Bad history pisses me off

This is almost as bad as bad science...

The opening to today's Groupon.com email:

"The oldest civilizations flourished around the Mediterranean Sea, likely because the water provided secret salts that improved the flavor of their food. For $20, you get $40 worth of classy Mediterranean cuisine and drinks at Ariadne Restaurant & Bar in Newtonville, named a Best New Restaurant in 2003 by Boston Magazine and just a 15-minute drive west of Boston."

Really? So it was actually tasty cuisine which caused the rise and fall of empires?

Someone tell the president so that he spends a few billion dollars stimulating our taste buds!

Marketing asshats.

Thank God I wasn't homeschooled?

Stephen Colbert gave Conservapedia a good whipping today when he mentioned their current crusade to de-liberalize the Bible. I figure they got tired of all the "Hippie Jesus" jokes and want to strengthen their claim to Him, in the attempt to finally be able to "prove" that they're right. You know you're begging the question when you start rewriting your so-called sacred texts. The argument will no longer be "the bible is true because the bible tells us so," but rather "the bible says we're right because we wrote in the bible that you're wrong."

Anyway, so I paid my first visit in a long time and other than lots of heavy-handed banning going on, I noticed the following "homework" answer (ref. here)

7. Charity is based on the foundation of a successful free market. Or is a successful free market based on a foundation of charity? Describe and explain which is the cart, and which is the horse (in other words, which comes first or is most important, charity or the free market). I think that free market comes first and is the horse - yes, it is true that charity is a huge part of America today, but would people even have the freedom and liberty to decide to be charitable to whatever organization they wish if there was no free market? Consider the communist time when Hitler was ruling - do you think those people under his tyrannical ruling would have been able to donate whatever they wanted to whatever cause they wanted? No! You weren't even allowed to help a Jew, unless you were doing it secretly, and if you were caught you were penalized harshly. Compare that to America today, where there is a free market where people have the right to do whatever they please!

Oh, dear lord, where to start, where to start?

Let's ignore that one should question why the... um... "teacher?"... actually thinks there's a need to explain the (completely unnecessary) horse and cart metaphor. These are bumpkins, not Amish- they don't understand that God didn't create cars, and that they're an evolution of transportation methods developed by humans. Maybe he should have just said "chariot"- they had those in the bible...

One could begin by mentioning that Nazis weren't communist (that was Russia- you know- with the red flags and the bears). Then follow that up with a "what the hell does Hitler have to do with charity?" and point out that saving someone from persecution is simply the moral (one could even say "Christian") thing to do, and not charity. Then close with "just because you were forbidden to help the state-oppressed minorities doesn't mean you couldn't do other charitable works, such as, say making cookies for the Hitler Youth bake-off*."

Looking at an earlier historical perspective, one could not help suspect the free market is a rather new concept, but charity is rooted in antiquity. Thus, there's obviously no need for a free market for charity to exist. I could easily find a couple good quotes in the old testament, but that'd be a waste of time because a self-righteous Christian wouldn't try to argue that point.

Then I suppose the next step would be to say there's no need for charity for a free market to exist either, pointing out that charity doesn't help the free market. To say it provides some counterbalance to allow an unsustainable system built on greed to survive in-between crashes by redistributing the wealth of a divided society... that'd be communist-speak.

Looking back at the structure of the answer I have to wonder at the state of mind of the student. I can't see much deep thought here, other than trying to come up with some way to incorporate Nazis (a "Godwinian answer," if you will). Then there's the use of choosing what looks like an arbitrary answer to serve the current master (it's an economics class, so naturally the free market must win), followed by a weak straw-man to suggest that there was ever a real choice. Finally, comes the useless anecdote with a healthy dose of that good old chest-thumping: "I'm American and we're better than everyone, so our system must be God's will."

If this student doesn't get a failing grade, that's just one more thing wrong with this "school."

* Yes, that's quite nonsensical, but given the context I really couldn't care less.

Astrology: astronomy's non-scientific evil cousin

Well before the western world was burning women for allegedly practicing witchcraft we looked up at night and came up with other ridiculous false beliefs. A prominent false science that amazingly still exists today is the idea that there is a correlation between the time of our birth the location of our neighboring planets in relation to Earth, and what happens to us on a daily basis.

When I actually thought about this just now, I asked: why these two variables? The skeptic in me explained: these two factors are a perfect combination to get acceptance on part of the layman. The first provides a personal uniqueness that reinforces our desire to be special and unique. The second is a spiritual link, suggesting a higher power than ourselves that is guiding our lives or even watching over us.

Together with the mostly rosy picture painted in them, and our strong desire to be in control of our lives and know the future, we are left defenseless in the face of an onslaught by professional charlatans.

My Yahoo! horoscope for today reads:

"You'll get an unforgettable rush from discovering something new today, but it will take a lot of effort on your part to find it! Leave no rock unturned in your search for new sights and sounds today -- behind any new face could be your new love. On any radio station could be your new favorite band. Around any corner could be your favorite new coffee shop. Be thorough and don't skip over anyone, today. Unlock your curiosity and let it take you wherever it wants to take you."

Note the element common to all the "mystical sciences": specificity. Non-science cannot and will not provide the core requirement of science- to provide a repeatable test*. It relies on simply accepting the word of an "expert". Read this rewrite:

"This horoscope provides no real idea of what positive thing will happen to you. It could be anything from finding a five-dollar bill in the street to meeting your future wife. Heck, if even one of seven stop lights you approach is green, that's sufficient to attribute success! Oh, and if you had a lousy day, it's your fault for not trying hard enough to make something good happen to you."

What makes this particular horoscope especially crafty is that escape route placed right at the start. Did you notice how easy it is for the unsuspecting fool to not disbelieve astrology? It's their fault for not putting enough effort into it. Most insulting is just this requirement- this horoscope is actually a general piece of advice ("it's important to work hard for your future") masked in mumbo-jumbo superstition.

You know what would be a more impressive prediction? If the horoscope told me to not look for something new and exciting. If it told me to stay at home, eat a hot pocket and watch sitcoms all afternoon. If I found a new love, or took on an exciting new hobby by doing that, then I'd take horoscopes just a tad more seriously.


* for a great few hours of watching YouTube videos, search for a physicist by the name of "James Randi", also known as "The Amazing Randi". Two of my favorite videos are his talk at Google and his explanation of homeopathy

NO! Bad Bush! Bad!

Bush said rising gas prices are "...like a tax on the working people." That's so obviously dead wrong, that it requires a C student to utter or accept.

Taxes go to government, which in turn will (in theory) provide services to taxpayers, or in more socialist governments, give the money to poor people.

Whether or not you agree with socialism, this is totally different from the money going to oil companies and Arab dictators and monarchs, who give little if anything back to low- and middle-class US citizens.

As always, Bush ignores the plight of working people, and doesn't have the decency to stop the rhetoric. Of course, neither do the other "same-old same-olds", Hillary or McCain.

But what's really sad about the stupid "proposals" by McCain and Clinton is how little this populist tactic would do, because gas prices are rising faster than their little "tax holiday" savings. 18.4 cents per gallon? Regular gas prices have gone up over twice as much in the past month, over $0.50 a gallon since Christmas and $0.67 from a year ago ("reformulated retail" prices from the Department of Energy *).

Obama is right on this matter. There's no point in messing with this tax. The real problem is the climbing gas price, and the only way to help "the working people" is by switching off of cars that use massive amounts of petroleum. As far as I'm concerned, keep the tax on gasoline to pay for highways and bridges. Then use Clinton's idea to collect $6 billion from oil companies and give it as a subsidy to the first US car maker to churn out a huge fleet of cheaper and cleaner cars. Good for American economy, innovation and manufacturing competitiveness, union jobs, the environment. Everyone wins. Well, except for Exxon Mobil, the Saudis, and our best friends, the Iranians. If we're lucky, Iraqis might even notice this threat to the value of their single national resource and get their act together.


* Interesting thing I wanted to post-script: when you look at the data you see a clear trend by the market to make the price soar instantly (well, at most over the course of a week, since the data was weekly rather than daily). This is usually accompanied by a return (or near-return) to previous prices over a period of one to two months). For example, a $0.60 spike is seen one week, then five or six weeks of $0.10 decreases are seen. The loser in these cases seems to always be citizens and small businesses, since larger businesses can usually weather these temporary increases, buying their fuel in bulk. The general public is, of course, unable to purchase store and store to 20 gallons they might need to weather the storm, and the extra we pay is going to someone who the market clearly doesn't think (based on the eventual return to normal) deserve it. Makes you wonder who is in charge of gas prices, and if they are the beneficiaries of this, doesn't it?

Printing queues to hard for Microsoft to get right?

Is it me, or is is still impossible (as of Windows XP/SP2) to take a document sent to one printer and move it to another?

I've got a printer at home that I used to connect to my work laptop (the last bastion of Windows in my home). Now it's on the file server (a Linux box, of course) and shared over the network.

But I only just configured that networked printer this morning, after I had mistakenly sent a print job to the old queue for the previous USB connection.

The job is sitting there in the queue. It's not store in some kind of USB buffer or anything- it's just waiting in the queue. Taking those bunch of bytes and putting them in another queue should not only be easy as hell to code, but should be something that the guys at Microsoft have noticed and needed by now.

Just one more way Windows makes life easy for us, I guess.

Oh, Comcast; I hate thee!

So I just got off the phone with Comcast. It's a weekly thing I do, just to make sure I never get nice and stress-free.

My service has been terrible ever since I bought this place in late May. Not a week goes by without having to reset the modem. Often, the television signal disappears, and my MythTV box records a few hours of static. Other times, I lose my connection to the Internet, or specifically, to Comcast's DNS and DHCP servers.

This is actually the first time I called about the VOIP phone service. It's currently down, and keeps telling me to dial a '1' before the number I call; even when I dial 1-800-COMCAST.

Today, I spoke with a nice young lady, who was great at her job, but not very bright and certainly not tech savvy. She asked a couple of questions she already had the answers to, and managed to confuse herself with regards to what the problem actually was. She eventually opened a ticket and said it would take up to 64 for the problem to be resolved. I made a fuss about that, and then I asked about a credit.

The one thing you should always do: ask for a credit to your account. Doesn't matter what you're calling about- just ask for it. Comcast is run so poorly that it seems customer retention is a huge deal (bigger than providing service, that is). I figure they're scared to death that people will complain to the politicians or leave for Verizon, that they'll just give you some of your money back- no questions asked. So ask.

The second thing I had to complain about was more subtle. When I asked for the credit, she said that she can't credit the account now, but they can credit my account after the ticket is resolved. Notice the "can" in the second part. I asked "I'm sorry- I'm not sure I heard that- you can credit my account, or you will?". She replied, "will". I lost it. Not only am I getting crappy service, but I have to keep running after them to get it fixed! I just asked to speak with her manager. She didn't even say anything, I just went right on hold.

The manager was a nice guy. He seemed genuinely concerned about the problems. He actually looked at my service record and quickly understood what kind of customer I was. He dropped his guard a bit and vented about his customer service department not being told what the technicians know and made a couple promises about how they're trying to fix the problems in the system. He didn't even give me a chance to complain about the credit issue at length- he just said he'd give me $15. Not a figure calculated based on the actual service missed, but certainly more than I'd get normally. I was glad to take it. Then he gave me a direct phone number, name and employee ID. Now that goes a long way with me (assuming it's not fake, as they do over at Dell and HP).

So ends another tale of being screwed by the monopoly, but screwed just a little bit less.

As one of my favorite computer game characters says: "The squeaky wheel gets the KICK!"

A Half Hour's Worth of Straw

I'm watching an episode of "The Half Hour News Hour" I recorded on my MythTV box earlier this week. I heard about it where most probably did- Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show". Lewis Black, who mentioned the show, stated the obvious- that this show, run on the "Fox News" channel, is a ripoff of his show. Obviously, but oh so very different.

Where to start? It's bad for lots of reasons and on so many levels. Let's just take a couple of content issues, and ignore stuff like poor acting and production.

First- its pride of bias. They go beyond the obvious bias that Fox News shows have (but hide behind the claim "fair and balanced"), outright showing where they see themselves differing from the liberals they so hate. Counting the topics they try to make fun of or criticize, we have:
Al Gore, Hollywood (several times, including specifically at Sean Penn, who they deem deserving of being hit by a North Korean nuke), environmentalists, New Jersey (twice- what's with the hostility towards Jersey?), gun control, the ACLU, atheists, and surprisingly- the John McCain campaign (maybe that's what makes the "fair" happen). Oh, and how could they forget to try to make fun of Cindy Sheehan, Nanci Pelosi's face, Joe Biden's bald spot, and Michael Moore's gut (yup- just another dumb fat joke, like Republican senators are all thin). Oh, and they had Dennis Miller on to provide the minute of hate segment on our evil enemies- Michael Moore and Cuba.

How many times, and in how many ways, do the producers of this garbage want to make sure you know what their view is (and yours should be, or God will kill you). To compare it to the Daily Show is (besides insulting towards the later) quite pointless. Where the Daily Show makes pointed examples of stupidity and hypocrisy using (mostly*) factual events and (often*) actual clips (*they make sure the line between the two is obvious), this show makes up highly unlikely circumstances which are loosely "based on actual events," and then proceeds to bash away. Watching this cruft should be equated to listening to half an hour of straw man arguments.

The poke at atheists was strange. During what I suppose is the equivalent of the interview segment (where the Daily Show actually has real people being interviewed, though blatantly for the purpose book/movie plugging), they had actual books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the table. Then they brought three actors playing fake authors of fake similar books, and proceeded to kill off one and then a second, making it blatantly obvious that God was in fact killing the atheists (a wonderful example of classic monotheistic rule by fear and something that really pisses off Hitchens). The third (and author of "I Hate God!") is then made to look ridiculous and hypocritical, to the point where he calls his book "fiction." I'd love to get Dawkins' reaction to this, though I expect he would simply ignore it due to its vulgarity. The notion that a reasoning person such as Dawkins would act in such a manner is ridiculous, due to the fact that he takes pride in being a rational person, who does not allow superstition to influence his actions.

It's strange. I'm watching it, as the last living "author" is groveling, praying and singing "Amazing Grace," and I can't help but think of people like the few "bad apples" who caused the L.A. Archdiocese to pay big-time for. Now don't go thinking I'm saying religious folk are bad, because I'm not, and neither do the real-life authors of such books. But it's amazing that people who do claim absolute moral integrity as a consequence of their religious beliefs can still be really crummy people.

I'm not big on God. I never really have been. I've never gone so far as to believe or declare myself an Atheist- comes from being brought up into a religion (with quite the vengeful deity at that). I probably will some day, but I haven't done my homework yet. Half of my family is secular, and the other very conservatively observant. They're all very fine human beings and there's no argument that would persuade me that belief or lack thereof had much to do with that fact.

One last thing I want to leave you with. The Fox News channel, isn't a news channel. It's just a channel Murdoch calls "Fox News", so you don't think the Simpsons are going to be on at 7. It's not so much about telling you what's new in the world, but giving you what he'd like the news to be. CNN and the other media channels aren't news channels anymore- in the pursuit of the almighty dollar they dumbed themselves down so they could play on Fox's level. I swear- after listening to the kind of questions the press asked at Bush's press conference last week- the world is lucky he can't hold the office beyond 2008.

I guess all I have left to say in this one is "God bless the twenty-second amendment and the United States of America."

235 is the loneliest number

Crazy Steve is at it again, which puts me into my ramble and rage mode- get out of the way, or put on a pair of steel-toed boots.

Ballmer: Linux infringes on 235 patents!
Sane person: Which patents are those?
Ballmer: Well there's 42 in the kernel, "graphical user interfaces" have 65, OpenOffice infringes on 45, e-mail programs 15, and 68 other transgressions"
Sane person: Yes, yes- but which specific patents are you talking about?
Ballmer: We will enforce our intellectual property! Resistance is futile!

Steve-o's empty words remind me of another great dictator... Forgive me, I meant President and his minions. Sure Ballmer will tell us what's infringing, just as SCO's lawyers told the judge which code was copied into Linux. Do you recall this doozie: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." "Somewhat"? Don't you love how much we value precision these day, especially when it comes to the collection of intelligence and its use in dictating global policy? It's as if we don't care for truth anymore, or do we?

The reason for being so forthcoming? If he presents evidence, the Open Source has the chance to refute it, or invalidate his obvious and unoriginal patents. But keep them secret, and you can sell those coupons and keep the Windows monopoly for another year or two. It's a brilliant strategy- rant about how you're being attacked and violated, and nobody will doubt your sincerity.

As usual the financial media are clueless when it comes to anything out of the ordinary tedium of stock price fluctuation, record Dow figures, management shuffling, and their stupid unending and almost universally wrong forecasts. The piece I linked to at the start of this article isn't bad compared to the general coverage of Linux and related issues, even if it does include jokes it assumes its readers don't understand. But most of the article is fluff, unnecessary, and providing little of actually-necessary context. Here's one small example of incompetence appearing at the core of the issue at hand...

Assclown... um... I mean, Fortune Magazine senior editor, Roger Parloff writes: "Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents." (emphases added). Tell me Mr. Parloff- how is "no fewer than" a "precise figure?"

Why is it that Ballmer's image is now that of a politician, and why does Parloff allow him to get away with it? Maybe Parloff just doesn't want to upset Microsoft's PR division. Is it related to how spineless and corporate news media has become? That is what put Parloff's CNN only slightly below Fox News on my list of things to think about during my daily two minutes of hate.