Dumping Ground

Since this blog is my dumping ground anyway, I suppose that it is a good a place as any to rant for a few paragraphs. Mostly I'm trying to prime the pump, as it has been for too long since I wrote anything of significance. The blog post ideas are starting to back-up again. Must write, or head will explode. That would be messy.

Rant. Right.

Living in a consumer-driven world has made us unforgiving, and raised our expectations to a level of impossible standards. Let me elaborate. A blogger I read (and enjoy) recently made a post about how his Xbox 360 died recently. However, he made a rather ungracious post about his experience, and what I felt was an unfair comparison of the new console to a bunch of older technology including DVD Players, VCRs, and the Atari 2600.

And this is the thing that makes me wave my hands in the air and scream in frustration. How can people even make these comparisons on reliability? The consumer mentality has us believing that everything new should be smaller, faster, quieter, better, sleeker, and 100% reliable. Everything must improve. There must be no sacrifice. If we get smaller, we can't get slower. If we get faster, we can't get hotter. If we get more impressive, we cannot fail. At all. Ever.

Bullshit.

As technology "improves" there has to be some sacrifice somewhere. Something has to give. As things get smaller, they get harder to put together. As things get faster, they get hotter. As things get better looking they get weaker. As things get more complicated, they become more prone to failure. These are unavoidable consequences of improvement. Once the initial improvement has been made, we can then work out the issues in later revisions. That is what revisions are for.

I think this all boils down to people not understanding that testing for failure is an imprecise and impossible task. Yes, impossible. There is no way to test for everything. You cannot test chaos. You cannot test unknowns. You can test everything you can think of, but you will never think of everything. You want examples?

Can structural engineers test for every possible weather condition on a building to ensure that weather will never compromise the structure? No. We can test theoretical models to ensure that it will survive realistic extremes. We can test scale models under reproducible conditions. But cannot build the thing, then test everything. And we can certainly miss a lot of tests on the way. Does that stop us from building magnificent and death-defying architecture? Not likely.

How about medicine? Watch an episode of House. While the show is obviously dramatic, highly inaccurate when it comes to the administration of medicine, and wildly into hyperbole, it does illustrate one thing: you can't predict everything. Only after everything normal has been attempted, tested, and eliminated do you find the one thing that was missed. The one overlooked, ignored, or unlikely combination that results in the rare condition.

So what do you do when you get a lemon? Do you complain because you are the unfortunate recipient of small percentage of failures? What if the failures aren't so small? Your outrage at the failure of a consumer product to live up to your expectations does nothing at all. You are yelling into the wind at best, spooking other consumers and creating a problem for the manufacturer at the worst. Chances are that they know about the problem. The first time something goes wrong there is some unlucky person who has to figure out why. And then figure out how bad the problem really is. And how much it's going to take to fix it. Sometimes it's cheaper to ignore the failure because it can't be fixed without crippling the business.

Just pray that person isn't you. And cut them some slack, they're only human.

(Parenthetical)

I have a deep-seated love of parentheses. It comes from my writing style being very stream-of-consciousness. I write the way that I think, and I think very much the way that I would speak. Or, perhaps it is the other way around; I speak very much as I think. So much so that I am sure that I sub-vocalize as I write, and even when I’m just thinking. It leads to other things, like talking to myself. I know it makes me sound crazy, but the monologue is already in my head, why not let it out.

I’m starting to digress, so I’ll try to get back to my point. I digress a lot. I do this because my mode of speech (and think) includes a lot of little asides and points of interest. I have to regularly stop and say something relevant, or irrelevant, or interesting, or pointless. So I drop a set of parentheses and put my aside in them, and then continue on my way.

I’m not the only one to do this. In fact, the more stuff I read on the Internet, the more I see this as a common trait among bloggers, and posters of all stripes. It’s gotten so bad, that it is almost anticipated that daily I will come across something that I dread: a set of nested brackets. As much as I love to use them, I try not to nest them (God knows that I fail sometimes). I just can’t stand them, they make the words just that much harder to read.

Types and Purposes

We are blessed by technology. In the days of typewriters it was hard to find punctuation that suited your basic needs, let alone your esoteric ones. Mechanical constraints and design limitations meant that it was not uncommon to be left with the bare minimum of punctuation marks. Quite often, typists would have to do without even such commonplace staples as the exclamation mark. We, however, have 101(+) key keyboards that contain more punctuation that we know what to do with. They even include 4 different types of brackets.

Each type of bracket has specific purposes within writing. They also have many specialized purposes across varied disciplines (although this itself may be another essay). Triangle brackets < > are used primarily in technical writing and special cases. Curly brackets { } (or chicken lips, as programmers occasionally term them) derive from math, and are (fortunately) seen little in the world of words. Square brackets [ ] show up as a multipurpose editor's tool, editing quotes and containing all sorts of bibliographic information.

This leaves only the poor parentheses to hold all of my asides and inner-most thoughts. Well, that's not entirely true. I could use the trusty double dash – the em dash – to isolate my ideas. Except that I've always felt that the dash brings out and emphasizes an idea, where the parentheses subdue and stifle the idea into an ignorable aside.

The problem is the aside within an aside. These are confusing and, for the most part, unnecessary. I've found that, with a careful amount of self editing, many of my asides can be worked into my main stream of thought. I manage this by re-organizing sentences, putting in comma breaks, and sometimes just deleting meandering and useless junk. This makes my ramblings easier to read, and reduces my overall use of parentheses.

Everyone can do this. No more should there be needlessly complicated and recursive writings. Simple reduce, reorganize, and relocate your parenthetical ideas and no more will you find yourself putting a bracket within a bracket. Leave the nested brackets for math and programming. Make your English easier to read.

I'm addicted to parentheses, but I'm recovering. Well, I'm trying (really!).