Text Like a Little Girl

None of my friends use SMS text messaging (or if they do then they’re all ignoring me). For a while I wrote SMS off as a silly technology that teenage girls use to chat with each other instead of AIM. But I don’t think chat is the real point of it all. Cell phone keypads are bad input devices for text, even with T9. Sure, you can get used to them, but they’re still not that great for extended messaging sessions. But that’s not the point, they’re for short messaging.

Often I’m going somewhere to meet some people and I’ll realize my phone has a voice message. I dial into voicemail and get this: “Hey, it’s me. We’re meeting at 9:30, not 9.” Total time of the message: about 4 seconds. Total time it took me to see I had a message, call voicemail, press 1, listen to the caller’s number and timestamp, hear the message, press 7 to erase it, and hang up: about a minute. This is the sort of message that SMS was designed for. “Meeting @ 9:30.”

Part of the problem is that Sprint PCS does a terrible job with text messages and most of us had Sprint when we should have been figuring this sort of stuff out. It used to be the case (and probablly still is) that in order to get a text message on a Sprint phone you had to have an internet plan, which no one did. But times have changed, and though we all have iPods, broadband internet, and sophisticated video game systems, we’re losing out on communication efficiency as compared to your average teenage girl.

Labyrinth and the Liar Paradox

What could be better than a 16-year-old Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie, and a bunch of muppets all in one movie? Anyway, you know the part where Sarah gets to the castle and has to solve a puzzle to pick the right door in?

Sarah: What am I supposed to do?

Jim: Try one of these doors.

Tim: One of them leads to the castle,
and the other one leads to —

Ralph: Ba Ba Ba Bum!

Tim: Certain death!

Guards: Ooh! Ooh!

Sarah: Which one is which?

Jim: We can’t tell you.

Sarah: Why not?

Jim: Uh… I, uh…
We don’t know.

Tim: But they do.

Sarah: Oh. Then I’ll ask them.

Alph: Uh…
You can only ask one of us.

Ralph: It’s in the rules.
One of us always tells the truth,
And one of us always lies.
He always lies.

Alph: I do not! I tell the truth!

Ralph: Oh, what a lie!

Tim: Ha ha ha!

Alph: He’s the liar!

Sarah: All right, answer yes or no:
Would he tell me
That this door leads to the castle?

Alph: Uh…
What do you think?
Really?
Yes.

Sarah: Then the other door leads to the castle,
and this door leads to certain death.

Alph: He could be telling the truth.

Sarah: But then you wouldn’t be,
so if you said he said yes,
the answer is no

Alph: I could be telling the truth.

Sarah: Then he’d be lying.
The answer would still be no.

Alph: Is that right?

Ralph: I don’t know, I’ve never understood it.

Sarah: No, it’s right. I’ve figured it out.

To recap, Sarah got the answer right. She pointed to a door and asked Alph if Ralph would tell her that it leads to the castle. So we have two options. Either Alph is the truth-teller, or Alph is the liar.

Alph is the truth-teller

Alph’s answer was “yes”, meaning that Ralph would say that door leads to the castle. If Alph’s the truth-teller, than Ralph is the liar. So if Ralph says that door leads to the castle, then it doesn’t, and leads to certain death instead.

Alph is the liar

If Alph is the liar, then Ralph always tells the truth. If he says that Ralph would say that door was the right one, then it must not be.

So, no matter which person is trust-worthy and which isn’t, the door that Sarah pointed to is not the door she wants to be going through. Now here’s the trick: as soon as she goes through the door, she falls into a pit. So did she get the answer wrong? From what I can figure out, there are basically two options: either the pit doesn’t qualify as “certain death”, since after all she doesn’t die, or Sarah’s fallen into the trap of the Liar Paradox. It’s entirely possible that neither Alph nor Ralph ever tells the truth, or that they sometimes lie and sometimes don’t. Just because they said that one tells the truth and one lies doesn’t mean that they weren’t lying when they told her that. Or there could be more rules to the game but only told her the part about the lying. So while she got the correct answer to the game set before her, she could have been playing a different game with different rules that would be undiscoverable.

Did the filmmakers have this in mind when they put a pit inside the “correct” door, or were they just trying to move the story along to its next segment? It seems odd to put in a game, lay out a set of rules, and then set them up so that the rule-givers are themselves untrustworthy, but in a world run by glam-era rock David Bowie, why not?

MetaFeeder

Matt Haughey writes about how he wants to be able to include different kinds of posts from different sources in one XML feed. As weblogging continues to mature, people are starting to want to do more and more. A lot of people aren’t just adding one entry to the top of a long list of words anymore. They’re writing for multiple pages. They’re keeping linklists. They’re commenting on other people’s pages. As it stands, the tools we use to run our weblogs aren’t set up to cope with our evolving needs.

I think would all pretty possible with a good MovableType 3 plugin plus an addition to TypeKey. First, I’d like to be able to specify that multiple weblogs running on the same MT install to appear on the same page. Second, I’d like to be able to set my TypeKey identity to send TrackBacks to that page whenever I leave comments on other peoples’ pages, so that the comments would also appear on my page. And of course everything would dump to the same XML feed. Visitors would be able to see everything I’ve written recently no matter where on the internet it originally appeared.

Update: After thinking about it for an hour, I’m pretty sure you could hack this together by setting up a new MT blog, enabling category TrackBack, and setting all your pages to ping that category. You could use Simpletracks to ping comments and linkblog entries. This would work, but an integrated setup that doesn’t require a standalone tool would be nice.

Limp-Fristed

Attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage failed today. Here’s a statement made by Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) following the defeat:

Will activist judges not elected by the American people destroy the institution of marriage, or will the people protect marriage as the best way to raise children? My vote is with the people.

I’ll break down that quote phrase by phrase, first explaining what Frist is trying to say and then giving my reason for why he’s wrong.

Will activist judges […]

Frist employs a talking point often uttered by President Bush, meaning that these judges are going out on their own and trying to write law according to their own principles. An activist judge is one whose ruling you don’t agree with.

Judges are selected because of their keen understanding of legal matters. It’s their job to interpret the law. The Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Court didn’t just make their decisions based on personal inclinations. They released reasoned opinions explaining their ruling.

[…] not elected by the American people […]

Paired with “activist,” this phrase is intended to paint judges as renegades who sit on their benches and make decisions in a vacuum with complete disregard of the Will of the People. You didn’t elect them, yet they can overturn laws? How dare they!

In fact, the framers of the Constitution had a very good reason that judges be appointed and not elected. The Bill of Rights protects the rights of all even if their beliefs are unpopular. Judges need to be able to rule in favor of the minority — something we could not trust them to do if they knew they had to campaign for their jobs afterward. Basics of American law: elected representatives write the laws, appointed judges can overturn them. Checks. Balances.

[…] destroy the institution of marriage […]

In Frist’s definition, Marriage is a union of a man and a woman. If homosexuals were allowed to marry, the definition of that word would have to change and therefore the institution would be destroyed.

Frist is right about the semantics but wrong about the destruction of the institution. When gays are allowed to marry, the definition of marriage will have to change to include same-sex couples, but the institution will not change because including extra members into the definition won’t change the nature of the current members’ lives. Marriage isn’t a club where your rights diminish as more people are inducted.

Each couple’s marriage is their own. Some spouses live together. Some live in different cities. Some have children. Some do not. Some go to church. Some do not. The relation between any person and his/her spouse has no bearing on any others’. When I get married, nothing will change about anyone else’s marriage. If someone gets divorced, nothing will change about my marriage. Each couple’s marriage is their own.

[…] will the people protect marriage as the best way to raise children?

Frist sees gay marriage as a threat to the family structure. He’s trying to appeal to those who are worried about the constant decline of nuclear families in light of less traditional arrangements like the single parent home. And of course, the most dangerous degradation of the American Family would be two gay men raising children together, corrupting them with every lisp, limp-wristed gesture, and independent thought.

Again, the marriages of other people have no bearing on any others’. Straight couples will still be allowed to raise children.

My vote is with the people.

Your vote is one on the side of hatred and discrimination. Your side lost today.

The Spine

Following up on my rant earlier today is some good new from the world of DRM-free music: They Might Be Giants’ new album, The Spine, is now for sale on their website for $9.99. 256kbps mp3 files, no copy protection, maximum profits for the band.

Oh, and video for the first single, Experimental Film, was directed by Strongbad & The Cheat.

Update: The video seems to be down for the moment.

Update 2: Here’s the video on Homestarrunner.com.

Talking Avengers Dissassembled with Bendis & Quesada

Talking Avengers Dissassembled with Bendis & Quesada

On the new hyped Avengers storyline (spoilers abound).

glynn!

Glen! glynn!

Excellent Starbucks commercial.

Tell your senators to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

Tell your senators to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

Unless you can convince me how someone else’s marriage changes your own, go to this website and send a letter.

New iMac in September

New iMac in September

Apple uncharacteristically announces it is clearing its current channel in preparation for a new iMac. I don’t think the old one is stale yet.