2011 March | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Mar

love you, mama, but you’re too proud to change

Posted by Perich at 7:40 am

While I’m thinking about Netflix, a quick question: why does Netflix care so much about improving their recommendation system?

Netflix made headlines years ago when it announced its Netflix Prize, a $1,000,000 bounty to whoever could build an algorithm that would improve the accuracy of its recommendations by 10%. When this award was claimed in 2009 by BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, Netflix gave them the million. They then announced a new prize for whoever could improve the system further (which was later canceled.

What’s in it for them?

My understanding of the Netflix business model is low fixed costs (giant DVD warehouse) plus low variable costs (envelope stuffers, postage, replacing scratched DVDs) vs. hefty subscription fees = profit. Even if Netflix buys its DVDs at retail prices – which they don’t – they only need to rent out each DVD three times to make back its cost. The margins are in the low transaction costs and the quick turnaround time.

I don’t see how a more accurate recommendation system adds value to that.

Someone help me out here? What am I missing? Netflix knows more about the video rental market than me, obviously (or even Blockbuster), so I’m willing to bet they know something I don’t. But what is it?

Mar

turn on the bright lights

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

How to Change the Brake Lights on Your Sedan:

Google “how to change brake lights [make] [model]“.
Read a few contradictory articles on eHow.
Head out to your car with an adjustable wrench, screwdriver and a pair of brake light bulbs.
Pop the trunk.
Unfold the interior panel on the side with the expired bulb.
Get to work unbolting the three bolts holding the brake light assembly into place. These bolts are designed such that they can really only be reached with a socket wrench, so your two-setting Craftsman adjustable really ain’t gonna cut it.
There’s a weird shelf of sorts inside this panel. Go get a flashlight and rest it on there so you can see what you’re doing. It’s clearly not meant to be a shelf, but it works.
And did I mention that the interior of a sedan trunk really isn’t any place for a 6’5″ person to contort into and try to unbolt a brake light assembly?
Correction to #6: four bolts.
And if you thought undoing three of them without a socket wrench was a pain, then oh brother.
Let me just tell you.
Explore every possible configuration of a 6’5″ adult male into 15.9 cubic feet of space that will still orient the male’s head, and at least one hand, toward a recess that’s no more than a few inches in any direction and is already filled with mechanical bits.
Ponder for a moment about whether you can just force the damned thing out, since three of the four bolts are already
Oh, crap, where’s the third one?
God damn it, you really should have set the bolts somewhere more organized than just “inside the trunk you’re squirming in.”
God damn it.
Wait, here they are.
Anyhow, back to the brake lights. Since three of the four bolts are already out, can you just push the thing until
Huh. The fuse box shifted a little when it was pushed. In fact, it feels like it has two tabs along the side. Almost as if
Sigh audibly.
Remove fuse box.
(Which, yes, could have just been popped out any time, and didn’t require unbolting anything)
Unscrew expired light bulb.
Replace with fresh light bulb.
Turn car on and see if “Brake Light” warning comes on.
If not, snap fuse box back into brake light assembly.
Re-attach three bolts, which go in a lot easier than they came out.
Close up interior trunk panel.
Close trunk.
Congratulate yourself on avoiding a trip to the mechanic, with no more than $5 in parts and a few minutes of
Stop.
Think for a moment.
Return to car; open trunk; open interior trunk panel.
Retrieve flashlight from weird interior shelf thing (see step #7).
Close panel; close trunk.
Pour a beer.

Mar

we can’t go on together with suspicious minds

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Top Ten Ways that Libya 2011 is not Iraq 2003 (Juan Cole):

1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense or with UNSC authorization. Most countries in the world are signatories to the charter and bound by its provisions.

[...]

5. None of the United Nations allies envisages landing troops on the ground, nor does the UNSC authorize it. Iraq was invaded by land forces.

Intolerable Cruelty (Joel and Ethan Coen):

Freddy Bender: “Kershner” was in Kentucky.
Miles Massey: “Kershner” was in Kentucky?
Freddy Bender: “Kershner” was in Kentucky.
Miles Massey: All right, Freddy, forget “Kershner”. What’s your bottom line?
Freddy Bender: Primary residence, 30 percent of remaining assets.
Miles Massey: What, are you nuts? Have you forgotten “Kershner”?

I can’t fault Cole too hard here. Often when I get lost in a paragraph or an article, I forget where I started, too. But the difference is that I don’t claim to be “informed.”

Mar

the economics of niche programming

Posted by Perich at 9:13 am

New post on Overthinking It examining the difficulty – and success – that smart TV has in finding an audience.

Battlestar Galactica is set in a universe that, confusingly, looks a lot like 21st century Earth, only with starships. But it’s not Earth. In fact, it’s the last survivors of a genocide, who are fleeing across the galaxy to Earth. They’re pursued by robots that either do or don’t look like humans, depending on which ones you encounter. In the close quarters of a huge ship, they deal with intertwining personal relationships, political tension and questions of identity. Oh, and there’s mysticism at play as well.

(And that’s just the first two seasons – when it was still making sense)

That’d be a hard novel to sell to an audience of sci-fi fans, much less a television series. And yet it found a devoted group of followers, critical acclaim and pop culture presence for four seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel.

So why did BSG succeed when Firefly failed? Why is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia entering its seventh season when Arrested Development struggled for three? What’s the element that those successful shows had in common?

(Credit to Sylvia for giving me the frame story – Netflix’s entry into producing a TV series – that tied it all together)

Mar

the world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?

Posted by Perich at 7:37 am

silly
work

On Friday, I came downstairs from my desk to get a seltzer water from the fridge. I noticed three cans of seltzer lying in the crevice between our two refrigerators. Since this isn’t the usual place to store water, my mind reeled.

I looked up above the fridge, where twelve-packs of soda are kept. Within seconds I’d reconstructed a scenario. Someone tried to lift a partly-opened twelve pack from atop the fridge. Not being blessed with my height, they struggled and three cans fell out. They decided to leave the ticking timb bombs lie and go about their day.

Not wanting water to go to waste, I fished them out of the gap and took one of them to the sink. It hissed and bulged as I opened it, but finesse prevented disaster. This left two cans, which I put back in the fridge. We love our seltzer here at Micro.

But! The next person might not know where those seltzers had come from. How best to warn future generations?

“Can I borrow a Post-It note?” I asked Karen, whose desk sat nearest the kitchen. “And a pen?”

I composed a note to warn anyone opening the seltzers to exhibit proper care. Having done my due diligence, I opened the fridge to stick it to the other two cans.

They were gone.

Poking my head out of the break room, I saw John V. heading down the hall, a green can in his hand. I sprinted after him, catching up just as he returned to the Engineering pods. My hand shot up and my jaw went slack as he cracked the tab on a …

Can of 7-Up.

John and the other product development engineers looked at me. I lowered my hand.

“Did you see two seltzer waters in the fridge?” I asked John.

“No,” he said. Then he blinked twice, as if reviewing slides. “I did see two seltzer waters on the counter next to the snacks.”

Oh, right; I hadn’t put them in the fridge yet.

“Thanks,” I said, sprinting back down the hall like that was just a thing I did sometimes.

I stuck the note to the cans, put them back in the fridge, and went back to campaign optimization. It’s a fast-paced job, and I bitch about the hours, but the pay is good.

Mar

sitting here in my safe european home

Posted by Perich at 6:56 am

A few reminders:

1. There is no non-fictional source of power that will allow a First World country to operate at its current rate of industry that will survive an 8.9 quake without venting pollution. None.^*

(Right, right; solar and wind power can keep the entire planet not only stable but growing, just as soon as this one infrastructural barrier is overcome. Any day now. That magic bullet’s the next one in the mag, I promise. But in the meantime …)

So your choice is to either adopt sub-Saharan levels of consumption or to live with the risks. And the risks still seem to favor nukes. I can’t imagine the worst quake that Japan has ever recorded would treat a network of offshore oil rigs any better than it did the Daiichi reactor.

2. That said, the damage is always worse than you hear.

You can count on a government agency to paint a crisis as rosier than it is. It is always worse than they tell you. This isn’t cynicism; it’s observed empirical fact. You can always make money by betting that a federal project will run over budget and over schedule, that a war will cost more than predicted, and that a recession is not over when they say it is. This is the smartest bet on the table. Pros make a living on this bet; they’re called “government contractors.”

And not only does the verdict of history bear this out, but it makes good theoretical sense too. What incentive does an employee of a democracy have to be the bearer of bad news? He’s either an elected official, in which case keeping his job depends on reassuring voters, or he’s an appointed official, in which case keeping his job hinges on giving elected officials good news, or he’s a career bureaucrat, in which case he doesn’t care.

I’m not saying that everyone’s lying. I’m saying everyone’s guessing. That’s what the institution encourages. And an institution is not ten people conspiring to do evil; it’s ten thousand people with no incentive to do good.

So when a Tokyo Electric Power Company official says that “preparatory work [on laying a power cable to restore the reactors] has so far not progressed as fast as we had hoped,” I take that to mean everything’s fucked. No one in a position to speak to the public would use a sentence like that if there were the slightest hope. I could certainly be wrong. Maybe the situation’s under control. Maybe the wheel will come up 00 this time.

____________________________
^* If we stretch the definition of “First World” to include Iceland, a country which is actually powered by tectonic instability, then I suppose we have one exception. But the fact that almost nobody lives in Iceland helps my argument more than hurts it.

Mar

to douchebags, with love and squalor

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I was having a bad week last week. A week where I was recovering from a mild but persistent sinus infection that left me coughing, sneezing, aching and feverish. One of those weeks where I left the office late every night. And this night was one of those nights where I Wished a Sucka Would. When I boarded the train at South Station just as Boston’s loudest panhandler was getting off. That seedy white guy with a rolled-up newspaper who’s always asking for bus fare, because he just got out of rehab and his friend hooked him up with a place to stay, but he can’t move in until the start of the month, and he’s going to stay with his grandmother in Springfield, so he just needs $27.50 to take the bus out there, at the top of his hoarse lungs^*. Never mind that a $27.50 bus ticket could get you to New York from South Station. I wanted him to stay on the train, not to leave, so that I could give him a piece of my mind.

I wanted to get in a screaming match with a meth head on the Red Line. That’s the sort of day it was.

I nursed this foul mood all the way back to Somerville. I scowled my way up the escalator, brushing past people who had the nerve to stand while I was in such a hurry. Exiting the station, I started walking down Elm Street.

“Hey, Davis Square’s pretty cool.”

The voice came from behind me. It was a young voice, male, not a local accent.

“Definitely.” A similar voice at an equal distance.

“Check it out – Boston Burger Company.” He indicated the tiny, expensive but tasty burger joint across the street.

“This is a great neighborhood,” the other guy said. “When the weather gets warmer, we should definitely come back here.”

“There’s that theater,” the first guy said. “Lots of great bars. Good places to eat.”

“Plus those Harvard chicks.”

“Oh, totally.”

I smiled. The tension dissolved from my shoulders. My head sank into one hand as I stifled a laugh.

“Which way is Chester Street? Do you think we’re going the right way?”

“We’re going the right way.”

“We haven’t passed it, have we?”

I sighed. Of course they were going to Redbones. Of course.

That’s where I left the gentlemen, ducking into Chipotle for a burrito and then heading straight home. I ate my dinner, wondering what sort of trouble these gentlemen from the Green Line were getting into. Maybe they were meeting some friends at “this awesome barbecue place in Somerville.” Or maybe they would end the night getting kicked out of Sligo.

Either way, I was grateful. Because even on the shittiest day in a long and shitty week, I still go to bed in one of the cooler neighborhoods of one of the cooler cities on the East Coast. I get paid an absurd amount of money to work online all day for one of the most desirable startups in the marketing industry. I’ve got a wealth of options right outside my front door and most of my friends live or hang out within three subway stops.

So thanks for the reminder, guys. I hope you had a good time.

^* Boston is a small enough city that it only takes a few years to recognize the major panhandlers.

Mar

you should hear how she talks about you

Posted by Perich at 11:48 am

Today I discovered that, if you feed every sentence in a David Brooks column into Excel and use OFFSET() and RANDBETWEEN() to rearrange them at random, the resulting paragraphs make just as much sense.

For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student. I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing IQ, degrees, and professional skills.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect.

While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism.

And this is with limited resources! With the right sort of grant money, I could prove that three out of five New York Times columnists fail a Turing test.

(BTW, I owe the OFFSET() formula, as well as several other Excel tricks, to Joel Grus and his latest book, Thinking Spreadsheet, one of the more accessible and comprehensive Excel how-tos I’ve ever read. Check it out)

Mar

I mean the macaroni’s soggy, the peas are mushed and the chicken tastes like wood

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

cooking
food

Someone needs to go back in time^* and tell me about the following:

Two slices of wheat bread, buttered;
Some thin slices of salmon;
A bit of light mozzarella cheese;
Assemble whole into sandwich and heat in conventional oven on 350 for 5-10 minutes

Not only does it take less time to prepare than the heat-and-eat stuff I used to choke down, and not only is it cheaper than any sandwich I could buy in the surrounding area, it tastes so good. Seriously. I have a problem now where I can’t keep salmon in my fridge long enough, because I eat it all so fast. Sometimes I put it on sandwiches. Sometimes I tear it into tiny strips and put it on pita crackers and melt some cheese on top. The salmon vanishes days after I buy it! This is a problem that only middle-class people and the neighbors of Top Cat have.

top-cat

This has been the alchemical riddle for me – food that’s good for me, tastes good, is quick to prepare and is cheap. Chicken’s also a staple: a thin-sliced breast with a little McCormick seasoning, thrown on the skillet with some butter, just a few minutes on a side, boom. I’ve experimented with salad, but I have yet to find a dressing that really works for me. I can assemble the occasional flat bread pizza with a whole wheat wrap, some cheese and some pepperoni. I get plenty of fruit at work. But is that it?

So impress me with any really quick, really cheap healthy recipes. I promise I’m listening.

_________________________________
^* Unless someone already came back from the future and told me, which is why I know now. Given a long enough timeline, the likelihood of that approaches infinity. But I don’t remember meeting a time traveler! Unless they were subtle. Maybe they whispered it in my ear while I slept. Does that even work? Time to conduct some experiments … and so on, and so on, until you see me getting dragged out of my home in cuffs.

Mar

you’re just a rapping infection, dirtilizing my section

Posted by Perich at 12:29 pm

sick

While doing my taxes, I was presented with the option of deducting my medical expenses. After doing some math, I realized I would have to have spent over $3000 on doctor’s bills in 2010 to take it as a deduction. “Three thousand dollars a year in medical expenses?” I thought. “Is that even possible?”

(Progressives, if you’re looking for an example of “male privilege,” bookmark this post)

God laughed at my plans and laid me low with sickness less than a week later. Friday evening, driving home from a friendly poker game (first out), I had a hoarse voice. Saturday it was painful to swallow. Sunday I called off jiu-jitsu and slept until 1:00 PM, returning to bed at 10:00. Monday I thought I was doing better, until I tried going to sleep. I spent the next seven hours hacking up gunk, shivering in a fever and massaging my aching jaw.

All signs pointed to a sinus infection – the aching in my skull combined with the symptoms of a bad cold. So I stopped off at CVS last night for, among other things, a giant tub of generic NyQuil. The self-checkout beeped and raised a whirling light when I swiped it: you need to be 21 or older to buy cough syrup at CVS. Which means that, were I in college now instead of a decade ago, I’d need to rely on generous older students for the medicine that would keep me sane. But hey! It’s for the kids!