¿Am I Turning Into My Parents?

Do you have magnalineaealbaephobia or motus autem necessitatis?

March 6, 2018 4:19 pm March 6, 2018

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I don’t know if this is just a local thing or not but I have noticed a significant increase in drivers suffering from magnalineaealbaephobia. I have asked friends if it’s…

I don’t know if this is just a local thing or not but I have noticed a significant increase in drivers suffering from magnalineaealbaephobia. I have asked friends if it’s just me and they too have noticed a spike lately—they say they have observed it too. In case you haven’t been able to determine the definition of magnalineaealbaephobia, it’s the fear of big white lines. More and more I see drivers who either pull past the white stop line at an intersection or way behind it thereby failing to trigger the traffic light. This is especially annoying in left turn lanes. In general these drivers stop past the line, in the intersection, if no one pulls in behind them to trigger the light, they eventually give up and make an illegal left turn. Those that sit so far back that they don’t trigger the sensor seem to be able to wait forever. I was behind one of those clueless drivers, who didn’t even seem to be distracted by a cell phone. We sat through two cycles of the light until I finally pulled around them and stopped in front of them on the sensor allowing us to proceed with the next cycle of the light

These people really yank my chain. Just in spite sometimes when I need to make a left-hand turn and one of these comatose drivers is stopped so that the sensor is clearly visibly not close to their vehicle, I continue to the next intersection and make a U-turn.

And then there’s motus autem necessitates, or urgency of movement; not like the IBS or Crohns type. Argghh! What is it with those drivers who sit at a red light and slowly edge their way six inches at a time into the intersection until they are clearly blocking cross traffic? I know I shouldn’t care but for some reason it bothers me. If I’m behind them I purposely edge up behind them so they can’t back out of the intersection. Not very Christian I know.

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Technology

I don’t like self-driving cars

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February 8, 2018 10:12 pm February 8, 2018

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Why do they bother me? It’s the loss of independence. Would you trust your self-driving 4×4 to take you from one end of the Rubicon Trail to the other arriving…

Why do they bother me? It’s the loss of independence. Would you trust your self-driving 4×4 to take you from one end of the Rubicon Trail to the other arriving unscratched, let alone all of the passenger alive? OK, I know that about 99.9999% of everyone driving around in their 4WD, all-wheel drive and whatnot never intend to take them off a paved surface unless it’s a gravel parking lot at the local pumpkin patch. And most of those cool guys with jacked up 4×4’s with 10’ lift kits haven’t a clue; they raise not only their vehicle so they can mount those massive tires, but also their center of gravity. But since they’ll probably never drive off-road they don’t have to worry about flipping their vehicle—unless they drive over a curb. To be honest I have to admit I have a Toyota Tacoma 4×4 with a 3” lift kit to accommodate my slightly larger than OEM tires. We also own a mini-van and a Prius.

My “mega truck”

WAKE UP! I know you thought this would be on a more ethereal level and not a screed about 4×4’s. So let’s get serious. Given the above, I believe it will be awhile before we get rid of human driven vehicles, though the vehicle in your driveway might become a collector’s item sooner than you think. Even tractor trailers might become autonomous soon if Mercedes has its way. But not all trucks are that easily automated. What about dump trucks, tow trucks, ambulances and fire trucks, or trucks with wide loads? Hey and what about motorcycles?

Why are these “exceptions” important? It’s because today the accident rate for self-driving cars is twice that of non-self-driving cars and the reason is all the other vehicles on the road. The problem is that autonomous cars follow the rules of the road and most human drivers don’t. Autonomous cars are more likely to be rear-ended by an inattentive human than human driven vehicles.

Not only do autonomous cars follow the rules, but they are learning machines. That means that as they drive they learn. Therefore they are not programmed for every possible situation they might encounter; they learn as they go. This complicates things a bit since the “code” changes itself as it learns. This makes troubleshooting and reconstructing events a bit troublesome. This will evidently lead to legal issues yet to be imagined. Who’s at fault when an autonomous vehicle is at fault in an incident? This has already popped up in San Francisco where a motorcyclist claimed an autonomous vehicle hit him and he’s suing GM, even though he was the one cited.

Clearly this technology will require a major cultural change; maybe the millennials can handle it but I don’t think I can.

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Aging Technology

Are you smarter than the average 14-year old?

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January 10, 2018 7:13 pm January 10, 2018

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OK, I do have a BS in math and an MS in Computer Science, but that’s from the punch card era. My son considers himself an expert on all devices…

OK, I do have a BS in math and an MS in Computer Science, but that’s from the punch card era. My son considers himself an expert on all devices electronic since he can follow his teachers’ instructions and successfully post Google Doc assignments online. In his opinion even more impressive is that he can do a corkscrew spin in a B-29 bomber without damaging the plane and his virtual crew. So I was surprised when the other day he came to me in a panic because his phone had been hacked. What?

He said that he knew it because no matter what he did all it does is go through the beginning of the phone’s boot before shutting down. I doubted it. First I had to explain that the problem is probably his battery is dead. Impossible he said since it would start booting, it the battery was dead that couldn’t happen. I explained that phones and computers in general, have a second, smaller battery, to save BIOS settings when “the battery” dies or in the case of computers they’re powered off. To prove it I got a new battery and sure enough it didn’t charge either. I asked what that could possibly mean. He had no idea other than his phone had been really massively hacked.

I explained that the symptoms would indicate that there was probably a problem between the outlet and the battery contacts. Of course he was flummoxed as to how to test this. So first we replaced his charger with the one from my phone—didn’t work, and then we replaced the power cord from my phone—didn’t work either. I noticed that the cord wiggled around in phone’s connector, so I asked if he had dropped his phone while he had it plugged in and of course he had. He had apparently broken the contacts in the connector. A multimeter confirmed this. Use of a multimeter was another later lesson along with one to teach him the symptoms associated with the loss of an internet connection.

Is it just me?

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Aging Technology

It’s a gooey world!

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January 10, 2018 6:12 pm January 10, 2018

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Why have a dash when there’s steering wheel? (Maserati Boomerang ) I remember the days before string theory and quantum mechanics when if you had half a brain you…

Why have a dash when there’s steering wheel? (Maserati Boomerang )

I remember the days before string theory and quantum mechanics when if you had half a brain you knew pretty much everything you needed to know to live. Even me; someone who sucked at sports but excelled in math, science, and even English, could not only find and identify a carburetor, but fix one too.

But with the advent of complex stuff to aid mankind survive our day to day lives ordinary things have become almost magical. Because computers have always been a bit hard for the average homo sapien to comprehend they have been dumbed-down by using graphical user interfaces (GUI, pronounced gooey). No more line commands typed into the console required. This has spread to cover all aspects of our lives. Can you adjust the carburetor in your car? Of course not, it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now a fuel injection system, nothing here that doesn’t require a computer and some software.

So have you ever wondered why there’s a tachometer in the dashboard of your automatic transmission car? When automatic transmissions first came out the tachometer disappeared from the dash in most cars, but it’s back! Most people I’ve asked don’t even know what a tachometer is let alone why they need the information it imparts. I would think manufacturers would bring back the battery level so it was more like a smartphone. I’m sure this will happen when everyone is driving electric vehicles. Even my wife has forgotten that the reason a battery is even in a combustion engine vehicle is so you don’t have to crank start it. It’s not really there to power the entertainment system and other electronic devices. What how could the battery be dead? I wasn’t even driving the car!

Then there’s our daughter who dresses more for form than fashion. She commonly complains that the car heater is defective; it takes too much time before there’s any heat. I had to explain that the heat comes from the engine and since we don’t own a nuclear powered vehicle it takes time for the engine to warm up (really “heat up”—it becomes more than warm).

It seems to me that today people are more about memorizing the details than understanding the concepts. I’m convinced that Standards of Learning tests help reinforce this. But then maybe it’s always been this way, that’s why there are so many people qualified for government jobs.

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Growing Up Nostalgia

DoUDo Commando?

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December 7, 2017 3:06 am December 7, 2017

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I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve heard Jimmy Buffet’s song “Pencil Thin Mustache.” It’s supposed to be a nostalgic look at his childhood as a senior citizen. He released…

I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve heard Jimmy Buffet’s song “Pencil Thin Mustache.” It’s supposed to be a nostalgic look at his childhood as a senior citizen. He released the song when he was 28, so how much did he know about life as a senior citizen? The song is on a playlist on my phone and every time it plays as soon as I hear: “Yeah, but now I’m gettin’ old, don’t wear underwear,” I wonder where did he get the idea that seniors commonly don’t wear underwear. There’s no way you’d catch me going commando. My urinary system is a bit leaky and it really bothers me when the last dribble runs down inside my water-resistant cargo pants into my socks (cargo because I need lots of room for my keys, wallet, glasses, phone, and geocaching tools) making my legs, pants, and socks smell like urine. There’s no way I’d skip underwear; I’d be washing my outerwear every day.

In spite of that I like the song in spite the stereotypes of us seniors. So what else is there in the song? Here’s the lyrics (in bold) annotated by me (not in bold).

Now they make new movies in old black and white

With happy endings, where nobody fights

So if you find yourself in that nostalgic rage

Honey, jump right up and show your age

For the life of me I haven’t a clue why this is in the lyrics or what it means. New movies in old black and white? But since lyrics are poetry set to music maybe it doesn’t have to convey a crystal clear idea or concept. Maybe it there to cause me to emote—it failed. Clearly he never anticipated Game of Thrones where every episode ends unhappily with the inbred characters.

I wish I had a pencil thin mustache

The “Boston Blackie” kind

This is a reference to the Boston Blackie television series which ran from 1951 through 1953—before we had a TV, so I had to look this one up. It turns out that before TV, there were quite a few Boston Blackie movies (58 to be exact) from 1918 to 1949. Boston didn’t have a mustache let alone a pencil thin one in the movies. But when Kent Taylor played the lead in the TV series, he had one. As part of my rebellious nature I grew a mustache in the Marines and still have it. Marine Corps regulations during the 20 years I was in dictated a pencil thin mustache. It couldn’t touch your top lip or extend past the corners of your mouth. The Marine Corps Grooming Standards and Body Composition Program also states that the “The individual length of a mustache hair fully extended must not exceed ½ inch.”

A two toned Ricky Ricardo jacket

Everyone should know that Ricky Ricardo (played by Desi Arnaz) was Lucille Esmeralda Ricardo née McGillicuddy’s (Lucille Ball) husband on the TV series I Love Lucy. The marriage between Caucasian Lucy and Latino Ricky marked the first appearance of an interracial marriage on an American TV show; I Love Lucy debuted in 1951, sixteen years before Loving v. Virginia legalized all forms of interracial marriage in all 50 states.

And an autographed picture of Andy Devine

Andy played Roy Roger’s sidekick Cookie. That was back when Roy Rogers was a film and TV show star, not a fast food restaurant.

Writin’ fan letters to Sky’s niece Penny

Again speak for yourself; my heart was reserved for Mickey Mouse Club’s Annette Funicello not Sky King’s daughter.

Sky King’s daughter Penny

Annette Funicello

Oh I wish I had a pencil thin mustache

Then I could solve some mysteries too

Oh it’s Bandstand, Disneyland, growin’ up fast

Drinkin’ on a fake I.D.

In downstate New York we didn’t need fake IDs, we were served anywhere we went. Maybe that was because it was New York, not Alabama where Jimmy spent his formative years. The legal drinking age in New York at the time was 18, so of course we were practicing drinking around 15. We commonly cut study hall in high school and went to the Newbridge Inn for pizza and beers.

And Rama of the Jungle was everyone’s Bawana

Another TV show that died before we got our first TV.

But only jazz musicians were smokin’ marijuana

Maybe in Alabama, but in New York not only were people smoking mary jane, but hashish, and doing tabs of LSD. Louis Armstrong was famous for smoking marijuana starting in the 1920’s and then throughout his career.

But then it’s flattop, dirty bop, coppin’ a feel

Grubbin’ on the livin’ room floor (so sore)

I’m sure everyone has seen a veteran (active and retired) with a flattop (not me, never had one). The bop was a dance, and coppin’ a feel and grubbing on the floor should be obvious to anyone who has gone through puberty.

A non-compliant military flattop

Yeah, but now I’m gettin’ old, don’t wear underwear

Maybe it’s because he forgot. Below is a survey from the Huffington Post. Clearly not many men go commando, but the results are a bit suspicious since 3% of those surveyed said they go commando, but the total of all the men that buy underwear is 100%

I don’t go to church and I don’t cut my hair

This might explain why he doesn’t have a pencil thin mustache—he’s probably has a full beard knotted up with his nose and ear hairs.

But I can go to movies and see it all there

Just the way that it used to be

That’s why I wish I had a pencil thin mustache

The “Boston Blackie” kind, a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket

And an autographed picture of Andy Devine

Oh, I could be anyone I wanted to be

Maybe suave Errol Flynn or a Sheik of Araby

I was surprised that The Sheik of Araby is a song, not a movie. It was written in 1921 in response to the popularity of Rudolph Valentino in the film The Sheik. Even the Beatles did a version of the song!

If I only had a pencil thin mustache

Then I could do some cruisin’ too

Yeah, Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do yah

Brycreem was British brand of hair styling products for men. The first Brylcreem product was a hair cream released in 1928. It’s available at Walmart! The cream is an emulsion of water and mineral oil stabilised with beeswax. Their byline was, “a little dab’ll do yah.” Back in my days it was iconic of the “greaser look.”

Oh, I could do some cruisin’ too

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Graphics Humor

Are pictures worth a thousand words?

admin

November 25, 2017 6:38 pm November 25, 2017

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Mississippi’s answer to “no child left behind.” No slow children signs here; it’s every driver’s responsibility to help raise the scholastic standing of Mississippi’s school children. (Gulfport, MS)

Maybe this warning on a ladder makes more sense in Spanish

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Aging Attitude Growing Up Health

Does looking good = good health?

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November 25, 2017 6:27 pm November 25, 2017

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I am at the age where I have a number medical diseases and condition that can’t be cured. This isn’t anything that people don’t associate with aging. My primary…

Is this a extremely good looking guy?

I am at the age where I have a number medical diseases and condition that can’t be cured. This isn’t anything that people don’t associate with aging. My primary doctor told me not to worry. The rule of thumb amongst internal medicine docs is:

50’s = heart attack

60’s = cancer

70’s = stroke

80’s = a hospital visit terminated by pneumonia

As you age your “baseline” changes. If I had gotten up feeling like I do now when I was 30, I’d be asking myself what it was I did yesterday and make sure I don’t do that again.

So why is it that people keep telling me that I’m looking good? Are they just being polite or am I so good looking that people can’t see through my beauty? All of a sudden it dawned on me…maybe it’s my attitude. Maybe I act younger than others of my age.

So I took a bunch of those less than scientific online tests that purport to tell you your mental age. Most of them are pretty simplistic with questions clearly aimed at the younger crowd; particularly women in their teens and twenties. It was hard for me to come up with good answers to questions about how I handle my homework assignments or boyfriend problems. In the end my “mental age” averaged over eight different tests was 33.5. What?

I suspected that it might be impossible for me to come up with a mental age that was even close to my real age. So I took all the tests again answering all the questions as my mother might have (a bitter curmudgeon who died at 82). The average results of those tests was 50.2 years.; 35% less than my physical age That seems to lead credence to my impression that these tests aren’t the most reliable.

I did some more research and found that there really is a scientific concept of mental age. At the beginning of the 20^th century Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, developed the Binet-Simon Scale at the request of the French Ministry of Education to determine which students did not learn effectively in standard classroom environments. Below is a picture of a sample of one of the test questions. The test has since fallen out of favor since it was designed only for children 6 through 14 and later used by the eugenics movement to show that whites were smarter than other races; among other things. It has since been replaced by the IQ test. But before the IQ test became generally accepted, intelligence quotient was determined from one’s mental age using the following formula (this is where the “Q” in IQ came from).

(mental age ÷ physical age) × 100 = IQ

Well that’s disappointing. If those online tests are valid my average IQ is 49! That means more that 99% of the world’s population has a higher IQ than I do. I’m a knuckle dragging drooler! I took an IQ test once long ago when I was in my twenties and had a “very high” IQ; I don’t remember what it was. So I took another IQ test. Plugging the results into the formula above shows my mental age to be 78.6—I’m mentally slightly more than 10 years older than my physical age. Ugh! Though if you have an IQ over 100, which indicates you are better than normal, then your mental age will always be higher than your physical age.

So much for that. I found an article called, “8 Habits Of People Who Look Younger Than Their Actual Age” written by Nancy Collins. She seems to have about as many creds on this topic as I do. Neither of us have a degree in psychology, mental health, or psychiatry, so it must be fairly reliable. Though from her picture she hardly looks as experienced in life as I am. She says the secrets are:

Age Gracefully
Add Some Spice to Your Diet
Accept Life for What it Is
Sing!
Spend Quality Time With Your Dog
Wondering How to Look Younger? Sleep!
Get Religion
Google Can Help You Appear Younger

I noticed that plastic surgery isn’t on the list, thank goodness. I have a few still work on, but maybe those are really the secrets to aging and looking good. It does seem clear that looking good doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healthy. I think a lot has to do with your attitude, which clearly isn’t related to one’s mental age. The better your attitude, the better you look. Perhaps I do act and think younger than many of my peers. So go out there and “just do it.”

“Which of these two faces is the prettier?”

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Media

Fake or Psychic Black Friday News?

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November 25, 2017 3:46 am November 25, 2017

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I find it a bit jarring when I look at the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal and see a headline saying, “Shoppers Flock to Phones” with a…

I find it a bit jarring when I look at the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal and see a headline saying, “Shoppers Flock to Phones” with a subheadline of “Consumers shun Black Friday for the mall in their pockets as retailers ease mobile buying.” The article is written the presence tense. How is that possible? Today is Black Friday and my print edition of the WSJ gets delivered, when it gets delivered, between 5 and 6AM.

We also get the Washington Post, which is delivered by the same person who delivers the WSJ. On page A14 there is an article titled, “The fading thrill of Black Friday bargains,” with a subheadline of, “With early discounts and the rise of online shopping, fewer consumers are lining up to nab in-store deals.” Surprisingly for the Post, famous for confusing editorials with news, for the most part the article discusses the recent history of Black Friday only minor diversions into the present. Furthermore, it based some of the report on the portion of Black Friday that apparently occurs Thanksgiving afternoon.

Checking the Times of London, the Brits don’t seem to make as many distinctions between ecommerce and brick and mortar sales as we do. They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, though they do have a Black Friday which starts on Friday not Thursday afternoon. As far as I can tell all reporting about Black Friday was published no earlier than 5PM on Friday. That’s one of the reasons I subscribe to the Times—less fake and psychic news. One of the other reasons is to see what other countries think of what’s going on in the U.S.

What do they think you ask? “An emperor who is a dotard. A population in the grip of opium addiction. An economy held back by bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure. A culture fixated on past greatness but in fact hopelessly decadent. This was how westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries regarded China. It is how the Chinese (not to mention most Europeans) now regard the United States.”

Sigh.

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Technology

Are you ready for when AI isn’t artificial anymore?

admin

November 16, 2017 10:35 pm November 16, 2017

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Are you ready for when AI isn’t artificial anymore?I earned an MS in Computer Science back in what has been called the “AI winter.” …

Your brain on AI

Are you ready for when AI isn’t artificial anymore?I earned an MS in Computer Science back in what has been called the “AI winter.” That was when AI was more theoretical than practice. Our mainframe was a Digital PDP-11 booted from paper tape in a freezing room surrounded by tape drives. I wrote my thesis using WordStar on an Altos microcomputer powered by an 8-bit Z80 processor with 64K of memory. It was one of the top of the line computers for its time; it even had two 5¼” floppy drives!

Now there’s the “world famous” IBM Watson, known for beating humans at chess, go, and Jeopardy using AI.

According to Wikipedia artificial intelligence (AI) is:

… Intelligence displayed by machines, in contrast with the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of “intelligent agents“: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”.

There are those who can hardly wait for this technology to become mature enough to implant extensions of the cloud into our brains (called hybrid thinking). Does this sound like a good idea? There is even the Cyborg Foundation (“IT’S TIME FOR TRANS-SPECIES TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET”), whose stated mission is, “…to help humans become cyborgs, to promote the use of cybernetics as part of the human body and to defend cyborg rights.” It’s bad enough that your computer can be hacked or infected with malware; imagine if your brain was. Talk about identity theft!

Ironically this is exactly one of the reasons this technology is getting so much attention. Identity assurance is a major concern in today’s workplace and everyday life. Nymi is working on this problem, but since their solution is a band that can be removed it’s not considered the ultimate solution. One of the proposed ultimate solutions is embedding a chip in everyone to establish their unique identity.

What makes AI different from other “computer programs” is that it learns and as it learns it modifies itself so it becomes better at whatever task or tasks it is assigned. This has some interesting implications, the most important of which is that it can’t be easily audited like “normal code” can be. The complex way AI grows and improves makes it harder to understand and even harder to control. There are many out there like IBM’s Grady Booch who believe it is possible to “raise an AI” system to be a responsible citizen. After thousands of years we still have a hard time raise our kids to be responsible, what make us think we can raise AI to be perfectly responsible?

A company, OpenAI, trained an AI to maximize its score in a virtual boat-race game, but instead of navigating the course as quickly as possible; the AI taught itself to exploit a flaw in the game by driving in circles and racking up bonus points while crashing into walls and setting itself on fire. They say that an IA tasked with maximizing profits for a corporation—and given the seemly innocuous ability to post things on the internet—could deliberately cause political upheaval in order to benefit from a change in commodity prices.

Are you ready to become a cyborg? Are you ready to turn your life over to AI?

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Media

All the news that fits to print—October 2017

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November 2, 2017 1:50 am November 2, 2017

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Have you ever wondered what newspapers think would make you want to buy their paper? Supposedly what appears above the fold on the front page is what the editors…

Have you ever wondered what newspapers think would make you want to buy their paper? Supposedly what appears above the fold on the front page is what the editors and publishers think will draw your attention enough to induce you to buy the paper. Above is the most frequently used words found above the fold in the month of October, 2017 in the Washington Post (in blue, considered liberal), the Wall Street Journal (in green, considered conservative though I find it pretty unbiased), and the Washington Times (in red, considered conservative). All of these words appeared more than once over the month and the font size is an indication of the frequency of the word. The font sizes are scaled the same for all of the sources, so if a word appeared 10 times in all three papers, it is the same size font for all. I also used word roots so that, for example, the word “campaigns” became “campaign.” If various forms of the words were meant differently then I didn’t reduce them to their roots, so “Senate” and “senator” were not reduced to the same root. Also Wordle eliminates “common” words such as articles, pronouns, etc.

It’s not surprising that “Trump” appeared most often in all three papers, though it tied with “U.S.” in the Journal.

Though all of the papers mentioned the GOP, Mueller, Republicans, Russia, and Trump, they clearly emphasize different issues. As one would expect the WSJ is the only paper that included articles about the CVS and Aetna merger and GE’s plans to drop the manufacture of trains. The WSJ also covered “health care’ and “health law” as opposed to the Times that covered “Obamacare.” The Post had nothing about that topic above the fold. The WSJ is the only paper to use the “president” to refer to Trump.

The Post is the only paper that had anything about the legislation that restricted the DEA’s power over the manufacture of opioids. It was also the only paper to put anything above the fold about Trump’s controversial calls to families of killed military personnel. It is the only place you’ll see any mention of Bannon, Kelly, and the upheaval in Catalonia.

The Times was the only paper to include the words abortion, Obamacare, social media, Democrats, and “Islamic State” above the fold. Unlike both the Post and WSJ, it didn’t include anything about the wildfires in California or the current tax bill.

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