What is easy about pie?

Several months ago it briefly looked like the University of Chicago might be on the list of schools to which Archer, our high-school senior, might apply. In the end he did not, but he got far enough to learn the application requirements, which include writing an essay on one of several creatively chosen topics, including, “What if the moon were made of cheese?” and “It’s said that history repeats itself, but what about other disciplines?”

I liked the sound of one prompt so much that I immediately sat down and wrote my own essay on the topic: “What is so easy about pie?” I didn’t show it to him until after college-application season was over, not wanting to unduly influence him.

What is easy about pie?

Nothing! It is a simpleminded lie — the pie lie! — meant, perhaps, to give comfort in a cruel and indifferent world. “Easy as pie!” “Santa Claus!” “American exceptionalism!”

I turn to no less an authority than the great Carl Sagan, who said:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Does that sound easy to you?

Even granting the existence of the universe — the gravity crushing hydrogen into helium in the heart of the sun, and binding the Earth to its orbit; the vast web of interdependent organisms deriving their life energy, ultimately, from that nuclear fusion; the evolved apes with the means to harvest that life for flour, sugar, cinnamon, butter, and apples — even granting all of that (and that’s a lot to grant), it’s still not easy, as the columnist Megan McArdle pointed out in a recent essay for the Washington Post, “Can America save its national dish?”:

In 2019, more than 50 million Americans used frozen pie crusts, and more than 40 million used the refrigerated kind. Even though store-bought crust is terrible.

Yet commercial bakeries don’t do much better.

Why would we Americans use terrible store-bought pie crust if pie is easy? Why can’t even commercial bakeries get it right if pie is easy? Easy: pie is not easy.

Take special note of McArdle’s title, and now consider Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” If pie were at all easy, wouldn’t Americans save it? Of course they would; but Betteridge, McArdle, and Sagan say they will not.

Pie is not easy. But then, nothing worthwhile ever is.

2021-and-done

When the year fails to acquit itself well, it is my self-appointed duty to compensate with witticisms and clever observations. (Previously.)

  • Not everything in 2020 was bad.

    Not everything in 2021 will be good.

    Also, it's foolishness to assign credit or blame for events to the calendar.

    Still happy to have 2020 behind us. Happy new year!

  • Continue reading “2021-and-done”

Trying hard, and failing, not to make a 2020 hindsight joke

Seldom has a year been more unloved
Or with such relish on the trash-heap shoved.
(Previously.)

The spirit of the season

‘Twas the night before Christmas
In, I think, ’82
And for once, the day came
With no things left to do

The gifts had been bought
And been wrapped in advance
To relax and be still
We at last had the chance

We sat in the living room
Candle-lit, calm
And chatted like grownups
Not a boy and his mom

The Christmas decor
Caught the flickering light
It sparkled and gleamed
As we talked through the night

Our tone, as we spoke
Was hushed and subdued
Neither one wishing
To spoil the mood

It’s my perfectest mem’ry
Of how Christmas could be
I wish peace like this
To my friends and fam’ly

Yegging him on

It is a good day when Steve Yegge has a new rant to read.

Yegge is a veteran software engineer whose career runs strangely parallel to mine. We overlapped for a short time at Amazon in the early 2000’s, and a few years later at Google. More recently we both worked for companies enabling mobile payments in Asia. We’re both opinionated bloggers (each of whom has name-dropped the other), we’re both Emacs partisans, and we’re both anguished by how Google’s technical superiority is matched by utter cluelessness in product design and marketing.

Where Yegge outshines me by far is in his entertaining, informative, impassioned, and dead-on-accurate rants. His most famous one is probably his Platforms Rant, which was meant to be Google-internal only but made headlines when it was posted publicly by mistake. In that one he implored Google to invest more effort into making its products, which were increasingly “walled gardens” with inflexible feature sets dictated by competitors, into platforms that would allow others to build onto them, the way Amazon was doing. This rant came in the early days of Google+, when many of us within Google were expressing concern over its product design and the lack of any useful APIs that would allow an open ecosystem to develop around it. Ironically, his rant was a Google+ post, and it was the product design, in part, that led to its being misposted publicly. Also ironically, Google+ is now dead—arguably from the very causes Yegge and I and others identified back then—taking his Platforms Rant post with it. (However, it’s preserved in other forms around the net; just google [yegge platform rant].)

In his latest rant he again improves on one of my own frequent refrains: that Google keeps giving you shiny new things and then keeps yanking them away. Like me, he’s a user of Google Cloud Platform products; like me, he is increasingly frustrated by how often those products require you to rewrite your own code to adapt to Google’s changes; and like me, he is entertaining abandoning Google Cloud Platform for this reason, in favor of the more stable (if less technically excellent) Amazon Web Services platform.

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

Shark

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Stories

[This story, dated 7 July 2013, is the third of three that I recently rediscovered from when I was hoping to set an example that would inspire my kids to write their own stories.]

“I want to be a shark for Halloween,” Davey told his parents. So a couple of days later, Davey’s dad came home with a shark costume from the Halloween store.

“This looks fake,” complained Davey, standing in front of the mirror while trying on the shark suit. “A real shark doesn’t have legs that stick out.”

“Well your legs have to stick out,” explained Davey’s dad. “How else will you get from house to house?”

“Swimming, like a shark,” said Davey.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Davey’s dad. “There’s no water between the houses in our neighborhood to swim through.”

“Anyway, a shark’s skin isn’t fuzzy like this. And my face shouldn’t be poking out between the shark’s teeth. I want to be like the sharks in the aquarium.”

“Well that’s the only shark costume they had,” said Davey’s dad. “If you don’t like it, think of something else so I can take this back for a refund.” He left the room, muttering something about “constant unreasonable demands.”

Davey’s heart was set on being a shark for Halloween, and on being a more realistic one than a store-bought costume would allow. He sulked at his father’s brusque dismissal. Davey’s mom saw this and turned to Davey with a reassuring smile. She told him in a low voice, “Your dad’s having trouble at work. But don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.”

Several days passed. Davey’s dad didn’t notice how busy Davey’s mom was in the garage. Didn’t notice the length of tubing she brought back from the hardware store, or that the lawnmower was lying half-disassembled in the back yard. He was too distracted to think about Halloween. He had had an argument with his bosses at work. He felt like a hard worker and asked for a raise, but they said no, explaining that he always did the least expected of him and never went “the extra mile.” Davey’s dad was frustrated. He didn’t understand how he could get everything on his list done, on time, and still be told he doesn’t do enough.

Before he knew it there was only one day left. He turned to his wife and asked, “Did Davey ever choose something else to be for Halloween?”

“He wants to be a shark,” she said as she walked through the room smelling of hot-glue.

“I know that’s what he wanted, but he didn’t like the costume, remember? I told him to pick something else.”

“No, he still wants to be a shark,” said Davey’s mom as she disappeared through the doorway on the way to who-knows-where.

“Poor kid,” said Davey’s dad to himself. “Eh, we can always stick a cap on his head and call him a baseball player.”

The next day was Halloween. Davey’s dad got home from work a little late. Trick-or-treating had already begun. He wondered what costume Davey’s mom had put on him. He shrugged and put some dinner in the microwave, waiting for Davey and his mom to return.

As he ate he noticed the sound of a lawnmower engine in the distance, which was unexpected. Who mows their lawn while trick-or-treating is going on? A moment later he realized the sound was coming closer up the street, which was even odder. Davey’s dad got up and looked out the door. What he saw astonished him.

There was Davey’s mom, pushing what looked like a shopping cart whose large wire basket had been removed. In its place was a clear tub filled with water, and in the water was a shark, about the size of Davey. The water must have made the cart enormously heavy, because a lawnmower engine was attached to the wheels of the cart to help Davey’s mom push it.

The shark was sleek and shiny, made from a sheet of rubber cleverly folded and padded. It had a fin that stuck up above the surface of the sloshing water. Looking closely Davey’s dad could see that a clear plastic tube ran from the tip of the fin down into the shark’s body: an air tube that allowed Davey to breathe. The shark had black glassy eyes, gill slits, and pectoral fins that moved around. Davey’s dad guessed that Davey’s hands were in them. With a small movement of his head Davey could make the shark’s mouth open, showing a row of pointy triangular teeth.

As Davey’s dad watched, Davey’s mom wheeled the contraption up to a neighbor’s house, killed the lawnmower engine, set the brakes on the cart, and rang the doorbell. A moment after the door opened and the neighbor shrieked, Davey pushed himself up to his knees with his pectoral-fin hands, sticking up out of the water and pulling open a seam in the shark’s belly to reveal himself. “Trick or treat!” he shouted with glee.

Davey’s dad backed into the house, mouth agape, and sat down at his half-eaten meal, now totally forgotten. He finally understood something important. “The extra mile,” he said to himself in wonder.

Amphibian

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Stories

[This story, dated 30 June 2013 and recently rediscovered, is another of a few that I wrote for my kids when they were in grade school in the hope of inspiring them to write their own stories.]

I have a secret power. I’ve never told anyone, but in the summer I sometimes like to show it off, just a little. Not enough to freak anyone out, just enough to impress them. When my friends come over to play in our pool, I challenge them to breath-holding contests. One by one they submerge, and one by one they come back up gasping. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Forty-five. Then it’s my turn. I stay down for sixty seconds or seventy. After that people start to get scared, so I don’t stay down any longer than that. But I don’t really have to come up. I can stay down as long as I like. I’m an amphibian.

I know that sounds impossible. I’m obviously a human boy, and everyone knows humans are mammals, and mammals are not amphibians. Some mammals can stay underwater for a very long time, but only because they can hold their breath. I don’t hold my breath, and I don’t breathe the water through gills like a fish. I don’t have gills. But I never feel the need to come up for air. Amphibians can breathe through their skin, and I guess that’s what I do.

Of course when I do my holding-breath trick I make sure to gasp for air when I come up even though I don’t need to. It would be too weird for everyone if I didn’t.

One day a new girl moved into the neighborhood, and to help the new family feel welcome my mom made me invite her over with my friends for a pool party. She didn’t know anyone, and I’m a little ashamed to admit my friends didn’t include her in things as much as they should. Neither did I.

Inevitably my friend Billy insisted we do the breath-holding challenge again. He’s the one who can stay under the longest, besides me, and he always thinks he’ll beat me someday. Maybe one day I’ll let him, but on this day I didn’t plan to. I guess I wanted to show off a little bit for the new girl.

Once more we took turns going under the surface. Once more we compared times as we came up. I stayed under extra long this time, seventy-three seconds. When I came up, I was a little self-conscious about my fake gasp, maybe because of the new girl, and maybe I didn’t quite do it right, because the new girl gave me a curious look. After everyone congratulated me as usual, the new girl blurted out, “Let’s have a long-jump contest.”

That was a new one on all of us. We’d never tried a long-jump contest. But the side of our pool deck was the perfect spot for it, and I had chalk to draw a jumping line, and to mark where everyone landed. One by one we jumped. Some jumps were far, some weren’t. Mine was somewhere in the middle. Poor Billy, who wanted to be best at something, wasn’t best at jumping either.

Then it was the new girl’s turn. Since the rest of us were boys, and boys are stronger than girls, we didn’t expect much from her jump. But she sprang from the ground right at the jump line and sailed right over everyone else’s marks! At the last instant before touching the ground she seemed to… glide a few extra inches, stretching it out, as if she’d stopped falling back to earth for an instant.

There was a lot of wounded pride, and some of my friends tried jumping again to beat her mark, but they couldn’t. It was my turn to give her a curious look.

A short time later the party broke up and everyone went home. I couldn’t stop thinking about the new girl. Had I imagined that extra little float of hers? Had anyone else noticed it? Could she be concealing a secret like mine? I have amphibian powers. Could it be that she’s hiding… bird powers?

I never thought much about girls before, but none of them were ever special before. I want to find out a lot more about the new girl. Maybe we can be friends. Maybe I can tell her my secret.

The cat and the hat

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Stories

[This story, from 2 June 2012 and just recently rediscovered, is one of a few that I wrote for my kids to model creative writing for them and to whet their appetite for doing it themselves.]

Once upon a time there was an old cat. The cat was so old that he was losing some of the fur on top of his head. “Meow,” thought the cat, which meant, “I wish I had a nice hat to cover my bald spot.”

As it happens, there was a nice hat that the cat’s person sometimes wore. But it was high on a shelf — too high for the old cat to jump.

“Meow,” thought the cat, which meant, “That hat would look great on me. I wish I could reach it.” But try as he might, he couldn’t.

At that very moment, the cat’s old enemy, the mouse, appeared from his hole. “Meow,” thought the cat, which meant, “A nice mousey meal will make me feel better.” The cat pounced at the mouse, but being so old, his pounce was very slow, and the mouse had plenty of time to disappear back into his hole. “Meow!” shouted the cat in frustration, which meant, “Not only am I going bald, but I can’t even catch a mouse anymore!”

The mouse heard the cat’s “Meow” and understood it (because at mouse school they teach cat language for self-defense). Even though the cat had been trying to eat him for years, the mouse felt bad for him. Then the mouse had an idea. Maybe he could cheer up the cat. Maybe then the cat would stop chasing him!

“Squeak!” said the mouse from his hole, which meant, “If you’ll promise to stop trying to eat me, I’ll help you get that hat.”

The cat (who understood mouse language thanks to an after-school mouse-language class he once took) laughed and said, “Meow!” meaning, “If I, a cat, who’s an expert at jumping and climbing, can’t get that hat, how can a mouse possibly get it?”

The mouse poked his head out of his hole. “Squeak,” he said, which meant, “Oh I can get it, alright.” He added, “Squeak?” meaning, “Do we have a deal?”

“Meow,” the cat nodded skeptically.

The mouse disappeared back inside his hole. For a moment, the cat heard nothing; but then there came the sound of tiny mouse feet marching up through old tunnels he’d dug in the walls over the years. Then silence again for a moment; and then to the cat’s astonishment, a tiny hole appeared in the wall just above the shelf, right behind the hat. A moment later the mouse’s nose appeared through the hole, and as his tiny claws dug the hole wider, the rest of the mouse emerged.

“Squeak,” called the mouse from high above the cat, meaning, “We have a deal, right?”

“Meow,” agreed the cat admiringly. So the mouse gave the hat a push and down it tumbled from the shelf — right onto the old cat’s head.

The mouse re-entered the wall, scampered down his tunnels, and came back out through the hole near the floor. “Squeak,” he said to the cat, meaning, “That hat looks nice on you.  You should go look in a mirror.”

The cat went to a nearby mirror and took a look at himself. “Meow,” thought the cat, meaning, “I look years younger! I’ll bet I could catch that mouse now!” And with one quick pounce, the mouse was trapped beneath his paws!

“SQUEAK!” said the mouse, meaning, “HEY! WE HAD A DEAL!”

The cat brought his face closer to the trapped mouse. Terrified, the mouse watched the cat’s mouth open and thought, “Squeak,” meaning, “This is the end.”

And then the cat poked out his tongue to give the mouse a grateful kiss.

“Meow,” said the cat, and meant it.

Decade done

Another year, another silent prayer that next year’s social-media utterances are less fraught and more fun. (Previously.)

  • [A friend made a “time to make the donuts” post.]

    “Time to make the donuts” is my first waking thought most days.

    The weird thing is, a different Facebook friend made a “time to make the donuts” comment (to which I made the same reply) a year ago, as one of the very first posts of 2018.

    So a new year is now “time to make a time to make the donuts” post.

  • Continue reading “Decade done”

RMS, titanic

One afternoon in 1996, as I worked with my partners at our software startup, the phone rang. I answered it, and a voice on the other end said, “Richard Stallman?”

This was disorienting. Richard Stallman was the legendary technologist who had created the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to freedom from corporate and government control for those who program computers and those who use them. He founded the GNU project, dedicated to creating an alternative to the Unix operating system unencumbered by patents and copyrights. He was famously ensconced in an office at MIT, not a house in a northern California suburb doubling as office space for our startup. Why would someone call us looking for him, there?

Or did the caller think I was Stallman??

The moment was even more baffling because I was then at work (as a side project) on a book about Stallman’s other great creation, Emacs, the text editor beloved by programmers. So there wasn’t no connection between me and Stallman. But he wasn’t involved in my writing project; he had merely invented the thing it was about. That was a pretty slender thread. How do you get from that to expecting to find the great man himself in our humble headquarters?

Three years earlier I did work briefly with Stallman, after a fashion. The GNU project was releasing a new file-compression tool called gzip. Stallman wanted files compressed by gzip to have names ending with “.z”. In an e-mail debate with him, I argued that this would make them too easy to confuse with files created by “compress,” a predecessor to gzip, which used a “.Z” filename suffix. The distinction between uppercase “.Z” and lowercase “.z” would be lost if those files were ever stored on, or passed along by, an MS-DOS computer, which permitted only monocase filenames. Stallman, in his typical mulish way, refused to allow any consideration of how Microsoft software behaves to influence what the GNU project should do. But I was insistent, not least because I believed that the potential for confusion would harm the reputation of the GNU project, and I wanted GNU to succeed. I was on Stallman’s side! I was joined in my opinion by a couple of others on that thread. In the end Stallman relented, and as a result gzip used (and still uses) the filename suffix “.gz”.

This was a rare concession from a man whose primary goal with the Free Software Foundation was the repudiation, on principle, of the entire edifice of intellectual property law. The creation of actually useful software was only ever secondary to that goal.1 To the extent that Microsoft owed its existence to intellectual-property plunder, Stallman would have seen it as a moral obligation not to allow it to affect the design of GNU gzip.

Stallman was never one to allow pragmatism to overcome principle, an outlook that extended far beyond his professional pursuits and into all aspects of his public persona, with results often off-putting and occasionally problematic. In principle, why should anyone object to an impromptu solo folk dance in the middle of a fancy restaurant (as recounted in Steven Levy’s recent Wired article)? No one should, of course — in principle. In practice, most of us would agree there are good reasons to keep your spontaneous folk-dancing inhibitions in place. But Stallman is not most of us. In principle, it’s merely being intellectually honest to engage in a little devil’s-advocate hypothesizing on the Jeffery Epstein scandal, and how Stallman’s colleague Marvin Minsky might have been involved. In practice, for a prominent public figure — one with authority over others — to do so at this moment, and in that way, betrays at best a cluelessness that’s just this side of criminal. It’s what forced Stallman to resign recently from the organization he’s led for over three decades.

But in 1996, when the phone rang at my startup, Stallman was, to me and my colleagues, simply a legendary hero hacker and fighter against oppression. When I said, “Hello?” and the voice on the other end said, “Richard Stallman?” the effect on me wouldn’t have been too different if it had said, “Batman?”

I stammered something along the lines of, sorry, this is Zanshin, in California; Richard Stallman works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The voice said, “No, this is Richard Stallman.” What I had taken for a question mark was really a period. (Or possibly an exclamation point.)

In principle, it makes perfect sense to shorten, “Hello, this is Richard Stallman” to “Richard Stallman.” Those four other syllables seem superfluous; might as well save the effort it takes to utter them. In practice, of course, it is decidedly odd when placing a phone call simply to declare your own identity and expect your intention to be understood, especially when you leave off anything like, “May I speak to Bob Glickstein please?”

Stallman was calling me, it turns out, because of the book I was writing. He wanted to know if I would consent to giving the book away for free. (A few years later Stallman would put the same pressure on his biographer, Sam Williams, as recounted in the Salon.com review of Williams’ book.) I said that I was not unsympathetic to his request — after all, Emacs, the topic of my book and the output of many programmer-hours of labor, was distributed for free by the FSF. But how could I consent, when my publisher had production and marketing costs to recover? What about the value of all the time I had invested, couldn’t I reasonably expect some compensation for that, especially since I was not yet drawing any salary from my startup? I additionally thought, but did not say out loud, that unlike Stallman himself I had not earned a MacArthur genius grant to fund my writing and programming whims.

Stallman had no answer for the questions I posed, other than to reiterate a few times his certainty that the book should by rights be free. We ended our call, and (as it turned out) our professional association, at a stalemate on this topic.

As with the gzip episode, I was nominally on Stallman’s side. I would have given serious consideration to his request if he could have compromised somehow, or if he could have spoken about the prospects for earning revenue from a product even when it’s given away for free, or, hell, if he could simply have articulated some understanding of or sympathy for the objections I raised. But he was doctrinaire. The principle was the one and only consideration for him.

The paradox of Richard Stallman is that this single-mindedness made him remarkable and allowed him to achieve remarkable things; but his disregard for pragmatism in favor of an insistence on principle cost him the goal of freely distributing my book, on this occasion — and, on another occasion twenty-odd years later, also cost him his career.

  1. Ironically it’s that secondary goal at which the FSF has been more successful by far (despite the many who have rallied to Stallman’s anti-copyright banner — myself included, with varying degrees of conviction over the years). Intellectual property law is as constraining to individuals and organizations as ever. But you and I and everyone we know and, not to put too fine a point on it, our entire modern information economy, depend daily on infrastructural software created by the FSF. []