The Iron Yuppie

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.

On the other hand, maybe I should just spend my entire blogging life recalling stupid pop culture references. See above re: WOPR and previous posts re: Joust.

Man, I wish I could talk like that computer though... "Would you like to play a game?"

Actually, that's probably a bad title. I was watching some Monty Python the other day (I believe this particular episode was filmed in the late 60's) and they had a fake newscast where the newscaster was remarking how there had been a recent surge in potty humor, and how this was going to bring down society (obviously this was satirical). The thing that struck me is that now, more than ever before, we have the OPPORTUNITY to go back and review opinions of an earlier time and prove that things were generally no more or less civil/well-behaved/etc.

I came across this in a recent discussion forum:

• The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. This quote was used by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Gijsbert van Hall, following a street demonstration in 1966, as reported by The New York Times, April 3, 1966, p. 16 -Anon., widely mis-attributed to Socrates
• I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint. - Hesiod
• The world is passing through troubling times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress. - Peter the Hermit, attributed, probably apochryphal
  

These are ALL probably apochryphal, but I'm 100% sure the sentiments were correct for the time period. Why? Because history repeates itself. Man, I feel I could do about a million stories covering nothing but that.

D

If for no other reason, than I'm a total follower. Basically, Robert Scoble is asking people to list this nonsensical word to test out search engine speed and blogs. Here's the search to track it: brrreeeport

Interesting experiment. Also, since no one can seem to spell it right:
breport
brreport
brrreport
brrrreport
breeport
brreeport
brrreeport
brrrreeport
breeeeport
brreeeeport
brrreeeeport
brrrreeeeport

Enjoy.

D