This is satire, but wickedly on the mark. Obviously poking fun in the direction of Microsoft, but that’s not the only target — I saw at least one other large company using the same tactics, just before I dumped their product in disgust. I’ve no doubt that several other companies (that I’ve been fortunate enough never to run across) have adopted such tactics as well.
“What Happens When the Average Lifespan is 150 Years?”
As a semi-related extension of yesterday’s rant, here’s some more evidence that science does have some idea what it’s talking about. If it didn’t, none of this would work.
It’ll be interesting to see how humanity adapts to much longer lives. So long as life expectancy climbs slowly, I think we can handle it without things getting too “interesting.”
(Thanks, Ploni)
“Moon *Not* Made of Cheese, Physicist Explains”
Just in case you were wondering. 😉
I don’t know the context of that quote, but I’m very concerned about the science deniers in the US. It seems that, despite mandatory science classes in high school, most people still don’t understand science. Conservatives seem to think that science is like religion: convince enough people of something and science will have to follow. It doesn’t work like that… if all the evidence goes against your Intelligent Design theory (code-words for creationism), then your theory is thrown out. Regardless of what you might want to be true, or how nice it sounds, or how many people might agree with you.
If you claim that humans did not evolve from other creatures, as a pointed for-instance, then you’re denying the very basis of the medical knowledge that allows people — including you! — to live more than thirty years today. It’s only due to the belief that we did, and thus that we’re very biologically similar to other creatures, that we can progress on the assumption that things that help other creatures should also help us. Would you rather we had to assume the opposite, that other creatures are entirely unrelated to us, and test everything out on people from the very beginning? The death rate would be appalling. No one would stand for that, so medical science would never be able to develop anything. Which, by the way, was the state of things when the world was ruled by religion — it was actually illegal to dissect a human corpse, so there was no way would-be doctors could legally learn about the human body.
Worse, if a large enough minority of people deny science (which is where we seem to be headed right now), then science can’t continue and will actually be pushed back. Do you really want to turn the clock back to medieval lifespans? Vocal science deniers do, though some might not realize that that would be a consequence. Not that it would matter to them, they preach one thing and do the opposite, and see no problem with it so long as they’re not caught.
Science is about being able to explain the physical world so that we can predict things about it. It has sharply-defined limits — it can only address the physical world, and can’t be applied to everything even there. But for those things that it can be applied to, you’d have to be a flaming idiot to deny its evidence.
Unfortunately the world — and especially the US — is full of flaming idiots, and they’ve been given far too much authority in recent decades.
“Wooden Mars ark voyagers set to step out on Earth”
Remember that wooden “spaceship” I mentioned a few months ago? Well, it has almost completed its journey, and I’m happy to say that the astronauts survived without major conflict for the full trip. Of course, they knew in the back of their minds that it wasn’t the real thing, so the stress wasn’t as bad as it would be on a real one, but it’s encouraging nonetheless.
I’ve noticed, from stories that my father-in-law tells and from movies of the era, that people seem to have gotten less aggressive in the last sixty years. I’m sure that helps endeavors like this, since the pessimistic predictions of murder and mayhem during such long-term voyages seem to be hold-overs from the imaginings of the fifties and sixties. Probably a good idea to be pessimistic about such things, but it also feels pretty good to learn that we’re not entirely the savages that we thought we were.
I’ve got some ideas about the future of the human race, and the techniques and technologies that will enable us to advance far beyond what we think of as normal now. Oddly enough, most of those techniques and technologies already exist, there are only a few that I have identified as necessary but haven’t found yet. More on this later.
“Halloween Sadism: The Evidence”
It seems that our parents were — again — worried about absolutely nothing. Which makes sense… anyone contemplating such a move would quickly realize that if they did it on a mass scale they’d be tracked down in a day or two at most, and even targeting it at the one brat that has been terrorizing your pet iguana for years offers too much opportunity for discovery or for someone else ingesting the weaponized treat.
Sorry to ruin your fun, but poisoned apples apparently only happen in fairy tales.
“Boss leaves robot in charge of office”
I love it. Lounge around in your underwear all day and still keep an eye on those shiftless no-good employees of yours. 😉 I doubt it’ll catch on in the near future though. And I hope the robot has a good software security system… if it has arms (something I can’t determine from the two photos there) and could be taken over by unscrupulous hackers, it would be the perfect inside accomplice for a robbery.
(That’s just how my mind works: when I see a security system, or any other system with security implications, I have to play with it in my head to see if I can see a way around it. If I were a less ethical person, I’m sure I’d make a very good living a high-end burgler.)
“We like zombies… because we *are* zombies”
I always wondered at the popularity of zombies in popular fiction. They have no skill and no intelligence, and they move very slowly, their only truly horrifying trait (other than their dire need of cosmetics) is that they won’t stop so long as they can move even a single digit in your direction. It requires no intelligence to stop them, just lots of firepower and the willingness to use it.
(Hm… mindless hordes coming after you relentlessly, with big guns and endless ammunition your only defense, and intelligence completely unnecessary… that seems to be the way that today’s Republican voters view things. 😉 Or at least how the party thinks they do. But I digress.)
Anyway, the point to this post is to highlight this article. To give you the executive summary, here’s a quote from near the end:
Zombies may well be popular today because they speak to a similar feeling of powerlessness shared by many members of our society. […] The key question is why, like today’s portrayal of zombies, are we unwilling to take a stand against the powers-that-be and overwhelmed by a lack of political interest? It seems the time is right to reclaim the original zombie concept of a controlling sorcerer but one that can successfully be resisted. Today’s zombie phenomenon is a really good opportunity to get people thinking about who may be wishing to control our brains and what resources we have to resist.
In the past, zombies wandered around consuming brains, but today’s zombies are encouraged to wander around consuming the latest, heavily advertised, branded goods.
He just might be on to something.
“Secret Codes in Bacteria”
In Michael Stackpole’s book I, Jedi, set in the Star Wars universe a few years after Return of the Jedi, the main character must develop his latent Jedi abilities in order to track down and rescue his kidnapped wife. Unfortunately, the late and unlamented Emperor has done a very thorough job of wiping out all the Jedi lore he could find (as well as almost all of the Jedi and their offspring), and there’s little for Corran to go on.
His adopted grandfather, who had been a liaison with the Jedi who was Corran’s real grandfather before the Emperor rose to power, had done more than altering records and adopting Corran’s father when he saw what was happening. He’d also encoded all the Jedi lore that he could find in a place that none of the Emperor’s minions would think to look for it: the DNA of the flowers that he now breeds in his retirement.
If that wasn’t the impetus for these scientists, it should have been 🙂
“iPad baby baffled by paper magazine”
I saw something in a science fiction book once (I don’t recall which one, but it might have been David Brin’s Earth, though I can’t locate my copy of it now to verify that). It described a young man’s first encounter with a printed book, after spending all his life with a World Wide Web interface to information (it was written several years before the Web even existed), and how frustrating it was to him that he couldn’t get definitions of unfamiliar words just by touching the page (he had to actually look them up in another book, called a dictionary, a ridiculously slow process), or get more in-depth information on a subject by touching on-page links.
This video reminded me very strongly of that. The caption at the end pretty much says it all:
For my 1 year old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work.
😀
Spam: More than 54.8% of Hits
That’s right: more than one out of every two hits on this blog recently are spam attempts. I say that because that was the percentage of the last 1,600 or so hits that were on a single post with very little content… not coincidentally, the exact same post that spammers have been pounding on without mercy for more than a year.
Yup, more than a year after they started trying (and constantly failing) to spam that message, they’re still trying. Even though they can’t even get to the comment page from that one anymore.
I’d really like to know why they’re all pounding on that particular post. A quick Google search on its URL turns up more than three hundred pages listing the same invalid link from it, on what look almost exclusively like Japanese-language blogs that have been overrun with spam, with titles that translate like “OB Football Association Board Keio Medical” or “BBS
Oh well, maybe I’ll figure it out some day.