Libertarianism in Engineers

I’ve noticed a disproportionately high number of self-described libertarians among my software engineer coworkers. As in, more than half of the people whose political/economic leanings I know are libertarians. This is pretty clearly out of line with the general populace — why is that?

(Man, this whole post is totally pointless. But I’m gonna keep writing it.)

My theory is that it’s because the pure free market economy is elegant. It’s the most elegant solution to the problem of how to distribute scarce resources. And software engineers are trained to strive for elegance in solutions — hence the attraction to pure free markets.

However, much like software, the free market, as it turns out, has to occasionally deviate from the theoretical ideal in order to work properly. Sometimes you just have to hack in a special case, like penalties for pollution or subsidies for public works projects.

(Whenever I come up with an analogy between software engineering and anything else, I always feel (a) like a tool and (b) like I’m on very thin ice. It’s much more likely that I am making no more sense than an underwater eggnog factory right now, but I will forge ahead.)

This is not to say that you shouldn’t bother striving for elegance, though, either in economics or in engineering. You should try to write elegant code, resorting to hacks only when necessary (and exercising due diligence when determining whether it’s necessary). Similarly, although I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian, I believe that a free market-type structure should be the first attempt to solve any distribution-of-resources problem. But if a free market isn’t going to work, you should not force it, recognizing that free markets cannot solve every problem perfectly.

Community, eps. 1-4

I can’t say I’m hugely impressed by this show, but it’s good enough that I keep watching it without really being sure why (much like Dollhouse in early season 1).

To me, its strong point is that it does dialogue better than any comedy on TV right now. I’ve never heard a line that sounded wrong or like it was dreamed up by something other than a human. It’s the polar opposite of Dollhouse in that sense. And despite having perfectly true-to-life dialogue, it still manages to be funny. In episode 4 (the most recent), there was one line that, while very simple, cracked me up for several minutes: Britta saying to Jeff, “You broke my trust. You SUCK!” In a normal TV show you’d expect the second sentence to be some cheesy thing like “You betrayed me!” but no, it’s “You SUCK!”

Community’s weak point is its characters. They all seem pretty two-dimensional to me; not so much that they’re unoriginal or archetypal (they’re not really) but more that they don’t evoke much sympathy. I’ve been spoiled in recent times by other shows: nowadays I can only get really attached to comedies that mix drama with the comedy (like Chuck or Scrubs) or that are at least flat-out funnier than Community. Community doesn’t really keep up a rhythm throughout each episode like more adept comedies do. Too much of Community feels like it’s just killing time.

It also doesn’t help that Community’s main character is kind of a tool. Just a little bit of a tool, though. So I don’t sympathize with him enough to hope he succeeds, and I don’t hate him enough to keep watching to see him get owned. It’s an unfortunate middle ground.

The other characters are good, though, especially Abed and Troy (who in at least two of the episodes so far have done what seems to be an improvised scene over the end credits, and these are usually the funniest parts of their respective episodes). Pierce (Chevy Chase) can also be good, but he’s not as funny as the writers seem to think he is. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ken Jeong as Señor Chang is awesome in his unrestricted unhingedness. A dose of wild absurdity in a show is helpful as long as it doesn’t take over, and it seems like Señor Chang is firmly a recurring background character.

Community definitely has promise, and I’ll keep watching, but it isn’t assured of a spot on my permanent weekly show rotation. It really is exactly the same situation as with Dollhouse in season 1. Perhaps, like Dollhouse, Community will pleasantly surprise me in a few episodes’ time.

Tap The Dot released

So I’ve actually been pretty heavily involved in iPhone development since the SDK was released to developers. I’ve taught a class on iPhone development and worked on an iPhone app for Apple. However, my debut into the App Store has waited until today.

The App Store is a potentially great idea gone a bit wrong. There’s definitely some excellent work in there, but it’s often swamped by an ocean of 99-cent garbage. And what’s worse, a developer can make a good bit of money by writing one of these 99-cent garbage apps, like a fart noise app or a flashlight.

So being the cynic and lover of money that I am, I decided to get in on that. I decided that one weekend, I would sit down and crank out some piece of crap in a few hours and sell it for 99 cents.

I wrote Tap The Dot in 3 hours and 14 minutes; I timed myself. It’s a game, for a rather loose definition of the word “game”. The basic gameplay mechanic is this: the app puts a dot on screen. You tap it. Then the app puts another dot on screen. You tap it. Repeat.

It’s now available on the App Store for 99 cents:

Tap The Dot

My initial aim is to recoup the cost of the iPhone Developer Program ($99). If I make more than that, then joy for me. Stay tuned.

Oh my god TV

Holy shit, the new season of TV totally snuck up on me and now there’s like a billion things I have to talk about.

In dramas, we have Bones, House, and Dollhouse all starting up again. I seem to be the only person left in the country who doesn’t actually care all that much about House — I watch it if someone else in the vicinity is watching, but I don’t follow it myself. I may also be dropping Bones from my lineup. Dollhouse is still in; I’ll probably post about the premiere soon. I’ve also recently gotten hooked on Heroes, but I’m not going to start watching current episodes until I’m caught up, which may take a while since I’m only just finishing season 1.

Also: Gossip Girl. My dirty little not-so-secret.

In comedies, there are a bunch of new ones I’m watching. We have Parks and Recreation, which I haven’t written about before, but I have seen all the episodes and I like it. There’s Community, which is completely new; it looks pretty funny but I can’t say it really holds my attention, except for Ken Jeong’s (Señor Chang) amazing rant in the second episode. There’s (oh God don’t make me say it) Cougar Town, which I would ordinarily give an emphatic “hell to the no” but it’s created by Bill Lawrence, so I have to give it a chance. I may be writing about it.

The only other show I watch regularly that starts this fall is 30 Rock. The others (Chuck, Better Off Ted, “Scrubs” with emphatic quotation marks) are all slated for midseason, as far as I know.

And I swear I have a whole bunch of crap written about the Scrubs (real Scrubs) finale, which I will post eventually.

Def Leppard

It must be difficult to be a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. The entire rest of the world knows you’re not going to repeat your success and it’s only downhill from here, but you have to pretend that’s not the situation. You’re a bunch of guys in your 40s at least, trying to pretend you’re still the wild, hedonistic youths you became famous as. There may be groupies at your concerts, but that doesn’t even do you any good because you’re married and have kids. The worst part is, the groupies suffer from the same problem as you: they’re in their 40s and failing miserably to be 20 years old again.

I have to say, it’s also difficult to be fan of a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. You have to constantly worry that the band’s lead singer is going to fall over and break a hip on stage, or otherwise make some other embarrassing concession to his advanced age. You feel slightly embarrassed for their antics: they’re close to half a century old and they’re still running around on stage wearing ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and asking the audience to pour some sugar on them. One might say their refusal to succumb to the boring, humdrum life of most midlifers makes them brave or even heroic, but to me it looks self-delusional. Worst of all, when you go to their concerts (which you are pretty much obliged to do — when you’re dealing with this kind of band, any tour could be their last, and as a fan, no matter how embarrassingly old the band has become, it’s still a thrill to see them live), you have to deal with the other fans. The aforementioned groupies are among them: women who are in their 40s and who have apparently not been informed that they are no longer 19 and as such they should not attempt to dress like the hot, skinny 19-year-old they may once have been. There are also the male partners of said groupies: generally dudes in their 40s or 50s wearing mullets and ridiculous moustaches, with bad teeth and grating voices. Aging metalheads like this fill me with a mixture of fear and pity for some reason.

That said, the fellow-concert-goer situation wasn’t all bad. I saw a surprising number of people wearing Rush t-shirts; I’d always thought the fanbases of Def Leppard and Rush were disjoint sets except for me. I also saw Metallica, AC/DC, Dream Theater and Queensrÿche shirts. And my seat was on the end of a row, so I was only next to one person, who was not a scary aging metalhead but an unusually attractive girl in her 20s. Her boyfriend, next to her, distinguished himself by acting like a spectacular ass (mainly shouting and waving his arms around in something with only a passing resemblance to rhythm) but the girl did not, acting more like me instead (mainly swaying and foot-tapping most of the time, in rhythm, with occasionally more pronounced rocking-out during higher-energy moments, and only singing along when appropriate*). She also exchanged judgmental quips with me when, between Poison’s and Def Leppard’s sets, an extravagantly drunk Scary Aging Metalhead lady stumbled up to me, grabbed my leg and asked if the seat next to me was taken (which it clearly was). After Scary Aging Metalhead left, Unusually Attractive Girl said to me, “She just wants to sneak into a better seat! I thought you were going to get lucky!” I raised an eyebrow, glanced at Scary Aging Metalhead’s departing figure and said, “Well…” Unusually Attractive Girl looked too, curled her lip and said, “I guess that wouldn’t really have been lucky, huh?” See? Reasonable people can go to Def Leppard concerts too.

Regardless, it is still difficult to be a fan of an ’80s band. Which makes my life rather a series of difficulties, since essentially all of the bands I like saw their greatest success before I was born (in the ’80s). Hell, the next concert I’m going to is by a band in exactly the same stage of downfall as Def Leppard: Metallica.

And you may be thinking, based on the preceding griping, that I did not enjoy the Def Leppard show. On the contrary, it was great. I was just musing on how much better of a person I am than everyone else there.

As I mentioned in my post about the Rush concert I went to, Shoreline Amphitheatre is a very pleasant concert venue; in fact, it’s probably the best concert venue I’ve been to. It’s arrestingly attractive in the evenings, and there’s something about its grand scale and park-like atmosphere that makes rock music seem that much better. I think Def Leppard are more of an arena band, though. The amphitheatre setting suits Rush to a tee, and probably other progressive, wanky bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, but a band more focused on the rocking than the artistry is really more suited to the arena.

Poison and Cheap Trick were OK. I wasn’t there to see them, though. (I’ve already written about the trials of being an opener for a much more popular act, so I won’t do it again.) They were largely unremarkable, except that I have to say that Poison’s guitarist C.C. DeVille has a lot of talent that is being put to waste. He did an improvised solo that sounded an awful lot like Yngwie Malmsteen. The general sense that I got was that he pretty much carries Poison.

Now finally, let’s talk about Def Leppard. Not only do they have to deal with the difficulty of being an ’80s band in 2009, but they are also a band who produced three astronomically popular songs and a huge quantity of other material that almost nobody cares about. So most of the audience is just going to be bored until they play “Photograph”, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or “Rock of Ages”. They did play all of those, in a row, and in that order. “Rock of Ages” was the last song before the encore. If you ask me, they should have played “Sugar” as the encore. This is classic psychological manipulation. Everyone knows that at some point in the concert, they must play that song. So by leaving it till the very end, they’d have been building anticipation for it all along, and they could walk off the stage with the audience shrieking in joy. Rush did this: they played “YYZ” as the encore.

To be honest, there were parts of the concert where I got bored. Def Leppard’s hard-rocking songs are hit-or-miss. They tend to be either fantastic (“Rock of Ages”, “Gods of War”) or completely forgettable filler. They played some of the filler-y ones towards the beginning. They have two other general types of songs: medium-speed power ballads (“Hysteria”) or full-on slow acoustic songs (“Two Steps Behind”). Both of the latter types can be OK, and they generally played good ones. Part of Def Leppard’s distinctiveness comes from their unusually strong ability to do those types of songs, so it makes sense that they devoted about a third of the show to those.

And when it comes to pure hard-rocking fun, few bands do it better than Def Leppard, however old they may be. They can make a crowd sound as if they earnestly want Def Leppard to pour some sugar on them.

It occurs to me that Def Leppard is the first British band I’ve seen live. All the rest are American or Rush. And Def Leppard is almost amusingly British. Rick Savage had a bass with the Union Jack on the body. Phil Collen had a guitar with the English flag on it. The giant video screen behind them occasionally flashed images of Britishness. I don’t know if all British bands do this, but it definitely stood out. “By Jove, we are British and we think that is capital, old chap” was the impression I got. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them bust out a pot of tea onstage.

A couple last musical things to call out. You do have to give Rick Allen a lot of credit for not reducing the complexity of Def Leppard’s drum parts after losing his arm. Plus in live shows he has to play pre-amputation drum parts anyway, so it’s moot. Def Leppard’s drum parts are definitely of nontrivial complexity, and he plays them adroitly. (If you’re an etymology aficionado like me, you’ll see the pun there.)

Until now I’d always wondered why neither of Def Leppard’s guitarists seemed to be more famous than the other, or at least famous in a different way. Turns out it’s because they alternate lead and rhythm roles. They do have slightly different soloing styles (Collen’s solos are more shreddy) but neither of them takes any kind of primacy over the other. It’s interesting. Most of the other bands I like have either (a) one guitarist or (b) one clear lead guitarist and one clear rhythm. Then there’s Iron “the more the merrier” Maiden, whose three guitarists are knocking on redundancy’s door.

I’m glad I saw Def Leppard. I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if I hadn’t seen them (if, for example, I’d gone to the AC/DC show happening in San Jose at the same time) but I’m glad I did before they, and their groupies, get any older. It was a good show, but it’ll probably only be downhill from here (in their shows, and their albums). But they’ll always have Hysteria, one of the best albums of the ’80s as far as I’m concerned, and they’ll always be British. Good enough for me.

* ROCKET! YEAH!

Better Off Ted episode 112

I’m almost at the end of the first season of Better Off Ted, and it seems to be getting uniformly better.

I mentioned in my initial review that when it started, each character was essentially a single personality trait that was magnified to absurd proportions. That’s still true to some extent (especially of Phil and Lem) but they’ve also started to flesh out the characters a bit. They’re letting Veronica display a bit of a human side, and they’re letting Ted and Linda act a little insane.

I’m writing about this episode specifically because it was a significant step above the rest in terms of awesomeness (with the exception of episode 4, the one about racial sensitivity). Also, there was some actual honest-to-God Japanese spoken at the end. Those were real Japanese people, speaking real Japanese, and they said what the subtitles said. Nothing more to say about that.

This episode featured some great Phil-and-Lem moments, as well as two fantastic lines from Veronica: “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel!” and “I wish I had the power to make everyone go away. Oh wait! I do! *leave*” I think I’m going to start using the latter one.

Random note: you know what’s weird? The resemblance between Portia de Rossi (Veronica) and Yvonne Strahovski (of “Chuck” fame). There’ve been a few moments where the physical resemblance has been almost creepy. Plus they’re both Australian imports on American TV shows who do American accents with just the tiniest flaws.

This is a bloody difficult show to write about. It’s not particularly deep (yet) and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so all I can do is watch, laugh and enjoy. There’s little room for criticism or analysis. It’s probably good for me to have a TV show that I can just watch without thinking about it too much.

I just have the season finale of Better Off Ted left to watch, but I’m saving that till tomorrow. Also tomorrow I will be giving The OC a chance to redeem itself after the heinous Chrismukkah episode of the fourth season. The whole time I was thinking “oh man we are airborne over the shark right now” and I’d hate for The OC to have punked out in its last season after a good run.

Communication via Library Books

There’s an unexpected side effect of patronizing a library, which is that it affords you occasional, strangely intimate glances into the lives of other people, without you ever knowing who these other people are.

The way this happens is through stuff that previous book borrowers leave in books. Like a lot of people, apparently, I take the approach of using library checkout receipts as bookmarks. And, like a lot of people, I don’t always remember to take them out before returning books. So sometimes, I open a book and someone else’s reading habits fall out. More than once I’ve discovered other interesting books from these. It works sort of like Pandora for books.

More fascinating, however, is when people leave in pieces of paper other than checkout receipts. Recently I found a sheet of paper from a hotel notepad. The hotel was in Texas. Did someone take this book with them to Texas? Did they go to Texas, take the hotel’s notepad and bring it back here? I don’t know. I’ve also found a shopping list.

Most recently, I found a note from one person to another. It was in a book about Pittsburgh: part history, part guidebook. Apparently two people were going to take a trip to Pittsburgh together. The note was from one to the other, listing things from the guidebook that they could do, and expressing great excitement.

This was very weird for me. It was like eavesdropping on a private conversation with pillow-talky undertones. It’s not even clear that the message’s intended recipient saw it. Maybe the note’s author put the note in the book and the recipient just returned the book without opening it, which makes this whole thing even weirder. What if I’m the only person other than the author who read this note? Then I’d be sharing an oddly close connection with this person, whom I’ve never met, I’ve never seen, whose name I don’t know. But from the type of thing this person was excited about seeing in Pittsburgh (mainly off-the-beaten-path residential neighborhoods), I have some idea of what kind of person they are.

I’m probably thinking about this too much.

Now, though, I’m trying to devise a plan to use this communication channel proactively. Basically I have the power to send messages to people, targeted by taste in books. There’s a lot to think about here. How could I make this communication channel two-way? (Out-of-band communication, like writing a book-message containing an email address, would be cheating and would take all the fun out of it.) And what would I say? I’ll have to ruminate on it.

The OC episode 404

I know I’m roughly 3 years late to this party, but all I have to say about this episode is thank goodness for actual French people. After the infamous (in my mind) Dollhouse French incident, I’m now eternally grateful for any properly-rendered foreign language on an American TV show.

The dude who played the lawyer is definitely French and spoke honest-to-God fast-speech registre soutenu French, like an actual French lawyer would speak. Autumn Reeser is definitely not French, but she tried so darn hard and got pretty close (while speaking pretty fast and, commendably, continuing to act) so that didn’t upset me unduly. Her intonation of Comment le savez-vous? “How do you know?” is totally wrong* but that’s the worst criticism I have, and it’s mild and understandable.

The translations that appeared in subtitle were good. The only complaint I have is minor, which is that the translation of the lawyer’s line Je vous préviens, je me suis entraîné de ne pas réagir aux larmes misses the funny turn of phrase. It’s translated as “I warn you, I am impervious to tears”. Yes that’s what it means, but what it actually says is “I warn you, I have trained myself not to react to tears”. I don’t see why they couldn’t have subtitled it with that. The English line as it is gets a laugh; why not just keep the funnier literal meaning of the French?

Anyway, this is just another in way in which Josh Schwartz continues to improve the world. Vive la langue française.

And in a frigging awesome coincidence, this is my 404th post.

* Her intonation is flat and low for the first two words, then falling through the last two words, whereas it should be rising through the first word, then flat and high for the rest. This is a pretty difficult thing to translate, actually. And as I will demonstrate, the French phrasing conveys what the English stress pattern should be, and thus some additional meaning. Looking at the English, there are two stress patterns that make sense: “you” stressed or “know” stressed. Which word is stressed determines where the uncertainty is. But in French, you’d determine where the uncertainty is by different phrasing, and not all intonation patterns are correct for a given phrasing. If the “you” were stressed in English, I’d say Comment est-ce que vous le sache? (intonation the same as for the English sentence “how is it that you know?”) and if the “know” were stressed in English, I’d say what was actually said in the show, with the intonation I gave at the beginning of this ridiculously long and pedantic footnote.

A correction

I hate to admit I was wrong about this, but my conscience compels me.

In my review of Bones season 4 episode 23, I got all in a huff over what I thought was an erroneous treatment of Japanese personal pronouns and ended up writing:

And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns.

This is, I now realize, blatantly false. It is in fact very easy to infer gender from certain third-person pronouns, those being kare “he” and kanojo “she”. (Random side note: these words can also mean “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” respectively.) So I was completely bloody wrong about that.

In my (feeble) defense, I have this to offer: the use of personal pronouns in Japanese to refer to people is not common; certainly it’s much rarer than it is in English. Most often, people are referred to either by their proper name, by a demonstrative such as kochira “this person here” or simply not referred to explicitly at all (Japanese permits omission of subject and object from a clause when they can be inferred from context). In formal contexts, the demonstratives are usually preferred over the personal pronouns. The most common scenario I can imagine in which a third-person personal pronoun would be used is in reported speech, such as recounting a conversation. Using personal pronouns there would still be relatively uncommon.

Excusatory heuristics aside, I can’t explain away the obvious factual error, which is somewhat embarrassing. I promise to more rigorously fact-check any linguistics-related content in future.

Better Off Ted, eps. 1-4

I’ve started watching a new show: “Better Off Ted”. It’s just completed airing its first season of 13 episodes, and it’ll supposedly be back in January for an 18-episode second season. Also, it’s fantastic.

The show revolves around main character Ted, who is a mid-level manager at a generic megacorporation called Veridian Dynamics. The other primary characters are Ted’s emotionless, unscrupulous boss Veronica; a duo of perpetually squabbling scientists, Phil and Lem; and Linda, an underling of Ted’s. You might already be thinking that this premise offers few paths that have not already been taken. But “Better Off Ted” manages to find one.

Unlike “The Office” (both British and American), “Better Off Ted” does not aim for realism in its portrayal of generic megacorporation office life, but instead engages in wildly over-the-top parody. It takes all of the setting’s little absurdities, magnifies them to epic proportions, and shows Ted (who is a relatively normal guy) dealing with them. For example, the scientists Phil and Lem are constantly getting into the kind of little kerfuffles that long-married couples stereotypically have, culminating in shamelessly bizarre situations like the two of them squeezing themselves into one hazmat suit.

On the other end, there is Veronica, whose main function is to relay the whims of the nebulous upper ranks of the corporation to Ted, who, as head of R&D, must get his underlings to fulfill such duties as creating beef without the use of a cow, and weaponizing a pumpkin. Though she is emotionless and unscrupulous, she avoids all the tired “evil boss” archetypes. Again, it’s the show’s total abandonment of realism that accomplishes this. The things she says and does are so absurd that her coldheartedness doesn’t come across as an unusually strong bad trait like it does in, say, Bill Lumbergh, but just as a normal trait that is exaggerated like everything else in the show. It doesn’t make her evil; it’s just how she is.

Stylistically, the show bears a striking resemblance to “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s extremely fast-paced, full of random and abrupt segues, and has a main character who habitually breaks the fourth wall. While fourth-wall-breaking normally bothers me, it seems natural enough in “Better Off Ted” that I’m OK with it. The only thing wrong with it is that it feels like a vestige of “The Office”’s mockumentary format.

Of course, since it resembles “Malcolm in the Middle” so much, by transitivity it resembles “Scrubs” quite a bit too. But it doesn’t resemble Scrubs in tone at all. Like “Malcolm”, and unlike Scrubs, “Better Off Ted” plunges itself headfirst into comedy with nary a dramatic moment. It’s all about the silliness. However, three of the thirteen episodes were directed by former Scrubs directors, Gail Mancuso and Michael Spiller (who, incidentally, has directed some “Sex and the City” too).

Through the absurdity, the show often musters some absolutely vicious social commentary, especially episode 4, the latest one I’ve watched. The plot of the episode revolves around some new motion detectors the company installed to save money by, for example, turning off lights when there is no motion in a room. Trouble is, the motion detectors operate by detecting light reflected off skin, and as a result, cannot see black people (like Lem). Hilarity (really good hilarity) ensues.

There’s one area of the show that’s not quite like the others: the relationship between Ted and Linda, which is, predictably enough, fraught with sexual tension and emotional confusion. It doesn’t involve the same unabashedly ridiculous situations as the other plotlines, but it’s great nonetheless. Early on, after they end up holding hands during a tense moment, Ted claims that he didn’t hold her hand; he held onto her hand after she held his hand. Linda, first coyly: “Oh, that’s how we’re playing it?” Then disgustedly: “We’re gonna play it STUPID?”

In contrast to this obviously meant-to-be relationship that just causes a lot of awkwardness, there’s the relationship between Ted and Veronica, where they occasionally hook up, think nothing of it, and experience no awkwardness as a result. It’s all very quirky, funny, and in the strangest of ways, believable. It’s the only believable part of the whole show.

Granted, I’ve only watched four episodes, but I have high hopes for this show. For its potential to entertain me, that is. Naturally, since it is a very funny, offbeat comedy with a devoted following, it has terrible ratings and probably won’t survive beyond two or three seasons. Such is the cruelty of television: a great show like “Better Off Ted” gets shitty ratings and has its first season cut short, while stupid bullshit like “Hell’s Kitchen” rolls along for infinite numbers of seasons and has viewerships in the zillions. Such disappointment is the price of having good taste in TV shows.