Questionable knowledge

The last time I clicked the random article link on Wikipedia, I was served up an article on Galina Antyufeeva, which led to my discovery of Transnistria. How many people lived their lives in blissful ingorance of these facts, I wonder. Fortunately for my three readers, there are people like me who not only compulsively dig up such facts, but also feel compelled to share them with you.

Yes, you're welcome.

So, in keeping with this unofficial and self-appointed mission, I once again went trolling for knowledge on Wikipedia, with an eye for something truly obscure to enlighten you with. However, I'm sad to report I didn't get far in this respect. Instead of random knowledge, I came across something which now compels me to write more about it.

I was served up an article on what at first seemed an unassuming school located in Toronto, Canada, called the Hawthorn School for Girls. What caught my eye wasn't the fact that it is a private school of the Roman Catholic denomination (I myself went to a Roman Catholic private high school, and then to Notre Dame). Rather, it was the organization with which it is affiliated: Opus Dei.

Opus Dei, as millions now know, was brought unwillingly into the international spotlight by being a prominent plot element in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". As unflattering as the portrayal was, a lot of what was shown of their practices has been chronicled by other sources, some of them ex-Opus Dei members. The self-flagellation, use of the silice and, most of all, the rigid adherence to doctrine which underlies the daily activities of its members, all have been amply documented.

But I'm not writing about Opus Dei per se. As far as I'm concerned, it is but one of a great many such organizations, each having more bizarre beliefs than the next, and none amounting to much more than what my father would have called "shovelling clouds".

What I wanted to write about goes beyond this particular example, though I will use this one to make my point. On the Hawthorn School's website is the following statement:

Underlying all the activities of the school is the unquestioned acknowledgement of the existence of God, of knowable objective truth, and of moral absolutes.

And its mission statement:

To assist parents in the integral education of their daughters to become free and responsible women who know and love the truth.

I recently wrote about Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". In the book, Dawkins makes an argument that calling a child either a Muslim, a Catholic or a Protestant child is as meaningless as calling them a liberal, republican or a fiscalist. To him, tarring a child with such a loaded burden is tantamount to child abuse:

There is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents. Whenever you hear the phrase Christian child or Muslim child or Protestant child or Catholic child, the phrase should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

I suppose I should feel lucky. After all, I was likewise raised in such a biased way. I was never given a choice as to what spiritual path (if any) I wanted to follow. The idea seems ridiculous to most people, so deeply-ingrained is this notion that a child's spirituality is a parent's purview, but that a child should de facto be submitted to the same spiritual strictures as their parents is utter madness. The girls of the Hawthorn school, despite the best intentions of the parents who founded it, will be spiritually stunted, and will likely never even come to realize the blight that this original bias imposed on their ability to think critically.

They will come to understand the existence of god as being 'unquestioned' and, in all likelihood, will indeed never question it. Just so it's clear, I don't care if the belief is in the christian god, Mohammed or even Thor—what bothers me is the fact that children are presumed to be of one faith or another simply by being born in one place rather than another.

Kinda gives the expression "there but by the grace of god go I" another meaning, doesn't it?

Overlooked in the iPhone hype

Well, it finally happened: Apple unveiled what had long been rumoured to be in the works, a true Apple phone (in contrast with the ROKR, the product of that half-hearted collaboration with Motorola last year). And while I wouldn't say that all the excitement about the Apple iPhone over the past week is completely unwarranted, I do believe that Apple's strongest bid for consumers' dollars went by largely unnoticed.

I've been having a lot of discussions about the iPhone, and it seems like everyone has a different take on what it means for Apple strategically, both now and in the future. And it's fun to speculate on where it's all going, but I'm much more interested in another product that Apple introduced last Monday: the Apple TV.

By most accounts, the Apple TV's introduction was underwhelming. Despite the buzz it created last September when Steve Jobs uncharacteristically introduced a product that was not yet ready for market, this time around it was largely overshadowed by the iPhone. And it really did feel like even Apple wanted to downplay this product. The specs were nothing to get excited about: a mere 40Gb hard drive and support for up to 720p video. Right now, its abilities are pretty much limited to streaming media from up to five household computers and displaying it on a television screen.

But should we expect it to end there? No way.

Back in the fall of 2004, in the context of an introductory marketing class at Notre Dame, I did some research on what could lie ahead for Apple. The result of this research was what I then called the iCore. It was a nondescript grey box equipped with massive onboard storage capacity, wireless capability, and the requisite connectors (phone, cable, internet) to become a sort of central hub through which all household communications flowed. It would be a base station for phone lines, for cable television and for the internet, and through wireless transmission, could enable a host of appliances throughout the home. Media could be shared from a PC to a television, phone calls could be routed through the internet, and recipes could be fetched from the internet and displayed on the microwave oven door, all through this central hub and a simple, ubiquitous interface.

And because Apple was the only company with expertise in both hardware and software, it would be the only one to be able to offer a fully integrated solution, while all others would have to rely on partnerships.

So what is the Apple TV capable of right now, and what could it possibly enable in the future? More importantly, why would Apple choose to release such an uninspiring product now if its true promise lies in the future? The answer, I believe, has to do with something Steve Jobs himself said: that, given enough intrinsic flexibility, a product can remain relevant through upgrades rather than overhauls. The Apple TV, as introduced last week, already features HDMI, component video/audio and ethernet connectivity, though the latter isn't explicitly useful in its current incarnation.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of the touchscreen for the iPhone was that, by avoiding a physical interface (like a multi-function keyboard), the iPhone could perform any task imaginable, because it was all just a matter of displaying an appropriate interface. Every function of the phone could have its own custom interface without being wedded to a multi-function keyboard.

Similarly, the Apple TV can stake a claim in users' homes immediately, and when the dynamics of the converged marketplace change sufficiently (as they will), the full breadth of its capabilities will becomes obvious. Oh, and you can bet that by then Apple will have the 'better' and 'best' versions of the Apple TV on store shelves, possibly offering integration with the iPhone, for instance.

In this respect, the Apple TV is truly a Trojan horse. It is Apple's claim to the home media market, and in iTunes, it has the perfect unifying vehicle to tie all of its wonderful products together. Software, hardware, design, and flawless execution. Can anyone else do that? Not likely.

So for now, the Apple TV will be content to be an unassuming box with unassuming abilities. But the future sure looks promising.

Nic