Troubleshooting device charging

So it has come to this: I'm using this blog to bookmark random Web articles. Oh well.

The Wired piece is, "WTF Just Happened: Why My Gadget Charged Very Slowly (Or Not At All)" by Tim Moynihan.

The tidbit I didn't know that I want to ensure I don't forget:

If you want to replace a cable to charge your tablet without paying a premium for a manufacturer-supplied replacement, your best bet is to look for a 28/24 AWG (American Wire Gauge) USB cable. This is a wider gauge than the 28/28 cables supplied with 1-amp chargers, and more of the cables’ wires are dedicated to transferring a charge. These cables are easy to find at all the major outlets (Monoprice, Amazon, Newegg) starting at less than $2.

[links in original]

The Times' science coverage is weak

The New York Times does an exemplary job of covering national politics and foreign policy. It manages to do a decent job of covering the arts. It runs its share of long pieces on a variety of subjects, whether it be a profile of a (putatively) important person or a school's struggle with decades of sexual abuse (I don't have a link to the Horace Mann story, sorry). It even manages to toss in regional stories that might have larger implications, particularly where it has a good supply of stringers, e.g., Texas and California.

For a national publication, though, its coverage of science is decidedly weak. I was going to say "dreadful", but the truth is, I can't think of another general-interest publication that does a better job.

That bugs me.

I know that All Knowledge Is Available On The Internet. Having it available and actually encountering it, though, are different things. We need gateways to expose people to information they don't know that they don't know, that they don't know they should seek out.

The Times does have a Science section. Its focus, though, is frustratingly narrow. The articles tend to be about technology, especially as it affects daily life; biology, especially as it affects health; or the environment. These are important subjects, to be sure, but they're not the be-all and end-all of science. Where are chemistry, geology, or physics, to name but three very big areas of scientific inquiry? When physics is in the news, as with the apparent confirmation of the Higgs boson's existence, the coverage tends to be more about the technology (the Large Hadron Collider, in that case) than the underlying physics. I don't expect a mathematically rigorous explanation, of course (I'm no more qualified to understand that than the average layman), but it would have been nice if the Times had put the news into context by explaining at least a little about the Standard Model.

I happen to be a cosmology buff, so the Times' treatment of this absorbing subject especially irks me. The nature, origin and fate of the universe may not be everybody's cup of tea, but as a topic it surely deserves better than vapid essays like this one. The paper covers small towns in Vermont with more care. Hell, it covers fashion far more thoroughly than science. If we had as many column-inches about current research as about Milan, the Times' readership would be the most scientifically literate bunch on the planet.

No publication can do everything well, I suppose, but the nearly unlimited room available to the Web version of the paper makes the narrowness and shallowness of its science coverage an especially egregious weakness. In an age where the national debate requires a populace that understands enough science to recognize bamboozlers and frauds (I'm looking at many of you, Republican lawmakers), this is a weakness we shouldn't tolerate in one of our most nationally important publications.

Chuck Jones exhibition (yawn)

The Museum of the Moving Image in NYC is hosting a Chuck Jones retrospective starting 19 July 2014.

Jones was certainly one of the Big Three directors at Warner Bros. during the studio's Golden Age of animation, the other two being Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett. (In spite of being essentially the father of the outfit, Tex Avery didn't stick around long enough, nor did Frank Tashlin or Art Davis; of Bob McKimson's directorial stint, the less said, the better.) Yet Jones carries an outsized reputation, especially among casual cartoon fans.

Jones certainly had his moments, a few of them cited in the article (though I prefer others, like Rabbit of Seville and The Dover Boys at Pimento University). However, for pure laughs, he couldn't hold a candle to Friz Freleng. The thing is, because Jones self-identified as an intellectual, I think it was and still is easier for both academics and adults not sure they should be proud of liking cartoons to like him. He self-consciously incorporated elements of "higher" art into his shorts. And by happenstance, he simply lived long enough to be able to ride the modern wave of animation appreciation that started in the late 1980s. If there was any elder statesman people were likely to meet or to hear about in the last couple of decades, it was Jones.

Yet nobody's cartoons make me laugh as hard as Friz Freleng's. Not Jones', not Avery's, not even Clampett's. And Freleng managed to wring laughs over the longest time of any Warners cartoon director. Whereas the quality of Jones' shorts declined in direct proportion to the quality of the animation in the late 1950s, Freleng stubbornly overcame the limited animation and stylized drawing to produce at least mild laughs until the studio's nadir in the early 1960s. Freleng's cartoons at their best are masterpieces of timing, artful repetition and exemplary musicality. As Jones himself admitted, Freleng made effortlessly funny cartoons at a time when Jones was still trying to figure out how to be funny rather than precious. (Preciousness is a failing that Jones never quite overcame: his limited-edition Bugs Bunny "cels", really original artwork, from the 1990s are as nauseatingly cute as his Sniffles shorts from the late 1930s.)

Throwaway gags are exquisitely set up and paid off. Look at Sylvester's facial expressions in Canned Feud, particularly in his brief breaking of the fourth wall when he looks at the audience: the look of sheer desperation, the tiny droplets of sweat that run down his face, the brevity of the scene (a second or less), are all just enough to convey exactly what he's feeling without milking the gag. Bugs Bunny sends Yosemite Sam over the cliff in Bugs Bunny Rides Again, but the real payoff is when Bugs looks stricken, races to the base of the cliff (ahead of the still-falling Sam), produces a mattress, says to the camera, "You know, sometimes me conscience kinda bodders me," pauses, adds, "But not dis time!" and tosses the mattress away. Later in the same cartoon, Sam is pursuing Bugs through a tunnel; we cut to Bugs hurriedly building a brick wall over the tunnel's end; we cut back to Sam rushing into the now-dark tunnel, experience a second of total blackness before his painful collision (which is so severe, it lights up the wall to show Sam and his horse flattened against it), then cut back to the exterior where Bugs watches a Sam-shaped part of the wall topple over, followed by Sam and his horse. The bare description of this gag doesn't convey its perfect timing, which is what sells it.

Little moments like these are littered throughout Freleng's shorts. They absolutely kill me, so I've wondered for a long time why he's not better loved even among animation fans. I've concluded that part of the problem is that there's nothing flashy about his shorts. They don't break new ground in drawing style or concept: he never produced a short that consciously lampooned Fantasia, for instance, or laid out explicit rules for his chase cartoons, while Jones did both. Yet if you step back, it's hard to claim that What's Opera, Doc? is funnier than Rhapsody in Rivets or that the average Jones Road Runner/Coyote short is funnier than the average Freleng Tweety/Sylvester short, especially if Granny is present and voiced by Bea Benadaret.

Focusing on Jones and ignoring Freleng is akin to focusing on Disney and ignoring Warner Bros., which is what animation scholarship did for decades. It seems the assured old hands who reliably deliver laughs don't get no respect. But just as scholars eventually woke up to the inventiveness in Warners shorts, inventiveness of a type not found in Disney's, they need to wake up to the sterling qualities in Freleng's cartoons, qualities not always found in Jones' shorts.

Random thoughts for 12 July 2014

• There is no justice in a world where all four original Ramones die before Keith Richards.
• Israel's ultra-Orthodox religious fundamentalists and hard-right hawks have made the country thoroughly unlovable. The illegal settlements are bad enough, but this pointless rocket/missile exchange with Hamas over the teens each side has slaughtered ... are right-wing Israelis too blind to see what a dead-end strategy they've embraced?
• Andy Lopez was a 13-year-old killed by police last year because officers mistook his replica toy gun for the real thing. Some have cast the shooting as racially tinged and an example of police brutality, but I think this was simply a terrible mistake. I understand the family's outrage. However, the onus here is on the toymaker: if you make a realistic replica of an AK-47, you're simply inviting a tragedy like this. ThinkProgress has a good recounting of the story.

Religious liberty isn't just about gays

Dylan Scott at TalkingPoints Memo writes that so-called religious freedom bills are being advanced in the wake of the Supreme Court's biased and wrongheaded Hobby Lobby ruling.

The TPM piece discusses the bills only in the context of their possible effect on non-heterosexuals. That's too narrow a view.

The religious fanatics pushing these bills publicly declare only their desire to be free to discriminate against non-heterosexuals today. That, to them, is a winning stance in that a significant fraction of the country is still deeply uncomfortable with non-heterosexuals being treated as "normal". However, the idea that the fanatics would stop there is naive. So is the idea that other fringe nutjobs won't jump on the bandwagon to enshrine their own pet prejudices under the color of religious liberty.

Want to escape the burden of providing health insurance? Become a Christian Scientist. Want to deny service to non-Muslims? Embrace Islam. Prefer to serve whites only? I'm sure you can find a religion somewhere that will justify that. Take a look at the U.S. corrections system, where claims of religious duty have been used for decades to get special meals and other preferential treatment. Convicts have even created their own religions for the purpose, and gotten away with it.

The Hobby Lobby decision forces courts to determine what constitutes a reasonable request for exemption from laws. Federal judges must be thrilled at the prospect. If those pushing the exemptions were genuinely concerned for their faiths, they would be no more enthusiastic. It's a lose-lose proposition.

Every form of discrimination has been justified at some point by holy texts. The Supreme Court opened the door for all of it to come flooding back.

Ambiguity in the Declaration of Independence?

Per the New York Times:

A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less.

The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original.

A punctuation error that affects the interpretation of one of our founding documents is potentially a very big deal. The Declaration is one of the two documents at the heart of the story we tell ourselves, the story of what our nation was intended to be.

On the other hand ... we've been poring over these documents for more than two centuries. I doubt a punctuation mistake will lead to some radical, totally unexpected interpretation of the Declaration. It would be unfortunate if any new interpretation led to the kind of seemingly endless and destructive imbroglio that surrounds the Second Amendment, but maybe it will lead instead to the kind of ongoing vital debate we have about the First.

Should be interesting to see what comes of this.

Who are the really smart people?

In a blog entry entitled "The Curse of Smart People", the author observes:

Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

[emphasis in the original]

In other words, smart people supposedly can convincingly argue themselves into believing they're always right.

I've certainly known many people who, in spite of concrete evidence to the contrary, bullheadedly proclaimed the correctness of their ideas or work. I don't consider these people smart. At best, these people are clever. (Some of them aren't even clever.) I never trusted their work. Neither did anyone else.

The smartest people I've ever known have always been open to the possibility they're wrong. They know they're human.

apenwarr has figured this out, too.

Ironically, one of the biggest social problems currently reported at work is lack of confidence, also known as Impostor Syndrome. People with confidence try to help people fix their Impostor Syndrome, under the theory that they are in fact as smart as people say they are, and they just need to accept it.

But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who *aren't* sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient.

Impostor Syndrome — what a dopey name for a healthy instinct. (And the ones trying to "fix" the "problem" are usually the real impostors.)

I got dinged a lot at my last tech job for lacking confidence. There was something to that, but some of it was simply my manager trying to make me play the political game within the company. The game requires that you mulishly assert your own correctness until proven wrong. If you merely agree to investigate the possibility of an error before being presented with incontrovertible evidence a problem is yours, you are looked on as a pushover, a wimp. It's sad that men — and this is a largely male problem — who were mocked and bullied as wimps themselves are clueless enough to reproduce this brain-dead attitude, but there it is. I refused to play the game, and that's one reason I'm no longer in the industry.

Some people legitimately have self-confidence issues. However, the vast majority of high-tech workers don't. They should cultivate a healthy sense of humility, and admit that there is always the chance they're wrong. Much of the time they won't be: they're not dumb, and mostly they're careful in how they do their jobs. But admitting the possibility of error isn't weak, it's prudent. No, it's more than that: it's responsible. Isn't that a trait we value?