Tag Archives: Facebook

IFL Science grows up.

I used to follow an Australian science blog, called “I Fucking Love Science.” Elise Andrew and her crew scanned the literature with a keen eye for the interesting. They regularly posted to Facebook and alerted science nerds like me to all sorts of new science bits with minimal commentary, minimal advertisements, and no politics. On average they found 6 or 8 really interesting posts, per week, generally one or two on fundamental physics, one or two on materials, one or two on biology or medicine, one or two astronomy, perhaps a chemistry post. My post about the color of the sky on Mars was ignited by a picture of the Mars sky that I saw on IFL Science — the sky was yellow, and I had just written about why the sky on earth was blue, and not green.

But, as with all quirky things, this one matured. The name changed to “IFL Science” — a change that I suspect was designed to promote sharing. There were more advertisements, and click bait — “this starlet lost a ton of weight,” “you won’t believe what this famous person’s partner looks like now,” etc. And there was politics, vaguely presented as science. Ms Andrew wrote more and more of herself, making herself into a personality whose travels and speaking tours would interest us. And there were non-science, guest bloggers too: People telling you who to vote for and more importantly who to vote against. All for the good of the world, she said, but it was her opinion, and not what I’d gone to IFL for.

The science got less technical, too and more popular. More pretty pictures and misleading headlines. Currently there is no math, no equations, no chemical diagrams. A top story of this week told of a semi-interesting approach for women with constipation — something that “would change everything.” When you click on the story, you find that women put their finger in their vagina and work out the poop that way, something called “splinting.” It’s sort of science, but not the sort that made me love science. Another top story — the top one from today is as follows:

Top story from IFL science today, Feb 28, 2021. Is there really no fuel use? No. The fuel is a battery, and the speed in 4m/s (9mph), and the plane looks nothing like this.

If you follow the links to here, it turns out that the plane (unmanned) looks nothing like this. It uses electric energy from a battery to move ionized air rearward at an efficiency far lower than with a propeller. The forward speed is 4 m/s (9 mph) and the maximum distance covered was 55m, half a Canadian football field. As presented in IFL science, it’s a misleading, non-math clickbait for something that’s interesting engineering — sort of. As for being Star Trek like, no. To move this plane, you need air.

I’m sorry, you can not make quantum mechanics for dummies. No dummy will understand it. You can make a book that’s not quantum mechanics for dummies, or a quantum book not for dummies. Just saying.

In the treatment of the work of the recent Noble laureates, IFL Science didn’t talk about the work so much as the biographies of the people, and their struggles, and that two of the people who won Nobels for their work in biology were women — for an advance related to CRISPERS– but that wasn’t science. I’d prefer to know what the advance was, and how it works. I’d prefer to figure out that these were women from their names or from the pronouns like, “she” or “her”. There was also no information about other two researchers (males, I assume, or perhaps females who had less-interesting biographies?). It was the same with the Physics Nobel except that I already knew there was a black hole at the center of the galaxy, and that those who found it are long dead. Instead the Note Prize was being awarded for a photograph of the black hole. Interesting (sure doesn’t look like a black hole to me). Is there something they learn from the photo. I’ve noted that we are likely within a black hole, and I show why this is using some, not too difficult math.

Having griped along this way, I have to say that that IFL isn’t that bad, it’s just non-mathy, popular, and a little grown up. That’s sad, but it’s not toxic. Grownups make money, and please customers, and that’s how it goes. To quote a wonderful book, The outsiders, “Nothing gold can stay.” In my own blog, I try to be more math-y, and more science-y. My model is Isaac Asimov, a writer who excited me to love science from when I was 8 to when I entered college, nine years later (1972). He would die of AIDS from a transfusion, 20 years after that.

Robert Buxbaum, February 28, 2021

Chinese billionaires keep disappearing with facebook twitter’s help. Alibaba’s Jack Ma is the latest.

Jack Ma, disappeared billionaire owner of Alibaba.

Every 25 years or so, for the past 1500 years China gets a new dictator who rounds up the rich and famous for loyalty trials, imprisonment. and worse. This was true of Li Ping following Tianamin Square, and Mao Zedong who killed some 75 million as part of his 10,000 flowers, great leap purges. The current dictator, Jenping Xi. Like, has been rounding up anyone he worries about, and that’s basically anyone he might worry about. The latest is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, China’s version of e-bay and Amazon. Until his disappearance, he was the richest person in China.

Ma had not been seen in public since October 2020, when he and two top lieutenants of Alibaba were called to meet with regulators. He reappeared months later in a 40 second video (some say a hostage video) to say he is more rested now, and that he is positive that China’s regulators do not stifle innovation. As typical for China, there is no information about his whereabouts. What’s novel is that US media companies are involved helping Xi to trace potential opposition and keep questions out of the press. This includes Google, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as US media outlets.

71st Cannes Film Festival - Screening of the film "Ash Is Purest White" (Jiang hu er nv) in competition - Red Carpet Arrivals - Cannes, France, May 11, 2018. Fan Bingbing poses.
China’s biggest starlet, Fan Bingbing, vanished from sight and the internet for months. She may have said something critical, but has reappeared and recanted it.

In the past the news and social media would have been full of negative comments about China, and Ma’s detention , both from within and without. Now there is hardly anything and what little there is, is mildly positive about Xi. For three months there have been no e-mail or published tweets or Facebook posts from Ma or his lieutenants. Similarly, there is no room for negative speculation within China, and little within the US. The company’s planned IPO was cancelled, one that could have been the richest in history, but this fact got virtually no press, not in China, not in the US. Regulators cancelled it just two days before the start of trading. You’d expect screams from inside and outside China; instead, the story has been covered only briefly by CNN and the Financial Times, generally putting a pro-China spin on it. They stress the importance of regulations and avoiding monopolies, and don’t mention that Alibaba competes with Amazon, e-bay and Walmart. The expectation is that Ma and his higher-ups will be found guilty of monopoly trading and abuse of power. Under Xi, these crimes that have sent corporate leaders to prison for 12 to 20 years.

Ren Zhiqiang, missing billionaire, sentenced to 18 years.

Consider the fate of Ren Zhiqiang, the 69 year old chairman of Huayuan property conglomerate. It was one of the largest property groups in China, but Ren vanished in March 2020 after being heard to have complained about how the government was handling COVID-19. He was expelled from the communist party, and in September 2020 sentenced to 18 years in jail for “taking bribes and abuses of power.” There was hardly a trial, and as with Jack Ma, Facebook and Twitter helped the party silence Ren and his supporters. The result is that he had no recourse to the court of public opinion. About a month later, Facebook and Twitter did the same to Donald Trump, banning him for life from Facebook, Twitter. All other platforms joined, these included Snap and Reddit. As in China they also banned his main lieutenants and his main supporters, including the my-pillow man. The internet services also closed (deplatformed) Parler, the only competing web-service that allowed Trump and his supporters to post.

It can help to have public outcry, as Xi found after he disappeared China’s most popular movie starlet, Fan Bingbing in July 2018. Fan is a star of Chinese TV and movies and appears in Iron Man II and X-Men. As with Ma and Ren, Facebook and Twitter removed all posts, comments, questions, and complaints about Fan, releasing only the official statement that she was under investigation and taking a break. Unlike Ren, Fan reappeared a year later, April 2019 with no official charges filed. Nor has there been any official report. She has apologized for misdoings. and is supposed to have paid some $150 million, but she’s free. My guess is that the pressure of 100 million Chinese fans is what helped Ms Fan to un-vanish.

Chairman of Anbang Insurance Group Wu Xiaohui attends the China Development Forum in Beijing, China
Had Wu Xiaohui, former chairman of Anbang Insurance Group, and owner to the Waldorf Astoria.

A less positive outcome is when there is no outcry. When Wu Xiaohui, chairman of the Anbang Insurance Group, and the owner of New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel vanished for two years. When he reappeared, he faced a quiet trial that sentenced him to 18 years in prison. The usual charges: fraud and abuse of power. Wu’s mother claimed she had no access to her son for those two years. Anbang, once one of the largest insurers in China, was taken over by its insurance regulator who has applied to liquidate the company. Why liquidate? Probably because it’s the easiest way to remove potential Wu loyalists.

In the US, there are some claims that Facebook, Twitter, Reditt and a few other companies have too much control of public discourse. Others claim that these companies exercise too little control. These companies claim the right to silence opinion they consider untrue, or inflammatory, and they have been allowed to deplatform their competition. Congress is moving to be in charge of who they silence. I’ve found they don’t like pro-Israel sentiments. While they don’t put words in my mouth, I don’t like it that they take words out of my mouth. As a result, I’ve cut back on my use of these platforms.

Jack Ma reappeared after 3 months in this 40 second video, shot from an unknown location. To me, it looks like a hostage video, “I’m well and being well treated …” Biden has argued that now is the time to move closer to China.

As I write this, Trump is impeached for the second time. The charge is inflammatory speech. Like with abuse of power, there is no way to prove you didn’t do it, especially after the internet giants silence you and anyone stupid enough to support you. Among Biden’s first acts is to undo Trump dictates that kept China from providing the technology underlying the US power and water system. Clearly Biden feels it is important that China should have a hand in this. I surely am not going to suggest that the bribes Biden is supposed to have received from China played any role. I will say that, when I ran for water commission, one of my goals was to help make the water system more resistant to cyber attack.

Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum. February 8, 2021. As an update, I see that Jimmy Li was arrested. He’s the founder of Hong-Kong’s most popular newspaper, Apple daily. No comment in the US, or from the Vatican. Li is Catholic, and the Vatican used to chime in when prominent Catholics were arrested.

Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

Some days, I spend hours at a time on facebook, and when I’m done, I often feel it was a complete waste of time. I do not make friends this way, and I have little evidence that I’ve convinced anyone. Still, for some reason, I can’t seem to stay off for long, so I figure I might as well look for the attraction.

One positive thing I do (did) with FB was to run for office. I lost, but I was able to speak to more people using FB in a day than I could have otherwise. Another thing I do is to spread articles — those I find interesting, and my own writing, blog posts, mostly. I write these posts for free, and while I imagine my blog posts do some good. I sometimes get nice comments suggesting people read the blogs and think about what I say. Still, it does not make money, and takes a fair amount of effort.

I can imagine I help mankind in some subtle, long range way, or perhaps gain some long-range fame. But who cares about long-range fame? And, as for helping people, it is also possible I will hurt them too. Computers sit analyzing my words, and everyone’s, tracking their views and using the data for what. I’m just feeding the computer, and that makes me think my writing may harm more than help. What I write on FB is owned by FB. It’s free content for the owners of FB to re-use to sell: my personality, capsulated, my friends likes and dislikes, for sale at a price. My posts turn me and my friends into commodities — and there isn’t even remuneration.

It is claimed that, in the 2016 election, Trump was able to win, at low cost, through a Russian-managed facebook campaign. The educated elites of politics were not able to come with the wiley Russians, for all their brain-power, and despite help from the FBI, or so the theory goes. If so, it’s a warning that all the information I provide to facebook is available to Trump and the Russians to use against me. The management of facebook was committed to Ms Clinton in 2016, and is completely committed to Trump’s removal as best I can tell. If they are not able to beat the Russians, maybe I should not try. Then again, maybe they’re not as elite as they think.

Sometimes I imagine that the alternative of not-posting is worse; it is to have no voice at all, and to have no information of the common discussion. The newspapers seem no less biassed than those on my FB. I write then in a bizarre chasm between hope for posterity, and a better world, and out of desperation that to be an unheard, quiet one, is to be dead. I suspect I’m not unique here.

Robert E. Buxbaum, January 27, 2020.

Google+ vs Facebook and Twitter; of virtue and sin

Google has just announced the end of support for Google+; I’m sorry to see it go. It was supposed to be the better version of Facebook killer. It was, and I suspect that’s why it died. Unlike Facebook, Google+ allowed me to decide which group of friends I would get to see which group of my posts. I thought that was a good thing. I only shared political posts with some folks — those who I thought would not mind; and only shared jokes with other folks; family photos with yet others; religion thoughts with others, and technical thoughts with other folks still.

Google+ called the different groups in your life, “rings of friendship,” and it seemed to me that such rings were an important part of being able to live in a polite society. Any normal person shares different things with different people. There will be some overlap, of course, but rings of friendship allowed you to shield your friends from your religious and political views, and allowed you to shield technical colleagues from family photos that would bore them. Behaving this way is common sense and simple politeness.

Google+ died, in part I think, because maintaining rings of friendship requires forethought. It also requires that your friends honor your privacy, and accept that they will not be a complete part of your life and confidence. But such activity requires work, both on the part of the poster, and on the part of the recipient. Besides, posting this way tends to make your posts dull. It reduced the number of eye-ball-grabbing rants that get seen by people who are highly offended by seeing the rant. Facebook, by contrast, uses and algorithm to decide who sees what. It requires no work from us, and I suspect the algorithm makes posts more interesting as it seems to favor the sensational, salacious, and inappropriate.

Facebook spreads the most salacious posts, I think, to increase the amount of time people spend on FB. That would be entirely self-serving, but it also gives the user a thrill as you see how many likes and followers, Facebook suggests “friends” that you never knew, who your other friends know, or who have similar interests. People friend these folks they hardly know, and post the most controversial of things in hope of getting followers and “likes.” It’s destructive to privacy, but it’s a dopamine rush in having people think you are a more interesting and exciting person than you are. The graphic below associates FB with the deadly sin of Envy — the desire to have what you don’t have.

An interesting take on social media

An interesting take on social media — the main platforms are the seven deadly sins.

There are six other deadly sins, and six of the other major social platforms seem designed to target one each. LinkedIn seems to target greed; Tinder targets Lust and Yelp targets gluttony. Instagram targets pride, the greatest of the deadly sins. It was natural that Facebook would acquire Instagram as Facebook had the most money, and pride is the strongest draw among the sins. In the graphic above Netflix is associated with sloth; I’m not sure that’s entirely fair: Netflix is passive, but no more passive than YouTube (owned by Google).

Twitter deserves a special mention. It was designed to be more immediate than FB, and I find it’s even more tipped to the salacious. When you post to Twitter, you have no control over who sees it; your only control is over what you see, and most people like to see salacious. President Donald Trump’s presidency is largely built on his Twitter posts. He claims he’s the Hemingway of 140 characters, and he certainly is good at grabbing eyeballs with outrageous comments and short simplifications of difficult matters. Last week his Twitter insult of Congressman Adam Schiff caught the news services all about. Similarly several congressmen calling Trump a mother***ker made news, Trump’s insult was more amusing, IMHO, if you read the name Adam a variant pronunciation. Facebook can tolerate the salacious like this, but it still limits the number of eyeballs to friends and acquaintances. Twitter is the home of wrath, and so far it seems a lot more successful than Google+.

Google+ was a reminder that world of social media is not all darkness and deadly sins. To my mind, Google+ was supposed to contract the evils of envy and intemperance with the virtue of temperance. That is Google+ was one of the cardinal virtues: Temperance in this case amounted to giving the appropriate amount of information to each of your friends, and not being excessive with any. It’s possible that the failure of Google+ was that it did not directly go after the audience for LinkedIn, but instead tried to mimic Facebook. Linked In (Greed) is almost exactly the opposite of Temperance.

The seven godly virtues are listed below, as set out by Pope Gregory, based on Paul. The first three are considered Godly, the other four Cardinal.

  1. Faith: belief in the right things (including the virtues!).
  2. Hope: taking a positive future view, that good will prevail.
  3. Charity: concern for, and active helping of, others.
  4. Fortitude: never giving up.
  5. Justice: being fair and equitable with others.
  6. Prudence: care of and moderation with money.
  7. Temperance: moderation of needed things and abstinence from things which are not needed.

Looking at this list it strikes me that the first three virtues are already present in social media. I associate Wikipedia with Faith, I associate it with a belief in knowledge itself, and in the ability of people to self govern. I associate Google, before it decided to be political, with Hope. It was based on a positive view of nature and people: that given free access to organized information they will come to the right conclusions. I liked that originally, ranking was decided based on people’s common choice. It was anti-FB, and humbling: there was no way that you could proclaim yourself greater than your neighbor if others didn’t see you that way. Currently Google allows paid customers to promote themselves, and conforms search for political patrons, eg China. In this way, it has become more like FB.

I associate “Go fund me,” with the virtue of Charity, and would like to propose that perhaps Prudence is Consumer Reports, or maybe e-bay. This leaves room for Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance (now that Google+ is dead). I leave it to you to fill in the gap.

Robert Buxbaum, January 8, 2019. There is a great manga fiction involving the seven deadly sins; Full Metal Alchemist. Also I should note that there are many versions of the seven virtues including the seven virtues of Buddhism: Right decisions, Valor, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty.