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.

Fortunately for us, there fire department was already on the scene. There had been half a dozen burly firemen standing in the lobby of our building when we’d stepped in to that elevator, and they quickly went to work on freeing us.

We had just spent ten minutes standing on the street with the fire alarm blaring, until those same firefighters had determined that the alarm had been triggered by “a malfunction in the garage sprinkler system” and let us back inside.

About 15 minutes before that elevator door gave up the ghost, I had just sat back down to our fancy Valentine’s Day dinner after fending off a telemarketer. I was just saying to myself, “that was our interruption for the evening,” when the fire alarm started to ring. Now, here we were, going nowhere at all in a small metal box, while our dinner rapidly cooled on the table, a dozen stories above our heads.

To the great credit of the Ottawa Fire Department, the firefighters managed to get the door unstuck after about five minutes of fiddling with it. We thanked them and took the stairs, laughing all the way back up to our apartment, and to our dinner.

Happy Valentine’s day, everyone.

“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.

I snapped this a couple of weeks ago at the locks on the Rideau Canal. I think it’s one of the cooler pictures I’ve taken, though I can’t claim it was totally on purpose.

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.

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.

The time machine that the two engineers invent allows them to travel backwards a day or two at a time, pretty much at will. A lot of SF that deals with time travel often dodges the really interesting possibilities: i.e., can you go back and meet yourself? No, it’s not allowed, it might “rupture the fabric of the space-time continuum” or something like that. Primer takes the easy road out of nothing: it grabs the concept of time travel with both hands and runs with it as far as it can. I really liked that it only took the inventors a week to go from “we can use this to predict the stock market and get rich,” to absolute chaos.

Primer is probably not for everyone. The last third is extremely hard to follow (there’s a huge chart on the internet somewhere that tries to lay out the plot as it continually circles back on itself, and even after spending some time with that chart I’m still not completely sure what happened) and a person could easily find it both bewildering and boring. Despite all that, I thought it was fantastic.

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.