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Dark matters

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Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I’ve read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I’m not sure whether I’d have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I’ll never know, of course.

In any case, Pullman’s New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn’t believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here’s a taste of Pullman’s answer:

  The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don’t write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn’t like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit.

If u cn rd ths msg u r jst lke vryne lse!

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Today’s hot meme in the blogosphere is this notion, now heavily Slashdotted, that readers can easily make sense of passages of verbiage in which the words’ letters have been scrambled as long as the first and last letters of each word are left intact. Try it — everyone else in blog-land has!

Waht tihs tlles us, of csuore, is taht cxonett is ideblrnciy intmorapt to our criepoehmnosn of txet.

(And that, as you can see from the above sentence, this approach is tougher to use as the length of words increases.)

This novelty occasioned a few thoughts:
(1) The human brain is much more forgiving than most software, at least today’s software. Fuzzy math may help. Google is getting good at suggesting what you really meant when you misspell a query.

(2) This is why we miss typos. I spent a significant portion of my college years proofreading newspaper paste-up boards, and still spend a lot of time editing on computer screen, and if you’ve ever done this sort of editing work properly, your eyes behave differently from the normal reader, and you notice tiny transpositions and goofs that a typical eye will simply pass over. (This is why Don’s Amazing Puzzle was not amazing to me. I caught it the first time I looked at it back when Dave Winer first presented it. Not because I’m a sharpie but because I’ve worked as a copy editor.) For anyone who reads this way, interpreting words scrambled in this fashion can actually be harder — because you’re trained to see what’s actually there, not what your eye thinks should be there.

(3) Reading slowly is a dying art. As our world pushes us inevitably towards more speedy skimming of information blasting at us through a dozen different protocols, we scan more than we read. That makes it easy for us to parse near-gibberish, and that capability is a wonderful thing. But reading slowly is a wonderful thing, too. It is an art we still need in a number of areas. Reading poetry requires the ability to read slowly. If you read a poem the way you read your e-mail, you might as well not bother. Oddly enough, working on computer code requires a similar ability: Both because the computer is far more unforgiving of typos, bad punctuation and garbled verbiage than the human eye, and also becaause in good code, like good poetry, every word counts, and you need to be able to notice the patterns the words establish.

(Catch the typo in that last sentence?)

Stephenson speaks

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Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:

“A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.”

Why?

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Question of the day: One of my three-and-a-half year old sons, Matthew, has a query for his parents that he has repeated on several occasions, and each time it has stumped me, so I am throwing his inquiry out on the Net waters to see what responses it might evoke.

Matthew’s question: “Why are we people?”

Orwell’s reminder

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Slow blogging here as we gear up some new projects for the new year at Salon.

For a side project I have just re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” I used to read this once a year or more but have fallen out of the habit. Take ten minutes out of your week to read it if you haven’t lately. In the era of Iraq war cant it provides a good bucket of cold water to the face.

  If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Pirates ahoy

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Tim O’Reilly’s new essay on piracy offers much wisdom. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” “Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say “may” because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.” Read the whole thing here.

Big worlds

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Joel Spolsky has posted a new essay on programming: “Lord Palmerston on Programming.” Joel writes about how vast the pools of knowledge programmers need to master to become really expert in each of the many programming “worlds” that are popular today. Choice quote:

  People who only know one world get really smarmy, and every time they hear about the complications in the other world, it makes them think that their world doesn’t have complications. But they do. You’ve just moved beyond them because you are proficient in them. These worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. Lord Palmerston: “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”

Large mountain, small bullets

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Britt Blaser offers this moving parable, from the author’s Air Force experience in Vietnam: Sometimes, the paranoia can be worse than the danger. Now that the immediate threat of sniper shootings is behind us, these words are worth attending to:

  Our brain — specifically the reticular formation (so-called “reptile brain”) — is set up to face threats first and only seek opportunities when not threatened. That bias for threat info sells stuff to us. To that end, the media has grabbed and holds our attention, robbing us of the chance to pay attention to something other than the media.