I Love My Phone, I Hate the Phone Industry

In college I built my own computer. It was a great experience, and I still use that computer 7 years later when writing this. Saying you built your own computer tends to earn a lot of tech savvy points with the average person, but it's really not that hard. A lot's changed since the days of Wozniak's home brew club & the Altair, and these days you can by the parts and put them together without much more difficulty than assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. If you need an upgrade later, you can open your case up & snap a piece in.

This ease is based in no small part on the standardization of the ATX & PCI standards, a set of guidelines for how hardware should be made in such a way as to be compatible with other devices. One thing that's impressed and worried me lately is the dearth of such a standard for cell phones, and the perhaps anemic attempts to create one. It's an unfortunate marker of the way technology has gone from a scientific industry with the goal of empowering individuals and humankind to a consumer industry chasing fashion and trendiness, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

People are talking a lot these days about a little thing a little, 3.5 millimeter thing. Apple decided not to include a headphone jack on their phones, Google is following suit with their latest Pixel, and the creator of the android OS also axed the jack with the Essential Phone. The last one really bugs me, because empowering the tech consumer with more choices is one of the reasons why essential was founded, and yet the most ubiquitous, easy to use, and powerful interface options was deemed unnecessary.

OK, when I started this blog I wanted to stick to bigger issues, things that effect society or even humanity. Why am I letting myself get distracted by the minutia of what's popular in cell phones these days? Well, it's because this is a symptom of a larger, much more insidious cultural disease. Wow, OK that could be overselling it, but as I've mentioned before the choice to go with something stylish or convenient instead of something which creates an empowering infrastructure is perilous.

The Essential phone has some special connectors for accessories. Motorola is making phones with attachable accessories as well, but they go the extra mile of providing a developer kit for independent companies that want to produce these. The highest level of this was the now tragically defunct Project Ara which planned to produce an entirely modular smartphone. It also had the distinction of being the only project I know of that would have released a standard that could be used by any company to produce appropriate components. If the essential accessories or moto mods take off, any other manufacturer that wants to let customers use these will have to license the specifications from essential or Motorola, and that means they probably won't proliferate anytime soon.

And thus we, the consumer, have to be content taking whatever the phone companies decide to give us. Oh, we can shop around a little for more memory here or a better camera there, but the reality is we can't really choose what we want in our phones, or how they work. A handful of tech giants makes those decisions for us. And that's not only true for phones. that's true for social networks, gaming platforms, and more. What's the more? Well, perhaps news organizations, political parties, and advertisements. This is where the insidious cultural disease part comes up. Most people have their phone on them for most of the day in 2017. We can't act like decisions about how that works being made by some team of marketers and engineers rather than individuals is OK and won't siphon away independence and freedom from the individual.

Pluto Should Never Have Been a Planet

I just finished reading Mike Brown's How I Killed Pluto and Why it had it Coming, and it was a fantastic read.  It got me thinking of so many things; scientific progress and history, how the public perceives scientific ideas, becoming entrenched in a way of thinking, distress over change, and how so much of education seems to be storing data in memory rather than learning algorithms (and man for some reason I've really been connecting with my inner computer scientist lately) are just some of the highlights.  It's amazing how much depth there is to the trivial or technical classification details of a rock out there past Neptune.  There's one more aspect of the book that I loved, Mike Brown's humanity in his love for his wife, his daughter, and the sky, but I think I'll write about that in detail later.

I remember when Pluto was reclassified.  Many jokingly consoled forlorn Pluto, kicked out of the planet club by the big boys.  After reading the book I find it odd, why did no one talk about Eris (the Kuiper belt object actually larger than Pluto which theoretically could have been the tenth planet)?  Why did no one bring up Charon, Pluto's moon which is almost as large as Pluto?  Why did no one discuss what exactly it meant to be a planet, and how exciting it was that we were learning more about our solar system in finding so much out there in a whole new asteroid belt out beyond the gas giants, the aforementioned Kuiper belt?

I've groused before on this blog about the dreadful way mathematics is taught, perhaps it's time to get some of that ire up for science as well.  One thing the book made clear is that we all learned that the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and (as we learned at least) Pluto.  Did any of us ever learn what a planet is?  I think the 'Pluto controversy' pretty clearly indicates no, we didn't.  If we had we would have always found Pluto's planethood a little odd.

Pluto's moon doesn't orbit around it, they orbit around each other.  Pluto's orbit is eccentric from the other planets.  Pluto is smaller than many planet's moons, including Earth's.  To kids and creatives that might make Pluto mysterious and fascinating (it did to Mike Brown as a child), but to scientists and logical thinkers it seems misplaced in the solar system.  And indeed it was.

But no one really seemed to feel that way.  We all sort of felt bad for Pluto, and some people might have even been upset.  I think there's two major components why.  The first is, as I alluded to, the way we learn science.  The next is our unwillingness to accept change.

Thinking about the Pluto controversy I am brought to worry that we are often taught 'the way things are'.  Mike Brown talks about trying to get students out of the mindset of, "Give me the answers I need to know for the test".  The unfortunate implication is that something gets them into this mindset in the first place.  Standardized testing is a convenient and popular target for modern problems in education, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention that of necessity it requires students to memorize and later regurgitate facts, and testing any deeper thought processes is at the very least much more difficult.

I read a NYT article that talked about why teaching the difference between fact and opinion like we currently do in schools is morally perilous, as well as simply fundamentally misguided.  It points out interesting ideas, like how teaching children that facts are provable and true causes them to equate truth with provability, even though they're very different things.  I think a focus on 'facts' in science class also carries a dogmatic implication for young students.  Science is always true because we collected evidence for our ideas.  Here's where the distress comes up; Pluto no longer being a planet means facts can change as our understanding does.

And that opens up a whole new can of worms in our minds.  It forces introspection and meta-cognition, in which sadly most of us are loath to participate.  It creates a crisis of certainty, because after all if Pluto being a planet isn't true what other tidbits we learned might not be true?  Doubt is, unfortunately, scary to many.  We're unwilling to change our thinking, to update our knowledge, to print retractions or errata for our memories.  This is why teachings of humility are so important.  They allow us to maintain our sense of self and identity even when we're forced to change our thinking, context, or experience.

A great idea that came together for me when I read The Island of Knowledge is that science must necessarily be the least sure of itself of all human endeavors or reservoirs of understanding.  It must be forever willing to except new evidence or observation which proves previous ideas wrong, and moreover perhaps must forever be seeking these out.  No less than the well known and liked Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently said in a podcast I listened to that the greatest problem is always dogmatism, because it ends a conversation and makes learning from others difficult or impossible.  Let's take this to heart, accept that Pluto should never have been a planet, and rejoice in the fascinating newly unfolding mysteries of that Kuiper belt.

Trick or Treating: The Last Bastion of Neighborhood Community?

People don't know their neighbors any more.  Our interactions are more and more impersonal, mediated by computers.  We have fewer and fewer real communities to engage in.  They're being replaced by forums and social networking groups.  These things aren't as bad as people often make them out to be, but they do present problems.  We're cut off from genuine interaction.  It's being replaced with a type of self promotion, making it harder and harder to 'be ourselves' and be accepted for who we are.  We're exposed to less diversity because we don't spend time with those whose ideas and opinions differ from us.  Churches, neighborhood barbecues, and kids playing in the street used to serve these purposes.  Most people don't go to church these days, I can't remember the last time I heard about a neighborhood barbecue, and we setup play dates for the kids nowadays.  There's one area that still hearkens back to the days of the local community, though.

Trick or treating is a wonderful Halloween tradition that builds a neighborhood.  Once a year parents and kids walk around, say hi to their neighbors, show off costumes, and share sweets.  What a classic community building activity that is!  Families can talk afterward about how cute the kid down the street looked dressed up like a princess, or which families in town gave out the best candy.  Finally, a time when a family can discuss their neighbors and how much they enjoyed spending some time with them!

This is an important lesson for our children, too.  364 days a year we tell our kids about 'stranger danger,' but on Halloween they're finally encouraged to meet new people.  They're rewarded with candy, given to them in return for wearing an amusing costume and displaying it for thirty seconds at the neighbor's door.  This activity will teach them that they don't have to be suspicious and scared of every person they share the world with.  They might even learn that many people are kind human beings.

Even this noble tradition is dying out, though.  We're learning how to make imitation trick or treating that, like imitation food, is a pale shadow of the real thing that carries little of the original value.  Church groups do 'trunk or treats' to make sure families can collect candy with kids while remaining insulated from their neighbors and any community they don't approve of.  Trick or treating routes are less and less up and down the street you live on and instead are becoming visits to homes of family friends.  Some people in a sickening twisting of the tradition in pursuit of efficiency and increasing returns worthy of a heartless corporation go up into the wealthy areas of town, spurning their own neighbors, because 'they give better candy.'

Let's not become that people.  Let's continue to love our neighbors and even learn to enjoy their company.  Let's teach our kids to build a community and meet those they share the world with.  Let's go trick or treating around our neighborhood this Halloween.