The Iron Yuppie

I was browsing through my RSS reader of choice, and came upon this blog by Naydne:

The taps in a shower are a really bad user experience. They're not standardized at all. The taps in this hotel room at the Westin in Bellevue, Washington, are nothing like the taps in a hotel room at the W in San Francisco. Every time I encounter a hotel room, I have to determine how to take a hot (not cold, not burning) shower. The taps don't give me an indication of how to work them. I have to figure out which way to turn them.

 

[...]

 

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a button near your shower that you could push and it would automatically give you a shower of the right water temperature? My car remembers where I like the seats, why can't my shower remember how hot I like the water to be?

Well spoken!

My thought was "didn't I say something about this before"? Then, after a quick search, I find nothing, which means it's one of many topics I wanted to blog about but did not, mostly because I'm lazy. I suppose there's no problem with two people talking about something like this, but the blog world does seem like first come = most insightful, no? Gaping Void must have some great drawing about this phenomenon... I wonder what keyword I would use to find it.

So I don't know if you're familiar with this Internets thingy, but apparently there's a lot of great stuff out there. Case in point - DayTipper... what an incredibly useful set of stuff. The problem is that many if not all of the items are very specific. For example, getting a splinter out with no pain. The problem with this is that it's so specific, that it's almost silly to bookmark. I only need this bit of information when I actually need it. And considering I can barely keep important bits of info in there, like the address of my wife's blog, I can hardly expect to have this kind of stuff in my CPU registers, my second level cache, or even stored on disk... it's likely to be the kind of thing on tape backup. My question is what is the best way to maintain an index of this stuff, either in my head or my computer so that it can be readily accessible? Right now, it's a mix of my email inbox in a folder (and then just search), my favorites and my rss feeds. None of these are particularly good. Del.ico.us?

One of the interesting things about consumer electronics is that the defaults tend to always be very obvious and well known. So all alarm clocks go off at 12 AM (much to Joel's disappointment), people's hard drives are open for the viewing (because the web server is on on their desktop machines, directory browsing is on and firewalls are off (or missing)), and apparently, one of the most common first pictures for new cameras are boobies. The only flaw with this analysis is that it doesn't look at what the next 100 pictures are either... I'd suspect it's pretty close to what the first one is. Actually, I'd be that as number of pictures per camera increase, likelihood of pornography also increases, considering pornographers just happen to take so many pictures.

Anyone out there want to tell me how to get the rest of the Ben and Jerry's pint to taste as good as the first bite? I know it has to do with the thawing and refreezing of the contents, but come on! Scientists, I don't know what the hell you're working on, but it's lower priority than this.

Chooky, Ph.D. of Chemical Engineering, pointed out this sick video:

UM... holy crap.

I'm constantly fascinated by people who are incredibly deep in certain areas and you never know about it until you're wandering along talking about whatever, and happen upon this area of expertise.

First time it happened for me with Chooky was discussing the best way to have my FoodSaver marinate the meat I was cooking (small aside: if a company capitalizes a word half way through, such as FoodSaver, does that mean it's actually two words?). He described in depth the use of vacuums to move liquid through solid mass (rocks) and the nature of the container I was storing it in in order to get the marinade to work properly.

I had a similar experience with my wife and the Beatles. I think it was nothing more than listening to some promo on the radio with a fairly obscure Beatles song which she not only sang along to, but also named a whole set of facts about the background of the song.

General philosophy point? There's a lot of information out there... make sure to tap into as much as you can.

Yeah, so like I have little if any excuse for not writing much over the past month, since I was basically sitting at home doing nothing during the entire time. Well, not EXACTLY nothing:

Above, observe one Henry Peter Aronchick, born 2007-07-08. Apparently, these baby things need some care and feeding, which has taken up some of my time. And while I have neither the biological equipment nor the genetic predisposition to help out, I've tried to do my best.

One thing that's always surprising is how much this blogging things feels like hurling meaningless crap into the ether, until you start to hear people complaining about you never blogging any more. Anyhow, thanks for all your patience... I'm back on full time duty (as it were).

Man, I've been referring to this phrase/term for the longest time without knowing what the proper naming of it is:

Negative Externality

It's basically when whatever you're doing is artificially under priced because someone else is bearing the cost such as my zero percent credit card for 1 year (other people with high interest rates pay), the dollar beer at the local pub (those who get ultra drunk off the dollar beers and order the $100 bottle of Johnny Walker Blue) or, the one I feel most strongly about, the fact that someone can sit around spewing huge amounts of pollution and CO(2) into the air with no tax, since future generations actually pay the cost. Nice to have a definition on that finally wrapped up.

Mark Andressen mentioned off-handedly that the Dutch Tulip Bubble is largely a myth... based on this book. That's a pretty big academic shocker for me (btw, shockerpics.com? Hilarious!).

I realize every generation must go through this process of shitting on the previous one's analyses and inserting their own, but it feels like this time around is different (note, all fallacious arguments begin with that phrase). It just feels like every basic belief or thought is under more scrutiny than ever before. I believe it's almost built into our culture... we're desperate to be surprised,  and find out the "real story". Like Twinkies are never baked (they form like jello) or the Hindenberg exploded because of the paint rather than the hydrogen. Of course, it seems people tend to be overzealous in this regard. Because Twinkies ARE baked. And the Hydrogen DID contribute/cause the Hindenberg explosion.

Ok, I get it. I'm the last person on earth to see these. And I'm just passing this along as faithfully as a corporate shill. But these are hilarious, nonetheless:

Boo Squirty Lemon

Boo Plant-hating Light Fixture