Hung Truong: The Blog!

blink – Malcolm Gladwell: Book Report!

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction books lately. A lot has been written about Malcolm Gladwell’s books so I figured I’d grab a bunch from the library. I just finished reading “blink.” I haven’t read The Tipping Point or Outliers just yet. Anyway, I thought I’d write a quick review.

Blink tells the story of our subconscious (Gladwell uses “unconscious” which kinda bugs me) brain’s ability to make split-second decisions. Basically, he argues that we’ve evolved to “thin-slice” certain experiences (recognizing when a fake statue just doesn’t look right or hearing a singer who turns out to be a natural). That ability can be used in other contexts if we could just determine the important variables and block out everything else.

Gladwell is a really good writer; his stories are interesting and they flow well. Unfortunately, the actual substance feels like it lacks the scientific rigor that I’m used to. For example, he has a chapter on the aforementioned thin-slicing – only taking in the important elements of a situation and deciding based on those. Later, he discounts thin-slicing because it leads to us stereotyping entire ethnicities and cultures. He gives an example where music executives hear a singer who they know is a natural hit (and cites Fred Durst as an expert, which makes me throw up in my mouth a little). Unfortunately the executives fail when it turns out that actual listeners don’t like the artist. Another story is about a wargame that the army set up where the advanced system succumbed to paralysis by analysis. It was a really weak example of thin-slicing and had very little to do with the theory he described earlier. I think he just wrote that chapter to fill up the book.

The book is full of inconsistencies and it seems like Gladwell is trying to tie everything into a cohesive theory. The thing is he fails at it pretty horribly. What we end up with is a bunch of nice stories and no overarching theory of anything. They’re just stories. Are they interesting? Yeah, but they contradict each other and end up making the book weaker in its narrative.

As a counter-example, Duncan Watts has a way of writing interesting stories and linking them all together in Six Degress (how appropriate). Also fun to note is that I believe there’s some kind of nerd feud going on between Watts and Gladwell. I tend to believe Duncan Watts because he’s a super badass and has numbers to back up his theories.

I dunno if I’ll read any additional Gladwell books at this point. I’ll probably try some other authors first and go back if I run out of other stuff to read.

Free Birthday Stuff Adventure in Ann Arbor!

Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve been aware of this giant list of free stuff to get in Ann Arbor on your birthday at ArborWiki, and since my last day of work was on Friday and I’m basically on vacation, I figured I’d try and get as much free stuff as possible. This is my story.

Firefox 3.5 beta 99 – Get Multitouch Gestures Back!

I just updated to the newest beta of Firefox 3.5 and it’s apparently beta 99. This is pretty funny because the previous one was 4. I think it’s just an indicator that they’re pretty close to a release candidate.

One thing I really like about Firefox (at least these beta versions) is that they support multitouch gestures on my Macbook Pro. Pinching zooms out, un-pinching (spreading?) zooms in, three finger swipe up goes to the top of the page and three finger swipe down goes to the bottom. This is really cool.

One of the weirder ones is that twisting with two fingers lets you go back and forth between tabs. I thought it was wacky at first but now I think it’s very useful. For some reason, the default value for this gesture is disabled in the newest version (beta 99). It’s also disabled in Shiretoko, the nightly build. I tried looking in the preferences to control this but they weren’t in there. Then I remembered about:config.

To get the twist thing back, type “about:config” into the address bar. Then find the settings that say “browser.gesture.twist” The setting for “browser.gesture.twist.left” should be “Browser:PrevTab”  and the one for .right should be “Browser:NextTab” like so:

Voila! Your twisty tab changing gestures will be back!

Quarterlife Crisis!

Today, I turn 26. I think I can officially have a “quarterlife crisis.” Yes, I know that’s pretty generous, assuming I’ll live to 104, but hey, with science and technology, maybe life expectancies will shoot up…

Though I used the term previously, I recently read about it at Krunk4Ever. That led me to an article about the phenomenon, which led me to a book on the subject. I checked the book out from the library (Shapiro Undergraduate, AKA the UGLi) and figured it’d be an interesting read.

Basically, the phenomenon is that people these days are on a fixed track for much of their lives, up til around their twenties. They go to grade school, do well in that, go to college, do well, and maybe go to grad school. After getting a terminal degree, they actually have choices to make. They need to decide what they’ll do for the rest of their lives. This can seem daunting, apparently. I suppose I myself feel that way, though mostly I think it’s empowering and exciting.

The article I read was concise and informative. The book is a bit too long, too colloquial and seems to talk down to the reader a bunch. There’s also lots of random references, like a testimonial that uses Back to the Future to drive home the point about rejection (Marty’s dad is a wuss). Basically, the book is composed of a bunch of examples of people who had quarterlife crises and what they did to get out of them. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts (of the amount I read (I only got about halfway through the book before deciding it’s a waste of my reading time)):

… I realized that I don’t want to make marriage my goal, because I’m afraid that if marriage is a goal for me, then I’ll settle for some less-than-perfect man when I hit 30 just because the time is right… I have a backup plan: if I’m not married by 30, I’ll buy a cat (I already have two). And then if I’m still single at 35, I’ll buy another cat. And then, if I’m still single at 40, I’ll buy another cat, which means my goal in life is this: at the age of 40, I’ll either be married or have five cats.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Sandra has an ALA-accredited degree… Librarian!

Maybe one thing that just annoys me about the book is it’s full of whiny twentysomethings complaining about their lives that aren’t really that bad. Everyone wants a job that’s fulfilling and interesting. But those don’t come easily; if they did, everyone would have them. The book claims the profiles are from multiple ethnicities and regions of the US, but it reads like Stuff White People Like. This is kind of amazing because the book came out years before the blog.

I guess my own experience has been a bit different. For a while I didn’t know what I’d end up doing, but I was pretty confident I’d be okay in the end. I just realize that as bad as things might seem, they could definitely be worse. I’ve also been extremely lucky, getting into a great graduate school program, securing a job before graduation, etc, so maybe I have enough direction that this crisis doesn’t apply.

I’ve had a few life experiences that have shown me that living life to the fullest is really important. There isn’t really time to doubt yourself and get into a slump. After all, the quarterlife crisis assumes you will live to 100. It assumes that you will have much more life ahead of you. While that may be true, I’ve seen firsthand that life can be cut very short. I think the trick is living with intention and enjoying life howevér you can. Roll with the punches; play it by ear. This doesn’t mean to forgo planning, but don’t sacrifice too much for the distant (unpredictable) future. It sounds cliché, but really, I think it’s a good motto to have.

Some people are not even lucky enough to reach their quarterlife crisis. That seems to make the “crisis” seem a bit more manageable. While this is a pretty far-out comparison (being unsure of your life is better than being dead), I think it helps to put the thing into perspective. Be sure to check back in ~25 years for my mid-life crisis thoughts!

Shuffling and Randomizing Algorithms for Music Playlists

I’ve been messing around with iTunes and the DJ functionality. It seems like all it does is pick random songs out of the library and shows them in the order they’ll be played (unlike shuffle, which just randomly jumps around). Typically, I like to put my iTunes library on random when I’m listening. This allows me to hear a bunch of different music in my library. If I don’t like a certain song, I’ll skip it, unless I’m not really paying attention.

I find that the most important piece of metadata in my iTunes library is probably “play count.” This is a pretty good indicator of how much I like a song. It’s a bit off sometimes though, since I might really like a new song with a lower play count because I haven’t had a chance to listen to it 80 times. I use a smart playlist that sorts on “play count” to determine which songs to stick into my iPhone on sync since the phone can’t hold my entire music library. Generally it works well. Perhaps there could be another measure like “normalized play count” that takes into account how long the song has existed in my library.

The iTunes DJ is pretty lacking in terms of how you can weigh what will randomly show up next. You can basically click a box that says “play higher rated songs more often.” I don’t rate my songs (the metadata gets thrown away pretty quickly as I move from computer to computer or Mac to PC, etc), so this feature doesn’t do a lot for me. I prefer the implicit rating (play count) versus the explicit rating (star rating) because the implicit way to do it is natural and doesn’t require me to do anything extra.

I’d like there to be a “play songs with a higher play count more often” feature. This could be bad, though, because it’d lead to a sort of rich get richer deal. So weighting would be important. I’d say it’d be a good heuristic to give each song a probability of “(playcount + 1)/(total number of library plays + # of songs)” to be played. That way the more popular songs (the ones I like more) are played more often, but other songs still have a chance to be played as well (and skipped). There might be other better algorithms for weighing songs based on play count that don’t lead to an unnatural skew (which would mess up the point of having the feature in the first place).

Another thing I could do is prune all of the songs I skip most out of my library. I’m too much of a digital packrat to do that, though, so I guess a smarter algorithm will have to suffice.