Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

Food for Thought for American Conservatives

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More good content floating around the Web.

This morning, @derekcbart tweeted a link to a site with the below-quoted content. I’m trying to find the source and the closest I seem to get is this post on reddit.

The author of this put a lot of thought into it. Although his grammar leaves a bit to be desired, and his original title is sure to turn off anyone who actually is a conservative (which is why I edited it), he’s 100% correct in his statements. I’m reposting it here as some food for thought. (If you are the author of this post and would like it removed or would like attribution, please contact me.)

I AM AN AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE [REDACTED]

this morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

As an American with empathy for those struggling against the odds to survive in financial hard times, I think health care reform will provide relief to many, many people. Please understand that the reform proposed by the Obama administration is nothing like the socialized medicine the NeoCons want you to think it is.

And if anyone knows the real source of this passage, please use the comments to share it. Do not use the comments to share untruths meant to scare the public; they will not appear on this blog.

Lazy Shopping…For a Helicopter?

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Some people are willing to pay strangers to help them make a huge purchase decision.

A while back, I read a blog post on Pilot Mike’s Weblog titled “Purchase vs. Rent Robinson R22?.” In it, Mike discussed his thoughts about buying an R22 to do his training in.

While I didn’t buy a helicopter to do my primary training, I did buy one for my commercial training. It would have saved me a lot of money if my flight school didn’t charge $75/hour for the CFI to train me. (Yes, they ripped me off. Yes, I know it now and suspected it then. There were extenuating circumstances. I no longer do business with that organization or recommend them to anyone else. I’m not the only one they’ve burned like this. ‘Nuff said.) As it was, I probably saved $25/hour on dual time and $100 hour on solo time. Of course, I used the money save to actually pay for the helicopter and its related expenses, so you can easily argue that I didn’t save anything at all. Still, I wound up with my own helicopter, which I could use as I liked 24/7/356. That’s got to be worth something.

I made a comment on the blog post back in late May 2009 with some of this information. In it, I mentioned my old R22, which is for sale again. I also subscribed to the comment so I could be notified if there were any follow-up comments. (This is a great thing to do if you’re interested in a topic and want to stay involved.) Yesterday, I got an e-mail message from the blog with the contents of the first follow-up comment:

My brother is buying a R22…
I would like to contact Maria

Since the comment included the e-mail address of the commenter, I replied directly to it. After all, there’s no reason why our personal conversation should appear on Mike’s blog. So I wrote:

I should probably start out by clarifying — I’m not selling my old R22. I don’t own it. The guy who bought it from me is selling it. It’s listed on Trade-a-Plane.

If there’s anything else you have question about, let me know. Just keep in mind that I haven’t owned or flown an R22 since 2004, so I might not be able to answer your questions.

He replied quickly in an e-mail I received on my BlackBerry while out for a bike ride. Apparently, he had more than just a question:

Thank you so much for replying.
I have 0 (zero) knowledge about it, and my brother is going to ask me to buy a new one probably next week. I would like to pay for a trusted help/advise OUTSIDE dealers or any other info from a seller.

There is so much wrong with his statement that I don’t even know where to start.

First of all, he must be a good brother to simply buy a helicopter when his brother asks him to. I know what my helicopters cost and I know what even the least expensive ones are going for on Trade-A-Plane. He’s not going to touch anything worth flying for less than $75K. A “new” one — if he really means new — will cost $200,000 or more.

Second, who the hell spends that kind of money without doing their homework? And no, hiring someone to do the homework for you isn’t the same as doing it yourself.

Third, he doesn’t even know me! I could be some Internet con artist, trying to pass myself off as a helicopter expert to lure people like him to an inventory controlled by me or an associate.

Fourth, what makes him think I want to be part of his purchase decision…and possibly be held liable if he buys a lemon? By taking money to give him advice, I’m setting myself up for liability if things don’t go right. I don’t want any part of that.

So I wrote back from my BlackBerry:

I’m sorry. I can’t help you.

This morning, from my computer, I added:

I also want to add that anyone who has zero knowledge about an aircraft should not be buying it. Do your homework, don’t pay someone you don’t even know to do it for you.

I haven’t heard back from him. And that’s got me wondering….maybe he was trying to scam me? Maybe the next step was to ask me for my bank information so he could wire me payment before I started consulting with him?

Or maybe he’s just an idiot who is too damn lazy to do his own research.

On Censoring Dictionaries

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Why?

This morning, one of my Twitter friends @mjvalente linked to an article on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog, “Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple.”

As a writer, I’m bothered by most forms of censorship, so I read what Gruber had to say. He described Ninjawords, an iPhone dictionary application, and had all kinds of glowing praise for it, followed by the meat of the problem:

It’s a terrific app — pretty much exactly what I’ve always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store.

But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.

Apple censored an English dictionary.

Gruber goes on to point out just how idiotic this is and, frankly, I can’t disagree with anything he has to say. Dictionaries should include all words in common usage; the words that were removed — words like shit and fuck — can be heard daily on cable television and in schoolyards.

My question is this: By removing them, are they trying to pretend that these words don’t exist?

Whatever.

This morning, I used the Dictionary widget, that’s part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Mac. I use this tool often throughout my work day to make sure the words I’m using in my work are the right words or to look up words I’ve heard but am unclear on meaning. With Gruber’s post fresh in my mind, I decided to see what would happen if I looked up shit.

Shit in the Dictionary WidgetGuess what? As you can see in this screen shot, it was there.

So was fuck.

So Apple makes a dictionary with “objectionable content” available as part of its operating system, which can be used by anyone — including school children! — but will not allow an iPhone (and iPod Touch?) app with the same content?

You might argue that the Dictionary widget and application in Mac OS X are protected by Parental Controls. But how many kids who are unfamiliar with these words are likely to be buying dictionary apps? And with these words in common usage throughout the U.S., how many kids do you think have never heard them? And isn’t there some educational value to understanding the true meaning of a word and its usage? I don’t know about you, but I find the Dictionary Widget information shown here quite illuminating. I especially enjoy the “unobjectionable” explanations of the phrases.

This all goes back to George Carlin’s routine “The Seven Words.” The whole routine — not just the words. (If you follow that link and watch the clip on YouTube, watch the whole thing, including his reasoning. George Carlin was a genius.) They’re just words, people. They’re not going to bite you or make you immoral or cause you to want to kill someone. They’re individual words — not even used in sentences to communicate a message. Just plain words.

Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense to cut them out of the dictionary.

And removing other words with perfectly acceptable meanings — words that even appear in the Bible! — just because they also have “objectionable” meanings only makes matters worse. A cock is a bird. An ass is a donkey. (Gruber’s post lists more of them.) Should kids be kept in the dark about these meanings, too?

Apple, you know I love you — I’ve been using Macs and writing about them since 1989 — but you’re being silly. Cut it out. You’re embarrassing us.

Please Don’t Drag Me Into Your Life

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I am a stranger.

This morning, as part of my e-mail routine, I checked the list of new Twitter followers. As I’ve said here and elsewhere, I don’t follow many people on Twitter, but I do check out all the new followers I get. Although most are spam these days, occasionally I find one interesting enough to reciprocate the follow.

Today’s batch included one that made me stop and think. About 75% of this person’s recent tweets were about the deteriorating health of her mom. Heart failure, lung problems, pneumonia. She was tweeting from the hospital, she was tweeting after discussions with doctors. She was keeping her followers apprised of what certainly seemed like the impending death of her mother, right down to details about how her father was taking it.

There are a few things that struck me about this.

Should strangers be expected to care?

First, I find it hard to believe that a good percentage of her 1,000+ followers really care enough about her and her life to want to read the grim details of the family health problem unfolding for her and being broadcast on Twitter.

Sure, if my mom went into the hospital, I’d likely mention it once or twice on Twitter. But if she got really sick and I was spending a bunch of time at the hospital as she lived her last days, I don’t think you’d find many blow-by-blow tweets about it. In fact, I don’t think you’d find many tweets from me at all. I’m not very close to my family, but I’m close enough to spend important time with them and to keep it mostly private. I have 700+ followers on Twitter and I’m positive that very few of them need (or want) to know about the things in my life that are real downers.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve followed folks on Twitter who have tweeted about their health problems or the health problems of family members. That’s normal; health problems are a part of life. But if any of them became absolutely consumed with the problem and tweeted mostly about that, I had to take a hard look at the situation. How well do I know this person? What can I do to make it better? How do I feel reading about this day after day, alongside tweets with links to yodeling cats, health care reform analysis, and cartoons? If the person was a stranger and I’d already said the comforting things I could and the tweets were making me feel like shit every day, I’d stop following. I’d have to. I cannot allow my emotional well being to be dragged down by the misfortunes of strangers who, for some reason, need to make their physical or emotional pain a part of other people’s lives.

So no, I’m not saying I stop following people who complain about a bad back or tweet briefly to mention a loved one with a health problem. But if I don’t know you and that’s just about all you tweet about, please don’t blame me for turning off the volume and getting on with my life.

I guess my point is, there’s just some things you shouldn’t expect strangers to deal with.

Can a person’s priorities be this fucked up?

The other thing that struck me is that this person was going through an ordeal with doctors and hospitals and family members, yet she still found time to follow me on Twitter. Are her priorities fucked up or what?

Now you might suggest that she followed me using some kind of automated tool. Lots of people do that for reasons that are not always in the best of interest of the Twitter community. (I don’t think she is a spammer, though.)

When I checked the time-stamp on the follow notification, I saw that she began following me at 5:47 AM today. My last tweet last night was before 10 PM and my first tweet this morning was after 6 AM. So I hadn’t tweeted anything that could trigger an automatic follow at that time of day.

So that leads me to believe that she’s surfing the Web, reading tweets, and interacting on the Internet. She’s somehow found my Twitter address and has decided to follow me.

Now.

While her mother is potentially on her deathbed.

Or is the whole family thing exaggerated? Just a story to make her sound more interesting to people who like to read that sort of thing?

I really don’t know what to think.

I’m not knocking anyone…Just trying to understand.

Please understand that I’m not writing this to knock a specific person dealing with a family problem. I’m just floored by the whole situation, trying to understand how someone’s take on “social networking” can be so incredibly different from mine.

And I’m wondering how off-base my thoughts on this matter are. How do you feel about strangers you meet on social networking sites detailing the sad parts of their lives? What is it that you want from your social networking activities?

Open-mindedness

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Defined with a video.

In keeping with this weekend’s theme of skepticism (in celebration of The Amazing Meetint (TAM) 7 going on in Las Vegas right now — but allowing for the fact that I’m working on a book revision and can’t spend much time blogging — I present the YouTube video “Open-mindedness” by QualiaSoup. The director, Doug, does a better job of explaining open-mindedness and skepticism than I ever could.

A side note here: I found this video on the Skeptoid Web site, which I mentioned in another blog post. Brian Dunning says he “*loves*” this video and I can see why. But unlike Brian, I can’t see how anyone could possibly be offended by it. If they are, well they must not be very open-minded at all.