When Amanda Knox was on trial for murder in Italy, I remember being struck by the ease with which I formed the opinion that she was probably innocent. She was half a world away and so were the events that had taken place. I was just following along with the American media/social-networking spin that here was someone who was being abused by a legal system because she was a foreigner.
When I realized how easily I was accepting a canned narrative, I had to stop and think. I couldn't take back that gut instinct, that feeling she was innocent, but I could know it for what it was -- an easily manipulated irrational jump to judgement with little-to-no-bearing on the truth.
This wasn't that hard for me, because this wasn't the first time I'd thought about it. I'd often been struck by the ease with which people could find a jury verdict to be a 'miscarriage of justice'. Despite not having been there in the court to hear the evidence--despite only hearing everything fourth-hand, through heavy media spin, people could so easily be certain of someone's guilt or innocence. Yes, sometimes people get off on technicalities; sometimes passing judgement on a jury verdict isn't unreasonable. But most of the time it really is.
So I've been feeling pretty awkward about this whole Trayvon Martin thing. There's certainly one clear thing: he really shouldn't be dead, and we have handguns and "stand your ground" laws to blame. Regardless of who started it, the death is a terrible, terrible outcome.
But that's not the direction most people are coming from. Most people have decided that Trayvon Martin didn't start it; that George Zimmerman shot an innocent kid, unprovoked. Certainly Zimmerman's actions leading up to the event are pretty reprehensible, and his choice to carry a handgun questionable. But these things don't to me make a pattern that means he is unambigously the kind of guy who would attack or kill a black dude without provocation.
Zimmerman's story is, unsurprisingly, that Martin attacked him. Can we as easily reject that Martin could have attacked Zimmerman first? We don't have the narrative convenience of Martin going around stalking white guys to make convenient sense of it. We're told Martin was just an unthreatening kid coming home from the store. This is some kind of story, but does it get at the truth? Do we actually know enough about Martin to know he couldn't have started it?
Martin's parents think they do:
The attorney for George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month, said Monday that Martin initiated the confrontation, beating his client so badly he suffered a broken nose and injuries to the back of his head.
Martin’s parents and their attorney, preparing to fly to Washington for a congressional briefing Tuesday, disputed the account, which contradicted their long-standing assertions that Zimmerman had attacked their son without provocation.
The problem is that Martin's parents have no idea what happened; this appears to be a narrative they have invented solely from their knowledge of Trayvon Martin's character. And they're his parents.
The problem we have in this case is an information asymmetry; only one person is alive to tell his side of the story. We feel a need to find some kind of balance; to attempt to provide some kind of version of the other side's story. But when we choose the most extreme, biased source to construct a purely fictional alternative narrative, we should at least hesitate and think about what's going on.
Kids don't always show the same person to their parents that they do to others. That the parents' narrative paint him as a harmless saint should be unsurprising but also unconvincing. Maybe he was a great, harmless guy. Maybe he was the kind of guy who would start a fight with a racist who was following him around. I have no idea, and I don't really think any of you do either (although you may think you do).
I do not have an opinion on who started it--on whether Zimmerman is guilty of murder. This doesn't mean I think they're 50/50 responsible. I'm refusing to apportion blame at all, not splitting it. For people who have formed an opinion, I would like them to think about what sort of evidence it would take to change their mind. What if an eyewitness came forward verifying Zimmerman's version of events; would that change your mind? (The police claim they have one.) What if the eyewitness was black? What if there was video?
I honestly think there are some people who would say something like "well, sure, if video happened, but no such video could possibly turn up, because I know Zimmerman is guilty". If those people are personal friends or family of Trayvon Martin, then I'm sympathetic. But for everybody else who might feel that way, I'm a bit worried that there's a rush to judgement here based on feelings, not facts. We really don't know Trayvon Martin, and don't know what he might or might not have done.
Yes, racism is terrible, and it plays a major role in the chain of events that leads to someone like Martin being dead, whereas someone like me, a white 45-year old, would never experience that chain of events in the first place. But we can point fingers beyond racism. Two things I'm really sure of is that Martin shouldn't be dead and that information asymmetry when one party to an altercation is dead or in a coma seriously hinders our ability to uncover the truth. The solution to both of these problems is to discourage things that leave parties to an altercation dead: to attack handgun ownership and get rid of terrible "stand your ground" laws.
Like I said, I don't know Trayvon Martin. It's hard (and unfair) to try to imagine what he was capable of, but I feel obligated to because of the rush to judgement against Zimmerman. So: if I picture him as Wallace from The Wire? Then I can't imagine Zimmerman as anything but a murderer. But sticking to "The Wire" really limits the possibility space. How about if I imagine him as my friend Jay?
Jay is a skinny guy. I can't imagine think you'd think he was scary if you met him. In the last three years Jay's gotten into three fights that I know of. One time he hit a guy for spitting on the sidewalk near him as he walked past. Can I imagine Jay getting in a fight with some guy who was stalking him in a suspicious manner? Easily. Can I imagine Jay getting shot by that guy after provoking the fight? Well, now I can, sadly.
I'm not trying to put Trayvon Martin down by implying he might be like my friend Jay. I'm just saying nothing on the table makes that scenario impossible, or even necessarily improbable.
I'm certainly not trying to say Martin was an impetuous, volatile youth. I have no idea whether he was or wasn't one. But my point is I'm not sure why both options aren't the table. And I don't say this is a possibility for his character because he was a 17-year old black kid. I say this is a possibility for his character because Jay is a white millionaire in his 40s.
When viewing a conversation, can't easily view further back in history (you used to be able to click on a tweet back in the history and see further back; now that just shows 'details' and you have to click on that, opening a new tab or losing current state, and view history there).
When looking at people retweeting/favoriting you on the @Connect tab, you can't click through to see the actual tweet they're retweeting/favoriting (for example to check the counts on it). You have to dig it up in your timeline.
When looking at the details on a tweet and seeing the retweet/favorites, you can't tell who retweeted and who favorited (this is sometimes interesting when looking at other people's tweets)
The actions on each tweet which only appear when you hover over it can appear over the user's name. But the user's name is clickable to open a window about the user. So you can try to click the user's name and accidentally click 'reply'.
Promoted tweets in the timeline are still dismissible, but the Dismiss choice only appears when you hover over the tweet, so it takes longer to dismiss (hover to locate the Dismiss choice, then click it).
When you block someone, the blocked tweets stay visible; the block doesn't take effect until you refresh the page, which twitter avoids doing most of the time using AJAX. You can switch back and forth multiple times between Home and @Connect and the tweets remain. (This might have been true before, but it was jarring to me in a way that suggests it was a new experience for me. But I'm not 100% sure.)
I've been using twitter actively for a couple months now, and goddamn is it busted.
If you block someone, and someone else retweets them, you still see their tweet.
Your timeline doesn't show other people's replies to other people who you're not following. This is sort of understandable, but broken in many ways:
No way to say "show me all of this user's tweets no matter what" (you have to manually view their timeline), despite the fact people'll will obviously want this for some small number of really important people they follow
Because people say generally useful things in replies, and there's no way to say "show all this users tweets", sometimes they'll prefix a dot (".") at the beginning of the message to prevent the normal suppression so that some of their replies are publically visible. However, this doesn't work some of the time (I think it doesn't if it's a true reply (one that enables their threading), and does work if it's only a manual reply)
If someone I follow mentions me, it should show up in my main feed, not only in mentions. It doesn't show up in my feed if their tweet is a reply to somone I don't follow.
When somebody asks a public question, it would be nice to see all the replies to it. (Remember on moderated Usenet groups where the etiquette was to collect responses and post a follow-up summarizing them? Good times.) The conversation thing shows a line, not a tree, so I'm not sure what it does when there are multiple replies. But it also misses replies that aren't true replies. The solution is simple: be able to see the "mentions" tab for other people (note that you can just search for @whoever, which will give similar (same?) results), but why not just give me the tab?
Once you are following enough people, it doesn't make sense to add everyone who is even slightly interesting. What matters is how what they post will affect your feed (their signal-to-noise ratio, basically). So you go to their profile and look at their timeline, but that shows you *all* posts. Since replies to people not on your follow list won't show up, that may not at all resemble what you'd actually see (or it might, depending on how many replies they do and how their follow list matches yours). So you have to scan through, guestimating how many are replies to people you follow.
Nothing about the way tweets behave (like the above examples) is documented, and they're hard to discover since there's no way to check what's going on, to e.g. determine to whom your tweets are visible--how your stuff looks to other people.
I'm sure there's other stuff affecting me that I just don't know about yet, plus I'm sure there's stuff that's busted but that I don't use.
I encountered all of this stuff within a week or two of using twitter actively, although it's taken me longer to realize just what was going on in all cases.
Ugh. Just finished spending a couple hours cleaning up some malware that got on my machine this morning ("XP Security 2011"). Seemingly from something on the onion avclub site while running the most recent update of Firefox 3. Probably something on their ad network. If you run firefox 3 you might want to stay away from avclub until the next FF3 update.
welp, i've been feeling some odd pain in my left hand when I try to play guitar over the last week or so, so I've stopped playing guitar until that stops, so no more sketches.
In other words, works for modern player piano, which I'm sure is a well-explored realm of 20th-century composition already, and made far, far easier by modern technology where you don't have to cut holes in paper, just program in MIDI, and you don't actually even need one of the physical pianos (*I* don't have one), so maybe it's kind of lame to even try this. But hey.
#1 probably exceeds the limits of a real mechnical piano briefly with the fast stuff from 1:18 to 1:29 (I hadn't bothered to do any research on the plausible limitations when I wrote it) and 4:15-4:30 but most of the rest is plausible. (The crazy fast bit of #2 at 0:47 peaks at 12 notes per second on any given key, which appears to be right around the limits of feasibility for physical pianos, but only for high velocities/loud notes, so it might be tonally implausible. On the other hand, the shifting from 0:47 to 0:53 is actually moving from a chromatic sound to an all-white-key-sound, where I chose all-white-keys over some other major scale purely for the visual aesthetic purposes even though that doesn't actually, y'know, happen without a real piano doing this, which I don't have.)
I wrote these on Sunday but wasn't going to release them until I got a better piano sample set up, but then I decided I don't care, since these are just sketches. I'll probably explore this stuff further and make some more polished (but still weird and experimental pieces), and I'll do those with a better virtual piano (this one has 30MB of samples, but in fact I have one with 500MB), and probably writing my own authoring software, because programming this through Reaper's MIDI editor makes it way impossible to do a lot of velocity-based stuff I'd like to do, and maybe some interesting mixes where half of what's played is mathematically determined and half is authored (this is what the 1:41-2:10 of #1 is exploring, various automatic or semi-automatic "expansions" of the the same hand-authored theme).
My unintentional guitar collection has grown again -- I got a Stratocaster clone around a year ago that I probably never mentioned, and I just bought a baritone guitar (sort of like a 6-string bass).
So now I'm up to: 4 electric guitars, 3 electric basses, 2 acoustic guitars, and a mandolin. (Also 5 toy plastic guitars.)
#16: I had planned to put in a "real" melody by working out a little melodic snippet, recording it, and moving on to the next one. So first I cheated and created loops for most of the backing parts. But then when I was working on the melody I wasn't coming up with anything I liked, so I went back to fully improvised. But this time, I edited together a single solo out of 4 separate takes. (2 minutes, 3 MB, 5 "tracks") A couple of the edits produce obviously odd jumps, but there's probably a lot more edits than you realize (22, to be precise)
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