Random Thoughts From A Worldly Primate

This post is a blatant ripoff of the frighteningly insightful knowledge-bombs frequently dropped over at Apes In Elysium, which you should be reading instead of this piffle.

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The only real-world use I have ever got out of the Irish language is impressing foreigners or talking about them. This is all I ever expect to get out of it. That so many of my peers are incapable of stringing a basic sentence together in Irish strengthens the notion I've held for years that we are pissing away millions of man-hours keeping a braindead language on life-support. This time and money could - and should! - be put to much better use elsewhere. Traditions be damned, keep a few experts trained up and leave it at that.

Oh, Internet

If you're a tech-savvy, intelligent person, it's a great time to be a shopper.

It excites me that I can walk into a store, browse through the offerings, and scan the barcode with my smartphone to pull up price-comparisons across physical and online outlets. It's the cutting edge of subversive thrills.

One category where the gulf between online and retail prices is at its most gaping is cables. This applies to any kind of cables, but Audio/Video cables seem to be subject to the most marketing nonsense and price hikes. Since HDMI cables are (arguably) the most convenient way of hooking up your high-definition equipment, they're subject to the most egregious price inflation.

Monster cables have long been a target of internet watchdogs for their often shady practices of comparing their HDMI cables to archaic composite cables, then using this evidence to charge customers $80, when the exact same thing is available online for less than a dollar apiece. Bear in mind that these are digital cables - any claims of double-insulation or gold-tips increasing the fidelity is utterly bogus.

It seems that some enterprising company asshole has seen their scam and decided to crank it up to 11.

Three and a half feet of cable for $1,095.99! That's 5768 times more expensive than the $0.19 I paid for my cables, which were twice as long! The blurb had better be impressive:

Oh boy. Well that's a load of impressive-looking piffle. Let's hope that the last line of defense keeping fools and their money united is vigilant. To the customer reviews!

Urk. All the reviews are 5 stars, and a full two thirds would recommend the product to a friend. At least we can read the text of the reviews as a case study of cognitive dissonance in action!

At least that's what you'd think. Read past the gushing headlines like 'Amazing!', 'Your Life Can Change Too!' and 'Not just a cable, an investment!', and you'll find a consistent subtle (and not so subtle) ironic tone in each of the reviews.

They take on the persona of materialistic luddites trying to regurgitate sales pitches:

Similar to a BMW (or if you remember from the golden age of automobiles the classic ‘Monza’), this will only increase in value as time goes by. So I would definitely recommend this cable. But with one caveat… only use it when important guests are over say of a caliber such as Donald Trump. Do not use it for run-of-the-mill every day guests. If you overuse it, the quality of the signal may eventually degrade and of course that would affect the resell value down the road.

They heavy handedly satire the kind of heavy handed marketing nonsense that is crammed down the consumer's throats:

I bought this HDMI cable around Christmas time. Even though I just had a small 20-inch vacuum tube television and VCR-laserdisc combo player, my favorites immediately were up-converted to High Definition. I've honestly never seen Mulan like that before. Now I don't have to imagine what it would have been like to face the Huns - I can experience it every Thursday night in the comfort of my own home.

They take the mickey out of the steepness of the pricetag:

After a few months I have finaly saved up to buy this cable... lets just say I am thrilled! Definately worth the buy, it is a very pretty cable. Now I am saving up for my TV.

These six reviewers have silenced that part of my brain fretting about the plight of misled buffoons, and have caused me to bookmark this page for the eventual angry 1-star review taking the others to task for their enthusiasm for a worthless product.

There's a lot more on the product page that I haven't posted, so check it out if you want to witness a well established subversive shopper behaviour.

Law #45 of Internet Commentators

A common problem with reporting on the importance of scientific findings is that the PR department responsible for spreading the word has a tendency to overstate the significance of the research in order to gain the attention of the newspapers, which is then further spruced up by the papers so as to be noticed by the readers.

This results in such frothsome headlines:

As I'm aware of the laws governing Internet commentators, I know that anything pertaining to space and alien-life is going to bring out the conspiracy-theory whackjobs. I couldn't even finish the article before skipping down to the comments section:

I love the internet.

Old News: The practice of Irish oneupmanshit

I've always maintained that anything the yanks can do, we Irish can do too. We just do it shittier.

Television shows. Fashion. Women. Roads. Obesity epidemics. Anything they do, we Irish will chance a second-rate knockoff.

One thing that the nutbag yanks like to do is manufacture controversies about the theory of evolution's veracity. Let's have a look at an Irish take on this phenomenon, eh?

One of the more notable items from the news in Ireland last week was the short sightedness of Conor Lenihan, who is our Minister for Science (among other responsibilities) for agreeing to launch a creationist book. The inevitable backpedalling? He was attending in his "capacity as friend", not as a person with intellectual responsibility. Shitty Irish politics from a shitty Irish politician.

There was a bit of a shitstorm that played out on the blogs, columns, and letters pages, but what caused it?

A manic depressive by the name of John J May.

John J May has self-published a pathetic treatise on why evolution is a sham, called "The Origin of Specious Nonsense". He is promoting it with a series of inane videos on YouTube in which he lists some incredible scientific facts about reproduction, and argues that the mere act of considering these vast odds proves that the theory of evolution is false.

He's a shitty author, a shitty thinker, and he has a very shitty website. Let's look at the website, in all it's 2001 school-of-web-design splendour:

Not pictured: Terrible Soundtrack

The site has a dazzling range of keywords to lure in the punters. Including "evolution, birth death, charles darwin [...] Sam Harris, Daniel C Dennett [...] religeon, muslim, orthodox faith, atheism, life, babies, pregnancy, cancer." (And yes, they misspelt "religion" in the keywords.)

Of course, the effort to cast a wide net with the keywords has been nullified by the background music that can't be disabled, thus making spending any time on this website even more of a chore than it ought to be. Since the website is clearly a steaming pile of excrement, the author has wisely decided to over-compensate with breathless enthusiasm for the book's content: "You will be shocked, mocked,amazed, dazed, confused, amused, enraged, engaged, but most of all thrilled and mentally fulfilled by the information you are about to read.. After 18 years research & 18 months writing comes" THE ORIGIN OF SPECIOUS NONSENSE""

I'll hold for a moment if you want to take a quick vomiting break.

All flushed out? Jolly good.

Perhaps being aware of the popularity of lists on the internet, the author has compiled the seven reasons that he "rejects and detests evolution". Here comes the science!

1: It teaches us to be satisfied with - not understanding origins.

2: It promotes the dangerous nonsense of no first cause - no supreme scientist and suggests order came from disorder.

3: It is a metaphysical speculation, a doctrine dressed up in scientific garb.

4: Anyone who teaches evolution is either ignorant or deliberately suppressing the known scientific facts.

5: It is a toxic poisonous mind virus which destroys the hearts immune system against hope and common sense.

6: It is an anesthetic against reason.

7: It cripples sanity, promotes myths, obscures reality and elevates matter above a maker.

Actually, wait a sec. These are all emotional reasons! This troglodyte has no interest in a scientific discussion, despite his repeated appeals to reason and sanity. This jackoff deserves no interest from me, you, or the media. Those of us itching to have a dance-off between the forces of enlightenment and medieval superstition can go home disappointed. This lunatic represents no threat to the theory of evolution, his appearance on the radar serves only to highlight the incompetence of yet another Irish politician.

I'm going to leave the last word to Dr. Steven Novella, from last week's Skeptic's Guide to the Universe:

"Have you guys taken a look at John J May's book or website? This guy is the living embodiment of the arrogance of ignorance - the Dunning Kruger effect [...]" The less able you are to assess your own stupidity, the smarter you think you are."

Yep. Sounds fairly spot on.