Blayne Sucks

As I mentioned in my last post, Randy Pausch’s book The Last Lecture has become a runaway success. (And Randy has was named to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, which is an honor he absolutely deserves.) The day after Finals week ended I read the book cover to cover.

It is just over 200 pages and doesn’t take long to read. Despite the short length, there’s quite a bit of material packed into it. Randy has promoted the book as another medium for him to pass his life lessons on to his kids and it’s obvious that there’s a lot of material in the book that would be impossible for anyone with a terminal illness to talk about publicly without breaking down. He talks about how he met his wife, how they got engaged, and how his children were born.

There’s more to the book than just the stories. There’s an intimacy with the written word that is different than a speech, video or story. As a reader, you might be sitting in a comfortable chair in your house, on an airplane or in a waiting room, but the act of reading puts you in this separate world. Even if someone knows what book you’re reading they don’t know what part of that book. The only person who knows that is you. As a result of that magic and of Randy’s conversational style, this book absolutely seizes your attention.

The book’s message gets across loud and clear: Time is short. Live your life to the fullest. You truly can achieve your dreams. Never lose that optimism you had as a child.

A hard message to convey with authority, but Randy does so more than effectively. I sincerely urge you to consider getting this book. Don’t pick it up at the library. Go out and buy it. Read it every year. It’s short, and easily manageable in a day. Don’t let yourself get lost in life and forget the things that make it worth living in the first place.

For those of you who don’t know, Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also dying of cancer. He is 46 years old.

As many other people, I have been following Randy Pausch’s battle with pancreatic cancer for a while now. You can read my previous posts here, here and here. When I first posted about his last lecture, the wave of media was just starting. Since that time his exposure and impact have absolutely ballooned to unreal proportions. (Note: This is almost certainly not related to my blog. :-P) I strongly urge you to take some time and dig beneath the media hype to learn what Randy Pausch is all about. He does not disappoint.

His famous Last Lecture has been profiled on Oprah and he’s been interviewed by Diane Sawyer. Just recently he sat down with Time Magazine for their 10 Questions article. His lecture has been turned into a book and has become an instant success. It has become the overall bestselling book on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the New York Times Bestsellers lists. If you only read one book this spring, make it this one. I know I’m looking forward to next month when I’ll have enough time to read it.

As a former member of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers Rube Goldberg team, I was extremely pleased to see that they recently won the national competition! If you have never heard of the Rube Goldberg competition before, then you’ll definitely want to check out this summary page that describe the history of the contest at Purdue. You can also read more comments on the Slashdot article.

I just ran across a post on Concurring Opinions that rocked me back in my seat. The full text of two of Dan Solove’s most popular books are now available online for free. The Digital Person and The Future of Reputation are both fantastic books. I have been meaning to reread them and get a review posted here, but one thing leads to another and this semester has become rather backlogged. However, in lieu of writing a short review that doesn’t do justice to either of these books, I will simply give them a heartfelt recommendation. Perhaps with the end of the semester rapidly approaching, I’ll be able to get a review of them up soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll take a peek!

Last weekend I was able to see a documentary called Helvetica. Although most people I’ve recommended it to this past week have been less than enthusiastic in their feelings towards watching a documentary of a typeface, I strongly urge anyone reading this to give it a fair shot. It is a short documentary on something that virtually everyone takes for granted. I guarantee it will give you a new outlook on text.

To back up a couple of steps, I wanted to talk about Times New Roman, which I have have always disliked. I think I pretty much hate all serif based typefaces. (Serif typefaces have ‘feet,’ called serifs, on letters like capital A’s while sans-serif typefaces have none.) Times New Roman was the default font on many word processing programs when I was in high school. As a result, it was the “required” font for many projects and papers that I had to write. In fact, Times or Times New Roman are still frustratingly required for most academic publications. My favorite font to use in high school was Arial. I even reconfigured the default typeface on any word processing program I could get my hands on to Arial. I was never entirely sure why I liked it, but it seemed to get out of my way. I just felt less formal and made me more relaxed when I was writing something.

How does this related to the documentary? Apparently, many type designers feel that Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica! That’s right folks. There was even speculation that Arial would make an appearance in the film as a villain, but I won’t spoil the surprise for you. Microsoft didn’t want to pay the royalties for Helvetica so they made their own “humanist” typeface. (A humanist font is essentially one that is closer to how a human would write the letter than one that appears machined.) Does that not sound like classic Microsoft to anyone else?

More broadly, anyone who loves design or is otherwise detail-oriented would love this documentary. There was a great quote from Paula Scher in the documentary that holds a subtle truth which applies very broadly.

When you come into design at the point that you start out in history, without knowing that you’re starting out in history, very often you don’t have a sense of what came before you, how it got there, and you certainly don’t know what’s going to come after.

What modern technology company has the best reputation with design? Apple. Why? Most people say this is entirely due to Steve Jobs. How did Steve Jobs become enamored with design? Calligraphy. Calligraphy is as old as writing itself. He began to really appreciate at an early age the historic impact of design and communication. Every aspect of your product speaks to the user. This has been critical to their success.

Anyhow, I hope you’ll consider watching Helvetica. They have a blog on their website which is also rather interesting. You might also like Typographica’s Favorites of 2007.

I previously posted my thoughts on Lawrence Lessig’s possible run for an open seat in the House of Representatives. Since that time, he has decided not to run. For those who support him and his ideas, this is actually probably the better decision in the short run. In truth, Jackie Speier probably agrees with Lessig (and vice versa) on many issues. The 12th district in California would almost certainly be electing someone that held those views. Congressman Lantos serves as some proof of that. Thus, in net, the “standard” positions would not really change all that much if Lessig were to win a seat in Congress.

However, Lessig’s time and focus would change. People of all stripes seem to agree that the only way that Congress will change is through a grassroots movement. The question is how do you start such a movement? I think people like Lessig are the answer. He (obviously) has a huge voice, and I’m not sure that getting elected to Congress would appreciably improve that voice in terms of his ability to empower a grassroots movement. He would certainly have a bigger stage, but he would also have different core responsibilities. He would have to focus on the needs of the people in his district, instead of being able to focus completely on educating people about Congress, including why change is needed and how to cause that change.

I certainly would like to see some real change in the current political process at virtually all levels. In particular, I think new ideas and new approaches are needed. Lessig has certainly been open and receptive to many of those things in the past and I would love to see him eventually get elected. Time magazine’s cover story this week is about experience and its effect on politicians. Though the article makes some great points (such as the trend that second terms in Office are usually less effective than first terms), I actually thought the follow up article on the “science” of experience was better.

There is something that I have found to be true, which isn’t mentioned in either article: creativity and experience tend to oppose one another. Perhaps this is why Lessig has been so open and receptive to new ideas. Why isn’t experience viewed as a lack of creativity? Why are people asking if Obama is experienced enough to be an effective President rather than asking if Clinton is creative enough to be an effective President? Another part of this debate that seems muffled to me is the fact that our government has a system of built-in checks and balances that should limit mistakes due to inexperience.

George Will mentioned on This Week with George Stephanopolous that Lincoln was preceded by Buchanan and succeeded by Andrew Johnson, who are generally considered to be two of the worst Presidents in history. He also pointed out that Buchanan and Johnson were two of the most experienced politicians ever to become President while Lincoln was one of the least experienced politicians. Although Will didn’t mention this in his debate, Lincoln’s entire Presidency is defined by his successes in winning the Civil War, despite having zero background in warfare. He actually ended up checking out books on military strategy from the Library of Congress to figure out how to pull the whole thing off.

Anyhow, I said that I though his decision was good in the short run, but I think it does raise a long term problem: how do you espouse change in Congress effectively while also refusing to run for it? I’m not sure how he will be able to avoid answering this question as time moves progresses. I suppose we’ll see in time.

Allison passed me a link to a video about the comparisons between Barack Obama’s campaign for President of the United States and the fictional Santos Campaign on the TV show The West Wing via email today. I have mentioned that I’m a fan of The West Wing before. I didn’t necessarily agree with the politics in the show. In fact, sometimes I strongly disagreed with them. However, the show portrayed politicians of every stripe as people who earnestly want to improve the world in which they live. Sure, they talked about the seedy side of politics from time to time, but on the whole the picture was one of politicians actively caring about the people. The American people yearn for that. This Slate V video is just another example of (in part) why Barack Obama has been so successful.

Although Ed Felten has recently gotten tons of press about his research group’s recent analysis of breaking hard drive encryption, I wanted to talk about some research that he’s done previously on electronic voting for several reasons. First, I mentioned voting in my last post. Second, I have blogged about electronic voting here before that. Third, it is an election year and seems pertinent. Fourth, I am still trying to catch up on some blogs that I follow and recently was able to watch Ed Felten’s presentation in the CERIAS Security Seminar series.

If you are unfamiliar with Ed Felten, I would like to provide some background. He’s a computer security researcher with extensive experience in authentication, secure Java programming, and digital rights management. He has recently also become a leader in analyzing security concerns relating to electronic voting. He is a fellow of the ACM and an EFF Pioneer Award winner. He is the author of a popular technology and public policy blog called Freedom to Tinker. He is also an excellent presenter.

His presentation for the CERIAS seminar is extremely good. I think it is probably accessible for those who are not well-versed in computer security terminology. Certainly, most of the talk is non-technical in nature. I strongly urge anyone reading this who has wondered just what the big deal surrounding electronic voting is all about to at least watch the first half of the presentation. It is an excellent introduction into the amazingly insecure fashion by which elections are held in America.

He talks about the history of electronic voting, some of the legislation that may affect electronic voting, the goal of verifying an election and how their research group has approached the problem. I’m not entirely sure that the importance of the problems can really come through in a sterile environment such as an academic presentation, but he certainly does a great job of motivating these problems on his blog. For example, the pictures on his blog he takes of unattended voting machines prior to election day. Of course, like any true academic, he provides references to their work so that you know where to look for more information if you are interested.

At the end of the talk he is asked a question about possible cryptographic methods that would allow a voter to obtain a receipt that they could later verify on a government website. I’m not entirely sure I like his answer. He says something like (Yes, I’m paraphrasing.), “There are attempts, but they aren’t ready for primetime.” This is a huge caveat and it almost seems to imply that the crypto isn’t quite there yet. Usually, it’s the humans that aren’t ready for the crypto. In this case there are some pretty interesting cryptographic schemes, and they lack the same thing most other cryptographic schemes lack: an easy-to-understand user interface. I’m sure Dr. Felten knows this and was just providing a concise answer, but if you are interested in more, I would read Dr. Rivest’s paper on Three Ballot Voting as a great place to start.

Lawrence Lessig, perhaps best known for his creation of Creative Commons licensing, is considering a run for Congress. His possible campaign website, and the somewhat related change congress website, talk about the kind of change that Congress needs. While the talk is good, I am not sure it’s anything new. People have known for many, many years that it’s probably not a good idea for congressmen to be accepting campaign donations from the industries they regulate, but that certainly hasn’t been the impetus needed for change.

There’s a part of me that wants to believe that Lessig could bring about this kind of change. I have to admit that I like a lot of his ideas. The Creative Commons licensing concept is an excellent example of the kind of thinking that I think we need in America. It is new, different and consumer friendly. I love the fact that he was willing to create a book through the use of a wiki and consider feedback from interested parties. So many politicians appear so disconnected from the people that elect them, but as the Draft Lessig movement shows, he has a lot of real people supporting him.

I’m not sure what to think. I don’t live in California, let alone in his district, but I do think I would vote for him if only to see what happens. It’s not that I’m not skeptical. Lessig is a former Harvard Law Professor and current Stanford Law Professor - those aren’t exactly “new and different” institutions which would bring sweeping change to Capital Hill. Plus, the sheer numbers of people that have tried to change congress and failed are staggering.

Another aspect about him that I think is rather interesting is his background in writing actual constitutions for former Soviet Republics. Very few politicians have actually written constitutions that were meant to really be used. It sort of reminds me of the saying that was written on Richard Feynman’s chalkboard at the time of his death:

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

I’m not sure politicians who haven’t tried to create a constitution for real people can understand what democracy is all about. Democracy is more than a piece of paper can ever really be. It is a culture. It is a mindset. It is a way of life. It is fragile. It is in danger. After the problems with the 2000 Presidential election, you would think that it would have been the number one priority to improve voting accuracy. After all, Congress should have significant motivation to make sure that elections are fair, right? Amazingly, here we are in 2008 and we are still working on a solution. There is obviously something wrong. Something that needs to change.

Change is a tall order though, particularly in Washington, which is a city where change goes to die. But there is something Obama-like about Lessig, an Obama supporter himself. If there is hope for change in Congress, perhaps people like Lawrence Lessig are the folks to do it.

Fox News is reporting that some lost documents and artifacts relating to the assassination of JFK were found in a Dallas courthouse. As someone who has been fascinated with the JFK assassination for years, this is obviously interesting news for a variety of reasons.

My first reaction was the sort of comic imbalance of the stark reality that an object possesses compared to its potential importance. Baseballs in the baseball Hall of Fame don’t really look all that different from some old baseball you have in your closet for 20 years, and yet people would pay millions of dollars for them on the open market. Moon rocks look pretty much like earth rocks, except that you have to actually physically travel to the moon and back to show them to all your friends and relatives. In the history of all kitchen knives that have been used as weapons there was a point when someone bought it at a store and used it to prepare food that they later ate. I’m sure the brown leather gun holster they found doesn’t look any different than that description would imply, except that at one point it was holding a gun that was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on national TV.

However, the documents that were discovered are even more interesting to me. After everything that I’ve read about the assassination, I think the most compelling conspiracy theory has to be the mob theory, which these documents would seem to support. It’s compelling for many reasons. One of the main reasons I find it compelling is that the first rule in assassinating someone is always kill the assassins. This is the essence of a dead end. Police can’t interview their main suspect when he’s dead. Without being able to ask detailed questions to suspects it’s difficult to uncover what really happened.

The mob has understood this very well and has a long and documented history of killing anyone who had any chance of telling the police anything. (Plus, as is mentioned in the article, the mob had serious motivation to kill JFK.) In Oswald’s case, it’s even more interesting because he claimed to have been setup prior to his death. This puts investigators in the unenviable position of trying to prove a negative - that he murdered alleged assassin *didn’t* actually do the assassination. If Oswald was framed and the framing was done at all decently, proving he didn’t really do anything without being able to ask him questions about everything leading up to the assassination can be extremely difficult.

Perhaps it would be easier to think of it using the analogy to the controversy surrounding baseball. Roger Clemens claims to have not used HGH or whatever. How can he prove that he didn’t? There’s no evidence either way that would be unimpeachable. Without irrefutable proof that a particular event actually happened in a particular way, it can be extraordinarily difficult to prove that the event in question didn’t happen another way. (BTW: This is not my first post on the JFK assassination that involved Roger Clements. This is. :-P)

This is in part because of the way the question is phrased. Thomas Pynchon once said,

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

This is most apparent in conspiracy theories. A conspiracy nut will ask you to prove that it didn’t happen any of a million different ways. Many of these may require a cogent argument to prove, but they are the wrong questions to ask. However, that is the wrong question to be asked. What should be asked is “How can you prove that Oswald acted alone killed JFK?” If this can be formed into a rational argument, then that would be the only argument that matters.

The difference is subtle. On the surface you might think that proving Oswald did something alone would be equivalent to proving that everyone else didn’t do it. In mathematics, proofs actually can work like that, but real life is different in that humans are imperfect by nature and therefore a certain level of uncertainty exists in everything we do. Uncertainty can either work in favor of an argument or against it. Conspiracy theorists force people to try and eliminate every possible uncertainty, which uses uncertainty as a weapon against an argument. However, if you accept that every argument is going to have an element of uncertainty and present your rationale supporting the theory of Oswald acting alone as the most certain of the arguments, then you are using the uncertainty of everything else to support your argument.

Anyhow, I suppose I’m no longer really commenting on the article and more accurately rambling like a true blogger. I’ll stop now and spare you, the reader, from further blather.