Category: new!

We live in many worlds at once

We live in many worlds at once. The present world, of course. We live in the near future world, where the next choice we make creates the next present world. At the same time, we can be in old haunts, and in our minds, we now inhabit past worlds. Or our minds will imagine us living in worlds that don’t exist. Imaginary worlds. Worlds where we win the lottery, where we avoid past defeats, or we turn out different than we did. We live in worlds with fears and worlds with hopes, where the invisible things around the corner or over the hill shape our world even if we never encounter it.

We inhabit the world and the objects around us, but we live in many worlds at once. For our lives in the world are a function of mind, and with our thoughts we make the worlds.

Some thoughts on books as social objects

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This week I was carrying this book around with me and managed to have two people initiate conversations regarding it in the same day. First a younger waiter in a restaurant told me the author’s name was similar to a favourite children’s book she had many years ago. Then on the subway, a man who appeared to be a gamer engaged me in a long discussion about war games, the US Civil War, and the Napoleonic wars.

Neither conversation would have happened if the book were an ebook or even an abstract cover, I suspect. The cover itself caught their eye, and that led to further conversation.

Books are great social objects. They tell something about you, and they give a topic for others to start talking to you about.

Both conversations were not really about the book directly, but ways for people to share something about themselves. This is a benefit of social objects: you can learn much more by taking the object out in public. With private objects, you have to do all the work: with social objects, people help you learn more.

It likely helped that the book was not controversial. Plus it was odd enough to catch people’s eye. The potential barriers to starting conversations were low.

It is difficult to say what makes an object more social than others. Much of that is random. I had been reading the book all week: that day was the first one that people talked to me about it. Certainly something people are passionate about helps. Even that is random, though.

Other objects can be social, too, but books can be both personal and impersonal at the same time. That dual quality makes them a good social object. Strangers asking about highly personal objects may seem prying and put people on the defensive. Objects like food are too impersonal and not easy to make an interesting topic to start talking about. Books are nicely in the middle.

In short, get down your quirky looking books from your bookshelf and take them out for a walk. Your social life may improve. Even in a big city like Toronto.

An additional note: I was walking down Yonge Street yesterday, and I stopped to admire a mosaic on a wall. While I was doing that, another man walked next to me and told me about the construction of it and his thoughts on it. It too was a social object, thought I created the context for socialization by stopping to admire it.

Nike ups their game with a new fuelband

According to Fast Company, Nike has a new Fuelband coming out called the Fuelband SE. It sounds like it is going to be smarter and more flexible than the current Fuelband:

Like the FuelBand, the FuelBand SE measures its wearer’s activity levels via a gamified system in which you can earn points for moving. The SE comes with even more built-in game mechanics to encourage users to want to move more throughout the day. It also offers a feature called “sessions” that allows you to categorize your movements according to the activity you’re doing, such as playing basketball, cycling, and now, sleeping. The FuelBand SE can also detect how hard you’re working during seemingly low-impact activities like yoga, and mete out points accordingly.

This should give the Fitbits and other wearable tech a good run for the money, and it may be the thing that makes me want to buy it.

Speaking of that, how much is it going to be?

Nike is currently accepting limited pre-orders for the FuelBand SE, which costs $149

Good price.

Wearable tech promises to be big. Looks like Nike plans to be in the front of the pack with the Fuelband.

My assessment of the assessments of Healthcare.gov

From Paul Krugman (Obamacare Success – NYTimes.com) to Ezra Klein (Ezra Klein: Thus Far, Obamacare a ‘Big Failure’ | National Review Online) to the NYtimes (From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal – NYTimes.com) to Alex Howard at BuzzFeed (How The First Internet President Produced The Government’s Biggest, Highest-Stakes Internet Failure) there has been more and more assessments coming in for healthcare.gov, and most of them have been negative. How good are these assessments?

I would argue that at this point, the assessments of healthcare.gov are of limited value. For example, the NYTimes.com article has a good run down on the background of the project and the politics involved, but the analysis of the system is mostly based on insider and second hand information. The Buzzfeed article has a great analysis of the challenges of IT procurement in the U.S. government, but again, it doesn’t deal directly with the system itself in question. That doesn’t mean those stories are bad, for there is alot of interesting background information in them. But it doesn’t tell you much about the actual system that makes up healthcare.gov.

There have been some good attempts at an assessment from an IT perspective from the CTO of Huffington Post (Why The Experts Are Probably Wrong About The Healthcare.gov Crack-Up | John Pavley), Paul Smith over at TPM (A Programmer’s Perspective On Healthcare.gov And ACA Marketplaces), as well as from individual bloggers with IT knowledge (e.g., Too Big To Succeed and Is There A Problem Here?). Someone wanting a better idea of the technology and the design of the system would be better off reading those.

In all cases, the individuals doing these assessments have very little to work with. A proper assessment of an IT system can take a team weeks if not months with full access to the system and all the artifacts and deliverables that went into making the system. Most of the assessments I have read so far have been based on having little if any data and few if any artifacts. This isn’t a criticism of the assessors: it’s all they have to work with. (The only fault I see is with some assessors displaying slight arrogance in thinking they have nailed it in their assessment as to what is wrong with the system.)

Given the little to go with, the people who are assessing the system a success or a failure are basing it on a number of assumptions that they have which may or may not be true. I don’t see much value in those assumptions. For example, most of the assessments I have read so far seem to assume the system should be up and running with few problems, given the importance of this site and the money invested in it. (Klein in particular seems to be certain of how an IT project should go, which I find remarkable in someone with an non-IT background like his.) There is nothing wrong with that assumption, but that’s all it is. You may think it is a valid assumption, but that is besides the point.

At this point in time, the only ones that can assess if the project is a success or a failure are the key stakeholders for the project. If you are someone who could never get healthcare because of preexisting conditions and now, even with difficulty, you are able register for a get healthcare, you likely consider the site a success. Conversely, if you are an insurer who expected to get alot of applicants from the site and are getting none, you may consider the site a failure. Right now it is too early to weigh any of that: it will take time and further analysis.

The government seems to have a longer term view of the site than most of the analysts that I have seen so far.  As the NYTimes.com story says, “Administration officials have said there is plenty of time to resolve the problems before the mid-December deadline to sign up for coverage that begins Jan. 1 and the March 31 deadline for coverage that starts later”. There is actually some benefit in launching the site now, well in advance of the December deadline. Sites with deadlines often experience the most traffic around the time of the deadline, and I expect healthcare.gov will be no exception. They have two months to resolve performance issues, better model usage patterns, fix critical bugs in the software, enhance the infrastructure, and improve the integration with other systems. Two months is a short timeframe, but it is feasible that they can resolve many of the obvious problems that the site is suffering now. As well, the proponents of the site should have enough data and analysis of the data to argue the success of the site.

Regardless of how the site is perceived then, anyone doing these assessments should have alot more to work with. In the future, if you are reading future assessments of the sites, things to consider are:

  • how much information about the site is the writer using in the assessment? More is better. Skip the ones based solely on anecdotes, or that ignores key stakeholders.
  • what is the criteria the writer is using for determine whether or not the site is successful? Is that criteria a valid one? Comparing it to other government or large scale commercial IT project is a good criteria. Comparing it to the roll-out of the latest iPhone is a poor one.
  • is the writer assessing the IT aspects of the site? How much IT experience does the writer have? You don’t have to be an IT expert to write about IT, but if you are talking about IT, you should have a basis for why your analysis is valid. If you are saying the architecture is faulty, you should be able to represent the architecture diagrammatically and say the architecture is faulty at points A, B, and C and here are the reasons why.

I am excited to see people discussing IT architecture with general audiences. I have been building and assessing IT architectures for decades, and it is a topic dear to me. I also know it is hard to assess the validity of what people are saying about it. That’s why I decided to write this. I appreciate any constructive feedback, and I will try and answer any that I receive.

(The above Flow Chart: How Health Insurance Exchanges Work is a representation of a health insurance exchange. I’ve included it to represent the complexity of any IT system that has to provide this type of capability.)

Some thoughts on power and empowerment

In reading on empowerment, the key assumption in many of them is the form a person’s power takes. I can see how this happens. If you believe that money is the ultimate source of power, then you would assume that empowerment has to do with controlling amounts of money. If you believe control and influence over others is a source of power, then how much control and influence you have indicates how much power you have. Or personal autonomy: you may assume that the more control you have over your life, the more power you have. There are other forms of power as well, but you can see just from these three how someone could be seen as both empowered and powerless. You could be wealthy, but a recluse struck with a terrible disease. You could be poor individual, but have all the freedom you want and great influence over others around you and beyond.  The poor individual and the wealthy recluse both are empowered and powerless, depending upon the lens you use to examine their lives.

There are tradeoffs we all make in these areas of empowerment. I might work a certain job because it gives me greater power over some aspects of my life while restricting me in others. Same with being a parent.

Everyone makes tradeoffs to achieve the power they need.  You may not respect their choices, you may find the sacrifices they make to be wrong, and you may not see the power they seek as one that is worthwhile. Despite that, they are trying to gain some form of power over someone or something to achieve a greater good. They are empowered or becoming empowered to achieve that.  We can disagree that their goals are not good ones, but we cannot say they are not empowered. If they are on the way to achieving what they want, they are empowered.

Some thoughts on Miley Cyrus, Show Business and performers of her age

Having a daughter a bit younger than Miley Cyrus, I have followed her career and that of many of her peers whether I wanted to or not. I even chaperoned my daughter to a Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana concert! So I have always been interested in what happened to them, if only because they have been part of her life and part of my life indirectly. Most of them shone on as stars for awhile and then faded (e.g,. Hillary Duff, some of High School musical gang). Some of them have crashed and burned (e.g., Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes). And some of them seem to be in the process of transitioning from kid stars to adult actors and performers (e.g. Miranda Cosgrove, Vanessa Hudgens). And some have been all over the map (e.g., Brittany Spears, who crashed and burned but now seems to be on the uptake, career wise).

Ideally all of them, because of talent, would mature and become successful adult performers (e.g., Jodie Foster, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Justin Timberlake). But that transition is difficult. First, because alot of them are in the Disney/Nickelodeon machine, and while they are in it, they are well managed and groomed, but once they are out of it, they are on their own. Unlike some of the other performers, Cyrus has an independent support network, and that seems to have kicked into high gear with the timing of the VHS performance, her video release, and the Rolling Stone cover coming one after another.

For those upset at how over the top it all seems to be, recall that she had a previous attempt at transitioning to performing as an adult and it was mocked and dismissed. She and the people she works with likely thought they would have to do something stronger to succeed. Hence the recent performances and appearances.

She does seem to be succeeding too, if you measure success by gaining and holding attention. That has always been the measure of success for American entertainers, and by those standards, she is succeeding. It would be best if she could gain that attention by the quality of her work, not by subverting her previously manufactured image of the stereotyped good little girl with the new stereotype bad girl, but I have seen her work, and it was never that good. For example, her show, much like the Jonas Brothers that came before her and many others like that, consisted of lots of costumes, dancing with other dancers, and generally doing a lip synced/over dubbed musical show while a bunch of middle aged dudes all dressed in black pants and T shirts played all the music in the background. (I imagine the star did play and sing, but the session type musicians in the background did all the heavy lifting, musically speaking, while Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers entertained the crowd.) That doesn’t mean she can’t sing and dance: she can dance, and at the end of the show, she performed a solo number, as if to show the audience that yes, I am real.

Did you know that Miranda Cosgrove recently did a series of rock n roll type concerts? No, you wouldn’t, because Cosgrove’s were pretty standard and very tame in comparison to Cyrus. She is comparable with Cyrus musically, and she has a ton of fans, who filled her shows. But unless there is a hidden talent she is holding back until a later time, she is never going to get on the cover of Rolling Stone or have people talking because of her music, fan base or not. To get that attention, you need to be either really good or really outrageous, or both.

Justin Bieber seems to get this. Or at least his handlers do. He should be fading now, but he manages to stay in the news with his behavoir these days. It too is a bad boy behavoir, though because of our patriarchial society, his bad boy behavoir comes across in a different way. It’s not bad boy behavoir compared to Keith Moon or Ozzie Osborne, but Bieber doesn’t have to be that bad to get attention. The same with Cyrus: she’s not Courtney Love nor Janis Joplin, but she doesn’t have to be.

A Show Business career, like alot of lucrative careers in the U.S., is a brutal business. Cyrus seems to know this and seems determined to succeed in it by whatever it takes to succeed. Mick Jagger once said that Madonna was a thimbleful of talent in an ocean of ambition. Like many quips, this is unfair and insightful. What is true is that Madonna would do what it took to stay on top, and has managed to do it for a crazy long time. That is her true talent. It looks like Cyrus has the same ambition, and she may decide to follow the same path to achieve a similar level of success.

The latest Rolling Stone has her interview here: Miley Cyrus on the Cover of Rolling Stone | Music News | Rolling Stone. I breezed over it, but she came across as pretty savvy here, which is not surprising, after I thought about it. She’s been in the business for along time, and she’s been a star for along time. Right now she is outraging people with her calculated behavoir, and the interview shows her dealing with some of the fallout for that. She is a professional, and that comes across in it. In a year from now, if a different set of actions will keep her in the news, I imagine she will tack in that direction.

It is possible she will crash and burn at some point. (The same could be said for Bieber.) I suspect she will not, and she will transform herself many more times over the course of the next few decades. Like Madonna, I suspect we will be listening to Cyrus for years to come, whether you like it or not. And like Madonna, that will be her true talent.

In the future, people will not make manufacture things. The question is: what is next?

As this article in the Wall Street Journal shows, advances in Robots May Revolutionize China’s Electronics Manufacturing. Here is some key parts of the article (underlining is mine):

A new worker’s revolution is rising in China and it doesn’t involve humans. With soaring wages and an aging population, electronics factory managers say the day is approaching when robotic workers will replace people on the Chinese factory floor. A new wave of industrial robots is in development, ranging from high-end humanoid machines with vision, touch and even learning capabilities, to low-cost robots vying to undercut China’s minimum wage.

Over the next five years these technologies will transform China’s factories, executives say, and also fill a growing labor shortage as the country’s youth become increasingly unwilling to perform manual labor. How the transformation plays out will also go a long way in deciding how much of the electronics supply chain remains in China.

Now, I would argue that while wages are relatively higher in China, the idea of them soaring is very relative too. I’d also argue that even if the wages were stagnant, it would not matter, for the robots will become cheaper and more productive year after year. The question isn’t how will robots manufacture every thing, it’s a question of when will they manufacture every thing.

From there, the next question is: what will people do? Who will buy these products? There is a hint of an answer from the realm of software development. As more lower levels of software development were taken over by other software (e.g. assemblers, compilers, IDEs), software developers focus on higher level versions of software and bigger and more complex problems. This could also be the future of manufacturing. People who work in manufacturing will not make the things: they will design the things (e.g., robots and instructions for robots) that make the things and work on more complex ways to make things (e.g., how to take parts made in China, Kenya, and Canada and have them all come together in the same place and as little time as possible).

(Photo is of a concept robot from Delta Electronics).

On Beauty, the Veil, and Free Arabs

Whatever you think of the veil( be it banning or embracing it ), you owe it to yourself to read this article at the site, Free Arabs: Beauty and the Veil.  There’s a good review of a show by the Moraccan artist Majida Khattari called “Orientalismes.” After you have seen that, head over to her site for more great work, like this:

Check out the rest of the Free Arabs site: it’s packed with good content.

Going to art galleries this fall? You need a guide to the lingo

If you go to galleries occasionally, you may pick up reading material that is written in art-speak. There’s a reason for it, and a guide to how to deal with it, here: A user’s guide to art-speak (The Guardian).

You can ignore the guides and the reading material, but often times it helps to at least take a stab at gaining an expert’s thoughts on the exhibit before you. If it is art-speak, this guide can help.

 

 

Getting a new iPhone? Maybe you should want to get a new plan too. Read this

This June 2013 article (What’s the best, cheapest Canadian cellphone plan out there? | Globalnews.ca.) has a good rundown of the various cellphone service providers and their lowest cost plan and everything that you get with that. Even if you don’t want the cheapest plan, knowing that can help you negotiate the plan you really need. Highly recommended.

Get the new iPhone (if they have it) and save money on your plans. Good deal.

There’s alot of crappy advice on how to make Minecraft run faster. This isn’t

I reviewed alot of online material to help make Minecraft run faster on my son’s laptop. Much of it was YouTube videos made by nice kids, but most of it was less than helpful. However there was one thing I can across that was actually very useful, and it was this: 25 things you can do to make MineCraft run faster! FULL REDUX!!! Minecraft Blog.

I did most of these things, save put a cat on my son’s laptop, and they made a noticeable improvement in the speed of minecraft on his machine. The more of them you can do, starting from the top, the better  improvements you will see. Highly recommended.

How to make your Internet use more secure and private, 2013 edition

It’s a constant battle, but this article by Sean Bonner (Encryption and Privacy – What I’m Using) is a great rundown of tools you should consider in making your Internet use more private and less exploitable.

He covers a wide range of tools, from Tor to VPNs to duckduckgo, and more. Better still, his article is readable and understandable by people who lives revolve around something other than computers.

When it comes to security, you are always making trade-offs between being more secure and other things you want from technology (e.g. ease of use). That said, try and make your computer as secure as you can: every bit helps.

Need a good place to travel to this fall? Why not consider the U.S. Rust Belt

It doesn’t have the glamour of travelling to NYC or LA, but trips to the great American cities of Detroit, Buffalo and Pittsburgh have lots to offer. (And cities like Detroit could use your tourist dollar.)  Whether you are skeptical or excited about the idea, you should check out Denise Balkissoon’s article on what you need to know to visit these places. 

Check out Rust Belt road trips at The Grid TO and get the details. U.S. Football season is coming: great time to hit the road and check it out.

A bad new trend: buildings that act as magnifying glasses and burn people like ants**

First off there the building above, still being built. According to the Express,  the “half-finished 37-storey tower at 20 Fenchurch Street in central London, dubbed the “Walkie Talkie” due to its distinctive shape, is now being called the “Walkie Scorchie” due to it’s ability to concentrate sun rays and melt cars and singe hair.  Don’t believe me? Read this.

It’s not the first either building to do so either.  The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, designed by none other than Frank Gehry, did something similar.

I find it incredible that architects don’t take this into account when they are designing buildings, given that they take so much into account, such as shadow and wind creation. Then again, these building curvatures are fairly recent creations. Perhaps it will be taken into account now.

More on the Walkie Scorchie building here.

** Slight exaggeration, but still! 🙂

Is all failure good, the way innovators say it is?

I don’t think so.

Innovators who seemingly rejoice at failure have a very limited view of failure. Perhaps the particular way they fail does benefit them, but I believe this isn’t the case for everyone.

As this article shows, there are lots of different ways to fail (Among Six Types Of Failure, Only A Few Help You Innovate | Co.Design: business + innovation + design). While it’s possible that one can learn from all of them, some of them are easier to learn from and recover from than others.  For example, abject failure, where you suffer a significant loss, can take years to recover from. This is very different from predictable failure, when you bounce ideas off coworkers, most of which will be rejected, with little if any loss and no need to recover.  It is worthwhile categorizing failure before you jump into an endeavor, and after that categorizing, performing a cost/benefit aspect of failure that needs to be accounted for.  Don’t accept the idea that all failure is the same and all failure is easy and good.

Is this what Google Glass(es) might look like?

Possibly, at least according to this.

The bigger question will be: will people use it? Google Glass has taken a hit to it’s reputation recently, and there is a chance that it may not recover. My feeling is that such a heads up display will come, but it won’t come from Google. Regardless who does it, years from now, that will be how people interact with computers and the Internet, and when you  see photos of people holding smartphones from this era, that will seem weird. (Actually, it seems weird even now.)

If you are a young man looking to build up a wardrobe, study this

The Essentials, at the MR PORTER web site, has a long visual list of items you should have in your collection of clothing. Even if you don’t buy them from this site (which is not cheap), you should use this page as a guide of what to acquire elsewhere.

My only quibbles are these:

  • I would go with a longer length for men’s shorts
  • skip the cargo pants
  • Introduce colour via accessories

That said, the list is great and well, essential, if you are building up your wardrobe.

Some thoughts on twitter, and blogging, and blogging again

I like twitter. Simply stating I have over 42,000 tweets should be enough to prove that.

I like blogging too. I’ve been blogging on this blog since 2007, and on other blogs since around 2005.

Like many bloggers, somewhere along the way I went from blogging alot, to a bit, to hardly at all. Meanwhile, tweeting has more or less stayed the same.

It hasn’t helped that a number of tools that I used for blogging and to make blogging easier have died off, but it would be wrong to blame the tools. It’s simply that tweeting is easier and writing blog posts, even simple blog posts, is much harder.

I plan to try and reverse that over the next few months, or at least make an attempt. I have been inspired by some people I follow on twitter, much better writers than I, who manage to tweet good stuff while blogging really good posts on a regular basis. While their tweets are fine, I get so much more out of the longer blog posts that they write.  I don’t know if the same goes for me, but I hope that will be the case for at least a few people who follow me on twitter as well.

I also miss the “log” part of my blog. I always find something when I look back over older blog posts. Tweets, in comparison, just roll on.  I hate the thought of losing the good things amongst the things I share. Blogging also forces me to think harder about topics, at least the ones I care about. Tweeting is conversational for the most part. Finally, I have gotten good feedback on some blog posts, feedback that has been rewarding and encouraging. I miss that too, and with some luck, I hope to regain it.

Elysium is like Blade Runner (and other reasons I really liked it)

If you were to read the reviews of Elysium in places like Rotten Tomatoes, you might think it was going to be mediocre at best. Instead, I think it is brilliant and will be appreciated more as time goes by. Here’s some random notes jotted down on why I liked it very much.

It follows the same pattern as Blade Runner: the longer I watched Elysium, the more it reminded me of Blade Runner. It is a immersive, dystopian world centered in Los Angeles. Only the poor live on earth, while the better off live off world, tended to by robots. In Blade Runner, the lowest form of life (the replicants) are in desperate need of expert attention to survive. In Elysium, it is the poor who need medical attention to survive. While they are trying to get help, they are being chased by killers trying to stop them.

While there are similarities in the story lines, there are also similarities in the reimagining of Los Angeles.  Ridley Scott imagined LA as a dystopian mixture of punk club and Japan, all cast in darkness. Blomkamp imagines it as a sunbaked shantytown with no end. Both are bleak places, and both represent a vision of the times they are in even as they are cast into the future.

Like Scott, Blomkamp has a great eye for detail. In particular, with the wealthy. There are all sorts of details, from the Versace healing beds, to the watch Jodie Foster wears to the luxury vehicle that Matt Damon’s character attacks midway through the film. The wealthy live in neat, opulent spaces while the property of the poor is caked with dirt, dark, piled up and messy, and Blomkamp does a great job of setting the stage with a high level of detail.

Overtime, the influence of Blade Runner has grown and grown, as has it’s stature as a film. I predict that as Blomkamp makes more films, he has a chance to have his films seen the same way. Elysium may not gain the following that Blade Runner has, but over time, I believe it will be appreciated more than it currently is.

It’s an big budget action film: District 9 was impressive in that it managed to be embody many genres, from Science Fiction, documentary, horror, buddy film, action film, with lots of politics and even romance throughout. (Watch it again: it is dazzling to see it all come together.)  Elysium is a big budget action film, and while that gives Blomkamp freedom in some ways, it restricts him in others.  I think some viewers were let down by those restrictions and were expecting something closer to District 9. I was happy that he got to make another film like this that had a good chance of attracting a similar audience. Why?

It’s agitprop: I think it is amazing that Blomkamp got to make an agitprop film. A big budget agitprop film, with big international stars.  Underlying all of the action and drama of the film is the message that immigration and health care restrictions are bad, and that the wealthy need to have a responsibility to share and help the less fortunate, not shun and ostracize them. To emphasize this, Matt Damon’s character is an ex thief and working class, and the woman he loves is a nurse, while his chief adversaries are cut throat politicians, CEOs, and the henchmen that do the ugly work on their behalf.

It’s not Costa-Gavras, but in this age when most big budget American films are based on cartoon characters, it is both extraordinary and influential. Maybe not influential for viewers who think about these ideas all the time, but for many people, this will have more influence on them than any serious documentary (which they would never go to) would have. Agitprop needs to go where people live, speak to them in their language: not have them come to it, speaking down to them.

It is the present dressed up as the future: watching Elysium, I was struck by how close this future is. LA is not a shantytown, but shantytowns exist everywhere.  There is no city in space, but in much of the world there are resort hotels and resort cruise ships which may as well be in space for the people that live there.  There are no flying cars or drones yet, but the drones are practically here and autonomous, if not flying, cars are just a few years away. It is a dystopia, but not a far off one. As well, immigration and health care are big topics of discussion in the United States of America right now: that they are a big part of Elysium can be no accident. Like much good SF, the future is near and drawn from the Now.

It has flaws: overlook them. There are a fair number of flaws with Elysium, but I felt that was because Blomkamp was taking current reality and moving it into the future, flaws and all. Or he was focused on illustrating a point. All SF has flaws — anyone who ever watched a SF film with time travel will tell you that. And to insert ideas into a fast paced action film risks introducing more flaws.  But to write off the film for those flaws is to miss out on a lot.

It nicely pays homage to other SF, including District 9, Wall-E, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and no doubt more. SF fans can enjoy watching the film just for references.

Why the Surface RT Failed and the iPad Did Not (Not)

Nick Bilton tries to explain the failure of the Surface with one cause, here: Why the Surface RT Failed and the iPad Did Not – NYTimes.com. While I think this is one potential reason, I also think there are many reasons why it failed. Here are some more:

  • Too expensive: comparatively to other tablet devices. Even if it was alot better, customers would be more likely to go with the equally impressive and less costly iPad or Android devices.
  • No need for the product: if the other tablets lacked in some capacity, perhaps the Surface would have taken off. But the needs of tablet users was more than met by what was in the market.
  • Network externalities: what used to work for Microsoft now worked against them. It’s not enough to develop a tablet: you have to develop all the things tablet users expect and support that as well. Otherwise you have to go to the commodity market.

Invalid reasons would be:

  • Microsoft can’t do hardware: Microsoft can do hardware. Their XBOX line in particular is nowhere near the weakling of the Surface or Microsoft’s earlier hardware failure, the Zune.
  • No one can compete with Apple: Google in conjunction with Samsung and others are doing a good job of competing with Apple.
  • There is no room for more hardware in the market: again, Google and others have shown it is possible to compete in this space.

I don’t think Microsoft is done in this space. But I think they may approach it differently. We’ll see in the next two years.

Some thoughts on online calculators that save you money

I like this site: Washing Machines: Cost per load of washers — Ask Mr. Electricity

It gives you an online calculator and shows you how much you can save by changing the way you do laundry.

A good exercise would be to have an entire list of such calculators, run them all, and total up how changing a few simple behavoirs can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The accumulation would really impress people, I think.

Dedicating a tree or bench in Toronto

The City of Toronto has a great program that allows you allows you to pay tribute to someone or some event by purchasing a park bench or tree for installation in a public park through their Commemorative Tree and Bench Program. The details are here. It’s a wonderful way to be remembered, I think. Check out the link to find out more.

(Blog post text partially taken from their site.)