The Blogg

January 18, 2012

Perspective: SOPA Vs. NDAA

Filed under: Computing,Politics — chadhogg @ 11:31 am

The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act are bad policy. I hope that they are defeated, and I am delighted that so many individuals, organizations, and businesses are engaging in activism against them. But where were they when the National Defense Authorization Act was passed last month?

The stated objective of SOPA (and its Senate version, PIPA) is to reduce copyright infringement. Following is my understanding of their contents, based on a lot of reading but no legal training. In short, the bills require that websites declared to participate in or facilitate copyright infringement be censored, through techniques such as requiring search engines to remove those sites from their results, requiring businesses to sever connections with these sites, and perhaps even requiring Internet Service Providers to forcibly block their customers from reaching these web sites. The procedures under which a website could be declared website non grata range from the relatively reasonable (a court order requested by the U.S. Justice Department) to the completely insane (a request from a copyright holder directly to third parties, which they would be legally obligated to follow unless the accused could prove their innocence). The bills would criminalize types of infringement that are currently matters of civil liability. Perhaps worst of all, they would make the operators of websites responsible for content posted on their websites by third parties without the consent or knowledge of the operators. It is, overall, a very bad idea for everyone other than the MPAA, the RIAA, and their lobbyists and representatives.

The National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012 does a great many things, most of them routine and uncontroversial. But it also allows the U.S. government to without a court order, trial, or any oversight whatsoever indefinitely detain U.S. citizens in military prisons. President Obama has issued a signing statement promising that his administration would not exercise these powers, but his successors may have no such qualms. The act itself states that it “may not be construed to affect any existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States”, though the language of the bill plainly does so.

SOPA is terrible, but if you think SOPA is the biggest threat to American liberty, or the government action most worthy of protest, then you and I are of very different minds. (This is also true if you think abrogation of the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is necessary and proper but requiring companies to compensate society for the negative externalities of their actions is tyranny, but that’s a different discussion.)

December 28, 2011

McSweeney’s And Christmas Music

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 9:11 pm

Last night I stumbled across a short series of essays by David Hill. In each, he tells a story about a bet he made (blackjack, chess, professional boxing, or horse racing) juxtaposed with either an unrelated story from his life or a broader perspective. I am still learning to enjoy short fiction, thanks to Cocca, but I can spend all night reading beautifully-written non-fiction.

So then I wandered over to a much longer series by Charlie Hopper, in which he describes his attempts at songwriting and hopes of selling a song to a country musician. I fall into the category of Nashville haters that he describes in the second iteration: I can respect the work of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, but find pretty much everything played on a modern country radio station to be schlock. But as someone with a fair amount of musical knowledge and ambition but zero songwriting talent, I could not stop reading. Even if you have no interest in music, Hopper has some fantastically frank insights into interpersonal conversations and internal monologues.

The most recent entry in Hopper’s Dispatches is about Christmas songs, and he states “It’s true: I have a lot of opinions about Christmas music”. That’s true of me as well, and this is what I really intended to write about.

For not the first time, I was called a Grinch this year when I declined to listen to Christmas music, even early on Christmas Eve. I acquiesced later that day, but with a request for “traditional” songs. What I meant was something like “Angels We Have Heard On High”, “Away In A Manger”, “The First Noel”, Hark The Herald Angels Sing”, “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear”, “Joy To The World”, “O Little Town Of Bethlehem”, “Silent Night”, and so forth, most of which I adore. What I got instead was the like of “The Christmas Song”, “Frosty The Snowman”, “Let It Snow”, “The Little Drummer Boy”, “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “White Christmas”, “Winter Wonderland”, and the like, most of which fill me with nothing but queasiness and annoyance.

You might look at these two lists and infer that I only like sacred Christmas music, and there is probably some amount of truth to that idea. I think it would be more accurate to say that I like Christmas music that was written in the 19th Century rather than the 20th Century. I like a lot of music that was written in the 1930s through 1960s, but it just does not work for me in this context. Popular Christmas music is chock-full of cringe-inducing features that are not otherwise prominent in music of the big band and rock and roll era: syrupy string arrangements; deliberately cutesy, child-like, sing-songy voices; and Spector-like production chief among them.

Unfortunately, those features are present in most recordings of those songs I like as well, which is why I am generally opposed to listening to Christmas music at all. And really, that’s the point. For me, Christmas music is not something you listen to; Christmas music is something you do. So if you want to go caroling, I’ll be there. If you want to turn on a mainstream radio station in the month of December, “bah, humbug!”

Note: This topic seemed familiar. It appears I wrote about approximately the same sentiments three years ago. Other note: Is it a bad thing that whenever I read something I wrote even a relatively short time ago I find myself mostly wishing I had never written it?

December 13, 2011

Hockey, Pugilism, And Brain Damage

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 9:28 pm

Every hockey fan should read this excellent series of articles from the New York Times about the life and death of Derek Boogaard. Given that he played for the Rangers last year (a division rival of my favored Philadelphia Flyers), I am a little surprised to not recognize the name.

My earliest hockey-related memories are of attending Hershey Bears games with my father and some family friends. All of us enjoyed the games, but when there was a fight on-ice (and in the AHL circa 1990, that was often) my father’s friend and his son cheered with an intensity that I found deeply frightening. Violence made their eyes light up in a way nothing else did, and looking around the arena it was clear they were not alone. Fortunately, I had many later and more positive hockey experiences as well. For a few years my father and I played all-ages pickup games of roller hockey most Sunday afternoons, and then I played 10 seasons (Fall and Spring) in an organized, age-partitioned league.

The Times reporting makes it clear that Boogard’s brain damage might have been caused by his many fights, but his drug use may also be at least partially responsible. And it sounds like he had developmental issues prior to playing hockey that may have indicated there were already problems in his brain. It is also clear that while the same kind of damage has been found in other former players, the level in Boogard’s case is an extreme outlier. But if you ignore the brain damage entirely, there is still plenty in the article to be angry about. This, for example, just breaks my heart:

Exactly what happened that winter’s night has been left to the rusty memories of the few dozen in attendance. This much is clear: Melfort was losing badly, and 15-year-old Derek Boogaard was suddenly inside the other team’s bench, swinging away at opposing players. [...] Players scattered like spooked cats, fleeing over the wall or through the open gates. “He had gone ballistic,” Len Boogaard said. “It was something I hadn’t seen before.” Eventually subdued and sent to the dressing room, Boogaard re-emerged in his street clothes. [...] Len Boogaard nodded toward the few unfamiliar faces in the bleachers. There were about 10 scouts from teams in the Western Hockey League, a junior league that is a primary gateway to the N.H.L. Among them were two men representing the Regina Pats — the chief scout, Todd Ripplinger, and the general manager, Brent Parker. “All the Western League scouts’ jaws are down like this,” Parker said. His mouth fell open at the memory. Ripplinger and Parker scribbled a note saying that the Regina Pats wanted to add Derek Boogaard to their roster.

There are so many things terribly wrong with this anecdote:

  • Rightly or wrongly (more on this later), on-ice fights between two willing and aware combatants are tolerated in many hockey leagues. That is not what happened here. A person whose emotions are so out of control that he is assaulting 20 people at once needs serious, professional help. Instead, he got a contract.
  • Fifteen year old children should not be playing on semi-professional sports teams. They should be living at home, attending normal schools, and being kids. No other major sport that I know of has something equivalent to ice hockey’s junior leagues.
  • It is clear that Boogaard was signed to the team for one reason: to fight. And it becomes clear later that he was expected to do so, and did so often. Let’s temporarily assume that fighting should be tolerated in hockey and that teenagers should be playing junior hockey. Even if that is true, paying a child to fight, and expecting him to earn it, is unconscionable.

In theory fighting is allowed in (some) hockey as a way for players to prevent and punish other illegal or dangerous acts through vigilantism. That has never made much sense to me. If player A, from team 1, makes a questionable play against player B, from team 2, this may result in players C and D, from teams 1 and 2 respectively, fighting. This is supposed to somehow deter player A from future dangerous plays? I cannot see how. The real reason fighting is tolerated is because spectators enjoy it (some more than others). It is certainly not an important part of the game. The 2010 Winter Olympics, in which fighting was considered a very serious offense (and thus did not happen), was some of the most exciting hockey I have ever seen.

It may seem odd that a fan of the “Broad Street Bullies” would be arguing against fighting. Well, the team earned that nickname before I was born. They do have an enforcer-type on the team currently, and I strongly dislike him. (Jody Shelley, who interestingly also played for the Rangers, perhaps just before Boogaard did.) They also have a potential enforcer-in-training (Zac Rinaldo), about whom I am still making up my mind. But among recent players I liked Dan Carcillo and loved Ian LaPerriere, both of whom served more than their fair share of major penalties.

The NHL has been very diligent about policing and severely penalizing the kinds of body checks that they believe are likely to cause serious injury. It seems strange that the same league who is very concerned about the danger of being thrown into the boards head-first would have no problem with being repeatedly punched in the head. I presumed this was because they had some evidence that the former really was much more dangerous than the latter. But is that so? The one data point of Boogaard certainly indicates that it is worth carefully considering.

Then again, brain damage at times seems nearly unavoidable. I have been writing this during intermissions and commercial breaks in a game where the Flyers are playing without 15% of their usual lineup. Claude Giroux, Brayden Schenn, and Chris Pronger are all recovering from concussions and “concussion-like symptoms”. None of their injuries were causes by fighting. Worse, none of their injuries were caused by the kinds of illegal plays that are known to be dangerous. Rather, they were the freak results of very normal-looking plays. Sidney Crosby, the face of the league, is out again, having returned for only 6 games after missing most of a season with his own head injury. As is happening in football, it seems to be increasingly clear that no simple rule changes or better enforcement are enough. Do we need drastic rule changes? Better equipment? Something must change if contact sports are going to survive.

November 27, 2011

Concert Review: Judas Priest / Black Label Society / Thin Lizzy

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 9:14 pm

On Saturday November 26, 2011, Judas Priest, Black Label Society, and Thin Lizzy shared a bill at the Sovereign Center in Reading, PA. And why wouldn’t they choose each other to tour with? Their three logos might have the most distinctive typography in hard rock!

Thin Lizzy was the main draw for me. Let’s not kid ourselves: Thin Lizzy ceased to exist in 1983, and any hope of their real reformation died with leader Phil Lynott in 1986, when I was three years old. But I would, and did, jump at the chance to hear a tribute band containing some original members play some of my favorite songs ever. I have never been that much of a fan of Judas Priest, which is surprising considering the style of music they play. I enjoy their hits well enough, but never felt the need to dig into their back catalog like I have with their peers. But in theory this will be their last tour ever, so I was glad for the opportunity to catch it. I was aware of the existence of a band named Black Label Society, but had never heard any of their music.

The show was scheduled to begin at 6:30. (Who starts a rock concert that early?) I scheduled 3 hours in which to make the 2.5 hour drive to the stadium, park, and get into my seat. I had been to the Sovereign Center many years ago to see Chicago [Transit Authority] and did not remember much difficulty in getting in, but this misled me. Getting into the city and parking took much longer than expected, and as I feared Thin Lizzy was the opening band. I missed the beginning of their show and was, and remain, furious with myself.

Lizzy currently consists of long-time drummer Brian Downey, some-time guitarist Scott Gorham, and late-era keyboardist Darren Wharton, with stand-ins bassist Marco Mendoza, guitarist Damon Johnson, and vocalist / guitarist Ricky Warwick. I do not believe I missed much at the beginning, and my recollection of the setlist was “Jailbreak”, a song that I recognized but could not name, “Killer On The Loose”, “Emerald”, “Rosalie”, “Roisin Dubh (Black Rose)”, “Cowboy Song”, and “The Boys Are Back In Town”. There are so many songs I would have liked to have heard, but I cannot complain about any of the ones chosen. I was a little bit surprised by “Roisin Dubh (Black Rose)”, which seems too closely associated with Phil. With three guitarists I thought they might try trading fours three ways on “Jailbreak” or using triple leads, but it was probably wise to leave the arrangements alone. The only thing that was changed a bit was the intro to “Cowboy Song”, which featured some harmonica.

Ricky Warwick is no Phil Lynott, but he had the requisite Irish accent. Mendoza must have spent hours studying the cover of Live And Dangerous, because he spent most of the show with legs bent and spread far apart and bass angled toward the crowd. I am not sure why Wharton was involved (other than having actually been in the band back in the day). I think they only played a single song that had keyboards on the original recording, and he was so buried in the mix that I couldn’t even tell he was playing most of the night. They played until about 7:15, and it was glorious.

While striking and setting the stage they had a woman who goes by the name Lady Starlight spinning heavy metal records. Every concert plays appropriate pre-recorded music in between acts, so I am not sure what this really added. She did dance to the music, but I did not notice anyone really paying attention to her. I hope having her added very little to the ticket prices.

Black Label Society came on at 7:40 and played until just after 8:40. It consists of a drummer, bassist, rhythm guitarist, and lead guitarist / vocalist. I thought it was odd that the frontman played several guitars, all of which looked like the Zakk Wylde signature models that I have seen advertised. Then I found out that he was, in fact, Zakk Wylde. (Whom I had previously known only as the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne for much of the last two decades.) This also explained why his playing reminded me so much of Randy Rhoads, if Randy had forgotten his sense of melody.

Though I did not know what to expect from BLS, I ended up finding their music quite enjoyable. It consists mostly of two-bar palm-muted riffs that never leave an E power chord (or more likely drop-tuned to D) repeated endlessly at a medium tempo. That sounds monotonous, and it was, but when the groove is executed with such machine gun-like precision monotony can be entrancingly enjoyable. That monotony was also broken up by plenty of leads, and if you love blindingly fast arpeggios that never seem to go anywhere, Wylde is your guy. He played a solo that was like Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” but twice as fast, eight times as long, and executed without any tapping. I have never before been so equally impressed and bored by something. I could not really make out any of the vocals, but they were clearly sung melodically. I’ll have to check out one of their studio albums.

The headliners took the stage at 9:10. I asked earlier who starts a rock concert at the early hour of 6:30. The answer, apparently, is someone who intends to have two opening acts with reasonably long sets and then still play for two hours and twenty minutes without stopping. That just doesn’t happen, and it is even more impressive considering that these guys are in their 50s or older. It may be the case that my lack of enthusiasm for Judas Priest can be blamed mostly on the differences between audio engineering in the early 1970s and now, because their songs sounded far more powerful and substantial live than they do on the studio albums. Rob Halford’s shrieks and growls still sound the same though, which is a good thing.

They put on a theatrical show, with props, lasers, smoke, and columns of fire. Halford rode a motorcycle onto stage for “Hell Bent For Leather” and later wore the Union Jack draped over one shoulder and then Stars And Stripes over the other. He also got the crowd involved early and often. In fact, I am not sure that he sang a single word of “Breaking The Law”, but implored the audience to fill in. I will not attempt to transcribe a setlist, but it included every one of their songs that I knew well and quite a few others. Two or three times it looked the band was leaving for an encore break, but they never left the stage for more than about 2 minutes at a time. They closed with “Living After Midnight” about 30 minutes too early for the lyrics, but it had been a long, thunderous, very enjoyable evening.

November 26, 2011

Game Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Filed under: Gaming — chadhogg @ 1:13 am

I have spent the past five years avoiding new computer games. There are plenty of very good games from years past that I have not been able to find the time to play, I usually have not had hardware capable of playing the state-of-the-art, and the deep discounts that Steam eventually offers are too good to not wait for. But this is different. The original Deus Ex was possibly the best game I have ever played. (Inter-genre comparisons are difficult.) The first sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was a disappointment, but when I heard that there would be another Deus Ex game I had no choice but to buy it and begin playing it the week in which it was released. Eleven years was a long time to wait, but I believe this is a worthy successor.

I squeezed about 40 hours of play time out of one very thorough playthrough of the game across three months in which it consumed most of my free time. It would probably be possible for someone who is less obsessive about reading every document, exploring every corner, conversing with every non-hostile character, and knocking out every enemy to complete the game in 20 hours, but that kind of player should probably be choosing a different game.

One of the things that made Deus Ex amazing was the degree of role-playing game-inspired customizability that players had. First, the character gained experience through the various things that they did in the game and used this experience to improve their skill level in a variety of ways. For example, players were functionally incapable of using sniper rifles until training themselves to be able to aim steadily at a target, and were unable to pick certain locks until they had learned how to do so. Second, the character could gain augmentations throughout the game that allowed them to do entirely new things. For each of several slots, the player needed to choose between mutually exclusive augmentation types, and the decisions that they made had a very significant impact on how they would play the game. Third, each player would use different tools throughout the game because of very limited inventory space and weapon upgrades.

Deus Ex: Invisible War took a step backward by eliminating the element of experience and skills, but retained the augmentation and inventory bases for customization. (Though it also managed to make those systems less interesting as well.) Deus Ex: Human Revolution does not do quite as good of a job as DE did, but is much better than DE:IW. There are no skills, but experience is reintroduced as the primary way in which the player earns the ability to augment their character, so that the game is able to reward exploration and doing things the difficult way. There are many more augmentations than in the past, some of which provide or enhance abilities in a manner analogous to the skills of DE. In DE:HR, however, no augmentations are mutually exclusive. In a moderately thorough game, the player will likely gain almost all of them, and a few are so obviously useless that you might as well be able to gain all of them. I can imagine why this design decision was made as developers targeted the game at a mass audience: many players feel cheated when they cannot be and do everything at all times. But it also means that the stakes are depressingly low when choosing augmentations. Whatever you do not choose now, you can instead choose half an hour later. Since all characters will end up close to identical, there is very little incentive to play again using an entirely different character build, like there was in DE.

Another of the amazing features of DE was the extent to which players had real choices to make, and these choices had significant effects on the game. One way in which the game accomplished this was to have multiple ways to achieve the same objective: through combat, stealth, intelligence, etc. Because characters were so highly customized, several of these ways might not be available depending on decisions made earlier. A second, more powerful way in which the game accomplished this was to allow the player to choose their objectives. Throughout most of the game, different organizations asked the player to do different things. The player spent most of the game trying to suss out what the real objectives of these organizations were and which they should ally themselves with. Ultimately, there were many ways for the game to end depending on the decisions that were made.

DE:IW did a decent job of maintaining this freedom of meaningful choice, but this is one area in which DE:HR falls short. There are usually multiple ways of accomplishing the same objective, but since all characters are pretty much equally good at everything, it never really seems to matter how you accomplish your objectives. The rich, fluid way in which in which the player decided what to do from DE is almost entirely absent from DE:HR. In the new game, you work for a company and do exactly what your boss orders you to do. There are side quests you may take, in which you do exactly what the person who gave it to you asks you to do. The player can exercise some small amount of narrative control by choosing not to take some quests, but for the most part this game is as linear as most games that do not bear the Deus Ex name. There are four possible endings to the game, but they do not relate in any way to the decisions made by the player during the game (because there essentially are no decisions of import). Instead, the user simply presses one of four buttons in the final room. There was one moment of genuine pathos induced by player decision or player failure.

The third way in which DE was a step forward in computer games was the incredibly detailed world that existed. Every computer had emails that you could read, every bookshelf had books that you could browse through, and other narrative elements revealed a very complex story with lots of jokes and other details that were completely irrelevant to the plot but fascinating. The game was played in what was for that time an amazingly open world. You could wander around New York City, exploring whatever buildings and alleyways you wanted. Most had nothing plot-related, but would reward the player with interesting vignettes, useful items, or experience. Since that time “sandbox” games have grown tremendously in popularity and scope. So while DE:HR does essentially the same thing, it now seems mundane rather than groundbreaking. But in this regard I think they struck the right balance.

DE:HR perpetuates a number of dumb cliches. Guards will not be at all suspicious when their colleagues start disappearing, as long as they do not actually observe the disappearance. Almost everyone has their username and password written down somewhere, often because someone reset it and sent them a document giving the new values. Ninety percent of the employees of every company are security guards. Chinese women (Mei) have horrible stereotyped accents. I would have loved it if the game had subverted some of these, but I am not sure how it would do so. (Other than the last, which seems almost an homage to the horrible stereotyped Chinese accents in the first game.)

The gameplay in DE:HR is fundamentally similar to its predecessors, and should be familiar to anyone who has played a first-person shooter game. The controls are mostly self-explanatory and the beginning of the game includes optional tutorials as you encounter the first opportunities to take various actions. One major improvement over the prior games is that one of the built-in augmentations that the character has gives him regenerating health, so that players do not have to be paranoid about preserving it. Combat (at least on the highest setting) is more difficult than I recall in previous Deus Ex games, but this is not because of a problem with the controls or maddeningly accurate enemies. Rather, it is because of realism: if you are hit by more than a bullet or two, you are probably going to die. The boss fights were jarring and unnecessary, but I did not hate them as much as some people apparently did.

Technologically the game is a mixed bag. It ran smoothly and looked good on my machine, and I only found a handful of glitches while in the game itself. (All that I can recall consisted of two oblivious enemies next to each other but me unable to use the multi-takedown ability on them.) But while saving the game, loading the game, and loading a new area I repeatedly experienced freezes. This did not happen every or even most times, but it was frequent enough that it certainly should have been found and fixed unless the problem is very specific to my hardware.

I feel as though I have written rather negatively about the game, but I enjoyed it tremendously. My disappointment is in comparing it against a game that was legendary. By those standards DE:HR was destined to fail, but it is still far better than 95% of what gets published these days. It seems counter-intuitive, but no game with a massive development budget and even television ads is going to be great; it must sacrifice too much to be palatable to casual gamers. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is, frankly, a better game than it should be considering that fact. I would say it is significantly better than Deus Ex: Invisible War, marginally better than The Nameless Mod to Deus Ex, but not quite as good as the original.

October 29, 2011

Why Ritchie And McCarthy Are More Important Than Jobs

Filed under: Computing — chadhogg @ 7:07 pm

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and John McCarthy have a lot in common. All had profound influences on computing, and all died in October 2011 after historic careers. But there are also important differences. Jobs was a businessman, Ritchie was an engineer, and McCarthy was a scientist (though the line between the latter two is quite blurry). Also, almost everyone knew who Jobs was and mourned his passing, while the lives and deaths of Ritchie and McCarthy went by largely unnoticed by the general public. My goal is to change that.

Steve Jobs, as I am sure you already know, was the co-founder of Apple Computer and CEO for most of its successful years. He was also founder and CEO of NeXT Computer and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios for a time. Jobs had an extraordinary ability to sift through the ideas of others, pick out those that had the most promise, and make a profit for himself and others by building and marketing products based on those ideas.

In the mid 1970s Steve Wozniak figured out how to build a computer that could be small enough to fit on a desk and inexpensive enough to be affordable to individuals. The engineering challenge of building such a system using parts and tools that were available to hobbyists was significant, but Wozniak was happy to share his ideas with the other members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Jobs recognized that Wozniak’s work could be monetized and convinced him to co-found Apple Computer for that purpose.

Scientists at the Stanford Research Institute and later XEROX Parc in the 1960s and 1970s invented the idea of a graphical user interface for computers, in which the user would interact with buttons and menus through the use of a pointing device, but the idea did not become commercially viable until Jobs pushed his company to build the Lisa and later Macintosh computers. Only after Jobs and the engineers who worked for him demonstrated that end-users would pay for such an interface did they become ubiquitous in the industry.

Jobs similarly pushed his company to build the most popular digital music player, the most popular smartphone, and the most popular industry-approved distribution channel for digital music. In none of these areas did Jobs personally design or invent anything, but he had the business sense to know what customers wanted. In addition to knowing the right time and the right way to market other people’s ideas, Jobs had other remarkable skills invaluable for success in the business world. For one, he could inspire people to do things they would otherwise have thought impossible and to be loyal to his brand. For another, he could look the other way while his suppliers committed human rights violations.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was a researcher at Bell Labs when it was the premiere private research laboratory in the world, and later head of a research department in one of the many companies spun off from Bell Labs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ritchie designed and implemented a new programming language, simply named C. The influence of this language over the following 40 years of computer programming probably cannot be overstated. Exact statistics on the popularity of programming languages are hard to come by, but this monthly study is a reasonable estimate. According to it, in October 2011, around 18% of all computer programs in the world are written in the C language. Another 18% are written in the Java language — which was based on C. Another 9% are written in the C++ language — which was also based on C. The next three most popular languages, accounting for about 20% of programs together, are PHP, C#, and Objective-C. As you might guess from two of their names, these are all also heavily based on C.

Even so, the invention of C might not be Dennis Ritchie’s most important contribution to computing. He also worked with Ken Thompson, a colleague at Bell Labs, to design and build the UNIX operating system. UNIX has proven to be the most stable, secure, well-designed operating system in the history of computing. Today there are many variants in active use: versions like Solaris and IRIX that were built and sold by major corporations to run the mainframes that do important jobs like keeping track of how much money is in bank accounts and monitoring air-traffic control, freely-produced and freely-available versions like Linux and FreeBSD that provide much of the infrastructure for the Internet and run on the personal computers of hobbyists, and stripped-down versions like Android that control smartphones. The main operating system used by Apple Computer for the last 9 years has been Mac OS X, which is itself built on UNIX. Yes, Steve Jobs even used the ideas of Dennis Ritchie. In fact, the only significant operating system that does not owe an enormous debt to UNIX is Microsoft Windows, and with each new, stabler version, it accepts more and more of the ideas behind UNIX. Oh, and Windows is entirely written in C and languages derived from C.

Ritchie never stood on a stage and introduced a new product to the adulation of screaming fans. I also doubt very much that he personally ever owned billions of dollars, although his work has undoubtedly produced trillions of dollars in wealth. His inventions were owned by Bell Labs, and for the most part have been made freely available for anyone in the world to use.

John McCarthy was a member of the faculty at Dartmouth University, MIT, and eventually Stanford University. In 1955 he was the first to use the term “artificial intelligence”. In 1956 he sponsored a month-long conference that effectively founded that field by gathering together all of the people interested in exploring the limits of what computers could do, sharing ideas, and building consensus about a way forward. He championed the idea that formal logic would be the way to represent knowledge for computers to reason about, found many of the important early discoveries in AI, and gave the discipline a much-needed theoretical foundation.

McCarthy also designed and implemented a programming language, called Lisp, which remains the 13th most popular programming language more than 40 years later. As part of that language, he invented the idea of garbage collection, which is used by the popular languages Java and C# mentioned above and most other recently-developed programming languages. McCarthy’s contributes are more scientific than technological, so I cannot point to any particular product common in everyday life and credit him with it. But when a robotic vacuum automatically cleans your home, a navigation system suggest that you turn left in one mile, or Google finds just what you were looking for on the web, you are benefiting from McCarthy’s ideas.

I am glad that people like Steve Jobs exist. But please, let us not be a society that heaps praise on the leveraged-buyouters, motivational speakers, and savvy marketers while ignoring the builders and the thinkers.

October 3, 2011

Seriously, Slate XX Factor?

Filed under: Personal,Politics — chadhogg @ 8:30 pm

I am not an angry person by nature. While writers have often inspired me to share their anger at the injustice they are exposing, I do not believe I have ever felt apoplectic toward a writer herself before this evening, when I read this article while eating my dinner this evening. I am not sure why it affected me so much today; the same attitude that pervades this piece is disturbingly common. Nevertheless, I read it more than two hours ago and cannot move on. Here is the sentence, in particular, that causes my blood to boil:

The whole idea behind the “rape, incest, or medical emergency” exception [to a law disallowing Medicare funding to be used for abortions] is that the law can meaningfully divide women into virgin and whore categories, and allow the former to have the abortions they’ve earned by being good girls in pitiable situations (including women who fully intended to have their babies like good, Christian women, but who face health problems that prevent them from doing so) while making sure the filthy sluts who have sex for pleasure get their due punishment.

Personally, I question (but understand to an extent) the decision by pro-life advocates to make an issue out of how legal services are paid for, when they are unable to secure a legal prohibition against such services. I am even more suspicious of a law that carves out special cases. But as a person who can imagine being convinced to support such a law, I find the author’s characterization of the motivations behind doing so absolutely repugnant.

I am quite sure that the people who championed this law did so based on the following beliefs:

  1. A fetus is a human being, and to deliberately cause the death of a fetus is to kill a human being.
  2. Any action I can take that prevents homicide and the acceptance of homicide by society is worthwhile, even if it is done through economic rather than legal means.
  3. While being the victim of a terrible crime does not make it acceptable for a person to commit a terrible crime themselves, there is no chance of a law passing without such an exception, and a partial law is better than none.

As I discussed more than five years ago in a style I now find to be cringe-inducing, I am not convinced that the first belief above is true, but am horrified of the consequences of abortion if it is true. And as described above, I am sympathetic to but unpersuaded by the last two.

But do I care about “punishing” women who have too many sexual partners, or the wrong kind of sexual partners, or find sex pleasurable? (Why would anyone, ever desire that last part not to be the case?) If I were to push for this law, would I do so because I want to keep women barefoot and in the kitchen, speaking only when spoken to? Is my motivation maintaining a patriarchal regime in which I could lord power over the “weaker sex”? Obviously not, and nor is this true of any of the other many pro-choice people I know (roughly half of whom are female).

To state, unequivocally, that pro-lifers really do not give a damn about life and that their motives are in fact those above is beyond the pale. Ms. Marcotte also refers to those who disagree with her viewpoint “anti-choice” rather than “pro-life”. I honestly believe that her motivations are to free women from what she views as the shackles of an oppressive society. It would be absurd for me to write, and even more absurd for me to sincerely believe, that her motivations are to murder as many children as she possible can. If I did believe this, how could there be any hope of us ever reaching an agreement?

I cannot decide whether it is possible that the author is delusional enough to really believe this or if she is just cynical enough to hope it will sway opinion, nor which would be worse. But two things are clear: Writing a “blog” that is part of a news magazine does not require anything that could even masquerade as journalistic distance or objectivity. And there are some people who are simply unwilling to have an honest conversation.

October 2, 2011

Philly Eagles: Worst Team In NFC East?

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 4:39 pm

The “Dream Team” moniker was nonsense, but it was very reasonable to expect coming into this season that the Eagles pass defense would be excellent, run defense would be poor-to-average, pass offense would be good, and run offense would be average. Getting into the Super Bowl is a crapshoot, but that would be a very good team. Offensively, the predictions seem to be about correct. But it would really be nice if they could successfully run in short-yardage situations and if they could get a big pass play that does not depend on Vick making a miraculous escape from rushers. Defensively, the team has been poor-to-average against the pass and terrible against the run. Two weeks in a row Eagles defenders have tackled each other while an opponent ran right by, and on many other plays there are no Eagles players even close enough to appear in the television frame. I hate to be one of those entitled fans who acts like the world is ending whenever their team does not win, but this has been really, really disappointing.

September 30, 2011

Novel Recommendations And Awful Jokes

Filed under: Books,Computing,Personal — chadhogg @ 3:35 pm

While recovering from a cold this week (it was my reward for going home for the first time in a month), I had a lot of time in which I was too exhausted to do anything more taxing than web surfing. Here are the two best things I discovered:

Thanks to a Google+ share by Mykroft, I participated a few months ago in a survey to select the best science fiction and fantasy novels. Since then the results had been tallied, but for someone with specific interests it was still difficult to make an informed choice. Someone has developed a fantastic, humorous, flowchart to guide the potential reader to exactly the book that would most interest them. I have only read 27 of the 100 works (some multi-part), so I should be headed to the library this evening.

The other is a journalistic summary of some research in NLP and machine learning. As a lover of AI; bad, formulaic jokes; and early seasons of “The Office”, I wish I would have thought of it. It looks like the problem of writing “your mom …” rejoinders is still unsolved! But I bet it’s a lot harder than it looks. (You see what I did there, I presume.)

September 24, 2011

Absence, Policy Change

Filed under: Administration — chadhogg @ 9:59 am

I have been to busy to write anything meaningful over the last month. Fortunately, Chris Cocca has been taking on the most important issues far more eloquently than I could have. I have still been taking time each day to read through all of the new comments that appeared here, so that in the slim chance that a real human being wanted to start a real conversation it would not get lost in the stream of spam.

The policy here has always been that if you respond using credentials that have not been used in the past, your comment is saved in a queue for me to moderate. If you respond using credentials that were used to create a previously-approved comment, then you skipped the moderation queue. The rate of spam comments is now significantly over 200 per day, and filtering them manually is simply no longer possible. Thus, I have started using akismet to automatically filter out spam comments. If you write something that does not show up as a comment, please let me know. But if you can avoid including a large number of links and offering to sell me pharmaceuticals, improve my search engine rankings, or trade naughty pictures with me, I think we should be OK.

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