saturn return to sender

I think people and the media (mostly) miss the point. It’s necessary to ask whether the policies the Obama administration brings to the office are the right policies. The debate—the tension between the essential conservative and liberal viewpoints—is healthy. Obama’s policies may result in good or ill, or (more likely) some of one, some of the other. I am not an expert on the economy, for example, and though I do tend to think that power should not be concentrated among the empowered, and so am for Obama’s policies, I am definitely ready to admit to the value of the conservative point of view.

But one thing Obama brings (returns?) to the office, and to government, and to our culture, which is in my mind unequivocally, marvelously, giddiness-inducing good, is the intellectual honesty required to be able to tell the difference. If we can’t honestly look at ourselves outside of ideology, it doesn’t matter what the policies are, because we won’t have honest access to the feedback of their effects, we can’t correct course when something goes wrong, and Rome will burn. This has nothing to do with liberal versus conservative philosophies, but does seem to have to do with the current Republican party versus the anyone else, and in particular versus the “reality-based community.”

An example. An Obama official admits the inevitable about the recovery plan: there will be wasteful spending. “How could it not?” columnist Gail Collins says.

Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

(Note: That quote is the columnist, not the Obama representative.)

Can you imagine a Bush official agreeing that his plan will not work flawlessly? I can’t. A Bush administration official would talk around the point, avoid the question, generalize it to some kind of heroic-abstract “challenge” we must overcome. I keep coming back to the same metaphor (is it a metaphor?): Obama is a grown-up. Bush was a child. A well-intentioned, but petulant and untalented child.

Panicked and unable to understand why the complex world doesn’t bend to his will, a child will invent fantasies about the forces in play against him. Then he understands, he feels like he’s back in control. A grown-up accepts that the world is complex, evades understanding, that he can’t control it, but he takes responsibility and grapples with it anyway, on its own, ineffable terms. The grown-up is concerned with solving problems. The child raids windmills.*

I should say, it seems that Obama is bringing intellectual honesty to the government, it seems that he is a grown-up. We’ll see how the next years play out, but I am optimistic.

I had an idea for a little visualizer toy and started playing with Quartz Composer over the weekend. I’m always blown away at the power of that tool whenever I dip into it.

That said, I spent hours and hours trying to convince QC to do what I wanted. The macro I came up with for one part of the idea looked like this:

And after trying several variations, it actually—mysteriously—didn’t work in a critical way. I imagine it’s due to some lack of understanding of how QC’s pipeline works. But eventually I broke down and wrote the logic I wanted in Javascript using a single Javascript patch instead of that macro, and it looked like this:

Er. Yeah. You know how they like to say “and you can do all this without writing a single line of code”? Sometimes that’s only a good thing if you can also just write the damn code.

I also want to play with Processing sometime soon.

The beta version of a Javascript app I built is now available at wiki.name.com.

You can filter the names in the spinners by origin, meaning, gender, popularity, length … it’s a fun way to learn about names or—if you happen to be looking for a name for your baby—to find for a name for your baby.

The interesting programming challenge here: there are around 3000 names in the wiki, and the user should be able to spin through all of them by clicking and dragging (or “throwing”) the spinners. No browser could be expected to cope with a list of 3000 names, so the trick is to only display the subset you need at any one time, and do as little work as possible to add and delete list items on either side of the current set, and only add or delete when necessary. It’s similar to how google maps works: they only load the bits of map that you need to see at the moment, and not the entire world.

It’s conceptually pretty easy to visualize, but add in filtering by properties on the names, type-to-jump to a name, and various weird edge cases, and it’s not entirely trivial to implement. (And there are still a few glitches, particularly when using the arrow keys to nudge the list up or down.)

There’s also the issue of synching the names in the baby naming wizard with the wiki data. Rather than asking the wiki to output its entire database on every page load, we periodically run a server-side script which JSON-encodes the data into a single file.

The app was built with the most excellent jQuery and the plan is currently to open source the core spinner code and release it as a jQuery plugin. It’ll probably be a little while before that happens. In the meantime, congrats to name.com for getting this out there, and if you’re reading this, I encourage you to support them by checking it out, playing around a bit, and contributing to the wiki!

Seriously. Jon Stewart is my hero.