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Well, I’ve become addicted to yet another British TV show. The show is called Most Haunted and it is quite similar to the Sci-Fi Channel’s Ghost Hunters. Given the long history of TV producers on both sides of the Atlantic stealing each others ideas, it’s probably safe to say that Ghost Hunters is based on Most Haunted. In any case, the premise behind Most Haunted is simple – a film crew and a “spirit medium” visit a supposedly haunted site and record the events of a night spent there with green “night vision” cameras. I’ve seen about eight episodes of Most Haunted to this point and not much happens aside from the occasional noise and ex post facto video evidence of paranormal activity, such as shots of books on the floor after a spirit has supposedly pulled them off a bookshelf. The show itself is a bit of a set up, really. Think about it – here’s a film crew spending the night sitting in the dark in some four hundred year-old house in the English countryside. It’s no wonder they hear things. Lots of houses make noise, especially once they pass the century mark. And any person in an unfamiliar setting – especially one there for the premise of finding ghosts – is sure to interpret any sound as something out of the ordinary. Also, many of the “psychic” types the show uses – mediums and whatnot – lack credibility, even for people of their profession. This isn’t because they’re “quacks” per se, but because of the locations Most Haunted visits. It’s not hard to imagine that a medium could be compromised – consciously or not – by investigating a building he or she might have read about back in school. For instance, Most Haunted once visited the Chatham Dockyard, which at one time was the Royal Navy’s most important shipyard. It was hardly surprising then that the show’s main medium – colorful character named Derek Acorah – was “contacted” by the spirit of Peter Pett, who just happened to be the commissioner of the dockyards at the time of the Royal Navy’s most humiliating defeat ever. One might think that the show would hire an American or Canadian medium to take some of the possibility of cheating out of the loop. But alas, they never called me for that suggestion. Also, the show’s mediums sometimes “channel” spirits from several hundred years ago that speak modern English remarkably well; as you might know “English” from the 13th or 14th century was markedly different than it is today. Perhaps the earliest a current English speaker could go back in a time machine and still be understood by people of the day would be around 1550, yet Derek can “channel” people from 1400 that speak as plainly as a Londoner today.

Continue reading “Ghosts?”

So I’m hangin’ at the house one night, kickin’ it and flipping through the dial when I come across Penn and Teller’s new show: Bullshit!. As Penn so eloquently said, “if you call someone a liar or a quack, they can sue you. But if you call what they do ‘bullshit’, you’re legally OK.”

Anyway, as you might imagine from the name, the show is dedicated to debunking spurious claims, such as penis enlargement pills, global warming – or in the case of that night’s episode – UFOs. In my time I’ve known several people that genuinely believed that aliens walk among us, visiting regularly in their super-fast spaceships to find out all they can about us with the dreaded anal probe. Personally, I think the whole thing is a sickness. Just as some people get addicted to drugs or join cults, these people are tying to fill some void in their lives. They have a need to be “different”, yet part of a group at the same time. It becomes an almost religious belief. And interestingly enough, most everyone I know that believes in UFOs – the little green men with anal probes – also thinks Christianity is “silly”. Go figure.

Continue reading “What About The Aliens?”

Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past few years, you’ve probably heard of the war between Windows and Linux. But there’s more to this battle than just a group of Linux “freedom fighters” taking on a monolithic corporation. There is a philosophy at work here and I’m talking about something deeper than the “information wants to be free” mantra that the open-source crowd is fighting for. You see, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars and man-hours trying to make software that’s easy to use. Unix on the other hand has always been about software that does one thing and does it well. To that end, most people can sit down in front of a Windows computer and get the hang of it after a couple of hours – yet Windows has historically been an OS of dubious stability. Unix (and its offshoots, like Linux) has a reputation for stability but is also well-known for being somewhat less than user-friendly.

Unfortunately, this is par for the course with computers. Making a program easy for non-technical users means adding huge amounts of code, which introduces the possibility of instability. Making a program as rock-solid as possible means removing large amounts of code or features. Think about writing down a recipe – for someone that’s never cooked anything before, the recipe would need to be long, complex and detailed. Writing that same recipe down for a professional chef like Jamie Oliver or Emeril Lagasse would take far fewer steps. The sheer length and complexity of the first recipe means that you are more likely to make a mistake while writing it down; the smaller “professional” recipe – being shorter – will, by definition, have fewer instances for you (the “programmer”) to make an error in your “code”.

Continue reading “A Tale Of Two Apps”