Ladies and Gentlemen, Neil deGrasse Tyson (and Stephen Colbert)

Here is a wonderful discussion between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert. If you aren't familiar with Neil deGrasse Tyson, here is a great way to start that beautiful relationship. He's an astrophysicist best known for hosting NOVA and various science shows, and generally for explaining and popularizing science. He's also the person I most admire in science, because of his way of demystifying it and making it understandable and approachable. I'm a huge fan of taking something "too complex" to be understood by laypeople and showing how anyone can grasp it if you work with them to understand it.

Summary: He is a great man, and inspiring to listen to. And here is him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, who (it turns out) is also an inspiring and deep thinker.

Obligatory SOPA post. But seriously this is important.

Sorry about the politics again, but I feel obligated to do my part to spread the word about this. I think the ratio of ramifications to how many people know about it is really big on this one. It's the first proposal to censor the U.S. Internet. It will put us in a club that includes China, Syria, and Iran.

Suffice to say, watch the video, that will explain it pretty well. And then visit americancensorship.org.

Oh! But before I forget, here's the most important point I can get across: It won't work. Not at all. There are already point-and-click workarounds. This won't stop a single criminal. If you know enough to use BitTorrent, you know more than enough to be able to simply ignore this legislation. It is a completely half-baked bill. Half-baked, but horribly destructive.



Note: PROTECT IP is the Senate version of the House's SOPA bill.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

Google's onmousedown link trickery

So you do a Google search. You find something interesting, but instead of clicking on it perhaps you just want to copy the link. Say you want to IM it to a friend or paste it into a malicious site search service. So you right-click on the link and "Copy Link Location" or whatever it is for you people on Chrome/IE/Safari/Opera/RockMelt(loljk). Then you paste it into your destination, but what you get looks like this:

Obviously Google's using some redirection trickery for some kind of internal purpose. But when you hover your mouse over the link, the url that shows up at the bottom of the window is the normal, short, non-Google link! And that hover-over url never lies, right? How is this happening?

Well, the good news is that technically the hover-over url isn't lying. It is indeed the correct url at that moment. But try right-clicking on the link, and before you do anything else, notice the hover-over url again*. It's changed! It seems Google is using some Javascript tricks (like an onmousedown event) to show us the expected url at first, then change it at the last second.

Sneaky? Maybe.
Annoying? Definitely.
Clever? Absolutely.

*A note in case you try this yourself: this only seems to happen on like 1/4 of the links on a typical page. And there's no way to predict which ones it will affect.

What happened at 1:17AM, November 6?

I just realized a weird side effect of daylight savings. In the fall, it creates an entire hour where times are non-unique. What I mean is, if I said I brushed my teeth at 1:17AM on November 6, would you know when that happened? It could be the first time 1:17 rolled around or the second.

I only thought of this as I sent a text during those ambiguous two hours and saw the timestamp. I use Google Voice, which shows the time sent next to each text. So I wondered if I sent one at 1:25 in the first hour and then at 1:17 in the second hour, would it show the one at 1:25 before the one at 1:17? I guess so.

Of course this mostly only matters if you think about software that timestamps things. Which is one reason why Unix time was invented, I guess. But I also start thinking about things like police reports or other important documents where you might say X happened at 1:17AM on the night of November 6. That doesn't specify exactly when it happened! There's no standard way to indicate what exact time you're talking about.

Again, this is one reason computers use Unix time, though I just discovered that apparently Unix time has this problem too. Its rule is that it always increases by 86,400 seconds per day. But some days are longer than others because of leap seconds. So again, we find that some times, like 915148800, are ambiguous. Now that really seems to pose a problem for software like server logging, etc. Why would you make the same mistake, Unix guys?

Note: Hmm, I wonder when I posted this? I guess we'll never know!

Luddite Fallacy: not wrong anymore?

Smash away!

(Wikimedia Commons)

I just read this article suggesting that the current job crisis might be a symptom of a larger trend: disappearing middle class jobs. The author cites technology and outsourcing as the causes. The technology part reminded me of an idea that's been forming in my head for a while.

Technology is bottoming out the cost of anything whose price was held up by the difficulty of communication or automation. The news, music, and even postal industries all were undercut when the internet made it dirt cheap to transfer information.

Of course, it also made all those goods cheap and plentiful for everyone. For a while I thought that was part of the answer to why technology doesn't create the massive unemployment the Luddites feared. But.. lately I've realized this time might be different.

So maybe the way this is working is that there are benefits to society but the benefits don't address the drawbacks. So we get to live in a world with an abundance of information always at our fingertips but that doesn't help the fact that none of us have jobs.

Steve Jobs is bigger than Michael Jackson

Remember in 2009 when Michael Jackson died, broke the internet, and the entire rest of the summer was filled with people playing his music? Well I remember at the time checking out the spike in searches for "Michael Jackson" and seeing it indeed exceeded any single event I could think of, including Obama in November '08.

Google Trends data: interest in Michael Jackson trumped Obama on election day and inauguration

Well, this last week I got notified of Steve Jobs' death by two different groups of friends within an hour and then realized the trouble I'd had accessing Wikipedia earlier that night happened exactly when the news broke. I thought "is this going to be a mini-Michael Jackson thing?" Turns out, it's not a "mini" one:

Google Insights for Search data: Obama, Michael Jackson, and Steve Jobs' spike.
Steve Jobs' is so recent it's squashed over to the right but look closely at the top of that peak.

I found it interesting to see that it's not just people over in the tech world who find this to be hugely significant news.

Postscript: The point of this post isn't to comment on the actual event. First, of primary importance is the fact that a man died after fighting a terrible disease, which is sad for him and his family. Second, to be clear, despite having significant problems with Apple, I'm honestly quite worried about the future of computers without Apple pushing everyone to make better and better devices. They have problems with openness, but Google, Microsoft, and everyone else has a problem with making things intuitive, tasteful, and above everything, useable. Apple pushes the rest to be better.

HOW DO WE MAKE THIS HAPPEN

Or, for the nerdier caption, "I hope this is in IPv6."

(source: uh, tumblr. all of it.)

Why don't we learn programming by example?

A lot of the past year I spent in a highly concentrated study of programming. I've been learning both the semantics of programming languages and the high-level art/philosophy of coding.

And there's a lot of advice flying around. It doesn't take you long to discover that programming is a field whose inhabitants are keen to look at it not just as a job, but as a highly important zen/philosophical/artistic way of life. They care a lot about how you code. Comment your code, don't overcomment your code, use top-down design, use bottom-up design, code for readability, code for efficiency, use descriptive variable names, refactor often, modularize everything, and don't break out of a loop early unless you turn around three times and spit first.

I'd certainly like to follow all of it. I'm trying to synthesize it all into some idea of the right way to do it. But something I notice is that there are terribly few examples to go by. I find it odd that the experience of learning programming, be it from a school, a book, or a website, is not full of examples of other people's real-world programs.

I've realized that learning to write well-written code is very similar to learning to write well-written English. It's hard to declare rigid rules that you can just follow to get there. There's plenty of advice, but advice in a vacuum isn't extremely useful. You need positive examples of good writing. A lot of what makes effective writing is that it's easy to follow for people used to it being laid out in a certain way. It also uses constructions that are efficient and effective. That's for both written English and written programs.

You learn to write English well by reading books and essays written by the masters. But you're supposed to learn to write code well by.. writing code. I find it strange that there aren't far more examples of well-written programs in books and university classes. There are whole books and websites of collections of essays and stories! Why not programs? There are certainly enough people who care about it, let me tell you.

This post was prompted by reading an essay by Steve Yegge on overly-commented code by novice programmers. I'd always heard people putting an emphasis on well-commented code, so it was interesting to hear the arguments for why it can get cumbersome. I thought it was compelling, and I'd like to put the advice to use in my coding. I want to learn, Steve Yegge! Really! So please, just show me how it should be done! I want to be an E.B. White or Christopher Hitchens, but I can't do it without examples!