We Are All Programmers Now

Every once in a while you hear about an accident someone has using a spreadsheet. One of the more recent and frightening ones involved the British NHS Covid-19 tracking spreadsheet that lost a lot of data. But other (hopefully less serious) stories regularly involve the corruption of data like messing up pasted-in Greek letters or mis-interpreting some numbers for calendar dates. 

These accidents are kind of like autocorrect (which should perhaps be renamed “overcorrect”), but instead of automatically changing the spelling of a word, it changes the numbers and other data you might type or paste into a cell. And you might not notice.

Microsoft Word and other word processors are expecting you to input text. Whether it’s a love letter or a resume or a grocery list, it assumes you’re typing words into it. You might also paste a picture or two, but it’s still only trying to figure out where to display it in relation to the text. It doesn’t claim to know anything much about the words you enter except how to spell them and some pedantic grammar rules. Excel, on the other hand, isn’t a tool for merely displaying and printing out nice, neat tables: that’s just a by-product. The real job of a spreadsheet is to do math, and we don’t realize that whenever we type numbers or words or other symbols into Excel, it’s fully expecting to do mathematical things to them. Whether you know it or not, you’re programming a computer. Excel gives you the settings and tools to specify exactly what kind of numbers you’re typing in (e.g. money, percentages or text) but most of us go with the default setting.

So using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets to make a quick table of words and numbers that you just want to read might be a bit like using a blender for a flower vase: it will hold whatever you put in it even though it might look a little awkward. And it might do something unexpected and violent to its contents if you’re not careful.

The Things We Carry

Laptops are much better suited than smartphones to all but the simplest of tasks, but we’re willing to give up ease-of-use for portability. Smartphones have really, really good cameras these days, but not as good as an actual camera with a lens the size of a rocks glass.

Using a smartphone can be like having a superpower and a disability at the same time. You can access and work with all the knowledge of the world, but only by peeking through a narrow (albeit rather high-resolution) aperture; navigable with only 1 or 2 fingers. And that’s before we consider the quality of any given app.

My pocket tool has a knife (which works great), a pliers (which works pretty well) and screwdriver bits (which work OK, as long as you don’t have to turn them for too long). The idea of having a power circular saw built-in to a pocket multi-tool might sound kind of cool at first, but if my pocket tool had one, there’s a good chance that using it would be either terrifying or incredibly annoying.

The things we carry in our purses or pockets are for convenience (not to be confused with genuine ease), not necessarily for quality.

Eye of the Tiger

I awoke to a noise at 5am one day last week and immediately became aware of two things, one completely understandable and one utterly inexplicable: the first was that the smart speaker in the kitchen was playing music, the second was that the song was “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. I fumbled with my smartphone, first laying on the nightstand, then held by both puzzled, drowsy hands until I could turn it off.

The complexity and brittleness of today’s modern technology didn’t allow me to immediately rule out a purely modern technological explanation for the music playing, e.g. a brown-out, an obscure firmware glitch or a faulty TCP-IP packet. But I had other suspicions, confirmed once I inspected the kitchen: items disturbed in the area of the speaker, and a small amount of cat vomit containing plant matter which matched the plant sitting next to the speaker.

The smart speaker has a capacitive touch control on its top surface, allowing the user to pause/play and increase or decrease the volume. It is rather a sensitive interface, as most smartphone users will acknowledge, that is easily—and not infrequently—inadvertently activated by attempting to wipe off it’s dusty surface with a sleeved arm, or accidentally brushing against it while working in the kitchen.

One of our cats can sometimes become particularly restless early in the morning, and the evidence points toward his foraging on the counter (because he cannot possibly learn to not eat the damn plants that always, always, always make him puke every single time), accidentally activating the smart speaker and then fleeing the scene, knocking over the items during his escape.

“Eye of the Tiger”, indeed.

Device Register Revisited

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to our devices can be tricky. That’s a relatively recent development; an older problem is how our devices talk to us. Siri and Alexa actually sound normal enough to not be jarring—if they correctly interpret our request—and I would expect that to continue to steadily improve.

But there’s still a need for getting printed communication right, and it seems there will “always” need to be a human to look closely at text rendered on the screen to help. A classic example for those of us of a certain age is the dreaded “syntax error” message of early computer systems. Frustrating and opaque, there is almost no information contained therein: the programmer may as well have left off the word “syntax” and just had the single word “error” displayed instead. It might have been less infuriating.

I spotted a somewhat more amusing example at a grocery store recently. At the self-checkout, the display admonished me to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” This could be taken two different ways. One would be as enthusiastic encouragement to participate in the grocery shopping process; to get into the spirit of commerce and joyfully ring up those eggs, asparagus and bell peppers and get them into a bag so I can go home and make a frittata! Oh, boy!

But another reading might feel like you’ve been transported to a busier, perhaps slightly grittier grocery store, where even the machines are in a hurry. One might feel like the message to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” could easily be followed by “I don’t have all day!” or “There’s other people in line, pal!”

The difference, of course, is tone, which isn’t something that our devices have a lot of flexibility with yet when they are speaking. (That will be an entirely different and possibly much more amusing chapter in voice assistant development.) But it’s also something that requires much more care any time that text is displayed that you might ordinarily simply say out loud. At a time that everyone is forming text messages exactly the same way they would speak, the mistaken assumption is that you know how I sound in my head just by the words I’m typing. Perhaps that’s why we lean on emoji to ensure the other person knows what we mean. ;)

Lasting Effects

The most obvious and well-known danger of using dull knives is that you’ll have to use so much force to cut something that you’ll slip and cut yourself. But a subtler, more problematic danger is getting used to dull knives.

If you’re used to using sharp knives and you find yourself in the situation of having to use a dull knife, you automatically get a warning when you realize that you can’t cut as accurately or efficiently as you expect to. You can then decide to sharpen the knife, find another knife or even proceed at risk.

But if you’re used to using dull knives and you find yourself in the situation of suddenly using a sharp knife, you may be surprised at how efficiently it cuts. “Surprised” here might mean that you cut deeper or differently than you’re expecting. Depending on the exact circumstances, you may even cut something you never intended to.

Using a dull or a bad tool is dangerous each time you use it. But the lasting effects of using a bad, dull tool over and over again can gradually make even a good, sharp tool dangerous.

The Economics of Convenience

From classical economics:

The return on land is rent.

The return on labor is wages.

The return on capital is interest.

The return on management is profit.

When I took economics in college, there was some debate about what the return on technology really was. (I’ll throw in my two cents by suggesting that it’s markets.) But it’s a different consideration in personal economics. If we’re already well-off, the return on technologies that make things “quick and easy” is probably just additional leisure time.

But what’s the return on “slow and difficult”?

Avocado, Bagel, Cutting Board

Some of the most common hand injuries admitted to the ER are cuts from preparing avocados and bagels. I don’t have the statistics on the reasons people give to doctors and nurses as they’re getting their wounds cleaned and bandaged, but I can make some pretty good guesses:

“I was in a hurry”, “I wasn’t being careful enough”, “My knife just slipped.”

I can sympathize: I’ve had my fair share of near misses.

The problem with this particular situation isn’t necessarily just underestimating what can go wrong—it’s what happens when you actually succeed. Or, more precisely, what happens right after you succeed.

We tend to look at some tools and technologies as the entire solution to the problem. In the case of cutting an avocado in two, we grab the part of the knife that fits our hand and vigorously apply force to the avocado-problem with the part of the knife that fits the avocado. At this point, however, the line between success and failure is razor-thin if our other hand happens to be supporting the avocado-problem.

Cutting boards are boring. They’re one more thing to get out, clean and put away. But boring things like cutting boards (and parking brakes and hard drive backups) are highly underrated, and it might make a lot of sense to consider a knife and cutting board as forming a system that can gracefully withstand your successes as well as your failures.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Rock: our basic, inherent nature and needs.

Paper: (mostly) pre-modern technologies that address those needs: food, conversation, hugs, a good book or meaningful, healthy movements , e.g. work, play, exercise.

Scissors: high-technology solutions to our basic needs and problems: NETFLIX, cars, maple bacon doughnuts and anything with a touchscreen.

Paper covers (read: “soothes”) rock, by definition above.

And yes, scissors cuts paper, i.e. makes it look stupid and primitive and inefficient, even though paper works totally fine most of the time. (Paper is a wonderful technology, by the way.)

Rock breaks scissors, but probably only after scissors sits next to rock, distracting it and tricking it into creating an account by presenting an interesting article headline, which the rock knows is probably just clickbait, but the rock is really enjoying a mocha frappachino in an overstuffed chair, procrastinating doing real work, so why not? (As an unusually literal example, I could tell you a story about an ordinarily mild-mannered friend who actually went completely Office Space on an ink jet printer in his driveway after his patience ran out.)

Seems like the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is itself broken when a computerized laser scissors with soft-touch handles gets to play and starts seriously messing with the rock. Rock may need to get better at recognizing scissors for what they are instead of being fooled by the fancy Kickstarter video presentation that scissors put together. Rock should probably rethink its strategy against scissors, because scissors is not even playing the same game.

Our basic, biological, bedrock nature can be tricked and hacked for our short-term convenience and enjoyment, but the fact is “scissors” are brittle and can’t solve every problem in the long term. They’re an adjunct, not a substitute for “paper”. “Paper” is natural and flexible—a set of holistic approaches that developed with “rock” over a much longer period of time than “scissors” have had. “Paper” is pretty reliable, even if it seems a little boring or tedious at times.

Coffee Makers

Four of us enjoyed a rare gathering outside, spaced several feet distant around a backyard fire pit on a frigid afternoon. Our friends told us that they had tried different coffee brewing methods and settled on a Chemex brewer for their morning cup: ideal for its excellent flavor and fast clean-up.

The subject of coffee preparation has come up a couple of times lately. It’s interesting to note the machines and accessories and techniques people prefer: what makes good coffee, the right amount of coffee, what’s too much fuss, etc. It’s an interesting lens to look through when you consider all the choices available. So what is it we’re making, anyway?

For some people, coffee is just hot brown water that needs to happen—quickly—in order for life to continue. For others, there are subtle flavors to be gently coaxed out. Less often, there are those that value the ritual just as much as the final product, perhaps more—coffee as an act of creation. For some, coffee is a medium for delivering flavored syrups or milk.

To be clear, I try not to judge what anyone likes to drink, even though I sometimes poke fun at the tastes of friends and family. Some people find the very idea that a well-brewed cup of coffee is important to be faintly ridiculous, but I can't hear them over the sound of my conical burr grinder.

It is extremely tempting to equate a particular method or device with a level of discernment and taste, but it’s not always so. A coffee brewer is a lever that you pull. (metaphorically speaking, of course: very few have actual levers) You might just need the lever to efficiently produce coffee. Or you might think that the lever should be especially beautiful to look at or a pleasure to use. The lever might be cheap or durable or small enough to fit on the counter. You might enjoy adjusting and tweaking the lever until it's just right before you pull it with practiced skill.

But we are the coffee makers: we're firmly, if sometimes sleepily, gripping one end of that lever. (And merely pulling that lever is doing subtle work on us, too.) Any of the brewers can be supplied with high or low-quality coffee beans and water, and can be operated with varying levels of care. The gadgets we select are a small subset of a dozen different factors that impact what we use and how we use it to get a good (or maybe just good enough) cup of coffee.

Bodies in Motion

There is something about the swing of a pendulum or the sweep of a second hand. You know that there is a machine at work, but it’s still relatable. After all, we’ve chosen to call the pointy things on analog clocks “hands”, not “pointers” or “indicators”. (I might have chosen to call them “arms”, since they’re much longer than they are wide, but no one asked.) Those kinds of clocks have faces, too.

Lots of things have anatomical names: tables and chairs have legs and a back (OK, everything seems to have a back—it’s usually on the other side of the front), hammers and nails have heads, bread can have a heel, bolts can have shoulders and roofs can have hips. It’s easy to think that when we needed to name these parts or features, perhaps the thing that came to mind was the body part it reminded us of. Everybody knows what an elbow is, so if you’re looking through a pile of plumbing parts…

Digital clocks are minimalist information displays: compact and efficient. Four or six digits that change abruptly, a little punctuation and maybe an “AM” or “PM”. No second hand, whether a continuous sweep or discrete movement. No movement through space, however confined, to trace the passage of time. No face, no hands—no features that I would be tempted to name after a part of my body or anyone else’s. (No, “colon” doesn’t count. And stop giggling.)

We have an intuitive grasp of mechanical movements, since we are very much physical beings, and we can often imitate them. We have an appreciation for the qualities of acceleration and speed, precision and tempo because we recognize them as desirable.

But a mechanical clock or analog gauge isn’t an organism. It’s something less than a tree, but something more than a carefully placed stick casting a shadow on the ground. It’s sophisticated and tangible, and we can see something of ourselves in its features and behavior, even if we have no need to name it.

Every Problem Looks Like a Full Dishwasher

The skill of being able to effectively and efficiently use a hammer is still valuable, but perhaps less frequently needed than it used to be. Nails and hammers have largely been replaced by screws and cordless screw guns, so the idea that every problem could look like a nail is becoming ever more antiquated. (The need to occasionally smash things with some kind of hammer is perennial, however, which gives me solace.) I would posit that in these days of ubiquitous computing and relative isolation, almost every problem looks either like a login page or Tetris. 

The login page is self-evident: nearly everything that we used to do in person in order to trade money for goods or services is now done with the computer as a facilitator. Everything we need to do requires an online account of some kind—even if the service is free. Thus, the login page and attendant username and password.

Every other problem we face, it seems, is some variation on the game Tetris. Tetris is a video game challenge of correctly orienting and positioning colorful shapes on the ground that fall from the sky in order to form that most prized configuration: a perfectly flat surface which then disappears, preventing a growing pile of colorful but distressingly disorganized shapes not unlike the mountains of laundry that parents are regularly faced with. The strategy is, of course, to make these sometimes awkward shapes fit together in the most efficient, continuous form possible.

It is the familiar problem of trying to schedule another Zoom call with all the people whose schedules are already filled with Zoom calls. It is doing dishes for the 3rd time between the 7th and 8th Zoom calls of the day. It is packing endless scraps and leftovers into the refrigerator. It is stuffing a seemingly self-reproducing supply of Tupperware and Pyrex and disposable/reuseable/not-very-environmentally-responsible food containers into the god-dammed cupboard. It is getting the first load of laundry started early enough that the 3rd load of laundry will be dry before bed. It is wedging another 3 dishes into the dishwasher so that there is no need to wash dishes by hand for the 5th time today. (It is, sometimes, the very happy problem of not quite being able to fit all of the M&M cookies into the cookie jar.)

A password manager or a simple pad of Post-It Notes solves the problem of login pages, but we will need to build a hell of a robot to offload all our Tetris problems.

The Source of Tension

The day after Thanksgiving we struck out for the Christmas tree farm and cut down our trees, as is our custom. Trees, plural, because we get a giant one to put in the open stairwell by our front door, and another, more reasonable-sized tree to put in a normal-sized room. Some years it’s been convenient to stick them both in our almost-an-SUV and let the crowns of the trees hang out the back. But when we get a tree that takes advantage of the full height of the entryway (about 18 feet) it seems more appropriate to secure it to the top of the car instead.

Traditionally, this would be done with ropes or baler twine, but now ratchet straps seem to have largely usurped their place in the world of securing loads. Nylon webbing is extremely strong and has the added bonus of getting tangled less easily than a traditional rope, and there’s no question that it’s simpler to use than it is to remember how to tie a trucker’s hitch or even a taut line hitch once a year. 

In fact, there are all manner of “new” gadgets for making ropes taut instead of tying a knot or hitch: fixtures with odd geometries that allow one to wrap the rope around it to secure it and others with special cams to hold the rope in place under load. Fun gadgets that offload the job of memory and practice: an outsourcing of skill to clever product design. Any why not? Tension is the key (especially at highway speeds) and the mechanism for creating and maintaining it is secondary.

Maybe next year, just for fun, I’ll bring a long hank of old rope to the farm next year and look up the knots I need on YouTube. After all, neither the rope nor the tree care if I’m skilled or just connected to the internet.

Two Kinds of Careful

If a knife is really sharp, you have to be very careful with the edge: it’s going to efficiently cut whatever it touches. If a knife is really dull, you have to be very careful with the pressure you’re exerting: it’s going to be difficult to stop if the blade slips off to one side or it suddenly plunges through.

The first kind of careful requires you to be attentive and skillful.

The second kind of careful demands much more of both.

The Classic Hammer Problem

It suggests that you don’t actually have any other tools; just a hammer. Maybe even only one kind of hammer.

That’s always been an oversimplification—a useful one, to be sure—but we’re way past that now. We’ve got every kind of hammer and screwdriver and saw and pliers you can imagine; both metaphorical and literal.

I think the more difficult and realistic scenario is that we find ourselves faced with a problem and the hammer is already in our hand, tempting us with an immediate, if inappropriate, solution.

P.S. This is the blessing and the curse of having a multi-tool in your pocket at all times: it’s extremely convenient and it’s good enough at solving most common problems that it discourages going to the effort of fetching the right tool when the occasion demands it.

Variety

Before humans figured out how to cook food, we basically had to spend all day finding and chewing whatever raw foods we could: roots, animals, berries, insects, plants, etc. By learning to cook, we traded some of the time and effort we used to spend chewing for time and effort spent cooking: working with wood, fire and raw plants and animals to make something to eat that didn’t require an entire damn afternoon of gnawing and chomping. Cooking introduced early humans to a new set of skills, a completely new set of activities.

It also increased the number of things we could eat, by making more things edible. (It also meant that we could sensibly talk about eating something besides a cold salad buffet.) It enabled the very idea of a cuisine.

One simple concept—applying heat to food—has replaced foraging and chewing with an abundance of different ways to spend our time and enjoy our meals.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Press “Play”

A phonograph record is played differently than the radio or an 8-track cassette. A (compact) cassette, a VHS cassette and a CD are played a bit more similarly. A CD and a DVD play exactly the same, in more ways than one. And a YouTube video and a podcast and streaming music all play identically.

Conceptually, for the user, there has ceased to be any difference at all between playing speech, music or video because the media has effectively disappeared and the interfaces have unified under the same abstraction. We tap the “play” button and off we go. The universality of that interaction is enormously efficient and convenient for everyone.

What has not gotten any easier—indeed, what has become paradoxically more tedious, technical and yet somehow more manageable—is troubleshooting the system when it doesn’t work. An internet search of the troubling symptoms can helpfully reveal a potential problem with your OS, a workaround for the app or maybe even a limitation of the hardware. Or maybe you just don’t have enough bandwidth at the moment.

When things are working properly, they are all alike; when they malfunction, they each malfunction in their own very specific ways.

The Endurance of Symbols

Yup, cameras still look like this.

Cool: everybody who has a decent podcast has a microphone like that!

OK, I haven’t had a phone that looked like this in my house for decades, but I guess they’re still like that at work… (Remember going to work?)

Nobody who’s voting for the first time this year really knows what this is.

The Mother of Invention

Sometimes when you need to solve a problem of organization or material handling, looking at the items you can get in a grocery store or a big box store is helpful. I’ve already extolled the virtues of trays, but there are more!

Need something cheap to hold a lot of little parts in a single layer? Try a rimmed baking sheet. Need to make sure all those little parts don’t slide around everywhere? Put a silicone baking mat on top of the baking sheet. Food storage containers excel at keeping cables and partially disassembled assemblies in one place without losing anything. (And they usually stack!) Need to run some experiments on how various materials respond to certain solvents? Throw them in some canning jars. (Well, there were canning jars last year…)

(This goes both ways, of course: the line between scientific equipment and cookware is completely blurred now as well, with sous vide machines, vacuum sealers, dehydrators and other gadgets.)

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but hospitality and food service are its midwives.

Every Technology Since Fire

Before fire was mastered things were, in fact, simpler. By definition, there was no gathering of firewood, making the fire, stoking the fire, yelling at the kids to stay away from the fire, cleaning up around the fire pit, etc.

After fire, there was a lot more to do and there was a lot more to think about: who’s going to keep the fire going, when are they going to be back with more firewood, where should we build tomorrow’s fire ‘cause this spot sucks and don’t even get me started about how bad the smoke is from this crappy wood.

And more serious considerations: getting badly burned, accidentally burning down your house or having to flee the area because now the meadow is on fire. But fire meant warmth, protection and the almost immeasurable benefits of cooking.

Every technology developed since then has had complications: maintenance, second-order effects, misuse and abuse—and just plain difficulties when trying to use it. Just getting a new technology to work at all is hard, but I think it’s much harder to see clearly in advance what kind of complications might arise when the adoption and use of it scales up.

Because we’re far more clever at using things that already exist than we are at making brand new ones.

Leverage Happens at a Distance

Human language—real human language—happens in the mouth and the throat, not on the page, not on the screen. Face-to-face, back and forth between two mouths and four ears, in real time.

Fresh foods, simply prepared, is what some people would call real human food: unprocessed, unpackaged, free of preservatives. And possibly prepared by a family member a few hours earlier.

Real human movement, from our first cries as a baby, to cradling a baby in our arms, to simple walking while carrying a jug of water or bundle of sticks, happens within arm’s length with the force that our arms can provide, for results that are tangible.

Technology makes all three of these things more powerful and/or accessible through leverage, from the words you’re reading now to frozen pizzas to bulldozers. In exchange for money, we can get more benefit for less effort. But without care and attention, we’re further from the people we connect with, the food we eat and even our own bodies.

Leverage is a fine thing, and I wouldn’t do without it, but leverage happens at a distance.