Recently the inventor of those pop-up ads apologized for creating them.  I guess he finds them annoying too.  Here’s my take: Many websites offer all kinds of “free services,” so they’ve decided to make money by convincing corporate advertisers that those pop-up ads, especially those targeted to a consumer’s interest, really are worth it.  I guess that’s progress.  We’ve progressed from the carnival quack screaming about his wondrous elixirs; to TV’s screaming used car salesmen (they’re invariably men—they scream the best, Toyota’s ever-present spokeslady notwithstanding); and finally to the internet’s pop-up ads, which now are often videos with people—you guessed it—screaming about some wonderful product they’re selling or recommending (streaming video’s inventor should also apologize!).

I can’t believe any sane person enjoys this.  Millennials love to scream—go to Central Park in the summer to any GMA concert, or to any popular protest event that’s a la mode.  GenXers love to scream at their kids—they have kids now, and the GenXers pandering to their every need has backfired for these paraents.  Baby boomers no longer scream—they lost their voices (and hearing, for that matter) screaming at protests (against the Vietnam War instead of against Wall Street or Israel), rock concerts (lots of dBs there), and their kids (the boomers overly permissive parents too).  I suppose turn-about is fair play.  The internet is so democratic that it screams at all of us, although it can tailor the content of the screams to the audience using all that info about ourselves that we give the data brokers.

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Item: Borrowing v. buying.  I think I’ve talked about this before, but now it’s official: most ebooks you find listed on Smashwords, which already distributes to Sony, Apple, B&N, and so forth, are now available on Scribd.  Maybe in response to this, Amazon has created a new program, Kindle Unlimited, to complement its Prime lending service.  In other words, you can borrow my ebooks through Amazon’s Kindle Prime or Unlimited  (about half of them, the ones in Kindle Select) or Scribd (the other half of them).

Some FAQs: (1) While all my ebooks on Smashwords are covered by the Scribd service, these can’t be in KDP Select, i.e. Prime or Unlimited, because Amazon requires an exclusive for its special programs.  I’ve maintained my Smashwords listings as a service for readers with non-Kindle devices, but so far Smashwords hasn’t produced much movement on my ebooks.  Because of the Amazon exclusive restriction for KDP Select, that’s getting a bit old and it doubles the formatting cost for my ebooks.  I might revise my policy in the future.  (Sometimes I think it would be better to go the open software route and post .epub and .mobi files at my websites as free downloads, asking for a payment if you like the book, but that would require some babysitting that would take time away from my writing.  <sigh>)

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No, this isn’t an essay on parenting.  This post is mostly about competing technological standards that seem often to reduce to X v. Y.  Remember eight-tracks v. cassettes?  Betamax v. VHS?  Blue Ray v. regular DVDs?  UNIX v. DOS?  MacOS v. Windows?  Android v. iPhone?  All clashes between terrible twos, some still going on.  Consider Betamax v. VHS.  The first system was clearly better, but the U.S. basically forced the rest of the world to adopt the inferior VHS.  In the UNIX v. DOS battle, morphed now into MacOS v. Windows, for those not up-to-date, DOS and Windows always seemed inferior but simpler than UNIX, but maybe Apple + UNIX tilts the scale in the UNIX direction.  (I personally liked VAX VMS, but some of you might know what happened to that great OS.)  My take: UNIX always seemed a shrine to cutesy nerdiness, and DOS a monument to Microsoft stupidity.  That’s just me.  You might have a different take, if you bother to care at all.

I won’t touch on the other cases where I’m more an infrequent user and/or never cared enough to go into the pros and cons.  I will state my criterion for one member of a techy terrible two winning out over another: it has to be complex enough that any nerd (I once counted myself occasionally in that category) can get down in the weeds and invent clever stuff while the casual user (I’m spending more time in that category with each passing year) can stay in the trees, reaching for the sky, without having to get down into the weeds.  With that criterion, no member of any of the terrible twos I listed achieves a passing grade.

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John Stuart pointed it out.  Ignoring all the crude jokes and spiffy graphics, he talked about four ex-EPA leaders serving four different Republican presidents (all the way back to Reagan) stating before Congress that global warming is a problem we MUST solve.  Those weren’t the exact words, but that’s the idea.  It was amusing to hear this, of course, coming from Republican mouths that usually “speak with a forked tongue” (maybe all the good old white boys that stole land from Native Americans were Republican?).  More amusing perhaps was the global warming denial espoused by the GOP idiots, aka honorable congress people, who were questioning these ex-EPA officials.  What’s with this denial of global warming?

Some of it, of course, is due to this frightening current running through America, a prehistoric, Neanderthal anti-science current, if not an all-out hatred of science.  This covers the gamut of people distrusting science (didn’t it cause all the world’s problems?) to religious fanatics who find science far too secular.  Our nation now has millennials to old geezers covering that whole spectrum who are technical savages, addicted to their technology and enjoying the internet’s social media, iTunes, NetFlix, iPhones, and other technological marvels, but know less about where this all comes from than an aborigine in Australia (who, in fact, probably understands practical weather-related science more than these millenials—or those GOP idiots).  Our nation also has religious fanatics, again from all ages, who love that museum in Kentucky that shows modern human beings coexisting with dinosaurs (all those fossils are just consequences of Noah’s flood, don’t you know?).  And, above all, our nation has unscrupulous business people, mostly wealthy old farts, who deny global warming simply because they want to continue their polluting, toxic chemical leaching, and natural-gas-fracking ways.  The latter are those represented by those GOP congressional lackeys, of course.

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Maybe their bad rep is due to the fact that they’re second-rate citizens in the bee hive, but drones are under attack recently.  The more vociferous attacks come from people who decry how deadly they are in attacking terrorists.  They kill all those innocent people, don’t you know?  I’ve rebutted that in these posts, but I can’t refrain from summarizing: (1) Drones and Special Ops are our most effective weapons against terrorists, a battle that must be fought unless you want to return to the Dark Ages of a radical Islamic Caliphate; and (2) drones and Special Ops avoid thousands of battlefield casualties, among our own troops as well as innocent civilians.  Here stats don’t lie.

A recent editorial in the NY Times (5/21) titled “The Limits of Armchair Warfare” basically ignores both points in a Ramboesque plea about returning to a conventional boots-on-the-ground mentality championed by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team of brilliant strategists.  Our troops fought valiantly, but Iraq is still an ethnic battleground.  Wrong in so many things, Biden was right with this one: Iraq should have been divided into at least three countries.  That worked in Yugoslavia and will end up being the right solution in Iraq.  McCain, that vengeful champion of the surge, also favors boots on the ground.  And Mr. Obama’s mistakes in Afghanistan can be summarized succinctly: he listened to that old Pentagon doggerel, although he knew from experimental evidence that drones and Special Ops are the solution.

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Believe it or not, this is a book review (see later), but first a bit of history.  I’m not into fancy GUIs and sliding icons.  The work in my old day job required mostly UNIX workstations.  There was a GUI, but it was primitive compared to today’s Apple and smart phone GUIs.  No sliding icons or touch screens, but there was enough firepower to handle terabytes of data.  That’s science, or, at least, the dirty kind where you’re given lots of data and you’re supposed to make sense of it.

I hate to admit it, but I don’t have a smart phone.  My fingers are too big and I’m too much of a touch typist to use the primitive keyboards they contain (I suppose touch typing will disappear as people’s thumbs grow longer in future generations).  In fact, touch typing and speed reading were the most useful skills I learned in high school, discounting the ability to run fast when a gang member whipped out his switchblade, or resisting the temptation of getting on the back of that Harley when the driver was stoned (I couldn’t afford my own–Harley, that is).

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[Note from Steve: This is the third post in preparation for Tom Pope’s and my Socratic dialogue on writing thrillers.  It’s more about reading, though, not writing.  The title is a bow to Pete Seeger.]

I read and review in many genres, including non-fiction.  Every author should be an avid reviewer.  And, if you want to give something back to the community of readers and writers, honest reviews help those readers who are looking for new and interesting books to read.  Of course, they help writers too, but I’m pleased when I receive that note from Amazon saying that one of my reviews helped a reader make a reading decision.  That’s my reward.  (I never charge for reviews because money can’t beat that kind of reward.)

Many writers don’t share my views on reviews!  Some will say that they’re busy writing and that they can’t take time to write a review.  Some will say that they have a policy of not reviewing other authors because they’re afraid of being accused of practicing review exchanges, aka a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours review policy.  Whatever the reasons, I respectfully disagree with them.  Authors should write reviews.  They can do them on review websites or places like Amazon and Smashwords and avoid the review exchange criticism (many accept clever pseudonyms for their reviewers).  They can be technical without being erudite.  And their reviews will be useful to the reading public.  Above all, writing reviews shows that the author is also a reader and not just a person interested in selling books.

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Nuclear technology is with us to stay…well, as long as we don’t destroy the Earth!  On one hand, we have the frightening scenario of a nuclear exchange; on the other, we have the possibility that nuclear power plants can contribute as alternate energy sources.  Somewhere between these polar opposites, one finds nuclear medicine.  I’m a person that believes that nuclear technology is not inherently good or bad, but human scientists and engineers who handle it need to ensure its safety.  More than most technologies, human error can have devastating consequences.

The reactor problem in Japan is one egregious example.  That region might require millennia to recover.  The same can be said for Chernobyl.  Estimates are all over the board.  Both cases are examples of human complacency, stupidity, and terrible miscalculations.  For Japan’s case, one can ask: Who would build a reactor close to a fault line?  We do!  California is one of the most active earthquake areas in the world, yet there are reactors on the California coast.  The one on the Hudson in New York State only seemed to have the problem that the river provides an easy access.  I rode by it on a tour to West Point—I didn’t see any special security arrangements.  Moreover, an earthquake did occur not long ago.  I was writing when the room started swaying and felt like I had returned to my youth in Santa Barbara.

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[TANSTAAFL: Do you read this blog?  I’m not asking if you like the posts, just whether you read them!  If so, don’t be passive.  React.  Write a comment—chew me out if you like (no foul language, please).  You can even receive a free ebook—see the bottom of the “Free Stuff and Contests” webpage; or write an honest review of one of my ebooks in exchange for the ebook.  In general, buy, read, and review some of my books.  Your participation motivates me and helps defray the costs of this website and my ebook releases.  Be active.  Help indie authors provide you with inexpensive entertainment.  It’s a two-way street, folks!]

The evil one who shall not be named decided Uncle Jang (Jang Song-thaek), his mentor, was a threat to solidifying his power in this oppressive, dark, and paranoid country.  Exit Uncle Jang.  Hanging…poison…ten thousand lashes…does it matter?  While some people in Washington might think this is just a distraction from their negotiations with the Persian nutniks in Iran, I call on them to remember that, in contrast to Allah’s warriors, he who shall not be named already has nukes and missiles to carry them—if not to the U.S., at least to South Korea, Japan, Vladivostok, and Beijing.  Any of his neighbors that pisses him off and sends him into a spoiled brat’s tantrum better be prepared for a nuclear attack.  And, as the case of Uncle Jang shows, it doesn’t take much to piss him off.  Talk about dysfunctional families.

Like Grandpa and Daddy, the North Korean leader doesn’t give a rat’s ass that his people are starving, that North Korean children are turning into low IQ zombies from malnutrition, that his prisons are just thinly disguised torture camps, and that his economy is the laughing stock of the Asian world.  He’s a sociopathic psychopath so much into establishing his own cult of personality—he wants to become God—that psychiatrists wouldn’t know what to do with him, except put him in a strait jacket and lock him up in a padded cell.  He makes Kaddafi, Pinochet, Amin, and even Hitler look like angels.  Given the state of his economy, he probably smoke-cured Uncle Jang and is slicing ham from the carcass for his breakfast.

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[TANSTAAFL: Do you read this blog?  I’m not asking if you like the posts, just whether you read them!  If so, don’t be passive.  React.  Write a comment—chew me out if you like (no foul language, please).  You can even receive a free ebook—see the bottom of the “Free Stuff and Contests” webpage; or write an honest review of one of my ebooks in exchange for the ebook.  In general, buy, read, and review some of my books.  Your participation motivates me and helps defray the costs of this website and my ebook releases.  Be active.  Help indie authors provide you with inexpensive entertainment.  It’s a two-way street, folks!]

My mind surprises me sometimes.  I’m not just talking about my writing.  I expect that most people think writers are weird, maybe even schizophrenic with all those characters bouncing around in our heads.  (Followers of my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” will remember how the main character in Sing a Samba Galactica had three ET mentalities bouncing around in his—that was easy for me to write!)  No, I think it’s my training as a physicist—I observe the world around me and make strange connections between things.

This happened watching bits of the dog show that occurred last week.  (Never remember the name, but it happens around Thanksgiving every year.)  I started thinking about GMOs.  That Great Dane and Chihuahua are GMOs (for those who haven’t yet mastered the acronyms of the 21^st century, GMO means “genetically modified organism.”)  Humans have been making GMOs at least for 50,000 years—nothing new there.  I’ve mentioned this to several people, including two dear nieces, and the people I speak to usually respond, “Yes, but….”

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