Pity of It All

Stupid found between chair and keyboard

December 21, 2011
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It seems there’s a lot of “stupid” going about nowadays. No idea if it’s the internet that’s just giving people more voice or if stupid is just becoming more common. Like many people I get a lot of my news online. Thus, I get to read it at my computer and, if something is interesting, save it. I read from various sources, conservative, liberal and neutral alike. It’s best to stay as best informed as possible so as to minimize the likelihood of exacerbating any given bias. But it seems some people are just incapable of doing that. They cling to sites that expound their personal biases. Some of the beliefs are mistaken but harmless, but others are harmful. And the problem is that people with a similar attitude then read the associated articles, sometimes purported to be “news”, thus reinforcing their prejudices or non-scientific beliefs. And because of some of these misguided beliefs people have died — such as those unwilling to take common vaccines, for example. Again, I don’t know the cause — poor education, the long-standing glorification of the idiot, the hate for anyone intelligent, … who knows. But what I do see is that these idiots

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Stupidity Truly Knows No Bounds

December 5, 2011
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I’ve been reading about the Chevrolet Volt fire risk the last few days. It seems to me to be the perfect arbiter of intelligence. If you figure the Volt’s risk is high and you’re utterly panicked by the potential of the battery catching fire, you’re an utter moron. The rest of you can continue on with your day. Why do I claim those worrying about the battery are morons? Simple, really. Each test done wherein a fire, sparking or smoke emerged from the battery pack happened many hours, days or even weeks after the crash. The most recent tests performed by the NHTSA and GM have been done on the battery packs by themselves, wherein they have done some very serious damage to them and then waited to see if something amiss happens. It took months of testing before they could replicate a scenario wherein hours, days or weeks later the pack would ignite. To appreciate the type of damage that is being applied to the packs you must read the original NHTSA report wherein they say the car must suffer a serious side impact followed by an impact into a low diameter object, like a rigid pole, followed by

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Black and White or Shades of Grey

October 5, 2010
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This article is interesting in an ironic way. Why? Mostly because the black-or-white thinker is how I think. Make a decision, go with it. Hemming and hawing is stupid and just delays the inevitable. Pick a way, go that way. If it’s wrong. Admit it, turn around. Duh. Stupid people drive me nuts. And this article just shows that even the author is unable to just come out and say that dithering just leads to problems. Especially the dithering that so many people engage in in trying to make sure everyone is happy or that no one is offended. Bah. No wonder so many people are screwed up today. They’ve never had their feelings hurt. They’ve never been allowed to fail or been told their ideas are stupid or wrong. They’ve never had to deal with reality within the safe confines of the social fabric that is modern Western Civilization. Instead, we get this placation of “every opinion matters/counts”. Which is utter bullshit. Not every opinion matters or counts. If someone tells me the moon is made of cheese his (or her) opinion is bullshit and doesn’t count. If someone tells me that the heart is the seat of intelligence,

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Why’d It Take So Long???

September 19, 2010
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First off I should let anyone who cares know that I’m a UNIX guy from way back. I started using System III and subsequently System V from AT&T in 1983. I used BSD on Vaxen in the 80s as well, where I found Rogue and spent way too much free time battling characters (literally ) to get the Amulet of Yendor. Simpler days. In the past I’ve had FreeBSD running on an old 200Mhz Pentium. I had an old box running BeOS, and quite quickly too. BeOS was great. Fast and elegant. But too different. And that led to its demise. I don’t run Linux anymore. I’m tempted now and again, but I haven’t succumbed. Why? Mostly because Linux offers me nothing I want or need. I’d like it to, but it doesn’t. Maybe twenty years ago I’d have loved it, but now it’s an anachronism to me. I want the OS to get out of my way, I want to get real work done. I don’t want to compile kernels or drivers. I don’t want to look at code. I just want to focus on my work as a computer scientist,a s a researcher. It’s really too bad. I

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The Fattening of America

September 18, 2010
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The Fattening of America

I recently finished The End of Overeating by Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. It was primarily of interest to me because, like many people, I’ve struggled with weight gain. And following the so-called “Food Pyramid” has only exacerbated the condition. So it was eye opening to read Dr. Kessler’s book on the food industry and why sometimes the food we eat is particularly bad for us. Furthermore, it readily explains much, perhaps all, of the fattening of America that has occurred during the last 50 years or so. The basic question behind the book is simple: What’s causing the so-called “Obesity Epidemic”. Whether you believe in the epidemic or not is immaterial. We all know that way too many people are struggling with huge weight issues. And the usual methods of staying slim don’t seem to work — more on that when I finish Good Calories, Bad Calories. In the book Dr. Kessler examines what we’d consider “normal” food — i.e., the stuff nature produces — vs. the food we often consume from restaurants, processed food sections of supermarkets, etc. He determines that it isn’t fat that makes us fat. And that’s something

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The Lack of Generalists

October 6, 2009
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I came across this article titled The Last Days of the Polymath. It’s an excellent article that got me thinking about my day job. I’m a generalist, though, ironically, my title proclaims me a specialist albeit in an artificial construct called “complex solutions”. Generally, what I do is think about the problems our clients inform us about. Our clients have a variety of problems. A single solution isn’t going to cut it, otherwise they’d already have purchased said solution. These clients usually have compelling and complex problems that are (usually) ahead of what the industry norm is currently focused upon. That’s OK, that’s cooler in my mind. However, to address the problem requires the outlook of a generalist and not a specialist. The problem at hand is never so narrowly focused or defined that a single, simple, and deep approach can be applied. The problem is usually one where you want to apply a “good enough” solution. One that may only resolve 50% of the issues at hand, but that’s better than what the client currently is dealing with which is a 0% solution to the problem. True specialists usually come in before us and proclaim how their given product

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Ph.D.s, Focus, and the Loss of the Infinite

July 2, 2009
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I’ve been trying for a long while to put into words why I became disenchanted with the Ph.D. process, and why that was one reason — though not the overriding reason — why I terminated my pursuit of a doctorate. But today, sitting back and reading a bit of Thomas Aquinas I came to a sudden epiphany. The reason is straightforward, and ironically was told to me by a dearly departed friend years ago. The problem, is that Ph.D.s are too narrowly focused. Or, as Jim Anderson so eloquently put it way back when, “Some of the stupidest people I know have Ph.D.s.” He bemoaned their inability to grasp the larger picture, instead focusing on minutiae, some small problem ignoring all else. Sometimes ignoring reality itself and coming up with a “solution” that worked only within some fantastical model that had little relation to how the real world functioned. Now Jim, like myself, was an old grey beard of security. In fact, I would argue that Jim was responsible for what today is called “information security”. The very foundations of computer security were formulated and documented by Jim way back in 1972. I was fortunate enough to work with Jim

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Shepherding Code

January 12, 2009
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I don’t understand why we’re still shepherding our software through the CPU. Machines are so fast we should be focusing on the software, the experience. Instead, I watch as software gets bigger and bigger, more and more cumbersome. More difficult to understand. When I started coding 30 years ago we had to write tight code which often meant having to shepherd code through the CPU. But today. Today CPUs are so fast what’s the point? Why do we write so many lines of code to accomplish so little? Every time I look at Java code I get despondent. It’s all gone so wrong.

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Shirky and Overload

September 23, 2008
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This is truly an amazing talk. It explains logically why we see so much crap and why Sturgeon’s Law seems to be the only one we experience day to day. Shirky’s always good for one of those “Duh” forehead slaps. This is another case in point. In terms of spam, and I believe this for all of computing, we need to move the costs closer to the creator. Thus, if you create an email message you should pay to email it. If you produce anything on the internet you should pay to publish it. If sites, like YouTube, wish to subsidize publishing, great, but if not, bear the brunt of the cost if you so believe in your message.Of course, this requires a massive change in mindset which I don’t see happening anytime soon.

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New and Improved vs. Old and Lousy

September 18, 2008
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New and Improved vs. Old and Lousy

I’m getting more than a bit annoyed that some of my favourite things keep getting “improved”. Sometimes it’s a mild change, like using HFCS instead of sugar in a soft drink. Other times, it’s more insidious. Yesterday I bought a bag of Goodies. For those unfamiliar with this candy, here’s a picture and a link. That was one of my favourite candies, until yesterday. Now it’s “goodier”, according to the bag. It’s not. It no longer has the nice, hard outer candy coating and the licorice inside is grainy, as if Hershey embedded small granules of sugar into the licorice. It’s ruined for me. I can’t eat it. Not altogether a bad thing as I can go without the calories, but why change something that’s been essentially the same for decades? I foolishly thought that when Coca Cola fooled around with the formula for Coke and suffered the consequences of customer rage that every single manufacturer would never play around with successful formulas. Change the packaging but leave the contents alone. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Argh.

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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