It has now been one month since an evil man forced his way into an elementary school and murdered 20 helpless first-graders and any faculty that dared get in his way. I have debated as to whether or not to say anything about it on this blog. Since you are reading this, I must have decided to do so. I don’t really have any interest in being yelled at by people who really had no interest in reading this, so I’m going to close comments, and I’m not posting this on Facebook. This got pretty long, and believe it or not I have edited it down. With that said, I’ll divide this into three parts. Let’s begin.

Games

Before I get to real guns, let’s talk about pretend guns. As someone who plays a lot of video games, this is of particular interest to me. It may surprise most of you to hear that I would agree that the medium has gotten a little too violent. But that is largely because it means there are very few games I can play with my kids in the room. I would stop short of saying that games are causing mass shootings like the one in Newtown, and I would stop short of saying that the answer is government involvement. I don’t reject outright the possibility that there is a link, but you’re going to have to show me the science. The government has tried to find a link between violent media and real violence at least seven times since the Columbine massacre, and has been unsuccessful. The most that has been shown is that games can make people more aggressive for 3-4 hours after playing them. I suspect you could find the same thing happens when you watch a close basketball game or argue with your sister-in-law about whether or not you said a forbidden word in a game of Taboo. The Supreme Court has ruled that video games are a protected form of speech, just like books and movies. For any censorship of games to be allowed by the courts, they would need to re-interpret the first amendment, or there would need to be some compelling evidence that playing a violent video game is comparable to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. That evidence is lacking.

There is the argument that video games are different from books or movies because they are an interactive medium. Again, I’m open to the idea but show me some science. Until then, here’s what I see: Predator drone pilots sit in a trailer in Arizona or somewhere and push buttons to fire on targets halfway around the world. You couldn’t think of anything more like a video game. Here’s the thing: some of these pilots get PTSD. They know that they are killing real human beings. It affects them the same way it would if they were shooting someone standing right in front of them. As far as I know, no one has ever gotten PTSD from playing Call of Duty, or from shooting at people in a paintball game. Regardless of how good the simulation gets, there is a difference between killing real people and pretending to kill people. Some (not all!) of the killers in these shooting sprees play violent video games. I wonder if they are turning to games because they are looking for, and failing to find, the kind of thrill that they would get from actually killing people?

On another note: if people want violence in media to be toned down a bit, there is a more direct way than government censorship. The ESRB, which rates video games, and the MPAA, which rates movies, both seek to give ratings as a guide for what parents think is appropriate for children. Their standards evolve over time: the MPAA now considers cigarette usage something that will raise the rating of a movie, and consequently you don’t see too many people smoking in PG-13 movies any more. Both agencies have a highest rating that is almost never used—AO for video games and NC-17 for movies. Technically, anyone is free to create something with these ratings (or without a rating at all). But in reality, no one does this because most theaters and stores will not carry the film/game, and therefore it will not make any money. Usually, the game/movie is edited enough to get a lower rating. (This system is a bit controversial, with some saying it creates de-facto infringement of free speech. That’s a different conversation.) Currently, it takes an awful lot of violence to get AO or NC-17 rating; mainly, these ratings are reserved for graphic sexual content. But enough angry letters could probably change that.

Guns

Having said quite a bit about pretend guns, let me switch over to real guns. The people calling for strong gun control need to stop pretending that it is a panacea. Even if we restricted gun ownership to muskets, you could still have another DC Sniper. And even if you could magically make every gun in the universe turn to dust, someone could go on a stabbing spree or make an Oklahoma City style bomb. You could even outlaw murder (I understand they’ve tried this in a few European nations), but people will still find ways to do it. The President says we can’t accept these events as normal, but we have to be realistic and accept that we are never going to be able to completely eliminate them either.

That having been said, I think the science pretty much confirms the common sense idea that the more guns people have, the more people are going to be killed by guns. Or as Christ put it, those who draw the sword will die by the sword. Guns make it fast and easy to kill things, and guns that can unload thirty rounds in five seconds without reloading make it really fast and easy to kill things. I honestly don’t understand why anyone would think we need people walking around the streets with assault rifles. I know, this opinion associates me with left-wing unpatriotic America-hating communists like four-star general Stanley McChrystal, but that’s what I think.

The NRA says the answer to Newtown is to put armed guards in every school in the country. OK, I will grant you this: with armed guards, shooters will be able to kill fewer people before getting killed. But schools aren’t the only place these things happen. Do I need an armed guard when I take my kids to the playground? At my daughter’s preschool? When I go to church? When I go to the mall? Eventually, we get to the point where everyone needs to have an armed guards surrounding them at all times. Which is probably what they’re really after anyway.

The Second Amendment

Any gun control is limited by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the second amendment. Now, let’s be honest about the second amendment. It wasn’t designed to give people the right to defend their homes against criminals. It wasn’t designed to give people the right to hunt. It was designed to give people the right to have weapons so that they could do exactly what the founding fathers did: form a militia to start a civil war if the government became tyrannical. Thomas Jefferson said that bloodshed from civil wars would be the “natural manure” of liberty. Here’s my controversial take on this: I think they kind of got it wrong. I think they vastly underestimated the extent to which the free and open exchange of ideas in a nation of democratically elected officials would become a check on the government. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of press. The first amendment has been so good at preserving liberty that the second amendment hasn’t been a factor. Not that it matters; there would need to be a dozen Sandy Hooks this year for there to even be a hint of a chance of anything happening to the second amendment. I think there are still a bunch of common sense things that can be done without changing the constitution. It’s all a matter of where we draw the line between arms that individuals can keep and bear, and arms that only the military can possess. Currently we draw the line somewhere between an AK-47 and an M1-Abrams.

In the past I have made an introspective blog post on or around the seventeenth of November; I have decided this year should be no different. I wasn’t going to post anything, but then I found something like an outtake from last year’s post that just needed a little polish. This is a reflection inspired by the song In This Diary, by The Ataris. Here is the chorus:

Being grown up isn’t half as fun as growing up
These are the best days of our lives
The only thing that matters is just following your heart
And eventually you’ll finally get it right

Don’t get me wrong—I think this is a great song, and it’s actually the seed to my favorite Pandora station. It is clearly supposed to resonate with young people, and inspire them to carpe the crap out of that diem. But I have always had a problem with the lyrics: even when I first heard the song at twenty-one, I thought, “This can’t be right. I can’t possibly already have the best days of my life behind me.” As of this morning I am thirty-one years old, which I think qualifies as being grown up. And I can say with confidence that being grown up is definitely more fun than growing up, and the growing up years were not the best days of my life. I’m pretty happy with where things are now, and you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back.

And if you’re a teenager and you think that these awful years are somehow the best days of your life: just wait. “It gets better” is not just for the gays.

I have once again made a compact Fall 2012 TV Premiere Schedule (PDF), if anyone would like it. New shows are in bold. This only covers the five main networks. The only things I took out this year were: 7:00-8:00 hour on Sunday, CW and NBC on Sunday, and all networks on Saturday. These times were all sports or local, with the exception of 48 Hours Mystery. If that’s your jam, look it up from one of the links below.

Most of the credit goes to TVGuide.com. I just took this table, added in the premiere dates from this calendar, and spent half an hour formatting it in Excel so that it would look nice on my iPad. It should also look alright if you print it. Here it is in Excel format, if you’d rather have it that way.

Just like in 2008 and 2010, I have taken the Olympics TV schedule and put it into a very compact format that is useful for deciding what to tell your DVR to record. I took the data from this page (because the official NBC site is so poorly designed that it is essentially unusable) and formatted it differently.

2012 London Olympics TV Schedule

Abridged 2012 London Olympics TV Schedule (No boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, soccer, or re-airings. This got it down to two pages.)

All times are for Eastern time zone. Times are in military format (24-hour) because I like it better, and because it fits better. All times are subject to change based on the weather or the whim of the Olympic organizers or NBC execs.

A little over a year ago I wrote an article on how to come up with a secure, easy-to-remember password for every site you visit, even if you aren’t a geek. I would recommend you go read that now if you didn’t the first time around.

This is a follow-up post about something very simple that you can do to make your identity much more secure. But this advice is only for GMail users. If you don’t use GMail, you can stop now. Still with me? Okay. As a GMail user, you can enable two-step verification. This means that whenever you sign in to GMail from a new computer, Google will text you a six-digit verification code which you must also enter. This way, even if someone got your email password, they cannot log in to your email without also having your phone. It sounds like it would be a huge pain, but you really only have to go through two-step authentication once a month, which I have found to be not a big deal at all.

I used to think that this was only for really paranoid people, not for me. I don’t have anything all that confidential in my email. I daresay that if the contents of my GMail were posted to Wikileaks tomorrow, I would only be a little embarrassed by what people could read. But then it was explained to me1 like this:

Your email is the master key to your online identity, everywhere.

Think about it this way: If someone gets access to your email, they have access to everything. For example, say they go to your bank’s website and click the “forgot password” link. Your bank will ask for your email address, then dutifully create a new password for the account associated with that address, then send the new password to that address. Voila- now they can access your bank account!2

When American white people sit around making conversation, something that comes up from time to time is ethnicity. We will each take turns saying what we think is in our blood. For the most part, this is English, Irish, Scottish, or German. From what I’ve seen, you win this game if you’re a little bit Native American. (Maybe you can feel like there’s no blood on your hands if there’s some in your veins?) You also gets points for Jewish ancestry.

I long ago came to the conclusion that I don’t care for this game. Most people are making up their answers anyway, or at least guessing. My response is simply that I’m American. People seem to think that is a bad answer, but how deep do your roots have to go before that becomes your ethnicity? I couldn’t name an ancestor who got off a boat. I’m pretty sure all branches go back a minimum of five generations. One branch for sure goes back well into the early nineteenth century. (I’ve seen the genealogy my great grandfather compiled.)

Even if I had a grandfather from, let’s say, Denmark, how Danish would that even make me? And what if that Danish grandfather had a grandparent that moved to Denmark from Italy? Wouldn’t he be Italian, as much as I am Danish? So then wouldn’t I really be Italian? Surely you see where this is going. There has to be a line somewhere; where I draw it makes me one hundred percent American. Why would anyone want to be anything else?

The CDC has recently started airing a series of “Tips From Former Smokers” ads. Here is one example:

I hate these ads. They tell people who have these throat holes that they are monsters, and tell the rest of us to cast judgement on them. Of course, the commercials don’t mention that it is possible to get throat cancer even if you have never smoked. It is essentially a publicly-funded ad campaign belittling cancer survivors. Imagine if the commercials instead featured people who got lung cancer from smoking and lost all their hair from chemotherapy, and presented them as monsters. That’s not really very different from what they are doing.

I’m not even sure who they are trying to reach or how they think these commercials will be effective. No one who has started smoking in the last forty years has been under the impression that it is safe, right? Cigarettes are dangerous. We all get it. Trying to tell people something they already know can’t be that effective.

This year’s trip to Oak Island has come to a close.  Here are seventy-seven photos from this week. As a loyal reader of my blog, you will get these photos a whole day earlier than the people who only care about me on Facebook. Thanks! I also included a few extra photos that are more artsy on the website which won’t be going on Facebook. (And by “more artsy”, I mean no humans are in them.) Enjoy.

One of the main uses of this website nowadays, for me, is to serve as a digital photo album that I access from my phone. Everytime I did this, I was reminded of just how out-of-date my photos are when viewed on a mobile phone. When I would hand it to people, I would have to instruct them on how to advance to the next photo. The text was too small to read on a phone. So I decided to do something about it.

A few weeks ago I set out to create a new version of my photo-viewing page that works with smart phones. I opted not to use jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch, just because they felt like overkill for what I was doing. After a little Googling I found that there really is not that much to it. You just listen for HTML5 touchstart, touchmove, and touchend events. So now I have a photo album that behaves a lot like the native photos app: swipe left or right to move through photos, tap a photo to view title/caption/timestamp. Tapping also displays forward/backward navigation buttons. It all works in a desktop browser too, but you can’t swipe. (At one point I emulated touch events with mouse events, but I disabled it because it was kind of weird. Keyboard left/right buttons work though!)

I’ve also played around with the HTML 5 History API, so the URL in the address bar updates itself even though the browser hasn’t actually loaded a new URL. And you can use the browser’s forward/back buttons to navigate. It’s pretty cool!

A few caveats: I’ve mainly tested on iOS. I did cursory testing on a coworker’s Android and everything seems to work. Windows Mobile is broken pretty severely. Nothing will work with Javascript disabled. I’m no longer worried if Google can’t index me, and everyone else enables Javascript, so I dropped support for the plain-old HTML version.

If you run into any issues let me know!

Today North Carolina votes on Amendment One. It’s touted as the gay marriage amendment, but the fact is that no one in North Carolina today voted to either make gay marriage legal or illegal. Your options in this vote, if you chose to vote, were: “Against”, meaning keep gay marriage illegal; or “For”, meaning make gay marriage even more illegal than it is now. I’ll be surprised if the amendment doesn’t pass. It is on the ballot during the primary election in a year when there is a real republican primary but there is not a democratic one. But even if it doesn’t pass, gay marriage will still be illegal in North Carolina.

The theory, I believe, is that if it is an amendment, not a law, then it will be harder for future generations to overturn it. But is anyone really myopic enough to believe that? Can’t we all see where this is going? In fifteen or twenty years the Supreme Court is going to rule that it is unconstitutional for the government to prohibit gay marriage. Then it will be legal in North Carolina, and every other state, whether it is a law or an amendment.

And my great grandchildren are going to look at my generation and say “why did they hate the gay people so much?”  The same way my generation looks at the greatest generation and says “why did they hate the black people so much?”

I posted a variation of that last paragraph on Facebook today, but I’ve since deleted it because I got tired of trying to keep it civil in the comments, and Facebook doesn’t allow you to close comments on your posts. (For the record, the uncivil comments I deleted were both from the pro-gay-marriage side.)