“They are us.”

“They are us.”  This article bemoans the know-nothing politicians running for President (in both parties) and then drops the hammer of doom by saying:

They are us.

Yes, they are.  Which is why I'm not optimistic about the U.S. maintaining its leadership in the world over the long term, and not optimistic about the world in general over the longer term.

 Many years ago I read a science fiction story (I've forgotten the name of the story or its author) with the premise that human society was becoming increasingly stratified between a small educated, intelligent group of elites and the masses of relatively stupid, celebrity-addled, substance-less drones.  The latter survived only by mooching from the former, and eventually the elites got tired of it and started shipping all the drones off to Venus.  The mechanism wasn't practical, but the motivation certainly was plausible.

One of the passages in that story talked about how the drones' desire for fast, sporty cars was satisfied in part by electronically generated sound that simulated the engine noise they expected.  A few years ago I first read that car manufacturers are actually doing that today.

Maybe our elites should start shipping the drones somewhere...

Lots of human languages are going extinct...

Lots of human languages are going extinct...  That's generally presented as a bad thing, but I don't understand why that's so.  It seems to me that the more easily we members of the human species can communicate with each other, the better.  I suspect we're inevitably headed in the direction of one universal language, though my guess is that that won't happen for centuries...

Douglas Crockford is...

Douglas Crockford is ... some combination of a friendly lunatic, a national treasure, and JavaScript guru extraordinaire.  If he didn't exist, someone would have to invent him!  Now look what he's done...

Are floppy disks dead?

Are floppy disks dead?  No.  Will they ever die?  Maybe not.

My six years in the U.S. Navy gives me a deep appreciation for the way that the military can preserve a technology far beyond anyone's reasonable expectation.  I served on a ship (USS Long Beach CGN-9) in the '70s that proudly used vacuum tubes, magnetic core memories, Baudot teletypes, vector graphics on storage tubes, mechanical analog computers for missile targeting, and sound-powered phones – all the while calling itself a showcase for advanced technology.  Of course they still have floppies!

Perceptual image compression...

Perceptual image compression...  Flickr recently rolled out this new JPEG encoder, and this article tells a bit of the behind-the-scenes work that went into it (note to the geekophobes: it's not very technical).  They've automated something that I (and many others!) have done by hand: tweaked various “knobs” on JPEG encoders to get an image that was significantly compressed, but not degraded in perceived quality.  It's that “perceived” bit that makes this hard, because the impacts of compression artifacts on visual perception are unobvious and subtle – as the Flickr team discovered!

One little factoid from the article that I particularly enjoyed: when people were shown identical images side-by-side, they only called them identical about two thirds of the time.  Perception is tricky!

Correlation is not causation...

Correlation is not causation...  Have you ever wanted some good examples to help explain this basic concept to someone who doesn't understand it?  Here are over 30,000 of them.  Really!  The one at right is a terrific example, showing the (entirely coincidental!) correlation between the number military and government satellite launches worldwide and sociology doctorates awarded in the U.S.  Ha!