Solid Geekery

I love my XM radio. It has single-handedly quelled my testy demeanor during the aggravating 1/2 hour trek around monstrous potholes and through clouds of apoptotic-inducing truck emissions on my way to school.

Lately, however, my XM has become quite nefarious. Temperamental. Traitorous. Why? It has started picking up signals from other cars, leaving me to listen to the dubious music choices of Mr. Ford F250 (supplemented with mud flaps and a gun rack, just like my brother) to my left and Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong with a hip-hop twist to my right.

Did I mention that it picks up the CB signals of truckers? That in itself is quite a thrill, especially is somebody’s rig is on fire.

I guess I can’t complain too much, it usually doesn’t last long…until I find myself unfortunately yet firmly planted in a long line of cars waiting for a short traffic light. That has happened to me a few times lately, making me wonder what people hear when I unknowingly interfere with their radio. Soft Cell? Mikey J? Or (gasp), my insatiable addiction to Augusten Burroughs?

Through some sophisticated detective work (Google) using a high-tech, classified contraption (laptop) and esoteric word strings (XM interference), I have discovered that the FM modulators are apparently to blame. The theory is that if you and an adjacent driver are tuned to the same FM frequency in which to funnel XM, you can get interference. At least that is what I think happens, there were lots of complicated acronyms and technical terms that honestly just blew my attention span. What’s the take home message? You can, unknowingly and without intent, screw up the listening pleasure of another driver. Imagine having all that power and not even knowing it.

So, despite the fact that I have experienced a 75% increase in rogue signals over the past few months, I wouldn’t give up my XM. Let’s just say that the calm, soothing sounds of “80s on 8″ keep me from purposely ramming into the lady ahead of me who is applying eyeliner, drinking coffee, teasing her hair, and intermittently attempting to drive.

In a nutshell, XM is the non-drug cure for road rage. Well, at least for this subscriber. Watch out drivers, here I come.

1 Comment

I found this article on hand-held lie detectors being used by the US military. Statements about the accuracy of the device varied depending on whether inconclusive results were counted in the statistics. When inconclusive results were counted, the accuracy was around 70%, but when only positive and negative results were used, it was closer to 90% accurate. One problem with the device is that it doesn’t have all the capabilities of the lie detector devices used in police investigations and security clearances. There is a lot of opposition to using the device from people who say that it is not accurate enough and that troops aren’t trained well enough to make results from the device conclusive.

Human lie detection

So if 70-90% just isn’t good enough, then how well do people judge truth from lies. According to this article on deception, the average person can determine truth from lies about 55% of the time. This is pretty bad considering if you flipped a coin to decide if someone was lying, it would on average give you the correct result about 50% of the time. There was a small subset of people who could determine truth correctly 80% of the time, but they represented a very small portion of the sample tested. Even a group of trained police detectives were only correct in about 65% of the cases.

How accurate do they have to be?

So the question that remains is what level of accuracy is acceptable? Do they have to be near perfect, and is that even possible? Is 80% accuracy, the level that only a small group of people can attain with any frequency, good enough? Should we trust anything that does better than the human average which admittedly isn’t much better than chance?

While I think these questions are valid, I think a more important consideration is the length of time it will take to figure out how to circumvent the device. The armed forces require that the device not be used for final determination. It’s used more for determining from a group of people who should be questioned further with more traditional forms of interrogation. But what happens if these devices become a crutch used by people with little training in interrogating suspects? Once techniques are developed for fooling the device, it may make it more likely for information to be missed.

2 Comments

To continue my series of anime reviews, I thought I’d talk about my favorite comedy of all time.  Hare+Guu has been a favorite of mine for several years due to its fast pace and crazy characters.  One word of warning about this show though is that the people talk fast.  Sometimes they talk so fast that it’s hard to keep up with the subtitles.  If you don’t like reading subtitles, I would definately recommend listening to the English voice track.

What’s it about?

Hare is a young boy living with his mother in their small home in the jungle, and despite the fact that he acts more grown up than his mother, he seems to be really happy.  Then Guu shows up.  It’s not certain who or what Guu is, but she has a habit of causing as much chaos and destruction as she can to keep Hare from being bored.  She can swallow people to send them to a strange alternate dimension, summon people and things with a thought, and change peoples’ bodies at will.  Just when you think you’ve seen all you can handle, Guu finds another way to shock you.  One of my favorite scenes in any anime is when Guu laughs for the first time.

The thing that makes the show so outrageous is that every character has some part of them that is blown totally out of porportion.  There are two characters that are so in love with each other that they can’t stand to be apart for even a second.  One character is so enamoured with his own chest hair that he falls into a death-like state when Guu removes it.  And all the adults are so irresponsible that Hare ends up taking care of all of them.

One thing that I’ve always disliked about humor in anime is that it usually only consists of plays on words.  Japanese humor relies almost entirely on puns, and it was refreshing to find an anime that went in a different direction.  Granted there are some puns littered throughout the show, but it’s made up for with the outrageous characters and generally upbeat tone with which Hare handles all the problems he faces.

Final Thoughts

I’ll be the first to admit that Guu is not for everyone.  It is extremely fast paced, and it may be difficult to understand what’s happening at first.  But if you stick with it, I think you’ll find that it is an excellent series.

2 Comments

Relationship, love, and chemistry do not need to be all present when you have a lover.  Today, I am opining on what makes and breaks the lover’s bond.

Forming a relationship requires very little.  Two people with mutual agreement to be together will have a relationship.  The basis for the agreement can be anything such as lust, money, education, gender, political preferences, religion or as simple as we work on the same team/project or play together.

Love is a bit tricky.  The best writing addressing the question of if this is love is as follows: first there are different kinds of love, so excluding all those blood related types of love or those for pet…

“in order to find out if you love someone, the basic place to start would be to ask yourself, do you want to be with them? If the answer to that question is no, then it really can’t be love. When you love someone, you want to be with them. Not just be with them, but share everything with them. You have a great day at work and want to rush home and tell them every wonderful thing that has happened. You feel excited at the prospect of just being in their company, just being close to them isn’t enough, you want to be a part of them, a part of their life forever. You can’t stand the thought of being away from them yet, when you are, you still feel that ever-present bond that ties you together wherever you go. You can almost feel what they are feeling. You feel like, with a little bit of effort, you can see what they are seeing and think what they are thinking. It is almost as if you both can occupy each other’s bodies with complete trust and harmony. That to me is love.”

The description above does not require two parties to be present to have love.  Unrequited love is often possible when one person feels closer emotionally and mentally connected to the other person.  This bids the question of whether it’s possible that those who fall in love often are of higher mental/emotional capacity than those who don’t often fall in love.  How about those who recognize love’s presence and proceed to block it off?  Certainly, the common theme in that line of reasoning is love requires some intelligence and controlling love is a separate level of consciousness.

Chemistry is often confused with lust.  Feeling chemistry is not a bad thing, it just means you’re excited by another person. I wonder if it could also be cause by the other person sending you ‘telepathic’ signals and their electrons reach you and thus igniting a chemical reaction.  It would be interesting to somehow experiment with this by placing one person (A) who is extremely attracted to person B, while B has no initial attraction to A at all to see if A can cause B to somehow chemically respond to A.  In relation to that thought, B is somewhat of an innocent victim of A’s attraction.  B never really liked A but now there is a confusion ignited in B as to whether s/he does like A.  The question i have here is, given this type of situation, it would be natural to think that we should have evolve to be equipped with defense mechanisms against unwanted attractions!  At least we should naturally reject those who are biologically incompatible with us, like a bad DNA match would immediately cause B to react with horror to A’s advances.  But would we have control of our defenses?  Can we choose to let our guards down and accept A anyway, or accept those who are not a good biological match for us?  Now im curious… it’s too bad i don’t have those answers.

Moving on to What breaks lovers.  I wonder if break-ups are purely a social creation or is it something of a consequence to human being’s higher capacity for morality (that we break up because we have fallen in love with someone else or at least desire someone else).  The easy answer is when there is no love, there is a break.  The common cases are when there is some level of love or attraction that hinders clear decision to go either one way or another.  But staying on course, do people need a reason for a break-up?  Should people also provide that reason to their lovers?  I think generally there are no logical reasons for break-ups.  That when one person feels ill in the presence of the other, it’s time for a break-up.  No amount of ‘trial separation’, flowers, or extravagant vacations will take away that ill feeling, though it may delay it.  So, next time when you feel like vomiting at the sight of your lover, it’s time perhaps to let the other person know they make you sick. Breaking up on any other grounds could indicate that you have practical concerns that are more important than being with your partner.

Having explore the basics of love, the next write up will delve into the more complicated issues and on friendly advice (that most involved in a relationship should not take).

4 Comments

A friend was recently complaining about a colleague’s overuse of large words, saying that it rendered his sentences to a nearly incomprehensible level. The verbal killjoy then proceeded to state that the only reason this person used big, scary words was to make himself look (and feel) intelligent.

I took a little bit of offense to this since I am a lover and user of big words. I guess “big” really isn’t the operative word here, maybe “variety of” is a better fit. But more on that in a second.

I did a Google search and found that the hate for verbophiles (yeah, I made that up) is quite sizable. And I can understand their complaints, as I too have been around people who use large words simply because they want to appear sophisticated and smart or because they are some sort of extensively trained animatron programmed to dazzle and amaze. Daniel Oppenheimer, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Princeton, did a study on the use of overly-complex words ironically titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly” and found that pieces of writing containing strings of complex words were judged to have been written by someone who was not very intelligent. So perhaps this is some scientific evidence to back up the haters, but what does that mean for those of us who truly enjoy having an extensive vocabulary?

My favorite word is “duplicitous” and yes, I know what it means and I can use it properly in a sentence. I don’t have a private-school-merge-to-Harvard education, I was taught in West Virginia public schools and universities. It just so happens that when I was younger, I would go to the library and pick out 10 or so books at a time…and read them all. The bottom line is, if you read that much, you are bound to pick up some terms that are a bit out of the box.

I guess, on a basic level, that I can understand not wanting to read a book or hear a dialog that is littered with grandiose verbiage. It’s too much stuff to muck around in and figure out. It’s better to be an author with a creative mind for new word/phrase combinations as to invoke imagery rather than use the same old standby language (such as “meanwhile, back at the ranch”….it makes me shudder). As for me, I find that using a different and uncommon word here and there keeps my brain healthy and challenged. I don’t think about it, I just do it naturally; I don’t use big words in every sentence or because I need to impress someone, I do it because it makes me happy.

Maybe what I am trying to impart here is a tiny life lesson. If you are a hater of the verbally-gifted, take a hint from Cher in Clueless and sporatically learn a new word or two. Do it for your brain, because wrinkles are sexy. If you happen to be that guy who makes others dizzy from weaving nonsense with your rhetoric, remember that not everyone is as “cool” as you. Cut back to one big word per minute and never, ever use the word “recalcitrate” unless forced to by threat of death.

Does that pacify everyone? Good.

As a side note, while looking for a word meaning “fear of words”, I came across a website with an indexed list of phobias. Did you know that you could have a fear of flutes (aulophobia), property (orthophobia), and even fear of the great mole rat (zemmiphobia). That’s…..(checking Thesaurus.com)….numinous!

Adios!

2 Comments