From DFD’s about page:

I have a long list of interests, among them writing, typography, music, theology, technology, and design.

From Wiktionary:

expertise: great skill or knowledge in a particular field or hobby

An issue that has vexed me as I have struggled to get this blog off the ground is that I really haven’t got very much to say. I read blogs such as Daring Fireball and 43 Folders and think to myself, “Why can’t I write that often? Why can’t I write informed opinions?”

Daring Fireball is a technology/design blog written by John Gruber. To a certain extent, Daring Fireball’s design influenced Dollars for Doughnuts’. 43 Folders is a blog about personal productivity written by Merlin Mann. Both of them write excellent and well-informed articles on their respective subject matters. Like them, I am a good writer and opinionated.

Unlike them, I have not been trying to write within my area of expertise.

I have a history of wishing that I knew about a particular subject matter simply because I found it fascinating. Fortunately I have friends who are good at teaching me about subjects that interest me without making me feel foolish for having thought that I knew anything about them in the first place.

One of my hopes when I started Dollars for Doughnuts was that I would grow in my knowledge about these subjects in the process. Unfortunately, you cannot learn how to program a computer by writing about computer programming. You cannot learn good design principles by writing about good design. Writing about these subjects would help me refine my skills and ideas if I already had some expertise in them. If I knew Objective-C, writing about it would make me research it, form opinions, and make decisions that I would not have had to consider if I had not written about it.

Out of the list from my about page, I only see two things that I’m really an expert in: music and writing. I also have a fair understanding of theology, though I certainly would not consider myself to be an expert in that field. If you look back in the (short) archives, you will see three articles: one on aerodynamics, one on the music industry, and one on narrative in video games. Fundamentally, these are about aerodynamics, music, and writing. The article on aerodynamics only fits when one considers that I work for a company making a simulator for radio controlled aircraft, and have a good working knowledge of the forces acting on an airplane (and there are a lot of them).

I always intended to write more: perhaps two or three times per week. Unfortunately, nothing caught my eye in the list from my about page that gave me enough material to write about. My most humbling moment in a previous blog came when I asked a friend what he thought of an article that I wrote about Apple’s “digital hub” strategy, and his response was that it was a good article, but that he had seen other more famous people say the same things first. Fortunately, Dollars for Doughnuts was always intended to be a site where I write anything and everything that catches my eye and see what “sticks” as I work my way toward making myself famous through my writing. I suppose that by not writing, I found out what definitely doesn’t stick, owing to my lack of expertise.

Imagine that an airplane is sitting on a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt moves backward at the same rate that the plane moves forward. Will the airplane be able to take off?

This is the subject of much debate on message boards across the Intertubes. Mythbusters even recently did a show on the subject,¹ but the debate rages on. What I find interesting about the debate is that the correct answer seems to be the least common answer given; and that the people who disagree with the correct answer neither have any clue what they are talking about, nor are they able to provide an explanation of their erroneous answer that stands up to any scrutiny.

Airplanes are very complicated machines, and in some ways they can be counter-intuitive. For example, if you want to trim an airplane to have more up elevator, you have to adjust the trim tab so that the tab points more down This seems counter-intuitive, but it works because the down-pointing elevator deflects air downward, which pushes the rest of the elevator upward thanks to the Newton’s second law of motion.

In fact, the common understanding of how an airfoil generates lift is based on an idea of equal transit time–that is, that the two halves of a parcel of air that is split by the leading edge of the wing must meet up again by the time that they reach the trailing edge of the wing. As a result, the theory goes, the top parcel has to move faster in order to meet the bottom parcel since the top surface of the wing is typically larger than the bottom surface. Because it is moving faster, the top parcel produces less downward force on the wing than the bottom parcel produces upward force. This theory is false–there is nothing that says that a parcel of air, once split, must rejoin itself at the same time at the trailing edge of the wing. If the theory were true, airplanes would not be able to fly inverted and symmetrical airfoils would not generate lift. Yet in spite of the theory, airplanes still can fly inverted and aerobatic planes are designed with symmetrical airfoils so that they generate the same lift whether they are inverted or upright.

The true answer is much more simple: airfoils are designed to deflect air downward through a combination of the shape of the airfoil and its angle of attack. The downward deflection of air causes an equal and opposite displacement of the airfoil upward, creating lift. This also causes a downward pitching moment on the airfoil as a result of the fact that some of the deflection occurs due to air that is deflected downward at the very trailing edge of the airfoil. Drag is also created because the air moving past the wing loses some of its speed in the process, again following Newton’s second law of motion.

Most of our experience with objects moving along the ground under their own power involves objects pushing against the ground. In a car, the engine turns the wheels, which push against the ground. The ground pushes back, which makes the car go forward. The same thing happens when we walk–our foot pushes against the ground, which pushes back, causing us to fall forward and forcing us to catch ourselves with the other foot.

An airplane operates fundamentally differently. The airplane moves through the air, not against the ground. The purpose of the wheels is only to reduce friction between the airplane and the ground. The propeller spins and deflects the air around it. The air pushes back on the propeller, which moves forward and takes the rest of the aircraft with it.

Can somebody tell me where the ground comes into the picture?

Consider a table setting with a tablecloth. When a magician (vaudeville entertainer, small child, et al.) pulls the tablecloth off of the table quickly enough, the dishes remain in place. The dishes have inertia, and if the magician pulls the tablecloth quickly enough to overcome the force of friction between the dishes and the tablecloth, the dishes will stay in place due to their inertia. Now imagine a frictionless axle connecting the wheel to the airplane, which is sitting on a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt starts moving, and the wheels spin, but the airplane does not move. The treadmill spins the wheels, but no force is transferred to the airplane because there is no friction between the airplane and the wheels, and the airplane has inertia.²

In real life, there are no frictionless axles, so an airplane with no thrust would travel back with the conveyor belt. However, if you add thrust from the engine, the airplane need only overcome that friction force in order to travel forward. Once the friction force in the axle is overcome, the only friction force left to overcome in order to travel forward is the rolling friction between the wheels and the ground.

The only forces that keep the airplane in place relative to the conveyor belt is the friction between the airplane and the wheels, and the friction between the wheels and the ground.

No matter how fast you move that conveyor belt, the plane will take off as long as the engine has enough thrust to overcome the rolling friction and the friction in the axle with enough thrust to spare to get the airplane up to its takeoff speed. The airplane travels through the air, not against the ground. Always.

1. Notably, their test pilot was of the opinion that the airplane would not take off. [return]
2. There is an exception to this. Because we still have friction between the ground and the wheels, the airplane will move, but only if the treadmill does not move with enough force to overcome this friction. [return]

The music industry is destroying popular music as an art form. In turning music into a money-making machine governed by business decisions, most of the artistic merit in popular music is gone.

I can name, off the top of my head, at least a dozen obscenely popular bands and solo musicians who started between 1950 and 1980 whose music I respect for its artistic merit:

• Jimi Hendrix
• The Animals
• Bob Dylan
• Johnny Cash
• The Doors
• The Police
• Eric Clapton
• The Allman Brothers Band
• The Doobie Brothers
• Carlos Santana
• The Beatles
• Pink Floyd

Not bad, eh? There are about a bazillion more; those are just the first twelve that came to mind. Note that ALL of these musicans were extremely popular in their heyday and continue to have significant followings now.

Contrast that with my list of obscenely popular bands and solo musicians between 1990 and the present whose music I respect for its artistic merit:

• Dave Matthews Band
• OutKast
• ???

Popular music has ceased to be an art form and has become an engineering effort. How many people buy an album based on the fact that there are one or two good songs on it? Clearly the industry is oriented around lumping together one or two marketable songs with nine or so other ones that have been slapped together in order to sell an hour-long album. Occasionally you hear whispers on the Internet about hot albums that would change everybody’s world, except that the labels can’t find a good radio single to use to market it, and so the whole project is canned. I wouldn’t put much faith in whisperings on the Internet, except that some of these whisperings have been accompanied by bootleg copies of these unreleased albums.

The industry has turned music into a commodity. One of the definitions of a commodity is that product from one source is indistinguishable from a product from another source; a kilogram of copper is a kilogram of copper, regardless of which mine it came from. Music has been made to be the same way. Take away the distinctiveness of the individual voices, and I challenge anybody to distinguish Britney Spears’ output from Christina Aguilera’s. Every bubblegum pop song is the same, every emo song is the same, and every country song is the same. There is a narrowly defined set of genres and few artists dare to step out of the genre that made them famous, lest the audiences who made them famous defect for a different musician who can give them the sound that they demand.

This is a bigger problem than it sounds. Very few classical composers wrote in the same style and mood all the time; of those who did, only one of them is truly famous and he is Chopin (he wrote almost exclusively solo piano music). Imagine if J.S. Bach wrote exclusively concerti; the Brandenburg Concerti were certainly nice, but part of the reason for that is their scarcity. The Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (a catalogue of all of Bach’s works) contains about 1,100 entries; only nineteen of these are concerti. Imagine if Bach had tried to compose 1,100 concerti. I doubt that he would be the celebrated composer that he is today.

That’s just the problem—how many songs has My Chemical Romance come up with outside of the emo genre (I know that Gerard Way doesn’t consider his band to be emo; I also know that he is wrong)? Yet they’re one of the most popular bands on the planet right now. They may write & perform emo very well, but let’s acknowledge them for what they are—a one trick pony. This is true of a large number of popular musicians today.

This is pervasive throughout the industry today, and the seeds of it were going on even in the first, longer list of musicians above. Eric Clapton plays many different styles of rock, but he still just plays rock. At this point, you can argue about how narrowly you define a given style, because at a certain degree of granularity, even My Chemical Romance plays different “styles” of emo. I do not see them that way, but one could argue that they do. Going back again, Jimi Hendrix likewise only played rock, but a crucial difference here is that at least his songs were more easily distinguishable from each other stylistically than much music today.

Part of this is because of the popular combination of musician and composer. Beethoven may have written a number of different styles of work, but he was not the one performing this work, either. Even in the classical world, you see that performers are usually locked into a particular style of performance. I wouldn’t expect Renée Fleming to be a backup singer on Christina Augilera’s next album because singing opera requires a markedly different technique than singing pop does. Likewise, I wouldn’t expect Joshua Bell to enter the county fair fiddle contest. I suspect that the fact that composers of popular music usually also perform their music considerably limits their possibilities in terms of variety. Yet even this argument breaks down at some point, because any major orchestra will play a large symphony and a small chamber work on the same concert, even though these genres of music are markedly different.

The other half of the puzzle is that the music companies have taken advantage of this pigeonholing in their marketing. The fact is that unclassified music takes more effort to sell. People know what they want and familiarity with a given musical product ensures that they get exactly what they want. I don’t take a box of Triscuits off of the shelf at the supermarket only to find that there is Ritz inside. I also don’t take a U2 album off of the CD rack so that I can listen to speed metal. I buy a U2 album because I want to hear prog rock with social sensibilities, and that’s exactly what I get. The relatively simple taxonomy of popular music options plays right into the music industry’s desire to market music directly to its audience, and to make money. Unfortunately, this gets musicians locked into their markets and quality and creativity suffer as a result of this inability to experiment.

About five months ago, I stumbled across an animation featuring the characters of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and the comedy styles of The Fanatics. The visuals of this animation intrigued me, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. What intrigued me even more, however, was the premise of the game—you play the game as Phoenix Wright, a defense lawyer who takes on cases that ought to be unwinnable (a full review is forthcoming). This was the game that got me to purchase my first console since the Nintendo 64. The next day, I bought a pink Nintendo DS, Mario Kart DS, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney—Justice for All.

Narrative, of course, is not at all new to video games. The role playing game genre in particular is one well-known example of a type that is defined by narrative. Yet even in the RPG, the narrative is not the game itself. The narrative serves as a wrapper for the real action, which the player partakes in. Take Final Fantasy VII as an example. It has one of the better stories in video games, but the narrative is entirely interstitial. When a full-motion video is playing, the player just watches. When plot is revealed through dialogue, the player can only watch the cut scenes and press the X button to advance the dialogue. Yahtzee said that he felt as though he might as well pop in a random anime DVD and mash a few buttons on the remote control every few minutes.

Phoenix Wright is an example in which the game is the narrative. I strongly suspect that the development team relied heavily on the Choose Your Own Adventure series when designing the game. There is a strong difference, however, in that Phoenix Wright has two endings: either you win or you lose. This leaves the consumer with only one track through the narrative; this is somewhat akin to reading a novel. The difference is that you have a puzzle that must be solved in order to advance the plot.

Put in these terms, it is easy to see that the video game can be used as a narrative form in exactly the same way as a novel. In Phoenix Wright participation is essentially reduced to the same level as turning the page in a novel, but it’s there. Furthermore, your actions do in fact map to how the game progresses—you can either win or lose based on your response to questions and your ability to present the correct piece of evidence. However, if you do lose you have the opportunity to try again and so you can’t really affect the outcome of the narrative by your own efforts. It as though you portray a character in a play—you participate in the sense of saying the lines, but the lines are already written out for you. Clearly, it is not necessary to remove authorial intent to make a video game, because the medium is not inherently open-ended. Video games CAN be open-ended (à la Garry’s Mod or Crysis, to varying degrees), but they can also be linear.

I could easily imagine a great novel being made into a game. This is essentially what happens all the time, except that most of the stories that I’ve seen in video games are far better suited to trashy $3.00 airport novels than classics of Western literature. Imagine, however, a great novel converted to the format. Crime & Punishment: The Video Game could put the player in the shoes of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, and various choices could either advance the plot or send him to prison. Of course, at this point you really may as well just read the novel, but imagine if a new work on the same level of greatness as Crime and Punishment were written as a video game.

The problem is that right now, there is no such thing as great fiction in video games. The lack of quality fiction in video games has led to a widespread perception that the medium cannot possibly support great fiction. I counter that this is akin to citing all of the awful Hollywood summer blockbusters as examples that film can never be art. The difference is that film has counter-examples such as L’Avventura and The Graduate, whereas video games have yet to develop such specimens.

Roger Ebert famously said of video games that “There is a structural reason [that video games cannot be art]: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.” The problem with his argument is that participation in a narrative does not necessarily entail choice. Go back to the JRPG examples—virtually none of them offer any choice other than which side quests the player can embark on. The plot is fixed; it’s simply a question of how much of the plot that the character wishes to uncover. A video game could easily be made that forces the player to uncover all of the plot.

One thing I’ve noticed about software testing is that it’s like the tide. After three weeks of having little to do, the last week and a half have been non-stop head-under-the-water panic.

I have been known to be over confident in my opinions. Hence the name for my website.