Radio-Friendly Gear Shifter

I looked up the lyrics to the song "Starboy" by The Weeknd. Before telling you why, I ask you to reflect on how hard it is to type "The Weeknd" on a modern smartphone with auto-correct. I'm hoping musicians of the future will take that into consideration when choosing their names. Can you imagine if they had smartphones in the heyday of Lynne skyrocket... interred skinned... dammit, the guys who did "Sweet Home Alabama."

Anyway, I wondered about some of the lyrics, particularly:

• What is he saying about The Wrath of Khan?
• Does he know he's pronouncing "wrath" wrong?

Apparently I'm not the only one, since I found this whole explanation. To answer both those questions, it's actually a pun on the Rolls-Royce Wraith, and thus, yes, he meant to pronounce it that way. In fact, most of the song is bragging about his expensive cars. It's easy to miss that because some of the references are cryptic (for instance, "lamb" for "Lamborghini.") Though I may have to hand in my car guy membership card for not realizing that the mention of "P1" near the start of the song referred to the McLaren P1.

But the big discovery for myself (and I'm assuming many people who have only heard the song on radio) is that the repeated "I'm a I'm a" in the chorus is actually to cover up profanity in the original recording. I have to say, they did a pretty good job; it's always bugged me when a song has a bunch of really clumsily blanked-out words. As a kid, I annoyed people on the phone by pushing the mute button on and off while speaking, and that's what these songs sound like on the radio.

Look, I came of age musically in the eighties at the height of Tipper Gore's crusade against naughty song lyrics, so I don't like the idea of Bowdlerizing music. But if you're going to release it as a single, can't you put a little effort into the clean version? Sometimes I think they add the awkward censoring just to make sure everyone knows there's lots of profanity, to encourage kids to buy it so they can feel badass. Really, all it advertises is that there can't be many good songs on the album or they would have picked a single that doesn't sound like a bad cell connection.

Tso Long And Thanks For All The Chicken

There's a Tums ad running where a guy finishes a meal at a Chinese restaurant, then receives a declaration of war from General Tso, who - in the form of some sort of meatball avatar - proceeds to pelt him with chicken pieces. It's a reasonably funny ad, even though it's likely a historical abomination.

Okay, I looked it up, and yes, General Tso was a real person. Though at least General Tso's Chicken did originate in Taiwan, which makes it more authentic than much Westernized Chinese food.

But speaking of General Tso Chicken, it also brings up a point I've wanted to make for a while now: For the last time, people: It's General Tso, not General Tao.

You could understand if it was a simple misspelling or something, but this is a rather awkward misremembering in which people confuse two of the few Chinese things they've heard of. Worse, Tao is a religious concept, so it's a particularly touchy thing to confuse. Imagine that Apple Crisp became popular in China, but they couldn't remember the word "crisp," so they started calling it, "Apple Christ."

What's especially embarrassing, this seems to be a largely Canadian problem. Americans seem to get the name right. But here in Canada, companies like President's Choice put "Tao" on their packaging. Even Chinese restaurants give in and use the wrong name. So let's take this ad as proof we need to change; there's no way we can get out-ethnic-diversitied by Tums.

Must Love Dogs

There's been a big controversy over the movie A Dog's Purpose, after footage leaked of a dog being abused on the set. That's frustrating, since it happened with a movie that's all about the love of dogs, and there are supposed to be checks on animal abuse in movies. And you'd think that a hugely pro-dog movie would be particularly conscious of the need to treat their dogs well.

As an animal lover who isn't a dog person, I guess I have an outsider's view of the issue, and I'm amazed at how this film has gone from one extreme of dog lovers' passion to the other. If the ads were any indication, it was relying on dog-loving schmaltz and little else. It seems to be that kind of uplifting movie that I hate: rather than help you to see the world in a better light, it creates a mythology that tells you what you want to hear, like a second-rate new age religion.

Now, that dog spirituality has all been reversed, and you've got to think this whole movie is going to be a financial albatross to the studio; the one constituency that you were relying on now hates you.

My apologies to albatross lovers who may have been offended there.

So I have to wonder if dog lovers feel used. I'm not saying their hurt feelings compare to the injustice done to the dog, but this was a blatant manipulation of their emotions. When it turned out that some on the set were not so committed to the animals after all, that only underlined how people's feelings were just being used for profit.

I Am A Dropout, Like My Father Before Me

There's an interesting new study that suggests people are getting - very slowly - less apt for education. It's based on research in Iceland; its small, long-isolated population makes it a goldmine of genetic research. It probably applies to other populations too, but for now we can only be sure of Iceland's slow decline. Now, if you agree that Björk was better than Of Monsters and Men, you have some scientific backing.

This is the sort of study that is destined to be misinterpreted and exaggerated for years to come. No doubt there are dozens of anti-Millennial essays being pounded out right now on hundreds of Baby Boomers' manual typewriters. But the truth is that the effect is tiny - less than an IQ point a decade.

But still, it's an interesting idea. It's easy to imagine how this could happen. Natural Selection works when factors affect a creature's likelihood to reproduce, and there are still plenty of factors that affect human reproduction rates, even if they're no longer sabre-toothed factors. And unlike past natural selection, this may not reward good qualities. In the education example, the thinking is that people who dedicate a lot of their life to their education will probably have less time to have kids. Say you take a masters, you won't graduate until well into your twenties. Your counterparts who got real jobs after their bachelors have a few years headstart on starting a family. And folks who just did high school have already been going forth and multiplying for the better part of a decade. Any genes that encourage education get passed to fewer members of the next generation.

Who knows how many other things could affect your reproduction? The type of job you have, the food you buy, the place you live. It's important to realize that these effects a not just small and slow, they're also dwarfed by individual differences. So you'll find plenty of prolific parents doing post-docs, and childless high school dropouts. Thus, these findings don't have much short-term practical use. And talk of overall strength of genetics will remind people of eugenics. But I like my science dangerous, useless and misleading. It's enlightening to demonstrate how natural selection works using relatively tangable things.

Wiikipedia

Well, that's it, I've finished reading Wikipedia. Yeah, I'm one of those people: look up something simple, see a link to something interesting, and then five hours later I'm reading about the history of Armenia and can't remember how I got there. After years of doing that, I've read the whole thing.

I may be exaggerating a bit. If I had read all of Wikipedia, I'd go on Jeopardy before telling anyone about it. And if you're interested, I did once look up how long it would take to read all of Wikipedia, and the answer is: you could never finish it, because people are adding to it faster than a person could read.

Wikipedia has been a great thing for looking up answers quickly. As I've mentioned before: I'm a great proponent of the idea that the Internet is better for curing ignorance than displaying it. But there's still a lot we could do to reduce the world's ignorance.

Okay, reading that last sentence over, I realize it's painfully obvious. I mean, even if we write-off people who don't notice or don't care about their ignorance. It would be nice if there were more tools like Wikipedia that are useful for our tiny minority that wants to learn.

For instance, Wikipedia is great for answering the who, what, where, and when, but we also need something to answer the why.

Right now, what I'd like to answer is: why are people so excited by the new Nintendo Switch? Yes, I know, it's a game console that's got a portable screen so you can play it anywhere. But that's just like Nintendo's Wii U, which was a sales disaster.

It would be great if there was a Whykipedia where you could look up the Nintendo Switch and it would tell you why it's happening, and why people think it will work this time. But there is no such thing right now, so I tried googling, "What's the difference between the Nintendo Switch and the Wii U" and I got a few articles comparing them. All I really got out of it is that it comes down to the idea that they've thought it through better this time.

I realize, for the generation that makes up most of tech journalism today, they grew up with Nintendo, so they have warm fuzzy feelings towards it that I don't truly understand. But there seems to be a general problem with technology, that we keep falling for the same ideas that don't work. I mentioned this with Microsoft and their continuous effort to make a smooth transition from the Windows interface to the Surface that hardly anyone uses to the Windows phone interface that no one uses.

So in a world where even the smart people in the tech world are unpredictably nonsensical, there's no way to understand people's motivations. A wiki repository of explanations would be really useful. I wonder why no one has done that yet.

Diverging Lanes

Most people may know Divergent as the poor-tween-girl's Hunger Games, but it's also the name of the latest automotive startup determined to shake-up the car industry. I know, lately innovation in the car business has been as repetative and predictable as, well, Young Adult distopian fiction. But this Divergent isn't just another Tesla wannabe promising a cheap, self-driving electric car, funded by questionable financing. They actually showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show with a gas-guzzling, drive-it-yourself sports car.

(As an aside, it only now dawns on me that we're going to have to come up with a retronym for non-self-driving cars.)

Divergent is going to revolutionize the auto industry by changing the way cars are made. Specifically, they want to bring 3D printing to the business. That's not new; there have been 3D-printed cars on show for the last few years. But those tended to be home-built monstrosities that don't look ready for prime time. But Divergent has a process for forming metal that produced parts that look like real car parts.

And that brings us to their second innovation. They don't really look like ordinary car parts: they look significantly better. 3D printing parts opens up far more freedom to shape the parts in ways that weren't possible before. So they're combining it with computers "evolving" the shape of the parts into an optimum shape that produces the needed strength with minimum weight.

This automotive journalist is overjoyed about the Divergent concept car, largely because it's finally a big car revolution that doesn't involve taking the wheel out of our hands.

That's not such a big concern for me. Unlike most car fans, I'm not really dreading the disappearing ability to drive for oneself. Since most of my car fandom is expressed vicariously through video games and journalism, I'll be fine commuting in an automated appliance as long as I can do so while playing Gran Turismo 16 and neural-downloading a Car and Driver article about billionaires racing their no-longer-street-legal Lamborghinis at an exclusive track in Dubai.

Having said that, I'm not really excited for self-driving cars. For all the social transformation, there's a surprising amount that won't change. For one thing, most of automotive manufacturing won't be effected. As a rate environmentalist/car enthusiast, I would have been reluctantly okay with sacrificing cars as we know them to eliminate global warming, but we actually face a worst-of-both-worlds scenario where we make cats boring, but don't get an environmental payoff.

And now that more people are thinking seriously about a self-driving future, they're starting to see the potential downsides. This may sound cryptic, but rather than change the world, self-driving cars may make the world more like it already is. That is, it could make a couple of the unfortunate features of modern life worse. Take commuting. It's unfortunate for families, urban culture, the environment that people are willing to commute huge distances for work. But self-driving cars could greatly enlarge the problem. If you don't actually have to be awake for the drive, that opens up even bigger distances. You may as well live a two-hour drive away from work so you can fit an entire movie in the commute.

But if you're going to spend such a long block of your day with no responsibilities, why not get some work done? Another unfortunate social development is the always-on-call work day. If everyone is just sitting around for an hour or two before and after their shift at the office, it won't be long before it's expected that you're working there too. After all, there's enough pressure to stay in contact with the office in the car now. Imagine how it will be when you don't have the excuse that you're busy piloting two tons of steel through suburbia.

Electric cars are a less exotic technology, though it will probably have a bigger impact on the industry. Get rid of the gasoline engine and you also remove the fuel tank, transmission, radiator, and Big Oil. Yet, the measure of electric cars' success has always been its similarity to gasoline. Does it have the same range, can you fill-up as fast?

Divergent, may be giving us boring things we already have - car parts - but in a revolutionary way.  I reported on evolved designs and 3D printing last year, hopeful that it would change the way our world looks and works. It could give us quantifiably better cars, subjectively better looking products, and upend manufacturing.  Really, that could be a bigger change, or at least, a more exciting change.

On The Offensive

There's a perception in the world today that people are too easily offended; you can't mention anything without someone complaining about it. Personally, I don't share this view, but that's not what I'm here to argue about. Instead, I'd like to open people's minds to the possibility that some good can come from people being offended. No, no, not that harmony and mutual respect and all that crap. I mean we can use it as a weapon to get rid of bad pop-culture.

This is the aspect of Political Correctness that gets lost in the debate: A lot of politically-incorrect media isn't that good to begin with. Stereotypes are many things, but at their heart, they're cliches. That's why I'm always perplexed when a comedian laments all the humour prevented by political correctness: I can understand why you might want to fight for the principle, but I wouldn't think you'd actually want to tell decades-old jokes.

I'm thinking about this because of the new movie Split, which seems to be the usual kidnapping/murder horror movie, where the twist is that the antagonist has multiple personalities. Of course, people are complaining about the portrayal of people with the condition, or as it's properly known, Dissociative Identity Disorder. You might assume that I saw an article about how people are angry about the movie, so I wrote this post. But no, I hadn't seen anything about the movie other than the TV spots for it every ten minutes. I just assumed there'd be complaints based on how the condition is being used as an easy story device.

It really doesn't look like a great movie. I'm not a horror fan, so I'm not the best to judge, but it looks transparently manipulative. And it's from critical punching-bag, M. Night Shyamalan. And it's being released in the movie graveyard of late January. And the plot is disturbingly similar to the terrible film-within-a-film that Charlie Kaufman's brother writes in Adaptation.

So putting aside the principles, I think you'd have to root for the folks targetting the movie. Letting them drive this movie out of the theatres isn't going to start a slippery slope to newspeak. So how about you spend this month arguing for freedom of speech in the abstract, and look the other way while activists run this flick into the ground. Let's use the power of offense to benefit us all.

(I swear, they just ran another ad for Split as I was finishing this post.)

I Am Jack's Disappointment With Social Media

Watching the Playstation Fiesta Bowl, Ohio State got off to a slow start when their kicker missed his first two field goal attempts. That's not a big deal, unless you're a fan of The Ohio State University, which I'm not. But during the awkward let's-show-close-ups-of-the-guy-who-screwed-up shots, they mentioned that the kicker's name is Tyler Durbin. Of course, that's quite similar to Tyler Durden, the character from Fight Club played in the movie by Brad Pitt. So when I saw that "Tyler Durbin" was trending on Twitter, I had to check it out, assuming I'd see creative humour based on the movie.

But I was disappointed. All I saw was angry, mindless condemnation of Durbin. In a few cases, it even escalated to idle threats against him, should he ever return to campus. Okay, there were a very few that made Fight Club-related jokes of the form, "The first rule of Missed Field Goal Club is..." But mainly, I was just overwhelmed with the unrepentant anger expressed. Certainly, I've been frustrated when a team does poorly in the big game, but I've never felt that much anger at a single player. Oh, and by the way guys, if your team's first-half offense consists entirely of two missed 40+ yard field goals, then the kicker is not the main problem.

This brings to mind a complaint I have about how people portray Twitter. I've heard voices in the media describe Twitter as dominated by celebrities. That's always news to me, as I find that it's dominated by writers, comedians, scientists and activists. But that's because Twitter (and the Internet in general) is what you make it.

What's depressing is that this isn't a new point. Back in the nineties when it was first going mainstream, we reached a point where most people had heard of the Internet, but only a few had any significant experience with it. So you'd sometimes see reports in the media (the old media, I mean) where they'd get people's impression of their first experiences with the new medium. And their thoughts usually included, wow, there sure is a lot of porn out there.

That angle was great for the media to demonize the Net as a chaotic underworld. But it also betrayed something about the people being interviewed. Then, as now, porn rarely just appeared on your computer for no reason. If you found pornography on the Internet, it was probably because you were looking for it. So although most people seeing these stories didn't realize it, the interviewees were essentiallly admitting that they had been given a chance to use this amazing new communications technology, and used it to look for porn.

Really, nothing has changed. The Internet is still what you make of it. If anything, it has become more personalized; with social media, you can surround yourself with people of whatever type you want. While that often means that you insulate yourself from the realities of the world, it also means that you can ignore hateful sportsfans with limited movie experience. Just remember that even if you're ignoring them, they're still out there, only a hashtag away.