Posts published by “centaur”

Never stop learning. That's my motto: the more you know, the more you know you don't know. That's usually an accumulative process: the more you learn, the more you can learn, and the faster you can learn it.

But in the magical fairyland known as IT, some people seem to actively destroy knowledge, creating more confusion wherever they go. We've had a word for it for a while - FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Now we have an explanation, at least analogically - the uncertain world of vaporware and project requirements must be quantum, yeah that's the ticket, and we've just discovered that Quantum information can be negative:

Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative information makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, negative information does exist in the quantum world ... What could negative information possibly mean? In short, after I send you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world ... Negative information turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much.

Really I don't want to be a typical popularizer abusing quantum mechanics for my little analogies ... long before the concept of negative information appeared, the philosophical concept of defeasible reasoning captured the idea that in most real-world situations learning new facts can force you to give up previously held conclusions. Certainly this is true in any scientific revolution, where switching from the Ptolmaic to the Copernican world view or from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics required throwing out vast amounts of knowledge.

But the next time I encounter a confusing cloud of fuzzy figments surrounding the slippery, unfocused requirements of the latest vaporware, I want to believe I've encountered negative quantum information, dang it.

-the Centaur

At last, Apple has released a multi-button mouse. After years of bravely thinking different(ly) and enduring consequent public ridicule and lemminglike adoration, Apple released a Mighty Mouse with not one, not two, not three, no, with FOUR, count them FOUR buttons:

Here would go an image of my new Mighty Mouse. But by the time I got to the Apple store, you got them all. So there isn't one. Next time, if you want an image of my new mouse, leave one for me. Until then, please enjoy this ascii art of the new mouse I don't have:

------------(o )

Thank you.

The center ball is the new scroll wheel, PLUS left click, right click AND "innovative" squeezy buttons on the side, just like the squeezy buttons on the side of my Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical Pro attached to the Blue Slab of Coolness, except the "less innovative" Kensington distinguishes squeezes from the left or the right. Ah, the price of "innovation". But I digress.



Or do I? The neat thing about the Kensington is that the side buttons look like highlight accents on the mouse: if you don't want to use them, you'll never know they're there. There is a tension between providing powerful features and clean design: the clutter of obvious interface features can be intimidating, confusing. I believe it's far better to have a clean design that doesn't clutter the user's view with features, and to make the power user features "just work" the way you want them to. While I haven't seen any user interface studies specifically examining this question, it does seem consistent with research I recall having read about about human attention (we can directly perceive or "subitize" only about four items at a time) and novice users (who can be confused and put off by cluttered interfaces).

Apple has done the same thing that Kensington did: the mouse appears to have only two buttons, the main surface and a tiny scroll ball for panning and scrolling inside documents. Beneath that shiny surface, however, are sensors that allow the Mighty Mouse to tell its left from its right (at least on its top surface). However, in its default mode, both the right and the left button respond as left buttons, so the default experience of novice users is the same. Out of the box (ha ha) the Mighty Mouse provides Mac users with the experience they have come to expect - but if you are a power user, and presumably you are if you dashed in to the Apple store to scoop up all the Mighty Mice they had before I could get one, you bastards, then you will know to go to System Preferences and set your right mouse button to respond to the right. This is where the excellent Ars Technica review both gets it and doesnt get it:

The debate over one-button versus multibutton mice has become extremely heated at times and has roots going back for almost as long as mice have been around. Proponents for both sides claim that their mice are "easier to use" and promote productivity, although I am not personally aware of any extensive human-computer interface (HCI) studies done on multibutton mice that have come out in their favor.

However, regardless of the results of various usability studies, the tech world refuses to relent and geeks around the world demand the versatility of the multibutton mice that they've come to know and love, just not from Apple.

With all due respect to the reviewer, who really hit the nail on the head with his review, this particular dig at two-button mice misses the point. While I, too, have not tracked down any studies specifically testing one vs. two button mice, user interface studies generally show that more complicated input procedures that require people to actually, like, learn things generally kick the ass of input methods designed for novices. (This one reason why I regularly get schooled in Starcraft by people who know the hotkeys, or why my friends David Cater and Henry Crutcher can program rings around me because every possible configuration of input devices on their computers does something useful for them. But I digress.)



Or do I? I certainly FEEL far more efficient browsing the web on the Blue Slab of Coolness because I can right-context click and save files or view source of a page without performing a context click than I am on the Grey Slate of Smoothness, which only has a one-button trackpad and requires a key-and-mouse dance to get the same functions. Or, to compare Apples to Apples (ha ha), I definitely feel far more efficient using my iLamp with its third-party three-button mouse than I am on the Grey Slate, which feels like a step backward.



(In fact, compared to the Toshiba Satellite's slick programmable animated trackpad ...



...the Powerbook's simple grey slate seems like something out of the Stone Age:



... especially when you think how easy it would be for the animated trackpad and Apple's grey slate to be combined. But, again, I digress.)


Apple's genius of late has been to show that the true solution is NOT "either novices or experts" but is instead "BOTH novices AND experts". Apple's new mouse is not a one button mouse or a two button mouse ... it's both: a four-button mouse that looks like a one button mouse from the perspective of novices, but is fully programmable. Apple is one of the most GUI-focused operating systems that exists that "just does the right thing" for novices, but it's now layered on top of Unix so that the most hardened hacker can crack open bash, Emacs and Perl to get his job done. As the Ars Technica review notes:

When you press both buttons at the same time or simply depress the top half of the mouse, it left clicks. I consider this to be a very important point, as much of the recent debate about this mouse has revolved around whether it would be a good mouse solution to package with new Mac products in the future, therefore having to still "just work" for those who desire the one-button simplicity and not confusing those people when they start seeing unexpected contextual menus popping up. I think it would be very difficult to accidentally right-click this mouse, as most one-button users simply click on the left side with their index fingers or click in the center, which would still yield a left click.

SO maybe there AREN'T user interface studies that will definitively show that one button mice {kick the ass of | suck compared to} two button mice. But now Apple has shown you don't have to accept that Hobson's choice ... you can get both. And since Apple has now given users the means to choose (spiced up of course with Apple's marketing mojo and the distinctive Apple innovations like that micro scroll ball which enables you to pan and tilt anywhere in large documents in programs like, oh, PHOTOSHOP or something - talk about playing to your core audience. But I digre-WHAM-thud). Ahem.

Since Apple has given its users the means to choose, we no longer need to wait for studies - we can let the market decide.

And I decide a two-button mouse will make me feel better ... as soon as I can snatch one from all of your fast little hands.

-the Centaur

So Captain D's now has lighter fare. For those who don't know me, I am the "Captain D's Guy". The restaurant was founded the same year I was born, and I imprinted upon it at an early age when my mom would drop me off there for lunch while she shopped at the grocery store next door. Even now, I still eat there twice a week - sometimes even twice a day.

Flash forward ten years. My uncle Joe died of heart failure when I was in college - and my dad had quite the history of heart disease himself - so even though I'm adopted I figured it was time to start looking ahead to beat the family curse. I decided to focus on baby steps: going for a walk once a week, or ordering one less piece of fish for lunch, or switching from fries to rice. This was difficult, but over time the "baby steps" approach worked: I went from walking to running to the Peachtree, and from the three piece fried fish dinner to the two-piece broiled grill with veggies. It took another ten years, but I eventually DID manage to lose the college fat and bring the cholesterol (which never was bad, mind you) under control.

Fast forward to now. I'm developing a "your money is your voice" philosophy: I choose to shop at Whole Foods, and will soon choose to switch to a hybrid car, NOT because I'm a granola health food environmental nut but instead because I think there is value to healthy food choices and fuel efficient cars and I'm willing to put some price premium on doing things a better way. Hopefully if enough people think like me, businesses will notice, and will apply some of that crackerjack capitalist ingenuity to making me happy in a healthy, environmentally conscious way.

SO I was pleased to see that Captain D's has indeed adopted lighter fare. In addition to the broiled lunch special I've been eating all this time, they've added low calorie, low carb and premium grilled selections which target any kind of health diet you so choose. And you know what? Surprise, surprise - they're some of the tastiest meals on the menu. And this is speaking from someone who loves fried fish: it's great to have something that tastes good be good for you, for a change.



Go check it out.
-the Centaur

This never fails to crack me up:

Anthony Francis: Seventeenth century quack physician and alchemist. Claimed ability to dissolve gold into a universal remedy.

- Wedeck, Harry E.
A Treasury of Witchcraft: A Sourcebook of the Magic Arts., p196. Avenel, New Jersey: Gramercy Books. 1961.

If only I knew all the things I've been doing...

-the Centaur

So Bill Clementson thinks he has too many books, eh?

The fact that I have too many books is, of course, even more apparent to me at the moment as I'm packing up for the move to Vancouver and I've just filled 15 boxes full of books in preparation for the move!

15 boxes of books. Uh-huh. He has no idea.



NO idea at all.

-Anthony

(P.S. What you can see there, is 25 boxes of books. What you can't see along the walls and behind the archway, is another 25 boxes of books. What you can't see upstairs, is another 75 boxes of books. Of course, some people say the first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have a problem. On the other hand, I say the first step in dealing with a problem is buying a book written by someone else who has the same problem so you can find the best solution - What? :-)

Recently, Henry Crutcher and I discussed Chomsky's famous phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", intended to be an example of a sentence which was grammatical but meaningless.

Henry was curious about whether a stronger example of a meaningless phrase could be found, as he could see ways of interpreting it analogically and wanted something stronger. However, he backed off when he thought about colorless green - a seeming contraditction in terms.

Not necessarily. I pointed out if you tweaked the words, you might be able to come up with usages. For example, in quantum mechanics, the Phi meson is a strange particle (a particle made from strange quarks) which has zero strangeness because it incorporates both a strange quark and antiquark. Or, more pointedly, ALL mesons are "colorless" particles because they contain quarks and antiquarks, each with its "color" and "anticolor". So our sample Phi meson might reasonably be described as a colorless green particle because it is composed of green and antigreen quarks.

But this analogy seemed like it didn't help because particles don't really sleep ... unless you consider the furious sleep of virtual particles in the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. Modern theories of physics suggest fantastic numbers of particles that we can't see are created all the time and just as quickly destroyed ... which, curiously enough, funny quirks in the movement of particles that we CAN see. These "virtual particles" don't really exist except through their influences on other particles, almost like how ideas don't really exist except through their influences on the people that hold them. So in this sense an infinite number of colorless green ideas sleep furiously throughout the universe around us. But I digress, because neither of us were buying that interpretation.

Green ideas DID make sense, however, in the "novice" or "untried" sense of green. In that sense an idea can be green - and it can also be bloodless or colorless if it fails to excite anyone. Once an idea has failed to excite anyone, of course, it falls asleep. Henry suggested that sleeping furiously could mean an idea that had many sleeping copies, at which point it occurred to me: an idea that's sleeping furiously is just a failed marketing campaign: millions of copies exist but fail to influence anyone, like New Coke or Windows DNA. In fact, in technology space it seems like every week someone pops forth with a new, green idea, standard or technology that's hot only to their marketing department but is colorless and bloodless to everyone else. The idea is marketed furiously, then peters out and dies as its marketing money withdraws, leaving piles of detritus heaped across the landscape like glacial moraines, still green and untested, but too colorless for anyone to care to wake them from their prehistoric slumber.

So now we know where colorless green ideas sleep furiously: on the internet.

And then Henry and I were very happy, having found an interpretation of an uninterpretable sentence that at last made sense. "Dot NET is a colorless green idea sleeping furiously!" - or at least the marketing initiative is, though .NET is live and well in development land. But again I digress, because our jubilation over interpreting the uninterpretable didn't last. We thought we were being clever ... unfortunately, someone else thought of it first.

Oh well. It wasn't a very good analogy, right bloodless in fact. And I'm sure everyone else who hears the phrase thinks of it too, at least the first time they tackle it like a novice. Perhaps it's best to let this analogy rest, along with all the other thousands of colorless green ideas that sleep furiously beside it.

-the Centaur

Google Moon. Enough said.

SO, I just participated in the MIT Weblog Survey, the latest attempt by the Georgia Tech of the North's Media Laboratory to replicate the success of the GVU's WWW User Surveys. :-)

Seriously, all smackdaddy talk aside, blogging is the latest thing (well, the second-to-most-latest thing, after podcasting) in the evolution of the Internet, and it's important that we try to understand it.

So, if you blog, help the guys up north and take the survey:



- the Centaur