An article about why virtual worlds died reminded me of a pet theory, by virtue of not mentioning it as one of the possibilities. I call it the BOAC Fallacy, which stands for "... but on a computer!"

Yes, complete with the ellipses and italics. There's a recurring pattern I've seen in technology prognostication best shown by example.

I surrender. Many years ago, I set myself a simple task. I would create a blog layout for myself, and it would have some sort of color in it. It would not simply be a white background. After all, the best way to learn something is to force yourself to do it, right? Unfortunately, I failed. The resulting design could be charitably described as "quirky" and accurately described as "

Human words are a great deal fuzzier than the concepts they hope to cover. For instance, consider the word "love"; it means anything from stalker-level obsession to a moderate preferance ("I love pizza!"). In order to talk about anything precisely it is often necessary to specify what a given word refers to in some specific context. Every writer has the right to choose what definitions they are using in a particular bit of text.

(A not-quite twitterable bug report for @Netflixhelps:) Setting family controls on the XBox 360 (system-level preference) to G correctly causes unrated content or content rated higher than G to display the locked-out icon. In the previous version, navigating to one of them and pressing A would prompt for the family password, then unlock all the covers. You'd have to enter the family code again to watch. In this version, if you navigate to a locked folder and press A, you get the family code entry, but upon successful entry you immediately begin watching the selected video.

When I was younger, I thought leadership was oversold, and what really mattered were the people on the team. I have recanted this belief. I still don't entirely understand why leadership is so important, but the experience I've collected over the years is pretty clear on the matter. My best guesses are that it is some combination of the following: It is true that the performance of a team is bounded on top by both the quality of the team and the quality of the leadership, but people tend to badly underestimate how much quality and talent there is in the world.

It's time for gas stations to drop that nine tenths of a cent off their signs.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! (A Beginner's Guide) by Miran Lipovača, published by No Starch Press (2011). No Starch was kind enough to send me an advance copy for review.

Haskell books for "real programmers" are still thin on the ground, being limited at the moment to Real World Haskell (2008) and possibly Programming in Haskell (2007). As its introduction states, this book is aimed at existing programmers who are currently fluent in something like Java, C++, or Python, and would like to learn Haskell.

I put my take on the traditional discussion of why you should consider learning Haskell in another blog post, so we can get on with the review here.

The hardest thing about learning Haskell with no previous functional experience is bootstrapping the strong foundation that you've long since taken for granted in your imperative language. If you don't have this strong grasp of the fundamentals, then every line of code is an invitation to get stuck on some subtle issue, and you'll never have the fluency that great work requires until you have that foundation.

This book is the best way I know to obtain the Haskell foundation you need for fluency.

jerf.org is a website where I partition off the part of my life that makes for boring real-life conversation. In real life, you can go a very long time without hearing me ramble about politics or the other things I go on about on this website. Going on about those things is the entire purpose of this website, whereas my music, TV, work life, and family life are saved for real life.

No Starch Press asked me to write a review of the new Haskell book, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!. I started to write a section about myself and my view of Haskell for context, and realized that it really needed to be its own post as it grew to a length where it was self-indulgent to make it part of the review. But it fits as its own post nicely.

I have always had a romantic attraction to the "could have been"s, the aesthetics that die early or fail to become popular but feel like in an alternate universe just next door they could have been wildly successful. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has always struck me like this; even as the Classical music period gave way into the Romantic period and harmonies get ever wilder until they run entirely off the rails in the twentieth century, it always felt to me like the Ninth could have been the foundation of a different aesthetic than the one we actually got. (A matter of opinion, of course.) It's a fully-formed masterpiece from the could-have-been.

I like to watch the "How the Movie Was Made" documentaries for movies from the Star Wars era up to the late ninties, because I love to see all the dead special effects techniques; the wonderful models, the animatronics, all the clever tricks they play, all interesting in exactly the same way that watching the documentaries for a 2010 movie are very uninteresting, seeing as how they all boil down to "And then we used a computer". I wonder what movies we'd be seeing if somehow computers were impractical for special effects and these techniques continued to be refined and honed.

And there's a smattering of other such things I enjoy. In the movie domain, many of them end up becoming what we call "cult classics", movies that may be awesome or may be fundamentally terrible but are above all else different. Buckaroo Bonzai, the David Lynch version of Dune, and, as telegraphed by my title, Tron.