Category Archives: rant

comments, literacy, novel, rant

Does Commenting Cause ….

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Does commenting cause a decline in literacy?

Before you go psycho and attempt to ban me from the blogosphere, I’m not talking about a decrease of writing ability and/or intelligence. What I am talking about is the hideousness of most comment interfaces on blogs and the effect it has on the literary merit of the comments left on those blogs.

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Some comment interfaces don’t allow even the most primitive of proof-reading. The only option is to push the publish button with only the raw text entry box for you to have proof-read. And if you do press publish? Then your only corrective option is to delete the whole comment (leaving those nasty “Comment deleted by author.” squirrel tracks to mess up someone’s pristine blog) or to leave your dirty underwear hanging in public.

Some comment interfaces at least allow you to proof-read your comment. Unfortunately they then often require an arcane sequence of button pushes or the corrections will be lost. The end result is often the same: delete and leave a meaningless squirrel track or leave the skid marks of life hanging in the breeze. Of course that means that the misspellings and other embarrassing errors are preserved for the universe to see too. There is a reason that Google finally started offering alternatives to the search word you entered. That way they can use a canonicalized index and find things in spite of all the misspellings out there. I attribute at least part of that to blogs and their comments as filtered by the current interfaces.

I could probably live with the above limitations, but because of security worries, you lose the ability to do any but the most plain jane formatting and referencing in the comment forms. How many times is the perfect comment a link to another place that you cannot put in the comments? I understand why many hosts and blog forms don’t allow references and links. Heck, let me put unrestricted links in the comments and I can think of hundreds of mean and malicious things I could do. Including infecting every reader who came by with some really nasty viruses and spyware and maybe even a bot or two. Can you imagine the meltdown if that happened on a popular blog with 100,000s and 100,000s of views each day. How long would it be before all blogs were verboten in browser security packages? But it does seem that a good hosting service combined with appropriate blog design would at least allow tags so one could put in links and have them vetted as mostly harmless before they become visible.
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If I haven’t lost you to glazed eyes yet, what do you think? Is the comment interface a detriment to the literary quality of the comments you leave and read? Do you resort to direct email to the author to avoid the interface?

Off Topic:
(What, you mean you couldn’t detect a thread of thoughful reason through all of the above? For shame!) I have been toying around with the idea of a collabrative novel where each author writes a chapter and then the next author has to carry on using the previous developments. Short chapters, say 2-4 pages so that anyone could participate and not be over-burdened. Given the immense range of writing styles I see in all the blogs I read, I think it could be very amusing and fun. So is anyone interested? Am I insane? (No wait, don’t answer that!)

My copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue came today, I need to go drool now.

radio, rant, trivia, water

Wacky Wednesday

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This morning was the normal weekly radio show. I didn’t have a lot to say since the main topic for the week has been water rights. The EPA forced treatment of our water under the new standards will force us to waste (not use in any constructive way) at least 15% of the water we pump from the ground. That means that although we thought we had sufficient water rights to cover the projected growth in usage for the next 35 years, we now need to begin looking for more water to buy to cover our depletions much sooner. I know that people who don’t live in the water short American West don’t have a clue what I’m moaning about. Those who do are going “yup, been there and been burned by stupidity of easterner’s laws before too.”

One of the nice things about doing the radio show is that things here in “small town” have been pretty calm, so I don’t get the raving lunatics calling in. It’s more the attack of the rabidly apathetic – you can’t get them to call for any reason. That means I get to blither on about topics of my own choosing. Sort of like rambling to your self on a blog – you don’t know until later who was listening/reading and only then when they comment on it. For small market radio, the rule of thumb is that if you have 100 listeners, you will get around one comment in the next week. I wonder if there is a similar rule of thumb for comments on blogs. Have you heard of one?

Time to get on with cleaning up the kitchen. I left the dishes after supper and now have to do them before bed. I find that when I’m batching it, I have a tendency not to do things like the laundry and dishes if I don’t do them right away. On the other hand, I’m enough of a neatnik that I can’t stand having the mess sitting around. So I have this internal dialog going on in my head between the angel of neatness and the imp of sloppiness. Add to that the trio of me, myself, and I all babbling at each other and the conversations gets a bit hard to get a word in edgewise. And of course Molly the dog feels free to contribute here two barks as well. Which might explain why I’m so incoherent at times! {*grin*}



Speaking of raving lunatics, what is the one thing least likely to happen to a U.S. citizen on May 22? That was the question we used to give away the dozen donuts on the trivia show that follows my meandering on the radio. My pre-air prediction was < 3 minutes and 2 callers. I hit it on the nose. Leave your guess of the answer in the comments. I will include the answer in tomorrows blog entry.

money, rant

Money ad nauseum

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I saw that the topic of the day over at One-Minute Writer was: “Can money buy happiness?” I want to consider the obverse: “Can lack of money cause unhappiness?” That is because I firmly believe that money cannot buy happiness, but I almost as firmly believe that lack of money can cause unhappiness. So how do I support my feeling that lack of money can cause unhappiness?

The prime example supporting the thesis can be found every day in the world around us. People (adults and children) are condemned to death simply because there is no money to pay for the drugs or the operation or the food or … that would keep them alive. The failure to prevent senseless deaths for want of as little as $15 per year per person seems to be a real indictment of humanity. But the issue as far as the thesis here can be reduced to the question of whether death can be equated to unhappiness in some way.

I know that some would argue that death is not unhappiness. The Christian far right and religions with a tradition of belief in martyrdom would argue that death and the subsequent journey to heaven is the opposite of unhappiness.  After all, consider the rapture of conservative Christianity and the martyrdom of conservative Islam and other such teachings of other religions. I don’t have any unique insight as to whether the victims themselves are unhappy, but I would argue that even if the victim was not unhappy, the circle of friends and family connected to the victim certainly are. It is the rare parent indeed that is not unhappy to see their child die. It is even rarer for any person not to have emotional ties to other people such that those people are not unhappy to see them die.

So I’ll leave it open to the theologians and moralists for a “politically correct” answer. But my personal answer has to be that a lack of money can indeed cause unhappiness. Being a logical sort, you’ll note I immediately pushed the argument right to the wall in equating death to unhappiness. That is because illuminating a question in black and white can make the shiftiness of shades of gray less entrapping. No matter whether you want to push it to the edge or not, you probably have an opinion on the question. So – Can lack of money cause unhappiness?

[ As and aside: I have to say that the ammo for Stupid Saturday is growing by leaps and bounds. While I really want to thank the universe for stepping up and making tomorrow’s post easy, I am at the same time very concerned for the survival of the world as we know it. It is probably good that intelligence is not a required trait for species survival. More tomorrow. ]

rant, repair, weather

The wind is rising

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After a dull and dreary day the wind is now coming out of the north bringing the cold. Oh well, it makes it seem less painful to be house cleaning tonight and tomorrow. At least most of my cold has gone with the wind. I figure it just didn’t want to go out walking in the cold with Molly and me any more.

I spent part of the evening tearing open one of my monitors that has been developing a case of the jitters. I don’t know about you, but I cannot stand a jittery monitor. Probably because it means that it needs fixing more that the annoyance factor of the jitter. It is amazing how much trouble shooting you can do with some knowledge, a heat gun, a can of spray coolant, and a soldering iron. (Of course having a set of drawers on the back porch filled with odds and ends and replacement parts helps.) At least I got the major part of the jitter gone – if I can find the right size and voltage of capacitor to put in the beast it should be good for another few years.

Every time I open up a piece of electronic equipment and see the excessive metal cages around the high voltage sections and all the safety interlocks, I am reminded how dumb people can be. Back in the old days, a simple label on the case was enough for people to read it and know that they shouldn’t be opening the case if they weren’t trained. And if they did open the case and electrocute themselves, we figured that was one less idiot in the world. Now we have the idiot label on the case, more labels and a metal Faraday cage on the inside, and more than one safety interlock. And of course as a society we don’t repair them anyway. So why not just seal the case and prevent the idiots any entry? I suspect that it is a clash of ethics. The old ethic from the pre-IC days to repair and fix carries on in leaving the access pathways in the product, but the modern ethics of idiocy in a litigious society means that we spend heavily on adding the metal cage and interlocks and … I have seen the same design principles carried out in even low-voltage devices. Given all the heavy metals used in modern electronics, I’m waiting for the requirement to put a label on devices like cell phones warning idiots not to eat the device. The first idiot to be diagnosed with selenium and germanium poisoning for eating the electronics will undoubtedly sue because it wasn’t obvious that the device was not meant for snacking on. And in the brain death of our legal system, he or she will probably win.

Enough half formed ranting for now. I’ll save it up until I have a full on rant.

rant, repair, replace, scientific method

Rant #1

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Do you ever wonder about all the things we no longer fix or repair because it is not “cost effective”? Or the services that have disappeared because there is no demand? I do.

Intellectually, I understand the economics of manufacturing things that cannot be repaired. After all, it you are making a few million of something, and it costs an additional $5-10 to make each one if you design and manufacture it so that it is repairable, you will loose $10-30 million potential dollars. Not to mention the questions of reliability, etc. But emotionally, …

 I can remember when TV/Radio repair shops were common and those items were repaired when they quit working. Now? Not so much. Talk to an automobile mechanic about major repairs to engines and you’ll find the same trend to whole unit replacement that eventually lead to the demise of the TV/Radio repair shop. If the cost of labor and parts to repair is more than the cost of replacement (12 hours of labor + $200 in parts >> 2 hours of labor + $500 in parts), replacement it is. It is not long after this point is reached that the ability to even get the parts for repair disappears. After all, none of us wants to pay any more than we have to to fix anything. And if the thing in question is on a downward price curve, it makes more and more sense to upgrade rather than repair.

I worry about what we as a society are losing in the mix as repair becomes replacement. I cannot overestimate the number of my colleges in the technical fields who grew and nurtured their interest in the field by tinkering. The ability to reverse engineer and perhaps create alternative function  from old items was a keystone in their development of an interest in science and the scientific method. The reward of making something work that hadn’t worked before led to learning the theory behind the operation and the science of the thing .

As an example, I grew up playing with old TV’s and radios. I learned how to repair some of them, cobble several of them together into one working unit, and sometimes adapt the remaining carcass to some entirely new function. You’d be amazed what a high voltage section from a TV, an old neon sign transformer, and a few other parts can become in the tinkering mind of a teenager. It was how I built my first laser, explored electromagnetic induction as a means of propulsion, built bug zappers, etc. Now with one piece custom chips and other advances, there is nothing for the budding tinkerer to play with when the appliance quits working. There is nothing to be repaired because replacement is generally the one fix. And even that is often not possible because after a few years, you cannot find those custom chips,  It is not in the interest of the manufacturer to have more of them on hand than needed to ship the product. It is often economically saner to just ship another new unit than to even waste the time diagnosing the problem. How many of you have had the experience of buying a relatively high ticket item and having the manufacturer replace it with a different model when it fails under warranty? Quote unquote because the parts are no longer available?

My concern is that young people today do not get the same chance to tinker and explore. I know that some organizations are convinced that the lack of such experiences are behind the shortages in several technical fields. Some kids have adopted to tinkering with computers, but the feel and intellectual stimulation is different. And one major difference is that instead of learning science and the scientific method, they are often learning the artificial logic of a non-real universe. I.e. one designed by a game designer where the normal constraints of reality are relaxed or removed in their entirety.

Given that change in experience, moving from the hard rules of reality to the malleable and often whimsical rules of the computer or game, the ability to discern fact from fiction is declining. The young people I talk to have a hard time applying common sense and experience to determine the plausibility of any given statement. It leads to what I refer to as “tabloid science”, where a claim in violation of scientific fact is made. And they believe it because they have no basis to rationally determine the plausibility of the claim. The effect is even more pernicious than it first appears, because with experience of the warped and arbitrary logic often shown in gaming and fantasy worlds, they have lost the ability to logically deduce consequences from posited truths. Without that ability, they cannot reason the consequences of the tabloid claim and then test those consequences. Scientific method – not in this group.