Computer Crap

Late last week I ran across an article [Link] on “How to Choose the Best Mechanical Keyboard (and Why You’d Want To)” and this prompted me to consider the matter.

What, is a non-mechanical keyboard? The inference is that the mechanical is somehow different and that only leaves non-mechanical. I am at a loss for this. Since every keyboard I have ever seen/used has been a machine for converting finger taps/presses into ASCII characters or some action. To the author mechanical evidently means individual keys but this again is a distinction that is elusive. I am forced to the hypothesis that the author is a ferd.

But the meat of the cognition was once I got past the journalism of the article and settled into considering that nature of things. The question emerged over the weekend of ‘why are keyboards so terrible?’ By this I do not mean the QWERTY layout but the machine quality of the device.

It may be argued that the personal computer began in the early ’80′s with the IBM PC. One may argue variously for earlier computers but I find those arguments to lack inertia. At that time the IBM PC cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a kilobuck to a kilobuck and a half. It was well made and highly dependable. And the keyboard was wonderful.

At the same time, automobiles, especially those made in Amerika, were junk. They lost half their value when driven off the lot, and often had to be replaced within three years. One was pressured to pay them off before they had to be discarded. On the other hand the IBM PC is still good today, those who have not been discarded as obsolete, and the same goes for the keyboards which command great prices in the marketplace.

Nowadays, automobiles last at least a decade. My morning motorcar, a Honda CRV, has seen more than fifteen years. Additionally, prices have decreased, at least in constant year dollars. So automobiles, and to a great extent appliances, have vastly improved in both durability and cost.

On the other hand, the quality of computers – PCs – has steadily declined. I long ago began to purchase refurbed workstations to try to recapture the durability of the original while obtaining price reduction. PCs are cheaper now, but they are not as durable, mostly due to poor design.

But compared to the keyboards, PCs are adamantine. The keyboard that has come with every PC I have bought in the last ten years was a flimsy feces. Especially the ones from HP who used to build the best calculator keyboards – and calculators – on Tellus and now has runny stercus. I refuse to use these pieces of plastic poo. I use one of my Northgates from back in the days when tower cases were built out of steel. IT is well I do because FD SCP does use those keyboards and I need a lot since they seldom last more than six months.

Similarly, laptops are now flimsy cracker boxes compared to what we had in the ’80′s and ’90′s. And it is now impossible to find a major brand laptop with a decent keyboard.

Why is this? Why have automobiles and appliances gotten better and computers, especially keyboards, have become trash?

computers, machines, humans, quality, extinction

Forgetful Day

Today is Memorial Day, the Yankee government’s hostile take over of Decoration Day that we observed in Alibam in my youth.[Link] This gives rise to several questions.

First, while I have no problem with reflection on the deeds and service of the nation’s military, why do we have two days for such? We also have Armistice or Remembrance Day, now rebranded as Veterans’ Day (and misspelled, but that is a matter of the ignorance of bogs which is a necessary part of the YG getting way with this travesty but rather something else.)

Second, given we have two holy days for the military, why is it that we cannot/will not/do not make mention of those who were originally memorialized? Today will go by with no meaningful discussion of the Second American Revolution; this fall Veterans’ Day will do by with no meaningful discussion of the Great War. Why?

Have we become a society incapable of having a history? If this also part of the pln of government, or an artifact of the information age. Does only the now, the War de Jour, matter?

And why do we have holy days anyway? This one will be little more than an inconvenient Monday off day for most. The ceremonies that we conduct to honor our military will be sparsely attended and pay scant attention to anything but spun sugar platitudes. No mention will be made of the losses, on both sides, of the war this day was set aside for. Is this so we will not see the now, of tornado and bomber raids, as the less than pin pricks they really are?

And no one, save the straggling few Daughters of the Union or Confederacy, and the Sons of similar orders, now few and almost forgotten, will do what is supposed to be done, the decoration of graves in demonstration of the real theme of the day.

And so all we have is another emptiness, an abused, mistreated, excuse for a day off from work. And we are so asentient that we cannot even perceive this and ask why we do such. And what we should do.

humans, behavior, society, government, tyranny, extinction

Humings? Off to the cliff!

Ok, time to get serious or no ice cream for me today.

First, an article [Link] about some calculation of when homo sapiens is going to go extinct. The argument, which I can’t follow very well from the reportage, is that there is some probabilistic total number of humans that can live before we go away. Yeah, that’s why I have problems with this one. But I think its the presentation rather than the idea. I have similar concerns but mine are founded in two things: available resources; and extinction events. There are only so much oxygen, water, ….. on Tellus, in the solar system, in the galaxy,….. and when it is used up we, and life as we know it, ends. And it doesn’t have to be exhaustion, just scarcity enough to tip us into the void. The extinction event thing is more direct but harder to confront since the probabilities are small at any time. So we happily go along being bogs, in the main, and assuming that will be solved by a nerd in someone else’s lifetime. And not inconvenience us.

That may the the scariest source of extinction of all.

On a different azimuth, I found an article in WIRED [Link] that argues we need to change our computer usage from GUI to “conversational interface”. Ala Star Trek. The article is amazingly, to me, at least, frank about the difficulties, turning them into values in several cases. But I can’t suspend my disbelief. I spent several years trying to use dictation word processing software. It never had an accuracy better than 0.1. On a VERY good day. I quit repeatedly because I couldn’t afford the time waste.

My concerns about this all turn on vocalization. Language is complex, full of things with fuzzy meanings. I don;t think we are going to be happy limiting ourselves to baby talk to deal with computers. Besides, there are lots of things, some of those 18 click chains the article mentions, that I can do better and faster with clicks than words. And there is accent. No one thinks they have one. And while we may all be able to learn to machine talk, can we keep it up when we are sick or distressed or emotional?

Nice idea. Maybe it will work with the next dominant species.

Speaking of which, i see [Link] that 0.2 of the population of the Yankee republic, as estimated from assumedly representative sample populations, afirm they have “no religion”. That doesn’t mean they are atheists. It just means they don’t associate themselves with a religion organization or brand. Yes, I know religions don’t talk about branding outside the inner circle. But they;re a business and that means branding.

What’s missing from the stats is the demographic of nerds versus bogs. I know the folks here in the old Confederacy are less likely to have this state, but I would like to know what fraction of that 0.2 are nerds and geeks.

humans, extinction, computers, religion, nonsense

Happiness Everywhere

OK, it’s Sol day but so far there isn’t much indication of Sol. But then yesterday all the evidence was indirect, much cloudiness in the sky so that all the light was diffuse. But it is also the end of week out and time once more to hawg tabs.

First, from the Australian National U we have the offering (?) that life is a soliton. [Link] It is an intriguing proposal since it offers all sorts of fixes to why and how questions, and it is, I think, testable. And somehow reading it on sundae makes it seem all plausible. I have to admit to not knowing a great deal about solitons. They rose to prominence after I exited shule, and at the time were supposedly dissipationless, so outside my interest area.

I also ran across this cartoon [Link]

and it struck me on several azimuths. When I go to gym I usually get exposed to that rather painful pseudo-science commercial about Einstein and a coupon web site that I always think should end with the speaker being rushed off to hospital after he gets some noxious chemical all over his hand. In the ’50′s and ’60′s the bog view of scientists was shaped by the containment response monster movies from Hollywood and Nippon that were nuclear war wet dreams. Now the scientist facade has been absorbed by the corporate prevarication.

But the part that is most humorous about this is the famous modifier. That is largely a bog thing. Scientists don’t idolize other scientists. We respect and even admire, but we don’t make them celebrity shibboliths, at least until after they have discorporated for some time. So saying that one wants to be a famous scientists is largely a bog perversion and almost assuredly doomed to failure.

As it should be.

Next, a rather encouraging article [Link] about how Alibam is ranked number 45 among the states of the Yankee republic in “happiness.” Does that mean we are number 5 in “seriousness”, or just “misery”, as is implied? I hate to say this but I don’t think I want to live in a “happy” state. I want to live in a competent state, which is unlikely, perhaps impossible, for any state to be.

It turns out that the rating is based on some whacked psychology index and the difference between states is statistically irrelevant. The “happiest” state is Hawaii, which from what I have learned about I would not want to even visit there. FD SCP went there and it was a nightmare, especially the trip. But the whole life style there is stressful and irrational. Not that the life style in Alibam is at all rational, at least for all the bogs. So maybe this is just a bog thing? Can we induce all the bogs to move to the Sandwich Islands and leave the rest of the YR to the geeks and nerds? How can we do this? And how soon?

Next, and contributing to that happiness, is a lovely [Link] entitled “There is no such thing as emptiness. There is only quantum foam.” I have to object to the “only”. It is unnecessarily derogatory. And I prefer vacuum to emptiness. And it is nothing new to physics and physicists. And if it bothers the bogs, then they will move all the sooner to the sandwich islands. But the point is something that children know and see and adults can’t, that there is no emptiness, just stuff we can’t get a good grasp of. [Link]

Next, another happy article [Link] entitled “Would you hire someone with poor grammar skills?” The answer, both in the article and in the poll is a resounding NAY. Those who cannot have an acceptable competency in syntax (and spelling) cannot communicate and hence are almost useless in the workplace. Only as idiot savants segregated and kept in a greenhouse can such be. And thereby the exceptions are few and limited to the mentally exceptional. So bogs with bad grammar can collect rubbish.

And lastly, another lovely article [Link] entitled “NASA chief: Earth is DOOMED if we spot a big asteroid at short notice Action on REAL threat to the planet ‘put off for decades’”. You have to wonder at that “short notice” and “decades”. This is not news, incidentally. It has been known for a long time. What is news is that the Yankee government has finally admitted that if a big space rock comes along we get to join the same death society as the dinosaurs.

I particular liked a quote from the NASA Grand Exalted Pall Bearer:

“The president has a plan. But that plan is incremental. And if we want to save the planet, because I think that’s what we’re talking about, then we have to get together … and decide how we’re going to execute that plan.”

The plan incidentally, is to do nothing until his term runs out and then it is the next guy’s problem. Great confirmation here of how politicians operate. And I won’t make the usual kerfuffle about reading this in a furrin newsmedia.

Not that it isn’t understandable. First, the cost is way high because we’re really talking Space Patrol here. And second, it makes no difference from a politician difference. If the big sky rock doesn’t come in a politicians term, no harm done, and if it does, no more elections. So why worry? So why do anything?

Enjoy the ice cream.

humans, behavior, government, stupidity, astronomy, extinction

Word Whacked

OK. Once more into week out. Which raises the question of how did Saturn’s day get to be the busiest day of the week? And it’s all little things so that there is much to remember to do but each is so insubstantial one has problems remembering whether it has been done or nay.

One of my pet peeves is how the bogs bog down out language with their modifications and perversions of the language. I particularly do not like the misuse of “literally”

Literally, adv. 1. According to the primary and natural import of words; not figuratively; as, a man and his wife can not be literally one flesh.  [1913 Webster]

of how every phrase ends with “you know”, which at least has the benefit that in conversation I can say “No, I don’t.” at each utterance and quickly reduce the shlumpf to tears or cursing or something other than the contradictory phrase. If anything the usage seems contradictory. Literally has come to mean actually or something akin since the words that follow cannot be literal and the repeated indication of “you know” either indicates insecurity – not surprising in humans, bogs especially, – or making the whole conversation irrelevant.

Nonetheless, I was rather taken by an article [Link] in Scientific Americal entitled ““Chemical” Is Not a Bad Word”. Having started college as a chemistry major, and then later adding maths and physics as additional majors as an act of desperate reality, I have especially problems with dealing with how bogs misuse chemistry terms. For example, I shop at Earth Fare and Fresh Market which make ado about selling ‘organic’ foodstuffs. My initial and abiding thought is “so what?”; organic just refers to the presence of carbon compounds and that’s a sine qua non of food. And people.  But what the bogs mean is something else and since they are religionists on the matter totally closed of mind and behavior of any rationality or discussion. To them “organic” is good and not “organic” is evil. I have this so far controlled desire to lock them in a room with a relatively high concentration of mercaptans, preferably extracted from an actual mephitis mephitis so it will be “organic”.

These tend to be the same people who use the term “chemical” to mean not “organic”, i.e., manufactured. Since many of the compounds produced in laboratories and chemical plants are the same as produced in Nature, the distinction is patently specious and deliberately divisory, even evil. Which is a nice thing to think of these smug, self-righteous zealots. It does not hurt that they smell more than a bit nasty since they tend to use soaps of poor effectiveness and unoften to sustain the water supply. I have entertained the hypothesis that this odor has impacted their brains but closer cogitation indicates the opposite.

I have to admit that I have reached the age where I despair of correcting these errors. There are too many bogs and they cannot be rescued. But I am also not yet of an age to adopt the conclusion that they need to be eradicated for the good of the species. I hope that day never comes – cleaning up after it would rather compromise the water supply.

humans, behavior, stupidity, extinction

Reality Plays

Week in recommenced. Huzzah! Even gym was passably good this morning. Not too dense with educationalists and weight bouncers, everyone seemed in a good mood, and the podcast was an episode of CBC’s “Best of Ideas”

The episode was about Inuit “stories”, fables or such like, and they had all of the appeal that Hollywood cannot put in its movies for fear of censure and censor.

These fables were all about nasty aspects of life. The most recurring themes were about wives running away from their husbands, or, in one case, plotting to get their brothers to kill the husband. In another a wife “witches” a fish bone to kill her husband. Makes one rather suspect the Inuit have a strong matrilinear bent? Of course there was also evil spirits, starvation, and cannibalism. Rather makes one understand why the Europeans thought these people primitive, for the realism of how they exposed the reality of life.

In Europe, of course, they have all this but it is not discussed or related to children as life lessons. Ah, the benefits of the veneer of civilization and too many people.

Along that azimuth, I note that Hewlett-Packard is shifting its resources from computers to slabs. [Link] Given the roaring success of Winders Ate, this would hardly be a surprise. But given the groaning failure of W8 – MegaHard has supposedly already announced W9 and the rumor mill has it even further from the business base – and the density of Android slabs, the move seems as suicidal as MegaHard’s.

I admit that I am not a great fan of slabs. Yes, they have a good use for consumers, but I can’t find any constructive use for them other than as a reference monitor. They are very nice to let me access dictionaries and the like, but I can’t do anything creative and useful with them. Unlike GEN Y, I do not – obviously – consider entertainment utile – except for those who want to sit on a population of bogs rushing lemming-like for the cliff.

My long love-hate affair with HP is known, dating back to the days when we thought the greatest thing in computing was the HP-35. I still have mine. And I still use calculators daily. Somehow the HP-48 emulator on my slab and cellular telephone are not as efficient nor effective – nor trustworthy – as the real thing. And my desktop is too dense for such. Perhaps that is why I also dislike the tile GUIs?

Anyway, I am beginning to rather wish that HP would go off into the night – quietly. This cake walk of seemingly endless management incompetence is not entertaining. It bears the same relation to those Inuit tales that Hollywood does. And I shall not comment on how it is also a similar failure.

The problem is that when entertainment has become a right and a necessity it has become so mediocre that 1890′s parlor activities seem refreshingly good. The quality of acting and singing and dancing has deteriorated to nothing more than cartoon digital airbrushing and digital filtering. Actual cartoons are more appealing than live performers. Humans have become second rate, trite, tired, and tedious.

And Hewlett-Packard? It has become a phosphorescent paradigm of what is wrong with Amerikan industry. I look forward to sitting kaddish for it.

humans, behavior, corporation, stupidity, extinction

Evil in Sheeps Clothing

Nasty night last. Rain and winds. Drove my land kite to Scant City and back for gym this morning and it was indeed good kite weather. Happily not much traffic at those hours although what there is tends to be either oblivious to conditions or overly aggressive. Especially educationalists. One does not want to exit the parking lot followed by an educationalist. Good way to wind up in a drainage ditch or worse.

Tuesday is science podcast day, which is rather more choppy than the other days because of the number of shorter podcasts I listen to. SCIENCE podcast for the first twenty minutes of arm bicycling; usually Guardian Science for the first twenty minutes of leg bicycling although with a series on sustainment mechanics that is decidedly too corporate and monetary I may fall back on Material World for the next few weeks; and for the last twenty of leg, a collection of short segments from NPR. That order is sort of like wine at weddings, good stuff first and rot gut after everyone is snookered.

But one of those NPR episodes had to do with the birth control aspects of O’Bama Care. The creationists were all holding that the day and week after pills are abortificants and hence abhorrent to their mysticism while all the real science types are saying the pills aren’t abortificants. And this is moe than just semantics.

So while I am not a biologist type I was rather struck by the contradiction of the argument. Most of the religionists hold that they are entrusted by deity with stewardship of the planet. This raises the question of how their stance on human population increase tracks with their stewardship when it not only means the extinction of many species of animals, and the pollutive gutting of the environment, but also the accelerated extinction of humans.  All their stance seems to favor is the short term benefit of the religionist organization, not either the religion nor its adherents.

So how can unbridled increase of human numbers, to the point of ecological collapse and extinction be moral or good or holy? As one would expect with those who deny testability, no meaningful response will be forthcoming. But the evidence is increasing that organized religion is evil and destructive.

Not that government is any better but it doesn’t really pretend to be.

humans, religion, organization, population, extinction, evil

Every Child a Boob

Once more into the breach, or, in this case, the week out. And not a bright outlook. In fact a bit dismal out this morning after a night of rain. I am also in the mode of clearing tabs and I find most of them this morning to be dull and uncommentable.

I have however, been cogitating the nature of freedom, something we have rather little of these days. And the politicians seem Hell-bent on reducing that, regardless of their party. But the mode I was thinking in goes back to he comments yesterday about the emerging requirement of a college diploma – I am unsure this means one has satisfied the REAL requirements for a degree any more – for any sort of job.

There will, of course, always be jobs that college graduates will not seek except in the direst of circumstances. Those that do not pay a living wage, much less enough to retire the now coupled college debt, and those that are abhorrent. I rather doubt that we shall see many wetback graduates toiling in the fields of vegetables and fruit. In many cases these jobs are scorned by Amerikan non-graduates of even high shule because of the labor required. So we have become an affluent society of aversion.

But there are several things troubling about such a trend. If nothing else it will further alienate the necessary but menial jobs. This may have the minor benefit of raising their wage levels but only at the price of reduced numbers of positions. If anything it will advance the proliferation of automation with its detriment to society. It seems also likely to further the degradation of academia.

It is exceedingly rare, in my experience, for any position to require less educational and knowledge credential than the work requires. Jobs that require a baccalaurate can usually be performed by an “associate”. This follows from the absence of freedom in almost all positions, a constraint that leads to great waste and dissatisfaction.

But it is in the nature of education that it is highly individual. The best criterion is that one has learned how to think in a constructive, creative, positive fashion. What data was accumulated along the way is less important than the skill. Sadly, this is hard to assess and the old way of a committee review for a degree has proved long ago too expensive even in the graduate environment. Hence we come to the other side of the abyss, that educational institutions are uniform, in several of the horrific meanings of that word. In my day it was largely a matter of courses that could be assembled with some freedom to meet the uniform requirement for a degree sans examination. Today that freedom has disappeared and the nature of courses has become so uniform that who teaches a course is of only minor importance, hence the demise of tenure.

This may be expected to intensify as the requirement for employment further become only a demand for a certificate and not demonstrated cognition. After writing all week about ways the species ends, this seems likely the most horrific, to reduce our intelligence to facade.

humans, education, academia, business, stupidity, extinction

Ways to Die from the Sky

Once more into week out, and once more into weather. A cold front is nearing/encroaching on Castellum SCP and I am once more confronted with the frustration of weather beaverism. The Weather Channel add-in to this FireFox browser tells me the temperature in Arab is 31 degF. The WunderWeather map with local stations tells me that the temperature around Arab is 33-34 degF. Surely there is not that much uncertainty? And the BIG TEETH on the Huntsville television stations are even less helpful being unable to cover every village and town. Given the incompetence of their news readers and the painful boorishness of their sports babblers, I have to wonder what value these have in the modern world? Why do we have to lose newspapers and strengthen these schlemiels?

On a more pleasing azimuth, night gazers parasitic to the Chandra observatory satellite have found what they portray as a young gravitational singularity, only 1 KY of existence. The article is a bit sparse and, frankly, boggish for British journalism, but the Chandra site is a bit more helpful. I reproduce some of the visual just because it’s a nice picture.

According to the rather sad journalism, and sadly the Chandra site as well, the singularity is the result of a “p” supernova rather than the usual “s”. The letters refer to the explosion geometry. And the beast is only 26 KLY away. Now if the metal bashers at NASAl would just get to work we could have a drive to get there in a few thousand years.

On a related azimuth, the folks of the former Soviet Union, near Chelyabinsk in Siberia got whalloped by a thermally exploding meteorite yesterday. [Link]

Apparently the beast exploded at good altitude and did not strike entact. A rather amusing hole in the ice covering a lake was shown on Amerikan national news program expressing the whackedness of Amerikan journalism. Nonetheless, lots of windows – the glass kind – were shattered and some 500 humans damaged with a fair number admitted to hospital. Sadly, no report of any damage to the OS type of windows.

The national news readers also trotted out Neil DeGrasse Tyson and treated him rather like a dressed chicken, which is a pun we should have had yesterday. He got silenced immediately when he started talking about meteorite threat and danger and the need for a space patrol to remove that threat. No wonder these guys toady to the black Irishman. I am not a fan of Tyson, his presence is entire too red rubber nose and big shoes but in this instance I have to agree with him. We need to not follow the dinosaurs by being penny wise.

OK. Enough bad illusions and puns. Let’s get off the branch and find something other than road kill.

astronomy, black hole, meteorite, extinction, stupidity, humans

Astronomical Bullet

One of the strangest bits of physics in the annals is the dinosaur extinction meteorite strike of 66 MYA. The physics turns, not on the astronomy, but on Iridium. But the effort also displays one of the problems with physical measurements which is ranges of error and uncertainty.

I got reminded of this this morning at gym listening to a podcast (NPR) episode about new measurements that put the extinction and the impact very close together. This is admittedly for one set of samples, but it tends to strengthen the application of Occam’s razor. I was further reminded by an article [Link] I tabbed yesterday that got me to think on other matters.

The climate change caused by this strike is postulated to be the reason we are here, that the dinosaurs and much of the other life on Tellus was extinguished. But what doesn’t get talked about so much is the size relationship of the meteorite. If we take it as having a size of (approximately) 15 km x 10 km x 5 km, then we can do some size comparisons.

The volume of Tellus is approximately 1E12 km^3 and its area is approximately 5E8 km^2.   Then the ratio of meteorite area to Tellus area is 3E-7, and the ratio of volumes is 7.5E-10.

Out in terms of a human body, that corresponds to a bullet massing a half gram! Proportionately that’s all it would take to end humanity as a species.

astronomy, dinosaurs, extinction, physics