Will Glenn Beck’s head explode?

How to not look like a total moron
[Via pandagon.net]

by Amanda Marcotte

For some reason, Jesse’s excellent post mocking a bunch of wingnuts for their “brilliant” plan to build a gay bar by the Cordoba House has brought a shitstorm of illiterate Twitter rantings at me from the sexually repressed and those lacking self-awareness or reading comprehension. You know, even though I didn’t write it. Their urge to gang up on a lady will not be thwarted by the fact that it wasn’t a she that called them out so much that they have nothing left to do but rave like lunatics.

I just have one thing to say. Just because their kids set them up on Twitter doesn’t mean they’re computer literate, or they may have done the first thing that occurred to me, which is to look and see if there are any gay bars within the vicinity of the Cordoba House. And lookie here, there are!

[More]

Glenn Beck had a guest on that discussed getting back at the Cordoba House by building a gay bar next to them. ‘That’ll show those muslims, building a mosque where we don’t want one. How’ll they like being next to a gay bar?’

All a nice joke.

There was this interesting exchange, though:

BECK: Now, this is to teach what exactly? Tolerance —  
GUTFELD: Tolerance and communication.
BECK: Right.
GUTFELD: You know, the way that New York is going to accept the mosque, the mosque should accept a gay bar. You see that?
BECK: Yes.
GUTFELD: The correlation —
BECK: Now, as someone who wouldn’t want this gay bar built next to my church or, you know, a temple of mine, do you think it might be a little over the top?
GUTFELD: No. I think it has to be done, Glenn. It has to be done. And if I’m not the person to do it, somebody must do it.

So teach tolerance by building something that Beck states he himself wouldn’t want to be built next to his church. Exposing his hypocrisy is not too hard, especially when he is ‘joking.’

But what is great is that, as Amanda found through a short trip to the ‘Internets‘, there already are gay bars near the proposed building. Reality reveals that their joke is based on tired stereotypes rather than anything insightful.

Going to be tough for the neighborhood to support another gay bar if they really go through with this – not going to happen, although the idea charged up several pundits, with adjectives like inspired and brilliant.

Just for interest, the publishers of the softcore magazine, Juggs, are only 2 blocks away. I wonder if Glenn would allow the within 2 blocks of his church?

And, as I noticed when I ‘walked’ around the block at Google Maps, there is a ‘Gentlemen’s’ Club called NY Dolls right behind the site.

I do not think the builders of the Cordoba House missed that. I’d imagine Glenn would never want his church built so close to that club. But some people seem to have no problem.

They do not want to understand

from Wikipedia

Managed ignorance
[Via Balloon Juice]

Dave Weigel passes on this interesting tidbit from Pew:

Only a third of Americans (34%) correctly say the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted by the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly believe TARP was passed under President Obama. Another 19% admit they do not know which president signed the bank bailout into law. Notably, there is no partisan divide on the question.

Fortunately, according to Pew, most Americans know what Twitter is (85%). (You can take the Pew quiz yourself, here.)

This may be a symptom of what Jason Kuznicki has described as ‘managed ignorance’:

Ignorance has become a feature where it used to be a bug. Formerly it was the job of the media to correct ignorance, insofar as it was possible (and, truthfully, it wasn’t very possible). Now though it’s increasingly the job of the media to manage ignorance. To make a space for the ignorant, and to ensure that those kept in managed ignorance get just enough news, and never more than they need to remain exactly where they are.

[More]

There were two questions where fewer people got the right answer than the TARP question. But in both cases, the majority of people did not know the answer. That is true ignorance – simply not knowing.

But, with the TARP question, only 19% said they did not know. 47% said they did know the answer and they were wrong. This cut across the entire political spectrum, with the same number of Republicans, Democrats and Independents getting it wrong. This is more willful or managed ignorance.

The Prime Minister in Britain is not really used to support any narratives here in the States. Thus the true ignorance. But Obama’s politics are part of many narratives, including those that foster managed ignorance.

Ignorance allows people to support a world view that, while only a poor facsimile of reality, does give them comfort. Their Cargo Cult World is simple and explains so much. It may be wafer thin but it allows them to ignore any attempts at greater understanding. The Cargo Cult World they inhabit allows them to just ‘know‘ what is real without having any real idea of what is going on.

Cargo Cult Worlds actively stymie actual understanding.

Because understanding pierces the bubble surrounding these simulacrums of reality. Scientific approaches and other processes of the Enlightenment were developed to help us break through Cargo Cult Worlds, to overcome our own bias and work closer to a truer understanding of the principles underlying our world.

This has allowed us to build aluminum-skinned machines that can fly anywhere in the world, including the small islands of the South Pacific. The inhabitants there tried to recreate these machines using whatever material was at hand.

But their wooden planes will never really fly just as other Cargo Cult Worlds will not allow us to really solve the complex problems facing us. Cargo Cult Worlds survive because of an ignorance of the underlying principles involved, an ignorance that must be maintained in order to support the Cargo Cult World.

Many things in the world are changing very rapidly. Heuristics and rules of thumb that used to work – simplifications once true because they were in alignment with the real world – no longer provide a useful function. So people use confirmation bias and other rational fallacies to prop up something – anything – that can explain things in a way that gives them comfort.

A changing world is extremely uncomfortable. Toffler wrote about this in Future Shock, one of the great books of the 70s. This shock, like culture shock, leaves many people disconnected and stressed. So, it is natural for people to seek the comfort of just-so stories that can support their replica of the real world

What seems to be happening, though, is that the media, instead of promoting understanding and stifling ignorance, is actually facilitating it. The MSM just does not want to puncture any bubbles supporting Cargo Cult Worlds.

The MSM is actively working then to prevent us from finding solutions. It does not want to inform people of the underlying principles needed to solve many of our problems.

Thus, a lot of the people know that TARP happened after Obama took office. That Social Security cards tell you which bank owns you. That humans were created in their present form 10,000 years ago. That germs do not cause disease. That Cordoba is a purely a symbol of Islamic conquest. That Einstein’s theories of relativity are disproved by Jesus’ action-at-a-distance. That a bike share program is going to lead to increased abortions. That vaccines do more harm than good. That humans are apparently alive and at work on Mars. That climate scientists are wrong about the warming of the world. That Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of the world. These are just from the last 2 weeks.

There actually are people of all political persuasions that want to promote understanding, that value ideas over ideology, that are willing to admit that the world is often more complex than we would like.

But these people seem to have smaller and smaller soapboxes in the public arena. And the MSM does everything it can to make them disappear.

If we hope to overcome our problems we have to work for greater understanding and work to overturn Cargo Cult Worlds. Otherwise, we will see a continuing disconnect from reality with an increasing inability to understand the principles underlying our real world problems

[Take the test. I got 11 out of 11 correct, same as 5% of the public. You should already know one of the answers if you have been reading.]

Nor does it support Arabic

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac Still Doesn’t Support Hebrew
[Via Daring Fireball]

Also: worst URL ever? (Thanks to Joe Clark.)

[More]

2011 Office does not support any right to left languages. But it does support Finnish.

Apple language support is system wide, not by application. It not only has support for writing language like Hebrew or Arabic but language-specific dictionaries, such as Hebrew, can be added that are available system wide.

At least for programs that are up-to-date. So why does Office have to create its own set of tools?

In fact, not all of it does as the article states:

One application diverges from the others – Outlook. Since Outlook is using Webkit at its core, it benefited from Apple integrated proofing tools. Although more limited and with less languages available (“only” 12), it opened up new possibilities such as language detection which means, if you frequently send mails in different languages, you don’t have to go to your Tools menu to change the language option every time you write in a different language.

Sounds like part of Office uses Apple’s system-wide approach. Maybe someday the rest of Office will. Or just use iWork.

Perhaps then they could create a better URL.

Dealing with failure successfully

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by jurvetson

What Google Could Learn From Pixar
[Via Daring Fireball]

Peter Sims:

Despite an unbroken string of 11 blockbuster films, Catmull regularly says, “Success hides problems.” It’s an insight Google should acknowledge and act on.

[More]

One thing the article mentions is that Pixar is always working to find solutions to problems. I wrote about this before, where I sketched out some of the technical problems each Pixar movie was designed to solve.

As Pixar says, “Success hides problems.” The complementary idea, that “Failure reveals problems”, is one very few organizations want to examine. At many companies, failure leads to loss of employment. The organizations seem to believe that as long as someone never fails, then they must be better than others. Fear of failure prevents innovation. This leads to a maladaptive company, one that is not resilient enough to deal with failure when it inevitably happens, because the hidden problems do eventually pierce the bubble of complacency.

In a complex world, failure often tell you more than success. I use the game I learned in Junior High School called Bulls and Creots as an example. Here, outright failure to get anything right actually gives you more knowledge than any other single guess.

Similarly, with some very complex systems, the only way to get to clarity is to make something fail, to make it work wrong. In biological systems, some of the most insightful work has come from disabling a part of the system and seeing what happens. So, for example, in a metabolic pathway with a large number of enzymes, looking at a single enzyme tells us little about the process, since in many cases we do not know what the enzyme really does.

But disable the enzyme and what will happen? If it is a critical part of the pathway, then none of the final product will be produced. Instead, a large amount of an intermediary product will build up – the intermediary product that the disabled enzyme was supposed to work with but can’t. So, like throwing a wrench in an assembly line backs up everything behind the wrench, a disabled enzyme results in a backup of intermediary product. Study that product and you will know what the enzyme does. Do this for each enzyme in the pathway and you can then delineated what happens at each step as you add material at the beginning of the pathway.

This and other approaches yielded understanding like this, which shows the complex intermediary metabolic pathways in cells. Pretty complicated but it was only revealed through things like designed failure.

Failure and the continuing drive to solve problems is how you keep innovation fresh and creative. Pixar gets that. Companies that do not will discover that Failure does eventually reveal problems in even successful companies and if they do not deal with that failure in a productive way, the organization could go down in flames.

And this is quite likely simply because the company has no experience with failure and will lack the resilience to deal with that Failure in a successful fashion.

You are not going to be innovating with those numbers

Chuck House on HP’s Shitcanning of Mark Hurd
[Via Daring Fireball]

Chuck House speculates that HP’s board was looking for a reason to force Hurd out:

The Voice of the Workplace, HP’s thirty-five year historic ‘measure’ of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding — more than two-thirds of HP’s employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative. That number never used to be in double digits.

Hurd was, apparently, very unpopular with the HP rank-and-file.

[More]

Wow, 67% would work at another company for the equivalent pay. I wonder what percentage would work at another company for less pay? I wonder if they will be doing another one of surveys in 5 years?

Great idea for NCIS episode – hacking the tires

by Tony the Misfit

Cars hacked through wireless tire sensors
[Via Ars Technica]

The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.

Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego showed that the ECUs could be hacked, giving attackers the ability to be both annoying, by enabling wipers or honking the horn, and dangerous, by disabling the brakes or jamming the accelerator.

The new research shows that other systems in the vehicle are similarly insecure. The tire pressure monitors are notable because they’re wireless, allowing attacks to be made from adjacent vehicles. The researchers used equipment costing $1,500, including radio sensors and special software, to eavesdrop on, and interfere with, two different tire pressure monitoring systems.

[More]

Nice. $1500 and they can disable the brakes through the tire pressure sensors. And authorities will be able to follow and track people without having to place a GPS unit in the car. I would imagine that since the wireless is being broadcast, they will be within all constitutional authority here.

Or how about corporate sabotage, a la Ford messing up Toyota cars. (I see that one of the commenters mentioned this same scenario.)

And what happens when the car itself has wireless INternet connections? All sorts of ways to hack in, I would imagine, and take over the car or record its movement.

I hope the cars used for the President or other VIPs have had their TPS disabled.

[Listening to: Solitary Man from the album "The Essential Neil Diamond (Disc 1)" by Neil Diamond]