you sometimes think you understand how something works

Even simple systems that should make sense can - and do - have lurking issues. This gets a tad bit geekisk, but is an excellent example of how we can fool ourselves - tip of the hat to Bjarne for the link.

I maintain it ca be real folly to claim you can accurately predict something like human behavior with samplings of social media. You can get bits and snatches, but I suspect expectations are way overblown. Human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system:)

 

Comments

[Roger]

I'm sorry. So why do I always have something to say?

I wonder if Trey Harris may also help me figure out how something works.

It seems that I once had Comcast cable Internet service where stuff roared across the cable at multi Megabytes per second, if memory serves me correctly.

Then I made the terrible mistake of moving into the countryside where I cannot even use DSL.

So I searched around and discovered Hughesnet and signed up without doing any homework. And after six months without service half the time and with lousy service the other half, I told hughesnet where they could shove their scam and forfeited my three hundred dollar deposit.

Then I agonized over Verizon and AT&T MIFI, again totally ignorant. Oh, yes, Verizon said, you'll be happy with our service. We have hundreds of millions of happy customers. Well, I don't remember exactly how many millions of happy customers they claimed to have, but I do know that they have many more millions of customers than they have happy customers.

My god, Verizon's average speed is 848 kbps which equates to 106 kBps. Now that may be Verizon's average speed, but that is not Verizon's average speed coming into our 3G/4G device, which is more like 10 kBps or less. Yes, once or twice in a blue moon it may peak out at 120kBps.

We cannot play audio without some skiping, unless the bandwidth is very low. We cannot play any video unless the image is very small or the resolution is very bad.

We have a one year-old grand daughter who lives in California. We like to see and hear her on Skype now and then. What do we get when our Skype download rate ranges between 5 and 10 kBps? We get blurred, jerky images that we can barely recognize. We get unintelligible, garbled voice where every third word or so may be recognizable.

I have spent far too many hours fighting Verizon's robotic answering service and explaining and arguing my problems with people who seem to know less about our problems than I do. Now I have given up and accepted that I will never again have the golden luxury of Comcast cable Internet service.