Absurdity for the day

The archetype of the Mall Ninja (spotted by mzmadmike)

If you made this shit up, folks would say you were exaggerating.

(I swear I did not front-load the music.)

New light

So you thought LED lights were the most energy-efficient lighting coming to market, huh?  Guess again.  An outfit called Luxim has a new gas-plasma light technology they call LiFi.  The new LiFi bulb is the size of a gel capsule, and delivers 140 lumens of instant-on, very high visual quality light per watt with very little waste heat.  (Compare that to around 10-12 lumens per watt for an incandescent bulb, 13-15 for halogen, 35-40 for compact fluorescent bulbs, or about 80-90 lumens per watt for the brightest production LEDs.  Wikipedia has a handy reference table here.)

Got sunblock?

Then again, don't bother.  If you were anywhere near GRB080319B (astronomically speaking), sunblock was probably moot.  Astronomers picked it up yesterday; it's the brightest gamma-ray burster (in visible light) ever detected, 7.5 billion light years away (more than halfway to the edge of the visible Universe), yet so bright that if you'd been looking in the right direction when it went off, you could have seen it with unaided eyes.  To put it into perspective, as Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy Blog did, in the few seconds duration of a gamma-ray burster event, it emits more energy than our Sun will produce in its entire ten-billion-year stellar lifetime.

(Pointer kudos to james_nicoll)

That content strike again

furiosity provided a more accurate translation of Anton Nosik's comments (anton_nosik, iirc, but that journal appears to have been suspended ... too much hate mail, perhaps?), and the man makes an excellent point.  I personally have thought all along that this "content strike" is misguided; the odds are it'd be a blip in the noise, if it was noticed at all.  But what Anton pointed out is that when one considers the realities of business, the content strike is not only not productive, it is COUNTER-productive.  Until the content strike is over, SUP CANNOT address the issue the strike is about, however much they may want to — because SUP CANNOT be seen as kowtowing to blackmail from its users.

Q: So why don't you just let your new users go mad if they wish to?

A: I think it's necessary to give them that ability, though since the time the change was made, there hasn't been a single actual person who said that his individual right to using a Basic account has been violated. However, I believe that it's not worth it to forbid bloggers who come to LJ after March 12th from changing their Paid and Plus accounts to Basic. I hope that we will make the appropriate correction. However, this depends not on me, but on the collective decision by the company's management.

Q: When could such a decision be taken?

A: That's where we have a problem. In these current conditions of blackmail, the company's hands are tied.

Q: Why?

A: Let's say I tell you, the journalist, politely: "I think you put an extra comma here." Your normal reaction: "Yes, you're right..." or: "Let's ask the editor..." But if I show up here and say: "Hey you, get rid of that comma, or I'mma break your face!" Would you really check the comma placement, after that?

In a situation where people are trying to blackmail and intimidate us, threatening to destroy our business, there are business reasons not to reward this sort of behaviour. This isn't just the psychology of someone who becomes more stubborn the more they're pushed. The issue is that at no point in the history of any successful business, success was not reached by bowing to aggressive, unfriendly force. No decision -- even the most correct one -- should be taken under duress.

It would probably be right to reevaluate the [ToS] passage regarding March 12th in the following few days. But from the point of view of sound corporate politics, we'll have to wait for the boycott. Let it pass. So that the topic of public outrage, threats, and intimidation can be closed. And then we can discuss the problem thoroughly.

Because "Once you have paid the Danegeld, you'll never be rid of the Dane."

The martial art of noise

I had an insight a while back, that I don't think I ever posted here.  It's about another aspect of how Aspie minds work — or, at least, how my mind works.  I don't know for sure whether this is a personal quirk, or whether it's common to many (even all) Aspies.

It's about noise, and attention.

You see ... we can't help thinking about stuff.  Many of us experience ... compulsions, needs ... to do things like classify data, find buried patterns in data, even in random-looking environmental data encountered by chance.  It's the mental processing.  We can't — or at least, can't easily — shut it off.

Now, there's a lot of kinds of noise out there.  People who work in the field have all kinds of technical terms for different kinds of noise.  There's white noise, for instance, sound that contains random levels of energy distributed across its entire frequency range.  Ocean surf is a good example of white noise.  Or there's pink noise — noise which contains the same amount of energy at all frequencies.  It's very useful for acoustic research and acoustic measurement, because if you have an emitter of pink noise, and a receiver whose characteristics you know some distance away, you can compare what you send to the emitter to what you get back from the receiver, and you can use the difference to calculate exactly how the emitter and the environment are affecting sounds — how much they attenuate or boost the signal at what frequencies, to as fine a frequency resolution as you care to examine the signal.  That, in turn, means that you can then calculate compensate for that, so that a listener sitting where your receiver was will hear exactly the sound you intended them to hear.  If you have a home theater system that automatically calibrates its speakers, it uses pink noise to do it.

But that's not the kind of noise we're interested in here.  Those are kinds of auditory noise.  Right now, what we're interested in is what I'll call semantic noise.

You see, from a semantic viewpoint, there are three kinds of noise.  The equivalent to white noise is ... let's call it empty noise.  It's just ... noise and nothing else.  It doesn't have any meaning embedded in it.  It's just a sound.  Your car's engine is empty noise.  So is the sound of road construction outside.  (Well, mostly.  Both contain information of a kind, but it's not semantic information.)

The opposite of empty noise is sound that contains information.  Music.  Speech.  A morse code stream.  The clicks from a Geiger counter.  Even speech in a foreign language — even one that you don't speak or understand — or a made-up, artificial language.  You don't have to be able to speak the language to recognize that it is, indeed, a language and that it does indeed contain information.  You know that you don't understand the information, but that's OK, because yopu know that you don't understand it.  (And anyway, with enough to analyze, you can probably start to pick it up.)

Let's call this kind of sound "signal" for now.

The third kind of sound is where the problem comes in.  I'm going to call it pseudo-signal.  It's empty noise, but it's empty noise that sounds like signal without actually being signal.  Good examples include the kind of nonsense words that small children make up, or glossolalia, or perhaps the "scat singing" that is part of certain styles of jazz.  And because it sounds like signal, we — or I — have to try to analyze it and identify the information contained in it.

But there is no information.

It's not a conscious act.  There's apparent information there.  And because it sounds like signal, I can't not try to analyze the signal, isolate and identify the data.  Consciously, I can try to ignore it — but subconsciously, I can't not try to parse it.  But there isn't really any data there to parse.  So, my subconscious fails to analyze the apparent signal — and, when it fails, it reallocates more processing power to the problem.  And it still fails, because there's not really a signal there.  So it reallocates still more processing power to the problem.  And it still fails.  It's a runaway positive-feedback condition.  Before long, you're unable to keep your mind focused on anything, you can't think, you completely lose mental state, because all available processing power is tied up trying to analyze that damned signal.  Pseudo-signal is sort of a cognitive denial-of-service attack.

So tell me, my fellow Aspies ... is this just me, or is it something common to many of us?  Does pseudo-signal jam your brain too?  What else has the same effect on you?