confusion

I ran across an article today about edge.org’s [edge.org] “The Edge Annual Question—2006” (permalink [edge.org]). This years question is “What is your dangerous idea?” More specifically:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

This is a very intriguing question. Edge gathered answers from 117 different people, writers, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, and all manner of thinkers.

I have by no means read all of the entries but so far my too favorite are by Paul Davies and Keith Devlin. Paul Davies entry [edge.org] is titled, “The Fight Against Global Warming is Lost” is great. If you have ever watched the Discovery Channel or TCL you’ve seen this guy on all those late night space and physics shows—you know the ones Patrick Stewart or some other Trekie narrates? The conclusion paragraph to his essay is really good:

The idea of giving up the global warming struggle is dangerous because it shouldn’t have come to this. Mankind does have the resources and the technology to cut greenhouse gas emission. What we lack is the political will. People pay lip service to environmental responsibility, but they are rarely prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Global warming may turn out to be not so bad after all, but many other acts of environmental vandalism are manifestly reckless: the depletion of the ozone layer, the destruction of rain forests, the pollution of the oceans. Giving up on global warming will set an ugly precedent.

Global Warming, Climate Change, call it what you will, Davies nailed the problem: “what we lack is the political will.”

Keith Devlin’s idea [edge.org] is just as fatalistic, if not more so; “We are Entirely Alone.”

Living creatures capable of reflecting on their own existence are a one-off, freak accident, existing for one brief moment in the history of the universe. There may be life elsewhere in the universe, but it does not have self-reflective consciousness. There is no God; no Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives.

but he does end on a slightly more upbeat note that I agree with:

The fact that our existence has no purpose outside that existence is completely irrelevant to the way we live our lives, since we are inside our existence. The fact that our existence has no purpose for the universe — whatever that means — in no way means it has no purpose for us.

So, what would my answer be? I think my dangerous idea would be that a few pandemics might not really be a bad thing. This is because I think there are too many people on the planet. When a population overwhelms its environment eventually something must happen to restore some balance. AIDS or Bird Flu killing a few billion would be destroy modern culture—or would it? But if a string of pandemics killed billions over the next few hundred years would humans and the world be better off?

Another dangerous idea I have voiced in the past is “everyone should have the right to have kids, most people shouldn’t have kids” Which seems to be in the same vain as killing people with pandemics, but David Lykken [edge.org] seems to have hit upon the same idea with his idea “Laws Requiring Parental Licensure.”

I have made what will, hopefully, be the most important and rewarding decision of my life: I have asked Candice to marry me. I’ve been dating her for a year now, I knew she was ready, and I have know since last summer that I was ready to ask so I was 99.999999999% sure of her answer long before I asked. Sure enough that it never crossed my mind to wonder what I would do if she said no.

Until I actually asked.

I will admit that I was as nervous as could be when I actually asked. Even though I knew what I wanted to say the whole experience was dreamlike up until she said yes and everything was normal again. It was snowing, in Kyoto at the Golden Pavilion, when I asked and I was sweating. Go figure, does that make me a romantic or a nervous wreck?

Now all the real hard work: figuring out the next steps. When? Where? How? The answer to all of them right now is ‘I have no idea.’ It’s enough that my love is now my fiancée and we have made that commitment.

A recent article [slashdot.org] on Slashdot [slashdot.org] asked about what features would be in your ideal instant messenger client/service? The best part of this article is a comment [slashdot.org] made by Atario [slashdot.org]:

A filter that slaps you in the face if you start typing in IM-speak.

“u” for “you”, “4” for “for”, etc.
More than one instance of “lol” per minute
More than two exclamation points (possibly mixed with ones) in a row
Smileys on more than one quarter of your messages
And so on.

I have to say; I would pay to install this IM client on other people’s computers!

IM and SMS typing “short-form” grammar is a small annoyance and in most cases you can read it no problem. I understand the original reasoning behind it: limited space and the inability to type full words at the same speed you talk.

In IM it’s very annoying when you are trying to type a reply—and taking the time to actually spell the words—to someone and they just keep typing away. By the time you finish your thought in full words they might be far beyond the subject. IM as a form of human interaction pales in comparison to speech. It has many of the same hurtles as writing in that regard. Long ago people developed some ways of conveying emotion in written communication: punctuation. Learn to use a comma, a period, an exclamation point. IM seems to have exaggerated the need for this crutches to express tone and emotion because unlike writing a letter, or a story/novel/book, IM is a real-time communication medium.

Because not everybody can type at 300 words a minute, people resorted to shortcuts like the above cited, “u” for “you”, “4” for “for” and a plethora of other, sometimes obtuse shortcuts (WTF, and OMFG, being some of the best.)

Being in college in at the turn of the century (boy do I feel old for some reason when I put it like that… let’s say at the millennium! There, that’s better.) I was in the breading ground for the IM explosion—everyone I new had a free internet connection and everyone had a computer. ICQ and, later AIM were the communication medium of choice. If you went to class you could leave it one and your friends could leave you notes, or, if you had a laptop (and wireless) you could talk to people during class because IM is only as loud as your typing (assuming you turn off the sounds.) Everybody used IM—all the time.

And it’s only gotten more popular. In the few years since I finished college IM has invaded the corporate space like nothing else—except maybe email and blackberries. I speak to people in my office, in other offices of my company and even to client in other countries over IM!.

A similar situation evolved with SMS. When I moved to Europe in 2001, SMS was a small time novelty in the US. In Europe it virtually was IM. Most everyone I new in college in Europe had an MSN messenger account—no one used AIM and only a few used ICQ (and it has been my experience living in Southeast Asia and working with people around the world that MSN is the big boy and AIM is only a power in North America.) But in Europe many people did not have a computer; a lot did but not the number of people in the US. What they all had was a cell phone.

Now a cellular phone was designed—originally—to be like a ‘land line.’ It was meant to make phone calls, voice phone calls. And up until recently and in a lot of ways still, that is how it is used in the US. In the rest of the world voice calls are expensive. When SMS was introduced it provided a cheaper way to communicate, this is especially important to the younger segment of the market, teens and college student with limited income—and a need to spend that income on music, games, drinking and club cover charges. Most of these people are ‘pre-paid’ mobile users. So the expensive voice call is even more expensive, and in many countries you have to (or had to) pay for incoming calls as well as outgoing calls.

Thus the market was ready to embrace a new, cheaper form of communication. Enter SMS. An afterthought on the part of the cell phone manufacturers to use up the last bit of room in data packets, SMS was first marketed to business men—or at least that’s the image I saw portrayed in commercials. But it was quickly picked up as the inside communication method by teens and college students. The fact that their parents could understand the concept or type on the key pad only increased the draw to this new communication medium.

So the ‘SMS Generation’ was born, and has spread around the world, even the US is now a big addict to text messaging. But, at least in the early days, there was one tinny little drawback to SMS; because the protocol was designed to take advantage of some ‘extra room’ on the network the messages had to be small—less than 160 characters in the early days. Today many phones and operators have the ability to utilize larger messages, but that feature came too late. People quickly adopted the IM method of ‘short-form’ to save space.

This degradation of language was taken to the extreme in Europe and other places where a number of languages were sitting close together. Because many of the people using SMS and IM outside the US are communicating with other people who do not speak the same native language English is often used as a bridge language between them. This poses a problem because people learn the shortcuts and bad grammar of SMS/IM short-form because they use it all the time. I witnessed this when I was at university in the UK first hand. I helped some of my friends that were not native English speakers with their papers for class. The common theme in all these papers was bad grammar. No one new more than the three basic punctuation marks: ‘.’,’!’ and ‘?.’ They didn’t know how to start a new paragraph. Sometimes a blank line between them and indention, sometimes no blank line but with indention and sometimes a black line and no indention—in the same paper. It’s wasn’t just ‘first draft’ typos either, they didn’t know that there was anything wrong. But the worst thing about these papers was the abbreviations and short-form. People actually used, ‘4’ in place of ‘for’ in a college paper! They would end sentences with ‘!!!!’ This is fine for SMS or IM or ‘blog-speak’ but these people did not know how to write.

In the years sense, working in the ‘real world’ that is now filled with the graduates of the SMS Generation, I see all these habits invading email. I have seen articles online about the slow degradation of the average persons writing skills and I see the evidence to support these papers everyday. Grown business me, who have college degrees but can’t write a coherent email any better than their 6 year old can. Now the prevalence of the blackberry has made email more like IM or SMS and this will only lead more and worse abuses of language. We seem to be in a state where language is devolving rather than evolving. Soon we people will be communicating in grunts rather than words. The writing teacher’s last hope for the salvation of man must lie in the banning of the blackberry on patent infringement charges. For this could well be the turning point in the battle to save writing skills!

* by the way, according to the Techdictionary’s Chat or text message abbreviation page this means “Idiot Behind the Keyboard.”

I go by an unusual name in the day-to-day office environment. I use my nickname, beggs, that I have had since I was in elementary school. People in the office call me beggs and I sign all of my emails ‘\beggs.’ But some people have not caught on to how the name is spelled or spoken.

Now, even in the US ‘beggs’ is a rather unusual name and here in Asia, where most people are not native English speakers I don’t spend much time correcting people who don’t pronounce it quite right; becks, begg, begk and other harder to write pronunciations.

What gets me is that people continue to use these strange pronunciations of a fairly simple word (beg, as in the verb ‘to beg’ and add an ‘s’) after months of exchanging email. I get emails that say: ‘Hi Becks,’ or ‘Beg.’ Now this is a fairly small thing, except that after I have exchanged countless emails with you over the course of months, all signed, ‘\beggs’ you’d think people would catch on to the fact that my name is not Becks—I am not a German beer. When I write an email to someone I check any previous emails I have from that person to see how they sign their name. does M██████ Somebody sign ‘M██████’ or ‘Mike?’ It’s a simple thing to do and even if you don’t actively check the emails before you write a new one if you exchange emails with this person on a regular basis surely you would notice how they sign their name over-and-over again?

The best part of this whole saga, confirming my long standing dislike of commercial type people, is the fact that nearly 100% of the long term abusers of my name are commercial types—sales, presales, account managers, etc. I get emails from Engineers and Developers who I might only exchange two or three emails with and they open them, ‘Hi beggs.’ I’ve never met these people but they obviously thought that reading my entire email was worth their time. Sales people in my own company—in my own office—have been addressing my as ‘Becks’ for months.

Now I ask you: who actually reads their email?