malvasia bianca

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it.

But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) pictures: it’s a theory about the nature of life. (He’s not one to hide the ambition of his goals: the subtitle to the series is “An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe”.) While, of course, my first reaction to such sweeping claims is to roll my eyes at them, I just can’t do that here: he asks too many uncomfortable questions for me to simply ignore him.

Over lunch today (Cafe Brioche, yum), I finished the section talking about how the fifteen fundamental properties appeared in living objects. Which got me thinking: where else do they appear? I have go on the brain these days, and if any game is going to show signs of life, surely that’s the one, so let’s test them.

To my readers who are not go players, I apologize for the lack of context for the following. (And I have suggestions for how you can fix that!) I looked for good go pictures, but had a hard time finding ones I really liked; here’s one famous example, but that’s an abstract picture of a position, and of course in Alexander’s context I really shouldn’t be ignoring the actual physical objects involved. (Unfortunately, people who post pictures of go boards on flickr seem to like to take them from odd angles.) Anyways, let’s go through the properties:

• Levels of Scale Individual stones, adjacent stones, eyes, living groups, walls, territories. I can’t really imagine cramming in more levels of scale, given that we only have a 19×19 grid to work with! (And, if we talk about the physical objects involved, there are the lines on the board, the grain of the wood, the grain of the white stones, the room you’re playing in.)
• Strong Centers Thick positions, stones casting influence, the ear-reddening move, the pon-nuki that the proverb tells us is worth thirty points, areas of white or black territory.
• Boundaries The borders between black and white territories, that can be as proportionately thick and contested as any of Alexander’s examples.
• Alternating Repetition I’m not convinced that go games do a particularly good job of exhibiting this property. (The go board itself does, a little too rigidly perhaps.)
• Positive Space Territories expanding against each other. On a conceptual level, the space of two eyes giving life to the surrounding stones.
• Good Shape I don’t think I have to comment on the importance of this to anybody who has played any go at all.
• Local Symmetries The go board and stones exhibit this, of course; I’m not sure that positions generally do in a meaningful way. Though I suppose there are some conceptual manifestations of this idea, e.g. the notion of miai.
• Deep Interlock and Ambiguity White and black positions butting up against each other, a group of one color on the run between two groups of the other color and then, suddenly, turning the tables so the attacker becomes the attacked. (In fact, Alexander has a picture of a go board in his discussion of this property.)
• Contrast Black and White. Life and Death. Thickness and Weakness.
• Gradients I’m not sure the game does a great job of manifesting this.
• Roughness Boundaries between positions are never straight lines. Leaving a position slightly unfinished to move on to other areas of the game. The fact that people don’t place the stones exactly on the intersections: this stone is a little up, that one is a little to the right.
• Echoes I’ll have to think about this one a bit more; I think there’s something to it in the go context, but I’m not sure yet.
• The Void The board at the start of a game. Moyos. Large territories. The fact that (in Japanese rules, at least), you win by enclosing more empty space than your opponent.
• Simplicity and Inner Calm The game’s made out of a board, a grid, and black and white stones, nothing else.
• Not-Separateness The effects that stones have on adjacent stones, that groups have on adjacent groups, that (in the context of a ladder) a stone on one side of the board can determine tactical success or failure on the other side of the board.

Works for me; maybe this Alexander chap is on to something? Makes me wonder if I could improve my go game by concentrating more on expressing his properties.

What about a video game example? (I don’t expect them to do nearly as well as go.) I just finished Half-Life 2, so let’s use it as an example.

And, immediately, I run into a problem. The examples in his book are physical objects; in my go example, the physical positions of stones gave enough grist for my analytic mill that I didn’t have to go beyond that. But just talking about the physical layout of (the abstract space in) a video game leaves out so much of what makes them important! Not sure what to do about that; I’ll follow my nose and see where I end up.

• Levels of Scale Small objects, large objects and characters, vehicles, rooms, buildings, areas, levels, the game as a whole? Shooting a weapon, fighting an enemy, fighting a group of enemies? And perhaps some of my earlier complaints about excessive repetition could be ways in which the game misjudged this?
• Strong Centers The strikingly different character of some of the levels? The clear distinctions between types of weapons? Alyx? Large battle set pieces (boss battles, effectively) punctuating levels? Different places to take cover (with different virtues) in those battles? Maybe the levels could have used more of this in their physical layout, actually: if I’m going through section after section that feels the same, that’s a sign that I wanted more strong centers.
• Boundaries At first, I thought the game did a bad job of the sort of thick boundaries that Alexander is talking about. And there really isn’t that much transition from section to section. Then again, maybe the mini-levels (typically involving hooking up with the resistance) that punctuate the longer levels are an example of this? Or the approach to the prision (with bugs!) is a boundary between the travel level and the prison itself? So now I think there are some, but that the game could use more.
• Alternating Repetition Battle, quiet, battle, quiet. Building, outside, building, outside.
• Positive Space The buildings, the roads and the plazas between the buildings? That works to the extent that, for example, you can enter the areas on either side of a road; to the extent that you can’t, I don’t think roads feel like positive space. So they probably weren’t in the rural levels; the urban levels may or may not have had some positive space, I’d need to have a better global feel for the map.
• Good Shape Hmm, not sure I felt this one too strongly. At least on a larger scale, maybe the individual objects did a better job of manifesting this.
• Local Symmetries Maybe present in the objects/buildings; not sure. Not seeing it on a more conceptal level.
• Deep Interlock and Ambiguity I’m having a hard time finding good examples of this.
• Contrast The “Alternating Repetition” examples? The different feels of different levels? The fight of good versus evil? Not sure.
• Gradients The progression of enemy strength, of the strength of weapons, of the number of options you have available.
• Roughness I think the game does a great job of this in its physical design, the way buildings are lived-in, run down without descending into ruins.
• Echoes Again, I’ll have to think about this one; this may be the property that I understand the least.
• The Void Almost completely lacking (unfortunately the case for most video games). Maybe that’s why the “carried on a track through the Citadel” scene made such a big impact on me?
• Simplicity and Inner Calm Again, pretty much lacking. Though the game did a decent job of sticking to a not-too-large set of gameplay elements. (E.g. the limited set of weapons.)
• Not-Separateness At first, I was going to vote against this one: you couldn’t make choices that had significant ramifications elsewhere, the plot was going to do what it wanted whether you liked it or not. Then I went and read the description of the property, and now I’m not so sure: you are presented in the context of a larger world with signs of its own history. So maybe it’s not as lacking here as I thought.

Hmm. It seems like an interesting enough set of analytical categories, at least. And I suspect game designers could use the list to improve the design of their games. And I’d be very curious to see games that did a better job of bringing out The Void without having it dominate the games. Hyrule Field in Ocarina?

Of course, I came to Alexander through the programming community, specifically through groups influenced by his thoughts on patterns. (Which haven’t really lived up to their potential: Kent Beck seems to be the only person getting much mileage out of building a pattern language at multiple scales.) Can I use these ideas in my programming? Can I tell live code apart from dead code by how well it expresses these properties?

Something to think about. But later; this post is already quite long enough, and I’ll need some time to get my thoughts straight in that area anyways. Time to start looking at code through different lenses, though.

Via a link from Niels ’t Hooft, I ran into Sean Malstrom’s Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy. By far the most interesting explanation of Nintendo’s business strategy that I’ve seen, and it turns out that he has a whole website full of articles like that.

Which I’ve spent most of the evening reading. A warning: his articles are quite a bit longer than is fashionable for web content; fortunately, they more than make up for that by being quite a bit better thought-out than most web content (and I think they’d be of interest to anybody curious about business innovation), but you might want to make yourself a cup of tea before you start reading, or something.

No RSS feed on the site, but it seems that he has a blog; presumably he announces new articles there?

I managed to avoid playing any of the Half-Life games in the past: I’ve been almost exclusively a console gamer since 1998, and the few computer games I’ve played since then are ones that can be played with a touchpad (my hands and mice really don’t get along), which pretty much means that PC FPSes are right out. And, frankly, I’m kind of burned out on FPSes; I played and enjoyed some in the mid 90s, but even then there were aspects that I didn’t like so much, and I have so many more gaming options now that my quality bar is pretty high.

Having said that, I knew that I’d missed something important by not playing Half-Life and its sequels, so while I primarily bought The Orange Box because of Portal, I also saw it as a reason to get to know the Half-Life series better. So I was very happy to give Half-Life 2 a try.

I was pretty impressed by the start of the game. I liked the fact that you begin completely without weapons, and how you make your way from resistance cell to resistance cell. I thought the initial weapon introduction was well done: first you get the crowbar, which is really a tool rather than a weapon, then you get to spend a bit of quality time with your pistol, then you move up to the machine gun, all at a nice pace. I enjoyed the level design: linear while giving you a few nooks to poke your nose into, a coherent art style by section without being too monotonous. And the quite short levels at the beginning were a welcome surprise: no interminable wandering through corridors or mowing down countless hordes of enemies, you instead moved briskly from plot point to plot point, learning new techniques relatively frequently.

This initial infatuation lasted for about two and a half levels. By the time I was halfway through the third level, I was definitely seeing traditional single-player FPS aspects that weren’t my favorite: yet another corridor, yet another corner for me to carefully stick my nose around looking for enemies, yet another room to enter, to back out of, to wait for enemies to come into view so I could kill them. I realize that it’s a bit silly to complain about that in an FPS: that’s the core mechanics of the genre, I’m no more surprised by that than I am by battles on a separate screen against wandering monsters in a JRPG. But just because I’m not surprised by that doesn’t mean that I have to actively like it, especially when I’m also seeing hints of gameplay that I rather prefer.

Having said that, given that style of gameplay, it was carried out in a manner that I enjoyed. I played at normal difficulty, not even needing to go down to easy, and I still was rarely in danger of dying. There were a few environmental puzzles sprinkled about, giving some pleasant challenges of a different nature. Ammo and health were plentiful, and spaced appropriately to give a bit of tension in the big battles without turning the game into a resource management chore. My temperament encourages me to save rather more often than is healthy; the game let me do so at any time, and the save functionality was reasonably fast.

The fourth level was also long, but at least they mixed things up by giving you a boat to ride, and (halfway through) a gun on your boat. Then another short plot level introducing that most fabulous of weapons, the gravity gun, followed by a long level, going rather heavier on the horror aspects of the game while letting you use your gravity gun to great effect to slice them in half with sawblades. And then Highway 17: drive along dunes in your buggy, periodically encountering buildings where you have to fight enemies.

At this point, I was seven levels into the game; while I wasn’t actually regretting playing the game, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the second half of the game. I’d seen many things that I liked, but I’d also spent rather too much time time going around corners looking for enemies and then dropping back and spraying them with bullets. So, on the whole, I got the feeling that, at the core, it was an FPS much like many other FPSes that I’d played, I could guess how the plot would turn out, and I’d seen what new there was to be seen in the game.

And then things started getting a whole lot better. I first perked up when I killed the antlion queen, and got the ability to control antlions (and use them to attack my enemies): the game suddenly changed from a first-person shooter to a first-person bug-wrangler, which was certainly an interesting change of pace! That lasted for significant chunks of two levels; even when that was over, there were still new gameplay twists, e.g. the turret management in later prison battles, the strider battles. (And, to be fair, the earlier sections also changed up the gameplay once or twice a level as well.) I wasn’t too into the gameplay aspects of the squad play of later levels, but it was nice at least to have some people around who were glad to see me instead of more masked enemy hordes.

And then I reached the last two levels, which were thoroughly delightful. I loved the long scene where you were carried on a track through no end of corridors; a perfect way to take a break from the game, to give you a chance to look around and appreciate the wonderful world that Valve created. And then they threw away all your weapons and gave you only a souped-up gravity gun (and, to boot, made health stations so plentiful as to make health almost irrelevant): for the (pleasantly short) length of those two levels: the game was saying to me, “yes, we’re a shooter, but we’ll spend a few minutes showing you what makes this game different and special, not what makes it the same as a hundred other shooters”.

Also, looking back at the last half of the game, while I wasn’t thrilled with the corridor grind, I thought the set piece battles were extremely well done: the bridge battle on Highway 17, the approach to the prison, the turret fights, the generator plaza fight, the three generators that you had to disable, the strider battles were all loads of fun.

I’m perhaps not as enamored of the plot (either in its substance or presentation) as some people are: while it beats the crap out of Doom in that regard, that’s not exactly a high barrier, and I have fonder memories of the stories in Marathon and System Shock than I do of this game. And, for that matter, I’m not sure the plot here was all that much better than, say, the plot in Dark Forces or Halo, though the presentation of the plot was more interesting. Still, in general I’ll count the plot as a definite positive aspect of the game, and I was always happy to see Alyx.

So, having come to the end, I really do think this is a great game. Don’t get me wrong: I stand by my complaints above, and think it could be significantly improved. If they’d just cut all of the long levels in half (or all but one, for variation’s sake: maybe leave Ravenholm intact?) while leaving in all the weapon transitions and major battles as they stand, I think the game would have been significantly tighter while losing nothing. But I’m very glad to have played it; I’ll certainly play its two sequels, and I may well go back and play the first game, if I can find a copy that runs on a system that I have access to.

But I won’t play the sequels quite yet. (Warning: this is the part where I switch from game discussion to navel-gazing queue-management strategy minutia.) When I bought my Xbox 360, the games I most wanted to play were Portal and Mass Effect; third on the list, however, was BioShock. That game, however, falls squarely into the category of “games I’m not going to play with Miranda around”, and I move through that category rather slowly.

And, when I finished Mass Effect (my previous game in that category), I thought “I’ve already started The Orange Box; why not give the other games in there a try?” So I played this game. Which was great, but in retrospect clearly the wrong choice: I shouldn’t let inventory cloud my judgment of what I most want to play at a given moment. In particular, if I follow that logic through, then I’d next have to play the two mini-sequels to Half-Life 2, and it would be a miracle if I weren’t too burned out on FPSes after that to really enjoy BioShock.

So I’ve learned my lesson, and am putting the Half-Life series on a brief hiatus. (Actually, it may or may not be brief, depending on when I get around to GTA4.) In fact, I think I’ll probably change genres briefly before diving into BioShock: perhaps the Penny Arcade game would be a good brief palate cleanser? I’m not sure; for the next couple of weeks, I’m planning to spend my time when Miranda is in bed doing stuff like catching up on my blogging and getting started on the memory project, instead of playing video games. But I’m very much looking forward to both that game and the remaining games in this series.

I’m tempted to start filling this blog with complaints about recent customer experiences I’ve had, but on reflection I will avoid doing so. I am grateful to the nice person from KitchenAid customer support who spent a good half hour going out of her way to try to sort out an issue I’m having; the flip side of today’s lunch break is that whoever designed AT&T phone support is sadistic or insane.

I read a book on neuro-linguistic programming recently. It’s basically a way to reprogram your brain (e.g. to strengthen motivations or weaken phobias), using techniques like visualizing the trigger in question, then changing the way you visualize the scene. (Moving the trigger object farther away from you or closer to you, adding colors, adding theme music, …)

Which I was strangely taken by, but I have to admit that it sounds more like snake oil than not. At least I hope that the psychological profession is sensible enough to pick up on techniques that can cure serious phobias in five minutes, if those techniques actually work! Then again, it’s not like I actually took the few minutes to go through any of the exercises in the book; maybe traditional psychologists took the same approach to the ideas as I did…

Having said that, there were a couple of ideas in the book that seemed worthwhile. One was the notion of the direction of motivation: you can either be motivated towards something you want or away from something you don’t want. Or, of course, a mixture of both, even in a single situation, and certainly people can be motivated towards something in one aspect of their lives and motivated away from something in other aspects of their lives. But their claim that most people, in general, lean in one direction or the other sounds plausible to me; and I think it’s worth playing around with the idea of exploring both sorts of motivations in various context. (Of course, I still think it pales in comparison to the power of the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.)

In particular, I’m starting to buy into the notion of how powerful having a strong vision of a future goal can be. This is, of course, the core of “motivation towards”, and also ties in with their approaches that I outlined in the first paragraph. Thinking back on my life, or even about my present-day life, I think it’s not too implausible to think that the areas where I’ve been successful are areas that I’ve had a strong vision pulling me forward, while areas where I’ve been less successful are ones where that hasn’t been the case.

For example, I think you could make a reasonable claim that part of the reason I left academia was that I didn’t transform my vision of somebody who knew a lot of mathematics into a vision of somebody who discovered a lot of mathematics. I was quite good at the former and mediocre at the latter; some of that is doubtless due to my innate talents, but I bet a lot of the reason why I would pull out a math book at a moment’s notice (and work through all of the exercises in it) during parts of my life without putting in the same energy towards discovering new math later in my life had to do with my lack of vision of what the latter would be like.

Though, of course, having a strong vision by itself isn’t good enough. On that note, I thought their presentation of research on what factors lead to successful rehabilitation for injured athletes was quite interesting. The list they presented was:

1. Inner Motivation. Both towards a future vision and away from the painful present, in the case of rehabilitation.
2. High Standards. The successful athletes wanted to get back to their former peak performance levels or better: they wanted to run like the wind, not just get to where they can walk.
3. Chunking Down Goals. They broke goals into extremely small chunks, e.g. gaining an extra quarter-inch of range of motion in their feet.
4. Combining Present and Future Time Frames. They concentrated on the present when moving towards those small goals, while also having a vision of the future to sustain them through the rough times.
5. Personal Involvement. They helped design their recovery plans and carry them out themselves, not just putting themselves in others’ hands.
6. Self-to-Self Comparisons. They’re not worried about comparing themselves (especially in their injured state!) to other athletes: they’re comparing themselves today to themselves last week, and noting how they’ve progressed.

There are several things that I like about this. For one thing, it fits well with my view of areas when I’ve been successful: in those situations, I have a vision for what I want, I break that down in small steps, I take charge of my own plans, I don’t worry particularly about comparing myself against others but instead note the progress that I’ve made on my own. Whereas in areas where I don’t satisfy those criteria (which is also frequently the case), I make much less progress.

To take a much more modest example than a world-class athlete recovering from injury, I want to become a fluent reader and speaker of Japanese. That’s my motivation, mostly towards, though there’s a bit of an away from motivation in that there are art works I can’t really access right now! I won’t claim that my standards are wonderfully high, since even if I succeed fabulously there will still be more than a hundred million people who are more fluent in the language than I am, but I’m also rejecting goals of being able to just get by: one of my goals right now is to memorize the two thousand basic kanji and all of their common readings and meanings, for example, and I have no intention of stopping when I get there. But that goal will take me years to reach; that’s okay, as long as I know 14 more kanji this week than I did last week, and can keep that up for a little over two more years, I’ll make it to that goal. (I suppose that will also serve as an example of combining time frames!) I’m certainly involved personally: I’m not depending on anybody else laying out a course of study for me, I’m doing the best I can of finding resources to help me wherever I can and combining them to make a coherent plan that I’ll actually be able to carry out. And I’m not comparing myself to anybody else while doing this; sure, the kindergartener two houses down is probably learning Japanese much more quickly than I am, but that’s her, I’m me.

And, of course, I’m always gratified to see somebody talk about the virtues of breaking large tasks into small steps. I’ve certainly spent enough time obsessing about that over the last five years, whether in the TDD cycle, in breaking up features into small, coherent stories, or in the GTD notion of “next action”. It’s a very powerful concept.

The list also sheds an interesting light on Seth Godin’s The Dip. I blogged before about my mixed feeling towards the book: I initially found it seductive, but when I thought about it more it didn’t really feel right to me. And comparing it to the above list is useful: Godin does great on the High Standards part, and okay on the Inner Motivation part. (Though even there I think the fit is a bit uneasy.) I think he’s fine on the next three factors (they’re not particularly the focus of his book, but that’s okay), but the Self-to-Self Comparisons seems to me where his presentation really doesn’t work with me. Don’t worry about being better than everybody else in your niche: follow your nose, and see if you’re getting closer to your vision every day. Maybe this will lead you to being king of your niche, maybe you’ll open up a glorious blue ocean, maybe you’ll just end up having your life quietly spiritually richer without being able to say you’re more successful than your neighbors. Any of these seems like a good outcome to me; focusing on being the best has its virtues to the extent that it encourages you to set High Standards, but is harmful to the extent that you’re excessively comparing yourself against others.

Hmm, maybe I should figure out what, if any, my vision is for this blog?

I spent the day at this month’s Bay Area Go Players Association tournament. It was my first tournament in recent memory playing as a 1 dan; I had a record of 1 win and 3 losses and got the impression that 1 dan is a more accurate rating for me than 1 kyu, but that I’m not a particularly strong 1 dan.

In my first game, I took one stone, and the only reason why it was particularly close was that my opponent made a stupid mistake in the endgame that cost him about 10 points; I should have resigned earlier. Judging from conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he normally plays as 3 dan but his rating has slipped recently; I’m quite willing to believe that, it felt like he was 2-3 stones stronger than me.

My second game was frustrating in that the score on the board was 61 to 54, and the AGA rules have a rather large komi of 7.5. Oops.

The way my third game ended was instructional. We were fighting a ko; I made a ko threat. At least I thought it was a ko threat: my opponent started looking at it, and I realized that, because of a snapback, it wasn’t actually a threat to capture the stone it seemed to be threatening.

And then I looked more closely at the ko, and got really nervous. If I’d given in and connected, it would have only cost me a point. If he won the ko, rather than connecting, he’d capture four of my stones, which could be a big amount at some points in the endgame, but I had (despite my misreading of this one) several ko threats on the board that were bigger than that.

But then I realized that his capturing those four stones wasn’t all that was going on: it created a serious threat on my group adjacent to them, and in fact I wasn’t completely sure that my group would survive if I tenukied. (Which I would have to do to make good on any ko threat I would play.) This is something I hadn’t really thought of when doing ko fights: it’s not enough to just calculate the value of your opponent’s first move if he ignores your ko threat, you also have to figure out if that move is sente. And, if it is, you have to play ko threats that are enough larger to make it worthwhile to ignore that sente move.

Despite all of that, it turned out well. My ko threat wasn’t a threat in the way I thought it was; fortunately, when I read it more carefully, there was a more subtle shortage of liberties there. Which my opponent missed, so he won the ko; he captured four of my stones, lost twenty of his, and didn’t manage to capture the other ten of mine that were threatened! (In our post-game review, we decided that the best play after his initial capture lead to my group living in seki, but as it was it lived outright.) A very odd result: we both misread my ko threat, and the result was that, as an outcome of a ko fight that I’d initially miscalculated as small, the game turned from a close game to one where he resigned!

My fourth game was really weird. My opponent’s grasp of large-scale structures was even worse than mine, but he constantly wanted to get into fights with me. And, in doing so, he left himself weak, so I was constantly attacking him! Really bloody, and we both misread situations in significant ways; I misread more than he did, and lost. I really shouldn’t have misread some of those situations; the flip side is that I should probably look for clever attacks more often, because if he can find weaknesses like that in my positions, I’m probably missing some in my opponents’ positions.

One big takeaway from my first two games, which jives with my memories from other recent tournaments: I’m probably doing a better job of building up influence than I did a few years ago, but I’m also being far too cavalier about letting my opponents getting significant territory on the sides. In particular, I really underestimate how valuable it is to have an entire side of the board.

The nice non-go-related aspect of the tournament was that it was in the SF Japantown. I had lunch at Sapporo-ya, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but which we discovered has quite good ramen when we tried it out because we NEEDED FOOD NOW the last time we went to Japantown. And I did some shopping at Kinokuniya; they didn’t have what I was looking for (more Puzzle Nikoli books; fortunately, the ones I have will last me through the only upcoming trip we have planned), but I found a go book I didn’t already own.

And I browsed through the instructional language section, and acquired more inventory there. Which doesn’t entirely thrill me, but I’ll be finishing my Japanese textbook in about half a year, I’m not sure I’ll go to a Japanese bookstore between now and then, and I could use ideas from browsing in a bookstore. And if I learn about books that I want to buy while browsing in a bookstore, I’m going to almost always buy them there, instead of noting them down and buying them elsewhere. The haul:

• Collections of essays and fiction with “translations of all the complex passages”, copious notes, and a dictionary. (And a CD and profiles of the authors.) I’m really excited about these: they look like a great way to make the transition from book learning to reading real Japanese.
• Two volumes of Japanese in MangaLand: I liked the other introduction-to-Japanese-via-manga book that I read, so I figured I’d give these a try as well.
• A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I bought this partly because I figure it might be a reasonable thing to read once I’m done with the textbook and/or a reasonable reference, but mostly because there’s an intermediate grammar in the same series, which I expect will be a good follow-up to the textbook.

All in all, if I’m going to accumulate inventory, it doesn’t look like too bad a choice: I have specific triggers coming up in the not-too-distant future that I expect will cause me to start reading all of them, and I’ll probably start reading the manga volumes sooner than that: the first one would be a good candidate to bring on vacation.

A quite pleasant day. I even got some studying done over lunch, so I didn’t particularly fall behind in my regular activities.

In response to a tweet and tumblr post from Brian Marick:

According to the speaker in a talk I went to several years ago, it was the case until some time last century that educated Chinese people would have memorized hundreds of books going back as far as thousands of years. And these books wove together in a thicket of references: when an author wrote a phrase, it wouldn’t just be an allusion to a phrase/incident in a single book X. Instead, it would be an allusion to a phrase in book A written two thousand years ago and also to phrases is books B, C, D, and E that were written over the intervening centuries/millennia that all also alluded back to book A.

Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by yourself), and she had it mostly unpacked by the time I was done studying Japanese.

So we tried out the quick play multiplayer mode. I was on guitar; at first, she wanted to play the drums, but she found it kind of frustrating, and switched over to vocals after a few tries. I was worried that vocals would be kind of tricky since she’d never heard the songs before (which makes a difference on vocals since, unlike the other instruments, you’re not just responding to straightforward cues, you have to know something about the melody of the song), but she did fine, making it through all four of the the introductory songs.

While we were heating up leftovers for dinner, I downloaded Still Alive; Miranda was twice as excited when we saw that. I read the manual during dinner and figured out how we could make characters, so she didn’t have to play as (horrors) a boy (incidentally, I was very disappointed at the lack of beards; googling, I guess I’ll be able to unlock that?); we then played through Still Alive a few times. You could tell that she had practice with the song: on her first try (on Easy), she got it 100% correct, we were still doing fine with me on Expert and her on Hard, and I’m sure she would have done well on Expert as well. (It didn’t hurt, of course, that it’s a pretty easy song, at least compared to my memory of songs in the original Guitar Hero. Though I was surprised to see Expert having you switch between green and orange buttons so quickly; I didn’t remember that before.)

Quite a pleasant evening. I’m not thrilled with the guitar, but it’s okay, and Guitar Hero III should show up tomorrow and fix that problem. I’m curious to give the drums (and, for that matter, the vocals) a try. And I hope we’ll convince Liesl to join our band soon…

Any recommendations for other songs to download? I’m sure we’ll be happy for quite some time playing the songs on the disc, but, with that game, it would be a shame to not explore the downloadable content.

Jordan: I don’t suppose you’re ready to give in and get an Xbox 360, are you?

Warning: it is entirely possible that none of my regular blog readers will care about this in the slightest. I’m only writing it in case some other random person out there is dealing with this problem and googles for a solution. In particular, if the next paragraph makes your eyes glaze over, just move on, there’s nothing to see here.

Make has a feature called ‘vpath’. You can use this to tell make to look for your source files in some other directory or directories. We use this at work because, in a few circumstances, source files for one program/library/whatever can be taken from multiple other directories; that may sound like a bad idea to you, and I won’t argue with you, but I also don’t have the energy to eliminate all situations where we do that. And vpath deals with that situation just fine.

Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes, bad things happen for obvious reasons (e.g. identically named files in two different source directories); that’s easy enough to fix. And sometimes, as happened last week, bad things happen for really screwy reasons: like you move a source file, but a mention of the old location occurs in an automatically generated dependency file; that in of itself wouldn’t be a big deal, I know how to write dependency files in such a way as to be able to handle that (yay, gcc -MD -MP), but occasionally make’s vpath machinery can get really fixated on the old location.

And the screwy thing is, when we specify the source files, we specify the directories that they’re located in; it’s just hard to write wildcard rules to handle that without throwing away information and using vpath!

Well, it’s actually not that hard, it turns out. Here’s a sample Makefile using vpath:


all: foo

clean:
    -rm -f *.y foo


Try it out yourself: just create directories a and b, and files a.x and b.x in the corresponding directories. Notice how all the information is there in SOURCES; but then we strip it away to get the %.y: %.x rule to work. Which is screwy.

Here’s how you can avoid it:


all: foo

clean:
    -rm -f *.y foo


(Your web browser is probably wrapping the foreach bit over two or three lines, don’t be confused.)

Which is quite simple, as it turns out. (At least once you realize recent GNU Make versions have eval.)

Some warnings:

• The special variables from pattern rules (@$, @?, @*, etc.) don’t work in the eval version of the rule, so make sure you write the rule directly in terms of its arguments
• GNU Make 3.80 has bugs involving eval, so if you’re using that version (and it isn’t patched by your OS distro), you may want to upgrade to 3.81.

If you’re still reading by now, I, um, salute you? Glad to meet another member of the club of people-who-think-about-make-more-than-they-should…

The Gold Mine is a business novel about lean. It’s clearly inspired by The Goal; it isn’t nearly as good as the latter, but it does have some real virtues.

The Goal did, in my opinion, a remarkable job of pulling the reader along in the journey of discovery: you could really believe that the protagonist was figuring out this stuff (with Jonah’s help) as he went along, indeed you as the reader were probably figuring out some of the stuff as you went along. (Goldratt consciously adopts a presentation style designed to encourage that.) I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I even found the cheesy personal crisis parts of that book somewhat gripping. For some combination of those factors (and because ToC is inherently fascinating stuff), I stayed up way too late finishing that book.

The Gold Mine, in contrast, didn’t have those virtues. Honestly, I’m not sure that somebody who hadn’t already drunk the lean kool-aid would be any more likely to be interested in lean after reading this book than before.

But, as I read along, I found that it had other virtues. If you, like myself, have drunk the lean kool-aid, and if you’ve read some of the theory, you’ll find that this book fills in some gaps. By presenting a (fictional) case study of a lean transformation, it gives some practical advice on how to carry out a lean transformation that I haven’t seen elsewhere. (Not that I’ve looked a lot.) It presents an order in which to introduce the various lean concepts and techniques, it gives you some pointers about what are good and bad signs in your transformation, it makes ideas rather more concrete than I’d seen elsewhere.

I imagine that most readers will also learn something about some of the lean concepts while reading the book. I’d never thought much about 5S, for example; but it’s one of the earlier tools that they introduce in the book, and it has wider-ranging effects (psychologically as well as in its direct effects on processes) than I’d realized. Other people may already be more familiar with 5S than I was, but I suspect that most non-experts will find something new here.

It’s not the first book that I’d recommend on the subject, but I’m certainly glad I read it. It was a pleasant enough way to spend my breaks for a week or so at work, and there’s good stuff here; it’s just not what I expected before I started!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed my preferences for online video game coverage shift. I’ve been following the traditional news/reviews-oriented web sites for years (over a decade in some cases), and IGN is still one of the first places I visit in my nightly web surfing. (I never dipped into the forums for those sites, though, for what that’s worth.) So, when IGN started podcasting, I subscribed.

There were things I liked about their podcasts, and things I didn’t like about them. Their podcasts are more informal, more discursive, compared to the articles on their site; listening to people chat who have spent years immersed in video games is, in general, all to the good. But there were aspects I didn’t like so much: the staff is almost entirely male, there’s occasional casual sexism and general young man chest-thumping that I don’t really have much patience for. Which is part of the reason why I stay away from video-game forums, since the problems are apparently much much worse there; that’s also the reason why I haven’t been eager to start seriously using Xbox Live.

When I started reading blogs, I subscribed to some of the larger news video game blogs. But I’ve been moving my blog reading away from them and to sources with a different flavor more recently: the news is pretty much the same on all these sites, while other sources are giving me perspectives that I’m not seeing in the big sites.

One example that I’ve been avidly reading recently is Michael Abbot’s Brainy Gamer blog. (And listening to his podcast!) He has a very pleasant style, interesting things to say, and he’ll not infrequently spend time talking about games that are years old instead of games that were published yesterday. As somebody who doesn’t have the bandwidth to play all interesting new games as soon as they come out but who has played a good number of games over the years, I very much appreciate this broader historical perspective. (And I’m apparently not the only one: on a podcast episode, he mentioned that many other older games like his site.)

Other people that come to mind: Leigh Alexander, N’Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo. Those last two were a bit of a surprise for me: I’ve basically dismissed video game coverage in mainstream sources until now, thinking that, at its best, it’s casual coverage for parents to figure out what to buy their kids and, at its (all-too-frequent) worst, it’s actively offensive. But there are some people writing in mainstream sources who love and respect the genre and have some very interesting things to say.

And I think gender issues are probably relevant to the four people I just mentioned. Only one of them is female, but the other three spend time in places (academia in one example, non-video-game-specific media in the other cases) where I imagine they work closely with women on a regular basis, unlike the gaming-only sites. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of other reasons, their style is different from what I see in the more personal side of gaming-only sites: none of the young man posturing, none of the casual sexism (don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of places that are a lot more sexist than IGN podcasts, but it’s there and annoying), an environment where I’d much rather spend time.

(Incidentally, I have sexism more on my mind than normal right now, because a mailing list that I care about just self-destructed this weekend because it couldn’t deal healthily with discussions of sexism. Not sure I want to blog too much about that, but I wish it hadn’t happened. But I’d been thinking about this blog post for a few weeks now, so it’s not really a reaction to those events.)

So: what do I want out of a video game community? Or perhaps: what do I want out of a video game web site, what would cause me to be more of a community participant in it and less of a disengaged reader?

Here’s one way I’ve been thinking about game coverage recently: video game web sites, by and large, spend time on three different sorts of things. We can label those three things temporally:

• Coverage of forthcoming games.
• Coverage of games as they are released.
• Coverage of games that were released some time ago.

That sounds simple enough, but it turns out that these forms of coverage have a quite different nature from each other.

To start with the middle one, this basically translates into reviews of games as (sometimes slightly before) they are released. And it’s the main reason why I plan to keep on subscribing to IGN indefinitely: I like knowing something about basically every console video game that comes out, which means at least skimming the majority of their reviews, and reading the reviews for games that seem at all noteworthy, even if I’m unlikely to buy them.

The former category is the one that bothers me more and more. It must contain a good 95% of the material on most video game web sites; and I’m increasingly wondering how it does me the slightest good at all. I suppose it’s not a bad idea to be aware of important forthcoming games a little while before their release, or to have more context for them than a review can provide; but what we actually have is coverage of games that starts years before the games will actually be released (if indeed they ever get released), with the effect of building up excitement about games up until the point where they’re actually released. At that point, people may or may not play the game (most people obviously won’t play the vast majority of games), and the focus switches immediately to other upcoming games.

The result is that people (including myself) spend significantly more time learning about upcoming games than we do actually playing the games, and that we’re basically immersing ourselves in coverage that has a similar (but much much stronger) effect to advertising. I’m starting to wish that video game sites would simply stop doing advance coverage of games: just don’t talk about games until, say, a month before they’re released, or a week before they’re released, or the day that they’re released. Yes, I want to learn about games, but why wouldn’t it be better for me to learn about the actual published games themselves, instead of some fantasy of what future games might be like a year from now?

To get back to the themes from earlier in the post, I also suspect that this focus on early hype of games reinforces some of the most unpleasant aspects of video game communities. The stereotypical forum is filled with 14-year-old boys; these are people who are in the unpleasant situations of constantly having to deal with (group) identity formation and of not having a lot of spending money. Both of those have the effect that they are pushed towards picking a few games (and one console), and supporting them/it to wildly irrational and unpleasant extents; the focus on advanced hype for games just gives more grist to the mills of irrational video game loyalty.

And then there’s the third temporal category, coverage of games that were released some time ago. There’s very little of this on most sites; I have to see that as largely a consequence of the extreme focus on future potential games. And that’s another reason why I’m getting mad at the latter: I like reading people talk about games at leisure, in a reflective fashion. You get almost none of that from advance coverage, by its very nature (or rather, to the extent that there is leisure in the advance coverage, it consists of obsessively dissecting every scene of a trailer for a forthcoming game you’re excited about, because you won’t have any more information about it for months); good video game sites will provide thoughtful reviews, but the reviews are done under pressure, and don’t have the benefit of looking back on the game from the broader perspective of a few months or years (or decades).

And reviews at release time also don’t allow me to be a part of the conversation: I buy very few games at launch, and even if I do, I won’t be able to finish playing them until, at best, a month or so later. By that point, the broader discussion on the main sites has long since moved on to other things. And, to the extent that those sites do coverage of past games, it’s so often in terms of game-of-the-year discussions and the like, which is the most shallow sort of reflection. And which leaves me out in the cold, because I don’t have time to play the 10 serious GotY contenders that the industry will release in the last three month of the years.

So, to recast the three categories, what they really mean are:

• Hype building. This is by far the dominant category, it basically has the effect of being free advertising for video game manufacturers, its influence is almost entirely negative.
• Reviews of games as they are released. A useful category, present in an entirely appropriate proportion. (But unduly influenced by video game publishers, though not currently to an unacceptable extent as far as I can tell.)
• Reflection, discussion, discursion on past games; depressingly lacking in most web sites.

I’m on the lookout for web sites in which the proportion of those three categories are reversed, where the reflection happens from as many different viewpoints as possible.

The SuperMemo ideas don’t seem to be leaving my head, and I’ve finally gotten my todo backlog under control, so I think I’ll take a shot at implementing them. Some notes:

What algorithm should I use to schedule the reminders? I’ll work under the theory that each item that I want to remember is best reviewed at exponentially increasing intervals; see, for example, Wozniak’s Algorithm SM-4. (Though I should note that Algorithm SM-11, his most recent version, seems to drop this assumption.) And, of course, different items are best reviewed at different rates, depending on how easily my brain seems to remember them; let’s call the multiplication factor that we use in the exponential curve for an item its “difficulty factor”. (Where smaller DF = more frequent repetitions = more difficult.)

In SM-4, he suggests that a natural goal is to try to remember items correctly 90% of the time, and that a difficulty factor of 2.5 makes sense as a first guess. In earlier versions of the algorithm, he has what seem to me somewhat complicated ways of tweaking the difficulty factor, but, in later versions, it gets simpler: if you get it wrong, start over reviewing the item from scratch, and increase the difficulty.

Given that, assume you’ve gotten an item wrong W times, and have S winning streaks of 10 correct answers. (So a 20-win streak would count two towards S.) (Though, with the power of exponential growth, a 20-win streak would take decades at all but the hardest difficulty factors.) Then I’ll set the difficulty factor DF for that item equal to 2.5 – .1(W – S). The point here is that ten correct answers balances one mistake, which fits with getting it right 90% (or 91%, I suppose) of the time. And I pulled the .1 more or less out of my hat: I don’t want the difficulty factor to get too close to 1 most of the time, and subtracting .1 each time I get it wrong should fit in well with that goal, based on my experience over the last year with Japanese vocabulary.

With the above definitions, assume that your current winning streak for an item has length n. Then I’ll say that you review the item immediately if n=0, and review it in DF^(n-1) days if n > 0. Actually, I think I’ll change that last to (DF^(n-1)) – .5 days, since I only plan to do the review once a day, and I want to avoid weirdness that might occur if I do it at 8pm one day and at 6pm the next day, or even 11am.

This looks pretty simple: for any given item, I just have to store the next review time, W, S, and n to have enough information to schedule future reviews. (And the fact that one of the items to store is the next review time is very convenient, because that means I can figure out what to review by just doing a simple database query on that column.) I could even store W – S instead of storing both W and S, but I think I’ll keep them separate. One reason for this is that one of the ideas in the original is that different items can be considered more important to learn or less important to learn; if I have something that’s really important to learn, e.g. kana characters, then I could have each mistake count as -.2 instead of -.1, while each 10-time winning streak would still only count as +.1.

That’s the algorithm; what do I use to program the application? One of my motivations is to make it easy to continue my studies when I’m on vacation, or for that matter during my lunch break at work, so I’d like to make this a web app. It looks like a good fit for Rails, and I’d been meaning to get practice with Rails anyways, so that’s what I’ll use. Hmm, what are the best ways to learn about Rails? It’s alleged to be simple enough that I should probably just jump right in and program instead of spending hours reading about it.

The program will have to present questions and answers; each one will be a simple Unicode text field. (And I’ll want to do automatic line wrapping but to preserve manual line breaks.) It won’t affect the programming, but I’ll have to learn a bit more about multilingual input in the various operating systems I use; I’ve done kanji input on the Mac, hopefully it won’t be too hard in Linux, either, and hopefully it will be easy to switch between keyboard layouts on the fly. I can start off with buttons for “show me the answer” and “correct/incorrect”, but eventually I’ll want keystroke inputs for those, to minimize typing. And that’s all there is for the “test yourself” part of the interface; I’ll also need an interface for adding questions and for editing them. (Where the latter will require search functionality.)

If this works well for me, I may well want to let Miranda use it to help with her German; so I’ll have to think about account management, authorization, security. (And if any of my readers are curious, I’d be more than happy to open it up to y’all, too.) OpenID is the trendy up-and-coming authorization mechanism these days; maybe I’ll give that a shot? I would assume that there’s probably some Rails plugin that makes OpenID easy to use.

That should be enough to get me going; in particular, I have a clear next step, to get my hands dirty with Rails, and I have a clear first goal, to get the basics of adding and reviewing items working locally. And then followup goals of searching/editing and of doing this remotely in a not-hopelessly-insecure fashion; I’m going on vacation for a week in August, so I’ll try to get to that stage by then. The multiuser stuff can wait until after that.

Should be a pleasant way to spend some of my free time over the next few months. Andd it will directly address some of the issues I’m having with my current Japanese review: I’m currently managing to review vocabulary items both too frequently and not frequently enough! So I’d really like an algorithm that asked me questions at just the right time.

Anybody have a (landline long-distance) phone company that they like? I recently discovered that the long distance company that we’ve been using has been treating us badly (hint: grandfathering people into their plans only makes sense if their old plan is better than the plans new customers get), so we’re shopping around.

The introduction to Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831–1891, by Eric Anderson, leads off with a quote from an 1888 issue of Scientific American lamenting that

all postmasters and customs officers throughout the United States are constituted pimps and ferrets for these foreigners

in regard to a proposed copyright law. The full quote (from the May 19, 1888 issue):

The bill in substance provides that […] copyright patents shall be granted to foreigners; they may hold these monopolies for forty-two years; the assigns of foreigners may also obtain copyrights; all postmasters and customs officers throughout the United States are constituted pimps and ferrets for these foreigners; it is made the duty of postmasters to spy out and seize all books going though the mails that infringe the copyrights of foreigners; if an American citizen coming home brings with him a purchased book, it is to be seized on landing unless he can produce the written consent of the man who owns the copyright, signed by two witnesses. Who the said owner may be, in what part of the world he lives, the innocent citizen must find out as best he can, or be despoiled of his property.

I confess that I only skimmed the rest of the dissertation, but I couldn’t pass that quote up; for what it’s worth, the dissertation seemed quite readable, and I recommend it to anybody who happens to be curious about 19th century copyright in the US.

(Via Against Monopoly.)

I read Good Calories, Bad Calories about a month ago, and it’s thrown me for a bit of a loop. I’ve had reasonably high cholesterol for a while, and one of my grandfathers died from a heart attack at a younger age than I’d prefer to die, so I’ve been vaguely curious about the subject for a while. But, on the flip side, I like to eat, and there’s a lot of food out there with a high fat content that my life would be much less rich without.

So, for now, I’ve been mostly sitting on the sidelines, watching amused as the fat evidence changes over the last few years. Olive oil is now not only not bad for you but actively good for you; high-fat fish, ditto; while trans fats are now demonized as uniquely bad for you. All of which fits well with my personal preference to eat good food: I’ll take butter over margarine any day and will happily avoid processed junk food where partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is high on the list of ingredients. I was very happy with the “chocolate is good” studies, too; I’m eagerly waiting for somebody to show that cheese is similarly beneficial, though ice cream seems like a bit to much to hope for even to me.

Still, my cholesterol is high, and was a good deal higher when I got it checked a year ago than it was back in my grad school days. My doctor didn’t like that, so she put me on simvastatin; my cholesterol level responded quite nicely to that, yay.

But I perked up when I read about Taubes’s book. I’m pretty sure I read this New York Times article, which discusses Taubes’s claim that the evidence for a link between high fat consumption and heart disease is not very strong.

Which is the subject of the first part of the book; reading it, it looks to me like he’s done a pretty good job of gathering his evidence. His reasoning seems sound, his critiques of others’ reasoning seems sound. Maybe he’s misrepresenting the evidence, I’d like to see an equally well-done refutation of his points, but right now I’m not very convinced at all by the “fat is bad” claims.

What I wasn’t expecting was the rest of the book. One of Taubes’s points is that studies frequently focus on links between cholesterol and death from heart disease. And heart disease is bad, no question, but what I really want to do is increase my (enjoyable) life span, not decrease my chance of dying from heart disease while increasing my chance of dying from something else. (I also don’t want to increase my life span by two months at the cost of having to eat mediocre food for decades, but that’s a separate matter! Not an unimportant one, though.) After talking about fat, he turns to a range of other diseases (diabetes being the one that stuck in my head the most) that, apparently, are completely unknown in many populations before they start moving towards more western lifestyles. (And not unknown solely because of lower life expectancies, either.) So there really is reason to believe that dietary changes over the last century have had significant negative impact on our health; fat, however, doesn’t seem to be the smoking gun.

With which he turns towards presenting a case against excessive carbohydrate consumption. I’d assumed that the Atkins diet was just another fad diet; apparently, it has a rather long history, and the science behind it is a good deal more interesting than I’d thought. (Including links between it and some of the bad kinds of cholesterol; I’ll pay more attention to my triglyceride levels in the future.)

I’m not completely convinced by either the “fat is ok” or “carbohydrates are bad” parts of his argument. (And I don’t think he expects readers to be; the impression that I got is that he’d like a lot more research in certain areas and a lot less reflexive going along with the crowd.) But this doesn’t mesh too badly with my experience; in particular, one of the big changes in my diet since moving out here is that (partly because of the best cookbook ever), we eat pasta all the freaking time. And, going back to my “eat good food” mantra from above, I have a hard time supporting the notion that our diet isn’t rather too pasta-heavy; I’m sure Italians would look at our family menus with horror. So it does seem time to reconsider that part of our diet. And also to ask some basic questions: I’d never seriously considered eating brown rice or whole-grain pasta; maybe I should try them out and figure out if I like them? (The answer turns out to be that I actually seem to prefer brown rice in most contexts; I’m not completely sold on whole-grain pasta yet.)

So we’re experimenting, and our meals have gotten more varied. I’ve done some googling to try to figure out if Taubes is a crackpot or not; so far, I’m not seeing much reason to reject him. Take, for example, this article on carbohydrates from the Harvard School of Public Health. In one section, it talks about measuring the effects of different diets, including the Atkins diet, and says “it looked as though the women in the Atkins group had lost the most weight … and 3.5 for the Zone group. (18) Levels of harmful LDL, protective HDL, and other blood lipids were at least as good among women on the Atkins diet as among those on the low-fat diet”. Note the use of “looked as”: already, we see a rhetorical anti-Atkins positioning in an attempt to mute what sure sounds like good news for Atkins.

They justify their skepticism by saying “If you read the fine print of the study, though, it turns out that few of the women actually stuck with their assigned diets. Those on the Atkins diet were supposed to limit their carbohydrate intake to 50 grams a day, but they took in almost triple that amount. The Ornish dieters were supposed to limit their fat intake to under 10 percent of their daily calories, but they got about 30 percent from fat. There were similar deviations for the Zone and LEARN groups. What this and other diet comparisons tell us is that sticking with a diet is more important than the diet itself.” And, frankly, they should be ashamed of that conclusion: they’re trying to pretend that all of the diets would be equally effective if people stuck with them, without a shred of evidence presented in favor of that, while simultaneously brushing away what evidence the study actually presents.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Taubes mentions over and over in his book, where studies are interpreted in as anti-fat a method as possible. And there’s more of it later in the article: they admit that certain studies give evidence that certain low-carb diets are good for you, but present this in a tone of “well, if you go the low-carb route, you probably aren’t consigning yourself to early death, but who knows” rather than “you know, maybe these low-carb people really are on to something”.

If nothing else, being kicked out of a diet rut is to the good. And I’m happy to no longer have to feel guilty about eating bacon.

• Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better.
• TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the 95-100 wpm range, it seems.) (Via Game | Life.)
• Japanese anatomy scrolls from 1819.
• The Piet programming language. (Via Notional Slurry.)

• An amazing video:

  (You’ll have to bear with it a bit, it doesn’t really get going until about 40 second in.) (Via Penny Arcade)

• Japanese highway interchanges. (Via Pink Tentacle.)

• How to crush an egg:

  (Via Vacuum.)

• Pretty pictures. (Via Drawn!.)
• Virtual methods in the CLR and JVM. (Perhaps only interesting to me because I’m so ignorant about the CLR…)
• Samuel R. Delany gets laid more than I do. (Click on “The Polymath”; not even direct-linkable, alas, let alone embeddable.)
• As a manager is explaining that photography is allowed in Union Station, a security guard comes over telling them to turn off the camera…

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations is the third game in the Phoenix Wright series. I don’t have a lot to add beyond what I said before: it’s a good series, and if you’ve played the other games, then by all means play this one as well, while if you haven’t, give the first game a try.

The mechanics haven’t changed at all since the second game, which is fine; there’s enough to do, and if they’d added anything more, I suspect it would have felt gimmicky. The game starts off a good deal harder than the earlier games, with very little gentleness towards newcomers; fortunately, it doesn’t get any harder after the second case, and in fact I found the last case slightly easier than some of the earlier ones. (Or maybe my brain was just getting back in the groove.)

Amusing enough new characters, but no spectacular additions. (Though the chef is quite something, for better or for worse.) They continued the story arcs set up in the first two games, bringing it all to a conclusion in the last case of this game; timeless plotting it isn’t, but it did all come together acceptably (if not wonderfully) at the end. As with the earlier games, Liesl played all the way through this one, finishing it before I did. (Partly because I was obsessing over Professor Layton.)

I’m not 100% sure that I’ll play future games in the series, now that this plot arc has come to a conclusion; if Liesl wants to, I will, otherwise who knows. (It may depend as much as anything on how many vacations I take.) But I’m quite glad I played through these three.

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area.

For those of you who come here for video-game-related reasons, he worked on the excellent System Shock in a variety of roles, including doing some of the level design. He also wrote a pleasant introduction to XML.

But the main reason why I miss him is Lambda Expressway. It’s a fabulous quirky audio novella, mixing a sort of adventure story with mentions of the virtues of building your own backhoe, a character with a theme song immortalizing the virtues of buns, and, well, just go listen. (I do every year or so.)

I think I have another tape or two of his around somewhere; I really need to go and get them digitized. I hope they haven’t fallen apart…

Liesl’s car is getting a bit long in the tooth, so a week and a half ago we went and test-drove some cars. And decided on a Prius; one of the surprises was that I actually preferred its interior dimensions to the Camry’s. (I kept bumping my head on the Camry’s ceiling.)

We didn’t like the dealer we test-drove it at enough to want to give them our money (and the only package 2 Prius they had in stock was black, which didn’t sound great for summer driving), so we sent out some inquiries via cars.com. Piercey Toyota in Milpitas got back to us saying that they had a non-black package 2 in stock for $23,909. That sounded fine, so we left them a voice mail.

And didn’t get a response—I guess the person we were dealing with was unavailable on the weekend?—but we heard back from them yesterday, and made an appointment to drop by there this evening.

So we show up; the first words are “I have some good news and some bad news”. It turns out that they don’t have one in stock any more, which was pretty annoying; couldn’t they have e-mailed us to let us know? Still, we wanted a car, so we probably would have been willing to put down a deposit or something and wait for a week for the one they had on order to show up.

But, it turns out, Toyota has raised the MSRP in the interim: not only would we have to wait a week, we’d have to pay a few hundred bucks more. They kept us sitting around for a good twenty minutes or so while thinking about whether or not they really wanted to charge us the MSRP, but ultimately they stayed firm: if we wanted a car, we’d have to pay the higher price, instead of the price they quoted to us.

Which Liesl and I were both furious at, and were completely unwilling to do. The reason why we went through cars.com in the first place is so we wouldn’t have to deal with stupid dealer crap: they’d make us their best offer, we’d take it or leave it, no hard feelings either way. Instead, they told us one thing, gave us no indication that anything had changed, had us drive through rush-hour traffic to get there on an evening when, frankly, we had better things to do, only to tell us then that they wanted to change the price on us.

I’m not particularly mad at them for selling the one they’d mentioned on the e-mail: it’s a hot market, we didn’t jump in our car to drive there and buy it immediately. (Though, you know, it would have been nice if they’d indicated that they wouldn’t hold it for us unless, say, we called them to put down a few hundred bucks as a down payment or something: we got back to them pretty quickly, after all.) But if they are going to sell it and we’ll have to wait for a week or two to get another one, it’s simple basic courtesy to spend a minute and send us an e-mail: that way, we would have known what was going on, and hopefully we could have avoided tonight’s trip entirely, arranging whatever needed to be arranged over the phone.

Even with that, though, we would have been willing to put down a deposit for the next car tonight when we showed up and were told that, in fact, they didn’t have a car for us. But to change the price like that with no advance warning is completely unacceptable. Basically, it turns out that what their original “we have a #2 Prius to sell you for $23,909” e-mail actually meant was “we’re a Toyota dealer, it’s likely the case that we’ll be able to sell you a Prius at some point in the future for some undetermined price.” Which we could have figured out quite nicely on our own without blowing an evening on it, thank you very much.

Liesl will contact the next dealer on our list tomorrow; hopefully they’ll be more honest in their dealings with us.

One thing which I was expecting to find in the GTD book, but didn’t, was some sort of version of Standardized Work. This is an idea that I’ve seen in lean: it says that, if there’s a task that you do repeatedly, you should write down the best way you know of to do that task. From then on, you should either follow your standardized work guidelines when performing that task or be consciously experimenting with a new way to perform that task. (And then, depending on the results of the experiment, either updating your standardized work or going back to the old way.)

This is, of course, not an idea that is original to lean, and, in fact, I have heard David Allen mention it (either in a podcast or in another book, I can’t remember), under the term “checklist”. But I still think its absence in the book creates a gap; here’s why.

One of his quotes in that book is “There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” (p. 22) That’s perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that GTD trains you to capture certain kinds of thoughts (worries, ideas, …) as they flit through your mind, and write them down.

So: if the thought is a next action, it goes on your next action list. If it’s related to a project, it goes on your entry for that project. If it’s something you’re thinking about but haven’t yet committed to, it goes on your someday/maybe list.

But what if it relates something that you do repeatedly? You may be able to place that in one of the above categories, but, for me, they’re not a particularly good fit. That may sound a bit abstract (or wrong!), so let me give you an example as an explanation: sometimes, I am hiring. When I hire, I bring candidates in for interviews. And setting up an interview involves several steps: the candidate and I have to agree on the time, I have to reserve a conference room, I have to register the candidate with the visitor system, I have to make an entry in my calendar, I have to e-mail the candidate driving directions. And probably other steps that I can’t think of right now, which is exactly my point: I can try to hope that I’ll remember all of those steps, but they’re exactly the sort of thing that GTD teaches us not to keep in our brains, to keep instead in some trusted location.

But where? If I’m hiring, I’ll have a ‘hiring’ project, so I could keep it there. If I’m not hiring, I guess I could shuffle it over to the someday/maybe list. But that sounds like a lot of busywork for no particular reason; instead, I find it simplest to have a ‘checklist’ folder where I keep stuff like that. (If you’re curious, the GTD directory on my computer contains my tickler file plus four subdirectories: ‘projects’, ‘someday’, ‘reference’, and ‘checklists’.) So, at work, this is more or less my current set of checklists: a couple of hiring-related ones, one for when somebody leaves, one giving the steps of my weekly review, and my favorite ones, the checklists for when I get to work and leave work. (I created the “get to work” checklist the second time that I realized that it was almost lunchtime, that I’d been too busy to eat breakfast at home, and that I’d gotten distracted and hadn’t eaten breakfast at work; so I created a checklist whose fifth item is “have I eaten breakfast?”.)

Incidentally, my GTD system is settling down pretty well. I’ve made peace with the e-mail sorting issues that I mentioned earlier; once I’d added short keystroke commands to file an e-mail as action/waiting/scheduled (along with keystrokes for various reference folders), I found that having separate folders for those categories worked fine. I’ve instituted weekly reviews at both home and work; they haven’t had any big effects yet, but seem to be a positive occurrence as a whole. My personal next action list has been getting out of hand recently, but I made some progress in taming that this weekend, and it’s been a successful feedback mechanism in preventing me from taking on more personal projects that I really don’t have time for; my work next action list has remained pleasantly manageable. In fact, while I plan to continue tweaking the system indefinitely, I’ve declared the “adopt GTD” project at work a success, and I only have a couple of action items left on the home version of that project.