2010

Dan Ariely on irrational decision making

business, language & literature, science / /

From Dan Ariely’s “Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?” (TED: 24 June 2009):

I’ll give you a couple of more examples on irrational decision making. Imagine I give you a choice. Do you want to go for a weekend to Rome? All expenses paid, hotel, transportation, food, breakfast, a continental breakfast, everything. Or a weekend in Paris? Now, a weekend in Paris, a weekend in Rome, these are different things. They have different food, different culture, different art. Now imagine I added a choice to the set that nobody wanted. Imagine I said, “A weekend in Rome, a weekend in Paris, or having your car stolen?” It’s a funny idea. Because why would having your car stolen, in this set, influence anything? But what if the option to have your car stolen was not exactly like this. What if it was a trip to Rome, all expenses paid, transportation, breakfast. But doesn’t include coffee in the morning. If you want coffee you have to pay for it yourself. It’s two euros 50. Now in some ways, given that you can have Rome with coffee, why would you possibly want Rome without coffee? It’s like having your car stolen. It’s an inferior option. But guess what happened. The moment you add Rome without coffee, Rome with coffee becomes more popular. And people choose it. The fact that you have Rome without coffee makes Rome with coffee look superior. And not just to Rome without coffee, even superior to Paris.

Here are two examples of this principle. This was an ad from The Economist a few years ago that gave us three choices. An online subscription for 59 dollars. A print subscription for 125. Or you could get both for 125. Now I looked at this and I called up The Economist. And I tried to figure out what were they thinking. And they passed me from one person to another to another. Until eventually I got to a person who was in charge of the website. And I called them up. And they went to check what was going on. The next thing I know, the ad is gone. And no explanation.

So I decided to do the experiment that I would have loved The Economist to do with me. I took this and I gave it to 100 MIT students. I said, “What would you choose?” These are the market share. Most people wanted the combo deal. Thankfully nobody wanted the dominated option. That means our students can read. But now if you have an option that nobody wants you can take it off. Right? So I printed another version of this. Where I eliminated the middle option. I gave it to another 100 students. Here is what happens. Now the most popular option became the least popular. And the least popular became the most popular.

What was happening was the option that was useless, in the middle, was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it. But it wasn’t useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted. In fact, relative to the option in the middle, which was get only the print for 125, the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal. And as a consequence, people chose it. The general idea here, by the way, is that we actually don’t know our preferences that well. And because we don’t know our preferences that well we’re susceptible to all of these influences from the external forces. The defaults, the particular options that are presented to us. And so on.

One more example of this. People believe that when we deal with physical attraction, we see somebody, and we know immediately whether we like them or not. Attracted or not. Which is why we have these four-minute dates. So I decided to do this experiment with people. I’ll show you graphic images of people — not real people. The experiment was with people. I showed some people a picture of Tom, and a picture of Jerry. I said “Who do you want to date? Tom or Jerry?” But for half the people I added an ugly version of Jerry. I took Photoshop and I made Jerry slightly less attractive. (Laughter) The other people, I added an ugly version of Tom. And the question was, will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective, more attractive brothers? The answer was absolutely yes. When ugly Jerry was around, Jerry was popular. When ugly Tom was around, Tom was popular.

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My response to the news that “Reader, Acrobat Patches Plug 23 Security Holes”

security, tech help, tech in changing society, technology / /

I sent this email out earlier today to friends & students:

For the love of Pete, people, if you use Adobe Acrobat Reader, update it.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/10/reader-acrobat-patches-plug-23-security-holes/

But here’s a better question: why are you using Adobe Reader in the first place? It’s one of the WORST programs for security you can have on your computer. And most of the time, you just don’t need it!

If you use Windows, give Foxit Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/) a whirl. It’s free!

If you use a Mac, you already have a great PDF reader installed with your operating system: Preview. Use it.

The ONLY reason to use Adobe Reader is to fill out tax forms. When I need to do that, I download Adobe Reader, download the PDFs from the gubmint, fill out the PDFs, send ’em to the Feds & the State, & then remove Adobe Reader. I encourage others to do the same.

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2 great examples of Tom Wolfe’s early New Journalism writing style

1 Comment / art, history, language & literature, on writing / /

From Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” (Esquire: March 1965):

Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

…

Working mash wouldn’t wait for a man. It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn’t it have been something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you want them and not have to smuggle all that copper and all that sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a coppersmith and a plumber and a cooper and a carpenter and a pack horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in this world, all at once.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”

art, commonplace book, language & literature / /

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (1880)

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

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A vote for CrossOver

business, tech help / /

Let me recommend Codeweavers’ CrossOver, a commercial implementation of WINE that works on Linux & Mac OS X. It’s reasonably priced, & it makes setting up & configuring both WINE and the programs that run inside WINE much easier. Plus, the company is made up of good people, & they’re very upfront on their site about what works with WINE, what mostly works, what kinda works, & what doesn’t work at all.

http://www.codeweavers.com/

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How the Madden NFL videogame was developed

art, business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Patrick Hruby’s “The Franchise: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty” (ESPN: 22 July 2010):

1982

Harvard grad and former Apple employee Trip Hawkins founds video game maker Electronic Arts, in part to create a football game; one year later, the company releases “One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird,” the first game to feature licensed sports celebrities. Art imitates life.

1983-84

Hawkins approaches former Oakland Raiders coach and NFL television analyst John Madden to endorse a football game. Madden agrees, but insists on realistic game play with 22 on-screen players, a daunting technical challenge.

1988-90

EA releases the first Madden football game for the Apple II home computer; a subsequent Sega Genesis home console port blends the Apple II game’s realism with control pad-heavy, arcade-style action, becoming a smash hit.

madden-nfl-covers-sm.jpg

You can measure the impact of “Madden” through its sales: as many as 2 million copies in a single week, 85 million copies since the game’s inception and more than $3 billion in total revenue. You can chart the game’s ascent, shoulder to shoulder, alongside the $20 billion-a-year video game industry, which is either co-opting Hollywood (see “Tomb Raider” and “Prince of Persia”) or topping it (opening-week gross of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2”: $550 million; “The Dark Knight”: $204 million).

…

Some of the pain was financial. Just as EA brought its first games to market in 1983, the home video game industry imploded. In a two-year span, Coleco abandoned the business, Intellivision went from 1,200 employees to five and Atari infamously dumped thousands of unsold game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Toy retailers bailed, concluding that video games were a Cabbage Patch-style fad. Even at EA — a hot home computer startup — continued solvency was hardly assured.

…

In 1988, “John Madden Football” was released for the Apple II computer and became a modest commercial success.

…

THE STAKES WERE HIGH for a pair of upstart game makers, with a career-making opportunity and a $100,000 development contract on the line. In early 1990, Troy Lyndon and Mike Knox of San Diego-based Park Place Productions met with Hawkins to discuss building a “Madden” game for Sega’s upcoming home video game console, the Genesis. …

Because the game that made “Madden” a phenomenon wasn’t the initial Apple II release, it was the Genesis follow-up, a surprise smash spawned by an entirely different mindset. Hawkins wanted “Madden” to play out like the NFL. Equivalent stats. Similar play charts. Real football.

…

In 1990, EA had a market cap of about $60 million; three years later, that number swelled to $2 billion.

…

In 2004, EA paid the NFL a reported $300 million-plus for five years of exclusive rights to teams and players. The deal was later extended to 2013. Just like that, competing games went kaput. The franchise stands alone, triumphant, increasingly encumbered by its outsize success.

…

Hawkins left EA in the early 1990s to spearhead 3D0, an ill-fated console maker that became a doomed software house. An icy rift between the company and its founder ensued.

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A fine example of bad writing: repeated details

art, language & literature, on writing / /

From Keith Phipps’s “Treasure Of The Black Falcon, by John Coleman Burroughs” (The Onion AV Club: 25 March 2010):

Burroughs’ circuitous prose, which reads as if he absorbed the paid-by-the-word style of his dad’s early work, doesn’t help. Opening the book at random, I found this passage:

The air was warm, humid, sultry. Everywhere the dank, wet smell of rotting vegetation in the jungle by the river was so strong that it could almost be tasted. Except they knew that wild life was all about them and they could see the countless birds overhead, there was no sound. No breeze rustled the palm leaves, the fronds, or the tops of the giant conifers.

It’s humid, get it? And there’s no wind touching every type of vegetation Burroughs can think of. Not the palm leaves. Not the fronds. The giant conifers? No, not them either.

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How male water striders blackmail females into sex

science / /

From Ed Yong’s “Male water striders summon predators to blackmail females into having sex” (Discover: 10 August 2010):

Water strider sex begins unceremoniously: the male mounts the female without any courtship rituals or foreplay. She may resist but if she does, he starts to actively strum the water surface with his legs. Each vibration risks attracting the attention of a hungry predator, like a fish or backswimmer (above). And because the female is underneath, she will bear the brunt of any assault. By creating dangerous vibes, the male intimidates the female into submitting to his advances. Faint heart, it is said, never did win fair lady.

A male water strider doesn’t have to go through the hardships of pregnancy and he plays no role in raising the next generation. It’s a theme that echoes throughout the animal kingdom and it means that the best strategy for him is to mate with as many females as possible. After all, he has plenty of sperm to go around. A female, however, has a limited supply of eggs and mating opportunities. When she has sex, it has to count, so it suits her to be choosy. And she has the right equipment for the job.

Last year, Chang Han and Piotr Jablonski from Seoul National University found that female red-backed water striders (Gerris gracilicornis) can block their vaginas with hard genital shields. This defence is important because once the male manages to insert his penis, he can inflate it to make him harder to throw off. The female’s only hope is to prevent him from getting through in the first place.

Hyper-violent males can sometimes wear the female down but some opt for a subtler approach – they tap intricate rhythms on the water with their legs. When Han and Jablonski discovered these rituals last year, they suggested that the males might be trying to demonstrate their quality, by tapping out the most consistent rhythms. Now, they have another explanation – the tapping is a form of blackmail, a way of coercing sex from the female with the threat of death.

The duo studied the preferences of the backswimmer – a predatory bug that floats upside-down at the water’s surface and listens out for the vibrations of potential prey. When given a choice between a silent male water strider and a mating pair with a tapping male, the backswimmer always headed towards the vibrating duo. And since these predators attack from below, the female was always the one who was injured while the male strode off to tap another day.

The backswimmer menace is so potent that after a few minutes of tapping from the male, the female relents by opening her genital shield. If she had been previously attacked by predators, she gave in almost instantly. And only when she relented did the male stop his threatening taps.

…

The battle of the sexes between male and female water striders has led to a whole suite of adaptations and counter-adaptations. Some males have evolved special grasping structures to give them a better hold of females, while females have responded by evolving spines and other defences to weaken their grip. Females evolved their impregnable genital shields, which males have countered with a behaviour that makes females more likely to lower their defences.

To be honest, the female water strider has an easy time of it. In other insects, where females have evolved an upper hand in the war of the sexes, males have developed even more extreme counter-strategies. Look no further than the common bedbug – the male bypasses the female’s genitals altogether and stabs his sharp penis straight into the female’s back, a technique known appropriately as traumatic insemination.

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A summary of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society

business, education, history, law, politics, science, technology / /

From a summary of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (Abridge Me: 1 June 2010):

The Concept of the Conventional Wisdom

The paradigms on which society’s perception of reality are based are highly conservative. People invest heavily in these ideas, and so are heavily resistant to changing them. They are only finally overturned by new ideas when new events occur which make the conventional wisdom appear so absurd as to be impalpable. Then the conventional wisdom quietly dies with its most staunch proponents, to be replaced with a new conventional wisdom. …

Economic Security

… Economics professors argue that the threat of unemployment is necessary to maintain incentives to high productivity, and simultaneously that established professors require life tenure in order to do their best work. …

The Paramount Position of Production

… Another irrationality persists (more in America than elsewhere?): the prestigious usefulness of private-sector output, compared to the burdensome annoyance of public expenditure. Somehow public expenditure can never quite be viewed as a productive and enriching element of national output; it is forever something to be avoided, at best a necessary encumbrance. Cars are important, roads are not. An expansion in telephone services improves the general well-being, cuts in postal services are a necessary economy. Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses boast our standard of living, street cleaners are an unfortunate expense. Thus we end up with clean houses and filthy streets. …

[W]e have wants at the margin only so far as they are synthesised. We do not manufacture wants for goods we do not produce. …

The Dependence Effect

… Modern consumer demand, at the margin, does not originate from within the individual, but is a consequence of production. It has two origins:

  1. Emulation: the desire to keep abreast of, or ahead of one’s peer group — demand originating from this motivation is created indirectly by production. Every effort to increase production to satiate want brings with it a general raising of the level of consumption, which itself increases want.
  2. Advertising: the direct influence of advertising and salesmanship create new wants which the consumer did not previously possess. Any student of business has by now come to view marketing as fundamental a business activity as production. Any want that can be significantly moulded by advertising cannot possibly have been strongly felt in the absence of that advertising — advertising is powerless to persuade a man that he is or is not hungry.

Inflation

… In 1942 a grateful and very anxious citizenry rewarded its soldiers, sailors, and airmen with a substantial increase in pay. In the teeming city of Honolulu, in prompt response to this advance in wage income, the prostitutes raised the prices of their services. This was at a time when, if anything, increased volume was causing a reduction in their average unit costs. However, in this instance the high military authorities, deeply angered by what they deemed improper, immoral, and indecent profiteering, ordered a return to the previous scale. …

The Theory of Social Balance

The final problem of the affluent society is the balance of goods it produces. Private goods: TVs, cars, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol are overproduced; public goods: education, healthcare, police services, park provision, mass transport and refuse disposal are underproduced. The consequences are extremely severe for the wellbeing of society. The balance between private and public consumption will be referred to as ‘the social balance’. The main reason for this imbalance is relatively straightforward. The forces we have identified which increase consumer demand as production rises (advertising and emulation) act almost entirely on the private sector. …

It is arguable that emulation acts on public services to an extent: a new school in one district may encourage neighbouring districts to ‘keep up’, but the effect is relatively miniscule.

Thus, private demand is artificially inflated and public demand is not, and the voter-consumer decides how to split his income between the two at the ballot box: inevitably public expenditure is grossly underrepresented. …

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Woody Allen’s atheism

art, language & literature, religion / /

From Robert E. Lauder’s interview with Woody Allen, “Whatever Works” (Commonweal: 15 April 2010):

Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament?

…

I’m really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

…

I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again.

…

there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do… I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

…

I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope…. Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

…

I didn’t see [Shane, from the movie Shane] as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

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Catastrophic atheism

religion / /

From Damon Linker’s “Another Kind of Atheism” (The New Republic: 11 May 2010):

But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is … the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.

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Jeff Bezos on the differences between gifts and choices

commonplace book / /

From Jeff Bezos’s “We are What We Choose: Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010 Baccalaureate” (Princeton University: 30 May 2010):

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

…

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

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Errol Morris on “investigative journalism”

business, education, language & literature, politics / /

From Errol Morris’s “Film Legend Errol Morris Salutes New Graduates At 2010 Commencement” (Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: 10 May 2010):

I have often wondered why we need the phrase investigative journalism. Isn’t all journalism supposed to be investigative? Isn’t journalism without an investigative element little more than gossip? And isn’t there enough gossip around already?

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Errol Morris on film noir

art, education, religion / /

From Errol Morris’s “Film Legend Errol Morris Salutes New Graduates At 2010 Commencement” (Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: 10 May 2010):

There are many things I liked about noir. But in particular, there are images of one benighted character after another struggling to make sense of the world – and sometimes failing in the effort. [Their failure could be chalked up to many things. But most severe among the possibilities, was the thought that the world might be intractable. That you can never figure out how it works, what makes it tick. A terribly, sad thought. There has to be, there just has to be the presumption that you can figure things out.]

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Microsoft’s real customers

business, technology / /

From James Fallow’s “Inside the Leviathan: A short and stimulating brush with Microsoft’s corporate culture” (The Atlantic: February 2000):

Financial analysts have long recognized that Microsoft’s profit really comes from two sources. One is operating systems (Windows, in all its varieties), and the other is the Office suite of programs. Everything else — Flight Simulator, Slate, MSNBC, mice and keyboards — is financially meaningless. What these two big categories have in common is that individuals are not the significant customers. Operating systems are sold mainly to computer companies such as Dell and Compaq, which pass them pre-loaded to individual consumers. And the main paying customers for Office are big corporations (or what the high-tech world calls LORGs, for “large-size organizations”), which may buy thousands of “seats” for their employees at hundreds of dollars apiece. Product planning, therefore, is focused with admirable clarity on those whose decisions really matter to Microsoft — the information-technology manager at Chevron or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example — rather than some writer with an idea about how to make his colleagues happier with a program.

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A great example of poor comments in your code

history, language & literature, technology / /

From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 43:

[Peter Samson, one of the first MIT hackers], though, was particularly obscure in refusing to add comments to his source code explaining what he was doing at a given time. One well-distributed program Samson wrote went on for hundreds of assembly language instructions, with only one comment beside an instruction which contained the number 1750. The comment was RIPJSB, and people racked their brains about its meaning until someone figured out that 1750 was the year Bach died, and that Samson had written an abbreviation for Rest In Peace Johann Sebastian Bach.

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The Hacker Ethic

history, language & literature, technology / /

From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 40-46:

Still, even in the days of the TX-0 [the late 1950s], the planks of the platform were in place. The Hacker Ethic:

  • Access To Computers — And Anything Which Might Teach You Something About The Way The World Works — Should Be Unlimited And Total. Always Yield To The Hands-On Imperative!
  • All Information Should Be Free.
  • Mistrust Authority — Promote Decentralization. The last thing you need is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers. Bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary rules (as opposed to the logical algorithms by which machines and computer programs operate): they invoke those rules to consolidate power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as a threat.
  • Hackers Should Be Judged By Their Hacking, Not Bogus Criteria Such As Degrees, Age, Race, Or Position. This meritocratic trait was not necessarily rooted in the inherent goodness of hacker hearts–it was mainly that hackers cared less about someone’s superficial characteristics than they did about his potential to advance the general state of hacking, to create new programs to admire, to talk about that new feature in the system.
  • You Can Create Art And Beauty On A Computer.
  • Computers Can Change Your Life For The Better.
  • Like Aladdin’s Lamp, You Could Get It To Do Your Bidding.

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The origin of the word “munge”, “hack”, & others

history, language & literature, technology / /

From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 23:

The core members hung out at [MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s] for hours; constantly improving The System, arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics … When a piece of equipment wasn’t working, it was “losing”; when a piece of equipment was ruined, it was “munged” (Mash Until No Good); the two desks in the corner of the room were not called the office, but the “orifice”; one who insisted on studying for courses was a “tool”; garbage was called “cruft”; and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a “hack.”

This latter term may have been suggested by ancient MIT lingo– the word “hack” had long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, such as covering the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting foil. But as the TMRC people used the word, there was serious respect implied. While someone might call a clever connection between relays a “mere hack,” it would be understood that, to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity.

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Robert A. Heinlein on writing

language & literature, on writing / /

From Cory Doctorow’s “How Heinlein plotted” (Boing Boing: 22 July 2010):

My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changed his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.

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