Is 1984 Here? By our own choosing? ...Yes, it is.

A few years ago, I was interviewed by Seth Shostack for NPR as a technology expert. The question was whether the surveillance tactics like those in 1984 are on their way. The truth of the matter is...They are here.

After a few minutes on Facebook, we can see that as a society, we have become somewhat narcissistic in posting everything from "Look at the Sour Cream and Bananas I ate this morning" to giving specific destinations for our business trips and vacations, relating the airport destination data for all to see. But that is REALLY just where it all starts in two very important and distinct ways.

First, that's not all the data that's being collected AND SHARED about you and second (and this is most important), what you don't realize is what is being done with this data. Data is being collected from you in sometimes very subtle ways. We all know that when we search for or buy items online we will then be bombarded with ads for the same or similar items. (No, I don't need more screwdrivers) In the tradeoff for convenience, we have sacrificed this level of privacy. This loss of privacy extends beyond the online purchases and, even creepier is how your data is connected.

There are also more nefarious ways to collect our personal information. When you play one of those silly games like "choose your super-hero name" and you use your Month that you were born with the street you grew up on to select two names. Why do you think they exist? They are there to collect your personal information! This is not paranoia, this is FACT.

The second point is what is done with the information. I recently purchased some spackle at Lowes in the actual brick and mortar store. When I got home, I was bombarded with ads around my Yahoo email for drywall screws at Amazon. Consider for a moment the speed, the connective power and just how much data is cross-referenced from all of our identifying items...like your Lowes "rewards" card.

As for the data that is being trolled for on Facebook in the form of silly games, who knows. We already know identity theft is a serious thing and easily carried out internationally. The questions like "What street you grew up on" or "your first Pet" are often used as security questions by credit agencies. Consider also, your Birthday (usually available on Facebook) is often a security question.

Other personal information like the names of your children and family, our favorite books, movies, and TV shows could also give a hacker some serious clues for cracking your password. If you've made it this far, I bet you are re-thinking your current password.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 

Anything that we don't want to be true is now, "fake news."

I've already written enough on the topic of the news, but it just proves that the conditions of 1984 are already here.  They are just not quite as drab looking...yet.

If the Government says it is!  Anything else is labeled "FAKE NEWS!"  Know that you could be lied to.  It's possible!  At least question things!

...and that's the way it was.

When Walter Cronkite uttered those words, "...and that's the way it was," not a single American, left, right, Africain American, Asian American, etc., would disagree on the content or bias of the facts presented.

As divided as this country was on so many issues during Mr. Cronkite's tenure, from the Vietnam war to racial or gender inequality, we didn't waiver or argue in our perception of reported facts by any of the popular news sources simply because it wasn't what we wanted to hear.

I try, VERY hard to be an objective person.  I try to use news sources that are not tainted by the left or the right.  As a citizen of the United States, it's almost unbelievable that I need to go OUTSIDE the United States to find one.  I go to the BBC for major headlines and news.

Unfortunately, Snopes.com has become necessary for almost any political or news post on social media, left or right.

What is worse, is that we cloud our own perception of what public opinion is by listening to news sources that tell us what we want to hear.  We tend to surround ourselves with people on social media who have the same left or right viewpoints.  To top it off, we have a president who feeds this left-right polarization and actually treats the media sources' ratings like they are a more important fact than the events that are shaping the world.

This has to stop! 

We will find ourselves in a new civil war, that is not separated by geography, but by left, and right ideologies that are being influenced by media ratings and external (possibly Russian) influence.

I have done my best to try and keep any of my opinions of left or right issues out fo this, in the hopes that this post can spread without political bias when we all agree we need a search for the real truth.

“Daddy…is this the Men’s room?”

…my three-year-old daughter asks me, as I guide her quickly past the men standing at the urinals toward the stall where she can do her business.

Some men give me strange looks as I bring my little girl into the men’s room. Most places don’t have a “family” restroom (although I am grateful when there is) and as a father of, now four-year-old twin girls, I am left with little alternative but to bring them into the men’s room.

If I want to take my little girls out for breakfast to give my wife some well-deserved alone time, or some time at the gym, restroom visits are a common thing. It seems no matter how much I try to make them use the bathroom at home before we leave, I have still seen the inside of every single men’s room of every family-friendly restaurant in the area.   

Somehow, there isn’t anywhere near as much of a stigma in bringing a three-year-old boy into the women’s room with his mom.  Perhaps it’s because there aren’t urinals in the women’s room. Perhaps it’s an echo of a previous generation’s expectations of it being “a women’s role” to take care of the kids “bathroom-business.”

It can be a difficult road to navigate for a modern dad. In addition to some of the stares, some of derision, some creepy and general looks of disbelief; some men also don’t always zip up their business whilst facing the wall… A quick turn and one of my hands becomes a make-shift blinder.

There is, of course, the added fun of the conversation with my daughters in the stall:

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Thank you for sharing your room with me.”

“You’re welcome, sweetie.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

“How do you go to the potty with one of THOSE,” points out of the stall toward the urinals, “potties?”

Stammers…

”Are you done now, sweetie?”

What is a father in the 21^st century to do?

Posting this while I can

Well, we just lost the Net Neutrality laws. 

Watching the FCC debates and votes were so difficult.  It's so obvious the corruption that has taken place there.  It's sad.

Don't think it will affect you?

Do you like Netflix?  What if your provided added a surcharge to your already complicated bill for bandwidth to their site?

How about Youtube?  Pandora?  Amazon Prime video? Hulu?  Slingbox?  DirectTV?

That's just to start. 

How about making any web site that wants to be seen pay a premium to your service provider.

The corrupt FCC chairman compared it to Twitter or Facebook allowing paid advertisers to get better placement. 

Except it's NOT the same.  I don't have to use Twitter or Facebook.  I can choose something else.  I DON'T have a choice of my internet provider.  No one else is available where I am.

Even for the lucky few that have something of a choice, you maybe have two possibilities.

The FCC said it doesn't need to regulate the internet providers because they are not like a utility, that the "data lines are nothing like a pipe." 

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Did you ask ANY technical professionals?  That's exactly what we call it!

They said it won"break the internet."  Of course it won't.  But it will make it more expensive for you and me. 

Isn't that enough?

Would you believe ALL of our modern computing devices owe their basic architecture to a 19th-century weaving machine?

Standing in the basement of an old college building, looking at a collection of 19th-century weaving machinery, and in one moment the entire history of computing, even to this day in 2017 came to me.

It was 1990 and I was attending the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University).  As a favor to a professor, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I picked up a donated weaving machine and we delivered it to the basement of one of the main buildings, Hayward Hall. 

Surrounding us was an amazing collection of old fabric making equipment dating back to the 19th century.  I noticed a Jacquard weaving machine with some yellowing old punch-cards halfway fed through a mechanical reader.  In an amazing bit of mechanical engineering, this machine could mechanically, interpret the “on” and “off” instructions on a punch card to consistently reproduce a woven pattern on fabric.  

I remembered from a history of computing lessons that IBM adapted the use of punch cards sometime in the 1950s.  I even got some brief exposure to them myself in the 1970s, as some legacy equipment had yet to be replaced.  

What amazed me here, in examining the cards that the loom used, was that the cards hadn’t really been changed much for when they were adapted for computers.    They still had the same rows of eight dots (eventually there would be more than 8), punched or not punched.  These were a physical representation of 8 bits to one byte.  

This constant is the same today, in every computing device from supercomputers to iPhones.  Even though our chips got expanded to 16, 32, 64 and 128 bits, etc. All of these are still multiples of the original eight.

This was still not the moment of revelation.  It was when I saw the manual device that the operators used to punch the cards that gave me the biggest surprise.  The operator of the manual punch machine would sit on a simple metal stool, and feed the cards through the punching mechanism. The operator would grip two metal handles in front of them, that were shaped like small motorcycle handlebars.  The operator's fingers would rest on the eight buttons above the handle with the thumbs below.  The operator would press the appropriate buttons for the “ons” and “offs” for the pattern, then a foot pedal provided the actual punch of the holes.

This simple 19th-century punching machine has provided us with the basic architecture of our modern computing age.  All because of the shape of our hands fitting into a machine to punch cards for a fabric weaver.

The Total Perspective Vortex, from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Anyone who has stared up at the night sky on a clear night and tried to wrap their mind around the size of our planet, the Sun, the solar system, our galaxy, and then the hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond that may have felt like their mind might explode (or despair at the sheer insignificance of their life choices).

According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Total Perspective Vortex was designed to condense all the knowledge of the universe into a single moment, wherein a person would finally understand their place in the vast cosmos. Remember, that the universe is so mind-numbingly huge that anything imaginable can happen.

Instead of being enlightened by this moment of clarity, understanding the sheer magnitude of the universe and insignificance of one's perspective compared to all of that completely annihilates one's brain. An invisible dot on an invisible dot living in a tiny fraction of an eyeblink of the universe.

"You can kill a man, destroy his body, break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man's soul."

How Blind?

When The United States of America defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps, we proudly tore down the Nazi flag and raised the American flag!

When the towers fell on 9/11.  We took it back and raised the American flag again!

Would we allow someone to publicly salute the flag of Al Quaeda?

Then WHY??  Someone tell me WHY do we allow THIS flag to be raised here?  And our president to say "On BOTH SIDES??"

What if Bush had said "ON BOTH SIDES" after 9/11??

Y2K

Okay, this has to be said.  Y2k was a non-event.  Not because it wasn't a real threat, but

BECAUSE WE FIXED IT!!!

I worked at two different companies on this problem.  I was there for testing where we took devices like credit card readers, ATMs and even elevators advanced their dates.

You know what happened?

THEY STOPPED WORKING!!

So, to all of the people who think Y2k was some big hoax because nothing happened, you need to thank the teams that worked round the clock for years to make sure nothing happened.

Sorry, just had to speak my peace on this one.

" I don't really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there's nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to."- Pump Up the Volume

The quote I'm using for the title was from a 1990s movie.  

Have things gotten any better?

As a child growing up in the 1970s, we could find heroes in fiction and reality.  Television's characters were mostly either over the top evil or over the top good.  The good characters may not have been realistic, but you could try to be as good as, Captain Kirk, Laura Ingles or Mike Brady.

They may have been unrealistically good, but shouldn't we strive for that?

Look at the remakes and reboots for some of TV's characters:

The new Star Trek's Captain Kirk is essentially OK, but kind of an @sshole.  Same with the reboot of Battlestar Galactica.  Replaced are the squeaky clean Lorne Green and Richard Hatch with characters you really don't want to emulate.

“'Oh, realism! Oh, here, oh, now, oh hell!'”- Ray Bradbury 

Ray Bradbury predicted this would happen decades ago in the Martian Chronicles.  

I haven't even started on reality TV.  There are NO people in there you would want to be like.  Across the board, reality television features people we either hate, despise or pity.  Otherwise they are not deemed "entertaining."  .

Even many of our childhood heroes get smudged, buy attention seeking people looking to smear someone's reputation and history for the sake of "entertainment."

I used to look up to people like John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.  Look what has happened to them in recent years with scandals and rumors of scandal.

Can you honestly think of a hero you have in recent decades?  Someone who stood out and wasn't smeared by someone somewhere.

I used to have Neil Armstrong and John Glenn.  After Armstrong's death (and some before) news came out about his divorce and what a bad husband he was.  Really?  I didn't need to hear that!  

John Glenn has held up.  So far the only other decent figure I could find was Mr. Rogers.  So far no one has been able to smear him.

Consider someone like Lance Armstrong.  I know I'm going to get beat up here, but hear me out.
Now, he has a reputation for not being a nice guy.  He's probably not a nice guy but, in beating cancer, starting the Livestrong Foundation and Charity he inspired people to survive and probably saved thousands of lives just by being an inspiration.  Nothing else.

I realize the search for truth is a squeaky clean attribute, but was it REALLY necessary to go back and smear what looked like a modern day "Superman." (Don't get me started to what they did to Superman).  Wasn't the inspiration he created and the lives he saved and the hearts he touched worth more than the outcomes of races run over a decade ago.

REALLY think about it.  What have we lost versus what have we gained??

Hath No Fury Wins Second Place in Literary Agency Contest

Urban Literary Agency just announced their winners from their 2015 contest.

My book, Hath No Fury,  got second place!

Here's the specs from the judge:

Author Name: Hal Rappaport

Title: Hath No Fury

Genre: Romance / Paranormal

How is the author’s writing?                                        

Poor

Okay

Good

Great

Is there violence?

No violence

Some violence

Graphic violence

Is there sexual content?

No sexual content

Some sexual content

Explicit sexual content

How is the story narrated?

First person

Second person

Third Person

Alternating persons