At The Centre Of It All

You probably heard about David Bowie's death today. I won't try to eulogize him - as a late-gen-x'er I missed much of his career. But I do appreciate that I was an "indirect fan," since many of the musicians I liked were influenced by him.

So today the news was all-Bowie-all-the-time. I know, that happens every time a major celebrity dies. But given his position in society and the arts, it seems particularly inappropriate. Aside from the fact that he probably wouldn't want the world fawning over him, there is his final album, released last week; it's now acknowledged by his manager that it was recorded knowing it would be good last. That's very fortunate for an artist to get to say goodbye in their own terms. So surely the best way to pay tribute is not to listen to an anchorman reaching for words, but to listen to the music. (Doing that as I type; it's really good.)

But more to a point, the remembrance today has seemed incongruous with our society. For instance, when Michael Jackson died, there was a big deal made about it, and that was understandable. For good or bad, we're living in a Michael Jackson world. But really, if David Bowie had so many fans, then how do you explain this <points at Western Civilization>? A guy who prided himself in eclecticism and reinvention was a major inspiration in a world that keeps repeating itself?

I know, you're probably expecting me to call out non-fans for jumping on the posthumous bandwagon. But I'm going to be a bit more optimistic: I think all these people really do care about Bowie, and they've just lost their way. So everybody, take time to read the quotes and compliments orbiting social media right now and learn from them.

What A Concept

In the automotive world, there are these things called concept cars. They're one-off cars displayed at shows, as a kind of demonstration or prototype. There are several purposes behind them:

• They catch people's attention, and get them to stop at the manufacturer's booth.
• They give tangible form to a new technology. (Instead of describing the abstract benefits of a new technology, you talk about what this car is capable of.)
• It's a chance to evaluate a new design style in a way drawings and computer models never could.
• It lets the manufacturer evaluate reaction to a car they may actually be considering building (if is a relatively conservative design.)

But here's the grain of salt you should take with these cars: often times, they aren't real. I mean, there is actually a car there at the show, it's just that it might not be what is implied. Often, it's just the body and interior, with no engine. Or it's one of the company's existing cars with a futuristic body on top of it. Some don't even have interiors. And when the execs talk about the car's capabilities, they're usually just talking about what the hypothetical car would be capable of, if it were built. On top of it all, there's the simple fact that just because something can be built, doesn't mean it can be built for a reasonable price. Or that it can be built in large numbers.

Within the automotive press, this is all understood, and concept cars get treated with the aforementioned grain of salt. They're news if they have a particularly novel technology, or if they fit into that last category of cars that might make the market. But otherwise, they're just eye candy. Unfortunately, as the line between the car business and the tech business gets blurred, there's more opportunity for naive journalists to get taken in by concept car snake oil.

The latest example is from Faraday Future, an American-based, Chinese-funded electric car start-up. There's a lot of scepticism about them, and rightly so: it's hard to get an entirely new car company off the ground. And extra hard if you're also using new technology. Sure, there's Tesla, but there's also a graveyard of small car companies that never got across the starting line. They might have been unlucky, incompetent, or they were just scams from the start. And even if you make it to market, for every Tesla, there's a Fisker.

So Faraday Future is a believe-it-when-I-see-it proposition. And when they showed up at Consumer Electronics Show with an outrageous, non-running concept car, it was a non-story. If anything, it was such a transparent distraction tactic, that it raised doubts about them. But because it was an electronics show rather than a car show, the many reporters there to report on the latest gizmos just ate up Faraday's offering. Lots of them described it as looking like the Batmobile. It did, but it made me think of the styling of the Vector, an exotic sports car from the 80's. And oh look, it turned out to be a scam that never made it to market.

All Those Moments Will Be Lost In Time...

During the hype for the new Star Wars, there was a tweet passed around that dared you to quote any line of dialog, or name more than one character, from Avatar. Of course, that should be easy, since Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all time, at least for the next few days. Lots of people couldn't do it, which underlines the weird way pop-culture works.

When I was a kid, I remember going to the movies in 1982, and they had three movies playing. (Three screens! How adorable!) This stuck on my mind because I, unlike most of the world's movie-goers was excited about seeing Tron, while one of the other screens was showing E.T., which was turning out to be far more popular. In my mind's eye, I think the other screen was showing Blade Runner. I could just be imagining that, but according to the release dates, that seems likely.

In retrospect, it's interesting to see how those three movies have taken such different trajectories. E.T. was a huge hit, breaking Star Wars' box office record. It was also a cultural phenomena, getting referenced, spoofed and imitated all over. Yet it faded quickly from the public's memory over the years. The 20th anniversary reissue bombed. And now, at a time when other 80's blockbusters have had amazingly long lives, it gets ignored.

Tron was hugely anticipated, but died at the box office. For a while it was remembered only as the cinematic equivalent of the Edsel. But it maintained a following among us weird kids, and then when we took over the world, we elevated it to cult classic status, and it eventually got an unexpected big budget sequel.

Blade Runner was a disappointment at domestic theatres, but did better in Europe. Then it got rescued by, of all things, the director's cut reissue on video. It's reputation grew, and now it's regularly mentioned as the greatest Science Fiction movie of all time.

And we can see the same sort of things happening with newer movies. Avatar may not be as well remembered, despite its success. On the other hand, the previous James Cameron movie that held the box office record, Titanic, does seem to have maintained space in the hearts and minds of the public, at least if the there-was-room-on-the-lifeboat-for-Jack discussions are anything to go by.

The same thing happens in other media too. When I first noticed it, I called it the "Grand Funk Railroad phenomenon," after the band that broke Beatles' records in the 70's only to be forgotten by the 80's. Or on TV, there was The Cosby Show, which was very popular when it was on the air, but even before its star was revealed as a sexual predator, had faded from the public consciousness.

So what causes this? I've been trying to come up with some commonality to explain the fates of these pop-cultural artifacts, but I can't find it. For any rule about what makes something last, I can come up with a counterexample. Any ideas?

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.

A Tiny Window On My World

Everybody agrees that mobile computing is big and important. Everyone and their sibling is using a tablet or a phone. Wait, a tablet? That's so yesterday: I browse the web on a phone now. Ooh, no, not a phone. Google glass...no, I mean a Microsoft Hololens that hasn't been released yet.

By the way, my tablet seems to agree with me on Hololens, since it tried to suggest "hollowness".

So why do so many web sites work so badly on mobile devices? There are so many ways they screw up:

• Tiny little links, particularly lists of words so that you can hardly squeeze your fingertip on one without hitting its neighbours.
• Menus that only appear if you hover your mouse over them, so you don't even know they're there.
• Loading dozens of animations and gratuitous special effects, so your phone is so overloaded you can feel it starting to melt.

But the worst is the pop-up. A window appears in the centre of the page, asking you to subscribe to something or other. But they've positioned the pop-up based on the assumption that you have a desktop screen. So a window that's supposed to be a little message in the middle ends up covering your entire phone. The true frustration sets in if they've programmed the window to stay in the same place even if you try scrolling down the page. Then you end up as a modern Sisyphus, forever scrolling down to get to a "close" button you'll never reach.

I don't understand why this is such a problem. Aside from everyone agreeing that the mobile Net is important, there is plenty of software to help you create web pages that react to the size of the screen. So there's no excuse. In the early days of the Web there was a rule not to bother with a page that needed a minute to load. Well now there should be a rule not to bother with a page that doesn't fit your device.

I Wanna Grok

There's a principle you may have heard of that if you truly understand something, you should be able to explain it to a six-year-old. If you can't, then you don't really understand it as well as you think you do.

Personally, I think that's a bit harsh. After all, if it were true, we'd have much more educated six-year-olds. It would be more accurate to say that you should be able to explain something to another adult. Of course, that doesn't reflect well on our university professors: Their job is essentially to understand things and explain them to others. Given their success at the latter, it doesn't give me confidence to the former.

That brings me to a sudden realization: I don't believe in String Theory. No, it’s not based on emperical evidence or esoteric mathematics. It's because I don't believe anyone really understands it, because no one seems to be able to explain it.

I know, it's complicated, it's hard to wrap your head around. But there are lots of things that are hard to understand. The Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: those are also hard to explain. But it can be done; I've seen people do it. But not String Theory. I've seen and read dozens of explanations, and here's what I've learned:

• All the fundamental particles in the universe are actually strings.
• The strings vibrate.
• Somehow this means that there are lots of other dimensions, but they're really small.

That's it! That's not an explanation. If you were explaining it, you'd also tell us things like:

• How does this help us understand how particles behave?
• What do the vibrations do?
• Okay smartass, what are the strings made of?
• For that matter, why are you explaining something simple (particles that are just little points) with something more complicated (strings)?

Science is all about figuring out how the world works. So the joy of learning about science is to gain a greater understanding of our surroundings. I don't want to hear a few disjointed facts; I want to acquire a mental model of the processes of nature. For whatever reason, String Theory proponents haven't put much effort into this. It's probably just that there isn't much incentive for explaining bleeding-edge physics well. But until someone puts some effort into it, I'm going to assume that String Theory is a massive Emperor's New Clothes situation, where no one wants to admit that none of them get it.

Unfortunately, this kind of explanation-that-isn't seems all too common these days. There's an assumption that if you give the context of a thing, together with some ideas you can drop at parties, that's considered explaining it. But really you haven't learned anything useful: you just know enough to sound intellectual during a superficial discussion, assuming you're talking with other people who don't understand it either. It's really unfortunate that in a society where we can communicate information so easily, we're still not good at spreading understanding.

Droning On

We're only hours away from the drone-pocalypse, or Christmas as it's also known. Authorities are worried about the growing number of drones out there (or more precisely, about the growing number of idiots with access to drones) and  there'll likely be many more after they unwrap them Christmas morning.

As if to punctuate the fears, a drone fell out of the sky at a ski race and narrowly missed a skier. That was a big and presumably professional drone, so one has to worry what happens when they become widespread. People have enough trouble driving, and now we're giving them another dimension to deal with.

Of course, this is another symptom of our modern society, where inventions spread too fast for us to properly deal with them. Take cars for instance: people talk about the revolution brought on by the Model-T, but that was preceded by decades of cars as curiosities for the rich or whatever-they-called-nerds-then. That allowed society a bit of a heads-up. Imagine if Karl Benz had got his automobile patent, then a couple of years later, there are Chinese knock-offs everyone can afford.

One has wonder what's going to become of drones in society. I was - and still am - skeptical on their predicted use for deliveries. But if I'm wrong, there's going to have to be some organisation to stop the Amazon drones from hitting the FedEx drones. No, I'm not imagining Jetsons-style roads in the sky, with neat but fast streams of flying machines. Really, with some sort of computer air-traffic control, it will likely look more chaotic to us. But if this does come to pass, it will be the latest way modern civilization has changed the look of the world. At least it will be prettier than asphalt.