Mike Battista’s Blog

I don’t complain much, but when I do, it’s usually about technology. I have an unfortunate combination of bad luck and high standards when it comes to gadgets. Literally, whenever I buy anything with greater complexity than lettuce, it has some flaw, either minor and only noticeable to my hyper-critical eye¹ or a major defects². At least nothing has outright exploded, though not everyone is so lucky (see: iPhone spontaneously combusts aboard flight). It’s tempting to become a cynical old ass, shaking my wooden stick (not a microchip in it!) and grumbling about how quality control has gone down the stinker and nothing works like it should. I’ve certainly given into that temptation a few times.

But think of it this way:

We are a bunch of animals. We were crafted by nature to root around in the dirt, find food, then go home and screw. Yet we’ve taken some of that dirt and, with nothing more than our grubby hands and abnormally large brains, we’ve made tubes of steel that can fly us through the air. We’ve burned sand until we have a slab of glass that allows us to have food delivered to us by poking at it. “Technology” isn’t some mysterious black toaster that pops out perfect gleaming gadgets. We’re literally grabbing whatever imperfect raw materials we find lying around the planet, and sticking them into arrangements that accomplish things no other animal can fathom.

Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But the people crafting our gadgets (and crafting the machines that craft our gadgets) are not magicians. They are humans, animals, maybe smarter than you or I, but only by a little bit. They’re working with limited time and limited resources. They get tired. Sometimes the best they can do is try pretty hard, and hope it’s good enough.

Thinking of it this way, it’s odd to complain.

Maybe a dead pixel on my phone’s screen “shouldn’t” be there, but a bunch of strangers managed to get me 614,399 working pixels that beam all of humanity’s accomplishments directly into my eyes. I can probably live with it. I can probably manage to enjoy everything that works despite the small parts that don’t.

There are exceptions; technologies that are defective by design (e.g., DRM, planned obsolescence) are inexcusable. The average gadget works pretty well though, and although it’s not terrible to strive for perfection, I also need a moment to shut up and revel in the the awesomeness of the imperfect magic people have managed to weave.

¹ E.g., backlight bleed on my iPad 2, suboptimal battery life on my Kindle, phosphor trails on my TV.

² E.g., cutting out audio on my iPhone 4S, a computer with a display that occasionally turns to grey fuzz, six dead Xbox 360s.

Recently, I decided to pop by the university and get a PhD. Since then, a lot of people have been asking, “do you feel any different now that you have a PhD?”

Well yes, of course I do. Whenever I insist that someone call me “doctor Mike”—whether it’s government documents, or my friends, or the lady serving me a shawarma—I get a nice little reminder that I am, in fact, superior to all the common people without PhDs. That’s a great feeling.

It also feels different knowing that I’m now qualified to force my opinion about anything on anyone. Also, I don’t know if you knew this (you don’t have a PhD, after all), but a psych degree comes with a free license to kill. It also makes you a god in the sack, lowers your THAC0 by 3, and allows you to glow when you get in a fight.

Actually, I set up a camera to record my PhD defense so you can see what it was like:

Err but for serious, being The Last Dragon a doctor is, for me, a relief but otherwise no biggie.

These past 6+ years of grad school have certainly been important to me, but my degree was only one project I was working on. It’s not what has defined me as a person. So I’m proud of checking one more thing off my list of accomplishments, sure, but it is only one thing.

As a polymathic sort of person, I get pleasure in pursuing a variety of goals. Reaching those goals is rewarding, but often secondary to the pursuit. I don’t feel different when I complete a multi-year project, because the ongoing learning and building I’d been doing all those years was already fulfilling the reasons for starting the project.

Now I can focus on some other pursuits more. Substantial ones like kicking ass at my job, publishing some of my research, and finishing up those half-completed novels that are sitting around, but also more nebulous ones like building relationships with kickass people, blogging, and contributing to the good of mankind.

I’m proud of my PhD though. Sometime I should tell you guys what my research is all about, because I was extremely lucky to be able to study what I actually wanted to study, and it turned out pretty cool. Until then, cheerio.

– Dr. Michael E. Battista, M.Sc., Ph.D., O.M.G.

Yesterday I saw a turtle squashed in the middle of the road. It’s not something you see every day in downtown London, so I figure it was an omen that it would be one of those days when everything that could go wrong would go wrong.

My first of two thesis defenses was scheduled for 1:00. I gave myself an hour after I got to school to have lunch and go over my introductory presentation. I’d written it the night before, but hadn’t practiced it yet. Last minute I guess, but I work best under pressure and there was much procrasturbation to be had.

When I picked up some sushi and a drink, the server made fun of my “bucket of coffee.” It’s true though, a venti is approaching a litre of friggin coffee. On my way back to my office, my labmate told me that I looked really chill. Which I mostly was, because all my preparation plans were in place, and all I could do was my best.

I got to my office, then flipped on my computer.

I didn’t know Apple computers could have a blue screen of death, but there it was: a blank blue screen. It was perfectly fine just 30 minutes earlier when I left the house, and now, it’s giving me sass with this blue screen. I reset it, and the blue screen was fixed! Except now it was this grainy rainbow screen of death.

I frantically Googled on my phone. I safe-moded and start-up-item-altered and make-verbs-out-of-phrases-ized as fast as my fingers would allow, but nothing that the internet suggested would help.

I took a moment to bite into my sushi. I say “bite into” because the salmon sashimi was this stringy unchewable mess. But as I stared at the spit-out wad of rancid meat, in the light of what was now a grey nonfunctional screen, feeling less than chill, a supernatural clarity came over me. I found myself reaching for a video adapter thingy. I poked it into a hole in the side of my laptop, then removed it.

No more screen of death. Like many grumpy people, my computer just needed something hard shoved into a random orifice.

I quickly loaded up my presentation. Even though I hadn’t worn a tie in a year, I let my fingers figure out how to tie it while I practiced my presentation at quadruple speed.

I got to my defense with sushi breath (I was out of gum, naturally) and a screaming bladder full of venti ounces of caffè. Of course, one of the people who needed to be there didn’t show up, so we started late anyway. But the bottom line is that I got through the presentation and the rounds of difficult questioning, and passed like a boss. Revisions, one more defense, then I’ll be a doctor.

The lesson here is that even when things go horribly wrong (in a first-world-problems sense, anyway), let them go wrong, and it will probably turn out fine anyway. They might even give you a PhD.