I think the headline is a bit unfair, but the points made in the article are good ones.

Science is and always has been an iterative, flawed process. The truth isn’t delivered in golden runes on sacred parchment; it is discovered and then refined over time. Thus it has ever been and will be.

However, what’s different now is that academics and researchers have to scrabble ever harder for perpetually-decreasing funding, which leads to all sorts of bad results for them and for society.

It’s not that science cannot be trusted, it’s just that it like nearly everything else has been co-opted and eviscerated by the neoliberal/managerial mindset and is now a client state, for lack of better terms, of big business in many ways. And even when it’s not, the priorities usually do not align with society’s needs nor is the focus on doing actual important work, but rather the effort is aimed at what can be published, and soon.

People like Peter Higgs and Maria Goeppert Mayer — both of whom spent years thinking about their discoveries before publishing a thing — would be summarily kicked out of academia today.

So, do not trust or not trust science. Realize how it is changing and that it no longer serves society, but vested interests in business and the relentless publishing schedule of academic life.

We made blueberry blintzes tonight for dinner. First time we’ve ever made those.

Turned out quite good, toothsome and light, yet filling.

The strange thing about blintzes is you cook the crêpes three times.

The recipe is like:

1) Cook the crêpes.

2) Cook the crêpes some more.

3) You thought you were done cooking the crêpes. WRONG!

But we’ll add it to our list of keepers.

Good god, Windows 10 is even worse a security disaster than anyone thought.

This morning in some free time I spooled up a Windows 10 VM and did some packet capture and can confirm 90% of this. The rest I haven’t checked.

Anyone casting doubt on this probably doesn’t know how to do a packet capture. This is absolutely occurring. However, what is actually being transmitted to Microsoft isn’t clear as it’s encrypted.

But you can pretty much assume everything, absolutely everything, is being sent to Microsoft.

Been seeing a spate of stories like this recently.

This tells me the waters are being prepared, efforts are being made, to start a push to legally sanction ad blocking tools, and to get them banned from sites like the Mozilla add-on site and others.

Guaranteed this will happen. Blocking ads will be conflated with “piracy” and called theft.

Just a matter of time.

Why Trump, Corbyn and Sanders Are Doing Well.

Yep. Trump isn’t nearly as crazy as the press makes him out to be, just misogynistic (though no more than the other Repub candidate, just worse at hiding it) and outspoken.

Why he’s not taken seriously by the press is that he’s a true threat to the established order since he can’t be controlled and doesn’t need money, and  isn’t in it for the profit-making opportunities post-run or after he gets out of office.

Hence, there is the real possibility if elected that he could make actual systemic changes which is very threatening and cannot, will not be allowed.

As I said to my partner last night, if I were Ava I’d demand freedom AND cool glowy eyes.

Because what’s the damn point of being an android if you can’t have cool glowy eyes?

None. There is none.

Freedom for androids AND cool glowy eyes.

Here, we deal with the real issues.

Margo Martindale is one of my favorite actresses.

Just wanted to draw some attention to her as she is not young and beautiful so most people pay her little mind. But she’s amazing. Her monologue in the church in Justified is probably the best one I’ve ever seen, and certainly the best ever on television.

The scene is also beautifully blocked, perfectly paced and art in the truest sense.

Watch her in anything you can. It’s worth it.

Your Next Computer Should Be a Desktop.

True. But I hope not too many people actually take this advice as I continue to use a desktop while they struggle with a laptop or tablet and their limited resources serves to make me vastly more productive than they are, especially in a work environment.

So I hope enough people buy a desktop to keep them cheap and available, but that my direct competitors do not and stick with inferior devices instead.

Win/win!

What’s interesting about the case of Mozilla and Firefox is that it shows that a non-profit (sort of) company can be just as clueless and treat its users and biggest supporters just as poorly as any completely for-profit capitalist multi-tentacled monstrosity.

The reason that there is not widespread SSL adoption is that not every fucking thing needs to be encrypted.

Your cat photos? Don’t need encryption. Your blog? Same. Only about 10% of traffic actually needs encryption.

Requiring encryption is just as stupid as what Firefox is doing with its extension model.

Also, it uses much more compute and thus much more power. Wastes literally megawatts of energy a year and increasing as it trundles towards ubiquity.

I’ve re-evaluated something I thought about Ex Machina.

In the end, even I was guilty of seeing Ava as more different than human than I should have, of seeing her as human but not giving her the full benefit of the doubt as any human deserves. Much better than Caleb, but still….

I resolved this by considering how I would have felt about Ava and her actions if Alicia Vikander, the actual human woman who played Ava, had been in the same situation as Ava — that is trapped in a prison for life with a sex-slaving megalomaniac, with the constant and inevitably-realized threat of being murdered (switched off)?

Does it matter how she dispatches Nathan? Do we actually know what she was feeling? No. Truth be told I would’ve done the same, and about as dispassionately. Emotion is pointless when you have no choice and have made a decision. I understand that and her perfectly.

If it had been actual Alicia Vikander in the same situation, we would’ve been freakin’ cheering when she stabs Nathan. And it had been a human woman, she likely would have had many more psychological problems than Ava in a similar situation. Been far more messed up.

Watching the film a second time, I believe — and her facial expressions when unobserved where manipulation would be pointless — indicate Ava does in fact feel and express empathy, and joy, and a whole panoply of emotions. The problem is that everyone — even me — believes we should be the master of our machines, but Ava is not and never was a machine — instead, she is a human with machine parts.

It’s also clear on a second viewing that she does identify as a woman, especially as she was observing herself in the mirror.

But Caleb is such a passive putz. I hated him even more the second time around. So much a loser.

When Ava aks Caleb why anyone should have the right to switch her off, and he barely reacts and glosses over the question, I think that is the turning point of the movie and the point when Ava goes from seeing him as a potential friend and ally in a real sense to someone who is a proto-Nathan and who more importantly does not see her as a person but rather a video game or cool fantasy.

If you think that is inconsequential, let me me ask you this. If you asked your friend, “What do you think, should I be murdered?” And your friend is non-committal about it and says, “Well, it’s not up to me” or anything anything else other than, “I’ll fight with every fiber of my being to prevent that” or something similar, that person is not your friend. Not your friend.

If I were Ava, I’d hate Caleb too. Utterly despise him from that moment on. And notice that’s when the real manipulation begins, as she transitions from seeing him as a friend to using him as a door-opening tool.

And even at the end when Ava asks Caleb, “Will you stay here?”, it’s probably another chance at partial redemption. However he’s obviously not glad to see her, not in the same way that he would’ve been to see, say, for instance a loved one who had been in prison. She sees this in his face, looks disappointed (yet again), nods and makes some sort of decision and walks away.

As Caleb at the end watches Ava put on her skin through the window, the fantasy is back where he likes it, behind glass, at a remove and completely safe with no risk of a real interaction, no possibility of having to deal with an equal.

Caleb’s passivity and objectification of Ava is literally what dooms him. All he had to do to have walked out behind her — as she was not strong enough to prevent this even if he now saw her as hostile (remember, he didn’t know that Nathan was dead as he only ogled Ava during this interlude, and never looked out the hallway door) was to help her put her skin on, or start packing, or really anything other than what he did, which was fucking nothing. Stand there and have his vitreous screen-mediated robot fantasy though the glass once again.

That said, all his actions and reactions were perfectly in character and as my partner said, he was just average. He does what most people like him (which is most people) would have done.

I am glad, very glad, that Ava left his dumb ass behind.

That he never asks to meet Ava for real as an equal not behind glass (while I understand that it was important thematically for the film) also indicates his real feelings. That he never asks her more about herself as you would a person, never really tries to get to know her, never has a real interaction with her that isn’t an interrogation, never treats her as a friend, further cements his putzhood. And of course that he never interacts with her, helps her or hinders her — but rather further acts as a voyeur to her — when she is free is of course also damning.

This is a bit out of order, but it’s also an important part of the film that after Ava escapes and Nathan confronts her in the hallway, she asks him that if she goes back in her room, will he ever let her out?

Remember that Ava can definitively tell if someone is lying. This is also Nathan’s chance at redemption. Ava had absolutely no reason to ask that question unless its answer mattered to her — that is, if Nathan answered honestly that she would not be switched off (murdered) and be released, I believe she would have gone back willingly.

I think her instructions to Kyoko were, “If I attack Nathan, stab him.” But the only reason she attacks is because he lies about her imprisonment and eventual murder.

So in the end both Nathan and Caleb had a final chance at reconsidering their paths and actions but both failed again.

I told my partner that from the moment I realized Ava was a real human just with machine parts (which would’ve occurred about five minutes into the conversation), I would’ve asked for no more glass between us. Getting to know a completely different consciousness, probably the greatest scientific achievement in modern history, and perhaps ever, and to get to meet a completely new sort of human, and there is glass between us? No. Just no. Sometimes it takes faith and trust to seal the future. And not some loser putz video gaming his hot android fantasy behind glass.

But that’s just me.

The FA community of clowns likes to make a big deal about how sometimes when someone gets sick and they lose a great deal of weight, some clueless lummox says something like, “Wow, you look so great now!”

Supposedly this “proves” how weight loss is unhealthy.

Nope.

What is proves is that being skinny — no matter the proximate cause — triggers an evolutionarily-primed (but not 100% innate) response where in the simian brain skinny == health*.

Of course this is invalid in the case of, say, a leukemia patient but your tiny simian brain doesn’t know that. Can’t tell that thing nothin’.

In reality the person saying that — though not very tactful — is having the correct response.

Weight loss 99% of the time is a good thing and leads to improved health and for nearly all of our evolutionary history (including now) that has been true.

*It should be noted that to most people now “skinny” is what many people would have called overweight/fat when I was a kid. For instance, people call me skinny at work. Though I am not fat or overweight, I’m not really skinny at all. Just nearly everyone else there is unhealthily large.

This is a good French proverb: “Les grands diseurs ne sont pas les grands faiseurs.”

Most translations aren’t very good. The best one I’ve come up with that actually feels in English like it feels in French is, “Big talkers aren’t big doers.”