A while back I acquired a CD of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, which was probably the first jazz record I ever owned. I’m not sure if I still have the vinyl, but CDs are easier to rip anyway. I put it on the Shuffle and let the gods of random chance do their thing.
The first cut to come up in the mix was “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” In Ken Burns’ “Jazz,” Brubeck recounts how he stole a good portion of it from Turkish street musicians when he was on tour while in the Army, thus making it one of the first examples of my exposure to World Music. It’s in 9/8 time. The liner notes for Time Out was the first place I ever saw the phrase “time signature.” I suspect it was like that for a lot of young boomers such as myself, and I’ve occasionally wondered how many of the out-of-the-ordinary time signatures in rock (I’m thinking of you, Fairport Convention) have a root or two in Brubeck.
A while later in the randomness came “Take Five,” one of the most famous melodies in all of jazz. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I’d heard the original, especially in true “high fidelity,” i.e. through headphones, with a minimum of background noise. And as gooseflesh sprouted on my arms, I wondered, did I just forget, or had I never really noticed before?
Gloria Steinem once famously quoted Paul Desmond as saying that he “wanted to sound like a dry martini.” That self-deprecating witticism masked an amazing achievement. Paul Desmond gave his alto saxophone a tone unlike anything else played by anyone else. He made the alto saxophone sound like a flute, breathy, clear, and smooth.
The saxophone is a naturally raucous instrument; it fits into rock and roll as easily as bebop. It doesn’t do mellow easily. Yet Desmond made it so. You might be able to find some early to middle Coltrane with that kind of fluidity (then later he turned against that early “cooler” style), but that’s almost the whole list. Gerry Mulligan was in the same country with the baritone sax, but I just can’t come up with a memory of anyone who sounded like Desmond on the saxophone. I will say that I've recently encountered a tone similar to Desmond's, from Kenny Davern, playing with Dick Wellstone. But that was from a session in 1981, and Davern was playing the clarinet.
A friend of mine once said admiringly of Carlos Santana, “He’s achieved every musician’s dream, a sound so distinctive that his mother could recognize it coming out of a car radio.” Paul Desmond did that with the saxophone. He did it in plain sight; everyone remarked on it, even. But it was an achievement both effervescent and evanescent, slipping from memory even as the final notes are played, with the “dry martini” remark serving as a place holder to something far more magical.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Brubeck on piano, Desmond on sax, and Eugene Wright and Joe Morello on bass and drums, respectively, were the most popular examples of “West Coast Jazz,” sometimes derisively called “White Boy Jazz,” owing to a paucity of black performers in it. Brubeck, though, was a fierce integrationist, bless him, first integrating his Army touring group in WWII, then sometimes canceling gigs in the 1950s, if Eugene Wright was disrespected in any way.
Brubeck made the cover of Time Magazine, in November, 1954, the second jazz figure to do so (Louis Armstrong being the first). The story goes that Time debated whether to put Brubeck or Duke Ellington on that cover, and chose Brubeck. The two men happened to both be in Denver when that issue came out, and Brubeck tells the story of having Ellington knock on his door at seven in the morning, greeting Brubeck with, “You’re on the cover of Time!” when he opened the door.
Burbeck idolized Ellington and wished that the cover had gone to Ellington. Ellington was both a showman and a realist, assuring Brubeck that either way, it benefited jazz, and what was good for jazz was good for all of them.
I’m with the Duke on this one. Time Out was the first jazz album I bought, but it wasn’t the last. Every moment contains both the past and future. And something in all this evokes my memory of sitting on a blanket on the grass lawn of the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York, listening to the Count Basie Orchestra with some friends, and thinking that life is mighty good.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Hot Buttered
Orville Redenbacher is on the TV, telling us again how great his microwave popcorn is, and by the way, it doesn't contain diacetyl. Any more.
Diacetyl (emphasis on the first syllable) is also called biacetyl (emphasis on the last syllable) and the latter is what we called in when I was working on the photooxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons a couple or three decades ago. Biactetyl, in fact, occupies an important place in the history of smog chemistry, though I have to admit the notion of "important" is open to interpretation.
There are basically four kinds of "reactive organics" that are important in smog photochemistry: paraffins, olefins, aromatics, and carbonyl compounds (aldehydes and ketones), the latter being more commonly formed in the smog process than emitted outright. I'm taking a bit of a liberty here by omitting alcohols, ethers, and other oxygenated compounds, partly because, ethanol and MTBE notwithstanding, they still don't amount to a large fraction of the mix, and partly because their photochemistry is pretty close to that of paraffins, or ketones that don't photolyze, i.e. break up by the direct action of sunlight.
The early days of smog chemistry were dominated by research into the chemistry of paraffins and olefins, so much so, in fact, that it wasn't until the mid-1970s that researchers realized that the photolysis of aldehydes and ketones was the primary source of catalytic radicals in the smog formation process. In fact, that was the biggest single difference between the first photochemical kinetic mechanism that I worked with, the Hecht-Seinfeld mechanism, and the later, Hecht, Seinfeld, Dodge mechanism. The former used oxygen atoms (from the photolysis of NO2) as its primary radical source, whereas the latter used formaldehyde and higher aldehydes to that purpose.
Both of these mechanisms were based on smog chamber experiments involving butane and propylene (or propene, if you're a nomenclature purist). Aromatics chemistry was tacked on as an afterthought, not because it was believed to be unimportant, but more because nobody had any idea what to do with it.
Aromatic hydrocarbons, as they are called, all have a "benzene ring" somewhere in them, and that makes everything very complex. Perhaps you remember the story about Friedrich Kekule literally dreaming up benzene's structure. It's formula is C6H6, and its structure "bites its own tail," so each carbon atom, with four chemical bonds, has, after accounting for the hydrogen, three bonds to share with its two neighboring carbon atoms. That could work out to two and one or one and two, i.e. a paraffinic bond with one neighbor and an olefinic bond with the other, but the wonders of quantum mechanisms allows it to actually be one and a half bonds with each neighbor. Such are the wonders of quantum electrons being able to be in several places at the same time.
Benzene itself is almost dead, photochemically speaking; put it into a smog chamber and it mostly just sits there, making a little tang of phenol after a while, but phenol is deader still, so…boring.
But if you replace one or more of benzene's hydrogens with a methyl group (-CH3), now you're talking. One added methyl group gives you toluene. Two, and you get xylene, which comes in three isomers, meta, para, and ortho, depending upon whether the methyl groups sit right next to each other (ortho), on opposite sides of the ring (para) or one over (meta). There are also, of course, trimethylated benzenes, and compounds where the substituted groups are more complex than methyl groups. But actually, toluene and the xylenes make up the bulk of aromatic compounds in air pollution. There is even a refinery stream referred to as "TBX" which stands for toluene, benzene, and xylene.
Okay, so I'm going to tell you how the photochemistry works, then how it got figured out. The tricky part had to do with how the aromatic rings would open up. Everyone knew it had to happen sometime, but how, and what the products were was a mystery for years.
What happens to something like toluene in smog is that, when it encounters an hydroxyl radical (-OH), the hydroxyl adds itself onto the ring somewhere, usually at the carbon that sits next to a methyl group, because of the way that methyl groups mess with the electron distribution of the aromatic ring. This is what hydroxyls do with olefins, incidentally, so you can look on it as the hydroxyl briefly looking at the ring and seeing, not that "one and a half bonds" thing I mentioned above, but a double carbon-carbon bond, which hydroxyls just love to glom onto.
This breaks one of the carbon-carbon bonds, and one end of it now has a romantic relationship with the hydroxyl radical. But the other end, like a jilted lover, is on the rebound, ready to pick up with just about any pretty face that comes by. That face, almost always, belongs to oxygen, a really promiscuous molecule. It's diatomic (i.e. O2), but not so committed to the relationship that it passes up some good carbon bond action.
So an O2 gloms onto the other, lonely, carbon and you now have a peroxy radical, an aromatic ring with an oxygen tail. The radical characteristic of the thing tends to be concentrated at the free swinging tip of the tail, and in most peroxy radicals, that tip winds up reacting with some other molecule.
Not so with the aromatic peroxy radicals, however, because it so happens that the radical tip is just right for swinging around and hooking up with another carbon, somewhere else on the aromatic ring. You may now consider all of the other sexual double entendres that I could use for this situation.
Anyway, another oxygen now gloms onto the group, but now the situation is stable enough (maybe) so that it waits around for some outside compound (usually a molecule of nitric oxide—NO) to take the last lonely oxygen atom away from the daisy chain.
All the oxygens then decide to settle down with their new carbon best buddies. The oxygen-oxygen bonds call it quits, and that leaves another oxygen bond for each oxygen connected carbon. If you're counting, and remember that carbon only has four bonds to its name, this means that it has a double bond with an oxygen, one for either a hydrogen or a methyl group, and, whoops, only one left for another carbon in the aromatic ring. In short, the ring opens, in multiple places, once for each oxygen. At some point, the poor hydroxyl group, which is now the radical of the bunch, meets yet another oxygen molecule and the hydrogen leaves the party to for hydroperyoxyl (HO2).
The aromatic ring is pretty much finished at this point, and it cleaves into at least two pieces, one with two ring carbons, the other with four. The one with four has, in addition to two oxygen atoms, a olefinic bond (there was some belief for a while that the fragments might all have two ring carbons, each, meaning that there would have been another oxygen molecule bridge on the ring, but later product yield measurements indicate otherwise).
Both ring fragments are called "dicarbonyls" because they each have two carbonyl (C=O) bonds. In one of the fragments, the two carbonyl bonds are right next to each other.
The simplest dicarbonyl is called "glyoxal." It's just H(C=O)(C=O)H. The next one is methyl glyoxal, with a single added methyl group: H(C=O)(C=O)CH3. Both of these are very hard to measure; they tend to stick to gas chromatographic columns nigh onto forever.
Ah, but the next in line is a dicarbonyl with two methyl substituants: CH3(C=O)(C=O)CH3. This is called biacetyl, or diacetyl. And it comes through a chromatographic column.
If you photooxidize orthoxylene, with it's two adjacent methyl groups, when the ring opens, a certain percentage of time you get biacetyl. A group at the University of California at Riverside, (Darnall, Atkinson, and Pitts, 1979) saw the biacetyl coming off of their chromatograph and realized that they had seen the first evidence of ring opening products.
It so happens that both biacetyl and methylglyoxal photolyze like crazy, so much so that they last only a few minutes in sunlight before splitting into radical fragments. I had been looking for something exactly like these dicarbonyls in my own studies of aromatics photochemistry, because I'd found good evidence of very powerful radical sources in toluene experiments. My calculations indicated that the radical formation rate from toluene was twice what it would be if toluene were going to pure formaldehyde, which of course it does not. It forms a significant amount of methyl glyoxal, and that was what I was looking for.
Later, I heard that biacetyl/diacetyl was used to flavor margarine; I also heard that microwave food products use excess flavoring agents because the microwave heating process drives the volatiles away faster than regular cooking.
I had some vague suspicions that it might not be a good idea to use a compound as photochemically unstable as biacetyl in food. Light causes biacetyl to break into two pieces, both acetyl radicals, and when there is any oxygen around, you get peroxyacetyl radicals. Add some nitrogen dioxide and you get peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), which is biologically active. Actually, it's a good bet that any give peroxy compound is biologically active. These are some pretty potent radicals.
So then we see a story about the guy who loved the buttery smell of microwaved popcorn and got a rare lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans. More to the point, "popcorn lung" has been added to the list of industrial diseases affecting production workers.
All I had were a few suspicions, of course. Nothing to go on, really. But I can't say that I'm surprised in the slightest.
Diacetyl (emphasis on the first syllable) is also called biacetyl (emphasis on the last syllable) and the latter is what we called in when I was working on the photooxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons a couple or three decades ago. Biactetyl, in fact, occupies an important place in the history of smog chemistry, though I have to admit the notion of "important" is open to interpretation.
There are basically four kinds of "reactive organics" that are important in smog photochemistry: paraffins, olefins, aromatics, and carbonyl compounds (aldehydes and ketones), the latter being more commonly formed in the smog process than emitted outright. I'm taking a bit of a liberty here by omitting alcohols, ethers, and other oxygenated compounds, partly because, ethanol and MTBE notwithstanding, they still don't amount to a large fraction of the mix, and partly because their photochemistry is pretty close to that of paraffins, or ketones that don't photolyze, i.e. break up by the direct action of sunlight.
The early days of smog chemistry were dominated by research into the chemistry of paraffins and olefins, so much so, in fact, that it wasn't until the mid-1970s that researchers realized that the photolysis of aldehydes and ketones was the primary source of catalytic radicals in the smog formation process. In fact, that was the biggest single difference between the first photochemical kinetic mechanism that I worked with, the Hecht-Seinfeld mechanism, and the later, Hecht, Seinfeld, Dodge mechanism. The former used oxygen atoms (from the photolysis of NO2) as its primary radical source, whereas the latter used formaldehyde and higher aldehydes to that purpose.
Both of these mechanisms were based on smog chamber experiments involving butane and propylene (or propene, if you're a nomenclature purist). Aromatics chemistry was tacked on as an afterthought, not because it was believed to be unimportant, but more because nobody had any idea what to do with it.
Aromatic hydrocarbons, as they are called, all have a "benzene ring" somewhere in them, and that makes everything very complex. Perhaps you remember the story about Friedrich Kekule literally dreaming up benzene's structure. It's formula is C6H6, and its structure "bites its own tail," so each carbon atom, with four chemical bonds, has, after accounting for the hydrogen, three bonds to share with its two neighboring carbon atoms. That could work out to two and one or one and two, i.e. a paraffinic bond with one neighbor and an olefinic bond with the other, but the wonders of quantum mechanisms allows it to actually be one and a half bonds with each neighbor. Such are the wonders of quantum electrons being able to be in several places at the same time.
Benzene itself is almost dead, photochemically speaking; put it into a smog chamber and it mostly just sits there, making a little tang of phenol after a while, but phenol is deader still, so…boring.
But if you replace one or more of benzene's hydrogens with a methyl group (-CH3), now you're talking. One added methyl group gives you toluene. Two, and you get xylene, which comes in three isomers, meta, para, and ortho, depending upon whether the methyl groups sit right next to each other (ortho), on opposite sides of the ring (para) or one over (meta). There are also, of course, trimethylated benzenes, and compounds where the substituted groups are more complex than methyl groups. But actually, toluene and the xylenes make up the bulk of aromatic compounds in air pollution. There is even a refinery stream referred to as "TBX" which stands for toluene, benzene, and xylene.
Okay, so I'm going to tell you how the photochemistry works, then how it got figured out. The tricky part had to do with how the aromatic rings would open up. Everyone knew it had to happen sometime, but how, and what the products were was a mystery for years.
What happens to something like toluene in smog is that, when it encounters an hydroxyl radical (-OH), the hydroxyl adds itself onto the ring somewhere, usually at the carbon that sits next to a methyl group, because of the way that methyl groups mess with the electron distribution of the aromatic ring. This is what hydroxyls do with olefins, incidentally, so you can look on it as the hydroxyl briefly looking at the ring and seeing, not that "one and a half bonds" thing I mentioned above, but a double carbon-carbon bond, which hydroxyls just love to glom onto.
This breaks one of the carbon-carbon bonds, and one end of it now has a romantic relationship with the hydroxyl radical. But the other end, like a jilted lover, is on the rebound, ready to pick up with just about any pretty face that comes by. That face, almost always, belongs to oxygen, a really promiscuous molecule. It's diatomic (i.e. O2), but not so committed to the relationship that it passes up some good carbon bond action.
So an O2 gloms onto the other, lonely, carbon and you now have a peroxy radical, an aromatic ring with an oxygen tail. The radical characteristic of the thing tends to be concentrated at the free swinging tip of the tail, and in most peroxy radicals, that tip winds up reacting with some other molecule.
Not so with the aromatic peroxy radicals, however, because it so happens that the radical tip is just right for swinging around and hooking up with another carbon, somewhere else on the aromatic ring. You may now consider all of the other sexual double entendres that I could use for this situation.
Anyway, another oxygen now gloms onto the group, but now the situation is stable enough (maybe) so that it waits around for some outside compound (usually a molecule of nitric oxide—NO) to take the last lonely oxygen atom away from the daisy chain.
All the oxygens then decide to settle down with their new carbon best buddies. The oxygen-oxygen bonds call it quits, and that leaves another oxygen bond for each oxygen connected carbon. If you're counting, and remember that carbon only has four bonds to its name, this means that it has a double bond with an oxygen, one for either a hydrogen or a methyl group, and, whoops, only one left for another carbon in the aromatic ring. In short, the ring opens, in multiple places, once for each oxygen. At some point, the poor hydroxyl group, which is now the radical of the bunch, meets yet another oxygen molecule and the hydrogen leaves the party to for hydroperyoxyl (HO2).
The aromatic ring is pretty much finished at this point, and it cleaves into at least two pieces, one with two ring carbons, the other with four. The one with four has, in addition to two oxygen atoms, a olefinic bond (there was some belief for a while that the fragments might all have two ring carbons, each, meaning that there would have been another oxygen molecule bridge on the ring, but later product yield measurements indicate otherwise).
Both ring fragments are called "dicarbonyls" because they each have two carbonyl (C=O) bonds. In one of the fragments, the two carbonyl bonds are right next to each other.
The simplest dicarbonyl is called "glyoxal." It's just H(C=O)(C=O)H. The next one is methyl glyoxal, with a single added methyl group: H(C=O)(C=O)CH3. Both of these are very hard to measure; they tend to stick to gas chromatographic columns nigh onto forever.
Ah, but the next in line is a dicarbonyl with two methyl substituants: CH3(C=O)(C=O)CH3. This is called biacetyl, or diacetyl. And it comes through a chromatographic column.
If you photooxidize orthoxylene, with it's two adjacent methyl groups, when the ring opens, a certain percentage of time you get biacetyl. A group at the University of California at Riverside, (Darnall, Atkinson, and Pitts, 1979) saw the biacetyl coming off of their chromatograph and realized that they had seen the first evidence of ring opening products.
It so happens that both biacetyl and methylglyoxal photolyze like crazy, so much so that they last only a few minutes in sunlight before splitting into radical fragments. I had been looking for something exactly like these dicarbonyls in my own studies of aromatics photochemistry, because I'd found good evidence of very powerful radical sources in toluene experiments. My calculations indicated that the radical formation rate from toluene was twice what it would be if toluene were going to pure formaldehyde, which of course it does not. It forms a significant amount of methyl glyoxal, and that was what I was looking for.
Later, I heard that biacetyl/diacetyl was used to flavor margarine; I also heard that microwave food products use excess flavoring agents because the microwave heating process drives the volatiles away faster than regular cooking.
I had some vague suspicions that it might not be a good idea to use a compound as photochemically unstable as biacetyl in food. Light causes biacetyl to break into two pieces, both acetyl radicals, and when there is any oxygen around, you get peroxyacetyl radicals. Add some nitrogen dioxide and you get peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), which is biologically active. Actually, it's a good bet that any give peroxy compound is biologically active. These are some pretty potent radicals.
So then we see a story about the guy who loved the buttery smell of microwaved popcorn and got a rare lung disease, bronchiolitis obliterans. More to the point, "popcorn lung" has been added to the list of industrial diseases affecting production workers.
All I had were a few suspicions, of course. Nothing to go on, really. But I can't say that I'm surprised in the slightest.
Object Oriented
One the first page of my Web Site on sff.net, there are a couple of moving images, courtesy of Java applets. I yammer at length about the image manipulation part of the project in “Color Cycling with Java.”
As noted in the write-up, I undertook the color cycling project because of a long standing love for that particular effect in computer graphic art. It’s a simple trick; it can look spectacular; what’s not to like? Well, there is the part about how web browsers won’t do it without some sort of add-on, hence my Java applets.
What I don’t go into much is the Java part. Having the color cycling applets to point to allows me to claim some familiarity with Java, which is a useful thing for a technical writer these days. So there’s that. Moreover, Java is an Object-Oriented programming language. OOPLs used to be the flavor of the month; now they’re more like boilerplate. You have to claim familiarity in order to even interview for many jobs.
So let’s pause for a heavy sigh. (Sigh). I’ve complained many times about how the use of an ordinary word in a technical context can cause problems when the technical meaning differs significantly from ordinary usage. Jeez, does that apply to “object-oriented.”
Programming “objects” have nigh onto nothing to do with ordinary objects. They are programs! They do not have mass, weight, substance, color, physical dimensions, or persistence. Nor, for that matter, do they have anything to do with object code, the venerable term for a program that has been compiled into machine readable form.
What program “objects” have is “properties” and “methods.” For any old computer geezers such as myself, those translate to “data structures,” and “procedures.” But calling things by previously used names is so old-fashioned.
If that was all there was to it, then one might very well ask why bother, since there were already these perfectly reasonable programming structures called “sub-routines” and “modules.” Well sure, but there were a few new(ish) notions added to the mix: “inheritance” and “instantiation.” The former lets you create new “objects” based on old ones, with some modifications to the “encapsulated” data or the procedures that act on that data. The latter lets you fire off a bunch of similar program parts, each doing its own thing in the “multi-threaded environment” of the modern operating system.
See, this is just like taking your white hat and putting it into your matter duplicator, setting the dials to “blue” and “wings” so you have a new blue hat with wings. Then the blue hat can fly around and make fun of the poor wingless white hat.
That’s why they’re called “objects.” Because objects can do that sort of thing (snark).
Anyway, the idea was to use the object-oriented model to create re-usable program components that can be bolted together with minimal effort to create larger programs. This would have worked if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids and their stupid dog, I mean, if they had managed to get a variable typing system that was both consistent and comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the two major object-oriented languages, C++ and Java, based their variable typing conventions (as well as their syntax) on the C language, and that’s pretty much where the blue hat died and fluttered to the ground. C had so many exceptions and so much arcane weirdness in its variable typing that the whole thing was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s a simple fact that communication among “objects” can cause terrible headaches, because the variables they pass to each other get slippery.
Joke from the 1970s: C is Assembly Language in a clown suit.
Update to the 1990s: And C++ carries an Uzi.
Now realize, very little of this has anything to do with what someone is asking about when they ask you if you are “familiar with object-oriented programming principles.” What that translates to is, “Are you experienced with C++ and Java?”
I will say that the Object-Oriented project/marketing campaign succeeded brilliantly at making a lot more work for programmers. It also set the barriers to entry much higher and it resulted in the situation that programming now absolutely requires computerized programming tools. I wrote my Java applets more-or-less by hand, but I was hacking, just modifying previously written programs and sort of jamming them together. To do a similar project from scratch would have absolutely required a full bore Java programming tool set.
And it all would have been a lot easier to do in Pascal or even Fortran. But web browsers don’t support those, more’s the pity.
As noted in the write-up, I undertook the color cycling project because of a long standing love for that particular effect in computer graphic art. It’s a simple trick; it can look spectacular; what’s not to like? Well, there is the part about how web browsers won’t do it without some sort of add-on, hence my Java applets.
What I don’t go into much is the Java part. Having the color cycling applets to point to allows me to claim some familiarity with Java, which is a useful thing for a technical writer these days. So there’s that. Moreover, Java is an Object-Oriented programming language. OOPLs used to be the flavor of the month; now they’re more like boilerplate. You have to claim familiarity in order to even interview for many jobs.
So let’s pause for a heavy sigh. (Sigh). I’ve complained many times about how the use of an ordinary word in a technical context can cause problems when the technical meaning differs significantly from ordinary usage. Jeez, does that apply to “object-oriented.”
Programming “objects” have nigh onto nothing to do with ordinary objects. They are programs! They do not have mass, weight, substance, color, physical dimensions, or persistence. Nor, for that matter, do they have anything to do with object code, the venerable term for a program that has been compiled into machine readable form.
What program “objects” have is “properties” and “methods.” For any old computer geezers such as myself, those translate to “data structures,” and “procedures.” But calling things by previously used names is so old-fashioned.
If that was all there was to it, then one might very well ask why bother, since there were already these perfectly reasonable programming structures called “sub-routines” and “modules.” Well sure, but there were a few new(ish) notions added to the mix: “inheritance” and “instantiation.” The former lets you create new “objects” based on old ones, with some modifications to the “encapsulated” data or the procedures that act on that data. The latter lets you fire off a bunch of similar program parts, each doing its own thing in the “multi-threaded environment” of the modern operating system.
See, this is just like taking your white hat and putting it into your matter duplicator, setting the dials to “blue” and “wings” so you have a new blue hat with wings. Then the blue hat can fly around and make fun of the poor wingless white hat.
That’s why they’re called “objects.” Because objects can do that sort of thing (snark).
Anyway, the idea was to use the object-oriented model to create re-usable program components that can be bolted together with minimal effort to create larger programs. This would have worked if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids and their stupid dog, I mean, if they had managed to get a variable typing system that was both consistent and comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the two major object-oriented languages, C++ and Java, based their variable typing conventions (as well as their syntax) on the C language, and that’s pretty much where the blue hat died and fluttered to the ground. C had so many exceptions and so much arcane weirdness in its variable typing that the whole thing was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s a simple fact that communication among “objects” can cause terrible headaches, because the variables they pass to each other get slippery.
Joke from the 1970s: C is Assembly Language in a clown suit.
Update to the 1990s: And C++ carries an Uzi.
Now realize, very little of this has anything to do with what someone is asking about when they ask you if you are “familiar with object-oriented programming principles.” What that translates to is, “Are you experienced with C++ and Java?”
I will say that the Object-Oriented project/marketing campaign succeeded brilliantly at making a lot more work for programmers. It also set the barriers to entry much higher and it resulted in the situation that programming now absolutely requires computerized programming tools. I wrote my Java applets more-or-less by hand, but I was hacking, just modifying previously written programs and sort of jamming them together. To do a similar project from scratch would have absolutely required a full bore Java programming tool set.
And it all would have been a lot easier to do in Pascal or even Fortran. But web browsers don’t support those, more’s the pity.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Objectification
One problem with language is that so many words have more than one meaning that it’s easy to get confused. Of course confusion about one’s assumptions and intuitive models, and the degree to which such things don’t correspond to others’ thinking can occur even when the words supposedly have only the one meaning. The weasel word here is “supposedly.”
When you get down to the nitty gritty, a common word like “object” can be a real poser (or should that be poseur?). Thus do I charge headlong into the sexual politics of the phrase “objectification of women.”
One very common interpretation of this phrase can be encapsulated in a similar utterance: “treating her as a piece of meat.” That, of course, also alludes to the phrase “piece of ass,” or just abbreviated to “piece.” Carried further, a woman becomes a collection of piece parts, breasts, legs, ass, abs, or sternocleidomastoids (to use an anatomical part that I find particularly pleasing).
The attachment of sexual desire to inanimate or impersonal objects is actually a fetish, though I’ll agree that “objectification” is easier to pronounce than “fetishization.” Both Freudian and Behavioral psychology have a lot to say about the role of the fetish in sex, with Freudians holding it as an example of the projection of sexual desire, while behaviorists suggest that operant conditioning is the key to understanding. I have no quarrel with either mechanism and I’m willing to believe that both apply.
The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s lover/collaborator (before their nasty breakup) told a story of one of his patients, a full-fledged Lothario complex, who would speak of his conquests as “mere receptacles.” Branden suggested that he conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that one could construct a perfect female replica; this was pre-Stepford Wives, but that was the clear intent. Make a simulacrum of a woman out of plastic and rubber, totally lifelike, down to the genitalia, animated by motors and actuators. Would the Lothario find such a construct a desirable partner for sex?
“God, no!” was the reply.
Despite novelty “blowup dolls” (sold more often as gag gifts than as real sexual objects, I suspect), and other mechanisms, I believe that Branden’s patient’s response is typical. What is called “objectification” isn’t about reducing women to mere material objects; it is about using women as objects of fantasy, which is not the same thing at all.
In Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books, Modesty’s response to rape (and her history includes a number of such incidents) was to separate her consciousness from the event, thereby depriving the rapist of anything other than her physical presence. She refuses emotional connection, depriving the rapist of real domination. Within the context of the Blaise books, it is yet another indication of the primacy of the heroine’s will, her power over self. It also illustrates a thwarting of rape, and what that implies. Fetishization and the preference for a fantasy object is certainly depersonalizing insofar as it ignores the reality of the Other. In a sense, it denies the objective reality of someone else’s subjective experience. It is another pathological adherence to an internal model, a fixed idea about the external world.
Recognizing that we are dealing with the elevation of fantasy over reality in such cases also allows the realization that this is not a problem confined to men alone. Women crave the fantasy ideal as surely as do men; their fantasies tend to differ, however. It’s an open question as to what degree these differences are learned or innate. What is indisputable is that 1) they vary from individual to individual and 2) they are malleable.
The late comedian Richard Jeni had a bit where he suggested that the standard porn film is most men’s idea of a romantic film with all the boring parts left out. Compare and contrast that with the notion of the “chick flick,” which supposedly is nothing but the (for men) boring bits.
The clear implication is that romance is collaboration, and collaboration is hard, no matter what the circumstances. It’s hard to tell whether the fantasies of men and women are converging or diverging at this time; that’s a project that’s well beyond my own capabilities, and, for that matter, my interests. But simple observation and personal experience suggests that success is possible at the level of individuals, and that’s where my sympathies lie, in this as in so many other things.
When you get down to the nitty gritty, a common word like “object” can be a real poser (or should that be poseur?). Thus do I charge headlong into the sexual politics of the phrase “objectification of women.”
One very common interpretation of this phrase can be encapsulated in a similar utterance: “treating her as a piece of meat.” That, of course, also alludes to the phrase “piece of ass,” or just abbreviated to “piece.” Carried further, a woman becomes a collection of piece parts, breasts, legs, ass, abs, or sternocleidomastoids (to use an anatomical part that I find particularly pleasing).
The attachment of sexual desire to inanimate or impersonal objects is actually a fetish, though I’ll agree that “objectification” is easier to pronounce than “fetishization.” Both Freudian and Behavioral psychology have a lot to say about the role of the fetish in sex, with Freudians holding it as an example of the projection of sexual desire, while behaviorists suggest that operant conditioning is the key to understanding. I have no quarrel with either mechanism and I’m willing to believe that both apply.
The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s lover/collaborator (before their nasty breakup) told a story of one of his patients, a full-fledged Lothario complex, who would speak of his conquests as “mere receptacles.” Branden suggested that he conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that one could construct a perfect female replica; this was pre-Stepford Wives, but that was the clear intent. Make a simulacrum of a woman out of plastic and rubber, totally lifelike, down to the genitalia, animated by motors and actuators. Would the Lothario find such a construct a desirable partner for sex?
“God, no!” was the reply.
Despite novelty “blowup dolls” (sold more often as gag gifts than as real sexual objects, I suspect), and other mechanisms, I believe that Branden’s patient’s response is typical. What is called “objectification” isn’t about reducing women to mere material objects; it is about using women as objects of fantasy, which is not the same thing at all.
In Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise books, Modesty’s response to rape (and her history includes a number of such incidents) was to separate her consciousness from the event, thereby depriving the rapist of anything other than her physical presence. She refuses emotional connection, depriving the rapist of real domination. Within the context of the Blaise books, it is yet another indication of the primacy of the heroine’s will, her power over self. It also illustrates a thwarting of rape, and what that implies. Fetishization and the preference for a fantasy object is certainly depersonalizing insofar as it ignores the reality of the Other. In a sense, it denies the objective reality of someone else’s subjective experience. It is another pathological adherence to an internal model, a fixed idea about the external world.
Recognizing that we are dealing with the elevation of fantasy over reality in such cases also allows the realization that this is not a problem confined to men alone. Women crave the fantasy ideal as surely as do men; their fantasies tend to differ, however. It’s an open question as to what degree these differences are learned or innate. What is indisputable is that 1) they vary from individual to individual and 2) they are malleable.
The late comedian Richard Jeni had a bit where he suggested that the standard porn film is most men’s idea of a romantic film with all the boring parts left out. Compare and contrast that with the notion of the “chick flick,” which supposedly is nothing but the (for men) boring bits.
The clear implication is that romance is collaboration, and collaboration is hard, no matter what the circumstances. It’s hard to tell whether the fantasies of men and women are converging or diverging at this time; that’s a project that’s well beyond my own capabilities, and, for that matter, my interests. But simple observation and personal experience suggests that success is possible at the level of individuals, and that’s where my sympathies lie, in this as in so many other things.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Objective
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." -- Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” -- Philip K. Dick
In Stranger in a Strange Land Jubal Harshaw, as a demonstration, asks one of his secretaries the color of a neighbor’s house. She answers “It’s white on this side.” The idea was that she was a “Fair Witness,” a person with special training who didn’t make assumptions about her observations, so her testimony was given special credence in a court of law.
Sometime when I was in grade school, living on Ironwood Drive in Donelson, Tennessee, I was witness to an unusual atmospheric phenomenon. There was a very low cloud overhead; I think it may have been a contrail cloud from the relatively nearby airport, because the cloud was long and narrow. It was otherwise clear, and near sunset.
We all know how vivid the sunset can be in the last few minutes of light. This cloud picked up the neon pink of the last rays of sun, but it was close. The whole neighborhood lit up with that light. My hair became red; my skin looked dark and sunburned. Our house glowed electric pink.
Our house was actually encased in white asbestos shingles. But for a few moments it was pink—at least on the side that I could see. Truth to tell, though, for me to say that it would have also looked pink on the sides I couldn’t see would have involved fewer assumptions than Heinlein’s “Fair Witness,” was making.
Is this a cheap shot at Heinlein’s expense? I hope not. I’ve seen climate researchers Spenser and Christy refer to their satellite microwave measurements as “direct observations” of atmospheric temperatures, when they most assuredly are not, given that there have been over half a dozen “corrections” to their estimates since they were first published. They are hardly alone is this sort of scientific conceit; I’ve heard such claims many times over the years, as well as researchers referring to various chemical rate parameters (often photolysis rates) as being derived from “first principles,” another nigh onto meaningless phrase used to cloak a welter of assumptions and models of reality.
“What is reality?” appears in a Firesign Theater record as part of a series of audience heckles, and that’s what it often feels like. What we have to work with is subjective experience, which is then denigrated to “mere” subjective experience. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig has a nice long exposition on why words like “just,” “merely,” and “only” are out of place in any descriptions of objective reality, including science. They are indicators of a sneaky, subjective value judgment that someone is trying to slip into the mix. Chemistry isn’t merely very complicated physics. Chemistry is very complicated physics. The second sentence reads differently, doesn’t it?
We have a number of tried-and-true methods of “factualizing” subjective experience and most of them have to do with repeated observations, especially different kinds of observations. We believe in the “reality” of a rose because we can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and even hear it if it is moving through the air. Things that register on all the senses are commonly thought to be “more real” than something that can only be seen, such as a rainbow.
Objects also are given greater claim to objective reality if they persist, since persistence is one of the ways a single observer can make multiple observations. Objects made of matter have greater weight because they have weight, which persists, and can be felt.
Science takes everyday observations of reality and gathers them together into grand theoretical constructs, like Universal Gravitation, the Standard Model, and Evolution by Natural Selection. Scientific theories make sense of the world, allowing us to make predictions, or construct gizmos (in the largest sense) that give us power over the material and immaterial worlds. As Lester del Rey once said, “Mysticism has been around for millennia, science for only centuries. Science is ahead.”
The danger is in forgetting that our ideas about reality are themselves constructs. We believe that there is a reality, but no one has it on a leash, and no one speaks for it. The danger itself factualizes when someone projects their own subjective needs, fears, and desires upon that construct, making it yet another servant to the unconscious mind. We’re all guilty of that to some extent; paradoxically, it’s the ones who claim to most serve “reality” who are most likely to make their own ideas into yet another simulacrum of God. Then just crank up the dial to eleven, ‘cause it’s time for another episode of Monsters from the Id.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Poly
The story goes that a spinster inherited a farm and she wanted to raise chickens and sell the eggs. So she put in an order for thirty chickens and thirty roosters to the local broker. “Ma’am,” the dealer told her. You really only need one rooster for that many chickens.”
“Well!” said the woman in a huff. “Isn’t that just the way a man would think!”
________________________
Strictly speaking, polygamy is divided into two categories, polygyny and polyandry, the former being one male with multiple mates and the other being one female with multiple mates. In practice, polygyny is so seldom used as a label that it doesn’t even show up in my spell checker, and polygamy is generally taken to mean the multiple wives thing.
The predominance of polygyny over polyandry is pretty typical of mammals where there is substantial sexual dimorphism, i.e. where males are larger than females. In species where it’s the other way around (large females and small males), things aren’t quite so phalocentric, with the extreme cases being those insectoid suicide matings (bees, black widow spiders, etc.), that have served as the basis of many horror stories (or, contrariwise, female revenge fantasies, point-of-view being a factor in nomenclature).
Sociobiology and ethnology offer a lot of speculative theories on the nature of polygamy, most of them controversial, (well duh). It’s pretty easy to see how a shortage of males can lead to polygyny. Indeed, one hard fact in population demographics is that the birth rate in any given region depends on the number of women of child bearing age—period. It’s almost impossible to reduce the number of men to a level where it affects the number of children being born.
In the state of perpetual warfare that sometimes exists in some societies, a shortage of men is almost inevitable, and some sort of polygyny often results. Given long enough, this becomes institutionalized. It’s not necessary to invoke perpetual warfare, either; hunting large game is dangerous, and hunter/gatherer societies can easily develop male shortages and the whole “alpha male” structure, almost by accident.
A suggested countervailing influence in stone age societies is female infanticide. This is the dark underbelly of Eden, the crude population control measure that allowed the human population to remain stable for millennia. Some anthropologists have suggested that this sometimes led to polyandry, due to a shortage of females. It’s interesting to speculate about the future outcome of the gender imbalances that are being set up in some Asian countries as a result of pre-natal screening and selective abortion.
Female infanticide as a population control measure has been suggested as the origin of the form of institutionalized polyandry that exists in Tibet. One difficulty with this argument is that the custom is confined to a property owning class (which suggests that privation isn’t the primary origin), and that the woman’s spouses are fraternal, i.e. she marries the “family” as it were, and one brother is dominant, with the rest merely enjoying spousal privileges. That suggests that in this case, the custom is more akin to primogeniture, with the multiple husbands simply as insurance against infertility in the primary “alpha” male. It may be noted that this looks similar to the commonly noted phenomenon of infidelity on the part of the mates of the alpha males in various primate societies.
Substantial gender imbalances were the norm in the expansion of Europeans into the Americas, and history and folklore abounds in unconventional modes of co-habitation in the Old West. The Mormons dealt with their substantial gender imbalance in the early church with a “revelation” of God’s blessing for polygyny. By contrast, Wyoming Territory, responded to an extreme shortage of women by giving them voting rights in 1869, as an attempt to get more women to move to the territory.
A careful examination of social behavior in the Old West suggests that there is a form of polyandry that is seldom noted as such: prostitution. The legal system does its best to deny that the prostitute/client relationship is legitimate, as do practically all religious doctrines. But on any honest analysis suggests otherwise. What does a polyandrous relationship have that does not appear in prostitution? Certainly emotional relationships form; the client who wants to “make an honest woman of her” is so common as to be a stereotype. Children? Frequently children are the reason why women turn to prostitution. While it’s true that the anonymous sex of a street hooker doesn’t much look like marriage, it’s easy to find more domesticated arrangements upscale in the sex trade, while contrariwise, it’s not that difficult to find legal marriages that make a street hooker and her john look positively loving and healthy.
There’s no doubt that human relationships rapidly increase in complexity as the number of players increases. Same-sex monogamy will inevitably be even less complicated than the sort of opposite sex serial monogamy that has become normal in the modern world. By the same token, divorces in same sex marriages will certainly be at least as complicated as opposite sex divorces. Having both spouses “cheat” with the same individual is relatively uncommon in opposite sex couples, though it does happen, and, yes that’s yet another kind of gossip that will probably never appear in these essays.
But group arrangements, even when the group is so small as three, becomes so very complicated so very quickly that I doubt that they will ever be common enough for the law and mores to take much note of them. It should go without saying that such “outlaw” behavior is just the sort of thing that young people do as a way of testing limits, their own and others, just another set of behaviors that Seem Like a Good Idea At the Time.
“Well!” said the woman in a huff. “Isn’t that just the way a man would think!”
________________________
Strictly speaking, polygamy is divided into two categories, polygyny and polyandry, the former being one male with multiple mates and the other being one female with multiple mates. In practice, polygyny is so seldom used as a label that it doesn’t even show up in my spell checker, and polygamy is generally taken to mean the multiple wives thing.
The predominance of polygyny over polyandry is pretty typical of mammals where there is substantial sexual dimorphism, i.e. where males are larger than females. In species where it’s the other way around (large females and small males), things aren’t quite so phalocentric, with the extreme cases being those insectoid suicide matings (bees, black widow spiders, etc.), that have served as the basis of many horror stories (or, contrariwise, female revenge fantasies, point-of-view being a factor in nomenclature).
Sociobiology and ethnology offer a lot of speculative theories on the nature of polygamy, most of them controversial, (well duh). It’s pretty easy to see how a shortage of males can lead to polygyny. Indeed, one hard fact in population demographics is that the birth rate in any given region depends on the number of women of child bearing age—period. It’s almost impossible to reduce the number of men to a level where it affects the number of children being born.
In the state of perpetual warfare that sometimes exists in some societies, a shortage of men is almost inevitable, and some sort of polygyny often results. Given long enough, this becomes institutionalized. It’s not necessary to invoke perpetual warfare, either; hunting large game is dangerous, and hunter/gatherer societies can easily develop male shortages and the whole “alpha male” structure, almost by accident.
A suggested countervailing influence in stone age societies is female infanticide. This is the dark underbelly of Eden, the crude population control measure that allowed the human population to remain stable for millennia. Some anthropologists have suggested that this sometimes led to polyandry, due to a shortage of females. It’s interesting to speculate about the future outcome of the gender imbalances that are being set up in some Asian countries as a result of pre-natal screening and selective abortion.
Female infanticide as a population control measure has been suggested as the origin of the form of institutionalized polyandry that exists in Tibet. One difficulty with this argument is that the custom is confined to a property owning class (which suggests that privation isn’t the primary origin), and that the woman’s spouses are fraternal, i.e. she marries the “family” as it were, and one brother is dominant, with the rest merely enjoying spousal privileges. That suggests that in this case, the custom is more akin to primogeniture, with the multiple husbands simply as insurance against infertility in the primary “alpha” male. It may be noted that this looks similar to the commonly noted phenomenon of infidelity on the part of the mates of the alpha males in various primate societies.
Substantial gender imbalances were the norm in the expansion of Europeans into the Americas, and history and folklore abounds in unconventional modes of co-habitation in the Old West. The Mormons dealt with their substantial gender imbalance in the early church with a “revelation” of God’s blessing for polygyny. By contrast, Wyoming Territory, responded to an extreme shortage of women by giving them voting rights in 1869, as an attempt to get more women to move to the territory.
A careful examination of social behavior in the Old West suggests that there is a form of polyandry that is seldom noted as such: prostitution. The legal system does its best to deny that the prostitute/client relationship is legitimate, as do practically all religious doctrines. But on any honest analysis suggests otherwise. What does a polyandrous relationship have that does not appear in prostitution? Certainly emotional relationships form; the client who wants to “make an honest woman of her” is so common as to be a stereotype. Children? Frequently children are the reason why women turn to prostitution. While it’s true that the anonymous sex of a street hooker doesn’t much look like marriage, it’s easy to find more domesticated arrangements upscale in the sex trade, while contrariwise, it’s not that difficult to find legal marriages that make a street hooker and her john look positively loving and healthy.
There’s no doubt that human relationships rapidly increase in complexity as the number of players increases. Same-sex monogamy will inevitably be even less complicated than the sort of opposite sex serial monogamy that has become normal in the modern world. By the same token, divorces in same sex marriages will certainly be at least as complicated as opposite sex divorces. Having both spouses “cheat” with the same individual is relatively uncommon in opposite sex couples, though it does happen, and, yes that’s yet another kind of gossip that will probably never appear in these essays.
But group arrangements, even when the group is so small as three, becomes so very complicated so very quickly that I doubt that they will ever be common enough for the law and mores to take much note of them. It should go without saying that such “outlaw” behavior is just the sort of thing that young people do as a way of testing limits, their own and others, just another set of behaviors that Seem Like a Good Idea At the Time.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Terminator
The State of the Union Address left a programming hole on the West Coast, which Fox filled with a re-run of the pilot of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I'd seen it already, but hey, it's still fan boy time.Okay, here's where I realized they had me. Near the beginning, when John Connor is starting his new high school, Cameron Phillips (yeah, and the FBI agent is name Ellison), the "helpful Terminator" sent back by John Connor in the future, is masquerading as a regular high school student, and engages John in some light conversation, just a pretty girl trying to make the new kid feel welcome. And I'm thinking, hey, she's doing a pretty good job of pretending to be just a normal pretty girl.
When they get you thinking that behaving normally is acting, you're have entered the Twilight Zone.
Of course, the main reason for that is Summer Glau, a most righteous battle babe. Formerly, in Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity she played River Tam, a genius girl who'd undergone "treatments" that made her psychic, drove her more than slightly insane, and left her with various triggers that could turn her into a lethal battle babe. So Glau is in danger of being type-cast, but realize that for an actress, being type-cast as a battle babe is actually a career extender. Glau can be playing tough sci-fi or cop roles for the next two or three decades if she so desires.
Glau also does most of her own martial arts stunts, by report, for the simple reason that she can. Indeed, she's far better at it than most, because she has dance training. There's a reason why they call it "martial arts choreography." The point where I went "whoa" in Serenity is in the she-beats-up-everyone-in-the-bar scene, where she kicks someone who has grabbed her from behind in the back of the head.
All of this presents a considerable problem for Lena Headey, who plays Sarah Connor. Even apart from all the damn milf jokes that are going to be running around, it's awfully easy for Glau to steal the spotlight, in a way that is reflected in the plot dynamics of the story they're following. Connor is, in every way, a tough, capable, hypercompetent human being. But she's still only human and she's fighting machines, plus, her main ally in this is also a machine, one that is stronger, faster, you name it. How can Sarah compete?
Moreover, the Terminator story lines just drip Oedipal conflict, and by the way, just how big a bastard is the future John Connor? In the first film, he sends his own father back in time to his certain death, something that must happen for John to be born in the first place, actually. His only real father figure that we've seen has been a killing machine (who also dies—kills himself, actually—while John watches). They seem to be trying to ring in another ersatz father figure in Charlie Dixon, but anyone can tell you that this can't turn out well. If he's really lucky, he'll get out alive.
So, okay, tough mother whose son is the only hope of the world. Check. Robot babe even tougher than the mother. Robot babe has been sent back from the future by the future son, so mother can't just get rid of her; besides, how? Robot babe is far too tough and smart for that.
Also, they're trying to destroy a new technology (Skynet) before it gets off the ground. This is Ted Kaczynski territory, so "every hand is against them." Also, they've already changed time—twice, and John's own origin is a damn time travel paradox, so the plot is bound to get as twisted as the mother-son relationship, or the son-babebot relationship, or just about any other thing that comes down the pike.
I do have one final riff that I'd like to see, but I'm sure it never will happen. In my version, Skynet was actually trying to prevent a nuclear war, and failed. Which drove it insane, so now it's trying to destroy humanity before humanity can destroy itself. Sure, it's a paradox, but hell, in this series, what isn't?
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