The Burn of ….

I have not commented on the commercials displayed during the recent ‘Super Bowl’ (Enormous Toilet?) American football game. Many others it seems, from other bloggers through self-service organizations through the national news apparats, have done so, along various themes ranging from portrayal of abject stupidity through portrayal of gender based hate crime. So far as I can discern the only common piece here is ‘portrayal’ indicating that these commercials are either so good that everyone sees something different in them or they are so blah that imaginations are running overtime.

I did not comment for the simple reason that I did not see the commercials. I had better use for my time, namely sleeping. That, I did and do entertain, was a better use of my time than watching advertising commercials for stuff I neither want nor need, or watching a meaningless, contrived, artificial competition that has nothing to do with anything except blood and circuses.

This morning, as is my want on Tuesdays, I listened to science podcasts at gym. One such, the science podcast from ‘The World”, which is usually mediocre, managed to rise to that exalted height this morning largely because I killed it off before I had to listen to the extraneous, so-called but obviously not, music segment. What I did listen to was a vignette on the inauguration of a desalinization plant in Sydney intended to assure adequate potable water supply for the city for the next decade or so. That in itself was not particularly provocative of cognition but what did provoke were sound bites of interviews with individuals purported to be ‘ordinary Sydney residents.’

I was struck in this by what is evidently a Tellus wide mediast tactic of only interviewing bog putzes and shmendricks. These people’s remarks obey a very small taxonomy:

• If I am happy then all everywhere is well;
• If I am inconvenienced, all everywhere is in disarray; and
• If I am unhappy, all everywhere is collapsing.

Note please that this embodies the greatest of consumerist individualism – what happens to everyone else, except possibly my friends, is inconsequential and unimportant, only I am of any measure and weight – the modern extension of cogito ergo sum.

This phenomenon is commonly notable in the old Confederacy on local and national television. Whenever any misfortune besets anywhere the media seeks out the ugliest, obese (or anorexic) individual they can find who also enjoys abysmal dentition and/or acne and abysmal verbal skills and grammar and inquires of them their comments on the misfortune. The ultimate of the epitome! Especially as the individual in question speaks with both a pronounced accent and the absence of sentience usually associated with the offspring of incestuous parents.

Some of this is simple staging of the privations of living close to nature and the horrors of the camera. I have known some of the people interviewed thus and a large fraction are competent, relatively erudite, and intelligent individuals under less brain sapping conditions. Sadly all had been selected under circumstances where the more egregiously incapable were not available.

This, of course, leads us to ask what kind of conspiracy the media is perpetrating on humanity and its civilization? Why are inane, vapid, worthless artificial celebrities portrayed as normal, and normal people portrayed as monsters, scum, and genetic trash? I used to think this was just a conspiracy of reporting science, and while it is clear that the least intelligent of journalists seem to be made science reporters, the conspiracy seems rather to be against humanity as a whole. Is this something implicit to journalism or is it an artifact of the commercial dynamics of modern journalism?

Or is it just that the maxims of C. Northcutte Parkinson apply to all forms of communication and we fail somehow to appreciate that?

The Words Don’t Have It

Occasionally one notices a cartoon where the situation depicted does not match the dialog. This one [Link] is such.

It is not that excretory activity wasn’t important enough to bother about, but that up until that moment it didn’t impinge on attention span.

This is a circumstance shared by those of us in the wings of the age distribution. The young and the old are continually surprised by the need to excrete. It is a real surprise, often unanticipated and unplanned. Indeed, more accurately unplannable.

Cherry Topped

Once more to the cusp day of the week. Is this the end day or the beginning day of the week? Or was yesterday the end day of the week? And what difference does it make?

Back when I was still going to the office five (at least) days a week, Monday was the first day of the week, the best day since a full week stretched ahead, unsullied, ready to be made something of. Now, Saturday has become the end day of the week, not because of any such intellectual or even mystical aspect but because Saturday is the day when laundry is done. I know I should view Saturday as the first day of the week since this cleansing of the garments is a renewal (in the spiritual rather than the technical sense, although it is also a renewal in the technical sense, which makes it a bit confusing,) but I do not, mostly because the inactivity of Saturday and Sunday weigh heavily on cognition.

In which spirit, I once more stir through the residual articles from the RSS feeds. First off is a report from the Genographic Project [Link] that Charles Darwin, one of the founding fathers of modern genetic theory [1] was a direct descendant of Cro-Magnon. This is a great relief since it dispels any “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce declamation that Darwin was a direct descendant (once removed) of an ape or suggestions that he was a visiting alien come to uplift homo sapiens from the blight of Western Civilization.[2] Being a progeny of a migratory invader probably also explains Darwin’s penchant for walks in the garden. It also likely explains his dyspepsia and general distemper as a result of guilt over causing the demise of homo neandertalensis.

Next, and on the level of isn’t-it-wonderful-that-academics-have-demonstrated-that-we-already-knew-and-made-it-official is research from U Sowth Dakoter that humans are more positive about the future when their sugar levels are up.[Link] Given the general state of Western Civilization these days, especially in the Yankee republic, the high levels of obesity now seem natural. How else can you keep from becoming despondent and depressed unless you dose out on sugar all the time?

On the same azimuth, research at U Leeds indicates that extended use of the internet can cause depression.[Link] So is there a correlation between time spent surfing and BMI? And can we conclude from this that pictures of naked felines and humans cause depression? Once more, so many questions, so few answers!

And while we are on obesity, it seems that a star in NGC3603 has been found with a mass of 116 Sols. [Link] Don’t tell the administration; they would probably want to sent a relief intervention.

And lastly, the PEW folks [Link] have a survey that indicates some changes in the demographics of bloggers. (I suspect this is the de rigeur blot topic of the week, but suffer anyway.) The survey results are summarized in the figure,

I cannot wring my hands over this, it is hardly surprising. Despite the emo aspect of blogger whining, the writing aspects of blogging are more about adult reflections and greed than they are about adolescent angst. Although one of my colleagues did suggest that GEN Y is more secretive about its whining because of its herd mentality. Think lemmings? Anyway, in true blogger fashion, and quoting the Kingston Trio who sang it, “I don’t like anyone very much” which may explain everything about this?

Go out, eat an ice cream concoction and rest assured that you are fracturing the laws of a century ago when such was considered a ‘blue’ activity. And reflect amidst the ‘brain freeze’ whether we have advanced or decayed.

[1] More intriguingly (aha!, didn’t quite use the “I” word, did I?) is another founding father, Gregor Mendel who being a member of celibate mystical order could not have been a biological father without doing the apparently usual thing of ignoring vows.

[2] A rather better argument could be made for Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus being the uplifting alien, although I suspect both Charles and Erasmus would have agreed that the intermediary Darwin was rather a disappointment.

Skeptic Snake

I find myself tantalized by flashes of apparently irrelevant mental images. Yesterday I caught up on several articles, one a ‘bad science’ article, [Link] that discussed how the irony of so-called ‘climate conspiracy’ amongst scientists has to be uncovered and explained by scientists.

The Latin catchphrase Quis custodiet custodesne comes to mind. [Link]

The primary image is that of the serpent Ouroboros who completes a circle by grasping his tail in his mouth. [Link] Alchemical and mystical meanings aside, the image of a lifeform devouring itself is quite compelling, indicating either a slow degradation to discorporation or over controlling discipline (as the Spartan lad and the fox.) The idea that a discipline need police itself seems to partake of this selfdestructive metaphor.

An excellent example of how a certain amount of selfdestruction is needed to preclude more extensive selfdestruction came into my attention span yesterday courtesy of the Columbia Journalism Review. [Link] The miscreant is not who we would suspect, the London Sunday Times, indicating that the wrangling of science by journalists is implicit rather than degenerative. They are quoted as proclaiming,

Women with fair hair are more aggressive and determined to get their own way than brunettes or redheads, according to a study by the University of California. Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way — the so-called “princess effect”.

The article in question, published in PLOS, made no mention of hair coloration.

Happily the egregious misrepresentation, which includes fabricated quotes from the researcher, have been bashed by other journalists. If it had only been the maligned researcher or other scientists crying ‘foul’ no action would likely have been taken.

Is it any wonder many (most?) scientists want nothing to do with journalists and explaining science to the bogs? But with this, scant wonder that newspapers are expiring.

Yesterday, there was one of those desperately horrifying, unfortunate shul incidents in Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill. One middle grader shot another. Aside from the depravity of the incident, two things were demonstrated, blatantly and unrelentingly repeated: the inability of the government officers to communicate in a rational, meaningful fashion; and the blatant emotionalism and pandering of the local television media. The rot is not limited to the printed media.

At some point the cancer takes over.

Idyl Speculation

One of my less stable acquaintances, Temperature Magnetic Induction, came up with what he claims is an epiphynal induction. He advances that the reason scientists cannot communicate with bogs is because the bogs will not acknowledge that anyone can be addressed as “Doctor” unless they are physicians or mystics. He offers as proof the almost universal hatred for the noise produced by dragging edges across a black board.

I did ask him if the sad state that the only ‘doctors” almost all bogs are exposed to are physicians and mystics would not be a more reasonable explanation of the inability of bogs to understand reality?

Once more a case of oil and water, in this case not shaken quite harshly enough.

In atonement, a rather neat out of container cartoon, [Link]

which somehow seems horribly appropriate given the contents.

Still Fettered

The candidates for the governor’s throne of Alibam have begun to make campaign noises which seems to conflict with the recent winter predictions inferred from the perception of Pennsylvania ground hogs. That the differences among these poltroons is minuscule and they are universally whacked is illustrated by their common absence of comment about Baptist slave traders in Haiti.

Baptists are one of the major religious organizations in Alibam, at least in numbers of professed members although the almost equally large number of individual Baptist organizations tends to indicate sometimes that the only thing shared by these folks is the name. This is hardly the case as they also share superstitions and perversions numerous.

But then, so do the candidates. No mention has been made of the slave taking activities of Baptist ‘missionaries’ in Haiti by Alibam politicians for the most personal and self-serving of reasons. They are not mensch enough to place morality above the chance of alienating a possible, perceived voting block. The deity preclude any Alibam politician risk the loss of even one vote in a display of either integrity or morality. Especially when it has to do with any religious organization.

Beyond this commonality of absence of morals and integrity, another such is apparently an attitude – belief as it were – that the female component of the state’s population should be reduced to the status of bond servants, if not actual slaves. I shall not be surprised when the state legislature introduces an amendment to the Alibam obesestitution recalling the franchise from every person in the state with ovaries. Certainly all of these candidates for state executive, and apparently almost universally so with Alibam politicians, categorically deny that women should have any aspect of reproductive self-determination.

I may thus happily report that Alibam has successfully weather reconstruction and kept the calendar in the nineteenth century – if not earlier.

Good Ole Daze

As an Old Retired Flatulence I receive all sorts of emails and URLs about automobiles and airplanes and institutions and practices of the ‘good ole days.’ Most of these date from just after the Great Patriotic War, when I was a wee bairn, to so poorly defined and definitely undersubstantiated cut-off point when a period of moral, social, civil, and national decay set in and continues in an exponentially increasing fashion today with the ultimate collapse of the nation/civilization/humanity/biology/planet/solar system/universe rapidly looming unless we immediately adopt some unavailable mores/memes/social conduct/religion/mysticism/superstition sine die.

In keeping with this general tenor, I find myself moved, given the particular odiousness of general conditions and the journalistic and political medias the last couple of weeks, to offer up some irrelevancies and irreverencies:

• Back when Gibbs Free Energy – Work – Magnetic Induction was the chief executive; and
• we were more afeared of creeping fascism than rampant socialism; and
• the employment fractions was ~0.95 instead of ~0.81; and
• texting on our cellular phones was neither a mitzvah not a crime; and
• we were outraged by the conspiracy of high petrol prices rather than the conspiracy of global climate change; and
• our houses were, on paper at least, worth more than what we were paying/owed on them; and
• we thought sending our children to shul offered them the means to retain their standard of living, if not improve on it; and
• college actually made lives better.

What we aren’t doing is realizing that the ‘good ole days’ are rapidly catching up with now. The question is whether that’s good or bad?

What Price eBook?

One reasonable thing that the iPad has apparently precipitated is a consideration of what an eBook should cost. Several sites I have visited this morning have commented on: Chad Orzel: Uncertain Principles; [Link] and Download Squad; [Link] are two examples.

The form of this discussion at the moment is Macmillan Publishing wanting more money for their eBooks than Amazin’ is willing to charge. My approach is somewhat different.

First of all, let me advance that an eBook is not analogous to a hard bound book. It does not have a board and cloth cover; the pages are not sewn and pasted (as opposed to glued;) and the pages are not heavy paper. The only thing one can find in a hard bound book that is analogous is, if one removes the dust jacket, absence of pictorial frontispiece.

Rather, the eBook is analogous – maybe – to a paper bound book. The cover is insubstantial; the pages are cheaply done on poor paper with inferior ink; and the binding is ‘perfect’ – glued and rapidly perishable. A full 0.1 of the paperbacks I buy today have loose (disadhered) pages before I finish first read. So if we are going to compare an eBook to a ‘real’ book it has to be to a paperback rather than a hard bound.

Next, we need to estimate the cost of the book. From overseeing libraries and education programs, I can offer a rule-of-thumb. Except for very high volume stuff like mail-order catalogs, about half the cost of a printed book is printing: paper; inking; binding; and labor thereof. The other half includes editing, overhead (a lot of overhead!), royalties to the author, bribes for endorsements and visuals, and profit for the corporate oligarchs. I haven’t talked about distribution/transportation costs but they are a few hundredths at best.

Now if we look at eBooks all of the binding, printing, … costs effectively go away if all that happens is someone downloads an eBook from a server to a (sorta) computer. There is still some transportation and handling, especially handling costs but they are less for an eBook than for a paper book. So as a rough estimation, say 1 dB +/- type of thing, we can say that an eBook should cost half what it would in paperback. If you buy it from a web site then that cost should be discounted for the same reasons that pBooks are under such circumstances except that delivery charges should be ZIP!

So Macmillan and all the other publishing houses can shut up and sit down on their thoughts of riches and get back to a cost model they know about. And over time it can evolve to reflect actual costs plus wildly inappropriate profits (but not like texting messages.) And people who want to buy an eBook can see whether they are getting ripped, just see what the paperback price is and divide by two. If the book vendor wants more than pennies more that that, buy paper. Or don’t buy. Remember customers define demand and that is half of the market dynamic – if the vendors are honest.

Sweaty Slate

The week is renewed! One more weekend has been survived. Although the primary challenges to surviving weekends is the absence of exercise (the gym is closed for mystical-social reasons) and indigestion and it is not at all clear that either of those is inherently lethal.

Anyway, back to gym this morning, another freezing night prompting some industry reducing the optical depth of ice on the windows of my go-to-gym-automobile. Sadly this seems to have been the morning for all the members of the educationist apparat to display their asociality. Gad what a din, everyone of these superior individuals striving to outdo the other in volume and inanity of speech. I got stuck between two shrieking harpies of such amplitude of noise as to make me have to cover my ears to hear the podcast I was listening (to.)

Somehow it seemed appropriate that the podcast was an interview with Richard Sennet discoursing on the erosion of the public aspect of human society. Only individuals with no sense of public decency and an acognative sense of private expression would have behaved as these educationists did.

As I was cooling off I listened to a slightly dated Future Tense podcast speculating about the Apple iPad, which had not been announced when the podcast occurred. This led me to a more constructive thought process about what I would like an ePad to have.

Obviously, I want a large high resolution screen (at least 25 cm diagonal and 240 dots-per-centimeter, more preferred) and a long battery life (twelve hours between charges and the type of batter one can recharge without discharging.) It also needs wifi but I do not really care about 3G since such is so sparse out here in the hinterland. A touch screen keyboard is a necessity, as is considerable storage memory (> 16 gB) and at least 4 USB ports. I should like an open OS in solid state memory so that I can get apps via repositories. And it has to support graphics and all the nerdish things like reading PDF files. And I suspect it needs to support FLASH and all that internet video froofraw.

What I do not want may be more significant.

I do not want to have to pay a monthly service provider fee! ZIP! NONE! And I have no interest in paying for content unique to the device. Unless I can see the content on all my boxes, no cash flow! And I don’t want the thing to weigh too much. And it can’t cost any more than what I would pay for a netbook. And I am a frugal ORF.

Thumping Due

It occurs that I have not given MalWart sufficient attention lately. So to remedy this, I shall ask

Why is it that the Greater Metropolitan Arab MalWart store cannot offer for sale english muffins that are low in sodium (~0.2 g or less per muffin) and still taste good enough to want to eat?

What they offer here are indeed almost low enough in sodium but have a textture and taste that cannot be made palatable my any amount of toasting, spread, jam, jelly, or syrup. In fact their feel and aroma come very close to evincing a gag reflex.

Not that they do a very good job in almost all areas of offering low sodium foodstuffs but in this instance when they almost do, the effort is compromised with nastiness. Or is this part of the strategy?