The Iron Yuppie

Name dropping is one thing, but there’s another behavior that annoys me much more.

My fiancé and I were in a bar recently and we happened upon a guy I'll call Johnny McStoryteller. We were sitting around listening to this guy and something struck me. It wasn't just that he kept dropping names, cause he generally didn't (though he must have mentioned at least three famous people in ten minutes). What he really kept dropping was proper nouns (a super set of just name dropping).

For example: the right way to start a story –

"I was recently in a bar late at night in NYC and I was talking to a girl with no-arms...”

Wrong way –

“I was at the Tunnel on the Lower West Side of Manhattan having a Mojito and I was chatting up this girl in a Chanel blouse who had no arms…”

I mean I understand the whole thing about setting the scene, but this is too much. I think I suffer from this a little bit as I always reference magazines or books I was reading by name when I mention passages or articles, but I’d like to blame that on my academic upbringing (always mention your sources) more than anything else.

I must give credit to my fiancé on this one for being a significant part of naming this behavior. We’ve agreed to call it “Proper Name dropping”.

D

Read this: Graphic Design in Germany: 1890-1945 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Hardcover)



I've always been so fascinated with how popular culture or communication (advertising) mimics the underlying subconscious of the populous. I mean, you'd think there'd be some barbershop ad in this book that will list "All Arayan since 1903" or something similar. It's amazing to me the difference in style of communication when someone is just forwarding an idea (as in an opinion piece) vs. forwarding communication designed to agree with you subconsciously with a clear drive to action (as in a piece of advertisement that implores you to buy a consumer product good).

D

Why is it that the administration seems so siloed into one opinion? Perhaps it's because they do not ever bother to view contradictory information.

As an example: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0322061cheney1.html

Cheney has it set to Fox News before he even gets there. Wow.

D

I guess this is what live information is all about. I'm at MiX 06, and during the MySpace.com demo during the keynote, someone yelled out "Give us some OpenAPIs please." Thought it was interesting, but thought no more about it.

Now I'm sitting here browsing through the Technorati postings on Mix06 and I not only find out who it was (Marc Canter), but I also can track his blog. Now that's pretty impressive. One person in the crowd identified him, and that was enough to make the knowledge widely known. Neat!

Just as an experiment, I'm going to drop the Technorati tag on here to see what happens. Mix06, Microsoft

D

JEEEZ these are REALLY good.

"Make friends with your fast" on Google Video

I want one of those little fast gremlins. I want one SO BAD.

D

I recently bought a car that is way too big for my britches (an Acura RL), but in the process it was a nice refresh on what the car industry had to offer me. My next car will probably be a hybrid, and it's nice to see they're finally getting around to making Sedans.

Toyota rolls out 1st hybrid sedan under Lexus brand

I don't really care if it's a hybrid or not, I just like the fact that it gets 14.2 km/litre (33 MPG). Gregg Easterbrook had a great piece on this... it's not that engines are getting less efficient, it's that they're more efficient from a horsepower/mileage ratio, but the horsepower is increasing faster than the gas mileage. Ah we Americans, we love the fast (whose commercials I absolutely love).

It is striking, now that I'm back from Europe, how different the average car is there. I don't think it's anything about being enviro-friendly, it's just there's no parking ANYWHERE. Plus, those little Audi A3s are absolute demons.

In addition to being a random dumping ground, I'm going to try to use this blog as nothing more than a nice place to remind myself to read/watch/whatever stuff that catches my eye. Anyhow...

Caught an article in the New Yorker about a movie called Downfall that got nominated for an academy award. It's about the last days in the bunker for Hitler. They listed a couple of others that sound interesting:

The Last Ten Days (1955)
The Last Ten Days (1973) starring Alec Guiness
The Bunker (1981) starring Anthony Hopkins

I just find it so interesting to watch these portrayals, though the critic apparently didn't like any of them. It's always the inflection points that I find to be the most intriguing. When something is just on its way up... when it's just over the peak ... and when people realize it's over.

D

I was keeping the Google toolbar around for just one button. One button only. Blog this. I know there were Javascript hacks to get it in your link bar but, for whatever reason, I couldn't get them to work. Now, SILENTLY, they have removed that from my toolbar. Bastards!

Whelp, that's the last reason for you to be there, and now you're gone. Smell you later. Smell you later forever.

D

Boy, I've got to be the last person in the world to catch this one, but this web comic is PRICELESS. Plus I especially love it because the jokes about New York are spot on.

D

NYTimes magazine a couple of weeks ago:

"A bowl of apples is like a piece of art," says Tony Freytag, marketing director at Crunch Pak, an apple-processing company. "It's dispaly. People won't touch it. But you put out a tray of cut-up apples -- that's food."

Beyond the genius science required to make cutting up apples work (which is remarkably complex), this is the gem of the piece. It's such a simple concept, but changing the form factor for things makes such a huge difference in usage. Those Go-Gurt guys realized the same thing. Just brilliant.

Heh - my brother is pissed about the Raiders re-hiring Art Shell. I have to agree. What a disaster.

One thing I disagree with him about:

"When you walk out there, when you into that stadium, you walk out there with a presence. Mr. Davis called it a swagger," Shell said. "I just want to get back to the point where when we walk into a stadium, they know the Raiders are in town. And when we walk into the Coliseum, the Raiders are here. ... We've got to create that attitude, and that's what I expect to do."

What does this even mean? So what? God! As a Raider fan, I take this to mean that the Raiders are going to go back to playing dirty [emphasis mine] and praying that penalties don't get called enough to lose more than 8 games.

This assumes they ever stopped.

My brother wrote a GREAT essay in response to my piece about Fox cancelling Arrested Development. Rather than muck it up with my ramblings, let me get out of the way:

I'm sure that there are plenty of people my age, if not older, with my IQ, if not higher, that enjoy the programming on Fox. However, I'm fairly certain that Fox doesn't care.

My theory is that Fox looked at the 2000 election, saw that people were identifying with a plain-spoken guy who hides his intellectuality (if he actually has any). They said, alright, we can identify the sweet spot. Let's program towards that. At that point, Fox decided that we were no longer an important part of their viewing audience.

I don't believe that Fox actively says, "No, that's too smart", and cuts the show, but I do believe that they give those shows (e.g. Arrested) a much shorter leash than shows with no intellectual challenge at all (The Quintuplets or That 70's Show). The fact is, the latter shows can be funny to anyone who turns them on at any point. They require no concentration and they use the same jokes and timing of a million other shows prior to them.

There was a King of the Hill where Peggy said something to Luanne with no reaction. Then she said the same thing and then rang a cowbell, and Luanne laughed. "The cowbell tells the listener that the joke is over and yes, it was funny." That's the premise behind these shows.

Arrested, on the other hand, required you to concentrate and follow the show from pretty much the beginning. There were jokes where, if you were paying attention, were hysterical. If you weren't you felt left out and stupid for not getting it. I didn't get it at the time, but there may have been a veiled reference to the people who didn't like Arrested. In the Ocean Walker episode, Rita suggests that the two characters in Maeby's movie walk across the ocean to meet each other, if it's not too deep. Maeby says, "No, that's perfect. People will wonder what just happened, but they won't want to look stupid, so they'll just say that they liked it."

Anyway, we clearly just have to say goodbye to the Fox network because they've already said goodbye to us.

In the airport in Copenhagen (which, by the way, is a place that just oozes design; from the stained colored hardwood floors, to the fashionable end tables in the gate waiting area to the curved wood (wood!) barriers between security and the gates, someone spent a long time thinking about how this place is put together), there are actual ash trays next to each sink, urinal and toilet. And not just ashtrays, but clearly WELL USED ash trays. I had to laugh at this.

Yes, I know that people who smoke, nearly all of whom started when they were younger than 18, have been sneaking into the bathroom to smoke since the discovery of tobacco. But there's something particularly weird about this... there's a smoking lounge right around the corner. As a result, you look at the facts on the ground here and must, ultimately, come to the conclusion that in the process of peeing, the urge to light one up must have overtaken them. Someone who smokes is going to have to explain that connection.

I'm reading an architectural review article and, while normally I enjoy the seriousness that deep experts in their field provide to reviews, this one is too much:

His winning design for an extension to the Denver Art Museum was described by The New York Times as a "dramatic glass-and-titanium jumble of rectangles and triangles." Calatrava's stylish engineering structures, in contrast, resemble sun-bleach skeletons; they are "techno-Gothic" according to one commentator -- "The Bilbao Effect" Sept. 2002 Atlantic Monthly

Um, ok! Which one of these is good? Or bad? Or are both good? Or bad?

Here's a hint... if your average man on the street cannot tell if you're paying a compliment or leveling a criticism, YOU'RE BEING TOO PRETENTIOUS.

That is all.

Just phenomenal article in the 13-20 Feb, 2006 article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell.

Basically, using nothing more than basic statistical theory, the article summarizes three examples where instead of focusing on the broad middle of the population, you could focus on the far left of the curve and nail the vast majority of the problem. The items listed were:

• The LAPD: Over a 5 year period (1986 to 1990), 1800 officers were charged with use of excessive force. When you look closer at the data, it turned out that the vast majority (1400) had only one or two allegations (it is important to note that these are all allegations, and not actual findings). In fact, the deeper you looked, it showed that 44 cops basically made up the VAST majority of complaints. The 8500 LAPD officers weren't the problem, less than 0.5% of them were.


• Homelessness: Analysis of the homeless found that 250,000 people were homeless over the five years previous to the early 1990's. But when you looked closer, it was just 2500 people that accounted for the MAJORITY of the costs; in specific, those 2500 people accounted for roughly $62M a year in health care and other costs. In Boston, tracking of 119 homeless showed they accounted for 18,834 emergency room visits at a minimum cost of $1,000 a piece. One homeless individual had been to the emergency room 87 times.


• Car emissions: 5% of all vehicles produce 55% of the auto pollution. A poorly tuned (either engine neglect or extremely high mileage) car can produce 200x more pollution than a new well-tuned car.

I am entirely sure you could find these examples of these power-law distributions all over the place. But Mr. Gladwell goes on to identify the real problem... it's not that smart people aren't doing the analysis to identify these, it's that we don't know what we're after. The example solution for homelessness, as an example, is to find the top people (maybe 500 a year) and get them off the street by showering them with attention and the tools to do so. This would entail free apartment, daily counselor visits, job placement, etc. This may seem costly, but it'll actually be MUCH cheaper than trying to solve their problems through existing methods (just giving them enough healthcare to get them walking out the door).

My thoughts are basically to clarify what you are looking for in the clearest possible examples. If your goal is to reduce pollution, don't bother requesting that everyone gets their car checked just because it's egalitarian. That's meaningless! It doesn't do any additional significant good. Just find the worst polluters and solve their problems (pay for it if you have to)! If your goal is to solve homelessness, then solve it. Pay for the work to get the people who tax the system off the street, and use the savings to help the broad middle. If your goal is to stop police brutality, don't bother continually training the common police officer, they're not doing anything bad. Focus on the worst and get rid of them. Equal treatment only works if everyone is the same. Everyone, in these cases, are most definitely NOT the same.

And for those who are worried because someone who spends a week on the street before they find a new job gets significantly less than someone who has cirrhosis of the liver, that doesn't matter, since the first person doesn't cost the system as much. If you simply constrain the lists (make it just the top 500 out of the top 1000 cases), people will not wait around or drink themselves silly just to get to the top of these special lists. People are more rational than that.