I have an intense memory of this show. I would have been six in 1987. I remember it as being extremely dark and disturbing. The protagonists wore power suits and the villains were completely robotic from the head down and they flew around in a post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland and fought. I think I must have had access to one of the toys at one point. There was a game you could play with the toy and a video cassette. I guess this game was stupid, or the toy broke or something, because I made my own “robotic soldier” out of a plush parrot and tinfoil, using syran wrap for the visor in the helmet. This augmented parrot was very, very cool and completely satisfied my feverish six-year-old imagination. My friend did the same thing with a teddy bear. Be sure to take a look at the wikipedia article. Who were the terrible people who made this show?

a la The City:

I was listening to my ipod in the back of the bus on the way to work. A guy got on with a guitar and came and stood at the back of the bus. He hesitated, even though there were two available seats. He looked at me and said, “You know why a guitar is better than an ipod?” I shook my head and smiled ambivalently. He kept looking at me. I took off my headphones. “I said, you know why a guitar is better than an ipod? Because it’s infinite!”

Maybe he was trying to tell me this.

Things that are different in Pittsburgh:

Alcohol — You can only buy wine or liquor at the state store. Only bars are allowed to sell takeaway beer … so the corner convenience store has an area where you can drink singles and smoke (smoking ban in effect March 30). You can bring your own beer or wine to a restaurant without a liquor license, and pay a corking fee. The way I remember it is, everything you can do in DC, like buy beer in a grocery store, you can’t do in Pittsburgh, and everything you can do in Pittsburgh, like drink beer in a convenience store or carry a six-pack out of a bar, you can’t do in DC.

Buses – Buses are part of the strangely influential and omnipresent Allegheny County Port Authority. Port Authority runs a huge transit system consisting of hundreds of little niche bus lines each with multiple permuations of [A, B, C, D…] and [Local, Express, Alternate], the T line light transit (which many people seem to feel is useless) and probably ferries, hot air balloons, etc. I don’t know exactly why I have this impression of bizarre complexity, except that it is a remarkably big system (facing cuts) that everyone takes for granted here. Near my apartment there is a dedicated bus road going downtown.

And buses have an authority beyond their size in this city. A bus I was on didn’t turn the corner at a sharp enough angle and couldn’t make its left turn because of the solid line of oncoming cars. The driver backed the cars up as far as they could go, and then forced three cars to drive onto the sidewalk before he could straighten out into his lane. The other day I saw a cop holding up traffic while he furiously berated a guy in a sports car for trying to get around a bus.

The buses aren’t actually lines, but cycles. They nearly all go downtown, so they’re basically named after their originating neighborhoods. These two facts confused me a lot when I first started riding. I couldn’t understand how I could get off the bus at one stop and then catch the same bus going in the same direction to go home. It’s because they follow a single route from the named neighborhood until they approach downtown, then they loop through the city and return to the single route when they get out from the city.

This is the reason for the (initially, to me) strange fare policy of having people pay when then get on if they are “inbound” and pay when they get off if they are “outbound”. Of course, it makes more sense for the bus to spend less time taking people on in the chronically congested downtown, especially at rush hour. But there are some places when the bus is still basically inbound but you’re planning to go outbound where it gets confusing. You just get on and don’t pay until you get off. Today I saw an angry homeless guy walk in through the back door (which is okay, as long as you’re outbound) and ride a couple of blocks and get off without paying. For all I know, it’s free to ride around downtown. At least, this is a fairly obvious hack of the system.

I think the bus system might be chainlinked way out into Allegheny county through a system of bus depots, like the one in nearby East Liberty. So the sense is that this is a commuter transit system where all roads lead to Pittsburgh’s downtown. ¹ This is a city with lots of cool, fully-fleshed-out commercial neighborhoods, but everyone who rides the bus has a constant need to go downtown.

I know I sound out of it. It’s just so much more centralized than I’m used to living in DC, where the bus lines crisscross the city with the purpose of getting you from one neighborhood to another, or from one quadrant to another. Also, we have the subway² . I would probably have a different view if I’d ever tried the daily commute from Maryland or Virginia.

Grocery store – We have a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s nearby. We mostly shop at the Giant Eagle, though. (Amy likes to free-associate this name with the divebombing bald eagle from the intro to the Colbert report.) The Giant Eagle in our neighborhood seems to be pursuing every demographic at once, and does a pretty good job of it. They have a complicated organization scheme that is oddly intuitive:

Cafe, plants, deli, gourmet cheeses, produce, deli breads… (yes, I’m doing this all from memory) then several aisles of food grouped by ethnicity: a whole wall of kosher foods facing miscellaneous European food nationality groups (e.g., German for jars of sauerkraut, a Scandinavian cluster for chocolates and strange pickled fruits) ; Mexican (e.g., salsas, including blatantly Anglo salsas) ; Asian (e.g., instant noodles) ; Italian (e.g., spaghetti sauce); Polish (e.g., pierogies) — each of these is very decently stocked with interesting stuff, and probably provides a good census of the ethnic-American makeup of the city. Along the walls, the standard fish, meat, milk, a small but vital fake lunch meats (and fake cheese) section, then pasteurized cheeses (remember the gourmet cheese section?) … over to breads, where you can find Thomas Squares Bagelbread³. Then several long aisles for: cookies, crackers, juice boxes; soups, spices, coffees and teas; beverages (juice); beverages (sodas); magazines; personal hygiene products; etc. ; etc. The two frozen food aisles feature lots of frozen ethnic foods, including more pierogies, as well as an excellent fake meat section (across and down from the Organic Foods section, which also has vegetarian fare). There’s a bank, a pharmacy and a place to buy bus passes. Amy gets a discount if she buys gas from a Giant Eagle affiliated gas station.

I want to talk more about this grocery store, I really do. The reason why I mentioned all that was to point out how ingeniously broken the store’s taxonomy is. In most grocery stores it’s more or less kingdom -> genera -> species, dairy -> cheese -> velveeta. Here, the categorization is based on clades.

Pretty good grocery store.

1. If you ever study a map of the area between Washington, DC and Pittsburgh, you’ll see that all roads really do lead there, or rather through it. [back]
2. I guess it’s harder to build a subway in a hilly city? [back]
3. The humor of which will be explained in a subsequent entry. [back]

[12:14:10 AM] tristil: All of a sudden, I get it.
[12:14:22 AM] Amy Taylor: yeah?

[12:14:26 AM] tristil: A rock group is typically four guys who practice a lot together.
[12:14:29 AM] tristil: To get a groove.
[12:14:54 AM] tristil: Jazz groups are a bit more fluid, because they’re trained to improvise and groove with each other.
[12:15:14 AM] tristil: Hip-hop is about a DJ and an MC or multiple MCs.
[12:15:36 AM] tristil: That’s why they have more collaborations.
[12:16:08 AM] tristil: Because it’s always a DJ looking for an MC, and vice versa. Each is incomplete without the other.
[12:17:42 AM] tristil: That’s all. I just didn’t know that before.

Update: Listen to this interview with Grandmaster Flash to gain true enlightenment. At the end he explains the origin of the MC. I love that: inward DJ, outward MC.

At least, I program. One of the happy recent developments in my life (out of some that have not been so happy) is that the programming thing is starting to come together.

What this really means is that if I apply myself to a programming task, usually in the form of hacking on an existing codebase from an established project, I am now able with considerable persistence and a fair amount of hair-pulling and alienation of my girlfriend, to push out a passable solution.

I can submit as evidence:

• A patch (and follow-up patch) to enable Banshee support for the music track listener in Gajim.
• The work I do as maintainer of the Alexandria¹ project.

I find that progress in programming skill proceeds somewhat arithmetically. There are days that I have spent hours banging my head against a problem only to come up with a solution that consists of a single line change. So I’m doing better if I make one more significant line change than yesterday, two more, etc. I just wrote about 8-10 lines of code in the course of about 5 hours. Pretty good! This is the rate I maintain when hunting and fixing bugs. I do slightly better when I’m adding incremental features, in part because I’m busy introducing new bugs and because my own code tends to be verbose. There’s some backsliding in this metric when I figure out/remember how to be more concise (for example, using collect and writing blocks for functions in Ruby and using list comprehensions in Python²), but this a good thing.

The last step is to learn how to properly design a program from the ground up. Learning how to think OO³ is the last to come for me. Studying the Alexandria codebase has helped me a lot; the previous development team was a clever bunch of guys, full of meta-programming tricks and “expressive” Ruby code that have caused me endless hours of frustration and led me to some pleasing razor’s-edge-of-duress epiphanies. I’m working on a program called Chronology that will give me some practice with designing a program from scratch.

In another life, I got a CS degree and this is all easy for me.

1. The current webpage sucks. To see what I do look here, here and here. I’m ‘method’. [back]
2. But never lambda or map. Python, I hardly knew ye. [back]
3. Object-Oriented Programming. [back]

Let me tell you about temping sometime.

This is me¹:

This is my desktop: ²

1. I don’t always look like this. [back]
2. Ubuntu Feisty on a dual-boot Macbook. [back]

I’ve done this so many times, I am weary of it.

Typo just flat-out didn’t work. And it didn’t work in baffling ways; all conditions being the same, it would just stop working. So I’m not gonna do that anymore.

[Questions at the end]

del.icio.us has a new “bundle” feature that allows for non-exclusive categories to contain tags. All it does now is break your tags up into headings, but it’s clearly intended to provide the second level of hierarchy as user’s tag lists sprawl beyond manageability. At first I was freaked out because I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to further categorize my tags. The nice thing about del.icio.us is the way that it encourages you to make a thousand eccentrically tagged piles and not worry about careful taxonomy. Each tag has a meaning for you, and when you want to find something again you look at the list and back-trail just one of your several associations. But then it’s social software, and so you take into consideration both the intelligibility of your tagging for other people and, possibly, their respect for your ordering scheme. (Certainly, one avoids telling associations. See, for instance, someone’s “funny” tag.)

I found with the bundling that I was self-conscious about making stupid general categories. For instance, I tend to throw everything “humanistic” into [literature/philosophy/art], because I have trouble separating out, say, critical approaches to works of art. But there’s something else that I consider [culture] that involves pop art, current events and light news stories (but not [politics]) and sociology. The other thing to keep in mind is that the bundles are non-exclusive, but that they contain tags, ie., sloppy on-the-fly categories, mostly chosen based upon associable attributes. Before I started writing this entry, I was chirping to myself, “It’s non-exclusive—no worries!” and even mused to myself that the law of noncontradiction only applies to things in the same time and place and respect, so I was okay. Now, I’m upset. My innocent, free-form, self-expressive tagging activity has been opened up to all this heavy stuff about the right way to chop up being.

Take, for instance, shirt. There’s this site that showcases different t-shirts. Right now, I put the tag “shirt” in [information] with my “apartment” tag. Now, if I decided that t-shirts were legitimately a form of art, then I would have no problem adding the tag shirt to the [literature/philosophy/art] bundle. What doesn’t make sense about this, though, is that usually an item tagged shirt is either going to be of informational or artistic value! So if you click on the [information] bundle and find shirt items in it, you don’t know whether they have anything to do with shirt qua information…

This problem is the reason why no librarian would ever use a del.icio.us-esque system for categorizing elements in an inventory. Actually, I think that tags tend to be backwards to normal taxonomy, because they’re not essentialist (e.g., biological taxonomy) but pull together disparate things by aspects. I think we choose the tags we use according to guesses about the relevance of the set of items that will share a given aspect, and I know I tend to discriminate against things that would make the contents of a tag too divergent and make a new tag instead.

We do the same thing on Google: we pick the words (aspects) that we think would be included in the type(essence) of page we’re looking for. (This is induction, right?) Here’s a question: do we actually have the concept of the page in our heads before we find what we want, or is this mostly a story we tell ourselves after the fact? I think the latter is the current (computerized) information science perspective; also, I have heard librarians complain about Google-style relevance searches applied to their Dewey-categorized catalogs. What the new IS people say is that old-school library science is tied to systems of categorization for physical elements, e.g., books, which actually have to reside in one place on a shelf (unless the library wants to keep multiple copies). So when the new IS people get excited they say that the same information can reside in many “places” and can be represented at the same time to many people in different ways. That’s why the del.icio.us-style tagging and relevance searching, because it’s easier to point to the thing that you’re looking for in the location where you know to look for it than to figure out deductively its location in a hierarchical system, especially if that system is impossibly big.

Except that physicality and distinctness keep reintruding. The W3C treats URIs (like http://www.stupididea.com/method/) as distinct locales that are always just one thing, at the same time and in the same respect (e.g., cgi inputs). For another thing, information always occupies a physical location, usually in the bits on a harddrive, although multiple identical instantiations of an item of information can exist simultaneously in different places. Since each instantiation of an item of information has the potential to be altered, W3C uses URIs to establish the unique identities of authoritative documents. Further, while most documents are texts that allow for a wide degree of interpretation of intent and the nature of contents, many documents on the web are XML-like data files that rigidly describe a set of contents which are defined in relation to explicit definition files. These documents carry their own intended meaning, simply a set of hierarchical and associational relations between values (for example, a Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) file binds together values of people’s names, addresses, etc. into a network of relations).

Noncontradiction holds for information as well, if one takes “in the same respect” to mean something like “in the same system of categorization”. Moreover, relevance search and tagging, or reverse look-ups based on aspects, approach essential, ie. hierarchical categorization as more terms or more tags are used to single out an item. In Google, you should find only one document (and copies) once you reach the absurdity of searching for every word in that document in sequence. A del.icio.us bookmark list will be trash if every item is tagged with every tag, and bundling will only provide more information rather than less if tags are chosen to work rationally together with a carefully distinguished set of bundles. (I might be misunderstanding something, though. These bundles confuse me).

For example, I had a tag named dog that was neither [people] nor [information] nor [culture], so I put it in its own bundle named [miscellaneous]. This is real lame, so I considered anticipating future tagging needs by creating an [animal] bundle, set against [people]. I realized how funny it was that in my supposedly informal categorization activity, I was being pushed toward established classification schemes (if I have [people] and [animals] I should have [places] and all sorts of things like [rocks] and [concepts]). Of course, I’m just imposing my prejudice for philosophically justified hierarchies onto a system of aspect-based tagging that is intended to provide a quick and dirty solution to mass organization of materials, right?

Okay, I’m going to stop now. Sorry for the incoherence and bad writing. My questions are:

• (asked by Mr. David to Amy T) “Is there more than one way to divide up being?”
• Does the need to reconcile the categorization of a large number of items in a system force specificity and thus truthfulness, or does it strain rationality, or is it just a perverse way to play a game of limited interest?
• How should I organize my del.icio.us using bundles?
• What is the being of a combined tag (like blue+car)?
• Should we force computers to make inferences based on philosophically rationalized datasets? Does this make sense, or is this possible?

Update: hb and Robbie P say it isn’t so.

Like a thunderbolt out of the blue, it hits me: Not so much, as in “Is Thomas Friedman a genius? Eh…not so much” is a new joke meme! See, it’s a joke that you use the English phrase indicating a reduction in degree when discussing a matter where it’s commonly assumed that there is no possibility for variations in degree, only in kind. I think that this meme has been perpetrated perhaps by Jon Stewart, where he uses it as a Jewish joke about excessive equivocation where the speaker has an obvious unequivocal opinion. I can’t remember the exact material, but it’s something like, “Do I think he’s a douchebag? Eh. ‘Perhaps’. Do I think he’s a ‘decent person’? Eh. Not so much.”

(This makes sense, too, because I’m thinking in particular of the Jon Stewart show immediately after his Crossfire appearance, which many people would have watched and remembered).

Here is the example that alerted me. The idea here is that the ugly roller mice do not appear to be ergonomic at all. It is my contention that this man, this blogger, has watched Jon Stewart and, consciously or unconsciously, picked up the “not so much” joke meme.

Further, I was myself aware of the joke meme because I have exhibited a tendency to use this joke, even though I don’t regularly watch Jon Stewart (although I did watch the post-Crossfire show). I now believe that I got it indirectly from from Hayden B., an avid Stewart viewer. I have in turn transmitted it, although perhaps in a weaker concentration, to Amy T. This indicates that “not so much” is a joke meme, rather than simply a habituated imitation of Jon Stewart, because then only the direct regular viewers would be affected. The etiology seems to be that certain primary carriers, like Hayden and perhaps the blogger, contracted the meme directly from the media source and then transmitted it to secondary carriers with a basic receptivity. The all-important stage in the proliferation is the passage of the meme to the tertiary carriers, who may have never directly witnessed a Stewart “not so much” incident.

My thesis, then, is that “Not so much” is a linguistic and humoristic meme operating at such a basic level in our language and transmitted to such a circumscribed crowd that its emergence and proliferation has passed virtually unnoticed. Until now.

Moreover, I will venture the following conjectures: 1) The overall extent of transmission will be limited by the relatively small population of people with receptivity to the humor and the insularity of the subpopulations of same. 2) The relative weakness of the infection in tertiary carriers will prevent further transmission, thus linking the continued viability of the meme to the persistence /humoristic promiscuity of the primary carriers. 3) Primary carriers are likely to be “media junkies” with high susceptibility to memes in general; thus, more recently acquired memes will tend to edge out older memes 4) Eventually, the primary carriers will forget about the “not so much” joke meme and the secondary carriers will be disappointed to find their attempts at hip humor rebuffed as “lame” 5) The meme may have reached its peak exposure and may already be in the process of recession and disappearance entirely 6) Jon Stewart’s continued media presence may have the ability to periodically resurrect the meme for short bursts of renewed activity 7) A careful linguistic epidemiological study in newspapers/magazines and on the web of 2004-2005 might reveal a pronounced spike in incongruous usages of “not so much” that would support the Jon Stewart “Not So Much” Joke Meme Hypothesis.

Am I employed yet? Eh. Not so much.