March 2008 Archives

OK, I found this weird - but strangely amusing - link to this set of Photobucket images where the artists shrinks the nose and mouth of the subjects. Here's George Bush:

What's going on here? These are hilarious, but why did somebody take the trouble to do these? What's with the "O"-heavy vowel replacement? I'm not getting it. But I laughed anyway.

You know, it's pretty startling to think how my priorities have changed since I was a younger man. I'm 31 years old now, but when I think about what my priorities were like, say, when I was 24, it's like I was a different person. I mean, yeah, some of my priorities remain from that time. I'm not a completely different person. But most of my priorities - if you can even categorize them in terms of discrete units - have changed.

Taken by itself, it's no big deal. I mean, if I knew how I would be today when I was 24, rationally I would have geared my life so as to put myself in a position that maximized my 2008 (the year this was written) priorities. Then again, if I had not had the priorities that I did when I was 24, and if I had not made those kinds of ensuing decisions - I would be a different 2008 John. Contemplating the meaning of my life up to today, my current firm set of priorities were inchoate and susceptible to new ideas then. Paradoxical, and fun to think about, but ultimately the past is immutable, and I'm not sure that I would have wanted to change it that much anyway. Not that it makes one damn bit of difference.

Then again, it's not so much fun. I'm extremely judgmental and critical about my former selves. Were they to meet on the street, I imagine they would walk away from each other, thinking "that guy's a real asshole."

(That's why I never read the old blog posts I have written.)

Extending this, and hoping to use this insight to make predictions, the scary part is will I have another priority shift? And how major? And, how can I prepare for it - if that's even possible? Which inchoate inklings of priorities that I have now will be realized into full-fledged priorities by the time I'm, say, 40? Or even 35?

Which priorities will I discard?

I guess this shadow of a fear comes from the thought that, somehow, somewhere, I'm wasting my time.

For most intents and purposes, I am a married man. And I recognize that this experience was the catalyst for a lot of my shift in priorities. I find that I relate much better with people who are married or have been in very long term relationships compared to single people.

And I also recognize that people with children have experienced another, similarly massive shift in priorities. They exhibit a degree of patience and a selflessness that I cannot possibly fathom.

I happened to catch a little bit of this (new?) documentary early Wednesday morning on PBS. It is called Bush's War.

It's long, and I only caught part of it (about an hour or so). But it was really riveting, and it illustrates how personality tensions within the administration and the subordinate agencies (including the armed forces) would turn out to be the prime determinant on whether or not tens of thousands of people would die (and which tens of thousands). That's a rather surface treatment of it, I acknowledge, but it is astonishing to me the extent the pettiness of our officials and their retainers would manifest itself.

On a different note, I love PBS. They've done a wonderful job of creating content and recontextualizing it for the web. In fact, PBS-created content is consistently the best on the web.

That, and the fact that they post most of their content online for free (if not all of it), is really cool.

I've been pretty busy, and will continue to be so probably until Thursday.  So don't expect my pearls of wisdom until at least then.

It's 6:00 AM, and I'm going to bed now.

J

Happy Birthday Heather! Thank you for putting up with me. I love you. -John

When I lived in Ishikawa, I played taiko drum with a bunch of people including my buddy Ed. Ed has continued to drum (and I am green with envy), and he recently sent me a video of his Taiko group Taiko Meantime. Very cool stuff. They are talented percussionists and master showmen. It's worth watching the whole video, even though it's about five minutes long.

That whole bit where they're passing the cymbal noise is the coolest. I really hope that I have the opportunity to see them live sometime soon.

We've made a lot of progress on Noteworks. We got stumbled up with the UI, of all things. In fact, we're still having a bit of trouble deploying on Macs because of some Java Swing stuff that just doesn't seem to be present on Mac JVM installations.

Anyway, we've added stochastic vertices as well as improving the look-and-feel with icons. Oh, and you can actually compose within the tool itself, which is a first. Now this video starts off a little slow and shaky because by computer was getting bogged down, but it improves pretty fast. I employed a lot of stochastic vertices in this network composition, as well as a wav vertex and three different MIDI voices. Check it out:

I can't wait to see what Rob and Dave come up with.

Never refer to a baby as "it," even if you don't know his or her gender. For example:

"Aww, what a cute baby! What's its name?"

For some reason, people get all upset when you do this. It's perhaps as if you're hinting that the baby's hideousness is to such a degree that it is impossible to ascertain his or her gender. Or, perhaps, you're implying that the baby is a hermaphrodite. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course: you don't actually believe these things, so you grasp for the closest pronoun that will cover all cases. Because - it seems seemed to me anyway - it's probably worse to refer to the baby by the wrong gender.

Face it, though: babies - newborns in particular - appear pretty sexless. To me, anyway. I think that this social misstep can and should be forgiven.

But I guess other people think otherwise. Fortunately, I did not have the misfortune to discover this on my own - I referred to the baby of one of Heather's friends as "it," to Heather alone, and she promptly expressed her horror and set me on the correct path. I also consulted with friends that are socially savvier than me this past weekend on how better to determine the baby's gender - or at least avoid embarrassing yourself. For example, rather than say:

"Aww, what a cute baby! What's its name?"

You should say:

"Aww, what a cute baby! What's his or her name?"

Or, smoother yet (in my opinion):

"Aww, what a cute baby! What's your baby's name?"

Often, in writing and in speech, people use the plural pronoun when they are unsure about a person's gender:

"Aww, what a cute baby! What's their name?"

There was much debate about their amongst my socially savvy friends. The consensus, at the end, was that their should be avoided, in general, and his or her is preferred. I did not understand and still have no idea how they arrived at this conclusion.

---

This recipe for social interaction should, in general, help you avoid or at least mitigate social awkardness. Unless, of course, the other party responds with a name that is common to both men and women - e.g. Jamie - or, even worse, if they respond with a name that you've never even heard of, like Gonzaldiatrez.

That name, Gonzaldiatrez, was a name that I encountered in my High School geometry textbook. I still remember it, more than half my life ago, as a fifteen-year-old. It's my default name, when I don't know what to name something. If I ever get a dog, believe you me, it he or she is going to be named Gonzaldiatrez.

I had never heard of that name before - or since - and a quick Google search confirms that it is, apparently, completely made up. Perhaps the textbook authors were under a mandate from management to ramp up textbook diversity. So, in subtle retaliation, they inserted a half-Latino, fully-robotic sounding name. Maybe it went down like the disgruntled Disney artists who covertly inserted an erect penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid VHS tape:

That went undiscovered for years.

Anyway, the geometry problem was a "story problem" (God, I hate that term) - that is to say, a contrived narrative of how Gonzaldiatrez used geometry to improve his (it's a dude's name, turns out) life - and the teacher asked me to read it. I think she asked me because she knew (correctly, as it turns out) that I would read it with humorous disdain (it was one of my High School personality specialties) so as to get a [cheap] laugh out of the other students.

Because nothing is funnier - or more disdainful - than stilted, transparent cultural diversification. Especially at the white-bread midwestern High School that I attended.

Discovered via the Wired article that I blogged about yesterday. Very interesting.

Speaking of autism, there was a fascinating article in Wired about autism and the [ongoing] change in perception towards it. That is to say, regarding it as just a different kind of brain, rather than as a disease:

In his original paper in 1943, Kanner wrote that while many of the children he examined "were at one time or another looked upon as feebleminded, they are all unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities." Sixty-five years later, though, little is known about those potentialities. As one researcher told me, "There's no money in the field for looking at differences" in the autistic brain. "But if you talk about trying to fix a problem - then the funding comes."

There are several parallels drawn towards the autism rights movement and the gay rights movement. It's not too hard to imagine the excerpt as being:

As one researcher told me, "There's no money in the field for looking at differences" in the gay brain. "But if you talk about trying to fix a problem - then the funding comes."

Reminiscent of Exodus.

So, we got an iRobot Roomba last week from Woot.com (for a massive discount). That is to say, Heather ordered it and it arrived. Refurb, naturally, but it still works perfectly, as far as we can tell.

What's a Roomba, you might ask? It's an autonomous robot that is also a vacuum cleaner:

Heather is really excited. She has been taking the Roomba into all of the different rooms in our apartment and letting it loose. The other day, in fact, she put it in our small bathroom and closed all the doors. She remained inside, to watch it. I thought that the whole point was to be able to not have to concern yourself with the burden of having to vacuum!

Disturbingly, Heather has also taken to omitting the definite article for the robot. "Have you seen what Roomba did today?" As if it were a little child, or a dog. That was, I think, a day after we received it. It's amazing how fast we can attribute the quality of life to something as simple as a household appliance - although this is admittedly the most intelligent-seeming appliance, granted. I think this portends our robotic future, and it won't be that long until we regard more sophisticated robots as, well, family members.

Equally interesting to me is my annoyance at Heather's calling the Roomba "by name." Why not treat the Roomba with the same amount of respect as, say, a goldfish at least? I think my annoyance stems from people calling their baby "Baby." There was a television commercial not too long ago where they referred to the baby as "baby," and it made me want to tear my eyeballs out.

Actually, the naming phenomenon is not isolated. According to Roomba message boards, lots of people name their Roomba. Including one guy, according to Heather, who bought five Roombas - and gave them all unique names.

Weird.

---

I will say this about [the] Roomba. It gets the floor and carpet astonishingly clean. And it's fun to see how much dirt and crap it picks up after it's done - though it's mildly embarrassing to be confronted by the sins of one's slothfulness: an old receipt here, a half-eaten, moldy, melted M&M there. And it's fun just to see it operate.

Though, as I told Heather in a rather uncharitable, un-PC comment, the vacuum trails it makes on the carpet makes it look like someone with autism vaccuumed the carpet.

Overhead something at a restaurant at lunch yesterday. It was a conversation between a young woman and her mom and dad.

Dad: Hey, do you remember Mr. ~?

Young Woman: Uhhh, no, but the name sounds familiar.

Dad: Do you remember the guy who lived across the street from us?

Young Woman: Do you mean the guy with the lawnmower? The lawnmower dude?

Dad: Well, no, that was his brother-in-law. He lived next door.  I'm talking about, you know, the guy with the-

Mom: He was always out with a hat-

Dad: Will you let me finish? Now, his wife had that old white car. You remember?

Young Woman: Ummm...

Dad: And he had two mean-looking dogs? You know, by the lake.

Young Woman: I don't think...

Mom: Let me try. He always wore a straw hat.

Young Woman: Oh, oh yeah, was he always outside with his shirt off?

Mom: That's the guy.

Young Woman (smiling in recognition): Oh yeah, Mr. ~! I forgot about him! How's he doing?

Dad: Well, he died.

OK so, to be honest, I fictionalized part of this conversation to protect the innocent, and because I can't remember the details, but you get the gist. I laughed my head off though. Comedy gold.

This is bad. The pothole problem in Michigan is so serious now, they're organizing contests that disburse prize money for photographs of the worst potholes. I heard about this on 94.7, WCSX, Detroit:

Is there a frame-bending pothole in your path each morning as you head to work?

That pothole could make you some money!

The Michigan Transportation Team and Drive MI Campaign are holding a contest to find the state’s biggest roadway crater.

When you submit your pothole picture, you’ll be in the running for one of three $318 “service center scholarships” – the average cost our crumbling and congested roads cost Michigan motorists like you.

My sister Leslie sent pictures of her Aerogarden. Wow.

That's a spoon she's comparing her plants to.

Check out the roots:

I'm experiencing definite Aerogarden envy.

She planted hers on Christmas of last year, so it's only been about two and a half months. She also says:

Looks a little worse for wear, but I just hacked it back on Saturday and the basil is due for another chop.

No, it looks awesome. It makes ours look pathetic!

Heather and I can't wait until we start harvesting, though. When do you know?

My Dad sent the following picture to me with the above subject line:

Wow. It's not nearly that bad in Michigan. Heather's mom took some pretty extraordinary pictures of tree branches touching the ground on account of being so heavily ice-laden. Lots of fallen brances on the ground, too.

Terence also had a very interesting photo on his blog: So THAT'S What 2 Inches of Sleet Looks Like...

Wow.

My sister just told me that her comments weren't coming up. That was happening with someone else, too, I discovered.

The problem is that I pumped up the strength of my spam filters. As you know, spam has become a major problem on my blog. Unfortunately, the spam filters were generating a lot of false positives and some legitimate comments were being filtered out. Bummer.

Anyway, I think I fixed it. When you make a comment, it should appear semi-immediately. If it doesn't show up, please please send me an email and we'll get it resolved together.

Sorry about this...

As you may know, Gary Gygax passed away yesterday. To honor his memory, Matt at No-Sword wrote an interesting and funny piece about the history of Dungeons & Dragons in Japan:

The Pre-Translation Age was one of truly legendary nerdery -- men and women without internet connections of any kind, importing at great expense books in an foreign language and studying the rules they contained for pretending to be an elf. Their cyclopean achievements make the otaku of today look like keg-chugging frat boys.

Yesterday I mentioned a song called Dundas, Ontario by a band called Manitoba (AKA Caribou). I was surprised and delighted to see the video on YouTube:

Here's another one off of a different album (I think this time under the name Caribou):

Manitoba is one of my very favorite bands (feels weird saying that - I think it's just one dude). I love Dundas, Ontario. And People Eating Fruit. And Brandon. And Paul's Birthday. Really neat stuff.

Heather told me about a neat Firefox plugin called PicLens that allows you to search and look at images on the web. Here, I did a search for "Chow chows" on Google's image search, but you can also search Smugmug, Photobucket, Flickr, Yahoo, and DeviantArt out of the box. Here's a screenshot:

When you click on an image, it pops out at you and a higher-resolution version is loaded.

Very cool. I think that I will actually continue to use this plugin. You can download it (and should) here - it's free, after all. I think that the 3D visual metaphor works much better for images than for whole webpages like the Spacetime browser. Which I don't use anymore.

Now I'm all about making a profit - believe me - but Mr. James Dyson and company, I think that you are in serious danger of alienating the public's trust with your "new" Airblade technology, and its misleading (at best) marketing campaign.

Take a look at this commercial:

This commercial flows like a template, virtually, for all effective commercials. Really a work of craftsmanship. But a flawed one:

• 0:00 - 0:06 : The setup. James Dyson explains the problem. Traditional handblowers suck, our hands are often still wet, and we finish the job by wiping our hands on our clothes (and this is true for me at least). Nice touch: "We all do this." E.g., "You don't have to be ashamed of your barbaric behavior. But there's a better way."
• 0:06 : The viewer recognizes by now Mr. Dyson's "exotic" accent, lending him an air of sophistication and awe. To Americans, at least.
• 0:08 : the phrase Airblade Technology is introduced. "Cool! Blades are awesome. And, gee, this thing is a technology! Not like the old-fashioned, non-technology paper towel that I usually use. Used to use, I should say!"
• 0:10 : "...and it dawned on me that..." - introduces the notion that James Dyson is anything but corporate, but is instead a regular Joe who happened to have experienced romantic serendipity - a vision - of a new product that would benefit all mankind. "No, no: no market research of any kind was done before we started developing this product. We're grass roots, man!"
• 0:15 : "Instead of the old evaporation system" - reinforcing that the Dyson Airblade is new, and that you must be too old-fashioned, ignorant, or poor to want to use anything else.
• 0:17 : (Did you see this coming? Did you? I bet you did.) "Which blows all sorts of bacteria at you." Capitalizing on the antibacteria meme that has spidered its way across our culture. Hooray for fearmongering!
• 0:18 : "We came up with..." So up to now, nothing has been too bad. Pretty garden-variety, really. But at 0:18, James Dyson and company commit an egregious sin. Airblade-like technology has been around in Japan for ages; Mitsubishi has been selling their "Jet Towel" model for nearly ten years, according to Gizmodo (see also Engadget). Now, Dyson, you may have significantly improved upon the design of the Jet Towel, and I have no doubt that your Dyson Airblade is the superior product. And, it may be that you feel that you have expanded Mitsubishi's offering enough to claim you have [re]invented it. And, moreover, these feelings may actually be legitimate. Nevertheless, the perception - and that's the most important part at the end of the day, isn't it? - is that you guys are intellectual thieves. And this mismanagement of your image is inexcusable.
• 0:20 : "purified air" - man, I just have to laugh at this one. I guess blowing air through a thin filter now makes it "purified." Unlike the poisonous fumes that we breath all day.
• 0:23 : "really satisfying solution to something that's annoyed me" (emphasis mine). Reinforcing the idea that Dyson was the sole originator of the idea. Also resonates with our western sensibility that we can engineer our way out of all discomfort in life. Well done.
• 0:28 : Onscreen: "James Dyson: Inventor of Airblade(TM) technology[.]" Here they just come out and say it.

I also found this fascinating crap commercial documentary on the Airblade - also starring James Dyson - on YouTube. It's pretty much the same as the commercial they deployed for television, but in greater detail.

Great section on positioning and conspicuous consumption around 3:24. Skillful appeal to rationality at 3:40. But pay special attention to the camerawork - especially starting around 3:56. From that time until about 4:05, the cameraman films all of Dyson except his head. He cuts Dyson's head off!

Come on. I get, Dyson, that you want to create a kind of avant-garde atmosphere - one that positively oozes authenticity - with this thing. But you expect me to believe that James Dyson allowed himself to be "interviewed" for this documentary/film (frankly, I don't even know what the hell to call it) by somebody [legitimate] who was either too lazy or too incompetent to film properly? To cut off his head for nine whole seconds? Give me a break.

By the way, Dyson is a billionaire. That's with a "B." And that's in pounds sterling. Would he cut corners on something like this, an otherwise sophisticated marketing campaign? (Answer: no. Look how much attention to detail Dyson has put into the design of its product.)

---

There's an alternative/complementary scenario to all this, you realize. A sinister one: that Dyson did hire or solicit a young, aspiring filmmaker in his mid-to-late twenties (edit: or, apparently, an employee of the now-defunct Business 2.0 magazine) to create this piece. And then they - the marketing department - looked at it and said, "yeah, looks authentic. Let's go with it."

In which case, the only logical conclusion is that James Dyson and company, manufacturers of Airblade technology, believe their target market to be a bunch of lazy, shoddy slobs. Slobs... who are in sore need of hand-drying technology. Wait a minute... this marketing campaign is brilliant! I'm going to go out and buy my Dyson Airblade as early as next week! Maybe it'll be on Woot!

---

Seriously, Dyson, I think you've blundered badly with your campaign. Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps you are making a point to ignore markets of my demographic profile, and perhaps that is in fact the strategy that will yield the most profits for you, long-term. Can't blame you for that. But I can tell you that, because of how I perceived your campaign, you have made me - and in turn, everyone who interacts with me, to some extent or another - hostile to buying any of your products.

link.

Just read a really interesting article about the economics of free in Chris Anderson's article - entitled Free - in the latest issue of Wired:

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see How-To Wiki for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Emphasis mine.  I wish I had thought of that way of explaining our value chain in that class I took last semester.

I really think that the Internet is changing the ways in which we conceive value chains (or value webs, which is how we articulated our chain).   I mean, it's just not as straightforward as moving from raw materials to finished product.  It just doesn't work that way for a lot of things anymore.

This was ours:

Yesterday went to the gym after about a week hiatus. Which is bad. But I went on the scale today, and I've dropped 10.5 pounds since the beginning of the year. Which is good!

It's weird. I expected to have gained at least a couple of pounds - since I ate a pizza, some Arby's, and a few pieces of candy - not to mention several visits to restaurants - since my last visit to the gym. But I actually LOST weight over the hiatus.

I think it's because of the weight training. The people at the fitness center put us on a regimen of ten different weight training exercises, and both Heather and I are noticing differences in our muscle mass. Particularly in core areas that burn lots of calories, like latissimus dorsi, biceps, pectorals, hamstrings, quads, etc. Heather recently discovered that that's what Dr. Oz says, anyway. It makes a lot of sense, and we've both seen a lot of improvement. So we're really happy about that.

It's all about the core muscles, isn't it?

---

OK, so people look pretty ridiculous on the elliptical machine (which is my cardio machine of choice - it seems to be the most efficient calorie burning machine by far) under normal circumstances. Make that very ridiculous. Now, there are two modes of operation for an elliptical. Forward is what most people do. And it looks pretty lame. But watching someone on an elliptical going backwards is downright hilarious. Those people on the machines, with such serious facial expressions, contorting their bodies in such unnatural positions. It's like watching interpretive dance. But performed by a clown.

A sad, intense clown.

---

I saw somebody I knew today in the gym. It was the very first professor I had at Michigan, as a matter of fact. He taught a very interesting AI course. He didn't see me - and it looked like he probably didn't want to be seen - as he was mid-pump on the bicep machine. Seemed like it would have been awkward were I to come up to him with a "hey, what's up?" Maybe next time I'll say hi.

---

So I did an experiment today. A musical experiment. See, I always put music on my MP3 player that will inspire me to work harder during the cardio part of my workout. I carefully select the songs. For me, that usually means bright, peppy songs, with clear, unambiguous rhythms. However, before, the songs' BPMs would vary significantly, because I had not properly arrayed the songs. Which meant I had a tendency to work very hard (as my brain synched with the beat) on fast songs, and then slow down quickly for subsequent songs if they happened to be slower. And then fast again. Then slow again. Etc. This wore me out.

So I got smart. Rather than play songs in a random order, I specifically arrayed them to start slow, get faster in the middle for most of the work out, and mellow out near the end of the workout. Here is my first playlist where I have taken this into consideration:

1. Dundas, Ontario - Manitoba [4:24]
2. Surf Rider - The Ventures [2:27]
3. Love Me Two Times - The Doors [3:18]
4. At My Heels - Daedelus [3:21]
5. Bring Back My Happiness - Moby [3:13]
6. Feeling So Real - Moby [3:22]
7. Sunset (Bird of Prey) - Fatboy Slim [3:59]
8. Schedules and Fares - Manitoba [5:13]
9. Next to Nothing - Fatboy Slim [7:17]
10. Planet Home - Jamiroquai [4:45]
11. Touch Me - The Doors [3:12]
12. Everytime You Touch Me - Moby [3:42]
13. Weapon of Choice - Fatboy Slim [3:40]
14. Them Bones - Alice in Chains [2:30]
15. Just Briefly - Daedelus [3:14]
16. Light My Fire - The Doors [7:07]
17. Love is Stronger than Justice (The Munificent Seven) - Sting [5:11]

I wish I could list the BPMs. Nevertheless (BTW, I always feel like a lamebot saying "nevertheless" - what word works better?), this is enough music for a 65:00 workout. And it worked out pretty good! Probably the worst part, I think, is Feeling so Real by Moby. A good song, but much too fast. My target heartrate was 148, but this song elevated it to 160, which is probably a little too higher than I really want it. Gonna have to change that. Or at least go half-time on it. Here's a sample from that song:

I think the playlist is a bit too Doors-heavy, also. But Light My Fire is a really good cool-down song. My playlist used to be heavy on Jamiroquai. Now, I love Jamiroquai. Just ask Heather - she makes fun of me incessantly about it. But believe me - particularly when you're working out, a little Jamiroquai goes a long way. Planet Home is a great song, though.

Anyway, I'd love to hear about other people's workout playlists. If you have them.

---

To celebrate my weight loss, I bought a chicken queso burrito for dinner at Qdoba. And you know what happened? I have a little faux fat nodule again in the back of my throat [see last time]. A smaller one, this time - but it's still there. Now, mind you, this was a chicken burrito. So now I'm wondering if it might not be the enriched carbohydrates, and not the beef? Or maybe it's lower-quality meat in general that I have a slight allergy to.

I'll keep you posted on my epiglottal developments. I'm sure you're riveted.

From Ars Technica

With winter still in effect, the enthusiasm with which one greets fresh snowfall has tended to diminish. Every snowflake may be unique and beautiful, but when millions of them are standing between you and your car, beauty can be ignored. Now a team of scientists has taken a closer look at the particulates that cause snow to form, and it seems that most of them are... alive.

The article goes on to suggest that bacteria are integral to snowflake formation. One of the comments suggested that news outlets were spinning this story into "don't let your kids play out in the snow," and I had to see for myself. Although I didn't find that exact story, there was this:

When snow falls, Minnesotans know not to eat the yellow stuff, but a new study may make us pause before even sticking our tongues out to catch a fresh flake.

To be fair, the article does go on to say this:

Scientists think snow flakes are tiny little bacteria bombs, and that actually might be a good thing.

Just another battle in our culture's War against Bacteria. Seriously - doesn't it seem everything is anti-bacteria? I mean, haven't people gotten it through their heads that there's a lot of good bacteria out there? Sheesh.

Saw this commercial on Youtube. Formula 409 commercial starring Betty Boop. Looks to be 60s era.

Interesting conventions they employ in the commercial. Most of which are no longer applicable today.

• First, advertisers wouldn't dare equate cleaning with sexiness today. Nowadays, ads like this are designed to exploit women's feeling extremely busy. Also, there's a clear anti-bacteria bias. If you don't kill all (or nearly all) of the bacteria in your home, you're a bad mom - or so modern commercials connote.
• Look at how the bottle flexes after nearly every spray. Back then, there must have been a bias about cleaners not being strong enough to get things clean. Apparently, Formula 409 is the strong, silent type. Which is good - I don't like my cleaning products to be gabby.
• "Kid's stuff - spray and wipe!" At about 0:16, a thoughtless Betty Boop wipes off the artwork her child has just finished milliseconds before on the wall (the artwork is extraordinarily good, given the kid's apparent age). Right on, Betty Boop. Nip those faggoty artistic predilections in the bud. She could have at least said, "very nice dear" before eradicating her child's creation.
• At about 0:20, the bottle twists its own head off. That would have been enough to give me nightmares when I was a little kid. Of course, I am of the post-Exorcist generation.
• Some things haven't changed. Today, many consumers still want one product that does it all.

Another good excerpt from All Marketers are Liars:

Creating Fox News

The news on telivision isn't "true." It can't be. There's too much to say, too many points of view, too many stories to cover. Television can never deliver all of the facts and every point of view. The best a television journalist can hope to do is combine the crowd-pleasing, ad-selling stories on fires and crime with the insightful but less popular stories on world events. And, we hope, to do it without an obvious bias.

Fox News, founded in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, took a different approach. Fox knows that bias exists in any news organization and decided to use this unavoidable problem to frame the news in a way that matched the worldview of their target audience.

What worldviews does this audience share?

• a desire for a consistent story
• a point of view that emphasizes personal responsibility, conservative ethics and Republican politics
• the appearance of fairness, as opposed to being pandered to

That's the way Fox News decided to establish its bias, the way it chose to frame its story. Instead of its being a random mix of individual biases, Fox News chose to tell a coherent story, a lie that it s viewers can choose to believe.

Let's start with their slogan, "Fair and Balanced." While one could argue whether their news is fair and balanced, the slogan itself is brilliant. It flatters the audience, reminds them that they are not a tiny minority and reinforces a message that their worldview is valid and appropriate. "News for Conservatives" is precisely the wrong message. Subtlety makes the story work. By acting as though they represent the majority opinion, they frame their story in a way that this audience understands.

Slogans matter, especially here. The worldview of the Fox News audience was that they were disrespected by the established media. Suddenly this audience was watching a network that broadcast news that they agreed with. And they were told that they were the mainstream and that the news that they were hearing was fair and balanced. It made the story irresistable.

Every day Fox management sends a memo to all the writers, producers and on-air talent. The memo outlines the talking points for the day. In other words, it's the story they intend to tell. By managing the news to fit the story (as opposed to the other way around) Fox develops a point of view; it tells a story that viewers are happy to believe. It gives the viewers a lie to tell themselves and, just as important, to share.

Heather and I bought an Aerogarden from Sam's club around Christmastime. We finally got around planting it around February 5. A week later, we had this:

I don't know if you can see it, but a couple plants have sprouted by now.

Here it is today:

It hasn't even been a month!

Check out the cilantro:

The roots are pretty cool, too. These are the roots of the cilantro plant:

Cool.

One thing about the aerogarden, though, is that it's pretty bright. And we've got it configured so that it shines light until about 11:30 PM. This is what it looks outside the window at night:

The picture doesn't really do it justice, but everything outside the window is bathed in a bright white light. Heather told me that she's surprised we haven't been arrested under suspicion of growing marijuana.

Anyway, neither Heather and I can wait much longer for cultivation. Those will be some delicious days.

From P. 80 of Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars:

Why did John Kerry lose against an incumbent with near-record-low approval ratings after spending more than $100,000,000 on his campaign? Simple. He didn't tell a coherent story, a lie worth remember, a story worth sharing.

People make decisions big and small based on just one thing: the lie we tell ourselves about what we're about to do. And Kerry failed to tell a story we wanted to believe. No, not a story in a speech, but a living story, consistently telling us the story in everything he did and said. From the clothes a politician wears, to his spouse and his appointees, he's telling a story. Candidates sometimes want to manage response with a press release or a speech. It won't work anymore. Like him or not, George W. Bush did an extraordinary job of living the story of the strong, certain, infallible leader. John Kerry tried to win on intellect and he lost because too few voters chose to believe a story they perceived as inconsistent and unclear.

Cool. The narrative expands on page 124:

Flip-Flop

The facts are beyond dispute: George W. Bush was as mush of a flip-flopper as John Kerry. But Bush told the story first. He and his team did a masterly job of telling a story about Kerry and his inability to stick with one story. Millions believed the lie.

The Kerry team responded with a doomed effort to point out that Bush flip-flopped as much as Kerry did. Of course, this story couldn't take hold because the other story was already in place. It didn't matter one bit whether the Kerry team's story was true or not. The competition was already having success selling this story, and so Kerry's people had no chance to succeed with it.

Then the Kerry campaign tried to make the case that flip-flopping was a good thing, that it was another word for flexibility. A hard story to tell because the flip-flopping story told by the Bush team framed Kerry in a way that matched the worldview of millions of people. In order to adopt Kerry's story, people would have to admit that they were wrong - and that almost never happens.

The best strategy would have been to go first. Failing that, the appropriate response would have to [sic] been to tell a completely different story, one that used a frame that matched the worldview of the undecided voter.

Interesting.

Once in a while, a book comes along that blows you away. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin is one of those books for me. I read it in one sitting on the plane flights from Detroit to San Jose.

I saw this book on a shelf at my parents' house, and was really intrigued by the title. So I stole it. Sorry, Mom and Dad. It was really good, if you haven't read it yet. I'll bring it down next time I'm in Ohio.

But anyway, back to the book.

It's about marketing, but it's also about perceptions, effective storytelling, and applied psychology. I felt like, in every chapter, the author was beckoning me over, saying "can I show you something?" And the something was always cool. That sounds a bit lame, but I can't describe it any better than that.

I want to share with you a couple of my favorite passages from the book.

If you want to tell a great story, you need to know about the brain that's going to hear that story.

Whether you create a product, market a service or run a nonprofit, you win when you spread your ideas. If your idea spreads from person to person, you'll grow in influence and everything will get easier. I call an idea that spreads an ideavirus. If everyone who matters knows your idea, you win.

Ideas are worthless without a place to live. An idea in a book or on a whiteboard has no impact. Just like a virus, an idea needs a host, a brain, to live in.

A virus spreads through a community by jumping from host to host. When the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control try to understand a biological virus, they must first understand how the host (that's you and me) interacts with the virus.

The same thing goes for an ideavirus. But instead of tracking how the body reacts to a germ, we need to understand how our brain responds to the ideas and inputs we encounter.

Some people may recognize Godin's ideavirus to be the same as a meme. In fact, Godin's explanation is the most explanation of a meme that I have ever read.

Here's another one:

In Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant book Blink, he proves conclusively that humans make decisions on almost no data - and then stick with those decisions regardless of information that might prove them wrong. We decide that a politician is just like us, and it doesn't matter a lot when he misspeaks, makes poor decisions or even gets indicted. We've already made up our minds and we're going to look at everything that happens through the rose-colored glasses we put on after that first meeting.

In one study Gladwell recounts, we discover that the decision to sue a surgeon for malpractice has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the doctor was negligent or careless - and everything to do with whether he was pleasant to deal with in the few minutes the patient was with him in the examination room. In other words, we decide before the surgery whether we'll sue if anything goes wrong.

While the magnitude of these judgments might surprise you, the overall message shouldn't. The only chance our ancestors had to survive in the jungle was to make accurate split-second assessments. If you needed a week or even a day to decide if another Neanderthal was friend or foe, you were pretty dead. We inherited the ability to make accurate snap judgments.

OK, that's the second book in a row that has referenced Blink. I looked for it at the Ann Arbor library, and while the computer said there was a copy in, it was nowhere to be found. I might actually have to buy it.

Shudder.

Stuff White People Like blog.

Excerpt (Recycling):

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!

LLOL