Alien’s Grin

Each year the English Department of San José State University in San Jose, California run the Bulwer–Lytton Fiction Contest. Entrants are invited “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels”.

This years excruciatingly winner was written by Molly Ringle:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

Tsk Tsk. You have been referred to this page because you have committed one or more of the Cardinal Sins of Instant Messaging (IM) and need retraining.

The basic rule of thumb is: “Do I really want to break Ian’s concentration with a red hot poker in the eye right now?”, but here are the specifics:

1. If I don’t answer immediately I’m not being rude (or I might be, at my discretion). Just because it’s called “instant” messaging doesn’t mean that’s how I will treat it. IM is a convenient method for exchanging messages, not the other end of my chain for you to yank.
2. If what I said doesn’t make sense, look at the context – I may have been responding to something from hours ago – see (1).
3. Don’t interrupt me to tell me what you are going to do.
4. Don’t interrupt me to say “Nothing has happened yet“.
5. Don’t interrupt me by answering “Ok” unless it’s obvious I need confirmation.
6. Don’t interrupt me with “Thanks“. See “7. Pointless Pleasantries”.
7. Don’t say “Hi“, “Good morning“, “Sorry to bother you” or sign your name. You are not writing a letter. I know who you are and I made myself available for chat. Dispense with the noise. It’s ok to be terse; I won’t be offended.
8. IM is a written medium so unless you are Jane Austen the intent of your prose may not be obvious. If it’s long enough, emotional enough or personal enough to be subject to misinterpretation, or the consequences of said misinterpretation may involve fisticuffs, then it’s probably time to ring me.
9. Don’t IM me to tell me your puppy died. If it’s that important then ring me.
10. Last, but not least. If you are going to interrupt me, then take the time to compose an actual message. If you fire off a sentence as fragments in multiple messages, I will not sit there waiting for you to get to the damn point, I will come around to your house and rip your bloody arms off.

Ok, now you know and we can be friends again.

Having read read this you probably just smacked yourself in the forehead when you realised how crass you were. If you are about to Instant Message me to thank me however, please start again at Rule 1.

Every now and then my wandering on the web turns up a world view that is so far from reality it’s… well… breathtaking.

Take the Breatharians for example.

This page looks like yet another attempt to skim some cash from the gullible, in this case by the aptly named Wiley Brooks. The page that describes his “Immortality Workshop” reads like a clumsy spoof:

The workshop includes a visit to Earth Prime in the 5th Dimension in your physical body if you are ready.
The cost is $1,000,000.00 USD
The process starts with a $10,000 USD deposit by BANK WIRE TRANFER.
No Refunds

But no, a few Google searches turned up a legion of followers who believe that their Fearless Leader really can live without food and absorb energy from the sun like a solar panel. Apparently this is more an example of Poe’s Law than a deliberate scam.

What’s going on here?  Can these people really be occupying the same universe that I am? What is driving them to cling to such a Bizzaro World view?

It’s not as though it’s hard to test these claims. Just stick them in a room with no food, no water, all the sunlight they want and start the stopwatch. In fact, this is exactly what happened in the case of one of our local exponents when 60 Minutes asked her to demonstrate her abilities. To no one’s surprise she was almost dead from dehydration in 48 hours.

You would think that would be the end of it, but of course that’s not the way the world works. She’s still at it ten years later despite the fact that more than one of her followers have died from these bizarre practices.

To quote Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence“. Unfortunately the press, with its constant craving for new fodder, is less than skeptical when a catchy item like this comes along, and before you know it the fruitcakes have some free credibility – “…as seen on Today Tonight!!!“.

Take this poor soul for example. His story was splashed across the headlines last year when a “Facilitated Communicator” claimed she’d broken through his comatose state and could communicate with him via a keyboard. This kind of communication was discredited years ago but somehow she was given the benefit of the doubt. Eventually they called in the big guns:

“I believe that he is sentient. They’ve shown that with MRI scans,” said James Randi, a prominent skeptic who during the 1990s investigated the use of facilitated communication for autistic children. But in the video, “You see this woman who’s not only holding his hand, but what she’s doing is directing his fingers and looking directly at the keyboard. She’s pressing down on the keyboard, pressing messages for him. He has nothing to do with it.”

Well, no shit.

The story went cold when somebody thought to ask him some questions without the “facilitator” in the room. Yes, that’s right; it was a worldwide news story before someone actually though to do that. Too late anyway. The press had already moved on to the next piece of credulous fluff, and the more interesting story – the possibility that this man was conscious – was trampled in the rush.

It would be nice to think that these kind of fantasies would never get traction because people would ask the obvious questions. It seems that once you decide to dispense with reason life gets a lot simpler and the Dunning Kruger effect kicks in: the less you know, the more likely you are to exclaim that you do, and the less likely you are to listen to evidence to the contrary.

I fear The Endarkenment is upon us.

Aykroyd plays Dr Ray Stantz in GhostBusters, an eager, if slightly goofy, scientist investigating paranormal activities in a world where ghosts and the supernatural are real.

I stumbled on this interview with him from a few years ago that seems to indicate Aykroyd may have thought GhostBusters was a documentary.

The earnest interviewer (a “UFOlogist”) says he had to interview Aykroyd because:

I thought it was like Einstein was hiding inside of a comic genius, just so that if he told us the real truth he wouldn’t have to believe it.

Whatever that means.

Aykroyd’s calm, measured delivery might be worth listening to if the material wasn’t batshit insane. The interview goes for over an hour, interspersed with footage of distant shaky blobs, dramatic zooming with the standard motor drive sound effect (“click-click-click-whir”) to show how much more convincing they are as larger pixellated blobs. Sadly none of them are as impressive, or as pretty, as the one Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy described and immediately recognised as the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch.

All the standard conspiracy theories are trotted out, wrapped in enough non-sequiters and question-begging to make your head spin.  “In theory if there were another species in the universe” leads to, in the same breath, “the extraterrestrial machines that are coming and going”. Having dispensed with any sense of objectivity he launches into deep discussions of the “obviously intelligently controlled machines” and their technology and how we might benefit from them. Crop circles, cattle mutilation, abductions – it’s all there.

Of course Famous People are always assumed to have special insight because… well… they’re famous, so they can pontificate on pretty much anything they like and get an audience. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, whose respective training in pulling silly faces and flashing their boobs in Playboy qualify them to comment on medical research, have used this to great effect on the soapbox of Anti-Vaccine madness.

Aykroyd is a familiar face soberly discussing a complex subject with all the standard buzzwords like quantum energy, anti-gravity and multiple universes. If you’re a Famous Person, you say it with a straight face and you speak with authority I guess it’s easy for a casual viewer to swallow the story.  Perhaps that’s why so many of them are actors; it’s what they do for a living.

It’s possible that I missed the killer argument towards the end because, to be honest, I couldn’t sit it out.  He started to cite Fox News coverage, Ronald Reagan and “64% of Americans” belief in UFOs  as evidence and it all started to get unbearably silly.

This is a blast. I can’t imagine how long it took to set up, but note the pile of smashed TV’s in the background at one point. Presumably these are from previous takes.

via YouTube – OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – RGM version.

Janine was trying to comment on a blog the other day and asked me “what’s this OpenID thing?”. It appears that some Blogger accounts require you to sign comments with credentials from one of several sites or OpenID.

Her confusion was an indication of how far OpenID has to go before it will be usable by everyone. It provides the basic plumbing for authentication but its usability issues are a major problem.

Even if I’d tried to explain to her what OpenID is, the fact that logging in would jump her to another site then back again would have completely freaked her out and destroyed any notion that this was “simplifying” the login process.

This is a typical example of what happens when you let the implementation details poke through to the user.

The underlying protocol works by jumping between sites but this is the antithesis of what the user actually wants to do. They are at site A and they want to log in. Taking them to Site B completely destroys their conceptual model of what they are trying to do and sparks one of those wild-eyed “what the hell is the computer doing now?” moments.

It looks like these shortcoming are starting to be recognised so OpenID still has a chance of being integrated smoothly into the user’s browsing experience, but it’s a shame it’s had such a bad start for want of some up-front brainstorming on what user’s actually want to do.

Anyway, I’ve been experimenting with OpenID on and off with WordPress plugins and found it kind of clunky to set up reliably. An article on WebMonkey suggested that you could use Blogger as an OpenID provider by pointing your domain there. I did and it does.

Now I’m set up with a working OpenID and I can play along as it (hopefully) evolves into the universal sign-on we are looking for.