To refer is human

Having started to read Half-Blood Prince, aloud, at bedtime, to A., I've accepted that I have no choice but to wade through the flabby prose and clunky exposition that forms the first two-thirds of each of the books, before the bombs she's laid finally get to explode in the final third. But that doesn't mean I can't whine a bit. Example:

Then, three years ago, on a night very like tonight, the Prime Minister had been alone in his office when the portrait had once again announced the imminent arrival of Fudge, who had burst out of the fireplace, sopping wet and in a state of considerable panic. Before the Prime Minister could ask why he was dripping all over the Axminster, Fudge had started ranting about a prison the Prime Minister had never heard of, a man named "Serious" Black, something that sounded like "Hogwarts," and a boy called Harry Potter, none of which made the remotest sense to the Prime Minister.

Any halfway-decent editor would be tearing out their hair at a paragraph like that. It's a mess. There's never much music in Rowling's prose, but this is a really good example of a specific, systematic problem of hers: choice of referring expressions.

Doing (machine) natural language generation, one of the hidden but very tricky little problems is deciding on referring expressions. In a narrative that's anything beyond childishly trivial, there are far too many ways to refer to things. Deciding what's clear, unambiguous, helpful, but also what reads well, is a hard algorithmic issue. It's hard enough just to decide when it's okay to use a pronoun or not, but then there are indexicals, proper names, official titles, bits of metonymy, and so on. Too many choices. The fallback position when referring to people is to just use their name pretty much all the time; it's clear and unambiguous. Clunky as hell, but style usually comes somewhat behind clarity when it's a choice between the two in a machine generation context.

People, on the other hand, usually work it out quite quickly. Anyone who writes for a living, particularly so. But not Rowling, it seems. She chooses referring expressions like a not-very-good machine, dropping the same ones with no regard for variation and flow. Look at that paragraph again. There are four references to the 'Prime Minister'; the last is particularly dissonant. The paragraph comes well into a chapter which is told with a restricted third-person point-of-view: it's the Prime Minister's chapter. We're in his head, and yet Rowling is so unsure of her ability to maintain point-of-view, she seems to feel the need to keep reminding the reader. The effect, besides stumbling prose, is to feel as a reader that point-of-view is constantly shifting and unreliable. Rowling's restricted algorithm might be allowed a little more choice if she gave the Prime Minister a name, even, but she seems not to want to.

It's always been so. A perfect example from Goblet of Fire:

Ron and Hermione seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss their argument. They were being quite friendly to each other, though oddly formal. Ron and Harry wasted no time in telling Hermione about the conversation they had overheard between Madame Maxime and Hagrid, but Hermione didn't seem to find the news that Hagrid was a half-giant nearly as shocking as Ron did.

There's no point-of-view there. There are just names, and way too many of them. It's not prose; it's a plot stock-take, an Excel spreadsheet.

Bah. And while I'm grumbling: 'Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures'; 'Department of Magical Law Enforcement'; 'St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries'. Clunky, clunky, clunky, and referred to as such, in full, every single time. No-one who lived in her world and actually had to say such things would bother. Not many of us go to places like 'St. Bartholemew's Hospital for Human Unpleasantnesses and Unfortunate Occurrences'. We go 'to the hospital', or (if we're a Brit) just 'to hospital'.

Life's too bloody short as it is. Growl.

The Manual

Maybe I've been wrapped in the deadening clutches of US bureaucracy too much lately - yesterday at a branch office of the INS/CIS, fetchingly situated in the end unit of an unlovely strip-mall - but it occurred to me yesterday as I sat with the other hopeful souls that, while the essence of a country like Britain is its history and tradition, the essence of the US is a kind of user manual. It's a country, but maybe more than that it's a way of running a country: a country algorithm; a franchisable concept. I imagine an actual, foot-thick, heavily-thumbed tome in all of these government offices: America: The User Manual. To be sure, it's had plenty of revisions over the years, but the Constitution is its first few static pages, and the Supreme Court is always there to rule on what the manual says.

I don't mean this pejoratively at all. I think it's mostly a fascinating and optimistic experiment: rather than allowing American-ness to emerge from its jumble of generations and accidental significances, it's declaimed from the rooftops. There's a fundamentalism in the primacy of money that I find quite chilling sometimes, but it does arise inevitably, if not quite by design, from the Manual. There'll be time for some enforced dalliance with more socialist ideas when the space runs out and people have to co-exist across the country rather more than they do now. Either that or the whole place will turn into something dystopic from Blade Runner or Metropolis.

Almost the entire staff of the INS/CIS office seemed to be no more than a generation or two from their own immigration, which is as it should be. It pleased me that two bottle-blondes with heavy Russian accents appeared to run the place. Anyone can use the Manual.

Pause.

We forget how much we actually live in the future. As I sat in the McDonald's across the road eating perfectly rubbery egg and spreading tasteless margarine on the tasteless generic baked-good that came with it, I was fortunate enough to actually see, I think for the first time, a ritual so Jetsons, so post-automat, that it took my breath away. Here's what happened. At the close of the breakfast hours, one of the servers reached up and rotated the picture-menus above the counter. They rotated smoothly and with a heart-breaking synchronisation, eggs becoming burgers, hotcakes becoming chicken-strips. Breakfast vanished in a moment, and without a trace. The new pictures fitted as snugly within their frames as the expunged ones had done, the rotation itself a big secret. I was disappointed only that the process wasn't yet completely automated, the entire counter-space folding and unfolding with the Ken Adam chrome and hum of Goldfinger's pool table becoming a scale-model of Fort Knox.

Pause.

Oh yes. Even if you know all he's going to do is take your fingerprints, watching a government employee snap on a clean latex glove is quite enough to cause the involuntary tightening of one's anal sphincter.

Q

Maybe it's been done already, but someone ought to write something Kafka-esque in which a Josef Q finds himself compelled to join queue after queue in an impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy, the end of each interminable one leading to the beginning of the next, only to find, at the moment of apparent conclusion, that the purpose of queueing turns out to be the allocation of a permit which enables him to join the first queue again. (Though, now I come to think of it, that might have actually happened to me in Foyles one time some years ago.)

Monday, I parked at USC and took the bus into downtown to avoid the usurous charges in the 'public' (was ever a word used more nominally?) parking there. A sweetly warm and hazy day, it made me wish I'd brought a camera, but that wouldn't have been a good idea. Walking down 1st Street took me past the Disney Concert Hall. The sign above the street entrance for Founders parking has a vertical gap between bricks behind the final 's', so that it appears to say 'Founder$ parking'. A good joke, were it planned.

Then to the Federal Building on North Los Angeles. A queue to get in through the main entrance - regulated by time of appointment. Then a queue to go through the airport-ish security. So there's me doing the farcical dance yet again of trying to take off my belt, whose leather is split causing its removal from trousers I'm wearing to be something of an It's a Knockout marathon. Above a large atrium containing almost nowhere to sit there are the official photo portraits of Bush and Cheney, Useful Idiot and Eugene Helpmann.

Then a queue to get into the room where employment authorisation cards are processed, after being rebuffed by the security guard a couple of times for being, um, actually for being on time, because everything seemed to be running - already, by 10am - about an hour late. Then a queue to be issued with a number on a piece of paper. Then a queue, along with everyone else, to have the number entered into the system so that I could begin the real queueing - this procedure effected with the best available low-tech, the late middle-aged African-American woman behind the glass riffling the stack of appointment cards as if playing gin with shrewd old friends on a slow, hot afternoon.

Then waiting for my number so that I could sign the card and have my fingerprint (right index) taken. Then waiting for my number again to have my photo taken - receding hairline nicely burnt by the morning sun, thanks for asking. Then waiting for my card. It's the way a kid writes stories: and then this happened and then that happened and then something else happened and then and then. Bureaucracy is all about conjunctions.

In the absence of adversity, hell might indeed be other people, but with a common enemy people keep each other sane. A devilishly handsome Spanish man took it upon himself to charm everyone around him; he knelt at the gin-playing grandma's window to be at her height. The tiny, weathered Mexican man in front of me smiled, and that was quite enough to know exactly what he meant.

Three hours, but a formality this time, and still it was drainingly stressful. To have little or no English in such a context must be nightmarish. Some small token gesture is made towards Spanish, but not much. Oh, and, like Vegas casinos, there are no clocks once you're inside the room. How can you complain about how long you've been there if you don't know how long you've been there?

FBI fingerprinting on Saturday, and then a Green Card interview in November, and that should be that. Oh, and the final bit of Catch-22 is that the Green Card isn't green, and for all I know isn't a card.

Brazilian

A long day spent mostly at the Federal Building in downtown LA getting a long-awaited employment authorisation card thingy, so that I can work legally for the first time in more than six months. More tomorrow about that, because I'm pooped, but, as is the nature of things, something today reminded me of something Brazilian:

Interviewer: "What do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?"

Deputy Minister Eugene Helpmann: "Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, they'd get a lot more out of life."

I: "Nevertheless, Mr Helpmann, there are those who maintain the Ministry of Information has become too large and unwieldy."

H: "David, in a free society information's the name of the game. You can't win the game if you're a man short."

I: "And the cost of it all, Deputy Minister? Seven percent of the gross national product?"

H: "Ah, I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayer. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principle of information retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention, and for the information retrieval procedures used in their interrogation."

I: "Do you believe the government is winning the battle against terrorists?"

H: "Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs. We're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking 'em for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game."

Meanwhile, in the world that we persist in thinking of as real:

"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
Dick Cheney, June 2005

Outside the Chocolate Factory

Live 8 was a collision of so many different motivations, there's been something for every cynic to complain about: that it was all about rock-star ego; that its Anglo-Saxon whitey-whiteness was offensively patronising; that it was a missed opportunity to raise some hard cash; conversely, in a game of bluff and double-bluff and triple-bluff, that the cynics were just whining about a small though admittedly over-hyped gesture that couldn't fix everything and was never meant to. Maybe a bit of all of those, so choose your cynicism and get ranting.

Myself, I can't help smirking at the irony of Bill Gates coming on all philanthropic at the same time Microsoft is paying out huge sums in antitrust settlements. There's something viciously Robin Hood about Gates: crush the competition however you can, make zillions, hoover up art like it's going out of fashion, get your name on buildings and professorial chairs, then attempt to ameliorate the capitalist doggery by putting on a charitable mask. If he was serious about making the world a better place, he'd: make software that sucked less; make it cheaper to buy; not be such a craphound to competitors. That would not be a small amount of good in a techie world.

I only caught the second half of the London show on the radio, the prime directive of which seemed to be Don't Fuck Up. I'm sure Floyd were spiffing for the crowd, but I'm just not too sure the world needs another pitch-perfect version of Comfortably Numb, even if it does have Roger Waters croaking along. Robbie, as usual, Got It, and played the throng like bad karaoke, which seemed to hit the spot. To at least a couple of sotte voce complaints that this thing just isn't done, the Scissor Sisters played, gasp, a new song, and it was the most alive moment all night. Some wanker on Radio One moaned about it not being part of the etiquette to 'showcase' something new, presumably because the intent isn't supposed to be, you know, to sell records. No surprise, but it's the old stuff that's dancing out of the shops. You don't have to be Spinal Tap hoping that people like their new direction to bring out something new in concert and have it fit.

I miss the sense of Being There. I've lived in both London and Edinburgh, and both have had a centre-of-the-world quality to them the last few days. I live in one of the most populous cities in the world now, and yet I can scarcely think of a venue here where a Live 8 concert might have been staged. The Staples Center, maybe, or perhaps Dodger Stadium, but neither has the right feel of social space. LA is built not around parks, but around movie studios. 'The business' dominates the culture and the skyline with the walled-palace grandeur and secrecy of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. We scrabble for bit-parts and screenplays that might serve as Golden Tickets for entry.

The economics of edges

They've headed back down since, but for quite some time gas/petrol prices here were kept below three dollars a gallon only by the bulwark of the number system. Apart from one place in Beverly Hills which seemed to leap with abandon from the $2.90s into the $3.20s in order to skip the whole argument, everywhere else froze at $2.99, unsure of what to do next. Things had headed upwards quickly enough that it was clear this wasn't a natural equilibrium. The tide just stopped.

We're so used to being treated as fools who believe that 3 dollars (or pounds or whatever) is significantly more than 2.99 that it doesn't strike us as just a tiny bit irrational. Actually I suspect we're so used to being fools who believe that 3 is significantly more than 2.99. Personally I say a quiet thank you to places like Gap which eschew such manipulative, trivial, and quite, quite effective mind games.

So, it was nice to see the pump in the other hand for a change. Where usually the number system is a marketing tool, in this case it deprived the oil companies of squillions of dollars, and they only had their own timidity and greed to blame. They lost all that money because we happen to have ten fingers. I find the randomness of that oddly pleasing.

However, there's a general principle here, which is that it's pretty bloody stupid for any decisions of social significance to be influenced so heavily by the number of digits we happen to have evolved, or otherwise the number system we happen to have chosen for ourselves. Artistic, too. A film might lose a worthwhile scene or two because it's contractually obliged to run at less than two hours. Sure, there are economical reasons why shorter is more profitable, but that specific boundary is determined not by the intrinsic artistic worth of any individual part of the whole, but by accident of number system. If there's an optimal length for any work, it's vanishingly unlikely to have anything to do with how we divide up days.

So, I have a modest proposal for a mechanism which might help combat this economics of edges. Of course, in any number system there are going to be edges, so the solution is clearly to switch between number systems when it's prudent to do so. Gas prices stuck at 2.99 and feeling a bit queasy about being the first to break three dollars? Okay, then why not switch to displaying prices in hexadecimal: the leap from 12B cents to 12C cents doesn't look nearly so scary as the leap from 2.99 to 3.00, does it? If things go well and prices fall below FF, you might worry about the impending leap back above 100, but a quick switch to decimal 2.55 should solve that problem, because who cares about the difference between 2.55 and 2.56?

Of course, all this will be made much easier once we've converted to using Intergalactic Credits, and the number base can be switched intergalactically by some remote Big Brother at his economic or political whim - or because the numbers get so large that compression into hex is necessary to make them fit on the currency.

And I used to think I knew nothing about economics. Seriously.