The State of the Onion

[VidWhacker (camels)]

Good evening. Welcome to my eighth State of the Onion speech. I only have two more speeches to go after this, and I'll be up to 10. You see, 10 is kind of a magical number for speeches. According to Sturgeon's Law, 9 out of 10 speeches are crap. After we get to number 10, we'll know which one of mine wasn't ... Probably number 9 or number 10 ...

So I'm giving you fair warning that this is probably going to be a lousy speech. Those of you who attended Damian Conway's Presentation Aikido seminar yesterday will be sure of it. You'll probably get more out of this speech than anyone else — mostly as a kind of negative example. You can just get out Damian's notes and start ticking off all the rules I've violated.

Now the particular reason this speech is going to be lousy is that I made up all my slides before I knew what I was going to talk about.

Well, OK, that's not quite right. I didn't make up my slides. I was lazy. That's a virtue, right? And I was Impatient. Plus I had the hubris to think that it didn't really matter what my slides say — I can probably wrap a speech around them anyway. Especially since there's only a 10% chance that it has to be a good speech.

So anyway, here's my first real slide. It's a picture of how Damian thinks.

[Maze]

As most of you know, Damian is very clear-headed and determined. He gets where he's going. It doesn't matter what the problem is, he'll find a way to solve it eventually. He may have to backtrack occasionally, but he's very goal-oriented, and knows how to backtrack gracefully. It's very good that we have Damian on the Perl 6 design team, because we need someone who thinks like that.

Here, on the other hand, is a picture of how well I think on Damian's level.

[AntSpotlight (camels)]

Yes, this is the famous Ant Spotlight screensaver. And yes, that is where I got all my slides from. And no, I didn't have a goal in mind when I picked them. Do you see any goals in this picture? Do you see any efficient search strategies? Do you see anything resembling speed here?

That's how well I think on Damian's level. On a different level, I think like this:

[Cloudlife, fast]

On this level, my mind is in a continual ferment. Things bubble up to the surface unbidden, and evolve in unexpected directions. Everything gets compared with everything else because the entire stew pot is bubbling like crazy. Well, maybe it's not like crazy. Maybe it is crazy.

One of the things that bubbled up recently was that the subject of this talk had to be screensavers. I didn't know why. Maybe I still don't know why. But be that as it may, that's what this talk is about. Screensavers, and why I have to talk about them today, and why I have to talk about why I have to talk about them today. It's a kind of recursive problem, you see.

Incidentally, this screensaver is a variant of Conway's Game of Life. No, not our Conway, the other Conway. Unless our Conway is the other Conway. Whatever, we'll keep our Conway. After all, he's TheDamian.

Anyway, the game of Life is sort of the prototypical example of a cellular automaton. A number of screensavers are based on cellular automata. I have great empathy for all of them, because that's how I think... I think...

[Critical]

On the other hand, my mind is like a screensaver that no one can ever look at, except maybe me, and God. People can't see the ferment in my mind. What they see externally has to be filtered through my verbal apparatus, which is actually quite limited. I often think that my verbal processor is a slow interpreter. My wife's verbal processor is a fast compiler. Actually, those of you who know Gloria will realize that she probably does her verbal processing down in the microcode. Or maybe it's just hardwired. She can read out loud faster than I can read silently. Or maybe it's just that she can talk faster than I can think. Or more likely, it's just that I think slower than she talks.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. This is how other people view my thinking. I spend a certain amount of time bouncing all over the cognitive map, then I'll perseverate in a particular area for a while, and then I'll take a flying mental leap to something that seems to the observer to be totally unrelated. They aren't unrelated, but they are long-range links. You know — all that six degrees of separation stuff. You need the long links as well as the short ones to make your graph work that way. There, my mentioning that is another example of just that sort of mental leap. This screensaver tends to look like a random walk generated by a person with attention deficit disorder. I don't have ADHD. I tend to perseverate and not get distracted when I should get distracted. If anything, I have Asperger's syndrome, or some kind of mild autism. My good friend Tom Christiansen, who does have ADHD, once said jokingly that I have "task-switching deficit" disorder. He's probably right on that. Certainly I seem to be stuck on this Perl thing. I've been stuck there for more than 15 years now. People think I make these long mental leaps all the time, but they're all in the scope of this one picture. In my mind, everything relates to Perl, one way or another. You'll notice this screensaver never jumps off the screen.

Another way to view this screensaver is that the long jumps are indicative of the ability to stay on task a long time. In that view, if you have attention deficit disorder, your thinking looks more like this, because you're changing directions faster than you want to.

[Wander]

People with ADHD have many endearing qualities, spontaneity not the least of them. But it is a disability, and the ADHD approach only gets you so far. More to the point, it tends to get you back where you were. Here we see a screensaver based on a random walk. It's actually rather stultifying if you watch it long enough. It's been shown mathematically that a random walk will eventually return to the place it started if you wait long enough.

Now, just because I say a random walk is stultifying to watch, please don't take that to mean that ADHD people are stultifying to watch. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'm just using these screensavers as talking points, as metaphors of life, but some of my metaphors limp. As we get older we realize that everyone has disabilities. That seems to be true of metaphors as well. They all limp. Except for the ones that are dead. Anyway, please don't anyone take offense at my free associations. Even if they're true.

You know how people are sometimes rude on Usenet or on a mailing list. Sometimes they'll write something that can only be taken as a deadly insult, and then they have the unmitigated gall to put a smiley face on it, as if that makes it all right. It doesn't, you know. Nevertheless, if I insult you with a deadly insult in this talk, please put one of those little smileys after it. :-)

Anyway, where was I. Oh, yes, random walks. And the fact that they're kind of stultifying to watch.

[Rorschach]

You could throw in a little symmetry for interest. In fact, there's already a special screensaver for that, which you can use if you want to find out if you've cracked...

Hmm...

Personally, Rorschach blots always look like butterflies to me. Or pelvis bones, I admit it.

Or Mecha warriors. And such. You could almost swear the designers of Japanese anime must use this program to come up with new ideas for various kinds of monsters. But it's still a random-walk program when you look at it. It's value to psychoanalysis comes from the bilateral symmetry, which psychoanalysts think will remind us of sex, for some reason. Probably has something to do with the fact that people are bilaterally symmetrical.

Pychoanalysts tend to have abstract hang-ups about sex (at least the Freudian ones do), but since we're not psychoanalysts here, why stop at bilateral symmetry? Why stop at random walks? Why not psychoanalyze ourselves with other kinds of free associations?

Which is precisely what I'm doing here. Another way of looking at this talk is that I'm psychoanalyzing myself in front of you, using all these screensavers as Rorschach blots to free associate with. Another way to look at it is that screensavers are sort of a poor man's LSD, without the bad trips.

By the way, I don't think there are any Freudian psychologists in the audience, but if you happen to be a Freudian psychologist, and were insulted by my earlier remarks ... well ... just deal with it ... repress it, or something ....

In honor of Freudian psychology, I should in all fairness point out that I am myself the subject a classical case of repressed memory. I don't remember anything from my fifth grade. It wasn't anything sexual (I don't think!), but I am told that it was one of these experimental open classrooms where you have to decide yourself what you're going to learn. That works well for these kinds of people:

[Maze]

One of the aspects of my Asperger personality is that I don't initiate things like that. I have impaired executive function, in modern terminology. I almost never initiate telephone calls. I almost never initiate anything, in fact. Funny, considering Perl, but nevertheless true.

The most telling example of that is when Deja first put up all the old Usenet news articles for browsing. My good friend Randal Schwartz went in and discovered that of the hundreds of articles I'd posted over the years, only one article was not a follow-up to some else's article. I don't initiate. I have no initiative. I guess that makes me lazy. Oh, well.

Anyway, I don't remember fifth grade at all. I did terribly that year, and completely blocked it out of my memory. I remember fourth grade and sixth grade just fine though. But then, I did well those years. It all fits. Case closed.

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