In the apartment building where I currently live, there is a laundry room with a large sign on the front (put up by the landlord) indicating that the hours of operation are 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. This is for the benefit of the occupant of unit number four, whose bedroom shares a wall with the laundry room. As it so happens, that lucky occupant is me.

For some reason, it seems that people don’t obey signs like this. Now, I’m certainly not one to obey rules simply for the sake of obeying them, but in this case the rationale is clear: running the laundry room during those hours has a good chance of disrupting the sleep of the person on the other side of the wall.

This morning, a little after 7, I was fast asleep (having stayed up late last night) when I was awakened by the washing machine. This has happened several times before, though usually it’s late at night instead of early in the morning, and I’ve gotten sick of it. I opened the washer to shut it off and left a polite but firm note with the hours of operation and a request that they be respected. Then, at 8:08, the washer started up again, waking me up again. Normally, even I might let this slide, but I had just left a note saying please don’t run the washing machine until 8:30—and, let it be noted, 8:08 is less than 8:30. Why he couldn’t just wait another 22 goddamn minutes I don’t know. I shut off the washer again and left another, even more firmly worded note.

I’m pretty confident that the person on the receiving end of these notes (and the associated washer stoppages) thinks I’m a dick. Some of the readers of this blog might even think so too. Maybe I am a dick. But the person running the washer is an even bigger dick, not only for flouting the rules (and thereby waking me up), but also for putting me in the position of being either a dick or a doormat.

One thing I’ve learned is that if you just “suck it up and deal” in situations like this, then people will walk all over you. I’ve therefore resolved never to be a doormat, even if it means sometimes being a dick.

N.B. This specific situation will soon be a moot point since I’m moving to Silicon Valley in December. Interested readers who don’t know why can email me off-blog to find out.

Remember those ubiquitous “under construction” signs people put on their websites back in the ’90s? Man, those were stupid—newsflash! websites take time to build!—and annoying, especially when they were animated, which seemed inevitably to be the case. Thankfully, they went the way of the dodo, but their spirit lives on in a slightly different niche, the automated telephone menu. To wit: “Please listen to all options, as our menu items have changed.”

Who could this possibly be for? Presumably this warning is meant to prevent people from calling in, pressing “3” thinking that they’re getting, say, technical support, but actually getting sales. Oh, the horror! We’d better warn unsuspecting callers that our menu items have changed! But if you haven’t called their system in a while, there is almost no way you remember which number does what, so you’ll have to listen to the menu options anyway to find out. On the other hand, often you just listened to the menu and had to call back right away (usually because you got cut off by their incompetent system), in which case the menu has most assuredly not changed—their warning is then demonstrably false.

The beauty part is that many systems won’t register the number you press until their warning message has played, so you have to sit through it whether you like it or not. In these cases I often find myself swearing at the robotic voice (usually because I just got cut off by their incompetent system)—“Please listen to all options, as our menu items [no they haven’t you stupid fuckwad, I just called but got cut off by your incompetent system] have changed.”

In summary: much of the time the menu hasn’t changed, and when it has you don’t remember, so you don’t care. Dude, WTF?

Humans have a peculiar penchant for eschatology, and I just realized that I haven’t yet sounded off on the doomsday scenario du jour, global warming. With one notable exception—namely, the risk of nuclear war—all previous eschatological angst has proven to be misplaced. So, is global warming another exception? In other words, are we all going to die?

I’ll end the suspense right now: the answer is no. But what about all the science? What about the conspiracy by conservative closet-homosexual Republican pedophiles to suppress the truth about global warming, as helpfully reported recently in Newsweek? (Perhaps I exaggerate a little.) And what about Al Gore? Please, for the love of God, what about Al Gore?

Part of the problem is that “global warming” is used in at least three distinct senses:

1. global warming: Earth is getting hotter.
2. global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity.
3. global warming: Earth is getting hotter because of human activity, and we’re all going to die.

Here’s the deal: #1 is indisputable. #2 is probably true, but that’s irrelevant as long as #3 is false, which it almost certainly is.

Unfortunately, these three usages often get conflated. Those who doubt #3 are accused of doubting #1, which makes them look like idiots. Furthermore, those who fret about #2 often implicitly assume #3, and treat those who doubt #3 as immoral assholes, because goddamn it, it’s our fault, so it’s up to us to do something about it! And here I’m looking squarely at Al Gore when I say: if global warming represents a calamity for humanity, it doesn’t fucking matter whose fault it is. When we discover a world-destroying asteroid on a collision course with Earth, nobody’s going to say “well, we didn’t put the asteroid there, and it’s not our fault, so we don’t have to do anything about it.” I’ve long admired Al Gore, and I wish he were President instead of W. too, but on this issue he is the biggest, most self-righteous, most sanctimonious sack of shit that I’ve ever seen in my life.

So, in the end, we should only be worried if “we’re all going to die”—i.e., if global warming is actually a looming disaster. Is it? It’s possible, of course, though even the consensus IPCC report hardly looks like Armageddon. But what about all those scary pictures of Manhattan under water in “An Inconvenient Truth”, you say? Go and watch it again and see for yourself: Al Gore never talks about how likely the scenarios are, nor how long they will take. These are crucial omissions, and it’s no coincidence, because as far as I can tell no reputable simulations show effects on that scale on any reasonable (say, less than two-century) timeline. Moreover, even the worst-case scenarios are based on delicate, complicated computer models, and anybody who has any experience with such models knows not to trust them any further than they can throw them (which is, coincidentally, usually the distance to the nearest journal willing to publish them). (Anyone so good at writing computer models that they can actually believe the results is probably making millions of dollars on Wall Street right now anyway. Why worry about global warming when you can just buy a yacht and sail around while the little people drown?)

Finally, climate simulations typically ignore the effects of technology—technology that will be vigorously pursued if the consequences of unchecked global warming prove dire. Even at current technological levels, we could probably swing something. Moreover, our technological capabilities are increasing exponentially; when people worry about the sea level rising a few feet by 2070, I think Jesus, there might be superintelligent robots by then! In this context, it’s hard to imagine how our posthuman civilization would have much trouble with a few melting ice caps.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t a problem. It probably is. It may cost billions or trillions of dollars to avert its worst effects, though decisions about whether it’s worth making any particular change need to be based on a rational cost-benefit analysis (and the negative effects have to be considered against the positives, such as opening up Arctic shipping lanes and exposing billions of dollars worth of oil and natural gas under the Arctic seafloor). But, as far as I can tell, the idea that global warming represents an existential threat to humanity’s global technological civilization is utter bullshit, totally unsupported by the evidence. I’m a scientist; I could be convinced otherwise. But if the best you can do is show a graph with CO₂ levels going off the chart and a few slickly produced movies of the World Trade Center Ground Zero underwater, it’s hard to take you seriously.

Global warming? Yes. Anthropogenic global warming? Probably. Global calamity? Show me the evidence, or, seriously, STFU(AG).

I have contrarian tendencies. When I watch movies, for example, I often find myself secretly rooting for the bad guy; operating under the theory that the winners write the history books, I try to imagine how the story might be different had the bad guy won. Might the Emperor have been more sympathetic if he’d had a chance to tell us his side of the story, instead of being thrown down a reactor shaft by his trusted protégé and having his Death Star blown up, not once, but twice, by a handful of self-righteous rebels? Had not a bunch of lily-white men and elves defeated his dark-skinned, multiracial, multi-species armies, might Sauron be seen as a wise and compassionate champion of the downtrodden of Middle Earth? There’s little doubt that’s how he would tell it, if he hadn’t been so rudely dispatched by some meddling riverfolk.

My contrarian habits extend to nonfiction characters as well. (I can tear down pretty much any historical figure, no matter how revered; I’d be happy to take requests.) Recently, I found myself ripping a new one on a contemporary hero—that paragon of the American work ethic, the great Cal Ripken Jr., recently inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

Despite an outstanding career in the field and in the batter’s box, Ripken is known in popular culture almost exclusively for The Streak, the incredible 2,632 games in a row he played between 1982 and 1998. It’s an article of faith that Cal Ripken Jr. represents the hard-working ideal, a self-sacrificing team-player who just wanted to win baseball games—so much so that he’d play through injuries, the flu, hemorrhoids, anything. But let’s look at Ripken through a contrarian lens. Setting aside the tremendous luck required for such a streak—both his genetic luck-of-the-draw durability and freakish avoidance of serious illness and injury—should we join the crowd and laud Ripken’s achievement?

Perhaps not. Consider that a baseball season consists of 162 games—that’s a lot of games even for a relatively undemanding sport. Consider also that even durable players can benefit from the occasional game off. If you want to maximize the probability of winning, it makes sense to have your best players take some time to recuperate, resting against weak opponents so that they can be fresh against stronger ones. What this means is that there were almost certainly times when it would have been in the best interest of the team for Cal Ripken Jr. to rest—but this would have meant breaking The Streak. In other words, Ripken may very well have sacrificed his team’s success for his own personal glorification. (That this was done with the complicity of his managers and probably teammates as well indicates that he wasn’t the only one willing to sacrifice the team’s performance for personal goals—in this case, the reflected glory of being a manager or teammate of the great Cal Ripken Jr.)

One can plausibly argue that winning isn’t the only goal of baseball, and defend The Streak on the grounds that it increased the value of Ripken’s team more than the extra wins would have. This is quite possibly true, but that’s not the argument people make; The Streak is always couched in terms of hard work, dedication, and doing whatever it takes to help your team win.

Despite being mainly ironic fun, there is a serious undercurrent to these sorts of thought experiments. Trying to imagine how the Emperor or Sauron might have been wronged by the official accounts—or how Cal Ripken Jr. might not be the humble, selfless team-player of media legend—is like push-ups for your critical thinking muscles. It’s only too easy to believe what everyone else believes, simply following conventional wisdom wherever it leads. I find that habitually going the other way is a useful mental exercise, even—or perhaps especially—when it leads to Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac.

And don’t even get me started on Scrooge the Misunderstood.

Warning: mild spoilers from the movie Cars below. Also, this is my first rant, so the tone is a bit more, well, unhinged than my usual posts.

I love all the Pixar movies, so today I joined several small children (and their parents) to see their newest offering, Cars. On the whole, I enjoyed it very much, though, as with most popular entertainment, the economics sucked. (I am probably the only person in the world who cares about the economics in movies. Pixar is good for the most part, but they’re not perfect: The Incredibles irritated me with their demonization of insurance companies, while Cars missed the boat by blaming an interstate highway for the decline of a small town on Route 66.) But that’s not what this rant is about. It’s about: what the fuck is wrong with you people.

As with A Bug’s Life, one of its Pixar predecessors, Cars was funny all the way through, but the funniest part happened after the credits started to roll. In A Bug’s Life, it was a selection of hilarious “outtakes” that had me rolling in the aisles. With Cars, there were several amusements, but the best by far was a scene showing the cars from the movie (who exist in a world where there are no people, only cars) watching Pixar movies with cars playing the characters in those movies: A Car Toy Story, a Monsters, Inc. parody, and A Bug’s Life starring, of course, a Volkswagen bug. The best part was that the scenes they showed from the previous movies all involved characters voiced by Pixar good-luck charm John Ratzenberger—with the character Ratzenberger voiced in Cars watching, and commenting on how—wait a minute!—they were just using the same voice in all the movies! It was rad, rad, rad, I tells ya.

So what’s wrong? What’s wrong is that people started leaving as soon as the credits started to roll, even though the movie never stopped for even a second. These people had just paid good money to sit through twenty minutes of previews, a cartoon short, and a whole movie—but as soon as the credits started to roll it was as if someone yelled “fire” in, well, a crowded theater. Exactly the same thing happened when I saw A Bug’s Life.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Apparently, they are so conditioned to associate credits with “the end” that they leave even though the movie is still going on right in front of them.

I should mention, as an aside, that Cars also had an Easter egg, to be found only when the credits were over. I never leave during the credits of any movie, even when it looks like it’s just the credits, because I love Easter eggs, and I love the smug sense of superiority that comes from being the only one in the theater left to see them—recent examples include a tasty little treat at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one; I don’t know about Dead Man’s Chest yet, but I bet it has one, too), a flipping hilarious wedding at the end of Napoleon Dynamite, and a crucial scene that you are all complete morons for missing at the end of X-Men III.

I sort of understand why people don’t sit around and wait for Easter eggs, though I suspect most people are just ignorant. But leaving when the movie is still going? I just don’t get it. Fire? There’s a fire? Gotta get out of here!

Ah, that feels better. Now, time to take my meds.