February 2008 Archives

Next Monday (March 3, 2008) is Read Across America Day, timed roughly to coincide with Dr. Seuss' birthday. Young kids around the country are supposed to cuddle up with their favorite Dr. Suess book and get to reading.

That might be an interesting blog entry on its own, but what made me laugh yesterday was an article on cracked.com about "The 40 Most Inappropriate Children's Book Covers". A bit sick, but funny. Things get more sick and less funny on second page.

I love these sort of "Photoshop Contests" -- worth1000.com's contests are probably the mother of all of these sort of sites, though generally the point there is to display Photoshop talent rather than humor.

A friend pointed me to a new Flickr photo pool called Song Chart. The basic idea is to use charts or other infographics to represent lyrics from a pop song. I did one at the right (though it's a bit obscure; the song is from a recent Broadway musical.) Some of my favorites:

• Why do we scream at each other?
• Battle of men
• Nothing I can say
• Apartment
  
• Requirements 2 B my girl
  
• Sunshine flowchart
• Untouchable
  

Here's a scenario that happens to me occasionally. Get a link to an article or comic or column or some other piece of content on the web which is just one part in an ongoing series. Like it. Start looking at other content. Like that too. Start to get fatigued after reading 5–10 of them. Leave. Forget. Never come back.

My idea is to generate a personalized subscription for each person who signs up. By default it starts at the first post and sends each one to you in email or via RSS with a frequency at least 2× greater than the typical publish frequency. It intersperses the new content in with the old, so you do get the freshest stuff. But you also get a scientifically measured amount of old content that keeps you engaged, informed and entertained without overwhelming you.

Go ahead and burgle this concept.

673

Why didn't they have one of these when I was a kid? Oh right, because 9/11 hadn't happened and we weren't investing crazy amounts of money into ultimately inconvenient and irrelevant screening processes, when all we needed to do to fix the problem is lock the damn doors to the cockpit.

At any rate, now your kid can live the thrill of finding contraband in old Mrs. Hibbart's carry-on and strip searching her in the additional screening area. Fun!

I love stories like this one from Business Week:

In Polak's approach to solving poverty, poor people are treated as rational customers rather than as recipients of charity. Among other things, that means IDE develops only products that will pay for themselves in the first year through the buyer's increased productivity. One of the best examples is IDE's $25 treadle pump, a human-powered pump that enables a family working two to six hours a day to irrigate a half-acre of vegetables during the dry season and earn an average of at least $100 a year after expenses.

I’m a big believer that design thinking isn't just for new products and services; it can be applied to any problems, including the big ones in the world.

We need to do a better job of training people in the skills of design thinking, but we also need to encourage these people to go into diverse fields such as politics, public policy, social work, law enforcement, etc. Only then can we throw out the old systems and replace them with innovative new ones that actually work. One can argue the success of this program actually came from redefining the problem which led to these better solutions:

"Development leaders were outraged by my notion that you can and should sell things to poor people at a fair market price instead of giving things to them for nothing." But the case that Polak has made over the years, and that he makes in this book, is persuasive: The only sustainable, scalable approach to fighting poverty is to give poor people a way of increasing their income; to treat the poor as potential entrepreneurs, rather than as recipients of charity.

Along the lines of Dave's someecards post, comes Venture Capital Wear. It may be a "you had to be there" kind of joke, but for anyone who has been around the venture capital community, a site (seeming) dedicated to selling t-shirts to VC's is pretty funny. I'm still laughing at "don't pitch me, bro".

Wait, maybe there's a market for a company that can support millions of narrowly - targeted customized clothing businesses, mixed with viral marketing and a Web 2.0 (3.0!) sticky UI? You know, like Cafe Press meets Facebook...

Via BoingBoing I learned of a fanfic Firefly novel by Steven Burst called My Own Kind of Freedom. I download and read it in a single sitting on my Eee PC. The whole book took me about three hours to read, and was truly enjoyable. I have never read any fan fiction before -- but the characters from Firefly were too good to leave behind after only fourteen episodes and a feature film.

I also now know that the Eee PC is an very good e-book reader.

When was the last time a car alarm actually prevented a theft? Are there alert citizens out there who cry out, "Hark! Some scalawag is attempting to burgle yonder motor vehicle. Let us go give him his comeuppance."? I've never seen them. I've been in the vicinity of approximately 7,324 car alarms going off, and every single one of them was a false alarm. Either the owner set it off, or some passerby did.

So what is the point of these noisemakers? Do they really prevent theft? Or stated more germanely, what is the value they provide weighed against the annoyance caused the general public?

I think car alarms should be outlawed as devices solely created for disturbing the peace. Sure, you can go ahead and get one installed, but you'd better show a false alarm rate of less than 1%, otherwise you'll be fined, thrown in prison, or killed depending on how many priors.

Medical tourism is increasingly popular. I've known people who have gone to Canada for cheap lasik. And I've read about people going all over for cosmetic surgery, dental surgery, and even essential health procedures that would otherwise cost 10–20× as much in the US. And some of the procedures aren't even approved in the US.

So it got me thinking, why do you have to go all the way to another country for this? Why not float a barge in international waters off the coast of the country and shuttle patients out? It would open up this opportunity to a much broader range of the population, and it probably would be a good business too.

Probably some procedures you might not want to do in heavy seas, though. :-)

One of the great things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is the wealth of amazing resources, people, and events. A few years ago it occurred to me that I was pretty systematically ignoring this to my own determent.

My wife and I made a New Year's resolution to fix this problem (and also to drink more alcohol, but that's another story). One of the gems I found -- almost in my own backyard, is the SLAC Public Lecture Series. SLAC is the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the world's premier high-energy physics research centers. The second Tuesday of every other month, they host very well attended public lectures. I have been to a few, and while some are certainly better than others, all have been very informative. Get there early -- the more popular lectures seem to fill up quickly.

Plus there's cookies at the end.

A friend sent me one of these and it was pretty damn funny. And now I've wasted way too long browsing through their selection and sending cards to people myself. Really compelling content. Hilarious.

It is probably safe to declare 2008 the year that Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) came of age. I really like my ASUS Eee PC -- it's got a lot of rough edges, but it works very well for me, and I don't think twice about taking it with me. My first PowerBook with built-in WiFi changed how I use computers -- it was just "there" and "on" all of the time -- a quick lookup of something on Wikipedia trivial. The Eee PC has that same quality, but it goes one further because in goes with me more places so easily.

Lots of other manufactures are noticing the success ASUS is having, and are scrambling to release competitive products. Many seem to be crap, having made some questionable design trade-offs, but some look nice. Regardless, 2008 will see a flood of UMPC designs, and I'm absolutely sure I will switch from my Eee PC to something a bit better. Really there's only two things I want: a 9" screen of at least 1024 pixels width, and built-in Bluetooth.

Bruce Schneier's excellent blog on security today links to a long-ish, but interesting story about a young woman with a natural talent at social engineering as means to bypass security. Sadly, she used her talents to steal, but maybe someday a security firm will employ her for penetration testing.

Schneier's blog is an excellent resource for anyone interested in security in general (and information security in particular). At times it's overly technical for a non-techie reader, but those parts are easy to skip. If you have ever had a password or perhaps entered some personal information to a web form, it's worth reading.

Clever, funny, and all-too insightful at times, Stuff White People Like is one blog worth reading. An excerpt:

Recycling is a part of a larger theme of stuff white people like: saving the earth without having to do that much.

Recycling is fantastic! You can still buy all the stuff you like (bottled water, beer, wine, organic iced tea, and cans of all varieties) and then when you’re done you just put it in a DIFFERENT bin than where you would throw your other garbage. And boom! Environment saved! Everyone feels great, it’s so easy!

This is important because all white feel guilty about producing waste. It doesn’t stop them from doing it, but they feel guilty about it. Deep down, they believe they should be like the Native Americans and use every part of the product or beast they have consumed. Though for many white people, this simply means putting plastic bags into a special drawer where they will accumulate until they are eventually used to carry some gym clothes or bathing suit. Ultimately this drawer will get full and only be emptied when the person moves to a new house. Advanced white recyclers will uses these grocery bags as garbage bags.

If you are in a situation where a white person produces an empty bottle, watch their actions. They will first say “where’s the recycling?” If you say “we don’t recycle,” prepare for some awkwardness. They will make a move to throw the bottle away, they will hesitate, and then ultimately throw the bottle away. But after they return look in their eyes. All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill, trapping small animals. It will eat at them for days, at this point you should say “I’m just kidding, the recycling is under the sink. Can you fish out that bottle?” And they will do it 100% of the time!

The best advice is that if you plan to deal with white people on regular basis either start recycling or purchase a large blue bin so that they can believe they are recycling.

I have a big music collection on my home computer, but ironically when I most want to listen to it is when I'm at work. Enter JukeFly. You install a small daemon on your home computer and configure it via the jukefly site. Then when you go to the site from another computer and sign in, you can play your songs via the browser player. The fidelity is great, and the UI's not bad either. There's a bit of lag switching songs sometimes, but otherwise it works pretty darn well.

I came across this church sign generator in one of my recent forays across the interweb. Some of the real, we're-not-making-this-up signs are pretty darn funny, but here you can craft your own perfect message—for example the one at the right. Enjoy!

It's a bit late this year, but also check out the candy heart maker.

Virtual flowers, that is. I recommend They're Beautiful. Created by a start-up of ex-Microsoft UI folks, they really care about the user experience, visuals, and attention to detail. The flower arrangements are each uniquely rendered from atomic flower bits so you get a custom arrangement each time. Nice!

The weather seems to have finally cleared up in Northern California, and I spent a couple of hours outside with our telescope. The backyard of suburban Palo Alto might not be the world's best place to look at the sky, but for me it is since it involves almost no effort and I can easily share the views with my family. And the views did not disappoint! Saturn, Mars, and the Moon were are easily visible and amazing to see. A visiting cousin who had never really looked into a telescope before remarked that Saturn looked fake -- it was just too perfect with rings and moons and fuzzy bands all strutting their stuff.

I am not a serious amateur by any stretch of the imagination, but it's nice to know that there is at least one science where a dedicated amateur can make significant contributions. Here is an article about (among other things) a regular "mom from New Zealand" who has helped discover several planets around other stars using a technique called gravitational lensing. Of course, most regular moms don't have backyard observatories with a few tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, but that's splitting hairs. More power to her!

Funny / ironic paragraph in a review of The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. This is a book about the dumbing down of our society:

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

Something about "physician heal thyself..."

This week's newsletter from the Skeptic's Society has a great feature article on why the US TV news media sucks, and how it is harming the country. It's a quick read, well written, with lots of illustrative points. Here's just one example:

On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.

There are many, many others -- all following the same pattern of grossly misrepresenting reality for no other purpose that to keep the sheep (that would be us) watching. American broadcast news has completely and utterly become at best irrelevant and at worst a danger to the health of our society. Turn it off. Even the worst print or online news sources at least give us the time to pause and contemplate the information we're receiving.

Hey Jude, don't be afraid. We're not really going to play Monopoly. We're going to try to make it better.

My friend Matt finally got his excellent coöoperative game Pandemic published. (Ping me if you want to play it. Or if you don't know me, just buy it and play it with your friends.) It got me thinking (again) that I should design a game.

Or better yet, why not take a game that practically everyone has sitting around in a closet somewhere that is at it's heart a truly awful gaming experience, and try to turn it into something that's really fun. So that's my goal. Take the bits from a standard Monopoly set and come up with a new set of rules.

The concept is still nascent; I've done no work on it yet. But off the top of my head, I'm thinking it could be a card game (have to do something about the mortgage text on the backs of the deeds, though), or maybe a "visit all the locations" game like Elfenland. I'll probably have to ditch the Change and Community Chest cards, as they're pretty specific to the original game.

Any thoughts on how I might go about this? Leave a comment!

I really don't intend for this to turn into a “cute pictures of animals” blog, but I just had to share this one that I saw on cute overload. It's the sort of picture that makes one rethink their diet choices, as can be seen in the comments.

From the trip to Tahoe last weekend, my dog–just loving the romp through the deep powder–takes a break for a cute-overload–worthy portrait.


 

Since Dave likes to write so much about fixing the keyboard, I'll give him a bit more food for thought. Especially on a tiny notebook, the following keys seem useless and just get in the way:

• Caps Lock, of course
• Pause / Break
• Insert
• Scroll Lock
• Windows / Start
• Menu
• Right-Alt, Right-Ctrl

Getting rid of these keys would open up a lot of space on my Eee PC keyboard.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? But it's the result of a confluence of two events.

First, I have cats at home (technically, my wife does.) that will eat any plant that's left unguarded. And then vomit it back up. And then go back and eat more. Lather, rinse, repeat. So I learned quickly that to save the plants, I had to bring them to work.

Second, I work at a company where a bunch of people are constantly coming in the office for meetings. All guests are offered drinks, and many of them choose the bottled water. Then they take two sips and leave the rest. So instead of throwing this water out, I've started feeding it to my plants.

Of course I should probably work on convincing the folks her to get a water cooler instead of buying bottled water…

For several years I have been hearing reports that describe a strong correlation between regularly sitting down as a family for dinner, and all sorts of positive benefits for the kids (like better health, self esteem, lower drug use, etc). Just for the record, I have nothing against having dinner as a family, and in fact I like it, and we generally do just that in our home.

What bothers me is that I hear again and again the assertion that having the dinner together as a family creates better, healthier kids. I have never seen a study that claims this -- though I would certainly welcome it. Most studies that I have seen show clear correlation, but not causality. Correlation does not imply causation, no matter how much you want it to. Nor does it refute it. Correlation just doesn't say anything at all, other than, well, that the two things are correlated to some degree.

This misconception has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, and I'm happy to hear a report that takes a reasonable view. This morning I heard a report on the family dinner on NPR, and as it began, I braced myself against hearing the same claim with no evidence. But surprise -- the reporter knew her stuff! What was refreshing to me about this report is that it explored the question of causality. So far it seems, there is no clear evidence demonstrating that family dinners cause better kids. Most people seem to believe so, and want to find clear evidence of this. That's great -- but we can't yet claim that changing this behavior will result in the desired outcomes. Anyone making this claim is either guessing or doesn't get how science works.

In a previous post, I mentioned how I turned off the Caps Lock key on my keyboard. However is is pretty wasteful to have this large, easily accessible button just sitting there not doing anything. So I remapped it letting me easily enter high-ASCII characters.

The tyranny of the keyboard is that the existing key caps pose a significant barrier to entering proper typographic characters. Because of this, users type a lowercase x instead of the true multiplication sign ×, or three period rather than an ellipsis …, or a vertical bar rather than the more elegant middle dot ·

Using my master AutoHotKey script, I've remapped the keys like this:

CapsLock & -::Send {–}
CapsLock & =::Send {—}
CapsLock & [::Send {‹}
CapsLock & ]::Send {›}
CapsLock & ,::Send {…}
CapsLock & .::Send {·}
CapsLock & x::Send {×}
CapsLock & 4::Send {¢}
CapsLock & 8::Send {•}

Granted, you'll have to learn which keys generate which characters, but I've tried to use mnemonics to help (the period key produces a middle dot, the asterisk a bullet). And once you learn these characters and learn how to use them, your writing will look professional and stand out from the rest of the crowd—like this usage of an em dash.

So next time you want to add your 2¢ to gain a 3–4× improvement in revenue to £1.4 million, consider my script. Oh and if you want the complete code, you have to ask me in the comments. :-)