Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Learning About Dating Through Big Bang Theory

    Big Bang Theory has some amusing and interesting insights into the world of nerds and physicists, and the way it depicts the social standing of nerds in America seems very familiar to an Australian viewer. But like most American shows, when it moves on to talking about relationships and gender relations, it’s a whole new world. Because the show presents an outsider’s view of the social relations of ordinary people, it can be quite brutal in its honesty about what I assume are standard American cultural practices, and when it talks about “dating” and relationships I truly find myself wondering: is America really this crazy? So, this blog post is a plea for my American reader(s) to enlighten me about American “dating” culture: is it really so hard for you guys, and is America really that conservative?

    This isn’t a problem limited to just Big Bang Theory, either. Watching Friends, I’m struck by the pointless dufusness of the men’s behavior, the knee-jerk “I’m not gay”-ism and the puerile sex jokes that speak of writers uncomfortable with their own and others’ sexualities. Then there is the hideous conservatism of Sex and the City, that bills itself as being all about a new generation of liberated women, whose liberation boils down to … giving out blowjobs for nothing as if this were daring (and of course settling down for the older rich guy at the end[1]). There is the strange and juvenile way that Richard Castle loses his train of thought any time Kate Beckett implies that she might once have done something racy. Or the way that the women in Buffy all fall over themselves to prove how they’re not “sluts,” and perfectly attractive women in even vaguely gothy outfits are routinely referred to as “skanks” – and this from a supposed feminist. But the good thing about Big Bang Theory is that it’s not just reproducing social norms: being a story about outsiders who sometimes try to fit in, we see them on both sides of the fence. Sometimes they engage in the standard mating rituals of the American male, and then sometimes – as in the outstanding episode where Leonard and Penny decide to be “just friends” – they take on those standard rituals.

    In that episode, Leonard and Penny go out for a meal as “just friends,” and Leonard takes great pleasure in forcing Penny to pay for everything she consumes, because that’s what friends do. But the clear reason he takes pleasure in this is that, normally, he would be required to pay for everything.

    Is this normal in America? When you go on a date, is the man supposed to pay for everything? I was confused about this, finding it really hard to believe that such a backwards ritual could apply in the modern world, especially in a country so supposedly open-minded and equal as America; and after all, television doesn’t depict life just as it is, but often as the writers would like to imagine life should be, so maybe it’s fake? So I did a bit of online research, and I worry that the show might be telling the truth. This Irish website gives tips to Irish men dating American women, and after “don’t get drunk” the number 2 tip is “pay for everything.” This (admittedly more than a little obnoxious) Guardian opinion piece ponders why American women expect to be shouted everything, even when they earn more than the guy (and blames it on that crappy book The Rules); and this dating advice website corroborates another part of Robert Kelsey’s point about American dating tips – that you shouldn’t “make yourself too available,” which is apparently a delicate American way of saying “don’t have sex when you want to.” I found a website by girls seeking advice about dating French men, too, and the top complaint by the women there seemed to be that their Frenchie doesn’t text them every 10 seconds to tell them how great they are – like maybe he’s got a life, or something[2]. The strong implication I drew from these sites is that American women are high maintenance, requiring men to buy them lots of stuff and constantly tell them how great they are[3]. Also something that a lot of people trying to get by in America seem to notice is that the concept of “dating” is unique to Americans. The dating tips website even talks about this as an identifiable social mode:

    Whether you are new to the dating scene, are reentering the dating scene, or are a serial dater, you can use dating tips and advice

    Well clearly I would need dating tips and advice, since I’ve seen many scenes but I’ve never heard of a “dating” scene. And what is a “serial dater”? Is that maybe someone who just can’t get a root? In Australia, we don’t “enter the dating scene,” we meet people and if we like them and they like us we have sex with them, and at some point we discuss whether maybe we should stop having sex with other people (although often this is just assumed, or just a touch too delicate so we just keep on doing it until we move in together[4]). If someone is meeting a lot of different people of their preferred sex for dinner and drinks, their friends will say “ooh, he’s getting a bit isn’t he?” or “well she’s certainly enjoying her single life” but no one would say “I think Sheila’s dating again…” What a strange concept. Also, if Sheila is meeting lots of different Bruces, one can be fairly certain that most of those Bruces are expecting her to pay half of the bill. She is not, after all, an escort girl, so it’s not like dinner is a business expense. In fact, quite a few Australian women I have known would feel uncomfortable about the implied expectation of having a man pay for your dinner and drinks. How horrible would it be if a woman paid for my dinner and drinks, but I didn’t like her and didn’t want to see her again? I’d feel like a cheap fraud.

    Finally, one night I had a long conversation with my (good-looking, well-adjusted) American (Californian[5]) flatmate about this, and he told me that California girls are really complex, and that trying to become entangled with one is a real pain in the arse: not only do they expect you to pay for everything but the whole “dating” thing is a complex job-interview-like assessment, in which your current and future prospects and all you “have to offer” them is on the table. And you know they’re “dating” various other men – openly! – so that you know you’re competing, kind of bidding for a tender or something. I suppose it fits with the rest of the world’s image of Americans as having kind of commodified themselves, but to me the thought of going out looking for a root as being some kind of investment or marketing strategy is quite horrible.

    So my question to my American reader(s) is: is Big Bang Theory right? Is it true that men have to pay for everything and women mustn’t fuck on the first date? Do you really openly admit to your dating partner – through the very use of the word “dating” – that you’re seeing other people in the same context, and kind of taking applications …? Just how cold and calculating do you think people are in their assessment of their dating “partners” in such a context? And are American women as complex and princess-y as your dramas suggest? I’ve never had the good fortune of “dating” (or anything else!) one of your Amazonian women, so your culture is foreign to me. So please do enlighten me! If I were Leonard dating Penny, and I refused to pay for her ice-cream, would that be a faux pas? And if so, what do you think of these strange rules? And have you considered moving to Australia, where the women are beautiful and fun and simple and sweet and, quite frankly, easy?

    —

    fn1: At least, that is what I’m led to believe happened – I don’t dare watch the show too much for fear my head would explode from the sheer horribleness of the main characters, not to mention the intense pain brought on by the concentration required to pretend that these hideous brides-of-skeletor are actually pretty women who are capable of sexual enjoyment (though admittedly, all their sexual enjoyment seems to come from giving blowjobs and then telling each other about it, so maybe this last part should make sense).

    fn2: spent working hard to pay for the next date, maybe?

    fn3: I think there’s a Monty Python scene about this, involving Death and a salmon mousse.

    fn4: This is a slight exaggeration, but you get my point, I’m sure.

    fn5: Actually, is it possible to be Californian, good-looking, and well-adjusted at the same time? Maybe I missed something!

  • A D&D Character Sheet, in Business Buzzwords

    A first attempt at how a D&D character sheet might look like if written in business buzzwords:

    Click for a full Horizon-scan

    This character sheet is based on the D&D 4e Essentials character sheet, with the “skillset” separated from the “capabilities.” Follow the flow of that character sheet to see how they all fit in, though it should be obvious to anyone who is singing from the same hymn sheet as me exactly what should be actioned in, for example, the “Key Deliverables” section of the document. If you see a word you recognize, it’s because I can’t think of a suitable buzzword to replace it with. I considered putting in a statement about proper treatment of personal data and please destroy it if it has been emailed to you in error, but we all know that really those statements have no legal force. I think I haven’t used enough hyphens, and some of the nouns lose their full bullshit bingo force if they’re not used as verbs (or should I say, “verbed”).

    Suggestions are welcome, of course: we’ll stir-fry them in the ideas wok. I’m doing a full 360-degree horizon scan on this, so any blue-sky thinking on it is absolutely welcome. Just so we’re sure we’re all on the same page, I should clarify that this is issued under the Open Bullshit License (OBL), just like all product made available through this communication channel. Under the Open Bullshit License, if you envision a strategic fit to any of the ideas pioneered here, you’re welcome to transition them to your own knowledge base. A few questions for us to brainstorm:

    • Is “drill down” sufficient for “dungeoneering”?
    • “Empowerment” isn’t the best option for “Armour class,” but much as you’d like to see the average meeting turn into a melee (that ultimately ends with your boss getting stuck with a guisarme), I can’t think of a buzzword for this
    • “Intestinal fortitude” seems a bit weak. Actually some of the original words (dexterity, fortitude, intiative) are kind of bullshitty in their own right: should they just be kept as-is?
    • Should the whole thing be called a “Service Level Agreement”? I’m not sure…

    Let’s whiteboard any ideas and see if we can come up with a 2.0 version …

  • Current Viewing: Big Bang Theory

    I’m not a fan of American comedy in general, but Big Bang Theory has really impressed me. I presume no one in my readership is ignorant of the basic idea behind this show, but just in case: it’s about a group of nerds – three physicists and an engineer – who are completely out of touch with ordinary life, and one completely ordinary, normal, un-nerdy girl called Penny. In later seasons two additional extremely nerdy (and very, very funny) women join the group as partners of some of the boys. Two of the characters, Leonard and Sheldon, live together. The rest is classic American situation comedy, except that it’s all filmed from the perspective of the four nerds. There are no dufus macho American men like in Friends or your standard run of crappy sit-coms, clapping each other on the back and putting their feet on the seats: this is the kind of show where the main characters play D&D, or Settlers of Katan, and look on conscious displays of machismo as a kind of vice.

    The humour is simultaneously smutty and sophisticated, which is unusual for American TV, and the characters are excellent. Even Sheldon, who is clearly an arsehole by anyone’s lights, is really funny and endearing, and Howard – who if he were a normal guy would be a horrible person – is quite sweet in his own crazy way. The central character, Leonard, is also the most normal of the group, in that all though he is a nerd’s nerd – nerdier than you or I can ever hope to be, young Jedi – he understands ordinary human interactions sufficiently to be able to pass as a normal human, and his gentle manner means that he regularly manages to pull quite hot women (without ever intending to). The rest of them, however, are lost in la-la land. And this is the central conceit of the show: everything that is normal and coherent is reversed, so that the social relations, interests and even dreams of ordinary people are seen as weird and outre, while the warped social dynamic of nerd-dom is recast as the norm. This show reverses the role of insider and outsider, so that designing an app to solve ODEs is a normal Friday night activity, while going out drinking with your buddies is weird and unenjoyable. Instead of having the nerd or the freak point out the social contradictions and oddities – as happens in, for example, The Breakfast Club – in this show it’s the ordinary Nebraskan woman, Penny, who is constantly confused and challenging the social norms. This reversal in itself offers a lot of entertainment, as we see what would happen if the things we know are weird and unusual were normal, and the things we know everyone expects to be normal were considered a waste of time. It also occasionally offers some quite interesting insights into what is wrong with the standard social order.

    At the same time, however, the main characters are acutely aware of their status in broader society, and we are regularly reminded of their experience of bullying and social exclusion when they were younger. Now, of course, within the world of the university where they work, there is no such problem, and it is Penny – representative of ordinary society – who is cast as the outsider. But when they venture outside of their small group we are reminded of the fragility of their social setting and its fundamental defensiveness. Howard, out on the pull at a club, tells us in one memorable scene that if he waits until 3am all the cool kids will have scored, and he will be guaranteed success with the ugly and desperate social loners who remain – this is his conscious tactic. They occasionally have run-ins with people from their past, and are reminded of how weak they are in other social settings. Sometimes they try to do the right thing in broader society, to defend their rights as nerds or just to be moral, and it always comes back to bite them because they are weak and hated. So they return to their cocoon, aware that they are looked down upon by the rest of society but happy in their safe world. This isn’t really much like adult life as a nerd at all – nerds tend to be much more respected in adult life than they were in childhood, and this part of the show is very much about reliving childhood trauma in an adult setting – but it’s fun and in some ways (especially the parts about women and sex) still true.

    The show does have a few weaknesses. The treatment of Raj, an Indian, I would consider to be racist at times, though also the way that he takes the piss out of the image of India as a poor and backward country is quite funny. The characters never seem to successfully get back at the people who bullied them in their school days, which is frustrating, and the gender relations are typically conservative in that weird American way that mystifies the rest of the world whenever we see it (I’ll have more to say about that in a future post). Also, at times Sheldon is so annoying as to be offensive, and you kind of wish that he would relent a little. But these are minor flaws, considering that this is a show where people quote Star Wars, play Klingon word games, regularly visit the comic shop, and quite frequently have carefully rendered debates about quantum mechanics. The scene where they play D&D is brilliant, and every episode is a gem of good humour. Also, Penny’s dealings with the boys – the way she is affectionate towards them but understands how completely weird they are – is a thing of beauty, sufficient to give all nerds everywhere the hope that they, too, will one day be able to lose their virginity.

    I recommend this show for all nerds everywhere, or for partners of nerds who need to get an insight into their partners worlds without having to face the horror of actually participating in that weird shit. I also promise that if you, a nerd, watch it, you will be reassured of your normality in comparison to the freaks who populate the show. It’s a balm for the soul, if you’re into playing D&D in Elvish but don’t want to think you’re unusual. So if you haven’t already, give it a go…

  • Problems with Out of Sample Prediction using R

    I stumbled on a problem with out-of-sample prediction in R, which I think is an example of idiosyncratic programming (and possibly insoluble) and, in the spirit of Andrew Gelman’s stats blog, I thought I’d put it on the internet to see if a) I’m just being stupid and b) it really is as much of a barrier to automation of statistical functions as I think it is. Perhaps someone with more clout than me will find this blog and notice this problem – or perhaps it’s not a problem and I’m just being stupid (or unfairly demanding of my prediction modeling software).

    In case you haven’t worked this out already, if you aren’t interested in stats, R, or nerdy shit that wastes everyone’s time, you should stop reading right now. Everything beneath the dotted line is going to kill your love life, and probably your pets.

    —

    First, let’s consider the basic out-of-sample prediction process. We run a very simple linear model and then we provide R with a set of new data – containing exactly the same variable and type of variable – and get it to work out what the expected value of the line is on the new predictor variables. Taking the example straight from the manual, here is the code for a trivial predictive model:

    x <- rnorm(15)
y <- x + rnorm(15)
predict(lm(y ~ x))
new <- data.frame(x = seq(-3, 3, 0.5))
predict(lm(y ~ x), new, se.fit = TRUE)

    This is very simple code: we produce a set of x values and make the y values equal to these x values plus a random amount[1]. Then we run the model and get the predicted values (just for shits and giggles, btw), and then we make a new data set that contains values ranging from -3 to 3 in steps of 0.5, and run the predictions on these new x values. In this code, the data frame called new is the out-of-sample data, and we get the expected value of y given the observed values in new, for the given model. This is stats 101, right?

    In my case, the x values are

    1.5313262  1.5307600 -0.5067223 -0.1366010 -0.6557527  1.4245267 -0.3917136  1.7941995  2.0511560  0.3602334 -0.8798598 -0.5755816 -1.6419118 -0.7885237  1.1478910

    and the coefficients of the resulting linear model are

    [0.367,1.047]

    That is my model has an intercept of 0.367 and a slope of 1.047. This means that, e.g. for a new x value of -3 I would expect y to be 0.367+-3*1.047, or about -2.774. The correct predicted values for the new data set, based on these coefficients, produced by the 5th line of my code, are:

    -2.7751002 -2.2514963 -1.7278925 -1.2042886 -0.6806847 -0.1570809  0.3665230  0.8901269  1.4137307  1.9373346  2.4609385  2.9845424  3.5081462

    Now, let’s produce our first example of a problem. Consider the following very simple code:

    yy<-cbind(y,x)
    pred.m1<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]))
    pred.mnew<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]),new,se.fit=TRUE)

    Here, I’ve bound my previous x and y values together to make a matrix, with y in column 1 and x in column 2. Then I’ve rerun the model using the perfectly natural R method, of referring to each variable in the data set by its column reference ([,1] for the y, [,2] for the x). Then I’ve rerun the out-of-sample prediction on the same set of x values as I used before (the vector new). This is the simplest possible non-trivial linear model, and out-of-sample prediction in this case should be as simple as in the case of the previous model. So what happens? First, the following “warning”:

    Warning message:
    ‘newdata’ had 13 rows but variable(s) found have 15 rows

    Note this is a warning. So what values do we get? Here they are:

    1.97013967  1.96954674 -0.16412052  0.22347339 -0.32018633  1.85829845 -0.04368247  2.24542264  2.51450943  0.74376222 -0.55487302 -0.23623050 -1.35289974 -0.45922514  1.56860335

    These values are different. In fact, they’re the in-sample predictions. You can check it – they’re the result of applying the coefficients to the original observations of the predictor variable. This means that two important things happened:

    1. R failed to produce a solution to the simplest possible linear modeling problem, simply because I changed the input method for my regression model – even though the revised input methods (for the formula and the data) are entirely consistent with the R language
    2. The “warning” was not a warning: R didn’t just warn me about a problem, it failed to apply the command I told it to, and didn’t tell me about its decision. I could publish this shit, and not realize that I’ve been given my original values back.

    Note how thoroughly horrible this would be if I were running some kind of automated series of regression processes – I once did a capture/recapture model that was heavily dependent on automation in R, and I’m wondering if I fell for this crap then. R should not be declaring a “warning” when it is actually refusing to run the command I asked it to and producing completely different output. I know I’m only a statistician, but imagine if this kind of programming were allowed in Jumbo Jets. Unhappy punters we would all be, young Jedi.

    Also let’s just pause and dwell on the meaningless nature of that warning. I’ve supplied a vector of 13 observations, and the vector of 1s (for the constant) is implicit in everything I’ve done to date. So this means I’m (reasonably) assuming R will construct a 13×2 matrix with a column of 1s and a column of (out-of-sample) x values. Then, we have a 2×1 vector of coefficients. Thus, R should be able to calculate a vector of outputs from the information I’ve supplied it. The only possible explanation is that it is expecting me to supply it with a full-rank matrix, i.e. it has decided arbitrarily to stop implicitly assuming the constant. So, shall we try that?

    new.fr<-cbind(rep(1,13),new)
    pred.frnew<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]),new.fr,se.fit=TRUE)

    Same prediction process, only now the out-of-sample data that I provide is full-rank, containing a column of 1s and a column of (out-of-sample) x values[2].

    The result? The same problem: the same warning in red, and in-sample expected values. So the problem is not that I’m providing a less-than-full-rank matrix of predictors on the assumption that one column of the design matrix is implicit. The problem is deeper than that.

    I can, however, fix the problem in a weird way. If I assign column names to the original data, and also assign the new data a name that matches the name of the predictor in the original data, I get the correct output:

    yy2<-data.frame(yy)
    names(yy2)<-c(“Outcome”,”Predictor”)
    new2<-new
    names(new2)<-c(“Predictor”)
    pred.mnamed<-predict(lm(Outcome~Predictor,data=yy2),new2,se.fit=TRUE)

    In this case I’ve made a new data frame for the original data and the out-of-sample data, to avoid confusion, and I’ve given them all consistent names. Note now that in the prediction process the out-of-sample data, new2, is not full rank – the column of 1s is assumed in the calculation process. But it doesn’t cause any trouble: the previous warning about seeing only 13 observations doesn’t appear, and I get the correct out-of-sample predictions. I still only have 13 observations, but R doesn’t care. I get correct predictions and everything is fine.

    This might seem like a trivial problem until you’re doing automation. I recently wrote a program to do a search through a large number of univariate models, and then combine the variables from the top 10 in a predictive model. The predictions were the only thing I wanted. But I spent hours trying to work out why R wouldn’t give me out-of-sample predictions: my training sample had about 50k records, and my validation sample had about 20k. I was using numeric column references for the purposes of automation (the process should be fairly obvious: you make a matrix of variable numbers with AIC values from the corresponding linear models, sort by AIC values, choose the variable numbers corresponding to the best 10, and then put them into a formula in a linear model) but it wasn’t working. Eventually I worked out this problem, made a vector of column names and used the paste() function to produce a formula.

    But this work around is stupid. In both cases – using column numbers or referring to names – the design matrix is implicit, not specified by the user. The underlying R code has to construct this design matrix. So why does it screw me around like this? Why provide two ways of referencing columns and then have one of them bork your most basic modeling function? What would Tibshirani say? Dividing data into training and validation sets is an essential part of modern machine learning principles, but R can’t handle it because – omfg – one has a different number of records to the other. Even though the matrix mathematics is in no way affected by the difference in the number of records.

    That, dear reader, is called crap program design. Especially crap is the issuing of a warning that isn’t a warning at all, but an indication that the program has arbitrarily decided to produce a result different to the one you asked for! Rather than declaring a “warning,” R should say clearly “Catastrophic failure! Providing default prediction using original design matrix only!” Or better still it could say “What are you doing, Dave?” and refuse to let me out of the cargo bay doors.

    The manual says the following about giving out-of-sample data to the program:

    If the fit is rank-deficient, some of the columns of the design matrix will have been dropped. Prediction from such a fit only makes sense if newdata is contained in the same subspace as the original data. That cannot be checked accurately, so a warning is issued.

    and

    A warning will be given if the variables found are not of the same length as those in newdata if it was supplied.

    This is not exactly the most informative help in the world. I don’t think that what is described in the first sentences (to the extent that I understand the English) is what happens in practice, and the last sentence is certainly misleading. In R, warnings usually indicate something you should be aware of that does not affect the numerical processing of results (see e.g. Andrew Gelman’s statement in the above blog link, “I don’t care about warning messages.” Except you should, because sometimes R issues a message called a “warning” that is actually an indicator of insouciant and catastrophic failure to enact the expected mathematical process.

    Open source software: it sucks. Except that R is far and away the best software for automation in stats – until you run into crap like this. Fix it, CRAN!

    —

    fn1: of course the R manual makes this part just slightly more obscure than it needs to be, because hey! R is a really pithy language, so why would you use comments to make the process easier to grasp, or separate the process of generating x from the process of generating epsilon? Anyone who knows what they’re doing can figure it out, and manuals are for people who already know what they’re doing – right?

    fn2: I guess I could do this more accurately by supplying a variable containing only 1s, and specifying “no constant.” That might work, I suppose. How horrid.

    Here is the full code to reproduce all these results:

    ## Predictions
    x <- rnorm(15)
    y <- x + rnorm(15)
    pred.v1<-predict(lm(y ~ x))
    new <- data.frame(x = seq(-3, 3, 0.5))
    pred.vnew<-predict(lm(y ~ x), new, se.fit = TRUE)

    ## now make a data set yy that contains a column for x and a column for y

    yy<-cbind(y,x)

    pred.m1<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]))

    pred.mnew<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]),new,se.fit=TRUE)

    ## now give the data set names and retry it
    yy2<-data.frame(yy)
    names(yy2)<-c(“Outcome”,”Predictor”)
    new2<-new
    names(new2)<-c(“Predictor”)

    pred.mnamed<-predict(lm(Outcome~Predictor,data=yy2),new2,se.fit=TRUE)

    # now try a full rank matrix
    new.fr<-cbind(rep(1,13),new)
    pred.frnew<-predict(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2]),new.fr,se.fit=TRUE)

    x.mat<-as.numeric(lm(yy[,1]~yy[,2])$coefficients)

    # try again with matrix maths
    new.fr<-as.matrix(cbind(rep(1,13),new))
    pred.frnew2<-new.fr %*% x.mat

  • Valentine’s Day in Japan

    image

    This is one part of my Valentine Day haul, chocolate from the Delightful Miss E. I will of course receive more, and got some more before the actual  day. This is because Valentine Day in Japan is not a festival if mutual affection and dating, but a cunnibg marketing scheme concocted by the faceless men of Big Chocolate.

    And as a marketing  scheme it is of unparalleled wickedness, corrupting the western dating element and melding it to Japanese concepts of obligation and group membership – then targeting the whole  thing exclusively at women to make sure the meme manifests as fantastic profits. I love it for its sublime union of evil and chocolate.

    You see, in Japan Valentine Day has been reconstrued as a day for women to give chocolate to men, starting with their lovers and proceeding through all the men in key positions in their life: family, friends, club members, colleagues, even their boss and teachers. This last set of recipients reflect the women’s oblugations to men who have helped her during the year, and is referred to as giri choco. By this point most women are so deep in chocolate that they give to female friends too.

    As an example of the reach of this ritual, on saturday I went to see the band ElupiA, and their singer gave me chocolate just to show her appreciation for my support.

    What’s not to love about Valentine Day in Japan? Just one thing: i have to repay the lot on White Day, March 15th. As I said, it’s a wicked scheme…

  • Current Viewing: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

    Rebels don't endorse standard public health messages

    This is an excellent interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s page-turner of the same name. For my sins, I read the novel and enjoyed it despite its sometimes crappy writing, because the story is compelling and the characters are fun. Both the main male character, Michael Blomquist, and the eponymous female lead Lisbeth Salander are excellent depictions of their particular archetypes[1]: crusading journalist and lunatic hacker, respectively. The movie brings them to life well, perhaps even improving on them through good acting (’cause lord knows they were held back in the original through bad writing!) It also brings out the setting, both the historical part and the modern Swedish setting, so that they were just exactly how I’d imagined them when I read the book. It also makes the investigation interesting, and you can understand how the combined talents of Blomquist and Salander are capable of solving a mystery that no one else managed to. It also managed to cut out some parts that would have made the movie too slow, and to interweave the three stories (Salander, Blomquist, and the historical part) nicely without being confusing or chaotic. This is surely good movie-making …

    The acting was also great. The woman who played Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara, was superb in the role and did a brilliant job of holding together the tension, intelligence, viciousness and strangeness of that character without over-doing any of it, or pushing Salander into a stereotype of a hacker. Salander is a complex personality and a complex emotional story – simultaneously vulnerable and fragile and extremely tough, uncaring about convention but very aware of how other people think and feel – and Mara did a superb job of getting her right. In his own way, Blomquist, though superficially simpler, is also hard to get right, though perhaps more from a direction point of view: Blomquist is a man who respects women but doesn’t put them on a pedestal, who has deep passions but doesn’t lose control of them, and who probably isn’t a particularly expressive guy. Daniel Craig does a very good job of getting it right. The cast were also chosen so that everyone felt real, and many scenes that one might expect a movie remake to change, gloss over or misogynize were very well crafted.

    This is an important and unavoidable problem in bringing this book to cinema: handling the gender relations. This is a book about getting vengeance on rapists and murderers of women, but it’s also a story about a young woman who falls in love with an older man (cliche 101!) and a couple of Scandinavians who have an open relationship. The temptation here for your average movie director is to make the rape scenes sexy or shallow, to make the young woman a victim of the man’s charm or the age-gap completely normal and believable, and to make the women in the open relationship young sexy babes, or just crazy fucked-up people. None of this happens: the rape scene is horrible and the vengeance enormously satisfying, while also repulsive; the young woman is not a victim of the older man’s charms, and the nature of their relations with other people are such that you understand the situation is not normal for him or for her – it’s the first such old man/young woman affair I’ve seen in a movie that feels believable. And the older women in the open relationship – 40 something career women – look their age, like attractive 40-something career women in control of their own lives and sexualities. It’s through Blomquist that we mainly encounter these people, and his approach to the women in his life is straightforward, respectful and understanding. A perfect counter-point to the men that he and Salander are engaged in foiling, who are sleazy liars who only know how to use people, and especially women, for their own gratification.

    This movie also has one sex scene in it that really does describe the difference between a movie that depicts the real relations between modern men and women, and most of the rest of the American movie industry. The scene is nothing special, but its execution made me happy for its frankness and realism. We see the young woman and the older man having sex, but she is on top grinding away to her own orgasm, largely oblivious of him, and he is just kind of going along with it. In the end she comes and he doesn’t, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a sex scene where the woman gets something and the man gets nothing. Usually either the man comes or they both do, simultaneously, without any effort on his part except the glorious power of his amazing dick. The reality of course is that sex is not often like that, unless the girl is faking it, and everyone who has more than the barest experience of sex has experienced the woman who takes her own orgasm astride the man, often quite aggressively. It’s like the guy who made this movie actually wanted to show sex as it happens between real people who love each other, rather than as it is imagined in the minds of people who insist on reproducing the imaginary gender relations of the American culture industry. For that reason alone, the scene made me happy.

    The flipside of these scenes, though, is that there is a lot of nasty stuff to wade through in this story. The rape scenes, graphic evidence from the murder scenes they are investigating, the final tense showdown, animal cruelty … if seedy under-belly-of-society type movies don’t appeal to you or you just can’t watch films that involve rape or the cruel mistreatment of women, then I suggest avoiding this one. You’re not going to get much satisfaction. If you can bear this sort of thing in order to see a good story and fine acting, and you can get pleasure from fairly nasty revenge scenes (I certainly can), then I recommend taking this one in on the big screen. In addition to a tense story, fine settings and excellent acting, it also has some very cool cinematography and a great soundtrack, so its well worth the effort if you can endure that sort of cruelty on screen. But you need to go in ready for some nastiness, and if you don’t think you are, then you probably should give it a miss …

    —

    fn1: Archetype is the word you use instead of “stereotype” when you enjoyed the book.

  • A Visit to East Japan’s Disaster-affected Area

    The devastated coast of Minami Soma City

    On Monday I took a two-day business trip to Minami Soma City, in the disaster-affected area of East Japan. Minami-soma city was hit by the tsunami, and although there does not seem to be much online footage of Minami Soma City’s experience, the effect on nearby Soma City (just north of Minami Soma) can be seen in this terrifying video (the main wave is at about 8 minutes). Minami soma city is just 23 km from the Fukushima Number One nuclear power plant, so soon after the tsunami hit the town was included in the government’s 20-30km voluntary evacuation / limited outdoor activity zone. Its population reduced enormously in the weeks that followed, and has now returned to just over half its pre-tsunami numbers. The town is also home to about 6,000 displaced persons, living in temporary housing. My purpose in visiting – along with some of the students of my department – was to help the local hospital with some research they are doing into the health of these displaced persons and of the residents of the town generally.

    As part of my stay I was taken to the area where the tsunami hit, which is a stretch of coastline extending a few kms inland from the sea. These photos show some of the damage that I saw there. The full set can be viewed in my flickr account.

    Entering the ruins

    When we drove into the area I thought perhaps it used to be farmland, because aside from the piles of rubble it is completely flat, but in fact this whole area used to be houses and businesses. The ground is flat like fields because it was scoured clean of all but the largest structures, and the resulting rubble has been gathered together into great piles of debris (visible in the photo above). This gives the area the impression of being a moonscape or wasteland, where once houses used to be, and the area from which one enters the destruction zone is lined with these piles of rubble. If one drives for a few more minutes, one can reach the sea wall and look back over the entire devastated area, as in the picture below.

    Sunset over the devastation

    The sea wall itself is about 4m high on the outside, made of huge slabs of concrete. On the seaward face there is a small stony beach and then some lines of tetrapods (concrete structures that act as further wave barriers). The sea wall survived the tsunami, but was heavily damaged and didn’t serve to impede it. Parts of it were broken off and swept away, and its landward side was heavily damaged. I think the wave just ran over the top of it. We walked along this wall and the two photos below show the wall in both directions. The photo at the top of this post, of Miss A returning to our car, was taken from the top of the wall.

    Looking south in the lee of the sea wall
    On the sea wall, looking north

    Facing North (the second picture of the sea wall), one can see the only surviving structure near the sea – that strange orange building that has been hollowed out but withstood the wave itself. I guess other smaller objects survived but have subsequently been removed in the clean up, because as we left the area we entered the rubble zone and passed huge piles of broken stone that must have been taken from this area. We also passed a graveyard of cars. In amongst all this neatly-arranged debris there were also a few boats.

    A fire engine

    We spent the night in the hospital, in one of the unused wards. Staff levels have declined at the hospital, though the patient load has as well, but business seems to be going on pretty much as normal there. In fact, this is one of the strangest things about Minami Soma City: once you pass over the low line of scrub and hills that separates the unscathed part of the city from the damaged area, life goes on pretty much as normal. It’s as if nothing ever happened here, except that it’s quieter than a normal town and a lot of the businesses are on reduced hours or shut. It’s not a ghost town, though, and everything is perfectly normal there – we went out drinking and having fun with the other doctors in the evening, and everything was just like any other rural Japanese town, if a little quiet.

    You are 23km from Fukushima Number One plant

    As the sign in the hospital says, Minami Soma City is quite close to the power plant, and the only road leading to it from Fukushima passes even closer. It’s quite hard to get to Minami Soma City – there are only 3 buses a day from Fukushima, so it’s either a long bus trip to Tokyo (probably 6-8 hours) or a bullet train to Fukushima city and then one of those three buses. The buses were also not able to run at first, because of the exclusion zone, but now they’re open and the journey to Minami Soma City takes us through several deserted towns in the exclusion zone.  I think a few people might still be staying on in these towns but they were largely deserted, and the only people I saw were a work crew in full radiation suits, cleaning an outside area in the driving snow. The only other signs of life in the area were animal prints in the gathered snow.

    This whole area is obviously struggling with the triple challenges of dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy, rebuilding, and the fallout of the nuclear plant. Many people have left and the area is certainly suffering physically and economically. With the one year anniversary of the events coming up soon I imagine a lot of sad memories of the tragedy will be rekindled. But the people there are kind, friendly, and full of warmth and energy not just to rebuild their town but to turn the tragedy into useful lessons for disaster management in the future. I’m hoping through my advice and support to provide some small contribution to that process, and perhaps to be able to learn some lessons about post-disaster management in an aging society. The atmosphere there was one of hope and energy to make a better future, and despite the sad story that these pictures tell, the people there offer a great deal of inspiration to make a better future. Let’s hope that working together the people of Japan can overcome this disaster and, through their experience, offer other countries lessons they can use to overcome their own future challenges.

  • Charlie Brooker Stereotypes Japan (Part 2)

    In Wednesday’s Guardian, Charlie Brooker continues his series of articles on his trip to Japan, and in the same tone: where he started his first article with a long paragraph that combines toilet humour and assertions about the kookiness of Japan, this article starts with a description of a computer game about bouncing turds, and finishes the introduction with

    Unfathomable, futuristic madness: that’s what made me want to visit Japan.

    So, in case you weren’t sure from the first article, Japan is strange and fascinated with toilets and poo.

    Except, really, it’s Brooker who is fascinated with poo. He seems quite taken with the abject, if his first article was anything to go by. But once again, after he’s got the obligatory toilet humour and stereotyping of Japan’s “futuristic madness” out of the way, he carries on with a valid observation about this place:

    it’s a place where being a geek (or otaku) is comfortably mainstream. Former Prime Minister Taro Aso is an enthusiastic manga-collecting otaku, the TV ad breaks heave with glossy commercials for collectible card games, and multi-storey games arcades are commonplace.

    This is very true. Of course, he immediately follows this important observation with another example of drawing the wrong conclusion due to limited data:

    the subway is eerily silent: thanks to a strong underground signal, everyone’s staring at their smartphones, texting, playing games, or reading. Only after a fortnight did it strike me: not once did I hear a single person actually speaking into their phone on the Tokyo subway. Everyone – and I mean everyone – seemed to be perpetually tapping and swiping in silence. Unnerving to many: to a geek like me, it felt strangely comforting.

    This, Charlie, is not because everyone is madly playing some game or other. You might actually have noticed a lot of people reading these things called “books.” But the reason they’re not talking into their phones is because there are signs and announcements asking people not to. It is considered very poor manners in Japan to talk on your phone in restaurants, cafes, bars or trains. i.e. in public. And people in Japan follow these rules. If it’s “unnerving to many,” this is because that’s another one of those things about the west that don’t make sense once you haven’t lived there for a while. Those people you saw on the subway being quiet aren’t doing so because they are obssessed with a game; they’re doing so because they are refraining from offending others. That’s not “strangely comforting,” it’s perfectly ordinarily comforting.

    The rest of the article consists of a fairly nice description of one of Japan’s bigger game arcades, from the perspective of someone who is familiar with what should be going on but can’t understand it because he is in a foreign land. Again, though, he pushes the unfathomable nature of the thing too far, and again reminds us that Japan is exotic and incomprehensible:

    a roomful of sombre youths vying for individual supremacy using some form of networked arcade strategy game that uses collectible cards. Imagine witnessing a game of bridge being played in the Cabinet War Rooms in the year 2072 AD … whatever the theme, the nature of the action is absolutely impenetrable to the casual onlooker.

    Charlie, here’s a real-life hint for you: to people outside the nerd world, this kind of stuff is absolutely impenetrable in their own language. Now that you don’t speak the language, you can be reminded of how people feel when they watch you at your normal hobby. Eye opening, isn’t it?

    Other than this, the article struck me as a missed opportunity. There’s a photo of an “otaku girl” at the top of the article but she doesn’t look otaku to me, and (probably because he hasn’t had time to notice), Brooker hasn’t mentioned how different gender relations are amongst nerds in Japan compared to the West. To wit: in Japan, being a nerd is not only more acceptable, but it’s especially more acceptable for girls. There are adverts on the trains targeting Wii at old people, and the latest computer games (like Mario Land and Monster Hunter) at young women. There is an advert for a trading card game in which a member of a currently-popular boy band goes to a game shop and plays the card game with the lonely kid in the corner; there are adverts for a new trading card game where some of the cards are based on members of a famous boy band (Exile, I think). In Ikebukuro there is a whole series of shops devoted to targeting pornographic manga at women. This is a hobby world that is not just mainstream, but mainstream for both genders – and this is why Wii was invented in Japan, not the USA. It’s a shame that Brooker didn’t find a way to comment on this, and on how much easier that makes being a nerd in this country. He also didn’t find any opportunities to talk about the darker side of the nerd world in Japan: pachinko, or AKB48. Instead, he just took a last chance to remind us that Japan is crazy and incomprehensible. Just in case we didn’t know that.

    I wonder what his next article will tell us? Feel free to put your predictions in the comments …

  • Dexter Vs. Castle

    I’m currently watching the latest season of Dexter, and as we were watching my partner suggested that it would be excellent to see an episode of either show in which Dexter visits New York (or vice versa). Perhaps he is chasing a serial killer operating in NY, or perhaps the Miami police have to go to New York on some task. Or vice versa. Some fun aspects of such an episode:

    • Deborah Morgan would be competing with Kate Beckett to solve the case; both of them would, of course, be competing with Dexter. How would Beckett handle Morgan? How would Morgan view Beckett?
    • Castle is very fond of making wild conspiracy theories: the whole episode/sequence could run with him consistently treating the truth about Dexter as a conspiracy theory to explain the weird events of the case; but of course everyone is laughing it off
    • Esposito could figure out how dangerous Dexter really is, but no one (except Castle!) believes him
    • Castle finds out the truth, and confronts Dexter
    • The story could be played in both TV series, so we see it from Castle/Beckett’s point of view and from Dexter/Deborah’s point of view.
    • There could be a spin-off where, having identified Dexter, Castle conceives of a new series of popular novels about a serial killer with a conscience, and moves to Florida for a year to become Dexter’s shadow instead of Beckett’s
    • Or better still, Beckett’s lieutenant palms Castle off onto Miami, and he spends a whole season tracking the Miami metro homicide squad, getting closer and closer to uncovering the truth about Dexter …
    • And, the novel Castle writes is called Darkly Dreaming Dexter …

    Of course such an idea is just silly. But I think it would be pretty funny.

  • In Praise of Powerpoint

    This slide is a little busy, but …

    Today I sat through about 15 presentations, and in the x 100th of them, the powerpoint failed. Just stopped working. It was a disaster for everyone concerned, not least of the concerned being the master’s student whose grade depended on getting the software working again[1]. As the crash came down, I realized that actually Powerpoint is a quite awesome piece of software, and we’d all be stuffed without it.

    Bear with me here.

    This young man’s presentation had a diagram on every slide, and the diagrams were essential, and consisted of mitochondrial thingies with strange boxes and structures in them, and usually also a flow chart of some kind to describe the process being used to break into or out of the mitochondriality of the thingamy. Every couple of slides was a table, or a graph. Then some chemical structures, maybe a picture of a bug, and then back to some of those fiendish flowcharts and another mitochonria with a box up its arse[2].

    Watching him desperately trying to get his slides working again I realized that if he had to present this material to us in any other way, his 15 minute presentation would have been drawn out to about an hour as he drew painstaking diagrams and structures on – shudder! – a blackboard. Or worse still, one of those hideous transparency thingies that ate my soul back in 3rd year. Before the internet (do you remember those times? No, neither do I. Why would you?) Perhaps he’d have had to bring a couple of old-fashioned 3-D models of chemical structures. So we’d have got through only a third as many presentations, at a great cost in blood and treasure, and would be watching Masters presentations until Friday afternoon. And I’ll bet you a groat that most of those presentations would still have been bad, although by Thursday afternoon my brain would be mush and quality control would be out the window.

    Actually, the presentations were largely of very high quality, and almost all of their failings were in content rather than presentation – the presentation was of universally high quality. And the bad presentations failed for largely one reason: the presenter was reading the same words that were written on the screen. That is, the worst of the presentations were bad because they were like a speech. Had those presenters followed basic principles of powerpoint – short bullet points, diagrams and graphs that you hang a speech on – they’d have been improved. The main reason that powerpoint fails us is that we use it as a speech-making prop rather than a presentation tool. Sure, there is probably still the odd weirdo out there who uses animated gifs, and occasionally you see someone try to present a sophisticated jobby, with transitions and the like – these usually fail and make the presenter look like a wanker. But if you use powerpoint for its main benefits, you get a fine addition to your presentations. Bullet points and charts give you something to hang your words on, and by hanging your words on the points you make the points more interesting, and give your audience a way to process information at a greater density and with more focus than you would get if you were just reading it.

    So, I think the standard view of powerpoint – that it dumbs down presentations and makes them shallow – is flat out wrong. There’s a heavy dose of condescension and, I would say, luddism, in this view. Embrace your slide-y overlords!

    —

    fn1: A word of advice to all masters students out there: don’t use the timer on slides. You will go faster or slower than your timer allows you. In either case it looks bad, and then it gets annoying, and if you make your reviewers dizzy flicking backwards and forwards on the slides, it’s probably not going to help you

    fn2: My poor description of this presentation is not an indictment of Powerpoint, but a sign that I am not a biologist. I was there to support students from my department, who most certainly would not touch a mitochondria no matter how sweetly it talked to them. They’re all about the epidemiology!