Facebook hires developers who specialize in coding computer software

"As part of Facebook's recent growth spurt, the company has hired developers to specialize in coding computer software."
-- CNN report, July 7, 2011

I'm really excited to talk to you about some of Facebook's new features. As I've said at previous keynotes, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to make the world more open, more connected, and more awkward. That sensation you got in high school when you stood in the corner of the cafeteria, eating while standing up to make it look like you were still in line-- Facebook will spread that like paste over the entire internet, and then we will put that paste in your pocket through our mobile initiative. We call it awkward pocket paste.

Let's talk about the website. The next step in the evolution of the site and the product is to give people more power and tools to share information and confuse their grandparents. Some of the infrastructure we're developing breaks new ground in the field of computer science, which is why we're hiring coders from across five continents and twelve geological strata to improve Facebook's core usability. Here are a few examples.

The news feed shows you the status updates that your friends have been posting to their Facebook profiles, such as the running tally of their cat's hairball expectorations. Now, in what order do we show these updates? Thanks to our new hires, Facebook can apply the latest and most sophisticated sorting algorithms to present you the specific updates that are most relevant and necessary to your life at the very moment you're checking Facebook, that is, while you're on the toilet with your iPhone. Any old coder can do a bubble sort or insertion sort, whatever those are, and if you ask me, they sound kind of dirty. Our software developers can code one thing extremely well, and that's randomness. I'm just going to call up on the screen here the news stream for a random keynote attendee-- how about you in the front row, Frederick Whipplesmith. You may protest at first, but once I broadcast your stream to the conference and all our online viewers, and also the international press corps that's in attendance, I think you'll be pretty impressed with what we can do.

So, here's Frederick's stream. Lots of updates from his friends about their cats' hairballs, with a few of photos of Frederick sporting a mankini while funnelling wine coolers. Okay, very cool. Now, click "most recent" in the upper right, where it says 373 new posts, and what do you get? 373 most recent posts? No. You get a random number of status updates and photos from an assortment of friends, non-friends, acquaintances, in-laws, and congressmen. Which is pretty neat, because randomness is hard, if not impossible to implement in computer code. Facebook is introducing new frontiers of randomness to privacy, interface settings, news feed selection, and soap warehousing. That last thing? Random.

Think it's easy to be random? Go ahead, try it right now-- think of something random and post it to your Facebook status. Guess what, it's exactly the same thing as you posted yesterday, about how your landlady refuses to replace your broken recycle bin. Very original. That's not random. You clearly don't have what it takes to work at Facebook.

The next issue I want to talk about is data portability. Now, I'm really glad we've hired developers who specialize in coding computer software, because this is something we couldn't have done (or even known about) without them. What is data portability? That's an excellent question, and instead of answering, I'll give you an example. All of the data that you provide to Facebook-- your photos, messages, web surfing habits, and dental records-- all of those things are like little precious gemstones that we hoard in an undisclosed location as part of a policy we call Operation Marketer's Wet Dream. These gemstones belong to Facebook, and we can string them into necklaces that we wear while working nude in our offices. Those offices used to be in Palo Alto, but as you know we've recently moved to Menlo Park, and if your privacy gemstones weren't portable, they would have strangled our necks while we were loading the moving van with hard-copies of your frathouse bender photos. Clearly, data portability is very important, even if it isn't random.

So there you have it-- Facebook's latest changes and updates. Some of them will move the social landscape underneath uncharted waters of creepy awkwardness, which is pretty cool. If you're a software developer, and if your speciality is computer code in particular, then Facebook would be interested in looking at your résumé. Don't bother submitting it, really. Just keep it on your hard drive somewhere, or print it out and leave it on your office desk in view of your webcam. We'll get to it eventually.

The cartoon evil genius of newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch

Of course Rupert Murdoch is evil. This shouldn't be surprising. Let's analyze his name.

First, your cartoon evil genius name needs a good suffix. -ock, -ok, and -och are all variant spellings of a classic with long, demonstrable history of Sinistrosity:

Morlock, Gorlock, Doc Oc, Spurlock, and to a lesser extent, Hordak.

Then, you need a stem on which to append that suffix. Evil-sounding nouns are all good candidates. Hate, Death, Hell, Crime, or in a nice self-referential twist, Evil. But to really cap off your evil cartoon genius, you just can't beat an evil-sounding adjective. Maim, kill, rape, belch-- I think we can all agree that those are evil verbs. But across all cultures, times, and places, no evil activity is more universal than murder, which is why I suggest appending the evil suffix "-och" to the evil stem "murd." Murdoch. Now that sounds evil!

How about a first name? Here it gets complicated. Even in the case of cartoon villainy, you don't want your genius to fall victim to overkill. That's why there aren't many badguys named Evilman Killestro or Hatebringer Deathovich. Evil geniuses should have that element of genteel panache to them, like Professor Moriarty, or Dr. Evil, whose first name, "Dr." connotes many long years of study at evil medical school, as he would be quick to point out.

Overkill avoidance is therefore the reason why your evil cartoon genius must have a boring, whitebread, WASPy name. In naming our cartoon evil genius, we must employ Chiaroscuro, the method of the Italian masters, in which bold contrasts between light and dark heighten the impact of the composition. To highlight the patent evil of the surname, the first name should sound elegant and refined, such as James, Winston, Preston, or Huntington. Be careful not to employ the diminutive version of these names, because that will immediately convert your genteel evil genius into a superhero, or worse, a hero's childlike bubbly sidekick. Following the the above examples, no super villain should ever have a first name like Jimmy, Winnie, Presto, or Hunt-Hunt. So forget that. Ignore the diminutive temptation. If you stick with high-falutin' pretentiousness, such as an English adaptation of the German name Hroberahtus which itself is a variant of Robert, you should be set.

Yes. Rupert. Perfect.

And that's why, when it comes to evil cartoon geniuses, Rupert Murdoch takes the cake. Without paying for it. Because that's stealing. And it's what evil geniuses do.

STDU distracts us

Here on Shiny Things Distract Us (STDU), we report on those shiny things... that distract us. An example: STDU distracts us!

STDU: Scientific and Technical Documentation Utility.

Hooray for STDU!

(via Lifehacker)

Doggerel dogfight; a bad poetry competition

My wife and I had a Bad Poetry Competition the other day; 10 minutes to write an impromptu dash of doggerel so eye-wateringly bad that the reader would have no choice but to commit suicide. You have been warned! Here are our entries. Who won?

Her entry:

"Poem 1"
By Pharaohmagnetic's wife, aka "A wench in the works"

The VitaMix
Is no arbiter
Of degrees of miscegenation
Whether things float to the top and are pushed down
Or incorporate in a smooth, foamy, emulsification
It cannot show you the way out.

My entry:

"Turbulent Hyperbole"
by Pharaohmagnetic

Turbulent hyperbole engorges on me verbally
While silent flights of guile
Bestride the islands of my mind.
Vanity, insanity are unto me profanity
Where more can see the side of me
Inside the violent brine.
Are thunder-tossed belittlements a little brittle
ever since
The fissures of the tissue in my brain
filled up with spit?
I cannot bluff or cough enough
to underseat the powder puff
that whittles at the spittle that exuberates my eyes.

More bad poetry featured on Shiny Things Distract Us: Here, here, and here.

"I am the author of all things"

Here on Shiny Things Distract Us, Fraxas is the real Code-Wizard-Software-Developer-Computer-Programmer guy; I'm just a meatspace lab monkey. What limited experience I have with the world of algorithms and other abstractions comes from my occasional use of Mathematica to model data or solve the Python Challenge. I really love Mathematica; it's fun and easy to tool around with. If I had learned to code with Mathematica, rather than the tooth-cracking monstrosity that is C++ or Motorola 6800 machine language, I might have discovered enough enjoyment to find a calling. Oh well! Back to the soldering iron.

I've blogged (if tangentially) about Mathematica and its creator, Stephen Wolfram, before. His latest project, Wolfram Alpha, has been picking up a lot of buzz, and I'm very excited to try it out next month or so. (Here are two Slashdot posts on the subject: 1, 2.)

Stephen Wolfram's outsize ego, as made physical in the sheer mass and pagecount (1197) of his vanity-published book A New Kind of Science, is the source of much controversy. Basically, he argues that all of science and nature can be explained by simple cellular automata, a claim that may be neither New nor a Kind of Science. Nevertheless, I find Wolfram fascinating and amusing all at once, and I thank him for bringing Mathematica to the world.

But this is the best take-down of him, or anyone, that I have ever read. Hilarious:

bixx456's review of A New Kind of Science from Amazon.com.

More on Alpha below:

Quote of the Day

“Hey, you self-important humorless lemon-sucking purveyor of unrelenting grimness and despair: lighten up a bit, why don’t you?”

I think I just found my new catchphrase.

Source

A pun! My word.

One man's laughter is another manslaughter. That's the obvious pun. But according to Google, one man's laughter is another man's...

- poison
- disdain
- tears
- humiliation
- medicine
- painful tears
- annoyance
- annoyed grimace
- NOT...laughter?

Sheesh. There's a lot of hyper-literal, overwrought killjoys on the internet, wasting opportunities for a perfectly good pun(ishment).

Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

I actually do want a hug.

One Track Mind: On the Loose

A few weeks ago, Fraxas blogged about Stormy High by the band Black Mountain, calling them "a Canadian 70s-metal band" in all but chronological actuality. The reference touched off some free-associating on my part, and by the power of suggestion, I soon found myself listening to bona-fide Canadian 70s metal. To my delight and amazement, emusic offers a few albums from the back-catalogue of Saga, Canadian 70s metal band extraordinaire. Here I highlight their single hit On the Loose, which to this very day can be heard on the air waves of my hometown rock and roll radio stations. The unabashed synth virtuosity, the unironic pretensions to insanity, the echoing distant vocal stylings... I know I should be embarrassed to be writing this, but I'm not. I'm not. Every indier-than-thou geeky hipster has to have some guilty pleasure, right?

P.S. "On the Loose" is from Saga's 1981 album Worlds Apart, but I would like to still classify the song as Canadian 70s metal, because Saga was formed in 1977. Also, I need this post to make sense.

UPDATE: According to the titles at the intro of this youtube video, the song is actually from 1978! I win! But on second thought, upon actually watching the video, I realize just how embarrassed I should be feeling for blogging about this song. Very, very, very embarrassed.

The Pillows will Destroy us All

Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling is quite often brilliant. Never is this more true than when the comic strip satirizes comics itself. God-Man and Harvey Richards Esq., Lawyer for Children are both great recurring features, but they pale before the genius of Super Fun Pak Comix. This recent example made me laugh, because I have often suffered at the cruelty of too-abundant decorative pillows.

Art thou ready for some FOOTBALL?

If on the seventh day the toil of armoured men - armed with but their wits and strength, protected by their peers, their grunts, and plastic - attracts attention; if the names of Plaxico and Manning conjure faces and fond thoughts; and if the meter of this humble verse tickles fancy or imagination:

read, then, this link.

[Recovered Scenes from the Tragedy Plaxico by William Shakespeare, by Shane Ryan, on McSweeney's. Phenomenal.]

A Soundbite from Sterling

In this year's yearly interview with The WELL, Sterling issues this pronouncement:

I'm inclined to think the model [for local urban resilience in the face of nation-level leadership incompetence] is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year national existence.

So in order to be successful and happy in the face of the kind of collapse that the US may be faced with in the coming years, it has to become more like Italy.

(Aside: one of the problems with this idea is that the USA is geographically much more spread out, and population-wise much less dense, than that boot in the Med is. So the City-State of Boston might work, but Idaho and Wyoming would have two choices: retain a 'state'-like identity and continue to benefit from governmental services (like policing, banking, insurance, and defense) or become homesteaders-with-Internet.)

One Track Mind: Pianos From Hell

X-pressions, the 1997 album from X-ecutioners, is what happens when a group of DJs decide that it's time to step out from behind the masters of ceremony and take the limelight. Pianos From Hell is what happens when those same DJs have the composition chops to leave a beat almost entirely alone for three minutes.  The neat thing is that by doing that, they put the turntablism in the listener's mind.  I couldn't help but think of the scratching I'd do over that beat while it played.  You know how pretentious jazz drummers talk about the space between the noise being as important as the noise itself?  yeah, that.

One Track Mind: Frank, AB

I have a dilemma. I want this post to be about a track by the Rural Alberta Advantage, but something gnaws at my conscience.

Fraxas and I started out this project, One Track Mind, to automate our music-recommendation process. And, so far, it's working swimmingly. The tracks that Fraxas highlighted are all awesome, and I've assembled a playlist with all the posts so far. Listening to it is like drinking a tall glass of eclecticism made physical.

My dilemma comes from a long-debated issue that has faced music buffs from the early mists of time:

Single or album?

Fraxas and I are busy guys. We love to talk music. But the day is short, and thanks to certain sources, the pool of good music is deeper than I can ever remember. One track a week is a small commitment, manageable, digestible, and enough to ignite a decent conversation. As much as I appreciate a good album, we confine these blog posts to the subject of a single track at a time.

Critics, performers, and connoisseurs from all across the historical spectrum vary widely on this essential question. Some acts, such as Arcade Fire and Radiohead, insist that the album is a holistic experience, going so far as to prohibit the use of their tracks on compilations or to boycott music videos. On the other hand, to be blunt, most songs by most artists are terrible. By extension, the same is true of most albums.

Industry analysts agree that the true cause of Big Music's demise was its long track-record of releasing albums padded with filler. Given the public's short attention span and appetite for easily digestible singles, the rise of filesharing technology was only the catalyst for an overdue drop in album sales.

Now, I like singles as much as the next guy. I consider an album “good” if about half its songs are re-listenable. I don't take the extreme of deleting the tracks I don't like –-after all, HDD space is cheap-- but I'd consider a lot of my favourite tracks to be a Single experience. This would be true of most of my prior posts.

That's not to say I don't have my favourite albums. Radiohead's OK computer, Firewater's recent album the Golden Hour, and-- I'm not ashamed to admit it-- Achtung Baby by U2 are best experienced from the moment you press play. These are rare accomplishments that tower over even the selfsame band's remaining oeuvre, let alone the wider music world.

So here's my dilemma. Hometowns, the debut album of Toronto band The Rural Alberta Advantage, is one of the best I've ever heard. The whole thing hangs together like the Dude's Room before his carpet was peed on. It's Canadian Rock in all its thematic, heroic, unapologetic, anthemic, melodious glory, complete with lyrics that evoke geography and virtuoso, spare-kit percussion. What am I supposed to do? I can't pick out a single track to write about. It's too difficult. As pretentious as Arcade Fire and Radiohead are for their championship of the Whole Album, I'm afraid that I have to join their ranks in this case. Hometowns is 38 minutes of bliss. That's not a lot is it?

Okay, maybe it is. I will pick a track at random and blog about it in the only way that would be appropriate. Haiku.

Track Title: Frank, AB
Artist: the Rural Alberta Advantage
Album Title: Hometowns

Pizzicato first.
Cymbals rise towards chorus.
Heartbeat speeds, wordless.

One Track Mind: Stormy High

Yet Another independent rock band from eMusic's top 88 list (they make almost all my music recommendations these days), Black Mountain's a Canadian 70's-metal band.  At least, they are on In The Future, the only point of contact I've had with them.

The opening track of the album is a song entitled Stormy High.  I'm not sure what it's about - the lyrics are pretty vague - but the opening guitar riff is in 7/4, so they won immediate kudos for that. Then they won more kudos by extending the feel of classic metal - I'm thinking Sabbath vol 4, maybe pre-Wall floyd - through the entire track.  Guitar and bass mostly in unison on rising scale patterns, the keyboards acting more like percussion than anything else, drums that just keep on stomping forward, vocals that - despite the mildly cheesy female moan that surfaces in places - fit into the melody rather than wandering around it.

One Track Mind: St. Lawrence River

Lee Mellor is on eMusic's list of non-American Country artists (He's Canadian by birth). The cover of his 2007 album, Ghost Town Heart, is a moodily-lit portrait of him looking scruffy and tired and shaggy and all dressed in black, like a city dude's impression of what a country singer should look like. He's got a slightly nasal voice, a strong understanding of the tropes and patterns of alt-country, and enough Canadianness in his lyrics that I feel a connection to him I probably shouldn't.  Case in point: the song St. Lawrence River. It's a catchy ballad about bad choices and redemption that could have been set anywhere with a few minor lyrics changes. I've never seen the St. Lawrence; I can find it on a map, to be sure, and I know what it is and why it's important economically and historically and culturally, but it's not home in any meaningful sense of that word.  And yet, listening to Lee, I feel like nodding. You will too - but whether it's a feeling of shared experience, or just moving in time to a really catchy piece of alt-country, is up to you.

One Track Mind: I Lived on the Moon

Last time, I posted a video that, if briefly, portrayed a father-son relationship touched by fantastical tragedy. Here's another song/video in that series, via a long-ago post from metafilter.

Track Title: I Lived on the Moon
Artist: Kwoon
Album: Tales and Dreams

A high-quality download of the incredible video is here. It's by the animator Yannick.

Watch, listen, react.

One Track Mind: Transdermal Celebration

Track title: Transdermal Celebration
Artist: Ween
Album: Quebec

It is prudent to interpret the hipster-speak phrase "such-and-such are a band's band" as a warning that their music is inaccessible and impossible to appreciate from any rational perspective. Common examples: Radiohead, the Pixies. I love those bands, but let's not "Kid A" ourselves.

Ween is a band's band's band. They hop from one musical genre to another, all the while squirting virtuoso pieces of anti-serious songwriting, seltzer-like, into the clown-face of pop-culture. Once in a while, they record a straight-out pop-song that shows the world how easy it should be.

This video powerfully demonstrates that cartoons can be terrifying and poignant. Watch it when you have three and a half minutes to spare.

One Track Mind: Lovecraft in Brooklyn

Track title: Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Artist: Mountain Goats
Album: Heretic Pride

Whither H.P. Lovecraft? He of the overwrought, modern classical horror narratives, purveyor of all things "squamous" and "rugose?" He seems to be enjoying a minor renaissance among the net's intelligentsia, despite his bizarre proclivities towards eugenics and other outright violations of political correctness. Taste-makers from BoingBoing to MeFi peddle Cthulhu-themed tea-cozies and other mind-boggling, long-tail elements of niche hipster consumerism gone awry. Modern auteurs such as Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro borrow liberally from the fertile, feotid soil of ol' Howard Phillips' imagination, with admittedly entertaining results.

None of this excuses the truly execrecable aspects of Lovecraft's actual oeuvre, from his gender theories to his prose. And yet, despite his horribility, Lovecraft's stock continues to rise among present-day interwebbers. I can't explain it.

Now, something exists that might excuse these aspects of Lovecraft, and that is this song by the Mountain Goats.

H.P. Lovecraft, you can keep doing whatever it is you do, so long as you continue to posthumously inspire rock and roll such as this.

P.S. I like the double entendre of the song's rallying cry: "I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn." At first listen, I did not think of Lovecraft the Proper Noun, but rather "lovecraft" the possible neologism in the vein of "statecraft" or "songcraft." I feel like lovecraft in Brooklyn indeed.

Immersion

There's a link on today's Penny Arcade to what Tycho aptly describes as 'a meditation on starting into Fallout 3'. It's about appreciation and immersion, and it brought me to a pretty weird realization about myself.

This entry aside (oh god the irony), I don't spend all that much time in self-reflection; I prefer to live my life over thinking about it, even to the extent of preferring to plan as little as possible and just let events and other people's desires guide my actions. I like to think of myself as pretty immersed in my own life. But when I play games, I'm almost always playing some sort of meta-game, looking for cheats and walkthroughs on wikis. (Scroll down a bit, or ctrl-F for that link text, to see what I'm talking about there.  It's important, and not just for what I'm talking about now.) Even single-player games, where there's no competition, so there's no reward for metagaming. Why do I do that? Why do I have such a hard time turning in a quest without my refer-a-friend buddy there so I get triple XP?  Why do I reload my Civ games when Imperial Japan goes to war with me because of a decision I made 4 turns ago, so that I can repair the timeline and not get involved in the conflict until I have tanks and they barely have musketmen? The few times when the rules and context of a game have made it difficult to metagame -- Prince of Persia's built-in metastory comes to mind, as do the few times I've played 4x games multiplayer -- I've almost always enjoyed the game more.  But I can hardly stop myself from turning to the web when I hit the slightest roadblock, or from urging my friends to use voice comm in MMOs.

How do I just let the stories happen, and not worry about the man behind the curtain?