Bloviation

In the last few years, there's a really good metric for "movie will be bad" that I've noticed: If Subway gets the license for their kids meals, it's not going to be a very good movie.

I first noticed this when Subway got the Brave movie license. By then Pixar had repeatedly fooled me with trailers that didn't seem all that great, but turned into fantastic movies, so even though the Brave trailers didn't wow me, I was open-minded about it. But then Subway got the license, so I put off viewing it. It turned out to be the almost worst Pixar movie to that point, though it narrowly beat the previous year's Cars 2 on metacritic. And I still haven't seen it. (Or Monsters University or The Good Dinosaur.)

It is impossible to deeply understand a solution before you have the problem.

Let me give you an example that probably all my readers can relate to: Mathematics education. Do you remember first seeing the quadratic equation and wondering why you should care? Or even if you were a math nerd like me, can you understand why someone would be asking themselves that at that point?

The problem is that the students have not had the problem. For one thing, all the quadratic equations they've been solving were simple ones with integer solutions. For another, even the factoring problems themselves were artificial; they're not factoring because they've encountered a real life problem that requires a factoring solution, they're factoring because they were given homework. It's hard to care about the quadratic equation when it's a solution to a problem you don't have.

I thought I'd use Prime Music to explore some classical I hadn't gotten around to yet. You know... Mozart, some stuff by Beethoven I haven't heard yet, Bach, MC Hammer... you know, the classics.

Only a poor student of history could fail to notice history's cycles. The future can't be fortold in detail, but asking the question "Where are the cycles taking us?" gives you a better chance of guessing general shapes than anything else I know.

So it's easy for a student of history to look out at the United States and guess that we're approaching a libertine peak, and that over the next couple of decades we should expect to see the pendulum swing away from the wild excesses of the Baby Boomers back in a more "conservative" direction.

But at my age, I've never lived through a shift. So had I guessed how the counter-libertine shift would occur last week, I would have guessed a gradual cultural waning of the libertines and a gradual cultural waxing of those of a more conservative bent, with the advocates not changing their own views but their relative influence changing over time.

The debate about the reproducibility of science bubbles onward, with everyone agreeing that it's a problem but of course nobody with power to fix it doing anything about it.

Recently I've been thinking that science as we know it sits in a very unpleasant middle ground.

On the one hand, despite the propaganda institutional science is biased against replication. This holes it below the waterline, and any serious scientist (alas) must consider fixing this in their field their top priority or they are consenting to just spin their wheels forever. We do not work formally enough to produce good results, because merely reaching "Peer Approved Once" and getting published is provably not a solid foundation to build on.

Widespread angst about school quality is easy to fix... schools just need to look around and copy what's working out there in the real world.

Five Solids that you have to see to believe!

7 Places You Have To See Before You Die

This Woman's SHOCKING Actions Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

See why this guy thinks he can make you dance to his tune

This one weird chemical will BLOW YOUR MIND!

I don't listen to the radio hardly at all anymore. Recently, I was with my wife while she was just idly flipping through, and I was astounded.

Rappers? Autotuned.

Rockers? Autotuned.

Country? Autotuned.

The electro/techno stuff was autotuned, but that's less of a surprise.

Autotune, autotune, AUTOTUNE!

Not even subtly, either, but cranked up as far as it will go before the high end simply explodes with noise.

Is there anyone left in the music industry that can carry a tune?

Gold in vault, target
Steel door closed, locked, key thrown away;
Thief laughs "There's no wall!"

Data stream flows, filling
Lake overflows; disaster!
Arbitrary code

Man trusts fellow Man,
fellow Man undeserving.
Script code injected.

Novice celebrates,
Output easy, just append strings!
Master needs new novice.

Dark secrets made, shared
Tells foe the password is lost...
Rubber hose finds it.

"Love", Alice tells Bob
In anger, Eve flips one bit
Now love's checksum fails

In response to this story about a possible impending Helium shortage, someone suggested on Hacker News that perhaps someday we can use nuclear fusion to produce helium.

As it happens I'd idly chatted with my wife about that a few weeks ago, but that wasn't enough motivation to run the numbers. This was. Could we produce enough helium to satisfy our commercial production of it through fusion, if we just assume we have fusion?

Browsing through some old entries, I see in late 2007 I predicted:

One of the milestones I've been watching for is the first entirely DVD-based TV-style series. It's going to happen sooner or later, and will mark a major shift in how TV is produced, once it becomes possible to make it without advertising or subsidy, the only two models that currently work.

I'm going to give myself only half-a-point. True television-style "seasons" of shows have indeed now been produced without ever being "aired", but they didn't go straight-to-DVD. They went straight-to-streaming. I believe it was either Lilyhammer or House of Cards, depending on how picky you're being about not showing up on TV at all before being available via streaming. (Lilyhammer's first episode premiered on a Norwegian television channel, though this was clearly a publicity stunt rather than an attempt to "air on TV".)