Rhymes-With-Fox In Socks

Internet, Social Media

The fight against cancer is very important to me. Twenty-three years ago, my grandfather died after a battle with prostate cancer.  More recently, Superman Sam – a child whom I never met in person but who we got to know and love thanks to social media – lost his battle with leukemia.  Anything that helps the fight against cancer is fine in my book.

Recently, a campaign was launched to get guys to post photos of themselves.  These were not the usual selfies, though.  These pictures showed the men with nothing but a sock covering their private parts.

You’ll excuse me if I don’t see how this helps.

When I first heard of it, I didn’t hear "new testicular cancer awareness campaign."  I didn’t even hear that this was related to cancer at all. All that I heard was that some people were stuffing their "selves" into socks, taking photos of themselves, and posting the photos online. It seemed like just some weird perverted form of the selfie phenomenon. Eventually, I heard that this was meant to help fight cancer.  It took TheDaddyYoDude’s post to let me know that this was specifically targeting testicular cancer.

Like I said, I’m all for fighting cancer, but outrageous and shocking awareness campaigns are often counterproductive.  First of all, the campaign actions can overshadow the cause.  In this case, for every person who learns about testicular cancer thanks to this "socks" campaign, too many more will just see nearly-naked men wearing socks over their members.

The second problem is that these kinds of campaigns increasingly raise the bar for what is needed to shock people into awareness.  Once people are no longer shocked by socks, what’s next?  People posting close-up photos mid-colonoscopy?  Graphic photos of couples mid-coitis to raise awareness against STDs?

Were this a whimsical campaign designed to raise awareness in a humorous manner, instead of a shocking one, I might just participate.  Instead, this is the closest that I’ll go:

techydad-sock

What do you think about this "socks" campaign?  Will it actually help in the fight against testicular cancer or is it all shock and no value?

Unprepared Parenting Moments

Life, Parenting

nicubunu_Emoticons_Question_faceWhen I was young, I thought that parents knew what they were doing.  I thought that parents pulled from a vast store of knowledge about every situation.  I firmly believed that they were never surprised by anything and certainly never had to resort to adlibbing.

Oh, how naïve I was.

A couple of weeks ago, we heard that an indoor trampoline park that is coming to the area was going to be featured on Undercover Boss.  Hoping to catch some sneak peeks of what fun we might be in for – and show them to the kids – we turned it on.  During the program, one of the employees mentioned about how he was born a woman, has been living as a man, but needed some surgeries that he couldn’t afford to complete the process.

Yes, the kids heard this and yes questions ensued.

Let me first state that I have nothing against gender reassignment surgery.  In fact, I think it’s great that we live in an age when someone who feels more comfortable as a different gender than they were born as, can make that change.  I also don’t think the show was “at fault” in any way. The “transgender subject” shouldn’t be swept under the rug and ignored for fear that some small child somewhere might hear it.

The fact of the matter is that I just wasn’t ready to explain this complicated subject to my six and ten year olds.  We haven’t even had “the talk” with the ten year old yet.  How was I going to explain this?!!

I’ll admit that I resorted to the old standby of punting the question to the other spouse (“Ask your mother!”) and distraction hoping that they would tire of the question.  I even put them to bed that night hoping that the question would be forgotten by morning.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t.  JSL was still asking if they chopped off her boobs.

Side note: He’ll take any opportunity he finds to say the word “boobs.”  He really seems to like that word but in a potty-talk, not a sexual sort of way.  He also likes saying “poop” and is experimenting to see how much cursing he can get away with.  (The answer is none, but he’s still testing to see if there’s a loophole.)

The questions finally receded into the background after a day or two.  Am I proud of the fact that we danced around the question instead of giving a detailed answer?  No.  Then again, I don’t think our six year old and our ten year old – the latter of whom is actually about 6 socially due to Asperger’s Syndrome – are ready for that sort of thing.  I certainly wasn’t ready to give them a proper answer.

Hopefully, a few years down the line, I’ll be better prepared to talk to my boys about not just sex in general but the many complexities.  Until then, perhaps I need to hone my adlibbing skills.

NOTE: The “Emoticons: Question face” image above is by nicubunu and is available via OpenClipArt.org.

Love and Acceptance Trumps Hate

Life

Love vs HateThe past couple of days were marked by two events that both had a few things in common and that we vastly different.  They were both events concerning men named Fred.  Both of these Freds were clergy members.  This is where the similarities stop, however.  As you might have guessed, one of the men was Fred Rogers, whose birthday was yesterday, and the other man was Fred Phelps, who passed away a couple of days ago.

Reading Fred Phelps’ Wikipedia entry reveals the life of a man whose religious beliefs led him to spread messages of hatred.  Every event he was at, every place he appeared, he was there to tell people one thing:  God hates you and you’re going to burn in hell.  He and his church picketed soldier’s funerals, Presidential inaugural balls, and more.  They even went to Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in order to declare on the streets of Iraq that God hates the USA.  Looking at them, they seemed to revel in creating hurt.  The more hurt, the better.

If one good thing came out of their activities, though, it was the unifying force that seemed to bring people of different backgrounds together to oppose Phelps’ crew.  Bikers and gay rights activists, comic book lovers and the Foo Fighters – they all could come together to stage counter-protests.  At times, the protests were serious.  At times they were silent – for example, to shield family members from having to see Phelps’ group.  Other times, they would be hilariously irreverent.  (The Comic-Con counter protest is my all-time favorite.)

On the other side of the spectrum was Fred Rogers.  Known as Mister Rogers to millions of children and adults, he was a regular on public television for over thirty years.  Whenever you turned on his show, he was always happy to see you.  This wasn’t just an act, though.  He was extremely nice in real life too.

Don’t confuse niceness for weakness, though.  When he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys in 1997, Mister Rogers opted not to give the usual speech.  Instead, he told the crowd to spend ten seconds in silence thinking of the people that helped them get to where they are today.  The crowd laughed a bit thinking it was a joke but Fred – still nicely – told them he’d keep time.  He had an entire audience full of stars keeping silent for ten full seconds.  Not one of them dared to disobey him.

On the political front, Fred Rogers was always fighting for what he believed was right.  He won additional funding for PBS when cuts were looming.  When other programmers were decrying the VCR as something that could destroy their livelihood, Fred Rogers supported it because he believed families being able to choose when to watch his program would grow closer together.

Even his entry into television was an act of love trumping hate.  He initially hated the programming on TV, but saw the potential of the medium.  Instead of simply complaining about how horrible television’s programming was, he took it upon himself to create something wonderful.

Perhaps both legacies are best contrasted by people’s reactions upon their deaths.  Fred Phelps’ death was met with a mix of indifference and outright relief.  Fred Rogers’ death was met with near-universal sadness over his passing and wonderful memories of his life.

If I were to place a bet on the future, I’d wager that Fred Phelps will be, at best, a footnote.  His name will be a trivia item and not much else.  Fred Rogers, however, will still be well known.  People will still fondly remember Mister Rogers’ work both on-screen and off-screen.

The lesson that I’m drawing from this is that love and acceptance trumps hatred.  I life my life with the hope that I’ll leave this world a little better than it was when I entered it.  Fred Rogers definitely made this world a better place.  This world would be a better place if we had more Fred Rogers in it.

NOTE: The image above is made up of "Emoticons: Loving face" and "Emoticons: Devil face" both by nicubunu and both available via OpenClipArt.org.

The Great Android Phone Move

Smartphones/Tablets

androidmoveLast month, I wrote about my reluctance to upgrade my phone.  Well, last week, after one too many times with my battery dying too quickly, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade.  B showed me some of the phones she had gotten from being a member of the Verizon Lifestyle Bloggers program and I selected the Droid Razr HD.

We had already obtained a new SIM card for the phone (something you can request for free from the online live chat on Verizon Wireless’ website) so all that I needed to do was switch my plan to use that phone, move my apps and data over, and set all of my apps and phone options.  Switching my phone over was simple on Verizon Wireless’ website.  So was setting up my Google Play account on the phone.

At this point, I could have let Google Play install all of my apps for me, but I decided not to.  Over the years, I had installed many apps on my previous phone that I had used only a few times, but that I couldn’t bear to uninstall.  To prevent instant app-overload, I decided to manually install apps as I wanted them.

With most of my apps installed, I went about moving over the data.  Some of my data was moved over by simply moving my microSD card from the old phone to the new one.  There were only two apps whose data I cared about.  In Doctor Who: Legacy, Google Play’s cloud save feature moved my game over.  For My Muppets Show, I had contacted the developer ahead of time and they informed me of the process for moving my game over.

Some phone setting changes later and my new phone was all set up and ready to go.  I did keep my old phone on me for a couple of days in case I needed something that was on it, but I never actually did.

Now that I’m officially switched over, I’m only sorry that I didn’t do this sooner.  The process went pretty smoothly and my new(er) phone is much nicer than my old one.  The screen has a higher resolution and it runs faster.  Best of all, I can use it for 10 minutes without worrying about the battery draining to 40%.

Have you changed phones recently?  How easy was it to move everything over?

Extreme Geekery: Printing A Hard Drive

Computers, Extreme Geekery, Math

Hard_Disk_SmallIt’s no secret that I’m a geek.  It’s not just limited to watching shows like Doctor Who and movies like Star Wars.  It’s not just limited to memorizing random facts and having an interest in science.  I also love figuring things out sometimes.  Things that are too hypothetical to be practical.

For awhile, I’ve been  in geeky-love with Randall Munroe’s What If series.  In it, tackles some weird questions like What would happen if you put a drain at the bottom of the ocean? and How many people would a T-Rex let loose in New York City need to eat every day?  Randall delves deep into scientific facts and theories to back up his answers.  Sometimes he’ll use complicated equations used to calculate rocket trajectories and sometimes he’ll chart human growth rates.  Randall’s series has been so popular that he’s putting out a book.  (For disclosure purposes, I wasn’t asked by anyone to plug Randall’s book.  However, if I *was* asked to review it, I’d jump at the opportunity!)

I’ve been inspired by Randall.  For awhile, I’ve wanted to delve into some more geeky topics, but I didn’t want to scare everyone away by going full on mega-geek.  So consider this an experimental, possibly semi-regular series of blog posts.  Translation: As I think of them I’ll blog them but they won’t by any means overshadow normal TechyDad.com postings.

WARNING: Extreme Geekery Ahead!

The first question I’ll tackle is:  If you printed the contents of a full 1TB hard drive, how big would the stack of papers be?

To figure this out, we first need to set a few ground rules.  We could print the actual 1’s and 0’s on the hard drive or hexadecimal (base 16) representation of that data.  Hexadecimal would be shorter.  For example, 11111001 in binary is F9 in hexadecimal.  Also, we’d need to decide on a font size for printing.  Obviously, choosing a huge font size would mean less data per page (and, thus, more pages) than a tiny font size.

We’ll print in binary (1’s and 0’s) since that’s more literally what’s on a hard drive.  Also, normal font size is around 10 point so we’ll go with that.

Next, we need to figure out how much data would fit on a sheet of paper.  By opening up OpenOffice.org, I was able to type in 83 characters per line and 49 lines per page using 10 point Times New Roman font.  This means 4,067 1’s and 0’s would fit on a page.  This leads to the next question:  How many 1’s and 0’s are in 1TB?

1TB, or one terabyte, is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.  Each byte, in turn, is 8 bits.  Bits are those 1’s and 0’s.  This means that a one terabyte hard drive can store 8,000,000,000,000 1’s and 0’s.  (Theoretically speaking, that is.  Practically speaking, there are issues that keep you from getting all of those 1’s and 0’s on your 1TB hard drive.  We’ll ignore those issues for the purposes of this discussion, however.)

With 8,000,000,000,000 bits and 4,067 bits per page, we wind up with 1,967,051,881 pages.  That’s quite a lot of pages, but how tall would the stack be?

Some Google searching turned up that normal printer paper is 0.1 millimeters thick.  This means that the stack would be 196,705,188.1 millimeters tall.  Of course, 1,000 millimeters is one meter and one thousand meters equals one kilometer so this means the stack is actually, 196.7051881 km tall.  For those who don’t use the metric system often, this translates to 122.227 miles.  (Thank you, Google!)

Now we know how tall our stack of paper is, but what about a frame of reference?  We can imagine driving 122 miles, but that’s horizontally.  I doubt anyone drives vertically upward.  According to the earlier-mentioned Randall Munroe, 100km is the official edge of space.  So wherever this stack takes us will be in space.  Low Earth Orbit begins at 160km so some objects orbiting the Earth might hit into our stack.  Thankfully, Wikipedia says that the International Space Station orbits “between 330 km (205 mi) and 435 km (270 mi)”.  That’s much higher than our stack, so at least we don’t need to worry about the ISS crashing into our stack of papers.  (At least, not until we print out the 2TB hard drive.)

So now we know how big of a stack of papers would result from printing out the contents of a 1TB hard drive.  Aren’t you glad we can fit all of those bits into a relatively tiny casing instead of having to lug around a stack of papers reaching to space?

NOTE: The hard drive image above is by ricardomaia and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

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