Eye of the Needle of Public Opinion

These thoughts are better suited consigned to Twitter or Facebook, but 140 characters isn't sufficient. Normal qualifiers "in my social circle and in media portrayals I have experienced, contemporary and outdated" apply throughought.
The Hank Johnson curfuffle is embarrasing. Not because I am embarassed for him, but because I am embarassed of the social reaction. Obviously, what he says made no sense, even as a last ditch effort to address the infrastructural consequences of an increased military presence on Guam. But, really, the guy is human. Touting 'Bushisms' and the like as evidence of clinical idiocy is cruel and somewhat hypocritical.
We loudly recoil at the barter of our privacy for social networking perks. Polititians and celebrities survive under actual Orwellian surveillence. How else are the Hot/Not issues of Stars populated? My, incorrect, first reaction involved wondering if people expect their representatives to be perfect and are righteously angry that they aren't.
The support polls indicate the opposite, of course. Americans despise their representatives. More likely, they are pessimistic about the electees and relish the opportunity to hold up the evidence of unfit qualities. Really, Nicholas? This guy is fit? Bush Jr was fit? Perhaps he is a fine member on the Armed Services Committee or an anchor they couldn't tie to anything else. I simply consider it bad form to let this moment totally define my judgment about his fitness as a representative citizen. How couldn't it be? There was no story previously outside his home territory and he can't have the resources to defuse the PR that this infectious event solicits. Also, it's not prejudice if he actually did it. How intimate must I be to disdain someone? I dearly want to append "in power" to "someone", but the complaint works just fine without it.
I guess this just dredges up the ennui I exposed in the final post of my previous blog. My vote doesn't -statistically- matter in California for president. A bare four representatives between state and federal legislatures also diminishes the likelihood that My Vision of Responsible Government will ever come to pass. Short of changing national opinion about relevant issues, in the guise of a cultural icon. As if change was ever made that way. And no, I will not write you a story where you are the time-traveling Mary Sue inducting a premature Industrial Revolution into the Renaissance.
So, while that post laments, acceptingly, my impact on the bureaucracy, I chafe at how others handle their own doublethink. Who gets elected? Incumbents, corporate patsys, or extremist populists. And then they are subjected to this ahistorical level of nagging. I recall 2008 saw people decrying both candidates for biasing their stump speeches to the local audience, especially at fundraisers. I previously settled on a structuralist interpretation that false hope of 'change' keeps a compromise for the mentioned parties. (I mean voters, political parties, and governmental beneficiaries; not just the political parties.) How can we expect otherwise, how else can a candidate garner votes than to incite (unwarranted) passion?
The pattern of character assassination, of which Johnson is the newest enabler-victim, presents another filter on our political aspirants. You need skin like a battleship to smile and assure everyone that, no I didn't really mean that household proximity to Russia is tantamount to diplomatic experience. I can't see Mr. Smith going to Washington under these conditions. He has easier routes to earn prestige or charitable attention for his community than pour money into advertising for an uncertain victory that merits a single floor vote and perhaps an irrelevant committee post or two. So we get people we don't trust and occasionally people we shouldn't trust.
I was going to trot out machine learning as the utopian solution. One pillar of Scott Adam's party platform involves cowtowing first to our best (scientific) understanding of an issue or, where subjective, to statistical public opinion. But, we don't need a person to enact majority favor. I don't even mean just do what 51% say in one or many polls. The statistic weights built up from years of input could reflect our longer-term preferences. Or not, obvious literary figures have plumbed this depth and found it lacking as are our current AI capabilities.
Further, rehashing the capability of statistical algorithms detracts from the incipent cause of bringing it up. A human, even Adams on a neutral path, will flub some delivery and invite this sword of damoceles into his crown. A software neural network will produce the same answers without opening this chink. Because it will reflect our cultural decisions. It would be us, but only as a static oracle of introspection. Such a system would lack creativity. A perfect civil servant would be inhuman, at minimum in this capacity.
I don't ask that you avoid sharing in a gape mouthed blank stare. It may even be fun. We are Meaning Producing machines. (Superstition as path to Kuhn paradigms.) For example, I like looking at mixotronic. It returns three randomly chosen concepts, ostentibly for an onlooker to create a story or something with it. What would the union of 'machiavellian,' 'seige,' and 'Stranger in a Strange Land' be like? I opined, after a non sequitur commercial in between scenes of Awake, that perhaps a postmodern advertising scheme involves offloading meaning creation to a consumer. And, the work is largely instinctive within a domain of connectivity. So long as the brand is emphasized right alongside, perhaps it may be more effective (via active listening) than relying on celebrity association (or other techniques) to shill your product, as those tropes are easily identified and tuned out. Or maybe not. I hear some people tried to call the FTC on bioware for insufficient narrative hand-holding since Mass Effect 3's final scenes were too 'open ended.'

Trading spaces

When learning to use Python for the first time, I turned to Zed Shaw's booklet, Learn Python the Hard Way. The initial exercises were a shade tedious as its intended audience is a complete beginner. In the end, I much enjoyed his style of introducing mechanisms without explanation and giving the answer later. In that space I form an association, whereas the novice can form a hypothesis. Both are useful. I heartily reccommend it to anyone who wants to learn to use Python and isn't an Expert in another language.

One suggestion he makes - I've seen it elsewhere, involves using underscored_variable_names rather than camelCasedVariableNames. I admit, it is more pleasant to look at and discern. But, the underscore is way high up on the keyboard, using my weakest finger. I would have little argument (compactness) if the key were as central as the spacebar it replaces. So, principle ignored.

But, today, I recalled another piece of advice I ignored, this by Steve Yegge. In a primer about using emacs, he suggests that a potential user switch the effects of the alt and caps lock key. Emacs uses a number of keyboard shortcuts that begin with alt. Yegge changed his setup to reduce strain in cupping his hand awkwardly to accomplish the most used sequences. He proceeded to explain how to do so in windows. I prefer emacs to vim, but prefer other editors to emacs, so that was a non-starter. (Not to mention an inconvenience with any computer I don't control, like when I switched to Dvorak.)

The connection came, what if I change the registry to promote a space into an underscore when used in conjunction with a shift key? It would promote this other practice that is useful across software. Admittedly, it may promote an uncomfortable habit when I work on other computers, but the habit would be nicer on the whole. Frankly, I'd have done it rather than writing this but for the death of our modem. It has served at least six years, when its expected lifespan was three. It operated at rates comparable to last year's model, so it is a great shame. Plus, no internet leaves Jack dull, boy. I occasionally wondered if we could improve its lifespan by leaving it off at night but stayed my hand in case it would frustrate my similarly nightowl sister.

I have not touched a project to implement Deitel's Simpletron in Python in twenty days. I felt disappointed by how crudely it failed to act as expected. The problem seemed to arise from a concern I had thought resolved earlier. (Instructions ended up pointing at some list index rather than a memory location.) While I originally hoped to use a dict(ionary/hash), I had more that a pair of values to associate. I decided to use a wrapper with a list and now the implementation largely reflects expecting index values and searching it. Tonight I realized that the symbol should be the key and the wrapper, sans symbol, should be the value. Obvious in retrospect. Further, I could even pare down to a normal dict if I use a string-number for line numbers and integers as const values. Then the value is the memory location.


My only reservation is the degree of change this will require. I'm finally studying how git handles branches, so I can make a verbose version separate. Yet another thing to try.