Tomato, Tomato

I speak english (or more precisely, the Queen's english) with a slight tinge of Geordie when I get angry. I sometimes say things that other english speakers fail to understand - either I pronounce words in a way they don't understand, or I use words that I think mean a certain thing when my conversational partner means something else.

It never fails to amaze me that we actually manage to communicate ideas and concepts to each other, given the opportunities for vagueness and overloaded meanings of words, both spoken and written. Lead, lead - one's a metal, one's where I guide someone. Edinburgh - but don't say "burg".

At my workplace, we have a set of words that are massively overloaded. Build - what does that mean to you? for me, depending on who I'm talking to and the time of day, it could mean building some code, building some data, the result of a lighting calculation, the latest version of the game, and a variety of other potential options. Pipeline and workflow suffer the same issues, and don't get me started on "Object", "Entity", "Component" or any of the other synonyms for "Thing".

The worst example I saw recently was an MIT video (Introduction to algorithms) where the presenter delves into formal proofs for complexity representation, and midway through one of his equations, makes a quick aside to the effect of "That equals sign - well, that really means definitely not larger than in this context". I have 30-something years of brain mapping that says the symbol "=" means "equal to", and he's using it to mean something different. Surely there's a better symbol for him to use? maybe even "<=" ?

This overloading and confusion crops up constantly, and it's a huge stumbling block whenever people need to collaborate. Sure, some of these issues could be resolved by being more precise when talking or writing, or establishing glossaries when communicating. However, I think the issue is much deeper than that.

Our brains are heavily wired into attaching a meaning (or a feeling) to symbols. Words, mathematical symbols, brand images, even blocks of raw colour evoke a response. Pictures really are worth a thousand words, and look just how important words are. Misusing a word or using a word in a different context is a problem when your brain is trained to respond to that word (or sound, or picture) with a preset response.

Another example that came up during my discussion with Joe was the symbols we use in calculus. When learning to differentiate at school, I had endless problems - not with the concepts, but with the notation. every time I saw "dy/dx" my brain was screaming at me - Divide! Divide you moron! You've done it a thousand times, what makes this time different? This problem never really went away until I saw Newton's notation (dots above letters; more dots equates to higher order derivatives) and Lagrange's notation. Seeing a way of expressing the concept where the very expression itself wasn't already mentally mapped to something else instantly removed that roadblock to how I thought about the process.

The same issues are also prevalent in UI design. Pictures on buttons - or if you drive an american car, english words on buttons - become ingrained from the moment you see them, and if you see a different image mapped to a familiar operation, or the same image meaning something else in a different program - you are instantly confused.

So, next time you strike up a conversation with someone, don't just say what you want to say - say what you want them to understand. If that makes any sense at all. Either you'll confuse the hell out of yourself, or you might just get your point across.

Did I mention that my tomato plant is doing really nicely?

Banging the rocks together

I had a revelation today, one of those moments when your mental jenga stack crumbles, and you have to enter the laborious process of building it back up a few blocks at a time. I was attending an "Inspire and motivate" presentation by Victor Antonov where he was discussing a new artistic project he's working on, and he mentioned using an abstract concept as a tool for defining how to achieve the required end result. I'll get to the details in a minute.

At that point in time, my brain jolted. Abstract concepts as tools? What the hell? My mental picture of a tool is ... well, stuff like hammers, bandsaws, straws, or software tools like Maya - they are tangible things that you interact with. I can grok picking up a hammer, swinging it, and hitting a nail - result achieved. How can I use an abstract concept as a tool? I can hear the jenga stack falling all around me right about now.

Building back up a new mental concept around something as simple as "what is a tool" takes a bit of work, so I'm going to lay out my thought process here.

1. This guy is saying he uses abstract concepts as tools, and he's achieved a result from that - I can see, looking at his presentation, exactly what he's describing as his hoped-for end result. (In this case, He was discussing reduction of scene complexity, including lighting and texturing, to get what he wants).

2. He's talking about using this tool in terms of what he wants - i.e. the end result - not in terms of how he interacts with it - i.e. how you swing it. This is my first disconnect point - my mental picture is normally all about the interaction, and this is the first thing I need to change. After talking to my friendly technical artist Joe, he's quite clear that the best tools are transparent in translating what an artist pictures in their head, and the end result. I've paid lip service to this, but i've never really got it.

3. He's expressing his end result in the simplest of terms - in this case, he's taking a theme ("Lighting defines mood") and establishing a spectrum or gradient ("one end is a single light which gives solid contrast and clear lines between light and dark with lots of shadow, the other end is large numbers of lights and soft ambient lighting which reduces contrast and minimises the clarity of shadow direction").

4. He's then mapping his abstract concept, the theme given above, as the tool that lets you tweak where you lie on the gradient. By tweaking where you lie on the gradient, you end up with a result. Bingo! The process is as simple as a volume slider - how it works is irrelevant, as long as it works.

Using tools is something pretty ingrained in the human psyche. It's been used as a discriminator between humans and animals for quite some time, even if we now know that many animals use tools regularly. As the hitchhiker's guide says, "We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys." Still, it's a step away from using tools to manipulating your environment using abstract concepts, even though we do it all the time. I'm certainly not suggesting that i've never used an abstract concept as a tool, I'm just saying I've never really thought about it before.

The discussion with Joe lead us into the problems of language dissonance, overloading symbology and user interfaces - but I'll keep that discussion for another post.

Propping up the houses

So, looking at the latest results for Barratt the builders, everything looks pretty rosy. And so it should - given that they're obviously being fed money by you and me, via the council and government, to the tune of a couple of hundred million pounds. Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen - we're not only buying banks so that we can loan ourselves money, now we're buying land and houses directly so we can sell them - to ourselves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/09/barratt-housing-slump-debt

See that last sentence there? "deferred terms"? that's right - it means that they're buying up land on a massive "buy now, pay later" scheme. And where is this land coming from? Correct - greenfield land that presumably must be gifted by councils. After all, they did promise the government they'd build houses, so it all makes perfect sense. Any sane builder knows that brownfield projects aren't worth the fake paper they're printed on these days, just look at how cheap town center 1-bed rabbit hutch apartments go for in these troubled times.

But wait! there's more! not only are we giving Barratt's the land to build on - we're also paying them over the odds for their houses! Yes indeed - while house prices fell around the country to the tune of 20% or so, Barratt sales to councils (social housing projects) increased on like-for-like properties to the tune of 12%. How's that for price inflation?

Well done, Barratt. It must have been a real struggle for you guys this year with all the money we're giving you.

http://www.barrattdevelopments.co.uk/media/releases/Content.aspx?id=1554

I should be so lucky

I'm an incredibly lucky man. Pretty much everyone I know to talk to is also blessed - with a lifestyle that didn't exist even a hundred years ago. Talking a few days ago with a friend, we discussed how human societies for the last few millenia have strived, fought and died aiming for the simple goal of trying to be the very people we are today.

Technologically, this is strongly evident. Even if we begin to take what we have today for granted, there is always something new on the horizon that jolts us out of our perceptions of what is possible - who could have believed even 20 years ago that I would be able to hold a realtime conversation with friends three thousand miles away as though we were in the same room, essentially for free? Who could believe that we would see videos of events on the other side of the world captured by ordinary citisens broadcast minutes later to anyone who cares to watch? Who would have believed that we would be able to look at the roof of our house, see our car in the driveway, all through a computer screen?

All of these things have been imagined by authors, of course. Most science facts are proposed in science fiction well before they occur in reality. That doesn't detract from the fact that we really can do all of the things in the list above - and they're not even strange to contemplate now, they're actually comfortable parts of our lives. Undoubtedly there will be advances in the near and far future that bring more of people's imagination to life, that change our capabilies as humans even further than we have already gone.

When you look outside technology, it seems less obvious, but it's no less stunning just how incredibly good we have it. I can walk to the shops, right now, and buy - well, just about anything. A new TV? no problem. Fruit that isn't even grown in this country? check. A pair of shoes, or the latest movie? Batteries? check, check, check. I have the library of the world's media at my fingertips, the produce from every corner of the world at my whim. We are the ultimate in opportunistic consumers, and we take it completely for granted.

What do we do with this incredible opportunity we have available to us? Do we use our time to good ends? Do we appreciate the fantastic opportunity that the entire rest of human civilisation has killed itself to give us? I can only answer that question for myself, as everyone in this world really is different, and I know there's some pretty solid yes and no answers out there, but stepping away from the black and white, I think this is the thing that defines whether you really are a good person or not.

We have time, love, thought and motion, all in limited quantities. Are you making the best of them? I know i'm not, but i'm beginning to think that if there is a point to our existence, it has to be putting them to the most use you can get out of them. Humanity, from the start till right now, has been about nothing else other than delivering you and me to this time, and giving us just about every conceivable tool, toy and list of instructions that any human before us could have dreamed of.

Time is something you can keep for yourself, or give to someone else. Both are valuable, if you make them - helping a friend decorate, teaching a new skill to your child, Learning a language - these seem like pretty good uses of time to me. Watching the "news" with the same recycled stories about interchangeable celebrities that i've never met, or the 100th in a series of celebrity cook-offs - these are starting to look like bad investments to me. I read a really interesting post about dedicating time to work and time to improve yourself recently, where the author thought that 40 hours working and 20 hours improving your skills was something to strive for, and I have to agree with him. I may disagree about the focus of the 20 hours, but the important lesson, I feel, is that you should be doing something useful with it not wasting it.

Love is free to give, and done the right way it's what makes being a human feel worthwhile. Something special happened to me this April that has made me begin to appreciate the loves in my life, and I can only hope that I give it back to the people who deserve it (and more) as I get older and wiser.

Thought and motion have been discussed endlessly by men and women far brighter than I could ever hope to be, but I like to do them both. I doubt it would hurt for me to put a bit more effort into the motion part of the equation, especially given that I aim to live forever - Maybe it's time to bring out the Wii fit again.

I had intended to write something about how obsessive i'm becoming about my time, and how some other concerns are starting to fade (power, money, celebrity). I had intended to post a diatribe about how most people seem caught up in the rat race, too busy killing themselves and each other stiving for what we've already got - but then, on the face of it, life is too bloody brilliant to waste it worrying about that. I think instead, i'm going to finish this post and go learn something that will make my wife smile. <3 to you all.

There's gold in them thar hills!

Well goodness to betsy. I spend years holding in the words, and the day after I write down what has been in my head, this happens:

Channel 4 intends to put a big fat chunk of their content on the internet, gratis.

Kudos to you, channel 4. I always loved your style.

Sailing the digital seas

I have an imaginary friend, who I like to refer to as "my evil twin". Most days, my evil twin is dressed in black, performing evil ninja missions to bring down governments, or carrying vengeance to my imaginary enemies in the form of poisoned blades and curt japanese whispers.

Occasionally, my evil twin discards his ninja costume and instead dons the jaunty garb of a pirate, sailing the digital seas in search of digital ships to digitally plunder. "Arr", he cries, as he digitally stabs upstanding navy members while buckling his swash on the way to another stash of digital booty.

Of course, I'm not referring to real piracy - I'm referring to downloading TV shows and movies. Downloading content from the internet is about as far from real piracy as you can possibly get. For starters, there are no ships involved, unless you count the Pirate Bay logo. There's also no sea. There's also a distinct lack of stabbing, shooting, cannons, flames, wooden legs, parrots and (in these modern times) somali nationals. Last but not least, there's a complete lack of two things - the first is death, and the second is theft.

The concept of piracy is a strong one, with deep fabulous roots. The connotation of theft of tangible goods and murderous actions is a great thing to grasp one's attention. Tales of stealing and murder abound, including many real life examples such as Blackbeard and sir Francis Drake who while being renowned in English history as an explorer and a politician, was also viewed by the Spanish as a privateer, pirate and generally all-round bad guy. I guess your view of his actions depends on which side you're on, and I'd assume the slaves he took and the crewmen of the ships he sank would probably look on him with ill favour.

Watching TV shows on the internet is certainly not piracy in any traditional sense. Certainly, if I were to take the side of content distributors grimly hanging on to a distribution model based on physical movement of tangible goods, I can understand why I'd like to protect that business model by lobbying and P.R. efforts to draw parallels between theft, violent actions and other malicious behaviours and downloading. After all, that's much simpler to do and less scary than adjusting the business model to fit consumer behaviour.

The terrible thing about this stance is that it's simply bad business sense. The most recent independent surveys such as this one and the one referred to in this article suggest that capturing and monetising the audience who download content from the internet is actually the best way to make money - the very people being criticised and castigated are the best consumers.

While I myself would never in a million years think of downloading internet content for my television viewing pleasure, I do occasionally watch over the shoulder of my evil twin, and when I see something I like I have a habit of buying the BluRay. Oddly enough, I tend to not do this with shows that i've never seen before.

If only there was some way for me to watch this content, without annoying adverts, without warnings on the front intimating that I'm a criminal, on my own terms and timetable, on any device that I'd like to view on. If only there was a way, I would reward those content producers with some of my hard earned money.

Needs more polish

For the last 18 years, I've been making computer games. I've been lucky enough to be involved in just about every part of the process, from writing music and sound effects through to designing some pretty cool graphical effects. I've also played a lot of games - in fact, some would say a ridiculous amount of games. I feel comfortable saying - I know a good game.

And a good game needs polish. Every great game i've ever played shines when compared to the alternatives out there. Sometimes this is graphical, sometimes it's a gem of design, sometimes it's the hook behind the game, but there will always be at least one part of the product where you can see the love, time and attention - where someone has bent their back and applied pressure. Taking something rough and refining it until it is gleaming.

It's easy to spot when you look - it will be something that, upon close examination, improves in your estimations. Something you think is good, and then when you dig deeper, realise it's actually brilliant. Something that sparkles at you, drawing your attention in the first place. A good game will have a few of these gems, a great game will be liberally scattered with them.

I try and ensure that my work is polished, and I'm lucky to work for a company where the same is true of most of my colleagues. I've come to expect a certain attention to detail when work is complete; after all, we're in a highly competitive industry and you need to shine to be the best. Recently, I've had a startling revelation.

The rest of the world doesn't work like this. The majority of people are happy to just get by, happy for the fruit of their labours to be just good enough. I've had experiences recently with car salesmen, boiler repairmen, service in restaurants, estate agents; the list is pretty long, but the end result is nearly always some level of disappointment.

I've come to the conclusion that two things are for sure - I need to lower my expectations, and the rest of the world needs more polish.