Category: Uncategorized

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I once heard an interview with a labor organizer who said that the three most effective words for getting people to organize were “You’re being robbed!” Why are we so compelled to believe that we’re being jerked around whenever we go shopping? Does the fact that we have access to so much free product information on the web even help? Hell no! The greaseball who wrote that marketing shit is on the take! They’ll tell you whatever you want to hear and then rob you blind. Who are you gonna trust? Some sleazy ad-writing chiseler, or me, your friend?

There’s a fascinating article on the Knowledge@Wharton site called Pricing and Fairness: Do Your Customers Assume You Are Gouging Them? The upshot is this… Yes. Your customers will always assume you are gouging them. The authors were surprised to find that it is surprisingly difficult to convince people that the market generates fair prices for most goods. For instance, the test subjects believed that profit margins for grocery stores were around 30%, whereas they are in fact between 1% and 2%. This is the kind of reasoning that makes shoplifting so eternally appealing. “Macy’s is rich… look at all this stuff! I shouldn’t have to pay for it.” But Macy’s has it easy compared to, say, Atlantic Records. When it comes to music, anything above a token amount of money is considered a rip-off. As a denizen of the software industry, I see the Napster problem headed our way. When shoplifting is easy, free of risk, and easily justified then you’re talking about a sunset industry. Do you often feel like you’re being robbed because of the prices you pay? Now you can at least take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.

My September 11th post generated a fair amount of email, which is always gratifying. Matt mentioned, after seeing my little cartoon of Osama bin Laden’s notebook, that you can see the real thing at the Smoking Gun. The manual on display concerns “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.” A lot of it is standard Anarchist’s Cookbook kinds of advice: wear sneakers, hide in the dark, be careful with explosives, and so on. What makes it disturbing is the fact that it probably really was used by the people who did the deed. It contains a strange mixture of Islamic fundamentalist cant along with boring high school textbook pedagogy. Here’s a sample:

Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they always have been: by pen and gun… by word and bullet… by tongue and teeth. In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate.

This book belongs to the guest house. Please do not remove it from the house except with permission.

What do you suppose the punishment is for removing it from the house without permission?

Another good friend, colleague, and poetry aficionado extraordinaire pointed out that when Andrei Codrescu mentioned Allen Ginsberg, he probably had the poem America in mind. As my friend said “It’s at least one model for the form Codrescu chose, and the contrast in their endings heightens the poignance of Codrescu’s, at least insofar as poems resonate further in the way they play off of one another. And Codrescu’s is plenty poignant on its own.”

It is a worthwhile thing to mark this day (“altogether fitting and proper,” as George Pataki says), but there’s not much new to say. When the newscasters have bleated themselves hoarse saying the same thing over and over, it’s time to listen to the poets. It takes the poets a while to digest the newspaper, but we sure need what they cough up. As William Carlos Williams said

It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably everyday
for lack of what is
found there

It was William Carlos Williams who wrote the introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and it was “with Allen Ginsberg in mind” that Andrei Codrescu began his poem on this evening’s All Things Considered: “Nine-eleven, I can barely remember you, they have buried you in so much hype.” Listen to it. Codrescu is noticeably moved by the end of the reading. It was a helpful tonic in a news-weary world.

Drawing on my own words, I feel much as I did last October when I set down these words in an essay on this site. It was therapeutic to write them then, and it was therapeutic to reread them today. Still, one disturbing thought that came to me soon after the attack haunts me to this day. We will chasten and gird ourselves. We will chastise our offenders when we find them. We will prevail. But the final insight about our changed world may be this: These kinds of things will happen from time to time.

The New York Times magazine has an in-depth report on the World Trade Center, past and future. It starts with The Height of Ambition: Part One. But there is also some multimedia and video material worth looking at. I find the file footage of the towers going up in the early 70s to be enthralling. I’m impressed that sites like the Times and NPR continue to invest in dynamic media even though they’re no longer being pecked at by the dot-com competition. Don’t burn out on 9/11 anniversary reflux until you give this site a look.

I see that Stefan Fatsis is doing the book circuit again now that the paperback version of his book about competitive Scrabble, Word Freak, is out. I heard Fatsis do a good piece on NPR about the origins of Scrabble. It was part of NPR’s Present at the Creation series (which is itself worth a detour to see). I figured the paperback release of the book must be coinciding with the Scrabble Championships, and sure enough they finished up on August 22nd in San Diego. This year’s winner, Joel Sherman, figures prominently in the book, which is fun to see (if you’ve read the book). Incidentally, here is the NSC 2002 player profile for Stefan Fatsis.

I read an intriguing article in the Boston Globe (unavailable online to deadbeat surfers like you and me) about big pumpkins, the really gigantic pumpkins, 1000 pounds and more, that loll on groaning platforms as they compete for blue ribbons at the county fair. Late August is the peak growth time, and some of these monsters will pack on 30 pounds in one day (the equivalent of almost four gallons of water). The article pointed out that giant pumpkins (almost all of them are Howard Dill’s Dill’s Atlantic Giant® Pumpkin breed) are getting giant-er every year, with the record size growing at a remarkable rate. Curious? Check out (where else?) BigPumpkins.com. It occurred to me that this is a good example of how the web supercharges a community of hobbyists. Now big-pumpkin people from all over the world can get in touch with one another and instantly share their best techniques, brag in their Grower Diaries, and peek at one another’s Pumpkin Cam. I find web-induced optimization like this to be both exhilarating and terrifying. Things are moving so fast.

There are a thousand similar stories. Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire gives us another example of network of horticultural enthusiasts supercharged by the web (and other forces): marijuana. In this interview on the Borders site, A Conversation With Michael Pollan, he explains why “the drug war is probably the best thing that ever happened to the cannabis plant.”

Before the drug war, most of the pot smoked in America was very mild stuff from Mexico. The plant barely had a presence here. Then, at the behest of the U.S., Mexico started spraying its marijuana crop with paraquat, an herbicide, and President Reagan sent helicopters into Humboldt County, California, to rout the pot growers. The result? He created a domestic market for marijuana and drove the growers, and the plant, indoors, where it has thrived. The breeding work done in this country since 1980 has revolutionized the plant to the point where it is now five times more potent, half the size, and grows to maturity in two months under a high-tech regime that is truly a marvel to behold. Result: Cannabis now has a vast new habitat—the basements and closets across American where it now happily grows. When you look at the drug war from the perspective of natural history, and from the perspective of this plant, it appears in a whole new light.”

We think we have domesticated these plants; they are polite enough not to point out that it is in fact the other way around.

A few months ago (June 16th, to be exact) I was observing that the Bose Acoustic Wave radio/CD player has a volume control that goes up to 100 in steps of two instead of going up to 50 by ones. You can’t dial in an odd number for the volume. Why?

Since then, the Rambles weblog has been tirelessly researching the issue. Actually, one of the usability specialists where I work went on a business trip to the Bose factory in South Carolina, and so I asked her to investigate. This she graciously did, and the answer, as suspected, is that from the designer’s point of view, a maximum volume of 100 arbitrary units is much better than the same maximum volume being assigned to 50 arbitrary units. But the software had been written to break it into 50 steps, so they just multiplied everything by two. The new maximum volume meant that the two-digit LCD volume display was no longer adequate, so they had to order a special display to manage the “1” in 100. I know this is how design works, but it seems particularly pointless in this case because nobody ever turns the volume ALL THE WAY UP TO 100. But if you make industrial design a top priority, as Bose has and as Apple has, this is the kind of price you pay. And in general it seems people are happy to pay it.

From a highly-placed source (and good friend) deep inside EDS comes this cheerful reminder of Standard Business English in 2002.

EDS is going through a long term initiative called “Global Competitive Resourcing” which is corporate-speak for “If you are a staff-level software engineer, your job is going to India.”

I understand that in India they’re terrified that all their business is going to flee to Russia. So maybe your job will have a refreshing layover in Bangalore, do a little shopping, check out the local temple, and then hop a plane for Moscow.