Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2009

Maybe there isn’t a lot of ruin in a nation? Or a civilization?

Filed under: Books, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Adam Smith remarked that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but he perhaps was speaking just of economical ruin? In culture, things seem to have the ability to change remarkably quickly … usually in a ruinous direction. Ghost of a Flea looks at an interesting — but depressing — phenomenon:

In less than a generation, we have come to an extraordinary pass. Once right thinking progressives lined up to purchase copies of The Satanic Verses — my first edition sits untouched and unread — and death chanting rioters in Bradford and elsewhere were called out for the barbarians they so manifestly demonstrated themselves to be. It was the thin edge of the wedge. 9/11 worked as it was intended by its authors, sending every weakling into a panic, lashing out at the men on the walls lest they provoke another raid from the borderlands.

These days, Salman Rushdie would most likely be charged with something by a Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Prevention of Hatred. In Ireland they would cut to the chase and press criminal charges. Under the new regime, all demons may be mocked save the one pretending to be God.

These Weimar conditions are a hot house for growing hatred against the people they are ostensibly meant to protect.

iPhone annoyances

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:08

Jared Newman offers a list of iPhone annoyances and some suggested fixes/workarounds for them:

Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the “Jesus phone” has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user’s skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we’ve not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we’re also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much.

10. Default Apps Can’t Be Hidden

Yes, that is an annoyance. Certain of the default applications are useful enough to keep, while others are merely a subset of what other third-party apps now offer (the WeatherEye app is much more useful than the default Weather app, even though it does have tiny ads running at the bottom of the window). It would be much more convenient to be able to remove the default app when you’ve found a more congenial replacement . . . but you can’t.

Organizing your apps is a pain in the butt, as there’s no Apple-supported way of creating groups of applications — something that Palm/Handspring had available several years ago. I miss the tabbed organization of my Treo, where I could create named pages to hold my different types of apps. I could tap a tab name to have that tab appear immediately, while on the iPhone, I have to page through all the other pages to get to the one I want. I would have thought functionality like this would be trivial, considering all the other programming wonders on offer, but I guess it’s part of the operating system that Apple doesn’t want to open to third-party development.

8. The App Store Is a Pain to Browse

It’s a victim of its own success: there are so many apps available now that it can take forever to find what you’re looking for. For example, if you check the App store “Photography” category today (on the Apple Canada version of the store), there are 51 pages of apps to view. At 20 apps per page, each of which has to try to sell itself to you — or at least to get your attention — with only a name, an icon, and a price. This is why one of the most commonly asked questions on the Apple-iPhone mailing list is “What apps do you recommend for x?”

Update, 6 August: J.R. Raphael chimes in with a long link-laden list of things Apple is doing that work to alienate their customers:

3. iTunes Control

The days of DRM may finally have ended this past April, but Apple’s practices surrounding iTunes continue to come under fire. The latest complaints center on — to put it simply — Apple’s refusal to play nice. The company recently updated its iTunes software to keep non-Apple devices such as the Palm Pre from accessing the program. Analysts tell The New York Times the move is reminiscent of AT&T’s early attempts to control what devices could be used on its phone lines.

4. That Whole Flash Thing

Folks have been begging for Flash support on the iPhone pretty much since the device’s debut. Yet, every time it seems the unthinkable might actually occur, the hope flashes back away before you can say “Steve Jobs juggles giant jugs of juice.” (Why you’d be saying that, I’m not sure. But still.) Countless Web pages are rendered useless without Flash enabled, and there’s no question it’s what customers want — so why, with each passing update, does it remain conspicuously absent?

Print me a gear

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

3D printing was really cool when it was just wax or plastic. This moves it to the next level:

The future of fabrication is here: Shapeways announces stainless steel printing

Sure you’re not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword — yet — but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That’s right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.

All-purpose material replication is still a long way down the road, but it’s closer . . . it is cool to be living in the future.

H/T to Virginia Postrel.

Blotting out Rorschach tests

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:

It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.

Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”

But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.

QotD: It’s not about politeness

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I really don’t think think this is a debate about politeness. I mean, I’m happy to have that debate, too, but it’s not as important. Is it polite to call someone a liar? Probably not; but if they are a politician, like Jennifer Lynch is, and they really are lying, as I’ve meticulously documented, and the lies are important lies, then I think that politeness must take second place behind public accountability. I think it would be unethical to elevate mere politeness for politeness’s sake ahead of responsible government. Those who think that one can expose the lies — and corruption and abuse and neo-Nazi activities(!) — of a 200-person, $25-million/year government agency without marshalling the full force of the English language are either naive and inexperienced, or — as Jennifer Lynch is doing — simply trying to change the subject from the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s bad behaviour.

When Canada’s censorship laws are finally repealed, and the abusive, corrupt staff at the CHRC and other HRCs are disciplined for their outrageous (and, in some cases, illegal) behaviour, we can then have a debate as to whether or not it is fair game to call their chief politician and spin doctor “haggard”. Until we have shut down the real and pressing menace to our civil liberties, I’m not too interested about whether or not I’m using the wrong fork for my salad, or other exquisite courtesies.

Ezra Levant, “More letters”, EzraLevant.com, 2008-08-04

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