this is not your ____.

Fancy book learning and noises and animals and languages. I'm @wjjjjt on Twitter.

[wjt]

Adapting the unadaptable

I loved The City & The City by China Miéville when I read it 9–10 years ago, and I thought the recent BBC TV adaptation was reasonably good, particularly given the source material doesn't really lend itself to TV. The core problem with adapting it is the need to represent the objects, buildings and people in the other city that each character is unseeing, as well as making it easy for the viewer to work out which city they are seeing. (There are mild spoilers below. You've been warned.)

So: the two cities had very different palettes and appearance: Besźel uses muted browns and yellows, with a ’70s vibe, and Ul Qoma is brightly lit with blues and reds, and looks like a wealthy Western city. (They actually highlighted the colour aspect in the dialogue of a scene where Borlú is training for a visit to Ul Qoma.) To represent unseeing, the camera is declared to see what Borlú sees, and parts of his field of view which he's unseeing are blurred. When Borlú breaks the rules, as he does during a chase sequence where the suspect is in the other city, what he's looking at comes into focus. While watching, I thought these techniques worked quite well (unlike some dodgy CGI in a couple of places, which definitely did not).

But when I discussed this with the others in Garuda¹, Trev – who's just finished the novel, and not seen the TV adaptation – pointed out that the differences between the two cities are meant to be so subtle that outsiders can't easily spot them, so making this change means dropping one of the more interesting elements of the book: the willingness of both cities to respect the separation based on minute cues. It's true that I spent the whole TV show wondering how they would film a sequence in the novel where the suspect is carrying himself in such a way that he's not obviously breaching, but no-one can work out which city he is in, so neither police force can pounce. The disappointing answer: they didn't.

I also realised that I barely remember anything more than the broad strokes of the novel, even though I've been enthusiastically recommending it to anyone who asks for a decade. So I had trouble distinguishing between things which had been changed for the TV adaptation – such as TV Borlú's Orciny-obsessed wife who disappeared a few years ago – and things I just didn't remember. For example, I don't remember a whole subplot involving a far-right nationalist Besź Mayor-elect, but I'm told it was in there. Oh well. It's the only Miéville novel I have ever felt able to recommend to people who aren't into chitin and/or alien cultures built around similes, and I'll keep recommending it anyway.

¹⁾ Our band was, of course, named for the creatures in Perdido Street Station.

[wjt]

The News Did Not Exactly Improve

It's been a year and 6 days since my last year notes! Let's see what happened.

Serious Business

I still work at Endless bringing the year of Linux on the desktop to the 75% of the world that don't have access to computers. This is now my second-longest-ever period of continuous employment, and I hope it continues. It goes almost without saying that Endless is hiring.

Over on my GNOME blog I wrote about the technique we use for non-destructive dual-boot installations (and its teething pains), and some surprisingly interesting work getting Endless running well from a DVD. I also took part in this Reddit AMA with many colleagues, and found two bugs in Windows.

Two years ago, I wrote the following about my previous project:

I had hoped that something would have made it out into the world by now, but it was not to be.

This is still true.

Bleep Bloop

I made and then abandoned a bot which parodies the “That's Not My ____” series of books for babies and toddlers. Because it has to maintain state between tweets, it does not use Cheap Bots, Done Quick! despite being mostly implemented as a Tracery grammar. Nonetheless, please consider supporting CBDQ and its creator George on Patreon.

@fewerror turned 4. I noticed it was getting a lot of spam followers and in November decided to report a bunch of them, whereupon it was suspended. I have filed two appeals, and have never heard back from Twitter. I had been thinking about retiring it for a while – the joke is done and spam-fighting is no fun – so I guess the decision was made for me. Still, it would have been nice to switch off new posts and have all its old #content visible for posterity. Twitter obviously has larger problems than my stupid bot, but it's very discouraging to have no idea what rule it violated, and to have no recourse, despite having put a lot of work into making it well-behaved. I think I'm done making bots for that platform.

Cis and I formed a band, Downlands Cancara, and performed at DIY Space for London's First Timers in April. I played the GSA Capital Commemorative Balalaika in public for the first time. I'm mentioning this under “bleep bloop” because this was my first band with electronic instruments (all of which were under Cis' expert control). It was a new kind of songwriting for me, and I was really pleased with the three tunes we came up with: I rank Isola Bella among the best songs I've cowritten. I hope we'll get a chance to record some of these tunes and write some more, but we are on hiatus while I do Life Stuff and while Cis is living in Indonesia.

I'm A Leaf On The Wind

I visited:

🚗 Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, where I snowboarded 📷, walked, and met a cat 📷 and some Alpine llamas 📷.

✈️ Hamburg, where (among other activities) I marvelled 📷 at Miniatur Wunderland. If you're in Hamburg I can't recommend it highly enough. It's huge, and if you're anything like me you'll unexpectedly want to spend ages looking at tiny details, so budget a few hours and accept that you won't see everything.

🚄 Manchester, for one day of GUADEC 2017. It was great to see lots of familiar faces from the GNOME world, and to meet a fair few colleagues for the first time. Shame that the year it's in the UK is the year when I can't really stay for more than a day, but so it goes.

✈️ Orkney, to see family and to catch a bit of the Orkney International Science Festival. It's been running since 1991 and the organiser is a relative, but I'd never been before. Strongly recommended if you want a broad selection of talk subjects – including archaeology, ancient music, additive manufacturing, renewable energy, and Peter Higgs – in a beautiful archipelago 📷 prone to windy deluges 📷.

Consumer of Content

I read 26 books, a little more than half what I read in 2016, and two more than I was aiming for. Hooray! The best was Kindred by Octavia Butler; by far the worst was Deep Work by Cal Newport. This does not include dozens of children's books.

The new laser sword film is fine. Mad Max: Fury Road was extremely enjoyable a second time in “black and chrome”. Hey Duggee Series 2 episode 31 “The Stick Badge” is great.

Public Service Broadcasting were good 📷. The Spook School were good 📷.

I started learning German on Duolingo. Supposedly I am 25% fluent, but I can barely read Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt.

Life Stuff

Last year I said:

In particular, I hope that when I write these notes again in 12 months, I am reporting something other than “I have a new job”. I also hope that we are not all vapourized during this ongoing period of “political turmoil”.

The second sentence still seems a bit touch-and-go. As for the first sentence: I became a dad in May. It's great! Of course there have been some tough days/weeks/months but it's all worth it. It does mean that working from home is rather more distracting these days.

Okay, that's enough! Onwards for another year.

[wjt]

I made a new bot, That's Not My Bot…, inspired by the series of books for young children by Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells. The books have 8 spreads, in this format (from “That's Not My Tractor…”):

That's not my tractor. Its engine is too bumpy.

That's not my tractor. Its trailer is too rough.

[more pages]

That's my tractor! Its headlamps are so shiny.

Each page has a cartoon of a different tractor, with a textured area representing the adjective: corrugated foil for “bumpy”, rough foil for "rough", velcro for "scratchy", and so on.

The bot has a simple grammar for generating sentences like this, and fixes the first object (eg "tractor") for 1 or more negatives before generating a positive sentence, and gradually posts them as threaded tweets. The grammar may be simple but it is enormous – 12,337 lines at the time of writing. I hope this extremely large space of possible texts will keep it fresh a bit longer than some previous bots in this genre. I went a bit overboard lifting word lists from dariusk/corpora and added a few of my own. My favourite touch is using terms from wine tasting notes as some of the adjectives.

I planned to use Flickr's CC image search to mock up pages for the book. I decided to get the bot going with just text (perfect is the enemy of good, etc) and come back to images when I had time. I tried searching Flickr for an object the bot picked (“can of peas”) at the maximum Safe Search level and found a swastika in the first page of results so I've decided it's better left as text, unless or until someone comes up with a good way to generate inoffensive-but-funny imagery.

I also originally planned to use Cheap Bots, Done Quick but wanted a feature that unmodified Tracery does not provide: adding "is" or "are" to agree with a word which may be singular or plural. So I used Allison Parrish's Python port of the library, and wrote my own crude implementation of the .is modifier. It gets (eg) "cans of soup" and "surgeons general" wrong, but then again the the built-in .s modifier (to make a singular noun plural) gets these wrong too ("can of soup" → "*can of soups") so I am not too worried.

[wjt]

Are there other answers to the popular riddle?

There's a popular riddle which goes something like this:

Find a word that you change from singular to plural by adding a letter, and then change back to singular by adding the same letter again.

The canonical answer is the title of this post, but are there others? I did a little breakfast experiment channelling the power of Azure Notebooks, Python, WordNet and /usr/share/dict/words which you can look at if you're interested in the methodology. Here are the candidate answers I found:

a → ad → add

bra → bras → brass ★

care → cares → caress ★

employ → employe → employee

hi → his → hiss

ma → mas → mass

ma → mat → matt

me → mes → mess

needle → needles → needless ★

pa → pal → pall

pa → pas → pass

prince → princes → princess

I think the starred ones are plausible answers to the riddle, though "needless" is not a noun. If you accept "ma" and "pa" as terms for parents that can be made plural, then those ones work too, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

[wjt]

2017 in books (part 2)

Mostly lifted from my Goodreads reviews:

Fahrenheit 451: someone told me that writing two-sentence mini-reviews without explaining what the book is about is not very helpful. So! This is about a future where books have been outlawed; the protagonist's job is setting unearthed caches of contraband on fire. Spoiler: he realises that Books are Actually Good.

The idea is that books fell out of favour gradually: first you introduce other forms of mass media which are easier to consume in bite-sized chunks (TV, cordless earbuds, sleeping pills), so that people mostly stop reading of their own accord. Then you make buildings fire-proof. Now you can ban books and set them on fire when you find them without anyone kicking up too much of a fuss. The population is itself partly to blame for allowing this to happen.

(Aside: writing this reminded me of the precise moment I lost my last shred of interest in the band Porcupine Tree: 11½ minutes into yet another tedious song about how the youth of today are numbed by TV and antidepressants, concentric circles of spinning pills appear, in case you hadn't fully appreciated the subtle and original message they're trying to deliver.)

It's a pretty good read. Every so often Bradbury flips into Metaphor Mode and spends a page or more describing some minor detail, which I could do without. It all feels a bit rushed at times – and according to the foreword and afterword in the edition I read, its original short-story incarnation was written in 10 days, and the expansion into a novel twice the size was to a tight deadline, so it feels that way for a reason. There's some interesting commentary in those about how the timing of the two versions of the novel interacted with the ebb and flow of McCarthyism, and the well-timed launch of Playboy where it was possible to take literary risks, distracted by another form of media which is easier to consume and get enraged about.

The Collapsing Empire: spaaaaaaaaaace stuff. Premise: faster-than-light travel is possible, but only via “the Flow”, a poorly-understood system of predetermined pathways between points in space. An empire has been built up around this network, with every node economically dependent on the others. So what happens if the network starts to fail?

This was fine as series-openers go. It’s nice to see latency in the spread of information – I liked this about Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. On the other hand, without knowing up-front the travel time between the different settings of each chapter, it’s a bit hard to keep track of whether character A knows about event B yet – I think this could have been clearer, or maybe I have a bad memory. (Broadly speaking the answer is “if you’re not sure, they don’t know yet”.) I expected a bit more from the republican movement, but no, the empire and system of family monopolies is pretty entrenched and almost every character we meet doesn't seem too bothered about it. (To be fair, most of them are pretty blasé about everything, like most of Scalzi's characters.) Maybe that's a strand for a future installment.

Compared to Scalzis past: it's broadly similar to Old Man's War etc. but with a lot less shooting and wacky technology – an improvement. There's at least one minor character who echoes the gimmick from Lock In, I guess as an Easter egg for the attentive reader.

Bumpology: A Myth-Busting Guide for Curious Parents-To-Be: Good pop-sci round-up of evidence-based answers to questions about pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Cochrane reviews make regular appearances. A lot of things can be summed up with “it probably doesn't make much difference” or “moderation in all things”.

One nice example is the early question, “Is coffee bad for my baby?” Apparently, more than 550mg of caffeine per day has a slight but measurable impact on babies' height, and low amounts are probably okay. But a survey of espresso strength in Scotland found the amount of caffeine varied wildly: between 51mg at Starbucks to 322mg at an unnamed café in Glasgow! So one double-shot drink might be totally fine, or it might not.

The later stages of the book – how much do newborns understand about the world around them? when should one introduce solid food? – seemed more actionable to me as a non-pregnant participant (unsurprisingly), but of course it's a bit early for me to say if the advice is actually useful. Answer unclear, ask again later (this month).

A Tiger Remembers: The Way We Were in Singapore: Notes on family structure and social dynamics in Singapore over the past century or so, told by “the founding mother of social work education in Singapore”. I don't really know anything about Asian family structure, so I found the variations between the different social/ethnic groups of Singapore particularly interesting reading. There are some good chapters on living conditions before and after the post-colonial drive by the HDB to provide affordable but good-quality housing for all – and how this negatively affected social structures and agricultural work. Also, plenty of anecdotes from the author's experience growing up in wartime Britain and marrying into a Singaporean Chinese family. A nice mix.

I found myself reaching for my phone to look up Singapore-specific terminology. For example, the term “HDB” – Housing and Development Board – was explained several chapters after it started getting casually dropped into sentences. I don't think I am the intended audience, though, so fair enough!

Angel Catbird, Volume 1: This is a pulp-y little volume about a man who, through a Freak Science Accident, can transform into a humanoid half-owl, half-cat. It's fun enough, particularly if you like bad cat puns, but doesn't really break any new ground. Being one of the world's greatest living authors grants one a certain amount of freedom… maybe a future volume will be a bit deeper.

Previously in 2017.

[wjt]

Old Man Yells at Cloud in a Formal Tone of Voice

It really bothers me when people write in clumsy, pseudo-formal English. Here's the main paragraph of an email I got after asking to be removed from a (postal) mailing list:

I am sorry to hear that you do not wish to receive mail form ourselves. Please be assured that we have requested your address to be taken off our own mailing list, so you should not receive any further mail from ourselves.

Let me count the ways…

"form"

"ourselves": you mean "us"

"Please be assured that" is redundant

"we have requested your address to be taken off":

I don't care whether you did it yourself, or asked someone else to do it; just tell me "we have taken your address off"

But if you insist, is "to be" correct here? I think "We have requested your address be taken off" reads better

"our own mailing list": is "own" really necessary? Come on. Nobody talks like this.

On a less petty level: one of the great consequences of engaging with brands on social media is that a conversational (but polite) tone is becoming acceptable, so maybe we'll see less of this, and more of:

Thank you for your email. We have removed your address from our mailing list.

[wjt]

2017 in books (part 1)

Here we go again. New year, new series of lazy reviews:

number9dream: my least favourite of the David Mitchell novels I've read so far, but still enjoyable.

The Fly Trap: it's good. Obviously I heard of this because its author won the 2016 Ig Nobel literature prize for this and its two sequels (not yet translated). Nice combination of memoir, description of unusual pastime and biography of a little-known (to me, though that's not saying much) entomologist.

I really like this observation at the start of chapter 14 (pp. 199):

The history of biology has many stars, and two of them shine brighter than all the rest together—Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin. I don't know what kind of breakthrough it would take for someone, sometime, even to approach the power they exercise over the way we think about life on earth. Above all, Darwin strikes me as utterly impossible to surpass, so great is the truth he saw and described in the most complete detail. Of course, Linnaeus is also magnificent, but what makes him a megastar forever is that he managed to sell an operating system, a bit like Bill Gates. What he didn't do was formulate an eternal truth.

Empire Games: fine but definitely the first of a trilogy. Heavy on setting things up for later volumes; light on developments which aren't broadly predictable from previous installments in this universe. I'd never noticed it before, but Stross has an irritating habit of ending chapters with dialogue ending in an ellipsis, in lieu of actual suspense.

Home (Binti #2): a quick read, in an interesting world. Some good stuff around the arbitrary but powerful divides between communities.

Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, Whispers Under Ground: not exactly high art but good fun and extremely readable (obviously, he says, having read three volumes in a month). Fantasy in a 21st-century London where Magic is Real and all that goes with it. It seems inevitable that I'll compare this to Stross' Laundry series, given the premise and tone: 100% more jazz vampires and 75% less insufferable narrator.

[wjt]

2016 in books (part 4)

The year's over. I read 48 books, four short of my goal but matching last year's count, so I'm awarding myself points for effort. Here's my final set of reviews:

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World: excellent. The future looks bleak for the cod. Unexpectedly slavery-heavy for the first third, and I had no idea that the Cod Wars happened. Full of recipes which I will never follow for a variety of reasons.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone: real food for thought in here, laying out evidence to show that a more equal society raises all boats, and arguing for a few possible changes to help bring that about (more employee-ownership of companies is the big one). But, the authors often refer to “a society which knows where it wants to go”, and similar:

The task is now to develop a politics based on a recognition of the kind of society we need to create and committed to making use of the institutional and technological opportunities to realize it.

Unfortunately, inasmuch as the society I live in has a direction, I don't think it's the one they have in mind…

A Closed and Common Orbit: pretty much what I expected based on its predecessor. A nice read!

Station Eleven: excellent. Reminded me of second-hand descriptions of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play which I would love to see performed some day. There is only so much fiction about the downfall of human civilization that I can cope with, but this is not so relentlessly negative as the genre can be, and the point-of-view characters are well developed.

Ninefox Gambit: I found this really hard work for the first ⅓ or so, but it really grew on me. The core mechanic – the local belief system affects local physics – has some interesting consequences, even if it all boils down to “space magic, as needed by the plot”.

The Best of the Nebulas: an absolutely gigantic tome. It took me four months to get through this but there are some really good stories in here, such as Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17/Empire Star: I'm beginning to wonder whether I need a “Sapir-Whorf Fanfic” shelf on Goodreads… These stories have both aged pretty well. There's a nice passage playing with first vs. second person pronouns – just long enough for you to adjust your mental mapping from quoted speech to characters. (It reminded me a little of reading Halting State, which is written in the second person: very annoying for a while, and then it fades into the background.)

Bridging Infinity: I enjoyed some of these stories a lot while I was reading them. There's a nice one about troubadours on a Dyson sphere, for instance. Unfortunately I read these late at night while I couldn't sleep, and didn't take notes, so remember relatively little about them. I enjoyed an earlier collection from this series, Engineering Infinity, so I guess I should check out the intervening three volumes.

The Iron Tactician: not bad; also not Reynolds' most outstanding work. The main twist was no great surprise.

(part 1, part 2, part 3)

[wjt]

Let’s Not Talk About The News

Serious Business

I spent the first half of the year working with Phenomen on the Dau media project. Last year, I wrote:

I had hoped that something would have made it out into the world by now, but it was not to be.

This is still true. I've left with new friendships, many fascinating conversations around topics I'd never otherwise have discussed, and a deep well of anecdotes.

In July I joined Endless. I work on the downloadable version of the OS (until shortly before I joined the only way to get Endless OS was to buy a computer with it pre-installed). This means that after a decade as a card-carrying free software zealot, I now maintain an MFC-based Windows application. It's a Wubi-esque installer that allows you to install Endless OS alongside Windows non-destructively (without repartitioning your disk, and so on), with a few novel twists which I'll write about some day. I have learned many weird and wonderful things about GRUB, crappy UEFI firmware (naming no vendors because one could really just list them all…), NTFS on-disk structures, the default Windows defragmentation schedule, overlayfs, OSTree, and more.

It's great to be working with many old friends and collaborators, not to mention new faces. It's my first real experience working remotely, and my first taste of the VC-funded startup world. This is also my first experience writing scary, system-altering software that will be run on arbitrary hardware and OS versions by non-technical users, and I have learned some hard lessons about defensive programming and customer support.

From a technical perspective, it's a bit ironic that, in the same year that a former Collabora colleague (now working mainly in Scala) discovered the joys of monads and other FP stuff I used to drone on about, I find myself back in the manual memory management mines. The GNOME stack has got better while I wasn't looking, and pig-lipstick C macros like g_autoptr are definitely better than nothing, but it's still a bit of a shock to the system to have to worry about every allocation again. Perhaps 2017 will be the year of Rust on the Endless OS desktop. On the Windows side of the fence, I've never written much C++ before and my review is that it's “alright” and “unavoidable”. I try to resist assuming that unfamiliar API design is bad API design, but I will say that you can really feel the cost of maintaining source compatibility all the way back to Win16 (in some cases).

Bleep Bloop

Pretty quiet on the side-project front. A little bit of bot tinkering:

@gnuerror has more Stallmanisms plus more-chaotic whitespace.

@xbotsdoney happened after an evening with Cis playing Katamari Forever and coming up with ever more ludicrous synonyms for “Cheap Bots, Done Quick”. Apparently no-one had done this joke before.

I wrote a thing a few months ago about three years of @fewerror. The only thing I have to add is that I added some probabilistic festive emoji. Suggestions welcome for other topical emoji at other times of year.

Oh, I almost forgot! I wrote a little Euclidean rhythm sequencer, and gave a talk about it. That was fun. I would like to give more low-profile talks next year.

I'm A Leaf On The Wind

I visited:

🚄 Loch Ard (for a wedding) 📷

✈️ Budapest (in honour of @millerdl and @elledodd's union) 📷

🚗 Cornwall (for a wedding) 📷

🚄 A field near Guildford (for Electromagnetic Field, which I highly recommend)

🚄 Bolton (for a wedding) 📷

✈️/🚄 both Irelands (📷 Giants' Causeway is pretty good, eh?)

✈️ Massachusetts (for the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony) 📷

Probably some other places

My carbon footprint is broadly unchanged, ie “too high”.

Consumer of Content

It's December 31st and I've read 48 books, four short of my goal. I have written short reviews of the first 39, which you can find under the 2016 in Books tag, and reviews of the rest will follow. I don't think I'll repeat this challenge next year: it is much harder work to read a lot now that I don't commute.

I didn't write and record any new music this year. I was given that rarest of beasts, an English-language book on how to play my balalaika, but I haven't made much progress.

My favourite album of the year was Silent Earthling by Three Trapped Tigers; the best track is Engrams. I saw them play twice this year and the novelty still hasn't worn off. I liked Valuables by Enemies a lot more than their previous work; shame this album is their swansong. Once again I find it hard to remember what new music has really excited me this year.

Some recent film mini-reviews:

Arrival was good apart from the final two lines of dialogue

After seeing The Force Awakens at the end of last year, we watched Star Wars in the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI. Having not seen the prequels before, my conclusion is that this order is indeed more satisfying than release order (IV, V, VI, I, II, III) or chronological order (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) would have been. My shocking and unprecedented review of the prequels is that they are bad. I have still not seen The Phantom Menace and do not intend to. Rogue One was fine. I don't want to see another lightsaber for at least a year.

Life

I turned 30, which was nice. I don't really do gambling but I did place two small bets on the “wrong” side of two important votes as a kind of consolation-prize insurance; so I'm a bit disappointed that both June and November ended without any nasty surprises.

I'm expecting the next year (and decade) to be more chaotic in certain ways, and less so in others. In particular, I hope that when I write these notes again in 12 months, I am reporting something other than “I have a new job”. I also hope that we are not all vapourized during this ongoing period of “political turmoil”.

[wjt]

📚 Do you want any of my books? 📚

I'm pruning my bookshelves, and all of the following books are free to a good home! All paperback unless otherwise noted. Happy to post them to UK-based strangers, too! (Books marked ✔ are spoken for.)

Fiction:

Gravitas and Gigapolis by S. Christopher – I remember this author being another pseudonym of chromatic, the notable Perl developer, though this page just describes them as a “friend and frequent collaborator”

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow – a signed copy I got when I joined the Open Rights Group

✔ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle – a single hefty volume

✔ Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov

Borderliners by Peter Høeg – I think I read this off the back of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, which as I recall was better

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

Neuromancer by William Gibson

✔ Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson – I read this trilogy backwards, which I don't recommend. I don't know what happened to my copy of the middle book, Idoru

✔ Etc Etc Amen by Howard Male – I think the edition I have predates a round of editing, so might be worth getting a fresh copy (with a cooler cover)

✔ Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark – I remember really enjoying this, but I am unlikely to re-read it and in hardback, at ~800 pages, it takes up a lot of space on the shelf!

✔ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – as if the charity shops of the land weren't overflowing with this one

Flux by Stephen Baxter – oh, now I see that this is the third in a series. That explains why I couldn't make head or tail of it

Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress – the first Kress novel I read. It's good!

Non-fiction:

✔ Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly

✔ Watching the English by Kate Fox

✔ Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

✔ Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

✔ The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies

Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity by David Allen – though really, if you were going to join this particular cult you would have done so by now

✔ The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw – I remember this being pretty good, it doesn't shy away from mathematics to help explain a concept. Hardback.

✔ The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex: What's Wrong with Modern Movies? by Mark Kermode – no Oxford comma in the title, it's dead to me

The Internet, Now In Handy Book Form¹ (and similar coffee-table books):

✔ The Internet is a Playground by David Thorne

✔ He Died With A Felafel In His Hand by John Birmingham

Diesel Sweeties: Pocket Sweeties Volume One and Crush All Hu-Mans: A Diesel Sweeties Treasury by R. Stevens

Garfield Minus Garfield by Jim Davis, Dan Walsh – it even has the subtitle “The Internet sensation–now in book form!”. Hardback.

✔ Cyanide And Happiness: I'm giving you the finger – Hardback.

The Book of Bunny Suicides and Return of the Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley – he gave a great (and totally unrelated) talk at Boring Conference in 2015. Hardback.

¹ I only just realised that there is a David McCandless book titled The Internet Now in Handy Book Form. Doesn't it sound terrible?

[wjt]

“Capitilized”

From Linux Kernel Development (paperback, second edition, pp. 145) by Robert Love:

To initialize a dynamically created mutex, you can use:

init_MUTEX(sem);

I do not know why the “mutex” in init_MUTEX() is capitilized [sic] or why the “init” comes first here but second in sema_init(). I do know, however, that it looks dumb and I apologize for the inconsistency.

I've mixed feelings about the tone of this book in general but this bit was very welcome. There's a certain irony in misspelling “capitalized” here, though.

I was curious how common that typo is, and the answer is: so rare that it does not appear in Google Ngram Viewer's corpus. “capitilize” is present but extremely rare.

[wjt]

The 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony

Three years ago, I visited Lawrence and Elle in New York. The trip was timed so we could catch a train to Boston, take a short ride on the T and attend the 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Through sheer incompetence, Lawrence and I missed the train. This year, our attempt was more successful. Our expanded group of six registered as an official delegation – “Extremely Competent Public Transport Users” – and you can see us briefly in the video of the proceedings when the delegations are announced. I wear a bright orange hat and Lawrence models the official neckwear of the delegation.

Economics

An article by Tim Harford has been doing the rounds, in which he complains that the economics Igs “provoke little more than harsh laughter”:

They’ve been awarded to Nick Leeson and Barings Bank, Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and so on. The first economics prize was awarded to Michael Milken, one of the inventors of the junk bond. He was in prison at the time.

Half an hour into this year's ceremony, some past winners were introduced, including David Karpook, a former director of one of the companies awarded the 2002 Economics prize “for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world” along with Enron and co. I did a bit of snooping, and it seems that while he was indeed a director of one of those companies, he wasn't directly implicated in the fraud.

This year's Economics prize – awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson “for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective” – was pretty interesting. Video of their informal lecture on the Saturday after the ceremony isn't online yet, unfortunately. The gist is that they applied a standard brand personality survey to photos of rocks – not notable rocks, just lumps of rock – which do not obviously have any of the same properties as brands; and yet they found positive results for a number of personality traits. The authors suggest that the perception of these traits (in brands and in rocks) could be an artefact of the brand personality methodology, rather than a property of the brands themselves.

Upside-down goggles

Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi were awarded the Perception prize “for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs”. Higashiyama's Saturday lecture explained that they also used goggles that invert your vision to separate the “everything is upside-down” aspect from the “my head is between my legs” aspect. They discovered that it is the position of your head which affects the percieved size of objects, not whether objects appear upside-down. They've also worked on many related studies of how body position affects perception.

I find it striking that Carsten Höller exhibits upside-down goggles in art galleries and, let's say, other artistic contexts; and yet there's much more rigorous research being done, using essentially the same hardware, that is totally unreported. The prize-winning paper was published ten years ago!

Pseudo-profound bullshit

The Peace prize was awarded to the team behind On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, who studied whether people are receptive to statements generated by a Deepak Chopra parody tweet generator. As a procedural text afficionado, naturally I find this interesting, but it's a shame they (apparently – I have only skimmed the paper) limited the study to 140-character statements. Without context, it's often hard to distinguish real statements from garbage in a field whose jargon you're not familiar with. English words do not necessarily have the same meaning in philosophical discussion (for example) as they do in everyday life. (I am completely unfamiliar with Deepak Chopra's writing – maybe it's profound, maybe it's bullshit? I'll leave that to someone else.)

Charles Foster shared the Biology prize for “living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird”. When he began his Saturday lecture, I muttered an obvious joke that his project might itself be pseudo-profound bullshit; but I was dismayed when someone in the audience made the same point to him directly. (I suppose this makes me a coward or a hypocrite.) He seemed hurt, but retorted that he was flattered that his work might be seen as “profound”. Another audience member asked him what sense he feels humans are most missing out on. In his (long!) answer he referred repeatedly to “olefaction”, and never used the word “smell”; a lot of the audience had no idea what he meant. So, I think he actually falls prey to people confusing his unfamiliar speech patterns and choice of vocabulary (particularly as an English barrister, speaking in the US) with bullshitting. Ben described him as “speaking in paragraphs”, which is absolutely right. That's just how he talks.

Tim Harford points out that the other Biology prize-winner, Thomas Thwaites, is the same person who tried to make a toaster from raw materials. I had no idea, and I agree that that work is much more worthy of an Ig; but, having seen him stumble to the lecturn in his goat prosthetics and try to stand up, I understand why they made the choice they did.

More generally …

… the descriptions of the prize-winners' work tend to (try to) be funny at the expense of doing the research justice. It's a real shame that videos of the Saturday lectures, where winners are given five minutes to actually explain themselves, are not online (yet).

[wjt]

2016 in books (part 3)

It's the end of week 40, and I've read 39 books. I work from home now, so I don't have two 45-minute journeys every day to keep me on track. Two trans-Atlantic flights helped, but I need to step it up for the rest of the year…

A Psychogeography of Games: I believe this started life as a series of talks & articles, converted to book form, then converted to e-book form. I think it probably lost something significant in each conversion.

Fledgling: vampires, co-existence, and race. At the time I gave this five stars but looking back I feel like many of the important themes were covered better in the Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood series by the same author. I really like Octavia Butler's writing so I'd appreciate recommendations for what to read next.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics: the text was enlightening, though I imagine it'd be old hat to people who have thought about geopolitics before. For a book with “maps” in its subtitle, though, it's really let down by its maps. Maybe it's just a limitation of the mass-market paperback format but they did a poor job of illustrating the features and border disputes described in the text.

How to Talk about Videogames: exploring the dual nature of video games as art and as utility, and what that means for criticism. It was fine, but it was the fourth book about games I'd read in eight weeks and really I think that I've read enough deep thoughts for one year about a medium I only dip my toes in.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: multiple plot lines straddling the titular fall, and (spoiler alert) everything joins up in an unsurprising and unsatisfying way. Critics disagree with me: it won two Best Novella awards and was nominated for two others. I suggest reading something else by Nancy Kress instead.

Children of Time: arachnophobes should steer well clear of this one, though it means missing out on one of the better alien points-of-view I've read, and it has a good line in post-disaster human civilization cannibalizing the technology of our day (or at least, the standard sci-fi technology written about today) without fully understanding it.

Revenger: a new novel by Alastair Reynolds! Pretty strong, and also featuring neo-archaeology. It feels a bit like playing a rail shooter, and it's very convenient how “past occupation tech” can be used to justify any magic the plot needs, but still a satisfying read.

False Hearts: not for me. Elements of Vurt but a little too YA-ish for my taste.

Interview with the Vampire: I felt like I should read at least one classic novel about vampires one of these days. This is pretty good; I'm not going to read the other thirteen Vampire Chronicals novels but I can see how the moralizing vampire point-of-view was an important development for the genre.

Okay, that's it for this instalment. I'm off to read a biography of cod.

I'm still not sure how comfortable I am posting some of these to Goodreads – particularly when my reaction to a book is mostly unrelated to the book itself, or a bit flippant – but you can get my reading activity and some of my reviews as they happen(!) by following me there if you really want.

(part 1, part 2)

[wjt]

Three Years of @fewerror

@fewerror, my most popular bot by a very wide margin, turned three years old earlier this week.

’Twas the night before I moved out of my place in Cambridge, to start a new job in London 10 days later. I couldn't sleep, and decided the time had finally come to automate a running joke about hypercorrection: it's not funny to correct people's use of “less” rather than “fewer” along prescriptivist grounds, but it is funny to do so in totally inappropriate contexts. I feel like I'd been talking about automating this for an extremely long time, fretting over the details, but in a moment of clarity I realised it's relatively simple:

add part-of-speech tags to the input

match the pattern “less w”, where w is basically any part of speech except a plural noun

correct the speaker to “fewer w”

There are a few linguistic details you need to work out (the de-facto standard Penn Treebank part-of-speech tags do not distinguish singular nouns from mass nouns; correcting “less adj noun” to “fewer adj” may be correct) but if you err on the side of false negatives, you get pretty good results from not much code. You may or may not agree that the joke is funny (many people I admire and respect are very firmly in the second camp), but it has 25% more followers than me so it must add some value to the world. I maintain a gallery of praise for @fewerror, not all of which is necessarily sincere…

Over the past three years I have discovered that the hardest part of “automating smug men getting things wrong” is not actually the natural language processing: it is making it behave appropriately and respect the social norms. In some ways this is made harder by the bot's entire premise being to interrupt with an annoying joke.

Initially, the bot searched the public timeline for the word “less” to find its victims, and was not properly rate-limited. This got it suspended within a few hours. Do not underestimate the rate at which people tweet, even in 2013.

Then, it only replied to tweets by people it follows – and would automatically follow back if you follow it. But I didn't implement the dual logic: if you unfollow it, it should stop talking to you. This Hotel California behaviour is very poor form. It also took me a long time to realise it should un-CC any users mentioned in the tweet who do not also follow it.

On the other hand, my poor bot ethics did allow me to manually opt-in Richard Dawkins, leading to the bot's finest hour. I'm afraid I'm still pleased with myself for doing this, and I justify it to myself as punching up.

Even though it tweeted a racist slur within six months of its launch, it took me until March 2016 (over two years! ugh) to add a bad words filter.

You have to jump through hoops to handle retweets (native and manual) in a sensible way.

I feel quite bad about some of the past bad behaviour, most of which I could have anticipated if I had tried. I think it is well-behaved these days, but if you disagree in a way that can't be solved by un-following it, please let me know on Twitter or GitHub. My goal is that no-one should feel the need to block it.

The other unexpected timesink of running a relatively simple Twitter bot is that you get to be your own ops team, dealing with infinite loops in the libraries you use and setting up automatic deployment after tests pass in CI and all these good things. If you're thinking of running a bot, I'm afraid it's worth getting deployment and monitoring working from the start: it'll save you time in the long run. If at all possible, consider outsourcing the hard work with v21's Cheap Bots Done Quick.

Three years and three jobs later, I'd like to believe this project is done. Maybe one day I'll make some procedural “art” which is less divisive, but for now I'll raise a mug to an artefact that still seems to find new fans!

[wjt]

2016 in books (part 2)

More miniature book reviews!

Seveneves: I really enjoyed this. It's the first Neal Stephenson novel I've read which doesn't end awkwardly and abruptly, as if he was running out of time and just had to finish the chapter and stop writing. It's too long, like most of his writing, but the three-part structure makes it manageable. It does have a lot in common with Stephen Baxter's Flood / Ark diptych: the world will end, but there's enough time to make real preparations to leave; then the space refugees disagree about what to do next, with sub-optimal results; and here's how the descendants of the readers' generation have mythologised our society and culture. In Ark, I wasn't particularly sure about its handling of cultural heritage, and I think Seveneves does a lot better. The third part is the weakest but still pretty good.

My friend Pearl mentioned Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, in which a Simpsons episode, as remembered by the survivors, becomes a form of capital after “an unspecified apocalyptic event”. I'd really like to see a performance of this.

Leviathan Wakes (book 1 of The Expanse): apparently there is a big-budget, critically-acclaimed TV series adaptation of The Expanse; and apparently everyone on Goodreads loves this book; but, as space opera goes, it's distinctly average.

Central Station: this is fine as a collection of short-story impressionist sketches about a post-singularity space port, but I didn't get a lot out of it.

The Nightmare Stacks: pretty good. If you like the Laundry Files series, this is one of the better installments, as long as you can put up with the insufferable protagonists.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets: when I was younger, I thought The Black Swan was great. This is essentially the same book, and I neither learned much nor got a lot out of its style. You could distill it to “survivorship bias is real and even people who know about it are fooled by it”. I guess this is the problem with reading pop-sci books from a field of which you have some knowledge.

Super Mario Bros. 3: alright, we're back on track! This is the first of the Boss Fights Books series I've read. It's a nice memoir for the game, and for how it's been entwined with the author's relationships throughout her life. If I had to nitpick: maybe it could have dealt more with the game (and genre)'s flaws a little more?

Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe: language trivia blog posts in handy book form.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class: the core argument is plausible but it's exhausting to read. Every time someone is quoted, their political allegiance is re-stated (in unfavourable terms, assuming they're a Blairite or anything further to the right). A few quick sets of search results: “New Labour through-and-through”, “devout Blairite”, “New Labour loyalist”, “stalwart defender of New Labour”, … We get it, you don't like New Labour, that's fine, you don't have to go on about it every time you (re-)introduce Hazel Blears. Similarly: “shameless greed of the bankers”, “greed and incompetence of a wealthy banking elite”, “banks whose greed and stupidity [caused the crisis]”, “greed of bankers”, “crisis caused by the greed of wealthy bankers”, “crisis of private greed”, and so on.

I feel like you could tell the same story and make the same point more effectively as a long-form article rather than a book, and cutting out all this stuff would probably get you halfway there. The facts and narrative are damning enough on their own.

Take all this with the usual pinch of salt about being part of the problem.

Spelunky: this is Boss Fights #11. Mark recommended both the game and the book to me and he was absolutely right on both fronts. Reading this confirmed that I will never finish Spelunky and that that's okay. On the other hand, I do need to get better at finishing my own projects.

Speaking of finishing things, how am I doing? It's week 30, and I've read 30 books. I'm calling that pretty good going.

[wjt]

Just noticed that my two favourite albums of the first half of 2016 – Man Made Object by GoGo Penguin and Silent Earthling by Three Trapped Tigers (NB cool WebGL visualization of the album behind that link!) have extremely similar cover art.

[wjt]

Rousay Remembered has published this article about Westness House, written by my late grandmother. My mum grew up here, and my grandparents still lived here when I was born, but they moved away soon afterwards so I don’t have any childhood memories of it. I visited the grounds for the first time in my living memory at Christmas, and took this photo of the surroundings, but the photos in the article are better – not least because they show the inside of the house, which I haven’t seen, complete with William Morris wallpaper.

Google Maps doesn’t quite drive home how beautiful the views out to sea are;  nor do these photographs of the dead whale washed up on the beach just north of the house in December.

(My grandfather’s name was James Firth, not John as claimed in the introduction, which I’m sure will be fixed in due course.)