I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

I remember when my hometown library first replaced the trusty old card catalogue with a computer version. I looked up - fittingly enough - books on computers, and I discovered that the system had three related categories: One was just "computers," another was "electronic computers," and then there was "digital computers." Of course, "electronic computers" only rules out the abacus and Charles Babbage's difference engine. But "digital" includes all modern computers, save for some curiosities. So essentially the three categories are the same, and if you're looking up a book on computers, it could be in any of them, you have no idea which.

I bring up this tale from the library of the nineties because I'm amazed at how often the same sort of problems come up. No, not in libraries, but in stores.

You'd think that a modern e-tail store would be able to do better than my nineties small town library. After all, they have decades more technology, millions more in their budget, and they only have to categorize a limited selection of products, not all of humanity's knowledge.

But still, they have the same inability to clarify things. Similar to that nineties librarian, whose classification system was technically correct, but worse than useless, they have difficulty classifying their wares in a way that helps people find things.

Again, I'm having difficulty shopping for an external hard drive. Hard drives can be internal or external. They can also be solid state or, um, the spinny kind. So you'd think I'd just have to make my choice on those two dimensions and look at what fits the category. But often there are weird, imaginary dichotomies, like they have categories for solid-state drives or external drives. So if I want a solid-state, internal drive, I don't know where to look.

(And this is fun: when I typed, "spinny" into my phone, it interpreted it as "spiny" and suggested the hedgehog emoji.)

Another weird aspect of that early computer catalogue were the dates. See, on a lot of old manual typewriters, there were keys for digits "2" through "9," but no "1" key, since that was identical to the lower-case "L" in the old Courrier-like font they used, and apparently keys were incredibly expensive. So I would occasionally see that a book was published in "l985," because it was typed by someone who was still used to those old typewriters. Those entries must have been fun for anyone who had to search for a book by year.

But even today, we're at the mercy of whoever types in the information, just hoping they get it right, and are consistent. When I was looking for the game controller previously, I found Walmart had only four Xbox controllers. Actually, they have hundreds, but there were only four where the underpaid stock boy who enters the info had bothered to add the Xbox tag.

And when I went looking for earbuds, I found that when filtering the brands, there was an entry for "Sony" and another for "SONY" from someone who must have thought it was an acronym. Or I suppose the problem could have been they just didn't know their caps-lock was on, but that just adds to the 90's computer system ambiance.

I'd like to think that we will eventually build up a better understanding of how to organize things. Like maybe once databases are as old and commonplace as that card catalogue was to the librarians in the l990's. Maybe then the understanding will be so innate that people will just naturally organize things in a nice efficient way, and when I'm shopping for my nanobot farm, I'll only have to think "indoor nanobot farms" into my neural interface, and not worry that it will exclude the new transquantum nanites just because the warehouse cyborg entered them separately.

It Can't Possibly Be Da Shoes

I remember a time in my teens when I was at a friend's house, and his mother arrived home from shopping and announced she had bought him new running shoes. I was amazed: when I bought new shoes, I needed to try on at least six pairs to find one that fit comfortably. The idea of just buying shoes based on nothing but the size and then assuming that's it, the transaction is done? That was mind-blowing.

The point is, there are two types of people when it comes to shoes: picky, and not picky. Okay, I guess "picky" then subdivides into picky for fit and picky for style, so, um, that wasn't as neat as I'd hoped.

Our current retail world is really not good for people like me. For most people and most products, ordering things online is great. Essentially, the plus is that you have incredible choice because the whole world is available to you. But the disadvantage is that you can't inspect anything before buying. Oh, there's the whole lack of human interaction too, if you're into that sort of thing. For most products, that's a reasonable trade off: you don't really need to feel a new iPad before buying. But for me, it's trying on the shoes that I miss.

If you find comfortable shoes easily, this world is great for you: type your size into Amazon and you're done. If you're in that choosy-about-styles subgroup,  it's not perfect, but you might trade the ability to try on shoes for the increased selection. But for me, it really sucks. When it comes to casual shoes, there's just Wal-Mart, Foot Locker, and a few locally-owned stores. Previously, I would have gone to Zellers, Target, Sears, Payless for the sweet spot of cheap but with some quality. But they're all gone in Canada. So I'm stuck with super cheap or super expensive. It's the first time I've come up against this problem. I've bemoaned the lack of bricks and mortar options in modern retail before, but this is the first time I've had the experience where I need to buy something, but I'm not really sure where to get it.

There's No Nation Like Donation

Universities will often go to alumni looking for donations, which has become a little awkward. I'm sure it made sense in my parents' generation, when tuition was low and education was undertaken in a spirit of enlightenment.

But today's grads look at it differently. Obviously, many are held back by the fact that they're asked for a donation while still paying down student debt. But even if debt isn’t holding them back, university plays a different part in our lives now.

Today, it's more of a business proposition.  The university may not be making a profit on education, but it is charging as much as it can while still remaining a sensible value proposition, much a products on the free market are. Tuition is an investment, that — while expensive — will pay off in the long term. Once you’ve paid a huge amount of money as an expensive long term business investment, You’re less likely to think of that institution as a charity.

It would be like if you bought a car, and it's a really nice car, and you're glad you bought it. But then a year later the car company phones you to ask if you'd care to give them more money. It's like, yes, I like the car, but I paid fair market value for it, so I assumed that was the end of the transaction. It’s not something I think about donating to.

There's lots of things that ask for donations today. I mean, Wikipedia is one biggest ones. It's such an unusual institution to begin with: a widely-used resource that doesn't make a profit or get government grants. So I don’t have any automatic assumptions about giving to it.

In sharp contrast to the University situation, Wikipedia is an institution that you've never given money to through payment for services or through taxes. So its donation requests are unusual: usually charitable giving is purely altruistic, given to a service that others — less-fortunate people — will use. It's not too often that you’re asked to donate for your own sake. The closest parallel is a busker, but you generally don’t choose your buskers. Okay, maybe a better parallel would be a museum with a “recommended donation,” which is kind of what the Wikipedia donation request/guilt-trip is.

(To be clear, I’m not comparing Wikipedia to a University education. I’m aware that the latter is necessarily a lot more expensive than the former)

And now, at this time of the rolling year, many institutions are asking for donations. Not just charities, but also open-source software, and public radio & TV. It’s a reminder of how our world has developed a lot of “free” options that nevertheless need to pay the bills, and non-mainstream media tastes will make it more likely you’ll encounter them. It makes me wonder if this is going to be a viable way of keeping things operating in the future: A labour of love that stays afloat with donations. It’s an odd idea, because we think of donations as going to the less fortunate, in a situation where users of the service are in no position to contribute. But now we’re talking about users paying for their own service, but voluntarily, and hoping that the donations from the wealthy or extra-generous will offset those who can’t or won’t contribute. 

Will it work in the long term? I’m skeptical, though some open-source software has been sustained for a while now with a combination of volunteering and semi-self-interested donations from people and corporations. So maybe it can work.

1198 Days Later

I, like a lot of people, have some misgivings about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. To be fair, I haven’t personally experienced much unpleasantness or inconvenience as a result of his changes to the service. The worst it’s done for me is bring back bad memories what happens when my fellow nerds and I start thinking we can fix everything in the world.

To be honest, I’d mostly stopped using Twitter even before the Muskopalypse. And contrary to most experiences I’d heard of, I wasn’t warn down by toxic disagreement from political enemies. Rather, I was getting stressed by people with similar politics pointing out every injustice and outrage. I can understand the motivation: people feel an obligation on social media to amplify the signal of things that are important to them. But it was stressing me out, so I started to drift away.

By the way, I haven’t seen many people bring this up, but Elon Musk is still the reigning Time Person of the Year. At the time of announcement, that title struck me as at least five years late: He used to be the only guy trying to make electric cars and private space programs a reality, but by last year, both had become cliché. And Musk himself had devolved from intriguing intellectual, to, well, a nerd who thinks he can fix everything in the world.

So I followed many people over to Mastodon, the open source alternative to Twitter. So far it’s been okay, and in terms of the basic usage, not that different. But like a lot of open source software, it does seem more complex than it has to be.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Mastodon is that it’s not one entity that stores all the posts and information about all the users. Instead, it’s a bunch of servers that operate independently, but can still interact with one another. And anyone can set up their own server (at their own expense) and set up their own rules.

(Fun fact: Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social is just a modified version of Mastodon.)

So Mastodon is a bit of a throwback to harder-to-use, do-it-yourself Internet from before social media. That throwback feeling was underlined recently when famed blogger/tweeter/author John Scalzi promoted the idea that we go back to blogs as a sort of pseudo social network. I thought that sounded appealing, and I’d thought of reviving this blog recently, so I took the plunge and dusted off my old blog. Maybe it will lead to a new age of intriguing long-form commentary, and intelligent discourse and interaction. But I notice that the new Blogger interface makes it easier to add emojis than links and that does not fill me with confidence.

Plus And Minus

You may have seen that Google+ was recently shut down.  You may also have forgotten what Google+ was; it was Google's attempt to cash in on the social network gold rush. It wasn't too successful. Too bad, we could use some new blood in the Social Media field. Facebook is still making a fool of itself on the privacy issue, and Twitter is still dragging its feet on the should-we-allow-nazis issue.

And frankly, this is the sort of thing I wish Google would put more effort into. My complaint about them in recent years has been that they are choosing which business to enter on a whim, rather than the classic business basis of find-a-problem-and-fix-it. We needed a good search engine, and they built one. We needed a competitor for iOS and they built one (well, bought and nurtured one, but close enough.)

Then they started going off the rails with Chrome. If they'd released it a decade earlier to counter the dominance of Internet Explorer, that would have been great. But doing it after Firefox had managed to - improbably - break the monopoly, Google just looked like bullies. Now they're bringing out a game streaming service, despite the fact that the gaming world is already a crowded business, and that people are starting to get leery of the everything-is-a-subscription juggernaut. Oh, and rural folks keep trying to point out that they're not okay with streaming everything on their antiquated broadband. And hey, that's just the sort of problem Google could solve and win lots of kudos, instead of suspicion.

So if you're not too pleased about Google's game streaming plans, just remember that it might be another Google+ instead of a Chrome. After all, I wasn't even going to comment on the passing of Google+, except that they somehow set things up so that if you had a Google+ account when you signed up for Blogger, it lost the connection with your Google account, so I just had to have a panicked run through FAQ's and message boards to try to get signed back in. And this post is my combined test/scream-of-frustration

Are Friends Eclectic?

I saw this meme on Facebook a while back. That really stood out to me, since It’s become accepted wisdom among many that modern technology has left us more “connected” with people but emotionally distant. I’m sceptical of this concept, since I’d always noticed how superficial a lot of our interactions used to be even in the pre-social media world. I mean, you talk to far fewer people in the course of an average day now, but most of those lost moments of human contact were forgettable rote interactions. If you now buy things on Amazon instead of a store, you don’t really lose any emotional involvement, since the interaction with a store employee is usually just you playing a part based on expectations.

This meme takes that same concept to new heights: in the same way that you may play a part in your interactions with/as service workers, you also play a part as a high school student. In each case, you act as expected, and this prevents you from having a meaningful involvement. Yes, I know, lots of people develop really deep friendships in high school. But compared to the total number of people you go to school with, and the amount of time you spend with them, it’s amazing how little you know about them.

This comes back to a point I realized a few years ago. It’s not something that’s easy to say, and some people will be shocked by it, but The Breakfast Club lied to us. Its message was that teenagers can be pushed into different roles, but still have commonalities. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also true that high school forces a sameness on us. As I watch my friends and I age, I keep noticing personality come out that couldn’t be expressed before. In school there's so much pressure to play the roll of a teen that you suppress your unique features.

This might be a product of age: we just need a lot of time to explore the world and find ourselves. Our maybe it's due to the same modern technology that delivered that meme: The Internet has allowed us to connect with others with similar inclinations instead of having to fit in to a community of others that we have little in common with. Certainly that’s one thing I’ve envied today’s kids for: the Internet gives them a chance to pursue their interests regardless of how isolated their real-life situation.

But I suspect that my new understanding is because of the different perspective you have of your high school friends now. For adults, social media is more a respite from the world than a part of it. It's the people you choose to be around rather than those you must be around. Thus, it's safer to keep your guard down and be yourself. If people don't like what they see, you're an unfriending away from ending the problem. The irony is that the people you're now allowing to peek behind the mask are the people you used to show the mask to.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll Gladly Text You Tuesday For A Cheeseburger Today

There's been a furor about the emojis representing cheeseburgers. Here are the Apple and Google versions, courtesy of Emojipedia

The Apple version shows the more traditional arrangement of cheese on the patty, while Google has the cheese under the patty. All other companies that provide emojis with their phones or apps also have the cheese on top.

So here's how it played out:

SOCIAL MEDIA: Can you believe the Google cheeseburger emoji has the cheese on the bottom? That's so weird!

MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Get a load of this controversy over the cheeseburger emojis online! That would make a great filler story if we're having trouble filling...What's that? Mueller's started filling charges? Drop the cheeseburgers, we finally have real news!

FOX NEWS: Get a load of this controversy over the cheeseburger emojis online! That would make a great filler story if we're having trouble filling...What's that? Mueller's started filling charges? Get those cheeseburgers on the air! We need distraction, stat!

THE DAILY SHOW, COLBERT, SETH MEYERS, JIM JEFFERIES, ETC.: Can you believe that while the rest of the media was reporting on the Trump Administration going down in flames, Fox news was reporting on controversy over cheeseburger emojis? Why would they think that's important. But seriously, Google's all wrong, everyone knows the cheese goes on top.

ME: That Google burger with the cheese on the bottom looks familiar. <Looks up pictures of the most popular burger at the most popular burger chain>

Just as I thought.

Where's The Over-Analyzing Emoji?

Since The Emoji Movie is out, I should probably say something about them. And if the reviews are anything to go by, I’d better be quick. I have to admit, I never really liked emojis.

I don't really hate them. A part of me is fascinated by the idea that we could be developing a new interlingual pictogram writing system. And I'm pleasantly surprised at the development of the eggplant emoji; that showed a subtlety I didn't think society was capable of.

But ultimately, I don’t like the inelegance of it. I appreciate things that have a few simple components that can be assembled in a variety of ways, as a challenge to creativity (say, Lego.) I also appreciate things that are so varied and complex that they give rise to virtually endless possibilities and ultimate personalization (say, the Web.) But emojis fall in the anti-sweet-spot between those two possibilities. They're varied enough that they don't really take creativity to use, but limited enough that they can't express individuality.

And before you reach for counter-examples, yes, I know that there are some epic examples of expression through emoji. I saw that tweet where Kyle McLachlan explained the entire plot of Dune in emojis.

🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑 #dune https://t.co/bXwpdYC8jz

— Kyle MacLachlan (@Kyle_MacLachlan) August 16, 2016

But here's the biggest problem I have with emojis: I miss smileys. I loved their simplicity, the challenge of making punctuation look human. I also appreciated the subtlety: None of the overacting we get from emojis. It was just a humble little facial expression, conveyed with minimalist cuteness by the technological descendant of the "Have a Nice Day" face.

Remember how there was so much concern over not having black faces in emojis? No need to worry about that with smileys. They don’t have enough detail to tell what race/gender they are. The smiley is the only true post-race character. It smiles for all of us.

Filtering Facebook

Yesterday the local TV station did a story on the murderer who streamed his killing on Facebook. Or, to be specific, it was about the use of the Internet to publicise the crime. I had several problems with it. For one thing, they played a lot of the video (cutting it before the act itself, of course.) But the most objectionable aspect of the filming was the making the innocent victim a prop in his game of revenge, and showing the recording plays into that.

But that was clearly not the way they were looking at it. The reporter went through some other crimes that have been broadcast on Facebook or other social media sites. That list included the case of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer, which was recorded by his girlfriend, who wanted to show that the killing was unprovoked. Now most people would say there is a world of difference between a remorseless killer broadcasting his crime as a twisted revenge and a victim broadcasting a crime to prove its injustice. But in this case the journalist was more concerned with the fact that violence is being spread on the Internet, than with the causes of the violence.

And that brings up another aspect of the story that I find frustrating: the apparent surprise that a person can post something violent on the Internet. To be clear, Facebook did take the video down (although they took their time about it.) But this report (and several other media outlets I've come across.) Seem to be questioning how the video got on the site to begin with. I'm not really sure what they're envisioning; Do they expect teams of people vetting everything uploaded to Facebook, or Artificial Intelligence that can make sense of videos at the level that they can tell the difference between an actual murder and a clip from an action movie.

I can't believe that we're a quarter-century into the Internet revolution and we're still having this conversation. If we're going to have a medium where everyone is a publisher or broadcaster, there is no way we can automatically edit out what we don't want. We can act to remove it when it happens, but we can't have a world where objectionable material never appears. In other media, society came to an understanding with what was possible and what was reasonable to expect. No one expects the phone company to stop people planning crimes using their system. We've made - and accepted - the idea that the reduction in crime wouldn't be worth the expense or intrusion in privacy. But we can't seem to reach that consensus with today's technology.

Just to clarify, I'm not one of those techno-libertarians who thinks the Internet shouldn't have any rules. We do need rules, and our Internet institutions could usually benefit from more of them. We just need to be realistic about what they can do. And that's part of why I'm angry about this: there are important discussions that we need to have in this society about what's going to be acceptable on the Internet, but we can't have those discussions because so many of us still live in a fantasy world where we can get anything we want just by telling the nerds to throw technology at it.

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.

Fan Of The Fans

Recently, I've written posts on both Stargate and Gilmore Girls. And in the process, I've also mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fan-fiction. That brings up something interesting I found about ten years ago.

I read an article about the world of fan-fiction; specifically, the sheer size of the subculture, and the fact that pretty much every story in every medium has at least a little fan fiction written about it. Yes, even movies and TV shows you barely remember have fan-fiction. Do you remember MVP, the CBC's short-lived soap about hockey players' wives? Well a couple of people cared enough to write about it.

Having never been exposed to this, I found it fascinating to see a site with reams and reams of fan-authored stories. I didn't read much of the fiction itself, but it was interesting to see what kinds of franchises attracted writers. It wasn't necessarily the most popular things. Also, it wasn't necessarily the worlds that traditionally captured fan imaginations: for instance, both Star Wars and Star Trek were at low ebbs during those early 2000's, so they didn't attract the attention you'd expect. I'm sure that if Internet-spread fan fiction had existed throughout the twentieth century, those two would have built-up story reserves that will never be eclipsed.

Anyway, the aforementioned shows, Stargate SG-1, Gilmore Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were the three TV shows that had the most stories written about them. That made me wonder what the common bond that attracts a fan-fiction writer would be. Witty writing? Smart female characters? I suspected the subculture has female-skewed demographics, and apparently statistics confirm it.

The question stuck in my mind because they also have another thing in common: I was a fan of each of them. So apparently, I look for the same things in TV shows that fan-fiction writers do. That's kind of odd, since I've never really had a desire to write fan-fiction. (Though now that you mention it, I've got some great ideas for a Stargate/Gilmore/Buffy crossover.)

But since I'm revisiting the issue, I though I'd go back and see what the most popular shows are now. Here's the top ten shows that have the most fan-fiction stories written about them:

1. Supernatural
2. Glee
3. Doctor Who
4. Sherlock
5. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
6. Once Upon a Time
7. NCIS
8. Vampire Diaries
9. Criminal Minds
10. Stargate: SG-1

Again, not a lot in common, other than female viewership. But now I have some future binge-watch targets.

You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

Recently, I saw a graphic being passed around Facebook, about peppers. It said that you can tell the gender of sweet peppers by the number of lobes on the bottom. (plants can have genders too; you knew that, right? ) Three lobes: male, four : female. And this also has a slight effect on the taste and texture of the pepper.

This sort of claim lands in the shadow of doubt for me. Weirder things are true, but they usually aren't. So I googled "pepper gender," somewhat alarmed at what I might find.

Actually, I just got a link to the misinformation-quashing site snopes.com. They pointed out that it's not true; peppers don't really have gender. They also pointed out that this is an urban legend that's been around for a while, but it's recently received new life on social media.

So now there are going to be thousands of people around the world choosing their peppers based on incorrect information, possibly taking out their romantic frustrations on their vegetables. "Think you can go a week without calling, Mr. Three-Lobes?" That's hardly a concern, but this is of course just an innocent and less emotionally-charged example of a much bigger problem: misinformation being spread - and believed - all over the Internet.

What's troubling is the disregard for the truth. In the above example, I made an assessment of the believability given the unknown source. But I also took advantage of the fact that the Internet can be used to easily look up facts, rather than passively consume them. I also have greater credence to an authority than to an anonymous source. Snopes.com isn't exactly the word of God, but I'm going to believe them long before someone I don't know, and has shown no credentials beyond a modest ability with Photoshop.

But I seem to be the exception rather than the rule. People are quite willing to believe anything they see on the Internet, a fact symbolized by the Oxford English Dictionary giving its word of the year award to the term, "post-truth."

Post-truth will probably be a term to define our era, so it will be hilarious when future historians look back and see that it's predecessor as word of the year was the crying with laughter emoji. So any future research into how this became the post-truth era will be short and sweet.

So how did we get here? We have the greatest information sharing device ever, and it's led to a total lack of consideration for the truth. Coincidentally, that question was recently posed to Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of Snopes.com. She said that it was a result of the low quality of mainstream news. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I'm as critical of them as anyone; throughout the election campaign, I kept fantasizing about the eventual downfall of conventional media, picturing Don Lemon on the streets, holding a hand-written sign reading, "will repeat talking-points for food."

But the fact is, the public is abandoning established news services for even lower quality online sources. I don't think anyone is saying, "my newspaper's reporting is too superficial, I'm going to switch to this web site that says Hillary Clinton had Justice Scalia murdered.

Actually, I first saw the post-truth world coming twenty years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream. I remember seeing a political discussion, in which someone referred to how Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, and that triggered the Great Depression.

Of course, many have critiqued and questioned the wisdom and success of the New Deal over the years, but everyone remembers it as a response to the Great Depression. Reversing the causality is a brazen attempt to rewrite history. When called on it, the far-right folks in that old newsgroup hedged a bit, saying, yeah well it made the depression worse, and that's what they really meant.

But the incident opened my eyes to the possibilities of a media world where there are so many voices. What we know to be true is really just the consensus of experts. After all, I wasn't around for the Great Depression; my knowledge of it is based on the words of those that have studied it. It could be that I have been deceived, but I think it's unlikely that so many would be so wrong in such an organized way. But what about when the waters are muddied by many people claiming to be experts? Or what if you're just not that choosy about who's expertise you trust?

Really, I don't think there's any explanation for our entering the post-truth world other than, we can. All this time we've held together the concensus of society only because there are so few microphones. Despite all the rhetoric that The Man controls The Message to his own ends, the fact is that people who get to speak are usually more-or-less deserving of authority. Without that bottleneck on information we'll need to develop a new way of attributing authority.

Now I Wonder How Whatsername Has Been

After today was mostly over, I discovered that it was National Unfriend Day. As you can guess, it's a day in which you are encouraged to unfriend people on social media, particularly Facebook. Apparently this was started by Jimmy Kimmel.  (Though the story about it on the evening news didn't mention that part, so as a viral marketing tool, it didn't work that well.) According to the Facebook page, you should use the following criteria:

• If you wouldn’t loan someone 50 dollars, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t invite them to your birthday party, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t cry if they got hit by a bus, unfriend them.

I'm not sure about those rules: I've never had large parties, and I would cry for a number of people I wouldn't loan fifty bucks to. But maybe I'm just emotional. After all, I don't really get the concern some people have over friendship being so broadly defined on social media.

Sure, there are plenty of practical concerns about how many friends you have. You can only keep up with so many people, you don't want to share your personal information with someone you just met, and some people post way too much stuff.  Or they post things that make you angry, which is another odd thing about this day: why have Unfriend Day right after American election day?  We've just gone through months of unfriending, with no promotion needed.

Beyond those problems, I don't see why there's a problem with having too many friends.  Unfriend Day's page says it's to "protect the sacred nature of friendship," but I don't think that's a problem.  My close friendships are not harmed just because my friend is also friends with someone they met at night school eight years ago, or the woman in HR he can't remember the last name of.

I'm not just targeting Kimmel here: Others have tried to put down social media friends over the years, portraying them as meaningless things that are little more than acquaintances.  I've always thought that feeling was misguided; there's a lot to be said for those lighter friendships.  I'm not pretending that they are the equivalent of the people you share a close connection with.  But they are a big part of your life. After all, since those relationships include most of your co-workers, and many people you socialize with, you probably spend half your waking hours with them.  They have a big impact on whether you gave good days or bad, and a person who has a positive effect on you can make a big difference in your life.

And the fact is, you don't know when you may have to depend on a sort-of friend.  You don't know when misfortune may strike, and you might need to rely on your acquaintances.  You may find that when push comes to shove, they care more than you expected.  Maybe they'll even loan you fifty dollars.

So don't unfriend your less-close friends.  Instead, be glad that we have technology to maintain connections with so many people. And you could reflect on how so many people have affected your life. Or at least, wonder why anyone would look at this world and decide the problem is that there are too many friends.

Mustang Silly

Back in 2002, GM took the Chevy Camaro out of production due to poor sales. I read an editorial in the Detroit Free Press that tried to explain why the Camaro's sales were low, especially considering that it's eternal rival, Ford's Mustang, was still doing well. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it now, but the gist was that the Mustang had some subtlety while the Camaro was too showy, a point they illustrated by refering to the song "Bitchin' Camaro" by the Dead Milkmen. I believe the way they put it was that the Mustang is a cool car for cool people, while the Camaro is the car that tries too hard for people who are desperate to look cool.

At the time, that seemed to me to be an accurate assessment. The Mustang of that era was a fairly modest car, an evolution of a design first used in the late seventies. While the Camaro contemporary was a gaudy vehicle that somehow managed to be sleek but not sexy. So I was totally in line with the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press and the Dead Milkmen.

But I'm not so sure anymore. If you don't follow automotive news on the Internet, let me explain. Owners of impressive cars often get together, for car shows, or more informal gatherings such as the Cars and Coffee series. And when people leave these gatherings, they often can't resist the temptation to lay some rubber. And since many people who own powerful cars cannot drive them nearly as well as they think they can, these burnouts often result in the driver losing control rather embarrassingly. And because there are usually a lot of people around watching this parade of impressive cars leaving the meet, there are a lot of people on hand to see the embarrassed driver, and usually at least one person recording it on their phone. It goes on YouTube, goes viral, yada yada yada.

What's weird is that the car driven by that bad driver is usually a Mustang. I'm not sure why: the Chevy Camaro and Dodge Challenger offer cars of similar design and power, and the Camaro is currently selling better than the Mustang, so you would expect that there would be plenty of Camaro crash footage too. But it's more likely to be a Mustang. And that's led to a bunch of memes on the subject. And that has led to one celebrated case of a Mustang owner who claimed he wanted to sell his car because he was sick of the memes.

In my own experience, I have to say that there may be something to this idea that Mustang owners are a little different. I mean, I think we all start to notice differences in the behaviour of drivers based on their cars. Even if you don't know much about cars, you've probably realized that you have to give SUV's a wider berth, because there is a good chance they haven't noticed you. And similarly, you realize that BMW and Mercedes drivers will notice you, but won't care. And I find that Mustang drivers are more likely to push the limits. When seeing one of them, I do subconsciously ready myself for aggression.

I don't know why there'd by a difference, since both cars seem to have a similar gaze-upon-my-masculinity style to them. But somehow the recklessly aggressive are opting for the Mustang. That's a little troubling for me. Mustang vs. Camaro is one of those dichotomies where you're drawn to one or the other, and I've always had a preference for the Mustang. But I have a much stronger aversion to the culture around it. So now I'm not sure which I would prefer out of these two cars I'm unlikely to ever own.

These Memes Won't Turn Anyone On

I'm kind if surprised that people are still using homosexuality as a putdown.  For instance, I've seen a few variations on the graphic to the right.

As you can see, it makes pronouncements about how various musical jobs will affect a man's ability to attract women.  For the most part it shows the hierarchy we'd expect, putting the singer and guitarist at the top.  Although in my experience, people are quicker to slag the drummer than the bassist, but either way, neither gets the respect they deserve.

But it's disappointing that they use the implication of gay men to deliver the ultimate put down to the keyboardist.  Yes, I know, homosexuality has been devalued forever, this shouldn't be news.  But with its increasing acceptance in society, you'd think the people who still see it as an insult would be aging legislators who don't know how to use the Internet.

So it worries me that a lot of the acceptance of homosexuals may be shallower than we think.  People have gotten to the point of accepting their existence, or their lack of evilness at least. But perhaps they still haven't gotten to the point of seeing it as equal to any other sexuality.

Like I said, I've seen a few variations on it.  One was to insult different types of cars.  Unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just went looking, but the same point can be made with these graphics that reflect demonizing of gay men, or possibly straight women:

And of course it reasserts my point that the Chevy/Ford rivalry is just a meaningless lobbing of the same insults back and forth.

But the breaking point that prompted me to write this was when I saw the meme applied to programming languages:

I assume that if you aren't familiar with programming, then this looks rather surreal, a bunch of unfamiliar names arbitrarily assigned to implications of virility. Well let me reassure you that even if you are familiar with all these languages, it looks about the same.  I really have no idea how they decided on these, other than that it was obviously put together by a PHP programmer. As the oldest and least-forgiving language there, one would think that C will make you attractive to others. Maybe Perl if you're looking for someone particularly kinky. But the point is, that shows how silly this all is. People are just flinging outdated insults at others, but all they're doing is exposing their own bigotry .

Voices Carry

I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice.  I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices.  I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.

In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.

Surprisingly,  I don't often read tweets in other's voices,  though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow.  So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet.  The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.

I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did.  But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often.  Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV,  but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote,  say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long.  Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.