So in one week I find that I was one of many runners-up in the Buffalo News short-story contest to someone who claimed to have never written before, and then that a thirteen-year-old is tearing up the best-seller lists in Britain.
Sigh….
Like sighting a passenger pigeon in the wild….
It turns out that Craig of BUFFALOg is something I thought I’d never see, ever: he’s a non-obnoxious Objectivist. I find that absolutely amazing, given that until now, every admirer of Ayn Rand’s philosophy I have ever encountered is unimaginably irritating and obnoxious, like the creepy guy on the FilmScoreMonthly message boards who recently called me “sick” and “evil” because my views stubbornly don’t align with his. It’s very refreshing to find an Objectivist who, at the merest hint of disagreement from someone, doesn’t start droning on about “A=A” and “the Law of Non-Contradictory Indentification” and taking the usual tactic of “Ayn Rand prized Reason above all else, I love Ayn Rand, therefore I prize Reason above all else, therefore my views are by definition reasonable and yours are not”. Wow. And here I was being already amazed that Craig is a non-obnoxious Republican! [rimshot]
I read Rand’s “heavy hitters”, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the summer after I graduated college (or maybe a year after that), and I was not impressed with either book, neither from the philosophical standpoint nor from the literary standpoint. (I fail, for example, to see what’s so admirable about Howard Roark — an ass who is rock-hard consistent in his ass-ness is still an ass, isn’t he?) I found Rand’s work to be one goofy thought after another, contained in one goofy sentence after another, and since then I’ve pretty much been completely mystified over the level of admiration that has accrued around her. But then, when it comes to philosophy-drenched novels, Robert M. Pirsig has always been more my speed.
BTW, here’s another good article about the Rand-cult. Craig’s entirely correct that Objectivism probably shouldn’t be strictly equated with the Rand-cult; but my experience runs to the contrary, in that until I read Craig’s post, I never once encountered any adherent of Objectivism who wasn’t also a big-time drinker of the Rand-cult’s flavor of Kool-Aid. (What flavor would that be, I wonder? I suspect it would be some kind of horrible melange of melon and pineapple.)
UPDATE: Via Bookslut I see this bizarro example of Rand-cultist-speak. This, unlike Craig’s blog, is how every Randian I’ve ever encountered has spoken, no matter what the topic:
A recipe is not a concept per se. It is, rather, a conceptual listing. A recipe is comprised of: 1) a formal and repeatable listing of the ingredients; 2) the specific, objective procedure by which those ingredients are to be integrated into a viable, non-contradictory whole; 3) a stipulation of the temperature at which and duration for which the food is to be cooked; and finally, 4) an explication of the manner and terms in which the food is to be served—served to man.
It should be obvious, here, that in this context, “service” is not be taken as “self-sacrifice.” Ayn Rand rejected the notion of cooking and dish preparation as a form of self-sacrificial service. Only producers deserve to consume, Ayn Rand believed. And then, only if they consume rationally. Ayn Rand could not abide irrational eating, and did not permit it in her presence.
According to Ayn Rand, a recipe permits a range of options in the amounts of the specific ingredients and in the temporal order of their integration—but this range is objectively delimited by the nature, the identity of the dish being prepared, which in turn is defined and programmed by the recipe, which specifies the measurements and gives the methodology.
If a recipe describes a “pinch of salt,” for example, any minor variations in the size of the pinch are all well and good, and we may omit the measurement of the variation in our measurement of the overall amount. But it would be impermissible to add a tablespoon of salt to the mixing bowl, let alone a cup.
Good Lord. You see, for the Randian it would be impermissable to add a cup of salt when a pinch is called for because it would be “irrational” and “contradictory” to do so. For a normal person, it would be impermissable to do so because the end result would taste like shit.
In my experience, whenever a Randian opens his or her mouth, I immediately open the nearest window and turn on all the fans.
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Search Engine Follies
Lynn Sislo on people who don’t know how to use search engines correctly:
There are a lot of people of all ages who don’t know how to use the Internet or else they are so lazy they expect they can type in a word or two and whatever they want will instantly appear on the screen. The apparent notion that any website that comes up on a Google search is somehow obligated to have the information the searcher is looking for is laughable.
Heh, indeed, and all that. While I haven’t had anyone actually attack me for not having the information they’re looking for (which should be apparent from the Google results anyway, since Google provides the relevant snippet of quotage from the web site in question, thus making it fairly obvious that maybe the search term results are coming from entirely different sentences and/or posts), anyone who maintains a blog for even a short while soon notices the kind of strange search engine queries that bring people calling. Most are benign, of course — someone looking for something happens upon the possibility that a post of mine may have mentioned what they’ve been looking for, and they come calling.
But then there are the truly bizarre search engine requests. I’m not talking about the ever-surprised soft-porn requests that somehow lead people here, but the just-plain-strangely worded Google requests in the first place. This is what I sometimes think of as the “Star Trek Library Computer” view of the Internet. Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which some aliens tried to help some poor off-course human space explorer by building a replica of the hotel described in the trashy novel he’d been reading for him to live in, under the assumption that the novel depicted a proper human habitat? And how, upon discovering this two centuries later, Captain Picard orders the Enterprise computer to display the text of the novel (which, judging by the episode’s subtext, had probably not been read since those very aliens had found it), and the computer pops up the text in seconds? (Picard starts reading, and sure enough, the book opens with, “It was a dark and stormy night…”)
I think that people expect the Net to basically be the proto-version of the Star Trek computer: a repository of every single bit of content ever generated by the Hand of Man. And judging by the odd phrasing of search-engine requests, they think that search engines constitute the interface through which they access this information (fair enough), and that they approach that interface in the same way. This, of course, is wrong. Wrongity-wrong. Returning to Star Trek, remember that bit in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Scotty, encountering a 1986-era Macintosh, picks up the mouse and tries to talk into it? That’s the exact same level of misunderstanding here. People think that a search engine is like a reference librarian: you tell it what you want, and then it goes off and comes back with exactly what you want. And more, you don’t have to evaluate what’s been provided; all you have to do is take your information and go on your merry way. The idea that the searcher may have some responsibility for making sure they’ve found what they want seems unheard of.
And that’s why we see Google requests phrased really strangely. If a person’s looking for, say, an exploration of the themes in Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliet Symphony, instead of seeing a Google search phrased like this:
themes Berlioz “Romeo et Juliet”
I’ll see things like this:
Give me information on the themes in Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet symphony
And then there are some truly hilarious ones. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I once encountered a Google request phrased something like this:
Give me Barry Bonds’s stats for 1996. I repeat, 1996. Not 1997.
I’m not making that up. I can’t recall what the person was actually looking for, but the “I repeat…” phrase was there.
So what’s the problem? Well, it’s twofold: first, lots of people don’t know how to effectively look for information in the first place, and second, lots of people don’t know how to actually evaluate the information they find, once they’ve found it. This all seems to me fairly problematic, given how often I read that we are now living in the “Age of Information”.
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[Cheeks reddening]
OK, I feel a bit unsavory linking this, but Jennifer has some ideas for Valentine’s Day gifts for single women. This stuff may not be safe for work — in more ways than one, if you know what I mean.
And no, I don’t know what you’d do with most of this stuff…nosiree, Bob…um…ahem…hey, how ’bout those Eagles!
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But are the passages twisty and all alike?
Will Duquette has been doing some work on a computer game for his own children, and he’s been posting a bit on the issues that come up in game design and how to address those issues from the computer-code standpoint. Now, I don’t know much at all about programming computers (assuming a value of “very nearly zero” for “not much at all”), but reading about the issues themselves is pretty interesting — such as this post of Will’s about mazes.
I hope that Will’s game will include the possibility of being eaten by a grue if the player’s lamp goes out….
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Fixing the barn door, after the horse has come home
Buffalo’s NBC affiliate, WGRZ, did a bunch of investigative-type stuff into wasteful spending in the Erie County government, mostly pertaining to patronage jobs to “friends and family” of County Executive Joel Giambra (who recently had an old buddy on the payroll as his personal driver, making over $80,000 a year before the outcry made Giambra reassign his buddy to the Parks Department, where he’s now scraping by on $73,000 a year). It was pretty disgusting an eye-opening.
But also disgusting was the little “mutual admiration society” that surrounded this bit of reportage, with nearly every on-air personality at Channel 2 congratulating the reporters for their dogged pursuit of this story. Not only do I find it incredibly annoying when TV news people tell us how great their news is (“You heard it here first!” could almost be Buffalo’s official motto), but I also remember that nary a peep of this kind of thing was heard back in fall of 2003, when Joel Giambra was running for re-election.
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AGGHHH!!!
Why, O why, would the powers-that-be decide to open the new Hayao Miyazaki film, Howl’s Moving Castle, just two weeks after the new Star Wars movie opens?! Ack!
Also, the New Yorker apparently ran an article about Miyazaki in a recent issue, and the writer of that article gives an interview on the subject. Why they couldn’t just put the article in question online is beyond me, but hey, that’s what libraries are for.
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Whose President is he?
Dear Mr. President,
Since I am an American citizen, you are my President, whether I voted for you or not, whether I agree with your policies or not, whether I agree with the direction you wish to set for this country or not. If I want to be able to attend a speech by you, and I can get a ticket, I should be able to do just that. It distresses me, as an American citizen, that apparently those who work for you disagree.
(link via Oliver Willis)
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It’s about…layers. Lots of layers.
[Navel-gazing about clothes here]
Over the last few months I’ve come to like the “layered” look, in terms of clothing. I’ve never been much into layers before, beyond the occasional mock turtleneck (I’ve never tried a real turtleneck) under a sweater, but now I find myself doing the “long-sleeve t-shirt under a short-sleeve henley” thing, or some such variant. Part of this stems from work, where I’ve pretty much been layering ever since I got hired at The Store. I’ve always been one to generate a bit of sweat — not quite to the levels of a Norm Peterson from Cheers, of whom Carla once said, “We could grow rice!”, but I do start to get uncomfortably warm at temperatures most other people consider pleasantly temperate, so I started layering to keep my work-provided shirts with The Store’s logo from getting a bit too, shall we say, aromatic. But now I see that the layered look is pretty “in”, and I like the look, so I’ve adopted it.
The only thing really interesting to me about this development is the fact that to this day, I still tend to adopt those fashion statements that are achievable with clothes I already own. If I have to go out and spend money to upgrade my wardrobe in order to keep up with a fashion trend, my general response is still to ignore the trend.
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Lazy Linkage
Just some stuff today:
:: The Buffalo News has been running a series on Scientology (which, by the way, really creeps me out). I’m being too lazy to link all four articles, but Julia has them.
:: I don’t really have much interest in French cooking, but this site is interesting, and its design is just terrific. Seriously, that’s a great looking web site.
:: Via Lynn Sislo, a nifty-looking site devoted to the Japanese Tea Ceremony.
:: Craig at BUFFALOg is concerned that apparently high-schoolers right now think that freedom of the press should be curtailed. Oy. These are the next generation of American voters, folks.
:: ACD doesn’t get the appeal of Star Wars. I mean, he really doesn’t get the appeal of Star Wars. He asks for an explanation, but I don’t think he’d come anywhere near buying my own personal explanation, since I reject most of his premises (that the movies are dumb, the acting terrible, and the special effects laughable, for starters). Anyhow, links to a few of my ruminations on Star Wars are available in the sidebar.
:: I’ve seen this interview with a comments-spammer linked a number of times. Since I use YACCS commenting, I never get comments-spam, which I suspect is because YACCS comment pages are not archived by Google (or whatever the term may be). So there’s nothing to be gained from comments-spamming blogs like mine. Which makes me wonder why more non-search engine indexed blog commenting systems aren’t coming on line; I suspect that they’d have newfound popularity given the increasing annoyance of comments-spam.
OK, enough for today. Gotta watch the State of the Union last night’s Scrubs.
(I’ve updated this post a couple of times.)