Darkling Wood

So That's Why They Call It "Cyclone" Technology

In the middle of preparation for tonight's Burns' Supper, wife yells through that the vacuum cleaner has stopped working. It's a fairly new Dyson DC25, so I assumed she'd just vacuumed up the TV or something and all I'd need to do was unblock a hose. It wasn't just as simple, and even had me on the Dyson web site, following their step-by-step instructions. One in particular gave some cause for concern:

 

"When checking suction, make sure small children ... are removed from the area."

Why I Don't Read (Watch, Listen To, etc) "News"

When I came to the US from the UK over five years ago, my consumption of news in the form of newspapers and TV news dropped. I think it was because in the UK it's easy to feel "closer" to major news. On the one hand, the UK is just like a large, but not huge US state. Wikiunleakypedia has it at roughly the same area as Michigan, 11th largest in the US. But UK news doesn't feel like Michigan news. Michigan doesn't have nukes. It doesn't have international links going back to the days of Empire. And it doesn't have over 60 million people, squeezed into its 250,000 km². Michigan itself has under 10 million people, and even California -- the most populous US state -- has only 37 million. So news in the UK - the zeroth state of the Union, if you will -- feels more like US-wide news: major politics, high finance, wars in far off places kind of news. But, as I say, closer.

But since then, I've reduced my consumption even more, almost to zero. These days I never read a newspaper, I don't watch news channels on TV, I don't listen to news on the radio while driving, and I don't look at any news sources on the internet. Now that approach does not mean I don't actually "get" any news. I'm probably as up to date on most things as most folk. But I get it, as I believe does the Dalai Lama, by osmosis. I, myself, don't actively pull news into my brain, and here's why:

1. Negativity. News by the normal channels is subject to a very heavy bias towards the negative. This is understandable because bad news tends, I imagine, to sell much better than good news does. The headline "Gangs of drug-enraged Mexicans stand, machetes in hands, at our borders ready to come take our jobs, our women, and our children" is going to get a newspaper more sales than one saying "Illegal immigration isn't as bad a problem
   as you probably think". Now I'm not looking for my news to come from Pollyana Media Corp. If bad things happen -- and they do -- I sometimes want to know. I'm looking for assistance in building as true a picture of the world as is possible. So the reason this bias is significant is because the picture it creates is not true. While any given news story may itself be accurate, the news as a whole is simply false.
2. Over-reporting and repetition. There's really not as much news as you'd think. There's certainly a lot less than you read about in the news. Now the UK is good at repeating itself in news, but the US is even better. I first noticed it when I was on a visit here in June 1999, on the day John Kennedy Jr died in a plane crash. My recollection is that we were met with reports from early am, and I certainly began hearing them over breakfast. And from there it was wall-to-wall repetition. Each new report -- although that makes it sound like they were separated by periods of non-reporting; they weren't -- offered "breaking news". But they rarely gave anything new. The same thing -- the crash, the deaths, that's it -- was repeated over, and over again. As I say, that was in 1999. If anything, it's worse today.
3. Opinion-not-fact. That Republicans tend (sweeping generalization, I know) to like FOX and dislike MSNBC, and the situation is reversed for Democrats, suggests that neither channel is publishing hard objective facts. (There is of course another possibility; that one of the channels is getting to the truth, that its supporters are as clear thinking as Socrates, but that its detractors are biased fools. I imagine that is the view held by many on both sides. I don't buy it.) Of course when reporting on topics other than mathematics or physics -- although try telling that to Hooke, Newton and Leibniz -- it is well nigh impossible not to inject some bias into the report. Still, these days it seems that much more reporting is opinion-ated. For those who want to form their own opinions, its hard to get Just The Facts.
4. Irrelevance. This comes in two forms. First, there's the plain irrelevant. Not too long ago I remember seeing a red news ticker appear across the bottom of my TV, while watching some comedy soap or other, with the ominous text: "BREAKING NEWS ... EXCLUSIVE ...". It continued with "... BRITNEY SPEARS LOSES CUSTODY BATTLE". It's not that I don't care that the poor girl has had personal problems (if indeed she even has -- how could I really tell). But there are many such poor girls, here, there, all over the place, but I rarely hear about their plight. For me, Britney's problems are simply not newsworthy. (As I say, that's for me. This post is about why *I* don't read news.) The second form of irrelevance is perhaps more contentious. Suppose I had never heard about the 9/11 attacks in New York. I wasn't there that day, and I never heard anything about it other than through the news or one person who was herself watching the news. So had there been no "News", would my life have been any different today from what it actually is? (OK, maybe there'd be less chance of getting felt up at an airport.) Suppose no one ever reported on the recent financial mess. Suppose I heard nothing about stock prices changing, jobs disappearing, and so on unless I heard about it directly, as it affected me or those within a reasonably close network. Would my life have been any different today from what it actually is? Bird flu, immigration, multiple victim public shootings, suicide bombs in distance places; I'm not arguing that those things aren't important to those that they affect, but it seems to me that part of what modern news does is cast a spell over us to convince us that *we*, all of us, are affected by each and every thing. And we're not.

By stark and warm-and-cosy-hued contrast; when I wur a lad, back in the "good old days", you could tell that the front pages of the newspaper were the factually news bit, and the opinions came later. On TV, news was delivered by stern faced blokes and unsmiling headmistress types who just told you facts. Well ... until, that is, Angela Rippon got most of her kit off and started prancing about on Morecambe and Wise.

 

It was presented for an hour at most, at 6:00pm and then at 10:00pm, and that was it. And if some piece of news broke into regular programming between those slots then you could be sure that it was of well nigh galactic significance. Auntie Beeb would have had it no other way.

So there it is. Imbalanced towards the negative, repetitive and irrelevant opinion; today's news paints a picture of a dark world that doesn't actually exist, that impinges on my real world far less than it appears, and it keeps painting it even when I'm trying to watch Modern Family!

Regression

Remember the days when it was sensible to save your computer work every so often, because the likeliehood of a crash was high?

 

 

When it suddenly becomes sensible again -- for example, when you are forced in Excel 2011 on Mac OS, instead of doing a single copy-paste of a block of cells, to copy-paste one line at a time, adding a save of the file between each such copy-paste -- then you know technology doesn't always move forwards.

 

 

What makes it worse is that the beach ball has been spinning for long enough after my most recent attempt that I've had time to write this blog post. I sense a "Force Quit" coming on.)

You know, maybe it wouldn't seem so bad if it at least had the courtesy to say "You have been forced to force Excel to quit. Again."

Rassen sassen frassen :-(