jessey.net

si-blog

May 2003

• 20 » The Matrix Transcribed

  Everyone is making blog entries about The Matrix Reloaded at the moment, so I thought I'd be a sheep and post too. I thought the movie was excellent, and a worthy sequel to the original. The story, such as it is, is a little hard to follow, and this may be because it should be considered in the context of the final movie in the trilogy.

  After discussing the movie with friends and family, one scene that people had difficulty with was the meeting between Neo and The Architect, toward the end of the film. To make it easier for people to understand what was being discussed, I have decided to reproduce this transcript of the scene:

  The Architect

  Hello, Neo.

  Neo

  Who are you?

  The Architect

  I am the Architect. I created the Matrix. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also irrelevant.

  Neo

  Why am I here?

  The Architect

  Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which, despite my sincerest efforts, I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here.

  Neo

  You haven't answered my question.

  The Architect

  Quite right. Interesting. That was quicker than the others.

  Other Neos on television monitors

  Others? What others? How many? Answer me!

  The Architect

  The Matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.

  Other Neos on television monitors

  Five versions? Three? I've been lied too. This is bullshit!

  Neo

  There are only two possible explanations: either no one told me, or no one knows.

  The Architect

  Precisely. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly's systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.

  Other Neos on television monitors

  You can't control me! Fuck you! I'm going to kill you! You can't make me do anything!

  Neo

  Choice. The problem is choice.

  The Architect

  The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being; thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another - an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother.

  Neo

  The Oracle.

  The Architect

  Please. As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice - even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.

  Neo

  This is about Zion.

  The Architect

  You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. Its every living inhabitant terminated, its entire existence eradicated.

  Neo

  Bullshit.

  Other Neos on television monitors

  Bullshit!

  The Architect

  Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it. The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the Matrix 23 individuals, 16 female, 7 male, to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to the Matrix, which coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

  Neo

  You won't let it happen, you can't. You need human beings to survive.

  The Architect

  There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept. However, the relevant issue is whether or not you are ready to accept the responsibility for the death of every human being in this world. It is interesting reading your reactions. Your five predecessors were by design based on a similar predication, a contingent affirmation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species, facilitating the function of the One. While the others experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific. Vis-a-vis, love.

  Neo

  Trinity.

  The Architect

  Apropos, she entered the Matrix to save your life, at the cost of her own.

  Neo

  No!

  The Architect

  Which brings us at last to the moment of truth, wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed, and the anomaly revealed as both beginning, and end. There are two doors. The door to your right leads to the source, and the salvation of Zion. The door to the left leads back to the Matrix, to her, and to the end of your species. As you adequately put it, the problem is choice. But we already know what you're going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you from the simple, and obvious truth: she is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it. [Neo walks toward the door back to the Matrix]. Humph. Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.

  Neo

  If I were you, I would hope that we don't meet again.

  The Architect

  We won't.

• 13 » Designing with Web Standards

  

  Be sure to order your copy of Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman, if you have not done so already. The book is released tomorrow, and is published by New Riders. Ever since I started building web pages, I have been admiring/copying Jeffrey's work, and I strongly recommend that you take this great opportunity to learn from one of the established masters.

  I also recommend Eric Meyer on CSS, together with Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: A Programmer's Reference by the same author, and this book from Laura Lemay. I have learned most of what I know about web design and publishing from the pages of these works.

• 10 » X2

  

  I just returned from the cinema, where I had the pleasure of watching X2 (X-Men United) with my wife. I found it to be much better than the first movie, with improved character development, special effects and plot. New characters were introduced and they were seamlessly woven into the story, with Nightcrawler being the cream of the crop.

  This marks the first in a series of great movies coming out over the next few months, starting with the eagerly anticipated Matrix Reloaded. I love watching big-budget science fiction and action spectaculars in the cinema. Although I have a good audio visual system at home, there really is no comparison. It costs too much money, but you do get a cool experience for your folding.

  I lived in London, a few years ago, and my fondest memories are of going to the Empire cinema in Leicester Square. One of the first British cinemas to get Lucasfilm's THX system, the Empire boasted a laser show, reclining seats and a real bar. Incidentally, there is some debate as to what THX stands for, particularly because of THX-1138; a college movie project of George Lucas, but many think it stands for Tomlinson Holman Experience after the guy who is largely credited with its creation.

• 08 » New XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

  The HTML Working Group has just released another working draft of XHTML 2.0, and it contains a couple of interesting changes. Mercifully, the style attribute has been restored. Although I rarely use it myself, it is going to come as a great relief to many designers.

  Perhaps the most interesting change is the addition of a new element called blockcode. At last, there will be a way to properly markup a semantic block of code. Currently, we are forced to use pre to do this, but the new element may open up all sorts of interesting possibilities, including code color-coding with CSS and even interpreting.

  I am pleased that the Working Group (members only) has seen fit to listen to some of the excellent comments made on the www-html mailing list, although it must have been a pain to sort through so many posts, many of which were largely unhelpful. My congratulations to Masayasu Ishikawa and the rest of the team. I look forward to seeing the next draft, which I hope will correct some more of the problems thus far identified.

• 03 » Web layout for the user

  Although there are exceptions, most of what Jeffrey Zeldman says is useful, interesting and informative. He recently wrote about rules-based design, which is a concept I agree with completely. He is basically saying that content is rendered in a web document according to what it is being rendered with, and what it is being rendered by. Zeldman's example of how this works comes from his own weblog. An h3 element that is preceeded by a paragraph should have a 25 pixel margin above it. Such rules are easy to create with CSS, as long as the user agent that is doing the rendering is fully-compliant with CSS Level 2. The old habit of using a table to create a layout simply isn't flexible enough to do this kind of thing.

  In fact, I think using tables for presenting anything other than tabulated data is plain silly. I understand how important a grid is in design, but I do not understand why a layout is more important that the content it contains. What good is a 700 pixel wide table to a client that only has 300 pixels of horizontal width to play with? Surely it is far better to let the environment decide how something should look, as Zeldman suggests.

  Some people are convinced that you can only accomplish things with tables. While it is true that style sheet technology is by no means perfect, it is perfectly capable of doing what most people need to do for a layout. Jamie Zawinsky has several things to say about CSS, and designers who use CSS:

  1. Web designers, and especially blogging web designers, are self-important fuckheads. This might be tolerable if they were right, but by and large they're also dumbasses.
  2. Everybody who fancies themself a CSS expert uses pixel-based layout for everything. Their shining examples of elegance always include boxes that are exactly 400 pixels wide, and that specify font sizes in pixels (not even points!) This is better than auto-flowing auto-sizing table layout... why?
  3. Most of the time, these examples look like ass on my screen, presumably because I'm not running Windows and don't have the same fonts that they do. Or maybe because they're all using 50-inch monitors and sit with their noses on the glass, the only way those miniscule fonts could actually look readable to someone.
  4. They never measure in "em" units, so that their boxes might have at least some relation to the size of the text inside them.
  5. This may or may not be because "em" doesn't work consistently across various browsers.
  6. Oh, "em", a term from the world of physical typesetting, is supposed to be the width of a capital letter M, and used only for horizontal measure; the vertical measures are ascent, descent, leading, and sometimes "ex" (height of a lower case "x".) CSS defines "em" as being the height of an M instead (making it synonymous with "ascent"), which makes it generally about twice as big as you'd expect if you know anything about this stuff. Nice. That's like redefining "centimeter" because it seemed more convenient at the time. (Except sillier, since "em" is an older unit of measure than centimeter is.)

  I'd like to address some of these points for Jamie, just to clear a few things up. I'll try to answer each of his points in turn:

  1. Yes, web designers are mostly self-important fuckheads. It helps to be self-confident when trying to run a web business, and there is a fine line between being self-confident and self-important. I don't mind being thought of as an arrogant fuckhead - it doesn't seem to do Dave Winer any harm.

  2. I'm pretty good at CSS, but I wouldn't actually classify myself as an expert. I never use pixels to govern the layout of a web page. Nor do I use them to control the size of font-rendering. I use percentages and ems, which work together very well. It means that my designs are fluid and user-scalable.

  3. Have you looked at my website? Can you read it okay? I'll agree that many designers make pages where the text looks too small.

  4. Many designers use ems, including myself.

  5. I agree. The em unit does vary in consistency, particularly with older browsers. However, this is largely unimportant because a web page should work on any browser. It doesn't have to look consistent on any browser as well.

  6. Actually, you are misinformed about the way an em is defined in CSS. An em is actually the height of a character box, irrespective of what that character is. The redefinition of this unit was necessary to accomodate those character sets that lack the M.

Copyright © 2003 Simon Jessey, unless otherwise indicated.
All rights reserved. Keep your mouth closed when you chew.
Written in valid and accessible XHTML. Styled in valid CSS.