dan-o's blog

Sat Dec 26

langer:

Avatar is a bad film.

Not because it lacks any meaningful character development (which it does), not because its plot is laughably flimsy (which it is), and not because it is little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully, but because it is yet another example of b-grade Hollywood moralizing, of not very smart people with typically superficial good intentions offering Americans an insidiously shallow civics lesson along with their 64-oz Cokes and shrink-wrapped boxes of Butterfinger Minis.

I was lucky enough to see Avatar with langer on Christmas day.  I agree that it’s a bad film, and I agree it’s “little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully” (which we watched later in the day, so believe me, we’re sure).  For me, though, I went in with the expectation that it would be a mostly weak film with stunning visuals, and thought I would be OK with that.  Turned out I wasn’t.

The 3D took a lot away from the visuals for me.  I’m not sure if it’s because the theater was imperfect — that’s likely the case — but there was enough ghosting and inclarity for me that I simply wasn’t blown away as I ought to have been.  I’d kind of like to see it again without 3D, but I really, really don’t want to sit through it again.

There are plenty of films that I’m glad I saw despite finding them generally uncompelling as films, simply because of their stunning beauty (Children of Men, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Pan’s Labyrinth come to mind), but Avatar was not one of them.  It was, frankly, a waste of three hours of my life.

my data is just fine, thank you

I think a lot about the evolution of language, and how words come to mean something more or different than they did 50 or even ten years ago.  It’s tricky, sometimes, being a bit of a stickler about spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and perhaps more than anything, semantics), while still allowing our language to evolve, and changing with it.  I do think it’s possible, though, to live in the grey area between two absolutes.  This is the Obama era, right?

So, “data” is the plural of “datum”.  Fine.  But it’s time all the language purists came out and admitted that another meaning of the word has evolved which, while having the same etymology and essentially the same meaning, is not a plural, but rather a mass noun, just like “water” or “rice” or “helium”.  In which case, it’s perfectly fine to say “this data is bogus” or “this is too much data”.  These days, anyone who says “these are too many data”, let’s face it, just sounds like a pompous ass.

Wed Dec 23
gpoyw… good hair day

gpoyw… good hair day

Sat Dec 19

my christmas story

AT-AT imperial walker

It was December of 1981.  I had just turned 9, and there were two big-ticket items I and my two brothers (Casey, 6, and Bennett, who we called “Ben” in those days, 11) desperately wanted for Christmas: an AT-AT imperial walker and an Atari 2600.

A couple days before Christmas, I accidentally got a glimpse of the Atari in its large, glorious box in the trunk of my Dad’s car.  It was like the scene with the briefcase in Pulp Fiction — my brothers saw the golden light shining on my face.  My Dad slammed the trunk shut and, shortly thereafter, took me aside and carefully explained that I was not to share what I saw with Casey or Ben.

Of course, there was no way that that was happening, because (a) I was way, way to excited to not share it with anyone, and (b) Ben was my big brother — he had ways of extracting information from me.  The interrogation began less than an hour later.

Ben: What was it.

Me: I’m not supposed to say.

Ben: It’s an AT-AT, isn’t it.

Me: No.

At this point, I’m beginning to enjoy this — I know something that my big brother doesn’t, and that he painfully wants to.  I’m going to try and milk this for as long as I can.

Ben: It is so I can tell.

Me: No I swear it’s not.

Ben: OK… what’s the first letter.

Me: A.

Ben: Fine what’s the next letter.

Me: T.

I SWEAR THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED.  I couldn’t believe me luck, and I was chuckling feverishly on the inside.

Ben: IT IS AN AT-AT! What’s the next letter!

ME: A! But I swear it’s not!

The interrogation took at quick turn.  I was starting to feel guilty, and big brothers can smell that. It only took him a few more minutes to extract the “R” from me and figure out what I’d seen.

In the end, it turned out our parents had gotten us BOTH the imperial walker AND the Atari 2600, and all was well with the world and it was pretty much the best kid Christmas ever.

Atari 2600

Thu Dec 17

the three stages of debugging

stage 1: that’s completely impossible and I refuse to believe it.

stage 2: ok I believe it now. but now I don’t understand how it worked in the first place, or how anything else is working.

stage 3 (if you’re lucky): oh now I get it.

Welcome to stage 2, population: me.

Sat Dec 12
http://langer.tumblr.com/post/280573007

langer:

“We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works.”

—

Richard Feynman, Caltech lectures, 1962 (via fdanbo)

I got turned onto this quote yesterday by Dan-o while we were out on a smoke break at work and we got to discussing quantum mechanics (because that’s how you make small talk in Kendall Sq., Cambridge). I was remarking on how striking it is that as far as our individual perception of the world goes we all still very much live in a Kantian/Newtonian universe, how our experience of sensations and the way we talk about them are all still very much in the language of classical mechanics, as if the quantum theories, though accurate, do not offer a narrative that coincides enough with human subjectivity to let us speak in its terms.

Dan-o countered that the pedagogy of physics had come a long way over the last century—that the folklore and the storytelling and the metaphors had evolved greatly since Bohr &co.—and that today’s physicists are actually internalizing quantum mechanics in ways we haven’t really seen before.

Sounded like a lot of bullshit to me. I mean come on: it’s a particle and a wave? Position or velocity but not both? Time dilation? Who can actually internalize any of that?

But here’s the thing you have to realize about Dan-o. Dan-o is a smart dude. Dan-o went to MIT. Dan-o can answer just about any question about just about anything. Dan-o has been known to alter the gravitational pull of Saturn’s moons just by thinking really hard about something. But here’s the real kicker: Dan-o doesn’t listen to music while he writes code because he finds music too distracting. Instead he listens to Feynman lectures. He says they’re “soothing”.

So yeah, maybe he was right. I mean if anyone could perceive fluctuations in the passage of time while riding the subway I guess it would be Dan-o.

Aw shucks!

Except now all your followers are going to find my tumblr expecting elaborate discourse about science, mathematics, and physics, and be disappointed to find about one entirely uninteresting post a month.

Anyway, the actual Feynman quote I was referring to was this one:

“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you know about, or that you have any direct experience about.  They do not behave like waves; they do not behave like particles; they do not behave like clouds, nor like billiard balls, nor like weights on springs, nor like anything that you know anything about.”

But yeah, same idea.

Wed Dec 2
I’ve seen ads like these all over the subways and elsewhere in Boston.  It seems they’re intended to be funny; each has a pithy punchline similar to this one (“I feel drunk with power.”) It just struck me: does this mean Microsoft thinks the idea of actually listening to their users is funny? It’s as though they’re saying, “HA HA OMG these people think we did this because they wanted it ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS”. Anyway, it’s not an advertising campaign I would have chosen.

I’ve seen ads like these all over the subways and elsewhere in Boston.  It seems they’re intended to be funny; each has a pithy punchline similar to this one (“I feel drunk with power.”)

It just struck me: does this mean Microsoft thinks the idea of actually listening to their users is funny? It’s as though they’re saying, “HA HA OMG these people think we did this because they wanted it ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS”.

Anyway, it’s not an advertising campaign I would have chosen.

22T!

danob@michael-jordan:~$ df -h /dev/md1
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1               22T 1.1T   21T   5% /mnt/raid6

Tue Dec 1

It was Feynman’s idea to use the double-slit experiment as an introduction to the principles of quantum mechanics.  I have a recording of him explaining it in a lecture at Cal Tech in 1962, but alas it’s nearly an hour long so tumblr won’t let me upload it.

So for now I’ll just quote my favorite part:

“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you know about, or that you have any direct experience about.  They do not behave like waves; they do not behave like particles; they do not behave like clouds, nor like billiard balls, nor like weights on springs, nor like anything that you know anything about.”

This is a really good explanation of the double-slit experiment, which, if you don’t know much about quantum mechanics, might blow your mind.