Infamous Potatoes

Dean Burnett - described in his bio as a Neuroscientist who is also a part-time comedian - has written an interesting blog post for The Guardian.  In it, he talks about how he accidentally created a new psychological condition, called "Lonely Potato Syndrome."  It's the condition of always wanting to cook more than one of something (often a potato) because one would seem lonely. 

The weird and interesting thing is that when I say he "created" it, I don't mean that the condition existed and he gave it a name.  Rather, he mentioned this concern of his as an example of a personality quirk.  But other people recognized it in their own behaviour, and - combined with his authority on things mental - mentioned it to other people, and the idea took off.

Aside from being funny in a weird, surreal, British, help-I'm-trapped-in-a-Douglas-Adams-book sort of way, this incident brings up a lot of issues.  One is the authority we give to the words of experts, regardless of the evidence that backs them.  Another is the concept of labels.  That's a tough one in the world of mental health, where people take labels very personally.  I don't think anyone would be offended at being labelled as a Potato Sympathizer, but it does show how labels spread.  Once the label is created, it becomes easy to apply to more and more people. 

Personally, I think labels get a bad wrap.  Obviously, no one likes the idea of being pigeon-holed with others who may have a very different experience.  But that seems to be the way to get taken seriously these days.  I find it interesting that society is making headway in getting people to care about mental illness at the same time that society is becoming less caring and accommodating in general. We're quick to call people weak or lazy, yet we're more willing to sympathize with those diagnosed with depression.  So it may be that we'll have to slap labels on things just to make people take our problems seriously, and treat one another with dignity. 

Occupying The Passing Lane

It's kind of forgotten now, but when Bill Clinton was first elected, he was promising a health care system. Of course, that effort went nowhere, and other aspects of Clinton's presidency are better remembered. So now we rarely remember "Clintoncare" except when some smartass reminds everyone that Republicans of the day made a counter-proposal that looked a whole lot like Obamacare.

So it's hard to believe now, but there was actually a computer game simulation of the health care effort. It was from the makers of SimCity (and lesser known contemporaries like SimEarth and SimAnt.)  Obviously, it was called SimHealth

I remember this, because of the first time I saw the SimHealth box in a store. I picked up the box to read it, partly out of interest in the game, partly out of amazement that such a thing exists. As I'm reading the box, a little kid wanders by, sees which game I'm looking at, and says, "I heard that game's too hard." And I thought, my god, I'm in a political cartoon.

That incident comes to mind because I found myself in another political cartoon today on the highway. Two semis were driving in the two right lanes. A Prius was about to pass them, but it got cut-off by a Cadillac driving wildly and way over the speed limit.  You've got business on the right, the rich ignoring laws, wiping out the middle class and hurting the environment.  All we needed was to work a Hummer into the scenario too.

Reports Show Joy In Mudville Down Sharply

In the past month, there's been a lot of talk about improving baseball. I guess it's because they've finally got a new commissioner for the first time in about twenty years.

Several news outlets have gotten hold of the bad news in TV ratings: ratings for local broadcasts of games are doing great, but the ratings for national games have dipped badly. It seems that individual teams are popular, but the support for the sport in general is weak. I can relate to that; I've followed the Blue Jays through thick and thin, but don't really pay attention to other games.

So what's the problem? Many sports pundits have lined up to blame it on their personal pet peeves. But a lot of people have focused on the length of games. And I've been impressed with how willing people are too change the game. In the past whenever anyone has suggested that baseball should be sped up, someone - probably Tim McCarver - reassures everybody that the game is perfect and everyone in the stadium is having fun and eating hot dogs and not thinking about being home by ten. But now it seems like everyone's willing to impose time limits on at-bats, ban visits to the mound, or eliminate warm-up pitches.

Impressive, but I don't think this is baseball's real problem. After all, football games are just as long. Here's my take on some of the major problems:

Steroids

People always look at the steroid issues as being about trust. That has been a problem, but here another problem: stats. Baseball has always been bigger on numbers than any other sport, but now it's biggest numbers are meaningless. It used to be exciting when Cecil Fielder or Brady Anderson went above the usual number of home runs. But now, the records have been pushed out of reach, and aren't taken seriously anymore. They should just erase them and make what everyone feels the reality: Maris and Aaron are the record holders again.

Stars

I could write a whole post on how nauseating the Derek Jeter retirement hype has been, but instead I'll just say this: have you considered that he isn't even the best player on his own team? No, I'm not talking about A-Rod, who isn't so impressive anymore (see point one.) No, I mean Ichiro Suzuki. But he doesn't get nearly the publicity, because he played most of his MLB career in Seattle, and to the baseball media, he might as well have stayed in Japan.

Of course, bias to big markets affects all sports, but in most others there is still the possibility for a Kevin Durant, Peyton Manning, or Sidney Crosby to gain national fame from a secondary market. In baseball that's more difficult, even with exceptional accomplishments. Consider Yasiel Puig and Miguel Cabrera: who has the greater accomplishments in the last few years, and who gets the most attention in the media. If you're only going to look to a handful of franchises for your nationally-recognizable stars, you're really limiting yourself.

Anonymous teams

The competitive imbalance that has plagued baseball for years did a lot of damage. It seems to be fixed now, though I'll reserve my final judgement until I see one of these youngster-laden small market teams win the world series.
But a big problem that remains is the transient nature of teams. Big market teams churn through stars they've bought elsewhere, and small market teams are a conveyor belt of prospects that are used for a couple of seasons before being sold to the highest bidder. Wannabe teams either have second-rate fill-ins while they restock the farm system, or they parachute in expensive trades and signings trying to get to the top.

So one way or another, players move all over the place. Yes, there's more player movement in all sports these days, but in the NFL teams can usually hang on to a player for most of their prime, and in the NBA and NHL most teams can afford to at least hang on to a core of players.

But baseball's generous free-agency has lead to a generation of Yankees-Red Sox games that look like all-star games. And now we have to get excited over  Royals-Mariners games featuring players we've never heard of. If you don't have a rooting interest, it's hard to get excited about such arbitrary matches.

The Soul Of A New Machine

Kia has a new commercial for the Soul, again featuring hamsters (this is an extended version):

• I'm confused by the hamster in the ball. It seems to be an ordinary hamster among all these anthropomorphic hamsters. You're just not allowed to do that. Either the animals are normal or they're a stand-in for people. Disney tried to do that with Goofy as a humanoid dog and Pluto as a pet dog, and that confused generations of kids.
• So either the hamster in the ball is a child that will one day grow into one of the big hamsters, or the big hamsters are mutants, and they keep a normal one around for some reason.
• Or this is supposed to take place in an alternate universe where hamsters evolved sentience instead of primates.  In that case, the hamster in the ball is the equivalent of a monkey to them. That makes more sense
• Would hamsters consider a thin female in skin-tight clothing attractive? Surely they'd prefer a plump and furry female.
• How come these hamsters have better taste in music than what we've seen from the species in the past?
• For all the ad's other flaws, I have to say that nerdy hamsters are adorable. In the previous hamster ad, if you look closely at the scene where they're in the salon, one of them is reading a copy of Wired with a hamster on the cover. So apparently they have a gift for technology. But you don't have to tell me that...

Please Print This Post Before Reading It

I saw a news report on the making of the new movie The Boxtrolls.  It's an animated movie.  But unlike other studios these days, they're animating it old-school, using stop-motion animation.  That's not so unusual, Wallace and Gromit's studio works the same way. 

Anyway, this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Boxtrolls showed that their studio has several 3D printers, which they use to make parts for the models they use in their animation.  Further, they make some of their animations by printing character parts by the hundreds, each with slightly different shapes.  I'm thinking, that's quite impressive, they went through a lot of work to...wait a minute, where did they get the designs for all these parts that they're printing out?  Sure enough, they design them, using computers.  So, rather than use computer animation - in which they design characters on computers and then have a computer do the grunt work of rendering them on the screen - they use real-life models, which were designed on computers, printed out, and then filmed for the screen by hand.

Now how does that make sense?  I realize that old ways of doing things often have their charms, but this seems to defeat the purpose of it.  It's like making a font based on your handwriting, or programing a synthesizer to sound like a buzzy lo-fi electric guitar, or bringing a mini-espresso machine camping.  Yes, I know people do those things too.

Start Me Up

I've decided that the next time I get a new PC, I'm going to erase whatever version of Windows it comes with, and put on Windows 95.  Yes, I do still have the CD.  I believe I also have a copy of OS/2, but it's on 25 floppies.  I'm also going to put on an old version of Microsoft Office from that era.  That is, if I can't find an old copy of WordPerfect with the white text on a plain blue screen.

Why would I be putting obsolete software on a brand new computer?  Because I want to know what it's like to have a really fast computer.  Yes, all computers seem fast at first.  But that quickly changes: your computer gets slower and slower, until routine actions leave you staring into space while you wait for the machine to catch up.  I figure that the only way to make a computer stay fast in the long term is to run software from the days when computers were a hundred times slower.

Why do computers get slow?  It's a lot of things.

First, there's psychology: your shiny new computer seems fast at first, but once it's lost that new-CPU smell, you start to notice that it takes thirty seconds of hard-drive thrashing just to open the web browser.

And there's the sheer amount of software: as you install more and more stuff, there's more going on in the background.  Even when you're not using an application, it could be checking for updates or something in the background.

And of course, the faster computers get, the more the programmers take that speed for granted.  On early computers, programs were simple but computing power was at a premium, so the programmers could afford to go through their code in detail on a quest for efficiency.  With more power and bigger, more complex applications, that won't happen.

So I wonder if computers have really gotten faster.  It would be interesting to see computers of various eras compared in their time needed to, say, open a word processor document.  Certainly, my tablet opening a Google Drive document would be one of the slower competitors.

Norm(s)!

The way I look at it, most people in society agree on a lot of things. I mean basic things: murder is wrong, love is good, racism is bad. We all know that there are some people who don't agree on these things, but we assume they are few in number, and fairly recognizable.

Then there are a lot of things that we know people don't agree on. Some of these are inconsequential. These are things like Coke vs. Pepsi, the Oxford comma, and which way around the toilet paper goes. But some of these issues are consequential, and most of these are what we call politics. Okay, I guess there's religion too, but if you live in a homogeneous area, it may be in that category of things everyone agrees on.

Anyway, that's how I assume the world works, and I think most people assume it works that way. Of course, there are fuzzy areas, like the fact that the list of things we all agree on is constantly changing. I listed "racism is bad" as one thing we have a consensus on. But it wasn't that long ago that it was far from universal. It also wasn't that long ago that "homosexuality is bad" was the near-universal belief, but now it's in doubt, and it appears "homosexuality is okay" will soon be the norm.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I'm finding a surprising number of times that universal beliefs turn out to be less that universal. No, I'm not talking about the beliefs of random nutbars on the Internet; I long ago realized that they wouldn't fit into any societal expectations. I mean people who seem quite intelligent and civilized.

So why is this? One is that it's an effect of social media. Note that we can hear from a person all the time on any topic, there are so many more chances for people to reveal all aspects of their values. You don't just assume that your favourite actor is similar to you; you can go on Twitter and find out. And since you see their view on every topic, it increases the chances that you’re going to stumble across a very unusual opinion, if there is one.

Another is the diversity of modern media. With 500 channels and a billion web pages, it's easy for anyone to immerse themselves among the like minded. Thus the speaker may be fooled into thinking their values are more universal than they are, as the listener is fooled into thinking their values are the norm. A further reason is the sheer amount of disagreement. Yes, most of that disagreement is with the aforementioned nutbars, but social media gives one the impression that disagreement - even extreme disagreement - is normal if not admirable.

(Let’s start a punk band called, “The Aforementioned Nutbars.”)

I guess the lesson here is that society is - as usual - not what it appears. Ideas - even those seemingly entrenched - must be constantly fought for. Consensus should not be confused with correctness.

St. Andy Talking

So the Scotts said no. It seems like a very British near-separation, with everyone being polite and putting a positive face on it. It also seemed to be surprisingly rational. Of course, I’m watching from an ocean away, but discussion seemed to have surprisingly little delusion and dirty tricks, despite what I talked about earlier in the campaign.

People really emphasized that the no vote doesn't mean business as usual, and there has to be further devolution of power. I hope that works. Partly because it could end up with my own dear Birmingham becoming the capital of the province of West Midlands. But also because it seems that with the closer cultures, lack of language differences, and vaguer desires, Britain may actually come up with a long-term solution. No, I'm not saying that no one will want independence ever again - there'll always be hardcore separatists - but they have a chance at satisfying enough people to sap the movement of its softer support. That's if the federal government acts decisively. Prime Minister Cameron, though, doesn't seem like the grand-gesture type, so I’m guessing that reforms are headed for committee hell. And yes, I know the British don't call it the federal government; but if they're serious about devolution, they soon will, so let me be the first.

This could be interesting to watch in the future: The nations of Britain will be reassessing their role vs. the federal government. At the same time, Britain (and likely a few others) will be reassessing their membership in Europe. And Europe will be, um, trying to make things work. There’s potential for this to be a much-needed re-examination of what countries and nations are and what we want them to do. But I suspect it will be business as usual within Britain, while it caves to staunch conservatives and leaves Europe, and the EU will continue living off of Angela Merkel’s credit card.

I Still Find What I Wasn't Looking For

Apple has given all iTunes users a free copy of the new U2 album, and boy are they angry. If you're confused about this, the problem is the way they did it. They could have just presented people with the option, would you like a free copy of the new U2 album: yes/no? Or they could have just dropped the price of the album to zero, giving everyone a chance to take it if they want it. But instead, they automatically placed it in everyone's libraries of owned music. That means it will always be in everyone's searches of their own music. And if - like many people - the account is set to automatically download purchased music, it downloaded to their iDevice without their knowledge.

I think there's a couple of trends at work here:

Music Distribution

Ever since the rise of MP3s in the late nineties, people have been proposing new ideas for selling music, in a desperate bid to create something that would work with the new technological reality. And these proposals have generally been terrible:

• give music away, make all your money on t-shirts,
• let people pirate music, but give fans remixes and outtakes if they pay for the music (with no explanation of why those extras won't be pirated.)
• sell music at much lower prices, and people will buy more of it (and stop pirating it)

You can imagine how this album giveaway might have been promoted to the suits as a bold new initiative for distributing music and glamorizing the Apple brand.  It would be easy to load it with buzzwords and get everyone excited. And it's apparent that neither Apple nor U2 thought this through either. Apple made a big - likely expensive - gesture for its customers, and it made them furious. U2 released an album that a lot of people liked, but the big story is how many people didn't like it.

Of course, previous schemes to reinvent the music biz required a mass movement with businesses and consumers getting on board. But in this case, it would've just required the agreement of U2, their manager, and a few Apple execs. So I fear we've entered a new era where harebrained schemes to distribute music will actually be put into practice.

Music Tastes

I’m a fan of U2, so I would have been pleased to receive a free copy of the album. But I do sympathize with the people who were upset about it. That’s because it’s so easy to imagine a reverse example where someone I didn’t appreciate was imposed on me, by a corporation that assumes everybody wants the same thing.

U2 have regularly been called the Biggest Band In The World, and through a lot of their career they have been the biggest rock band, though that says more about the splintering of music fandom and the decline of rock as the primary pop-music style. And yet, even they aren’t universally liked enough for people to be happy getting their album for free.

Arguably, they’d still be one of the best choices for pleasing the most people by giving away free music. They’re far from the most popular now, but they won’t provoke anger like some artists. For instance, more people would be happy to receive a Justin Bieber album, but more people would also be infuriated too. So this incident demonstrates just how diverse popular music has become. In fact, there is no “popular” music any more, there are just genres of varying sizes.

Why England Suddenly Hates Us

Britain's Guardian has an op-ed piece titled, "Why Canada Wants Scotland To Vote 'Yes.'" I of course, said, "we do?"

I doubt that headline is true. It's quite a case of wishful thinking on the part of Canadian journalist Stephen Marche. The article is based on some old-fashioned conceptions of both Canada and Britain. As I've said before, people who try to understand the Britain of today using the ruthless, amoral empire-builders of the past end up looking quite silly. And his conception of Canada as gullible masses lead by an England-loving elite is nearly as dated.

The weird thing is that beneath everything, I do agree with his philosophy: by basing is identity around its British roots, Canada has never looked to its own characteristics and accomplishments for identity. Like him, I wonder what Canada would do in the wake of a Scottish separation, which might force us to reassess a British heritage we aren't really ready to give up yet.

In his defence, the headline - which he likely didn't write - is misleading. He does actually acknowledge that there is very little desire in Canada to dump the monarchy, so he does make it apparent that the wish for a separate Scotland is a personal desire. Essentially, the article misrepresents reality, and the headline misrepresents the article, resulting in a headline that has no basis in fact.

I haven't seen any surveys on the subject, but I find it hard to believe that most Canadians are looking for a "Yes" vote. I'm sure people with direct Scottish roots probably would like to see them independent, and many Quebec separatists would like the precedent. But for Canadians who don't have a dog in this fight, i'm guessing they will be hoping for a no vote, because of the precedent for Quebec and the British basis of our national identity.

This has really stressed me out, so I'm going to have to order one of The Guardian's Scottish Separation Squeeze toys.

Forever Disaster

Did you know that Adidas is an acronym of All Day I Dream About Sport? No? Good, 'cause it's just an urban myth. It's actually a contraction of the founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler.  Well his brother, Rudolf didn't get along with him, and left to start his own company, Puma.  How about that?  You have a successful multinational shoe company, and it's only the second biggest  multinational shoe company in the family.

So it's fitting that Puma has always been the poor cousin to the big boys of sports footwear. The only organized sports I ever participated in - playing soccer as a child - was in Puma shoes. So when I was entering my teens, at about the time the marketing Svengalis at Nike convinced everyone in my generation that shoes were the determiner of athletic prowess and social status. Here I was, the closest connection I had to this suddenly important world of shoes was through the ones cheap enough to be sold at Zellers, the Autobots to Nike's Transformers.

But now Puma is going to try constructing a bad-ass image for itself with a new ad campaign. And someone in PR decided they'd do it with athletes in hot-tubs.  In their trying-too-hard ad, you probably recognized Usain Bolt.  If you follow soccer, you recognized Mario Balotelli and possibly Marta.  And I had to look it up, and the woman who is about to take a two-stroke penalty for taking the putter in the tub with her is Lexi Thompson.  And I don't know why they have footage of Formula 1 pit stop either.

The whole thing seems like a miscalculation, even before you find out that Thompson is only 19.  Like I say, its attempt to look rebellious is really over the top.  But it's also not really believable from mostly likeable athletes. Yes, Balotelli has enough sinisterness for all of them, but that leads to the biggest problem.  The scene of him in the hot-tub is the creepiest thing I've ever seen.  There he is, with a hint of a grin of self satisfaction, with his arms around a couple of early-round-losers from a Taylor Swift impersonation contest, speaking for him in bubbly voices with Borg-like unison.  Yes, I know it was probably just something they threw together when the ad's director discovered he can't speak English, but now I'm going to go out and buy some Adidas shoes just so everyone knows I'm not involved with this.

Next Is The E

This weekend was the first race in the new Formula E auto racing series. As you might guess from the name, it's kind of like Formula 1, but for electric cars. And it's organized by the same organization, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA).

There's been some scepticism, since this series will, of necessity be smaller, slower, and cheaper than the big series. But lesser racing series have survived in the past, so it could work out. Because it's really too early to tell whether it will be successful, most media reports have focused on silly questions like whether auto racing fans will take to racing that's so quiet, which just makes all of us in racing fandom look like fools. Of course, there have been complaints in Formula 1 about the sound of the turbo V6's used this year in comparison to the V8's that have been in use for years, so maybe we really are that simple. And the inaugural race ended with a dramatic crash at the end, so less sophisticated fans should be convinced now.

I think Formula E could be successful, because it has a couple of big things going for it, aside from its environmental credentials. One is the aforementioned lack of noise. That means a great deal of flexibility in locating races. Rather than go to tracks in the middle of nowhere, or street courses carefully positioned in cities but far from residential areas, you can have electronic car racing anywhere. Street races have been successful; if you can find a good location, the community will really get behind them, even when the racing series itself is struggling, as we've seen with the IndyCar races at Toronto and Long Beach.

The more hidden advantage is that it gives the FIA an opportunity to start over, without Formula 1's baggage. As successful as the top series is, there's so much about it that needs reworking. They're constantly fighting the issues of high costs, lack of parity, and reining-in ever increasing speeds. I have to admit, they're making some progress on these fronts, but all the way they're fighting organizational inertia, and racing teams that benefit from the current situation. It doesn't help that series organizers spent about twenty years trying to ignore their problems, instead promoting their boring parades of delicate, high-speed contraptions as a competition of engineering. That trained a generation of fans to think of racing as being about fancy technical specs, not actual competition.  So now they too push back against tightening the rules for the sake of exciting racing.

So Formula E gives a chance to start over, and build a series on competition, not esoteric engineering. And it will work, but it will take time to build up interest. Will the FIA give it the time it needs? I have no idea. The FIA is an odd beast: a huge, highly profitable organization, but with a few eccentric and not-entirely-pleasant individuals in positions of great power. So I could believe that Formula E will get a chance to succeed because it is a sensible long-term investment, or because someone sees it as a personal legacy. But I could also believe that it won't get a chance because the short-term balance sheet won't look good, or because someone quickly tires of this hippy electric crap.

Words Like Violence

So we're going to war, but who is this that we're fighting? We started off calling them ISIS, for Islamic State Iraq and Syria. But then some people decided it should be ISIL, for Islamic State Iraq and Levant. And others drop the place altogether and just call it Islamic State. And then they also have the nickname “Daesh.”

The problem is that they aren't really thinking of themselves as limited to Iraq and Syria, and no one knows what Levant means (apparently just “middle east.”) “Islamic State” perpetuates the idea that Islam is all about terrorism (and probably leads to some hilarious mixups with the Nation of Islam.)

I'm assuming this is one of those cases where there isn't going to be a truly correct translation. So let's just choose our own. Supposedly they hate “Daesh,” so we could go with that, if “Those Bastards” is too unsubtle. Or we could poke fun at ourselves, calling them "This Week's Enemy."  Let them try portraying this as ultimate Armageddon with a name like that.

And one of their enemies is the Kurdish force known as the Peshmerga. But, in the grand tradition of TV reporters showing off how good they are at pronouncing local names, they spit it out quickly as Thepeshmerga. Which I always mis-hear as “Depeche Merga” and that leads to some very strange imaginings.

Let Your Keyboard Slide

okay,i'm trying the new 5 tiles keyboard. It's a new and radically different touch screen keyboard in which there are just 5 keys, and you have to slide between them to form letters. The advantage is that it takes up only a tiny portion of the screen.

supposedly, people have achieved high words per minute, but I'm finding the learning curve rather steep. I seem to remember that it took me a while to learn to touch type. For one thing, i'm learning just how much ive come to rely on some of the features of the sliding typing, such as inserting a space after each word.

Even before the growth of mobile phones, ive always thought that modern technology could do better than the typewriter keyboard as a way of entering text. Something different like chording keyboards could surely work better.

I think this keyboard could be superior to Blackberry style thumb typing. But i won't be quitting slide typing for it. The ultimate keyboard is yet to be created.

An Ebbing Tide Lowers All Boats

I heard a joke once about the Russian people trying to decide which revolutionaries to support. I couldn’t find it online, but I remember the punchline was that they had to choose between the group who wanted the tsars to be as poor as the common folk, and the group who wanted the common folk to be as rich as the tsars.

Which brings me to the Trivago guy. A lot of people have been criticizing his appearance. But this is just a lot of piling-on with a particularly visible person. Honestly, if you saw him on the street, I'm sure you wouldn't notice him.

Some people have welcomed the extra scrutiny on Trivago Guy's appearance as a new level of equality, since his being judged brutally on his appearance with no consideration of his personality is very much like the female experience. Well, that's true, and hopefully some men will learn from that, but this isn't what I had in mind with equality. The idea wasn't to bring everyone down to women's predicament, it was to get everyone the rights and privileges that had previously only been available to men. Or, to put it another way, when looking at women's income disparity, I would think that all but the most radical would fix it by increasing women's salary by 30%, not dropping men's salary 30%.

When it comes to appearance, I think men have it pretty close to ideal. Yes, I know everyone has their anecdote of a fashion disaster, but for most of the people you see in an average day, the men generally look quite acceptable, yet spend very little time getting to look that way. It's a balance between looks and effort that I think most women would choose if media and beauty magazines had not set the bar for respectability so high. So instead of criticizing men as though  they're women, we should cut women slack like we do men.

Somebody Call Dick Tracy

Apple released its latest iPhones, and they come with improvements in... who cares, they've finally got a watch!  It's still months away though, so we don't know all the details, and so far, it seems a little disappointing.  It looks like... a watch.  It's not as clunky as earlier smart watches, but it still does look like a digital watch, with a big rectangle on a much-thinner strap.

They even kept the little wheel at the side - not to wind it, but as an input device for when the tiny screen would be obscured by using on-screen controls.  Which makes me think: 1. haven't they noticed that those wheels aren't easy to use? Ask me in the middle of the daylight-saving shift if I wouldn't give up the wheel for setting the time with a touch screen.  And 2.  The original Blackberry (the one that looked like a pager) also had a wheel to navigate its functions: just one more reason for them to curse fate.

It sounds like they've got the right idea usability-wise by not just making it a mini-iPhone, and instead giving it a new paradigm.  But stylisticly it's not even as good as Samsung's smartwatches. I guess the disappointment is that the iPhone didn't look like previous phones, mobile or otherwise: it created its own, cleaner style.  That's kind of what the Pebble did with watches.  The iWatch barely even looks better than this fake Windows watch.

Going Back In Time

So, an NBA owner is selling his team after he was caught that he had said racist things in private.  Let's see, I'm sure I can use the last post I made when that happened.  Just search-and-replace, and...

Shame on Bruce Levenson for what he said in private.  Of course, now he's going sell his under-performing Atlanta Hawks, and will probably make a big profit.

...Okay, maybe I can't reuse much more, but still, that is an embarrassing trend for the league.  It's also an embarrassing trend that in about two-and-a-half years of this blog, I've used the "race" tag five times now, with three of them in the past month.

Levenson wasn't nearly as overtly racist as the Clippers' Donald Sterling, though some have pointed out that he's probably a lot more representative of the racism in the NBA and throughout American business.  Since whites have more average income than blacks, there have probably been a lot of discussions about how to get more white people to the games. There may be a lot of incriminating e-mails out there.

One thing Levenson wanted was more white-friendly music, with more country and less hip-hop.  If we're going to complain about racist music at NBA games, I've been waiting to get this off my chest for a while:  A lot of arenas play House Of Pain's "Jump Around" before every jump-ball.  Yeah, it has "jump" in the title, but:

• It starts with a fanfare that most people won't recognize.
• The vocalist wears a Celtics shirt in the video
• There are so many other songs with "jump" in the title

While I appreciate that white people rapping about jumping confronts two negative stereotypes at once, you'd think they'd give diversity a shot.  I realize that The Pointer Sisters' "Jump (For My Love)" is a little too retro, but they could go with Kriss Kross's "Jump."  I know, I didn't like that song either, but if they were going for quality then their sop-to-whites choice would have been Van Halen's "Jump."

The Dismal Magazine

A few days ago I wrote a post referencing an article in The Economist about South Dakota.  For the most part, I was only talking about their calling South Dakota "neglected" and using that as the basis for silly jokes about lesser-known states.  But I also made a snide remark about The Economist's conservative standpoint.  When I first wrote that, I had started off on a rant about my long-running pet peeve with them, but I figured it was too off-topic and dropped it.

As I said, The Economist has a conservative, pro-capitalist point of view.  I'm liberal, and have more lukewarm feelings about capitalism.  But I've always appreciated that The Economist avoids many of the problems with conservative media outlets:

• portraying conservative politicians and parties as perfect and unfailing, rather than just promoting conservative ideals
• conflating religion and conservative policies (they were in favour of gay marriage before most liberal politicians would touch the issue)
• denying reality when it contradicts doctrine

So I've liked their writing, finding that an intelligent take on world events is welcome, even if it comes from a different philosophy than mine.

What has always bothered me, however, is the way they always find a way to back the most conservative option, regardless of their reasoning.  For instance, they may write articles acknowledging the reality of global warming, but then they seem to contradict that by endorsing a politician who's policies have no consideration for the environment.  Or they concede the need for corporate regulation, then oppose regulation when actual laws are proposed.  One ends up wondering if the intellectual moderation is all an act.  Though another possibility is that they know that a lot of their income comes from telling conservative Americans what they want to hear.


I bring all this up, because of a recent controversy over one of their book reviews.  It was for a book called, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism.  It has the thesis that capitalism, as we now know it, was forged by the American slave-based economy.  Obviously, I would expect that they would have a problem with that idea.  But I would expect that realistic and intelligent conservatives would do one of the following:

• make a counterargument against the idea that capitalism was influenced or created by slavery, or
• concede the point, but contend that a system's detestable origins do not make it an evil system

They took a stab at each of these, but in the end they did something that only the most far-right pundits would do: play the slavery-wasn't-that-bad card. They imply that slave-owners had a vested interest in keeping slaves healthy and treating them better.  Most shockingly, the review ends by claiming that the book is not objective, because all the blacks in this book about slavery are "victims."

To their credit, The Economist retracted the review and apologized.  And to their further credit, they have posted the review with their apology, rather than hide their mistake.  But this is one of those missteps that is hard to apologize for, since it has revealed something of the mindset at the magazine.  At least a few of their people thought this article was a reasonable thing to write.  That's the sort of incident that is hard to forget unless it comes with an explanation of how their perspective has changed and their behaviour will be different going forward.  Unless they do, I'm going to believe that there is no limit to how far they will go to court the conservative extremes.

You May Know Me From Hollywood Boulevard

Every now and then you hear about someone new being added to the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. What's weird is that the people being honoured seem to be at different levels of their careers. It's not like a sports hall of fame where their career has to be finished, or a lifetime achievement award where it's for a lifetime body of work.

On the other hand, they sometimes do give it to someone who's been around for a while. So we get these announcements that there's a ceremony to give stars to Kesha and Rich Little. And I'm wondering who decided that they are at the exact same level of accomplishment? And what did Rich Little just do that got him over the line? Is he lifting the ceremonial cover off that star thinking, thank God I did that show in Tucson last week, that finally got me here.

I'm really wondering about that, given the recent announcement that Phil Hartman is getting a star. I'm all in favour, as you can guess given that in the tag cloud in the margin, the SNL label is about the size as my hometown. But I have to ask what just happened to make him worthy, given that he died sixteen years ago. But then I realized: it was the recent Simpsons marathon. Apparently Troy McClure made a big impression on the Walk Of Fame people.

You Gonna Use That State?

The Economist has an article about the economic success of South Dakota.  The article isn't that interesting; here, I'll sum it up for you: taxes, regulation and unions, all bad.

What I found interesting was their referring to South Dakota as "a neglected state."  That's an accurate way of describing it, and it's the sort of subtlety of American culture that often escapes foreign journalists.  Really, there's four levels of state fame:

• The superstar states (California, New York, Texas, maybe Florida) where everything happens
• The popular states (Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) where people are from
• The but-of-joke states (Iowa, Oklahoma, Utah, etc.) which enter the public consciousness only as caricatures
• States that just fill out the flag (Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Vermont, Delaware, New Mexico, Wyoming, Maine & Rhode Island)

A fair number of people do live there; several of those states have over a million people. But it's pretty surprising how seldom they get mentioned. Even I mentioned a while back that I had trouble coming up with Idaho stereotypes.

Of course, we in Canada can relate to the problem of getting ignored by the United States.  So I was thinking, you remember that map that was passed around a few years ago, where they created the United States of Canada (Canada plus the Blue States) and Jesusland (the Red States)?  Well maybe that was misguided.  After all, If Canada has a defining attribute, it is not liberalism, it is being invisible to the U.S.  So we should adopt some of those neglected states.  New Mexico would be better of with Mexico, and they can keep Delaware and Rhode Island since they'd be off on their own.  But we'll also take upstate Michigan and New York, since they're as ignored as any state.

Obviously, for this to work, we'd have to reciprocate and give the Americans everything in Canada that Americans don't ignore.  That would be just Rob Ford and Justin Bieber.  Sounds good to me, what do you think?

Calculating Dog

One thing I discovered in software development is that you have to distinguish between the user's problems and the user's solutions to those problems. A great example of this concept is Henry Ford's quote that of he had asked customers at the start of his career what he could do to improve their transportation problems, they would have asked for faster horses.  Instead, he concentrated on the customer's problem (transportation) but created his own situation.  Okay, it turns out he probably never said that, but you get the point.

That sounds obvious when we're looking at a situation a century in the past, but today it's not so easy to ignore the user's suggestions. The computer biz has a bad history of ignoring the customer's needs all together, so ignoring user suggestions, even in the name of innovation, will be frowned upon.

One thing users will always ask for is a simple button.  That is, they'll ask why they have to dig through menus and dialog boxes to accomplish something, why can't they just hit a button.  The problem with that is that with much modern software, if there is a button for each task it's capable of, the screen will be covered with buttons.  It will be impossible to find the button you're looking for, and it will be even harder to use.

A good example is here on my laptop, which has a number of dedicated keys for launching programs such as e-mail and the web browser.  Personally, I find that a waste of the precious real estate of a laptop keyboard.  I launch the browser once and then leave it open, and I get email through the web, so I don't need a special key to make it easier to get to either.

But the big fury-inducer on this keyboard is the button to launch the calculator.  How often does a person use the calculator on a computer anyway?  It's only needed for that little gap between math that's faster to do in your head, and math that's part of a more sophisticated program like a spreadsheet or an accounting application.  And yet, I can launch it with one stroke of a pinky.  I have to admit, I have used the key.  But the number of times I've intentionally use it is infinitesimal compared to the number of times I've accidentally hit it.  What's worse, it's right beside the Control Key, so if I do hit it by accident, I'm usually holding it down while hitting another key.  On a few occasions I have completely filled the screen with calculator windows.