Over-structured data

Data can be overstructured. That's as bad as too little structure, because it doesn't take exceptional circumstances into account. For instance, say you've decided that a postal address always consists of a street number (strictly numeric), a street name, a street type (eg "Road", "Street", "Avenue"), a suburb, a state and a postcode. Well, in this case, maybe you missed a street type in your list, which means a certain type of street (eg "Place", "Esplanade", "Boulevard") is excluded. Or what about unit numbers? They all share the same street address, but delivering to unit 7 is very different to delivering to unit 17. You get the point. You need to strike the right balance between structuring your data to give it meaning and consistency, and leaving it unstructured to allow for unforseen circumstances. It can be a tricky balance to strike.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The worst part is that the right structure is always changing.
PPS - Everything is always changing.

I don't channel-surf online

I don't feel like I have "bookmarks" any more for sites that I need to remember to visit every day. I have three places I go for online entertainment: feedly, Facebook and Pocket. The only reason Facebook is on that list is because I can't get my friends' posts in Feedly. Pocket is where I put items from Feedly that I can't (or don't want to) read or watch right away. That's it. If your website doesn't provide a feed I can load into Feedly so that it comes to me automatically, I will probably forget about you forever.

Is this harsh? I don't think so. Is it unusual? Perhaps. The thing is, I'm not looking for my internet experience to be like channel-flipping on a TV. I don't gain any pleasure from hunting around for something new when I could program it all to come straight to me. That makes far more sense, to my mind, plus it means I don't miss anything just because I didn't go to this or that website today. This is important if I want to read certain web comics, because they're telling one long story, in order. Missing one is like missing a chunk of the story, a chapter of a book, and the rest never makes sense again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - One day, perhaps, I'll have to accept missing out on some articles online.
PPS - The best articles should show up in multiple places, though.

Internet law and order

What should be the law enforcement model for the internet? A police force that patrols and investigates to prevent and fight crime? An armed force that develops an arsenal and deploys troops to trouble spots? A spy agency that secretly infiltrates hostile or potentially-threatening organisations to destroy them efficiently and covertly from the inside? Private fiefdoms with individual guard troops to defend just their own territory? Something else entirely?

It matters how we think of this, because it affects the way we treat the internet as a resource and the threats we find there. If we imagine a war metaphor, we will talk about collatoral damage, attacks, strikes and operations of attack. If we talk about spies, we prioritise exploiting vulnerabilities instead of fixing or reporting them. Right now, we're working with a mix of everything I've mentioned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I believe it should be a combination of police and private security.
PPS - And that unfixed vulnerabilities make us all less safe.

Two kinds of habits

Building a habit of quitting is much harder than building a positive habit. When I talk about a positive habit, I'm talking about, for instance, doing pushups every morning when you wake up. It's a definite action. When you wake up, you do some pushups, then you know you're done. Even if you do it later in the day, that's a kind of success.

To quit something is a much more empty kind of act. Say you're quitting smoking. Today, you throw out your cigarettes and don't buy more, but the victory is when, every single time the urge to smoke rises up, you do nothing. Then tomorrow, when you want to smoke, you do nothing. You continue doing nothing until, hopefully, eventually, the urge to smoke doesn't come up again, and "not smoking" is no longer a goal or a victory but your default state of being. There are certainly rewards to quitting something destructive like that, but they're less tangible and more long-term than the satisfaction and reward of doing something positive.

Perhaps that's something to consider. Instead of aiming just to quit something, you should aim to take up something positive instead, like the pushups. Maybe, eventually, you will associate the same triggers with an urge to do some pushups instead of an urge to smoke. I'd like to see that clinical trial.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure it's been done.
PPS - It seems to be common enough advice, anyway.

Satire of yourself

Playing satire in public where people have to know you to know that you're kidding is a dangerous thing. If it starts to reach enough people, plenty of them won't know you're kidding, just because they don't know you well enough to know that's not "really" you. At that point, the honest defence of your actions - "I was just kidding!" - sounds over-defensive and insincere.

So, to summarise, if you tell a joke by acting out of character, someone won't get it, and then it's very difficult to take it back.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm aware I'm advocating a chilling effect.
PPS - Or, from another perspective, a good PR move.

Thick skin

People sometimes excuse their own lack of tact by saying that people need to develop thick skins, and they're only helping out. But needing a thick skin doesn't mean that nobody is ever going to be nice to you again, does it? There are plenty of people being mean in the world, or just being tactless. Be one of the good ones.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like to think I am.
PPS - I guess most people want to believe they are the good guys.

Too tired for your mental health

Like muscles that are overtired and can't work properly any more, good mental habits can be undone by mental stress or overwork. Those "good mental habits" might be anything you've learned in your lifetime, such as "not having panic dreams about being naked in school just before a test you haven't studied for" or "not slipping into bottomless depression for no reason".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The funny thing is, sometimes you don't know you have these good mental habits until they disappear.
PPS - And then you don't know how to get them back.

Encoding trust

Security of any form is a system of trust. So what is trust? It involves delegation of authority - I allow you to act on my behalf - and it also implies an alignment of goals or interests, or at least an assumption of such. I believe that the actions you take on my behalf, or the actions you take that will affect me in some way, will be in my best interests, or at least will be a decent compromise I can live with.

Employers trust their employees to act as part of the company. Spouses trust each other to respect boundaries of online accounts or to treat shared finances with respect. Friends trust each other to keep private stories, pictures and other shared secrets private. In many cases, fear of social or professional repercussions are the limiting factor. If we violate this trust, we lose our friends, lose our jobs, put strain on our relationships.

A lot of the time, though, trust is a very difficult thing to codify into a computer system. Real-world trust can be very granular. I trust you in this area but not in that. I trust you only for about half an hour when left alone, and only if I lock up the petty cash. I don't trust either of you alone with these nuclear launch codes, but I trust you together to keep an eye on each other. What you can never account for is secret intent. If I have decided, on my own, that my employer of fifteen years is doing something corrupt and illegal, and that my best course of action is to take some evidence to outside authorities, how can you tell what I'm doing? If I normally copy certain documents every morning for work purposes, and today I'm copying similar documents in the same way but for untrusted purposes, the computer system won't know that, no matter how it is coded.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whistleblowers will always be a "threat" to corporations.
PPS - Personally, I think whistleblowers are a security feature for society.

Is there any freedom of speech online?

Is there a public space on the internet, or just a series of private spaces we all perceive as public because they're available to everyone? People arguing against "censorship" online are often actually arguing for their "right" to say whatever they want in "public" spaces, but when every space on the internet, from Facebook to Twitter to your own blog is actually owned by someone (your blog is probably owned by Google, Wordpress or your web host) then there's no space where someone else doesn't have the right to take down what you say because they, personally, disagree with it. From that point of view, there might actually not be anywhere on the internet where the notion of "freedom of speech" even applies. There is nowhere you can say something online that someone else can't just say "no" to, and take it down again, no rights violated.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am not a lawyer, though, so don't take this as any kind of legal opinion.
PPS - I'm also not American, so the American Constitution, with its Amendments, does not apply to me either.

I missed a spot

Yesterday may have been the first weekday in years that I've not posted here. I'm not going to go back and check how long it's been, though. I think, sometimes, in the past, I've even back-dated a post just so that it still looks like I've been diligent. This time, though, I think I'll just leave it.

I've been sick, on and off for the past two weeks or so, and this has been a major disruption to my normal routines, including blogging. The details of my sickness are disgusting, so I won't share. The secondary effects are lots of sleeping and staying home from work. I really hope, this time, I can recover properly and put it behind me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also haven't been writing or reading much.
PPS - At home, I gravitate more towards YouTube and other internet activities or television.

Could anything replace Linux?

At this point, could some other open-source operating system topple Linux off its perch as the dominant open-source OS? There are others around, but they'd have to match Linux's stability, functionality and support levels before they'd be seen as a significant contender. That would mean attracting the same number of dedicated developers, and that's unlikely, in my opinion. All the developers who would be working on some other open-source operating system are already either working on Linux or on their own pet project. Those pet projects, lacking the developer effort and organisation of Linux, will move more slowly and will therefore feel like they're being left behind by all flavours of Linux, not to mention Windows and OS X as well.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It takes a lot of effort to make a modern OS.
PPS - And in software, effort means time and people, which in turn usually means money.

On this day in the future

On this day in the future:

2084: The Olympic organising committee votes to allow traditional pole dancing as part of the female gymnastics program. Lobbying for male pole dancing inclusion begins immediately.
2123: The majestic Cadbury Creme Pigeon, source of all Cadbury Creme Eggs, is declared extinct. The last specimen goes on display at the Cadbury Natural History Museum in New Atlantis.
2191: A motorcycle with a horse's brain, called Grey Matter, wins the Melbourne Cup in 58 seconds. Muddy conditions the following year prevent Grey Matter from retaining the cup.
2208: After lengthy discussions between the Australian and New Zealand governments, The Commonwealth of Australia finally accepts statehood in New Zealand.
2253: Arnold Schwarzeneggar's brain dies at the age of 306. A stand-in brain is hired to complete filming of his 267th movie.
2288: Brazil successfully enters an ape in the Olympics for wrestling. Broadcasts are stopped mere seconds into the ape's first bout for undisclosed reasons.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wrote these all at different times, for different reasons.
PPS - There's more about the sports and brains than I remembered until I put them together.

Removal of software features

Software sometimes faces the removal of features as it goes on in life. This is especially true of large, complex software with lots of users. Maintaining features through upgrades costs time and effort in development and support. Sometimes the justification is made that this or that feature or option is being removed and replaced with a permanent setting based on how many people don't use it, or the way most people keep the setting. This stands to upset as few people as possible.

The problem is that it does upset some people, and if you have thousands or tens of thousands of users, you're going to be upsetting a large number of people, however small the percentage is. That can get lost in the analysis. If "only" 35% of your users sort oldest-first, but the majority keep their lists sorted in the default newest-first order, you may be tempted to set the sorting option to newest-first permanently. However, if you have 100,000 users, you're about to cause problems for 35,000 of them. Some will adapt. Some will leave for software that still does what they want. Are you willing to risk those 35,000 users for the sake of not maintaining a sort option?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, a lot of my software has an audience of one.
PPS - And when it doesn't, removal of features is not up to me.

One-way content sharing

I'd like to know when and how the "roach motel" business model for online service providers will fall down again. Well, I say "again" because I think it's similar to the Compuserve and AOL "walled garden" business models of the early web. Those companies aimed to provide everything their users could ever want or need in curated collections, but the Weird Wild Web outdid them and they collapsed. These days, companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are all vying to be the only service provider you need, but in a different way. Now they provide search, calendars, personal posts, email, maps (or some significant subset) and all their APIs are aimed at getting content in, but not letting it out. Google demonstrated their commitment to this model recently by shutting off external RSS feeds of each user's YouTube subscriptions, forcing tech-savvy users like me to go directly to YouTube instead of keeping up to date on my subscriptions via my feed reader. Content checks in, but it doesn't check out.

Can this business model succeed where the walled gardens failed? I don't know, but I kind of hope not. The one-way sieve operating here is strong, and it's difficult to disrupt. You can start yourself as a tiny content provider, but as long as the big players can suck in your content, they get all the same benefits without needing to change. If you don't allow them to pull you in somehow, then you wither and die because they are the gatekeepers of online attention now.

The only bump in the road I can see is if they start disrupting each other. If Facebook users want to start sharing content from there to Google+ for some reason, and they can't, and this problem grows larger, then Facebook has to cave to user demand, but this would just lead to them being swallowed up by Google, in my opinion. They need to defend this border or they die.

So I guess I don't have an answer. The only remaining idea is that these giants of the internet get too big to keep growing and break apart on their own, like some kind of Google Civil War. Perhaps a generation from now, when their founders are gone and the core ideals rotted from the inside, there will be a breakaway group that forms a new company, large enough to compete but small enough to react to the web we will have 20 years from now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whatever that will look like.
PPS - If I knew that, I'd be rich already.

Fallibility

Nobody can do no wrong. Your heroes are fallible human beings who make mistakes, overlook things, and sometimes hold problematic opinions. They tell lies, they dislike some things you love, they love some things you hate. They say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. They get into accidents, sweep things under the rug, would rather not discuss certain topics. They run out of energy, get sick, get injured. Sometimes their bodies don't work properly, sometimes their minds don't work quite right. They forget, they remember incorrectly and they will occasionally deceive themselves.

It's easy to forget, when you only interact with them one-way, from their public persona and appearances to your perception and mental image of them, but if you weren't familiar with their work, you could sit next to them on the bus and never know how much they mean to the world.

They are people, and people are fragile, complex, emotional, intellectual beings with faults and failures as big as their strengths and successes. Try to remember that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You probably won't remember it all the time.
PPS - I certainly don't.

Does my ideal job even exist?

When I think of the kind of job I would like to do in my 40s or even closer to retirement, I still think of software, fiction and acting. As always, however, I tend to picture a job that doesn't involve any of the things I dislike doing, or that fill me with a sense of dread and disgust. Those would be any sales and marketing activities, and, if I'm being honest, management and leadership, too. I don't want to be a leader. I've never wanted that. And if my mental self-image ever overlaps with smarmy, greasy, sharks-in-suits salespeople (which is obviously a caricature or stereotype) then I'll be very disappointed with my life.

I know everyone has to do things they don't want to, but every now and then, you come across a person who, with a huge smile, says she is exactly where she wants to be and, if they stopped paying her tomorrow, she'd still be doing this job. That's the kind of job I want. Is there a place for me like that? If not, I'll happily take the financial freedom to just retire.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As would plenty of other people, I'm sure.
PPS - But I asked first, so there.

No, I did not have "man flu"

I've been sick for several days and counting now, but I'm back at work, coughing, sneezing and snotting my way through the day, trying not to infect every surface I encounter. I've been asked by some coworkers if I had "the dreaded man flu". Now, because I am a man and had flu-like symptoms, some people will not believe me regardless of the evidence I present. As a man with flu-like symptoms, of course, my judgement cannot be trusted on this issue. However, I would like to present Exhibit A: fevers, experienced over the first two days, Exhibit B: constant nasal and sinus congestion and Exhibit C: a cough producing yellow-green phlegm from my lungs. I'm sick. No question about that in my mind, and I wouldn't call it "man flu".

To me, "man flu" means exaggerating your symptoms, demanding to be waited on while lying comfortably in bed. Picture Homer Simpson, lying on the couch, ringing a little service bell and yelling for Marge to come and serve him some specific food or drink. He's clearly not as sick as that, and neither am I. I'm still running the domestic micro-errands requested by the lady of the house ("Can you get me some water, please?"). If I were to accept the diagnosis of "man flu", that would have to be the first thing to go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I could possibly have gone back to work one day earlier.
PPS - Since I wasn't getting paid time off, however, that's my call to make.

Crowdsource what can't be computerised

To a large extent, almost anything you think can't be automated by computers can be crowdsourced. Do you think an HR job can't be taken over by a robot? Try asking 10,000 people for hire/fire decisions on your potential and existing workforce and compare that to your HR department's decisions. I bet they'd be close. The only question is whether crowdsourcing is cheaper, faster or more reliable than hiring one good person.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The problem gets very meta when talking about hiring HR people.
PPS - I'd love to see how well a crowd can act as CEO.

Escapism

Escapism should be used as a way to get an external perspective on your problems, rather than trying to leave them behind. All within reason, of course. Nobody will begrudge you a little escape now and then, the same way you're meant to take regular holidays from work. The point is more for creators. Take the time to make your creations relevant to the problems you see in the world, they'll have more depth, even if most people don't realise why. To me, that's a pretty good win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And a very tricky thing to do.
PPS - But worth it, I think.

Too big for Twitter

I'm sad to hear that Joss Whedon quit Twitter. It seems, lately, that social media is a bad place for people to get attention. Or maybe I'm trying to say that a lot of attention online will also bring you a lot of negative attention, regardless of what you do, and exposing yourself to that level of toxicity is less likely to get you any super powers and more likely to get you into therapy.

This is what we do to famous people these days. Back before Twitter, famous people were a rare bird, only seen in sleazy paparazzi rags, publicity events and their own work, or, if you were very lucky, in a random encounter on the street. Then Twitter opened up and said "We have the celebrities! In a cage! Come and poke them!" And we did. Oh, how we did. They didn't like it much, but what could they do? Not be on Twitter? Please.

Except it seems like that's the best option now. Rather than trying to filter a little signal out of the torrent of noise, gaining a tiny bit of happiness for hours of wading through humanity's excrement, your better odds for happiness are to avoid the general public altogether, which is how it used to be anyway.

There was a reason celebrities became recluses. It's because humans, en-masse, are terrible people, who will abuse, berate and harass you for making the things that they love.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Thankfully, being too big for Twitter would have some pretty great consolation prizes.
PPS - Like huge piles of money.

Can we convince trolls that it's not funny?

How do you change someone's mind that trolling is funny? We all go through this stage, it seems, when we aim to get a rise out of people online (or in person) because we find it funny, because at some time during puberty we turn into gaping a-holes spewing poop at the world - just coating it in our stinking, festering monkey-poop - and lauging at people who get upset that we have covered them in our poop. Then some time later we realise that, when we did that, we were being gaping a-holes who didn't deserve the free room, board and internet we got from our parents and we settle down.

Is there a way we can train kids early on not to be that particular kind of a-hole to each other? Is there something we can say to them to indicate that the descriptor "clever insult" doesn't apply to the phrase "you should shut up and kill yourself"? I hope so. The internet gives our words vast reach and permanence, so when you're an a-hole in person, it can be damaging, but when you're an a-hole online, it can be so devastating that people do kill themselves.

So, pre-pubescent trolls, listen up: when you aim to make someone upset online, I'm going to need you to explain to yourself, first, why it's hilarious. You need to go far deeper than "It just is, because now they're angry, so shut up". You're angry, too. That's most of the reason you're smearing your own feces on the internet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you can explain why it's funny, it still has to be something you'd be happy for your parents to read.
PPS - I'm well aware that this post, on its own, won't change any troll's mind.

The real problem with nepotism

The reason nepotism is a problem is not necessarily that the wrong people get the jobs. If a relative does a terrible job but his family refuses to fire him, the company will just collapse or, at best, not fulfil its potential, and then the job goes away entirely. No, the real problem with nepotism is the mixing of power structures. If I work for you, but then you hire your son as my subordinate, I can't actually tell him he's doing a bad job or fire him if necessary, because that counts as a slight against you, my boss. The person who is supposed to be my responsibility is actually someone I have to treat as my superior, even if you tell me not to.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That particular arrangement won't usually happen, though.
PPS - Because, if you're going to hire your son, you won't put him more than one level below you.

Magic and comedy

To me, I think there are two subtly different ways of combining magic and comedy. On the one side, there are magical comedians like The Amazing Jonathan, who seem to have started in comedy and use magic for their act. If you go expecting amazing illusions, you'll be disappointed, because The Amazing Jonathan is there to make you laugh, first and foremost.

On the other side are comic magicians like Sylvester the Jester, who is clearly a magician first, but flavours his magic with over-the-top cartoonish comedy and sound effects. Sylvester the Jester performs for the magic, and comedy is just his gimmick.

For me, a fan of both magic and comedy, I think I prefer the magical comedian approach, in part because the comedy in a comic magician show feels too tacked-on. If you're aiming to make people laugh, that takes a certain type of performance, and the magic gets in the way of that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's probably a way to lift both of the aspects up to a truly great magic comedy performance, but I've never seen it.
PPS - I've never actually seen a live magic stage show.

Nesting doll houses

Someone should make a matryoska doll house for those Russian nesting dolls. Just nest smaller and smaller doll houses inside each other, one for each size doll. Bonus points for observing that, once you unpack it all, it's bigger on the inside.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My dad went to Russia and brought back souvenir matryoska dolls for everyone but me and my brother.
PPS - Twice.

A white featureless room

When I'm writing, I tend to leave out a lot of environmental descriptions. This might be because I want the action to move along quickly. Excitement! Explosions! People flying through the air! No time to tell you what colour the walls are, we're DOIN' STUFF over here!

This might be because I trained myself on flash fiction. Whatever the cause, I need to consciously practice writing those descriptions that I otherwise leave out of my work. I'm not yet sure how to do this, but I'm trying something at the moment where I take something I've written before and just write another version that is all environment and description. No dialogue allowed, so I can't get expositiony, and no character names, either. I'm not sure if the "no names" policy will work well, but trying to tell the same story with nothing but environment and explicit facial expressions or gestures - no interpretation - is much trickier than I'd expected.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also not sure how to integrate it with the rest.
PPS - I guess that's a whole different struggle.

Societal security practices

Individual security, in some instances, is a personal choice. You might leave your phone completely open with no PIN or lock pattern. Someone else might install a PIN lock per app. I lock the whole phone with a lock pattern. We all choose what works best for us, and most people choose convenience (no lock) over security (lock).

That aggregate choice, however, affects or even creates the broad security landscape in which we operate. If most people lock their phones, then most thieves can never get into a stolen phone, making phone theft basically pointless. However, since most people do not lock their phones, phone theft is still viable and a locked phone can instead be more vulnerable when stolen, because a locked phone will just get discarded while an unlocked phone gives you time to hunt it down.

This is exactly what happens when the general public get to choose how convenient they want their technology. What can we do about it? Well, one option would be to all leave our phones unlocked and just track them down when they're stolen. Another option is to demand, at the manufacturer level, that all phones have locks installed from now on. Take away the choice. Either way works, but I have a feeling that the second way would make a better world, even if it's a less-convenient one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, that won't happen, because it's hard to change.
PPS - And, as we've learned, law enforcement opposes anything that makes it harder to spy on us.

The full cost of cheap software

You should always count the ongoing cost of software you buy for your business. You might pay less for a particular package, but if it takes a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain to do the job you want it to do, the long-term cost is more than other software that's easier to use. Even if that other software costs more up front, the lower maintenance costs will quickly overtake the "cheaper" option.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, consider how rare and expensive are the skills needed for the software.
PPS - There are a lot of factors to consider.

Control vs Security

You can't secure what you can't control, but control alone is not security. People mistake control for security when they say the iTunes App Store is safe because it's curated, or that only registered taxis are safe. The iTunes App Store and registered taxis are controlled, but that does not automatically imply that the control exercised over them is perfectly secure or even that their criteria for control is in your best interests.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Spoiler alert: Apple is not out for your best interests.
PPS - Neither is any other for-profit corporation, just to be thorough.

The Big Red Button

You know those locked plastic covers they have over the Big Red Button in movies, regardless of what that Big Red Button does? They need that same thing over the "Reply All" button in email programs. That action needs to have some real gravitas. Not a pop-up asking "Are you sure?", but the action itself impressing upon you that this is a big thing you are doing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's going to be a fair bit more annoying.
PPS - And that's kind of the whole point.

Being Batman

I see one of the arguments in favour of Batman is that he is a testament to the upper limits of human ability and training. If that were all he was, then fine, but it's not, is it? I mean, yes, he's well-trained and all that, but also a very large part of being Batman is the gadgets. Can Bruce Wayne even be Batman without armour, a grappling hook and bat-shaped boomerangs, not to mention a sweet ride? Take away all the gadgets and Batman is just Gravel-Voiced Punching Guy. He might be good at that, but it's not everything we think of as Batman.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure, in his long history, there has been an exploration of what non-billionaire Batman would look like.
PPS - I'm sure it felt like there was something missing.

What makes a robot?

Personally, I find it a bit misleading to call something a "robot" if it is completely remote-controlled by a human. Yes, it might have some neat features and perform a useful task, like a snowplow I saw recently, but that just makes it a sophisticated power tool, not a robot. I mean, if a remote-controlled vehicle is all it takes to be called a robot, then I had a robot toy car when I was a kid.

I'll grant that there's going to be a blurry line here. If a remote controlled vehicle has on-board sensors that it uses to, say, avoid rolling off cliffs, but you are otherwise controlling it yourself, is it really a robot? Any question of classification ultimately devolves into this kind of nitpicky legalism, so at a certain point the question becomes a bit of a meaningless time-sink. I just think that using the word "robot" sets up certain expectations of autonomy that are often not delivered.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the semi-autonomous machines that give the most trouble.
PPS - Taxonomically, that is. I'm sure fully-autonomous ones are the most trouble behaviourally.

Arimaa

I'm kind of interested in the way a game was created specifically to be difficult for computers but easy enough for a 4-year-old to play with standard chess pieces, called Arimaa. It's an interesting goal to push computer game-playing research further, and it seems to have worked. The game was invented in 2002 and then a computer won the yearly human-vs-computer tournament this year (2015). On the one hand, this might represent massive gains in processing power and algorithmic research since the game's invention, or it might represent an unforeseen weakness in the game design. Most likely, it's a bit of both.

My question is: what comes next? Does someone else design a new iteration of game that is really tricky for computers to play but comparatively easy for humans? Do we modify Arimaa to bump up the computer difficulty? When do we reach the point where "easy for a 4-year-old" also means "trivial for computers"? If it takes decades for computers to beat human grandmasters at chess, but only one decade for computers to beat human Arimaa masters, how much difficulty can we expect to squeeze out of a new iteration of game difficulty? Probably a year or two, I'd think, given the pattern.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd love it if a computer designed a game itself to this goal.
PPS - Which, I guess, would make that game a kind of CAPTCHA.

How small can a dishwasher get?

I think it would be possible or beneficial to create a little in-sink automatic dishwasher rack that connects to your taps. It couldn't hold much, and it probably wouldn't do such a good job, but think of the space savings. For small apartments or small kitchens, this could be a real benefit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe, by then, the benefits are just too small.
PPS - Because, really, you'd only fit a couple of plates in there, wouldn't you?

To achieve a meaningless first

I want to be the first person carried up Mount Everest on a sedan chair. Sure, it's a kind of achievement, but I could easily be replaced with a sack of potatoes and it would make no difference. I like that kind of weirdness.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That is all. I'm tired.
PPS - Which is the perfect time to be carried around. Anyone interested?

Making online workspaces for teams

To bring together the widely-dispersed teams of the future, we need people who can build virtual office spaces as much as today we need people who fit out physical offices to the specifications of clients. The difference is that today's business says "we need space for 60 desks, each with two computer monitors and a phone, plus we need three eight-person meeting rooms" or whatever, while tomorrow's global business might say "we need a connected workspace for a team of 20 people, including easy video for private meetings, plus of course some shared file storage, and we'd like people to be able to work offline and re-sync later". The virtual architect of that workspace will need to know how to bring together existing and new software seamlessly so that the virtual office just works. That should mean that nobody needs to think about the where and how of talking to each other after a 5-minute tutorial.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Very small businesses may have off-the-shelf solutions for online work.
PPS - Very large corporations will be an altogether different beast.

ASMR

Autonomous sensory meridian response, if real, might just be the pleasure centre of the brain reacting to a feeling of intimacy generated by whispering, plus the blessed relief that comes with finally getting some peace and quiet from the noisy world for once. The white noise represents that quiet nicely and, as a bonus, comes with the high-gain settings necessary to capture whispering on a microphone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not completely convinced.
PPS - I haven't had it myself, anyway.

Super-speed

I've always thought, if I could have a super power, that super-speed would be pretty great. I just think I'd get a lot done, plus the opportunities for messing with people are huge. We discussed this at a recent dinner with friends, because I have awesome friends, and we bounced back and forth different ideas of what you could do with such power if, say, someone was giving a speech. With a couple of props, you could make it look like they were trying to avoid giving the speech at all by performing a bunch of magic tricks. Imagine putting ping-pong balls in their mouth any time it opens up, releasing doves from their sleeves every time they gesture widely, then replacing them with a monkey in a critical moment. Hilarious.

Of course, this assumes that the force and speed don't disintegrate anything, create sonic shock waves or superheat the air, which is a real danger with super-speed and not at all fun. It has to be a weird kind of magical, non-destructive speed power. Quicksilver, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, holds Magneto's head so he doesn't get whiplash, then runs at a speed that would disintegrate a human body anyway. You want to avoid that, if you're super-speeding about. Just a tip.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd probably get a lot of reading done.
PPS - Then I'd probably get super-bored, to be honest.

Are backer rewards worth it?

Do backer perks kill or at least bog down creative projects funded through Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sites? If I were attempting a project like that, I'd be surprised if I didn't spend half my time signing things and shipping them out, rather than doing the actual project. And a significant amount of the funding would have to go to those backer rewards, too, which leaves less available for the actual project. That could easily be a trap that creative people fall into when asking for crowdfunding money. If you think you'll need $100K to complete your project, and you reach that goal, but you have to spend $50K on backer rewards, you're going to fail, because you're really only half-funded. Or if you're making some new device and you promise one to every backer, then you fund your whole first production run, send them all off to backers and you're back to square one.

While I realise that backer rewards are something people can easily comprehend, I think crowdfunding should probably work more like ordinary venture capital. I invest in your project, you make it happen, I get dividends in return from your sales. If I want a copy of the movie, TV show, nifty gadget, I can buy one like anyone else. Freebies for backers work pretty well if you've got two big investors. Throw them a bone to sweeten the deal. Why not? But if you're funded by ten thousand of your biggest fans, then you give away the work to them afterwards, I think the money would all just form a complete circle and cancel itself out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Presumably, though, you learn some stuff.
PPS - And are in a good position to start a second run, if you made any profit.

Calorie counting made easier

Counting calories is a massive pain, especially when cooking for yourself or eating out. Who knows exactly how much of each ingredient has gone into a meal? All the charts and tables are really, really precise - often listing individual meals from popular fast food chains down to single-digit accuracy. This means you need to find the exact thing you're eating, not a reasonable facsimile, and if you can't find that, then you're kind of screwed. Calculating calories for your own home-cooked meals means measuring each ingredient, finding that on the chart and adding it all up. If you're eating out at a unique restaurant or little cafe, you'll be guessing more than anything.
My idea of the day is to draw up a rough-idea grid of calorie counts in different classifications of food - not "chicken", "pizza" and "beer" but "bad", "so-so" and "good", with a breakdown of portion sizes, "small", "medium" and "large". From this, you should be able to get a good enough idea of your calorie intake without needing to look up the difference between white rice and brown rice. We're sacrificing some precision for better usability. You do need to know enough to say whether a meal is good or bad, and that might get subjective, but how much difference does it make to your system if you think you've eaten 50 calories instead of 60?
So here's my chart. Consider it a work in progress, able to be tweaked if you want, but remember the goal: simplicity over precision, but maintaining accuracy. By all means, adjust the values, but if you start trying to add in the difference between chicken and beef, stop.

	Healthy	So-so	Unhealthy	Sweets/Desserts
Large	300	600	1200	1600
Medium	150	300	600	800
Small	80	150	300	400
Bite	0	50	100	200

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's weird, but I put off writing up this table for weeks.
PPS - I guess I thought it would be hard.

Whole-system design

I think there are probably some gains to be made in whole-system design in houses, for energy efficiency. After all, we have one device to pump heat out of a small box and into the air (fridge), a different box to pump heat from the inside to the outside (air conditioner) and then a tank to put heat into water (water heater). I have a feeling that all of these heat pumps could be connected for greater efficiency somehow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd be surprised if that were the only gain to make.
PPS - A good architect probably designs this kind of system all the time.

Domestic training

I used to take some offense at the idea of women "training" their men. It sounds so degrading, like teaching a pet a new trick. It puts the woman in charge and the man in a subservient role, and it's not truly enjoyable for either person. It's not a partnership at that point, but more of a matriarchal dictatorship. Neither side is supposed to be "in charge" of a healthy relationship.

However, I do recognise that many men grow up with terrible domestic habits. We leave wet towels on the floor, we don't cook or clean or tidy up, things like that. These are habits and behaviours that we should have grown out of, but if a boy has his mother picking up after him all of his life, it won't even occur to him that towels should go anywhere else. Why would it? Don't count on self-awareness and consideration developing naturally. We do need to be told things sometimes. If you pick up after a man and wait for the guilt to set in after self-reflection, you'll never get what you want. If you ramp-up the consequences of inconsiderate actions ("Put his wet towels under his pillow!") then you will grow to see your man as a child. I think the better move is to talk about it. It's still training, in a way, but respectful.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also remember: nobody is the perfect partner.
PPS - Not even you.

I need sports info

At social gatherings, I often feel left out when other guys start talking sports (which, in Australia, means cricket and two codes of football, plus the soccer world cup). The last time I thought to myself that there must be some news feed I can follow that gives enough info for me to fake my way through these conversations.

Then I thought, maybe there isn't, and I could create it.

Then my last thought was maintaining the site - adding content - would mean making it my job to watch these sports live (so the site updates would be timely) and suddenly I've signed up to be Full-Time Sports Guy when my goal was not to have to deal with sports directly at all.

So, in short, this is probably not happening, but I wish someone else would do it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I need this for world news, too.
PPS - Right now, I'm only as informed as John Oliver can make me.

Cargo cult consumer design

Samsung's new phones have no removable batteries or storage card expansion slot, probably because that's what Apple does. Hey, Samsung, you know what I'll buy if I want something like an iPhone? An actual iPhone. I buy Android phones because they aren't like Apple's lock-in crap. You're giving up your differentiating features in a cargo-cult mentality, believing that if you copy Apple, you will copy Apple's success. That's a flawed concept, as far as I'm concerned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you're a little Apple, you might have a little bit of Apple-like success.
PPS - But not a lot.

Dealing with the entertainment singularity

We are already at an entertainment singularity. Not only is there already more entertainment of every form (books, movies, TV, cat videos) than any one person could experience in a lifetime, but we are already producing far more of it than any person could hope to keep up with. What is the best way to deal with this flood? I have a system where I keep a very large list of items, carefully prioritised, and add anything new to the list so that it gets the same chance of washing up on my beach as anything else. It is, however, always getting longer, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

The only other way I can imagine dealing with it all is to learn to let go of the idea of doing the "best" things and just let absolutely everything wash over me all at once, doing whatever new thing I have time for right now and forgetting about the rest forever. Is there a new book coming out, but I'm reading another one? Too bad, new book. I guess I'll see you in Heaven. New TV show, but I have no time? Oh, well. I guess I'll never know what it was about.

That feels like giving up, to me. I know being the latest thing doesn't mean it's the greatest. I just can't let go like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess most other people are already at that last stage.
PPS - I might have a fear of missing out.

Amazon Dash is disruptive

The Amazon Dash button, announced just before April Fool's Day, caused some confusion among people online. Was it a joke? Is it necessary or just lazy? Is it a bad thing to be lazy this way?

If you missed it, Amazon Dash is a dedicated physical push-button reorder system for household consumables like coffee, paper towels and laundry detergent, for Amazon Prime customers (so, not for me in Australia, then). The promo video is an unselfconscious revelling in consumerism, but that's another post.

I'm kind of torn about it. On the one hand, it's a neat gadget, and that seems cool. It's like convenience shopping inside your home. Very "Internet of Things", in a way. On the other hand, it does seem really goofy. I look forward to a lot of parody videos.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The thing is, I can't think of any ways to make it really funny.
PPS - Just sort of mildly amusing.

Board games on mobile

I really like the idea of board games playable on mobile devices over the internet where it doesn't matter how long each person takes to play their turn. Because it can be hard to organise a group of people to get together all at once to play a game, this way everyone is always playing, and the game just goes on, even if one person delays a bit. It will take a lot longer to play a game through, but who cares? The fun is still there, and you've got other games to play, too. This is just a way to play specific games with friends that would otherwise take a lot more effort and commitment to play.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish there were more of them.
PPS - And that I could play them. Obviously.

On-demand basic services

Here's a weird thought. With internet services for on-demand travel and shelter (eg Uber and AirBnB) plus storage lockers and wireless data, could some people live "homeless" but as fully-employed, fully-functional members of society now? Or, if not now, then when? It might not be too long from now that robot cars provide transportation as a subscription service, and it's not too far-fetched to picture the same deal for accommodation and storage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People who sleep in robot cars will be a very weird sub-tribe.
PPS - Though I plan to do that myself on my way home all the time.

Self-forgiveness

I find it really hard to forgive myself for mistakes. I make plenty of them, so you'd think I'd have enough experience, but I'm still just as bad at it today as when I started beating myself up about my screw-ups, which was many years ago. "Progress" is managing not to call myself names while I am figuratively punching myself in the guts in the aftermath. That progress is often short-lived. I even get into some meta-self-flagellation about my self-flagellation, this post being a soft example of that.

I think part of it stems from (or is at least related to) my long-standing behaviour of trying to elicit pity as an attention-getting strategy. I would cry at school, I'd tell people how my mother died when I was young, I'd loudly and publicly lament that I'd never had a girlfriend, I'd avoid bringing up people's mistakes about my name or about overlooking me in order to spring it on them much later to maximise their shame and the pity they'd feel for me.

It's pretty pathological behaviour, when you look at it like this. The point, in context, is that seeking pity is now a long-ingrained reflex for me, and tearing myself down is just one step in that process. I need to be low to get pity, and if I'm not low enough, I'll make myself lower.

This does not mesh well with forgiveness, or the problem-solving mindset I have to use for my work. Often there's no solution and nothing to do but accept the loss and move on, trying to do better next time. I never feel like I can just move on without trying to figure out how it all went wrong this time. This leads me to focus obsessively on my mistakes and the costs associated with them, which can be exhausting.

Take a recent example: I had a function to attend after work, and this would have been most easily managed by driving to work that day so I could drive there and drive home at night when it was finished, instead of taking the train as I normally do. I didn't plan my transport and didn't discuss it with my wife until I had already taken the train to work that day. We only have the one car, so if I drive to work, she needs to know that. I could have discussed it in advance, the night before. I could even have tried discussing it that morning, though that wouldn't have been so easy. I leave early, and let's say not everyone in the house is alert in the mornings.

Still, there are a lot of ways I could have done better, and I was well aware of these in advance. I didn't do them or even make an attempt, resulting in some tense exchanges of texts that made me feel like an irresponsible child. That's a recurring feeling here: that of an irresponsible child. It readily feeds into a number of other anxieties and personality issues, too, such as not being good enough to be a father, not being worthy of being a husband, remembering all the poor organisation and problems I have caused at home and so on. It's what makes me feel, most often, that I am not a Real Man, whatever that means. Real Men, says the voice in my head, communicate properly with their wives so they don't have to ask for a lift home at night. Real Men are confident, in control and show a basic life competence far beyond yours, obviously. Self-flagellation. And, in the end, it turned out not even to be a big deal.

Wanting to break out of this cycle is not enough. Knowing how, clearly, is not enough. Suspecting that I might have mild anxiety or depression is not enough, because you can hardly go to the doctor and say "Doc, sometimes I feel like an irresponsible child and that makes me feel bad, is there something wrong with my brain?" I need therapy. I need to do better. I need ... I don't know what else I need. I feel like forgiveness is just enabling my problems, most of the time. It's not that I don't feel I deserve forgiveness, because true forgiveness isn't deserved or earned. What I feel is that I shouldn't get forgiveness because it wouldn't help fix me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sorry if this is too long and heavy.
PPS - It bothered me, though.

What separates programs from queries?

Sometimes the line is quite blurry between what is a program (or a programming language) and what is an expression. I'm not even completely sure what to call the second one, actually, but after reading about "runnable tweets" written in Wolfram Language and seeing the graphical plot results, it seems to me that these programs are more like search expressions or queries. They require a very rich interpreter with access to a lot of very complex data sets and extremely heavy functions to manipulate them. It's difficult for me to think of something like "GeoListPlot[GeoEntities[Atlantic Ocean, "Shipwreck"]]" as a program. It might be meaningful and unambiguous when interpreted against a particular data set, and clearly Wolfram can produce results from it, so I'm not sure what is my objection. Perhaps that there is only one system in the world that can run it? Well, that would be true of any very specialised software. I've written expression parsers that only my programs use, but I never called the input a program.

One objection might indeed be the power of the functions available. You could write a "language" whose only function is "List The Monarchs of England In Chronological Order", but is that input a program, or is the interpreter the program?

Maybe it's a size issue. Because of the massive scope of the language, and its inherent complexity, every program written in it will be many orders of magnitude smaller than the interpreter itself. I think that's what's bugging me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus there's something about the native data sets.
PPS - It doesn't feel like big, real-world data sets should be considered part of a programming language.

Majority content

According to Bruce Schneier's blog, his book _Data and Goliath_, when read on Kindle, reaches the end of the main text when the Kindle app (or device) says you're 44% of the way through. Basically, there's more raw text in the form of citations and references than in the main body of the book.

What amuses me about this observation, however, is that 44% means the "main text" is not the "majority content", and you could make a point that what Schneier has done is to gather a very extensive list of relevant reference materials, then written a kind of index summary as an appendix.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't read the book yet, but it's on the list.
PPS - I have a very long and complex list.

Overloading the name "bible"

I'm not a big fan of the overloading of the term "bible" in a lot of contexts. It's not from any kind of religious offense or hurt, though. It's more of a clarity thing. I had a friend once say, out of nowhere, that she'd been reading "the bible", by which she meant "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus". I've heard the primary documentation on software projects referred to as the "project bible", which always gets shortened to "the bible", and it always takes me a few seconds for my brain to latch onto the real contextual meaning rather than the one with which I am automatically most familiar (the actual Bible).

My point is that communication is supposed to be clear, although poetry can sacrifice clarity for emotion. When you refer to some other book or document as "the bible", you are probably being just a little bit too poetic, sacrificing just enough clarity for the sake of your point about the importance of that book.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We'll all know how important a document is, in context, from experience with it.
PPS - Or because you say "this is our most important document".

Mundane time travel

Time travel will be used for the most mundane purposes imaginable. Corporations will hire multiple copies of the CEO for all management positions. Employees will be forced to go back in time so as to never have any time off - sick days will be a thing of the past, because you'll just come back when you're well. On the plus side of that scheme, you can have whatever preferred schedule you like. Two days on, five days off? No problem, as long as you're in the office Monday to Friday. Three months of leave per year? Go for it, just come back to the beginning of your holiday when you're done. It would get tricky to track, and some employees would, as a result, burn out a lot faster than others. Some, who take a lot of time off, would age a lot faster than others, who don't. That would be weird.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Time travel, used this way, would lead quickly to the tech singularity.
PPS - Because corporations will want whole research eras to be done, literally, yesterday.

Cinderella is not an insulting name

With the movie "Cinderella" opening in Australian cinemas today, it seemed time to make this observation. To me, it's never made much sense, in the story of Cinderella, for her name to be an insult. I mean, I do understand that it's meant to refer to her menial household labour, especially cleaning the chimney, but from a purely linguistic point of view, "Cinderella" is a remarkably beautiful name. Flowing and feminine, and reminiscent of the common observation that "cellar door" is one of the most beautiful phrases in English. "Cinderella" and "cellar door" are just a couple of letters away from being anagrams of each other.

So, to me, using "Cinderella" as an insult name has the same kind of meaning as saying "We'll call you Rainbow McBeautifulface Sexybody Unicorn Glitter! Ha! See how you like that!" You know they're trying to be insulting, but it's just coming out all wrong.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you want an insulting name, just go for "Poop".
PPS - It's not as creative, but there's no chance of confusion.

Shopping online

I don't do a lot of my shopping online. This might be weird for someone of my age and technical expertise, but it's been informed by several bad experiences. First, there have been a few times when I've got what I ordered, but it wasn't the right thing. I bought a $199 router from Kogan, paid $9 shipping to get it to me, waited four days for delivery, then had to send it back because I was mistaken about its capabilities. The return shipping and the restocking fee cost me a further $38, so by now I'm out $47 and back to square one. If I had just walked to Dick Smith instead, 5 minutes down the road from my house, I would have had the correct device in my hands immediately. Oh, and I still don't have my money back, more than two weeks later, so there's that, too.

The other thing is that Australia Post delivery drivers don't bother looking for our front door. We live in a townhouse complex with a lot of little twisting roadways and paths, so I understand that it can be hard to find a particular house number, but they don't even try. They get to the mailbox, toss in a "sorry you weren't home" card and sod off again, leaving me to pick up the package from the post office during office hours anyway, or on Saturday morning, which is when I can actually get there. While there's supposed to be parcel pick-up outside those hours, the arrangement where I live is that this is done from the PO Box bunker, and that parcels are not kept there, but inside the shopping centre. Guess whether the PO Box attendant can get to your parcels outside normal shopping hours. Go on. Guess.

So online shopping hasn't exactly sold me. I don't trust the delivery drivers to actually bother delivering, and I don't trust myself to order the correct item without talking to someone about it. Does this make me a shopping luddite? Yeah, probably. So what? It's still working for me, and until online shopping can actually provide me some savings or benefits, I think I might stick with bricks and mortar for now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do order flowers online now and then from our local florist.
PPS - They regularly misspell our street name, and they abandon flowers on the doorstep, but it does seem to mostly work.

The perfect house is a myth

Will you ever have the perfect house? Of course not. Your circumstances and needs change, so the perfect house for you this year might not be the perfect house for you next year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We need our houses to be more adaptable.
PPS - Perhaps that's what makes it perfect.

Published!

Today I'd just like to let you know that the good people of PodCastle, a weekly fantasy fiction podcast, have done me the great honour of publishing my story, "Lord Darq, Regis and the Orb of Power". You can find the audio file on their site. I've been a fan of PodCastle for ages now, so it's super-cool that they're the ones to publish my first ever sale!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's only 5 minutes long.
PPS - Go. Listen now.

Motivation is BS

I recognise that a lot of people find exercise "too hard". They "can't get motivated" to do it. I've had people ask how I find the motivation to get up and go for a run. You want the real, honest-to-goodness answer?

I don't.

I'm not motivated to run like that. I don't have some magical inner coach urging me to get up and at 'em, that reaches down through my laziness and bad moods and pulls me up by my collar to get myself moving. That's the secret. I frequently don't *want* to go, but how effective should that really be as a method of stopping me? If someone put up a little sign at the foot of your bed that said "I don't want you to go running", would that stop you? That's what your lack of motivation is: a little sign somewhere in your world that doesn't want you to go and do anything, and the only reason it's standing in your way is that you are sitting there paying attention to it.

Next time, try this: set a time to get some exercise. When that time comes, stop what you're doing and go exercise. When your "lack of motivation" comes up, picture that little sign and ask why it should have any power over you at all, then go exercise, because you are the only reason you aren't getting over your own lack of motivation. When you need groceries, you go get them. When you need fuel in your car, you go get it. When you need water, you go and get it. When you need exercise, just go and get it. Motivation is not in your way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "But how do I get exercise with this little sign here?"
PPS - You ignore it. That's how.

How I'd spend one billion dollars

If I were a billionaire, I'd build a hotel in the city and just let my friends and family stay there for free forever, with free food from the kitchen, free laundry service and all those things. I want my family and friends to have everything they need for survival, to allow them to focus on the bigger things in life.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or if someone wanted to do this for me, I'd have no objections.
PPS - I prefer a river view. If that helps.

All you need to prototype a card game

If you're desperate to prototype a card game, you can make basically anything with a label printer and a normal pack of cards, with the added bonus that they're very cheap. You're welcome.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been meaning to get a label printer for ages.
PPS - And I have lots of cards.

You know, one of these days I'm pretty sure they're going to make a super-realistic animatronic replica of Jurassic Park, and I am so there. The world needs a free-range robot dinosaur park. I guarantee, no matter how much you have to pay to construct it, you'll make a killing. Figuratively speaking. I mean, there's a slight chance that the robots could go berserk and kill everyone, but I'm willing to take that risk.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - With the blood, and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
PPS - I'm sure we can fix it with flash photography.

Better baggage retrieval

I think we could do better with baggage retrieval at airports using technology. Instead of having one big conveyor belt and a crowd of people who could easily mistake someone else's luggage for theirs, or could just wander up and take whichever one they like, we should have a system of RFID tags on luggage so that they can be identified throughout the flight and when you land. Then, at the baggage claim, bags are unloaded as before, but then held in individual bays awaiting claim. To claim your own bag, you take your boarding pass and scan it at a machine which recognises the tag, matches it to a bag and sends it down for you. If the airport doesn't have this system, they can still use their old single-conveyor method.

Now, how can this system fail? Well, if you lose your boarding pass on the plane, you'll have to go and see customer service to get your bag with some other ID. There won't, however, be a situation where your bag gets picked up by someone else by mistake unless you manage to mix up your boarding passes. What if someone steals your boarding pass in order to take your bag? Well, they could take your bag anyway, in the current system, but this way you have a chance for the machine to take their picture when they claim the bag, to give some hint who might have it. If your bag is misrouted? You find out right away when you go to claim it, rather than sitting there and waiting for all the other bags to be claimed first.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The thing is, it's fairly expensive to implement and provides only minimal benefit.
PPS - To the airlines, that is.

Camping on the sea

Having a boat with a sleeping cabin is kind of like glamping on the sea or driving your camper van into the desert and just parking wherever.

So, from now on, I think I'm going to call yachts "the trailers of the sea".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It should make me feel better about not owning one.
PPS - Though that doesn't come up much and it's not really a life goal of mine.

Learning actors' names

I make it a point to learn actors' names once I've known them in two or more performances I've enjoyed, or in one very significant one. This is why I know names like Christian Kane and Morena Baccarin. It's important to me to know them as a name rather than a vague collection of typecast roles, like "that guy who was a lawyer in Angel, then the tough guy in Leverage and also the Librarians".

I also sometimes deliberately learn the name of "the other guy" in famous movie duos. Like Keanu Reeves and that other guy in Bill and Ted. Even though Alex Winter hasn't worked much since then, I'd hate to be known as just "the other guy", so I do them the courtesy I'd expect for myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now, if only I could be this good about the people I actually meet.
PPS - I've proven I can do it. I just need to focus.

Thank teachers for their service

I've seen the phrase "Thank you for your service" extended to basically every soldier that appears on screen these days, when they encounter civilians. I think that exact same phrase and respect should be extended, verbatim, to teachers. Just sayin'.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know a few.
PPS - They're undervalued by some people and taken for granted by most.

Designing houses through living in configurable spaces

I think it would be an interesting experiment to put a family or a group of people into one big warehouse space with movable walls plus power and plumbing easily moved around and just see how the space ends up being configured over time. Do you end up with separate bedrooms for everyone as far away from each other as possible? Does everyone tend to get their own living space, or are we happy with one to share? Would people try really unusual things like a single washbasin in a bedroom instead of a full ensuite?

It would all depend on the type of people you put in the space, of course. Fiercely individual people would probably end up in more of an apartment setup, with everything self-contained. Families might use more space than they expect. Single people might find themselves happy with relatively small living spaces and lots of storage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess I've been thinking about living spaces lately.
PPS - My interests come and go in waves.

Estimating software is really hard

Are software estimates valuable? It's hard to say. We, as programmers, feel that estimates are very difficult to obtain, usually inaccurate and therefore something of a waste of time. Managers, on the other hand, have a certain budget available and often a certain time frame, too. They want to know if a project will fit into those constraints or, if they are a particularly talented manager, what subset of the blue-sky-dream requirements can be completed within that budget and time. Estimates are the way budgets turn into project plans.

The problem is that software estimates are always a tricky beast. Software isn't like constructing a building. It's more like designing a building for a swarm of robots to build in seconds for no cost. All the effort in software is design effort, not construction, and design is the hard part to pin down.

When you design a building, you have some solid requirements to work from. It will be this tall, with this many floors, we want this many units or offices inside, and this many car parking spaces. That, in turn, leads to some other calculated requirements - to serve that many floors, you need this many lifts. Fire stairwells are this size and regulations require two of them. Concrete can support this much weight per unit surface area. You know what you're getting into.

Software, so far, doesn't have any of that, and might never do. Also, by the time you're done finding out how large the project is, that's part of the design work. If, for instance, you're trying to measure business software by the number of database tables required, then you need to find out what tables are needed and count them. Finding out what tables are needed, though, means gathering all the requirements and designing tables to store the relevant data and oh, look, now you've done a database schema to estimate how long it will take to develop a database schema. It's almost as if the nature of software rebels against being quantified before it is completed. Unfortunately, "I'll know how much it will cost when I'm done spending the money" isn't a satisfying or wise answer to the question of budgets.

So what can we do? Maybe skilled managers have better intuition about how large a project will be, based on some imprecise metrics. If I know we're dealing with five kinds of business data here, then we'll probably have (for instance) 50 tables (10 per data type) and 10 major processes to write (interactions between the major data types), and from there we can guess how long that will take (assuming we know our team well).

The best way, probably, is to say "This is what we want to get done. We have up to this amount of money, or up to this time to do as much as we can. How close might we get to perfection?"

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have to plead ignorance on how other industries estimate their work.
PPS - Except sometimes when I saw managers give a gut-feel guess and everyone called it good.

The "solution" to short phone battery life

So, these days, we seem to be solving the problem of woeful phone battery life by making people carry an extra "turbo charger" or backup battery around with them, to boost the battery when we're away from power and still need our phone to work for, oh, 8 hours at a time.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the way market demands have completely screwed us over here? I mean, if we weren't demanding that our phone batteries get a couple of millimetres thinner every year, they could actually work long enough for our phones to last an entire day.

Honestly, when you hear that your phone comes with a big brick of a backup battery for on-the-go charging, your response should not be positive. You should be thinking about why the internal battery sucks so hard.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Market pressure being what it is, though, this is the market solution.
PPS - Personally, I'd rather have a battery that doesn't suck.

Modular jewellery boxes

You know, there never seems to be enough of the right kind of space in a jewellery box, from what I've seen. I think it would be both neat and useful to have a modular system where different tiny boxes clip or stick together to form one large box that can expand or contract into sizes, shapes and configurations far beyond its original arrangement. Of course, it's probably not going to be quite as pretty as custom-made, one-size-fits-all boxes, but maybe you can make the pieces out of wood with magnets embedded in them, to keep it looking good.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or keep it simple and just use stackable drawers.
PPS - And probably some dividers inside the drawers, too.

The problems of account recovery

We have enough services online now, holding enough personal information in each, that it is possible to put together a very comprehensive profile of personal information based on what each company chooses to withhold and reveal, and using social engineering to fill in the rest (tricking customer service to reveal personal info over the phone).

So what can we do about that? Well, until we have better standards for information privacy online, there's not a lot we can do. If each company is free to make up their own minds about what should remain secret and what information is required to verify identity, we, the public, will still be vulnerable to these cross-service attacks.

Getting that legislation into effect is a big, difficult step, though. We still need to be able to identify people worldwide with information that is not unique to a given company, but the person themselves, and that is the exact key to these cross-service vulnerabilities in the first place. If my mother's maiden name is the backup "password" for account recovery on every service I use, then that one bit of info can be used to hijack all of those accounts by just calling customer service, then saying I've lost my password when I moved house. As far as the company knows, then, that invalidates just about everything they know about me - phone number, email and postal address - leaving just name, account number and mother's maiden name. And you can't just allow someone with that info to cancel the account, either, because that's a different kind of attack. You can't use social security number, either, because that's unique to Americans and if it's known in more than one place, then it's a vulnerability, not an account recovery strength.

Unfortunately, there may not be a solution to this problem. What we need for account recovery is a shared secret known only to the customer and that particular company, and one that can't be lost or forgotten. The best way would be to register these details with a trusted third party like an attorney. Generate a truly random key for each company account, register it in person with an attorney and go back to them if account recovery is needed. We give up convenience, but we gain security.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At this point, any gain in security might be worth it.
PPS - Worth it for customers, that is. The companies won't like it.

Prioritisation

The killer feature of productivity software and methods should be prioritisation rather than filing. We deal with such a large volume of inbound traffic in our digital lives, from social media to email to articles and videos from our favourite websites that we need systems to help us focus on the most important things first. Facebook already tries to show you what's most important on your Timeline, but as far as Facebook is concerned, Facebook is all there is. What we need is a way to draw absolutely everything in our lives, from all that digital stuff above to the actions and projects, movies, TV shows, books and so on into one inbound stream, or as few streams as possible. That makes the next step easier: figuring out what's most important out of everything.

This will always take some time. After all, there's always more stuff coming in, and you'll always have to deal with it. However, if you're dealing with the most important stuff first, and you know that it's properly organised, you'll know that everything is as good as it can get. There's no need to stress that you aren't dealing with the hundred and three things that came in this morning when thirty of them are company update fluff from upper-upper management and another thirty are a passive-aggressive "reply-all" war about no business of yours. This, to me, is a key of GTD. Consolidate your inboxes, your filing and your action lists, prioritise them properly and then just do the work. It gets really hard to do sometimes, but it's absolutely worth it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have too many digital inboxes that refuse to play nice.
PPS - One day, I'll figure out how to manage them better from a single interface.

Between share housing and independent housing

Would you agree to live in the equivalent of student housing if the rent or prices were lower? If you had less space and shared bathrooms but gained an inner-city location, would it matter to you? I'm not sure. For me, I don't think I need my shower and toilet to be *in* my house as long as it's in the same building.

When you think about it, this is kind of a step between a share house and your own house. In a shared rental situation, you get your own room, but you have to make do with one kitchen, one lounge and one or two bathrooms. In your own house, you get all of those things to yourself, but for a higher price. There may be room in the middle for independent living with some shared facilities, but more available than just at universities.

Then again, plenty of people will not be willing to give up their ensuites and the privilege of shuffling naked to the toilet in the middle of the night. One day, we may see that arrangement as the "first class" equivalent of living spaces, compared to economy (share housing) and business class (student housing). I've actually never lived in either a share house or student housing, though, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, it would remind me of church camp.
PPS - And as long as it's clean, what's the harm?

The problem with prison

Before our morality fully develops, we picture prison as a place where bad people go to be punished. We don't want prison to be a comfortable or nice place, because it's for bad people. A lot of people never really grow out of that mental image.

The problem with prison, to me, is that criminals are a drain on society whether they're in prison or out. Economically, the best result of prison sentences should be rehabilitation - turning criminals into non-criminals. That doesn't happen automatically, and it doesn't work on everyone, but it should definitely be the goal. Otherwise, we're losing to criminal enterprises on the outside, or we're paying a large amount to keep criminals locked up. If we can, instead, vastly reduce the rate of reoffences, we'll start seeing some economic benefit. It will take a lot of time for society to change its collective mind about criminals, but if we can view prison as more of a hospital for criminal minds, rather than a dark pit we put people we'd rather not deal with, that will be a start.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are probably fewer criminals unable to be rehabilitated than you think.
PPS - Or I'm a naive optimist.

Don't pre-reject your work

I read Chuck Wendig's (typically profanity-ridden) rant about "pre-rejection" which is what I've been doing to, well, everything I write, basically. Except the flash fiction I vomited straight to the web that one year when I was actually writing. I've been stowing away my pieces because they're "not good enough".

Well, Chuck would have some harsh words to say about that, and I really need to listen. The point is, I've got a couple of pieces I'm sitting on because I've pre-rejected them and I've decided they don't belong out in the world for whatever reason. It was some time ago that I promised to start submitting to real publishers, and it's high time I lived up to that promise, starting as soon as possible.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that story I actually sold still hasn't run.
PPS - I'm kind of starting to think it won't, which is a demoralising thing to happen to your first sale.

Diversifying Hollywood

Hollywood may need to start doing more with less in the future. Putting all their eggs in very few baskets of the "traditional" Summer blockbuster is going to prove a more and more risky proposition until all we get year to year are endless Transformers sequels, cut and pasted from previous scripts. Sooner or later, someone will stumble onto the obvious idea of diversifying their portfolio, figuring out how to make better movies for less money or just making a wider variety of movies.

I think, in general, the days of the behemoth movie companies are numbered. When they collapse, there will be a lot of creative people with nothing to do, but a love of movies and visual entertainment. Those people will probably start making lots of smaller movies on shoestring budgets and putting them online.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For some people, that's probably all they can do, and so they did.
PPS - And I'm glad for it.

I assume all calls are scams

If you as a company are initiating a customer call, it should be standard practice to identify yourself first. Otherwise the call comes to the customer and basically goes:

"Hi, this is 'Robert' from Telstra, can I please have your full name and date of birth to verify your identity?"

Your immediate answer should be "What? No, sorry, I have no way of knowing you're really from Telstra."

Unfortunately, at that point, you run into a bit of an impasse. The customer shouldn't divulge any information over the phone until he or she is satisfied they're talking to the real company. The company shouln't offer customer information over the phone until they're sure they're talking to the real customer.

The only way I can see this going well is for the company to call the customer and ask them to call back on a publicly-listed customer service number to complete the call. That way, the customer starts with reasonable confidence that they're talking to the right company, and the company can ask for identity confirmation. Unsolicited calls, unfortunately, need to start with a high level of distrust, because scam callers have broken the whole industry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I tend to do just as the title says.
PPS - It makes receiving calls awkward, but more secure.

Google robot cars to update street view?

I wonder if Google's robot cars are expected to update Google Street View more or less non-stop. That would be a pretty big advantage for the company, to have up-to-the-day visual data on city streets, but it could also raise some privacy concerns. Right now, Street View is updated at intervals of a few years, in Australia at least. That's at the level where getting caught on Street View is kind of a novelty and something you might even aim for. If, however, there are Street View captures every single day in some places, then you're more likely to consider it a bit of an invasion. You don't want to get caught on Street View every single day on your way to work. You don't want the only "safe" place to be inside the car itself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It puts us under surveillance.
PPS - So do security cameras, but those results aren't just available to everyone.

The internet is confronting

The internet brought together all people, whether they wanted to be together or not. It challenged old racist and sexist stereotypes by having actual, accidental contact between awful people and the people they despised or misunderstood. By this process, it raised the hackles of those awful people, and their first-generation response is to unionise their awfulness, banding together to reinforce their old ideas to each other and convince themselves that the world is wrong, not them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think that will be the response forever, though.
PPS - I mean, I hope so.

We know the supervillain wanted to get caught

At this point in our superhero movie and TV history, it is reasonable to assume that the villains want to get caught as part of their plan, and that the heroes should definitely plan to do something different to counteract that. If the villain assumes he or she will be caught and will be interred somewhere specific, change that arrangement. Move the facility, audit the security, chain them to a post in the ground in the middle of the desert, anything but the flimsy cell in the middle of the police station or even the standard supervillain prison where all his/her friends are kept, even if that's in specially-designed, isolated cells.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the new common sense.
PPS - Which means it's time the trope was subverted.

An easier home dishwasher

Unloading a dishwasher can be a pain, and, a lot of the time, it feels really unnecessary. Why go unloading it if the dirty dishes are just going right back in afterwards? Why not just have dishwaser drawers everywhere and, when they're dirty, just run them and the dishes are clean again.

Well, the first problem with that is expense, of course. If every drawer is a dishwasher, then every drawer is as expensive as a dishwasher, too. Instead, I think the best idea is to model your dishwasher setup after commercial kitchens. The dishwasher there is a pull-down square hood that you load and unload with heavy plastic sliding trays of whatever you want. So you have one dishwasher and a lot of trays, and you just put the trays away in your cupboards when they're washed. A little drainage for the runoff and you're set.

Now, your kitchen might start looking a lot more industrial than you'd like, but for some people who prefer function over fashion, I think this is exactly the kind of solution they need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been mulling this one over for a while, since my brother-in-law expressed a desire for the dishwasher drawer design.
PPS - It's still very much a first-world problem, especially since the solution will run into several thousands of dollars.

Preventing HIV infection with drugs

Apparently there was a study recently on a potential HIV-preventative drug that found it could be up to 90% effective for preventing new infections if taken daily. However, a very large number of the participants who were given the drug to take daily during the study failed to do so, and some contracted HIV as a result. Despite this, the scientists were able to create a statistical model based on the amount of the drug present in blood samples in the trial group.

So here's my question. You (hypothetically) have been identified as an individual at risk of HIV infection due to your lifestyle, and you agree to participate in a drug trial for the prevention of that fatal infection. You are provided with the drug for free, plus education on how to reduce your risk of infection via other means, then you go home, go out, neglect to take the potentially life-saving drug, engage in exactly the same risky behaviours as before and get HIV. You will now die.

I'm stunned by this. Really. If I were the scientist administering the study, the first person in the trial group who showed no detectable levels of the drug in their system plus an HIV infection would have gotten a sharp dope-slap to the head. The second person maybe a disapproving glare. From the third onwards, a resigned sigh.

The only thing I can think is that these people are so hopelessly lost to themselves that they didn't see the point in trying to prevent infection and prolonging their lives anyway. And now that I've come to that realisation, it makes me sad. To think that there are people so lost and hopeless in the world that they don't really care if they live or die. It's heartbreaking.

Please, if you're prescribed life-saving medication because your doctor thinks it's a good idea, even if you're too depressed to care if it works, please take it. Please. It would be a tragedy to the world if you were to die, as much as it is a tragedy for anyone else to die.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, it's either depression or the "it's treatable" mindset.
PPS - Treatment should be a last resort. An ounce of prevention, etc.

The coffee cups on TV are empty

I hate being able to tell that the coffee cups on screen in a TV show or movie are empty. Actors come in carrying two in one hand at odd angles, set them down quickly and heavily, someone else picks one up and tilts it almost horizontal to sip from it when it's supposed to be fresh and new. It's just a detail I notice that pulls me out of the action and says "this thing you're watching is fake".

The thing is, the fix is super-easy: fill them with water. For any other beverage container - a wine glass, a regular drinking glass, a bottle of water - directors or props people put something in them. For some reason coffee cups are immune to this treatment and are carried empty. No doubt it saves them several seconds of preparation and avoids spills, but I think the main motivation is "it won't be visible, so don't bother". And they're probably stretched pretty thin already to bother with details like this. Still, if I were in charge, I'd make sure the coffee cups were filled, because it's a pet peeve of mine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps some props people do fill the cups.
PPS - And perhaps I never noticed those because it looked normal.

How to fall in love

I read an article about a scientific formula for falling in love, and it got me thinking. Basically it's a guided discussion comprising 36 "get to know you" type questions, followed by 4 minutes of constant eye contact. What I wondered was how much of this you could sort of weaponise and deploy against an unsuspecting person if they weren't playing along. Several of the questions ask for each partner to share something in turn, such as a positive observation about their partner, which you might not be able to do to a person who wasn't knowingly participating, and the uninterrupted eye contact would be hard to pull off on someone unsuspecting. Still, some parts could definitely work.

The catch is that this isn't designed to elicit one-way affection. The method is designed to pull two people close in mutual affection, so attempting to use this as a way to just get laid will only work if you're a psychopath.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be trying this my wife for Valentine's Day.
PPS - I might let you know how it goes.

Swatting is a trust issue

Swatting - the practise of calling in fake anonymous tips to the police to get someone's house raided by a SWAT team - is a security issue, at its core, because it hinges on an abuse of implicit trust. The police trust that an anonymous tip is completely genuine and so urgent that they can't delay acting on it. That trust should not be so easily manipulated. By all means, act on anonymous tips, but it needs to take more than "I'm not telling you who I am but there are guns and drugs at this address and they know you're coming". Maybe send someone around to look the place over first, or quickly check whether the area has seen any bad activity lately. Don't just rush off at the first hint of a chance to use your ex-military tanks and grenade launchers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We do still need the ability to call in anonymous tips, though.
PPS - I just think the police need to be more careful with them.

You're allowed to correct your outdated trivia game cards

If you play trivia games, you know that sometimes the answers can get outdated, such as "Which movie holds the record for the most Oscar nominations?", depending on when the game was published. People become angry or discouraged at such outdated answers, but why not correct them yourself? You don't need the publisher to produce a whole new version just for you. If you know the answer is wrong now, you could break out a label printer and just stick the right answer on the card, over the old one. Would that be so bad? Yes, you'd be "defacing" the game, but would you rather have a game card that's pristine and wrong, or one that's right?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Somehow it gains more weight when someone else prints things for you.
PPS - I can see this becoming less of a hangup in the future.

Lame Facebook quizzes

Sometimes I look at the ridiculous online quiz results people post to Facebook and roll my eyes. "What's your old-person name?" "How weird are you?" "Which 90s sitcom hairstyle are you?" Most of them seem lame and absurd, certainly not worth my time and very likely not worth anyone else's time either.

However, despite my disdain for them, I won't put anyone down for posting them, because I think they serve another purpose, too: introspection. These days, we spend far too little time thinking about and observing our own behaviour critically. We just kind of let it happen and tell people it's their problem if they don't find us acceptable. These quizzes are the only introspection some people get, and the only hint that they might not be perfect - that there might be some room for improvement in their lives.

From that point of view, I consider it a good thing that lame Facebook quizzes exist. Even though it's done somewhat in public, it encourages the kind of private, critical self-reflection that is so rare in the world these days.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I still won't take any of them myself.
PPS - Well, hardly ever.

Mental health

We talk about mental health and mental illness quite often these days. Is it taking the metaphor too far to say we should practise good mental nutrition and get plenty of mental exercise? Well, whether or not it stretches the metaphor, I think the mental equivalent of eating junk food and sitting still all day is bound to catch up with you, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably not with a serious mental illness, though.
PPS - Just mental laziness.

I'm not a fan of horror

I'm not a big fan of horror in general, but I think it's modern horror in general that I have a problem with. See, old-school horror wanted to scare you with monsters or aliens - things that aren't real - and let you get on with your life afterwards. You get a good scare, but you can let it go because it is so clearly fiction that it doesn't really stick with you. Modern horror, on the other hand, wants to be completely plausible, get right down there inside your head and settle in for the rest of your natural life, burning in the impression that, with just a tiny little push, your life could be precisely this horrifying, not even kidding a little bit. Old-school horror wanted to give your heart a little shot of adrenaline. Modern horror wants you to have PTSD. Forever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, and the authors are really good at it, too.
PPS - I suppose I could desensitise myself, but that seems like a lot of work for a small payoff.

3D printing out-of-production materials

Perhaps one of the big advantages for 3D printing technology as it becomes more common will be the ability to reproduce old things - materials and objects that have been destroyed or are no longer in production. For example, we had some yellow textured glass in our patio in the home where I grew up. About two decades after the house was built, someone threw a rock through two panels of that glass. We were unable to find an exact replacement and instead settled for a pretty close match. With more advanced manufacturing technology, we might have been able to have an exact match produced fairly easily. The same would go for tiles.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For books produced these days, "out of print" is an absurd notion.
PPS - When that happens to physical objects, too, the world will quietly change again.

A la carte TV subscription is not what we envisioned

We are sort of beginning to get a-la-carte pay TV, where you can choose just the channels you want from a wide selection, but it's not quite what I imagined or hoped for. What I imagined was one service (though multiple competing services would be better) with a wide range of channel selections available and the ability to choose only those you want to pay for, not to be forced to buy them in bundles.

What we are beginning to see now are many individual online services - Netflix, Quickflix, Hulu - with different exclusive content each, making them the equivalent of the "channels" of traditional pay TV. Each one has its own subscription costs, which means you're paying individually for the particular shows you desire. So there we are, paying for individual "channels" based on the content we want. It's just a much more disjointed and unsatisfying experience than what we want as consumers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And consumer desires tend to be at odds with company desires for profit.
PPS - Which is basically an explanation for the entire entertainment industry.

Positive speaking

I have a theory that how we talk about situations, objects and people to each other and to ourselves affects the way we perceive those things. For instance, if you constantly refer to your phone as "this stupid thing", you're not going to develop a healthy relationship with it, are you? You'll be less patient with it and more eager to rid yourself of it, because it's not "my beautiful new phone" any more, just "this stupid thing". It's much easier to attach more negative epithets to "this stupid thing" even than to "my phone". "This stupid thing" can easily turn into "this stupid, slow, ugly thing" and retain those associations for a long time.

I'm not sure what the process of cause and effect is, and it could easily be that the negative associations latch on and cause the insulting name rather than the name causing negative associations, but the point when you assign a negative name must come with some baggage, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do try not to do this myself.
PPS - It's harder than you think, sometimes.