It’s a Follow-Up Post
I’m eating my words all right. What happened over the weekend still doesn’t seem in step with reality, but for a different reason now. Why? Why why why? The videos show people running up to windows, taking three swings with a baseball bat and then retreating into a crowd. Another clip shows someone trying to launch a newspaper box through a window. Really?
This isn’t practical, it doesn’t get out the right message. The message we hear isn’t “save the whales” or “feed the starving” or anything useful. Those messages just become footnotes, and the real protesters have a lot to be upset about. This weekend, the medium was the message, and was ugly.
Showdown
A week or two ago we were told not to come to work during G20 summit: the shop and most of the campus would be closed those days due to our close proximity to the protests scheduled at Queen’s Park. This seemed strange at first. Protests in Toronto are regular enough after all, and if organized well, usually peaceful. Granted, something polarizing like the G20 is probably going to draw a larger crowd, but surely–
I’m not sure that the over-the-top security measures are really in step with reality. Maybe a month from now I’ll be eating those words, but right now it looks like they’re expecting a city-wide riot. What’s more terrifying: the idea of local law enforcement gearing up for a small war, or the possibility that it might all be necessary? Or maybe it’s self-perpetuating, I don’t know. The rhetoric from Star and Globe commenters is wearing thin too, though this is true for most stories (conspiracy theorists are particularly well-represented on G20 stories).
Above all the noise of dissenting opinions, I just hope the G20 passes uneventfully. Peaceful protests are one of those things that make Canada great; the right to yell through a megaphone without fear of arrest or martial law is something not all nations enjoy. I think it loses some of its relevance though once you see people being carried away on stretchers; does the us versus them mentality begin to upstage the actual issues? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.
Move Over Tic Tacs
Now, I’m not the sort of person that goes out and buys a giant screw driver set on a whim, but this weekend I had need for three uncommon drivers. Thus, it was off to the hardware store, that special place where you can find gardening tools and chain-saws under the same roof. The most important driver, a phillips 00, usually only comes as part of a larger set and in this regard I get pretty lucky: a 75-piece driver set on sale for $35. To put this into perspective, a respectable screw driver tends to retail for $5-10 on its own. Phillips 00? Check. Torx T8? Check. Hex drivers? Check, and we’re done.
Here’s where it gets crazy. On my way to the register I pass another box, this one almost identical save for that it has 95 pieces and it’s not on sale. Instead of doing the rational thing and laughing my way past it, I stop and begin to wonder if this larger set is a better deal. Sure, it costs more, but it has more tools, and it’s favourable to grabbing the (marginally) smaller kit and topping it up with twenty more tools at $5 apiece. Wait! There’s a problem: I only need three screw drivers. What good are twenty extra tools that I don’t actually need? Maybe I’ll build a rocket ship one day and need a reverse-robertson 2.8x wireless hammer, but that’s still nineteen rocket hammers short of a good deal unless I actually end up using every piece.
Fortunately the madness passed and I left with the smaller set, but I had to wonder: what sort of person impulse-buys a 95-piece screw driver set?
Media Clouds
It’s time. In my last post I mentioned Danny’s discovery of Wordle, and after playing around with it for a few minutes I started wondering what would happen if you fed a whole news site at it. Would it be possible to quantify how much attention a story gets? Better yet, would it be possible to quantify the language used by different media sites if they all ran similar stories and you could compare the coverage? What type of stories does a news site prefer over its competitor?
Wordle may not be able to answer these questions, but perhaps it will provide a starting point. Wordle’s function is to absorb whatever text you throw at it, determine what words appear the most, and then create something that is at once pleasing to the eye, and full of useful information. Words that get repeated are made proportionally bigger, and since we’re visual creatures, the results may speak louder than a simple word count.
Of course, the news doesn’t stand still, so it trying to find answers from only a single day of stories would be inaccurate. Using five days worth of material would be better, and though it would probably be better still to take a whole year worth of samples (slightly difficult with the constant 24-hour news cycle), five days seemed like a sane way to start before committing to a schedule of daily copy-and-pastes. The following are tag clouds generated from five days worth of news site front pages, July 13th, 14th, 16th, 21st, and 23rd. Read on to kill your dial-up modem…
Litmus Test
The other night Danny and I were talking about tag clouds and a possible experiment that could be done using something called Wordle (see this post for more info about Wordle). The experiments requires that the news cycle be on “autopilot,” i.e., a general representation of what’s going on in the world over a long stretch of time. The recent swath of high-profile celebrity deaths has thrown a kink into the works (to put it lightly), so hopefully I’ll be able to put up some results in a week or two.
In completely other news, I’ve located another excellent source of OpenGL ES tutorials, this time from Simon Maurice. Jeff Lamarche, whose tutorials I posted a few weeks ago, has also added some new content and updated his project template to work with the new iPhone OS. Good stuff.
Reinventing the Wheel
I found something neat today called ReactOS. The goal is to recreate an open-source successor to Windows XP based on the Windows NT kernel. The analogy has probably been done to death, but it sounds a lot like another open source OS that re-implemented an existing one. It sounds like a great idea, or at least a very ambitious one, intending to put a stranglehold on Windows’ security holes and optimize the hell out of it. Interestingly, they had this to say of a group of operating systems that already accomplished this:
Modern incarnations like Mac OS X put a fancy graphical user interface on top of UNIX, to hide system details and focus mainly for beginners and likely advanced users are left out in the rain. In contrast, various Linux and BSD flavors have been put together originally for server usage and are therefore very console centric. Most advanced features cannot be accessed from the basic graphical user interface. Almost all UNIX flavors retain some of the original design flaws and binary compatibility between various versions is usually non-existent
Now, it’s probably a bad idea for me to argue with a group of people who are capable of building their own operating system, but there are some flaws with these arguments. We’ll deal with Mac OS X first, because it’s the easiest, and applies to all the popular *nix windowing environments:
Hiding in Plain Sight
Though the terminal is probably the most easily-recognizable tool to get past the GUI, it’s not the only one. Most windowing environments provide a processor viewer similar to top, a log viewer, and even a SELinux policy generator with my copy of Fedora. It’s true that a GUI is meant to hide the complexities behind something simpler, but advanced users are hardly forced to deal with a Fischer-Price OS when more advanced tools are so readily available.
The assertion that server versions are the polar opposite is at least partially true; the most powerful features tend to require some advanced tinkering, after all, it’s a server. It’s hard to simplify that which must be equal parts accessible to trusted clients and guarded against those who aren’t. Some efforts have been made to putting a friendlier face on administrating network services, and while I’m a fan of Mac OS X Server’s admin tools, others simply prefer the control afforded by the more venerable terminal.
The final argument about legacy flaws and binary incompatibilities may as well be true. These operating systems have all been around for a long time, and the potential for junk to pile up (not unlike my closet) is a given. Are these issues so entrenched as to make it impossible or merely difficult to overhaul? Is the solution to renovate, or throw out decades of hard work and begin fresh? I don’t envy the people staring down these decisions. Binary incompatibilities is an issue I’m barely qualified to touch on, so let’s leave it there.
As for ReactOS:
In contrast to UNIX, ReactOS was designed for people familiar and comfortable with the Windows environment. Everything can be done through the well known Win32 user interface and advanced users are free to automate tasks with scripts or use the console.
“Everything,” which I’m assuming they don’t mean literally, can be done through the GUI, and advanced users can write scripts and access the console. This all sounds rather familiar. ReactOS sounds like a very cool project, but I think we’ll have to disagree about the current state of *nix operating systems.
Magnets: Great, but not Magical
Forgive me for not having a great deal of enthusiasm for Mr. Gary Goodyear. Take this quote for example, published by the Globe and Mail, as Goodyear answers whether or not he believes in evolution:
“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.”
This by itself doesn’t merit coverage. It’s well-established that evolution has its skeptics, after all. The reason you should be worried is because, as Gigi pointed out, this man is our federal Minister of Science and Technology. Before we grab our torches and pitchforks, perhaps we should look over his resume. The article claims that Goodyear studied chemistry, physics, statistics and kinesiology as an undergrad, and fiddled about with automotive mechanics in highschool. That sounds pretty good, actually. A man with this background is surely a good fit for the cabinet post. In fact, his early accomplishments are downright impressive:
“When I was in high school, we were already tweaking with a coil that would wrap around the upper [radiator] hose and it got an extra five miles to the gallon. … So I’ve been there on this discovery stuff.”
Discovery stuff indeed, Gary. There’s only one problem: it’s bogus. More specifically, it’s bogus when applied to the fuel line. It’s double-plus bogus when applied to the radiator hose which pumps water-based coolants or oil, not gasoline. Suddenly I’m anxious again. Beliefs of evolution aside, Goodyear must at least appear qualified for his portfolio, and this is worrisome.
Let’s be clear: religion is not the enemy of science, nor does it preclude someone from following a career in science. We should all be open-minded and accept that years of science and years or theology still haven’t defined the exact means by which the universe exists, and the answers may yet be controversial to all beliefs. However I expect that whatever religion or non-religion our Minister of Science and Technology happens to follow, he judge evolution by its own merits and not invoke religion as a contention against it.
UPDATE: Goodyear has decided that yes, he does believe in evolution. I recommend reading the full article for context, as this clarification is not as reassuring as it should be.
High Score
So Leora has written another insightful media analysis, and it makes me wonder who’s steering this ship. Although we as a society generally disapprove of sidelining our ethics, we also seem to take it for granted that large corporations, politicians, lawyers, and the misery industry all run on a diet of immorality and corruption (part of this complete breakfast). Last I checked, all of the above are run by the same people who complain that we’re headed towards dystopia thanks to our many vices. How did we gain this split personality, doing the devil’s work from 9-5 and then transforming back into indignant masses on evenings and weekends?
(Disclaimer: the author doesn’t believe in the devil, but presumes that anyone starting a career in malevolence would work for him.)
Our generation is getting ready to inherit the Earth (and her wonderful deficits), so keep this in mind, generation: now that it’s almost our turn to decide how the world turns, let’s try to beat our parents’ high score.
