Lost

I'm trying to decide if the persistent telegraphing of the "twist endings" on Lost is intentional. I think it has to be. I don't read spoilers and don't obsessively rewind and freeze frame with the TiVo, but I still rarely find myself surprised by the revelations. Wasn't it evident about a minute into "Walkabout"'s first flashback that Locke was handicapped? Every shot was framed to accentuate Locke's powerlessness, not to mention that he was never standing up. Was there any doubt that Sawyer was going to kill the wrong man in "Outlaws"? If he kills the right man, there's no emotional turmoil, and no surprise, and Lost is never without both.

Kate's doomed childhood friend... Locke's kidney stealing father... Desmond in the hatch... all obvious well before the "payoff".

Part of it must be Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": if the audience knows what to expect, and the characters don't, the result is suspense. But that doesn't really explain spending so much time building up to the reveal of Locke's handicap. Maybe it was more subtle than I give it credit for, but it appears that Lost could be accidentally underestimating its audience's intelligence, or deliberately taking advantage of the typical viewer's desire to feel clever.

Of course, Lost could be brilliantly getting the best of both worlds: casual viewers are surprised, and regular viewers feel self-satisfyingly clever. The omnipresent "Easter eggs" of pre-island character connections (Hurley on Jin's TV, Locke's box company), and the inclusion of some "surprises", like Jack's future wife's miraculous recovery, that aren't surprises if you've been watching regularly, support this interpretation.

It's a tough balancing act: keep the twists from seeming like they come out of nowhere, but don't make them so obvious that the audience spends the whole episode anticipating the ending, ruining the suspense. Frequently (particularly in the case of the flashbacks), I think they err too far towards the latter.

This is all by way of praising with faint damnation. Lost is terrifically entertaining. The premiere was surprisingly satisfying, especially given the tendency of many shows to "wimp out" after building up to a suspenseful finale, premiering with:

• a flashback episode - Battlestar Galactica almost went this route for season 2, and much to showrunner Ron Moore's credit, they recognized it was a terrible idea.


• a flashforward episode - The West Wing began heading toward the shark jump in season 3, when the premiere skipped ahead to months after the MS revelation, which something like the last 12 episodes of season 2 had intimated would be a huge ordeal. I think ultimately the payoff was one congressional hearing that focused on Leo.


• a left-field episode - South Park becomes Terrance and Phillip...
  

Lost opened the hatch in the finale, and showed us what was in it in the premiere - and better still it wasn't another hatch, an empty room, or some other clichéd metaphor. Even though all of television history suggests the writers/producers don't have any idea where they're going (paging Chris Carter), so far everything has fit together so well that I have some faith there's a story being told here. Maybe I'll theorize in a later post.

Good advice for Microsoft

As it struggles to compete for mindshare and marketshare with Google and Linux, Microsoft would do well to take this anonymous minimsft poster's advice:

Microsoft is way too focused on building the next billion-dollar business; there is no way for a team to start something that will be a great 50 million dollar business even with great profit margins. Why not create 100 teams like that? Some of them (with no way to predict which) WILL turn into billion dollar businesses. But if you don't let them start they never will.

Read the whole thing.

There's actually a plethora of insightful comments (and the expected sour grapes) on the anonymous-MS-employee minimsft blog.

I actually interned for Microsoft in the Windows product group in Summer 2001 (working up to the XP release). The top-down direction criticized by the poster was very much in evidence. It baffles me why an organization which prides itself on hiring amazingly smart people would put a management structure into place that actively discourages small, exciting projects. Instead, the review-goals-uber-alles mindset means that if you're not polishing a spec for a dialog box or oiling a cog in a compatibility database, you're hurting yourself professionally.

At Google, it appears, a great idea can go from a glimmer in an employee's eye to a beta system used by millions in a matter of weeks. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't have the equivalent of Google Labs. If they don't start encouraging individual innovation, they're going to see those most interested in innovation go elsewhere.

Python

I'm finally starting to do some real work in Python. There are some small annoyances, like the weird nodelimiterlowercase built-in names, but generators are (a carryover from Icon, I believe) are terrifically useful. I'm surprised something like them didn't show up in other scripting languages earlier, since they're naturally suited to the sort of source/filter/sink piping you see often in scripts.

In this particular case, I'm using a generator to produce specification objects one at a time from Perforce, which conveniently gives you an option to get your command results in the form of marshalled Python objects. Generators let me open up one connection to Perforce for a whole set of these, and return them one at a time as requested. The generator "owns" the network connection, and keeps it up while waiting for future requests. Poor man's lazy evaluation!

I can't believe...

... that I missed Grilled Cheese Monday on Slashfood!

At least now I know what I want for Christmas. Ought to be perfect for making the delectable mozzerella, fig jam and prosciutto sandwich.

Mmm... ham, cream cheese, and strawberry jam...

Stayed at the recently renovated Hilton Hartford this weekend with the girlfriend. Overall we were very pleased; the renovations are stylish and the room was comfortable. Our only real complaint was the (audible from the 12th floor) jackhammering in the parking garage at 8am Sunday morning, but the hotel was nice enough to refund us $20 for the annoyance.

The highlight was breakfast at Morty and Ming's. I had a grilled sandwich of straberry jam, grilled ham, and about a half-inch thick spread of cream cheese. Sinfully good, though it probably doesn't sound that way! She had blueberry pancakes with vanilla butter, also delightful. The hashbrowns on the side—shredded potato, the only way to do it right, crisped to golden perfection with onions and scalions—were the best I can recall.

Just enough energy to survive a trip through the New Haven Ikea...

winterspeak.com

I've read half a dozen posts on winterspeak.com, found via link from Asymmetrical Information, and I'm hooked...

A representative sample (on the causes of the U.S. trade deficit):

The key dynamic here seems to be that China, following mercantilist trade policy, is taking money from Chinese consumers and importers and giving it to Chinese exporters, who are in turn tying dollar bills to their exports. The rational thing to do in this circumstance would be to take the money and buy the Chinese exports -- anything else would be foolish! Thus the trade deficit. When the Chinese decide to stop taking from their local peasants and giving to American flat-screen TV buyers, then the trade deficit will go away, but until then American consumers should take the money and run.

Great stuff.

Reading List

Although almost no one actually reads this blog, I'm going to start taking note here of what I've been reading. At least it will give me a chance to take stock of my reading time, of which I never have enough. My reading could best be grouped into two categories: technical papers, articles and books running the gamut of computer science topics, and everything else. The former I typically read during my lunch hour, an old anti-social habit that I don't think I'll ever break, while the latter I try to find time for when I can, typically at night, but also during marathon sessions on vacation at Cape Cod during the summer.

One summer selection was V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River. As a (purely hypothetical) regular reader of the blog might deduce, I'm exceedingly fond of Joseph Conrad. If the brooding prose of this book is any indication, Naipaul is the modern equivalent. The story is semi-autobiographical, and has a specific historical context, but like Heart of Darkness, there is just enough of a mist around the edges to allow both tales to dissolve the bonds that tie them to a particular time and place: The name "Africa" appears once in Conrad's story, and only in a list of continents. The name "Congo" appears not at all. Similarly, Naipaul never names the nation whose fate drives the story, nor its nominal leader, the "Big Man".

The resulting meditations on the nature of man thus take on a universality that I find quite appealing. The prose is brooding, as I said before, in the best possible sense: heavy and thoughtful, but only because the subject demands it.

Highly recommended.

On the CS end, I was thrilled to discover the collected notes of Edsger W. Dijkstra. The breadth of his interest in "Computing Science" is matched only by the strength of his opinions, resulting in forceful insights on a broad range of topics. From what I've read so far, I can particularly commend:

"My recollections of operating system design"

and

"Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges"

Battlestar Galactica

I came in a little late, knowing nothing about the original except that it had a reputation of being cheesy, but the new
Battlestar Galactica is easily the best SF show on TV in a long time. That's in no small part due to show-runner Ron Moore, who provided much of the creative energy that made the middle seasons of DS9 so much fun. BSG is a much darker show (figuratively and literally - I never understood why Trek always had to be filmed under kleig lights), and it's the better for it.

The toughest part for the writers and producers, I think, will be exploring the mythos. This is where, say, Babylon 5 fell down for me. The early seasons offered some real mystery, both about the characters and the universe they inhabited. But the "revelations," spread out over 4 years (season 5 doesn't really count), brought to mind the quote from Conrad about sailor's tales fitting within the shell of a nut. Ultimately there wasn't that much to the backstory that couldn't be summarized in a few sentences: Shadows = chaos, Vorlons = order, Sinclair = Valen. The characters were interesting for the most part, but because the story arc was so threadbare, almost every event of consequence had to revolve around them. This might work well for a medical drama, but you're sacrificing what makes good space operas: the sense of scale, of a huge universe you can only meagerly comprehend.

On the other hand, you can go too far the other way, and treat the mythos as an inexahaustible supply of new weirdness. X-Files fell victim to this. I don't think anyone can tell a plausible story that fits everything that was thrown onto the screen.

BSG will hopefully manage to walk the line here. I hope it'll be clear by the end of this season whether, for example, there's anything more than mysticism to the Cylon's God-talk and the President's prophecy talk.

Luckily, even if the mythos sucks, if the production quality shown so far continues, it'll at least be worth watching.

Bring back the Grilled Stuft Chicken Enchilada Burrito

Sign the petition to bring back
the greatest Taco Bell burrito ever.

Why does Taco Bell insist upon rotating in these great new products, and then getting rid of them, never to be seen again?

They are the biggest tease in the fast food industry.

While they're at it, they should bring back the Chicken Stuft Caesar Wrap, which was likewise excellent.

The new guru

George Lakoff is a clown:

"'They found that choice wasn't playing very well,' says Lakoff, who's become an unofficial guru to beleaguered Democrats. He told the groups it was no wonder: 'choice' came from a 'consumerist' vocabulary, while 'life' came from a moral one. In one of his more controversial suggestions, he advised the activists to reclaim the 'life' issue by blaming Republicans for high U.S. infant-mortality rates and mercury pollution that can cause birth defects. 'Basically what I'm saying is that conservatives are killing babies,' he says."

After all the whining those on the left do about George Bush "dividing America", they make this guy's book a bestseller. He certainly seems interested in civil debate, doesn't he?

Oh well. I hope they keep listening to him instead of finding leaders who call this kind of talk absurd. Then they'll keep losing elections, and I'll keep getting cheaper goods through free trade, a growing economy through lower tax rates and less regulation, and a foreign policy driven by American ideals.

The Downing Street Memo

Tim Cavanaugh joins the growing chorus of Iraq war skeptics acknowledging that there's no 'there' there in the Downing Street Memo.

Of course, all but the most wild-eyed Bush haters never thought the "revelations" in this memo would be a major scandal. After all, most of it was conventional wisdom when the memo was released: the Bush administration thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs and were unenthusiastic about the changes of a UN-mediated outcome.

The real reason the Left loves playing up this memo is the fortuitous use of the phrase "intelligence and facts were being being fixed around the policy", which in the context of the memo almost certainly means that facts and intelligence supporting the case for the policy were being found (as in "to fix upon") and emphasized, which is exactly what happened.

However, through the lazy anti-Bush (and I suppose even more pro-scandal) filter of the media, this phrase gets summarized (as I heard it this morning on WBZ) as "allegations that the Bush administration 'fixed' intelligence to justify the Iraq war". Who cares if this is a rude mis-translation? The meme is out the door, and soon the scare quotes around 'fixed' will disappear.

Fred Kaplan, Broken Record

As anyone (yes all two of you) who read this blog regularly know, I'm a big fan of Slate. They provide a great mix of politics, pop culture, and the sort of uncategorizable stuff you don't find anywhere else. Where else can you find a lighthearted regular column on Supreme Court arguments? Left, right and center, Slate's stable of writers sets a high standard, and it's one that Fred Kaplan hasn't lived up to for a while. Take today's predictable assault on John Bolton. Is there a single insight here that I couldn't get from wire service reports and Democratic talking points?

...his intimidation of intelligence analysts who dared disagree with him, the dismal signal his appointment will send to the world...

...It takes enormous self-deception to believe that John Bolton is truly qualified...

...As an undersecretary of state in Bush's first term, he repeatedly sought the removal of intelligence analysts who dared to disagree with him...

Wow, that last talking point was so thrilling it got in there twice. Did he intimidate, then remove those brave State Department analysts? By remove he can't mean fired. Has anyone in the State Department actually alleged that their careers were hurt by their disputes with Bolton? Shouldn't spirited disputes over policy, which many of these were, be welcomed rather than seen as disqualifying? Doesn't the run up to the Iraq war demonstrate that policy makers should question intelligence analysts more and not less?

Kaplan's columns have been like this for a while. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with the administration or being contrarian, but he should at least acknowledge the other side of the argument, if only to dismiss it.

When I know everything I'm going to read in a Fred Kaplan column from the title, why should I even bother?

Finally, I'd be willing to wager that John Bolton will turn out to be at least a competent UN ambassador, thus putting the lie to Kaplan's claim that he's obviously not "truly qualified". Though if he does, will Kaplan acknowledge that perhaps his distrust of the Bush administration led to his own "enormous self-deception"? I'm not going to hold my breath.

If I had the time...

John Tierney's smart column would almost be enough to get me to subscribe to the New York Times.