Sunday, December 26, 2010

resolutions: 2011 edition

The last time I made resolutions, it was the end of 2008.  I've since gone 2 for 4 on those resolutions, and one of them took me an extra year.  Here's what I resolve to do in the coming year (in no particular order):

  1. Take piano lessons and do at least one public performance (Rewind shows don't count).
  2. Participate in at least one submission wrestling tournament.
  3. Re-learn and improve the 540 kick (see this video).
  4. Take a dance class.
  5. Finish (version 1 of) the awesome chord-listening iPhone app I'm working on.
I think I can go 5 for 5 this time.  These are all extremely doable, like your mom.  Notice that I did not officially resolve to post more often to this blog, or learn to snowboard, or learn to ride a bike, or learn Portuguese, or learn Chinese, or read more books, or play more video games, even though these are all things I want to do.  You have to make cuts somewhere.

I also didn't include any work-related resolutions, because they are top-secret.  And because we already have a similar process, except they actually hold you to it.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

generalized bullshit

I haven't read Harry Frankfurt's 1986 philosophical treatise On Bullshit.  But here's a summary I like from its Wikipedia page:

In the essay, Frankfurt defines a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications.  In particular, Frankfurt distinguishes bullshitting from lying: while the liar deliberately makes false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth.  Bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences.  While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth.  Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
This does seem to be the defining characteristic of bullshitting - the lack of regard for truth.  And it does seem to be more dangerous than lying, for the same reason that a machine learning classifier with 50% accuracy is far less useful than one with 10% accuracy.

However, bullshit can describe many things beyond statements with a truth value.  For example, we talk about bullshit jobs.  What exactly is a bullshit job?  Is a bullshit job just one that requires you to generate bullshit statements?  I think there's more to it than that.  There's a whole book on bullshit jobs, and it provides us with some useful examples: cheese artisan (sculptor of supermarket cheese), feng shui consultant, economist, aromatherapist, life coach, and so on, though some unfortunately stray from bullshit territory into mere unpleasantness (roadkill collector) or overt detriment to society (patent troll).

What do these jobs have in common with Harry Frankfurt's definition, the lack of regard for truth?  Certainly some may require explicit truth-disregarding, but I think a more fundamental similarity is the idea of a broken link to what really matters.  For bullshit statements, the link between a statement and its truth value has been severed.  Again, this is different from false statements, in which the link is present but set to "reverse".  And bullshit jobs, then, are jobs which provide no direct benefit to society, and for which the indirect benefit requires a link which has been severed or never really existed at all.

What "really matters"?  I'd say something that makes a person happy, though you can use whatever rule you want, as long as it isn't "nothing".  Or, I suppose, if you say nothing matters, then you should conclude that everything is bullshit, which might be a defensible position.  And keep in mind that there's lots of non-bullshit that is pretty far removed from mattering, like designing uniforms for train conductors, but that remain non-bullshit as long as the intermediate links hold up.  In many cases it may be difficult to test all of these intermediate links, and in fact the increasing specialization in modern society may be the cause of the proliferation of bullshit.  I'd guess that hunter-gatherer societies are able to get away with considerably less bullshit, because the links to usefulness of any activity are easily testable by anyone.

Looking it at this way, a large fraction of what we do all day is bullshit.  From personal experience, most of what happens in academia is bullshit.  99% of research papers, including (especially?) the ones by me, are bullshit, even if every single statement in them is intentionally true.  The business world, notorious for its bullshit, actually seems a little bit better.  From what I can tell, tech startups seem to have relatively low levels of bullshit.  At least, the good ones do - some have made my life noticeably better.  And things like baking and selling bread are about as far from bullshit as you can get.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

my first iPhone app

Last week, my first iPhone app was finally accepted by Apple and is now available in the App Store.  At first, I was a bit surprised at the number of hoops I had to jump through just to make my app available: lots of certificates, code signing, Developer Program joining, bundle identifying, not to mention Apple's notorious review process.  Now that I look at the sheer number of throwaway apps available, though, I think there should be some more hoops, or at least different ones.  For example, does iLike really need to produce an app for every single music artist in existence?

My app has now been up for a week or so, and another surprise has been the geographic distribution of downloads.  Most of my downloads are from outside the US, even though I made no special effort at internationalization.  I'm not even sure how people are finding it, as so far I've only told my friends about it and it's certainly not at the top of the App Store charts.

Oh yeah, I suppose I should describe the app itself.  It grew out of a simple demo I created for our music seminar here at UW.  Our theme that quarter was the theremin, which allows for continuous control over pitch but is extremely difficult to play.  The problem with continuous control over pitch is that usually (in Western music), you just want to play the 12 standard notes, and mostly just the 7 notes from one key.  My app lets you trade off between these two extremes.  You play by touching the screen, with pitch on the x-axis and hardness of quantization on the y-axis.  Touch near the top of the screen, and the pitch is quantized to the nearest note from a particular scale.  Touch near the bottom, and the pitch is unaltered.  Touch near the middle, and the pitch is "soft-quantized", or nudged gently toward the nearest scale note.

Anyway, my app is pretty fun.  You should download it.  And if you tell me how to make it better, I might actually do it, especially if you have suggestions for making it a "real" instrument, that someone might use in a performance.

Interestingly, there is another instrument that allows for both continuous and discrete control over pitch: the ondes Martenot.  Good luck porting that to the iPhone.