by Michael Kempe

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We know that some things are connected. For example, Mark Bernstein is the author of the weblog that you are reading. (And that sentence connects in a different way to the opening of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter night a traveller.) That some things are connected to other things cannot be denied, but are these connections exceptional and instrumental, or are they ubiquitous? As a rule, I find that people who believe in ubiquitous connection embrace tools like Tinderbox, while those who disagree do not.

Leibniz (1646-1716) remains a central figure in the philosophical question of connectionism. Postulating that God is perfect and perfectly kind, Leibniz tried to deduce the natural laws that would follow. Famously, he reasoned that a perfect God would not create an inferior universe, nor one that inflicted unnecessary suffering on its inhabitants: ours must be the best of all possible worlds. Because stupidity and suffering are not hard to find, Leibniz concludes that they must be necessary, and intuits that they are necessary because paradise would not be paradise unless it were achieved by universal effort. So, for Leibniz, everything must be connected because it is God’s plan not to build a garden for his creation, but to allow his creation to build a better one.

In his work on automatic calculators and on languages, Leibniz discovered the trick of representing any text as a very large number. This is one of the crucial connections that Gödel and then Turing made in demonstrating the incompleteness of formal systems. Leibniz didn’t quite get there — he did not quite figure out that there is more than one infinity, and that focus on the one perfect God was a distratction. Still, Leibniz did understand that, if the events in life could be represented as texts (like the Sybil’s book), then eventually everything (and everyone) happening right now would happen again. (Leibniz eventually embraced the alternative view that events must be continuous in the way time seems to be, more like the Fate’s weaving than the Sybil’s writing.)

Petit mode d’emploi des médias sociaux à l’usage des personnes malveillantes, in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances.

by Alina Adams

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I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca “Bex” Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice doesn’t quite meet the technical requirements of the genre: there is no second body. Nor is it a thriller, because Bex never really leaves her element; she’s an intelligent and (mildly) analytical observer of a sport and a medium for which she feels little affinity, and even when she’s most worried, her concerns are chiefly about losing a job that she doesn’t much like. We have good — even great — books that flutz the formal requirements of the mystery, but I found it odd here because figure skating is so concerned with formal requirements.

The sclerotic idiocy of the American Labor movement will be on full display at the World Figure Skating Championships.

After their favorite skaters perform, some skating fans like to give them stuffed animals. Often, they make or modify these “plushies” for their particular skater. For example, one young woman has designed and sewn a plush Amber Glenn doll for Amber Glenn.

The Boston Garden is prohibiting stuffed animals, citing an agreement with the vendor union. Stuffed animals will instead be sold inside the arena. The unhappy attendees are calling this plushiegate.

Sure, this preserves union jobs — perhaps as much as 1/10 of a minimum-wage job per year.

This is a good way to demonstrate to thousands of young people that unions care only for other people — for people who are older, whiter, and richer. And it’s a good way to demonstrate how Democrats demoralize voters in order to protect unions who turn around and support Trump.

A ten-episode series about figure skating, although it is chiefly about living with bipolar disorder.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time later this month at the World Figure Skating Championships, so I’ve been doing a media diet of skating books, web sites, and films. This is a terrific ten-episode film, made with sense and (some) taste. The writers wanted to avoid the convention in which the star has exclusive narrative rights, and they do a wonderful job of providing separate arcs for the (inevitable) minority sidekick (with a brilliant performance by Amanda Zhou, who shamefully lacks a Wikipedia page), for little sister, for Mom, for everyone. These are not one-episode shifts of focus, like The Bear does, but prolonged arcs. Unfortunately, in the late episodes this forced too much narrative into too little space. Lots of really fine acting, notably the brilliant Kaya Scodelario.

Last weekend, Detlef Beyer hosted a terrific Tinderbox meetup to demonstrate his integration of Tinderbox with a variety of large language models.

The previous day, Detlef had run into a particular JSON reply that crashed Tinderbox when Tinderbox tried to parse it. The problem arise from quoted strings that contained new emoji from Unicode’s Supplementary Multilingual Plane. This is a group of 65,536 potential code points (not all are currently assigned) that represent characters you seldom encounter: cuneiform, Linear A, Mayan numerals, and many recent emoji.

Tinderbox 1 didn’t support Unicode, because Unicode was not then in widespread use. We started to get serious about Unicode in Tinderbox 4, and Tinderbox 6 was already pretty good at Unicode. Unfortunately, that Supplementary Multilingual Plane can cause headaches.

One of the core classes in Tinderbox is Parser, which provides services for parsing actions, parsing export templates, parsing JSON (from Web services) and RIS (from reference managers), and lots of other little chores. My recent(ish) fix moved the internals of Parser to be Unicode-aware. Each parser needs explicitly to adopt the new way of doing things: the parts of the system that predate Unicode also predate test-driven development!

I think it’s time to make sure that everything has in fact adopted the new way. It’s a big refactoring, because it tends to ramify in surprising ways, and also because the New Way changes the architecture significantly. The core problem is that Parser, in the nature of things, reads character by character — and thinks that a character is a unichar, a 16-bit code point.

Our supplementary code plane contains unusual characters that don’t fit in a unichar! So we need two unichars, or four utf-8 bytes, to hold them. So, where we used to return a plain old unichar, now we return a bundle that might contain a unichar or might contain the longer character code:

The upside of this is that, once we are working with explicit TbxCharacters, we can make them do more work. For example, we could have methods that ask the character whether it's a backslash, or a quotation mark.

I usually wait to write about refactoring, if I write about them at all, only after they’ve succeeded. I thought it might be interesting to try this, and then see how things turn out.

Update: Two very long days later, the refactoring is mostly done. It was a bear; Monday evening, I left the office with a broken build. I almost never do that — I’d estimate perhaps once every two or three years — but dinner was urgent and something was breaking 132 tests. I managed to restore sanity on Tuesday morning by backing off some recent changes that I’d made with too much confidence; as usual, straying from conservative test-driven work had led me astray,

Nice email from a user to report that they, too, had experienced this crash and that they appreciated the imminent fix.

by Gabriel Kreuther and Michael Ruhlman

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A beautifully-produced and evocative book by an Alsatian farm boy who became a famous New York fine dining chef. The book combines two separate books. The first is a nice cookbook about traditional foods in Alsace with an emphasis on home cooking. The second is an ambitious cookbook that takes ideas from traditional dishes and adds elegant ingredients and modernist technique. It makes for good reading.

by Jennifer Ackerman

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An engaging, informal treatment of the natural history of the owl. People like owls, because owls look like people. (In some places, people mistrust owls for the same reason, thinking that they prophecy death and disaster.) They’re fascinating creatures with some curious habits; Burrowing Owls, for example, like to decorate their burrows with pretty little things. Some owls keep blind snakes as pets in order to help clean their nest. Some male Snowy Owls summer in the arctic and then, when the cold really sets in, fly even further North to hunt ducks and geese.

We’re learning a lot from some ingenious equipment — remote cameras, tiny little owl-sized backpacks, in-flight brain scans. I’d hoped to learn more about what owls know, because a lot of progress is being made right now in animal cognition. We just don’t know very much, alas, not yet.

A Pattern Language is a hypertext built around the Christopher Alexander classic. Very cool! Via Dave Gray.

by John Vinci, ed.

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This fascinating (and gorgeous) book examines Adler & Sullivan’s lost masterpiece. Built in 1891, this was briefly the world’s tallest building. Demolished in 1961, it had become an unwanted derelict, soon to be replaced by a grimy parking garage.

John Vinci, the editor, had recently finished college when he got a temporary job with photographer Richard Nickel, to work on salvaging some of the building’s amazing terra-cotta and plaster ornamentation. This three-man crew worked just steps ahead of the wreckers, but their notes offer fascinating insights into how the building worked, how it was built, and how its design was compromised by neglect and bad taste. Chris Ware, the comic book artist, designed the book, and it’s simply amazing.

My paper on “Amiability and the Web: Lessons from Red Vienna and the Origin of Computing” has been accepted for the History of the Web track of this year’s WWW Conference! So it looks like I’ll be heading to Sydney at the end of April.

Boiling Point (2021) is a decent British movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant.

Cooked (2025), also known as Umami, is a decent Turkish movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant. It seemed sensible to drop in and continue the binge.

What makes it really interesting is that Cooked is a very faithful remake of Boiling Point. The changes are slight, which makes them especially intriguing.