The Blogg

May 20, 2010

Everybody Lies (At Least Blumenthal And Landis)

Filed under: Politics,Sports — chadhogg @ 6:59 pm

Not just a House aphorism, but a statement too often proven true. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has been allowing people to believe that he is a Vietnam veteran, to paint it in the most charitable light, despite having never done so. In fact, he apparently successfully did just about everything possible to avoid being drafted and later deployed overseas. Why would he lie about something so easy to repudiate? It isn’t like being a veteran was a requirement for getting his job; making these false statements can only have had a very minor effect on his approval rating, while discovery that they were false will surely scuttle his political career.

Some are saying that part of being a politician is built on exaggerations and half-truths, such as Secretary Clinton having faced sniper fire in Bosnia and Senator McCain having never referred to himself as a “Maverick”, and that the line between truth and fiction blurs for people in such a position. I can see that point to an extent. Like so many people with everything to lose who still cannot keep their pants on, it seems to be a pathological compulsion. Slate has a humorously rigorous skewering of Blumenthal’s hypocrisy.

The other case in the news at the moment is Floyd Landis admitting to doping. Most people probably forgot about Landis long ago if they ever knew who he was, but since he grew up some 15 miles from my own hometown he was a big local story when he won the Tour de France in 2006. Immediately after the race he was accused of using synthetic testosterone based on lab tests drawn during one stage of the race and stripped of his title. Although it looked unlikely in light of the evidence, I think everyone in Lancaster County wanted to believe that he was innocent, or had been unknowingly doped, or something. The kid with old-order Mennonite parents could not have been a cheater. Today he still denies having used testosterone at the time he was accused, but admits that his entire career was fueled with performance enhancing drugs.

Landis says that he “does not feel guilty” about using performance enhancing drugs, and that doping simply leveled the playing field since every other cyclist does it. That seems to be somewhat valid, but I sure hope he feels guilty about having repeatedly lied to everyone for the last four years. To have cheated and been evasive about it is one thing, but Landis went far beyond that. Recognizing that he would be very unlikely to actually succeed in having his title returned, he nevertheless fought vigorously against the charges, saying this was about his honor and principles. In the course of appeal after appeal he impugned the lab that performed the tests, the French cycling administration in general, and many other people. I realize this is just defense lawyering 101, but it seems especially galling when the consequences of admitting guilt are much less severe than prison time or execution. Landis even used fundraising from fans and believers to finance his appeals. Perhaps it is just because I had a geographical connection with Landis, but he seems like far more of a scumbag than any of the steroid users uncovered in baseball and other sports.

May 17, 2010

Book Review: A Passage To India

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 1:07 pm

The writing is fine and the plot interesting, but I enjoyed this more as an illustration of life in a colonial, apartheidic regime than as a novel. I am always amazed when I realize how recently institutionalized discrimination has been the norm, both in the United States and abroad. While most of Forster’s British characters are unabashedly prejudiced against native Indians, even the author reveals what I presume to be his own less offensive stereotypes in expository sections. Most characters in the book are one-dimensional, which is a shame. Surely it could have better pointed the reader toward his own biases if we could see any Anglo-Indians other than Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding as sympathetic. I do appreciate the fact that no perspectives of Indian women are given, nor are any even named. Perhaps this was not intentional, but it nicely symbolizes the purdah system. I had much difficulty understanding what actually happened in the story’s climactic moment. Apparently critics see it as a symbol for the shock of Western minds understanding Hindu philosophy, but I do not see that at all in the text.

May 16, 2010

A Fond Farewell

Filed under: Uncategorized — chadhogg @ 1:28 am

According to news releases, NBC Universal has chosen to cancel long-running drama Law & Order. Wikipedia claims the same fate for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but their source has gone missing and I can find no corroboration. In exchange, we are to get a new spin-off set in Los Angeles.

The glory days of Lennie Briscoe investigating cases and Jack McCoy trying them were never coming back, but I actually thought the current detectives and attorneys were quite interesting and believable. I enjoyed the original series more than any of its spin-offs because of its unique split in focus between the police and the courts. While there are probably lots of reasons that viewership has dropped over the years, I think one of the greatest threats to Law & Order was competition from itself. By now the series has covered just about every possible interesting scenario multiple times. Between NBC, USA, and TNT, you could practically watch a rerun from one of the related franchises all day, every day. With such an extensive catalog (and my poor cultural memory) many are as good as a new episode. Add in all of the CSI franchises, NCIS, and the rest of the crime procedurals produced in recent years and there is a real glut of material.

Still, it would have been nice to see them make 21 seasons and take the record as longest-running drama. As for Criminal Intent, they essentially jettisoned the entire cast at the beginning of this season. Jeff Goldblum’s character is ok, but it was really only Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of Robert Goren that made the show work. I would not be surprised to find that their ratings have fallen off a cliff in the last few months. Even Special Victims Unit has been going down hill recently, featuring cases filled with implausible and unexplained events. I assume the primary reason a version of Law & Order set in Los Angeles is expected to do well is that it will have a much lower casting budget than the original. Perhaps it will prove to be just as good, but it will be difficult to pique my interest in an entirely new cast of characters.

May 9, 2010

Cultural Memory

Filed under: Books,Gaming,Music,Personal — chadhogg @ 12:34 am

“Cultural memory” seems to me the best descriptor of what I want to discuss in this post, but it appears that I do not mean it in the usual sense. What I mean is individuals’ memories of culture, and how it colors their interpretation of new art and experiences. You might feel more comfortable thinking of this in terms of “tropes”, “memes”, or “allusions”.

You can find these cultural touchstones in music, when Metallica plays a melody from West Side Story, when Neil Young sings about Johnny Rotten and the King, when Bruce Springsteen writes an album based on the character of Tom Joad, and even (ugh) when Kid Rock fuses Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Examples abound in literature, such as Joseph Heller’s take on Achilles, any other work that uses that phrase, the similarities between one of Heinlein’s titular characters and a familiar figure (along with a vast number of other literary characters), and Nabokov’s obsession with The Raven. Television and film do the same thing: Community’s Abed builds a job as a short-order cook into a ruthlessly efficient underground market in chicken fingers that would impress Michael Corleone, Spaceballs visits the Emerald City in addition to its more obvious parodies, etc. Also, computer games, youtube videos, visual art, and any other form of creative expression. It is even useful in “real life”, like when someone inserts a quote from a movie into their conversation.

Tapping into someone’s cultural memory is a very powerful thing. Comparing a new situation or character to one with which people are already familiar can provide as much detail as thousands of words. When I described the name of a bill as Orwellian, it saved quite a bit of explanation of the absurdity of naming something as its exact opposite. Through the power of analogical reasoning, it may even be possible to succinctly communicate a concept that cannot be expressed directly. This is exactly what I was trying to do when, recently struggling to describe exactly my interpretation of the psyche of Michael Scott, I instead compared him to Willy Loman. Placing cultural memories in different settings or scenarios from those in which they originated can be fantastically humorous. Shared cultural memories can help to form bonds between people as well. This is my goal (and to get a laugh) when I reveal my poker hand with the proud statement “all red”.

All this is well and good, but what happens when someone attempts to communicate through a cultural memory that their audience does not have? Part of my decision to start reading through parts of the literary canon a few years ago was to expand my cultural memories. I made a very poor choice in starting with what many consider the greatest novel ever written. While the primary reason that I struggled until eventually realizing it was making me dread reading and gave up was the writing style, it would have been largely a futile effort even if that were not the case. To gain anything more than a surface understanding of Ulysses, it seems one must have a working knowledge of the entire source material of Western civilization.

In the case of Ulysses, much of what I was missing was material I had never read. My much larger concern, however, is that cultural memories rarely seem to make it into the long-term storage center of my brain. I can remember obscure and useless facts quite well and experiences of my own life fairly, but my memory of fiction is exceedingly poor. I was able to come up with the examples above largely from material that I either had been required to study academically, love dearly, or have consumed often or recently. I started writing short reviews of everything I read here partially to mitigate this problem (also, I crave the opportunity to discuss these works with others who might comment), but I am not sure it has worked well. For most of the books I have read in the last four years I could probably write everything I remember in a fairly short paragraph, and most of that would come from the first 10% of the book. “To The Lighthouse” is a great example — I remember only that a young child hoped to visit a lighthouse, his father told him it would be impossible due to weather, and his mother wanted him to hold out hope. I believe that was on the first page or so. Of the actual trip to the lighthouse I can remember very little. I think they were boarders in someone’s home, along with an artist. There was someone else who belittled the artist because he believed women could not be creative. Some people visited a beach and lost a piece of jewelry. Or maybe that was from a different novel. The only thing I can say for sure is that I did not enjoy it.

There are certainly times when this lack of long-term cultural memory can be useful. I can watch a movie, read a book, and play a computer game that I have not touched in several years and be surprised by the punchlines and surprise endings as if I was experiencing them for the first time. But most of the time it is quite frustrating. When people quote movies at me, I more often than not can recognize that there is supposed to be some subtext but do not know what it is. In the books I am reading I know I am missing layers of meaning that I should be able to understand. When I must wait years between installments of a series, I have no chance of being able to understand the latest installment without re-reading its predecessors.

Perhaps I should just be glad that my brain decides to save programming language syntax and the route to the grocery store instead of plot points …

May 8, 2010

NBC’s Community

Filed under: Uncategorized — chadhogg @ 2:37 am

If you’ve not watched the show “Community” Thursdays on NBC, you should give the first few episodes a try. I think it may have surpassed “The Office” as my favorite show in that lineup, as good Office episodes have become less and less common. “Parks And Recreation” is also quite good, but that is a topic for another time. “Community” is much like “Family Guy” in that more than half of the show is parodying other media, lampshade hanging, taking reasonable ideas to their illogical extremes, and one-liners. Initially character development was important, but more recent episodes have been mostly exploring how the characters interact in increasingly absurd scenarios.

That said, this week’s episode was especially made of win. I have never played paintball myself. It sounds like a lot of fun in theory, but I feared it would devolve into arguments about who shot first, whether or not someone had really been hit, etc. If it were played as in this episode, where people struck with paint immediately act like corpses, I would be all about that. I did try laser tag once many years ago, assuming that the use of sensors would mean that one’s weapon would be disabled as soon as they became a casualty. Instead there were no tactics whatsoever and opponents just stood across from each other scoring a dozen hits each before returning to power their weapons at their own base. Do there exist more “realistic” forms of this?

While I would not expect a comedy of this nature to be extremely careful about continuity, there was something that made little sense to me in this one. For at least the first half dozen episodes Jeff took no trouble to hide from Britta or anyone else his desire to get in her pants. Now when people say there is sexual tension between them he denies it. What gives?

April 26, 2010

Book Review: Henderson The Rain King

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 3:21 pm

For a time I enjoyed the rambling, conversational prose of Henderson The Rain King as a sort of stream-of-consciousness-lite, but it eventually became annoying as the narrator would jump to past events that may have not been previously discussed to draw analogies with his current situation. This and the philosophical tone of much of the dialogue and reflection make the non-narrative parts of the story difficult to follow. I cannot shake the feeling that Bellow has some powerful thesis about life, love, personality, suffering, and the relationship between man and beast. Unfortunately, I cannot reconcile Henderson’s character with my own and am at a loss to explain the understanding that he finally seems to gain. If I am going to follow a man into deep Africa and catastrophe, I’ll take “the horror, the horror” over “I want, I want, I want”.

April 18, 2010

Dream Job, Or Giving Up?

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 3:04 pm

I had the (mis)fortune of seeing Ke$ha on SNL last night, and it made me wonder: did her guitarist as a child hope to someday play mindless riffs that could barely be heard over synthesized bleeps and bloops while wearing a silver jumpsuit and space helmet? Somehow, I cannot imagine this being the case. My problem is not that he is a sideman or accompanist; the Band (Bob Dylan) and the Eagles (Linda Ronstadt) did so quite effectively, but they were essentially playing the same kind of music that they would choose to write themselves. Nor do I claim that hip-hop and rock & roll are mutually exclusive, having seen The Roots meld the two so well. But this performance was in no way synergistic.

My thought is that a lover of electro-pop and rap music would never choose to pick up the guitar, but would instead practice scratching records, mixing samples, singing, etc. The kinds of interests that would entice someone to learn to play guitar are exactly those that the music of Ke$ha repudiates. So does that guitarist actually love his work, or has he resigned himself to the fact that he will never be respected by his peers and accepted this as a way to monetize his talents? What about all of the instrumentalists supporting boy bands, pop divas, or American Idols? Have any of them ever gone on to successful careers of their own? Am I just closed-minded when it comes to musical genres?

It strikes me that you might ask the same question about the members of the house band on SNL and other late-night television shows? Most of those guys are jazz musicians who took an opportunity for a steady paycheck. They have to play commercially-acceptable music on these shows, but it does not seem quite so antithetical to their art. Certainly, members of these bands such as Michael Brecker, Lou Marini, Doc Severinsen, and Branford Marsalis have had acclaimed careers outside of those bands.

April 14, 2010

I Survived The Double Down

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 3:23 pm

The new Double Down “sandwich” from KFC consists of bacon and cheese between two fried (or grilled, but let’s be serious here) chicken fillets. Naturally it has been the butt of jokes and commentary as a prime example of America’s unhealthful, gluttonous lifestyle. Given all of the hype and the fact that fried chicken, bacon, and cheese are among my very favorite foods, I had to give it a try.

I bought the fried variety, without the Colonel’s Special Sauce. (I am always leery of such things; it could be based on mayonnaise or something equally disgusting.) The chicken was surprisingly good, and consisted of an actual cut of meat rather than reconstituted chicken slurry. The bacon was bacon, which means it was amazingly delicious. I was disappointed in the pepper jack cheese, which was spicy yet retained the rubbery look and feel of American cheese-like product. I am glad to have had the experience, but do not expect that I will be eating another one in the near future. Bread does add a certain something to a sandwich, and I think I would rather have one of the fillets with bacon and cheese in a roll.

At 540 calories, this sandwich confirms my thesis that even eating terribly unhealthful foods it is difficult to reach 2000 calories. The sandwich was an entire meal for me, and I do not think the half cherry danish I ate this morning and 1/10 of a pan of lasagna I will eat tonight will contain 3 times as many calories. It does contain nearly half of the daily recommended intake of fat and more than half the recommended intake of sodium, and I am guessing that a large proportion of the fat is saturated. Fortunately, I recently read an article that questions the role of fat in obesity and heart disease.

April 6, 2010

MusicMap & Recommendations

Filed under: Computing,Music,Personal — chadhogg @ 1:28 pm

MusicMap is a style of research that I have been interested in for some time, and hope to branch into at some point in my career. The idea is to provide a 2-dimensional model in which similar things are close to each other and dissimilar things are far away from each other. I could not find it stated explicitly anywhere, but my educated guess is that these relationships are based on data from last.fm, with the similarity between two musicians based on how frequently they appear together in the list of artists a user likes compared to how frequently only one of them appears.

There are legitimate questions as to whether or not the same people liking two artists really makes them “similar”, and the process of trying to embed very high-dimensional data into the plane inevitably results in artifacts that appear to affirm relationships that do not actually exist. Looking at this map, is the music of Duke Ellington really that similar to the music of Eminem and that distinct from Lee Morgan? Are Morgan and Ellington really more similar to Snoop Dogg than to each other and very far from Louis Armstrong? What does Garth Brooks have to do with rhythm & blues?

Not surprisingly, my own interests tend toward the extremes of the map, away from the vast desert of mainstream pop in the center of the continent and the northwestern electronica steppes. Start with the jazz musicians at the southwestern coast; move eastward through soul, funk, and blues to classic rock; drift northward through hard rock and into heavy metal (but avoiding the peninsula of extremism); then tiptoe to the northwest, sampling a taste of modern rock but never quite comfortable until you reach the punk coast; continue through to the peninsula of ska; and from there take a boat east to the isle of reggae. Where do you draw your own citizenship?

I created a last.fm account for myself a few months ago. If you too have an account, please be my “friend”. As a way to keep track of what I have listened to and look for trends, I find the service very useful. I am not so sure about its utility as a recommendation system, however. Last.fm uses what appears to be a binary model of interest: either you have listened to a musician or you have not. Perhaps they use weights based on how often you listen to a band, but the fact that some artists are much more prolific than others would complicate that. There is no easy way to differentiate between that which you love, like, or merely tolerate. (It is possible to “love” individual tracks, but I do not think that this is used for recommendations.) More importantly, there is no way to distinguish between musicians that you have not listened to because you are unaware of them and musicians that you have not listened to because you hate their music. Any system that attempts to learn without any negative examples is going to have serious difficulties.

Long ago I set out to create my own music recommender system for several class projects and my own interests, but found the task far too large for a single person. My system was to be album-based, so that it can work in spite of artists who have evolved significantly over their careers. Instead of the ambiguities in the last.fm data, users would be able to rate albums on a numeric scale, and would be encouraged to rank some music that they are familiar enough with to know that they do not like it. It would attempt to collect other data about albums (the year they were released, producers who worked on them, whether they are studio / live / compilations releases, etc) and about users (age, gender, geographical location, etc) to explicate how those features might explain some users’ ratings. Users would be able to generate custom recommendations by choosing an algorithm (k-means clustering, singular value decomposition, …) and a data source (user’s ranking, album data, user demographics) instead of the default. Unfortunately, even if I had been able to find the time to implement all of this, collecting all of this data from a large sample of the population would be impossible. That is the genius of last.fm; while the informative content of the data may be weak, it is collected automatically from people who opt-in.

I became a member of Pandora back when you actually had to pay for an account. I love the idea of their Music Genome Project attempting to find similarity based on actual musical characteristics, but they often seem to find the most superficial relationships while ignoring the factors that are important to me. Their system has a tremendous knowledge engineering requirement to determine the “genetic code” of each song, and it is amazing that they have been able to accomplish this feat. But does it actually make good recommendations? Only partially, in my experience. Based on a playlist of thrash and mainstream metal, it has selected the song “Hitman” by Metal Church for me. This is good; I like the song. But Pandora has played that song for me dozens of times and never any other track by Metal Church. It is possible that this is the one and only song they ever wrote in the style of music that I enjoy (I’ve not yet actively sought to hear the rest of their catalog), but this seems unlikely. If one of the objectives is to help me discover new music that I would like, then a little variety would be nice.

April 2, 2010

Book Review: Winesburg, Ohio

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 1:03 pm

I described the U. S. A. trilogy as more a collection of mostly unrelated narratives than my conception of a novel, but I should have saved that description for Winesburg, Ohio, which is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of a small town. While dos Passos usually followed his subjects through enough of their lives to develop significant characterizations, we see only a few minutes or a day in the lives of most of Sherwood Anderson’s characters. While the people are not unimportant, this is more a book of events and moments in time. Some of the individual stories are quite captivating, but most did not interest me.

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