Nomenclature

We've only been doing the last-name thing for ten generations or so.

How Does Harry Potter End

If you make a man a fire, he will be warm for one night.

If you set a man on fire, he will be warm the rest of his life.

At some point in high school, I spent a chunk of time in a Barnes and Noble and skimmed through a whole rack of Cliff's Notes. Of course that is so last-millenium - if you want to know how Harry Potter ends nowadays you should just read Wikipedia.

Don't think you are cheating at life somehow. That is wrong wrong wrong. Reading summaries of famous works of literature is a dense, information-rich, exciting experience. Read a single paragraph summarizing the plots of the 100 greatest novels of all time and you will learn a lot. Read a single one of them, that makes you a bit wiser.

You might ruin the fun later, though. Maybe you should read the Wikipedia entries for greatest novels 101-200.

More Tufte Quoting

From "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information":

Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field. The assumption led down two fruitless paths in the graphically barren years from 1930 to 1970: First, that graphics had to be "alive", "communicatively dynamic", overdecorated and exaggerated (otherwise all the dullards in the audience would fall asleep in the face of those boring statistics). Second, that the main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception (the dullards could not protect themselves).

With a generic but powerful analysis tool, it's easy to focus on how unskilled users can screw up. It's a lot more obvious when something goes wrong than when something great just doesn't happen. But the most important, most permanent, most exciting effect is to make a skilled user even more powerful.

Same goes for statistical charts as search engines.

Two Reasons I Hate Django

"Top ten" lists are played out. Instead I propose the "Top two" format. Perhaps, like sonnets, restricting the medium will result in higher quality thought.

In the past year I have probably introduced a couple dozen different programmers to Django. But, I can't say it is awesome with a straight face. There's a lot of small stuff you can nitpick, but really I have two overriding complaints.

1. By the time you get started, you have lost your enthusiasm.

I have set up Django from scratch on Windows, OS X, and Linux. I don't think it has ever taken me less than ten minutes. Often much more. The experience should work like this:

a. someone searches for [install django]
b. they click on the first search result
c. that page has a link to something they download
d. they run the one command explained on that page
e. they go into their python interpreter and type

>>> import django

f. they paste in a short snippet of code
g. you have a server that does something

For Django, the first impression is really important. Non-corporate "cool" technologies, like Django, have to spread bottom-up, with enthusiasts converting their friends. But the success of these conversions depends heavily on what you can show a friend before they get bored.

2. It sucks to switch languages.

In the course of hunting down a single bug you might have to flip between looking at python, html, SQL, css, javascript, and the Django template language. This is not a very happy programming experience!

Add this to the typical nightmare that is cross-browser compatibility and you start to wonder - maybe we should have libraries that wrap the html, css, and javascript. Some team of honored maintainers somewhere can constantly test that Netscape version 0.3 doesn't crash.

Wouldn't hurt to include Comet support out of the box, either.

If I Had An iPhone

I estimate I would blog quotes from books I was reading about twice as much.

Quote quote quote quote

From "Beautiful Evidence", by Edward Tufte:

For, as Paul Klee wrote in The Thinking Eye, "Didn't Feuerbach say: For the understanding of a picture, a chair is needed? Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind."

And you can quote me on this.

The Barack Obama Muslim Phenomenon

Go to Google Suggest and type in 'barack obama'.

Three of the ten suggestions are

barack obama muslim
barack obama religion
barack obama's religion

Not that I even know how exactly Google Suggest chooses its phrases, but this is what real people are searching for. This is what they are wondering.

I predict Obama gets swift-boated in the general election, accused that he is really a Muslim. The argument goes something like

R: Barack Hussein Obama? I don't think I can vote for a Muslim.

D: He's not a Muslim he's Christian you moron.

R: Muslim law says if your father is Muslim you're a Muslim.

D: But, his dad bailed when he was 2 and his mom was Christian.

R: So? And did you know his name is Barack Hussein Obama.

D: Well I always make a point of leaving out the Hussein part.

You heard it here first!

Math

Really, the bell curve and the long tail are the same. The question is just whether the mean is negative something and therefore chopped off, or not.

I don't mean "pimping" literally

Sorry to keep pimping Malcolm Gladwell but a line from this article is too curious to resist:

"If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father."

Procrastination

Easy to get a lot of one thing done while pausing in another.

(Blogging.)

It's for your benefit, though, O reader. Check out this article (by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame) about how the king of infomercials has raked in a billion dollars in sales, basically starting with nothing but ideas for new kitchen products.

What Does "Best" Mean

I may have blogged this before, but the video game Spore won the "Best PC Game" award at E3 in both 2005 and 2006.

Release is scheduled for September 2008.

Interesting Interview

An interesting interview with Will Wright, designer of the most breathlessly praised not-yet-existent video games of recent memory.

Interesting how he measures time by a relatively specific number of mouse clicks. Describing one goal of Spore:

"Recapturing that magic where come up to the computer, and in ten or twenty mouse clicks you've done something that really surprises you, that you didn't think you could do or the computer could do, but really the credit comes back to yourself."

In Which I Stop Trying

Which is more correct - classical uses of numbers, or Intrade?

What if you had two intrades, that had totally different numbers - sure you could arbitrage, but that's not my question. My question is, what would you do to tell over time which one was more accurate?

I Try To Avoid Politics

So I'll just quote this without comment.

"""
Even before any results were in Saturday, despite the daunting number of delegates Mr. McCain has amassed, Mr. Huckabee told reporters he was not pulling out of the race. Mr. Huckabee, a pastor before he became governor of Arkansas, said: “I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too."
"""

-- the NYT on the Feb 9 events

Who Calls Themselves Squirrels?

Occasionally people ask me what I do all the time.

Pete jokes about the Cheers episode where Norm gets a job as a beer taster. That night: "Whew, I'm exhausted. Gimme a beer."

Ken has a much more active plan, beginning the Cincinnati water polo revolution. The picture of their mascot may look squirrelly, but actually it's a snapshot of Ken in 1996.