May 2008 Archives

• Sharper Image bankrupt, expensive, gadgets, overpriced, crap, junk...
• AT&T phone, iPhone(!), monopoly, global, death star, evil...
• Fox News biased, conservative, news, lies, republican, liars, tv, bias, right wing, crap, propaganda...
• TicketMaster ripoff, tickets, expensive, concerts, fees, monopoly, evil overpriced, scam...
• Nike swoosh, just do it, shoes, sports, sweatshop, child labor...
• McDonalds fat, fries...
• Wii fun...

• Apple mac, cool, iPod, design, computer, awesome, innovative...
• Microsoft windows, evil, monopoly, computer, bill gates, software, crap, shit, pc, sucks...
  
• Google search, internet, awesome, god, evil, useful, smart, everything, find, cool... 
• Yahoo! search, internet, email, google, old, mail, microsoft, fun, search engine...
  
• AOL internet, old, crap, online, dead, slow, outdated, sucks, lame, shit, obsolete...
  

Here's a conversation I imagine taking place in 30 years:

Kid: Grandpa, let's look at those old "digital" pictures of mom when she was a kid
Grandpa: Sure kid. Here's some now.
Kid: Holy crap grandpa, what the hell are those things on her feet?
Grandpa: They're called Crocs kid; quite the fashion at the time. Lots of people wore them -- even the president.
Kid: Which president?
Grandpa: Bush, Jr.
Kid: (!)
Grandpa: People are much smarter now

A while back I mentioned that the New York Times was now reasonably readable without registration, and that the newspaper is making a good run at being relevant in the web world. Now the Washington Post seems to be doing much the same thing, with results that are sometimes better and sometimes worse.

The Post appears to be pretty much completely readable for me without registering (though I do browse with cookies off by default). They have a very good editorial department, solid US and decent foreign coverage, with most of the writing seemingly done by their own staff. The latter point is especially telling to me, as I'm guessing it lets the Post set their own editorial standards. Even better, by writing most of their own content the Post guarantees that their web site (and newspaper) will have original, hopefully interesting new works. Contrast that with the San Jose Mercury News, which is pretty much just a jumble of syndicated content that I've read the day before.

The Post also has built an active community around their Talk, Global and especially On Faith sections. Their coverage of religion is especially interesting and in-depth, though some weeks their questions for discussion are a bit forced.

The biggest problem with the Washington Post's online experience is that the site is radioactive without a good ad-blocker turned on, and even then the main page is filled with "partner links," "sponsored blogs," "travel deals," "featured advertiser links" and on and on. I know that ads pay the bills, but there has to be a better way of presenting sponsored content.

If you can get past the tacky mesothelioma links, the Post is worth a daily visit.

A (C# on top)   E/A             D/A     A       D/A     B/A

A                      E/A              
   I have been waiting for this,

D/A         A     D/A            B/A
    all the time,     it's on my mind.

A (C# on top)   E/A             D/A     A       D/A     B/A

A                              E/A              
   'cause you've been alone for so long now,

D/A            A      D/A            B/A
    it's in your eyes,    behind those eyes. and I

D/A     A     D/A     A   
want    to    love    you,   but I 

D/A             A        B/A
  don't know if I   know how,

        D              E         D                 E
'cause when I have to go away I lose all sense of yesterday

when I ask you to stay for a while,
the look in your eyes always comes as a surprise.
you see caution lives far from my mind,
and this life of mine, makes me smile sometimes.

and I want to love you, but I don't know if I know how,
'cause you look at me as if to say,
you haven't changed in any way.

bah dah bop, bah dah, bah, bah wah ahh
ooo some say it's ignorance, that turns love into self defense.
can turn to a silent rage is any glimpse of common sense.
it makes me smile sometimes.
bah dah bop, bah dah, bah, bah wah ahh
it makes me smile sometimes.

[Yahoo's CEO Jerry] Yang was not prepared for perhaps the one question that every CEO should be ready to answer at all times: "What is the business of Yahoo?" He was all over the place. He said their core focus included "home page, mail, search, and mobile." He also said "We can't be all things to all people. We have become much more focused," before taking about other areas of focus at Yahoo, including advertising, social networking and their new open strategy.

[President Sue] Decker stepped in and tried to distill their core message, repeating "we focus on homepage, search, mail and mobile" but then went on to talk extensively about advertising, including a new display advertising product that the company will launch in Q3 this year.

G                      C
Seems the further from town I go
    D      C         G
The more I hate this place
G                    C
He's got leather and big tattoos
D                  Em
Scars all over his face
      C
And I wonder if he ever has cried
         Cm
Cause he couldn't get a date for the prom

G            Em         C           G
He's got his arm around every man's dream
    G             Em             C       D
And crumbs in his beard from the seafood special
   G                G7       C        Cm 
Oh can't you see my world is falling apart
     G                D               
Baby please leave the biker 
          C               G
leave the biker break his heart
     G                D        
Baby please leave the biker
          C               G
leave the biker break his heart

In a recent techdirt blog entry, Mike Masnick comments on Zappos legendary customer service. This story is making the rounds today because of a recent Harvard Business article detailing their unusual practice of paying new customer service employees $1000 to quit, which on first pass seems a tiny bit weird. It works out that only 10% of the new recruits take them up on the offer. The other 90% apparently have decided that they like the job, company, future prospects, etc. At Zappos, customer service is not viewed as a necessary evil cost center, to be squeezed for every last dime of savings. Instead it seems that the agents are viewed as customer retention and loyalty specialists. This jives well with the common belief that it's much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to get repeat sales from existing ones.

Similarly, Subaru has decided that garbage is an asset. (Well almost). Its plant in Indiana recycles 99.8 percent of all waste. The other 0.2 percent either gets burned to make energy, or is medical or toxic waste that must be disposed of in specific ways by law.

And then there is the "no haggle" or "value" pricing of some car brands, led by GM's Saturn. What do all three of these examples have in common? They all are cases of companies turning a necessary evil of doing business into a competitive advantage. This may not be possible in all cases, but asking "how can this expense be used to make the company stronger?" seems like a valuable question to ask from time to time.

It takes 113 million BTUs of energy to make a Toyota Prius. Because there are about 113,000 BTUs of energy in a gallon of gasoline, the Prius has consumed the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gasoline before it reaches the showroom. Think of it as a carbon debt -- one you won't pay off until the Prius has turned over 46,000 miles or so.

The Geo Metro — with all of three cylinders — that were written off long ago, except with die-hards and collectors, have gone from $2,725 Blue Book value in May-August 2006 to $3,050 this year. It cost $9,000 to $10,000 when it was introduced in 1989.

As an engineer, lawyer, computer programmer and Roman Catholic, I have a problem with the concept that the evolution of the species just happened. From an evolutionary perspective, we are probably somewhere in the chicken and egg debate.

As man supposedly evolved from a single-cell amoeba to the complex organism that he is today, we had to develop a complex brain to manage the process.

The first problem facing a self-developing species in its early stages would be the need to know that there is something out there to see, feel, hear, touch or taste. The second problem is that a complex brain could not survive the incredibly complex development process without the five senses in operational mode. And you can't get the senses in operational mode until you have developed a sophisticated brain with the ability to communicate and interact with the senses.

Therein lies our chicken and egg dilemma.

Ken LeBrun

Stony Brook, N.Y., May 13, 2008

• Sean O'Malley, lead product manager on AskMeGo
• Frank Cort, technical developer on AskMeGo

(Somewhere there must be a variant of Godwin's Law about the first blog post to mention Hitler signaling the end of something, but I can't find it, and besides, I thought the content below was funny -- tasteless, but funny)

I am fascinated by mashups or remixes or digital derivative works or whatever we call them this week. The abundance of digital content, combined with great tools and free distribution yields what seems like (and probably is) a never ending stream of mixed and re-mixed content.

A couple of months ago, I saw a great remix of a pivotal scene from The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich(film), in which Hitler finally comes to realize that war is lost. Except in remix, the subtitles replace the conversation with one concerning the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war. Since then, this scene seems to have been re-remixed many times, but the unwritten "rule" is to stay within the "person finally realizes that the game is up" genre. It may not be haiku or a sonnet, but it's still a formulaic art form.

I think that this one spoofing Hilary Clinton is the best.

Note: Many of these videos seem to be pulled off of YouTube from time to time, due to a copyright complaint from the creators of the original movie. Boo. Searching for bluray hitler etc. will easily find the goods.

Bad Astronomy blog has a very succinct summary of the crap surrounding the non-link between childhood vaccines and the "increase" in autism. I'll summarize the summary here: no link has ever been found, despite massive attempts to fine one.

I'm linking to that post and reminding us all about this issue, not just because it's a good thing to fight for the forces of reason against pseudo-scientific BS. The vaccine "debate" is especially important because the misinformation it generates gets implanted in the brains of otherwise rational people, who at some point might make an unfortunate decision with horrible consequences. We are (happily) quite removed from the days of many children dying from measles and rubella. Can we not let sleeping dogs lie?

This is not a theoretical topic to me. I understand exactly what it means to have that tiny bit of doubt in my mind as I sign the form allowing my second child to be vaccinated, despite the diagnosis of the first. We all want to find a cause for autism -- vaccines aren't it. Keep looking elsewhere. Can we instead focus this misdirected energy on looking for a cure? In the meantime, I propose a new name for those considering skipping a vaccine or worse propagating this misinformation: child abusers.

The website has encountered a problem and cannot display the page you are trying to view.

The Consumerist asks what is the grade of Taco Bell meat? . Why are we even asking this? Is this a Zen kōan ? What is the sound of one hand performing the Heimlich maneuver?

For what it's worth, I have been told that the boxes of Taco Bell meat are marked "Suitable for human consumption."

1. Custard-Filled Speed Bumps (of course by "custard" he means a dilatant substance, such as a corn starch and water slurry)
   
2. Ball Dogs - Next time Wimbledon is about to be held, organise 4 or 5 of the sort of dogs who are insanely obsessed with retrieving balls to fill in for the ball boys/girls.
3. 30 cat night - a more granular scale than the famous 3 dog night.

          C                                      F                    C
There's a small town in the mountains, where the streets are wide and still;

          F                             C           F C  
There are children making angels in the snow.

    F                 Gsus4            C       Em/B     Am     C/G
The sunset paints the sky at night; An old man works by candle light;

  Dm     /E F6                   G
A tiny baby smiles and waves hello.

       F         C/E      Dm7      Dm7/G C      Cmaj7/B
In the cold gray light of dawn, an eagle flies;

        Bb            F                G
And the men are happy wearing matching ties.

          Bb       F           Fm6/Ab          C
A pair of poodles;    A broken finger will not bend.

          Bb       F           C
Soup with noodles;    A female Klingon's drunk boyfriend.

        Bb   F               Fm6/Ab         C
A sexy lady;    This party's better than it seems.

       Bb           F              G               C
Warren Beatty; Dear sleeping giant panda: pleasant dreams.

F#m              D      /E
     Are you the plane?

F#m       E          D      /E  
     that shapes the board?

F#m       E/G#  A  D        /E
     part of    a  history,

F#m       E            D
          smoothed and worn. And

Bm   C    C#m      D              F#m/D#   D 
ohhh...        the windy weather,

F#m/D#       D      F#m/D#     E5
         dry spell,         brush fire.

In a recent New York Times editorial David Brooks does a fine job laying out the real effect of globalization on job growth and loss. His main point is not that jobs (especially manufacturing jobs) have been lost to globalization. If manufacturing industries have been leaving the US for countries with cheap labor, then one would expect US global manufacturing share to decline -- but this is not the case.

"...U.S. manufacturing output is up over recent decades. As Thomas Duesterberg of Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a research firm, has pointed out, the U.S.'s share of global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980."

"...manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades..."

"The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change... Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers."

So US manufacturing market share is up slightly in about a generation, but productivity (i.e. output per worker) has more than doubled. You can't quite compare those two concepts (since share is a percentage of a number not given), but if global manufacturing output doubled in that time (a guess), then there would have been no job manufacturing job growth (and even a big perceived loss, as the population went up by about 75 million people during that time).

But I believe there's a more subtle problem that Brooks misses, or at least ran out of space to address: flexibility. In an automated factory, output can be increased only to a certain level -- then more capital equipment needs to be purchased, installed, configured, etc. and that is very expensive. In a completely manual factory, adding capacity means hiring and training new workers. In the US at least, when times get tough, it is pretty easy to shed workers. But the resources spent on capital equipment generally cannot be recovered.

To me this means that US manufacturing flexibility is a bit like French job creation: employers are reluctant to take on new expenses that cannot be easily undone if times get tough.