Infamous Potatoes

Dean Burnett - described in his bio as a Neuroscientist who is also a part-time comedian - has written an interesting blog post for The Guardian.  In it, he talks about how he accidentally created a new psychological condition, called "Lonely Potato Syndrome."  It's the condition of always wanting to cook more than one of something (often a potato) because one would seem lonely. 

The weird and interesting thing is that when I say he "created" it, I don't mean that the condition existed and he gave it a name.  Rather, he mentioned this concern of his as an example of a personality quirk.  But other people recognized it in their own behaviour, and - combined with his authority on things mental - mentioned it to other people, and the idea took off.

Aside from being funny in a weird, surreal, British, help-I'm-trapped-in-a-Douglas-Adams-book sort of way, this incident brings up a lot of issues.  One is the authority we give to the words of experts, regardless of the evidence that backs them.  Another is the concept of labels.  That's a tough one in the world of mental health, where people take labels very personally.  I don't think anyone would be offended at being labelled as a Potato Sympathizer, but it does show how labels spread.  Once the label is created, it becomes easy to apply to more and more people. 

Personally, I think labels get a bad wrap.  Obviously, no one likes the idea of being pigeon-holed with others who may have a very different experience.  But that seems to be the way to get taken seriously these days.  I find it interesting that society is making headway in getting people to care about mental illness at the same time that society is becoming less caring and accommodating in general. We're quick to call people weak or lazy, yet we're more willing to sympathize with those diagnosed with depression.  So it may be that we'll have to slap labels on things just to make people take our problems seriously, and treat one another with dignity. 

Occupying The Passing Lane

It's kind of forgotten now, but when Bill Clinton was first elected, he was promising a health care system. Of course, that effort went nowhere, and other aspects of Clinton's presidency are better remembered. So now we rarely remember "Clintoncare" except when some smartass reminds everyone that Republicans of the day made a counter-proposal that looked a whole lot like Obamacare.

So it's hard to believe now, but there was actually a computer game simulation of the health care effort. It was from the makers of SimCity (and lesser known contemporaries like SimEarth and SimAnt.)  Obviously, it was called SimHealth

I remember this, because of the first time I saw the SimHealth box in a store. I picked up the box to read it, partly out of interest in the game, partly out of amazement that such a thing exists. As I'm reading the box, a little kid wanders by, sees which game I'm looking at, and says, "I heard that game's too hard." And I thought, my god, I'm in a political cartoon.

That incident comes to mind because I found myself in another political cartoon today on the highway. Two semis were driving in the two right lanes. A Prius was about to pass them, but it got cut-off by a Cadillac driving wildly and way over the speed limit.  You've got business on the right, the rich ignoring laws, wiping out the middle class and hurting the environment.  All we needed was to work a Hummer into the scenario too.

Reports Show Joy In Mudville Down Sharply

In the past month, there's been a lot of talk about improving baseball. I guess it's because they've finally got a new commissioner for the first time in about twenty years.

Several news outlets have gotten hold of the bad news in TV ratings: ratings for local broadcasts of games are doing great, but the ratings for national games have dipped badly. It seems that individual teams are popular, but the support for the sport in general is weak. I can relate to that; I've followed the Blue Jays through thick and thin, but don't really pay attention to other games.

So what's the problem? Many sports pundits have lined up to blame it on their personal pet peeves. But a lot of people have focused on the length of games. And I've been impressed with how willing people are too change the game. In the past whenever anyone has suggested that baseball should be sped up, someone - probably Tim McCarver - reassures everybody that the game is perfect and everyone in the stadium is having fun and eating hot dogs and not thinking about being home by ten. But now it seems like everyone's willing to impose time limits on at-bats, ban visits to the mound, or eliminate warm-up pitches.

Impressive, but I don't think this is baseball's real problem. After all, football games are just as long. Here's my take on some of the major problems:

Steroids

People always look at the steroid issues as being about trust. That has been a problem, but here another problem: stats. Baseball has always been bigger on numbers than any other sport, but now it's biggest numbers are meaningless. It used to be exciting when Cecil Fielder or Brady Anderson went above the usual number of home runs. But now, the records have been pushed out of reach, and aren't taken seriously anymore. They should just erase them and make what everyone feels the reality: Maris and Aaron are the record holders again.

Stars

I could write a whole post on how nauseating the Derek Jeter retirement hype has been, but instead I'll just say this: have you considered that he isn't even the best player on his own team? No, I'm not talking about A-Rod, who isn't so impressive anymore (see point one.) No, I mean Ichiro Suzuki. But he doesn't get nearly the publicity, because he played most of his MLB career in Seattle, and to the baseball media, he might as well have stayed in Japan.

Of course, bias to big markets affects all sports, but in most others there is still the possibility for a Kevin Durant, Peyton Manning, or Sidney Crosby to gain national fame from a secondary market. In baseball that's more difficult, even with exceptional accomplishments. Consider Yasiel Puig and Miguel Cabrera: who has the greater accomplishments in the last few years, and who gets the most attention in the media. If you're only going to look to a handful of franchises for your nationally-recognizable stars, you're really limiting yourself.

Anonymous teams

The competitive imbalance that has plagued baseball for years did a lot of damage. It seems to be fixed now, though I'll reserve my final judgement until I see one of these youngster-laden small market teams win the world series.
But a big problem that remains is the transient nature of teams. Big market teams churn through stars they've bought elsewhere, and small market teams are a conveyor belt of prospects that are used for a couple of seasons before being sold to the highest bidder. Wannabe teams either have second-rate fill-ins while they restock the farm system, or they parachute in expensive trades and signings trying to get to the top.

So one way or another, players move all over the place. Yes, there's more player movement in all sports these days, but in the NFL teams can usually hang on to a player for most of their prime, and in the NBA and NHL most teams can afford to at least hang on to a core of players.

But baseball's generous free-agency has lead to a generation of Yankees-Red Sox games that look like all-star games. And now we have to get excited over  Royals-Mariners games featuring players we've never heard of. If you don't have a rooting interest, it's hard to get excited about such arbitrary matches.

The Soul Of A New Machine

Kia has a new commercial for the Soul, again featuring hamsters (this is an extended version):

• I'm confused by the hamster in the ball. It seems to be an ordinary hamster among all these anthropomorphic hamsters. You're just not allowed to do that. Either the animals are normal or they're a stand-in for people. Disney tried to do that with Goofy as a humanoid dog and Pluto as a pet dog, and that confused generations of kids.
• So either the hamster in the ball is a child that will one day grow into one of the big hamsters, or the big hamsters are mutants, and they keep a normal one around for some reason.
• Or this is supposed to take place in an alternate universe where hamsters evolved sentience instead of primates.  In that case, the hamster in the ball is the equivalent of a monkey to them. That makes more sense
• Would hamsters consider a thin female in skin-tight clothing attractive? Surely they'd prefer a plump and furry female.
• How come these hamsters have better taste in music than what we've seen from the species in the past?
• For all the ad's other flaws, I have to say that nerdy hamsters are adorable. In the previous hamster ad, if you look closely at the scene where they're in the salon, one of them is reading a copy of Wired with a hamster on the cover. So apparently they have a gift for technology. But you don't have to tell me that...

Please Print This Post Before Reading It

I saw a news report on the making of the new movie The Boxtrolls.  It's an animated movie.  But unlike other studios these days, they're animating it old-school, using stop-motion animation.  That's not so unusual, Wallace and Gromit's studio works the same way. 

Anyway, this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Boxtrolls showed that their studio has several 3D printers, which they use to make parts for the models they use in their animation.  Further, they make some of their animations by printing character parts by the hundreds, each with slightly different shapes.  I'm thinking, that's quite impressive, they went through a lot of work to...wait a minute, where did they get the designs for all these parts that they're printing out?  Sure enough, they design them, using computers.  So, rather than use computer animation - in which they design characters on computers and then have a computer do the grunt work of rendering them on the screen - they use real-life models, which were designed on computers, printed out, and then filmed for the screen by hand.

Now how does that make sense?  I realize that old ways of doing things often have their charms, but this seems to defeat the purpose of it.  It's like making a font based on your handwriting, or programing a synthesizer to sound like a buzzy lo-fi electric guitar, or bringing a mini-espresso machine camping.  Yes, I know people do those things too.

Start Me Up

I've decided that the next time I get a new PC, I'm going to erase whatever version of Windows it comes with, and put on Windows 95.  Yes, I do still have the CD.  I believe I also have a copy of OS/2, but it's on 25 floppies.  I'm also going to put on an old version of Microsoft Office from that era.  That is, if I can't find an old copy of WordPerfect with the white text on a plain blue screen.

Why would I be putting obsolete software on a brand new computer?  Because I want to know what it's like to have a really fast computer.  Yes, all computers seem fast at first.  But that quickly changes: your computer gets slower and slower, until routine actions leave you staring into space while you wait for the machine to catch up.  I figure that the only way to make a computer stay fast in the long term is to run software from the days when computers were a hundred times slower.

Why do computers get slow?  It's a lot of things.

First, there's psychology: your shiny new computer seems fast at first, but once it's lost that new-CPU smell, you start to notice that it takes thirty seconds of hard-drive thrashing just to open the web browser.

And there's the sheer amount of software: as you install more and more stuff, there's more going on in the background.  Even when you're not using an application, it could be checking for updates or something in the background.

And of course, the faster computers get, the more the programmers take that speed for granted.  On early computers, programs were simple but computing power was at a premium, so the programmers could afford to go through their code in detail on a quest for efficiency.  With more power and bigger, more complex applications, that won't happen.

So I wonder if computers have really gotten faster.  It would be interesting to see computers of various eras compared in their time needed to, say, open a word processor document.  Certainly, my tablet opening a Google Drive document would be one of the slower competitors.

Norm(s)!

The way I look at it, most people in society agree on a lot of things. I mean basic things: murder is wrong, love is good, racism is bad. We all know that there are some people who don't agree on these things, but we assume they are few in number, and fairly recognizable.

Then there are a lot of things that we know people don't agree on. Some of these are inconsequential. These are things like Coke vs. Pepsi, the Oxford comma, and which way around the toilet paper goes. But some of these issues are consequential, and most of these are what we call politics. Okay, I guess there's religion too, but if you live in a homogeneous area, it may be in that category of things everyone agrees on.

Anyway, that's how I assume the world works, and I think most people assume it works that way. Of course, there are fuzzy areas, like the fact that the list of things we all agree on is constantly changing. I listed "racism is bad" as one thing we have a consensus on. But it wasn't that long ago that it was far from universal. It also wasn't that long ago that "homosexuality is bad" was the near-universal belief, but now it's in doubt, and it appears "homosexuality is okay" will soon be the norm.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I'm finding a surprising number of times that universal beliefs turn out to be less that universal. No, I'm not talking about the beliefs of random nutbars on the Internet; I long ago realized that they wouldn't fit into any societal expectations. I mean people who seem quite intelligent and civilized.

So why is this? One is that it's an effect of social media. Note that we can hear from a person all the time on any topic, there are so many more chances for people to reveal all aspects of their values. You don't just assume that your favourite actor is similar to you; you can go on Twitter and find out. And since you see their view on every topic, it increases the chances that you’re going to stumble across a very unusual opinion, if there is one.

Another is the diversity of modern media. With 500 channels and a billion web pages, it's easy for anyone to immerse themselves among the like minded. Thus the speaker may be fooled into thinking their values are more universal than they are, as the listener is fooled into thinking their values are the norm. A further reason is the sheer amount of disagreement. Yes, most of that disagreement is with the aforementioned nutbars, but social media gives one the impression that disagreement - even extreme disagreement - is normal if not admirable.

(Let’s start a punk band called, “The Aforementioned Nutbars.”)

I guess the lesson here is that society is - as usual - not what it appears. Ideas - even those seemingly entrenched - must be constantly fought for. Consensus should not be confused with correctness.