Movies I Hate: War of the Worlds & Gone in 60 Seconds

Hooray, filler! I only have one "Top Ten List" on Netflix, and it is titled Movies I Hate. Here are two of the members of that list. Enjoy.

War of the Worlds

0.5 out of 5 stars

Never before have I sat in a movie theater and actually wished that a scene would turn out to all just be a dream. But as I sat through the transcendentally bad denouement of this movie, I realized that if Tom Cruise woke up, and it was just a dream, and he was really dying of pneumonia, I would forgive everything this movie had put me through. I would forgive the fact that our so-called protagonist is a lousy father and totally unsympathetic character. I would forgive the fact that tanks and helicopters can't take down a Strider, but apparently Tom Cruise with a couple grenades can. I would forgive the fact that each time Dakota Fanning screamed, I involuntarily squirted a little bit of urine into my pants from the horror.

It was not to be, and unless I blacked out momentarily from the sheer idiocy, the scene was not, in fact, a dream. If I end up an alcoholic five years from now, this movie is at least a little bit to blame.

Gone In 60 Seconds

0.5 out of 5 stars

What is the one reason we tolerate all the horrible plots, awful dialogue, and wooden acting in movies revolving around cars? Why, it's because we get to watch cars run into each other! So if you're going to make one of these movies, which element should you NOT remove? I'm no expert, but I would go with 'cars running into each other.'

To this day I am at a loss for why anyone thought it was a good idea to give this movie a plot stipulating that none of the sexy cars the characters drive can be smashed to smithereens. That was all it had going for it. Instead all we get to see is some police cars hitting scenery, and everyone one of those is followed immediately with a shot of the bumbling policeman appearing from the wreckage unscathed. Because, y'know, if someone got hurt, Nick Cage might be morally responsible (gasp), and how could we root for a washed-up felon then?

This movie also subjected me to the worst scene involving dirty talk and car parts I have ever witnessed. Really just one of the worst scenes of any type. It's been about five years, and I'm still angry.

89.3 The Current and the Mysterious Non-Expanding Playlist

Let me say this much up front: I still love The Current. I still have the dial on my car tuned there permanently, I still listen to the podcasts when I get a chance, I'm still a member. I'm saying this because the rest of this post is going to sound like Current-bashing. I still think it's a wonderful station - I just don't like the direction it feels we're heading.

A short primer: A few years back, a magical public radio station was born. It billed itself as "the antiformat" station, gave the DJs a massive amount of freedom, and played music that was always fresh, varied, and exciting (and usually quite good besides). Then, somewhere along the line, someone decreed that certain songs needed to get certain amounts of airtime. DJs started being told what their playlists should contain. One DJ quit over the issue. And people like me started wondering why the same song was playing every day on my 20-minute commute. Not that it's a bad song, just... I don't need to hear it every single day. I don't need to hear any song every day.

But, rather than complain anecdotally, I decided to use the power of numbers. The Current makes a massive history of their playlist publicly available on their website, dating back to 2005. So I wrote a screen-scraper in Python to pull all the songs off the site and store them in a sqlite database, which I could then run queries on and make pretty spreadsheets and graphs.

On methods: I tried to normalize all the data before storage, such as stripping non-alphanumeric characters and converting to lowercase letters. This helps increase correct matches. I also ran queries against songs grouped by (artist, title) to avoid false matches on title alone. I don't think I screwed anything up, but I have no formal training in statistics, so no promises. All code used to collect and analyze the data, as well as the spreadsheets and graphs of the results, are available for download under the GPL here.

The question I wanted to answer was "is The Current's playlist shrinking, and how badly?" Generally speaking, a "good" playlist should play many different songs, and not play any particular songs too frequently. The challenge is to coax a subjective measurement like "good"-ness out of a massive pile of song listings.

The first measure I have is the "unique song ratio" - that is the number of distinct songs played in a period of time compared to the total number of songs played in that time. So it should be a fairly good measure of how much variety a playlist is offering. Higher is better - it means of the total playcount, there is a larger selection of songs played.

The numbers themselves are somewhat arbitrary, but there's a pretty clear and shocking trend visible here. Somewhere near the end of '07, things take a massive dive. The ratio over a week, which was hovering around 0.9, drops to nearly 0.6. It makes sense that the ratio over a month is lower all along - over the course of a month, it becomes much more likely that the song you're playing has already been aired. But when the giant dip in the graph levels out, the ratio over a week has leveled out right around where the ratio over a month used to be. That can't be good.

Similarly, we have average song plays, or the number of times a typical song will be played over a period of time.

That same programming shift is visible here, peaking at an average of 2.5 plays per song per month and leveling out over 2.

Of course, if The Current played every song exactly twice a month, I wouldn't have much room to complain (I might wonder if the director of programming had some nuerotic tendencies, but that's a separate issue). My concerns lie more in if certain songs are being overplayed. To further address that, let's measure the maximum playcount - the highest number of times any one song is played in a period of time.

Again, the same trend is plainly visible. And this time, the numbers themselves are troubling. The recent end of the graph is somewhere between 60 and 70. That's enough to play the most popular song for a given month more than twice a day, every single day. The weekly count is up near 20, which is almost three times a day for that week.

So... ouch. This isn't just a minor tweak to programming. To me, this looks like a shift in the very identity of the station. And I don't think I like the new Current as much as the old one.

I don't want to get too hyperbolic. I'm sure these numbers would still look very good put up against a Clear Channel subsidiary, or really just about any commercial station. I would have loved to compile some numbers from one of those stations to have a good laugh, but sadly I couldn't find any that made old playlists available. If you know of one, I'd be interested to hear.

All the complaints flying around are not because we haven't counted our blessings - it's because we know just how lucky we are, and we're afraid we're slowly losing our treasured station to the mainstream. So no, it's not the end of the world, and I'm not convinced 89.3 has sold out to The Man just yet. But I used to describe The Current to my friends as "single-handedly saving radio." And I'm starting to wonder if I can still count on them for that. Maybe it's time to lay the responsibility in Triple J's hands.

Postscript

I want to close with one more analysis. Curious if drive time or other factors would affect the playlist at all, I ran a set of queries for the same uniqueness ratio as above, but now broken up into two hour time slots throughout the week (and yes, I included the weekend, whether that's good or bad).

The orange line along the bottom is the monthly value, included just for reference. As you can see, most of the time slots follow the general trend towards less variety very closely. There are three slots, however, that don't: those from 4AM through 10AM. The Morning Show runs from 5-9AM. Strangely, the 6-8AM slot actually takes an upturn as everything else heads down. Did they ramp up their eclectic selection in reaction to the station's overall homogenization? I don't know. At any rate, woo yay Morning Show! Too bad it's ending forever in a week.

Visualizing sorting algorithms

I think sorting algorithms are cool. What? You're leaving already? But you only just got here...

It's true, I think sorting algorithms are cool, and not only because I'm a huge, massive nerd who sometimes spends weekend evenings coding for fun. I think they're cool because they're one of the places where the theoretical side of computer science can almost be concretely realized.

Visualizations of sorting algorithms not only make the process easier to grok, they sometimes look really cool. I like things like the Mandlebrot set because it's beauty from a totally theoretical source. By providing a simple set of rules for how the output should display and letting the computation run its course, one can create art.

So, when Grinnell's CS department decided started looking for a new logo, and John Stone brought up the idea of sorting a list of colors visually, I immediately liked the idea. Two Grinnell students, David D'Angelo and Soren Berg, had spent the summer implementing a Scheme console in Inkscape, and had recently given a very impressive presentation on their work. So I decided to give the idea a go with Inkscape and Scheme.

The resulting code can be found here. I tried to stick close to the functional paradigm, so you end up passing in a bunch of functions: most importantly, a function which takes a list and performs one "round" of sorting on it. In the examples here, I've tried to use "rounds" that take roughly n time. So with the simpler algorithms, it's one pass through the list. With quicksort, it's picking one pivot and moving everything else to one side or the other. And so on.

A visualization of mergesort that I made with this has been accepted as the new Grinnell CS logo, and will presumably be making an appearance on the website sooner or later.

Enough exposition! Let's move on the the results.

Insertion Sort

Well, we had to start somewhere...


Pretty straightforward, no? We start with a randomized list of colors on a gradient between black, Grinnell Red, and white. Each pass, we pull an item off the unsorted group and run through the sorted list to find the right spot for it. It works, and it's simple, but it's kinda dull and pretty slow.

Here's the same sort without the black borders, for your aesthetic enjoyment:

Merge Sort

Now we're talking. O(nlogn), wooooo!


Each black border represents a sorted list (in the beginning, every list of one is sorted, because it only has one element). On every pass we merge these lists by twos, until we only have one list left.

Here's an un-bordered merge sort:

Quicksort

Everyone's favorite fast algorithm that's still O(n^2).


On each pass, a list is split into three lists: an arbitrary pivot, and all items less than and greater than that pivot. You can see divide and conquer at work here: on the first pass there is just one pivot created. By the second, there are three: the original, and one pivot picked out of each of the sublists. In contrast to merge sort, here it is when we have a plethora of one-item lists that the sort is done.

One without borders:

Bubble Sort

That's right! A very special treat for you all!



Remember kids, just because it's kinda pretty, doesn't mean it's a good sorting algorithm.

Other Stuff

The cool thing is that now that I have my framework written, it's relatively easy to plug in new ideas. Following are a couple examples that I wrote up just recently.

Quicksort on a value-only gradient.



Quicksort on a list across the entire range of hues. The previous examples sorted by a simple sum of the RGB values of each color. For this one, I wrote a new comparator that sorts by the Hue part of HSL and used that for the sorting instead.



Mergesort on the same list of hues. Yes, I realize these are obnoxiously bright.



Okay! That's all for now. Hope you have enjoyed this, and maybe it's even inspired you to think differently about sorting algorithms for a moment. I may get inspired to mess around with these more in the future, who knows. I feel like this is only brushing the tip of the iceberg as far as the potential of scripting in Inkscape goes. Another promising route is to use David and Soren's library of transformation functions to do cool things to the items in the lists after they've been created, or in relation to their stage in the sorting cycle. And this list-based approach could probably be applied to things besides sorting. I'm off to research entropy...

How Bulk Political Mailing Should Be Done

A few days ago, I came across a real gem of a political mailing from the Republican Party of Minnesota. To a casual observer, it might just look like a sad smear attempt by a party hijacked by reactionaries and lacking any real substance. But I saw beyond the partisan hackery, and realized that this mailing had far more potential. It could be something truly great. And behold, with some scissors and glue, I made it so.

Before

After


For best results, read in your best Dan LaFontaine voice (and watch a preview or two in his memory).