The USS Quad Damage

No matter how hard I try, I can never get a good answer to what makes a person left leaning or right leaning, Hell, I hardly even understand what left and right leaning means. I think at least a part of the problem is that the differences are probably moral or ethical, and I think that decisions based on morality and ethics affect our lives the least. An example:

In a hospital emergency room, five critically ill patients desperately need organ transplants. A healthy man walks in. Should the doctors remove his organs to save the sick five? Most people will respond in milliseconds with a resounding “No way”. Now imagine an out-of-control train about to run down five workers standing on the track. There’s a fork ahead, and throwing a switch could divert the train to another line on which there is only one worker. It’s the same question – should we sacrifice the one to spare the other five? – yet most of us would say “yes” just as quickly. How do we make these lightning moral judgements?

This is the original source, but I read it from a Kuro5hin article. Anyhoo, the original article uses it as a launching pad to talk about right and wrong. I don’t think the situation itself is meant to mean anything other than “two similar situations can sometimes yield different, yet consistent, moral viewpoints. Now let’s talk about science”. I’m willing to accept the quote to discuss the science, but in any case, the Kuro5hin article takes issue with the statement and starts arguing about how the voting process can be improved, and how libertarians can see the “flaw” in the quote above.

I saw a different flaw: The situation is ridiculous. That’s often the deal with moral issues. I’ve yet to see a clear-cut moral issue that makes any sense, realistically, and I can’t remember the last time I was in a moral or ethical dilemna.

In the first situation, we’re asked to choose between one healthy man and five sick ones. I ask, how did the five sick get into this situation? Does one need a liver transplant? Is it due to excessive drinking? Can all operations be done with no risk? Even in the extremely unlikely circumstance that all five of them have some genetic condition (hence getting into the situation through no fault of their own) does it really make sense to save someone whose offspring may also have similar troubles?

The far more likely scenarios of bad hygiene, viruses, or bad life decisions would mean that the real decisions lie much further back, before these 5 people were in critical condition.

The train scenario is even more of a no-brainer. Why on earth are there people working on tracks when trains are on these tracks? Why can’t they get out of the way on time? Why can’t the train stop on time? The decision to make is damage control, whether to kill one or five people. The error was made long before.

To illustrate the point, let’s replace the train driver with a drunk driver. Now, you’re a drunk driver who’s speeding down a road, and a bunch of “unruly teenagers” on the sides of the road who think they can race across the road. There are 5 teens on one side and 1 on the other. If you swerve you can definitely hit the one teen, or not swerve and definitely hit the other 4. What do you do?

The point I’m trying to make is: About the time a moral decision needs to be made, someone has made a bad technical decision at some point. It’s usually damage control, and either option is terrible. I propose that people who are left leaning or right leaning live their lives in this “mode”, not really being forward thinking… or forward… leaning.

So I propose a new political leaning: Forward!

In my last post on the topic, I’d barely driven a manual. It’s been a couple of months since then, and I’ve been driving a manual for a few weeks now (I didn’t get the car until the beginning of march, and due to dodgy garage doors I’ve only driven it for a couple of weeks). I’m not a pro by any stretch, but I’ve approached what I’ll call “stage 3” manual driving. To explain, let’s go through the stages.

Stage 1

I was nearing the end of this stage when I wrote my first article. You know the fundamentals, and everything is still strange and new. You dread driving the car for fear you’ll crash or do something else stupid.

Stage 2

You’ve kind of “got it”, the clutch feels more natural, and you can mostly drive with confidence that you won’t do any damage to you or anyone around. However, you still can’t get into second without making the car bounce a little, and for some reason driving slow is a tough ask. It also takes ages to get off at the lights. However, due to the extra confidence you always want to drive to hone those skills, but there just aren’t enough opportunities.

Stage 3

I’m splitting these into stages because the change happens almost overnight. It’s like a “level up” after a week of driving like a spaz. For some reason you’ve figured out how to hit the accelerator and take the clutch out at the same time, giving quick and smooth transitions. You’ve also figured out how to drive slowly (I mean 2kph or so). You’ve also re-gained the ability to do stupid shit like adjust the radio while driving. However, for some reason hill-starts are now harder, but you can pull them off (usually) without stalling. You’re also “over it”, and the car is now just a car. Not something to fear or something to play with. You just drive to drive. I’m only just at this stage, so the rest is speculative.

Stage 4

You’re as good at driving a manual as you were at driving an auto. It’s just a different car, no more, no less. For some reason all your high school friends end up in your car and you talk shit and drive around all night for no reason. You’ll probably stay like this for the rest of your life unless you drive heaps, in which case…

Stage 5

You’re driving really fast one night and the lights all blur into a stream. The next thing you know you’re in a house with an old man and he’s you! You sit there and have tea. Nobody knows what’s going on. You emerge perpetually wearing a racing outfit and helmet. Everyone calls you the “Stig”.

Yesterday I checked my Gmail account for some reason and found that someone had replied to an old post of Sunny’s entitled High On Christianity.

Among the gratuitous spelling errors, jumble of loosely related words and ideas I managed to get lost more than a few times attempting to read their post. I’m yet to with any sort of confidence actually work out even a single point presented. Is there anyone out there who can translate for me?

It’s really interesting when the most compelling thing about your platform is something you haven’t done for it. If you’ve been reading any Gizmodo recently regarding the ps3 the posts go something like this:

• Folding@Home will be released on the ps3!
• Folding@Home arriving soon on the ps3.
• Folding@Home arrives on the ps3.
• ps3 pwns Folding@Home stats.

The Playstation 3 accounts for more than half the current TFLOPS on F@H, and it’s so new, it’s only got 30,000 active CPUs (contrast with about 200,000 odd PCs/Macs). In fact, using F@H as a (very dodgy) yardstick we can see that a ps3 is about 16 times as powerful as a PC. Considering the fact that it’s also going graphics a fair bit fancier than the PC versions of F@H do, it’s a pretty compelling reason to consider getting one.

As a gaming platform, it may not be all that, but IBM really have delivered with their cell processor. If we could get it for (a fair bit) cheaper in this country, and there was a linux kernel for it, I may consider getting one.

The only problem is, what on earth would I use it for?

Ian Thorpe’s been on good weekend magazine, and all the newspapers have cut and pasted the story into headlines such as:

Ian Thorpe is not gay

or

Ian’s Lethal stroke we’ll never see.

or

Ian thorpe loses a sandwitch he made, but later finds it in his back pocket.

Why is his face covering everything? He’s retired. Why should anyone care? How does this sell newspapers? It’s all very strange. Worse,how is it that newspapers can essentially quote Good Weekend and call it their article? What a bunch of lazy bums we have for media. They swallow up tons of whitepapers and spit them out word for word. They regurgitate other newspaper articles without checking the facts. I’m quite sure media watch is a lot longer than it used to be. We need a decent, critical media who really puts their work in and finds out what needs to be told.

The only thing worse than our rail network is our media network. It’s a scary country to live in, in many ways.

Leading upto the official launch I’d read all about the PS3. Atleast enough to know that it wasn’t a giant success in the USA, is priced considerably higher in Australia compared to the USA and that alot people had their doubts about it and were going to avoid buying one. I expected a flop of epic proportions.

Watching the TV news today I couldn’t help but notice that apparently I’d been wrong. The Sony PS3 had large launch crowds, thousands around the country had apparently lined up to get their PS3 at midnight and it was an apparent success. What happened to all those nay sayers? Apparently they weren’t the majority or had caved in and bought one.

That was until I saw this article on The Age

In summery at the official Australian launch location of the PS3, Sydney’s Myers store in what I can only assume is Pitt Street Mall had 40, yes 40 people. Infact security and media out numbered customers them until 11pm. Absolutely hillarious in my opinion.

Last night I saw an episode of Top Gear where the presenters got their mums to test out some micro cars. Some of the cars were “ordinary”, and some less so. For example, one had electric sliding doors, and starting the car was non-trivial. The expectations of the old ladies from cars they’ve driven in the past were not going to help them in some of these cars. The least “ordinary” car took about twice as long to start as a car that had everything in a familiar place.

At this point the presenters declared the most “ordinary” car as the most user friendly. At this point I had a catharsis I’ve long since lost, but I’ll try and re-gain it here. User friendliness is often taken as similarity with past experiences.

That is, something that is user friendly will present a familiar interface to the user. At first blush, this seems like a fair enough statement. However, it niggles me. One of the reasons is that if something new is invented, the only way to make it user friendly is to (somehow) make it familiar to the user. It would be akin to saying that a soft-phone should look like a real phone.

Clearly, this makes for an extremely inefficient interface. Even user friendliness nuts think it’s stupid to make software look like something in real life. When making an example of bad UI design a fair chunk is spent on trying to mimic some aspect of reality—To make a desktop seem like a physical desktop, or a soft-phone seem like a real phone, or to make an mp3 player look like a cassette or CD player, yet they still dismiss an unfamiliar interface for being “too difficult to understand”.

I think can catch the contradiction if I try: When talking about ugly VoIP clients matt mentions Gizmo and Skype as exemplary examples. Want to know why? Because they look like IM clients! That is, they’re familiar, despite the fact that familiarity was the very thing that made all the other phones “ugly”.

In order to find an example of good UI design, we must go back through the history of IM clients. IM clients copied their UI from IRC clients. mIRC is a good example of a typical IRC client, and I’m pretty sure on windows you wouldn’t use any other IRC client.

If a usability expert were to talk about the usability of mIRC, I’m sure they wouldn’t find it very usable. It’s customisable, it’s configurable, it’s got thousands of options under obscure menu items. It’s not something that you picture “ordinary people” having on their desktops. However, I think everyone who used IM clients had used IRC before then, because IRC fed the same need as IM before IM was around.

Unfortunately, I have no perspective on how easy or hard it was to use IM for the first time, because I used IRC heavily before I installed ICQ. I had familiarity on my side. If I was an old lady, maybe IM would’ve been a confronting task.

I think familiarity, therefore, should not be used as the benchmark for user friendliness, and usability experts should think about whether their opinions on some device are coloured by past experience.

Incidentally, I’m going to argue that consistency, as distinct from familiarity, is also a bad metric for usability. Consistency is making your device look like all the others in the same “area”. Back in the day, Everything in your TV cabinet was black. This was good. It didn’t affect usability so much as to make everything seem a part of a consistent whole. Now a lot of devices are coloured silver, and this makes all the devices look different and unclean, and the extra colour adds clutter and confusion. While I like consistency, and it might mean that no one will use your device because it’s inconsistent with the rest, it doesn’t make a device more or less usable.

So let’s re-iterate: Familiarity is a bad metric for usability, because familiarity is different to different people, and conistency is a bad metric for usability because it’s purely stylistic, and does not affect interaction.

Note: I’m not saying that these are useless metrics, period. In fact, familiarity and consistency will probably determine if your audience will use your device at all, because they probably just won’t bother to use a device if it’s either inconsistent or unfamiliar, but just because a device is familiar and consistent doesn’t mean it’s usable.

Just to give an example: Office 2007 now has something like a ribbon with all the options on that instead of using menus. Presumably this solves some problems that were insurmountable with the old menu system (for example, huge menus that fill up the screen). However, this means everyone who learnt your software has to learn it again. The inconsistency and unfamiliarity is frustrating and will probably end up making everyone hate Office 2007, except for those who haven’t used any previous versions. It’s the same with learning to type DVORAK, or using a track-ball, or learning a new (non-programming) language. It may be frustrating, and it may not seem “user friendly” but really it’s just the familiarity, and has no bearing on usability.

So what is a good metric for measuring usability?

A good paradigm: Every good device puts you into a world which is internally consistent and internally familiar! For a simple and well-made device it will likely also be externally consistent and externally familiar. i.e: The paradigm will be one found in other similar devices, but that has no bearing on the usability, which only depends on the internal consistency and familiarity. That is, the device will behave similarly for similar actions. It must have lots of repeating patterns and ways of interacting. It must build habits which are useful in the operation of the device.

In conclusion, you shouldn’t work very hard to be like everyone else (from a device perspective). People will probably find you frustrating if you’re inconsistent with everything else, but those who persevere won’t look back.

I think I need a break from life. I don’t seem to be able to do basic human things any more, and that’s why I haven’t been posting. At work, I wrote the letter “b” down three times, when I meant to write “d”. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t figure out which way around it went.

I’m also having trouble putting together basic sentences and concentrating on my tasks… I don’t know what’s going on. At least a little of it is the stress of getting a new car (and the crap that happened afterwards), but there’s more to it than that. Something’s… wrong…