Working In Theory

This week there was a conference in London on Inclusive Capitalism. The concern is a popular one these days: the sense that economic gain is not evenly spread, there is unpunished corruption, and that only the rich are getting richer.

Usually, this issue is raised by activists on behalf of the poor, but the problem is now big enough that all but the most dogmatic within the business community are starting to consider it a problem. And that was the attitude here: the wealth gap was presented as a threat to capitalism itself. The premise being that if too many people decide that the system doesn't work for them, then they'll push for a different system. Thus there is an incentive for companies to behave more amicably towards people: play nice or the game will be changed.

It's hard to disagree with that logic. But there's a doubt I have about it's ability to change the world: the central tenet of capitalism is that people need a personal incentive to work. That is, it's not enough to tell people that it's the right thing to do, nor is it enough to say that it will be best in the long run to work for society's sake.   And yet, that's what these people expect businesses and their executives to do: make a sacrifice today that will offer no personal or immediate payoff, just for long-run survival or the overall good of society. So as much as I appreciate their goals, I don't think this attitude will change business, any more than I expect people to work without pay.

I Declare This Post Didn't Really Happen

In one of those news stories that a lot of people didn't understand a word of, Disney announced that "the Star Wars Expanded Universe is no longer canon." The translation for non-geeks:

• Star Wars: famous sci-fi movie series.
• Expanded Universe: all the books and videogames and comics based on Star Wars settings and characters.
• Canon: a term used by fans of long-running franchises to refer to which parts are considered "real" parts of the story, and which parts are not. For instance, Doctor Who fans can consider the 1996 movie to be an actual part of the Doctor's history, while this spoof starring Rowan Atkinson is not.

Whether or not something is canon might be decided by consensus of the fans, or it might be determined by the creator.

I first came across the canon concept in university from friends who were into comic books. Canon is complicated for comics, because there may be movie versions with contradictory plot points, but also because there are so many special editions and crossovers. And it gets worse because the comic publishers insist that all their comics take place in the same universe.

I have to admit that I never really got the need for stories set in the same universe. Comic fans seemed to feel a need for overall consistency. If someone did a series where the X-Men play against the Harlem Globetrotters, it's not enough to just think of it as one of many stories; there seems to be a need for it to all fit together.

But I think I understand it now. Even though I never read any of the expanded universe, it still kind of ticked me off. It may be silly to make distinctions of what did and didn't happen in a fictional story, but a lot of people invested a lot of emotions in it, and they've ignored that for no reason beyond the fact that the hot shot director doesn't want his hands tied.

Maybe it's about time to abandon the canon idea.  With more and more reboots and sequels and re-imagining, not to mention fan fiction, it's getting harder to decide what is fact within the fiction.

V's Are Everywhere You Want To Be

After yesterday's difficult post, I'd like to explore an unimportant and less serious topic: What is with all the superfluous V's in the names of indie rock bands?

Wavves and Chvrches have been around for a few years now. But now I see that there's a band called Alvvays. (I like their sound; they bring back pleasant 90's memories.) While I realize that band name trends come and go, but this seems strange.

I could see using strange spellings of words: online promotion is so important these days that the band would want to have their own web site or Twitter handle. It says something that it's more important to know the spellings of band names than the pronunciation. I've heard people pronounce Wavves and Chvrches as "waves" and "churches." But I don't know if Alvvays should be "always" as most English speakers would pronounce it, or as a hack actor impersonating a German interrogator.

And what's so special about V? It's had two TV series. And V For Vendetta has an art/rebellion vibe musicians would appreciate. Though it's not just music: there's also an indie video game called VVVVVV. (Great game, try the online demo. It brings back pleasant 80's memories)  I know I'm not going to complain too much about V's; after over use of iWords and X-things, the rest of the alphabet should get in on the action.

All In All

You probably saw that this weekend, a young man murdered several people in Santa Barbara, California, apparently motivated by anger over his failure with women. That lead to a lot of events on the internet. If you're confused, here's how it happened:

• Violence against women is an obviously emotional issue to begin with, but it's a particularly raw nerve on the Internet, where a number of women have received rape threats as part of online discussions.
• At the same time, there's been a number of men taking up the mantle of Men's Rights Activists (MRA). That's quite a vaguely-defined cause, but it's mostly been men who see their interests as opposed to women's rights, that their rights suffer from the actions of feminists. So there's been a great deal of animosity between women online and MRAs.
• A number of women in online discussions have grown tired of the "not all men" phenomena. That's the situation where they write about some bad experience they've had with men (such as the aforementioned online threats) only to be inundated with men trying to point out that not all men do the thing being complained about. Of course, not many women do believe all men perpetrate violence against women, but it's annoying when that's the first reaction people have to your difficult revelations of personal hardship.
• So in the aftermath of the events in Santa Barbara, there were plenty of women talking about violence against women, which lead to plenty of "not all men" replies. A popular response to the not-all-men response was to point out that not all men mistreat women, but all women are affected by it.
• At some point, someone, somewhere must have said, "surely not all women." And thus was born a hashtag on Twitter, #YesAllWomen. This was full of heart-rending personal examples from women of ways they've suffered from sexism or sexual violence (or its threat.) It also lead to some beyond-tasteless jokes, which provided perhaps the most obvious ever example of Lewis's Law.

I just looked at the tweets with that hashtag, and the bad news is that after four days there are still tweets coming in. But the good news is that they seem to have outlasted the trolls.

So I - like a lot of men - am left wondering, what can I do?  Obviously, don't participate in violence and threats.  But not being part of the problem seems a little weak now.

I've read from some men who have put forward the idea that all men are indeed part of the problem.  The explanation being that no one is perfect, we all - possibly accidentally - perpetuate stereotypes and roles and the status quo.  But I don't buy that.  Although I have a standard of behaviour that some have considered unreasonably high, even I wouldn't claim that a person contributes to rape culture by forgetting to say "salesperson" instead of "salesman."  I suspect this self-blame is done out of the frustration of being powerless over the true perpetrators.

So what can men do? The best points that I have seen are to listen to women's experiences.  Incorporate this perspective into your world view; that is, be conscious that these frustrations and fears are part of the world you live in.  And don't be complacent: Challenge men who disrespect women instead of letting it slide.  Remember women's concerns, and stand up for them when you get the opportunity.  I'll also add the words of Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer:

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.

Don't Read This Blog! Look At My Friends And Family!

Today I had one of those careful-what-you-wish-for moments. Last week I praised the telecasts of Australian Rules Football for showing replays and reaction shots in a little picture-in-picture box on the corner of the screen. Today, the broadcasters of the Indianapolis 500 made use of the technique to show the wives and girlfriends of the contending drivers in the final laps of the race. I hated it, and even other sportscasters hated it:

Wonderful finish Indy 500..and TV shows me wife and girlfriends..I don't care..All those in car cameras and that's all they used..terrible
— Vic Rauter (@TSNVicRauter) May 25, 2014

I have to admit that it was not as bad as their usual practice of breaking away to show the significant others full-screen, sometimes in between every camera change. Trouble is, they decided that the facial expressions of the partners - while not worth ignoring the race for - was at least of equal importance to the race. So they showed each shoot side by side. That is, they showed the entire widescreen view of the race, with the widescreen view of the partner beside it. So with the graphics and borders included, we end up seeing the race on less than a quarter of the screen. I assumed that would be temporary, but they held that dual-view all the way around the track for the second-last lap. Fortunately they came to their senses then and at least gave us the final lap fullscreen.

What makes it extra silly is that on a sunny day, everyone at the track is wearing sunglasses, so we have to watch these oh-so-important reaction shots based entirely on mouths. Castroneves loses the lead - and look, his girlfriend is frowning. Oh, but Hunter-Reay's wife is smiling. Aren't you glad we have this human connection instead of just guessing what everyone is feeling during the race?

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #14

Edited July 18, 2015: I realize this entry is going to be taken rather wrongly now.  See, this was when Caitlyn Jenner's transgender nature was a mere rumour, which, like many things associated with the Kardashians, didn't really get taken too seriously.  So I wanted to note that this post is referring only to reality TV misadventures:

Being in The Village People's movie is no longer even one of the top ten most embarrassing things Bruce Jenner has done.

But lets' face it, this joke isn't really going to work any more, now that Jenner has vaulted herself from bit player in a family used as a punchline to a civil rights hero.  There are plenty of other ways to take the joke: "Winning the decathlon gold will turn out to be only the second biggest achievement for the person you know as Bruce Jenner," or, "One day, retroactively talking to yourself about Bruce Jenner will require saying, 'the person you know as Bruce Jenner.'"

Who Are We? Madrid! Who Are We Going To Beat? Madrid!

This Saturday is the final of the Champions League, the top championship of soccer teams in Europe. It has extra interest this year, because for the first time, both teams are from the same city: Real Madrid versus Atletico Madrid.

Having not grown up in or near a city with multiple sports teams, I've always wondered how people in such a city choose their team. Plenty of places do have that choice: Real vs Athletico, Mets vs Yankees, AC vs Inter, Cubs vs White Sox, City vs United, Angels vs Dodgers, Rangers vs Celtic, Jets vs Giants.  In some cases, it's based on areas of the city, that accounts for, say the many soccer teams of London. But what's really odd is that for so many of those pairs of teams, one is historically more successful than the other.

So what sort of person chooses the Mets over the Yankees, given that the Yankees have won twenty-seven World Series, while the Mets have won two, both of which appear to have been by divine intervention? Sure, some people are just drawn to the underdog. And I guess some are turned off of the top team by the many posers who are drawn to them. It says something that so many people far from New York and Madrid choose to be Yankees or Real fans primarily to be associated with the winning team. And really, that seems to be how more people choose their sports teams: they look for a winner, even if it's far from home.  So voluntarily cheering for the lesser local team shows quite a dedication to the disadvantaged, or just a sense of sadism.

And speaking of the disadvantaged, in some cases the choice of team is based not on the part of the city you're from, but the class you're in. In Madrid's case, Real is reported to be the team of the upper class, while Atletico is the team of the working class. That's all too fitting, since Real's on-field success comes from their bigger budget. It's part of the great sporting irony that American sports leagues feature socialist measures like revenue sharing, luxury taxes, and salary caps, while European leagues are highly unregulated, offering a laissez-faire atmosphere that Americans prefer in any area of life except sports. I've always wondered why European sports fans haven't risen up to demand more equal sports. But now that I find out that their teams reflect their real-life situations, I can't believe we haven't seen a revolution. "Real" even means "Royal"; what more promoting do they need to grab the pitchforks and storm the castle/stadium?

Warning: Labels

This week there was a proposal from American university students to have content warning labels on books used in school assignments. We all had a good laugh at it. Can you imagine, warnings that literature might give you feelings. Nanny state, political correctness etc.

But is it really asking too much that a sexual assault victim get fair warning that there's a rape scene in a book? Here's an article about the original action from the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper. It's really not the Orwellian threat everyone is making it out to be. Nobody's asking for anything to be banned or censored.  All they're asking for is warning.


What this has revealed is that PTSD still isn't taken seriously. It seems that our society has a cycle when it comes to dealing with a new mental illness:

• the sufferers make their case about getting a little consideration to better cope with their illness. 
• Everyone else treats their illness as equivalent to the ordinary emotions everyone copes with.
• the concerns are dismissed along with some insults and questioning of the victims' courage.

Today, PTSD survivors are just going through the same routine we've already been through with depression. Most people have moved beyond telling the depressed to just suck it up. But we're still okay with accusing trauma survivors trying to avoid flashbacks of hiding from reality.

A couple of caveats: I can understand professors fear of this policy.  Universities have done a poor job of creating power structures that balance the rights of students and faculty, and professors already live in fear that a particularly determined student could make life hell for them with complaints.  This policy offers another avenue for that possibility, so I'm betting professors will err on the side of too many warnings. But as I say, that's a pre-existing flaw in the university structure.

Secondly, yes, students and their organizations will likely abuse the system by claiming triggers on virtually everything they find offensive or just objectionable. But I wouldn't reject a policy just because it means administrators will have to keep saying no to every demanding activist group.

Remaking The Playoffs

It's that time of year when we have duelling interminable playoffs offered by the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association. Aside from being long, up-to-28-game playoffs involving more than half the league, they also have one big thing in common, and that is how much the game changes for the playoffs,

Of course, in any sport, the nature of the game will change in a shorter string of elimination games, as opposed to a marathon season of largely forgettable match-ups. Players will expend more energy the fewer games they have to save up for, and they'll be more willing to play through injury.  Plus, eliminating the lesser teams means general improvement in skill, so teams will approach each game differently than your average game.

But other than those subtleties, football playoffs don't really change the way the game is played. In baseball, there are noticeably different strategies, what with four- or even three-man pitching rotations. But other than the intangibles of increased intensity, these games aren't too different from a mid season game that happens to draw two star pitchers.

But in hockey and basketball, the nature of the game does change, and in both cases it's primarily an increase in physicality. And with that physicality comes a greater emphasis on defense. To some extent, you can explain the change in terms of the extra effort that comes with not having any need to conserve energy. But mainly, the difference comes from a change in refereeing. Both sports' officials are known to change the interpretation of the rules in different times during the game, and they also use different standards during the playoffs. Compare that to football, where the referring standard is quite consistent and the nature of play doesn't change as much for the playoffs. This in spite of the fact that, as an extremely physical sport, football would surely see a large effect from the leave it all on the field principle.

This post-season officiating shift leads to a logical question: Is the playoff game better? I ask that because it leads to another question: since the difference in the sport's character comes predominantly from a chance In officiating standards, and those standards could be applied any time, why have a different standard between regular season and playoffs? If the playoff officiating style leads to a more entertaining game, then why isn't it used all the time? And if it doesn't lead to more entertaining play, why use it for the most watched games of the season?

Extremely Loud And Very Distant

The 9/11 memorial museum in New York is finally open. And as with everything involving 9/11, there's controversy. This time, it's the decision to inter the unidentified remains of the victims at the memorial at ground zero, under the museum.

Of course, it's hard to know what to do with unidentified remains, since you don't know which family members to ask. But you could poll all the families of the unidentified and see what most of them want to do. They've made it clear they'd rather the remains be interred somewhere else, somewhere they could directly visit, and some place that had no commercial component, unlike the 9/11 museum which will have the revenue-generating gift shop that's de rigueur in today's museum.

That brings up a point I've noticed for a while about September 11th: it seems to have a greater emotional hold on people who are further from it. New Yorkers never seemed as scared of further terrorist actions as others did.  The harshest anti-terror measures got their biggest support from the right, which had its strongest support in rural areas, which were least likely to be targeted. And I always was amazed that the families of the victims seemed less angry, and felt less need for revenge than others. And now it's those families who would like a low-key, out of the way remembrance, whole those indirectly affected are the ones turning the site into a mausoleum.

I guess this is an indication that the biggest reason 9/11 had such an effect was not the sheer death toll, but the way it took away a sense of safety from American society. Thus, it's those of us with no direct connection that still feel the need to heal ourselves with a grand gesture, while the families directly affected just want to privately grieve as anyone suffering a loss would.

What Else Do You Speak?

Recently there was a map making the rounds of the Internet showing the most popular second and third languages in each state in the U.S.  Spanish is usually second, but a variety of languages are the third most popular language in a state.  Who would have though German is so popular in so much of the country?

Of course, I wanted to do a Canadian version.  Here are the most popular mother-tongues in each province, other than English and French, based on census data from 2011:

• The asterisk indicates languages that also beat one of the official languages.
• Inuktitut is first overall in Nunavut.
• Yes, I know "Chinese" is a family of languages, but not everyone specifies which variation on the census
• Cree is barely behind German in Saskatchewan, and they both beat French.

Across all of Canada, Chinese is third.  The numbers are: English, 18,858,975; French, 7,054,970; Chinese 1,072,555.  After that, Punjabi, Spanish, German and Italian all have numbers in the low 400,000s.

Why Aussie Rules, Rules

What's the deal with Australian Rules Football?  Back when channels dedicated to sports first appeared, they couldn't afford the rights to the popular sports, so they had to get creative.  Aussie Rules was one of the more extreme attempts to get something affordable on the air.  But as ESPN and TSN got richer, they went with the sports popular with the local audience, and the Australians were elbowed off the schedule.

But lately, it's making a comeback.  Usually it's late at night, but you are seeing it appear occasionally.  It does look like an entertaining sport, with a lot of scoring, big momentum swings, and I'm assuming some interesting strategy.

Of course, without knowing what's going on, its entertainment value is limited, but I want to watch it just because it contains one of the greatest innovations in the history of televised sports: when they're showing a replay, they keep a live shot in the corner of the screen. 

How is it that no one has thought of this before.  Soccer needs this more than any other sport, because there are fewer interruptions in the play.  So surely someone, somewhere in the world would have tried this.  But it would be great in virtually all sports where the TV directors insist on showing the reactions of players, coaches or fans.  I don't know how many times we've missed seeing a basket while the camera stays in a close up of the player who made a bad play at the other end.  Haven't they noticed that basketball players never have any expression other than an intense frown?

Probably the picture-in-the-corner developed first in Australian Rules Football because they want to show the coolest thing in the whole sport: the two-armed point the officials make when a goal is scored.  I don't have any reason to want either team to win, I just want them to score to watch that.

Anyway, I call on the people covering all sports in the world to look into this technology.  Now that we have big TVs, we might as well use that acreage.

Do As I Write

Hockey's Milan Lucic made headlines this week after his Boston Bruins were eliminated by the Montreal Canadiens. During hockey's traditional post-series handshakes, he singled out an opposing player to threaten him for next year.

It seemed like just another incident on the ugly side of hockey. But then someone pointed out the irony: Lucic co-authored a children's book. Having a kids book written by an overly aggressive hockey player may sound crazy, but wait. There's more: Lucic's book was to discourage bullying.

There's been a lot of anti-bullying action in society lately. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly support anti-bullying efforts. But on the other, I'm really sceptical of these efforts, and Lucic's book is a good example of why.

The fact is that we, as a society, still don't really condemn bullying. Sure, all but the most violent among us now agrees that kids shouldn't torment each other. But beyond that, we're totally accepting - if not downright encouraging - of it. Lots of people have noted the irony that anti-bullying measures often come from politicians who got into office by relentlessly attacking opponents. But looking around our civilization, there's plenty of examples of where bullying is rewarded, perhaps even celebrated: Business, sports, reality TV.

To describe where we are in the fight against bullying, I think there's an analogy to the civil rights struggle. I wasn't around at the time racism was pushed to the periphery of society, but the impression I get us that there was a time when it was popularly recognized as being wrong, but still widely tolerated in public and in our institutions. It seems bullying is at that point. We've recognized that it's wrong, but haven't quite come to terms with just how prevalent it is, or how much will have to change. Were at the point of integrating schools and asking our kids to all get along, all while still living in a world of racist institutions. As a society, we are like Milan Lucic, telling kids to behave one way while we behave differently. Eventually we'll have to realize that's what's not okay for our kids is not okay for us.

This Is Like An Entry In The Captain's Log From Star Trek

This week I saw an article about the introduction of a new "Luke" prosthetic arm. That's a great technological achievement, though I'm not sure about that name. I mean sure... Just wait a second:

Ancient spoiler alert!

...Sorry about that. I mean sure, Luke loses his hand at the end of Empire Strikes Back, and gets an artificial replacement. But that's hardly the first thing you think of in relation to Star Wars.

An even worse example came up last week, when a science article talked about the possibility of "Star Wars-style shields." True, as any geek will tell you, the X-Wing fighter did have shields. But really, the "shield" concept was a bigger part of Star Trek. You never heard Han Solo say "shields down to twenty per cent, she can't take much more of this." Though I suppose Chewbacca might have been saying that, for all we know.

If you're going to try to describe things in terms of popular sci-fi in an effort to make the article more accessible, it would make more sense to use the franchise most focused on the technology. That prosthetic arm for instance, would have been better described by analogy with the Six Million Dollar Man.

Not that we really need these metaphors to understand these things. "Artificial arm? What's that mean?"
"You know, like in a throw-away plot development in a movie from thirty years ago."
"Oh, now i get it!"

Lots of speculated technologies have appeared in popular science fiction, or just been discussed in the media.  So we really don't need it related to something in a movie in order to understand it.

So let's not be naive, it's really about click-bait. Putting Star Wars on a story gets lots of people to click on it, and show some more ads. So congratulations, Trekkies, in the perennial battle between science fiction's two big franchises, you may not have the most money, most collectable Action figures, or the best video games, but you are the least gullible.

O Yanada

Every airport on earth has a three-letter identification code. This is usually an abbreviation of the city name (e.g. Boston - BOS) or an abbreviation of the airport name (e.g. New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport - JFK.) But in Canada, for reasons no one seems to fully understand, all airports have a code starting with Y. For instance, the local airport just east of Kitchener is YKF. In some cases, the second and third letters are an abbreviation of the city name (e.g. Ottawa has the unfortunate identification, YOW.) But in other cases, no part of the name makes sense. The prime example is Canada's most heavily-used airport, Toronto's Pearson International Airport, known to all the world as YYZ.

Why would a person like myself - who rarely flies - care about this? Because I've noticed the strange trend that Canadians seem to be embracing their nonsensical airport codes as civic symbols. During last year's floods in Calgary, Twitter users started using #YYC as a short form for the city. Now I see an ad where Edmonton is using YEG in a web site about the city.

It's kind of fun, and quite Canadian to embrace such oddness. But it is still confusing. My knowledge of the codes is pretty much all in this article. Well, I did also learn while researching this that Vancouver's YVR is said to stand for "Yes, Very Rainy."  But the point is, if someone from, say, Winnipeg were to brag about their city by talking about "The YWG," it would be lost on me.

We Can Forget It For You Wholesale

The European Union court has ruled that people have "the right to be forgotten" online. And as such, they can demand that Google and others leave out the search results relating to a person, if that person so demands. (Though the original information elsewhere on the Internet is not affected; this ruling would only prevent people from searching for the it.)  And fortunately, there's a stipulation that it doesn't apply to a public figure whose actions are part of the public record. So sorry, Silvio Berlusconi, you can't demand that all your exploits be forgotten.

Every now and then European courts put out an idealistic ruling like this. Sometimes it seems like a good counterweight to the U.S. and it's laissez-faire attitude. But other times they seem rather out of touch, offering up impractical judgments for dubious benefits.

This seems to be in the later category. I find it hard to see why a person has the right to be forgotten.  After all, we don't have that right in real life.  I heard your embarrassing clarinet recital in grade six, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Having said that, it is dangerous to extrapolate personal morality to the scale allowed by modern technology.  An example that comes up in surveillance discussions is that just because it's acceptable for a police officer to walk down the street comparing people to a wanted poster, that doesn't imply that cameras on every street should identify every person in public. So try that reasoning: Although you can't count on being forgotten by the people around you, the effect of having so much information about every aspect of your life available online is unfair.

I still don't find that convincing.  I'm all in favour of forgiveness, and allowing a person to have a second chance in life.  But that's not really the same thing as a right to be forgotten. 

Furthermore, the situations in which information about us can do the most unfair harm are not covered here.  A bad credit rating or placement on a no-fly list based on misleading or incorrect information, say.  Or to put it another way, when I worry about the effect of all the information about me in today's world, I worry about information deep in the servers of businesses or governments, not whether someone can Google me.

My Headphones Saved My Long-Term Profitability

It's been in the news for about a week now: Apple is thinking about buying Beats Electronics, the headphone and speaker company started by Dr. Dre. So that could lead to another in my series of things the teenage me would never believe:

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #13:

One of the guys from NWA will make billions selling a company to Apple.
 
Wait, that one would have to be preceded by another:

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #12.5:

Oh, and yes, Apple is not only still in business, their best days are still ahead of them.

But back to Beats. Many people, including me, are wondering how this makes sense. The reasons I've seen explaining the purchase are usually one of three things:

• Beats is successful, so of course Apple would want to buy it.
• Beats makes stylish technology, so it's just like Apple.
• Beats is really important to young people, so if you don't get it, them you must be old, and thus you can't possibly hope to understand, and you will be irredeemably old unless you join me in admiring the Emperor's clothes - I mean, youth culture

My answer to these arguments are, respectively:

• The Slap Chop is successful, but that doesn't mean Apple is going to buy it.
• Why would you buy a company that has the same strengths? That's redundant.
• Given how youth brands come and go, does it really make sense to put out that kind of money for a brand that young people currently like? If you disagree, my aforementioned teenage self has some Ocean Pacific stock to sell you.

This CNET article offers a possible explanation. Although, it does touch on each of the above arguments, it also make the point that Apple may want another brand that it can use to sell to people who aren't as enamoured with the Apple brand. That could be important if Apple is planning on jumping into wearable computing with both feet. So it's less about buying the youth market than it is about selling to different people with brands.

Having followed the auto industry for many years I can appreciate the need to sell Toyotas, Lexuses and Scions to different markets. But each of those brands was built from the ground up by Toyota, because that usually makes more sense than taking over an existing company. You'd think a company as good at brand building as Apple is, could just construct its own.

Every Continent Should Have A Guilty Pleasure

Today was day for the Eurovision Song Contest. Although I've been taken in by some of the cultural leftovers of my European heritage, this is one thing I never adopted, so it's as much a mystery to me as it is to any other North Americans. Basically, it's a kitschy music contest in which each country enters a song and someone to sing it, and all genres are welcome. And everyone watches even though they don't like a lot of it.

But in our connected world, it's hard to ignore anything that's popular somewhere in the English-speaking world. I've spent the day wading through cryptic tweets about the performances. It was a lesson in how we in anglo-North America must sound during events like the Superbowl. My apologies, rest of the world.

I find it interesting that the contest is such a modern thing: international, reality TV, audience participation, appreciated ironically. It's hard to believe this is the 59th year, so it's almost as old at commercial television itself. 

It's surprising no one else has picked up the idea. A world wide song contest would probably be unworkable: every independent country given, say four minutes to perform, that would be over thirteen hours. And I don't see a North Americavision Song Contest working - even Canadians are going to start channel surfing part way through the performances by all those little Caribbean island nations. 

But I bet Americans would love a state-vs-state competition. We've seen that they love televised singing competitions, and they also love state rivalries, whether they have their genesis in politics or college football.  And Canada could easily support such a province-vs.-province-vs.-territory competition. It would be nationalistic, cultural, and mainstream: a perfect storm for the CBC.

A.I.'s Horrible Ending

Stephen Hawking recently said that it would be a big mistake if humanity created artificial intelligence.  There seems to be a lot of technologists concerned about the effect of possible future science. It seemed to start with Bill Joy's infamous essay on nanotechnology.

I can understand where they're coming from. When you think about how we've abused everything from internal combustion to high-fructose corn syrup, it becomes scary to even contemplate what we would do with self-replicating nanomachines.

But there is a flip-side to that line of reasoning: because we abuse every technology we create, we can't stop now. We don't use technology responsibly or with restraint, so we need to keep inventing new things to clean up our past messes.

To look at it another way, we often laugh at past alarmists, like Malthus or the  folks who said we'd have so many horses that today's world would be awash in manure. But they weren't wrong, they just didn't see new technologies coming. Without improved farming techniques, we wouldn't be able to feed the world (the part we do currently feed) and without the car, the world really would smell a whole lot worse.

So if you're going to advise us to avoid future technologies, you'll also have to prescribe a great shift in how we use our current technology.  Standing still with the world we've got now simply isn't an option.  I realize it may seem reckless to continue our current "strategy" of ignoring the consequences and assuming we can invent our way out of any problems we get ourselves into.  But until you can talk humanity into a new level of maturity, it's all we've got.

Mediterranean Blues

There's a Spanish island in the Mediterranean called Ibiza.  I always thought it was pronounced "ib-ee-tha." But now that there's a contest to win a trip there, the ads keep pronouncing it as it's spelled, "ib-ee-za."  At first, I thought it was just local talking heads who didn't know any better.  But now even better-produced ads are pronouncing it the later way too.

So I did what I always do when confused: I consulted Wikipedia.  It says that the "th" pronunciation is "British English" (and close to the actual Spanish) while the "z" pronunciation is "American English," which in turn makes it the "zee" pronunciation.  Ibiza is known for its Electronic Music scene, so I had heard of it through association with British people, and had thus adopted their pronunciation.  But most people just say it the way it's written, and those people seem to be taking over.

I bring this up because:

• Apparently the Ibiza scene is over.  DJs, it's time to move on to Majorca.
• I never realized the irony here.  English speakers are often unaware of how rare the "th" sound is among the world's languages, and are only dimly aware of how much trouble it causes people around the world that we put it in several of our most frequently used words.  That's why people speaking English as a second language often turn it into a "z" sound.  But in Ibiza, we English speakers are turning a "th" into a "z."

One Big Party

South Africa is going to the polls today. News services are trying to put an interesting spin on it: they look at the issues, examine the different perspectives of groups within country, and look at twenty years of democracy in the country, with special focus on those born after apartheid, who are voting for the first time. And then they admit that the ANC are going to win again.

If you haven't taken notice of the country since the eighties, the African National Congress (ANC) was the party of Nelson Mandela, and has formed the government there ever since the end of apartheid. What's weird is that there's a great deal of dissatisfaction with the state of the country. Unemployment is high, infrastructure is unreliable, and much of the country still lives in poverty. I can't figure out how one party stays in power through all that.

Yes, I know, I've written about how people stand by unimpressive politicians no matter how far they go, all using Rob Ford as the ultimate example.  But that's over a short term.  I don't really expect that Ford could keep his nation together for twenty years, even in the unlikely event that he lives for twenty more years.

And yes, there are examples of parties that have stayed in government for a long time.  Mexico's Industrial Revolutionary Party governed for 71 years, but that was with questionable means.  Japan's Liberal Democratic Party governed from 1955 to 1993, but that was through tremendous economic growth.

This doesn't seem healthy in a country that is still new to real democracy.  Of course, saying that means I am implying that a healthy democracy is one in which people change their minds.  So perhaps I should have new respect for places like here in Ontario where we tend to vacillate from one side to another.  And perhaps I should worry for Canadian and American federal politics, where the parties' support is more static than ever.

If I Had A Million Dollars

I think I just saw a TV commercial in which they had to explain to people the benefits of the $1 million prizes in addition to the main $50 million prize.  Did I really just see that?  Oh, wait, I have a PVR now...

Yes, they actually had a guy explain that he can do all the things he fantasizes about for a lottery win, even with a single million.  Have we really become that inured to big prizes that we have to relearn what good a million dollars is?

I always thought that lotteries should give away a greater number of smaller big prizes, rather than one massive prize.  After all, wouldn't it seem more meaningful if you could change the lives of a few dozen people, rather than just one? Of course, I don't buy lottery tickets, so I'm not in their target audience. I guess if you're the sort of person who thinks through his lottery fantasies like I have, then you'll also realize that lotteries are a losing proposition.

And that's why this commercial will ultimately fail.  As the saying goes, lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math.  So trying to explain the mathematics of financial dreams is counterproductive.

Keep Your Feathered Friends Close...

I thought the birds were getting a little competitive around the feeder.  Don't mess with the Godfeather, or you'll be fitted with cement talons.

Really, I don't think the birds could run a mob.  If they get arrested, you know they'll sing.  Yes, you've got to love child-level puns on adult material.

Yes! Deer!

Now there's a new zodiac based on native North American spirituality. That's great to see. I'd much rather base my life on misinterpretations of ancient spirituality that's been produced locally. Those Greek pictures in the sky never did me any good.

So apparently - in the new zodiac - I'm a deer. That's odd; I don't think I have much of a connection to deer, other than a childhood affinity for Bambi. But I do like their description of me: "The Deer is inspiring lively and quick-witted. With a tailor-made humour...this combined with his/her natural intelligence make the Deer a must-have guest at dinner parties."

So now I'll have a new smart-ass answer for "what's your sign?" I will no longer say, "a neon sign that reads 'I don't believe in Astrology.'" Now I will say, "I'm a deer." I'm not sure how they'll react:

• "You mean Capricorn? Isn't that a goat?"
• "Which Chinese restaurant do you go to? I don't remember seeing 'deer' on my place-mat."
• "That's not a sign."

And I can just react to that last one with, "Yes it is, you Eurocentric clod."

Does Whatever Order Aranea Can

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is out this week.  Wired has a mathematical analysis of how fast Spider-Man would actually be able to travel by web-slinging, and whether it would be faster than just running.  They say he could swing at about 30 mph, which is probably faster than he can run. That got me thinking about this article, which I've been meaning to write:

Things I've learned about Spider-Man by playing him in a videogame:

• Even with Spidey strength, it takes a lot of energy to swing an adult human several stories into the air. If you’re travelling by web slinging, there's a temptation to just skim along the ground rather than launching yourself high above the streets. So everyone should thank him for being nice enough to try and avoid knocking down pedestrians, bowling pin style.
• Superpowers make a person very reckless when crossing the street.
• After years of modernist architecture, the streets of New York all look the same when you're up in the air. It's easy to get lost, and I'm surprised Spider-Man doesn't just break down and take the subway. Or perhaps his spider-sense is used primarily as a substitute for GPS.
• If the villains were smart, they'd plan their crimes to take place at the centre of Central Park. That's the one place in New York that Spider-Man can't swing to. He'd have to fling himself as far into the park as he can, hope he doesn't land in a pond or the zoo, then jog the rest of the way.
• For that matter, think how difficult it would be for him to get around in almost any other city.  Even if it was another major American city, he'd only be able to patrol a small area in the business district, unable to reach any crimes in the suburbs.  For the Marvel Universe to be believable, we have to assume that lots of people get bitten by radioactive spiders, and we're just following the one who lives in New York and is thus able to make use of his skills.