Author: gulley

I’m a sucker for the Hokey-Pokey, but I’m not sure why.

The Hokey-Pokey’s enduring influence on our culture is hard to explain. Why is it still around? I think its strange charm stems from its unabashed goofiness combined with its open-ended mystery. For instance: first you put your right foot in, then you take it out. You put your right foot in again, then shake it, and only then, just before turning yourself around, do you actually do the Hokey-Pokey. So what is the Hokey-Pokey, exactly? It happens between the shaking and the turning, but the song doesn’t provide any clues. My friend JMike is convinced the Hokey-Pokey refers specifically to the screwing-in-a-lightbulb motion you do with both hands before turning yourself around (or as he put it, “rotating your hands thusly around the long axis of your arms”). This sounds like plausible guesswork, but I do not consider it authoritative. What do you think the Hokey-Pokey is?

It is the closing line that moves the Hokey-Pokey from mediocrity to greatness: “That’s what it’s all about.” Ambiguity is everywhere. What’s “that”? What’s “it”? Truly, the Hokey-Pokey is a mirror in which every age sees its own reflection. We might ask, for example, what William Shakespeare would have made of the Hokey-Pokey. As luck would have it, the Washington Post’s Style Invitational recently invited readers to “rewrite some banal instructions in the style of some famous writer.” The winning entry, by Jeff Brechlin of Potomac Falls, Virginia, gives a sonnet version of the Hokey-Pokey in the style of William Shakespeare (you have to scroll down a bit to find it). How might the bard have styled the song that launched a thousand skate-themed birthday parties? Ahem…

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

The seventh semi-annual MATLAB Programming Contest is in its final lap before finishing up tomorrow. This contest’s puzzle is based on the well-known traveling salesman problem. The contest has been running for a week and so far we’ve had more than 1400 entries. It’s hard to explain the visceral appeal of an online programming contest to those who’ve never tried it (and never plan to), but I think it has something to do with making a real-time performance out of something that is generally solitary and hidden. A virtuoso programmer can perform a dazzling cadenza of insightful codework and leap into the lead before a large and appreciative audience. Programmers don’t generally find themselves in this situation. Those that do can get sucked in deep. As one contestant said (in the MATLAB newsgroup)

Well, this is my first matlab contest and it is giving me far too
much enjoyment. It’s one of the most addicitve and compulsive things
I have tried. The exercise is improving my programming skill – true –
but in return I have neckache, backache, a terrible diet, no social
life, and not much of a work life either. Also, I have experienced
physical trembling while making the final preparations to send a code
into the pit. Is that normal?

A few days ago I remarked that downtown Baghdad was probably going to look different soon. I didn’t suspect that DigitalGlobe would go on publishing free images of the changing face of Baghdad, but they have done just that with this Baghdad Region Image Gallery. It’s really pretty remarkable the kinds of things you can see. For example, here’s something you couldn’t easily do in any other war before this one: independent verification of bombing accuracy. We say our bombs are accurate. Are they?

This close-up view of the region across the river from the al Sijud palace shows at least one impressive example of accurate targeting. Click on the small picture to the left to see a bigger view. You’ll see two rows of buildings, eight of which have been reduced to rubble-strewn craters, punched out of existence as though with a paper hole-punch. We are entering an era when bombing inaccuracy will refer almost entirely to faulty designation rather than faulty delivery. No matter how good a surgeon you are, you can still take out the wrong kidney from time to time. Oops!

As Matthew noted in a follow-up comment to my last post, Space Imaging hosts similar pictures at their site. Here is a shot of Baghdad on April 1st with oil trenches smoking away. Elsewhere on their site you can see pictures of the (former) Saddam International Airport. Just think, all the Iraqi Information Office would need is a web browser and a high-bandwidth connection to verify that the troops on the ground are not actually theirs.

Read what Peter Arnett has to say for himself in the Mirror: This War Is Not Working

Charles Paul Freund writes about War Flutters on the Reason website. War flutters are the predictable anxieties that appear when a conflict becomes scary, real, and unpredicatably dangerous. Freund makes the point that scandalizing comments like those made by Peter Arnett are part of a larger process that serves us very well, whereas Al-Jazeera is not serving its own constituents well. As Freund puts it,

The debates that emerge from negative press stories are not a distraction, they are a necessity. If you want to see a medium that is, by contrast, largely failing to do its journalistic work, then you should find a way to catch Al-Jazeera’s coverage. Anyone in the Arab world depending on Al-Jazeera for an understanding of the conflict is not being well served.

Tantalizingly, he goes on to quote Michael Young of Beirut Calling that Al-Jazeera is the beginning of a brand new phenomenon in the Arab world that will itself mature. I’m quoting Young directly here:

It’s important to understand that while Al-Jazeera does indeed often act like a propaganda outlet, it has been a liberating experience for the Arab publics, providing them with higher expectations from their own media. Already, Al-Jazeera has to look over its shoulder at Al-Arabiyya, a Dubai-based station, and at Al-Hayat-LBCI, a venture between Lebanese LBCI and the Saudi daily Al-Hayat. This could explain the station’s penchant for sensationalistic atrocity reporting. In time, however, Arab stations will understand that accuracy is a better magnet, and the standards by which Al-Jazeera (and others) are judged inside the Middle East will be raised.

The Economist leads its print edition this week with the headline The fog of war wherein they talk about how the war’s actual course is being obscured by all the scattershot realtime imagery. Who would have thought that too much information would give us the same kind of confusion in the 21st century that a severe lack of information gave von Clausewitz in the 19th century? But it appears to be so.

Inasmuch as the news imagery has the power to motivate strong emotion (as opposed to illustrating the strategic balance sheet), al-Jazeera seems to be taking the lead. If your primary intent is to show that war is cruel and messy, focusing a high-quality camera on the gaping wounds of civilians is hard to beat.
On the Reason website this week, Tim Cavanaugh writes a good piece on how the hard-hitting al-Jazeera network is thrashing the limp rah-rah coverage on CNN. As he points out in his conclusion, he’s not making any claims about the actual war, but as far as the battle of images is concerned, “there hasn’t even been a stalemate. So far, it’s been a stunning victory for the Arabs.”

In another part of the Economist this week, they also single out the Arab news network for its recent surge in popularity: Al-Jazeera comes of age. If you want to be seen by 45 million Arabs quickly, it’s the only way to go. By the way, in the small print below the article, there is a link to an interesting al-Jazeera page on the Cursor web site.

I can’t resist linking to this fellow blogger: NedBatchelder.com. Ned Batchelder is, like me, a blogger, a resident of greater Boston, a software developer, named Ned, and the father of an autistic son. Whether or not he was born in North Carolina I cannot say, but his blog is full of useful information. Only yesterday he posted the answer to that perennial riddle “why is a tomato a fruit?” His answer:

Grains are seeds, fruit is anything that carries seeds, and vegetables are everything else.

So tomato is a fruit. Corn is a grain. Eggplant is a fruit (who knew?). As are the noble pomegranate and humble kumquat. But does that make a seedless grape a vegetable?

I’m back from my France mini-vacation, and as far as I could tell, there was no overt Yankee-bashing going on. I saw one anti-Bush message scrawled on a subway wall but that’s about it. Their news magazines looked like our news magazines, with interested stories and simple headlines like “The War in Iraq” (as opposed to, say, “That Stupid War Those Arrogant Americans Foisted on the World”).

My flight back was uneventful, but I did learn something interesting about the euro-dollar exchange rate. According to the European Central Bank, at today’s exchange rate you could buy $1.07 with one euro. But in an Air Canada jet flying over the north Atlantic from Paris to Montreal, you can buy the same beer with either four dollars or three euros. I sense an arbitrage opportunity here.

I’m spending a long weekend near Paris, and I can officially say that so far nobody here has given me a hard time about the nasty things the U.S. is doing to Iraq. Not that I’ve been going out of my to get into political conversations… The trip over was very uneventful. I didn’t notice any more or less security along the way, and except for the nonstop CNN at the airport very little seemed different.

DigitalGlobe is a company that will sell you extremely detailed satellite images (they claim 60 cm resolution) of anywhere in the world. To prove they’ve got the goods, they have a nifty gallery on their website that features, among the various famous touristic locations, some photos of North Korea and Iraq. Here is a shot of downtown Baghdad from last year (use this map to get your bearings). No doubt it will soon look very different. This is Saddam’s Baghdad palace (there are pictures of at least nine other palaces) and if you look closely you can see him swimming laps in his pool. Well, okay, I bet you could if he were swimming laps.

One of the most arresting images I came across was this one of Mecca during the Hajj. Right at the center of the image you can see thousands of pilgrims performing their seven counterclockwise turns around the Kabah. It’s a fascinating peek into another world. I can’t decide if images like this make these places seem more real or more exotic. Now, instead of saying “I wonder what Baghdad is like?” I am more likely to say “I wonder what it’s like right there where that bridge over the Tigris river enters Baghdad university?” Either way I wonder.