Category Archives: Idle Speculation

The Art and Words of Comics

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Reviews, Words!

What do you look for when you’re reading a comic? The words? The art? Both? Does one interfere with the other?

I was talking with S recently, and I was extolling the virtues of Casey and Andy[1], one of my favourite web comics. S mentioned that she had tried to read it multiple times (often at my behest), but had been unable to get into it because of the art[3].

For me, I had briefly noticed the bad art very early on in the run, but the ideas he played with, especially with non-standard comic framing were more than worth it. (And it didn’t really bother me much at all.)

Thinking about it, I realized that the webcomics I like are generally very simple art-wise. I’m not sure if I actively prefer webcomics with worse art, but I may prefer those with simpler art. Some of the ones I read most often:

Questionable Content (mature themes, sometimes nsfw)
Order of the Stick
XKCD

have very simple art, perhaps well done (I think), but very simple lines and drawing.

Some of my other favourites are still simple, but (I think) most would say that they are reasonable artists:

Freefall
Prequel Adventure
SSDD (sometimes nsfw)

I’ve stopped reading:
Dr. McNinja
Goblins (often disturbing cartoon violence)

perhaps because of the more complex/busy art. I know I stopped reading Goblins because I find the art a little too gory/uncanny valley/disquieting.

I also enjoy:

Cyanide & Happiness (Trigger warnings)
asdfmovie (NSFW/warning/etc.)

But they are both incredibly simple art. Cyanide & Happiness is probably the worst art of any on this list, but I enjoy it because of the humour.

Among the graphic novels I’ve enjoyed are:

Transmetropolitan (nsfw, probably triggers in there too)
Watchmen (natch) (movie was rated R)
Ex Machina (some adult themes)

I feel that all of these, their art enhances the story. In Transmet, it really brings the world alive, and it works that you have a really busy future city, where everything is happening all the time. You also get important information about Spider’s personality and how he treats people. Watchmen is just a work of beauty woven on so many levels, and I like the vibrant colours of Ex Machina. I feel that something more realistic would almost detract, bring things closer to the uncanny valley, perhaps.

Interestingly, I have a perhaps similar reaction to music, that when I’m listening to a piece of music, I can really only listen to the music part of it, the words I can almost never hear, except when they are very clearly in the foreground, and/or I’ve heard them many times before. This may be related to being an instrumentalist in my previous life.

tl;dr: I like the words of web comics. I like it when the art is simple, or when the art if more complex and is cast in a supporting role to the story. Art more than that can detract (for me, at least) from the words, which (in comics) are my favourite part.

[1]This comic is perhaps one of his more bizarre comics, but I think a fair example of his artistic style/talent. He mentioned in his AMA[2] that “I realized I hated doing the artwork. I just liked telling jokes to people and the art was a necessity for it. That was the main reason I stopped making the comic.”

[2]Also, you probably know him as Andy Weir, the guy who wrote ‘The Martian‘.

[3]You can see a takedown of his drawing of a different comic called ‘Cheshire Crossing’ here.

Trolley Problem Memes

Economics, Engineering, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Machine Learning, Organizing Systems, Thoughts on Thoughts

Trigger warning: Conversation and possibly dark humour about fictional (and possibly not-so-fictional) people dying in car and train accidents.

How do you design a self-driving car to appropriately value human life? Can you use a Facebook group to speed the development of philosophical discourse?

The ‘Trolley Problem‘ is a problem in ethics, first known to be described in its modern form in the early 1950s. Basically, it boils down to the question:

If you have a choice between action and inaction, where both will cause harm, but your action will harm fewer people, is it moral to perform that action?

Interestingly, people answer this question differently, based on how active the action of harm is, the ratio of people hurt between the choices of action and inaction, and other reasons.

The astute will notice that this type of decision problem is a very common one, the most obvious being in military applications, but also vaccines (and invasive health procedures in general), firebreaks, and perhaps the canonical example, automobile design and manufacturing.

This type of decision making has become even more important with the advent of self-driving cars:

Would you drive a car that would choose to drive you into a brick wall rather than run over five pedestrians?

Overall, you would think that this would reduce your risk of fatality, but few people would choose that car, likely because it is a classic prisoner’s dilemma[1][2].

What is your self-driving car's ethical system?
What is your self-driving car’s ethical system?

Personally, I think that much of this conversation is sophistry[3]. If one is truly interested in preserving life, the solution is not to convince self-driving cars to kill different people, but perhaps to have more stringent driving training requirements, to invest in fixing known problem intersections, to invest in better public transit.

So, if these conversations are not useful for anything else, they must be useful in and of themselves, and therefore must be Philosophy[4]!

One of the places that these conversations are occurring is the ‘Trolley Problems Memes Facebook page‘[5].

Now, you can argue that this page is purely for entertainment, but I think there’s a lot more hidden there. There is a fomenting and interchange of ideas, much faster and more fluidly than at any time in history. The person who writes the next book[6] on the ethics of decision making could well be influenced by or be an avid user of a site such as this one.

They may have started with Rick-rolling, but image macros are helping the advancement of human knowledge. Stew on that one for a while.

And while you’re thinking about that, something which ties it all together[7]:

"The creator might argue that his robot is an 'individual', capable of his own decisions, while the opposition would say that he (the creator) is responsible for the algorithm that led to the action. Imagine this happening - it would give birth to one of the greatest on-court debates ever." From Patrice Leiteritz via Trolley Problem Memes
“The creator might argue that his robot is an ‘individual’, capable of his own decisions, while the opposition would say that he (the creator) is responsible for the algorithm that led to the action. Imagine this happening – it would give birth to one of the greatest on-court debates ever.” From Patrice Leiteritz via Trolley Problem Memes

[1]If everyone cooperates, overall they will receive a better result, but if any one of them betrays the others, they get an even better result, but everyone else’s result is much worse. This theoretically leads everyone to betray everyone else, leading to everyone having a worse overall outcome.

[2]People also like the feeling of control.

[3]Check out the article. Apparently, the Sophists were the first (recorded) right-wing think tanks.

[4]My undergrad Philosophy 101 prof. made the argument that because philosophy was not useful for anything else, it must be inherently be useful (and that that was better).

[5]Dark humour. You have been warned.

[6]And it might not even be a book! A blog post, even! 😀

[7]Not a deliberate pun.

The Oft-Hidden Fringe Benefit of a Liberal Arts Education

Idle Speculation, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

“In retrospect, it was so cheap. Only 30,000 a year for people to care about your opinion on art history!”

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/final-exam-dram

How does it affect the world to have people in school be told that their (often wrong and terrible) opinions matter? That someone actually cares about their ideas? How does this affect issues of privilege?

Even before grade inflation and students’ expectation of full feedback, students would perform work, someone from the establishment (TA or prof.) would peruse the work, and assign some sort of grade, sometimes with suggestions on how to improve.

But this is not generally true outside of undergrad classes. Questions are not so well defined, answers are often illusory, and generally many fewer people immediately care about the quality of one’s work.

Learning to accept these, I feel, is an important part of growing up. Teaching classes where things are not so well defined is inherently more difficult, and is generally reserved for extremely small class sizes. Illusory answers, or avoiding the ‘easy answer’ can also be difficult for many, as it requires significant introspection. This introspection can also be directed more easily in extremely small class sizes. One also needs to internalize the importance of the quality of one’s work, which is more difficult when someone in power is watching every assignment/essay/exam that one writes.

“No, it was a fantasy. All of those people cared about the quality of my work. Everything mattered so much.”

Perhaps marking of exams and essays persuades people to focus on the minutiae[1], rather than striking out[2] and saying something truly novel and interesting in the ‘real world’ that people actually care about. But maybe it’s important to have small, provable ideas.

But back to the original question. Is it a good or a bad thing to pay money for someone to care about your opinions on art history?

Those with more money can effectively pay to be seen as more important, those with less are forced into other disciplines, or more precarious positions.

At the same time, those in positions of less privilege may find it beneficial to have anyone at all in a position of power care about their writings[3].

“Everything mattered so much.”

When everything matters so much, it can disguise what is actually important[4], but it can also help find new important new things not discoverable by normal methods[5].

Thoughts? Comment below!

[1]I’m not going to address how formal education enhances conformity, that’s a well-known first-order effect.

[2]In this context, ‘striking out’ is an amusing auto-antonym.

[3]Although it can probably be even more devastating if those people in positions of power say that their writings are bad or unimportant.

[4]Analogy: Human civilization changing which traits are passed down.

[5]Analogy: Simulated Annealing.

“Senseless Juxtaposition of Wildcards.”

Fiction, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Programming, Science!

He had to admire the the gall of the programmer who wrote the error messages.

“Senseless Juxtaposition of Wildcards.”

It might as well have said:

“Grow a brain!”

Or:

“Try listening to classical music.”

But then it got him thinking…

What would be a senseful juxtaposition of wildcards?

First, we would have to make a list of possible wildcards:

The ‘standard’ wildcard character, specifically referring to a character is the question mark, ‘?’. Generally standing in for any one of some set of things (or in Perl, 0 or 1 of a thing).

The ‘larger’ wildcard character, ‘*’, which stands for any number of something (including 0), sometimes expressed as ‘%’, if you’re speaking SQL.

The ‘even larger’ wildcard character, ‘…’, which is like a recursive ‘*’.

But could there be something larger still? Something which climbs the directory hierarchy in the oppsosite direction, perhaps? Something which can make it past all of the automatic filters, but is clearly wrong? Something like typing ‘NaN‘[1] into a number field box? Something which steps outside the usual boundaries, like Thiotimoline?

In a biological context, there are entire alphabets of more-and-less-specific wildcards.

So, knowing all of this, what would be a senseful juxtaposition of wildcards? Something like ‘**’, or ‘?*’, or ‘*?’ would be meaninglessly equivalent to ‘*’.

You could attempt to mix SQL with bash-isms: “WHERE ID LIKE ‘%*’ “, showing that you expect an SQL character string followed by a bash character string, but that is again non-sensical.

Maybe it would have to be something like ‘hello??????'[2], to say that there are 6 characters of some type after your ‘hello’.

But there it was. The senseful juxtaposition of wildcards… bash statements inside command-line SQL statements.

That was it! But he had to think. How would he use this?

[1]And like the link says, you really don’t want to confuse it with NaN3. You really don’t want to confuse *anything* with NaN3.

[2]Or ‘hello……’.

No Basis for a System of Government!

Idle Speculation, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

ARTHUR: Old woman!
DENNIS: Man!
ARTHUR: Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
DENNIS: I’m thirty seven.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I’m thirty seven — I’m not old!
ARTHUR: Well, I can’t just call you `Man’.
DENNIS: Well, you could say `Dennis’.

As you’re reading this, I will no longer be able to pretend to be Dennis in quite the same way.

I think I’m at peace with this (although it is really fun to be able to say those lines and have them ring truer than usual).

Speaking of being at peace with things, I wonder if meditation and relaxation can help you deal with nightmares.

Anyways, off to my day off. Enjoy the video!

[script link]

New Job, New Flows, New Structures

Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development

So you’re moving to a new organization. You know that what you will be doing will be different, you may even have read up on it.

But there are going to be all kinds of unexpected differences, and they’re likely going to come from the most unexpected directions.

Each organization has its own flows (I’m going to talk about software, as those are the flows I know best).

When an organization is writing software, there is generally some sort of version control-coding-testing-release pipeline. However, there are many different pieces of helper software for each of these steps.

There’s the flow of information as clients are using software. Information supplied by the clients, information supplied by your organization, and these all have to work together smoothly to solve whatever the client’s problem is.

The way that feedback from clients is turned into actionable items can be vastly different between organizations.

On the transition line between flow and structure, the way that teams are divided often reflect historical decisions made in antiquity, often the division of labour of the first few people writing the code for the first iteration of the product.

Information will be flowing through this system while the software is running, effectively handing off from team to team.

There will be structured and unstructured information flows in the organization. Many people are at their most effective when they receive all of their new information before it arrives through official channels.

Even the structured flow of information can be very different, for example in a very flat organization such as Valve.

So, be mindful, and watch for the different flows. You may be surprised at how different each organization is (or how similar).

New Divisions of Five Management Roles

Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development

Yesterday, we talked about five management roles:

Performance Manager (Worker Evaluation)
Estimatrix (Estimator)
Product Owner (Prioritization)
Scrum Master (Removing Obstacles)
(People) Development Manager (Development Conversations)

In a traditional corporate structure, these five roles are combined in one person (your boss).

However, there are many ways to divide these roles, and many reasons to do so (the simplest being that different people are good at different things).

Valve famously has an incredibly flat structure, where each person has a set of peers (the rest of the company) who handle performance management, and all of the rest of the roles are performed by each person themselves. As they say, occasionally teams will form with people splitting off into roles, but that’s all dynamically allocated by the people involved.

Your standard ‘Scrum‘ Agile shop will tend to put the ‘Performance Management’ and ‘Development Management’ into a ‘People Manager’. ‘Estimation’ is done by the team as a whole, the ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Obstacle Remover’ is traditionally not the people manager, but is a separate role. The ‘Product Owner’ can be the ‘People Manager’, or someone else, sometimes an external product or project manager, but is generally not the same person as the ‘Scrum Master’.

I would argue that this tension between prioritization and removing obstacles is one of the reasons the system works better than many.

There seems to be a growing trend to separate Performance from Development[1], with some companies having separate reviews in different parts of the year for each of these. This can be especially helpful as many people are unlikely to be relaxed enough to think about how to take beneficial risks in the future when they’re tied up in knots about whether their boss wants to fire them.

I think it might make sense to push this to its logical conclusion, and have separate people for these separate roles in a company. The ‘Development’ role feels almost like a traditional HR thing, but I feel like to best serve employees, it would really need to be a separate department, called ’employee growth’ or something similar.

What do you think? What have you heard about how different organizations split these roles? How do you think they should be split?

[1]Development as in ‘where is your career going?’

How do You Think Before You Speak?

Engineering, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Puns, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

I’ve talked a lot about the speed involved and possibly required for retorts and humour, but not all conversation is retorts and counter-retorts[1].

For example, you’re giving a speech or lesson, and someone asks you a question. Many of the same tactics are helpful. It’s helpful to know your audience, to have an idea of their background(s), which types of words will work best for explaining things, and to have an idea of what they perceive the relative level of hierarchy is between you and them.

But once you have an idea of these things, what do you do?

This trigger for this post was an article reporting on Jon Stewart talking about how Hillary Clinton pauses for a few seconds between a question and when she answers[2]:

”
…“It’s — look, there are politicians who are either rendering their inauthenticity in real enough time to appear authentic, and then their are politicians who render their inauthenticity through — it’s like, when your computer … if you have a Mac and you want to play a Microsoft game on it …”

AXELROD: Yes, yes.

STEWART: … and there’s that weird lag.

AXELROD: Yes. No, I mean …

STEWART: That’s Hillary Clinton.

AXELROD: … that’s a big problem. There’s like a seven-second delay and all the words come out in a perfectly …

STEWART: Right.

AXELROD: … politically calibrated sentence.

STEWART: Right. Now, what gives me hope in that is that there’s a delay, which means she’s somehow fighting something. I’ve seen politicians who don’t have that delay and render their inauthenticity in real time, and that’s when you go, ‘That’s a sociopath.’
”

So, when you’re answering a difficult question, do you pause? Why? For how long?

For me, it depends on the type of question. For emotionally difficult questions, some of it is finding a neutral[3] perspective from which to address the question, to speak to the person(s) asking the question in a positive and useful way. Sometimes it’s choosing the appropriate emotional outlet[4] for whatever I’m feeling at the time.

For technically difficult questions, it feels much more like assembling a mental model in my head, or choosing between different visualizations/places to start. Parts of this can feel similar to emotionally difficult questions (perspectives vs. visualizations), but to me they feel quite different[5].

So, how does this work for you?

[1]No matter how much bash.org would want you to think so. (Note that outside that page, bash.org is quite unfiltered internet. You have been warned.)

[2] Article is here. In a footnote because the editorializing in the article is outside the scope of this post.

[3]In the emotional perspective sense.

[4]This is often laughter for later when I’m alone. I mean, really, we’re just ape-like creatures who don’t know the first thing about ourselves. Why are we getting all angry about minutiae? This can only be funny.

[5]Now that I say this, I’ll have to watch next time. But something getting my back[6] up really feels different from trying to focus and assemble a visualization. Maybe being able to relax for all types of questions would make them more similar.

[6]Back hackles?

Picard: Is Truth More Lawful or Good?

Character Classes, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Politics, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was reading some internet forums associated with one of my favourite webcomics, and an argument came up about Captain Picard’s ‘alignment’.

“That’s a really good one. (Although I don’t watch enough star trek to recognize the LN guy)It’s Captain Picard. You could make a case for him being Lawful Good, just not that friendly, but LN suits him just as well.”

(A brief aside. ‘Alignment’ in this context is from Dungeons & Dragons, where each character is considered to be aligned along two axes, ‘lawful-neutral-chaotic’ (respect for the rule of law) and ‘good-neutral-evil’ (good of the many vs. good of the few). This gives 9 ‘alignments’, from ‘lawful-good’ to ‘chaotic-evil.)

Some had him as ‘lawful-good’, or trying to do the best for the many while respecting laws. some had him as ‘lawful-neutral’, where adherence to laws is more important than the good of the many. I can see the ‘lawful-neutral’ interpretation, just from listening to one of his quotes:

“The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy… and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”

It seems at first blush that here the law (the Prime Directive) is more important than any group of pre-warp civilizations[1].

Another famous quote:

“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform.”[2]

So we have two questions here:

1) Is adherence to the Prime Directive more ‘lawful’ or ‘good’?

2) Is Truth more ‘lawful’ or ‘good’?

1) The Prime Directive ostensibly has the interests of the many (the inhabitants of a pre-warp planet) outweighing the interests of the few (those few people who would exploit them).

And indeed, when the Prime Directive does not have their best interests in mind, Picard tends to look for exceptions.

Although there are times when he seems perfectly willing to let a planet’s culture perish to avoid interference.

So, I would count this as the Prime Directive is a ‘law’ that is mostly ‘good’, and Picard usually tries to move it towards ‘good’ when there is wiggle room. At the same time, when the ‘law’ conflicts with the ‘good’, sometimes (but seldom) he chooses ‘law’, so ‘lawful-good’ seems appropriate.

2) Now, let’s look at truth. Another quote seems to be in order here:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”[3]

This would suggest that barring violating the Prime Directive above, truth should be ‘good’, specifically the speaking of truth to power. (I think that’s what actually necessitates the Prime Directive, else if truth was pre-eminent, interference to tell people the error of their ways would be a very convenient excuse.)

So, truth is probably ‘good’. Is it ‘lawful’? You could make the argument that adherence to truth is equivalent to a code of honour[4], and it’s just as important (or more important) to do things the right way as to reach your objective. So, truth can be either or both of ‘lawful’ and ‘good’. The quote above from ‘The First Duty‘ is speaking about the good of the many (Starfleet, the reputation of his dead friend, and the trust between Starfleet officers) outweighs the good of the few (Wesley’s year of school, his reputation), so I’d call this a meeting of ‘lawful’ and ‘good’.

I’d say Picard is pretty firmly ‘lawful-good’, with some ‘neutral-good’ leanings (bending the rules to help people) and some ‘lawful-neutral’ leanings (sometime rules are absolute).

Thoughts? Comment below!

[1]Leaving out the non-interference in the Klingon civil war as out of scope.

[2]That quote also appears here:

[3]Note that George Orwell is most frequently associated with this quote, as is William Randolph Hearst. The actual source seems unclear. I enjoyed a number of the humorous takes on the quote in that article.

[4]No, not the episode. And I’m not linking to it.

The Name’s the Thing

Idle Speculation, Puns, Words!, Writing

Last week, I was talking with D, and he mentioned that the name of this blog ‘Sometimes Egregious, Always Gregarious’, because the words are more complex than necessary, because many people don’t know what ‘egregious’ means[1], might turn people away[2], and thus be unduly limiting. In a way, it might act as a filter on those who might read it.

I responded that I don’t see it that way at all. I chose those words because they seemed to fit, and when I looked back, I could find many reasons why that was so[3].

Some might say that my entire blog is itself a filter, and I’m the only one that would enjoy it in its entirety. I am at peace with this notion. At the moment, I’m writing the things that I want to write that I think people might be interested in. Sometimes I’m wrong, sometimes it’s a completely different audience than the previous post.

At the same time, I use the words that flow naturally when I’m talking about a particular topic. As when I’m teaching, I try to notice when I’m talking about something when not everyone would have the appropriate background, and I’m sure jargon will creep in, as it’s useful for being precise and concise. (Also, I love big words, I love the sound and taste of them, and I could never fully give them up.)

[1]Interesting that ‘gregarious’ is considered much more common. They seem pretty similar to me, but what do I know?

[2]Also, ‘‘ feels easy to me, but I realize many people read on mobile.

[3]I’m also really enjoying having some of these thoughts I’ve had kicking around in my head now in blog posts, so that I can refer to them as a link rather than having to write them out each time.