Bartz Fired And Yahoo! For SALE?!

Carol Bartz has been fired from Yahoo!. I liked Bartz. I had high hopes. Understandably, then, this is a bit of a disappointment.

I think that Bartz should be somewhat happy about her performance, even though she was eventually fired. She was brought on as a kick-ass manager and she did kick-ass manager things. She trimmed about a metric ton of fat from the company, jettisoning winning properties like Geocities. But she also failed to bring in a clear vision for the company. Was Yahoo services? Was it content? Was it web-applications? Yahoo! does all of these things in a very disconnected way.

Yahoo!'s services are great. I like Yahoo! Mail, I love MyYahoo!, but that's where the goodness ends and the mediocrity begins. Yahoo!'s apps are terrible. They bought Konfabulator for widgets... and did nothing with it. Yahoo! Connected televisions are slow and buggy, and even if they weren't, customers seem to be less than thrilled.

Yahoo!'s content is hopelessly hosed. They want to dance the line between inert and edgy, trying to be cool while not insulting anyone, thus appearing hip only to people over the age of 65. In the age of websites like Gizmodo, Engadget, and countless smaller sites that will not mince words, the old maxim of "insult no one," forced upon mass media by the FCC, fails miserably. Instead of realizing that the world is growing up, and thus daring to use naughty words, Yahoo! has been left behind, stuck in the same weird, existential hell in which other Internet old guard like Cnet are trapped.

For evidence of this shift, go to Alexa.com. The audience for Yahoo! is basically flat for all age groups except for 65+, which is highly positive. Same with Cnet. Compare this to a youthful website such as Gizmodo. It is essentially not read by anyone over the age of 40. Even the New York Times is younger than Yahoo!'s audience. Yahoo! cannot pretend to be hip, it has to actually be hip. And being hip means pissing people off.

Regardless, listing the ways that Yahoo! has failed achieves little. It's how Yahoo! can still succeed. They are the fourth largest website on Earth. They are third in the US, behind only Google and Facebook. They have massive reach. They have four major resources that I see: MyYahoo!, Flickr, Yahoo! Pulse, and Mail/Messenger. They have two minor resources, Finance and search.

Yahoo! needs to start with their major portal, MyYahoo!, and generate as much value as possible for the end user. Value comes from integrating all of their tools as easily as possible onto a single page. Facebook, Flickr, Pulse, eBay, news, live video. Integrate Yahoo! shopping into the home page as a service and sell it on the back end as a product, just like Google's search revenue. Don't rely on companies to develop MyYahoo! content, do it yourself. Make it graphical and compelling. Hell, sell the development of MyYahoo! content.

Use Flash and HTML5 to make content boxes dynamic. It allows people to visit other sites and read news without leaving their portal page, which keeps them on your services longer. It also gives you significantly more vibrant versions of mail, messenger, and video.

Fuck your own services! If customers are using other things, let them use them. Develop high quality YouTube, GMail, and MSN boxes. Do EVERYTHING that you can with others' products. Do this because no matter how much you do, you will be able to do more with your own. Always develop, always innovate. If you are not releasing a major update once per year, you're dying.

The goal is to turn the MyYahoo! page into an "app" that people leave on for all of the time that they are at the computer. Facebook is already this for many people for social reasons. Yahoo! can become the flipside of the coin, being the portal through which people find things to share via the social connections.

Flickr is still the premier place for pro photographers. The service has stagnated almost entirely with no updates whatsoever for months, and no major updates for years. Design Flickr Apps, push Flickr integration with digital picture frames, and push Flickr onto cameras. Flickr is integrated absolutely nowhere else in Yahoo!. WTF?! You want Flickr everywhere. Make it easy to do whatever the hell a user could ever want. They still, STILL, do not have an Android app. That is pathetic.

Yahoo! Pulse will be great once they integrate it into MyYahoo!. Until then, it's a wan rejoinder to Facebook and does little to attract people to Yahoo!.

Mail and messenger are still strong platforms for communication. Again, with better integration between Yahoo!'s other services, it encourages users to use Yahoo!.

Finally, Yahoo! cannot succeed with the detached, mathematical advertising of Google. Google does it better and will win. Instead, Yahoo! needs to follow the lead of Gawker media, where they heavily integrate ads into the overall experience. Yahoo! needs to work closely with advertising partners to develop compelling pieces that are both prominent but not intrusive. The era of the ad-blocker is coming, and soon no one will see any ads ever.

Make ads a choice. Make them desirable. Think about all of the ads that are viewed willingly on Youtube. For example, have a list of "See This Week's Fliers." Companies buy a spot on the list and can also buy a "featured" position that is always at the top. The remaining list is sortable by most popular, most recent, or by category. People click on it and a big, Yahoo! designed (or customer, just so long as it looks good) flier made from ANYTHING OTHER THAN PDF appears through which the user can peruse. This provides excellent advertising data and reveals user engagement. Integrate the same user-optional advertising all throughout the site.

Finally, some of Yahoo!'s content is good. Finance has good user engagement and a decent reputation. Sadly, they are doing little with this. Other financial websites like MarketWatch and Bloomberg are blowing Yahoo! out of the water. The same goes for Yahoo!'s OMG! and Shine pages.

Basically, I think that Yahoo! should ditch the branded names scheme and create entirely new .com addresses. For example, AOL has TMZ for gossip. It is a standalone entity owned by AOL. Yahoo! needs to do this with ALL of their content immediately. Build other brands that you can then integrate into your parent brand. Don't try to grow the parent brand beyond its boundaries. OMG! and Shine are already entrenched and have good readerships, but they need much more. They need to start spewing content. Gadgets, clothing, politics, cars, environment, science. If they're not producing original content, they need to partner with someone who does.

Yahoo! can grow, but it will require significant investment in new, productive talent.

Philosophy's Greatest Issue

Is The Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Dead?

If so, perhaps this will make us finally, FINALLY, FINALLY, realize that our drug laws are mind-meltingly stupid.

Do you want to know who killed that tribe? We did. Because we're trying to stop something that will never be stopped, and in doing so have created a massive, multi-billion-dollar market for drugs that makes these barbarous monsters unbelievably wealthy. We make the game so profitable for them that we have whole towns being wiped out in Mexico, and people who aren't even aware of the outside world are being killed for something that they can't possibly understand.

WE KILLED THEM. Legalize drugs! Legalize all of them! Pull the rug out from under this ridiculous industry! Don't do it for taxes, or because you simply can't afford the police anymore. Legalize the drugs because it's everyone's right to ingest whatever they damn well feel like! The pursuit of happiness does not restrict chemical happiness! And it never will, whether we try to do that or not.

People do drugs. We love nicotine, and caffeine, and alcohol just as we love cocaine, meth, and heroin. People will always do them whether we want them to or not. We will not stop them. Ever. Are the people that do drugs stupid? You're darn-tootin' they are! But that doesn't matter. I think people who drink are stupid, and smoke, and eat McDonalds. But that doesn't stop them from having every right to continue on drinkin', smokin', and gettin' fat.

Legalize drugs. Stop the bloodshed that is happening on our streets between drug gangs. Stop the wholesale slaughter of people in Mexico, and stop the deaths of people who are about as innocent as can be found on planet Earth. This is in the power of the Western World. No one else.

Misogyny, Misandry, And The Blended Penis.

UPDATE: I feel better, especially considering the hate that I have received from the "Men's Rights" movement, that the Southern Poverty Law Center has published a report on the hateful misogyny contained therein. When I wrote and posted this, all I was responding to was The Amazing Atheist. I wasn't even aware that this "movement" existed. Well, I'm sure as hell aware of it now, seeing as the group took a movement all over the comments section of my video. When something like the SPLC is on your side, you feel vindicated. /UPDATE

The amazing atheist recently posted a video attacking the CBS show The Talk, where they laugh over a man getting his penis cut off and thrown into a garbage disposal. First off, let's address the fact that their laughing about it is rather disturbing, especially being a man who is more that slightly attached to his penis.

That said, his response is wrong on one level, and at best misdirected on others.

First, he is flat-out wrong in his association of feminism with this. Men and women, who more than smack of misogyny, equate misandry, of which there is plenty in our society, with feminism. This is resolutely not the case.

I read Jezebel a lot. I also read lots of other blogs written by level-headed, intelligent people. Feministe, Feministing, and a variety of other sites that deal with gender and society. If these are representative of feminism in the world today, then he is wrong, and if he can't take feminism seriously, if he can't take the drive for absolute equality of women seriously, then he is nothing more than another stupid white guy who can't look past his own perspective.

Is there misandry? Of course. There's tons of it. Cosmo magazine is a great example, with its subtly misandristic portrayal of men as only animals in need of sexual placating. But all of the misandry in the world pales, PALES, in comparison to the amount of misogyny out there, especially in regards to the violent nature of the misogyny. If you feel that I need to make a list of examples of misogyny, you need to read more news.

For example, JUST as I was writing this, Kotaku, the gaming blog that is actually the sister website of Jezebel, wrote of a large LAN party celebrating the release of Battlefield 3, a video game. They banned women because their presence causes the men to act up. Put yourself in the shoes of the female gamers who wanted to attend, or those who attended the previous year, thus motivating this absurd regulation. You can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.

He uses an example from Forensic Files where a woman killed her husband, but doesn't give us all of the details. The woman shot her husband in the head with a shotgun while he slept, and claimed that he had been beating her. Has he never seen Burning Bed? It's a viable defense. And it's not a viable defense for emotional reasons, there are reams of psychological research data describing the state of mind people can come to be in when living in an abusive household. He uses this as a counter example, but it fails.

He fails to take his OWN words into consideration when saying that women are treated differently. He talks about how every show is the husband killing the wife, and I watch the same shows, it's true, and then a episode is of the wife killing the husband. Doesn't that make any intelligent person think that, if all other cases are one way, and this one is another way, that there might be something different about it?

Especially considering that the episodes of that very show that involve women, which I've seen and I'm sure so as he, where the women's motivations are black as pitch, the women never do what he described. They poison, which is very popular, or they hire someone else.

Women do not physically abuse men. Even with recent research showing that female on male abuse is higher than originally thought, it is still a tiny fraction of the abuse of male on female.

He also mentions a case in Russia that may or may not be true of a woman who beat up a man who was trying to rob her store, cuffed him, and kept him as a sex slave for three days. He talks about the reaction to her behavior, with people creating her a Facebook fan page. Well, I have another case that is definitely true. The Russian “Black Widow.” A woman who was charged with drugging and raping ten men in 2009. I find the reaction of the men interesting. If this had been a man, the response from women would have been universal, “That is horrible. I can't imagine being in her shoes.”

But instead, the response from men was frequently “Why can't I find women like that?!” One of the men even refused to press charges because he liked it and only wished he hadn't been drugged. But even here, there were many obviously misadristic women nearly calling for the beatification of the Black Widow. Their words dripped with hatred. This is not feminism. Not in the very slightest. You would never hear these words from actual feminists like those on Jezebel. But EVEN THEN, the situation is not equal.

Misandry and misogyny are different. Absolutely. They are not different because one is right and the other wrong. They are both equally wrong. But they are different in the behaviors caused by them. The Amazing Atheist fails to notice that men raping women happens all of the time, but women raping men makes international news because it is so very rare.

That is not to say that female-male rape doesn't exist. Truly, women can be sexually aggressive as is found in statistics of sexual coercion between lesbians. But my likelihood of being raped by a woman, in ANY setting, is about as low as winning the lottery. My chances of being raped by another man, on the other hand, are much higher. This is probably the root of misandristic threads in gay culture and the fact that in your average gay club, every man in the building is watching their drink like a hawk.

The Amazing Atheist and the women on The Talk talk about cutting off the penis as identical to the breasts and clitoris. No. Wrong again. As my partner Danielle pointed out very succinctly, the penis can be a weapon, and it is a weapon that is widely used by millions of men every year when they rape. Women simply do not have a counterpart to the penis.

Even the very video to which the Amazing Atheist linked stands as a testament to misogyny, and this is again something that he doesn't discuss. It was posted by some absurd “Manhood Academy,” which references “getting your balls back.” Because in this blatantly, horribly sexist and misogynistic world, masculinity is something that women can take away, because masculinity exists only vis a vis women.

If a man is attacking you for being a bad person, even if you aren't, you call that person an asshole. Nothing else. He's just an asshole. But if women do it, you're being stripped of your masculinity. Because here, masculinity is a reciprocal construct that exists to put women in their place. If women are not in their place, masculinity has been “stripped.” Masculinity is directly associated with sex.

That “Manhood Academy's” website lists this, and I quote”Manhood Academy is the first worldwide male educational center specifically designed to train men like you in social competence. And best of all—our content is ABSOLUTELY FREE. Whether it's going on your first date, saving a troubled relationship, addressing your wife's 'bitch' behavior, making new friends, or standing up for yourself in this emasculating feminist environment, our goal is to teach you how to conduct satisfying social interactions.”

Notice how in their list of things that they can help you do, of the five items that emasculate you, four are directly associated with women. Funny how that is. That is because in this view, women are not people. They are “women.” Something that is somehow fundamentally different and separate from men.

The content of the video is just that, but you cannot avoid recognizing that the people who saw fit to post this video online are just as bad as those they attack.

So why are people not getting up in arms, like the Amazing Atheist demands? Because women doing this is so damned rare. Rape of men is not a pestilence on society. Men might fear mugging, but women on the street fear abduction, rape, murder, AND mugging. It is a predatory world out there, and it is just plain stupid to argue otherwise. How many serial killers killed men? How often do women form gun-toting gangs? How often do women form small armies that are paid with the rape and pillage of wherever their leader sends them? Do you have any examples? I do not. I do have examples of the men doing it, like when the Red Army raped every German woman they came across during the fall of Berlin. Again, you can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.

If I met any misandristic women, I would just as soon run for the hills from their toxic nonsense as I would from misogynistic men. They are equally large assholes in a purely intellectual sense. But something tells me that those same women would not go off and rape, beat, and molest. The men do. I do not feel threatened by misandry, but women do and should feel threatened by misogyny.

It's not that men don't have the right to get up in arms, it's that they have no reason. Sexism doesn't affect them systemically. Men, for all intents and purposes, rule the world. As women reach higher positions of power in the future, this will likely need addressing, and I may become to feel threatened by misandry, but it doesn't today.

Women and those damned angry feminists get up in arms precisely because the pissed off men who follow stupid shit like Manhood Academy are so ready to put women back into their “place.” The definition of manhood for these people is having women under control. Religion wants them back in the kitchen. Society wants them sexualized and put up for decoration.

Angry men the world over want those bitches down. Look at the scummy social underbelly of France that has been revealed with the Strauss-Kahn case in New York. Or the governmental representatives in Australia who keep meowing at female representatives. This is a seething, toxic undercurrent to our social zeitgeist. And because of that, misogyny and misandry are, and will remain for the perceivable future, different. Logically identical, but practically very, very, terribly, violently different.

UPDATE: Because of the direction that the comments on this site and YouTube have taken, I want to focus on a good example of what shows up on real feminist websites. Misandry is not feminism. Real, level-headed feminists write about gender in general, and freedom, and apple pie, and the American way, and all that good stuff!

Once Again, Men Can Be Raped Too (Jezebel.com)

Apple Blows The Doors Off Earnings

Apple's profit just continues to rise, and I see it as a grand endorsement of what it means to operate a company based on a philosophy. Obviously, Apple's philosophy has mutated over the years. They started as a company that was so open, they included circuitry maps in their first computers. Today, they are a company almost defined by its famous secrecy and security measures.

I don't think that the security measures are necessary. Even if companies knew precisely what Apple was doing, they would still fail to copy it. They would fail because it is not the ideas that are valuable, it is Apple itself. It is the machine and the philosophy that produce the ideas.

For example, look at the iPhone. Apple was KGB-like secretive about its production, but why? After it was released, the rest of the market did... nothing. Nokia did not and has not responded. It took Google years to match Apple's quality and conception. It was the idea, it was the company.

Apple doesn't need lawsuits. They don't need secrecy. I think that it is painfully obvious that other companies, being run by idiots who have no philosophy, wouldn't know what to do with the information even if Apple made daily reports as to precisely what was happening behind the brushed aluminum curtain.

A good counter-example is Microsoft. Microsoft is one of the two software giants in the tech world, and they have been floundering badly in recent years. I argue that it is because their philosophy, which was tacit, has become depricated. Apple has an explicit philosophy that is discussed at length by Steve Jobs whenever he is given a chance. He wants things to be beautiful and magical. They must do what they do and do it perfectly. It's one of the reasons why Apple's products sometimes have features missing. If they didn't integrate perfectly, they were left on the cutting room floor.

That tacit philosophy that I mentioned at Microsoft, as opposed to Apple's explicit one, was a philosophy of geekiness. They wanted to take what the geeks had and give it to the entire world. And that worked wonders. The 1990's was, in my mind, the golden age of geekdom.



In 1995, we saw the release of Windows 95, which was really the culmination of Microsoft's philosophy. It was still very DOS-y, and allowed the geeks to fuck around to their hearts' content, but was also user-friendly. If you clicked on something, it ran.

But from that point forward, Microsoft's philosophy became ever-more outdated. Geek stuff got pushed further into the background. It stopped being about numbers and more about refinement and experience. It became Apple's time with the release of the iMac.

Apple has nothing to worry about. Microsoft is now trying to copy the gross aspects of Apple, just as other companies are doing, but without the core philosophy, they are failing and will continue to fail.

I wish that I could like Apple. I wish that I could buy their stuff. But I just can't get on board, and I hate other companies for failing to do what Apple does. I WANT what Apple has, but I refuse to be caged. I refuse to buy into a closed ecosystem.

Morals Don't Exist

• Morals don't exist

  • I hate morals. They don't exist.

  • How do I know that they don't exist? Point to one.

  • If you do think they exist, how do they exist? If morals are objective, such as from God, why should we listen to God? Why is what he says right?

  • I hate morals because there are no answers to these questions. Philosophers have tried for thousands of years and have failed every time. The best we have is utilitarianism, and even that is riddled with problems.

    • Don't even get me started on Mere Christianity. Christian apologists love to attack the simplistic philosophy of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, but then hold up their own facile piece of philosophical garbage as something special. I won't go into a blow-by-blow deconstruction of it here, but as I've said before, if you think that it holds up, you really need to read more books.

  • The reason why I hate morality the most is precisely because it's so nebulous.

  • What does it mean? Right and wrong? What do those mean?

  • Since all words must come from something external, when I describe something as morally right or wrong, what do I mean.

  • I argue that, especially in religious usage, morally wrong means that elicits a disgust response. Even a mild one.

  • We can use the word to elicit disgust responses from stimuli that would have never done so if we hadn't relied on such a poorly defined concept. We can use words with such a massive amount of wiggle room, that we can apply them to situations and then use the word to manipulate other people to have similar responses.

  • Obviously, we do have some fundamental issues that seem inborn. So in that sense, an inner sense of right and wrong does exist. Cross-cultural studies showing similar determinations about hypothetical situations proves this, but that is an incredibly primal response. It has to be if it's shared by all people.

  • These primal responses are notoriously difficult to explain or tie down with words because the sensations in all likelihood predate the formation of language. We can safely recognize these sensations, but when applying words to them that have a whole bevy of subtle connotations, we have to be careful. Otherwise, we can use language to manipulate these deep feelings and totally fuck with our, and other people's, worlds.

Atheists Are Not Out To Get You

The Golden Age Of Geeks

RIM's Bad Strategy

There is an article over at The New York Times discussing how RIM might find salvation in the smartphone market by cozying up with carriers. Basically, the carriers are worried about Google and Apple having so much control over the cell industry and they want a counterbalance.

Unfortunately, doubling down with the carriers is the worst idea. RIM has been cozier and better served by the carriers than any other company in the past decade, which is precisely why they're in the shitter.

The carriers are lazy. They have an oligopoly in the United States and only really care about squeezing as much money from customers as possible. They are expanding their networks more slowly than their European or Asian counterparts, they're services are slower, and they cost more. What the carriers are concerned about, if Apple and Google have their way, is that they will lose the ability to squeeze money from customers when they become what's known in industry-speak as a dumb pipe. Basically, the company is nothing but the channel through which services run.

This is actually an enormously profitable place to be, but it's not romantic and it's very hard to be a rip-off, which is what the cell companies want to be. As such, the cell companies want the status quo to change as little as possible. RIM was attached to these corpses more tightly than any other company. If your company is tied to another company that wants to keep the status quo, there is no motivation to change and innovate. This state of affairs was as much responsible for RIM's current state as any internal problems the company might be having.

It was also directly responsible for a company like Apple, being lead by a legendary boardroom bully, being able to shove its way in and completely upset the old business model.

Reading Rainbow Flashmob

Levar Burton is organizing a Reading Rainbow Flashmob, in an attempt to raise awareness of our illiterate children.

Maybe I shouldn't say that our children are illiterate, certainly they're not. Our kids today are smarter and more capable of multiple, complex tasks than generations previously. Combined with websites, texting, chat, and school, kids today probably read more words per day than any other demographic.

The problem is that kids aren't reading books, and as this study shows, reading stories expands one's sense of self. It makes a person more than they were before! By incorporating different narratives and ideas, we are able to reprogram ourselves. We can make ourselves better.

With an expanded sense of self, nationality and group identity becomes less important. Just imagine if White Supremacists read more books. Maybe they'd stop thinking in ridiculous in-group/out-group terms like the pack of chimps that they are.

But instead of encouraging and expressing reasons to read, we're trying to convince kids to simply know how to read. In our moronic quest to be "better" than Eastern schools, or to cater to the head-aching stupidity that is No Child Left Behind, we're neglecting to explain WHY to our children.

Pale Blue Dot

The name of this blog is taken from a book by Carl Sagan. His wisdom cannot be understated.

BBC Horizon: Why Do We Talk?

Thoughts on Logic

My video and the notes I wrote out before recording it.

• De logica

  • Logic has spent the greater part of its existence trying to be something that is a priori, as in knowledge derived from logic does not require sensory experience for it to work.

  • Bertrand Russell was obsessed with logic and with equating mathematics to logic, thus giving math the status of a priori knowledge.

  • I think that both logic and math are fundamentally empirical things. In physics, you only know that your math is correct with an appeal to experimental data. Similarly, how do we know that two and two equals four? How do we even know that the concepts exist? It FEELS like there is some underlying principle,

    • And certainly, special areas of the brain have evolved to handle numbers, so we do have some degree of neuropsychological data to back that idea up

  • But I think that it's essentially a multi-faceted illusion. We know that two “exists” because I look at a table and see an apple while seeing a separate apple in the same visual field. Thus, I call this impression “two apples.” Likewise, we have the ability to hypothesize about a surrounding environment about which we do not currently have sensory data. If I see an apple, turn around, I assume that the apple is still behind me. So if I fill my visual field with apples, I can count them all, then turn to another pile and continue counting. This ability to assume the existence of numbers outside of the visual field allows mathematics to function without sensory data.

  • But for math to work, it must come back to 2+2=4. If it doesn't we can never “know” if it's “correct”

  • Likewise with logic. It is not a priori. It is fundamentally linguistic. Our language operates on certain rules that evolved to fulfill the needs of communication, but there are many aspects of language that never evolved rules simply because there was never any need.

  • Our complex language has a multitude of semantic issues, such as contradictions. For example, I can say “The King of Mexico is a 6-foot-tall woman.”

    • This sentence works. It doesn't make any sense, but I am able to say it. If we assume the truth of the words, like no women masquerading as kings, then a king can't be a woman, and Mexico doesn't have a king.

    • There are similar issues in the world of logic. One of the most famous is Russell's Paradox, which has to do with sets.

      • Sets are exactly that, a set of something. The set of all spoons is a logical construct that includes all spoons everywhere. If we create a set of all things that are not spoons, that includes cell phones, dogs, Mars, and chocolate cake. Anything that isn't a spoon.

      • But what about sets of sets? Let's say, the set of the sets of things with ears. Thus, we have a set that includes the set of rabbits, the set of dogs, the set of people, ANYTHING with ears. All of the groups within the parent set are still separate sets unto themselves, but they are also part of the larger set of all things with ears.

      • But let's say we have a set of all sets that doesn't include itself. That set would necessarily be included in itself, because it doesn't contain itself... but if we do, that suddenly does contain itself.

      • A famous practical example is the barber that shaves all of the men in a town who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself, then he must shave himself, which is a contradiction.

    • What this does is reveal not problems with logic, but fundamental problems with language, and logic is built on language, not the other way 'round.

      • Russell's problem is that a set of sets is empty. There is no such thing as a set. It's an internal hypothetical construct based on that assumption that there are things that we do not currently sense, but can sense if we explore.

        • So for example, the set of all apples is actually a statement that there are apples that I am not currently seeing, but could see in the future. We verbalize this as the nebulous idea of apples.

        • Plato tried this with his idea of the perfect essence of apple. Again, he was talking about an evolutionary predisposition to believe that there exists a thing that I have seen that also exists in places that I am not currently seeing. This sort of programming fosters curiosity, since there be apples in them thar hills.

  • All of logic is linguist, just as math is linguistic, and language is empirical. Is and not is is logically impossible simply because we've never seen something both be and not be at the same time. It sounds impossible to be and not be, but that's because our language itself is also based on our empirical experiences.

  • The best a logician can say is that the concept of “be and not be” are ineffable internal concepts that represent something beyond empirical reality. And anything beyond empirical reality is philosophically void, intellectually bankrupt, and wholly useless.

    • I'll only briefly talk about that. Language as we use it represents an internal world and an external world. When I say “a bear,” I'm referring to the sensory experiences of a bear, and the word “bear” evolved from common usage of the term between people to communicate either the actual persistence of an empirical entity within the visual field, or the idea of a bear.

    • But if I say “I'm angry,” what I'm communicating is an internal state. The word “angry” did not evolve to communicate this internal state, since they are necessarily ineffable. I cannot show you what “angry” means to me.

    • Instead “I'm angry” actually represents a set of behavior. When I'm angry, I feel the need to punch things and scream.

      • I don't actually. I'm not psychotic, but for the sake of argument.

    • When I see other people punching things and screaming, everyone uses the word “angry” to describe that set of behaviors, and since I want to act the same way, I assume that his similar empirically observable behavior represents similar internal sensations.

    • As such, we have a disconnect between what a word represents and what it means.

Evolution and Self Worth

I don't understand the problems that people have with evolution and its supposed destruction of self worth. As though finding out that our distant ancestors looked like monkeys is counter to our grand sense of self.

I find this absurd. It's as though I believe myself to be scum after finding out that my great-great-grandfather was a serial killer. It has NO effect on me. It does not change me. I am still the "me" that is defined by my actions and words. My past does not define me in the slightest.

This sort of personal or moral essentialism drives me up a wall. People who identify as Irish, or black are insane. You are not Irish. You are you. You are whatever you decide of yourself. To subscribe to some socio-historical narrative and then define yourself as that is barking mad!

It forces you to accept that the behaviors of your ancestors are somehow the right behaviors. That you have a responsibility to continue some tradition, regardless of how stupid that tradition may be.

History is an illusion. All that exists is the present. We are defined by our present and our memories, and at any moment we can choose to change. The fact that my Great⁵⁰⁰⁰ Grandmother was chimp-like (remember, she wasn't a chimp. Chimps didn't exist yet.) means nothing to me.

If anything, it forces me to marvel at the mechanisms in nature that are able to produce me --a GPS-using, latte-making, music-listening, blog-writing marvel-- from the bug-chewing, lice-infested, poop-throwing raw materials of that long-dead ancestor. That's fucking amazing!

I feel downright special knowing that I am the intellectual zenith of evolution on this planet. I am not separate from it. I sprang from it. If you want a spiritual sense of one-ness with the universe, there it is! I am not somehow fundamentally separate. I have no transcendent soul. I am not special in comparison to other animals because some nebulously defined creator made me.

I am a gear in an astounding machine. I am made from the same stuff as my dog or my girlfriend. They and I are one. And just as I can choose to change, my body, and the genetics that comprise me are continuing to change over vast time scales. That doesn't diminish me. My Great⁵⁰⁰⁰ Grandmother was a chimp-like thing, but I am not. And that's all that matters.

I Hate Tablets

I hate tablets. I don't like the iPad, I don't like any of the Android examples, I don't like the Blackberry. I hate them all.

I hate them because all of the tablet fanatics out there, perhaps intoxicated by Steve Jobs exaltations, believe that tablets will one day be the predominant form of computing. At least for now, this is total nonsense.

Every time you talk to a developer, they talk about one of two things: "specific considerations" of tablet development, if they're careful about the words they use; or "limitations" of tablet development, if they aren't. I prefer to use the term "limitations" of the tablet platform. Essentially, until we have neural connections with our computers, tablets are a much more limited form of communication between user and device. That is undeniable. There are simply fewer channels of interaction.

Moreover, the media community and even the tablet developers continue to make those limitations even worse! First was Apple's exclusion of Flash, which was a real bummer, since the iPad's best at media consumption, and that means Flash. Then, it was the media companies trying to block pretty much everything from the mobile browsers. Even on Android, you can't watch music videos on YouTube. You can't watch Hulu.

That is in no way a comparable experience. It's not even different. It's inferior.

When Windows is on tablets, I'll bite. That way, a tablet will be an actual computer. Not a toy.