Perette's Journal: 2010

Contents

1. Big f'ing heads-up on X-UA-Compatible

2010-09-01 16:41 (Wednesday) journal

The X-UA-Compatible setting for IE behaves strange when you request IE=8 or IE-8=edge. You would think requesting 8 & up would imply standards mode. In reality it may or may not, instead switching to quirks mode based on the DOCTYPE as follows:

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 strict, it uses the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
                          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional, and the DOCTYPE is present in full,
    unabridged form, it will also use the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
                          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional but abridged, it will use quirks mode.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

So what the hell was the point of X-UA-Compatible if it's ignored sometime? Don't ask me, it's Microsoft.

2. Reason, Intuition, and Religious Tolerance

2010-08-22 23:59 (Sunday) journal

A friend acused me of being intolerant, which got me to thinking, and like I often do I started writing and thinking to sort out my feelings. It took a good chunk of a month and a lot of thinking, but I finally finished Reason, Intuition, and Religious Tolerance. Sorry for the length, but there were a lot of intertwined and related thoughts.

Also, I haven't received any good reason to stay with Facebook, so I'll be ditching that RSN. Those really bent on keeping up with me can read my journal, which has an RSS feed available, or on LJ.

3. To Facebook, or not to Facebook (RFC)

2010-08-03 22:04 (Tuesday) journal

As many of y'all know, I'm not real keen on Facebook. It's a privacy nightmare from hell. I've long been iffy about FB: it keeps finding me a lot of people I've lost touch with, but does it really put me in touch? FB now demands I land on the News Feed, where I can see all sorts of useless trivia about what people are up to. And I've got to ask myself: is this making my life better?

And recently, Facebook has some stupid new application that people can make comments about me in, but I can only read them if I'm willing to grant whatever disreputable app access to all my data. If I did, would it make my life better?

As I've mentioned before, Facebook is the Roach Motel of social networking: it collects data, then only gives it out when I'm at Facebook. It doesn't export an RSS feed or something that allows me to participate in interactions in my own way. Is there some way I'm not seeing that this makes my life better?

And it's only getting worse: you know those little "Like" buttons that have recently appeared on web sites that allow you to show your approval on FB? Well, they're little iFrames, or at least some of them are, which most of you probably don't care about. Except that it means not only is the web site you're visiting tracking you, but FaceBook is tracking you. Every site with a "Like" or other FaceBook interface, all around the web. So when you visit my client Flex Gym and Aerobics, not only can I track what you do there but now FaceBook can too. And they implement the FaceBook interface in a way that they can expand on it if they come up with better ways of tracking you. Is all this tracking making my life better?

(And people used to think it was bad that Google has access to all those search keywords I enter, and search results I click on. Ha!)

In whatever period I've been a member on Facebook, it's only achieved one cool thing that I can think of: I got together with a couple of the cool people from my high school class.

Other than the one instance, the answer I keep coming back to, is that no, Facebook and its useless apps and trivial "friendships" don't make my life better.

I'm therefore tentatively looking at axing my account in September. One other advantage I can see is that doing so would mean no longer giving the pretense that I use Facebook, or having to think about approving new acquaintances as friends. It would release the associated "web site handle", the little chunk of resources that are stay occupied by my continued presence on FB. (This probably seems trivial to others, but I like simplicity and when you start looking at the number of sites I'm on-- FB, FetLife, a couple of Yahoo groups, a Google Group, f'ing LinkedIn (which also gets on my tits), 4 fetish forums for stuff I'm into, and a handful of fetish forums related to some of my modeling, they add up to a sort of "mental clutter". And for the record, FB isn't the only one being considered for eviction from my life; there's a Big Pruning in the works.)

FB is a big enough fish, though, I'm questioning whether it I'd just find myself "out in the cold" or something. So I'm open to discussion or debate on the matter. Comments can be sent to me via mail, or made in response to this article on Facebook or on LiveJournal.

4. Plug for CFI Acupuncture paper

2010-07-08 08:43 (Thursday) journal

"Traditional acupuncture theory is further confounded by studies that show that acupuncture is just as effective when performed incorrectly. A recent study on back pain shows, for example, that the placement of needles is clinically irrelevant to outcomes (Cherkin et al., 2008). In the study, randomly placed needles were found to be just as effective as needles inserted precisely at the correct meridians. This is the equivalent of a drug that works exactly the same no matter how much and how often it is taken. (Novella, Steven, Science-Based Medicine blog) Another study even showed that the acupuncture practitioner doesn’t even need to puncture the skin. Simply pressing the tip of the needle against the skin is as effective as inserting the needle. Even more remarkably, one study showed that similar results can be achieved by pressing toothpicks into the skin." -- Acupuncture: A Science-Based Assessment

It's a great review of the latest literature, debunking bullshit that has aggravated my life (shiatsu, or "acupuncture without needles", is one of the required shams that's taught as part of the New York State massage curriculum and part of the reason I abended massage).

As I'm reading, the ludicrousness of this stupid system struck me: We can't measure or event detect the qi (chi) that allegedly moves through the meridians/channels to keep us healthy. Yet despite this being a mystical, spritual energy (and hence it being unmeasurable), sticking a physical steel needle into our body (or just pressing on it, in the case of shiatsu) is supposed to alter its flow. There's a contradiction there.

5. Blogging: the Internet and me

2010-01-28 11:23 (Thursday) journal

The web behaves like anything under a capitalistic system, and so it's no surprise that there are multiple competing web sites for just about anything. Sometimes it's not bad: social bookmarking systems (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc.) each have a particular audience, allowing a us to choose which one best fits the kind of user we are. And the competition doesn't create any problem for me as a user.

What about social media though? LiveJournal was the first blogging site I recall, but Blogger and various others followed quickly. And fairly early on, they all started supporting syndicated RSS feeds-- and with a feed reader, it should be easy to keep up with all my friends as the program does the work of slogging around to all the different web sites and grabbing everybody's recent news.

Except, as I mentioned in my last post, that the internet is coated with privacy concerns. One argument is that I could just post to my blog and assume that there's just so much on the internet that only my friends will bother reading any of my content; it's not a bad argument, and one I've used for many years.

But the 'net has the ability to archive everything, creating the possibility that future events will transpire where I don't want people researching me to be given the option of doing so. My recent consideration of getting a "Real Job" puts me in this basket, and so my recent business of scrubbing any actual part of my identity off the internet lest someone find any individuality to be offensive-- and besides, if I have time to develop individuality, I must be a slacker. If I devoted myself to work, I wouldn't have time for such trivialities. Clearly, such things raise questions about my unswerving devotion to helping Corporate America increase profits, and the free overtime hours I'll offer my employer in hopes of keeping a job.

Which raises the necessity of "friends" systems. Sure, anyone can see neutral, certified non-offensive stuff, but only appropriately selected people will be able to read the meaty posts that talk about real life, personality, individual struggles.

But the authorization systems that handle this mean that a site has to know who is asking for access. And since logins expire routinely for security reasons, feed readers break too. I have several friends in Canada who post frequently on LJ, but I rarely ever see any of it because I only ever log in when I'm posting a comment on a public article. And then my feed reader announces there's 112 new articles between 5 people on LJ, and most of them are probably severely dated and certainly the amount is overwhelming to deal with all at once. But at least it's better than nothing.

That's nothing compared to Facebook, the roach motel of social media: data goes in and it don't come out. Facebook will read other sites' RSS feeds, but won't provide them; when an app implemented the capability, it was shut down.

This experience feels, to me, like when friends move to a gated community in the suburbs, and I don't see them that often anymore. They wonder why I don't come visit, and don't seem to grok that they live in the middle of nowhere. And I just sort of lose track of them, thinking about the terrible gated buzzer-entry system I have to go through to see them that doesn't work half the time, or they're on the phone when I try to get in, or any of the other hassles that go with gated communities.

My excuses seem incredibly lame in both cases– what's a few miles on my car, or a few seconds to login and check another web site? These are friends, right? Yet somehow, it's just different. When I can walk or bike to a friend's house, they're close. If it's farther but I can drive in the same time, aren't they effectively just as accessible? It seems like they would be, but in practice they aren't. Maybe it's something about walking or biking, or the way my brain maps distances and perceptions of closeness, but as my friends moved to the suburbs I didn't see them much anymore. "Out of sight, out of mind."

And so I find the same thing with social media. Friends use it, and I've got these RSS feeds set up so I read the public stuff. But making the trip to Blogger and LiveJournal and FaceBook and whatnot to log in and to make sure I'm able to read the private posts... Even if it seems like this should be readily doable, in reality it's another "out of sight, out of mind", and I'm gradually losing track of those acquantances in favor of real-life relationships (although there really aren't enough of those either).

And so when I turn back to myself, I'm in a quandry: I've previously published my journal and thoughts fearlessly, but now events suggest I restrict it only to my close friends. But they're spread out among systems, so I can write on FaceBook (and the LiveJournal folks will lose me), I could write on LiveJournal (and the FaceBook people will only see the public posts).

Technology once promised to make it easy to keep in contact with my friends who left the region, and to get to know people in my life more intimately. In practice, though, I perceive similar barriers to real life that prevent this. And when it comes to my journal, if the point was to share my life with my friends so they understood what's going on in my life, but it can no longer serve that purpose... I fail to see its function anymore.

THE END[.?]

6. Disappointed at social media, the Internet

2010-01-26 10:41 (Tuesday) journal

I'm disappointed that technology's influence has not altered the world as extensively as I had hoped. Things are somewhat better in that counter-cultural individuals can use the internet to talk with the like-minded, but it hasn't revolutionized things by making us accept each-other's variation.

Sure, many of us have encountered some sexually deviant thing like TubGirl (uh...) or 2G1C (thankfully, I've only heard about this one), and plenty of less extreme fetishes. But knowing about these things hasn't changed the acceptance of them. Goths and some other off-beat groups have gradually been accepted some (although this would have happened anyway) but are still outside the mainstream, while their derivative the Emos are now marginalized and it's often the Internet used to denigrate them.

And has the Internet helped at all on race issues? Class issues? Poverty? I can't say that it has, and certainly it hasn't created a revolution on these issues.

In some ways, things have even gone backward. Employers use social media to research potential employees, allowing them to dig into our personal lives in deciding on employment. And with most people running around with a camera phone, it's easy to have our moments of embarrassment or stupid mistakes captured and shared with the world, magnifying them and putting them on record. To a degree this may help us recognize each-other's fallibility, maybe making us more realistic– but not to the extent it could have. And if you've said something polically incorrect, regardless of whether it accurately represents the state of the world you're going to be the subject of an inquest. No matter what the situation, it seems it must be horrible to be the one who takes the brunt of this.

7. Time slowing?

2010-01-25 18:22 (Monday) journal

According to an article at the Daily Galaxy, scientists are kicking around a new theory for the bizarreness of our universe: time itself is slowing down.

Up until a few years ago, the expectation was that our universe's expansion was slowing, and the big question was whether gravity would win and in some billion years we'd go into the big crunch, or if things would just continue expanding into a cool, nearly-empty nothingness. Then someone proved that the expansion was accelerating, and everything sucked.

According to this new theory, though, maybe it's just our perception that it's accelerating, an effect of changing the rate at which time occurs. Sort of like if you record a film at one frame rate, and play it back at another– if you record at a high frame rate, things appear slower played back. As time escapes, the slowed playback speeds up to match our perception, creating the illusion of acceleration.

It is sort of bizarre in that I'd expect the change to be imperceptible, because it would effect us in the same way. But if time is slowing, a lot of shit in the universe starts to make sense:

        - If things slow down in our 3 dimensions, why not time?
          The idea that time would suffer effects similar to the
          other 3 dimensions seems very reasonable.
        - The problem of the inflationary period at the beginning of
          the universe might disappear.  If time happened faster, then
          sure, expansion would happen faster than the speed of light...
          because more time would be happening.
        - The acceleration of the expansion no longer needs
          dark matter, which is a nightmare of a theory.
        - Although it doesn't explain everything, returning things
          to the earlier question - will we go back into the big crunch? -
          makes me happy.  I like the idea of the universe repeating
          over and over, which eliminates the need for a beginning and
          end.

Occam's razor gives this new theory a lot of cred, and allegedly the math works out too. I look forward to hearing this theory's progress.