Friends and Coworkers

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.

Netflix vs. Redbox

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?

Freshman Orientation

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.

Concentration

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?

Separation of Concerns

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

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

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.

How We Communicate

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.

A Bit of Humor

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

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.

Lazy Reporting

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

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?

What is Computer Science?

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.

The Twitter Tipping Point

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

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.

Bracketology

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?

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.

Cleaning Party

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.

On Faith

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.

The Three Foot Experience

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.