Gokmop's Crufty Bits

Ziltoid the Omniscient

2008-10-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be familiar with Devin Townsend. He's a Canadian metal musician that works with a number of different bands, (Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Lamb of God, Zimmer's Hole, and others) and also produces solo material.

I recently got a copy of his latest solo album, "Ziltoid the Omniscient", and I'm loving it. I guess you could say it's a pretty niche genre, because it's halfway serious progressive metal, and it's halfway a comic metal opera.

"Ziltoid the Omniscient" is about a 4th dimensional alien named Ziltoid (who, as you might have guessed, is omniscient). Ziltoid comes to earth and demands earth's "finest cup of coffee" within 5 minutes. Earth presents him with what he considers to be an inferior cup of coffee, and he attacks the planet. In between, there's a 6th dimensional being known as the "planet smasher", references to a place called the benevolent hive-mind 9, the crowning of the ultimate 4th-dimensional guitar hero, and of course the leader of the human resistance, "Captain Spectacular". (Come to think of it...in several ways the Ziltoid album bears more than passing resemblance to Dr. Horrible's Sing-along blog)

If all of that sounds pretty silly, well, it pretty much is. The music all the way through is fantastic, and Devin manages to pull it off and keep it silly...but not stupid. There's a real difference - this is music that can laugh at itself and be fun, but it doesn't come off as dopey to me. My only criticism of the album is the drumming. The one instrument Devin appears not to play is the drum kit, and he used programmed drums throughout the album. As metal drumming goes, it's OK, but unimpressive when compared to what Devin's frequent band mate Gene "The Atomic Clock" Hoglan can do.

If you're looking for something way off the beaten track in music, try Ziltoid the Omniscient. Particularly the tracks "Color your world", "The Greys", and "By Your Command". It's a version of progressive metal that doesn't fall victim to all the cock-rock BS that you sometimes find in metal.

One more for focused comedy blogs

2008-10-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Passive Aggressive Notes - a site dedicated to nasty notes that people write for one another anonymously and leave in shared spaces.

You know how every once in a while when some fool cuts you off in the parking lot, you have the urge to write a nasty note and clip it to their windshield after they park? Well, if you do that sort of thing, your note is probably on this blog somewhere.

Like Cake Wrecks, they're very focused and have piles of material. They have so much material in fact, they can do an entire series devoted to notes left for people who stole cheese.

In the words of JWZ, "Oh Internets, is there anything you can't do?"

The Rorschach Cake Wreck

2008-10-08T07:40:00.001-07:00

Cakewrecks is one of my favorite blogs. It has the two most important highlights of a good comedy blog - an intense and very specific focus, and an endless supply of material.

Yesterday, they had a game show where they presented a wretched cake and tried to get people to guess what the cake was supposed to look like. Here are the results.

Oooh, he's good

2008-08-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

The latest on the Georgia/Russia conflict is that Putin is now blaming the US for the conflict.

??!!?

It's true. Putin is claiming that the US encouraged Georgia to attack South Ossetia in order to provoke Russia, in order benefit a US presidential candidate.

Of course this is complete nonsense. One big tipoff that it's just a smoke screen is this:

Putin told CNN his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush -- although he presented no evidence to back it up.

Plausible deniability, should crackpot theory be proven false? Check! My defense officials (inspecific) gave me the information! Of course I trusted them. Evidence? No. Claims that don't contain actual substance are difficult to disprove.

There are a few other aspects of this that are absurd. First, assume what Russia is claiming is true. This is basically the same as Russia admitting that they are easily manipulated and baited into action by the west. Putin is indirectly saying that Russia is dancing to the tunes called by the US. It's safe to say he doesn't actually believe that.

Second, what advantage would this be for a presidential candidate? Barack is in the thick of his convention. I don't buy for a moment that there is any event he'd want pre-empting attention on the convention. As for McCain, I suppose you could make a vague weak argument that it plays to his relatively larger foreign relations experience...but it's quite a stretch. Putin realizes this, so he deftly avoids indicating how or why any of this is an advantage to a presidential candidate.

Also Thursday Putin announced economic measures which he said were unrelated to the fighting with Georgia. Nineteen U.S. poultry meat companies would be banned from exporting their products to Russia because they had failed health and safety tests, and 29 other companies had been warned to improve their standards or face the same ban, Putin said.

Does anybody else notice that when we talk about Russian allegations and actions of this sort, we're not talking about Russia's actions in Georgia? This isn't particularly good sleight of hand. But it's working.

Guy Kawasaki on Entrepreneurship

2008-08-25T12:26:00.001-07:00

Guest blog article on Sun's site written by Guy Kawasaki.

There are a few gems in here about small business entrepreneurship that are funny and true. Like this one, complete with excellent proverb:

Try stuff. I also used to believe that it's better to be smart than lucky because if you're smart you can out-think the competition. I don't believe that anymore--this is not to say that you should strive for a high level of stupidity. My point is that luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth."

Choosing between being smart and lucky of course is a false choice. Most successful companies will be both.

Dinosaur Comics and Psychoanalysis

2008-08-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

As blogging goes, it's pretty lazy and uninteresting to continually post comics from other sites. I mean, this must be the 5th or 6th dinosaur comic that I've posted. I could just give you enough credit to go check that site periodically on your own if you found any of the earlier ones interesting, but no.

Sometimes these comics just have something in them that grabs me. Take for example today's Dinosaur comics.

There's this element of self-reference. (Talking about analyzing thoughts, leading to the analysis of that thought, looping back on the original exposition) Then there's this element of implicit assumptions about the way people's inner lives work. For example, that your thoughts and actions necessarily have some wider meaning either to others, or as an interpretation of an un-expressed unconscious phenomenon. The last element is the puerile joke (ha-ha, only serious) which answers the question. Some thoughts don't have broader meaning to others. They may not even be expressions of anything subconscious. They might just be for one-off silliness and humor.

Some day, I'll write a rant about the unconscious mind and how the way that we approach it changes the way we think about ourselves, just as T-rex wonders what it says about him that he wants others to find wider meaning in his actions. That's a whole different kettle of fish though, and would compel me to write about cigar-smoking Austrians in a way that's not conducive to including web comics and "boner ahoy" references.

Ce la vie.

Sickening Drive-By Shooting Caught on Tape at Local Park

2008-08-18T11:44:00.001-07:00

Tales of the Weird

2008-08-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

The scoop:

SALT LAKE CITY -- A woman who made news around the world when she had five pups cloned from her beloved pit bull Booger looked very familiar to some who saw her picture: She may be the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave.

My friend's comment: "Some people just don't know when to stay out of the limelight."

I can see how she was recognized. This is not a mug that I would forget either.

I can't resist another choice quote:

In a 1977 court hearing mobbed by the British press, Joyce McKinney said she'd fallen head-over-heels in love with the Mormon man and acknowledged tracking him to England. "I loved him so much," she told a judge, "that I would ski naked down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to."

Common sentiment, that.

Circumlocutory Proverbs

2008-08-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

My new favorite brand of nerdiness - circumlocutory proverbs.

A disposition towards inquiry deprived the feline of its vital state (Curiosity killed the cat)

Elementary sartorial techniques initially applied obviate the need for repetitive similar actions to the square of three (A stitch in time saves nine)

Exigency is the matriarch of ingenious contrivance (Necessity is the mother of invention)

The stylus is more potent than the claymore (The pen is mightier than the sword)

There is illumination at the termination of the subterranean excavation (There's a light at the end of the tunnel)

Lame programming joke

2008-07-25T15:10:00.001-07:00


/**
 * TODO - robust implementation of this method would really help the program.
 */
public static void ___turingCompleteAI() { 
    while(true) { 
 // Trivial implementation of cognitiveLoop()
 // left as an exercise to the reader.  :)
 // cognitiveLoop(); 
    } // End while
}

War of the Fonts

2008-07-24T10:20:00.001-07:00

War of the Fonts

Poodwaddle World Clock

2008-07-07T12:46:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wanted to be bombarded by statistics about what's going on in the world, all at the same time?

Look no further.

No Comment

2008-07-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

Interesting Metrics in the Washington, DC Area

2008-07-02T07:17:00.001-07:00

I work with engineers. Engineers are all about measuring things. Here are two recently mentioned metrics I think are amusing in a nerd engineer kind of way.

STH

Seat/ton/hours. Seat ton hours are the measure of the human tonnage in seats at meetings over time. Mindless meetings and beuracratic waste can at least partially be measured in STH. 10 individuals of 200 pounds each, in a meeting for 1 hour is measured at 1 STH.

The average government symposium might be 500 people averaging 170lbs, for 2 days (7 hours per day) totaling a simply majestic 595 STH.

Due to the propensity of meetings to drag on, and the high likelihood that cookies, brownies, and coffee will be served, it is well established that STH tends to grow. Initial evidence suggests that STH's rate of growth accelerates as its value increases.

MPBB

Mean penny basket balance. This is a measure of an area's affluence. You know those "give a penny/take a penny" baskets by all of the cash registers? This is a measure of the basket's mean balance over a given period of time, typically a day or a week. Affluent areas have high MPBB's. For example, (and as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up) I was in a Caribou Coffee in Crystal City (Arlington) yesterday, and their penny bucket had more quarters and dimes than pennies. It even had two Sacajaweas in it. Presence of non-pennies in the penny bucket is an indicator of high MPBB. If you're in an area where people are throwing away $1 coins into a communal bucket for the next random stranger to use for coffee purchases, that's a tip-off the area might be affluent. If you further notice a long line of customers pay for their coffee and leave without using the coins, it's a further tip-off that these people are not concerned about scraping for dollars.

The First Shopper

2008-06-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

Sure, Robert Mugabe gets a lot of play in the media. But what about his wife?

Read about the "First Shopper", Grace Mugabe

Asked recently how she justified travelling to Europe to spend thousands on Ferragamo shoes while her people starved, she replied simply: "I have very narrow feet, so I wear only Ferragamo."

An interesting trophy wife who is all too eager to spend Zimbabwe's dollars, in full knowledge of where they came from.

By the way, for all you Americans out there that are complaining about a crappy economy and high inflation, I suggest you take a look at the exchange history of the Z dollar..

Psychotic Visitors to the White House

2008-06-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

As you might imagine, the White House is a point of fixation for a lot of people in the country who have grievances, both real and imagined.

MindHacks has a story today detailing case studies of psychotic visitors to the White House. Worth a read, to get an idea for what goes through the head of someone who is truly psychotic, as opposed to just your average Joe who might be derided as psychotic.

A Tour of Interesting Intellectual Evasions

2008-06-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

A few coworkers were discussing all of the different bogus defenses that obviously guilty defendants had tried over time, so we tried to dig up some information on some of them. A few we found:

The Twinkie Defense - I've been eating too much sugar lately, and it made me temporarily insane.
The Chewbacca Defense - here I am, a successful trial attorney standing in front of court, talking about Ewoks and Chewbacca. Does that make any sense? No! Not at all! Just like this case - it makes no sense!
The Idiot Defense - I didn't see the wrongdoing taking place, because at that moment I had my head in the sand.
The Gay Panic Defense - I thought he was interested in me, so I had to kill him.

World Speed Record: Swimming

2008-06-27T07:52:00.001-07:00

I've written about how fast humans can run before. Newsweek's recent article on the record speed impact that a new swimsuit is having made me wonder what the world speed record is for a human swimming. I wonder about these things because I always wonder about the limits of human physical capability.

Why bother wondering? This is why we have an Internet! Observe:

World record for 50-meter freestyle: 21.28 seconds, Eamon Sullivan. Anyone who has been in a pool and who has swum 50 meters should be extremely impressed at this point.

50 meters in 21.28 seconds = 1,000 meters in 425.6 seconds. Granted no one can keep that pace for that period of time, we're trying to calculate average top speed for water sprinters.

425.6 sec/km. Divide by 60 to get:
7.09 min/km. Divide 60 min/hour by 7.09 to get
8.46 km/hour. Use Google's nifty conversion tool to result in
5.26 miles/hour.

So the fastest current swimmer on the planet can manage about 5.26 miles per hour through the water. Contrast this with Asafa Powell from the previous speed post, who can manage 22.9 mph on the ground. Kinda points out exactly how much drag the water introduces, doesn't it? A world-class athlete in the water is a factor of 4 slower than a sprinter on land. And the swimmer is doing 50 meters, while the sprinter is doing 100m.

A couple of other minor things - the Wikipedia page indicates that the "short course" speed record is faster than the "long course" record. A "short course" is when you swim 50m in a 25m pool. Down and back, with the addition of pushing off of the wall on your way back. The long course is a 50m pool. I used the long course time record, because the short coursers are cheating when they get to streamline off of the wall on the way back. That ain't swimming; it's gliding through the water at high speed.

Also, in contrast to Asafa Powell's maximum speed, which is probably higher than his race time would suggest (due to his acceleration speed at startup), Eamon Sullivan's speed is aided because he gets to leap off of a starting block and glide at high speed for the first 1-2 seconds of his swim. As a result, if you wanted to get really technical the maximum swimming speed is a little lower than what I've calculated.

FSJ and Blogging

2008-06-27T07:09:00.001-07:00

Fake Steve Jobs has had a bit running for a while now dealing with Jerry Yang, the Yahoo CEO writing on the blog instead of Fake Steve Jobs. Jerry has generally been displaying his own incompetence in the typical humorous FSJ way.

Today, FSJ has finally had enough and has resumed control of the blog.

...He started to stammer something about developing a rhythm and finding his voice and I was like, Look, slackjaw, you posted nothing all day yesterday. Nothing. Not a single item. He goes, Well, I've been working on something big, but I wanted to think about it. I'm like, Think? You wanted to think? Dude, Rule Number One in blogging is this: Don't think -- write. Ever read Scoble? That's how it's done, chum...

Taft Slash Fiction

2008-06-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

OM NOM NOM NOM

2008-06-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

OM NOM NOM NOM

Source: The excellent Shorpy

Reference: Pikes' Cat

Don't get any of this? Look here

What's No Good About Magic

2008-06-23T15:29:00.001-07:00

Further Hatin' on Indiana Jones

2008-06-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

Abridged Script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, courtesy of JWZ.

Our Presidential Candidates

2008-06-17T13:09:00.001-07:00

Many bloggers this campaign season will offer you thoughtful analysis and commentary on the race to determine the next leader of the United States of America.

I, on the other hand, will offer you funny pictures courtesy of Face of the Future, a highly-recommended time sink I recently discovered.

First, let's start with good shots of the candidates so we know who we're dealing with (visually speaking). These are the candidates as they would wish you to see them.

Ever wondered what these distinguished gentlemen might have looked like as children? I know that I never did, but the important thing is, I did this morning when I discovered this cool new website. It turns out that Obama probably wins the "cute kid" award, as evidenced by the following composite photos:

Clearly, the digital child-like avatar of Senator McCain was severely beaten with the ugly stick. And what about the alternate universe where they were both east Asians?

OK, I hear the clamor - east asian is all good and well, but what about west Asian?

Finally, the coup de grace: the candidates as Botticelli paintings.

Observations & Conclusions:

I, for one, welcome our new digitally disfiguring face-mangling overlords.
Software recognition and processing of faces has come a long way from just 5 years ago.
Software processing of faces still isn't really all that convincing.
The internet is the greatest enemy of productive work, and desperately needs to be destroyed.

Air Travel

2008-06-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Today I’m writing from an airplane. I’m headed to Vancouver for work, and I have the distinct pleasure of being routed from Philadelphia, over Dallas, and into Salt Lake City before going on to Vancouver. The geography of that route doesn’t really make any sense at all, but it has been dictated to us by the density of flights in the skies over the Midwest, and the massive storm front in that area as well. As it happens, our fun little detour has necessitated a stop in Salt Lake City for more fuel before continuing on our “direct” flight from Philadelphia to Vancouver.

Unless you’ve been living on the moon recently, regularly avoiding the news, you are likely aware that airlines are all in a mode of nickel and diming their customers to the nth degree, because they simply can’t make money. I suppose for the average beleaguered traveler, it’s one point of consolation that even through all of the crappy treatment, the airline still isn’t turning a buck. Between the costs of funding their worker’s retirements, and the cost of gasoline, they’re losing money even when they manage to pry $25 out of you for that extra bag.

The benefits that airlines provide to their customers in the form of frequent flier miles don’t get their customers anywhere; due to the fact that most planes are full these days, upgrades purchased with frequent flier miles don’t work, because there aren’t any available seats to use for the upgrade. The same problem blocks customers from using frequent flier miles for free flights. Those free tickets are typically only available these days on certain rare routes, and only when the airplane wouldn’t otherwise be full. In short, your demonstrated loyalty to an airline in the form of frequent flier miles might buy you the right to fly standby on an unpopular route at an inconvenient time. If you’re lucky.

Air travel problems don’t stop there though. There is a widely acknowledged problem with the growth and scalability of the US national air travel industry. Simply put, there are more delays these days because there are too many airplanes clogging the skies. FAA regulations require a certain “separation” between airplanes for safety. You don’t want one airplane landing too closely after another, or there can be trouble with timing and coordination. Further, the military often helps itself to large blocks of the civilian airspace, blocking it off for training exercises. This in turn requires all of the airlines to fly around those blocks of space. Resulting in…you guessed it, more gas burned and late arrivals. The FAA is taking part of a huge project called “NextGen”, which is an attempt to envision the next-generation air traffic control space in the US. Ultimately, this mastodon of a federal bureaucratic project will collapse under its own weight, but the need for airspace improvements is legitimate and pressing.

And then there’s the security. The TSA continues to keep us very safe from a wide array of hallucinated threats, as well as keeping us somewhat safe from a handful of serious threats. When I go through the security lines and stare into the dead eyes of some of these poor souls who have been inspecting thousands of strangers per hour, I pity them. If I were in their shoes, (and really I could be, since when I’m in their presence I’m not in my own shoes) I would probably be just as annoyed by the testy business travelers and the morons who can’t follow simple verbal instructions when repeated 10 times.

How does this entire situation come to pass? We’re talking about the preferred mode of distance travel in a major industrialized nation, and the setup we’ve created for ourselves is one where a service in heavy demand isn’t profitable, and is widely loathed by its customers. You would think that in a business that had the sex appeal and romanticism of the open skies, airlines would be able to come up with something.

They say that in most markets, after you strip away the many layers of so-called rationality, you’re left with market psychology, that of fear and greed. Perhaps that idea is in play here too. Air travelers are fearful, in that we allow the TSA to foist ridiculous security onto us in exchange for vague promises that we will be safer from the bogeymen. (Which threats have they protected us against recently? Well, they’re so scary, they’re classified). And let’s not forget greed, or rather its bastard cousin, stinginess. Air travelers simply aren’t willing to pay for a standard of service better than what they’re currently getting in ballast class travel. If what we pay doesn’t even cover the snack box on the flight anymore, and we’re not willing to chip in a couple extra bucks to cover the gas, we have to expect to be nickel and dimed. The alternative is to expect that airlines will simply start losing money for the fun of it, a prospect that to me seems even less likely than some of the TSA’s more disturbing dreams.

Plan 9 From Outer Space

2008-06-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

Dirtwoman for Mayor!

2008-06-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

There's an upcoming mayoral race in a city I hold near and dear; Richmond, Virginia. The current mayor Doug Wilder will not be running and the deadline for filing for mayoral candidacy is in 5 days.

I was perusing websites looking for profiles of the candidates, and I came across a familiar face...Dirtwoman is running for mayor.

Dirtwoman is a famous Richmond transvestite that has been with the city for many, many years. [S]he was involved in the underground music scene, the art scene, and just about everything in between. It's unclear how serious hu is about hu's candidacy. But it has such potential!

I see shades of Jello Biafra for mayor.

Yakoff Smirnoff the Genius

2008-06-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

"What a Country"

Reading employment announcements of "Part-Time Woman Wanted": "What a country! Even transvestites can get work."
Upon being offered work as a barman on a "graveyard shift," he remarks “A bar in a cemetery! What a country! Last call? During Happy Hour the place must be dead."
At the grocery store: "Powdered milk, powdered eggs, baby powder . . . what a country!"
"The first time I went to a restaurant, they asked me 'How many in your party?' and I said 'Six hundred million'."
"You have such nice things in the U.S.—like warning shots!"

In America, you can always find a party.
In Soviet Russia, Party finds you!

Indiana Jones 4

2008-06-03T05:55:00.000-07:00

A lot of people these days are hatin' on the new Indiana Jones movie (the Crystal Skull). I saw the film last Saturday night, and I can gladly report that contrary to JWZ's opinion, the movie is not made of FAIL.

Here we have a movie written by George Lucas, and directed by Steven Spielberg. When you have a George Lucas script, you're bound to have ham-handed attempts at humor that don't quite hit the mark, over the top action, and a sci-fi angle that tends to the bizarre. So you have to know that going in, and if you hate George Lucas movies, just stay home.

All of that said, this was a classic Indiana Jones movie. I think this movie is falling prey to the same syndrome that killed the Star Wars prequels. A bunch of 20- and 30-something hipsters who have amazing memories of the original movies in their childhood are approaching the new movies (Star Wars prequels, and Indiana Jones 4 alike) with adult eyes, and expecting them to provoke the same sort of wonder they felt when they were kids. When it comes to the old memories it's not the story or the characters that they remember, it's the way that the story made them feel. You know, the sense of wonder that only an 8-year old can feel when they're pretending that the back seat of the family station wagon is a battleship in space.

These days, they're all grown up. What they get today isn't a feeling of wonder, but a kinda campy, kinda hokey, not really believable story with paper-thin characters and lots of fight scenes. Still, it's exactly what they got when they were kids before they were sophisticated enough to see through that kind of stuff.

A comment my coworker made I think says it all. He took a 10-year old son to the new Indiana Jones movie. He himself hated the movie for all of the reasons above. His 10-year old thought it was about the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Even as an adult, I thought the movie was fun as brain candy. The plot towards the end started getting really outrageous, (even for Indiana Jones standards) and the use of obvious stunt doubles for a now-elderly Harrison Ford was pretty obvious (and sometimes distracting). But there was plenty of fun stuff, a good Russian female villain (who reminded me of Natasha from Bullwinkle), and a few really remarkable CGI scenes.

Bottom line, it's not as bad as people would have you believe, as long as you can avoid criticizing it like a "cinema piece" and realize that it's just cheap entertainment.

Damn you George Lucas for making us all realize that we're old now.

Fear

2008-06-03T05:52:00.000-07:00

BHAGs and Aiming High

2008-05-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

Related to the previous post, today's Google "quote of the day"

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. - Arnold Toynbee

Reference the BHAG. A Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. BHAGs are very similar to the "vision statements" from my last post.

BHAGs get a bad rap because nobody knows what to do with them. When you're in an engineering organization, the engineers don't know how to build one, so they scratch their heads. When you're in a research organization, they can't figure out how to break a BHAG down into a series of step-wise journal papers. When you're inside of a financial organization, they can't figure out how to put it into a value on a spreadsheet.

The thing about BHAGs though is that they are the source of the messianic zeal that you find in the most effective leaders. The BHAG is the nutjob idea that motivates inspired leadership. It's that thing that looks wildly unplausible...right up until the point when it actually happens.

It's very rare that anyone or any organization has the wherewithal, the staying power, and the (yes, strategy) to actually reach a BHAG. When there is such an organization, all bets are off. Men start walking on the moon, technology jumps ahead in years rather than decades, and life changes.

Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

2008-05-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things that's been bugging me in my professional life for some time are the ideas of vision, strategy, and tactics. At my work, I'm often involved in discussions about strategy in particular, with large organizations that don't really know how it's done, or even really how to think about the problem. It's such a common problem though (and not one that's specific to large organizations, but even to individuals who are trying to plan different aspects of their life) that I thought I'd throw out a few observations about it.

First, what are things anyway? Vision, strategy, and tactics are not hopelessly blurry Dilbertesque buzzwords subject to random interpretation. The terms do actually mean something. "Vision" is a statement of some hypothetical future; it's what you aspire to or hope to accomplish. It is not an action, but a description of some future state. A good vision should be specific and unambiguous. Anyone should be able to look at the state of affairs and determine whether that vision has been accomplished or not. A great example of a short and sweet vision statement is, "Wind power cheaper than coal power by 2020." It's a good vision statement because it's specific, audacious, and easy to evaluate. Examples of lousy and meaningless vision statements include things like

"To deliver differentiated value to our clients",
"To provide best-in-class service to a broad range of sectors over time"
"Improve capabilities and gain stakeholder buy-in"

Notice that these bad examples are open-ended (no dates or milestones), and fuzzy. It's not too surprising that they sound Dilbertesque. Acceptance of a vision like this is concrete evidence of groupthink, and participants who are more invested in paying lip service to the process of strategic thinking, and less invested in the process of actually improving anything.

Once you have a vision, you need a strategy. Yes, in that order. Without a vision, even the most brilliant strategist won't get you very far. The reason this is true boils down to the old chestnut that "without knowing where you're going, any road will do". The purpose of the strategy is to outline the plans that will be used to achieve the vision. Good strategies are:

Plans that articulate the what, not the how. A strategy should say what you are going to do (e.g. "build wind farms in locations in the midwest", or "invest in research to make wind power more efficient") and not the exact method that will be used;
Plans that are complete; if all of the plans in the strategy are followed, it should be clear that the vision will be accomplished. Bad strategies have gaps, where it isn't clear how the vision will emerge, even after all plans have been successfully executed.

OK, let's assume there's a good strategy in place. Then and only then do you worry about tactics which go into specific actions, methods, and schedules that you will use to accomplish your goals. Tactics is where it pays to get specific, and to deal with all of the messy aspects of getting things done in the real world. Your strategy might be to invest in wind power research to make it more efficient, your tactics would involve which projects to fund and why. Tactical considerations would include where to put the windmills, what material to make them out of, how much of the budget to spend on building windmills vs. on research, and so on.

Tactics are heavily affected by the expediency of the moment, and the environment where you're operating. They should be fluid and subject to change. Strategy needs to be more firm, a guiding set of plans that help you coordinate tactical moves. Finally, the vision needs to be very firm. A vision should only change in response to a monumental shift in the real world.

A rapidly changing vision will render your strategy toothless (because the strategy will very quickly be heading in the wrong direction). A rapidly changing strategy leaves you nowhere with respect to tactics, because your tacticians and planners won't know where they're going, or why. On the other hand, tactics can change every day, while their strategic end remains the same. There is no inherent conflict there.

The problem with this constellation of considerations is that they require too many different styles of thinking, and too many talents at the same time. People who are good at vision and strategy tend to be lousy at tactics, and vice versa. Tactics are taught in any undergraduate college education in the form of the things that you need to do to accomplish a task. Almost no one learns strategy and vision in any formal education. The best that you can hope for is that they are exposed to someone who is really talented, and can pick up some of their chops.

No one learns strategy and vision in school, because school always starts with the end purposes "baked in". If you're a doctor, the purpose is to heal the patient. If you're a programmer, the purpose is to write a program. If you're an advertising major, the purpose is to create a TV ad. Strategy and vision are all about how to choose what you want when you are in an open environment and where your end is not pre-identified. Most people in school are already pursuing some purpose, and so they aren't exposed to the open-endedness that hones visionary and strategic thinking.

Even worse, when you cobble together teams that consist of folks with all of those necessary skills, they rarely get along. While not universally true, typically such teams have such different personalities, each group ends up thinking that the other groups just don't get it.

If all that wasn't enough, then there are the consultants. Most large organizations at least at some level realize that vision and strategy isn't their primary skill, so they call in consultants to help. Consultants are great for vetting existing ideas, helping to structure the discussion, or refining an idea. More often though instead of serving in that capacity, the organization abdicates their responsibility and assigns the consultants the task of coming up with the vision and strategy for them. No matter how smart the consultant, they are unable to come up with the right vision and strategy, because they aren't members of the organization. They don't have to live with the consequences of the decisions, they aren't as familiar with the operating environment. They simply aren't invested in the same way.

Look at it from the consultant's point of view. If you are being hired as an external consultant to write a company's vision and strategy, it's because your client doesn't know where they want to go, or what they want to do. What possible hope do you have of getting it right? How likely do you think it is that the company will follow that strategy if there's no way for them to know that the strategy reflects what they want to do (because they don't know)?

All of this just goes to show that even large organizations struggle with the question, "what do I want to be when I grow up?" Like people in their personal life, there is no objectively correct answer, only a huge number of options that you're left to sort through by yourself. Even if you concede that it can't ever be done perfectly, experience suggests that having a bad vision or strategy is better than having no vision or strategy. When the tacticians are running the nuthouse, it's pure chaos.

Petals around the Rose

2008-05-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

A web game to drive you nuts:
Petals around the rose.

The setup is simple. Press the "Roll" button to get started. Enter how many petals you think are around the rose. Press the "Check" button to check your answer.

Work at it for a bit, and see if you can get it. Results are highly variable; some smart people will look at it for hours and not get it. Some average people will just glance at it and have the solution in 30 seconds flat.

The Pitfalls of Spell Checkers

2008-05-16T07:45:00.000-07:00

Gaffled from HumorList:

I halve a spelling checker,
It came with my pea see.
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I dew knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait aweigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the era rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

I've scent this massage threw it,
And I'm shore your pleased too no
Its letter prefect in every weigh;
My checker tolled me sew.

Beautiful Music

2008-05-13T05:05:00.000-07:00

Over this past weekend, I spent some time with a friend strumming away on the ukelele playing a few songs. We worked out the structure of a basic blues, and played "Amazing Grace", "I Will Survive", "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", and "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath. Yes, Black Sabbath can be played on the ukelele and it's a riot.

Monday evening, I was jonesing for more tunes. Who would have known that the internet is such a cornucopia of guitar tablature, chord sheets, lyrics and references?

Here are a few extra favorites. All are relatively easy to play on the guitar (except the last one), and should lend themselves to easy transposition to the ukelele.

Mad World by Gary Jules. But also by Tears for Fears. And about a frazillion other artists too. This tends to happen to good songs. If played correctly, it's wistful and beautiful.
Least Complicated by the Indigo Girls. Play it with a "gee whiz" air; it's light-hearted, and fun.
You Are My Sunshine by Norman Blake. A classic - feel free to invent your own lyrics to this one, it's easy.
Such Great Heights by Iron and Wine. This one isn't as simple to play because it relies on a finger-picking pattern and not chord strumming, which may or may not work on the ukelele. Still it's a great song. Iron and Wine is proof that classic folk songs are still being written and performed today, it's just that it may be another 40 years before we know that they're classic folk.

If you really start to think about what you can do with 5-10 chords and a guitar or ukelele, you realize that the entire catalog of Simon and Garfunkle, Bob Dylan, and several others is now open to you. Not to mention quite a few Irish drinking songs, and the better part of Weird Al Yancovic's catalog.

Shorpy: Earth and Sky

2008-05-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

A friend recently turned me on to Shorpy, the 100-year old photo blog:

Shorpy.com is the 100-year-old photography blog that brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century.

The photos span a lot of different subject material; a lot of the recent posts seem to be dug out of government archives, but users can post their own vintage photographs that provide a picture into what things looked like at various points. I don't know if my memory is typical of most people's, but all of the visual images I can conjure about these time periods come from super-famous images that have been held up as emblematic of their times (for example, a picture of the crashing Hindenburg, or the "Dewey Defeats Truman" picture). Some of these photos are interesting in that they just show a bunch of guys standing around, with good detail on what their surroundings were.

One of my recent favorites is Earth and Sky, Puerto Rico, January 1938. "Workers in a tobacco field. The straw shed in the background is a hurricane shelter." View full size. Medium-format safety negative by Edwin Rosskam for the Farm Security Administration."

Police Helicopters and Infrared Video

2008-05-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

If you've ever wondered what it looks like to be a policeman in a helicopter, looking down on an infrared scene where a guy is getting chased by a police attack dog, well you don't have to wonder anymore.

Brevard County K9 Pursuit

Amazing. They've even added music for comic effect. Important note - if there's a police helicopter around, don't bother running.

The Gimmick Limerick

2008-05-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest attempt at a limerick. These typically don't work that well, because when I start with a pun or joke that I try to work into limerick form, sometimes they come out as artificial. Still, I figure you'll never get better without trying, so here goes. Warning: this is a groaner.

The desert is hot, and the air
Is drier than some men can bear
While there, you might thirst,
but you'll eat till you burst
On account of the sand which is there.

I have also recently been submitting others to LimerickDB, but sadly they do not yet appear on the "latest" page, so I can't provide links to them. Seeing as how this here is a "family blog", I also can't exactly reproduce them here. I can only provide this one, which I submitted, but sadly can't take credit for having written. It's a doozy. The combination of high-brow reference with crude implication is priceless.

Dinosaur Comics: A Window into an Alternate, Corporate-Controlled Universe

2008-05-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

Commercial Lyrics: they're easy! You just imagine being good, and then don't do that.

Fake Steve Jobs

2008-05-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

If you're not familiar with the Fake Steve Jobs blog, and you have an interest in technology, you should check it out.

Fake Steve Jobs is a person who is openly impersonating Steve Jobs, and who writes blog posts in a style that people who have speculated about his personality would expect. Since Steve Jobs is widely considered to be a pretty driven, creative, and somewhat odd person, this can make for humor. Today there's a post called Sickening Spoof Goes Viral that's pretty typical of the style.

I was like, "Katie, look, I'm in my meditation chamber, and I'm listening to Lothar and the Hand People and trying to focus on the future. This stuff about existing products -- who cares? I mean the Air is done. It's out there. You have to let it go. I let go of it the moment I introduced it. It's not ours anymore. It's a part of the world.

The form of the blog is also interesting, because it's an invitation to skewer other people in the tech industry through the conceit of expressing (fake) Steve Job's personal opinions.

Namaste, internets.

This is killling me...

2008-04-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

ADHD:

ADHD: Neurological disorder discovered by drug companies, who recognized that the need for rough and tumble play by pre-adolescents represents in fact a horrible disease that is coincidentally treatable by their concoctions. Successfully treated ADHD sufferers (i.e., 12 year old boys) can reenter society as self-satisfied drones who will sit idly with remote control in hand and thus be prepared to enter the adult world. (see Simpson, Homer)

Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology

2008-04-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be familiar with The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. It is a dictionary of terms defined in an amusingly cynical tone that cuts a little bit too closely to the truth.

Today, MindHacks uncovered Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology, which is a spiritual brother to the Devil's Dictionary. For example, Dr. Phil:

Dr. Phil: (1946-2005) Greatest psychologist that ever was, and an inspiration for an entire nation to shape up, get in ship shape, or otherwise ship out. Author of the '10 life laws', the '15 life strategies', and 'how to earn millions without having to serve 10 to life'. Dr. Phil has revolutionized the intellectual landscape of American as curricula changed nationwide from philosophy to PHIL-osophy.

Dr. Phil was a graduate of the Academy of Lagado, and winner of several Ponzi awards, the Salieri Prize, the Oprah Legion of Honor, and of late was spiritual adviser to the Republican party.

Tragically, Dr. Phil's life came to an abrupt end when in a household accident, he tripped and was crushed by his own ego.

Or how about Emotional Intelligence:

Emotional Intelligence: A type of intelligence, common among angry housewives, who combine emotions and intelligence as they berate their unemotional and witless husbands for not listening, not taking out the garbage, etc.

Emotional intelligence quotients of EQ's are also commonly handed out to ninnies who score low on IQ tests, thus making more than enough intelligence to go around.

Go forth, and be entertained!

Gokmop Radio: Post-Rock Edition

2008-04-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Post-rock:

The post-rock sound incorporates characteristics from a variety of musical genres, including ambient, jazz, electronica, and experimental. The traditional method of power chords is replaced with timbre and texture for guitar-play while the song and voice is abandoned by its ambience. The rebellious overtones of rock as we remember it is no longer the theme for post-rock groups. In fact, utilizing dub reggae, hip hop, and rave, post-rock manages to create an androgynous and softer means of subversion. The clubs were also a response to the emergence of a new post-rock vibe where musicians escaped musical genre labels and traded ideas. Early post-rock groups also often exhibited strong influence from the krautrock of the '70s, particularly borrowing elements of "motorik", the characteristic krautrock rhythm.

Mmmm. "Soft subversion".

My picks from recent fanatical Last.FM listening:

Deliciously Insecure

2008-04-21T13:54:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal blog is carrying a post about users giving up their passwords for chocolate. (Nod to Bruce Schneier). Apparently all that's necessary for a person to give up the keys to all of the systems they have access to is a pretty girl and a bar of chocolate.

(The picture attached to the WSJ blog post is pure gold - the thoughtful look on the guy's face, the angle of his gaze; you can just see his rational fore brain being thrown into the back room and locked away without even a single complaint)

This trick is a tried and true application of social engineering. The principle is that it's easier to break into computer systems by manipulating people and their trust instincts than it is to try and break through some computer system's security. The most famous hackers who have ever walked amongst us mere mortals didn't fly through 3-D cyberspace to "break the code" like you see in the movies. Generally, they just called someone up that used the system they wanted to break into, and asked them for their password.

Perhaps the mark of a real hacker's guile is that they generally aren't pretty girls, and they don't use chocolate. Still it works. If a basement-dwelling computer-obsessed nerd can sweet talk a password out of someone over the phone it would seem that if you add a pretty girl and a chocolate bar, it's a slam dunk.

Bruce Schneier on his blog notes that there isn't any data available about whether or not the passwords were real. I suppose we'll need some additional experimentation to determine whether or not guys will lie to pretty women to get what they want. Hmmmm....

Maybe inflation in the US isn't so bad after all...

2008-04-14T05:29:00.001-07:00

BBC report: Mugabe's Stranglehold on Zimbabwe

I had just bought two cups of tea and two glasses of water and, reaching into my bag, I took out a massive wad of Zimbabwean dollars.

New and crispy Z$10m notes. Clean and sleek.

Then I looked at the bill. The charge was Z$204m. That would make a serious dent in my brick of notes.

The Zimbabwean dollar is one of the most worthless currencies in the world so any notions of being a millionaire, or even a billionaire, lasted all of a few seconds.

The rate of inflation is now estimated to be over 165,000%. At this kind of rate, it doesn't really matter what the job situation, housing situation, or any other situation in the country is. People are just up a creek.

To put this inflation rate into perspective, take something that cost a $1 at the beginning of the year. Say, a soda. At the end of the year, it would cost $1,650. Think about what that would mean in terms of what you would have to earn in order to get by.

To show the power of compounding, amazing that’s only 2.1% increase a day, compounded daily. You only need an inflation rate of less than 2.4% annually to cause 10 fold inflation in 100 years.

Blanktop & Batman

2008-04-11T19:09:00.000-07:00

If you're not familiar with the Blanktop Chronicles, it's a blog written by a guy who is a dispatcher for an Arlington, Virginia taxicab company. Pretty much all of the entries are about amusing or abusive conversations he has with people who call in looking for cabs.

Blanktop Meets Batman

A taste:

So let me get this straight: There was a purse in the cab when you got in, you rifled through it and found a bunch of cash and credit cards, and now you want to keep it rather than let our driver hand it over to lost and found. Can you tell me what's wrong with this picture?

Mediocre

2008-04-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Tales of the City

2008-04-10T06:50:00.001-07:00

Healing Heart, Drunken Pit Bull: Making Peace

A sneak preview:

I lived in tired little termite buffet painted the color of dingy Band-Aids. A small community of grizzled vagrants in electric wheelchairs would commune around a trash fire in the alley behind my house most afternoons, drinking Thunderbird. Sometime around twilight most nights, one guy with a blurry swastika tattooed on his forehead would rev up out into the road, barreling upstream against one-way traffic. I had decorated the interior of the place myself — carpeted the entire house in Astroturf, green for the living room, the stairs, and upstairs hallway, my bedroom in neon blue with a giant American flag for a bedspread. Waking up each morning was like a Lego funeral at sea.

Bob

2008-04-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

On the recommendation of my brother in law, I looked up Weird Al Yancovic's song "Bob".

Behold, a song whose lyrics are all palindromes. This song makes sense the way things can make sense at 3:00 AM after a few too many.

More Limericks

2008-04-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

A reliable source recently tipped me off to the existence of the Limerick Database. I don't think I need to tell you what you're going to find there.

This Limerick database is a spin-off of the XKCD webcomic, which is created by Randall Munroe. I know I won't be the first or the last, but let me applaud Mr. Munroe's profound contribution to entertainment, and decry his complete lack of respect for my productive time.

I immediately felt the need to contribute a few of my favorites, which won't be reposted here, because I like to maintain a paper-thin veneer of respectability.

The one thing about this Limerick database is that it skews heavily towards technically nerdy limericks. Many of them can't be grokked without a proper understanding of UNIX, operating systems, and sci-fi. There are a few gems though that it doesn't take a computer person to understand:

If you catch a Chinchilla in Chile
And cut off its beard, willy-nilly
   You can honestly say
   That you have just made
A Chilean Chinchilla's chin chilly

A young psychic midget named Marge
Went to jail with the most heinous charge
   But despite lock and key
   The next day she broke free
And the headlines said "Small Medium at Large"

Lunch isn't romantic, and other interesting things that the web can tell us

2008-04-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

Compare Stuff - random correlation of word mentions on the web.

Did you know that lunch isn't nearly as romantic as breakfast?

Why I Love Kingdom of Loathing

2008-04-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

For those of you who aren't familiar, the Kingdom of Loathing is an online multiplayer fantasy game that uses crudely drawn stick figures as characters, and extensive use of puns and corny jokes throughout the gameplay.

Today being April Fool's Day, they put a new area onto the map where you could adventure, called "The Spectral Salad Factory". Just giving you this kind of a sample will give you a sense of what you're in for with the Kingdom of Loathing. Adventuring in the Spectral Salad Factory yielded the following:

Tossing the Salad
The great Spectral Salad Factory! None may know the hour of its coming or going, but here it is! Who knows what sort of terrifying salad-manufacturing horrors may await you within these ghostly walls -- Merciless, unyielding crouton golems? Bewitching, beguiling radish dancers? The terrible Archfiend Bako, Lord of Lies?

You grit your nerves, wield your teeth, and steel your weapon... wait... Well anyway, you bust through the door, ready for action!

"Hello," says a man in gray overalls.

"Hello. Which way to the terrifying salad-manufacturing horrors?"

"Laid off," he says. "Whole factory went automated last fall." He gestures to a salad that goes zipping by on a conveyor belt. "Me and a couple other maintenance guys, that's all that's left."

"L-laid off?" you stammer, aghast.

"Ayep. Well, 'cept the golems, they got dismantled and sold off for parts. Radish dancers all got jobs in gentlemen's clubs."

"And Bako?"

"The Lord of Lies? Well, why don't you just go ahead and assume I made some witty political joke, there. Save me some trouble."

"Huh. That's pretty disappointing."

"Well, that's progress for ya. Sorry 'bout that. Here, have a salad," he says, plucking one from the conveyor belt as it whizzes by.

You acquire an item: delicious salad

Internet Music and Last.fm

2008-03-31T05:10:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, I've been using Pandora online while at work. Pandora basically creates customized radio stations for you. You start off by identifying an artist that you like, and they pull up a song by that artist and start playing it. After that song is finished, it starts to play other "thematically similar" songs. At any time during each song, you can indicate that you like the song or hate it, and the service will automatically skew the songs it plays towards what you've identified that you like.

Pandora is nifty, but it's a flash-based web application. It loads somewhat slowly, and it's quite advertising heavy. Recently, a friend of mine who always gives me good recommendations on music suggested Last.fm. Last.fm is quite similar to Pandora, but has more social networking features, and can be used as a stand-alone client application on your computer.

I don't tend to use the social networking features. I just plug in artists and listen to the right channel depending on my mood. Recent favorites have included Jesu, Chuck Brown (aka "the Godfather of Go-go"), and Sigur Ros. I can't say too much about the specific music right now, because I'm prone to rambling on about sub-genres and the direction of music. The executive summary is that however much awesome music that you think is out there, you're wrong. There's more than that. Which is a good thing.

Anyway, last.fm seems to me to be superior to Pandora. One of the things that always bothered me about Pandora was that the feature for indicating a song is a favorite, and then going back to browse which bands were in your favorites was a pain. Doable, just annoying. Last.fm makes it easy, and doesn't require a web browser. These days, everything wants to be a browser-based application. I suppose that's OK, but some things I don't want in my browser. For example, when I'm done checking out web pages, I'd like to be able to close my browsers and have the music continue. I think of listening to music and looking at web pages as two distinct activities.

Maybe some day, I'll bore you to tears with an extended essay on the brilliance of the post-rock genre, or my thoughts on why Steve Vai's technical education was sadly wasted. But until the day comes when you honestly have nothing better to do than read that crap, do yourself a favor and check out last.fm.

Disposal of Sodium in the pre-OSHA days

2008-03-17T10:05:00.001-07:00

The US Government disposes of large amounts of raw sodium.

What else were they going to do with it? They dump it in a lake.

Getting smacked up

2008-02-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

So the conventional wisdom for a number of years about the "runner's high" was that it was caused by release of endorphins, which are morphine or opium-similar chemicals released by the brain. Basically, runners get euphoric because they're getting high on self-manufactured smack.

Cool, huh?

Well, it turns out that the conventional wisdom is right. Some folks have recently published a neuroscience article where they used PET scans to demonstrate the relationship between absorption of the smack, and runner's reports of euphoria.

The research leads us to one of several conclusions. Conclusion 1: The test-subject runners are hiding small syringes of opium-like chemicals inside their brains, and choosing to squeeze brain muscles in such a way that the syringe plungers are depressed right as they lie to the researchers that they are feeling euphoric. (You have to admit, this would explain the experimental results) Conclusion 2: the conventional wisdom applies, and their brains are actually making the drugs in response to the physical exertion. Conclusion 3: same as conclusion 1, but optionally with some kind of containing pocket, rather than syringe.

Applying Occam's razor, we arrive at conclusion 2.

Someone needs to contact the DEA immediately. These neuroscientists have just proved that over the past decades, America's marathoners have been knowingly manufacturing large quantities of opium-like drugs. And they've taken them, too! The horrors! Shooting them directly into their brains...how degenerate!

Limericks

2008-02-26T13:44:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I dropped more limericks, so here's another dose.

For the first two, I can't resist a few metalimericks.

There once was a poet named Dan,
Whose poetry just would not scan.
When pointed out why,
He said with a sigh,
"I know, because I try to fit every last syllable on the last line that I can."

There once was a man from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

Then there are the good wordplay and phonetic coincidence limericks...

Arthur Jones to his bride-to-be said,
“I can shoot off this pear from your head.”
  Then he missed by a hair,
  But he still split a pair,
For there’s lead in the miss he misled

There was a young fisher named Fischer
Who fished for a fish in a fissure.
  The fish with a grin,
  Pulled the fisherman in
Now they’re fishing the fissure for Fischer.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of 2008 Election Early

2008-02-26T13:31:00.000-08:00

Diebold accidentally leaks results of 2008 election early

I love you, Onion.

Area Woman: If you can't trust your shadowy overlords to keep a secret, then what is the purpose of voting in a puppet democracy?

I love you, Onion.

The Fascination of a House

2008-02-25T13:36:00.001-08:00

Over the past few months, I've spent a large amount of time doing home repair. It started out with a kitchen remodeling project, but since it's gotten much more involved with a basement remodeling project.

Sometimes the work is boring and dreary and involves doing something simple over and over again. Cutting drywall is a good example. After you've done it 10 times or so, there's nothing exciting about it, there's only the prospect that if you're not careful, you'll mess up the cut and have to redo it. Ho hum.

Other aspects of houses and home improvement though are pretty cool, particularly plumbing and electrical. It's really interesting to get into the guts of a house and see what it's actually made of. Until I started doing home repair, I didn't realize how ignorant I was of what was behind the average wall. Structures are cool because they're complicated and simple at the same time. They're complicated in that they have multiple independent subsystems (framing, plumbing, electrical, heating, etc). They're simple in that if you look at a single subsystem, the way that it works is very straightforward in principle.
The most interesting part about home repair is trying to figure out why things are done in certain ways. Millions of people over thousands of years have worked hard to figure out what works best in a home, and all of their accumulated knowledge and expertise is deftly hidden in the design of small things. I suppose most people don't wonder about these kinds of questions, but I do - why are certain plumbing pipes only so wide, but no more? Why are there always 2 outlets on a standard electrical socket? What's the magic about the particular dimensions of a wood board that holds up a wall? (Why those dimensions? Why not 1/4" less or more?)

The thing about these questions is that they all have very good answers. The design and function of things inside a house is never random or haphazard. Sometimes the reason the design decision was made is apparent, but mostly the reason isn't. Why are the seals that hold toilets to the ground made out of wax, when just about all other plumbing seals are made out of neoprene these days? Over time, as you do home improvement work some of the answers to these questions become clear through experience. The process of acquiring the experience is a lot of fun - learning about how the subsystems work, and seeing the hidden genius in the design of really simple things like electrical sockets or a PVC elbow joint.

And it's all completely invisible, neatly tucked behind your walls and working properly year after year. Have you ever noticed how your house hasn't burned down due to an electrical fire? You probably don't even know anyone who has had that experience. The reason it hasn't happened boils down to very small design choices in fixtures, as well as standardized electrical practices developed over decades.

Yeah, so this stuff really isn't as romantic as it sounds. Cramming yourself into the back corner of a grubby bathroom so that you can cement a pipe into place isn't much fun. But the learning and the knowing never gets old.

Writing

2008-02-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

For a long time, I've been into writing. And by writing I don't necessarily mean the abstract intellectual activity of creating good prose. I mean the physical act of staining paper in a way that's meaningful to other people.

I have been made fun of by some of my coworkers in the past for having peculiar tastes in stationery and writing supplies. For example, I don't like black ink. When given a chance, I always write in blue ink. For taking notes, I like canary yellow standard ruled pads (8 1/2 by 11, not legal size). For other notes and writing, I like standard printer paper. I don't always know why I want things this way, it just seems important to me.

Today I splurged and bought myself a Levenger soft folio in black leather. The leather is beautiful, and the magnetic clasp is nicer than the zipper I had on my old one. The folio I've used for the past 5 years was a cheap-O nylon folio that was a free giveaway at a business meeting I went to. The pocket configuration and size of the thing happened to be perfect, so I used it until the zipper fell off and the thing was so dirty I couldn't look at it anymore. The Levenger is the replacement, and looks like it's going to be great. I felt a half-second of guilt about throwing out the ultra-premium special-ruled block of paper that came with the padfolio, but ultimately I have to have my canary yellow note paper. This folio does manage to accommodate my fat-barreled wide gauge blue ink pen, so kudos to them for designing well.

The Subprime Mess: A Primer

2008-02-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

The subprime mess: a primer

A sample from the comic:

Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Random Encounters

2008-02-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

I have been running Google Analytics for a number of months now, because I was interested in why people would ever want to come to this blog.

I'm somewhat puzzled by the results. Here are the top three search terms that lead people to this site, ordered by their relative popularity:

"Cosmic Jewish Zombie". There's more competition for this search term than you might think. Anyway, the bit I posted about Jesus a while ago seems to have them coming in droves. Whoda thunkit?

"Retrograde Wheelbarrow". Yes, that's right - the tangent mention of a non-existent sexual position comes in at number two. Reference The Retrograde Wheelbarrow

"Barry Bonds Before and After". I got curious one day, so I found a side-by-side shot of Mr. Bonds and posted it. Apparently I wasn't the only one who wanted the before and after shot.

Huh.

The Kidney Thieves are Real!

2008-02-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

Coolest headline this year. Police parade kidney snatching mastermind.

Check this guy out. He even looks the part of a deranged, organ stealing lunatic.

The bared teeth...the thousand-mile stare...he almost looks like he might remove your kidney with his bare hands.

Years ago I used to listen to this band called Kidneythieves. Some friend gave me one of their demos, so I listened to it a couple of times and actually liked it. The one thing I remember most vividly about the band was their liner notes. They had an elaborate story in there about a guy in a bar who meets up with a beautiful woman. He starts having a few drinks with her, telling stories, and having a grand old time. She invites him back to her hotel room; naturally he's elated. As he's getting to the hotel room, he starts to feel a bit groggy. (Not explained, but presumably because of something she put into his drink) The story pretty much drops off there, and resumes with him waking up 18 hours later, in the hotel room's bathtub full of ice. By the side of the tub, there's a telephone. He looks down onto his chest, and sees that she has written in lipstick "CALL 911 OR YOU WILL DIE".

Yoink!

The Kidney Thieves are just too good of an urban legend. Even though they've been busted as a legend and not a truth, it's just too strange and alluring to let die. I'm sure this guy they've arrested in Nepal is going to turn out to be something more prosaic than a real kidney thief. But we can hope.

White and Nerdy

2008-01-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

A total classic. Check out Donny Osmond in the background.

While My Ukelele Gently Weeps

2008-01-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

Ahem.

2007-12-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

How undignified!

The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business

2007-12-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

This is the first of the normal annual flood of year retrospectives that comes out in December and January. The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business 2007.

101 is a lot, but even in the top 20 there are some gems; toilet recalls after the toilets were found to catch fire, the CEO of Merrill Lynch fiddling while Rome burned, a dog that inherited $13 million, and electronic voting machines hacked with a picture of a key.

You know, it's surprising sometimes that as a planet we can even tie our shoes.

Oooh! Don't forget the toy that contained a chemical that converts to the date rape drug when ingested. That was brilliant. So was Microsoft saving us from naughty language, and a funeral home using cremated remains to prevent slipping on icy sidewalks.

20 Interesting Alarm Clocks

2007-12-18T19:09:00.000-08:00

The Carpet Alarm, and Other Inventions.

A while ago, I was looking for a different kind of alarm clock that didn't make annoying noise, and I came across this page.

Some of these are geared towards people who need to be physically coerced to get out of bed. I don't want to take it quite that far, but there are a couple of really cool ideas here, including the wirelessly vibrating rings, that will wake you up without any sound.

Non-obvious causes of headache that doctors sometimes forget to check

2007-12-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

A MindHacks case study.

People putting nails into their heads and living to tell the tale is not all that rare. It can happen without you even noticing it.

Ask Zak de la Rocha

2007-12-17T15:39:00.001-08:00

Fake Steve Jobs - Ask Zak de la Rocha about MP3 Players

Zak DLR was the singer for the band Rage Against the Machine.

Postsecret makes me feel icky

2007-12-17T06:45:00.001-08:00

For a while, I've read PostSecret, the site where strangers post personal secrets about themselves. I'm swearing off of it as of today.

At first it was interesting. At turns it tugged at the heart strings, or held the eerie fascination of a car wreck. Sometimes it made me laugh out loud.

These days, I just find it creepy. These are people divulging real, personal secrets that are just none of my damn business. I feel sorry for them that their available forum is a website full of strangers. As desperate as they clearly are to communicate their feelings to someone, an internet forum probably won't help them.

Using the internet for ersatz psychotherapy is not a good idea. Unless you like a therapist with a million identities, a million different perspectives, and a strong penchant for calling people "asshats".

Polygamy, Limericks, and Definitions

2007-12-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

The shocking headline:

Woman Married to 10 Men At Same Time: 26-Year Old Accused of Being a Bigamist

Bigamist: "Bi" (meaning 2), "Gamy" (meaning marriage).

Clearly this woman is not married to exactly two men, and should be acquitted at once. Of course she's guilty of polygamy, but that's a different story. The prosecutors have weaseled their way out of this obvious conclusion by charging her with 9 counts of bigamy - being married to exactly two men, 9 times over.

None of this pendantry would have warranted a blog post for me, if it wasn't for this - I got an email with a bigamy related limerick today!

There was an old fellow of Lyme
Who lived with three wives at one time.
When asked, 'Why the third?'
He replied, 'One’s absurd,
and bigamy, sir, is a crime.'

Terrifying Santas: Holiday Linkage

2007-12-10T06:17:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of MrPikes, I give you Twelve Days of Terror. Photos of children terrified by being with Saint Nick.

You really have to wonder. Do the shopping mall flunkies who hire these lunatics to put on the suit ever check the local registry before they hire?

What proportion of the nation's Santas are drunken hobos with felony raps, withdrawal symptoms, or cots at the local halfway house?

It's not easy being green

2007-12-05T12:41:00.001-08:00

Interesting Pictures from Google Earth

2007-12-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

Case in point: a "Coca Cola" logo built out of empty bottles in the Chilean hillside, visible from space:

Plenty of other examples.

Siegfried and Roy

2007-12-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Siegfried and Roy may return to the stage.

Interesting quote:

Roy Horn and Siegfried remain convinced that Montecore (the name of the tiger that attacked him) sensed Horn was having a mini-stroke and was dragging him to safety, rather than attacking him.

Ummmm, so that's what happened. Yeah. It's all so clear now. By locking his jaws around the guy's neck, the tiger was trying to save him. And wow, that must be some kind of magic psychic tiger to be able to "sense" strokes. And with such a fine faculty! That tiger can sense strokes that are so small, they don't even present with any symptoms!

The two magicians, who are 68 and 63 respectively, might not have very long careers if they were to return, due to their age. To put things into perspective, they started working together in 1959 on a German ocean liner.

It really sucks that their careers had to end like this. They were quite good performers, and put on a hell of a show. However, if you're an electrician, you shouldn't be surprised if you occasionally get shocked, even if you're careful. It's the nature of what you're working with that's the issue. And if you perform onstage with lions and tigers, well even if you're very professional and safe, you can only be but so surprised when....

The Republican YouTube Debate

2007-11-29T06:48:00.001-08:00

Last night, the second-ever YouTube debate was held, this time for Republican candidates. Read all about it.

I happened to be channel surfing when it came on, so I figured I'd give it a listen.

The impression I got was that these guys aren't speaking from personal conviction, but they're speaking towards what they think their audience wants to hear. On most topics, their positions lack any kind of nuance that would reflect an understanding of how the world works. They seem to stick broadly to classic themes.

Take for example illegal immigration. All of the candidates were tripping all over one another to be "tougher" on illegal immigrants. Huckabee was by far the most left, when he suggested that illegal immigrants who have lived in a particular state all of their lives should qualify for in-state tuition rates if they want to go to college. (This was branded by the others as giving illegal immigrants an unfair advantage over citizens, and even *gasp* Armed services members who come to college from out of state) Not one of them addressed the issue of the overwhelming incentives that bring people to the United States, and whether or not an "enforce the law" only approach could ever fully address the problem.

So their position is that illegal immigration is, well, illegal, and that we should enforce the law. That's not a position - it's a statement of current law. Of course we should enforce current law (to the extent that we're able). The question is what else we should do, in the likely case that enforcing the law isn't enough.

The Republicans are still to-the-man pro-life. Occasionally you'll find a radical one who thinks it should be up to the states to decide, effectively punting on the decision and refusing to take a stand. One of the more interesting questions of the night was when someone asked "If abortion should become illegal, what should the punishment be for the woman and the doctor?" They all dodged that question, but one or two leaned more towards punishing the doctor and not the woman.

Then there was the religious panderfest. Candidates were asked whether they believed the Bible to be word-for-word true, and what Jesus would have thought of the death penalty. No one would address the Jesus question with anything other but a deflection or joke. All of them signed on to the Bible being the "Word of God", with various evasions about the extent to which it was word-for-word true.

Grover Norquist showed up in the debate to ask the candidates to pledge never to approve a tax increase. All except two did take the pledge. McCain said it was enough for him to promise and that he didn't have to sign anything Norquist gives him. One other candidate refused to pledge citing the potential for national emergency which could necessitate the need for a tax hike. (OK, I have to give that guy points for having a least an iota of nuance)

These debate events are real party-defining moments. For as much as the questions seem to illustrate the differences between the candidates, certain themes emerge: pro-life, pro-death penalty, pro-tax cuts, in favor of reducing government's involvement in personal life (but not really), in favor of continuing the extended police action in Iraq, and law'n'order on illegal immigration.

Candidate calculator

Re-learning study habits

2007-11-27T06:41:00.001-08:00

I'm still trying to learn the Cantonese language, these days using much better materials and a tutor. Also, I recently learned that learning languages as an adult doesn't have to be harder than when you were a kid, which is encouraging for me.

The humbling part of this experience has been re-learning my study habits that I haven't used since high school and college. When I study at home, I don't get anything done because there are too many distractions. There's always a reason to take a brake for a little bit of TV, or just to check that one thing on the internet. I actually get more done when I'm sitting in a shop with a drink and nothing to do but stare at my study materials. (You might think there'd be more distracting things in a loud restaurant, but somehow it works for me...)

Each time I sit down to learn some Cantonese, I actually do learn something and I find the time spent to be fun and rewarding, but for some reason it's torture to make myself sit down and do it. This is just more difficulty with priority-setting. There's always something else to do, and it's difficult to summon the energy after a full day at work, running a few miles, doing housework, or whatever other lame excuse I'm cooking up on any given day to avoid doing what I really want to be doing.

German Rap - The Fantastic 4

2007-11-16T05:17:00.000-08:00

Following the recent theme on foreign-language rap, I managed to dig up an old music video of a German rap group called "die Fantastischen Vier" (the fantastic 4) on YouTube.

(Yes Internet, YouTube is that cool)

Tag am Meer (roughly "Day at the Ocean" in English) is a 1993 song that was quite popular in Germany. It's laid back, not at all gangsta, and well I have to admit at this point it's kinda funny to look at how different the "cool" clothes look from the early 1990s.

The video is also kinda trippy in that low-budget-Salvador-Dali-meets-MTV kind of way.

(Link to lyrics. I tried to find a decent English translation, but I wasn't able to and the automatic translators mangled it beyond recognition.)

Dinosaur Comics

2007-11-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

Cantonese Hip-Hop

2007-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

I have recently been made aware of The Notorious MSG, a Cantonese rapper from New York city.

Blasting out of the streets of Chinatown, THE NOTORIOUS MSG have arrived with a vengeance. Serving up deep-fried beats straight from the Chinese ghetto, they will not stop until they achieve complete world domination.

This is the story of three renegade restaurant workers from the hardened streets of Chinatown, New York City. Pursuing their dreams of rap superstardom, Hong Kong Fever, Down-Lo Mein and The Hunan Bomb fled the harsh ghettos of Asia only to face more hardships as second-class citizens in America. They struggled to earn a living, toiling in the kitchens and risking their lives as Chinese restaurant delivery boys. Facing robberies and beatings on a daily basis, their fight for survival came to a head when an unknown assailant killed one of their original band members, Funky Buddha. This was the last straw; it was time to fight back.

These boys are what the Chinese call juk sing, which is the Cantonese term for an "ABC" - American-born Chinese. Searching around for the meaning of that word, I found this -

juk sing is related to the mandarin "zhu sheng". (...) It is to imply that they are not clever enough to make corners in their thinking, that their thinking is like bamboo, just shoots straight up. a product of their American upbringing. :)

Some people say the word is derogatory, and some people say it isn't. (Seeing as how there isn't another word as far as I know, if the only term for American-born Chinese is derogatory what are you going to do?)

Check out their moves, or the "Hot in the Kitchen" Wokumentary

How Couples Manage Money

2007-10-19T10:45:00.001-07:00

One idea I've been kicking around for a while is writing a short book on how couples manage money. The idea would be to target something like a 100-page book, the kind you could buy for $8.95 in the bookstore, devoted to topics like:

Why couples fight about money
What purposes are served by having a joint account
What purposes are served by having individual accounts
Agreeing on retirement planning approaches
Different models for "funding the family"

The purpose wouldn't be to give people smart financial advice, there are a billion books that already do that. I would want to focus it more on the needs of the couple, the way they interact, who has the income, and how that should inform how they structure their finances. The goal is to minimize fighting, let each person get what they need (and some of what they want), and form an agreement that can last.

So far, I've heard of a few different models that various couples use for managing their finances such as:

All-together. Each person puts all of their money into a joint account, which funds everything.
All-separate. Each person keeps all of their money separate, and they work out an agreement on who pays for what.
Separate with a joint account. Finances are kept separate, but a joint account is established for certain expenses.
Compensated spouse. One bread-winner "pays" the other person an income for savings, in consideration for effort (housework, childcare). This can be used in conjunction with any other model.
The "Hong Kong" model. Apparently this one is actually quite prevalent in Hong Kong. The primary breadwinner gives his or her spouse ("the bill payer") a monthly budget. The spouse who receives this budget is responsible for paying all bills, and taking care of domestic work and child care. Any money left over at the end of the month that wasn't needed for groceries, bills, clothes, etc belongs to the bill payer.
Some mixture of the above - need I say more?
Total chaos / No model. Always popular, this option has the advantage of requiring little planning and prior agreement. The downsides though can be pretty rough.

So the obvious question is, which model is right? That would be the purpose of the book - to give people a way of figuring out what is right for them given their circumstances. The specifics that need to be taken into account include:

Who has the income? One, both, or none?
How disparate are the incomes?
Who naturally pays the bills?
Does one partner more than the other tend to handle financial matters for the household?
How much does each partner want to spend on hobbies, or personal things that are not for the household?
How important is "equality"?
What does "equality" mean? (I.e. does it mean the partners have the same number of dollars, that they do equal work, that they have equal responsibility, what?)
How do they handle debt?

Just a few thoughts for an outline.

Science Tattoos

2007-10-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

If this isn't up my alley, I don't know what is.

The Loom - Branded with Science is a post on a science blog calling for photographs of science-related tattoos. Given that the blog is read primarily by scientists, they tend to be tattoos on researchers rather than your friendly neighborhood Hell's Angel.

So far, they've collected more than 80 images.

So I guess a DNA double helix can be a beautiful thing, but in terms of science tattoo art, I'd consider it boring and passe. But tattoos of glucose, hieroglyphics, and repaired hearts deserve some points for creativity and all-around coolness.

Hiatus

2007-10-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

It appears I'm back from another hiatus. Recently, life has been busy with home repair, travel to asia, and indoctrination into the world of research. Seriously.

Each time I go for about 2 weeks without posting anything to the blog, I think I'm going to completely abandon it, and just give it up. Maybe download my posts and save them for posterity or something, but otherwise just quit. For some reason, I never do. I guess I just have some deep-seated personal need to share trivial information with people I don't know.

Microsoft Vista Ad

2007-10-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Vista Ad - a parody.

Best quote: "And now, from the company that taught the world to turn their computer off by pressing a button labeled 'Start' - comes Vista!"

Second favorite: "We took Windows CE, Windows ME, and Windows NT and combined them to code-name our new release 'Windows CEMENT'"

New Heart Device Allows Cheney to Experience Love

2007-10-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

New Heart Device Allows Dick Cheney to Experience Love

WASHINGTON, DC—Recovering from minor heart surgery Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney stunned both the medical and political establishments when he mysteriously began to experience love for the first time in his life, sources reported Tuesday.
Enlarge Image Cheney

It is believed to have been the first recorded incident of Cheney exhibiting compassion for his fellow man.

Government Workers

2007-10-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love jokes at others' expense?

Three young boys were fighting over whose dad was the best.

"My dad is so good he can shoot an arrow, run after it, get in front of it, and catch it in his bare hands."

"My dad is so good that he can shoot a gun, run after the bullet, get in front of it and catch it in his bare hands."

"I've got you both beat. My dad's so good because he works for the government. He gets off work at 5:00 and is home by 3:00."

Stimulating Shatner's Bassoon

2007-10-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

Drug spoof:

David Amess MP, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Basildon, was fooled into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European drug called Cake, and went as far as to ask a question about it in Parliament [1]. The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon" and was frequently referred to as "a made-up drug" (a drug, they were told, not made from plants but made up from chemicals). Other celebrities such as Sir Bernard Ingham, Noel Edmonds and Rolf Harris were shown holding the bright-yellow cake-sized pill as they talked, with Bernard Manning telling viewers that "One kiddy on Cake, cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It's a fucking disgrace" and that "... you can puke yourself to death on this stuff - one girl threw up her own pelvis-bone... What a fucking disgrace". Manning then informed anyone offered Cake to "chuck it back in their face and tell them to fuck off".

Investigate the dangers of Cake

A hallucinogenic drug, currently legal in the UK, originating from Prague in Czechoslovakia. Cake is part of the "boom rave" culture. It is sold in round, 12" yellow slabs filled with nutrients and industrial dye. Groups of users (or "custard gannets") wolf down large quantities of this drug. It stimulates Shatner's Bassoon - the part of the brain that regulates time perception. During a Cake trip, the user percieves a single second to be as long as a month.

Appealing to 0.0001% of the Population

2007-10-01T08:07:00.001-07:00

Here's how you know you've lost touch with the mainstream. It's when you pick up a newsletter that you're interested in, and it has articles with titles like:

Why we shouldn’t fault Lucas and Penrose for continuing to believe in the Godelian argument against computationalism

Courtesy of The Reasoner

US Religious Discrimination Reaches Shocking Depths

2007-09-14T11:52:00.001-07:00

Student punished for spaghetti beliefs

Pastafarians follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and believe that the world was created by the touch of his noodly appendage. Furthermore, they acknowledge pirates as being 'absolute divine beings', and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming.

(...)

Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear 'full pirate regalia' as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism.

The school, however, say that his pirate garb was disruptive.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Growing Arachnid Threat

2007-09-14T10:43:00.001-07:00

The word is out. Everyone knows it, and we can't hide from the awful truth anymore.

Spiders have learned to communicate. Sort of.

The web covers hundreds of square meters. Not only was it built by hundreds of spiders, who normally build isolated webs and eat each other if they get too close, but entomologist Allen Dean reports that they belong to twelve different families! We're talking massive inter-species communication here folks, and not particularly closely related species either. It is comparable to communication and collaboration between human beings (family Hominidae) and Lar Gibbons (family Hylobatidae).

Language Log picked up on it. Normally wary of interspecies communication claims, Language Log was part of the vanguard of websites to acknowledge the peril of this cataclysmic development:

I don't like it. If they keep this up, pretty soon it won't just be little spiders in North Texas building a big web, it will be armies of giant tarantulas coming to get us. Think of the bugs in Starship Troopers. We need a massive, international research effort into spider communication right now, so that we can put a stop to this menace. I don't know why the BBC and other journalists haven't raised the alarm. They're probably in league with the spiders.

Evolgen picked up on it too, but took issue with the comparison to human communication with Lar Gibbons:

Contrary to what Poser claims, humans collaborating with gibbons is not equivalent to the various spider families working together to build I gigantic web. To accomplish such an inter-taxon collaboration, humans would have to work with kangaroos, koalas, or possums. I'm not sure how they do things in Australia, but I doubt they've got Tasmanian devils working construction.

You heard it (third) here, folks. Spiders as different from one another as humans and Tasmanian devils are joining together to weave a web of wicked wrongdoing over Texas.

I, for one, welcome our new telepathically-communicating hominid-consuming arachnid overlords.

The Human Brain is a Weak Tool

2007-09-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

Disrupt and Re-frame

This concept is the result of a study by Barbara Davis and Prof. Eric Knowles in which they sold note cards door-to-door for a charity. When they told people that the cards were eight for $3.00, they had a 40% success rate. When they told people that the price was eight for three-hundred pennies and then said, “which is a bargain,” 80% of the people bought cards.

This reminds me of push polling in a way. You can convince someone of something by providing no evidence whatsoever. Just saying it's a bargain makes it a bargain. Maybe there is something to the secret after all. :)

Less than brilliant: Food ideas

2007-09-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Funky Fries and other foods that flopped

Reddi-Bacon

Any company smart enough to bless mankind with sprayable whipped cream -- the sort that promotes direct-to-mouth feeding -- has got to know a thing or two about immediate gratification. But sadly, the makers of Reddi-wip® were unable to meld their keen understanding of human laziness with one of processed meat.

Ahem.

Neat Anti-Piracy Device

2007-08-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

Check out this series of images of a Windows Vista install disk.

Notice the hidden picture that's embedded in the border around the CD.

This reminds me of currency security printing.

You might ask, why do this on CDs and DVDs when most of the piracy action is on the internet? Probably because it makes it easy to identify fake copies that are distributed at the street level, such as in the many outdoor markets of China that are notorious for selling pirated disks. Faked copies won't have the expensive security printing around the rim, even if they are trying to look like official DVDs/CDs.

Karl Rove gets pranked

2007-08-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Pranksters get to Rove's Jag

Assistants to top Bush strategist Karl Rove — who officially steps down from his post Friday — covered his Jaguar with plastic wrap and multi-colored post-it notes Wednesday morning.

They also attached two stuffed eagles to the trunk and reportedly slapped on an "I Love Obama" sticker.

Nice touch.

FAIL

2007-08-28T07:01:00.001-07:00

Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

AskPhilosophers, Faulty Premises, and Unasking Questions

2007-08-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

I wanted to follow up on a much earlier post that dealt with an AskPhilosophers entry. As it happens, there's another similar AskPhilosophers entry that I thought I'd link to and quote, because it's another example of what I consider to be the most pervasive problem in argumentation and logic. The problem is incorrect conceptualization of an issue.

Anyway, in a question about the big bang, Marc Lange puts it fairly well:

Intuitively, it seems like the question "What happened before the Big Bang?" ought to have an ordinary answer, rather than a cop-out answer like "There is no such time." However, the history of science is full of examples of questions that were once thought to have ordinary sorts of answers but later were discovered not to do so. These were not cop outs. Rather, they were consequences of well-confirmed scientific theories. For example, it was once believed that in order for a body to keep moving at a constant speed in a constant direction, something must continually be acting upon it; otherwise it would slow down and eventually stop. That seems like a sensible idea, based on our everyday experiences. However, Newton discovered that the question "What keeps this body moving in a constant speed in a constant direction?" has no answer because it is based on a mistaken view. According to Newton's first law of motion, a body that is acted upon by no force at all will keep moving uniformly; forces cause accelerations, and motion in a constant speed at a constant direction involves no acceleration. Consequently, that motion could be maintained indefinitely, and would be in the absence of anything acting to change it. Perhaps science has discovered that the question "What happened before the Big Bang?" is in this respect like the pre-Newtonian question "What's keeping this body moving in a constant speed in a constant direction?"

To put this in context, the question was "what happened before the big bang?" The problem with the question is that if you take the big bang to be the beginning of time, there was no "before" the big bang. The question would be equivalent to "what's north of 90 degrees latitude?" or possibly, "What's the difference between -2 kelvin and -100 kelvin?"

Homer Simpson and the Guatemalan Insanity Peppers

2007-08-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

Favorite. Simpsons. Clip. Ever.

OK, this isn't funny anymore

2007-08-21T12:37:00.001-07:00

The obsession with security "in our post 9/11 world" has officially gone too far. You can be sure of it when we feel the need to develop security furniture.

Check out the secure bedroom table.

It is reported that 50% of people in London are worried about security and sleep with some form of self-defence to hand, for use against intruders.

The 'Safe Bedside Table' has a removable leg that acts as a club and a top that doubles as a shield for self-defence. This is for people who are willing to take on an intruder, providing an extra sense of security whilst in bed.

Note that since this table only has one leg, it's a crappy table. In return for a 0.000000001% chance of unsuccessfully defending yourself, you get a lifetime of setting up your table that just fell over. Oh, and if you ever actually end up using this thing, you'll look like a kid who is playing "knights and dragons" and improvising with really lame equipment. And it's likely to be less effective than just about any other non-laughable actual weapon. Other than that, this is a fantastic product that I'd wholeheartedly endorse.

Imagine someone actually did successfully use this product. It would qualify for a great Onion article: "Local Man Bludgeons Burglar with Disassembled Bedside Table"

How could I possibly resist? The science of magic

2007-08-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has published a great article (don't laugh, it does happen occasionally) - Sleights of Mind. It deals with the cognitive science behind how stage magic and illusion works.

A recurring theme in experimental psychology is the narrowness of perception: how very little of the sensory clamor makes its way into awareness. Earlier in the day, before the magic show, a neuroscientist had demonstrated a phenomenon called inattentional blindness with a video made at the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois.

(For an example of inattentional blindness, see this earlier post)

Thanks to the ever-awesome Mind Hacks for the linkage.