Perpetuation of the Species

Ice Cream Day! And I am still desensitizing my newly exposed roots after oral surgery, so no frozen yogurt for me. There is however a promise of absence of precipitation from the weather beavers this day which is the holy day of maternity. And they also fortell a last coolness of spring before the early onset of torrid summer. 

Of all the holy days, this is one of the few that actually make sense. Never mind that it was invented by the greeting card industry to sell bad poetry and ugly paper, it still makes sense that we should acknowledge and honor the biological imperative of perpetuating the species. So while Easter and Christmas are sheer mysticism, Mother’s Day at least has some grounding in actuality.

While I’m on the azimuth of mysticism, I should mention a somewhat clumsy article [Link] arguing – that’s the clumsy part – that Android is the new “Windows”, as in the predominant OS. That’s not my criterion but I won’t quibble since the primary reason I cite the article, pointed to me by my erstwhile colleague Magnetic Inductance Force, is to quote

“When users can’t view several windows simultaneously, they must keep information from one window in short-term memory while they activate another window,” writes noted usability expert Jakob Nielsen. “This is problematic for two reasons. First, human short-term memory is notoriously weak, and second, the very task of having to manipulate a window—instead of simply glancing at one that’s already open—further taxes the user’s cognitive resources.”

This is an indictment of tile GUIs at the fundamental level of how humans operate. And it supports my independent (?) assessment that tile GUIs only work for people who work sequentially, not those who work cumulatively!

So micturate on you Unity, Gnome 3, and whatever MegaHard call Metro this week!

Next, some research from U Tel Aviv indicates that Facebook – and other social networking sites – may cause psychosis. [Link] I fear this has to be considered just official, i.e., academic, confirmation of what most nerds and geeks who use FaceBook already know, that there are a LOT of whack jobs on FB. Maybe all but one, maybe two, as in the Amish saying about weird.

Next, a study out of Nawth Carolinia State U that indicates that old coders are better than young coders. [Link] Duhhhhh! What you lose in endurance you more than make up for in guile and deceit. But it’s nice to put that to bed, or at least to strike a counter bow to young coder insecurity expressing itself. Deal with it pups, that’s how you get to be an old, good coder!

Along those same lines, a study from U Washington indicates that the dinosaurs became dominant because of opportunistic success after a major biodiversity crash. [Link] So the rise of mammals – and the demise of dinosaurs – after the Yucatan strike is fair game. And DUMB luck. Remember that homo sapiens!

On which note, a study out of U Colorado indicates that humans who hold extreme political views do so as a result of an illusion of understanding. [Link] This confirms what I have hypothesized for a long time: no one understands politics and those who think they do are wrong and deluded.

This is one of the reasons we need to do away with politics, or at least, political organizations. Firing parties for all members of such may be considered.

And lastly, an article [Link] about a rather telling argument that science and religion cannot be reconciled. Does this mean we can quit humoring the mystics?

humans, behavior, science, politics, religion

Spoil the Moment

Yesterday I ran across this cartoon [Link]

and I was struck by the accuracy of the presentation. It managed to summarize the television news so accurately I was whelmed.

First that the news people seem to have no compunctions about decency, integrity, or honesty, to say nothing about their overt practices of cruelty and inappropriate happiness at misfortune and suffering. I have yet to understand how it can be policy for any organization, not dedicated to the extermination of the human species, to relate on pain, agony, and/or misery with a garish smile. Somehow this seems the epitome of evil.

Only when the matter touches the lives of the folks who own the broadcasting instrumentality does any respect or regard creep in. Any other time it is blatantly false and pretended. And even when they are batted down, the respite is short before their evil pours forth undiminished.

Only the weather forecast is partly worth while since it deals with useful information. And the commercials are a relative respite, which, a mixed blessing, are growing in duration as a fraction of the broadcast.

And the apparent bias in the news read is disturbing. I am not sure which is worse though, the repeated protestations of fairness and objectivity, both of which are clearly subjective in the professional activities of the news media, or their natty lectures to the populace for holding them accountable.

All in all, a good cartoon. It remains to see if we do anything about this cancer it prods.

corporations, prevarication, evil, journalism

Toy Fun

The sky is falling – again. Oh!, the joys of climate change and this period of wetness for the old Confederacy. At least it is fairly mild right now, or a few minutes ago when I assayed forth to seed the tree mammals and the dinosaur descendants. Not even rain coat intensity.

I have begun the task of pruning tabs already, mostly because of the twangs after removal of the dental packing around the sites of incision. One article I was particularly taken with [Link] was purely because of the charm of this

There is something endearing about both the idea and the actuality of a giant ‘rubber duck’.

Sadly, an adjacent article [Link] the same rag didn’t come across nearly as cute and endearing in describing some “revelations” of the tablet marketplace. First, they claim Apple is not in trouble. The problem is that it’s not Apple that is in trouble, it’s society and the villain is Apple. Happily Apples rush to world domination is being reduced as the forces of good and well gather their efforts.

Next, they claim that Amazon isn’t destroying Android. I have to wonder where that idea even came from. Amazon is a niche player, currently on the hard road to oblivion, courtesy of the greed of the Yankee government. Once Amazon has to collect sales tax does anyone think it’s going to hold its own? Hardly. Besides, the control of destroying Android is in Gooey’s clutches. And they aren’t about to. They don’t have to collect sales taxes.

And lastly, they claim that PC manufacturers are in a world of hurt. Makes you wonder what religion urine these folks are sipping? Yes, there are reductions in sales of PCs, which can be traced to two streams of causality: MegaHard’s persisting stupidity with Winders Ate and the differentiation of the consumer/creation information marketplace. Tablet sales are soaring because tablets are fairly (maybe) good at providing consumer information but PC sales are still strong because you can’t create information – well, worthwhile information – on a tablet. To do real information work you need a box. And there are some consumer forms that you still need a box for but they are pretty well niche market segments.

Yes, there will be fewer PC manufacturers, and there will be fewer PCs sold and their price will go up, hopefully with an accompanying increase in quality over the stercus being manufactured today. But those who do work and not just mind sumping will continue to use PCs for serious endeavor. It’s sort of an ant/grasshopper thing, to use a metaphor the editors maybe can handle?

Incidentally, System 76 is still growing, and there is no mention of (a) Winders tablets or (b) Ubuntu Unity tablets. Wonder why?

humans, computers, stupidity, toys, joy

Too much, Too late

Thor’s day and am I happy to put the hammer down. My sally to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill began with a visit to have the bandaging from the oral surgery so now I am in the mode of flouridizing the newly exposed roots so I can once more eat/drink stuff slightly different from body temperature. Coffee was DEFINITELY an adventure yesterday!

The gym was happily thin this morning, which rather matched with my absence of energy from the joy of food and drink yesterday. I listened to an episode of the English Ubuntu podcast and aside from the skit had little to gain from it. But it is noise of distraction.

Before I forget, today is the anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman. I shall celebrate his memory. I may even draw a few diagrams or drag out the bongos.

And in typical Feynmanesque humor (maybe) I note an article [Link] entitled “10 reasons why Canonical and Ubuntu will connect the masses with Linux”. My colleague Magnetic Inductance Force shared with me and my discussion will largely follow his comments.

The thesis is that Canonical, via Ubuntu, will glue together userdom. The list is sadly stuttering but that goes with any list. It’s the sort of thing that defies good composition but is attractive to humans, even the majority who suffer dyscalcula.

I fear I have to put this prediction in the same pile as Laplace’s (?) that the seas would turn to lemonade. What Canonical now seems fated to do is flop. For several reasons:

1. First of all, there is Unity, Canonical’s tile GUI. This abomination has been billed as the common interface for box/slab/phone. It does that, but as with most Swiss Army Knives, not well.
2. Second, Unity works for people who either do not work or who work sequentially as opposed to cumulatively. For those of the latter, Unity is something to to avoided or, as in my case, blown away with some useful GUI like XFCE or KDE.
3. Third, Unity is a tile GUI, just like Gnome 3 and whatever MegaHard calls ‘Metro’ this week. So all the folks running screaming in terror from W8 are not going to run to Ubuntu. One of the derivatives with a workable GUI maybe, but not Ubuntu.
4. Four, the Ubuntu tablet is probably never going to be anything more that a niche market. Consider the abject dismality of MegaHard’s tablet sales. The average tablet user – mostly consumerist – doesn’t care about OS, only about app. Which means that they ain’t gonna learn a new OS that has few apps when they are already comfortable with Apple or Android.
5. Five, the Ubuntu phone is probably a non-starter. Look at W8 phone sales. Same as with tablets but squared. The marketplace is pretty well dominated by Apple and Android and Ubuntu isn’t a camel to sneak into the tent.

That isn’t ten but it’s enough. I would be pleasantly surprised if Ubuntu does any good in the tablet or phone markets. I hope it does. I would like an Ubuntu tablet that I could do something useful on. After I replaced Unity with KDE, which already has a tablet and a tablet interface. I’m not sure about the phone. Maybe. That way I could get decent (maybe) email and calendar apps. If Thunderbird will work on a phone.

humans, behavior, corporations, computers, OS, stupidity

Reunion Denied?

A righteous day, so far. Lovely fog this morning, the kind with big lazy particles that don’t have much optical effect other than making a big glow. And the gym was two day typically sparse of weight bouncers and educationalists so the atmosphere was decidedly pleasant, at least for a gym. Despite the ORF aroma of BenGay and musty.

The episodes were of science podcasts and not too bad: a bit about early bacteria that had hydrogen sulfide flatulence; and a bit on self-learning in children. Sadly the latter was a TED talk and hence almost worthless for content. I sometimes think the “T” stands for THEATER because that is certainly what those talks are about. I was almost amazed at the so-called discovery. How has the contemporary educationalist instrumentality managed to forget how widespread self-learning has been? Pride does precede a fall.

I also ran across this cartoon [Link]

yesterday and it gave rise to some reflection.

I should comment that in the forty-something years since I matriculated from undergraduate shule I have received zero announcements or invitations to a reunion. My high shule class, and its temporal neighbors, have reunions every five years but I long ago ceased to attend because they were boring and inefficient. They are always held in the high summer in places with no or inadequate cooling, which is a negative when you have inadequate body heat regulation. You go and seek out the folks you know but haven’t seen and then after a half hour there is nothing left but food, ethanol, bad patter, and worse music.

I can’t eat the food for medical prescriptions, and the ethanol is too polluted for me to waste my ration points on. The same folks who couldn’t communicate but were ‘popular’ in shule are still talking and can’t communicate but they have lost almost all of their popularity. And my taste in music was not rock and roll but folk so the music is trash and noise.

But none of my colleges have summoned me and I had occasion, courtesy of this cartoon. I am not sure I would attend. My high shule class was, round numbers, 500; my undergrad class 5000. If there ate few at the high shule reunions I want to talk to, how many fewer at the undergrad? SO I suspect I would not attend just out of expectation of disappointment and distress.

But I would like the chance.

education, humans, behavior, college, nonsense

Wet Start

Survived another week out although the rains continue. And I did manage to retrieve the dowager maternal element from hospital. Despite the rain. Which continues this morning thus giving the negative to the proposition that the rain intensifies when one is going somewhere, especially somewhere sad like hospital.

I am also happy to report that Scant City Memorial, despite being a back woods, Jeff Foxworthy hospital in nawth Alibam takes second chair to none in its glacial pace of dismissal and its disregard for courtesy and efficiency. I suppose they have cultivated this skill to compensate for their other inefficiencies and apparent incompetencies?

In which spirit, I note an English corporate study that indicates that if one wants a prompt response to one’s email, one should write in a tone of despair and pessimism. [Link] The criterion for the assessment was apparently key words absent any context. I have to admit that of the examples cited, half were ambiguous in that regard. But then I am sure that being an introvert I have an inadequate appreciation of how extrovert bogs feel.

No attempt was made to associate this with email dependence, the phenomena whereby people have to reply to ever email, the modern equivalent of you-hang-up-first. Also no mention was made of age dependent differences in perception of email courtesy.  So what does this company do other than apparently inept studies?

Next, I ran across an article [Link] in Economist on how the English government organization for funding science has decreed that all research they pay for has to be journaled in open-access journals. The Yankee government is expected to follow suit soon.

Booyah! About time.

But what is entertaining is the tear jerk, handkerchief wringing from the for-profit journals. They threaten to discorporate if not paid for publication, and not the current exorbitant fees, but what they claim is actual cost.

Go quietly into the night, dinosaur.

I fear I cannot summon much sympathy for Nature or even Science. They have servers already and all they have to do is open then to the public. And their costs reflect a bloated archaic instrumentality whose lie is demonstrated by the new, not-for-profit journals like PLOS.

But I can summon glee for the demise of the for-profit journals, like Springer Verlag. I look forward to dancing on your graves.

And lastly, I note [Link] another instance of the lie that England is not a tyranny. Seems that one of the royal parasites was elected to honorary membership in Royal Society. What demonstrates the tyranny is that the ballot sent to the members for the election only has a Yea check box!

Gee, sounds like something Stalin would do, doesn’t it?

Makes me happy that we evicted the blackguard tyrants at point of bayonet when we did.

computers, humans, email, health, tyranny

Jargon Stream

Hectic weekend, what with the dowager maternal parental element in hospital and the precipitation. And still recovering from oral surgery myself. Gad! I am coming to hate mashed potatoes.

So as a diversion I shall clear a few tabs. First, a rather deepening article [Link] from the Tsar of Tsmart Ass, Alan Alda. The article is an admonition from Alda, who is doing some sort of popular science program on PBS, that in dealing with the public scientists not use “jargon”. Since I wanted to make sure the ramifications of the word, I looked it up

Jargon 1. Confused, unintelligible language; gibberish. “A barbarous jargon.” –Macaulay. “All jargon of the schools.” –Prior.  [1913 Webster]

I have to admit that after reading this and trying to place it in Alda’s context, I was quite confused. Then I realized that I had to put this in the frame of a communication model. The confusion is not on the part of the scientist but the other side of the conversation.

The point is that the folks on the other side, when one is talking to the “public” are mostly bogs, hence lacking any knowledge of the discipline. But my colleague went on to say that the hard part is not learning this, it’s obvious to anyone who observes, but rather the hard part is knowing what words to use. He claims, and I agree, that a certain minimum commonality of terms is necessary for any effective communication and if one side lacks those words, communication is impossible.

I am not sure why this is so unapparent to Alda.

On a rather less frustrating azimuth I see [Link] that the Google Glasses are being implemented to take photographs with a wink. I have to admit that I consider this whole Google Glasses think jargon. Why would anyone other than a voyeur want them? And if they take photographs with a wink how do they tell it from a blink? And does this mean that society will evolve into something where everyone appears to have palsy?

I shall admit to being ORF. And I am slowly warming to my barked shin (smart) cellular telephone, especially in dealing with situations when I am distanced from a real computer. I am also increasingly alienated by the shitty nature of the software and the opacity of the OS. I find it rather crippling to have to go find a REAL computer to find out how to make my phone do what I want it to.

And it is hideously time consuming. With my desk boxes I only lose time when the power is out or I need to do a system reboot. With the barked shin phone I seem to spend a quarter of my time fiddling with unruly software and another quarter charging it. Is battery technology really THAT bad?

And followingly, an article [Link] on the most reliable box to run Winders on. Seems the result of the study, small data set, is an Apple lapbox. In fact, only lapboxes were considered. Strange. That restriction, that is, lapboxes are much less reliable than desk boxes. But then consider that the primary issue of recovery is not so much the OS but the user. Hence, given the elitism of Apple and the uberboggish nature of their user demographic, that an Apple box is reliable is no surprise. And that the average Winders user cannot recover is the same. That’s one of the reasons we call using Winders serfdom – ignorance is exalted.

And lastly, I see [Link] that Winders Ate is being rescued – by Linux. Seems that the KDE folks, who have rescued Linux from Canonical’s Unity and Gnome’s Gnome Tile GUIs, are developing a version of KDE for Winders. BOOYAH! This is a true mitzvah. Not that MegaHard or most of its serfs will recognize it as such, of course. But at least it offers a means for Winders users who can do so or have access to a wizard get some relief from the insanity that is whatever MegaHqard calls its tile GUI today.

humans, stupidity, communication, computers,

Me Either

I don’t own an iPud either. [Link] It’s not so much a purity of music sound thing though. I have the integrity to acknowledge that the music I like – 50′s and early 60′s folk, pipes, and military bands – are not the finest of musical purity and quality. They do however speak to me in ways that the classical performances of great symphonies didn’t in my youth. So the dubious quality of MP3 is adequate to resonate with both my corpus and my mentus.

There’s another reason. This music, if I may call it such, isn’t readily available on iTunes. I get it the old fashioned way by buying physical media and converting to MP3 myself. That is a bit of work but it makes it all the more dear to me.

Besides, iTunes works like merde on Linux. Never have understood Apple in this regard. The Apple boxes all run bastardizations of the progenitor OS so why so inimical? Could it be insecurity?

Anyway, I own three MP3 players: an old Creative that I started with and which was on almost last legs when I moved its files off and now keep as a momento of better, simpler days; a Sans Disk that houses the music collection; and a Conow that houses the podcast episodes. Both the Sans Disk and the Conow are file based devices that act like USB storage devices. That way I can do what I want with moving files and not have to wait on a  religious experience like iTunes. The Sans Disk contents are very stable, almost no deletions and only occasional additions now. I fear my taste in music is becoming antediluvian with Bobby Horton being the epitome of contemporary artists. The Conow’s collection changes weekly as old episodes are discarded and new ones added. And, of course, quality of sound in podcasts is a joke.

humans, behavior, music, quality, modernness

Bog Amerika 1

Inversion layer this morning, and a bit of fog, just enough to bring out the lemming death rush in the Bogs of Marshall County. But the gym was sparse in population, especially educationalists, and while the podcast episodes were mediocre and unmemorable, it was a fair session.

On which azimuth, I noted this sundae that the Pew folks and the Smithsonian, the American national museum paid for by English monies, have done a test to assess the science knowledge of the Amerikan public. [Link] I will discuss the survey results in a later blot. For today I want to talk about my taking the test, not as a part of the sample population but as an insight seeking effort. And, as it turns out a rather disappointing journey. [Link]

The test consists of thirteen questions, either true-false (in the vernacular) or multiple-guess. The questions were not really science questions in that they didn’t have anything to do with the substance of science, but rather dealt with factoids like which gas is most common in the atmosphere of Tellus. But I suppose these are the things one would expect a bog to be exposed to and perhaps learn.

Even given that, the questions were all pretty innocuous and placid with one exception. That question asked whether an electron was larger/smaller than an atom. The problem with this question, to me at least, was that I had to assume what they meant by size.

As it turned out, my assumption must have not been too bad because I got a full score – thirteen out of thirteen – correct in their frame. I have to admit that the questions were not all that challenging other than having ill defined context. If bogs primarily learn their science for mediaists then this may be a fitting ill definition.

But what was depressing was the distribution of scores. The web site gave me this bar graph

Next: comments on the state of Amerikan knowledge as represented by this test.

humans, knowledge, America, science

Only Mixtures Are Stable?

New week, at least in the frame or measure that the week starts on Monday. I suppose that is a hold over from religionist times – the dark ages – into the industrial revolution and the generality of not working in the home. The podcast this morning, as is usual on mundane day, was an episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, dealing with the concept/actuality of secularism. It’s a series and the bits today were rather primarily concerned with trying to say that religionism and secularity are not orthogonal. Of course these are not scientists speaking and even if they were they would edit their vocabulary usage to accommodate bogs.

But while motoring back to Castellum SCP, I came to reflect that the reason they aren’t independent is because humans are rule breakers/avoiders/deniers. One of my pet peeves is people who pull up past the safety line at intersections. That’s a breaking of the rules expressed by law, hence somewhat arbitrary and self-serving of the organization at the expense of its members. This violation is widely recommended as a safety trade-off since it permits one abetter density of lines-of-sight. It also makes it difficult for anyone turning left at the intersection to avoid striking the motorcar pulled out.

This is the basic nature of humans, I fear. Breaking rules for their own benefit, rarely for anyone else’s. And the purpose of religion, in addition to “explaining” things people are too lazy to investigate rationally, is to limit this rule breaking for self’s sake. Sadly, the two aspects seem to get intermixed to the detriment of the good.

Simply put, it seems that humans are too self-interested, expect perhaps for that wee bit of biological programming that makes them sacrifice for offspring, a matter hated by almost all organized religions, to permit a rational social organization. Reason is not enough, emotion and endocrine secretions are necessary to bind society.

This all sounds like another monologue about bogs versus nerds, but this is coming from a different direction. Yes, it does lead to the distinction among the bogs and geeks and nerds, but it does not derive from that distinction. What it comes down to is that the large fraction of humans are going to be bogs and any society is going to have to be largely irrational. It’s somewhat of a third law of thermodynamics for humans – you can’t get out of the game. Or otherwise, society has to have all three types of folks to work.

So maybe we can eventually turn all this extrovertism around and get some rationality back?

humans, behavior, religion, rationality