The Tech Curmudgeon

Our Story So Far

2012-02-17T13:06:00.001-05:00

Between 13 and 14 billion years ago, the universe arose from the cosmic explosion commonly known as the Big Bang. Things carried on for a while, and about 10 billion years later, Earth was formed. Lots of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occurred, to the accompaniment of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Once things were cool, microscopic aquatic animals appeared and then evolved into bigger ones that could eat their former colleagues. These creatures evolved over millions of years into fish, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs, mammals and lawyers.

Actual humans have only been around for a couple of million years, a pitifully small amount of time in evolutionary terms. Yet somehow the species has managed to become differentiated into various racial and ethnic strains, professions, religious affiliations and sexual proclivities.

In particular, this process has somehow produced both me and the idiot who cut me off on the Mass. Turnpike this morning.

What Are People?

2012-02-15T00:01:00.053-05:00

Sometimes the things that seem most obvious are the hardest to define. This is true for abstract concepts like love, virtue, art and so on.

But I thought the idea of what people are was pretty clear. At least, until this election season. Now I'm not so sure.

For example, the Republican candidates all seem to think that zygotes are people. (For those who, like me, haven't taken a biology class in a while, a zygote is a fertilized gamete ... a fertilized egg.)

But at the other end of the spectrum, corporations are people. That's right! Mitt Romney said exactly that, with the Supreme Court to back him up. Apple and Exxon Mobile and AT&T are all people. So go ahead. Invite 'em to your next dinner party.

Recently, in response to Romney's obtuse comment that he's "not concerned about the very poor" and "not concerned about the very rich," Newt Gingrich quickly retorted that he's "concerned about all of the American people." But in December, Gingrich said "please don't turn America into Massachusetts." He also has no great fondness for New Yorkers who "live in high-rise apartment buildings writing for fancy newspapers in the middle of town after they ride the metro." New York and Massachusetts are among the first colonies settled, and the first states to ratify the Constitution, so their residents are clearly American. So it must be the case that New Yorkers and ... um, Bay Staters are not people.

These same Republicans seem to believe gays are not people, and so should not be entitled to marry. They want to amend the Constitution to define marriage as excluding gay couples.

So can a corporation marry a zygote? And what kind of wedding music should they have?

Yes, but the characters are still two-dimensional ...

2012-02-13T00:01:00.006-05:00

On Second Thought ...

2012-02-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

Ok, so maybe the random drivel idea wasn't so bad.

Reboot

2012-02-09T00:01:00.027-05:00

It's time to rededicate this blog to its original purpose, which is ... well, it's not just posting a lot of random drivel that crosses my mind. (We have Twitter for that.) It should be carefully planned drivel, the kind that makes you stop and think. And I hope what you're thinking is not "Well, that was a complete waste of time."

I think a blog is supposed to build community or some such crap. It's a place where like-minded and not-so-like-minded individuals can engage in civil discourse on whatever topic the blogger dictates unilaterally.

And speaking of like-minded, how about Facebook going all public? They figure the company is worth $100 billion. And the only asset they have is your personal information. That's right. They know how many pink pigs you have in Farmville, and how many mafiosi you've rubbed out, and what words you've exchanged with friends. All 800 million of you.

That means that your personal information is worth, on average, $125 per person. So how much is Mark Zuckerberg giving you?

Let me announce here that I'm starting a new social network. You can join and provide as much or as little personal information as you like. But for every piece of information you disclose, you'll get a share in the company. So when we go public, you'll get something for your trouble!

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah. The blog thing. Well, I hope you like it.

Sketch Book #1

2012-02-08T00:01:00.015-05:00

The Game's A Foot

2012-02-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

I'm not what you'd call a big sports fan. I had never watched a baseball game on TV until I was 30, after I had moved from New York to New England. Consequently, I was never a fan of any of the New York teams, though some of my high school friends consider this treasonous. What little rooting I have done has all been for the more northerly teams.

Nonetheless, I'm able to see a clear distinction between New York sports fans and fans in New England. Specifically, New York sports fans tend to cheer their teams because those teams win a lot.

In New England, fans seems to endure their teams, the way they endure the climate and the terrain. Red Sox fans grew more passionate with each passing year of championship drought. They finally found a manager who led the team to its first World Series victory in 86 years, and then followed up with another victory 3 years later! And what became of that manager? They fired him.

Now the New England Patriots seem bent on grabbing some of the Red Sox cachet by also snatching defeat from the jaws of victory ... repeatedly.

Perhaps it's because the whole region is so infused with a sense of its own history, but New England sports fans seem to prefer reminiscing about past glories to actually enjoying new ones.

Get Your Priorities Straight

2012-02-05T15:50:00.001-05:00

The Exception That Proves the Rule

2012-02-03T00:01:00.055-05:00

This is an appropriate time to talk about the great game of football, and to draw the inevitable comparison between this national sport and the long national nightmare known as the presidential election.

But I've never been too concerned with what's appropriate.

So instead, I want to talk about exceptionalism. This is, briefly, the idea the people, places or things can be exceptional. (Duh.) There's a widespread concept of America as an exceptional country. Sure, it's pretty cool, but Americans are not, in general, any better than anyone else. In fact, Americans are anyone else. Aside from the natives, Americans are all directly or indirectly related to people who came here from elsewhere. (In fact, even the natives came from elsewhere, but it was before diaries, so it doesn't count.)

Same goes for people. History is often taught as a collection of outstanding deeds by exceptional people. Certainly the actions of some people stand out, but more often than not, these people were just in the right (or wrong) place at the wrong (or right) time. Charles Darwin only published his discoveries of natural selection because Alfred Russel Wallace was going to beat him to it. Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone because he made it to the patent office a few hours ahead of Elisha Gray. Isaac Newton had a lifelong feud with Gottfried Leibniz over which of them had invented calculus.

Take Mitt Romney. He thinks the whole Occupy Wall Street movement was just about envy. Everybody envies him because he's amassed such a huge fortune through his own talent and hard work, right? Of course, the fact that his father was chairman and CEO of American Motors, governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate had nothing to do with it.

It's not like Mitt is an innovator, like Bill Gates, who became the richest person in the world by having his company be the third to adopt a windowing interface, after Apple and Xerox. Or Mark Zuckerberg, who had the good fortune to have his Web site become more popular than the many others that were doing the same things at the time. Of course there is talent and hard work, but there are millions of talented, hard-working people who don't become exceptional.

The point is that we like thinking of people, places and things as exceptional. We have lotteries so that random people become fantastically wealthy just because they don't understand the odds. We call eBay buyers "winners" because they're willing to pay more than anyone else for something. And we put strangers on remote islands or drop them into pinball machine-like obstacle courses because that's entertainment.

There's nothing exceptional about these people or their accomplishments. We've spent centuries creating societies in which random individuals can become incredibly lucky or unlucky. That's just how we like the game.

Anyway, I don't care too much about football.

Writer's Nemesis

2012-02-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

Newton, The Moon

2012-01-30T00:01:00.005-05:00

The First Time

2012-01-27T00:01:00.003-05:00

The Art Scene

2012-01-25T00:01:00.008-05:00

If the Suit Fits ...

2012-01-23T00:01:00.006-05:00

Limerick of the Day #108

2012-01-20T07:36:00.003-05:00

Adam Smith said supply and demand
(What he called "the invisible hand")
Will achieve the effect
Markets will self-correct.
What "correct" means we don't understand.

Flea Market Economy

2012-01-19T00:01:00.089-05:00

Lots of people talk about free market economy. They claim that if government would just leave things alone, the law of supply and demand would act to set prices, achieve employment and create a better life for everyone. Even people who don't believe in anything supernatural may buy into the magical powers of supply and demand.

The theory, laid out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), is that when there's plenty of something, the price goes down because the cheapest seller will attract the most customers. On the other hand, when something's scarce, prices go up because a seller will be able to find buyers who will pay more. When the corn crop is harvested, corn is cheap because everyone's selling corn, and you can shop around for the cheapest. But if you somehow save some of your corn, you can sell it for a higher price in February, because there won't be much corn around.

The big leap is the idea that these natural up and down changes in price will lead to a good outcome. It turns out this is true because in the Free Market mentality, a good outcome is defined to mean "natural up and down changes in price." For instance, not only will some people sell corn cheaper, but some will invent better corn in order to charge more. See? Isn't that great for society? Of course, if they can't really make better corn, they'll just touch up the photo and say it's better. Works just as well.

But there's a dark side. There are some things this simple theory ignores, such as:

1) Cheating - some companies will lie about their products or use inferior materials, even contaminated foods. The Free Market's response: Don't worry. These companies will go out of business once the word gets out.

2) Public Service - Some products, like drugs that can cure illnesses, should be inexpensive and widely available, even if market forces don't lead to that. The Free Market's response: The drug maker gets to control the supply and price.

3) Disasters - If you stake your life on the corn crop, and it's wiped out by an outbreak of corn blight, you're out of luck. Sure, corn prices will go up, but you don't have any to sell. The Free Market's response: Tough luck. You should have had a backup plan.

4) Redundancy - The very idea of competition means multiple people and companies trying to do the same thing. Can you imagine if all the iPhone and Droid engineers got together, what kind of incredible kick-ass phone they could make? Or if the drug companies pooled their resources to cure cancer? The Free Market response: Not going to happen.

5) Extra forces - Supply and demand don't cover everything. If marijuana were suddenly legalized, the supply might not change right away, but demand would probably go up. In spite of that, prices would sure as hell go down. Also, things like copyrights, patents, etc. only have value because of laws. If the laws are changed, all bets are off.

6) Wealth Concentration - Finally, a free market always leads to increasing wealth concentration. It has to. As backwards as it sounds, people with more money can always get things cheaper. You pay $1 each for a half dozen ears of corn for dinner. Total cost: $6.00.

A rich person might buy a thousand ears for $0.25 each, and then sell 994 of them for $0.75. Now their corn is free, and they've even made $497.00!

Rich people can also wait out bad markets. Trying to sell a house during a recession? No problem. Just close it up, live in one of your other houses and wait till the market improves.

So the rich keep getting richer, just as the saying goes. And the rest of us? We wind up rummaging through the attic and the basement, looking for stuff to sell at the flea market.

Copyrights And Wrongs

2012-01-18T00:01:00.028-05:00

Copyrights are very trendy these days, so I'll hop on the bandwagon. The idea is that as soon as you create something ... a drawing, a novel, a comic, a blog post, whatever ... as soon as you do that, you own all the rights to it. Shocking, huh? You don't even have to register it or put a "©" on it, 'cause it's yours. Of course, you might want to register it and do the "©" thing to get some protections.

A lot of people think everything on the internet should be free. Music, movies, e-books, images, etc. They figure if it can be downloaded, why pay for it? Some people even say "Information wants to be free." What a crock, right? Information doesn't want anything. (Actually, that's only part of a quote from Stewart Brand, who in the same breath also said "Information wants to be expensive." He was talking about the dilemma posed by technology, not trying to liberate everyone's copyright-protected stuff.)

But here's the weird part. Even if writers and artists and musicians could somehow protect their creations from being illegally copied, after some period of time, they just flat out lose ownership of those things anyway. Of course, it's a hundred years after they die, but still, why shouldn't their great great grandchildren have the benefit?

If I, by dint of hard work, plant an orchard, my descendants can keep selling the apples forever. (By the way, Wikipedia's blacked out today to protest some stupid anti-piracy law or something, so I can get away with saying a dint is a unit of measuring hard work. I worked 2 dints today.) But anyway, my children and their children and theirs and so on can keep selling those apples.

On the other hand, if I put that same dint or two of work into writing a novel or painting a picture, then after I've been dead for a hundred years (or however long Disney has managed to jack it up by then), the government says "Too bad. You don't own this anymore, so anyone can print and sell your book or sell posters of your painting and not owe you or your great great grandchildren a nickel for it." What's up with that?

Why the Wealthy Deserve It

2012-01-16T00:01:00.010-05:00

Waiting

2012-01-13T10:05:00.006-05:00

In Hermann Hesse's Siddartha (1922), the protagonist lists one of his skills as "waiting." This is clearly a lost art in our society. People run red lights, cut in line, and grow furious if their multi-gigabyte downloads take more than a couple of seconds. We insist on reading email and texting while having breakfast ... while driving. We use DVRs to skip commercials, and single cup coffee makers to get near instant caffeine doses. We upgrade our electronics every year or more.

My employer may have found a way to counter this tendency. They may have found the way to teach patience.

This is a privately held company that places a premium on employee satisfaction. They go to great lengths to provide every benefit and accommodation employees might require. Among these, they offer a continuous supply of a wide variety of beverages. I work in one of three buildings on the main campus, and on each floor of this building, there are roughly 200 employees. For each floor, the beverage choices include skim, low-fat and regular milk, decaf and regular coffee, four flavors of iced tea, three kinds of seltzer, apple, cranberry and orange juice, lemonade, six varieties of soda and technologically purified water. In all, 23 different beverages for the 200 employees on each floor.

And four bathrooms.

On Death and Voting

2012-01-11T22:43:00.004-05:00

In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined five stages of coping with death:

Denial ("Can't be. I've never felt better!")
Anger ("What! Outrageous!! I been waiting for the iPad 3!")
Bargaining ("I'll eat really healthy starting tomorrow! No, wait. Monday. I'll start Monday.")
Depression ("Crap.")
Acceptance ("Oh, well. Better clean up my hard drive.")

In some ways, the Republican nomination race has followed the same progression. Think about it.

Denial ("Hey! Michele Bachmann is pretty smart!")
Anger ("Oh yeah? Then take Herman Cain!")
Bargaining ("How about Newt? He had the whole Contract with America thing.")
Depression ("Santorum? Huntsman? Paul? Anybody?")
Acceptance ("Well, I guess it's Romney, even though he looks like one of those pictures that comes with a new frame when you buy it.")

Limerick of the Day #107

2012-01-11T00:01:00.002-05:00

In the first-in-the-nation primary
All the way down from Derby to Derry,
N.H. voters chose Mitt.
May that win benefit
Him as much as it once did John Kerry.

Consumer's Guide to Ideas

2012-01-10T00:01:00.003-05:00

Many have argued that a society is best served by a free and open marketplace of ideas. The fruit of human thought and invention can be considered and weighed by others, subjected to opposing ideas, and perhaps adopted or rejected. This can help bring about reasoned debate, possible consensus, and certainly some good jokes.

We feel it is important not to enter any marketplace unprepared. Therefore, we offer this beginning of a consumer's guide to ideas.

Rich English People

2012-01-09T00:01:00.055-05:00

Last night, Public Television's Masterpiece series opened the second season of Downton Abbey, the latest in a long string of programmes[sic] about rich English people. American television viewers seem to have an insatiable appetite for rich English people, eagerly consuming Downton Abbey, Upstairs/Downstairs, the complete works of Jane Austen and various other 19^th century English novels about rich (or want-to-be-rich) folks. Even the Masterpiece Mysteries series is mainly about which rich English person murdered which other rich English person. Apparently there's some deep yearning among television viewers to be rich English people, despite the fact that most of these stories are set in a time before the advent of indoor plumbing.

Typically, for contrast, these stories alternate between the lives of the rich English people themselves, and those of their below-stairs staffs, including cooks, maids and butlers. This creates the dramatic tension of a visual volley between House Beautiful and a Williams-Sonoma catalog.

For those of you who missed all 47 airings of this episode on the 12 different Public Television stations near you, here's a brief recap. Spoiler alert: There are no spoilers except the rich English parents. In fact, this review was written before I actually saw the show.

The offspring of the rich English people, suffering the cruel fate of having every conceivable human desire gratified, become bored and rebel against the etiquette and propriety of their class. They engage in scandalous behavior such as going out alone or without a hat. This incurs the wrath of their proper rich English parents, but a knowing wink from the mischievously (4 syllables, please) playful grandparent/uncle/aunt/whatever.

Meanwhile, below stairs, the staff panic at the impending shortage of quince, which interrupts their near-constant bed swapping. When not thus occupied, they spend their time learning and sharing the dark secret that is invariably hidden in someone's past.

Oh, and some dramatic historical event intrudes on their lives.

Tune in next week for more.

Freewheelin'

2012-01-06T14:39:00.006-05:00

Regular readers of this blog (if any of this blog's readers could be considered "regular") will know that I'm a big HPV fan. Of course, I'm referring not to human papillomavirus, that scourge of humankind, but to human powered vehicles.

This is the time of year when even hearty New England outdoorspeople tend to stay indoors, sometimes resorting to gyms in desperation. It was on just such an occasion, trudging along monotonously in the gym, that I started thinking about how great it would be if I could take this elliptical machine out on the road and go places with it. I really liked the motion of the elliptical, but standing around a gym is just plain boring.

This became something of an obsession. I started to consider how I might build such a contraption, perhaps from an existing elliptical machine. Many of the parts were already there. The flywheel could be fitted with a rubber tire. Some kind of front steering mechanism would have to be devised. It was an intriguing idea.

Then I discovered in a SkyMall catalog, that Mecca for shoppers with too much disposable income, the StreetStrider! It looked great. They seemed to have solved the steering and other problems, and were actually able to sell these things. In fact, it was featured as an exercise machine on Biggest Loser. Of course, I wasn't sure Biggest Loser was quite the image I wanted to evoke. Worse, there was no place to take a test ride. The only option was to order one, and return it for a full refund if not completely satisfied. The idea of hauling this thing back to the post office was too daunting for me.

But, by one of those bizarre coincidences that so often occur in blog anecdotes, I stumbled upon the ElliptiGO while doing a random Google search. (Ok, it was a search for "elliptical bike.") This was a thing of beauty. Basically as mechanically simple and elegant as a bicycle, this offers the full elliptical experience in a sleek, gainly device. Better yet, I found a local store where I could test ride it.

That's all it took. One ride. I was completely hooked. I've since spent many happy hours riding this puppy around, covering all my usual bike routes and then some. And the ElliptiGO has come to be known (affectionately) as the E-GO.

I've even found a few other local owners who are similarly unconcerned about appearance and willing to go on group rides. We are all E-GO maniacs, going on E-GO trips.

Two Wrongs Making a Right

2012-01-05T10:11:00.008-05:00

In a wildly flawed syllogism, we can demonstrate that two false premises can lead to a valid conclusion:

Government is a business. (FALSE)
Businesses are people. (FALSE)
Therefore, government is of, by and for people. (TRUE)

Despite the oft-heard claim that we need business leaders to run government, nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of a business is to make money for its owners. That's it. Any seemingly good works, such as treating employees well or serving customers or protecting the environment, is simply what the owners have decided will make them the most money. Or lies.

Government, on the other hand, exists to ... well, to form a more perfect union, establish justice, blah, blah. It's all spelled out in the Preamble of The Constitution. You can read about it here. Nothing about making money for the owners or anything like that.

Likewise, businesses are not people. People pursue happiness. They want things like plenty of food, shelter and clothing and opportunities for their families to enjoy same. Beyond that, they want lifestyles, entertainment, friends (real and virtual), and everything else on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Businesses want ... repeat after me ... money for the owners.

But, as Lincoln famously noted, our government is "of the people, by the people, for the people." Government is all about serving the needs of the people. Government officials are called public servants for a reason. They're supposed to be working on our behalf. All of us. The one hundred percent.