Author: Ben

Ben http://benjaminfenster.com/

Why Come They Ain’t Smart No More

I just watched the movie Idiocracy.  Two very average people get frozen for 500 years, and when they wake up they’re the smartest people left on Earth.

I have two complaints.

First, the movie opens with a shot of Earth as seen from space.  This just happens to be exactly (exactly) the same image I use as my desktop background, so the first 20 seconds of the movie made me wonder why the video wasn’t playing.  This may be unimportant to the larger audience.

Second, it was meant to be a comedy – and it had some funny jokes – but I’m pretty sure its premise is exactly right.  The film opens with a narrative about how the intelligent couples of the world are all busy having intelligent discussions about when to have children, while hillbilly Cletus who doesn’t understand birth control has a dozen children with three different women and his family tree flourishes.

With the natural forces of evolution no longer able to remove any but the most catastrophically stupid from the gene pool, it really is a question of who’s reproducing most.  The evidence is all around us.
Comedian Greg Giraldo does a great bit about letters that civil war soldiers – 17 year old kids – wrote home from the battlefield.  He recites an example:

My dearest Hannah,

This morn finds me wracked with the fiery pangs of your absence.  I’ll bear your cherished memory with me as I battle the forces of tyranny and oppression.

Then he speculates what letters from Gulf War soldiers must sound like:

Dear Marie,

It is hot as $%^ out here!  … It is very, very hot, and I am very, very sweety (sic).  It is very, very hot out here because I am in the dessert (sic).  What else did I wanna axe you?  Oh yeah!  Don’t $%^& nobody ’til I get back!

(And now let’s pause for a moment to reflect that “‘very very hot’ Civil War soldier” was just an awful choice of search string ot use when trying to find that quote.  Now Google thinks I’m gay, with a Civil War fetish.)

The movie gets no more than two stars for being funny, but five for obliterating all remaining hope for the future of humanity.

Have I Moved and Not Noticed It?

Dear Netflix,

The front of the return envelope you sent me reads:

Nearest Netflix Shipping Facility
PO Box 6005
Columbia, MO 65205-6005

I am not in Missouri.  I am, in fact, more than 1,000 miles away from Columbia, MO.  Google estimates it would take 20 hours, 29 minutes to drive from there to here.

I understand that movies must sometimes be shipped from a different facility when they’re unavailable near me.  I’m not sure, however, that it can still qualify as the “nearest” facility.

If you’re not going to have us return movies to the nearest center, now would be a good time to relabel your envelopes.

Sincerely,
A guy who owns a map

Got Any Examples From Other Angles?

I was researching a particular fact about DNS in Wikipedia, when I stumbled on this sentence:

In the United States, the “Truth in Domain Names Act” (actually the “Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act”), in combination with the PROTECT Act, forbids the use of a misleading domain name with the intention of attracting people into viewing a visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct on the Internet.

Those first two links look good, but I have a bad feeling about that last one.  It turns out to link merely to the article on “Internet pornography,” which contains an image at the top with the cutline (I swear I am not making this up), “An example of a pornographic website.”

Anything in the name of research, I guess.

1… 2… 10!

Dear MSIE 7,

You just reported an error in my script, which reads:

Line: 121561571
Char: 4
Error: ‘_input’ is null or not an object
Code: 0

That’s a lot of lines of code.  I’d like to propose a deal.

I only wrote 3,507 lines of JavaScript for this application.  If I promise to debug all of my code, will you debug the remaining 121,558,064 lines yourself?  This arrangement seems entirely fair to me, since I really shouldn’t be held accountable for 121 million lines of code you just invented on the spot.

Thank you for your cooperation,
A developer who didn’t introduce any bugs just now.

SorCon 2008: Count Me In!

From The Onion (and thus false, but amusing):

“When Aaron [Sorkin] hit the stage and announced The West Wing animated series, the crowd went wild,” said self-described “Sorkin nut” Karla Waples, 33, who has attended SorCon every year since its inception a decade ago. “It was such an adrenaline rush to see him make TV history yet again. This is why people drive all the way across the country to be here.”

Held annually at the San Diego Convention Center, SorCon has grown from a small convention in 1998, when Sorkin screened his television series Sports Night for friends and family, into a major Sorkin-industry event attended by tens of thousands of upper-middle-class whites and political-science geeks—or “Sorkies,” as they prefer to be called.

Is it wrong that I read the entire article wishing it were a real event?  I’d pay good money to go to that!

Who Let the Computers Make Hiring Decisions?

I just received an e-mail that begins thusly:

Dear Boston University Instructor

Woo hoo!  I didn’t know I’d gotten a new job, but… okay!

This is way better than the two times BU’s computers tried to fire me.  “Our records show you no longer work at Boston University,” they said.  Well I sure showed them!  Not only did I keep my job, but I got hired as an instructor!  Sure, I don’t have a classroom, or a salary, or any students to teach, but I have this e-mail, which I will now archive and forget entirely.

That Tip is a Little Shifty

“Select multiple conversations at once – check the first, then press shift and check the last.” – GMail tip

Google, you are my hero.  This is such an obvious feature to have in a desktop application, and it never once occurred to me that it might be implemented in GMail.