December 2007 Archives

It's a poor workman that blames his tools, but I find myself constantly wanting better tools for editing text. I'd like to have Just One Tool for the purpose, but by necessity that must be a plain text editor, or at least an editor that stores in plain text.

While I can use and don't hate software like vi/vim and joe (don't even mention emacs, thanks), I find it difficult to write much more than short notes in those. But somehow those tools just don't do it for me when I want to write a weblog entry. Using those I'm reduced to copying and pasting my text into that shitty little textentry area. The MT4 text interface isn't as terrible, but it's still not great for my purposes, and there's always formatting issues.

I've tried a few pieces of third-party software. I tried Journler but MT4 came out and 2.5 didn't work with it. Now the author's dropped support for weblogging altogether. I don't blame him, but it still stuck me, because I could work around the other shortcomings of the software. What I like about it was the way you can store attachments directly with their individual journal entries, and I'm still playing with it but I'm not optimistic about its long-term viability for my purposes.

After I dropped Journler, I tried some specific tools, Ecto and MarsEdit, but neither of them are good for me either. I forget why I hated Ecto, but I dropped it pretty quickly. I'm writing this post in MarsEdit, but so far I'm not entirely happy. If nothing else, it doesn't yet support tags in MT4.

I looked at using Scrivener, but I can't figure out a way to make it work well for more than a single post per document. There have been a couple of threads on this subject in the Scrivener forums, but none of the suggestions there would seem to be exactly what I want. I'm currently working on a short academic-style weblog posting in Scriv, and it's working out well enough, but I'm not sure how viable it is for managing content for an entire weblog.

Further complicating matters is the fact that I like to write from anywhere. Unlike many people, that doesn't mean I have a laptop I use everywhere. Instead, I have a laptop that I use in places I can't sit in front of a desktop. So, whatever tools I choose needs to easily work on three+ machines, which for me usually means CVS or Subversion respositories. Journler was ok on that front, but MarsEdit and Ecto appear to be non-starters. While Scrivener supports this sort of thing, it doesn't make it terrifically easy either.

At least my three primary machines are all Macs - I shudder to think what would happen if my requirements included Linux or Windows. Nevertheless, sometimes I might like to do things from a non-Mac. MT has the capacity for storing unpublished posts; it would be nice if my tools could store drafts on the server, rather than locally.

It could be that what I'm asking is particular enough that the only tool or toolset that can satisfy me is something I come up with myself. The quest continues.

(Edit: yay, MarsEdit got the correct timestamp, anyway. Boo, my paragraphs were all run together and, of course, it didn't know to ping Technorati.)

I've now taken seminars in two topics, history and cognitive science.  My history seminars were full of other people, mostly just like me: third and fourth year honours history students.  Some were doing joint honours in political science or psychology, and some were older (we had a pair of retirees in our class, for instance), but we all had more or less the same sort of background.  My cognitive science seminar - listed as phil/psych - was mostly philosophy students, but there were at least three or four psychology students and three or four engineers.  A chunk of the philosophy students and at least a couple of the psych students were also grad students - we had 6 in total, I think evenly split between Masters and PhD.

My experience was that while the cross-disciplined approach seemed to be less "echo chamber"y[0], it also took a bit longer for us to cohere, despite the greater academic experience of those in the class.  (As it was, us old fogeys tended to dominate the conversation anyway.)  For a 10 week seminar, taking four or five weeks for everybody to feel comfortable talking - and it wasn't until the last couple of weeks that we had actual disagreements - is just not fast enough.

I'm not sure how one could kick-start the process.  Obviously, familiarity with one another would help - perhaps UW could look at a series of CogSci seminars.  It doesn't seem to me that there's an attempt made to keep a class of people together, as we had at UNB in my history program.

[0] Google and context will tell you what I mean, if you're not sure.  I'm resisting the obvious Wikipedia link, but here's a Salon article about its alleged effects on the 2004 Howard Dean campaign.

I'm fairly happy with my strategy of keeping everything important in my CVS and Subversion repositories, but BackupPC looks like an interesting cross-platform solution.

For Mac users there's also, of course, Time Machine (which is reasonable enough in its way, but suffers from the usual "Macs don't like to sleep with USB devices plugged in" issues) and the gold standard: Carbon Copy Cloner.  CCC is 'just' a front-end for rsync, but does a neat job.

A number of my faculty members have had good luck with Unison as well.

There's been a lot of talk about the Oilers since Georges Laraque blew town - and even before that.  The talk is that a team without a player like BG is risking injury, particularly to its stars, since it can't retaliate.  I'm sure that will get hauled out again since Lapointe stuck his knee out on Hemsky last night, and Stortini didn't exactly make him pay afterwards - although he did do more than his usual hug him to death, at least.

I'm wondering if it's really true - do teams lacking a "deterrent" in a big fighter like Laraque or Derek Boogard really lose more man-games to injury?  There's always going to be plays like Reasoner going into the boards feet-first and hurting his knee, but with Laraque in the lineup, does Lapointe knee Hemsky?  Many hockey fans will say "no", or perhaps say "maybe, but at least then Lapointe will pay" or even "Laraque could have gone after Kane or Toews".

A few years ago I would have been in one of those camps, but now I'm not so sure.  The Detroit Red Wings, famously, don't have any designated tough guy in their lineup, although they've got plenty of toughness and have in the past iced guys like Darren McCarty.  Tough guys are infamous for skating poorly - does the risk of having a guy who plays 3-7 minutes a game and is good for a quality chance against at least once a game outweigh the reward of having somebody who may or may not deter cheapshots on your star players?

It's a very interesting topic to me, but one that would be difficult to approach.  Any of you four willing to lend a hand?

Since I started reading Zinsser, I've been paying a lot more attention to what and how people write.

Two words have progressed to the point of actually inciting rage in me when I see them.  One of those words is "arguably".

I'm going to pick on Guy Kawasaki here, since it was his post that most recently set me.  Plus, I'm sure he can take it, and he's far from alone.  I used to use that word myself too, but just because I'm a hypocrite doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Guy says of Brett Hedican "Arguably, one of the best skaters in the NHL . . ."  What Guy is really saying is "somebody else might say that Hedican's one of the best in the NHL, but I won't because I don't have the courage of conviction.  I'd simply say that he is one of the best skaters in the NHL, since that's probably defensible, but I won't even bother to do that because I don't want to get drawn into an argument myself."

In other words, "arguably" is a weasel word, and weasel words suck.  Don't use them.  Make your argument on its own merits, without asking somebody else to help you out.  If you're not willing to do that, why should anybody listen to what you have to say?

The rest of Guy's article is arguably laudable and otherwise well-written, so it's worth reading despite his poor choice of words in what was probably only meant to be a throwaway comment anyway.

(The other word, incidentally, is "however", but that's another rant.)

If you read no other magazine article summarizing an academic study, read this one.  I wish I'd had it when I did my paper.  Summary of the summary: the general public is fairly credulous when it comes to articles with pretty pictures of brains included, even if the conclusions drawn by those articles is counterintuitive.

My initial thoughts were that this could be dangerous, but Western society is pretty firmly libertarian (in the philosophical sense, not the political one) and dualist.  It should be interesting to see how this cognitive dissonance - trust in science, yet a fervent belief in truly free free will - plays out.

(Via the Neuroethics and Law Blog.)

I just discovered something important about N1GE6 that I don't see covered in the docs: if you have a grad student that prefers editing files in Windows, don't let him do so to his N1GE shell scripts.  GE will barf out with odd error messages.  Make him re-type the scripts into vi rather than spending 30 minutes debugging before doing the same thing, as I just did.

Maybe 6.1 is better, I don't know.

That is all.

I wrote a 15 page (ok, 17 page, but some of that includes bibliography) paper for my cogsci course on consciousness, centred on fMRI scans and their application in the law.[0]  So articles like this tweak my interest. 

I'm of two minds on the "drunken defense".  On the one hand, I do think it's possible to be so blotto that you don't know your own name, never mind what you did.  On the other hand, what the fellow did was reprehensible and he should be locked away.  Clearly he lacks the controls that we ought to expect of our citizens.  I don't think second degree murder is the most appropriate crime to convict him with, but I don't know that our legal system has exactly the best way to handle this sort of case anyway.

[0] Summary: fMRI scans are here and they're not going away.  I take a generally compatibilist approach to matters of cognition, which is to say I'm too wussy to pick a side.  So, I argue that society is pretty much going to have to accept that we don't have as much free will as we think we do, and laws are going to have to change as a result - our concept of mens rea is entirely incorrect.

And mine does too.

Since I've a paper due in, oh, about 14 hours give or take, and I've another 4ish pages or 1000ish words (whichever comes first) to go, writing is even on my mind than usual as of late.  My wife sent me a link this morning, and I've been off and on skimming the site through the day.  One which resonates clearly with me: poor grammar.  I think I tend towards the fogey side; some would probably argue I shot right over that edge and am plummeting, but hey.

All that aside, the site is a good read, and it's not just for dead-tree authors either.

Via a friend, an oldie but a goodie: assholes in academia.

I don't really have much to add to this, beyond saying if you don't know who the assholes in your work place are, chances are - it's you.

Fortunately, I could name at least a few, so I think I'm mostly safe.

From one of the comments: "I suspect though, that he can bully when he needs to . . . "  I've long had a theory that inside every professor, a little jerk lives, just waiting to hop out.  I think it's virtually impossible to get to the point where tenure is offered without having at least pushed somebody aside a time or two.  I say this knowing that my mother is a tenured professor, and is one of the nicest women I know.  (And she agrees with me.)  Of course the prof referred to in that comment can bully when he needs to, or he wouldn't be a department chair.  The line is knowing when you really need to bully, and when you should just shut your mouth.

33% of Canadians don't know where the 2010 Olympics are.  That should be a clue to the organisers about the current relevance of the Olympics.

I'm not even sure what the Olympics are supposed to be any more.  Amateur sport?  Not even technically since the US "Dream Team" in basketball at the 92 Summers, and the men's ice hockey teams comprised mostly of NHLers has sealed the deal.  (Funny how the rhetoric switched from "the purity of amateur sport" to "but it's not the best players in the world" once we wanted the pros in.) We now explicitly pay for medal wins, not that athletes weren't receiving sponsorship deals essentially based off wins anyway.  Anybody remember those Alex Baumann commercials that he did for the Egg Council?  Suppose he did those for free?  Think they'd have been made with somebody else instead if Baumann hadn't won?  Even if athletes weren't paid, the Olys have been smirched for some time with the political aspect - boycotts galore in the 70s and 80s, Cold War tensions leaking out through the seams.

So why are the games still held?  Most people I know watch one or two events (men's and women's ice hockey), sometimes count the medals as if they mean something personally, and that's it.  In Vancouver, it seems to be mostly about the local business the games generate.  Oh, and sweeping up the trash.  For China, it appears to be a way for the government to show the rest of the world that it's not really all that bad.  Oh, and sweeping up some more trash.  Besides, the rest of the world really doesn't care anyway, as long as the Chinese keep selling us cheap consumer goods.

This is not intended to disrespect Olympians in particular or "amateur" sport in general.  I understand that to the athletes, the Games are the ultimate competition, the aspiration and dream of a lifetime.  I just wonder about everything else, and if having the Games continues means the everything else must escalate, as it seems to be doing, then the price is too high.  "Swifter, higher, stronger" means "more, more, more," and it's sickening.

Copyblogger is weblog about writing.  A recent post discussed the problems with writing for an online audience as if one was writing an essay, and went on to say: "Your new media writing should sound like your everyday speech, albeit a more precise, polished version." then suggests ". . . that’s why we revise and edit."

Mr. Lash isn't wrong; we should write as we speak, of course - it's more engaging.  The problem is, the latter advice can be at odds with the former for a lot of people.  We can't edit while we speak.  If we could, we wouldn't be speaking, we'd be thinking.  Thinking instead of speaking is not necessarily a bad thing, everybody knows a few people who could stand to do more of the former and less of the latter.  But eventually it gets in the way of having a conversation.

William Zinsser points out in On Writing Well that many people don't want to edit or wordsmith their work, because "it's not their style."  The issue is that unfortunately, in conversation, we have the chance to not edit, but to explain.  In writing, we only get one chance to say it, so we'd better say it well.

I think Lash gets his advice backwards.  Our writing should be natural, but it should also be clear, understandable and, if possible, concise.  That means it probably should also be grammatically correct and correctly spelled.  After all, if you're writing weblog articles, you're speaking to the public, presumably with the intention of having us understand something.  We can't understand you if your writing is poorly thought out, misspelled, and incoherent.

All that being said, I don't believe incoherence is what Mr. Lash is promoting, and the article's well worth reading despite the problem I have with it.  I will say, however, that relying on English professors to teach how to write is about as silly as relying on Computer Science professors to teach how to fix computers.  If that assertion surprises you, you should find some professors of CS and ask them.