Algorithms for the Masses by Julian M Bucknall

Quick links to the most recent posts:

• Southwark in 1766 (Fri 3-Feb-2012)
• What’s in the water in Indiana? (Thu 2-Feb-2012)
• Fisking a grammar prescriptivist (Wed 1-Feb-2012)
• A musical calculator: Casio ML-81 (Tue 31-Jan-2012)
• The popularity of “could care less” cannot be underestimated (Fri 27-Jan-2012)
• Art at Chatsworth, September 2011 (Thu 26-Jan-2012)
• Kindle Fire (Wed 25-Jan-2012)
• JavaScript for C# developers: coercion (Tue 24-Jan-2012)
• Agile New Year resolutions (Mon 23-Jan-2012)
• Tintin: the British cars in The Black Island (Sat 21-Jan-2012)

One of the kinds of art I really enjoy is art that shows off the draughtsmanship of cartographers, especially from the early 1900s or earlier. We have a small collection of framed old maps from places we most closely associate ourselves with: London, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Normandy, Colorado. Road maps, railway maps, topographic maps. I find them utterly fascinating, tracing in my mind’s eye how the countryside has changed or the urban expanses filled out, squinting to read the names.

One of the examples I have is a page from The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1766. This was a monthly periodical that was published from 1731 to 1922 (the first such to use the term “magazine” in fact) and printed a summary of news, information, letters, and commentary, mostly about what was happening in Britain. Samuel Johnson, he of the astounding A Dictionary of the English Language, worked as a writer for the magazine for a while.

A 20-year stretch of issues of the magazine – from 1731 to 1750 – has been scanned and published online as part of the ILEJ project. They are engrossing to read, but can be opaque in places, what with all the long S’s and ligatures and abbreviations. Here’s a flavor:

The inhabitants of Westminster petitioned to the H. of C. [House of Commons] for the free fish market, like that of Billingsgate, in order to encourage fishermen, and reduce the price of fish ; and a bill was order’d accordingly.

Four petitions from the high sheriff, grand jury, justices of the peace, and gentlemen of Suffolk, met at the assizes and quarter sessions, were presented to the House, for an act to hold the former assizes at Ipswich ; as it is very unsafe, as well as expensive, to carry Smugglers and other prisoners as far as Bury ; to which place many gentlemen, and others, who are obliged to attend on business, have fifty miles to go ; and therefore, as Ipswich is even way more convenient, being nearer the middle of the county, etc. leave was desired to bring in a bill accordingly ; and a motion being made for that purpose, it passed in the negative.

Phew. Thank heavens the printer’s long S disappeared, it’s way too much like a lowercase F: fiſh, aſſizes, buſineſs, and so on, so forth. 

Anyway, in one of the issues for 1766 this map appeared:

(I really would click to expand it. The full size is some 1600 × 2400 pixels, 3Mb, so be warned.)

It’s a lovely map, despite the visible ink shadow from the other side in the lower half, and shows a good part of Southwark on the South Bank. It depicts some possible new roads to be built to connect the new (it was still being built) Blackfriars Bridge in the north to the main routes to Surrey and Kent in the south. (The bridge opened in 1769.) If you look carefully at the north end of the bridge you can see where the River Fleet empties into the Thames. Presumably there was an article that went along with it to describe the choices, although I don’t have it.

The map is full of fields and gardens, with Lambeth Palace and Westimster Bridge just visible. The closer to the river you get the more built-up the area becomes. There are some lovely names of places and streets and businesses, redolent of the times: Johnny Groots; the Dog and Duck, clearly marked at the junction of Lambeth Road and the Road to Clapham, Melancholy Walk, Dr. James’s Laboratory (I wonder what went on there?), Watson Calico Printer, Hay Market with a little icon of a windmill by it. The river has the various quays and landing stages clearly marked: Arundel Sta. ("Sta." is short for stairs), Surrey Sta., Essex Sta., Morris’s Causeway, Paul’s Wharf, and the like.

After a while of looking at it, you want to see what the current place looks like, how things have changed. Did any of those roads get built and survive to this day?

My plan was to superimpose a current map of the area over this one, so that the old map bleeds through. Not entirely successful, I’m afraid:

The main reason is that the current map is dense with streets. Southwark has changed incredibly in the past 250 years. It is extremely built up when compared to the old days, and in the building frenzy of the 19th and 20th centuries, entire streets were thrown away to be replaced by others. Some new streets took on an old name, even though they were in different places (look for Maid Lane, which became Maiden Lane). And some streets are still there: Red Cross Street had a slight change to Redcross Way, but Dead Man’s Place (where it ended) is now Park St. Part of the building changes were due to the construction of the railways in early Victorian times. Whole swathes of Southwark are now under rail: there’s Waterloo Station to the west and London Bridge station to the east. The position of the old Blackfryars Bridge (it only lasted one hundred years) is now where Blackfriars Rail Bridge is.

The other incredible thing is the direct result of Bazalgette’s remarkable plans to construct a modern sewer system one hundred years after this map was published. If you look at the present course of the Thames compared with the old map, you can imagine the monumental work that went into building the Embankment on the north side in Victorian times. He narrowed the river quite a bit with this construction, and some of those stairs I mentioned became streets instead (I went to King’s College, which is just south of Somerset Garden on the old map, and to one side of it is Surrey St, roughly where where Surrey Stairs are depicted).

The other fascinating part of the map for me (because I used to live in Camberwell to the south and hence travelled through it a lot) is the Elephant and Castle. On the old map it’s already pretty built up with several houses marked, although at that time, the name “Elephant and Castle” was an informal name for the village – it was the coaching inn there – the official one being Newington. It amuses me a bit to think that the Metropolitan Tabernacle is built on the site of the Fishmongers’ Alms Houses. I know, I know, I’m easily pleased.

Next time, I’ll briefly talk about how I photographed the map: it’s still in its frame.

Now playing:
Level 42 – Running in the Family -Dave O’ Remix
(from Running in the Family (Platinum Edition))

In 1897 a new bill was submitted to the Indiana General Assembly. It was written by an amateur mathematician called Edwin J. Goodwin whose ability to understand basic mathematics was so poor that he firmly believed that he’d squared the circle. (The proof that it can’t be done was published in 1882 by Lindemann.) The bill was presented as a contribution to education in Indiana and was titled “A bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth”. The interesting passage is this one:

Furthermore, it has revealed the ratio of the chord and arc of ninety degrees, which is as seven to eight, and also the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square which is as ten to seven, disclosing the fourth important fact, that the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four[.]

Taking first the “ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square which is as ten to seven” part, we can use Pythagoras’ Theorem to show he means that 10² = 7² + 7² (ooh, close!) or, if you prefer, that √2 = 10/7 or 1.4286. As I said, close, but no cigar.

The “ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four” part is the one that everyone remembers. The ratio of circumference of a circle to its diameter has a name all of its own. It’s called π and this phrase determines that π=4/(5/4) or 3.2.

Yes, this was the Indiana Pi Bill, as it’s now called. It passed the House of Representatives but was tabled by the Senate. Everyone who had at least half a brain heaved a huge sigh of relief.

The reason I bring this up is that on January 31, the Indiana Senate, on a 28-22 vote, approved a bill to allow the state’s public schools to teach “various theories concerning the origin of life” and specifically mentions “creation science” (which of course is anything but science). Although this managed to get through the Senate Committee for Education as is, it was amended for the full Senate to include other “theories” from religions like Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Scientology (emphasis mine – although I almost died laughing when I first read this) to try and avoid accusations of teaching a single religion in schools. (See Edwards v. Aguillard, which declared that teaching creationism alongside evolution was unconstitutional because it promoted a given religion.)

So here we go again: a nonsense bill is again on the verge of passing in Indiana.

State Senator Scott Schneider, R-Clueless, said if there are many theories about life’s origins, students should be taught all of them. This is just an incredibly stupid thing to say. It implies that all such possible theories (where theory is assumed by such people as having the sense of conjecture) have equal weight, ergo they should all be taught since any one of them is equally likely to be valid. Such idiots don’t understand what a theory means in science terms (a hypothesis that has so much empirical support that it can be viewed as a fact or law) and that evolution is such a theory.

This bill is equivalent to teaching Ptolemaic astronomy (the Earth is at the center of the universe, the stars are points on a glass sphere, etc) as an equally valid theory to modern cosmology. Or that π is equal to 3.2. Crass stupidity would be too mild a term to call such a proposition, and it’s an equally applicable phrase to this Senate Bill 89.

(Image courtesy Buzzfeed.)

Here we go, another grammar article full of the most awful bollocks. 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong by Jon Gingerich. Go read it, I’ll wait.

I just love the snide remark of “I know some of the best authors in history have lived to see these very toadstools appear in print.” Good grief, the best authors in history knew/know what they’re doing, and if you’re going to take Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, or Amis to court because they used which instead of that, then you lose. And that’s the problem with the majority of this piece: it’s Gingerich’s opinion masquerading as fact and cast as commands. And, to be utterly honest, a lot of this stuff isn’t really even grammar (that is, the morphology and syntax of the language), it’s word definitions.

Armed with the OED online, the Oxford Modern English Dictionary, Chambers Dictionary to support my fisking (they’re the ones I have at hand), let’s wade into this swamp and hope we reach some dry tussocks of grass every now and then:

Who and Whom. Oh, for the love of Pete, whom is dead. Unless you are writing a Victorian novel or are a pretentious snob. For everyone else, the language has moved on and now who is pretty much used everywhere, because, quite frankly, the myriad traditional rules suck to remember and get right. Not only do they suck, but people would really look at you askance if you tried.

Which and That. The old restrictive versus relative clauses rule. Well, since Gingerich refutes his own advice with a perfectly fine counter-example, don’t worry about it too much. Geoffrey Pullum has some good advice in his article that pulls apart Strunk and White (executive summary: they lay down the rule and then break it continually throughout the book). Or should that be which?

Lay and Lie. This is a good piece of advice. And, boy, it gets difficult sometimes.

Moot. WTF? This is in the top twenty because their/they’re/there and your/you’re went out for a drink down the pub? The possessive apostrophe was out to lunch? The Oxford comma was otherwise detained?

Continual and Continuous. Utter bollocks. Just read the OED (definition 1a). There are differences (in mathematics, you talk about a continuous function, but not a continual one for example), but the assertion that continual just means “always going on, punctuated by intervals” is not true.

Envy and Jealousy. Damn these dictionaries when they say that a definition of jealous is envious. It just ruins Gingerich’s day. Lexicographers the world over must be jealous (or should that be envious?) of his success at promoting his artificial view of the language. If only reality was so clear-cut.

Nor. Gets bonus points for mentioning the nor after neither, or after either rule and how that’s too restrictive. As a whole his rule’s almost right, but you still can’t convince me to use it. Nor will I change my mind.

May and Might. Just splitting hairs, in my view. I mean to say, may implies more possibility than might? So, if the probability of some action is, what?, 50% or more then use may? 75%? Sounds incredibly like a style thing. I may use it, but I might not.

Whether and If. A simple trek to the OED disproves this one. It’s OK as a general suggestion, perhaps.

Fewer and Less. Gag. Big time. Go and read Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage on the subject. This rule is the pinnacle of picky prescriptivism.

Farther and Further. Pretty much an invalid distinction (note the author’s weaselly use of implies for instance). It seems to be a matter of style more than anything obtained from a dictionary. Oxford Modern English Dictionary says “The form farther is used especially with reference to physical distance, although further is preferred by many people even in this sense.” Note there’s no clause about “measureable” which seems to be entirely in Gingerich’s head. Go ahead, make it a distinction for your own writing, but no way is it a hard fast rule.

Since and Because. Since I’m a cad, I’ll just say this is utter and complete bollocks. I don’t even have to go to the dictionary (but I did, and Gingerich is wrong to state his restriction: since can mean because). Has he ever used a dictionary since his first children’s picture dictionary?

Disinterested and Uninterested. Yep, agreed on this one.

Anxious. Another trip to the dictionary disproves this one. Yep, the primary definition is “troubled” or “uneasy”, but an alternative definition is “full of desire”. Let’s say I am anxious that this stupid rule is never seen again.

Different Than and Different From. Oxford even gives different to as a “less formal” British alternative. I suppose this advice is fine as far as it goes: “Use from unless it sounds better to say than.”

Bring and Take. This is a problem? So bad a problem that it has to appear in a top twenty list? I must be reading the wrong stuff.

Impactful. Gingerich may hate the word (and I’m not particularly enamored of it – it reeks of self-important Madison Avenue marketing types wielding PowerPoint slidedecks), but that’s no reason to pretend that it isn’t one. Here’s Chambers’ definition: “1. Creating an impact. 2. Effective or impressive.” Not in the OED yet. In Merriam-Webster though.

Affect and Effect. I’ll allow this one since he uses “almost always” in his description. Oh damn, I used since again. I so have to effect a change in my writing.

Irony and Coincidence. I’ll allow this one too. There’s a great skit by Ed Byrne that lampoons Alanis Morisette’s song Ironic by pointing out that many of her examples of irony aren’t.

Nauseous. Oh, geezus, this one just makes me feel sick, especially after the twaddle I’ve just been through. Definition 1b in the OED is the definition Gingerich rejects as being false (earliest citation 1885; “orig US”: Americans have been wrong for 125 years!). Definition 2a is the definition he allows. Ditto for all the other dictionaries: they have both definitions. Sorry, dude, you can’t just pick and choose the definitions you like and then cast the others as a mistake. That’s just arrogant.

And then to cap it all he recommends The Elements of Style. It’s a horrible little book that doesn’t even follow its own prescriptions. Talking of which, I really commend you to read through Pullum’s essay again: it’ll open your eyes.

So, let’s see the score: six or seven are OK, out of twenty. Thirteen or fourteen are somewhere on the line from being nauseatingly picky to arrogantly wrong. Some of them might charitably be described as style suggestions, but far too often he’s quoting his opinion as fact without even checking with the dictionary.

For your jaunt down memory lane today, I present another calculator from my collection: the Casio ML-81.

On the one hand it’s a four-banger with memory, but on the other it plays music! Click the picture to expand it, take a look at the keys really carefully and you’ll see that they are marked Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, etc. When the little slider switch top right is in the treble clef position, the calculator will ding every time you press on of the number keys. Not only that, but if you do a calculation, it’ll play the answer to you. Now admittedly the notes are entirely artificial, electronic, and ting-y, but they’re there.

Not only that, but it has clock functionality as well. So there’s the current date and time (you can see when I took the photo, for example) which chimes on the hour every hour, stopwatch and timer functions, and there are two alarms. And, when in the awesome treble clef position, the alarms will play a little melody when they expire. Alarm 1 plays the beginning of Frühlingslied by Mendelssohn and alarm 2 plays Traumerei by Schumann. (The timer plays a tune when it reaches zero: Schubert’s Moments Musicaux No. 3.) All pieces are twenty four seconds long.

So, why do I have this calculator? Apart from it being an entirely awesome piece of consumer electronics, that is? To be honest I bought one back in the mid-80s just for the fun of it. It was cheap enough that it was just a spontaneous purchase: I saw, wanted, bought it. Probably in some electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road, if truth be told. I even used it as my wake-up alarm instead of a boring old clock for a while. And then my flat was burgled one day and they took it along with my hi-fi, CDs, and other stuff. Then, about five years ago, maybe more, I spotted one in an auction on eBay (NOS - New Old Stock, as they say) and bought it for $50. That’s the one you see here. I keep it out on my bookshelves (in its cover) and it still merrily chimes the hour.

(There were a whole bunch of different Casio calculators from the 80s that have clocks and tunes, some of which I own. I’ll do another post showing some of them.)

Personally speaking, I find the usage of “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” to be a little annoying. I’d even go further: to my ear it sounds illogical: “hey, if you could care less then you must care a bit!” Much merriment and good-natured joshing ensue, ho, ho, ho. But, to be honest, life’s too short to start a grammar war over it.

I’ve even encountered the theory (I believe it was Steven Pinker who first proposed it) that the speaker of “I could care less” is being sarcastic: “hey, I could care a bit, but, like, it’s so not worth the effort”. But then again, “I couldn’t care less” is also being sarcastic by using emphasis: whatever happened to the simple “I don’t care”? Besides which, it’s used so often in an automatic unthinking manner that it’s a little presumptuous to imagine that every usage is sarcasm (ditto the “negated” version, I suppose).

They are both idioms. They don’t have to really make sense literally: you are conveying the thought through the cliché. People don’t really hear the words, they hear the shape of the saying and get the meaning from that. You cannot fail to miss with colloquial phrases. Everyone knows them. Here’s one: “I’m head over heels in love with you”. You all know this one, it means “I’m bowled over by you”, and maybe you’ve even had it said to you. And yet you’ve never really read it. Look, when I’m standing upright, my head is over my heels. So, I’m in love with everyone I meet as I walk around the mall? Duh. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable states that the saying used to be “heels over head” which makes a lot more sense. But the idiom changed over the years.)

In essence, it’s part of a problem with how our poor monkey brains deal with negation (or even over-negation) in sentences, especially in conversation. Sometimes it seems there’s just not enough time for the brain to process the complicated grammar, craft a sentence, and get the mouth to say it; or even the other way around: to hear and parse what someone else is saying to you. No one is too intelligent to avoid misinterpreting over-negated sentences. We just cancel out some of the (explicit/implicit) negation and somehow hear what the other was trying to say, even if the sentence literally meant the opposite. Heck, I know de Morgan’s Laws and yet I still have problems writing complex conditional expressions with not operators. I have to stop and really think about what I’m trying to say.

So, before you all jump over me for condoning “could care less”, maybe you should reread what I wrote.

For our wedding anniversary this year we went to the Peak District and stayed at a hotel in Baslow, just north of Chatsworth Park. Of course, since we were so close, we had to go visit the House and grounds.

Bizarrely, despite the fact my family used to live near Matlock when I was a late teen, I’d never visited either. I’d driven though the Park at the time in my parents’ borrowed Capri, but never stopped. Maybe at 18 I was too cool for art.

With our visit, we were fortunate in some ways, but most unfortunate in a couple of others. The South Front, the part of the house that looks down that impossibly beautiful lake with its Emperor Fountain, was being renovated and was covered with scaffolding and white tarps. Also, due to a drier spring than is usual in Derbyshire, the water level of the lake that feeds both the Cascade and the Emperor Fountain was too low, so both attractions were only being turned on to a strict schedule. The fortunate part: Sotheby’s had an exhibition of monumental sculpture in the park, with some quite wonderful pieces.

First, though, the house. The Dukes of Devonshire, over the centuries, had amassed quite an impressive art collection; with some striking modern art collected by the current Duke.

The first piece that really grabbed me was this Damien Hirst sculpture of St Bartholomew in the Chapel (the full title is Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain). The light was atrocious and I didn’t want to use flash, so it’s taken at ISO 1600 with as steady a hand as I could manage.

(I’d click through to see the full sized image.) It depicts a man with scalpel in one hand, outstretched, and a pair of wicked scissors in the other. Over his right arm there’s something draped, a coat? Then you see that it’s his skin and you see his muscles and tendons, and realize that he’s meant to have flayed himself. (St Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles and was supposed to have been skinned alive in Armenia.) A disturbing image, especially in a chapel, but strikingly executed.

For the next one, I didn’t make any notes about its provenance but it’s a fun modern metal sculpture of a man in a hat:

As I mentioned before, the light inside was bad and I didn’t want to use flash. Here’s a great picture of one of the ceilings along the tour:

Another just about acceptable photo (1/2 second exposure, wide open, at ISO 1600 – I must have been leaning on something) of the famous violin on the door: it’s a trompe l’oeil painting, not a real violin:

A little easier to take was this portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as Cynthia from Spenser's Faerie Queene. (If you saw The Duchess with Kiera Knightley, the film was about this rather flamboyant 18th century socialite.) Unfortunately although the light was better, taking the photo full on would have resulted in too much glare. I tell you, it just wasn’t my day for indoor photos.

The sculpture gallery was magnificent. The story here is that prior to filming Price and Prejudice at Chatsworth, the sculpture gallery had tapestries and wall-hangings adorning the walls, and had chairs and couches dotted around. They were removed temporarily for the scene where Elizabeth Bennet changes her mind about Mr Darcy, and the resulting light in the space was so spectacular that after filming the tapestries were not replaced and the gallery was again filled with the neo-classical sculptures that it used to contain. The effect now is breathtaking: the light from the domed skylights illuminating the gritstone walls whose soft color reflects the light evenly over the white marble sculptures. Here’s a couple of pictures of the lions at the far end:

And this is Ganymede:

See what I mean about the light? After all my difficulties trying to (unobtrusively) take good photos elsewhere on the tour, suddenly it was easy.

Outside, it was trying to rain (and succeeded, off and on). As I mentioned above, there was a display of modern sculpture in the park, so we dodged the raindrops and took some photos. Of particular interest were Legend and Myth by Damien Hirst (again) at the end of the lake. Here’s Myth, the unicorn:

(You can see the Emperor Fountain running at half-height in the middle distance, and the tarp-covered South Front at the end.)

And here’s Legend, the winged horse:

I suppose Hirst is exploring here the differences between legend and reality by showing these mythical creatures as having ordinary muscle, sinews, and bone. Or maybe he’s wacky. The sculptures are weirdly beautiful, if austere and a bit cold.

The final piece I’d like to show you is really quite extraordinary. A sculpture of a roaring lion made from steel and used tyres by Ji Yong-Ho. It’s just called Lion:

It’s raw and menacing with a wonderful sense of frozen movement, and incredibly beautifully done:

All in all, I think we spent all day there: we arrived before the grounds and house opened, and we left when they were shutting. Quite a wonderful day.

On the day that Apple announces that they’ve sold a gazillion iPads in the last quarter (and that they can clearly see the near future when more iPads are sold than Windows PCs), I’m going to tell you about my Kindle Fire. Bucking the trend, moi? Wading upstream? Yep, that’s me.

There are a couple of reasons why I decided to pre-order a Fire when Amazon announced them last September. The first is obvious: I already had and was using a Kindle (a second-generation, international 3G version) and was very enthusiastic about it. I’ve now read ebooks from Amazon on it, as well as technical books from Pragmatic Bookshelf and O’Reilly. I’ve read PDFs that I’ve downloaded to it. The format is great, the device light, and the ability to sync (WhisperSync as Amazon calls it) across all Kindle devices and apps is awesome. Just before Christmas we found ourselves in some fabric store – stupidly, we’d chosen the “up to 50% off” sale day to go – and I read a third of a book on my iPhone Kindle app while waiting for a fabric cutter. Brilliant.

The other great thing about the older Kindle? Annotations and highlights. For novels, meh (although it amazes me that other people have highlighted a Lee Child thriller – “Detection and response. Stage one, stage two. First you spot the threat, and then you react.” – a little creepy, no?), but for technical books it’s a dream. And the text is searchable, to boot. A technical book on an e-reader is the best thing out.

And the other reason for ordering the Fire was the ability to do other things with it. Web, video, games, etc. And in color too!

So, on November 16, UPS delivered my Kindle Fire. My opinion? Almost ideal. It’s perhaps a little too heavy for me, although the size is perfect. I much prefer a seven-inch tablet to the iPad’s ten. Like the e-ink Kindle, it’s about the size of a paperback book. Reading e-books on it is great, apart from the slight heaviness. The web browser works just fine for the sites I visit: I can catch up with emails and the feeds I follow in Google Reader just before going to sleep. The speed of its processor is fine for what I use it for; and I’ve never had any touch issues apart from a tendency for the swipe-to-unlock screen to be a bit hesitant. But, then again, sometimes my iPhone does that too.

I was already a member of Amazon Prime, so I’ve watched hours of free streaming video from Amazon on it. In fact, way more than from Netflix (we’re subscribers to that too) even though there’s a special Netflix app for the Fire. I’ve also used it to replace my iPod Touch as the device I use on flights to watch my DVDs I’ve ripped. (The iPhone/iPad settings in Handbrake work just fine for the Fire.) The only issue with that aspect is that selecting the video file to watch is remarkably hard (the Fire just displays a captured screenshot of the video – no file name – and, if you’re selecting one from several episodes of a TV series, that can be somewhat awkward).

Games? Nope, sorry. Haven’t bought/downloaded/played any at all. Not even Angry Birds. To be honest, that’s not what I bought it for. For me, the Fire is a consumer entertainment device where “entertainment” means videos and books. It’s not for work, although reading tech books is just fine. Mind you, since I wrote about the Fire’s web experience for PC Plus, I can even claim for it on my taxes. Score!

I’ve now updated the OS three times on it (the first was when I initially turned it on: there was an immediate update) and had no problem at all. In fact, I didn’t wait for the “over-the-air” update to happen the other two times: I downloaded the update files directly from Amazon with my PC and just connected the Fire via a USB cable to perform the update. The Fire comes with just a power brick so you have to have a mini-USB cable handy to do this, but since my previous Kindle had one of those, I was golden. (I’ve since bought spares, and my youngest kitten has already chewed through the cable on the power brick so that’s been disposed of. The power brick that is, not the kitten.)

So, all in all, an excellent device. Well worth the $199 for the Fire itself, and the $25 for the cover. If I were to compare it to the iPad, the only thing I would say is that you can buy five Fires for the cost of two of the cheapest iPads. No contest.

Benefits for me:

• Size is ideal.
• The whole online Amazon experience. WhisperSync, Amazon Prime, ordering content online, the works. Amazon so have this aspect down pat.
• Great e-book reader, either with .MOBI files procured from Amazon or sideloaded through USB
• Great video player, either streamed via Amazon or sideloaded as .M4V files.

Minor downsides, in my opinion:

• Could be a little lighter.
• Speed of the web browser – aka Amazon Silk – with “Accelerate page loading” enabled  is still slower than when it’s disabled. WTF?
• RAM is too small. It should be 16GB at least (or there should be a version with 16GB or more).
• Uploading with USB is pretty slow.
• When recharging, the little green power light comes on at 90% full and not 100%. I now ignore it.
• The keyboard sounds are WAY TOO LOUD. Now permanently turned off.

All in all, recommended.

In C#, we have implicit and explicit conversions. In both cases the idea is that we, the readers of the code, are not surprised by any conversions that happen. That’s why we can freely intermix ints with floats in a floating point calculation and everything turns out just fine. The ints are implicitly converted to floats (there’s no data loss) and the calculation comes out right. However, when there’s a possibility of some kind of data loss (say, converting a ulong to a long variable) you have to explicitly state the conversion in order to say “yep, I know what I’m doing; move along, nothing to see here.” Of course, the explicit conversion does come with an implied contract – that you have, you know, actually determined that the possible loss of data is benign – but otherwise just have at it.

In JavaScript type conversions are known as coercions. Variables will be coerced automatically into values of another type to make the statement or expression work. Unlike C#’s implicit conversions where there’s no data loss, JavaScript’s coercions can really wreak havoc if you are not paying attention.

One great example I’ve already talked about is the use of the double-equals (equality) comparison operator. If the two sides are evaluated to be of different types, JavaScript will coerce one or both sides to make sense of the comparison. So we get things like this:

var b;
b = 0 == "0"; // true, the "0" is coerced to 0
b = 0 == ""; // true, the "" is coerced to 0
b = "0" == ""; // false, duh, both sides are the same type

var o = {
  toString: function () {
    return "42";
  }
};
b = o == "42"; // true, the object is coerced to a string using toString()

As you can see, the first three assignments show that ‘==’ is not even transitive, going against everything you’ve ever learned; which, if nothing else, should keep you up at night. That’s why the recommendation is to always use triple-equals (identity) as a comparison operator since it does not do any coercions at all. As a handy hint, if you really, really want to use “==”, then you can force the coercion you want rather than the one you get:

var b;
b = "" + x == "" + y; // String comparison
b = +x == +y;         // Number comparison
b = !x == !y;         // Boolean comparison

But really, forget I told you this and just use “===”. Really – you can just thank me later.

At CodeMash 2012, Gary Bernhardt did an awesomely funny presentation called Wat. Watch it, and then come back here. I’ll wait.

The JavaScript parts of Gary’s talk are all to do with coercions. The first one was “what’s [] + []?”, or, in other words, what’s an empty array plus an empty array? The answer is the empty string, and the reason is not that difficult when you think in terms of coercion. The binary “+” operator in JavaScript, like C#, has two meanings: add a number to a number, and concatenate a string to a string. In C#, that’s all there is to it: you’ve got to make sure the types match and you’re done. However, in JavaScript, if the left-hand side and the right-hand side don’t make sense when used with “+”, they get coerced, usually to strings. Since [].toString() is the empty string (toString() on an array will list the contents of the array as strings separated by commas), you get the result Gary showed.

The second example, [] + {}, should now be obvious. Again, values are getting coerced to strings using the toString() method. (The answer is the string “[object Object]”, the default result of calling Object.prototype.toString().)

The third example, {} + [], caught me out at first. To my mind, it should be the same as the second example. This is where it gets seriously wacky. This code:

var result = {} + [];
console.log(result); // "[object Object]
console.log(typeof result); // "string"

produces the results shown in the comments; exactly the same as before. Yet, typing {} + [] in the Console in Firebug produces Gary’s answer of 0. What’s going on?

The answer is that the first {} in the statement is not evaluated as an object, but as a block. It’s an empty block (open brace, no code, close brace) and does nothing. So we’re left with +[]. The unary plus is numeric only, and so the empty array gets coerced to a number, in fact to 0. (In essence, it’s coerced to an empty string, and coercing an empty string to a number produces 0.)

The fourth example ({} + {}) is (a) an empty block as before, and (b) an object coerced to a Number (OK, it coerces to “[object Object]” as a string,  and that string, when coerced to a number, produces NaN).

Mind you, if you ever rely on any of this stuff, please let me know so that I don’t work on the same code as you. Thanks!

I was having a chat with a friend recently about the blog post I published on January 1, the traditional day for writing down on a napkin your resolutions for the coming year. He was saying that it didn’t sound like a bunch of resolutions of the form “I will do this new thing” or “I will change this existing behavior”. It read as more wishy-washy than that.

It reminded me of something Donna has been saying since the New Year. For the past 6 months or more, she’s been in training to improve her marathon times. To aid in this, she has a personal trainer at the local megaplex gym and goes there twice a week for some kind of torturous exercise. She mentioned that around the New Year the parking lot at the gym was overflowing at the times she went, compared with before Christmas. She had to park further away from the main entrance. However, this week the parking situation has ameliorated and has regained its previous occupancy level. In other words, all those “I gotta get more exercise and lose weight NOW” resolutions have already fallen by the wayside.

Why should this be? If I put my Project Manager hat on, I think it’s because too many New Year resolutions are of the Waterfall type. They’re big. It’s all or nothing. This major change has to happen, and once that’s done I’ll embark on this other major change. Just like in software development, it’s all very well making the big plans down to the last detail (“do this, do that, then do the other”) but they tend to fail more often that you’d like. There has to be more feedback in the loop. Goals have to be more bite-sized, not gulp-sized. Resiliency is the name of the game: unforeseen situations come up that have to be accommodated, be absorbed into the plan. The timetables for goals have to be measured in days, not months, to force them to be automatically smaller and more achievable.

Resolutions have to be Agile, in other words.

And that’s the point of my post and what my friend was remarking on: I am going to make gradual changes to help me reach my far future goals. I am being Agile. For example, with regard to this blog, my ultimate goal is to train myself to write better, to write quicker, to acquire a better facility with the language. Talk about a Waterfall process. Bloody impossible to achieve, that’s what it is. So, I’ve broken it down, made it more Agile. I have a mini-goal of one post a day. Say an hour’s work; 500 words. I have a list of topics on a pad to my left – if you’re a developer, you’d call them stories and probably write them down on post-its and put them on a whiteboard. Some of these stories are small, some wacky, some easy, some hard, some will require research and will take longer. I don’t care. Just so long as I can respond rapidly to what fate tosses in my path day by day.

But, if something transpires (or conspires!) such that I don’t write a blog post one day, it’s fine. It could be that I write two the next (but still dole them out at the rate of one per day) – this has happened tonight and several times over the past month. So long as I do at least 5 per week, I feel that I’m doing well and am on track for my major goal.

Ditto for the rest of my goals for the year. They’re all in train, one small step at a time. Agile resolutions, each resolutely agile.

I am slowly making my way through the Tintin comic books in the original French, just so I can keep my hand in. I’ve now got to number 7, L’île Noire, or as they say in English, The Black Island.

Like all of the early books, this was originally drawn by Hergé in black and white. It wasn’t until L’étoile mystérieuse (number 10) that he started publishing them in color, at which point, since they were proving so popular, he went back and redrew and colored the previous 8 (Tintin au pays des Soviets was never drawn in color, probably because it was essentially crude anti-Communist propaganda rather than a cohesive adventure per se) over the next few years. L’île Noire was first redrawn and colored in 1943, but when the British publisher Methuen was ready to print a translation in English in the mid-sixties, they decided that it desperately needed updating. The main reason why was the adventure was set in England and Scotland, and Methuen thought that it didn’t properly depict modern Great Britain at all.

Hergé sent one of his illustrators to England to take some photographs and gather information about places, planes, trains, and automobiles, and on his return they redrew L’île Noire completely and reset the plot to 1966. As a kid, when I first read it, L’île Noire therefore really resonated. We’d just moved to Le Havre (which is why I was reading it in French in the first place) and the look of the whole book was quintessentially English to me. Especially the cars that Hergé and his studio drew. Imagine you are 7 or 8 again: you like cars, you can spot them and name them, you pay attention to such things. So I thought it would be fun to identify here all the British cars that appear in L’île Noire.

The adventure starts off in Belgium, but pretty soon the plot moves to Sussex. The first car we see is the blue taxi that Tintin takes from the station to Eastdown, where a suspicious plane had crashed:

It’s a blue Ford Zephyr (to be precise, a Ford Zephyr 6 Mark III, characterized by the split grille at the front and the rear lights sloping outwards at the top).

Unfortunately Tintin is being pursued and is captured by the baddies in a red Jaguar Mark X:

This one is not I fear one of Jaguar’s prettiest cars, with its forward sloping front grille.

Some adventures later, the baddies escape in the Jag, and Tintin has to flag down a couple in their car – it’s pulling a caravan:

It’s a Triumph Herald. A convertible to boot. It’s hard to tell from the drawing, but if it is an original one then it only has a 948cc engine. No wonder it was having problems pulling the caravan. In fact the caravan, in which Tintin was travelling, broke loose and crashed. Tintin was forced to flag down another car  to continue his pursuit:

This one is perhaps a little harder to identify, since the basic shape was used by British Leyland throughout their marques (Morris, Austin, Riley, Vanden Plas, MG, Wolseley), but it’s an MG 1100. Not my favorite cars from the 60s at all, with Hydrolastic suspension copied from the Citroën 2CV, and built at Cowley when the unions were at the height of their power (so the quality was pretty crap).

But what’s this? The baddies have crashed into a tree and escaped on foot to the nearest station! And so we get a glimpse of our last car (the other half of the book just involves trains, planes, and boats):

Although we only see the rear third of that blue car, it’s obvious what it is: a Rover 2000TC (aka the Rover P6), the preferred police car in the late 60s, early 70s. It was also the car that Princess Grace of Monaco was driving when she crashed and died from her injuries in 1982.

And there we have it, a nice little quintet of mid-60s British cars from the only Tintin book set in Great Britain.