Mitchell Prothero, writing in Vice Magazine:
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
This is one of the most fascinating pieces about the Middle East I’ve read, well, possibly ever — certainly this year. Read every word.
This right here is some Hideo Kojima/John le Carre shit. Terrifying, hilarious, inspiring, frightening journalism.
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He recorded as The Notorious B.I.G. People knew him as Biggie Smalls, or Biggie. Fifteen years ago today, he was murdered when he was only 24 years old. Yet he’s one of the most revered, emulated and biggest-selling rappers in the game.
Biggie’s voice doesn’t sound like anybody else’s. It’s plummy, wheezy, humid. It sounds like it comes from deeper in his chest than other people’s voices.
“Computer science is not really about computers — and it’s not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes, and geometry isn’t really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don’t really understand it very well, it’s very easy to confuse the essence of what you’re doing with the tools that you use.” — Hal Abelson’s 1986 lecture on SICP
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This one’s for the inimitable picardy3rd.
Thanks for the awesome hat, J. <3 <3
Many people write about what it feels like to be depressed. Some of them even do it well. But few people write about the experience of mania.
This is not surprising, on reflection. Outside of those afflicted with bipolar disorder or methamphetamine addiction, most people will never experience mania. It is rare – thank goodness – and is thus naturally marginalized. But unlike other marginalized disorders, our culture values the fundamental symptoms of mania: energy, élan, creativity, willingness to go without sleep, and a drive to succeed are, when properly controlled, positive and admirable traits.
My manic experiences are, I’ll admit, pleasurable at first. Colors seem more vivid, my mood grows brighter, I wake up earlier and well-refreshed, and the air takes on a particular crispness. Yet the fact that mania’s first expressions are so subtle and inoffensive makes it difficult to recognize its onset. And the disappointment experienced when happiness reveals itself as nascent mania is particularly poignant.
It takes a few weeks before I start noticing the psychological changes. I find myself making lofty, unrealistic promises, starting overly-ambitious projects, spending money foolishly. It becomes difficult to converse with people: I hop from topic to topic, distracted from ever fully exploring a thought. (I’ve learned that if my conversational parter starts looking askance or with pity at me, I have been changing the subject too often.) My appetite diminishes drastically; when I force myself to eat, food is overwhelmingly flavorsome, well past the point of unpleasantness. My memory becomes unreliable and spotty. I fill up notebooks with ideas, most of which are extraordinarily bad.
At its worst, I am sort of torn along by this torrent of energy, leaving a trail of angry people and hurt feelings behind. The experience, as a whole, is akin to having a high-pitched screech pumped into your ears at all hours of the day: it is overwhelming, omnipresent, and utterly impossible to ignore. No serious work is possible while in a manic state, as it is simply impossible to expect a manic person (I use that term rather than ‘maniac’) to pay attention. Such a person is not capable of doing so.
I have a souvenir from my last manic phase: an essay, written at the height of a three-day bout of sleeplessness, in which I attempt to record some of my thoughts on the nature of science. It is almost charmingly illucid, full of half-finished sentences, incoherent ideas and grandiose comparisons. It breaks my heart every time I read it.
Mania sucks. Big time. But it’s the burden I must face. And what keeps me going is the knowledge that this too shall pass, that someday – maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe three months from now – my brain will calm down.
I can’t fucking wait.
This year’s Whyday has come and gone with a minimum of fuss or fanfare. If you’re not familar with _why the lucky stuff, he was – and I use the tense advisedly – a prolific Ruby programmer, author of projects such as Shoes (a GUI toolkit), Camping (a microframework), and Hackety Hack (a Ruby environment and tutorial aimed at beginners to programming). In 2009, he deleted his blogs and his Github account without warning or explanation; Whyday is a holiday of sorts meant to commemorate his legacy and inspire the sort of creativity for which _why became famous.
To me, _why’s departure is an example of the worst parts of the programmer archetype – it was spiteful, histrionic, and thoughtless. It is perfectly acceptable to leave a community, and I suppose it is also acceptable, if somewhat self-centered, to call attention to the act of doing so. Yet it strikes me as utterly childish to do this by attempting to destroy all of one’s contributions.
_why’s attempt at torching his legacy was obviously fruitless. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum – once expressed, they become part of the collective discourse and cannot be caged or redacted. The fact that his source code was in Github, a service designed around redundant ownership of code, makes such an attempt even more laughable. Deleting his accounts and his repositories served only to inconvenience others in the name of making a point: it was truly saddening to watch his collaborators scramble to reassemble the various pieces of his corpus.
By departing in this manner, _why enormously inconvenienced anyone who worked on or depended on his code. I can attest to this personally: I worked on two projects that incorporated _why’s syck code for reading and writing YAML. I was tasked with removing syck from MacRuby; it was rather an involved process, considering that the replacement code needed to match the original API call-for-call to remain backwards compatible1. Had he been around, I might have been able to ask him questions: no dice.
No other creative discipline would forgive actions like _why’s, yet the Ruby community, caught in some peculiar Stockholm syndrome, has actually commemorated the anniversary of his departure. To be sure, _why’s impact on Ruby was enormous – I, along with many others, learned metaprogramming from Dwemthy’s Array. Yet at this point, it seems more likely to me that he’ll be remembered for his departure more than his accomplishments.
It is interesting to note that replacing syck with libyaml provided, if I remember correctly, a 10-15x speedup. ↩
According to Merriam-Webster, the most-frequently defined English words are, in descending order:
This list utterly delights me. It seems a remarkably human sort of list: no scientific or technical terms are present. Rather, these words – ‘pretentious’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘integrity’ – are reflections of day-to-day concerns, encounters, and difficulties. And the inclusion of ‘love’ – the only single-syllable word on the list, and the only one not of Latin or Greek origin – is particularly wonderful.
Aside from ‘love’, this list is notably skewed towards the negative aspects of human existence. Nobody wants to be described as ‘apathetic’ or ‘cynical’. Do we like our insults to be couched in rhetoric? Are our praises more straightforward than our criticisms?