The Stripy Strudel's Journal

In an imaginary, ideal and pitch abstract world live people who don't give a damn about being trapped in our thought experiment: they're people, too, and try to get their human fun from life. Just like us, they meet, make friends, mix and give each other simple pleasures. And just like in our world, they have social obstacles, having grown up in somewhat different cultures and then gotten mixed together. That's why what's natural for some is unthinkable for others.

For example, some people love massage of the head so much that they're willing to spend hours scratching, stroking and massaging each other's heads — if they find someone like them. But here's the catch: for some others touching the scalp is a taboo that can't even be mentioned. Because nobody knows whether it's disgusting or delightful for someone, you can't really offer this to a person: what if they get offended? So two head massage lovers don't dare to offer it to each other because each one of them is afraid that it's unacceptable for the other. Same thing with nose-rubbing, round dances, riding horses together, pat-a-cake and numerous other ways in which our speculative poor things bring enjoyment to each other.

Here is the problem the society is facing: invent a way for fans of various pleasure to recognize each other. It seems trivial: why not introduce conventional signs? For example, a red T-shirt could mean a round dance devotee. But it's not that easy: a round dance lover wouldn't like those for whom round dances are a taboo to know about their devotion. Hey, there are places where they won't let you in if you wear that! Therefore, a signaling system has to be more selective.

Let us call the whole range of ways to please each other acceptable for a person their easiness, as in “he's an easy (uncomplicated) person”, “she's easy to be with”. An easiness is a mathematical set. Let us designate the easiness of a person X as E_X. Then the requirement to a signaling system should be stated as follows: for every person Y, conventional signs worn by Y should suffice for X to derive E_X ∩ E_Y. Consequently, for each of his devotions X will only find out whether it's shared by Y, but he won't find out about those of Y's passions that X himself dislikes. He'll find out what he can what he shouldn't try with Y, but won't know anything shocking or destructive to their friendship.

A solution to this problem can be a variety of signs with limited knowledge of them. For every questionable pastime A enthusiasts establish a club, society or some other kind of community for A-doers. To become a member, one needs to do A with any current member. For lovers of A it's not a problem but rather a pleasure, but those for whom A is unacceptable won't even think about joining the community. Of course, the lists of community members are kept in secret. Because the world is ideal, everyone knows about every such community, and can and will join all the relevant ones. In a closed meeting, members of the A-doers society decide on a sign by which fans of A will recognize each other. It can be anything: an item of clothing, an accessory, a feature of speech or gait, a code word or gesture. Different communities pick essentially different signs, so that it's impossible to tell by the look of how many communities a person is a member. This way, everybody only knows the signs of belonging to those communities one is oneself a member of, and when X and Y meet, they instantly see what their common easiness, the intersection of E_X and E_Y, is, and within that intersection they feel at ease with each other.

The problem and the solution have been found in brainstorming together with Wheezle, for which I'm thankful to her. This way, we have determined by experiment that joint brainstorming is included in our common easiness. And if you, my dear readers, also love head massage — welcome to the club!

По-русски: Общество любителей фантазировать с умным видом

Some people ask me why I dislike Apple when they make good things, nice and comfortable, which “just work”.

In order for things to work (and especially “just work”) with other things, there are standards. All electrical appliances have plugs of the same shape, and that's why they can be plugged into any socket of the same standard. You don't need a Siemens socket to plug a Siemens hoover. Anyone can make a socket into which a Siemens hoover can be plugged. Any hoover can be plugged into the same socket. The owner of the apartment chooses the electric power supplier or even produces their own power. A Siemens hoover will still work in a new apartment after moving because the sockets there are the same. Even Eskimos who live in igloo and herd penguins have sockets into which a Siemens hoover can be plugged.

An Apple hoover can only be plugged into an Apple socket. There is no publicly available schematic for Apple sockets. Chinese manufacturers have disassembled a sample and started making sockets into which Apple hoovers can be plugged, but using such sockets voids the warranty on your hoover. Not every hoover can be plugged into an Apple socket. Electric power in Apple sockets is supplied by Apple's partners and is more expensive than on the free market. Apple sockets cannot be found in every apartment, but I must admit that Apple builds beautiful apartments. Apple sockets are never found in igloo because Apple has no interest in that market. Nobody knows what the plugs of the next generation Apple hoovers will look like, and whether they can be plugged into Chinese sockets.


© Martin Bekkelund, 2008.

This is a picture from the photo-report about the demonstration in Oslo against accepting the OOXML format pushed by Microsoft as an ISO standard. A banner can be seen in the picture: «Nei til nye stikkontakter» («No to new sockets»). On the right, with a megaphone in his hands, is Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software and the inventor of the CSS technology. To him I'm grateful for the idea of the plug-and-socket analogy which I somewhat developed here.

By the way, here is an article in the Norwegian newspaper VG where the bottom picture captures yours truly taking part in the demonstration.

UPDATE: No, it's not a Siemens advertisement. I just needed some placeholder.

UPDATE: For the sake of justice I must admit I've got no complaint against Apple's browser department. Thanks to these guys for their decent and fair competition, for active participation in the web standardization process and for active cooperation with fellow browser makers on security issues.

По-русски: iРозетка

From all the features of my PDA, I only use two; all the others have turned out to be useless or unusable. Firstly, I read books with Haali Reader; secondly, I use the to-do list, but only to keep the shopping list for the supermarket.

The look of this to-do list is trivial: there is a list with a square to the left of each line; the square can contain a check mark. This simple application also has a menu where I should point out two items:

• Active tasks
• Completed tasks

Obviously, tasks are subdivided into active and complete. Initially, I can see both kinds in the list. If I pick “Active tasks” in the menu, I'll only see the active tasks, and when I open the menu next time, there will be a check mark to the left of the “Active tasks” item. So I can only see active tasks (I've enabled this mode a year ago and have already forgotten what I did to get there), and now I want to see all the tasks. Question: what should I pick in the menu?

Here is how I think: “Right now I can only see active tasks, and the ‘Active tasks’ menu item is checked. I cannot see any completed tasks, and the ‘Completed tasks’ item is unchecked. It seems like the categories of tasks currently shown have check marks in the menu. In addition to the active tasks that I already see, I also want to see the completed tasks, so I need the ‘Completed tasks’ menu item to have a check mark. Usually, when I want a check mark to appear for a menu item, I have to click the item.” Of course, I make a decision like this rather intuitively, but it is actually backed by reasoning like this.

After considering this for a second, I pick “Completed tasks” in the menu, and what I get is… the list of only the completed tasks! After that, the “Completed tasks” menu item has a check mark, but the “Active tasks” item hasn't. At a second attempt, I realize that, in order to see all the tasks, I have to remove the check mark from the menu item that has it, which returns the system to the “normal” state (as opposed to the “special” modes where only active or only completed tasks are shown).

Of course, I'm long used to such behavior of this application, but I've never understood it and have rather memorized the “irregularity”, just like I had to remember that the marks for cold and hot water in my bathroom are switched. Every time I use the tap, I routinely recall, “The wrong way!” and tilt it to the side marked with red to get cold water. Similarly, every time I use the menu in the to-do list application, I recall that it works “the wrong way”.

Earlier, when I encountered such interface solutions working “the wrong way”, I thought them to be bugs or design mistakes. However, mistakes of this kind are quite common and are often similar to each other, fitting in a pattern. Moreover, such solutions are often found in applications and devices that non-technical users usually describe as simple, intuitive, easy and convenient to use. It seems like there are two approaches to interface between a human and a machine, and maybe even two systems of thinking. I might not have chosen the best names for them, and someone might have already described and studied them, but nevertheless I'll try to provide brief descriptions.

Object-oriented approach

This approach is often found in technical experts, especially programmers. The approach is centered around the notion of an object (such as a document or the system as whole). An object can be in one of a multitude of states, and it transitions from one state to another under influence of various factors, including user actions. In order to control the object, it's important to know its current state, that's why this approach great attention is paid to informativeness of the interface, that is, to its ability to inform the user about the current states of objects. The problem the user is facing is perceived as the difference between the current and the desired states of the system, and is solved by applying the inputs necessary to get the system into the desired state. To solve a problem successfully, one has to understand the structure of the system, its possible states and the transitions between them, that's why the object-oriented approach favors documentation that describes concepts, principles and the overall system organization.

Procedure-oriented approach

This approach is prevalent in people who aren't technical experts. The approach is centered around the notion of a task. In order for a problem to be solved, it has to match one of the tasks that the application or device is designed for (ideally), or at least to be possible to break up into a sequence of such tasks. The problem is solved by applying the inputs that get the system to produce the desired result. That's why the procedure-oriented approach favors documentation that provides step-by-step instructions for solving typical problems. Because the critical part is knowing what input is necessary to perform a task, attention is paid to discoverability of these inputs (toolbars, context hints).

It's hard for me to write about the procedure-oriented approach because it's not how I think, and everything that's made that way feels unnatural to me. The conclusions I'm making are based not on my personal experience from using this approach but rather on the analysis of the systems following it.

I'm surprised not by the very existence of two different approaches, but rather by the gap between them that is so wide that people following one of them can't even project the thoughts of those following the other approach onto themselves. The existence of these two approaches answers a lot of questions:

• Why cannot programmers design a good interface for non-programmers?
• Why do televisions and videotape recorders have such “stupid” menus that an experienced programmer often cannot configure them without the manual?
• Why are the “easy to use” image processing applications (that often come along on a CD with a scanner or a digital camera) unusable?
• Why don't you have to press “Enter” on a doorbell after entering a one-, two-, or three-digit apartment number?
• Why do home appliances so often have those (annoying to many programmers) automatic transitions from one state to another after a delay?
• Why cannot many people master programming?

On the other hand, new questions arise:

• Is the bias towards one of the two approaches inborn or is it rather acquired with upbringing?
• Can a person following one of the approaches learn to use the other one?
• Does schooling affect the choice of approach?
• Does the object-oriented approach determine the choice in favor of a technical occupation, or is it the other way round?

The original entry in Russian features a poll: Object-oriented vs. procedure-oriented approach. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Which of the approaches better describes your way of thinking?

• Object-oriented approach.
• Procedure-oriented approach.
• A third approach not described here (please comment).
• The subdivision into the two approaches is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate.

UPDATE: I have to agree with kalinka_malinka. This entry is an example of how to run knowingly non-representative surveys.

UPDATE: Another interesting aspect of the problem (in Russian).

По-русски: Все программисты с Марса, все пользователи с Венеры

Note: This has been initially posted as a comment in a discussion about a recent epidemic of a social virus about a little girl needing blood for transfusion. The fake message has been started by a LiveJournal user, and contained a plea to forward it to as many people as possible.

During the recent epidemic, I've got the message saying that someone needs B group blood dozens of times, and the shocking thing about it was that some of the people I got it from were:

1. Smart people, and I've got no doubt about it. I can warrant that some of the people whom I got the message from are smart, I've been studying together with them and I know them rather well. They are capable of complex mental activity both at work and in private life (so that it's not “common idiocy” when a professional outside of his workplace is helpless and naïve like a child).
2. People we haven't talked with for quite a while. If those people decided to send the message to me, it means they were sending it to everyone in the contact list, and maybe even outside the contact list.

The most scaring is that the first and the second groups have non-empty intersection.

A little analysis.

None of the forwarders tried to change the text or at least add something to it like “Do you think it's true? What if it is?” to express their degree of trust for this information. Does it mean everyone trusted it for 100%? Of course not. Maybe the hoax got them convinced for 60%, and they decided to forward it. But forwarding or not forwarding is discrete, it's either 0 or 100%. This way, 60% is rounded up to 100%, so we end up with stable reproduction of the worm. If every forwarder expressed their degree of trust, after three or four hops the information would “fade out” and turn into a tale that nobody is going to believe. It's this “rounding” that ensures the reproduction of the worm: the forwarded message looks exactly the same as the original. No gossip transferred the traditional way, through mouth and ears, achieves such steady reproduction as an electronic rumor gets nowadays when text can be copied and forwarded without distortion (experiments show that oral rumors, even when the forwarders are actively trying to reproduce the information exactly, get distorted to full loss of content after ten hops, and after three or four they loose half of the meaningful content).

Why does spam about this subject get reproduced the most steadily? One could build a mathematical model of gossip reproduction with the following parameters:

1. Persuasion threshold — the degree of belief necessary for the reader to take the information seriously.
2. Eloquence coefficient — the factor (usually less than one, but may as well be greater) expressing how the persuasiveness of the message changes when it's forwarded once. For electronic messages forwarded by verbatim copying, the factor equals to one.
3. Distribution factor — the number of recipients that a single participant decides to forward the information to when 100% convinced.
4. Connectedness characteristic — a property of the acquaintance graph (the average number of common contacts that two people in contact have).

Because the connectedness characteristic is a property of the medium and doesn't depend on the message content, this leaves us with the remaining three values. All of them affect the process of message distribution. When the persuasion threshold is high, the eloquence factor is low, or the distribution factor is low, the process fades out after some predictable number of links. This is what happens to most of the lucky mails: you usually get them from a contact or two, but no real epidemic begins. However, when the aggregate attenuation factor (the ratio of the number of active forwarders on the current iteration to that number on the previous iteration) that depends on the aforementioned parameters is greater or equal to one, the process doesn't fade out but instead continues until all closely-linked part of the acquaintance graph is informed. In practice, that means informing close to all potential forwarders in the Russian part of the Internet.

The persuasion threshold, the eloquence factor and the distribution factor depend on the message content. What made the aggregate attenuation factor exceed one in this case? The persuasion threshold, as it seems, is lowered for messages of this type because people prefer to be safe than sorry: “I'm only 25% convinced that it's true, but if it is, I could save someone's life by forwarding this”. However, the potential forwarders in LiveJournal are gullible enough already, one just has to remember this: “They're going to make ICQ a paid service. To not let it happen, please forward this to all your friends”. So I don't think it was the persuasion threshold that played the crucial role. The eloquence factor of one is also typical for electronic communication (though in some cases the forwarders decide to retell the message in their own words, which usually makes the eloquence factor less than one). This leaves us with the distribution factor. An indirect confirmation to this is that I received the message from some people I rarely talk to. It's for this specific kind of information that the distributors feel it especially important to maximize the number of recipients by all means because they think that someone's life depends on it. (The latter might not be exactly true. For the most, as it seems to me, it's more important to ease their own conscience than to save the little girl's life, and to ease the conscience, one has to perform the ritual of forwarding the message to everyone possible, so that one can say: “I did for the unfortunate wretch everything I could”.)

По-русски: Факторы воспроизводства социальных вирусов

“Human's physiological and psychological abilities are up to date poorly researched,” the lecturer's monotonous voice pontificated. “To believe in your own strength, to realize the depth of your hidden reserves is the way to discover the concealed abilities that each of us has.” The man who was telling this didn't look anything like a Tibetan monk who long ago had found the key to the secrets of his body and soul. He looked about twenty-five, and most of all resembled a programmer who had been working enthusiastically for the last fourty-eight hours.

Mark was sitting in the third row of a lecture hall and fiddling with a leaflet inviting to the “Unique seminar on the original method of discovering your own potential”. He was scolding himself for coming to this stupid lecture in the first place, and also for feeling so inconvenient to just stand up and leave that he was listening to this plod for one solid hour already. He had failed to follow almost in the very beginning and was by now altogether sure that there was nothing to follow, and that the lecturer whom the leaflet styled “Certified professor” was making no headway from the very start. Mark had dropped in on the unique seminar after work, and now the fatigue, lack of sleep and the lecturer's monotonous voice did their bit. Mark sank into a muddled, absurd dream where he was analyzing his, or maybe someone else's undocumented abilities with a disassembler, but finding nothing but useless features canceling out other useless features.

He woke up because someone touched his shoulder. “Hey, sir! I have to lock the hall.” It was the certified professor. Mark sprang up and guiltily rushed to the door. “It's OK, it's OK”, assured the professor. “What do you think, did you like it?” His vivid voice was now nothing like the colorless recitative of the lecture. Mark stopped halfway to the door. “Well…” he mumbled and immediately cursed himself for doing it. “Honestly, I didn't exactly understand…” He cursed himself in the choicest language for saying this just because he had to say something, and prepared for at least half an hour of boring explanations. But the certified professor was already looking at Mark with understanding and interest, and there was no way back. “I didn't exactly understand what those abilities are that you can discover in yourself if you believe in your strength.” To believe and to discover were the only things Mark remembered from the entire lecture, but the professor seemed to enjoy this question as if he never had heard anything more interesting. “This is the most important thing! If you really believe in yourself, you'll realize that there's nothing impossible for you, and that you can do anything.” “Like what? Will I be able to move objects with my eyes?” “No, why? That's a stereotype. You don't have to move objects with your eyes. In fact, you wan't even need it because someone for whom nothing is impossible gains the firmest self-confidence and doesn't need to move objects with his sight to confirm it — it becomes simply unnecessary!”

“Hey, hey, wait a minute. Are you saying that I have to believe in myself in order to have a reason to be self-confident? What's the point of it?” Mark was really interested now. “The point is simple. For example, are you self-confident?” “Well… yes. Yes, I'm self-confident.” “But why? On what grounds?” the professor kept asking. “Well, I'm a good specialist, I'm valued at work, I've achieved everything I have myself…” Mark never thought about this before, but it was unexpectedly easy to find the answer. “See? You're self-confident because you have this and that. But what if you don't have it tomorrow — will you still be self-confident? But if someone is self-confident because he believed in himself and discovered his unlimited abilities, this won't go anywhere, anywhere at all!” Mark considered this. The professor was talking obvious nonsense, but Mark couldn't spot where the error was. “What about you, did you believe in yourself and discover your concealed abilities?” he asked. “Mind you, I'm still far from mastering my full potential. But I've made significant advancement.”

Mark walked home and couldn't get the blatant rubbish that the certified professor talked out of his head. During the dinner and later in bed, falling asleep, he was still chewing the already tasteless logical cud. Only deep in the night he fell into a dreamless sleep. In the morning he woke up as a firmly self-confident man.

По-русски: Безграничные возможности

Basing on the prior experience of the uneasy relationship with my own memory, I've concluded that it is quite non-uniform. If I was to draw an analogy between human and computer memory, I'd rather compare the brain with the Harvard rather than Von Neumann architecture. To remind the reader, the former has separate memory for program and data, and the CPU accesses it in different ways; the latter uses common memory for both program and data.

According to this analogy, the brain contains fundamentally different structures for memorizing pure information (data) and procedures (program). In some people the former is better developed, and in some people, like me, the latter. I suppose that the latter is actually more common because there is a lot of methods to memorize pure information by substituting a generating procedure for it. For example, to memorize a telephone number like 1252627, many would find it easier to remember a procedure: write down 1 and then three consecutive integers starting with 25. I think that most people, while trying to memorize this number, will find the above procedure (without verbalizing it) and memorize it instead of the original number. Not every number can be represented with a reasonably short procedure like this, that's why some telephone numbers are considered easy to remember, and some are harder because one has to use the less developed memory for pure information. However, some people don't need the mnemonic tricks, and they can memorize all telephone numbers equally easy. These people have the memory for pure information better developed than the procedure memory.

I would call the content of the pure information memory knowledge, and the content of the procedure memory comprehension, even though this doesn't entirely agree with the casual use of these terms. Of course, the analogy with computer memory is incomplete: in my conception, the second type of memory holds not only procedures but also generalizations and relations (it's possible that there is some finer subdivision of memory types). Knowledge, on the other hand, is uniform, and there is no subdivision by type of information. To understand some information means to promote it from knowledge to comprehension by analyzing it, finding patterns, and probably relating to the previously understood. The ability to comprehend highly depends on the nature of information and on the similar comprehension already acquired. When someone says they have good memory for numbers, or melodies, or poetry, it means that they are relatively good at analyzing particular kinds of information for transforming them into comprehension. On the other hand, highly developed ability to accumulate knowledge rather than comprehension is more rare. Extreme cases of such development (such as when a person can recite the entire book after reading it once) are usually called infallible memory.

Human brain is a flexible system, and it's often that one system or mechanism in it gets replaced with another. In particular, replacement of knowledge with comprehension happens almost constantly. This incurs a certain overhead for both storage (analysis, pattern identification) and retrieval of information. For example, to call the telephone number memorized as the procedure described above, one has to execute the procedure first. The reverse replacement is also possible: someone who is unable or unwilling to analyze some information can memorize it as knowledge. In situations where the original information has to be reproduced precisely, knowledge is preferable to comprehension because it doesn't require any transformation. On the other hand, it's impossible to use knowledge in situations that require comprehension (though in some cases one can transform stored knowledge into comprehension, in other words, understand it when it becomes necessary).

The hypothesis about human memory using the Harvard architecture is valuable for pedagogics. The goal of teaching is to have the students comprehend the material, but often knowledge is substituted for comprehension. This happens for a variety of reasons: a better capacity for memorizing of pure information rather than for understanding, lack of ability or training for the analysis necessary for comprehension, lack of understanding of the previously learned material which is often crucial for understanding of the new. A great part of the substitution of knowledge for comprehension should be attributed to the imperfect system of progress assessment based on standard tasks and even on simple reproduction of the material. In the latter case, knowledge can be used instead of comprehension to reproduce the information; in the former case, it's impossible, but a student who is unwilling or unable to attain adequate comprehension of the material can rather attain inadequate comprehension. This kind of comprehension uses the same approach as the adequate comprehension but makes only shallow analysis resulting in identification of superficial patterns. An example is a memorized procedure for solving a type of standard problems in school physics: s divided by v yields t. Obviously, inadequate comprehension is as deficient with regard to the goals of teaching as pure knowledge. It is clear that improving the progress assessment system alone won't yield better results but will just lead to deterioration of the average figures. It is necessary to improve the methods of presenting the material as well as of training and stimulation of the abilities for information analysis. The latter is crucial because the analysis necessary for understanding happens in the student's head, and it can't be replaced by any visual teaching methods. There is always the work that the students have to do on their own, and if they cannot or don't want to do it, the teacher's work is wasted.

По-русски: Модель учащегося с гарвардской архитектурой