C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

I programmed this dice game to teach myself the JQuery library for Javascript, and to improve my Javascript skills. There will be many more features. If you think the current version is neat, you're really going to like it. I'm excited. And oh, yes, the visual design will also improve. But you know what they say: launch with the mimimum viable product.

Shout-outs go to my friends on the Lojban #jbopre IRC channel for their patience in answering my questions: rlpowell, chrisdone, kpreid, and Tene. Thanks to _jer for his professional tutelage and for hosting the webspace.

A poster in Ops at U-Con advertised seeking geeks to be interviewed, for an honors thesis about geek culture. So I emailed Rachel Yung at and signed up. If you self-identify as a geek, Rachel wishes you to do likewise. Here is a transcript of the interview.
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lo prami mo
doi pampe'o na mi dunku ko
na mi dunku ko
ca'o

Translated from Lojban back into English:

Love applies to which predicate variables?
Oh boyfriend/girlfreind/lover, imperative I am not anguished/distressed/emotionally wrought/stressed by you.
Imperative I am not anguished/distressed/emotionally wrought/stressed by you
continuative tense.

I'm bringing this up on my personal blog rather than my blog about Lojban because its lessons are broadly applicable to things that a lot of you are interested in, so I'd like to get your feedback.

Do you like my new icon? I made it after camgusmis talked me into being the cat-herder for Lojban's language debugging committee. (Yeah, a speakable human language has a debugging committee, is that not neat?) I don't possess expertise in linguistics or logic. I do not intend to arbitrate disputes over language, discuss linguistic issues, or even possess voting rights in the debugging committee-- just keep it moving. The Lojban word for "captain" is "jatna", pronounced "zhat-nah", but "Shatner" is my mnemonic device. Scotty, Spock and McCoy are the ones who know how to do things; I just keep them from sitting on their butts.

The job of herding cats is what I do with the vast majority of my free time, so I feel uniquely qualified. I define "herding cats" as "coordinating any project whose workers are true volunteers, are not obligated by compensation". (I feel the phrase is inappropriate to refer to paid employees, no matter how catlike you think software engineers are. You are not a cat herder if you have the power to fire or penalize someone. But that's another matter.) Cats show up only when they want to and are motivated by friendship and/or personal fascination.

What I am not qualified to do is design a constructed language. Just as in running a science fiction convention, my role is limited as follows:

1. Understand what tasks await doing, not necessarily knowing how to do them.
2. Assign tasks and track who is assigned to what.
3. Set deadlines and warn of their approach and arrival.
4. Keep current with everyone's contact info and preferred means of communication.
5. Talk to the volunteers a lot, asking for reports to check if they're active.
6. Seek replacements for the ones who went inactive or lost motivation.
7. Motivate active volunteers with vision, encouragement, small gifts, public thanks, or incentives tailored to their unique motivational drives.

And that, my friends, is herding cats. However, in the current traditional structure of a science fiction convention, there is a lot more that goes into being conchair, which is why I am not a conchair. It really is two totally unrelated jobs, which could be split. The second set of conchair responsibilities is:

8. Set the budget. ($$$)
9. Negotiate the hotel contract. ($$$)
10. Make long-term strategic decisions. What constituency to extract money from. What message to use to extract it from them. Where to best invest money to attract them. How to reduce the expenditure of money. ($$$)

"Oh, Matt, you can easily be conchair!" quoth he and she who have smoked crack and uttered a counterfactual statement.

The reverse side of that coin, to speak candidly, is that deeply savvy and wise decision-makers (tasks 8 through 10) do not always have sufficient personal availability to create and nurture a concom (tasks 1 through 7). Vital concom slots go empty, and we sort of coast along because we can't afford to have a leader who can create an active concom only to lead it right off a cliff. I am not speaking of any convention or any year in particular: it's fairly common.

In spite of being a cat herder, the reason I am not, have not been, and do not want to be conchair, is that I do not have opinions on 8 through 10 and money bores me. Paying attention to such matters would drain all interest out of me and make me want to GAFIAte. I would stab randomly in the dark at budgets, contracts and strategic decisions. I would be held responsible for the resulting failure, and I would be rightly blamed for having asked people to fail along with me. I will not, and constitutionally can not, evangelize anything that I don't believe in. When I mentioned this to Sal and Heather of Aegis Consulting, Sal remarked, "You don't like guessing, do you?" If I were to find out that those I trusted had staked my time and energy on a guess, I would be livid. So no, I can't evangelize guessing.

You may have noticed by now that my trust is of vital importance to me, and its dissappointment (to put it gently, I will not say "betrayal") is a recurring theme of this blog. I hear horror stories from avt_tor about conrunning politics in other regions, in which people actually compete to be in charge, and yet what an embarrassment of riches that must be. By contrast, in Michigan nobody wants to do anything. This is our harmonious blessing and lethargic curse. One issue with conventions in Michigan is that the number of people I trust enough to recruit as concom workers dwindles every year. You can't successfully build a concom if you say to people "Where have you been?" and "Have you gotten anything done?" as if to say "I don't have confidence in you." But it's true, I don't. As Head of Programming, there are two individuals to whom I say almost nothing but those things, every time I see them, because the success of my responsibility depends on it! I even tried adding someone to the "team" to shore up the task, and this third individual is doing nothing that I can see. (Don't worry, the vast majority of the programming team is completely present and it's going great overall.) Meanwhile I'm fielding inquiries about these tracks of the schedule and am helpless to do it myself since I know nothing about the topics. I feel I'm doing all I can as a cat herder, but at the end of the day, the cats are really in control.

I just keep reminding myself that the dysfunctionality is a necessary tradeoff for what I like so much about cat-herded groups.

This work is courtesy of the XKCD webcomic, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

To the man with a hat I could say {jo'a go'ira'o zo'o} -- "That's true for me too. (humorously)" The man without a hat is not entirely correct. In Lojban one can speak as illogically as one wishes to speak. But by pointing that out, I'm exhibiting the sort of detail-oriented pickiness the man with the hat refers to. :)

For Lojbanists, getting xkcd'ed is as good as getting Slashdotted, Dugg or Farked! That means the author of xkcd is expressing a sentiment similar to Groucho Marx's statement, "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
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The Lojban Festival was fun, despite the organizational train wreck of Philcon. We persevered and had the biggest and best gathering in the fifty-year history of this language project. I've put up photos on Flickr.

( First, the complaints about our treatment by Philcon. )( Second, praise for the Lojban attendees and our awesome time with each other. )

When a presentation is scheduled for the Sabbath and my expert presenter practices Orthodox Judaism, "Can he get up to the whiteboard?" ceases to be a metaphorical question. Some people literally can't write before 5:21 PM.

I've known copingwithcows for years, but didn't expect her to show up for the meeting of my local Lojban group this week! Who would have thought that she speaks so many words of Tolkien's Elvish (aka Quenya) and can get up to the whiteboard to scribble formulas for the Monty Hall problem? What fun. The regulars Neil, Jen, Bruce and Sean all managed to attend simultaneously. It was the largest gathering we've had all at once. Let me know if any of you feel an interest, by the way.

I made frozen coffee drinks for us all, this time containing coffee-flavored ice cream. Jen and I reported on the status of the Lojban fridge poetry magnet prototype, and the plan for the Logical Language Group Inc., of which I am a board member, to have a company print several hundred batches so we can sell them on the site.

We talked about which film to translate, out of the candidates whose filmmakers have offered them to us. I would still like to make a machinima of Fossil Games as a long-term goal, but currently Love and Plutonium looks like a front-runner.

We also translated something which came out as {mi na kufra le nu do vecnu le mi zargu}. If you know what that means, you're laughing right now.

Google just bought my favorite 3D drawing program, SketchUp, and made it available for free to everyone. This is the easiest and most intuitive way to create 3D models, with the possible exception of Second Life. It comes with a tutorial that will have you making models in no time. I used this program to create this illustration of a space station which I use as a visual aid to explain Lojban sentence structures.

Recently I made a model of a three-dimensional chess variant I invented years ago, named Hannibal. Click the pictures to see larger versions. Here it is perpendicular to the ground. Before I add the playing pieces, I want to tilt the board until it rests all three of its deepest points on the table.

I rotated it 45 degrees along one non-vertical axis and 45 degrees along the other non-vertical axis. As you can see, this still isn't level. Here's a geometry question: from the starting position shown above, how many degrees do I have to rotate it around each axis to rest all three points on the ground?

rikhei requested the English version of "I Am A Little Teapot of Borg" as a ringtone. I translated "I'm A Little Teapot" into Lojban, and this sound file (click here to download the MP3) is what I got when I translated it back into English. I'm not sure who laughs harder at this, rikhei or palindromeg33k. It might just be funnier than the Sesame Street theme song translated into Klingon. (I order you to immediately tell me the way to Sesame Street!) Resistance is futile. You will hear me shout. You will be tipped over and poured into Borg.