Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I just finished watching the Kurosawa film Yojimbo, about a samurai who walks into a strife-torn Japanese village and plays both sides of the battle. He thereby kicks a great deal of ass, gets really beaten up, and triumphs in the end. (I would worry about spoiling something here, but I’ve just described about 90% of the movies ever made. If the above spoils the film for you, then you’re not watching the right parts of the film.)

(Spoiler up ahead. You have been warned.)

Hard to tell whether there’s any “deeper meaning” here. The protagonist is in some sense a hero, but his actions lead to — or at least accelerate — a lot of deaths. The town is laid to waste by the time he’s done, and he ironically comments that it will be a lot quieter now that he’s gone. His character is too quiet to breed much sympathy, except in that we love the strong, silent type. No one in the film is really a hero. And this film doesn’t carry the theme — present in, say, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs — that an earlier honor code has been destroyed by immoral ruffians. It’s hard to truly side with the protagonist.

The cinematography is breathtaking. The characters are constantly in brief poses while the camera lingers on them; I’d love to grab some frames from this film and frame them. And finally, the action is intense; obviously we know that the protagonist will prevail, but how he’ll pull it off is a mystery until he does it.

Incidentally, I think the people who did Die Hard drew on the final scene in Yojimbo. Check it out and let me know if you agree.

I think there’s an inherent tension between the quality of a given art, and how broad a subsection of the public it reaches. There was a time when far fewer people read books, but the books they read — as far as I understand — were higher-quality. Now we have many more people reading, but Tom Clancy and Nelson Demille sell well.

Ditto Web design. Now design doesn’t just belong to professional designers; anyone with Microsoft FrontPage can design crap Web pages. (I realize that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and that this page isn’t the world’s best.)

It’s an essential tension between populism and quality. I go back and forth on how to respond to it, and what to make of it. On the one hand, I love that more people are reading. On the other, I often have a hard time deciding whether books like Clancy’s are any better than television (well, early Clancy novels are at least better than the movies which got made out of them). Similarly, I’m so glad that millions of people have put their pet obsessions up on the Web, no matter how bad the design is.

The goal in these realms — as in so many others — should be to create systems that fail well. Maybe very few people will be designers, and everyone will use FrontPage. In that case, make the default styles in FrontPage very decent. Or teach people some basic design skills; if we recognize that the most popular mode of artistic communication in the next few decades will be personal Web pages, then schools should take some time to teach people effective communication through good design.

I was just going through a box of books that I’ve yet to unpack since I moved into my new apartment. It’s been a couple months, but for some reason I’ve just not gotten around to fixing up a bookshelf that I have, and adding a new shelf to accommodate a rather ungainly pile of books.

In any event, I happened upon Box & Tiao’s book Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis, which is defined as a classic by whoever defines such things. It’s in the Wiley Classics Library, whereby Wiley swanks it up with gold print on a black background. It costs around $85 for the privilege.

This and other things remind me of what it was like to be in college — to be absolutely ecstatic about things that don’t really matter all that much. Don’t get me wrong: if I could have a nation of people who felt as passionately about things as college freshman taking econ 101 (“Of course the free market is the answer; I proved it today”), I would wave the magic wand and make that happen; it’s better than the state of abject disinterest that pervades this country now.

But a long habit of absorbing college ideas makes all these things seem important. College also breeds a vulnerability to doctrines: you tend to spout out what you learned from some very smart professors. I’m sure I said at some point, “Oh yes, Box and Tiao are incredibly important Bayesians.” Indeed, I thought that it was important whether you were a Bayesian or a frequentist. On many occasions, I went off to my parents about this new axiomatization of my life: “It’s important to factor prior information into our decisions,” I would say confidently. “That’s much better than the classical approach,” I would scoff, largely unaware that neither my parents nor 99% of the rest of the world really cared about the Bayesian or the frequentist approach. Only a small branch of academicians really cared about it, as well as a larger group of, say, computer scientists.

My point is not that these ideas are unimportant. If only through the process of cultural osmosis, many of these ideas seep into the world and make their presence known. But a great many of them don’t, and never will. The latter have an audience only because some college professors need a job.

Now two years out of college, I’m trying to find those ideas and actions which will actually make a difference toward the things that count: getting large portions of the world out of starvation; ending repressive regimes; helping most of the world go to sleep at night, confident that they won’t be shot while they dream. These things are important. To the extent that someone’s personal philosophy of the universe will help toward the things that matter, I support him or her; to the extent that it’s just mental masturbation, I’d suggest that he or she do something else with his or her time.

Not that anyone much cares, I imagine, but I think I’ll soon be changing this to an XML Weblog. XML is the wave of the future anyway, and this blog is already structured rather hierarchically; I’m using div tags everywhere to mark off logical sections of the document, which is just proof that HTML had to incorporate some kludges to make it flexible. HTML’s era is over; XML is where it’s at. Might as well catch the wave.

A lot of things about companies bug me. First among those irritants may be Corporate-Speak, wherein companies get “traction” in a market, “leverage” “synergies,” and compile lists of “best practices.” I can’t stand the vocab. Maybe it’s like any other discipline, and adopts precise vocabulary for precise situations. I’m inclined to believe, to the contrary, that this is just another instance of the language-abuse that William Zinsser and George Orwell attacked so vehemently. This is the language disease that makes massive civilian deaths “collateral damage.” It’s the same cancer that turns “a lot of people losing their jobs” into a “downsizing.”

This isn’t just semantics. A steady diet of this oral garbage dulls us to what’s really happening. After years of being bludgeoned by the Pentagon and General Motors, we forget the real people whom the words cover. Corporate-Speak is just a small part of it.

I’m in the middle of reading James Monaco’s fascinating book How to Read a Film, which covers film from economic, political, artistic, and technological perspectives, among others. In a section arguing persuasively that Hollywood films spend all their time confirming — or constructing — American myths, we have

“Figure 4-19. `America’s Sweetheart,’ Little Mary Pickford (c. 1920): sausage curls, gingham, and cute puppies.”

Kinda neat: I just spent a pleasant evening having dinner with a group of passionate, intelligent, well-spoken, tremendously interesting people. It’s interesting to monitor one’s own mind during the course of a conversation, particularly an intense one. Sometimes it feels absolutely necessary to jump in and say something incisive — if you feel passionately about something, that’s only natural. But then there are other times when the people around you are so fascinating and so wonderful to be around that you can just absorb it all, be fascinated by everything, and smile. That’s the kind of conversation we had tonight.

It reminds me of an idea my brother mentioned a while ago: it would be instructive to pass an entire day without once using the pronoun “I.” It’s really hard. I certainly haven’t done it yet (and certainly not on this page).

I’m not old, but one of the frustrating parts of being 24 is that I have to start looking at girls’ left ring fingers.

I should probably read more philosophy before I decide to reject it, but I think I really like the idea of having no philosophy at all. The famous Shakespeare quote that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy” is quite apt, as is J.B.S. Haldane’s update: “I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any philosophy.” I tend to agree.

There are, of course, those who disagree, and I need to read them. Ayn Rand wrote a book called Philosophy: Who Needs It which purports to tell people why they should be philosophers. I need to read that book, even though I find Rand’s philosophy repellent and her followers even more so.

Why shouldn’t philosophy just be viewed as another model among many? A philosophy is just like a scientific model: it’s a way of abstracting details away from the world in order to understand some larger issues. The model may be wrong while still giving us some useful insights. If we view philosophy this way, I suspect we’ll stop holding it upon such a pedestal, where it becomes incredibly important to have a philosophy in the first place; to me it seems no more important to have a philosophy than it does to hold strong beliefs on quarks.

Who starts trends, anyway? Have individual people ever started trends, or do many people need to start doing it simultaneously? For instance, did a lot of people independently start saying the word “cool” back in the early 20th century, or did one person first use it in that context? (Yes, I realize the silliness of trying to pin down the origins of things like this. I’ve read Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown”) And why do some trends take off whereas others don’t? Why did Nick Konidaris’s attempt to make “dolphin” a widely-used synonym of “cool” fail so utterly? In Nick’s case, I suppose it’s because “dolphin” doesn’t fill any new role; “cool” already does everything we need “dolphin” to do. But how about “cool” itself? Did it fill a needed role? Or did it just take off among a subset of the population and proceed from there?

I realize I’m focusing on words here, but I think the general question is simply, How do we start trends, and why does one trend take off where another fails? Why did Jennifer Aniston’s hairstyle from Friends take off, whereas Courtney Thorne-Smith’s did not? These questions puzzle me. Not as much as the question of whether to have a philosophy, but they still puzzle me.

A sign that maybe — just maybe — the Bush Administration’s power grab is fading away: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that the Administration must release the names of those whom it’s put through deportation hearings.

I love the quote “Democracies die behind closed doors.” Finally someone noticed.

The New York Times also has some coverage of the decision.

I’ve been hesitant to get my blog fully “out there” in the world, because I’m not so confident in my design skills. Plus I’ve gotten rusty on my CSS skillz. But I decided that I would finally take the plunge and start with a mildly flexible blog format (NB for the geeks: it’s a series of Apache Server Side Includes). We’ll see how it goes.