Are Trends Electric?

I remember seeing a headline on a magazine cover once that said, “Electric Cars are (Still) Around the Corner.” Of course, that sarcastically got across the idea that electric cars are constantly promised without becoming mainstream. It’s especially meaningful, since I saw that headline in the eighties.

But today that headline is more meaningful because it looks like electric cars finally really are around the corner. So it’s a lesson that just because it seems like some promised revolution is never going to happen, it might still happen one day. So maybe jet packs and space travel are going to happen eventually too.

This walk down Electric Memory Avenue is because I recently saw someone speculate that self-driving cars will become one of those things that will be five-years away for the next forty years. I could certainly believe that: I’ve been skeptical about them, and the over-optimistic predictions in the mainstream media certainly do sound like the predictions of the future that I’ve heard my whole life.

But even skeptics like me have to remember that just like electric cars, it will happen eventually. The irony is that another of those things that have been constantly promised without ever happening is Artificial Intelligence. It was once thought that it was inevitable that computers would be doing all the things humans are capable of in just a few years. But as we learned just how difficult things like language and vision are, the technology wasn’t able to deliver, and the most we ever saw in the real world was the occasional impressive chess computer. I simply got used to hearing an annual prediction that this time next year, we’d be talking to our computers like on Star Trek. Of course, we are now talking to our computers, even if it isn’t quite as smooth as we’d hoped.

What I find interesting is that there is a very different attitude towards self-driving cars. With electric cars, there wasn’t a lot of effort put in by the big companies, and the key innovations ended up coming from outside. Whereas with self-driving technology, there seems to be a rush to avoid being left behind. And that’s the one thing that makes me a little optimistic about the concept: it seems like all these companies are pouring so much time and money into research that they’re going to make it happen out of sheer willpower.

So I wonder why this is different: why didn’t fear of being left behind push car companies to make electric cars work? One reason is because this is less of a car problem and more of a tech problem. The big car companies know that the key innovation could come from some startup no one sees coming, instead of just being a competition of a few corporate behemoths. Also, it used to be that if a car company where caught behind a startup, they could always buy-out the smaller company. But now, between the financial problems of the car industry and the eager investment in technology, it might not be that easy to just buy tech from the innovators.

Also, it’s not just the car companies that want self-driving cars, there’s also the ride-sharing companies. Uber is still losing money, and it’s starting to look like self-driving cars are their only hope. And that’s another thing that isn’t following the previous pattern: Tech companies usually follow one of two trajectories: They lose buckets of money until they get to a scale or structure that makes money (like Amazon) or they discover that their plan was never going to work, however much size and technology they had (like Pets.com).

But Uber’s business plan is clearly in that futile second group, yet investors keep throwing money at it. I’m not sure how this is going to end: Uber has lasted long enough to become an indispensable part of the culture, yet it just can’t survive long-term. It’s like investors love the idea so much that they won’t let anything — not even the rules of economics themselves — prevent it from happening. They’d rather admit that capitalism doesn’t work than have to go back to taxis.

So it’s fitting that Uber’s fate is probably intertwined with self-driving cars: they’re both bad investments that we’re going to make happen, somehow. Part of me admires that tenacity. But mostly, I wish they had gone to the wall for jet packs instead.

Sun Life On My Shoulders

I’m stuck here watching the traditional NBA Christmas games, since it’s that or watch year-end retrospectives or sitcom marathons, or get into the twenty-first century and pay for a streaming service. I should have invited someone to watch them. I know the Raptors aren’t doing anything today, I could have asked them. Of course, that’s Canadian basketball’s yearly complaint, that it doesn’t matter how many winning seasons the Raps have, they’ll never get invited to play on one of the Christmas Day marquee games. At the same time, it doesn’t matter how bad the Knicks get, they’ll just keep getting invited back.

But I should acknowledge that this complaint is not just unique to Toronto this year. Not only are the Raps not playing despite leading the league, the Western Conference leading Denver Nuggets are also at home to unwrap presents and watch 28th-out-of-30 New York stagger around the court. I’m sure some folks are putting together anti-Canadian conspiracy theories based on the fact that one of their key players is Canada’s own Jamal Murray.

It’s more likely that the Denver market just isn’t important enough to the American broadcasters. You see the same thing in Baseball, where the Sunday night national telecast has become a tiresome rotation of the same few teams over and over. No, I’m not expecting them to show the Blue Jays — at least over the last couple of years — but teams like Milwaukee and, again, Colorado get ignored even when they have good teams. Having said that, smaller markets Portland and Utah are coming up in the Christmas night game, so you could also chalk this up to the broadcasters and league doing a bad job of predicting which teams will be good this year. If next Christmas features the Nuggets playing the Knicks while the defending-champion Raptors sit, then we can go back to Canadian indignation.

But one thing you can appreciate when watching multiple NBA games is the oddness of the league’s uniform sponsors. Starting at the beginning of last season, teams have had a corporate logo on their uniforms. It’s nice and tasteful, rather than the giant ads used in soccer or the WNBA. So I’m filing it with the NHL’s shootouts under sports ideas I hated but surprisingly don’t get angry about.

It helps that there haven’t been any embarrassing ad associations. That’s in sharp contrast to venue names, where most of the names are okay, but you feel stupid talking about Sleep Train Arena or Smoothie King Center. Actually, it’s been nice that many teams have sponsorship from local companies, such as Harley Davidson for Milwaukee or Goodyear for Cleveland.

But what’s odd is that even though the less-lucrative teams like Sacramento have not had to take sponsorship from Depends or Preparation H, the more popular teams haven’t taken sponsorship from the Blue Chips. Like, you’d think the Warriors would have a bidding war that only the richest companies could hope to win. Say, a local company like Google or Apple. But no, their sponsor is Rakuten, which is a Japanese e-commerce company and not, as I had assumed, a sound effect from Street Fighter. Apparently it’s a big company, I’m just surprised that a bigger American company didn’t want it. Or, to put it another way, Rakuten is apparently called “the Amazon of Japan,” yet they wanted to sponsor an American sports team even more than the Amazon of America did.

And the Lakers should be a big score too, given their history and their Lebron James. But again, they’re sponsored by Wish. Sure, that’s a big company, but you’d expect the Lakers to be sponsored by Exxon or something, if only to match the Celtics and their GE ads. Okay, I guess the current Lakers are promising, but haven’t truly arrived yet, which is sort of like ordering from Wish.

My point is that the ads aren’t really the prestige item you might expect, many companies are seeing it as a path to legitimacy. I guess it’s sort of like a Super Bowl ad. Sure, Coke or GM might make one, but a lot of the time it’s just some dot-com betting half their funding on making a big impression with the public.

Welcome To The Satire House

I always liked the song, "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols. Yes, I know, it may pale in comparison to the other song with Bohemian in the title, but it's still a fun and catchy song. (This is the censored, but probably still NSFW video:)



For one thing, it's great to hear hipsters playfully making fun of themselves. Though they may have a reputation for being humourously self-important, the fact is that they can (mostly) laugh at themselves just as much as anyone.

But I heard it on the radio recently, and the DJ pointed out that although it's clearly about hipsters, it doesn't use that word because the song was released in 2000, which was before hipsters were really a thing. But even if they weren't recognized by most people, here's a song written by and for hipsters, and it's making fun of them. So hipsters had identified their own culture and started ridiculing it before the general population. Or, to put it another way, they were making fun of hipsters before it was cool. So that's it, there is nothing that hipsters won't do before everyone else discovers it.

Cold Comfort

Recently we've had controversy because some radio stations have banned the song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" for its connotations of date rape. While you might think that this is a result of oversensitivity in the age of #MeToo, I have to point out that people were finding it kind of creepy for years before. I also have to point out that others claim the song was originally intended quite differently: the idea was that the young lady wants to spend the night with the man, but social mores of the time prevent it, so the two of them are trying to build up the idea of the bad weather to give her an acceptable excuse to stay.

I'm no expert on the moral nuances of the 1940's so I can't say which interpretation is correct, but there's one thing I do know: The Anti-PC crowd has been so distracted by this that I haven't had to endure a single It's-Merry-Christmas-not-Happy-Holidays rant. Wow, all it took was sacrificing a song that lots of people hated anyway. We should do this every year.

The other big story that's been getting the goat of the Politically Incorrect is that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has demanded that we stop using phrases involving the disrespect of animals, such as "getting your goat." As I've observed before, PETA has a strange random targetting pattern, where they make proclamations as it occurs to them, not caring what the reaction to them.

As a liberal with an interest in political strategy, that's the sort of action that costs me patches of hair and years off my life: So many people and organizations just act on what ever they feel like, without asking if this is the battle we really need to be fighting right now, or if it will lead to a backlash that does more harm than good. And PETA is clearly the worst for this, regularly picking fights that make its whole cause a laughingstock for no gain at all.

And yet, part of me admires that bold disregard for consequences. I think we all admire audacity, and PETA has it in spades, even if it doesn't come with much guidance. Hey, you know who else likes people who act without considering the consequences? The Anti-PC crowd. Once again, the extremes have a lot in common.

Seattle Slew

As a hipster who places a great value on morality, I don't have many guilty pleasures. If I believe something is morally wrong, I can't take pleasure in it. But if I enjoy something, I believe you should assert your individuality by enjoying it without guilt.

But one guilty pleasure I do have is the pageantry around sports. As a kid, I practiced drawing by recreating the logos of sports teams. Today I still love that. I have strong opinions on which teams need to adjust their colour schemes. Can the Canucks build around Elias Pettersson, or is he not tough enough to withstand the rigours of an NHL season? Beats me, but I can tell you they should use a darker shade of blue.

So the news that Seattle could be getting a team is pretty exciting, since it will require a new name, logo, uniforms, etc. Yes, I know, everyone wants Quebec to get a replacement for the Nordiques so we can have a return to the Battle of Quebec and really stick it to Gary Bettman. But a whole new team in a new place opens up so many possibilities. As soon as the franchise became official, everyone started brainstorming possible team names. Here are some of the top suggestions I've seen so far:

Seattle Metropolitans

Hockey historians will know that back before the NHL was formed, when the Stanley Cup was awarded to the winner of a series between the champions of top leagues of the time, a team called the Seattle Metropolitans became the first American team to win the Cup. So some people will automatically go with that historical name. It might be too much like the New York Mets, though you could also shorten it to "Metros." Also, people are reminding us that there is a Metropolitan division - silly me, I keep calling it the Patrick division - so I guess this name isn't going to fly.

Seattle Steelheads

That's a type of Rainbow Trout, which has a nice ring to it. And if there's one thing the world needs, it's more fish-based sports teams.

Seattle Sockeyes

A different fish direction, it makes a veiled reference to hockey's fight culture just as it's disappearing. And this logo idea looks great and puts Vancouver's to shame, even if it is epic cultural appropriation.

Seattle Kraken

The Kraken was made famous in Clash of the Titans movies, but it's from an old Norse myth, so there's no copyright concerns here. Of course, being a Norse myth, that means the Kraken lives in the Atlantic, far from Seattle. And the Kraken is usually depicted as an octopus or squid-like creature, and the Red Wings have an octopus as an unofficial symbol. Still, some people put a lot of thought into this particular nickname, and I kind of want to see it.

Seattle Sasquatches

I had no idea Americans even knew what a Sasquatch is. You can't say Seattle Sasquatches five times quickly. And what would the short version be, "the Squatches?" But this team could have a great logo.

Seattle Totems

They used to have a minor league team called the Totems, so this is one of the leading possibilities. You’d think they'll steer clear of indigenous names, but whenever the issue comes up, we're assured that this is a tribute to native peoples, and naming a sports team after one of their religious artifacts couldn't possibly be take the wrong way. I figure that if this name is selected, Seattlites can resign themselves to this team being a Browns-style disaster, since it takes a special kind of incompetence to voluntarily take on that problem.

Fun fact: the Totems minor league team was awarded an NHL expansion team in the 70's, but their financing fell apart before they could get the team started.

Seattle Emeralds

Apparently Seattle is the Emerald City. Fans could do lots of fun things with Wizard of Oz references.

Seattle Seals

Some people are seriously suggesting this. They might want to acquaint themselves with some hockey history.

Seattle Eagles

It's a bit more obscure part of hockey history, but that also has a precedent.

Seattle Firebirds

I don't know what the connection to Seattle is, but I'd love to see jerseys with the Trans Am flaming chicken on them.

Seattle Whales

I like whales, but like most hockey fans, I still have a hope for resurrecting the Hartford Whalers.

Seattle Nor'Westers

Speaking of the Whalers, I came across this idea (scroll down,) which comes with a logo that pays homage to them.

Seattle Grunge

I and many others my age, have reasoned that since there's already a precedent for naming a team after a style of music (the St. Louis Blues) we might as well try that again. You could base the jerseys on Kurt Cobain's shirt from the "Smells Like Teen Spirit video." This Totems concept uni seems to have hinted at that.

But more likely, you'd want to work some plaid into it. Part of me wants to see plaid become part of the sports uniform landscape. Some people have already tried that out in their fantasy leagues. But then I saw this mockup which makes a "Team Spirit" pun. I realized that opens up a new possibility. "Spirit" has been used as a team name in the minors, as with the OHL's Saginaw Spirit. So that would seem like a generic team name, but those of us of a certain age would take it as a double meaning, so now I'm cheering for Seattle Spirit as the darkhorse candidate.

Tough (Nursery) Room

I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I had a blog right from birth. Sure, the entries up to age fifteen would be brief because that’s when I learned to touch-type. But I had plenty of things to vent about. And I guess I owe it to my younger self to go back and belatedly complain.

Like, the jokes we tell kids. As a child, you often get exposed to jokes, particularly in riddle form, through books or other activities that are supposed to be fun. I think it’s about time that I speak up for kids and say, those jokes are crap. Well they were in the seventies anyway, maybe they’re better now.

Like, there was one joke: What do you get when you cross an owl with a goat? A hootenanny. I guess that’s funny, but the problem is that appreciating the joke requires knowing what a hootenanny is, or at the very least, knowing that it is a thing, and not just a random collection of sounds. Of course, as a four-year-old, my experience with free-form folk happenings was rather limited, so I had no idea what that word meant. So not only did I not find it funny, I misunderstood the whole idea of riddles for a while, assuming them to be some kind of bizarre random code rather than a form of humour.

Indeed, I just saw “What is a hootenanny?” Among a list of trivia questions, so it’s hardly a fair joke topic for a child.

But the ultimate bad joke for kids is, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Potentially, it’s a funny joke, but it relies on two things from its audience:

• They’ve heard a large number of jokes in the riddle format.
• They have a good appreciation of irony.

The problem is, children are the one group of people who don’t have either of these things, so it falls flat. The teller has to explain the joke, and as everyone knows, if you have to explain a joke it won’t be funny. But in this case it’s worse, because the kids won’t even understand it after you explain it.

It’s actually pretty surprising that the joke is still around: by the time you have the necessary mental faculties to understand it, it’s so old that you can’t appreciate it. Just think, probably no one in the western world has laughed at that joke in the last fifty years, and yet somehow, it’s still with us.

But this whole walk through bad-joke memories was triggered by something I saw in a store recently. It was a toddler’s sweater that a picture of crossed hockey sticks on it, with the words, “Ice Ice Baby.” That struck me as tremendously unfair to the child. To them, it’s just a reference to ice as a skating surface, and they have no way of knowing that they’re walking around with the title of a song on their chest — a song they may come to consider rather embarrassing, depending on their own musical direction.

Of course, the makers of the shirt are counting on appealing to the parents, many of whom today are of an age where they will recognize the joke and find the shirt funny. But that would be like if someone my age had been forced to wear a shirt with a humourous reference to a Pat Boone song. Thanks mom and dad, you’re using me as a pawn in pop-cultural struggles for your own amusement. I’ll make my own musical choices, thank you, right after I figure out this ‘irony’ thing.

Rated Xmas

I don't know if you're aware of it, but there's become a whole subculture of TV Christmas movies. Okay, "subculture" isn't really the word for it: in our modern world, we have so many entertainment choices that there can be an entertainment trend that exists on its own and has ardent followers, but much of the public remains oblivious, like Amish Romance. Well that's what has developed here; several specialty channels will be showing nothing but Christmas movies all through November and December. But it's just a few channels, and mostly during the day, so you may not know about them at all. But there are so many - with more being cranked out ever year - that there's apparently a great appetite for them. Apparently the Hallmark Channel in the U.S. is making most of them, and here in Canada they've been picked up by several channels with compatible programming. Mainly that's the W Network. Hey, remember when that started and everyone expected it was going to be radical feminism 24/7? Innocent times.

Generally, these are laid-back romantic-comedies, though there isn't even the pretence of going after the bro market, so the stories are very focused on the female character, and not a hint of slap-stick or gross humour. And there's a theme of people finding themselves, finding their love of Christmas, or, a new appreciation for their small town.

Interestingly, they seem to be mostly made in Canada. For one thing, we've become the cheap film capital of the world, and we have snow.  And that leads to something interesting: The stars of these movies are either soap stars, or people who used to be on sitcoms. But most of the supporting cast are Canadian actors. Even if you don't know them, you've seen them in commercials. But the mainly American audience for these movies wouldn't know this, they'd just wonder why the same few people keep popping up in one movie after another, and assume that these folks have somehow decided to specialize in just holiday-related roles.

I've complained in the past about the ubiquity of Christmas, and how long we celebrate it, so you'd think that I'd be really annoyed by these movies. And yet, I'm not. For one thing, I don't hate Christmas, I just hate having it shoved down my throat non-stop. I find that it's quite pleasant having Christmas in nice little parcels that I can take or leave, even if they start early and schmaltzy.

My only complaint is that, as I said, these movies are all variations on a theme, and it would be nice if other networks concentrating on different genres would offer their own Christmas movies. That could be difficult. Like say, there have been only a few Christmas horror movies. And there aren't really any sci-fi Christmas movies beyond Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. And twenty-eight Doctor Who specials. 

Of course, there's a discussion every Christmas about whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie, since it doesn't have much in the way of Christmas themes, but does take place on Christmas Eve. I always thought that argument was kind of silly, but perhaps I'm being too harsh. It's just the first of a new wave of Christmas action movies. The next one should be along any time now.

All About That Bass, No Pressure

At a recent hockey game, a commentator was discussing the scoring slump of Max Pacioretty, the winger for Las Vegas who was acquired in an off-season trade. The commentator said that he had asked a local reporter if he was under any pressure because of the lack of scoring. That reporter just said, of course not, it's Vegas. After all, hockey teams don't get nearly the media exposure in the US, even in markets where the sport is popular. The subtext is that Pacioretty had previously played his whole career in Montreal, where players are constantly in the spotlight. Had he started the season this slowly there, it would have been the only thing the city was talking about for a week.

And that's a concern that comes up a lot in Canada. Our hockey teams have never been great at attracting free-agents. Sure, the Leafs signed John Tavares this summer, but generally we haven’t made big splashy signings, and we'd like a better idea of why. Some say it's higher taxes, some say it's the cold winters. But if that were true, northern blue states would have the same problem, but it doesn’t work out that way. So many wonder if it's the media fishbowl that we put our hockey players in.

It’s great if you’re a successful hockey player in Canada; you’ll be treated like a god. But there will be a lot of pressure too. The unfortunate aspect of this is that it’s a negative with little upside. In most sports, being under the media microscope comes with more money or a better chance or winning. That’s why people love to sign with Barcelona or the Yankees. But the NHL’s salary cap means that you get the same money wherever you sign. And with that, the chance of winning is no different for Canada’s hockey teams, and the evidence is that they have even less chance. It seems that all things being equal, players would rather not have the pressure than risk it to get extra fame.

I've heard a lot of people over the years discuss this price of fame outside the context of sports. Is it worth the fame and fortune if you can't go about your life in peace and privacy? I remember a DJ once hypothesizing that bassists have the best life of any musicians. They get the same share of the money, as well as the cheers and whatever happens backstage and in the hotel. But once that’s over, they can go about their lives in peace with no one recognizing them.

But being a hockey star in the US is a similar perfect balance. Mostly, you go about your life unbothered. But then every few days you get to spend a few hours surrounded by adoring fans cheering you on. Within the arena, people know who you are and care about you, but once the game is over you go back to anonymity.

I know it's sacrilege to say, but the Americans have it right, in their own way. They care just enough about hockey, but not too much. Indeed, that’s how the whole world should work: We have this big event where everyone is really excited and has a good time, but when it’s over, we put it aside and stop worrying about it, and treat the participants like normal people. Yes, we should all learn from American hockey fans. When they show up.

This Here Gerenuk

Google is making a marketing push for the various incarnations of the Google Assistant. That includes an ad showing people narrating videos with obvious errors, like misidentifying the Eiffel Tower. Every time I watch that one, it seems quite unbelievable. Not that people would misidentify the Eiffel Tower - I totally buy that. I just can't believe the ad is going to win anyone over.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, the internet allows you to cure your ignorance almost instantly, yet so many people just don't use the opportunity. And one of the defining characteristics of our age is that despite being a time of abundant information, so many people don't care whether or not they are correct. In a world where anonymous social media sources are more esteemed than experts, it's hard to imagine anyone caring whether they've correctly identified some animal at the zoo.

To be clear, I'm not putting down people who lack knowledge, but come on, if you can't recognize giraffes or the Eiffel Tower, you've probably been hiding from learning most of your life. Or to look at it another way: If you have a great lack of knowledge, surely you would get used to the idea that you’re often wrong about things, and thus you’d learn not to make over-confident statements about things you know little about. But if you persist in making authoritative statements anyway, you presumably care more about sounding smart than being smart, so you're not going to change just because you can ask your phone. After all, you've always been able to ask the person next to you, you just don't want to.

Indeed, the second half of the ad is the fakest-sounding, with the same people reacting to being informed by Google. They all take it quite well, humbly accepting the correction in a way that’s completely alien to anyone on twenty-first-century planet Earth. Come on Google, your business is built around knowing the Internet, yet you haven’t noticed that people don’t react politely to being challenged in public? I hate to play the Silicon-Valley-is-out-of-touch card, since that seems to be the explanation for all shortcomings of technology today; but that seems to be the case here. Google is assuming that the public is crying out for more information, and valuing facts above all else.

Super Andretti Bros.

With the Formula 1 season winding down, we're getting more info about the season for Formula E electric cars, which is run over the fall-spring. Probably the biggest change is that there are new cars with batteries that now have the capacity to run an entire race, so there'll be no more of the silly-sounding mid-race car change.

But another big change is the "Attack Mode" concept. What? you think that's a childish sounding name? Well it was almost called "Hyperboost." And nearly everyone is calling it what it reminds them of: Mario Kart. The premise here is that if you drive over a certain areas of the track, you get a temporary speed boost. The activation area will be off the racing line, so there'll be a bit of strategy on whether it makes sense to go for it.

Many people won't like this on the grounds that:

• it's an artificial gimmick, and,
• if you were going to import something from Mario Kart into real racing, surely it would be the exploding turtle shells.

But the fact is that artificial speed bonuses have been creeping into racing for a while now. Formula 1 has the Drag Reduction System (DRS) in which a driver can press a button to flatten the rear wing to get a temporary aerodynamic aid, though you can only use it for passing. And Indy Cars have the Push To Pass system, where the driver can get a temporary power boost, but only for a total of two minutes per race.

Add a long-time racing fan, I know I'm supposed to hate these ideas as a tarnishing of the pure and simple concept of auto racing. But actually, I'm okay with it. The fact is that racing is reaching the limits of what can be done within the constraints of human abilities and the current technology. It could certainly be managed better than the elitist mess that is Formula 1, but even Indy Car and NASCAR are running into a dull sameness.

When you listen to fans about how to improve racing, their prescription is usually to relax the rules and allow more innovation, but the fact is that rules are limiting money more than innovation, so that unconstrained approach would just lead to even more predictable results. The only way out that I see is to introduce strategic challenges outside of the engineering challenge of making faster and faster cars. Preferably, these would be:

• Strategic challenges that the drivers have to face on the fly, not something that the teams can calculate and optimize to the nth degree.
• Things that the viewers can see and relate to, rather than esoteric considerations that few relate to.

Getting these ideas implemented will be difficult, because Formula 1 has spent a generation promoting the idea that it's a pure challenge of engineering, and that's why it's okay that their races were just expensive parades of predictable order. Pivoting to a future where the cars are near-identical  and interest is generated by in-race bonuses as they do it in Formula E will take a while.

Paintdrop On The Wall

I recently came across a strange news release in my Facebook feed. (Warning: Gen-X age marker ahead!) Massive Attack, the British Trip-Hop group, is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their classic album Mezzanine. No surprise: they’re issuing a re-release of the album. Big surprise: it’s on paint.

No, this isn’t an effect of my first post-pot-legalization post. They had the album encoded into DNA, then mixed that DNA into a spray paint. So it’s not just paint, it’s genetically-engineered paint. I don’t know of any technology to read the information in DNA, at least, DNA on a wall. So it could be ordinary black paint for all we know. Or perhaps it really contains “Never Gonna Give You Up” in a truly epic Rickroll.

Of course, I have plenty of reactions to this. First is a scientific amazement at the storage capacity of DNA. Then there’s the amazement at their initiative in doing something so unusual. But then that leads to the question of whether this is the best use of music-paint possibilities. It’s black paint, and Massive Attack’s music does have a darkness to it, but I’d really rather tell people that my black paint has Goth in it. Others would, I assume, prefer “Back in Black,” “Back to Black,” or either Black Album. But really, among music paints, I’m sure Purple Rain Purple would be the biggest seller. You could also have White Album White, and other colours would be mixtures of:

• Simply Red
• Orange Crush
• Coldplay Yellow
• Reverend Al Green
• Joni Mitchell Blue
• Indigo Girls
• Violet Femmes

Just remember to use Primus Primer.

But putting all this aside, there’s the subtext that Massive Attack member Robert “3D” Del Naja is rumoured to be infamous graffiti artist Banksy. So a big graffiti-related announcement from the group was greeted with snickers and knowing winks. To be fair, Del Naja is an admitted graffiti artist that Banksy has acknowledged as an influence, so Massive Attack spray paint is not necessarily an indication of nefarious culture jamming.

Of course, you could argue that once you’re using expensive gratuitous technology like this, we’ve left true rebellion and anarchism behind. And that’s something people have been asking about Banksy lately. His previous caper was the auto-shredding painting. That seemed like a great statement against the monetization of Banksy’s works that so often misses his point. But afterwards there were some questions about just how unexpected it was. For one thing, Sotheby’s usually puts paintings on an easel to auction them, which would have prevented the shredder from working, yet this one was conveniently on a wall at the side of the room.

I guess you could say that it’s subversive to talk a major auction house into risking its reputation by participating in performance art. Similarly, you could argue that conning people into buying expensive graffiti implements is a great satire of the economics of music memorabilia. Particularly if it turns out to be ordinary black paint. But even if it is real, memorializing electronic music with genetically-engineered vandalism is some quality cyberpunk.

With Or Without U

My alma mater Waterloo has generally not had a great football team. They had a golden era of sorts in the 90’s, when they were a perennial contender. I could point out that their good era coincided with my time at the school, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone.

Unfortunately, it went downhill after I left. The lowlight was a one-year suspension following a steroid scandal, followed by a brutal six-year run with a combined record of 4-44. But now it appears that the team is much improved. So when I remembered that they had a big test against Western yesterday, I was curious how it went.

So here is the record of my quest to find the score of yesterday’s Western-Waterloo game on the Internet. This shouldn’t be asking too much; this is the Information Age, and I just want a tiny piece of information. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, it’s amazing how often we can’t seem to convey information. And it all gets worse when you combine it with the giant national shrug that is Canadian university athletics (or U Sports, as it is now officially branded.)

Remember, this isn’t some obscure event, it’s a football game played approximately 24 hours earlier, featuring one of the most storied sports programs in the country:

SportsNet.ca:

• Choose “More/U SPORTS” off of the top menu. I’m greeted by a month-old story about Duke’s Canadian tour
• I choose “Men’s Football” off the U SPORTS sub-menu.
• I’m given a list of the weekend’s games, which immediately refreshes to show a list of next-weekend’s games. I can’t seem to find a button to go back a week. There’s a “Previous month” link at the bottom, but it doesn’t work.

TSN.ca:

• I choose “Sports” from the top menu, which drops down a list of sports and leagues. NCAA is on it, but U Sports isn’t.
• I choose “More Sports” at the bottom of the list. It pops-up a second list of choices, including U Sports, though it’s below “Jay and Dan”
• I’m greeted by a list of stories, the newest of which is more than two months old. The fifth-most recent story is about Western winning the Vanier Cup last year.
• I can’t find any link for scores: the U Sports sub-menu just has an entry for “News,” which is the page I’m at. The score ticker at the top of the page only has CFL/NFL/MLB/NHL/MLS

CBC.ca:

• Hit “Menu” link
• Choose “Sports” from “quick links” list
• Try “scores” heading, but it only has NHL/MLB/CFL/NFL/MLS
• Try “More/All Sports” this sends me to a list of sports that includes entries for the Commonwealth games, Red Bull Crashed Ice, and Spruce Meadows equestrian, but no University sports

GlobeAndMail.com

• Choose “Sports” from top menu
• Choose “Football” from Sports menu
• There are several stories listed, I click one labeled as “U Sports roundup”
• A pop-up tells me that this content is only available to subscribers

TheStar.com

• Choose “Sports” from menu
• There are articles arranged into several categories depending on what team, sport, or city they are about, and which columnist wrote them. There’s nothing on University sports, and only three articles in the “Football” section, all on the NFL.

NaitonalPost.com

• Choose “Sports” from main menu, and “Football” from sub-menu. The sub-sub-menu only has CFL and NFL options
• Try “All Sports” item instead. That page has many sports articles, but I couldn’t find any on Canadian University sports. There’s a “Scoreboard” box, but it only has NHL/NBA/MLB/NFL/CFL

I then gave up on national sports outlets, and when to the Waterloo Region Record, site, where I quickly found a recap of the game. Unfortunately, Waterloo was about as successful as I was looking for info on the game, in which Western won easily, 67-7.

A Bad Title

There’s a new movie opening next week called The House with a Clock in its Walls. I don’t know about the movie: it looks like a cheap excuse for special effects and Jack Black. And it’s a bad sign that it’s been relegated to a post-Labour-Day opening, meaning that the studio doesn’t have high hopes. But there’s one thing we do know for sure: that is the worst title in the history of movies.

Just to make sure, I looked up some lists of the worst movie titles of all time. There are some bad ones, but I think we may have a new loser here. Actually, I was a little disappointed by much of the bad title lists. I was expecting some of the all-time awkward names (I Love Trouble, Cutthroat Island,  Moon Over Parador) but for the most part, they were just strange and/or bad movies with appropriate titles (Santa with Muscles.) I mean, I have no doubt that Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was a terrible movie, and it’s a terrible premise. But once you’ve made that movie, what else could you really call it?

Lately, the bigger problem with movies titles is that they’re vague. Edge of Tomorrow was a title that didn’t tell you anything about its intriguing and exciting concept. And one of the all-time great movie titles, Snakes on a Plane, was nearly called “Pacific Air Flight 121” and only changed back at star Samuel L. Jackson’s insistence. And they made a movie about tiny people fighting for control of a forest, and what did they call it? Epic. I had trouble finding it in IMDB, because if you just search for “epic,” it returns all the movies that are classed as epics instead. What could be vaguer than naming something with a genre?

But The House etc... could be worst.There have been other movies with overly-long titles (The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain) and overly literal titles (Life as a House) and titles that make an interesting concept sound boring (John Carter,) but it’s amazing that they put them all in one movie.

Car And Browser

It's long been a feature of our Internet age that advertisers try to figure out what we are interested in and then advertise more of it to us. And it's a feature of our Internet age that it often fails, sometimes hilariously.

It seems like a simple enough programing concept: if customer X has shown an interest in product Y, show X some more Y's. Show all the Y's. Try Y₁, Y₂, Y₃. Maybe Z, that's close. Give Ω a shot, that's the same idea, really.

But there are times where this doesn't work. I remember one person complaining that after buying a toilet at Home Depot, it started suggesting other bargains on toilets. Their program apparently didn't consider that for some products, once you've bought one, it actually becomes less likely that you'll buy another.

And I realized this right from the first time I tried ordering things on line. Some of the first things I ever bought were gifts. That lead to months of misguided suggestions for products I, personally, had no interest in.

Now I'm having the same thing happen to me with car ads. I've looked through on-line used-car ads many times, but, well, I often use the car ads to dream, rather than find practical transportation. But the Autotrader ad program can't understand that if I'm looking at a Maseratti in Winnipeg, that doesn't mean that I am likely to buy a Maseratti, or that I'm in Winnipeg. I don't know, but I had kind of assumed that if you actually were in the market for expensive cars, you wouldn't be looking for them in Autotrader. But maybe they do things differently in Winnipeg.  Anyway, the point is that I look at car ads the same way I look at Wikipedia; I start with a nice, pragmatic search, then  I follow a few links out of interest, and next thing I know, I’m looking at a vintage Land Rover in Trois-Rivières.

The problem is, the misunderstanding doesn't end there. When I'm on Facebook, I'll often see ads placed by Autotrader. It will be something like, "Great deals on coupes in Winnipeg," followed by some of the cars on offer, hoping I'll go to the page. I'll snicker at it at first, but then I'll see that one is a third-generation RX-7 for $20 grand, I'll think, that's a great deal, and click on the link. And then I'll be off in automotive fantasy land again, looking at cars I couldn't afford.

And so the cycle repeats itself. The next day I'll see an ad for convertables in Kamloops, and I'll remember, okay, sure I guess I did look at one such car, and they extrapolated from... ooh, a low-milage Boxster in Kelowna.

Anyway, Autotrader's idea of what I'm looking for has long ago departed from any vehicle I'm ever likely to buy. And that's how I was today shown an ad for trucks in Edmonton, by Autotrader's french service, AutoHebdo.net.

I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

I'm really getting sick of investment commercials. I know, you have to expect this sort of thing at tax time, but now it seems like they're going year round.

I especially hate those Questrade ads where they have highly assertive customers talking back to their brokers. The intended result is that were supposed to feel empowered to rebel against our brokers. But for me, the feeling I get is sympathy for the brokers. Poor guys, having to defend themselves against people who are surprised to find that mutual funds have fees. The fact that they don't lose their temper shows some remarkable restraint. I think i'll invest with them. Where do they sell Strawman Funds?

The Wealth Simple ads have a bunch of people in the target demographic talking about investing. At first, it was kind of refreshing: they talked about money in a relatable, down-to-earth way. They managed to sound like overwhelmed consumers, without sounding like the unrealistically dense idiots normalizing stupidity on most commercials.

But as the campaign has gone on, they’re increasingly being smartass know-it-alls. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were showing people learning about investing and thus getting more confident, but instead they just seem to be getting more arrogant but still clueless.

I mean there’s that one where the woman talks about how you don’t want to invest in big institutions, because everyone knows that large organizations are crumbling dinosaurs going nowhere, really, just trust us, the upstart investment company. Then she says you want to invest in the “disrupters,” a word she surely learned from an online TED Talk. Has she ever thought about how may startups go nowhere? I know millennials hate being characterized as inexperienced and unworldly, but I know they’re old enough to remember the dot com crash.

And now there’s a new ad, where they tell you how your money can make more money, and that money can make more money, etc. It leaves me depressed that they feel the need to explain compound interest to people. I guess it’s good that they’re trying to clean up after our education system. But mainly I’m suspicious of it. Why are they specifically targeting the least knowledgeable segment of the audience?

No Hitter

I was surprised to see this article on concussions in hockey. In it, Hall-of-Fame players Eric Lindros and Ken Dryden argue for radical action on concussions, including a seemingly unthinkable ban on hitting. You might expect that from the intellectual goalie Dryden, but it’s a shock coming from Lindros, who made his living as a physical player. But after a career derailed by concussions, he plays non-contact hockey for recreation, and has been surprised that he still enjoys it.

That brings up Thing I Don’t Get About Hockey, #973: much of the hockey that actually gets played is non-contact. Women’s hockey doesn’t have body checking, children at an early age don’t either. And a lot of the recreational leagues don’t. And yet, whenever anyone discusses violence in hockey, experts talk about the physical nature of the game as being integral. Take it away and it’s not the same sport anymore. So by implication, women, children, and part-time players are playing some other sport. Those ads we keep seeing during commercial breaks pleading with parents to let their kids play hockey, are in fact, encouraging them to play some weird de-fanged facsimile of the sport. It’s a hypocrisy where the sport’s gatekeepers want us to keep the sport violent, but also want to maintain the idea that the sport is a wholesome part of Canadian society.

To be clear, I don’t for a second believe that removing the physical contact from the game is going to happen any time soon, but having respected players talk seriously about it is going to shift what is acceptable in discussion. The sport’s going to need major changes to make the sport safe, but so far, they haven’t been willing to make changes that will change how the sport is played, unlike the NFL. But if respected folks are going around talking about a massive overhaul, then those play-changing alterations will seem more palatable.

I’m also glad that Dryden brings up another point that I wish someone would acknowledge: just how much the game has changed over the years. He notes that if you look back at games from the 50’s - 60’s, there’s actually less hitting than now. That’s something I’ve noticed whenever the CBC shows old games late at night. Even as late as the 1980’s, you can see a distinct reduction in the physicality of the game. Specifically, there seems to be a different philosophy, with players often passing up the opportunity to hit another player. Today, in the same position, anyone would hit an opposing player at any opportunity; there’s no question of tactics or choosing when to hit, you just hit anyone you can any time you can, that’s how it’s done.

But Dryden points out that it’s not hard to understand why there was less hitting: in the original-six era, shifts were much longer than they are now. Players didn’t have the energy to hit everything that moved, and even if they did, no one had the energy to get up the speed to hit particularly hard.

Oh, and this leads to Thing I Don’t Get About Hockey, #1,562: Hockey is an extremely traditional sport, yet no one seems to care that it keeps changing. I always thought that the fundamental difference between hockey and baseball is embodied by the implements of the sports: the bat and the stick. Both baseball bats and hockey sticks are traditionally made of wood. But as soon as someone considered making the bats out of something else, they immediately banned the concept and assured everyone that bats would be forever made out of wood. In hockey, they started making the sticks out of carbon fibre, and no one said a word. The players quietly made the revolutionary change without much pushback from the sport’s traditionalists who howl at any rule change. Now wood sticks are as rare as players with perfect teeth.

Similarly, if you ask anyone, they’ll say they never want the game to change, even though it’s now totally different from what it once was. Hopefully, more people will recognize how much and how frequently the sport changes on its own, and realize that we can improve it when necessary.

Who’s A Good Ancestral Wolf?

There’s this new movie called Alpha, about the first ever pet dog. It looks like another of those movies that is going straight for heartwarming, without any big stars or promises of explosions or special effects. I don’t know how it got a summer release instead of going straight to download. Or straight to the Walmart $5 DVD bin that somehow just keeps going no matter how many people abandon DVD’s.

And, of course, it has dogs, which can carry a movie all on its own.

I was wondering if it even had religious overtones. I know that seems like a stretch, but in today’s movie industry, if a movie doesn’t have stars, action, comedy, or art house chic, it’s a mystery how it even exists. I start to wonder if it’s an extension of some brand that’s really popular in the American-Christian subculture.

But then it hit me: this movie is set — according to the ads — 20,000 years ago. Apparently, that’s based on some guesswork, since dogs might have been domesticated before or after that date. But still, 20,000 years. That’s an American family movie taking place 20,000-screw-you-Young-Earth-Creationists-years-ago. So it’s not just non-religious, it’s going to be offending the super-Christian. That’s kind of surprising. I’m sure that for entertainment aimed at the entirety of American culture, they would probably choose to take science’s side and assume that the Christian Fundamentalist boycott wouldn’t amount to much. But for family-friendly entertainment I would think that they would rather have hard-core religious families on side, and just let Neil DeGrasse Tyson rant about the inaccuracies. That’s especially given that this movie is going to have appeal to people who aren’t really in love with the usual Hollywood fare.

So this is kind of a weird concept: heartwarming family science. And I just read a review that pointed out that the stars in the sky are accurate even taking into account the drift of stars over those twenty millennia. So now I’m picturing Neil DeGrasse Tyson in the theatre weeping along with everyone else, having never seen such scientific accuracy in a movie.

The Twenty-First Century's Yesterday

Comic book author Warren Ellis pointed out something interesting. He's looking forward to next year, because it was the year when the original Blade Runner took place. No, it's not because he's saving up for one of those cool florescent light umbrellas. He points out that it is the last thing in science-fiction. We all lived through 2001 without any monoliths, and went right through 2015 without hoverboards. But next year will be our last future year. I would point out that it's not just Blade Runner: Akira also took place that year. That will be -20 geek points, Mr. Ellis.

Of course, it's not really the last sci-fi future: Buck Rogers is still waiting for us in the twenty-fifth century. And all of Star Trek has yet to happen, even Khan conquering a quarter of the world. That was supposed to happen in the 1990's, and he's really taking his time about it. The point is, when it comes to near-future science-fiction stories, the predictions run out after the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century.

That's not too surprising. Back in the twentieth century, 2000 was pretty much what people thought of when they thought of the future. There wasn't much need for a sci-fi author to set a story any further into the future. That would be like saying that the story took place the day after the future. So now those of us who lived in the twentieth century have to get used to the idea that we're living beyond what was once our future.

(As an aside: I referenced the light-up umbrellas in Blade Runner above, even though I was pretty sure that I remembered seeing that someone was actually selling them. So I looked it up, and found that they were available, but are no longer being sold. So that seals the argument that we are now ahead of the future.)

Ellis thinks that this development will be liberating, because there are no longer any expectations handed to society by our fiction. That's good, because it's always been disappointing when we cross one of these future anniversaries. Above, I referred to how 2015 didn't measure up to the future depicted in Back To The Future II. And to me, the big symbol of disappointment in the future was 2001, which represented incredible discovery as a movie, while the real-life year will always be associated with a shocking act of terror that represented humanity at its worst.

So I'll also look forward to not having it occasionally shoved in my face that the world's future is not as good as I was promised. I'll miss the invitations to nostalgia, but in today's world, that's hardly a problem.

Hey, You, Get On To My Cloud

I’ve noticed a problem creeping into technology: So often, we don’t know what to call things. It used to be simple: WordPerfect was a “program” or “application.” MySpace was a “website.” Angry Birds was an “app.”

But now those are blurred together. Facebook is a website that is a social network. But many people access it on an app. Instagram caught people’s attention as a photography app, but it also allows people to access a social network. And you can access that social network through a website.

Yes, I know, this isn’t exactly rocket science. But it starts to break down whenever you’re talking to people who don’t have the best knowledge of technology. People want to try to classify a thing, and that’s difficult when so much of today’s technology is really an abstract service that is available in a number of ways.

In their effort to try to understand things, a person with little acquaintance with technology will often hang on to a particular classification. Say, they first encountered Facebook on the web, so in their minds it is, and will always be, a web site. But they first use Twitter as an app, so it will always be an app. So this person thinks of these two things as apples and oranges, even though they do essentially the same thing. And this sometimes leads to people trying to make bizarre arguments, like that Facebook is less popular than Instagram because people prefer apps to websites.

That’s why the “cloud” analogy — annoying though it may be — is quite useful. The cloud concept may be poorly understood by much of the mainstream population, but in today’s world that may be helpful. A vaguely-defined amorphous concept is pretty useful for defining services that may manifest themselves in our lives in multiple ways.

Surface Tension

Microsoft has a new, cheaper version of its Surface tablet. The Surface Go is a 10” table for C$529, which puts it close to the cheapest iPads. That seems like a good move. I never understood Microsoft’s early attempts at a tablet. In general, I don’t understand why they feel the need to make tablets, but that’s another issue. The first Surfaces were very high-end, and I wondered how much market there is for tablets that are more expensive than nearly all laptops. On top of that, there’s the question of how many people want a super expensive tablet but haven’t bought them from Apple. It’s like when VW periodically tries making an expensive car; it may well be a nice car, but I’m not buying a luxury vehicle from Volkswagen.

But with the Surface Go, Microsoft seems to have taken a sensible approach to deliver an inexpensive but still powerful tablet, so they apparently think there’s a good market there. That’s interesting, because it’s been about ten years now that computer makers have been fussing around trying to make a new computing format, something that’s portable, affordable, and convenient.

First we had the netbooks. They started off as microscopic laptops with flash memory and custom Linux-based operating systems — essentially they were small versions of today’s Chromebooks. That seemed like an intriguing idea, but people weren’t ready to make such a big break with the past, and soon netbooks had hard drives and Windows, which made them less cheap, portable and usable.

Then tablets took off, and while they’ve been popular, they haven’t been super-profitable for manufacturers. And as a personal observation, they’ve been kind of an awkward proposition: you can get a really cheap tablet which you can use for many things, but it will be far from a replacement for a laptop/desktop. You can use it for e-mail and some web surfing, but many web pages won’t work well on a small screen and underpowered processor. And slightly larger jobs like typing this blog entry won’t be easy.

But there seems to be a new format coalescing: you can get a 9.7” iPad with a keyboard case for about $500, and now Microsoft is aiming at a similar price-point. I find that tablets at this level are much more capable what with their screen and computing power, and an unobtrusive keyboard opens up many more uses, while still keeping the device more portable than a laptop. And sure enough, I’m typing this on one of those iPad/keyboard pseudo laptops.

So I think we’ve finally figured out the formula for a new computing format. I don’t see this replacing anything: there’s still things laptops are better at, smaller tablets are significantly cheaper, and phones are much more portable. But the 9-10” tablet/keyboard is a very useful setup. My apologies to that kid in the “what’s a computer” Apple commercial. You were on to something. But it’s still a computer.

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Unready Player One

My very first post on this blog was a joke about Facebook games. I mostly stayed away from them, as they felt more like psychology experiments than recreation.

Since then, I've been playing a lot of mobile games. They have some of the same qualities, since free games need to make money somehow. But fortunately, they lack that hard sell you have to keep playing and paying to cheat. But they still have a structure that is built around at least the possibility of selling things. For instance, they’ll have some sort of power-up concept, because it will be easy to sell a power-up to the gamer when they get frustrated. And that’s becoming the accepted style for free mobile games.

It's weird how games can develop their own cultures. I first noticed this in university when some of us found out there was a 3d Tetris. Thing is, it was put out by Nintendo, and they had, well, Nintendified it. In contrast to the original Tetris, which was simple and minimal. When we tried playing it, it prompted the player to choose a character. That just seemed kind of childish. Sure, for a lot of folks this was natural, because they were Nintendo fans who were introduced to the original Tetris that way. But those of us who had loved the game as a work time-waster just felt stupid.

Now I sometimes find myself experiencing a similar clash of gaming cultures. For instance, I’ve wasted many an hour playing the Cell Connect game app. It's a simple abstract puzzle game. After playing it for a while, it was updated, and they've clearly decided to make it more in the style of app and social media games. The changes aren't too intrusive, but they are confusing.

Power up cards? Um, okay. Getting 5% bonus is nice, but it's not as exciting as invulnerability or something. The second card is a raccoon, what the hell does that mean? And now I've leveled up. This isn't an RPG, so I’m not even sure what that could mean.

In short, all these changes have made gaming rather complicated. Ironically, I just came across this article from Wired in which they examine the huge popularity of Fortnite, and argue that it is surprising since it is a fairly complex game,in contrast to lowest-common-denominator games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush. But it seems to me that even games aimed at the mass market have their own complexity, but it is within a culture of its own.

Chuck Berry

You’ve probably heard that tomatoes are technically fruits. Perhaps you’ve also heard the saying that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. And that brings up an important point: there’s a limitation to these technical classifications.

It gets much worse the more you look at these terms. Technically, a berry is “a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary.” Yes, plants have ovaries, try not to think about that right now, there are bigger things to worry about. So the following are not berries:
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries

...but the following are:
Oranges, tomatoes, bananas, eggplants, grapes, kiwis, avocados, pumpkins, watermelons

Vegetables are plants, and so are herbs. The only difference is that herbs are just to taste, rather than a main ingredient. But basil is usually a herb, but pesto isn’t pesto without basil, so does that make it a vegetable. Or a part-time vegetable?

This is turning into one of those pedantic, meaningless, non-trivia pieces of trivial information like the names of groups of animals. I (and others) argued that if no one uses the term, then the term doesn’t really have meaning.

I’m not one of those people who insists that scientific classifications have to conform to popular ideas. (Sorry Pluto, I’m with Neil Degrase Tyson on this one.) And it’s fine when we try to put some scientific rigour behind common definitions, only to find that there are exceptions we didn’t previously think of. I will still correct you if you try to call whales or dolphins, “fish.”

But if the scientific definition turns out to have nothing at all to do with the popular definition, then it’s time to admit that we need new words. How about we define "berry" as, "sort of fruit-like, but smaller." And then the scientific concept that they're calling "berry" — even though it isn't — can be something else; I don't know, name it after a great berry scientist or something.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #42

There will come a day when you no longer hear the traditional phone ring, as all phones — whether cell or cordless — are fully electronic. At first, they just use artificial beeps; then later they can use a recording of whatever sound the user wants to notify them of an incoming call.

And then there will come another day, about twenty years later, when you’ll hear that traditional phone ring all the time in all sorts of places, because lots of people thought it would be ironic to use a recording of the phone ring as their ringtone on their cell phones.

Check Republic

So Croatia has made it to the World Cup semi-finals. Good for them; I don’t have a connection to them, other than a Croatian community in KW, but it’s always good to see a country punch above their weight.

But watching them today, I found myself wondering: how did they come to own the checkerboard? They’ve kind of made it their thing. It’s on their uniforms — however subtly — and their flag, and their crest. They’ve decided that it is their symbol. Talk about punching above your weight: there are only so many patterns in the world, and they’ve decided to claim one of the basic ones.

I know, every country has its symbols. But a lot of the time, it’s something rare or unique. Here in Canada, we put the maple leaf on everything, but that’s something that you only get here or in the northern United States. There’s no one off in Burkina Faso who’s feeling cheated because they wanted to use it as their symbol.

It’s a wonder more countries don’t try this. Like why hasn’t anyone claimed polka dots? That might look weird, but you’d be distinctive. Surely that would be worth it to someone who doesn’t get a lot of the world’s attention. If you’re, say, Paraguay, you might figure it would be worth it to look a little ridiculous if it means that people think of you when they see polka dots.

I guess a few countries have just grabbed basic things as their symbol. Like Japan has taken the sun. Yes, there are lots of other countries that have the sun on their flag, but Japan just took it as their whole national identity. We’re the land of the rising sun. Yes, we know the sun rises everywhere, but we’re just going to put in on our flag and make it our nickname.

Now that I think about this, it could work. There are about 200 independent countries in the world, so I’m sure you could find 200 basic patterns and common elements that everyone could find one. Sure, Croatia acted first and grabbed checkerboards, but someone else can have lines. Okay, that’s too much like stripes, and everyone has stripes. How about wavy lines? Laos, do you want wavy lines? Papua New Guinea, you can have dotted-lines.

And someone could take clouds. They don’t have the life-giving worship-inspiring importance of the sun, but they are pretty universal. They could be like, we’re Estonia, and we’re the land of clouds. We re-drew the flag with a cloud on it, so now, when you look into the sky, you’ll think of us. Or Japan, depends what kind of day it is.

Where I’m Coming From

Just before the World Cup started, I was trying to make small-talk, and mentioned that I have an English background, so that will explain why I may be in a bad mood for the next month. Bringing up that topic, I had assumed that others would chime in with their own reasons for cheering for a particular country. This being KW, I would expect that several people would smugly announce German heritage. Possibly one or two would just burst into tears, and I would assume they are Italian.

But instead, everyone seemed unsure. Rather than proudly state the allegiance, they were non-committal. People would say, yeah, I guess I have English roots so I could shout for them.

To be clear, I wasn’t expecting that everyone would be a fanatic for the source of their DNA. But I did expect that there was an understanding that in sports, particularly out-of-the-ordinary events, you pick someone to cheer for, and put on the die-hard fan act. Getting behind the home of your maternal grandfather for a month fits the bill. But no one I talked to looked at it that way. Having temporary allegiance to a country you have a flimsy connection to is a, well, a foreign concept.

Ethnicity is a weird thing here in Canada. You’ve got some people who are wrapped up in their family’s country of origin. But others have been here for generations, and don’t think of themselves as having any connection to other lands. I first noticed this in school when we were given an assignment to find out about our personal heritage. We had to list an ethnicity for each of our four grandparents. For me, the assignment was trivial: I just wrote “England” four times and handed the paper in.

Of course, I realized that most Canadians have a more diverse background. But I hadn’t realized that it would be much more difficult for others. The teacher had to encourage the students to ask around their families. He also had to explain — like he’d been through this before — that you can’t just write down “Canadian,” however far you have to go back to find something else.

I get the same sense watching all these commercials for genealogy services and genetic testing. They promote it as discovering your roots, with examples of people who have no idea what their heritage is. Sure, I had been shown that young kids were often pretty clueless about their origins, but I had naively assumed that by the time people got to adulthood, they had been filled in on their ethnic background. But apparently it’s enough of a mystery that people will pay good money to find out.

Of course, there’s a flip side to this: many people who take their heritage as a major part of their personal definition, often to the point of displacing their Canadian identity. Again, soccer is a place where we often see this. For years we’ve seen national flags on car windows during every World Cup. This year, I noticed that a kiosk in a mall was also selling hood flags. That is, a flag that wraps across the hood of your car, so you can show your allegiance even more forcefully, with the added benefit of not compromising your aerodynamics. I wasn’t sure if this idea would take off, but I’ve been seeing more of them over the course of the World Cup.

Canada’s national soccer teams — at least on the men’s side — are notorious for having difficulty getting home teams to cheer for them. Fans often cheer for the team of their ethnic origins, rather than the country they’re currently living in. That’s a situation that’s been debated to death in the past, so I won’t do it here. Instead, I’ll just point out how this illustrates Canadians’ diverse ways of dealing with ethnic affiliations. Some of us have completely lost touch with our roots, while others hold onto them no matter what.

I’m not sure what this means, or where it’s going to go in the future. I feel like Canada’s sense of identity is slowly getting stronger, despite the persistence of strong connections to other countries. Clearly it’s more complex than I had assumed.

Good Whill Hunting

In a recent interview, George Lucas revealed some of his plans for the third Star Wars trilogy, had he been the one to make it. He didn't make it, of course, having sold the franchise to Disney. And after hearing his plans, people are thinking that’s a good thing.

He revealed that the third trilogy would have gone into the microscopic world, looking more in depth at the midi-chlorians that no one liked from The Phantom Menace. He would have introduced another bunch of microbes, the Whills, who really control The Force and the universe.

At this point, I have to say that I’m not entirely sure that Lucas is being honest with us. Part of me believes that either:

1. He’s so tired of people criticizing the prequel trilogy that he’s trolling us by taking what people didn’t like about them and then expanding on that. If we discover that one of the Whills is a whiny teenager having an unconvincing romance with an older Whill royal, then you’ll know I’m right.
2. Like any decent Star Wars fan, he’s alarmed by the bigoted criticism the new trilogy is getting, so he’s running interference by putting out truly bad ideas for how it might have gone. Racist “fans” will be quicker to accept non-white-male stars when they realize that they could have gotten microbe stars.

But assuming that Lucas’ ideas were genuine, this stands as the most extreme example of a principle I heard once about why sci-fi/fantasy franchises often disappoint over time: that the creators probably have different ideas of what the story is about than the fans do. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said that, but I think it was someone on a Battlestar Galactica after-show. That was another show that deviated from expectations as it went along. It became a convoluted origin story for the human race, rather than the parable of post-9/11 America that attracted many fans.

The midi-chlorians were a good example of this. It struck a false note with fans because:

1. The concept of The Force had seemed like a statement of mind over matter. The idea that great power could come from patience and understanding was an inspiring meek-shall-inherit-the-galaxy idea. The 98-pound weakling could watch the movies to escape from a world where he gets beat up by the school bully. But by introducing the midi-chlorians, it made it seem like just another genetic lottery. Now the 98-pound weakling realizes that in the movies’ universe, he’d just end up getting force-choked by the school bully.
2. Although Star Wars has always played fast and loose with science, at least it avoided using technobable as an cop-out story device, unlike a certain other Sci-Fi franchise.

Supposedly Lucas had the midi-chlorians in mind right from the start, so he perhaps didn't realize that the fans were building up a different mental image of the story's world than he had.

Ironically, another example of this is the aforementioned bigot fan contingent. A variety of incidents have exposed the fact that there are a lot of alt-right crossover in the sci-fi community. That’s a surprise to many, since Star Wars and Star Trek have, in their own way, made morality into a key ingredient. How that could possibly be compatible with tormenting a person for being of a different race is a mystery to most of us. And yet, these folks evidently have a great deal of passion for a franchise, despite not sharing some of its key values.

I guess you could make the argument that we all pick and choose what we want from a media property. After all, a lot of people are fans of Star Wars without being a fan of, you know, wars. We can absorb the story’s themes while glossing over the message that comes from the movies’ action, perhaps because action and violence are so ubiquitous in our media. There’s a similar concept in video games called Ludonarrative Dissonance, which is when the gameplay and the story have different messages, such as a violent game that tries to have a pro-peace moral. And I guess this can be a solution to my long-standing question of why far-right politicians often listen to music with a liberal message. Lefty lyrics often come with aggressive delivery, so you might well absorb one while ignoring the other.

That’s not to say that everyone has a right to get what they want out of our favourite media. We simply can’t all expect to get something out of it when we each see such different things in it. And if your experience is very different from either the creator or the rest of the audience, then you’ll be disappointed.

Dougie Jekyll And Gordie McHyde

Canada has entered a spat with the United States. Of course, it’s not a common thing for us to be in a spat with anyone. Yes, we've had plenty of disputes with the US, but they’re usually esoteric trade issues that get fought in a court. National leaders taking shots at each other? Not our style.

People sometimes bring up our territorial dispute with Denmark over Hans Island. The Canadian government says it should be ours because it is part of the Northern Archipelago which was claimed by Britain and inherited by Canada. The Danes say it should be theirs because it is closer to Greenland, which they own. This “dispute” amuses others because of the comically low-key way that it is fought. That is, it’s “fought” by each nation occasionally sending a ship to the island to take down the other country’s flag and put up their own.

It may surprise outsiders, but there are those in Canada who don't like our low key approach. I'm not talking politicians - those in government who want a more active role are still confined by the limited tax base of a country that won't put up with the military taking up half our budget. So their get-tough attitude comes out as a commitment to buy 7 destroyers instead of the 6 that those wimpy liberals would have bought.

No, I'm thinking of the talk of average people, in coffee shops, living rooms, and online. Most Canadians appreciate our civility, but you occasionally come across folks who think we need to be more forceful, that we should go in to Hans Island guns blazing and set up a Tim Hortons.

But here's what makes this week's American dispute interesting: the subsection of Canadians that longs for aggression overlaps with populist conservatives who generally love the United States and would like us to be closer to them. Of course, most of the time this correlation works out fine; The US is the poster child for aggressive foreign policy, and the easiest way for us Canadians to get more aggressive would be to tag along on their latest adventure.

So what are they supposed to do when we're having a tiff with their beloved American role models? I swear I could hear heads exploding all over the country as they tried to solve that puzzle . It's made worse by the fact that the attack on the Great White North was entirely the creation of Donald Trump, a great aggressive role model.

I was kind of worried what I might see online: so often these days, political sides trump all else, so I wondered how many conservative Canadians might take Trump's side in all this. In the past I've been disappointed that many politically naive Canadians have assumed that their mild distaste for a pretty-boy PM is the equal of the ideological diametric opposite in the White House. But to my surprise, people have been coming out in support of Trudeau. Even self-professed Trump admirer Doug Ford took Trudeau's side.

So maybe this is one of those cases where the political sides are going to start realigning. If a Republican president can be anti-trade, maybe Canadian conservatives will start being anti-American.  It might be good for us if the urge to be nationally assertive could work with the desire to have a separate identity. Watch out, Denmark.

Blinded With Science

In the past, I’ve seen many discussions on the ethics of inventions and scientific breakthroughs. In our society, we’ve generally gone with the assumption that progress is good, and it’s just expected that new ideas are going to keep coming. But sometimes someone suggests that we’d be better off without certain inventions. In the past, that’s been big things, like nuclear weapons, say. But these days, we’re more likely to be questioning the value of social networks, or modern applications of AI.

I always thought there was an aspect of this discussion that was missed. When people rue the very existence of inventions, the anger is usually pointed at the inventor. It often isn’t explicitly stated, but the feeling is that the inventor should have thought twice about whether the world is really better off with the invention before telling anyone else about it. There’s an implicit assumption that this world-changing decision should be made by the inventor. I see a couple of big problems with this.

One is that this difficult ethical decision will be made by someone who probably doesn’t have a lot of knowledge of ethics. No, I don’t want to dredge up stereotypes of scientists being unfeeling or uncaring, I’m just saying that we should probably have people with more experience and representation to make such wide-reaching decisions.

The second — and I’d say bigger — problem is that the inventor of a technology is the least objective judge of the new technology that there can be. If it is up to them to decide the fate of their new invention, then we’re asking them to make a rational decision between two options without being swayed by the fact that one option gives them fame and fortune, while the other gives them nothing but the satisfaction that they did the right thing in a circumstance they can’t even tell anyone about. And in modem "publish or perish" academia, they may have to make a major career sacrifice to do the right thing.

So I'm thinking about this because we're starting to see the down side of many of our recent innovations. A lot of people were concerned by Google recently showing off its assistant making a call on your behalf to make an appointment.

That’s technically impressive, though it’s another example of us solving a problem with unnecessarily complex technology. The claim is that you could use this to set up appointments for you when you don’t have time. But a less difficult way to do that would be some sort of shared calendar, like what Google and Microsoft Outlook already offer. But making one that everyone can use would require different companies to agree on a universal standard so that you can use your iPhone to make an appointment with your dentist that uses Google. That won’t happen, so we’ll have a future where your computer calls the dentist’s computer, and they each use cutting-edge AI so that they can talk English to each other.

But the other complaint is that it's not hard to imagine how this tech could be harmful: A human-sounding computer could be great for scams, and it would put telemarketing within reach of any company, not just those that can afford a third-world call-centre.

And what further concerned many wasn’t just the technology, but the universally warm welcome it received from the tech-conference crowd. That was in sharp contrast with the discomfort that was most people’s reaction, and it seemed to show off the industry's disconnect. While much of the outside world is still sore from Facebook's many betrayals of our privacy, it's still business as usual in Silicon Valley.

So that's what reminded me of my concern with who polices innovation. In the modern case, you can replace my hypothetical inventor with a company, but the same principle applies: we expect an entity to fall on its sword for the good of society.

Traditionally, this is where government would step in and do what's right for society. But the other shocking thing from the Facebook scandals was how unprepared the U.S. government was at dealing with technology. The Facebook hearings often seemed like a parody. In "defence" of the politicians, I would point out that a lot of their apparent ignorance was really just playing to ignorant voters. From what I saw of the hearings, the interviewers ignored the actual problems to focus on points that were minor or irrelevant, but easier to understand. But still, we can’t realistically expect judgement of inventions from politicians who are either ignorant, bought-and-paid-for, or terrified of being seen as an over-regulating commie pinko.

I don't really have a solution to all this. I'm just pointing out that we're right back to where we started, assuming that innovation is going to keep coming.

Have You Invested In Ford Lately?

Ford is getting out of the car business. Okay, not completely: they're keeping the Mustang around. But for the most part, they're just gong to sell trucks and SUV's. Chrysler has essentially done the same thing; their only cars are some stagnant Dodge sedans and the Fiat 500.

Even if SUV's are big sellers, I'm still skeptical. As many have been pointing out, the SUV craze may only live as far as low oil prices, and that won't be forever.

This could lead to a bigger version of what happened with the recession in the 2000's, where Americans suddenly wanted fuel efficiency, but American manufacturers had let their small cars fall behind the competition. This time it could be worse, because they wouldn't even have those cars available.

And word is that the biggest reason for this is not Americans' preference for trucks and SUV's, but profitability. SUV's are more expensive, and fewer people base their purchases on price, so there isn't as much pressure to keep the prices down. Thus, manufacturers make a lot on each sale, and the corporate books look good, even if market share suffers.

That's unusual, because market share has traditionally been the big indicator of success in the American car biz. So this move is showing us how much influence Wall Street has on even the biggest companies. But investors don't always have concern for a company's long-term health.

That brings up my main concern when American manufacturers start ignoring the low end of the market: that strategy sets it up so that most people buy their first car from one of the imported brands. In an industry where brand loyalty is a big deal, that sounds like a disastrous strategy, at least in the long-term.

And it gets worse when you combine it with another big trend in the car business: really long loans. It used to be that car loans were in the four year range, but now car makers are happily pushing 84 month financing. If they're going to be relying on more expensive products now, you can expect the long loan trend to accelerate.

But the flip side to this SUV trend is that although they may be replacing cars, SUVs are also becoming more car-like. The Toyota C-HR (SUV) is 1,565 mm tall while the Mazda 3 (car) is 1,455mm tall. So the difference between a car and an SUV is a mere 11 cm (about 4"). Seeing them parked beside each other, they don't look that different. I guess this isn't really that surprising: Although people want SUV's, they still want things cars are better at providing, like efficiency and maneuverability, which is forcing SUV's to get more car-like. So I’m suspecting that a decade or so from now, We’ll be right back to where we’ve always been, driving cars, but we’ll be calling our vehicles "SUVs" instead of "cars."

I Think It Would Be Fun To Ruin A Newspaper

Elon Musk made headlines recently when he suggested a website that would allow the public to rate journalists on their truthfulness. According to a poll of his twitter followers, this is a really popular idea. Among others, however, it’s not so popular, and has attracted a lot of ridicule.

Why Musk is going to war with the media is a bit of a mystery. After all, he’s benefited greatly from media hype. Generally, he’s had positive coverage, up until the recent questions about Tesla’s factory safety. You also have to wonder why other super-rich, super-famous people haven’t had similar reactions. Just think of all the opportunities for Bill Gates to snap when facing critical press. You might be inclined to think that this is just another example of the central malady of our age: powerful men realizing just how much they can get away with. But there are also contemporary examples of tycoons handling media critique less childishly. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has faced similar scrutiny over his company’s work conditions. And Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has faced an even larger media barrage; while he hasn’t exactly faced it like a great titan of industry, he also hasn’t gone looking for cheap revenge.

I’ve seen comparisons between Musk and Donald Trump. That’s easy to understand: although quite different in other areas, they seem to share a surprisingly thin skin. So many are heralding the end of Elon Musk, as he melts down into a nerdier Trump. Or perhaps he just becomes a Bond villain. Personally though, I think a more accurate comparison for Musk is Charles Foster Kane. He has the same playful entrepreneurialism, the sense of being a self-appointed public hero, and an ego that is incompatible with being the people’s hero. At least Musk’s girlfriend is actually musically talented.

But back to the journalist site idea. Some people have pointed out that similar sites have been tried before. Others have made the should-be-obvious point that it would be easy to rig the site to give ratings that fit someone’s vested interests. Musk tried to assuage these fears by saying it would have to be able to resist mass input from bot armies. But even if you could do that (good luck) there’s still the threat of coordinated efforts of many people working together. After all, similar things have already happened.

But the biggest problem with this idea is that it’s trying to fix the problem with more of the problem. Let’s assume that this website would work as intended without being manipulated or hacked, and thus displays an accurate picture of the general public’s opinion of the accuracy of journalists. I have to ask how that would be any different from how our current society works. We already run society based on the assumption that popularity is more important than correctness. Musk’s website would just formalize that process. He even suggested calling it “Pravda,” in reference to the Soviet newspaper whose name ironically meant, “truth.” But a more appropriate name for Musk’s journalist-rating site would be, “truthiness,” the word Stephen Colbert coined to describe something that feels true, whether or not it is.