Mark's Musings

A long time ago, I remember watching a film about the ubiquity of television. I saw it some time in the 80′s but, thinking back on it now, it must have been made in the 70′s or 60′s. The part I remember of it was short, but it showed a family in their house, and no matter which way the family members looked, there was a television screen. No matter which way they turned, they could still follow the show they were watching without missing an interlaced frame of it.

Back then, of course, the video portion of the television was implemented using something called a “cathode ray tube”, which is big and bulky. And they had this weird 4:3 aspect ratio. Strange, right? Anyway, what sticks most in my mind is a short portion of this film: the homemaker wife in the kitchen being able to see the television show even when she’s putting a food tray in the oven to bake because the baking tray had a small CRT built into it.

I remember thinking how ridiculous this was and how much it made it sink home to a know-it-all teenager how bad a television addiction can be. Especially when it becomes culturally accepted. That’ll never happen, I thought to myself. Nobody could become that addicted to TV that they need to see it wherever they turn. I wish I could see it again, but it’s kind of hard to just use Google to find it, you know? I bet I’d be able to find it on YouTube if I knew what it was called or what the film was trying to promote.

What made me remember was this commercial I saw recently on TV: 2010 FIFA World Cup: Fan’s Point of View. And, what do you know, it’s now apparently culturally acceptable to watch TV everywhere you go.

Just don’t throw your iPhone in the oven by accident.

Yeah, so. Apparently Twitter is down right now. But there are so many 140-char-or-less thoughts I need to express! I wonder of there’s going to be a tweet flood once the service returns.

I’m typing this on my iPhone into the official wordpress app, just to see how painful it is. Answer: not too. I may try it again some time.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to tweet was that Julie and I just finished watching the first season of Veronica Mars tonight. It was loads of fun. They did a great job of revealing who the season’s bad guy was, and a casual viewer like myself was (mostly) satisfied with how the various plot threads were addressed. High School is not really my ideal setting, but detective fiction is right up my alley, so I was totally into the stories. Looking forward to season 2!

(OK, that’s really “Nook eReader” but I like it better the other way.)

Two weeks ago my wife bought me the Barnes & Noble “nook” e-book reader. I had looked at the Kindle and the nook, and I had a — completely subjective, I admit — preference for the color touch screen. The Kindle has a nice keyboard (and a little joystick too), but I was just attracted to the nook’s clean design.

I took it on a business trip to California to see how well it worked. My thought was it would be easier to carry the nook with me than the usual three paperbacks I take when I go on trips. I used to bring just two, but I ran out of reading material one time, and went hunting desperately through the airport bookshops during a layover trying to find something appealing to read.

The nook worked very well. I had no problems transferring pdfs (I used “calibre” before upgrading to Snow Leopard, but now calibre crashes on me), and I bought Singularity Sky to read based on recommendations I got prior to the trip.

I initially had problems reading the book. They weren’t due to any issues with the nook proper, but actually reading a book on a brand-new piece of hardware was very distracting. I kept wanting to play with the features — browsing available books, looking at what was free, flipping around on pdfs, using the built-in dictionary, and so on — instead of read. I think I restarted Singularity Sky three or four times before I finally actually was paying attention to the book itself.

Once I got past the newness factor, the nook made reading really easy. No more worrying about bookmarks, or losing my place, or forgetting a book (they’re all right there!). I did notice some rendering issues, though, especially with italic text, but I’m sure that can be fixed with a software upgrade. After playing with the fonts a bit, I found that using the “smallest” setting, with the built-in serif font, worked the best. Any larger, and I was turning pages too frequently, which in itself is a distraction.

My one complaint about the nook is the responsiveness of the touch screen. They must have skimped a bit on the CPU because it’s kind of sluggish when compared with, e.g., an iPhone. But it works; it’s serviceable. And the built-in 3G and WiFi work very well for browsing and downloading.

One of the biggest annoyances I have with sites like Amazon is that they give you a single number to rate something like a DVD. And DVDs cannot be rated properly with a single number. If I tell you a particular DVD scored 4.5 stars, what does that mean to you? Does it refer to the film or TV show’s quality? Does it refer to the quality of extras that come on the DVD? Does it refer to the quality of the transfer process? Does it refer to the packaging? How does that one number allow me to sort through multiple releases of the same film to see which one is the best one to get? This is broken.

(also, my latte is too foamy)

When I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, one of my motivations was that Google Reader gave me more control over the RSS feeds I was interested in. First, it let me “tag” each feed, and the feeds for a given tag would be aggregated together and sorted by time. This was exactly what I was looking for. What I didn’t know I was looking for, but was thrilled once I figured it out, was that I wasn’t limited to one tag per feed – a feed could have several tags, and show up under multiple folders. Of course, Reader is smart enough to know that once you’ve read a particular entry under one tag/folder, you don’t need to see it again under any alternate tags or folders.

Anyway, I want the same thing for twitter. I’d like to tag each follower (friends, Hollywood, alpha geeks, CEOs, and so on), and then be able to select which tag I’d like to read. I think I’d follow more people if I knew I wouldn’t get flooded by Miles O’Brien every time I fired up the app. Is there an iphone app that lets you tag twitterers?

John Scalzi points us towards Orson Scott Card’s whinging, in which Card says:

A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as “mentally ill”?

That’s a great question: how long before bigotry is considered a mental health issue? Bigotry is an incredible source of evil in the world, it would be awesome if it could be classified as a mental illness. Alas, it is so pervasive that it appears to be part of the human condition. It may be some time before prevention (let alone a cure) can be deployed so, until then, we’ll just have to deal with it as best we are able. And poke fun at those who flash their bigotry in full view of the world.

I do not want the FCC to be the parent to my children. I am the parent to my children and I resent government interference in that.

Unfortunately, there are many out there who would happily cede their parental responsibilities to the government. Unfortunately, they are loud. Unfortunately, they change the laws of the land. The particular law in question regards advertising in television programming. In kids’ television programming, specifically. Basically, the law says that shows cannot endorse products, implicitly or explicitly. Advertising is the only method by which products can be promoted. When a show crosses the line, then it’ll be fined. Why? Because most kids can’t tell the difference between advertising promoting products and authority figures teaching facts. I don’t dispute this. What I do object to is making it easier for people to toss the remote to their kids and say, here watch something because I need to work / nap / hang out with friends.

I’m not taking the other extreme, either: I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t get to see TV. My kids watch shows, and our TiVo’s “Now Playing” list is evidence of that. And if that isn’t sufficient, our DVD collection is. However, we vet every show they see, and they never watch them unsupervised. Doing housework counts as supervision, by the way, because you can still keep an eye on what they’re seeing, even if you don’t sit there with them every second.

Is TV really the only recourse available to people? Is there nothing else available to keep the children occupied? Dickens had Scrooge famously say “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”, but I think we can unironically ask “Are there no toys? Are there no books?” Is there really and truly nothing else but TV for children?

I’m left wondering what people did before TV came along. My grandfather likes to tell stories about what he did as a kid, and that was well before TV was even heard of, let alone commonplace (he was in his mid-twenties when the first commercial TV licenses were issued). Somehow, his parents managed.

The internet does not suffer from this sort of regulation. We’re fortunate in that our anti-censorship voices are currently louder than those advocating severe restrictions. How long will that last? Will the FCC eventually be given the authority to control what is said and shown? After all, parents could hand the computer over to their kids and say “have fun”. Adding interactivity just makes it more likely that kids will see or read something their parents would prefer they didn’t. Sites regulate themselves, depending on the audience they’re going after. Youtube, for example, disallows pornography (which of course provides an opportunity for pornographers to create their own site). Do we want the FCC to tell youtube what is acceptible? Or do we want the parents and other consumers of Youtube to define that?

Ought the FCC even be allowed to dictate content? The FCC is essentially being used as an anti-first-amendment tool right now: they are a government entity and they are telling non-government people what is allowed and disallowed.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. And yet, if enough people want it, congress goes right ahead and makes those laws. I say strike them down. I want the FCC to be handling the licensing of the spectrum, and not defining the limits of what the spectrum is used to transmit. This autumn, we get to find out if the Supreme Court agrees with me, or with parents who are interested enough in their children to stop them from hearing “swear words”, but disinterested enough to not pre-screen the television those children watch.

The easier it is for people to allow the television to substitute for parenting, the more people will do it. I say: make it harder. Maybe the need to find alternatives will increase our ability to provide them.

So, the last of the big three has passed on, bringing an era of my life, and the lives of many others, to a close.

Is it possible to disprove gravity? Enh. I know that Scott Adams likes to say silly things in order to get a reaction, but I think he’s misunderstanding something here. He asks the question:

So here is my question of the day for people who accept evolution as a fact: If cosmologists someday reached a consensus that free-floating brains are infinitely more likely than our current notion of reality, would you agree with the following statement: “The theory of evolution is false.”

What do you think? If scientists found free-floating brains, would that automatically mean magnetism (which is a fact as much as evolution is) doesn’t exist? Whether or not we’re part of a gigantic simulation doesn’t change what we can observe here on Earth. To put it tautologically: Is reality real?

There are more interesting questions to ask about the universe than these, surely.

I’ve been using the Pimsleur CDs for a while now, to learn Japanese.

OK, I’ve only used the actual CDs once, to rip to iTunes, but it amounts to the same thing. And it’s a lot easier to carry an iPod about than a stack of 45 CDs. Yep, 45. Each of the three levels of Pimsleur Japanese contain 30 half-hour lessons. Fifteen CDs per level means 45 CDs. Which means 45 hours of pure, solid Japanese learning.

You might think I’d be nearly fluent by now, but you’d be disappointed.

There are pros and cons to this method of learning. One of the pros is that I can listen to the lesson on my way to work. The driving part of my brain seems to be nearly completely separate from the translating part of my brain. It’s only when having to deal with a tricky traffic situation that I need to hit pause — much like when listening to the radio is normally not distracting, except when you’re trying to concentrate on a particular task.

I’d drive to work and do a lesson at the same time. My commute is a bit shorter than a half hour, so I’d sit in my car for a few minutes after parking, and finish up. It worked out rather well.

Another ‘pro’ is that the way the vocabulary and grammar are taught (the ‘Pimsleur’ method) seems to work pretty well for me. I’d have to listen to a lesson two or three times, but it would eventually sink in. And getting things 100% right isn’t necessary, as the next lesson would review what was taught in the previous.

Now come the ‘cons’. Are there enough pros to outweigh the cons?

The first is that the way the lessons are constructed, they mostly teach you how to translate English into Japanese on the fly. This is certainly a useful skill, but it’s pretty much the only skill that’s taught. There are short segments where the lesson switches to ‘now we’ll have a conversation in Japanese’, but these are few and far between. The vast majority of the learning comes from the (native English-speaking) narrator saying things like “Tell her the weather is nice” (Ii otenki desu ne) or “Order a beer” (Biru ippon onegaishimasu) or “Invite him in” (Douzo ohaidi kudasai).

I became very good at going from English to Japanese, flipping the word order on the fly, as in Japanese the verb comes last. For example, ‘I live in Kyoto’ becomes ‘Kyoto at live-exist’ (Kyoto ni sunde imasu), with the ‘I’ implied. Or ‘I have three children’ becomes ‘three people children exist’ (San nin kodomo ga imasu), with the possessive implied. I actually do have three children, so this lesson was perfect! Hitori otokono to futari onnanoko ga imasu. Mada chiisai desu. See? I thought of what I wanted to say in English, translated into Japanese, and romaji-ified the result. Piece o’ cake. Of course, it would be better if I could think in Japanese first, without going through the English step. But perhaps I’m asking too much.

At the beginning of each lesson, they present a short conversation that both tested your knowledge of the previous lesson and sometimes introduced new vocabulary. This, for the most part, was the extent of the work done to help your brain understand spoken Japanese. Like any beginner, I would first translate the Japanese into English in my head, and then translate the English into concepts that I grokked. The second translation was automatic, of course, but the fact that I still need, after 90 lessons, to go through the intermediate English step is disappointing.

That brings us to the next ‘con’, which is lack of Japanese direction — by which I mean spoken instructions as to what to do, say, or learn next. Partway through the first level, probably around lesson 14 or 15, the narrator – and I call him that for lack of a better term – stated that, as the lessons progressed, more and more instructions and directions will be given in Japanese. Oh would that were true. Instead, a couple of commonly-used phrases (e.g. ‘listen and repeat please’) were used, but nearly all the rest of the direction was in English. Some half-hearted attempts were made to increase the amount, but were eventually abandoned.

Another ‘con’ is the sliding-window nature of the vocabulary. They might spend three or four lessons introducing, reinforcing, and reviewing a topic, but once the topic was covered, it was never used again. Certainly some of the knowledge is used throughout, and some basic vocabulary (conjunctions, common verbs, and so on) is ubiquitous by necessity, but much of the vocabulary is abandoned once it’s considered ‘mastered’. The fault lies with the format, of course. Each lesson lasts 30 minutes, which provides just enough time for a bit of review, introducing some new vocabulary or grammar, and then working on that. There is no way to fit everything learned in every previous lesson. With a human teacher, you’d be able to work on parts you’re struggling with, and set aside parts that come naturally to you.

One other problem is that the later lessons (mostly levels 2 and 3) are geared towards business needs. “Where’s the overhead projector?” / “I need a copier.” / “Is Mr Ito available for a meeting?” / “I need more time to prepare the presentation.” Of course, this is great if you’re going to Japan for business, but less helpful when you’re studying the language for my reasons.

Yeah, Mark, why are you learning Japanese anyway?

Two words: Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. Er, I mean “Spirited Away”. The Japanese title is complicated. ‘Sen’ and ‘Chichiro’ are names; ‘to’ means ‘and’; ‘no’ indicates possessive. “Sen and Chichiro’s …” And then we’re left with kamikakushi, which means abduction by spirits. Googling for more information resulted in this quote: “The core definition of kamikakushi is the sudden and mysterious disappearance of individuals attributed to their abduction by some supernatural being.” Yow.

Sen and Chichiro’s Ghostly Abduction? Sen and Chichiro’s Mysterious Disappearance? Yeah, ‘Spirited Away’ is much better, given its dual meaning.

Anyway, back to my main point: I am learning Japanese so that I can watch this film in Japanese. I’ve seen it many times already. Once with the English dub, and the rest in Japanese with English subtitles. I’ve seen it enough times now that I could watch it without the subtitles and still know what’s going on. But I want to watch it and listen to the Japanese and understand it. Pimsleur Japanese isn’t doing that for me.

To answer the question I posed earlier: do the pros outweigh the cons? Despite all I said, the answer is yes. The ability to listen to the lessons on my way to work and the ability to translate English into Japanese – even though it’s pretty simple grammar and vocabulary – is a great step forward in learning the language. I do feel as if I could “get by” in Japan were I to visit. And I would like very much to visit.

Until I can, I’ll be watching Spirited Away and re-listening to all my language CDs.