Category Archives: Observations

Marketing Diseases

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It’s October, and that means football players everywhere are wearing pink. Some in token gestures, others with shocking neon forearm and shin wraps. It’s part of an effort to end breast cancer.

Now, I’m all for that. Breasts should not get cancer. People with breasts should not get cancer. For the record, I’m against cancer. But, like General Motors, cancer sells under many names. Breast cancer is a killer, but lung cancer kills more women yet. Lung cancer also kills non-women. Lung cancer bites hard.

Maybe lung cancer doesn’t get the same attention because it’s perceived as a consequence of the afflicted’s choices. Hey, you chose to smoke, don’t ask me to feel bad for you. That’s tough to hear if you’re a non-smoker with lung cancer, but statistics are a bitch.

Because of the smoking connection, lung cancer is a tough sell. As a bunch we don’t pony up so well for diseases like that. Breast cancer is much more marketable, what with innocent women being brought down merely for having boobs. Most folks, myself included, are in favor of boobs, and are against women dying for having them.

But truly kicking one cancer’s ass will likely yield the keys to kicking the rest of them. Mad Cell Disease must have some common roots between manifestations. There are eleventy-bajillion different sorts of cancer, and it’s up to our generation to kick twelvety-bajillion tiny cancer nuts, and send them home to cry to their mommas. And then kick their mommas’ tiny cancer nuts.

We can fix this cancer thing, with the proper resolve. So forget about politics and don that pink ribbon with pride and vigor! Better yet, pony up a buck or two. It’s like voting, but your opinion actually matters. That lymph gland you save may be your own.

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The Coroner Rides a Motorcycle

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Riding the bus to work, top deck at the front. King of all I survey, which, from up there, is a lot. Ahead, brake lights. Even the carpool lane slows to a stop.

As we inch along, the driver moves the bus well over when motorcycles roll past in their unofficial lane between the carpool lane and the next lane over. Many bike drivers hold out their left hands in a horizontal peace sign as they roll by.

Another bike, much like the others, except the driver has CORONER written in yellow letters across the back of his dark-blue jacket. He weaves through traffic, rectangular white storage compartments flanking his rear wheel. Coroner stuff, no doubt.

This makes sense, I realize. Cars tangle, metal twists, bones break and people die. You can’t clear traffic lanes until the coroner gets there. That’s going to happen a lot sooner if the coroner rides a motorcycle. It’s efficient.

When we are judged as a people in the unimaginable future, I imagine folks will say of us, “Well, they got things done; gotta hand them that. They got things done.”

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Marketing — A Huge Fail and an Interesting Idea

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I’m hardly an expert on the subject of marketing, but sometimes you don’t have to be one to notice when someone does a terrible job. In addition, I came across an interesting marketing idea that I may well end up using.

Let’s start with the bad. When I first saw the trailers for Cabin in the Woods, it looked like a fairly standard horror/slasher type of flick, and not a terribly interesting one at that. Perhaps there were hints that there was something deeper going on, but nothing that came anywhere close to telling what the movie was about. Nothing to hint that there is a lot of humor inside that scary package.

Had the preview shown the guy in the white shirt and tie shouting “We have a winner! Redneck zombie torture family!” I would have given the flick more than a second glance. Bare-bones slasher movies don’t do much for me — even the ones friends and family helped make — but Cabin is much more.

Note: There are redneck zombies, and there is blood. A lot of blood. You can’t dissect the genre without dissecting a few people. If you’re OK with that, and, like me, weren’t excited by the trailers to Cabin in the Woods, go back and give it a second look. One of the worst-marketed films I’ve ever been aware of deserves a bump.

While we’re talking about marketing, I read the first two chapters of a novel today that I had no intention of reading. How did the writer accomplish this trick? With cleverness! You see, I have one of those electronic reading devices you’ve heard so much about. I’ve been catching up on my classics, because I should and because they’re free. Recently I downloaded H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and cracked it open the other day on the bus to work.

Before the beginning of the public-domain text was a brief foreword by one Félix J. Palma, saying (roughly) “This is one of my favorite stories ever, and I hope you enjoy it. I have included the first chapters of my novel at the end; if you feel so inclined I would be delighted if you would give them a read.”

At the end of Wells’ classic Mr. Palma returns, saying how much he loved The Time Machine when he was a kid, but how it failed to delight as thoroughly when he read it as an adult (an experience that echoes my own). Without denigrating the master, he talked about his time-travel story for a couple of paragraphs. With a turn of the next ePage, we come to the title page of Palma’s work, which proclaims beneath the title The Map of Time, and after some Victorian-era histrionics:

YOUR EMOTION AND ASTONISHMENT ARE GUARANTEED.

To which I said, “Hell, yeah, Félix.” Chances are, I’m buying the book. The first two chapters haven’t blown me away, but they’re solid and have a distinctive style. I have one more free chapter to go, and there’s a collision coming. He gets that right and I’m in. And heck, it’s guaranteed.

So now I’m wondering: What public-domain work would most attract readers who would enjoy Munchies?

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This is Journalism?

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I left this comment on an article over at Forbes.com

This is an interesting article, but seriously, Forbes, is anyone there watching over the grammar? Is the third most innovative company America? I don’t think that’s what you meant, but that’s what you said. Maybe I can forgive the missing hyphen (well, no, I can’t, not from alleged professionals) in the Red Hat bit, but there’s some nasty comma action going on.

Later, another missing hyphen, that changes the meaning of the sentence.

Probably the most annoying error is the comma splice in the da Vinci section. Good Lord, people, learn to use a semicolon! You’re Forbes, right? Professionals and masters of prose? Certainly no one would confuse your articles with some unchecked blather steaming out of the blogosphere. Although you’ve done nothing to differentiate yourselves in this article.

Show a little pride in your work.

Just because it’s the Web doesn’t mean you can write like shit.

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Doing What It Takes

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I’m at the ice rink right now, and it’s getting late. The figure skating lessons are over, the kids have all gone home. Below me, a guy in pads has dragged a net onto the ice, set it on its pegs, and is practicing his moves in front of it, all alone. That’s dedication.

Though before I could post the above, another guy showed up, and is slapping shots on goal. The whack and boom of the shots echoes through the empty arena. At this moment, the shooter is kicking the goalie’s ass. Goalie needs to get settled. Shooter can put it anywhere he wants to. More people taking the ice. I think shooter might be their coach. If he is, at some point he has to consider that what he’s doing isn’t making his netminder better.

“Come on, dude!” I just said from high above and behind glass. This goalie I started out respecting won’t commit now, won’t challenge the other guys, won’t pick out a threat and say “I’m stopping that one.” It’s not that he’s getting beat, it’s that he’s not committing. Even in warmup I expect to see the goalie attitude, that belief that even the most casual toss of a puck toward MY net is a personal affront. So that guy in the first paragraph? Apparently he doesn’t exist. Good job, coach!

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Moms Say the Darndest Things

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Frustrated mother to son: “It’s time to go! You need to stay here!”

Dad laughed.

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Data Centers and the Environment

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Greenpeace has been outspoken recently, denouncing Apple for having inefficient, carbon-spewing data centers. There are worse offenders than Apple, but let’s face it, when the protest is at Apple, more TV cameras show up, and there’s a better chance of making a national story. Also, Apple has certainly had room for improvement in this area. On top of that, as Apple goes, so goes the industry. Directing protests at Apple makes perfect sense if you’re Greenpeace.

For a while now, Yahoo! has been at the top of Greenpeace’s eco-friendly data center list. The guy that built those data centers now works at Apple, and I heard a talk from him yesterday. It was really interesting, and I got the feeling that the environment was important to him personally; that he saw better, cleaner data centers as his legacy.

Mostly I’m going to talk in the abstract here, and when I do mention Apple I’m going to be careful to only say things that I can find in public sources.

I’ve always thought of data centers (warehouses filled with humming computers) as being pretty clean, except for all that dang electricity they suck up. It turns out there are other issues as well, and Greenpeace would do well to broaden the scope of their scrutiny. For instance, modern data centers use a crap-ton of water (that then has to be treated), and they have (literally) tons of lead and sulphuric acid onsite. There’s a bunch of ways besides just consuming electricity that the huge server farms popping up everywhere can hurt the environment.

But let’s start with electricity. There’s no getting around it, computers need the stuff. Data centers are not rated by how much computing power they contain, but by power consumption. Keeping the computers cool is another massive power drain, but it’s WAY better than it used to be. One simple shift made a big difference: cool the computers directly, rather than the room (or even the cabinet) they’re in. Physical changes to allow heat to escape through convection also save a lot of energy. So that’s good news.

Also good news is the efforts of some companies (well, I assume more than one) to provide their own power, onsite, to remove the need for batteries and backup diesel generators. Apple has built a huge fuel-cell plant and a large solar generating farm at its new data center in North Carolina (I’m pretty sure this is where Siri lives). Fuel cells still put out CO2, but Apple is getting their fuel from “biomass” — methane coming out of local garbage dumps. The logic is that putting that gas to use is better than letting it loose in the atmosphere. CO2 bad, CH4 worse.

Now, don’t get all misty-eyed at Apple’s greenness. They do this stuff to make money. If you had a big pile of cash at your disposal, wouldn’t you spend it now to gain immunity from energy price fluctuations in the future? You bet your sweet ass you would. If you can do it in an environmentally responsible way, all the better. (Fuel cells are definitely not the cheapest solution short-term.) But as Apple’s new data centers come on line at a ridiculous rate, Greenpeace is finding less to complain about. And that’s a good thing for everyone. Greenpeace can say, “See? We influenced this giant company and now they’re doing the right thing.” Apple can reply, “We would have done it anyway. It’s good fiscal sense.”

Either way, it’s still a good thing. Although, there’s no getting around the fact that these server farms still use an enormous amount of energy. Even “green” energy puts a burden on the environment — something people seem to forget. So, let’s not get complacent here.

Oh, yeah, and the water thing. Apple’s newest data centers don’t use any. The only burden on the sewer system is the toilet in the office. Take that, Yahoo!

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Seriously, NASA?

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You may have heard about the impending arrival of our latest robotic explorer on Mars. The goal of this mission is to finally find those elusive six-armed ten-foot-tall green men and the super-hot (though delicate) princesses that current theory says have to be up there somewhere.

First, Curiosity has to land safely on the red planet. I have to confess that I’m a wee bit skeptical about this plan. I’ve linked to a video below, but before you go there, allow me to enumerate the stages of the landing.

  1. The mother ship releases the landing system. This is pretty routine at this point, and assuming no miles/kilometers snafus, should be all right.
  2. The craft hides behind its heat shield as it streaks through the atmosphere – this also fairly routine, except this time the payload can shift around behind the shield to get a little bit of steering. But it can’t see anything because it’s behind a heat sheild.
  3. Mars’ atmosphere is not thick enough to provide all that much braking, so now it’s time to deploy a parachute! I imagine the (estimated) shock of opening the chute has been tested many times, but needless to say, not in an atmosphere as thin as Mars’. So it’s all been simulations on the individual parts.
  4. As soon as the ‘chute is open, the heat shield has to go, so the lander can see the ground with its radar. This is the kind of thing that seems simple but so often turns out to be the killer. One explosive bolt doesn’t fire, and all is lost.
  5. But hold on, there, sparky! The parachute is still dropping too fast, and there’s not enough control over the landing spot. Now it’s time for… rockets! Controlled by computers! 500,000 lines of code! Holy crap. Several things have to happen at almost the same instant: all four rockets fire and the parachute is released.
  6. First maneuver: dodge the parachute. The lander will have to juke to the side. Remember, this machine has not been tested in conditions anything like Mars.
  7. Safe and stable, the lander will pick a sweet spot to set down the rover. It will not have help from humans.
  8. Oh, if only it were that simple. There’s a problem with dust, you see, if the rocket-powered hoverboard gets too close to the surface. (How close is too close? Well, now, how fine is the dust right there? How windy is it? Guess we’ll find out.) Rather than land on rocket power, our little miracle will hover and lower the rover on ropes. (How windy is it again? Are there any conditions the software wasn’t tested for?)
  9. After that, all that can go wrong is that the ropes fail to disconnect or the hover-thingie explodes and crashes onto the rover.

Right here I was going to say, “What? no ______s?” but I couldn’t come up with anything to put in the blank. (I’m sure lasers, ultrasonic beams, and explosives are all used in there somewhere.)

Here’s the promised link: Curiosity Before Mars: Seven Minutes of Terror

The entire sequence lasts seven minutes and we’re fourteen light-minutes away from Mars. We won’t hear anything back until the rover is either free and ready to roam or a twisted pile of junk. NASA is calling the seven minutes of descent “Seven minutes of terror.”

Now, there are a lot of smart people at NASA, and I’m sure I’m not going to come up with an alternative they haven’t considered. But really, I have to wonder if this is the result of solving a bunch of little problems instead of stepping back and reassessing the fundamental goal. Soft landing in a chosen spot without messing everything up with dust. Seriously, there has to be an easier way. It might involve a big-ass zip-lock bag.

Still, all this crazy complexity and systems that could not be tested in the actual environment has a pretty good chance of success. We’re actually getting pretty good at virtual testing, and engineering to amazing tolerances. I’ll be checking in on Sunday to see how the whole things plays out, and hopefully we can finally find that valley with the jewel-encrusted cliffs of solid gold.

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Divided Loyalty

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I don’t follow baseball religiously, or even regularly. My team is the San Diego Padres, who have sucked pretty bad for a few years, and really raised the bar on sucking this year. I’m comfortable with that. Someday they’ll be good again.

Lately, I’ve started following, now and then, another team. It’s in the American League (also known as the Softball League), so the Padres might be able to forgive me.

The Oakland Athletics just swept the Yankees in a four-game series, and are continuing to beat up the American League East. The A’s also have the lowest payroll in baseball. As a fully-conditioned American, that appeals to me. It makes me think of adjectives like “scrappy” and “selfless” — whether or not those actually apply. Plus they have a guy named Coco Crisp. You gotta like that. (He’s not a power hitter, but he hit two home runs today.)

Do they have a shot at postseason glory? Honestly, probably not. But then again, they sweep the Yankees again in October and Moneyball II will hit the theaters in January.

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Metaphor Wanted

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The other day I was sitting on a wide porch in Kansas, letting the heat soak into my aging joints. As I watched, a big flying critter of a type I’d seen before, pushing two inches long and bulky, with a striped, tapering abdomen, came flying up at maximum speed.

It smashed right into the side of the building with an audible whack, turned around, and flew back the way it had come, vanishing in the distance.

Apparently it had accomplished what it came here to do.

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Say Watt?

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While moving to our new home, many of my hard-won good health habits fell by the wayside, including getting on the trainer several times a week. Yesterday I got back on at last. Hooray! I’ll be doing it again today, you can be sure.

I’ve mused in the past about the physiological effects of burning 500 calories at a stretch, but I’ve been wondering just how accurate the readout is on the exercise machine. Do I really burn more than 500 calories each time, or is the number inflated to make me feel good? Well, let’s do a little math and see what comes out, shall we?

A calorie is a measure of energy. The first thing to do is convert that to a unit that’s easier to work with, the joule. Several conversion factors from calorie to joule exist (the calorie changes depending on conditions), but they all fall in the ballpark of 4.2 joules per calorie, or 4200 joules per dietary calorie. Multiply by roughly 500 and you get in the neighborhood of 2,000,000 joules. (We’re rounding things off aggressively here, because we are dealing with estimates anyway.)

Is that a reasonable number? It’s harder than ever to tell, but now we can figure out how many watts I’m generating. A watt is a joule per second. It takes me half an hour to burn the alleged 500 cal, so if we take our 2 megajoules and divide by the number of seconds, we get 2000000/(30*60) ≈ 1100 watts. Now there’s a number we can check.

I found this interesting article which has a lot of facts but no references. It seems to borrow (without attribution) from this wikipedia article which in turn cites “lab experiments”. Wherever the original source, we get that an in-shape person can sustain 3 watts/kg of body mass for more than an hour. So if we take what I would weigh if I was in shape and multiply by 3, that would be a reasonable output.

And that’s… 220 watts at the heaviest definition of “in shape” for me. Not even close to what the machine says.

OK, I could never sustain that rate for a full hour, so let’s fudge the number upwards a little and call it 250 watts.

That’s still less than a fourth of what the machine says I’m burning. Could it really be so far off?

Well, there’s another factor in the muddle. The articles above talk about the energy I’m producing, not the calories I’m burning. this article gives a once-more-unattributed (“has been measured”) number of 18-25% for the efficiency of human muscle. So, every joule a cyclist produces requires burning at least four joules of stored food energy.

By that estimate, if I’m producing 250 watts of power, I have to be metabolizing at a rate of about… 1100 watts!

Which is to say, 500 dietary calories in half an hour is probably a reasonable estimate, as long as we don’t forget the “estimate” part.

BONUS! Here’s another interesting article, in which the author actually cites his sources. Hooray!

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I’m Not Making This Up

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So I sent my fourth tweet ever today. While I had my tweeting-software fired up I noticed that the Calgary Flames were selling used equipment. I perused the list, and there are a few interesting things there. But nothing that matches THIS:

Ferland Goalie Jock @$39.99
Size: SR
Uniform/Color: N/A
Used/New: Used
Final Cost:$20
Quantity: 1

Remember, those are Canadian dollars, so it’s an even better bargain!

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Gone is the Village, and the Hero Thereof

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As I write this, I’m watching a girl in hot-pink ice skates take instruction from a portly woman who moves like she never takes her skates off. The girl is doing well, arms held so, feet working the drills, and my instant assessment is that this kid can be pretty good.

But, honestly, not great. I hope she’s in the whole figure-skating game for the right reasons: because she loves the challenge, the discipline, and feels great when she gets the toe-thingie just right.

Once upon a time (was it Vonnegut who first pointed this out to me? Maybe. Probably not.) a pretty-good singer could be the pride of a village. “She has the voice of a nightingale,” her neighbors would say. They would ask her to sing at all the village events, and she would, without any compensation beyond the appreciation of her friends.

It was electricity that broke this relationship. Curse that devil’s magic! The villagers could hear the broadcast from New York, then buy records, and before long our village chanteuse is being compared to the best in the whole damn world.

But it didn’t end there, especially in sport. First there’s a tournament in town. The winner of that goes on to face the winners in the nearby towns. That winner goes on to face a group from farther away. Somewhere on this sleigh-ride our hero loses. All the heroes lose but one, out of thousands. Tens of thousands. “He lost at regionals.” “She lost at state.”

OK, that’s an exaggeration, there’s plenty of celebration when a local athlete gets to state. But as the world gets smaller we just can’t let someone be a local champion.

And so, back to the girl on the pink skates. She’s working hard, dong things slowly that seem like they’d be easier fast. I hope she’s having fun. (I think back to trumpet lessons when I was a kid. I wanted to be good, but honestly the lessons weren’t fun. That’s about me, not the teacher. I wasn’t hungry.) I hope there’s a village where Miss Pink-Skates can be the best, but even if there isn’t, that’s not a disaster. The worst part about being the best in the village is the sudden arrival of the world outside.

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A Quick Tip for Would-Be Hockey Goalies

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If you follow hockey at all, you’ve heard of the five-hole. It’s the space between a hockey goalkeeper’s legs, and it’s a popular place to shoot at.

All NHL goalies that I know of use the ‘butterfly‘, a ligament-stretching move in which the knees are pushed together and the lower legs are parallel to the ice, forming a solid barrier to any pucks skidding along the surface. Why shoot for the five-hole, then, when it is so easily turned into an impenetrable wall? It’s all about time.

When a player slaps the puck toward the net, the time it takes a goaltender to close the hole is limited by the acceleration of gravity. Even after he recognizes the threat his body must fall into position, and no amount of strength or conditioning can make it happen faster.

I just watched in slow motion as the Rangers goaltender let a puck through his five-hole, and I had to cringe. You see, a lot of five-hole goals are preventable, and pretty easily, too. As the goalie collapsed into position, his stick was off to the side, pointing directly at the shooter, and completely useless. Had he simply kept his stick in front of him as he went into the butterfly, the goal would have bounced harmlessly away. His sloppiness might mean his team will not compete for the Stanley cup this year.

This failing is frightfully common. I often see keepers lift their sticks as they move down, and while that will get their legs into position a couple of milliseconds earlier, they lose their most important interim defense. It is a completely natural reaction to throw your arms up to get your body down faster. Don’t do that!

So, kids who want to be the next great net minder, when you’re practicing dropping into the butterfly long into the night (you are practicing long into the night, right?), always, always have your stick and always keep it in position. Watch video of yourself or have someone watch your stick as you work, and watch your GAA go down. I don’t think there’s any more easily correctable habit in all of hockey that can make such a difference.

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Penfinal?

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I just received a document named “XXX_final_v2”.

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