Mary Rose Cook

[In this post, there are lots of spoilers for The Wire. If you haven’t seen all five series, go and watch them.]

Lester Freamon in The Wire: “We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.”

The writers on The Wire occasionally let their characters say what it is the programme is driving at.

David Simon, the creator, has said that The Wire is about the way institutions affect people’s lives¹. He has also said the programme is modeled upon Greek tragedies², and as he noted, Grecian tragedy is obsessed with fate. If you combine these three insights, you come up with something magical: a piece of art that simultaneously champions two opposing views. In the case of The Wire: that every piece matters, and that the characters are fated.

For the characters, they are fated. Their personalities dictate what they will do when placed in circumstance. For the viewer, every piece matters. They do not have a complete picture of the characters’ personalities. Thus, they cannot predict what the characters will do in each situation until every personality facet has been revealed.

This contradiction is illustrated by Jimmy McNulty’s progression through Series 1. McNulty takes pride in his work and refuses to let police politics or his home life get in the way of his work. This means that when his superiors become concerned that his indictments will start riling their superiors, he continues his investigation. At the end of the series, this leads to him being exiled to a dead-end detail in the Baltimore port.

However, there is an extra subtlety: people can be beholden to zero or more institutions. Can the characters in The Wire choose the institutions to which they belong, and thus have a choice in their fate?

By the end of Series 3, McNulty has had enough of detective work and become a beat officer. This allows him to join the institution of marriage by moving in with Beatie Russell.

Thus, at the end of Series 3, McNulty withdraws from one institution and joins another. Did he choose this, and thus his fate? In a sense. He willfully chose to leave the first institution because it could not meet his terms.

By Series 5, McNulty is a detective again and, consequently, he goes back to drinking and philandering. However, he was most definitely ripped out of his newly adopted institution by the pull of his old one. Thus, in that sense, he had no choice.

¹ “[The show is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how, whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.” Source: David Simon “The Target” commentary track [DVD], 2005.

² “Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct - the Greeks - lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.” Source: David Simon interview in The Believer, 2007.

If Twitter has invented a new mode of communication, and Digg has invented a new mode of content filtering, does that mean that there is lots of room for Twitter clones that cater to different communities, in the same way that there are lots of Digg clones that lean towards different topics and styles of content?

Just found an amazing American public radio interview programme, The Sound Of Young America. The interviewer asks interesting questions and gets out of the way. I have listened, in a prostration of amazement, to the following:

Ariel Schrag
Steve Albini

Wow, wow, wow.

Snow Leopard is a cute name for the next release of OS X, but there are two problems with the theory. First, if you are not a Mac fan, it is difficult to discern the relationship between Snow Leopard and Leopard. Which is newer? Do I need one to install the other? Who knows? Second, it has been reported that banners reading “OS X Leopard” are hanging in Moscone West, ready for WWDC. Why tout Leopard when you’re going to announce Snow Leopard?

I have always really liked Des Ark but, for some reason, for the last week, I have not been able to stop watching their videos on YouTube.

They make me want to cry, Aimee’s guitar playing makes me boil with envy, and their two delivery methods (crushing rock and crushing acoustic) leave me lost in admiration.

Michael Mann has always given great attention to detail in his films: getting people to train his actors to behave like convicts, capturing the light of sodium street lamps properly, having his armed characters check chamber.

“We have full-time people who just show customers the code, or look at other specifications, and things of that nature.”

“burn rates, ignition propensities, things of this nature.”

The first quote is from a Bill Gates interview in 1986. The second is one of Jeffrey Wigand’s lines in The Insider.

Both quotes include the phrase, “thing of [this/that] nature.” When I read the interview with Gates, that phrase stuck out as something that only a precise person, an engineer, would say. And precision is Wigand’s defining characteristic.

You can please everyone.

Why does everyone love Radiohead and the iPod, yet no one deride them as philistine? Why did reddit go from being a relatively interesting news site to a politically-leaning version of Digg? Why is Digg populated by moronic stories?

It’s a matter of taste.

Steve Jobs sired the iPod by the force of his refined taste. The masses loved it because almost everyone can find a use for it, and because it is aesthetically pleasing.

Most pop music only has the former quality - we all like to dance, and to replay a melody in our heads. But Radiohead (1) take those nice melodies and spit them out in newish ways. Thus, they win the approval of everyone, including the critics. So, to a lesser extent, do Sonic Youth.

A few times a day, I visit a website called Hacker News. It’s quite like reddit: people post news items, vote and comment on them, and the most popular items get the most exposure. The difference with Hacker News is that all the news items are ostensibly focused on programming. Even in the three months since I joined, I’ve noticed a drop in the overall quality of the news items. But how does this drop in quality manifest itself?

It is often said of universally revered pieces of art that they have been “done very well”. When people say this, their admiration is a proxy for aesthetic pleasure within a well-understood set of rules. Jane Austen (2) took the romance novel, a traditionally trashy form, and wrote books that conformed to the established rules, but achieved great artistic heights. Converge released Jane Doe, a record that toes the metalcore line with its beatdowns and screaming and blast beats and heavy, distorted riffs. But they show such technical excellence and the music sounds so bleak that the record exceeds everything else in the genre.

Converge are a popular hardcore band, but they are not a popular band. I like hardcore, but my Mum does not, she says, because of the screaming. Most people share her view. Thus, Converge will never achieve the critical and mass popularity of Radiohead because, though they are very aesthetically pleasing, most people cannot find a use for them. Cathartic screams are just not their cup of tea.

How do you achieve aesthetic pleasure? There are two ways. One, appeal to a narrowly-defined group of people whose aesthetic judgement is closely aligned. Two, find the superset of the world’s taste and embody it.

This explains what has happened to reddit and Digg, and what is happening to Hacker News. These sites began with a core group of users who all had fairly closely aligned interests and values and so it was easy for the site to give them aesthetic pleasure. Once the user group became more diverse, there were an increasing number of stories posted that only appealed to a subset of the users’ interests and values. Therefore, these items get fewer votes and less attention. What rises to the top is the items that are universally appealing. But wait. Instead of a dictator with impeccable taste in charge, there is a mass of independent people. This universal appeal is based upon a lowest common denominator. We all quite like pictures of cute cats, and Top 10 lists and bold, unsubstantiated headlines. But these things only push our aesthetic pleasure bars up to maybe a four. Thus, mediocrity reigns.

The iPod has a dictator with impeccable taste and everyone can find a use for it. The same is true of Radiohead. Converge fail because of the second condition of universal popularity. reddit, the first.

(1) I don’t actually like Radiohead, but I am an outlier. (2) See Paul Graham’s article, Some Heroes, for more on good writers who chose populist genres.

I’ve been working on a large personal project for the last four months. To keep myself fresh, I’ve also done a couple of little mini projects. The first was Tweviews, tiny reviews on Twitter.

I knocked up the second this weekend: Throw Text, instant text storage and retrieval. I know there a lot of these things on the ‘net, most called Online Notepad. But my goals for Throw Text are a bit different:

1. Identical sign-up, edit and retrieve screens.
2. Text stored as you type.
3. Clean, clean cleanliness.

Some technical notes. Throw Text was written in Ruby on Rails. It is hosted on Slicehost for $20 a month. It is served by Apache 2 and mod_rails (aka Passenger). The data is stored in MySQL. It took longer to set up the hosting than to write the code.

So, give it a whirl: Throw Text.

I need to run a model method on my Slicehost production app every hour. I tried rake+cron, cronedit and a number of nut.crack(sledgehammer) queueing server solutions. Some didn’t work and the rest were unreliable. Therefore, for all you Ruby On Rails On Slicehost people, here is my approach. Treasure it.

1. ssh into your Slicehost account.

2. Switch to your user directory: cd ~/

3. Make a new directory: mkdir cronlogs

4. Make a new cron log file: nano notifications.log

5. Add a space to the file and then save it.

6. The crontab is a text file that holds all your scheduled cron jobs. Edit it: crontab -e

7. We are going to enter a line into this file. It will have the following structure: [timings] [switch to your app directory] && [path to ruby] script/runner -e [environment] [method to run] > [path to cron log]

8. Here is what I entered into my crontab. When you write your own version, make sure that the paths reflect where you have stored ruby and your app, and that you fill in the blank for your app name and set your own timings. 1 1 * * * cd /home/admin/public_html/[your app name]/current && /usr/local/bin/ruby script/runner -e production 'Match.generate_and_save_matches' > ~/cronlogs/notifications.log

8a. It is a good idea to test the command you enter (minus the scheduling information) in your command line. If it doesn’t work there, it won’t work when run by cron, either.

1. If you try and save your crontab and it says you have errors, make sure the whole thing is on one line.

2. If your model method runs OK, you will probably get no feedback. However, if there was an error, you should either get some mail or something should get written to the cron log you created.

The tweet I sent once I got this working.