Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I came across this really interesting graph from Business Week of Internet demographics broken down by age and class of activity:

It was mostly what I expected, with my age group leading the wave of technology adoption. For us, email and IM are very mainstream, but social networking sites started just after we left college. So those of us on Facebook or MySpace tend to be either still in school or using them in conjunction with dating websites. On the other had, for my little sister and her friends, social networking sites are very mainstream.

An interesting thing from the graph is that the “critics” who comment on blogs and write reviews are older than the majority of the creators who write blogs and post to YouTube. It looks like the critics are more college aged and the creators are high school aged. It’s a minor numerical difference between the two categories, but I imagine the difference is that in college your social circle expands a lot, so you spend more time on other people’s sites.

I was also surprised that the “collectors” (people who use RSS to aggregate information) are spread out very evenly across all demographics. I would venture that this is a indication of poor adoption, as the use of RSS for Youth and Gen Y is very small relative to the general Internet usage.

The last thing that is interesting is the generalized age demographics. For the most part, if you had a particular technology available during your technological “formative years” (high school and college), you’re more likely to use it. That’s what we see right now, where the leading adoption curve is roughly matched with the age group that was in college when it was released.

We haven’t yet seen yet is if there is an age when people stop using social networking sites. I understand the advantage of staying on Facebook for a long time, since it will have your built up network. But I imagine as people get married and have a few kids, they get busy with “family” stuff and will have a lot less idle time to spend on those sites.

If that’s the case, forty years from now, the usage graph would have a similar shape. Though, instead of older user groups not ever using the services, the decreasing curve would be us kids growing up and decreasing our social network site usage.

Last week, I read that the City of Seattle is considering banning cooking microwave popcorn in city buildings. Apparently a few times over the past few years, someone burned popcorn, setting off fire alarms, and causing entire buildings to be evacuated. The article claims that the Justice Center has been evacuated 8 times in the past 3 years.

It really annoys me that when there’s a problem, a lot of people jump straight to a full ban. Obviously this loss of productivity is worth preventing, but popcorn does have legitimate purposes. It’s not like microwave popcorn is only used to set off fire alarms. My guess is that microwave popcorn is popped properly hundreds and maybe thousands of times a year in the Justice Building.

If you think about the problem, you can see that the problem is the burning of microwave popcorn, not the actual cooking of microwave popcorn. So the proper solution would be to attack the problem: start with small penalties for burning popcorn and as necessary make it larger.

And to keep this in proper perspective, the Justice Center has 400 people in it. Let’s estimate that at least one person pops popcorn a day. So over 3 years of work days ( ~750 days), the 8 instances represents ~1% (8/750) of the uses causing major problems.

With this in mind, here is my solution:

1. Social Pressure: If someone causes the building to be evacuated, have the person send an email to everyone apologizing, explaining how it happened, and stating what they will do differently next time. It sounds a little childish, but it works great in software engineering for people who break the build. You could also have some traveling “award” for the culprit to keep in their office.
2. Monetary Fine: If the problem persists, impose a fine. Start at $100 and have it increase until the problem goes away.

Sadly, the people in charge of making our laws can’t come up with this sort of simple solution. Nor can they be bothered to actually investigate the problem. When asked (from the article), how this happens so many times, the city official said, “I really don’t know, I can’t answer that question for you.”

I noticed two things of interest on my drive into work today. The first was that it is the middle of June, yet it was 52 degrees and rainy. Stupid Seattle weather!

The second thing I noticed is that my car horn is in a strange place on the steering wheel. If you look closely at the picture, the place you press to honk the horn is the same place that the airbag comes out. I’ve never been in an accident where the airbag is deployed, but if I am, I imagine my hand will likely be pressing the horn because some guy just cut me off.

So what would happen to my hand? I assumed that the smart engineers at Honda thought about this, but then I read this from one of those ask the experts forums:

[It is recommended] that drivers use caution not to have any portion of the arm, hand, or fingers over the airbag module at any time while driving … in particular, a maneuver to sound the car horn or brace against the steering wheel or dashboard just prior to an anticipated collision places the car occupants at particular injury risk.

If that’s true, you shouldn’t use your horn, because if that airbag goes off it’s going to hurt. Seems like bad design to me. The car horn buttons were placed where they are before airbags were invented, so it wasn’t a problem with the initial design. Rather, no one updated it when they added airbags. It seems smarter to have steering wheel triggers buttons for the horn, that you can honk without having to move your hand near the airbag.

If I ever design a car, that’s what I would do. That, and the car would fly, have auto-pilot, and an in-dash nachos dispenser. :-)

Crissy’s and my apartment is a mess. Not a mess like with dirt and garbage everywhere, but a mess where all our stuff is ridiculously disorganized. It’s probably because our rooms are over-purposed. Our second bedroom is my office, the guest room, Crissy’s painting studio, Crissy’s office and storage. The dining room is a dining room, library (has half my collection), Crissy’s jewelry business studio, and additional kitchen storage.

And it certainly doesn’t help that we added a bunch more stuff from my little sister (when she moved out of her college apartment) and all of our camping stuff is still out from our Memorial Day trip.

So we decided to reorganize everything and move a lot of the furniture around. Now the dining room will become Crissy’s painting and jewelry studios, Crissy’s office, and part of the library. The second bedroom is the guest room, my office, the storage, and the area we need for the non-creative parts of Crissy’s business (packing, shipping, paperwork).

If you read closely you’ll notice that we no longer have a “dining room”, which sort of stinks. But, it turned out that this was the one function of the room we used the least. We’ve been talking about renting a bigger apartment or a house soon, so it should all work out.

Once all the cleaning is under control I plan to do another round of eBay-ing stuff we don’t need. I call it eBay Cost Recovery, since you are usually just getting a fraction of the original cost back. Last time, I did this I made back $600. I think this time I could pass $750. Hopefully this will free up a bunch of space.

Once this is done, it’ll be time to get Crissy’s jewelry business launched on the web. Up, up and away!

A couple of weeks ago, I read some news about testing beef for Mad Cow disease that made me think, “Don’t have a cow, man!” A smaller company wants to test all of its beef for mad cow disease, which would allow them to differentiate their product by advertising “100% Mad Cow Tested” (industry-wide about 1% is tested).

This is a great example of marketing to trends (which I wrote about before), even though the risk of getting bad beef is low, most people would probably prefer to pay a premium to get the “benefit” for the thorough testing. If I ate beef, I know I would.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to block the company from doing the testing. They cite two reasons:

1. By increasing the amount of testing, there is an increased chance of false positives. This could cause a panic that could seriously hurt the industry.
2. The 100% testing would give them an advantage over their larger competitors that don’t do the testing. The competitors worry that they would lose market share.

Let’s start with the second one. If you support free markets, this reasons makes no sense. If one supplier is able to differentiate his product and take market share from competitors, it’s a natural and good thing for both the supplier and the consumer. If we stopped people from making their products better, we’d all still be riding horses to work.

Now the first reason: the risk of false positives. This sounds somewhat valid. But realistically, a better solution would be to help create tests with lower false positives. Though, even that is unnecessary since the industry itself is already intrinsically motivated to do this since they have their perception to maintain.

Most likely, this move is motivated by the larger companies bribing (or lobbying) the government to pass unfair laws to help them maintain their market share. Unfortunately for us consumers, this sort of thing happens all the time.

I just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.2 and I’m again impressed at how easy the upgrade experience was. Simply backup everything, overwrite with the new files, and then open the upgrade page (which launches the upgrade script). And as far as I can tell, there were no problems (tell me if you see something otherwise). Next, I need to update and edit the theme I’m currently using. But since I’m sleepy from hockey (we won!), I’ll do it another night.

Also, WordPress is telling me that this is post #100. Yay for milestones! :-)

About a month or so ago, I finished reading Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. It won the Man Booker Prize and had a great tag-line on the inside cover: a story that “will make you believe in God.” Even though the book didn’t involve circles or apples, I felt I had to read it. :-)

It looks like I may end up being one of the few people in the world that didn’t love the book. Parts were entertaining and insightful, but other parts dragged the book down. Essentially, the book had three parts, first was the young boy (Pi) learning about different religions, followed by a discussion about zoos and animals, and last, a survival story of the Pi on a life raft on the ocean with a tiger. Tacked on at the end was the part that was supposed to make you believe in God.

The first part of the book was the young Pi’s journey into religious syncretism (I learned a new word!). As we’re introduced to Pi and a number of interesting secondary characters, Pi decides to be Hindu, Christian, and Muslim at the same time. Unfortunately, the “many paths to God” and “all religions are the same at the root” themes are barely discussed. Rather, any further exploration is put aside in favor of the old “a child is wiser than adults” theme, as Pi’s faith challenges his parents and priests from each religion.

I feel that Martel missed a huge opportunity here. His setting was very unique and engaging, exploring these religious themes in this context could have been amazing.

The next part of the book was a discussion about animals and zoos. Here the major theme was challenging the romantic view of nature: the idea that nature is an Eden-like state where animals have peaceful and happy lives. Most people instinctively feel bad when they see animals in a zoo, thinking that they would prefer to live in the wild. Like all things, this is arguable. After all, the wild is a pretty tough place: things are constantly trying to eat you while the things that you are trying to eat keep running away.

Martel presents a lot of good information here and this was probably my favorite part of the book. But the tone of this section came off as unnecessarily defensive and was distracting.

From here, we abandon the zoo and India, as Pi and his family take a boat to Canada with a handful of animals. The boat sinks and we’re left with Pi, a tiger, and a few other animals (zebra, hyena, and orangutan) on a lifeboat. This section is pretty interesting as the animals are clearly out of their element and it takes a while before only the tiger and Pi remain. The tiger, named Richard Parker, is very anthromorphized through the story.

Along the journey we get long descriptions of the Pi’s and the tiger movement on the lifeboat, but as we never got a clear description of the boat, it’s hard to understand how all this could be happening with a tiger on board. We also read about a hallucination where the boat comes across another castaway and later then an island of algae and meerkats. The latter is a straight-forward literary device indicating major psychological change, but most of the effect was lost since the island adventure was so nonsensical.

We also get a lot of details on how Pi survived on the boat: taming the tiger, catching fish, sharks, and turtles, and building a smaller raft for him to live on. We also learn how he reached a mutually beneficial arrangement with the tiger (Pi catches the food and feeds the tiger) which is similar to the relationship between a zookeeper and his animals.

Finally, Pi and the tiger get to Mexico and the tiger disappears into the forest. Pi is then interviewed by some insurance adjusters about the ship sinking. They express disbelief in his story and he tells them a much more realistic but disturbing parallel version of events that where the animals are replaced by other survivors from the ship. This version includes Pi’s mother’s murder and Pi murdering the cook.

Pi tells the insurance adjusters that since the “true truth” can’t be proven and both stories seem to fit the details, they should choose the story they prefer. By metaphor, the religious lesson is that we don’t believe in things because they are true, but because we choose to believe in what makes us happy. So why not opt for the more happy story, even if it’s not the more plausible.

It is interesting how the subconscious can push us to accept the happier story, but in this case, Pi is completely aware of both versions and consciously chooses the one over the other. As a result, the “religion is a better fiction” theme fails, because the story didn’t execute properly on it.

So ultimately I was a little disappointed by the book. It had some great themes and ideas, but failed to execute. The book was enjoyable and I’d recommend it to others, though I probably wouldn’t read it again.