Archive for the ‘humor’ Category

Happy Groundhog Day

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Phil and Phil - one of them controls time, the other one is a weatherman

Happy Groundhog day everyone! Yes, I’m lazy today, and I’m using a local holiday to post a half assed excuse for an article here. Sue me.

Now, I know that Terminalists are an international bunch, I should probably explain this US-centric ritual to my readers from other parts of the world. You see, each year on February 2 we commemorate a freak event in 1993 when Bill Murray got stuck in a time loop. Actually the custom is much older than that, but we forget. The ritual is simple: we pull out a random groundhog out of a hole and shake it in front of an angry crowd. This usually scares the shit out of the poor animal and prevents it from creating a stable time loop.

If you paid attention in your bio class you should know that American groundhogs are somewhat related to displacer beasts but rather than bend space they bend time – and only in February for some reason. Unfortunately (or fortunately for us) due to severe inbreeding and laziness they completely lose this ability when they get scared – a bit like Fainting Goats. Yes, it seems like a useless ability – you’d expect it to be a fight of flight type response thing, but it’s not. Groundhogs are basically like natural homing missiles. Most of the year they live as peaceful herbivores, bur around February they enter their predatory stage. Damn things have been living alongside humans for so long they actually evolved to prey on us. A Groundhog will usually imprint on a nearby human, and then snare him in a time loop. Then it will remain hidden and feed on his victims emphatic energy. Being stuck in time is highly stressful, and humans tend to get restless, frantic and delusional after a while – which is exactly what the beast seem to want. We don’t know how they choose their victims (but most likely it is convenience and proximity), or how the loop can be ended (killing the animal does not seem to work as it re-spawns at each iteration of the loop). All we know is that if there is one of them things living near your house, you better scare the shit out of it in early February or else you may end up like Bill Murray. Then again Bill got lucky and managed to break out of the loop and then make a movie about it. According to his research in the area, Groundhogs lose interest with the victim once it stops struggling and finds inner peace. But it is yet to be confirmed.

Yes, it’s a silly holiday but hey – it’s practical. If you have never experienced a time loop, don’t judge us.

Oh, and if you are relatively new here, I highly recommend taking this occasion to read my Groundhog Day post from 2008. That’s the one we discuss what we would do if caught in a time loop. For example, how would you keep time? What would you do with all the free time? Would you become a superhero or super villain and etc…

In the real world…

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

This excellent XKCD comic is pretty much the story of my life:

Seriously, never leave college!

Seriously, never leave college! © xkcd

Yep, once you leave academia no one will actually understand what you do. Unless you are working for a geek friendly company that was funded and is currently managed by geeks, people will be more impressed with your “Outlook configuration” skills than with your programming. People will assume that you actually went to school to learn “computers” – ie. how to fix and configure them. Programming being just a small but intricate case of “computer configuration” process.

Case in point, have you ever notice how people tend to use words configure and program interchangeably? Hey can you program this address into my Outlook? Can you program my excel to open those Office 2007 documents? Can you program my laptop to work with your wifi connection?

Of course this language quirk probably stems from the fact that we commonly say “program” when we mean configure when working with other electronic devices – like VCR’s or DVR’s for example.

Oh, and the only time you will be praised on your programming is when your GUI is actually visually impressive. Yeah, GUI – that most insignificant part of the software most of us throw together the last minute – that’s the only part people in the real word actually notice:

This is how your boss sees your project. The chart on the left is generic, and random but you get the idea

The chart on the left is generic, and random but you get the idea

Ah… Real world is a funny place. If you love to program, love solving difficult problems, love being challenged and want people to appreciate your skill, and knowledge and you want to do actual computer science for living then you should really consider getting a PHD, becoming a professor and staying in the academia.

That’s really the only place you can actually interact with other people who understand, appreciate and perhaps even admire your work. Your real work that is. Not just praise you on a well designed GUI but look at that meticulously crafted algorithm, and really, really get how much work you put into it. Academia is also the only place you can get paid for hacking away on really obscure, abstract projects that really interest you but have no real world applications (yet). Things that only you and a select group of other PHD’s in the same field will actually find use for. You know, applications that will have no retarded users who will complain about trivialities, and ruin everything all the time.

The only problem of course is that these people who understand you will be few and far in between. Most of them will work at different universities. Likely most of your fellow faculty members who you will see every day will have no clue about your field of research. They will politely nod and try to hide their yawns when you talk to them about your craft. Hell, most people in your field will likely be bored to death by the stuff that fascinates you. Unless of course you pick a popular research area, in which case you will have to deal with a lot of competition. Obscure stuff is much more convenient.

Oh, and you will probably need to teach bunch of classes to young impressionable people who will do everything in their power to actually fail your course, and not retain any information you are giving them, no matter how hard you try.

So yeah… You’re screwed either way.

I guess, what I’m trying to say here is that ours is a lonely, thankless craft. But someone has to do it, eh?

Ghosts in the Machine or Why Does Your Computer Hate You

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

You can’t blame your computer for crashing, being slow or losing your work. If it is behaving in a funny way, then it is problem with you – it’s operator. You are doing something wrong. Or did in the past, and now you are paying the consequences. Barring unforeseen hardware issues and unpredictable software bugs, almost every computer issue can be traced back to you. Why? Because computers don’t do stuff on their own. They are dumb machines that need to be directed and configured to work properly.

And yet, people insist on treating them as if they were conscious, living beings. They curse at them, blame them or worse yet – give them cute names. It’s not only silly but also counter productive. This behavior is basically empathic imprinting. Personification slowly but surely imbues the inanimate machine with either positive or negative emotional discharge. It pools up inside of the machine, fills all available spaces, covers every inch of the surface and then starts thickening. After several months of being bathed in waves of unrestrained empathy, the concentration is high enough it starts acting like a spectral equivalent of the primordial soup. It becomes a bubbling cauldron of psychic emanations. Sooner than later there is a spark of cognition, and the whole thing coalesces into a non-physical emphatic sophont entitiy. For the purpose of this article I will refer to these entities as “Machine Spirits (or MS)” but they are not true ghosts – at least not in the way we understand them. An MS specimen is nothing more than an empathic echo. While sapient, it’s thought patterns are shaped entirely by the emotional input provided by the human. As such it is incapable of exhibiting emotions other than it was exposed to. Being a specter born out of emotional energies it usually possesses no logical faculties and exhibits highly irrational and capricious behavior.

Machine Spirits use your computer as a physical host body that anchors them in this universe

Machine Spirits use your computer as a physical host body that anchors them in this universe

The exact patterns of course depend on how the user treated their physical host (ie. the computer). For example, people who think the computer hates them, will give a new beginning to a being that knows little more than hate. Those who despise technology will have to deal with spiteful specters. Machines that were pampered and loved on the other hand will loving and playful personalities. This may not seem like a bad thing, but you have to remember that these beings are purely irrational, run on raw emotion and are incapable of reasonable thought. Thus a loving spirit for example decide to manifest their fillings by arranging bits on your hard drive into pleasing patterns irreversibly corrupting your data in the process.

What’s worse, since Machine Spirits are bound to a physical host and manifest in the physical universe rather than the spectral realm, they must have some mechanical means for their cognitive processes. Most (if not all) MS entities learn to steal CPU cycles and reserve memory areas for their own purposes which severely degrades the performance of the machine they inhabit. This is precisely why a brand new store bought computer is usually blazing fast for about a year, and then slows down, eventually grinding to a halt. It usually takes anywhere from 6 to 18 months for a user to successfully imprint an emotional echo on a machine and create an MS entity. As the specter grows and matures it requires more and more resources which explains a sharp decline in performance on machines that are over 2 years old.

MS entities enter dormant state when the hardware is powered down. They are irrational beings and their minds and emotional patterns are fully formed “at birth”. Still, over time they acquire new experiences which can alter their personalities. Unlike their original makeup these experiences need to be physically stored somewhere. Most MS entities steal hard drive space to accomplish this. This is why many users with MS infected machines often notice shrinkage of free HD space, but are unable to explain where that space is used.

There are two known ways to remove an MS entity from a piece of hardware. First one, is naturally the wipe & reinstall procedure. Unfortunately id does not guarantee removal of the spirit, but it can at least “reset” it to it’s original state by wiping it’s experience cache from the hard drive. Sometimes this experience is traumatic enough for the MS entity to self terminate or go into an indefinite dormant state.

The other method is starvation. While MS does not actually feed, it does thrive in environments rich in emphatic emanations. Of course it is a highly subjective, and finely tuned emphatic receptor that can only detect emotional waves directed at its physical host. It remains ignorant of all other emotional background noise. Since MS entities have no sensory apparatus (and no, they actually can’t learn to operate web cams and speakers) emotional deprivation works similar to sensory deprivation in living beings. It will slowly drive them insane. But unlike physical entities, specters can essentially will themselves out of existence. In other words if you stop personifying your computer, it’s embedded persona will eventually go away.

The problem with his that experienced machine ghosts develop defense mechanisms against this technique. They will for example try to provoke emotional response from the user by crashing the system, corrupting data and causing all kinds of other mischief. In worse case scenario they will dump themselves to hard drive and go dormant for a while but without releasing any of their tied up resources. This is why this method is most effective when combined with reformatting and re installation of the OS. A confused, vulnerable and freshly amnesiac MS will be much easier to starve than a a malicious ghost with baggage of experience to draw on.

Neither of these methods is 100% successful, and you have to keep in mind that the entity may still take over your box after sufficient amount of time has passed. Once you get a machine spirit, getting rid of it is very difficult. Buying a new computer is usually the only solution that works. But if you keep personifying the new machine, it will eventually develop it’s own specter.

The solution? Don’t do it! Your computer is a machine. It is a tool. It is an extension of yourself. It has no personality, and no mind of it’s own. Stop pretending like it does. Stop talking to it. Stop blaming it for your own mistakes. Stop talking about it as if it was alive. Don’t ever personify it – even jokingly. Don’t even think about it as an entity of it’s own. A computer is a conduit of your will – a transmission medium that connects you to the internet. Nothing more. If you think of it in any different way, you are just asking for trouble.

All of this also applies to modern cars which have computerized on-board diagnostic systems. Did you ever have that annoying “check engine” light flashing on your dashboard for no reason whatsoever? Yeah, now you know why. Don’t fucking personify your car either!

This post is part of the computers are magical cycle, which aims to explain advanced technology to lay people in a way they can relate to: by equating it to magic and inventing ridiculous mythology around technical subjects that will promote good computing via blind indoctrination, fear mongering and general misinformation.

I encourage you to share our own personal experiences with machine ghosts in this comment thread.