Oblomovka

2008-09-26»

Got to run to work, but … can’t… keep… away from today’s national trainwreck installment.

Yesterday looks like it must have been a terrible polling day for McCain. The average lead for the national daily polls so far is +4-+5 for Obama, and given that most of these polls are averaged over a number of days, that hides a big leap in yesterday’s polling.

Twitter has automated the “searching for McCain” trick I talked about yesterday, and spun off a separate site (reality has once again already transcended my lame predictions: you don’t even have to hit reload for this crack-delivery-mechanism). Selected twitters are going to be running under the debate feed tonight on Current.TV. That seems a bad idea, and calling it “hack the debate” sseems an even worse one. Whatever real-time filtering you can do, the distributed nation of Anonymous will still evade it. Could this be the debate that rickrolls a nation?

I’m probably playing some subconscious counter-over-under-expectations game for my man Obama, but I don’t think he’ll necessarily rule tonight as some are expecting. If people are looking for Reaganesque smackdowns or answers shorter than a paragraph, that’s not what he does. And I don’t think he’s going to suddenly drop the umming and ahhing (though I do expect at least one pre-hearsed speech-Obama moment). By contrast, McCain’s calm talking-point delivery is going to contrast with the crazy-like-a-fox image that electors currently have of him. I think what it might do is moderate the frenzy of today’s reactions a little. less of a debate bump, more of an attenuation. I think that Obama will maybe settle back to being up by two, and the pundits will scream that he lost the debate. Fingers crossed for something better.

On Palin: I feel for her in the Couric interview. She is way, way out of her depth, but outside of the most cringeworthy parts, she does okay as a generic politician answering generic points. In the clips where she completely loses it and just babbles incoherently, I think I recognise a little what’s going on. She launches into her answer, screws up a bit, and then a whole part of her head lights up going “OMG THIS IS KATIE COURIC”. There’s a real isolation when you’re on your own responding to a question in a big media organization. All around you, dozens of people bustle and operate in the most professional way possible, because they’re absolutely the top in their field. From the make-up to the lights person, they know exactly who they are and what they are doing. The person interrogating you is a familiar, famous, face. Sometimes that leads you to your own shell of professionalism: you click in and play the role. Other times, if you have even a smidgen of self-doubt, it kicks your feet away from you. You’re surrounded by people who know their job; and you know nothing about yours. It must be like a nightmare for her.

One thing is for sure: there’s going to be a hell of a market for the insider story of the McCain campaign, post-election.

Here’s the best (Obama-leaning) piece on what happened yesterday, for my mind:

It was McCain who had urged Bush to call the White House meeting but Democrats made sure Obama had a prominent part. And much as they complained later of being blindsided, the whole event turned out to be something of an ambush on their part—aimed at McCain and House Republicans.

“Speaking professionally,” said one Republican aide, “They did a very good job.”

When Bush yielded early to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) to speak, they yielded to Obama to speak for the assembled Democrats. And it was Obama who raised the subject of the conservative alternative and pressed Paulson on what he thought of the idea.

House Republicans felt trapped — squeezed by Treasury, House Democrats and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate. And while McCain spoke surprisingly little after asking for the meeting, he conceded that it appeared there were not the votes for the core Paulson plan without major changes.

Obama’s done a great job of taking control of the Democrats. Of course, it helps when they think you’re going to win, rather than scrabbling to distance themselves from Bush, McCain and each other, as the Congress Republicans seem to be right now.

Oh, and my favourite quote so far on that version of the non-deal:

“Bush is no diplomat,” said a Democratic staffer, “but he’s Cardinal freaking Richelieu compared to McCain. McCain couldn’t negotiate an agreement on dinner among a family of four without making a big drama with himself at the heroic center of it. And then they’d all just leave to make themselves a sandwich.”

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2008-09-25»

There’s now a fairly large confessional group attached to those of us addicted to 538: a friend of mine described hitting reload there as an “instant election endorphin hit”. God knows, it’s getting more like crack these days, in more ways than one.

I think the reason why there’s such an addiction to polls — perhaps more in this election, perhaps no more than usual — is a phenomena that I’ve described before: it’s just impossible to gauge what other people think at this scale, and with this level of cultural separation. Most of the people who supported Obama were spooked by Palin, just because it was so impossible to predict how she would play out. Revitalizing VP? Nightmare neophyte? When I watched her convention speech, I was convinced that she’d blown it: she seemed like an amateur reading from a script.

I know well enough that my impressions are not the same as others: but where do you find out what others really think, and in what proportion. You’d think that the Net would be good for this, but there’s no proportion there: you can hear people’s opinions, but only individual opinions, never an aggregate.

On my Twitter stream, my friends were saying predictable things about the Palin speech. But then I switched to searching for palin through the public sum of twitters. It was like a sudden reveal: almost everyone was talking about how well she’d done, and how Obama must be scared now, and how awesome she was. It was chastening: particularly because, if you were going to ascribe a bent to Twitter, it would probably be a liberal one. (I doubt that now: like blogging, it may have started with a majority in new-san-fran-londonaustincisco, but it’s everybody’s now). Palin’s speech was, sure enough, a hit.

Now today, and cut to McCain’s current randomness. How’d it play? If the Twitter searches mean anything, really badly. For people who don’t seem to really care about politics, Letterman’s drubbing of McCain in tonight’s show is all there is right now. From the moment the preview tapes got uploaded to YouTube, when people talked about McCain, that’s what they talked about. And I really didn’t detect much sympathy for McCain.

Like the Palin moment, it’s mostly about the spectacle. It’s not so much about whether they themselves could support the person, it’s whether, in the distant arena of politics, the candidate make a good or bad throw. As the convention bump showed, that kind of impression can be transitory. But it’s going to be hard to turn this one into a positive. I wonder if the presidential run that started on Letterman will end there too?

Anyway, I think in times like this what people are looking for in polls and the Net, is just an aggregated taste of what everybody is saying: I do wish there was time before the debate to create a webpage that had three dials, one for Republicans, one for Democrats, and one for Independents. You’d pick one, and spend the debate (if it happens) twiddling your dial, up for good, down for bad. The stream of values gets ajaxxed over to the server(s), which average the total value they get, and report it back in realtime to be displayed on the same meter (so you can see how others in your demo are reacting). It’d be live-streaming bandwidth/latency intensive, but averaging would be pretty simple and parallelizable function. Probably gameable, but maybe not in this timeframe — or maybe not if it got popular enough. World wide focus group!

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2008-09-23»

People think trolls are other people: He/she is a troll, you are a feisty opponent, while I merely have strong opinions. And it’s true that some people do turn into trolls full-time, presumably while growing hair out of their ears and developing a head-under-shoulders look (or is that gonks?)

But really, we’re all just one “submit” button away from being a troll. I’m writing this meta-narrative because I was just about to write a long aggressive dismissal of a column someone had written about the “death of e-mail”. What stopped me was the following:

• It’s about the “death of e-mail” . E-mail and opinions on spam are just huge magnets for inevitable trollish arguments. Not because some people are trolls, but because the discussion is frequently heated, and definitively unbounded.
• It’s a column. Columns are supposed to elicit responses: it’s their fitness function: if a column gets a lot of responses, editors think they’re working. (I’ve never been very good at this part of columnating, to be honest. I tend to go more for the ooh-wee-ooh Criswell Predicts peer into the future. You want comments? Get a blog.)
• I have profound psychological damage from discussing e-mail and spam. After pursuing it as an intense topic of research for a year or so, I can rant for hours about it to you — even though you have done nothing to harm me. Yet. You may well do so after the fifth hour. Going after someone who says very mildly the wrong thing about e-mail (or any other topic, for that matter) is the way that those who have suffered for their knowledge take it out on those who have not.

So I just hit <delete> on my entire flame. I tell you this, because I think more people do that than you’d think. I want you to know that when you next do it, and feel that weird emptyness from having denied yourself the troll-id pleasure of going nuclear on somebody’s arse-delivered opinions, the ghosts of a billion other flames are cheering you and welcoming your flame to the blissfully quiet troll afterlife. Some things are better left unsaid.

Of course, that never stops about three hundred other people with exactly the same opinion spooging all over the Internets immediately after you. But your ascetism has been noted.

9 Comments »

2008-09-22»

Because I didn’t shave my beard off as promised, I now have to lose a few pounds elsewhere, so as from today I’m messing with my eating habits. Not a diet, because everyone knows diets are bad, you just end up yo-yoing your weight and biting everyone’s heads off (mm, delicious heads, full of low-carb brains). No, I need to do a little gear-shift to a lifestyle that perhaps doesn’t involve random mealtimes whose name is determined by how long I can be bothered to use the microwave for (hot pizza == dinner. warm pizza == supper. cold pizza == breakfast!).

Getting up the motivation change my bad (but delightfully familiar) habits is hard for me. Like most geeks, I mostly feel that my body is just something that keeps my cerebellum from dragging in the dirt. Still, some things get me going. As you may have deduced from this blog, I have a fascination with those who wander off the mainstream in ways that I both admire and gawp at, so I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Ray Kurtzweil’s Fantastic Voyage (mental note: what a great parody show title that would make).

The three word summary for Fantastic Voyage is “The Singularity Diet”.

Everyone who, like me, was promised that John Macarthy and Daniel Hillis were seconds away from booting up Skynet in 1983 and creating a glorious hive mind as soon as their were as many Commodore 64s as neurons in the human brain, has become slowly resigned to the fact that infinite lifespans and the serious planning of a Far Edge Party was, and is, always going to be another 20 years away for the forseeable future. Kurtweil , who also wrote The Singularity is Near, is self-evidently more optimistic, but even he is running out of spare decades.

Therefore, he and his medical advisor Terry have made the sensible decision to simply stop aging until life-extension reaches the crucial “average life expectancy increases one year, every year” point.

If you were going to make me stop and pay attention to a diet, hinting that it might freeze my decrepitation long enough to allow me to download my brain into a Moravec Bush is probably going to win me over. As in all transhuman endeavours, the science of Fantastic Journey is so magnetically attractive (and heavily cited) you almost buy in, and then, bang!, suddenly they’re off wandering off talking about drinking six barrels of alkine water a day and sitting in a room for a day a week have nutrients injected intravenously into their perfectly pickled bods.

Jon Ronson would love and scorn this nuttiness, but really my sympathies are more with Julian Dibell’s attitude, which is more there but for the grace of God — oh shit, even with the grace of God and an attachment to contemporary mores in my favor, I’m almost with you. Stop messing with my mind!

Yes, [it] flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code.

No matter how you feel about the Singularity, reading about someone who takes hundreds of separate pills every day so that he can live for a thousand plus years does at least make you think about eating a salad sometimes.

Well, it’s day one of not eating crap, and I should say that I’m already more sceptical that at any point reading the book. Point one: shirataki soy/yam noodles maybe the cutting edge of low-carb nutrition, but I’m currently thinking their “authentic aroma” may just be too high a price to pay for a bazillion years of bliss. Someone upload me a doughnut!

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I was rather hoping somebody would ask me about race in the Presidential elections, because I wanted the opportunity to do a great deal of processing on that. Instead, Julian asks:

As ever the most disturbing thing about the elections for a Brit is the obsession with religion and religious weird science and all its implications. Asking all the Republican candidates their position on creationism, science and right to life seemed downright bizarre. I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine Gordon Brown and David Cameron being subjected to that (though perhaps in an Irish election).

Well, first you do have to pick out a number of variables here. The religious stuff does tend to leap out, but it’s easy to overstate it. One of the reasons why the candidates proffer opinions on these topics is that 20% of the population wants to make sure they’re not secret Dominionists, and another 20% wants to ensure they’re not going to start aborting 40 million Christian babies as soon as they get into office.

To use the clarifying effect of time rather than space, in the political sense, it’s somewhat equivalent to Labour party figures talking about unilateral disarmament or nationalisation in the Eighties. Much of the language was trying at that time to convey to the wider group “Look, we’re not freaking CRAZY”, while still reassuring their base “Don’t worry, we are indeed your kind of CRAZY”. After eight years, I don’t know what the talismanic incantations are for the bases in a Brown/Cameron election: but I’m guessing they will be there. Probably something to do with immigration.

Anyway, most US independents I speak to discard this religious noise with the same resigned aplomb as someone who doesn’t seriously believe politicians when they talk about “making Britain great again” or railing against the Nanny state.

I should say I’m not really drawing strong comparisons here between the nature of American religion and minor political issues in the UK — I’m just trying to contextualize the relative importance of the religion debate. Having c-r-a-z-y ideas about religion and holding down a deskjob (or even the Presidency) is not considered automatically inconsistent here: largely because being batshit about something religious has a fine historical pedigree in the United States. (Currently, that wonderful tolerance is somewhat constrained by the fact that nobody trusts the atheists — or, for that matter, the Mormons. Time, I think, will process all of this: after allfreaking out about Catholics is within living memory in the UK, too.)

For most, churchs remain in America what they were to the British right up until the 1950s: a place where you go for a nice quiet sit-down, meet your neighbours, maybe pick up some tins of food if you’ve fallen on hard times, and sometimes tentatively chat about deep things without feeling a berk. In the UK, I sense those roles are now played by, respectively, parks on a sunny day, the occasional power cut or flood, the dole office, and the offtopic corners of World of Warcraft forums.

And still, I hope, the tolerance grows. “No religion” as a stated preference sits between 14-16% in both the UK and in the United States, and continues to swell. I hope to live to see our first Goth President with an Emo Orthodox atheist vice-president being sworn in on a copy of Drawing Down the Moon – and perhaps on that glorious day, the wisdom of a Jedi Knight will finally grace the British Cabinet.

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2008-09-20»

Went out to SF in SF, where science fiction writers read their works out loud to earth humans. Traditionally, I’m the sort of science fiction reader who gets bought those huge “The Entire Fucking Year in Science Fiction” anthologies by a relative at Christmas, reads them all the way through, and then never buys anything else for another year. These days, I’m spending a lot of time very very close to science fiction fans (it’s a thing we new fans like to do: stand uncomfortably close to you), which means I get to hear about the good stuff without having to wait for Christmas and/or having no-one to talk to about it. Istill have not got to the point where I can remember anyone’s names, let alone annoyingly recite their own plot points back to them at cons, so real aficionados have to introduce all authors to me as “you remember, Danny, that guy who wrote that X you said you really liked”

The speaking writers this month were Nick Mamatas, who is that guy who writes the Cthulhu mythos story in the style of Jack Kerouac, and David Levine who is that guy who wrote that Tk’tk’tk story. They were interviewed by Terry Bisson, who I only found out afterwards is totally that guy who wrote They’re Made Out of Meat.

The stories they read were great: during his tale, Mamatas shifted slowly in my mind into the very slightly new category of that guy who wrote the Cthulhu mythos story in the style of Raymond Carver. And after Levine‘s reading, I have him mentally categorised now as “The Ted Chiang of Toontown”. If I’d heard either of those descriptions independent of my own head, I’d want to go read them, and so should you.

4 Comments »

2008-09-19»

Me, I think Harper will still get in.

Ohhhh, those *other* American elections?

So this is all with the proviso that this far out we really can’t predict anything. But, you know, what’s the point of predicting if you already know what’s going to happen? Also, I have to have something to show for my endless obsession with the pollster sites.

For those of you not keeping track, here’s the expert opinion (which is really me just drinking down Nate’s 538 analyses with a heavy pinch of digestive salts):

First, despite all the freaking out and revelling in the last week or two, Obama is still seen as the favourite. But like 2000, it’s all very close.

Second, the battleground states this year aren’t Florida and Ohio — at the moment it’s more complex than that, partly because Obama’s team want it to be more complex than that. That’s their (and the Howard Dean democratic party’s) “50 state strategy” in a nutshell — don’t throw all your weight into winning a few key demographics in a key state or two, but take advantage of the $$$ and eyeballs of decentralised fundraising to open up as many fronts as you can.

(A brief side-metaphor for the British. You probably all know this from your downloads of “The West Wing”, but one curious aspect to the American party political system is how loosely-joined the parts really are. When someone wins a party’s Presidential nomination, they don’t move into some pre-existing office in a thrumming party machine — it’s more like they plug in their own sentient national network drone into a seat in marked “LEADERSHIP” in a skeletal political mecha suit, and start rapidly re-wiring the whole thing to work the way they work.

This year that booting up was a lot easier for the Democrats, because Obama’s policy is pretty much in accord with the (still controversial) “50 state strategy” of Howard Dean. Dean went from that screaming thing you may remember from 2003 to being the head of the Democratic National Committee (which is, I guess like becoming Chairman of the Conservative Party) and promptly started filling it full of the lessons learnt from his incredibly innovative online campaign (which didn’t do him much good but made him shitloads of money).

Team Obama’s ideas come from grassroots organizing, but mesh very well with the Dean online decentralised approach. McCain’s staff had more trouble, because I sense they had to sit around prodding the zombies that Rove left with sticks to get them to do anything, until eventually Palin energized them to start their engine creaking up to full speed.)

So, thirdly, Obama has a structural advantage this year. The Obama strategy, in a nutshell, is this: keep the Kerry States (which got Kerry 252 votes out of the 269 needed to tie/win in the electoral college last time), and then grab the 17 needed to win anywhere else you can get them.

If you were Obama, you *could* get them by going all out for Ohio (20 votes) or Florida (27 votes), Kerry/Gore/(and Hillary?) style, but Obama and the Democrats’ country-wide push has given them more options in play for longer.

Barring a disaster, Obama has already snagged Iowa (7 electoral votes) and New Mexico (5 votes), which leaves him with 5 more electoral votes to tie, 6 to win outright.

Obama’s strategy has meant that sure, he’s been aggressive pursuing Ohio and Florida, but also Colorado (9 votes), Virginia (13), Nevada (5), Indiana (11), and Missouri (11). Getting any of these would take him over the top, provided he can hold the Kerry states. Conversely, of course, that means that McCain has to hold *all* of these states, and not drop a single one. So, advantage Obama.

But can McCain break into the cache of delicious Kerry states and scrump one while Obama is out hunting for Bush states? Maaaaaaaybe. That’s certainly what he’s been doing with Palin in the last few days. The best targets here are New Hampshire (4 votes), Michigan (a yummy 17), and Pennsylvania (21 votes). These are the states that currently lean most Republican out of the Kerry states.

But they’re really not that accessible. Apart from some weird outliers, McCain has not yet shown much in the way of poll victories in any of these states, whereas Colorado has been leaning to Obama.

The upshot of this (explained in stat-ridden detail here) is that Obama could conceivably snatch Colorado and keep the Kerry states, even if he was losing by 1% in the popular vote. Add to that the fact that if he ties in the electoral college, 269-269, the Democrat-led Congress gets to make the decision of who is President, and you can see why he has a slim structural advantage.

Okay, there, I’ve downloaded my brain to you all. Tomorrow I can talk more subjectively about the actual polling (from the POV of a San Francisco latte-sipping libertarian), and how Palin is doing, and what will happen next — but in the mean time, feel free to ask any questions, particularly if you’re a confused Brit wondering who is going to be your World Tyrant-In-Chief for the next four years. Extra points for queries that require me to stereotype all Americans, or somehow explain why they are so stupid/pliable/religious/have-funny-chins.

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… although my sleeping patterns are all skewiff again. A meme going around at the moment is to take a picture of you right at this minute, and post it. Here we go:

You can see the endless fractal of Photo Booth glare in my glasses (I booted into OS X to watch something, and haven’t rebooted). I’m in bed, as I have been for the last few days, ailing. I’m pretty sure that beard is going away in the next few days, as I’m filming something on Tuesday and my rule is that beards are weird on camera (though half-tanned faces are kind of strange also). There may be some Ritz cracker crumbs in there, but I think the resolution saves you that. The headphones are playing (or were, my music is on the Linux partition) the latest Frontalot album, which I can heartily recommend.

Here’s me from my first home page, in 1994, back when Photoshop was exciting, and resolutions were low. It was taken with one of the first consumer digital cameras, in Britain’s first Cybercafe, which me and Bill Thompson had somehow finagled out of Pipex and shipped up to Edinburgh for the festival. One of us thought that spraying yellow in my eyes was cyberpunk.

I ended up happier, and with slightly more hair than I envisaged back then. There, I was 25 and fairly sure that I’d blown it — too old to do anything but wait for my number to be called in. Also, I thought I was really unattractive. How was I to know that there would be a future of girlfriends looking at old photos of me and saying how they wished they knew me back when I was cute. Dude! It’s me from the future! You’ll never be hotter! SLEEP WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN!

This holds true of any boy in their twenties I think.

Okay, this is weird. I will stop looking at photos of myself, and encouraging them to create counterfactual asshole versions of me.

Also my mum reads this.

5 Comments »

2008-09-17»

When I was ill off school, I remember sitting and just mashing the remote control, as I flicked through endless channels (although actually it must have been just four, thinking about it). I’ve been doing much the same thing today, when I’ve been awake: flicking through a handful of sites, hitting -R on each.. I seriously wonder how much of the success of the Web has actually been down to the instant response of this pleasure-seeking behavour? And I wonder, when the traditional press (and advertisers) marvel at the huge audiences of sites like digg.com, slashdot.org, or the drudge report, do they realise how much of those high audiences really comes down to just reload fever?

Back in 2001, stymied by the fact that slashdot.org had eaten NTK’s breakfast by posting daily (NTK’s weekly feed was predicated on the fact that by pushing out every seven days, we could beat Wired’s deadlines by about two months), I tried to project where this was all heading. If the news cycle was shortening to a day, what kind of site would beat slashdot’s daily schedule? I sketched out the design for a website that would just throw news up as fast as it was happening; where you’d suck all of the wires, run them through a document-clustering algorithm, spit out the summaries of any new stories onto an IRC channel ,and have a team just come up with a suitable headline for those clusters (for those of you who knew me back then, that’s what I was talking about when I talked about spoolfeed.com). Story clusters would keep the same permanent URLs, so that once you’d bookmarked a story, any new developments would append to that page (and keep it high in the search ranks).

Spoolfeed’s really evil part, its elevator pitch for cackling VCs, would be that it would always change when you hit reload — no matter how quickly you hit reload. Stories that hadn’t changed between page views would be discarded, so only new items would appear. If you really did use up all the top stories, the space would be filled with the strange edge stories — clumsily translated Portugese news, crummy press releases from business wire. Just make every reload do something.

I felt kind of dirty when I came up with that, because I felt like I was feeding the monster that was eating everyone’s brain. But it also felt inevitable that sites would head this way. I’m surprised that digg.com doesn’t do it now to be honest. Feed the reload beast, and the world’s foolish advertisers and journalists will come baying at your door for your precious hitrates.

7 Comments »

Sorry, I’ve been super-ill today, and so remarkably short on spiffing ideas: so let me point you to this meta-idea on why you shouldn’t write a book.

1. People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.
A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it’s too late to change anything.

Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

Also, note that if you want to get ideas out there, it’s a remarkably inefficient method these days. Especially for the sort of low-grade, rumblingly conjectural micro-ideas most of us are shedding. Just keep spilling them out, and don’t worry if they don’t get purchase. It’s the cheap and cheerful end of innovation. If you’re truly lazy, as all good authors should be, you’ll thank yourself for manipulating others to pick them up and run with them, without even having to spell them out completely yourself. I think in many ways the most economically-efficient idea would be one which was easily conveyable in a few sentences, yet would be irresistably tempting for a Ph.D. student to want to turn into a thesis or project.

Would anyone like to create some empirical research on that?

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