Ed That Goes Ping

Apparently I Shall Live Forever

Telegraph | News | Want to live longer? Then drop the fitness regime and put your feet up

It is the news that all sloths have been waiting for. Scientists in Germany have found that too much exercise is bad for you and that doing less could lengthen your life.

In a new book called The Joy of Laziness: How to slow down and live longer, Dr Peter Axt, retired professor of health science at Fulda University near Frankfurt, and his daughter, Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann, a GP, say that everybody has a limited amount of “life energy” and that the speed with which it is consumed determines their life span.

Webcomics: Threat Or Menace?

PVP thanks Mike “Gabe” Krahulik for administering an appropriate dose of smackdown to Wiley, author of the Non Sequitur newspaper comic, who’s been not-very-subtly slamming webcomics and web publishing in general in his strips, ever since Scott Kurtz of PVP harshed the mellow of syndicated cartoonists in general by declaring the syndication model obsolete and offering his comic free to newspapers for advertising purposes.

Websnark has some good comments and summary on the whole situation.

All I wanted to say was that Danae, the character in Non Sequitur who’s being used to slam web publishing, is OK and all, but she’s no Agnes. Agnes rocks my world. I just wanted to get that out in the open.

And All the Children are Above Average

Imagine a place where everybody’s a brilliant scientist. I mean, Feynman, Einstein, Bohr, Hawking kind of brilliant. But nobody knows that, because they don’t know about the outside world, where people aren’t all brilliant scientists. Because of this, they consider only the top 1% of their population to be at all intelligent; most of the brilliant scientist folk don’t even bother doing science because they’re not really smart like the uberbrilliant folk. Say, they have an IQ of only 195 instead of 220 or whatever, so they flip burgers for a living. It’s a gigantic waste, but they don’t know any better. They don’t know the absolute value of their world of geniuses, just the relative value. So most of their people never bother using their scientific abilities.

There’s another place where everybody’s a genius musician or composer. Everybody there is a Bach, Mozart, Haydn, or a Hendrix, Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughn, or a Louis Armstrong, or Muddy Waters, or a Yo-Yo-Ma, or whatever. They’re all musical geniuses, every one of them. But because they don’t know about the outside world where people aren’t all musical geniuses, only the top 1% of them (by some measure or other) are considered actually “talented” — perhaps some forms of musical genius aren’t even respected at all in this world — and most of these people never pick up an instrument at all, or when they do, they’re ashamed of their work and think it’s pedestrian, amateur crap. Because they’re just average or sub-average people, in their world. The absolute value of their musical ability does not occur to them; they can only see the relative value. And despite the fact that the worst of them is still a world-class musician to us, their musical ability is the object of derision in that place.

Repeat this scenario in as many fields as your imagination can supply. A world of Mother Teresas. A world of Bill Gates’s. Whatever.

That’s the actual world we’re living in, I think. I think that our civilization is suffering terribly from an obsession on people’s relative value to the expense of their absolute value — grading on a curve. It’s scarcity-based economics applied to human beings.

I have come to realize working day to day in a moderately difficult field like programming that 95% of the skills you need as a programmer are skills you would need as a fry cook or a house cleaner or anything else. They’re the human skills of perception and problem solving and response to unexpected situations and judgment of importance and all that. The things we’ve all been doing forever. There is an additional 5% which consists of having learned a bunch of unusual technical knowledge, but it’s not the most important 5%.

Being human, having a normal, ordinary, day to day, functioning human mind, is a huge thing. It is genius, in an absolute sense. An ordinary everyday human who can think is capable of incredible things, and most of those humans are artificially prevented from doing most of what they are capable of because in any given field they can see someone more capable and therefore they judge their own absolute genius as relatively worthless.

The further hell of it is, those standards are not only unfair because they’re merely relative and ignore absolute value, they are also arbitrary and context-dependent. Despite the pretensions of IQ and other such curves to grade on, there is no real absolute measure of competence, ability, value, or the like. Any standard by which you measure how much something is “worthy” is going to have limitations and ignore other ways to be worthy or have value. So besides the relative/absolute problem, we have the sheer arbitrariness of the standards by which relative and absolute value are judged.

The fact is, our civilization hasn’t really learned that people are valuable just as people, without being on the end of this curve or that, and have a lot to contribute individually. We make a lot of noise about “everybody being special/valuable” but we don’t act that way; we act as if you only matter if you’re on the far end of some arbitrary bell curve. And we are so much the poorer for it. There are so many things that everyone could contribute to the world that they are afraid to becaue they’re not “good enough.”

Metaphors Lost

Steve Dekorte notices that the metaphoricity of modern desktop metaphors has been diluted badly. I know I’ve seen these observations before from someone mourning the passage of OS 9 in the face of OS X — Was it Tog? Zarf? mpt?

I remember someone pointing out that Classic Mac OS took great pains to give the impression that an icon wasn’t just a representation of a file, it was that file, as far as the user need be concerned. And a window wasn’t just a representation of a folder, it was that folder (at least in its open state). You couldn’t have two Finder windows open displaying the same directory because that window was that directory. I understand newer versions of GNOME use this technique, while Apple has long abandoned it in favor of the NeXTy finder windows they have now.

Good design isn’t always what you choose to do, sometimes it’s what you choose not to do.

I’m not sure any Unix-based OS is ever going to have a really good, intuitive GUI, because the GUI is always going to be a construct on top of and separable from the primary underlying text-based system. Although ROX seems like a step in that direction — it integrates the GUI and underlying filesystem better than any other Unix GUI I’ve seen — at the cost of changing the traditional Unix customs about the structure of the filesystem.

Just Asking

Sometimes people just ask for things. You can grant them or deny them. There is no punishment if you deny them, besides your knowledge that you have denied someone something they asked for. And no reward if you grant them, besides your knowledge that you have granted something someone wanted, and their thanks.

More often people ask for things as a polite way of telling you to do something, with consequences if you refuse. “No smoking please” is not just asking. They’ll kick you out if you smoke. Maybe they’ll call the cops.

Because of these “loaded requests” people sometimes react very strongly to actual “just asking” requests. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, much of which is customarily bundled with the Linux kernel, asks you to call the resulting system GNU/Linux, not Linux. He also asks you to stop using proprietary software, and to release any software you write under a Free Software license. He won’t do anything to you if you don’t, except perhaps refuse to do things he is under no obligation to anyway, like speak at your club meeting. He just asks you to do these things because he thinks they are the right thing to do.

People get very, very bent out of shape at him for asking to do these things. As if he’s done something terrible by asking people to do things he thinks they should do. I think that’s because actual requests, without an implied threat, are so rare these days that people react to them as if they did carry an implied threat. As if Stallman were going to go kick their butts if they refused to call it GNU/Linux.

Here’s a similar request: Kasper asks that you not use the Typo3 CMS system for what he would consider “anti-Christian” purposes. He won’t stop you if you do. It’s still standard GPL-licensed software, free for anyone to use. He’s just asking you not to use it in certain ways, and he’s even asking you to use your own judgment as to whether you’re using it in the ways he wouldn’t want. This was thought remarkable enough that it was blogged at Metafilter and generated a lot of commentary, where a lot of people seemed to have a hard time understanding the difference between “just asking” and “requiring by license terms potentially enforceable by lawsuit.” One person even specifically described such a specifically unenforceable and unenforced request as “coercive.” That’s like, the opposite of what “coercive” actually means. Another described him as “attempting to control what I do” and went on to say “Yeah, it’s just request. But it’s narrow minded request and this sort of crap from any religion shouldn’t be tolerated.” These reactions didn’t all seem to reflect failure to notice the distinction between asking someone to do something and forcing them to do it; they often seemed to reflect a belief that asking someone to do something wasforcing them to do it.

There’s a very strange discomfort with “just asking.” People react as if they’ve been forced, and feel as if they’ve been forced, even if they specifically have not.

This fascinates me.

A final quote — this is one of the most interesting quotes from Richard Stallman ever. I feel it explains a lot.

JA: Are you optimistic about this?

Richard Stallman: I don’t know. I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I’m not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win.

From the Kerneltrap interview.