Leap seconds clever but stupid.

For a variety of reasons the Earth isn't always perfect about making it around it's access in the expected amount of time. The implemented answer to this is Leap seconds. Periodically we add a second to our time keeping systems. Since 1970 we've added 26, and we're slated to add the next at the end of the year. I think that this system is stupid for a variety of reasons. (also let's just state off the bat that all numbers in this post will be approximate)

The first thing is the question of why adjust. Why do we need astronomical noon to be perfect noon in part of London? Not all of London mind you, just part of it. At a latitude of 51 degrees 30 minutes, a second's worth of the earth's rotation is only .179 miles. London is over 600 square miles, which is equivalent to circle with diameter 27.6 miles. which at that latitude would take 154 seconds to rotate through. At the current rate of leap seconds it would take over 200 years for the perfect moment of noon to make it all the way from one side of London to another! And it's not even perfect noon since the sun is always slightly to the south. And with s system that takes so long to pay off London might be growing faster than the need for leap seconds to keep noon in London. Will it matter when we've got colonies all over the solar system where in the sky the sun is at noon in London?

Another big problem with this is the effort it takes to actually implement this for all our time keeping systems. Human's don't notice that big a change but computers sure do. So in all our computer systems we keep having to code in and fix weird edge cases like adding a second. Adding this leap second is hard and it's buggy. A stupid amount of human effort goes into pulling this trick off. And probably more effort goes into fixing the things that break when it fails. And this time Google's solution is real time to not implement the extra second but to slowly stretch the seconds on other side.  Hopefully nothing high precision will be using googles clocks that day. Plus there is the question about what they do going forward. Normally things keep track of all the time unit seconds since the beginning of 1970, and have a table to look up when there have been extra seconds, but if google computers don't ever live that extra second then how are they eventually going to take care of it. Are the all the computers just eventually going to register an error of a second and skip ahead? The effort that is involved just doesn't seem worth it.

This also has the gross effect of eliminating all other units of time. If the span between 11:59:30 and 12:00:30 is a minute, then how long is a minute? It depends on which one. If it's one of the ones that has had a second added then it's 61 seconds. And so on for larger units. This already impacted years with leap years, and moths weren't regular anyway, but now everything above a second is not just a calendar indicator instead of an actual unit. And because of weird implementations like google's, a second isn't even really that any more.

One potential solution for this is to do it in time zones. Right now to tell you your local time. your computer has to look up the time zone and modify the time based on that and then look up the leap second chart and modify the time based on that. Why modify the time twice? Why not just make leap seconds or any other minor adjustments for local pride part of the time zone? That way locale's that want noon to be special can finally have it that way, and then they can keep it that way for as long as they desire.

But what we're really going to eventually drive at is global / universal time. The inefficiency of having so much space/stuff dedicated to one person is eventually going to falter and we'll end of with round the clock people trading off space/stuff throughout the day. Not to mention globalization which increasingly creates communities in many time zones that all are on one schedule. All the effort that has gone into local time, and keeps going into maintaining local time is eventually going to be set aside. And then we'll look at the legacy of the leap second look up table and ditch it. Hopefully by then it won't be so late that making that change in and of itself won't be a major headache of an undertaking.

Flying Cars.

Back to the future day was over a year ago, so where are our flying cars?

One of the biggest things holding back flying cars is the human element. We're not that great. And air traffic control for humans would suck. Transition to a future without human drivers. Then that problem goes away and we can have flying cars. We're already doing extensive work in automated drone piloting. Is it really that hard to imagine flying cars as a next step?

Self-driving cars, have a lot of perks in terms of infrastructure. They reduce traffic, so road expansion to mitigate traffic is reduced. They can park on their own, so there doesn't have to be parking everywhere, since your car can drop you off then go find parking. Flying cars increase those perks. At the point where we have flying cars roads are only need for long haul transportation, and so we can spend a lot less money on them. And if you reasonably assume vtol, parking lots can be extra dense. 

And if we want to cast our gaze further forward. Once we have ubiquitous flying cars why would ground level even still be an important thing. we can all have aerial egress. no more going to a central shaft to go up and down. At that point cities might end up looking more and more like the worlds of the Jetsons, or the 5th element. 

Perhaps we'll even moving to ocean based habitats, either floating or in platforms high above the sea, leaving the land to be a nature preserve with only small groups of luddites left. But, of course this magical future has the pitfall that as technology becomes like magic, a crash in society takes us back to square one. In which case our ocean based super-society will be just a legend to the luddite remnants of civilization left on the mainland. But that particular scenario was deliberately picked to sound like the legend of Atlantis.

Getting back to reality: As flying cars kept failing to materialize we kept thinking of them as an increasingly distant prospect. But if fully self driving cars are mainstream by 2020, it's not improbable that we might have flying cars mainstream by 2030. We've gotten so used to predictions of a dull future that an exciting one might just sneak up on us, and that is pretty wonderful to think about.  

Apple's Laptop Event

I've seen a lot of circular and confused comments about Apple's laptop event last week, and I thought I would chime in with some of my own thoughts as well clarifications of some of the things I see confused.

To me the biggest question, is what about desktops. There were reports that the iMac has been delayed, but we've heard nothing about the Mac Pro or Mac mini. So we still need answers and it doesn't seem that likely that we'll be getting them this year. If the desktops were addressed, then with a straight face you could tell all the people claiming to be ultra-pro, but demanding in a laptop that they are being silly. With the MacBook Pros still not stepping up to fill all the desktop roles they really have a hole at the top of their computer lineup.

So from a line-up perspective what happened? Apple got rid of the 11-inch MacBook air, and the old thick 13-inch MacBook pro. They left the entry level 13-inch MacBook pro in place but limited it's customizability. Replaced mid-line 13-inch models with the 13-inch without the touch bar, and the high end 13-inch models with the 13-inch with touch bar. They left the entry 15-inch without discrete GPU in place, and replaced the versions with discrete GPUs with the new 15-inch with touch bar. And it looks like they left the 13-inch MacBook air and MacBook alone. If you weren't familiar with the specs of the old laptop lineup or that they left those old MacBook Pros in the line up. It can look like the prices shot up, instead off it being the case that they just didn't make new entry level machines.

As to whether or not they are falling behind Microsoft, with their announcements. I can imagine that for those that draw all the time the Surface Studio is great. And for a company that has been doing a full court press on the laptop front about touch it's great to see them stay true to that message and finally deliver it on the desktop. I hear that they drawing isn't as good as on an iPad, but they are sticking with their gimmick. I don't know that I've bought into the whole touch thing and I'm not sure everyone has, so I think it's ok that Microsoft is better at their gimmick then Apple. But for Microsoft they are a one platform company, where Apple is not so I think it makes sense for them to find a way to unify their platform when Apple is not.

I haven't played with one of the new macs yet, so I can't speak about the touch bar first hand. In the presentation it seemed way better than the pre-announcement rumors I had heard, which made it sound like it would just have buttons with changeable labels. I think that it's all going to depend on the apps, as to whether or not it takes off. I think it will be a bump in the road for the people that do still use keys in the top row with any frequency, which I do because of my correct editor choice of vi, but I hope it will just be an adjustment, and that what there is to be gained is more than the lose.

For the ports, I think that it's great that they went with Thunderbolt-3 / USB-C. I think that thunderbolt-3 offers more than just straight USB-C, and it's good that it's there, and the ports can all be used for whatever. And I think that the industry has spoken and USB-C and/or Thunderbolt-3 are the way of the future. It's annoying that it's everything all at once, and before we've even finished off the last of the magsafe-1 devices. But I don't think that these ports will become "mac" ports the way firewire or the first two thunderbolt versions were, which is great.

As for the memory limit of 16GB. I am constantly amazed at what can be done by tablets and phones with less than a quarter of that. And one of the reasons to use more memory is to make up for other bottle necks, which have all gotten faster. I do think that there is a place for a mac with more memory, but it probably shouldn't be a laptop anyway.

And doubling back to the complainers. I saw people both complain about the "price change", and that the high end wasn't high enough. Their high end prices didn't really change, so you if you're making both those complaints you probably weren't in the high end before. And if it really is a big limit on you, why are you trying to do all that much on a laptop anyway. It should probably be a minor annoyance unless you're trying to do way too much on a laptop.

I also think it's funny to see so many people talking about how Apple is alienating their core customers. They are the most profitable company ever and their market share in the industry had been growing until they got to the heart of this drought. I imagine that they know exactly who their core customers are, it's probably not who it was 15 years ago. There are also a lot of internal equations that could see someone leaving the mac platform, and I think that those people who have already made that decision will use a new release to re-affirm it to themselves, when nothing could have kept them on the platform anyway.

In general, I think that there is a lot of unnecessary doom and gloom (as long as they do something about the desktops). I think that the size and efficiency improvements will be a big plus to a lot of people. The new task bar provides an interesting opportunity. Finally have a secure enclave in the mac is interesting (and from the point of view of someone that supports them scary). It is disappointing that apple is moving to the model of having the old model as the low-end/entry model at the end of a drought.

Smart Watches

I've had an Apple watch for about a month now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts, on it in particular, and on smart watches in general.

Why did I buy the apple watch? I wasn't buying a new smartphone this year for a change, but saw from Apple's entry into the bluetooth headphone market, that the remote was a thing of the past, and thing to fill that gap would be a watch. So if the new ecosystem was going to be one with a watch, I wanted to buy it in this off year, to make next year cheaper, and to be a position where I could make a better judgment about the proposed ecosystem. I also kind of think that health trackers of some sort are the future, so might as well, jump in.

I probably don't use the apple watch typically. I'm not an alert fiend or a workout hound. I sleep with the watch on and have it on for most of the day. It frequently gets some time off (and charging) right after I get home, and again while I shower in the morning. And with this routine, and with rise to wake off, I don't have problems with the watches battery life.

I think where the watch really shines for me is as a digital watch. It's probably the best I've owned. It's alarms with it's taptic engine are nice and discrete. It's easy to have many of them and to set them up in same-complicated fashions. It's replaced my iPhone for most of my alarms. It's timers are also good. And it's generally more convenient to get to then my phone for the time. I don't think that any watch has lasted on my wrist so long.

It's a fitness tracker, but I don't watch that that much. I'm not trying to use it for that much. My curiosity about such things is fed by it. I think that it's a good supplement to my phone. And it meets my idle curiosity. But a large part of my interest in this function stems from the death of my mother. She died alone and her last hours are a mystery to us. We used some of the tracking in her phone to shape up that period. But a watch that's almost always on me will, I imagine do a better job.

I haven't gotten to use it as a remote yet. I can but it's somewhat silly since I'm not using bluetooth headphones. Even when I do, then model I think is most compelling has an on wire remote. So we'll see if this use pans out. maybe I'll be able to do enough or maybe it'll be slower for all the things the on cable remote can do, but too awkward to do the more complicated stuff.

While my phone is a device I spend a lot of time staring at I think the watch is a device for glancing at. I really like the intimate notifications of it tapping me. and using it for apple pay can go either way depending on the terminal location. For health monitoring and discreet notifications, and maybe as remote for things on less accessible objects. Overall I think that it's a plus. If you're not sure, I'd consider waiting until series 3, comes out and you can potentially get a used series 2, on the cheap.

I think there is a future for wearables. I imagine in the future, I'll wear headphones that work for all of my devices. have a watch for when I'm on the go and need to interact with something, and really only pull out my phone for entertainment/productivity, when I'm stopped somewhere for a while. I once thought that what we should have is a personal area network, that lives in a brick in our bag, and that can manage choosing between cell or wifi, and have lots of endpoints we can interact with. Now that's what we're getting but it's going to be our phone.

Attack of the self driving cars.

I've seen multiple posts so far lamenting the dark side of self driving cars, the lost jobs. And this argument starts to spiral into if car automation actually gets that good, then a lot of the problems that have gotten in the way of a lot of other automation will be solved, what are we to do. And this raises the legitimate question of what happens to the masses when it's cheaper then a living wage to build and have a robot do everything.

Let's start in the short term. Most cars are not driven by professionals, this means that if we can come up with one to many jobs related to these new cars they may be absorbed by the dislocated work force. The first of these jobs is UAC pilots for when cars get into trouble. Secondly these cars will likely have a much lower tolerance of dysfunction then people have with their cars, so the need for mechanics will rise. And really where the magic is with that translation is that this change will be spread equally over the cars that are professionally driven and those that aren't so it won't need to be a 1-1 exchange for jobs.

Now to look at what happens as robots take over everything. 

First thing to do, expand. The needs of how many people or service people a mostly automated society can take care of are bounded by the geographical area that the people are in. So if we decrease density and expand we can grow human jobs that way. Of course this means expanding int new types of areas which will require new types of innovations so the innovation sector will expand.

The second thing to do is change the education system. As economic activities are increasingly reduced to ownership, innovation, and education, we need to move increasingly towards free educations and then towards paying people to become educated ( rewarding higher levels of pursued education with higher compensation). So that as industries die, those that can are motivated to move up the path of education. That way we will always move towards a maximized innovator class and move people to their optimal level of innovation so that people who can learn more don't take away opportunities from people that are maxed out.

The third thing, is to avoid the accumulation of ownership into the hands of individuals. One way to do this is to adjust the rules for inheritance, to favor the distribution of inherited wealth both to as many parties as possible and to those that are not already wealthy. And if anything is left to fall to the state, either hold it in a social trust, or distribute it as possible, depending on your politics.

The fourth thing you do is to manage the population in both directions. If there are too many people you increase the disincentives toward childbirth. If there are too few people, you make it a pro to have kids.

You don't do all of those things overnight so we need to start moving in those directions before we are too messed up. But maybe I'm completely wrong. Those are just my ideas.

So there has been a lot of chatter recently about Chick-fil-A and it was disheartening, because of people that were incapable of rational thought or being open minded. And there were a lot of things in the discussion that I thought were going on. That I want to enumerate without making a narrative about it. Because these are just simple things that people don't or wouldn't get. 

- There are differences between boycotting something personally and discreetly, boycotting something and announcing it, and calling for a boycott on something. The first you do when you just disagree with something. The second when you disagree and think that other may share the opinion and wish to do the same. The third when you think that something is or should be unbearable to all. 

- There is a difference between conducting a business transaction with someone and someone making a profit. In a business transaction you think you both get something. It is not a gift of value it is an exchange of value, ideally both parties leave the transaction with the same value that they entered it with, just in a different form.

- The biblical rules against homosexuality in the bible come from the old testament, but the new covenant, replaces the old and those rules no longer apply. (That's why Christians don't have to keep kosher).

- Many Chick-Fil-A locations are operated by franchisees, who have beliefs and positions distinct from those of the the Chick-Fil-A corporation and are staffed by employees that may have beliefs that differ both the operators and corporation. These people are more directly impacted by boycotts and maybe disproportionately affected by them. 

- Morality is not absolute, and that's never been humanity's position on it. There has always been the allowance for amorality ( like the actions of animals ). Morality has always required knowledge / belief. That is why isolated societies are not condemned ahead of contact and exchange.

- If you believe that causing someone to be tortured is evil, people may be fundamentally influenced by others, there is a God that is strict, and there is hell being condemned to which results in a eternity of torture, then influencing others towards a violation of God's rules is an act that will lead to their condemnation to hell and that is really evil.

- Denying to let a corporation conduct business in a city because of their beliefs or what they say is a violation of their first amendment rights. Banning them because of their supposed behavior with enumerating the behavior or giving legal recourse is a violation of their 5th amendment rights.

- Denying some potential employees a full range of benefits, reduces your ability to recruit those potential employees and is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- Charging more then a fair value for your services so that you might have extra to syphon away from your business to a cause that you believe in is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- Closing one day a week, on a day when many people are out and about is a potential competitive dis-advantage.

- A publicly traded company exists in obligation to it's shareholders and can only take positions on the belief that they are financially sound. Since most systems of morality require for deeds to be good that they be done without concern for the deeds financial soundness or in the belief that the act is a sacrifice,  both of which publicly traded companies are not allowed to do, so in many systems of morality they are at best amoral. 

- The Catholic church beliefs that homosexual activity is a sin and that supporting it is the same, and they support gay inequality. If you Participate and contribute to the Catholic Church but you believe and support in gay equality and believe that fighting it is sinful. Then by the standards of the Catholic church you are sinful and by your standards you are sinful, for for contributing to the Church. 

- The world is not fair, and the protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion ARE used to make the world a place where there is ever less oppression, and people can increasingly co-exist as equals. Despite the fact that many see them as having done their job.  

- If two opposed parties are both close minded then neither will win. One must be open-minded enough to accept the ideas of their opponents, or open-minded enough to understand their opponents in order to effect change in their close-mindedness.

A New kind of Religion.

I want to introduce a new concept. That of the existential religion. Most of the classic religions that we think about Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, etc, have to do with creation. So I'd like to categorize them as creationist Religions. From there what I'd like to introduce is existential religions. That is to say a collections of beliefs that have to do with the current stat of things as they exist right now. As I see the world progressing, I see more and more people acting in accordance with beliefs that don't directly correlate with any clear historical basis.

Some examples of this are, that wind energy is green, that climate change is bad and that extinction is bad. What we know about wind energy is that the law of conservation of energy, says that that energy is coming from somewhere, and we're not sophisticated enough to accurately know what the impact of diverting it is. Why do we think that is good or green. As wind energy as risen on the U.S. west coast, so has the problem of weather systems stalling in the middle of the continental U.S.. Wind energy is not green it's probably our next environmental sin waiting to be identified. (Or not we don't know and we know that we don't know. So why is it great?) What we know about climate change is that for most of the existence of the earth the climate was warmer then it is now. So the climate we have now is just the result of climate change. More over, astro-physicists believe that all of the elements we have on earth other then hydrogen are the result of stars exploding and spreading their material throughout the universe. So if other star systems didn't suffer catastrophic climate change then we could't be hear. But most of the people who claim that climate change is bad don't account for the billions of years of it that led to where we are, they just take the position that change is bad. (There are reasons why climate change can be very bad for us, but any beliefs to that effect should be based on actual reasons, so that an actual intelligent discussion can be had. And from my last example that extinction is bad, well, without extinction there would be no humans. There would not have been environmental niches for our ancestors to fill, and we wouldn't be here. I've heard that something like 99.999% of all the species that have ever been have gone extinct. Extinction isn't the rare exception, it's the norm. There are arguments  for preserving the biological diversity of earth. But far more pragmatic approaches then fighting ALL extinction at all cost, seems to fall short of the pragmatically best approach. By trying to save all the species, even those in direct competition or potentially so for the same ecological niche, we may lose both. So a more pragmatic approach would be to allow for or encourage the trimming of some genetic trees to preserve a much broader collection of trees, rather then endangering whole families of animals to allow a few to survive, and that should be argued on a case by case basis, based on the relative merits of the specific cases.

I mention this new class of religion, because it occurred to me that Eco-catholicism was upon us. That we were already pretty much at the point of declaring people whose views differ from the mainstream to be outcast heretics, and beyond that we are already at the point where carbon indulgences are being sold. Not sure when the eco-martin luther is going to come along and nail a manifesto to some church but it's probably coming too. More over Pepco has found religion around here too, and even volunteered to upgrade whole apartment building including mine.

There are a few things I fundamentally disagree with with the upgrade of my building. The first is the replacement of normal incandescent bulbs with CFLs. When I asked the upgraders about them, they said, don't worry about the CFLs, they contain as much mercury as a can of Tuna fish. Then as they left they handed me a folder which included the half page of instructions (from the EPA) of what to do if a CFL broke. After seeing that I am never eating tuna again. Also I'm going to call in a hazmat team any time I see two can's opened at the same place at the same time. I particularly think that CFL's in a bathroom are dumb. These are light that take a minute or two to warm up, but are used for a minute or two at a time. All that does is encourage me to leave them on all the time, which will use more energy then an incandescent bulb. probably more over the course of my apartment then is saved by the whole cfl upgrade. Additionally they put a reate limiter on my kitchen sink. one of the main uses of my kitchen sink is to fill things. What good is it to make that take longer? It's just more likely that a related fridge open will be left longer or that it takes so long that it will be abandoned and overflowed. So again that is backwards. The last is low flow shower heads. Not only should the Jerry Seinfeld PSA about these should have warned us, I have recently discovered that they are defective by design, that is that be diverting some of the water out the faucet a high pressure flow can be established, at about the normal flow of water, so not only am I not saving anything in my showers, I waste a bunch of time trying to get the just right water flow. Why do hippies want everyone else to be dirty too.

The big problem with these beliefs that people hold religiously is that people who believe will refuse to enter into legitimate discussion that those beliefs. That's the real disappointing thing. These beliefs exist with out labels to use to identify themselves, and exist in a limbo. So that there is no reform possible because there are no well defined dogma to reform. And because when people impose these beliefs upon you, there is no redress in the form of the courts and freedom of religion to save you, because religion is never flamed for these beliefs.