Science and tech

Sprint: the not right now network

May 1, 2013 8:48 pm•By: •What say you?

The 4G gods have stopped smiling on me, if they ever did.  I wish the least of my problems over the past few weeks was that sometimes facebook photos took too long to load.  Forget about 4G.  I’m happy if my 1 bar of 3G sticks around, because too often my service magically evaporates and I’m left with nothinG.  Texts show up when they feel like it, which is usually a few hours after the Russian lover has determined I am almost certainly tied up in a trunk somewhere.  Sometimes calls don’t come through at all, and I don’t even have a missed call alerting me to the fact that someone was trying to get in touch.

The first few times he couldn’t reach me he thought I was being a jerk.  The next few times he couldn’t reach me, he went into a panic.  The times after that and Enough was Enough.  I called Sprint and learned that there were “service upgrades” happening and hopefully the disruptions would cease soon.  In the next week or so.  Probably. They apologized for the inconvenience and asked for my patience and offered that they could credit me 25 bucks for the hassle.

I called back, because missing important calls from people for whom I am the sole point of contact on certain matters is not a hassle.  It is a potentially career-ending, relationship-killing huge fucking problem that only Sprint customers in this city seem to be having.  And I talked to some supervisor’s supervisor and I got nowhere on being let out of contract without an ETF or being credited an amount of money would offset that ETF.  As far as Sprint is concerned, this level of service falls within their acceptable bounds.

Sprint CS explained that they couldn’t guarantee service everywhere people go. I explained that if they couldn’t guarantee service smack-dab in the middle of the fifth largest city in the United States, then they should stop pretending to be a major national cellular carrier.  Maybe get Candace Bergen back and try to sell people some long distance minutes again.

4G Phl

Sprint 4G map of Philly via sensorly.com

The circled areas are where I happen to spend a good deal of time, in the center of the city, where coverage is looking a little sparse according to this map.  The other areas of Philadelphia that have similar-looking coverage on this map are places where people regularly get shot.  Sprint 4G: The social equalizer.

When I was with the Russian lover in NYC, I thought I was pretty good with 4G for much of the time we were bumming around Manhattan.  But there, too, it didn’t seem consistently good.  So today I also pulled up the 4G map for New York; the circled area is where the Russian lover’s crash pad is located, and where we spend a fair amount of time:

NYC 4G

Foiled again.

And now I think I understand the main reason people want to be famous.  Because if there is one thing celebrities are not, it is helpless consumers in the face of inferior products and services.  If Beyonce called Pepsi saying “This new soda of yours I just tried is gross”, Pepsi would not be like “Thank you for your valuable feedback.  We are so sorry” and leave Beyonce out a couple of bucks.  They would respond by dispatching a team tasked with creating a new soda to Beyonce’s specifications.  Meanwhile, when Coke got wind of her displeasure, they’d offer her a billion dollars to abandon her Pepsi endorsement.  A bidding war would ensue.  Beyonce would be gifted with endless amounts of gratis superior cola product.  That is consumer power.

Somehow, I don’t think any service provider is going to try to hold Beyonce hostage to her cell phone contract.  The rest of us?  We just have to yell and tweet and blog and try to band together until enough of us add up to one Beyonce.  Because the only hope we regular people have against incompetent corporate tyrants like the now network is the momentum of our human networks.

Posted in Celebrity, Culture, Science and Tech
about , , , , ,
What say you?

Darwin shurgged

Nov 13, 2012 8:13 pm•By: •What say you?

There is more than enough evidence to be found in our preferred forms of entertainment, and the latest US election results should remove all doubt, but science is here to support what many of us already suspect: Humans are collectively getting dumber.

It has always been and always will be true that you are only as smart as your ability not to get killed.  Darwin may be a dirty word even in those circles where God has been given the heave-ho, but his premise is no less true for our modern civilization than it was for primitive life forms.  We just like to think that because we’ve built bridges and tunnels instead of anthills and bird nests that we have evolved far beyond the tooth and claw rule of nature.  We pat ourselves on the back for having compassionate feelings for our fellow man, and sometimes even acting on them, and somehow this makes us less bound to the Darwinian principle than the lions tearing apart their prey or the gazelles being torn apart by the lions.

A collective trajectory of decline is worrisome, but maybe what scientists are actually perceiving is the emergence of a bell curve.  In our caveman days, life was equal for humans in a way that modern-day Marxists can only dream about – we were born into a hunter-gatherer environment and we died in one; in between we ate and fucked and hopefully reproduced, but mostly we just died early and often.  Ability to outsmart the harbingers of death was a tangible and huge advantage, and since your collective pool of knowledge and wisdom was only as large as your clan and that clan’s ancestral memory, you did not have a lot of outside assistance dodging death if you were personally deficient in doing so.

Today, however, the idiotic sabre-tooth tiger food of the prehistoric era is the cast of our present-day reality TV shows.  Thanks to the genius of a select few individuals and the industriousness of many more very intelligent people, someone who forgets to look both ways before crossing the street can be put back together, good as new.  We can even save the people who swallow a bottle of pills to indicate they no longer wish to live.  Despite the ongoing pockets of poverty and war, and the pervasiveness of certain illness we can’t yet cure, it is, in fact, harder to die in the world than it’s ever been.  Which means it’s easier to reproduce before you do finally succumb to death, which means that we’re no longer necessarily breeding more intelligence as a species.  We’re just breeding…more.

The prehistoric era could not have sustained both a Snooki and an Einstein; it probably could not have even created either one.  But as our technology becomes more and more sophisticated, I expect geniuses will emerge who make Einstein look like Snooki, and idiots who make Snooki look like Einstein will be able to live and thrive.  But most of humanity will be somewhere right in the middle of the spectrum, maintaining that balance that was the caveman’s status quo — smart enough to do something useful; smart enough not to get ourselves killed.

Posted in Culture, Science and Tech
about ,
What say you?

Come in peace or leave us in pieces?

Sep 27, 2012 8:09 pm•By: •What say you?

Last night the Russian lover and I were sitting out on the fire escape when we saw something in the sky that looked like a flash of lightening.  At first.  Except for the strange way that it flickered and glowed behind the clouds just above us, with no thunder to be heard.  First it appeared behind this cloud, then that one and that one.  Finally the glow pulsed between two points in the same cloud, going off and on and back and forth for a few seconds before disappearing entirely.

Neither of us could identify what exactly it was to our satisfaction, and one of us has an advanced science education.

One time when I was a kid, riding along in the car with my mom, we saw something streak across the sky overhead.  It was bright and almost green, seeming to explode on the horizon.  Given the global tensions at that time (is there ever a time without global tension?), we were completely freaked out.  An object like that could only be a missile or an alien spacecraft.  Since nothing in the Western hemisphere blew up that night, we decided we’d seen a UFO.

A few years later, sitting in Astronomy 101, I learned that what we’d actually seen was a bolide; ie, a fireball meteor.  Nothing extraordinary, just something not often seen over the mIdatlantic.  I was quite disappointed to realize that my UFO was now an IFO.

Stephen Hawking is right about aliens, of course.  Wanting aliens to show up in their super-awesome spacecraft with their super-advanced technology and totally foreign biology would be like Native Americans wanting the Europeans to show up with their guns and their smallbox and their disingenuous swagger.  The clash of civilizations always has winners and losers, and  human civilization is in no position to emerge victorious in an encounter with anyone capable of crossing the vast reaches of spacetime.

We are so pleased with ourselves for putting that robot on our neighbor planet, but as far as potential civilizations in the universe go we haven’t even reached the milestone of rolling onto our belly.  If some alien race showed up, it would be like a meeting between a diapered week-old infant and Einstein.  If we’re so lucky. In which case the worst that will happen is that they’ll coochy-coo us, maybe play peek-a-boo for a bit, and then hand us back to ourselves when they get bored.

Unfortunately, it seems far more likely that such a meeting would resemble Genghis Khan encountering a squalling infant in the course of a terror campaign, in which case we would simply be put out of our misery and snuffed out of existence altogether.

Or maybe the aliens would be like democrats, benevolent would-be dictators who just want to push us around for our own good and keep us in line for the collective good.  We’d even be allowed to try and contribute in the advanced realms, the recipients of some sort of galactic affirmative action.

Not to worry. I’m sure there is some entirely rational, dull explanation for those lights we — and everyone else who sees such things — saw in the sky.  But in the meantime I’m being fitted for my tinfoil hat.

 

 

Posted in Culture, Science and Tech
about , ,
What say you?