My past few years with Apple

As the title suggests, what follows is a laundry list of the annoyances and difficulties I've experienced using Apple products over the past few years:


The IPod
1. Received an iPod shuffle, 2nd Gen, nicely engrave with my handle :)
2. (2 months old) the IPod clip, while clipped to my waist, gets a severe bend. I manage to bend it back with pliers, but it never clips as well again.
3. (5 months old) iPod stops interfacing properly with the Mac. When plugged in, it's orange light continues to blink, and it does recharge, but does not appear on my system so I can't change songs. I proceed through all of Apple's troubleshooting suggestions, though most of them talk about resetting the iPod software using a program that also cannot detect there's an iPod connected.
4. (11 months old) After not using the iPod for about six months, I call tech support, who are quite helpful and agree to send me a new docking cable. The cable arrives, doesn't solve the problem, so tech support agrees to send a replacement iPod. I'm given a choice between getting it sooner or waiting longer to have the replacement engraved. I choose the engraving; the replacement iPod arrives unengraved.

The MacBook
1. Purchase a brand new MacBook online; it arrives promptly and complete.
2. (Day 1) Notice that the mouse button is sticking in a horrible way. Apple website says to take it in to the Apple store; another forum is full of posts saying the Apple store doesn't do anything, but it can be fixed by putting a small piece of folder paper behind the battery. This works.
3. (Week 1) Plastic begins chipping off the front edge of the keyboard plate.
4. (Month 1) Battery stops connecting entirely. Take Mac to the Apple Store in London for a replacement. Days a couple of days, but they do it all under warranty and also replace the chipped keyboard plate free of charge.
5. (Month 1 + 1 Week) Keyboard plate begins chipping again.
6. (Month 3-present) Mac randomly decides to restart when lid is closed
7. (Month 6) First power cord stops working. Purchase a new one.
8. (Month 8) Second power cord stops working. Call to get a replacement from Tech Support. They say that the cord is covered, but I'll need to pay $40 for shipping. I ask to speak with a manager, and that $40 charge soon goes away.
7. (Year 1.2) Battery stops working entirely. Apple store suggests I take machine to my nearest apple store, and helpfully tells me that it's in Toronto (I'm on Vancouver Island).
8. (Year 1.2) I set machine up to save its state and hibernate when the lid is closed in order to not have to restart it every time it's unplugged. This requires waiting for it to sleep when I'm finished and for it to wake up when I want to start again. I still must restart and lose work whenever the magnetic power cord pops out, which is designed to happen quite easily.
9. (Year 1.3) Third power cord stops working, it's head frayed off completely. Tech support sends me a new one.
10. (Year 1.5) The same old battery manages to reconnect. Only has about four minutes of life at full charge, often dying before or as the "low battery" warning came up. But, I now had enough time to replug in the power cord before losing work, so I was happy.
11. (Year 1.7) A new problem begins, in which when waking up from hibernation, the keyboard is completely inactive. Sometime it comes back if I wait about five minutes, normally I must either restart or rehibernate and wake up again.
11. (Year 2) Chips have continued to regularly fall of the plastic at the edges. At this point about half of the keyboard plate's edges are gone, the monitor plate is chipped in three places and cracked straight across in two places at the top.
12. (Year 2.3) Forth power cord stops working, with atrocious timing, and I have to purchase a new one in order to use the machine—I opt for a third party model. I call tech support for a replacement regardless, in order to have a spare.

The Magical Negro

I was recently exposed to the concept of "The Magical Negro", a tv and movie trope in which a white protagonist is aided by a African character. Often, this character will possess some variety of super-natural powers, be disabled and/or of visibly low status, and be patient and wise. This aid will be entirely altruistic, purely out of the goodness of the character's heart, and will often be the only contribution of that character to the story.

And it's true that endless examples of this can be found. From Will Smith in "The Legend of Bagger Vance", to The Oracle in "The Matrix", to Whoopi Goldberg on "Star Trek: TNG", to Morgan Freeman in "Robin Hood", to Morgan Freeman in "The Shawshank Redeption", to Morgan Freeman in "Bruce/Evan Almighty...

Yet somehow this didn't sit well with me: not the phenomenon but the very concept itself. "Aren't we supposed to strive towards not seeing colour?" I though, though that's a rather arrogant view if this truly indicates a problem.

Eventually I realised that I was uncomfortable with how the question is being posed, implicitly asking "How many examples of this character being black can you think of?" And, lo and behold, a slew of black examples are returned as the answer. I wondered what one might find if, on the other hand, one searched for such characters from any ethic background?

So that's what I did. Went through my list of favourite movies, noting where I could each character that fit the definition above, the results of which are in the table at the end of this post, and a racial summary shown in the chart at left. This wasn't a formal study, of course, and from about 250 films only 30 characters came to mind. Part of the difficulty again stems from the definition of a "magical helper". The help offered must be altrustic, i.e. not befitting the character himself—at the same time, the character is defined as one-dimensional, with no background, existing solely to help the protangonists. But, without knowing the character's background, how can we know his reasons for helping? For example, in "It's a Wonderful Life", (spoilers ahead), we know Clarence helps George Bailey in order to get his wings—had the story not given us that background on Clarence, would his help then become altruistic, and his character become a magical helper?

Despite that, from these rough results in seems that far more of these characters are Caucasian than of African origin; in fact, the number of these helpful characters played by black-skinned people is about the same as the number played by animals. And this shows the crux of my issue with this question: what would be the "correct" percentage of African characters to play this part? If examples of this character were invariably white, wouldn't the complaint become that Africans are never shown as altruistic characters with the virtues of patience and understanding? I posit that there is no "correct" ratio of ethnicity here, no more than there would be a correct ratio of hair-length, age, occupation or anything else unrelated to the character's part in the story.

Role	Actor	Race
Red	Morgan Freeman	African American
The Wolf	Harvey Keitel	Caucasian
Obi Wan Kenobi	Alec Guiness	Caucasian
R2D2 & C3P0	--	Robot
Motivational Speaker	Brian Cox	Caucasian
Tim Roth's Supervisor	--	African American
Oogway	--	Animal
Various sea creatures	--	Animal
Miracle Max & Wife	Billy Crystal	Caucasian
Silent Bob	Kevin Smith	Caucasian
Turnip Head the Scarcrow	--	Object
Journalist	Philip Seymour Hoffman	Caucasian
The Sphinx	Wes Studi	Native American
Rufus	George Carlin	Causcasian
S. R. Hadden	John Hurt	Caucasian
Shepherd Book	Ron Glass	African American
Nick	Robert Prosky	Caucasian
Sylva	Natascha McElhone	Caucasian
Curly Washburn	Jack Palance	Caucasian
The Hermit	Tommey Tweed	Caucasian
Gaby LaRoche	Syme Jago	Caucasian
Sebastian	Samuel E. Wright	Animal
Lisle Von Rhoman	Isabella Rossellini	Caucasian
Peter Malloy	Tom Selleck	Caucasian
Mary Poppins	Julie Andrews	Caucasian
Nikola Tesla	David Bowie	Caucasian
Wilson	Volleyball	Object
Andrew the Butler	Roddy McDowall	Caucasian
Del Paxton	Bill Cobbs	African American

Random Shopping Algorithm

This is a problem I've ran into a number of times yet have never found a happy solution to. I've coined it the "Random Shopping Algorithm", and the set up is as follows:

Given a certain amount of money and presented with a collection of items, each with a different cost, the algorithm should return a random group of items to purchase whose total is the amount of money given.

Just pick items at random until the money is exhausted does not work, as it won't select "many cheap items" as often as it should. For example, consider the case with $20 and two items: A, costing $10; and B, costing $1. There are three possible outcomes:

1. Buy 20 As
2. Buy 10 A and 1 Bs
3. Buy 2 Bs

The algorithm should come up with these three outcomes with equal probability. If you simply select the item to purchase with equal weighting, chances are you will end up with outcome 2 more often than option 1, and rarely see option 3 at all.

Because of this, I tried varying the probably at which each item is selected, hoping to find a point where all three outcomes had an equal chance. That this doesn't work is probably not too hard to see, but the detailed results are shown in fig 1. This means that a simple re-weighting of the items based on their cost is not sufficient, and perhaps the weighting will have to chance as items are purchased.

The brute force method of accomplishing this is to create a comprehensive list of all possible purchase-sets, and then merely select an item at random. This would obviously be very slow and become slower as more items are added, so is not practical for the general case. Starting with this concept may however be helpful in finding a more efficient algorithm.

On Gratuitous Notions

Welcome

I've created this blog as a place to get whatever thoughts are in my head down on paper, so to speak. I expect the topics to cover a wide spectrum, from controversial issues to game reviews to personal experiences: whatever I feel inclined to write about at the time. Instead of giving myself complete freedom, I'm aiming for weekly posts, but we'll see how it goes :-)

On Abortion

With Sarah Palin joining the republican ticket, abortion's once again become a hot topic. I'm going to attempt to summarise my own stance and describe the arguments from each side.

First of all, I detest the emotive language that has developed around the issue. The terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are seeped in derogatory vitriol. Of course the "pro-choice" crowd aren't against life in any general sense, nor are the "pro-life" advocates against people having a general freedom of choice. These terms simply cause anger, further division and defensiveness in both camps, and don't at all help us to find an affective compromise. Unfortunately, such is the nature of language that complicated positions must be striped down to simple terms, so with reluctance I will accept their use.

Any examination of the abortion debate must start with the deceptively simple question, "When does life begin?" How one answers this question almost completely decides where they will fall in any discussion of abortion. The two most common answers are: A) at conception, or B) at birth. Like all controversial issues, it is impossible to prove this central question one way or the other: is life within the womb truly life? Or is the loss of a potential life a tragedy that must be avoided at all costs? I certainly don't have the answers, and personally believe that no one does.

That's the issue from the point of view of the fetus; the other side is of course that of the mother. Most would agree that each woman has the sole right to decide what can and can not happen within her body, but the central question becomes "Is a fetus part of a woman's body?" A rigorous scientific examination of that question would probably be inconclusive, but in this case I think the obvious answer is more than sufficient: anything within a person's body is part of that person.

But, if we decide that a woman the sole person allowed to make choices for within her own body, and that a fetus is alive from the point of conception, are we effectively giving women the right to murder their fetuses? I think we are, and that that is actually alright. It's not unprecedented, either. We give police the right to shoot criminals in certain situations, and soldiers the right to murder those of opposing army and even accept a certain amount of innocent civilian casualties—we might not approve of them, but we certainly don't try the soldiers for murder. And that's not even considering the amount of acceptable murder of animals for food, hunting, or development.

In summary, I do believe that terminating a fetus is ending a life, but that that is acceptable as no one else can say what a woman chooses to do within her own body. Consider the alternative: if abortions where illegal, one small accident—a drunken mistake, forgetting a pill, a weak condom—could leave a woman with the life-long burden of a child. It's a wonderful burden, to be sure, but also a financial and social one. That seems to me a punishment far out of proportion for such a small indiscretion. I know that life isn't always fair, but I thought the goal of a civilization was to create a society of fairness and justice for all.