Santa

There are a few well-known serious talks that parents have to have with their children. One that I've been wondering about lately is the "Santa isn't real" talk.

My siblings and I dodged that one simply because my parents never taught us that he existed, so we were enlightened from an early age. For those whose parental lying necessitates this kind of talk, I wonder if there needs to be a guidebook that handles the best way to approach the subject and how to deal with common questions or concerns. Here are a few excerpts from what I think those talks must usually be like:

Kid: Why didn't you tell me that it was you buying those gifts?
Parent: Because we believe that gratitude should be reserved for enigmatic fat men and not actually given to those who deserve it.


Parent: We told you about Santa to make you more excited for Christmas.
Kid: Yeah, but that just raised false hopes. Had I known that my Christmas presents would have been capped by your budget, I wouldn't have expected so much, and thus, wouldn't have been nearly as disappointed.
Parent: We're preparing you for the future. You'll constantly go through cycles of convincing yourself that life doesn't suck only to be proven wrong.
Kid: So you only told me about Santa to make the disappointment that much sharper when I didn't get what I wanted?
Parent: You'll thank us for it when you're older.


Kid: So it turns out that I would have gotten all of those gifts regardless of if I was bad. That means I no longer have any motivation to do good, right?
Parent: Well we might not get you gifts if you behave too badly.
Kid: Should I use your past regard for the truth as my means to analyze that statement?


Kid: Now exactly why did you lie to me about Santa?
Parent: Well, we believed that it was important for you to be excited about Jesus' birth, but we decided that Jesus was too boring, so we fed you some BS about a magical philanthropist so that you would be excited about the holiday.
Kid: So Santa was just a mask for the much less exciting Jesus.
Parent: That is right.
Kid: Can you just skip to the end and tell me about the really boring person that Jesus is masking?


Kid: Once you decided to lie to make me excited about something, why did you choose Santa? Telling me that Star Wars or Lord of the Rings was real would have been much cooler and not been so easy to disprove.
Parent: Santa is a major part of our culture.
Kid: Wait a minute. Your behavior has nothing to do with what is intelligent, makes sense, or will improve your life or relationships? It's just blindly following your culture?
Parent: Well, I guess when you put it that way...
Narrator: And with a sudden depressing insight, the child now understands the cause of so many of the world's problems.

Waiters

Holding to my values can be an exceedingly difficult task. One value I'd like to call my own is "vote with your money". Purveyors of this phrase suggest that if you dislike the behavior of a business, you can facilitate its failure by not spending your money there.

To understand why I have difficulty holding to my values, the fact must be understood that I find food to be extraordinarily pleasing. Gluttony is such a major part of my life that if the Lord hadn't blessed me with high metabolism, my personal gravitational pull would have disrupted the earth's orbit by now.

Many years ago, some brilliant chap devised a scheme to make a business that appeals directly to people like me. He called his creation a "restaurant" and he themed it entirely around food. The finest chefs in the land were brought forth and spent their days concocting substances designed to provide maximum happiness to any human who inserted them into his mouth and proceeded to consume them. Truly there never was a greater source of joy among all the people.
As with all good things, though, these restaurants began to be corrupted. For when the unwashed plebeians entered, they came bearing disturbing ideas. The heretical notion was put forth that the experience surrounding the eating was of greater importance than the eating itself, and fearing the wrath of the masses, the restaurants succumbed.

One of the proclivities among these miscreants was laziness: another--inefficiency. The real horror came when they combined the two.

"Why should we get our own drinks," they asked, "when another person can get them for us."
"Is it truly necessary that we order our food when we're ready? Or should we wait for a person who isn't even sharing our meal?"

And worst of all. "I really hate having to make the decision on when to leave. Wouldn't it be best if some uninterested party made that decision for us?"

And thus the waiter was conceived.

The purpose of this waiter is to force those who come seeking delicious nourishment to wait. Would you like a drink? You'd better wait for the waiter to come inquire of you which liquid you covet. Even though you could reach the drink dispenser yourself with a single-digit number of steps. Have you beheld the food that you would like to order? Well, you'd better wait for that superfluous human to come by and ask you.

What if you would prefer a fork for your sushi because you've found yourself to be incompetent in the ways of chop sticks. Instead of surreptitiously slipping over to the fork area and acquiring one of the aforementioned devices, you have sit dejectedly until the waiter walks by and inform him that you wish to offend the culture of the restaurant and use American utensils.

Eventually, these inconveniences are set aside as you have both the glorious vittles and the instruments with which to eat them. The next fifteen minutes are splendid, apart from the minor bout of dehydration because your cup is empty and you aren't allowed to refill it. At the close of this part of the process, the restaurant has fulfilled the measure of its creation, and your most appropriate activity would be to vacate it.

But, alas, the waiting isn't over yet. You are once again forced to wait for the waiter to bring you the bill, at which point you cast your credit card at him and wait another five minutes before he returns with a receipt to sign. And here is the part where things get truly abominable: You are expected to pay extra money to this person who lengthened your visit. They call it a 'tip', and if the waiter has only mildly damaged your eating experience instead of utterly destroying it, you are expected to make it's value 15% of your food purchase. It is, after all, much more difficult for this person to carry a twenty dollar steak than a three dollar plate of mashed potatoes, so the tip must be inflated appropriately.

It is here that my values are challenged. "Vote with your money" is my theory. By bestowing my hard-earned lucre on this person, I uphold their position. Clearly then, it's vitally important that I give no tip. In fact, to ensure that a revolution succeeds as I desire, I should eat out as often as possible, always withholding my tip.

But then I have a realization: it goes something like this: "Josh, you make video games for a living. You go to a nice office full of cool people who treat you well. Here is a poor sap who spends his days dealing with annoying people like you. He's probably struggling to make ends meet. He works evenings which has brutal effects on his social life. In addition, the restaurant pays him roughly the amount it costs to buy the gas to drive home. Give him some frikkin' cash, you incorrigible miser."

So I do. Perhaps one day, I'll develop the skills necessary to be a jerk, but until then, waiters, you'll get your tip.

Optimizing Politeness

So we have this little thing called 'The Golden Rule' which saith: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

For some things, it's a pretty good policy. I'd prefer not to have people eviscerate or defenestrate me, so I figure it's appropriate that I don't do those things to them, either. In some cases, though, it doesn't work as well.

One of the best examples of this is holding the door open. Now, I understand, if you're closely tailing some chap that it may be nice for him to perform this behavior, lest it fly shut into your face and give you justification for saying "Ouch!". However, this is usually not the case.

Often, when I am a significant distance from the aforementioned door, the human who is traveling through it decides that it's expedient to hold it open for me, anyway. I'll use math to demonstrate why this is bad:

If my current velocity and trajectory causes the door-opener to perceive that I would like to emulate him in traveling through the opening created when this door is ajar, he could run a rough mental calculation and determine the approximate time before I reached the door. If he, for example, estimated that it would take me 5.47 seconds to reach him, yet it would only delay my journey for 1.2 seconds for me to open the door myself, then we have a net loss of 4.27 seconds.

However, there are other complications. It is possible that I'm not actually heading for the door. Further, he has removed from me control over my environment. Last of all, common politeness obligates me to thank him, and the combination of all of these has far more power to derail my train of thought (which is always going somewhere weird like when I come up with these posts) than the instinctive act of opening the door.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are cases where this door-holding obsession that people have can actually be helpful. If I'm carrying a live salmon or have my hands glued together, the difficulty of opening a door is increased tremendously, and I'm grateful when somebody relieves me of this arduous activity. However, when somebody's thoughts are, "Hi, I'm going to burn 5 seconds and interrupt your train of thought because it will save you 1 second if I am correctly prognosticating your destination," I do find it slightly annoying.

Some day, I'll learn to be a jerk and make progress in optimizing the world. For now, I just thank them and move on.

My Conversations With Search Engines

First:

Me: Hello, Google, I would like to know how to open a file using JScript.

Google: Here are thousands of webpages telling you how to open a file in JavaScript

Me: Yes, but I want to know how to do it in JScript

Google: Since JScript and Javascript are the same thing, I have happily given you all the links with either one.

Me: Actually, they're not the same thing, and I need to do it with JScript

Google: To help you out, I've even put every instance of "JavaScript" in bold so that you'll know which websites you want to visit first.

Me: Okay, look, these links aren't helpful. You've buried the ones that actually reference JScript 50 pages in. Can you only show what I'm searching for.

Google: The best thing about about assuming equivalence between JScript and JavaScript is that if I only returned the 800,000 pages that only say JScript, you might run out of stuff to look at. Now, you'll have to opportunity to go through millions of pages before you reach the end of my wisdom.

Me: Yes, but can you please just give me the pages that say JScript.

Google: Aren't you glad I understand what you want even better than you do?

Second:

Me: Hello, Google, my friend Marc wanted me to look at his web page, but I can't remember the address. So I'm just going to put his name into the search engine and see if I can find it.

Google: Fortunately for you, there are many people named Mark who have the same last name. Aren't you excited about how many pages you have to look at?

Me: Yes, but his name is "Marc", not "Mark".

Google: The great thing about the name "Mark" is that it is also a commonly used noun and verb. For example, here is a page where somebody referred to somebody else by their last name only and said that they were going to "mark" them. In fact, I've found hundreds of pages with something similar, and I just know that you want to look at every one of them.

Me: No, I don't want that many pages. I only want the ones that say "Marc"

Google: The thing I've learned about humans is that they never know what they want. I'm pretty sure I'll have far more success guessing the intent behind the search rather than actually looking for the terms they entered.

Note: In both of the above cases, I fixed the problem by using msn search (now called Bing, though it wasn't during my first experience). To some degree, it does the same thing; it's just not nearly as bad.

Third:

Me: Hello, Youtube, my friend recommended a band called Valkyre. I'd like to hear a few of their songs.

Youtube: That's wonderful! Here's a link to the game Valkyrie Profile, and here's a video somebody made involving the Starcraft Valkyrie unit. It gets better, though, many songs, both old and modern use the term Valkyrie, and I'm going to give you every one of them.

Me: No, you don't understand. The band is "Valkyre", not "Valkyrie". That way you can narrow down the videos to only the ones I want.

Youtube: I have a dream...Some day, correct spelling will truly be a thing of the past. The Internet has made great strides in making sure that every word has at least three valid misspellings, and I'm proud to say that I'm now contributing.

Me: No, no. That's BAD. People should spell things correctly, and you should actually pay attention to what I'm writing.

Youtube: Sadly, a few backward-minded people still care about spelling, so I'm going to swallow my pride and put a link that says "Did you mean Valkyrie" below the search bar. But I'm going to assume that you did, even if you don't click on the link, and I'll send my results accordingly.

Me: Can you please just give me the results for Valkyre?

Youtube: I'm so happy. This poor man misspelled Valkyrie, but I quietly brushed his error under the rug and pretended that he didn't. It will make his life so much better.

These are all actual events, though I've simplified them and anthropomorphized the search engines. Note that if you try to recreate this problem, you need more than just the name given. You also have to have other words to narrow down the search. If it returns a lot of irrelevant pages, it's happy, but if it would only return a few pages, it starts doing stuff like I describe above so that it still can return a lot of irrelevant pages.

For example: If you only search for the term "Valkyre" in youtube, it complies because it can return a lot of pages where the video submitter misspelled "Valkyrie". However, if you search for "Valkyre music", it's horrified that it can't pile thousands of results onto you, so it commences with the egregious violation above.

I understand that there are actually benefits to these features, but the user may not always want them. Here's a recommended UI for future search engines:

The "Google Search" button is for people who know that the search engine understands their intent better than they do, and the "Actual search" button is for people who really want what they entered.

Basically, search engines are a little like people on forums. They'd be a lot more useful if there was an option to make them actually read what was typed.

How to Comprehend Women

Understanding women can be a great challenge--one that I've found requires skills to exceed my own. Thus, I decided that I would try to take an indirect route and seek this understanding through analogy. I figured that I could state some characteristics of women, find something else that shares those characteristics, and acquire an understanding of the more attractive half of the world's humans by studying that which carries the same characteristics.

So, I'll commence by describing a few traits of women. They are beautiful and fascinating. They are vitally important to the way the world works. However, I also find them to be quite irrational.

The question, then, is what else exhibits these same characteristics. The answer, of course, is the square root of 2:
Beautiful? Certainly to those who see the beauty of logic and physics.
Fascinating? Undoubtedly. It has all kinds of purposes, such as multiplying by the length of a leg to find the length of the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle.
Vitally important to the way the world works? All math is.
Irrational? Yes, the square root of 2 is an irrational number (look it up if you don't know what this means).
Thus, we conclude beyond doubt that women are like the square root of 2.

This is where we encounter a problem. See, the approximate value of the square root of 2 is 1.414, but this is not exact. In fact, if you continue to try calculating it, you will find that it goes on forever, adding additional numbers beyond the decimal point. No matter how long you study, how long you calculate, you can never have the joy of putting the precise value of the square root of 2 in decimal form. The digits go on into infinity.

This is the enlightening part, for when one understands infinity, they can thus understand the power of the square root of 2 as an analogy to women. Infinity has some unusual characteristics, most notably that any finite number, no matter how vast, when divided by infinity, will result in a number that is basically zero (essentially as close to zero as a number could possibly become without actually reaching it).

Therefore, no matter how many digits of the square root of 2 you have calculated, you are, for all practical purposes, 0% of the way toward finding the exact value.

Thus it is as trying to understand women. There are books, conversations, and other such that will teach you more about them, and it's perfectly reasonable for men to double, triple, or even ten times their amount of knowledge of women. However, as with finding the exact value of the square root of 2, whatever numerical value could be attached to your knowledge of women, it would always be divided by infinity.

We can therefore conclude that after any finite amount of studying and experience, a man will always have a 0% understanding of women.

Okay, going for weekly posts

So, I cast my thoughts about and decided that I'm going to try for weekly entertaining/informative (hopefully both) posts. I plan to pack each one with a significant amount of awesomeness, so be prepared.

EDIT: Okay, the weekly thing failed, but at least they're better than semi-annually.

Dual-wielding blogs

"Oh great! Now Josh is doing two blogs when we already have to put the number of days between updates in scientific notation"

The reason I'm running a second blog is because it's hosted on gamasutra.com, which means that it gets read by other game developers. Therefore, if I'm going to do a long, well-thought-out blog on game development, I will post it here: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoshuaMcDonald/2936/

Anything else I blog will remain on the website that thou art currently gazing upon.

And for my final bit, I will now link to one of the funniest things I have ever read: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

Farewell and enjoy being a human.