[Dixielandjazz] Those who dislike change . . .

[J McClernan]

wise beyond your years, Gary. Thank you for exposing the elephant in the room.........
but, I think you'd better duck
Cheers,
John



On Jan 25, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:

wearing my internet-professional hat here, just let me say that
regardless how you feel about 'new' technology, email has been
unchanged since it's introduction in 1969, and to this day the vast
majority of the bits that travel over the internet trunk lines are
email messages.  I think it may have something to do with Occams Razor
;)

USENET, for example, was a great 'social' media that had a good long
run, but it is layered over top of what is essentially just email,
enhanced and improved for all good engineering reasons, efficient and
sexy, and yet, who here still uses USENET?

But let's look at this statistically, with the cold cruel hand of
Science: up until recently there was this excellent bookie's website
that ran a service they called 'Punditwatch' where they asked folks to
enter in any pundit prediction they wished and the site would compute
the odds and track the prediction to completion.  It didn't matter the
domain, finance, politics, sports, technology, whatever, they didn't
care, they were just interested in our ability to predict.

The premise of Punditwatch was that there are three truths about
prediction: 1) humans love predictions 2) humans are completely
hopeless at predictions 3) humans don't really remember predictions
and so they don't notice #2.  In its long run Punditwatch finally
declared a winner, The Most Reliable Pundit On The Planet turned out
to be a financial journalist.  His success rate was a paultry 61%

What this means to me is that *everyone* is entitled to their
predictions on the future of whatever, because the hard scientific
truth is they have a 61% chance of being right ;)

So I would like to enter a plea into this discussion, that we let it
rest, that we let nature take its course that we just go back to
talking about DJ and let the chips land where they will and then LATER
some contingent can tell the other contingent "I told you so!" and we
can all be friends again ;)

oh, and btw, I just noticed, my slick quick popup email browser plugin
lets me respond to emails super-easily and shows me previews of the
message and instant alerts and all that, but y'know, it doesn't allow
me to change the subject line!  Never noticed that before ...