Carl Zetie

Stories By Carl Zetie

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  Social Media

  Social Media By Carl Zetie

  The seven people you meet on Facebook (and wish you didn't)

  At the beginning of December, I quit Facebook cold-turkey. There was no single big, dramatic, catalyst; just the growing realization that I had little I wanted to share anymore. And then finally one morning I realized that the only reason I was still checking in was to see how many Likes my posts and comments had garnered. It had become purely an exercise in intellectual vanity. So I stopped. A month later there are times I still occasionally miss Facebook, but I definitely don't miss these people: the seven people who suck the fun out of any post or comment thread. 1.The political inactivist. Their contribution to public policy is to re-post smug slogans from a variety of partisan political sites -- most of which boil down to "our side good, their side bad" -- while adding no insight or nuance of their own, then acting like they've made a real contribution to the public debate or the success of a campaign. Even when you agree with their politics, you find yourself slightly ashamed of the company you're keeping. 2. The one-trick pony. No matter the thread, they'll find a way to bring it back to their own unique area of expertise: "Taylor Swift's new single? That reminds me of the time I was leading the penguin census in Patagonia...". 3. The Wikipedophile. The one-trick pony's mirror image, there is no topic on which they don't have a contribution to make and an opinion to share. Unfortunately, their knowledge of the subject was gathered entirely in the last fifteen minutes with a Google search and reading the top three hits, one of which is the same Wikipedia article you just read for yourself. 4.The factually-challenged. OK, they admit that maybe the Hollywood star didn't say that after all, but it's the kind of thing he would have said, so it still counts, right? And yes, alright, that thing about Congressional pensions was materially incorrect in every important way, but can't we still all agree to be as outraged as if it were? No. Let's limit our anger to things that are actually true, shall we? 5. The grammar pedant. Even as you read this, somebody else already broke off to write an angry comment about the hyphen in "factually-challenged" above. Sure, we can all get irritated by people who confuse "their" and "there", but honestly, when somebody complains that a sentence used "insure" when "ensure" was intended, all they are really doing is bragging about their own knowledge, not improving anybody else's understanding. The pedant insists that although English is a living language, the only place and time it was ever really written properly was in their English Composition class in high school (however long ago that was). 6. The angry atheist. Not satisfied with their own choice to not believe in God, they won't be happy until everybody else rejects religion too -- the root of all evil, in their minds. These people are the reason I became an apatheist: I really don't care whether or not there's a God (or gods), or whether anybody else believes in Him, Her, It, or Them, as the case may be. The best part about being an apatheist is that it annoys militant atheists and religious fundamentalists in equal measure. 7. Me. Yes, I've done all of the above myself, and probably worse too. The more I looked back over my posts and comments, not to mention the ones I had the rare good sense to discard before posting, the less I liked Facebook Me. Frankly, if I met Facebook Me online I'd un-friend him. So I did.

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  News

  News By Carl Zetie

  IT nightmares: the hot zone

  Back in the mists of time -- OK, the late 1980s -- I was working in tech support for a minicomputer manufacturer. (Readers under 40: ask your parents what a minicomputer was.) One of our new clients was having persistent problems with disk corruption and data loss, which was baffling all of us because our machines were famously robust, even in electrically noisy industrial environments. Eventually, the higher-ups decided that a site visit was called for, so as the most junior person on the team, I was pried loose from my terminal and dispatched. I arrived at the customer location and was greeted in the lobby by my contact. "You'll need to remove your shoes and put these on", he told me, handing me white overshoes, hooded overalls, and surgical gloves. "The computer is in the Clean Room", he added. Now I was even more confused: my first guess had been a dirty environment causing disk heads to foul -- in those days, the gap between heads and disks was so large that dust could mean disaster, and smoking around disk drives was an absolute no-no. But in a clean room? So dressed up like doomed extras from a plague movie on the SyFy channel we passed through a positive pressure airlock into a modestly sized lab that looked as computer-safe as you could possibly wish. A few of our minis sat on benches around the room, floppy disks shelved alongside them. Small, anonymous capsules about the size of a medicine bottle sat on top of the computers and disk boxes. "So, what do you do here?", I asked out of curiosity. "We make radioactive materials for medical work. Tracers, and so on. In here we do we calibration checks on samples." "Uh, these little bottles are radioactive?", I stuttered. "Only mildly", he smiled. "Don't worry, we scan you on the way out just in case. Why?", he asked, picking up one of the bit-killer-emitter bottles from the top of the disk box and setting it down on an eight inch floppy disk that was lying on the bench. "Is that a problem?".

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  Tomorrow

  Tomorrow By Carl Zetie

  Athens and Sparta: An Open Source Parable

  Among all the city-states of Classical Greece, the most famous are certainly Athens and Sparta. Sometimes allies, often enemies, despite their shared language and culture, these two could not have been more different. So in the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, who ultimately emerged the winner? In the 5th century BCE, the dominant city-state was Sparta. It was hierarchical, authoritarian and ruled by tyrannical kings and aristocrats. It's greatest cultural values were discipline and conformity, and the kings of this highly militaristic state were also its generals. Sparta was incredibly effective at concentrating its resources to conquer a chosen goal – the phrase "the tip of the spear" could have been invented for it. As a result, Spartans were feared in battle across the Greek world, and Sparta was able to impose its military will on its neighbors. But then, Athens began to rise to prominence and oppose the hegemony of Sparta. It became a famous center of creativity in the arts, learning and philosophy, home to Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum. Athens also gave the ancient world Socrates, Pericles, Sophocles and many more philosophers, writers and politicians. Its schools and forums were often lively, open-air marketplaces for competing ideas. It thrived on creative chaos. Even more remarkable were its experiments in democracy that included a unique combination of direct and representative democracy: everybody was expected to participate in and contribute to Athenian civic life. In stark contrast to Sparta's general-kings, Athens elected its generals according to the needs of each war. For a century, Athens and Sparta were in almost constant conflict for dominance of the Greek world, pausing occasionally and briefly to unite against a common enemy. Finally, in 404BCE, Athens was defeated for good and fell under Spartan rule. So did this mean that Sparta had won? Not exactly: Sparta's dominance was short-lived. Neither Athens nor Sparta ever fully recovered from the costs and destruction of their wars, which impoverished most of the Greek world and ushered in the beginning of the end of the era of Greek city-states. So if both Sparta and Athens lost, who won? While Sparta and Athens were exhausting themselves in civil war, far to the west a small village called Rome was growing into a regional power. Rome was something strange and new: it borrowed many ideas from the Greeks, but had no real artistic culture of it's own. Its sculpture, painting and poetry were second-rate derivations, sometimes even direct copies, of the works of the Greeks. It contributed no significant advances in mathematics or science, and barely anything to philosophy. Even the gods that the Romans claimed to worship were obvious imitations of the Greek pantheon. And yet, the Romans were exceptional engineers, great builders and implementers of others' ideas, and unsurpassed practical problem solvers. When it came to delivering water, building highways, bridging rivers, or fortifying walls, and doing so on scales never before imagined, Rome was in a league of its own. While the Greeks declined, Rome conquered a vast empire, convincing native populations almost everywhere that it was in their best interests to assimilate into Roman ways. In the end, neither Sparta nor Athens won: both lost to Rome. The moral of the story: In today's tech world, Athens is Open Source; Sparta is traditional commercial vendors; and Rome is... well, it depends on where you stand. When I first wrote this piece, I had Microsoft in mind. Today, perhaps Amazon is a better fit. Will the outcome be the same? Or will Athens and Sparta realize they have a common enemy?

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