back on the hamster wheel

Paul Klee's Notebooks Are Now Online. 3900 Pages of Bauhaus Teachings (1921-1931) http://goo.gl/pmEBTH   HT @openculture HT @EdwardTufte

surprises of the day

Readers of pp will have noticed that it has gone silent for long stretches.  There are too many things I can't talk about.

I realised today that I had fallen into bad habits.  Things turn up in my Twitter feed and I retweet; this is, perhaps, helpful to the people who happen to be checking Twitter at the time, but is not much use to anyone else, and, from a selfish point of view, I have no way of going back to these links later on.

There are blogs I check out every day, but the general point of going to blogs I know I like is that I know I will find the sort of thing I like.  Twitter brings more surprises.  I thought I might start putting some of the surprises on pp.   And someday, who knows, there may not be so many things I can't talk about.


How to Make Mistakes in Python, Mike Pirnat, free download from O'Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/files/how-to-make-mistakes-in-python.pdf

A great way to lie to yourself about the quality of your code is to use

   Hungarian Notation. This is where you prefix each variable name

with a little bit of text to indicate what kind of thing it’s supposed to

be. Like many terrible decisions, it can start out innocently enough:

strFirstName

intYear

blnSignedIn

fltTaxRate

lstProducts

dctParams

 (Have not finished the book, but this is representative of what I have read so far. Since a writer spends countless hours doing things that looked like a good idea at the time, only to be revealed as idiocy which will take countless hours to fix, it's cheering to read someone who comes clean. Pirnat comes closer, to my mind, to the way a writer thinks; it's interesting that the tone is so different from your typical Paris Review interview.)

A mouse's house may ruin experiments

Environmental factors lie behind many irreproducible rodent experiments.
Sara Reardon, Nature, HT @EdwardTufte

It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.

 http://www.nature.com/news/a-mouse-s-house-may-ruin-experiments-1.19335

(What's interesting, to a writer: why does the word 'rodent' make a sentence funny? '...many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.' So lovely.)

Cory Doctorow "Wealth Inequality is Even Worse in Reputation Economies" http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/03/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/   HT @dgwbirch

The story of ‘‘meritocracy’’ – a society that migrates wealth, status, and decision-making power into the hands of the most capable – is seductive. Rich people love the idea of meritocracy, because the alter­native is that their lion’s share is unfair, the product of luck, or, worse, cheating. But many of meritocracy’s losers love it, too. In the words of John Steinbeck, ‘‘Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’’

(I revise my opinion of John Steinbeck, previously seen as worthy, now, unexpectedly, a wit.)

take that!

The site is simple to use, just sign in with Twitter via Oauth and then your off. Once logged in you can do the following tasks. You can manually check who has unfollowed you every 15 minutes, call out your unfollowers for unfollowing you, view people you are following that are not following you back and view a 7 day unfollower history.

Once you have checked who is not following you back on Twitter, you can then unfollow them, if you want to, or even post a tweet saying that tweeter isn’t following you any more.

(Details of this invaluable resource here.)

[This strikes me as very, very strange. I think Evan Soltas is very clever, for instance, so if he bothers to post on Twitter I would like to know, but I can't for the life of me see why he would want to follow me. If he were to do so on impulse he would soon discover his mistake. The idea that it would be rude of Mr Soltas not to follow me back, or that I might call out the hapless Mr Soltas for unfollowing me, seems completely ludicrous. Still, it's cheering to see that there is a whole miserable way of life out there that I have effortlessly avoided.]

[PS - Oh, er, yes, it is possible to follow me on Twitter. I am clearly not taking this seriously enough; otherwise I would presumably have been chivvying readers of pp into following me. (But, um, why?) Anyone who wants more ways to fritter away their time, though, would do better to follow Anatol Stefanowitsch (@astefanowitsch), who has a real genius for the medium.]

die fetten Jahre sind vorbei

I had NO IDEA until I read it in the Times that writers had stopped keeping blogs!! Three or four years ago—that’s just when I started blogging! And now I’m one of the last ones left?? How did this happen?? When??

Elif Batuman on Twitter

H, R

Piece on the Book Bench about reactions on Twitter to casting of an actress of color as Rue in The Hunger Games.

Interesting.  Too slothful to link back to my own posts, but I was surprised by many of the covers for The Last Samurai - I went out of my way in the book to give Ludo an appearance that would leave the ethnicity of his father open, and then got many a cover back with a little white boy.  In one case, with blue eyes. Later, talking to Steve Gaghan, I commented that there was really no reason Sibylla must be played by a white actress - I had always thought of her as looking like Nigella Lawson, but there's nothing in the text that would be require it. (Was trying to be helpful -- really just wanted to emphasize that he could do whatever he wanted.  Not that it did in fact help.)

Twitter also seems to have an interesting property: the limited message size lends itself to informality so people are less concerned, and indeed, less able to be 'self-important' and so will post about their own work and opinions more than in other mediums. For example, imagine you're working with someone who makes a point of telling you every time they have an article published or read something they found useful. You'd probably get pissed off with them pretty quickly. But for some people, I would like to know this information. Sophie Scott (on Twitter as @sophiescott) is a good example of this. She's a professor of neuropsychology at UCL who studies speech and language - an area I'm by no means an expert in. When Sophie Scott thinks a new study is important, I'd like to know that. Twitter is the internet equivalent of making these announcements by writing them on post-it notes on your office door. We all know people who have expertise we value - whether that includes neuroscience, football or new music, and I want to read their post-it notes, but without breaching social etiquette and hassling people. Like all communication technology, it's useful primarily because it addresses a social issue.

Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks

(I have a Twitter account. I have Followers. Je ne tweet jamais.)

the 140-character solution

Alan Rusbridger on Twitter and Trafigura and John Wilkes. (Trafigura tried to have the Guardian silenced by injunction.)

But the plan began to unravel rather rapidly on Monday when it transpired that an MP, Paul Farrelly, had tabled a question about the injunction and the awkward document in parliament. That was bad enough, what with the nuisance of 300-odd years of precedent affirming the right of the press to report whatever MPs say or do. There was a tiresomely teasing story on the Guardian front page. And then there was Twitter.

It took one tweet on Monday evening as I left the office to light the virtual touchpaper. At five past nine I tapped: "Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?" Twitter's detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters. My 104 characters did just fine.

By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly's question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.