I have a deep dislike for CNN. A lot of it is due to high standards I hold news casters to, but still, a lot of my criticism is (I feel) objectively deserved.

The most recent thing is the superfluous and distracting practice CNN adopted of showing a footage of something by filming it being shown on a screen! This makes no sense to me (unlike weather there is no reason for the presenter to point outto something) and seems like a purely aesthetic choice CNN made. Yet it’s dumb- it presents lower-quality footage (both due to double sampling–I can even sometimes detect the de Moivre patterns–and less real estate to show the footage) that’s usually also displayed in perspective.

I find it frustrating (alas, it might be a necessary evil) that most of the places I need to visit to get things done happen to be open precisely when I need to be at work. Banks, plumbers, electricians, the DMV, the post office, even my bike shop. There is a sliver of hope- some of these places are open on Saturdays (which means no fun Friday night if I want to get things done), but that’s a very faint silver lining. I will concentrate on banks because they are the worst, usually open between 9am and 4pm with a one-hour lung break in between. I can’t imagine the tellers being busy at all in a bank branch. How many customer may be coming to the bank during the day? And for those that do, think about the wasted GDP by having these people have to go to the bank during work hours. Terrible.

I’ve noticed some forms (especially government forms dealing e.g. with applications for visas) start asking for nationity at birth. Presumably this is because it’s no longer sufficient to be, say, a U.S. Citizen, now your parents would have had to be. And since the forms are asking for this kind of information, there is nontrivial probability that in some cases this information is used to make a decision. This is bad at two levels, in my view: it puts my life even less in my control (previously when, say, U.S. Citizenship sufficed to get fast-tracked for a visa, now something entirely independent of me–and something that I can’t change no matter how hard I try; no matter how much effort I’m willing to put proving my good intent), and it effectively decreases the privileges of the title of U.S. Citizenship (if geting U.S. Citizenship won’t get me fast-tracked for a visa, its value has been reduced in my eyes, but also in the eyes of current U.S. Citizens. It’s as if there was another title, “Super U.S. Citizenship”, that you can only get if you were a U.S. Citizen at birth.

I’m not saying anything new here. Speed limits have become more like guidelines these days. Initially set in the 70s to make people save on gas that was expensive, with cars muc less safe and fuel efficient than today. The law is outdated, and doesn’t reflect reality anymore. Worse, drivers realize this- there is not a day when everyone in the left lane of a highway goes 70 in a 55 zone. Going 5 to 10 over has become a kind of grace amount.

By itself it’s not that bad, but its implications are large: drivers start ignoring rules thinking them obsolete or not law. And this creates a dangerous precedent that can spill over to other areas of the law, where the rules in place are there for a good reason.

The mini Jack is unquestionably the standard for (non-hi-fi) audio connections. Virtually every headset in the world has it; it’s extensible (just count the number of rings on the plug- if it’s two, you have a standard stereo plug (two sources of information). If it’s three, the plug has been extended and probably has additional features that the device knows how to understand; the iPhone, for example, uses the third channel for the microphone and for control commands to e.g. pause the song being currently played. If you’re smart, you can confuse the system, or listen to that third channel by incompletely plugging in the headset; the chances are, however, that the control commands are encoded wit high frequency tones) and backwards-compatible.

So why do so many inputs use some strange, proprietary shapes? A lot of airplanes split the two channels into two mono channels and you need the F-shaped plug (which you usually get from the flight attendants anyway, with a converter). Why aren’t engineers pushing for more standardization?