Self-Titled

When I answer the phone, I usually move into another room for privacy and so I won’t distract others. This seems natural and reasonable to me. I talk in a normal tone and no one has ever complained that they couldn’t hear me. Others seem to either think differently or don’t realize they’re being obnoxious. They’ll sit right next to me and carry on their one-sided conversations at a heightened volume. It can get so bad that I can’t focus on anything but the words coming out of their mouths.

What is going on? Don’t they get it? It seems that manners and consideration don’t evolve as quickly as technology. I’ve often wished for a pocket-size cell phone jammer that I could activate at a whim to silently punish these phone offenders. I found one that has a range of ten meters, runs for four hours, and fits in a pocket, but it’s $220; a little steep for a transient yearning for vengeance. But prices always go down.  Soon…

Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of the programming language PHP, came to Cal Poly yesterday to give a two-hour lecture on PHP and related web technologies. I didn’t know anything about him, but I was pleased to find he’s a very intelligent, pragmatic, and humorous person. He spoke at length about the transition of PHP into an open source project, the evolution of the language, and some security and performance topics that I found very interesting. He works at Yahoo full time on PHP right now, and apparently they use PHP everywhere, so they have him optimize and improve PHP for their own needs and then contribute his work back to the open source project so that everyone benefits. He also demonstrated Yahoo’s JavaScript user interface library, which was pretty nifty. I wish we could get more big names in computer science to come talk to us. I’d listen.

I was in Seattle last night. I had planned to fly home to San Luis Obispo at 7:20 PM and ultimately arrive at around midnight. But the fates had other plans.

Katherine dropped me off at my hotel and I was already running late. I ran through the glass doors, up the stairs, and entered the elevator. The elevators there required guests to slide their room keys to operate them. Judging by the title of this post, can you guess if my key worked? So I ran to the counter and had them fix it, then returned to the elevator and rode up to the sixteenth floor. I packed hurriedly and shot back into the elevator and headed for the lobby. When I stepped out, I found a line had formed where there was none before, and it took what felt like forever to get up to the counter. Everything was supposed to be billed directly to Microsoft, but of course they hadn’t heard of any such thing and were ready to happily charge everything to my credit card. I didn’t have time to work it out, so I told them they were supposed to bill Microsoft, left my phone number at the counter, and bolted out the front doors again.

Katherine was still there and drove me to the airport. We arrived at 7 PM and I hustled to the check-in counter, only to be told that my flight had been delayed by two hours and everyone who had checked in early (like we were supposed to) had been put on an earlier flight so they could still make their connecting flights. I could still take the delayed flight at 9 PM to San Francisco, but there wouldn’t be a plane there to take me to SLO. Katherine called a travel agent to arrange for another flight out of SF to SLO, but there wasn’t a ticket available until Monday. We looked into renting a car at the SF airport, but a one-way rental would incur a $400 drop off fee, which I didn’t have on hand. I could either take the delayed flight, spend the night with some family in San Mateo near SF, rent a car there Sunday morning, and drive down to SLO, or take a 7:25 AM flight out of Seattle to Salt Lake City and ultimately arrive in SLO at noon on Sunday. I picked the early flight.

I almost died getting up in the morning, getting only four and a half hours of sleep. The flight out of Seattle was delayed by forty minutes, and my schedule had only allotted me thirty minutes to change planes in SLC. I had to run for five minutes through three terminals with two bags and arrived to find the door of my plane already closed. I was breathless and about ready to keel over from stress and sleep deprivation and breathlessness. The crew was gracious enough to open the door again just for me. I was the last one to get on, by which time everyone else was already seated and waiting. I think the stewardess had already given the safety speech. It was one of those small planes, where the overhead compartments are much smaller, so it took about a minute of crunching and squeezing before I could shut the overhead compartment door and sit down again.

But I made it. Kiss my ass, fates!

It seems to me that political debates nowadays are a waste of time. Two people come together to debate an issue and wind up either talking about different things or don’t address what the other person is saying, much less provide concrete support for their arguments. There’s just too many tricks to fudge your way out of really committing to something and sticking to it. I blame the dependence of our electoral process on audio/video media. You can’t slow down what they’re saying and pick apart their words, weigh their meanings, and make reasoned judgments if their words are flying past you at the speed of speech. One candidate speaks, and the others have to scribble quickly on a paper pad to remember what to say in their rebuttal five minutes later. There’s no provision for going back at leisure and examining the merit of every spoken word. This isn’t just a disadvantage for candidates, it’s a detriment to the electoral process: it diminishes our ability to correctly choose the best candidate.

What we need is a shift from audio/video media to written text and an emphasis on constructing and critiquing arguments using logic and verifiable facts. No more hand raising. No more thirty-second answers to loaded questions. No more Jack Johnson versus John Jackson (see Futurama). In order to participate in the electoral process, candidates should have to present formal arguments on a range of precisely-defined topics. Then all the other candidates can take turns inspecting and critiquing each premise and argue whether their argument is valid and sound. It is only through a system like this that you can really get down to the heart of things.

I think a cool experiment would be to build a computer system, maybe a web site, that could facilitate arguments like these. It wouldn’t need to be used solely by electoral candidates. If you could guarantee that only real people contributed to the arguments and critiques in the system, then judgments made in that system could have real logical and political significance. Imagine if the system was very popular and many people read it, contributed to it, and deferred to it. Judgments made in this system could have an impact on real-world decisions.

I would pair this system with a public forum that facilitated interesting and relevant political discussions, where posted articles may be rated somehow by quality of their content, and highly-rated authors may rise to prominence and be heard by the rest of us. I’m not aware of any other such system.