Historical concreteness
In graduate school we were carefully taught that history is the study of texts — the word inscribed by human hands — and that we need not concern ourselves with actual stuff. But now that I’ve travelled far afield for the first time in many years, I’m amazed at what is obvious in situ but not at all apparent on the page.
For instance, I had no idea that so much of what we think of as Greek culture actually happened in what is now Turkey. Troy is in Turkey. Ephesus, with its now-vanished Temple of Artemis, is in Turkey. Herodotus was born in Turkey, and much of his history took place there — unsurprisingly, since Turkey lies smack in the middle of Greece and Persia. Ionia is in Turkey, while Rhodes, Lesbos, and Samothrace hug its shore. Paul of Tarsus — St. Paul to Christians, who wrote and probably spoke in Greek — was from Turkey, and a bunch of his missionary work was in Turkey.
I’m sort of amazed that all of this had escaped my notice, because I’ve always been most interested in the historical construction of identity — how the branches of history are pruned or grafted to tell a particular backward-looking story. Obviously they whole Greek-Turkish thing became a touchy subject as time went on — I can’t say that either the Turks or the Greeks seemed all that thrilled about discussing the subject, and the Turkish ministry of tourism in particular seems to be a hive of total incompetence — but I can’t believe that I studied Greek Thought and Lit for a whole year without even bothering to ask where “Greece” was.
Another inescapable conclusion I reached on my Mediterranean cruise is that concrete — that stuff in between bricks and chunks of stone — is clearly one invention that was necessary for civilization to develop. Without concrete that would set underwater, no aqueducts. Without aqueducts, no plumbing. Without plumbing, it’s awfully hard for cities to grow beyond a certain point. In photos, it’s not all that apparent that the Parthenon is made out of solid chunks of marble but the Pantheon is made of brick with marble facings and Pompeii was largely constructed of brick with plaster on top — but when you walk around the various historical sites, it’s glaringly obvious.
The trip was a salutary reminder to get my head out of the books and the Internet once in a while, and just see the outside world. “Stuff” may not be history per se, but without it you’re left with a very thin and deceptive picture of the past.
Bicycle delivery
Over the last year I’ve become more enamored of bike riding — the word “cycling” is far too serious for what I do — and finally I joined the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Today when I came home from work, there was a fat envelope on the mat from them, filled with maps and stickers and all kinds of loot. The super-cool part though was that in the place where the stamp would normally be, it said “Bicycle Delivery”!!! How awesome is that?
Schadenfreude indeed
There are few feelings as delicious as the one that suffuses you when you are driving home, safely and legally, only to be brutally passed by some jerkoff in an SUV who roars up behind you going at least 20 mph over the limit and almost rear-ends the braking minivan in the next lane before cutting you off with inches to spare and then finding himself boxed in for all his trouble… and then 30 seconds later someone else makes the exact same move… but then he hits the light bar and you realize it’s the Highway Patrol pulling over the first guy. How truly sweet it is.
Mediterranean cruise planning
We don’t exactly brag about this, but Renkoo has had an unreal record of death, disease, and destruction for a company of such modest size, with such young and well-educated workers. For the entire three and a half years we’ve been in existence, we’ve hardly gone a month without a burglary, funeral, traumatic hardware failure, or hospital visit.
After a devastating beginning to the year, I decided that I would fulfill my mother’s wish to visit early Christian sites in Turkey and Italy. So I did some research, and concluded that it would be most efficient to take a cruise. The Mediterranean is so small that basically it amounts to creeping along like a snail, with transportation and housing in one unit at night while you spend your days visiting historic sites.
If anyone has advice about lunch spots, can’t-miss sights, or early Christian history in of the following ports of call, please get in touch:
* Istanbul
* Izmir/Ephesus
* Athens
* Dubrovnik
* Venice
* Naples
* Rome
* Barcelona
I’m not the world’s greatest shopper, but I would be more than happy to repay your information by bringing you back some trinket or luxury item from the city in question. Thank you!
Game culture and engineering culture
I’ve never liked games. I didn’t get into D&D or Pacman as a teenager; bridge and poker put me to sleep about the time most people feel they’re just getting warmed up; I lack the reflexes for video games, even really slow ones like Wii Bowling or Sim City; and I can’t even imagine learning the rules to Settlers of Catan (although it always amuses me to hear players muttering things like “I must have sheep!”). On the two occasions I’ve forced myself to gamble in Vegas — on the nickel slots, no less — the experience was duller than life itself.
It’s probably the area in which I am the least engineer-like, and I’ve always been somewhat self-conscious about it. A shared love of games is embedded in engineering culture to the extent that people have become completely lazy and herd-thinkily unquestioning about it. Programming classes are almost invariably taught using games as the use case of choice. The vast majority of job interviews in Silicon Valley feature “brain teasers” that are supposed to measure your “raw horsepower” by means that are even more bullshit than the GREs. After hours, game nights are one of the most common social events in the Valley. Even my beloved Rands in Repose, in most matters the most reasonable and insightful of men, unhesitatingly defines nerds as those who most love toys and puzzles. I wonder how many non-gamers — who I’m guessing are mostly chicks — see this type of stereotype perpetuated over and over before deciding engineering must not be for them.
I really struggled with this “deficiency” for a long time, until finally it occurred to me: it’s not GAMES per se that define an engineer. I think a more general formulation might be that engineers are drawn to meaningless technical challenges with lots of rules and/or quantitative data (e.g. “scores”) to geek out on — and by that standard, I am easily in the fold. It’s just that interviewers don’t think to ask whether you’ve undertaken bizarre chick tasks like designing knitted garments using mathematical principles, planning long trips while optimizing over multiple variables, calculating the gear ratio when converting your bike to a fixie, or embarking on Iron-Chef style challenges to maximize the amount of nutrition per calorie for a given menu.
My point isn’t that games are bad, but that they’re limited and inevitably exclusionary and quite likely somewhat gendered. What if you, as an interviewer, had to expand your notion of “general interest” domains? What if you just weren’t allowed to ask puzzle questions? What if you were specifically enjoined to judge candidates’ interests by their real-world applicability — in which case trip planning would come in miles ahead of Grand Theft Auto or WoW for most of us? How would engineering be different?
Slow Food Nation
The first US Slow Food Nation event was this weekend, and I must report mostly disappointment. As many of us feared, it was an elitist food-porn extravaganza rather than a celebration of real American foodways or a call to action on better food for all. In its own way, Slow Food Nation ended up being the most powerful argument that a middle ground is NOT possible, and that Morris’s “swinish luxury of the rich” is incompatible with the true needs of the masses.
I visited both the Tasting Pavilions, at Fort Mason, and the more populist marketplace and garden in Civic Center Plaza. Let me note that pricing everywhere was bizarrely uneven and at times offensively so. The Tasting Pavilions cost $65, which entitled you to entrance and 20 units in “food dough” or scrip. You could buy more scrip at the rate of $10 to 5 faux dough. Prices inside were basically the opposite of the real world, in that expensive commodities (booze, coffee, tea) were less than 2 scrip, cheese and meat and ice cream were 3 scrip for decent to large quantities, and preserves were an outrageous 2 scrip — $6.50! — for a dab of jam or a couple scraps of dill pickle. Even in the marketplace, there were reasonable deals (Scott Peacock’s biscuits with country ham for $6, or a 10 lb flat of Frog Hollow Farm peaches for $20) as well as total ripoffs (cup of New Orleans iced coffee for $5.95).
Generally each booth at the tasting pavilions was a work of art (except for the completely lackluster wine booth), using materials and layouts that tried to highlight and suggest the beauty of each ingredient — wood-fired ovens for bread, antique beehives for honey, rows of different colored olive oils, floating black-and-white curtains for tea. Organization and line management were generally abysmal, especially in that you had no opportunity to ask any questions or see what you were getting until you were already at the head of the line; and they wasted way too much manpower having individual stations of servers, none of whom had time to talk to you anyway. The sole exception was the cheese pavilion, which was amusingly bovine: it was almost entirely staffed by middle-aged women, and they intelligently herded together all their offerings on a single plate which freed up the actual cheesemakers to roam the line giving out free samples and answering people’s questions. It was the only pavilion in which I saw true interaction between the producers and the consumers (or coproducers in Slow Food Nation parlance).
A striking thing about the tasting pavilions was how little of the offerings were actually American in the letter or the spirit of the term. The coffees and chocolates were all grown outside the country, and they were deliberately downplaying the processing part in favor of the growing part. The spirits were with one exception (Square One Vodka) all foreign made. The teas obviously were all from Asia. The cheeses and meats and ice creams were all produced in the country, but in almost every case (except country ham) they were deliberately trying to ape the products of Europe with their prosciuttos and gelatos and Edams.
There was also almost no ethnic or class diversity on display at Fort Mason for the paying guests. There was one Native American booth, but it was lightly visited; and I think there was one guy making naan. The pickle stand offered no kimchi or real chutney, which in India means something more like pickled veg or fruit (e.g. lime or mango pickle). Needless to say there were no stands featuring African-American or Latino foodways… although all the people I saw sorting recycling from garbage by hand were African-American.
The Civic Center outpost was supposed to be more populist and inclusive and educational. The gardening exhibit was the one attempt I saw to improve the daily diet of the common citizen. It was also the only vegetable-oriented thing in the whole place — the market vendors were all fruit or sweets or cheese purveyors. But let’s get real: how many people in the Bay Area are going to grow their own vegetables? Almost everyone lacks the time, space, or both. I salute the crap out of organizations like City Slicker Farms, a community gardening group in Oakland — but how are they not the token group in service to poor Black people that every San Franciscan needs to assuage the guilt of enjoying the epicurean life?
I personally think the biggest problem with American food — which affects everyone, rich and poor and middle-class — is that very few people seem to know how to cook vegetables in ways that are truly delicious. If you don’t want to eat vegetables in the first place, you won’t grow them in your garden or seek them out in the farmer’s market or look forward to their seasonal arrivals. You certainly won’t eat enough vegetables, and your health will suffer. Meat is good, cheese is delicious, fruit is yummy, good bread is a miracle… but I think vegetables are the key. I would have loved to see someone like Scott Peacock — who learned everything he knows from Edna Lewis — talk about Southern vegetable dishes, which are truly American, affordable, and appealing to all — as well as very very slow! I would have enjoyed meeting farmers from a CSA, and hearing them talk about how they manage to fill their members’ boxes every week with a variety of vegetables. I would have liked seeing a tasting pavilion dedicated to corn or beans or tomatoes. If Slow Food Nation doesn’t do those things, if they succumb to the allure of celebrity chefs and food-stylist layouts, then who will?
Over the counter euphemisms
How I adore the infinitely tenuous relationship between over-the-counter medications and the gross physical maladies they purport to cure! The drugstore is already the storehouse of curatives for only the petty, inglorious, and mortifying illnesses of humankind — the fungal infections, the clogged pores, the corns and bunions of life — but the effort required to wrassle the disgusting messes of the body into socially acceptable prose can constitute a delicious sideline to a logophile.
Imagine, if you will, the young brand manager or copywriter who first described an expectorant as helping to “thin bronchial secretions to make coughs more productive”. I didn’t understand what this meant until I was like over 30 years old. It amounts to, “you’ll hack up gobs of rubbery yellow stuff, bit by painful bit, but it’s the only way to get over the chest infection that’s making you stupid and miserable”. And you know, sometimes that’s the message you need to hear — if only you could understand what they’re saying.
Or take the latest craze, “probiotics”. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with some good folks at an ad agency which handles one of the big accounts in this space, and of blurting out the indelible phrase “Oh is that the yogurt that makes you poop?” And you know, in person they actually agree with that description… but I guess it doesn’t make for very good ad copy, because the official promotional material for these products is so tangled up with terms like “digestive regulation” and “functional foods” that most people have no idea what the point of the stuff actually does.
Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if advertisers were required to state in 10 words or less what their product actually does. But then I always end up concluding that the indirection and lack of clarity are more snicker-worthy when all is said and done.
Eleven national parks
Not only does King’s Canyon/Sequoia have the biggest trees on earth and a glacier-carved valley second only to Yosemite, but it’s an automatic two-for-one on any national parks life-list because you have to go through a bit of the former park to get to the latter. Along with my previous eight, and Death Valley which I forgot to mention visiting last Thanksgiving, this means I’m up to 11 national parks. Only 47 to go!
Did I mention that I was almost eaten by a bear? I was sleeping peacefully in my tent, when all of a sudden I heard my neighbor shout “Bear! Bear! Get out of here, bear!” and similarly alarming epithets. Then like a dozen people lined up to shine their flashlights and battery lanterns in my sleepy eyes, while discussing which route the bear had taken to escape — which appeared to be directly behind my tent. I knew the bear would be coming for me.
Learning Python
I took a 3-hour tutorial on basic Python at OSCON this year, partly to see what it was like from the perspective of a neophyte because I’ve been teaching a lot of newbies to code lately. Plus I just like Python, potentially I could come to love Python… which doesn’t of course mean that I don’t have some issues and puzzlements about that community.
I have to say I can’t approve of the way Python is taught, which is invariably feature-based rather than task-based. Our instructor did the typical Python thing, which is to start babbling on about lists-tuples-dicts, demonstrate slices, move on to closures, deliver a little lecture on OOP, and finally try to explain the whole Python 3 thing. That’s all very very cool, but let me put it this way: think of a case from your entire career in which you needed to use a tuple as the key to a dictionary item. Ops Boy came up with one (geocoding), but that’s not exactly a daily task for most programmers. I happen to believe that the vast majority of humans — particularly women — learn faster if given concrete, task-based instruction with a goodly amount of repetition using realistic examples from meaningful domains.
I think this focus on “cool rather than useful features of Python” generally comes out of what I see as their biggest weakness as a community: lack of focus, exacerbated by small size. Check out the Python.org statement of what Python is good at: everything from humongous web frameworks to scientific programming to games to new ideas in sockets. PHP, in contrast, knew from Day One what it wanted to be the best at when it grew up, and generally PHP teaching tends to be quite concrete and task-based. From what I’ve seen of Perl culture, it’s even more about getting shit done without regard for adorable flourishes. I get the feeling that there’s an awfully large body of knowledge that 100% of PHP users will want to know; but for Python there might be 5 disparate topics, each of which is beloved by 20% of the community. It’s hard to grow the entire team like that.
At this juncture you probably want to point out that Java has a universal focus with seemingly more projects and libraries than there are grains of sand on the beach… but they are also probably the biggest community of all time, with massive corporate resources behind them. Pythons, if you’ll permit me a gross generalization albeit one based on personal experience, tend to be proud individualists who have difficulty accomodating the herdthink that is a necessary part of organizing resources at scale. Under those circumstances, it’s difficult to grow a community big enough to be great at so many things; and it’s disastrous to follow Java’s path towards imperial overstretch. I’ve also come to believe that PHP was lucky in never having a single Benevolent Dictator type, but instead having multiple leaders who were good at different things and had different interests.
It’s possible that deep down Pythons don’t care about being popular — and that would be cool if it were true. But it would be a shame if they actually want to be understood and loved, and just can’t explain themselves to newbies. I can only reiterate that task-based rather than feature-based thinking is the way to go. If you can’t explain the 10 things that everyone will want to do with Python rather than another programming language, and the 10 questions everyone will have about Python, then you probably have a bigger problem than just a lack of publicity.
Cycling in Portland
Portland loves to tout itself as the cycling capital of America, and it definitely deserves the title… but a recent visit there hinted that if this is the future of transportation in America, we’re all in for a bumpy ride during the transition to a less auto-centric nation.
On a vist to Portland last week I observed more bikes being used for everyday transport than I’d ever seen in any American city. A very wide range of ages, ethnicities, body shapes, genders, and pricepoints were to be found among the cyclists there. It seemed like every business had a full rack of velos chained up outside — especially the plentiful bars, lounges, and pubs that make Portland the Chicago of the west (and I mean that in the most devoutly complimentary way). Even strip clubs had full bike racks!
But why do bikes — which are legally vehicles — not get to park like vehicles? Cycling advocates love to point out that a single car parking space can yield 10 - 12 bike parking spaces. In theory, very true… but in practice, I can’t remember EVER seeing an automobile parking space converted to bike parking. Instead, bike parking is invariably carved out of pedestrian space. You can easily find any number of popular Portland watering holes where the sidewalk tables are plunked down in the middle of full bike racks! Is it going to kill the municipality to turn actual car parking into bike parking instead of taking up valuable sidewalk space? What if every block of every city had one less parking space and one more bike rack? Even in Bike City USA, that idea doesn’t seem to have occurred to the city planners. [Update: I learned from this blog that Portland does create bike parking by subtracting car parking! Good on ya, fellas!]
I am also sorry to report an enormous proportion of scofflaw cyclists on the streets of the Rose City. It seems like you can’t be outside for more than 10 seconds without seeing someone riding on the sidewalk, riding against traffic, blowing through a stop sign or red light, not signalling, or turning onto a busy street at a very high rate of speed. All that stuff would be illegal or seriously inadvisable if you did it in a car. It starts to look suicidally dumb if you do it on a bike. From what I could tell, bike people were quick to cop an attitude too… like just because car drivers do stupid shit, that makes it OK to “retaliate”. There were reports in the papers of road rage incidents on both sides, and of both cycling advocates and cops trying to inject some common sense into the maelstrom.
I was surprised how few bike lanes there appeared to be in the central part of the city — and the ones there were tended to be on the narrow side. Of course, I live in Bike Lane Heaven: the bike lanes near where I live in the South Bay are often nice and wide, and sometimes go on for many miles. What Portland seems to have instead is a system of streets parallel to the main drags, which are de-facto “bike first” or maybe “car last”. It’s definitely a different paradigm than I’m used to, and I have no real idea what mix of the two will end up being dominant on the nation’s streets. Seems like if possible the bike lanes are preferable, but the alternate routes are easier to retrofit in places with narrow streets. In the end we’ll all have to learn to share the roads though, and the sooner the better.
When all is said and done, I think Portland really is the future of transportation, for better and worse. If you haven’t visited lately, you really don’t know what you’re missing.
