Sharon and I recently moved to a new house, which resulted in a switch from Speakeasy DSL to RCN cable. As a result, we now have a TV signal coming into our house. Strangely, I don’t think I have ever lived in a building with a cable connection, except for a 6 month stint in graduate school when I was busy enough building robots that I don’t remember what room my roommates had the TV in.
But now, I get to explore television as a visitor from the mid-80s. Here’s what I remember from 1984 or so:

• The Jeffersons: a show about a family with the last name “Jefferson”
• Rhoda: a show about a woman named “Rhoda”
• The Dukes of Hazzard: a show about a family with the last name “Duke” who live in Hazzard County. To liven things up, these Dukes engage in hazardous motoring in an orange car. This makes the name of the show a pun.

Now, show titles are abbreviated: CSI, ER, 24, NCIS. I don’t know what these shows are about, but from the ads I’ve seen, they’re about law enforcement and medical emergencies. We now have multiple editions, like CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. There appear to be a lot of shows about law enforcement, but that may be just an illusion induced by shows with opaque titles like Naruto (from a tv.com summary, I gather: a demon fox, an evil spirit trapped inside a baby, and “shinobi,” which is a word I don’t know). With the exception of the evil spirit trapped in the baby, which is creepy, these are trends that I expect to see in America, the land of the fearful, where Sarah Palin gets airtime. I’m happy to report that despite 150 channels, I don’t feel like I’ve missed much in the last 20 years.

However, I did discover something new that I didn’t expect: the glorification of the mistreatment of kids. One instantiation is “The Principal’s Office.” Pitched as a reality TV show on TruTV (I guess “tru” is the reality TV version of “true”), the episode I saw followed a high school principal around the halls as he caught kids beating on each other. The kids were taken to the principal’s office, where he yelled at them, and the kids squirmed in a mix of resentment and embarrassment. It’s obvious that the presence of a camera escalates the conflict between the kids and the principal, so we can safely assume that the goal of the show isn’t to document a good principal at work. All that leaves is a man yelling at kids. The “man yelling” part doesn’t bother me in the least, but I don’t like the “at kids” part. “Hey, troubled kid, if you let us humiliate you on national TV, we’ll give you $200.” (Review from the Boston Globe with some more details.)

The second show is one on FuelTV called Camp Woodward. It’s a thinly disguised advertisement for a sports camp in Pennsylvania that focuses on skateboarding, BMX and rollerblading. In the episode fraction I saw, one of the counselors explains that when he’s at home in Florida skateboarding by himself, he doesn’t throw tantrums, but when he’s trying to teach kids to skate, if he can’t land tricks, he gets angry and swears. Another section of the show details the tribulations of a 13-year-old who thinks his $100 for food has been stolen by rollerbladers. After being berated by his mom via cell phone, he finds his money in his shorts pocket. He repeats the lesson that he has learned that you should deposit all your money at the camp canteen as soon as you can, lest someone steal it.

Both of these shows mystify me– I don’t understand why suffering kids are now fair game for entertainment.

Morbid prediction: a reality show with the following theme will be produced in the next decade: life of a child soldier or life in a refugee camp. I think that’s the bottom, and I don’t see what else is going to stop us.

Philip Taubman had an interesting article on the front page of the New York Times yesterday: “Top Engineers Shun Military; Concern Grows.” The article profiles an engineer by the name of Paul Kaminski who worked for the Air Force designing planes for several decades. Kaminski now heads a task force that is attempting to deal with the difficulties the military is having recruiting engineers. According to Taubman, the number of engineers working for the Air Force has decreased 35-40% over the last 14 years. The reasons cited for the decline include:

• better pay in high tech firms
• more cachet at Google or the like
• more engineering students from foreign countries who can’t get security clearances
• lack of exposure to new technology in the military

Strangely, Taubman omits what I suspect, perhaps foolishly, is the central cause– top engineers are driven to solve problems. As I consider the central problems facing the world today, I do not notice an alarming lack of weapon systems. The US military is already extremely good at killing. If you’re really a top engineer, you can choose where to work. I can’t imagine why someone would be drawn to weaponry when there are so many obvious unsolved problems elsewhere.

As an interesting footnote, the article gave no hints of what Mr. Kaminski’s task force will do about the lack of people willing to carry out the jobs they have in exchange for the salaries they offer. One solution might be to stop trying to build so many damn weapon systems.

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

–Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Chris Lott has a great post responding to my last post about this gatekeeper business.

As I commented on his blog:

Well said, Chris Lott.org! I know you used my blog post as a example of disagreement, but you have stated my central point quite well: “The issue here is that many in this debate use the term ‘Gatekeeper’ when what they mean is ‘powerful connector’ or something of that ilk.”

I’m not disputing the shape of the long tail or the influence of Doc’s link love– the question is just who, in your metaphor, is driving the Ferrari.

I claim that the drivers are Dave Sifry of Technorati and Page and Brin of Google, not Doc Searls. I also agree with your description of the desire behind the argument, the desire to have Searls (for example) “recognize the influential power they have and the amount to which they tend to link inside their circle and that other worthy people don’t get that link love.”

I was just drinking some cocoa at the old Darwin’s with the translation-obsessed SJ Klein, and we talked over the gatekeeper business. I suggested an idea I had recently:a Wordpress plugin that presents your blogroll in reverse order of Technorati rank. SJ suggested an even more amusing possibility– sorting by reverse Technorati authority.

When this gets written, you’ll see the news here first (unless someone else writes it).

I am hesitant to go head-to-head with an A-lister like Goelzer, but while I appreciate his recent post complimenting my blog, it had a few inaccuracies.

I wouldn’t say that Peter Quinn, the CIO (not CTO) of Massachusetts was forced to resign. He was harassed so much that he felt compelled to resign, but the decision was made to preserve the emotional well-being of him and his family. “Compelled” seems to me like a better description than “forced.”

Also, I don’t think Quinn’s support for ODF is “surprisingly controversial.” Rather, I would say that it is less controversial than I expected. We live in a world where Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” certification is not lampooning Microsoft, but actually promotes music that works with their players. Myself, I don’t think marking music as playable should be a distinguishing feature.

In other realms, the value of standards is well understood. In mechanical engineering, for example, advertising a bolt as “Actually threads into our nuts” would be seen as ridiculous– a 1/4-20 bolt should fit into any 1/4-20 nut, regardless of who manufactures it.

An elementary school that advertised that it taught a special made-up language that allows its students to communicate with the rest of its graduates (”Talk to all six of your classmates in real-time!”) would find itself short on students.

I’m baffled as to why someone like Microsoft’s Alan Yates doesn’t get laughed off the stage when he suggests that a choice of standards is a good idea, but he doesn’t. The view that Microsoft is a benevolent overlord that protects our computers from nasty h4×0rs and helps us manage our private information safely is repeatably predictable, so the ODF controversy is not surprising.