--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 02f
+title: On usability, a case study
+date: December 6, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: tech
+---
+
+Given nowadays' popularity of the web, usability is, I suppose, still something
+of a hot topic in the field of human-computer interaction. More than half a
+decade since the first electronic computer, the concepts behind making our
+computing devices usable are still largely left to exploration. But what is
+"usable"? I will defer to my friend, [Merriam-Webster][merriam-webster]:
+
+> us·able
+> 1: capable of being used
+> 2: convenient and practicable for use
+
+So, is a hammer usable? Well, it is, in the sense that I can use it to drive
+nails into pieces of wood. Is then a guitar usable? Well, it generally is, in
+the sense that it allows me to make music; in particular, it might or might not
+be, depending on the guitar's neck and the length and width of my fingers. So,
+is the computer, a general-purpose device typically comprising a keyboard, a
+mouse and a monitor as input/output tools, usable? It's hard to say, this
+depends on what I want to do with it, on the operating system and the user
+interface it implements and so on; if I intend to play a game, maybe I'm better
+off using a gamepad or some other type of specialized controller[^1].
+
+Getting back to the World Wide Web, in the last few decades companies such as
+Google have been pushing to move at least a part of their applications on the
+web. JavaScript has become the most widely used programming language on the web
+for exactly this purpose: the web had an untapped potential for improved
+interaction from the very beginning, as semantic content can be easily
+implemented on top of it using pages, hyperlinks and "rich text" elements.
+JavaScript merely allows this content to be modified dynamically, allowing, for
+example, the browser to change a section of a page when the user presses a
+button, as opposed to reloading the entire page. Along with the great potential
+for developing web applications, this has also opened a few more perverse
+avenues for developers; for the sake of sticking to the subject, I won't go
+into any details regarding this aspect.
+
+I wish to present a comparative case study for the purpose of illustrating the
+usability of web applications. I will dive into the bowels of one of the web's
+most widely used applications, Gmail, comparing it with Mutt. I've been using
+both of them extensively for at least one year now, so I am quite able to
+distinguish between the pros and cons of both.
+
+Firstly, I should mention that Gmail comes with many features in comparison to
+Mutt. For example Mutt doesn't have filters and it doesn't offer any interface
+for editing mail by itself; it doesn't have any support for built-in chat, nor
+does it allow configuration for multiple accounts, since it doesn't really have
+a well-defined concept of "accounts". Fortunately, that functionality can be
+integrated using many third-party applications, which is why I will focus on
+the basics, i.e. reading mail and making sense of the great e-mail organization
+mess of which we are all aware.
+
+One major advantage that Gmail has over all the other clients is that it
+replaces folders with labels. This is compatible with the IMAP folder view, but
+with the addition that you can have a single mail residing in multiple folders
+(or under multiple labels, to use Gmail terminology) at the same time. This is
+indeed very useful, mostly because you can keep an e-mail in the inbox *and* in
+another folder simultaneously. However, Gmail's biggest and greatest advantage
+is the search function, allowing anyone to find e-mails almost
+instantaneously[^2].
+
+Mutt on the other hand was created back in the 1990s, when folders weren't very
+popular, so the focus of the main window is on the current folder and only
+it[^3]. Mutt's main disadvantage is the steep learning curve: you have to sit a
+few hours to [configure][mutt] it before obtaining a usable interface. After
+you waste that time, however, the interface will be blazingly fast, albeit
+keyboard-driven instead of mouse driven. This feature is so useful that it was
+borrowed by Gmail's keyboard shortcut interface, whose documentation, in case
+you're not aware, can be accessed using the question mark (`?`) key.
+
+Regarding composing and answering to mails, I mentioned earlier that Mutt
+doesn't have a built-in editor. Well, no, but it simply opens your system's
+default text editor whenever you want to edit an e-mail. This hard separation
+is, I believe, Mutt's greatest strength and Gmail's greatest weakness. Did you
+ever open a draft in Gmail's big, shiny "composer", started writing, focusing
+some other window, then re-focusing the "composer" window, pressing `enter` and
+finding out that your draft was just sent? Well, that, dear reader, is the very
+opposite of usability: an e-mail client should never, ever, **ever** send your
+e-mail when you press `enter`, because that's one of the largest keys on your
+keyboard and one of the most commonly used. Not to mention that when I write
+e-mails, I want to write e-mails in that precise context, without any useless
+clutter.
+
+Mutt's greatest disadvantage is that it sucks. However, as its author
+[mentions][mutt2], "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less".
+
+So, is Gmail usable? Mostly. Is Mutt usable? Not much more than the previously
+mentioned client, but it does the same essential stuff at a much lower price.
+At the end of the day we use whatever we feel comfortable with, regardless of
+their usability. Or "usability".
+
+[^1]: Although I personally never enjoyed using controllers to play games. The
+mouse and the keyboard are the perfect interface for, say, a first person
+shooter.
+
+[^2]: Note that this is also partly a feature of e-mail being text-driven,
+rather than HTML-driven or whatever nonsense "modern" "enterprise" e-mail tries
+to push nowadays. HTML isn't usable in e-mail, because not everyone can or
+wants to look at HTML, and not everyone wants cross-site scripting embedded as
+a "feature" in e-mails. Also note that this is not a matter of preference,
+despite how much your mileage may vary.
+
+[^3]: Although certain forks come with support for sidebars.
+
+[merriam-webster]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/usability
+[mutt]: /posts/y00/00a-conversation-view-in-mutt.html
+[mutt2]: http://www.mutt.org/
--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 030
+title: Interstellar, or why deus ex machinae in science fiction are a bad idea
+date: December 20, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: video
+---
+
+I'd like to start this by stating that this isn't about how Interstellar is a
+good or a bad movie; it's a pretty good movie and it also has its bad parts,
+obviously, but all that doesn't matter. What matters is stripping it down naked
+in front of everyone and whipping it until we get down to its core, assuming
+that it is more than form without substance. I know how these kinds of
+discourses, dialogues and debates are frowned upon more and more in various
+parts of the "civilized world" nowadays, but I don't see how that's gonna stop
+us sane people doing it.
+
+I went to see Interstellar more out of curiosity than anything else. Once the
+news about Kip Thorne and the [accurate simulation][sciencemag] of a black hole
+became public, and later, when people started discussing the movie's more or
+less sciencey stuff, I became interested, despite having to go to the cinema
+and sit through all the 3D "immersion" crap, because this fad hasn't gone away
+yet.
+
+The movie's action takes place in a not-so-far-away future, when the population
+growth and other important stuff such as, y'know, "global warming", forces the
+move from an industrial society to an agrarian one, where people are mostly
+farmers and all the military is gone from the face of the Earth. This isn't
+such a bad scenario, but it's a highly optimistic one: I for one would rather
+see a couple of big wars happening before this shift, reducing the population
+to only a few billion, making the poorly industrialized agrarian approach more
+or less realistic, but bleaker than it's represented in the movie; I know that
+this is below humanity, but you really don't see the worst in humanity until
+you see it. Hunger will make people kill each other and that's that.
+
+This scenario brings forth several other "issues of humanity", namely that the
+climate has changed to dust storms, probably inspired by Mars, and wheat crops
+are extinct, while corn crops are on the way to extinction. Probably most of
+the animals are dead too, since I don't remember seeing any in the movie. So
+our main character, Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey), is a farmer and an
+ex-NASA-pilot-engineer-whatever with a dead wife and two kids, one of whom
+becomes a brilliant scientist later in the movie, and is called Murph, played
+by three actors. As things go in American movies, out of nowhere our Coop is
+re-recruited by ex-NASA, which is now actual NASA, a secret organization
+attempting to launch a rocket through a wormhole that suddenly appeared
+somewhere in our Solar System, leading us to another galaxy with potentially
+habitable planets and, fuckety-fuck, a black hole that does nasty stuff with
+time and mind and matter.
+
+There are more or less relevant details regarding the movie's plot, more
+specifically the "Plan A" and "Plan B" which are bound to be forgotten by most
+people until the movie is over, due to what I suppose is pretty bad writing,
+but the more spoilery part is that Coop goes, wastes a few of humanity's
+decades, goes into the black hole, breaks relativity a few times, somehow
+manages to escape, meets his daughter who's now older than him and then goes
+off to find his, I didn't get it, was that chick played by Anne Hathaway his
+girlfriend? No she wasn't, but that's not really relevant.
+
+## Science meets bullshit
+
+One of the key aspects that the movie tries to emphasize, and that are part of
+Cooper's character, and that make up one of the scenes at the beginning, is the
+so-called love of, or for science: Murph tells her father that she has a ghost
+in her room, and at that point he tells her that that's not a ghost, and that
+the essence of science, and indeed, of truth, is to question everything and
+come to truth through critical thinking. The movie doesn't emphasize that
+enough in my opinion, but I liked the fact that it actually tried to do that
+and it shows that at least some of the writers are tired of the
+pseudo-scientific bullshit going on in the previously mentioned "civilized"
+world.
+
+This issue is also brought up in another one of the first scenes, when
+apparently we are presented with what seems to be a good dose of revisionism
+taught in American schools. This is nice and all, but it falls into the
+classical Hollywoodian problem of presenting an issue of the US as a global
+one; I like to think that the rest of the world, or at least a big part of it,
+likes to value truth versus the propagandistic "documentaries" about the Moon
+landings being a hoax and other absurd crap, as we've had our share of bad
+history with falsifying knowledge, what with the communism and all.
+
+Other than that, the movie aims to give pretty accurate scientific facts, at
+least up to some point. There's no sound in space, for one; the facts about the
+black hole and relativity are mostly true, although I don't get how people
+could survive in an environment so near to a black hole, where the time
+dilation factor is 1 hour to 23 years, given that the gravitational pull would
+be immense; heck, I don't get how a planet can exist that close to a black
+hole, but I guess we'll leave that to speculation. Also, later on some of the
+scientists there keep saying some stuff about how "gravity can go back in time"
+or something of that likes, which is obviously false, given that the only way
+of achieving this would be managing to break the energy-mass equivalence
+somehow.
+
+Of course, we'll never know how Cooper survived the pull into the black hole or
+how he got back, or how he actually managed to transmit information into the
+past, but that's the "fiction" part of science fiction; it's okay, the writers
+went full "2001" there and we're all okay with that. Still, I think that if an
+advanced humanity living outside of time were able to conceive such a paradox,
+I think that this kind of occurence would have been more common in nature,
+which makes the feasibility of such a phenomenon extremely improbable. But then
+again, so are dinosaurs in the center of the Earth.
+
+The thing that bothered me the most however is why the government would spend
+so much money *in secret* to attempt such a risky mission, when I'm sure there
+would be better solutions available. Those that have read Dune are probably
+familiar with the actual *science* of ecology, versus the nasty, political,
+almost religious ecologism occuring nowadays: since we assume that humans have
+a hand in "global warming", then it's conceivable that humans could devise
+controlled climate modifications, so that the ecosystem would be properly
+regulated. This is in my opinion a much more efficient course of action, given
+that we already have the means to modify weather. But meh, I suppose sending
+people in space is cooler, and it is indeed a good idea, but only after we've
+learned how terraforming is done, which doesn't happen in Interstellar.
+
+Oh, and I want a robot like TARS. Really, that's some nice AI, despite that
+small chance of them wanting to kill all humans.
+
+## Deus ex machinae in science fiction are a bad idea
+
+Despite the whole black hole thing being a perfectly good element in the world
+of science fiction, I think it's a pretty bad plot device, especially given the
+science fiction-ness of the movie, moreso that it's its central element: at
+some point in the future, humans become a super advanced race being able to
+spawn black holes that let people send bits of information to the past, which
+constitutes the thing that saves humanity in Interstellar. Don't get me wrong,
+it's pretty damn nice, except I don't think it is.
+
+First of all, sending information to the past gives rise to this mind-bending
+paradox which is hardly explainable by any science fiction author: humanity is
+on the verge of extinction, which leads some people to the desperate act of
+going into a hardly achievable quest which eventually leads them to a black
+hole where they're able to modify the past in order to lead them there in the
+first place, thus creating a time travel loop; well, we don't really know who
+created the time travel loop, the dying humans or the super advanced humans who
+were beyond time, because we assume that humans survived anyway. So yes, this
+breaks any temporal logic that we know, but on the basis of what? "Quantum"?
+Come on.
+
+Given this time travel weirdness, I have to say that the black hole is no more
+and no less than a deus ex machina. No, it's not that humans saved themselves:
+the god from the machine saved humanity, which from a writer's point of view is
+nothing more than cheap storytelling, more suited to fantasy settings like The
+Longest Journey universe, where the problem is actually solved a lot more
+gracefully. Yes, I am aware that these elements appeal very well to the average
+viewer, but I'm really, really curious what mister Nolan has to say about it.
+
+Finally, the events in the movie's conclusion confirm the western writers'
+obsession with happy endings, whereas in my book Cooper could have just as well
+died there without making the story any less richer; meaning that his survival
+didn't make the story any more richer, just packed with more irrelevant
+details.
+
+## Hollywood and The Problem™ redux
+
+Looking back at the whole thing and at the [thing before it][into-darkness], it
+looks like Hollywood has the same fundamental problem as the "music industry",
+quite probably as the "book industry", the "game industry" and all other
+industrialized forms of art, namely that it has expectations, and more
+specifically that it has the wrong ones and the wrong kinds.
+
+Interstellar is a mash-up of good scenery where predictable clichés happen: the
+world is in danger and needs to be saved by its saviour, who goes far and
+beyond to ensure the survival of ever-lasting humanity, manages to outsmart all
+the bad guys and doesn't stop caring for the otherwise worthless characters,
+that is, if they don't die. It's nice, it makes a small attempt to keep the
+spirit of science alive and another small attempt to criticize the lack of
+initiative of sheep and the abuse of stupid people, but they're only small
+attempts that the sheep will overlook anyway.
+
+It's not that the movie is bad; also, it's not that it has no substance. Yes,
+it does have some deeper stuff, but that stuff is so blandly put together that
+it makes you wonder if the Hollywood guys are even capable of writing a good
+drama anymore. I'm looking back at the other dull movies and the few
+outstanding exceptions, and boy, do I miss movies such as Contact... which
+Interstellar does not manage to reach, by far.
+
+[sciencemag]: http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2014/11/physicist-who-inspired-interstellar-spills-backstory-and-scene-makes-him
+[into-darkness]: /posts/y00/011-star-trek-into-darkness.html
projects / thetarpit.git / commitdiff