Feel Good Ink

My parents asked me if I had bought the new book Fire and Fury. I had not, nor had they. It seems that we had each independently come to the same conclusion: it's a waste of money to buy the book, as you can just watch the news for a few days and they will read out the best parts to you.

Of course, you don't even need to do that much; the book can be summed up easily: Trump is an idiot. And you had probably already come to that conclusion. So I'm not sure why people are buying the book; you'll be reading anecdotes you've already heard, telling you something you already know. And apparently, it's now been leaked onto Wikileaks. I guess that site is trying to hurt the book sales as revenge for attacking their guy. And they're doing it by spreading a book that makes their guy look bad. Remember when the world sorta made sense?

An interesting aspect of the news around the book is a joke from cartoonist Ben Ward, who tweets as @pixelatedboat. He decided to spoof the bizarre anecdotes leaking out of the book by creating his own totally-exaggerated fake anecdote that was supposedly from the book. In his excerpt, it was alleged that Trump was very displeased that the TV in the White House does not have "The Gorilla Channel." This despite there never having been a gorilla channel. To placate him, aides created a fake Gorilla Channel by editing together Gorilla documentaries and feeding them on a loop to Trump's TV.

Of course, as many people are finding these days, it's pretty much impossible to ridicule through exaggeration. After all, making a fake cable channel is only a little beyond what we've heard White House employees do to placate their boss. I noticed that in one online discussion people were trying to assure themselves that the passage was fake, and the final convincing argument was not the content, but the fact that the author had put periods outside the quotes, which goes against standard editing practices.

What I found interesting is that Netflix tweeted a plea to stop asking them for the Gorilla Channel. By the same principle mentioned above, I have no idea if they are joking. But imagine if they aren't: here we all are making fun of Trump for wanting this channel that is quite silly and doesn't even exist. And yet, it turns out that given the chance, lots of people want the same thing.

And that's something that worries me in all this. Much as I don't like Trump, I worry that when we ridicule him, we let the rest of society off the hook. After all, the troubling aspect of his story is not the fact that he exists, but the fact that he has been allowed to take this much power. And to address that problem, we have to concern ourselves with the competence of our whole society, not just Trump. Reading about his exploits of stupidity makes us feel superior, but it allows us to avoid the need we all have to look at our inner Trump.

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.

Still Working On Automating My Blog

There was a news item recently about Dominos experimenting with driverless pizza delivery. That's interesting, as it's yet another of the common things in our society that will be revolutionized with automation. There are so many things like that, where it's obvious once you think about it that self-driving cars will totally change it, but we just haven't thought it through. I mean, automated ice cream trucks.

Science Fiction author John Scalzi pointed out how this ruins Snow Crash, the Sci-Fi classic who's main character is a pizza deliverer. It's yet another case where we didn't think through how technology would work, imagining this futuristic world with a guy driving his own car. No, he'd be unemployed. That is, unless you believe the Dominos president, who said that the company's 100,000 drivers would take on "different roles" within the company. To put that in perspective, GM employs a little over 200,000 people in total. There's no way they need that many people tossing pizza dough. That is, in the unlikely event that it doesn't also get automated. You have to wonder just how many people a company like Dominos will employ in a few years.

But the thing that stuck out to me was how the whole story was presented as some sort of cutting edge research. The TV version I saw made it sound like Dominos was trying to build their own driverless car so that they could deliver pizza with it. Of course, developing their own self-driving technology would make about as much sense as designing your own car specially for pizza delivery. I'm sure you could make a pizza-optimized car, but no one did that, since the cost would be astronomical compared to just buying a general perpose car. Really, Dominos and all other delivery-based businesses will just use mass-produced self-driving cars.

Sure, there's a bit of work before they perfect automated pizza delivery, since you'll have to have the customer access the pizza themselves. But that's not really on the same level of research. Nor is it particularly newsworthy. Really, this is just Ford doing the self-driving research and development they would be doing anyway, but letting Dominos piggy-back by providing a cute task for their prototype to do. And Dominos gets the publicity when it becomes a news story.

The Men They Couldn't Hang, Stepped To The Mic And Sang

Both Sides Now

There's been a lot of work parsing Trump's unwillingness to single-out the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville.  Most of the focus I've seen is on his administration's long history of playing footsie with the far-right.  But I think that's misguided.  Trump isn't trying to reach out to Neo-Nazis; he's trying to appeal to the people who don't really like the KKK and friends, but are also really uncomfortable with Black Lives Matter and many other activist groups. In short, they don't like people disrupting the status quo .

In A Mirror, Darkly

Trump did his best to establish false-equivalence between heavily armed fascists and those protesting them. Some in the media fell for it, replaying his press conference antics without noting whether his claims were true.  But I think journalists are slowly getting wise.  Or at least, they've started running with the "Trump is nuts" narrative instead of the usual "one side against the other" narrative.

But what really worries me is a relatively small part of the press conference.  Trump didn't merely draw a parallel between the side, but he labeled the counter protesters, giving them the name that seemed the natural counterpart to the so-called "Alt Right." It's a name no one was actually using, and doesn't really make sense, since there isn't really any new force on the left, just the usual groups working harder when fighting the new efforts associated with the Alt Right.

You notice I'm not saying the new name?  That's because I think it's going to be the most dangerous thing to come out of this whole event.  A lot of people are laughing at the name; after all, it's defined as anyone who opposes Nazis, so that would seem to be most of humanity. But the problem is, it's an invitation for false-equivalence.  It invites people to group those countering hate together as though it was one group with its own agenda, rather than what it is: people acting on what most of our society believes in. It makes it sound like they are as much a separate group outside the mainstream as the hat groups themselves are.  In short, it invites the sort of world view I described Trump encouraging in the first section. So I cringe every time I here someone repeat it, even if it is to ridicule it.  It's such a dangerous idea that you shouldn't be giving it any publicity.

Working For The Clampdown

One strange aspect of Charlottesville was the focus of the anger.  Throughout most of my life, whenever bigotry has bubbled to the surface in America, it's generally been pointed at Hispanics, Blacks, or Muslims.  Yes, I know, there's more to it than that, but those are the big targets that you hear about from race-baiting politicians and conservative media.

And yet, when you wade through the ground-level coverage of the hate groups present, they frequently jumped straight to Jews as their hated group of choice.  I really didn't see that coming, since the march was supposedly about a Civil War statue, and their hero in the White House has generally left them alone.  During the campaign, I mentioned that Jews were staying away from Trump, and one explanation given was that they understood that they would inevitably be targeted by the movement.  They sure called that right.

But why are the haters so angry at Jews, despite no coaching from the media or politicians? Recently, an explanation was proposed in the Washington Post: Because they have the privilege to fight back.

Say, remember when "haters" just meant people who were really negative?  Taylor Swift used to sing about them?  Innocent times.

This Used To Be My Playground

There's a dispute going on about how to see Charlottesville. On one side, you have (mostly white) people saying things like "everything has changed" or "this isn't America." On the other side, you have (mostly black) people saying, "this is nothing new."

To some extent, this is a misunderstanding of nuance.  If a person says, "this isn't my America," it's not clear whether they mean, "I refuse to believe this hatred exists here," or, "my vision of this country is a society that's better than this."  The first interpretation is naive and ignorant, while the second is just very idealized rhetoric, and not really a problem.

The trouble is that in recent years, a lot of the most egregious incidents of racism in the U.S. have been disguised within government and corporate policies, hidden in societal norms, or covered over by the justice system.  So activists have gotten used to pointing out that there have long been problems that most of the population just isn't seeing.  That's become enough of an instinctive reaction that even after an incident that seems like a game changer, they're still telling everyone that it wasn't that big of a deal.  I can understand why they would feel that way, but I don't think that's the best message to be putting out there right now.  At a time when white America is finally ready to believe that racism is a problem, you don't want to be telling them that no, it's business as usual.

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.

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.

Fill Ms. Fission And Charge Up The Flex Resistor

I want to assure you that I’m not going to talk about cars for a third straight post. This is about technology and media, and it’s only tangentially inspired by cars.

Earlier this week I wrote about the big rumour that Apple would buy McLaren. That was reported all over the net, but the Yahoo! article attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Their article referred - both in the headline and the article - to McLaren being vaulted to fame when their car was used as the time machine in Back To The Future. Of course, car fans, movie fans, children of the eighties, and pretty much everyone else, knows that was a Delorean. It’s hard to imagine that you could confuse the two: McLaren was only making race cars when the movie came out, but wouldn’t go into street cars until more than a decade later, by which time Delorean was long gone. Also, McLaren been pretty profitable, and haven’t yet had any cocaine scandals. Pretty much the only thing the two have in common is five of the letters in their names.

So it begs the question of how this could have happened. I mean, I think of myself as having a good memory, and I’m not getting paid to do this. Yet if there’s any chance that I’ve misremembered a fact, I look it up to confirm it. Why do I do this? Because it’s the Internet, and you can look up anything in five seconds. So it’s hard to imagine the mentality of someone who is evidently writing about topics they don’t know well, but doing it all from their flawed memory. In fact, the article somehow stayed up for at least another 24 hours with the incorrect reference (it’s down now.)

Of course, Yahoo! had something else on their mind for those 24 hours: news that they’d been hacked two years ago, exposing the information of the whole half-billion people with an account, and they didn’t even know about it until now. Many people asked how they could have made such a mistake, but I was thinking yeah, I can see that.

But let's not make it all about Yahoo!; Really, this is part of a bigger problem that the news media doesn't value knowledge. I'm not sure what exactly they do value, but it's clear that the people in front of cameras and keyboards don't know more than most people. It's also a good reminder of the work needed in Internet news. During the current election campaign, I've been increasingly believing that the current media establishment is doing more harm than good, and that I can't wait for new media to paradigm-shift it out of existence. Well, perhaps that new media isn't ready.

My Tiff With TIFF

It's time for the Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF. I kind of dread hearing about it. Sure,  I like movies, and I'm proud that we've got one of the world's biggest festivals here in Canada.  What I hate is how the Canadian media goes all star-struck and treats it like a big celebrity get together.

Yes,  there are a lot of celebrities in town, but the whole event is about movies, so that should be the focus of the reporting,  not whether you saw Leo on the red carpet.   And I realize that there are plenty of people out there who want to hear about celebrities, but we've created specialized outlets for those people.  They aren't watching the news I'm  watching, they're watching a bunch of celebrity-focused news programs I could try recounting the names of, but won't for fear of embarrassing myself.

So CBC News Network shouldn't be excitedly reporting celebrity sightings first and movie news second,  since the viewership has different priorities.  If got really cared about fame,  you shouldn't be working at the national broadcaster, you should have sold your soul and gone to work at CTV.

Tour Of Duty

President Obama has visited Louisiana to tour flood damaged areas, several days after the flood itself.  Media seems to be covering it like this:

Critics are complaining that Obama took too long to visit.  He was on vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Usually visiting disaster areas is part of the job of being president.  But he didn't visit because the Governor of Louisiana asked him not to until authorities had better control of the situation.

Um, isn't that kind of burying the lead?  You've got a story about the President not going to Louisiana, and you know why he didn't go to Louisiana, but you decide to take us on a tour of other explanations that you know aren't true.  In effect, you don't actually have a story, you have a perfectly ordinary situation.  It would be like this:

An Unidentified Object was seen in the skies last night.  It might be some sort of supernatural phenomena.  It could have been an alien spacecraft.  Many people claim to have been abducted by aliens.  But in this case, it was just a weather balloon.

Again, not actually a story: It's something boring that you've made into a story by being conveniently stupid.

But to look at it another way, it's not really "burying the lead" (or "lede," as some people apparently spell it.) That refers to leaving the interesting part of the story until the end.  In this case, you're putting the interesting part at the start, the way you're supposed to.  Instead, you're leaving the truth until the end. It's kind of like in televised sports, where they always show the replay from every bad angle first, then finally play it from the angle that everyone knew was going to be the best.

And I can understand why the Governor wouldn't want him to visit.  A visit by a President or any other high-ranking leader is a big production requiring lots of people.  It's a waste of precious effort for them to make a token trip to a devastated region.  Given that they can't actually do anything, it's little more than a photo-op, which is pretty selfish. So hopefully this will encourage a new tradition where leaders stay away from the immediate aftermath of disasters, and find some other ritual for the leader to demonstrate basic empathy .

The Matter Of The Truth

BBC World News has been running a commercial for their coverage of the U.S. election. In it they're trying to showcase their impartiality, listing off the things they won't tell you, like "who to vote for" or "what to think." I can get behind that, but what really stands out is that two of the most prominent things they promise not to tell you is "who's right," and "who's wrong." To that, I must ask, isn't telling us what's right the whole purpose of journalism?

Of course, this philosophy is hardly unique: it's obvious that this is the policy of most news organizations now: report the claims of both sides without comment. Actually mentioning which side is lying and which is telling the truth is considered bias. It's been this way for a while, but in an election campaign in which we've seen some of the most brazen lying in living memory, the noncritical reporting strategy is lookin sillier all the time.

So the ad's promise is not a foreign concept, but I don't think I've ever seen a news organization state it so boldly. If you hang on to the old ideas that journalism is supposed to be about finding the truth, it's pathetic to see a reputable news outlet promising not to bother you with reality.

New York Solitudes

Lots of people are weighing-in on a recent New York Times article declaring that Canada is now "hip." This is based in part on the election of Justin Trudeau, but also on a selection of Canadians. Not surprisingly it includes Drake, The Weeknd, and Justin Bieber. I was surprised to see Sarah Polley, since it seems like she's been around forever. But she is only a couple of years older than Ryan Gosling (also on the list.) But there were also lots of non-obvious selections; nice to see them recognizing Grimes.

But this isn't the only time Canada has made a prominent appearance in a New York newspaper.  The New York Post had a notable cover attacking Ted Cruz. In the latest Republican debate, Cruz had attacked "New York values" as an indirect way of attaching Donald Trump. So the Post - which is living proof that some New Yorkers have values in common with Cruz - showed a cartoon of The Statue of Liberty giving the finger. That was pretty appropriate, but what bothered me was the comment that Cruz should "Go back to Canada." (Cruz was born in Canada.)

Aside from the fact that we don't want him back, there's the obvious point that Canadian values have a lot more in common with New York values than with the extreme social conservatism Cruz is selling. But this is part of a trend: I've seen many Americans associate Cruz with Canada without appreciating the irony, and in some cases actually thinking Cruz is somehow an example of Canadians.

So I'm not sure what New Yorkers must think of us: some see us as cool, in part because of a liberal politician, while others find us an appropriate dumping ground for a politician who's conservative even by American standards.

Broken Resolutions

You may have seen that Canada's shiny new federal government missed its goal on Syrian refugees. During the campaign, the Liberals pledged to bring in 25,000 refugees by the end of the year. When they got into office and realized just what a logistical nightmare it is to move so many people. It's essentially moving Corner Brook, Newfoundland to another continent.

So they reduced the goal to 25,000 over all, and just 10,000 by the end of the year. That's a mere Selkirk, Saskatchewan. Much easier. But unfortunately, that goal was also missed, with only 6,000 entering the country by year's end.

That's unfortunate, and the media and opposition should take them to task for it, but I've been disappointed by how they've both been sleepwalking through the broken-government-promises script on this issue.

The problem is, this is an unusual issue, since the breaking of the promise was based pretty much entirely on put judgement on what's possible. Normally, the cause is laziness, graft, or misleading the public about the governing party's motives. So it sounds strange hearing people berate the government over dishonesty when they have in fact put in an actual effort that's come up against the constraints of reality.

But this is a difficult issue to criticize. Normally, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition would be all over the government's first mistake. But after trying to ride hijabphobia into office, they can't really complain that the government isn't letting Muslims into the country fast enough. And the go-to criticism style in Canada is to compare us unfavorably to other countries, preferably the Americans. But again, you can hardly cry scandal over our slowly accepting 25,000 refugees, when 10,000 refugees has them flirting with fascism.

So ultimately, this is a uniquely Canadian scandal. We're worried that we aren't doing altruistic actions fast enough, and we don't really know how to word our complaints about it.

First Among Equals

This is shaping up to be a really close election in Canada.  The parties are within a few percent of each other, and the latest projections show that they'd each win roughly the same number of seats.  That will lead to some interesting political horse trading after the election to determine who has the power.  Did I really just say, "horse trading?"  That's how close it is! I'm using century-old slang to describe it.

But that political showdown can wait. For now the point I want to make is: please stop talking about who is "winning" or "surging" or the most this or the least that.  When everyone is within the margin of error, it's misleading to talk about that.  We're told the NDP is winning at 31%, while the Conservatives are languishing in last, at 28%. A report said Stephen Harper is most trusted with the economy, then we're quickly told that it was by a 35-30-25 margin. 

Let's just give up on the idea that anything definitive is going to come out of the polls, or the election itself.  If someone starts getting close to majority levels (say, 40%) then you are invited to make a big deal over it.  But for now admit that we've got nothing to talk about.  The media may as well show the pollsters drawing lots to decide who's leading in the polls today.  Drawing lots? Who says that any more?

Electioneering: No Surprises

In the U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump has been the big story. But now that Bernie Sanders is surging on the Democratic side, the big story is how two no-chance candidates are doing so well. The two don't have anything in common policy-wise, so pundits are seizing on their one commonality: neither one looks or acts like a traditional politician.

In trying to explain Trump, it had already become an article of faith that voters were drawn to his authenticity, with some talking heads saying that voters are so sick of artificial candidates that this was the main reason for his success. Although it wasn't usually stated, there seemed to a implication that his supporters were so desperate for authenticity, that they supported him in spite of his racist, sexist rhetoric, as long as he was speaking from the heart.

The problem with that explanation is that fake politicians are like attack ads: everyone says they hate them, many claim they don't work, yet they just keep winning. If authenticity was so important to people, how is comes filled with such pretentious, manufactured politicians. Even Trump himself has left plenty of clues that he's as fake as anyone. His initial attack on Mexicans was followed by a revelation that his own clothing line was made in Mexico. But his supporters - like so many people before them - chose to ignore facts that doesn't fit the narrative they wanted to believe.

I get the impression that the media is hanging on to the people-just-want-authenticity explanation because it’s hard to accept that so many people are attracted to Trump’s repulsive message. But really, the Trump phenomenon isn't hard to understand, intellectually or emotionally. He's polling what, 24%? That's 24% of Republicans, so about 12% of Americans in general. Is it really so hard to believe that there are 12% of Americans who are bigoted enough to agree with the content of his message?

This also helps to explain the other question pundits are struggling with: surely he can't win, so how is he going to lose? They either conclude that eventually he's going to go too far with his wild statements, or that his campaign with implode in confusion and infighting. Those things could happen, but there's a simpler explanation. Think back a few weeks; what were we making fun of before we had Trump to make fun of? We were joking about the huge number of Republican candidates. Here we are taking about a guy "dominating" with about a quarter of the vote. For him to win the nomination, he'd have to win over lots more voters, just like any of the other candidates. And that's his biggest obstacle: there can't be many supporters of Rubio, Jindal, Fiorina, et al who would go to Trump when their preferred candidate drops out. Really, Trump is a story only because there are so many candidates splitting the sane vote.

On the Democratic side, Sanders’ surge is not surprising or even unusual. There have been lots of election cycles where a party flirts with a candidate who seems to represent a purer expression of the party’s ideology. For a precedent, you only have to look to the first President Clinton. He was one of the few presidents who didn’t win the New Hampshire Primary. It was won by Paul Tsongas; remember him? Didn’t think so. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush didn’t win New Hampshire either; John McCain did. Say, why do we care so much about New Hampshire again?

Howard Dean and Pat Buchanan are other examples of party favourites who gave the eventual winner a run for his money. In each case, the party eventually voted for the less exciting but more mainstream candidate. Why? There are a lot of reasons, but I believe the biggest is that as the election process goes on, the members get a chance to look at their opposition, and remember who they are and what they stand for. After a while, everyone starts to remember that their main goal is to win the election, and the fantasy of having an ideologically perfect candidate isn’t as important. A few more weeks of Trump leading on the Republican side would be bad news for Sanders' campaign.

Rodeo Dive

News is getting way too excited about this balloon guy. He attached balloons to a chair and intended to skydive into the Calgary Stampede or something - I can't be bothered to pay attention.  But news organizations are loving to use it to fill space and time.

There are plenty of reasons why: It's unusual, it presents a nice visual, it ties in with the movie Up.  And here in Canada, it's local content. Plus it's a difficult time for news in general, since it's hard to make the Greece story intelligible or interesting, while Canadian news just keeps reporting on forest fires.

But even modern media has some ethics, and this was a very thinly-veiled publicity stunt.  Usually sports broadcasters have a policy not to show spectators who run on the field, and that's essentially what this is.  No, it's worse than that, it's essentially a less-clever version of that Fan Man guy who crashed (literally) a boxing match in 1993.

And while we're talking about being less-clever, this is the YouTube age, and our bar for being impressed by stunts is pretty high.  Just using lots of balloons to perform a stunt that didn't really work hardly seems notable any more.

You're Watching The Turing News Network

There's a phrase you sometimes see in discussions of artificial intelligence: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." That phrase illustrates some of the problems with getting computers to understand human language.

• "Flies" can be a plural of a common insect, or the third-person singular form of the verb "fly"
• "Like" is either a verb indicating affection, or a preposition indicating similarity.
• Many nouns (such as "fruit") can be turned into adjectives.

See, it's grammatically legitimate to assume that these sentences are telling us that time-traveling insects use arrows as their weapon of choice, and fruit travels through the air in the same way a banana does. The point is that you can't understand human speech or writing without a lot of background knowledge about the human experience. And that's why you should be patient with Siri.

Of course, even other human beings sometimes misunderstand things when the meanings of words and phrases are ambiguous. I find this happens to me often when reading the news scroll on BBC World News. I mentioned this on Twitter a couple of months back:

BBC World, a headline like "French Air Strike" sounds rather more military than what you meant, "Air France Strike"

— Jason Roe (@JasonTRoe) April 8, 2015

But then last night I had a great deal of trouble parsing the headline, "Baby from ovary frozen in childhood." Wait, was the baby frozen? Wouldn't the baby have to be frozen in childhood; I mean, it hasn't experienced any other life stages yet. And aren't all babies from ovaries?

This was followed by the solemn even-harder-to-read news about the Alps plane crash: "Alps crash remains land in Germany." Does no one read these?

There’s also the problem that the scroll is all in capitals, and they are unable or unwilling to use periods in initials. That makes American news hard to read. A visit by the CEO of China’s Alibaba.com to the U.S. comes out as, "Alibaba boss in us charm offensive." Really, he's in us right now? And I thought Amazon was everywhere.

And they just had to decode to refer to ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State as "IS". With the U.S. fighting them, you get a headline like, “Us ‘spends $9M a day’ fighting is.”

Bogus Technology, Dude

A lot of people have been talking about this article in the New York Times by then-technology writer, Erik Sandberg-Diment. That's in spite of the fact it's from 1985. What's notable is that it is about laptops, or at least the overgrown calculators that passed for laptops in the eighties.  The article has been widely ridiculed for getting it about as wrong as possible.

As an aside, I wonder why people are only now seeing it. Presumably it's been sitting there on the NYT web site for years, just waiting for someone to find it. Maybe there's someone with a hobby of reading the Times thirty years later for fun.

The website Boing Boing made the point that the lesson of this article is less about obtuse journalism, and more about how companies try to push a technology before it's ready for the public. I think they've got a point. Consider what a "laptop" was in 1985: it wasn't just a portable desktop. These machines were underpowered even by the standards of the time. They made do with tiny, monochrome screens that only had room for a half-dozen lines.  In retrospect, the only reason those machines look useful is that we look at them knowing what they would evolve into.  Really, they were trying to produce future technology with what was available at the time: in other words, they were low-level steampunk.

It also reminds us that predictions have to be taken with a little context. One thing that stood out to me in the article was that he kept focusing on those laptops as failing due to their software. That's quite nonsensical today: we're used to laptops having the same software available as a desktop. But in those days, they were limited to custom-made, perhaps built-in, software, made to deal with the less-powerful processors and limited screens. If he could see what we consider a laptop today, he might change his tune. I'm guessing anyway; I couldn't find a comment from Sandberg-Diment himself.  As far as I can tell, he left technology journalism to go back to his first love, painting. 

Anyway, the point is, our world is well beyond the scope of a 1985 newspaper article.  Back in the twentieth century people thought of "the future" as starting in 2000, so we're not just living in his future, we're living beyond it. Who knows what people in the eighties would have imagined 2015 to look like. Oh, wait, we don't have to wonder, they made a whole movie about it.

I bring this up as someone who has made negative predictions about a few technologies myself. I've been bearish on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and drones. So I feel I should emphasize that I'm not saying these things will never happen, just that they'll take longer than people - particularly the media - think they'll take. I have no doubt that they're all possible, and barring disaster they'll all happen eventually.

But another point on considering misguided predictions from the past, is that it's never clear when to finally pass judgement. A second part of the article that stood out to me was his ridiculing the idea of lugging a laptop home from work, when you could just carry a few floppy disks. And of course, today we could replace those floppies with a thumb drive that's more portable and durable. So that's a good question, why do we lug our laptops/tablets/phones around?

The simple answer is that in a world where computers do so many things, the data and applications specific to us are more than we can fit on a thumb drive. But I wonder how long the current situation will last. More and more devices are connected, and more of our data is on the cloud. All we need are some breakthroughs in security, encryption and identification, and we would have a world where people feel comfortable accessing their personal data from whatever devices are available, not necessarily their own personal devices. To put it another way, we expect artificial lighting to be available wherever we go, but that doesn't mean we carry flashlights everywhere. It could be that people in the future will look back at laptops as a strange aberration in the history of computers, and see this New York Times article as very prescient.

I Didn't Need To Read The News Today, Oh Boy

I've always hated it when headlines tell you obvious things. To me, news is defined as being surprising. So a headline like "Obama Does X, Republicans Furious" is not news. But you could argue that such headlines contain some information, even if it's just that things are proceeding normally. "Sun To Come Up Tomorrow" at least confirms that the earth is continuing to spin on its axis.

But then there are the headlines that literally contain no information. There's a great weird I learned in mathematics for this: tautological. It means something that is obviously true, like 1=1. But you see it outside of math too. For instance, you might see a headline like, "X Happens, Critics Sceptical." That doesn't tell you anything, because a critic is someone who is sceptical. It's like saying "Pedestrians Walk."

But now there's a new class of useless headlines, and I'm not sure what to call them. If that first class is "things that we already know," and the second is "things that have to be true," then the third class is "things you didn't already know, or even consider, but that you immediately understood the moment you read about it." My first example of this last type of headline is, "Why You Shouldn’t Watch Porn In The Same Room As Your Parrot."  Which you can learn about here if you really need any more explanation.

What's Invisible And Read All Over?

Everybody is talking about this week's issue of Charlie Hebdo.  And no one is showing it.  I'm trying to think of something that has been as talked in the media without being shown in the media.  The only other things I can think of are celebrity sex tapes.  Even then they usually show a few brief clips.  No one is daring to even show part of the Mohammed cartoon on the cover.

On the one hand, I can't blame them.  During the Danish Cartoon Controversy, a lot of smaller or more ideologically-motivated publications published the cartoons as a matter of principle.  I didn't really agree with that: I don't think you need to help spread people's message in order to defend their right to speak. 

To put it another way: they say the test of your commitment to free speech is defending the right to speak even for a speaker you disagree with or are offended by.  Thus, it's entirely possible that you would want to support a person's right to speak while not wanting to help them speak (or listen to them.) From that perspective, I would think it was appropriate not to reproduce the cartoons, since many publications would support the right to publish them while not supporting the sentiments expressed in them.

In this case, it just seems strange.  People are talking about this magazine that is mysteriously absent from the reports about it.  It got really weird when one reporter held up some of the inside pages for the camera, even though they were careful not to allow even a glimpse of the cover.  So the usual images you would expect from a story about a magazine (like showing it on a newsstand) are suspiciously absent.  At this point it's getting pretty silly: we're worried the extremists are going to go after every news outlet in the world for catching view, in the background, of a cartoon drawing of Mohammed.

My Word

It's that time of year again.  Time for dictionaries to get free publicity by declaring a word of the year, or a selection of words that will be added to their books.  I was going to rant about these choices, but it seems I've done that before.  More than once.  But the fact is, sometimes these words aren't really deserving of their accolades; I'm still waiting to hear anyone use the word "infosnacking" after it was declared 2005 word of the year by Webster's New World College Dictionary.

So I have a proposition.  This is for any dictionaries or linguistic societies out there that have put off finding a word of the year for 2014, and are now scrambling to find a new word they can use to get those cheap mentions from the world's news providers. A few weeks ago, I used the word "Googlespace" to describe the proportion of relevant results a word or phrase gets.  For instance, if I Google "jaguar", most of the results are for the car company, rather than the cat or the football team.  So the company occupies more "Googlespace" than the other uses of the word.
You'll note that I used the word without explanation, as though I'm assuming that my hip, fashionable readers on the bleeding-edge of technology would already know what it means, so you can reasonably claim that the word is already used and about to hit the mainstream.

I assure you that my royalty demands will be reasonable.  But if you don't want to use my word, you can always make up a word for a manufactured news item used to get free publicity.