a.out

The Fractured Genius of Lil Wayne

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:32:17 -0500

I wrote a piece on my cousin’s blog This City of Islands about the ways in which Lil Wayne’s 2007-2009 run of incredible mixtapes changed the face of hip-hop. Check it out.

pbowden: Awesome guitar cover of Tyler, The Creator’s “BIMMER”

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:03:55 -0500

pbowden:

Awesome guitar cover of Tyler, The Creator’s “BIMMER”

aubject: I’ve started leaving notes to my future self while...

Wed, 30 May 2012 13:28:49 -0400

aubject:

I’ve started leaving notes to my future self while high. Mostly so I can remember what I did, but also so I know how proud or embarrassed I should be of myself.

Today I am proud.

Paintballing with Hezbollah

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:48:57 -0400

Paintballing with Hezbollah:

nullarysources:

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.

pbowden: The long awaited fourth first episode of Colin,...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:42:00 -0400

pbowden:

The long awaited ~~fourth~~ first episode of Colin, Patrick, and my podcast, Postmodem, titled “El Paso Metaphysics” is now out. (Alternatively titled, 3 Beardy Nerds Bullshitting Near Microphones)

We’re sorry.

Around two years ago I cornered Colin and Phillip, plied them with drink, and got them to agree to do a podcast with me. After much planning, deliberation, and beer, we finally got around to recording and publishing an episode. I’m pretty proud of the result – my co-hosts are terrifyingly smart and sidesplittingly funny.

gangbanglerfish: nothing like realizing you are the huge ass,...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:39:41 -0400

gangbanglerfish:

nothing like realizing you are the huge ass, it is you

nprmusic: He recorded as The Notorious B.I.G. People knew him...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:12:00 -0500

nprmusic:

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..."

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:55:00 -0500

“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

Nirvana, on the first show of the In Utero tour, crammed this...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:12:13 -0500

Nirvana, on the first show of the In Utero tour, crammed this old Nevermind favorite into the end of a televised set.

At 1:53, you can see that Kurt is having problems with his guitar. By 2:11, he’s flung it down, almost petulantly. He looks terribly small and frail behind the microphone.

But at 2:16, I always start to get goosebumps, because I know something magical is about to happen. And then it does.

This one’s for the inimitable picardy3rd. Thanks for the...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:00:02 -0500

This one’s for the inimitable picardy3rd.

Thanks for the awesome hat, J. <3 <3

Please stop the ride, I want to get off

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:08:00 -0500

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.

Someday – maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe three months from now – my brain will calm down.

I can’t fucking wait.

On Whyday and the Celebration Thereof

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:47:21 -0400

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...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:19:08 -0400

According to Merriam-Webster, the most-frequently defined English words are, in descending order:

pretentious
ubiquitous
love
cynical
apathetic
conundrum
albeit
ambiguous
integrity
affect/effect

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?

Of Tabloids and Utilitarianism

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:52:00 -0400

I’ve always had a morbid fascination with supermarket tabloids. It never fails to impress me that people can make a living based on publishing almost¹ entirely fictional stories about sordid and debauched behavior by celebrities.

I am, of course, referring to the actions of American tabloids. Because English libel and defamation laws are so broad and wide-ranging, it is impossible for English tabloids to publish the standard “Justin Bieber Caught in Hotel Tryst with Orca” sort of spiel. This has an unfortunate side effect – rather than concocting fictions about celebrities, English tabloids dig into the lives of ordinary people, extracting, twisting, and putting on display the most unfortunate and horrifying incidents – rapes, murders, pedophilia, you name it. I feel that it’s this desire for provably-true gossip that has engendered the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, which yesterday defied all our expectations and grew even more lurid thanks to revelations that former PM Gordon Brown’s phone was hacked in order to reveal his infant son’s medical issues.

The contrast between the effects of British and American tabloids presents an interesting ethical dilemma. American tabloids are concerned almost exclusively with celebrities, and any sensible person knows to disregard the overwhelming majority of what tabloids print. It is unfortunate that celebrities must endure a bevy of falsehoods about them under the American system, but contrasted with the English system a much smaller number of people suffer. From a utilitarian point of view, America’s weaker libel laws – though they fail to stop the publishing of untruths – end up minimizing unhappiness: after all, tabloids don’t need to hack people’s phones if they can just make shit up.

It’s worth reflecting on the way that laws restricting free speech, even when enacted in the best of faith and with the best of intentions, can end up exerting a demonstrably negative effect on society.

I say “almost” because on a few occasions tabloids have published factual articles, such as when the National Enquirer broke the story of Rush Limbaugh’s prescription drug addiction. ↩

hipsterorathlete: Andrew Bogut is underwhelmed by the new...

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:30:00 -0400

hipsterorathlete:

Andrew Bogut is underwhelmed by the new Radiohead album.

Holy shit, I just found hipsterorathlete (via the inimitable Colin Barrett) and I think I’ve injured something from laughing so hard.

Manila: A Keynote Theme

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:49:33 -0400

I am a big fan of the following things:

Black text on a soft-yellow background
Helvetica Neue

As a result, I bring you Manila, a Keynote theme I made featuring black Helvetica Neue on a soft-yellow background. I’m about as far from a designer as one can possibly be, but I’ve used this theme in the past and people seemed to like it.

Download it here. To install it, place the file in the ~/Library/Application Support/iWork/Keynote/Themes folder.

I’m putting this in the public domain: feel free to do what you like with it. But if you like it, please drop me a line!

On Being a Member of the “Dumbest Generation”

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:44:36 -0500

If author Mark Bauerlein is to be believed, my generation – the generation that grew up with the Internet – is hopelessly stupid, trapped in narcissism and solipsism by smartphones, Facebook, and Twitter.

This is complete horseshit.

Compared to other generations, ours is the most supportive of equality for gays and lesbians, the least fettered by religion, the most supportive of women’s reproductive rights, the most economically optimistic (even in these dire economic times), and the least racially prejudiced. And, in case you forgot, we turned up at the polls in 2008 in record numbers to elect our nation’s first black president.

Perhaps most importantly, it is the members of this “dumbest generation” who have the courage to resist tyrants and dictators – in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and now Libya.

In truth, I feel sorry for people like Bauerlein. They repeat the pattern of hating and fearing the new generation, forgetting that we are not the ones who put greenhouse gases in the air and a hole in the ozone layer, that we have started no wars (but we have fought and died in them), and that it was their greed, not ours, that caused the global financial crisis.

Whatever you call this generation – Gen Y, Millenials, the Post-Cold-War-Kids – I’m proud to be one.

The Best Debugging Story I've Ever Heard

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 12:59:00 -0500

Back in the early 80’s, my dad worked at Storage Technology, a now-defunct corporate entity that made tape drives and pneumatic systems to drive these tapes at high speeds – for that period of time.

(Used under license from Laughing Squid. The original is available here.)

They had ~~hacked~~ engineered the tape drives such that you could have one central drive – the ‘A’ drive – connected to seven other ‘B’ drives, and a small operating system on some RAM attached to the A drive would delegate the reading and writing of data across all of the B drives.

Every time you started up the A drive, you had to insert a floppy disc into a peripheral drive connected to the A drive so that the operating system could be loaded onto the A drive’s RAM. The operating system was appallingly primitive - it derived its processing power from an 8-bit micro controller.

The target audience for this sort of thing were corporations with very large data sets - banks, magazines, et cetera - that needed to print huge amounts of address labels or bank statements.

One customer had a problem. In the middle of a print run, one particular A drive would stop working, causing the entire print run to stop. To restore the drive the attendants had to reboot the entire drive - and if this happened in the middle of a six-hour print job, there’d be a ton of expensive computer time lost and the whole operation would fall behind schedule.

So Storage Technologies sent out technicians. The technicians, despite their best efforts, could not reproduce the bug in test settings: this bug seemed only to happen in the middle of large print jobs. So, on the off chance that this was a hardware issue, they replaced everything they could - the RAM, the microcontroller, the disk drive, every conceivable part of the tape drive - but the problem kept happening.

So the technicians phoned up headquarters and called in The Expert.

The Expert got a chair and a cup of coffee and sat in the computer room – these were the days when they had rooms specifically dedicated to computers, after all – and watched it as the attendants queued up a large print job. He waited until it crashed - which it did. Everybody looked to The Expert – and he didn’t have a clue what was causing it. So he ordered that the job be queued up again, and all the attendants and technicians went back to work.

The Expert sat down in his chair again, waiting for it to crash. It took something like six hours of waiting, but it crashed again. He still had no idea what was causing it, other than the fact that it happened when the room was crowded. He ordered that the job be restarted, and he sat down again and waited.

By the third crash, he had noticed something. The crash occurred when the attendants were changing the tapes on an unrelated drive. And furthermore, he realized that the crash occurred as soon as one of the attendants walked across a certain tile on the floor.

This type of floor was made of aluminum tiles propped up by posts about 6 to 8 inches tall. The massive amount of wires that these computers needed were threaded under the floor tiles so that an unwary attendant wouldn’t trip over a crucial cable. The tiles were put together very tightly so that no debris would fall into the space where the wiring went.

The Expert figured out that one of the aluminum tiles was warped. When an attendant stood on the corner of the warped tile, the edges of the tiles rubbed together. As the plastic connecting the tiles rubbed together, they produced microsparks, which in turn caused RF interference.

Nowadays, RAM is much more thoroughly shielded from RF interference. But back then, this was not the case. The Expert figured out that the RF interference was corrupting the RAM and, in turn, the operating system.

The Expert called the maintenance office, got a new tile, installed it himself, and the problem went away.

thatbullshit: “At the height of his cocaine addiction, David...

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 13:14:30 -0500

thatbullshit:

“At the height of his cocaine addiction, David Bowie weighed only 95 pounds, hardly a healthy weight for 5’11”. He later said that he spent most of the mid-Seventies trying to perfect telekinesis and trying to keep Jimmy Page and witches from stealing his soul.”

This took me an hour to build. It’s probably a good thing...

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:58:50 -0500

This took me an hour to build.

It’s probably a good thing I went in for computer science rather than electrical engineering.