My 2019 Subaru Crosstrek is in the shop, my request that the tech attempt to learn why my milage dropped from 31-32 to 27-28 following a clearly bad tank of gas following a climbing trip to Joshua Tree, and five tanks of gas later, no recovery. My guess is a clogged fuel filter or char’d spark plugs. While I await a verdict the dealer provided me with a loaner, a recent model Subaru Ascent. This was Subaru’s questionable answer to a larger passenger vehicle. On the drive from Biosphere 2 back to my home, which I do most every weekend, I found myself frustrated beyond exhaustion by the constant barrage of lights and sounds, warnings for my coming too close to the paint on the sides of the lane, warnings for cars I am passing and cars passing me, and an on-dash animation that shows me how far I am from the car in front of me. I counted 65 illuminated buttons and dials accessible from the driver side of the vehicle. This is more than a Cesna 172 aircraft and likely comparable to a fighter jet in the US Air Force.

The goal of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is valid. They want to reduce accidents year after year, and eventually bring fatalities to zero. But what doesn’t makes sense is the means by which each automobile manufacturer is allowed to implement new features with almost no consideration for human factors and the human-machine interface.

Given my BSc in Industrial Design I am keenly aware of humans factors that work, and human factors that fail miserably. The transition to LCD screens is in and of itself a tremendous contradiction in safety as the lack of tactile feedback to the driver’s fingers means that every single time the interface is addressed it demands that the driver take his or her eyes from the road to the screen. Where with physical buttons and knobs the driver quickly, usually within just a few attempts develops muscle memory for the function, position, and resistance required to actuate the button.

What’s worse, automobile manufacturers are appealing to new buyers with the same marketing strategy as those employed to sell laptops, tablets, and cell phones — bigger screen is better. But to fit 65 physical buttons into a single dash, not including the function of the LCD screen does not make sense. What’s more, the animation showing my distance from the car in front of me is drawing my attention away from the road which is the only place my eyes should be observing. I realized I was putting myself in danger for the attempts to configure the dashboard display settings to reduce the stimuli, and pulled over to work through the myriad options.

We are not suppose to look at our cell phones while driving. That makes sense. But the automobile manufacturers distract us with far more engaging graphics and information in the name of safety, then automate driving to compensate for our lack of attention behind the wheel. While these safety features are likely reducing some types of automobile accidents and automobile/pedestrian strikes, How many automobile accidents are now the result of in-dash infotainment systems?

Finally, how much of the driving experience is diminished by the constant chatter of the computer system? Do we become better drivers, or just tune-out the noise while feeling safer at the wheel? Are we in fact encouraged to be engaged in non-driving functions such as conversations, food, calls, even watching movies while driving?

According to the NHTSA 2020 report, “The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its 2020 annual traffic crash data, showing that 38,824 lives were lost in traffic crashes nationwide. That number marks the highest number of fatalities since 2007. The estimated number of police-reported crashes in 2020 decreased by 22% as compared to 2019, and the estimated number of people injured declined by 17%. While the number of crashes and traffic injuries declined overall, fatal crashes increased by 6.8%. The fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled increased to 1.34, a 21% increase from 2019 and the highest since 2007.

“The 2020 crash data report also examines fatality data in key categories, as compared to 2019:
– Injured people, including occupants and nonoccupants, down significantly in most categories
– Estimated number of police-reported crashes in 2020 decreased by 22%
– Fatalities in speeding-related crashes up 17%
– Fatalities in alcohol-impaired driving crashes up 14%
– Unrestrained passenger vehicle occupant fatalities up 14%
– Motorcyclist fatalities up 11% (highest number since first data collection in 1975)
– Bicyclist fatalities up 9.2% (highest number since 1987)
– Passenger car occupant fatalities up 9%
– Fatalities in urban areas up 8.5%
– Pedestrian fatalities up 3.9% (highest number since 1989)
– Fatalities in hit-and-run crashes up 26%
– Fatalities in large-truck crashes down 1.3%

In 45% of fatal crashes, the drivers of passenger vehicles were engaged in at least one of the following risky behaviors: speeding, alcohol impairment, or not wearing a seat belt.” It seems that in the end, it remains human recklessness and speed. As I learned more than two decades ago from a mechanic in Fort Collins who retrofit passenger cars for the race track, “If Detroit installed a roll cage in every car, we’d walk away from nearly every crash, unscathed.”

Would the finch donning a strap-on propeller evade the claws of the hawk or eagle?

Would the tuna sporting a motorized fin and AI controlled rudder escape the stomach of a dolphin?

Would the earthworm find more fertile soil if it was able to employ ground-penetrating radar?

Does dominion over the natural world grant us a sense of superiority and control?

The hawk would be forced to shift its diet to those prey yet within its reach, as all species have had to do over time. But if the trend spread quickly, and all birds under the watchful eye of hawks, eagles, and owls were to escape most encounters relatively unharmed due to hi-tech gear acquired on low interest rate loans, the ecosystem would collapse for the uncontrolled proliferation of those that consume insects and seeds and the inevitable demise of their food source too. Only the vulture would benefit, in the short term, until a new balance was found.

Coyotes with Kevlar body armor would stand fearless against the rancher. Mountain lions with pepper spray and tasers would no longer take refuge in trees against hunting dogs. And the lowly rat would dominate the human house if its teeth were reinforced with diamond-carbide coatings, enabling concrete block, drywall panels, and wire mesh a mere time consuming annoyance.

Yet, with each improvement, with each upgrade, the rapid altering of a balance defined by millions of years declares no winner, only those who lose. When will we be OK with what we have, finding joy in the speed of our own two legs, the strength of our own two arms, and focus instead on the development of our heart and minds?

Letter to the editor, New Scientist:

Concerning “Exclusive: Grave doubts over LIGO’s discovery of gravitational waves” —October, 31 2018

When I was CEO of the software development company that produced Yellow Dog Linux, I was frequently interviewed about our product launches and related support of Apple, IBM, and Sony computers. In one particular interview the “reporter” got it all wrong, so bad that for the first (and last) time I was forced to take action to have the article retracted, as colleagues, even close friends reached out to ask if it was true.

It occurred to me then that if people who knew me, who trusted me were swayed by the power of the printed word to question my integrity, when in fact nothing of the sort occurred, how many other articles had I read by this small-town publication, and many more by large format journals, were equally incorrect or intentionally slanted to sell copy?

In reading the New Scientist article Did we really find gravitational waves? I was blown away by the disinformation contained therein, intentional misuse of key facts and figures, a total lack of understanding of the means by which the LSC isolates signal from noise, and the blatant disregard for the 70+ EM follow-up confirmations (not just one). The article reads as a children’s storybook, a version taken to such simple explanation that it becomes wrong.

Now, as I did many years ago, I question the integrity of the publication as a whole. While I have for a half decade enjoyed NS’ snippets of information in a diversity of subjects, fully aware of the sensational cover stories, I am baffled by how this article could be called an “investigation”. An investigation requires the reporter to become something of an expert in the subject during his or her information gathering campaign. This was clearly not your agenda. Rather, you moved to publish cover story to capture the attention of the reader without concern for the integrity of the information contained therein.

It is one thing to give a scientist a platform on which to question a colleague’s work. That is the very reason we publish. But to call it an “investigative report” and feature it on the cover when the article doesn’t even begin to describe the methods by which the LSC conducts its research is a completely different ball game.

I am not an astrophysicist, yet I could give a half hour lecture on the points of this article that were intentionally slanted or simply wrong. I was proud to have my latest film LIGO Detection, launched by New Scientist but will not be renewing my subscription in 2019. Not because as a member of the LSC I am offended. No. Because I know enough to recognize the fallacy in what was published, begging the question how many more of your publications portray research in an equally incorrect manner. You have given in to the need to capture attention through conflict instead of good science in a world that needs more critical thinking, not polarized controversy.

Cheers,
Kai Staats, MSc

Read a more complete story at Ars Technica

I remember when I first engaged the Commodore 64’s voice synthesis software, a function built-in to what was truly an impressive BASIC foundation. With some clever, intentional misspellings and exaggerated grammatical misgivings, the voice synthesizer could be made to sounds fairly reasonable, and most certainly understandable. This was in the early 1980s.

While this was by no means anything resembling artificial intelligence and not even a precursor to machine learning, it was simply fun. I had disassembled a land line (the only kind of line at that time) hand receiver and wired the speaker jack of my C-64 directly into the phone. In this manner, I could both dial phone numbers (and generate pink noise, Tassie locking frequencies, and otherwise reserved operator functions) and then order take-out pizza by means of my keyboard. Assuming the person receiving the call was willing to send a pizza based upon an order by a voice that was something of a blend of the Terminator and Max Headroom without the stutter, the pizza arrived thirty minutes later.

It was good, clean fun. Admittedly, we all dreamed of a day when we really could talk to our computers and the myriad devices they would control. In the ’90s MIT’s Nicholas Negropante wrote and spoke of a magical future in which humans and machines cohabitate working and living spaces—cars, offices, kitchens, bedrooms, our homes. In those shared environments the machines are employed to relieve us of mundane tasks, to assist those who do not possess a full range of motion, and by the very nature of the interface, invoke joy for the capacity of human creativity to invent such profound assistants.

Some thirty years later, we are riding an evolutionary wave of improved computer and robotic assistants. Siri, Alexa, Erica, and other female facsimiles are available to do our bidding. For now, their range of functions are limited to digital media: phone calls, written messages, and playing music we didn’t even know was our favorite.

At the outset of this digital assistant revolution I was excited to see the fruition of my experiment as a teenager. But soon thereafter I recognized something more profound—the very thing we wanted was eluding us, more out of reach than when we started.

We are a social animal. We are a creature that has evolved to depend on other humans for our well being. Even when we crave time alone it is through direct, face-to-face, skin-to-skin contact that we find a sense of belonging.

When I was a kid and made my first phone call using my home computer (and the pizza arrived), I had unknowingly inserted a gap between myself and the person I would have come to know at the pizza delivery service. I missed an opportunity for connection, replacing human contact with a machine interface.

That simple function is now exacerbated to such a high degree that an entire generation has grown up without knowing how to communicate face-to-face, alienated by the very function of speaking to another human. What is it that invokes satisfaction when a machine does our work for us? What joy do we experience in not doing something for ourselves? And is the joy of employing a digital assistant greater than that of moving our own bodies, of the tactile feedback of physically engaging the world around us?

I recently received a text message from a friend that read, “Sounds good safe travels and is this who is this who is this who is this who is”. A bit perplexed by this repeating phrase, the next message clarified, “Sorry my Siri was on [and] I just realized it was taping [what] my radio was saying”.

1. A unique password for each on-line account or account groupings with a minimum of 8 alpha-numeric and non-standard characters that are not an explicit word or phrase. While you may have an incredible password, if it is the same across all of your accounts, a thief with immediate access to one of your other accounts has access to them all.
2. Encrypt all data storage devices such that if your phone, tablet, or computer is stolen (assuming you were not logged in and active at that time), the data cannot be obtained even if the storage is removed from the device. Encrypt your SD card too, if supported, or do not move key apps and dadta onto the SD card.
3. Enable remote locking of your phone so that if lost, it can be disabled.
4. Do not install bank, PayPal, or investment apps on your phone, or do not auto-enter your account name and password. The chance of you losing or having your phone stolen is substantially higher than your laptop or desktop computer. And as your phone is always on-line, it is interrogated on a regular basis and therefore is more susceptible to a break-in.
5. Use the Private Mode on your web browser for all financial transactions. Do not allow 3rd party cookies. Clear your browser cookies once a day, or worse case every week. Remember that in a non-private mode, when you move between websites your browsing history can be tracked by cookies, meaning companies know where you came from and where you will go next.
6. Log out of every account you are not using, on your phone, laptop, and especially at a cafe.
7. Use a cable tether from your phone to your laptop, not cyber cafe networks or open networks on city streets if you are at any point in time entering a username and password. Or use a Virtual Private Network (VNP) to secure the full connection, end-to-end.
8. If you have the capability, create an email alias for every new on-line account, such that facebook@[your_domain_name].com and twitter@[your_domain_name].com are different from united_air@[your_domain_name].com or first_bank@[your_domain_name].com. This allows you to track who is selling your data and at the same time, keeps bots guessing as to what your login email address might be.
9. Get your friends and co-workers to drop Hotmail and Yahoo! as these email systems are single-handedly responsible for the vast majority of spam. Every time an account is hacked, the bots harvest the address book and deliver its contents to massive databases sold to marketers.
10. Never accept a broken or invalid security certificate. Never. A broken security certificate can be a sign of a man-in-the-middle attack or spoof in which your credentials are intercepted and stored for use by hackers.

Finally, read every End User License Agreement (EULA) before installing a new app on your phone. Use Uber? You might not if you knew how much of your life they have acquired: your full contact list, calendar, and every text message you send. Just because a company’s services are cool does not mean the company is cool with your data. You need only look at Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony to understand the effect of an open-ended EULA and associated privacy and distribution. As of May 25, the European Union implements the General Data Protection and Regulation (GDPR) policies which will change the way in which all international corporations manage client data.

Thank you Chris Murtagh for guiding me for the past two decades to maintain high quality server and personal computer security. Surely, the horrendous mistakes you have witnessed in your world of systems administration has saved me and others countless catastrophes.

Per my post The Dire State of Gnome, I am pleased to learn that Ubuntu MATE includes Flashback.

An update to my post Digital Film – Storage, this brings the I/O performance, transfer bandwidth, and storage capacity numbers up to speed. I offer this in part for my own quick reference, in part to compare to the industry standard just a few years ago, and in part to keep companies such as Apple from spewing marketing bullshit. While the latest, greatest Thunderbolt might offer an increased capacity, the reality is that the drives themselves are very much limited by their ability to get data off the spindle or out of the Solid State interface.

USB I/O PERFORMANCE
USB 1.0 (LS) – 1.5 Mbit/s (187.5 KB/s calc)
USB 1.1 (FS) – 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s calc)
USB 2.0 (HS) – 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s calc)
USB 3.0 (SS) – 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s calc)
USB 3.1-2 (SS+) – 10-20 Gbit/s (not yet to market?)

SATA and THUNDERBOLT I/O PERFORMANCE
SATA 1.0 – 1.5 Gbit/s (150 MB/s real-world)
SATA 2.0 – 3 Gbit/s (300 MB/s real-world)
SATA 3.0 – 6 Gbit/s (600 MB/s real-world) *
SATA 3.2 – 16 Gbit/s (1.97 GB/s real-world)

Thunderbolt 1 – 10 Gbit/s (1.22 GB/s calc)
Thunderbolt 2 – 20 Gbit/s (2.44 GB/s calc)
Thunderbolt 3 – 40 Gbit/s (4.88 GB/s calc)
(source)

* The fastest single drive on the market today delivers 6 Gb/s which could, if the drive is running at its maximum performance, saturate a USB 3.0 connection yet it remains 40% slower than the slowest Thunderbolt.

SD CARD PERFORMANCE
DS – Default Speed: 100 Mb/s (12.5 MB/s)
HS – High Speed: 200 Mb/s (25 MB/s)
UHS1 – Ultra High Speed I: 832 Mb/s (104 MB/s)
UHS2 – Ultra High Speed II: 2.5 Gb/s (312 MB/s)
UHS3 – Ultra High Speed III: 6.6 Gb/s (832 MB/s)

SD CARD CAPACITY (SIZE)
SD: 2GB or less
SDHC: 2-32GB
SDXC: 32GB-2TB
(source)

We have succumb to a future once foretold in science fiction films. Not the one in which we explore strange, new worlds and seek out new civilizations. Rather, the one in which product placement agents know our most intimate desires, our habits, our favorite colors. Advertisements interrupt our conversations to remind us what we prefer for breakfast, how to spend our weekends, and where to save on new attire.

We are so completely inundated with advertising that like the audible drone of a near-by highway or cacophony of car alarms on a windy day, we are told to accept it as the norm despite the slow erosion of our soul.

We celebrate programmers and the algorithms they deploy. News stories promote the accuracy of tracking of our behaviour, celebrated as a technological breakthrough, something to behold! And with that we welcome the invasion of our privacy, the compromise of our digital and physical lives, and the aggravation of all that makes us individuals into the neurons of an AI in which we are seen as wearing neon “FOR SALE” signs, perpetually held just out of our own reach.

To express concern is acceptable. To fight is to fail to contribute your part in the new global order. To leave the system altogether, Rolodex, day timer, and cash in hand would be … unthinkable.