Last update: 7/11/01; 7:23:15 PM.
Does honesty count for anything? I don't know what I'm doing yet . . .
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
Just More Follow-up
We have to recognize the difficulty of the jobs of both the press and the police, but while it is good that pressure is brought to bear on what could be a string of cases (based on a number of accounts that draw similarities among a number of assaults), it is apparent that public opinion is pushing the press to look for answers that the police can't give them.
While we understand that media interviews can sometimes come off more like interrogations, it is evident from DC Police Chief Ramsey's interviews that reporters so eagerly pressed him that he didn't have an opportunity to answer fully those questions that he was asked. On the issue of probable cause, it is evident that it was not necessary to seek cause once Condit offerred consent. Just as Ramsey indicated that this makes no inference about Condit's guilt in a crime that hasn't even been established, we can likewise infer that it says nothing about whether there was a crime or whether he might be guilty of it -- it just says very little, so to title the article Condit's home searched for signs of foul play is more than a little misleading. Of course, nobody who wants to get a scoop would find much appeal in publishing an article entitled Police seek materials of evidentiary nature.
Of course, we may be overlooking the fact that this title would be a more honest description of what happened. Judging from some of the mechanical errors in the compositions, I think we can see that the writers are too pressed to check their material without even considering whether they verify their sources. These aren't shots at the media, it's just an honest assessment of what we have come to know already: News is a commercial business under a crunch to get the product to market. I'm just some guy with a weblog, and even I would be embarrassed by some of the writing in these articles. Still, I think I could put accurate titles on the accounts that would add some interesting irony, like At Condit's Condo, Police show up for work.
On the issue of whether the police were looking for signs of foul play or signs of a struggle, it is certain that that wasn't all they sought. The best title perhaps would be Police Seek Clues to Levy's disappearance in Condit's DC residence. Yeah, I know -- a little long -- we wouldn't want to go to a smaller typesize or lose the attention of our audience, would we? Police seek lie detector test of Condit - July 11, 2001 [News from CNN.com] 7:16:40 PM
I think this article Entertainment: | FILM | Final Fantasy stirs star nightmares could take on another spin, outside of the Star Nightmares (aka actors loss of revenue, but giving credit to the notion that a separate photo-real representation of oneself on the screen has to be a little mind-bending): The title of that spin would be What we see every day defines the norm. There is an excellent summary of the movie Final Fantasy and significant praise for its technology as well as criticism for its plotline. But the core point seems to be that as long as Hollywood can generate eternally youthful actors by computer, human actors will obsolesce.
Far from any theme in this movie, an automated actor/anchor scare does resemble the plotline of a Michael Crichton story, a film which he also directed, called Looker.
I guess it shouldn't be unusual for us to see Crichton predicting the future in a more-than-20-year-old movie. He has tied impending future and remote past together in both Jurassic Park and Timeline.
While Looker has elements of Romance and Adventure, its actual storyline is a combination of serious satire and light-hearted spoof. Much of the satire fades with age because it has all the appearances of a period piece, but it shouldn't because it reaches out to touch the present topic, Actors replaced by computer-generated animation. Albert Finney plays a somewhat stumbling, but curious and supposedly observant plastic surgeon who uncovers a devious plot when beautiful women parade through his office in succession, complaining that they are not perfect enough. When they are picked off one by one, Finney's character, Dr. Larry Roberts adopts a protective poise toward Cindy, a character played by Susan Dey when it is spelled out for the audience that she is next on the list. They are then involved in a game of cat and mouse with an evil Jimmy Coburn who plays a wealthy techno-industrialist who dispenses with expensive actors in a preface to his attempt to manipulate both the public and his target presidential candidate whom he might be able to control and eventually even replace with this elaborate three-dimensional imagining technology. The tagline is if looks could kill, but the "looker technology" is a kicker to the imaging technology that hypnotizes television viewers, converting them into bovine, docile and helpless consumers. It also serves as a convenient weapon that complicates the chase game between Cindy, Dr. Larry and Coburn's character, John Reston.
We've been here before, but what else is new? Am I talking about Looker or Final Fantasy? No.
I find this nightmare fascinating in that, at least in the United States, we now have a society that suffers from all sorts of unreasonable preoccupations in self-image that range from superficial dress issues through body-image and into public relations concerns. John Reston's mesmerizing television does seem to have consumed us with petty concerns just for the sake of selling its wares.
Where women once wanted to buy something pretty to wear, a generation of girls have been kept captive by the electronic babysitter so that as phrenetic young women, the La Vittria Style by Lambagio Adusco is to die for (Don't get excited, I invented the name on the basis of market surveys). Where men once seemed to be the last to be preoccupied with body-image, they are now afraid to go outside in a T-shirt unless they have six-pack abs, pumped lats and bulging pecs to go under it, and just the right brand of jogging shorts and cross-training shoes. Fad diets are raking in the revenues like never before as the previously svelte now seek to be lean and buff. The PR lines sell all the accompanying delusion, too: According to marketing propaganda, women now make their own money and demand more to project a strong image rather than appearing increasingly entrenched in commercial superficiality. Men have become health-conscious and are regulating their cholesterol (fat intake, complex carbs, proteins -- or whatever the trend is this week) rather than becoming maniacally obsessed with their physiques.
We could think of this as another Darwinistic principle: As the easily-manipulated drop one right after another from suicide over delusions of inferiority and anorexia, those who resist the appeal of demon media projections will survive and procreate. I kid a bit in this article, but I do worry that if we idealize humans and then expect to imitate that false image -- what are we going to do when we try to emulate some pristine digital holographic projection? If we would like to suggest that we have evolved, I'd like to point out that evolution generally occurs through the mechanism at the beginning of this paragraph.
Well, I managed to turn another good-humored poke at dangerous consequence as interpreted by the press into a long rant, so excuse me while I quit before I'm no further behind. After all, what we see every day defines the norm.
Entertainment: | FILM | Final Fantasy stirs star nightmares. 11:33 ET - BBC [NewsBlip.com] 4:38:16 PMMore on a theme: Police search Condit's home for 'signs of foul play' - July 11, 2001
Adding to the Chandra Levy Story: I wonder about Joyce Chiang -- and are there others?
[News from CNN.com] 2:17:17 PMBook review: "Effective STL". This review by an author on the Kuro5hin feed who only identifies himself as MSBob covers Scott Meyers' third book in his "Effective C++ Programming" series: "Effective STL". MSBob notes [that Scott Meyers is] the author of some of the most influential books in the C++ community: "Effective C++" and "More Effective C++".
Where I think Bob hit the nail on the head was in his "Summary."
If you are a C++ programmer you must have this book. As it's unlikely that you already know all the items this book covers, even long toothed C++ gurus will have much to gain from this book. If you only just embarked on the STL adventure you will find "Effective STL" a goldmine of useful information about the library. If you already own "Effective C++" and/or "More Effective C++" I doubt I need to convince you that you should have the third one too. It is in every bit as good as the first two. Undisputable five stars out of five.
You not only have to agree with the rating, but I think (IMHO) the whole commentary that I cite applies pretty much to the other two books as well -- they are all must-reads and should probably hang around as references even after you've reached "guru status" (which I haven't).
I have a question, though: I know better than to just ask for an answer, because that apparently breaks some study protocols (RTFM) that dictate that you should have lived your life exactly like everyone else who ever learned C++. My question is what I should read to find out whether the bitset template is part of the STL. It would appear that it was in "The Standard," but while I've bought a good number of books, I feel that I should finish those first before learning to recite the ARM or buy the latest copy of the standard. Sure, there are (hypertext) web versions, but I could search those and find even contradictory information after which I could return to the lists and be flamed again.
Even MSBob had some coverage questions, but I am not so daring: It is just puzzling to me (at the intermediate level, where most people would classify Meyers' effectiveness collection) why Scott chose to give passing mention to bitset in the other books, but chose not to discuss it in the STL book. I'm sure that there is good reason for this, and that I probably "should have read something" first, but I just want to know which of the many possible references it was -- next on my list is C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup's The Design and Evolution of C++, Addison-Wesley, 1994 (ISBN 0-201-54330-3). Being a Software Developer for 20 years, and having an in-depth knowledge of compiler design, I'm sure this process history [my emphasis: EC] will provide valuable enlightenment as to how features of the language evolved as they did. I may try to search Jason Merrill's December, 1996 "Standard" if I get a clue as to what I'm seeking, but for now I'll just leave it as a curiosity and hope someone will tell me in a relatively nice way what a fool such as myself should have read before bothering people whose lives are infinitely more valuable than mine. What led me to wonder about bitset is that there seem to be so many implementations of it with so little resemblance to the descriptions that it is given in textbooks.
I'm just a little bit surprised that Bob got his review out so soon -- Amazon had an "advanced notice" order (that I found jumping from Scott Meyers' Mailing List, but I didn't seize the Amazon link when I first saw it. But my copy came quickly when I did order a few days later. Unfortunately, I'm still pouring over More Effective C++ because I had problems getting Effective C++ in the first place because the first edition was out of print and the second edition hadn't been distributed yet.
My first thought as I opened the box was that I could 'blog a review of it -- considering it important -- but I'm just as happy that MSBob has done it for me. The issue near and dear to me about templates and the template library is reuse: I'm glad to see that we're getting a little closer to using prefabricated components [My emph. EC]. While using templates isn't really object-oriented, especially standard ones, in the sense that each solution isn't a customized modelling of the solution set at the low-level, a good set of standard containers, iterators and algorithms were chosen to support higher-level constructs -- where the OO action really should be taking place. The existence of a template library doesn't preclude you from creating your customized solutions, as Scott Meyers points out, "[the STL] bears looking-into" before you attempt to achieve an efficiency (often with an overly-idealized [read: "under-planned"] requirement specification) that is already there in the library.
Credit to [kuro5hin.org] 12:42:48 PM
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
© Copyright 2001 Ernie Cordell, ernie.cordell@computer.org.
