Why I Fear AI

You’ve seen Terminator. War Games. 2001. iRobot. Westworld. It’s all over the news. AI is coming and you should be frightened. I know I am. Not of super learning machines that will take over the world and destroy humankind with plasma energy waves that will destroy all organic matter. No, I’m frightened that I may go postal one day after dealing with aggravating user interfaces. 

Take YouTube. I’ve been watching too much of it lately and I’ve noticed you need to be very careful about what you watch. This morning a recommended video popped up about how a tankless water heater works. Thinking that might be interesting I clicked on it. About a minute in (my average attention span) I decided life was too short to keep learning about water heaters. Go back and refresh my YouTube home page and… Boom! Approximately 37 recommended channels of home building, plumbing, and do it yourself videos. Thank god I didn’t click on the figure skating video.

Seriously, we’re not smart enough yet to do some sort of statistical averaging in our recommendation engines yet? Same with most ad engines these days. One innocent search for the latest innovations in chia pets and you’ll get some seriously odd ads served up for the next month.

And don’t get me started on the Facebook’s drunken monkey top post/most recent sort methodology. Silly me thinking most recent meant everything in chronological order. Or the Outlook mobile app deciding that I no longer need to see a month at a time on my calendar. Three days should be enough for any man. Or WordPress and/or Facebook randomly deciding what picture to display on a post. I’ll have three or four images in a post and Facebook seemingly randomly decides which one to pick to display.

No, I’m not worried that AI will destroy mankind. I’m worried that society will suddenly abandon badly crafted software, causing massive portions of the tech world to collapse. The economy will implode and hoards of unemployed tech workers will wander the streets with no discernable life skills. The craft coffee industry will die, the Tesla market will dry up, and millions of hipster skinny jeans will end up in the landfill.

Ok, that may be a bit pessimistic. Maybe Netflix will finally figure out how recommend movies based on something other than genre. Maybe Google maps will figure out how to make their walking directions useful. I’m pretty sure giant media organizations and massive corporations won’t be influencing the content we consume any time soon. It’s not like we’re going to have automated bots infiltrating social media. Oh, wait…

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Unplugged

I’ve decided to completely unplug. To stop feeding the evil corporations and their bottom lines. To no longer be a pawn to the latest must-have advertising push. I am officially no longer carrying a cell phone. Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty we are free at last!

No? Ok, so in reality the laws of physics got me. A weight which shall not be mentioned, traveling at a velocity of v * some meters per second²… or was it divided by? At any rate, it was a large amount of force hitting the ground. My cell phone, in my back pocket, was the unlucky buffer for that force. Physics always wins. Energy has to go somewhere.

Rest in peace Samsung S6. You served well. Enjoy the eternal nap.

Cool! Mourning period over. A new phone, what should I get!?!?

Paradoxically, for a former tech guy I’m not very into “tech”. Clearly evidenced by a cell phone multi-generations behind. I didn’t think that I was that reliant upon a phone. I despise talking on the thing. I’ve purchased exactly one app in my life. I would have told you that I don’t need a phone right away.

It’s not until it’s gone that you realize just how dependent upon these things we are. It’s how I communicate with the outside world. I use it daily for work – communication, setting timers, the flashlight, looking up reference material, and the translator (why oh why didn’t I take Spanish in high school?). I didn’t realize how often I was checking the social webs. I can’t take pictures. It has my stored notes for music I’ll never download and books I’ll forget to read. It has my (free) list making app that I’ve used exactly once. It’s my alarm clock and nighttime bedside clock. Calendars, maps, contacts, the entirety of human knowledge instantly available at all times.

And now I’m without. I actually felt briefly vulnerable driving. What if something happened? What if I broke down? How would I get help? What if I went to the store and couldn’t remember if we had milk – how would I contact Mrs Troutdog? Do I buy a gallon and potentially end up wasting it? Do I skip the cow juice and risk a second trip?

* side note, we purchase milk EVERY single time we go to the store. We do not drink milk. We don’t put it in coffee. We don’t cook with it. We don’t eat cereal. It sits in fridge, quietly going bad, week in and week out. When it goes bad, we dutifully buy a new one. I don’t understand our compulsion to buy milk.

Anyway, I lost track of my point. I’m a little frightened at how dependent we are on these ridiculously expensive devices and how it happened in such a short period of time. It’s only been around about ten years in its modern form. Suddenly we’re all chained to a life long service contract.

Meanwhile I’ll be in a dark hole for two more days. Out of contact. Unable to summon help. Unable to snap that picture of bigfoot or a UFO. A barren, lonely existence, indeed.

* Google Pixel 2 XL is the replacement for those interested.

The Business Of Science

A question for you: What is the global warming   climate change “extreme climate” debate about? If you answered something along the lines of proving or disproving that warming is real, you’d be wrong. That is a talking point intended to prop up a strawman argument that has nothing to do with the actual debate.

All reputable “scientists” believe that the earth has warmed in the last century. There’s a little bit of quibbling around the margins of error regarding the degree of warming, but there is no doubt that there is warming. The actual debate is if that warming is entirely human caused (anthropogenic global warming or AGW), a product of natural cycles, or a mixture of the two. That’s it. There is no other debate. Anything else you hear is horribly ill-informed or intentional spin by folks with an agenda. The derisive label of “climate change denier” is a fabrication that has nothing to do with what the actual science is about.

The problem so many people have with the AGW hypothesis is that it’s (originally) based on a series of computer models that haven’t just been wrong, they’ve been spectacularly wrong. For example, did you know that until 2016 we most likely had a pause in warming that lasted 18 years (yes, really).This seemingly contradicts the idea that exponential growth in CO2 emissions is the direct (and only) cause of warming. This alone should cause people to question the original idea. There are hundreds of other peer reviewed studies and papers postulating other potential reasons for warming. Shouldn’t the idea that there’s only one possible cause of warming be examined further?

The foundation of science is that you come up with a hypothesis, do a bunch of experiments to try and prove your idea, then open it up to others to try and disprove it. Consensus has no part in the scientific discussion. We have been unable to prove the idea that CO2 emissions are the sole cause of changes in our global climate. It’s still just an interesting idea so far.

Understanding climate is hard. Every year there are new discoveries about ocean currents, the ocean as a CO2 sink, and solar cycles, heat reservoirs, etc… Look at your local weather forecast (yes, I understand that weather is not climate). Arguably the bulk of our research dollars today goes into accurate weather forecasting – after all it can have real impact on peoples lives. With all the technology we currently have, the best we can do with a weather forecast is have a general idea a week out and a pretty good idea 48 hours out. Truly accurate forecasts of wind speeds, directions, rainfall amounts, etc… are still only in the 4-6 hour out range. This stuff is difficult. There are thousands of factors that can impact a storm as it travels towards you. Why would something as complex as figuring out global climate (measured in decades or centuries) be any easier or certain?

The entire purpose of science is to question. Unfortunately, the discussion has become religion for people, throwing around terms like “denier”. Let’s be clear – there is NO 97% of all scientists agree. As soon as you start hearing consensus in science you should be worried. There is no consensus – there’s facts. You can either prove it and have it stand up to peer review or you can’t. Until then, it’s just an idea. When Bill Nye “the science guy” and Al Gore resort to faking a science experiment to prove their point, you should question the motives.

So why would so many reputable scientists (or the UN) push an unproven idea… even cultivating a distracting narrative about the issue when that’s not the real discussion? As Rod Tidwell said in Jerry Maguire – it’s all about the Quan baby. Follow the money. You can’t risk having the research dollars dry up. I have no problem with continuing the research. I encourage it. What I disagree with is turning a scientific discussion into a religion that demonizes and characterizes people as non-believers and heretics, while in pursuit of money. Even scarier is crafting political policies that can have real economic impact based on an completely unproven idea.

If you believe that rising CO2 levels are the sole cause of the earths global temperature changes – prove it beyond a doubt and disprove the other ideas (i.e. science). Do that and I’ll be AGW’s biggest cheerleader. Until then keep it as what it is… an interesting scientific discussion that warrants further research. Nothing more, nothing less.

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There are three misconceptions in particular that bedevil our thinking. The first: isn’t there a disagreement among scientists as to whether the problem is real or not? Actually… not really.

I believe this is a moral issue. It is your time to seize this issue. It is our time to rise again, to secure our future

– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

Dr. Peter Venkman: [to librarian Alice] Are you currently menstruating?
Library Administrator: What has that got to do with anything?
Dr. Peter Venkman: Back off man, I’m a scientist.

Gigahertz And The Abacus

I’ve been shopping for a new modem. The tin cans and string we’re currently using simply aren’t fast enough anymore to keep up with our home data demands. I want my Darwin awards videos instantly. Anyway, I figure the prudent thing to do would be to check in with our current service provider and figure out what modems are on their “approved” list.

I asked the support person if they have a modem that supports 5 GHz wireless channels as well as the standard 2.4 GHz. That didn’t seem like a difficult question for someone who answers the support line for a telecommunications company. Her first reply was “The website has a list of modems”. I informed her that I knew that, but the list doesn’t include specs so I was trying to avoid spending hours individually looking up each modem and finding data sheets. Silence. Crickets. I asked her if, she didn’t know, could she possibly go ask someone else? After being on hold for long enough to write the next great American novel, she came back with one of the best technical answers I’ve heard. “Sir, our modems have speeds.” Uh, what? “I checked and they said all our modems have speeds.”

We’re doomed. Technology is advancing at a frightening rate. We rely upon complete connectedness and data infrastructure in every aspect of our daily lives. Unfortunately we’re busy creating a front-line service sector that probably has trouble operating the TV remote. This does not bode well for the future. Kids, do you have facial tattoos, ear gages, or a degree in art history? Then you’re a perfect fit for the exciting world of telecommunications technical support! No experience needed!

Which reminds me of a news item that came out this morning. Per testimony being given for Clinton scandal number 1,234 it turns out that the former Secretary of State did not have a computer in her office. Why? Because she did not know how to “do email” on a computer, only on her Blackberry. The head of a department that employed tens of thousands of people and had a budget of $65+ billion dollars can’t figure out how to “do email” on a computer? I’m flabbergasted that in today’s technology centric world such dinosaurs still exist. For gods sake, Facebook became uncool because it’s user base became 90% grandmothers and aging soccer moms. Its been a year or two since these new fangled computer things were invented. Claiming technological illiteracy no longer flies.

Why on earth would we keep putting people like this in charge? This is not an indictment (no pun intended) of Clinton – I’m sure there are swaths of pointy-haired managers across government with the same lack of qualifications. Could you imagine any corporate board today voting to hire a new CEO who isn’t capable of using an email program? I’m fairly certain the days of the abacus and having your secretary “take a memo” are over.

I’m starting to think it’s time to just unplug and enjoy the simpler things. A bike ride. Reading a book. But then I realize I’d miss watching crazy ass wingsuit flyers. And, at guaranteed ludicrous download speeds! (ludicrous speed is theoretical. your speed may vary. ludicrous speed only available with 8 year contract extension)

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Colonel Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow.
Colonel Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes, we’re gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed.

Solving The Wrong Problem

On this day in the year two thousand sixteen of the common era, 18 days and 15 hours after it began, my green home experiment died a quiet death. My sad little recycle bin only contained several junk mail flyers, a popsicle stick (not recyclable), and a paper plate that probably shouldn’t be there because it’s coated with wax. Do I wish good things for my planet? Of course. I carry the same first world guilt that many Americans do. I fear photoshopped pictures of frightened polar bears desperately clinging to their shrinking icebergs. The image of Iron Eyes Cody, a tear streaming down his face as he watches garbage callously tossed from a vehicle haunts me. But, I’m also terribly lazy and trying to figure out what can and can’t be recycled was a pain so that was the end of that.

After a brief pang of guilt, I moved on. I’m an adaptable guy. But it does highlight a common human problem. We invest tremendous amounts of energy in solving the wrong problems. Trying to solve the solid waste management problem by forcing people at the end of the chain to dutifully sort and separate their trash is doomed to fail. National participation rates hover in the 20-30% range. With the exception of aluminum, recycled materials are a net cost and energy loss. Virgin plastic resin costs 40% less than recycled plastics. Raw silica sand used for glass production is around $20 a ton vs $40 to $60 for recycled glass. A quote I either found or made up regarding the efficiency of recycling is:  “There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource or just garbage. If someone will pay you for the item, it’s a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, then it’s garbage.”

We are not going to solve the enormity of our waste problem by imploring people to rinse out their plastic mustard containers and carefully place them in a special bin. The problem needs to be solved upstream. Radical changes to packaging, incineration and reuse of the ash, building a dedicated monorail and shipping it to the desert to create a giant pyramid future historians can marvel at… these are the ideas we need to focus our energy on.

It feels as if much of the United States is stuck in a conventional thinking mode. The old guard is longing for a time when we clearly dominated the world without really trying. Uber is a great example. My city just recently fought a protracted battle with the transportation upstart. The old guard was trying desperately to protect the cab companies and the way things have always worked. I recently took a trip and used both Uber and a cab company. Leaving for the airport at 4am, I checked the Uber app and there was a driver a few blocks away. It took him a few minutes to get to my house. His car was new, clean, and he was a pretty nice guy. $9 for my trip, taken care of by my credit card already on file. The return trip I took a cab from the airport. The cab was a rattling death trap that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and was driven by someone who grunted monosyllabic answers. Nearly $30 for that lovely experience. Why would anyone spend energy to defend that sort of old school business?

Politics, foreign policy, artificially created “shovel ready projects”, bringing back industrial manufacturing, the Eagles and Rolling Stones reunion tours, Hollywood remakes of movie classics like Vacation and Point Break – why? Move on. The world has changed. It’s time to think forward rather than wistfully dreaming of the days of the Sony Walkman and killer mix tapes. As Homer Simpson famously said, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”. I think he meant the line to the Krispy Kreme, but donuts or global innovation… it’s all the same.

We’ve had a pretty solid run. We can feel good about it. CNN can continue to crank out specials documenting each decade. But we need to come to grips with the fact that it’s over. The world is changing at a remarkable pace. We need to make sure we’re solving the right problems or we’ll look up and wonder why our standard of living plummeted. My point? I’m not sure. I think I’m just frustrated because my Zune music player finally died and the new music landscape is just so… confusing. Sigh, why can’t we just bring back the original MTV?

On Star Trek, And Tricorder Repairmen

We are at a crossroads in America. We no longer have a middle class. It’s disappeared. Poof, gone. You can work in the retail or service sector for low wages, or you can try and get an advanced degree and work in the tech world. There’s almost nothing in between. We cannot compete with the global economy when it comes to manufacturing. Period, game over, it isn’t coming back.

Of course there will be niches here and there we succeed at and offshoring isn’t quite as cheap as it once was. At the end of the day though, you cannot compete against a country whos workers are paid pennies on the dollar compared to the U.S. The sooner we come to grips with that the better off we’ll be.

I was listening to Department of Commerce Secretary Pritzker on a morning show today and she made an astounding comment. When asked what U.S. sectors are doing well right now her answer was “construction, housing, and consumer retail”. That’s it. That’s our economy in a nutshell. Sectors that are based upon low skilled labor and are volatile and bubble-prone. That oughta scare the holly bejeezus out of you. I don’t know about you, but I’m not all that comfortable banking our economic underpinnings on the hope that Americans will continue to embrace the iPhone 9s with a screen size .02 cm larger or the resurgence of the hover board craze (guaranteed fire resistant!). It’s ok though, ’cause you’re going to need a bigger home to store all that stuff – and boy, do we have some exciting new mortgage options for you!

So what will be the economic engine for the middle class in the future? I’m certainly not smart enough to figure that out or I’d already be investing in it. It clearly won’t be the manufacturing of “things”. It has to be a commodity that can’t be easily shipped from overseas. Something that takes development of an actual skill or expertise, yet doesn’t necessarily require years of schooling and advanced degrees. A job that is valued and recession-proof enough that the average Joe/Jane can support a family and, with some prudent saving, can afford to go drink fruity adult beverages with tiny umbrellas on a beach occasionally.

While I don’t know what that sector will be, if I had kids or if you’re just starting out in the job world, I’d make damn sure I was comfortable with data, information management, and device connectivity. Learn how to create a website beyond just using a canned template. Can you connect a device to a network and troubleshoot problems? Can you write simple scripts to connect various programs and do something with their output? Can you take data from a program and do something with it to present it in a compelling way? None of these things take years of advanced math or electrical engineering to understand. These are skills anyone who applies themselves can master.

What is clear about the future is that we will be driven by data. Billions of cheaply manufactured devices will all be connected to various networks and attempting to communicate with each other. Yes, eventually your refrigerator will be not only ordering your weekly groceries, but will be preparing nutritional summaries for your health care provider. My report will be exclusively cheese, beer, and hummus. Beef and pork will be too damn expensive for anyone but the evil one percenters.

I’ve  gone the route of helping sick people. There will always be sick people, right? Meanwhile I’ll probably be replaced by an $11 an hour, 17 year old medical assistant wielding a Star Trek medical tricorder. I should have been training to be a tricorder repairman. Or an Obamacare v.12 website administrator.

 

 

Problems. And Moore’s Law.

Way back in the age of flower power, Dylan, The Who, and The Beatles, some dude made a prediction about computer processing power. He said that it would double every year and he was kinda, sorta, almost right. When I was a wee lad walking uphill both ways in the snow to elementary school, we had this horrible thing called the library. If you wanted to know something you had to look it up in the card catalog, navigate this weird Dewey decimal system to find the book and either make Xerox copies of specific pages or check it out and hope you’d remember to return it.

Today the internet is seeing global IP traffic in the range of 1.3 Zettabytes per year, growing to about 112 Exabytes per month. (1 Exabyte would hold 3,000 times all the information in the library of congress) You have instant access to the entirety of human knowledge in a tiny little device you carry around in your pocket.

Why do I mention this? Because I’ve been watching the political debates. Watching these meat puppets bloviate has been a mistake for many reasons, but they did get me thinking. Why are we busy trying to solve the  problems of today using the same old school thinking of the past? Information and the world is changing too fast. Shouldn’t we be focusing on what we think tomorrows problems will be and try and solve those?

Take the disaster that is the VA and its ability to process and manage the healthcare claims of our veterans. The standard government approach is to study the data available today. Analyze the data. Hire flotillas of consultants to create fancy presentations about the data. Form a commission to inquire about the progress. And then, if we’re really lucky, some small incremental change might be made. Meanwhile the problem is now exponentially worse and advances in healthcare and informatics have made whatever we have obsolete. We’re busy solving a problem that will be vastly different tomorrow.

It’s time to start trying to solve what we think will be the problems of the future. The same tired old problems rehashed in every debate could have come from any election in the last two decades. How refreshing would it be to hear some thinking about what our actual future might hold? How are we going to feed a couple billion more people? Where’s our water going to come from? How are we going to generate enough cost effective power to run the new data centers coming online daily? I don’t care about ISIS, I care about what’s going to happen when Europe and China’s economy implodes. I don’t care about trying to revert the deindustrialization of the United States, I care about finding a new economic engine that will create middle wage jobs.

A wise man once asked, “do you take the red pill or the blue pill?” I’m starting to think I’ve been spending a little too much time on the darknet. It may be time to just take the blue pill, go back to being oblivious and go for a bike ride.

Ben Franklin Quotes

I’ve been terribly conflicted about Apple’s stance against the FBI order to unlock a phone. Initially I supported them. Government overreach, George Orwell, the $500 million Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), Snowden, and whatnot. However, the more I thought about it the more I think Apple is in the wrong this time.

What changed my mind is a safety deposit box. According to both political parties, if the other party wins life as we know it is over. Armageddon, dogs and cats sleeping together, America is lost. My first thought was that it’s time to bury my gold bars, toilet paper, and zombie apocalypse supplies in the backyard. Unfortunately I live in a designated historic district so that would take approximately 16 months for environmental permits and preservation committee approval. That’s when I realized a safety deposit box was just the ticket!

Every good spy has a safety deposit box stocked with the essential bug-out supplies. So I started reading up on the rules. Turns out, the government does have the right to open up your box. If you’ve committed a crime, or the box is suspected to contain material related to a crime they can obtain a warrant and seize the contents. Isn’t that exactly what has happened with this iPhone? A government agency owns a phone that was suspected to be connected to criminal activity. The FBI obtained an order for that device to be opened. Seems lawful to me. I think Apple is wrong in this instance.

I still agree with the principle of Apple’s argument. If Apple wants to open the phone and hand it back to the FBI, fine. However, the FBI should not be given a set of keys to everyone’s safety deposit box just in case they might need it someday. The government does overreach. Once you cede privacy and rights to them there’s no going back.

I’m not a Cliven Bundy conspiracy nutjob. I don’t think the government has a grand, evil plan to turn us into North Korea. A large percentage of government workers aren’t smart enough to find their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone hatch a vast KGB-like network without spilling the details to Whoopi Goldberg on the View.

However, technology is making data collection and eavesdropping easier than anyone could have imagined. Look at the Stingray and Dirtbox. Even local police are now intercepting cellular conversations. The amount of surveillance being done around Anaheim and Disneyland is disconcerting. Come on now – Mickey friggin Mouse? Wait, a giant mouse that walks around only in odd shorts is kinda weird. What’s the real story behind his name change? Someone needs to keep an eye on that dude.

As Homer Simpson famously said, “A man who would give up a donut today for the promise of weight loss tomorrow, deserves neither the donut or beer.” It was something like that. It could have been Ben Franklin. But his often misquoted statement was related to his appointment by a family who resisted paying taxes to raise a defense against Indian attacks. But that’s a story for another day. I need to start digging that hole in the backyard.

 

 

The Contrarian

Among my vast social circles, I’m often known for expressing an opinion that is alternate to the rest of the crowd. Most likely it’s because I was dropped on my head as a baby. Sometimes I really believe what I say. Sometimes I just like to be difficult. Needless to say, my social circle shrinks every year. I don’t know why it is, but the herd mentality of agreeing with things bothers me. Take lemmings. Everyone knows that lemmings are mindless creatures that will follow their fellow lemmings off a cliff. Except that it’s not true… that footage we all saw as a kid was faked. Boom – mind blown.

In todays age information flows incredibly fast and we consume it voraciously. The problem is, what are we consuming? We’ve become a society of soundbites and opinions. There is no real news or reporting anymore. The news consists of the same six stories everyday, repackaged as though it’s something new, and debated by panels of bloviating experts giving their opinion. What happened to simply being a journalist? A facebook meme pops up, two hours later twitter is exploding with people angrily blocking racist trolls, and that night Rachel Maddow and Megan Kelly are ready to do battle in a steel cage. Meanwhile, the networks are gobbling up advertiser dollars in the billions.

My point? I don’t know, I lost track. How bad has our herd mentality gotten? It now dominates science. Now I’m not the sharpest crayon in the box, but I have taken a couple of those science-type classes. I’ve even read a few of those fancy reports with all big words and citations and stuff (the ones with pictures are the best!). I do remember hearing something about the scientific method. That whole have an idea, do a bunch of fancy experiments, then turn it all over to your peers to see if they can replicate and/or disprove it. You know – like those couple ‘a guys who discovered that whole cold fusion thing. Oh wait, never mind.

Lets say you have a theory. You push it on the world. Movies are made, Oscars and Nobel prizes are won, and industries and government subsidies are created. Meanwhile, back in the Batcave a bunch of other folks say hmmm… let’s think about this for a second.

• All the computer models that predicted gloom and doom have not only been wrong, but spectacularly wrong. By at least 3x.
• A custom filter based upon questionable tree ring data produces a hockey stick graph that nobody else can replicate – and spawns hundreds of peer reviewed papers questioning the data and methodology.
• Despite CO2 levels rising… we have seen no warming for 18+ years.
• The motherf***ing polar bears are snacking on seals like Chex-mix and have significantly larger populations than a ten years ago.
• We’ve had no strong cat 4 or 5 hurricanes here in a decade.
• 97% of everyone agrees. Or, how to lie with statistics.
• And point, after point, after point…

Now if you’re a Hollywood celebrity, I can see how you would fall to your knees and avow to host a gala dinner to fight this injustice. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to think you were some sort of luddite that dropped out of high school and waited tables for 10 years. But if you’ve had even a few science classes, when you read that computer models are wrong and that others can’t replicate your theories – you’d think that you might question things. Even just a little.

But when it’s a cult, you can’t. My god, what if I got voted out of the herd? Does this mean global warming isn’t true? Of course not and no climate scientist would claim so. The earth has warmed slightly in the last 100 years. The only question is, has man caused it?

My theory is yes. And the actual cause was when the real Dr. Evil Ryan Seacrest created the Kardashians. The heat produced by the combined processer power of millions of global iPhones frantically searching for the latest Photoshopped image has tipped the warming balance. It’s true. Thousands of cell phone repetitive stress injuries don’t lie.

We’ve gone too far to stop the Kardashian juggernaut. We just have to wait for the next massive solar eruption to disrupt all electronics and reset the balance. Meanwhile, I’m going to prep for the coming ice age. And check in on that wacky Lamar and Khloe. They’re such a cute couple!

ISO And Color

More playing around, trying to learn. Playing with ISO, noise, and color masks. This was from a day in the woods looking for a christmas tree. I never got around to taking any pictures of the actual tree hunt. I need to get better at that. Taking more pictures that is…