The CBC Reports:

Nobody feels worse than Mellisa Hollingsworth right now.

The 29-year-old skeleton racer from Eckville, Alta., considered to be a lock for a podium finish at the Vancouver Olympic Games, had a medal slip through her fingers after a disastrous fourth run down the track at the Whistler Sliding Centre on Friday night.

“I feel like I have let my entire country down,” Hollingsworth told CTV as tears streamed down her rosy cheeks.

No Melissa, you haven’t let us down. If you’ve been made to feel that way, perhaps by the reporters shoving microphones in your face and flaunting their photographs of your tears, or by national sports officials eager to “own the podium” at the games, then let me apologize for them and for all of us. We’re happy to cheer for you, ecstatic when you win, and we share your disappointment when you fall short, but we don’t need you to win a gold medal for us. We’ll be just fine if you don’t.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying you should stop striving for gold. We want you to go for it, and we know in your competitor’s heart that you want that gold medal badly. But whether you finish first or last (and 5th place at the Olympics is a rather good showing) we’re proud of you. And if we aren’t, that’s our problem, not yours.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Physicist Richard Feynman, from the report on the Challenger disaster.

This is obvious, and yet apparently easy to forget. It drives me nuts when I see corporations and governments spending marketing dollars to tell us how Green they are, or Sustainable, or Organic, or whatever the branding fad of the day requires (google “greenwashing”). The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, not in the advertising copy. This applies most immediately to the climate crisis. Even the best ad firms in the world aren’t going to be able to fool nature on that one.

The global corporation sells mass-production techniques, even in their branch plant version. To be profitable, however, mass production requires mass consumption—that is, the homogenization of the tastes, needs, values, and priorities of all the nations within which the firm and its subsidiaries operate. In the name of technical efficiency, we erase the differences among persons, the style and the art of their living. People of different cultures and nations in varying stages of development are made, through enormous selling and advertising pressure, to want the same things. The freedom of the individual to choose, to maintain his own preferences, and to search for satisfaction, is reduced.

Economist Eric W. Kierans, from his 1983 Massey Lecture, “Globalism and the Nation State”

In this TED talk on the paradox of choice, Psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that the west’s vaunted “freedom of choice” is not liberating but crippling. Not only do too many options bewilder us, he says, but they also raise our expectations. He gives the example of buying a new pair of jeans. In the past, there had only been one kind of jeans, but on a recent trip to the clothing store, he discovered that there were many different options to choose from. He eventually left the store with the best-fitting pair of jeans he’d ever owned.

All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse. Why? […] The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations of how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor; when they came in one hundred flavors, damn it, one of them should have been perfect. What I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. So I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing.

I think Schwartz is on the right track, but in light of Kieran’s observation, I wonder if Schwartz might have missed something. He says that when there was only one flavor of jeans, he had no expectations. If he had no expectations, he can’t have been very invested in his need for a pair of jeans. Perhaps the kind of choice that we find so paralyzing is actually choice among options that don’t really appeal to us in any deep way. Why was Schwartz so sure he actually wanted jeans in the first place? Was his desire for them a product of advertising and social convention rather than an expression of his real preferences?

If you have to choose among 100 options when your heart isn’t really in it, of course you’ll have a rough time. When it comes to choosing things that you really care about, having a wide range of options does not seem negative. For example, I never feel buyer’s remorse after a trip to the bookstore, but then I love books much more than I love jeans. Maybe we don’t have a paradox of choice so much as an illusion of choice. Choosing among a hundred pairs of jeans is not a real choice, if jeans are not meaningful to the chooser. Maybe the reason Schwartz felt deflated after buying his jeans is that he thought he was getting a choice, but in the end it wasn’t a meaningful one.

At work, I use a Mac and a Windows Vista machine every day. I also poke around on XP and Windows 7 from time to time. When I have to switch from using the Mac to using some flavor of Windows, I always wince a little bit. I’ve been trying to work out exactly why.

I’ve always thought that the Mac’s user interface, especially since Leopard, looks much cleaner and grown-up (I have a special hatred for XP’s Fisher Price blue-and-green default colour scheme; thankfully Vista and Win 7 have moved away from that), but my discomfort with Windows can’t just be because the Mac is more pleasant to look at. People often say that Macs are “easier to use”, but how does one measure that? There aren’t wild differences between their user interfaces: both are point-and-click and built on the metaphor of a “desktop” with several “windows” floating above it, and each window contains a “document”. We tend to take that basic arrangement for granted, but it is useful to remember that it really is only a metaphor: one could conceive of other modes for performing the same underlying interactions. For example, a command line interface is built on the metaphor of a conversation: I tell the computer to do something by typing a command, it does it, and then tells me about the result with a line of text.

Of course, most of the time we don’t interact with computers via the command line: we use the desktop metaphor instead, because it is an easier metaphor to work with. It’s easier for us to conceptualize a pile of documents that can be shuffled and sorted and laid out than it is for us to carry on multiple simultaneous conversations with the machine. We can accept this metaphor at face-value and then get on with working on our “documents” without bothering to remember that they are really representations of the underlying computer data. And I think this might be one way in which the Mac user experience is an “easier” one: the Mac does a better job of maintaining the metaphor.

Here’s an example that I hope will illustrate what I mean. On a Mac, there’s a little “grip” area in the bottom-right corner of a window that you can use to resize the window by clicking and dragging. On Windows, you can resize a window with a similar grip, and also by dragging the edges of the window’s frame. While these interactions are superficially the same, there is a key difference. On my Mac, the window always resizes smoothly. On my Windows machines (Vista and 7 especially), the window’s content tends to lag behind the frame. For a split second there will be an empty black gap between the outside edge of the “document” and the inside edge of the frame, and then the document “jumps” over to fill the gap. Well, so what? Does this really matter? After all, on both platforms, I accomplished the same thing, didn’t I? I resized the window, giving me a larger area in which to work on my document. So what if it looks a bit less clean on Windows?

That wily window frame has some other quirks too. Sometimes, when application is starting up on Windows, the window frame will appear before the content, giving you a split-second view “through” the window at the desktop behind it (imagine holding up an empty picture frame and looking through it at the room behind). Then, the window content appears and the whole thing is properly opaque. This never happens on the Mac.

These may be small things that you barely notice consciously, but I think the small details are really important. On the Mac, the window content (the “document”) and the window frame are a cohesive unit. A window is a solid thing, it contains a document, and it behaves in a reliable way. On Windows, you get these constant reminders that all is really an illusion. Every time the window shears apart, the metaphor is broken, and your brain has to work a little harder to paper over the little gap between the metaphor and the reality. The Mac’s interface doesn’t tax you in this way. I think that’s why I breath a little sigh of relief when I switch back to working on the Mac: I know I can just relax and get on with what I’m doing.

The prevailing story on the Balloon Boy episode is that it was a stunt designed to attract attention to the boy’s family and help them secure a reality television show about themselves. I don’t have an opinion on whether the it was a hoax or whether Falcon’s parents really believed him to be aloft in their homemade weather balloon. However, if it is true that the family wants to bring the dead eye of a reality TV camera into their lives, well, I must question their judgement.

Actually, I’ll let Anton Chekhov question their judgement, since he does such a good job. Follow this link to read his short story “Joy”.

It laughed out loud the other day when I read this for the first time. It completely sums up my thoughts on our culture of celebrity-for-any-reason, and it was written in 1883. We ought to have learned our lesson by now.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the grocery store was very busy today. As we went about our shopping, we kept hearing, on the P/A, variations of “Mr. Smiley, telephone, line 1 please.” This call was repeated every few minutes the entire time we were in the store. My first thought was that Mr. Smiley ought to get himself a cellphone – it would make things much simpler for him, given that he gets a lot of calls and is never near a landline.

Then I started to notice that it was always different people asking for Mr. Smiley, which seemed a bit odd. Perhaps “Mr. Smiley” doesn’t even exist, and by calling him to the telephone, various store employees were instead sending some kind of coded message. “Shoplifter in aisle three”?

Then I started to worry about myself for inventing grocery store secret codes and conspiracies. Still, the whole thing was a little strange. Perhaps I’ll call them up one day and ask for Mr. Smiley, just to see what happens.

I just finished reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and I recommend it highly. The book imagines that all humans vanish from this planet overnight (aliens, killer virus, the rapture, etc) and then investigates what would happen to the planet after we’ve gone. It makes for a good framework within which examine all the terrible things we’re doing to our little blue marble home and what it would take to clean up our mess.

To me, the scariest chapter is the one called “Polymers are Forever.”

“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says [research scientist] Tony Andrady […], “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

Most of it is in the ocean. The large pieces are clumped up in what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the middle of the Pacific Ocean absolutely covered in garbage. Which is bad enough, but that’s only the big pieces. The really terrifying part is what happens to the small pieces. Plastic pieces don’t biodegrade, they just break down into smaller pieces of plastic.

The book quotes marine biologist Richard Thompson, who studies the accumulation of plastic in the world’s oceans. Thompson has discovered that most sea creatures happily eat “bite-sized” pieces of plastic, and then die if the pieces are too big to pass through their digestive systems. As the plastic bits get smaller, smaller animals start eating them and dying.

At what point would [plastic debris in the ocean] star to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms sometime far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.

“When they get as small as powder, even the zooplankton will swallow them.”

We’re wildly irresponsible in our use of plastic. It’s one of the most indestructible materials we’ve invented, and we use it primarily to make disposable goods like packaging and grocery bags. It’s insane. As a species, we’re terrible at long-term thinking. We’re merrily destroying our home and poisoning ourselves, but it’s happening slowly enough that we can turn a blind eye to it in the name of short-term profit.

We ought to factor the costs of safe disposal (and by disposal I mean breaking down to base elements) of our materials into their cost. It’d drive the price of plastic through the roof and probably ruin the holy economy in the short term, but it might keep the plastic wrapper containing today’s breakfast from being part of breakfast tomorrow.

Roy “Doc” Halladay, the best pitcher the Toronto Bluejays ever had, is very probably going to be traded before the end of the week. I’d never seen him pitch except on TV, and, with a little bit of panic, realized that his Friday night start in Toronto might be my last chance. So I did what any die-hard Jays fan would do in my position: took the day off work and booked a flight. Shengrong said I was “feng feng dian dian de” for my impulsiveness, but gamely came along.

Halladay is incredible. Because he plays in Canada, and not say New York, he isn’t as widely known as he could be, and he seems to like it that way. Whenever he talks to the media he’s thoughtful and well-spoken, even a little shy. One the field, he’s incredibly intense. He rarely smiles or even looks up at the crowd. He glowers down at every batter like an ace pitcher should. Occasionally, steam comes out of his ears.

And what a pitcher he is: “dominant” is a word often used to describe him. He’s an incredible athlete: all of his pitches from the 94 mph fastball with deadly movement, to his pinpoint curveball, to his devastating 92 mph cut-fastball (Marino Rivera, the Yankee’s legendary closer, throws only cutters), to the sinker and the change-up, are “plus” pitches, meaning better than the average for the league. He has great command of all of them: he can throw any pitch for a strike on the corner of the plate when he wants to, and the hitters can never guess what might be coming next.

But there are many pitches with great “stuff”, as the pitch-arsenal is called. Great pitches alone don’t make a great pitcher, and his “stuff” is just the beginning of greatness of Roy Halladay. Some pitchers with wicked pitches try to strike everyone out. They spend five or six pitches per batter and are worn out after five or six innings. They’re happy when they manage to finish the seventh. Halladay can “pitch to contact”, he throws pitches that look appetizing enough for the batters to swing at, but they don’t connect solidly with the bat, and turn into easy outs. He saves the strikeout for when he really needs it, and thus saves his arm. He usually leads the league in innings pitched and throws more complete games in a season than most other teams. He once threw a 10-inning complete game and won it 1 to 0. Incredible.

And then there’s his work-ethic. Starting pitchers throw every 5th game, and Halladay is known to make the most of the time in between, both in terms of physical conditioning and in his analysis of the opposing hitters, learning their weaknesses, formulating a plan. I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell mentioned Halladay in his book on how “genius” is often a product of a huge amount of work, but if he didn’t, he should have. When Halladay first arrived in the major leagues, he dazzled everyone by nearly throwing a no-hitter in his second big-league game. Then he ran intro difficulties and seemed to fizzle out. He was sent down all the way to A-ball and most people thought that was the last they’d hear of him; he’d be the baseball equivalent of a one-hit-wonder. But Doc worked is butt off in the minors, retooled the mechanics of how he throws the ball, and came back. He’s been to six all-star games, he’s thrown 44 complete games, he’s won the Cy Young award for best pitcher in the league.

But Roy Halladay, the arch-competitor, has never been to the post-season. He’s on a team that hasn’t made the playoffs since 1993, and that’s not good enough for the Doc. He’s current contract ends after 2010, and he’s said that, while he’d prefer to win in Toronto, time is running out for him (he’s 32) and he might look to other teams where he’d have a better shot. Right now, his trade value is as high as it has ever been, and so the Jays, fearing that he’d leave in 2010 and they’d get nothing back, have put him on the market. It’s unclear whether the Jays will get the kind of deal they want for him, but there’s a very real chance he could be going.

Whether he’s traded or not, I’m glad I got to see him on Friday. If it was his last game in Toronto, it was in some ways a fitting conclusion to his Bluejays tenure. He was brilliant, throwing 9 innings, giving up only 2 runs (1 earned) (giving up fewer than 4 earned runs in 9 innings is considered “good”), allowing only 4 hits, walking only 3, and striking out 10. The crowd, although not as big as it ought to have been for Doc’s final game, was certainly aware of what they might be about to lose. They gave him a standing ovation when he walked off the field after his warmup, they gave him a standing ovation after almost every inning, they stood and cheered whenever he got two strikes on a batter.

But for all of Doc’s superman effort, his team couldn’t get him the win. His opposing starter, Tampa Bay’s Matt Garza, kept right up with him, allowing only two runs to the Jays and baffling their hitters over nine innings. In the tenth inning, the Jay’s bullpen coughed up two more runs, and then the Jay’s hitters went quietly. As much as he tries to carry the team, Halladay couldn’t carry them enough to win the game.

I believe I have made my feelings on chainmail underwear and other ludicrous video-game garb clear. Suffice to say, I’m not a fan. So I was quite pleased to find this a little while ago while researching a Secret Project(tm) that I may or may not be cooking up in my spare time lately.

It’s the box art from The Bard’s Tale, a computer RPG from 1985, and here are some adventurers that nobody wants to see in their skivvies. These blokes look like they can get the quest and the drinking done, and both without any nonsense. I’d trust them to liberate the town of Skara Brae from the clutches of the evil wizard Mangar long before I’d turn to a barbie doll in a titanium bathing suit. Gaming needs more heroes who don’t wear high heels. My only complaint is there don’t seem to be any women in sensible shoes among the lads here. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Bonus content: here’s an old magazine ad from the era when the graphics were mostly schematic and they actually had to tell you about their game.

I feel like it has been a very long time in coming. Today is Bush’s last full day in office. I can’t say I’ll miss him a whole lot.

Here’s some appropriate exit music for “the decider”: the Two Gallants playing their tribute, “Waves of Grain”.

…such an infamous freedom / such a militant peace…