peristaltor | Entries tagged with stuff we really should be taught

So, years ago, a friend gifts me an old video console, an XBox 360. It was totally unexpected, and yay!

His deck was pretty kitted out with memory and lots of controllers and remote batteries. Ah, but batteries…. These are most likely NiCads, Nickel Cadmium, cells. NiCads, like their more recent relative the Nickel metal hydrides, use a basic electrolyte, have nominal voltage of 1.2 per cell, and… tend to self-discharge. That last is to say if you don't touch them with a charge every now and again, they will get bored, lose voltage over time, and wind up flat dead.

This is not to say they are dead, per se, but that they can't be charged with a typical charger, which should not just dump volts into them without feedback, lest the battery actually be dead. If that happens, the current which doesn't flow into the bad cell will flow into the better cell; but the voltage of one cell is half the voltage of the pack of two cells.

That means the better cell will get force fed current meant for two cells.

That is not good. Not good at all.

Overcharged batteries can swell in size, heat up dramatically, even burst into flames. So good chargers will avoid shoving amps into a flat battery that still has some life in it, which means you need to jump-start that battery somehow, or kill the voltage regulation system somehow, or do something somehow to get the darned thing charged.

( So, what to do? )

***

Something else fascinates me.

Now that we as a society use videos and blog posts and other online references to fix stuff, shouldn't we take a page out of the scientific method and figure out a citation protocol?

Seriously, the first two videos I embedded above I categorized as "Unhelpful." Again, they kinda work; but I can't recommend them. Those embeds, though, give those two vids exactly the same credit as the "Slightly More Helpful" video. To do the record justice, I really should have an option to both embed and rate videos, lest the algorithm elevate the provocative but destructive repairs… just like it does the provocative but destructive social issue videos.

I guess to make any progress on our repair videos, we (again, as a society) first have to wrest control from the entities who care only to make a tidy profit on our watching habits, no matter how efficacious the advice contained therein.

In sixteenth century in the British Isle, the concept of a woman as the ultimate source of authority disquieted many religious thinkers and writers. In Scotland, John Knox, later the founder of the Presbyterian Church, famously complained about the coming "regiment" (or rule by) of Mary Stuart, soon to be Mary Queen of Scots.

The 1558 pamphlet with which he vented his spleen was titled "The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women".

The Wiki here.

That kind of explains the characters, doesn't it?

(I picked this tidbit up not from the Wiki, but from David Starkey's Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne (HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, pp. 110-111), where I also learned that in their personal letters Henry VIII referred to Anne Boleyn's breasts as her "pretty duckies".)

From a F*c&Book entry, I just learned the Spanish word for "dildo" is "consolador" (in masculine; feminine is "consoladora", though I have no idea what would distinguish the two).

Still, what a nice word, cognate, it appears, with "console":

Comfort (someone) at a time of grief or disappointment

That's all. I just like the sentiment.

Wonder why? Credit in part goes to Rewi Alley:

Rewi Alley could lay claim to many things——one of his biographical entries lists him as "writer, educator, social reformer, potter and Member of the Communist Party of China"——and is also undeniably the most famous New Zealander ever to have lived in China. He lived there fore sixty years, becoming a mythic figure in his own lifetime, an intimate of the Chinese Communist leaders, a man regarded by his admirers as almost godlike and by his enemies as a charlatan, a traitorous propagandist, a libertine, and a pederast.…

But in 1937, when the Japanese bombers struck targets in Shanghai and their troops overran the city, he fled. He went west, settling initially in the city of Hankou on the Yangzi. Here, the following year, in the company of Edgar Snow and his wife, Helen Foster (who was known as Peg Snow and by her nom de plume, Nym Wales), and the secretary to the British ambassador…, Rewi Alley sat down to help create a revolutionary new industry.

Since by now the Japanese either controlled or had destroyed almost all of China's major manufacturing capability, and since the Chinese military response to the mighty invading army was based on guerrilla tactics of harassment and surprise, why not organize guerrilla industry too? Why not build hundreds of factories which were light, flexible, and perhaps even mobile; which could operate in the far beyond of inland China; and which could simultaneously provide low-paid work for the locals and low-cost output for the national good? The idea——no one is entirely sure who at the meeting came up with the concept, but supporters of Rewi Alley like to say he did——was immediately and widely accepted as entirely brilliant. The Chinese government chipped in some money; international appeals were launched to ask for more; and an organization known as Indusco, or the Chinese Industrial Cooperative (CIC), was formally set up.

By happenstance the first two characters of this new organization's Chinese name were gung ho——and though there was no linguistic connection, the two words were very soon afterward adopted as a motto by a friend of Alley's in the U.S. Marines. They became the battle cry of this marine unit, and such were the unit's successes on the battlefield that the phrase——much like "Up and at 'em!" or "Banzai!"——slipped into American English lexicon.

(Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, Harper Collins, 2008, pp. 111-113.)

An effort to redistribute manufacturing becomes a company whose name becomes a battle cry.

Just last night, I got a message that literally caused me to howl:

Unfortunately, Nintendo will suspend all video streaming services on Wii - including the Netflix Channel - after January 30, 2019

So now I'm going to have to find a device that not only will play Netflix streaming, but that—and this is to me the really crucial element—not suck.

I'm not gauging my suckage on buffer speed, or screen clarity, or any of that tech rot. Rather, I'm judging based on the ease of selecting shows to watch… an area that has been all but completely abandoned by all but the Wii.

Seriously, have you ever tried to search for a title using a Wii?

Point to letter––>Enter!——>Point——>Enter!——>[Repeat as necessary]

By contrast, you know what the alternative is, don't you?

downclikclikclikcliksideclikclikclikclikEnter

…And that was just for the FIRST letter! Keep going to spell out the rest of the fucking name! Say what you will about the Wii, that it's games are all for kids (true), that other game makers had a devil of a time making games (also true); its interface was a dream.

Ah, the interface. Its view into the living space was simply an IR pair sensing the position for the end of the controller pointed at it. All the other crap loaded into it——the attitude sensor and the accelerometer, stuff that allowed you to wield a kendo staff or light saber——that stuff was just fluff compared to the simple point-and-play interaction with the screen.

And they're killing it. Not just for movies, but for all online use:

The Wii Shop Channel is set to shut down at the start of the new year as well, which means there will no longer be a way to purchase Virtual Console titles nor WiiWare games there. The Virtual Console is still a feature the Nintendo Switch [The Newest and Shiniest machine they offer] is bereft of, a year after its debut, though fans are still clamoring for its inclusion.

The article notes the weird: "…given the console’s debut 12 years ago (2006)…, it’s still a household item that’s in regular use around the world."

( Which reminds me of my old roommate. )

( So, why am I whining? )

( For a raft of reasons… )

*The Shit River is large and reminds many people of poop. There is another thing bearing the same name draining the basin between the Andes and the Pacific in South America.

…Comes this, the most comprehensive and interesting web page news story I've ever read.

If that isn't an endorsement, nothing can be.

h/t to Conuly.

1922 Cartoon Protesting Radio Advertising

From this site.

Radio advertising may have built the radio we suffer today, but it didn't happen without protest.

I'm not complaining, not at all. This, though, is fascinating:

Although the Oxford English Dictionary offers no etymology for the word “Honeymoon”....

The term most likely comes from an old English tradition that dates from the Middle Ages. Mead was drunk in great quantities at weddings, and after the ceremony nuptial couples were given a month’s supply of mead—sufficient for one full cycle of the moon. It was believed that by faithfully drinking mead for that first month, the woman would “bear fruit” and a child would be born within the year. Incidentally, raw honey has been shown in clinical studies to be a powerful fertility booster.

Mead! Mead! Mead!

A pedestrian has been hit by a bus. And killed.

Five years ago, there was a similar accident in Portland, Oregon, though that one was far more deadly. That crash served as a wake-up call to transit operations everywhere. As a direct result of that crash, for example, we drivers in King County had a mandatory "pedestrian awareness" training class concerning the most likely causes of crashes and how to avoid them. I remember that class very well. The instructor told us that we should always be tired after work. Why? If we aren't tired, we weren't paying enough attention.

There is logic in that. ( There is also a problem. )

From Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God, we learn about the kick-off to Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential campaign in Abilene, Kansas.

The town staged a massive parade in his honor, with a series of floats depicting events in h is life, ending with one carrying a replica of the White House with him inside. His parents had long since passed away, but the candidate made an appearance at their old clapboard home, using it as a shorthand for his humble upbringing, his family, and his faith.

You get that kind of political spectacle today, of course. What you do not get, especially in this silly era, is the timing.

All of the above happened in Abilene, Kansas, in June, 1952.

Eisenhower secured the nomination in July, 1952.

The next time you feel obliged to comment on the presidential candidacy of anyone, please wait until June of next year. Do not sit through news that contains any campaign information, at least not until June of next year.

Do not feed the beast of silliness.

Ridden the bus lately in King County? Or, rather, tried to ride it? Things are a bit sticky of late. Why? Well, let's run down the laundry list. First, ( what you know. )

( What you should know. )

If I have learned nothing, it is to always follow the links, for that is where you find stuff.

Back in grade school, I was assigned a "paper" on Betsy Ross, supposedly the first person to design the flag we here in the United States fly today (in its form modified by national changes to the country itself). General George Washington supposedly visited Ross and asked if she could design and make flags for the new country. Among other details, she supposedly suggested the five-pointed star be present rather than the six-pointer; this was because they were easy to sew (if memory of that book read over 40 years ago is correct).

So a friend sent me an article from Kos over at the Daily Kos concerning the whiteness of one proposed Confederate Flag design. A link in that short article quoted the designer of the Confederate Flag:

As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race ; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.

I'll leave you to peruse the link and Kos' article; it's worth a gander. Once I got sucked into that link, I was hooked for hours. This book, Flag of the United States, with an Introductory Account, written in 1872 by Geo. Henry Preble, U.S.N., is an exhaustive examination not just of the US flag we know so well, but of just about every flag every flown. We don't get to the Stars and Bars until Part III and more than 180 pages. Here, we finally learn:

On Saturday, the 14th of June, 1777, the American congress "RESOLVED, That the flag of the thirteen United States by thirteen stripes alternate read and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." This is the first and only legislative action, of which there is any record for the establishment of a National Flag for the sovereign United States of America. . . . This dilatory resolve of congress, it will be observed, was not passed until eighteen months after the union flag raising at Cambridge, and the sailing of the first American fleet from Philadelphia under Continental colors. Nearly a year after the declaration of the entire separation of the colonies from Great Britain, and another two and a half months elapsed before it was promulgated officially. There was red tape in those early days as well as now.

(Linked scanned book, p. 187.)

The author goes on to cite some pretty interesting sources conjecturing on the origin of the five-pointed star and its relation to Washington (stuff about his noble ancestors that the General himself never related in either diaries or correspondence). I'm going to bury the lead a bit and relate the storybook origin. Here's how Mr. Preble relates it:

A committee of congress, of whom Col. George Ross was one, accompanied by General Washington, in June, 1776, called upon Mrs. Ross, who was an upholsterer, and engaged her to make the flag from a rough drawing which, according to her suggestions, was redrawn by General Washington in pencil "then and there in her back parlor."

(Ibid, p. 192.)

Yes, that was the account I remembered from my childhood report. It gets interesting, though, to relate what immediately preceded this account:

In 1870, Mr. Wm. J. Canby, of Philadelphia, read before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania a paper on the History of the American Flag, in which he states that his maternal grandmother, Mrs. John Ross, was the first maker and partial designer of the stars and stripes.

(Ibid.)

Got that? The historical account is from Mrs. Ross's grandson. It is primarily an oral history told second-hand by the family of the principal agent of the story. He backs this history by citing other relatives who have heard this story. The catch: They all heard the design story from the woman herself.

Three of Mrs. Ross's daughters were living when Mr. Canby wrote his paper, and confirm its statements, founding their belief not upon what they themselves saw—for the incident occurred many years before their birth—but upon what their mother had told them concerning it.

(Ibid, p. 193.)

The author received and included contents of a letter from Mr. Canby defending his account, including written statements from an aunt who had also been involved in early flag making after Mrs. Ross retired from the activity; that cannot, though, corroborate the fact that no written official design of the flag account exists. Mr. Preble is forced to conclude at the top of p. 192:

We people are social beasts who relate the world around with story telling. The more complete the story, the better. Evidence is often an impediment to a good story. And the more iconic an item, the more necessary the story to back its importance. After all, as the author quotes in the beginning of his (as far as I can tell with a few hours of skimming) excellent book:

There is the national flag! He must be cold, indeed, who can look upon its folds rippling in the breeze without pride of country.

—Charles Sumner

I'll be the first to admit that most primary and even secondary educations are inadequate. No, scratch that: they are adequate for most things; for some things, they completely miss the point, because to come to the point they would have to address uncomfortable facts and what school wants to deal with uncomfortable stuff? That's just unnecessary.

So in school I learned almost nothing about Vietnam—how it started, reasons the country was even involved—even though many of my classmates had fathers and uncles still deployed there. We learned of old wars, and of course of the big one, WWII; but teachers shied away from even mentioning 'Nam, lest some student go home and mention the mention, leading to a shitstorm from one side of the kerfuffle or the other.

It turns out one of the biggest taboos of our history went back a bit farther to the Civil War. And these taboos, according to a fascinating article, regard the Dark Period after the Confederate Surrender, specifically how this period leads to, of all things, the Tea Party.( To the Dark Age! )

X-Posted to liberal.

Ever since the "New Democrats" have installed themselves in the political scene, many of the standard rallying calls of the Progressive Movement have been sidelined into being mere tropes and tall tales. The problem, as I see it, is that these New Dems are, rather than the raging bull liberals of our past, merely steers who mewl rather than snort with rage and charge into the breeches. They have adopted meek standards, weak tea compared with the heady strong stuff of former years, and have in pursuing these standards continued to survive the increasingly competitive political environment forced upon all potential candidates.

( What might these weak standards be? )

X-Posted to liberal.

Some years ago, I asked myself a question: What is an investment, and how does it differ from an act of speculation? I'm getting closer to an answer, especially after hearing Seth and Justin interview two authors on the topic of a man who has become largely myth, and about whom we know almost nothing: Henry George.

( It turns out Mr. George. . . . )

X-Posted to talk_politics.

Do yourself a favor. Watch a short movie.

Real Estate 4 Ransom from Real Estate 4 Ransom on Vimeo.

I have never heard of this Land Tax concept, yet it has been around since the late 1800s. It was so revolutionary, in fact, the modern configuration of neo-classical economics was created to bury it. Rockafeller funded the foundation of the Chicago School of Economics to promote the idea that land shouldn't be taxed as Henry George proposed; this largely allowed him to keep the revenue he extracted from his many natural resource properties.

Later, if you want a bit more, head over to Seth & Justin's site and hear two pretty good interviews on the topic (though the second interview with one of the writer/directors for the above movie, I've got to say, is painfully sibilant; dude needs a new mike badly). Sadly, the few Henry George books I've found online are pretty crappy, so badly scanned text that it is all but unreadable. I may have to see what I can do about that.

(I've been putting this one off for too long. I can't drop it, try as I may to convince myself. It's just not droppable.)

Ah, Mike Daisy. First you bend the facts of the case, then you defend the bending.

For those of you as late to this kerfuffle as I am, Mr. Daisy — a most entertaining chap, from what I've heard of his work on the radio — bagged the elephant, as it could be put in theater circles, convincing This American Life to run a short version of his stage play on their show. It led to the most downloaded episode in the show's already heady history, grabbing over 880,000 downloads.

Then, just a few weeks later, came the retraction. It turns out Mr. Daisy "embellished" his China visit account portrayed in his one-man show. Little details were "exaggerated" for the listening audiences to more fittingly adapt his trip to the "theatrical experience."

And after all that, instead of hanging his head in shame, he unleashes on TAL in a blog post.

In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson.

You forgot Milli Vanilli. More to the point, you forgot Andrew Breitbart.

Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.

Yes, Mike, that's the case. You just don't get it, do you? You see, there is a very real difference between fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction is verifiable fact; fiction is what people pull out of their ass. A key point here: it doesn't matter how much is fact and how much is ass-pulled. Like racist policies in the deep South, transforming a work of fact into something pulled from an ass requires only one drop of fiction.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of ass product. More than half the books I read are bowel fabrications of the highest quality, ones I enjoy greatly. Most of the movies, the same. Of the shit Orson Welles pulled out of his own copious ass, for example, I cannot get enough. (Well, except for a few. Not all his ass-pulls were great; some were shitty pieces. We all have them, and they should be flushed.)

Magician Jamie Ian Swiss has a phrase for pulling things out of your ass for entertainment: he considers them "honest lies", in that everyone watching or reading or listening (yes, most music lyrics are lies as well) accepts that the following is not necessarily true, but is instead meant to entertain.

Meaning when you get up on stage or in front of a microphone and portray some events that actually happened and intersperse events and observations that did not happen — in other words to forgo any adequate disclaimer about what the audience can expect — you are not lying honestly. You are inviting the audience to follow an account they will consider factual.

Meaning it better be factual. Because, if you don't, everything you say will be called into question, and not just in Agony.

Everything.

Here's an example. A few years before this particular piece, Mr. Daisy produced something called Monopoly!, a "devastating monologue about monopoly and its discontents," where Mr. Daisey "explores the warped genius of inventor Nikola Tesla and his war with Thomas Edison over electricity." Portions of this aired on another public radio show, Studio 360's "Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius." With me so far?

Excerpted from Daisy's show was a passage about Edison's DC trolleys. According to the piece, these streetcars would occasionally start buzzing strangely; when this happened, all the locals knew from past experience some kind of violent electrical discharge would soon follow. If they didn't get away from the streetcar, a bolt might find a bystander and electrocute him or her. Daisy proclaims that this was the origin of the Brooklyn Dodgers' name, and invites skeptical listeners to "google it!"

Shortly after TAL's "Retraction" aired, I did. At the Wiki (as I write today), we learn that by "1890, New Yorkers (Brooklyn was a separate city until it became a borough in 1898) routinely called anyone from Brooklyn a 'trolley dodger', due to the vast network of street car lines criss-crossing the borough as people dodged trains to cross the streets."

I didn't think it necessary to do so at the time, but when I google'd the name origin a few weeks ago, there was a big red warning label on the entry questioning the veracity of some of the information provided, and (without letting the reader know what this was) noted that the questioned information had since been retracted. I'm willing to bet that information might have had some connection to Mr. Daisy's trolley bolts of death. After TAL, someone thought to retrace all of his utterances, and to remove a bit of information that he himself probably lifted from the net without properly verifying it. In other words, thanks to the fact that Mr. Daisy said it, someone else thought it necessary to either prove or disprove, and now it's gone from the web. Scrubbed.

Thinking back, I realize I had heard Daisy on the radio many years ago. He did an interview here in Seattle just after his stint as a phone support guy at Amazon.com in promotion of another theater piece, "21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com." I laughed at his observations regarding that job, at the silliness of some of Amazon's policies, some of which I've heard first hand from friends. Now, I'm not so sure those stories, like the one he told about improving his caller response time (or whatever Amazon called it), were stunts he pulled himself, or stories he pulled out of his ass.

It's sad when people who used to be believed are suspected of uttering untruths. Think Dan Rather. Think most any oh-so-totally-not-gay Republican "family values" lawmaker. Take as wide a stance on your performance piece as you think likely, Mr. Daisy, but you have failed. Worse, it's obvious to me at least that you care deeply about the conditions Chinese workers face as they labor to build our stuff. Consider this: though nobody seriously questioned the silliness surrounding GWB's ROTC service, the fact that the document hinting at such silliness was a forgery (printed, I'm sure, by Karl Rove himself) derailed not just Dan Rather's career, but also any other reporter's pursuit to document W's shady past. CBS handed President George W. Bush authenticity and respectability he most assuredly did not deserve.

Back to Mike:

Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before.

One lie begets another, Mr. Daisy. One lie begets another. It may gall, but you did the galling. You galled your audience. According to them, you lied once, so. . . . So if you hear about another Chinese tech factory explosion or mangled hand or chemical spill in the very near future and would like someone to blame, Mr. Daisy, perhaps you should find a mirror.

When last I posted, I ended our short history of money noting, among other things, that money is no longer backed by precious metals as once it "was" (I hope to make the scare quotes more salient later). Even before Pres. Nixon removed the US from the gold standard in 1971, wild swings in our money supply drove the country into a Great Depression that few theorists foresaw. Few theorists today foresaw the current crisis, and that should be easily explained. We have, essentially, unlearned the lessons of the Great Depression, removing the legal speed governors and safety interlocks that prevented our economy from revving too out of control from 1934 to about 1980, pulling the final bit of monetary prudence away from the system in 1999.

For that reason, it is illustrative to go back to the heady days of 1929 and see the policies that brought down the economy . . . you know, the policies we have today . . . and maybe answer

brucenstein's initial question about the weirdness of money. ( I'll try my best. )

darksumomo turned me on to a short essay (PDF) that deals nicely – and far more succinctly – with everything noted in my dismal mythos tag. Behold:

The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work in the 50s and 60s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than a plausible scientific description. In reality, markets are not efficient, humans tend to be over-focused in the short-term and blind in the long-term, and errors get amplified through social pressure and herding, ultimately leading to collective irrationality, panic and crashes. Free markets are wild markets.

Well put, sir. Well put.

It's nice when a book not only confirms my niggling suspicions, but shows that I was not cynical enough by a wide, wide margin. The book is High and Mighty SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How they Got That Way by Keith Bradsher. He points out not the now-tired observations about how SUVs tend to kill their occupants and others far, far more often (well, not just those observations), but interesting points about the big "truck" drivers that I thought you folks would find illuminating. Let me give you a taste:

Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.

No, that's not a cynic talking -- that's the auto industry's own market researchers and executives.

(Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How they Got That Way, PublicAffairs, 2002, p. 101, me with the boldening.)

Would you like specific citations backing up this broad generalization? ( Why, certainly! )

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The Peristaltic Testator

I Affirm and Aver The Following Is Poo

Entries tagged with stuff we really should be taught

Navigation

Fixin' Stuff

This Will Only Make Sense to Fans of Discworld

How Soothing

Ever Feel Gung Ho?

When Does This Shit End!?

From The Guy Who Hardly Reposts Anything…

It Should Be Remembered

Those Drunken Middle Ages!

Once Again, I Predict Doom

Let's Return To A Simpler Era

Penny-Wisdom and Pound-Dumbfuckery

The First American Flag

I Did Not Know That: Southern Reconstruction and the Tea Party

Reasons to Revive Actual Liberalism

Income, Earned Versus Unearned

Bring On The Land Tax!

Liars, Both Honest and Not

Taking Stick of Money Today

On Economics and the Scientific Method

Suspicions Confirmed!