First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan's determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.
Alan Jacobs single-handedly proves there is intelligent life in the humanities after all, even if he did wrap his fine meditation in three layers of compatibility cloak. His thesis is that McLuhan made an immense contribution by giving people permission to speak about media in a different way, without sounding like complete idiots (in comparison to what McLuhan got away with himself).
This lumps McLuhan in with Pirsig and Freud.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
You're one of those. I'm on the opposite side of the fence. I regard the Apple-branded wedding dress as a Symbiote spider skin. Your GF would probably think that totally rocks as a wedding dress, if it comes in white. Don't forget your first anniversary, she might have a temper.
You're concerned about Layton making $200,000 annual salary as leader of Canada's official opposition, who publicly subjects himself to the kind of nonsense you just spouted 24/7?
Layton misses the $375,000 cut by a Canadian country mile. Obviously, coaching a football team takes real talent; if the players lose faith, they tune you out; you're under incredible public scrutiny to perform now; it's not the easy street of running a country, giving good quotes that don't blow up in your face, or placing well in national elections.
I understand that snowflakes tend to congregate in snow drifts, but how is it that our precious snowflakes are stuffing the ballet box? Our elections are won and lost on the fat demographic bulge of baby boomers nearing retirement with visions of Nortel still in their heads. These were the precious snowflakes of previous generations. Have you seen the footage of previous generations? I bet you've heard the music.
The jobs that used to fall off trees for young people have A) been outsourced to China, B) locked up by older Canadians who still dominate the work force, and C) no longer subsidized by the free-love price of gasoline in 1960.
The precious snowflakes aren't quite as stupid as you make them out to be. They understand that ten years from now when the boomers have mostly retired and are struggling to manage their booming personal health care burdens, there's going to be a sharp correction in the value of compensation available. Someone has to process all the paperwork for the millions of immigrants we are going to require to stretch our underfunded pension programs to the Freedom 95 finish line.
By the way, our pension funds aren't half so "underfunded" as you hear in the telling. When pensions were first established, not many people lived well past retirement age. It has never been economically feasible to support 1/3 of a western country's adult population out of the work force at a three car garage standard of living. Why were those promises made in the first place? The voting power of a grasping demographic bulge. It sold well to the masses, didn't it? All you had to do was convince the Saudi's to play along. Why conserve a precious resource for a rainy day when you can promise it to the flower children in their golden years instead? Besides, it never rains in Saudi Arabia. The pension program "underfunding" is a lot like the Madoff losers, who at first reported losses against what the crook had promised, oblivious to their failure of due diligence. Harry Markopolos wrote a newsletter packed with salient insight, and no-one subscribed. You wonder what these greedy people did to earn their success in the first place, or if the bulk of privilege accrues from hitching yourself to the right crook on the way up and knowing when to severe your ties.
Harper's contribution has mostly been to muzzle the people who work the equations: statisticians and scientists. The feelings of love emanating from the newly retired that get a politician re-elected for multiple terms are mainly threatened by accurate accounting. Nobody ever said Harper was stupid. It's our job, as the electorate, to demand better, should be choose to use it.
Some of us did. Layton will do a fairly competent job of clearing his throat and shaking the carpet as the worst of the Tory blinkering. The whole dynamic is entirely stupid. It's a natural thing when you've promised a large group of people eternal sunshine (that you could never afford) to shoot the messenger when the heroine wears off. Harper would be insane to accelerate this. That's why a democracy also needs a competent opposition party: someone has to be the bearer of bad news if anything is going to change soon enough to make a difference.
I don't see how our precious snowflakes could do much to deflect this iceberg even if they lived o
The result was a total transformation. Instead of completing only three problems in nine months, the team was able to complete nine problems in three months! Of course, this led to a different problem when management reasoned that it should be possible to complete the last calculation needed for the Trinity test in less than a month. To meet this deadline, Feynman and his team had to address the more difficult problem of breaking up a single calculation into pieces that could be performed in parallel.
I should add that the opponents of climate change have intent of being right on any time frame that exceeds their present day vested interests.
On one side we have no credible agenda whatsoever, on the other side we have a credible agenda trying to take credit for an accomplishment we won't see for many decades yet, and telling us to take radical action, with no reliable metric for cost effectiveness, except that the grants keep flowing.
As software people, we ought to know what a premature declaration of victory looks like. You know, the 30 year lag between when a technology first is announced as "just around the corner" and when it's mature and cost effective for mass consumption.
On that score, I don't see much difference between the IPCC and the AI people from the 1960s. Slowly the AI people are winning the battle. Their system is only mildly more difficult than the climate system.
In some ways, the IPCC is less testable than string theory. If we had a handy inventory of Genesis planets, we could really put them in their place.
But no, they get special dispensation to effectively claim, "if the planet warms up catastrophically, we were right all along". Even if their present model is 100% certifiable bullshit applied to any Genesis planet.
Winner by KO over four centuries: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Lagrange, to name just a few.
Round 2: Voodoo Science
Winner by KO over two centuries: Maxwell, Michelson, Heisenberg, SchrÃdinger, Einstein, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonga.
Round 3: Giant Messy Dynamic Systems Science
Losing on points in the first round, but rallying furious when pressed to the ropes, the IPCC alliance of funding activists.
It's a big job. Given a century of progressive refinement, we'll soon have something to crow about.
Nobody seriously doubts the climate scientists will ultimately come up with a story that jives with reality. The debate here is whether we should shift a trillion dollars worth of present-day economic activity on an alpha 0.1 quality model somewhere around the Windows 3.0 turning point.
Given the complexity of the earth's climate system, there's no reason to think this model has converged to reality over such a short time frame, any more than we should expect our rocket scientists to build a fully functional Star Wars spaced-based laser system in under 30 years if we could return CERN for a full money-back refund.
Our rocket scientists put a man on the moon, and sent space probes to the most distant reaches of the solar system. I have some reason to trust them. Name *one* climate system the IPCC has ever got right.
Boyle's law and the triple point of water and the greenhouse effect on Venus, with a partial pressure of CO2 at the planet's surface of just under 9MPa. Did I miss any other illustrious accomplishments?
Or do we believe them simply because the IPCC has more scientists than their model has free variables? One scientist per variable, they've got the entire system covered. If only we managed software development half as well.
The people who want to buy the iPhone sight unseen are the same people who would have secretly been happy to attend a school with a school uniform so they didn't have dress themselves in the morning using their own discretion, only some kind of miracle school where the uniforms are insanely fashionable with only a sarcastic trim of grey flannel.
Back when Microsoft had a similar pile of money, they gave I think it was $40B back to investors in a massive stock dividend. The money doesn't do Apple any good at all if they have no enormous strategic investments on the horizon. But maybe people who own Apple stock also like the idea of someone else managing their investment portfolio. Is Apple a good fund manager? What ROI are they getting on their $80B these days?
My entire last post was essentially a satire on Constantly Risking Absurdity, one of perhaps three nuggets I've retained from my private school education. Knew it would come in handy, some day.
When I first read that poem during my years at Pretentious High I regarded it as a send-up of narcissism. I reluctantly completed many written assignments by starting out complaining that I had nothing to write about (which is effectively writing about oneself) and then seguing into something more interesting from which the useless first page could later be shorn. Always found more to say after clearing my throat of the hairball of hostility.
Not long ago I set myself up with a blog. Never write there, even though I write compulsively every day. I just don't like performing under an integrated identity. I like my circus costumes. I'm sure there have been movies about that, about actors who can't function without the costume. Not quite Wings of Desire. Seriously, that movie could have been about anything. Reminds me of so many poems that left me speechless.
I'm writing far more than usual lately trying to get the costume out of my system. Doubt I'm succeeding. There are sober things I would like to say under the auspice of a perpetual self.
Entrechats, my ass. Way too fucking feminine. Damn I wish I had said that in my essay long ago. I get it, there's a second reading: beauty's a bitch. In my case, it's more like playing hopscotch with Elvish chalk and a magic decoder ring. Not the glam elves, the ones grabbing your ankles from the Dead Marshes, canted in trapezoids. Facebook prime.
I probably write as much for what I erase as what I say. The brush sweeps transverse to the chalk. I'm constantly barfing up memes of disengagement. I write to assimilate, and I write to purge. How many opinions written here are white flags of the soul? Petite mots of surrender? Glib self-loathings of reconciliation?
For a trapeze artist, there's something unseemly about stringing your own wires. A blog feels more like bricks than ballet shoes. Little bricks you keep politely hidden on the third page of Google's search results.
It almost seems like identity has jumped the shark for a generation indoctrinated on commoditizing eyeballs. I have no idea really who I am. With a lot of scratching for words, a few clues emerge. It's not a yard sale of self-documentation.
For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step
A funny poem. On Slashdot, usually that's the guy I'm barrel rolling, quarrelling coons in the canopy.
This goes back a lot further than social networks. We all maintain multiple identities across different social circles, starting with the language we use while watching the hockey game with Dad when Mom is out of the house.
Fashion has always functioned as an identity hack. I'm as much into fashion as any fashionista, but not sartorial fashion; I mince, but not in drag; I'm queen of the lateral link; Uruk-hai ninja of the face-palm rebuttal. But not on my cravat or my crevice sack, by which I declare myself Puritan of Pattern Recognition. Nor have I scribbled on my leather pyjamas: I can't figure out which anthropic landscape to pick from; it seems premature. Blakley got my goat a bit by presuming that the game is only played on sartorial terms. Forgive me if that paragraph is not my regular office gab.
Hey, I've got an idea. Let's do it all online. What I say in the locker room, what I say to the girl I spoke about in the locker room, what I tell my parents when I come home late after speaking to said girl, let's make the whole thing part of a unified dossier. What could possibly go wrong?
I might work for a company that couldn't care less about my verbal excursions. But they might want to present me to an investor as a level-headed character who is the brains behind the operation. Now, the investors already know that it's a coin flip whether the brains behind the operation is a total flake in his private life. (So true.) Mostly, they don't really care. But if you rub their nose in it, they have to care. CF CYA.
A flake with the good grace to hide the fact will suffice if the job gets done. This becomes a tenuous proposition on Fishbowl+. (I'll learn to love that + sign yet. It goes anywhere. I could even print a T-shirt --Fishbowl+ if I weren't so busy hiding my other half; or my other half wasn't so busy hiding from me.)
It's also a sign of social grace is knowing when to let it go and not peering over the fence into ever aspect of the social lives of the people you work for, with, or employ.
The CX 980s have a slightly cooler-looking design on their ear buds and plug, but the mc5s have a splash of color to them and really, whoâ(TM)s studying your ears so much they notice a subtle design flourish on your in-ears? Creepy people, thatâ(TM)s who. What would your mother say if she knew you were deliberately accessorizing your ears for creepy people?
We'll all be accessorizing for creepy people if this direction continues. Kudos to Mr Brezinski for this wonderful send-up of coolspotting.
Put more generally, why should everybody else get their wallets eviscerated to save the environment when the problem isn't the price gas but that we manufacture cars that get shitty mileage?
Do you mean "everybody" working as inner-city burger flippers, or "everybody" as middle-class burbians with a three car garage and a 60 mile round-trip commute?
In the theory of economics, wages adjust to reflect the cost of living. This is why wages are higher in NY city than Butte Rock, Montana.
The structural problem of living out on the burbs far, far away from where the jobs are is another matter. There would need to be some structural readjustment.
The free market is always the best way, with limited government intervention to prevent corporate monopolies, and abuse.
See? This fellow agrees with me. The market always adjusts.
Yes, it might not make sense to you to pay the cost of an SUV's fill-up. And indeed you might not have an SUV for that very reason. But some people have decided that it is worth it -- and those are the people who drive those "mommy SUVs" that you're talking about.
The parent's point still stands: eventually, gas will get expensive enough that most people don't think it's worth it to drive inefficient cars anymore.
Structural adjustment takes time. Mommy is competing for a promotion at work, so has to stay late to chat the boss; but Bobby is turning six this year, and if he's late for advancement class, he'll never pass his future MCATs. Give and take is where the rubber meets the road.
The governing dynamic in this debate is musical chairs. Many people are locked into short term incentives. No one about to vest wants to tell a sorry story and depress the market just before they cash their chips. As soon as one person cashes out, the next person on a short vest takes their place. I think velocity is a proxy for leverage. And the powerful do love their leverage.
The idea of a CEO of a big three car company telling the truth to the public about the future price of oil ("think twice before buying in subsubsuburb") and being sued by present day shareholders is a telling one. Most often, the present shareholder sells to a future shareholder. A high price benefits the former. A low price benefits the later. In either case, you've made one shareholder happy, yet the legal system prioritizes the next guy in line to cash out. He can sue the CEO if the share price falls due to unnecessary disclosure of accurate and depressing information; the purchaser is governed by caveat emptor. But like conservation of mass, you've got conservation of shareholders. One is an electron, the other is a positron.
(The case where the company buys back its own shares is a different one, where there is clearly conflict of interest in accurate disclosure, in this case concerning understated lucrative upside.)
If the price of gas had been put on a path of consistent and moderate increase since 1980, we wouldn't now have nearly so much structural liability. But waiting for the last minute to tell bad news is so much better for executives cashing out on short term bonus incentives that the obvious forewarnings are rarely heard.
When it comes to M$ they have been unreliable, manipulative, insensitive and arrogant.
True, but does it remain relevant? Long ago Microsoft lost the war to hire on the basis of stock option grants making every second grunt into a millionaire. The whole company was vested to behave that way. On top of a small number of billionaires there was a much larger base of people doing much better than can ordinarily be achieved as a 9-5 wage slave, and it was only possible for this to continue for as long as it did by a broad program of coordinated sphincter contraction.
The new Microsoft consists of talented (if unspectacular) engineers continuing to milk one of the most lucrative cash cows in human history.
I wonder if any of the arrogance wore off in the transition from robber barons to milk maids, shocking as that might sound.
I suspect this post will be lost amidst the Saffirâ"Simpson in a teapot.
Another way to look at this debate is to imagine we had figured out that the fate of humanity hinged on raising average terrestrial surface temperature by two degrees over a century, starting at 1950. We fund a Manhattan project and determine that we need to burn 2 trillion barrels of oil to accomplish global salvation. Oil is extracted and funnelled into the clouds on a scale that even the wildest optimist could not have predicted. The fate of humanity now rests on the correctness of our atmospheric hypothesis: would our audacious and daring attempt to tip the earth's climate pan out and save the day?
Pessimists and worry warts gather anxious to example the recent global temperature record. This is small cause for optimism in the collapse of a few arctic ice shelves. But this doesn't really prove anything unless the glaciers themselves accelerate their melt cycle. Some believe this is happening, others are less sure.
Apart from the ice melt, there's hardly any cause for optimism. A tiny hopeful upward tick has been detected since the year 2000, more than halfway to the deadline. It's very sensitive to the analysis model. Hardly what you'd want to pin the survival of humanity upon.
Many doubters have called the whole program into question. A cadre of optimists have reassured the public with confidence bordering on stridency, "don't worry, that tiny tick is the certain beginning of a sustained upward trend".
Reverse the scenario, we'd about ready to lynch the people who suggested that burning 2 trillion barrels of oil was certain salvation.
Think of flash memory as acid/base chemistry: a one is stored by pH much lower than 7, a zero is stored by a pH much greater than 7. The reaction is confined to pores in a pumice stone. In order to reduce cost, pumice stone with increasingly small bubble cavities (and mineral wall thickness) has been pressed into service.
By the laws of solid state physics, this makes acid/base pumice stone inherently more reliable than magnetic domains spinning on a fluid bearing.
The bottom line here is that every SDD die shrink generation is an entirely new set of loaded dice. Due to the incredible churn rate in IC fabrication technology, no SSD product remains in the market after establishing a solid track record.
It could be that Intel SSD products are like the Staal brothers. Or not. If you're willing to average over a flock of white swans and black swans, it could well be more reliable than HDD storage.
I find the underlying variance frightening. The maturity model sucks, because as fast as they figure out one problem, the problem is immediately replaced by a harder problem, as per Douglas Adams.
Correlation does not imply causation. What are the odds that humans would explode over the planet at precisely the end of the previous ice age? We were synchronized with the climate cycle since before we started to rub sticks together.
I have no doubt that humans have changed the earth's climate to some small measurable degree. What's in question here is whether our relatively small contribution is feeding into an exquisitely balanced tipping point, subject to alarming self-amplification.
We've made a modest relative change (+25%) of a trace constituent measured in parts per 10,000. As such, we're terribly dependent on accurate models rather than common sense.
Science is good at getting models right given 200 years. Peer review on a day to day basis is about as reliable as the 11 o'clock news.
It doesn't matter what he inherited. He asked for a chance to fix it. The resources have been spent. It's not fixed. Time's up.
You should stick to posting on sports forums. Sports exist to channel ceremonial outrage. What's your opinion on the trade that sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees?
Or you could bone up on differential equations, game theory, and conflict resolution, all of which have something different to say about the primacy of initial conditions. I'm trying to imagine this world where initial conditions don't matter. What would I do with my brain? Consumes 25% of my blood glucose and contributes nothing useful. It should go.
Nice to know you personally keep the president on a short string.
Dad still plays on his 30 year old stereo 30 year old music. Not a lot of wrong notes (or mixer catastrophes) on Dark Side of the Moon. Goes well with a 30 year old whiskey, too.
In my case, the amplifier is a NAD 7040 and a small pair of B&W S3. The NAD doesn't give a damn about driving 4 ohms. This speaker is reputed to be 8 ohms at most, and well less than 8 ohms over fairly wide sub bands.
I'd love to upgrade the caps, but my own caps are going, and dentists aren't cheap.
No coffee beans in the house this morning, not even a bag of mixed dregs in the back of the freezer from three years ago. First time in maybe ten years I'm dreg destitute. I shook a quarter of a bean out from between the teeth of my coffee grinder and chewed on it, then ate a square of dark chocolate. It's amazing any word came out right in my previous post.
That's pretty much my list exactly. Wired has a nice piece from time to time, but when I start to click links at Wired randomly, I punch myself in the head and say "OK, back to work now." I regard the good stuff there as nostalgia pieces. It functions like the writing in Playboy used to then it descends into the gadget version of Maxim. Wired has an article about death (or grim ways to die) just about always. As Vonnegut used to say, death makes everything more profound.
I'm such a science junkie that my orbit includes many repeats. This isn't always a bad thing, though. Right now edge.org has a book abstract that repeats an older TED talk.
The Annual edge.org Question Center is good if you like straw polls on how real scientists are viewing the world. (You must, or what are you doing on this thread?) If the guy banging on about haecceity appeals to you, also you'll like aldaily.com, which unfortunately has changed a lot and is turning into a TL;DR waterdrip torture for unemployed humanities students to spend long afternoons to imagine having a job they trained for. You'll come away with a whole new appreciation for topic sentences. Some of these articles consist of one False Cleanerfish after another, until you're whittled to the bone.
A little bit of intelligent !science helps retune the filters.
Not Even Wrong is a nice place to visit to see what happens to people who spend their whole life training to construct theories about phenomena the world can no longer afford to measure. If you squint at the Higgs, the fine print reads "No new particles next 10 orders of energy magnitude." Freud has fallen out of fashion, but string theory has picked up the slack. Turns out falsification has budgetary constraints. Who knew?
They just vacuumed up as much data as they could snarf w/o worrying about whether it was legal or not, because that's the way they roll, and now they are paying the price. Maybe they'll be a bit more careful in the future.
Many data analysts adhere to the motto, capture first, prune later. It's not like the data costs them a lot of money sitting there waiting for script to happen.
And BTW, the future is already here. The sloppy code in question probably dates back to 2006 if the data collection began in 2007. Internal policies could have changed three times over since then.
And a big round of -1 for all the people out there running unsecured Wi-Fi for the convenience of having no drapes.
I've talked to many people about the census, and the only intelligible reason for him screwing around with the census that comes to light is so that there's less quality data available to organizations doing good work with fewer agendas. I've always heard that the quality of StatsCan data was legendary, in part for having excellent continuity and statistical control. Well, it only takes one man to burn the library of Alexandria, doesn't it?
I'm not so sure this majority will work in his favour. Rome fell when they ran out of other countries to pillage. In Harper's case, the limiting resource is other people to blame.
hillbillies with cultural agendas
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The Rise of Git
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I get this distinct hillbilly feeling after reading some of the names the open source community has come up with for their projects of late.
There's something about "gitorious" that doesn't square with the hills of the Appalacians. You can go too far. Feynman had a point in complaining about the brethren of the elusive squirtino, which is in the news lately.
One the hillbilly side of the fence I've got a finger named "git". BitKeeper was a nice product, and a nice lesson. Thanks for all the fish may you rot in hell. After MySQL, we should have known better. Certified 100% hillbilly free by Sir Lawrence Ellison.
Also, the purple rat is not dead yet, but appears to be pushing up the daisies really slowly. Good god, it 1.0-ed when I wasn't looking! Meanwhile, the hummingbirds are feeding elsewhere.
Do your Gaga friends have culture? Of late? Just wondering.
I amped my apostrophe finger to type that correctly, then added a gapped tooth to "smile" for interest. That's as close as I get to Synesthesia. Yeah, like "smile's" is the autonomic form any day of the week.
It's problematic when faith in faith challenges skepticism about skepticism. We're well beyond the orbit of mere ideas. A true skeptic doesn't jump bandwagons at the drop of a pin. Despite outward appearances, there's no stubbornness gap in this confrontation.
I don't do "the shake" much in my everyday thinking. Of the issues that come to mind where I could go more than one way, it's because *there is* more than one way. Nuclear power is one such issue. If we decide (collectively) that it's devil spawn from top to bottom, then we're better off without it. We'll be too busy cursing at it to solve real problems.
If we decide (collectively) that nuclear power will save us from a multitude of greater griefs (e.g. the forced emigration of Bangladesh) and that puts us into a mindset to take the problems seriously and do something about them, it will probably work out.
At a major fork in the road, take the decision where you're most willing to tough it out. I've taken worse decisions because I had more staying power to confront the consequences on that side of the fence, and it's been the right decision.
The right decision quickly becomes the wrong decision if you stop moving your legs at the first hint of quicksand. (When I put it that way, it almost seems rational.) There are many decisions where right and wrong are downstream from collective gumption. This study suggests that people are wired to take gumption surveys.
Gumption surveys are connected to the blame reflex. Some page view of recent history informed me that:
The man who smile's at misfortune has thought of someone to blame.
I think the intransigent decile are Adam's apple to goat's blood at the first sign of trouble. It's less about sway than stockpile.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a sister's "See?" -- Linus Van Pelt
One instance of the word "sample" in my post above could perhaps been rendered as "wind-up" instead, rife with puns and elisions... and Charlie Brown's pitching elbow. Makes for a bad sentence. The sibilants of Spain are mainly the same. Is that a linguistic fact? I wonder.
Flawless astroturf is indistinguishable from hard work. It's certainly possible, but is it actually cheaper than not making a crap product in the first place? The makers of flawless astroturf are unlikely to be employed by Motel 69. I've heard it presently costs somewhere north of $500m to get a new drug approved by the FDA. The dreadnoughts of Amazonia are overstated.
I've argued several times recently for the virtues of pseudonymous pluripotency and against the consolidated identity of Google+. But then, I don't besmirch my pseudonymous splendour with motel reviews. (I fear my gig could be busted on a measure of bifurcated alliteration; but for the moment, writing such a filter is--you guessed it--indistinguishable from hard work.)
When you think about it, this is the Turing test in miniature. In the samples given, the straight man on the left is the easier text type to mimic flawlessly than the gusher on the right; the difference is that the gushy cake mix is more likely (I presume) to influence consumers with poor impulse control, so the fakers helped themselves to a giant box of Woody Allen instant pudding.
I picked both samples as fake. The sample on the left doesn't pass for anything more clever than a really long paper tape with heart-felt opinions on infinite spools; the sample on the right doesn't pass any test.
The review that finally sold me was the guy who said, "whenever I get into real trouble, this is the first book I crack open". He was saying that there was plenty of depth between the lines, for the reader willing to struggle. Any large book I'm going to lug around in the physical world had better come equipped with more lifelines than the 2nd Titanic.
I also bought an introduction to VHDL programming at the same time (Amazon now has me narrowed down to a few dozen meatspace puppets) that was precisely the opposite: a quick bootstrap with nothing whatsoever to recommend a third reading. For the price, I was disappointed. Perhaps it paid for itself on the first reading; even if it did, it was a soulless experience.
It's not that everyone wants convenience. It's more the case that most large companies want consumers who want convenience. Convenience is a sound people make while opening their wallets knowing that they skipped out on proper evaluation.
Competence is indistinguishable from hard work. When I do read reviews, I tend to scan *every* review, not just the five (most helpful to Amazon) that they offer up for one click less. While my eyes are skimming madly for dialtone in the morass of pseudo-babble, my brain is consolidating in background the few useful sentences, pro against con. The brain is good at PCA if you give it a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance used to be a bit of a cult favorite. I think for me it was my Marshal McLuhan watershed.
From Alan Jacobs' superb distillation Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?
Alan Jacobs single-handedly proves there is intelligent life in the humanities after all, even if he did wrap his fine meditation in three layers of compatibility cloak. His thesis is that McLuhan made an immense contribution by giving people permission to speak about media in a different way, without sounding like complete idiots (in comparison to what McLuhan got away with himself).
This lumps McLuhan in with Pirsig and Freud.
You're one of those. I'm on the opposite side of the fence. I regard the Apple-branded wedding dress as a Symbiote spider skin. Your GF would probably think that totally rocks as a wedding dress, if it comes in white. Don't forget your first anniversary, she might have a temper.
I hate it when I get my possessives wrong. It would help in the heat of composition if SAUDIS didn't rhyme with TARDIS in the tips of my fingers.
I also missed one stitch: I should have connected the leverage of the baby boom bulge with leverage in capital markets.
Normally I write for myself. For once it would please me if anyone read past the deceptively slow ignition.
You're concerned about Layton making $200,000 annual salary as leader of Canada's official opposition, who publicly subjects himself to the kind of nonsense you just spouted 24/7?
College Football Coaches Salaries - Top 100
Layton misses the $375,000 cut by a Canadian country mile. Obviously, coaching a football team takes real talent; if the players lose faith, they tune you out; you're under incredible public scrutiny to perform now; it's not the easy street of running a country, giving good quotes that don't blow up in your face, or placing well in national elections.
I understand that snowflakes tend to congregate in snow drifts, but how is it that our precious snowflakes are stuffing the ballet box? Our elections are won and lost on the fat demographic bulge of baby boomers nearing retirement with visions of Nortel still in their heads. These were the precious snowflakes of previous generations. Have you seen the footage of previous generations? I bet you've heard the music.
The jobs that used to fall off trees for young people have A) been outsourced to China, B) locked up by older Canadians who still dominate the work force, and C) no longer subsidized by the free-love price of gasoline in 1960.
The precious snowflakes aren't quite as stupid as you make them out to be. They understand that ten years from now when the boomers have mostly retired and are struggling to manage their booming personal health care burdens, there's going to be a sharp correction in the value of compensation available. Someone has to process all the paperwork for the millions of immigrants we are going to require to stretch our underfunded pension programs to the Freedom 95 finish line.
By the way, our pension funds aren't half so "underfunded" as you hear in the telling. When pensions were first established, not many people lived well past retirement age. It has never been economically feasible to support 1/3 of a western country's adult population out of the work force at a three car garage standard of living. Why were those promises made in the first place? The voting power of a grasping demographic bulge. It sold well to the masses, didn't it? All you had to do was convince the Saudi's to play along. Why conserve a precious resource for a rainy day when you can promise it to the flower children in their golden years instead? Besides, it never rains in Saudi Arabia. The pension program "underfunding" is a lot like the Madoff losers, who at first reported losses against what the crook had promised, oblivious to their failure of due diligence. Harry Markopolos wrote a newsletter packed with salient insight, and no-one subscribed. You wonder what these greedy people did to earn their success in the first place, or if the bulk of privilege accrues from hitching yourself to the right crook on the way up and knowing when to severe your ties.
Harper's contribution has mostly been to muzzle the people who work the equations: statisticians and scientists. The feelings of love emanating from the newly retired that get a politician re-elected for multiple terms are mainly threatened by accurate accounting. Nobody ever said Harper was stupid. It's our job, as the electorate, to demand better, should be choose to use it.
Some of us did. Layton will do a fairly competent job of clearing his throat and shaking the carpet as the worst of the Tory blinkering. The whole dynamic is entirely stupid. It's a natural thing when you've promised a large group of people eternal sunshine (that you could never afford) to shoot the messenger when the heroine wears off. Harper would be insane to accelerate this. That's why a democracy also needs a competent opposition party: someone has to be the bearer of bad news if anything is going to change soon enough to make a difference.
I don't see how our precious snowflakes could do much to deflect this iceberg even if they lived o
To satisfy the lameness filter while my coloured correction card chases my original post.
Celebrating Richard Feynman at TEDxCaltech
I should add that the opponents of climate change have intent of being right on any time frame that exceeds their present day vested interests.
On one side we have no credible agenda whatsoever, on the other side we have a credible agenda trying to take credit for an accomplishment we won't see for many decades yet, and telling us to take radical action, with no reliable metric for cost effectiveness, except that the grants keep flowing.
As software people, we ought to know what a premature declaration of victory looks like. You know, the 30 year lag between when a technology first is announced as "just around the corner" and when it's mature and cost effective for mass consumption.
On that score, I don't see much difference between the IPCC and the AI people from the 1960s. Slowly the AI people are winning the battle. Their system is only mildly more difficult than the climate system.
In some ways, the IPCC is less testable than string theory. If we had a handy inventory of Genesis planets, we could really put them in their place.
But no, they get special dispensation to effectively claim, "if the planet warms up catastrophically, we were right all along". Even if their present model is 100% certifiable bullshit applied to any Genesis planet.
Round 1: Reductive Science
Winner by KO over four centuries: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Lagrange, to name just a few.
Round 2: Voodoo Science
Winner by KO over two centuries: Maxwell, Michelson, Heisenberg, SchrÃdinger, Einstein, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonga.
Round 3: Giant Messy Dynamic Systems Science
Losing on points in the first round, but rallying furious when pressed to the ropes, the IPCC alliance of funding activists.
It's a big job. Given a century of progressive refinement, we'll soon have something to crow about.
Nobody seriously doubts the climate scientists will ultimately come up with a story that jives with reality. The debate here is whether we should shift a trillion dollars worth of present-day economic activity on an alpha 0.1 quality model somewhere around the Windows 3.0 turning point.
Given the complexity of the earth's climate system, there's no reason to think this model has converged to reality over such a short time frame, any more than we should expect our rocket scientists to build a fully functional Star Wars spaced-based laser system in under 30 years if we could return CERN for a full money-back refund.
Our rocket scientists put a man on the moon, and sent space probes to the most distant reaches of the solar system. I have some reason to trust them. Name *one* climate system the IPCC has ever got right.
Boyle's law and the triple point of water and the greenhouse effect on Venus, with a partial pressure of CO2 at the planet's surface of just under 9MPa. Did I miss any other illustrious accomplishments?
Or do we believe them simply because the IPCC has more scientists than their model has free variables? One scientist per variable, they've got the entire system covered. If only we managed software development half as well.
The people who want to buy the iPhone sight unseen are the same people who would have secretly been happy to attend a school with a school uniform so they didn't have dress themselves in the morning using their own discretion, only some kind of miracle school where the uniforms are insanely fashionable with only a sarcastic trim of grey flannel.
Back when Microsoft had a similar pile of money, they gave I think it was $40B back to investors in a massive stock dividend. The money doesn't do Apple any good at all if they have no enormous strategic investments on the horizon. But maybe people who own Apple stock also like the idea of someone else managing their investment portfolio. Is Apple a good fund manager? What ROI are they getting on their $80B these days?
My entire last post was essentially a satire on Constantly Risking Absurdity, one of perhaps three nuggets I've retained from my private school education. Knew it would come in handy, some day.
When I first read that poem during my years at Pretentious High I regarded it as a send-up of narcissism. I reluctantly completed many written assignments by starting out complaining that I had nothing to write about (which is effectively writing about oneself) and then seguing into something more interesting from which the useless first page could later be shorn. Always found more to say after clearing my throat of the hairball of hostility.
Not long ago I set myself up with a blog. Never write there, even though I write compulsively every day. I just don't like performing under an integrated identity. I like my circus costumes. I'm sure there have been movies about that, about actors who can't function without the costume. Not quite Wings of Desire. Seriously, that movie could have been about anything. Reminds me of so many poems that left me speechless.
I'm writing far more than usual lately trying to get the costume out of my system. Doubt I'm succeeding. There are sober things I would like to say under the auspice of a perpetual self.
Entrechats, my ass. Way too fucking feminine. Damn I wish I had said that in my essay long ago. I get it, there's a second reading: beauty's a bitch. In my case, it's more like playing hopscotch with Elvish chalk and a magic decoder ring. Not the glam elves, the ones grabbing your ankles from the Dead Marshes, canted in trapezoids. Facebook prime.
I probably write as much for what I erase as what I say. The brush sweeps transverse to the chalk. I'm constantly barfing up memes of disengagement. I write to assimilate, and I write to purge. How many opinions written here are white flags of the soul? Petite mots of surrender? Glib self-loathings of reconciliation?
For a trapeze artist, there's something unseemly about stringing your own wires. A blog feels more like bricks than ballet shoes. Little bricks you keep politely hidden on the third page of Google's search results.
It almost seems like identity has jumped the shark for a generation indoctrinated on commoditizing eyeballs. I have no idea really who I am. With a lot of scratching for words, a few clues emerge. It's not a yard sale of self-documentation.
A funny poem. On Slashdot, usually that's the guy I'm barrel rolling, quarrelling coons in the canopy.
This goes back a lot further than social networks. We all maintain multiple identities across different social circles, starting with the language we use while watching the hockey game with Dad when Mom is out of the house.
Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property
Fashion has always functioned as an identity hack. I'm as much into fashion as any fashionista, but not sartorial fashion; I mince, but not in drag; I'm queen of the lateral link; Uruk-hai ninja of the face-palm rebuttal. But not on my cravat or my crevice sack, by which I declare myself Puritan of Pattern Recognition. Nor have I scribbled on my leather pyjamas: I can't figure out which anthropic landscape to pick from; it seems premature. Blakley got my goat a bit by presuming that the game is only played on sartorial terms. Forgive me if that paragraph is not my regular office gab.
Hey, I've got an idea. Let's do it all online. What I say in the locker room, what I say to the girl I spoke about in the locker room, what I tell my parents when I come home late after speaking to said girl, let's make the whole thing part of a unified dossier. What could possibly go wrong?
I might work for a company that couldn't care less about my verbal excursions. But they might want to present me to an investor as a level-headed character who is the brains behind the operation. Now, the investors already know that it's a coin flip whether the brains behind the operation is a total flake in his private life. (So true.) Mostly, they don't really care. But if you rub their nose in it, they have to care. CF CYA.
A flake with the good grace to hide the fact will suffice if the job gets done. This becomes a tenuous proposition on Fishbowl+. (I'll learn to love that + sign yet. It goes anywhere. I could even print a T-shirt --Fishbowl+ if I weren't so busy hiding my other half; or my other half wasn't so busy hiding from me.)
It's also a sign of social grace is knowing when to let it go and not peering over the fence into ever aspect of the social lives of the people you work for, with, or employ.
From Mark Brezinski at Sennheiser CX 980 Comparison
We'll all be accessorizing for creepy people if this direction continues. Kudos to Mr Brezinski for this wonderful send-up of coolspotting.
Do you mean "everybody" working as inner-city burger flippers, or "everybody" as middle-class burbians with a three car garage and a 60 mile round-trip commute?
In the theory of economics, wages adjust to reflect the cost of living. This is why wages are higher in NY city than Butte Rock, Montana.
The structural problem of living out on the burbs far, far away from where the jobs are is another matter. There would need to be some structural readjustment.
See? This fellow agrees with me. The market always adjusts.
Structural adjustment takes time. Mommy is competing for a promotion at work, so has to stay late to chat the boss; but Bobby is turning six this year, and if he's late for advancement class, he'll never pass his future MCATs. Give and take is where the rubber meets the road.
The governing dynamic in this debate is musical chairs. Many people are locked into short term incentives. No one about to vest wants to tell a sorry story and depress the market just before they cash their chips. As soon as one person cashes out, the next person on a short vest takes their place. I think velocity is a proxy for leverage. And the powerful do love their leverage.
The idea of a CEO of a big three car company telling the truth to the public about the future price of oil ("think twice before buying in subsubsuburb") and being sued by present day shareholders is a telling one. Most often, the present shareholder sells to a future shareholder. A high price benefits the former. A low price benefits the later. In either case, you've made one shareholder happy, yet the legal system prioritizes the next guy in line to cash out. He can sue the CEO if the share price falls due to unnecessary disclosure of accurate and depressing information; the purchaser is governed by caveat emptor. But like conservation of mass, you've got conservation of shareholders. One is an electron, the other is a positron.
(The case where the company buys back its own shares is a different one, where there is clearly conflict of interest in accurate disclosure, in this case concerning understated lucrative upside.)
If the price of gas had been put on a path of consistent and moderate increase since 1980, we wouldn't now have nearly so much structural liability. But waiting for the last minute to tell bad news is so much better for executives cashing out on short term bonus incentives that the obvious forewarnings are rarely heard.
True, but does it remain relevant? Long ago Microsoft lost the war to hire on the basis of stock option grants making every second grunt into a millionaire. The whole company was vested to behave that way. On top of a small number of billionaires there was a much larger base of people doing much better than can ordinarily be achieved as a 9-5 wage slave, and it was only possible for this to continue for as long as it did by a broad program of coordinated sphincter contraction.
The new Microsoft consists of talented (if unspectacular) engineers continuing to milk one of the most lucrative cash cows in human history.
I wonder if any of the arrogance wore off in the transition from robber barons to milk maids, shocking as that might sound.
I suspect this post will be lost amidst the Saffirâ"Simpson in a teapot.
Another way to look at this debate is to imagine we had figured out that the fate of humanity hinged on raising average terrestrial surface temperature by two degrees over a century, starting at 1950. We fund a Manhattan project and determine that we need to burn 2 trillion barrels of oil to accomplish global salvation. Oil is extracted and funnelled into the clouds on a scale that even the wildest optimist could not have predicted. The fate of humanity now rests on the correctness of our atmospheric hypothesis: would our audacious and daring attempt to tip the earth's climate pan out and save the day?
Pessimists and worry warts gather anxious to example the recent global temperature record. This is small cause for optimism in the collapse of a few arctic ice shelves. But this doesn't really prove anything unless the glaciers themselves accelerate their melt cycle. Some believe this is happening, others are less sure.
Apart from the ice melt, there's hardly any cause for optimism. A tiny hopeful upward tick has been detected since the year 2000, more than halfway to the deadline. It's very sensitive to the analysis model. Hardly what you'd want to pin the survival of humanity upon.
Many doubters have called the whole program into question. A cadre of optimists have reassured the public with confidence bordering on stridency, "don't worry, that tiny tick is the certain beginning of a sustained upward trend".
Reverse the scenario, we'd about ready to lynch the people who suggested that burning 2 trillion barrels of oil was certain salvation.
Think of flash memory as acid/base chemistry: a one is stored by pH much lower than 7, a zero is stored by a pH much greater than 7. The reaction is confined to pores in a pumice stone. In order to reduce cost, pumice stone with increasingly small bubble cavities (and mineral wall thickness) has been pressed into service.
By the laws of solid state physics, this makes acid/base pumice stone inherently more reliable than magnetic domains spinning on a fluid bearing.
The bottom line here is that every SDD die shrink generation is an entirely new set of loaded dice. Due to the incredible churn rate in IC fabrication technology, no SSD product remains in the market after establishing a solid track record.
It could be that Intel SSD products are like the Staal brothers. Or not. If you're willing to average over a flock of white swans and black swans, it could well be more reliable than HDD storage.
I find the underlying variance frightening. The maturity model sucks, because as fast as they figure out one problem, the problem is immediately replaced by a harder problem, as per Douglas Adams.
Correlation does not imply causation. What are the odds that humans would explode over the planet at precisely the end of the previous ice age? We were synchronized with the climate cycle since before we started to rub sticks together.
I have no doubt that humans have changed the earth's climate to some small measurable degree. What's in question here is whether our relatively small contribution is feeding into an exquisitely balanced tipping point, subject to alarming self-amplification.
We've made a modest relative change (+25%) of a trace constituent measured in parts per 10,000. As such, we're terribly dependent on accurate models rather than common sense.
Science is good at getting models right given 200 years. Peer review on a day to day basis is about as reliable as the 11 o'clock news.
You should stick to posting on sports forums. Sports exist to channel ceremonial outrage. What's your opinion on the trade that sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees?
Or you could bone up on differential equations, game theory, and conflict resolution, all of which have something different to say about the primacy of initial conditions. I'm trying to imagine this world where initial conditions don't matter. What would I do with my brain? Consumes 25% of my blood glucose and contributes nothing useful. It should go.
Nice to know you personally keep the president on a short string.
Dad still plays on his 30 year old stereo 30 year old music. Not a lot of wrong notes (or mixer catastrophes) on Dark Side of the Moon. Goes well with a 30 year old whiskey, too.
In my case, the amplifier is a NAD 7040 and a small pair of B&W S3. The NAD doesn't give a damn about driving 4 ohms. This speaker is reputed to be 8 ohms at most, and well less than 8 ohms over fairly wide sub bands.
I'd love to upgrade the caps, but my own caps are going, and dentists aren't cheap.
No coffee beans in the house this morning, not even a bag of mixed dregs in the back of the freezer from three years ago. First time in maybe ten years I'm dreg destitute. I shook a quarter of a bean out from between the teeth of my coffee grinder and chewed on it, then ate a square of dark chocolate. It's amazing any word came out right in my previous post.
That's pretty much my list exactly. Wired has a nice piece from time to time, but when I start to click links at Wired randomly, I punch myself in the head and say "OK, back to work now." I regard the good stuff there as nostalgia pieces. It functions like the writing in Playboy used to then it descends into the gadget version of Maxim. Wired has an article about death (or grim ways to die) just about always. As Vonnegut used to say, death makes everything more profound.
I'm such a science junkie that my orbit includes many repeats. This isn't always a bad thing, though. Right now edge.org has a book abstract that repeats an older TED talk.
The Annual edge.org Question Center is good if you like straw polls on how real scientists are viewing the world. (You must, or what are you doing on this thread?) If the guy banging on about haecceity appeals to you, also you'll like aldaily.com, which unfortunately has changed a lot and is turning into a TL;DR waterdrip torture for unemployed humanities students to spend long afternoons to imagine having a job they trained for. You'll come away with a whole new appreciation for topic sentences. Some of these articles consist of one False Cleanerfish after another, until you're whittled to the bone.
A little bit of intelligent !science helps retune the filters.
Not Even Wrong is a nice place to visit to see what happens to people who spend their whole life training to construct theories about phenomena the world can no longer afford to measure. If you squint at the Higgs, the fine print reads "No new particles next 10 orders of energy magnitude." Freud has fallen out of fashion, but string theory has picked up the slack. Turns out falsification has budgetary constraints. Who knew?
Many data analysts adhere to the motto, capture first, prune later. It's not like the data costs them a lot of money sitting there waiting for script to happen.
And BTW, the future is already here. The sloppy code in question probably dates back to 2006 if the data collection began in 2007. Internal policies could have changed three times over since then.
And a big round of -1 for all the people out there running unsecured Wi-Fi for the convenience of having no drapes.
I've talked to many people about the census, and the only intelligible reason for him screwing around with the census that comes to light is so that there's less quality data available to organizations doing good work with fewer agendas. I've always heard that the quality of StatsCan data was legendary, in part for having excellent continuity and statistical control. Well, it only takes one man to burn the library of Alexandria, doesn't it?
I'm not so sure this majority will work in his favour. Rome fell when they ran out of other countries to pillage. In Harper's case, the limiting resource is other people to blame.
There's something about "gitorious" that doesn't square with the hills of the Appalacians. You can go too far. Feynman had a point in complaining about the brethren of the elusive squirtino, which is in the news lately.
One the hillbilly side of the fence I've got a finger named "git". BitKeeper was a nice product, and a nice lesson. Thanks for all the fish may you rot in hell. After MySQL, we should have known better. Certified 100% hillbilly free by Sir Lawrence Ellison.
Also, the purple rat is not dead yet, but appears to be pushing up the daisies really slowly. Good god, it 1.0-ed when I wasn't looking! Meanwhile, the hummingbirds are feeding elsewhere.
Do your Gaga friends have culture? Of late? Just wondering.
I amped my apostrophe finger to type that correctly, then added a gapped tooth to "smile" for interest. That's as close as I get to Synesthesia. Yeah, like "smile's" is the autonomic form any day of the week.
I do miss the "D'oh!" button after a corn roast.
It's problematic when faith in faith challenges skepticism about skepticism. We're well beyond the orbit of mere ideas. A true skeptic doesn't jump bandwagons at the drop of a pin. Despite outward appearances, there's no stubbornness gap in this confrontation.
I don't do "the shake" much in my everyday thinking. Of the issues that come to mind where I could go more than one way, it's because *there is* more than one way. Nuclear power is one such issue. If we decide (collectively) that it's devil spawn from top to bottom, then we're better off without it. We'll be too busy cursing at it to solve real problems.
If we decide (collectively) that nuclear power will save us from a multitude of greater griefs (e.g. the forced emigration of Bangladesh) and that puts us into a mindset to take the problems seriously and do something about them, it will probably work out.
At a major fork in the road, take the decision where you're most willing to tough it out. I've taken worse decisions because I had more staying power to confront the consequences on that side of the fence, and it's been the right decision.
The right decision quickly becomes the wrong decision if you stop moving your legs at the first hint of quicksand. (When I put it that way, it almost seems rational.) There are many decisions where right and wrong are downstream from collective gumption. This study suggests that people are wired to take gumption surveys.
Gumption surveys are connected to the blame reflex. Some page view of recent history informed me that:
The man who smile's at misfortune has thought of someone to blame.
I think the intransigent decile are Adam's apple to goat's blood at the first sign of trouble. It's less about sway than stockpile.
The Slashdot comic-box gods are on to me:
How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a sister's "See?" -- Linus Van Pelt
One instance of the word "sample" in my post above could perhaps been rendered as "wind-up" instead, rife with puns and elisions ... and Charlie Brown's pitching elbow. Makes for a bad sentence. The sibilants of Spain are mainly the same. Is that a linguistic fact? I wonder.
Flawless astroturf is indistinguishable from hard work. It's certainly possible, but is it actually cheaper than not making a crap product in the first place? The makers of flawless astroturf are unlikely to be employed by Motel 69. I've heard it presently costs somewhere north of $500m to get a new drug approved by the FDA. The dreadnoughts of Amazonia are overstated.
I've argued several times recently for the virtues of pseudonymous pluripotency and against the consolidated identity of Google+. But then, I don't besmirch my pseudonymous splendour with motel reviews. (I fear my gig could be busted on a measure of bifurcated alliteration; but for the moment, writing such a filter is--you guessed it--indistinguishable from hard work.)
When you think about it, this is the Turing test in miniature. In the samples given, the straight man on the left is the easier text type to mimic flawlessly than the gusher on the right; the difference is that the gushy cake mix is more likely (I presume) to influence consumers with poor impulse control, so the fakers helped themselves to a giant box of Woody Allen instant pudding.
I picked both samples as fake. The sample on the left doesn't pass for anything more clever than a really long paper tape with heart-felt opinions on infinite spools; the sample on the right doesn't pass any test.
The last book I purchased with recourse to the Amazon rabble was The Elements of Statistical Learning.
The review that finally sold me was the guy who said, "whenever I get into real trouble, this is the first book I crack open". He was saying that there was plenty of depth between the lines, for the reader willing to struggle. Any large book I'm going to lug around in the physical world had better come equipped with more lifelines than the 2nd Titanic.
I also bought an introduction to VHDL programming at the same time (Amazon now has me narrowed down to a few dozen meatspace puppets) that was precisely the opposite: a quick bootstrap with nothing whatsoever to recommend a third reading. For the price, I was disappointed. Perhaps it paid for itself on the first reading; even if it did, it was a soulless experience.
It's not that everyone wants convenience. It's more the case that most large companies want consumers who want convenience. Convenience is a sound people make while opening their wallets knowing that they skipped out on proper evaluation.
Competence is indistinguishable from hard work. When I do read reviews, I tend to scan *every* review, not just the five (most helpful to Amazon) that they offer up for one click less. While my eyes are skimming madly for dialtone in the morass of pseudo-babble, my brain is consolidating in background the few useful sentences, pro against con. The brain is good at PCA if you give it a chance.