The Big Q Stands For Questionable

For a while now, Quaker State motor oil has been advertising a promotion: if your car gets to 400,000kms (using Quaker State, I assume) they'll pay you the amount your car is worth.  They're not buying the car - you get to keep it - you just get the money you would have gotten if you sold it.

This begs a couple of questions.  First and most obvious: how much is a car with 400,000kms on the odometer going to be worth?  Less obvious but more damning is when you think how this deal is going to work for them.  If your car lasts a long time, they pay;  if your car doesn't last, they don't pay.  Essentially, they're betting against your car lasting!

Oh Yeah? I'll Show You How To Insult Microsoft!

Vanity Fair has an article by Kurt Eichenwald on Microsoft's poor performance over the last decade, since current CEO Steve Ballmer took over.  It's interesting, and offers a peek into the problems of managing a technology company.  But I thought it missed a few important concepts.  I could write this in the comments section at the Vanity Fair web site, but why, when I have my own virtual Speakers' Corner here?

Oh, and if you're not willing to read the article, I can summarise it quickly.  Microsoft's problems of the last Ten Years are due to:

• Management's myopic fixation on the core products, Windows and Office
• An inflexible employee evaluation system that discouraged cooperation
• The lack of a soaring stock price that took away employees' interest in the good of the company

First, he seems to equate Microsoft's success with "cool."  The fact is, Microsoft was only cool for a few years in the late seventies or early eighties.  Even a late-thirties techie like myself is too young to remember it.  I'm not saying this to insult the mighty MS, I'm just trying to pinpoint it's place in tech culture.  The truth is that for most of its existence, Microsoft has been technology's Wal-Mart: No one - with the possible exception of your Aunt Phyllis - thinks they're cool, but everyone thinks of them as accessible and reliable, so they're wildly successful.

But worse, Eichenwald - like so many mainstream reporters over the years - really misunderstands Microsoft's strengths.  So often their success has been attributed to "innovation."  The truth is that Microsoft has rarely been innovative, at least in the sense of inventing new products or concepts.  Their real secret has been their adaptability, taking any new concept bouncing around the technology world and bringing a usable version of it the mass market quickly.  They're the Madonna of software.

Along similar lines, he perpetuates an idea that's been a long-time pet peeve of mine in the mainstream media:  that any technological empire is always one unexpected innovation from irrelevance.  That is, some college kid could invent something tomorrow that would take down Google or Apple, and the big company would have no defence against it. 

It's certainly true in technology there are a lot of paradigm shifts.  (And yes, I felt dirty using that phrase.)  If you think of the auto industry, the American Car companies had to survive two shifts: one was to mass production, and the other the rising price of oil and the simultaneous arrival of foreign competition.  That's two paradigm shifts in a century.  And in the second case, it took about fifty years to go from hubris to collapse.  In technology, you face those shifts every few years, and you can disappear just as quickly.

In his zeal to portray Microsoft non-investor Warren Buffet as the Daedalus to Bill Gates's Icarus, Eichenwald perpetuates this misconception.  But the idea that a tech giant is powerless to deal with those changes in the market is simplistic.  There's plenty of strategies - of varying levels of morality - that the established company can take to defend itself.  Once again that's Microsoft's traditional strength: their remarkable ability to adapt to the changing market.

Really, Microsoft managed to successfully survive two big paradigm shifts: command-line operating systems to graphical user interfaces, then stand-alone computers to the Internet.  Along the way they also handled several smaller shifts (like the rise of multi-media software or using databases on PCs.)  Eichenwald misses that it's this lack of flexibility, not the lack of innovation, that is the big problem.  For instance, he makes a big deal of Microsoft burying an ahead-of-its-time e-reader.  You can understand how that is frustrating from an intellectual standpoint, but the fact is that the underwhelming Zune music player and it's inability to dent the iPod's market share was a better example of how Microsoft has gotten away from doing what Microsoft does best.

And one last thing: I'd lose my geek credentials if I didn't point out the article's many technological missteps.  It's clear Eichenwald doesn't know a lot about computer technology, and has misunderstood much of what he learned for this article.  It's not a major problem: the technology isn't the focus of the article.  But surely someone at Vanity Fair knows someone who knows computers who could have proof-read this.  I mean, the magazine does have a website after all.

I Like Every Kind Of Fair, In The Crowd, You Bet I'll Be There

I live near a downtown park, and during the summer it is host to a number of weekend festivals.  The focus of the festivals change - just off the top of my head I can think of annual celebrations of books, ribs, multiculturalism, children, non-violence, and gay pride.  I don't really put much of an effort into knowing when these events are coming up.  Just sometimes I go outside to find the park packed with people.

Today when I stepped out of my building, I heard the familiar sound of one of these festivals.  I hadn't thought about it until that moment, but they all seem to have the same sound.  That sound is made up of:

• The discordant sound of several songs of various different songs being played through bad speakers with the bass turned up
• The hum of many generators and compressors
• Young children screaming, between them expressing the entire range of human emotions
• A dozen cars idling while waiting for parking spots
• Somewhere in there, countless conversations in a variety of languages and accents.

But today the weirdest thing happened.  I heard the sound as soon as I left my building, but when I arrived at the park, it was empty.  I could still hear the music and everything as I strolled across the open grass, but the only people there were a largish family barbecue.  Clearly the sound was coming from another part of downtown, but with sound reverberating off of buildings, you couldn't decipher what direction it was coming from. 

So I had the lonely experience of wandering around largely empty streets, hearing a party going on all around me that I somehow couldn't see.  Eventually I found the source: the main street closed-off for a motorcycle show.  Despite stereotypes, it seemed like a really happy, cordial get-together.  I even saw a couple of places where Harleys were parked next to Japanese bikes.

Eventually I got to the cafe I had been headed for, and when I walked in, it was completely empty of all people and furniture.  Had I not already known they were going to move next-door at some point this summer, I probably would have lost my remaining sanity right there.

Prodigious Firestarters

I was pretty happy with the London Olympic opening ceremonies.  It seemed to have a good selection of British culture without having to resort to ancient history.  That's good, since the British can be like fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs: drawing pride entirely from the achievements of the distant past. They had something from just about all of modern Britain.  I heard the one guy complain there was no Doctor Who.  Actually I thought I did hear the Tardis sound effect during "Bohemian Rhapsody."  But if you're going to go into that kind of detail, I didn't see anyone from The Office or Ab Fab either.  I didn't notice any Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but then I didn't count, maybe they had 42 dancing nurses.

However, I was disappointed in the broadcast of it.  If you're not here in Canada, you wouldn't have seen the broadcast I did, but you may have similar complaints about your own broadcaster.  My main comment to the announcers would be this: Shut up.  I'm not even sure the ceremonies need commentators, other than to fill time during the interminable parade of athletes.  I know the whole thing isn't really a great work of art, but I would say that on the scale from "art" to "cheese," Olympic opening ceremonies are much closer to the art end than, say, dance numbers at the Oscars.  And yet we don't seem to need commentators there.  It wouldn't be so bad if they actually had anything to add to the broadcast.  Like say when rapper Dizzee Rascal was performing; he isn't well known outside of the Britain, so it would be nice to introduce him.  But instead, Lisa LaFlamme just assumed we didn't want to hear him and talked over his performance without any acknowledgement.  Also, when she started to talk about the author of Mary Poppins, then realised mid-sentence that she didn't know who wrote it, well that said everything about the media's talk-first-think-second philosophy.  And Brian Williams, if you feel the need to talk over the moment of silence, you've got some serious ego problems.

Earlier I joked that Mr. Bean would light the Olympic flame.  I was shocked that I turned out to be much closer than I ever expected, in that he was actually part of the opening ceremony.  Having young athletes do it was high on symbolism but low on intrigue.  The cauldron made up of the dozens of "petals" was very beautiful, but I have to say on behalf of all Canadians: Okay, we get it, we should have made sure all the torches at the Vancouver opening actually worked. 

So here's my list of other appropriate people to light the cauldron in Britain:

• James Bond, using some kind of pen laser
• A dalek, say in an attempt to exterminate David Beckham
• A football hooligan, in attempting to burn down the stadium
• A backfiring MG
• Roger Bannister, after running another four-minute mile
• A descendant of Guy Fawkes
• Or, for that matter, V (as in "For Vendetta")
• King Arthur, using The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch

A Big Star at a Theatre Near You

Lots of times when a movie star has a new film out, TV channels will show some of that star's older movies.  Top Gun is on again?  Cruise must have a movie out.  I'm sure it's not some corporate conspiracy - often the channels have no connection with the movie studio.  The TV people are just capitalising on the star's current spot in the public consciousness.

So I'm suspicious when I see that tonight the movie Best In Show is on, which stars Fred Willard.  But maybe that was just a coincidence.

Let the Games Begin

Watching the British getting ready for the Olympics, I'm starting to think that they are actually more enthusiastic about the games than the Chinese were.  Where's the traditional British cynicism?  I hear talk of whining or complaining among the people, but I expect more sophisticated complaints out of the UK.  Yes, they made the TV show Twenty Twelve, but I still find myself wishing I could see what Spitting Image would have done with the Olympics.

Anyway, the games are often seen as a symbol that the host nation has arrived on the world stage.  That was certainly the case with Beijing in 2008.  But Britain seems to be seeing it as keeping them on the world stage.  Which means there's even more pressure on them to put on a big show than there was for China, yet the British have to reach that high bar in the middle of a depressed economy.  I think the only way they'll create an opening ceremony as memorable as Beijing is if the mysterious flame lighter turns out to be Mr. Bean, who then proceeds to burn down the stadium.

In Soviet Russia, the Birds Watch You

I'm not a bird watcher, but I have picked up an interest from my parents.  Like so many people, I know it's only a matter of time until I buy binoculars and a Peterson Guide.  But even as a senior citizen, I don't see me having the patience for bird watching.

So I'm going to put my own spin on it, and become an Inverse Bird Watcher.  That is, I'm not going to count the different species of birds that I see; I'm going to count the different places I see birds.  Already I've compiled a pretty good list just this year:

• my balcony
• treeless urban streets
• the local grocery store
• several shopping malls
• my building's parking garage

As long as sparrows keep reproducing and cities keep sprawling, my new hobby will keep going.

A Trip Down Tag Lane

One thing I wanted to get out of this blog, besides the fame and fortune, is the tag cloud.  That's the "Labels" box you see at the side of the page, assuming you're using the full-size desktop-oriented version of the site.  The size of the labels represents the number of times it's been used. 

I was curious how much each topic would come up.  It seems popular culture and sports pop up a lot, since those seem to be easy to write about, but not necessarily my two favourite topics.  Britain, Canada and Facebook seem to come next, the three places I've spent most of my life.  That's followed by books, movies, music, politics and technology, all things I spend much more time on.  It seems that the formula for how often something appears in my blog is the amount of time I spend thinking about a topic, times the amount of annoyance that it gives me.  I sort of pay attention to pop-culture and sports, but find both full of aggravation. 

But then there are all those one-time-only tags.  For instance, I have a "Kony" tag, for the one time I talked about the Kony2012 video. In my defence, I have to point out that when I started out I assumed that the Tag Cloud Gadget would only show the most-often used labels, and leave out the singletons.  So I just happily attached any labels I felt like.  When my first post was about Angelina Jolie's dress at the Oscars, I added "Angelina" and "Oscars" as labels.  But it always shows all the labels.  Since then I've learned not to create any labels I'm unlikely to use again.  So I wrote a whole article about Chaz Bono without a special label.  But still, that tiny "Angelina" tag has been sitting at the top of the cloud ever since, never growing any bigger.  It will probably still be there years from now when this is blog is an indelible part of popular culture beloved by millions.  Hopefully it will at least mean that Angelina Jolie will make an appearance in the movie adaptation.

With Six You Get Beanroll

I have a lot of respect for Chinese people who run Chinese restaurants.  On the surface, their job may not seem difficult.  You go to a new land, and immediately go into a field where you have an unfair advantage over everyone because of your heritage.  You also skip having to assimilate to the new culture.  It's the easy way out.  Besides the twelve-hour days six days a week part.

But as you may know, the "Chinese" food in North America is a rather warped version of actual Chinese food.  It's mostly based on the cuisine of Hong Kong and environs, since that's where the early Chinese immigrants came from.  The cooking has been adapted to local tastes and available ingredients.  And a lot of it was invented by immigrants in the U.S. long after they left home.  When you realise all this, you've got to wonder what they're thinking when they go into business making inauthentic food that misrepresents their homeland. 

To put this in terms we can more easily understand: Lets say you decide to emigrate to the planet Xardak.  You arrive to find that there are many Earth Food Restaurants, and the Xardakians always have an appetite for more.  It sounds like a great business opportunity.  But upon going to one of these Earth restaurants, you're horrified to see what they've done to our food.  Battered hamburger patties.  Curry with melted mozzarella on top.  Deep-fried sushi.  Pizza covered with one giant pepperoni.

So what do you do?  They'll never accept real Human food now that they've gotten used to their version of it.  You'd have to sell the Xardakians the food they want, trying not to gag as you ladle out their New England Clam Borscht.  Bite your tongue as you want so badly to point out that French Fries don't really go on a Caesar salad.  Try to convince them that this "Jambalaya" that you're introducing really is authentic Earth cooking, but their favourite stir-fried spaghetti is just something some guy made up when he was running out of ingredients. 

Maybe if your restaurant is in a bohemian neighbourhood of a Xardakian metropolis, you could convince a few trendy aliens to try your mother's recipe for shepherd's pie.  But for most Earth ex-pats, you'll have to conform to expectations if you want to stay in business.  Your only satisfaction will come from talking about your customers behind their backs in English.  Or, for maximum irony, learn to do it in Mandarin.

Yet Another Has-been Organization Overhaul

Yahoo has a new CEO.  Oh I'm sorry, "Yahoo!". It's good to see they brought in someone from Google; for many years Yahoo has been in denial about being a tech company, instead insisting that they're a media company.

And that's kind of the problem; Yahoo turned itself into the sort of company that 90's businessmen imagined would dominate today.  It's a portal site, with multimedia content from converged sources .  It's a collection of stale buzzwords. 

What's frustrating is that with hindsight they could have created a number of huge businesses that actually existed.  They were the site to find things on the web, but gave it up and let Google dominate the world.  They bought Geocities, which was essentially a proto-social-network, but did nothing with it.  They were an early player in Instant Messaging, but could turn it into a Twitter-like service.  And they bought Flickr, which could have been as big as Instagram.

One way out of their problems might be to try to retroactively build their rag-tag collection of services into the do-it-all social network it should have been. Maybe then fed up  Facebook users will finally make good on their threats to leave after the annual unneeded redesign.  But I won't bet my RIM stock on it.

Cracking the Maclean's Code

How is life like a Dan Brown novel?  There are many ways: a lot of it is hard to believe, it goes by more quickly than you realise, the characters act in inconsistent ways.  But I can add a new one: A little knowledge helps you know what is real and what isn't.

I'm probably like a lot of people in that I read The Da Vinci Code when it was a big deal, and then later read the previous book in the series, Angels and Demons.  I'm sure I'm also like a lot of people in that I found the predecessor had similar entertainment value, yet it actually made both books seem disappointing by revealing how formulaic they both were.  Surely Brown knows there are some women who were not orphaned and raised by a male relative who instilled her with a love of science.

But for me there was an extra disappointment: The Da Vinci Code revolved around art, history and other subjects in which I'm no expert.  But a lot of Angels and Demons was concerned with physics, a subject I am familiar with after taking half a degree in it.  Once I saw how fast-and-loose Brown handled physics, it revealed to me just how far he bends facts.  No, I'm not one of those people who thought The Da Vinci Code was based on reality, but a great deal of its appeal comes from the fact that it seems tantalisingly possible.  But if Brown's long-range conspiracies are as real as antimatter production and hypersonic aircraft, then I'll just go back to straight-up science fiction, which is about equally believable, thank you very much.

I find the same thing works with the news media.  Like any thinking person, I'm never sure how much of the media's sensationalism should be believed.  But every now and then they report a sensationalist story about a topic I know well, and I have my answer.  This week's Maclean's was a great example, with a cover story about the Higgs Boson.  It features the couldn't-be-more-misleading headline "This Changes Everything" (as I mentioned in an earlier post, the new findings really just boringly confirm what most physicists already believed.)  It also implies that the discovery opens the door for "teleportation, phasers, alternate dimensions". 

My half a physics degree may not have ever helped me get a job, but it did let me know that this cover story was so ridiculous it would lose them their journalists' licences, if only such a thing existed.  So now I know I can disregard lots of other things I've read on their covers, just over the last few months:

• We'll soon be eating lettuce with built-in dressing
• The Hunger Games is a symptom of widespread rage among young people
• Canada will never have a cold winter again
• The one-third of women that earn more than their husbands are causing major societal upheaval
• RIM's downfall is all Balsillie and Lazaridis's fault
• Bill Gates knows how to fix public education
• The Bloc Quebecois has been good for Canada
• Newt Gingrich could be president.

Okay, I don't think I needed any physics education to see through that last one.

Rewind

Following a power failure, I had to reprogram the clock on my VCR, which admittedly I use primarily for the clock.  You even have to enter the year on my VCR, and of course it lays a guilt trip on me by starting the year field at the default value of 2001.   So I'm paging up through the years, and I can almost hear it asking, "Really, people still use VCR's in 2012?". So I had to blog about it on my phone just to feel current again.

The Spy Who Tore My ACL

In baseball parlance, "shagging fly balls" refers to catching fly balls in practice.  Which is why, during the All Star Game, commentator Rick Sutcliffe mentioned that earlier in the season star pitcher Mariano Rivera "blew out his knee shagging."  Unfortunately he forgot that he is working on the international broadcast of the game.  So now any baseball fans in Britain think Sutcliffe has quite a potty mouth, but have a strange respect for Rivera.

Women and Heat - it's not what you think

People have long debated whether the ends justify the means.  I find myself having a post-modern version of that same debate a lot these days.  For instance, there's that TV commercial showing women from all over the world, while a voice-over asks, "Who better to understand the problems of a woman in the developing world, than another woman, in any part of the world?"  That leaves me with a few questions:

• Who's voice is that?  Is it Sarah Michelle Gellar?
• Does the claim really make sense?  I'm sure there are issues of discrimination and personal safety that women anywhere in the world have in common, but I really think the primary troubles of a woman in the developing world (hunger, disease, war) are things they have in common with the men in their lands, but not with the women in the developed world.
• How much does that bother me?  Is it okay for an advertisement to spout an emotionally-charged but intellectually faulty line if it's for a good cause?

That same situation came up today reading the paper.  There was an op-ed piece that was built around the idea that the current heat wave should make us all more concerned about global warming.  A lot of people say similar things, and it always bothers me.  I'm glad they're concerned and trying to raise awareness, but, well, I have a memory...

See, each winter, at some point there's a cold stretch, and global warming deniers claim that the weather proves that global is bunk.  And then more environmentally conscious people point out - correctly - that global warming is about long-term change and doesn't imply that there will never be cold weather again. 

But then when summer comes around and the climate shoe is on the other political foot, those same people claim that a heat wave is proof of global warming.  Sorry, but the only proof you can draw from hot weather is a greater incidence of heat waves over time.

Yes, I'm so dedicated to logic that I'll knock down political arguments for causes I believe in when they don't measure up.  It's just like Chief Justice Roberts voting for Obamacare.  So consider that debt paid back; Right Wing, are we good now?

Higgs Goes On

As another addition to the Higgs Boson story, I came across this article on a sad/troubling footnote to the story: pioneering physicist Abdus Salam.

The Things I Do For Others

I hope British tennis fans appreciate what I did for Andy Murray a few days ago, ridiculing him in a post, thus guaranteeing that he would have a great run at Wimbledon.

Strike a Boson (okay, not one of my better titles)

There's been unprecedented requests for my opinion on this topic - in that a friend e-mailed and suggested I write a blog entry on it.  It's the sort-of discovery of the Higgs Boson.  It wasn't that long ago that I learned I was mispronouncing "Boson" and now suddenly everyone is talking about it.  So here are some thoughts:

• It's odd how underwhelmed physicists are about having our leading hypothesis confirmed.  A few have even come right out and said it would have been more interesting if they had failed to find it.  It's a pet peeve of mine that people who know little about science often imagine scientists as being anal-retentive organisation-freaks who are driven to explain everything out of a supreme fear of the unknown.  Anyone who has actually been around scientists knows they're actually attracted to mysteries, and their current disappointment is indicative of it.
• I should be grateful to the media for mentioning this story which is surely not gaining them any ratings.  At the same time though, you get the feeling that the amount of hours spent on the Higgs story could have been better spent on regular reports on science.  But that's true of any topic: we'd be better served by a media that gave well-rounded, regular reports than periodic, fanatic over-analysis.
• I'm at least glad they've largely stopped calling it The God Particle.  As many scientists have pointed out - putting aside the questionable theology of the name - the fact is that really gives an over-inflated idea of what the particle does.  It's important, but not supreme-deity-important.  Having said that, I saw one headline calling it, "God's Particle."  Um, aren't they all God's particles?
• But I'm not done running down this particle.  I recently found out that the layman's description of the Higgs - "it gives matter mass" - isn't entirely true.  It does give matter some of it's mass, but most of an atom's mass is a result of the forces holding the nucleus and its components together.
• Keep in mind that there's still plenty more to do in Physics.

Invernym

Definition: when a person on the Internet types "you're" when they mean "your" rather than the other way around.  Rarely used.

What Do You Do With a Tennis Player With Three Balls?

It's Wimbledon time again.  As a borderline tennis fan, I'm always filled with questions during any major tournament.  Like what is an Unforced Error, and why does no one count Forced Errors?  Why is Andy Murray considered one of the "Big Four" Men's players?  Yes, I know, he is one of the top four male tennis players in the world, but isn't that sort of like counting the company that makes Oscar Mayer Wienermobiles as one of the Big Four American car companies?

But right now I'm wondering about one of the odd practices of the game.  Before a serve, one of the ball boys/girls will give the server three balls.  The server stares at the three balls for a second, tosses one aside, puts another in his pocket, then uses the other.  So I'd like to know:

• What is he looking for?
• Why is it than in any group of three balls, precisely two will have it?
• How come the players can tell, but the ball boys can't?
• Why put one in your pocket?  You have these speedy servants hanging around you, they could just give you a new ball as soon as you need another one.  I mean sure it's a great power trip to have these balls presented to you just so you can reject one, but wouldn't it be an even better privilege to miss your first serve, angrily snap your fingers, and have a servant run out with another ball?

It gets even weirder in the Women's game.  They don't have pockets, so what do they do with the extra ball?  Shove it up the side of their skirt.  Where are they putting it?  A lot of the women in tennis go to great lengths to appear stylish on the court; doesn't it occur to them that no amount of jewels or designer outfits can make up for the appearance of a giant growth on their hip?

Stuck in a Holding Pattern

The flying car is a bit of a sore spot for many, since it was something that was promised to us from long ago.  And it seemed so believable.  No one really expected to see Warp Drive in their lifetime, but a flying car seems to just be rearranging inventions we already have.  Yet for a variety of reasons, it just didn't work out.  And now, between those expectations and our disappointment, there seems to be an overreaction every time some hint at auto-aviation arises.

Sometimes this comes from Mr. Paul Moller, an engineer focused on the challenge.  I first read about him in an article on new technologies coming in the 1990's.  It virtually guaranteed that he would deliver a practical flying car by the end of the decade.  Since then, I've seen similar articles about him and his technological quest every few years.  The articles are always portraying his production of a flying car as an inevitability that's right around the corner.  The oddest example of this naive optimism was in the middle of a job-hunting book in which the author went off on a tangent about how the government is wasting our money on public transit because Moller is going to answer all our transport problems in just a few years. 

I don't think Moller is trying to defraud people.  There's an old joke about asking an engineer how complete his current task is, and he says, "90%."  A week later he's asked how complete the job is, and he says, "95%."  A week later, 99%.  A week after that, 99.9%.  It's a common mistake to over-estimate how complete a new undertaking is (I've been guilty of this enough times.)  Moller is just an extreme example.  That or the car companies are sabotaging him.  Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

But the latest flying car red herring is TerraFugia.  In this case, it's quite real and practical.  It's just that it's only technically a flying car.  Have you seen it?  It's really just a small plane that has wheels, and thus could conceivably be driven on the road.  I suppose that could be useful in a few cases; an amateur pilot would be able to store the plane at home and drive it to an airport.  But should a product useful to a few small-time pilots really get mainstream media attention?  No, we're only being told about it because it technically comes under that magic "flying car" label. 

It would be like if a jet-engine manufacturer created an engine small enough that a single person could carry it to the plane for installation using only a specially designed, back-mounted harness.  Conceivably useful, but limited in audience.  However, once they call it a "jet pack" it'll be on every news report on earth.