About browsers eliminating status bars and the like, I suspect that the stated reasons aren’t the real ones.

The claimed justification is that it “gives more space for the content.”

Most likely the true reason for eliminating status bars is that it makes it more difficult for people to see what sort of calls the browser is making to which sites. For instance since I cannot exist online without status bars, I still see everything my browser is doing.

Like this:

That will never connect because I have anything and everything to do with Facebook completely blocked.

Note that this attempted connection occurred on a page with absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. It was just attempting to track me, to load some useless Facebook widget, or most likely both at once.

The real reason that status bars have been removed is so that the users never notice (or notice less than they already did) when they are being surveilled.

Apparently, Google is deliberately slowing Firefox down on Google properties (and perhaps other browsers as well) to try to force people to privacy-thieving Chrome.

Not surprised, just reporting.

I’ve never owned an iPod or other portable music player because I do not like listen to music in public.

I can’t tolerate not being able to hear people coming up behind me and such. Having been bullied a lot as a kid, not being able to detect people approaching in areas that I can’t see them just doesn’t work for me. And it wouldn’t be good for them, either, as I tend to be rather, uh, reactive when someone sneaks up on me. It’s just instinct, one that has gotten less severe over time.

But I did buy an iPod for a girlfriend once, so I did get to use it a little.

At the time, they were indeed amazing devices.

I like them better than smartphones.

Smartphones – iPhones and the like – feel more like leashes to me most times rather than useful and freeing tools.

I don’t care for texting and I don’t like talking on the phone. I prefer to be unknown and anonymous most of the time. All of this “social” obsession leaves me behind, and leaves me cold.

For me, being social is a one-on-one affair done in person. I also like e-mail, but beyond that it’s all lost on me.

I’ll take a day of sitting next to the river reading and talking over the frantic thousand text messages a day pace that most people seem to manage.

Where the world is going technology-wise is a place I don’t like, and it’s a place that will harm most people – not being allowed to own anything. “Streaming” means nothing is yours. “Netflix” means the company owns you, not the other way around.

The corporations are trying to make it where to experience anything in life, you have to rent it by the hour or the month.

That is just fucking not for me.

The iPod was a strike against that, that made music more yours than any other device in history.

Now we are going the opposite direction; the Cloud is just a method of ensuring that corporations and the NSA have control of your life, your data, and that you do not. Do you think Cloud everything would be pushed so hard were that not the case, not the end goal?

It’s clear that the majority of people do not want what I want, or rather they do want what I despise. All too often humans love their chains, love them more than their freedom as freedom takes work and thought.

Servitude takes none of that.

One of the things I’ve always liked about the MacArthur grants is that they award them to those working in every field, including people who work in the arts.

Science is great. My fifth grade teacher called me “Mr. Science” because I loved it so much and knew so much about it. But science and math aren’t the only things in life, or even the most important things.

So I am glad there is an award that doesn’t just go to scientists and mathematicians.

Today, Alison Bechdel won that grant, among others.

On my old blog – which alas does not exist any longer – I asserted accurately that even during the Great Recession crime was continuing to fall and would keep doing just that.

I was attacked (for some reason) mostly by a group of people from one website that had a vested interest in believing that crime would rise during the Great Recession. The details are unimportant, and would distract. The point is that they had a narrative they wished to push and reality did not matter to them even though normally they and I would have been natural allies.

Well, I was right.

I don’t understand the narrative pushers. Yeah, everyone is biased but I try to temper this with updating my beliefs with the evidence as often as humanly possible.

As I’ve mentioned many times before and surely will do so again, I get evicted from many groups (or self-evict) because I refuse to just go along.

It means that often I hold no beliefs or partially incorrect beliefs about something for longer than those who just “buy in.” But it also means I really do know more than the average fish swimming through water whose response to, “The water sure is cold today” is “What the hell is water?”

It took me several years in the 1990s to accept global warming either way. But I wasn’t one of those knuckle-draggers going around screaming about how the scientists were attempting to shake down the NSF for all that sweet, sweet grant money.

I just waited till I understood, and learned.

Rafe Colburn at rc3.org has a phrase as his blog tagline that I’ve always liked. “Strong opinions, weakly held.” That’s how I try to arrange my mind. I don’t care about tribal beliefs, which is what informs the majority of most people’s beliefs. But I do care about being able to have actual, real evidence for what I believe.

I have no tribe, nor do I want to be part of one. Ever.

Don’t worry that you can’t read this. It doesn’t matter. Just watch the awesomeness in the video at the bottom.

The woman in white is Olga Ivanova, Taekwando world champion. She intervenes when some dude is harassing a woman as she is passing by. It was filmed by a dashcam (very common in Russian cars).

What Olga does is the difference between training in real combat and not having it. I am in no way blaming the woman being assaulted, but notice she hits the guy several times and it has no effect. No training there.

Olga lands one not-all-that-hard kick in the right place and the guy goes down instantly. She most likely kicks him in the lower sternum, the same place that EMTs do the sternal rub. The reason is that doing anything to that spot is extremely, EXTREMELY painful. In fact, kick or punch someone there hard enough and it will kill them. At the least it will cause great pain and knock the air out of you.

Just from her poise and stance before she does anything at all you can tell that she has training, like you can always recognize a ballerina even when they aren’t dancing.

I don’t read comic books. I am just terrible at visual processing and can’t really understand them.

But when I was a little kid, I was gaga over the 1970s TV version of Wonder Woman. I had no shame in carrying my Wonder Woman lunchbox to school after my grandparents bought me one.

I have no idea if watching Wonder Woman turned me into a little feminist. But it certainly didn’t hurt. This relates to something I was discussing with my girlfriend, about how the Left is just terrible at propaganda and PR while the Right excels at it.

Marston put it this way: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

Disdain for PR efforts means that the Left consistently loses where it should win. On the Left, there should be equivalents of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute; there is not. This means the Left will lose battles over and over even when they have a large majority.

Interesting that one side of the political spectrum consistently loses battles where it should easily dominate while one side goes nearly insane and still prevails effortlessly.

Anyway, the Wonder Woman TV show while not that good demonstrates that we’ve actually regressed a bit from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. A show like that – with a woman superhero – would not get made today.

Role models matter. The Left needs to take the creation of Wonder Woman and use that as a lesson for how to proceed.

Bad design reigns supreme now.

Nominally, this sort of design disaster is intended for tablets. However, having enormous header elements and too-large headlines actually makes it more difficult to read on a tablet. (Yep, just checked on my iPad.)

So what is the purpose of it, design-wise? It’s not easier to read. Not on a phone, desktop machine or tablet. It doesn’t use less bandwidth and isn’t more attractive.

I’m not sure, then. Just to change, I think, and it follows myrmidon-like all the latest worthless design manias.

Not sure if I’ll keep reading that site now. It’s design is just painfully bad in every way.

If you ignore the energy companies and their propaganda, what’s puzzling about climate change denialism is that almost without exception nearly every initiative proposed to prevent or ameliorate climate change and its effects would help us anyway, even if climate change were utterly false.

I wonder if the imperatives of evolution would also tend to build such irrational creatures as humans elsewhere in the universe, or are we an anomaly?