Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts

Monday, September 17, 2018

To Blog, or Not to Blog, that Is the Question

For some time now I’ve been dealing with my evolving view of the Web and in particular its benefit to mankind. What began as a wonderful way to freely put out and find information, it looked like one of humanity’s greatest inventions, perhaps even something that would bring the world together.

Alas, it has turned out to do the opposite more often than not.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Something in the Air?

Lately I’ve been seeing people flip out on others online to a degree worse than usual. Being a target of it out of the blue a couple of times myself, it has been an exercise in Christian forgiveness followed by deliberate avoidance since the attackers persist no matter how much you explain yourself patiently. This is nothing new on the Net for I remember the flame wars on Usenet decades ago.


Tuesday, January 13, 2015

The World Is Burning–So What?

The first post of the year 2015 is something I actually started awhile back and forgot about. Lately I’ve been pondering how people deal with life’s challenges along with how much behavior is influenced by external pressures. Stress fractures in society are increasing in size and quantity while people seem less equipped to deal with them. That’s the backdrop for what I began writing last year and updated for this post…

Russia slowly undermines and takes away chunks of Ukraine, China bullies its neighbors and lays claim to vast swathes of sea, Islamists are wreaking havoc in France and Africa, illegal alien minors including gang members are flooding over the border with Mexico, Iraq lost territory to terrorists and Iran sent troops in, and the United States has the most corrupt and incompetent leadership in its history. Yep, it is business as usual -- if you are a student of history. Unfortunately, most people are not.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Failure Is an Option…

…At least it is where engineering is involved. NASA has successfully tested the privately built Orion capsule with parachutes rigged to fail. While we live in a risk and failure averse society (no lose soccer matches anyone?), science requires failures to advance knowledge and nowhere is that more true than in mechanical engineering. Failures expose weaknesses so that they can be addressed so that tragedies can be avoided as much as possible.

There is a life lesson in that, I think. My failures have taught me more than my successes, so I appreciate the necessity of screwing up from time to time. Maybe not immediately, but once cooled off things can be assessed objectively.

Oddly enough, the anime Space Brothers is going through an arc involving parachute failures right now, so this article leapt out at me even more than the usual aerospace report. Lives will depend on getting this right, so it is good to see the test went very well.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

How to Survive Black Friday

Massive swarms of shoppers bustling about like yellow jackets on the prowl for meat or sugar is not my idea of fun to deal with. It has been many years since I braved a store during the Black Friday weekend and so far I’ve succeeded at avoiding the perilous locations. For those of us (mainly of the male persuasion) who consider shopping boring and/or painful, the Web has given us a way to safely survive Black Friday.

Online sales.

In my case, there usually isn’t anything I’m even interested in the big store sales, but there is gold to be found at online vendors. Yesterday, I snared Iron Man 2 on Blu-ray at Amazon.com for under $4 along with a couple more heavily discounted BDs. My little Christmas present to myself, now that I have taken care of required gifts to others.

Not once while browsing did I get crowded away from a display, though a cat did jump on me. Spending long minutes if not hours standing in line to get in and also to check out? Did not happen. Only a few mouse clicks were required, which is not terribly taxing. It was bitterly windy and I did not feel it at all.

I have come to the conclusion this is the manly way to shop. You can be as under dressed as you want while lounging around with food and drink, yet still score a decent deal. This isn’t just surviving Black Friday – it is surviving it in total comfort without any stress.

You should try it.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Headlines: Shootings and Armstrong Is a Doper

Early reports of three to four dead near the Empire State Building in New York City with the gunman dead. Like I have written before, I expect to see a lot more of this as society slowly comes apart at the seams. Too many economic and social pressures are causing marginally stable people to crack.

Meanwhile, Anders Breivik gets twenty one years for killing seventy seven people in Norway. He is eligible for early release in a mere decade. Way to protect your public, Norway!

The other big story is that Lance Armstrong quit defending himself and has been found guilty of doping. All seven Tour de France titles have been stripped from him. It puzzles me that people did not believe he was doping when that sport is completely dishonest. Frankly, all sports are populated by cheaters and dopers now and are not worth following. Certainly, the athletes should not be made heroes at this point, but the masses are desperate for secular gods.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Why Are Zombies Popular?

It is the day to set up the county fair booths, so what am I thinking about after getting up this morning? Is it politics or the logistics of the materials needed for the booth? No, my brain is stuck on the inexplicable popularity of the walking undead, AKA zombies. No, not the drug induced Haitian slaves or the poor souls who followed the Grateful Dead around. I'm talking about cannibalistic, brain chomping, slow shuffling, spreading like lice movie zombies.

It all seems to have started with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a low budget B &W movie that tossed in at least a little serious social commentary on race, but mainly was about grossing people out. Ever since then, low budget horror movies about zombies have been churned out with great regularity. True, some of them are direct to video or the SciFi Channel, but they appear to be perennial favorites of horror fans. It has spread to comic books, with an entire miniseries called Marvel Zombies being popular, with heroes like Captain America, Wolverine, and the Fantastic Four becoming villains eating the population.

But why? I can understand the popularity of vampires, because that essentially has been about sex ever since Bram Stoker wrote Dracula and we all know that sex and sensuality sells. Women in particular are drawn to trashy vampire novels and there are even people who live a vampiric lifestyle. Werewolves are popular with the guys and I suspect that has to do with the whole hunting reversal theme in those movies. But what is the appeal of shambling masses of rotting flesh wandering around eating people?

I don't get it. My reaction if this happened in reality would be something like this, "Oh, look. A group of zombies is staggering down the sidewalk. I'd better walk a little faster, maybe cross the street. I bet they'll make good target practice after lunch. I wonder if I left the stove on."

The only reason I can figure for zombies being scary is we have become such a lazy society that a slow moving and unintelligent predator is a threat. Is this horror born of loafing around too much combined with our ever shortening attention spans? "DUDE! I'd have to get off this couch and walk to escape this flesh eating monster. That is so unfair! Oh look, Britney's taking her clothes off in her new video... *CHOMP!*"

Forget nukes, all our enemies need is to invent zombies like in the movies.