Sweet Tweet-Back Backwards News

I'm on Twitter, but I've never been a big participant in it.  I've posted the occasional tweet, or retweeted some, but mostly I've just lurked, reading what others write.  Part of the problem is that it's so immediate.  People don't tweet about what they did today, they tweet about what they're doing right now.  If you wait a few hours to catch up, you'll be reading after the moment has passed, like hearing people talk about a great party that you missed.

But sometimes going back and reading tweets from hours past can be useful, because you can treat it as a way of condensing reality.  A great example was just last night.  I didn't watch the final night of the Republican convention, but by scanning through tweets, I can get a nice summary.  So without sitting through all the speeches and ceremonies, I know that all I need to know about the night is: Eastwood talked to a chair.  Now I know enough about the event to understand the next week's worth of late night talk show monologues.

Why Not Smile?

The smiley and I go way back. :)  I knew him before he got all uppity and wanted to be known as an "emoticon."  So I've been disappointed that the old-fashioned, up-cycled punctuation smiley is so often replaced by little graphic smiles in e-mail and texting programs.  It's fine if they use the simple, classic, "have a nice day" smiling face, but too often they have a garish thing with a giant smile and blushing cheeks and tuft of hair - they're just trying too hard.

That's why I'm happy to see that some people are taking it upon themselves to make a new generation of smileys.  For those of you less familiar with computers, it used to be that pretty much all computers used a code called ASCII to communicate text.  But it had the shortcoming that it could only handle the Roman alphabet (that is, this alphabet.). So now they use a new standard called Unicode, which can handle all the letters in all the world's alphabets, plus hundreds of symbols used in math, publishing, linguistics and more.  All these thousands of symbols have been a boon for anyone interested in making pictures out of letters.  Already we have this extra smirky smiley, which is really just a Japanese character:

ツ

Here are some other ones I liked (which may not work on your computer.  Good luck!):

Ꙩ_Ꙩ

⊂(◉‿◉)つ

◔ᴗ◔ 

◉︵◉

(´・ω・｀) 

ಠ‿ಠ

On the other hand, they also made a couple of smiling characters,  which is nice, but makes it a little too easy:

☺☻

My Phone Has Been Shanghaied

It's happened again.  A few weeks ago I mentioned a strange incident in which my phone's autocorrect somehow "corrected" my attempt to spell "and" with the Chinese city of "Zhengzhou." 

Well, in typing my last entry, I noticed that where I had tried to type the word, "that," and again, I don't know what virtual keys I actually hit, but half-a-sentence later I looked back and saw not, "that," but rather, "Fuzhou" which is yet another Chinese city.

That can't be a coincidence; it must be a conspiracy.  Once again, China is doing things their way.  Any other country would sabotage our phones so they can see what we're talking about.  But they have sabotaged our phones to encourage us to talk about them.

Cared Spitless

I've noticed that a lot of prescription medications list dry mouth as a side effect.  Apparently it wasn't my imagination: they now have a prescription drug to handle dry mouth.  A lot of people would be suspicious about this: Big Pharma gives you a drug that gives you dry mouth, but don't worry, they have another drug that fixes that.

To me, the bigger question is: isn't it kind of a coincidence that fixing so many of your problems involves reduced saliva?  I remember George Carlin joking that saliva causes stomach cancer, but apparently it causes everything else as well.  Or maybe it's the part of the brain that handles salivation that causes all our problems.  That makes sense, since it has a pretty simple job, as Pavlov showed.

Let's Pretend This Post Never Happened

Last week Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.  And it was just a month ago that Joe Paterno was stripped of over a hundred of his wins. Normally I'm a big fan of justice, and I'm a lot more rule-positive than most sports fans, but this retroactive editing of history strikes me as a weird kind of punishment. 

(Continuing my recent tradition of basing posts on Onion articles, here they are making a similar point.)

For one thing, I'm wondering just how much punishment it is.  Imagine you're just starting out in cycling and you have the choice:  Use drugs, win the Tour de France seven times, and spend a decade as the greatest in your sport, make a ton of money, then lose your titles and reputation, (but keeping the money.)  Your alternative is: don't use drugs, and you'll spend a few years as an anonymous also-ran before you have to retire and get a real job.  In that case, you still have your reputation - or at least you would, if anyone knew who you were.

Of course, as a sports fan I've been thinking back, trying to come up with any instances where my favourite teams and athletes might have benefited from some retroactive justice.  The best I can come up with is back in 1989, the Blue Jays were eliminated from the playoffs by the Oakland Athletics, the latter lead by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire.  We now know that both of them used steroids, so I think they should be stripped of their World Series title that year.  Yes!  The Jays won the Pennant!

But you can make a better argument for Armstrong's punishment than Paterno's.  In Armstrong's case, the punishment is to remove achievements gained by breaking the rules.  In Paterno's case, it's an arbitrarily chosen punishment for wrongs committed away from the game.  I suppose the motivation is that now that he is dead, he can't be directly punished.  The only thing we can take away from him is his legacy, so that's what they've hit at.

But here's the problem: as countless people have pointed out, part of the core problem in the Penn State scandal is the reverence we give to sporting heroes like Paterno.  Essentially, we assume that a person who achieves great things in sports must be a morally sound person.  And now the disappearing-wins punishment is the same thinking in reverse: if we find someone is not the moral paragon we assumed, we have to change history so that he didn't have great achievements in sports.  Perhaps it would be a good lesson for all of us if we just had to live with the fact that one of the best ever at his job ended up disappointing us.

Home, Cheap Home

For a while now, Home Hardware has been using the slogan, "Homeowners Helping Homeowners."  I can get why they chose that: you like to think that the people helping you at a store are not unlike yourself and can relate to your needs. 

But as a non-homeowner myself, I can't help but feel a little left-out.  For one thing, my apartment's flimsy wiring has blown countless light bulbs, directly resulting in my being a repeat customer at the local Home Hardware.  It's also the implication that a non-homeowner isn't going to care to help a homeowner.  "Which drywall compound is most appropriate?  How should I know - I wish I had something I could drywall."

But that claim - their company is made up of homeowners - brings up an interesting aspect.  Are the people in their stores homeowners?  I mean, think of any large retailer, and the people who work there, and consider whether they own homes.  Even before the collapse of easy home loans, it's hard to believe that, say, Walmart employees were home owners.  So Home Hardware must really be paying their employees way more than their competitors.  Good for them, but I think a company would get more success if they advertised that they were "Ununionized Working Poor Helping Homeowners."

Serious Convenience

As many people have observed over the years, there are a lot of commercials that show an unrealistic portrayal of their customers.  Or at least an unrepresentative example: thin and athletic people eating fast food, charming and coherent people drinking beer, happy couples doing home renovations.  Some people consider this kind of unrealistic advertising to be immoral, because companies are covering up the dangers of their products.  Personally I don't have a problem with it: as long as the products can be used safely, and the potential dangers are well known, I'm okay with leaving it to people to make their own consumption decisions.

Besides, consider the alternative: every ad showing the worst side of its product's effects.  You'd see alcoholics drinking until they pass out, depressed over-eaters endangering their health without satisfaction, couples pushed to the brink of divorce over paint swatches.  TV would be too depressing to watch.

Payday loan services are in the same situation.  Their usual marketing strategy  is to show happy, well-adjusted people looking for loans.  They look relaxed and reasonably well-off.  In other words, exactly the people who wouldn't need a payday loan, nor the people who would be particularly hurt by their sky-high interest rates. 

But now MoneyMart has ditched the ads with happy actors and a computer-generated piggy-bank, and made a series of ads with testimonials from actual people who use their services.  The most common one shows a single mother with two jobs talking about how she uses MoneyMart's services. 

It makes me want to yell financial advice at the screen.  "No! Stop using these places!  You can reorganise your spending so your expenses come out after your pay comes in!  You'll save over 10% of your income!  Same goes for those other guys with the kangaroo in their ads!"  The only really positive thing she says about the service is that it gives her a feeling of control - presumably oblivious to how much that feeling is costing her (and her kids.)  I can't think of any other company with ads that not only don't dance around the downside of their products, but practically rub our noses in it. 

Ryan's Rage

When news came out that Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan listed Rage Against The Machine as one of his favourite musicians, I knew I had to write a post about it.  The only question was which Rage song to use in a headline pun:

• Ballot in the Head?
• Bull on Parade?
• (Don't) Know Your Enemy?
• Renegades of Spin?
• Or perhaps a lyrical clip, "Fox News, I won't do what you tell me?"

Now that I've got that out of my system, on with the post.  If you're interested, Rage guitarist Tom Morello gave his thoughts in a Rolling Stone article (he's not amused.) 

First of all, this recalls the mini-controversy that shows up in pretty much every American political campaign, in which a musician gets an injunction to stop a Republican politician from using their song on the campaign.  Just in the time I was working on this entry I saw it go by on the news that Dee Snider of Twisted Sister won't let Ryan use "We're Not Gonna Take It."  I keep wondering when Republicans are going to figure out that they're stuck with only Country music for their campaign stops.  Or Ted Nugent.

Well now it turns out that Paul Ryan is a fan of one of the most openly politically-liberal groups of their generation.  That brings up the question of just how much the meaning and intent of a song matters to the enjoyment of the song.  It's not a question I have to deal with often, being a left-leaning person who is not a fan of Country (or Ted Nugent.)

I'm trying to think of instances where I'm in Ryan's shoes:  There are artists who's attitude is not one I completely follow.  I don't look at life with quite the emptiness that, say, Joy Division's lyrics would indicate, but I share enough of their world-view that I do know where they're coming from.  There are a few one-off, one-issue songs I can say I don't agree with:  The Smith's "Meat is Murder" comes to mind, since I'm not a vegetarian.  But that's one song out of many, so it's easy to look the other way on a song of hard-line animal rights beliefs, when I am with them on so many other songs.

And of course there are plenty of artists who's music is lyrically ambiguous.  Maybe the New Pornographers are far-right activists, and we'd know if we could only understand their lyrics.  That of course begs the question of how important the lyrics are.  But I think there's a difference between ignoring cryptic lyrics and ignoring clear lyrics that promote ideas you've dedicated your life to fighting.

So I have no explanation.  Either Paul Ryan is so emotionally flexible that he can share in a band's feelings without sharing in the reason for those feelings, or he's just trying to win votes from his Gen-X brethren.  Or he uses music to live out fantasies of being a liberal, in the same way suburban white kids listen to hip-hop imagining themselves to be gangstas.

Thanks Internet!

For one of my Olympic Posts I mentioned how silly divers look like from certain angles.  To back up my argument, I looked all over the web for example pictures.  Well now I've stumbled on a page of such pictures.  It's mostly focussing on the divers' faces, but still, the point is no degree of difficulty should justify people looking like this.

Don't Trust the X in Apartment 23

About a week ago, my building's super passed out a sheet of contact information for us to fill out.  That's pretty funny in itself - the people who run the building where we live need to know how to get in contact with us.  It's also a nice bit of nostalgia that they want us to fill in information by writing on paper.  No web site, no QR code to find the web site, just a paper form.  And not even a place to write in our e-mail address.

But what's interesting is that they taped it to our doors to ensure it didn't get lost.  And now, a week later, a few of them are still affixed to the doors on my floor.  That has me wondering:  Have these people really not been out in over a week?  They could be empty apartments.  But there isn't much oversupply in the city's rental market.  It could just be that they can't be bothered to fill out the form, so they've left it there.  But then, I've also seen other stuff - like phone books - left at apartment doors for long periods of time.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  There are a lot of seniors in this building, they could have a quiet life without much activity.  But the seniors are surprisingly active, even if it's only strolling down the hallway.  It's not a subsidised building, so the mystery renters must have some sort of income.  They also have to plan their grocery purchase well: none of my shopping without a list, oh, I can run out again in a few days if I forget something.

So I've pieced together this idea of a well-organised telecommuter with a zen-like satisfaction with solitude.  That makes me feel better.  Or I can just take solace in not being the most anti-social person on my floor.

I Think You Can Read 'Bout Dyson

Today I once again had the privilege of using the Dyson Air Blade hand dryer in a public washroom.  This always restores my faith in humanity.  There are certain things that you start to believe our race is simply incapable of: overcoming our instinct for aggression, having compassion for the less fortunate, curtailing our impact on the environment, building any device in a public restroom that actually works as intended.

And then, here among malfunctioning taps and misaligned cubicle locks, we have a hand dryer that actually works.  I believe this proves several things about company founder James Dyson:

• James Dyson is a genius.  After all, he has succeeded where so many have failed.
• James Dyson has a near-psychotic fixation on air movement.  The fact that his company makes an odd range of products that just have this one thing in common is strange.  The fact that he would take on an item in the restroom when no other inventor finds it worthy of any thought at all proves it.
• James Dyson should have been born twenty years earlier.  There was a long period between the Moon Landing and the mainstreaming of the Internet when the world was devoid of revolutionary technological change.  We really could have used funky vacuum cleaners and fans then.

So what other air-movement devices can he work on?

Ceiling fans - environmentalists point out that they take only 2% the energy of air conditioning.  I don't know why they present that fact as if it were a surprise; to me it's obvious, as they are only 2% as effective.  So how about a ceiling fan that cools the room, doesn't require you to secure all light objects, and doesn't give you the impression that it is one loose screw away from taking your head off.

Computer fans - inevitably clog with dust and become less effective.  Just to disperse the heat generated by playing Mah-jongg my laptop has to run the fan so fast I worry the keyboard will turn inside-out.

Air Conditioners - not so bad if you're in a house, but for an apartment/condo, you have to chose between hearing the TV or having the AC on (or having your neighbours hate you for watching at volume eleven)

Clothes Dryers - using the vacuum technology, he could do away with lint traps.  And all that lint going around in a cyclone, it would spin itself into yarn.

Supersonic Combustion Ramjets - that would allow us to build spacecraft that would make it into orbit without multi-stage rockets.  Or are you afraid to tackle something useful, Mr. Dyson?

No, It's All Too Believable

Previously I mentioned Literally Unbelievable, the web site that shows articles from The Onion that have been shared on Facebook, along with the reactions of Facebook users oblivious to the satirical nature of the articles.

With the American election campaign on the go, The Onion has been doing more political articles, and that's shown up in the articles featured in Literally Unbelievable.  Recent articles getting attention include:

• Obama to appeal to younger voters by appearing in a stoner comedy with Seth Rogen and James Franco
• Paul Ryan thinks he should have told Romney about guy he's dating
• Obama ad accuses Romney of murdering JonBenet Ramsey
• Romney admits he made $32 trillion in 2006
• Obama pledges to repeal health care if re-elected

What's funny/depressing about all this is that the way people talk about these fake and ridiculous articles is pretty much the same way people talk about real issues.  In response to the piece about Romney and his huge earnings, the liberals point to it as evidence of our system corrupted by a manipulative oligarchy for its own ends, while the conservatives jump to his defence saying he deserves it and we should stop demonizing success.  The fact that they're talking about a fictitious story doesn't seem to matter. 

Also, people seem willing to believe so much about the other side.  When the Romney story mentions that he's on the board of 486 Fortune 500 companies, it fits right into the world-view of cynical liberals.  And angry conservatives have such a strong view of Obama as lazy, incompetent and without morals, that they'll go for any story about desperate campaign manoeuvres.

So the moral of this story is that if you've ever suspected that modern politics is just a kind of theatre of confrontation where the substance itself is near irrelevant, well, um, yep.

BLG

You know those white-oval country abbreviation bumper stickers?  Wait, why am I describing it?  We have pictures on the Internet now.

Used with Gnu Free Document License

See?  One of those things.

Anyway, I don't know if they're still common in Europe, which I believe is where they started, but there isn't much call for them on this side of the Atlantic.  So mostly you see humourous take-offs on the concept.

Today I saw one that said, "VGN".  That left me wondering.  I suppose it could be someone originally from Virginia, but that's usually abbreviated, "VA."  So it must be some sort of statement about the driver.  The only such possibilities that sprang to mind were "Virgin" or "Vegan."  Given that this was a full-size pick-up, neither possibility seems likely. 

Loss Leaders And Dance Numbers

I have a counter to yesterday's post about how I've lost touch with fashion.  It's time for back-to-school sales again.  On the one hand, after more than a decade out of school, I am finally over the spastic twitch I used to experience every year when I got that first reminder that summer was scour to end.

But on the other hand, I'm still somewhat in-tune with youth culture, since I can still tell that stores' attempts to look cool to teenagers are pretty laughable.  In my day it was pretty easy, I guess.  You just put binder-paper on sale at 10¢ for a thousand sheets, and wait for the parents to come in and buy over priced binders and pencil crayons.  Now you're trying to sell electronics - and the parents don't understand them, so you have to appeal directly to the kids.  And that's how we end up watching teens dancing through school with laptops during commercial breaks.

Bright Side of Life, Dark Side of the Moon

If you've read my tweets in the shiny new Twitter gadget I just installed in the margin, you know I wasn't too impressed by the Olympic Closing Ceremonies.  I liked the opening for its ability to show a variety of elements of British culture, not merely the clichés everyone already knows.

The closing ceremonies were supposed to do the same thing.  According to our commentators, the slate of music was chosen to be not necessarily the best British songs of all time, but rather a representative selection of songs.  I can agree with the "not necessarily the best" part, but representative?  The impression one got was that Britain recorded a bunch of famous classic rock anthems before 1980, and after that, have done nothing but bubblegum pop. 

There was plenty of old music, so I assume people over about fifty were probably happy, though I suspect they would be disappointed that other than an appearance by Ray Davies of The Kinks, there wasn't much that isn't already the stuff of mainstream radio.  Anyone younger - and appreciative of light pop - was likely glad to see the Spice Girls reunion, though they seem to be less remembered than the height of their fame would suggest.

Trouble is, the Spice Girls, Take That, and George Michael - who mostly appealed to the same people - formed most of the representation of the eighties and nineties.  For that huge part of the audience that is under fifty and not into bubblegum, our entire musical experience was summed up by Fatboy Slim and one song by half of Oasis.  Okay, there was the Pet Shop Boys too, but they were relegated to playing during the athletes' march; I looked down at the wrong time and missed seeing them altogether.  What's especially odd is that two bands that would have brought some balance to the program, Blur and New Order, were there, but only for an earlier concert outside the stadium.

Look, I realise not everyone can get the perfect show for them.  To quote, ironically enough, the Rolling Stones, "you can't always get what you want."   Just because I'd like to see them end with the Jesus and Mary Chain covering Paranoid Android doesn't mean everyone else would.  But really, a retrospective of British music with no punk, metal, new wave, Madchester, trip hop, or grime?  That lack of depth made the whole production seem like nothing more than a really big Super Bowl half-time show.

The Accidental Tourist

Even before getting a cell phone, I'd heard all kinds of horror stories about the odd things auto correct features can insert into messages.  I assumed they were exaggerations or extreme examples.  But now that I'm experiencing it myself, I am truly amazed at just how bad it is.  The suggestions it gives for partially complete words are bizarre.  For instance, when I just misspelled "bizarre" as "bizzare," it offered "blizzard" as a suggestion.  When I moved on to the next word, it automatically changed it to "biz are." I had to experiment with the spelling on my own to get it right.

But nothing can compare to what I experienced while typing the previous blog entry.  I was typing quickly, so I didn't see which keys I actually hit.  But when I looked back over the sentence I just typed, in the spot where I was expecting to see the word "and," I instead saw the word "Zhengzhou," a city in Eastern China.

Aging Progress

I think I've figured out exactly how it is that old people come to feel old.  See I was just waiting to cross the street at a stoplight, and I saw an old lady walking towards me on the sidewalk.  But as she approached, I started to realize that she wasn't old; in fact, she was younger than me.

So how could I have made such a mistake?  It was her sunglasses.  She was wearing giant, round sunglasses.  Those are stylish now, but I have years of experience thinking of then as old-lady-glasses.

And that's the maturity dilemma.  As I recently observed, once you get to pushing forty, you've seen everything be in and out at least once, and fashion is no longer instinctual.  And once you have to think about it, it becomes to easy to just say screw it, I'm wearing something comfortable.

Pesky Jason and the Olympians

After two weeks of trying to follow the Olympics, here's my critique of all the sports I've watched:

Water Polo:

Redesign the head covers.  I don't know what looks worse: the ear covers that look like Princess-Leia-hair, the string strap tied in a precious little bow under the chin, or the way their hair forces it into a conehead shape.  Hockey players use less-than-optimum helmets for the looks (the "bubble" helmets of the seventies were better, but judged to be too ugly) so I think water poloers, or what ever they're called, should get to use something better-looking too.

Synchronized Swimming:

Redesign the nose plugs.  You can use the excuse that it's for streamlining.

Swimming:

As many people have said, there should just be freestyle swimming, since the other disciplines are like giving extra sprinting medals for running with silly walks.  Oh wait, they do...

Racewalking:

Admittedly I haven't watched all the coverage of the Olympics.  But I have watched a lot, and there's still one thing I can't believe I haven't seen: Racewalking highlights set to the Benny Hill chase music.  Or perhaps a montage of racewalking highlights interspersed with clips from the Silly Walks sketch.

Beach Volleyball:

Drop the pretence and just have everyone naked.

Diving:

I'm assuming the judges are all at the side of the pool.  Why?  Because any of them were looking directly at the diver from the ends of the pool, no one would want to give any marks for the Tuck position.  That has to be the most embarrassing move I've seen in any artistic sports.

Marathon Swimming:

It's only in its second Olympics and I have to say: what kind of a new sport is that?  It's simple and extremely challenging.  Exactly what we don't expect from the newest Olympics sports.  Where's the insular jargon, the sanity-straining stunts, the weird equipment, the cryptic judging criteria?

Tae Kwon Do:

It's an interesting sport, though it's not as entertaining as you would expect from a sport of trying to kick your opponent in the head.  Maybe it's just the way it's presented on television.  Hong Kong action directors, the challenge is yours.

Badminton:

That's far more entertaining than I expected, the intentional losses notwithstanding.  It's a weird combination of fast and slow: the shuttlecock starts out lightning fast, then slows like it hit a molasses cloud.  I find it's like watching Table Tennis, but without that nagging feeling that the players are violating the laws of physics.

Modern Pentathlon:

It's supposed to be based on the skills needed by a soldier - as of its creation, in 1912.  That includes fencing and horseback riding.  So like Modernism itself, the Modern Pentathlon seems quite dated.  What we need is a Post-Modern Pentathlon.  Okay, that sounds bad - I just mean sports based on what today's soldiers have to do.  I'm sure we could make a difficult set of events out of Navy SEAL training.

Triathlon:

I was disappointed to find out that countries often send their triathletes to the games not to try to win, but just so they can help pace the country's top competitor.  That strikes me as against the spirit of competition; if countries are going to turn it into a team sport, they should all share in the credit.  I still can't quite figure out how a person wants the challenge of a triathlon, but the challenge of pacing themselves is just too much.

Canoeing:

Is it too much to ask that they actually look like canoes?  I know, race cars don't look like street cars, so I shouldn't expect authentic birch-bark canoes.  But still, it loses some style.  Perhaps competitors could be required to carve their own canoes as part of the competition.

Velodrome Cycling:

It's always been an odd discipline to begin with, what with the dawdling around the track, daring the other competitor to take the lead.  Yes, I understand the concept: drafting the other cyclist to slingshot around makes it advantageous to trail late in the race.  But the same principle works in Nascar too, but you don't see them weaving along the track in first gear waiting for someone else to go first.

Equestrian:

Lots of people ask whether this even counts as a sport - a sport of humans, anyway.  And with Mitt Romney's wife owning a horse in the event, there's also the question of whether equestrian is just a sop to the wealthy.  Well they could diffuse that by including some more cheap sports.  Ultimate Frisbee anyone?

What? I Only Have a Weekend to Get All My Olympic Thoughts In?

One thing always makes me a little uneasy about the Olympics, especially the summer games, is the extreme dedication today's athletes have.  I know dedication is supposed to be a good thing, and usually it is, but there's a limit.

Usually we think of sports as a measure of humanity.  We like to think the “best” person won, whether that be the strongest, bravest, smartest, most skilled or most dedicated.  But when I watch the Olympics, particularly the unending lets-meet-the-athletes mini-docs, I can’t help but find their single-minded determination to be way beyond admirable and downright unhealthy.  The “best” person doesn't win, they finish last because they have enough of a balanced approach to life and thus spent only fifteen hours a day practising.  Meanwhile some borderline-sociopath practised sixteen hours because they have nothing else in their life, and for that they take the gold. 

It's not quite as bad in the Winter Games, since there's a much smaller pool of competitors, so you don't have to be quite as crazy to be the best.  It's also a good argument for some of the much-maligned new or obscure sports.  BMX biking and Trampoline haven't been reduced to a science by an international coaching complex yet. 

Cures and Curiosity

Every time NASA is in the headlines, there's some talk about the huge costs of their achievements.  Any news story about the latest space probe will include mention of its cost, which will be in the hundreds of millions for even the cheapest of missions.  Couldn't we feed the poor/cure cancer/fix the economy, everyone asks.

As a socially-concerned techie, I'm torn by these arguments. On the one hand, I'd like to feed the poor/cure cancer/fix the economy as much as anyone. On the other hand, the space program fan in me feels unfairly picked on. Yes, the space program is hugely expensive. But our world is full of hugely expensive things that nobody ever questions. For instance, the Total Recall remake cost $125 million - the studio's not getting that back, they might as well have put that in to curing cancer. Or a space mission - more people would have watched that.

But the chorus of cost complaints is notably muted for the Curiosity mission, in spite of its high-even-by-NASA-standards cost of $2.5 billion. Why?  Because the other big story on the planet is an even bigger, even more superfluous expense: The Olympics. In fact, the one tweet I saw going around talking about Curiosity's cost was comparing it favourably with the games (which cost nearly six times as much.). It'd be nice if in future NASA could schedule its missions during the Olympics, but it's hard enough coordinating with the orbits of the planets.

It's Monday Night, Time For (a post about) Headlines

A few weeks ago, you may remember that Donald Sobol, the author of the Encyclopedia Brown books died.  But I found about about it in an unusual way.  The Washington Post used the headline, "Donald Sobol, author of beloved 'Encyclopedia Brown' children's mystery series, dies at 87"  Unfortunately, the news summary app on my phone just takes the first however-many characters it can fit and uses that as the headline, with no indication if it's the entire headline or not.  So all we saw was, "Donald Sobol, author of beloved 'Encyclopedia Brown' children's mystery series".  Um, that's nice, what about him?  Of course, I suspected what the story was going to be about just from the headline fragment that I saw.  But when you're getting bad news, it's frustrating that they can't even deliver it properly.

But sometimes sentence fragments are actually intentional.  Many crawls or web sites just take all the headlines in a newspaper or newswire, under the mistaken assumption that all headlines are a self-contained factoid.  For instance, you'll be watching the headlines crawl across the bottom of the screen on your favourite news channel, and in between, "European Leaders Meet to Avoid Financial Crisis" and "Kofi Annan Tries to Save Peace Agreement" there'll be something like, "Seven Tips to Cut Your Gluten Intake."  God forbid you should think the next seven items are the tips.

Things That Never Change

I guess I've reached the point where I feel like I have some sort of experience.  I think it comes from having survived more than one generation.  Many of my contemporaries are raising families now, and many of those children are into their teens.  Those folks have probably learned great insights into the human experience.

I, on the other hand, have no children, and thus I have only great insights into popular culture. I survived the Eighties, and now I've survived seeing them get retro chic.  In all that time, I've noticed that for all the change in the world, some things remain constant.  So I thought I'd do what I could, and start passing that knowledge on, as it occurs to me.

The first instalment, in keeping with the Olympics is this: Athletes retire, records fall, sports come and go.  But you can rely on Nike to never sponsor the Olympics, then come up with a clever ad that comes as close as it can to referring to the games without actually mentioning them.

Olympic Butthole Surfers

There's always a debate at the Olympics about whether it's too big, and whether some of the old sports should be dropped, and whether some more of the big, globally-popular sports should be included.  Rugby and golf are coming next time.  Baseball sometimes gets in.  On the other hand, some of the smaller, quainter sports probably wouldn't exist without the Olympics.  When was the last time you heard about the Modern Pentathlon in any other context?

I differ from many in that I'd get rid of the big popular sports.  See, the Olympics are like Lollapalooza: it started with a bunch of little attractions that don't normally get recognition, but when banded together can generate a lot of interest.  But then it gets more and more popular, and the bigger attractions want to take part.  So you're adding in basketball or soccer or Metallica.  But that makes the little attractions start to seem trivial and irrelevant, and the focus is on the big attractions.  But they seem redundant, since they already get a lot of attention anyway.  Olympic tennis?  Didn't we just have Wimbledon?  Didn't Pearl Jam just tour last year?

I'm not asking to turn the Olympics into some wild freak show of alternative athletics: no one wants to find out what the sporting equivalent of Goth subculture would look like.  I'm just saying that if everyone on Earth is going to spend two weeks every four years (that's 1% of our lives) immersed in sports, it's refreshing when they're not the same old sports we're semi-immersed in the rest of the time.

Do You Believe?

I'm amused at the sort-of controversy about Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen.  People speculated that she may have used performance enhancing drugs.   More than anything, I'm amused at the people who say, "well, nothing's been proven."  It's refreshing to see such an wide eyed, uncynical attitude, but I can't help wonder what these people are like elsewhere in life, say at a magic show:
"Oh my God, he sawed that woman in half!"
"I'm sure he didn't really; there's probably a simple explanation."
"Yeah, but until you have any proof, we have to believe he actually cut her in half!"

But I'll try to keep an open mind: there are plenty of completely innocent explanations as to how a teenage girl beat the top man in the world in an activity that's mostly determined by upper-body strength.  For instance, she could have been bitten by a radioactive spider.