That Time of Month

Star Trek, like many alleged science fiction television series, was never that much about science fiction. Genre fiction, like science fiction or romances or westerns, seem to be populated by people who don't seek to be great writers, or lack what it takes. Science fiction, in particular, tends to attract writers with good ideas or good science, but often lack the skill to write good characters.

Star Trek, like many shows that aren't set in the present, often serves as commentary about the present, particularly the original Star Trek. In Let This Be Your Last Battlefield, the Enterprise picks up two beings, who look rather identical to the crew, until one (played by Frank Gorshin) says that he is black on one side and white on the other, but the other gentleman has his black and white side reversed.

It is a thinly veiled reference to the racial politics of the time, where liberal thinkers would argue that color shouldn't matter. It took many years later to realize that although color doesn't matter, culture does, and that African Americans were leading different lives than white Americans, and for that matter, based on class, white Americans weren't unanimous in their values.

Science fiction wasn't the only genre television dealing with topics of interest in the present. Shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza would deal with issues such as treatment of Native Americans, or of Asian Americans. The enlightened view of the characters often matching the enlightened views of the era these shows were on.

I went to watch Casanova earlier today, though it has been my intention to watch Match Point, Woody Allen's latest. To be honest, I generally don't care for the kind of neurotics that inhabit Allen's films, but this was considered his best movie in years, set with a British cast (and Scarlett Johansson). My housemate, Dave, had not been that enthused when he watched it, since it was a film filled with unlikable characters, much in the same vein as Closer.

I decided, pretty much last moment, that I didn't want to watch that either, and would catch the lighter fare of Casanova. To be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to watch it. About the only thing that I thought might be interesting was watching Heath Ledger.

Depending on whether you consider Casanova a film from 2005 or 2006, it is Heath Ledger's third film in the past year. Interestingly enough, all three films are period pieces. He play one of the Grimm brothers in the terribly uneven Brothers Grimm directed by Terry Gilliam (who also directed the absurdist Brazil), then the "gay cowboy" movie, Brokeback Mountain, and now, Casanova.

As I said, I had rather low expectations of Casanova. It tells the story of Casanova, lover of many women in Italy, but who has never found a true love, and who is waiting for the return of his mother, who left him as a young child to seek a better life. He encounters Francesca Bruni who secretly enters all-male universities and pronounces that women are just as capable of men, and Casanova is intrigued by this most feminist of women.

Perhaps the reason Casanova works well is that it doesn't take itself particularly seriously. Jeremy Irons plays the inquisitor, but balances it so he's not quite horrifying, nor buffonish. Oliver Platt plays Paprizzio, the wealthy lardmaker of Genoa, who has an arranged marriage with Francesca, a marriage Francesca wants no part of, but is compelled by her single mother, who tells her that they need the money to survive.

Ultimately, the film is about everyone in love with everyone, with Casanova pretending to be one person, then the next.

This film resembles, to some extent, Dangerous Liaisons, but where Liaisons was about two manipulators who eventually manipulate each other and had a nasty edge, Casanova isn't about being devious or nasty. Liaisons cast John Malkovich as, effectively, the Casanova of that film. It's a testament to the boldness of that choice and the strength of the acting that we don't mind that Malkovich isn't obscenely handsome, as Ledger is.

Casanova ought to be faced with a similar dilemma that plagued Lucas in Revenge of the Sith. Lucas had to find someway to explain why a good man becomes evil. His answers are lacking.

Casanova should explain why Casanova is in love with so many women, what he gains from it. Liaisons treats it as a game, with two cunning experts of deception, that challenge each other to use their skill to humiliate and conquer others. To its credit, Casanova simply offers no explanation at all. By the time he's interested in Francesca, he's basically able to put away any other interest in women. There's no explanation that he's a sexaholic, or that somehow he sees his mother in the women he sleeps with (admittedly, a rather twisted theme for a film so light). Heck, there isn't even an explanation why there is a religious figure that defends Casanova. There's almost a hint that Casanova may not restrict himself to the fairer sex, but otherwise, there's nothing much said.

Casanova is presented, much like James Bond. He's well versed in philosophy, and a gentleman, but also happens to like sleeping around with women. Otherwise, how would he appeal to the educated Francesca? He's not going to woo her by being too hot to resist. He has to rise above that.

But the film doesn't focus on him. Instead, there are a bunch of other plots, including how Paprizzio thinks he's way too fat to be attractive to Francesca, never mind that he's wealthy, and that should have been enough during this period, to Francesca's brother, who pines for the woman who lives in the next building over, and who Casanova reluctantly agrees to marry, so he can stay out of trouble (don't ask).

For period pieces like this, it's all about buxomous women wearing clothing they literally burst out of, and masquerade balls, and the church, and boating around in Venice, and eventually, a madcap conclusion, with confusion of identities.

I can't quite tell you why I liked it, though I suspect having more than one character fall in love makes it easier to swallow.

Can't say Ledger worked real hard at this character. He's still interesting enough to watch, but not as surprising as either his performance as bookish Jacob Grimm, nor his reticent portray of Ennis Del Mar. You can't even say that this role is like Denzel Washington doing an action movie because he wants to appeal, every once in a while, to the African American base, since period pieces don't attract people in large numbers.

I suspect, much like Johnny Depp, or, dare I say it, Tom Cruise, that Heath Ledger is trying to find ways to have a lasting career, and one way to do this is to work with good directors. As much as one thinks about Cruise from his earlier films: Days of Thunder, Risky Business, and Top Gun, he's since worked with a number of well-reputed directors.

These include Steven Spielberg (three times!), Stanley Kubrick, Rob Reiner, Cameron Crowe, John Woo, Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, P.T. Anderson. Compare him to the brat pack actors of the day, and you see that he's worked with far more important directors.

Ledger, too, has been aiming his career in this direction, and he seems to have the acting chops to handle it. Most actors would love to manage their career half as well as Tom Cruise has, and Cruise isn't even a particularly good actor (although credit him for trying). Ledger has, for a guy who's basically another of the hunkish types out of Australia (Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, in particular), been a pretty good actor. To be fair, many of the folks coming out of Australia falling in that mode have been good actors (add to that, Eric Bana and Guy Pearce).

Back to the movie. I'll say that Sienna Miller acquits herself well, portraying a woman who both seeks to be independent, but feels modestly trapped by her family's misfortunes. I had never heard of her before this film, but it seems she's the one dating Jude Law. They met on the set of Alfie, one of a gazillion movies that Law made last year (I saw four of them, I think). He had cheated on her with some nanny or some such. I don't follow the tabloids, so I couldn't say for sure.

I'll say that the film is much better than I had expected, in that it was fun, I somewhat cared about the characters, and I could forgive the silly plot that doesn't, upon scrutiny, make a whole lot of sense. I'm sure the cast had fun getting into costumes and running around.

The films I'm looking forward to, but may or may not watch are: Match Point, which I missed today, Transamerica, with Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives playing a transvestite (and seemingly convincingly! I had thought a male played the lead role of a man trying to take the last steps to become a woman, who is reunited with a son she's hardly ever met), and Michale Haneke's, Cache, the Austrian or German director directing French superstars Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche (are there only like 5 real famous actors in all of France?). Haneke, in particular, is noted as something of a formalist director that can make scenes creepy, a la David Lynch, I suppose (though not nearly as weird as Lynch).

Lynch is apparently wrapping up a movie to be released this year which stars Jeremy Irons, who also appeared in Casanova.

Freedom of Song

When I think of folk music, I think of something that sounds a bit like country music, but is paced a bit slower, and isn't about divorce, or boozing, or the other topics people stereotype with country. Bluegrass, then, is country heavy metal, with banjo virtuosity replacing electric guitar virtuosity. If you make me think hard enough, then I'll recall that in the 60s, people like Bob Dylan were writing folk songs with a political bent.

This isn't exactly new. Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land, and perhaps, much like Bruce Springsteen's, Born in the USA, it's been miscontrued as a patriotic song. And, if you only read the first two verses, it does paint an idyllic view of these United States. Get past the first few verses, and you'll read:

As I was walkin'
I saw a sign there
And that sign said no trespassin'
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office
I see my people
And some are grumblin'
And some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking
That freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me

The lyrics become rather ironic, as it turns out that only part of the US are made for you and me (the parts that aren't blocked off), and then he talks about the poor, unable to make a living in the US, and finally says that he can achieve freedom by essentially hitchhiking. There's a kind of freedom in poverty, and yet, not really.

I had heard some relative of Woodie who said he would have found it quite strange that kids would embrace this song as symbolic of all that is good about America, its simple values. And yet, it's only because people conveniently don't sing the verses you see above.

Bruce Springsteen's lyrics ought to be even more obvious. While Guthrie's lyrics are ironic, starting off with the idealistic notion of every part of the US belonging to everyone, and then basically saying it ain't for the poor, Springsteen's Born in the USA is about coming back from Vietnam and being unable to cope, sort of like Rambo without the heroics. And yet this song was embraced during the Reagan administration as a particularly red state song, because, fundamentally, they skipped listening to any other parts of the song other than "Born in the USA". The imagery of Springsteen's back and a flag waving was his form of ironic portrayal, and yet, people thought of it as patriotism, at least, 80s style, cowboy patriotism.

With the advent of alt-folk artists like Sufjan Stevens, Devendra Banhart, and Iron and Wine's Sam Beam, there's a resurgence in folk music, but not of necessarily of the political variety. It's still great stuff to listen to, but occasionally, you want to be reminded of the politcal roots of folk.

As usual, I was perusing for music at NPR's All Songs Considered, and listened to Janis Ian's Danger Danger from her upcoming album Folk is the New Black (listen to Press On). Ian hits all the topics that tend to get people riled up. Racism, gender preferences, books with racy topics, the war. For some reason, this song elicits memories of Annie Lennox since Missionary Man, which is trying to be oddly blasphemous, creating imagery of a missionary man who's part superhero. Is it trying to provocative by using the word "missionary"? Still, oddly enough, I could see Annie Lennox singing (or in her case, wailing) this song, and wonder if it might not derive some power from it.

Speaking of folk and bluegrass, I was also listening to Robinella Contreras. She and her husband are bluegrass musicians, but in their latest album, have tried out other folks of music, more closely resembling jazz or new-age sounds. In Solace for the Lonely, Robinella sings Press On, which has a steady drumbeat sounding like Native American beats. The song seems downbeat, the early parts describing a need to get away from presumably an awful situation, and head where? To heaven, to meet Jesus.

Throughout the song the refrain "Press On" repeats, which, to me, suggests soldiering on. And it made me think of these two word phrases that simply don't make sense, like "press on". "Press on", in this context, seems like, you keep moving on regardless of what life is dealing you, which presumably is not something great. In the year that the Red Sox got the monkey off their back and won the World Series in dramatic fashion (down 3-0 to the rival Yankees, who had beaten them the previous year in a pivotal 7th game, with Aaron Boone hitting a home run on knuckleballer, Tim Wakefield, and his brother, Bret announcing the game.

Last year, they won, and the key phrase was "Cowboy Up", which made no sense, but which I pieced together to mean that you have to get up, and be, well, a cowboy? The 2004 Red Sox team was supposed to be loose, having fun, and a contrast to the businesslike pinstripes of the Yankees. Perhaps no one more symbolized the Red Sox than the long-maned Jonny Damon, who refused to cut his hair, when the rest of the team showed solidarity. It didn't take him too long to accept the money that the Yankees were offering, and Johnny was shearing off his beard and long hair.

I read another similar phrase just yesterday about Cornelius Griffin. His dad was a pastor and preached to his kids that they had to "Tighten Up", that when things got tough, they, too, had to stay tough. When his dad was killed by a drunk driver, he almost wanted to turn back from heading to Alabama, where he was ready to play college football, but the words of his dad told him to stay steady, to be reliable, to "tighten up". If you were to ask anyone what "tighten up" means they'd almost surely say that it meant getting nervous, getting too tight, not relaxed enough. Yet, in this context, it means pretty much "press on", go forward (now I'm about to quote Devo songs, but I digress).

Put two words together, give it a context, and someone will figure out what it means.

Blog On!

That's fine, man!

Recently, a coworker discovered that other coworkers found out about her blog. Her response was to shut it down. There's a funny aspect about blogs. Despite its very public nature, it's quite common to want a blog that's somewhat secret, i.e., available to some people you know, but not to others.

You could, of course, achieve this effect by password protecting the blog, and only letting your friends know, but then they'd have to remember the password. And there's something about strangers reading it too.

As usual, even though this opens up my entry for the blog, it's not what I want to really write about.

What I really want to write about is Richard Feynman. I have to say that he is one of the great influences of my life. No, I didn't go into physics. I didn't become a genius. I won't become a Nobel prize winner, nor have I played bongos, nor did I try to find my way to Tuva.

However, he did have an influence on how I try to think about things. In particular, he tried to understand things in a real-world sort of way. He gave credit to his dad for that, who would tell him how big dinosaurs were by picturing them relative to the house they lived in.

Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Feynman's Lectures on Computation. No, this is not his original book on physics. It's about the fundamentals of computers.

Feynman died in the late 80s, but by then computers were quite prevalent. While he was a physicist by training, he learned some stuff about computers too, though in a fundamental sort of way. He would be interested, for example, in the basic computer architecture, and to know what is or is not computable. He would probably not care to know how modern software is written.

Like many books that he gets credit for, these lectures were not written by Feynman. Instead, they were recorded, and more or less transcribed. His original lectures in physics were done this way too, and usually, someone else did the job of transcribing.

Although Feynman had the reputation of being a good teacher, what makes for a good lecture doesn't always translate to easy reading. It takes work to make it sound as easy to follow as it was live.

With that caveat, I must say Feynman seemed to have a pretty good idea how to teach stuff. He knew that the key was to relate what he was teaching to every day things people understood. Even a well-educated person benefits from such explanations.

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of explanations and feel that Feynman was perhaps nearly as brilliant a teacher as he was a physicist, and that's a rare quality indeed.

If you get a chance, I'd read his book on computation. It's not revolutionary by any means, but it is a interesting read by a person who looked at the world in his own way.

Hasselbeck Guy

Why is it that announcers insist on calling Matt Hasselbeck, Matt HasselBACK? Because he is a quarterBACK? Because they can't read? If a name gets too long, it seems like the average person just stops reading.

I feel certain that Brett Favre's name is not really pronounced "FARV", that it's more likely pronounced "Fahv", but that ever since Madden pronounces it that way, so does everyone else. And maybe the same is true of Hasselbeck.

Ah, Hasselbeck. He's the quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks, don't you know? Mike Holmgren, who coached the Green Bay Packers to a Super Bowl win (1997), has been toiling in Seattle for a while. He put his trust in Hasselbeck, who seemed like a poor quarterback for several years, but finally seems like he's playing decently, especially with a reliable running back in Shaun Alexander, who is this year's league MVP.

The Redskins have the honor of flying cross-country to face them in the next round of playoffs. They're lucky to be there because the defense pretty much did all the scoring for them.

The much maligned Lavar Arrington, who was benched for quite a few weeks and has earned so little trust from the defensive personnel that he only plays first and second downs, managed an interception, that lead Portis to an easy score. Arrington was positively giddy about that, and beamed uncontrollably after the end of the game, trying to say nothing was bothering him. One year with Norv, one with Schottenheimer, two with Spurrier, and now two years with Joe Gibbs, and he's in his first playoff game. That's how bad things had been for the Redskins under the Snyder regime.

The second touchdown came from a particularly odd play. Marcus Washington had stripped the ball from Cadillac Williams, the Tampa Bay running back, that had been injured for part of the season. He picked the ball up and began to run, when he fumbled the ball himself. This was then scooped by Redskins' safety, Sean Taylor, who ran it in for a touchdown. He was later ejected for the game for spitting at an opponent.

With a 14-0 lead, it looked as if the Redskins would run away with it. Little did they know that they'd score only 3 more points. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay almost tied it up with a third down pass by Simms to Edell Shepherd, who bobbled the catch, enough for the incomplete call to be upheld in review. Tampa Bay tried the play again, then gave it up on downs.

Redskins simply could not move the ball, and broke a record for the fewest number of yards made by a winning team in a playoff, breaking the record held by Baltimore, the year they won the Super Bowl. Portis couldn't run (it seemed he was out half the time), and Brunell couldn't pass (intercepted once late in the game). To be fair, Tampa Bay had the number one ranked defense in the league (though that ranking is primarily based on number of yards given up by the defense, which isn't always a good way to measure how good a defense is).

With this win, the Redskins face Seattle. Seattle seems highly favored. Here are the reasons why. With Hasselbeck, Seattle can put up a lot of points. They have a star running back in Shaun Alexander, who was the league MVP.

But here are reasons to think that Seattle may not be all that good. First, they play 6 games in their division. Who's in their division you might ask? St. Louis, Arizona, and San Francisco. These are bad teams, and two are truly horrendous. Houston wins the Reggie Bowl (though they may pick Vince Young, instead) with the worst record in the league at 2-14. The next two are Arizona and San Francisco.

Let's look at some of their other wins: Atlanta, NY Giants, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Houston. Of the bunch, only the Giants made it to the playoffs, and even that game was close, with Eli Manning tying it up late. And the Giants were just demolished by Carolina, who is a visiting team!

The one quality win they had was against Indianapolis, and they had just lost to San Diego, and were resting their starters. Sorgi played most of the game. Harrison didn't even fly out. So it's hard to point to that.

And look at their losses: Green Bay (in the last game of the season), who is awful this year, Jacksonville, who is decent, but just got thumped by the Patriots (admittedly, without a healthy Byron Leftwich), and yes, the Redskins (admittedly, at Washington).

Yes, the Redskins are one of the three losses by Seattle. Now, there is still every reason to think Seattle can win this. The Redskins need to shore up their offense, though there's reason to believe they can move the ball on Seattle (and Seattle used to be the one team that the Redskins did all right against, even when they weren't so good). Although the defense is likely to be the best that Seattle has faced all year, it is a bit banged up. Still, if Shawn Springs can be effective, it's all the more reason to see if Gregg Williams can rattle the Seattle offense.

But the real issue is travel. Redskins must travel to Seattle. However, travelling is usually a bit easier going to the West Coast, because everything is a few hours later, relative to the East Coast. It's tiring to go West to East, where you add a few more hours due to timezone differences, and have to start earlier than usual.

Still, I put the game at just about even, and certainly, the Redskins have a chance to beat Seattle. If they were playing, say, Carolina or Pittsburgh or the Patriots, I'd worry a lot more. All three have stout defenses, and also play a ball control style that the Redskins like. Of all the teams to play, Seattle seems as good an opponent as any for the Redskins.

I wouldn't be surprised if they lost, but I wouldn't be surprised if they won either.

Video Killed the Webpage Star

Let me digress a bit before getting on to the point of today's entry. MTV started August 1, 1981 with the video Video Killed The Radio Star by the British band, The Buggles.

The song itself is rather insightful making it a good choice for the first video. Basically, the song is about a change in emphasis from radio to television, and that some stars weren't able to make the transition. It could be seen as a statement about music videos.

The novelty of the music video lead to a lot of creative artists in the first decade, but you don't see that many new videos these days. MTV and VH-1 simply couldn't hold people's attentions watching videos.

Eventually, both stations had to abandon showing videos and go to reality and game shows, or in VH-1's case, shows about the 70s and 80s, appealing to nostalgia buffs. MTV was perhaps as instrumental as any in producing the reality TV show, even if Survivor was the one that made it the format take off.

Instead of talking about music videos, which still occasionally produces highly creative art (see Feel Good, Inc by the Gorillaz), I want to talk about putting video out for all to see.

While most of the talk is on Google Video, there's also You Tube. Both allow people to post up videos, I believe, for free (I have no idea how they manage this).

The question is what will come of this. Will people put good stuff on there? Already, I've seen a few videos that are, well, if not good, then better than what you used to be able to do with video. People now edit somewhat better, can overlay what they do with music, but usually, these videos are a step above home videos, often made without professional actors, or for that matter, a script. It's a person taking a camera, and filming stuff.

Such video sites give free distribution, but what if you want to make money off of it? Or to maintain some intellectual property. Does this do it?

And to gaze into the crystal ball more deeply, is this something people care about? Right now, instead of sending jokes, people may send a link to a site with a funny or unusual video. For example, there's this video called "Matrix Ping Pong". It appears to be this Japanese game show of sorts, where these two guys are pretending to play ping pong. It's not really a ping pong, but a guy holding a stick with something that resembles a ball.

Assistants dressed in black maneuver the two players, so it appears as if they are defying gravity. While it's obvious enough that they aren't, it's still awfully creative. Someone tapes this, puts it up at a website, and tells their friends about it.

The next step, really, is convincing content providers to put stuff on there. Original TV programming, for example. Will people prefer to watch programming off the web.

The first key, really, was to make this video watchable on the web without the usually jittery behavior that sometimes comes from a streaming feed. Both Google and You Tube seem to have done a reasonably good job, provided you have a fast enough connection.

The problem, as it now stands, is organizing this content, and deciding what to watch. Until real content arrives, and until it becomes exclusively available in this medium, and until it becomes easy to figure out what to watch, these services will be novelties. However, there's a sense that Google does not want this to be a pure novelty.

Google has come up with unusual strategies to push its own business. Rather than think of the traditional forms of software, e.g., office software or presentation software, they've looked to search, blogging, and now video distribution as ways of branching out.

They came about the problem sideways, trying to figure out what kind of services people wanted from the web. Not everything they've done has turned to gold. For example, Blogger, while successful, appears to be overtaken by MySpace.

GTalk is not the most widely used IM, as far as I know. I barely use Froogle for anything.

Still, they have more hits than misses, and all without users having to spend money, which is really the most amazing part of it all. Although I'm sure that will change (and perhaps some stuff already requires money), it shows a highly unusual view of the software world.

I think we're still looking at a few years down the road before we figure out whether this kind of video distribution will lead to something interesting or not.

Learning Curve

There are plenty of teachers at colleges who've never had one single education course. Not one. More than that, have they even wanted to take an education class? I doubt it. Teaching is easy. You just teach. And there must be some evidence of it too. What university has ever required their faculty to learn how to teach? They figure it's the transferrence of knowledge from teacher to student, and most of that, they figure, isn't how that knowledge is transferred, but what the knowledge is.

To be fair, education classes are no more about (in general) teaching and learning theory as computer science courses are about installing software. Sure, some of it is about that, but there's also courses dealing with students that have learning disabilities, or teaching younger kids or adolescents.

For some reason, though, everyone else outside the education department seems pretty content that they don't need to learn much about teaching. All the years I taught, I was never really advised to do anything to improve my teaching. Indeed, if anything, it was mainly about putting out fires. For example, a colleague set a deadline for a particular time, and said the project would get a 0 if it came after a certain time. And it did, and it got a 0. Student wasn't happy about this. He was furious. Why should that be the case?

What's the fair thing to do? I mean, without such rules, students (some) would always turn things in late, and you'd encourage that lateness is fine, and that you should be cut a break, when other students worked hard so they could get it in on time.

And what if a student is sick. Not a day. Not two days. But a week. Two weeks. This is already a significant part of a semester. Do you cut them a break? What kind of break? In general, as a teacher, the more you can keep everyone on the same schedule, the more efficient you can be. If anyone is late, you are dealing with them differently, which means they are causing you much more grief. That one student can take as much time as a dozen other students who do things on time.

There are many issues that sit outside of plain-old teaching. In general, most teachers would rather simply teach. Help students learn. Reality means that a teacher's job is not confined to just this, because the teacher student ratio is high enough that teachers must find ways to be efficient with their time.

I do want to get to the issue of teaching, however.

I like to think of teaching in much the same way people think about transmitting information, say, music through an antennae. There's a transmitter. There's a receiver. Information is sent accurately if the signal received by the receiver matches that sent from the transmitter.

This is quite a bit more complex when it comes to teaching, because what we convey is only approximated by words. Concepts such as, dare I say it, recursion and pointers require time for the listener to digest, reformulate, and eventually comprehend.

The most surprising thing I learned about learning is that, no matter how good you are, if the material is sufficiently technical, then half the people listening will have no clue what you are talking about, or only partly grasp what you're talking about. I remember, sitting at a restaurant, watching a basketball game, hearing someone ask about the posession arrow. A person piped up and said that it alternated between teams.

Technically, that's true. That's what the possession arrow does. But it doesn't explain why the possession arrow exists. So, here's the explanation. In basketball, there are times when two players are contesting the ball. Say, I grab at the ball, and you grab it simultaneously. I'm pulling. You're pulling. There's no clear advantage.

A referee would normally call "jump ball" to settle this dispute, to decide who should have the ball. A referee would stand between the two players, toss the ball higher than either player, and on the way down, each player would try to bat the ball to their team.

However, jump balls favor taller players. In college, there are only a handful of very tall players, and so certain teams would generally always have the advantage when it comes to jump balls. So, college basketball instituted a rule that said that in jump ball situations, the team that has the arrow pointing to it gets the ball.

Say, the arrow points to your team. You get the ball. At that point, the possession arrow switches over to the other team. If there's another similar situation, then the other team gets the ball.

With this explanation, you see the history of how the possession arrow came to be, you get the sense of why it exists. Of course, you might wonder why the NBA still uses jump balls, or what exactly is a jump ball situation. And in the end, you may not care about the answer, since you don't care about basketball.

The answer I give depends much on who's listening. Part of the problem with explaining it to someone who doesn't know much about sports is that they are convinced they don't know much about sports, and so they don't make a particular effort to pay attention.

To give an explanation that may resonate more with people who do follow sports, but don't play, say role-playing games, I could tell you a rule about when you should roll 2 ten-sided dice vs. 3 six-sided dice. But it is an isolated rule in a game filled with rules, and makes very little sense in isolation.

If the game is well-crafted, I might be able to give you a good explanation. Or it could simply be a rule that doesn't make sense, but is simply part of the game.

I've tried to explain to my brother the basics of football as well as programming, but he has a strong aversion to me explaining it to him. For one, he honestly doesn't care. For a second, he just doesn't like me explaining stuff to him. For some reason, it grates at him. Maybe because he's really, really not interested. But even when he is, I think it's painful, because he's so used to not wanting to hear me explain stuff.

What's the point? The point is that teaching something to someone is challenging because it presupposes they want to learn. Go and ask a class if they want to learn, and they'll say they do, but they'll also say they don't want to be bored, that they want to expend less effort to learned. If you're funny, then it's much easier to hold someone's attention.

Part of the challenge of learning is that much of learning is indeed doing. You can hear an explanation of how to make, say, a pie, but if you don't try to make it yourself, you don't make mistakes, you don't realize what's important to know. A teacher can run into this problem too. One reason teachers learn about teaching by doing is that they make some assumptions about what the students are learning and how they are learning. They get exasperated if students aren't learning at the pace they want.

I remember taking a class where the teacher would assign algorithm problems to work on. He rarely gave complete solutions. They were sketches of solutions. That was his problem. He thought that you simply had to give a solution. It never occurred for him to think about how one would come up with that solution. It's getting the right kind of thinking that helps you head to the solution, but so many people are unaware of how they come to solutions. They think hard, and get to it. But have the m explain how they do it, and they aren't really sure. Then, have them explain how anyone else is supposed to get it, and they'll say "Well, I figured it out. And a few others figured it out too!". And eventually they decide it's something you're born with, which makes you wonder why they bother teaching, except that, with some odds, the people who are born to understand it just need to be directed to the right problems to think about, and all is well.

Oh, I forgot to say that there were solutions for only those problems he cared to give solutions to. The rest, he'd point to some paper or another. At the time, I thought this was the height of laziness. I believe I was right. He honestly didn't want to spend more than ten minutes writing solutions, even if he'd have to spend hours and hours writing up a paper to submit to a journal, he couldn't devote even a fraction of that time to writing good solutions, which, by the way, he could even reuse if he had done it right the first time.

But, it's not like he was wrong either. If I really wanted to be successful in this area, I needed to read papers. But I had never done this as an undergrad. No one had bothered to explain it to me, and I was supposed to magically infer that reading papers, even papers that were probably written in a rush to other people who are well-versed in algorithms.

If you want to explain things to people, you need to know where they're coming from, and the truth is, the audience is far from homogenous. Give me one person, and I can sketch out an explanation for them and they'll go "yeah, yeah, I get it". Same explanation, different person, and I'd have to explain it ten different ways, make them review stuff they should already know, and even when it kinda got through, it would not make as much sense to this person as it did to the first person, who had the right mental tools to take that answer, and make sense of it, and more importantly, take it to the next step.

And really, many people find it incredibly challenging to listen to an explanation. You might think, well, I'll simply ask them "Do you have any questions?". But it's the one thing that you can ask that simply doesn't work. Many people are so lost that they couldn't ask a well-formed question if they wanted to. Some get it, and don't need to ask questions. Some are indeed too shy to ask.

You would think, for such bright people, teachers would realize how rarely this works. My solution is simpler. Ask the students an easy question based on what you've been teaching. If they can't answer it, then you need to work on your explanations.

For technical things, I'd suggest the following strategy. First, show them how to solve a problem. Then, ask them to solve a similar problem. See how well they do. Then, add a twist to the problem, and see how well they do. You'd be surprised that there are people, when shown a solution, then asked to reproduce it, aren't able to do it. That goes to show you how much you showing, and them not doing makes a difference.

There's a problem with this idea. It can slow you down. Also, there's no guarantee people will want to do it. Learning is a painful process for some. They feel like they're being forced to do something, and some mentally rebel against it, even as they ought to know it's in their best interest to pay attention.

But, when it works, it should work far better than the way you've been teaching now, because fundamentally, it gets students to do things now. And doing is almost always a better way to teach then having them watch you.

How obvious do you think this idea is? It doesn't seem revolutionary. Maybe it isn't. But see how often it is used, and then ask yourself why teaching is often this passive one-way experience.

And then you'll have the answer why students don't learn as much as they can.

I Hop to IHOP!

It's been a while since I've been to IHOP.

I'm willing to guess on the order of years. I used to go to IHOP all the time. (Has IHOP been IHOP like forever? The JLo-ification of words has made McDonald's into Mickey-D's, which was always an unofficialy nickname, and Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC, but a ponderously pretentious name like International House of Pancakes just invites a shorter name like, well, IHOP).

I stopped going for several reasons. First, during the weekends, which is the time I'm most likely to go, it was a madhouse. There were too many people all the time. Second, service was often so-so. Third, it was often times expensive. You think of spending five bucks for pancakes, not ten bucks.

But in my vain effort to find some place to eat that was good, I ended up at IHOP (I had been hoping to make it to IKEA, which has cheap eating fare, but it wasn't open for twenty more minutes, and I wasn't willing to wait).

Surprisingly, the experience was rather pleasant. I was seated quickly, asked about a drink order (coffee, thank you), put in the order, got the order five minutes later (from a second person), and shortly thereafter, got a bill, and was ready to go. I think I was in and out of there in fifteen minutes, which is what I like to do when I'm by myself.

Speaking of which, restaurants need to learn that if you see a person dining by themselves, get their order in first (unless you're in the business of serving many people by themselves). Cut them in front of everybody else. If there were ten people ahead, put that one person up front.

That one person is there by themselves, and basically, they want to get food, and get out. People who come in groups see it as two things: hanging out with your friends and eating. You can do the first, while waiting for the second. You can see where I'm heading with this. A person sitting by himself or herself is a loser, and as such, they wish to eat and leave.

Restaurants, by and large, seem oblivious to this fact. Maybe the pricier places are more considerate, but your local run-of-the-mill restaurant should do it too. There's even an added benefit. If I want to eat and leave, then I'll do so far more quickly than the patrons who are there to yap, yap, yap, and you'll get a table opened up more quickly so you can seat other patrons that want to blah, blah, blah.

In any case, that wasn't the problem today. I was seated quickly, had my order, my food, and everything. Heck, I even had two kinds of hot sauces (the standard McIlhenny Co. Tabasco sauce---does anyone even know the companies name? Goodness! And the Cholula hot sauce, which is a bit sweeter and less tangy than the tabasco) offered. People were friendly.

Yes, it was still a madhouse. But, I think they dropped the prices. I seem to recall prices closer to ten bucks. This was $7. Had I paid attention to the ads on the table, I could have found pumpkin pancakes for $5. But oh well.

The only other problem, which isn't so much IHOP's fault, as restaurants in general, is that portions are just way too large in American restaurants. This is why we, as a country, are so fat (that, and the need to have fried foods everywhere). My order was Chicken Fried Streak with gravy, three pancakes, and three eggs.

Really, two smaller pancakes (the pancakes weren't that large, so that was good) and maybe an egg or so (the ones I got were a bit undercooked, so I was a bit underwhelmed).

Still, on the whole, it was a more positive experience than I had hoped.

I'd like to find a breakfast buffet. I remember a friend took me to one ages ago, but I neither recall the name, nor the place. It wasn't that great, but it had a pleasant atmosphere, and the buffet meant you didn't have to wait.

Now, I feel, as a colleague likes to say, loathesome. Ate too much food, and all I'm thinking about is passing out.

Cheers!

MySpace, the final frontier

Did I ever mention how frightful this editing pane is in Blogger? Folks in software discuss two kinds of software. Desktop applications and browser applications. Desktop applications are things you could use if you didn't have a browser. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, and so forth.

These applications are said to be feature-rich. They have good speed (usually), good interaction (usually).

Browser applications, on the other hand, have progressed beyond basic webpages, but not a whole lot. Blogger, for instance, uses this window pane that holds a different amount of text depending on the font you're using. The painful part is that you can't even resize this thing.

Generally speaking, I prefer browser apps, at least, in principle, because it attempts to be a kind of OS that works everywhere. I can be on a Mac or a PC or Unix workstation and expect (more or less) my applications to work. Except I would have thought someone would have come up with a decent language to write apps. Everything used on webpages generally sucks.

But I severely digress.

Because I wanted to talk about MySpace.

Again.

A few days ago, I came to the conclusion that there were many people migrating to MySpace. I'm sure news magazines have come to this conclusion far sooner than me. I had, of course, been puzzled wondering why MySpace was any more successful than, say, Blogger.

I was perusing through some MySpace, well, what do I call it? Blog? Spaces? Well, whatever they are, and began to piece together what makes it successful.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, MySpace's key is linking to friends, and the key to that is putting up a photo.

A few years ago, there was this website called something like amihotornot.com. The website, as I understood it, was something of a joke. You'd put a pic up and let the world decide whether you were hot or not. I suppose it became a way for people to decide whether they liked someone based solely on looks, which, alas, is how many people decide whether they like someone.

Many other sites began to copy this idea, with little variation. However, the sites made the act of seeing and being seen purely reductive. You ranked others. They ranked you. It was, fundamentally, a cheapening act, and yet people didn't seem to mind. Furthermore, that was all it was.

On the other end of the spectrum were blogs. These were sites where the more literary types (yeah, right!) would pontificate on such high-minded topics like whether Bush is good for the country (is that Reggie or Dubs?).

The problem with blogs? It takes a lot of work to keep up. Most people eventually tire of it, and the blog falls into decay. This is especially true, I'd say, for the younger crowd, even if, in the end, they have more time on their hands to maintain a blog.

What blogging services, like Blogger, lacked, was a particularly easy way to link to others, and more than that, to do away with the blog as the centerpiece of interaction.

MySpace is, therefore, a mix of Blogger and amihotornot. It allows people to tell who they are, then link themselves to all their "friends". That would be boring too, except now that people have to put photos up, they try to put something that will attract others. Should they look serious? Like they don't care? Fun? Whatever. They pick a pic that hopefully maximizes other people's interest.

The next step, which is also big, is enough browser real-estate to talk about yourself. This is done, typically, by describing yourself and what kind of person you're looking for. Many people fill out quizzes about themselves, and of course, you can blog about yourself, should you choose to.

The final step is to allow others to comment on you, naturally, with their picture, so you can see who's saying what. Commenting on other people's spaces is convenient because you don't have to write a lot. A short "I miss you so much! We really have to party again!" suffices (oh, I must retch after writing that).

Now, what prevents this from reducing down to a bunch of people you simply don't care about. In reality, I suppose nothing. But, for those involved in it, it becomes a kind of odd competition. Who has the most friends? How savvy are you? Who is the funniest, the quirkiest, the hottest?

And that brings me to the point that has me intrigued. Some people remember high school fondly. Some despised every minute of it. High schools are a story within a story.

On the surface, high schools are schools. They are places of education. People are supposed to learn.

However, the kids attending high schools are adolescents. They're evolving from kids, who like to watch cartoons, play video games, and hang out with their friends (wait, I know a few 20 somethings that this describes...) into adults who are starting to be interested in the opposite (or same) sex, and are beginning to worry about how popular they are or aren't.

Some people rely on their good looks. Others on their witty banter. Others on their brooding. Others are psychotic. Others brainy. The list goes on. But, for a long time, this kind of social Darwinism was primarily confined to the high school itself. Whether you were popular or not rarely mattered to the next high school over.

But things have changed, and we have the net to credit or blame for that. Now that it's relatively easy to post things on the web, and free of charge, once you pay the admission of having a computer and a decent connection to the net.

All of a sudden, your presence is not confined to your physical body, or possibly, phone calls or (egads!) letters sent via snail mail. You can now log into your favorite messenger service (or several!), and people know your virtual presence all day long.

And these days, people aren't shy about letting others know what their lives are all about. They're out eating, clubbing, watching a movie, taking an exam, even snogging.

To understand this mindset, ask yourself whether you do any of this? If you don't, ask yourself, why not? You might be saying to yourself "I don't want people to know what's going on in my life". You don't want to discuss what's up with your girlfriend or your spouse. You don't want to say you covet someone else. You don't want to mention the various pecadilloes you have, or the immature or spiteful thoughts that cross your mind. People don't deserve to know that.

And it's not really strangers you're afraid of, it's the people you know. Strangers, as long as they're content to not contact you, are this nebulous concept of someone "out there". The people you know, on the other hand, are they there because they find your writing style intense, your insights sharp, or are they trying to figure you out, trying to find some weakness, some flaw, some something that will make them giggle with glee because they have something on you.

These are natural fears that prevent people from actually blogging about anything more interesting than the movie they watched last week, but also, it's that people don't want others to know.

For some reason, such fears don't extend to high school (I should extend this to college, because it applies just as well). I suspect it's because, for the most part, people are single and therefore the consequences are less for anything bad they might do. They don't have jobs to worry about. They don't have spouses or kids that might check stuff out.

I suspect MySpace creates a dynamic that's somewhat similar to what you find in high school. There's a bunch of people trying to be accepted by others, except, in this case, on a much larger scale. On the other hand, there are people who'd rather not have a MySpace, because they don't want to compete with their more popular friends.

And the stage is frankly larger now. Rather than popularity in your high school, you can now become popular on a much wider scale. You look at your friends, and your friend's friends, and so forth. And because people are on the Internet, picking up conversations with "strangers" is even easier.

I don't even mean this in the boo-the-Internet-is-scary sort of way. When you head to college, you're meeting new people all the time. Why should it therefore matter that you meet them through MySpace?

And, beyond this brave new world of interaction are television shows like the O.C. (and earlier on Dawson's Creek) which are now shows that appeal to teens, especially teenage women.

Let me think about the shows that were aimed towards me when I was growing up. There were SF shows, like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. There were shows like Dukes of Hazzard. I knew people who liked Dallas in high school.

But really, this isn't the kind of fare aimed at teens now. Instead, they are now seeing kids their own age. And what do they discover? That they don't match up! Look how devoted everyone is to each other! Look how mean they are!

I generally don't watch any of these shows, but occasionally, there it is in front of me. I'll relate about the only snippet I recall. Dawson is talking to one of his female friends, saying that he had forgotten his friend's birthday. He feels awful, and knows his friend hates him for it, and acknowledges that he is right for hating him for it.

It's this kind of sentiment that reveberates through shows like this. We owe it to our friends to be really, really friends, to think about them, to feel bad when we don't, to confess this to our other friends, who then advise us to make up. I mean, couldn't Dawson have just said "It's just a frickin' birthday!".

And so girls get to complain to guys about why they can't be sensitive like Dawson, who's such a good friend, even when he occasionally messes things up. Concerns that used to be placed on the twenty and thirtysomething set back in the 70s when women said they wanted men to be Alan Alda (sensitive, cries occasionally), instead of John Wayne, are now being pushed on the ten-something crowd.

All this is swirled together, creating more complexities for everyone. These aren't the high school portrayed in Napoleon Dynamite, isolated from the world (yeah, his brother did get on the internet, but it seems so 80s, using texting to communicate).

And the funny thing about MySpace? Nothing seems original. Nearly everything they did has been thought of before. LiveJournal comes closest to what MySpace does, except it centered on blogs. It allowed you to link to friends (but without pix!). It allowed you to comment on blogs (but on a separate page).

Maybe MySpace becomes the new way people communicate, the Google of the next generation. More than likely, something will replace it, but not real soon. I suspect MySpace will ride out maybe 2-3 years longer, and then there may be something out there that will attempt to compete.

This is hard to predict, because instant messengers are about the same as they were ten years ago, with the exception that ICQ, the granddaddy of them all seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. IMs are basically MSN, Yahoo, AIM, with, I suspect, GTalk way behind. And it appears that MySpace also has some chatting service, and if it does, that is just as key to what they are doing, which is encouraging people to link and talk to each other.

Orkut and Friendster tried to do this, with some success, but somehow MySpace seems to have won out.

This would be better and possibly more ironic if I were making this entry in a MySpace account.

But, please. I have my dignity.

My Space or Yours?

As you can tell, I'm using Blogger. One reason is that it's free. The other is that I've heard of it. There are a few others I know of. Microsoft has their "spaces" and there's SquareSpace (which is pay, although the guys who started it are from U. of Maryland).

But the one site that seems to have gained a lot in popularity is myspace.com, and I have no idea why. It may be one of those things, much like AIM, that once enough people were on it, then it became a deluge.

I suppose one thing myspace has that Blogger doesn't is a simple way to link to other people's myspace. Yes, I know you can do this in Blogger, but never underestimate making it as easy as possible to link to friends. If the page literally yells that you must do it, then you do it.

As far as I can tell, it does this two ways. Obviously, there's a link on the main page. However, that link is almost always a picture. So, when you go to someone's myspace page, you immediately see how many friends they have.

Incidentally, the founder of myspace is automatically a friend of everyone, which is why his picture always shows up. Clever of him, eh?

As I said, the first thing you notice is how many friends a person has. There's also, usually, a place for friends to put their comments on, so you can see how recent the comments are.

All in all, this appeals to the narcisstic, yet insecure teen, who needs to show off just how many friends they have. You look at a myspace page, and it is like looking at some yearbook, except in this case, it's more like, how cute or hot are your friends?

Point is, it seems to work. And that's odd, because LiveJournal did almost the same thing too, and possibly less gaudy. The one thing about LiveJournal is that it emphasizes the blog. MySpace seems to emphasize who you know, and lists. The blogging component, although it exists, isn't used, but it doesn't seem to matter that it isn't.

Oh yeah, I think LiveJournal makes you pay, where I bet MySpace is free, free, free. That has to help too.

Even though I find MySpace to look rather gaudy, it has done its job to attract lots of people. It goes to show you that emphasizing the right things can make it more enticing to people. It doesn't seem to do much original, but it's able to do the right combination of things that makes it appealing to a lot of people.

The Year In

Every time we head into a new year, it's a time for hopeful outlook, and a time to reflect. You see all sorts of best-of lists. I was listening to NPR's All Songs Considered listening to their end of the year best of. It was partly the opinions of several of the folks who do their music show, which leans heavily to the indie scene, as well as votes by fans of the show.

I'll list the top ten by votes. Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, Sigur Ros's Takk, the self-titled Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spoon's Gimme Fiction, My Morning Jacket's Z, The Decemberist's Picaresque, The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan, Death Cab for Cutie's Plans, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and the number one voted album, Sufjan Stevens Come On Feel The Illinoise.

Of these albums, I own all except the Fiona Apple, My Morning Jacket's, and the White Stripes. In other words, I have 7 of the 10 listed, which shouldn't be so surprising since I picked these albums primarily from the website (not quite so true for Sufjan, who I found browsing at Amazon).

The various people who host All Songs Considered were also asked to list their favorite songs. One of them really liked Feel Good, Inc. by Gorillaz.

I just watched the video online, and it is rather unusual. I've heard parts of the song, since Apple used it heavily in one of their Ipod ads. Leave it to Apple to add to its hip status by picking songs that, to anyone else, would just sound like a song, but has some meaning to those in the know. It's just elitist enough that others recognize it, but not so elitist that no one's heard of it.

The video for Feel Good, Inc. draws heavily from anime, but American (or at least non-Japanese) anime always seems a bit different. In this case, it's part anime, part inserted video, a la Apple's Big Brother ad, and ends in a rather subversive, ominous way, which you rarely see in anime. Of course, how would I know? I'm hardly an anime fan. It just seems different.

My listening habits are a bit odd in that I think I'm much older than the demographic for the music I listen to, but I think that I'm not that unusual. I suspect the trend is that as we get older, more of will continue to seek the latest "good" music.

The teens and post-teens that are listening to new groups like Sufjan or Clap Hands, are going to continue to listen to this scene as they grow older and head into their thirties and forties, being more hip to today's scenes than their parents were. You know how parents would often exclaim "That's not music!" when listening to the music of their kids. Now, they may be listening to that kind of stuff for much longer. Heck, NPR may be making this all respectable for the NPR set.

Ultimately, this is a splinter group, one that's gaining some popularity (enough that people have coined the term "yupster" which is short for "yuppie hipster", and yuppie itself being short for "young urban professionals". I suspect the other term for this is bobos, which, alas, sounds too silly to really really catch on. There's a sense of this term referring to a poser, someone who uses, as the Newsweek article points out, the soundtrack to the O.C. to inform their music selection (for that matter, Six Feet Under is also credited for bringing indie music to its fans).

Television shows use indie music to give it a kind of street cred. Although the purpose is completely different, this is how Indian music is distributed. Not through shows so much, but through films. Most bands in the west release CDs and/or tour. Popular Indian music is disseminated through film, usually as the lead actors lip sync their way through the songs (singers are considered so specialized in what they do that mere actors wouldn't think of trying to sing their own songs---Hong Kong actors can work around this because many of them came into the industry through talent scouts looking for singers, then producing albums, and finally, having these singers cross over into acting).

One of the albums I picked up this year was In The Heart of the Moon, a collaboration between Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabete. It's an unusual mix. Toure has often been called a Mali bluesman. Toumani plays the harp-like kora. Ry Cooder, who helped Toure produce one of his albums (I believe it was his last, Niafunke), was also key arranging these two in an improvisational session that lasted a few days.

To be fair, I had CDs from both of these guys years ago, so they weren't so new to me. Before trying out the indie music scene, I picked up a lot of music that's termed Afropop, a lot of it is quite good. There has been some crossover, with the album Dimanche A Bamako (Sunday at Bamako, I gather), two blind husband and wife musicians, singing in French. These two are also from Mali, which seems to be the hotbed of African music.

I also really like the deeply resonant, Cesaria Evora, but I don't know if she's released any albums lately.

I've just put in an order for Konono No. 1, which is a band from Congo. It was considered, along with Dimanche and In the Heart of the Moon, the three best albums coming out of Africa this past year.

I think I'm going to listen to a little more of Clap Hands Say Yeah. I suspect much of whether you like the album will depend on whether you can stand the voice of the lead singer, Alex Ounsworth. It sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of a song. The first "song" is more like an exhortation at a carnival or circus, which, alas grates, but the rest of the album is first-rate.

Although it was released in 2004, the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, the somewhat fictionalized story of a Texas high school football team that feels the pressure of a town to win the state championship, has music by Explosions in the Sky, by a group that's classified as post-rock. It seems like a totally odd choice for music, but it works (for me). The group is based in Austin, which goes to show that all music from Texas isn't honky-tonk, line dancing, and country.

Oh, I'm going to end on a completely unrelated note. Whole Foods rocks! I was at Whole Foods yesterday looking for spices, in particular, nutmeg. I'm not a huge fan of nutmeg, but Dave wanted some, and it is often seen as an ingredient to pumpkin pie. I discover this huge stash of spices, and it's like dirt-cheap. Well, cheap enough. It's like going to an Indian store.

What I got for $2, I'd have to easily spend 3 or 4 times anywhere else. Sure, they're packaged up in cheap, throwaway plastic containers better used for pastries or what-have-you than spices, but I can deal if it's going to cost so little.

Deep in the Heart

I'm watching the game with my housemates and friends, and one of them says that Vince Young is not going to be able to do what he did in that game. He said Young's throwing motion is not exactly textbook, and that he runs a lot. While no one was able to run him down, even Vick doesn't rely as much on his legs in the NFL as he did in college. Defenses are too fast (and too tough hitting) for even the most nimble of quarterbacks to survive long as a running quarterback.

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. I thought, despite his arm motion (which I couldn't tell good from bad), that Vince Young was pretty accurate. It sounds like, from Tony's commentary, Vince threw mostly to one guy, and when that wasn't successful, he ran, and he did that over and again.

To be fair, USC's defense is not one of the best, and the team often gives up a lot of points (strange given that Pete Carroll is the team's defense coordinator), and that, after the first half, neither team did a great job of stopping each other, though there was a critical fourth down stop, where USC decided that if they could make the fourth down, the game would have been over (and it would have been).

Texas came up big, but still had two minutes to make a touchdown, and needed all of 100 seconds to get it, all on the back of Vince Young.

Does success in college games lead to success in the pros? People are high on Leinart, Bush, and Young, the Heisman finalists. It doesn't hurt that Carson Palmer, who only had one good year with USC, is doing remarkably well this year, giving credence to the USC system (to be fair, Palmer is supposed to be taller and stronger than Leinart, but Leinart's been in the system several years).

Does Houston take Bush or Young, or neither? Wilbon argued for taking Bush, saying that Carr was not the problem with the Texans. The lack of a good offsensive line was the problem. Pick up Bush, get the O-line in shape, and Carr, already a few years into a quarterback apprenticeship, a position widely thought to be the slowest to develop, and you're better off than having Young.

Decisions in the NFL don't make that much sense though (the running joke is Detroit drafting yet another wide receiver, when the team so clearly has other needs, and that the wide receivers have not panned out).

Young said he'd return, but Wilbon says there's really, really no reason to do so. The same was said of Leinart, who came back, and his stock is about as good as it would have been last year, possibly better, since his health was in question a year ago (though no one much knew it until he declared he'd return).

We'll see come draft day.

Nice Package

Everything of consequence that folks buy seems to be shrink-wrapped in such inconvenient ways. Think about it. CD. Wrapped in plastic, then the ends have this sticky label. It is a complete pain to remove it.

Surely, surely, the manufacturers know this, and yet, they proceed to confound the consumers with packaging that is meant to infuriate. Why, oh why, do they do this?

I know. If it were so easy to open something, then someone would accidentally open it, and then what would you do? But is it really necessary to make it extremely painful? Is there no middle ground?

Well, that wasn't much to write about, so I'll throw in some other stuff.

USC was playing Texas in the national championship game. Of football. College football. I thought I should elaborate since you may not know this fact. But then, if I have to elaborate, you simply don't care.

USC was hyped up. Last year, they were undefeated, and won a national championship. This year, they were also undefeated. They won the national championship the year before too. They were trying to win three in a row, a feat never accomplished in college football.

Texas, meanwhile, has struggled in the past, especially to beat rival Oklahoma. That has to be rather shameful. Texas is a much larger state than Oklahoma, yet, Oklahoma has remained very competitive in football, even winning a national championship a few years ago. Texas would try again and again to beat their rival to the north.

This year, they finally thrashed them on their way to an undefeated season. However, given USC's track record and with electric stars like Reggie Bush, LenDale White, and Matt Leinart, a list that includes the last two Heisman trophy winners, it's no surprise that USC was favored, and somewhat heavily at that.

ESPN had, for weeks leading up to this evening, hypothesised how the 2005 USC Trojans would fare against a variety of opponents, and the pundits claimed they'd beat all the great teams of the past. Texas was noticeably left out of the discussion.

The game started off low-scoring, and eventually, USC took the lead, at the end. While Leinart and Bush was efficient, it was the Vince Young show for Texas, who was doing pretty much everything for them on offense--running, throwing.

In the end, coaching let USC down. When they had the ball, wanting to eat up clock, they threw a ball for an incomplete, rather than just run the ball. At fourth down, they went for it and did not make it, when they could have kicked the ball and given Texas a much longer field to work with. They called time outs when they didn't have to. A key penalty let Texas have a first down when it looked like they would turn the ball over.

In other words, USC had plenty of chances to seal the victory. Instead, Texas moved the ball down, and let Vince Young and his legs do the work, eventually trotting down with some twenty seconds left to take the lead, and making the 2 point conversion to lead by 3 points, forcing USC to cross enough of the field to attempt a field goal.

Though USC made up a lot of ground on the first play, they simply ran out of time on the second, unable to find an open receiver close enough to make a reasonable kick.

So, in 2006, Texas manages to beat juggernaut USC, showing that, in a close game, coaching still make a difference, or in this case, lack of good game-time decision.

Too bad these games run so long, but at least that's the end of college football until it starts up again in the fall.

Troll!

There used to be this thing, in the Usenet world of yesteryear (like in the 90s!), which was called a troll, which is a post that is meant to create a lot of discussion. For example, I used to read and post to a group called soc.college. Most people there believed in affirmative action, but there was one guy who stoutly did not, and would claim that it was racist to have affirmative action. Needless to say, this generated a lot of discussion, and not of the civil variety.

I'm starting to realize that this is what Joel Spolsky does. He doesn't want to write stuff that's so abstruse that only Alexandrescu understands. No one would read his blog. He doesn't want to make vaguely bland pronouncements. Instead, he wants to be provocative, but in an almost reasonable way.

For example, he recently ranted on JavaSchools (as he refers to them), which are computer science departments that have switched to Java. This is, to his dismay, making it challenging to detect smart people (boo-hoo, Joel!), but the rant is provocative enough that this is my second entry on it, because I suddenly had an epiphany: Joel is trolling!

OK, not the most profound epiphinany as epiphinies go (how do you make that plural?).

But why? Why do this? Because Joel is not Google. He is not Microsoft. He is not Apple. You haven't heard of Fog Creek Software, which sounds like it might write software for bluegrass musicians. And he wants the best. The way he does this is through his blog, through his writings, through word of mouth.

So, when people say, hey that Joel is being an ass, and hey, that Joel is so right about the demise of modern computer science education, it's exactly the kind of response he wants. He's not so dumb as to make this pronouncement sound completely like the rantings of a madman, even as he boils down programming guru-dom to understanding recursion and pointers, he takes precautions to talk about learning functional languages, and working through tough courses, advice that is reasonable, even as it's mired in histrionics.

Joel Spolsky, you are a troll!

And a mighty effective one at that!

Review of Kong

I've just read two reviews of Peter Jackson's King Kong. One is hardly a review, more than a quick sense of what he liked about the film. Yeah, I kinda missed the compare and contrast of the untamed jungle life vs. the crass commercialism of civilization.

The second one is a full-blooded review, which is that of Bryant Frazer. Unlike me, Bryant has seen the original King Kong, and he objects to one decision Jackson made. Where Jackson wanted a King Kong that actually seemed like an ape, which meant that his Kong wasn't going to be sexually interested, and he wanted Ann and Kong to have a mutual, if oddball relation, based on, well, animal magnetism?

The original Kong apparently played Kong as mighty Kong of the jungle who has fallen hopelessly in love with the main character. But here's the key. She doesn't fall for Kong. Thus, it represents, in some odd way, the kind of rejection males have when trying to woo the unobtainable, that even as imposing a figure as Kong can somehow lose complete control, and do anything to impress this woman who just doesn't care.

This creates a much different dynamic, and as Frazer points out, it makes for a creepy sensibility. Far from detracting from a movie, he thinks this vaguely icky idea is what makes the original Kong (and even the mid 70s remake) work. Jackson takes a deliberately more PC approach to the film.

This is the kind of review that's quite interesting because it defends an older approach, even as there's much to admire (and deride) in Jackson's approach.

It's also one reason I like to read good reviews, because they present an insight into the film that you don't get just by watching it, and that the best reviews observe stuff that you don't notice, or don't pay attention to, and describe it with such clever use of the English language, that you want to shrink back to a hole and never write again.

So be a good boy or girl, do a search on Senor Frazer, and read his review.

Memory

I may have covered this before, but I'll do it again since I feel like talking about. If I had to point to one thing that makes smart people smart, it's their ability to memorize things.

I knew someone who objected to this notion. He equated memorization with a lack of knowledge. I can appreciate that view. Teachers in grade school make you memorize presidents, and dates, and so forth. To what end? It's understanding what those events were all about and making intelligent comments that is really what we should strive for in education.

Even so, imagine if you're writing a program and keep forgetting the syntax. At some point, this wastes time, and in the worst case, it's so distracting that it's not even worth the bother.

To illustrate the importance of memorization, think about attending a lecture several times a week. If you can summarize what happened for the last few weeks without having to refer to your notes, imagine how much easier it is to learn the things you need to learn. If, on the other hand, you forget what happened in a lecture 20 minutes afterwards, then you have to go back and relearn it all.

OK, that's unfair. Most people, in fact, don't really learn that much from a lecture. Half the time they're falling asleep, the other half, they've completely lost their train of thought. In the end, sitting in the lecture didn't help. But if you pay attention, and follow what's going on, then you've saved a ton of effort when you actually have to learn the stuff in depth.

But the point is, the ability to keep focus on what's being said, and to digest it, and to remember it, really saves on time later on.

Now sometimes this memorization comes easily, albeit on the easiest of stuff. Many sportscasters have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, remembering results of games, what happened in each game, the key plays, the weather, and so forth. Tony Kornheiser's knowledge for pop songs over the last thirty years is incredible, and so is Nigel's, since he's the one picking the songs.

Some of this information is moderately useless, but just the ability to remember lots and lots of stuff makes it easier to learn.

I suspect memorization is really organizing the information in your head in an orderly manner. People who are bad at names and faces don't try hard to remember faces and names. I have that problem. The easiest way to remember names is to use it right away, or at the very least, not be embarassed to ask the name a second or a third or a fourth time.

Unlike my friend who says memorization and understanding are at odds with one another, I'd say that memorization leads one to understanding.

I know there are some exceptions. There are people who know they can't remember much, but what they remember where to look things up. Most people aren't good at looking things up because it's so laborious. When's the last time you looked up the definition of a word you didn't know? Sure, the web makes that easier than ever, but you still need to be at a computer to do it.

Memorization can be difficult if you don't understand what you're memorizing. The key to understanding anything, I believe, is being able to explain it in your own words. I went to a talk where the speaker calls this being "consciously competent". He says many people are "unconsciouly competent", meaning they don't know how they know, they just know. Forcing them to be consciously competent forces one to organize that information in the head so it makes coherent sense not only to themselves, but to others as well.

That's funny, because I heard this at a short course on Java-related technologies. The stuff I remember best about it is the stuff related to learning, and this one bit about conscious competence.

My brother related another interesting anecdote. He met up with a high school buddy of his (you don't go up there to "high school"---but I digress) who he claimed had a fantastic memory. He'd remember questions on exams and the answers he put, even months after it was done. He'd remember what day of the week certain events happened.

To be fair, since my brother doesn't remember these events, his friend could be lying, and he'd never know. Even so, his friend has no particular reason to lie. But he found his friend had a tough time remembering things that happened more recently in his life, such as stuff happening in the past year.

This, he claimed, was because he had more time to think about the stuff in the past. There's a line of thought (pun somewhat intended) that says that you don't remember things, that you remember the last time you remembered things, and that through repetition or refreshing of these thoughts, you reinforce what you remember. Most often, these recollections occur when you are recounting a story to someone. The more you do it, the more it becomes ingrained.

I recall Abe Lincoln claiming that it was hard for him to remember things, but when he remembered something, he remembered it. He likened it to etching something in metal. It's hard to do, but once done, it never goes away.

Knowing that people remember with different abilities, I knew that this would affect how I taught things. In particular, repeating stuff, rephrasing stuff, would cause it to reinforce. The funny (or sad) thing is that it would work far better on people who memorized stuff. If repetition works well on people who don't remember well, it really does a number on those who do.

The ability to memorize may differ from thing to thing. I knew one woman who was fantastic at remembering people, which one had kids, or which country they were from, but was awful once you did something technical, and made her have to memorize technical definitions. That stuff just didn't stick the way faces and names did. I don't know why that is, although I find I have the opposite problem.

Anyway, food for thought.

Weirdness

I'm trying to figure out why I'm getting an error, so I'm posting this small post.

More Punkin'

I tried making pumpkin pie a second time, but this time I did a few things differently. First, I cut back on the sugar and spices. Second, I cut back on the evaporated milk, because the last time I made it with milk, it overfilled the pie shell.

The recipe also says to heat the oven to 425 for fifteen minutes, then lower it to 350. However, we had a pizza stone in the oven, and it's difficult to lower the temperature quickly because the stone radiates heat, so I never set it up to 425.

However, the result of the pumpkin pie was something rather mushy. I'm not sure whether that's due to not heating it up til 425, or whether I needed more eggs. I used the two as requested, but next time I'll try 3, and see how that works.

In the meanwhile, since the rest of the housemates aren't into pumpkin pie, I'll slowly have to eat it all.

American Pie

I like cuisines of all sorts, particularly Asian cuisine. And I include Indian, when I say Asian, though I tend to exclude Turkish and Russian food. I mean, generally, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Indian foods.

But for some reason, perhaps because I grew up on desserts in the US, I don't care for desserts from other countries. I don't care for the sweets from India. I like some Chinese sweets. Overall, though, I prefer the chocolate chip cookies, the pies, and the general dessert fare in cooking Americana.

One dessert, in particular, I've taken a liking to late in life, and that's pumpkin pie. I'm sure I didn't eat much of it when I was a teen, but once I was in late high school and in college, I really like pumpkin pie.

It never quite struck me what goes into pumpkin pie other than pumpkins, and even then. If you've ever carved a pumpkin, pulled out its stringy guts, its seeds, you'd wonder how you would even eat this monstrosity.

Yet, when suitably pureed and canned, pumpkins make for a great confection. Except pumpkin pie is really a spice cookie made into a pie. Maybe pumpkin itself isnt a compelling enough dessert, or that it's too much like eating squash or some other vegetable.

But no, no, let's add spices, milk, and eggs to it. In particular, cinnamon. Cinnamon, by American standards, is seen as a dessert spice. Added to cinnamon rolls, or to spice up cider, or to sprinkle on gourmet coffees, cinnamon reminds people of sweets.

Except that it's not universally seen this way. In India, cinnamon, in conjunction with a myriad of spices, is as likely to be used to flavor meats, and so there is a cognitive disconnect between cinnamon and desserts that Indians have, which may make them shrug as to why Americans perceive it as dessert (even more fascinating is the smell of almonds, which Americans perceive as sweet, and Indians perceive as bitter, since the smell of almonds is really the smell of rotting, bitter almonds).

I wanted to figure out how to make pumpkin pie, but never did so, until I saw the cover of Saveur with its tempting cover of a pumpkin pie, slightly roasted, with the promise of a traditional Southern recipe, buried inside.

But really, the recipe is about what you'd find on the can, with the portions a little different, but the result about the tasty same.

Eggs, cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cloves, evaporated milk, sugar, pumpkin, bake, and pie.

And it's not that much more complex than buying a pie from the store. Suddenly, I'm all fascinated by foods that are much easier to cook than I had originally imagined, and robust enough to handle variations in the recipe.

Which reminds me. I need to get some pie.

Toodles!

Video and Print

A little while ago I blogged about Kurt Eichenwald's expose of the life of Justin Berry, a teen who had been webcamming for money since he was barely a teen. He's 18 or so now, quit the business, and turned in evidence.

It turns out there's an associated video interview which resembles those you see in 60 minutes, so I watched it, and noted how the video content is different from the written content.

The written article has a lot more information, as written articles generally do, and is often the reason I prefer reading news than watching it. But there's something you get in video, and it's hard to say whether it's more or less honest.

The first thing that strikes you about Justin Berry is that he seems like a normal kid, except that, oddly enough, he smiles a lot, and furrows his brow as he answers questions, as if puzzled, looking quizzically. If anything, he resembles a child star and I thought, in appearance, he resembled something like Macaulay Culkin.

Culkin's actually a good similarity, not just based on the superficial similar looks, but really, Culkin's life. Culkin starred in the Home Alone films and was the next big child star. His parents were managing his life. I can't say I remember much of the details, except, much like Drew Barrymore, his interaction with his parents was troubled, and what seemed like an innocent childhood, when brought in the light of public scrutiny and the untold wealths of acting, lead people--kids, parents--to act out. Not to say such acting out (yelling, screaming, lying) doesn't occur among those with less money, less means, but that it seems more magnified in the acting business.

Culkin dropped out of the acting business for a while, and has resurfaced some, doing independent movies. Barrymore has really come back despite a life of drugs and scenes that might come out of Mommie Dearest.

But this story's different, because Justin isn't a film star, his name isn't well-known, and yet many of the things that happened to him, albeit to a different degree, and to a much smaller, much intentedly focused audience, isn't that far removed from what happens to child actors.

For one, Berry is comfortable in front of the camera. He's used to smiling---a lot. He has an easy charm about the way he presents himself, so much so that you don't realize that most kids his age are really awkward in front of a camera. Watch a college-aged football player being interviewed, and you realize that despite their media popularity, many of them lack the polish to be on camera. We're so used to watching TV actors who are literally trained to be good on television, that we don't realize how unusual that is.

To be sure, programs like 60 Minutes often have guests that also seem comfortable in front of the camera. But I suspect that they prefer not to have people stammer in front of cameras, and probably make difficult decisions about people who aren't good in front of the camera. The key, I suppose, is keeping answers focused, and letting the interviewer push the discussion so the interviewee doesn't have to carry the weight of sustaining the conversation.

Much like the article, Eichenwald presents himself as the objective interviewer. He's balding, has the mannerisms and distancing of a reporter, and the interview isn't so much different from that of Mike Wallace or Ed Bradley. If anything, 60 Minutes tends to be far more manipulative, and that is quite telling about the investigative media.

Before there was 20/20, before there was Dateline, there was the venerable 60 Minutes, which often did quite well in the ratings. This show had the veneer of journalistic integrity with the dispassionate reporters all heading into retirement age, lending authority and gravitas to the situation, their uninflected voice giving the illusion of impartiality.

And therein lay the problem of such programs. They seemed like news, when they were advocates, and that's why they were so popular. Go watch a few segments of 60 Minutes, and you discover that they often present two sides, say, a whistleblower and that person's employers who have since fired them, and you find yourself rooting very strongly for one side.

Why is that? Isn't 60 Minutes impartial? Well, no. This is the secret of their popularity. They make it seem like they're presenting both sides arguments, but it always works out that one side is, by far, the good guys, and the other, the bad guys, and by the end, you're despising the bad guys. You've been roped to believe exactly what the makers of the segment want you to believe.

To be sure, had you collected the evidence yourself, you might have come to the same conclusion, but that's not the point. The point is you are being manipulated. Were it, say, some interview about the inner workings of how the interest rates are adjusted, you'd be bored out of your skull. Such segments never make it on the air because it lacks the emotional investment from the viewer.

20/20 caught onto this formula, mixing serious segments where you'd root for one side, with offbeat segments often starring John Stossel. Even 60 Minutes wasn't relentlessly serious. They, too, would have feel good segments about Martina Navratilova, or about some music star.

What's clearly missing from this generally pleasant interview is the agenda that Eichenwald has, which is that he is completely aghast by this entire situation. His calm misdemeanor throughout doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how thoroughly frightened he is of this world he knew nothing about, and how compelled he is to do something to stop it.

You only get a sense of this by the word he chooses, the questions he asks. In particular, he uses the phrase "adult pedophiles" and "pedophiles" quite frequently, and for that matter, so does Justin Berry. Is it accurate? What exactly is a pedophile anyway? It's important to ask this question because the word is so overloaded with stigma that it can be difficult to think of this term with any degree of objectivity, and is precisely the reason the term is used. It evokes a sense of disgust and a desire to protect.

But, to the definition. Wikipedia presents some information about pedophilia. There are several issues at hand. Age is one. Some people distinguish between people who are sexually interested in pre-pubescent kids, so, for boy, before the age of about 12, and for girls, maybe a little younger, and hebephiles,
which refers to a sexual interest in adolescents, presumably teens.

Justin was 13 when he first started his webcam, and presumably didn't hit his popularity until he was closer to 15. Now, most people would still find having thoughts with a minor to be abhorrent, but it's even more so when you think of it with someone pre-pubescent.

Pubescence, almost by definition, is about the changing of the body that involve developing sexual organs. For women, it is the development of breasts and the start of menstruation, i.e., the ability to have children. For men, it's more about the ability to produce semen. For both, there are other characteristics, mostly involving hair growth, the deepening of the voice. This is a period of transition as kids are becoming adults.

It's also a period where many teens are beginning to experiment sexually. Many teens, by the time they are 17, have already had their first sexual experience, but there are even teens who remember having sex at 13 or 14, what might seem, to some, like an extraordinarily young age. Often, this happens with say, a friend of an older brother or sister.

There are laws against sex with minors in the U.S. primarily because this period of time is very confusing for teens. While most people would forgive, say, two teens who are in a sexual relationship (are both pedophiles?), because they are both immature, and at least, they are close in age, people become queasy when the one person is significantly older than the other. Even perfectly legitimate relationships between 40 year olds and 20 year olds (think Hugh Hefner) are seen as manipulative, with the older flaunting wealth and the younger seduced by the maturity and the opportunity to buy whatever.

Is it unhealthy to have these thoughts? Ads push youth and sexuality, particularly, Calvin Klein, Abercrombie and Fitch. Most of those portrayed in the ads are usually between 18-25, which is just beyond the age that camwhores are, but not always. Camwhores themselves could be between 18-25 as well.

Remember Britney Spears? How old was she when she jiggled her way onto the male consciousness? How many men, even significantly older men, were turned on, and how much did she know that she was being provocative, that she would turn people on? She wasn't a pre-teen. She was a teen. She was already becoming a woman. People would have to remind themselves how old she was and tell themselves it was wrong, and yet, she could look just as she does, and be 5 years older, as she is now, and those thoughts would suddenly be fine again.

The reason people are unnerved by this situation is that teens are still emotionally vulnerable. We've automatically been told that it's wrong, but without understanding why it's wrong. It's not that these kids are innocents, because frankly, some of them are far from innocent. It's that they are emotionally raw at that age, and are unable to process their feelings adequately, and in particular, they may be prone to manipulation.

Again, such things already happen to teens by other teens, but in this case, it's the blind leading the blind. Those manipulating are not particularly good at it. In any case, there's something sweet about people of the same age being together. You think of high school proms, and dates to get ice cream, without realizing that modern day high schools are filled with kids who are already thinking about sex, and doing something about it.

It's just that when someone is much older, there's a sense that they are obsessed, beyond normal means, about the situation, and further, that they are able to take advantage of the situation.

I recall being in high school, where a girl, my age, was, by all accounts, having sex with the English teacher, a man old enough to be her father, and in fact, had a son not two years younger than the girl. Was this teacher nuts? Yes and no. The girl herself did not deal well with her own parents, in particular, she had many a fight with her father, who eventually hired a detective to find out what was going on. I suspect, as a sign of rebellion, she wanted to go out with said teacher. Now, he should have said no, and he had to know that the consequences were high: his wife, his son. And yet, temptation can work its ways, and often does (see Election for a movie treatment of this topic).

There was a combination of factors that lead this to happen, yet, it's easy to pin the blame on the predatorial nature of the teacher. I'm not saying that maybe he didn't think about these things, because honestly, I don't know him at all. What I am saying is that when something is so demonized, it's very difficult to treat the subject with any sense of rationality, to see what might be going on.

Back to the story. At some point, Justin also refers to his fans as pedophiles, and, to some extent, this is roughly accurate, because it pushes the boundaries of the definition in at least one major respect: that he was definitely peddling his sexuality. Where Britney hints at showing off her goods, Justin crosses that boundary.

So let's bring up another issue. Kids and drugs. When a teen does drugs, is the teen blameless? When they smoke pot, are they free from blame? Maybe because we think of the people who get kids on pot as just their age, or just a little older, we place the blame squarely on the kids themselves. It's not like parents are coming to schoolyards and selling it to kids, a thought which some might recoil at. But the kid takes some blame.

But why? Some kids say they've learned to say no. Others think it's cool and neat, and try it out. Perhaps they learn even more, that pot , while less harmful than serious drugs like cocaine or heroin, was lumped equally, because people wanted to pass laws that would get blacks into jail, and since blacks were into pot, then voila, let's criminalize that. It's a thought so pervasive that people who have distanced themselves from drugs often do equate pot and cocaine as equally dangerous.

What makes one kid do drugs, and another not do it? Part of it is to deal with problems. There are kids, given the same situation as Justin, who wouldn't have done what Justin did, pure and simple. Even teens realize that they shouldn't do this, and can get away from it. It's not entirely surprising that Justin did not get along well with his folks, and as cheerful as he seems in an interview, this is someone who was, indeed, seeking friends.

And to that extent, those involved were guilty of pushing Justin's emotional state. He wanted someone to care about him, and people were willing to take that role on. But, it's more subtle than that. There's reason to believe that people who wanted to be his friends honestly believed that, honestly deluded themselves into thinking that they were his friends, but if push came to shove, they'd know that without his acts, they'd be offended, and want more from their "friend".

And there's reason to believe that Justin didn't consider these people "pedophiles", at least, not in those terms, though probably the terms weird and scary would be more accurate.

And that gets to the point of the interview.

It strikes me as less than honest, not that the honest truth would be any less harsh, but that somehow Justin is seen as something of an innocent, and part of it is that he smiles his way through, when what went on was plenty enough serious on both sides. When he says he was "messed up", that's very true, and yet, for many years, he didn't mind that much. It gave him an odd power trip, it gave him money, and it gave him the warped life, much like a MacCauley Culkin that one can't even begin to imagine.

In particular, what doesn't come across in the interview, but what does somewhat come across in the written piece is that Justin, himself, was manipulative. He knew he had power. He'd ask for thousands of dollars, and he'd get it. I doubt he was Mr. Congeniality all the time, and probably berated fans, then came back whimpering later, begging for forgiveness.

The print version gives you a much better sense of this cautionary tale, that the video doesn't, and the video is, in fact, more likely to lie. Eichenwald being calm and impartial, when he's clearly not. Berry being wide-eye and, well, if not innocent, then possibly disarmingly charming, too much of a regular guy to have ever gotten into this, and really, saying words that he wouldn't have said had you approached him earlier on.

Did Justin really want to "save other kids", or was this impressed on him as a compelling reason by Eichenwald himself? I don't blame Eichenwald for wanting to get Justin out of the mess that is his life, in fact, I applaud it. But I'm sure he had to do as much manipulation as Justin's fans did to get Justin to realize the errors of his way, that if Justin didn't do the right thing, how many others would be hurt? Did he want others to really go through what he went through?

What he doesn't get at is its similarity to drugs, such as smoking or alcohol. You can tell people that they should stop doing drugs or alcohol because of the kind of evil it does to them. And yet, it hides the fact that they were hooked on it, bad, and that it was for lots of reasons they stay hooked.

Camming was a drug to Justin, as it is to many others. From it, he derived attention, power, money, and from it, he derived a warped sense of the world, met with people who could, more or less, lead normal lives, and yet felt compelled to a similar addiction of their own. You'll notice that the fans of his site were not interviewed. Why not?

Simple. They would seem far too normal, far too ordinary, and then they'd have to play up the theme of "evil lurking behind innocence", a Dave Lynchian theme from Blue Velvet. It would be the banality of evil going on, and the demonization would have to be amped up, even as the angelization of Justin is amped up too.

Ultimately, you'll not get an accurate picture of what really happened without other interviews, taking, alas, a more dispassionate (or possibly even sympathetic) view.

And that leads to a film I watched a few weeks ago called Good Night and Good Luck. A film about the life of Edward Murrow. He becomes symbolic of the kind of journalistic integrity and neutrality that journalists in the US inhabit, and yet, it really was this attempt to deal with the witchhunts of Joseph McCarthy, that he goes from journalist to a kind of advocacy.

Other countries are more clear about their biases. In France, if you want a liberal viewpoint, you get a liberal newspaper. If you want a conservative viewpoint, you get a conservative paper. In the end, you get the news shaded how you want to see it.

These days, Fox News is as close as you get to having news shaded the way a certain population wants to see it.

I don't mind that journalists generally want to appear neutral and unbiased. I think that's a strength of American journalism. What I do mind is when the try to lend the weight of unbiased journalism to something they clearly have bias on, and while Eichenwald doesn't entirely hide this fact, he also doesn't put it completely out in the open.

Were he to point the camera at himself and ask the questions that he should ask, you'd get an interesting answers. What did you think when you first heard the story? How do you react as a parent with three kids? Can you sympathize with the people who went to his site? Can you sympathize with Justin? Is this a kind of Taxi Driver thing going on ("you talking to me?")?

And one other problem with the story, which again, happens with shows like 20/20. It's the story of one person. When you hear one person's story, you get one view, and maybe that view isn't representative enough to tell the whole story. For example, I remember a segment where they send one white guy and one black guy with exactly the same credentials, and everywhere the black guy goes, he's unable to get a fair shake.

But that has to be shoddy journalism at best, seeking out just the kind of people who would act that way, claiming rampant racism. In that segment, the black man tries to hail down a taxi, and no one will stop, which doesn't get to the fact that many taxi drivers in New York City are often Pakistani, just as dark skinned as the passengers they may not be picking up, and yet, the point is to insinuate that these are white guys, and of course, had he been picked up, that part would be left out of the segment, as it doesn't illustrate the point that the writers so desperately want to convey.

Hot N Sour, Part 2

Typically, once you've made a recipe once or twice successfully, then you'll probably good after that, but for some reason, my third attempt at hot and sour soup did not go particularly well. Of course, it would have helped if I had followed exactly what I did the first two times.

Except, really, the first two times weren't successful. In particular, it wasn't hot enough. I'm following a recipe that is right out of Cooks Illustrated, but it seems to rely on white pepper to make the soup hot, and that just doesn't seem workable. At best, it may work with freshly ground pepper, but it isn't even close for stuff that's not fresh.

I also tried using black vinegar, by Koon Chun, and unless the bottle I have is bad, it doesn't come anywhere near close to making stuff sour. When I tried it last time, I used rice vinegar, and that worked pretty well. I may try Chianking(?) vinegar which is also some kind of black vinegar, with a much different taste.

I think I need to try the recipe out from Saveur, which is another snobby cooking magazine that seems to focus more on typical "American" cooking, despite its fancy name. Unlike, Cooks, Saveur does not explain why its recipes work. In that respect, Cooks is pretty much unique. I've complained before that recipes rarely explain why they work.

That's because people often pass it down, and rarely explain how they came to that recipe.

Anyway, I'll need to get the magazine recipe and see if that's any better.

Let you know how that goes.