The cure for what ails you

My friend the Pundit’s Apprentice sent this round to his email list recently. I find it strangely compelling, since I’ve often wondered whether the world would operate better for me if I just banged my head against a wall long enough to turn my brain to mush. I overthink pretty much everything.

Thing is—I’ve got a rather uneasy feeling that you can accomplish the same thing, without resorting to MinusIQ™ drugs; because it really does seem to me that the very act of signing up for a Twitter account lowers your IQ by at least 27 points. Along with the concomitant shedding of grammar, circumspection, civility and all sense of actions (and words) having consequences.

(Actually, the company that produced it has other very compelling—if not as amusing—videos on its site. Have a look: www.sleepthinker.com.)

Anyhow—it’s tequila o’clock on Funky Friday, so enjoy the possibilities.

Mixing oil & vinegar

Back in the 90s I read a story in the Washington Post to the effect that you can tell who’s a yuppie by the number of types of vinegar they have in their pantry. I remember thinking, “Uh-oh” back then, because I probably had about five lying about, along with three or four types of cooking oil.

I was reminded of that the other day asI pulled out the balsamic when I wanted the red wine vinegar for a spinach salad, and I really looked at that cabinet shelf. Which is half full of vinegar bottles.

The other half is different kinds of oils.

Here’s the tally.

Vinegar:

•  Champagne (two bottles, but one’s almost empty and the other was on sale)
• Red wine
• White wine
• Balsamic
• Cider
• White
• Rice
• Raspberry
• Raspberry red wine

Oil:

• EVOO (California estate)
• EVOO (Kalamata)
• Persian lime EVOO
• Eureka lemon EVOO
• Lemon basil EVOO
• Sesame
• Walnut
• Canola spray
• Garlic
• Basting olive oil with herbs
• Canola
• Peanut

Don’t quite know what to say about it. I’m not really excessive, I don’t think. I’m pretty sure I could stop at any point.

Well, maybe just one more…

Rogue killer app

One of the people I follow on the Twitter-dot-com was apparently having a bad day earlier this week. You could tell that when his tweets began referring darkly to “rogues”.

I got the impression that by “rogues” he meant “scoundrels”, and not, say, “scamps”, or even “undesirable deviations from a standard”. That’s because he declared, “If I invented a gadget that detected rogues I’d be a billionaire in a week.”

Well—you can’t argue with that, really.

He went on to announce, “So it’s time to get busy inventing a rogue detector”.

And the product manager in me kicked in pretty much automatically. Because in software product management, it’s all about understanding the problem that needs to be solved and who has the problem. Only after you’ve got those two elements completely in hand can you start thinking about defining the technology that might ameliorate the situation.

I pointed that out to him—the big challenge in developing a scumbag-identifying device or (more likely) application is in how one defines a scumbag. My standards in the matter are going to be somewhat different from yours, depending on how charming you find lying, cheating, self-puffery, back-stabbing, expense-fiddling and other behaviors and character traits. You probably wouldn’t download the app if it’s set to my criteria.

(Well—it’s the Twitters, so I was limited to 140 characters. What I actually said to him was “The big problem is accommodating individual definitions of ‘rogue’. #GoodLuck”)

This guy is definitely CEO material, the man with the Big Idea; and every start-up needs one of them. Maybe more, in case of traffic accidents or bad seafood. His response was right in line with the CEO approach:

“LOL…but my definition is the only one that matters! ;-)”

Well, I tried to be circumspect, as you are to CEOs. “To you; yes. But to the millions who’ll pay you $$$ per download…they gotta have their definition. Just sayin’.”

(I once told a CEO who was visualizing Big Things for a product I was developing, “It’s your job to build castles in the air. It’s mine [as product manager] to get out the shovel and start digging the foundation.” This tweeted exchange was along those lines.)

And he graciously came around: “Very true…I’m actually beginning to think seriously about the plan… :-)”

But then he came up with a prototype involving Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.

Okay, look—it may surprise you to know that I have given considerable thought to this whole rat-catching issue over the years. Being able to detect scrotes is the first step to getting them out of your life. It is therefore my opinion that a Lasso of Truth is not only hardware-intensive (you’ve got manufacturing and distribution costs, moving parts and all the stuff that can go wrong. Plus—what do you do about batteries?), it’s not subtle and it puts you in closer proximity to the schmucks than I think you should be, as a paying customer.

I’m thinking mobile app, here; something that combines user-defined scumbag criteria, maybe NLP, voice recognition, even facial scanning technologies. The subscriber chooses what’s important to her from a comprehensive pick list, sets the priorities, probably using sliders, and then just taps the icon when she’s in the presence of a suspected schmuck.

(I say "subscriber" because this has to be Software-as-a-Service. Need to determine the subscription model—per-month or per-use. First thought is that per-use is going to be the money-spinner, but I'll have to run some number projections; maybe plug them into a spreadsheet.)

The app would “read” the jerk in question from a discreet distance (pretend you’re taking his picture; they’re narcissistic enough to be pleased by that) so that it would never occur to him that he’s being, ah, filtered, and process the inputs according to some algorithm yet TBD.

(It would have to be robust enough to handle the presence of multiple scumbags. So that if you were, say, in any legislative body anywhere in the world, or a Hollywood party, it wouldn't crash through the sheer weight of data. Well—maybe we put in the instructions that you shouldn't waste your per-use fees on politicians because everyone knows they're all lying, thieving rat bastards and why would you even fire up the app for what you already know?)

What you do about it is, of course, not part of the app, and we’d have to state that very clearly in the End User License Agreement (EULA). So it’s not what you might call a complete end-to-end solution. For that we’d probably have to partner with some, ah, services organization(s); so that would be part of a future version in the product roadmap.

But, like 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it’s a start.

I think I’ll just put together a little product requirements document and have it ready in the cloud for when I run into VCs at a local coffee shop somewhere near Sand Hill Road. I'm thinking there's a Google Glass tie-in, too.

Keep on truckin'

I don’t ordinarily watch commercials on TV. As with all manner of online ads, I’ve trained my eyes so that I just don’t see them. (Thus all that work Google, Facebook and the Twitter-dot-com put into their ad-serving algorithms is just swirling down the drain when it comes to getting my attention and money.)

In fact, for the most part I’m afraid that television is basically a talking lamp to me—flickering lights with noise accompaniment.

Sometimes my ears prick up, though, and there was something about the sound of this Chevy Silverado commercial that made me look up.

There he is, our rugged hero; a guy and his truck. Out there on the range in the pissing-down rain, protecting his herd. But—no—there’s a calf gone missing! Noooo. And like the shepherd in the parable, our waxen-coated truck guy goes off in search of the lost little one.

And blah, blah, blah.

Until he finds it and cradles it to him.

Awww…

But am I the only person watching that commercial who’s thinking, “Hey—that’s a beef cow! In two years or so (life span of beef cattle being less than three years), that little dogie’s going to be hauled to the slaughterhouse."

Perhaps towed behind that truck.

Gratitude Monday: The blessing of water

My friend Danger Girl brought this story from Forbes to my attention recently. You’ve no doubt seen the videos of Shark Cat—the feline that likes to ride a Roomba and lets its humans dress it in a shark outfit.

(If you haven’t—you probably might want to check your broadband connection. ‘Cause it would have been hard to miss.)

The Forbes writer makes the case that Shark-Roomba-Cat may be the quintessential depiction of the wealth of America—roomy, well-equipped kitchen; high-tech robotic floor cleaning device; people with enough disposable income to buy shark sweaters for their pets.

DG didn’t object to that characterization, but she did point out that many Americans are not in fact represented by that video; people in their millions who only dream of having the space and equipment of this kitchen. And the multiple bedrooms, working bathroom and suburban yard that presumably surround the Roomba-riding cat.

She’s spot on, of course.

But let me add one element to the discussion, which is the subject of my Gratitude Monday today, which isn’t mentioned in the article:

With some exceptions, the vast majority of Americans have access to clean, potable water, and are not in danger of contracting or dying from numerous water-borne diseases. Assuming your own plumbing is operational, you can turn on the tap and can drink whatever comes out of it without greater fear than that it might taste funny. You don't even think about things like cholera, typhoid, dysentery or a dozen other hazards.

That is a triumph of technology and civic services.

When I moved to Korea, it was in the middle of a cholera epidemic. Since I did not live on base, and bottled water was not at that time the universal thing it is today, I had two choices for consumption: either drop purification tablets into a pitcher of water (which turned it a shade of brown that made you wonder whether the color alone was killing the bacteria), or boil it. For ten minutes. On a hot plate.

Well, okay—three choices: tablets, boiling or take my chances with cholera.

The Korean government occasionally sent round loud-speaker trucks to urge people in the apartment complex to get their cholera shots (which I found very Orwellian). This was not in any way a joke to anyone. But they didn’t have the infrastructure for delivering clean water to the populace. Our neighborhood (maybe most of Seoul) had open sewers. If you've never experienced a banjo ditch in monsoon-hot/wet summer...well, consider yourself fortunate.

(Actually—I was in one of the “luxury” buildings of the complex. We had indoor toilets. Residents of six out of the twelve six-story walk-ups used outhouses.)

So, long after my time there, I am still deeply grateful that I do not have to boil water before I drink it, and that I don't have to worry about killer diseases shooting out of the taps. I know there are millions and millions of people in the world who do not share in this blessing.

Twitter goes to the movies

One thing about the Twitters is it’s a great place to get silly. Every once in a while someone starts a hashtag dare, and it’s off to the races.

After the Texas Lege banned feminine hygiene products in its hallowed chambers, #ReplaceAWordInAMovieWithTampon trended for a day or two.

You know: Lethal Tampon. A Fistful of Tampons and so on.

Then there was #TitlesWithNachos.

So you had Die Hard with Nachos, Where the Wild Nachos Are, Harry Potter and the Deathly Nachos, No Nachos for Old Men and… Well, you get the idea.

One of my favorites, and therefore my excuse for the Funky Friday post today, is #1letterwrongmovie. Change one letter in a movie title; get a whole new film.

What happened with this one was that the Photoshoppers came out in droves. It wasn’t enough to play with the words; they had to augment the images.

You do not want to be drinking anything while looking at these. Or, if you are, at least aim your nose away from your keyboard.

Nightmare on Elmo Street:

 

Pilates of the Caribbean:

Fat & Furious:

Iron Nan:

And—I can’t decide which wins the prize—Lord of the Wings:

Or Paws:

What do you think?

A flight into history

A friend of mine alerted me to this video of B-17s in action during the Second World War. It’s set to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”.

B-17s were the workhorse of the US air war in Europe, and they were perhaps the earliest of my technology interests.

They didn’t have the payload capacity or the range of other bombers, but once their armor was beefed up, the Eighth Air Force followed a strategy of formation flying and they developed long-range escort fighters, the B-17 just kept pounding targets all over Europe.

It was called the “Flying Fortress” because you could shoot half of the fuselage, most of the tail and other sundry parts away, and it would still make it back to base. (You can see this in the video.)

I’ve actually been in one—a guy I was going out with was designing Mattel’s “B-17 Bomber” Intellivision game, and we went to an air show specifically to see it. (The game kind of tanked; wonder how it would do with today’s graphic action capabilities?) 

(And if you want to see the interior, here are some pix from the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine.)

The interesting thing to me was the old guy they had showing us around. He’d flown in the craft and had lots of stories to tell.

The one thing I remember, 30 years on, is that he said that, even with its stolid homing capabilities, about half of the Forts were lost during the war. (And since each plane held a crew of ten, that means a loss of more than 50,000 men.) According to this guy, a high proportion of those losses occurred on a crew’s 25^th (and final) mission. The pilot would try some damn-fool stunt, like buzzing the control tower, and that was all she wrote.

Well, maybe, maybe not. I can’t find that documented anywhere, but it makes a good story.

Both Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were working journalists during WWII, and they’ve written about “ride-alongs” they took on B-17s. I recommend their accounts to you. Before their sortie, they’d absorbed the ground-pounders’ usual complaint about how war for the flyers was all glamour and no risk. They had a different perspective afterward.

Cuisine-in-a-can

Okay, I suppose someone was going to do this at some point. For any number of reasons.

Wired reports that a grad student at a London university has created a 12-course dinner-in-a-can. Twelve foods embalmed in gelatin & entombed in a can. Chris Godfrey says it’s part of his investigation into today’s “bombastic consumerism”, but I’m betting he really did it to see if he could.

From the top down they include:

Selection of local cheeses

Pickled Kobe beef

Ricotta ravioli

Shiitake mushrooms

Halibut poached in truffle butter

It goes on and on, through the main course, rib-eye steak with grilled mustard greens; and it ends with a canelé and hazelnut latte.

Leaving aside the issue that a latte is not an appropriate after-dinner coffee, I guess Chris Godfrey has covered all the major food groups, although covering them in gelatin just makes them icky.

(Hey—you ever eaten an aspic by mistake? You’d be scarred for life, too.)

I’m really seeing this as a guy thing—can’t think of any woman who’d spend hours and hours preparing expensive ingredients and layering them in a can, knowing no one’s ever going to eat the result.

Me—I can’t even get my head around the turducken. Plus, if you’ve ever tried to get the jellied cranberry sauce out of the can whole at Thanksgiving, you know this would be a bitch-and-a-half to extrude onto your plate without smooshing it.

But I bet Godfrey gets his degree off this. His committee’s probably all-male.

The flow of human history

I came across this timeline of sorts—“Histomap of Four Thousand Years of World History”—yesterday. It covers 2000 BCE to 1931. (Click here to go to a somewhat larger version at the Slate site.)

I’ll start out with a complaint—why couldn’t Slate have made it zoomable? At least zommable so that it doesn’t go into a blur?

But beyond that, this thing is fascinating.

For one thing, it’s beautiful to look at—the multicolored rivers of human groupings, flowing through history. They appear, they expand; they disappear…

If you view the whole thing as one long strip, it looks like something that came from one of those WPA murals that used to adorn all manner of public buildings. Which would put it in the right time-frame for something that ends history at 1931.

Look at where the US appears—that little blue rivulet way, way down towards the bottom at the left. Just a little blip in the course of human history. & Great Britain—it achieved its greatest point of expansion just as we broke away, presaging the collapse of empire.

China is the one constant in this whole thing—ain’t that a kick in the pants?

I really wish I could print this out on some gigantic printer, so it’s at a legible scale. Then I’d hang it on a tall wall next to a multi-floor staircase so people could walk up and down to follow the streams of history.

Second complaint—why couldn’t Slate have commissioned a graphic artist and historian(s) to pick up at 1931 and take it through to at least 2010? This just cries out to be updated.

Gratitude Monday: My excellent birthday adventure

Saturday was my birthday. I stopped making a big deal about that around the time I moved to Seattle and pretty much gave up the will to live. My family and friends always remember it, and I get the most wonderful cards and presents; I just don’t bother with it much myself, since the closest one of the family-and-friend crowd is more than 500 miles away.

But a couple of weeks ago, a friend who lives right here asked how I intended to celebrate my birthday. She takes this kind of stuff seriously, to the point of taking the day off from work to mark her own birthday. So I thought, well, why not?

Except for our foray in to Union Square for the SF Design Week events a couple of months ago, I’ve not been into San Francisco in a couple of years. And those trips were for job interviews. So that became our destination.

It was an incredible day.

We had to adjust out plans a bit when we realized that Outside Lands was going on in Golden Gate Park, but it still turned out great.

We started out with breakfast at Mel’s Diner, where the food was good and the service what you’d expect at a place that makes its money from tourists who won’t be returning.

The real star of the day was the park, where we spent about six hours, and barely cracked its possibilities. Dahlia Dell, the conservatory, the de Young Museum, the rose garden, the Japanese tea garden and the carousel were all we could manage.

Highlights:

The conservatory reminded me of its counterpart at Kew Gardens, though smaller and more intense. (Meaning it was basically a sweat lodge with a lot of greenery.) They have a temporary exhibit of a butterfly garden, which was fascinating (down to and including the signage):

They invited you to add the word for “butterfly” in other languages onto a chalkboard. Ann and I gave them the German (der Schmetterling); right after that, a Vietnamese woman wrote in bướm bướm, which is apparently pronounced somewhere between “bom-bom” and “boom-boom”. But I like the repeated “B” sound for the fluttery creature; seems appropriate.

I was stunned by the variety of dahlias, all concentrated into a small space, so they just cry out for your attention. Also, for the ministrations of bees, who were stocking up on all the good pollen:

The carousel was wonderful—totally mechanical (as opposed to electronic), with spectacularly beautiful animals. It dates from 1914. I rode the tiger (no limericks, please). Take a look at the stork:

To tell you the truth, by this time (nearly 1700) we were just the teensiest bit tired. So back to Japantown for some of the best sushi I’ve ever had, with boats floating past us to distribute the delicacies. Listen—I’ve eaten a lot of raw fish in my time; this was amazing. Also: first time I've ever seen éclairs at a sushi bar; much less floating past me on bamboo boats next to raw shrimp and salmon.

The sushi cutter’s name (according to his name tag) was Alberto.

America, gonif.

It was a great way to celebrate my birthday, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it and for a friend to share it with. Gratitude Monday hardly seems big enough to cover it. But it’s a start.