Author: admin

I am always amazed when I see people jumping the turnstiles in NYC. I find myself wondering “What are they thinking?”

In general, they tend to be well groomed and well dressed young people, so I am guessing that they can easily afford the modest fare.

Maybe they think they are rebels, bucking the system, sticking it to the Man. But in fact they are just hurting everyone else, dealing death by a thousand cuts to a transit system that is trying its best to accommodate the needs of the most difficult to run and interconnected city in the nation.

New York is a special place. It’s a city where people not only tolerate but celebrate diversity and cultural difference, where we all try to learn from one another, where we realize that people from everywhere in the world have much to teach us, and much to contribute.

So it’s hard to see entitled individuals simply taking all that for granted, and in their ignorance attacking the very infrastructure that makes it possible.

I’m pretty sure that these are not people who voted Republican. This is New York City after all.

But I’m guessing that many of them were too lazy to go to the polls on Election Day. I’ll bet they just said “Free Palestine” or some other convenient slogan, and then stayed home, robbing the rest of us of the slim margin of votes that would have preserved our democracy.

So now instead of an actual government we have a ruthless authoritarian kleptocracy, which is quickly dismantling the checks and balances that make democracy possible.

Meanwhile it looks as though Palestinian refugees are going to be shipped out of Gaza en masse, and around the world vulnerable people are about to die unnecessarily while our nation’s reputation takes a nosedive as USAID is dismantled.

I realize that the fare beaters are just being clueless idiots. But sometimes people need to do better than be clueless idiots.

Various people talk to me about what happens after you die. And I listen attentively, hoping to gain some insight.

Unfortunately, so far nobody who has actually died has come back to give me a proper report from beyond. It would be nice if somebody did.

Until then, I am going to wait patiently.

I remember seeing Tim Robbins’ film Bob Roberts three decades ago, soon after it came out. It tells the wild and fanciful tale of a creepy arch-conservative authoritarian politician on the rise who presents as a kind of friendly Bob Dylanesque folkie. Sort of Don’t Look Back meets A Face in the Crowd.

What struck me most about it was the segment in which Roberts is invited to be the guest host of a show that is clearly modeled on Saturday Night Live. Several SNL staff members protest when Roberts unexpectedly turns his appearance into a political pitch.

In real life, Elon Musk was more strategic. He used his time on SNL to present as slightly goofy and harmless. Unfortunately, we now know better.

Recent events suggest that Tim Robbins was eerily prescient. It feels as though we are watching Bob Roberts, the Sequel. Except this time it isn’t fiction.

The other day I posted about Douglass Engelbart. I discussed his prediction that humans are evolving exponentially as a species, because of our access to computer-based tools, which are growing in power exponentially over time.

In response, Andras posted the following very reasonable observation: “Not to take anything from the well deserved celebration but I wonder if there may be an inverse devolution under way.”

I’ve been thinking about this as well. Engelbart observed that humans were evolving exponentially, but he didn’t necessarily tell us whether this is a good thing. Clearly we have capabilities now as a species that we did not have even a short time ago.

When something happens these days, many millions of people can not only know about it pretty much instantly, but also respond to it, sharing their thoughts with other millions of people. Active discussions involving entire populations can not only begin but continue to mutate over the course of a single day.

Not that long ago this would have been seen as the realm of science fiction. Before the Web (a mere three decades ago), mass communication was pretty much limited to the old fashioned “one to many” broadcast and print paradigm.

But this evolution doesn’t necessarily mean that the power of social media is a good thing. Cancer grows exponentially, and nobody thinks of that as a good thing.

We are indeed evolving exponentially as a species, just as Doug Engelbart predicted, but that may not be a positive development.

There isn’t always a binary yes/no answer to the question “Do you know so-and-so?” Rather, there is a continuous range of correct responses to this question, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0.

There are people I’ve known all my life, and others that I have known for decades. In the latter category there are some people I knew for decades but then completely lost touch with.

Can I actually claim to know those people? Or do I really just know a younger version of them — a version that in a sense no longer exists? In any case, I don’t think that kind of “knowing” rises all the way up to 1.0.

Then there are the people I know only from professional conferences, or as friends of friends. They know who I am, and I know who they are, but there are vast swaths of information that we don’t know about one another.

And after that are people I’ve met only once. Maybe we had a conversation which stuck in my mind. That is a kind of knowing, but much nearer to 0.0 than to 1.0.

Finally there are the people with whom I have shared some sort of social situation, but with whom I’ve had at most a brief and meaningless conversation. If they are famous, my fragile ego might be tempted to say “I’ve met so-and o.”

But wouldn’t really be honest. On that superficial level I’ve met a lot of famous people. But I seriously doubt that they have the faintest idea who I am.

And I’ve noticed that of the people whom I really know (nearer to a 1.0 than a 0.0) who happen to be famous, I tend to forget entirely that they are famous. Which is probably a good thing.

Douglas Carl Engelbart would have been 100 years old today. One of the towering giants of computer science, he was, essentially, the father of user interface research.

But more than that, Engelbart believed in humans as toolmakers. Specifically, he said that as we continue to evolve our computer technology, we are in essence evolving ourselves.

Since computational capability evolves exponentially, this means that in this modern era, we possess the opportunity to evolve exponentially as a species. And he personally invented many of the new computer tools that could make that possible.

After witnessing so much recent stupidity on our national stage, it’s nice, for a change, to think about somebody who was actually intelligent.

On the other hand, as we learned in today’s news, maybe they are just really incompetent fools. Let us hope.

I love the fact that the official W.H. explanation for its decision to rescinding the memo was “dishonest media coverage.” Let that sink in for moment.

Essentially, the W.H. just said that if some news outlet badmouths a policy, that is sufficient reason for the W.H. to reverse that policy. Rule by sound bite.

It’s as though the entire lot of them are still stuck in third grade.

If you want to convert a democracy into a dictatorship, a good place to start is by grabbing power that doesn’t belong to you. The reasonable people in the room may be too confused to effectively stop you.

The Constitution of the United States is very explicit about impoundment of funds allocated by Congress. The President does not have the power to simply refuse to spend that money. Those funds do not belong to the executive branch. They belong to Congress.

Here’s an analogy: Suppose you put money into a bank. You know that it’s your money, not the bank’s money. But suppose the bank says “Sorry, but we’d prefer to keep this money. Go away.” Would you be ok with that?

That’s effectively what the January 27 memo is saying. Somebody is claiming ownership of something that belongs to someone else.

I believe the term for that is “criminal activity.”

Sometimes an interactive program I wrote for my computer won’t quite run right on my phone. Or else it will run, but not the way I expected.

And sometimes something that worked great on my phone won’t seem quite right on my computer. Or maybe a program runs just fine on both my phone and my computer, but not on my multitouch tablet.

So I tweak and adjust things. And not just the technology underneath but also the design of the user interface.

Because the way you use your mouse or touchpad on your computer isn’t really the same as the way you use your stylus and fingers on a tablet. And neither is the same as the way you interact with your phone.

And when you’re working on a VR/XR headset, that’s yet again a whole other thing.

Trying to get the same essential capability working across all of these different devices is always a learning experience. And at the end of the day, learning experiences are good.

Hypothetically speaking, suppose that somebody with no qualifications whatsoever is appointed to head a major branch of the U.S. government. Suppose further that the people who actually make things work in that branch are extremely intelligent, highly skilled, and have worked hard for decades to prove their worth as they moved up through the ranks.

What should those people do when confronted with a new boss who has no idea what is going on, and most likely doesn’t have the capacity to learn? Should they all find a way to gracefully work around the useless person at the top, while saying nice things to him to make him feel good?

Of course all of this would be much more worrisome if that branch of the government happened to be responsible for the security of our nation in the event of a military attack.

Hypothetically speaking.