That’s parenting: a measure of your success is how you’re needed less and less.
James Lileks, Bleat, 2010-05-11
May 11, 2010
QotD: Parenting, in a nutshell
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May 6, 2010
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already
New Age terrorists have reportedly developed a new, terrifying weapon — the homeopathic bomb:
Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.
‘It was only a matter of time before these people got hold of the material that they needed to make these bombs,’ said former UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, ‘The world is a much more dangerous place with the advent of these Weapons of Mass Dilution.’
‘A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,’ said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, ‘Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible’.’
The severity of the situation has already resulted in the New Age terror threat level being raised from ‘lilac’ to the more worrisome ‘purple’ aura. Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane.
H/T to Megan McArdle.
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May 4, 2010
The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice
A colour survey gone very wrong:
Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.
First, a few basic discoveries:
* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.
And a selection of miscellaneous answers:
April 30, 2010
European map, rationalized
The Economist would like to redraw the map of Europe:
People who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.
Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).
In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.
April 27, 2010
Further evidence that PowerPoint is the tool of Satan
DarkWater Muse sent me the following link, saying “Finally somebody who sympathizes with my long held views on PowerPoint”:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
[. . .]
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.
[. . .]
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
One of the worst aspects of any PowerPoint presentation is that by the use of graphic tricks and pretty effects, serious flaws in actual content can be “handwaved over”. This is great for the presenter who doesn’t want to impart real information, but terrible for the victims audience. Bulleted lists are a useful device for summarizing key ideas that don’t necessarily have a hard sequence or hierarchy, but they can also be used to imply illogical or inconsistent groupings of concepts or facts, especially when the eye (and the mind) is being entranced by whizzy tricks.
To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, “a good Civil Servant must be able to use PowerPoint not as a window into the mind but as a curtain to draw across it.”
I’ve sounded the warning call about the evil incarnate that is PowerPoint before. Do have a look at the (yes, I recognize the irony) slideshow here.
Update, 30 April: PowerPoint badges for your BDUs.
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Tech-clueless in Toronto
I received the following rant from a reader who is experiencing some, um, technical challenges in his job. Not technical challenges for himself: boss and co-worker foundering under the foaming, rushing waters of technology:
They are going to drive me absolutely insane.
Did you know … that you can select the program with which to open a file by right-clicking on the file and selecting Open With…?
DID YOU KNOW THAT?!
That is the MOST AMAZING THING EVER, according to the oldsters. These guys could not figure out how to open a text file that has an extension other than .TXT. I showed them the Open With… twiddlebit, and now Head Oldster is busy adding the procedure to our internal style guide.
Gobsmacked with heartbroken outrage, I said “Dude. Anyone who has used Windows for any amount of time will know that. You don’t have to put it into our style guide.”
To which he responded: “I have been doing this for 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. So it should be documented.”
I don’t know how much longer I can work here.
And to top if off, BOTH OF THEM are constantly getting calls from headhunters and former employers who want them back as contractors. How is that possible? Head Oldster can generally get through the day, but The New Guy — Judas on a Vespa with Cheese and Peppers. Watching him navigate through FrameMaker is like watching Stephen Hawking type out A Brief History of Time character-by-character with his eyeballs, minus the genius part of it.
The guy struggles to find the SAME FUNCTIONS THAT HE USES EVERY DAY in the menus. How can he possibly beswamped with job offers? IS THE ECONOMY DOING THAT WELL?
Crickey.
I have to admit, reading this rant made me feel better about my own work . . .
Almost right
Kathy Shaidle linked to this map at Spleenville, showing an approximation of how Europeans (and implicitly the rest of the world) view the United States:
(Click map to see original image)
[. . .] As a matter of fact, from what I’ve garnered from across the pond, the rest of the world thinks the USA consists of one large metropolis — Newyorkangeles — with a sunny beach where only blond, tanned, perfectly-toned twenty-something models are allowed to go, and the rest of it is a desert wasteland full of racist white cowboys who wear big hats and shoot their guns in the air.
You forgot the teeth: Europeans all seem to believe that Americans all have identical “Hollywood” smiles. Oh, except for the gun-toting racist yahoos, who only have a few teeth each.
That lost iPhone prototype
As re-interpreted by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:
Two questions I am often asked:
1. How far in advance do you work?
2. How quickly can you publish a comic on a current event?Today I will indirectly answer both questions by talking about something else entirely. I assume you’ve all been following the story of the Apple engineer who left a prototype 4G iPhone at a beer garden. I found this story too delicious to resist, but I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I’ve never tested it.
I drew two comics while considering my options. In the end, I thought it wasn’t worth the extra friction to push them to the front of the line. And it would be June 18th before they ran in their normal position, which seemed too far in the future. So here now, exclusively for you blog readers, the totally unfinished first drafts of those comics. You will never see these in newspapers.
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April 26, 2010
April 21, 2010
Just the thing for Pokémon fans
It’s a mashup of Pokémon and Cthulhu: Pokéthulhu, the free role-playing game:
Amid the sagging gables of old New England, evil lurks . . . and squirms, and scuttles, and purrs. Grownups are fleeing in terror, hiding behind the Elder Sign.
You’re 10 years old. You’re our last hope. Armed with a Shining Dodecahedron and the elder incantations to make it work, you capture the monsters and train them to use their power . . . But not for evil. For sport.
You’ve thrilled to the popular TV show. Now, you can play the game! Is your Shoplifting score good enough to sneak a page from your opponent’s Pokénomicon? Is your trained Jigglypolyp powerful enough to defeat a devolved Fungal Cluster? This is the world of Pokéthulhu, and now it’s yours to save — or conquer!
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April 20, 2010
QotD: Food porn and subversive humour
The KFC Double Down makes me despair. Not because of the “sandwich” itself but because of the predictable reaction; in general, if you didn’t know that the thing was made of chicken, bacon, and processed cheese, you would get the impression that it was lovingly constructed from scorpions and poison. [. . .]
But which side in the war between soulless conglomerates and food puritans has irony on its side? KFC has literally rearranged the same ingredients that go into most every other grab-and-go entrée it serves, and gotten rid of the bread, which, guess what, might not be that good for you anyway. The sinister Elders of Tricon, who were surely lit unflatteringly from above in an austere modernist boardroom when they made the decision to create the Double Down, knew perfectly well that it would create panic and horror for no other reason than its configuration. The Double Down is, explicitly and unapologetically, a piece of food comedy.
And all the horrible people — for it seems virtually impossible to talk about food without being horrible — are reacting exactly as planned. The unapologetically paternalistic healthitarians, the grease-sweating Warcraft-playing fast-food reverse-snobs, the one-idea-in-their-whole-head theorists of food salvation, the paleos and the Pollanites, the narcissistic Nietzscheans who look at cheese as though it was about to go critical any second but will buy whatever’s new on the shelves at the GNC without so much as looking at the label . . . all the people, in short, who routinely insist on adulterating the pleasure of eating, and that includes, most of all, the types who’ve imbibed too much M.F.K. Fisher and who write pornographically about the “pleasure of eating” as if they were zooming a powerful camera in on an open mouth furiously masticating a mouthful of gnocchi.
Colby Cosh, “The Double Down: your move, America”, Macleans, 2010-04-20
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April 16, 2010
QotD: Blog Post EULA
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this blog post, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Cory Doctorow, “Video-game shoppers surrender their immortal souls”, BoingBoing, 2010-04-16
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