The Masses Versus Useful

After I put up my post about the movie Hanna, I thought that maybe I should have included a picture of the Nazi wind tunnel, so I went looking for one. I remember seeing a whole photo essay about the place, lots of really cool pictures with lots of abstract shapes, kind of science-fictiony. I found bupkis. Oh, I found a few photos, but the only ones that looked anything like what I remembered were stills from the movie Aeon Flux.


OK, I'm old, and memory is not totally reliable, and supposedly it gets worse as you get older, but this is just wrong. Did those pictures, the ones I am thinking about, just vanish? Did someone take them down? That would be weird. And then I noticed that most of the pictures Google was returning were pictures of celebrities, or of people anyway. Has the people's penchant for pictures of other people taken over Google's search engine? I mean their photo organizer Picasa is totally centered on people. It can even identify the people in your pictures.

But this is not what I want. If I have one picture of people I know, that is plenty. I don't really understand why you would want more than one, and I certainly don't need any pictures of celebrities, I don't even know them. Yes, I realize that pictures of celebrities can be found on my blog but I believe it is always in relation to a movie, and those posts are about the story, not the actor.

Then I got this email from High Performance Computing this morning and I realize that the mass market is now feeding on itself. The amount of gossip is growing so fast we now are dedicating an entire industry to studying it. This looks like a giant case of GIGO to me.

So while the mass market has led to mass production of fiendeshly clever devices, the application of these devices has now become almost totally focused on gossip. Any useful application of modern computing/communications only exists on the fringe of this giant chatroom, and is apparently subject to being pushed off the edge whenever the volume of chatter gets a little too loud.