All posts by djones

oddness, strangeness

Wha?

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Today is being spent making up for all the brain deadness of yesterday. Yesterday was one of those days that would have been better spent not even getting out of bed. How bad was it? Well …

The day began with me getting up and mentally going through my todo list for the day as I got dressed in my bathroom. My attention wondered back to reality when I saw a flash of green and  had the random thought “I don’t have any green pants.” A few moments later it struck me that I was busily trying to stuff my leg into my green tee shirt sleeve and pull it up in the belief it was my pants. That brought reality crashing in for at least a few moments, at least long enough to finish getting dressed and get to work. At least I didn’t look quite as odd as Lady Gaga in one of her tamer incarnations:

But it was close, too close for comfort.

The bad thing is that it was the high point of my day. The rest of the day amounted to being interrupted mid-thought in everything I tried to get done. I got phone calls from every marketing firm in the universe, a couple from people who still won’t believe I’m not named Steve, and the usually assortment of lost pets and animal care concerns. After trying 5 times to fill out the grant paperwork for a proposal and still not getting past the first paragraph, I decided to go with the flow and just shut the brain down for the day. How do you handle those kind of days?

So today my brain has been rebooted and the cogito interruptus has been at a minimum. Maybe I’ll even get some real work done and not do battle with non-existent green pants. A guy can hope, can’t he?

Maybe tomorrow will be even better as I turn yet another year older and closer to death (with due apologies to Pink Floyd for mashing their timeless lyrics). (Yup, that’s right. I have a {*gasp*} birthday tomorrow.)

growth, internet

Growing Exponentially

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And no, the question is not “What is my waistline doing?” {*grin*}

Along with all the publicity about running out of IPv4 addresses, how many of you caught on to the near exponential growth of the beast called the internet over the last 30 years? Given that I was assigned my first domain name in the eighties when there were only a few of machines connected, I have seen it happen and lived to tell the tale. Sometimes it has amazed me and other times it has seemed like the most obvious of things.

What do I mean? Consider the following data points:

Year Number of Internet Connected Devices
1984 1000
1992 1 million
2008 1 billion
2010 5 billion
2020 50 billion (est.)

Who would have thought that an academic/DARPA experiment to go beyond dial-up store and forward systems would grown into such a monster. 1985 was the year the very first .com domains were issued (symbolics.com was the very first in 1985). Most companies saw no purpose to registering a domain name back in the good old days. All the hoopla would come later.

So my question for you is how many devices in your home and on your person are connected to the internet right now? I come up with between 10 and 20 for me, depending on how you define device. (And no, my toaster is currently not connected to the internet!)

Molly, valentine

Happy …

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… whatever day. It was originally supposed to be Happy Valentine’s Day, but then I was awoken at 3:30 this morning to inglorious sound of Molly the wonder dog retching by my ear. One of the joys of pet ownership is the occasional gift of upchuck, be the pet a dog or cat. I just wish it didn’t happen while I was sound asleep. By the time it was all cleaned up and the carpet cleaned, I was wide awake. At least it wasn’t hidden like kitty cats tend to do. {*grin*} For some reason, cleaning up after the dog brought to mind the days of the Son’s infancy from long ago when we would undergo poop containment system failure. You know, when the onsie has both legs full and the only sane method of recovery is the emergency shower as you peel the onsie off. Odd how the mind will connect unrelated scenarios like that.

Getting back to Valentine’s Day, L and I have been together and celebrating the day in our own low key way for 39 years now. We met the first day of sophomore year of high school in 1969 and didn’t start dating until the fall of 1971 – not due to a lack of effort on my part. The first time I asked her out, she said she couldn’t because her grandparents were in town and then showed up at the event I asked her to sans grandparents. Needless to say, it was a couple of years later that we actually went on a date. The rest is history – much to the concern of her parents at the time. I think they got really tired of flicking the porch light off and on when I’d bring L home from a date and we’d sit in the car talking for hours in front of their house.

This Valentine is for you, L. I miss the days when we could spend hours cuddling and talking about anything and nothing without life getting in the way. May we return to those days in the future.

Nothing like a little scientific humor to go with the sentiment of the day. (You do recognize Charles Darwin, don’t you?) (You can find this and other scientist Valentines over at Ironic Sans.)

behavior, deindividuation

Deindividuation

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Do you know what it means? I think it is one of the more informative terms ever to come from sociology and psychology. It explains so much of the atrocious behavior we see every day in real life and on the news from our fellow human beings.

So what is it? One definition is “doing together what you would not do alone.” Wikipedia says

Deindividuation, as described by Leon Festinger and colleagues in 1952, is the situation where anti-normative behavior is released in groups in which individuals are not seen or paid attention to as individuals. Simply put, deindividuation is immersion in a group to the point at which the individual ceases to be seen as such.

One of the clearer explanations of the experimental results underlying the phenomena  and the societal appearance was given yesterday in the wonderful “You Are Not So Smart” blog. I encourage you to click on over and be amused and amazed and edified.

Deindividuation explains phenomena as diverse as crowd riots, flash crowds chanting “jump” to potential suicides, much teenage behavior, and facebook and blog attacks. It makes clear much of the ugly behavior that happens on line. But the most interesting part to me is how easily the problem can be controlled simply by requiring people to identify themselves as individuals. Any one who has run a public forum that allows anonymous comments versus one that requires a validated ID knows just how powerful it is for commenters to be seen as individuals rather than as part of the faceless horde.

The really sad part is that it is an unconscious feature of all of us. Anyone can undergo deindividuation with only a small nudge in the right circumstances. So what do you think? And which of these two pictured individuals is more likely to suffer deindividuation?

(picture credit unknown)

Does it change if they have on hoods?

Molly

Cold Doggy

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Remember how I remarked on Molly and her cold loving habits yesterday? Well here she is at about 9 this morning as the temperature hit 2 degrees.

This is after an hour of me repeatedly calling her and asking if she wants to come in and getting the “Who me?” look in response.

My real question is what does she hope to spot as she scans the snow. The squirrels don’t come down to the ground when it is this cold, so it can’t be a squirrel. Likewise the birds aren’t flitting about much right now. (Although I did see a flight of at least a 100 geese circling and honking this morning as I shoveled the walk!) So what is it that is so interesting?

I have my own theory. This is when Molly thinks her deep thoughts. You know, the thoughts that she tries to express when she sits with her head in my lap and makes googly eyes at me. Rather than dumb affection, I always wonder if it might not be more along the lines of her trying to mentally convey that she has solved all the problems of the universe and why haven’t I caught up to her. What do you think?