C S Lewis popping up

It was when I was working at BT Labs, that I saw a notice in the (surprisingly good for a large working place) staff canteen which explicated C S Lewis’s Trilemma. To wit, this presupposes that Jesus must have been “Lord, Liar, or Lunatic”, whence one presumably is supposed to reach the conclusion that “Lord” is the only possible alternative. This has of course been criticised by better people than me, but at the time it was a new argument to me. As I mulled it over, I first realised that the options of course aren’t mutually exclusive. I can perfectly well imagine a god who is stark raving bonkers, and lying about it to boot. (Here’s one, for example.)

As I thought about it further, I defined my own quadrilemma, also of mutually non-exclusive alternatives: ”Mythical, Misguided, Misquoted, and/or Misunderstood”. Not that I think it will convince any believer, but I was rather proud of the alliteration, one letter up, and one alternative more. Take that, Lewis!

In other news, Ana Mardoll has, with the aid of her faithful commentariat, over the last few years, been doing close readings of the Narnia books and actually working out the consequences and implications of everything that happens in them. Not only do they find serious inconsistencies in how the world of Narnia supposedly works in terms of geography, time passing, political relations, etc, but also that the theology espoused boils down to “whatever Lewis personally enjoys (which is not particularly consistent either) is ordained by God”. Quelle surprise !

One does not have to require perfect consistency of stories, but as they say, once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. As it happened, as a child I read the Narnia books in internal order and completely failed to notice that they were supposed to be Christian allegories until I got to The Last Battle, where it was so heavy-handedly presented even I couldn’t miss it. I felt immensely betrayed – I had enjoyed the books for stories of adventure and meeting magical creatures. Realising it was all a trick in order to indoctrinate in a religion I even then had deemed irrelevant was, I imagine, somewhat like finding yourself in the forest with the weird man and no candy forthcoming.

To Infinity and Beyond

“A bird flies back and forth across the universe. Once every thousand years, it comes to sharpen its beak on a mountain which is one hundred miles long and one hundred miles high. When that mountain has been ground to sand, one second of eternity will have gone by.”

I’ve always been rather annoyed by this storicle—it plays out as if eternity is just a slowed-down version of…what really? Eternity is that which has no end, so if we were to say that the grinding-down of the mountain took a googol seconds of eternity it would be as true—there would still be exactly as much of eternity left.

And so, in what way is eternity different from the time we normally experience? Arguably we could imagine that in the far future of our expanding universe, it will become so dilute that there is no way even to count time and say that at this (fuzzy) point time has ended, and that our universe has had a finite existence. In this case we would need to posit some other universe which actually exists eternally. Had we this eternal universe we could subtract the lifetime of our universe from it, and there would still be as much left of eternity.

This may be because people really cannot comprehend something infinite, and assume there should still be an end stop even to eternity, just very far away. However, I am reminded of what Stanley Schmidt wrote on the subject once (“Finite cornucopias”, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Feb 1986):

“The concept of infinity is deeply ingrained in the average layman’s mind at a very real, painfully practical level. Infinity is the amount of electricity in the wall socket, the amount of oil in Texas…”

So, by that count as well, the bird mountain story is pointless. Let us now forget it.

Flotsam and jetsam

Some time ago, my mother and I were out walking on a crisp autumn day. A contrail crossed the sky, and my mother, as she always does, pointed it out and said: “Look, a jet fighter!”

Now, people often say stuff that is incorrectly specific, to try to be funny or whatever. (The OBCM, for example, will refer to all birds as “ducks”, to underscore that she’s a city girl and can’t be bothered with the details of non-asphalt-based organisms.) But this time, just to make conversation, I said: “Heh, yeah, but properly speaking it’s a passenger aircraft, clearly going to land at Arlanda.”

My mother was surprised. “It’s an aeroplane?”

I in turn was surprised. “Uh yes, or well, aeroplane exhaust. If you look carefully, you can see the plane itself at the tip.” I gave a brief explanation of how contrails form in the cold air at altitude, and my mother marvelled at this new information. I for my part realised that she had been a child when newly-purchased Vampire jets probably would have been the only aircraft flying high enough to form contrails in the skies of Finland. Presumably her elders would have pointed out the streamers in the sky, excitedly referring to them as “jet fighters” [suihkuhävittäjiä], but not making it clear that a jet fighter was a type of aircraft rather than a strange name for a strange celestial phenomenon, and somehow the misunderstanding had gone uncorrected all this time.

I wonder what misconceptions I have that people think are just me trying to be funny.

Hope and hops

It struck me that my relation to religion is much the same as to beer drinking: While I see that it clearly is important and enjoyed by many, not least as an excuse for meeting friends (but may get you into fights about which brand is best), possibly may have health benefits under certain circumstances, has been historically very influential, and arguably may even have enabled civilisation, I still don’t quite get why anybody would see it as enjoyable, and suspect it is probably not good for you in the long run, especially as your arguments become increasingly more unintelligible the more you have partaken of it.

Situational illiteracy

I’ve often wondered over the phenomenon that error messages apparently instantly remove the ability to read from the person viewing them.
“Aaah, my program crashed! Now I'll have to randomly click icons until the problem goes away!”
“This popup says ‘Connection lost, please check your Ethernet cable’. Would it be this cable that’s fallen to the floor?”

sigh OK, that’s enough smug superiority for now. There are of course reasons for this behaviour. Too much software generates too many useless error messages:

• A common method is by not catching the error at all and instead getting a stack dump from the underlying runtime system, which may be useful to a debugging programmer, but not to a working user.
• Or, if the programmer has bothered to trap the error, the error message is still mostly intended for debugging (“Stack overflow in function getResCompFlow().”) and does not suggest to the user either how to avoid it or how to proceed from a bad state.
• And then we have the opposites: the too brief message (“Syntax error”) vs dozens of long lines of information, with the possibly useful message hidden in the middle.
• Many error messages do a very bad job of analysing the problem situation and either suggest something very vague (“Error, please retry”), or something completely incorrect. (“Couldn’t connect, please check your Ethernet cable.” Actually I mistyped my password.)
• And so on…

So, the end result is that users are conditioned to believe that error messages will not contain any useful information–even when they actually do so. Now what still surprises me is that methodical checking of possible error sources apparently is not even the last resort for many people, who rather prefer wildly clicking at anything in sight in the hope that the error will go away. Is there anything in computer systems that conditions people to believe this will work?

Angry and disgusted

I’ve been tangentially involved in consumer aspects on what’s known as the Internet of Things, so when SICS announced the Internet of Things Day 2012 I thought it was interesting enough that I took the day off to attend the presentations.

Professor Kia Höök, whom I otherwise much respect, argued in her introductory presentation that applications for the Internet of Things need to be emotionally attractive and to function in everyday life. However, “everyday life” turned out to specifically mean “leisure activities of affluent Westerners”. At some point I’ve had it deeply embedded in me that my task as an engineer is to make the world a better place and at the end of the day I don’t think computer games are a high priority in that respect. In fact, as far as I could tell, the proposed applications were explicitly geared towards increased consumption, probably with the assumption that Expanding the Economy is a Good Thing.

Interestingly enough, the more technical presentations in the afternoon session did demonstrate e g environment-monitoring applications, but the wrap-up presentation introduced a training aid for the Swedish national ski team and it was obvious that a corresponding body posture monitoring program for, say, cleaning staff, hospital orderlies, or garbage collectors had never been and would never be even reflected on even though it would affect a lot more people who would be more likely to get longer-term benefits from such help.

Back in the day, when the students’ union was still organised along party lines, Socialistisk Kårfront (the Socialist Student Front) had a slogan like “Technical development for the working class”. I thought it was rather silly sloganeering at the time, but technical development that automatically excludes the working class is never going to be user-centred in my mind.

Professor Höök also spoke about making “desirable” applications, which I find even more insidious. One of the keynotes was delivered by a Chinese official and I reflected that while dictatorships may use various means in order to coerce desired behaviour on part of the population, it is usually clear that this is imposed from the outside, whereas marketers manipulating our emotions make us believe that it is we ourselves that want to behave in the prescribed manner, making it that much harder to break free.

The Male Gaze

[I don’t know if this is an example of male self-pity or of how gender inequality hurts all. Maybe it’s a generational issue. Judge as you will.]

The prevalence of the male gaze in media has the corollary that men are seldom depicted as desirable. Is then a longterm consequence of that that men in general come to see themselves as fundamentally non-desirable? What does that mean for female-male relations, when one is desirable, the other not? It would then suggest that hetero-sexual relations are unbalanced; as women clearly cannot desire (sex with) men, they must be bribed with something they do desire, such as security, offspring, or glittery gifts. Alternatively, sex must be taken by force or duplicity.

Maybe there might eventually come something good from teenage werewolves running around without their shirts.

Double-checking

When it became obvious that my father was going senile, my sister and I went out looking for good dementia homes. We visited one which looked promising (though Father eventually ended up elsewhere) and the head nurse showed us around. As it happened one of the patients came by and sat down by a piano and started playing. The nurse expressed her amazement at how speech and memory might be lost but the ability to perform music still remained. I noted to myself that the old lady actually did not play any specific piece, but rather stuck together disjointed phrases, executing ingrained motor programmes. I did get to see a lot of that over the following years, how for example greetings and thank-yous remained and were automatically executed at the right cues.

Another common “truth” I’ve heard a lot is that old people get worse short-term memory but have no problem remembering things that happened long ago. It struck me: Has anybody checked whether these long-term memories actually correspond to true events, or might they just as well be constructed there and then?

Breaking eggs

So this guy had told himself that in order to achieve certain desirable goals, regrettably a large number of children had to be slaughtered as brutally as possibly. A sure sign of psychopathology one would think, but this kind of calculation is common among those who go as statesmen and strategists: “To hasten the end of the war, we are forced to bomb these civilians.” Unless we want to consider well-known heroes as psychopaths, we have to assume that the ends in fact do justify the means. The question then devolves to what ends justify the killing of people who don’t necessarily feel that their deaths would improve the world and who gets to define those ends. Is it OK if it is our elected representatives, presumably acting on our wishes?

So is it that the psychopath is the one who bears to actually meet the victims, while we normal ones are allowed the same kind of thinking as long as we do not personally create the corpses?

Auto-correction

The information we get from our environment is pretty noisy, and we constantly apply an error correction which seems to align our perceptions to some kind of Platonic ideal. Consider for example a spoken dialogue with someone: the words are often slurred, affected by surrounding words and sometimes just plain misspoken, yet we adjust to them almost effortlessly and hardly ever think about what was actually said, rather than what was meant. Or what we think was meant—sometimes we over-correct something, a new word that is similar to one we’ve already heard.

It was years before I realised our next-door neighbours actually were called Sällström. My parents pronounced the name quite correctly, but compensating for the Finnish accent I assumed they meant to say Kjellström.

A quite proper lady of limited computer literacy consistently referred to the “dildo” character on the keyboard (~). I never dared ask her what she thought the word meant.

Now I found a grad student referring to a “defector standard”. What would that be—an Anthony Blunt a year?

Transcender

Among the many things Honeybuns has given me, is a set of new friends and acquaintances that are nothing like the ones I have from before. To begin with, none of them has an engineering degree.

At a recent party I found myself the only heterosexual male in the room. Or, at least that’s what I assumed, but I couldn’t be entirely sure—some of the people in the room, quite consciously, defied my attempts to sort them into definite male/female categories and I was annoyed with myself for even attempting, yet some deep-rooted reflex demanded certain knowledge.

I was reminded of once when I was visiting my parents. The OBCM was taking an advanced course in numerical analysis at the time and had brought along some homework. My father asked what she was doing and got an explanation of how she was computing the (parabolic) velocity profile of the water flow in a pipe. My father was intensely provoked by this. “Clearly the water comes with full force!” he decreed. If I hadn’t been so annoyed at the time it would have been an interesting example of how something that goes against one’s preconceptions can be rejected out of hand, even when a tiny bit of physical reasoning would let one work out one’s misconception.

I’ve often seen the same rejecting-out-of-hand non-reasoning with regards to transgender/intersex people, so my lack of equanimity disturbed me, but then again, as I’ve mentioned before, living correctly with respect to others requires constant awareness.

Cultural sensitivities

In hackerdom, it’s deeply ingrained behaviour to look away when somebody else enters their password; it’s automatic and often quite subtle, just a slight turn of the head and a defocussing of the gaze for the necessary few seconds. Conversely, it is expected behaviour by the other: A n00b that I was instructing leaned over my shoulder and watched my actions even while I logged in; I couldn’t have been more disturbed if she’d insisted on following me into the bathroom.

On the subject of conspiracies

I see many people whose opinions I would otherwise respect tacitly make the claim that Julian Assange has been caught in a “honey trap”, but what none of those has been able to formulate is What exactly could the CIA/UD/Säpo/Illuminati offer the women concerned to make them go through a rape trial? Their identities are public, their motives questioned, their reputation picked apart, their careers most likely shot, and I can’t imagine they’ be able live a life in quiet luxury afterwards without it being brought to the light.

There’s no reason to applaud

One of the things that makes a spex a unique experience is that the audience can demand instant replays of particularly funny scenes, typically with an alternative rendition of the scene.

In the spex ”1492, eller, Expedition: Inkvisition” princess Joanna feigns madness in order not to be married off. Then she meets and falls in love with prince Philip. When Philip suddenly dies of poison she becomes insane for real. At the performance I saw this became an absolutely heart-rending scene. A small section of the audience shouted “Restart!”, but all the rest squeezed “No!” past the lumps in their throats. The emotions were too real, there could be no restart, no jokes to make light of what had happened. The play ended on an unusually sombre note for a spex.

I felt much the same when I finally heard the lyrics to “Another Day in Paradise”—how can you dance to this?

The right person in the right place

A square peg fits quite well in a round hole if the hole is large enough. I think this is true in the figurative sense as well.

No man is an island

The phone I got when I started my current employment has a recycled number, which apparently used to belong to a door salesman (not a door-to-door seller, but someone who sells doors) in the other end of the country. Not everybody in his extensive network had gotten the message that he no longer had this number, so I got calls and messages intended for him for quite some time.

This was an interesting phenomenon as only a certain subset of his acquaintances had failed to update their phonebooks and this subset of course shrank over time, as they called me and got informed. So, I would get sort of an attenuating sampling of his life as reflected in his messages, I could detect when his first daughter was born, when distant relatives remembered him for Christmas, and so on.

I haven't received such calls for a long time now, but suddenly this last week there have been several, apparently from people just tenuously related to him, but who still have been spurred into calling. I hope this is just a statistical fluke, rather than something serious having happened to him.

Problem symptoms

I have found it a persistent urban legend that Swedes would be particularly prone to suicide. In order to demonstrate that this is not the case I looked up the relevant WHO statistics. As you can see, Sweden is not particularly high on the list, but we knew that. However, what did stick out as a sore thumb was that the People's Republic of China is the only country in the world (for which there are statistics) where women have a higher suicide rate than men.

Googling around confirmed that I am not the only one to have noticed this. Explanations seem centered on Chinese women's subservient position and low chances for poor people to improve their lot, and somehow I can't help but make the connection between this and the Google ads that turn up in the margin…

Avoiding going native

Some years ago I listened to professor Hans Rosling talking on Sommar. He described how he figured out that the epidemic disease of konzo is caused by insufficiently processed cassava in the diet. Then, apparently to demonstrate the wisdom of indigenous populations, he mentioned that the local population know very well what causes konzo but poverty often requires balancing between not eating at all and eating potentially dangerous cassava. I was dumbstruck. Why couldn't the patients have mentioned that, as they were piling up in the hospital and the (presumably city-bred) medical staff were scratching their heads at the mysterious disease? Didn't the physicians think to ask, were the patients too intimidated by the experts to voice their own knowledge, or did they just not care, as long as they were taken care of?

I had a bit of the same feeling when I recently saw District 9. The aliens had been on Earth for almost 30 years, long enough for humans to have learnt their language, yet no-one in all that time had asked them why they were here. I first thought this was a major plot hole, but considering Rosling's experience, I wonder if it isn't rather an accurate and scathing assessment of human behaviour—we don't care about the motives of refugees that (literally!) descend upon us, we just do what we, for reasons completely our own, decide to be the appropriate thing to do.

The stage is all a world

The Only-begotten Daughter's theatre class had developed a play of their own again, yet again touching on the theme of struggling for a better world while people are as they are.

The setting was of a house scheduled for demolition being squatted by a disparate gang of youths, ostensibly to turn it into a house of youth culture, but the high-flying plans coming to nothing. A dizzying ambiguity underlay everything, not allowing any easy taking of any given position, putting every interpretation into question. Their soliloquies on how life could be more beautiful or their own pain were just enough over the top to possibly be taken as ironic subversions of themselves, yet perhaps not. In the end the police storm the building and the group stand together, lighting up the dark with their little cigarette lighter sparks of hope, singing “Imagine”, yet defecting into the dark one by one.

Certainty? Nowhere.

Internationally renowned

It was a bit of a surprise to me to find that the Polish Wikipedia entries on the Stockholm underground network are more extensive than the Swedish ones—I'd thought the Slavic conversations I hear on the trains were in Russian.