Category: Opinions

What I think about things

Minority Report becomes Reality

And without Tom Cruise, thankfully.

Check out this YouTube video of a prototype workstation. The way the guy is interacting with it is exactly the way we should be using computers… I’m very excited for the future.

I suspect that the real future for the keyboard for the foreseeable future will be one that is physically rendered in addition to being graphically rendered. By this I mean that you will be able to feel the keys, either through some localized stimulation or through gross alteration of the screen, so touch typing can remain a reality.

God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?

From “The Institute for Humanist Studies”, this article titled “God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?” is a rather scathing critique of the impact of religion on civilized nations.

I largely agree with the assessment presented with the reservation that there are many secular influences (historical government, societal and even religious practices) that have shaped those cultures and can bear at least some of the credit / fault for the way they function today.

The portrait of Japanese as being overall better off than Americans just due to religion ignores the cultural submission to authority that seems to be much more prevalent in the Asian world than here. Further, population densities and thousands of years of civilization have helped make these folks who they are. But it also has constrained them in many ways and I do not believe it is as easy to express oneself in these rigid cultures. Indeed, a lack of cultural inertia is one of the best things that the US has going for it. Without the hindrance of centuries of tradition we are freer to explore and elucidate the world around us.
Unfortunately, religion does crop up whenever there is uncertainty, and when you are not that thoroughly grounded (only a couple of hundred years hardly qualifies as a culture) then you are just a babe and perhaps still do need your all powerful fables to help you sleep at night..

Mail-in Rebates and other Crummy Marketing Practices – take a stand!

When mail-in rebates started becoming more popular I was stuck dealing with them along with everybody else. I have to admit that my success rate was pretty high. Now I didn’t buy a lot of stuff that had these rebates associated with them but, in the beginning, I would get back a check for every single one that I submitted.

Then, last year, Symantec decided to decline a legitimate mail-in rebate due to “insufficient proof of existing product”, this after I had mailed in the first CD from exactly one of the products that they listed as a legitimate upgrade. Since then, life has become.. well.. busy. And I’ve noticed that the timeframe for submitting these rebates has decreased substantially, often to only about 15 days after purchase. Personally, I like to know I’m going to keep a product before submitting the rebate. I haven’t tried to return a product with the UPC symbol carved out of the box but I imagine that it doesn’t go over very well.
So I’ve missed some pretty hefty rebates recently, one for a laptop that we purchased, another for my Bellsouth DSL modem.

So I’ve decided that I’m fed up with them and now completely do not consider the value of a mail-in rebate when making my purchasing decision.

I recently purchased a 250 Gigabyte hard drive, it “retails” for $130 and I was able to pick it up for either $90 right then and there or to wait for a few days when they would have a mail-in rebate for $70 (making it a $60 purchase – pretty sweet). When I look at that choice I see a $90 drive or a $130 drive. So I went for the $90 drive. No fiddling around like an idiot cutting things off of boxes, no filling out little questionnaires, no printing neatly so they’ll be able to mail something back to me, and no waiting 8-12 weeks for them to maybe send me a check that can easily be mistaken for more junk mail. No, I haven’t done this yet, but I imagine that larger families must do this all the time.

The other thing that skews my buying choices nowadays is the digit “9”. I understand that human psychology views $29.99 to be a much better deal than $30.00 but it’s pretty brazen of companies to be using this on every product they sell all the time. How many times have you seen adverts indicating that this $99.99 puts this product in your house for under a hundred dollars (apparently there is no sales tax in those areas)?

I absolutely love, and go out of my way to patronize places that round prices to the nearest dollar. If they can include those insulting sales taxes in the prices too, I’m all for that. There is a local golf club that does this and, though it’s not the closest one to me, it’s one reason why I go there. Treat me like a reasonable adult, not a moron who needs to be misdirected, cajoled and fooled into making my purchasing decisions. If I want that, I’ll go see a magic show.

OK, rant mode off. I *am* a little curious if anybody who sees this feels at all the same way as I do about these things…

Doomsday clock – piffle I say

I’ve been reading about the so-called “Doomsday Clock” for few decades now and I have to say that it seems stupid and irrelevant to me.

Here you have an awareness tool that is modeled after something most folks can relate to, a simple analog clock. Therein lies the problem. Firstly, the stupid Doomsday Clock only started at about a quarter ’til midnight. Secondly, it is able to go backwards.

To me, the relevance of this kind of warning vehicle is completely negated by the fact that you can say “We’re only 4 minutes away from CERTAIN ANNIHILATION!!” (and yes, I remember when that happened). And then a little while say “Ah, things have changed… no worries, we still have more time.”.

1868

It’s alarmist and it’s faulty, and worse, it’s just a bad metaphor as it attempts to use something completely irrelevant to the conversation in trying to make its point. At least the wildly lampooned Homeland Security Alert Levels never claimed any kind of time component to them, which makes them a far better vehicle for non-hysterical situational awareness. Even if nobody understands what the heck the colors are supposed to mean :).

Getting Things Done

  Getting Things Done
David Allen’s excellent book is a must read if you find yourself awash with “Stuff” to do and trying to figure out what and when to do it all.Of primary importance is creating a system, how it’s implemented doesn’t matter, that you trust to capture all of the stuff that you need to do. Getting it out of your brain and into your system allows you to free yourself for more productive work without the nagging suspicion that one of those thoughts zipping around in your head should be being addressed instead of the task at hand.

It’s really a simple, basic approach to, well, getting things done.

How soon before Matrix-like virtual reality becomes an option?

What a truly astonishing era we live in today. The amazing thing is the fact that, 10 years from now it will be even more astonishing, and 100 years after that even more so.

This is a neat opinion piece I just read off of Dr. Steven Novella’s Neurologica Blog titled “Coolest NeuroScience Breakthrough of 2006“.

Superstitious nonsense

*sigh* At one time the Arab world was at the forefront of scientific literacy and achievement. Then they fell into an abyss of superstition, fear and ignorance that plagues them to this day.

Just because we (America) are on top today, does not mean that the same thing can’t happen to us. We really, really have to guard against this kind of nonsense.

I can’t verify if this article is true or not, but based on the Bush administration’s previous meddling in NASA science publications and this blog entry on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog I am pretty confident it is accurate.

Park Service Can’t Give Official Age Of Grand Canyon For Fear Of Offending Creationists…

Time Magazine’s Article – “Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn’t… …And Ignore The Things We Should”

Time magazine tends to cater to a pretty credulous mindset. If I want solid reporting and analysis of world events I favor “The Economist”, but I was pointed to “Time’s” December 4, 2006 cover story by a blog entry on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog.

I fly airplanes, I shoot guns, I don’t smoke and I do exercise. Mostly, however, I manage risk. Understanding what is safe and what is really dangerous, not just emotionally appealing, is key to focusing on and dealing with the real issues that face us today.

We really need to get a grip on the things that we allow our public leaders use to divert us from the real issues. Check out this article for some perspective.

Carl Sagan remembered

This is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death (Dec. 20, 1996) and if you’re in the blogosphere you’ll likely see many of the science-oriented sites post entries about this sad milestone.

There is not much that I can say that has not already been posted before about Dr. Sagan’s role in growing our knowledge about the planets and moons of our local solar system as well as in popularizing the Cosmos in general. Click here for his Wikipedia entry.

My own experience with Dr. Sagan’s work began way back in 1989 when I was on vacation in Morocco for a couple of weeks. That was one of the first vacations I’d ever been on where I was truly a “stranger in a strange land”. There were a couple of French TV stations available from France in the North, but most channels were in Arabic (Berber, I believe). There happened to be a copy of Carl Sagan’s book “Cosmos” available, and over the course of those two weeks I managed to read it cover to cover.

While I enjoyed that experience immensely, it is not for that work that I really respect Dr. Sagan. I disagreed with some of his stances on political issues (nuclear holocaust and environmental concerns chief among those),  but I greatly respected the skepticism and mental rigour that he expressed so clearly in my favorite of his works, “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the dark”. I have this book on audio tape and feel it is a must read / listen for anybody interested in understanding what skepticism is really about.

I truly regret that Dr. Sagan can no longer produce such wonderful and thought provoking works anymore and that he is not able to see the incredible discoveries we’ve made both within our own solar system and throughout the Cosmos over the past few years.