In an article last February on software development culture, eWeek’s Peter Coffee made reference to a maxim on complexity: “Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.” The source was John Gall’s 1978 work called Systemantics, a kind of satire of General Systems Theory that simultaneously mocked and catalogued the tendencies of systems to create their own problems. With its title taken from a mash-up of systematic, semantic, and ’system antic,’ the book laid out a quite illuminating series of ‘laws’ that afflict systems in the same fashion that the Peter Principle underlies corporate hierarchy, Conway’s Law outlines the effect of committees, and Murphy’s Law describes probability—in fact, one law is that “a complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways” which essentially encapsulates Murphy. Gall also ventures into policy, arguing for a much broader understanding of global concerns as being generated by underlying systems:

“The religious person may blame it on original sin. The historian may cite the force of trends such as population growth and industrialization. The sociologist offers reasons rooted in the peculiarities of human associations. Reformers blame it all on ‘the system,’ and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point—that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular system but rather in systems as such. Salvation, if it is attainable at all, even partially, is to be sought in a deeper understanding of the ways of systems, not simply in a criticism of the errors of a particular system.”

Other references to Systemantics include excerpts of the 3rd edition (renamed The System Bible) via Amazon’s Online Reader—for example, you can browse the entire “Index of Horrible Examples” from Czar Alexander to Three Mile Island and the Titanic—and collected references via del.icio.us. Regrettably Amazon does not actually sell any of the 3 editions, but another company called General Systemantics advertises copies for sale (via a default MS FrontPage theme, itself fodder for a whole article on system failure) along with the brilliantly epigrammatic praise by William Safire that “Work books gall, but Gall’s book works.”

More contemporary parallels to Gall’s work include Donella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points which describe a scale of effective places “to intervene in a system,” alternately thought of as levers by which you can affect the workings of a complex system; Edward Tenner’s book Why Things Bite Back on the ‘revenge effects’ or unintended consequences of technology; Jared Diamond’s book Collapse on possible causes of failed societies; and Anti-patterns, an outgrowth of Design Patterns that have been utilized in fields like architecture and software design to find well-solved problems and re-use them. Most anyone who’s held a job can probably relate to one or more organization or management anti-patterns, which also includes longstanding concepts such as “moral hazard” from economics and “scope creep” from project management.

[EB: Systems Engineering]

Steven Poole is one of many to engage in that promotion du jour, giving away a digital copy of a product—in his case, a book called Trigger Happy about the aesthetics of videogames, a topic which would naturally appeal to an online audience. Six months and 31,100 downloads later, he follows up the experiment with a compelling review of the state of media online and what the future may hold for various creators, notably musicians and writers.

His response is noteworthy for encapsulating many of the issues facing creators who wish (or face pressure) to distribute their works online, especially unfettered by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and preferably free. In the giveaway economy, as with the dotcom bubble before it, how exactly does that lead to sustainable income? Not all doom and gloom, Poole notes the promotional upsides in terms of wider distribution and thus ’seeding the market’ for possible hard-copy sales and future endeavors. However, the Paypal tip jar approach as attempted by many donation-supported software projects, Stephen King’s abortive The Plant, and Radiohead’s experiment with In Rainbows bears out the online form of tragedy of the commons where free access to a resource cannibalizes paid support for it. Without adequate volunteered funds as recompense, Poole summarizes the stark options remaining:

“If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.”

He goes on to describe the common rejoinder (termed the “Slashdot argument”) that free content can be subsidized by correlative sales, like live shows, T-shirts, and service contracts. While his reaction to this position is somewhat kneejerk (essentially “you try working for free!”) it does underscore the difficult proposition facing anyone who sees the future purely as online free distribution: just how do you offset the production of an album, a book, a videogame if the audience demands that the primary work be free while you try to make up the difference in low attach-rate items like T-shirts and strategy guides? He also outlines the difficulty facing anyone trying to follow in the footsteps of the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails offerings, namely that both earned their fanbase “through the nasty old music-industry business model” while the possibility of an unknown band reaping the same rewards still begs the question on opt-in payment. Plus, how many other bands will garner the same level of press coverage that in turn drives the traffic once the novelty wears off?

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In light of new coverage of the ongoing legal battle between J.K. Rowling and HP Lexicon, I thought I would do a quick survey of recent Harry Potter news.
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Following in the footsteps of A. J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All in which the author devoted himself to reading the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, Ammon Shea has spent the past year reading the Oxford English Dictionary and will publish his experiences in Reading the OED this July. This first preview mentions some of the ‘absurd entries’ that he came across.

Absurd Entries in the OED

One example is a tautological pair that reads like a lexicographical snigger -

The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Others might be considered circumlocutive obfuscation, such as trondhjemite (”Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase“) and disghibelline (”To distinguish, as a Guelph from a Ghibelline“). Yet ironically, when I posed the latter to my friend SW as a joke, she immediately started describing the differences between those terms - for as it happens, they are two warring factions from 12th and 13th century Italy…and she is a doctoral student specializing in art of the Italian renaissance. So maybe KA’s geology class will have covered trondhjemite (aka plagiogranite). For my part, I fondly remember getting Yggdrasil as a selection in a game of Balderdash and casting it as some kind of Yiddish, while of course knowing it as the World Tree from Norse mythology where Odin hung for nine days (cf. Gaiman’s American Gods).

The Kindle announcement has been echoed by hundreds of pronouncements about its eventual impact, ranging from the revolutionary “Re-inventing the book” to sneering condemnations that it will have the same negligible impact on ‘real books’ as all the previous e-book readers have to date. Here is a cross-sample of some of the more interesting, each of which carries a different emphasis re: the design, the service, the restrictions, etc.

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For the record, I have not used or even seen an Amazon Kindle yet, so this is not a bona fide product review. These impressions are based on the ideas presented by Amazon and the Newsweek article about how the Kindle is supposed to operate, and what the future may hold for similar devices versus its progenitor, the humble book.

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With Deathly Hallows out awhile, the Harry Potter omnivore has moved on to movie news, JK Rowling pronouncements, and social commentary. These have trickled in at various times since the final book’s release, not necessarily in this order. (more…)

To put aside the obvious, Stardust the movie is not Stardust the book. This is as important as it is tautological aka trivially self-evident, since we the adoring fans of the latter are often prone to forget when sitting down to watch the former. This was immaculately captured in a brief blogging exchange between William Gibson and Cory Doctorow over the subject of the perenially imminent film adapation of Neuromancer. Gibson’s initial consternation, not at the perpetual delay (or in his words, the liminality) but at the presumption that “feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis,” in turn fueled Doctorow’s observation:

Books, by and large, don’t make very good movies (how many great film adaptations of novels can you think of that were true to the original that were worth seeing? How many total, utter disappointments can you recall?) Yet people who meet novelists inevitably ask, “anything of yours been made into a movie yet?”

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[spoiler warning: The book is discussed in total, and particularly focuses on those things which were not already known from prior books as well as the implications of the ending. If you have not yet finished reading it, I highly recommend you do so first.]

This has been a few days in coming, for a variety of reasons - wanting the book to settle a bit, giving others a chance to finish reading it for themselves, and recovering from the side effects of Harry Potter Week. I had originally envisioned a full week embargo for spoiler avoidance, but I believe everyone I know that was reading it is now finished. Moreover, I really need to start thinking about other things, and instead I keep finding partial analyses of the book rattling around upstairs.

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[spoiler alert: I have finally read some, but by no means all of Deathly Hallows, by this point. While I will take great pains to keep my impressions to events thus far as elliptical as possible, if like me you have been cutting yourself off from the outside world since its release to maintain a pure sphere of discovery, you may wish to read no further. And if you should need to check up on a character's name or background, on Wikipedia say, be warned that even as early as yesterday afternoon entries had been updated with details from book 7.]

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