#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while (1) {
    eval {
        system ("wget 'http://onlineraceresults.com/race/view_race.php?race_id=14261' -O race");
        my $results = system ("grep 'There are currently no results posted for this race' race");
        if ( $results ) {
            system("/usr/bin/mail -s 'Race results' xxxxxxxxxx\@tmomail.net < /home/zachmu/results") and die "can't send mail";
            exit 0;
        }
    };
    sleep 60;
}

By the way, if you know my mobile phone number, you can use the email address template above to send me text messages via email. Please don’t script this.

Anyway, the above didn’t work because of a subtle bug. See it? I didn’t, and so I didn’t get a text when the results were posted. Turns out that wget -O file won’t overwrite an existing file, so after the first one it was a no-op. Grr. Always read your man pages! This can be fixed with a little call to rm inside the loop.

Next I wanted to see how I did compared to the rest of the pack, and wanted to view a histogram of times. The online results site doesn’t support such a thing, of course, so I ginned something up:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;

my $seenDiv = 0;
my $runner;
my $cell = 0;
my $runners = [];
my $cellProcessors = [
                     simpleFieldExtractor('link'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('first'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('last'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('division'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('place'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('divplace'),
                     simpleFieldExtractor('genderplace'),
                     timeExtractor('guntime'),
                     timeExtractor('time'),
                     timeExtractor('pace'),
                     ];

while (<>) {
    my $line = $_;
    chomp($line);

#    print "DEBUG $line\n";

    if (!$seenDiv && $line =~ m/DIVISION:/) {
        $seenDiv = 1;
    } elsif (!$seenDiv) {
        next;
    }

    if ($line =~ m/tr class/) {
        $runner = {};
        push @$runners, $runner;
    } elsif ($line =~ m/td class.*>(.*)<\/td>/) {
        $cellProcessors->[$cell]->($runner, $1);
        $cell = ($cell + 1) % scalar @$cellProcessors;
    } elsif ($line =~ m/block-footer/) {
        last;
    } elsif ($line =~ m/<\/tr>/) {
        $cell = 0;
    }
}

my @filteredRunners = grep { defined $_->{'time:sec'} } @$runners;
$runners = \@filteredRunners;

analyze();

sub analyze {
    my @sortedByTime = sort {
        $a->{'time:hrs'} <=> $b->{'time:hrs'}
        || $a->{'time:min'} <=> $b->{'time:min'}
        || $a->{'time:sec'} <=> $b->{'time:sec'}
        || 0;
        } @$runners;

    my $bucket = 0;
    my $bucketCnt = 0;
    my $STEP = 60;
    foreach $runner ( @sortedByTime ) {
        next if (not defined $runner->{'time:sec'});

        my $totalSec = $runner->{'time:hrs'} * 3600
            + $runner->{'time:min'} * 60
            + $runner->{'time:sec'};
        if ($bucket == 0 || $totalSec > $bucket + $STEP) {
            use integer;
            my $label = "";
            $label .= $bucket / 3600;
            my $min = ($bucket % 3600) / 60;
            $min = "0$min" if ($min < 10);
            $label .= ":" . $min;
#            $label .= ":" . $bucket % 60;
            print "$label:";
            for (my $i = 0; $i < $bucketCnt / 10; $i++) {
                print "*";
            }
            print " $bucketCnt\n";
            $bucket = $totalSec - ($totalSec % $STEP);
            $bucketCnt = 1;
        } else {
            $bucketCnt++;
        }
    }
}

#print Dumper $runners;

sub simpleFieldExtractor {
    my $fieldName = shift;
    return sub {
        my ($runner, $field) = @_;
        $runner->{$fieldName} = $field;
    };
}

sub timeExtractor {
    my $fieldName = shift;
    return sub {
        my ($runner, $field) = @_;
        my ($hrs, $min, $sec) = split(/:/, $field);
        if (not defined $sec) {
            $sec = $min;
            $min = $hrs;
            $hrs = 0;
        }

        $runner->{"$fieldName:hrs"} = $hrs;
        $runner->{"$fieldName:min"} = $min;
        $runner->{"$fieldName:sec"} = $sec;
    };
}

When you feed this the race results page, it spits out the following histogram. Each asterisk represents 10 finishers with the time indicated, discarding seconds.

0:24: 2
0:25: 7
0:26:* 14
0:27:* 12
0:28:* 12
0:29:** 20
0:30:** 28
0:31:*** 38
0:32:**** 41
0:33:***** 51
0:34:******** 83
0:35:********* 90
0:36:************ 128
0:37:************* 137
0:38:****************** 180
0:39:********************* 216
0:40:********************* 210
0:41:********************** 228
0:42:************************ 243
0:43:***************************** 296
0:44:************************* 257
0:45:*********************** 238
0:46:****************** 187
0:47:********************** 221
0:48:************************ 241
0:49:******************** 209
0:50:******************* 192
0:51:*********************** 231
0:52:******************* 190
0:53:****************** 187
0:54:************ 129
0:55:*************** 151
0:56:************ 126
0:57:*********** 111
0:58:********* 98
0:59:******* 77
1:00:********* 97
1:01:****** 66
1:02:***** 55
1:03:***** 54
1:04:****** 66
1:05:*** 36
1:06:** 27
1:07:*** 32
1:08:** 27
1:09:* 17
1:10:* 18
1:11:** 26
1:12: 8
1:13: 7
1:14: 8
1:15: 8
1:16: 6
1:17: 9
1:18: 8
1:19: 7
1:20: 1
1:21: 3

So, my 37 minute time puts me well above the modal hump there. That’s what I wanted to know!

I should be able to use these same tools on other race results posted on that site, provided they don’t change their format significantly and break my screen scraping. Provide an API, you yokels! I hereby release the above software into the public domain, so if you’re of the running and coding persuasion feel free to use it!

“Scientific racism” is a slur in the academy, roughly analogous to calling something “psuedoscientific” in the mainstream scientific community. Largely because there are observed differences in the results of IQ tests of different races, it is politically correct in many academic circles to refer to general intelligence under the euphemism “whatever it is that IQ tests measure.”

And, in fact, it’s solid science that performance on such tests is strongly influenced by individuals’ own perceptions of their ability. Blacks taking a test that is presented as a “laboratory exercise” outperform those taking the same test presented as an exam. In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely relates an even more intriguing experimental result. Researchers seeking to understand the effect that stereotypes have on math test performance decided to see if they could study the interaction between two conflicting stereotypes: that Asians are good at math; and that women are bad at it. They tested a large sample of Asian women, subconsciously priming a third of them to think about their womanhood (by asking questions about child birth, motherhood, etc.), another third to think about their Asian-ness (by asking questions about the language spoken at home, immigration, etc.), and leaving a final third as a control group. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that each test group lived up to the stereotype they were primed to think about — the Asian group did better, and the woman group worse, than the control group.

As a society, we find the very idea of cognitive differences between races so vile and reprehensible that anyone making such claims does so at the risk of their academic and scientific career. The Bell Curve, a book on intelligence distribution that includes a chapter on the black-white achievement gap and suggests it cannot be explained by social factors alone, has received more refutation (and its authors, more ostracism) than any other modern, mainstream scientific text.

I’m currently reading How the Mind Works, an aptly named treatise about how evolution designed the human brain to fill the “cognitive niche” that no other species does. The author, Steven Pinker, understands that any discussion about innate human behavior, no matter how polite, raises the hackles on many of his more critical readers, and so he spends the first couple chapters of his book hammering home the point that we, as a society, need to separate the concept of what is right from what is true. He warns about the dangers of the twin logical fallacies applied to this area of research: the naturalistic fallacy (because something is natural, it must be good); and its opposite, the moralistic fallacy (because something is good, it must be natural). He notes that in the 1980s UNESCO proactively refuted any scientific study that claimed humans have an innate, evolved tendency towards violence and war, asserting that it is “scientifically inaccurate” to make such claims.

But with the genetic revolution, any ethnic differences that do exist are inevitably going to come to the forefront. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia is concerned about our ability to keep this discussion civil:

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism…

The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event…

I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.

It’s getting harder every year to profess the standard social science model of the “blank slate” embraced by Piaget and Freud (and many others). The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more we learn that major aspects of our personalities and minds are determined at birth or earlier. For example, recent research suggests that executive function — one’s ability to control one’s thoughts and behavior — is almost entirely heritable. As time passes, the number of cognitive and behavioral traits in the “almost entirely heritable” list is guaranteed to grow, seriously challenging long-cherished beliefs about justice, merit, and agency.

Since this result is inevitable, it’s imperative that we begin, as Pinker suggests, to separate our moral disgust from our notion of scientific truth. It’s certainly proper to be passionately skeptical about results indicating inborn differences between groups of humans; but it’s not proper to rule out, a priori, the possibility that such differences could exist, as is the current fashion in the academy.

Yeah! We’re against the expansion of the federal government and fiscal irresponsibility! Seriously, we didn’t even notice that the president was of the negro persuasion until someone pointed it out to us, and then we were all “whaaa?” We’d be saying the same things about a white president — that’s why we were so overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush tax cuts and deficit spending, and the creation of the DHS, the single largest expansion of the federal government in a generation.

We wanted to show up to protest the Bush administration, too… well, about that. Jim’s grandma got real sick, and Lou there was busy with overtime at the slaughterhouse. Also, we couldn’t find any black markers or paint stirrers to make our signs. By a total coincidence, when Obama was elected we overcame these obstacles just in time to warn America about how the gubmint takeover of health care was gonna death-panel Jim’s grandma after putting her Medicare in the hands of some Washington bureaucrat.

You see, this movement is all about freedom, not racism! That’s why when Arizona passed a law to allow police officers to demand that anyone they suspected of being an illegal immigrant show their papers or face indefinite detention, we showed up in mass to protest this Nazi-like intrusion into American liberty. Actually hold on… in this case, we’re sure those government officials will not abuse their powers (we trust them), so we showed up to protest the overwhelming protests of the new law. You see, this law keeps America America-er. Any real American has nothing to fear. There’s no way that brown-skinned people are going to be targeted by this law; if they’re here legally, they’re one of us.

Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the [Tea Party] movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy.

Ok, yeah, if you’re talking about all black, and all latinos, sure. But the ones we know personally are great, and those other ones could be great too, if only they just applied themselves and quit looking to the gubmint for a handout.

Our movement welcomes all people of color! There’s no reason to imagine things would be any different if we were all negroes ourselves.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Hey, who are you going to believe, us, or the Jew-run liberal media? Now for the last time, quit calling us racists!

First, they are big. How big? Bigger than both the music industry and Hollywood.

That didn’t answer any real question about the nature of video games, but it does give you a sense of scale. Regardless of how you feel about them, video games are an essential part of modern society.

However, mainstream society dismisses them as a juvenile waste of time, in some ineffable but furious way a graver vice than other isolated, passive forms of entertainment like television, film, or reading (not that anyone reads, just saying). I recently found the following pseudo-anonymous screed linked from an erotic photo blog I read:

The average video-game player is thirty-fucking-four years old. Every other generation had a career and a family by then. Get your shit together, us! We’re basically the explosive diarrhea generation.

This kind of critique is easily dismissed, and should be, as the self-hating whining of an underachiever trying to scapegoat their failure. I guess when you lack even a basic understanding of the topic you’re criticizing, it’s not hard to be this wrong. Yes, the average gamer is 34. My older brother is, in fact, the average 34-year-old gamer. He has a solid career and 3 children. He and his kind (and mine, for that matter) are quickly entering the mainstream, although you wouldn’t know it to listen to the dang liberal media*. An entire generation is playing video games, but the mainstream is content to treat gaming, the most ascendant and important cultural trend since the television itself, with a slack-jawed mixture of condescension, befuddlement, and fear. You might be surprised how often they hit the trifecta in a single story, actually — pretty much happens whenever a white teenager shoots someone.

With only mad jibbering coming out of the mainstream on the topic, people who care about this kind of thing look inward for insight. Jesse Schell recently gave a talk at a gaming expo, worth a watch even if you don’t have any interest in gaming as a hobby. He gets the importance of gaming, really gets it, on a level that most people don’t. He sees gaming-like activities permeating every aspect of our society within a decade, and from where I’m sitting it looks like he’s right.

The aspect of gaming that Jesse Schell thinks is migrating to the real world is the same one we exploit when we wire up a rat’s reward center in its brain to a switch on the floor of its cage, and it steps on that switch over and over until it keels over from exhaustion. We know from scanning live brains that this region lights up equally readily in response to getting fed for a hungry person, looking at porn for a man, hitting a jackpot for a gambler, and incrementing the Xbox Live gamer score for a gamer. The neural mechanism that is ultimately responsible for all addiction literally cannot tell the difference between biting into a cheeseburger when ravenous and getting a sweet frag on Live. Almost all successful games exploit this mechanism to some extent, and some of the most successful ones effectively wire into the brain directly, just like we do to those poor (but happy) lab rats.

A few months ago I poured about twelve hours into an indie game called Miner Dig Deep. There’s no reason anyone should call the activity in this game, which involves tediously digging thousands of feet underground and then riding elevators back to the surface, “fun.” But it is fun. It’s so fun it’s hard to put down. It’s fun because it randomly but consistently rewards you with ever more valuable gems as you delve deeper underground. You can sell the gems for money, which you can use to buy better equipment, which lets you dig deeper or faster or longer, which is how you recover even more valuable gems, completing the cycle. I found this pointless cycle so incredibly rewarding that I always, always had to make an effort to put the game down, to not head back down to the bottom of the mine for one last haul before bed. In the game’s defense, it’s a charming piece of cottage art, complete with an original guitar score. But to call its gameplay mechanics Pavlovian would be generous.

As Schell mentions, the largest part of the Zeitgeist is harvesting virtual tomatoes in Farmville. I haven’t gotten on board; not because I wouldn’t like it, but because due to experiences like Miner Dig Deep I know I would, and I don’t have the spare time to get involved with it. There’s quite a lot of scholarship on Farmville being written, such as this one out of SUNY. It’s interesting because it accurately assesses the role that social obligation plays in Farmville’s success, and then absurdly concludes that this obligation is the only reason anyone plays. I love picking apart this kind of academic drivel, because it sounds so plausible to read if you’re willing to settle for appeal to authority over actual observation; for semantic niggling over real debate.

Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?

True, I did produce this kind of sophistry on demand when I was earning my own liberal arts degree, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call out egregious bullshit when I see it. I don’t have to; Farmville players get it, and this guy doesn’t. Every one of those pumpkins is a bump of coke. The activity is its own reward. If you don’t understand this about the medium, you shouldn’t attempt to form an opinion.

Successful writer Tom Bissell recently spent three entire years doing nothing but snorting coke and playing Grand Theft Auto 4, which is about as perfect a complementary activity as I can imagine.

The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer and almost relaxing. This coke, my friend told me, had not been “stepped on” with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next 30 hours straight.

There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.

Last week Roger Ebert returned to a statement he made years ago: that video games can never be art. Again, it’s possible to imagine a way for a person to be this wrong; I think in Ebert’s case it’s a combination of advanced age and a profound misunderstanding of the medium he tries to critique. For example, he believes he can experience a game without playing it. For a better, more nuanced rebuttal to this absurd position than I could write, see Mike Thomsen’s at IGN.

The reason football is not art is because its rules were designed with the primary goal of competition. Competition is only one of a great many different experiences that a videogame can create. Games can also be about losing, and not competing at all. They can be about love, the impossibility of relationships, the beautiful indifference to our individual life choices, urgent intimacy in the shadow of death, sexual anxiety, and confrontation with life choices to which there are no right answers. There are games that, using the language of authored interaction, invoke all of these ideas, and many more beyond.

For myself, I simply know they’re art. I can’t feel otherwise; too many gaming experiences have affected me deeply, too many to count, in ways that only the finest non-electronic art ever has. And so I know they’re art the same way I know I love looking at naked ladies. The fact that they’re also a lot like a slot machine doesn’t change that in the least.

*The term “liberal media” is used here ironically and is not meant to imply the existence even of a centrist media.

I don’t know if calling a Constitutional Convention is a realistic goal, but I agree with Lessig that’s it’s probably our best shot of fixing the system.

For most of a decade I’ve been carrying around a phone that was pretty cool in 2001 and hopelessly outdated by 2003, the Nokia 8390. Just look at this bad mother. It has these sweet white LEDs in its faceplate that light up when you push a button or get a call. Back when nobody had color screens yet, the 8390 was about as sexy as phones got. That changed pretty quickly.

Fast-forward to 2010 to find me carrying the same model. Not the same phone — I’ve gone through three identical ones in all, including one that spent 15 minutes at the bottom of Lake Sutherland and recovered. My coworkers universally have iPhones or Blackberries, and my friends, even the luddites, have color screens and cameras on their phones. I’ll admit to the occasional pang of jealousy at those luminous devices, but mostly I was immune to phone envy.

Ironically, what spurred my decision to move into the 21st century of mobile communication is that AT&T became so overwhelmed with the volume of data traffic generated by iPhone customers that they couldn’t even bother to reliably make my simple non-smart phone ring when I got a call. So I caved and, for better or worse, joined the ranks of people who can dick around on the internet in public whenever they want. I chose this sexy beast to the right here over the iPhone, mostly because I want to write applications for it without having to buy a $2000 laptop. Overall it’s probably not as polished as the iPhone, but it has more functionality (at least until the 4G) and will let me put my own software on it without jumping through a bunch of quasi-criminal hoops.

I’m still just scratching the surface of its functionality beyond making phone calls and web browsing, but I’ve already started using it as a camera and a GPS. This weekend I used it to trace Roark, Adam and me as we wended our way up a ridge line outside Leavenworth. I might even buy an armband and take it running, just like those people I used to mock mercilessly once they had jogged out of earshot.

I hate to say this, but Twitter is probably next. Sorry, everybody.

It’s relatively safe to say that some impressionable pubescent male is getting turned on by this stuff, and that, later in life, he’s going to have trouble getting off unless he hears the sound of a team of Japanese men screaming at him to try harder. Imagine how crippling that’s going to be for him in his relationships.

This problem, writ large, is really about the extent to which the ubiquity and strangeness of internet pornography is producing a generation of deviants. It really is too early to tell — the medium only really flowered with broadband, so we’re talking this decade. The first batch of young men to be shaped by it only recently reached the age of majority. The sexual dysfunctions and anxieties they’re going to have as a result of exposure to the above kind of stuff from an early age (as well as dozens of flavors of much nastier, abusive porn) really is hard to predict, but I’m going to go on the record right now and say that in another five or ten years it’s something we’re going to have to confront as a society, probably at the institutional level. Sex therapy for men, to re-wire their brains to be turned on by something as humdrum as a naked lady, is going to be common. We’ve got advance warning of this problem coming from the ultimate spiritual source of bizarre porn, Japan. In 2005, Durex conducted a global poll of sexual satisfaction which found that Japan is the least sexually satisfied country in the world, with just 25% of those polled saying they enjoy sex.

To be clear, I’m a fierce opponent of censorship of any kind on the internet — it always, always starts with someone asking you to think of the children, and ends with your news being filtered. Literally every country with internet censorship has followed this pattern. But I do think that parents today need to consider being much more open with their kids about the topic of sex and porn, especially little boys. It’s no longer enough to keep them away from those dirty magazines; limiting exposure with today’s technology is like trying to beat back the ocean. Rather, today’s parents probably need to actively talk about “good porn” versus “bad porn.”

That American parents are in no way ready to have that talk with their kids tells me that we’re going to be in for some really interesting and depressing cases of sexual dissatisfaction that affects an entire generation of men.

It’s difficult to express how this wealth of archaeological data makes me feel. On the one hand, it’s a meticulous and reasonably honest record of my life, such as this account of my host family in Vienna. On the other, it’s a look back to a trivial and somehow gratuitous form of self-expression that’s frankly embarrassing to read. It’s a view onto a younger, less settled incarnation of myself, one I’m not entirely sure I still want around.

My dad sometimes comments dolefully on how my blog got all serious and full of, you know, content all of a sudden. He has a point. I don’t fully understand why, but I got pretty deeply disenchanted with the idea of online journaling, to the extent where updating the website felt like a chore. Maybe I’m just not self-absorbed enough anymore, or maybe there are only so many “interesting” things one can write about oneself before getting burned out. In any case, you’ll notice that I filed all those old posts under the “Musings” category to highlight their essentially substance-less nature. I think it says a lot that the earliest incarnation of this blog was titled “Zach’s Musings.” I’m not so interested in musing about nothing anymore, for better or worse.

Now, at least, the evidence of all those former musings are part of the public record.