So guess what?

A few weeks ago, I went to buy some Microsoft Points for my Xbox Live account. I'd done it a few times before, but now it just comes up over and over that my credit card is invalid. After calling my bank and verifying that it's fine, I had to come to the conclusion that I wasn't allowed at the US Xbox Live store no more.

Oh well, I don't bother with XBLA much anyway.

So then last night I was cursing myself for ever selling the Violent Femmes first album. I decided I'd buy it again from the excellent Amazon MP3 store, which is DRM-free and is encoded at a reasonable bitrate (I don't buy iTunes because of the DRM, but more importantly, a 128kbit music file is worth exactly nothing in my book). I've done this a lot lately. For bands that I really love, I like a CD so I can rip it lossless, but for stuff that is just in my "collection," 256kbit is fine.

Now it comes up with a message that they only serve people in the USA. No music for you!

(sigh)

Here is a nice little piece about when and why to distrust expert opinion.

His example about pain reminds me of a great article I found and used in my Media English class (to the befuddlement of student and colleague alike, I'm afraid). Do you remember being taught that the reason your muscles hurt after strenuous exercise was that there was a buildup of lactic acid? Well, it's totally unscientific bullshit.

As I've climbed higher (and really, I'm not that high) on the academic ladder, I've realized something: Experts are just people. They work hard, but they can make mistakes, and they actually have more important things to do than be right. They usually have to eat, and admitting everything you've said for your entire career is bunk can be very hard to do.

Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.

Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.

This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.

Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).

This is one of the longer posts I've made regarding Linux's viability as a Windows replacement. I've edited it a bit from the original for things that have changed since then:

Linux is a toy. A powerful toy. An-almost-infinitely-customizable toy. But a toy nonetheless. I say this because the people who use it do so because they enjoy fiddling around with config files. Even if they actually like using it--and of course they do--using it requires one to fiddle with config files in ways that one would only know how to do if he enjoyed learning about such things. I'm sorry, but that is a tiny subset of the computer-using public. Most people don't want to fiddle with things to get them to work or use weird, off-brand knockoff software developed by groups of people who do it as a hobby. It is a toy.

Invariably, this comment upsets a lot of people and there's the obligatory "It runs the internet!" and "dont be rediculous i use it for my business!" (sic) replies. But none of that means it's not a toy. OpenOffice or Crossover Office do not a real computer--as most people actually use them--make. Most businesses do more than type and make spreadsheets.

Here is a quick list of software my parents' company, for whom I do IT from time to time, uses. These are industry-standard applications:

PowerClaim [powerclaim.com]

Xactimate [exactimate.com]

Internet Explorer (for dealing with the head office)

Without these, their business does not run.

Another repost. I have intimated on this site before my thoughts on Linux, and have always wanted to write a monster post that details them more thoroughly, but the time doesn't come. Here is a slightly-edited-for-readability post from elsewhere on non-computer-savvy people's ability to set up and use Ubuntu Linux:

I build my own PCs. I think that's falling-off-a-log easy. But try to get a noob friend of yours into it. No really, try. They'll come up with the goofiest, craziest, hardest questions you've ever heard. I understand on a conceptual, top-down level what is going on when I'm putting a system together and getting drivers, etc. I've been doing it long enough that when I build a new one, it's a simple matter of just learning the changes since last time I did it. Usually I already know about them because I'm a geek and keep up on such things for fun. But, for example, the change from 20-pin to 24-pin ATX connectors caught me completely by surprise and required another trip to the store to get an adapter. It still happens. I know to look up beep codes. I know what to do if it doesn't start up. When all is said and done, I forget these little problems because they are not memorable--they are not salient events because I calmly and quickly solved them. This is not the case to a person who doesn't have that comparatively vast storehouse of latent knowledge.

For someone just starting out, though, that "24-pin ATX connector" confusion happens with every single step of the process. What seems simple to us only seems that way because we've got a massive backlog of understanding that we just take for granted. We only need to make adjustments to it.

Lately I have been bemoaning the fact that I don't have time to blog as much as I'd like. But then I realized that I actually write a lot, but they are on forums, and are usually only seen on that site by a few people. I am toying with the idea of reposting the longer ones here. Here is the first, which was in response to someone complaining about the hours they worked at their software dev job. Begin:

I'm an academic, and the single biggest reason is that I'm a workaholic and if the place didn't almost shut down for 4 months of the year, I'd work myself to an early grave. As it is now, though, I work my ass off 8 months of the year, and 4 months of the year I'm blessed and cursed to be able to get almost nothing done (well, nothing that requires the organization). It's been very good for my health and mental well-being, if not necessarily for my wallet.

Over the last summer break, I spent about a week staying with my friends who work at a major IT company as developers. I saw their lives, and was envious. They make a lot more money, they come home earlier, and it is virtually impossible for them to work at home, so they don't. "Damn," I thought, "I really did pick the wrong career." But then I noticed something: I was staying at their house in a different country from where I live for a week, and that was just one week out of about 7 or 8 in a row that I didn't have to report to work. I was still getting some things done on the laptop, but that had much more to do with my workaholic nature than necessity. "Damn," I thought, "maybe I picked the right career after all."

The point I'm trying to make is that you are ultimately in control of your time. You are. Really. It's your time. Your life. If you feel that you are losing it to a company, and the money isn't worth it, you need to change gears. It's not their fault. It's your fault for doing it.

Most people don't care that the iPhone is closed. They don't even know what the difference between open and closed is. And they most certainly don't care.

The iPhone is a phone. It was designed to address problems with phones. The problems it tried to address mostly had to do with the fact that cellphones are almost unusable. For example, I have no idea how to use most of the features on mine, and I'm a geek. It doesn't bother me.

Apple is not interested in hackers. No one is. There are only four of them in the world, but they write in blogs all day, so it seems like there are many more. The main people people who read the blogs are the other three hackers. These four people say the same things to each other for months straight, while companies like Apple and Microsoft rake in billions by serving the other 6.5billion people on the planet.

All the Apple bashing for closing down a piece of hardware that they designed to make money for them misses the point; they don't care about you. Not any more than they have to to get your money, anyway. The way Apple has found to get your money is by limiting options on their products to just what most people want to do. This is how they deliver ease-of-use and stability. Hackers/makers/copyfighters/freetards get angry at the company instead of at themselves for wanting the toys anyway.

But nobody cares what the hackers think. There are only four of them in the whole entire world. They are an insignificant minority.

Math.

Math.

Here's the thing about math: People don't like it. I, for one, hated it in school. I remember math classes thusly:

1) Teacher writes some problems on the board and shows how to solve them.

2) Teacher gives an assignment of scores of similar problems, to be due the next day.

3) Teacher takes nap on desk while students start working on the assignment silently.

Is it any wonder that people don't like math or get "math anxiety" when it is "taught" like this? What was the point of that? Why was my youth squandered doing long division and endless algebra? We all knew that we'd never find a use for such skills, and for that knowledge, it seems, we were punished with hours of hunching over lined loose-leaf, scribbling with our pencils, watching the evening tick away into bed time. But that's the only way you learn, right? Right?

See what the wackos at Pizza Hut Japan have dreamt up (click the image to go to Flickr for notes):

Anyone who knows me knows that I tend to pooh-pooh anything I perceive as hippie nonsense, and this includes a great deal of environmental nonsense (watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit! episodes on recycling and the environmental movement for a pretty good explanation of why I roll my eyes).

But the story linked below just has to be told. Executive summary: There are three spots in the oceans where the water runs very slowly. The currents just kind of swirl there, so a lot of stuff gets stuck. These things are hundreds of miles across.

They are also visibly awash in discarded plastic.

Hundreds of miles, folks.