Category Archives: Thoughts on Thoughts

Hey, Dipshit!

Economics, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

“Hey Dipshit, if you ever plan to own anything of actual value in your life…”

So, I’m biking along Adelaide, and a black reasonably expensive* car drives into my lane and stops in front of me. Because I’m paying attention, I have time to stop, but I still have some momentum when I reach him, and put my foot on his car/kick it in frustration. He rolls down his window, I explain that he cut me off, and I bike off.

Not sure what happens next, but I’m guessing he got out, checked his car, and made a decision about what to do next.

Two blocks later, he drives up to me, rolls down his window, and says the phrase above: “Hey Dipshit**, if you ever plan to own anything of actual value in your life…”

Now, at this point, I have a few options. Do I:

1) Escalate? Get into an argument with this person about bike vs. car privilege, or perhaps about working (probably) in finance (and where their money actually comes from, or perhaps even their cis white male privilege?

2) Try to reconcile, and maybe get them to acknowledge a point of view outside themselves?

I ended up choosing option 2), saying “sorry, I over reacted”. He seemed to accept this. In exchange, I asked him to acknowledge that he understand that he drove into my lane and stopped in front of me. He may or may not have internalized this.

So, as you can tell, I ended up thinking about this a lot (as you can tell by this blog post). There are the standard questions of whether you can actually change someone’s mind… Whether, even if I had the time required to talk to him to help him unpack all of the things underlying his statement, whether he would actually change or not…

“Dipshit” is an interesting word to use. Dipshit also sounds like a word that people would use a generation ago: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dipshit&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdipshit%3B%2Cc0
or something you’d see in Glengarry Glen Ross. It just felt odd coming out of the mouth of a Beemer-driving 20-something. Like he was aping people in power (perhaps parents) without really understanding what they did to get them there.

So, I ride a bike by choice, and I happen to wear a t-shirt to a tech job downtown, also by choice. But put me in the financial district, and I look like I have no status there (which really, I don’t). “Dipshit” is a word you use to talk about someone obviously beneath you, which suggests an underlying current of classism that would probably take a divorce and years of therapy to cure.

Anyways, food for thought. I think I took the correct path (after the initial incident), but I wonder how you help people unpack things, or deal with the fact that you know that a person would be helped by doing so, but you can’t do anything about it.

*Maybe a BMW, or an Audi, or something equivalent

**Not necessarily an exact quote, but within a couple of words

A Manual of Style for Satire I

Administrivia, Idle Speculation, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

I have always enjoyed reading satire. Ever since I picked up Monty Python’s Big Red Book, read my first Onion article, read my first mainstream news article as an adult.

This is my favourite Onion article. It combines political satire with intelligent art humour. The execution is also quite good, (mostly) transporting the reader into an alternate reality where the events described are normal.

http://www.theonion.com/article/republicans-dadaists-declare-war-on-art-858

That being said, there are a few places where I feel it could be better.

If I had to summarize this into a few statements, it would be the following:

1. You are writing as if the subject of your story is your (alternate) reality

This means that you should be writing in proper objective style, and making no judgements:

2. Make no judgements

You are a simple objective watcher. The humour comes from the juxtaposition between the seriousness of the writing style with the absurd situation.

3. Describe what the reader would see, instead of telling them what is going on

This will help with the above. You want to be like a good Game Master, describing what the reader sees, instead of telling them what is going on. You want to encourage them to make the connection themselves. They’ll enjoy it more, the comedic timing will work better*, and they will be more satisfied.

At the same time, when the people you are writing about are doing things that they could be describing themselves,

4. Use quotations instead of description when you can

This is even better.

Example from the Onion article above:

“Calling for the elimination of federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; the banning of offensive art from museums and schools; and the destruction of the “hoax of reason” in our increasingly random, irrational and meaningless age, the Republicans and Dadaists were unified in their condemnation of the role of the artist in society today.”

Note that the ‘Journalist’ is (possibly inadvertently) making a judgement here, when they could instead be quoting one of the Dadaists saying “the destruction of the hoax of reason in our increasingly random, irrational and meaningless age”.

An even stronger example is the below:

“Added nonsense-poet Hugo Ball, founder of Zurich’s famed Cabaret Voltaire: “…’dada’ (‘Dada’). Adad Dada Dada Dada.” Donning an elaborate, primitivist painted paper mask, he then engaged reporters in a tragico-absurd dance, contorting wildly while bellowing inanities.”

The description ‘nonsense-poet’ is reasonable. Even if the audience doesn’t know enough art history to understand exactly what a ‘nonsense-poet’ is, they can probably figure it out. It also sounds enough like a title that a person in our alternate reality would understand. Similarly, ‘founder of Zurich’s famed Cabaret Voltaire’ is a reasonable description. It is factual, and objective (you can reasonably check how famous a cabaret is, and who the founder was). The paragraph then continues with a quote (fine), but then becomes problematic. The descriptor ‘primitivist’ seems almost unnecessary, and presumes a knowledge of art history probably only shared by Onion writers. ‘he then engaged reporters’ is simple description, fine, but then ‘tragico-absurd dance’ is again too art history-jargony. ‘contorting wildly’ is again a judgement. Perhaps a quote from someone describing what he was doing, or ‘contorting his body’ for a more objective description. ‘bellowing inanities’ is telling the audience what is happening. A quote would be far better here, such as “yelling loudly ‘Shpma Protback Beep!'”.

The fixed paragraph:

“Added nonsense-poet Hugo Ball, founder of Zurich’s famed Cabaret Voltaire: “…’dada’ (‘Dada’). Adad Dada Dada Dada.” Donning an elaborate, painted paper mask, he then engaged reporters in a tragic dance, contorting his body while yelling loudly ‘Shpma Protback Beep!’.”

So that feels better to me, but could probably use more editing. (Perhaps the Onion chose scansion over humour smoothness scanning?)

The rest of the article was generally smooth, including such gems of description as:

“Dadaist leaders were even more strident than Helms, stressing the need for the elimination of not only art, but also of dada itself. “To be a Dadaist means to be against dada,” Arp said. “Dada equals anti-dada.” Urging full-scale rioting, the assembled Dadaists called for their own destruction, each of them alternately running into the audience to pelt those still on stage with tomatoes.”

Which I think strikes just the right level of description and quotations. It also shows an important point, that the ‘journalist’ can describe what the ‘person’ is saying, as long as it’s immediately followed or preceded by a quote.

The following almost works:

“Centered in Berlin, Paris and Zurich, the Dadaist movement was launched as a reaction of revulsion to the senseless butchery of World War I. “While the guns rumbled in the distance,” Arp said, “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a means of deadening men’s minds.” ”

I would put ‘senseless butchery’ in quotes. Perhaps the ‘journalist’ only wanted to put quotes around actual quotes said by dadaists?

“When told of Arp’s comments, Helms said he was “fairly certain” that he concurred.”

Let me know in the comments below other humorous articles you wish me to dissect!

😀

*See a later post that I will write about the theory of puns, and other forms of verbal warfare.

Some things I read and found useful while writing this article:

Writing Satire Is Harder Than You Think

This article wrote around the edges of what I was speaking to above:
http://www.nottheonion.com/howto.cfm

Some things I found not so useful (too general, more of a 101 instead of actually helping you write well):
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Satire-About-Current-Events

I tried to find online manuals of style, but they all cost money or only talked about technical details about whether you said ‘one’ or ‘1’.
https://shopping.yahoo.com/9780312569846-yahoo-style-guide/
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook

Chicago Manual of Style basics


https://www.apstylebook.com/

Less Conventional 4-Quadrant Diagrams: The Horsemen of the Elements

Analysis, Fiction, Games!, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts, Visualizations

So, 4-Quadrant diagrams are very common in the ‘make-something-two-dimensional-from-something-one-dimensional-and-name-it-after-yourself-and-sell-a-million-business-books’ field.

This series will cover some less commonly used 4-Quadrant diagrams.

First, the Elements:

  Gas   Condensed
*-------*-------*
|       |       |
| Fire  | Earth |  'Dry'
|       |       |
*---------------*
|       |       |
| Air   | Water |  'Wet'
|       |       |
*-------*-------*

Now for the Four Horsemen:

Activity Level:
 Human    Biological
*---------------------*
|        |            |
| War    |Pestilence/ | Abundance
|        |Plague      |
*---------------------*
|        |            |
| Death  | Famine     |  Lack
|        |            |
*--------*------------*

And as a special treat for those watching my Gold Box series:

 Includes     Does not
  'Pool'      include 
  in the     'Pool' in
  Title:     the Title:
*----------*------------*
| Pool     | Curse of   |
| of       | the Azure  | No Teleporters
| Radiance | Bonds      |
*-----------------------*
| Pools    | Secret of  |
| of       | the Silver | Teleporters! 
| Darkness | Blades     |
*----------*------------*

Emphasis

Idle Speculation, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, how do you say the phrase:

“penguin!”

You can’t shout it, because that would be “PENGUIN”. You somehow have to give emphasis without being too loud all the way through.

Kind of like stacatto?

No, that’s more of an emphasized ‘P’enguin.

S says it feels more like the emphasis is on “pENGuin”.

“So, what was the issue?”

Engineering, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, we were debugging a common ground issue today at a in the amazing Helios Makerspace in Montreal.

We got as far as we could ourselves (debugging one common ground problem, and tracking the data signal through one board and on to the second), then we got stuck. We tried a bunch of things, but it was only when the came in, and determine it was two problems: A second common ground problem, combined with the first (Arduino) board having too many outputs and so not outputting a high enough voltage.

The really interesting part (aside from learning again how important common grounds are) was watching the engineers in the room (the people who were building things, perhaps or perhaps not engineers) all run over as soon as the problem was solved and someone asked the question “So, what was the issue?”

Anytime someone is agonizing over a problem for hours, there is bound to be some learning for those around…Thinking about this from a min/maxing perspective, someone spends hours solving the problem, then you spend 2mins learning about the solution, and then you add it to your list of things to try/check when debugging, taking maybe 30s to possibly reduce your own debugging time by hours.

BoF II: Some one-liners from 2014

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

(Along with some selected* comments.)

“Chaotic Justified. That’s my alignment. -S”
J: “Do you tab indent every third line?”
Me: “It’s more that I tab indent a number of spaces equal to the strange attractor?”

“Church bells: A peal to authority.”
Me: “Perhaps more specifically: ‘Church Bell Arguments’.”
Me: “http://mzonline.com/bin/view/Python/ChurchBellsSketch/”

Almost a Koan:
“Is Evening Performance when you balance something on top of an evening?”
M: “or light the evening on fire and spin it around”
K: “Every response merely encourages him!”

“New idea: Name one of the rooms in your home ‘Metonymy’.”
S: “That’s where we’ll store the literary theory!”
K: “Based on the amount of my mortgage that I’ve paid off, I figure that I own whichever room of my house that I am currently occupying.”
K: “I get metonymy and synechdoche mixed up.”
L: “The only example I can remember from highschool english re: metonymy is breadwinner. Does the aforementioned room provide earnings and sustenance for the rest of the domicile?”

“Sometimes unceasing horrible noise is its own reward.”
J: “That would explain your presence in bands in high school. Har har.”

*Generally from those who were playing along. If you have issues with my editing, tell me! 😀

Essays and Pedagogy

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The discussion started with the article:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/12/college_papers_students_hate_writing_them_professors_hate_grading_them_let.html

and evolved into a fun discussion about pedagogy in English classes.

I was reminded of:

http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

and how it talked about (amongst many things) how learning how to write was combined with the study of literature in a more or less default way.

As a significant part of my background is running a teaching lab, I immediately thought of a similar process for teaching people how to write. You might have 10, maybe 20, maybe 30 students in a room with an instructor/teaching assistant for a few hours, writing on a topic or topics. They could have a computer with internet access if the topic required moderate levels of research. Ideally, the topic would be chosen where the writers could write something interesting, but not have to access primary source materials which were not on-line (this is becoming less and less of an issue, as more materials are digitized).

The student to teacher ratio would have to be a balance of keeping the students and the instructor engaged, and affordable to the students and worth it for the teacher.

As I say this, I can’t be the first person to think of this, and:

“2787 Weekend Intensive: Fiction Workshop”

http://2learn.utoronto.ca/uoft/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&cms=true&courseId=21311438

Which is 24 hours of sessions over 4 weeks, for $650.

The caveat is that this is for “A workshop for aspiring writers with short stories and novels they want to improve”, and you have to already have some writing. But there’s no reason this couldn’t be adapted for students at an earlier stage/lower level.

I would guess that the only thing stopping this is university budgets and classroom ratios.

I see a parallel between this sort of writing workshop and parts of a computational biology course I took a number of years ago. To fully express your ideas and explore them in computational biology, you want/need to have command of computer programming, in perhaps a similar way that to fully express your ideas in Literature, or Theory, or the any of the other myriad disciplines of English, you want/need to have command of writing in English. So, what was done, as it was an interdisciplinary course, for those who needed programming training, there were intensive how-to-program lessons (and the same for those like myself, who were weaker on the Biology side).

All this is a very long-winded way of saying that there are solutions to the problems that the original author faces, and they do not necessarily lie with reducing standards in English/Literature/etc. classes. (From the comments in the conversation, it seems as if the actual issue is more one of Universities and other educational institutions not being interested in applying the resources required to actually solve the problem of people who cannot write…)