Tea Leaves

It’s the middle of August which means that the new Madden is out and we can say that the annual “Retarded Fall and Holiday Gaming Release Flood” has officially begun. While the coming weeks probably won’t bring us anything quite as bountiful as last year’s Bioshock followed by Halo 3 followed by Ratchet and Clank followed by Rock Band, there are no lack of interesting titles.

I just paid $90 for a set of games that, purchased separately, would cost nearly $500.

Long-time readers know of my love, bordering on irrational, for the games of Everett Kaser. From his first great game, Sherlock, through to what I consider the apogee of the deduction game, Baker Street, Kaser’s games have kept me company for upwards of 15 years. There has always been one problem: his games didn’t run natively on Mac OS X.

Until now.

I’ve alluded, once or twice, to my growing interest in Japanese whisky, and talked about the bottles that I absolutely, positively, did not buy out of state and certainly did not bring back to Pennsylvania, because that would be wrong. I have, it seems, taken it to a new level: friends have started not bringing me whisky directly from Japan.

I’d like to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies, please.

When I go to other cities, especially cities that have large Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or other East Asian communities, I tend to shit on the so-called “Pan Asian” style restaurants. My opinion of the iconic Vietnamese place called The Slanted Door in San Francisco is typical. I couldn’t see why I just spent all that money to get typical Vietnamese takeout food on fancy plates with a bar in the background (we went to the original, not the new one).

Now that the Richard Chen restaurant has opened in East Liberty in Pittsburgh, I think I understand why people would be excited about a place like that. This is the best new Asian restaurant to open in the city since Rose Tea Cafe started serving food. But, it is a lot of money and very fancy plates.

Previously on this channel we discussed the role of abstraction in the context of constructing software. Abstraction enables laziness by hiding details that are unimportant or irrelevant to the problem at hand. This is a powerful and beautiful idea because it gives the appearance of providing programmers with a great deal of leverage against complexity. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. The problem is that at some point if you are going to ship anything someone has to worry about all those hidden details. And this is typically when people get into trouble.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit overcommitted at the moment, which means my leisure writing has taken a back seat. Here’s a nice image to hold you over.

Thanks to the model for posing for this photo, and to Nikon for lending me the camera with which to take it. I’ve gotta say, this camera takes really good pictures!

Honestly? I didn’t think this would work. But I tried it anyway, and it is six kinds of awesome.

• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sugar
• Two heaping tablespoons “green tea slurry” made from cheap green tea powder.
• About a cup of blackberries and blueberries, crushed by hand.

Whip for a bit in a blender before adding it to your ice cream maker (if, like me, you are a cheap bastard and have a cheap ice cream maker).

The odd thing about this recipe is the purple berry juice cancels out the green color of the tea slurry, and you end up with something that is sort of an unearthly glowing ultra-white. It has the bracing bitterness of green tea, mixed with the tartness of the berries. It’s great.

Now, here’s the thing about dwarves: they’re not like you and me. We wake up, we shower, we get dressed, we go to work, and while we’re doing all this, sometimes we get an idea. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” we think, and then we get out of the shower and towel off and we don’t write the book. “I should create a mosaic depicting Washington’s terrible defeat at Fort Necessity,” we think, and then, almost always, we reach our bus stop, we step off the bus, and we go on with our lives.

Dwarves aren’t like that. They have lives, and jobs, just like us, and they have normal ideas that don’t come to pass, just like you and me, but sometimes — often enough that the Dwarves have five different words for it, all of which translate, roughly, to “touched” — a dwarf gets a particularly strong idea, an idea that he can’t shake. “I should write a cookbook that focuses on pomegranates,” the dwarf will think, “and I will make the cover from pomegranate peel. And the ink will be made from pomegranate juice, and the pages shall be made of the finest papyrus, and the pages will be bound with a single thread of gold. And the book shall be called ‘Berrydowned’.”

The dwarf’s co-workers might say to him “Hey, Arast, why did you stop hammering?” and Arast will say “Fuck you,” walk in to a grocery store, kick everyone out, and spend the next nine hours obsessively examining each pomegranate to find the perfect materials for his cookbook. That’s what dwarves are like.

Abstraction is the activity that lies at the core of much of computer science, and computer hardware and software engineering. Understanding what the word means is thus at the core of understanding both how and why computing systems are are put together and evolve the way they do. It is also a large part of the key to understanding the mind of the engineer, because more than anything an enthusiasm for clever and aesthetically pleasing abstractions is what drives people to become engineers in the first place.

So what is abstraction anyway? In my mind the you can boil it down to the following overly simple definition: Abstraction is the act of giving a short and easy to remember name to something that is long and complicated. By doing this, you absolve yourself of needing to remember the long and complicated stuff.