Month: March 2012

In a “denial of service” attack, a web site is taken down by flooding it with requests (generally by software robots that are pretending to be people) until the site crashes from overload.

I was at lunch today with a group of friends, and most of us ordered tea. It came up in conversation that tea is the most expensive item to serve in a restaurant, in terms of time/effort of the server per dollar collected from the customer (there are people who actually study these things).

And it occurred to me that if you really hated a restaurant, and wanted to take it down, you could just get all your friends to go there and order nothing but tea. Eventually, the restaurant would be overwhelmed by the need to serve all those individual slices of lemon, servings of cream, cups, saucers, spoons and sugar containers, and (if it’s an upscale place) little pots of tea and freshly steeped tea leaves.

I’m not saying anybody should ever do such a thing. My heart goes out to poor overworked restaurant employees everywhere just thinking about such a thing. But I wonder — would it be illegal? Or perhaps more interestingly, would such an act ever be ethically justifiable? More broadly, is a DoS attack purely an on-line phenomenon, or are there in fact real-world examples of pre-internet denial of service attacks?

Over dinner recently, a friend told me about someone he works with who is very rational and intelligent, but happens to be highly religious. “It’s odd,” he said, “she is such a logical person, and yet when we were all going out one friday evening, she said she couldn’t join us, because she couldn’t travel after sundown on the sabbath. When I asked her why, she replied that is just the way she does things.”

I told him that all of us have rituals we cannot logically explain, that we do just because that is the way we do things. When he disagreed, I gave him an example.

“Suppose,” I said, “I were to pick up your fork right now off your plate and eat your food. Wouldn’t that be breaking an unspoken taboo with no logical basis?”

“That would be unsanitary,” he replied.

“You know I don’t have a cold,” I said. “After all, a little while ago you and I tasted some wine from the same glass, and you didn’t even think about it.”

At that point he agreed. We are all bound by many little rituals and social constraints that we cannot logically justify, yet which form the very fabric of our social interactions.

I reached into my pocket after lunch today to grab my little case of dental floss. Looking down at my hand, I realized I had actually pulled out my cell phone.

Which got me thinking. Why do we combine some functions into a single pocket-sized box, but not others? We now have one device that handles phone conversations, text messaging, email, and surfing the web to find the nearest restaurant.

Why don’t we have a phone that helps you floss your teeth? Is this merely due to a limitation of technology, or is there some unconscious cultural resistance to taking that final step, one last valiant stand against putting every aspect of our existence into a single miniaturized plastic case?

I have spent most of this past week at the Game Developer’s Conference, and have realized that the main cultural topic of conversation here is “Dammit, we are not movies, we are games. We are, in our own right, a legitimate part of the means of cultural production!” All this accompanied by much indignity and metaphorical foot stamping.

Which is all fine, I guess. But it leave me wondering why such defensiveness is necessary. After all, people in the movie biz don’t spend a lot of time arguing that movies are not computer games.

The only thing I can conclude, if I can make an analogy, is that computer games are to movies more or less what Canada is to the United States.

As I write this, I am attending a talk by Sid Meier, the creator of the game “Civilization”, who is discussing his creative process. He keeps going back to the phrase “find the fun”, as a guiding principle.

I find myself thinking about Robert Sherman, who co-wrote many of the greatest Disney songs with his brother Richard, including the songs in “Mary Poppins”. In particular, I’m thinking of the opening lyrics to “A Spoonful of Sugar”:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun.
You find the fun and Snap!
The job’s a game.

Sadly, Robert Sherman passed away earlier this week. Ever since I was a child, his song lyrics have had a special place in my heart. There is a bright cheerfulness to the songs of the Sherman brothers, and yet there is also often a deep undercurrent of sadness running just below their surface, almost a feeling of dancing on the abyss. For example, “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, with its minor key and surprisingly mysterious lyrics:

Winds from the east
Mist coming in
Like something was brewing, about to begin
Can’t put me finger on what lies in store
But I feel what’s to happen, all happened before

seems to suggest an old dark magic just out of frame. And the haunting “Feed the Birds” makes me feel like crying every time I hear it.

In a way Robert Sherman’s work is like that of J.D. Salinger. It’s all bright shiny surfaces and cleverness, yet with a terrible sadness lying just beneath our view, such as the inner struggle of the soldier in Salinger’s story “For Esme, with Love and Squalor”, and the haunting tragedy of Seymour Glass.

As it happens, these two well known wordsmiths, painters of dazzling verbal pictures, had something very specific in common. They were both among the very first Allied soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II, suddenly confronted by a nightmare for which they were completely unprepared.

We cannot know in full measure the demons that must have haunted Salinger or Sherman in the wake of such an experience. But it’s not surprising that an individual with the soul of a poet, when faced such devastating horror, will do everything he can to beat back the darkness, devoting his talent to trying, heroically, to find the fun.

    laptops are just like
    politics: it’s all about
    access to power

I recently posted some experiments in creating geographic landscapes over the space of novels such as “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice”. Like any maps, these are potentially spaces upon which people can overlay shared commentaries, links, histories, or interesting routes and connections.

The game changes somewhat if the landscape is built from a play, such as, for example, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the case of theatre, we not only have the original written work, but also specific embodied performances. One can imagine a geographic landscape of the play as a map into a performance, and as a space for people to discuss aspects of that performance (or even from which to compare different productions).

I have a sense that this sort of shared landscape can have a richness that goes beyond what we can do with novels, since the liveness of theatrical performance adds depth and dimension to the discussion. It would be interesting to see whether we could apply an adaptation of my narrative geography to the problem of building a community of thought and commentary around an particular performance of a play.

We could also do the same with movies, yet somehow I find theatre more appealing for this process, because the connection is so much stronger and more essential between the original sequence of words in the script and the resulting performance.

When you hit the “Send” button on email, your thoughts have just sailed into the world. If you have something like Google “undo” installed, there is a short period of time when you can change your mind. But after that, it’s all over.

This is usually fine, but every once in a while we all find that we’ve sent out a badly worded email, or one which accidentally contains factual errors, or sometimes, (sigh) an email that we shouldn’t have sent at all.

It seems to me that the last moment to change our minds should not be moments after we’ve hit the “Send” button, but rather moments before the intended recipient has read our missive.

Yes, it’s true that shortly after we hit “Send” the underlying sendmail protocol has already delivered our first email, and soon our original message has been copied into a spoolfile somewhere in the recipient’s file system. But so what? Modern mail programs contain layers of functionality over this raw base level. Surely they could deal with an “edit earlier email” meta-email.

So why don’t email programs allow us to continue editing, up until the moment the message is actually open and read?

At some point technology will advance to the point where we will be able to see and hear distant friends and colleagues through augmented reality glasses, in a way that closely approximates the experience of sitting across a table from them.

At that point, perhaps a new kind of restaurant will emerge, one which caters to a clientele that enjoys sharing conversation over a good meal with distant friends, but seeks to avoid the time, expense and inconvenience of air travel. Perhaps at some point even the waiter will be virtual, appearing to serve food that is actually delivered to your plate by robot.

Remember feeling that buzz of sparkling conversation all around you, the last time you had a great time in a fine restaurant? Maybe, just as eBooks might replace paper and ink, the experience of going out to a restaurant might end up being something we will one day enjoy in the comfort of our own homes.