Pink Air

Miners

Like planning, data mining (AKA KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)) is kind of leaning over the edge of facts to select from a set of more or less risky possibilities. So besides being something that planners might find useful, it's also a field that planners might find interesting, in part because KDD's efforts to automate the process of finding the most valuable among the huge number of patterns discernible in any large database has led them to contemplate the nature of interestingness.

There is no standard definition of interestingness among the miners. That would go against their gritty and perverse nature. But there is wide acknowledgment that interestingness is central to their task (“Data mining can be described as the process of finding interesting patterns in large databases”) and that it is usefully decomposed into a number of sub-criteria:

Interestingness differentiates between the "valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable" mined association rules and those that are not--differentiating the interesting patterns from those that are not interesting. Thus, determining what is interesting, or interestingness, is a critical part of the KDD process.

Different authors produce different lists of criteria...

...but in general, the miners' blueprint of interestingness overlaps to a surprising degree with intuition and my more scribbly formulations. Novelty, validity, surprisingness, range, peculiarity(!) and utility are all there, each one intriguing if not entirely self-explanatory (I see that as my job), and the "ultimately understandable" criterion is consistent with the observation that delayed comprehension can be more valuable than immediate understanding. At least, it should make us reconsider our definition of comprehension.

Insights into interestingness are everywhere, but data mining offers an especially rich, data-driven yet thoughtful lens through which to view and address our own interestingness management issues. What makes "Just Do It" such a concise, surprising, useful idea to so many people? What contextual knowledge ("domain expertise" in minerspeak) is required for a campaign idea to be novel rather than just weird? "Novel, surprising and peculiar, yet valid, useful and ultimately understandable" could describe a leverageable pattern of purchase behaviors mined from the slag of last week's retail numbers. It could also be a critic's response to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or a viewer's take on a chocolate ad featuring a musical gorilla. Each of these things is worth minding and potentially valuable because first of all, they are interesting.

Overconfident

Last week, I accidentally erased some of Jen's email as we were trying to diagnose a previous problem. I still don't know exactly how or why it happened, but I do know when. I deleted an old account that was somehow serving as the Library setting for her current account. Jen hates deleting anything, so she asked, "Are you sure we should do this?" and I  quickly responded, "Sure. You don't use this account and there's nothing in it."

I also remember feeling impatient. I don't feel frustrated or anthropomorphize broken gadgets into bad guys. It's more like being eager to tinker and find out what works. It's fun to figure things out and machines are figureoutable. You may stop looking, but you can be sure that an answer exists. That's why I repeatedly disassembled our phones as a child and prepared for work in the IT department at Morgan Stanley by reading about medieval Italian banking and the nature of electricity. (This is an excellent site if you're interested.)

Mac Repair salvaged what they could, but in the end, I permanently erased two weeks of Jen's mail. My only defense is that I was in some sort of engineering fugue state. Men in particular seem susceptible to these outbreaks of blind overconfidence, especially when it comes to traditionally masculine topics, which makes us (among other things) worse investors than women.

While we were waiting at the repair shop, I happened to be reading a kindlet that contained one of Captain Bligh's last messages sent from the Bounty and I think it works as a general credo for Male Pattern Overconfidence:

My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.

Immanent domain

There was a point in "Going Dutch," Russell Shorto's critical appreciation of our adopted country's social welfare system, when I thought he was about to recognize a pervasive quality of Dutch culture that I've always felt, but never seen clearly expressed. Interestingness often feels like the revelation of something we already knew subconsciously, so I was prepared to be interested when I read:

It’s true that I have grown to appreciate many aspects of this system. But honesty compels me to reveal another side. There is a mood that settles into me here, deepening by degrees until its deepness has become darkness...Something about this place rekindles the existential rage of my youth. Why are we here?

"Existential" is a word I often use to describe Dutch culture, confusing natives and immigrants alike, and I'd hoped that someone more articulate was about to clarify my meaning for me. But Shorto's essay glances off that target to bury itself in the broad backside of Dutch collectivism, consensus and conformity. True (and at times annoying) enough, living here is sometimes like an extended visit to the DMV. "What makes you think you're so special?", translated into Latin, could easily be the national motto of the Netherlands.

But there is a powerfully individualist flip side to Dutch culture, visible even in the well-known admonition to "just be normal" that Shorto quotes, like most people, incompletely. The full saying is: Just be normal and you'll be crazy enough. The Dutch system is based on an existential appreciation of the basic weirdness of everyday human existence. It attempts to minimize the common material wants that typically fuel market economies and make people more fearful, competitive, rushed, violent, status-oriented, more crazy, than they need to be. Like Freud in reverse, the Dutch system is designed to remove the sources of common unhappiness and free the individual to ask, "Okay. If I'm not here simply to survive, why am I here?"

That question, as strict and bare as the interior of a 17th-century Protestant church or "the calm, bland streets and succession of broad windows giving views onto identical interiors", leaves you stranded with yourself in a way that might very well inspire an existential rage in someone who believes that individual value and happiness are dependent upon being special in some way. I think this is one of the reasons why ex-pat bitching sessions inevitably resolve into complaints about Dutch "service." There's always a whiff of "Don't these people know who I am?" in the air. (A phrase which, translated into Latin, could easily be the national anti-motto of the Netherlands.)

Dutch culture doesn't exactly deny the possibility of individual transcendence. But it does make you wonder. Maybe that kind of happiness, if it exists at all, just isn't something you can pursue.

Voudou

As a lifelong member of the National Romerian Association (not to be confused with the other NRA with whom we have nevertheless proudly shared both a president and a tagline for just over a year now), I have never had much time for the Haitian or "voodoo" zombie. In the end, being docile, hard-working and non-flesh eating just isn't all that interesting. But I'm willing to reach out across the aisle after seeing the Voudou exhibition at the Tropenmuseum yesterday. The red and black icons of the Bizango secret society would be equally at home in Silent Hill or the Saatchi collection.

Henchmen Inc.

Companies rename themselves for any number of reasons. Sometimes they want to direct attention to a fundamental change in what they do. Sometimes new management simply want to announce their arrival. And sometimes (think Philip Morris to Altria), they want to cover their tracks.

This seems to be the case with Blackwater, the U.S. military security firm that quietly changed its name to the benign and in their own words "meaningless" Xe two months ago. Any rebranding risks effacement of brand equity, but when effacement is the primary objective, most companies seem to believe that the more meaningless the new name, the better.

Which is a shame. Evil henchmen have a long and inglorious history, reflecting the eternal need of rulers to shed blood while avoiding the spatter. When the cry rolls down from the castle, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest/little girl/country?", who will respond to the call?

Why not Wickersham, Wickersham & Wickersham, Royal Purveyors of Mayhem Most Subtile Since 1798? Or if you want something more Web 2.0, names like Iago, Flying Monkeys and Turd Blossom prove that unscrupulous doesn't have to mean humorless. (Nor must it imply a tin ear, though most henchman themes seem to be variants on the Song of the Volga Boatmen. Even the Oompa Loompa song. This may be because good henchmen, like good proletarians, are required to joyfully signal that they have no individual identity.)

Now, Oompa Loompas, while clearly henchmen, are more creepy than evil, reminding us that the defining characteristic of henchmen is not evil but amoral obsequiousness. The word appears in the 14th-century as an apparent compound based on Old English hengst/horse, so the original henchman was probably a groom or stablehand.

Hengst still means "stallion" in German and Dutch and is associated with male sexuality through related forms like hengstig/horny and hengstenbal/stag party. (Which speaks to the Oompa Loompa connection.) And as a sidenote to that sidenote, Hengst and Horsa (also meaning horse) were 5th-century mercenary brothers from Jutland who were invited to England by the Celtic Britons to fight off their native enemies, the Picts. Mission accomplished, H&H liked it so much they decided to stay, invited a bunch of other Germanic tribes over, and took the country away from under their chagrined Celtic hosts. The Blackwater of their time, the Jutes may have been first on the ground, but were dropped from the letterhead when the Angles and Saxons later instituted an ambitious but ultimately successful rebranding effort.

Inhuman

 

I borrowed Jen's iPod Touch to try the Amazon Kindle app and in the past two days I've read sample chapters from about twenty books. Mobile book browsing seems to hit a neuromarketing sweet spot in my brain where browsing, buying, reading and stealing intersect. I feel like one of the survivors in a zombie movie, grabbing stuff off the shelves in an abandoned store because, why not?

But instead of racing back to a reinforced cellar in the evening with a knapsack full of No-Dōz and Moon Pies, I do a quick wireless sync and in ten seconds I'm reading from the collection I've stashed away piecemeal during the day. It's surprisingly satisfying to read ten to twenty pages from a book and move on. You get a high rate of interestingness at a comfortable, intermediate, cycling pace, and a good sense of what you actually want to read all the way through.

I'm eager to read more of Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson's practical, philosophical guide to what makes animals happy. Imagining another species' mind is touching, shocking and oddly relaxing, like Magic Eye. To see it, you have to let go of something you didn't know you were holding onto.

I also enjoyed a sample from Forensic Pathology, part of the CRC series in forensic investigation. (I've long treasured my old copy of Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon Gebreth, BBA, MPS, FBINA, Bronx Homicide Task Force and general editor of the series.) There is, admittedly, a lot of unseemly rubbernecking to be done in a book about bodily decomposition, both sudden and gradual. But like the animal mind book, it offers a compelling alternative perspective on almost everything, as very interesting things often do.

Uncanny

The 2009 Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival site just went up and though the films do look especially fantastic this year, I always look forward to the festival because I'm addicted to the uncanny. Like other addictions, the uncanny feels like both stimulation and relief, which puts it in the same class of neurological VIPs as dreams, sex and scratching.

Etalagepoppen

Suckcessories

 

In Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling distinguishes between those items we like to have around because they express identity claims, like a poster of a favorite band, and those items we keep around because they help to regulate our moods, like Successories. People who surround themselves with mood-regulating items tend to score high on measures of anxiety. Which makes sense.

So I don't know what it says about me that I not only make my own personal line of mood-regulating posters, but put them in a computer file that I never look at, and that most of them are, at least on the face of it, mildly depressing. But there you are.

A good conversation starter

and great all-around meme from Carl Sagan: 

Suppose your father or mother--let's say father for the sake of definiteness--walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. And just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours?

The answer is a week. The parade of ancestors moving at the ordinary pace of walking would take only a week before you got to a quadruped.