Cool New Product

I just heard on the radio that scientists have created a reverse microwave.  That is, a device that can chill things at speeds similar to a microwave.  At least I'm hoping they have: The only online references I can find are at food sites and local radio, newspapers and TV stations that aren't usually the media outlets of record.  You'd think technology sites would be all over this, but they don't seem to have reported it.  And there's no mention of it on Wikipedia, so it doesn't exist.  But then, neither does this blog, so I'm going to assume the reverse microwave exists.

And that's great, because I've wanted one of these for a while.  I had always assumed that it would violate some of the laws of thermodynamics, so I had given up hope.  It's being billed as a great alternative way of cooling drinks, since it would take less energy than keeping drinks cool continuously in a fridge.  But that's not why I wanted it: I wanted it to cool hot food.  In particular, food that's too hot because it came out of a microwave.

And that's the device I'm going to wish for now: a combination microwave/reverse-microwave.  You can use the microwave function to heat the food, and if it turns out to be too hot, you just use the reverse microwave function to cool it.  Of course, if the reverse-microwave function is as unpredictable as modern microwaves, you may end up overdoing it and making it cooler than you'd like.  So you'll have to use the heating and cooling back and forth, trying to zero-in on your ideal temperature.  You'll finally have food that's at the right temperature, and the only cost is using twice the power.  Thanks science!

Spy Vs. Spy

I've been thinking about this latest more-or-less admission by the U.S. government that they've been spying on the leaders of supposed allies. It makes one recall the start of the Obama administration, when many - particularly in Europe - saw him so optimistically due to nothing more than the fact that he wasn't George W Bush. But, outside of not starting a war of choice, it's hard to see how his foreign policies would be any different.

The depressing part is that I don't really believe Obama is all that similar to Bush in terms of his priorities beliefs and tendencies. So I'm really wondering how much it matters who the President is.

I hate to say that because such it-doesn't-matter-who's-in-office sentiments usually come from either activists so radical that all others seem the same to them, or from the politically disconnected looking to justify their apathy.

But here's the most damning realisation of American behaviour: it really just comes down to what they can get away with. That is, there's no sense of a limit to morally acceptable behaviour. There isn't even a coldly pragmatic strategy to be nice to those who could turn out to be useful later. There's just an increasing drive to do anything that can be done until someone stops them. Or to put it another way, the U.S. had become the world's Tea Party.

You Shoulda Taken That Left Turn At Albuquerque

Something happened to me today that hadn't happened in a while: a driver stopped on the street to ask me for directions. As a frequent walker, this used to happen all the time. Either I've become less approachable as I've aged, or GPS systems have reduced the number of lost people.

The strangest directions I've been asked for was when I was walking to class in Waterloo, and someone asked how to get to Toronto. I was trying to think of a polite way to say, you've got to be kidding, when it occurred to me that it was easy: I told him to turn right at King Street, then turn when you get to the 401. Then I walked away before he realized that I was directing him through both Kitchener and Waterloo. But hey, you asks for directions, you takes your chances.

Another time an American stopped me at a gas station (fittingly, it was near that 401 interchange that I had directed the other guy to.) He asked how to get to the border. I asked which border, Detroit or Buffalo? That should have been his first hint that he was in over his head, and he should just go back into the gas station and buy a map. Which is also what I should have told him: I'm not trying to avoid helping you, but I guarantee that in about an hour, you're going to wish you had paid five bucks for a map.

The weird part is that during our mangled discussion of how to get to Buffalo, he kept asking, "Is this the 401?" I continually assured him that it was. When he seemed to understand enough to get on his way, he hit the road - up King Street and back into Kitchener. It then hit me: when he was asking if "this" is the 401, meant the street the gas station was on, not the superhighway just down the road. Now he was going to drive through Kitchener and Waterloo, looking for a highway that would take him to Niagara Falls, and getting even more lost. So somewhere in Buffalo there's a guy with a poor sense of direction and hostility towards Canadians.

Ack! Knee!

I've heard older people make this complaint before, and now I have to admit I'm experiencing it too. It's the overlap between young-people health problems and old-people health problems.  One would think that there would be some interval in between when your body finally works properly and you can focus your worry on finding jobs and relationships.

But no, it doesn't work that way.  My knee has started hurting. I don't participate in any sports, so unless my St. Louis Rams fandom has caused Sam Bradford sympathy pain, I can only blame it on the suddenly cold and wet weather.  It doesn't get any older than joint pain and weather-predicting pain.

And yet, at the same time I'm experiencing that, I have acne. It still happens from time to time.  Most recently it became notable because of the location: on my nose, approximately one drinking glass width above my lips.  But finally I can say, at least it will distract people from my limp.

The Electronic Slide

A new feature I've been using on my phone is trace typing. On the standard Android virtual keyboard, you don't have to hit each key individually, Blackberry-typing-style. Instead, you can just slide your finger/thumb over the keyboard to each of the letters in your word. It will infer from the path which word you meant. I don't know many devices this is available on; even if it has Android, a phone/tablet may have a proprietary keyboard, so it may not work for you. But you can still download Google's standard Android keyboard.

I've been critical of phone technology in the past, and recently of Google itself, but I have to admit, I'm amazed at how well this works. I've been using the slide technique to type this entire article so far, and although I've had to retype the odd word when my movements were a little careless, it's managed to recognize each word. In fact, it's very good at interpreting sloppy traces around the keyboard, even when my thumb careens wildly around resembling Tim Tebow's throwing motion. For instance, when I typed, "movements" I just sent my thumb back and forth across the board, only in the general direction of the needed keys, yet it somehow made sense my virtual scribble.

It's taken some getting used to. Twenty years of touch typing have left my brain with no conscious awareness of where the letters on a qwerty keyboard are. So I sometimes forget where I'm going half way through a word, and make a wrong turn. Yet it manages to figure out my intentions anyway a lot of the time. Okay, as I'm typing that, I had one of those lost moments, and turned "intentions" into "injunctions."

My point is, this is the opposite of so much artificially intelligent things that try to be helpful but misunderstands you even when you're trying to be clear. Finally here's A.I. tech that exceeds expectations.

American Excess

During the war in Afghanistan, a Canadian base hosted a Tim Hortons to serve the soldiers. Thus, many of their American counterparts got to see Canadians ordering coffee for the first time, and were thus introduced to the phrase, "Double-Double" (Canadianism for coffee with double cream and double sugar.) Supposedly the American soldiers responded by inventing the "four-by-four," which is four creams and four sugars.

That just seemed excessive to me. It seems like an attitude of "anything you can do I can do better, even if I look foolish and endanger my own health in the process."

That incident came back to me as I was watching the baseball playoffs this week. The Boston Red Sox have been growing beards as a symbol of team unity or a good luck charm or something.  I don't know if it was directly inspired by the hockey tradition of playoff beards, but it's already gone further. The Sox are now more hirsute than a veteran hockey player after the NHL's marathon postseason. 

Like the double double, hockey playoff beards were pushing the bounds of sensibility already. Yet when Americans get involved, they have to take it even further too far. I wouldn't mind so much except that their excess causes us to keep thinking of ourselves as sensible, even when we're only sensible by comparison.

Kansas, And Friends Of Dorothy

I just saw this article of U.S. census stats that shows something surprising: Seattle has passed San Francisco as the American city with the highest proportion of gay households. It's not by much, but it does show that our perception of cities isn't always accurate. San Fran is second, with Minneapolis third. Hopefully now they can be more honest about their relationship with St. Paul. Yeah, sure, you're "twin" cities. That's why you spend so much time together.

At the other end of the scale, El Paso has the fewest gay households. Fort Worth is next, so we can assume they'll continue to disguise their relationship with Dallas using macho names like "Metroplex." And then there's Colorado Springs, which is also a major military site, so we'll see if that status survives the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

But the reason I found these stats interesting is the gender breakdown. Part of the reason for Seattle getting to number one is that they have a close-to-equal ratio of male and female couples, while San Francisco's gay community is disproportionately male.

And that brings up a question I've long wondered about: when we think of gay areas in major cities, we usually think of gay men. But lesbians have to live some place too. So where do they live? According to the article, the answer is Wichita, Kansas.  There, 88% of gay couples are female, the highest proportion in the nation. 

So I Googled "Wichita Lesbian Neighborhood" to see what came up.  It was surprisingly tame.  The results didn't mention any particular part of the city, but there is one lesbian bar, and using Street View, here it is:

 So now you know what a lesbian neighbourhood looks like.

The Seven Unintelligible Grunts You Can't Say On Television

There's something I've noticed while watching football.  I don't know if it's the "miked up" players, or maybe a new breakthrough in parabolic microphone technology, but it seems like we're catching snippets of the players swearing more often.  This might be evidence of society getting a little more comfortable with profanity; in the past few years we've become less scared of The Finger, so spoken offence must be the next taboo.

Maybe football's background swearing is on purpose: the networks could be softening us up so that they have more freedom to use strong language on their other shows.  Reality shows would be much easier to edit. Swearing would make for easy cheap jokes on sitcoms.  And to think those cultural puritans thought the Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction scandal at the Super Bowl a few years ago was the worst effect football ever had on popular culture.

Purposeful or not, it could be a redefinition of what is acceptable on TV.  I feel like George Carlin must be smiling down on us...

...or not.

Now Let Me Tell You How Hard It Was To Publish That Last Post

I haven't posted in a couple of days, since my difficulties getting the last post online had me close to throwing the computer out the window.  See?  I'm so mad I couldn't even come up with less clichéd way to describe my anger.

I won't recount all of it, but it began with my not being able to upload the flow chart graphic directly from my computer.  That is likely due to the security set up of my browser, so I don't blame anyone for that.  But I then launched into an hour of bouncing the file between my computer, phone, and tablet, using Google's Drive online storage, the Blogger app and website, and the phone and tablet photo galleries.  Something as simple as moving files around is made difficult by both bugs and sparse touch-screen interfaces.

This is all in spite of the fact that Blogger, Drive, and the Android operating system on my phone and tablet, are all Google products.  So let me be the first to say it: Google has turned into Microsoft.   A company that turned a good product from years ago into an empire of buggy software, spreading itself too thin by trying to take on all markets at once, resulting in applications that are supposed to work together but don't, and never get fixed.

You're Either With Us Or Against Us

The American shutdown is over, and financial meltdown has been avoided. I didn't think there could be anything more annoying than politicians apocalyptic threats and the media's endless discussion thereof, but there is: non-political people casting vague blame at all of congress.

Certainly both parties have done plenty of things that would have you hating both. But I'm not talking about building up a long term hate for all of congress, in talking about people who blame both sides for the shutdown. There isn't really a justification for that point of view:

Consider Cthulhu

Today I found out about a web site called, "I Write Like."  It will analyse a sample of text and determine which author your writing style is most like.  Needless to say, that was an hour of productivity out the window.  I put my most recent blog posts in, and these are the authors it chose:

• I Still Think Digital Watches Are A Pretty Neat Idea - David Foster Wallace  
• Advanced Tweetology - David Foster Wallace  
• Well York U Too - H. P. Lovecraft  
• It Won't Work - HP Lovecraft
• One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is - David Foster Wallace
• Politics From the Fifth Dimension - David Foster Wallace

...thus giving me the third time in recent weeks that I've name dropped David Foster Wallace.  That may sound pretentious, but I deserve it dammit; I read all of Infinite Jest, even the endnotes, so I deserve some post-modern literary swagger.  And just to see if my writing style has changed in the year-and-a-half that I've written this blog, I tried one of my earliest posts, and the author gave me was Dan Brown. So then I tried some other sites:

• Wired - Cory Doctorow
• The Onion - Dan Brown
• Stereogum - David Foster Wallace

So Dan Brown is really taking a beating in this post.  I also compared news sites, each of them on a report of today's shutdown resolution:

• BBC - William Shakespeare
• CBC - David Foster Wallace
• CNN - William Shakespeare
• Fox News - Mario Puzo

Speaking of authors I've name dropped recently, this all started with a post on John Scalzi's blog in which he asked fans what authors he has a similar style to.  Someone fed a sample of one of his book Old Man's War into I Write Like, and the result was James Fenimore Cooper.  I put the blog post itself in, and it chose H.P. Lovecraft.

And finally, I put the first page of David Foster Wallace's essay, Consider the Lobster in for analysis, and the author chosen was, again, H.P. Lovecraft.

I Still Think Digital Watches Are A Pretty Neat Idea

Samsung has been promoting its new smart watch, using cute references to old sci-fi. So there you go: radio/TV watches were only the poor cousins to jet packs and flying cars among cliches of the future, but it appears it's the only one were getting any time soon.

I'd like to buy one just to reward them for including the Babylon 5 clips, but really, I'm still not convinced. Ironically, I stopped wearing a watch when I got a mobile phone, since the phone can do the watch's job of telling the time occasionally. I don't think I'm about to go to a watch that can also be a phone.

But this brings up another watch-technology question of mine: why can't we make a good looking digital watch?  You can get digital watches that are quite expensive (even without resorting to a smart watch) and that do lots of impressive things that I'm sure some triathlon trainee somewhere makes use of. But they still have the same ancient seven-segment display that digital readouts have used since before I was born. We have high-resolution displays in other devices, so is it asking too much to put a more elegant font in there?  You could have a nice elegant watch with Times New Roman, or a arty, minimalist watch with Helvetica.  Get on it Samsung!

Advanced Tweetology

It's always weird when people I follow on Twitter turn out to be following, or at least know about, each other. Really, Ohio-based sci-fi author John Scalzi, you follow Nigerian-American author Teju Cole? It got to strange levels today when the only other country accounts I follow - Ireland and Sweden - started conversing. What were the odds of that? There has to be some weird aspect of the human psyche that brings people of eclectic backgrounds together, people that seemingly don’t have anything in common, yet are drawn to one another.

I’m thinking you could study this if you mapped out all the people on Twitter. You know, people who follow each other are placed close to each other on the graph, so you could find people nearby who are most similar.  We could use this to introduce ourselves. Tell me about yourself. I'm in sector E-27-5.3, and yourself?

And surely it would be easier to meet people this way. Currently there are meet-up groups for a variety of interests, even meet-ups for Twitter itself. But instead people could get together with others who follow the same people.

Well York U Too

Recently, York University has been running ads like this one, featuring current students talking about their future accomplishments:

I appreciate achievement and aspirations as much as anyone. So why do I hate these ads?

An obvious reason is that these are young, idealistic university students with dreams of great, world-changing accomplishments. That's me from twenty years ago, before I became bitter and pragmatic.  But really, I think there's more than just personal reasons for not liking the ads:

• What the world needs isn't more breakthroughs - we've had plenty of those. What we need in a general improvement in our maturity. If anything, we need to get past the idea that brilliant people will invent our way out of current problems.
• This is such typical university thinking: total focus on high achievement, total ignorance of the majority of students.  Really it's that good-but-not-great majority who pay most of the university's bills, and carry most of society's work.
• They're such generic dreams: landing on Mars? Curing cancer? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see that happen.  But anyone who's been paying attention in recent decades has noticed that innovation no longer works that way.  Technological innovations are rarely predictable ahead of time, and medical progress is a series of unheralded advancements, not massive breakthroughs.
• They also seem to be an old-fashioned view of the future, if that makes any sense.  Space travel? Vague discussion of curing diseases?  What about genetic engineering, nanotechnology, data mining.  Trade your Asimov in for some Gibson.
• For that matter, they're not even realistic time frames.  Another ad talks about the first human on Mars in 2027.  Fourteen years?  Who's going to believe that?
• If I could offer advice to current and future university students, it's that you can't be aiming at pre-planned ideals of success.  Instead you have to be willing to be flexible in your life goals, and derive self-esteem from a wide variety of accomplishments.  If you've already written a life story, you're setting yourself up for disappointment regardless of which university you choose.

This Won't Work

See what I did there? Or rather, see what I didn't do there? I had a great opportunity to make a twerking pun, but I didn't take it. I didn't take it, because the topic's really been taken too far.  We'd already taken it too far a couple of weeks back, but I finally snapped when I read today's comic strips.  Yes, the Capp Gap has gone by, and now we're reading comic strips making twerking jokes.

Now you may wonder: Jason, you appreciate satire - and you hate pop culture - so wouldn't you want lots of humour about a popular (and silly) trend?  Well yes, I do like jokes about popular culture, but hardly any jokes are actually about twerking. Mostly they fall into one of two categories:

• Generic references to the new tend without any apparent knowledge of it. These are the late night monologue jokes for grandparents who have heard the term but don't know what it means. E.g. "President Obama and John Boehner met to discuss the budget, but they didn't make much progress because they spent most of the time twerking!"
• Fearful references to the trend as something you wouldn't want to see. They assume you know what it is, or at least have decided you're not comfortable with it. E.g. "I missed the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week, but that's alright.  Who wants to see the opening number with Richard Dawkins twerking?"

So yes, I welcome real jokes about twerking.  Ridicule the idea that a woman miming sex using items she appears to have found in a younger sister's closet is supposed to be sexy.  Make fun of how were getting worked up over badly simulated sex twenty years after the Internet went mainstream.  Heck, even make fun of that poor middle-aged mother trying desperately to keep up with the times who confuses the words "twerk" and "tweet" at the worst possible moment.  But let's forget the brain-dead fill-in-the-blanks jokes. They are, to satire, what twerking is, to sex.

One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is

I've complained about this before, but it bugs me when news apps or web sites have lists of titles of news stories at other sites, but they shorten the titles, and what you get makes little sense.  For instance, the News & Weather app that came with my Android phone is currently reporting articles with the following headlines: "The Jaguars and Broncos fighting on Twitter will probably be more" and, "Thanksgivukkah? Gobble tov! American Jews prepare for."  Okay, admittedly that last one was going to sound silly no matter what, especially when you consider that it's coming from the Christian Science Monitor. 

But today I was surprised when the app linked to this story about racing driver Dario Franchitti's accident this weekend.  The headline is, "Dario Franchitti recovering from frightening crash, wife Ashley Judd by his side."  But all I saw was, "Dario Franchitti recovering from frightening crash, wife Ashley Judd."  I know they separated, but that's just not fair.

Politics From The Fifth Dimension

Here's an article from the New Yorker on the reasoning behind the politicians forcing the shutdown.  He likes to call them the "suicide caucus," which is clearly the label he hopes will stick. That's unfortunate because it undermines his argument that they are in fact acting rationally, given their circumstances.

It all comes down to gerrymandering. That's the art of manipulating a district's boundaries to give your party's candidate am advantage.  Here in Canada, as in most countries, that can't happen because the electoral districts are laid out by noon partisan bureaucrats. But in the USA the districts are laid out by committees of politicians. So they try to fix things to their own advantage. That's the answer to the enigma of why congress has the approval rating of steamed brussels sprouts, yet most of the members get re-elected every time.

The Daily Show made a similar point this week, implying that gerrymandering lets politicians have consequence-free careers.  I believe the way they explained it was to say that the Republicans refusing to pass spending legislation could drown kittens and they'd still be re-elected.  But that misses the point that the politicians' actions are actually popular within their districts.  So they do face consequences, but it's the consequences of a very specific segment of the electorate.

A better way to explain it would be to imagine that these politicians come from a parallel universe where the U.S.:

• has very little immigration
• is still not very urban
• has an even older population
• has far fewer black people.

When you picture that alternate America, it's not so surprising that politicians will go to the wall to stop Obamacare.  And I think that's the most interesting/disturbing part about this: the huge changes in society produced by small changes in demographics.  After all, it's not like these hard-core Republican districts have no immigrants or African-Americans, just a lower percentage than the country as a whole.  But shifting a few percent in the demographics changes the balance of power enough to make actions others find radical to be mainstream.  It's another reminder of just how much people can disagree with one another even within one society.

Virtual Reality: Definitely Maybe

I've noticed that in recent years, authors have become more willing to portray the near future.  It used to be that science-fiction authors would prefer to focus on the more distant future because it was more interesting and there was less chance of being proven wrong.  And non-science-fiction writers would avoid the near future because ewwwww, genre fiction! 

But now they're more open to it. Mainstream writers aren't afraid of sci-fi any more, and the Science-Fiction genre itself has become more open-minded.
All this has lead to a greater chance of seeing predictions from books coming true in your lifetime.  For instance, a few weeks ago I made a reference to the "sponsored years" concept from Infinite Jest.  That hasn't happened (yet) but the novel also mentions a business that streams TV and movies, and delivers recordings by mail.  That's pretty much Netflix.

Recently, I've been reading Ready Player One, an unapologetic celebration of geek-culture of the 1980's.  The story centres around a virtual-reality world called OASIS.  That's hardly unique in the sci-fi world; global online virtual reality worlds are today's green bug-eyed alien with a ray gun.  But this is a book released last year that expects us to believe such a thing could start up right now.

That got me thinking: could it happen?  After all, Virtual Reality is, to the information age, what electric cars were to the industrial age: something that seems to be permanently just around the corner.  But now it seems the rise of electric cars is just a matter of waiting for the slow march of battery technology and gas prices.  So maybe there's hope for VR too.

The book indicates that the system required three breakthroughs: 

1. Big computers behind the scenes to handle millions of people interacting with one another (in today's online games, like World of Warcraft, you don't get to meet all the millions of people playing, just the few thousand that are connected to the same server as you.)  Well that innovation just seems like a matter of time as computer technology progresses.
2. Cheap, lightweight virtual reality glasses.  And oh look, someone is already doing that.
3. Haptic feedback gloves.  (Haptic means touch, see; it's a glove that makes it feel like you're touching virtual objects.)  I'm assuming they mean something more sophisticated than the old Nintendo Power Glove.

So there you go: most of it is doable, but it all comes down to the gloves.  Hopefully not everyone in technology is working on apps or social networks (or batteries.)

Who Knew This Blog Would Last Longer Than The U.S. Government?

So the U.S. Government non-essential services are closed starting today as the Republican-controlled house refuses to pass a spending bill unless the Democrats cancel or delay Obamacare.  Meanwhile, Obamaca...I'm sorry, the "Affordable Care Act" started coming into effect today.

But speaking of the act's names, I've noticed something today: several times on Twitter and on Blogs, I've seen people call it, "ACA" (that's the initials, see.)  What's weird about that is that I don't think I've heard anyone call it ACA in the years since it was first announced.  People who are against it call it Obamacare because they think an association with Obama soils anything it touches.  People who flippantly or neutrally refer to it, also call it Obamacare because it sounds sort of silly and non-technical.  Politicians in favour of it call it by its full name, the Affordable Care Act, because they want to give it the branding they've chosen for it.

But what kind of person would call it by it's initials?  A person who is in favour of it, but not actually a politician trying to sell it.  What I'm getting at is, American liberals haven't exactly gone out of their way to support this thing.  It seems like it's only today that they're talking about it happily, and without disappointment at missing out on Canadian-style single-payer.

That makes me wonder if the Democrats really should go to the wall for the ACA.  Sure, the U.S. may be split down the middle politically, but it certainly seems like conservatives don't want it more than liberals want it.  Maybe now that it's under threat, liberals will summon some enthusiasm for the Affordable ObamaCare Act.