Perry Mason repeatedly jumped the shark

Early this year I presented early Perry Mason episodes as the epitome of the episodic. Since then I have watched several more seasons of the show. In the following I will be spoiling a few episodes and some diversions from the purely episodic.

Modern design is not comfortable to live with

During my visit to Chicago, I again spent time in a museum, this time the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of what I looked at was not modern art or design, but there was some of that. And it reminded me of a second issue I wanted to discuss after my visit at MoMA: how uncomfortable it is to actually live in a world designed in a modern fashion. I experienced that less when exploring the museum exhibits, and more when I made use of their bathrooms, or those of the mostly modern hotels I've stayed in. Basic elements such as sinks and doors look nice and simple, but basic aspects of them just don't seem to take into account that people would be using them, or how they will do so.

Lets start with sinks. The fact of the matter is that people will be using sinks to wash their hands. For that you need to be able to comfortably get your hands under the sink, have room to wash and rub those hands together, ideally without touching the sink while doing so, and be capable of draining the water, suds, and so forth. It is surprising how many bathroom sinks I've seen recently fail to do any or all of these effectively. One hotel bathroom had a sink that was just a shallow rectangular basin, with the faucet too low over it. As for the draining, since it was rectangular, it only halfheartedly drained, meaning any suds or detritus of shaving had to be actively cleaned off. I've also seen several recent bathrooms where the water, soap, and air drying implements are part of one contraption. Aside from the fact that this does not allow for proper pipelining, as someone washing their hands will presumably be taking up the sink until they are done drying their hands, everything is so close together that it is easy to touch a bunch of surfaces where it would be better to avoid doing so.

As for doors, I can enjoy the aesthetics of a sliding glass door, but when one is used for a shower, it needs to be set up to block off the water from spraying outside - often, that was not the case. And I was in more than one hotel room where a sliding door was used to close off the bathroom itself, sometimes set up so that it would bounce back if simply pushed closed, never really good at keeping sound in, which is recommended if sharing the lodging with anyone.

Many "organic" modern buildings essentially create a lot of dead space at corners while making for a nice-looking façade. There seem to be many of those on the Chicago riverfront, although I have not looked inside to see if my experience with others of the genre repeated here.

I feel like a lot of these problems would go away if designers and architects were forced to live with the products of their designs for at least a week.

Podcasts do not replace higher education

When I was in undergrad, there were a bunch of classes I was required to take. Some of them, like Discrete Math or Introduction to Programming, I took to immediately. Others, like Calculus/Analysis, I struggled with. It took me all of Calculus1 and a bit of Calculus 2 to finally understand the power of epsilon-delta proofs. That shift in thinking has served me to this day, even though I am doing very practical things.

That was a more obvious exposure to very different ways of thinking, but I also had very different professors, with very different ideas of how to teach and learn, and how to think.

These days there is a plethora of podcasts about academic and technical topics, in all fields of the humanities, sciences, engineering, and so forth. Each podcast has a whole community around it, with people forming relations and developing intellectually under the podcasters` purview. Some people might think that this is a substitute for a college degree, and with the cost of higher education being as it is these days, it's understandable that they might prefer to spend a fraction of the cost to financially support their favorite teachers.

But every field, I think, has a variety of subfields and approaches. And no single academic, not even a small group thereof, is going to give a beginner the exposure to all of these that an actual degree from a university program would. Even when these people are fully open about their own biases, they are not going to be able to present other views like someone who actually held them.

I would like to think of myself as mature enough, seeing as I have been exposed to different views in academia and outside of it, to take a contrary stance to existing podcasts. I know that I usually will listen to them, maybe immerse myself in their community, but then tire of the repetition and the limitations, and either leave or at least make sure to expose myself to other attitudes. But I worry about those who seem to fit in too well.

Science sometimes involves a lot of serious arguments about methodology, theoretical frameworks, occasionally facts. Cultural criticism can come from many directions, some of them incompatible with each other, and their interaction with cultural practice can be a bit difficult. Technology advances, changes, and occasionally old, washed-out ideas become new again, while other times the cutting edge leads absolutely nowhere.

While you will end up with your own biases and specializations, you shouldn't let yours be completely dictated by a specific choice of community that came when you were the most impressionable, and most able to understand things differently, if you were given the opportunity, or forced to.

In praise of artificial stupidity

When I was looking for a career change after my physics doctorate, one obvious direction was data science. There were bootcamps for people in my position, it was highly paid and highly valued, there were still not as many specialized fully-fledged training programs to compete with, so I looked into it. And to be honest, it just wasn't clicking with me. I wanted to like it, as I did have a scientific background, as well as in computer science and software development, but it was just not my thing. I realized after a while that I wasn't satisfied in finding a model that seems to provide patterns that showed that it knew something - I wanted to know and understand things myself. So I instead went into game development, and particularly, computer graphics.

Years later, it seems like computers understanding things for us has just become more and more popular. Professional computer graphics conferences are full of machine learning algorithms and neural networks for many purposes, with hardware technologies to go with them - one talk at SIGGRAPH 2021 distinguished itself as providing a non-neural graphics algorithm. Moreover, computers are now capable of not only processing things for us, but of generating a lot of creative work, leading to a lot of concern and downright disruption of the lives and livelihoods of the people who do this for a living. More and more it seems like all these techniques and technologies under the rubric of artificial intelligence are on the upswing. Maybe I made a bad bet.

But I, personally, prefer artificial stupidity. Take Newton's second law: F = ma. It says that in the contexts that it explains, nature can be modeled as something fundamentally very stupid: it just takes forces and converts them to accelerations. Even if we model something complicated, like a large bridge, or a system made of up thousands of particles, and are not able to perform all the calculations ourselves, when we tell a computer to perform those calculations for us, we're just telling it to do something stupid faster than us. We still understand what it's doing.

Of course, there are aspects of what a computer does that are not as obvious as they used to be. We are using an abstraction that has become less and less representative of the actual behavior of the hardware. When we tell a computer to calculate things, it might perform these calculations in an order different from that which we gave it, under the constraint that the results are as if it had done them in the right order, but in practice, much more quickly than it could have had it just abided by our instructions. But even these ways of working are understandable. Maybe this will change in the future.

Generally, we are now faced with a lot of "algorithms" that people do not understand, but just accept as the way decisions are made. That's the opposite of what algorithms were always for me, when I was studying computer science - even if clever, they ultimately did understandable things, and if they were doing things in ways that did not make sense, that was a reason to investigate, not to shrug and accept what was given.

Computers are tools for our use. But to be tools, they have to be understood. It needs to be clear when they aren't working - and when they get to set both the results and the standards, we can't do that.

We no longer live in a pre-COVID19 world

I have tried keeping politics and current events away from this blog, but since Twitter is no longer an outlet for me, I find myself wanting to express certain things here.

Let's start with a film. Late December I watched a political thriller, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. I strongly recommend it, although the reason I watched it then was that it was leaving Amazon Prime, so you'll have to find it elsewhere.

I won't spoil the film for you, but I have been repeating one episode in it to people when I try to explain my exasperation at the discourse about COVID19 and "going back to normal". In the film, Beatty's character chases someone onto an airplane. He runs from a cab, through the terminal, up the stairs, into the airplane, and only then, after takeoff, does a flight attendant come over to ask him for his name and whether he'd be doing a round-trip or taking them one way. See, back then you didn't need to have pre-paid for a ticket, checked your luggage with your ticket, gone through security, then have your boarding pass checked before you were let on a plane. Planes were a lot more like buses.

Now imagine the following pitch for a new airport design: once we're done with terrorism and airborne smuggling, surely we'll go back to those good old days as expressed in the film above, so let's use the latest in soundproofing technology to allow the gates to be a dozen feet away from departure drop-off, so people can very easily get on the plane. TSA is just a temporary measure, right? Airliner hijackings are a thing of the past, right? We'll go back to normal, and then we can just make things so much smoother.

This may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how policymakers and business leaders sound when they discuss COVID19. It's all about "going back to normal", "getting people back in the office", dozens of op eds concern trolling about the ills of working from home, the psychological effect of physical separation of children from their classmates - all potentially legitimate concerns, but not comparable to the horrors of suffering from a serious disease or watching classmates, siblings, parents, colleagues, teachers, suffer or perish.

We can't just pretend things are going back to normal. Nothing says that we won't still be dealing with it five years from now. And we'll still only have solutions designed for a world that pretends that this plague doesn't exist.

Imagine a different path. Imagine if, six months into the pandemic, world and local leaders had actually sat down and thought how a functioning society could work while taking this disease into account. We have all these tools that allow us to work and study remotely. We have the constraints that are very acute for parents with children. What could we do with this? Maybe the government could incentivize households to pair up so that work and childcare can be shared. Maybe the office buildings which will no longer consistently hold in-person businesses can instead be used to significantly reduce class counts to make in-person schooling actually safe. Maybe some effort could've gone into modernizing ventilation systems and adding air filtering to classrooms and businesses, and training more healthcare workers to deal with expected surges. Maybe there are better solutions for these and other problems that have come up that I can't even imagine, because I'm a software engineer and RPG crank whose highest academic training was in theoretical physics. But we'll never get there if we keep pretending that this is just a temporary speedbump.

We are beginning Year 3 of the Plague. Let's not pretend it's going to just dissipate. It'll even be economically more sensible long-term to actually adapt instead of constantly pushing off the inevitable by insisting on normalcy and then disrupting this normalcy as case counts make it untenable again.