KPAO by Dave Cortright

Pop song lyrics + infographics = crazy funny

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
  

Anyway I could go on like this, but you get the idea. Check it out. Funny, clever, and sometimes make you think. I bet even Edward Tufte would find it humorous.

“Catch me up” feature for periodic content

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.

How's your geographic knowledge?

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I want to be a TSA screener when I grow up…

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!

The End of Our Past

According to evolutionary anthropologists, humans are a tribal species. We evolved a sense of "our group" and "not our group" as a means of more effective survival. Assuming that an "other" might decrease my chance of survival makes good sense in the tightly-knit, highly competitive world of pre-historic humans.

Fast-forward 10,000 years. Advances in agriculture and technology let us have massive "tribes" -- millions of people in the "us" group and billions in the various "thems." Our notions of "us" and "them" remain, but is no longer applied to just our local troop of 50-100 others. We now call this tendency by various names which usually end in "-ism" and have negative connotations: racism, sectarianism, xenophobism, and the like.

It probably took hundred of thousands of years to evolve the tribal tendency -- maybe millions. It is present in all of us, and is our default way of thinking. This trait doesn't go away just because Martin Luther King had a dream and many of us are fortunate to see a lot of it realized. No matter how enlightened we may think we are, we are all racists, xenophobes, and secterianists. There isn't a damn thing you can do about it -- it is just "how we are."

Except that we understand the problem a bit more. For the first time in human history, we have a reasonable (though not perfect) understanding of how we got to be who we are. We have decent ideas of evolution and human behavior and a fair amount of data supporting this explanation. Human brains have not changed much in 10,000 years, but human thinking, society, and morality have.

We know from studying primates and other sources that we humans are not perfectly monogamous. But we also know from living in the 21st century that the way we have chosen to structure our families and our societies strongly favors monogamy. We choose to stay monogamous even though that's not purely in our nature, because we can think and project and understand the consequences of our actions. Not always of course, and not perfectly, but in general. We know it is something we have to constantly work on, and most of us do.

Same deal for fatty, high-caloric foods: we have evolved to seek them out and our bodies to store the energy. Back in the day that kept us alive; today it just makes us porkers. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built up around the realization that with effort we can overcome our evolved tendencies and stay fit.

So why have we not come to this same general understanding with the concept of "other?" We will have racist, stereotyped, and xenophobic thoughts. That's just the way we are. But we don't have to give them voice, act on them, or pass along a culture that supports their free expression. Like the twelve step plans say -- first we have to admit to the problem. Only then can we vigorously and systematically work on bettering ourselves. Our evolved structure can not be an excuse for our actions. Instead it should be the foundation on which lies our ultimate transcendence.

I'm sure succeeding despite ourselves is easier for some and harder for others. Some of us might find it trivial to stay blissfully monogamous or tortuous to avoid the second grande burrito. For most folks, I suspect that really, truly not being racist or xenophobe takes work, and is a lifelong commitment.

Design thinking can solve the world’s problems

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.

T-Shirts Just for Venture Capitalists

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...

A new Firefly Novel

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.

Stop the car alarm madness, for the love of humanity!

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 barges could skirt FDA

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. :-)