D is for Digital

I’m enjoying a book by Brian Kernighan — yes, that Brian Kernighan — based on a course he’s been teaching at Princeton called “Computers in Our World.” D is for Digital is a clear, straightfoward, grownup introduction to computers: hardware and software, programming, and the Internet. [Disclosure: Brian wrote some of during his year as a fellow at the Berkman Center.]

D is for Digital is brief, but it drives its topics down to the nuts and bolts, which is a helpful reminder that all the magic on your screen is grounded in some very real wires and voltages. Likewise, Brian has a chapter on how to program, taking Javascript as his example. He does not back away from talking about libraries and APIs. He even explains public key encryption clearly enough that even I understand it. (Of course, I have frequently understood it for up to fifteen minutes at a time.) There are a few spots where the explanations are not quite complete enough — his comparison of programming languages doesn’t tell us enough about the differences — but they are rare indeed. Even so, I like that this book doesn’t pander to the reader.

D is for Digital would be a nice stocking stuffer with Blown to Bits by Harold Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry R. Lewis, which is an introduction to computers within the context of policy debates. Both are excellent. Together they are excellent squared.

1 Comment »

Publishers Weekly has posted its review of Too Big to Know. It’s good, not only in the sense of positive, but also as a brief description of what the book is about:

Weinberger…engagingly examines the production, dissemination, and accessibility of knowledge in the Internet era. The fundamental and pertinent question Weinberger pursues is how the new surplus of knowledge afforded by the Internet affects our “basic strategy of knowing.” This strategy evolved from “book-shaped thought,” a form “in which parts depend upon the parts before it.” Unlike books, however, Weinberger contends that long-form argument on the Internet engages a more dynamic dimension than a static book ever could: it is “put into a network where the discussion around it [...] will violate its pristine logic.” Despite the slight incompatibility to long-form argument, ideas, and knowledge on the Internet are plentiful, hyperlinked, autonomous, open, and, perhaps most importantly, unsettled, making the Internet a forum within which knowledge is not merely accepted; it is contemplated and questioned. While occasionally tending towards the philosophical, Weinberger’s book is full of relevant and thought-provoking, insights that make it a must-read for anyone concerned with knowledge in the digital age.

Inc. Magazine also ran a review of it, by Leigh Buchanan. It’s a brief and accurate summary of the thrust of the book. Thanks, Leigh!

The book ships on Dec. 13, so I assume it will hit bookstores shortly after that, and will be fulfilled by Amazon very shortly after that.

1 Comment »

I have a prediction about who is going home tonight on So You Think You Can Dance.

I am more certain about the boy who’s leaving: Jess. I believe the judges are setting us up for this. It seemed to me that he danced fantastically last night. His second dance in particular elicited “mehs” instead of what seemed to me to be the more obvious and more fair course: His movement is so precise. His rhythm is amazing. He stayed in character and exhibited joy. He excelled in a style not his own. But not a word about his “growth,” much less having “taken us on a journey.” Instead the judges praised the slightly less strong performance by Clarice. (Note that I know I am not a dance expert.) And Nigel gave away the game when he said that Jess is unsteady in his lifts. I.e., Jess is short. Very short.

So, I think the judges (= the producers) have decided that Jess can’t make it into the Top Ten because they will not be able to keep him from getting paired with a tall girl. So, he has to go. Thus, they’re setting it up so that tonight when he dances for his life, sending him home won’t be out of the blue. (The fact that a couple of weeks ago the judges told Ryan that her dance for her life wasn’t up to their standards but they kept her anyway pretty much confirmed that the decisions about who to cut are made before and regardless of the “dance for your life” segments.)

I’m pretty sure they’re also setting us up to send Ryan home. I personally think she’s the weakest of the girls, so I’m not as bothered. They even gave her a dance last night that featured what are supposed to be her “Hollywood” good looks and didn’t use that to boost her to us viewers. I believe her goose is finally cooked. The story will be that they gave her a chance when they rescued her a couple of weeks ago and she just hasn’t come through, although they’ll put it in more new agey language about being true to herself and being in the moment.

Overall, I think this season’s Top Twenty has been amazingly strong and even. But I’m not finding the same peaks as in many other years. (For me, Brandon and Will were two mighty peaks.) If I had to pick a favorite, it’d be Sasha Mallory.

5 Comments »

A couple of days ago while waiting my turn in the shower, I snapped on CNN, quickly got fed up with what can only be called drivel, and spun the dial. I landed on what I at first thought was Airplane! but,which after a cognitive twitch came into focus as that upon which the parody was based: Airport 1975.

This morning I went through the same drill, but this time I landed at the final fifteen minutes of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Fortune has, I believed, paired up for me two movies that meet the rigorous formal requirements for the relationship Could Not Be More Different Than.

Airplane 1975 is the one with Linda Blair faithfully waiting for a kidney, lying next to Helen Reddy who is an honest-to-jeebus singing nun. It’s the one where Karen Black accepts the garland for Worst Performance Ever by playing the stewardess-behind-the-wheel with such passivity that you want Sister Helen to come into the cockpit and slap her once, real hard. It’s the one where Charlton Heston descends from a helicopter through the hole in the airplane to save the incompetent female, and then tells her to calm the passengers with the eternal bard-llke phrase: “Go, do your thing,”

On the other hand, in the fifteen minutes of Much Ado, I laughed hard, cried harder, and hugged my wife at the end.

I’m sure there are other pairings, and I’m curious what they might be, but none can surpass the More-Different-Than-ness of Airport 1975 and Much Ado about Nothing.

1 Comment »

I’ve got an ever-growing list of books that I intend to write reviews of because they’re so damn interesting. In fact, it’s because they deserve full reviews that I’m not writing any reviews. So, with the knowingly-false intention of coming back to write a longer review, here’s a brief report on one book on my list.

John Sundman (Disclosure: John is a friend from a mailing list) is a geek, and Cheap Complex Devices is a geeky novel. It not only assumes familiarity with some technical concepts (some but not all of which it explains along the way), it’s got a slashdotty sense of humor. But it shares its deep recursiveness — I can’t tell if it ever actually comes to ground — not only with Stanislaw Lem and Douglas Hostadter, but also with Borges, and contains passages that are reminiscent of (deep praise ahead) Nabokov.

Since much of the fun is in figuring out what’s going on in this very brief work, I don’t want to give away too much. But I feel safe in disclosing the premise: This book is supposedly the winning entry in a contest for computer-generated narratives. But there may or may not be a floating point error in the computer. Thematically, I take the book as a playful meditation on the emergent properties of loosely connected systems, the way a hive emerges from bees, the Shakers are (or, perhaps, are not) more than their individual members, narratives are more than their words, and consciousness is more than a bunch of neurons (or bits). It’s a narrative that seems to be at war with itself, struggling to be whole, but not sure that it wants to be.

Yeah, I’m being obscure. In part that’s to keep the book a surprise for you. In part it’s because I haven’t figured out how all the pieces work together. This is not a normal book. But it’s fascinating, and written with a very sure hand. As Julianne Chatelain says in her review, it “contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny.” As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again.

John details the mechanics and economics of flogging self-published books in his report on DefCon.

4 Comments »

[Note that I've removed all the distributed "in my opinion"s from the following, and instead have concentrated them in this introductory paragraph. The following expresses nothing but my opinion:]

Tonight is the season finale of Mad Men, a show that I think has gone from good to great because it has outlived its premise.

Shows that start out with a strong premise often need a couple of seasons to find their way past it. The Sopranos, for example, initially revolved around the cute premise that a mob boss would have mother issues that drove him into analysis. The Sopranos was good from the beginning, but not because of the premise: the acting was amazing, the cast was large, the relationships were complex. It took a season or two for the Sopranos to develop the tragic sense that made its basic comedy so deep. Dexter likewise has gotten better (unevenly) as the starkness of the premise (decent guy except he has to kill people) has been surrounded by less extreme human drama. The same for the Mary Tyler Moore Show (a working girl who is ok with being single) and M*A*S*H (doctors kept sane by humor in an absurd foreign war).

Now, it may well be that what’s really happening is that it takes a couple of seasons for the relationships to develop that deepen a show. If the best of television has gotten more complex over time (as Steven Johnson argues in Everything Bad is Good for You), then the same is true within a series as well as across all series. TV series let us tell (in Steve’s words) 100-hour stories, and the first set of hours are necessarily not as developed as the later sets. During those early sets, the show relies more on its premise.

For me, Mad Men started out as a totally enjoyable series that focused on reminding us through mores and decor what life in the 1950s was really like. That first season was all about the wall art and the martini lunches. You could almost hear the writers’ meetings in which they’d say things like, “Oooh, you know what would be really cool? Let’s have an embarrassingly pretentious ‘bohemian’ ad guy who dates a black woman to make a statement,” or “Let’s make sure that all the offices have bars in them.” Now in its fourth season, there are plenty of period references, but the show is less about them. It’s about an amazing ensemble grappling with timeless issues within the constraints of their era. It’s blown way past its original inspiration. And that is awesome

[SPOILER ALERT for those who have not seen Season One:] My once concern is the series’ continued fascination with Don’s double identity. In the original idea for the show, that might have been the kicker that sold it to the TV executives: “So you have a show set in the 1950s as they really were. But what’s it about? What happens?” The fact that Don stole his identity long ago and is at risk of being discovered might have sounded like a good answer. But by now for me it’s a melodramatic contrivance that’s out of place in the series’ genuine drama.

The identity theft has shown up in this season. I’m afraid that the finale will come back to that as the cliffhanger. If so, it’s too bad. We don’t need it. There are enough cliffs already; this season has been about the humiliation and cleansing of Don Draper, a long night that is not yet over. Don Draper is fascinating enough without the silly dual identity backstory.

BTW, have I mentioned how much I love the acting? Even January Jones (Betty) is having a good year, perhaps because she’s out of the dramatic center and thus doesn’t have to try to round her character out to a full three dimensions. Every one of the rest of the women are phenomenal, expressing so much nuance and life within and through the limited social roles they are allowed to play — which is itself a heartbreakingly true reflection on the times. And I have to say that Don and Betty’s daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) is amazing. I don’t know how tonight’s episode will wrap up the season, but I do know that we will be watching this phenomenally gifted 12 year old for the rest of our lives.

5 Comments »

I’m a big fan of Aaron Sorkin, but I saw The Social Network last night and was quite disappointed.

First, some notes: I don’t think there are any spoilers in what I’m about to say, at least not beyond what you would read in a typical review. Second, I didn’t have a problem with how the movie presented the Internet; my reaction is not about that, because the movie really is not about that.

It’s not a bad movie, just disappointing, and a little long. Even the dialogue was way less interesting than what the glowing reviews had said, and what we’ve come to expect from the writer of the West Wing.

I had two major problems with the movie, both due directly to the writing. (The acting and editing were good. I also like the Trent Reznor score.)

First, the movie is cliched. It’s about the cool kids against the snobby frat kids, with the difference that the cool kids are the geeks. Predictable and boring. Also, I didn’t recognize what I know of Harvard in it, although I admittedly am in an odd corner of the place.

Second, I thought the portrayal of the main character was lazy and cowardly. The movie shows Mark Zuckerberg as affectless, arrogant, and without empathy or social graces. (Forget the cheap irony that was probably the original motivation for the movie: Oooh, the guy who invented the world-changing social networking site is not social.) The only explanation we’re given for his anti-social behavior is banal and silly, having to do with a couple of incidents that caused MZ some social class envy. That’s lazy. Then, at the very end, a two sentence re-framing of his character is presented that I think we were supposed to think is revelatory. But it wasn’t, at least for me. It contradicted everything the movie had led us to believe about MZ, and gives a non-sensical characterization unsupported by anything else in the movie. Honestly, when I heard it, I thought the movie-makers were just thinking about how to dodge getting sued by MZ.

By the way, I heard Sorkin say that the movie makes no judgments, and tells the story three different ways, in a Rashomon way. Baloney. In the movie there are two sets of plaintiffs and one defendant, but the movie presents a single view of what happened. In one of the two cases, we are left with some doubt about who was right. But that’s not exactly seeing the same events multiple times through different eyes, as in Rashomon.

(An early note to Oscars wagerers: Because I thought the script was disappointing, I am predicting that the movie will win at least best screenplay.)

11 Comments »

We saw Inception last night. Here are my predictions for its Oscars:

That’s twelve nominations. Titanic was nominated for 14, Avatar for 9. Inception is certainly better than either of those two movies, not that that has anything to do with it.

I’m not saying I agree with the Academy’s decisions here. I don’t think Marion Cotillard deserves a nomination, and I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was very good in this, will win to reward him for playing humans with decent haircuts in indie movies after “3rd Rock from the Sun.” But then you have to ask why Ellen Page didn’t get a nomination. Sometimes I just don’t understand the Academy!

But Inception is an excellent movie. Much better — in my opinion! — than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I thought was a mess rescued by Heath Ledger’s performance. I also liked it better than Nolan’s The Prestige, a movie I liked a lot even though in the end the plot cheated. As for Memento, well, that movie is just special. Inception is special, too: a Hollywood movie of its sort (no spoilers here!) that actually works. It is conventional enough that you’ll predict some large-stroke stuff, it’s arbitrary enough in its rules that you’ll feel it’s all a bit weightless, and it’s confusing enough that you’ll leave not sure if it followed its own rules (I think it does). But it’s well-imagined and extremely well-told. It’s The Matrix with a brain.

M. Night Shyamalan must be kicking himself that he didn’t come up with the idea of Inception so that he could direct it and really f*ck it up.

Screenrant’s page on Inception is nothing but spoilers, but it usefully goes through the film’s rules and narrative. Read it after you see the movie…

[Later that day] Here’s a Donald Clark’s thoughtful appreciation of the movie, also full of spoilers (via Seb Schmoller).

[Later that day] I put in “screenplay” twice. D’oh. I meant to include cinematography. So, I fixed it.

17 Comments »

We just saw Anna Deavere Smith’s one-person, one-act show, Let Me Down Easy. I liked it, but probably less than anyone else in the theater, given the immediate standing ovation she was given.

I feel bad saying anything negative since the show is incredibly well-intentioned and ADS is hugely talented. In it, she presents monologues in the voices of about 20 different people, based on interviews with them. These are named, real people who span ages, genders, races, and countries. Impressive. The topic is health, health care, having a body, and death. Some of the monologues are moving, some are funny. I loved the one by a New Orleans’ nurse. But I felt manipulated by others. And the main thing that kept me from leaping to my feet at the end was the fact that only occasionally did ADS get me to forget that I was watching an actor — an immensely talented actor — imitating someone else.

It was admirable and enjoyable. For me, it was 3.5 stars out of 5.

We also went to the Bauhaus exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I loved it. It covers everything from architecture to painting to furniture to font design. (Great fonts!) And it does a good job conveying the movement’s political and economic principles. I only wish there were some examples of pre-Bauhaus design, because it’s become so much the standard style of contemporary design that it can be hard to remember how radical it was at the time: from heavily ornamented wooden cabinets to simple cabinets with glass doors, designed for practicality of use and manufacture. Bauhaus so won.

It’s a great, rich exhibit. And when you’re done, you still have five floors to visit!

2 Comments »

Avatar is a big, visually beautiful movie whose march to dumbville is relieved by only a couple of bright ideas.

One of the bright ideas is the one you enter the theater knowing [SPOILER ALERT, IF YOU HAVE AVOIDED ALL $150,000,000 SPENT ON MARKETING THIS MOVIE]: A human can mentally inhabit an alien’s body. After that, it’s pretty much all downhill, making it the world’s most expensive computer graphics demo. Cool graphics, though!

It’s actually not a very imaginative movie. The landscapes are standard issue alternate-world stuff, albeit filled in with eye-gobbling detail. Worse, the plot and characters are straight out of a thousand other movies. There’s Mel Gibson doing his Brave Heart exhortation (right down to the blue skin). There’s Star Wars’ weirdly anti-technology message. And, yes, as my wife pointed out, most of all there’s Fern Gully‘s sentimental environmentalism. And these are not coy, arch Tarantino-esque references. They’re James Cameron thinking he’s touching our hearts and our minds. It’s pap. (For the record: So was Titanic.)

The racist tinge is the inverse of the old godawful racism that sees indigenous people as “savages” and “primitives.” Instead, Cameron sees them as wise, mother-earth-worshipping perfection. That’s a lot better, but you watch Avatar’s forest folks and see too many embarrassing resonances with stereotypes of native Americans, with occasional guest stereotypes making cameo appearances. (On the other hand, James Cameron’s most fully realized person in any of his movies was a cyborg, and #2 was a ship, so maybe we shouldn’t expect too much.)

It’s not a bad movie. The graphics were enough to carry me along for 2.5 hours. But it takes every opportunity to be predictable and sorta dumb. You leave wondering how many better movies could have been made if it’s $500M budget had been divided among 500 young filmmakers.

11 Comments »