Recovery

 

Scott goes home.  He gets a thing of bacon out of the fridge.  Fries four or five slices.  Butters two slices of Wonder Bread, places two slices of Kraft's American Processed Cheese between, adds the bacon, inserts the result in the sandwich toaster deal.  (It sounds crazy, probably, but he did in fact stock up on Kraft's American Processed Cheese, buying 100 72-slice packs @ $9.95 for a total of $995.00 (at 2 slices per day, a 10-year supply).  Toasted cheese sandwiches are Ralph's favorite food.)  Ralph is nuzzling his legs all this time, purring like a steam engine.

Um, okay, no, not purring like, obviously, producing a sound that is more reminiscent of steam engine FX than your typical purr.

Cruel to be kind, Scotty forces the cat to wait till the sandwich has cooled; no way should a cat eat a piping hot toasted cheese sandwich with the liquid cheese close to boiling.  Ralph meows pitifully. 

Electric Literature has posted one of my stories, "Recovery," here.

(Er, as so often, this is in fact part of a longer work, a 61,000-word draft of which sits on my hard drive.  Bah.)

MS Wha-

He had good reason to fret. Signs that Microsoft would be missing the boat in the next decade were already emerging. That very moment at Microsoft’s headquarters, in Redmond, Washington, a group of executives were developing a device that, in 10 years’ time, would transform a multi-billion-dollar industry: an electronic reader that allowed customers to download digital versions of any written material—books, magazines, newspapers, whatever. But, despite its multi-year head start, Microsoft would not be the one to introduce the game-changing innovation to the market. Instead, the big profits would eventually go to Amazon and Apple.

The spark of inspiration for the device had come from a 1979 work of science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The novel put forth the idea that a single book could hold all knowledge in the galaxy. An e-book, the Microsoft developers believed, would bring Adams’s vision to life. By 1998 a prototype of the revolutionary tool was ready to go. Thrilled with its success and anticipating accolades, the technology group sent the device to Bill Gates—who promptly gave it a thumbs-down. The e-book wasn’t right for Microsoft, he declared.

“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” one programmer involved in the project recalled. But Windows would have been completely wrong for an e-book, team members agreed. The point was to have a book, and a book alone, appear on the full screen. Real books didn’t have images from Microsoft Windows floating around; putting them into an electronic version would do nothing but undermine the consumer experience.

 ...

The death of the e-book effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits, according to a former official in the Office division. The real problem for his colleagues was that a simple touch-screen device was seen as a laughable distraction from the tried-and-true ways of dealing with data. “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,” the official said. “There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.”

Kurt Eichenwald on Microsoft's Lost Decade

ich wünschte ich wüßte...

Cathy and Cosma both feel that knowing specific programming languages is not essential. To quote Cathy, "you shouldn’t obsess over something small like whether they already know SQL." To put it politely, I reject this statement. To apply to a data science job without learning the five key SQL statements is a fool's errand. Simply put, I'd never hire such a person. To come to an interview and draw a blank trying to explain "left join" is a sign of (a) not smart enough or (b) not wanting the job enough or (c) not having recently done any data processing, or some combination of the above. If the job candidate is a fresh college grad, I'd be sympathetic. If he/she has been in the industry, you won't be called back. (One not-disclosed detail in the Cosma-Cathy dialogue is what level of hire they are talking about.)

Why do I insist that all (experienced) hires demonstrate a minimum competence in programming skills? It's not because I think smart people can't pick up SQL. The data science job is so much more than coding -- you need to learn the data structure, what the data mean, the business, the people, the processes, the systems, etc. You really don't want to spend your first few months sitting at your desk learning new programming languages.

Both Cathy and Cosma also agree that basic statistical concepts are easily taught or acquired. Many studies have disproven this point, starting with the Kahneman-Tversky work. ..

Terrific post by Kaiser Fung (of Junk Charts and Numbers Rule Your World) - not least for thrill of discovery that Cosma Shalizi is, er, aggressively discussing...

discretion

Ratio of published posts to drafts: 1149:636.

Yesterday

Gestern wurde ein Humalog KwikPen vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Mammut vergessen. Gestern wurde ein Ring vergessen.  Gestern wurde ein Gebilde aus Kunststoff vergessen.

Went back to check out the Sankt Oberholz blog, which gives poignant yet witty descriptions of items left at the café.  As so often, think some of the books I would like to write can only be written in German.

ipse dixit (allegedly)

1. Mr. Chicago Hates Hyphens

What’s wrong with hyphens?  Mr. Chicago hates them, loathes them, despises them.  He hates them so much that he wouldn’t let me refer to Jesus’s original audience as “Palestine-dwellers,” but instead insisted on “Palestinians.”  (Palestinians?!  I’ll get hate mail!)  He also wants me to use “words” like nonmoral, nonillusionistic, nonmagical, noncomic, noncraft, nonformative, noncentrality, nonmythical, semimythical, counterposition, antireferential, pseudoimmortality, and selffashioning (all of which get squiggly red lines from Microsoft Word.)  I sometimes think he has a secret desire to turn English into German.  An Englishintogermanconvertingdesire.

Then again, he regularly wants me to glue the prefix onto the word, even where the resulting monster looks like it should sound different: firsthand, preemptively, preexisting, preestablished, cooperative.  (Yes, I know what the New Yorker does with those; the hörror, the hörror.)

found in translation

James Morrow on a new translation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic:

In the case of Roadside Picnic, the improvements wrought by Olena Bormashenko over Antonina W. Bouis’s earlier version lie more in the realm of artistic integrity than verbal felicity. Upon submitting their manuscript for publication, the Strugatsky brothers inevitably endured censorship from their Soviet editors, who confronted the authors with not only “Comments Concerning the Immoral Behavior of the Heroes” but also “Comments about Vulgarisms and Slang Expressions.” In both these domains—immorality and vulgarisms—I can best communicate Bormashenko’s accomplishment by adducing Michael Andre-Driussi’s “Notes on the New Translation of Roadside Picnic,” his splendid article that appeared in the June 2012 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.

In the matter of “immorality,” Andre-Driussi cites this moment from the older Bouis translation, in which the protagonist, Redrick “Red” Schuhart, ruminates on a pleasure-seeking young woman named Dina.

He was repelled by the thought and maybe that’s why he started thinking about Arthur’s sister. He just could not fathom it: how such a fantastic-looking woman could actually be a plastic fake, a dummy. It was like the buttons on his mother’s blouse—they were amber, he remembered, semitransparent and golden. He just wanted to shove them in his mouth and suck on them, and every time he was disappointed terribly, and every time he forgot about the disappointment.

Andre-Driussi then gives us Bormashenko’s rendering of the unbowdlerized text.

Thinking about it was repellent, and maybe that was why he starting thinking about Arthur’s sister, about how he’d slept with this Dina—slept with her sober and slept with her drunk, and how every single time it’d been a disappointment. It was beyond belief; such a luscious broad, you’d think she was made for loving, but in actual fact she was nothing but an empty shell, a fraud, an inanimate doll instead of a woman. It reminded him of the buttons on his mother’s jacket.

The whole thing here.  (He also discusses a new translation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, but we don't want to appropriate the whole essay.)