Paul Ford got it about right on George Saunders, I think: his gift is his ability to inspire empathy. He is sardonic and funny, and this somehow gives him license to pursue huge emotional honesty without readers dismissing the proceedings as maudlin.
This collection is very good. “Victory Lap,” the opening story, is astounding and scary and nearly overwhelming — I took it to be about the line between righteousness and self-righteousness. “Sticks” is brief, great and brutal. “Escape from Spiderhead” might be the closest to the Saunders I met in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, writing characters that shrug through corporate dystopia on their way to pathos and transcendence (here, the point seems to be about the arbitrary nature of romantic love compared to the universality of compassion, which I’m not sure I buy but was certainly moving). “Home” is lovely, and the story that titles the collection is both affecting and pretty technically dazzling.
That same technical brilliance might be the collection’s weakness, though. It’s a strange thing we do to literary authors these days, holing them up at the head of MFA programs, where they can subject their own work to endless forensic analysis. I suppose it’s one way to keep them fed, so, you know, fine. But, having read a messy, confused and deeply resonant Dick novel shortly before this book, I’m not sure how happy I am to have writers paring themselves down toward some literary tao. It occasionally manifests as a problem here, most notably in “My Chivalric Fiasco,” which seems to be purely a technical exercise. “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the longest story, pairs that tendency with the bad decision to revolve around a dream that Saunders had and found haunting (there’s a lot of nice and funny stuff in it about fatherhood, but it lacks Saunders’ typically satisfying conclusions).
So I don’t know. These stories are great, and I would recommend this collection highly. But if you’re looking for a place to start I’d probably suggest CivilWarLand In Bad Decline first (that being the only other thing of his I’ve read — Pastoralia is on the shelf, waiting…).
Ryan Avent has a very, very good article on the state of innovation. You should go read it. I come down on the pessimistic-but-waiting-to-be-surprised side — it really looks to me like fossil fuels were a one-time (and possibly impermanent) equilibrium-shifter — but Ryan makes a very strong case, and there’s really nothing I can disagree with.
I do have a handful of reactions, but they’re really just notes:
Moore’s Law is doing okay, but I’ve read a lot of people worrying that its translation into practical processing power isn’t. In general, silicon photolithography seems to have given people a lot of bad ideas about technological progression being inevitably governed by exponential laws. I’d really like to see a kW-per-dollar versus time plot of electrical engine performance, for instance (I haven’t been able to find one).
3D printing is an older technology than most people realize, which makes me think they’re overestimating its upside. The medical applications are real and important; its implications for design processes are substantial; it will almost certainly become a useful neighborhood amenity, available at copy shops and the like. For manufacturing, its effects will be limited to expensive, small-run applications (like the aforementioned medical uses). It seems extremely unlikely to me that 3D printing’s economic significance will be greater than that of the 2D printer industry. Which isn’t nothing! But it’s not flying cars either.
Predictions of sudden algorithmic progress that unlock new types of economic activity are more interesting, and clouded by two things. First, the Big Data trend story, which is a conceptual distraction that a lot of tenuously-relevant activity is being shoehorned into. Second, the research black boxes that are the dot-com survivors. Google, in particular, has bought up a ton of the world’s best engineers and provided a sudden infusion of resources to scores of academics whose work would otherwise stand little chance of practical relevance. I think we still have only the vaguest idea of what this effort will produce. The performance of GOOG over the next few decades could turn out to be a pretty good test of Cowen’s thesis.
The extensive versus intensive distinction is new to me, so I’m probably about to apply it incorrectly. But it seems to me that fossil fuel technology is profoundly extensive in nature — it’s as if you can suddenly convert horses to a nonperishable liquid, and better still, there’s tons of it just lying around underground, free for the taking! These are new resources. Information technology, by contrast, is about intensifying existing activities by reducing communication friction. This is very important, but also the kind of thing that the market started working on in a serious way right after the telegraph was invented (and had been plugging away at before, of course, through couriers, postal systems, soldiers running back from the Battle of Marathon, etc). There’s an incredibly long tail to build here — smartphone-dispatched taxis, simplified appointments with the doctor, grocery delivery services you don’t have to think about — but it’s mostly composed of known tasks that aren’t sufficiently lucrative to merit hiring an unskilled human to coordinate. With enough of them, you can definitely make money. I’m not sure how economically significant it’ll wind up being, though (not least of all because consumers seem likely to capture a huge portion of the gains).
So, yeah, same old opinions from me: a lack of imagination paired with pessimism about the upside of the technologies I understand best (borne of being close enough to them that I can find their limitations dismaying).
I do think there will probably be some big unexpected thing that will make fogeys of us all. But other than driverless cars or a sudden, later-than-expected payoff to genomic medicine, I don’t see how any of the bets people are placing have enough upside to be the one that hits big.
I’m still working on automating this process — all of the RSS → WordPress plugins seem to be designed for producing SEO spam; Goodreads doesn’t offer reviews-only feeds; and so I think I’m gonna have to submit a patch — so for now I’ll just post ’em manually.
Spoilers follow, but you should probably read them instead of this book. I’m not sorry to have read this — I did it for a book club, and look forward to discussing it — but it’s pretty bad.
This is an awful book. It’s funny: Kim Stanley Robinson uses the word “autistic” as a mild pejorative in the opening pages, but that might be the single best description of this book’s aesthetic. The author consistently ignores the things that make a novel worth reading — excitement, interesting characterization, original ideas — and instead hangs little essays filled with thoughts (by turns implausible and banal) about terraforming, economics, gender and governance onto a novel-like framework.
As Ben has noted, nearly all the action occurs outside the narrative, and is simply mentioned off-handedly as having occurred. This might be for the best, since the plot makes absolutely no sense: a seemingly low-stakes real estate dispute on Venus somehow accidentally gives rise to a multi-step mass-murder plot hatched by a new class of artificial beings? But it’s not clear that there’s any intentionality behind this–perhaps it’s just a screwup. Certainly the villain (if there’s a villain?) is barely named and never confronted, seemingly because the author is tired and wants to wrap things up. Then the perpetrators–a new race of beings, maybe, who are somehow detected, surveilled and rounded up from across the solar system in a massive police action that is mentioned but not even slightly described–are shipped into exile by the inspector who was working the case, who gets to declare judgment and sentence because…?
I would like to to bag on the characters, particularly the endless, hammer-it-into-your-head repetition of Wahram’s froggy eyes as his defining trait. But the truth is that I did find that Wahram and Swan eventually emerged as distinct entities. This was particularly true of Swan, whose pervasive neuroticism was both off-putting and fairly believable. This showed the way to the most promising potential theme in the book, I thought: the cultural claustrophobia and exhaustion faced by humanity as it finishes developing the solar system’s resources and realizes that what they’ve built is a prison. Alas, Robinson flirts with this idea briefly and and then abandons it. Instead he sprints toward ridiculous nostalgia, implying mystical spiritual renewal through communion with (wholly manipulated!) nature, along the way spewing a lot of bullshit about “our horizontal brothers.”
Still, though Wahram and Swan were decently developed, the idea of romantic chemistry between them seemed absurd, and the larger treatment of relationships in the context of massively extended lifespans felt superficial.
Absent a source of excitement (plot) or emotion (compelling character mechanics), we’re left with KSR’s thoughts about the evolution of human civilization.
His musings on speciation and blurring of gender are fine, but never really deployed in a way that made me squirm, which felt like a missed opportunity. It’s all reasonable enough, but kind of boring. When Wahram and Swan finally have their weird and unnecessarily graphic hermaphroditic sex, my reaction was less about alarm over the plumbing that KSR was so anxious to explicate and more a basic dismay at having to read about a boring nebbish (Wahram) sleeping with a sure-to-be-trouble headcase (Swan). Ick.
There is a LOT of time spent talking about terraforming. And there’s a place for that kind of hard sci-fi stuff. But KSR seems to expect to be allowed to waste my time with technical minutiae the way Clarke does in, say, Rendezvous with Rama. Sadly, he doesn’t have the chops. Randall Munroe has helpfully demonstrated the impossibility of one of KSR’s schemes — making Venus rotate faster through planetary bombardment — but there’s plenty more fishiness throughout the book when it comes to masses, energy levels, speeds, distances, problems related to acceleration and docking, venting waste heat and the quantity of astronomical objects in the solar system. I haven’t done the math, but it seems pretty obvious that the author hasn’t, either. He sure pretends like he has, though.
His soft-science ideas are worse. The Mondragon, a cybernetic economy run by AIs that perfectly allocate resources, is laughably utopian — particularly when he introduces a sudden real shock into the economy by destroying the city of Terminator, but never discusses how the system responds. The ideas about governance are incredibly vague. There are plenty of allusions to human civilization’s balkanization. But the only form of government that seems to exist outside of Earth consists of tiny, tiny oligarchies — say, a dozen people on Venus, and maybe a few dozen more throughout the rest of the system. Through robotic, exposition-filled meetings and the occasional conference call these groups are somehow able to organize resources sufficient to terraform planets or stage immensely complex logistical operations (the “reanimation” of Earth). This is all the more ludicrous when one considers how implausibly dependent on human labor much of this hi-tech future activity seems to be. Seriously: Wahram, that tedious milquetoast, would be among the humans with the most governing power in history if he could do what he’s described as doing. It makes absolutely zero sense.
So yeah, it’s just a complete mess. The thing is long and boring, and the ideas on offer are either bland or half-baked. Terrible.
Just one point: this is an app idea that has been executed many, many, many times before. I could find you a half-dozen other examples if I had more time for Googling “self-destruct message app” right now.
Nothing against SnapChat! If people like it, that’s great. But it’s a good example of software success clearly driven by cultural factors rather than the inherent attributes of the app itself*. This distinction is very rarely made when people write about software fads, but it’s important.
* Sure, you can tell a story about design/business model/whatever. I don’t think I buy it.
Michael Arrington is bored. About eight months ago, Alexis Madrigal was similarly bored. These guys are leaders in their field, and consequently I think their malaise is likely to spread. I suspect it has to — that it’s an inevitable consequence of the kind of mentality on display in this audio clip:
That’s from NPR’s “Best Apps of 2012” piece. I think it’s revealing: Brown picks an app in a done-to-death genre and *explicitly* says that novelty forms the basis of his excitement about it.
This statement can perhaps be dismissed as a Freudian slip, but I think it’s representative of a subtext underlying most popular writing and thinking about technology and startup culture — the elevation of “disruption” as an end in itself is just as emblematic of this focus.
And perhaps that’s fine: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying novelty. I know that I derive a lot of utility from it, and consistently base various consumption decisions on it (“What albums are on the 2012 year-end lists?” versus “Which of these albums are objectively better than my all-time favorites?”). And at Sunlight we know that novelty is of huge importance: we rely on the press and public to spread the technology we build. We know that people will only be driven to do so if it excites them, and we know that novelty is one of our best tools for achieving that end.
For aesthetic consumption industries in general, pursuing novelty seems just fine. It’s why books and music and movies and fashion organize themselves into trends and movements. It makes culture understandable and criticism rewarding. But, speaking as a software engineer, it can be an odd criterion to have to grapple with, and it has been slightly bizarre to watch its selection as the primary lens through which our culture perceives this discipline.
(It also seems like a pretty silly way to allocate financial resources when, unlike those other disciplines, reaching profitability is usually premised on a comfortably long product lifecycle, the idea of which is badly undercut by a focus novelty (though I suppose the possibility of hitting it rich as a fad does help with reaching scale). Then again, I don’t really know anything about investing.)
It might be that all of this is obvious, but hearing that report on the radio made something click for me. And I think it marks a useful dividing line for tech journalism. Was this story written because its subject is new, or because its subject is important? For me, outlets like Ars, Techdirt and MIT Tech Review immediately come to mind as publications that consistently choose the latter rationale, and I think that has a lot to do with why I prefer them.
Some people really enjoy fashion. More power to them! There’s no reason they can’t enjoy software on those terms. But I do think that this type of tech connoisseurship is ill-served by the story it currently tells itself about its true motivations, which are usually said to be about convenience, economic importance, or more far-fetched ideas about the transformation of society. The problem isn’t so much that these claims are incorrect (though they usually are) but that they ground what should be an artistic endeavor in a terminally boring bourgeois aesthetic. You are never going to get a punk rock photo app from someone who follows Fred Wilson on Twitter. In this respect, tech writers would be well-served to look to the indie gaming scene and hope that a similar miracle of independent taste and thinking can colonize the app store.
Just wrapped it up, and posted some thoughts to Goodreads (I’m thinking of automating that process here — let me know if any of this blog’s few readers would find that irritating). The short version: it’s a great history that’s marred by a bunch of fairly silly futurist speculation. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has read this thing.
Here is a fun thought experiment: if you could do anything, be anyone, or have any power, what would you want to do? Fly? Swim to the bottom of the ocean? Be an officer on a starship and explore space? Make love to a beautiful or handsome man or woman? How far down the list is the fantasy of killing someone?
Being the crotchety old man that I am, the time I spent this evening on my gym’s treadmill left me feeling cantankerous. I had been watching Jeopardy, and all of the categories seemed horrible, dagnabit. Back in my day we didn’t have questions about sitcoms! No, it was all Latin, and poetry, and similarly high-minded pursuits.
Then I got home and remembered I had a bunch of code left over from when we built this thing. See, there is a terrifying website called j-archive.com. It’s maintained by former players, and it comprehensively chronicles every game of Jeopardy.
It’s possible to scrape this site to reconstruct games, which is what I did for the Cordray infographic. With this as a starting point, figuring out the percentage of categories devoted to television versus weightier topics was a relative cinch. I was absolutely confident that I would find a line snaking smoothly upward. Here are the regular expressions I used:
And here’s the graph that resulted (normalized by total number of categories in a season):
Gotta say, I didn’t see this one coming. I guess the nerds are (mostly) all right after all. Alex Trebek’s still kind of a supercilious asshole, though.
Anyway, I’m open to other suggested analyses. Lay ’em on me.
I think this is a valid description of the present dynamic, but not of how we got here — the account of the underlying strategy is a bit too 7-dimensional-chess-y for my tastes.
What really crystallized my thinking on the maps issue was a conversation with Eric Gundersen of Development Seed/Mapbox. Over beers at Townhouse, I asked him and his colleague Alex Barth what the hell was up with Apple’s maps strategy. Why set up a gigantic and difficult new internal practice? Their lack of expertise meant they had low odds of success, it would be horribly expensive, and Google’s model of offering free computing services to keep users in their ad ecosystem seemed like it was pretty compatible with Apple’s needs.
Eric’s response was pretty simple: “The future is mobile, right? Mobile’s about location. If you want to own that, you need to own the map layer.”
I think that’s right. This mapping fight isn’t about iOS or Android specifically, but rather a play to avoid dependence/achieve dominance over an increasingly vital (and potentially expensive) informational asset. If your software giant steps into the ubiquitous computing/augmented reality era wholly dependent on a mapping provider with monopoly power — which Google was on track to be — you’d be pretty well boned.
So they made an investment (though a rather chintzy one, by some accounts), took a reputational hit, and have their fingers crossed that iOS’s popularity will subsidize the development of their mapping stack into a competitive informational asset.
Google, meanwhile, is facing its own headaches. It’s only in the last year that they’ve tried to monetize GMaps in a big way, and almost immediately they were forced to drop their prices due to credible competition from upstarts like the aforementioned Mapbox (which is pretty awesome, by the way, and deserving of a lot more fawning profiles than I’ve seen so far — if you want a DC software startup with a credible plan for world domination, they’re the ones you should be talking to, not the guys selling coupons).
So Google’s clinging to its vision of a consumer mapping monopoly, I think, by focusing on the quality of their offerings. It’s a credible approach: OpenStreetMap still has licensing problems, everyone hates Apple Maps, and Google’s privileged access to oceans of information about consumers’ preferences and desires really does give them a competitive advantage. They have geographic information that no one else seems to have, and ambitious engineering projects that are going to be very, very difficult for competitors to replicate without paying Google for GIS privileges. So they’re working to build an unapproachably awesome map stack, and retaining users is part of that — as Apple Maps have amply demonstrated, there’s no substitute for users using your product and slowly helping to refine it.
Matt’s right that this dynamic is good for iOS users and consumers in general. It’s competition! But I think the competition is happening over the map layer, not the handset OS layer. Geographic information isn’t just a handset feature, it’s a potential monopoly. These guys legitimately want to crush each other; it’s not just brinksmanship in service of preserving a cross-firm subsidy.
Still, the lingering shreds of my 14 year-old self couldn’t help wasting a few hours writing a convenience utility for extracting snippets from the Simpsons for throwaway-gag social media use. I did this despite realizing that, yes, quotation is a low and basically irritating form of humor — it’s basically the same as the bully with the audio-playing jacket in Back to the Future II . Still, if you’ve got a library of video you want to pull snippets from, perhaps you’ll find it useful.
Important notes/caveats to this important work:
Having to upload to an FTP endpoint sucks. Using a video service would be great, not least because they’d handle the tedious ffmpeg tweaking I wasted a bunch of time on. And, in fact, I had this working with YouTube. But their copyright infringement detection algorithms are too good. It’s a shame; I feel that quotation of this kind is fair use.
Quicktime is a real jerk, and ffmpeg is a mystery. For an embarrassingly long time I couldn’t get Apple’s default OS X codecs to play the H.264 file I was making (VLC played it no matter how badly I mangled the parameters, of course). Using the .mov contained was the trick. Bah.
Is there really no URL shortener that will work without an API key? Weird. Weird and stupid.
Mostly this saves me a minor amount of trouble — the command line is faster and more flexible than the VLC/SimpleMovieX/CyberDuck workflow I used to employ. But my real motivation has more to do with a pie-in-the-sky featureset I’ve daydreamed about for a while:
Enter text phrase
Search database of extracted subtitles for timestamps and surrounding text.
Select desired quotations.
Search for moments of audio silence surrounding the window indicated by the rough subtitle timestamping.
Plug results into today’s script, automating the gap from remembering a line to pulling the video for it.
Again, a huge waste of time. I don’t even have a torrent with subtitles yet! And I have a ton of projects I ought to get to before then, not least of all my mom’s website. But if I were a collective of infinite monkeys, I’d certainly tackle this. Hell, one could conceivably connect it to work, if you ignored C-SPAN’s copyright and pulled all their video and transcription.
A more tractable next-step is probably adding animated GIFs as an output option.
An exaggeration, sure. And I should acknowledge that the article that prompted Ryan’s tweet is a poor example of the form I’m about to discuss. But I do think that journalistic trolling is ascendant. And I think there are three trends that have led to this:
First, there’s an obvious glut of written material on the web thanks to technologically-lowered barriers to entry, an expanding tail of digitally-accessible archival content, and the continued desirability of writing as an occupation (whether professional or not, largely thanks to non-financial considerations).
Second, as Yglesias has repeatedly noted, there are a bunch of new forms of leisure (videogames, social media) that are competing for a pool of consumer time that’s only growing slowly (and which will ultimately hit physical and/or biological limits).
These first two trends lead to fierce competition, and combine with a third phenomenon: A/B testing and other forms of analytic instrumentation that make it easy to quantify which kinds of content are most profitable to produce.
Pornography, cat pictures and aggregation are all known to fit the bill, but I think that direct, strategic assaults on readers’ self-conception have only recently become a deliberate technique. To me, Slate’s “You’re Doing It Wrong” cooking columns are the epitome of the trend (“you make pumpkin pie with condensed milk? you’re an asshole”), and represent a more dramatic divergence than one might first think from the counterintuitivism the brand is known (and gently teased) for. But examples are everywhere.
The opposite dynamic seems to work nearly as well: people love to be told that they’re great just the way they are. I think this is the lens through which one should view much of Gawker Media’s output, from their shaming of racist teens on Twitter to their outing of Violentacrez the Reddit troll. The moral judgments underlying these articles aren’t wrong, which makes them very hard to argue against. But the public performance of those values is clearly about flattering the sensibilities of the audience — “gawker” is exactly the right word for it. When the formula works, there’s an element of triumphalist mob mentality to the proceedings. To me, at least, this often seems more odious than the pathetic and easily-dismissed troll’s gambit.
In some cases, a single article can benefit from both strategies, simultaneously trolling and flattering. Usually this involves an attack on a cliched straw-man — the NYT’s recent piece on hipsterism fits the bill, as does this Philippic by Jill, er, Fillipovic. You can count on some portion of the audience to angrily recognize themselves as the ones being caricatured, and another portion of the audience to pat themselves on the back for participating in the shaming of that imagined subclass. Everybody wins, except for the part where they’ve just demonstrated themselves to be petty, provincial rubes.
Not *everything* will descend to these forms. We will continue to see various kinds of content, even from outlets that embrace these strategies, thanks to editors’ nostalgia, imperfect rationality, deliberate cross-subsidization strategies, and responsiveness to prestige-related incentives that allow them to deploy their position in a principal-agent dynamic for personal gain.
But I do think that this gaming of human psychology is likely to remain ascendant, and to find new forms — online journalism is, if nothing else, a rapidly evolving system. Still, as an audience member, I really dislike feeling like I’m being manipulated. I suppose all one can do is try to develop mental defenses to this kind of conceptual lure, and quietly pine for the simpler, more dignified days of nip-slip galleries.
A quick observation. To me, the most interesting subtext of the pundit/quant pissing match that erupted in the late days of the campaign is the similarity it bears to the hoary aggregator/reporter handwringing we’re all so used to.
Nate Silver is heavily dependent on publicly available polling data, much of which is funded by media organizations. Those organizations engage in polling both to allocate resources and — probably more importantly — to generate grist for stories. Attracting attention to stories written about the back-and-forth of individual poll results is an important part of how these polls are paid for. Silver’s work not only implicitly and explicitly tells us that such stories are a waste of time, but offers a substitute product that can be consumed more efficiently (and which, for the time being, has the benefit of novelty).
In both this and the familiar “oh no Buzzfeed/HuffPo/DCist/whatever” case, readers are being offered a distilled, intensified information product that has been created from more basic inputs. Those inputs are paid for by the value that their creators — media companies — derive from advertising. Aggregators capture some of that value for themselves. To the extent that all of this is zero-sum, the producers of the inputs feel that the aggregators are free-riding and endangering the entire ecosystem. I think that this explains a lot of the animus directed toward Silver.
In the case of content aggregation, we seem to have reached an uneasy truce. And good for us! But this is more reflective of the media’s admirable commitment to openness than it is of a sustainable equilibrium being figured out — though of course the increasing amounts of original reporting done by the aggregators is encouraging.
Perhaps poll aggregators will follow a similar route and begin collecting their own data, though this seems somewhat unlikely given the startup costs involved. Perhaps more plausibly, one could imagine a growing dependence on data gathered by universities. Everyone wants to be a research institution, after all — prestigious new polling operations seem like a viable destination for ballooning tuition fees, shifting the source of Silver’s received subsidy from media to the education sector. It also seems likely that polling will increasingly find ways to use the huge amounts of data that voters now accidentally generate on a continuous basis, and aggregators like Silver might be able to do some of this themselves thanks to the problem’s amenability to automation. (Notably, the price that this data’s owners will set still seems unclear.)
So I think we’ll be fine — to the extent that we need polls, I suspect that our need will be satisfied. (Though that extent is unclear — campaigns will continue to pay for private polls to guide strategy, of course, but I suspect that poorer information for election-watchers might be utility-enhancing, since uncertainty is entertaining.) But I do think it’s interesting to view the current, superficially inexplicable animus toward Silver through the more familiar lens of what’s been happening elsewhere.
UPDATE:Another perspective. I think a preference for simplistic accounts is made possible by structural factors like those discussed above, though.
ALSO: Seems like Henry Farrell wrote something very similar just after midnight this morning — I’ve only just read his post now (11PM) but it’s certainly worth a look. I swear I’m not just ripping him off! Simultaneous invention! Zeitgeist! Etc!
Notwithstanding last night’s late-breaking pumpkin seed roasting and the Obama jack o’lantern rotting in my front yard (thanks, neighbor), it’s probably time to let go of Halloween 2012. But it was a good year, marked, in some subtle ways, by more and more friends indicating that their crazed devotion to the holiday is just as deep as my own. I find this immensely encouraging.
The only down notes: the continued lack of a Fickeween-competitive party venue (although: tremendous thanks to Megan, Peter, Kate and Brant for leaping into the breach so ably; I just miss running my own party); and the unavoidable aging and en-lamening that makes it less and less likely that we’ll find one while it still matters. There was also the hurricane’s cancellation of Sunlight’s Halloween Open House (which is a good time, though I am a little saddened, even if only by the symbolism, to have been forced to reprogram my decorations and general spooky zeal away from a big huge mess of a dance party and toward a professional event).
But nevermind all that. As with last year, I redirected my enthusiasm toward my costume, and it all turned out pretty well. Dave got the best shot of it (apologies to him and everyone else whose Instagrams I’m about to rip off):
Here’s a pretty good (almost) full-body shot:
I’m proud of the engineering behind this one, so excuse me while I indulge myself with a walk-through. First, the easy stuff:
I veered further off-model than last year. In part this was out of simple necessity: Mr. Freeze has gone through a bunch of different character designs; and the realities of fitting a dome over a human head (especially my outsize noggin) require different spacing for things than in the cartoons. But it also reflected preference: I don’t actually like the gray torso in the animated series original all that much, and didn’t feel like trying to implement a design as focused on conveying a sense of boxy roboticism.
But the gloves are a legitimately nice touch from the original design. Victor Fries is a scientist; scientists wear purple nitrile gloves. Easy!
The cuffs are made from some cheap jersey sheets I bought on Amazon, rolled into cords and covered in colored duct tape. I had a lot of success last year with colored duct tape, and it proved really easy to work with this year, too — when something only has to work for one night, it becomes a really fantastically easy and versatile fabrication technique. The whole thing is secured by adhesive velcro, a shift from last year’s use of taped-in-place neodymium magnets. Magnet fetishism is fun but not all that practical, it turns out.
The mantle is posterboard (which these days is cheapo, paper-thin garbage! scandalous) and more tape. The cut-off bottom of a stackable garden cloche adds some structure and stability. Incidentally, I had no idea cloches were a thing until Fancy Hands turned them up in response to a costume-related request I made. Thanks, guys! The top dome, as you might imagine, is an uncut cloche from the same three-pack.
On to the electrics! I’m pretty proud of this. The LEDs are mounted on an adhesive-backed strip that I got off of ebay. These things are absurdly cheap — they’re sold all the time for about $1/meter — and are very pleasant to work with. All of the resistors are in place, the adhesive backing makes mounting easy, and you can cut them to various lengths with a pair of scissors. Highly recommended.
I terminated the power leads in a barrel connector, the other end of which I ran down to a belt I contructed, again, out of colored duct tape and velcro. The buckle ornament was a $2 5K potentiometer from Radioshack (pre-soldering shot here; here’s the front). It’s a circuit simple enough that you might’ve built it in elementary school, but it did the job nicely. LEDs’ perceived brightness level doesn’t scale linearly with current, meaning that there was a bit of a brightness cliff right in the middle of the potentiometer dial. This worked out fine, since I mostly just wanted to pulse the display in time to music or to surprise people, not fade it smoothly — having a quick transition point was desirable for this. If you wanted to do it “right” you’d probably want to move things to a little AVR, setting the brightness with PWM control of the duty cycle rather than simple resistance. Actually, a 555 in astable mode might work very well for this, now that I think about it (though the AVR would allow for some cool automatic effects). But this was basically fine, and dead-simple. And having a costume that involves integrated circuits sounds like a good goal for next year.
The LED strip industry was basically invented to help stupid men make their cars look tacky, so it all runs on 12V. This made a sealed lead acid battery a natural choice:
Pros: the aforementioned voltage; cheapness; safety and simplicity of charging relative to other chemistries like lithium. The downside: weight. But this thing was only 3 or 4 pounds, and I don’t think I used more than a fraction of its charge over the course of the night. A cut-up black nylon backpack let me carry it around fairly comfortably (though getting it mounted on the backpack required some creativity).
Also worth noting: the duct tape pouches for credit cards, ID and my iPhone. I’m rather proud of those last-minute additions. More support for the flexibility of the velcro/duct-tape combo. I had spare coin cell batteries taped in various places, too — more on that in a second.
My freeze gun was the last, and most half-assed, thing that I tackled. But it was also the most ambitious.
That’s a bicycle brake lever and cable that a gentleman at Bicycle Space sold me while he replaced my wheel. Pretty cheap! Going to a bike shop was a good idea: I wouldn’t have known that I needed little metal collars for the cable housing, for instance, but they threw ’em in for free, plus they provided some valuable installation guidance.
The inside of the gun is PVC, which was probably overkill. But, as I said, this was ambitious, because everything was connected to an actual pressure vessel. In this case, a fire extinguisher. I drilled holes through the two handles, then terminated the cable with a couple of bolts tightened in an appropriate spot. The carabiner is there to hold the safety pin in place. The whole thing was connected to the freeze gun by both the brake cable and a pressure hose and clamp.
Did it work? Well, sort of. The trigger mechanism worked great! But I didn’t appreciate just how little charge is in a conventional fire extinguisher, or how focused its design is on moving yellowy fire retardant powder around. The powder got stuck in the hose (and spread everywhere — very glad I did this outside), and the pressure was discharged after two quick test bursts. Boo. My dreams of an actual freeze gun: dashed. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably look at a CO2 extinguisher, particularly since we have a 25 lb tank at work that I could probably have used to refill it after any test firing. Ah well — sloppiness on my part.
The final bit was the goggles. These were a big hit:
They were also pretty simple to make. You can see the construction here. I had bought a bunch of CR2032 cells off Ebay a while ago for my bike lights. Protip: batteries are one of many electronic-y commodities that are super-cheap on ebay; in this case, just 5% of the retail CVS/Radioshack price, if not better.
So I had a bunch of these things hanging around, and a few nice holders (I don’t even remember what project that was for). I added a couple of cheapo Radioshack switches and some not-so-cheapo Radioshack red LEDs (the LED Ebay/Radioshack price difference is perhaps the most astounding and offensive). I threaded things through the side ports on a pair of cut-rate welding goggles that helpfully came with a set of clear lenses in addition to their impractically dark default lenses. I scuffed the LEDs with sandpaper to make the light diffuse better, and bang: I was done! I didn’t even need a resistor — the battery’s internal resistance is enough. Each eye is basically an LED throwie, but with two LEDs instead of one and no magnet. I changed the batteries once during the night, but this was mostly because I’d been running down the originals a lot in the preceding weeks (the goggles were the first thing I built).
Like I said, these were a big hit — several people said they wanted a pair. If I did it again, I would choose a smaller switch and move to surface mount LEDs (and perhaps more of them) so that the light sources wouldn’t be so individually noticeable. The LED strips I used for the mantle/dome might be a good choice, actually, if you could pare down the sides. Better still, you might use bicolor LEDs and let people swap between modes. Hmm…
As is probably clear, I get way into this stuff. But this was much less work than it probably looks like. I spent a Saturday afternoon on the last-minute gun bit (which included some overkill LEDs of its own), but the rest of it was done in three evenings’ worth of puttering around the apartment while watching Battlestar Galactica.
The biggest revelation, for me, was understanding how much of successful fabrication is about knowing what to source and where. Knowing about the existence of the LED strips made everything much easier; knowing to get them from Ebay instead of an auto shop made it cheap. Same goes for having the batteries and holders lying around, and the right crimping connector tabs for the battery — something I’d bought years ago for who knows what, and managed to remember I had on hand. Pretty much everything else came from Amazon Prime or the hardware store around the corner.
Basically, I felt like Adam Savage seems to in this video:
I’m much less talented, and have much less impressive tools (just some electronics bric-a-brak; meager compared to a guy who has a band saw on hand). But I can relate to the experience of seeing how a system is going to fit together, and building it with surprising speed thanks to the investments you made in parts (or yourself) in the past. That’s a very nice feeling — one of the best things about engineering, if you ask me, even if it’s in service of something as silly as a Halloween costume.
Well, I think that about does it for my Man Booker season. The winner is set to be announced on October 16th, and while I might be able to get one more short list entry read before then, my heart’s not in it. There are a few reasons for this. Perhaps most importantly, my guesses about what would make it through from the long list have been much less lucky than the ones I made last year, which means I’d have to read a lot more to cover the short list, and I’m feeling burned out on this kind of book. Plus a lot of what I’ve read from the short list has been surprisingly sucky.
And the remaining unread short list books just don’t appeal to me very much. I read and liked Wolf Hall, and while a sequel to that book would surely involve plenty of Anne Boleyn badassery, I feel like I got the idea the first go-round with Mantel. I think I’d rather spend that time on the new season of Downton Abbey. Will Self’s prose drives me completely bonkers, so Umbrella is a no-go (experimental work like that is sufficiently hard for me to follow that the effect becomes impressionistic, which is fine in some media but not when you enjoy reading for plot). And that leaves me with Swimming Home, which looks fine, but doesn’t seem all *that* compelling (another book about depression! great).
Besides, it’s October. I usually like to spend this month reading ghost stories. As it stands, I have a number of pending genre obligations: Cloud Atlas for sci-fi book club A, the sequel to The Passage for seasonal spookiness, and the sequel to The Quantum Thief for general mind-bending awesomeness.
But enough excuses. I did make it through a bunch of Man Booker nominated novels, and I enjoyed several of them. I’ve also found that I enjoy writing about books — it’s nice to know that you’ll have that exercise waiting for you as you read. It seems to focus my thinking and makes me more attentive to what’s going on. So, like last year, here are some impressions of the books that I did manage to get to. I’ll list them in the order in which I tackled them, and link each title to the longer review I wrote on Goodreads (something I’ve gotten into the habit of doing).
Skios – Very light, very fun. A farce about mistaken identity set in a Davos/TED/Aspen Ides-y kind of context where rich people are seeking new insights and doing various other foolish things. There seems to be a sense that this nomination was to recognize Michael Frayn’s body of work rather than the specific novel, which makes sense. This is one of the few books on the list that I think I’m likely to recommend to others (and have already, with success, in fact). But that’s mostly because it’s light enough that I can be sure I won’t be traumatizing the reader.
Narcopolis – A book about addiction set in the dying Bombay opium subculture in the late seventies. Very, very good. My favorite of the short list entries, and the short list entry that I hope wins it all.
The Teleportation Accident – Probably my favorite book from the whole long list. A bit of a mess, and hard to describe. But striking, and with a really entertainingly bleak sense of humor. The hero is a shallow, foolish narcissist — but he’s still our hero, he’s not there to antagonize you. I really liked it.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – A tear-jerker, and what I understand to be a very conventionally Booker Prize-y book, but pretty darn good. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Communion Town – The most bizarre inclusion on the list. A collection of short stories from a young writer, and one that betrays what struck me as a characteristically immature male sense of drama. Which is fine — I write this as a guy who spent most of his free time this weekend building a supervillain halloween costume — but it’s unusual for a Booker entrant. Mostly the stories didn’t work for me, but one or two were pretty good. There’s an individual breakdown at the link, if you’re intrigued and want a suggestion about where to start.
Garden of Evening Mists – Can a work be orientalist if it’s written by an Asian? I say yes: in this case, it’s a book written by a Malaysian that clumsily fetishizes various aspects of Japanese culture. I thought it was jumbled, cliched garbage, but judging by the Goodreads reviews I seem to be in the minority. Still, I really thought this was abysmally bad. Other reasonable people have read it and come to much milder conclusions (though the consensus seems to be that it’s at least a bit boring).
The Lighthouse – Not bad, but not destined to be a favorite. The protagonist has been permanently damaged by his mother’s abandonment, but his resulting weirdness and childishness seemed a bit unbelievable to me. Not that he shouldn’t be weird and childish! Just not in this way. Nicely written, though.
And I think that’s it! Now for some time-travel, vampires and post-singularity surrealism.
You should all run out of your houses, right now, and get on road bikes. Take them to the country. Trust me, it will be great.
Charles arranged for me and some other friends to do exactly that last weekend, and I think I’m hooked. Most of you already understand that I approach city biking with the kind of inflexible zeal most often associated with religious pilgrims or genocidal tyrants. But this kind of biking — cycling, really, as people like the one I am becoming find themselves insisting on calling it — it’s something else entirely.
Charles has an in with a bike shop guy that allowed us to rent Madone 5.2’s. These are very fancy bikes, built of little more than ashes, glue and less metal than you have in your coin jar. As you can imagine, they are very, very fast. Getting onto one, I immediately understood the profound absurdity of “intelligent design” in a new way. Had we been intelligently designed, surely this is how our muscles and tendons would have been deployed: stretched onto a frame that can outrun a deer, and more than a few racehorses.
It’s easy to develop a taste for this sense of power, to seek that Frankensteinian reconfiguration. And yes, you will find that you’ve become an abomination: the villagers will never do anything but recoil at the sight of your spandex and energy bars. But you won’t care anymore, because you will be a very fast abomination.
On a weekend like last one — wow. What better way to be outside? Each pedal stroke was a moon-leap across dozens of yards of bean plants fading to yellow; violet flowers climbing up dried cornstalks; cows wallowing beside me and hawks coasting on thermals above me. I love autumn, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to capture the (probably illusory) intensity of the childhood memories of hay mazes and cider and indian corn that define its mental timbre. Consuming that landscape at speed, though — that just about does the trick.
I’ve mostly observed this phenomenon through the lens of forward-looking nonprofits in my professional space (Public Lab, Homicide Watch, Open Plans); the early wave of developing world microfinance efforts exemplified by Kiva; and the many game-related Kickstarter efforts that Penny Arcade writes about.
The words “finance”, “lending” and “investing” tend to get applied to these platforms, but that’s obviously wrong. For both legal and practical reasons, the returns are always modest: you’re either overpaying for a service, or for some digital or promotional knick-knacks, or the returns can only be reinvested in the service.
Thanks to the cynically-named JOBS Act, many of the relevant legal restrictions are going to disappear. But is there any reason to believe that practical considerations will? People are overpaying because they want to. It’s not just about making sure that a particular thing happens — look at the DoubleFine Kickstarter, which has now collected more than eight times the budget its creators say it requires (there are plenty of otherexamples, too). It reminds me of all the talk at the DNC about Republican defense spending proposals that vastly exceed the Pentagon’s own statements about their needs.
These expenditures are about spending money not just because we want what it will buy us, but because we wish to promote the values associated with this kind of use. It’s a subsidy to a particular class of thing and, perhaps just as importantly, an act of self-expression on the part of the funder. This latter aspect is deeply entangled with our human appetite for narrative: crowdfunders appear to value the consumption experience of (for example) picking out the village where a new well will be drilled over the knowledge of funding a venture that issues quarterly reports on the total number of wells it drilled. You can see this clearly in the emphasis on video storytelling on Kickstarter, or the upset that erupted when it became clear that Kiva aggregates funds since (gasp) money is fungible. If we cannot cast the act of funding into a meaningful narrative, it becomes much less satisfying.
For the types of projects that are most emblematic of this movement, it seems unlikely that the possibility of positive returns will attract many marginal investors. Rather, returns will attract a different kind of investor — and probably a different kind of project. After all, the kinds of projects that currently succeed at attracting funding will have no reason to put equity on the menu when a well-produced video presentation can suffice. Sure, the possibility of actual returns can presumably matter for investors for whom altruism isn’t the sole motivator. But there are existing vehicles for that kind of investing that come with a proper layer of regulation and diligence. I worry that we’ll soon see projects that promise to satisfy our values, but which offer promised returns as a substitute for an established track record (I expect many of these to come out of Silicon Valley).
There’s a huge disconnect between people who support the JOBS act because they are inspired by Kickstarter and those who are worried about hedge funds bilking seniors. I’ve got friends with strongly-held opinions on both sides of this; I have to admit that I don’t understand the dynamics well enough to know where I come down. I will say that slowly expanding the SEC compliance burden is the only realistic mechanism I see for leveling the transparency playing field between corporations and consumers — from that perspective, JOBS is tremendously disappointing.
But I suppose I’m generally heartened by Kickstarterism. It’s obviously not a rational way to allocate resources. To a large extent, it’s counting on investors to optimistically fill in the blanks about games and causes and projects, and many of the results will inevitably disappoint. You know how much less excited you feel flipping through movies in iTunes versus when you saw their trailers in the theater? It’s like that. There is money to be made by charging your entry fee on the early side of that declining enthusiasm function.
Still, overpaying talented people and trusting them to make something great is a model that has, at times, produced some pretty wonderful things. At some point we mostly gave that up: efficiencies were sought, and the patronage model was abandoned in favor of a coordinating layer of fund managers and NGO executives and the like. As with any occupation whose practitioners take their duties seriously, expertise and rationality-esteeming professional norms tended to accumulate at that layer, and consequently funds were aggregated and disbursed on a (supposedly) dispassionate basis.
But now, thanks to the internet, we can cut out those irritatingly Spock-like middle-men. In a world of scarce resources, it’s hard to wholeheartedly defend this return to romanticism. But those middle-men were only human themselves, after all (honestly, who were they kidding?). There are worse ideas than octupling DoubleFine’s budget and then waiting to see what happens — as long as we’re not conning seniors into spending their IRAs to do so.
I’d heard the arguments, but for some reason they hadn’t sunk in. Pricing goods based on the buyer’s means isn’t too dissimilar to the Swiss policy of ticketing drivers for amounts that go up with their incomes. In most markets, it seems likely that this will amount to a cross-subsidization from rich purchasers to poor — a progressive transfer. In the past I might have complained about this because the sorting mechanism used to distinguish between the rich and poor was basically to make the poor jump through a ton of hoops: weird store hours, clipping coupons, and otherwise imposing what amounted to a tax on their time (which they were willing to pay because their time was worth less than that of the wealthy). This seemed pointlessly wasteful and inhumane. I think that’s the part that really bugged me.
But of course the stores don’t have any particular desire to make you clip coupons. They just want to be able to effectively price discriminate. I realized that the privacy-dissolving information technology that makes that possible should be viewed primarily as a benefit to the less wealthy: the beneficial price discrimination scheme can continue, but with fewer associated costs to filter out rich people who aspire to freeloading. If those least able to pay can be given a price break without any gross affronts to human dignity, I’m all for it.
But the broader loyalty-card behemoth now seems less objectionable to me. I don’t expect to retain much privacy in the face of technology; and to the extent we try to impose restrictions, enforcement against firms seems like the way to go. Let’s pass some relevant legislation, beef up the FTC’s budget and call it a day.
Last night Walt escaped a plastic zip-tie handcuff by using electricity from a household socket to create an electrical arc that melted the plastic. Not to belabor this, but when you short out a household electrical socket, this is what it looks like:
There are sparks of hot metal that burst everywhere, and it only lasts for an instant because the circuit’s breaker or fuse pops. It’s also probably going to complicate things to be connected to a very well-grounded metal object like a radiator — to say nothing of stripping the live wire with your mouth, which is wet and much more conductive than skin, producing a circuit that flows directly through your heart as it heads toward your earthed left arm.
On the other hand, if you grant the implausibly-persistent arc welder effect (perhaps Vamonos Pest has a dangerously configured but simultaneously robust electrical system), the grounded radiator would presumably have allowed Walt to apply it against the part of the plastic ziptie that anchored him to the radiator, rather than producing an unnecessary (but dramatic) act of self-mortification.
So yeah: it’s implausible that he would’ve survived the wire-stripping without serious injury. And even making some allowances for an unusual electrical system, Walt could’ve done something less painful.
UPDATE: in comments it’s been pointed out that Walt turned off the power while stripping the wires. I don’t remember that at all, but that’s probably just my own lousy memory. The stuff about the electrical arc still stands, though.
I went skydiving with coworkers yesterday. This is the third year that Eric has arranged such an outing (though a last-minute injury kept him from going this year), and the first time that I’ve joined the proceedings. It was fun! The staff at Skydive Orange were friendly and professional, and the whole process went very smoothly. And, though I sort of joked about it, the atmosphere really did remind me of Drop Zone, the great(?) Wesley Snipes Point Break knockoff.
(OT: having your male lead punch his love interest = really charming screenwriting, guys!)
I say this not because I saw Gary Busey kill anyone by forcing their parachute into high-voltage power lines (though obviously I didn’t watch every jump), but because of the atmosphere. It was a big event weekend at Skydive Orange, apparently, with an extra plane and team competitions and beer-filled campfires in the evenings. Everyone seemed implausibly attractive, friendly, bohemian, and really, really happy. Skydiver parties must be pretty fun.
But of course as newbies (and ones who weren’t camping out), that scene wasn’t really available to us. Perhaps later jumps become about freedom and self-expression. For first-timers like myself, the experience is about introspection.
A few weeks back I found myself boozily explaining why I wanted to jump out of a plane. It was a statement about human progress, I said: a testament to our mastery over materials, physics and our own instincts. How many other species would ever pursue a recreational activity like this? How many subsequent generations, for that matter, will be able to waste the energies necessary to haul themselves up and down the atmosphere for a thrill? I was lucky to be born during an age when this strange, beautiful ritual was possible, and that struck me as a privilege I should embrace.
I still believe all of that, but the actual experience didn’t tell me much about the fate of our species; it told me about myself. Specifically, about the kinds of fear that work on me. And I don’t mean to flatter myself with the following: I don’t think I’m a particularly brave person (quite the opposite, in fact). But this experience didn’t trouble me. There was a sense of unreality about it. Nerves, sure. Necessary compartmentalization, certainly. And at the lip of the door there was that cliched moment of vertiginous terror as I looked down at the ground below and the miles of air between us.
But then I looked back up — a field of view that was more “window seat” than “imminent death” — and worried about arching my back, and whether I was causing any inconvenience to my instructor (an enormous Italian guy, now strapped to my back, who had complained at length about his car’s failing catalytic converter as the plane ascended). And then I was tumbling; straightening; figuring out how to breathe; trying not to glance at my altimeter too much; and noticing the sluggishness of my arm as Mario guided it to the ripcord. Violence, satisfaction that the instant of greatest stress on the equipment had passed safely, and then a few still moments as Mario pointed out our shadow and gave a brief lecture on steering a parafoil. We slid to earth more smoothly than some slip-n-slide trips I’ve taken, and then it was over. Supposedly this took about six minutes; it felt like 90 seconds at most.
I had been told what to do, and I’d done it robotically, and it was fine. As I said, this wasn’t physical bravery. I think such a thing exists, and is necessary for someone to become a great athlete or dancer or even just to photograph well. This was more about embracing blankness, ignoring anxiety by focusing on the task at hand. It reminded me of my LASIK surgery more than anything else.
What was interesting was the fear that persisted outside the blankness: the worry over disappointing my instructor, or insulting him through second-guessing, or committing a dangerous faux pas by standing in the wrong place as people packed their chutes in the hangar. I think I understand better how a soldier can leap over the lip of a trench and into machinegun fire: it’s because back in the trench there’s a sergeant yelling at him, who would be extremely disappointed to see any hesitation. It would just be very awkward.
I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but I think I know a little more about myself for having jumped. I’d recommend it to anyone, and encourage those who feel nervous to push through their fears. It’s really not that bad. Leaning out of an airplane is infinitely easier than leaning in for a first kiss.
Yet I’m conflicted: I remember a wave of excitement around Identi.ca and XMPP that was motivated by many of the same concerns. People were talking about federating with Twitter, building something more like SMTP or Usenet. Some early adopters cross-posted between the two services, but Identi.ca never really went anywhere. I haven’t followed the fortunes of the platform closely, but I see troublinglyfew people asking how App.net will be substantively different, and even fewer plausible answers.
Predictably, the valley types most excited about App.net are talking about its odds in terms of its technology and business model. This is understandable: these are things that can be controlled. It is both self-flattering and empowering to pretend that these are the most important inputs to the equation that will determine a technology project’s fate. Nobody likes talking about overcoming network effects or path dependence. Certainly no one wants to talk about dumb luck, novelty, stylishness or the role that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher played in making Twitter a hit. Not unless Marco Arment counts as a Kutcher-equivalent, anyway.
I wish these guys success, but it does seem like, having watched David challenge Goliath and lose, they’ve decided to make the next David a new shirt and send him back into the fray. Well, fingers crossed.
What’s a bit more interesting is the idea that all of this is part of a new trend. You can find pieces proposing that Svbtle, Medium, App.net and their ilk all represent some kind of noveau-social-web minimalist/anticorporate movement (unsurprisingly, BuzzFeed has the one I found most easily via Google).
This is stupid. Refactoring software is not a process that stops. As I’ve said before, I think online disillusionment and reinvention is a cyclical phenomenon, but that the periods of these cycles are increasingly out of sync. By way of example, it seems suspicious that this allegedly-new ad-eschewing, content-esteeming minimalist web publishing movement seemingly doesn’t include Tumblr or Instapaper. Those services are a couple of years old though, you see. Not much use for a trend story! And the novelty that these latest sites offer is strikingly threadbare — nobody’s even mustering a story as compelling as the celebration of Tumblr’s incredible “like” (and not unlike!) button innovation. What they offer is not being the current thing, but seemingly not much else.
Still, it may be true that something is happening. The relative popularity of social networks is a dynamic system, and no equilibrium in this space should be considered permanent. Sometimes I picture us as so many early-adopting wildebeests, wallowing in our watering hole, grazing and snorting and occasionally forming ranks against threats (SOPA, lions). But perhaps there is a ripple of unease growing: a sense that the grass is thinning, the seasons are changing, and we need to move, move, move. Knots will break away, tentatively and unsuccessfully at first, but at some point it will be like a bottle that’s uncorked, and we’ll all flow across the plain to whatever the next thing is.
