Trying not to Fossilize, or Avoiding Elf Stasis

Zoom is what did it.

Zoom, of course, is the online collaboration platform, where one can have video presentations, chats, and other meetings and such with widely-dispersed groups. We use Zoom at BYU-Idaho in our teaching groups, where we may have teachers from across the nation working together to become better teachers in a teacherly way.

But this semester – it took me five weeks to find my way into the group chat. Because things had changed.

Or maybe not changed. I haven’t used Zoom much, and when we have meetings, I get a link to them. To go into the program – annoying called apps these days – was something I hadn’t done in a long time. So it took some time to remember how to get there. And how to log in. And what my password was. And to realize I didn’t need my password if I used a push notification which, thankfully, I have used more often and remembered how to do.

So there I was, stumbling into the chat four weeks after the fact, like an Elf finally giving up on Middle-Earth and heading to the Grey Havens to sail to the Undying Lands.

Elves, we have to remember form Tolkien’s universe, love stasis.* Their world was perfect, so why change that? But due to the meddling and weaknesses of men – and the scheming of those who destroyed Numenor and brought their evil to Middle-Earth – their existence was threatened and their stability shattered. Though they hadn’t given into the corruption of the One Ring, it hung heavily over their heads, viz:



So when stasis could not be maintained in Middle-Earth, they departed for Valinor, where their stasis could be maintained.

I’m evolving into a technological elf. I want things to remain the same. I’m tired, for example, of our teaching groups changing each semester, having to find the new place in the community, It’s awful.

But I need to be adaptable. Things will change and continue to change, and those who refuse to change are doomed to wander, lustrous and beautiful, in a world that no longer suits them.

*Warning: Major Nerd Alert

Mandelbrot and Fibonacci Mush

I’m trying – really trying – to understand why I should care about Fibonacci numbers.

Today’s contemplation all started with today’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria comic strip, in which artist Pab Sungenis the following:

I’ve heard of the sequence before. I know that it’s been “spotted in nature.” I know it gets math nerds as excited as Winston Churchill retorts get word nerds excited.

I just don’t know why I need to be excited about it.

Whee. The Fibonacci sequence has been noticed in the clustering of florets in some flowers. That’s neat. It’s just as neat as the phenomenon of pareidolia, which involves people spotting, say, images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in tortillas, tree bark, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Just because you can sorta see something in something else doesn’t mean it’s there on purpose or that I should get all whipped up about it. Maybe those florests arrange themselves that way because that’s how they’re arranged. Then we come along behind and notice that some mathematical sequence happens to match the pattern and then boom it’s the Face on Mars all over again, but since it’s science-y, that takes the curse off it.

All of this reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Ghost From the Grand Banks,” in which the story’s requisite genius has a lake in the form of the Mandelbrot Set. He had to include the Mandelbrot Set in a novel because, well, it was the newest, neatest science-y mathematical thingie to mince down the pike.

Problem is, he had no idea what to DO with the Mandelbrot Set now that it was in his novel, except to have it be the place where the requisite genius (or whomever, it’s been a while since I read it) meets his/her/its end. The lake could have been in the shape of, say, a four-leaf clover or the sigmoid colon and the end would have been just the same: Genius and/or minion and/or relative dies in the lake, shaped like the whatever.

If a science weenie like Clarke (he came up with the concept of geosynchronous satellites, for heaven’s sake) can’t do much beyond introducing a mathematical wowie as a mediocre plot device in a rather boring novel, then how do the rest of us stand a chance at getting all excited about it?

Heaven knows I tried. Waaaaay back when the Mandelbrot Set was all the rage, I labirously typed a computer program into my Radio Shack Color Computer 3 to reproduce the Mandelbrot Set on my computer. I remember sitting there, watching the image slowly – and I mean slowly – form on my screen, and stroking out every time one of he pixels turned up a color other than black, because that meant the program was going to run faster for a while until it got back to that familiar field of black.

I’m not saying here that these sequences and sets aren’t neat, or that they don’t help to solve problems, or help mathematicians to visualize what’s going on in nature or the universe or whatever. I’m just saying that the public relations people they have working with them aren’t doing their best to get the rest of us excited about it all.

Maybe I’ll go read about Mario Mertz instead.

Nerdlings, What is Uncharted's Job?

Dan and Chip Heath, two young nerdlings writing a piece at Slate.com on the demise of Second Life, say things.

They say things like this:

But what “job” did Second Life perform? It was like a job candidate with a fascinating résumé—fluent in Finnish, with stints in spelunking and trapeze—but no actual labor skills. The same was true with the Segway. No one was interested in employing a $5,000 walk-accelerator. (Though, to be fair, Segway eventually got a part-time job saving tourists from exercise.)

What about the Apple Newton, the first widely hyped PDA back in the 1990s? It was clearly applying for the right job—to give us mobile access to our calendars and to-do lists and such. But it was a lousy employee, with notoriously poor handwriting recognition and a limited attention span (from low battery life). PalmPilot got the job a few years later.

So, as a former Second Life devotee (I took a semester-long masters degree course that was pretty much held in Second Life; my conclusion: There are more efficient ways in both time spent preparing and bandwidth hogged to hold meetings) and as vice president of Uncharted.com, I have to ask:

What is Uncharted’s job?

I’m afraid my conclusion is thus: Doesn’t matter. Right now, that job is being taken by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, and even my own humble blog, thank you very much.

And, just as importantly, what first impressions are we making? Given a faulty photo-uploading module and a consistently flaky story-upload module, that first impression can’t be good. And that’s bad, according to Farhad Manjoo, Slate.com’s in-house nerdling. Here, he speaks of the decline and fall of Google+, another, much bigger social network that is looking for a job but really hasn’t found one yet (it’s comforting to see the big boys stumbling at this just as we are, by the way).

Why am I so sure that Google+ can’t be saved? Because there’s no way to correct Google’s central failure. Back when companies were clamoring to create brand pages on the network—or users were looking to create profiles with pseudonyms, another phenomenon that Google shut down—the company ought to have acceded to its users’ wishes and accommodated them. If Google wasn’t ready for brand pages in the summer, it shouldn’t have launched Google+ until it was. And this advice goes more generally—by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.

And yet another Slate.com nerdling – Erik Sofge – reminds us all that while one thing may do a job – and do it well – when that thing is moved to another job, often it fails.

I’ve long whined that my iPod Touch is a less handy music-listening device than an ordinary iPod, because with the iPod, I don’t even have to take the thing out of my pocket or bag to make musical adjustments (OK, some I do, such as changing albums, but for the simple task of skipping a song or shutting the thing down altogether, I can do it by feel.) Not so the iPod Touch – it’s a series of three or four steps to shut that thing down, and it requires all my attention. Enter Sofge:

An outstanding interface separates the products you love from the ones you simply use. In the Nano’s case, the touchscreen works. There’s nothing broken about it. But it’s clumsy and ill-conceived, given the uses for which it's supposedly designed. To put a touchscreen on a Nano presumes that a touchscreen can be a universal interface, and that all devices aspire to do all things. But people don’t buy a Nano because they want a mini-iPhone or a micro-iPad. They want something they can shove in their pocket or clip to their shorts when they take a walk or go for a run, a device for playing music on the move. In those scenarios, a touchscreen doesn't help at all.

So back to Uncharted. Does all of this mean Uncharted is dead in the water? Not necessarily. We just have to figure out what job Uncharted should apply for, and in what way it can fit the users’ needs in a way that nothing else fits. Social networking, I’m afraid, is not open to entry-level groups like Uncharted. Unless we find a job that’s vacant somewhere, waiting to be filled.

One thing I thought of: Uncharted could become a haven for writers looking for a space to share their unpublished stuff privately in a community where people would give them good feedback. Probably services like that out there somewhere, but it’s worth a thought.

Another thought: Stellar writing and photography on travel. But you know what, there are others doing that just as well on Facebook and Flickr. Not a good thought at all.

Other ideas: I don’t know. This is why I’m not an entrepreneur.

Oh, the Humanity

Good. I did get the pop culture reference in, though I’m not sure it really counts, as it’s nearly 100-year-old pop culture. Did they even have pop culture back then?

Still, The Onion’s article on “panicked Americans” freaking out over having to read 500 words of English uninterrupted by a YouTube video, bulleted list, hyperlink or any other interruption is pretty funny, right down to the quotes from people who can’t figure out that it used to be words that conveyed ideas, rather than symbols and catchphrases and such:

“It demands so much of my time and concentration," said Chicago resident Dale Huza, who was confronted by the confusing mound of words early Monday afternoon. "This large block of text, it expects me to figure everything out on my own, and I hate it."

And one more:

“I'm sure if it's important enough, they'll let us know some other way," Detroit local Janet Landsman said. "After all, it can't be that serious. If there were anything worthwhile buried deep in that block of impenetrable English, it would at least have an accompanying photo of a celebrity or a large humorous title containing a pop culture reference."

Added Landsman, "Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it doesn't even have a point."

I know I find myself falling into these kinds of traps on this blog, although I hope that most of the folderol that accompanies the blocks of text I produce add to the comprehension and understanding, rather than act as placeholders or shorthand cribbing for those who can’t gain comprehension unless the text is accompanied by a SpongeBob Square Pants video.

There are some foolish notions out there about reading, especially on the Internet. I’ve never bought into the fad that Internet texts should be short and peppy simply because long blocks of text don’t hold peoples’ attention. If that’s true on the Web, why not true in books? I think there’s a lot more to do with subject matter, style and quality of writing, the need/necessity for the reader to read and many other factors that play into text getting read, aside from length. Yes, there should be minimal formatting; margins, et cetera, to make the text legible and orderly (this includes commas, other punctuation and proper capitalization, folks, it’s not just for English majors or Grammar Nazis).

BORAX on the Mind

BORAX III Reactor

You know, a big part of me really wished I'd been alive to see this:

Imagine you're driving along U.S. Highway 20 in the middle of the Lost River Desert. The only thing you can see aside from the extinct volcanoes on the southern and eastern horizons and the Lemhi Mountains to the north are vast plains of sage brush and cheatgrass. Suddenly, to the right as you're traveling east, you see something like a geyser shooting water more than a hundred feet in the air.

Only it's not a geyser. It's a nuclear reactor. Technically, it's the BORAX reactor, an experimental reactor that went critical in 1953. The reactor was purposely run through hundreds of tests in which those testing the reactor committed errors from removing control rods to allowing the reactor's water coolant to boil (hence the geysers shooting into the air).

Here's something interesting about those experiments, taken from the book "Proving the Principle" by Susan Stacy:

The results proved correct. In every case, the chain reaction stopped before the aluminum fuel plates became hot enough to melt. It appeared that boiling water reactors might therefore be "inherently" safe; that is, safe because of the way nature took its course, not because automatic controls, machinery, and human judgment operated perfectly one hundred percent of the time.

That, of course, did not prove to be true, as subsequent experiments showed. But it's this kind of experimentation that led scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory to plumb the natural forces of nuclear reaction they sought to understand. They've helped make reactors worldwide safer.

What's fun is that I work about a mile and a half from where all this experimentation took place. Each day, we drive past the little dirt road that wanders off into the rejuvinated sage brush where the reactor (and a handful of other experimental reactors) once stood. Aside form the dirt road and a patch of desert where the sage brush is growing back but isn't as big as what surrounds it (no signs of contamination here, despite the experimentation and excursions which took place here ) there's no way to tell these kinds of tinkerings took place. So I remind myself that there's history out there, as I go to and from work.

The BORAX III reactor, pictured above, was one of those groundbreaking experiments. It was the first nuclear reactor that supplied power to an entire town -- nearby Arco. One of these days, I hope to see a commercial reactor built out in this desert that can supply Idaho Falls and other cities in the area. Maybe someday.

Dumb Journalists Like Me

There are many reasons I am no longer a journalist, and glad to be so. But here’s the biggie:

I’m dumb.

Dumb as a rock. I have a major failing in me that cripples my ability to work as a journalist, and that is I trust people. Yes, I know the first rule of journalism is “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” I get it. But I’m still dumb.

Not as dumb as others, however.

This “Climategate” thing just keeps getting worse. The New York Times finally chimed in on the matter in an intelligent fashion – I don’t mind that it took a week and a half; I’m pleased that someone is looking at this stuff without a knee-jerk reaction. But what John Tierney writes in the Times really speaks to me not as a skeptic (because I’m not) but as a former journalist. Here, he’s speaking of the famous “hockey stick” graph purporting to show a marked increase in global temperatures in the last portion of the 20th century (emphasis mine):

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim.

So, enter the dumb journalist in me. I’m rather like Dave Barry: Maybe I’d like to go out there and, as a journalist, fight corruption. But I have no idea how to find any. And if the so-called experts – who are much more knowledgeable than I – say this graph and the data behind it is good, so be it.

So I’m no longer a journalist. I’m too dumb. As Dogbert is fond of saying, a journalist in this kind of situation can take the report, consider it, talk to other experts, work really hard and maybe, after several months, find the problem. Or he can just write up what the expert says and be done with it. Either way, it pays the same.

Nobody ought to be cooking the books or spinning the data this way. There’s plenty of umbrage on the greener side of the spectrum concerning the spin behind nuclear energy, clean coal, climate change skeptology, that you’d think those on the side of righteousness would be extra scrupulous in making sure their data was good, comparing apples to apples. Compariing apples to pomegranates to make the situation look worse, or, as Tierney says, making it appear unequivocal, is dumber than a dumb journalist parroting that information to the masses.

CRU hacker/whistleblower, thank you, whoever you are. I’d like to see one side of this debate present honest work. Still waiting. In the meantime, I can enjoy this:

Facepalm, Part II

As expected, the Internet heated up over the weekend about hacked/leaked e-mails and other files from the Climate Research Unit in England.

Trot over to RealClimate.org at this link for some interesting information on consdiering the context of the purloined e-mails. Keeping things in context is always an excellent rule of thumb when trying to understand what's going on, especially when, s in most communications you and I send out, we write in shorthand, expecting the recpients of our messages to understand what we're talking about without having to go over everything in excruciating detail. So it's good to read the context that's beign provided, though the haughty "We don't have to respond to this because it's false" attitude generally being taken isn't the way to go. You don't get converts by essentially saying "You all are too stupid to understand what's really going on here" to those posing the questions. You offer context. You explain. A lot. You just gotta HAVE PATIENCE, man (start at 4:59 for the proper scene).



Of course, it also helps if you're not throwing horseshit at the wall to see what sticks (which is what your opponents on the opposite side of any argument expect you to do, and you them).

Meanwhile, over in England, there's word of an inquiry into the matter of the purloined e-mails and the (maybe) hack science. I don't know that it'll go anywhere.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, there's discussion that global warming may have stalled out, or at least that there are other factors besides human activity that are playing not-quite-understood but demonstrable roles in global climate change.

So it's a complicated matter, one that won't be solved here on this humble blog.

What Am I doing to save the environment for the three kids I've broughtinto the world?

We recycle aluminum cans. We re-read (and then burn) newspapers and other paper in our woodstove. (Yes, that puts carbon into the atmosphere. So do I and my wife and three kids. You've got to allow us some carbon, y'see. Besides, we burn waste from a log-home-building company that they would burn anyway. And we use less natural gas in our furnace as a consequence. We don't waste water. We grow a garden and bottle the excess. No guilt here.

{Climatoligist Facepalm}

First off, I have to confess: I'm not a scientist. I don't even have PhDs in psychology and parapsychology. The "kids" do not love me. And there is no way I'm being moved to better quarters on campus.

I do know this: If, as a scientist, a researcher, a journalist, a writer, a whatever noun you want to insert, if you falsify your data because you're not getting the result you expected or wanted, then, indeed, you are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman. (Go to 3:36 for the "Poor Scientist" speech from Dean Yeager.)


I'm speaking here, of course, of reports that hacked files and e-mails from The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England reveal researchers, including some top=flight folks at the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration have colluded to falsify and cloud some climate data in order to support their theories ot anthropogenic climate change (or climate change caused by human activity).

Does this mean Global Warming, with the proper capital letters, is dead? No, I think reports of ACM's demise is premature, at least until, as Gen. Turgidson would remind us, all the facts are in.

If, indeed, the CRU folks have falsified their data and colluded across the Atlantic to do so, their research is at best questionable, at worst, completely worthless. I'm curious to know, however, how they hope to build or retain credibility in the scientific community if their research and methods are called into question. If they have indeed lied, which, it appears, they have, at least to some extent. I'll watch this unfold with much interest, to say the least. I just know that anything that even stinks of impropriety means that there's something rotten in the refrigerator.

Do we need legitimate research into mankind's effects on the environment? Absolutely. However, it's just as foolish to think that mankind's activities have no effects on the environment as it is to falsify data to make that appear to be the case. If these reports (here, (that's the one I recommend) here, (an even better one) and the leaked documents here (it's The Pirate Bay, so don't open this up on work computers and be prepared for safe-for-work but eye-bleach worthy photos of bimbos)) are true, then shame on those who falsified their data. That's not science. That's dishonesty. That's doing your science a disservice. That's telling the world that you are, frankly, a poor scientist.

What will also be interesting to watch is how the climate change true believers take this news. So far, as far as I can tell, there are a lot of folks saying, wow, these creeps ought to be jailed for what they did. And they're speaking of the hackers, not the scientists. Of course, what the hackers did was illegal. What the scientists are accused of doing is merely unethical. There seems to be a bit of denial out there -- this time on the part of the true believers. They may find crow tasty. They may not. It'll still be interesting to watch.

Nerd Alert

Okay. I must confess to being an absolute nerd.

A few moments ago, I was on CNN.com and stumbled across this story, headlined "Sibelius to be White House HHS chief."

I immediately thought of this guy:


Jean Sibeluis, probably the most famous composer ever to come out of Finalnd. (Not to be confused with El Guapo, who is the biggest actor ever to come out of Mexico.) Listen to some of his music here and here. Side note: Sibelius, in his later years, looked surprisingly like Marlon Brando:


But it's not Jean Sibelius, Finnish composer, whom Obama has tapped to be HHS Secretary, but this gal here, whom I've never heard of. Still, it's fun to think a Finnish composer could rise so high in American civil service.

Only a Nerd Will Understand

It's odd. I haven't typed on my old TRS Color Computer III keyboard in, what, nearly 20 years, but, on occasion, I still carry an odd typing tic I picked up from that keyboard. Once and a while when I want a double quotation mark, I do the old SHIFT+2 combination, which, as you can see in this picture, gets you the double quote mark on that keyboard -- the "@" symbol is all off by itself, next to the P. Which is what I get when I do the SHIFT+2 combo on modern keyboards.

I told you only a nerd would understand.