Matt McIrvin's Steam-Operated World of Yesteryear

Having gotten some ducks in a row, I ought to say this publicly: I'm looking for a job right now, preferably in greater Boston, Massachusetts or southern NH.

I'm a programmer with advanced mathematics/physics training and 12 years of experience working on graphics, font and imaging code for embedded systems, usually implementing system APIs. I've written code now running in millions of devices, including widely used laser printers and mobile phones; I've been both a core programmer and a customer-engineer-facing guy. I love graphics, but other things aren't out of the question. Future work doesn't necessarily have to be in embedded systems, though I'm really good at working in situations where memory and cycles can't be assumed to be unlimited.

My current email address is

matt.mcirvin@gmail.com

Resume available on request.

I just finished reading Anathem, which is enjoyable if huge and somewhat difficult in spots. It gradually turns into a more typical Neal Stephenson novel as it goes on (though the ending is better than most).

Lots of other people have written detailed reviews, and often concentrate on Stephenson's weird alternate-history worldbuilding and use of language, and the initially slow pacing of the novel. I just have a few spoileriffic comments about Stephenson's use of physics:

( SPOILER SPOILER )

I'm not what you would call an unbiased observer, but holy cats, the show is astounding. There's two shows tomorrow; if you can get to the Somerville Theatre do check it out.

People, an actual theremin was on the premises. Right next to the Martian Weedwhacker.

Ask your grandparents; if they were around in 1938, they undoubtedly remember the giant tripod machines striding through the city, their heat rays obliterating all comers. And, perhaps, the lighthearted comedy broadcast that preceded the horrifying reports.

At any rate, the Post-Meridian Radio Players are, even as I speak, reenacting that fateful night in The Big Broadcast of October 30, 1938 at the Somerville Theatre. I just got my ticket for tomorrow night's performance; they'll be doing it again twice on Saturday. This is PMRP's biggest Halloween show ever by a gigantic margin, and it promises to be something special.

I'm not performing in the show this year—while it would have been lovely, it's probably for the best, since it's been a busy enough autumn that doing this show as well would likely have stretched me pretty thin. But this also means that I get to see the show! I've never actually seen a PMRP performance all the way through as part of the audience, and I'll be excited to see and hear it.

There was some minor and relatively uninteresting controversy over the album's forthright discussion of evolution, and, to a greater degree, over "Science Is Real"'s lumping-together of "angels, unicorns and elves" as unscientific and implicitly unreal notions.


What I find more interesting is that "Science Is Real" seems to give the philosophically trained fits for espousing what they consider a naive scientific realism right in the title. It inspired a couple of interesting discussions on Crooked Timber and Matthew Yglesias's blog, the first of which is partly in song. They seem particularly peeved that John Linnell quotes Rudolf Carnap in the introduction, though the actual song's take on science as a privileged probe of objective reality is probably not a sentiment Carnap would endorse without qualification (and Yglesias argues that the Carnap quote is an inadequate description of science as well).

I point to this not to mock philosophers of science. It actually gives me pause, too, since I spent years studying a field where there are radically different competing ontologies describing the same set of results, and nobody can quite agree on what reality is even in broad outline, so about the best you can do is fall back on an operational description of what you're doing: if you do X you have probability P of getting Y, and what that means is left as an exercise for the reader. Also, I guess I've seen scientists beaten up so long with accusations of scientism that anything that looks like an opening, even coming from a rock band of nonscientists, puts me on guard (even though I am not even an aspiring scientist any more!)

And yet, and yet. It seems to me that a description suitable for a three- or four-year-old that, say, captures the essential difference between dinosaurs and dragons (a point on which Jorie is not entirely clear) is going to lean heavily on the naive realism, and science has something to do with that. Also, the mere fact that there are about three songs on this album that even deal with science as a process, rather than science as repository of received wisdom or enabler of technology, is pretty remarkable. "The truth is with science" is a bit too strong a statement, but "A scientific theory isn't just a hunch or guess/It's more like a question that's been put through a lot of tests" is pretty good as a first approximation.


Apparently John Flansburgh cold-emailed PZ Myers to offer him a free copy, which may possibly give additional insight into Flans's position on the angels/unicorns/elves question.



In other news, I vote "Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is A Miasma Of Incandescent Plasma)" as Most Fun To Noodle Along Stupidly With On Your Guitar.

beamjockey has been having lots of fun with the Life magazine photo archive, and here he's encountered one of the most famous Life images of all, the shot of an audience of people wearing 3D glasses.

I was just talking about this image earlier and referred to it as an iconic image of people wearing red/green anaglyph lenses. But it turns out they're actually not--the movie is Bwana Devil, some sort of killer-lion story made by none other than Lights Out! creator and "Chicken Heart" author Arch Oboler, and it was shot in color and shown using a polarizer process. So they weren't colored lenses. From critics' complaints it sounds as if they did darken the image quite a bit, though.

Anyway, one often sees (or at least I've seen) the Life image reproduced in quasi-colorized form, with red and green lenses drawn in on the glasses to be cute. It appears that this is not accurate.

After about a year of regular practice and some basic study of music, I'm at the point where I'm just starting to be able to pick a key and play that scale all up and down the neck, switching positions as needed. It's also getting a lot easier to figure out how to play a tune by ear.

( more musings )

Just watched the DVD with Jorie. This album is pitched a little older than TMBG's last two kids' albums, so more went over her head, but it was the second viewing for her and she was enthusiastic. The DVD replaces the interstitial Puppet Johns with animated Johns that are not quite as endearing, but it's in keeping with the older target audience.

I think that, on balance, last year's "Here Come The 123s" is still my favorite TMBG children's album, but there's a lot to like here. On first listen, "Meet The Elements", "Electric Car", "Cells" and "Photosynthesis" entertained me the most; "Cells" recycles the catchy guitar hook from Mono Puff's "Hillbilly Drummer Girl".

This album also marks the official album debut of "The Bloodmobile," a ditty about the many functions of the circulatory system, which I think was actually recorded for "No!" but didn't make the cut; it previously appeared on the rarities disc "They Got Lost". This album is definitely its proper home. (Correction! This is completely wrong. TMBW says it was recorded for a Franklin Institute exhibit, and it's not on "They Got Lost" so I must have heard it on the podcast.)

The most familiar song is, of course, the cover "Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)" which is a mainstay of TMBG concerts, and, in a very different form, headlined the EP of the same name; the high-energy version here is more or less the recent concert arrangement, like the "Severe Tire Damage" one but with the first bridge sung in a trippy manner. It's immediately followed by a brief bit of light funk, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is A Miasma Of Incandescent Plasma)" which does not, in fact, speak of why the sun really shines, but is more precise about its state of matter. The round "What Is A Shooting Star?" is from the same sixties kids' album as "Why Does The Sun Shine?" and is similar to the version TMBG sung on a video podcast with the Puppet Johns a while ago.

Sam recently took Jorie to her very first movie in a theater, and it was the 3D rerelease of Toy Story. This turned out to be somewhat awkward as there were no 3D glasses small enough to fit well on Jorie. It sounds as if there were very few personnel actually on duty in the theater at the time, so it's unclear to us whether this was a local oversight or if no kid-size glasses of this particular type actually exist. But I actually suspect the latter, based on some brief web searching based on what I figured out later on. Anyway, Jorie seems to have watched much of the movie with the glasses off and just accepted the blur as the way of the world. But she liked the movie anyway and told me all about Buzz Lightyear that evening.

Instead of dumping the glasses in the recycling bin, Sam brought them home, probably figuring Jorie would find them an interesting novelty. Of course I set about reverse-engineering them as soon as I got my hands on them.

( Fun with polarized light )

I haven't had much to write about lately with regard to my musical fumblings, because I'm at the point where there aren't a lot of big cerebral revelations, I'm just training my ears and fingers. Les Paul just died; he was a pretty significant figure. Jorie actually knows his name, if only through the line of Gibson electrics he endorsed.

These pages on intonation by luthier Mike Doolin are really interesting. I don't have an instrument which has been crafted to the degree suggested here, but the weird six-string A5 and E5 power chords he introduces at one point as a rough and ready tuning device are actually useful. The idea is that, if you want to play more than one chord shape, you want equal temperament, which means you want to deliberately ignore thirds when tuning; but having six-string chords to work with cuts down on the accumulating systematic errors in the beginner tuning method of just comparing each fretted string to the next higher one played open. (I know, tuning systems get a lot more elaborate than this.) It's not possible to finger them in any normal hand position, as far as I can tell, but I can get them by reaching over the neck.

Jorie's 3-year-old power games have assisted in my ear training: her latest thing is to insist that I'm not allowed to play my guitar in her presence, but I am allowed to play HER guitar, the small-scale instrument that I actually started out on. This guitar, being a glorified toy (albeit a good one), was never very precisely intonated to begin with (the saddle is completely uncompensated, so there's only so much you can do), it's pretty battered by now, and it drifts all over the place, and also Jorie has a tendency to randomly detune it by fiddling with the keys. So playing recognizable tunes on it means that I have to retune it all the time, starting from total chaos. I'm actually getting good at this, and the silly thing now sounds better than it did when we first got it.

For a long time I'd make the B and high E strings ridiculously sharp if I didn't have access to Sam's electronic tuner, but these days I usually just tune it while I'm trying to play along with Jorie's Wiggles DVDs, which gets me the tone reference, especially since I now remember what keys a fair number of Wiggles songs are in (the characteristic keys got higher when Sam Moran replaced Greg Page as lead singer).

As for Jorie, her current favorite instrument is the electronic drum pad set she got for her third birthday. She can bang away at that thing for ages. Fortunately it's not as loud as her little glockenspiel, which I think could hold its own against Sam's horn.

Astronomer Franck Marchis talks about the thing that hit Jupiter (seen via selidor commenting on james_nicoll's LJ).

My parents tell me I was watching on TV when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon. I have to take their word for it, since I was barely one year old and have no memories of the event.

I do remember bits and pieces of some of the later missions. I have really distinct memories of watching TV at our place in Ohio and seeing a Saturn V taking off, and my father explaining how the stages of the rocket would fall off as it got higher. I was concerned about what was going to happen to the people riding in the lower stages. Dad said there weren't any, but I insisted that some of the markings on the side of the rocket were windows. Then I made a crayon drawing of a rocket with USA written on it separating into pieces.

I also remember seeing some Walter Cronkite-narrated footage of an Apollo command module bobbing in the ocean, with those big strange-looking flotation balloons on top. Cronkite is tied up in all of these memories, as well as in everything else I remember of world events of the early 1970s.

The really vivid July 20th space memory I have is (as I've said many times before) of the Viking 1 landing on Mars exactly seven years later, during CBS's East Coast airing of Captain Kangaroo. I was a huge space buff by then and it fired my imagination tremendously.


As James Nicoll says here, the history of American space exploration after Apollo (sometimes in collaboration with other countries) has been pretty remarkable—it just bears little resemblance to old science fiction or old futurism, and hasn't involved massive human movement into space. The main thing we've learned from human spaceflight efforts in the past 40-odd years is that working in space, while possible, is a lot harder than optimists thought it was in the Collier's days.


NASA's post-Shuttle plans involve a push to go back to the Moon (and, theoretically, on to Mars), in spacecraft that in some ways resemble an enlarged Apollo. Charlie Stross has said he doubts it'll come off. The program is probably technically feasible, but we don't have anything like Apollo's psychological-warfare motivation to keep it going. Apollo was unusual in that it was a human-spaceflight program that actually did have an enormous scientific haul, but it was so expensive that it never would have happened if it were motivated by the science alone, or by the manifest-destiny dreams of space fans.

I missed this when it appeared a few days ago, but it's a good day to post it: LRO has imaged five of the six Apollo landing sites at a resolution of a few meters per pixel.

The largest human-made object in each of these pictures is the lunar module's octagonal descent stage, which was left behind when the ascent stage took off to take the astronauts back to lunar orbit on the first leg of their trip home. The best picture (because of a favorable sun angle) is actually of the Apollo 14 site, where you can see suggestions of the lunar module's landing legs (or their shadows), and the tracks made by the astronauts (and their handcart?) as they walked between the sites of the lander and the ALSEP science package.

I'd hoped to see the rover tracks from the last three missions' sites, but they're not visible; LRO may get them later in pictures taken from final mapping orbit.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Canada Day always puts me in mind of the couple of times I spent it at the celebrations in Ottawa, among proud people who, if we were all sufficiently fortified with fine Canadian beers, were eager to educate me at length on the USA's 20th century contingency plans to invade Canada and the whupping Canada gave my native land in the War of 1812.

Anyway, in that vein, here is an interesting list of areas disputed by Canada and the United States.

I have no opinion on the merits of any of these claims. Most of the disagreements are over maritime borders or the status of various waters, but Machias Seal Island and North Rock between Maine and New Brunswick are actually disputed pieces of land, the larger of which is a popular birdwatching destination (it has puffins). I think this is the only land contested by Canada and the US. Recent diplomatic activity concerning the area seems to have been carefully crafted to make no particular attempt to resolve the issue.

I was actually inspired to look this up after reading this Strange Maps post on Bir Tawil, the only area in the world known to be disclaimed by both sides in a boundary dispute.

Something I never got around to learning until just now: James Ensor was actually awesome.

Jorie's going to preschool three mornings a week now, and it's already weirdly hard to get her to talk to us about what she does there, even though her teachers report that she's chatty enough in class. So we piece stuff together from teachers' remarks and ask her leading questions, and sometimes other things come out. She had a slightly rough adjustment when she moved up from the toddler to the preschool class; she's now one of the youngest and smallest kids in her class, and I get the impression that the other kids are generally nice to her but treat her more as a cute baby than as a peer. Nevertheless, she does refer to some of her classmates as her friends, so I guess she's doing all right there.

They did a recent unit on space, and one teacher mentioned that Jorie was just about the only kid in class who was getting into the lessons about planets, maybe because she'd gotten interested in the subject previously. One evening when I was trying to get her to sleep, she suddenly announced "The Sun is hot. It has hot gas. Mars is cold." Yesterday she started talking about putting her spacesuit on to walk on the Moon.

At almost 2 years 10 months, she's started to recognize some short printed words (mostly in all caps), and is into attempting to spell things with magnetic letters on the refrigerator; the order that the letters go in can be a little fuzzy, but she does all right otherwise. One of the earliest ones she wanted to spell was "VOOM", the mysterious nanotech cleaning agent under the hat of Little Cat Z in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. She's also memorized essentially the complete text of that book and recites it by heart when I try to read it. It's become a bit problematic, in that she's discovered she can slow down the recitation as a delaying tactic at bedtime, and she gets angry when I try to butt in and start reading again. "NO!! You can't say that!"

She likes to scribble on her chalkboard; the scribblings have not become all that figurative yet, but there are some things she likes to draw because I identified a chance resemblance to something, such as a forest of vertical lines that we call "beanstalks", and her first recognizable glyph: a vertical line with a horizontal leftward bar at the top that is the digit 7. Jorie also seems to have a pretty good operating concept of numbers up to about 5, and can count as far as 29.

Yesterday, she spent the whole day referring to herself as Laurie Berkner. This morning she decided that she and I were John Linnell and John Flansburgh.

1. The Doctor Who theme
2. The Decemberists, "The Rake's Song"

The conclusion I draw from this is that if the life situation you are in lends itself to the Phrygian mode, RUN.

If you were a nerdy kid who lived through the Seventies (or early Eighties), james_nicoll's ongoing review and discussion of a 1977 CoEvolution Quarterly compliation on space colonies will ring several bells. If you want to know what it was like, this may be a good place to start. It just gets better and crackier as it goes on, and James' comments are typically deadpan.

As people such as Stewart Brand and Gerard O'Neill and R. Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri trade comments with the likes of Wendell Berry and Lewis Mumford, often the anti-space-colonization side is as crazy as the pro side. But the argument between T. A. Heppenheimer and John Holt gets to the meat of it (Holt gets his orbital mechanics wrong, but otherwise I think his objections to O'Neill's cylinder colonies are pretty devastating).

Yes, there were people back then who seriously thought that multi-thousand-person space cities could be built at the Earth-Moon L5 point by the 1990s. Sometimes, I was one of them. Sometimes, NASA's PR people encouraged them. Sometimes, people still insist that it really could have happened if only [insert politically charged counterfactual here] just to annoy kadath. In its way it was more outrageous than any tailfinned Wernher von Braun vision of the Collier's era.

For all I know, people might emigrate massively into space someday. The future's hard to predict. But at the very least, the claim that this can be practically done with existing technology doesn't make a lot of sense, and people were already claiming that over 30 years ago.

I've seen a lot of advisories about the possibility of a flu pandemic that give a lot of common-sense advice about how to prevent transmission of the disease: wash your hands frequently and thoroughly, avoid touching your face (this is hard for me to manage), cover your coughs and sneezes, and, especially, an admonition to stay home from work if you're sick.

The last grates on me. Not because it's bad advice—it's very good advice—but because it's always phrased in terms of individual behavior, as if this were an entirely free choice. It's the "Tips for Living Green" approach to public health, as stacebass might have put it.


People who don't live in the US may not know this, but most American employers don't give their employees any time off for illness, per se. You probably know that Americans don't get a lot of vacation time; what you may not know is that for most of them, their vacation time is actually "PTO", Personal Time Off, a combined pool for sick time and vacation time and whatever else you need to miss work to do. Employees who take days off because they're sick have to take it out of their already paltry vacation time.

If you rarely get sick, this may seem like a fair deal, because you're not being asked to cover for your sicker co-workers without compensation. (We wouldn't want those lucky duckie sick people to benefit from being irresponsible enough to get sick—that's not the American way!) But if you are sick, this is a serious incentive to tough it out, with all the dangers that implies.

The recommendations I've seen say you should stay out of the office for the entire length of your symptoms, plus two days. I know from experience with the flu that the more minor, cold-like symptoms can drag on for weeks; that could easily be enough time to wipe out all of your vacation for the whole year! Nobody is going to do that, unless they can make arrangements to work from home, which not everybody can do.


As it happens, I do get sick time that is separate from my vacation. But I am lucky; this is a highly unusual situation in my country. And I still have to live in a country where most adults are structurally encouraged to be disease vectors. (And, I suspect, most kids as well, since their working parents would have to take PTO to look after them too.)

Now, I suspect that if this thing really does become a big scary pandemic with mounting numbers of seriously ill and dead people, employers will feel compelled to make special arrangements. But lots of people die of the ordinary seasonal flu every year.


Americans are currently trying to figure out how to reform the completely dysfunctional US health-care system. I propose that doing something about the cultural norms for sick time could do a lot of good.

Anyway, the little boxes referenced here are also the basis for a pattern for playing the Okinawan (and pelog barang-like) musical scale that I accidentally rediscovered back here. It's that little box plus an extra note, the fifth, which appears adjacent to the root on the next string down. Repeat by octaves and dislocate as necessary for the G/B string gap.

I still don't know jack squat about Okinawan music but I did spend some time last night noodling around with that scale. It has an interesting sound, happy but wistful to my ears, which of course have their own cultural associations.


An unrelated thing I realized recently was that when I remember (major-keyed) tunes in my head and then try to play them from memory, they tend to gravitate toward the key of D. I'm not sure why this is.

Sam speculates that D suits my voice well. My own theory had originally been that I just liked the way songs in D sound on a guitar. Since the lowest note on a guitar with standard tuning is an E, the lowest D is almost an octave up, so the easy open chords in D tend to have the root note higher up on the I chord (that is, the D itself) than on the other primary chords (G and A). You go up to return to the tonic, and that gives D major a bright and cheerful sound--unless, of course, you're doing something other than playing easy chords. (On the other hand, I suppose that if you are using drop D tuning, D might become a sepulchral key of underworldly darkness.) But this D business probably predates my attempting to play a guitar.

When Sam and I were talking about my bias toward D, I mentioned that I'd been messing around on my guitar the previous day while she was singing to Jorie, and found that Sam had been singing in F. Sam laughed and pointed out that she plays a horn in F. (It's a double horn, actually, like most modern horns; but one side is an F horn, and music for horn is usually scored with a transposition such that the key notated as C major is actually F).


Early on I scoffed at the whole notion of "key color" in music written or played after the rise of equal temperament, since for people without absolute pitch (which is to say, most of us) it ought not to make a difference; and in fact the most involved discussion of this seems to be old. But one thing I wasn't appreciating was that, unless you're composing on a computer with MIDI samples, the pitches you're using aren't generated out of the blue; they're coming from some physical instrument (or a human voice) operated by a person, and that's probably going to affect how the different keys sound. With a stringed instrument on which one frequently plays chords, the tuning is going to affect what inversions or octave repetitions can be used in a multi-string chord. While keys aren't going to have color in the abstract, they might well have it given a particular instrumentation.

I also wonder if most people don't have some sort of latent absolute pitch perception, even if they lack absolute pitch memory. Obviously in an extreme and rough sense we do detect absolute pitch, in that we can distinguish very high pitches from very low ones without a basis for comparison. And I can compare a tune I hear to the one I'm silently thinking of in my brain, it's just that the one in my brain probably wandered over to the vicinity of D when I wasn't thinking about it.