Mutterings
Despite that I am rapidly degenerating into a mass of mental uncoordination – at least according to the boys at the other shul, the really arrogant one, not the playful arrogant one, on the Charles [Link] – I am going to mutter on. So Caveat Emptor, or at least, Caveat Legens.
We note that the increased use of cellular phones is making polls less reliable. [Link] That is, if we ever could credit polls as being very reliable in the first place. There are several art form components to polls and all are sources of failure or compromise, hence valid reasons for one to distrust polls.
The first source is the instrument itself. If you don’t phrase question correctly, or structure them with the right multiple choice answers, then you get biased results. The most common of this is that whoever is paying for the poll has question to be answered and they know what answers they want and thus the poll composer has an uphill fight convincing the customer that they are prebiasing the poll. What happens is that starting with the second question that doesn’t have an answer choice that the poll taker wants, the probability of the poll taker "punching out" increases. Hence, those folks who can’t honestly answer the questions tend to not be represented in the poll sample. Indeed, there are all sorts of such, albeit minor, that skew the sample.
There is also the matter of how the sample is selected. Since most polls are done for pay, the sample is selected in the lowest cost fashion possible. Hence the sample gets skewed to those who are cheaply askable.
So overall, all that rhetoric about the poll being 90 something percent valid plus or minus some percentage points is so much stercus. What they don’t tell you is that those confidence limits apply to the specific population sampled which has maybe fifty per cent correlation with the actual population. So you are always left with trying to figure out if the conclusions translate to the population as a whole – was the sample population really representative, or is it so much brain wash?
Speaking of brain wash, there is a lot of hooplah (evidently?) over this new alternate reality movie "The Golden Compass". [Link] Evidently some of the christians are taking exception to the animism and external soul aspects of this fairy tale. Thus far no input from Amerindians that I have seen. Nor any evidence that some folks have heard that the basis of all fiction is "suspension of disbelief"?
The provocative thing here is the conflict between the aspects of the season. The old aspect, of course, is the time of approach to the winter solstice, but this got trampled on by the christian organizational establishment in favor of promulgating, out of temporal context, their version of a messiah creation myth. Never mind that what they have pushed is anything but a messiah, but it does explain some of their irrational sensitivity. The new aspect, of course, is the consumer-business Giftmas one, and its combination of hedonism and capitalism is increasingly straining at the deception that binds it to the older, middle aspect.
I have to admit to not having seen any of the composition except the trailer, which was singularly too unappealing to motivate me to spend money on absorbing photons and phonons. If and when the movie becomes available on what passes for cable television in Greater Metropolitan Arab, I may, if nothing more fetching is contemporaneous, deign to view the film. But rush out to enrich its producers as part of the season? I fear not. As a result, however, I have no means of assessing just how overall bad or good the movie is. Given that most of the rhetoric seems to be originating from the Roman Catholic organization, which makes sense given their long battle to exterminate animist beliefs, which often took the form of misdirection, subversion, and outright adoption, and these are the same people who persecuted science and scientists, not that some of them like Galileo weren’t a tad too arrogant and baiting and hence deserved some of it, I have to observe that this smells like organizational selfservice in action. Hence, almost assuredly untrustworthy.
In fact, it seems to naturally rank with what we read that MegaHard is getting ready to find a way – any way! – to cram WINDOWS XP onto an OLPC laptop. [Link] This is more than ample evidence of rampant insecurity in Redmond! (And I do apologize for the Agnewism but offer that it was an opportunity entirely impossible to resist.) The competition from open source must be causing management to crack and badly.
But the fact is that even if one can get XP on an OLPC laptop, and given the resources available, that seems to enjoy a low probability of failure even if the success is nothing more than new splash screens of the existing OS, will the OLPC laptop still be what it is intended, an education instrumentality that is the antithesis of the Every Child Left Behind program? The answer is almost surely a resounding NO! Which is exactly what we have come to expect from MegaHard, and from the open source community, respectively.
