Steve Krause : Blog

Enlightening about Lightning

In Connecticut today, we had three separate waves of thunderstorms, the last of which is still going. Earlier I was near enough to a lightning strike that the thunder had no rumble; it was a bomb-like detonation, right after the flash.

Having recently moved from San Francisco, where thunderstorms are rare, the summer thunderstorms in New England are still novel for me. According to statistics from the National Lightning Detection Network, Connecticut has between five and six times the lightning flashes per square mile as California.

Yet that's only enough to rank Connecticut 36th among U.S. states for cloud-to-ground flash densities. The southeast dominates the top five, with Florida leading by a substantial margin. (Florida has seven times Connecticut's lightening flashes per square mile. It also leads the nation in lightning deaths.)

Having addressed where you're likely to see lightning, we might as well also cover the following:

People ask, “Who is most likely to be struck by lightning?” Something stirs in the mind about metal objects, and you might guess golfers, out there on the open fairways with four-irons raised to the sky, or fisherman clutching their metal rods. But you might not think of farmers, perched on their tractors and insulated by rubber tires, and, in fact, farmers it is. Where we need protection is overhead, not on the ground. Closed vehicles act as Faraday cages — named after Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century British physicist and chemist, who specialized in electromagnetism — and are a good choice for cover, because the metal that encases them channels the charge into the ground. As it descends to earth, lightning current is drawn to isolated objects, anything taller than others in its field. This might be a lone tree, a skyscraper, a mound of granite in a riverbed, or you in your small craft on open water. Farmers are vulnerable because of where they are when they’re out in their fields — the tallest object in an open space, plowing or haying as the summer day heats up.

The quote is from a fine essay by Jill Frayne in the Canadian magazine The Walrus. In addition to enlightening us about the science of lightning, she narrates a few close encounters: "The strike shot through the radio antenna, exploded in the living room into a blue fireball that roared down the hall, lifting up the linoleum runner by the tacks, ripping the nails out of the floor, splintering the house walls as fine as kindling before it ran off over the bedrock outside and died."

Here's the link again. It's a good read.

And with that, I'll post this before the power goes out.

[The image is from Wikipedia's Lightning article.]

Social Norms versus Market Norms in Daycare

"Any questions?" asked the daycare-center director. She was a pleasant mix of smart and caring. She no doubt wished her center could accept all the applicants. But this being one of the few daycare centers near downtown San Francisco, the wait list dwarfed the enrollment.

"Wait list" was a misnomer. The center chose children based on unspecified factors, only one of which was place in line. So, all parents present on this tour for applicants were listening attentively, mustering questions that demonstrated thoughtful consideration for their childrens' welfare, and otherwise exhibiting best behavior.

Until the following exchange:

Parent: What is the policy if I'm late to pick up my child?

Director: We understand that once in a while you get stuck in traffic or can't get here for extraordinary reasons. Just give us a call at the time, and we'll make sure someone stays with your child until you get here.

Parent: Is there a fine or penalty?

Director: We're not going to fine you for a rare event that's totally out of your control.

Parent: But what if it happens repeatedly? How many times do I have to be late before you start fining me, and what's the fine?

Director: Uh, we haven't had to deal with that before.

Parent: Well how do I get that question answered?

Director: Let me get back to you on that.

As this exchange progressed, the parent's demeanor went from neutral to baffled, like a boss mystified by a subordinate's inability to answer a simple question. Meanwhile, everybody else in the room was looking at each other like, "There's one person we don't have to worry about getting in before us."

At the time, I didn't ask myself why everyone except Baffled Parent knew something had gone awry. However, the incident came back to me when I read Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. The book is about how people's decisions—not just individually but in aggregate—can be skewed by factors beyond traditional economics' view of rationality.

Ariely would explain that Baffled Parent tried to apply traditional economics' "market norms" in a situation where "social norms" prevail. In fact, Ariely has an example of what happened when a day care center tried doing things Baffled Parent's way:

A few years ago, [Uri Gneezy of UC San Diego and Aldo Rustichini of the University of Minnesota] studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn't work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late—as they occasionally were—they felt guilty about it—and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this is not what the day care center intended.

I'll have more to say on Ariely's book—of which social versus market norms is a small section—in a subsequent post.

What Is a Vegetable?

That was the question posed to me by my two-year-old daughter. She already knew examples of vegetables. She wanted to know what makes a vegetable a vegetable.

I didn't know, and I later found that the answer has a few twists and turns. From Wikipedia's Vegetable article:

The term "vegetable" generally means the edible parts of plants. The definition of the word is traditional rather than scientific, however. Therefore the usage is somewhat arbitrary and subjective, as it is determined by individual cultural customs of food selection and food preparation.

Generally speaking, a herbaceous plant or plant part which is regularly eaten as unsweetened or salted food by humans is considered to be a vegetable. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom Fungi, are also generally considered to be vegetables, at least in the retail industry. Nuts, seeds, grains, herbs, spices and culinary fruits are usually not considered to be vegetables, even though all of them are edible parts of plants.

In general, vegetables are regarded by cooks as being suitable for savory or salted dishes, rather than sweet dishes, although there are many exceptions, such as pumpkin pie.

For a livelier version of the same topic, I liked "What is the difference between a fruit and vegetable?" from YES Mag, a Canadian youth science magazine:

The answer depends on your relationship with the two items. If you're stocking the produce department at a grocery store, a tomato is a vegetable. If you're a plant scientist—a botanist—a tomato is a fruit. Cucumbers, pumpkins, avocados, and peppers are all fruits. Culturally, however, the grocer is going to call them vegetables.

A fruit is the ripe ovary or ovaries of a flower—the mature ovary of a seed-bearing plant. Let's say you've got a tomato plant with those little yellow flowers all ready. A bee comes along and fertilizes the flower. The flower starts developing into a fruit with the seed inside. (There are four kinds of fruits, which explains fruits such as pineapple and blueberries, but let's not get into that.) And, hey, guess what? Nuts are fruits. True nuts that is, chestnut and filberts come to mind.

Vegetables, however, are the roots (eg, carrot), tubers (eg, potato), leaves (eg spinach), stems (eg, celery), and other bits of plants that you might eat. For a botanist, a vegetable is sort of like the umbrella word for all the edible parts of a plant. Just to keep life interesting, mushrooms aren't plants at all, they are a kind of fungus.

Let's just keep with the cultural distinctions!

I'm still working on how to explain this to a two-year-old.

The State Motto Grotto

When you drive in New Hampshire, you are constantly reminded of that state's motto, "Live free or die." It's on everybody's license plates.

Elsewhere, the opposite is usually true: You don't know or see state mottos. Yes, you'll see state nicknames on license plates, like Missouri being the "Show Me State." You'd recognize many such nicknames, but state mottos? Other than "Live free or die," they're apparently kept in a cave somewhere, a cave we'll call the State Motto Grotto. Prepare to behold the many beasts of language that dwell there.

A word of caution first. Many state mottos are in Latin, because if you really want to make a motto memorable, you of course say it in Latin. I mean, who can remember Alabama's "We Dare Defend Our Rights" without the crutch of the official Latin version, Audemus jura nostra defendere? Obligingly, I will provide non-English mottos in their original language and then an English version.

As a starting point, you might be surprised how few state mottos are about geographic identity. Minnesota: L'étoile du Nord (French, "The star of the North"). Indiana: "The crossroads of America." And with an extra bit of marketing panache, Michigan: Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice (Latin, "If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you").

Beyond those, state mottos are more about concepts than places. For an extreme example, North Carolina: Esse quam videri (Latin, "To be rather than to seem"). Don't look for it on a license plate soon.

Or how about Maryland's Fatti maschi, parole femmine? The direct Italian translation is, "Manly deeds, womanly words." But before your imagination runs wild, think of it as something like Theodore Roosevelt's, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, and South Dakota: God gets a mention in each of their mottos. Apparently, they're not taking too literally the "state" in "separation of church and state." (Florida, you clever one, your choice of "In God We Trust" kicks any complaints upstairs to the federal government, which features that phrase on its money.)

In the secular-inspirational genre, we have New York's Excelsior (Latin, "Ever upward"), Wisconsin's "Forward," Alaska's "North to the Future," California's Eureka (Greek, "I have found it"), and New Mexico's ominous Crescit eundo (Latin, "It grows as it goes").

Less manifest-destinational is South Carolina's Dum spiro spero (Latin, "While I breathe, I hope"), which Rhode Island reduces to "Hope." And Connecticut brings us the unusual Qui transtulit sustinet (Latin, "He who transplanted sustains"). It probably rocked harder in 1639, when it was first used.

More contemporary sounding, albeit from 1873, is West Virginia's Montani semper liberi (Latin, "Mountaineers are always free"). Or consider the following mottos, pulsating with the poetic minimalism of the Standard Industrial Classification. Utah: "Industry." Tennessee: "Agriculture and commerce." Montana: Oro y plata (Spanish, "Gold and sliver").

Finally, there's that classic American theme of liberty and freedom, rendered variously as:

• Delaware: "Liberty and independence"
• Iowa: "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain"
• Massachusetts: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (Latin, "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty")
• New Jersey: "Liberty and prosperity"
• Pennsylvania: "Virtue, liberty, and independence"

...and of course New Hampshire's "Live free or die," which delivers the theme in primal, commandment style.

Now, having toured the State Motto Grotto, perhaps you'll agree that "Live free or die" deserves to bask in the reflected headlights of motorists everywhere, or at least New Hampshire. By comparison, most other state mottos lack the pith and punch, and thus they linger in silentium (Latin, "in obscurity").

[Should you wish to audit every state motto, see Wikipedia's List of U.S. State Mottos. The license plate image is from Wikimedia Commons.]

The Eric Carle Museum

Having recently moved nearby, it was inevitable that we'd visit the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts. Any museum that won't instantly bore a toddler is a worthy museum for our current lifestage. Besides, having read The Very Hungry Caterpillar aloud several hundred times, I was a stakeholder.

For the uninitiated, Eric Carle is author of so many popular children's books that his work often commands its own shelf in bookstores. Carle's medium is the picture book: Each page has a picture and a small amount of text. A typical Carle book tells a story about an animal while teaching concepts like colors or counting.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Carle's most beloved book, seems to charm every child (and parent) it meets—to the tune of more than 20 million copies. The only risk in giving the book to new parents is that someone else already has. (If you want another Carle option, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is also a sure winner.)

Visiting the museum, I was interested to learn that Carle was formerly an art director at an ad agency. In a video, I believe he even said something to the effect that he thinks of each page in his picture books as a billboard. This explains much about his simple visual style, child-like in its own way, communicating essence with little ornament.

Carle's visual recipes typically include basic shapes, vibrant colors with varied textures, and lots of white space. His textures are from painted tissue paper—cut, pasted, and layered into figures like the famous caterpillar below.

For a selection of Carle's work, with commentary by the artist, see this three-minute slideshow by National Public Radio.

And if you're in the Amherst area with small children in tow, check out the museum. It's part Eric Carle, part other picture-book authors and illustrators. In addition to the galleries, the library has thousands of children's books, the art studio lets children create their own collages, and the smartly curated gift shop goes well beyond just Eric Carle and kids' books.

Extracting That First Piece of Cake

Problem: You've got a circular cake, and it's time to cut the first piece. In this era of "I'll just take a tiny slice," how often have you seen someone struggle to get that first piece out cleanly?

Solution: Cut two or three pieces before taking any out. Then take them out together.

This works because when you extract multiple pieces at once, you are working with a wider base yet the height has not changed. By improving the width-to-height ratio compared to a single, tall and thin piece, you get greater stability.

[Thanks to Sharon the restaurateur for enlightening me on this.]

The Pleasant Mystery of the Perfect Cut

Last time, I talked about The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje. Following is a final topic from the book that resonated with my background in electronic-music composition and audio engineering. (I studied those subjects in college. They ended up being a path not taken in my life, although still areas of interest.)

Back in the day, if I was deciding how to bring musical elements together, I found the best results always had a mystery to them. For some reason, things just clicked—neither by accident (it takes a lot of technique to create the conditions for things to click) nor by a fully analyzable formula.

On this subject, Murch drills the bullseye straight through:

To determine [where to make a cut in a scene], I look at the shot intently. It's running along, and then at a certain point I flinch—it's almost an involuntary flinch, an equivalent of a blink. That flinch point is where the shot will end....

The key, on an operational level, is that I have to be able to duplicate that flinch point, exactly, at least two times in a row. So I run the shot once and hit a mark. Then run it back, look at it, and flinch again. Now I'm able to compare. Where did I stop the first time, and where did I stop the second? If I hit exactly the same frame both times, that's proof to me that there is something organically true about that moment. It's absolutely impossible to do that by a conscious decision. Imagine—there are twenty-four targets going by every second and with your gun you have to hit [exactly the same one].

Why that works is one of the pleasant mysteries in life.

Outstanding in the Field

You may ask, "Why is there a long table and chairs set up in the middle of that field?" The answer is both a story about innovation and an unusual restaurant recommendation.

Jim Denaven was the chef of Gabriella Cafe in Santa Cruz, California. He invited farmers to collaborate with him on special meals at the restaurant, featuring fresh-picked produce straight off the farm. These events were hits.

By Northern California standards, doing restaurant meals with featured farmers was mildly innovative. But then Denaven went a major step further: Having taken farmers to the restaurant, Denaven decided to take the restaurant to the farm.

He created Outstanding in the Field, an event that occurs throughout the summer and fall at various organic farms in the United States and Canada. A group of people get to tour an organic farm, culminating in dinner amid the fields. The food is prepared by a notable chef, using ingredients straight off the farm.

Jacqueline and I attended an Outstanding in the Field event a few years ago at Knoll Farms in Brentwood, California (about 60 miles east of San Francisco). It was fig season, and farmer Rick Knoll took us and a group of perhaps 50 others on a tour of the grounds, picking and eating ripe figs off the trees.

Later, we had dinner on a long table like the one in the picture, albeit shielded from the warm evening wind by parallel rows of fig trees on either side. The chef was from San Francisco's Fringale. It was a five-course meal, with different wine tastings at each course.

Among other things, the meal included the most explosively flavorful tomatoes I have ever experienced. It was the taste equivalent of super-saturated color.

When the sun was gone, a chain of paper lanterns was the only light source amid the otherwise dark fields, the sky dense with stars.

Just being near where food originates (no, not the grocery store), if even for a short while, dining in/with/amid nature—it was a good thing.

Take a look at this year's Outstanding in the Field schedule. Perhaps there will be an event near you. But beware, it is not cheap: $150 per person, maybe more.

The apt comparison would be a night out at a very fancy restaurant, where the purpose is to do something special. Outstanding in the Field is less fancy but more special.

Trojan Goldfish

We interrupt this blog for a special investigatory report.

Time is running out. To what, we don't know. But a 45-year trail of clues is telling us something.

1962: Inspired by a fish-shaped cheese cracker she saw in Switzerland, Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin "returns with the recipe" and introduces Goldfish snack crackers in the United States.

Genetically, the Goldfish cracker is a three-way hybrid of the Cheez-It, the oyster cracker, and Carassius auratus (the common goldfish), as depicted below.

Unanswered in the historical record is the question of which Swiss chemical company was responsible for this genetic engineering and, critically, what else may have been thrown into the mix.

The question matters because over time, Goldfish crackers have evolved—as if by some mysterious genetic code—from their original ecological niche as a cocktail cracker to the snack cracker of choice for small children. Along the way, Goldfish have spawned multiple variants that display emotions, personality characteristics, and the latent capability to influence a generation.

1973: Co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick, with Leslie Orgel, propose the theory of directed panspermia, suggesting that the seeds of life may have been purposely spread by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

Although the typical interpretation of directed panspermia is about the origin of life on Earth, what if a group of Swiss scientists in 1959 came across recently arrived seeds of life, courtesy of comet debris still frozen after impact in the Alps? And what if careful analysis revealed that the ideal host for this new type of life was a baked-goods consumer product?

1987: Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President Ronald Reagan says: "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?"

One year later, Goldfish crackers go into space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.

1997: Goldfish crackers appear with a smile stamped on them, the first change since their introduction. They become "the snack that smiles back."

With this, Goldfish become more than passive objects of consumption. Goldfish become friends to their little consumers. Ingratiating their way into relationships by simply smiling back, are Goldfish setting the stage for something more than smiles?

1998-2004: Pepperidge Farm introduces Goldfish product variants such as Flavor Blasted Goldfish, Goldfish Colors, Giant Goldfish, Baby Goldfish, Goldfish Sandwich Snackers, and Goldfish Crisps.

Consistent with the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, Goldfish speciation occurs in an explosive six-year period following a 35-year period of stasis. The new variants replicate the primitive emotional apparatus of "smiley," albeit for different market segments. 

2005: Pepperidge Farm announces that "Americans will be smiling even more as they get to know [Goldfish] in a whole new way as the fun-shaped snack comes to life in three dimensions."

Embodied in the animated character Finn, Goldfish now have a figurehead to actively influence young minds. More than a year of market research shaped Finn to leverage the already "significant emotional connection with the brand" that Goldfish had attained.

2005: According to Pepperidge Farm, nearly half of U.S. households with children under 18 purchase Goldfish snack crackers annually.

While perhaps true, this statistic masks the well-known fact that 100% of children under age five eat Goldfish crackers on a near-continuous basis. The few parents that have tried to resist—such as those who sought refuge from Goldfish's cheddary goodness by living in former nuclear-missile silos—still found their children innocently enjoying handfuls of Goldfish while watching Teletubbies.

In other words, while Goldfish were evolving their emotional and communicative capabilities, they were also accumulating market share, invited into American homes like little Trojan Horses.

2006: Pepperidge Farm announces a new ad campaign featuring Finn and three new Goldfish friends, Gilbert, Brooke and X-treme. Steve White, Vice President, Youth Snacks, commented: "We see this new campaign as a tool to begin to help teach important lessons and help instill values in kids in ways they understand and identify with, without being preachy or patronizing. The Goldfish characters' distinct personalities and tales of everyday life are things every child—and adult—can relate to in an optimistic way."

Having built the infrastructure for its own mini-religion, with a devoted following of millions, what "lessons" and "values" will be forthcoming? What panspermic messages did those Swiss scientists transfer into the Goldfish genetic code that have yet to be expressed? And given Goldfish's recent rate of evolution, how long will it be until Goldfish are capable of human-like intelligence, and perhaps superhuman emotional, brand-building characteristics?

The stakes are high. We could preemptively try to negotiate with them now, before they turn America's children against us. If so, do we take the obvious route and negotiate with Finn, or do we try to turn his new sidekicks against him?

The 85 billion Goldfish crackers produced each year are forward-positioned in diaper bags, pantries, and other strategic locales throughout the world. We don't know their next move. What will be ours?

[Note to readers who arrive here from a search after April 1, 2007, when this was written. If you are unfamiliar with April Fools (or All Fools) Day, then be aware that the above is not entirely reliable, and thus you should not use it as a primary source for your term paper.]

Air Sickness Bag Collecting

There are some topics that you can only discover through a random occurrence.

To wit, on a flight today, as everybody was getting on the plane, the guy next to me called the flight attendant and nervously said, "There doesn't seem to be an air-sickness bag in here," pointing to his seat pocket.

He was quickly awarded a bag, which he thankfully did not need.

Later, Jacqueline said, "Maybe he was a collector," in that postmodern tone that decodes to, "This would have been a joke in the relatively recent past, but in all likelihood there are actually air-sickness bag collectors."

A Google search immediately surfaced several sites, including the Yahoo directory's official recognition of the subject at:

Directory  > Recreation  > Hobbies  > Collecting  > Air Sickness Bags

And where there is collecting, we can also expect buying, selling, and trading. Indeed, an eBay search for "air sickness bag" had 28 active auctions for air-sickness bags as of 8:30pm PST on 1/8/2006. (It was a nice touch to see several listings qualify their items as "new" or "mint.")

So the cat—or whatever it was—is out of the bag. I, and now you, know about the secret world of air sickness bag collecting and commerce.

Bassmaster and the American Dream

It started with an aside, a few sentences in a New York Times Book Review piece. The subject was bass, as in fish. The reviewer was listing colorful characters in the world of competitive bass fishing, including:

...Takahiro Omori, winner of the 2004 Bassmaster Classic, who came to America from Japan in 1992. (There seems to be a Japanese craze for American bass fishing.) Omori arrives here virtually penniless and without any English, and lives out of a 1965 Chevy Suburban for three years while trying to break into the pro angling circuit. When he finally has some pro success, he buys a house in Lake Fork, Tex., where he installs a swimming pool, not for swimming but for testing lures.

As American Dream stories go, this one had me hook, line, and sinker.

The inevitable Google search revealed Omori's Angler Profile in ESPN's Angler/Tournament Database. His logo-clad outfit testified to competitive bass fishing's oft-quoted goal of becoming "the next NASCAR." Copious statistics detailed Omori's performance in the real world, as well as in Bass Fantasy Fishing. How far he had come.

A 2004 feature article in the Dallas Observer recounted Omori's journey, from nine-year-old pond fisher to 18-year-old Japanese pro to competitive bass fisherman in America. From his start in the United States at age 21, it took twelve years—of initial failure, then slow but methodical progress, and finally Bassmaster Classic victory.

On the Omori work ethic:

He'd finish one tournament, and even if the next was three weeks out, he'd drive there and pre-fish until it started. At night, Omori would find other pre-fishers and ask them to dinner, whereupon he'd talk fishing. Or, if there weren't other pre-fishers to dine with—because, really, who wants to pre-fish for three weeks?—Omori would head to his van and read a bass magazine. His trailer on Lake Fork became a library of Field & Streams and Bassmaster videos, stacked to the ceiling. Boxes of fishing tackle were everywhere. Eventually, Omori had to clear walking paths so he could get from his bed to the trailer's door without stepping on a Rick Clunn tape or a stray crank bait.

Most bass guys had families or at least dated, but how did you date when you put 40,000 miles a year on your beat-up van and were home only to pack up for the next trip? Most guys tinkered with their lures to make them fly better or land softer, but how many stayed up half the night making lure modifications for scenarios, for the moment when you're fishing in Kentucky, near a bank's edge, in the early morning, and it's sunny out, and the water's 5 feet deep? How many did that? How many had more than 110 tackle boxes with lures inside that carried a labeling, a reminder, of said fishing scenarios?

Omori's singular pursuit of a U.S. bass-fishing career left him estranged from his father, who only saw dishonor in the enterprise. But by 2001, when Omori started to win enough money to buy a house (which, of course, was on a famous bass-fishing lake), father's attitude was thawing, to the point that father and family came to the United States to see Omori compete.

But two weeks later, father was dead, sending Omori into 16 months of grief and contemplation. He came out the other side a renewed man on a mission, regaining form in 2003 and aiming for the ultimate goal: a win in the Bassmaster Classic, "the Super Bowl of bass fishing."

In preparation for the 2004 season, Omori installed the swimming pool mentioned in the New York Times Book Review quote. The Dallas Observer piece adds the following color:

Before it was filled, Omori painted a 1-inch-wide line down the center of the pool. As he prepared for the bass season, he'd grab a fishing rod and one tackle box from the walk-in closet filled with tackle boxes (but not clothes), sit in a chair a full cast from the pool, smell the chlorine and try landing his different lures onto the 1-inch strip, making adjustments if the lure didn't land right, making adjustments if it hit the strip but then drifted away with a current. He'd do that for hours.

Omori went on to win the 2004 Bassmaster Classic. For a dramatic retelling, see the Dallas Observer article, near the end.

It was August 1, 2004, twelve years after Omori arrived in the United States with hardly any money or English vocabulary. Omori called it the greatest day of his life.

It's the greatest story—fish or otherwise—that I've heard in a long time.

 

Disney Gadget Magnetism

I recently walked the exhibit floor of a consumer-electronics tradeshow for retailers. The exhibitors were mostly manufacturers, showing their latest products in hope of securing holiday-season orders from retailers.

In lieu of any breakthrough new gadgets, my attention turned to stuff that might interest my daughter. At 9 months old, pretty much anything she can chew on is interesting, but projecting forward a bit in her development, I noted this Mini Mouse USB drive.

Sorry for the blurry picture, but I wanted to show how small it was in relation to my hand. You can fold the plug back into the pink case, making it yet smaller. Here is a clearer view of the device (without Mini stenciled on the front) from the manufacturer, A-DATA of Taiwan.

They weren't giving the USB drives away at the booth, but the A-DATA reps did provide me (on behalf of my daughter) what's pictured below.

You might think these are Disney-logo'd Secure Digital (SD) cards, ranging in capacity from 256 megabytes to 2 gigabytes. You might also think this is one of those Asian-market peculiarities, like the 22,000 unique products adorned by Hello Kitty logos. Think again.

First, these are actually refrigerator magnets of Disney-logo'd SD cards, sized exactly to SD card specifications. Second, although they are not yet available in the United States—as SD cards or magnets, apparently—you can score other Disney-logo'd SD cards (with Disney content) at Wal-Mart today.

And finally, a semi-related thought: Some analysts predict that solid-state media (like that in SD cards) will soon eclipse magnetic media (like that in hard drives). If so, we have now seen how the "magnet" in magnetic media can live on, as the tchotchke version of solid-state media devices, which themselves feature children's cartoon characters.

Alaska's Width

Until today I was not aware that Alaska is as wide as the lower 48 states, extending from San Francisco to Jacksonville, Florida. A colleague's office has a map similar to this one, which illustrates the point.

It's easy to forget the Aleutian Islands' 1,200 miles of westward reach, as well as the eastward span of the Alaska Panhandle.

[A larger version of the map is here. Thanks to Doug L. for the inspiration.]

Piracy in Peru

The BBC has an interesting article about piracy (of the intellectual-property type) in Peru, where "the legal music market has collapsed, unable to compete with 98% of all music being sold on the black market."

A few more excerpts:

More than half of Peru's economy is made up of unregulated businesses that do not pay tax. More than half the 28 million population lives below the poverty line and simply cannot afford the genuine goods....

150 police officers armed with tear gas and riot control equipment who raided one well-known pirate market in Lima were simply fought off by the well-organised black marketeers.

And finally:

There is a story circulating in Peru, which could well be true, that another Peruvian writer, the popular Jaime Bayly, was waiting at traffic lights when black marketeers offered him a pirate copy of one of his own books.

Recognising the author from the photo on the back cover, the vendor, without even pausing to blush, offered him a discount.

Read the full article here.

David Foster Wallace Serves It Up

This morning's New York Times had a welcome surprise with David Foster Wallace's "Federer as Religious Experience." Wallace is one of the most innovative writers around, and if you like his style, this piece won't disappoint.

About Wallace's style—well, let's take an extended example:

Tennis is often called a "game of inches," but the cliché is mostly referring to where a shot lands. In terms of a player's hitting an incoming ball, tennis is actually more a game of micrometers: vanishingly tiny changes around the moment of impact will have large effects on how and where the ball travels. The same principle explains why even the smallest imprecision in aiming a rifle will still cause a miss if the target's far enough away.

By way of illustration, let's slow things way down. Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner's baseline. A ball is served to your forehand — you pivot (or rotate) so that your side is to the ball's incoming path and start to take your racket back for the forehand return. Keep visualizing up to where you're about halfway into the stroke's forward motion; the incoming ball is now just off your front hip, maybe six inches from point of impact. Consider some of the variables involved here. On the vertical plane, angling your racket face just a couple degrees forward or back will create topspin or slice, respectively; keeping it perpendicular will produce a flat, spinless drive. Horizontally, adjusting the racket face ever so slightly to the left or right, and hitting the ball maybe a millisecond early or late, will result in a cross-court versus down-the-line return. Further slight changes in the curves of your groundstroke's motion and follow-through will help determine how high your return passes over the net, which, together with the speed at which you're swinging (along with certain characteristics of the spin you impart), will affect how deep or shallow in the opponent's court your return lands, how high it bounces, etc. These are just the broadest distinctions, of course — like, there's heavy topspin vs. light topspin, or sharply cross-court vs. only slightly cross-court, etc. There are also the issues of how close you're allowing the ball to get to your body, what grip you're using, the extent to which your knees are bent and/or weight's moving forward, and whether you're able simultaneously to watch the ball and to see what your opponent's doing after he serves. These all matter, too. Plus there's the fact that you're not putting a static object into motion here but rather reversing the flight and (to a varying extent) spin of a projectile coming toward you — coming, in the case of pro tennis, at speeds that make conscious thought impossible. Mario Ancic's first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it's 78 feet from Ancic's baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you.(9) This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

(If that last paragraph's density attracted you, look for the 258 word sentence in the piece's second paragraph.)

In our excerpt above, we have several interesting features:

(1) The first paragraph is a nice conceptual flip. "A game of inches" is about where the ball lands; if you want to talk about fine distinctions, look at what a few micrometers will do at the point the ball is hit. Wallace then consolidates the concept with the rifle analogy, which makes it all seem obvious.

(2) "Imagine that you, a tennis player, are standing just behind your deuce corner's baseline." You probably don't know what your "deuce corner's baseline" is, and the meaning doesn't matter. Unlike the usual use of jargon, which is like a locked door to those out of the know, Wallace's use of jargon here is more like wallpaper. It contributes to the atmospherics of a room you're already in. 

(3) He is addressing you directly—yeah, "you." It juxtaposes well with the paragraph's technicalishness. (No, that's not an official word, but somehow it's right for this occasion.)

(4) As for the long middle of our excerpt's second paragraph, it's a big set-up. He enumerates the myriad factors that go into returning a pro serve only to deliver the punchline that you've only got 0.41 seconds to do the right thing—"the time it takes to blink quickly, twice."

(5) Finally, you may have noticed the (9) at the end of the excerpt's second-to-last sentence. That's a footnote, the unusual employment of which is a Wallace trademark. Footnote 9 is a preemptive strike against those who might question whether Wallace's calculation of 0.41 seconds suffers from omitting the additional distance the ball travels from the bounce. This footnote has its own footnote, another Wallace trademark. If only one could trademark a trademark.

On a larger level, Wallace makes some structural gambits. For example, a child that contracted cancer at age two appears first as a bit of innocuous reportage, then later as a jarring counterpart that interrupts the story, and finally in the last paragraph, not of the main piece but of the footnotes, as an explicit connection to the main theme.

You get the idea. A breezy read this piece is not, yet Wallace's technical skill brings a conversational tone to the most entertainingly arcane points. Call it obsessive-casual.

So set aside 10 minutes and read the piece. Even if you can't get into Wallace's style, you'll find enough little gems along the way to make it worthwhile—for example, the description of Wimbledon line judges "in their new Ralph Lauren uniforms that look so much like children's navalwear."

Check it out: Federer as Religious Experience

George Harrison, Pirate?

While on vacation, I ran across A History of Pirates. I didn't read it, but the cover caught my eye: Is that an All Things Must Pass era George Harrison as a pirate? You be the judge.

Small Town Volunteerism

I live in a dense urban setting. But once or twice a year, we decamp to a small town amid the corn fields of Illinois, where my wife is from.

It's a place where you run into people like the guy who is a member of his town's volunteer fire department. With a population of 2,500, his town is even smaller than the one we visit.

A volunteer ambulance driver, he was up at 2:30am the night before, responding to a random emergency. He was joined by two other paramedics. They all live close to the fire station, so they can get there within three minutes of their pagers' ringing.

This type of volunteerism combines generosity with self-reliance in a way that's natural to small communities. And while I'm not suggesting that everyone in these small towns is ready to charge out into the night to respond to someone in need, I'm nevertheless inspired by those who do.

By the Numbers: Komar and Melamid's "People's Choice"

Last week's posting "Data Visualization as Art" reminded me of another topic where art and numbers intersect. In this case, it's Komar and Melamid's "People's Choice" project. I say "project" because People's Choice comprises many different paintings, each of which is the result of market research into the "most wanted" and "least wanted" paintings of various countries. The data from the market research is part of the displayed art too.

This 1999 New York Times review of the project's accompanying book, Painting by Numbers: Komar & Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, explains the idea:

Noting the gulf that yawned between a democratic society and its self-consciously elitist art world, Komar and Melamid decided to find out for themselves what people who were not a part of that world liked to see in pictures. Accordingly, they availed themselves of that scorned but ubiquitous resource, the opinion poll. Beginning late in 1993, telephone researchers hired by them questioned 1,001 Americans of all demographic shadings, asking them about their preferences as to color, dimensions, settings, figures -- 102 questions in all. Sixty-seven percent of respondents liked a painting that was large, but not too large -- about the size of a dishwasher (options ranged from ''paperback book'' to ''full wall''). A whopping 88 percent favored a landscape, optimally featuring water, a taste echoed by the majority color preferences, blue being No. 1 and green No. 2. Respondents also inclined toward realistic treatment, visible brushstrokes, blended colors, soft curves. They liked the idea of wild animals appearing, as well as people -- famous or not -- fully clothed and at leisure....Armed with this information, Komar and Melamid started to paint.

Below is Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted" painting for the United States, reduced down from its original "dishwasher-size" canvas. It features the attributes just mentioned (yes, that's George Washington posed in the middle):

The image is from the Dia Art Foundation's site, which has a Web version of People's Choice, including the survey results—display of the data is part of the piece.

Back to the New York Times review:

Komar and Melamid's project is conceptualism at its most elegant and effective, a little bomb thrown into the works. It puts into question not only the relation between art and ordinary people, and the meaning of ''the market,'' but also the ambiguity of opinion polls and, by extension, the discordance between the individual and the mass.

Finally, the Dia Foundation's "Director's Introduction" quotes Melamid thusly:

In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato's idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that's how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created. In a way, this is the same thing; in principle, it's nothing new. It's interesting: we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It's absolutely true data. It doesn't say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That's really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.

You might as well consider that commentary part of the piece too.

In art textbooks of the future, look for People's Choice to join Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can paintings as emblems of (post)modern consumer society.

Back to the Land: Earthbound Farm Tours

If you have an organic farm, you can skip this. Everyone else, if you want an interesting perspective shift, take a tour at Earthbound Farms' Farm Stand in Carmel Valley, California.

It's a chance to see your food from the point of earthly production. You get a tour of the fields, including the ability to fill a basket with whatever you want to pick.

Being in the clear air, amid the literal cornucopia of vegetables and herbs—it's a good way to reconnect with some fundamental things.

Although the Farm Stand is open daily, farm tours only happen on a handful of Saturdays each year. On the Farm Stand's calendar of events, look for the days/times with either a Farm Walk or Chef's Walk.

[The picture is from Earthbound Farms, taken at the Farm Stand.]

User Agreements: Stop the Madness

At some point in recent history, user agreements for consumer services got out of control. We all have ignored multiple screens of legalese just to get to the "I Agree" button. The irony is, now that everyone ignores such agreements, it doesn't matter how ridiculously long they are. So they just keep getting worse.

For example, I got an email asking me to review Hertz #1 Gold's updated terms and conditions. So I followed the link to the Hertz Web site and found the usual dense thicket of verbiage—which went on for 39 pushes of the "Page Down" key before I reached the bottom, where I could register my agreement. Out of morbid curiosity, I did a "Print Preview" and found that if I printed the screen on standard 8.5x11 paper, it would be 47 pages long.

Now I know that the rental-car business has lots of issues, including different laws for different states and countries. But people, there must be a better way.

Here's an initial suggestion: The introductions says, "It is not necessary to read Terms and Conditions for rentals in countries in which you are not enrolled to use Gold." Then why are you showing me those T&Cs in the first place? Under other circumstances, the Hertz Web site knows who I am and what I am enrolled in. Why the sudden amnesia?

To those involved in creating and implementing such agreements, stop the madness!

Interstellar Magnetic Slinky

Aside from being a potentially great band name, the title of this post refers to a press release from UC Berkeley called, "Astronomers find magnetic Slinky in Orion."

I point to it because, in the world of press releases, having a title that rises above the noise is crucial. To understand the challenge, let's look at the press release's lead paragraph:

Astronomers announced today what may be the first discovery of a helical magnetic field in interstellar space, coiled like a snake around a gas cloud in the constellation of Orion.

Getting from that to "Astronomers find magnetic Slinky in Orion" is the difference between something that won't get attention and something that will.

It also helps to have some eye-catching imagery:

Laying Down the Law on Dating

Thanks to Isaac for pointing me to Mr. Yoest's Ten Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter, a funny read whether or not you have a daughter.

And if you like that writerly style, check out W. Bruce Cameron, whose original piece Mr. Yoest enhanced with a little extra guns 'n ammo.

Product Name-O-Rama

Our pediatrician's office is in a building that opened in 1973. Although the pediatrician has a tablet PC in every examination room, there remains some legacy equipment, identifiable by the groovy product names.

For example, this is not a scale; it's a "Health O Meter":

And don't just use an elevator when you can use a "Selectomatic":

"Don't Trash California" Ad

Can you think of a memorable public-service advertisement from the radio? They are rare, but here is one that is both funny and effective. (The link is to a Windows Media Audio file. You'll need to download it and then play using Windows Media Player, Winamp, or something else that plays WMA files. Go ahead. It's worthwhile.)

As an exercise in rhetoric (persuasion through language), this ad uses two techniques that go back thousands of years:

(1) Instead of having a spokesperson earnestly tell you not to litter, it makes the point through a story, a modern parable with sound effects.

(2) The core argument is based on reciprocity—in this case, a twist on "Do to others as you would have others do to you."

Mix these ingredients with fast-paced, clever execution, and you've got something that works.

Windows in the Rearview Mirror

The first few versions of Microsoft Windows are often cited as examples of half-baked software being foisted on the marketplace. As the legend goes, it took Microsoft until version 3.0 to make Windows marginally worthwhile.

So I was intrigued by the following, excerpted from Download Squad's "20 things you don't know about Windows 1.0":

After taking a look at a very early pre-release version of Windows in 1983, Byte Magazine declared it a system that would "offer remarkable openness, reconfigurability, and transportability as well as modest hardware requirements and pricing."

In 1984, PC World said that Windows "provides a simple, powerful, and inexpensive user interface that works with most popular programs. That alone is enough to guarantee consumer support to make it the de facto standard of the personal computer market."

Shortly after its release, PC Magazine gushed of Windows 1.0: "If you’ve ever complained about DOS and envied those more skillful at reaping its inherent productivity bonuses, Windows is just what you need. It makes dealing with DOS a snap and opens up all sorts of new possibilities. Once you try it, unless you’re already a DOS master, you’ll wonder how you ever got along in DOS without it."

Do these words stem from the lowered expectations of a DOS-addled world? Are they the product of computer journalists practicing the power of positive thinking? Or was Windows 1.0 not as bad as legend has it?

Follow the Money with Where Is George

I received a five-dollar bill with a URL written along the top: www.whereisgeorge.com.

That's George as in Washington, man on the U.S. one-dollar bill. The site is a collective exercise in tracking individual bills as they circulate. You can enter the serial number and series number of any major U.S. bill.

I did so for the bill with the URL on it. The bill had previously been tracked in Portland, Oregon, 20 days before. It had traveled an average of 25 miles per day.

The Oregonian who entered the bill had a profile. He is the night manager of an inn, and thus sees a lot of new bills. He has entered more than 1,000 bills, with only 8 follow-on hits so far. I'm number nine. The site will automatically notify him of the location I entered for the bill.

Take a look at one of the site's all-time distance leaders: a bill that as of November 2005 has traveled more than four thousands miles over three years. Starting from the northern tip of Michigan, it went west to Panguitch, Utah, then south to the western tip of Florida, by way of several stops in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Having subsequently been tracked in Kentucky and Tennessee, its latest sighting was Dayton, Ohio.

To do my bit for the collective effort, I entered the other two bills in my wallet at the time. Follow the money.

Livening Up Asexual-Fungus Research

Earlier this week, Imperial College London issued a press release about research on Penicillium marneffei, an asexual fungus. In this context, asexual means an organism reproduces without a mate, cloning itself.

In what must have been a desperate attempt to get Cosmopolitan magazine to pick up their story, they titled the press release "Lack of sex could be a signpost to extinction, claim researchers."

For the record, here it is.

Word of the Day: Deroach

I came across the word deroach back in my SRI days, when we often talked to people from the cable industry. At least in some parts of that industry, deroach referred to the process of refurbishing a set-top box after it had been returned by a customer. (Example: "Those boxes need deroaching.")

Apparently, analog set-top boxes of the day sometimes ended up as unintentional roach motels, and thus the term. Unlike the better known debug, which brings to mind thoughtful diagnosis of a subtle problem, deroach is thoughtless disposal of an obvious problem—shake 'em out and move on.

I'm blogging this topic because when I searched Google for deroach, I was surprised to find only references to the word as a name for places and people. So for future searchers of the non-name deroach, perhaps you will find your answer in this entry.

And for the rest of you who have inadvertently read this far, that concludes today's intersection of electronics, entomology, and etymology.

Bubble Calibration Instrument

Post the 2005 Web 2.0 conference, angst is rising about whether irrational exuberance has returned. In an effort to address this situation, I have designed a Bubble Calibration Instrument, pictured below.

Naming In Need Of Taming

Amid China's real-estate boom, new housing developments are appearing with aspirational names like "Aladdin Gardens" and "White House Mini District." Alarmed that many of these names have a foreign influence, the city of Kunming is taking action. As reported in China Daily:

"The fashion for foreign sounding names on buildings is a loss to native culture and reflects poor taste," [Kunming Communist Party Secretary] Yang said in remarks reported by the official Xinhua News Agency. "We must correct this practice immediately."

So does the French government have a new ally in the battle against cultural imperialism? Sort of. Turns out the policy's casualties will include "Paris of the East Plaza" and "French Gardens."

In related news, I was recently talking to someone from China who mentioned "Tycoon City" and "Live Like a Kaiser" as further candidates for housing developments with naming in need of taming.

High-Definition Lettuce

In terms of lettuce, I grew up a member of the Iceberg Generation. Our lettuce was a greener shade of pale, but what it lacked in taste it made-up in crispness. On sandwiches, that crispness broke the mouthfeel monotony of Oscar Meyer mystery meat on Wonder bread. But if one were to experience iceberg lettuce as the featured attraction, such as in a "salad," it was just roughage.

In the past decade, the U.S. population has begun an ascent up the lettuce hierarchy of needs. Where once our ancestors foraged only for iceberg at the local supermarket, now they return with a plenitude of choices: hail-caesar romaine, post-Popeye spinach, the weedeater's frisee, and other varieties with code-names like "arugula" and "butterhead."

As a habitant of Northern California, epicenter of lettuce actualization, I bring a report from the future. One of the best restaurant dishes I ever had was a recent salad. It was a small head of organic butter lettuce and a simple mustard-vinaigrette dressing. That's it. No croutons, no crumbled feta, no nothing.

If iceberg lettuce was like black and white television, and typical Northern California organic greens are like color TV, this was high-definition lettuce. Beyond that phrase, I won't try to relate the experience. My only point is to say that the trend toward better lettuce continues, not just in variety but in taste. So if you see a suspiciously spartan lettuce dish at a high-quality restaurant, try it.

(For the record, my butter-lettuce epiphany dish was at a San Francisco restaurant called La Suite, corner of Embarcadero and Brannan.)

It's Like Golf But with a Shotgun

I'd like to thank Eli Marcus, who in a recent conversation enlightened me to the existence of "sporting clays." When I heard, "It's like golf but with a shotgun," I had to know more.

Turns out his description was not an embellishment. Wikipedia's Sporting Clays article tell us:

"Sporting Clays is a clay pigeon shooting sport. Often described as golf with a shotgun, the sport differs from skeet and trap shooting in that it involves shooting clays at various locations which are launched at different velocities and angles."

Over to the Sporting Clays Magazine FAQ for a little extra color:

"With variations in trap position, trap speed, shooting position, and flight paths of different types of clay pigeons, targets can come through the trees, from under your feet, straight down, over your head, quartering, going away, left to right, right to left, and in any path a real bird might choose. The key words are unpredictable, variable, and sometimes bordering on impossible."

If bass fishing can be a televised sport, and my cable system has 500+ channels, I'm wondering what kind of market failure is responsible for the lack of sporting clays coverage on TV.