"Mamma Mia": movie impression

I saw "Mamma Mia". Don't know if I would side with the reviewers who said it was a stupid movie, or with those who found it great fun. ABBA's songs remain as catchy now as they were when I first heard them as a child. But the action between the songs is the problem. When I see people acting very stupid, I feel embarrassed for them. Well, unless they deliberately act stupid and I know I'm supposed to laugh at them, as in any Rowan Atkinson movie, then it's funny. But in "Mamma Mia" you were supposed not to laugh but to sympathize with them. And yet the antics of both the girl's and Meryl Streep characters made me cringe. And it doesn't matter that Steve said the only purpose of the characters' existence was to set up situations where they could break out into an appropriate ABBA song. I realize that. But when I see people on the screen, I can't help but judge them as if they are real and supposed to make sense. Unlike my 3-year-old, I can't tell myself "it's just fortend." :-)

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ArmadilloCon 2008: Stump the Panel

Here is my last, stray post from ArmadilloCon 2008. On "Stump the Panel" the panelists are supposed to come up with mundane and science-fictional uses for objects supplied by the audience. Indeed, in Rhonda Eudaly's, S. Andrew Swann's, and Lou Antonelli's imagination things like a pen, a nail file, a little red thing that evaded detection, and a box of Tictacs become something completely different. Especially the nail file. Rhonda had to restrain her imagination regarding this object, because there were children in the audience. :-)

And here is an article about a "Stump the Panel" from the ArmadilloCon 2006. That one was longer, funnier and more imaginative, mostly thanks to James P. Hogan. Ah well, maybe we'll have one of those again some day.

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Software to extract meaning out of life's trivia

Here's a very interesting article in Washington Post, that ties in to some degree with Clive Thompson's article on ambient awareness (discussed in my previous blog post):

Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

It reflects a lot of my own thoughts about what part data plays in our lives, and how it could let us get much more out of life.

"In San Diego, statistics student David Horn [...] is working with his engineer girlfriend, Lisa Brewster, to develop an all-encompassing life tracker, under the working title of "I Did Stuff."

I would like to have these guys' job. They want to track and record everything -- everything that happens in their lives, down to (or especially) the most mundane events.

It's been known for a long time, and a recent study confirmed, that keeping a diary recording every bite they ate helped people to lose weight. And therapists recommend people who have trouble sleeping to record what they ate, drank, and did before sleep, to see if a trend emerges that shows a correlation between certain foods / activities and insomnia. Also, keeping track of your time minute-by-minute -- writing down all activities, no matter how mundane -- may allow you to see where all your time goes, if you feel you have no time for anything in your life. So there is a well-established practical use for navel-gazing, that predates the internet. And the internet made it infinitely easier to record your daily events, both the kind you do consciously (Brightkite for tracking your location, MyMileMarker.com for driving habits, Fitday.com to map food intake and calorie expenditure, Last.fm for listening habits, and even BedPost for sex life), and the kind your body does autonomously (sites for tracking heart rate and blood glucose levels, or the self-explanatory MyMonthlyCycles.com :-))

But these two researchers want to take it much further.

Tracking not just what you did, but what you got out of it

[...] David Horn already belongs to BrightKite, Last.fm and Wakoopa.com, which tracks his Internet usage. He's also experimented with Fitday.com to map food intake and calorie expenditure. It was satisfying for a while, but now he wants something bigger -- something simultaneously broader and more nitpicky -- to fill in the gaps that individual sites don't currently track.

Horn is working with his engineer girlfriend, Lisa Brewster, to develop an all-encompassing life tracker, under the working title of "I Did Stuff."

"I'd like to track the people I talk to," says Brewster, "and how inspired I am six hours later. And definitely location history -- where I am, what time -- "

"Correlated with weather history," interjects Horn. "And allergy data, pollen and mold in the air."

Plus, "Web sites I read and their effect," says Brewster. "If I spend a long time reading a blog, like TechCrunch, but I don't get noticeable output from it."

At first the author of this article is boggled by this level of self-indulgent navel-gazing, but then she seems to understand what it is about. The usefulness of tracking is of course not in the raw data (who would have the time to re-read their life at the same pace as they are living it? :-)) but in extracting trends that would help you correlate perceptions with facts.

Has it really been a month since you last had sex, or does it just feel like that? Did you really floss five times last week, or was it more like twice? Now that you realize that, are you a little less angry at your dentist for that painful last appointment?

Analysis of mundane events reveals profound trends in one's life

Self-tracking [...] is partly about the recording, but also as much about the analysis that goes on after the recording.

The apparent meaninglessness of data recorded over time is actually what makes it profound.

The problem with diaries and blogs, trackers say, is that people use them to record the events they think are meaningful. What they forget is that meaningful events are often a result of months of insignificance, a cause and effect not readily visible to the human eye but easily detected with the help of a computer program.

"Things that happen over time can lead up to bigger events," says Horn. "They may seem small by themselves, but looking at them as a whole I can see how they lead to a bigger theme or idea."

"I was always a terrible self-journaler," says Messina. "Every once in a while I'd write in a journal, but it was always a major, momentous event. 'Got to college.' 'Broke up with girlfriend.' You lose a lot of the nuance that caused that situation to come about."

Tracking can "zoom out over my entire life," he says. It could, for example, help him better understand the aforementioned breakup. "When you've self-documented the course of an entire relationship, trivia that doesn't seem like much could, over time," help him understand exactly what went wrong, and when.

Maybe, to extrapolate on Messina's idea, your weekly date night had been Friday. And maybe you were always in a tetchy mood on Fridays because you'd just come from chem lab, which you hated. Maybe the whole relationship could have been saved by switching date night to Sunday, after your endorphin-boosting yoga class. Maybe you just didn't realize the pattern, because you weren't tracking it. All the answers could be right there, in your life data.

We can extrapolate even further. Perhaps the tracking software, if it was sophisticated enough, could notice increasing frequency and viciousness of arguments between you and your significant other, increasing frequency and length of time spent apart, and things like that. The software could flag it to you as a warning sign that the relationship is in danger. Then you could take steps to get it back on track. You might say most people don't need software to tell them when their relationship is off track; however, I think people often ignore warning signs -- sometimes wilfully, sometimes out of inertia. Inertia certainly plays a huge part in everything we do. We would rather keep a mental image of things as they were at their most comfortable, or downplay the significance of worrisome events, than acknowledge the truth that something is going astray. Life-tracking software could point out discrepancies between our partner's words and actions. It could force us to pay attention to those signs before it is too late.

The software could also give us tools to defuse certain recurring arguments which, if unexamined, tend to pick up destructive strength like a hurricane crossing the Gulf of Mexico. :-) You could look at the software and say: "we've had this discussion before; here is what was said; here is the conclusion we have reached. Do you have any new information that would give us a reason to revisit this issue?"

Of course, there are a lot of people -- most people, perhaps -- who would hate the idea of having their every word or phrase recorded, and of those records being resurrected as evidence (even by people they trust). I'm sure some people might think it diminishes their relationship somehow. But how could truth diminish it? Anyway, that's a social engineering problem, though those are often harder than computer engineering. Among the latter, a major problem would be to find a way to structure the data so as to capture its essential qualities. For example, how would you compute the intensity of the four horsemen of Apocalypse (made famous by John Gottman): Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling? How do you quantify formless, deeply subjective data? How do you even decide what to measure? It would be a tough task, but one I would gladly spend years working on, if I didn't have to worry about making a living. :-)

In fact, if I had come of age at the time of Web 2.0., I would seriously consider going to grad school so that I could do this project as my thesis / dissertation. I would probably find a professor somewhere in some university who could get interested in this idea enough to serve as my advisor. (I've seen people in computer science departments doing stranger projects than that. Or if not in computer science, then surely in the interdisciplinary studies. :-))

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Ambient awareness, digital ESP

There is a great article by Clive Thompson in New York Times magazine:

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

that explains the appeal of Twitter. Like many people, when I first heard of Twitter, and even long after I signed up for it, I thought it was pretty useless. At the very least it seemed useless for verbose bloggers like me, who don't like to post mere facts or sound-bite opinions without context or analysis (and you can't provide much analysis in 140 characters). But, as Clive Thompson says, the constant stream of friends' tweets provides an "ambient awareness" of daily rhythms of friends' lives. To quote the article, "It is very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does -- body language, sighs, stray comments -- out of the corner of your eye."

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich -- and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update -- each individual bit of social information -- is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

I'm beginning to feel that way about it too. And it's good for those fleeting observations that are not meaty enough to warrant a blog post. I might even change my mind about whether such observations do not reveal someone's personality better than well-thought-out blog posts. (If anyone wonders, my Twitter ID is elze.)

ArmadilloCon 2008: Campfire Stories

Joe Haldeman and Joe Lansdale told a few good stories ot the Campfire Stories panel, which took place on Saturday night in a darkened room. The four panelists were seated around a beautiful fake campfire. Joe Lansdale had entertained us Austin fans with his storytelling before at Nebula awards. The point of his Toastmaster's speech was how Texas is so weird it can't help but churn out great numbers of science fiction writers. He illustrated it with a story about the time an epileptic woman visited his house. It can be found in my article on Nebula wards ceremony. He recalled it here at the Campfire panel, as well as other incidents from his life. He shed some light on his family background, which kind of explained how he acquired all that colorful life experience. :-) Joe Haldeman was not to be outdone. I'll post only one of his stories here, as the other might contain a bit too many controversial details. ;-)

Joe Haldeman's story

One day Joe Haldeman was riding his bicycle home from a grocery store in his neighborhood in Florida. (I did not quite understand whether his neighborhood was in a "good" or "bad" part of town.) In these most mundane of circumstances (oh, and yay Joe for using a non-polluting form of transportation!) he got shot by a man in a passing car. The car sped away. The shot wounded him in the butt, but the wound wasn't very serious. He managed to bike home, then had his wife take him to the emergency room. The X-ray showed constellations of old schrapnel wounds. The X-ray technicians asked Haldeman: dude, which one is new? They couldn't tell, and neither could he. Thinking the wound wasn't serious, he declined surgery. He was afraid of surgeons more than of getting shot. The ER professionals replied: "dude, you don't know where that bullet is now! It went into your butt, by this time it can be in your brain!"

Once they figured out which of the multiple wounds showing up on the X-ray was the new one -- it looked round from several different angles -- the surgeon agreed it was better not to operate, since he would have to cut so deep into the flesh it would cause more harm than good. "But if you leave the bullet alone..." he gestured to the X-ray: "what's one more spot to a leopard?"

Joe Lansdale's story

Joe Lansdale's first experience with violence happened when he was 5. He had a little dog with who he bonded very deeply; they were like brothers, going everywhere together, and eating out of each other's dishes. A neighbor once saw Joe's dog digging in his flower bed, so he whacked the dog in the head with a pipe, grabbed him by hind legs and tossed him in a ditch -- all that while Joe was watching. Devastated, the boy went home and told his mother, who then went out, found a phone (they didn't have one at home) and called Joe's father. The father came home and headed straight to the neighbor's house. When the neighbor answered a knock on the door, Joe's father said nothing, just hit the guy really hard in the face. When the guy collapsed, the father took him by the ankles and swung him across the flower bed until the flower bed was completely flat. Then he tossed the guy in the ditch. His method of revenge was ironic, Joe said, because Joe had not told him that this was exactly what the guy did to the dog.

Surprisingly, the dog survived and lived until Joe was 17 years old. The neighbor survived too, but moved shortly afterwards. Back then people weren't so eager to sue as they are now, Joe said -- in fact, the neighbor would have been mortified to let the public know he had the hell beaten out of him. So he moved.

Joe Lansdale talked at length about his father, adding details that puts this story in context. His father was a carnival wrestler and boxer. He could bend coins with his bare hands. He could squeeze an apple with his hand to a pulp. People who tried to take advantage of him did not try to do it twice. One time, when he worked as an automechanic, a guy tried to take his car back without paying for the work; Joe's father knocked the guy out so badly, the guy forgot he had a car to begin with. Joe told of a few more episodes of his father solving conflicts with his fists, scaring poor Joe to death, and making even the local cops fear him. The only person he was scared of was Joe's mother.

After Haldeman and Lansdale spun their yarn, there was a moment of silence, until Bill Crider said: "I once stepped on a gum." He and Scott Cupp seemed a little embarrassed they did not have anything to top Haldeman's and Lansdale's tall tales.

ArmadilloCon 2008: Living With A Creator

"Living With A Creator" panelists were five spouses of creators (writers and artists): 3 women and 2 men. Perhaps unintendedly, the panel provided material for observations as to how an experience of living with a creator differed along gender lines. Take housework. One writer's husband said one of the perks of living with a professional writer is that he never has to lift a finger around the house. Never needs to rush home to feed the dog, does not have to take time off to wait for a plumber, and hardly knows how to operate a washing machine! It's all his wife's job because she has the flexibility of being at home whenever she needs to. It was apparent that not all spouses viewed it the same way, though. One artist's spouse said her husband's cleaning is a sign that he is in the "incubation phase" of his new work. When he's thinking about about his next project, but haven't started it yet, that's when he cleans -- as a way to procrastinate a little before plunging into work.

This reminded me what I heard on another panel, "Why I Write", in which more than half of the panelists proceeded to tell us why they don't write. Some of them put their writing on hiatus for predictable reasons, such as jobs and personal lives being too overwhelming at the moment. One author said that even though her husband lets her stay home and write, she can't. Instead she spends hours on Facebook. "Perhaps having a regular job to go to would help me structure my life for writing?" she asked. "I feel very guitly not writing, but I enjoy playing games on my computer". Well, well -- it resonated with what I've been thinking, that I am lucky my financial circumstances do not allow me to write full time. Otherwise I would be like her, and I would certainly not be a nice "creator" to live with. :-)

"Creatives" not too willing to collaborate

Do creative professionals and their spouses often collaborate? Is it common for spouses to offer ideas to writers / artists? The prevailing answers were: yes to the second, no to the first. Spouses' suggestions are not taken very often if at all, though some good may come out of unsolicited offering. When Joe Haldeman is facing a roadblock in the plot of a book he's writing, his wife Gay Haldeman tends to offer him ideas on how to proceed; he rejects them all, but after a few rounds of that he often figures out what to do next. So all this bouncing of ideas off of one another is not in vain. And Karen Lansdale once helped Joe Lansdale come up with an ending for his story which he had not been able to figure out himself, probably since he had been looking at it too long. So Joe put her name on that story. (I don't know if didn't mention the title of the story, or I just didn't catch it.)

Creative or not, it's tough to work in solitude

A big part of the panel revolved around the more mundane aspects of writers and artists jobs, that are not much different from any self-employed person's. The panic attacks that set in when you find out you've miscalculated the taxes you owe by $8000; the compromises necessary to balance the interactions between a spouse that works alone all day, and the one that comes home in the evening fried from their job. People who work at home face characteristic challenges of loneliness and lack of motivation. Two panelists revealed their writerly spouses seek distractions from solitude. One writes while watching old movies to keep her company, another works while reading a newspaper and chatting with a friend on the phone. (And I thought I was bad for checking email every 30 seconds while writing! :-) But unlike me, they had produced something publishable. So perhaps not all is lost for me despite my distractibility.)

What about the glamorous aspects of a creator's life?

There weren't many stories about dealing with the more esoteric or glamorous aspects of a creator's life. No groupie stories -- imagine that! Not even in science fiction writers' lives! :-) Perhaps we should have invited Neil Gaiman's wife to the panel. :-) And what about the perception of creatives as brooding, emotional, self-absorbed types -- isn't there a rich vein for stories there? The panelists didn't go far into that topic, except to admit that their spouses' moods are indeed affected by whether their creative project is going well, and what kind of reviews their books have been getting. One panelist put it this way: living with a woman who's writing a book is like living with a woman who's just had a baby. All her attention goes to it, so you have to learn to take a second seat.

The upsides of living with a creative

And the upsides of living with a creative professional? For one thing, you get to go to exclusive parties at conventions; though not all spouses enjoyed convention going, and some found SFWA parties boring, it turned out to be worthwhile for some of them when they unexpectedly ran into a Very Important Person they've always dreamed of meeting.

In a more extreme case, Gay Haldeman recalled someone saying to her: "I'm thinking of stealing your Rolodex", because there were all those famous people from Stephen King to George Lucas in it. "Oh, are they?" Gay replied. I don't know what I should be more envious about: the fact that she had rubbed shoulders with all those people or that it was so commonplace for her she didn't realize it was noteworthy! :-)



Gay Haldeman, David Lee Anderson's wife, and Karen Lansdale. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2008 are available in my photo gallery.

A less tangible perk of living with a writer or artist is that your kids (if you have them) often venture into creative professions too -- if only because they don't know any other way of life. In addition, they may develop other kinds of creativity, such as finding ingenious ways to talk back to grownups. David Lee Anderson's wife said their son never put his name on his homework, even though that was required in school. When asked why he didn't do that, he said: mom, you sign a painting when it's finished. "He never finished his homework," David Lee added.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2008 are available in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon 2008: What You Should Have Read

"The Year is Half Over: What I Should Have Read" is a traditional panel at ArmadilloCon, where a bunch of avid and discriminating readers recommend recent must-read books in the science fiction / fantasy genre. The panelists are an assortment of writers, editors and booksellers. Without further ado --

Rick Klaw recommends "Somnambulist" by Jonathan Barnes. It's a late Victorian era / Edwardian novel about a magician. It's the oddest novel you'll read this year, or perhaps any other year, says Rick. The ending is a little weak, but by that time you don't care. He also recommends Ann and Jeff Vandermeers' anthologies "Best American Fantasy" and "The New Weird" -- a collection of really odd stories. They also have a collection named "Steampunk". When you finish reading it, you'll have an idea exactly what steampunk is.

Rusty Hevelin recommends reprints of Robert Heinlein, and Jack Williamson, who's still as good as when he started selling in the 20s.

Sheila Williams didn't recommend any specific novel or story collection, but mentioned a few new authors she likes very much, such as Ted Kosmatka (especially his story "Divining Light" which came out in a recent issue of Asimov's, and got many fan letters from engineers and scientists, who all wanted to perform the double slit experiment described in the story), also Felicity Shoulders, who has a story "Burgerdroid" in Asimov's. She also mentioned recent stories by Elizabeth Bear (March), Stephen Baxter (September) and Nancy Kress, but I didn't catch the titles of those stories.

Willie Siros' list of this year's must-read books

Science fiction:

Charles Stross: Saturn's Children -- his take on the later Heinlein. If Heinlein hadn't gone crazy and was still writing well.

Iain Banks: Matter -- a new Culture novel. Incredibly fascinating far future.

Greg Egan: Incandescence -- Greg Egan is probably the most out there hard SF writer there is; keeps up with the cutting edge of matehmatics.

Greg Bear: City At The End Of Time

Melissa Snodgrass: Edge of Reason

Joe Scalzi -- Zoe's Tale

Joe Haldeman: Marsbound

Chris Roberson: The Dragon's Nine Sons

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother

Peter Hamilton: Temporal Void -- finishes current duology

Richard Morgan: Steel Remains -- a very bizarre far future world

Alistair Reynolds: House of Suns -- new space opera

Neal Stephenson: Anathem

Fantasy:

Thomas Disch: Word of God -- in this novel Thomas Disch reveals that he's God, and that his opponent is Phillip K. Dick, which he's been fighting for all eternity.

Ursula Le Guin: Lavinia

Terry Pratchett: Nation

Diana Wynne Jones: House of Many Ways -- a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. Willie thinks D.W. Jones is the one who God should have tapped on the shoulder, saying, hey, I'm gonna give you millions -- instead of JK Rowling.

Naomi Novik: Victory of Eagles

Adam. Roberts: Swiftly -- Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels turn out to be real.

Jeffrey Ford: Shadow Year

James Morrow: Philosopher's Apprentice

Gene Wolfe: Evil Guest

Joe Abercrombie: Last Argument of Kings

J. M. McDermott: Last Dragon

Matt Hughes: Hespira

Tim Scott: Love In The Time Of Fridges -- surreal. Too absurd to try to explain in 2 sentences.

Sean McMullen: Time Engine

Steve Erickson: Toll The Hounds


In addition to all this, Willie mentioned "Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse" by Victor Gischler. I'm not sure which category it falls into.

UPDATE:

Another person emailed me other recommendations that were mentioned on the panel, that I didn't catch.

Eric Marin recommends: ShadowUnit.org -- crime fiction with a supernatural twist, from TV concepts

Sheila Williams:

-- a Gulliver' Travels redux thingie by Gord Seller

-- "Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons Blues" in the July Asimov's

-- David ????, "Flowers of Nikosia" in December Asimov's, about a Nirvana cover band

Madeleine Dimond: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Some other people recommended:

-- Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

-- Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow

Here are lists of books recommended on other "What You Should Have Read" panels: at ArmadilloCon 2005, ArmadilloCon 2006, ArmadilloCon 2007, ArmadilloCon 2009, ArmadilloCon 2010.

Retiring a cliche

There is a word in The New Hacker's Dictionary "marketroid", a derogatory term for marketing people. It encapsulates contempt geeks supposedly have for marketers. They are traditionally assumed to know very little about technology, being the kind of people who have their secretaries type up and send emails for them, yet they are the ones whose opinion executives listen to. They are the ones who promise customers unimplementable features on unrealistic deadlines, leaving poor techies scrambling to get them out of the mess.

Of course, I can't say whether a mutual hatred and contempt between those groups really existed, or if it was a bogus phenomenon manufactured by people who seek comfort in group identification (like Mommy Wars :-)) But if I were to follow conventional wisdom, I would have to stay clear of marketroids.

But I didn't. Monday night I went to a Tweetup where I met a bunch of technically savvy Tweeple (to use the alternatingly cute and cringe-inducing webspeak :-)) who are essentially in the marketing business. They do it in the new media: blogs, podcasts, Twitter, and social networks. So they are well aware how to use the net to engineer human interactions for all kinds of purposes, from commercial to political to saving the world. And I have to admit this is more interesting to me than how to engineer computers. To model real-life human behavior in data structures, to formalize interactions between people by finding an appropriate electronic format for them, and observe how they change as a result -- I find it fascinating. These folks haven't created the internet and don't necessarily know much about its plumbing, but they have ideas on directions in which to push it.

What I liked best about the people I met at the Tweetup is that many of them seemed to be interested in meeting new people and receptive to new interactions. Unfortunately, I haven't seen so much of that at techie gatherings. Those often turn into "I'm geekier than thou" pissing contests. The tone at this Tweetup felt quite different, far more democratic.

Of course, I still don't know whether all these marketing folks aren't guilty of overpromising to customers. :-)

In any case, I think The New Hacker's Dictionary is overdue for some new chapters.

ArmadilloCon 2008: John Scalzi's Guest of Honor interview

John Scalzi's interview took a different format than the usual Guest of Honor interview. There was no interviewer; Scalzi paced back and forth, shooting the breeze with the audience. He probably didn't say anything one wouldn't find on his blog. It's how he said those things that made him so entertaining. He acted out various stories from his life as little skits. For example, he said, after you win a Hugo, you get only a week to be flaunt it -- and he did a skit of a person who mentions his Hugo award in every other sentence. After a week is over, he said, you're supposed to be blase about it -- yeah, I won a Hugo, it's no big deal.

Then there was a rich vein of humor in his attempts to find out what it's like to be a 16-year-old girl. He had to do that in order to get the "Zoe's Tale" protagonist's voice right. "Hard as it may be to believe, I've never been a 16-year-old girl," Scalzi said. He also never understood girls in high school. "You can ask people I went to high school with. They'll say, "no, John. Noooo."" So what were his options? Hang out with teenage girls at the mall? He illustrated this dilemma with another skit, that began with his sidling up to a girl in the mall, and ended with a restraining order.

And so the interview continued in this spirit. As far as creating Zoe's character, his wife turned out to be his greatest resource. After all, she was a 16-year-old girl once. It took a lot of tries to get Zoe right, but eventually he succeeded, and became proud of Zoe as one of the finest characters he ever created. He also told this story at the writers' workshop to illustrate his point that writers should venture out into unfamiliar territory and not be afraid to fail. In Scalzi-speak that's called "the power of suck".

Later on in the interview he commented on Neal Stephenson, openly admitted to stealing from other authors, and talked about why he could not afford to be as polemical in "Old Man's War" as Heinlein was in "Starship Troopers". Finally, he revealed an unexpected fact about himself.

The whole article is available on my website.

ArmadilloCon 2008: Getting the Biology Right in SF

On "Getting the Biology Right in SF" the panelists skewered writers for common biology-related blunders we see in books and movies. The aspects of biology covered in this panel ranged from human anatomy and physiology to ecology.

As an emergency room physician, Kimberly Frost was uniquely qualified to educate writers on what kind of injuries a protagonist could sustain and still survive. One of the highlights of the panel was her showing the audience how far her blood would spurt if the arteries in various places of her body were cut. The panelists noted that there are lots of individual differences in how much bodily damage a person can incur and survive, but feats like jogging 500 miles with a gushing wound (one of the panelists has actually read a story where this happened) is flat out impossible. Yet human body is capable of less ridiculous, but still impressive performance under duress. Paige Roberts told a story about her ex-husband, who had half of his right hand blown off by enemy fire; the bullet severed the nerves that controlled the two outermost fingers, but he still had control of his index finger. So he clamped the wound down with his other hand and kept shooting, and saved a dozen soldiers' lives. In a few hours, though, he was flat on his back in a helicopter, being medevac'ed. Adrenaline can only take you so far.

Kimberly Frost has first-hand familiarity with what happens when movies and books use medical facts irresponsibly. For example, too many times in the movies you see people breaking the glass with their limbs when they want to break into a house or out of it, and the glass just breaks away. But in reality it doesn't work that way. Kimberly has seen people who tried to do it: some of them cut themselves only superficially, and doctors were able to fix them up, but others cut their tendons that way. Paige writes erotica, and she is careful not to give readers ideas to try things that would be very dangerous in reality -- like bondage with a rope tied around one's neck.

Later Paige Roberts and John Moore got into an animated argument on whether the difference between your and opponent's body mass is a deciding factor in winning a fight. John Moore argued that it was; Paige, who's done martial arts, thought other factors matter more. She said she would have little difficulty throwing a tall, muscular guy across the room, but would find it impossible to do the same to a short person with a low center of gravity.

On the ecology front, one the most interesting observations was the one Kelly Persons made about Frank Herbert's "Dune". "Dune" is often praised for its ecological theme, but the problem with Dune is that it doesn't have any ecology. "It's a planet with one species on it. There's no energy input into the Dune world," Kelly said. It takes a lot of energy to power a worm that's as big as a locomotive to move underground. What did worms eat? And where does the oxygen come from, given that it's a desert planet? John Moore asked.

Why is carbon, not silicon the basis of life? was a question from the audience. Because, says Kelly Persons, carbon is able to form long chains, while silicon can't. A combination of silicon and oxygen can form long chains, but only under certain conditions. If you are writing about an alien silicon-based life form, the temperatures on the planet where it evolved would have to be very different.

About the writers' workshop from personal perspective

I got some useful critique. But the main points I would need to address to make my story better are nearly impossible to implement due to their paradoxical nature. As I said before, I chopped my story down from almost 8000 words to a little over 5000 words. Naturally, a lot of action and dialogue was cut out. So what was the main advice I got from people who critiqued my story? They wanted to see more dialog and action in some places, showing how certain things happened, instead of just being told in one paragraph "this is what happened". But those were exactly the places where I compressed 2-3 pages into one paragraph! Ironically, they also said I should cut down the story to 5000 words and I may be able to sell it. So, expand it and cut it down. Thanks so much. :-)

To be sure, I'm not blaming the people in the critique group for contradictory advice. It is not their job to be consistent. :-) Their job is to point out the flaws they saw. They are not obligated to also figure out how to fix them. Any kind of feedback is valuable, even if it's contradictory. I have nothing but thanks to the people in my group. But... I still feel the universe is laughing at me. ;-)

The ArmadilloCon aftermath wasn't all bleak. While it's not a direct consequence of the writers' workshop, I got some metaideas on how to salvage my earlier story ideas. Some fairly good ideas from my earlier stories that were so bad they aren't worth rewriting, can be cannibalized into new stories, that will hopefully be short. (Who am I kidding? my inner voice whispers.) However, I started to approach my story ideas by calculating how many scenes it would take to tell a story. I think that to fit under 5000 words a story should have no more than 2-3 scenes. I'm sure other people's mileage would differ, but for me, this calculus is pretty accurate.

Oh -- the bat-watching after the Thursday's pre-ArmadilloCon dinner unexpectedly turned out fruitful for me! While not expecting to see anything more than an underwhelming stream of black specks flowing out from under the Congress bridge, I saw an older man in a skimpy, sparkly cheerleader's uniform, milling about in the crowd. I joined several tourists in snapping a picture of him. He obligingly posed against the Austin downtown skyline. Later I found out this was actually the elusive Leslie, the "keep Austin weird" icon! I say elusive, because for all I've heard about Leslie, I've never seen him -- and I've lived in Austin 9 years! So, now I know that unlike Santa Claus, he actually exists.

ArmadilloCon writers' workshop: pros' advice and a story construction game

The writers' workshop started with advice panels on writing. Some of the advice the pros gave was debunking common writing myths, so in a way it was metaadvice. Sheila Williams, the editor guest of honor, shared some good, compelling pieces of wisdom. It's all the more valuable coming from the mouth of the Asimov's editor. She identified mistakes made by beginning authors with accuracy that made me hang my head down in embarrassment a s I recognized myself making them in my own writing.

Then Don Webb conducts an audience participation game. He and the audience collaboratively construct outlines for two genre stories: an immuno-defficient woman in a bubble encounters a giant germ (horror) and a little slave boy in the 19th century American south meets aliens (science fiction). For this, the audience needs to decide: the story's genre (SF, F or H), who is the protagonist, where or when the story is taking place, and, most importantly, what is the driving force for the story. If it's horror, what is the protagonist afraid of? If they are aliens, what do they want?

After the critique sessions, ArmadilloCon guest of honor John Scalzi gave a closing speech for the workshop students on the power of suck -- why a beginning writer should suck as hard as he/she can. :-)

The whole article can be found in my web site.

The pictures from the writing workshop and the rest of ArmadilloCon 2008 can be found on my web site.

William Gibson in Austin, June 11, 2008

William Gibson gave a reading, answered audience's questions and signed books in Barnes & Noble on June 11, 2008. He started by saying he was glad to be back in Austin, a city that 14 years ago was ground zero for the "so-called" cyberpunk movement. Then the microphone failed. The irony of this happening right before the speech of a writer who pioneered a new attitude towards technology in science fiction did not escape the audience. After a few attempts by B&N staff to fix the microphone, Gibson gave up and said he'll do a reading a capella. "I don't let technology get in my way," he said. "People have been reading books aloud for centuries. I'm gonna do it the way Byron did it, the way Dylan Thomas did it, except sober." And he read part of the first chapter of his latest novel, "Spook Country".

Then Gibson answered audience's questions. A few of those questions were specifically about "Spook Country", and they didn't make much sense without having read the novel. Others were about writing and Gibson's view of the world in general. Here are a few questions and Gibson's answers. Does he consider his works to be dystopian? Does he create his characters deliberately, or do they spontaneously generate themselves? The latter is definitely the case, as in an example of a character that grew out of a white room. Is there really such a cultural phenomenon as cyberpunk? Last, not knowing much about technology can enable a SF writer to see the forest for the trees.

The whole article is available on my web site.

Pictures are in my photo gallery.

Austin High Tech Career Fair

Austin High Tech Career Fair

Was great. Though I'm not actively looking for a job, it was interesting to see what's out there. I was glad to see that C++ seemed to be in demand, and C# / .NET even more so, as I happen to specialize in those technologies. I also took it as a good sign that some recruiters roamed the hall looking for anybody with a software developer's identifying green star on their badge. One of those ultra-enthusiastic recruiters touted the casual office culture as one of the main perks for working at that company; as a visual evidence whereof she spoke, one of the software guys in the company booth wore his jeans low enough to deliberately expose a sliver of his plaid underwear. :-) Hmm. I think even in the days of the first internet bubble you didn't get to see stuff like that in corporate-type events.

My interaction with recruiters and company representatives varied from brief exchange of resumes or business cards, to long conversations that resembled job interviews, in which they asked me about the details of my work. Later, during the networking part, I had a good conversation with an internet entrepreneur about my personal bootstrapping project. He was actually the first person I talked about this with. It's amazing how your pipe dreams suddenly start to take shape and not seem so unrealistic anymore when you discuss them with someone. Once you start talking, you are forced to put your nebulous concepts into words, and suddenly they crystalize.

Steve unexpectedly ran into his former roommate from his graduate school days, and we chatted with him a little. Then a door prize drawing was announced: door64 was giving away Chumbies. And what do you know -- Steve's ex-roommate won a Chumby! People swarmed all around him to take a peek. I was envious, but did not stay long enough for the second drawing. The crowd of people thinned out pretty quickly after that.

Social Media Camp, Austin, Texas, July 30, 2008

The Social Media Camp was modeled after BarCamp (or perhaps I should say it was a kind of a BarCamp). The campers occupied Cafe Thistle, which was partitioned into two areas; plus there was a lounge where a smaller group of people were aving discussions.

Michelle Greer. More pictures from the Social Media Camp are in my photo gallery.

"Media" was a key word determining what this camp was about; a lot of people in it seemed to approach social web from a marketer's/entrepreneur's, not geek's perspective. Unlike at a BarCamp I attended a year ago, there weren't many people here to chat about mind mapping via emacs shortcuts :-) But looking at how the web enhances or changes the lives of non-technical people can be more interesting than looking at it from a developer's nitty-gritty perspective.

What data portability means to non-geeks

At times, though, it was apparent we didn't speak the same language. For example, Michelle Greer started her session on data portability by asking the audience to define the concept. Somebody piped up "it's when you make a friend on Flickr and transfer him/her to your Linkedin contacts". Or speaking more generally, it means your contacts are portable across all of your social networking sites. Now that's quite a bit narrower meaning than the one used in computer science. Anyway, according to Michelle, data portability "saves you time so you're not a big loser, sitting at the computer all day, updating your contacts; so that you could live your life! So that you could use social media as a tool." And if that will be attained, she said, it will be through semantic web. Which is, to use another loose definition suggested by the audience, "embedding meaning in what you find on the web. It's data about data."

Actually, who's the geek here? :-)

I would have thought that people who go to conferences like this already know what semantic web is, but I guess many of them really were nontechnical. Michelle, for example, proudly declared herself a nongeek (having been an athlete in high school, she supplied this fact as an incontrovertible anti-geek credential :-)) I don't know about that -- a person who spends some thought on information architecture is a geek in my eyes, but I mean it in the best possible sense, as in "a person who uses technology to solve problems". Anyway, she assured everybody she only needs data portability to make her off-line life more efficient. Then she asked the audience to unleash their pet peeves regarding social web applications -- what do they currently not like about them, and what improvements they would like to see, at least where data portability is concerned.

What people miss in social web applications

Addie Broyles. More pictures from the Social Media Camp are in my photo gallery.

Addie Broyles' complaint was of a general kind: "it takes a lot of time to stay on top of all accounts", even though she considers herself a light user of social media.

Another person said she wanted to manage all her contacts on my own site, "not have to chase what's the cool site to go to next. Because inevitably we know that those sites will grow cold after a while." I guess she meant she didn't want to have to create an account and grow another network on friends on the next hot social networking site, when Facebook falls out of fashion. I can certainly get behind this wish.

Another woman said she wanted to maintain a separation between her identity a state employee, and her "social" profiles on Twitter, etc. So how do you have data portability while keeping those things separate? she asked. For some people it's desirable to be able to "port" their friends from one social network to another, but others need to maintain a brick wall between their work and social identities. In that way, she said, her situation was the opposite than that of JMac and Ricardo from Dell, who gave an earlier presentation on how Dell builds communities; they said Dell requires its employees to self-identify as working for Dell when participating in the social web. Other companies, however, have strong policies against that, up to taking sanctions on their employess they catch in online forums. So how do you meet the needs of both kinds of users? I find it a very interesting question too.

Michelle attempted to partially answer it by pointing out that when you are on social sites such as Twitter, and it lets you invite all the friends in your contacts, it gives you a choice which friends to invite. So don't invite your work contacts. Unfortunately, that does not even begin to address the problem of keeping work and social online identities separate.

How old media uses new media

Addie Broyles, Rob Quigley, Kristi Kingston and Omar Gallaga. More pictures from the Social Media Camp are in my photo gallery.

Overall I can't say I learned something very deep or unexpected about social media; the presentation topics stuck to the basics; however, it was interesting to listen to how other people use social web applications. And the Half-Baked game was quite eye-opening. (More about that later.) There was a number of industry representatives at the camp, from both "traditional" and Web 2.0 companies. Representatives of the "old industry" shed light on how their companies use social media to communicate with their users and to build their company's image in the community. For example, four journalists from Austin American Statesman -- Addie Broyles, Robert Quigley, Kristi Kingston and Omar Gallaga -- professed to be very much into Twitter; Addie Broyles (@broyles), the AAS food writer, tweets her readers all the time, passing back and forth tips on what's on sale at which HEB, and where to find certain products, and such. Readers have also suggested stories to AAS. Somebody from the audience asked them whether AAS was able to monetize their Twitter efforts, or is it an "editorial initiative" (thus confirming my suspicion that most people here were media people, not techies; as a software developer, I wouldn't know what an "editorial initiative" is if it hit me on the head). An AAS guy replied they've been kind of, sort of able to monetize it is by increasing traffic to their website. A lot of visitors to Austin American Statesman website that come from Twitter don't normally go to AAS website directly.

One thing was definitely worth, though, and that's the Half-Baked game. It's like having a ringside seat to an internet bubble. Here is a separate post about it.

Pictures are available in my photo gallery.

Jay Lake "Mainspring": FACT reading group discussion

10 people attended the FACT reading group discussion of Jay Lake's "Mainspring". Everybody except 2 people started the book. 6 people finished it, 2 more were planning to finish. 8 people had read something by Jay Lake before.

"Mainspring" is set on a world that looks a lot like our Earth, except it's literally a clockwork mechanism. The gears along the Earth's equatorial wall mesh with those of the Earth's orbital track as the planet travels around the Sun. Inside the Earth a giant spring, Mainspring, keeps the planet rotating around its axis. But now the Mainspring is becoming unwound, and world is in danger. A young man named Hethor, a clockmaker's apprentice, is sent on a quest to find the Key Perilous for winding up the Mainspring.

Several people thought the notion of the world as a clockwork mechanism raises interesting points about religion, but they disagreed whether this novel did a good job exploring those religious implications. Hethor's enemies, who try to derail his quest, do so because of religious differences, but it's not clear that the inhabitants of this world have a lot of latitude in religious interpretation of their everyday experiences. As some readers pointed out, faith is a belief in things unseen, but in this world God's presence becomes apparent as soon as you look up. The orbital track could have only been made by a super-powerful designer. So faith, as we understand it, can't really exist here.

Another reader argued that characters' doubts concerning religion are nonetheless justified, because a mechanical universe does not necessarily imply a conventional kind of God. "Did the maker of all these gears put the gears in motion and then walked away? The fact that the creator put the gears in motion doesn't mean there's someone watching day-to-day and intervening," said the reader.

Two people noted that the book has a more religious tone than one would expect from the cover blurb. The blurb promises Monty Python, but the novel is anything but. It's not irreverent, funny, or amusing, said one reader, who saw Hethor as a Christ figure. The fact that the key for fixing the world fit in Hethor's heart only reinforced her impression of "Mainspring" as a very reverent, very religious book. Another person agreed with that impression, pointing out that all the villains were Rational Humanists and all the good people were religious. Yet he thought the view of a world as mechanism wouldn't make a case for religion. So he found the book to be internally inconsistent.

Internal consistency of the world described in "Mainspring" was a fodder for much discussion. For one thing, people weren't sure whether the story should be taken straightforwardly or as an allegory. If this is straightforward science fiction, then, as one reader pointed out, it wouldn't be possible to wind the gigantic Mainspring with a key small enough to fit in one's heart. Another reader saw the clockwork universe as an allegory, and the key as purely symbolic, so the task of winding up the Mainspring wasn't physical, he concluded. Others argued that it's hard to see the gears and springs as mere metaphors when descriptions of the mechanisms that move the Earth are so detailed and tangible. Yet another reader said the notion that the Earth is filled with gears is so nonsensical (in that case what keeps you glued to it? he asked) that he concluded from the very beginning this book should not be analyzed intellectually. So he took out his brain and enjoyed the adventure.

Hethor's adventures -- his travels on airships and encounters with exotic tribes -- were found enjoyable by most readers. In that sense they found "Mainspring" comparable to books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, or "Lost Word" by Arthur Conan Doyle. However, several people were bothered by magic that suddenly appeared in the final pages, after having been absent anywhere else in the book. Nothing in "Mainspring"'s setting indicated there was magic in this world. One reader even said he wondered if the book changed overnight. Before the magic appeared, he didn't see how the character was going to achieve his goal in 30 pages, unless the story continued into the next book. He would have preferred that, instead of author pulling magic out of the hat.

There was also some confusion as to whether the people Hethor encountered in the Southern hemisphere were mechanisms or flesh-and-blood people. Hethor heard gears clicking in those people: does that mean they were, in fact, robots? Does that imply the people of the Northern hemisphere, including Hethor himself, were robots too, and they just haven't discovered that yet? Or was the clicking of the gears some kind of allegory, not to be taken literally? This was yet another confusing aspect of the book.

Yet a lot of people enjoyed the book despite the seeming inconsistencies: they chose whichever interpretation made the most sense to them.

Overall we agreed we were probably seeing more philosophical controversy in the novel than Jay Lake put into it. For example, one reader saw in "Mainspring" a parable for the pressing issues of today. "Here's a person who discovered that the world has a big problem; and there are people who don't believe in that problem and believe that God is going to come along and make it all OK. I wonder where Jay Lake got such an idea?" (he said sarcastically).

"So you think Al Gore inspired this book?" another reader asked.

"If so, a 12-year-old Al Gore inspired it," the first reader replied, "because it's way too naive."

Naivety and passivity were the main reasons why several people didn't like the protagonist, Hethor. Somebody said "He makes a couple of decisions in the 1st chapter, and then pretty much doesn't have any choices. He gets into situations that compel him to move in a certain direction. And then he doesn't make another decision until [halfway into the book]." Another reader commented: "I've never read a quest book where the hero had it so incredibly easy."

Others liked that while Hethor started out as a sheltered character, he learned a lot more about the world during his journey. One reader in particular liked Hethor's humor. Even when things are going horribly, he has a way of finding something darkly humorous about the events.

Everybody seemed to like several of the secondary characters, especially the librarian, who was the universal favorite. Arellya and the drover girl Darby were also thought to be interesting. Some people were disappointed that those characters disappeared quickly and for good.

Many people also liked the images in the novel, such as the image of Earth's brass orbital tracks, the vertical city on the equatorial wall, the airships. For some they were the best part of the novel, making up for its weaknesses.

Writing, a semi-failure

I finished my story for the Fencon writers' workshop. Alas, it's not something I can be proud of. I tried to write an original story, and as always, even when trimmed to the minimum, it was 3 times as long as the word quota (the magical 5000 words). So instead I dusted off one of my older stories that could be easily chopped down to 5000 words, and submitted it. This is so dispiriting. I wonder if I'll ever be able to write a story that fits the guidelines (well, obviously, I did that a few times in the past, but I'm afraid it's not reproducible). I'm going to try now to expand my latest story into a full-blown novel (or at least a novella), filling it in with more characterization (ha! who am I kidding?) and more worldbuilding, and then see if I could take just one episode and make a story out of it. The problem is that a story must stand on it own: it should not require additional background, and it should achieve resolution in the end -- and I'm not sure that's possible to do within the setting I'm writing about. What a conundrum.

If real-life people cared as much as netizens

From Washington Post:

The Impassive Bystander: Someone Is Hurt, in Need of Compassion. Is It Human Instinct to Do Nothing?

A woman fell on the floor, convulsed and died half and hour later in a hospital's waiting room while the staff walked by, watched, and did nothing. (Fellow patients didn't call for help either.)

A 78-year-old man tries to cross a street with a carton of milk. To quote the article, "He steps off the curb just as two cars that appear to be racing swerve on the wrong side of the street. The first car swerves around the man. The second car hits him and throws him into the air like a doll, then speeds away. What follows is even more chilling: People walk by. Nine vehicles pass him lying in the street. Some drivers slow down to look but drive away."

The article questions how it could have happened, and whether we are actually wired for indifference.

If no one else is moving, individuals have a tendency to mimic the unmoving crowd. Although we might think otherwise, most of us would not have behaved much differently from the people we see in these recent videos, experts say. Deep inside, we are herd animals, conformists. We care deeply what other people are doing and what they think of us. The classic story of conformist behavior can be found in the 1964 case of Kitty Genovese, the 28-year-old bar manager who was slain by a man who raped and stabbed her for about half an hour as neighbors in a New York neighborhood looked on. No one opened a door for her. No one ran into the street to intervene.

We seem to be more caring on the internet

At the same time, most of us in the blogosphere have probably heard of cases of people rallying around a virtual friend who's having a real life emergency -- e.g. calling police upon suspicion that a fellow blogger is about to commit suicide -- even if they have never met that person before. It can make you wonder: can we engineer the real world to be more like the internet in that respect? Would we be more likely to help a stranger on the street if we knew he was just a few friends away from being connected to us on Facebook?

Can we engineer real life to be more like the net?

Among humans, negative example is apparently contagious. But perhaps our machines could show some positive example for us, if we programmed them to do so. Let's say, a victim's mobile device notifies his/her Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or other social networking contacts; they in turn could alert their friends on their mobile devices based on location; and so the bubble of alerts could propagates to those who happen to be relatively close to the victim at the moment. (In the 6-degrees-of-separation world this should not take long.) Then perhaps those people within the alert wave might be motivated to help, not the least because they know there is an "audit trail" making them accountable to their friends. (Of course, there are a few technical problems here, but I'm talking about the concept.)

So in a sense the users would be Big-Brother'ing each other. But at the same time social networking applications could prompt us to do the right thing by making it appear as if somebody is doing the right thing. :-)

I finally saw "Sex and the City"

It's fluff as advertised, but a really long fluff, at that. Almost 3 hours of a nearly content free parade of ridiculous fashions. And goodness, are the fashions ridiculous. It boggles my mind that grown women would swoon after a bag in gaudy, primary colors -- something my 3-year-old would get excited about -- so what that it's Louis Vuitton.

Well, there is a plot, of course. But the story is rather predictable. So much so that at some point I was for a second confused if I slept through "Sex and the City" and was now seeing "Pride and Prejudice", which I was planning to watch on PBS Masterpiece Theater later that night. Because the story of Carrie and Mr. Big's circuitous courtship (if it can be called that) is so Jane Austen'esque. It's full of tropes that were launched into being by Jane Austin... or at least made popular by her. We already know that the hero and the heroine will get together in the end -- the only suspense is how they will get there; what kind of scheming it will take for them to reconcile after a series of misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Just like Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy. The similarity between Jane Austen's heroines and those of "Sex and the City" is that the fashions are dreadful in both cases; only in "Pride and Prejudice" is the other polar opposite: its heroines look like they live in their nightgowns day and night.

But the women's friendship, and how they rally around Carrie during the darkest time of her life, and nurse her back into sanity -- that was sweet.

I knew this first-hand for decades

... but it's always good to hear an authority say it. An authority on humor, no less. And British! Aren't British supposed to be foremost experts on humor. It is thus with a huge sense of validation that I present this news:

From this article on msnbc.com:

The president of the humor society, British sociologist Christie Davies, offered insights Tuesday on the state of humor in today's world.

Among other things, he said, jokes in eastern Europe were a lot better when the communists ran the show.

"Once you have a democracy with free speech, you have fewer jokes," said Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, in England. "Jokes, in many ways, are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in eastern Europe."

From itch to Immanuel

The Itch: Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies (New Yorker) is one freaky article. You might not think of itch as a Job-like misfortune, but in the cases featured in the article, it is. Those cases are almost biblical in their bizareness, too. :-) There's a woman whose head itched so persistently and maddeningly that one night, while asleep, she scratched right through her skull and into her brain. Another guy died from an itch on his neck because he scratched into his carotid artery.

Does perception originate in nerve endings, or in the brain itself?

What's worse, the cause of the woman's itch was not any problem her skin; in fact, the nerves in the itchy spot were 96% dead, so they could not have possibly conveyed itch signals to her brain. Rather, a neurologist thought that "the itch system in M's brain had gone haywire, running on a loop all its own."

[This speculation challenges] what neuroscientists call 'the naïve view,' and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We're inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain."

But a theory that's emerged lately considers that sensory perceptions originate in the brain itself, where it integrates, rather imperfectly, nerve signals coming from the outside world. So it is entirely possible for a brain to experience a fantom itch in a place where there's nothing to itch. It also explains the phenomenon of phantom limb. It also talks about fascinating therapies to treat pain and discomfort in phantom limbs by tricking brain into accepting contradicting information regarding the missing limb.

Things in themselves (the unknowability of)

All in all a fascinating article, but what's most amazing about it is that it takes evidence from sciences that deals with tangible things, such as biology and neuroscience, and uses it to support a realm of inquiry that's commonly thought of as metaphysical.

"In a 1710 "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," the Irish philosopher George Berkeley objected to [the naive] view. We do not know the world of objects, he argued; we know only our mental ideas of objects. "Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and figures -- in a word, the things we see and feel -- what are they but so many sensations, notions, ideas?" Indeed, he concluded, the objects of the world are likely just inventions of the mind, put in there by God."

All this reminds me of Kant, with his impossibility of knowing "things in themselves". It makes me want to regret not giving "Critique of Pure Reason" proper attention when it was mandatory reading for a philosophy course I took in college. As dry as it was, I vaguely remember being intrigued by its notion that what we think are experiences of real objects are actually just our own mental structures. My thought was, "there's got to be an idea for a science fiction story somewhere in there". :-) But the idea was too abstract to even try to turn it into a story. Now, however, I have a feeling that neuroscience could provide scaffolding on which to build a story exploring the most abstract (if not to say metaphysical) aspects of our existence. That, to me, is fascinating.

Turns out, cavemen loved to sing, says an article headline on msnbc.com. How, one wonders, do the modern scientists figure out such things? This article is interesting not just in that it reveals specifics of life of prehistoric civilizations, but also that it shows how scientists reach conclusions about things as nebulous as leisure preferences of long-gone civilizations. Namely,

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, scientists found that the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

They did it not just for their amusement. Cave dwellers used echolocation to map out the properties of the caves, the article says.

With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn't be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave.

As an aspiring science fiction writer, I'll certainly keep this article in mind when or if I try to invent an alien civilization for a story I'm writing. It provides enough inspiring details to fill out a picture of an ancient culture.

Charles Stross "Glasshouse": FACT reading group discussion

13 people attended the FACT reading group discussion of "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross. Everybody but 1 person has read Stross before. 11 people started the book, about half of the people finished it.

"Glasshouse" is set in the same universe as Stross' earlier far-future novel "Accelerando". To quote an Amazon.com review, the protagonist Robin "is one of millions who have had a mind wipe, to forget wartime memories that are too painful -- or too dangerously inconvenient for someone else. To evade the enemies who don't think his mind wipe was enough, Robin volunteers to live in the experimental Glasshouse, a former prison for deranged war criminals that will recreate Earth's "dark ages" (c. 1950 -- 2040). Entering the community as a female, Robin is initially appalled by life as a suburban housewife, then he realizes the other participants are all either retired spies or soldiers. Worse yet, fragments of old memories return, extremely dangerous in the Glasshouse, where the experimenters' intentions are as murky as Robin's grasp of his own identity."

Future shock -- from uncomfortable to hilarious

Since all the characters participate in a full-time social experiment, the readers thought the setting resembled Big Brother, The Prisoner, and The Sims game.

One reader called this plot device Gulliver travel. Just like an Englishman Gulliver traveled into the Lilliputian lands and put his experiences with them into a framework we can understand, a far future person (Robin) traveled into the past (our world) and told us how it looks like from his perspective. Robin / Reeve was more than a bit shocked by our reality, and it was amusing to see what shocked him / her. Stross does a good job to make the reader feel strange about things we've been taking for granted. For example, Reeve's first look at the bathroom in her 20th century-style house makes her think that the bathroom has crashed, because all the appliances remain extruded. Apparently in the far future appliances retract into the walls when not in use. Some readers found this scene hilarious. Also, Robin / Reeve's perspective made me feel abnormal to have an "ortho" body that can't take different shapes, the way far future humans' bodies do.

Not everybody felt that way, though. Some readers didn't like it that the characters switched their gender "all the time" (twice, actually, but that was two times too many for some people), or were dubious that the characters would be as comfortable in the body of opposite sex as they were in their originally chosen sex.

Others liked the ramifications of gender switching. A reader said: "if I'm in the universe where bodies are malleable, and I fall in love with you, to what degree it's mental chemistry and to what degree it's physical chemistry? I found that thing highly entertaining." She was also entertained by Robin / Reeve's outrage at discovering that an orthohuman female body she was given had no upper body strength.

In any case, the characters of "Glasshouse" are likeable and transparent. I'm not sure, though, if "Glasshouse" doesn't seem too simple to me, compared to the strangeness of "Singularity Sky" or the far-reaching ideas of "Accelerando". While "Glasshouse" uses the technology described in "Accelerando", in this book it is merely a backdrop or furniture. On the other hand, this book actually reads like a novel, with real characters, as opposed to popular science essay collection with talking puppets, like "Accelerando".

Sheds the light on mechanics of a totalitarian state

Some people who lived in the 50s were impressed how Stross got many things right about the 50s, especially considering he wasn't alive back then. "He really nailed the small town, neo-Victoriana fundamentalist mind set of the 50s," said a reader. "To me, the 1950s were not a time of jolliness and fun, they were time of being afraid of the government. And having a lot of nosy adults sticking their noses into my affairs".

I don't know about the 50s, but I can say that "Glasshouse" painted a very convincing picture of how an authoritarian state comes into being. The social engineering by which peer pressure works to support a dictatorship, causing even well-meaning people to become enforcers of an authoritarian government, was portrayed brilliantly. The "Church" in the novel serves no other purpose than to keep people in line, and a reader observed that that's exactly what the purpose of real-life churches in small towns seems to be. The same reader also praised Stross for noting how certain parts of Christian liturgy can be very frightening to someone looking at it from an outside.

Some people said "Glasshouse" took them a while to get into. Some futuristic details, such as time measured in kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc., slowed down some readers' progress. One reader was nearly ready to give up after having to interrupt the story again and again to convert megaseconds or gigaseconds into our conventional units of time (even though a conversion table is provided in the book).

But when the book got going, it became fun, people said. The ending was thought to be brilliant by some, and cheesy by others.

A controversial ending, and other SPOILERS!!!

One reader said the last 60 pages where everything changed blew her brain. "I thought it was really terrific," she said. "I reread that whole section twice. I think it takes a real skill for a writer to pull a rug from under the reader." Another reader wasn't too impressed. She said "the end just made me laugh. How cheesy is this! It turned into romance. I was totally shocked and entertained by this. I think Stross has a really twisted sense of humor." She refers to the twist at the end where a certain character sacrifices his / her life, and then it turns out that the character backed themselves up beforehand, so the whole idea of their sacrifice is turned on its head.

I liked the ending; I thought Stross struck a perfect balance between happy and realistic. The resolution is not what an optimist would expect, but neither does it end badly. One reader had an hypothesis, that the whole Glasshouse experiment might actually have been a front for a therapy session, because everybody in the Glasshouse was very damaged from the war. That's an interesting idea, since it would explain the cheesy ending, but I'm not sure the rest of the book supports it.

While the plot of "Glasshouse" kept me engaged, in some places it suffers from a weakness that's sometimes referred to "a plot that only succeeds because everyone acts like an idiot". Well, not everyone. Just the rulers of the Glasshouse. Why did they put the T-gate (or A-gate, whatever that thing in the library was called), under so little security that Robin could discover it by simply making a copy of a key? Why did the really important stuff have to be stored in the library, where the Glasshouse inhabitants could stumble upon it? The rulers could have just as easily stored in a place no one except them knew about. Robin's gaining access to special technology seemed too easy.

On the plus side, there is a plot twist in "Glasshouse" that showcases an interesting storytelling technique. At first, Robin / Reeve is the only person person in Glasshouse who understands what's going on. I got so used to her competence and her firm grasp of reality, that when she became brainwashed, I did not immediately understand that brainwashing occurred; I started to wonder if perhaps she gained some different insight that showed her that cooperation, not fight, is best. So Stross really fooled me by suddenly making Reeve an unreliable narrator. (Later, of course, everything returns to their proper places. :-))

A brief fantasy of a web application

that I might like to write as a hobby if my day was three times as long...

If your spouse thinks your child is poorly behaved, while you think your child's behavior is fairly good for her age, how do you decide where the truth lies? Is one of you too lax, or does the other has unrealistic expectations for a 3-year-old? The truth may lie in a large scale study that would let one compare their child's behavior against that of thousands of other children of the same age. Where would one easily come across such data? Why, that's where internet and social networks come into play.

There could be a web-based application that allowed a parent to record a child's daily tantrums, as well as episodes of good behavior. Then it could draw various statistical conclusions from those numbers. At the very least it would let a parent to discover where their child falls on the curve of his or her peers. This would, of course, require many parents' participation. They would need to track every instance of their offspring's good or bad behavior: every tantrum, every "please" and "thank you", and so on.

Mind-numbingly tedious? You bet. But, if the latest explosion of social web applications is any indication, people like to do mind-numbingly tedious things, as long as they get to do them on the internet. :-) Well, a certain category of people do. Witness the popularity of Twitter. If people don't get tired of posting what they ate for lunch, some of the same people might become just as obsessive about posting their child's behavioral microupdates. And of course they don't have to be at a computer for that. A text messaging-enabled cell phone is enough.

The internet indeed has a way of converting tedious chores into games. It's a quality that's already been leveraged by such applications as Chore Wars, where players get points for chores they do. Once you get stoked about beating fellow players, you don't even notice that you've finished cleaning your kitchen! Indeed humans (or a certain category of humans) are all about keeping scores. So an application that exploits this urge has a potential to do well.

And let's not forget that parenting is a competitive sport anyway -- so if anyone is inclined to keep scores, parents would be among those people! :-)

My new teh shiny!

A month ago I bought my first smartphone, an AT&T Tilt. I've been enjoying it so far, despite having a bit of a rough start with it.

The activation was a bit confusing. The box contains generic instructions for activating any AT&T phone, but not specifically the Tilt, and it does not contain separate instructions for activating an upgrade phone for those who already have AT&T wireless service and are keeping their old phone number. So I tried to activate it online, and got a message that it's already activated. But I couldn't make phone calls. So I had to call AT&T customer service, to have them activate it, which they promptly did.

Once activated, it worked like a charm

And it worked -- not just the ability to make phone calls, but also internet access and multimedia messaging. This is a big improvement over my earlier phone, a Nokia. The Nokia phone was theoretically able to send multimedia messages, but very few of them ever arrived. :-) With this one, no messages have got lost so far. Also internet access was very slow with my Nokia phone. Most pages never loaded. With this phone it's fast. It connects to 3G networks where they are available (and as far as I can tell, in Austin that's almost everywhere) and to AT&T's Edge network where 3G is not available.

The phone functionality works like a regular phone, so I won't talk much about it.

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly

The interface is intuitive and user-friendly. Any action I've wanted to do so far has been completely obvious. Partly it's because this phone uses Windows Mobile operating system; I should probably be ashamed of myself for using Windows, but I could not find any other phone that had all the functionality Tilt has, and didn't cost an arm and a leg. (Since I got a refurbished Tilt, it cost me less than $200.) As much as it is fashionable to hate Windows, this phone Just Works. :-)

The only learning curve that this phone has imposed on me is finding out is how to perform most operations with the keyboard instead of a stylus. I don't like using a stylus much: alternate between tapping the stylus and pressing keys is not very ergonomic and slows me down. (The same way it is inefficient to alternate between keyboard and mouse of a regular computer, which is why I'm big on keyboard shortcuts). Plus, styluses get lost so easily. You can't hold one in your hand when you type: you have to find a place to put it down. And that's how they get easily lost.

WiFi and camera

In addition to 3G connectivity, AT&T Tilt also has WiFi. So far I have only tried to connect to wireless access points that don't require encryption. If I were to connect to a password-protected access point, it shouldn't be a problem, since a new connection screen gives you an option to enter a password. However, my wireless router at home requires a MAC address of a device in order to allow it to connect. If I needed a MAC address of my Tilt, I would have to do some research to find it (perhaps only as far as the user manual -- I don't know. I haven't had much need to connect to an encrypted access point. At home, after all, I can use my regular laptop.)

The camera is adequate, for a cell phone. It's slow; as a result, pictures are blurry. The shutter lag is huge; it also seems to take an eternity to focus on the subject. At least it is like that with default settings. I twiddled with settings a bit, but it did not improve. And I don't think I'll twiddle more, because I've just bought a new digital camera and won't be using my phone camera much. I noticed, though, that the Tilt camera has a burst mode, among other things; that's nice, but the pictures in the burst mode come out nearly postage stamp-sized (320x240) and even more blurry than in the "regular" mode. I was a bit more satisfied with the Sports mode. It lets you take pictures in quick succession, like the Burst mode, but the pictures are 640 x 480 and about the same quality as regular.

Miscellaneous quibbles

I haven't tried some of the features of this phone that may be very important for people who use it for work. It's supposed to be able to access your mail, calendar, contacts, etc. from your corporate Exchange server, but I only use it for personal use, so I'll never know.

Synchronization between Tilt and a Windows computer works well, although initial instructions on how to set it up are a bit confusing.

One little quibble I have with this phone is that when its screen goes black (to conserve power), it does not respond to any key presses. You have to press the power button to "wake up" the phone, any other key will be just ignored. This was a problem for me when I was setting up my voice mailbox. Setting up a voice mailbox is a tedious task as you listen to pre-recorded instructions and press various keys in response to voice prompts. This process takes long enough that the screen goes black between one step and the next one. At some point the instructions ask you to enter your password. You start entering it and the screen goes black. You think that maybe pressing another key will light it up -- this would be only intuitive, no? I'm too used to "press any key" behavior of regular computers. :-) But no, it does not light up, and the keys you pressed have no effect; the phone does not recognize key presses when the screen is black. But the phone is not "asleep" (whatever that would mean), because your call does not get disconnected. The instruction robot keeps jabbering at you to enter your password. So there is this cognitive disconnect: you are still on a call, but your phone keys have stopped working. It did not immediately become clear to me that they stop working when the screen goes black, much less that the only way to get them working again is to press the power key. I was so confused by this at first that I called AT&T customer service to help me with this. Then I realized what I was doing wrong and unconfused myself. :-)

Speaking of AT&T customer service, I've had only good experiences with them (not just regarding Tilt, but throughout the 4 years of me being AT&T customer). They answer the call quickly, are polite, and make sure they resolved your problem to your satisfaction.

Alistair Reynolds "Revelation Space": book review

In short, it's a spectacular space opera. One of the best I've ever read. Actually, it was one of the most exciting SF books I've read in the last few years. Not the deepest or most original, but... exciting. A book that literally makes your heart race as you turn the pages!

Manipulative aliens in your mind...

Still, I believe that to get the most enjoyment out of it you have to be a fan of a particular set of science fictional tropes. If mysterious, super-powerful aliens who set up shop in people's heads and manipulate them to their own unfathomable purposes is your thing, you'll probably like this book. It is very much my thing, so this book was a feast for me. Extra points if the alien races have evocative, tantalizing names like Pattern Jugglers or Shrouders. Pattern Jugglers restructure your brain to make your thought patterns identical to those of another race. Shrouders... well, their function is more mysterious. You'll have to read the book to find out why they are called that.

I also like a coherent plot, where all subplots and threads come together in the end, everything happens for a reason, and all characters serve a purpose. "Revelation Space" is very tight in that respect. The tension did not let up throughout the book.

... which of them should you believe?

What kept me engaged with the story was that I didn't know until the very end which of the aliens could be trusted and which ones were to be feared. Actually, no: all of them were to be feared. None of them were really on the humanity's side. The only difference is whether they were willing to leave us alone, or not. It took me the length of the book to figure out who was plotting what against what. The human protagonists were just as confused as me. But unlike me, they had to figure stuff out while experiencing lethal attacks oh, about every five minutes! The aliens were none too gentle with the humans, shooting first and not even asking questions later.

As much as humans tried to puzzle out the intentions of their "puppetmasters", they still ended up mostly as puppets a lot of the time, though not for the lack of initiative. The characters were all very tough and smart, and did their best to play the game on their terms; however, intentions of superancient, superpowerful intelligences can be extremely difficult to fathom. In fact our characters got the only glimpse of those intentions when the superpowers decided to reveal some of the cards. The "puppetmasters" did that to convince their proteges to fight on their side, because apparently coercion alone didn't work as well. So we the readers find out the truth only from infodumps. Even then we can't possibly know whose infodump we can trust.

Tight plot, spectacular action

However, the convoluted plot in "Revelation Space" does not lead to frustration, but only makes the story more tantalizing. Probably because it hangs together by tight logic. I no longer take that for granted: I've read enough science fiction books lately where the vagaries of the plot betray the author's uncertainty of what the characters should do next. It made me more appreciative of books like "Revelation Space" where the plot seems very well thought out.

And even if it's a bit too twisted in some places, the action is so spectacular you can read this book purely for the visuals. :-) Very early into the book we find out how to kill a person using a spaceship flying at a near-relativistic speed as a weapon. No, it's not like using a nuclear missile to swat a fly. :-) The person to be killed is inside the spaceship. The murder is accomplished by placing the victim in an elevator shaft that goes along the length of the ship, and manipulating the physical characteristics of the flying ship to crush the victim. Quite impressive.

So -- mystery, intrigue, explosions, suspense, world-destroying weapons, the fate of the universe hanging by a thread, tough characters with posthuman enhancements (and 2 out of 3 main characters are women!) -- this book has it all. A very enjoyable, thrilling ride.

Movie review: "Sweeney Todd"

The story is almost Shakespearean, if not for that little deviation where Sweeney Todd and his baker girlfriend set up a rather bizarre business that leverages a perfect synergy of their respective skills. :-) Though I guess when your characters wear heavy goth makeup you can't expect them to play by the rules of classical tragedies. :-)

Their makeup also made it near impossible for me to tell them apart, at least for the first half of the movie. I think I've said before that all actors in any movie look the same to me, modulo distintive hairstyles, haircolor, beards, glasses, height, body type etc., which are visual clues I use to tell actors apart. That's true even when they are not wearing harsh black-and-white makeup! (Exceptions are actors who I've seen in at least 3-4 movies, so that their faces start to look distinct to me. So for example, if I hadn't stopped watching Harry Potter movies after the third one, I may be able to recognize its cast already ;-)) But the makeup in "Sweeney Todd" makes it hard to even tell men and women apart!

This is just one reason why I have difficulty understanding what's happening in the movies. "Sweeney Todd" made it exponentially more difficult because everybody in it spoke very quiet, very fast, and with a British accent (which is so alien to me it might as well be Chinese). This is one of those movies that gives your fingers a two-hour long workout on a remote control. When the music surges, you scramble to turn down the volume (especially when a child is sleeping upstairs). When dialogue starts, you frantically pound the buttons to turn the volume up. I don't understand what's the logic behind that. Shouldn't the dialogue be loud, while the music kept down to a non-irritating level?

Despite all this, I was surprised the plot seemed fairly cohesive to me. Except for one thing. At the very end Sweeney Todd is shattered to discover that a very important character has died. How did that character get into the basement? The last I saw of that character, he/she/it was in the barbershop. I wasn't even sure of this character's identity, but Steve (who says I am hopelessly imperceptive) assured me it had to be what it was in order for the movie to make sense. Still, he could not explain how that character got in there. So it's not just me. Either he is imperceptive too, or there is a hole in the plot.

The best thing about "Sweeney Todd" is its music. It's beautiful. The melodies are very complex. Such a beautiful reprieve from one-dimensional pop tunes. (Not that I listen to pop tunes much, but some of them infiltrate even the public radio (the only kind of radio I listen to).) If I found a legal and free download of Sweeney Todd soundtrack, I might even lift a finger to click on the link! ;-)