Paying the Piper

You want to know how square I am? A few days ago I was downloading songs from iTunes. Yeah, I know, there are all kinds of places you can go online to download songs for free. But here’s the thing.

Back in 1999, when Napster was at its peak of popularity, I used to spend all my free time at work downloading MP3s. And having spent most of 1998 automating all of my job responsibilities, I had a lot of free time. I downloaded every song I could think of. It’s a good thing that nobody was paying attention to how much time I was actually spending at the office, because my musical tastes weren’t broad enough to justify more than eight hours a week of downloading. If my boss had actually been paying attention to when I was arriving and leaving, I’d probably have 80 gigs of polka clogging up my hard drive.

I justified my theft of copyrighted songs by blaming the greedy record companies. It irritated me that they expected me to pay eighteen bucks for a CD when I only wanted a single song on it. I mean, who the hell wants an entire album by A-Ha? My thinking was, I can go to the grocery store and pick up a single 3 Musketeers bar for a dollar. If the candy industry worked like the music industry, I’d either have to pay $4.99 for a 3 Musketeers with some inedible detritus taped to the other side, or shell out $18 for a pretty package filled with barely palatable machine scrapings just so I could get that one 3 Musketeers.

I’d have felt a little more inclined to fork over that kind of money if I thought that any of it was actually tricking down to the artists. I suppose I could have just downloaded the songs illegally and then sent checks directly to the artists, but I’m not sure they’d want my charity. Besides, I think I’m already giving to the members of A-Ha through the United Way or something.

“If only the record companies would offer individual songs for, like, a dollar, I’d be willing, nay, glad to pay for them,” I said to myself.

And then they called my bluff. Now that you can get most songs for 99 cents, I feel obligated to pay for all the music I download. Bastards.

So I stopped downloading songs illegally. But then the question arose of what to do with my existing collection. There was a surprising amount of gray area here, as with songs that were on an album that I once had, but then lost. Should I have to pay for another copy of a song, just because I can’t find my copy? Surely not. And what about a CD that I had loaned to a friend, but never got back? I still owned it, didn’t I?

And what about the CDs that I had borrowed from friends, never gave back, and then lost? I didn’t intend to steal them; I just, you know, forgot to return them. Besides, the people I borrowed these CDs from had certainly given up on getting them ever back, which is to say that they had ceded any claim of ownership to me. Or to look at it another way, maybe I did steal them, but wasn’t that all in the past now? If I was going to be blamed for having stolen something years earlier, then shouldn’t I at least have a copy of it?

In the end, it was decided to form a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to consider these issues. The Committee spent many hours deliberating, eventually coming to the conclusion that “mistakes were made,” and that it was in everyone’s best interest to put the whole sordid mess behind us. Thus it was that my entire pre-Reconciliation music library was grandfathered in. A blanket amnesty was declared.


Today my undocumented recordings live in harmony with my legally acquired songs. I try to get all my new music from legitimate sources like iTunes, but man, they don’t make it easy. I just bought a little 2 gig MP3 player a few weeks ago, and I immediately set about copying over a big chunk of my music library. After a few hours of listening, however, I noticed that a lot of my songs weren’t playing. This was, of course, because my Philips MP3 player won’t play Apple’s music format. Apple, you see, has their own proprietary format that allows them to keep you from making unlimited copies of the file.

This is a brilliant move on Apple’s part, except for the fact that if I were the kind of person who was going to make a hundred copies of my music files and give them all to my friends, I wouldn’t have paid Apple for the song in the first place. I would have just used Limewire to download it for free.

The other problem with Apple’s protection racket is that in order to play a song, your computer has to be able to decode it. And if your computer can decode it, it can copy it. Which is why there are a hundred free applications out there that will convert Apple’s proprietary format to MP3 or some other unprotected format. So basically Apple’s scheme only works on two groups of people: people who have no interest in stealing from them, and people who are too dumb to figure out how to steal from them.

I downloaded one of these converters and converted all of my songs. Now I can copy them as many times as I want without having to worry that the song is going to suddenly stop working. And as a bonus, the songs will actually play on my MP3 player.

So now I’m looking to acquire some new songs, and I’m debating what to do. I have no problem paying a buck per song, but I don’t really want to worry about keeping track of licenses or screw around with converter programs. I just want to listen to my friggin’ music.

Between you and me, the Limewire option is sounding pretty good. Besides, who wants to give more money to Metallica so that tool Lars Ulrich can keep whining about how his fans are ripping him off?

I think I’m going to have a 3 Musketeers and write a check to the United Way.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Pandora's Box | The Rhythm of Love Find more stolen images at humor-blogs.com.

Just Give Me a Nice Big Knob and I'll Be Happy

One of the inevitable side effects of technology is that people try to improve things that are already working perfectly well.

A prime example is the ventilation controls in automobiles. Remember when your car had one big lever for hot and cold and another one for the fan? Blue = cold. Red = hot. In some cars there was even a snowflake and little heat waves in case you didn’t understand colors. That design was simple, intuitive and functional. So of course carmakers have abandoned it in favor of something much more complicated.

When I get into my car, I am greeted with this:



The first time I got into my car when it was a hundred degrees out, I couldn’t even figure out how to turn the A/C on. I kept looking for a button that said, you know, “A/C.” Or maybe “ON.” There's an “OFF” button, but no “ON.” How is that possible? I saw the button labeled “AUTO,” and thought, “Well, I know it’s not that one.” Because I already had an AUTO. I just wanted to make it colder.

After pressing every other button on the dash about six times (including a mysterious toggle switch with a red light next to it that activates Hugh Hefner’s defibrillator for all I know), I finally gave the AUTO button a try. It turns out, of course, that the AUTO button is the only one that actually does anything.




When I press the AUTO button, my car immediately goes into a panic, convinced that it needs to instantly lower the temperature to whatever number I happened to have left the thermostat set to. The fan kicks on at full blast, exorcising the inferno into my face while trying to scrape up some cool air. Meanwhile, I frantically claw at buttons on the dash, trying to reassure the car that it doesn’t need to kill itself in a misguided attempt to make me comfortable. Listen to him, R2! He’s dying! Curse my metal body, I wasn’t fast enough!

ECON? REC? As far as I can tell, neither of these buttons do anything. Finally my fingers find their way through the fiery blast to a couple of chiclet-sized sideways buttons hidden behind the steering wheel that control the air volume and direction. I usually hit the wrong one first, and then I hit the right one, but too many times, so that it cycles past the option I want and I have to go through them all again. I often manage to turn on the rear wipers and defrost while I’m at it. How is this better than the system of two big levers again?

Does anybody use the ECON button? What does it even do? Does it make my A/C run more economically? Is it like buying the “economy pack” of toilet paper, so that the ventilation system delivers massive amounts of cold air at a deep discount? Or is it simply a way to tell the car that sure, I want to be comfortable, but part of being comfortable is being secure in the knowledge that I’m not burning unreasonable amounts of unrenewable resources? Is there some kind of complex comfort-to-economy algorithm that it uses to determine how cool I can reasonably expect to be given the circumstances?

It doesn’t seem like I should have to tell my car to be economical. It seems like that should be the default setting. Just give me a special WASTEFUL button that I can use when I feel the need.

And REC. What is that about? I guess it stands for “recirculate,” meaning that the A/C will reuse the air inside the car rather than sucking in new air from outside. Again, why not make this the default setting, and then have a FART button that you can press when you really need some outside air?

Between you and me, I’m scared to press the REC button because I’m afraid that I’ll forget to turn it off and pass out from a lack of oxygen. “Poor bastard,” the paramedics will say as they pick through the wreckage of my car, “He forgot to turn off the REC button and asphyxiated on his own emissions.”

The ventilation controls in Mrs. Diesel’s car are similarly over-engineered. It has a highly advanced climate control system that would presumably settle on a comfortable temperature eventually if I didn’t immediately hit COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD every time I got in the car.

I have the same problem with my microwave. I just want to make a cold thing hot. Why do I have fifty-eight different buttons on my microwave, but not a single button labeled “Make a cold thing hot”? The closest thing is a button labeled “Plate of Food.” “Hey, ‘Plate of Food,’” I thought, when I noticed that button. “That’s exactly what I have! I have a plate of food!” What do I need all those other buttons for? Sometimes it’s a bowl of food or cup of food, but I make sure to put it on a plate so there won’t be an explosion or anything.

These things seem to go in cycles. Sometimes I drive my father-in-law's truck, and its ventilation controls are about as complicated as those spinny wheels and things that they put on those activity walls for toddlers:



Super-easy, right? Throw in a fake plastic phone and a big red button for making honking noises and I'm sold.

And yet, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to set his radio presets. I know, you're thinking, "Why would you set somebody else's radio presets?" Well, because every time I drive that truck, I think, "Why doesn't he have any presets set? I might as well set them to the stations I like, if he's not going to use them. And then I spend five minutes swerving wildly between lanes while I hit buttons with labels like PROG and SET before finally giving up.

By contrast, to set the presets on my car, you turn the radio to the station you want and then press and hold the desired preset button for three seconds. It's the simplest thing in the world. Why would anyone make a radio work any other way, especially once you've demonstrated that you understand the Two Big Knobs principle of ventilation control? It's like the engineers have meetings where they decide that they have to make the radio presets ridiculously complicated, because they made the ventilation system way too easy to figure out.

Or did somebody patent the easy preset function, so every other company is stuck with outdated system unless they pony up for the coveted press-and-hold technology? And while I'm on the subject, what is the deal with some beer companies not using screw-off caps? I mean, seriously, we have the technology, right? Is there some advantage to using non-screw-off caps that I don't know about? Just fork over the money to the screw-off guy already, would you?

So if you're one of the guys designing these controls, here's the deal: Just make it simple. I'm not a stupid person, but there are certain basic things in life that I don't want to have to think about. Think of me as a caveman. "Grog cold! Push button make Grog warm! Grog's food cold! Push button make Grog's food warm!"

I trust that I have made myself clear. Don't make me use that switch in my car again.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: My Laptop Bluescreened While I Was Trying to Think of a Title | Pandora's Box Listed on humor-blogs.com.

Does Not Compute

At my first “real” job, doing technical support for a software company, I worked with a guy who used to make all sorts of ill-thought-out claims. His claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine even made it into my book.

One time this guy stated – pretty much out of the blue, as I recall – that he thought metaphors were pointless. He didn’t understand why people used metaphors rather than just coming out and saying what they meant.

Now this is a stupid thing for anyone to say, but it’s particularly stupid for someone who works as a computer support technician. As confusing as technology can be, try explaining to someone how to save a document in a folder in Windows without using any metaphors (hint: you can’t use the words ‘document,’ ‘folder,’ or ‘windows.’)

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my co-worker was on to something. A big part of our job was to explain to people what was wrong with their computers, and this task is made much simpler when one refuses to use any metaphors.

You want to know why your computer isn’t working? I’ll tell you why. First of all, it won’t boot up. ‘Booting’ is short for ‘boot-strapping,’ which refers to the act of ‘pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.’ That’s a metaphor. Computers don’t have boots, much less boot straps, and they certainly can’t pull themselves up by them.

Your computer is not exactly on the cutting edge. It is incapable of understanding any commands you issue to it. It won’t even respond to a ping.

Your computer has no software installed on it. Installing is something you do to sinks and alternators.

Your computer can’t display windows. It has no available memory. It has no free space on its hard drives. None of its devices have drivers.

Your computer can’t talk to your printer, your monitor, your digital camera, or any other devices connected to it. It has no documents, spreadsheets, or any other types of files stored on it, and no folders or directories to put them in. Not even a recycle bin. Your computer might be able to print, but not in landscape or portrait settings. Good luck with that.

Your computer can’t connect to the web or any other networks. You can’t upload or download anything. You can’t visit any sites because you can’t send any data packets over any pipes, no matter what port you specify. Your computer doesn’t recognize any other computers in the domain. It can’t even use dialup. You can’t log in because won’t accept your password. It is incapable of acting as a client, server, or peer. It can’t share data. Your computer has no bandwidth. Not only can you not send any emails with attachments, you can’t send mail at all.

The upside is that your computer has no viruses. Not a single trojan or worm. No spyware has been installed on it. You have received no suspicious cookies. You have received no junk mail or spam.

Your computer’s drives do not need to be defragmented. Its firewall has not been breached, and you do not need a better virus shield. It does not have registry rot. It has no bugs. It is not acting up, it has not gone haywire, and it is not on its last legs.

To be honest, I really can’t tell you what’s wrong with you computer right now. Ping me later and maybe I’ll have the bandwidth to look into it.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Talkin' About My Generation | My Laptop Bluescreened While I Was Trying to Think of a Title Listed on humor-blogs.com.

My Laptop Bluescreened While I Was Trying to Think of a Title

So here's something you didn't know about me: I don't know jack about computers.

"Wait a minute," you say. "Aren't you, like, a computer programmer?"

Ok, first of all, I'm a software developer. "Computer programmer" is a term left over from when computers were the size of a Greyhound bus and packed as much computing power as your curling iron. "Computer programmers" were people who huddled in a dark room feeding punchcards to a giant steel behemoth made of spinning dynamos and vacuum tubes. If they were lucky, the programmers might be able to get the computer to beep or calculate half of 6, but in general they considered it a good day if the computer didn't go on a killing rampage and eat them.

Most people know that the first "bugs" in computers were literally bugs: Moths or whatever would get into the circuits and screw things up. Imagine how big a computer has to be for a moth to be able to get into the workings of the machine and cause 1 + 1 to intermittently equal 7. That's a big freaking computer. The very first computers were so gigantic, in fact, that computational errors were often blamed on stray cats stuck in the gears.

Ok, I made that last part up. It actually wasn't until the mid 90s that computers needed to be safeguarded against the threat of strange p*ssies.

The point is that when the term "computer programmer" originated, computers were nothing like they are now. Computers have gotten so much more powerful, more complicated, and more likely to be used by complete morons that the field of computer science, like human society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, has fragmented into two completely distinct professions.

As you'll recall, Wells envisioned that in the future humanity would schism into two separate races -- and no, one of those races is not the one that thinks it's ok to use the word schism as a verb. The two races were the Morlocks, who were dark brutish creatures who lived underground and controlled the mysterious machinery that ran everything; and the Eloi, who were gentle, beautiful and vapid creatures who probably thought that Wal-Mart was a place to get "wall stuff."

In this analogy, the creepy guy who smells like Doritos and laughs at you because you tried to connect your printer with an RS-232 interface cable is a Morlock. He knows how all the hardware works. He knows the difference between Cat5 and Cat6, and no, it's notCat1. He knows whether his hard drive is SCSI or ATAPI, how much hard drive space he has down to the kilobyte, and whether he's going to need to dump the odd-numbered Star Trek movies to make room for the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

The software developers, on the other hand, are Eloi. They are beautiful, delicate creatures who use words like "elegant" to describe 300 lines of what, to any normal person, looks like the result of someone typing with his keyboard upside down. They can tell you the difference between a runtime error, a syntax error and a logic error, and may attempt to regale you with an account of the time that they crashed a production web server with an infinitely recursive Java function. A computer is to a software developer what a phone is to someone calling a 976 number: It allows him to do what he wants to do, but it's hard not to think of it as a somewhat limiting medium.

Roughly speaking, the Morlocks are the hardware guys and the Eloi are the software guys*, and there exists an uneasy symbiotic relationship between the two. The Eloi rely on the Morlocks to keep the machines running, and the Morlocks rely on the Eloi to make the machines actually do something other than beep or calculate half of 6.

As an Eloi, I resent my reliance on both the Morlocks and their crude machines. I feel about my laptop the same way I feel about my car: It takes me cool places and lets me do all kinds of fun things, but I don't give a crap how it works. I'm pretty sure both of them involve a wheel and some gerbils. When something breaks, I open up the hood, tug on a few wires, and then take the damn thing in to a Morlock, who might have a chance in hell of fixing it.**

I hate it when people come to me with computer problems. Not software problems, mind you. I don't mind answering questions about Blogger templates or XML feeds. But calling me when your motherboard is fried is like calling up your brother-in-law the architect when your plumbing is clogged. Sure, he might know the answer, but at best he's going to resent you for coming to him regarding such a plebeian matter, and at worst he's going to flood your house with sewage. For architects, sewage exists only as an abstract concept, something to be routed away from the house by some decisive lines on a sheet of paper. That's not going to help you when your basement smells like the wool seat covers in Britney Spears' convertible after a three day rain.

The other day my sister-in-law asked me for advice on buying a laptop. I gave her the same advice I give everybody who is buying a computer: All of the numbers should be big except for the price. That's as detailed as my hardware knowledge gets. If one PC had herpes simplex 2 and another had herpes simplex 5, I'd go with the 5.

The only other advice I have is this: for the love of all that's holy, buy the extended warranty. Extended warranties are the equivalent of the Geneva Convention treaties in the eternal enmity between Morlocks and the rest of humanity. Sure, you're going to get screwed, but you'll know exactly how badly you're getting screwed and for how long.

Plus, you won't have to call me and bother me while I'm dancing and singing with the rest of the Eloi, trying to ignore those ominous rumblings underground.


*I use the term "guys" because, well, I've never actually seen any women in either of these fields.

**These days, of course, there is an alternative to fixing your computer. It's called "USB ports." USB ports allow lazy, non-hardware oriented people to just plug in a new whatever-it-is when the old whatever-it-is inside the box stops working. I've got so many USB devices plugged into my laptop now that I actually have a USB splitter velcro'd to the lid of my laptop, with all kinds of gizmos and dohickeys sticking out of it. When software people see this, they say, "Wow, that's cool!" When hardware people see this, they say, "What the f--- is wrong with your laptop?"


Humor-blogs.com thinks you're an idiot for not knowing what an RS-232 cable is.

Kidneying Around

In the late 90s, back when Al Gore's Internet was still shiny and brimming with possibilities, I worked as a tech support rep at a large software company. My boss at the time was a good-natured dufus that I'll call Chad. Chad drove a blue Camaro with the license plate YAHOOO, not because he was a fan of the then-nascent web portal but because he was, in fact, a moron. Chad would demonstrate his cognitive deficit by forwarding emails of dubious origin to our entire department. I'm not sure if he ever sent his bank account number to a desperate Nigerian, but one time he did forward the one about people being drugged and having their kidneys cut out. You remember that one, right?

At this point I should mention that I'm a big-time skeptic. Not a Skeptic with a capital S, but a person who tends not to believe anything that sounds a little fishy without some hard evidence. I mean, I believe in UFOs because, well, I've seen one, but I don't buy the rumor that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite because, well, I've also seen True Lies.

So I read the kidney theft email, complete with testimonials from people with reputable sounding names and titles, and thought to myself, Bullshit. I did a web search and found statements by several reliable authorities, including the Las Vegas police department, attesting to the fact that this story was indeed bullshit. I forwarded the information to all the recipients of the original email, along with my own editorial commentary -- which I don't recall in detail, but which I can only assume was an extremely tactful and subtle rebuke of people in positions of authority who should know better than to infect the entire company with their own stupidity. (This job was, surprisingly, not one of the many I was fired from.)

I continued to do my best to counteract this sort of idiocy for several years. Whenever an email started to circulate about little Jimmy whose dying wish was to crash the world's email servers through infinite recursion, I would do a quick search and then pound out a debunking email. I would try to respond almost instantaneously, as if to say, "Hey, it took me 26 seconds to figure out that your email was bullshit... so exactly how much research did you put into this before sending it to 300 people?"

Then, in the early naughties*, something strange happened: People got a little bit smarter. Not a lot smarter, mind you, because they were still people and people are inherently stupid. But for the most part they stopped forwarding ridiculous stories like these, which was of course a good thing. But then people started doing something even more irritating than mindlessly distributing lies: They started mindlessly distributing facts. Or, perhaps more accurately, factoids.

Factoids are more subtle than the Look Ma No Kidneys variety of nonsense, but they are just as widespread and even more difficult to dispose of. A factoid is a kernel of truth wrapped in an oversized package of misleading implications. What happens is that someone picks up -- usually from the internet -- some intriguing 'fact' which runs contrary to conventional wisdom, and then repeats that fact, sans context, at every opportunity.

I was recently treated to a factoid-based discourse prompted by my bout of the "stomach flu." Now if you've had the stomach flu lately, you know that the standard response to this statement these days is: "There's no such thing as the stomach flu." And technically this is true: What we generally call the "stomach flu" is not in fact caused by the influenza virus. Which, while we're being technical, I don't give a shit about.

Look, I'm not using the term "stomach flu" in a clinical sense. I'm using it in place of saying "Hey, I spent all day Monday Voldemorting into a tupperware bowl next to my bed." If you prefer the more graphical description, let me know. In any case, if Sports Illustrated can get away with an article saying that Kobe Bryant had the "stomach flu," then maybe you can let it go, Dr. Literal.

Anyway, the statement that "stomach flu" doesn't exist is an accurate, if entirely superfluous, correction. But the follow-up to this statement -- complete with knowing look and raised eyebrows -- is always: "It was probably food poisoning."

Look, I've eaten bad McNuggets. I know what food poisoning is. And yes, it's remarkably similar to the "stomach flu." But here's the thing about food poisoning: You get it from food. So if my mother-in-law gets sick, and then a few hours later my nephew, whom she was babysitting, gets sick, and then two days later my kids, who were playing with my nephew, both get sick, and then two days later I get sick, and then two days after that my wife gets sick, all with the same symptoms, guess what? It's not friggin' food poisoning. The only way that the food poisoning diagnosis makes any sense is if my family members were eating each other. And I think I would remember something like that.

Oh, and one more thing before I let this one go: Food "poisoning" isn't poisoning. It's caused by a virus, not a poison. So even if you're right, you're still wrong. Suck on that.

Another example is the old canard about how "Most accidents occur within x miles of home." When someone says this to me, I respond, "Wow, I should move somewhere less dangerous!"

The point, of course, is that you spend most of your time within x miles of home. When you say that most accidents occur within x miles of home, all you're saying is that most accidents occur in places where you spend the most time. Gee, thanks for the tip, Mr. Safety. In reality, my odds of getting into an accident on the way to Disneyland are probably 10 times the odds of me getting into an accident on the way to work -- they key difference being that I don't drive to Disneyland 20 times a month. Of course, if you work at Disneyland you're pretty much screwed, but I suppose that goes without saying.

Or how about this one: Someone once told me, in regard to jogging during the winter, that it was important to wear a hat because "you lose 75% of your heat from your head." Again, this is probably technically true. Of course you'd have to stuff the hat down your throat, because you're losing that heat by breathing. But hey, don't let me stop you. Two birds, one stone.

So here's the deal: Reading some factoid off the Internet doesn't mean you know any more than someone who didn't read that little nugget of wisdom. In fact, often the people promulgating those factoids are pushing some sort of agenda that they're hoping you'll help them with by mindlessly regurgitating their blather. Don't buy it. If you want to pontificate on a subject, do a little research.

And when in doubt, think bullshit.


*Come on, people, am I still the only one using this term?


CORRECTION: As the Amoeba points out, what is commonly called "food poisoning" is not caused by a virus, but rather bacteria. Proving that even when I'm right, I'm wrong. Or something.


Humor-blogs.com is a hermaphrodite that had its kidneys forcibly removed.

And He Pays for His Half of Dinner Too!

Note: Sometimes my posts start off kind of slow, but if you stick with them there's often a pretty good payoff at the end. This is one of those.

I find inspiration in the strangest places. Like right now I'm reading a book called Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It's about souls and consciousness and intelligence, which probably explains why I keep accidentally typing "An Eternal Golden Brain" and then snickering about it. That would be a cool James Bond movie. I can hear the sultry voice of Shirley Bassey singing the the theme now:

Pretty girl beware of this brain of gold
This brain is old. It's thinking of gold
Only gold. Thinking gold
It's thinking gold. Only gold
It thinks gold.

Or maybe Indiana Jones and the Eternal Golden Brain.

Anyway, the book explores how a work of art, such as a piece by Bach, encodes information, and intelligence decodes that information. An intelligent entity can, in a sense, "reverse engineer" meaning from a work of art, to ascertain the artist's style. "Perhaps," Hofstadter writes, "works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else. In that case, if you could ever plumb a style to its very bottom, you could dispense with all the creations in that style (emphasis mine).

In other words, if you could really understand the work of Bach, you wouldn't need any of Bach's actual music. You'd know "what Bach was getting at" without having to listen to any of his music. I know, pretty cool, huh? All the profundity without having to listen to hours and hours of classical music.

This got me thinking. If you really could fully understand the "style" of an artist completely, then you could also produce new works of art "by" that artist, in the same way that if you had a complete of the DNA of a tyrannosaurus and sufficient resources, you could make a string of increasingly lousy box office behemoths.

Now I've never been a big Bach fan, but I can see the value of creating new works by certain great artists. For example, this is worth over $40 million:



That's FORTY MILLION DOLLARS.

Now I don't pretend to be an art expert, but compare that to this painting, created by a promising young German artist at the beginning of the 20th century:



Personally, I like the second one better, but curiously it's worth nowhere near $40 million. It's probably worth a hundred grand or so, but that's primarily because the artist went on to conquer most of Europe.

Whatever. The point is, the first painting, crappy as it is, is worth an assload of money for the same reason it was virtually worthless while the artist was alive: because it was painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Imagine what a newly discovered (even relatively crappy) painting by Van Gogh would be worth. My mind reeled with the possibilities after reading that passage by Hofstadter. I was so consumed with the idea last night that I couldn't sleep. After tossing and turning for a few hours, I got up and descended to my underground laboratory, where I proceeded to build an automaton programmed with the painting style of Van Gogh. It took all night, but by morning I had produced the one and only Vincent Van Gogh Bot.

Capable of producing an original Van Gogh every 6 hours (plus drying time), the Van Gogh Bot is a modern marvel of mechanical ingenuity and expressionism. You simply fill it with paint, give it a subject, and press a sequence of random numbers on the front of the machine (the latter is not technically necessary, but it makes the whole business seem more Star Trek-ky), and voila! (Or, since the Van Gogh Bot is Dutch, daar!) Instant Van Gogh.

He started with a self-portrait:



I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. I'm going to be so rich.


Humor-blogs.com won't be truly appreciated until long after I'm dead.

The Final Frontier for Wikipedia

In a bid to gain an edge in respectability over its stodgier rivals, Wikipedia today announced that it would be publishing a print edition of its online knowledgebase.

"We're elated to be able announce our plans to develop a hard copy Wikipedia," said Karen C. Nautkaaren of the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation.

The main obstacle to producing a print version of Wikipedia is its sheer volume. Wikipedia contains roughly twenty-eight times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. The foundation plans to release it in 600 volumes, one per month over the next ten years. During that time, Wikipedia is expected to grow by roughly 700% and much of the existing information will become out of date.

The foundation announced an innovative plan for dealing with these problems. "We will release a revised edition of Wikipedia every three years," said Nautkaaren. "The second edition will overlap the first edition. When the first edition is nearly two thirds complete, we will release a third edition. The first volume of the fourth edition will become available two years after the last volume of the first edition is complete. Each edition will take roughly 50% longer than the previous edition to produce so, for example, we will begin 17 new editions while the fifth edition is still in production. I think. Anyway, make no mistake, this is a monumental undertaking."

Several frequent contributors to the user-created and maintained encyclopedia expressed a strong desire that Wikipedia retain its collaborative nature in the hard copy version. Todd Simmons, a 38 year old web developer in Pleasanton, California, summed up the feeling among the Wikipedia editor community.

"The other day I ran across an entry in Wikipedia that said that Blizzard had banned the Logitch G15 keyboard in Warcraft, when in fact all they did was ban a player who was clearly botting. He wasn't even using the G15. He was using the G11." Simmons shook his head. "Fortunately, I was able to correct the error. Imagine if that kind of misinformation were printed in thousands of copies of the article all over the world."

Wikipedia spokespersons said they would be taking corrections by mail and would be faxing daily corrections and updates to all subscribers for no additional charge.

Because of the uneven distribution of the expertise of its editor base, the Wikipedia hard copy edition will be broken down by subject area rather than organized alphabetically, like a typical encyclopedia.

"The organic nature of Wikipedia requires a unique organization system," Nautkaaren said.

So far, twelve volumes have been planned:

January 2008: Star Trek: Acamarians to Ferengi
February 2008: World History through the French Revolution
March 2008: Windows vs. Unix
April 2008: Quantum Physics
May 2008: Arts and Literature (non Sci-Fi)
June 2008: Star Wars: Alderaan to Calrissian
July 2008: Geek Humor
August 2008: Star Trek: Guls to Romulan Neutral Zone
September 2008: Britney Spears
October 2008: Eastern Philosophy, Kung Fu and The Matrix
November 2008: Video Games: Tips and Strategies
December 2008: Futurama



This post was found buried amongst countless tomes in the vast underground library of humor-blogs.com.

Mattress Tags: wikipedia Star Trek

Fed Chair Speaks Out Against Smiley Inflation

WASHINGTON, November 27 — Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned Monday that recent inflation trends were "unwelcome developments," indicating that he was particularly worried about a relatively recent phenomenon known as "smiley inflation."

In his toughest comments yet about the risks of smiley inflation, Mr. Bernanke said Internet users were utilizing smileys and chat abbreviations such as "LOL" and "ROTFL" at unprecedented rates. He indicated that while rising consumer prices were of moderate concern, what really worried him was the "irrational exuberance" regarding smileys characterizing the current market landscape.

"Five years ago, the basic unit of currency exchanged for a moderately amusing remark was a regular smiley ( :) ), grin smiley ( :D ) or a simple 'heh.' These units were rapidly devalued and were soon replaced by the laughing smiley ( :)) ) or LOL. Now there is an increasing prospect of serious LOL devaluation, which has a lot of people concerned."

Bernanke stopped short of saying the Fed would take decisive action to combat smiley inflation. As of Monday, the Federal Smiley Use rate remained unchanged at 36.3%, meaning that roughly a third of absurd announcements by government officials would continue to be followed by a single smiley, wink smiley ( ;) ) or eye-rolling smiley ( 8-| ). Use of devil smileys ( >:) ) and tongue-sticking-out smileys ( :p ) also remained unchanged at 12.5%, despite pressure from the Bush administration to raise this rate.

Bernanke would not comment on reports that the Treasury is considering the release of several additional high-end smileys. "For now," Bernanke said, "We believe that ROTFL and LMAO remain sufficient for most humorous transactions." He added that while the regular smiley has been devalued almost to the level of the dot ( . ), there remain some smileys, such as the clown ( :o) ) and crazy smiley ( 8-} ), that are inexplicably underused. "We think it's sort of a Sacagawea dollar situation," Bernanke said. "Is it a dollar? Is it a quarter? Nobody really knows what to make of some of these smileys, and that lack of certainty pushes up the use of LOL and ROTFL." The real worry, however, is that overuse of these abbreviations will cause users to resort to increased use of ROTFLOL and ROTFLMAO. If ROTFLMAO becomes devalued, many analysts believe the Treasury will be forced to release new smileys or abbreviations.

A recent Congressional Smiley Committee report had suggested the gradual introduction of several new smileys, including:

:(~) Laughing so hard you can see that thingy hanging down in the back of my throat.

:^&)) Laughing so hard that milk is shooting out of my nose.

:-[X=| Laughing so hard that I wet myself.

:)) [+] Laughing so hard that paramedics had to be called.

:)) $$$ Laughing so hard that I expect to be paid for it.

The committee declined to endorse the so-called "nuclear option," the release of FTIEH (Funniest Thing I Ever Heard). Committee members cited concerns that it left no room for future abbreviations of even greater value.

"The work of the Smiley Committee is appreciated, but I believe it is premature to be talking about the need for more high-value smileys," Bernanke said. He is known for holding the controversial opinion that the level of humor on the Internet has actually been decreasing over recent years, despite the proliferation of smileys. His remarks on this subject have fueled concerns regarding the possibility of a "humor bubble." Smiley inflation occurs when there are "too many smileys chasing too few really funny jokes," Bernanke stated. "There are a lot of markets where users are throwing out LOLs in response to Garfield-level humor. I don't believe that's sustainable over the long term."

Bernanke was asked to comment on an IM conversation between two office workers that made news over the weekend. The chat log, which was leaked to the press by an anonymous employee of AOL Time Warner, has created a firestorm of controversy regarding the company's alleged encouragement of the blatant overuse of smileys. The chat log reads, in part:

SidneyJennings2003: what r u doing this wkend?

KarenN1970: wacthing gilmor grlz. U?

SidneyJennings2003: LOL! me 2

KarenN1970: LOL ur 2 funny. is austin coming over???

SidneyJennings2003: we broke up

KarenN1970: OMG no way!!! :( :( :(

SidneyJennings2003: hes a big jerk i borke up with him!!!

KarenN1970: ROTFLMAO!!! ur 2 funny!! :D

"I don't see how anyone can look at an exchange like that and conclude that it represents a reasonable usage of smileys or abbreviations," Bernanke said.

Tim Kellerman, Vice President of AOL Time Warner for :D, dismissed the controversy. "Everyone knows that young female office workers use a ridiculous number of smileys," Kellerman said. "The market discounts it." He argued the use of smileys among users of all demographics remains well within historical norms. He added, "We're feeling very good about the level of use of smileys overall :) ."

The market's reaction to Bernanke's statement was mixed, with most Fed watchers expressing " :| "or " (:| ".

Another Indication That Computers Are Getting Too Smart

Beginner's All Purpose World Domination Plan

I'm a software developer. I use primary Microsoft tools, for reasons I don't feel like going into here. I know it's cool to bag on Microsoft, but I'm so far from being cool that learning Linux probably wouldn't help me much at this point. There are all kinds of dumb reasons people hate Microsoft. Like they'll say, "There are a thousand times as many viruses that target Windows as there are viruses that target Mac." Yeah, and terrorists don't usually blow up empty trains either, smart guy. People used to warn me that my Visual Basic applications would only run on Windows machines, which is like warning someone that their car will only run on gasoline. If I'm ever transported to a magical world that runs on Linux and kerosene, I'll make sure to thank you for the warning. Now don't you have some cryptic text commands to issue to your web server or something?

I used to use VB6 for everything. VB6 is like the Brian Dennehy of programming languages: Not a star performer, not much to look at, but he's reliable, he gets the job done, and he's freakin' everywhere. Lately I've been trying to force myself to use VB.net because, despite having the worst name since the two guys named Chad decided to name their band Live, it's the IN thing. Dot net allows you to do things in twenty minutes that used to take 3 hours in VB6, so that you are free to spend the next day and a half implementing screwy workarounds to prevent random errors that you don't understand. Earlier versions of dot net didn't even let you step through your code line-by-line, which is something that you could do in regular VB since the cretaceous period. In dot net you just had to hit compile and hope for the best, like that time my older brother Steve rode his sled down the hill in our backyard on his back, head first, with his eyes closed, because my dad told him to "trust the track." Trusting the track earned him a concussion, as I recall.

The new version of dot net has "improved error handling" so that, for example, instead of a runtime error looking like this:

...it looks more like this (click to enlarge, and if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, click to enlarge again):

I know, I'm sure I could pay someone in India six dollars to pore over that error for two hours and find me a line number, but it seems like this might be a case where less is more. I mean, is there really someone out there who looks at that and says, "Oh, it's that pesky System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.DebuggableCallback parameter again!"

Anyway, I'm getting used to it, and I'm still by-and-large a Microsoft guy. My complaints about dot net are pretty minor in the scheme of Reality.Universe.MilkyWay.SolarSystem.Earth.NorthAmerica. UnitedStates.California.People.Diesel.Problems.


Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Visual Basic, Dot Net, programming, error handling, humor