Working Stiffs

The term "working stiff" applies to all of us humans that actually get up every morning and start doing something in the attempt to make a small sum of money. Such people as gardeners, nannies, grocery store cashiers, computer programmers, janitors, teachers, cooks, nurses, doctors, mechanics, technicians and several thousand other kinds of workers -- all fall into this category.

There are other people, for instance the CEO of Exxon, who probably get up in the morning and also start doing something, however they do it for vast sums of money and are never referred to as "working stiffs".

I have noticed that the GOP, the right wing party in America, has become quite incensed with any hint of socialism that might creep into our government. I'm not sure they understand the difference between socialism and totalitarianism (which is closer to GOP thinking than socialism itself). The fear of socialism would be quite understandable if you are the CEO of Exxon, or perhaps the King of Texas (I mean, the Governor), because socialism means that they might be forced to accept less money for their stupendously superior amounts of work compared to say, a doctor.

Somehow, with the marvelous information propagation capabilities heretofore reserved for such greats as Goebbels or Stalin, the GOP has managed to make every gas station attendant, waitress and stock yard worker in America take up pitchforks against them damn socialists, wherever they are. This is because... well, I don't exactly know why.

Why would a waitress that makes $2.30 per hour, plus maybe $10 or $20 in tips, feel so incensed about taxes that they don't even pay that they would stick a needle in your eye for voting in favor of increasing their chances of getting quality health care someday? Why do working stiffs actually desired getting stiffed by the Insurance Industry? Why do "nonworking" working stiffs that can't even get a job desire for any possible job they might get to be outsourced to China?

I can at least understand the hatred some GOPs have for other races. I don't like it, but I understand it. I understand the hatred they have for other religions, again something I'm not especially on board with. They have a whole drawer full of stock hate-symbols to drag out for every occasion. I am not exactly sure why all the working class heroes are so dead set against worker's rights, minimum standards of health care, education and so forth. It's like wanting to own guns in order to shoot yourself in the feet.

Why are the GOPs so effective in making working stiffs desperate to screw up their own lives?

Propaganda on mass media. It works. Ask any preacher, advertising executive or producer for You-Know-Who News. They know it works and the GOP knows it works. And us working stiffs know it works-- so stop falling for it. Think for yourself.

Believe me, believe me not...

What makes a person decide to believe something? It seems very unlikely that people will just believe 50% of everything they are told is "true" and then disbelieve the other 50%. And there is also the "pollster" effect -- that people are more likely to say they believe something if it is expected of them within the context of a question.

Likewise, if I suddenly found myself surrounded by whooping and hollering painted savages who revere the great stone Volcano God, I doubt that I would just argue about the fine points of it all, or point out how silly such a thing is. I would probably just whoop and holler along with them, in fear that I might be found to "believe" the wrong thing.

Yet, in any of these instances the belief is a public thing -- a social thing. It is not necessarily what you believe regardless of any peer pressure. If you are in a cowboy bar, I doubt you are going to shout anything about why everyone is wearing those big hats and buckles. Nobody wants to get beat up over inconsequential things, so you just go along with it.

Science is my "thing", but it is a very dangerous thing for all the above reasons and more. Cowboys in the late 1800s, confronted with the scientific fact that their longhorn cows were spreading diseases would just as soon shoot you as listen to reason. That was their livelihood you were messin' with.

In the current day, oil and coal is the big thing and it is spreading a lot of death around, although mostly in less obvious ways. Most people don't care if this or that microbe in the ocean is dying off. Or even that coral reefs are dying off. Just so long as they can drive to work everyday and heat the house in the winter -- who cares about those bugs and slimy things anyway?

So, it is very popular nowadays to belittle scientists as being "blinded by science", or greedy for "research funding" or whatever. If you think greed is the issue, you should try being a scientist. They generally aren't rich people. And being blinded by a whole bunch of measurements and collections of facts is hardly worse than checking how much you pay for those shoes and making sure you're pants fit before you buy them.

There are also scientists who somewhat smugly ridicule "lesser educated folks" and try to push their objectivity theories as a kind of superior religion which should supplant all inferior belief systems as a matter of course. Whereas there may be good reason to push away "snake oil" religions and the harmful practices of savage rituals, there is hardly any reason to worship nuclear explosions as being more holy than anything else, either.

But you must ask yourself, in a world filled with exceptionally large amounts of discarded chemicals and nuclear waste -- do you believe that magical fairies will fix it all?

Lying about Climate Change

There were recent emails stolen from servers which indicate that many climate researchers from several UK and US universities and research institutions were attempting to cover up any evidence that the world's temperatures were not "rising" in step with the predicted global warming that has been so controversial lately.

I am not a climatologist although I understand the scientific method perfectly well. I could never claim one way or another anything about climate change with any authority, yet I do understand sensors, computers, statistics and so forth, as it applies to just about any subject in science and engineering. It is a lowly thing to do to "fix" the data to meet predetermined expectations. That is little better than calling dinosaurs bones "a joke played by God" in order to disprove evolution theory.

I think there are enough other problems with the world's environment, however, and since the very people who are so quick to cry hoax over these problems with climate change science are also many times the very people who generate vast profits from the unfettered pollution of the planet by their industries.

However, there are other problems with climate science -- on both sides of the aisle. There are not sensors in every conceivable location in the oceans and atmosphere, nor could there ever be, so the actual "temperature" of the Earth is pretty much guess work. There are some places that heat up and some places that cool down.

All in all the average temperature doesn't change very much, although it is certainly different now than for many of the last few centuries. This slow, agonizingly gradual change in the climate gives either side plenty of elbow room when trying to force their view of the situation upon a confused public.

But the measurements of chemicals such as chlorine compounds -- many of them highly catalytic and problematic for nearly all lifeforms -- are undeniably higher almost everywhere you measure than even just a few decades ago. There are so many man-made chemicals poured into the environment that no scientific means can be used to predict what they will do -- only time will tell. From what studies there have been, the results are not happy. From fish eggs to cow bones and squid swarms, the world is changing.

It could be that all of those chemicals become broken down by various newly evolved bacteria or other dynamic lifeforms. It could also be that those chemicals kill off more lifeforms than can evolve and adapt to them. There is little doubt that they have an effect, and usually a very negative effect upon our world.

The radioactive substances alone are profoundly dangerous and some countries have terrible proliferation controls. It is bad enough just here in the USA where we are paranoid about that kind of stuff. In some countries the ignorant masses are exposed to any number of radioactive substances by merely rummaging through trash or in war-torn places from the left-over depleted uranium dust our anti-tank weapons leave behind.

The catalytic compounds are many and cover a lot of ground. The bromine and fluorine catalysts are less widespread than chlorine, but they have very similar effects wherever they accumulate. Chlorine breaks down our ozone layers and does not become consumed by the chemical reactions, so it is free to break down more ozone for decades before it diffuses back to harmless levels -- if it ever will be reduced in output. Chlorine is even a problem when confined as a salt, where it renders water electrolytic and corrosive.

Dioxins and heavy metals like lead, mercury and arsenic, minerals like asbestos and chemicals like formaldehyde are released as manufacturing companies produce them, or when they try to discard them but have nowhere to put them. These and many more chemicals effect living organisms in bad ways and often times we live and breathe them in our own homes continuously.

Climate Change, as a religion, never was the true bogey man some claimed it was, although I do not doubt that something is happening to the ice caps and glaciers. It could truly be a problem, no doubt, if the ocean levels are effected, if the tundra melts, if methane is released in massive quantities into our air. But the truth or falsity of that religion means very little if the obvious toxic wastes of human civilization are allowed to keep accumulating without regulation.

No one has proven that climate change is false. They have only proved that scientists can be dishonest, which is little different than businessmen or people in general. But that is exactly what the people who make the vast quantities of wealth from pollution-producing industries want us to believe -- that climate change is false, so we should therefore do nothing about any pollution. That is called "The Straw Man" distraction, and mostly fools will fall for it.

But there are plenty of fools, and many dishonest people to take advantage of them.

Andoids Galore

I recently designed some Android Apps for the Google Phone. I wasn't sure what to make, exactly, since it seems like there is an application for every conceivable concept ever thunk. These are just a sampling of what I've done, since these are the ones I actually published. I have others that are just experimental, or require hardware that isn't always available.

The first one shown is actually not done yet, the Robot Evolver. It will be a good one, I think. But it is very difficult to design and write for all the variations of device, and to make all the body parts of the evolving robots harmonize correctly.

One I made is something called the "BibleCodeX" A-Z Bible Code Sequencer. It takes the entire King James Bible as a linear row of letters from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation.

It was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be, mostly due to translating my usual C++ kind of thinking into Android's Java language. My other Java coding was less troublesome because it ran on larger Linux machines without the processing limits that a hand held device would have.

Another (for FREE of course) is just the Android Logo with a beating heart. I shouldn't charge for things that are just trademarks belonging to others.

The Deer Hunting Clock is much harder than you'd think. Mainly it is because of the great detail in the clock photo, which causes great memory and time to process in the Android phone. There is another version for 480x854 sized screens, but it consumes so much memory it is unsuitable for sale.

Anyway, I'll keep on trucking, and put some more apps out there, whatever I can think of and have some utilitarian purpose, I guess.

Unlucky California

When I first came out here about 43 years ago, it was a happening place. I was just joined the Navy at age 17. A few years later I got out of the Navy and was then wandering around in a daze, wondering what I would do with my life.

After having traveled and lived in other states, especially in the Midwest, I again wandered back to California. It was the only place that I seemed to fit in. I was a kind of half-hippie, half-beatnik, half-science-geek. Whatever I was, it fit in here better than Texas or Nebraska, that’s for sure.

In time, after a rocky start with hard labor jobs, I was able to get into computer shops and eventually became a systems programmer, and then a computer scientist. I designed operating systems, control systems for robots, and myriad other contraptions used in automated manufacturing.

Whatever, those days were “the good old days” in my life at least. And those days are gone. No longer are there any golden opportunities in California. Until this economic collapse is repaired, and some kind of jobs return to this state – I am screwed.

At age 60, I am too old to work as a hard laborer now. I can’t just wander around in jeans and a tee-shirt looking for day labor or mural painting jobs like I did at age 20. Having worked in the computer field so long, it would seem that I’d have an ironclad secure job. But that is not the case.

Anyway, I will not give up. I will keep trying. I keep up with the younger crowd, and try all the new tools, just to keep “hip”. Although .NET, Android, Java and other modern programming environments help to standardize around the “Web 2.0” phenomena, I can’t help but think they are just as temporary as C and C++ were as my tools of the trade for over 20 years.

Still, I will keep going until my brain falls out or my hands crumble, even if I have to push a cart down the street looking for beer and soda cans in between.

The Slimmest of All

I just wondered what this was about. It is made with “Live Writer” which I downloaded while on Windows 7. It is a very slim document editor. 

These are pictures of my grand daughters. They are about a year older now, but this picture was handy. I have discovered that the pictures are static, and the text doesn’t flow around them like a web page.

Oh, well. So let’s see if this blog thing happens. Well – I was wrong about the text wrapping. I just fixed it so it does. Just have to read the manual more often.

It also updated my blog right handily as well. So this isn’t so bad at all.

The world isn’t flat, and the world of Redmond isn’t always stuck in 1979.

Wpf and Silverlight Programming

Click on the images for larger versions.



These are WPF program and Silverlight programs with lots of moving objects, beating heart, and so forth. They can play movies, display other background images in differing opacities, etc. There are many things that aren't apparent by just looking at this picture. WPF mainly runs right on the metal and Silverlight runs as a web page.

These products have been around in varying levels of quality for several years, but only lately have they seemed worth bothering with, especially now that Windows 7 is around. These were created on Windows 7 (a developer's version) using vs2008 with lots of sp1 and other updates. I did not use Expressions Blend, although it might have been much easier for parts of the animations to do so.

I haven't posted for a long while since I've been busy trying to create these. I'd rather use Linux for everything, (which I'm doing right now to type this), however the world is still 90% Microsoft.

There are very few choices for jobs, so I have to do whatever there is, and if that's using WPF and related tools, so be it. It is very difficult to learn, however, so I'm just now figuring out how to do animations and all that, and the bizarre separation of WPF and Silverlight is unfortunate and annoying. They should both do the same things with the same syntax if it is something that is otherwise identically rendered.

Anyway, as time goes on, I hope to have some stuff that is less goofing around and more useful. Maybe I'll make my own web page using Silverlight, just for grins.

Other artwork I do on computers: