Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Some people wax rhapsodic in re: the virtues of high density housing. Those people don’t have upstairs neighbors like mine. I hope you’ll indulge me in an open letter to these neighbors.

Dear Sir and Madam;

Your children’s raucous and undisciplined behavior speaks eloquently of their fundamental savagery, and of your deep failures as parents. I have no doubt that your son will turn to drugs at a young age, and that your daughter will become a woman of loose morals. When I think of you, I weep for the future of Western civilization.

You are shiftless and inconsiderate morons. I would call you barbarians, but that would be an insult to the men who had the wherewithal to sack Rome. You couldn’t sack a 7-11.

Your pal,

— Mike

If this causes even one person to reflect on the courtesy he shows to his neighbors, I’ll have done my good deed for the day.

There’s been some loose talk recently to the effect that the Senate might change its rules s.t. the filibuster is weakened, and the majority thereby empowered. I would be astonished if this happened in the current Congress; it makes no sense in the face of the current (and expected future) political landscape.

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A while back, I heard an ad on the radio that included this gem:

The Internet used to be called the World Wide Web.

Now, this is wrong in every important respect. The “World Wide Web”, if it refers to anything, refers to the universe of cross-linked hypertext documents. Those documents are stored on computers connected to the Internet. That is, the WWW is built on top of, and depends upon the Internet, which is a much more general thing.

The Internet dates from 1969. The WWW dates from 1991.

Grumpy

In other get-off-my-lawn news, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to hearing Guns ‘n’ Roses songs played on “Classic Rock” radio stations.

Today’s post is going to be a little smug. I can’t help that, but I think there’s a cautionary tale here worth telling.

Twitter

I thought that Twitter was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard. I was introduced to it pretty early, when it was still largely based around SMS, and the pitch was “tell people what you’re doing right now”. (At this time, Twitter business cards had “handing you my business card” written on them; I don’t know if/when they dropped that gimmick.) Now, this is really stupid. As Lore Sjöberg put it:

I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: “What are you doing?” Call up a friend and ask them what they’ve been doing lately and you might get an interesting response. Ask them what they’re doing right now and you’re almost guaranteed to get a boring answer: “Eating lunch.” “Thinking about doing some laundry.” That’s because if they were seducing a Nobel Prize laureate or rescuing a baby from a burning submarine, they wouldn’t have answered the phone.

So, why is Twitter such a big deal? Because the official line was a big fat lie. Twitter is a combination distraction engine, provider of the illusion of human connection, and effortless way to yell “look at me”. It’s blogging for people for whom writing long, self-indulgent articles is too much work.

Ahem.

Too Clever

It’s an interesting question as to whether or not the Twitter folks understood what they were doing, or not. Did they grasp the appeal of their thingy, and push it with their questionable conceit because “distract yourself with an endless stream of easily-digestible information, and express yourself in barely-literate grunts, you sub-mental chimp” wouldn’t have played well? Or did they just stumble into something?

At any rate, I attribute my failure to see Twitter’s potential impact to being too clever; I could see that the official story made no sense, and therefore assumed the product would fail. That’s right: Too trusting, and too clever. That’s me. Too wonderful for my own good.

Don’t make my mistake. Don’t listen to the official explanation for things; look at them for yourself, and reason about them on that basis.

Stuxnet

In that connection, and I’m just saying, but doesn’t it seem that an awful lot of very specific information is floating around about the impact of the Stuxnet worm?

The USS Phoenix (CL-46) was built in Camden, New Jersey, and launched in 1938. She was anchored at Pearl Harbor during the December 7th attack, but was not damaged. She served throughout the Pacific during WWII, receiving 9 battle stars.

In 1951, the decommissioned USS Phoenix was sold to Argentina, and eventually renamed the ARA General Belgrano. She was sunk in 1982 by HMS Conqueror during the Falklands War; to date, she is the only known victim of a nuclear submarine.

I am fascinated by this story; maybe it’s the slight incongruity of her original name, or the unlikeliness of her fate. If you’d told her captain on December 8, 1941 that she would eventually be sunk by torpedo, he probably wouldn’t have been surprised. He couldn’t have imagined the circumstances of that sinking, though.