Hoverboards Falling Back To Earth

What's up with hoverboards? Not the ones from Back to the Future, I mean these new devices that look like the spawn of a Segway and a skateboard. A lot of people have decided that it's the thing we're going to Cabbage-Patch into a Christmas obsession this year.

For a start, that's a bad name, since it doesn't hover. I know, I shouldn't expect the name of a commercial product to be accurate. But there is a problem with promising that much more than you can deliver. Lots of car companies exaggerate their products' performance, but no one just suddenly decided to call their engines "warp drive."  And yet, despite the pathetic attempt to oversell a product by piggybacking on a pop-culture favourite celebrating an anniversary this year, the public seems to be eating it up.

But somehow, I don't think this is a big breakthrough in wheeled conveyances. Yes, it looks clever and useful. But often new inventions turn out to be just stepping-stones to more profound achievements. For instance, people in the 70's probably thought roller skates were here to stay, but now it seems they'll just be remembered as an evolutionary step towards inline skates. Similarly, this "hoverboard" just looks like an invention that someone in the future will turn into something else.

(I just looked it up, and apparently the first roller skate was inline-style, so never mind.)

I don't just mean actual hoverboards - even with today's technology, I'm sure we could do better. I mean take a look at Orbitwheels. Doesn't that look cooler? And I know they have robots that balance on a single ball. And since Sergways/pseudo-hoverboards use the same sort of technology, why not a platform with a ball in the middle, so you can move in any direction?
I'm going to get to work on that right now, out at least after I check Amazon for Black Friday deals on hoverboards.

I Definitely Mean This

I'm really getting tried of the phrase, "_____ like you mean it."  It's no surprise for KFC to tell me to "Eat like you mean it." But when the CBC is telling me to "Holiday like you mean it," you know it's gone too far. Yes, it's an unfortunate aspect of pop culture that reckless aggressive entities get to use the memes when they're still cool, but the awkward ones that have trouble expressing themselves end up using them later, oblivious they've gone stale, and end up sounding like a dad trying to be cool.

But why is like-you-mean-it so annoying? Well, it's always frustrating when advertisers want us to believe that their product is the best way to express ourselves, like it's somehow a purer expression of our true spirit than everything else in this numbingly artificial world. One made numbingly artificial by all the mass produced products we're constantly being sold.

But in this case, we have an added dose of macho competitiveness. We're not just accusing you of living half-heartedly, we're making it sound like you're a wimp for not putting some effort into your life. Have some self-respect you wuss, and watch Frosty the Snowman.

So I am giving "_____ like you mean it" the "______ is the new black" award for phrases that have outstayed their welcome. Thus, I can now say, "Like you mean it is the new black." This causing the saying to disappear into the linguistic vortex in an implosion of cliche.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 28

CoverGirl has a line of Star Wars makeup.

Two Rails Are Safe, Let's Try The Third

I figure that every country has an issue that just never goes away. It's an issue that somehow touches all other issues, and gets brought up in connection with things you'd never expect. It's something everyone tries to stay away from - not out of political correctness, but just because everyone knows that if you bring it up, you'll never hear the end of it. And this is why it's so hard to understand the politics of a country other than your own: there's this one issue everyone is thinking about and reacting to, but not mentioning.

In Canada, that issue is language. I've seen it trip up Americans, in the few times they try to talk about us. They know we have French people, and to them, The French are an easy joke target. So they say something in jest, and then wonder why everyone reacts like a war crime has been committed.

In Britain, the issue is class. And in the U.S., it's race. They try to ignore it out downplay it, but it never goes away.

But speaking of things that are controversial and never go away, Donald Trump. He's entered another iteration of his cycle of offensive statement/free publicity/more support. As usual, that middle step consists of the media asking if he's gone too far this time. Pundit Jeet Heer pointed out the folly of this question by pointing out that were asking if a guy sorted by racists will lose his support because he just said something racist.

Normally, I'd be as pessimistic as Heer on this, but I think that if Trump is ever going to lose his infallibility, this is it. Of course, is for the reason I outlined at the start: he's now taking on America's raw nerve of racial issues. Yes, overt racism against Mexicans and Muslims turn on his supporters and don't offend the mainstream to any significant degree. But now he's exaggerating black crime, and defending the attack on a black demonstrator by his supporters.

I don't think that's going to go over the same way, just because this isn't the same kind of issue. Yes, I know, politicians in the US have been using race baiting for years. But they've always dressed that up to make it palletable. Trump's modus operandi is to come right out and say what the bigots are thinking.
If he does that here, it may finally be the end. We'll likely find that many of his supporters are no longer comfortable as racist if it's what they think of as the "real" kind of racist, not just hating foreigners. Also, the relatively mainstream forces currently giving Trump tacit approval (big donors and cable channels) might dessert him. After all, we know from the past that overt hatred of African-Americans is one of the few things that money and Fox News will not defend you from.

Blog, Dictionary, Person Speaking

You've probably seen how the Oxford Dictionaries named the "tears of joy" emoji as the "word" of the year. Of course, these dictionary word-of-the-year pronouncements are thinly-veiled attempts to get free publicity. But this year, that veil is thinner than ever. I suppose you can make the case that this symbol is being used for communication, so it is sort of like a word. But I have the feeling that this is the thin edge of the wedge, and a few years from now the word of the year will be the taste of cilantro.

BTW, this tablet's keyboard seems to be having a great deal of difficulty recognizing the word "dictionary." I think it could be jealous.

But who knows, maybe this is the beginning of emojis being accepted as words. I've seen the idea in science fiction that people in the future will only be able to "read" a set of universal symbols, like that you'd see in a multilingual instruction or warning label. Given that we've already standardized symbols for "pause" or "on/off" I wonder just how sophisticated symbols will become after a few decades of globalized technology.

Or, here's another way of blowing this out of proportion: perhaps this will lead to us creating a written language where each word gets its own symbol, like in Chinese. Centuries from now, the word "joy" might be written as a circle with teardrop shapes on either side of it.

My Reputation Precedes Me

There's a lot of talk about how much advertisers know about us. Of course, there's not a lot of respect for privacy, and companies want to assemble as much data about us as possible so they can give us the most targeted ads. My response is that I wish my ads were targeted to me. No, I don't want to download Candy Crush! What have I ever done that would make you think I want to play that? Being human sure, but the point is, it's not really a good use of the data about me.

But on the other hand, there's plenty of data out there that we hand out voluntarily. When I tried using Microsoft's new Edge web browser, I was shocked to find that it presented me with a list of recent scores of my favorite sports teams. How did it know? My phone knows my favorite teams, since I put them into the "Google Now" feature to get updates on them. But that's a Google product, and they don't talk to Microsoft.

 
So here I was, worried that my laptop had hacked my phone, all in an effort to please me. But then I remembered that had inputted my favorite teams into Windows 8.1 to get scores in one of those squares in that weird tile interface. Of course, like most people, I tried to avoid using that interface, so I forgot all about what I'd told it about myself. But apparently, in some Microsoft computer somewhere, there's a notation that I'm looking for Raptors scores. And that my affinity for Minesweeper somehow translates into a desire for Candy Crush. (Completely ridiculous - Minesweeper is true strategic, intellectual timewasting.)

But this brings up a question: how much other information have I left out there. I can't count how many sites I've signed up to, or created a log in for, but no longer use. I remember using a movie recommendation site in the nineties. So somewhere out there a computer knows all about the movies I liked as a twenty-something. But we've probably all left a digital impression of ourselves behind us. I don't know if anyone tries using that data, perhaps trying to link the info in abandoned accounts with the information they have about us today. Who knows how accurate that process is. They could be confusing me with an old GeoCities account for a James Roe. And he really loves Candy Crush.

Hi-Res Monitor

In my last year of university, I remember a dormmate asking how we were going to deal with living in normal places. Here we were living in a very social format, but in the real world, everyone is very private.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, our residence floor was hardly a stereotypical university living space. It was fairly restrained and nerdy even by the standards of the University of Waterloo. But still, it's a very different situation: you have a private room (or at least, as private as you want it to be) and pretty much everything else is communal. Compare that to my current apartment, where I don't know most of my floormate's names, much less organized late-night StarCraft tournaments with them.

My answer at the time was to point out that I had read about an experimental building where people were housed in more public circumstances. You get your own apartment, but there are also nice lounge areas outside to socialize with neighbours. I think it was in Vancouver (Big surprise.) I had the same worry about leaving the inclusive society of the university residence, and was a little scared of the lonely life of a single adult.

Today it's hard to believe I felt that way. When I imagine ideal accommodations, it's usually getting away from my neighbours, rather than getting closer to them. Maybe I've grown up, or maybe I've gotten used to a new paradigm. But I think it's a different reason: there's essentially two strategies for getting along with your neighbours: get friendly with them, or try to get away from them. Our residence was built on the first strategy, but most living circumstances in the western world are based on the latter.

But maybe things are changing. The Atlantic has an article about a company offering dorm-like accommodations to the general public. It's in Syracuse, New York (genuinely big surprise.)  The article mostly looks at it from an angle that the concept appeals primarily to millennials - before pointing out that they've had interest from all ages. So perhaps there is hope for a new way of living, and an appetite for it.