Clickbait is sheer humbug

An instance in which the precision and clarity of the writing (and sad continued state of the English language) means that the word "modern" has not become dated:

... modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

This ancient criticism from Orwell's Politics and the English Language applies today. A robot can make plausible spammy content titles,just by using formulas and "long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else." We should call clickbait "sheer humbug". (Although I advocate the adoption of this formulaic phrase, I am aware that such encouragement and behavior is exactly what Orwell rails against. A self-aware twinkle in my phrase-adopting eye.)

I'm rereading Infinite Jest as a way to purge such language from my mind, whether by frightening it away or by overwriting those parts of memory. If truly "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity", then Infinite Jest, for all its meandering ,difficult sentences and apparent lack of clarity, is overwhelmingly, achingly sincere. And in each style-separated section, DFW does convey something very particular and clear. It's just the kind of clarity that lets you see the many layers of sediment lying beneath the lens and the still water. I really like this book (and Orwell).


This post's theme word is snowclone, "a hackneyed sentence structure." Denigrating overused sentences is the new rock and roll... psych! Snowclone'd.

City on fire!

Welcome to the first-Wednesday-of-the-month Air Raid Siren Test! Don't worry, there's not a real air raid. And although it sounds like the city is on fire, with loud and pervasive sirens ringing from unidentifiable, distributed sources across all neighborhoods (my home, public parks, the city center... for some reason the newer-built neighborhood around my office doesn't have a siren yet), actually everything is totally fine.

Do you hear me?

Probably not, there are AIR RAID SIRENS.

Everything is fine, relax.


This post's theme word is hebdomary, "of or occurring every seven days; weekly." We are thankful that the air raid siren test is not hebdomary.

Ancillary Sword

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword is the sequel to Ancillary Justice, her knockout first scifi novel. All the excellent elements are there --- multiple simultaneous interwoven viewpoints, indignant outrage, powerlessness in the face of structural inequality. The book is about a spaceship in the body of a person, which body is itself often in other spaceships, and so of course the book is about boundaries and personality and what elements of a mind one can be aware of, and not aware of, and how each person must make conscious decisions that shape her character. Especially, of course, the supreme tyrant, in thousands of bodies, currently having a civil war over a little disagreement with herself.

The book is excellent. I have no idea how the author managed it, but it is supremely impressive. The characters develop meaningfully; the setting changes, without escalating to the Fate of the Universe Lies on One Heroine's Shoulders. Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ann Leckie makes human-sized problems, daily issues of real life, have real-life-style focus of her books, while still mattering to a larger plot. And it's presented in an intellectually and emotionally engaging way. The mind boggles at the number of things she has juggled here, perfectly. seemingly-effortlessly.

It's weird that there are three types of ship: Justices, Swords, and Mercies, and in book I the main character is a Justice, and the book is called Ancillary Justice, but in book II the main character is captain of a Mercy, and the book is called Ancillary Sword. And of course book III is called Ancillary Mercy, since that's the third type of ship, and it's nice to finish the trilogy off on the note of mercy, but in the interests of evenness, will the third book focus its action on a Sword-class ship? I wonder. Just for structure, you see, because I'm sure that whatever Ann Leckie has plotted is magnificent and deeply satisfying and engaging on every level.


This post's theme word is monish, "to warn; to admonish." The AIs monish, but few humans heed.

Confounding science with science

Scott Alexander is resplendent in this blog post about science, statistics, confirmation bias, control groups, and the study of whether psychic effects are real. If that list of keywords is not enough to hook you, I really knew the article attained a blazing level of reading delight when I reached this paragraph:

Then there’s Munder (2013), which is a meta-meta-analysis on whether meta-analyses of confounding by researcher allegiance effect were themselves meta-confounded by meta-researcher allegiance effect. He found that indeed, meta-researchers who believed in researcher allegiance effect were more likely to turn up positive results in their studies of researcher allegiance effect (p < .002).

Everything about it is a delight. The layers of meta-analysis. The English noun-phrase-constructing rules that permit the construction of a sentence in which the prefix "meta-" appears five times, variously modifying words which themselves are modifying other "meta-"-modified words.

I wonder if the same researcher bias/confounding exists in fields where the experiments are entirely done on computers. Can researchers' belief in the effectiveness of certain machine learning techniques affect their experiments? What about physics simulations? I don't see how, but of course I deeply believe in the inviolable sanctity of mathematics. This is an opinion founded in my acknowledged bias. Maybe coders would self-sabotage by writing bad code, so that experiments run slower? ... but in the end this wouldn't affect the actual outcome, just the agony and feasibility of running the experiment many times.

On a larger scale, I am supremely happy that scientists are using their scientific reasoning to criticize the very practice of science itself. In the same way that I frequently remind myself that the basis of the field studying privacy is "trust no one"*, it would be nice to have big science conferences where we all get together and just shake our heads at how unreliable the current practice of science is. Apparently. I mean, check out this conclusion:

But rather than speculate, I prefer to take it as a brute fact. Studies are going to be confounded by the allegiance of the researcher. When researchers who don’t believe something discover it, that’s when it’s worth looking into.

... which sounds convincing. 

But.

You know what?

I'm skeptical. 

This post's theme word is obverse, "the more conspicuous of two alternatives or cases or sides." The skeptic and his obverse performed a coordinated, randomized, double-blind study.

*Or, as I memorably put it during a job interview, "We've known for a long time that almost everything is impossible."

Maximum bagel/person/day rate

Testing the edge cases is important. This edge case is ridiculous.

Who would ever need more than 500 bagels per person, per day? The imagination exercise is left to the reader.

This post's theme word is schmeer, "the entire set (as in the whole schmeer)," or "bribe or flattery," or "spread or paste," or "to butter up: to flatter or bribe." Even if you schmeer the owner with a schmeer of money or positive media exposure, the whole schmeer of bagels is not available for today's cream cheese schmeering party.

*that I've found so far

Australian laundry

I encounter Australians when I do my laundry.

Every. Single. Time.

They peer at the machines (labelled in French) and the posters of instructions (in French) and the fire-escape instructions (French) and even the change-making machine (guess which language). Then, inevitably, they cheerily ask me for help: "Can you speak English? How does this work?"

And it's great. They are adorable at this. This one even tried to ask in French if I could speak English. But then again, he's the only stranger I've spoken to in months who correctly placed my origin as NY and not England. (My accent --- in English or French --- baffles the French, or they just default to assuming that English-speakers are from England. It's cute? I guess. Bizarre, to my ear.)

Since this happens with such predictable regularity, no matter what day of week I do my laundry, I grow more and more impressed with several (correlated) possibilities:

1. Australians visit Paris often;
2. Many Australians visit Paris;
3. Australians do laundry while travelling (possibly because the remoteness of Australia limits the amount of brought laundry, or lengthens the standard trip duration);
4. Australians with no knowledge of the local language nevertheless venture into strange regions and do not let linguistics limit their activities;

... and so on.The Australian launderers are always friendly, happy to chat, enjoying their trip, and pleasantly doing their laundry-chore like responsible adults. My interactions have all been positive, from the retired couple to the various students during (their) summer break, to assorted month-in-Europe travellers who work until they have enough money, then jet around the world, enjoying what it has to offer.

In this season, that seems to be mostly rain.


This post's theme word is enchiridion, "a handbook or manual." An English-language enchiridion at the laundromat would receive daily use.

Obligatory airplane window wing shot

I don't always peer out the window to survey North America, but when I do, it's pretty great. Even though it comes at the end of a long day of sequential travel: subway to train to airplane, across the ocean, to other airplane, to bus...

This pause to look at the territory, criss-crossed by roads and gently blanketed by light clouds, is nice.

This post's theme word is predial or praedial, "of or relating to land, farming, etc." The praedial layout of the inter-city area is visible to the naked eye.

Tree interrupts skyline

The Paris skyline is dramatic and distinctive. A certain density of unique monuments, and an enforced homogeny throughout the rest of the city, means that Paris has a certain "look". Fantastic lighting only enhances this.

The one-way streets fronted by white stone buildings contribute to this look, and of course for the Christmas season each neighborhood hangs lights and decorations. (I think this is to give some visual variety for the winter season, in lieu of snow which almost never happens.)

But then... the skyline is occasionally broken by what I can only describe as a visual non sequitur.

This post's theme word is vegete, "lively, active, vigorous." The vegete holiday decorations may have gone too far.

Perfectly projected coloration

There is an entrancingly cool piece of art happening on the surface of the Reims cathedral. A set of giant projectors are projecting colors onto the ornate carvings, buttresses, doors, windows, and the entire façade of the cathedral.

Usually the cathedral is visible in its imposing white stone mode, which impresses upon us the dour, intricately detailed, and unified front of what I think of as a "standard-issue Catholic cathedral in France". The monotony of the color blends together, imposing its looming mass upon we mere mortals who stand before it. To see the individual details, one must zoom in, move closer, and also be intimately familiar with the canon. Ah yes, this white stone man in robes is carrying a staff and standing next to a white stone man who holds his severed head in his hands, so he must be Saint X and the story is Y and the moral is Z and the significance to the builders/funders of this part of the cathedral is W and...

But projecting colors on the surface takes some of the guesswork away. The projection changed slightly and cycled through a series of choices --- many of them were perfectly aligned with the façade details, so that they seemed to paint the three-dimensional carvings. It was like watching time flow backwards, so that today's venerated white Roman and Greek statues grow back their original bright paint.

Some of the projections also added rose windows over construction tarps.

Overall it was very cool, and we stood in the cold for a long time watching the images cycle and gazing at different parts of the detail. Even the interplay of projected surfaces with the dark ones they occluded (because the single-direction projection can't reach every part of the building, of course) was fascinating.


This post's theme word is anatopism, "the error of placing something out of its proper place; also something placed erroneously." Without a hint, the acolyte would never detect the anatopism in the busy figures of the façade.

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel's sequel to the incredible Wolf Hall is called Bring up the Bodies, and it continues the terse and sparse storytelling around Henry VIII's dissolving marriages (the second one, this time). The novel continues to be told in a non-chronological, extremely limited third person, and almost every detail of characterization and tone must be interpolated by the reader, or understood from the reactions of other characters in each scene.

I loved this book.

I love Thomas Cromwell (Mantel's version) more than ever, but of course the portrayal is shamelessly Cromwell-positive: he is even-handed, polite, deferential to women, pro-education (for all!) and anti-magical thinking. He understands systems of finance and government, and understands systems of personal interaction with an incredible finesse, especially given how quiet and withdrawn he is; it is surprising to hear other characters shout at him about his overbearing nature, his ceaseless talking, since the world --- as understood from inside his head --- doesn't really contain him at all; he is a silent blank at the center of the book, and the incredible balancing act of spinning plates and juggling fire and turning lead to gold are taking place around a quiet eye of the storm, an absence which has more weighty presence than the king himself.

I recommend this book, though I enjoyed Wolf Hall more and you should (obviously) start there. I also recommend the audiobook versions, as I read this book (and Wolf Hall) several times each, then also listened to them. Simon Slater's narration of Wolf Hall is particularly effective; he does the accents, he does subtle intonations, he adds a sarcastic but mild depth to the book which really enhances it. (Although, having re-listened and re-read several times, I can say that there are 2 scenes where he mixes up which voice goes with which speaker; this is understandable, since the dialog happens without attribution, and everyone is "him" anyway.) Simon Vance's Bring Up the Bodies is also very good, although his version of Cromwell's inner monologue is a bit more spiteful in tone. Still, both are good.

This book highlights some interesting features of a monarchy; forgive me if, having grown up with no monarch, these are obvious. Firstly, it seems astonishing that we still have monarchs today, and that their personal connections and personalities and day-to-day comportment still influence national politics (e.g. "What kind of King will Charles III be?"), since the monarch is no longer directing the entire government out of their own brain. It also seems frankly incredible that any monarch ever ran a country without being supremely literate, but there I think I am only betraying my own hyper-literate upbringing in a world where the written word is widely used and understood. Huzzah for reading and writing, which enabled you to comprehend this sentence!

Thus endeth my sparse and idiosyncratic review of Bring Up the Bodies.


This post's theme word is calumniate (v tr), "to make false statements about someone maliciously." Is it possible to self-calumniate, like self-incriminating?