Advanced Tweetology

It's always weird when people I follow on Twitter turn out to be following, or at least know about, each other. Really, Ohio-based sci-fi author John Scalzi, you follow Nigerian-American author Teju Cole? It got to strange levels today when the only other country accounts I follow - Ireland and Sweden - started conversing. What were the odds of that? There has to be some weird aspect of the human psyche that brings people of eclectic backgrounds together, people that seemingly don’t have anything in common, yet are drawn to one another.

I’m thinking you could study this if you mapped out all the people on Twitter. You know, people who follow each other are placed close to each other on the graph, so you could find people nearby who are most similar.  We could use this to introduce ourselves. Tell me about yourself. I'm in sector E-27-5.3, and yourself?

And surely it would be easier to meet people this way. Currently there are meet-up groups for a variety of interests, even meet-ups for Twitter itself. But instead people could get together with others who follow the same people.

Well York U Too

Recently, York University has been running ads like this one, featuring current students talking about their future accomplishments:

I appreciate achievement and aspirations as much as anyone. So why do I hate these ads?

An obvious reason is that these are young, idealistic university students with dreams of great, world-changing accomplishments. That's me from twenty years ago, before I became bitter and pragmatic.  But really, I think there's more than just personal reasons for not liking the ads:

• What the world needs isn't more breakthroughs - we've had plenty of those. What we need in a general improvement in our maturity. If anything, we need to get past the idea that brilliant people will invent our way out of current problems.
• This is such typical university thinking: total focus on high achievement, total ignorance of the majority of students.  Really it's that good-but-not-great majority who pay most of the university's bills, and carry most of society's work.
• They're such generic dreams: landing on Mars? Curing cancer? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see that happen.  But anyone who's been paying attention in recent decades has noticed that innovation no longer works that way.  Technological innovations are rarely predictable ahead of time, and medical progress is a series of unheralded advancements, not massive breakthroughs.
• They also seem to be an old-fashioned view of the future, if that makes any sense.  Space travel? Vague discussion of curing diseases?  What about genetic engineering, nanotechnology, data mining.  Trade your Asimov in for some Gibson.
• For that matter, they're not even realistic time frames.  Another ad talks about the first human on Mars in 2027.  Fourteen years?  Who's going to believe that?
• If I could offer advice to current and future university students, it's that you can't be aiming at pre-planned ideals of success.  Instead you have to be willing to be flexible in your life goals, and derive self-esteem from a wide variety of accomplishments.  If you've already written a life story, you're setting yourself up for disappointment regardless of which university you choose.

This Won't Work

See what I did there? Or rather, see what I didn't do there? I had a great opportunity to make a twerking pun, but I didn't take it. I didn't take it, because the topic's really been taken too far.  We'd already taken it too far a couple of weeks back, but I finally snapped when I read today's comic strips.  Yes, the Capp Gap has gone by, and now we're reading comic strips making twerking jokes.

Now you may wonder: Jason, you appreciate satire - and you hate pop culture - so wouldn't you want lots of humour about a popular (and silly) trend?  Well yes, I do like jokes about popular culture, but hardly any jokes are actually about twerking. Mostly they fall into one of two categories:

• Generic references to the new tend without any apparent knowledge of it. These are the late night monologue jokes for grandparents who have heard the term but don't know what it means. E.g. "President Obama and John Boehner met to discuss the budget, but they didn't make much progress because they spent most of the time twerking!"
• Fearful references to the trend as something you wouldn't want to see. They assume you know what it is, or at least have decided you're not comfortable with it. E.g. "I missed the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week, but that's alright.  Who wants to see the opening number with Richard Dawkins twerking?"

So yes, I welcome real jokes about twerking.  Ridicule the idea that a woman miming sex using items she appears to have found in a younger sister's closet is supposed to be sexy.  Make fun of how were getting worked up over badly simulated sex twenty years after the Internet went mainstream.  Heck, even make fun of that poor middle-aged mother trying desperately to keep up with the times who confuses the words "twerk" and "tweet" at the worst possible moment.  But let's forget the brain-dead fill-in-the-blanks jokes. They are, to satire, what twerking is, to sex.

One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is

I've complained about this before, but it bugs me when news apps or web sites have lists of titles of news stories at other sites, but they shorten the titles, and what you get makes little sense.  For instance, the News & Weather app that came with my Android phone is currently reporting articles with the following headlines: "The Jaguars and Broncos fighting on Twitter will probably be more" and, "Thanksgivukkah? Gobble tov! American Jews prepare for."  Okay, admittedly that last one was going to sound silly no matter what, especially when you consider that it's coming from the Christian Science Monitor. 

But today I was surprised when the app linked to this story about racing driver Dario Franchitti's accident this weekend.  The headline is, "Dario Franchitti recovering from frightening crash, wife Ashley Judd by his side."  But all I saw was, "Dario Franchitti recovering from frightening crash, wife Ashley Judd."  I know they separated, but that's just not fair.

Politics From The Fifth Dimension

Here's an article from the New Yorker on the reasoning behind the politicians forcing the shutdown.  He likes to call them the "suicide caucus," which is clearly the label he hopes will stick. That's unfortunate because it undermines his argument that they are in fact acting rationally, given their circumstances.

It all comes down to gerrymandering. That's the art of manipulating a district's boundaries to give your party's candidate am advantage.  Here in Canada, as in most countries, that can't happen because the electoral districts are laid out by noon partisan bureaucrats. But in the USA the districts are laid out by committees of politicians. So they try to fix things to their own advantage. That's the answer to the enigma of why congress has the approval rating of steamed brussels sprouts, yet most of the members get re-elected every time.

The Daily Show made a similar point this week, implying that gerrymandering lets politicians have consequence-free careers.  I believe the way they explained it was to say that the Republicans refusing to pass spending legislation could drown kittens and they'd still be re-elected.  But that misses the point that the politicians' actions are actually popular within their districts.  So they do face consequences, but it's the consequences of a very specific segment of the electorate.

A better way to explain it would be to imagine that these politicians come from a parallel universe where the U.S.:

• has very little immigration
• is still not very urban
• has an even older population
• has far fewer black people.

When you picture that alternate America, it's not so surprising that politicians will go to the wall to stop Obamacare.  And I think that's the most interesting/disturbing part about this: the huge changes in society produced by small changes in demographics.  After all, it's not like these hard-core Republican districts have no immigrants or African-Americans, just a lower percentage than the country as a whole.  But shifting a few percent in the demographics changes the balance of power enough to make actions others find radical to be mainstream.  It's another reminder of just how much people can disagree with one another even within one society.

Virtual Reality: Definitely Maybe

I've noticed that in recent years, authors have become more willing to portray the near future.  It used to be that science-fiction authors would prefer to focus on the more distant future because it was more interesting and there was less chance of being proven wrong.  And non-science-fiction writers would avoid the near future because ewwwww, genre fiction! 

But now they're more open to it. Mainstream writers aren't afraid of sci-fi any more, and the Science-Fiction genre itself has become more open-minded. All this has lead to a greater chance of seeing predictions from books coming true in your lifetime.  For instance, a few weeks ago I made a reference to the "sponsored years" concept from Infinite Jest.  That hasn't happened (yet) but the novel also mentions a business that streams TV and movies, and delivers recordings by mail.  That's pretty much Netflix.

Recently, I've been reading Ready Player One, an unapologetic celebration of geek-culture of the 1980's.  The story centres around a virtual-reality world called OASIS.  That's hardly unique in the sci-fi world; global online virtual reality worlds are today's green bug-eyed alien with a ray gun.  But this is a book released last year that expects us to believe such a thing could start up right now.

That got me thinking: could it happen?  After all, Virtual Reality is, to the information age, what electric cars were to the industrial age: something that seems to be permanently just around the corner.  But now it seems the rise of electric cars is just a matter of waiting for the slow march of battery technology and gas prices.  So maybe there's hope for VR too.

The book indicates that the system required three breakthroughs: 

1. Big computers behind the scenes to handle millions of people interacting with one another (in today's online games, like World of Warcraft, you don't get to meet all the millions of people playing, just the few thousand that are connected to the same server as you.)  Well that innovation just seems like a matter of time as computer technology progresses.
2. Cheap, lightweight virtual reality glasses.  And oh look, someone is already doing that.
3. Haptic feedback gloves.  (Haptic means touch, see; it's a glove that makes it feel like you're touching virtual objects.)  I'm assuming they mean something more sophisticated than the old Nintendo Power Glove.

So there you go: most of it is doable, but it all comes down to the gloves.  Hopefully not everyone in technology is working on apps or social networks (or batteries.)

Who Knew This Blog Would Last Longer Than The U.S. Government?

So the U.S. Government non-essential services are closed starting today as the Republican-controlled house refuses to pass a spending bill unless the Democrats cancel or delay Obamacare.  Meanwhile, Obamaca...I'm sorry, the "Affordable Care Act" started coming into effect today.

But speaking of the act's names, I've noticed something today: several times on Twitter and on Blogs, I've seen people call it, "ACA" (that's the initials, see.)  What's weird about that is that I don't think I've heard anyone call it ACA in the years since it was first announced.  People who are against it call it Obamacare because they think an association with Obama soils anything it touches.  People who flippantly or neutrally refer to it, also call it Obamacare because it sounds sort of silly and non-technical.  Politicians in favour of it call it by its full name, the Affordable Care Act, because they want to give it the branding they've chosen for it.

But what kind of person would call it by it's initials?  A person who is in favour of it, but not actually a politician trying to sell it.  What I'm getting at is, American liberals haven't exactly gone out of their way to support this thing.  It seems like it's only today that they're talking about it happily, and without disappointment at missing out on Canadian-style single-payer.

That makes me wonder if the Democrats really should go to the wall for the ACA.  Sure, the U.S. may be split down the middle politically, but it certainly seems like conservatives don't want it more than liberals want it.  Maybe now that it's under threat, liberals will summon some enthusiasm for the Affordable ObamaCare Act.