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language
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I got a recall notice for my car from Toyota the other day, pertaining to a problem with the power windows in my car. I took a professional interest in what they had to say about the whole business, and my careful reading was rewarded. For example, the notice begins like this:
This notice is being sent to you in accordance with the requirements of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act.
I don't know how you read this, but a body could interpret this to mean that if the government had not legislated that they do so, they wouldn't be telling us any of this.
We then get:
Toyota has decided that a defect, which relates to motor vehicle safety, exists in the driver and front passenger door glass bolts ...
Let's look:
Toyota has decided. Toyota takes the lead here and boldly positions itself as the subject of the sentence. After giving the matter careful consideration, they have decided that there is a problem. Hold that thought.
..., which relates to motor vehicle safety, .... Ok, what is up with those commas? A normal person might write "a defect that relates ...". Is this comma-offset which business some sort of legalese?
... exists in the [...] bolts. Aha. Toyota started off all active and decisive-like. But all of a sudden this defect, it just ... exists. How'd it get there? Beats us.
Moving along, we read (irrelevant details removed):
On certain vehicles, the driver and front door passenger door glass bolts may loosen and come off, causing the door glass to separate from the window regulator.
Fair enough. What's the upshot?
If this condition has occurred in your vehicle, in some cases due to the components becoming loose and possibly rattling, an abnormal noise may be heard from the doors when operating the power windows.
I like the hand-wavy, back-pedal-y "in some cases due to ...". Hey, there could be many causes! This is just one possiblity!
I'll point out also, although this is so common as to be nearly unremarkable, that no one in particular seems to be "operating the power windows." You? Me? We do not care to be that specific.
Abormal noise? Is that it? Not quite. One senses that only under extreme duress do they admit that there are perhaps additional consequences:
In the worst case, the door glass may separate from the window regulator, bind and shatter during operation of the power windows [...]
The verb separate has a nice neutral engineering ring to it: The wings separated from the fuselage. You and I might say something a little more colorful, maybe something like fall off.
But dang, bind and shatter. That sounds pretty bad! Indeed, Toyota does note that there might be consequences:
[...], causing driver distraction and/or injury.
Yeah, I'd say that having a window shatter while you're closing it might cause "driver distraction." Well, and/or that injury thing.
Although I'm no lawyer, I've had some exposure to crafting verbiage carefully so as to convey important information while trying not to raise in the reader's mind unpleasant thoughts like "fault" or "liability." So I have some sympathy. But they can't hide (all) their wily tricks from me.
This was so much fun that I kinda hope that I get another recall notice. Assuming of course that I do not experience sufficient distraction and/or injury as to make my interest in such matters a moot point.
posted at
11:26 PM
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[
technology
]
Prolly you saw this, but maybe. Someone just fixed a bug in BSD -- open source, eh? -- that has been in Unix for 25 years. (Details.) That's interesting enough, but for me the best part was the delicious comment that Jason Kottke had about it: "I guess it finally accrued enough eyeballs to make it shallow."
posted at
11:39 PM
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[
editing
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This can be a very hard time. Often we are not prepared and we can have difficulty adjusting. You might feel anger or despair. These feelings are normal. Many people experience a series of psychological stages that go through a predictable sequence. The following list describes the most common feelings you might experience.
1) Shock
Red. Red everywhere. I feel like someone just kicked me. This was once a clean, beautiful manuscript, and now it's awful, a horrible tangle of strikeouts and lines and margin notes. There's hardly a sentence that hasn't been hacked up, starting with the title! 2) Denial
This cannot be true. Surely this is some sort of mistake. I spent hours and hours on the document, and I read it over before I sent it to the editor. Some of these edits -- well, I'm floored. There is no way that I said something that dumb! Or that I misspelled that word. Nuh-uh. 3) Anger
I'm starting to get irritated. What the -- ? That's a stupid edit. And so's that one. Ha! That's just wrong! Smartypants editors, think they know everything! Well, let me just set that editor straight ... 4) Despair
Gad. Look at this. I'll never be a writer. What a disaster. Jeez, what if someone else sees this thing?!? I'll probably get fired. Why did I ever think I could do this? 5) Acceptance
Well, I guess that that's a good point. Hmm. Yeah, I can see that. I agree, that sounds better. Hmm. Hmm. Ok, I guess I'll start here at the top ... 6) Love
OMG, thank you so much for fixing this up. Holy cow, what if it had gone out without editing?! 7) Impatience.
Hey, can I have that document back? I have a deadline, you know.
posted at
05:17 PM
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[
general | technology
]
Colleague David, who has a knack for finding these things, forwards an email thread that noted a new twist in having the computer "help" you: geolocation errors. As in, you look on a, uh, mapping site, and it gives you the city you want, only, like, in the wrong state. Country. Whatever.
An article on The Canadian Press about emission standards in British Columbia is datelined Victoria. For some reason, the article includes a map in case (I guess) you need to know where Victoria BC is. You might be advised to get a second opinion before driving there, though:
posted at
10:29 AM
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008
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How to use the telephone
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writing
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You probably have seen this -- it's a training video (or purports to be) for how to dial a phone.
[via growabrain, btw]
Even if it's not real, it illustrates an interesting point for those of us who write instructions for a living: you have to understand what your audience knows. There was a time when dialing a phone was new, and as obvious as it seems to those of us who grew up with dials, the user interface was not necessarily intuitive for people whose previous experience consisted exclusively of asking the operator to connect them to someone.[1]
We've seen this more recently with the Web -- most of us remember that when URLs were read on the radio back in, say, 1999, announcers often sounded out the fully qualified name -- "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash double-u double-u double-u dot ...". Painful to us now, and unnecessary.
When we write tutorials, we often have to stop and think about where the user's head is at the beginning of the tutorial. In our case, we generally assume that they know how to use Windows -- for example, we'll just refer to the Windows Start menu. Depending on what we're tutorialing, we might walk them through menu commands explicitly when they need to do something in Visual Studio. Or we might conclude that for a particular tutorial, they already know the commands and we'll use a more shorthand instruction like "Create a new page."
When you're writing, it can be easy to take for granted that people know what you know. The video underscores that we probably make more assumptions about what people know than we realize. It would be ludicrous for us to include instructions on how to dial a phone, or how to enter a URL, of course. But it's not unusual for writers to make other types of assumptions that might not obtain. A common mistake is to make culture-specific assumptions about what the audience knows, by assuming that everyone is reading in English, for example, or that everyone has a ZIP code, or knows American sports or TV shows.
A mistake I see writers make all the time it to assume too much knowledge on the reader's part. As with the telephone example, we sometimes are so familiar with a process we're describing that it's almost impossible to reset the mind to the perspective of someone who knows nothing of what you're talking about. A writing exercise you'll sometimes see is to have a novice writer create instructions for something obvious -- for example, how to create a peanut butter sandwich, perhaps with the added detail that you're doing this for someone who doesn't know what peanut butter or bread is. It's a good exercise because it forces you to examine in detail a process that you never actually think about.
Point being, you always have to think about what the audience knows. You might decide, as with dialing the phone[2], that it's safe to assume that the audience knows what you're talking about. But you should at least make the decision with forethought.
posted at
11:58 AM
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008
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What do you think you know?
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general
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Neil Comins teaches astronomy and physics at U Maine. He's spent a career learning and then refining his ideas about how the cosmos works. At one point while teaching introductory astronomy, however, he had a realization:[T]hat week I was back at school, in front of 250 students eager to learn more about the universe. Every semester for ten years I had taught such a group the latest information about astronomical discoveries and insights. My teaching was based on the assumption that I if I said things clearly, students would digest that information, replace incorrect ideas they might have, and make the correct knowledge part of their understanding of how nature works. This intellectual house of cards collapsed that day.  This is the beginning of Comins's book Heavenly Errors. The book is subtitled "Misconceptions about the real nature of the universe," and it is about that, and Comins spends about half of the book addressing the cosmological misconceptions he sees most frequently. (In fact, he keeps an ongoing list of them on his Web site.)
He makes a distinction between misconceptions and simple errors of fact. For the latter, he gives examples like the number of moons around Jupiter -- a fact that is easy to look up, and one whose adjustment does not require much mental rearrangement. By true misconceptions, he means "any deeply held belief that is inconsistent with currently accepted scientific concepts." These are beliefs, as we investigate through the course of the book, that require a bit of -- or a great deal of -- mental exertion to correct. People have surprising (or maybe not that surprising) misconceptions about the universe, as he catalogs -- everything from how seasons work, phases of the moon, and the nature of the sun, to somewhat more profound misconceptions like astrology, the long-held belief in a geocentric solar system, and the nature of the scientific process. (Plus of course pretty much most of the types of counterintuitive things that one attempts to learn in Physics 101.)
His examples are all drawn from astronomy and physics, of course, but misconception is hardly limited to his field. He relates an anecdote about a professor of biology who gave a presentation on the evolution of his beliefs about astronomy from his childhood to the present. As Comins says, "Even the diagram showing his current beliefs contained surprising errors." Comins relates this not to cast aspersions on this remarkably brave academic, but to illustrate that even highly educated people have many misconceptions. As he says:While I may have fewer incorrect beliefs about astronomy than you do, I probably have as many about economics, sociology, the law, paleontology, botany, and many other fields in which I am not an expert. Indeed. How many misconceptions do most of us have about various fields? We might be able to scan through Comins's list of 1700 misconceptions about science and feel pretty good that we don't hold that misconception or that one or (omg!) that one. But I can guarantee that there are things on his list that you are wrong about, and the world is large -- we can safely assume that a significant portion of what we think we know about the world is apt to be incorrect.
Comins is careful not to sound negative about this; his book is not about how dumb people are, but an exploration of the nature of people's misconceptions. This can be hard, as I bet you know. It's difficult not to get a bit tetchy with people who don't understand your field as well as you do, and who moreover make the most outrageously incorrect assertions about it. Sometimes it seems that the Language Log is primarily about addressing linguistical misconceptions, which (like cosmological ones) abound. (And a lot of its entertainment value arises when the posters there don't hold back their tetchiness.) Language is probably the field in which I personally experience the most WTF? moments when I hear people's ideas about how it all works. At one point Comins says, "I find it fascinating that we live in a natural world that rarely works as we believe it does, yet most of the time we function very well." Ditto language, methinks.[1]
As I noted, the book is not just a catalog of astronomical bloopers. After spending some time on misconceptions in his field, Comins turns his attention to the nature of misconceptions in general. Why do we believe what we believe, and why is it so hard to change our misconceptions? He surveys a variety of reasons, which include the following:- Sensory perception and "common sense" in conflict with the realities of science. The natural conclusion, for example, is that heavenly bodies circle us.
- Bad information. We take information at face value from people we trust: "The problem is, when the first source is allegedly trustworthy, we are unlikely to look further." Changing such beliefs is hard:
The reality is that everything in science is tentative. Tomorrow's experiment, observation, or theory may well show that current beliefs need revision or replacement. However, our minds work differently. Most of us usually take what we hear or see and accept it as "fact." Once we do this, it is very hard to change our belief on the subject. And not just because we're stubborn:After all, the conclusions you have drawn over the years have helped to determine many of your attitudes [...] Instead, I propose that you would take the new information and massage it to fit your prior beliefs. - Choosing the first or simplest explanation.
- Incorrect logic or reasoning.
- Finding patterns even when there aren't any. For example, it's almost impossible not to find familiar shapes in the clouds.
- Overgeneralization.
- Political beliefs.
- Media misrepresentations. For example, he said that after the first Star Wars movie came out, people "knew" that the asteroid belt consisted of huge rocks that were so close together that a space ship would have to slalom around them. In reality, as he explains, individual asteroids are millions and millions of miles apart.
... and so on.
The conclusion of the book is that Comins has changed how he teaches, certain now that his students are harboring incorrect ideas and that dislodging those ideas is not easy. The strategy is that he enlists the students in identifying and then fixing their own misconceptions. (Hence the list on his Web site.) When possible, he does demonstrations and other hands-on activities, because these make much more of an impact than simply reciting facts.
Anyway, an interesting book. As it happens, you can get this book cheap from Daedalus Books. Or if you've changed your beliefs about acquiring books (haha), you can always get it from the library ...
posted at
08:17 AM
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Sunday, 27 April 2008
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Pedestrian wrong-of-way
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general
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I'm not sure how much I've whined about this here before (hard to believe I've missed something to whine about, innit?), but I have my problems with the lengths to which pedestrian right-of-way is embraced 'round here. I grew up in Denver, and whether it was a cultural difference or whether I was just young and oblivious, when I learned to drive, I don't remember being quite so aware of this. Let's just say that when I moved to the West Coast, I found it peculiar that cars in both directions would come to a complete halt while a pedestrian strolled across the street.
It's not that I have anything against the concept in general. Obviously, pedestrians need to cross streets and such. Certainly I'm a pedestrian at times, and I appreciate when I can cross a street without fearing for my life.
The sticking point for me, though, is when people assert pedestrian rights in ways that are either oblivious to (I hope) or defiant of (jerks) traffic. Me personally, if a car stops for me to cross the street, I pick up my pace and get the hell out of the way.
Downtown Seattle is nearly impassable at rush hours or when an event brings throngs of people to the city center. Trying to make a turn under these circumstances is essentially impossible, and what happens is that one car turns per light (usually when it's already turned red).[1] In downtown Denver (at least, when I lived there), and in one single intersection that I know of in Seattle, this problem is addressed by unmingling cars and people: cars go one way, cars go the other way, and then pedestrians go all ways. Repeat. While cars have green, it's all DONT WALK all the time. When things are totally insane -- such as after a sporting event downtown -- this is the way that cops route traffic, right?
Even under less crowded conditions, however, a single pedestrian can cause a stack-up of cars that want to turn at an intersection. To me personally, it seems unthinking (or, ahem, rude) to keep all these people waiting while you betake your leisurely self across the street. Besides, it's environmentally unfriendly. Of course, if you're an old grandma or have a walking impediment, you can only go so fast, and good thing there's pedestrian rights, eh?
And then there's the times when it's not just a matter of inconveniencing others. I've been in a bus multiple times when the driver has had to jump on the brakes because someone stepped out in front of the bus. Everyone on the bus is thrown around, but perhaps more to the point, the pedestrian has some chance of being right but dead. When I'm in this position, I let cars pass. I don't care if I have the "right" to stop them. Soon enough they'll pass by and then I can proceed.
The other day, tho, I witnessed the height of idiocy when a couple of guys insisted on asserting their pedestrian rights. I work in a complex of buildings that is divided by a street that supports steady traffic.[2] There's a crosswalk that runs between the buildings, of course, and people are constantly running back and forth for meetings and whatnot. Naturally, this brings cars to a halt all the time, and people are used to walking across and having traffic wait for them.
This time, as I was coming up to the intersection, I heard a siren. A cop car, lights a-blazin', was coming up the street our way. However, there was a car and then a bus ahead of him, so he couldn't just race through the intersection. A couple of guys, meanwhile, had started into the intersection. The bus was stopped for them; it couldn't move. The car behind the bus and in front of the cop attempted to go around the bus to get out of the way. But he was stopped as well by these two guys, who saw a bus and a car coming at them, but hey, they have the right of way, so they just continued on their way. The cop got to wait till our boys finished their stroll before everyone could get out of the way and he could race off at 60 mph. I just didn't get it -- did these morons not hear the siren? It wasn't exactly easy to miss. If there had been no other vehicles in the way, would the cop car have just mowed these guys down? Seems likely.
Here's a crude diagram:
The word "rights" has a rich set of overtones in this country, and whenever the idea of someone's rights is brought up, the discussion polarizes and it seems that common sense is often left behind. I wouldn't be surprised if I got a frothy-mouthed response that spelled out just how wrong I am to think that maybe pedestrians shouldn't always insist on their rights. Nonetheless, that's how I feel. If you're a pedestrian, you have rights. But it isn't always in everyone's interest -- including sometimes your own interest -- to insist on asserting them. Look both ways before crossing, my friend, and don't step in front of moving vehicles. It just seems like common sense, doesn't it?
posted at
11:59 AM
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Thursday, 24 April 2008
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Roundup
[
roundup | technology | writing | language
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I'm losing my ability (such as it ever was) to tell what day of the week it is. As of last night, I was firmly convinced that today was actually tomorrow.
When Technology Predictions Go Wrong. Steve Spalding posts a few examples from the past where predictions about the future -- ie, now -- were spectacularly wrong. He invites your additions.[1]
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. Speaking of futures: predicting a "forgetting curve," which leads to a method (or "algorithm") that identifies optimal times to review material to be memorized. "Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress."
pont max tr pot lol. If you think that texting spells The End of Civilization As We Know It (omg! lol), then this post is for you.
Poetry guardians reject modern verse. (Talk about a group of people who probably buy the thesis of the previous item!) I guess according to these guys, Edward Lear yes, William Carlos Williams no.
posted at
07:22 AM
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Wednesday, 23 April 2008
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AM versions
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general
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With the NPR pledge drive underway recently, I went somewhat further afield in my radio explorations while motoring. For the most part, "further afield" doesn't get you very far these days, what with most radio stations managed by demographic experts who use Science to create playlists. (How anyone can listen to the oldies station for more than an hour running mystifies me, since their playlist rotation is about 50 minutes long.)
Radio used to be much better. Or was it? In my sonic explorations, I landed on one of those classic rock stations, aka stations for people who got stuck in their musical tastes the day they graduated from high school. KJR? KZOK? I forget which; I doubt it matters.
A quick digression. When I was growing up, Top-40 music had one outlet, and that was AM radio. All those tunes that I can now hear (over and over and over) on the oldies station[1] we learned for the most part through the tinny speakers of plastic radios that proudly announced how many transistors they had on them. (10! Ooh!) (Alternatively, we learned them off 45s on portable record players that often had a nickel sitting on top of the needle for extra weight.) Listening to AM radio now, which I do rarely and usually for sports, I find it kind of incredible that the amazingly low fidelity of AM was acceptable to us. But that was what there was ... FM radio at that point was for offbeat stuff, which only the extremely cool kids listened to. Before national corporations owned all those FM stations. And certainly not accessible via the little 10-transitor plastic radios that were our lot.
Ok. I was listening to the classic rock station and a version came on of the CSN song "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." Definitely a classic, and something I can certainly stand to hear again. So I was listening and you know how it is, you know the song so well that you can anticipate what comes next.
Not this time: the station played the dreaded AM version. You see, back when AM radio ruled, something else that ruled was the three-minute pop song. Woe to the artist who released a four-minute or seven-minute or twenty-minute song. Either it wouldn't get played at all, or it underwent a slice-and-dice job so that it could be squeezed into the requisite time slot.
So, as our boys were launching into their nice three-part harmonies, they made a quick jump forward ... and another ... and another, and then they were done. Presto! "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" in three minutes.
I could hardly believe that such a thing as the AM version still existed, but there it was. On the classic-rock station, which might as well bill itself as "the AM station of your youth, now on FM."
I guess I agree that radio has become homogenized, and that it's dang hard to find anything on the airwaves that doesn't have a sizable audience. But it's not as if the radio of our youth -- or at least of my youth -- was any sort of golden age of artistic expression. Or at least, not if your artistic statement ran longer than three minutes.
posted at
11:59 PM
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[
aspnet
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After many centuries (seemingly) of using Northwind as our sample database for examples in the code, we gradually moved over to using AdventureWorks. Among other reasons, we thought it would be handy to work with a database that was invented since the advent of the Web and that includes some URLs here and there.
As you probably know, AdventureWorks was created as a sample to show off the capabilities of SQL Server. It's big. It's bold. It does, AFAIK, a stellar job in doing what it was designed to do, which is to let the SQL Server folks illustrate many of their features. (Not an easy job, that, to come up with a sample that can cover something as rich as SQL Server.)
However, it has its downsides. See the aforementioned "big" -- the .mdf file is about 180 MB. There are 70 tables. This is not huge for a database, but it's sort of overkill for illustrating the sorts of things that we illustrate in ASP.NET.
AdventureWorks (aka AW) also uses schemas as part of its table names (e.g. HumanResources.Department, Person.Contact, like that). It turns out that the data source control wizard doesn't handle schemas on table names very well. You end up having to go in and manually tweak SELECT queries (probably easiest) or doing some other workaround.
But overall it's been a good database for us, so we've used it a lot. I was editing a new tutorial for Dynamic Data the other day, and a prerequisite is to have AW installed. I used the link in the document to go to the AW download page. This took me here:
I clicked the link you see there. This took me to the download page:
I clicked Download. This did an odd thing. It displayed the following PDF file:
Oho! The sample databases are now on CodePlex. This seemed like a peculiar (<cough>hacky</cough>) way to do the redirect, but whatever. Click the link. This takes me here:
Notice anything peculiar? Like, say, the version number of SQL Server here? Right: SQL Server 2008. Up, down, high, low ... it's all 2008 all the time. (Try it ... search for "2005" on the page.) Note that SQL Server 2008 is in beta.
At this point I whine to some colleagues. One of them says to click the Releases tab, where it says this:
Another click, another link:
Then yay, the database:
And I proceed with downloading and installing. Indulge myself in some more whining. (You're enjoying that part right now.)
In the course of this discussion, the issue of the size and complexity of AW came up again. Someone said they had started to use "AdventureWorks Light."[1] What is this thing, you say? (That's what I said, anyway.) From the colleague in question: "It has fewer tables, less data and is much smaller. It's a simplified version." Snarky comment (from me): It's Northwind!
Snark aside, this is a welcome addition to the AW family. The "LT" version of AW is available as one of the options on the 2005 samples page illustrated earlier.
For the time being, any customers who start in one of our topics and need to get AW installed are going to need to go through more-or-less the same steps I did. That's a bit unfortunate. We're figuring out internally here how we can fix this process; I'm not sure we can fix it entirely (as in, always link directly to the 2005 samples page), but we should be able to cut down a bit on the sheer number of clicks required to get there. Hopefully, anyway.
Anyway, if this has been a frustration to you, sorry. If it's any consolation, it's been a frustration to us, too.
posted at
05:00 PM
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