Fuzzy

Surprisingly often, scientific researchers make what (eventually, perhaps after decades) turn out to be bad assumptions. They simplify a vexing problem in order to investigate it with the available tools, and then assume that what they’ve learned describes what happens in the real world, forgetting that they began by making a simplifying assumption.

Right now I’m reading Microcosm, a wonderful layman’s science book about the bacterium E. coli. You may not know much about E. coli, but they know quite a lot about you, at least in a vague, utilitarian way, because billions of them are living in your intestines right now.

E. coli has been quite extensively studied in the laboratory. It’s right up there with mice and fruit flies as one of the favorite organisms used in research. But research can’t be done in your intestines. On p. 51, the author (Carl Zimmer) says this:

“Out of the 4,288 genes scientists have identified in E. coli … only 303 appear to be essential for its growth in a laboratory. That does not mean the other 3,985 genes are all useless. Many help E. coli survive in the crowded ecosystem of the human gut, where a thousand species of microbes compete for food.”

But I’m not here today to meditate on intestinal parasites (though that’s a topic worth meditating on). I’m a lot more interested in what happens inside of E. coli. The little critter is a jam-packed protein circus! Large molecules are whizzing around carrying out amazingly intricate

Dead Letter Office

Apparently nobody is very serious about wanting a solid, modern presentation for interactive fiction in web browsers. My recent blog posts on the subject, which I mentioned in the IF Forum, have met with a thunderous silence. As Adlai Stevenson once remarked, “I’m underwhelmed.”

I suspect that the main reason nobody is hot to tackle this issue and wrestle it to the ground is because nobody really gives much of a crap about interactive fiction in any form. I suspect that the observation I made the other day about Quest — that it’s caught in a negative feedback spiral because nobody who truly cares about producing high-quality work would mess with it — applies to the entire field, not just to Quest.

The 2011 IF Comp was won by a game called “Taco Fiction,” whose premise is that you’re a down-and-out, seriously broke guy. You can’t pay your rent or make your car payment, so you’ve decided that the solution to your problems is to mug a passing pedestrian and then rob an all-night taco joint at gunpoint. You haven’t actually loaded your revolver; you’re not quite that much of a desperado. In fact, trying to hold up a taco joint with an unloaded revolver is sort of doubly pathetic, isn’t it? But there we are. That was the most profoundly meaningful or best developed IF story of the year.

It’s pretty easy to see why any writer who wanted to produce serious fiction (and we’ll include humor in the “serious” category) would look at

Look Through Telescope

Yesterday I summarized the problem: The existing delivery systems for interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventure games) are mired in the 1980s. The early 1980s. Today I’d like to toss out a few ideas about what, ideally, ought to happen in order to bring the presentation of IF forward into the 21st century.

Broadly, there are two ways to move forward: either a massive extension of an existing authoring system, or an entirely new system. Both courses are fraught with difficulties; neither is a stroll in the park.

Let’s take a brief look at the characteristics such an authoring system would, ideally, have. The list below is not intended to be exhaustive — I may have left something out. It’s intended to serve as a starting point for discussion.

1. The games produced using the new system should be playable, and with an essentially identical appearance and functionality, in MacOS, Windows, Linux, and mobile platforms.
2. Convenience for the end user should be emphasized. The user should not have to download and install separate interpreter software or a self-contained app.
3. The authoring system itself should be available on all three desktop platforms, and without too great compromises in terms of utility. (No use of a command-line compiler should be required in one OS, for instance, if it’s not required in another.)
4. The author should have

Marvels

First the bad news, then the good news.

The bad news is, sometime during the next 50 years or so there’s going to be a worldwide collapse. The end of civilization as we know it. Billions of people will die in messy, painful ways. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. (Hopefully, not within my lifetime.)

This prediction has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar, nor with the Christian idiocy about Armageddon. It’s about overpopulation. We have already long passed the point at which our planet could support its human population. Resources are being depleted at a breakneck pace — and meanwhile, more babies are being born.

If it were just a matter of billions of people dying, that would be good news. But it’s worse than that. What will happen to all those nuclear power plants

Primate Priorities

This week my eye doctor told me I’m starting to develop cataracts. My hearing is getting a little less acute too. For a 63-year-old I’m still very, very healthy, but time is starting to catch up with me.

My career has been devoted mainly to helping other musicians. That was the mission at Keyboard, where I worked as an editor and staff writer for more than 25 years. Since being laid off ten years ago, I’ve written four books on music topics, plus a couple of hundred more magazine articles. I’ve also been teaching cello privately.

All this has been very rewarding. But in whatever time remains to me, I think I would like to concentrate on my own music, thank you very much. I think I’ve done enough to help others — this is my time.

Our ancestors evolved as social creatures. They lived in small, roving bands. Being part of the group was vital. If you wandered off on your own too liberally, your genes tended not to be passed on to the next generation. Today, we all actively seek social approval, and that’s why. Not being part of the group induces anxiety.

I’ve identified three factors that are keys to my music-making. I need to have creative input, I need a commitment to excellence, and I need some sort of social approval for the activity — some form of social feedback that keys into my instinctive need to feel that I’m part of the group.

Recently I’ve been playing in my local community orchestra. This gives me a very adequate level of social support. I’m part of a large group, we get applause, and because I’m the principal cellist I actually get a small paycheck too. Unfortunately, my creative input is approximately zero, and I would have to say that the orchestra’s commitment to excellence is marginal at best. I could give you some graphic descriptions of occasions on which excellence has not been demonstrated, but out of respect for your delicate sensibilities, I will refrain.

What I’d really like to be doing, with whatever years remain to me, is sitting here at my computer, composing and recording my own music. I have a suite of amazing, exciting tools with which to do this, and I’m proficient in the use of the tools. I have plenty of musical ideas and a high level of understanding of music theory.

This activity would be very creative, and my commitment to excellence is whatever I choose to make it. (Usually it’s very high.) The difficulty, and it’s an enormous difficulty, is that this is an activity that provides no social support whatever. When I’m doing it, there’s nobody else in the room — and when I finish a new piece, nobody cares. Sure, I can put it up on my website, but my website gets no traffic. Nobody will ever hear the music. When I die, it will be just some files on my hard drive, and the hard drive will be hauled off to the electronic recycling center and that will be the end of it.

As a practical matter, my awareness of my isolation produces waves of sadness and loneliness. I end up not producing much music, and it’s because I’m keenly aware that nobody cares. I might as well turn on the TV. If I put hours, days, weeks, months, years of creative effort into creating new music, there will be no applause. I will never get a check in the mail. I will never have anybody patting me on the back and saying, “We appreciate your hard work.”

Please don’t tell me about online self-promotion. I know all about that. Online self-promotion is, in an emotional sense, a way of courting enormous amounts of rejection. You send out emails, you send out demos — and 98% of the time, nobody cares. I don’t have nearly enough emotional stamina to put myself through that wringer.

What I want to do is what I’ve always done: I create the content, and somebody else promotes and distributes it. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to find or create a setting in which I can do that with my own music. So I end up playing in a second-rate community orchestra, because that’s where the social support is. What a fucking waste.

Abstract vs. Concrete

Yesterday I was reading up on the Javascript programming language. Then after supper I resubscribed to Netflix and watched the first four episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, back to back. Both activities were fun, but the contrast was noticeable.

Why Javascript? Because I’ve been looking into the possibility of presenting interactive stories in a web browser. Ian Millington’s Undum system makes this possible — but Undum uses Javascript quite intensively, so I would need to know it a lot better than I do in order to create a story with Undum.

The goal is clear: I’d like to write stories and make them available for people to read. The stories themselves would be concrete experiences — just words on a page or screen, it’s true, but words stimulate the brain to imagine that real events are transpiring.

Same deal with Buffy: The reality (cameras, scripts, lighting, makeup, paychecks to the actors, carefully designed special effects) is an abstract apparatus, but the viewer has, in the end, a concrete experience. Mentally constructed, to be sure, but it’s an experience of “real” events, not an experience of the syntax of computer code, nor of camera angles and all the rest. If we notice camera angles and lighting while watching a movie or TV show,

Big Sky

Today I’m toying with the idea that paranoid delusions are the only rational response to the world we live in. Attempting to understand what’s going on around us in a sensible, scientifically responsible manner is just too discouraging. I mean, how anybody in the Republican Party could possibly take themselves seriously, without either throwing up or collapsing in helpless laughter — there really is no way to make sense of it.

I’ve been forced, rather against my better judgment, to conclude that space aliens are doing something really awful to Republicans’ brains.

This theory has the advantage that it’s tidy. We can’t possibly understand the motives or methods of space aliens, so we don’t need to try to explain what they’re up to. It’s enough to grasp that they’re doing it. Because, really, what other explanation could there be?

You may say, “But Jim, there are no space aliens! All of those purported sightings are either deliberate lies by attention-seekers or the result of bad brain wiring. Those thousands of photographs of flying saucers — all of them are 100% fake.” That’s an interesting theory, of course, but it has difficult features. For one thing, it’s

Legacy Problems

My parents did a lot of stuff. They’re gone now, but some of the stuff lingers on. I have 20 large paintings that my father did — a few from the ’50s, most from the ’70s. That’s only a fraction of his output. Today I was looking at photos of him at work in his studio in about 1975. Interesting work hangs in the background of the photos. Most of it is gone now. Some of it may have sold; a lot of it is just plain gone.

I live in a 4-bedroom house, but even so, I have wall space for only a dozen of the paintings. And a dozen is too many. The house is jammed with paintings. In order to make the house more livable, I’m going to have to take some of them down and store them.

For years after my father died, my mother kept paintings in a big storage rack in the garage. Over the years, things happened to some of them. There was damage from cat urine, in some cases. The damaged canvases are gone now, either sold in the estate sale or, in a few cases, simply tossed in the dumpster.

I’m not going to store the ones that remain in the garage. Even though I don’t have cats. I can stack them in the middle bedroom. Hang five or six and rotate them every six months.

I could fill every wall in the house with family photographs if I wanted to. I don’t want to, but damn, I’ve got hundreds of good ones. Going back to around 1880.

Looming behind this little logistical logjam, though, is something deeper. A sadness about the meaning of a life. My parents were intensely involved with life — a fact that I sort of missed at the time, or took for granted. What I have now is

Concerning Stuff

Pardon me while I whine for a minute. I’m having a luxury problem here, and it’s driving me bats.

I live in a four-bedroom house. Just me, no inconvenient family underfoot. But yet, I don’t have enough room for my stuff. This has nothing to do with absolute cubic footage. I don’t have that much stuff. It’s a question of utility. How do I arrange my stuff in such a way that it makes sense?

I have, to begin with, a fairly large collection of books. Most of them I will never read again — but I went through them about five years ago and got rid of quite a lot. I don’t feel good about getting rid of any more. But they’re of no value if they’re boxed up and relegated to the garage. They need to be on bookshelves, with the spines displayed in the usual way, in case I have a random impulse to read one.

CDs and LPs, ditto.

Then there are the paintings. I have too many of my father’s paintings, which are inconveniently large and take up a lot of wall space. Fifteen of them are hanging on the walls, along with four of my mother’s (blessedly smaller) pastels. I don’t actually need to be staring at the paintings, but if I put them in storage, nobody will ever see them again, and that’s a very sad thing. The linen closets in the hall are packed with smaller art work that I don’t have space to hang.

I have both a living room and a family room — but strangely enough, I have neither a living room nor a family room. I have, in other words, no “social space” where people could sit around and talk if I invited a few friends over, or maybe watch a movie together. The living room is my cello teaching studio, and also houses my six-foot grand piano. (A grand piano? See, I told you it was a luxury problem.) Add a couple of bookshelves for sheet music and the couch for parents and family to sit on during the lesson, and the room is full.

The family room is larger, but it’s my electronic music studio. Here are set up my computer, a synthesizer keyboard, speakers, shelves for the aforementioned LPs, and so on. Plus, one wall is dominated by the fireplace and another by the sliding door to the back yard. The family room does have a couch and an easy chair, but the couch is in an awkward place. If I had a TV (there’s a natural place for it in the corner beside the sliding door), the couch would not be facing it. Very bad.

I could move the computer studio into the back bedroom, but it would be too cramped for me to also set up my electric cello in order to record music into the computer and play along with it. There isn’t even room for the electric cello setup in the family room unless I get rid of the awkwardly positioned couch. But where else can I put the couch? In a back bedroom, where nobody will ever sit on it? What kind of sense would that make? In the dining room???

I would like to buy a large-format printer, so that I can print orchestra cello parts that are large enough for me to read easily at rehearsals and concerts with my not-so-great eyesight. I can’t even figure out how to come up with one extra square foot for that. I would need a larger table … and where would I put it? In front of the fireplace?

I can’t get at half of the LPs, because they’re on shelves that are tucked away behind other furniture. Not that I listen to a lot of LPs, but once in a while, you know? Maybe I have this Jefferson Airplane-shaped impulse, but it’s way too much trouble to drag the easy chair out into the middle of the room to get at that particular LP shelf.

This is not a post with a snappy ending sentence. There’s no snappy ending in sight.

Ripped from the Headlines

Sometimes … well, fairly often … I despair of the world I live in. Sometimes I get mad.

Today’s bulletins included a story about a Tennessee legislator who defended low pay for teachers on the grounds that teaching is a “calling,” so we wouldn’t want people going into teaching for the wrong reasons (i.e., because of the pay), and then, in the next breath, defended giving legislators a raise on the grounds that it was important for them to be able to resist corruption.

Then there was the cute little graphic someone put up on Facebook showing the states in the U.S. where you can be fired from a job simply for being gay. More than half of the states.

I have not researched either of these stories in detail. Either of them could be fabricated. But even if they’re inaccurate in their details, they certainly illustrate what’s really going on in the world.

I watched a clip in which the head of Susan Komen for the Cure defended, or attempted to defend, her organization against the outrage over their de-funding of Planned Parenthood. She claimed, with a straight face, that they’re not de-funding Planned Parenthood, but she did it in a way that included careful phrasing. The MSNBC interviewer failed to ask