What A Load Of Fahrvergnügen

Volkswagen - not to mention its subsidiaries like Audi - is on the hot seat for faking emissions tests on its diesel cars. It's quite a black-eye for Volkswagen: aside from the dishonesty, they've invested a lot on developing and marketing diesel. But that dishonesty is shocking: the (direct) death-toll here may not be like GM's ignition scandal, but somehow it seems worse because it was blatant and premeditated. We expect companies to panic and cover up their errors, but we don't expect them to make conscious decisions to deceive everyone over the course of years.

How bad is this going to be for VW? It's hard to say. With the ignition scandal, I predicted that it would be disastrous, because it fit the stereotypes of American car companies so well that it would just confirm customers' worst suspicions. But that didn't happen; it really had little impact on sales. Now that could be for one of a couple of reasons: It could be that most people simply didn't hear about the problem, or it could be that people just have highly negative opinions of American car companies already, so further bad news didn't change anything.

If it is because the public doesn't hear about these scandals, then Volkswagen won't be hurt, though we'll be entering a dark age of automotive quality that will have Ralph Nader feeling like he's wasted his life. If it's the latter reason, then VW is in trouble because this will puncture their reputation. Their cars always seem pricey, so if customers don't think the price is worth it, then they're in trouble.

Of course, that's assuming this is as far as the scandal goes. It says something about our perception of the car biz that people almost immediately started speculating that other car makers are just as guilty.  If it does become larger, and other manufacturers are implicated, then Volkswagen might come out of it looking alright.  People will get angry and swear that they'll try to live car-free:   But as with politicians, even if our opinions of all the competitors are low, we still have to choose the least-bad.  At least in voting, spoiling your ballot doesn't require using public transit.

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It's National Punctuation Day!  Can you believe that‽ 

My apologies if the punctuation at the end of that last sentence didn't come through: it's an interrobang: a combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark that can be used to express incredulity. Sure, you could just type both an exclamation mark and a question mark, but who has time for that⸮  

And that sentence had an irony mark at the end.  It was proposed in the 16th century, though I've seen many people suggest that we need irony punctuation now in the internet era when irony is often misunderstood.

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These and other obscure punctuation marks are described at Mental Floss magazine.

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There are a couple of punctuation-related notions I'd like to mention. One is the question of how many spaces are after the period. I was always told to add two  spaces, but many people consider this to be a crime against humanity.  I don't have strong feelings either way, and I am pretty inconsistent about it.  So if you are offended by it, I'm sorry.  But you should really blame my Grade 9 typing teacher.

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The other is to point out just how often punctuation in computer text goes wrong in today's world.  Just today I saw an item on the BBC World news scroll about the Pope’s trip to America. 

The typo is frustrating because, for one thing, I know what's going wrong.  As I mentioned recently, text files are just numbers representing letters (and punctuation marks.)  Unfortunately, there's more than one standard code for representing letters, and things go wrong when a program is expecting one way of representing characters, and it gets a different way.  Here's a page that explains it in more depth.

But it's doubly frustrating because no one seems to care.  The news scroll went by several times with the error, and I've seen similar problems several times before.  Newspapers puke meaningless characters all the time, reminding us just how few proofreaders they can afford.  You know, the ampersand (&) is a deformation of the handwritten Latin word et. Perhaps centuries from now, their apostrophe will be based on the ’ characters. 

Who knows what Victor Borge would do with that.

Leaving The Neutral Zone

Wayne Gretzky recently threw his support behind Stephen Harper and the Conservatives in Canada's election.  The endorsement is purely symbolic, since Gretzky - a dual American/Canadian citizen - lives in the U.S., and that means he can't vote, due to recent law changes by...Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

It's a bit of a surprise, because hockey has its own political spectrum, in which Gretzky would be the Bernie Sanders to Don Cherry's Donald Trump.  But I suppose you have to include demographics: men, whites, rich people and Eastern Europeans are more likely to be conservative, so one would assume that the hockey world in general would prefer Harper.

Not surprisingly, there's been sharply divergent reaction to this.  When a public figure suddenly supports a politician, I wonder what motivates it.  Obviously, it could be that the public figure is really passionate about the politician and the issues at stake in the election.  But the other likely explanation is the complete opposite: they don't know or care much about politics, they're taking a stand without realizing how controversial it will be. 

If it's a celebrity that has a history of taking a stand, you know it's the former.  If it's someone new to the public eye, you'll also assume it's the former: it's probably someone with a passion for politics who will be making this a part of their persona for as long as they are famous.  But in a case like Gretzky's, you have to wonder why a guy who's been famous for decades would only take a stand now.  It's entirely possible that he didn't realize many people would turn on him.

I'm not saying you should feel sorry for him or anyone else who wades into politics and suddenly becomes controversial.  While I appreciate people taking a stand, that's because political issues have real consequences.  As such, it's irresponsible to get involved in an important discussion you don't understand. So always get informed before wading into politics.  People will still hate you for it, but at least you'll be sure you're right and they're wrong.

Reasons To Cheer For The Blue Jays This Year

• Not the Yankees
• If they can win by battering their opponents with excessive offence, image the hilarious teams that will be assembled over the coming years.
• "Longest playoff drought in pro sports" title will get passed to the Buffalo Bills.
• Remember when Dan Quayle predicted the Braves would win in ‘92? Well there’s plenty of opportunity for that to happen again.
• Also, not the Red Sox.
• If Toronto FC can hold on too, the Leafs would be the only T.O. team that misses the playoffs this year.
• Definitely a non-zero chance that this will open a portal to the early nineties, allowing us to go back and correct the mistakes of the last twenty years.
• Expansion teams with long and interesting histories really annoy baseball traditionalists.
• As in 92/93, playoff run coincides with an election, resulting in lots of audience signs that Americans will never understand
• Marines have just about got that upside-down flag thing figured out.
• Fanatic support for Jays and Raptors may finally convince Canadian sports media that we care about more than one sport.
• If all their success comes with the traditional uniform/logo, you’ll never have to live with another cartoony rebranding
• The longer they play, the chance for Expedia to make more ads with Ace going through customs. They haven’t even shown him with the TSA agents yet. Think of potential for a "No Fly List" joke.
• There aren’t any Muslim baseball players, so a Canadian team winning the World Series is about the only way to piss-off Curt Schilling.
• Stuffed parrot sales haven't been this high since the heyday of Monty Python.
• If the Jays win the World Series this year, you won't have to listen to fans complain about the game's unfair economics for at least another decade.

Colbert Is Still On The Right

Stephen Colbert has been hosting The Late Show for a couple of weeks now. It's been a little slow, but you have to have patience. I had heard that he was trying to break with tradition by arranging his studio the opposite of Letterman's, with the band on the right, and the desk/sofa where the interviews take place on the left.

That brings up a question I've had for a while about talk shows: while he was willing to change much of the stage set-up, there was one thing he didn't mess with: keeping the guests on the left side of the screen, and the host on the right. Carson, Letterman, Leno, Conan, Stewart, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Ellen, Latifah, O'Donnell, Hall: it's the same with all of them. Apparently even Steve Allen and Jack Paar sat on the right. Larry King's show on CNN was the other way around, but we all know he's immune to the rules that limit us mortals.

I looked it up on the Internet and people had detailed explanations, often revolving around the fact that we read from left to right. You'd think that would put it the other way round, with the person asking questions on the left and the answerer on the right, but whatever. Apparently this is the explanation for well-established theatre traditions, and the talk show set up is only the latest manifestation of it. I assume talk shows in the Arab world have the seating reversed. And in China, the host sits on stage and interviews celebrities in the balcony.

But there's a problem with this explanation: the one exception of today is James Corden, on after Colbert. He not only sits on the left, but he doesn't have a desk, and brings out all his guests at once instead of one at a time. None of this is because he's some sort of talk show maverick, but because he's British, and that's the way they do it over there. That punctures any ideas that it's about the way we think or the way we read. If anything, it could only be related to the way we drive.  And now that I look it up, I find that Egyptian talk show host Bassem Youssef used the traditional American way too; and the Arab world drives on the right.

This apparently meaningless tradition also calls into question other psycho-lateral explanations for behaviour. There's a popular idea that you can tell a person is lying if they look to the right, even though that's provably false. There's also a lot of reasoning I've heard about how things are placed in stores to make them more appealing by making people approach them from more favourable sides. Like they'd prefer to have you walk past display so the merchandise is on your right, so a right-hander is more likely to pick it up, and thus more likely to buy it. While subtle things can make a difference, I've always been skeptical of this ideas that people are like toddlers at the grabby stage, whom we can manipulate into zombie-like automatic purchases. I suspect all of it is pseudo-science driven by people's desperation for easy explanations to complex situations, combined with self-appointed experts using the Emperor's New Clothes to maintain their air of authority.

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?

Pictures Of "U"

What you're reading right now is a "text file." Essentially, it's a list of numbers, with each number representing a letter.  That may seem like a lot of numbers, but keep in mind that computers can store an astounding quantity of numbers; a gigabyte is essentially a billion numbers.  Looking at it that way, you realize that text files are downright insignificant for modern computers.

Now consider this picture of antique pig statuettes:

There are different ways of storing graphics, but most involve one or more numbers for each pixel, to describe the colour of that pixel.  There's usually some sort of mathematical trick to shorten that big list of numbers, but even if that trick can reduce the list by 90%, that's still a big list of numbers.  If you compare the number of letters in this post to the number of pixels in the picture, you'll realize that pictures take up far more space in a computer than text.

Go ahead, do your "picture is worth a thousand words" joke now.  I'll resist the temptation to point out that it's far more than a thousand in this case. Why am I taking you through Computer Principles 101? Consider the possibility of a picture of words.

It may seem to you that this is no different than the words around it.  But it's quite different for the computer.  The text you're reading now was shipped across the Internet letter by letter, then drawn on your screen by your web browser.  The picture of the words was drawn on my computer, then shipped to you, pixel by pixel.  The amounts aren't large in the grand scheme of things, but I'm always amazed at how many people don't realize that one is orders of magnitude larger than the other.

I first noticed it in university, when a physics professor posted the answers to a quiz on the web in the form of a huge scan of a printed page.  This was over twenty years ago, when such a large file choked the pitiful computers in the undergrad lab.  I couldn't figure out how he typed up the answers on a word processor, printed them out, and ran them through a scanner without thinking there had to be an easier way.

This misunderstanding about computers has reappeared from time to time, and the latest instance is on Twitter.  Of course, Twitter is weird in a lot of ways, but none more than the self-imposed and totally arbitrary 140 character limit.  The concept of posting graphics with your tweets was added later on, despite the fact that the pictures are much bigger than tweets.  And next thing you know, the graphics capability has become a way of overcoming the character limit; when people want to quote a larger amount of text, they can attach a picture of it to their tweet. Of course, for many people this inefficient way of communicating is not a problem. But when I'm stuck using a slower connection, it's hard to believe this is how we send text across the Net.