tags: personal journal

Before I talk about the nipple incident I need to discuss the way I walk. I walk very quickly, with long, even strides. I tend to look at the people I'm passing. Sometimes I stare at them in a very disconcerting way. If I'm not looking at people's faces I look straight ahead.

When I am on a collision course with somebody, I change direction. I telegraph the direction change from a long way off by reorienting my entire body, rather than just my feet. After making eye contact with people, I look towards the ground, so as not to be misconstrued as aggressive. The whole eye contact and reorientation thing gets stressful, because I never end up walking in a straight line, but is on the whole rather pleasant, because this is typically how other people behave.

Well, geeks beware, because apparently this kind of footpath politeness marks you as someone of low social status. I was reading one of those horrible pop-evo-psych blogs on the nature of social status. I'd like to summarise the argument of the blog post so you don't have to read it, but it was quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I am having trouble. On the other hand, the post is quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I don't recommend you read it.

The post does, however, link to a completely innocent improvisation blog post on low- and high-social-status walking behaviours. This was interesting because it presented lists of behaviours for actors to convey low and high social status to audiences.

One of the low-status walking behavious is "gets out of the way of other people". Others include walking jerkily or with unnecessary movements, looking up at people (head tilted forward), slouching, and so on. High-status behaviours include looking down at people (head tilted back), not looking at low-status people at all, and assuming other people will get out of your way.

So tonight while walking home I thought I'd live the high life. Instead of making eye contact with people I stared directly at where I was headed, giving the impression that I knew where people were but that I wasn't going to waste time looking at them. I didn't check to see whether people had noticed me. I didn't smile at all. And as usual I walked quickly, smoothly, and without slouching. Essentially, I acted as if I were more important than everybody around me.

The first thing I noticed was that walking this way was very relaxing, because everybody got the hell out of my way. The second thing I noticed was that walking this way was a little stressful, because every so often I would encounter somebody who had the same idea. This essentially turned a simple thing (walking home) into a ridiculous dominance challenge.

And this is when we get to the nipple encounter, because there was only one person who didn't move out of my way. This guy was rather muscly, taller than I, and obviously not used to encountering geeks role playing at being street poseurs. We strode confidently toward each other. I figured we were actually going to just bounce off each other, a prospect I wasn't looking forward to as inertia was clearly on the other gentleman's side. Fortunately, at the last second, we both did that awkward 45-degree watch-where-you're-going-you-jerk twist common to street theatre. Unfortunately, we were extremely close to each other at the time, so there was a fair bit of chest-to-chest sliding involved.

And that is how I rubbed nipples with a well-built man halfway along London Bridge. It was easily the most homoerotic thing I have ever done on London Bridge.

Idea: start a gym club for logicians. Call it "The excluded middle".

I just read a great interview with a moderator of encyclopediadramatica.com. It's clear that the interviewer was expecting the moderator to be a young stoner with anarchist leanings, but this expectation turned out to be hilariously wrong as the guy is a middle-aged professional and father. Ninemsn applied the standard you've-been-a-naughty-boy, what-have-you-to-say-for-yourself line of questioning anyway.

Choice quotes from the article:

Do you think it's possible for people to go too far with free speech? Is there a line that can be crossed?

Let us talk epistemology for a moment. The minute there is a hidden limit on speech, it is no longer free. Free speech with limits is not free speech under any circumstances. But Matthew 15:11 (what goes into a man's mouth does not make him "unclean", but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him "unclean") certainly applies to some users of ED and virtually any other web community in existence.

Later:

Allowing such material to be published doesn't seem to me like something most Christians would be comfortable with. How do you justify this to yourself?

All the things Christ said and did would make most "Christians" uncomfortable. He called the leaders of a specific ethnic group murderers and liars (John 8:44), demanded hatred (Luke 14:26) and flogged bankers and flipped over their tables. John 8 is an extremely condemning document — at the time it would have been considered worse than anything on ED. Many people were brutally murdered by the Pharisitic establishment over it. The synoptic gospels and the gospel according to John were so revolutionary that no publishing platform would take them.

These days most Christians focus on Paul and completely ignore the life and actions of Christ. If Christ were here again today he'd probably start a website and people would be crying for its censorship.

Interview with ED moderator.

Update: I'm late with this. Here's the relevant reddit thread which includes a couple of level-headed comments from the interviewer.

When I finish my thesis I'd really like to investigate some nature-of-consciousness type stuff, because the way the brain works is really interesting to me.

Here's a motivating example from my own brain. I've been in serious thesis-write-up mode for quite some time now. Often, I have problems structuring my writing. A good structure can really improve the readability of a piece of writing, so this is a big problem.

I deal with this big problem the way I deal with all big problems, which is, er, to procrastinate. But after procrastinating, I think about all the stuff I want to express, and start writing bits of it down*.

That (i.e. undirected writing) never works, so then I pace around a bit... okay, to get to the point, what actually happens is that after about 7 hours of this, the way to structure the chapter I'm working on just arrives in my head, apparently ex nihilo, and it all makes sense, and that ends up being the structure I use.

It seems like my consciousness isn't very involved in the creative process at all, but is instead content to just sit back and have fun. Kind of like the tourist sitting in a boat watching Disney's "It's a small world after all", who doesn't know about -- or care about -- the phenomenal amount of work that went into building the attraction**. So, to whatever part of my brain is doing the actual work -- hi, could you possibly hurry the fuck up? I'm keen to move on.

*There is a theory that doing a bit of work and then procrastinating for a while is more productive than trying to maintain focus for hours and hours. For obvious reasons, I find this theory to be very seductive.

**The subconscious mind: 289 animatronic dolls singing to a dark tunnel.

A.K.A. I Think All The Product Placement In Lady GaGa's New Music Video Is An Ironic Joke But Everyone Seems To Be Taking It Seriously

Who wants a Coke?

I like Lady GaGa, but her (not work-safe) video / mini-movie, Telephone, is confusingly full of ads. It features a shot of GaGa's crotch next to a prominent Virgin Mobile advertisement, and also Diet Coke hair accessories, Wendy's fast food wrappers, a Polaroid camera, Wonder Bread, and a couple of other products.

Each of these placements get the classic close-up-on-the-product-name that has kind of been a staple of product placement parody since it began. So by now presumably everyone is immune to this sort of stuff and its inclusion in a music video is a satirical take on the whole thing, right? Well, Welt Branding doesn't seem to think so. Nor does The Guardian, or a host of random bloggers. So I'm confused. Surely people don't actually take this stuff seriously?

The video is also 95% naked women but I'll leave that issue for some other blogger.

So what is this, ironic, post-ironic, or post-post-ironic? Thing is, it probably doesn't matter if it's ironic or not, since it will work anyway.

Also, what's with the Swedish lyrics ticker at the end?

Care for a crotchphone?

... or prison dating?

... or some delicious Wonder Bread?

... but I'm at a party. And I'm damn tired of my phone ringing. Sometimes it feels like I live in Central Station. At night...

This is Gordon Guthrie on attracting customers to his start-up:

it's also like teenage romance, because things seem to go well, we're getting on, you casually say "would you like to buy the software?" and they sort of coyly go "Ooh! Looks very interesting, but I'll need to speak to my friends and we'll see what's happening," and then you go home and sit by the phone, and you're waiting for this: "Please, please, phone up and tell me. Phone up and say you want to buy, you want to buy!"

-- Gordon Guthrie on the BBC World Service

Surprisingly lucid description for a software developer, I thought. ;-)

So I went and checked out his site. My first impression is that they really need to do a better job of conveying what the thing does. The front page says "build your own Web apps, without programming", but that's way too vague. What kind of Web app can I build? Facebook? It turns out that Hypernumbers is two things: a Web-based spreadsheet, and a way to build a Web-based interface to that spreadsheet. You can produce views which come from data in your spreadsheet, and you can also produce Web pages containing HTML forms which let users modify or add to your spreadsheet.

For example, their sample app is a small Web-based poll which lets you choose a favourite band from a drop-down list, but also lets you select options using radio buttons, or using free-form entry. Submitting the form adds the entries to the spreadsheet. Everything about the Web page and the spreadsheet can be customised (for example, the introductory text on the page is a reference to a cell in the spreadsheet containing text). My only beef with it is a counter they added indicating the number of respondents who have "bad taste in music": this is simply a count of the number of people who selected "Queen"! A particularly egregious error given one of the other options is Bananarama.

All in all it seems like quite cool tech, but it doesn't have a real-world use case. Or rather, it has too many: nothing for people to latch on to and say "this is for me!" Also, although the spreadsheet is very nicely done, the demo site is decidedly spartan to the point of looking a little out of date. I realise they want to keep things simple, but some reasonable CSS styling wouldn't hurt that goal at all.

To be honest, my favourite part of the site is nothing to do with the tech itself: it's the way it automatically picks a password for you, by combining two words and appending some numbers. It's more than secure enough (particularly if you do some kind of tarpitting after multiple log-in attempts), but also much easier to remember than the standard 8-random-letters-and-numbers copout. I wish more sites did it!

By the way, if you don't like targeted advertising, as I don't, you can visit Google's ad preferences site and opt out. But it's probably better to give bogus interests than to opt out, because it reveals less information. For example, I selected things I wasn't remotely interested in ("Football", "Nails Screws & Fasteners", "Payroll Services"). The less attractive "targeted" ads are to me, the better.

(Not opting out means that Google will still build a profile of your interests over time, so you may need to repeat this process. But I don't think it's any good at doing that, particularly if you poison the well as above, so I shouldn't worry.)

Facebook: Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

YouTube: the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.

(quotes from Wikipedia)

Bears: Godless killing machines. (Stephen Colbert)
Spiders: Godless spinning machines. (Diogenes, fark.com)
Atheists: Godless sinning machines. (MandyJoBo, tressugar.com)
Americans: Godless sex machines. (billi789, mediamatters.org)
The Universe: Godless vending machine. (aish.com)

Special thanks: Google. Not yet in the Snowclones Database.

This page now includes everything in my tumble log, flonk.lardcave.net. If you read Flonk and not this site, don't worry: it's still there, I'm just stealing its content. But if you read Flonk and not this site, what are you doing here?

LADY MACBETH NICHOLAS

Out, damned spot mucus! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man Nicholas
to have so much blood mucus in him.

It's important to preserve the dignity of the original. For example, I could have written "out, damned snot", but that's a bit gauche, don't you think?

It's trendy to have a low opinion of Valentine's Day, so excuse the hipsterism of this post, but it truly is the worst holiday. Catie and I want to show that we care on non-State-mandated days. So on the day itself, to acknowledge the pure unadulterated commercialism of the thing, we both go to the most depressing food outlet we know (McDonald's), order something small, and people-watch. We do this even when we're in separate cities, communicate by phone or whatever, and gossip. This is kind of funny, but also (to be honest) symptomatic of my early-to-mid-20s tendency to rationalise the life out of everything. We still do it, but, nowadays, just as something to do.

Anyway, Catie, who is much nicer than I am, apparently blatantly ignored years of tradition and sent me these.

I just ate one. It was delicious.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Hi girls and boys! It's time for "Lessons from the masters: The Elements Of Style, by Strunk and White"!

Today we're going to make a recipe inspired by their famous dictum omit needless words.

Banana Bread

You will need:

• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1/2 cup water

To make:

1. Combine all ingredients.
2. Bake.
3. Think about bananas as you chew.

Variations: Use more flour for tougher, chewier bread. Use more water for a more banana-esque texture.

Use more flour and more water for more banana bread.

Edit: This recipe's essence is immortalised in one of Masaoka Shiki's, uh, lesser-known works:
I bite into the banana bread
And jeering resounds
From Language Log HQ.

Tedious caller: Hello Joel and Jeff. My name is Jeffrey Wiens, and I have been a developer for around four years. I'm currently in an applied mathematics graduate program because I needed something more challenging than what my previous jobs could offer. How would you deal with programmers like me, that are intellectually bored at work?

Joel Spolsky: There are no bored people, there are only BORING people. If you're bored at work it's because you're a boring person.

-- Stack Overflow podcast #82