View from Boland’s Mill

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Bolands Mill is a place of historical significance in Ireland. By that I mean that I first heard about it in a history class in school, and I basically know nothing else about it. As I understand it, it was one of the key locations during the 1916 rising which ultimately resulted in Irish independence from the United Kingdom.

Much more significantly for me, it was the giant ugly concrete building across the road from my apartment when I lived in Dublin. It’s on the corner of Ringsend Road and Barrow Street, about a block away from Google’s Dublin office. I used to look at it during my (extremely brief) walk home from work, and I always thought it looked like an ideal model for a level in a first-person shooter. It’s full of huge ladders, narrow walkways and tiny slit windows. I can easily imagine playing Counter Strike in it.

The mill has been closed for years, so there was never any chance that I’d make it inside to have a peek around. Fortunately for me, my cousin Conor Coghlan managed to (perfectly legally and legitimately, I’m sure) get a bit of a look around recently. He posted this video of the inside of the facility, and the view from the top:

Bolands Mill from Conor Coghlan on Vimeo.

Obama Claus

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I love this video. Among a group of supporters vying for a slice of Barack Obama’s attention at a rally in Maryland, one man decides to tell the president, “I’m proud of you.” He says it in his first language, American sign language. Without a second thought Obama replies, “Thank you,” also in sign language.

Now I realize that Obama was saying thank you to pretty much every person he met along that line, without necessarily even hearing what anyone was saying to him. So it’s possible, maybe likely, that he didn’t understand what had been signed to him. He could have inferred from body language and context that it was something positive. I also recognize that the supporter in question, a student at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, arrived sufficiently late that there was “such a long line and I got so worried that I wouldn’t get a good seat to be able to see my interpreter” according to his own telling of events, so the fact that he got close enough to attract the president’s attention suggests that he may well have been seated deliberately to enable this kind of interaction.

But I don’t care. Because those thoughts occurred to me after I watched the video. What I thought of while I watched it was something much less cynical, and much more valuable.

There’s a movie scene that’s been among my favourites for, wow, nearly 20 years. It’s from the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street. In it, Richard Attenborough’s Santa Claus finds himself with a deaf girl on his knee at his grotto in the mall. The girl’s mother tells him that he doesn’t have to talk to her, that “she just wanted to see you”. Of course he ignores this comment and he talks to her in sign language. To him it simply doesn’t make sense that any child should be excluded from experiencing what all the other children get to experience just because she happens to be deaf.

Despite being a fiction, this one scene is the most touching example of how making a small effort to ensure people aren’t excluded can make a big difference.

I was 11 years old when that movie came out, and I’ve seen in any number of times since. That scene still inspires me to remember the huge effect an unexpected yet simple kindness can have on a person. I imagine that’s how this Obama supporter must feel.

International dining etiquette

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There’s an interesting piece on MSNBC Travel summarizing a few international rules for dining. It contains some familiar ones, like don’t eat with your left hand in India, or don’t order a cappuccino after noon in Italy. Actually that one isn’t such a problem. Italians are pretty happy to just flat out ignore you if you do ask for a cappuccino in the afternoon. It’s sometimes fun to order a decaf one, just to see how they react. And if you’re especially brave, order a tall decaf frappuccino. Just don’t blame me if you get hurt.

There are a couple of recommendations in the article that I should already know but didn’t. Apparently in Thailand the fork is used for putting food on the spoon, not for putting food in your mouth. I eat Thai food all the time and I never knew this.

There’s one tip in there that I didn’t know but which makes a lot of sense. In Georgia (I assume the country, not the state) it’s expected that you drink a glass of wine in one go instead of sipping. I think I know why this is. In my experience Georgian wine is terrible, like drinking super-sweetened garbage water, so if you ever find yourself in a position where you’re expected to drink it you really want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

The browser you love to ignore

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Microsoft has a new ad campaign promoting Internet Explorer as the browser you loved to hate. It’s amusing to see them play off the fact that so many geeks have spent so much time trying to convince friends and family to move onto better browsers over the years. I was certainly among them when this blog was young.

Internet Explorer’s problem is no longer that it sucks. I’m happy to admit that it probably doesn’t anymore. Its problem now is that it requires you to be running Windows, and that’s decreasingly likely to be the case these days. It’s not IE on Windows versus Firefox on Windows anymore. Now it’s IE on Windows versus Chrome on Windows, Mac and Android versus Firefox on Windows and Mac versus Safari on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Change of plan

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Warning: This is a blog post about blogging. No-one would blame you for not being interested in this topic.

When I started my March monthly challenge to blog everyday I quickly noticed that a very easy way to cheat would be to post one or two words of commentary along with a link, video, or quote, alleviating myself of the need to put any effort into composing a post. It would be as easy as clicking a button in my browser to claim that I had achieved my aim for the day. That didn’t seem to me to be within the spirit of the enterprise.

I made a rule to try to close that loophole: I would only count posts of 300 words or more as satisfying my goal of posting every day.

Two weeks later I’m convinced that that rule was a mistake. Most good posts don’t come from thinking about a subject and deciding that it would make a good topic for a blog post. Good posts come from a desire to make a quick post about an interesting subject. It’s only while writing that you can discover that a post would benefit from expansion into something lengthier. It’s much more difficult to decide up front, without writing anything, that a particular topic is worth 50 words, or 300, or 1000, than it is to discover that fact during the process of writing about it.

So a little over half way through the month, rather than continuing ever less successfully with the flawed original plan, I’ve decided to change the rules. From now on I’m removing the requirement that only 300+ word posts count towards my goal of blogging every day. Instead I’m replacing it with a more flexible rule: I will blog every day, regardless of how much I think I can get out of each topic. I will post more than once if I happen upon multiple topics that interest me in a day. If I see something worth sharing, I’ll write 50 words about it with a link. My hope is that some of those posts will spur me to add a few more words, and inevitably some will come out at the length that I originally hoped for all of my posts.

By the end of the month I’ll see if I got more out of this new approach of writing about what catches my immediate interest, or if the original “hold out until you find the one best topic of the day” strategy won out. My bet is on the former.

As Jeff Atwood pointed out on Coding Horror a few years ago, quantity always trumps quality. I’ll produce more good work by writing badly often than I will by writing well occasionally.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig

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Today is Paddy’s Day (not “Patty’s Day”, which is some kind of weird American barbarism). And this is the first time it’s fallen on a weekend since 2007.

Back then I had been finished university and unemployed for about six months—it was just a couple of weeks before I started working at Google—so I wasn’t in a position to properly celebrate. I hadn’t even moved out of home yet. So instead of being in Dublin I would have been celebrating in my home town of Greystones, which has the distinction of having the lowest pub to person ratio of any town in Ireland.

Fast forward a few years and I’m living in London. London has the downside that when Paddy’s Day isn’t on a weekend it pretty much doesn’t happen. For some reason it’s not a public holiday here. What gives? But there’s a corresponding upside that when it does fall on a weekend there are a heck of a lot more nightlife spots in London than in Greystones. You don’t decide which one to go to by tossing a single coin.

Strangely, London has decided that Paddy’s Day celebrations will actually happen tomorrow, on the 18th. Maybe they figured observing what is effectively a giant piss-up, where for many people national pride is directly proporional to alcohol consumption (and my people are very, very proud), on a Saturday might lead to a bit of a mess. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the threat of having to work with a patriotic hangover has any effect on the celebrations.

The parade tomorrow starts at Green Park at noon, and ends at Trafalgar square.

I imagine the rules for participants in London’s parade don’t have quite the same form as those for people marching in New York’s parade, which features this fantastic item:

4. The only banners allowed are ones identifying the unit or “England Get Out of Ireland”. Only one banner for each unit. NO EXCEPTIONS!!

Cabin in the Woods

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For the last couple of years Eileen and I have been slowly working our way through the complete series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It had been several years since I watched both shows during their original airing, and Eileen had only seen a few episodes. Now we’re coming toward the end, having finished Buffy and being some way into the last season of Angel (which carried on for another year on its own, after Buffy and co ran out of monsters to fight in Sunnydale). We’ll soon reach the end, and that means we’ll no doubt be feeling feel a certain withdrawal from Joss Whedon’s strange genius.

So it’s a good time for Whedon to be releasing a very cool looking new movie.

No, I’m not talking about The Avengers, although that does appear to hold a certain amount of catsuited charm. I’m talking about Cabin in the Woods, created by Whedon and former Buffy / Angel writer Drew Goddard.

If you watch the trailer you’ll see it initially looks like a fairly standard, cliché young-people-in-the-woods horror movie. When I first watched it I thought I was seeing a preview of an Evil Dead remake. But it never takes long for Whedon to throw convention on its head. By the end of the trailer it starts to look more like a twisted hybrid of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Truman Show.

Which would also like to see.

Cabin in the Woods premiered at South by Southwest at the weekend, and appears to have been received pretty favourably. Meredith Woerner from io9 calls it, “a shining beacon of promise for people that don’t need shaky cam to get their fear fetish rocks off. It’s the thinking geek’s horror film.”

I think it promises to be the best thing to happen to horror movies since Scream.

What if none of us goes for the blonde?

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Next week I’ll be starting a six-week course on game theory, provided by Stanford University. Thanks to the wonders of the modern age it won’t cost me a penny and I won’t have to travel to California to take part. (Even though I’ve never considered travelling to California to be particularly onerous, I do have a few commitments on this side of the ocean.) You can do it too, if you want.

The course is part of a collaboration called Coursera, which is offering free courses from the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

It works much like a regular university course, only online. There are short (eight to 15 minute) video lectures, ungraded review quizzes, as well as graded problem sets and a final exam. Because it’s online it’s necessarily a bit more asynchronous than an in-person course would be, so you can watch the lectures and do the coursework largely to your own schedule.

The full list of available and upcoming courses is at www.coursera.org. Among the more interesting sounding subjects are natural language processing, computer vision and cryptography. There are other courses in development, including computer science 101 if you find you haven’t got the background for the more advanced subjects.

It’s not all computer science and mathematics. Two of the upcoming courses are anatomy and making green buildings.

Enrollment looks to still be open for just about all of the courses and, like I said, they’re free.

I chose game theory because I’ve had it at or near the top of my mental “must learn about these subjects” list for a while. It’s a branch of mathematics that deals with strategic interactions. It’s not just what you would usually think of as games, like chess and blackjack, although those are certainly part of the subject. It also deals with lots of interactions in politics and business, which can be thought of as “games” with their own (bizarre) rules and strategies. Also, as memorably relayed by Russell Crowe, it deals with the subject of how to pick up women in bars.

The most famous topic in game theory is probably the prisoners’ dilemma, which poses the question, “How can I successfully screw over my friend in order to get away with a crime?” So obviously the practical applications of the subject are appealing.

Narrow the gap

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In recognition of International Women’s Day, which falls on March 8 every year, Gina Trapani (of Lifehacker and This Week in Google fame) launched Narrow the Gapp, highlighting the gap in salaries between men and women doing equal work.

(Edit, March 12: Gina has now posted about this on her own blog, Smarterware.)

For example, in software engineering women earn on average only about 91% of what men earn.

The data is from the United States, but the problem is world wide.

My natural first reaction to seeing statistics like this is to think, “It’s terrible that this is the case, but I’m sure it’s not true of my company.” And maybe I’m right. After all, I don’t work for a conventional comany. But even if I am right, that means that for every woman I work with who justly earns what her male colleagues earn, there is someone at another job who has it twice as bad as the stats imply.

Here’s the thing about gender and its relation to software engineering. I’ve seen some strange things in my time, but I’ve never seen anyone use a penis to improve his programming. It seems weird that you might be paid extra for having one.

A common argument that comes up every time the pay gap is mentioned is that men are better at negotiating salaries. But isn’t that still part of the problem? Pay should be related to the work you do, not your ability to negotiate with your employer. If men are more likely to be willing or able to negotiate higher salaries, then that is itself a systematic bias against women whether or not it’s rooted in overt discrimination.

It’s also likely that if men are generally more successful at negotiating it might not be because they’re better at it. It’s just as likely that they’re successful because of the attitude of the person they’re negotiating with. A lot of negotiation is in the perceptions of the person on the other side. Discrimination (intentional or otherwise) creeps in wherever it can.

The gamification of football

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Part of my ongoing, half-assed attempt to get myself into shape involves playing indoor football every week with some of my colleagues.

We aim to have five people per team, but we rarely hit that number. Sometimes we play an exhausting three-a-side game. We once played seven-on-seven, which was like trying to move a ball around a crowded nightclub. Often one team will be bigger than the other.

All in all it’s a pretty non-competitive event. We don’t make much of an effort to keep track of the score, and even when we do we’re still very likely to give up on scorekeeping at the end and just declare “last goal wins” when we’re about to run out of time.

Our relaxed approach to the game means that we’re more likely to try a manouvre that might look cool—like a bicycle kick or a diving header—than to do something that will actually lead to scoring a goal.

Chatting after the game today we came up with the idea of ‘gamifying’ the game. Just like many parts of life are being ‘gamified’ these days—like unlocking points and badges for visiting certain places in Foursquare—you can imagine getting achievements for things that you do in a real football game.

Some badge ideas:

  • Head boy: Score with a header. This is the achievement I spent most of today’s match trying (and failing) to unlock.
  • BFFs: Set up the same player for a goal, or have them set you up for a goal, 3 times in a match.
  • Poultry farmer: Be on the receiving end of a foul. (Is that too bad a pun?)
  • Postman: Hit the post 5 times in a match.
  • Greg Louganis: Take a dive!

Any other ideas?

The next step is to write the image recognition software to analyze video footage of a match and assign achievements (thereby earning the ‘Spent altogether too much time on such a silly idea’ badge).