CHAPTER 11
"The Gun on the Mantelpiece"
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Code looks so much better in its natural habitat, color-coded and onscreen. Here are the three versions of the Shakespearian Insult Engine in this much happier environment, from least to most sophisticated. I hope soon to have them runnable using a new offshoot of Python called "PyScript", which (like JavaScript) can run in a web browser—a big deal in the coding world. PyScript, incidentally, is the project Nicholas Tollervey now works on at Anaconda. A pleasing symmetry.
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Finally, in line 38 we call the function, causing it to run: Download the Mu editor (my suggestion because it's free and so immediate and easy to use, but there are plenty of alternatives) and run the Insult Engine at your leisure. If you're feeling adventurous, substitute the six-word lists of adjectives and nouns above with the full 40-word lists given below. Props to the British Library for maintaining these.
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no language is an island and there are things to worry about here, too: Not that the outside world is giving us a free pass. Shortly before conference, there was a media story about an abrupt leap in demand for university computer science (CS) courses, at the same time the industry was sucking up actual and would-be teachers. In reaction to the increased demand, colleges would start offering CS places only to those accepted them in advance of arrival, a move some academics considered likely to disadvantage already underrepresented groups—who are less likely to have taken CS in high school. See The New York Times, "The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class."
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"I am extremely proud to work at Facebook": I'll watch a similar display when an "evangelist" from Microsoft tells the conference, "People always ask, 'Why is Microsoft here at the Python conference?' the answer is because we love developers. We love you. Your code will change the world. Because of your code, some people around the world get to eat. Because of your code, we know what black holes look like..." The assertion, "You're changing the world," is made half a dozen-plus times in five minutes, always with breathless approval. And it's true, many people in this room do wonderful things with code. Others compromise elections by providing platforms for misinformation, refine facial recognition technology for use by totalitarians, write bias-reinforcing software that lends special interests a cloak of bogus objectivity—to the point where software is both miraculous enabler and existential threat. But there is no mention of any threat here, in what amounts to a giant collective self-delusion. I re-enter the conference hall feeling bereft, leaf through the recruitment leaflets in my swag bag and find the parade of boasts about "Making the world a better place," most of them specious at best. Even at the most trivial level I find myself wondering, "Have none of these people seen Silicon Valley?"
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the controversial Python Enhancement Proposal (or PEP) admitting the Walrus Operator into the language: It may be hard for non-programmers to understand how something so small could cause so much trouble. It is for me, too. As explained earlier, "operator" is the term for a symbol that performs an operation: the plus sign (+) and minus sign (-) are operators, as is the asterisk used to denote multiplication. In computing the "equals" symbol is known as the "assignment operator" because we use it to assign values to variables, as in x = 7, while "is equal to/the same as" is denoted by two standard equals signs together (==). The "Walrus Operator" gets its colloquial moniker not, per Lewis Carroll, from a penchant for oysters, but from its appearance (:=). Technically known as the "assignment expression," its function is a little obscure and I'm not sure I would have voted for its adoption. I do trust that Guido knows better than me, though—and that this is not a matter of life and death—unlike a vociferous minority of Pythonistas. More on the Walrus Operator controversy here.
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anything new will change your brain: "The Knowledge" is a 150-year-old process by which would-be London cabbies memorizes the name and location of every street within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross in the center of the city—sadly now a little compromised by satnav. More recently researchers writing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour claim to have found a "Pokemon region" of the brain in adults who played with Pokemon cards as children ("A Pokémon-sized window into the human brain," 6 May, 2019.) Something lovely about this.
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seeing images of my own brain: with software Janet's colleague Norman Pietek pointed me to—MeshLab, written in C++ and JavaScript, it turns out.
our brains, minds, selves can only be understood with reference to the gut, nervous system, internet, everything: for more on this idea see Dan Siegel, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human; or "Scientists Say Your 'Mind' Isn't Confined to Your Brain, or Even Your Body" by Olivia Goldhill, in one of my favorite science journals, Quartz. Goldhill quotes Siegel saying: "I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea. You can't limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it's one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process. Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind." Her piece is very worth reading for anyone interested in understanding themselves and the people they know. Goldhill ends on this note:
Siegel says he wrote his book now because he sees so much misery in society, and he believes this is partly shaped by how we perceive our own minds. He talks of doing research in Namibia, where people he spoke to attributed their happiness to a sense of belonging. When Siegel was asked in return whether he belonged in America, his answer was less upbeat: "I thought how isolated we all are and how disconnected we feel," he says. "In our modern society we have this belief that mind is brain activity and this means the self, which comes from the mind, is separate and we don't really belong. But we're all part of each others' lives. The mind is not just brain activity. When we realize it's this relational process, there's this huge shift in this sense of belonging."
I'm starting to realize there's a word that fits this sense of unbelonging, this denial of our relational essence, well: abstraction.