Stoss' Home » Reality

It’s all about Game 1

Stoss — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:56:09 +0000

I recently read a book on some misconceptions of randomness called: ‘A Drunkard’s Walk: How randomness rules our lives‘. One point that stuck out at me was a section on how sporting events like championships series in the NBA or the World Series etc. are a horrible measure of which team is better. That really seemed interesting to me.

Here are the basics from the book: Forget for a second whether it is a best of 3, 5 or 7 or whatever series. How many times have you heard an announcer say something like “Winning the first game gives the winning team a huge momentum”, or “Only times in history has a team come back from a 3-0 deficit to win the < insert championship>” ? It actually has nothing to do with momentum! It has to do with statistics. Speaking statistically the team to win the 1st game in a 7 game series has a 66% chance of winning the series (ie 2 out of 3 times). The book goes into the math of this, but essentially it is because of all the possible combinations of winning/losing that could happen in a 7 game series once you know the outcome of the 1st game, 66% of the outcomes will end with that team winning.

I was shocked at this! Could stats really prove that a weaker team is more likely to win a series simply by winning the first game? So, as a geek, I wrote a computer simulation to test this. I set it to play 100 million World Series where the teams were completely evenly matched (ie. 50-50 chance of either team winning) and then took the metrics. Below is one example, but all of the outcomes I ran were almost identical to this:

Team 1 Wins: 50006154 (50%)

Team 2 Wins: 49993846 (50%)

Team1 Wins First Game And Wins Series: 32821540 (66%)

Team2 Wins First Game And Wins Series: 32805104 (66%)

% 1st team to win wins series: 65.626644%

You can see that the teams won each roughly 50% of the time and 66% of the time the 1st team to win, wins the series! The book holds up. So if you are a betting person, this mean waiting until game 1 is over, then betting on the team that won for all of the remaining games and 66% of the time you will come out ahead!

Reduce this to a 5 game series and you are now 70% likely for the first winner to win and to a 3 game series 75%.

Now all of this is assuming the teams are of identical skill, which of course is impossible to actually tangibly measure

But just for some food for thought let’s look at what happens when I give Team 2 an advantage:

T2′s Advantage	T2′s Wins overall	T1 wins 1st and wins series	T2 wins 1st and wins series	1st to win wins series
51%	53%	63%	67%	65%
55%	61%	55%	74%	66%
60%	71%	45%	82%	67%

So what does this mean? It means even if a team is “better” than another team by a factor of 6-4 if the underdog wins the first game they are still 45% likely to win the series. That’s seems like a pretty decent shot for an underdog (regardless of Hollywood’s obsession with the underdog having a 99.9% change of winning).

So when does this advantage go away? If I reset the teams to even strength it isn’t until the best of 35 games (World Snooker Championship is best of 35) that the first game winner only has a 56% advantage. After that the curve gets really steep. At the best of 505 games (253 wins) the first team to win has a 51% chance of winning the series. I started to graph the limit, but got bored.

Keep in mind this is done all by simulator, no momentum, no “home vs away”, no external factors like weather, media etc. So, Does this hold up? Using Wikipedia I went through and dug up the first winners of every series… Out of 105 World Series 67 first game winners have gone on to win, which is 63%. Isn’t math fun?

This was just one of the amazing bits of this book, and I highly recommend it. It analyzes in detail the Monty Hall Problem and various other mathematical quandries that are so seemingly simple that you just can’t help but get them wrong.

Cluster F*ck 2011 (aka Election 2011)

Stoss — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:14:15 +0000

Over the past few days I have been sarcastically tweeting out random crap about the upcoming federal election in Canada. The problem with this approach is that I cannot sum up my frustration with this event in 140 characters. Below lies the complete platform with which I will base my future updates on this matter.

If I had to choose a motto for this election it would be this: An election that no one wanted, brought on by a reason no one cared about, at a time when we cannot afford it, amongst candidates that aren’t worth our votes.

This election was not spawned by the will of the people of Canada. It was spawned because of a light at the end of the tunnel by two wanna-be big-wigs and their fellow sheep, who leapt at the slightest opportunity that may give them a hope of adding PM to their business card. I mean, let’s be honest here: Iggy couldn’t lead an ant army to a picnic; Layton lives in a socialist dreamworld where money grows on trees and the streams flow with gold bullion; Harper’s platform is more anti-Canadian than the entire list of our enemies combined; Duceppe wants to split up our country; and May has about as much chance of changing Canada as I do getting a blowjob from Megan Fox. (Megan, if you’re reading this, I will vote Green if you do, in fact, blow me.)

And while Harper being our Prime Minister may leave a horrible taste in most of our mouths, it is certainly better than him having a majority government and wreaking his particular brand of havoc like George W did for his 8 years on the global scene.

On top of it all, we are still in the middle of an economic crisis. People seem to have forgotten that because we weren’t ‘as bad off’ as the US or UK, and because it isn’t exciting news. So, Sun and CTVGlobeMedia have relegated the story to the business section, which no self respecting ignorant Joe Blow reads anyway. Elections cost around $300 million. That’s $300 million less that the government can do something with. To put that in perspective; the Conservative budget, which Layton and Iggy both said they would vote against, offered $300 million to low income seniors as part of the Guaranteed Income Supplement program! So what they basically said was that they’d rather pay for an election, which by all rights should result in the same government, than give money to your grandmother. If this isn’t abuse of power, I don’t know what is!

What these guys seem to forget is they work for us. Given that 165 of 308 seats house didn’t go to Harper last time around, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t the Prime Minister of choice for over half of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should have an election every 18 months to try again!

Protection Against Protection

Stoss — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:16:12 +0000

The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.” Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!

But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.

There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.

Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
Purposeful circumvention: You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.

Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.” By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?

Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.

We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified. Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!

We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.

PS: I hate Two and Half Men.

Flight Sense

Stoss — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:08:07 +0000

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do! Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

The Fight Against Futility

Stoss — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:35:52 +0000

Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?

The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60′s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.

Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..

There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.

I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!

Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?

Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there. The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.

It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread. Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean: It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.

Top One Reason People Hate Technology

Stoss — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:44:09 +0000

I hate “Top” lists. I do. All of them. I’ve hated them since before Letterman tried to make them his own, and I hate them even more now when webpages take 10 links to show 10 pictures of the top 10 potentially homophobic animated characters as judged by someone with the television knowledge of my left ass cheek.

But here is a list that I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate. The Top Seven Ways Technology Owns You. For those of you who don’t want to (or can’t) read:

OnStar cars
Google’s data mining
Facebook and other social networking sites
Digital Cameras being used in public
Credit Card data mining to determine your risk as a card holder
CCTV
RFID Tags

OK, where to start…

OnStar: OnStar uses is the combination of 2 major technologies. One is a similar system to the black box on a airplane. This technology in cars has been around since 1970! It tracks data on crashes and is used to make cars safer for the general public and can be used in court to show dangerous driving. The second is GPS. Now, although this become operational globally in the 90′s, similar technologies have been around since the 40′s and were widely used in WWII. Having cars speeds controlled by these technologies is not scary, in fact it is probably the best method of accident prevention. Several years ago they started demo’ing Magnetic cars in California where there was no need to accelerate or drive. Speeds were controlled by magnets in the roads and a computer system. Cars could drive 70 mph within 5 feet of each other without any human error causing accidents… computer error, well, that is for another entry Oh and BTW, don’t you have to voluntarily buy OnStar?

Data mining (Facebook, Google, Credit Card): I wrote on this before, but I will re-iterate. Credit Cards companies are just that: Companies. They are in business for the bottom line. In the same vain as Health Insurance companies charging more to people with heart disease in their family and car insurance companies charging more for 17 year old males, they have every right to determine your risk to their bottom line and the bonus to them is, you can’t lie like you could on a physical, every purchase tells a story about you. One thing the article did teach me though is to stop paying for lapdances on my Visa. Now, Google and Facebook are very similar in this regard. You tell them something about yourself and they use it to their advantage. Write or wrong, that is the agreement you make by using their services. There are 100′s of search engines, don’t like it, use one who cares less about who you are… The one example I am tired of hearing about is this (which seems to be in every tech article I read) “Facebook changed their terms of service and essentially gave themselves the ability to do anything they wanted with user’s data and content whenever they felt like it, the community freaked out.” THIS IS PROPOGANDA! Facebook wasn’t trying to steal your data, they were trying to protect themselves like any company who holds sensitive information. The term actually was put in place because: If I send a picture or a message to you there are now two copies of that item: mine in my outbox and yours in your inbox. Now if I cancel my account they can simply delete my copy, but who “owns” the other copy? If you sent a Christmas gift to your girlfriend and then broke up, just try getting it back! In exactly the same manner Zuckerberg said that they need to keep control of that item, because now that you are gone you certainly aren’t the rightful owner. Admittedly, they could have gone about this in a better way, but regardless, they were not giving themselves the rights to all data!

Digital Cameras and CCTV: The argument here is that because everything from cellphones to pens have cameras in them, you can be recorded at any moment and placed on YouTube for millions to see. Fair enough. I myself don’t see the necessity of a camera built into every object. But is it really changing our lives? Do you walk around constantly thinking that you better not take a peak at that hot chick’s ass for fear of being caught on a total stranger’s camera? I am the first to admit this is a small small world, but I am not about to start panicking that I will be caught with my pants down by someone that happens to snap a picture at that exact moment and by some miracle that picture will be seen by someone I know. The biggest load of bullshit on this list is CCTV. This is the most useless technology ever concieved (at least in its current form). I don’t care that I am on camera nearly my entire day, because a) no one is watching and b) even if they were they couldn’t tell it was me! There is no magic CSI “enhance” button that turns %^#$%& scribbled on a gum wrapper in the backseat of my car into “I shot JR” and lands me in jail.

RFID Tags: I left this for the end for no other reason than it is my most simplistic and unelaborate argument. RFID tags are not going to take over humanity. They aren’t. It is a fantastic technology that can be used in numerous industries and in many fashions, but assimilating humanity into having all ID inserted under the skin is not going to happen overnight. AND even if it does, this is not a way for the governement to track our every move. The range of an RFID tag is less than 10m, so unless the gov’t wants to invest in more monitors than human beings, our every move isn’t going to be tracked! The passport argument doesn’t even hold either. If anything this will speed up airport times, and give border guards the exact same information they already have! Doesn’t sound like an apocalyptic move to me.

It is “Top” lists like this that promote the ignorance and fear mongering that sweeps through and takes over rational people’s minds. And this is the Top One reason why people hate technology: Dipshit reporters writing fake stories about exagerated technological capabilities with the underlying message being “EVERYBODY PANIC!” I myself will live my life, own a camera, use Google and Facebook, charge stuff on credit card, walk around in any major city surrounded by CCTV. I suggest you do too.

What a Hack

Stoss — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:16:30 +0000

It was recently announced that 1 month ago perennial Stoss Blog antagonist Twitter had a security breach when a high ranking executive’s account was accessed by a “hacker”. The hacker correctly guessed the users’s secret security questions to gain access to the account then surfed through corporate data and released it to well known techie sites. As the hacker himself posted: He did this to make people aware of the importance of security.

The articles I have read have used this as an excuse to bash the practice of “1 password for all sites” and the use of easily guessed security questions like “hometown” or “mother’s maiden name” which are ubiquitous it seems in the land of web sign up sheets. It’s almost as if some assmonkey whose only knowledge of security was the aluminum key that locked his pansy-ass diary decided one day it would be great if we could secure our most personal data using such totally secret, impossible-to-find-out data such as our pet’s name or the street we live on! Yeah, no one would be able to penetrate that code!

But I don’t so much have a beef with this. It’s security practices in general, both corporately and personally that are appalling! We focus so much energy on enforcing ridiculous rules that are absolutely unsubstantiated and yet no energy on the flaws in the human logic of password selection.

Here are the fallacy’s behind my favourite policies:

1) Change your password every 3 months & don’t use the same password for 10 changes

The genius that came up with this should be shot in the chest simply because it is now become the most ridiculous belief since the Hayley’s comet morons killed themselves to ride it to utopia. Would you change the lock on your house or your car doors every 3 months? Hell! Most people don’t change them when they move or sell their car! How many previous owners have a key to your house do you think? I have never figured out the logic behind this absolute waste of time policy that does about as much good as putting duct tape over your monitor to stop UV radiation. If someone finds out your password, they aren’t going to wait for 3 months then go, “drat, foiled again!” when it fails. It only takes a few minutes to download the entire contents of your harddrive, so by the logic of preventing data theft we should change our password every 5 minutes, right? If anything this helps hackers, because people are not random! We get lazy and append a number or capitalize a different letter to form our new password, so a hacker can guess for months on end and, once he has “your pattern”, will perpetually have access to your account. And this is the reason why not using the same password for 10 changes makes no sense! If anything this encourages using mypassword0 through mypassword9.
I also love the idea of “3 months” and “10 changes” seemingly being industry standards. What possible study could have resulted in these numbers being determined as the “optimal” values?
I love policies that seem picked out of a hat and then spoken about like they are a gospel to the industry. As if 91 days is a magic number for a criminal to guess your password, so better change it before day 90!

2) Password strength monitors and post-its

“Don’t tell anyone your PIN”, “Never write down your password”, “We will never ask for your password in an email”. BUT what we will do is analyze every character and tell you if your password is “strong” enough. Strong enough for what? To knock out Superman? To cut a diamond? We are talking about basic mathematics here. A password of length 5 made up of all small letter only has about 12 million combinations, throw in one capital and it is about 60 million combinations. Throw in a number somewhere on top of that and you are now at 3.5 billion combinations! That is a pretty big number. But consider most companies/websites have a 3 wrong and you’re out policy (A policy that does make sense), that is a hell of a lot of attempts on your password and if you can’t figure out after the ten thousandth time your account was locked that someone was hacking you than you deserve to be shot like the guy who proposed the stupid policy above.
The thing here is that the combination of letters, number, capitals and special characters is almost irrelevant, the most secure password is random, entirely random. I am still using a random letter combination I got generated for me by Geocities when I had my first webpage over 12 years ago. Sure, mathmatically it is probably trivial for a random generator to exhaustively guess it, most personal computers can do 1 billion+ calculations a second. But the point is it ain’t that likely! Just don’t use a simple dictionary word like “idiot” or “password” and you are probably in good shape.
I also love how secure it is that we are typing in a password that no one is supposed to know, but it can tell you “how strong” it is, meaning somewhere your password characters are analyzed. How is that different than me saying “psst, tell me your password 1 character at a time and I’ll tell you if you need more numbers or capitals, but don’t worry, my mind will forget it immediately”.
And of course this is where post its come in. The problem is not writing your password down, it is writing it down in the context of your computer and login. For instance:
Stupid: Writing your password in permanent ink on your monitor
Bad: Writing your password down and placing it in the top right drawer at the office
Less Bad: Writing it on the birthday square of your mother in a day planner you keep with you that has no reference to what that random word could mean or what login is associated with it.
Even better. Hiding it in a tattoo on your ass, written backwards and upside down. Of course you’d have 10 of them and have to re-design it every 3 months….
Writing a random word and placing it in a random location is not a bad idea at all! In fact if anything it’s a safeguard in case someone needs access to your data!

Locking all of your secrets behind a single alphanumeric combination is as logical as locking a door to a convertable or keeping your safe key hanging on the number dial. However in this day of technology we have to have something to allow us secured access to our information, and until we all scan our eyes, fingers and ass prints into a global database or want to prick our finger for DNA each time we want to read email, we are stuck with it. Be smart and just don’t fall into the trap and think that your security policies actually have as much bearing on security as they do on wasting your time. Oh and I know your mother’s maiden name and eye colour, so don’t use those as your “secret” questions.

www dot withdrawl dot com

Stoss — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:15:28 +0000

The other night I came home to no Internet. It appeared I could not get an IP address from my ISP. (un-geekly written: Internet had a booboo). I wanted to call the provider to tell them I was down, to make sure they were investigating, however I realized to do this I needed access to their website where their phone numbers were…

I was going to call my parents to catch up with them, but my VoIP phone needs Internet…

I wanted to write this blog entry, but… etc.

We are surrounded by Internet so much these days, that it is seemingly becoming almost a necessity of life. I tried calling an embassy the other day for information and their telephone line directed me to the website that contained the phone number I used to call them; very helpful.

While 84% of households in Canada and 74% in the USA had Internet in 2008, that is still beat by 90% of Iceland and 86% of Norway (like there is anything else to do in those countries anyway).

What else on this planet is as ubiquitous as the Internet? What else reaches so many generations and so many business verticals? Maybe driving? It is estimated that under 200 million Americans drive, so what’s that, 60%? That comes close. But then again, I have driven only a dozen times in 3 years. Which would you rather go without your car or your Internet?

With the web becoming more and more mobile, being connected is not only becoming easier, but it is becoming more inescapable. A new technology called MiFi is being advertised now in the USA. BUY THIS STOCK! This technology will be wanted by anyone who travels anywhere, ever! But this just goes to show how much we crave the Internet. We now have what is essentially a portable router to carry around so we never have to be disconnected anywhere a cellphone works, which these days is pretty much everywhere, except maybe anywhere North of Toronto or West of Thunder Bay.

The CEO of Google recently gave a speech to a group of University graduates where he told them to turn off their computers! And how rightfully so, except 5 years from now he’ll have to amend his statement to “Turn off your cellphones, toasters, coffee mugs, and iEngagementRings” in order for people to truly be disconnected.

What Hogwash…

Stoss — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:34:35 +0000

I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed its first death this morning, but since I have been typing (According to word press 80 words), 43 people have died of cancer and 39 by communicable diseases! 152 deaths in 2 weeks in Mexico is not a significant number!

Now, please don’t take this as “Go out and lick sick people’s faces”, all I am saying is be reasonable! This is same problem i wrote about in “Tazed and Confused“, people don’t understand reasonable precaution versus gross over-reaction!

I am flying in the next coming weeks to Canada (13 cases), the US (65) & Germany (3). And now for my favourite part: Math!

Country	Population (mil)	Percentage Affected
Canada	35	3.4×10^-7%
USA	307	2.1×10^-7%
Germany	83	3.6×10^-8%

So, statistically 0% of the population. Last year globally 1600 people died by falling out of bed. Including 450 people in the US. At that rate the Swine Flu would have to be in action in the US for 1 death every 2 weeks for about 17 years!

I’ll take my chances.

Editor’s note: I just read another article which said the “US death” was actually a Mexican boy in the US. If this is true, are we really counting a death on US soil as a “US death”?

The Continuing Social Networking Discussion (part 2)

Stoss — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:52:05 +0000

Chapter 3 – 5:

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid. Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people kill people all people kill people…

It is also the start of what appears to be this author’s favourite way to make a point… putting several questions in a row at the end of a paragraph to make you “think” about his ideas, as opposed to proving his ideas.

Does anyone remember Bree or lonleygirl15 as she was known on the web? He uses this interesting example of a new type of entertainment as an example that: “We’re never sure if what we read or see is what it seems”. Is a videoblog of a 16 year old girl who turned out to be an 18 year old actress really the best example of falsehood that we can find? How about the current Swine Flu “epidemic”, in 1st world countries no one has even died from this “epidemic”, in fact the only deaths have been in Mexico and of the 150 possible cases, only 20 swine flu deaths have even been confirmed! But wait! The fact we are in an epidemic and should be panicking all across the world is something paid, non-amateur writers are discussing, guess I better go by my $0.02 face mask! That will guarantee my health!

The next 2 chapters were sad. Mr. Keen tells us the sad story of his favourite record store going out of business and blaming it entirely on iTunes, and illegal file sharing. The sadness of his friends who will miss the choice and wisdom of the employees and how nothing will ever be the same… You know what? GET OFF MY LAWN. Things change. The vast majority of people prefer to pick and choose their songs. And in fact, this is nothing new… remember mix tapes? Isn’t that a collection of favourite songs, akin to an iPod play list? We have simply made the transportation mode more efficient. It is sad that the we won’t have the wisdom of a music geek’s opinion on music, but hell we get Ebert’s opinion on movies every day and ignore him.

Let’s think of the radio. Here is a technology that music companies embrace, but yet isn’t that really delivering their artist’s art to billions of people for “free”? The music companies found a way to make that profitable. Keen pulls out of his ass the beautiful (and smelly) estimate of 20 billion songs being illegally downloaded in a year. Coincidentally, I this comes from the RIAA’s wonderfully amazing calculation that 40 songs are illegally downloaded for every song legally paid for on the Internet. Let’s do some math. The current belief is 24% of people in the world have some sort of internet connection. 6 billion people on the planet, therefore 1.44 billion people have internet. That means every person who has access to the internet anyhere in the world has downloaded 14 illegal songs and ~ 1/3 of a song legally. Plausible? Keen even refers to the legal download industry’s $1.1 billion a year business as “paltry”!! We live in a world where $1.1 billion is paltry? What is paltry is the number of companies to jump into this space! At $1.1bn if 3 companies each took 33% of the market they would be $400million companies. That means all 3 companies would be on Forbe’s list of the 400 most profitable companies! Hardly paltry.

None-the-less I am not condoning illegal activities, but the truth is that all technology can be copied and shared. The Internet simply provides a convenient way of doing so. As we have seen so many times before, fighting the Internet is futile. Embrace the technology and you can share your piece of a $1.1bn business space.

His next topic is of course video. Same argument really. A comment I really enjoyed was his quote: “Blockbuster [is] already hedging their bets by planning downloading services of their own”. Hedging bets?! I call that a smart CEO who is making good decisions. Give that guy a $90mil bonus!

There is a common theme in this book so far. Besides the fear-mongering, Internet is out to kill all things attitude, it is that everything is better if the person is professional at it. ie. I am no good as a writer because I don’t write as a profession. The entertainers on YouTube cannot provide good entertainment as they are not professionals. He deals in so many absolutes. I tend to believe this world isn’t absolute. I keep saying adapt to technology, but in reality I am aware this isn’t possible, and definitely isn’t a short term move. The point is that amateurs have their place in our society. Some of the best magic, juggling, entertainers I have seen were street side performers in squares and parks. That doesn’t mean they should all start websites and YouTube channels. Amateurism is a title and not an indication of skill. Let’s compare Susan Boyle to WIlliam Hung. Both of them are stars and relative amateurs, but I think that is too easy of a point to have to spell out.

Direction of Anger

Stoss — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:11:41 +0000

Many of you have probably heard about the young girl Tori from Woodstock, Ontario who has recently been kidnapped. I feel so sorry for the parents and family of this child. She has been missing more than a week and I am sure none of you reading this, nor I writing it, can imagine the state of affairs around this town and the involved parties.

But this entry is not about her or her family. This blog is about the knowledge-less, Monday-morning-quarterbacks who are directing their anger at a senseless crime towards the Woodstock and Provincial Police.

I am tired of reading “An Amber Alert should have been issued within hours of her being away”, “She was always abducted, never missing” etc. The lead investigator of this case even had to take time away from investigating to tell everyone that this was just terminology! As he stated: The process of finding a child, whether decalred missing or abducted is the same! “A rose by any other name…” if you will. Media obsession and factless opinions has caused people to focus not on the important part here “A little girl is missing”, but on who to blame for her not being found (yet). I refuse to quote the commentary I have read over the past week. Needless to say it focused on lazy cops and scrutiny of a not-fully-publicized case.

So I did some research so I could speak to these people directly:

First off, Tori does not meet the criteria for an Amber alert. Taken directly from the Amber Alert website as criteria for issuing an Amber Alert: “There is sufficient descriptive information of child, captor, or captor’s vehicle to issue an alert”. In this case we have a blurry photo of a person in a white jacket, who by all accounts is walking beside the girl, not necessarily “with her”. Whether this is right or wrong, I am not making a statement.

Secondly, and this is the painful part, of all abductions by a non-family member in 2007 only 17% were recovered. This is a very sad statistic, but what I mean to indicate here is that an Amber Alert is not a golden ticket, so stop praising it like it’s the miracle panacea we’ve been striving for!

The senselessness of blaming the police for not solving a crime in the time of a CSI episode is beyond me. Place the anger where it belongs: On the deranged men and women who perform these acts. Fight for tougher sentencing, a loop-hole free legal system etc.

Fact: The man who admitted to murdering my Uncle got less than 1 year in jail. This is not due to lazy cops, it is due to the fact that a criminal who is caught gets time taken off any sentence if he is “forced” to stay in jail during the trail. We award criminals for having to wait to be tried and sentenced!

Fact: The person who killed my 2 cousins is still at large 15 years later. I do not blame police, I blame our justice system for not allowing police to charge the man they know did it without further evidence. The case remains open.

Don’t fight the battles you think you can win (ie. taking fighters of your safety to court à la the BC taser inquiry), fight the battles worth fighting. That is the only way change will be made.

Tori, I wish you well and hope for a safe reunion for you and your family.

A bright idea!

Stoss — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:46:57 +0000

Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of the office and work. The morning sun is usually enough light for me to find my seat and turn on my computer.

I have been doing this for 3 years and yet my coworkers are constantly surprised that I am sitting in the dark! Is it such a novelty for me to not want to bombard my eyes with blue-tinged, glowing chemicals at 8:30am?

On this note of turning lights off, recently “Earth Hour” seems to be deemed, by the media at least, a success. But really… Was this event really a success?

I was in a meeting the same day as Earth Hour occurred. We came into the room turned out the lights so that we could view the projector and held the entirety of the meeting in the darkened room. When the meeting was done, we got up to leave and the host of the meeting turned the room lights back on and closed the door to the now empty room. Why? What is our obsession with having everything lit up to its fullest potential? I walk through cities at night and see rows of 50+ story buildings with every floor brightly shining into the night! Even if there is some one on every floor, is it necessary that every single light be on? The linked Wiki page says the TO saw a 15% decrease in electricity consumption during that hour. Now I am no expert on energy, but if all I had to do to decrease consumption by 15% was shut a light switch off for one hour, and energy is a big concern for me, can’t this be done every night of the year?!

As my former roommates know I do tend to prefer darkness, probably my inner geek coming out, but I don’t think it is this preference that makes me think that Earth Hour (note the highlight) is a ridiculous concept. It is the fact that turning off a light when a room is empty is common sense that makes me come to this conclusion! All throughout Europe they have sensors that turn off hallways lights in hotels and business when empty, and turn on lights as soon as doors open. Even our office building in England has that, and we are a small building. These are not expensive tools, and according to Earth Hour, can save 10s to 100s of MWs every hour!

Regardless, you have to admit that organizing a global project to save sporadic amounts of energy for one hour in 88 out of 195 countries is not an efficient way to tackle this problem. Declared success or not, the real problem Earth Hour was trying to address wasn’t even scratched. How can you make the smallest dent in a problem by changing your behaviour 0.01% of the time (1 hour out of an entire year). Let’s put it this way: I want to lose weight using exercise. Using the Earth Hour Methodology® I only need to exercise 1.15 minutes in a week. Sounds good to me, but how many health experts would advocate that as a solution?

Look, I am not an environmentalist. I try to apply common sense to my daily life. Don’t throw wrappers on the ground, reuse shopping bags, use reusable containers for leftovers etc. So before the environmentalists say I am dismissing the effectiveness of the awareness Earth Hour spread, all I am saying is: Take all the effort you put into Earth Hour; The viral Tweets and Facebook groups, the banners, the government lobbying and put that towards a longer term solution and the Earth would benefit more.

BTW: This is all assuming that the Earth benefits from this… But that is another blog entry

A View from the Street

Stoss — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:58:13 +0000

As was my view in this entry of my blog, I can now provide even further proof of this ridiculous world we live in.

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over those years there have been some drastic changes that now have evolved into digital pictures. Pictures that don’t physically exist, but that can be immediately transferred around the world. This evolved into Google Street View: The ability to see, given a postal code, an area in pictures.

Every single article I have ever read on this topic includes some form of this quote:

But it has been accused of invading people’s right to privacy. Those left embarrassed include customers filmed leaving sex shops and a man caught being sick in the street.

In fact some articles even claim that divorces have been filed, which of course seems really ridiculous…

What the people in this particular village are now discovering is the same phenomenon that I spoke to before: By making a scene you are in the end screwing yourself over. Also known as the Streisand Effect.

Google Street View is not an invasion of privacy. Why? Privacy is the ability to keep things about you private to you or a group of people. The front of your house is not a private matter. I am willing to concede that the ability to view a streamlined picture of an entire street could be used for evil, but in the same token so can phone books! Millions of telemarketers use phone books to call you every single day. All a phone book is is a collection of every phone number alphabetically for a town. All Street View is is a collection of house fronts for a village in the order they appear on the street!

All technologies have the ability to be used for undesirable purposes. Do you think it is a coincidence that when you are listed as single on Facebook ads for singles in your area appear in the toolbar? No! This site is data mining what you upload to try and entice you to buy something. 20 years ago a company would spend millions on researching people to figure out who was single, what age range some one was in, what their favourite movies are, and now we are voluntarily typing that data into an international database!? For Christ’s sake there are marketing people who have wet dreams about this sort of thing!

CCTV is all over the UK. I am on camera every single day. There are people everyday being caught coming out of sex shops, vomiting in the streets and yet someone taking a static, let me repeat, STATIC photo of your house is an invasion of privacy? Are you kidding me? I walk past houses everyday, I see though the front windows and sometimes see a family having dinner, sometimes see the tv on. Is it really private knowledge that people eat dinner and watch tv? Hell, a friend once told me she was coming home from work and her neighbour had the blinds open watching hardcore porn!

The bottom line here is that irrationality and un-education about a technology or a cause makes the situation worse. If all these people did was read Google’s Policy, they could perfectly quietly ask to not have their pictures on the site, and Google will comply as several hundred people have done and no one would have known. (Coincidentally, just as you can do with the phone book)

Unfortunately my house is not on Google Street View, so I cannot show you my lovely flat and let you invade my “privacy”.

140 characters…

Stoss — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:19:01 +0000

I am a bit of a geek. I like technology and I like understanding the various uses of that technology. I have spent the last month or so reading every news article I can about a new (I won’t say newest, because as we all know in this industry “newest” is outdated within minutes) phenomenon: Twitter.

I signed up for an account after some prodding from other fellow geeks and went on my way exploring my life 140 characters at a time. What I found out quite quickly is: My life in 140 characters is quite boring. I don’t mean to say I lead a boring life, in fact I argue far from it, but my thoughts and experiences as a whole are not sum-up-able in such arbitrarily small space (I mean even a txt message has 165 characters).

Stephen Fry, the “UK poster boy” for Twitter, tweets non-stop from what airport he is in, to what he had for lunch, to the amazing sunset he sees in Singapore. Now don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry. His brilliant comedy and sharp wit is some of the best the UK has to offer. (Watch QI for an excellent display) But I don’t really need to know about every little thing he does, especially since: a) I will never meet him to discuss those thoughts and b) I appreciate him because of his comedy based on his life experiences, not his life experiences themselves.

Then I stumbled across Christopher Walken. How, here is a Twitter-er that actually is funny and only posted when something is necessary. Only one problem: It isn’t Christopher Walken!

This started my brain in motion. This is the Internet, and as is too often the case the hot blonde 19 year old you are hitting on is a fat 45 year old Star Trek fan trying to make it big in the “Dear Penthouse” letter writing business. Nothing on the web is real. This blog isn’t real, it is a series of 1s and 0s cleverly placed to form something we can read. You don’t really have proof that the Stoss you know and love (well…know and put up with) is writing this article. In fact you have no idea where this article is even stored! Truth be told, I am writing it and I have no idea where it is stored. I pay an amount of money to people to let me use a computer and tie that space to a memorable mnemonic. (Fellow geeks will recall the original CompuServ who thought that complex number letter combination would be memorable, yeah, not so much.)

To some extent, aren’t we all a bit thinner, a bit more built, a bit smarter and a bit more popular on the web? Think about your Facebook, do you post the 3am picture of you stumbling drunk down a back alley to piss, or do you post the one that has perfect lighting and shows a great smile with you giving the shocker to thin air? We form an online persona to escape reality and befriend people we haven’t spoken to in 15 years just for the ability to brag that we have more than 500 hundred “friends”.

We don’t show our real selves on the net for the same reason we dress a bit nicer at work, or for the theatre, or when we go out to a club: We want people we don’t know to see us the way we want to be seen, not the way we actually are. We spend all this time in public school being told “be yourself” when the truth is, in ever y area of our lives we are someone different. This is actually an area discussed in The Tipping Point a fantastic book that in one chapter discusses how our personalities are situational and mutable, not constant. You could even extend this theory to divorce, work problems etc. When the situations change, your mutate your personality, unknowingly and change the former perception of you to other parties.

This isn’t going to change, and in fact I don’t want it to change. I enjoy being my-multiple-selves and I enjoy each wake of life as much as I can, but I am also aware that “I” is not a singular word. So enjoy your life, use Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, but don’t be fooled into believing you are that person. You are who you are, not what people read about you.

Editor’s Note: cwalken, whose twitter page I mention in the post above has now been asked by Twitter to be changed to explicitly state that he is not Affiliated with the real Christopher Walken.

Second Editor’s Note: Twitter has now removed the page and the ghost writer has come forward.

Tazed and Confused

Stoss — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:01:48 +0000

Many of you may have heard about the trial of the mounties in the taser death of some nut at an airport. I don’t want to minimize a death in anyway, and I feel for his family and friends, but many words have been thrown around about these officers: “knee-jerk reaction”, “impulse acting”, “instinctual” etc. and all I can think of is “Wait… What?!”

These are police officers we are talking about! In most cases all they have is a knee-jerk reaction time, or a split second to make a very difficult decision. We are literally listening to a group of Monday morning quarterbacks tell us what “They would have done” and that is absolute bullshit. I have never faced a situation where a person was directly threatening my life or the life of others around me (although perhaps I should get myself in those situations, according to Die Hard 4, Transformers and most action movies all I have to do to get the hot chick is save the world), but I can certainly say that my frame of mine would not be the same as having to make a decision about über-stressful work. Sure, hitting send on an email to an executive with the word “fuck” in it isn’t smart, but it isn’t a mistake that is going to kill me!

In the same regard, an actress recently died while skiing. A headline in the UK from this tragedy: “Natasha refuses £6 helmet”, are you kidding me?! A woman has died and before the dust settles on her grave we are starting to say that “helmet action is overdue”? The article I linked even says that 2 people who died (of the VAST 3 he talks about) were wearing helmets and still died! Dying is a risk of being MORTAL it is what makes life so much fun to live! if there wasn’t a fear of dying the X-games wouldn’t exist!

Everyday people die from smoking and car accidents, and yet we legally sell cigarettes and hand out driver’s licenses to anyone who wants them, but 1 famous woman dies and someone decides it’s time that helmets be mandated for skiing, what happens when someone dies after that law is passed? Is the next logical step to wrap all people everywhere in styrofoam?

We are so bent on saving everyone, that we forget what rational safety is.

Skiing has been around since over 1000 years! How could we have survived that sport for so long if helmets are mandatory for it?

Taser’s have been around for 35 years, and we are just now realizing that people can be injured by injecting them with electricity?!

Wake up people, death is inevitable and no bylaw or government mandate will solve that.

Few see anything wrong

Stoss — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:54:58 +0000

As always I have an opinion: The recent Virginia situation as before when this has occurred is being brought out to be a sign of the decline of society. This is because it is easy to point to a moron with a gun and blame him for all the fear in the world.

What you never hear is that the decline of society is the cause, not the affect. And this is where I step in.

We now live in a world where a 16 yearold girl with her tits popping out of her waterbra can talk on one cell while txting on a another and last night was rammed harder than King George’s 12th century castle during the crusades by the highschool quarterback who eats E for breakfast alongside a 6-pack of fine 3% beer and a picture of the American flag which he gives the finger to for 3 hours a day. And few see anything wrong with that.

We now live a society where anyone (as the shooter did) can purchase a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition and have it described by the store owner as “an unremarkable purchase”. And few see anything wrong with that.

We also live in a society where dozens of twisted, murderous Hollywood movies gross billions of dollars each year and yet the shooter now has two “twisted plays” he wrote posted on the internet as “proof” that he was psychotic. And few see anything wrong with that.

And, we live in a society where you shoot 32 people and CNN does 24-hour coverage of the “ongoing updates” including: What colour his toothbrush was, the MacDonald’s employee who served him a Big Mac just minutes before the shooting and the climax of the story: The frowny face he used on MSN the night before to end his conversation with his German penpal. This guy got exactly what he craved: attention. And few see anything wrong with that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not in anyway condoning or rationalizing shooting 32 people, but to have the chief of police and president of Virginia Tech stand on national TV and say that the shooter “was a loner” is just a sign that they would rather polish the knobs of a self-righteous group of spoiled brats and dismiss the sociopath as a nobody, loser, than address the fact that there is a large societal problem here.

Can stupidity be stopped? Of course not! And to think otherwise, is to disillusion yourself like the majority of the western world. It isn’t the fact we can stop it, it is the fact that we need to acknowledge it that is my concern. I have said it a million times, you cannot legislate against stupidity. It is impossible. If someone wants to do something dumb, whether it be to shove fireworks up their ass and light them, or kick a dog in front of a bus or shoot 32 people for no reason… they WILL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Stop feeding the fire with your insistence that only “loners” are capable of this type of massacre! This was a stupid, stupid act. In a society where we can accept drugs, alcohol, glorified media, depraved sex, horror and destruction as daily things that occur, do not try and convince me that a “loner” who was mad at his ex-girlfriend is the cause for decline in our society.

Mistaken mistakes

Stoss — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 10:15:20 +0000

So the other night I couldn’t sleep. It was about 1am and I thought, maybe some TV will put me out. So I turned on the TV and there was only one thing that sounded good… well two, but “I came, I saw, I blew” cost extra.

The other was the movie “13 going on 30″. And I figured, Jennifer Garner is hot, so it isn’t too gay if I watch it.. especially if I have a beer while I watch…mmmmm….

Now, this movie is a blatant ripoff of “Big”, and no slight to Tom Hanks, but Garner pulls of the clueless adolescent adult better than him. Which may explain how she could even consider having a baby with Ben Affleck.

Now the premise of this movie is pretty typical: All kids want to be older. But the “hook” is that this little girl gets to experience her future. There is an interesting scene where she asks her mother “If you could do one thing over, what would it be?”, Her mother answered “Nothing”. This brings up a point, which I would bet the director/writers and the teenie boppers never got. How would the mother know about her mistake(s)? The only reason why Garner thought she made mistakes was because she skipped over the time when she made them and the future wasn’t what she would have expected. If “time” had played out normally, would she have thought her mistakes were mistakes?

In the end of course (Yes, I am going to spoil this movie, because if you didn’t predict the ending from the 1st 5 seconds of the previews before it even started you are too stupid to be reading this blog) she ends up with the guy of her dreams. But it took a trip to the future for her to realize this was the guy of her dreams.

I think this just goes to show human stupidity. Everyone meets someone who is “perfect” for them, but we are too busy looking for something else to realize it. Garner as looking for popularity, and almost lost the “perfect guy”.

If I could jump 15 years into my future, would I find a “mistake”? If you could jump into the future would you realize you lost someone or something because of an error in your judgement? A very interesting thought…. Especially in a time where divorces are about to out number marriages…

Maybe why people don’t have regrets is because they aren’t aware of what they SHOULD regret?

….and this is why I can never sleep.

Sanity or Sanitization?

Stoss — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:21:26 +0000

As many of you who are faithful readers of my rants know, I have this very unexplainable obsession with hygiene. We humans have this insane fetish with being absolutely sanitized from top to bottom, so much so that we are actually making ourselves susceptible to worse diseases, by killing the very ugly helpers that eat that bad stuff!

What gets me the most is lining the toilet seat with toilet paper. When I sit down and the toilet seat is warm, I just enjoy the sensation… I don’t wish there was a cushy layer of “protection”.

We will spend hours rolling around in a hot sweaty lovemaking session swapping unimaginable fluids, then go wash our face before bed.

We blow our nose into 1-ply Kleenex® and then scrub our hands until he skin comes off. But five minutes later we grab a greasy burger, carry it to our booth on a “well washed” tray and then eat it and lick our fingers.

Or how about Chicken wings? Served in highly sanitized wicker baskets coated with wax paper? YUM!

We religiously check expiry dates, and then eat day old muffins from Coffee Time because we same 10 cents.

Humans are insane.

Social Commentary

Stoss — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:06:13 +0000

I have to comment on this article, because it shows a LOT of what is wrong with society.

I am not sure if you followed this story, basically because I have no idea who “you” are, since you are sitting at a computer looking at this at any time and in any place.. So regardless, here is the Reader’s Digest version:
Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame) was asked (NOTE: Asked) to give a talk to a group of Highschool students about his experiences.
Upon arrival to the school, the school administrators asked him not to bad mouth McDonald’s because someone on their board own’s one. This in my mind is absurd! The only reason why this man has the little amount of fame he has is because of his research into how crappy fast food is! When he refused, he became the bad guy.
Then during the lecture, he reffered to himself as retarded, and insinuated that the highschool teachers smoke pot.
Two points here:

He is retarded! Anyone who injects that much McDonald’s into his body, without some sort of torture being threatened upon him, has to be! This is not an insult to the mentally handicapped people, this is an illustration of how freaking STUPID Morgan Spurlock is!
I dunno about you, but I think many of my highschool teacher’s smoked pot, and if they didn’t they sure as hell should have!

Because of his comments, he had to post the above mentioned article as an apology. Now I 100% agree with his decision to not apologize for the words, but explain that they were not meant as hurtful. He was hired to entertain. Making derogatory remarks IS entertainment, just ask Hollywood… Will & Grace made a sitcom out of that concept.

Some of the comments to his entry are from parents not even in the same country as him saying how ashamed he should be! (oh yeah, he said “Fuck” as well, b/c we all know that is the devil’s tongue speaking)…

Does anyone over 30 REMEMBER highschool? You used to mock the fat kid, the ugly kid, the stupid kid! And yes I mean you, the one reading this who I have no clue who you are! It’s a generaization that ACTUALLY works! Oh yeah, and I bet most of you once, just once, dropped an F-bomb!

The kids of the school wrote in some of those comments how they were not offended and how they thought he was great, and everyone else was taking this too far… these are 16 year olds being more rational than the 45 yearolds teaching them! The principal actually called them immature for laughing at such trash humour! TRASH HUMOUR! Turn on MTV! Listen to 50 cent! Morgan is a fucking saint compared the crap these kids are into!

It boggles my mind that rational people can be so irrational about a man who isn’t even famous! He is like Subway Jarrod’s evil twin! These two have the combined influence on society as a Canadian flee has on weather patterns in China! The only reason I heard about this is b/c of the uproar! Not b/c of the original comments! These parents are furthering the evil they are trying to defeat by making it more public!

People are starting to go insane. That is the only possible explanation. I hope there isn’t an insane gene that turns on inside me when I have highschool-age kids, because if I am considered sane now, you guys better watch the hell out!

Is this It?

Stoss — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:48:35 +0000

So I was thinking, which is scary enough in itself, but regardless. What if human beings are exactly like any other animal, except that we have this highly developed brain which causes morals, emotions, thought etc?
Do the popular lions always win Class President? Is there a class system of buzzards flying above us? Do lonley, bored seaturtles lay in their boxers shorts, sipping on a beer while channel flipping at 3am hoping to catch an exposed boob on cable tv?

My guess is not… We have invented these constructs using our all powerful minds, which leads me to believe that, yes, this is it. There is no magical purpose in life for a zebra. He trots along ’til a cheetah makes it dinner. This is the same for us. We are not here to unveil some mystical truth, we are here to trot along until cancer turns us into compost.

Some may view this as depressing. I view it as liberating. Once we stop thinking we are higher and mightier beings, we can start to notice the little things more. A friend of mine had as an MSN name “95% of species that have existed on this planet are no extinct, what makes you think your odds are so good?”

Forget about social constructs, stigmas and arbitrary rules that can change depending on which way the wind is blowing. Animals, plants and humans ([sic] see animals) are here for one reason: None. So enjoy it, this is it. That’s not a bad thing. And until we accept it, we’ll all just be like the seaturtles.

Thoughts By Stoss p5

Stoss — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:51:39 +0000

So, one thing that is quite neat about women and men is the different approaches they take on appearance. I found that when women need a haircut, they plan long in advance, have 2 or 3 magazine clippings chosen for the style and have had, at minimum, an hour or 2 discussion about what colour, style, and whether it will accentuate their jaw line too much with a few close girlfriends.

With guys, for instance me, it took 5 minutes of asking directions to the nearest Salon, and my only requirement was “Before Sunday”.

I spent more time deciding on what brand of cereal to buy then I did on what I should wear for the next month on my head. And on that note, don’t buy Muslix, it’s actually birdseed. That stuff is like eating trailmix that actually was made from mixing elements found along a dirt trail. I will stick to my Special K.

I think if a guy went to a salon and asked for the “George Clooney” look, the hairdresser would assume he was gay and could cut his own hair.

And why is it that male haistylists have to be gay? And not just gay, flambouyantly gay. You can spot a male hairstylist from 10 blocks away hidden behind a wall, in the middle of the night. They’re so flaming they light up the street.

Anyway, I think the most important point here is having the “Jennifer Aniston” does not make you Jennifer Aniston.. if it did, men would be even more horny and the world does not need hornier men. ‘Cause at the rate women turn down sex, we’d have to start tapping the gay hairdressers…

Thoughts By Stoss p3

Stoss — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 22:48:18 +0000

Where do homeless people get the markers and bristol board? Shouldn’t they be spending the money they do on signs, on FOOD?! Here’s an idea use the cash to buy a fruit cup! We get the fact that you are homeless…. Very rarely do home’d people cover their bodies in mud and sit on the side of the road, just for fun… It’s just not that common. So yes, we get it, we know you are hungry, that is why you are skinny. And if you have a hat out in front of you, no one is going to think you are a hat’s salesman. Signs are not necessary in this case.

So in conclusion, do NOT spend money on markers and bristol board to write on “HUNGRY, please help”. I don’t write one saying “Not hungry, but if you want to give me money I will accept it”. Signs do not help.