So he got a bunch of masters together, hooked them up to some specialized equipment, and analyzed their forms. He found that many of the masters’ styles had been subtly affected by life on the tournament circuit. They were delivering the most “correct” kicks as defined by their own professional standards, but not necessarily the strongest kick. The doctor very politely informed the masters of their flawed techniques via microphone, from behind a locked door.

It’s much the same with my writing. I’ve become very good at writing in a particular style for a particular audience, easily throwing around words like “psychophysics”, “subtending”, and “non-parametric”. This made for a great dissertation (trust me, it was awesome), but it’s been ages since I’ve written for a non-scientific audience, and I can feel it.

My new job is in a much more applied field and we produce content geared toward a much wider audience. One of the first things I did on the job, aside from gleefully order a $3,000 work computer, was to write a white paper. White papers aren’t like peer-reviewed research articles. I wasn’t beholden to the style or conventions of a particular field or journal, and I had tremendous flexibility while writing it. It was difficult at first; no standard definition of the problem to fall back on for a first sentence, no literature review to slide into, hardly any methodology to eat up space. But gradually I began to lay the words down. One thought followed another, things started clicking, and most comforting of all, as I began to write out my initial ideas, new ones emerged.

The draft was well-received. “It was a pleasure to read, seems like you had a lot of fun writing it,” said my supervisor. A few days later, as we were editing a draft of a different project, he said, “Don’t be afraid to shoot down my edits. You’re a better writer than me.” It was nice to hear, but the truth is that I don’t feel like I’m writing as well as I was five years ago.

If my graduate education taught me anything, it’s that the best way to improve is to do. It also taught me that the much-vaunted flexibility of the academic schedule just isn’t for me. My days had too little structure, my workload was too erratic, and I never seemed to find time for things like writing. Now that I’m on a more standard workday I find that I really like it. Far from being constrained by the standard workday, I’m more productive than ever. So here’s hoping that I’ll find the time to do more things like this.

I promised myself that there would be no new major purchases until my dissertation is complete. And then there was a sudden and somewhat unexpected inflow of extra cash, and well, you know how it goes. I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Sceptre LCDTV (42″, 1080p, and more HDMI inputs than I know what to do with). I’m very pleased with it, especially given the bargain basement price. Let’s hear it for no-name brands that deliver on their fundamentals.

There is, however, one tiny problem. A very tiny problem. The TV has one “stuck” pixel. In most practical viewing conditions I’ll never, ever notice it; it’s one malfunctioning pixel in a field of over two million. It’s only visible when the screen is completely black, and even then, I’ve got to be looking for it. It’s no big deal, and not worth the hassle of boxing the whole thing up and sending it back to Newegg.

Still, it’s there. And though it may not materially impact my viewing experience, I will always know. There are various ways to cure a stuck pixel, from physically “massaging” the area to flashing images on the monitor to try to “scrub” it out. The effectiveness of these methods varies from device to device, which is why I am absolutely galled—galled, I tell you—to find that some people are actually charging for image-flashing software. Software which, let me emphasize, may not even work for your particular pixel problem.

So here’s LCD Scrub, a “pixel scrubbing” program that I’m releasing for free. It was built in Processing (easily, I might add), and the source code is included. Here are the details:

• Start the application and simply move your mouse over it to display a handy help pop-up.
• LCD Scrub can display several solid-color screens: black, white, red, green, and blue. These are handy for checking your screen for any stuck pixels. If a pixel appears black on the white screen setting, that pixel is likely “dead” entirely.
• The “color cycle” mode will rapidly flash between black, white, and random colors. This is the mode that will hopefully “unstick” your pixels. At the least, it will remove any burn-in from your screen. Warning: could totally cause a seizure.
• The speed of the color cycle mode can be adjusted with the up and down arrow keys.
• Zip file includes versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you don’t have a convenient way to hook up your computer directly to your TV, I’ve also included a plain video of the “color cycle” setting. Stream away.

I’d recommend running the color cycle mode (or looping the video file) for an hour or two to see if that fixes your stuck pixel. I make no guarantees about the effectiveness of this software, nor will I be held responsible in the highly unlikely event that the software damages your screen. LCD Scrub has so far failed to unstick my pixel, but then again, I haven’t run it for a decent length of time (my screensaver kicked in). My pixel may come unstuck simply through repeated use of the TV. I’ve seen it happen. In any case, here’s hoping this little tool helps you out.

The departure from his beloved company, the impending biography, these felt like the actions of a man who knew the clock was ticking faster. Still, when I read the news—on my iPhone, incidentally—I was shocked. Even now, I’m surprised at how strongly the news has affected me. He was a once in a generation talent, an improbable mix of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John Lennon, all neatly packaged in casual jeans and a black turtleneck. It will be many years before we see his like again, assuming we are very lucky.

Years before I finally bought an iPod, then a Macbook Pro, then an iPhone, and then an iPad, I found him fascinating, as many people do (even the people who claimed to see him for the elaborate dog and pony show he “really” was). I’ve spent many hours, too many really, trying to figure out what made him so compelling. I think it’s that he was the guy who insisted. He insisted that a computer needed to be, indeed should be, both powerful and beautiful. He insisted that there was a better phone waiting to be invented. He insisted that mice were the future, and then he insisted that they were the past. He insisted that details were important, and he made it his job to perfect them. He insisted that technology empowered people, not the other way around.

I can’t claim to have been one of the faithful. I have no stories about growing up on an Apple IIe or a Macintosh. I’m not old enough to have stuck with the company through its dark days, but I am old enough to have watched him bring that company back to life. His products have changed my life. I truly admired him, and I am sad that he is gone. He was only fifty-six. That seems like hardly any time at all, but then again, I suppose that makes his life’s work all the more impressive.

In closing, take fifteen minutes to watch his 2005 Stanford commencement address. If you only have one minute, watch this instead.

Goodbye, Steve. Thank you for changing everything. Thank you for insisting.

First of all, if you’re going to print the values of each bar anyway, why are you bothering to make a chart? A table would do just as well. Secondly, that horizontal line representing the mean is redundant; there are only six data points here, so a summary statistic isn’t really necessary. Third, if you absolutely must include a summary statistic, you should choose the median, not the mean. We’re dealing with a very small data set, and one of its values is obviously an outlier. In this case, a simple mean makes for an uninformative summary since it vastly underestimates Apple’s retention number while greatly overestimating the competition’s. The median is a much better choice:

Now we can confidently say that most smartphone manufacturers have around a 30.5% retention rate, except for Apple, which maintains a remarkable 89% of its customers.

The graph of “smartphone switchers” is a more complicated affair:

Grouped bar charts are the Devil, alright? The alternating colors break the visual flow of the data and force the eye to work much harder to follow the story. Readers have to concentrate on colors and distances to pick up trends, rather than having them simply pop out. This data would be easier to follow if it had been split into two separate charts, one for “switching to” and another for “switching from”. Of course, it’s possible to arrange things nicely:

This plot looks a bit fancy, but it’s really just two bar charts laid out horizontally and then arranged next to each other. I’ve also made an effort to be a little more descriptive. Rather than “switching from” and “switching to,” I’ve opted to call these categories “leaving” and “joining”. Color acts as a secondary cue: no one needs to be told that green is good and red is bad. In this configuration, trends in the smartphone landscape jump right out at the reader. People are still switching to the iPhone in droves, seemingly at the expense of RIMM and Nokia, who by the look of the things are in some serious trouble.

Whew. Feel better? I know I do.

Gothamist loses ten points for using the word “eviscerates” in the article title.

As Colbert says just as the camera stops rolling, “Lovely.” I can’t imagine a more eloquent advertisement for Herzog’s new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

This degree of automaticity is remarkable. Touch-typing requires that you memorize the locations of twenty-seven keys controlled by nine different fingers, and that’s just the letters and the spacebar.  Most of us (whereby “us”, I mean people of my tech-savvy generation, give or take a decade) perform this complex dance effortlessly.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. Typing is a learned skill, if a ubiquitous one. How odd, then, that I barely remember learning it. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see what we get.

Stage Zero: Terror, Confusion

I can still vividly remember my family’s first computer, a hand-me-down from more affluent relatives. The computer was made by IBM, and like all computers at the time, it was a clunky gray box. It sported an eight-color CRT monitor with pixels the size of Legos, 64 kilobytes of RAM, and a floppy disk drive that read actual floppy disks. Its version of DOS used a shutdown sequence which asked the user to type “exit”, then to input a number corresponding to the color of a sticker on a surge protector my family didn’t own. This terrified me. Every single time I shut down that machine, I worried that an innocent slip of my finger would send the computer into nuclear meltdown. I mean, who knew what powered this thing? Look at all the keys, for God’s sake. What kind of lunatic would arrange letters that way? I was sure the keyboard alone held enough power to reduce our house to nothing but an oversized burn mark. Needless to say, though I do recall typing a couple of school projects on the thing, I wasn’t very good at it.

Stage One: Kremlinology

I’m in middle school, I think. I had signed up for a class called simply, “Computers”, and I was really enjoying it. In addition to learning the basics of how to use a computer and some very (very very very) elementary programming, students also had the option of learning to type. My memories of this time are jumbled and hazy. I believe the typing lessons were self-guided. If by the end of the semester you thought yourself sufficiently skilled, you could take The Typing Test. The Test was simple, or so I’d heard from other students: the teacher would come over to your computer, they said, place a cardboard box over the keyboard and your hands, and make you type. I, for one, did not believe that The Typing Test existed. Typing was something done by adults, who had jobs. In fact, I knew there were adults whose entire job consisted of typing. I had seen it in movies, like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, starring Whoopi Goldberg. Surely, our teachers didn’t expect mere children to be capable of the sort of skills that could get you into trouble with the KGB.

At the end of the semester, a couple of industrious students did, in fact, take The Typing Test. It was like watching a magic trick.

Stage Two: Swimming Upstream

My grandfather tried to give me typing lessons. From out of his vast archive of collected stuff, the place we referred to simply as “the office”, he produced an electric typewriter that had been branded as “travel-ready”, in the sense that it had a handle, and you, presumably, had the upper body strength of a Ukranian field hand. In the depths of the office, my grandfather also found a manual on learning how to type. I remember that it contained the sentence, “Strike the key quickly, as if it is red-hot!” No matter how quickly I struck the keys, however, every letter reverberated through the house like a gunshot. Well-intentioned as my grandfather’s lessons were, I was already falling for computers in a big way, and had little interest in learning how to use this archaic, phenomenally loud machine.

I’m fairly sure I’m still in middle school at this point. What I know for sure is that I’m in Mrs. Salmon’s Advanced English class, and Mrs. Salmon expects all final drafts to be typed, presumably because her teachings are so Advanced. By this time my family has upgraded to a more modern Packard Bell computer. It’s fast enough to run Windows 3.11 and has a great copy of Corel WordPerfect on it. Thus I sit in my family’s perpetually cold, finished basement, hunting and pecking my way toward the completion of my last paper for her class. As I enter the third hour of meticulously transforming my handwritten rough draft into a ten-page typed final, I know with perfect certainty that I hate Mrs. Salmon. I content myself by mocking her name. While most students dwelled on her obviously hilarious surname, I found myself fixated on the “Mrs”. Who on Earth would ever consent to marry this sadistic slave driver?

Every paper I typed for school was set in Times New Roman, bold weight. This served two functions. One, our printer wasn’t a very good one, and unbolded characters invariably came out looking insubstantial and hard to read. Two, bold characters take up just slightly more space than regular ones, meaning that I could type shorter papers without having to obviously fudge the margins or the line spacing. This was probably my earliest lesson in typography.

Stage Three: The Harsh Tutelage of Ms. Plural

Junior high. I must have discovered the internet at this point, as I remember being a fairly competent hunt-and-peck typist by this time. All this really did for me was reveal my shortcomings: I wasn’t as fast as I wanted—no, needed—to be, long words felt like a waste of time, and having to look at the keyboard every time I wanted to type made it difficult to multitask. I wanted to do things properly, so I willingly enrolled in a typing class. Like everyone who took the class, I expected a light workload, an easy A, and a practical skill at the end of it. What I hadn’t bargained for was Ms. Plural.

Some people feel that the institution of tenure should be abolished. Had these people ever met Ms. Plural, they would have found their mascot. From what I could gather, she had been teaching typing long before computers had entered her classroom. They seemed to confuse her to the point of visible fear, but she was too stubborn to try to learn about them. In any case, she was utterly unequipped to teach with them. For instance, she was absolutely terrified of computer viruses. We were prohibited from so much as changing the wallpaper on our desktops, lest this be mistaken for the influence of some nefarious hacker attack. She would blame virtually any standard computer process, normal or otherwise, on viruses. In what I can only describe as a stroke of evil genius, one student managed to install a copy of Grand Theft Auto, all seventeen 3.5″ high density disks of it, onto his computer. When Ms. Plural asked just what the hell he was doing, he claimed he was installing antivirus software. She bought the lie without so much as a second glance, which is remarkable given her otherwise short fuse.

Our typing exercises came from a manual that had clearly been written with typewriters in mind. We set our typefaces to Courier New, made sure our settings allowed for exactly 72 monospaced characters on each line, and dutifully hit Return when we ran out of horizontal space. Backward as it was, this all went swimmingly until the day Ms. Plural decided it was time to teach us the trick of centering a title on a page.

“There are 72 characters in a line. So to center text, count up the number of characters in your title, INCLUDING SPACES!! Then subtract that number from 72. Divide the resulting number by two, and you’ll know how far to indent the line.”

“Can’t we just press the little ‘Center’ button in Word?”

“Go to the principal’s office, young man.”

I swear to God, this happened. I also swear to God that I was not the young man in this exchange. In fact, I was never the young man giving her trouble. At this point in my life I was the very model of a teacher’s pet. I simply couldn’t bring myself to antagonize Ms. Plural, despite her breathtaking incompetence. My restraint did not, however, prevent Ms. Plural from calling my parents one evening to report that I was responsible for disrupting her class that day. I hadn’t disrupted the class, of course, I just happened to be sitting in the seat nearest to her when it happened. That was all the evidence she needed. My parents later informed me that “some crazy woman from your school” had called to bother them.

Over the course of that year, under the tutelage of an erratic, short-tempered, possibly narcoleptic instructor, I learned to touch-type. There wasn’t enough time in the year for me to properly learn the number row. It’s still a bit of a blind spot for me, but in the intervening fifteen years I’ve more or less pieced it together, and it turns out that we don’t use the number row all that often anyway.

Stage Four: Adaptation

I’ve had one further “learning to type” experience since junior high school, when I started my first real job out of college. The job involved a lot of data entry, and after my first week it became blindingly obvious that tapping in the data using the number row just wasn’t going to cut it. Two days later I had successfully taught myself the numeric keypad. Not that it’s terribly hard, mind you. I mention it because the numeric keypad is almost comically more efficient than the number row. I wondered how I’d ever lived without it. Within a few weeks I could enter data almost as fast as I read it, the quick, confident strikes on the keypad and Tab key ringing out as decisively as the typebars on my grandfather’s old electric typewriter.

Stage Five: Reflection

So last night, in the midst of a rather poorly timed bout of insomnia (guess who had to be up at 6:00AM today!), I idly thought to myself, “I sure do type a lot. How the hell did I learn to do that?” And now here we are.

I think that the act of typing is interesting because it is both mundane and miraculous, or put another way, it’s an incredibly complicated task that is now thought of as a basic, essential skill. You won’t get anywhere these days if you can’t type properly. That’s what my grandfather was trying to get at, in his own way; it’s why he enthusiastically dragged out a disused typewriter and tried to get me to learn. For him, typing is something done by doctors, lawyers, and men of import. In his mind he was preparing me for the life of a successful man.

Mrs. Salmon, too, was trying to prepare me. You could argue that we were maybe a little young to have an instructor demand that all submitted work be typed, but honestly, better to hit these things early rather than late. As a teaching fellow, I’ve seen the students who come to higher education woefully underprepared for the work expected of them. Mrs. Salmon was a thorough, methodical, and generally excellent teacher. Her typographical requirements were just an extension of that.

Ms. Plural, on the other hand, was not a good teacher, at least by the time I met her. She was alternately aloof, aggressive, unfocused, paranoid, or negligent. In other words, she was in the early stages of dementia. I’m sure that the other faculty noticed. I’m also sure that they were too polite to do anything about it. Unfortunately for all parties involved, her students both noticed and did things about it. We took advantage of her fluctuating mental state on the way to an easy A. As a student, I wondered how she could be so stupid. As an adult, I wonder how I could have been so blind.

This is not the place I expected to end up when I started typing today. Still, I’m glad I did this. I’m especially glad I could do this with a keyboard, typing out my memories as fast as I can recall them.

Let’s say you find yourself in a small, quiet room. The only point of interest in this room is the southern wall, upon which there are three light switches, all in the off position. One of these three switches operates a table lamp in a room located on the other side of the building. You can leave the switch room to go examine the lamp, but if you do, the door to the switch room closes forever. You can’t see, hear, or otherwise perceive the state of the lamp from the switch room. So, using nothing but these three light switches and your one trip out of the room, tell me which switch controls the lamp.

There’s enough information in the above paragraph to solve the problem, I promise (I’ll reveal the solution at the end of this post). Solving the problem requires you to think about it in a new, unusual way. If you want to win, you have to think outside the box. Take an intuitive leap. Think different. Shift the paradigm. Do some lateral thinking. You can describe this type of problem with whichever cliché you like best, but a psychologist would call it an “insight problem”.

An insight problem is fundamentally different from, say, an algebraic equation, a Sudoku, or a Rubik’s Cube. No matter how tricky the math looks, how many numbers are missing from the Sudoku grid, or how long the Cube has been sitting in a disused desk drawer in your attic, you can solve these puzzles. Given a complete understanding of the rules and enough time, a solution is inevitable. Insight problems, on the other hand, carry no such guarantee. If you can’t think creatively, you can’t solve the problem, and perhaps you never will.

The requirements of insight problems are different from those of non-insight problems. It should come as no surprise to you, then, that the feeling of solving an insight problem is different as well. This was studied back in the late ’80s. Researchers gave subjects sets of problems to complete, and asked them to rate how close they felt they were to the solution every fifteen seconds. Ratings for non-insight problems followed a predictable pattern; as subjects got closer to the solutions, they felt like they were getting closer. But the insight problems were different. As subjects chewed on the insight problems, their ratings never budged, until the moment the solution came to them. The subjects felt as if they were treading water, turning the problem over and over again in their minds, and then suddenly—bang, boom, eureka!—something clicked, and all at once the solution was obvious.

I can’t help but think of the recently released Portal 2 and its predecessor, Portal, as the world’s most successful insight experiments. Before I get into why, let’s take care of the preliminaries. Portal is a perfect video game (and Portal 2 is a near-perfect successor). I don’t say that often, but it’s true. As a game, as a story, and as an interactive experience, Portal lacks for nothing. It is thrilling every step of the way and sticks around for exactly the right amount of time. If you haven’t played it yet, you should buy it right now. It costs a measly ten dollars.

Portal is a puzzle game. The goal of each puzzle is to get from the entrance of each testing chamber to its exit. Your only tool is the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, a gun-like object that does one thing: creates a wormhole linking any two flat surfaces. If you’ve never played Portal, this video from an earlier version of the game is worth a thousand words.

With the portal gun in your hand, everything you’ve ever learned about moving through your environment, about the laws of physics, is suddenly open to negotiation. The portal gun breaks your assumptions about how the world works and gives you abilities you can only discover through experimentation. The point is this: playing Portal requires insight.

This stands in stark contrast to just about every other video game ever made. Games like Halo and Call of Duty may be dressed in fancy clothes, but really, all you have to do is murder your way to victory. In Mass Effect 2, an excellent game set apart by its top-notch writing and expansive atmosphere, you murder your way to the next dialogue tree. I’m not saying that you don’t need skill to play these games, or that you can’t play them creatively, but they require the sort of skill and creativity you’d employ to solve a particularly hard math problem, with guns.

There are other types of games, of course, games like Sam & Max or Curse of Monkey Island, that require a fair bit of creative thinking, but the creativity here is oddly constrained. It’s all about figuring out which quirky item from your quirky inventory you need to use on some oddly specific (quirky) part of the quirky world to progress to the next quirky set piece. So whether you’re playing Bioshock or Day of the Tentacle, the rules are clear, the win condition is readily apparent, and victory is, in a sense, inevitable.

Portal is an entirely different beast. There are no health meters, no command menus, no inventory screens, no neatly written mission objectives, and no hint system. You have one weapon, and it does exactly one thing; the game is all in how you use it. In most testing chambers you can see your goal from the very start. The only question is how you’re going to get there, and the only way to answer that question is to explore the chamber. So, you start looking around. You move through the chamber, perhaps taking note of which surfaces are portal-compatible and which aren’t. You might notice that there’s a button that needs pressing on the floor over here, and over yonder, on the other side of a bottomless pit, a big weighted box that could be placed on top of it. But how do you unite the box and the button? With your trusty portal gun, obviously.

Obviously. All you have to do is use the portal gun to…

Obviously…no, that won’t work. Maybe if you put one portal on this wall, and the other on the floor…

Obviously? No, clearly not. Alright, let’s see how things look when you portal yourself over to the box and…nope.

Obviously this is impossible. Who the hell designed this thing? This test chamber is unsolvable. You’d need an extra box, or another way to press the big button. But to do that you’d need to figure out some way to simultaneously get both of the…

Oh.

Oh!

And just like that—bang, boom, eureka!—the solution becomes obvious, all in a flash of insight.

The only thing harder than solving an insight problem is creating one for someone else to solve. You have to provide just enough information to make the problem solvable, but not so much that the problem becomes too easy or straightforward. Insight problems are very experiential. As I said earlier, solving them feels different from normal problem-solving. Unbelievably, the fine folks at Valve Software have created a game that generates the insight experience, that undefinable eureka feeling, over and over again (that Valve accomplishes this by meticulously testing and quantifying player behavior is another feat in and of itself).

Forget Portal‘s pitch perfect dark humor, its strangely immersive storytelling, or the wonderful look of the game. Portal, as a game, is about capturing that moment of insight. The reward the player receives for solving each test chamber is transient, unique, powerful, and entirely internal. No other game has ever offered something this pure to the player. No other game triggers this sort of feeling in the player’s brain. This, I believe, is what has made the Portal series such a wild success.

In closing, let’s return to our hypothetical light switch room. Using just these three switches and a single trip outside to check on the lamp, how can you tell which switch is the right one? Let’s label the switches A, B, and C for convenience. Turn on switches A and B. Now wait fifteen minutes or so. Turn off switch B. Congratulations, you’ve just solved the problem. Exit the switch room and go examine the lamp. If the light is still on, then obviously switch A is the right one. If the light is off, feel the bulb. Is it hot? If so, then switch B, which powered the lamp for fifteen minutes, is the right one. Finally, if the bulb is cold that means its switch wasn’t turned on at all, so switch C is the correct answer.

Science. It’s collaborative.