zelienople

It's not the ticket system that is broken; it's the people.

The problem with stadium tours is that 95 percent or more of the seats are awful. They provide an extremely poor concert experience.

The sound is very bad for most of the audience. Many technological innovations in stadium sound have tried to address this, but the underlying physics has been resistant to an acceptable solution.

The visuals are even worse. An enormous fraction of the audience cannot resolve the headliner on stage as a result of the size of the performer and the distance to the viewer. The visuals then devolve to the viewers ability to see an enormous television screen.

So why would anyone want to go to a stadium show, if not for the visuals and the audio?

It comes down to human competitiveness. Bragging rights. Ingesting mass media nonsense about how a product or experience will make one feel, and then disgorging it to a peer group as a method of creating an artificial distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".

Taylor Swift, in particular, has been a genius at creating hysteria among her fans. They have ingested the idea that, if Taylor is in town, and you are not there, then you are a resident of the outer, miserable, darkness.

The truth, however, is that if you attend a stadium show, the only positive aspect is that you "were there". You will not see, hear, or in any meaningful way, experience the object of your hysteria. You will be packed into a seat with a group of strangers also experiencing a mass-media induced mental derangement.

The foregoing may lead you to believe that I am not a fan, but you would be wrong. My opinion was formed by the experience of going to all the Taylor Swift stadium tours, up to a certain point.

What changed was that I stopped fighting Ticketmaster at one point. I opted out and did not buy a ticket. However, I still wanted to go to the show. All seats were prohibitively expensive on the secondary market; good seats, even more so.

There were two shows in my city on subsequent nights. The first night, I watched prices on the scalper sites and I discovered that, in the last few minutes before the start time of the show, prices for even the best seats tumbled dramatically.

This was simple economics; unsold seats are a cost that subtracts from overall profit. It makes sense to dump them for any amount, even at a loss.

The second night, I waited until the price for a single front-row seat fell below the original price of the least expensive seat anywhere. I bought it, printed my ticket, and went to the show.

This was a transformative experience because I was literally a few metres from the stage. I could get out of my seat and stand by the barricades and see and hear as if the show was at at my neighbourhood folk club or an open mic night. I then turned around, with Taylor directly behind me, and I could see the view of a packed stadium waving lights and singing along, just like what those on stage would see.

I learned the difference between what the few who had the money or influence to obtain the best seats experience, and what the great majority of stadium show concert-goers endure.

I was cured. I have never, since that day, had any desire to attend a stadium show or buy a ticket for a standard seat in any large venue.

Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to educate a significant fraction of fans by demonstrating this.

Maybe there is a technological solution, though. If we could arrange for people to have a feed from a front row observer in fully immersive VR, we could perhaps recreate enough of the experience that the rush to purchase a grossly substandard product would diminish.

There are probably significant economic forces that would oppose this (Ticketmaster, obviously) because education is often the enemy of mass-market driven capitalism.

The longer-term solution is probably to recognize that the innate social behaviour of humans has been exploited to our total destruction by those who would hoard all wealth for themselves, and to begin another great eugenics experiment: breeding selfishness, conflict and the tendency to self-destructive herd behaviour out of the human genome, But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Too. Many. People.

True for the entire planet; the effects are not evenly distributed.

This is Volkswagen, so they actually got 20km and the rest was measured rolling downhill with the engine off.

Occasion-related giving is madness on a finite planet. It is one of the main drivers of the waste economy. We buy things people don't need and exchange them for things we don't need.

I refuse, on principle, to buy or give or receive gifts for "occasions".

A friend recently had her television fail, out of warranty and could not afford to replace it. I bought her a new one with a 6-year warranty. I bought it on the length and strength of the warranty above all else. That gift was needed and appreciated.

I have no problem giving. I just refuse to do it mindlessly in response to a ringing bell and for no reson other than idiotic social convention.

This is an existential issue at this point.

That is a work of stunning arrogance and foolishness.

Math is a game we play in our heads that represents a fictionalized ideal version of reality.

An alien intelligence might have realized that two plus two never equals four not because the underlying logic is wrong, but because two does not exist in reality.

The idea that the little game of math we play represents an immutable and universal truth is typical of the overwhelming anthropocentrism of our kind.

I am dissapoint.

And that is the killer app! When you have 3 dozen 4GB DDR3 SIMMs sitting around doing booger all, it is overwhelmingly tempting to get a card like this, if it is priced aggressively, and run something really fast. Re-image the OS from slower storage at boot, or whenever the 18650 falls out.

Cheating... I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me. So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an assignment then I think I cheated on everything.

And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments were my own, but, often, I collaborated with other students to understand the questions, or to develop an idea of how to approach finding the solutions, or to clarify issues that were unclear.

And, always, to make sure I got the right answer. Because if I didn't, it meant that I did not understand something and I needed to go back over the material to work out what that was. Any other approach would have rendered school valueless.

This is the normal process of education. You can tell that I did not cheat because my work and my answers were unique. If I submitted an image of someone else's work, that would be obvious.

Ah, but wait! I think I see. If the answers are multiple choice, that doesn't work.

But why are they multiple choice? To make it easier and cheaper for the school. Your inflation of the profit margin on my education makes me a cheater because you can't tell if I did the work myself? That sounds about right.

I think academic integrity is eroded more by the profit motive than by the Jesuitical definition of cheating in the article.

Even though I went to what are considered some the best schools, the greatest insult to academic integrity was always the faculty, because most of them didn't know the subject they were teaching, faked it, and didn't care.

And when I see many of the students who didn't cheat coming out of school not knowing shit from Shinola, I have to wonder why it matters? You get out what you put in, so who cares if people violate an arcane rule that says, "this, this here is an assignment; but that over there, that thing that looks identical to this in every way, that's a quiz, so don't talk to your friends about it or we'll nip your promising young academic career in the bud. Understand?"

The only lesson here is that you need to cheat better.

I came across an "Eight Sleep" unit, which is a high-tech system for cooling a mattress topper. Apparently, someone had problems with leaks in the topper section and threw it out.

I took it apart. It has a custom ARM board with a removable 8GB micro-SD card containing the OS. The ARM board has a combo WiFi/Bluetooth unit and apps for Android and iPhone.

Turns out, this makes a heckuva cooling unit for my gaming PC without modification. It is completely silent and easily has the capacity to keep my CPU and GPU frosty. The price to buy one is prohibitive for this application, but the ol' "dumpster dive discount" makes it worthwhile.

I see why it is so costly. This thing is a combination of a robust Peltier heating/cooling unit, a high volume pumping system with auto-prime routines, two excellent Noctua silent fans, and a very capable custom Arm board. It's like a Bed Keurig.

That was fun!

Because market research has discovered that many customers are not price-sensitive, even when it makes no sense.

Some people with limited means do not even look at prices. The ready availability of consumer debt allows them to buy whatever they wish without considering price as a factor. They simply do not consider any form of budgeting or interest rates on debt when they spend.

One aspect of basic biology that is almost invariably neglected when discussing the possibility of the continued existence of cryptids like Homo floresiensis is that there must be an isolated breeding population.

Plate tectonics puts a limit on the size and depth of caves. So how do you hide a breeding population?

The short answer: it is impossible.

They fixed it. Possibly indicative that someone from the USGS reads this website.

When are we ever going to learn that our activities are needlessly destroying the planet? Make a phone. Sell it. Make it repairable and upgradeable. Let people keep it for a long time. The only drawback is the company won't get all the money that exists, just most of it.

But what good is all the money when we, the animals, the insects, and the planet in general, are dead?

The only reason you want a new phone at this point is to reinforce your feeling of superiority over the other monkeys. Neither that, nor the money, is worth what we have to pay for it.

You need to make an account and then you find out you have to put in a credit card just to try it out?

Oh, heck, go fuck yourself with a sharp cactus!

"You will be eaten by an aurochs. We don't know what that means."

I spent my childhood worrying about a nuclear attack on my city and now I find out that we didn't even make it to the map? I am disappoint.

We often exclude obvious apects of natural selection in these studies. In this case, the decision to have children during a pandemic may be indicative of a predisposition to poor mental functioning in the parents, which would naturally result in poorer cognitive function, on average, in the offspring.

More intelligent people would recognize the potential downsides to reproducing in a pandemic, such as (a) unknown effects of the novel coronavirus on the developing fetus, and (b) the role of excessive population density in fueling the pandemic. These more intelligent parents would tend to make the logical decision to avoid reproducing in adverse circumstances.

This man is illiterate.

It's matter and it's dark, but that means it's dark matter, not Dark Matter. That matters.

Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil.

Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.

Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.

But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!

Why is learning anything so damned hard?

Mainly because we are monkeys to whom a reasonably accurate reductive analysis can be applied if we label the axes "asshole" and "idiot".

It was a good blog post by a reasonably intelligent monkey who seemed to score low on the "idiot" axis. But some other monkey pegged the "asshole" axis by preventing us from highlighting the text so we could right-click and search to answer the primary question, "What is it?"

Namely, what is functional programming? Even after besting the right-click hurdle, no one easy and succinct answer is available.

The meta-analysis of this blog post therefore circles back around to perform a second-phase adjustment of the author's "idiot" score once we realize that he has done exactly what he is complaining about; he is a bad teacher because he did not answer the "What is it?" question.

He seems like a reasonably nice person, so I think we have to leave his "asshole" score alone in the second phase.

The collective effort, however, scores high on both the "idiot" and "asshole" axes, and this is the core of the "bad teacher" problem.

I spent most of my long university career angry about this problem. Why is is that monkeys can't teach?

Partly, it is because they are arrogant assholes who don't want to weaken their position by making it easy for others to access their expertise.

And partly it is because they are monkeys who think more highly of themselves than is justified, and therefore they cover their ignorance with jargon, hand-waving, and obfuscation.

Other than extinction, I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but I'm sure that the first step is by starting every lesson by answering the "What is it?" question succinctly and concretely, and, more importantly, realizing that if you can't do that, you should shut the fuck up and go away.

The image that this brings to mind is the denizens of a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting over an emaciated corpse.

Mobile yes; portable no. For bonus points, make it an actually portable executable. Then we'll be getting somewhere.

Too. Many. People.

The corporations do bad things because you give them money. Your lifestyles are horribly wasteful because you buy too much stuff that you don't need, and for the wrong reasons. Then you throw it away.

You buy new clothes not because you need them but because it makes you feel better about yourself and because you think the other monkeys will be impressed.

In turn, the other monkeys feel like they have to buy new clothing.

Then you throw it all out when fashion changes and you buy more.

The end result is that tonnes of clothing are discarded annually in my small neighbourhood.

I gather so much of this for my clothing bank that the homeless people don't want it any more. They are overwhelmed with clothing.

We run a clothing exchange for everyone and we still can't get rid of it. We try to ship it to other countries but they already have mountains of it. It has to be sent for industrial re-processing or put into landfills.

Your consumer goods last about one month after their already-short warranties expire and then you throw those out, too. Over 80% of what comes into my e-waste program is working or can be easily repaired. You don't even bother; you just throw it out.

Several groups in my neighbourhood have active campaigns against me because they feel like it is beneath their dignity to repair and recycle what they call "garbage". These people are defective monkeys who feel that they are better than others because they can afford to waste more and destroy the planet faster than everyone else.

Then you reproduce unrestrictedly and teach your little monkey babies the same ridiculously wasteful lifestyle. "You're a princess; you're a beautiful and unique snowflake; everything revolves around you. Go out and destroy the animals and pollute the oceans and kill the insects and wipe out the wetlands because you're worth it!"

No, you are monkeys who have gotten uppity. You have a few successes in technology, but you are actually horrible monsters who care only about themselves and maintaining your idiot social order by force.

You need to control your own numbers and stop the horrific waste of your idiot monkey lifestyles before you choke on your own exhaust and drown in your plastic refuse.

Seriously? They couldn't make the content something standard like a .zip file? Or a zip file with a SQL database in it? Bloody monkeys always have to go and create a new standard for everything. They will argue it's for performance or something, but it's really an exercise in ego. "Oh, mine's better!" No, it's not. What is better is what works with everything else in the world.

And that index! We couldn't capitalize the proper name of Wikipedia? And do you not understand there are visually impaired people in the world who can't read light red text on a white background? What is wrong with people?

And the terminology! What in the fuckety is Aard2? What is a .slob file? Why is it that everyone uses obscure acronyms or whatever for everything and never explains anything? Ego again, probably. Let's create a language that no one else understands to make ourselves feel superior! No, you are not superior, you are just turning language into thick vegetable soup.

Didn't you people go to university, or did you not pay attention when they taught you that the first reference is always completely spelled out and explained and you can use the acronyms (or whatever they are) after that. It's only common sense that you don't spout gibberish and nonsense words without explaining then in the first instance, unless your goal is to confuse everyone for the purpose of making yourself feel superior.

And the Google sheet and the flat index, what a hodgepodge of nonsense. What the heck does it mean? What is the difference between the different versions? Who knows?

I have to go now. My eyes are bleeding from trying to read light red text on a bright white background. I'll check back again once I get a Braille laptop screen.

I read Prusiner's book a few years ago and I was disappointed with his inability to definitively satisfy Koch's Postulates.

It looks like we can close the chapter on that one, horrifyingly.

Nonsense. Utter rubbish. People are fat because they eat more calories than they burn.

The only reason that studies do not reflect this is that they rely largely upon self-reporting and people lie.

We've been ventilating rats with anal perfluorocarbons for years now and all we've really learned is that ten percent of them seem to like it.

Most new books are about people. A few good new books are about things. Very few great new books are about ideas.

The decline has affected both fiction and non-fiction. Almost every book is a big disappointment these days.

Fearmongering nonsense. This was natural uranium ore, not explosive, not highly radioactive, not dangerous, cannot realistically be used for any nefarious purpose.

This was a scrap dealer trying to make a little money in hard times. There is absolutely nothing to see here except the profound stupidity of humans over-reacting to something they know nothing about. Move along.