Great Minds Think Different

The metric system is better than the imperial system in pretty much every way. It makes sense, it’s logical, its units are (often) based on fixed, meaningful physical quantities rather than the length of some guy’s foot. But there’s one way in which it’s sorely deficient, and that is poetry. The metric system is completely devoid of any poetic value.

Here’s what I mean. How is a writer supposed to invoke quantities expressed in metric without sounding like a complete fool? There’s nothing like an SI prefix to ruin any kind of mood. Forget about the actual conversions; just compare these two lines based on how they sound:

You move an inch, I blow ya fuckin’ head off!

You move a centimeter, I blow ya fuckin’ head off!

If you were a character confronted with the second line, you’d probably start laughing, because who the hell says “centimeter” in a situation like that? It gives you the impression that the speaker is going to whip out a ruler and confirm that the addressee has actually not moved a centimeter. There’s no way around it.

Now how about this one?

I tapped Bob on the shoulder and he jumped three feet in the air.

I tapped Bob on the shoulder and he jumped a meter in the air.

Or this?

I just drank, like, three gallons of water.

I just drank, like, ten liters of water.

Or this?

I feel like ten kilos of shit in a nine-kilo bag.

You see? It’s preposterous. What’s a metric man to do? You can’t write credible-sounding fiction with that malarkey.

It’s mostly okay, though — I think the imperial system is still at least vaguely understood in all English-speaking countries, and certainly there’s nowhere where the metric lines would sound more normal than the imperial lines. So I think we’ll be okay until the whole world goes metric and stays metric long enough for the metric system to be the only system anyone knows.

It makes me wonder, though: what do the French do?

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.

I can’t believe I’m about to make a post espousing the value of history education.

Yesterday, I was demonstrating internationalization and localization to my Cocoa class. A key part of i18n is making sure that dates, times and numbers display in the local format, so I was working on that in the context of an app where you enter your birth date, and it tells you what day of the week you were born on.

When I was demonstrating how it worked, I needed an example birth date. Most people would probably enter their own, but I’m secretive about mine, so I decided to choose a famous date in history. The first one that came to mind (it’s easy to remember, after all) was 6/6/44.

Amusing side note: Cocoa’s date parser interpreted that as the year 2044, which is not what I meant. I meant 1944. The cutoff is 49/50: a year greater than or equal to 50 is interpreted as 19xx, less than or equal to 49 is interpreted as 20xx.

I tossed out the general question: “What happened on that day?” June 6th, 1944. Nobody knew the answer. I got two suggestions that were in the right ballpark: “something bad in World War II?” “the atomic bomb?” Nobody got it right.

I was genuinely surprised. Is it just me, or is 6/6/44 one of the most important days in the history of the Western world? Even if history isn’t your strong point, shouldn’t you know that date? Maybe it’s just because I was educated in Europe, right next to where the events of that day took place, but the US was definitely involved on that day.

Now come on, look what’s happened. I always hated history classes; I never saw the point. Who cares what happened sixty years ago, I said. Who cares if I remember when the atomic bombs were dropped (Hiroshima was 8/6/45 and Nagasaki was 8/9/45), I said. That’s not important to me. And now here I am, whining about how a bunch of American-educated college students don’t know what happened on 6/6/44.

Maybe it’s because World War II was always the part of history classes that I enjoyed the most. I don’t want to give the mistaken impression that I’m good at history in general. Like, all I can tell you about when the Vietnam War happened is “in the 60s”. Of all the periods in history, WWII is definitely the one I know best. My eighth grade class took an extended field trip to Normandy, location of the D-Day landings (which took place on 6/6/44 — that’s the answer) where we visited a bunch of WWII-related sites as part of our history class’ WWII unit. The hostel we stayed in was literally on Gold Beach. I had a view of the remains of Mulberry Harbour B from my room window. It was the creepiest thing — gigantic concrete blocks, sitting far out to sea, crooked and sinking, a desolate reminder of what had happened on the very ground I was standing on, on 6/6/44. All in all, the Normandy trip was a pretty profound experience for me, which is maybe why 6/6/44 has stuck in my head.

Anyway, if you’ve read this, you should remember that date. And people should know it anyway, even if it makes no real difference whether they know it or not. I can’t really give a convincing reason why, but I didn’t seem to need one.

Here are a few pearls of wisdom that I would like to share with the world at large.

• Apostrophes are not meant to be sprinkled liberally into words. There are times when apostrophes do not belong between the “t” and the “s” in “its”. There is a very simple way to determine whether or not an apostrophe belongs there.
• “February” has two “r”s in it.
• “Alot” is not a word. “A lot” is two words.
• I know “of” and “have” sound similar in fast speech, but they are not the same word. “Could of” makes no sense. Neither does “could a”. “Coulda” makes sense as a phonetic transcription of “could’ve”, but is still not a word.
• Uniqueness does not come in degrees. Something is either unique or it is not. Nothing is very unique.
• “Than” is to be used only with comparative adjectives, for example “larger”. “Different” is not a comparative adjective. Therefore, “different than” is not to be used.
• The difference between words like “your”, “you’re” and “yore”, as well as “they’re”, “there” and “their” is not at all hard to learn. Learn it, or be judged harshly by people like me.
• “Grammar” is spelled “grammar”, not “grammer”. However, the surname of the actor who played Frasier is spelled “Grammer”. I know this makes the whole issue very confusing, but I’m confident that everyone can get their heads around it.
• One wreaks havoc. One does not wreck havoc.
• Last decade was the 1990s, not the 1990’s.

Yes, I am a stickler for good writing mechanics. Deal.

So I just got this spam:

Dear Customer, [my Google account name].

Notice: You can acess your account from a foreign IP or country by getting am (I.A.C) International Access Code, by contacting our local brances close to you.

First, there’s no particular reason for me to identify myself to any bank using the same account name as I use with Google. Like…why would I do that?

Secondly, the IP address they give is actually a server owned by the same outfit that owns the SMTP server that this message came from. They’re both in France, registered to some bloke named Thierry Jamet. So yes, someone logged in to my account on their server in France from a machine in France, without an International Access Code (whatever the hell that is). So wait, why would I need an International Access Code for that? And why would I be logging into a French bank account from France? I haven’t been to France for ages.

Thirdly, if they really want to make me think they’re a bank, they could at least spell-check their spam. It takes only marginal effort compared to setting up the scam in the first place. Maybe spending two minutes spell-checking would give them more hits.

But what really galls me is not how stupid the spammers are (“your protection is our future medal”? What the bejesus?), it’s knowing that there are people even more stupid — people who will actually fall for this.

Sigh.

Language Log: The Dan Brown Code

Finally! Someone who agrees with me that The Da Vinci Code is the most stunningly overrated piece of writing in the history of fiction. Not only that, but also that Dan Brown is an absolutely terrible writer in general. I can’t really describe the completely inept style better than the page I linked to. Brown shamelessly abuses the English language; you have to feel sorry for a person who has such a tin ear for prose. I don’t profess to be a master of style myself, but seriously, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than Brown’s work. I was under the impression that the existence of editors was for the purpose of not letting stuff like that get published.

It’s not just the horrific style that bothers me; in “Digital Fortress”, he makes a complete mockery of the field of cryptography. There is a device that can brute-force any ciphertext in a matter of minutes — without even knowing the algorithm the text was encrypted with! Now, I have no problem suspending disbelief, but this is just too much. Maybe it’s because I actually know stuff about cryptography. Oh, and the plot of the book is based on these wacky strings that confuse the über-brute-force-machine: “mutating” strings, which change themselves whenever you try to brute-force them. This just makes my head hurt. Whatever. That book is a completely lost cause. I think it’s Brown’s worst-selling novel (not that that’s saying much), with good reason.

There’s also the fact that Brown’s characters are entirely unoriginal. I’m of the opinion that without good characters, any work of fiction (of any significant length) is hollow and worthless. Brown’s books involve stick figures running around because of a plot (which I’ll get to later). The characters are archetypal and one-dimensional. Most of his characters are so similar that I can’t even remember which name was used in which book. What makes a book active entertainment? It’s the act of caring about the characters, empathizing with them, reviling them, wishing good or bad fortune on them. If the characters can’t be engaged with, then what’s the point of reading all those hundreds of pages? Getting through a complicated plot isn’t going to make you any smarter, and it’s not going to teach you any lessons.

Now for the plots. I read The Da Vinci Code first, and couldn’t understand what all the hype was about. Then I read Angels & Demons, and about a third of the way through, I suddenly realized: it’s The Da Vinci Code! The plot, modulo superficial inconsequential details, is the same! Even the characters are the same, except with different names. It’s a complicated plot, to be sure, but anybody can make a complicated plot.

As I mentioned before, I’m totally fine with suspension of disbelief. You can’t enjoy a work of fiction without it. However, Dan Brown makes reading his fiction and suspending disbelief almost entirely incompatible. In his meta-commentary in his books, he mentions that he’s done painstaking research and that a whole bunch of surprising things he says in the book are actually true, such as that Rome is really laid out so that five strategic places lie in a perfect cross. OK, maybe so (it’s not actually true), but he makes such a point of the factual accuracy of the book that it’s impossible to read his description of antimatter being carried around in a little canister without two fundamental forces clashing in your brain. The fact that a lot of the things he cites as true facts are not actually any such thing is an entirely different issue.

Seriously, if you enjoyed a Dan Brown book, you need higher standards.