No, Scott Adams isn’t a misogynist (or a creationist)

Note: This post doesn’t condone the views in either of the blog posts by Scott Adams that are referenced within – instead, I’m pointing out that neither does Scott Adams. Curious? Read more below.

I’d also recommend, if you haven’t come across this debacle before, reading this post in full before clicking on the links, as it contains quite a bit of context that the links lack.

Scott Adams seems to be in the news semi-regularly for possessing controversial views. I was somewhat aware of him being accused of being a creationist (or anti-evolutionist, whichever description floats your boat), but accusations of sexism/misogynism recently came across my radar (via Tumblr), based on a (taken down) blog post by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert (which he reposted at the bottom of this blog post.) Naturally, being both a feminist and exceedingly curious, I decided to dig deeper, to see if there was a larger story.

As it turns out, there was. And, as it turns out, while Adams isn’t a misogynist, he sure could have learnt a thing or two about communication.

Lesson One: On The Internet, Everything Must Be Marked

First, it turns out that Adams often posts controversial stuff, not just the two times mentioned. And he does this not because he believes it, but he thinks it’d be interesting for the readers of his blog to debate about it in the comments.

Here’s the relevant comment on the above website:

Scott Adams:

The entire piece is an anti-male-rights piece.

The regular readers of my blog understand that I routinely build arguments for whatever side of an issue is hardest to defend. Then they wrestle with it in the comments. When the piece is moved from the context of the blog, the message is changed by the new context. On the Men’s Rights blogs, it’s seen as an attack on men. On this blog it’s seen as an attack on women. The readers of my own blog email me to say, “What’s the big deal?”

Add selective quoting, which further changes the message, and layer on some poor reading comprehension and you get this zoo, which, as a student of human nature, I have been enjoying. The whole thing is fascinating.

The problem is often people come across blog posts without being regular readers of the blog. If you view merely the single post, the context is stripped away. Even just scanning the recent blog posts might not give you this impression.

If you use your blog for both serious and non-serious posts, the non-serious posts must be marked as such because the very nature of the Internet means that most posts can, and will be viewed outside of the context of your blog, and thus will be mistaken for actual opinion.

Luckily, this is one lesson Adams seems to have learnt. From a more recent post:

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply retroactively. I know it’s a lot of work, but I’d go back through and mark all previous posts that are similar with the same message.

Lesson Two: Be Clear The First Time (And Every Time)

So, as I mentioned above, Scott Adams himself began posting in the comments section of the site I linked. The problem is, the comment I posted was about the ninth that he wrote.

At first, he starts talking about the author of the post (and various others) lacking reading comprehension – but it’s hard to know what he’s talking about without the context he’s describing. In a later comment, he hints at what he’s on about:

umami:

Scott Adams also doesn’t believe in evolution.

Good to know that his lack of critical thinking skills go right across the board.

Scott Adams:

That’s another example of poor reading comprehension. I’ve often stated that evolution qualifies as a scientific fact. The confusion comes from my writings on how we perceive reality.

I’m also rumored on the Internet to be a creationist, an Obama lover, and nearly dead from a debilitating disease. (All false, by the way.) And according to my Wikipedia page, I’ve won some awards that I’ve never heard of.

Believing what you read is always risky.

Now, I think he didn’t initially post his explanation because he thought it was obvious, but only posted it when it became clear that it was not to the commenters of that blog. When something is obvious to you, it’s often frustrating when other people don’t see it, but the best thing to do is to communicate as clearly as possible what you mean the first time, even if you think it’s obvious.

If Adams had posted the post first, he would have short-circuited a lot of the complaining about ‘reading comprehension’ (but more on that below), especially that by people who just found his first post and leapt to the Reply box.

Here’s a quote from his blog post responding to the matter (in context, clearly addressing his audience):

Regular readers of my blog know that the goal of my writing is to be interesting and nothing else. I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion, largely because I don't believe humans can be influenced by exposure to better arguments, even if I had some. But I do think people benefit by exposure to ideas that are different from whatever they are hearing, even when the ideas are worse. That's my niche: something different. That approach springs from my observation that brains are like investment portfolios, where diversification is generally a good strategy. I'm not trying to move you to my point of view; I'm trying to add diversity to your portfolio of thoughts. In the short term, I hope it's stimulating enough to be entertaining. Long term, the best ideas probably come from people who have the broadest exposure to different views.

Contrast my style of blogging to the most common styles, which include advocacy for some interest group or another, punditry, advice, and information. Now imagine moving my writing from the context of this blog to the context of an advocacy blog. You can see the problem. Men thought I was attacking men, and women thought I was attacking women. The message changed when the context changed. I saw that developing, so I took down the post.

He doesn’t explicitly state that the things he blogs about aren’t necessarily what he agrees with, or that he “build[s] arguments for whatever side of an issue is hardest to defend”, and because of that, except to his regular readers, this explanation falls flat. As a result, many blogs, which only looked at the initial post by the feminist websites and not the comments (or only enough of the comments to convince themselves he was backpedalling), took this post as making excuses, as opposed to an explanation. If he had stated these two important things, then the context is there for everyone (and not just his regular audience) be seen.

Of course, many people would still attempt to rationalise their acquired belief that Scott Adams is a misogynist. It’s a natural response to attacks on notions they believe – most people subconsciously interpret attacks on their beliefs as attacks on them, on their trustworthyness. But doing the above will at least convince more people, especially the ones that read a post or the initial comments of one and think they have all the context to understand it, or those who might have been on the fence until they felt as if they’d been insulted.

A Note About Reading Comprehension

A lot of people misunderstand the meaning of “reading comprehension” – they think it’s the ability to comprehend the text. And while that may be the literal interpretation of the two words, that’s not the meaning of the term.

Rather, reading comprehension is the ability to understand the text in context. When Adams is saying the commenters lack ‘reading comprehension’, he means that they are failing to place the text within the context of his blog (which makes controversial posts so that the commenters can argue about them).

Unfortunately, people who either don’t know the meaning of term or think they have all the context take this as a fancy way of saying ‘UR DUM’, which merely makes them more entrenched in their belief that they understand quite perfectly, thank you very much.

Conclusion

As I hope to have shown, Adams clearly doesn’t believe the stuff he’s accused of believing – but he poorly communicated his explanations, and could have been a lot clearer about the whole thing. Let this be a lesson to anyone finding themselves in the middle of a debacle like this one.

Why the devs Peter Bright wrote about are wrong (and why Peter Bright is right about what to do about it)

How A Simple Bug Creates A Larger Problem: The Logoff Bug in Software Updater (Or: The Perils of Using e.Cancel in a FormClosing)

Is Charlie Sheen Crazy? I Don’t Think So

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past week, no doubt you’ve heard about Charlie Sheen’s recent interviews with various news stations. So, always wanting to get the full picture, I decided to watch the full interviews myself.

(The interviews I watched: 20/20’s “In His Own Words” [parts one, two, three, four, five, six], MSNBC’s Today Show interview [parts one and two], and the Piers Morgan interview [part one, two, three and four]. The Piers Morgan one is especially good, since it's the only one of these interviews that were both live and unedited.)

And you know what? If Sheen is crazy, insane, or otherwise psychiatrically unfit or unwell, I’m not seeing it.

It’s quite clear to me that he was joking around a lot in all those interviews. The fact that people are taking it as if he’s being serious, that they think he’s having a mental episode, is in my mind beyond bewildering, especially considering that when he’s actually seriousness in those interviews, it doesn’t sound crazy at all.

The man obviously does not believe he has tiger blood and Adonis DNA, or that he’s on a drug called Charlie Sheen, or that he actually has magic in his fingers, and I don’t think he was “banging 7g rocks” either. His new catchphrase “winning” doesn’t seem any different to, say, How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson’s obsession with the word “awesome” – in fact, many aspects of his interviews seem to share traits with the character. Do we take Stinson seriously when he’s obviously not? Of course not!

The tone, the way Sheen said those things, was so obviously a jocular manner that the way the media (and psychiatrists) has latched on to it is the only crazy thing about this.

Let’s face it, if his comments were scripted for Two and a Half Men, we wouldn’t bat an eyelid. If someone in a bar said as a pick-up line or says to his girlfriend “I’ve got tiger blood flowing through my veins”, we wouldn’t present the person making them as manic or crazy. If this was part of a stand-up routine, we’d be fine with it.

And If these were any other interviews, we’d take them as witty comments and leave them at that.

But no, Sheen just got rehabilitated for drugs, so it’s got to be some kind of withdrawal symptoms, or maybe they were driving him mad, or something. The way the media is psycho-analysing the man is sickening to watch, and even more sickening is the way the public is lapping it up.

Part of the problem are the medical experts weighing in. 20/20 got leading expert on mental health and head of the Hazelden Foundation, Omar Manejwala, to review the full recorded material without cuts, and he said that Sheen could either be suffering withdrawal or having a manic episode. Unless the crazy parts were cut out of the interviews (and why would they do that?) I can’t see it at all. Sure, I’m not a leading anything, but I honestly can’t see where the guy’s coming from.

I think part of the problem is that the media is asking psychiatrists What’s wrong with Sheen rather than Is there anything wrong with Sheen or What’s the likelyhood of these diagnoses being accurate, or How likely is this a mental episode rather than just something normal, and they therefore are pressured into analysing Sheen with the presumption that something is wrong, rather than analysing if there is, in fact, anything wrong. Additionally, there’s pressure to maintain the consensus (that Sheen is crazy) rather than have the potential to be ridiculed.

Is Charlie Sheen crazy? Does he need psychiatric help? I don’t know for sure. Do I think Charlie Sheen is crazy? Not in the slightest, or at least, no more crazy than the rest of us.

---

Searching the web, I’ve found I’m not alone in this opinion. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly:

“I don’t think you sound that crazy at all,” said Morgan. And indeed, Sheen came across as an intelligent, complicated man — jumpy and a yammerer, to be sure, compulsively rephrasing nearly every sentence he uttered, but by no means out of control or incoherent.

http://watching-tv.ew.com/2011/02/28/charlie-sheen-cnn-piers-morgan/

As noted above, Piers Morgan himself felt that Sheen wasn’t crazy, and he’s one of the few people who know Sheen; the two go back almost a decade. He points out that about 80% of the stuff he said then was non-serious joking stuff too, and I get the feeling he doesn’t get the media reaction either.

Marissa Foglia, who writes a blog called “Confessions of a Clever Wordsmith”:

I do not see a man who has lost his mind.

What I do see is a man who is well-aware of every word he speaks, every point he makes. His injections of verbal passion and honesty are surely overwhelming for most people, but I get it. Yes, that scares me, but only a pinch.

I see a man who speaks with no filter…something the general public are not used to. Someone who, God forbid, is 1,000% real and honest about what he TRULY believes and stands for. And there’s nothing wrong with that. He should not be judged on his words, no matter how outlandish. He should not be judged on his beliefs, no matter how much you may disagree.

http://marissafoglia.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/charlie-sheen-isnt-crazy-he-just-needs-a-bath/

Robert Pattison and "The Cynical Christian" of PoliPundit apparently both think Sheen's awesome crazy, not insane crazy, for what that's worth.

So I don’t think Charlie Sheen is crazy, and there are other people out there who don’t think he’s crazy either. What are your thoughts?

Thoughts on Christchurch

This past week, many New Zealanders played witness to the worst natural disaster they have seen in their lifetime.

Few are alive that remember the Nelson earthquake, the only earthquake in New Zealand similar in destruction and loss of life. So will few recall the Tangiwai disaster, in which a lahar destroyed a rail bridge off of Mt. Ruapehu, causing the second-worst transport-related disaster in New Zealand history. The sinking of the Wahine was long before my time, and I only know of it from reading about it, as with the tragic loss of life at Mount Erebus. All these disasters now live only in textbooks, and in the memories of the generation that lived through them.

I’m not comparing or demeaning the loss of life in any of those disasters. All of them are equally tragic, and many of us would give anything for the people who died in them to have lived their lives normally.

However, I feel that the 2011 Christchurch earthquake will be our generation’s disaster in New Zealand. It’ll be the disaster that we will have the most emotional attachment to, because we were there, because we remember it.

I’m not going to go into the details of the quake itself here, mainly because there are many publications that have done a much better job than I could. However, I will share a few of my thoughts.

We’ve heard much news over the past week. We’ve heard happy stories, like the woman who protected her son from a falling air conditioning unit, or the girl who walked out of the window of the CTV building as it crumbled around her. Someone survived being crushed in a bus by talking with one of the rescuers. The woman who rushed to her husband’s workplace and waited for him until he was pulled out and ran into her arms. The pair who survived the quake and got married in the week following. The happy chances that make this bearable.

We’ve also heard stories of tragedy. The man who tried to rescue someone else in the street from a pile of bricks, only to be killed by falling debris. The woman who got her family out of a superette, only to rush back for her phone and then get crushed when the building collapsed. The baby squashed by a falling television set. The groups of exchange students who were in the CTV building at the time, of which only half have been recovered alive. These are the stories that show how co-incidence is a cruel mistress. It makes survivors wonder what could have been if only they’d been in their loved one’s place, and brings sorrow to the rest of us, as well as reminding us of the fragility of life, and that death can come from anywhere.

The probability is high that we have all met or know someone who was in Christchurch at the time of the quake.

I knew someone who used the nom-de-plume Adaminator1. He frequented a chat room I visit often, but he hasn’t visited since the day before the quake. Though I only knew him for a few months, I have to be honest – I’m frightened. I fear for his safety.

I fear for everyone’s safety.

But we must be strong. We need to help, in any way we can. Even if it’s not directly, even if we give our best wishes to those who live in Christchurch still. They need our words of comfort and support, now more than ever.

We must show Christchurch that, although they may feel it, they are not alone. We must show them they have New Zealand behind them. We must show them they have the entire world behind them.

We must stand together as one people. Whether it be in mourning, in support, in remembrance, or in guidance, we must not let Christchurch stand alone.

We must stand as one.

A Modest Proposal: Private Clouds on a Large Scale

Misleading Statements at Google’s Chrome OS Event

Why *your* feedback is important

People love feedback. They revel in it. It’s part of everyday life for most people – whether it be their choice of fashion, their views or their creations.

Even if you disagree, your feedback is important to them. Without checks, they’ll just continue doing whatever it is you don’t like. And it’s possible that they might not have thought about it from the angle you have, or not know about it.

Heck, they might still keep on doing it, but at least they know that there’s someone out there who doesn’t appreciate it.

Commenting can help people know they’re actually being noticed, rather than just submitting stuff to an empty void. Some people, without feedback, might even wonder if they’re hallucinating about it being submitted, or that it came out as gibberish but their minds are pretending it’s not.

I know that every time someone comments on or reviews my work or replies to my own comment or review, my inner self is screaming with joy because someone noticed, someone cared enough to do so, even if their comment is tearing apart everything I hold dear. Feedback is that important to me.

And chances are, even if you may not admit it, even if you may not think it, it’s that important to you too.

So please, tell me if I smell, if my singing’s bad, if my artwork sucks, my writing’s boring, my software’s buggy, or my views are flawed. Heck, tell me if they’re merely mediocre, or if you absolutely loved or agreed with my works. I’d love to hear from you.

Transformation, audience appeal and “fetish comics”

Today I’m going to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately. Bear with me, because this might be long, and it might be a little rambly.

Every now and then, I hear the term “fetish comic” thrown around, usually against comics which engage in male-to-female (or vice-versa) transformations. The first time was while reading Your Webcomic Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad by John Solomon (now removed from the interwebs), on a review of The Wotch. Recently, I’ve also heard it used to describe El Goonish Shive – the implication being that people get off on that kind of stuff, or that the author themself does.

Before I start, yes I am going to defend these two comics against the label of “fetish comics”, and it’s not because “I secretly associate with those kinds of people” or something. It’s because I enjoy reading those comics, and I don’t like seeing something I enjoy being attacked. It’s a perfectly reasonable human emotion, so there.

(And no, I don’t enjoy them in that way. Get your head out of the gutter.)

First, let’s define the term fetish comic. I think we can all agree that a fetish comic is one where the primary purpose is obviously to cater to someone’s fetishes.

So, what might make a fetish comic a fetish comic?

The comic attracts perverts: Well, to be honest, that’s a ridiculous measure. I’m sure VG Cats (which is awesoem, BTW)attracts people into anthropomorphic cats as well – despite it being nothing more than anthro cats playing video games. The fact is, everything attracts some kind of fetish-ers – one would only need to search for Rule 34 stuff to see what I mean.

Even if (and that’s a big if) the fan base is primarily made up of fetish people, that doesn’t make the comic inherently a fetish comic. Unless there is clearly fetish-appealing material in the comic does it make it one. (And TF or TG elements are not merely sufficient – more on that later.)

The comic’s author is a pervert: It is my belief that you can’t judge what a person is attracted to from the elements in a webcomic unless the elements are framed in the manner of which he is attracted to them. That is, unless the TG scenes in either comic are framed in a sexual manner, then there is no basis for believing that the author is sexually attracted to TG situations.

But, whatever, say the author is attracted to the content in that way. If the content is devoid of such sexual framing, it doesn’t matter if they are or not, it’s not a fetish comic. Otherwise, it’s an ad hominem (attacking the content based on the merits of the person), and thus has no basis for criticising the comic.

The comic has transformation/transgender themes: Woah, there, hold your horses! Transformation themes are merely a medium or plot device for telling a story. It’s no more inherently feterish then having two cats talk about video games. There has even been transgender themes on shows aimed at kids, tweens and teens – two examples that come to mind are The Zack Files and Johnny Test.

It’s rather annoying when people have pre-conceived notions about a particular subject, and even more annoying is when they let that colour their judgement on content like webcomics. Please, don’t let that person be you.

Conclusion

I hope that I have presented my case, that comics are only fetish comics not only if they appeal to a certain fetish, but are explicitly framed in the context of being a fetish comic, well enough. If not, feel free to sound off in the comments.

I realise that I probably won’t convince anyone who already has their mind set against such things. I’m not writing this for them, though. I’m writing this partially to vent, and maybe to convince some people to rethink the way they approach things. If I’ve convinced even one to approach their values from a different angle, I will have considered this a success.

Thank you for your time, and good night!

Animation: Their Princess Is In Another Castle

O hai. I has an animation over at YouTube. It's rough, but I hope it gets the idea across.

[Edit: I should probably point out that the video has nothing to do with Mario beyond the title, which is more of an analogy than anything else.]

(The address at the end reads http://markk-b.sitesled.com/stuff/fanfic/ http://www.markkb.com/stuff/fanfic/, for those who find it too small to read.)

Basically, this is a draft for a trailer for a fanfic I’m rewriting right now. Those who have read my fanfics over at FF.Net will know what scene this video portrays. Otherwise, I hope I can surprise you guys!

Updated 14/07/2013 to fix broken links.

Why We Must Return To The Moon: In Defence of Constellation – Part 1

President of the United States, Barack Obama, has filed his planned federal budget for the United States in 2011. In it, he has boosted NASA’s budget; however, in doing so he has made no allotment for the Constellation mission.

This was met with both joy and disappointment – on the one hand, more money is always good, but on the other, some feel that Obama is essentially throwing away their chance to forge a name in space. And, to state my bias early on, I’m inclined to agree with them.

In this article, I’ll be examining Constellation, the controversy around it, and why I believe Obama’s decision is the wrong one for spaceflight in the United States.

What is Constellation?

Constellation is NASA’s plan for human-based space exploration for the near future. It consists of two kinds of rocket boosters – the Ares I, for human missions, and the Ares V, for cargo and heavy lifting – and three craft – Orion, for crew, Altair, for lunar landing and transport, and the Earth Departure Stage, which acts as both part of the rocket and as the lunar module.

Right now, Constellation’s primary focus is landing a man on the moon again, but future missions include landing on an asteroid and landing on Mars.

Why the moon? Haven’t we already been there?

Yes, but it is important we go again, if only for three reasons:

• Sharpening the blade. If we are to go to other planets, then the Moon is our best shot at practicing and perfecting our techniques and technology. If things go wrong on the way to the Moon, it’s a lot easier than if they go wrong on the way to Mars or Jupiter.
• Inspiration and innovation. Only five times did people look up at the Moon while people walked and talked upon its surface; those five times inspired many people to become astronauts and astronomers and physicists and engineers and computer technicians and programmers, in the hope that they too could be a part of it. Those five times prompted a spark of innovation, so that we can do things in space that one could not normally do; many of these technologies greatly benefited people back on Earth.
  We need to go to the Moon, not just because of what we’ll do once we get there, but what it will do for all of us.
• Inertia. In my opinion, it was a mistake to cancel the Apollo programme. We should have never stopped going there, simply for the fact that now that we stopped, it’s harder than ever before to go back. And now that we’re on our way again, we must seize the moment, least we loose it forever.

What do you mean, harder?

That’s right, I said it’s harder to go to the moon than ever before. But why?

It’s harder to go to the Moon than when Apollo 11 or Gemini or Explorer launched from Cape Canaveral. It’s harder than Jules Verne wrote his inspiring book, From the Earth to the Moon. It’s harder than when Kepler looked to the skies and found that the planets moved in ellipses; harder than when Galileo first spied mountains on the moon. It’s harder than when Copernicus and Aristotle wrote of the heavens; it’s harder than man told tales of vengeful gods and great heroes and strung their images in the heavens, or first looked up at the shimmering orb and decided, I want to be there.

Again, why is it harder? Because we’ve already been.

Because we can always argue, what’s the point? We’ve seen it, we have the data and the photographs. Big whoop-de-doo. We can always send robots there anyway. It’s not like we have to go.

We don’t have to climb Mt. Everest or K2. We don’t have to travel in rickety bulbs of metal and glass to the bottom of the ocean to explore sunken wrecks and unknown, alien species. We don’t have to travel to Africa, or America, or the Amazon; people have already been there, and besides, we can just send robots. I mean, it’s easier, right? And certainly a lot cheaper.

It’s always cheaper and easier to sit back and do nothing. It’s always easier to not have to worry about keeping humans alive; but such research helps us in other areas as well.

But that’s not the point.

It’s the human element. It’s saying, “we’ve overcome all these obstacles, and look at us now.” It’s holding the flag, and planting it in the soil of Plymouth, or the snow of Mt. Everest, or the dust of the Moon; even if you’re not the first, it doesn’t make the moment any less real. It’s about achieving things harder, faster, better; achieving things hardly anyone has achieved before.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.

Because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills.

Because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone,

and one which we intend to win,

and the others too.

--President John F. Kennedy, 1962

Internet Critique: A Sea of Neutral Facts (Part 1)

This is part of a series of posts I’ll be writing about Internet criticism.

When reading or writing critique, it is important to distinguish between negative criticism and neutral facts.

Neutral facts are facts that don’t weigh for or against an object being criticised. Misguided Internet critics often pad their critiques with neutral facts in order to try and persuade people to their point of view, by way of the sheer number of these “facts”.

That’s not to say that the person might have a point, it’s just shifting through the silt for a gem may be time-consuming.

The ad hominem

The ad hominem is the most basic kind of neutral fact and one that is most often employed, usually in the form of association fallacy. Basically, an ad hominem is when one attacks the person or entity as an argument of why his views, opinion or something he makes, produces, or is responsible for, is bad or wrong.

Association fallacy says: X is made by Y. Y is bad/wrong because of Z. Ergo, X is bad/wrong, or alternately, X is made by Y, for reason Z. Reason Z is bad/wrong, ergo X is bad/wrong.

Both of these arguments fail to explain how X is wrong or bad. They explain how Y is wrong, misguided or bad, but that has no bearing on the quality of the object itself.

If you establish that the price of tea in China is too high, you don’t back it up by listing social injustices committed by the tea company. Sure, it’s bad a bunch of workers were wrongly treated, but what has that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Wrong: Selling drugs is wrong because the Mafia does it.
Wrong: Selling drugs is wrong because the Mafia uses it to control the underground.
Right: Selling drugs is wrong because there are laws against it.

While the Mafia does wrong things, that says nothing about the wrongness of selling drugs.

Wrong: This webcomic is bad because only perverts read it.
Wrong: This webcomic is bad because it’s obviously aimed at perverts.
Wrong: This webcomic is bad because the author obviously has some sort of weird fetish for this kind of thing.
Right: This webcomic is bad because of weak plot and bad art.

The audience of a webcomic, or the intentions or interests of the author, says nothing about the quality of the webcomic. For all you know, it could be a good webcomic despite its’ target audience, similar to well-done children’s television shows.

Non sequiturs

The non sequitur is a fact that’s only superficially related to the current topic, but is used to back up an opinion anyway.

X and Y are related categories. Y has a product Z. Z performs poorly in category X, and therefore wouldn’t appeal to category Y.

Wrong: WIndows Mobile only has 4% of the consumer smartphone market, and therefore is a poor business phone.

The fact that Windows Mobile is doing poorly in the consumer market says nothing about its’ competency as a business phone.

Misuse of Percentages

Often, percentages will be brought in to back up why something is doing poorly. The problem is that percentages mean nothing without proper context, which is often lacking.

Right: These percentages show that people are ignoring Windows Mobile.
Wrong: These percentages show that Windows Mobile is haemorrhaging users.

What the example above is ignoring is that the market continues to grow – that is, the total number of users has increased and, in fact, so has the number of Windows Mobile phones.

This fact can’t be inferred from percentages alone – raw data and absolute trends are needed to get the full picture.

Appeal to Popularity

The examples given for the preceding sections also suffer from another fallacy: inferring popularity = quality. This is another kind of association fallacy – that is, everyone likes/hates X, therefore X must be good/bad.

Part two will be posted soon.

--MarkKB

Appetisers, prior art and patents

OpenCity vs. “Microzoft”: Why Are Linux Developers Jerks?

9/11: A Retrospective

Originally posted to my deviantART Journal.

What was I doing on the day the Twin Towers fell?

Honestly, I can't remember. Is that a bad thing? Keep in mind that I was only ten years old.

I'll dedicate this space, instead, on what I remember afterwards.

I remember echoes of rumours that an aeroplane had crashed into a building, maybe at lunchtime. I remember a small television on a dolly; whether or not we watched the news reports or not I don't remember.

I remember seeing the news early the next day on CNN.

I remember clearly the photograph of the South Tower, engulfed in smoke, that was displayed predominately on the front page of the Western Leader (our local newspaper), captured by a photographer from Laingholm.

Photographs of young, sad children waving the American flag. Photographs of the rescuers, with the haunting imagery of the smouldering ruins as their backdrop.

Photographs of the hole in the Pentagon, and of the remains of United Airlines Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania.

I have all these in a scrapbook. I tried to collect newspapers, as many as I could find, and paste anything about the disaster I could find into it. Even though the pages are yellowing, I still have that scrapbook on my bookshelf, tucked away with a few issues of TIME. Perhaps I did it for a school project? ... I don't know.

At the time, I don't think I realised what had really happened. How do you explain death to a ten year old? It was an abstract concept, far removed from the minds of the young. I just knew something bad had happened, and people were hurt. People were no longer alive.

On that terrible day, eight years and two days ago, we lost many people. Many lives were changed. And so, come September 11th, we morn the lost. Not only that, we celebrate their lives. We wish them and their families peace. We lower our flags to half-mast to honour their memory.

A hundred years from now, when few are still alive who remember the disaster, would we still morn? Maybe. I certainly hope that we remember what happened, at least.

That day was a day of sorrow, a shadow that hovers over us, even though the shadows of the Towers hovers no longer. A blight, a smudge in the manuscript of human history.

But we can't let that stop us.

So, rest in peace, those soaring souls that were joined with the ground and sky. Wherever they may be, we have to hope they are finally at rest.

And as we stand, sit, walk and run, drive or fly or swim or boat, we remember them on that day.

We need to remember.

Mark Guesses the Origin of Words #1: inflammable

The word flammable, meaning easy to set on fire, derives from the word inflammable, meaning… easy to set on fire. The reason flammable was created was because people thought inflammable meant not-flame-able.

But where did inflammable come from?

My guess would be that it derives from the word inflame, meaning… to set on fire. This use of the in- prefix is similar to inflate and increase. The reason inflate and increase didn’t get a similar treatment is probably because flate is far enough from float to be considered different words, and we associate crease with a different meaning (to fold neatly) then we did back then (probably “divide” or “make greater”. Apparently, crease actually derives from the Latin word crea, meaning to create.)

--MarkKB

Update on SiteSled Issues

You may have noticed some regular outages over the last half-year of my website at http://makk-b.sitesled.com/. There seems to be major problems up at SiteSled’s end, and I’ve been hoping that they’d get ironed out if I just weather the tide.

The most recent problem hasn’t limited your ability to look at it, but my ability to upload stuff – in fact, most stuff seems to be broken – FTP, HTTP upload, the forums, their wiki…

Apparently, hopefully, they’re fixing their ongoing problems:

It is true that we've experienced several extended outages, and communication has been spotty. The current software has been in use on SiteSled and our other free hosts since 1998, and is no longer supported with updates. This has caused several issues, which we are still working to solve.

[…]

We have been installing a new software suite that will allow us to offer a wide range of additional features on SiteSled.com and it's new sister site. We hope to be able to port over the old sites, but this has not been confirmed yet.

We will try to keep you informed, but again, our current software has very limited communication abilities.

We appreciate your support through the rough times, and hope to provide you with additional services in the future.

Thanks,
SS

[From the comments of this blog post – scroll to the end to see it.]

If this is true, it’s much appreciated (and a long time coming :D). Hopefully, this will all sort itself out, but if not, I’ve been researching both free and paid hosts. Although moving really is a last resort (since I’m lazy and don’t want to have to send everyone along to the new site. ^^)

--MarkKB

---

Update 14/07/2013: After going up (and staying up) for a bit, it seems that Sitesled is now dead for good. :(  My new website can be located at http://www.markkb.com/.

App Paths? What App Paths?

Delivering Papers (Or, Is There A Birdie Heaven?)

Time to write one of those anecdote thingies I’ve been promising. ^^; Well, here goes…

If you guys don’t know by now, I make a living^[1] delivering papers. And, as you guys also know, I’m rather lacking in what I call “good judgement” – brash, rude, lazy, a procrastinator, not looking where I leap, don’t know when to quit, always got to be right…

Wait, where was I?

Oh yeah, delivering papers.

One night^[2], I saw one of the usual cats^[3] sitting in the middle of a driveway. Now, this kitten was (one might say unusually) voracious/eager, so to see her just sitting in the driveway seemed, well, odd. Still, I walked up and stroked her head. Even more unusually, she didn’t move at all.

Then I noticed what was in front of her.

There was this poor little sparrow, lying sprawled against he pavement. It’s eyes were still open, and for a moment I stared at it, not realising I was still stroking the kitten.

And then they blinked, and I realised with horror what had happened – that it was still alive, and the last thing this poor magnificent creature would ever see is big evil Man congratulating his proud pet on another kill.^[4]

Crud.

If you’ve ever looked into a small birds’ eyes, you’d know they contain in them a sort of wonder, a curiosity, a spark in their beadyness that few others posses. I guess you have to be observant when the world is out to get you and your food’s smaller than your head. To see that spark there, even at the last vestiges of life, really gives this feeling of… great sadness, I guess. It sobers someone to the reality of things that we ignore day-to-day.

But there’s also another thing I saw in that little birds’ eye: hope. A hope for the future, that there’ll be no more death and killing and disease and poverty…

A hope that tomorrow’s going to be better.

Do not go gentle into that good Night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-- Dylan Thomas

--MarkKB

Footnotes:

[1] Of course, I don’t mean a proper living (I get to board free with my 'parents :D), but $20 each week isn’t too shabby IMHO.
[2] Oh, um, Boss, did I say night? I meant day! At 4:30p.m., even! ^^;
[3] It’s odd - some cats like me, some are scared of me, and some like to put stitches in my hand. ^^ Just kidding about that last part, that’s what my doctor does.
[4] “Man” here is the same Man who killed Bambi’s mother. Yeah, we’re a horrible bunch. (And that it’s not my pet is beside the point, we’re talking about the sparrow’s perspective.)

UAC is not (that) broken in Windows 7