Philonoist.net

Something ironic happened on the way home last night.

I came home late last night after spending an evening with a friend having dinner and, as always, checked my e-mail (one habit I’ll never break.):

“i find reddit to pose a quandary for myself also.

i dont have time or patience to dig around
individually strenuously enough to at least be
marginally aware of whats happening. to my perception
the country i call home is experiencing a horrible
meltdown and i dont trust the MSM. without reddit,
yeah okay i would be Less Angsty but i would also be
in Denial. a sheeple, much as i hate the expression.

how the hell are you going to inform yourself given
the current sociopolitical climate, absent some kind
of social news? who the hell do u trust?

sorry to sound angsty.”

Somebody responded to my article. Somebody I didn’t know. Somebody that wasn’t my mom. It’s a rare occurrence, so I responded to the e-mail with:

Ah yes, the “once you’ve seen our problems, you can’t unsee them” issue. I don’t implicitly trust the mainstream media, though I do find some sources more trustworthy than others, namely NPR and the New York Times: both currently appear unwilling to sacrifice the credibility they’ve earned for extra dollars in the bank. You have to remember that all news reporting, by its nature, is biased: unless it happens in your backyard (literally), by the time it gets to you, it’s gone through at least one reporter’s hands.

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington had several spies stationed in New York and at various strategic points in Long Island. Unlike his British counterparts, which favored using the material gleaned by the spies deemed most “trustworthy”, Washington laboriously cross-referenced the reports from ALL his spies, no matter his personal thoughts on them. It’s a subtle difference, but in a couple of cases, it was enough for Washington to have enough information to eke out a victory during battle.

To borrow a page from Washington, find as many divergent sources as you can: Reuters, NPR, BBC, the NRO, the Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Reason Magazine, the opinion pages of the big dailies (NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and LA Times). Each of these is a reputable news or current affairs magazine, some centrist in presentation, others on the ends of the spectrum. Contrary to popular reddit belief, you can type dailykos into Google and skip the reddit self-fawning. You can also try some conservative/libertarian blogs. Invest in a free RSS reader: paying a little now in setup time reaps dividends quickly. Everything that’s not a cited fact or a quote can get tossed out: it’s garbage. Keep the facts and quotes and check them against each other.

Remember that the printed word is the most concentrated and effective form of communication man currently has in his arsenal. The printed word, unlike the digital or the spoken, stands for all time, and is checked and rechecked by well-established hierarchies, all of which have their bacon on the line. A printed word is worth twice as much as its online or television counterpart. Trade having it “now” in favor of having it correct tomorrow.

I make it a point to spend the 30-45 minutes I used each day on reddit reading something elsewhere: maybe it’s a piece of nonfiction in book form, maybe it’s a newspaper, maybe it’s my blogroll.

But I’m not out to destroy reddit or social news: if you think it’s the best out there and you can’t do better yourself, or don’t have time to, don’t give up on it. Reddit is obviously better than nothing. Just remember the points I made in the original post: all cops aren’t bad, all corporations aren’t evil, and being trusting and courteous without being naive can go a long, long way. Speak out in the community, punish the “vote up”ers (your blue down arrow is a powerful beast), and keep an open mind.

Good luck out there.

It’s incredibly lucky that I checked my e-mail and responded before I checked my website statistics.

I’ll be honest: my first thought was that StatCounter had seriously fucked up. I also thought that somebody had used my site to test their RSS feed reader and was hammering on it.
Then the sweet, delicious irony hit me. All I can say is that: I didn’t post it. I posted under JoeCollege. I have no blood karma from this. (Feel free to post this to reddit if you must.)

After spending two hours last night e-mailing my web host, being wholly unprepared for having more people visit my site in a given second than I’m used to as a daily total, I’m a bit overwhelmed.

But while I’ve no doubt there are dozens of comments on reddit.com about this article, with a wide range of thoughts and styles, I can say that I am in awe of those of you that took the time to respond to the post either in the comments or via e-mail. Many of you were motivational, most of you were well-written, even in disagreement, and all of you were insightful. Truth be told, I still get goosebumps when I read: “You inspire me.” “I want to quit too.” “How well-put. This is exactly what I was feeling.”

I didn’t set out to inspire people, of course. I’m an engineer who wears a silly hat. I wrote to my personal blog about my frustrations with the lacuna between reddit and reality, and my experiences with it. Your mileage may very vary. You may favor Ron Paul and LOLcats. I don’t blame you: they’re interesting and fascinating, and I’m glad they have a part in the human condition. But I confess, in hope and inspiration taken, hope and inspiration is given. The comments and e-mails have made me more resolute in my decision to leave.

I’m not setting out to convert the world: stay with reddit if you think it’s the best you can do in the time you’ve got. Don’t sacrifice some information with noise to get none of either. Work on your filter, use the down arrow with passion.

But maybe you, like me, think you can do better than reddit. Maybe you can disconnect from the Web and engage friends, family, and coworkers. Maybe you live in a large city with seminars, book discussions and coffee talks. Maybe you live in a small town and the Internet is the escape from unpersonable, uncultured, uneducated neighbors. But read, think, and speak for yourself and never blindly accept what is presented to you. The single greatest thing I learned from reddit was to question everything and when the community discussions were at their best were when we were doing just that. Utill that reddit returns, I won’t.

That said, someone please e-mail me if we attack Iran.

Tagged with: News

Filed by Adam College at 4:23 am under Web
8 Comments

I went to an extreme this week: I force quitted myself of the reddit habit. Reddit, if you’re somehow unfamiliar, is a social news aggregation website: members can rank user-submitted headlines that correspond to stories, images, and the like. In theory, the top 25 articles at any moment, the newspaper “front page” serves as a more interesting and timely version of reddit’s print, or even online, brethren; stories make it to the front page of reddit that get missed or dissed elsewhere. In theory, the Reddit community is broad enough to have an expansive worldview: differing thoughtpoints combined into clean, clear HTML and CSS.

I’ve been a reddit user since the early days: I lived through the multiple influxes of users from the much larger (and hence, by the theory of Internet audiences, more juvenile) digg. I lamented the death of the “good article”, the gradual replacement of interesting science and programming content on the frontpage for LOLcats and pictures from Russia. I survived the still-smoldering diatribes on Bush and that fresh minty wonderment of Ron Paul (the man it seems who can do no wrong). None of these were my source of frustration. I’m wholly aware that the “real” Internet is by and large a libertarian community: a free society of free thinkers who feel it should be kept free. It’s abhorrent to hear of police brutality, unfair business practices, and animal abusing Marines. In a sense, I’m glad that there’s a place where these problems appear front and center and are discussed, albeit somewhat sophomorically. Any discussion of a society’s consternations has value.

In openness, two articles I’ve submitted were found interesting enough by the reddit community to appear on the front page: one from the New Yorker called “We are all Larry David” (about how patients in therapy sympathize with the wince-worthy HBO character) and one called “The Man who Unboiled an Egg” from the Observer. Both are verbose, eccentric articles: I found them fascinating and submitted them. Overall, though, my ratio is poor: I’ve submitted other articles more for kicks, in an attempt to get a feel for what sticks with the community. And, in shame, I admit that I’ve submitted no less than three articles from this very blog. None gained any traction (in retrospect, that’s for the best.) I tell you this because I’m not one of those people who quit a community because they feel they’re not being heard. I was heard. I had one-liners and discussions, and reddit, until recently, served me well as an information and entertainment portal.

Reddit, however, has two major problems. One is that it’s very, very good at sucking you in. Any idle minute at my computer found me typing in www.re and selecting the first entry from the FireFox dropdown. Reddit sucks down those five/ten minute blocks in between tasks, then expands to fill the available space. I grew to rely on reddit: feeling uninformed if I didn’t visit at least once or twice a day. Nothing was equal to reddit: digg, the mainstream press, even rolling your own bloglist. I was a Reddit junkie. It eventually dawned on me that Reddit causes the problem it aims to eliminate: getting your information from only one point narrows your worldview.

A great thinker can analyze, critique, and respect a valid argument, and ultimately choose to reject it based on logic. But in order to become a great thinker, one needs to see a plethora of arguments for this process to reach maximal efficiency. Reddit, nor any community big or small, cannot do all the work of presenting arguments for validation: ultimately, any community collapses to the least common demoniator. I found myself blindly accepting those tales of police brutality, unfair business practices, and animal abusing Marines as representative of the whole. The reality painted by Reddit and the actuality of the real world are as opposite as fire and ice, but when you spend the majority of your time in the virtual world and not in the real one, which are you more likely to believe? Fortunately, some real world time gave me the following: I accidentally jaywalked in front of a cop and NOTHING HAPPENED. I bought a video game from Best Buy, set off the electronic sensor on my way out, and the security supervisor WAVED ME THROUGH. My belt set off the metal detector and when I apologized, the TSA representative said it HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. But after spending 20 minutes on Reddit, I’d be pissed as hell at cops, corporations, and corporals. (Sure, you could argue that if any one of these had ended differently, taken to some version of the back room and deprived of rights and freedom, this would be a different post. And I’d agree with you. The point is not that these things never happen, but that these things happen more rarely than Reddit would lead you to believe.)

The other problem is the Reddit community by and large likes to be the show, rather than see the show. Stories on Reddit come with comments, both in the form of editorialized headlines and in threaded conversations on reddit’s site. Additionally, Reddit allows (and I’d argue encourages) “self” posting, in which there’s no story, just a conversation. Some of these are interesting, others hilarious, but most are just venting and ad-hoc emotional votes. Here’s three of the latter type (from recent memory):

“Vote up if you don’t give a flying fuck about the Oscars.”
“Vote up if you’re not watching the Super Bowl.”
“Vote up if you think BUSH and CHENEY should be IMPEACHED!”

All three of these, if memory serves me correctly, were at or near the top of the front page. Maybe I’m not the audience: I watched the Oscars and the Super Bowl, and I’d think it’d be a major destabilization to an already shaky economy to remove the President from power or even force the administration to think about preparing a defense. (Granted, I’m not sold on that last one.) These “votes”, just as unscientific and uninteresting as the Ron Paul debate spamming polls, consistently get voted up to the top. Talking about the news is one thing, seeking confirmation that, indeed, other members of the community have the same ideologies as you is entirely something else. Ultimately, these were what drove me away; if the cream of an organization’s output is that we should “chimpeach the chimperor” instead of have a debate about the merits and shortcomings of the current administration, then what can you possibly learn by staying in that community?

So I’m done. I’ve blocked reddit at work (by routing the URL to the loopback address) and at home (by blocking it at the router). I’ve been gone for a week and already, I feel less angsty. Don’t get me wrong, the first 48 hours were hell: withdrawl sucks. But I can already feel the mindrot receeding. I’m not going to bitch about it at reddit, because I don’t feel the community wants to change.

I, however, do.

Technorati Tags: Reddit, addiction, Ron Paul

Filed by Adam College at 11:17 am under Media, Web
34 Comments

I’ve owned joecollege at gmail since the early days of the service. You know, back when we only had 10 invites a piece, people were crazy enough to buy and sell them, and we all wondered what the hell we were going to do with a gig of storage space each. In 2007, I switched to using my full name, with middle initial, as my primary Gmail account, but since some people can’t be bothered to update their contact information, I’ve kept joecollege, automatically forwarding e-mail to my primary account. Most of it is bacn: the grey e-mail that’s not quite spam because I signed up for it, but is mostly unwanted and I’m not bothered if I don’t get around to reading it.*

Every so often, however, I’ll get a form e-mail response: I’ve gotten multiple ones from MySpace.com thanking me for signing up for their service. This morning I got one from CCBC, the Community College of Baltimore County (had to look it up). I usually scratch my head: there’s no f’ing way I’d sign up for MySpace, and CCBC would probably be a step down for me academically, not to mention a hell of a commute. Doing some digging usually yields that someone signed up for a form or online service, using joecollege at gmail.

Um, hello? Why the hell would you do this? Taking the time to sign up for something like Myspace, just so I go and delete it, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s a waste of my time and yours as well. You don’t get anything out of it: even on Myspace, I get your password e-mailed to me and go and delete your account. I have the key to the box that contains the key to your box, and I can change your key without your knowledge.

Here’s an example: the CCBC form responses were mailed to me.

Form: ask_an_advisor

1. First Name: Joe
2. Last Name: College
3. Your E-Mail Address: (e-mail removed by me)
4. Verify Email address: (e-mail removed by me)
5. Phone Number:
6. Status at CCBC: Prospective Student
7. Credit or Continuing Education Student: Credit
8. Major or Program of Study:
9. Purpose for Attending CCBC: Associates Degree
10. Type of Question: Selecting a major
11. CCBC Campus attending: Catonsville
12. Question that you would like to have answered by an academic advisor. (Be as specific as possible): <blank>

Here are the fathomable possibilities:

1) Some jerk developer is testing his own website code skills. Solution: don’t be an idiot, use your own e-mail address. How can you test the form submissions if you use a “fake” address?

2) Somebody felt like submitting a form for shits and giggles. Clearly this person gets excited clicking submit buttons. Here’s my solution: form-submission computations. If you really feel like submitting a form, just for the hell of it, go to such and such website, fill out the form, and once you submit, we’ll borrow your computer for 15 seconds and do some number-crunching for cancer or something for the greater good.

Actually, why aren’t we doing this already everywhere? It’s like reCAPTCHA but on a form-submission level. If you’re going to legitimately sign up for something, 10 seconds won’t hurt. It makes it prohibitively expensive for multiple spam submissions, and it’s for the benefit of humanity. Time delay is less of a usability flaw than a litmus test on a confusing looking graphic. If you’re upfront with the form and say it will take 10-15 seconds, so much the better, since real people will wait. The actual data from the form is inserted into the database at the *end* of the time period, of course, forcing spambots to wait the whole time.

Hmm… Thoughts?

*My personal bacn filter is to move anything with the word unsubscribe in it (among others). It’s not perfect, but since I check the bacn folder often (at a subject line level) I don’t miss much.

Filed by Adam College at 12:28 pm under Web
1 Comment

Check out this bubblegum sequencer.

Tagged with: Videos

Filed by Adam College at 3:00 pm under Technology, Web
No Comments

Not a big deal, but I finally got around to changing my del.icio.us username to adamjcollege from joecollege. This is part of a larger strategy of offline RSS reading and tagging, instead of using Google Reader. No particular reason for this except that I happen to like niceness of Vienna. Full featured, acts like Mail.app, and I feel more in control. And it’s Applescriptable, but more on that later.

I’ve combined Vienna with Pukka, a really neat dock app that allows quick posting to del.icio.us. It’s not free, but I’ll probably spring for a license when my free trial is up.

I’ll be changing the section of the main page that shows link snippets from Google-based to del.icio.us-based soon.

Technorati Tags: Vienna, del.icio.us, Pukka

Filed by Adam College at 11:49 am under Web
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I may be late to the game on this one, but I’m super excited about the NPR media player. I’ve long loved NPR, but my days of being in the car during Morning Edition or All Things Considered are past me (for the moment). NPR has always released the material online a few hours after air, and with RSS feeds, it’s been a snap to at least *read* about the day’s topics.

Listening was an entirely different matter: NPR provided Windows Media and Real Player formats, but Windows would get clunked down in codec hell and Real Player would hang for at least 45 seconds before each clip.

Fortunately, NPR now has a really slick web-based media player, with the critical playlist functionality. I can finally queue up some clips and go about my morning, listening to the news the way it’s meant to be heard.

Technorati Tags: NPR, media player

Tagged with: News

Filed by Adam College at 11:04 pm under Technology, Web
1 Comment

Fastr is a game based off images from flickr: basically, you compete head-to-head to come up with the shared tag for a set of flickr images. The images are on the small side, so you spend a lot of time squinting into the screen, saying “What *is* that?”

Apparently there’s no one to play with most of the time, which is sad because this is such an awesome idea. An awesome idea that would really extend well to a certain movie site that doesn’t have an open API yet. Yes, IMDB, shame to you.

Technorati Tags: fastr, flickr

Filed by Adam College at 4:42 am under Web
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The New York Times has a new blog focusing on air travel. Today’s opening post reminded me just how good things are at the airport and in the air.

In my parents’ youth, after all, plane travel was a thing for the rich few. Starbucks outlets in the terminal; e-mail at 30,000 feet; frequent-flier programs that allow you, as I have done, to fly free to Easter Island, Paris and Cambodia: What is it, exactly, that makes us think that we should complain about sitting in a seat and being taken around the world?

Hear, hear. I’m not flying this holiday season, but I’m definitely going to think about this the next time I traverse those friendly skies.

Technorati Tags: new york times, air travel

Filed by Adam College at 12:56 pm under Web
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…and they didn’t even get to make a sale.

I flew to North Carolina last week to spend some time with my family in their new house. They’ve only been there about a month, so as you can imagine there are still a plethora of boxes that need unpacking. Including the one with all of my Mom’s cookbooks.

It wasn’t a huge deal for Thanksgiving, since there’s really only one holiday recipe in my family that comes from a cookbook: the pumpkin pie. Instead of the “normal” pie, we make a chiffon pie, which, due to using a meringue, is lighter and airer than its normal cousin. It’s one of my favorites and, as my mother can tell you, among the most difficult to pull off: one heavy-handed moment with a spatula can deflate the egg whites and liquefy the pie. Digging into a pumpkin pie soup is a pretty crummy end to Thanksgiving day.

Rather than rummage about for the cookbook, we decided to use a recipe from the Internet, but as our night-before preparation time approached, we became skeptical of the ingredient list. The basics were all there: 3 eggs, some brown sugar and gelatin, but the spices didn’t seem right. We could glean from my mother’s pantry that some combination of allspice, ginger, and cinnamon were used, as they were the ones she’d brought to the new house, but we couldn’t remember exact proportions.

We were about to give up and use the internet recipe (which after examination was off because of its use of nutmeg) while I was Googling various variations of the name of the recipe. Then it hit me: we knew the name of the cookbook!

It was a long shot at best: the cookbook was published by the Junior League of Tampa, Florida, and hardly a Dan Brown bestseller or Oprah’s book club selection. But lo and behold, not only did Amazon.com have it in stock, but it was text-searchable!

For the truly concerned: search “Peerless Pumpkin Chiffon Pie” and see the recipe. Best part: the pie turned out perfectly.

I’ve long been thankful for Amazon’s “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” functionality. It’s an excellent feature that partially solves the “look but don’t touch” problem within online retailing: I’ll never be as satisfied by skimming the excerpts as I would loitering in Barnes and Noble reading, but it comes pretty close. I might just buy a book off my Amazon.com wishlist this week to say thanks.

Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving, amazon.com, cooking, pumpkin pie

Filed by Adam College at 2:51 pm under Life, Web
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What an absolute crock of crap:

“Next, below, is what President Lincoln could have said, if he had
decided that his speech was not only for Americans, but targeted the
whole world. With this Globish wording, his impact would have been
greatly improved.Anglophones can hardly feel the difference. Non
Anglophones observe that they understand better. This is the main
purpose of Globish.”

Our fathers came to this land eighty seven years ago. They brought to
this land a new nation; it was formed in freedom, and was committed to
the belief that all men are created equal. Now we are involved
in a great civil war; it is testing whether that nation or any nation
so born and so committed to that idea can long live. We are
meeting today on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to give
a small piece of that field, as a final resting place for a number of
our sons: those who gave here their lives so that that nation might
live.It is completely fitting and right that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not give– we can not commit — we can not make holy– this ground.The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have made it holy. They
have made it, far above our poor power to add or take away. The world will little note, and will not long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.It
is for us the living, rather, to be committed here to their unfinished
work; the work so greatly brought forward by the people who fought here.It
is rather for us to be here committed to the great task remaining
before us — that we take increased commitment to that cause for which
these honored dead gave the last full measure of commitment — that we
here highly decide and declare that these dead shall not have died for
no purpose — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not pass away from this earth.

Oration is more than words, more than language, meaning or tone. Excellent oration commands - and draws power from - audience and timing. Without being fawning of Lincoln, it’s clear he knew his audience: he spoke that day not to the world, not to the nation, but to those war-tired survivors who congregated on that field. His words would surely have been different had he spoke from the steps of the White House or after the close of the war.

The Gettysburg address has long endured not because of its global appeal, but
because of its national and local. Any attempt to improve or alter his speech would result in a product that omits the timing and the audience, because we cannot view - we cannot lay claim to - those times and those people. Such an alteration would, like the above, ultimately seem hollow.

Technorati Tags: Globish, Gettysburg Address

Filed by Adam College at 2:04 pm under Web
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