show. He worked with non-fans of the show as well as huge fans of the show to create a story that would work well for those who loved the series, and those who knew little about Spock and Kirk.

Nearly every report has said that he is "rebooting" the series, that he is reviving a moribund franchise. This has to be sucking up to a major degree. To be fair, the TNG movies have not been very good, partly because they relied on the same creative team that made the series, and that series often succeed where their films do not. The reason is familiarity. You get familiar with the characters, but then they seem more like friends rather than exceptional people, and you see their warts and all, and there's a great degree of history that needs to be respected.

The fact of the matter is the series had done quite well. The original series lead to 6 TOS films and a handful of follow-up TNG films. The TNG films have not done well, and there was a huge gap between the last and penultimate TNG film. However, Star Trek spawned four series, including the original, TNG, DS9, and Enterprise. That's pretty successful. True, there has been no Star Trek series since then, but it's had a pretty good run.

Was the so-called reboot necessary? Well, there's still a built-in audience that likes Star Trek. To recast the original group with younger actors, and to have some other creative talent take over, sure, that can help. Some might argue Star Wars would have been better if the Lucas would let go of the reins and let other directors work in the Star Wars universe.

In any case, entertainment reporting on Star Trek is still lazy, lazy writing.

Still, people are more excited then ever. I didn't care about any of the TNG films, but this one sounds like it's worth watching.

Wallet vs. Purse

2009-04-29T14:20:00.002-04:00

Here's an thought puzzle for you. Why do men use wallets and why do women use purses or handbags?

I was thinking about this. Do women really have to carry a lot more stuff than men? If a guy thinks about what a woman carries, he probably thinks about lipstick, mascara, mirrors, etc. In other words, cosmetics, things to make women look more attractive.

Women are generally held to a higher standard of attractiveness than men, and in ways that can be controlled by spending money. Better clothing, nicer makeup, etc. Guys can be far lazier in that front.

Women have greater freedom with what to wear, but with that freedom comes a bit of responsibility to use that freedom.

I was attending a wedding this past weekend and saw many women wearing strapless dresses, basically leaving the entire shoulder exposed. Other women that were not part of the bridal party wore differing styles. I thought there's no way a man could reveal his shoulders in the same way, even accounting for women's breasts making some of these costuming choices possible.

Men end up in boring clothing because that's how it works. There's not a great deal variations in suits. They are generally dark: blue, black, brown, and occasionally gray or even tan. Tuxedos are similarly boring. But in this lack of originality, men don't have to do a lot.

Women, on the other hand, are given a great deal of freedom, and because of that, they are compelled to wear so many different outfits. Witness Michelle Obama, where the press scrutinized every inauguration outfit she wore. Husband Barack only had to wear the tux when it came to the various balls that first couple were obligated to attend.

But let's get to purses. Why do women not carry wallets? OK, so wallets would be carried in a pocket. One disadvantage, presumably, is that skirts don't generally have pockets, and skirts were what women wore until the 1970s when jeans took over and both men and women could wear them.

So why the difference?

YOUR BLOG IS FALSE

2009-04-28T16:29:00.002-04:00

So J-Dog says my blog is false and that while IDEs and version control is important, universities aren't particularly good at teaching them so industry should teach it.

One could argue that industry doesn't even really teach, so they are at least as bad at it as anyone else.

I think it's agreed that you can classify the Stuff J-Dog Wants Taught as more fundamental, i.e., hasn't changed much in years (admittedly, algorithms and finite automata being relatively recent areas in computer science, some 50 years old) and Faddish Stuff, as in IDEs and version control.

Linear algebra, etc. all are rather "singular". There isn't X flavor of linear algebra and Y flavor of linear algebra, there's just linear algebra (feels like an Obama geek declaration). But there is a version of this IDE vs that IDE, and this version control vs. that version control, thus it has a faddish flavor, a technological contrivance, and to learn one might give you an overall flavor of all things in the class, but you may find yourself incompetent in a rival product.

And I can see that being distasteful to the university cognoscenti.

Wedding Bells

2009-04-26T07:01:00.002-04:00

I've probably now attended a dozen weddings or so. I don't get invited to a lot of them, which is maybe all the better because I find them slightly stressful. Being a person who likes sameness a lot, getting ready to have to fly somewhere, get dressed up, go through the pomp and circumstance. It's a bit out of the ordinary.

The more weddings you attend, the more you start comparing and contrasting weddings. What did this wedding do well? What did it not do well? It's a touch petty, but it's not that different from watching a movie and wanting to rank it or listening to a song and asking if it's your new favorite.

I decided to keep this trip on the shorter side. I flew in the day of the wedding, merely 6 hour before the ceremony. I wasn't sure I would know more than the guy getting married (Phil), his best man (John), and maybe that's it.

Still, sometimes you go to a wedding, start talking to someone, and even though you'll probably not run into them again, it's a pleasant conversation. At Adam's wedding, I met some Asian guy who, I believe, went to high school with him, and had since moved to Connecticut. I think they figured since we came as "singles" it was best to put as at the same table.

I hadn't thought about that since just about now.

Hmm, so let me quickly get to Phil, and this post may have to continue at a later moment.

I don't quite recall how I met Phil. I used to be at the university all the time. I had a couch in my office, and used it all the time. I was lazy, so I'd teach, head to the couch to sleep, and start the next day. It wasn't typical, and indeed, in hindsight, a bit weird.

Because of this habit, I'd run into students in the evenings. The big project of the day was operating systems. It was a course I had taken (though we had a different project) and been a TA for. Most OS projects seem to be deliberately vague, as if revealing the details would be far too much, giving students no challenge at all.

Since this was post 2000, the web was in full swing, and previous incarnations of the course were also on the web. Clever students cobbled together pieces from the previous projects to get a grasp of what they really needed to do.

There were two PCs dedicated to the project. It wasn't much, and most students relied on developing it at home on a suitably ratty PC.

There were maybe 5-6 students who would work on the project, and usually Phil would figure out what the project was aiming at and explain it to the others several different times. As anyone who has taught knows, explaining something to someone is the best way to learn.

OS was a pretty intense course, and the bonding that came from it something that students often remember years after the course is over. Although I wasn't really part of the course, that is, not a TA, not an instructor, I came and helped out when I could being an unofficial TA, and that was one of the fonder memories.

I had Phil suggest to be some modern indie mix that I still have on my ITunes to this day. We went a few times out to the 9:30 club. One time, we went to listen to the Gabe Dixon band, who was the warm-up for the suddenly popular Norah Jones (and he'd marry someone named Nora--coincidence?). We had listened to Doves, Sigur Ros. I can't say I've been to the 9:30 club much since then, perhaps once or twice by myself, but being out there was memorable.

I remember getting a flat tire very close to campus and not knowing how to change it. I called up Phil since he was one of the few people I knew. He didn't much know how to change a tire either. A cop came by, but wasn't helpful. He refused to change the tire. Phil called up a tow truck, and perhaps he wouldn't come for free (he had AAA). Eventually, we got that guy to change the tire, and I was fine. But it was a nice thing for Phil to do, as I was stuck an hour or probably two until then.

I had visited Phil's place in southern Maryland a few times, and remember that he was trying to meet someone here and how he'd lament that it wasn't happening. Phil's a prototypical nice guy, willing to give the shirt off your back, feeling guilty if he hasn't emailed you. They say guys like that have problems meeting women who want their guys tougher and not always as nice. Edge, they say.

Phil also wanted a career change, wanted to go to music. His programming career was as much due to the booming times in software and his parents suggestion that he do something more rewarding, monetarily, than astronomy, which was his big interest of the day. Phil said he never had much talent musically, singing or playing, but he loved listening to music, and started classes in sound mixing.

This eventually lead him to Chicago, where he thought a change of scenery would improve his life. Although the music career never quite panned out, he did meet Nora in Chicago, and I think he'll take that as a positive change, one that he didn't originally plan for (does one plan such things?), but has worked out quite well indeed.

More to come later...

What is Computer Science?

2009-04-23T17:07:00.003-04:00

I was having a debate with a friend, which wasn't much of a debate to be honest, because we weren't really debating.

He felt that a computer science program should cover the fundamentals which, to him, meant math. You should know things like algorithms, linear algebra, statistics. He said things like IDEs and version control should not be taught. You have limited resources, and those things are fads that change. And since industry uses these things, then let industry teach it, or pick it up on the job.

He argued that no one is going to pick up linear algebra if they aren't taught it in classes, but people can always learn IDEs and version control.

At the time, while I disagreed, I didn't present any counterarguments.

So it made me think. Would a typical person actually pick up those things at work? There are fairly smart people that don't want to learn IDEs or version control because it is a fad. Could they learn it on their own? Perhaps, but there are so many mundane details to learn, much of which isn't that important to learn, that people often go in the other direction. They learn just enough to get by without fully understanding it.

To take this to an extreme, there are smart people that know math that don't even bother to learn to program properly. If you say IDEs and version control is unimportant because of its faddish nature, then you might as well say learning to program in any popular programming language is also faddish. It can take at least as long to really learn a language well as it does to learn the basics of stats or linear algebra (i.e., 3-4 months of focus) and it takes a certain personality to learn a language as well as possible.

The problem, in my mind, is that computer science, as it leads to a programming job, is faddish and fundamental. If you focus on the fundamentals, then you are telling graduating majors that everything else is a fad and is "easy" to pick up. These faddish things are in fact not easy to pick up and are difficult in completely unsatisfying ways.

At least, you can argue that if you learn linear algebra or stats and it's tough to figure out, then when you finally do figure it out, then you can feel you've understood something deep.

This isn't really the case with IDEs and version control. You learn a lot of mundane details and wonder why certain things even exist, and what their purpose is for. A typical industrial strength IDE has hundreds of options. There are ways to extend the IDE (say, for an open source IDE like Eclipse), ways to integrate it with a build system, with a bug-tracking system, etc.

So many details are there, and it takes a long time to master them, and it's not always that uniform from one product to another.

My thinking is that we need to teach how to deal with this because it is a survival skill in the industry, despite being so very ephemeral.

In other words, despite the fact that people may not choose to learn linear algebra once they go into industry, they may, for quite different reasons, not choose to learn an IDE particularly well when they arrive there either. To assume that they will is a bit of folly.

Forehand Progress

2009-04-22T04:17:00.003-04:00

About a year ago, I bought a camcorder. I wasn't planning to make video of my kids since I don't have kids. I wasn't planning to make a movie, though the idea is certainly appealing. I wanted to record my tennis strokes.

Video isn't exactly new to tennis. Back in the 1970s, Vic Braden used to take high-speed videos of tennis players. He famously advocated that players use a very low toss for their serves much like Roscoe Tanner, the best server of his day. This was routinely ignored, especially in Europe, where the opposite occurred: extremely high ball tosses. Braden probably popularized the notion of wrist pronation vs. wrist snap, and that has been far more influential than the low ball toss.

But Braden had an expensive tennis facility and an expert making those videos, so it meant the average player couldn't look at his own strokes. You needed two things: low-cost camcorders and video software to slow down the action. Without being able to slow down your stroke, it's hard to notice where problems occur. While I don't have the benefit of high-speed high-def cameras, I don't really need them.

I use a mini-DV camera which is good enough (though not HD), and I use IMovie '09 to slow down the video. That is also good enough for me.

I first started modifying my forehand in probably October of 2007. At the time, I chose to model Novak Djokovic. I don't even recall why Djokovic, other than he was a rising star and that he was pretty funny. You have to understand that Djokovic had a huge breakout year in 2007. He literally came from nowhere and jumped to number 3. While people were distracted by epic Nadal-Federer finals, few noticed that, by Wimbledon, Djokovic had made his second consecutive semifinals, essentially matching Federer and Nadal, and made his first US Open final that same year.

The one problem with Djokovic's forehand, at least, at the time I decided to stop using his forehand as a model, was the following. Pause the above video. Notice that Novak's racquet face points behind him to the back "fence" (a wall, in pro events). He then lowers the racquet face down so it points down the the ground behind him (pause at 0:13), then turns the racquet face to the right tilted somewhat downwards (pause at 0:14), before pulling the racquet to contact.

To me, that seemed like a lot of excess motion, and I wanted a simpler model.

So I went to the forehand everyone said was the best, at least at the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008, and that was Roger Federer.

At the beginning of this video, Roger's racquet face points to his right. Contrast that with Djokovic, who brings the racquet behind him. In fact, this pointing to the right was something I had a hard time doing because my body awareness wasn't so good. By body awareness, I mean I would point my arm in one direction, but think it was pointing in some other direction. So I would probably think I was pointing to my right, and was actually pointing behind me.

How could I make such a huge mistake? One reason was simple. I wasn't looking. I was focusing on the ball, so when I stuck my racquet behind me, I didn't really know where it was. I could have asked someone, but it never occurred to me that my mental model of where my arm was and reality diverged so much.

Video really helped me see this.

Now, it turns out, Federer also has some motions that add some complexity to his forehand.

Pause at 0:04, and you see his racquet face pointed face down, and the tip of his racquet head pointed to his right. If you were take an overhead view, lined up so the baseline is "west-east" and Roger is hitting "south", then his racquet face initially points west, the moves north, and indeed a little north-east.

By the time it's pointing north-east, (pause at 0:08), the racquet face points right and slightly down. This is the common racquet orientation for pretty much every modern player, and occurs when they are about to accelerate the racquet head to contact. Up to that point, players do all sorts of things. I would say, at least for the better players I see on public courts, that the Djokovic model seems the most popular. Why? I don't know.

I discovered, after watching videos of myself, that I kept my racquet face down a lot, that is, almost the entire swing to contact. I only open the face right when I hit it, but otherwise, it stays closed.

There were several reasons, but one huge reason was because I feed the ball too close to my body. Feeding yourself the ball means to drop the ball and hit it. Most people drop it near their right foot, and that it simply too close to the body. It should be tossed maybe 3 feet to your right. You want your arm to be out far to the right so it gets more of a full extension.

The other reason was the way I oriented my wrist. It's taken maybe 10 months to begin to train myself not to close my racquet face and to know which orientation my wrist should be at.

Ultimately, that became the reason I abandoned the Federer forehand. Federer closes his racquet face, then points it to the right. Since I couldn't tell whether I was closing my racquet face or not (despite thinking I was pointing it to the right, often numerous times), I felt trying to imitate Federer that closely was going to confuse me.

At that point, I looked to a different model, which was probably the end of 2008, maybe around October or November. I had been trying the Federer forehand since probably March, or before I even started to video myself in May of 2008.

2008 turned out to be a big year for several players: Gilles Simon was ranked around 20 and moved to around 6 or 7 (but has slipped some since a big move to the top 10), Juan Martin del Potro's ascendancy has been more impressive, getting into the top 10 as well, and finally Andy Murray who started the year around 6, and moved up to a solid number 4, threatening to go to 3.

If you were to ask the experts looking at Murray's game what his best stroke was, well, they'd probably not point to his forehand. Indeed, his backhand is considered his stronger side. Still, that's just a relative comparison. That is, it treats his forehand and backhand separately. If you were to rank the top forehands, Murray's would be behind Federer, Djokovic, Verdasco, Gonzalez, probably Blake. It depends on what you think is important in a forehand. If you were to rank backhands, Murray might be 3 behind Nadal and Djokovic. Even so, most pros, have better forehands than backhands. One might argue this is true even for a player with as impressive a one-handed backhand as Richard Gasquet. Few people rip winners regularly from their backhands.

This is probably the best slow motion video of Andy Murray's forehand, despite the rather low quality of the video itself. It's about the only one that is shown from Andy's right, which you almost never see. Most videos are taken from the front, which is fine, but not to illustrate what I want to show.

In particular, since this video is from Andy's right, then when his racquet face points right, then it points to the camera. Pay attention to the entire swing path.

Starting at 0:12 to 0:17, the racquet face points right (i.e. to the camera, i.e., to you, the viewer) which is pretty much the start of his motion to just the instant before contact where he then, out of necessity (like every pro), points the racquet face to the ball.

Nowhere in that stroke does Murray point his racquet face down, which, if you recall from the earlier on, was my problem. I would close my face until just before impact.

Despite knowing this, it took a long time to understand several things. First, I had a tendency to point the racquet face behind me, a la Djokovic. I also had a huge looping motion behind me. I noticed most pros don't loop that big. They have a much milder motion that, in particular, doesn't get behind them.

I should say most male pros. Women pros, by and large, do get their racquet behind them, and hit it like some folks hit a one-handed backhand. There's only one male pro I know of that hits like that, which is Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy.

Watch at 2:16 (it's sad how bad Youtube video quality is--you can't watch tennis at all unless it's at least high quality, which is why it's nice that Youtube finally allowed better quality video to be uploaded). Chardy takes his racquet so that it is behind him (racquet face points to back fence), but unlike Djokovic, who has the racquet tip pointed up, Chardy's racquet tip points to the left. Most women pros (Safina, Sharapova, Ivanovic, etc) do this, but most male pros don't.

Think of your chest as a large infinite plane, much like the ones they teach in you in geometry. A plane divides 3-space into "half", which can be loosely termed as the half-space in front of you, and the half-space behind you. Now imagine your chest points to the right fence, thus you are sideways, relative to the net. This is the position you'd be in setting up for a righty forehand.

Most male pros keep their racquet head in the front half. Women pros, on the other hand, let the racquet head get behind them. This is so they can get a longer swing path. It mimics a one-handed backhand where the racquet face also gets behind you, but applies the same idea to the forehand. Men, perhaps needing less time to hit because they are physically stronger, don't do this.

In particular, if you watch the wrist and arm, it tends to go roughly straight back and drop and then the whole body rotates counter-clockwise. This would be much easier to illustrate if I had a video, but I don't.

To illustrate, imagine you are doing jumping jacks. Focus on your right arm. Jumping jacks have you swing your right arm at the plane of your torso. Basically, your racquet goes from being in front of you as you prepare to hit, to being maybe 45 degress pointing up in a jumping jack motion, to dropping your arm so it is maybe waist height (this is the part of the jumping jack motion where the arm descends down).

Notice the arm stays in that plane. My tendency was to pull my arm behind this plane and make my wrist move behind this plane in a loop motion.

OK, I'm being highly technical here. Clearly, women hit something like that, so why don't I?

Several reasons. One is silly. I'm a guy, I want to hit like other guy pros. Two, male pros have shorter strokes and so I think that's important so I don't get caught too late. Male pros already set up much quicker than I do, so they can afford to have longish stroke paths. Women pros are also quicker than me.

Three, I want to make my body do what my mind is telling it to do. And that's really the biggest reason. The change I'm making may not improve my forehand much, but the process by which I get there will help me think about how I do things, how I get my body to make a certain motion. I didn't expect it to take me a year to master. It's still a work in progress, but I am slowly getting closer to what I want to do.

One key is that I can shadow-stroke the way I want to hit. Shadow-stroking is where you hit the ball without the ball. You would think that motion is enough. If I can shadow stroke, I can hit the ball that same way.

Untrue.

When I shadow-stroke, there's no ball. I don't react to a ball, so I can focus entirely on the swing. But once there's a ball, I have to react so I can hit the ball, and then muscle memory kicks in to try to adjust the swing to hit the ball, and that's where my problems come in. You just have to swing over and over to train the body not to do what it's been doing for a long time.

Now, a year is a pretty long time to obsess over hitting a forehand, especially since the motion isn't coming to me that quickly. But I enjoy the process of getting there. If it came easily, I would have missed too many other things, in particular, a better awareness of what my body is doing. That's been a weirdly valuable lesson.

Weird, only because it's not that critical for me to know what my body is doing when it hits a tennis ball, but valuable because I realize what I thought I was doing and what I do are different things, and that's an interesting lesson, that might apply to less physical activities.

Right now, the motion is kinda there, but I still take my racquet back too much, so I am trying to reduce that motion. If I were to have done this motion 6 months ago, I would have told you I am not even pointing my racquet behind me, but it's off to my right. I would have been wrong. That goes to show you how off my perception was.

So I still need to practice. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that a month more and I'll have it close to where I want it, but then I've been trying this for many months already, so if it's longer, I won't be surprised.

The Twitter Tipping Point

2009-04-09T09:38:00.002-04:00

Twitter has been out a few years now. It was considered the darling of the Ruby on Rails crowd since it was a big popular application. Since then, Twitter has blamed ROR for scalability issues, accusations they once said were not the fault of ROR, but now the claim are. Indeed, there is a push to rewrite Twitter in Scala, a competitor to Groovy, which is a functional language built on the JVM. I had heard of Scala even before Twitter (or Groovy), but I digress.

For a long time, I did nothing with my Twitter account. I didn't get microblogging. I didn't have anything I wanted to post that frequently. I had no big reason to use it.

But that changed a few months ago, when Twitter hit a tipping point. Some people point to, oh, maybe 2005 SXSW, the music, technology, who-knows-what event that's held in Austin, TX (the city that is weird and wants to stay that way) when numerous attendees jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and brought Twitter to a screeching halt until they figured out how to deal with so many new Twits (TM).

That wasn't it. Twitter really took off when athletes and celebrities started using Twitter. Most surprisingly (but probably not), Shaquille O'Neal started tweeting. Indeed, he once announced he was at a restaurant and some nearby geeks saw him online and asked if they could come by, and he said yes. They got a picture with him.

Shaq is such a ham.

He's not the only athlete. In tennis, world number 4 player (and possibly going to be world number 3) Andy Murray is on Twitter. He shows a playful side. He and his "Team Murray" play footy-tennis, some combination of soccer and tennis and losers of the challenge often wear clothes inside out or women's clothing to public places such as dinner. He'll mention his tickets to see the Miami Heat, or practicing with a fellow pro, or a recent tennis result, or playing a "brain game". Not something you imagine Roger Federer (too classy) or Rafael Nadal (English not good enough) to do.

Of course, the Internet has always spawned its own lesser-known celebrities, thus, a Gabe Rivera of TechMeme fame might tweet with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch fame. Although Twitter didn't originally support "chatting" with someone else, people refer to one another by their Twitter name prefaced with an "@" sign, as in @gaberivera.

But certainly, it was enough to push it into national consciousness when Mike and Mike in the morning refer to Facebook and Twitter and when the venerable Diane Rehm now has people contacting her via Twitter. She probably doesn't exactly get it either, but her producers, I'm sure, help her through this technological wonderland.

So where I used to use Twitter sparingly, I now check into it daily. I have the every garrulous Wil Wheaton that I follow who posts like 10 tweets a day (most people manage 1-2 a day) or more. Brent Spiner is also on that list. I haven't yet added Levar Burton.

I follow Carl Lerche, a guy I saw at RubyRx. I probably should add Jared Richardson, but I don't have his tweety address.

And there you have it. When did it happen? Maybe 6 months ago? It's interesting how the NBA has probably encouraged its leading stars to embrace technology. Most players already have smartphones and laptops they bring everywhere to keep them connected to their fans. Gilbert Arenas had his blog and now Shaq twitters.

What on Earth will happen next?

Mad World

2009-04-08T10:34:00.002-04:00

I was a little surprised that Mad World was written by British band, Tears for Fears. Best known for Everyone Wants To Rule The World, this band produced 3-4 hits.

I first heard about Mad World from the indie SF thriller (only, it isn't), Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko is an early role by Jake Gyllenhaal who plays the titular character Donnie.

The film is basically about growing up in the 1980s. The SF elements are so strong that it's easy to miss the nostalgia for that period of time, which include the rise of evangelical Christians on mainstream TV, the popularity of Members Only and Ocean Pacific clothing, the trend from traditional cheerleading to a dance-style, and the medicating of the youth to deal with psychological issues, real or imagined.

Donnie Darko chronicles the troubled teenage life of Donnie who is a bit of an outcast and is, I believe, on medication to treat this. Of course, he falls for a girl, and then there is the requisite weirdness involved a very large, not terribly realistic bunny called Frank. Is Donnie insane?

If you listen to the version of Mad World by Tears for Fears, the first link I have above, you'll see that it sounds a bit techno, and doesn't even seem like a very good song given that arrangement. Gary Jules (in the second link above) creates a more melancholy version and it's the one that appears in Donnie Darko.

Last night was "songs from the year you were born" on American Idol, where the eight remaining performers pick songs, primarily from the 80s. Adam Lambert, the prohibitive favorite to win American Idol, sang Mad World opting for more of Gary Jules approach. Lambert is the emo guy who normally yells out parts of the song because his vocals are so strong. However, he's been dialing it down some because it's been seen as a bit too intense and over the top for most.

Interestingly enough, as blogs started covering last night's show, a weird phenomenon occurred. Eight people is tough to fit in a one hour live show. This year, they added a new judge, Kara, because Paula Abdul is so gushingly positive that they wanted someone who might have a negative opinion once in a while. This forced the show to conclude 5 minutes after it was supposed to end.

In particular, Adam Lambert, being the last to perform, was on from 9:00 to 9:05 (the song lasted 2-3 minutes as it's usually truncated to get everyone in). Apparently, and here's the fascinating part, many people prefer to watch American Idol on DVR, so they record it, then watch it about half way, and skip over the commercials.

The problem? The program was supposed to have ended at 9 PM, so the DVRs failed to record this. Now it seems like enough people had this problem that people were blogging about this.

Now that I write this, I wonder if this was done deliberately. Those who DVR'ed it will have to go find a version of it quickly. Does it hurt Lambert's chances or will they vote for him "blind"? Although samples of the song were up within an hour of the show, was that enough time?

I happened to see it live, so I didn't miss anything, but it's an interesting phenomenon.

Where's Google Weather?

2009-04-03T16:49:00.002-04:00

Weather reporting has only gotten marginally better over the years. The biggest innovation probably occurred 20 years ago when Doppler radar became widely used by meteorologists.

For someone who cares when the rain is, I want to see live and time-lapsed Doppler radar. Problem? I'm forced to use map resolutions I don't control.

Now who has maps that are draggable, zoomable and has innovative folks?

Google.

So where's Google Weather? Add it as an extension to Google Maps. Perhaps it might allow users to enter in weather data, most importantly, rain.

Of course, they could add more to it than that.

For example, with weather prediction, I want to see a time-lapse of how the weather for Thursday (say) has changed as the time approaches Thursday. How often is this data being updated? When did that prediction of sunny weather become rain?

And how far is the prediction for right now differing from now. I'll see predicted temperatures for 40s, when it's currently 48, which means the next few hours should be warmer than that. Shouldn't that be auto-updated?

Seems like the weather guys could do much better.

And they should.

Bracketology

2009-03-16T10:40:00.001-04:00

Every year, mid March, the basketball stat-loving fans are knee-deep into "bracketology". This is the pseudo-science that tries to guess who will play in March Madness.

I should back up some. The NCAA is a governing body of college sports in the United States. Each college/university is placed in a "division" based on the size of their school and on their level of athletic prowess. In particular, there is Division 1, 2, and 3. Division 1 is where the best athletes tend to go.

March Madness is the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Championships.

The tournament is in mid to late March and has 65 teams. Each college/university in Division 1 belongs to a conference. Each conference has a way of determining a winner. Sometimes they have a tournament at the end of the season. Most major conferences do this, e.g. the ACC, which stands for the Atlantic Coast Conference had a year-end championship that concluded yesterday, March 15 (Duke beat Florida State).

Duke, for example, got an automatic bid into the tournament by winning the ACC championships and represents the ACC.

The Ivy League looks at the team with the best regular season record (I believe, only against other Ivy League teams). This year, it's Cornell.

There are 31 conferences, each with an automatic bid based on how that conference decides to pick a representative. Why automatic? Many of these conferences are very weak and would not otherwise qualify for March Madness if it weren't for the automatic bid. Fans of basketball often enjoy these smaller (called "mid-major") conferences because the upset, while rare, is entertaining.

There are 34 at-large bids. A committee decides which 34 teams that didn't get an automatic bid qualify. The committee decides, based on a body of work, which teams get an at-large bid. It is the source of nervous anticipation when teams on the "bubble", that is on the verge of making it in or not, wait to find if the committee picked them or not. St. Mary's didn't get in. Arizona did. These two were on the bubble.

In the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday (which was March 15 this year), experts called "bracketologists" (a made up name to sound a bit scientific) try to guess which teams will make the 34 at-large bids.

Now if you add the two numbers: 31 automatic and 34 at-large, you get 65. This is not a power of two. A single elimination tournament should add to 64.

65 came about because a new conference was added to go from 30 to 31. No one wanted the number of at-large bids to go down by 1 especially since the new conference was likely to be very weak.

Usually, March Madness is played over three long weekends. By long weekend, I mean Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If a given team is not eliminated, they play two games during this long weekend. 6 wins gives you a national title.

How to deal with 65 then? Two teams play in a play-in game and that is played on the Tuesday (2 days before the first "official" day). The winner usually has the honor of playing a number 1 seed.

Ah, so seeding. Once we get to 64, each team is placed in one of four groups of 16. They are called East, West, Midwest, and South. Within each group, the teams are ranked (or seeded) 1 to 16. They play each other so that 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, 3 plays 14, and so forth. In other words, the highest seed always plays the lowest seed at each possible round, making their chances better (though not guaranteed) that they will make it to the finals.

Once each of the groups has eliminated down to 1, there are 4 teams remaining, and this is called the "Final Four". In the final weekend, they go from 4 to 2, then 2 to 1 to determine a champion.

For many universities, a good sign of success is making it past the first long weekend. If they win 2 games, they are in the final 16, which is called the "Sweet 16". A measure of how good a basketball program is is how many times they have made the Sweet 16 ever and in the last few years.

Bracketology is interesting because people spend lots of time trying to guess who will make it, and for the most part, they are correct, plus or minus 5-6 picks. The exact seeding is a bit challenging as other factors are put into play.

In particular, high seeds are often placed at a tournament site (picked long before March Madness) near their university so their fans can come and support them. This may seem unfair (it's common wisdom that the more fans that come and cheer, the better a team does), but in the past, lower seeded teams have sometimes been placed closed to home, while the higher seeded opponent is far away and fewer fans attend, thus giving a "home court advantage" to the lower seeded team.

The committee created something called "pods" a few years ago, so they could mix and match teams from different regions (the East, West, Midwest, South from earlier) at the same tournament site so they could help teams stay close to home. This is a tough job, and it affects seeding too.

It's amazing but people spend the last weeks of February and the first weeks of March trying to predict which teams will make it. Time and fastidious attention are critical, and yet it is merely a game.

Oh yeah, betting. This is perhaps the hugest betting that occurs on any event in the US. Most of it is done in small office pools where each person puts in a small amount, between 5 and 20 dollars. It keeps interest up especially in upsets and tiny teams and people who play but know nothing of the sport and do well nonetheless because those that know better pick more upsets than they should.

So it begins.

What's a City?

2009-03-14T08:16:00.002-04:00

Many years ago, probably at least 15, I stumbled on a conversation that was a bit of an epiphany. Epiphany is too strong a word, but nevertheless, I like the sound of that word over "eye opener".

The discussion centered around the notion of "what is a city". Of course, I had the rather naive view that it was anything above a certain population. Something big enough to make it bigger than a town, bigger than a suburb. A metropolis, such as it was, would be a big city.

However, the two people debating the issue, and it could hardly have been a debate, because they agreed to same principles, but were simply niggling on details of what were proper examples of cities.

A city, they had agreed, was not only a large metropolitan area, but some place that had a distinctive personality. So New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago fit the bill. New Orleans and Philadelphia would be considered cities, but places like Tampa or Rochester or Jacksonville might be suitably non-descript to count as a city.

Would Portland and Seattle be cities? Places like Nashville and Atlanta maybe yes. Places like Charlotte, not so much.

Why use this definition? It's been said many people who live in the city like the city. It has museums and plays and concerts and sports teams. Its very size generally means a diversity in things to do, and people that live there, as ethnic groups of all sorts will find more familiar faces in a big city than in a rural countryside.

If the city lacks personality, maybe Buffalo or Des Moines, then it becomes just a large place that isn't particularly distinctive, an overcrowded place without the kind of personality one wants.

The city seems antithetical to the car. Not to say certain cities don't practically require the use of a car (think Los Angeles), but that the convenience of cities should be nearby places to go that is walkable or certainly accessible via public transport. It's difficult for a city to be walkable and have cars. But to be walkable means you need to distribute restaurants, stores, museums, etc. all in the same area and not segregate homes on one end, and shopping on the other.

I happen to like the car, but there are plenty of times where the sheer amount of time, compounded by the incessant number of traffic lights, makes the journey so very arduous and therefore tedious. The city fights this because the parameters are so much bigger. The number of lanes, the tall building, the taxis jockeying for positions, the rules that seem to only appear in cities, one way streets, and so forth. What a pain.

If you like the car, then you want tiny towns and wide open spaces where the congestion of a city populace isn't there. It is an urban fantasy that a city be desolate of drivers except for the one person, free to roam down streets with towers that pierce the sky, and with the roof pulled down, the music blaring loudly, the wind rushing like waterless currents through one's hair, and equate this rush of exhilarating movement and equate this with freedom.

Watchmen

2009-03-13T07:03:00.002-04:00

Watchmen, so I've learned from reading several articles, is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, the same guy who penned V is for Vendetta. Moore has generally been viscerally opposed to any film adaptation of his work. However, fans of his work--and they are numerous are curious, at the very least, how it would turn out.

Given the big budget affair that most superhero movies have turned out to be, an action that generally attracts many well-named actors to roles, think Tobey Maguire in Spiderman or Robert Downey Junior in Iron Man or many of the cast of Batman, it's quite amazing to have a film where you struggle to recognize the actors. If you're the casual filmwatcher (no pun intended), you might not recognize any of the actors.

I recognized two, and even then, only barely. Billy Crudup, who shares the same birthday as me, plays the CGI-ed up Dr. Manhattan who is mostly very blue, very naked, and very unemotional. I also knew, somewhat of Patrick Wilson, who plays Nite Owl, the awkwardly straight-laced superhero who generally admonishes the crowd to behave themselves.

Contrast this with Batman, where there are, at least, tons of famous character actors from Gary Oldman to Michael Caine to Morgan Freeman to Christian Bale. In the latest, Dark Knight, you get to see the incredible Heath Ledger playing a demented Joker. But Ledger is so famous, even before his untimely death, that you would know "that's Heath Ledger, wow he's good".

In Watchman, you're so engaged with these actors as the roles they play, you don't even think "that's so and so". So many films are scared to cast relative unknowns to play roles. I understand these aren't hacks. These are actors with reasonable resumes who've done well in much smaller parts. But it really helps to be engaged in the storyline when you don't think of the people playing these roles.

The mainstream comics, Marvel and DC, have defined the modern superhero. Usually, though not always (Batman being an exception), the superhero is imbued with superpowers, in someway. They can climb walls, or have adamantium claws, or can have flames emanating from their body. There's usually an origin story. There's usually some maniacal bad guy who is just as powerful, or, at the very least, a mad genius. Think Lex Luthor.

Oddly enough, in a world of superheroes, the government never seems to think it's too weird or feels too threatened that they cower to the might of the superheroes. They simply pass laws and such restricting behavior and the superheroes sometimes listen. Although the film isn't a traditional superhero movie, The Incredibles has this theme where the government has told superheroes to clamp down and stop being super. And oddly enough, they listen.

OK, to be fair, that film really explores Bird's thesis that there are hugely talented people out there (artists, in his world) and the PC attitude that everyone is good is doing a disservice to the geniuses. But beyond the subtext, the film is still a superhero film and takes its cues from comics.

People have claimed that Watchmen is a dark movie, and perhaps it is. But I thought The Dark Knight was darker. The Dark Knight is not so much about Joker vs. Batman, at least in any conventional sense of bad guy vs. good guy.

It's more like real-world ethics where Joker is presenting one real-world ethical dilemma after another. He poses questions that Batman needs to answer. Does Batman want to save the woman he loves, or the man that could save Gotham. That Batman picks the woman, and ends up realizing he's been tricked, well, that doesn't matter. Joker, ultimately, isn't about anything. He's not a character that has his own goals and motivations. He's a teacher, a tester, a challenger. He is the foil for Batman, making him deal with his personal demons.

It helps the second film is not an origin film. That was the first film.

If Watchmen draws analogies to Batman, at least, the Christopher Nolan version (though any would do), it makes sense. Batman is really the wealthy Bruce Wayne. In such a world, the wealthy have access to genius engineers who build special cars and special suits. They are superior fighters and movers, but otherwise, lack any other special powers. They're just superhuman enough to win any fight, but not so superhuman to fly or have any particular power.

Except for Dr. Manhattan. We'll get back to him later.

The origin story of Batman also serves as some inspiration to Watchmen. Batman wasn't a do-gooder. He had a traumatic childhood event, and spends his life as a vigilante. He's not the "dark knight" for no reason. He's not a paragon of virtue like, say, Superman is.

Watchmen tackles several themes that superhero movies don't usually deal with. First and foremost is politics. The films generally have the worldview of commies and pinkos and liberals on the one side, and the righteous conservative view on the other. And most of the Watchmen lean on this end. They feel they need to be just outside the law to do what they need to do.

Many of the superheroes, perhaps The Comedian, most notably, are deeply flawed heroes. They don't take responsibility. They revel in power like renegade cops. Even the heroes that are close to wholesome, namely Nite Owl, have to deal with other heroes that are less than wholesome. Nite Owl serves as our protagonist.

In real life, he's much like Clark Kent. Meek, shy. His superhero persona is merely a rigid reflection of his more timid self. Constantly cleaning his glasses, he's repressed. He's Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark without the confidence. The film never quite establishes how or why he gets along with Rorschach who is the resident psychopath/detective.

The film, set in the 1980s, also pays homage to heroes that preceded them. This is one idea that really never gets explored in superhero films. Nite Owl is really the second of two Nite Owl's, the original already too old to fight crime. The younger, lacking the bravery to ask Silk Spectre out on a proper date, at least goes to cheer up the older Nite Owl, drinking and talking about the good old days.

Indeed, each hero, especially the male heroes, are different reactions to power. The Comedian is like bad cop, who does whatever he wants, because he's got power. Rorschach believes in vigilante justice. He's got a code, but once he decides you're the bad guy, he's not above any method to deal his brand of justice. (Maybe like The Punisher). Nite Owl is the closest to a straight-laced superhero, but who puts up with the shenanigans of other heroes. He's a bit helpless to stop their bad behavior.

Ozymandias is the smart one, who uses his brain to become, well, Tony Stark? He's successful in business. He's revealed his identity so he can use his talent and wealth to help the world in some way.

Dr. Manhattan is also a genius, in his way, but an otherworldly one. One who gets increasingly detached as the film goes on. Despite practically godlike powers, the early parts of the film shows that he isn't above manipulation, nor above being in relationships. Superheroes often are considered super-moral. Because Crudup plays him so detached, and because he's, well, distracting as a hero (they once claimed Hulk would be naked in the film), it's easy to overlook that he's not particularly moral himself, partly because he is so detached. There's a key scene where The Comedian does something particularly awful and he points out to Dr. Manhattan, much like he points out to Nite Owl (really Nite Owl 2), that he has the power to stop him, but doesn't.

Indeed, the characters that are considered "good" often lack the strength to do good, even as those that prefer "by any means necessary" choose less than savory means to achieve their objectives.

This is far from a traditional superhero film. The Dark Knight for all its ethical quandaries is still about a good (well, kinda good) guy against a bad guy, and their confrontation with each other, although it's really about a split identity. A key scene in The Dark Knight has Joker asking what Batman believes in and what is he prepared to do when push comes to shove. But despite pushing the traditional boundaries of how good and bad guys behave, it is, more or less, structured in this framework.

Watchmen doesn't have a traditional bad guy. The bad guys resemble some of the faceless henchman in some of the Timothy Burton Batmans who have superior fighting skills but zero personalities (at least, in the Watchmen, there is minimal personalities for the bad guys that appear in the middle of the film).

The Watchmen explores what happens if ordinary people became superheroes. The special effects have a strongly retro feel to it. There's a certain realness to the Nite Owl flyer that, like Batman's vehicles, mimics his character. Despite it's obvious large windows that look like eyes, it pays homage to heroes like Batman, but because Nite Owl is not burned into the collective psyche like Batman (another thing in the film's favor, I'd say), the craft is somewhat charming.

Finally, this is a world that is about the real people behind the masks and spends as much of its time there as it does in the superhero mode. Even in real identities, these characters spend little time dealing with real people. They hang out with one another. It's not like Clark Kent hanging out at the Daily Planet where he interacts with Perry White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen.

The Watchmen lacks the intensity of the recent Batman films, but it poses a lot of heady ideas. The world depicted in the film isn't fully realized, but it is full enough to keep the audience thinking about what it means to be a hero and what it means to have a life outside of being a hero.

Google Weather

2009-03-12T13:19:00.001-04:00

Most weather sites kinda suck. What I want, and it's simply really. Combine Google Maps with a weather overlay. I want zoom-in and zoom-out. I want to know if rain is on the way, etc. I don't even need weather predictions if the cloud cover is right.

Do it Google!

Cleaning Party

2009-03-09T15:20:00.002-04:00

When folks move, they are taking advantage of something people are willing to do as a favor. Expend a few hours to do a large amount of work. The tradeoff is this. The person who is packing expends a lot of hours packing so the movers don't have to. It's hard to get help if the things drags on and on.

There's something that could be done similarly, I think, but for some reason is social taboo. A cleaning party.

How many people do you know are a perpetual mess? Their homes look like a tornado went through it. I have to admit, I'm one of those folks. I'd love to have people over to help clean, but the problem is deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. I wouldn't be able to make that decision.

Ideally, what I need is someone to come for about an hour at a time and give me an assignment. Do this by the next time I see you. For some reason, external motivation works better on me than my own motivation which is simply to do nothing.

Instead, people feel awkward about helping others clean, even if the effort is a lot less than actually helping people move. They feel that the person should take care of their place themselves since it's possible to do it.

Obviously, I disagree, but that's me.

Cosmos

2009-03-07T00:29:00.000-05:00

Cosmos was a series that showed up on PBS in, hmm, 1980, I think. It was a 12 part series hosted by astronomer, Carl Sagan. At the time, science shows like this seemed cool. I caught an episode again in college a few years later, and it seemed laughably optimistic.

In the series, Sagan would travel around in an imaginary spaceship that resembled a dandelion.

What was rather notable about the show was the music. Vangelis composed many of the memorable music. This is something that is unusual. Rarely is a science program noted for its music.

Here's a sample:

Tennis Aha

2009-03-03T01:19:00.003-05:00

I was looking at some slow motion video of Andy Murray, world number 4 ranked player.

Slow motion video has to be the biggest aid to analyzing the way the pros hit. It's really changed how I look at strokes. Without slowmo, you can't see what's going on. It's too fast.

In tennis, there are two main theories of hitting a forehand. One is called the straight arm forehand. Federer and Nadal use this as does Fernando Verdasco. The idea is you hit the ball with a straight arm. To get the correct angle, however, your arm sticks out significantly to the right and in front of you.

The alternative is the double-bend forehand. Basically, your elbow is closer to your body, and there is a 120 degree bend between the upper arm and the forearm. This allows the forearm to be mostly parallel to the ground. To get a similar effect with the straight arm, you need to have your arm way, way out.

Here's the insight. It's much easier to get the racquet face to point right if the arm is parallel to the ground as opposed to being nearly perpendicular. The double bend facilitates this. The forearm is nearly parallel to the ground, and keeping the racquet face pointed correct is not so bad.

Now all I have to do is try this out on the court.

On Faith

2009-03-02T01:47:00.003-05:00

I was thinking about this a day ago at 5 AM eating at an IHOP waiting for food.

Although people will tell you that faith, and I mean Christian faith in general, is about, well, faith. It is about community too. Many "good" people like the church because it provides community. Without community, I wonder how faithful many people would be.

Consider how Christians perceive various fringe groups that claim to be Christians, e.g. Mormons. The more fringe it is, and the more it doesn't involve Christ, the more likely the average Christian says it's all fake, without seeing the irony of that statement.

If anything, Christians point to a long long history of the faith, that it didn't just come about last week. But they can also point to the large numbers of active believers. After all, Greek worship of their own gods predates Christianity by a fair bit.

Without community, you are isolated. You have no other people that confirm the beliefs you have. Despite the statement that one should place their faith in a higher being, the fact is, people place their faith in other people. It is because of the community sharing this belief that they feel good about faith. If they were the only ones who believed something and no one else did, they would be far less sure of their faith.

But beyond that, the community provides a sense of belonging. The faith creates a common kind of culture. Some people wonder why African Americans choose to live near other African Americans. One reason is community. There is a shared background and then there is a community that understands where you came from and helps shape that view.

I'm not saying that you couldn't live without the community but Christians place a strong emphasis on going to church. They want you to be part of the community and some take reassurance from that. The community is one reason many ethnic groups have banded together.

Now one reason some people aren't atheists is the loss of community. It can be made up through secular means, such as Habitat for Humanity or various non-denominational charities. Is the sermon important to community? Charities don't have the equivalent of services, but should they?

That would be very intriguing.

Tennis Update

2009-03-02T01:09:00.003-05:00

This is one of those blog entries that you should skip if you don't play tennis. I'll try to make it readable if you don't, but I won't try that hard. Expect to be bored. Even if you do play, you may or may not want to read.

Today, I thought I made a breakthrough. Let me explain what's going on. I've been trying to redo my forehand for about 9 months. It's taken a very long time because it requires me to adjust my wrist and arm at an angle so that it resembles the way the pros hit. I have a camcorder with a tiny playback. It's so tiny that I can't quite tell if I'm hitting the ball the way I want.

I have to take that video, upload it to my computer, where I can then slow it down and see if I've hit it right. That feedback loop is awful. That means, rather than fix my shot then and there, I have to wait until I get home and then, usually, realize I've hit it wrong. That can be depressing.

OK, so let me tell you what I'm trying to do. To explain this, I'll use a touch of physics. Imagine you had a frying pan. The surface you cook on has a "normal". To understand the normal, imagine you have a pencil. You put it on edge so the eraser is on the pan bottom and the point of the pencil points straight to the ceiling.

The pencil is perpendicular to the entire surface of the pan.

Now replace the pan with a tennis racquet, and the idea is the same. When you say a racquet face is "pointed" to a certain direction, it is the normal of the racquet face that points in that direction. That is, if you had that pencil, it's the direction the pencil points.

When you hit a forehand, you are hitting on the right side of your body. This is the power shot for most players.

If you watch pros hit, the forehand can be broken down into three parts. There is the takeback, where the player moves the racquet so it points to the back fence (the player faces the net). Then, there is the swing to contact, where the racquet moves forward until the racquet hits the ball. Finally, there is the follow-through. That's the part after hitting the ball until you finish.

While there's quite a bit of variation among the pros in the takeback, the swing forward has a lot of common attributes.

In particular, most pros have their racquet face pointing right. Now, when I looked at myself hitting a ball, I found that my racquet face pointed down. That is, to the ground. And occasionally, to the left.

I thought it would be easy to fix. Just rotate the wrist. But it isn't that easy. Small changes in the wrist cause huge orientations of the racquet face.

After many months, I realized a few things. First, the closer you swing the racquet to your body, the more likely it is to be closed, especially if you bend your wrist. I found that I generally bend my wrist a lot to hit the ball. The combination of bending the wrist a lot and swinging close to the body means the racquet face is closed.

It points down.

And I've spent months trying to figure out why I do that.

Part of it is muscle memory. When I swing, I stop thinking about how my wrist is oriented. My body just wants to do what it wants to do. I've thought about using various devices, but I'm just not that clever to do that. I know I need to bend my wrist less and I also need to move my arm further to my right.

I thought I had figured out a way to swing so that I don't get too closed. But, alas, it's not what I do.

This is why video is important. It shows me what I think I'm doing and what I'm doing is different.

Right now, the most successful thing I do is to think about one spot when I hit. That is, the racquet when it is right by my side. I make sure that is correct, and that seems to help the most. If I don't think of this reference point, then I end up closing the racquet.

The sad thing is, I can shadow swing, and do it the way I want to time and again. And then when I do it for real? I mess up. It's infuriating. The body just refuses to listen.

But I still try it and at least, there are things closer to where I want to be, but it's easy to make mistakes and slip to old habits.

Too easy.

I have an idea that I may give a whirl. I have a wrist brace. I can use that an a butter knife to make my wrist a bit more rigid. I should see if that helps or not.

Links

2009-03-01T03:14:00.003-05:00

I prefer having many open tabs in a browser to remember sites rather than bookmarks or del.icio.us. Second choice is to stuff it into a blog entry just in case the number of open tabs gets too unwieldy or I get concerned I'll lose my tabs.

Oscar Night

2009-02-23T12:01:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, the Academy Awards, called the Oscars, were given to Hollywood's big productions. What the Academy thought was the best picture often didn't coincide with what the critics thought were best pictures.

While this is true today, it's not nearly as bad. In general, a film needs to have certainly minimal production values so it doesn't look truly indie, and it must not be too out-there strange, i.e., defying the usual conventions people expect out of films. And it needs to be in English. Given that criteria, the films picked are generally critically well received.

Despite the glamor and glitz of Oscar night, many people choose to skip it. It's shown on a Sunday night, the ceremony runs 3 hours, and it's as much tribute and performance as it is giving out awards. The ceremony would be done in half the time if awards were the only thing presented.

Hollywood feels the need to glitz things up when presenting the awards.

Due to slipping ratings, they tried something different this year. Instead of getting a comedian to host the Oscars (previous years include Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, John Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres), they had Australian Hugh Jackman, noted actor, but also big Broadway star, sing many of the numbers.

They also hired comedians to help present, and spice up the normally boring segments where awards are given out to the various winners.

This year's Oscars were mostly not about quality but about charity, for lack of a better word. Slumdog Millionaire, a good but not great film, reveals the Bollywood world to us, and in particular, focuses on the slums of India, a topic that has only been discussed in small documentaries (Born into Brothels) or smaller indie fare (Salaam Bombay). Made on a shoestring budget, this film had built up steam in December until it became the prohibitive favorite to win it all.

Another difference was to put all the nominees up in the front row rather than have them distributed in various spots so any time the camera panned down, you could see everyone.

They also chose to use previous winners of awards as presenters. They had five actors announcing the five best actor nominations, and the same for the five actresses. Steven Spielberg presented best picture.

Although the show ended at midnight, which is not much different from other years, it did feel like it moved along at a better clip.

The upset of the evening was Sean Penn for his role as Harvey Milk. Mickey Rourke was considered the prohibitive favorite to win this mostly because of how his real life mirrors the role he plays. This was due, in part, to the elections where Proposition 8 (which banned same sex marriages in California) was passed. This choice reflected a desire by the Academy to show its support for this issue.

This isn't to say Penn did a bad job, but that most people felt Rourke did a tremendous job. Even Penn was a bit surprised at his selection and gave due credit to Rourke (who has won a bunch of other awards for the role so he's not lacking in that department).

Jared Jared Jared!

2009-02-21T11:13:00.003-05:00

It's like Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, but it's Jared, Jared, Jared (Richardson) that is.

So I was complaining about how white RubyRx is, but I did observe someone apparently Indian American (female) and there was a DZone rep that was Asian American.

Let me flip this and say that, otherwise, the conference is nice and cozy. This is one of the smaller conferences with two simultaneous talks rather than four simultaneous talks. The number of attendees is maybe under 100. The talks have been, for the most part, pretty good, as can be expected from a NFJS production (many speakers who speak here speak on the No Fluff Just Stuff circuit).

I was making an analogy to someone in the hallway. I like tennis, perhaps more than I like coding (I'm almost sure of it). If you're trying to sell a tennis enthusiast a product, it can't be introductory material. Novices in tennis typically learn from a friend who teaches them or perhaps take a lesson. However, tennis is suitably expensive that most people don't take that many lessons.

However, it's hard for a complete beginner to be really enthusiastic. Usually, you need to be about 3.0 on the NTRP ranking which means you're better than most of the weekend hackers that play once in a while, but you're not fantastic. You still have plenty of issues. These folks are looking to get better, and so you pitch to them.

Conferences are roughly aimed somewhere at a 3.5 or so in the tennis world (the scale goes to 7.0 and a 5.0 can play college tennis at a reasonably high level). The average person has had to pay something to attend the conference (or if their company has paid for it, all the better). I'm the rare interloper who doesn't code Ruby or Rails regularly (or even irregularly). I go because I think I should go, but that's like saying I'm dieting but cheating by eating meals I don't count.

You wouldn't expect complete beginners to show up to this conference. It's too expensive for that. They should get a book instead and get started in that fashion.

The good news is it isn't an academic conference where people of dubious presentation skills are presenting stuff they have spent hundreds of hours thinking very hard about and present it as if you had spent that many hours on it too because they don't have any idea how to simplify what they are thinking.

Ruby conferences are generally pretty high quality. Even when they aren't talking about technical subjects (such as freelancing of fear of programming), the quality is still very good.

And of course, Jared is a nice guy!

(So when can I expect my payment, Jared?)

Oh I have to thank Jared for his book that I won in a raffle. I didn't even know he authored the book, so it was destiny!

The Three Foot Experience

2009-02-21T09:38:00.002-05:00

Those in the digital living room arena, folks who make HDTVs and products that go onto them, talk about the 3 foot experience vs. the 10 foot experience. The 10 foot experience (shouldn't it be feet?) is the approximate distance from a person sitting on a sofa to their television.

Of course, with larger televisions, you can sit further back, but most people prefer the larger screens to better simulate the movie watching experience.

The 10 foot experience is contrasted with the 3 foot experience, which is really more like the 2 foot experience. This is the distance between the person and, traditionally, their desktop computer, though nowadays, their laptop.

Although people draw this distinction, there's one big advantage to the 3 foot experience. Zooming. And I don't mean a magnify that is implemented by software as some browsers do. I mean, leaning in to the screen.

I raise this point not because of TV or because of a computer but because I'm sitting in a RubyRx presentation. The presentation isn't the issue. It's how it the presentation is conducted. It's more like a movie experience.

Whenever you make a presentation, you make it so people can read it. Those in the back should be able to read it. Even if you sit in the front, it should be viewable. A computer screen can use very tiny letters because people can "zoom" in by just leaning in some more. At the very least, they might be able to use their browser to zoom in on their own to read things more clearly.

Edward Tufte complained about this. He's an expert in presentation software. He says traditional presentation can be too content-rich, but due to the nature of the projected "slide", the user can't zoom in closer. The presenter is limited to presenting what everyone can see, and therefore dictates what the viewer can see. They are in control, and the viewer can't experiment on their own.

Indeed, he suggests a few more low-tech way to present a talk. Give handouts. Of course, he believes that handouts should take advantage of the two dimensional structure of paper and its inherently high resolution. You should, he suggests, take a great deal of time to make a nice presentation rather than the rushed presentations that makes everyone's presentations look like everyone else's.

However, I don't see that changing much until either the software for presentation is changed or until the problem has just been rethought. For example, suppose a presenter could present something onto a sandboxed screen on your laptop. If they would let you move around during the presentation, then you could interact with the presentation on your own, independent of the presentation.

One reason this is unlikely to happen, other than the software needed for this, is the time it takes to prepare a presentation. Once upon a time, you had a chalkboard, and perhaps some written notes on a piece of paper. You couldn't do anything fancy with a chalkboard. Can't use too much text, because it's a pain to write. Can't draw elaborate diagrams. There are so many limitations that it forces the presenter to do very simple things.

Indeed, if the presenter knows something about the subject matter (or not) and doesn't need to prepare, they can present right away with no preparation. While this is a bad idea, there are many presenters that are more than content presenting with no preparation (i.e., they are lazy or great, but usually not both).

Presenting is a passive experience. The problem with making it more active, that is, allowing viewers to participate, is the viewers may not want to participate, and they may not be all equally able to participate. They might not understand the task you've set forth. They may find it trivial. They may lack the right software. And even if everyone can participate, it slows everyone down. You have to wait until they get done.

In a standard presentation, you talk about it, and if people don't get it, they can figure it out later on (or not). And with a laptop, you can do something completely different (like me, I'm blogging).

Presentation software has gotten trivially better, but apparently, people haven't really given it as much thought as they should. For example, developers of TextMate (and most editors) have yet to create a presentation mode with the text font suitable for viewing.

Anyway, back to the presentation.

RubyRx Impressions

2009-02-19T22:45:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I wonder why I attend these Ruby conferences. I don't really program Ruby. I don't really do Rails. I think I do them to convince myself to do them, but honestly, I don't fit the profile of the typical Ruby programmer.

Which leads me to the profile of the typical Ruby programmer. Now RubyRx might not be the big Ruby conference, so its demographics may be somewhat skewed. However, I've been to RailsConf and RubyConf and it's similar to what I've observed there.

Ruby developers, in particular, those that attend conferences, are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. I counted maybe 3-4 women out of 50 or so people in attendance. Superficially, they all seemed white. I saw no other Asians including Indians. There were no African Americans either.

For the sake of Ruby and its future survival, it feels like this should be a worrisome point. There's a sense of "we're geeks, we like to code, we like to code with other geeks, and let's not worry about anyone else".

How many Rubyists even care about trying to get Ruby used in colleges and in high schools? They should because otherwise it's going to have a niche status. When the AP exam seriously considers switching to Ruby, that's when Ruby will have real success. However, most Ruby developers seem pretty content in their Ruby universe. They don't care if no one else gets it. That's their loss.

I wonder if there's a good explanation of why the demographics are what they are. I know I'm already an outlier. I'm like a guy who attends a meeting with poets but doesn't write poetry, so I don't help the demographics at all except in a weird sort of way (conferences don't require you to show your Ruby merit badge so you can show up, which I think is a good thing).

Links

2009-02-17T10:05:00.000-05:00

Funny picture

Links

2009-02-09T15:26:00.001-05:00

Food links

BAFTA Rocks

2009-02-09T14:57:00.002-05:00

Sometime recently, right around the election, I imagine, I discovered I had BBCA which is BBC America. It's the BBC repackaged for the US.

Last evening, I watched about a 3 hour telecast of the BAFTAs which are the British equivalent of the Oscars.

Several things to note. Without an intrusive band, the winners of the prize somehow managed to keep their speeches mercifully short. A few thanked a bunch of people, but many chose not to do so. What causes Oscar winners to prattle off name after name? Is it in their contract? No one remembers the names except the people who are named, so why must we, the audience, be subject to this?

The reason the Oscars run so long is because they build up all these other specials in between. Long musical numbers. Long tributes. If they simply handed out the awards, they'd probably get done sooner.

A fair number of Americans show up for the awards. Ron Howard was shown many times. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and best actor winner, Mickey Rourke.

Admittedly, the awards ceremony is what it is. Is it that exciting to see a bunch of people get awards?

Slumdog Millionaire won best director and best picture, and although the main actors were nominated as well (why?), neither won.

US gets its chance soonish, but the affair will be drawn out much longer. Sigh indeed.

Facebook Killer?

2009-02-09T12:48:00.002-05:00

Of course, I mean killer more in the sense of an app-killer (and not even a killer app, though it would take a killer app to be an app-killer).

Once upon a time there was Livejournal. This allowed individuals who wanted to blog to blog. Blogger (which I'm using now) is quite similar.

This worked for a little while until people realized they had nothing to say in their blog and updated it so infrequently that no one bothered to check in. Good idea for a while but requires insane amounts of dedication to keep it going.

Then came MySpace. It was gaudy, but it had a bunch of things that made it appealing, none the least of which was the fact bands, big and small, often had a MySpace page and thus having a MySpace page was cool.

It was easy to install an audio player and have visitors wince as you impale them with your musical tastes. Even were your visitors deaf, you could pummel their retinas with shockingly bad backgrounds that made text well nigh impossible to read.

MySpace was more like a friendly poster of things about you. The key to its popularity, other than the aforementioned background and music was your list of "friends" collected like so many baseball cards, and the inane comments they would leave on your comment board. Appealed to high school kids until they learned better taste.

Big point. Blogging was completely optional which is good since most people have very little to blog about.

Finally, Facebook. Originally aimed at Harvard kiddies then spread to other Ivy Leagues, then universities, then high schools, then just everyone. Facebook solves the problem that these other two sites had. You had to visit your friends page. If they weren't updating it, you weren't visiting it.

Facebook neatly inverts the problem. You get a feed which Facebook algorithms gloms together from all your friends, and you get the information that's most up-to-date. Information being used loosely, of course.

Thus, the friend that never posts anything except once a year, still gets their info sent your direction so you can see it. More active friends have their content sent more frequently.

Two other things that made Facebook succeed. First, status. This is microblogging a la Twitter. You get feeds sent to your main page when the status updates. Second was tagging of photos. That way, you get to see your friends in photos.

Due to recent security concerns, you don't get to see every photo your friend appears in. In particular, if your friend's friend (who isn't your friend) posts a picture of your friend (call him Al), you don't get to see that picture of Al. Facebook used to let you see these photos by default, but I guess a few people got concerned their parents or some such would be able to see embarrassing photos.

The other aspect is the myriad of addictive games, including the now defunct, Scrabulous which allows the Facebook fan who is tired of reading status and looking at pictures, many hours of uninterrupted interruption.

And Facebook's UI prevents gaudy backgrounds so you don't have to deal with your friends' awful tastes.

But with all that, is there room for other Facebook-like competitors to succeed? What could possibly be missing that could allow someone to jump in and create something so compelling that people would leave Facebook? One wonders.

Dental Plan

2009-02-08T22:45:00.002-05:00

David after Dentist is one of those viral videos that you wonder about. This video had 6 million hits in less than a week. Indeed, the SNL video, Jizz in my Pants had fewer hits in the same amount of time, and they had the virtue of HD, advertising on SNL, and high production values.

How did this video, about a kid that was a bit drugged up from the dentist, being spaced out, and the friendly dad who tells the kid not to touch his stitches and wonders if the drugs are making him "feel good" get so popular?

Does it go to show that emailing friends clever videos is still the number 1 way that material is sent virally? I rarely get friends who mail me jokes or mail me links or stories. I feel I'm quite the exception. This is exactly the kind of email most people like to send.

We're likely to see such viral videos again and again. And wonder what is it about these videos that touch so many people?

5 Squared

2009-02-08T22:32:00.003-05:00

Perhaps as viral as anything that has hit Facebook, other than, of course, Facebook itself is the recently phenomenon, 25 Random Things About Me.

The idea is simple enough. Write down 25 facts about yourself. I suppose there's more to it than that. You're supposed to "tag" other people, presumably so they can also fill out their own list.

To put this into a little context, I want to rewind back to more than ten years ago when webcams were cheap enough and high-speed Internet which wasn't so high speed then was affordable enough that people, in particular, teens began their first foray into removing anonymity from their lives. There was something compelling to a few people where they would take photos of themselves of their rooms once a minute or more often.

Of course, the bandwidth was not what it is today where live streaming video and audio are now possible.

In those days, you would get one view of someone's life and yet that view was rather restricted. For, you see, a person isn't merely the physical shell you see outside. Even were you to interact with them, as people do at work, you wouldn't see them as they see themselves. Although self-perception can be flawed, it opens up what's important to someone.

Roughly the same time webcams were becoming popular, the earliest forms of blogging, mainly LiveJournal, but even homespun versions, opened a window, much like reading a secret diary, into the lives of individuals.

25 random facts is as much a reflection of the current desire by the youth and the not-so-young to tell the world, albeit in a small self-censored way, a little about yourself. That world is limited to your so-called Facebook friends, many of which are mere acquaintances if even that. Even so, they're usually not total strangers save for a few stragglers where you pressed "yes" when they asked if they could, pretty please, be your friend.

I don't know if 25 random facts is particularly compelling to me. I don't know I could dig up 25 interesting things to say about myself. Some of those things are less facts than things desired for. I want to be a better husband, better friend, better person. That kind of thing.

It's very much "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" but obviously a bit less titillating. The hope is to learn a little something about someone that you've only interacted in a certain way, or perhaps to learn something about them even though you thought you knew them quite well. Some people, I'm sure, would not enjoy this exercise at all.

The first are those that value privacy who don't believe their personal information is all that interesting to anyone else and certainly shouldn't be out there for just anyone to read.

The second are those who, even if they are perhaps tempted to write something about themselves, feel strongly that they aren't the types to jump on bandwagons, to follow the rest like mindless sheep. But then, they probably don't have Facebook accounts as part of their desire to remain independent.

Which one are you?

Phelps Drama

2009-02-04T17:35:00.003-05:00

Even those who don't follow much in the way of sports have heard of Michael Phelps. Can you name another American swimmer that's still active? When the Olympics ran, I could rattle off a few names, but since I haven't thought about them in 5 months, I can't recall any. Except Michael Phelps.

Recently a photo surfaced where Phelps was shown inhaling from a bong, a device, as I understand it, meant to make the inhalation of marijuana more pleasurable. I wouldn't know because I don't think I've ever witnessed its actual use.

Phelps has been in a bit of trouble before. In particular, he had a DUI incident and he apologized for that.

Now there's an issue of whether he should be in trouble for this incident or not. Some say it's youthful indiscrimination. Had he been a politician, it would have been ignored as a bit of youthful folly. Obama admits to it, as does Clinton.

Sports is a pretty conservative institution. They love to celebrate the military, especially in the US. They're supposed to uphold family values including avoiding illegal drugs.

Yet what makes marijuana illegal? Because the government says it is. There's evidence that shows it's illegal because African Americans used it, and the police or the politicians wanted legal ways to put African Americans into jail.

So some reporters are saying it is wrong and chastising Phelps because he is a role model. To the extent that the drug is illegal and his actions may encourage some people to use it, they have some justification to criticize Phelps. However, they could have also used it as a platform to ask, why is marijuana illegal? What is wrong with making it legal?

Why are cigarettes legal? Why is alcohol legal? Are they not harmful? We can't even make it illegal because people are rather addicted to both. Since we already have products out there that are legal yet harmful, it stands to reason that marijuana, considered less harmful than cigarettes and possibly a value to the snack industry should be legal.

Now if Phelps's sponsors want to remove his endorsements because they think he's no longer a role model (unlikely, it appears), then that's fine. Phelps may have to pay for his behavior with reduced income. But consider the numbers of politicians that have failed to pay taxes. Would Phelps be under more scrutiny if he hadn't paid his taxes?

It's time the government thinks about its stance on this issue, and while I doubt this incident will prove the tipping point to the repeal of this law, it would be nice if it were.

Yo Mama

2009-01-31T21:36:00.002-05:00

Now that I've heard three people invoke "Yo Mama" jokes, I have to say that this is something that appeals to white folks. American males don't have the Latino/Spanish/Italian machismo outlook where slurs on one's mother might lead to fights. They expect sexually suggestive comments about one's mother to be provocative, but not, well, violent or argumentative. These comments, by the way, are generally said by males, but for some reason, women can say it to, adding to its peculiar appeal.

The question is, what is the appeal? It's almost as if the idea of one's mother as a kind of milf is so bizarrely offensive that no one expect it to be true. For example, it's never someone's sister, is it? Because that borders on realistic. If someone comments about how they'd like to sleep with your sister, well, that seems to strike too close to home (especially if she's, say, inappropriately young).

There's something about being inappropriately old that makes it OK to make comments on "yo mama".

So ask yourself, what is it that makes you want to say it?

Clash of the Titans

2009-01-30T11:59:00.002-05:00

The Australian Open is a funny event. Held in January where folks in the US and Europe are in the middle of winter, the Australian Open is held in Melbourne in the blazing sun. More than any of the other Grand Slam events of tennis (the French, Wimbledon, the US Open), the Australian Open (AO, for short) has surprise finalists.

Last year, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga came out of nowhere to reach the final beating Rafael Nadal en route, then the world number 2. The year before, Fernando Gonzalez of Chile made the finals. Players like Rainer Schuettler, Arnaud Clement, Thomas Johannson (who won), Marcos Baghdatis have reached the finals in recent years. If these names don't exactly roll of your tongue, no worries, mate, it's typical of the AO.

Men's tennis is usually a game of the young. The best players often blossom by 18 or 19 if not younger. Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17. Mats Wilander won the French at 17 too. Pete Sampras won the US Open at 19. Rarely does a player who has been toiling on the tour blossom at 25. The exceptions are maybe someone like James Blake who, at 28, plays as well as he ever has. He's had a slow rise to top 10 and it's more a testament to his physical prowess than anything else.

So how did Fernando Verdasco suddenly play so well at 25? How did he push world number 1 Rafael Nadal, a guy who he had never beaten to 5 scintillating sets?

Although Nadal and Federer are known to be some of the best hitters in the game, it's rarely pointed out how mentally tough they are. Nadal, in particular, rarely has bad patches where he gets impatient and just lashes out. He's a disciplined player. What helps is just how tenacious he is. He continues to fight, to hit great shots, to run down balls that you don't think he will. As Verdasco said in the interview afterwards, Nadal makes you win the point several times.

Both players, however, are mentally tough and it explains why they are numbers 1 and 2 in the world. They rarely have bad lapses, which means they are always competitive.

There are players that hit a ton. Players like Tomas Berdych, who pushed Federer to 5 sets, or Ernests Gulbis, or even Fernando Verdasco. These players often lack in the mental toughness department. They get frustrated or nervous when they get down. They can't sustain a level of excellence it takes to win at the very top.

In principle, that's good for players like Verdasco. Verdasco suffered from several things that prevented him from moving to the top. First, his serve wasn't so good, especially his second serve. Part of that was nerves. He played an awful Davis Cup match that he won. Good that he won. Awful in that he was so nervous, he made lots of bad shots. He was only saved by his opponent playing just as bad.

Second was fitness. Verdasco's generally pretty fit, but to play at the best levels in tennis, you must be able to run all day. It means that today's players are less likely to have the longevity of players from the past where running shots down was not as important to the game as it is today. Almost every top player works very hard on speed and agility drills and fitness to run hours, especially in a tournament as hot as the Australian Open.

Most people felt, for a variety of reasons, that Nadal would win over Verdasco. The reasons were simple. Nadal had never lost to Verdasco. Nadal had had easy wins up to this point. Some felt Verdasco was just a weaker version of Nadal and Nadal simply did everything better.

I, however, did not think that. First, Verdasco's serve looked good against Murray and Tsonga, his two previous opponents prior to playing Nadal. The serve is key. With it, you win cheap points. Nadal returns well, but you can never underestimate getting a few free points off serve.

Second, Verdasco hits pretty hard. He ran both Murray and Tsonga ragged with his power hitting. Indeed, once he played Nadal, he hit nearly 100 winners in the match. That power works, even against Nadal. I felt his pace would help out.

Third, he beat Tsonga. It's one thing to upset a top player like Andy Murray. The great Roger Federer beat Pete Sampras in an early round at Wimbledon only to lose to Tim Henman in the next round. Time and again, a top player is upset by a lower ranked player and that lower ranked player bows out meekly to his next opponent.

This didn't happen to Verdasco. If anything, he looked more impressive against Tsonga, who was laboring in the heat and humidity to keep up with Verdasco.

It turned out to be more than correct. Verdasco opened up with a first set win in a tiebreak where he took an early lead. Basically, neither player had a whiff of a break point.

In the second set, Nadal had one break to win 6-4, and people felt, well, Nadal's going to roll. Indeed, Nadal broke Verdasco. But Verdasco broke back at love. Then Nadal broke again. And here's the surprise. Verdasco broke back again. They stayed even til the tiebreak where Verdasco made a few errors and Nadal took the tiebreak.

With a two sets to one lead, conventional wisdom says the better player would then take over and win the fourth set, often easily. The weaker player generally concedes he's given the best he's got, so that is that. The better player gains confidence, begins to hit more freely.

Except things didn't go as planned. The fourth set, which I saw none of, went to a tiebreak and Verdasco took that set rather unexpectedly.

In the fifth set, Nadal served first. Normally, this is an advantage. It means, once you get close to the end of the set, that a break by the player serving first automatically wins the set. A break by the trailing player means the leading player still has a chance to break back and tie.

Verdasco struggled to hold serve to 4-all. After ekeing out that win, he reached 0-30 on Nadal's serve and even got a look at a second serve which he promptly dumped into the net. 3 points later and Nadal had held serve and it was 5-4.

At this point, Verdasco serves and gets to 0-40 after some errors and a double fault. He then plays two aggressive points at net to get to 30-40. He misses the first serve, then, the second serve, well, it goes short. People said he choked. He served four double faults the entire match, two in the final game, and one at match point.

Will Verdasco take this victory as a stepping stone to a better future? Only time will tell. His game and mental resolve seem much better and if he can continue to play like this, he can be a solid top ten player.

Not bad for a guy of 25.

Links

2009-01-29T18:21:00.000-05:00

Just one today

20 Must Have Web Apps for Designers and Developers

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-25T11:20:00.003-05:00

Slumdog Millionaire is a film of the "World is Flat" era. Although Bollywood films have been around for years, they were beginning to register in the brains of Americans perhaps in the mid 90s. I had heard of such films from 1991 or 1992, but it probably took Americans until 1995 or so to get some idea of Bollywood films. Roger Ebert wrote about Bollywood when he went to visit India some number of years.

With a large number of Indians in the US, the advent of freely available video on YouTube and the like, Bollywood films are at least somewhat accessible in the US. I remember a few years ago, some company, I think DirecTV made a commercial with a guy sitting and dancing in his seat to a Bollywood film when the actor in the film stops acting and says "This is awful! You should be watching an action picture or science fiction!" and goes on to suggest DirectTV before continuing on with the dance. I thought that was particularly obscure, though very funny, tapping into a phenomenon few Americans were aware of.

India's impact in the popular imagination has come courtesy of the Internet age, which has meant a transformation of the world in so many ways. For example, the increasing access of the Internet to well-educated Indians has opened up the world to India, and this means more than entertainment. It also means access to software.

The open source revolution would not have been half as successful without the Web, which allowed you to get to the software. The computer revolution not only transformed the US, but it meant other countries could get involved, and thus was born, merely a few years after the browser, a huge Indian IT industry and the well-known call centers.

Slumdog Millionaire taps into all of modern India, though it focuses on a side of India that few people, including Indians, have seen depicted in Indian films. Most developing nations seem to go through a phase where film becomes extremely popular. At one point, Taiwanese were the most avid filmgoers. Eventually, film is replaced by television and the quality of television goes up, while films become less escapist fare and deal with topics that are more artistic and less wildly popular.

The common Bollywood film is escapism (Bollywood, so called, because its center is in Bombay, thus Bombay Hollywood, or Bollywood, for short). Due to the strong traditions of song and dance in India, infused through centuries of tradition, most films have their Austin Powers like moment where the lead actor and actress dance and "sing". I say "sing" because singing has been a tradition, and you don't let actors and actresses (a la Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter) do their own singing. Oh, no, that won't do.

Although the trend in American musicals, however rare they are now, is to let the actors do their own singing, when musicals were popular, it was common to dub other singers. Julie Andrews apparently sang for Audrie Hepburn in one film. In this case, though, it was one singing actress singing for a non-singing actress. In Bollywood films, singers whose faces never see the light of day, but whose name are well-known, e.g. Asha Bhosle, voice over famous actors who are asked to act and dance, but not sing their own songs (just as most actors would not play their own musical instruments).

There have been films set in India before, but usually, in stereotypical views of India, or from a mostly Western viewpoint, or from the long past.

Slumdog Millionaire explores the seedy underbelly of huge cities, termed "metros" in India, where large numbers of the extremely poor live in slums.

Interestingly enough, the film focuses on two Muslim brothers, Salim and Jamal. Jamal is the ostensible hero of the film, who is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. The film, as most people know, is told in flashback, as Jamal explains how an uneducated slumdog knows the answers to very difficult questions, and each answer reveals a dark period in his life.

You can appreciate the accuracy of some parts of the film if you know a bit of Hindi and have visited India. I was in Mumbai about two years ago, and there are kids who come to the taxis begging for money. I was told that if you have a baby, you would get even more money. The average well-to-do Indian is as unmoved by this experience as we are when we see beggars on the street. Americans are typically shocked, and want to give money to the poor Indians, which they are more than happy to take.

One of the scenes involves a child who sings well enough that his keepers decide to blind him purposely so he can fetch even more money. I will say I didn't see any blind child beggars, but I could see this happening.

Roger Ebert notes that these kids (Jamal and Salim) are scam artists and convince foreigners to take their shoes off so they can steal them. However, what he doesn't know is that various temples (like the Taj Mahal) require all visitors to go barefoot, with their shoes held at a central area and picked up at the end of the day. The idea, I believe, is more out of respect for the area much like Asians prefer you to remove your shoes before entering the main house.

You can hear terms like "chai walla" used in the film, which basically is a tea guy. Jamal works at a call center where he delivers tea to employees. When you have a country of a billion people, keeping them employed is a big issue, so small services like delivering tea to IT employees is one way to do this. It's considered a lowly job which is why the host of the game show makes fun of his background.

Mumbai is well known for dabbawallas. These guys pick up meals from the wives, lunch boxes called "tiffins" (apparently a British term, but like many British terms, only preserved in modern Indian English), deliver the meals to their husbands and return the boxes after lunch. The efficiency of delivering these meals for low cost to many employees is considered a marvel of logistical efficiency. These guys are also called "tiffin wallas" which means the "tiffin" or "lunch box" guy.

Knowing some swear words also helps. Sprinklings of "mother chod" or "chutia" (which is motherf*cker and c*nt) respectively add to the roughness of the film, something that again, would probably not be seen as much in Bollywood films which are generally family entertainment.

The film opens up with classic films by Amitabh Bachchan, who is India's most famous actor (at least, in Bollywood). His son, Abhishek, married Aishwarya Rai, called by 60 minutes as the most beautiful woman in the world. Unlike their Hollywood equivalents, movie star weddings are generally for life. There's no Elizabeth Taylor, seven marriage equivalent, in India where divorce is still practically unknown and where arranged marriages are still quite common.

Funny enough, Slumdog Millionaire does follow a convention of Bollywood films which is the main characters are in love. As much as arranged marriages are the norm in India, it doesn't make for good drama. Parental involvement with children is still huge, and one way it often manifests itself is through arranged marriages. Jamal pines for Latika, his childhood sweetheart.

I give credit to the casting director for finding little kids, especially the one that plays Salim, that resemble the adult version. I'd almost believe they cast the kid first and found a comparable teen to play the adult role.

Although a film set in India, there are Western touches, including Danny Boyle's very visual eye. He also portrays Westerners who are sympathetic to the slumdogs. This comes from an understanding of how the West perceives Indians (as tourists).

Boyle had music done by A.R. Rahman, a famous Bollywood compose, compose music for Slumdog.

The film ends in a Bollywood dance scene, though clear the actors are not dancers. This is done with the casualness of average people doing dance, which leads to a kind of realness, and is perhaps the cleverest way to keep an audience sitting through credits (for those that hate to do credits).

Ah, so the film itself. Well, I had basically known the outline of the plot. Although the visuals are stunning, the history interesting, I just couldn't get into the main story. It probably doesn't help that Dev Patel is only OK as an actor. Also, the idea of using Who Wants to Be a Millionaire as the conceit was, I dunno, a bit too cute.

Even that idea is a commentary on the international spread of ideas. That show, along with Big Brother and American Idol (which was Pop Idol in the UK), have spread throughout the world. Using this show is a sly way to comment on this phenomenon.

I'm currently listening to Jai Ho, the song used to accompany the dance sequence at the end. It's interesting how they decide to let the woman sing in a "lower" voice. Bollywood songs have women sing in falsetto to sound even younger. It's so commonly done that I'm sure the average Indian doesn't even think that the women are singing so high. Admittedly, all the men sound alike. You never hear a gruff voiced or extremely baritone man sing a song in these films. This is one fallout of lacking singer-songwriters. Singers sing, and songwriters write song, so it creates generic sounding singers and songs.

So the film was good and gives a view of India I has only barely seen, though perhaps more aware of than those who haven't visited India. However, I had a tough time getting fully engaged in the story of Jamal's longing for Latika, since she is something of a weird distant memory, a little bit like Anakin's longing for Amidala/Padme.

I'd give it about a B, I think. Worth watching to give insight into India, and I'm sure some folks will love the way it ends.

Birth of a Nation

2009-01-20T10:24:00.002-05:00

Barack Obama will be sworn in at about noon today as the 44th President of the United States of America.

It's a ceremony to be sure. Despite the economic times, much money is being spent to make sure this is a ceremony people will remember. People say it's the worst economic times since the Great Depression, but the depression has unemployment rates of 25% and another 25% were partly employed. The US is maybe 7-8% unemployed right now, which is high, but not like the Great Depression.

I was talking to an elderly Indian (from India) who felt that the significance of Obama being the first African American president was not that great since, in his mind, blacks and whites were pretty much equal now. Even if that were so, and it's hard to claim that for a variety of reasons, it's still significant that an African American is being elected given that none have been elected before.

The funny thing is this. Everyone knows he has a white mother. Everyone knows he was raised by his white grandparents. His father abandoned him. But many whites and even many African Americans look at Barack as African American. He simply has the facial features of someone African American, even if his values were shaped as much by growing up in white America as the next person.

Obama has, of course, embraced the African American culture. He moved to Chicago. He married someone with strong ties to Chicago in Michelle Obama. He joined an African American church before he left it. But it is as much an adopted culture as anything.

In the end, does it matter? Obama embodies this notion of unification of white America and black America, but he was elected by mostly ignoring the issue of race or to emphasize his white roots, given that he visually appears black.

And even if he is half-white, does it matter? As long as we perceive him to be African American, then he is.

One fascinating aspect of his Presidency is how he used Abraham Lincoln as inspiration. He started his campaign in Springfield. He took a train ride from Philadelphia to Washington much like Lincoln. Perhaps there's a bit of irony that it was Lincoln who was in far greater danger of being assassinated on his route to DC. We have reached a time where most people wouldn't even think of it, though I suppose it only takes a small number to carry out such a nasty act.

When FDR assumed the Presidency, he reassured Americans through radio, then a brand-new technology. In those days, citizens still respected the Presidency, and they were reassured by his words. These days, Americans are far more savvy, so far more cynical. They aren't swayed as much by words, and often feel a dissenting voice is their right. And this means conservatives! Bush would have been happy if he could have squelched dissent much like old time Soviet propagandists.

It's funny, but as well read as Obama is, surely he's read the Lincoln-Douglas debates with two candidates running for the Illinois senate (although Obama won, and Lincoln lost). In these debates, Lincoln was accused of being sympathetic with slaves and blacks which he vigorously denied. He felt that, in the forseeable future, blacks would not stand equal with whites.

Now that could have been political talk designed to get him elected. He could have changed his mind over the years as he became President and was President. But at least at one point in his career, he wasn't that noble person, that mythological figure. Obama knows, of course, that Americans view Lincoln as a myth and know very little about him.

Despite the accessibility of the Internet, the desire to read about Lincoln is far less than reading the latest installment of Harry Potter. We prefer to think of Lincoln as the man that freed the slaves, the President that presided over a Civil War, as Honest Abe, and finally as the President assassinated by a Southerner.

Would Lincoln have thought, some 145 years after his Presidency that the United States would have suffered a Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and elected a man born of an immigrant would be President? Perhaps he would have.

But we don't have to dream that. On the day after Martin Luther King's observed birthday, it's reality.

Idol Worship

2009-01-19T12:26:00.002-05:00

American Idol starts in two phase. The first phase is the judges go to a select number of cities and listen to a bunch of performers. They get to go to Hollywood.

The performers usually fall into three categories: good to very good, not quite there, and awful.

You would like to believe that everyone that falls into good to very good gets to go to Hollywood, but I don't think that's the case.

For example, if you tried out, and you were an opera singer, a professional one, for that matter, and sang opera, out you'd go. Sorry, this is pop singing, not opera. And to that extent, folk singing is usually out, country singing is tolerated. Basically, your best chance to get in, for lack of a better phrase, is to sing "black" which means a lot of vibrato and extending out notes for a while.

Black singing is, in fact, so popular, that it has defined singing, at least, diva style singing. Thus, Celine Dion or Justin Timberlake, two fairly white individuals, sing in this style.

You aren't going to get people singing like Sufjan Stevens to make it on Idol.

Furthermore, there are folks that simply don't look the part. Every contestant that looks, for lack of a better word, inbred, i.e., not sexy, and indeed, far from sexy, has a bad voice. Why is that? Isn't it possible that one of these folks who don't look the part has a great voice?

It's possible, but I bet they never show them on TV. They don't want to admit to that kind of bias. Here's someone that's not attractive that would get voted out because looks matter and yet they have a great voice. Why don't they show these folks? Because they'd look bad, that's why.

So American Idol prefers that we laugh at these individuals who look and sing horribly, and implicitly tells the rest of the world that you have to look good, otherwise your talents are meaningless.

And that's a sad commentary about American Idol.

But no one much seems to care.

Clothes Make the Man

2009-01-16T10:22:00.002-05:00

I was listening to NPR this morning and there's a buzz about what Michelle Obama, the new First Lady, will wear to the various inauguration balls (yes, plural). The fascination by the fashion industry and indeed by the average Jane means Obama must make her decisions wisely. She can't be too flashy, nor too expensive. She should exude class.

Men rarely run into this problem. The tuxedo has meant that most men can look pretty much alike and so therefore no one cares what Barack Obama will look like. It's interesting no one has pushed this concept so men can break out of the rather rigid mold.

But I don't want to talk about the clothing of the new President nor his wife. I want to talk about my own clothing.

Yesterday I donned a black long sleeve pullover of some sort with dark blue, let's call it black, pants. Black and more black. I was criticized by a co-worker for using a uniform color scheme throughout.

He recalled an incident when he was merely in the sixth grade and his fellow rugrats chided him for his lack of fashion couture. Ah, those 11 year old twits, thinking fashion when they should be worried about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or perhaps their multiplication tables. This made such an impression on his impressionable mind that he is now hyper-sensitive to this basic "rule" of clothing.

Most people have no problems with this, especially guys. They wear blue jeans and probably lack too many blue colored shirts. So it always contrasts well.

Indeed men's clothing are often so bland that the variations occur above the waist, where jeans will often suffice every day of the week.

And so it goes.

Working

2009-01-10T10:51:00.002-05:00

I just caught a Subway commercial where they sing some tune about five dollar meals. In it, they show three men dressed as construction workers singing it. They alternate with two women who sorta look business casual as they sing their song.

Normally an ad I wouldn't think that much about.

But I did think about it.

Why construction workers? It's an occupation that has comedic values but also an occupation that is thought of as masculine (construction guys always seem to have overweight fellows, which may contrast with the healthy eating Subway prefers). In short, comedic and masculine.

Why not doctors or lawyers or whatever? Doctors have stereotyped clothing, but maybe people don't feel enough kinship with doctors. Lawyers don't have anything particularly lawyerly. Judges do, and that could be amusing.

Women? They didn't pick a particular occupation for them. They seemed to be singing in a mall in a business casual dress, something you might expect a secretary to wear, but nothing that screams out a particular occupation.

Why's that? There are a handful of occupations that have distinctive women's outfit, such as nurses and nuns. Why did they decide not to pick an occupation for these women? And why were they a bit thinner?

All these things have to be going through the minds of the advertisers. Why have a men-only group and a women-only group? Once you have three men, then one of them has to be African American, but the other two should be white. These decisions aren't made on a whim. There are rules for all of this stuff.

All from a Subway commercial.

The Pendulum Theory

2009-01-02T16:40:00.001-05:00

I was at the tennis wall today trying to hit my backhand and finding, wow, couldn't seem to do it. A tennis wall, for those who are curious, is merely a wall that is very tall (one hopes) and has a line painted for the net (one hopes). It is used in place of hitting with another person or a ball machine. There aren't many good walls around, but I live near one. Hitting against the wall has many problems, but the one advantage it has is it's not a person. Therefore, you don't have to worry about irritating the person as you practice a shot yet again. You have time to sit, reflect, contemplate.

My purpose for being at the wall today was to work on my backhand. Although it may not be that obvious, there's more than one way to hold a tennis racquet. If you were to grab a racquet as it lies flat down, palm first, you would be holding it in a semi-Western grip (most likely). If the racquet were sideways so it was sitting on the edge and you put your palm on top of the racquet, then that would be an Eastern backhand grip.

I had been using a grip called the Continental grip, not so much because I wanted to use that grip on my backhand but because I was already using it for sliced backhands (this is where you hit a ball with underspin) and volleys (balls hit without bouncing, very close to the net).

I looked at a video Saturday night and either misunderstood it (very possible) or disagreed with the way they suggested I hold the racquet which might be described as a Western backhand grip. This grip is so rarely used for the backhand (sometimes it's called an extreme Eastern grip) that the name Western backhand is not that enlightening.

The Western backhand grip is actually a Eastern forehand grip flipped over to be used as a backhand grip. I realized I was holding it roughly in this style, and it felt awkward.

Once I figured out how to hold an Eastern backhand grip, I began fiddling with how my thumb should be placed. A racquet grip is usually just small enough that the thumb and index finger jockey for the same space. There are several ways to deal with it, and eventually I figured out how it is (roughly) done by players like Federer and Gasquet.

Anyway, the point is, I had changed my backhand grip and I wanted to try it out on court. The problem was that it felt awkward. Worse still, I was gripping it way too tight. Tennis is about staying relaxed, so I knew I had to loosen the grip some more. But I couldn't swing the racquet properly in a mini-tennis drill against the wall. It just felt wrong and I had no consistency.

Mini-tennis is when you hit tennis between the service line. The court has several lines. The two far lines parallel to the net are called the baselines. Halfway between the net and the baseline is the service line. If you play between the service lines, that's mini tennis.

Mini-tennis is meant to teach you to hit very softly while still practicing good technique. The idea is if you can hit the ball this softly with good technique then you should be able to hit faster balls with good technique.

I knew one problem was that I wasn't taking my racquet back enough. So I recalled some lesson that suggested that, and it helped a little. Now today was a sunny day, and on sunny days, I can see my shadow on the ground, which is a poor man's mirror. The shadow lets me see what I am doing in enough detail that it provides useful feedback.

So I began swinging the racquet a bit like a pendumlum. Back, forth, flipping my wrist at the nadir of the pendulum swing, so that when the racquet was reached the apex on my left side, the back of the racquet (where I'd hit my backhand) was facing forward (away from me), and when the reached the apex on my right side, the other face of the racquet (where I would hit a forehand with) was facing forward (away from me).

I figured this rhythm of going back and forth in this manner would help my mini-tennis drill. I would swing forward to the wall as part of the pendulum, then as the ball went to the wall, I would start to swing the racquet back the other direction. That's the pendulum in the other direction.

I had just watched a presentation at TED, an organization that invites smart, engaging speakers to talk about interesting topics to other smart, engaged audience members. In this talk, Steven Strogatz talks about how, despite the increase in entropy (i.e., disorder), there is also a strong tendency towards order or synchronization.

To demonstrate this idea, he took two tiny metronomes, two bottles, a pamphlet, and placed the two metronomes on top. Although they were out of sync to begin with, the motion of the metronomes were synchronized by the surface. Here's an example with five metronomes getting synced up.

Anyway, that thought was in the back of my mind. The body wants to synchronize against something, and this pendulum idea would create that synchronization.

To be fair, I do have some idea how to hit a backhand. I don't know if this idea would work out that well for someone completely new to tennis who hasn't built up a lot of the muscle memory of hitting a backhand.

I decided to apply this to the forehand. However, with my forehand, I wanted to work my body more into the shot.

Too often, beginners in tennis think of tennis as a shot that is hit by the arm. They don't know how to get the body involved more. The reason you want the body to be involved more is momentum, and that of a physics variety. Momentum is mass times velocity. When you swing the arm, you may have great velocity, but you don't have great mass since the arm isn't very massive.

Now I've tried to figure out ways to get the body more into the shot, and it's been partly successful, though awkward too. My shots look very stiff, and tennis is, as I've mentioned before, about staying relaxed.

One way to stay relaxed is to do twists. To get an idea of this, put your feet about shoulder width apart. Put your hands on your hips. Rotate your shoulders and hips so that you face to the left. To do this comfortably, when you face left, you should lift your right heel up so that only the point of the right toe is touching the ground. The right foot should have rotate some so that the shoelaces point left.

Then, twist so you shoulders and hips cause you to face to your right. Your right foot goes from being on tip to being flat. Your left foot comes up on tip. Just go back and forth several times. That provides the pendumlum action.

Now add the racquet to this. As you rotate right (for a right hander) get the racquet to point straight back. As you rotate left, hit a windshield wiper motion. The whole body is involved in this motion. The shoulders, the hips, the feet, and the racquet. By practicing this pendulum motion, you are incorporating your body into the shot and it's done at a nice relaxed, repeatable fashion.

And that's my pendulum theory of tennis.

Backhand Thoughts

2008-12-24T09:25:00.002-05:00

What's the difference between a blog and a webcam? Both are products of an Internet age, an age where privacy has given way to openness and sharing. Information, such as it is, is disseminated to those who care enough to pay attention.

The difference is a blog is a diary (at best). It is (or should be) an introspective perspective. It is a person talking about themselves, so you gain insight into how they think, how they feel, what's most important to them right at that moment. It is, by its nature, biased to the person presenting the information. Certain facts may be left out either by choice or lack of omniscient knowledge.

The webcam, were it situated in the same person's room, is a piece of technology that allows a viewer to see someone's life. Without sound, the day to day movements are broadcast and chronicled by those who choose to observe. Intention is lost. Thought process is lost. What seems like a person lying in repose on his bed may be someone wallowing in the depths of depression or deep in philosophic thought. The webcam reveals all and yet reveals nothing.

So it can be said of learning tennis. The tools that present itself is the equivalent of the webcam. It is the video recording of tennis professionals. It offers insight into how they do what they do. You can observe, and inspect, and scrutinize. But is it enough? Do you see enough? You can't feel what the players feel. How much information are you getting?

Lately, I've been thinking about the backhand again, and in particular, the one-handed backhand. This stroke seems sufficiently different from the two hander that the thought process doesn't seem the same.

It's very easy to perceive the one-hander has a motion that is initiated by the arm. The arm is the centerpiece in the action. For the casual observer, this feels very true. The arm is the most active part of the stroke.

And yet this hides the fact that it's better to think of the stroke from the shoulders and from the chest. Let it initiate the action. Let it be the source of the movement. By focusing on that part of your body, you involve the torso, so often called, the core, into the shot and let the arm do less work and therefore get less tired. The core, once involved, can assist the shot by providing mass.

Tennis is a game of momentum, but not the kind sportscasters talk about. It's not which team is playing well at the moment and capitalizing on play after play. It is momentum of the physics variety. Mass times velocity. The more you can incorporate the core, a difficult task because the human body isn't rigid, and even if it were rigid, it wouldn't help because the other component, velocity would be lost, the more mass comes to bear.

It is a delicate dance your body must go through, at once optimizing speed by letting your body be limber enough not to slow you down, and yet also working as a whole, so that mass is your friend.

If you understand how to initiate the action with the core, then you can decrease the amount of arm you need. This is a mistake many players make because they choose to re-invent the wheel. But what choice do they have? The information is not readily available. When you learn tennis, you often start from scratch, and despite the ubiquity of the Web and access to information, there's no easy way to find a definitive answer.

It's taken me a while to fully appreciate this, and only because I read it in a forum where someone whose life has mostly been devoted to teaching tennis made the point clear. The torso initiates the one-handed backhand and for much of the hitting, the arm is just along for the ride. It does, of course, play an increasingly important role the closer you get to actually hitting the ball, but again, that interplay between torso and arm, when does one end, and the other begin?

I use words when a visual would be helpful, something that, in effect combines the blog and the webcam. The two together offering not only insight, but a visual illustration.

Given the time challenges of making a video, I will now use words, as paltry a substitute as this may be, like Velveeta for Brie, a travesty, but the best we can do under the circumstances.

Stand in the ready position, and form a U with your upper arm making one side of the U, the forearm the bottom part of the U, and the racquet pointing up, the other side of the U. Turn your body to the left, enough so that eventually your back begins to point to the net.

Using your left arm, lift the racquet so your forearm eventually gets to shoulder height. Use your left hand to lower the racquet behind you, until the racquet head points to the right side of the court (were you facing the fence, it would be to your left). The racquet is nearly completely behind you from the perspective of your opponent.

Rotate your body so the racquet travels 180 degrees around and strike the ball, then lift your arm up as if you are holding a torch for the Olympics way up high.

There are other factors to consider. How high is the ball? If it's low, you bend your knee more and stay down more. If it's high, you lift up your leg and get on your tiptoes. Different situations demand different setup.

This is what makes tennis challenging. There are many situations to take care of under the name "backhand". This is why hitting thousands of balls is needed, so the body learns how to cope with such variety. But behind all of that is the basis for the shot, the skeletal framework by which all variation sprouts from. And this is what you often need in sage advice so you make the move that the pros do, not the one that is easy to see from the eye, but the one that is felt from within.

Musings on Tennis

2008-12-20T23:17:00.002-05:00

I look at India and find their fanatical devotion to cricket a contrast to the devotion of Americans to sports. Americans love their sports, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of passionate watchers who spend their weekends perched on sofas to watch groan men dressed in modern day gladiatorial armor, run as fast as they can to hit someone as hard as they can. And fans can be mesmerized at this, reeling off stats, exclaiming how sick a particular play was, lamenting the bone-headed play.

Still, it feels like the love of cricket is pervasive throughout India, especially among men, though women certainly enjoy it, perhaps as support of their men, much like the wives that make the trek with their husbands to a weekend college football game, even as they can hardly explain the rules of the game. They know enough to see a big play or a touchdown, and can celebrate those moments.

This pervasive love of cricket seems to stem from the lack of what I call the jock mentality. The jock culture in the US is where the athletes are heroes and make fun, that is deride those that lack athletic skills. Such kids often seek solace in geekier pleasures, whether it be computers or anime. Perhaps the love of Japanese culture is an indirect indictment of the culture of America. Anime lovers envision a world that is different from the one they grew up in and reject traditional American culture.

Indeed, such kids, having grown up with jocks have an antipathy to sports. They don't care about it, they don't watch it. Perhaps, at a minimum, they might do something that's not quite sports, like ballroom dancing, or something that doesn't involve team, such as running or hiking or biking. These pursuits are at least healthy and still reject sports as whole.

Indians don't seem to have this issue. Maybe kids are magnanimous when it comes to cricket. No matter how poorly you play, you'll be allowed to play and enjoy it. The key is having fun, and not making fun of those who play badly. You just need a few people who are willing to defend those that aren't skilled.

Or maybe it's how the whole country shuts down when an important cricket match is on, so playing cricket equates to getting out of work, so even if you don't care about cricket deeply, you like the idea that it means a respite from the daily grind.

I can't say, while I grew up, that I recognized the jock culture in our school. Perhaps it was there, but because of the way our school segregated the smart folks from the more academically challenged, I didn't encounter those folks every day.

Tennis had its heyday in the US during the 1970s. Not only did Americans dominate the 1970s with players like Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, and John McEnroe, but there were rivalries with players from other countries, like Martina Navratilova (who became naturalized) and Bjorn Borg.

Tennis was driven in popularity during the height of the modern women's lib movement, a movement that has been squelched by a brilliant if evil counterreply by Republicans who equate feminism with lesbianism, an accusation that seems to work just as well on women, if not more so, than men. During the time, Bobby Riggs, in his 50s, and once a top player in men's tennis, challenged then, number 1, Margaret Court to a match. With his dazzling array of spins and slices, and his trash talking, poor Margaret Court got completely rattled and lost easily.

Billie Jean King, then a leader for women's tennis, knew she had no choice but to play Riggs. She played him smart, and didn't allow Riggs tactics to rattle her, and it gave such a lift to women's sports that its repercussions are felt to this day.

And it boosted the popularity of tennis like no event since Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan got whacked on the knee by hooligans hired by rival Tonya Harding in a soap opera that was too weird to be true, and yet was true.

Tennis managed a resurgence of sorts as McEnroe and Connors were finishing up their last hurrahs in the early 90s, to be replaced by the greatest group of Americans to play in quite a while. This group was lead by Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras but included Todd Martin, Michael Chang, and Jim Courier.

During this whole period, I'd go out and play tennis occasionally. The height of my tennis playing was from 1989 to maybe the mid 1990s. In those days, the best you could do to learn to play tennis better, short of taking lessons, was simply to play more. There was no Internet. The books that were out there were simplistic.

Even when the web came out, there was no YouTube. YouTube and its brethren have become a kind of second web revolution. Sure YouTube contributes a ton of crap to the general viewer, and occasionally, viral videos spread like wildfire in a dry California summer, with no apparent rhyme or reason. From the deeply baritone singing of Chocolate Rain, to the desperate pleadings to "leave Britney alone", to Charlie, the laughing baby that bites the finger of his older brother.

In all of that, you can find pretty much lessons on anything. Want to learn how to parallel park? Watch YouTube. Want to cook? Do the same? For anything you could possibly want to learn, there's some chance someone put videos up on YouTube. The quality may not be good, but it's often there.

This has lead to a minor revolution of tennis. Perhaps it's affected other sports, but I can't say for sure because I simply don't care enough about those sports to comment.

In particular, YouTube, and various pay sites have been the source of many slow motion videos of professional players giving tools to the net-savvy tennis player to inspect how the best hit tennis balls.

Although I've seen some videos dozens of times now, there are always small details that I'm missing. And there are details that are not readily visible to the eye such as a waist rotation.

I contrast playing tennis with racquetball. Racquetball is played indoors in a large room. The goal is to eventually have the ball hit the front wall. Once it does that, the opponent must also hit the front wall before the ball bounces twice. Now, you don't have to hit directly to the front wall. It can hit the side wall or ceiling or back wall first, but it must eventually make it to the front wall without hitting the ground.

Since the front wall is huge, and swinging hard or high will typically get you to the front wall, then you can play the sport with bad technique. Nearly anything you do is good enough. That moves the sport away from technique and more to strategy with the goal of trying to hit the ball so your opponent can't run it down. Because the penalty of bad technique is low, there's little incentive to improve.

Ah, but what is technique? Technique, at least as it applies to hitting sports, is how you hit. What are the mechanics of what you do to swing a racquet to hit the ball. The better your technique, the more power you get, the more accuracy, with less effort.

The key to tennis is understanding some physics. Not a lot, mind you, but a little. In physics, momentum is mass times velocity. Physics also says momentum is conserved. Though it's simplistic, this says that the momentum of one mass can be transferred to the momentum of another mass. Thus, the mass times velocity of a player hitting a ball is translated to the mass times velocity of the ball being struck.

There are two basic ways to make a ball go faster. Hit faster or hit with more mass. Now you might imagine there's no way to hit with more mass. The racquet weighs what it does. However, if you merely swing with your arm, something that seems obvious in tennis, then you will only have the mass of your arm plus the racquet behind the ball.

If you can involve your body more, that is use your torso and your legs, you can increase the mass. However, that requires timing your body movements just right so you can bring that mass to bear. This is why diminutive Chinese women can hit harder than a muscle bound guy. It's not purely about muscle, it's about using the rest of your body to bring additional mass to the momentum equation.

Not to say swinging fast isn't also important, because it is. However, the faster you swing, the more likely that you are to swing incorrectly. It can take a great deal of time before you gain enough coordination to swing fast and swing accurately so you can take advantage of the other part of the momentum equation.

Much of this is simplistic explanation because the body, the racquet are all complex masses. They aren't simple balls of steel whose behavior can be explained simply in physics. As a player, you need to think about how your body moves until muscle memory ingrains it properly.

My strokes, now that I've seen them on video, are more rigid than most. This has lead to an awkwardness in my technique, so I've spent time observing the pros trying to find someone that I can emulate.

At first, this someone was Novak Djokovic. Ah, but his motion was a bit complex. So I sought a simpler model. Roger Federer. But as it turns out, although his motion was simpler, it still had a hitch (which I won't go into). Finally, I settled on Andy Murray, world number 4, who has a simple motion I like and have been trying in the last month or so to imitate.

They say the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the proof is in the video camera. With that, I can see what I am doing and see how close I am to achieving what I want to do. If I had full time to devote to this, I might be able to get there much quicker, but alas, I have to make money to make it possible for me to pursue this lark.

As I've watched the pros and read more, I see more and more. It just takes a while to translate that to my own game.

I don't know that there is quite the equivalent of this in the intellectual world. You can't see someone thinking so much, but you can observe how someone hits a ball. And while this makes the task of imitation easier than imitating a mental genius, it is still, by no means, easy.

These days, I've been working on the beginning part of hitting a ball. This is called the takeback, or at least, I call it that.

You can break down hitting the forehand into about four parts. First is the ready position. This is a stance you take as you wait for the ball. Usually you hold the racquet grip with the right hand, the throat of the racquet with the left. As soon as you identify that it is coming to your forehand, you rotate your body to the right and eventually drop the racquet so it points to the back fence. This is called the takeback.

The takeback I am imitating requires that I lift my elbow up to shoulder height, have my upper arm and forearm at 90 degrees, causing my racquet to point up to the sky. The racquet face is pointing to the right. Then, I drop my forearm so my arm is more or less straight, all the while the racquet face points to the right.

The motion from the racquet being fully back to the moment the racquet hits the ball is called the swing-forward. Or at leas, that's what I call it. During this phase, I rotate my body to the left, hit the ball. My shoulders should be square on, that is parallel to the net or a little left.

The rest is follow-through. It is from the point of contact until the racquet is wrapped over on my left side. I continue to rotate left, arc my right arm from right to left, bend at the elbow, and let the racquet go to the left of my body.

Although the ball has long since gone, the racquet head speed being propelled by a loosely relaxed arm is so quick that the arm must continue to move before it can properly decelerate. A long follow-through means your arm doesn't slow down and cause the ball to likewise slow down. It provides a minimum speed.

When I focus on my tennis, I invariably pay the most attention to the takeback, mostly because that starts the motion up. I have spent 6 months working on that part, and it's been a long journey.

So why do I do it? I don't have a good answer for that. I believe it's a challenge between my mind and my body. I feel I can make my body do a certain thing if I work at it long enough. It's strange to think of the mind and body as adversaries. Certainly without the body going on its merry way and doing what it does without interference from the mind, we wouldn't live. And yet, the mind feels, to some extent, that it can make the body do what it wants.

That's what I feel too. I know it takes a while for the body to listen, so I try to be patient.

Perhaps it's like Buddhist monks who learn to slow their heart rates or chop bricks. If your mind really wants to do it, it can. Many people use their mind for mental pursuits such as solving equations. But it can also be used for physical pursuits.

The funny thing is the mind initially dictates what is to be done, but to get good, eventually the body must react without mental interference. The body simply knows what to do. It has ingrained its responses, and the mind directs it minimally. It is like the parent to the child.

So that's where things stand. An ongoing journey to tennis enlightenment.

Milk

2008-12-14T18:48:00.002-05:00

Unless you've watched your fair share of American documentaries, you probably have never heard of Harvey Milk. In the last few years, the topic of gay marriage has come up. The notion that evangelicals and the right discovered this topic that appeals so strongly to the base that they will come out in droves to vote is not something that's ten years old. It dates back to the 1970s.

The anti-gay movement found an unlikely leader, one Anita Bryant, a Christian singer and promoter of orange juice. Raised a Baptist, she fought against anti-discrimination laws saying that gays did not deserve equal protection for employment. In other words, it was fine for gays to be fired for being gay.

At that point, there had been no openly gay official elected.

Harvey Milk ran as supervisor, which is a kind of city representative for several years. Although he could court the gay vote, he really needed a coalition to be successful, so he recruited union workers, the elderly, African Americans, etc. Although he ran and lost three times, the fourth time was the charm as redistricting gave him enough votes to get elected (the election used to be city wide, rather than different parts of the city voting for the person that might best represent their interests).

At the same time he was elected supervisor, so was one Dan White who grew up Irish Catholic and ran on more conservative grounds, despite living in the fairly liberal city of San Francisco. At first, Milk tried to work with White, but when he realized it was not in his interests to do so, White greatly resented what he perceived as backstabbing and chose to oppose every action Milk proposed.

White eventually resigned his position because he felt the salary he made was too little to support his family. However, the conservative police encouraged him to ask for his job back. As the sole conservative supervisor, other supervisors, including Milk begged the mayor not to give White back his job. The mayor agreed. White decided to sneak into the building through an unguarded window (even at the time, there was a metal detector to enter the facility) and proceeded to shoot and kill the mayor and then shoot and kill Harvey Milk.

White then turned himself in to the police. A sympathetic jury let him off with manslaughter, moved by his plight. He spent five years in jail. When released, he wanted to move back to San Francisco though was advised not to do so. In 1985, White killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning in a car in his ex-wife's garage.

The film, despite my summary of history, mostly focuses on Milk, as it should.

He's not made out to be particularly saintly, but a man who feels that gays needed to be more proactive. While most gays in San Francisco were willing to let change occur slowly, Milk, who loved the publicity of campaigning took a more direct route.

The problem with telling a story like Milk is that a person's life is not easily summarized in two hours. There's a bit of a clunky voice-over, in this case, Milk reading into a tape recorder (which is based on something Milk did). Then, you have to pick and choose what events to cover, including two boy friends (the activist/politician Scott Smith and Latino, Jack Lira), and various campaign bids.

When you want to be reasonably truthful to history, then there are speeches that need to be used near verbatim. Of course, one takes a few liberties. In the film, Lira kills himself as he did in real life, but in real life, Lira had already split up with Milk though certainly still liked him.

Gus Van Sant is generally an experimental filmmaker, more so than most in mainstream filmmaking. Despite that, he occasionally makes blander fare, telling a more straight-forward story. These would include films like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester.

Van Sant does have a few visual flourishes. At one point, Milk is running away from someone he perceives is out to attack him. To achieve this visual effect, the entire background is blurred until you just see hazy lights and the shadow of a person.

Van Sant uses his trademark "following camera" used as early as Elephant where the camera is behind a person's head as he walks down hallways, and occasionally in front of his head as he is walking. This is used when White goes to find the mayor and Milk.

Although it is a film about a gay man, the gay scenes are not particularly explicit. In particular, there are no frontal nudity scenes. Most of the scenes are usually close up kissing, usually much closer than conventionally filmed scenes.

The film has a pretty simple theme that it tries to get across. It starts when Milk complains that at the age of 40, he's not accomplished anything in his life that he's proud of. By the time he's nearing 50, he is able to get himself elected as city supervisor, which is surprising given the year is 1978, a scant 30 years ago. Despite the progress in the gay movement and the changing public perceptions, this is still very recent.

His death stirred tens of thousands of people to mourn, bringing candles out into the street.

So how was the film? Well, it is clunky in parts, because of the need to tell important parts of his life. Van Sant does what he can to keep things light and humorous and not perpetually angry.

Sean Penn does a masterful job at creating Harvey Milk. Honestly, if you wanted to get an actor that looked like Milk, you'd probably hire Hank Azaria. Penn, nonetheless, does a great job. The funny thing is that Milk didn't have a gay campy voice where Penn chooses to play him with a slight affectation, perhaps to increase the believability to the audience, who might otherwise not feel Milk was gay enough.

And there may have been a point. Perhaps Penn felt that people might like Milk more if he didn't sound gay, but that they should like him regardless. So by voicing him this way, audiences would have to accept Milk despite a potential dislike of the way he speaks (as portrayed by Penn). Or maybe he just wanted to up the level of difficulty in portraying Milk.

The other capable acting comes from Josh Brolin who plays Dan White. Early on, Milk suggests that White may have been a closeted homosexual, although this is never played up beyond that mere suggestion. Brolin captures how wired up White is, unable to make friends, wanting to do something for his constituents, feeling backstabbed by Milk who found himself wanting to help White, but feeling that he couldn't.

The good thing about historical films is what they teach you. Admittedly, this may not make for the best drama. Indeed, the acting is stronger than the plotting and pacing of the film, although the film gets stronger towards the end.

Although a lot of progress has been made in gay civil rights, the film shows, in the backdrop of today's politics, that in some respects, some things, especially scare tactics, have not changed. Where the film had a political happy ending (the defeat of Prop 6 to prevent gay teachers from teaching), real life did not match that (with Prop 8 passing).

Overall, a good well-acted film but not a great film. Good for its historical insight and even handling of the characters. B.

Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T10:11:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I was watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Wikipedia says this first aired in 1973, though somehow, in my mind, I thought it was much older. More than likely, I thought it was from the 1960s. This meant the first time I remember seeing it was mere years after it first came out. I'd guess I'd pay attention to it for the first time by maybe age 10.

In the cartoon, Peppermint Patty, who is among several guests that have arrived at Charlie Brown's house for a Thanksgiving dinner. Charlie Brown has not so much invited the group of invitees as Peppermint Patty has invited herself (there's a sense that she only has a dad and not a mom) and in the process invited Marcie and Franklin. Linus and Lucy (and sister Sally) also show up.

Charlie Brown doesn't know how to cook so Snoopy does the "cooking", which involves toast, pretzel sticks, popcorn, and jelly beans. That is, snack foods and toast. Peppermint Patty is outraged. She wanted turkey. She wanted mashed potatoes. She wanted pumpkin pie. She wants cranberry sauce.

And her rant got me to thinking about Thanksgiving.

Recently, I was asked, by a non-American, what Thanksgiving is all about. My response was food and family. And while that's true, it doesn't quite reflect what the importance of food.

Most of us understand that Thanksgiving is a bit of a feast. Depending on the family, the dinner can be served at dinner time, that is around 6-7. The day is then spent cooking possibly elaborate dishes and can take the cooks hours to make.

The last 40 or 50 years have seen a decline and a minor resurgence of cooking. I remember hearing a story of a woman, whose name eludes me (and is unlikely to be recalled any time soon), who advocated to American housewives that far too much time was expended in the name of homecooked meals. So much time that it left very little free time to do anything else.

Indeed, you see cooking in many cultures as a woman's job and to spend 1-2 hours if not many hours is considered par for the course. I was invited to a post graduation party by a graduating student. He is Italian American as are his parents. Apparently, they are used to hosting large parties, and the mother is accustomed to making 8, 10, or more dishes for these parties. She pish-poshed suggestions at how much work went in to providing food for the guests. It was, she exclaimed, a pittance. She was used to cooking far more than that.

But once you go the route of eating out at restaurants or making microwave dinners, you've reduced the amount of time to cook from hours to mere minutes. And to go back is a pain. It's like asking someone who normally has a 5 minute commute to work to take a 40 minute commute to work. That 40 minutes is exasperating and interminable. You wonder what you did in your life to deserve this Sisyphean fate. Once you manage to reach work, then you must reverse the trip, and reverse, and on and on.

There are several ways to resolve this issue of cooking. First, you can let the restaurants do the work for you. Restaurants have already perceived a desire by those who don't want to slave over the food preparation, nor the cleanup. They create Thanksgiving dinner for them.

Some of these restaurants are reasonably ritzy and upscale, perhaps to appeal to the wealthy who can afford to have other people do the labor for them. It may not have the same intimacy of home, nor the Norman Rockwell idealism of family and laborers in the kitchen, but it's a ritual many feel compelled to go through.

There are certainly cheaper ways to achieve the same effect, usually involving getting turkey from the Boston Market and other side dishes. Boston Market wouldn't bother with this if every family felt the need to make everything from scratch. Other cultures that have revered the woman as cook would find the notion of letting restaurants do the work or getting canned foods as horrific.

And in a sense, Americans think that too. Of course, if pressed for an answer, an American would say the fast foods we get, the canned, the microwaved, the pre-cooked foods do not taste as good as expertly prepared homemade food. That's fair. But they are willing to make that tradeoff. Rather than spend years learning to cook a variety of different dishes and attain a level of mastery that allows the cooking to be shown off and repeatably so, the time saved from learning to cook, the money saved from not buying all manners of kitchen gadgetry, even the basic effort saved from not cutting up vegetables, slicing meats, preparing marinades and side dishes and desserts, is considered well worth it for quick meals that taste significantly worse, but still now awful. A price worth paying, most would say.

Due to the fast-food mentality of America and a greater gender equality starting from the 1970s feminist movement, there is a countervailing bucking of the trend, most often seen by males who find that guys like Jeff "The Frugal Gourmet" Smith (whose shows have literally been eradicated by other cooking shows and by insinuations that were never quite proven of his predilection for youthful lads) and Bobby Flay and Christopher Kimball and the Iron Chefs that, indeed, guys can cook, that it's not shameful. Quite the contrary, it's cool if a guy can cook. Women seem to appreciate that fact too.

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving.

Despite America's love-hate affair with cooking, Thanksgiving reminds us of a time, perhaps a time that never existed, when American families got together for a huge family dinner:

What occurred to me, after all is said and done, is that Thanksgiving is not merely about eating food, though it certainly is that, but it's about a way to tie some idea nationally. That it's about a mythical view of the United States. Amber waves of grain. Purple mountains majesty. Fruited plains. (Fruited plains?).

I got this idea, of all places, by the juxtaposition of a Facebook status, and the watching of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The status, by one Jeremy Pelzer, reads "Jeremy Pelzer likes turkey almost as much as pumpkin pie".

And that got me to thinking that these were two of the items Peppermint Patty wants in her Thanksgiving dinner. Funny enough, Peppermint Patty seems like she's grown up in a kind of broken household. She's a tomboy. She's from a single parent family. (Does she have an intriguing relation with Marcie?).

But she feels something is missing from her life. She is missing some of the "traditional" aspects of life. She looks at Charlie Brown and feels he is living that traditional life. That his family surely observes a traditional Thanksgiving, that surely he must eat breakfast that consists of waffles and pancakes and bacon and orange juice. She is surprised that Charlie Brown's existence is mundane. That he doesn't know how to cook (funny how the parents are completely isolated from his life) and that breakfast consists of cold cereal. Is this Schultz's criticism of how our culture has abandoned its ways? Does he merely weep for the convenience of life? The various Charlie Brown specials often focus on how we've lost our way.

I hadn't intended this to be about the despairing vision of Charles Schultz which is bizarrely offset by the magically unreal world of Snoopy. When Americans have lost their ways, only their dogs will remember to dream.

Nope, I wanted to talk about the unifying idea of food on the American psyche. It's not that we simply eat food. There is Thanksgiving food. There is turkey. There is cranberry sauce. There is mashed potatoes.

We don't necessarily follow it to the letter. It doesn't have to be the Norman Rockwell dinner. Indian families that have lived in the US may choose to remember their Indian heritage while still making a traditional turkey and stuffing. Vegetarians still like the idea of family, and certainly, side dishes play a major supporting role to Thanksgiving.

The choice of pies is wide. While pumpkin pie is considered seasonal, very Halloween, very Thanksgiving (it's really a pumpkin spice pie, but I digress), others might prefer a traditional apple pie or a cherry pie.

Sometimes the interpretation is a bit more post-modern: turkey cutlets sauteed in garlic-thyme butter, resembling Thanksgiving, but more petite, more French, more snooty, but honoring both a past tradition, and a desire to elevate humdrum American cuisine with more cultural refinement.

As I eat turkey and mashed potatoes (and this year, I used roasted garlic with Yukon gold potatoes and mashed it with a special masher), I realize that it's an experience shared many fold across the country. The variations on a theme still reveals an underlying structure and commonality of food and family. Whether that means anything, whether there's some insidious idea that we are "one nation" united through food, I don't know.

Thanksgiving is perhaps that one holiday that attempts to unite a country through food, and thus, relieved of religious significance like Christmas, there's something more wholesome about it. Christmas is about family too, but it's also about gifts. Thanksgiving is about sharing a meal, and that meal is shared not only by family, but in a sense shared by a large number of American families.

Much like the campus buildings, the lay of the campus grounds, the chill of the air during winter time evokes a common historical memory of alumni of a college, Thanksgiving also evokes a common historical memory, and the nostalgia for an idealistic America not withstanding, is a pretty amazing thought.

Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T21:40:00.002-05:00

The Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is less well known than the Christmas show. However, the themes are fairly similar. Although I didn't sit to watch the entire show, I watched the few minutes that seemed pretty important. For some reason, Charlie Brown is hosting a Thanksgiving dinner, though, it appears to be outdoors, during daylight.

And Snoopy is the chef. The Thanksgiving dinner consists of bread, pretzel sticks, popcorn, and jelly beans. Peppermint Patty, who is pretty brusque (and voiced by a guy in this particular show), is horrified. Where's the turkey? Where's the mashed potatoes? Where's the pumpkin pie? Charlie Brown feels he's let everyone down (this cartoon really mines pathos, a topic that is generally unheard of from comics aimed at kids).

At the end of the show, Snoopy had brought Woodstock to his doghouse, from which he fetches a table, some chairs.

Snoopy then brings out a covered platter, and he uncovers it.

And what appears?

A huge turkey! And tiny potatoes and veggies!

And who is thrilled about this?

Woodstock!

Woodstock who rubs his hands, or his wings that resemble hands, shows us his mastery of cutlery and slices the food, and uses the fork to eat the turkey.

Does Woodstock not realize that he's participating in a form of cannibalism? Alas, for little kids, they probably won't even notice. I remember so little from the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and I think many kids also forget much of it, only to realize, as an adult, that it's far more serious than you recall.

Charlie Brown holiday specials, at its very heart, is often about trying to get away from the glitz and commercialism of holidays (something that almost never gets discussed) and look to something purer. We get together for Thanksgiving, they say, not to have food, but to be with one another. Indeed, it's not family, but friends that gather together, a kind of idealism that seems to exceed how most people perceive Thanksgiving.

Watch it again and you'll see how it's not what you expected.

Unless you watch it every year.

In which case, it's exactly what you expected.

Learning Tennis

2008-11-23T13:45:00.002-05:00

Oh so impatient are you!

You look at the title of this blog and your eyes avert away! Why is that? Was there some incident in your youth where you gazed at some dumb jock (and boy were they dumb!) who only cared about football or basketball but lacked the intellect to calculate the roots of a quadratic equation, that lacked the intellect to understand the causes of the Civil War, that laughably dreamed of a pro career where they would make money, a dream so improbable that perhaps ignorance of math was the only thing that sustained such folly, a folly as silly as Seward's? (You betcha!)

Tennis is one of the sports that you can, if you want, try to learn on your own. You can read books, you can have friends teach you, you can visit the courts frequently, or hit against the wall, you can admire the pros.

Even if you have a powerful intellect, one that reasons, one that thinks, until recently, until the Web, you really lacked the information you needed to play tennis well. You could, I suppose, record stuff on a VCR, if anyone has those gadgets any more, and play and replay and hit slowmo and hope to glean the mysteries of how to hit a forehand or a backhand, how to hit with spin.

Even with the Web as your ally, powerful search engines to narrow your inquiries, how do you interpret what you see. You want to run what is the equivalent of a physical diff.

What is a diff? In computer world, you often want to see the changes made to a text file, typically a computer program you wrote, but it could be a story you wrote in a creative writing course. A diff is a way to represent what was and what is. It looks a touch technical, and to the casual eye it is. The main lesson to draw is it summarizes what changed before to make it what it is now.

A physical diff then is the difference, in some general way, between the way your body does something and the way someone who does it "right" (as there are more definitions of right than we care about) does it. Because there are many definitions of right, we want to abstract one level up to point out what are the basic differences.

A diff of two text files, two programs, or two variations of the same story you've been writing is very exact. It's easy to tell the exact changes made. The kind of diff I'm talking about is much more akin to the difference between you and Hemingway, you and Shakespeare, indeed, you and any good writer. That level of abstraction is hard to capture in writing, but somewhat, though not wholly, easier in sports.

We can look at the general structure of how someone hits. They move their arm this way. Their wrist is this way. Their shoulders are that way. This is the sequence of things that happen.

We can learn by watching and imitating. But you may fail to see! You may not see all that there is to see. I didn't look at their legs! Was that important? Was that hop necessary? Why did they make this motion here, but not there? I don't get it!

The nice thing about tennis is that there are a handful of things to master, but you have to spend a lot of time getting the body acclimated to those motions.

But when it comes to learning something else, something useful, something like programming, there's far less to tell the would be programmer. Why is that? Admittedly, tennis has been with us for over a century. The knowledge we've gain about tennis has proceeded by leaps and bounds and is now accessible in a way never seen before until very recently. There are ways to look at our own game and analyze it.

But programming? Much younger. Still immature. And while people seem to know how to program just as people seem to know how to play video games, we don't yet know why. We don't have a good theory as to why. It doesn't make sense to us.

In the things we find most important, the learning of "real stuff", we are at an impasse. How is it that we don't even know how to program, that each of us finds our own way their and that perseverance, more than anything seems the key to guide us to a nebulous solution to the problem at hand?

In that respect, tennis seems more reassuring. There are answers, even if we must sometimes pay for such answers. These answers may change. The answers today may not be the answers tomorrow. The game evolves. The solutions evolve. Programming too may evolve perhaps far more dramatically than anything that happens in tennis.

I suggest that even as I learn tennis because I find satisfaction in learning tennis, that you think about how you learn something--anything. How does that happen, and why is that so hard to convey to the next person?

Control

2008-11-23T08:39:00.002-05:00

I was recently asked by Justin what I wanted to do, that is, with my life. He had suggested, since I like to write, that I should write. Indeed, I think it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to write. One reason I started a blog was to write, and blogs give me an opportunity to write.

The one great feature of blogs is the audience. To be honest, I don't know my audience. Most people I know don't regularly follow my blog because it delves into topics that are alternately interesting and boring to them, and if there's a rut of articles that are boring to them, they simply pass it by, and then don't come back.

That's short attention span theater for you, but that's fine. I don't write for a particular audience, though I understand there is an audience. If there weren't an audience, I might choose to make my words more abstruse, my thoughts even less coherent than they are now. I wouldn't try to elaborate on certain ideas in more depth because I already understand it.

Some of my inspiration, and this is an odd inspiration, for my recent writing comes from one David Foster Wallace. I might not have cared that much about Wallace, who is well regarded as a writer, had it not been for two things. First, he died. That's a sad event for many Americans that cared about his writings.

Alas, death has a way of making certain people's lives stand out more as people start to eulogize the person, write about what made them special. It makes you wonder why they don't do this more often when they are alive. I believe Johnny Cash gained more fame after death than he had immediately preceding it, because people who just thought of him as another of those old country legends began to see a darker, more troubled individual, who nonetheless found love. People who otherwise wouldn't have paid Cash any heed began thinking "this is a pretty interesting guy" and gave his music a chance.

All on the account of him being dead.

The second compelling fact of David Foster Wallace was that he loved tennis. If he hadn't been so talented as a writer, or had he been more talented as a tennis player, the world may never have been graced with his words. Although he wrote huge tomes like Infinite Jest, he also wrote a great deal of non-fiction.

He understood he had an audience, that that audience might care little or know little about tennis or whatever subject he was talking about, and he was surprisingly willing to use his intimate knowledge of words and how to string them together to produce a compelling narrative and explanation of, well, tennis. And not just tennis, but any other of a myriad of topics. Beyond the need to simply storytell, Wallace also wanted to explain.

So I have to say, in what little capacity I've had to read Wallace's work, which is quite little, these few things have been, in no small measure, inspirational.

There's another thing that's inspirational and that's the TED talks. I remember bumping into TED talks maybe 2 years ago. This organization is what Republicans would term as elitist and what liberals would term as elitism of the best sort. You see, Republicans love the us vs. them mentality. The "us" are simple folk who are God fearing, who work hard, but obviously not hard enough that we cared about education and independent thinking and embracing the diversity of the world and, to reiterate again, about education. They're hard working in the industrious physical labor sort of way. That education stuff kinda flew over their heads, and so they weren't so hard working there.

Liberals, frankly, want everyone to be elitist, but not because they feel elitism is us vs. them. Frankly, liberals complain about the salt of the earth not because they want to be separate from them, but because they want them to open their eyes, to understand what education is really about. And when people say that the working class is uneducated, they don't mean that they can't do math or conjugate a verb. They mean they don't know how to analyze someone's argument, nor construct one of their own, nor find information on the Web (or whereever), not evaluate the truthfulness of the information. They don't find ways to stretch their understanding of the world. They don't question why things are a certain way. They don't question their own beliefs.

The idea that the beliefs you grew up with are the right ones is the essence of conservatism (with a small "c"). It is about familiarity and comfort drawn from what you've always seen and it's the disdain for people who tell you your life is all wrong. You can understand, to an extent, why people are reluctant to change when they see nothing wrong with how they live.

But I seriously digress.

If you've followed me this far, then I've perhaps tricked you, because I want to talk about something that is likely utterly mundane which is to talk about tennis.

Oh noes! You tricks me!

I'm not really going to talk about tennis in the way you think. It's not about how to hit a forehand or how I've learned to hit a better volley. It is the entire endeavor itself.

And it has to do with the word of the day: control.

Why are sports so compelling to so many people? To a person who doesn't watch sports, the odd fascination of people running around or hitting one another or trying to get a ball to do something that most humans can't even begin to comprehend so the eventual score changes. That seems utterly preposterous (ah, our love of extreme words to convey extreme ideas!).

The fans want to do something that humans would love to do, which is to control the outcome of the world, at least, to some small extent. And to the extent that sports is so popular, they delve into this make-believe world where they believe, with enough of their fellow fans, that if they fervently believe hard enough, it will come to pass. Does that sound familiar?

People are often asked, if they had one superpower, what would it be. I have no idea if non-Americans would answer this differently. Maybe they don't understand superpower in the way we understand it. They might imagine doing something they already do, like farming, but much better. Or they might imagine being rich. We're informed by our comics, and then only the earliest most rudimentary ones at that, to tell us what superpowers are and then because this question is hardly original, by the same answers people keep giving to the question.

The most common answers are: flying and being invisible. Flying appeals to our desire to be freer than we are now. Gravity's a bitch, don't you know. And walking is too. It takes us forever to get anywhere. Wouldn't it be nice to skip the cars and busses and be truly green, and fly to where we need to go? Of course, once you free your mind that way, you wonder what kind of sports you'd even have.

Being invisible appeals to our desire to know, our desire to hear things about ourselves or to observe people in their most unguarded moments. Needless to say, most people would probably have pretty mundane lives of them watching TV, them sleeping, them making something to eat, them eating. Only a few minutes a day, if even that, are salacious enough to follow unless the kind of person you'd like to stalk are into a huge amount of gossip every day, and you want to get into that dirt.

Being invisible is not entirely right because it means the possibility someone could hear you, could punch you out, and all sorts of harm to your physical self. What they mean is something more ghost-like, the ability to be wherever you want and then to otherwise not interfere with what you see so they get to be their most honest selves.

Anyway, these salacious moments would probably amount to catching them showering, or moments of self pleasure, or moments writing in unbridled (if clumsy) ecstasy. And for some, these happen too infrequently to be patiently hanging around waiting for it to happen.

But there is another kind of superpower people might want to have and it relates to control. How many people fantasize that some person might fall in love with them, or perhaps more mundanely, have sex with them? I need to digress a bit because there's an amusing bit with Ricky Gervais and Patrick Stewart.

Stewart is classically trained Shakespearean actor, but most people know him as the captain of the Enterprise from the second Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gervais is visiting Stewart in his dressing room and Stewart is pitching an idea.

Stewart imagines he has superpowers and that is to magically make women's clothes fall off unexpectedly at which point he's taken a glimpse of "everything". Each show would primarily focus on this idea. Part of the amusement of this is how faux serious Stewart seems to take the idea and how much kid-like joy he gets whenever he says "but it's too late, because I've seen everything" while Gervais looks in mock horror at what sounds like the worst idea for a sitcom ever, but in deference to Stewart, he tries to look like he thinks it's interesting, but can't bring himself to that point.

In this sketch, Stewart is talking about godlike control. The ability to make the world conform to the way you want it to, albeit, in this case, with the minor ability to make women's clothes fall off. It's just short of being lewd, about being in control of the situation. and transforms what might be an ugly situation into something naughty. And only a wee bit naughty too. That way, it's palatable. The woman isn't being forced into actions against her will (though if you had such powers, you'd probably make her agreeable to the action on top of the action itself). In this case, she's embarrassed as well as being bewildered at the oddness of this hypothetical situation.

People understand that such powers don't exist, but it doesn't mean they don't want it. What lonely geek who, due to weight issues or lack of self confidence, doesn't imagine that some girl will eventually pay attention to them? Indeed, speaking of Star Trek, that series indulged in these ideas of fantasy with a recurring guest character, Reginald Barclay.

Barclay goes into a holodeck which is the best virtual reality simulator ever, and yet despite the fantastic-ness of this device, is hardly ever used, and lives his fantasies in them where he overcomes his stuttering and shyness and woo the only women that we ever see on board, namely, Crusher and Troi. It's funny how they decided to make the one fantasizing a male (why didn't they pick a fantasizing female? or why is Barclay straight?), but then they know their audiences, don't they?

Indeed, to indulge the fantasy powers even more, Barclay gets superpowers in one episode, in Star Trek's own variation of Flowers for Algernon (that book probably killed the name Algernon for use as a child's name, or maybe it was never that popular).

The kind of fantasies that Barclay has, G-rated as they may be, reflect the kind of fantasies many a teen has. They want to be liked. They want the popular ones to like them. They may resent those that seem to get the women as being assholes who, if they only got to know them better, would really appreciate them (this is something a roommate of mine said many years ago--I can only hope that he has had some success finding someone as that was 20 years ago).

The ability to find a significant other is a form of control. This problem is so challenging that societies have found other ways to handle it. Take it out of the hands of the people it involves. Namely, arranged marriages. For the rest of the world where arranged marriages aren't as common, the burden lies to the guy to try to find an appropriate mate, at least for those who think it's important. Because of our biological need to reproduce, certain incentives have been placed in our genetic makeup to skew this likelihood. People get horny, people get lonely. All these things make us more likely to want to find someone special.

But how to do it? Society also begins to produce imagery of who is desirable and who is not, and much of that comes from advertisers, but also from the film industry who must trot out their vision of beauty and talent to adoring fans, and the sports industry where wealthy skillful athletes are prized as desirable, to the entertainment industry (music, etc). Even to some extent, the business world, successful professionals, intellectuals, they all have some appeal to someone.

There are several factors (and I have to admit bias here, so I will tell a one-sided story) that appear to make men appealing to women. The first is attractiveness. Men find women sexy, and women find men sexy. Just not every man. Some men are very good looking and it overcomes nearly every flaw about them, in particular, if that person is very shy, or possibly, very rude.

Attractiveness can really be all over the place. The person need not be muscle-bound. Generally, people look at the face. Sometimes they want more, like a shapely body. But the face is king. Attractiveness can range the gamut of "hot" as in you'd want to go to bed with them immediately to the merely cute, as in you'd want to hug them and pinch their cheeks.

Another factor is personality. What if you find yourself not blessed with good looks where women want to talk to you just because of how you look? They can still like you a great deal because you're fun, you have lots of interesting things to say, or you know how to make someone feel special, or laugh, or you're supportive.

When you're not born with good looks and haven't frittered it away by gaining too much weight, then you have a huge problem that is, more or less, under your control. I say, more or less, because people have certain personality flaws. Some of the best looking people are awfully shy. If they were more outgoing they would have slept around with a lot more women (not that this should be a criteria for a successful life, but just saying).

But if you lack good looks, and you don't have to overcome incurable shyness, then one avenue available to you is making yourself more interesting, more desirable. Part of that has to do with doing things, either reading stuff, going to parties, what have you. It helps to be extroverted, and to be extroverted, it helps (though is not fully required) to understand how the world works, how to be funny, how to point out interesting stuff. It helps to have a good memory so you can regale people with something you read, or sing one of the hundreds of songs you've heard. Basically, this interestingness is a form of self-confidence, and for some reason, this is pretty compelling stuff to potential mates because it shows evidence that you can not only manage your life but possibly theirs too.

As I said, this take a great deal of awareness. If you love video games and crave them and read up all about them and that's all you can ever talk about, well, that's going to make you a lot less desirable, especially if you lack the looks too. Humor can be a way to attract folks, but how can you learn humor? It takes a lot of practice, it requires paying attention to the world, it requires a quick mind. Indeed, one thing you might notice about the funniest people is how smart they seem to be, and part of it is how quick their minds work because they spend a great deal of time trying to find humor.

But that's hard, isn't it? Hard to be funny. And when you're not good at it, wow, do you ever fall flat.

Now it turns out that people are often willing to settle. You don't have to look great, as long as the rest of your body is in pretty good shape. If you're not too short (and even shortness may not matter that much), but you are in physically great shape or at least decent, which means you have a decent height, and aren't particular chubby, and maybe even have nice chest, or nice arms, or nice ass, that can overcome even mediocre looks (and what's mediocre to you might be good enough for someone else).

There are some things about yourself that you don't control, namely, how tall you are, what you look like. There are things that are somewhat under your control, such as your sense of humor, how much you work out, how friendly you want to be. Personality is something that can be developed, but you're also born with a certain personality too, and the way you are raised has some influence on that.

Your personality affects things like how impatient you are, how willing you are to learn something, whether you think it's OK to get into fights or get into arguments, whether you mind offending someone. Your personality traits can make it easier or harder to try to develop the social skills that will hopefully win someone over, to essentially package yourself so someone will like you, and that can sometimes be through aggression on your part, where you try to really engage someone directly rather than to passively hope they will notice you.

We build these skills to try to do something that we wish could happen by magic. And that something must still lie in the realm of socially acceptable. For example, you might really think it's cool to be into leather and whips. Whoops, you've just eliminated a great deal of the population that finds that weird or worse, deviant. Or maybe you have a hunkering for three people to be involved. Again, too few people in society find that perfectly normal, and so all the smooth talking you do might not help you out. You have to seek a much smaller crowd and hang out with them.

Although we lack magic superpowers, we have some control based on our knowledge of the world, based on the personality we have, based on how we think people might find us charming or wonderful.

This talk of being more attractive to someone seems like an odd segueway to why I find tennis compelling.

We try to develop our minds, but doing that is honestly quite hard. What we're trying to do isn't clear. Something about physicality, the controlling of our own bodies, to make it do something that has no evolutionary advantages, but only because we find it fun and because it's tough.

Why are video games compelling? Because the more most of us work at it, the better we get. There is satisfaction when we achieve the goals we set for ourselves, and those goals, with enough time and skill, seem attainable. Far more attainable than some of the real world goals which involve, well, people. We don't know what to do to achieve the goals we want with other people. Some of those goals are probably far from realistic, summed up by a song called "Jesse's Girl" where the protagonist wishes he could have "Jesse's girl".

I have to digress there to recall a story from college. I knew a guy who had a thing for this girl. Problem? She already had a boyfriend (and I knew a guy who had a thing for this girl who already had a fiance!). What did he say? I bet I could beat up her boyfriend.

I told him to imagine this scenario. She is with her boyfriend walking down the street under pale moonlight murmuring words of idle affection. Then, out behind a tree (you need the surprise factor), you jump in front of them, point your finger at the boyfriend, and then proceed to beat the everliving tar of his now rather befuddled and soon to be bloodied boyfriend. After the ensuing mayhem, she rushes to your side and says "My Hero!".

I've embellished this more than is reality, but, heck, it's my story.

But that's about control. He didnt tell me that he'd be more interesting, more compelling, more exciting, more of everything for this girl so she'd be smitten and change her mind (after all, isn't it kind of silly to just say that that guy saw her first so he gets dibs, or maybe it her that saw him first).

Being more interesting is tough. How do you do it? How long does it take to get there? Why do some people fail more miserably at it than others? Is it there whiny voice? Why do people persist in having whiny voices when they should know it turns people off? Why does it turn people off?

Many questions.

Instead, he opted for the solution that made the most sense to him, or really, had the most opportunity for success if the world simply worked the way he imagined. He'd punch the guy out. It reduced the problem to something totally ridiculous, but made the goal realizable were the rules simply changed this way.

With tennis, I look for a measure of control. One reason that I admire sports is to watch people who have attained a high level of control, and partly they can do that because the sport succeeds, that there is some reason to waste your time doing this because money can be made, because there's a population that care enough to watch it, and cares enough to get better at it themselves.

And tennis still has secrets. Some of these secrets reveal themselves in slow motion. Perhaps like some people find conspiracy theories compelling because they like the idea of knowing something that everyone else doesn't know and doesn't believe (and with good reason), I believe there are lots of things in tennis I don't know and that with study and practice, I could learn and get better at. In this respect, it's like playing a video game except I play the same game over and over, simply trying to get better at it.

Although control is illusory, there is an appeal from gaining some small measure of control, something rewarding. It sounds dastardly, but it isn't.

It is the way of the world.

Caste Makes Waste

2008-11-22T01:55:00.002-05:00

I have a friend who pronounces "caste" that rhymes with "waste", so this blog entry would rhyme. Even so, it should rhyme with past, mast, last, etc.

Many Bollywood films would have you think that love marriages are the norm. While they have become more common, arranged marriages are still far more common than not. Bollywood films have an opportunity to tackle some tough topics, but many fans see these films as escapism and aren't prepared, except for the more literate crowd, to see something more politicized.

I was reading the following article about an inter-caste marriage, one between a Rajput and a Dalit. Dalits are the names given to the untouchable caste, still the lowest caste in Indian society. They are meant to handle cleaning of toilers, the handling of the dead, and so forth. They are considered unclean.

Arranged marriages have generally been more about status, according to the article. You marry some person that is appropriate to the family. Lest you think this is completely unheard of in the US, it wasn't so long ago that wealthy families would expect their children to marry other children of wealthy families. You didn't simply marry someone, you marry their family.

So I imagine a Bollywood film that starts off like any other traditional film of boy meets girl. Everything is good, song and dance, but it is eventually revealed, say, that the woman is a Dalit, and then slowly his family becomes horrified and wants nothing to do with her. They try to get someone more caste-friendly, but the son is uninterested, and eventually, despite pleading from the son, they feel that it is necessary to kill her, and there's a stoning scene.

Anyway, it would get pretty intense towards the end, so that the viewer is made to face these issues. Perhaps, with the prodigious Bollywood film output, a movie like this has been made, though I would imagine it would be difficult.

Just a thought.

Revulsion

2008-11-21T03:20:00.004-05:00

I just blogged about embarrassment. It's one of those odd emotions that isn't particularly celebrated because it isn't at the extremes. It's not joy. It's not hatred. It's not funny. It's not sad. And yet embarrassment probably weighs more in many of our day-to-day decisions than these other emotions which are generally not extreme.

It's why we have restrooms with stalls. It's why people sometimes avoid using public showers in gyms preferring the more complex ritual of wearing gym appropriate clothing then scurrying home to privacy. This usually adds quite a few minutes to everyday proceedings, but is considered worth the added measure of avoided embarrassment.

On the flip side, if there is such a thing, is revulsion. Revulsion, in this case, is a much stronger word than I want to use, but is the sense you get when you think "eww!".

Perhaps the strongest sense of revulsion for some is sharing food. Someone makes, oh I don't know, a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Or better yet, a bowl of cereal. Then, you are asked to eat it. Using the same spoon. At what point do you go, ewww! Ok, let's say you get to use a new spoon. Would you still say, ewww!

I was once with several Indians eating at Cheesecake Factory. While they could have all ordered their own milkshake, instead only one was ordered for all three. This has to do with another sense: frugality. If you choose to be frugal, then you might be less repulsed because sharing makes more sense, and that sharing extends to food.

Once one person ordered a milkshake, the rule became "anyone who thinks it might taste good should have an opportunity to taste it" (which overrules "if it's so good, then get one yourself" which is not invoked because it costs too much and is too much food). And because revulsion is not as big a problem, several straws dipped into the same milkshake, and much joy was to be had.

Americans would react two ways. One is "ewww" because of hygiene. The second reaction comes, oddly enough, from homophobia. Two people who are in love might overcome their revulsion to things unhygienic. Perhaps their love blinds them to the fact that something that would gross them out with strangers is OK with someone you care about. For whatever reason, Americans think of lovers sharing drinks, so there's something vaguely gay about two or more guys sharing the same drink. And Americans males tend to be quite homophobic, or view certain actions as homosexual even as other cultures see it as no big deal.

Revulsion isn't also about food sharing, but applies to intimacy. Many people can get to a level of intimacy because they are turned on by someone. This feeling often overcomes two related feelings: embarrassment and revulsion.

I knew a former housemate, and really, this could apply to many, many people I knew who found the idea of going to gym showers as somewhere between embarrassment and revulsion. On the one hand, we imagine the following thought experiment, a kind of experiment that probably never entered the brain of one Albert Einstein, father of thought experiments.

In this case, you imagine a gym shower near some locker, and to create some sense of embarrassment, I'll be a participant and you be the one using the facilities. To reduce the ewww factor, I'll be clothed, and you won't. You might still find this situation uncomfortable. You don't like the way you look. You don't like that others are looking at the way you look. Classic embarrassment, and perhaps to some extent, a secondary embarrassment if you feel the other party is somehow enjoying things too much, perhaps at your expense.

This reaction is different from someone who sings well or who plays well or who can share their intellectual acumen. In such situations, admiration is permissible and not the least bit embarrassing, indeed, it's rewarding.

Now, we can add the eww factor. Other folks are now using the facilities in the same boat as yourself, and society conditions you, especially males, to saw ewww. The male body is repulsive. This typically stems from a kind of homophobia American men grow up with but is combined a bit with embarrassment plus revulsion.

But to show you that the revulsion is not purely homophobia, because it isn't, we can rerun the thought experiment this way. If you're a straight guy, the gym scene would have involved unclothed men, and the thought is that these men are likely not the finest athletic specimens, and even if they were, well, ewwww!

Let's replace these unclothed men with unclothed women! Again, the strong sense of revulsion American males are trained to have about other males when they grow up has a flip side. They automatically assume that the women involved have mistakenly left their Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and have entered their shower facilities. They might even overcome their embarrassment because, wow, such hot women must surely be frolicking around without a care in the world.

Much better situation.

Much.

Ah, but let's tweak this experiment. If a guy thinks that the reason he doesn't want to be in a room of showering men because they would be obese, bad, and generally eww, we can do the same in this thought experiment.

Out you go, you Twiggy like women, you buxomous babes. Replaced with people who are a few pounds heavier with a few more sags, puffs on the cheeks, and suddenly, the notion is ewww, I don't have any desire whatsoever to see you? But wait, sir, aren't you heterosexual? Why, yes, but these women are (looks both sides before talking to you) fat whispered in hushed tones. Ah yes, not the erotic specimens that would bring fire to your loins.

OK, so let's not pester you about how society denigrates the overweight, claims weight can be controlled, and has perfectly logical
reasons for the biases (but really, it amounts to making excuses). After all, women with more ample hips were seen as models of beauty in the Renaissance.

We can replace these women with women of experience. Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Cougars. Grrr. Sure, they're a little gray, but for their age, maybe not so bad. Maybe they remind you of your, oh no. Noooo! Mother? Ewwwww! Grandmother!!! Stop it! Ewwww!

Perhaps we don't like to think about a locker room full of the geriatric set because they are SO old, but really, it's because we associate nudity with eroticism, and with advertisers realizing sex sells, they only want to promote teenagers and twenty-somethings and preferably early 20-somethings, lest they remind you that they might be your parents.

This sense of revulsion seems so strong that people are repulsed even as they get older. These women ought to be more age appropriate, but somehow the idea they were ewww when you were young isn't quite gone when you are older.

So revulsion typically comes from two sources. One is hygiene. There are some cultures, like Japanese culture, that might find even more things ewww than Americans, but Americans generally want everything to be ultra sanitary especially when it comes to food, but really, restrooms kinda fit the bill too.

The second eww has to do with how Americans especially American males equate nudity with eroticism and so either you like someone's body (i.e., they are sexy) or on the flip side, they are ewwww! Because you can't imagine making love to them. Even if that thought is not explicit, it is implied that this is the reason you'd rather avert your eyes.

The emotions of embarrassment and revulsion seem much prevalent than other more celebrated emotions. They are hard to write great plays about because they don't lift you up, nor do they make you particularly sad, and yet, they have a profound influence on the way you run your life.

Embarrassment

2008-11-18T14:39:00.004-05:00

When we think of the panoply of human emotion, hope, fear, anger, sadness, one of the ones that seem really low on the totem pole is embarrassment, but it governs much of human behavior. It's the reason people close the doors on bathrooms, why people wear clothes, why people are reluctant to tell you about their relationships.

Indeed, for the most part, we all know that people have relationships and these relationships often, though not universally, involve sex. Some folks like to be loud and irreverent and will either tell made up details of their sex life or possibly accurate details. Given how important people find it in their lives, it's rather amazing that they feel so embarrassed by it.

Perhaps they think that what they do is too vanilla. They feel it's like a competition. I have to be better at it than my neighbor. I have to do it at least as often as my neighbor. It's almost like raising kids except most people are generally content that they do enough. OK, they might not be as rich as the jet set who can send their kids to private schools, but they're content sending kids to the local public school.

Perhaps they feel they don't do it enough. Some people are simply a lot less horny than others. This can be a result of medication or physiology. It can also be that the couple is simply less interested than they once were with each other.

Perhaps they feel that they are into far more kinky stuff than most people realize. That nice couple? They like to use handcuffs? She likes to be spanked? Oh dear!

The embarrassment is not confined to relationships.

Once upon a time, many high schools, even middle schools, had teenage kids of the same gender take showers with one another. I suspect this was due to the military. The military probably thought people should be in good athletic shape just in case they need to serve in the army. For cost cutting measures, they had very simple setups for showering facilities. Since the army used to be all-male and males were supposed to be OK seeing their buddies in the buff, there was no arrangement made to create separate stalls to, yes, avoid embarrassment.

At some point, towards the late 80s, parents started getting scared. I don't want little Tommy to see my little Bobby in a shower. I don't want Sandra to see Holly without clothes. We're encouraging potential homosexual behavior!

The funny thing is that athletes, who are considered the most masculine (or feminine) the toughest and often a bit homophobic, were still required, as part of their sport to shower in groups. Athletes got used to the idea. But the shy nerd became fairly paranoid at the idea. I don't want that person to see me.

Of course, there's not a particularly strong reason why this embarrassment should be except we are taught this when we are young. Most kids don't understand why they need to be embarrassed, but over years of being told to cover up, they start to feel that they don't want others to notice them, and this is even the case if they are particularly well-endowed or have large bosoms or generally shapely figures.

It's perhaps resulted in something that is particularly odd, which is an outgrowth of this embarrassment but has little to do with it.

The jock culture.

I know a few folks that don't do anything particularly athletic. They prefer video games. They prefer anime. They prefer more sedentary activities. In their minds, participating in athletics means agreeing with jocks that thought they could bully other kids, who traded intelligence for athletic skill, and who felt that those that weren't athletic were unworthy.

This ignores the fact that many of the athletes that fit into this category fell into two sports: football and basketball. Those in track and field, those in soccer, were probably a lot less likely to engage in this jock culture machismo. I could be wrong though since I never experienced the jock culture.

Remember the kids who went on a killing spree in Columbine? One reason were the jocks at the school. The flip side of the jock culture was the fact that women, or young girls really, seemed to prefer the self-confident athletes rather than the neurotic geek who seemed awkward when hanging out with women.

Even if athletics have benefits, being healthy, being strong, learning to make your body do what you want it to do, excelling at something different from the mind, many shun athletics because of these jocks.

I was recently at our tiny little gym at work, and the guy felt a bit of discomfort being there. He didn't want to lift weights. No, that seems wrong. But why?

Except I was in that same boat. I felt that the weights were something that muscle boys did, the Arnold wannabes, who wore skimpy bikini thongs, and were greased like a maypole, nary a hair to be seen on chest or legs. This was not who I visualized myself.

That view was silly too. I don't think of myself at a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, but I do lift weights to work out. Not as often as I used to, but nevertheless.

I know people who went to the gym, but otherwise, avoided the lockers. They'd put on their gym clothes prior to arriving at the gym and headed home to shower because they both didn't want to see and didn't want to be seen. Embarrassment. Logic should say that this attitude doesn't make sense, but embarrassment is not logic. It is a learned behavior. It is shame. It is lack of comfort. And it seems like it shouldn't be the case. Already people have poor self images, and this simply exacerbates it further.

If you can get beyond embarrassment then you can worry about more important things.

Less is More

2008-11-16T22:37:00.003-05:00

Try harder. Give it your all. Bring your "A" game.

In sports, more effort is supposed to yield better results. That, or desire. You have to want it more than your opponent. If you win, then you "wanted" it more. Occasionally, you hear "maybe I wanted it too much" in a loss, a statement uttered by Arthur Ashe in a loss to Ilie Nastase. Both were tennis players, by the way.

When people think effort, they think muscular power, strength. Whether I realized it or not, I would tense up when I hit shots. I would clench my muscles. This happened without me fully realizing it.

Recently, I hurt my wrist. It was shortly after I was frustrated the way I was playing and started to hit harder. But due to bad technique or something, I ended up hurting my wrist, and it's hurt for a few months. So about a month ago, I decided to go to a doctor and he recommended I see a physical therapist, which I did.

The physical therapy has helped with the pain in the wrist and shoulder some, but more importantly, it's helped me become more aware various muscles that are tight, and just how tight they were. It was easy enough to tell. I just put my hand on my muscles, and they would feel hard as rock. And I was told they shouldn't feel that way.

I took a tennis lesson recently, and the recent observation harped on an early observation. Relax! But what does relax mean? Now that I'd done some physical therapy and begun to realize how I was tensing up, I had some idea of what I needed to do to relax.

I felt I wasn't getting my arm in a proper position, that it felt kinda rubbery and unformed. However, I was hitting at least as hard as I was when I was tensed up trying to hit hard, and that was more energy and looked like more effort. Certainly, it felt
like more effort.

I wanted to go back to the tennis wall and try it again today.

Except today wasn't yesterday. Yesterday was warm enough that the weather was heading north of 70 which is unseasonably warm. Today snapped back to brisk chilly weather in the 40s. It was windy. But at least it was sunny.

It's weather like this that tests the resolve of sports nuts, those who venture outside because they have a desire to hit against the ball, and can't wait until the weather is simply warm enough. There's sun. There's an opportunity!

So I went up to the wall, probably a little over a day after I had last been there. Yesterday it had been nice and warm, but I had five or ten minutes before it was getting ready to sprinkle and managed a few more minutes after that before conceding, heading back to the car, and the rains coming down again.

Today, no rain, but wind, blustery wind. I put on a jacket on top of my rugby shirt. It would provide marginally better protection.

My first few shots lacked power. I would frame the ball. Framing the ball is when you hit the ball on the frame instead of the strings. This is generally ineffective.

As time passed, I sensed myself getting tense again, and then not hitting with power.

Relax. Do less. Do less.

Finally, I was getting some of the rhythm I had yesterday. Don't tense the muscle. Keep it relaxed. The pace was starting to flow. I was getting pace again, and I was pleased I hadn't forgotten what to do.

Although it was still cold, and I was beginning to feel it in my face, I still wanted to pick up balls, and strike them again, remembering the lack of tension.

After what was maybe 20 minutes, I decided I had enough. The cold was winning, the light waning, as sunset would soon dim the skies, the sun dropping, dropping, dropping below the horizon.

It's strange that people have discovered this rather contrary idea, that being more relaxed, not trying as hard, will allow the body to relax, and in relaxing, allow it to move faster, hit harder, with less effort. It sounds preposterous, like a diet that allows you to eat all the food you want, and still lose weight.

Still, it seems to work.

I continue to think Zen thoughts. Peaceful, relaxed thoughts.

So I can smack a fuzzy yellow ball.

Whack!