"It's not the heat, it's the humidity", remarked Greg, a tall lanky farm helper person.

"It's not the balminess, it's the barometer", replied Sherilynn, a young intern working her first summer on the farm.

"It's not about the dog days, it's about the dew point", chimed in Mr. Ampleciovore, whose sun-work wrinkled skin were a testament to the countless summers he'd spent in these fields exchanging these same platitudes with generations past of interns and farm guys, many of whom had come and gone while he remained.

The farmer, whose name was Dave, had received his degree in farming 20 years ago and reflected back fondly on his days in farming university where'd be learn about farming every day from people who knew enough about farming to teach him about farming. He paused and stared at Greg, Sherilynn and Mr. Ampleciovore for a moment.

"These vegetables aren't going to harvest themselves!", he shouted in a voice loud enough to make even his great great grand-pappy stir in his grave. Which incidentally was like 100 feet away from where they were getting ready to go out and do some legit grade-A first-class farm work.

They realized he was right and grabbed their tools and went off into the field to do farm stuff using those tools.

---

Later that day, after they'd plowed and picked and plowed and picked, Dave realized it was just about time to wrap up the day and settle down in the big house for a nice hearty dinner of stew that he'd eat right before he polished his shoes or polished his rifle, depending on which looked like they needed to be polished more. He walked around the area of the people to see which people were done with their veggies and who had more to do.

Greg and Mr. Ampleciovore were both done with their farm stuff, and they took Dave's approach as a symbol that the day was done, stopping to wipe their brows only briefly before they hopped into the cool air conditioned cab of farmer Dave's Ford F-250 pickup truck with more torque and greater towing capacity than other truck in it's class.

Dave approached Sherilynn, who like I said before was still an intern and thus didn't know the name of all the vegetables yet.

"Sherry", Dave said, "you almost done?"

"Almost", she replied, "I've just got a few more of those really heavy green things to pluck out".

"Ah yes, those sure are cumbersome, let me give you a hand" said Dave. He then did indeed give her a hand if you catch my meaning and I think you do.

---

Years later, after she'd become a doctor of philosophy and was teaching her undergraduate class the ins and outs of thinking about thinking, one of her students asked Sherilynn what she did for her internships back in the day when she was younger and not yet a professor. She thougth about it for a second, and then told them something quite extraordinary.

"Well, I don't like to brag, but one summer I spent working at a farm and that led to me being the inventor of a vegetable."

"What in the sam hell are you talking about?!", remarked Buster Douglas, a student in her class (not the former boxing champion, just a different guy with that name).

So she told them the story about the fateful day when Dave had helped her with those last few veggies, and she'd misheard him when he said "those sure are cumbersome", thinking he said "some tough cumbers". Then later that night while Dave was all alone, full of stew, polishing his rifle, Sherilynn was sitting on the back porch with Greg, remniscing about the time just a few hours ago when they'd been plucking some lush verdent plants out of god's green earth.

"Oh yeah, what was that tough challenge you had at the end of the day?", asked Greg.

"Oh that?", sighed Sherilynn, "that was just a little queue of cumbers I had to deal with."

“And that class, is how the cucumber got its name”, remarked Sherilynn as she finished her story.

Separately, I was thinking about Plato’s “platonic ideals” — ie, things where you have like this perfect idea of a tree which is never realized in actuality, but then some actual trees which are realized in the world but fall short of the perfect tree-ness of the platonic ideal of the tree. One shortfall here is that you could never have a platonic ideal (in the literalist sense of a thing where Plato personally contemplated the ideal of the thing) for anything invented after Plato was dead, which is a while ago now. Like, for example — the Watt steam engine — there’s not a platonic ideal of that bad boy because it wasn’t invented in time for Plato to think about. Huh.

Thirdly, people often ask me about Jeff Bezos and his rockets, and my whole thing is — I remember when Bill Gates was the world’s primary software billionaire and everyone was going around saying things like “Gill Bates” as a fake name for him. I feel like you don’t see nearly the amount of “Beff Jezos” or “Zark Muckerberg” (for example) as you did with “Gill Bates”. I’m not even sure how you could research this. Maybe I’m just not in the circles w here these things are being said. Maybe the 90s was a time where we did more name flipping? I’m not sure.

Finally, I watched the Olympics opening ceremonies Friday night with a bunch of children and at one point they were like “Wait this makes no sense” and I thought yes that’s exactly correct, you now understand the opening ceremonies. We tried to promise them that later on in the next few weeks there’d be actual sports but I think they are probably convinced that it’s all just conceptual art and they’re not sure whether there will actually be track and field and swimming and so on.

And of course I’m really digging how someone on the Japan Olympic organization was like “yeah, you know how we had all those ‘Tokyo 2020’ signs printed?….let’s just keep those” and there were like 18 other people in that meeting just biting their tongues sort of wanting to convey that it was technically 2021 now but also not wanting to make the sign guy mad and have to totally redo his job.

With the games of the XXXII Olympiad merely a week or so away many people are coming down with a nasty case of OLYMPICS FEVER. Symptoms include an insatiable desire to watch live sports — but specifically only events which you don’t fully grasp and only watch once every four years. At a time with record heat waves, floods, and a global pandemic in play at the same time, this year’s OLYMPIC FEVER could be one of the worst in generations.

Here are some tips if any of your loved ones start exhibiting signs. First, make sure you have access to an appropriate cable or broadband subscription to watch the games. For US viewers, this probably means you have some way to watch NBC directly, or friggin PEACOCK, apparently. Second, if you have any old gym mats, yoga mats, thick blankets, etc - lay these out all over your living room floors. Younger viewers are particularly susceptible to the gymnastics events and will just straight up launch themselves into the floor if left unattended for a moment. Third, it’s a well known fact that all top shelf athletes drink Michelob ULTRA with every meal; so stock up if you want to show solidarity with your team.

I feel like I heard this idea somewhere and am now stealing it, so don’t give me credit for this, but here’s what the Olympics should be — just build a really stellar world class facility for the Olympics in Greece itself. Every Olympics is held there from now on. No one else ever bids on Olympics or builds new stadiums that are then either torn apart or never used again. We can get a lot of bribery done during the construction of the Greece facilities, and avoid the future bribery that would occur during future bidding and construction in other cities. In non-olympic years you can use these facilities for training or other world championships. Greece and it’s neighbors get like a perpetual tourism bump from this, but that’s because they invented the Olympics so we give them this as an award.

Separately, I’d like to see more laying of olive wreaths on people’s heads in circumstances outside of athletic victories. Let’s say you’re having your annual review with your boss and they tell you you’ve done a nice job and not only are you getting a 5% pay increase and a “Senior” in your title, but you’re getting a one-time bonus of $10k and you’re also getting an olive wreath placed on your head by YOUR BOSS’S BOSS! Man that would be a nice morning, huh?

Things were going fine until the seal broke

Due to the circumstances of my professional past, my social media circles have become more or less full of people talking about things like building software correctly, managing software developers correctly, investing in businesses, selling businesses, being a venture capitalist, how to build a great team, how to measure a SaaS business, etc. This is all good and well, but I struggle to enjoy it as “content”. It’s fine, and there are certainly better or worse ways to do this stuff … but I sort of know the arguments and sides of arguments and it’s become utterly exhausting to consume content where the actually-correct position of “well, it depends” never gets uttered and instead you get passionate attacks on strawman’d positions instead.

Anyway, what I have come to find utterly enjoyable is finding a person with a passion about a thing that I don’t know about and which seems sort of boring and like you can’t possible have a strong opinion about … and just listen to them go. Last week we had our pool pump replaced. The old one was sort of dying and was very loud and was a single speed pump; the new one is a quieter more efficient variable speed pump. Prior to having a guy install the pump, I thought those were the only facts I needed to know … but boy was I wrong. He spend maybe 15 minutes on my doorstep just passionately regaling me with facts about this new pump. Keep in mind that he was not selling this to me — I’d already bought it and he’d already installed it. It was a hot day and by all measures he should have been hopping back into his pool guy van and leaving my house - but instead he just went on and on about this pool pump. Very satisfying.

I was thinking about those “in case of emergency, break glass” boxes that have like panic buttons or fire extinguishers or emergency stop levers or pull fire alarms or whatever behind them.

At first this seems like a bad interface, because you’ve put an extra hurdle between a person in an emergency and a thing to help them in their emergency. But then you think wait that’s actually good - it should be slightly difficult to do so you don’t accidentally push the button. But then you think but wait sure ok it shouldn’t be easy to mistakenly do it, but a piece of glass?! - you’re going to cut your hand on that thing! But then you think no wait that’s actually good — we’ve increased the stakes for “is this an emergency?” to include “is it sufficiently an emergency such that I will bear the risk of cutting my hand on a bunch of broken glass as I deal with the emergency?”, which I guess is good.

I wonder if places that have these little boxes have an annual budget for replacing the broken glass from their emergency boxes? I feel like if you had 10 boxes in your facility and you found yourself replacing more than like 2-3 or them in a given year you’d have to confront the unfortunate reality that either a) you were running an utterly dangerous incompetent operation which had regular emergencies; or b) your staff had been insufficiently trained in the art of identifying emergencies and were treating situations which were merely stressful or serious as also being emergencies.

Hard to sleep well at night with that knowledge isn’t it?

In a famous SNL skit which is a pretend episode of Behind the Music depicting the recording of the song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult Christopher Walken performs as music producer "The Bruce Dickinson" and comically interacts with the inclusion of a cowbell on the song. At one point he declares that “I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell”. This sketch is amusing, but it got me to thinking — could you solve a fever with more cowbell?

I asked a bunch of leading geneticists, and their conclusion was surprising. It turns out you actually could selectively breed a population of people and — after a lot of waiting and trials and tribulations — you could use evolution via natural selection to arrive at a second population of people for whom the sound of a cowbell did indeed reduce their fever. I guess technically in this case you are using artificial selection because you are handpicking who will survive based on their ability to reduce their fever when a cowbell is played.

This experiment would be utterly horrific. The costs involved would be astronomical. You’d essentially be perpetrating a genocide against non-cowbell-respondents many many times over. You’d have to invest what I’m guessing would be thousands of years in this experiment, assuming you are using human subjects and not otherwise accelerating their reproductive cycles.

There’s literally no way any responsible IRB process would let an experiment like this go through.

Rising from the ashes, we found another pile of ashes elsewhere in the room

One common tool used in the world of statistics is that of a “Monte Carlo” simulation. In a scenario where you have multiple interacting data pieces and you can assign some weights or values to each one, you might run a Monte Carlo simulation to give some sense of the ranges of expected outcomes, given those inputs. This is often used in financial projections, for example — you give the simulation some baseline values and a range of performance over time — and then the simulator uses randomness (and potentially many runs) to give you an expected future outcome.

It sort of makes sense that if there’s a Monte Carlo simulation … there should also be a Monte Cristo simulation, right? You’d give a chef some baseline values to use around the relative portion of ham, egg, cheese, bread, etc — and by using an RNG that they keep in their kitchen they’d produce a sandwich for you.

Similarly, it might be cool to have a Count of Monte Cristo simulation, where a promising young sailor is promoted to be the captain of a ship, but then you use a random number generator to figure out what goes wrong in regard to various crimes he could be accused of or other ways which his life could take a turn for the worse.

When I first heard the term “fly by wire” in reference to flying airplanes, my initial reaction was that it seemed like connecting a wire to your plane and using it to fly the plane would severely limit the range of your airplane. I was picturing something sort of like the toy remote controlled cars which are not radio-controlled, but which have a wire between the controller and the car, thus limiting the range of the car to roughly one wire length away from the controller.

As it turns out, what fly-by-wire actually means is that the various components of the plane — flaps, wings, ailerons, spoilers, slats, stabilizers, rudders, the food cart, the overhead bins, fuselage, landing gear, cockpit, in-flight entertainment, etc — are all controlled by electrical signal by the aviators instead of by direct mechanical control. I think an analogy hear is power steering in cars … instead of having a 1:1 mechanical force mapping of the driving turning the steering wheel and the tires on the car turning, there is some sort of hydraulic force multiplier piece in the middle there such that you can get more turning radius per muscle energy.

I think one other benefit of fly by wire is that you can also give the plane “goals” instead of instructions. Like you can say “go over that mountain” and then have the plane translate that into actual movements of the flaps and beverage cart or whatever is needed.

Anyway I think a cool experiment for someone would be to try out even more variations of flying by wire! In one scenario maybe instead of electrical signals you could keep the same general mapping of the wires, but use the sort of ropes and strings that a marionette controller might use to guide their puppet in a performance. Another cool one could be like a “sky hook” sort of technology where the plane would be suspended by a wire from an even-higher up plane. And what is keeping that higher plane up in the air … you guessed it, another wire attached to a higher plane. In a third example you could have a guy make a suit out of wires and shape them into wings or something and try to actually fly around with the wires.

Lots of options on this one. Ripe for disruption.

Bubbling up versus simmering down?!

Whenever a guy says something like “oh hey, I heard you were in my old stomping grounds the other day?!” and then tries to talk to you about the neighborhood part of me is like “ok yeah this guy just wants to talk about the place he lived in his mid 20s and reminisce about the time he lived there”, but another part of me wants to sit him down in a “hot seat” and grill him as to how many places in that neighborhood he literally STOMPED ON while he was living there, and wether that’s sufficient stomping to refer to the area as his old stomping grounds.

Here’s a future-proofing piece of advice for anyone still in their early or mid 20s … wherever you are living right now, if it’s a place where you go out to bars and restaurants and coffee places and meet other single people and get up to all sorts of antics — you should make a point of going out one day and literally stomping all around the neighborhoods in question. This way, decades from now when you in turn are telling some youngsters about the place you used to live and one of them has the gall to question whether you literally stomped there, you can be like “Ha! I prepared for just this moment!” and you can confirm that you did in fact stomp on the grounds.

The region of La Mancha, in central Spain, famously has a bunch of windmills in it, as catalogued by Miguel de Cervantes in his early 1600s work The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. In the story the main guy (the titular Quixote, pronounced Quicks-Oat-Eeee or Key-Oh-Tee depending on your disposition) at one point sees a bunch of windmills and believing they are his enemies tries to battle them via jousting. This is where the English idiom “tilting at windmills” comes from (to battle imaginary enemies).

I bet there are a lot of people in La Mancha who just happen to live near some windmills and get some free tourism business from this history. Someone writes a story like 400 years ago and you reap a modern day windfall by setting up a diner on the road to some of the windmills featured in the story.

On the other hand, I wonder if there are people there who are sick of looking at the windmills and want to put in like a golf course or nuclear power plant or something instead, only to be rebuffed every time by the local tourism and historical councils who insist that the windmills be kept around. Cervantes may not have known it when he was writing his story, but he’s condemned the region to always be covered in windmills, even if they fall out of fashion. I hope that whenever he introduced himself to people he used a James Bond voice and said “Cervantes … Miguel Cervantes” and then ordered a cocktail in an oddly specific way or whatever.

There’s probably other stuff like this too. Like if you were walking around a random path in the woods in Germany and came across a tiny house made purely of candy, you’d probably need an elaborate permitting process to even consider knocking that thing down and building something more modern in its place.

There’s a surplus of ammunition but a shortage of poetry

I was trying to think of some useful metrics to determine whether I was patronizing a small or local business (as opposed to a large business or chain). One thing I came up with is this — if in the middle of whatever you were buying the person helping you got a phone call and just stopped whatever they were doing to answer the phone (and you were totally fine with this!) you are probably in a small business. I think this checks out for a variety of experiences.

If you’re in a local haircut place with like 1 or 2 people working and in the middle of getting a haircut the phone rings and the person who had been cutting your hair JUST STOPS to go answer the phone, this is probably a local business. I suspect that at larger chains this does not happen. There’s either a person answering the phone or the phone gets ignored. Same thing with cafes. If I’m at a Starbucks and the barista stops to answer the phone in the middle of talking to me … that would seem very weird and I’d be sort of surprised. But if I was in my local shoppe instead, I’d almost be surprised if they didn’t take the call. Hell, I might even grab the phone for them and answer it if they were busy grinding some beans or whatever.

Fans of folk music will sometimes discuss the time when Bob Dylan first “went electric” in 1965 at a music festival. Prior to that he had not been electric. He had been non-electric. He was just Bob Dylan and not ELECTRIC DYLAN. There’s like, a whole controversy about this.

My concern is that when discussing this topic phrases like “Dylan went electric” or “Dylan goes electric” or “Dylan plugged in” and so on are always used. No one ever says “that first time Bob Dylan publicly performed with an electric guitar”, even though that’s what (I think!?) they mean. To my knowledge Bob Dylan was before — and remained so after this moment — an organic creature who generates energy by consuming food which has converted sunlight into usable free energy just like the rest of us. He didn’t turn into a friggin robot on some random night in July 1965 and henceforth run on battery power or something. He’s still flesh and blood, a mere mortal. I’d like to see these articles stop talking about how he “went electric”.

Electric cars on the other hand have indeed gone electric. Their ancestors burned fossil fuels but through the power of positive thinking and with evolution via natural selection of random mutations, the current crop of electric cars use electric power batteries instead of burning fuels in their engine chambers. It’s possible of course that the thing which put that electricity into their battery was more of an organic burning process and not a purely electrical one of course. You can’t expect every car to know where every single calorie in its diet comes from.

I guess Bob Dylan is the same way. Maybe he BELIEVED that he had gone fully electric and converted into some sort of futuristic android at that point in time? But what’s sort of weird about that is that at this point 1965 was ~55 years ago, and it must be really dispiriting to Bob Dylan to have this self-awareness that despite himself having gone electric decades ago the vast vast majority of his contemporaries and colleagues and fellow performers — not to much a few generations of totally new people born since then — have not yet gone electric, and are mostly still just walking around eating biomass for fuel, just as they did before he went electric.

When the FBI or other police forces are about to perform a raid or serve a warrant or whatever, they’ll group up outside the house of the target and do a cool power move where they flip down or velcro on a little flap on their jacket which previously appeared as normal jacket but now says “FBI” or “POLICE” or “FEDERAL AGENT” or whatever on it in prominent letters.

I think this is done because if you put all your FBI guys in jackets that say FBI on them, they can just look around and see the other FBI guys by looking at their jackets. If you see a guy in a not FBI jacket, they are more likely to be a random bystander, or maybe part of your target. It might also help if you have a fancy dress shirt on to be able to throw a cheap windbreaker over it and avoid getting ketchup stains on your dress shirt.

I feel like if I were a criminal in a place trying to avoid being raided, I’d either a) acquire a bunch of flip-down FBI raid jackets of my own and wear them inside my crime den; or b) post someone to keep an eye out for guys who have suspiciously flip-down-able windbreakers on mulling around outside our crime den.

I’d like to see more collections of guys standing around adopt a policy like this. Like if you’ve got a street crew that’s about to pave a road or maintain a sewer line or something … maybe you could have them all pool up just outside the perimeter of the side, and then wait for some main leader person to be like “go go go! breach!” or whatever, and then you all flip down your “ROAD WORK” floppies over your windbreakers and just go in and attack that work site.

Or like, if you run a cafè maybe you have your whole staff just casually sitting around mixed in with the rest of the customers enjoying their own lattes and croissants or whatever. Then at some point a customer wanders in and they’re looking around and they’re like “what the hell is no one working here?” because they don’t see anyone behind the counter. Then your maitre’d is like “go go go! breach!” or something and all your baristas jump up from their mixed in positions and flip down things which say “BARISTA” and they go and serve that person.

We examined the patient and found no signs of triumph

The idea of a “Faustian Bargain” (or “deal with the devil”) is used to describe when a person is making some sort of moral or values compromise in order to get some wealth or knowledge that they want. This originates from a German story about Faust — which was apparently based on an actual German guy named Faust! — where the titular Faust trades his soul with the devil in order to get things he wants.

Looking at the chronology here, it looks like the actual historical figure of Faust was already dead before any of the folk legends about Faust started circulating; but of course he was accomplished and well known enough that his life could serve as fodder for these stories.

I wonder if the subsequent familial estate of future Fausts ever got really mad about this association? Like maybe their ancestor (the original, for the purposes of the tales, Faust) was actually an incredibly shrewd wheeler and dealer and made tons of really sweet bargains and trades in his life time. Like he was a pre-internet version of that guy who traded the red paperclip for the house. He was a ruthless negotiator and almost always got the better of his counterparts. But then these tales get circulated and he winds up being known for this one dumb mistake he allegedly made where he trades his soul for a bunch of stuff commonly deemed to be not worth trading your soul for, and all of a sudden it’s like everyone forgets about his previously stellar performance buying low and selling high, as it were.

I’m not sure what grounds they’d have to seek compensation for these damages. Perhaps some small portion of the collective pool of revenues derived from German folk tales could be put into some sort of reparations fund or something? There’s a ton of German folk tales so it seems like even a small piece of this action might alleviate the harm done.

I’ve been listening to an audiobook about various ideas in physics. Part of how you talk about ideas in physics is to give a history of ideas in physics. Because of this aspect, they wind up talking about Newton and Einstein and other historical guys quite a bit.

Newton famously poked his own eyeball with a stick to figure out how light and optics and vision work. I didn’t learn that from this book, though - it’s just a thing I know about from other sources (aka other books which were not this one) and now it’s a thing you know too.

A great thing about thing about this particular book that I keep changing my mind on what I think about is that nearly every time they mention a thing Einstein thought of or had an opinion about, they say something like “Einstein, who at the time was working at a patent clerk in Bern Switzerland, believed that…” or “Einstein, from his desk at the patent office in Bern, realized that…” or “Einstein, merely a patent examiner at the time, nonetheless…” or things like that. It’s sort of insane the number of times the author of the book makes the choice to keep re-mentioning this fact about Einstein. I think it makes sense to say it at least once as a matter of what the hell was Einstein historically up to … maybe even twice to drive home the point of “look this is not a guy hanging out in some eminent university department, he’s just doing his job” or whatever. But geez, after like the fifth time it starts to become a bit much.

One theory I’ve got is that someone the author (who is a physicist in a physics department, and not a patent clerk as far as I can tell) is friends with issued him some sort of dare or challenge to see how many times he could fit this into the book. Another idea is maybe there was some sort of copy editing or proofreading mistake and some intern just copied and pasted this text about Bern and the patent office all over the place. Another idea is that one or more parties involved in writing the book have some sort of personal romantic connection to Bern or to patent offices and that repeating that location gives them some sort of broad emotional calm or something.

The first time I read it I was like “ah yes, that’s right, this is a historical fact we all know about Einstein and the author has mentioned it here for any reader who happens to not know this already”. Then the next time I was like “ok cool you’ve conveyed that he’s doing this unprecedented thinking and discovery from a quaint place”. But as the mentions kept racking up beyond that I started to hate it. Every time Einstein would come up part of me was just listening to the actual words in the book but some little subprocess in my brain was building up in anticipation of the moment of fury and indignation I would react with if indeed the author chose to once again mention how Einstein was a patent clerk in Bern Switzerland.

I must confess though that there were some moments where I tried to embrace the idea of describing things like that. Like say you were reading a book about Natalie Portman and the author kept saying something like “Natalie, who at age 10 was spotted in a pizza restaurant by a Revlon agent and asked to become a model, believes that…” over and over again. You’d probably think this was weird at first, then you’d hate, then you’d want it to stop, then you’d eventually embrace it.

Separately, I genuinely do not understand many of the ideas in this audiobook. I get the feeling that you sometimes hit a point where the math makes sense to people who understand the math, but they are collectively unable to bring whatever the hell the math told them back to the everyday language and simple metaphors world. It makes the reading experience sort of frustrating, because my reaction to some attempted metaphor is like “this is too stupid and obviously inaccurate a metaphor for someone so intelligent to have attempted to use”. Basically all of our language and experiences are centered around a slow-moving, basically Newtonian worldview, and trying to move outside of that seems to be a struggle. Alternately, they are utterly brilliant metaphors and I am failing to grasp them.

Separately, I suspect there’s some kid in like 8th grade with a last name of Maxwell and every time they learn about “Maxwell’s equations” or whatever all his buddies are like “haha, Jimmy, they’re talking about your equations!”.

Separately, it must be a big challenge to be an attractive college lady in an anatomy class. I bet every time you try to invite someone over to “study for the anatomy test” they think you’re using some sort of euphemism and are inviting them over for a romantic liaisön. It must be maddening.

Re-calibrating the citrus squeezer should be done while wearing goggles

I bet there was a police department at some point who used police dogs as part of their law enforcement operations and then separately was in the process of coming up with standardized names for everything they do, and so they hired a naming consultant to assist with their re-org.

What I’d love to know is if the naming consultant just sat down right away and on the very first afternoon was just like “Sweet Moses, I’ve got it! — K-9!” and told everyone right away? Or maybe it took weeks to stew on that one while he was naming all the other stuff? Maybe he thought of it on the very first day but decided to keep his cards close to the vest and not say it out loud right away, opting instead to milk the contract for all it was worth and pretend to be working for another or whatever before dropping that cool new name on the chief who hired him.

Some puns are kind of stupid and you’d just sort of groan at the person and not actually use the pun, but I bet for “K-9” they were just like oh man this is utterly perfect and cannot be improved and we are 100% without a doubt going to proceed with using this name because it fits exactly the scenario we have on hand here.

The “historical fiction” genre is one where an author will take an actual historical event or era, and place a story within it. Typically they will stick to the facts in terms of the broad themes and sequences of whatever happened, but insert their own fictional (yet plausible) characters into the story to help move things along or make them interesting.

For example, maybe you’d have a story about Paul Revere’s ride within the larger context of the American Revolution. You’d keep the facts about Paul, the other historical figures of the time, the general timeline and route of his famous ride and so on all historically accurate — but then you’d make up some random family who lived along the route and have a whole bunch of stuff happen to them to give you a hypothetical everyman sort of angle on how the larger historical events that get remember might have experienced things at the time.

I think a cool new genre would be one where you totally flip this around. For example, maybe you’d find some insanely detailed diary of the day to day life of a random family from an era in history in which basically nothing consequential happened. Then, you’d treat this family diary the same way you typically treat the notable history … and you’d just straight up invent some large earth shaking events “out of whole cloth” as the saying goes.

In the normal historical fiction genre the readers of a novel might be like “I know I’m supposed to be focused on the details of Paul Revere’s ride here … but geez, the trouble that little Sally is having on the farm while she tries to learn how to churn butter and wrestle a steer at the same time is just captivating!”; where in bizzaro historical fiction novels the readers would be like “I know I’m supposed to be focused on the emotional decisions aunt edna has to make here about which patterns to use in her quilt, but wow do I find the side story about how the invention of the electric unicycle won the First World War just utterly compelling!”.

The shirts you keep at the bottom of the pile are wrinkled by now

In our modern era of computers and podcasts, one frequent technique to employ on a BOOK TOUR is for an author to go around and do interviews on lots of podcasts right around the time their book is coming out. I guess this makes sense and you probably try to hit podcasts which are topically relevant to whatever your book is about, and maybe cater the discussion slightly to hit whatever that audience cares about, assuming there’s not total overlap with your book.

I’ll occasionally have a thing where within the list of podcasts I’m regularly listening to multiple of them will all have on the same author who is promoting the same book around the same time and then I’ll wind up listening to basically the same conversation multiples times. The author will use the same anecdote with multiple interviewers!

This is probably not new. Comedians famously used to have literally just one “act” and they’d sometimes tour for years doing effectively the same set of jokes and stories in city after city because the people in Atlanta had basically zero access to the people in Austin, so the Venn diagram of people who’d have already heard that set was pretty small. Of course the internet sort of changed that and now you’ve gotta be more selective, I guess?

Anyway the point here is that whenever I see that multiple of my podcasts are having the same author on to promote their new book, I think of a bunch of things. First, I worry that I’ve created my own little content bubble or silo where I must be listening to too many similar things if they are all having the same person on. Maybe I should be broadening my subscriptions to get more hot takes from the “other side” or whatever.

But then I think no wait — maybe I should be looking up all the other podcasts that this author also did the same interview on, and also go subscribe to those! Maybe the signal of being on 2-3 of my regular podcasts is a bit of a tip-off for my and I can use “did you interview this person?” as a good proxy vote for a thing I might also be interested in.

But then I also have this incredible tension between “Sweet Jesus this is going to be so boring listening to basically the same conversation three times in a row” on the one hand and “But wait, this will be cool to see which of these hosts can do the most bang-up job of interviewing this same person?!”. It’s like a standardized test because they’re all dealing with the same guest and content. It’s like one of those things where multiple people wear the same dress to a fancy event and then the fashion magazinēs can do a “who wore it best” featurette on the event itself.

I was thinking about going into someone’s house and re-labeling all the spice jars in their spice drawer or spice rack or wherever they keep their spices.

I think for some people they’d see the humor in this and be like “ha! all my spices have the wrong labels now!” and they’d really just roll with it. Maybe over time they’d learn the mapping from wrong label to actual spice in the jar and be able to operate more or less intact, even though any guest chefs operating in their kitchenétte would struggle to make sense of it all.

Other people would be like hey that’s sort of messed up I had really labeled all of those nicely and was in a groove with my spices and you just messed it up. They’d be a little disappointed in you and also upset with you. Maybe they’d go stew or brood in their room for a while.

What I’m not sure about is how to put an objective assessment on the act of relabeling someone’s spices that is removed from the subjective reaction that the prank-ee (the person who has had their spices relabeled) has to the prank-er. Is it a funny thing to do? Is it a mean/jerk sort of thing to do? Can you make either of these statements in the absence of knowledge of how the person reacts? Is there just not an answer?

Within the field of philosophy of ethics that I work in, we have the ideas of consequentialism where the moral character of an act is judged by the impact it has — in this case, if the spice owning person reacted negatively the act would be bad; and if they reacted positively the act would be good — and the idea of deontology or virtue ethics, which would look at the person who initiated the act (the spice relabeler) and what their intentions were, regardless of what the reaction was.

Another angle to contemplate here is what if the person whose spices were being relabeled had anticipated that this might happen someday, and had preemptively and proactively replaced the entire contents of their spice drawer with the spices from the drawer of the person doing the relabeling?! In this case the tables are flipped or the tide is turned or something, and we have what the millennial call a “self own”, I think.

Ranking every acorn you’ve ever seen in your life

Despite what you see in films, within the firearms industry it is understood that gun “silencers” can’t actually make shooting a gun totally quiet so they are instead called “suppressors”. The degree of muffling/quieting that you can achieve will vary a bit and depends on the properties of the ammunition being used, the weapon itself, the surrounding environment, etc.

One fun thing that emerges here though, is that since people making movies are not actually firing guns at other people in the movies, any time there’s a scene with a silencer being used on a gun where they are pretending it actually makes the gun really quiet, it’s the job of some person to go back in and ADD SOUND to make the sound of what a movie silencer makes a gun sound like. It’s typically like a little “pew pew” or “pfft” sort of sound. I bet the person adding that sound in has lots of moments throughout the day where they’ve got to take a long hard look in the mirror and think about what they’re really doing here.

A cool product to make would be to make a really really effective gun silencer that muffled like 99% of the firing sound … but then put a tiny little speaker on the silencer that let the user customize the actual sound being made! If you wanted to license one of the in-film silencer “pfft” sounds you could do that. Aa fun thing to do would be to hire a couple 12 year old boys who had been “playing guns” to get into a sound studio and make their own “pew” and “uht-uht-uht-uht-uht” (semi-automatic) noises, and then export these as high quality FLAC files that people could load onto their Alexa-powered Smart silencers.

Rock musician Joe Strummer (of The Clash fame) was born in 1952 and originally named John Graham Mellor. He changed his name to “Joe Strummer” in his 20s “as a joking reference to his self-taught guitar style”, according to the internet.

I bet this was a really weird time for his friends. At first they’d be like “yeah man good joke” … “We get it!” … “because you play the guitar!” … “you’re a strummer, we get it, you strum” and so on. But then reality would settle in and they’d see that while it was indeed a joking sort of nickname, the guy had actually changed his name legally to Joe Strummer and he was going to keep this name both as a stage name but also for correspondence on legal documents.

Maybe after they sat on it for a week or two they’d start to come around and be like you know what despite my initial skepticism and reaction to this joke of a name, I’ve come around and this is actually a bad-ass name, and this guy is going to spend decades just straight up strumming things, so this is a great name. But that would probably be short lived. A couple days later you’d be like geez what the hell is this guy doing this is the dumbest name.

And so it would go for decades as he rose in prominence and fame. You’d start second guessing yourself. Maybe you could have stopped this dumb name when it was still in its infancy? But then — what if you had?! Maybe part of his success came from the confidence he got having this dumb new name. I’m not sure where you’d ultimately come down on an issue like that. You’d probably eventually just have to shake your head and breathe a deep sigh and sort of move on.

I’d like to see people in other lines of work start doing stuff like this. If your name is John and you work on a concrete sidewalk pouring crew but you don’t do the truck part or the mixing part or the pouring part — you’re just the guy who uses the broom at the end to give the sidewalk that nice textured look — maybe you could start calling yourself “Joe Sweeper” or something. The other guys on your crew would be like yeah I guess that’s technically what he does but it’s just a part of the larger thing we’re all pulling off here together, right?

The lines for the recital were easy to remember and hard to forget

I may have said this here before, but one thing I’ve realized living in the suburbs the last few years is how horrible a mistake it was to have created the suburbs. The trees were totally fine here! We didn’t have to screw it up with all these houses. There are people just constantly mowing their lawns and blowing leaves around. I get why they do it, but it feels so ultimately futile.

Your lawn is going to eventually defeat you. It is not a winnable battle. The leaves will keep piling up. A tree will like SORT OF fall down and then you’ll have to deal with that.

Anyway I think a cool business idea would be to start an UNLIKELY LANDSCAPING business. People would hire you to take care of their yards but you’d use exclusively unproven and esoteric methods to attempt to maintain things.

Maybe one week you bring some meditation gurus with you and they just sit on the customer’s lawn and try to will the blades of grass into cutting themselves. Another week instead of bringing a lawn mower you bring like a spork instead and see how far you can get with that as your only tool. In week three you do bring a full retinue of lawn care tools, but instead of using them on the yard of your actual customer, you go to their neighbor’s house instead and really just manicure the hell out of it, hoping to “lead by example” and get the other house to follow suit. The possibilities are endless here.

Sometimes a person will refer to their spouse or dating person as their “partner in crime”. The implication here I suspect is that they are becoming involved in capers together, or going through some sort of other trials throughout life and doing so together.

I feel like unless you are committing actual crimes with your spouse you should not use this phrasing. Some day you might commit an actual crime and then when the feds track you down they’ll be like “look at this instagram post from 2016 where you referred to him as your partner in crime! obviously you are both guilty!” and they’ll just totally have you nailed. You won’t be able to talk your way out of that one.

On the other hand, if you genuinely are committing crimes with your spouse … maybe don’t announce that publicly? If you recall that episode of The Wire where that random drug gang guy is taking notes in their meeting and Stringer Bell had to reprimand him to not take notes during a meeting of a conspiracy … that was good advice!

If people had tails they’d walk down the street together holding tails instead of hands

A lot of YouTube channels and other short-to-medium length video content are in the form of explainers about things, or like a “how to” sort of thing about some topic which has at least a little variety to it. For example, you could make a “how to make coffee” or “how to fix your basement” channel, and there’d be like dozens of first and second order topics there for you to cover. There are a lot of ways to make coffee, and there are going to be a lot of sub-projects and mini-projects tucked away in any basement updating project.

I’d like to see more people pick topics that are a lot more constrained and see how many unique episodes they can make. For example a “how to button your shirt” channel or a “how to mail a letter” channel or something like that seems like it could really provide a nice constraint to operate within while trying to hit on some bigger ideas.

I just upgraded the software on my new TV

Here’s a free superpower you can easily grant yourself if you’re nervous or scared about doing something new or having a hard conversation or whatever … ask yourself “what’s the worst that could happen here?”

For many many situations (but not all!) the answer is usually something like “it would be sort of embarrassing for two minutes than I’d completely move on and everything would be fine”. Once you realize this it becomes a lot easier to do a lot more things.

A good chunk of the border of southern Pennsylvania is also known as the Mason-Dixon line; a line which was made by two guys (named Mason and Dixon!) to settle some colonial border disputes, and then later served as a sort of a proxy border for north/south in the US civil war.

If you were a direct descendant of either of these guys, or even if you were just some random person from a not directly related Mason or Dixon family — and you also lived in one of the Mid-Atlantic states near this line — I bet it would be super duper appealing to seek out a life partner with the opposite last name and then try to live in a town near that border.

Let’s say my name was John Mason and I lived in southern Pennsylvania. I’d go on an internet dating site, or even just Facebook, or even my local yellow pages, and just straight up start calling every family named Dixon and ask if they had any daughters of marriageable age. I’d try to meet as many as I could and then identify one of whom I could ask her hand in marriage. I’d eventually find one, let’s call her Betty-Sue Dixon.

I’d secretly go to her father and be like look I know it’s sort of old fashioned to ask for a lady’s dad’s permission to marry the lady in this modern time, but I’ve gotta loop you in on something — I’ve purchased a huge tract of land which straddles the Maryland/Pennsylvania border, and I plan on creating a massive compound there with your daughter. We will operate a pickle cannery and call it Mason-Dixon pickles; we will operate an AirBNB house named The Mason-Dixon House; we will have a pizzeria named The Mason-Dixon Pizza House, and inside we will have a “line” where people stand in order to purchase their pizzas. There will be no end to my obsession and I will bring your daughter with me down this mono-maniacal rabbit hole.

Then like a couple days later at bed time, Betty-Sue would be like “Hey John, I had sort of a weird conversation with my dad earlier today”, and this would be the moment of truth where everything I’d planned would either be dashed away or start coming to fruition, contingent on her reaction to the proposal I made to her father.

A paring knife knows best when to pare down a pear

One common activity for a couple who are “expecting” (a baby, that is) is to go around their house and start “baby proofing” it. You want to make sure anything you have that’s in the realm of sharp objects, sharp corners, super-delicate breakables, etc - all gets picked up and put away and generally battle hardened before your little bundle of joy shows up. This is one of those good for the goose and good for the gander activities. I guess your baby is the goose and your valuable objects are the gander? So you put things away and your baby doesn’t get an owie from your broken glass artwork — but also, your artwork can be put away safely before your little champ destroys it all.

Of course, if you’ve never had a baby before, you can’t really think like a baby. I guess you technically used to be a baby, but most of us can’t recall what happened during that time, let alone retro-empathize with our earlier selves to get back into the headspace you’d be in as a 10 month learning to pull yourself up and walk. Most people rely on advice from friends or baby books or whatever to instruct their baby proofing.

Here’s a really bad business idea, though … what if you could hire someone else’s baby to come do stuff in your house?! You’d give them like $100 and they’d come over for a play date and just have their little one play in your living space with utterly no constraints on their activity. When they finally get injured, you know that you’ve identified a source of possible injury for your own future baby — and in this hypothetical scenario you are willing to put a dollar amount on the health and safety of the other baby who is not your baby and let them get hurt so your little tiger doesn’t have to whenever they are finally born.

For the testing babies, not only are they getting compensated for their time (responsible parents would tuck these funds away for college), but getting repeatedly injured in stranger’s homes would build up an incredible sense of grit and fortitude, since whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I guess you’d want to be sure that you didn’t actually kill them.

Maybe over time if the babies did enough of this testing they’d develop a heightened sense of how to avoid injury. They’d come to have superhuman (age calibrated anyway) abilities at accident avoidance and be more agile than other babies.

I recently rewatched the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks and his buddies go rescue Matt Damon, the titular Private Ryan. It’s a pretty intense war film as far as these things go. I was reminded of this Quora post about how much money has been spent saving Matt Damon from places, which is really solid and holds up.

There’s one scene where a top military guy is in his office and the other top guys are talking to him about how 3 out of the 4 boys in a family have all been killed in the war (the brothers of Private Ryan) and they are debating whether they should go out there and retrieve Private Ryan or how to otherwise deal with this scenario. The main general guy sort of pauses mid conversation, walks over to a random file cabinet in his office, pulls out a letter and starts reading it. At the end of reading the letter he looks up and says “Abraham Lincoln, 1865” or something to convey that the letter he’s been reading from is from Abe himself.

On the one hand, I’m not sure that pulling random Abraham Lincoln letters out of your drawer is really the best guidance for a WWII general to use. Like, it had been ~75 years at that point and technology and war had really changed. I’m sure there are some eternal principles which hold true, but the military should not do a wholesale embrace of “pull out a random letter and do whatever it tells you to do” as a large scale doctrine.

On the other hand, I guess that’s sort of what a lot of religions are doing with their books? Some of the ideas in the books really do hold up over time and you can ignore their literal provenance and origin and just sort of take them as good advice. On the other hand, some of the ideas have become utterly stupid and not aged well and we should knock it off.

I guess my point here is that if you are looking for a top-tier, top-shelf, ace-level POWER MOVE to utterly devastate your coterie of military staff with — look no further than pulling out a random friggin letter from your office desk cabinet full of war letters. These guys were utterly floored and had no good come backs.

Part of me really likes the remote work culture that the pandemic has required and I’d be content to never have a commute again … but in addition to maybe having some nice lunch talks and office camaraderie with my co-workers again some day; there’s now a big part of me that wants to get an executive job somewhere, outfit my entire corporate suite with old mahogany furniture, cram it to the gills with old inspiring letters, and just sit in wait for the day that some young hot-shot MBA comes in with an Excel sheet to show me. I’d put that upstart right in his place by just reading him an old letter that I randomly had lying around.

We need to worry about the area under the curve, but also the shape of the curve itself

With all the official locking down and self-imposed quarantining of the last year, hospital ER visits are down by 42% from pre-pandemic measures of emergency visits. This is both because people are doing fewer things outside in large groups, and thus are doing fewer things which might lead to accidents in the first place; but it’s also because people who might have gone to the ER for their little owie are considering it not worth it to risk a hospital visit, and dealing with it themselves instead.

Since hospital ER visits are down, hospital ER revenue is also down. One cool scandal I’d like to see is that some hospital administrator got really worried about their declining ER revenue and then like, paid off some amoral street criminals to take out some basting brushes and vegetable oil and go around to a bunch of neighborhood playgrounds and just lightly coat all the slides and ladders and monkey bars with a little bit of oil. You could probably gin up some ER business that way.

Years ago I was involved in a trip across several states with a group of friends to see another mutual friend and attend a party or maybe series of parties near his home several states away residence. The trip there was fine and I bet we made some inside jokes. I don’t recall all the details.

At one point we arrived at what I’m remembering as a series of parties at someones house and immediately upon entering I saw a lady of my approximate age who was wearing a winter hat (we were indoors, I don’t think it was winter) with the name/logo of a band we liked. By “we” here I think I mean mainly just me and presumably her. I’m not totally clear on where you all stand on this band.

So as the evening unfolded and the party guests were mingling I said something like “oh, you must like that band” to the girl with the winter hat of the band on. She confirmed that she did, and then we probably made small talk about the band and the periphery of bands you might also like in the event you were wearing a winter hat of a band inside a house in the not winter and talking to some guy you just met about these bands.

The party and evening unfolded uneventfully. At one point I think we probably made fun of a guy for doing a thing. As the party was wrapping up — or I guess at least as we were leaving the party? maybe it wasn’t wrapping up! — and I was about to walk out of the party with my friends I happened to see the girl with the winter hat again. I pulled her aside and I gave her a good stern look straight in the eyes and I said “hey, keep going to shows”. The implication here being that without my endorsement and guidance and instruction to continue going to shows (presumably shows of the band on her winter hat and associated acts) she might have forgotten to do it herself. She said something like “yeah, sounds good” and then I left the party.

As far as I know I’ve never seen this person again since this one night. Keep in mind here that she lived several states away and we only happened to have a small overlap of friends groups, if that. I have no idea what her name is and it’s possible that I never did. Looking back on this moment, I suspect that she didn’t actually need my advice there vis-a-vis continuing to go to shows or not. Like, she was probably going to continue doing that (or not!) without regard for the specific guidance of an out of state person she’d just met who noticed her hat. The advice I gave was totally unsolicited, and probably not needed.

I guess there’s some small small chance that in the back of her mind she’d been considering retiring from “going to shows” and my encouragement nudged her back onto the shows bandwagon and she went to some shows and maybe at a show she attended after getting that advice she met someone who turned out to be the love of her life. Maybe they spend all their anniversaries reminiscing about that time she was wearing a winter hat and that the one guy gave her that advice, setting up their entire meeting circumstances and thus their entire relationship.

A flock of birds which don’t typically travel in flocks

According to WebMD the definition of “Sexual Predator” is “[…] a person who seeks out sexual contact with another person in a predatory or abusive manner”. The definition goes on to clarify that the elements of abuse, domination, control, power, etc - are key elements of meeting the criteria for this full term. It’s unpleasant to read and think about, but it’s a real thing in our society. We are in a modern era of personal liberation and free actions (most of the time, for most people) in regard to the sexual part, but we’re sticking to our guns around the predator part being a problem. It is both frowned upon, legislated against, and penalized.

Separately, in the 1987 sci-fi film “Predator” an alien with thermal vision comes to earth and winds up hunting an elite team of soldiers, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers and in subsequent films, lots of other guys. They run around the jungle and the Predator thermal visions them and they all try to kill each other, sometimes succeeding.

I wonder if in the home planet of the Predator everyone is really comfortable and cool with predation and preying on stuff … but being sexual is frowned upon?! Like it’s a bizarro world of our world. Maybe the Predator aliens reproduce asexually via mitosis or something like that, and it’s never necessary — to the point of being considered rude — to attempt to sex someone … but it’s TOTALLY COOL to thermally hunt and try to alien laser everyone all the time?

Like maybe when you, as a Predator, thermal laser another Predator, that Predator splits into a dozen chunks and these chunks spawn into new tiny Predators, and it’s joyous for everyone … but when you try to do a sexual thing with another Predator it’s actually sort of a faux pas of sorts and you stop being invited to the cool dinner parties and things like that.

You could imagine a mentally unstable Predator living on the Predator planet who has gone over the line one too many times and when they move into a new neighborhood after being released from Predator-planet prison they have to go door to door and be like “Hi, I just moved in. I’m legally required to inform you that I’m a sexual predator”. From that point on their neighbors would all avoid them … because of the sexual part, not because of the predator part.

You see we’re taking the one thing and then we’re flipping it. Flipping the script. Flipping the tables. Turning the tide. You get it.

Here’s a cool Power Move for anyone who is about to be onboarded into a new job. At some companies when you get assigned an email address there’s some pattern like firstname.lastname@example.com or whatever, and everyone just has to follow that template. But at others there’s a policy of letting people just pick their own address. How nice! If you want to have matt@ instead of matt.jankowski@ — they’ll just let you do it.

Anyway, the power move here is to make a request for something sort of insane like StonyMcBlaze420@ or HailSatan666@ or whatever. Basically think of a collection of names that a 12 year old signing up for Reddit might pick as a username, and just go with that for your corporate email address username. I feel like this could lead to a ton of interesting discussions with HR reps at the org that you are onboarding into.

There are some buttoned down places that would be shocked at your request and ask you to reconsider. They might even take just your one single request and use that to justify a template policy! HR people love to find a policy to put in place wherever they can. If this happens, you can claim to have been impactful org-wide right from day one.

But if you find yourself at a forward looking organization that wants their employees to express their identities as part of the larger brand, they might just let you do it. You might also have some HR reps that are like hell this is so stupid but I’m just gonna let this guy do it because he’ll have to live with this decision and it will probably be a challenge for him.

A controversy around how many broken strings the bass guitar player had caused

In ex-military and adjacent circles there’s an idea of “stolen valor”. If a person who was not ever a TROOP is wearing a uniform and some pins to represent that they may in fact have been a TROOP and are just walking around that way in public, they are said to be stealing valor. That is, whatever acclaim that should (rightly or wrongly) be going to the legitimate genuine TROOPs is instead going to this pretend poseur guy instead. There are entire YouTube channels of actual valor guys going around finding valor stealing guys and calling them out on it. Frankly this strikes me as a questionable use of one’s time, but alas. The concept is clear enough.

Separately, you have the classic story of a college age girl “working her way” “through school” by working at a local strip club and performing exotic dances and otherwise degrading herself … but again, to GET THROUGH SCHOOL. This one is sort of nuanced but I think the implication here is that being a stripper is less ok than whatever you become after you’ve gone through school, and the claim that you are in this job merely to work your way through school is doing some work to remove the perceived degradation of the job in the first place.

On a side note here, I think a fun thing to get fake-angry about and a position to pretend you hold would be to harshly judge all the college-attending strip club employees and say that they are taking good jobs away from hard working non-college going strippers. Man that is another tough needle to thread, but I think there’s some daylight there if anyone wants to get fake-mad about this and run with it.

Point being, I wonder if the idea of stolen valor has ever been embraced by the working their way through college stripper community? Like, to the extent that the whole thing is looked at as some sort of sacrifice being done to serve a larger goal, I think that’s similar enough to the troops thing conceptually to sort of work. So what you’d need to have is some college junior who is majoring in accounting and dreams to one day be a CPA, but while she’s in school she had a paid internship at a local gentlemen’s club where she is — technically! — working her way through college at a strip club. Then she’d need to go around making this claim in public but being a little sly around the details of her being an accounting intern and not a stripper, and the people who actually are strippers there would call her out for stealing their valor.

As previously noted in this newsletter, one of my household chores is to take out the garbage and recycling when our local municipal schedule dictates. I gladly do this chore, but I don’t let this chore dominate my choice of footwear. If I’m walking around barefoot when it’s time to take out the recycling, I just stay barefoot when I take it out. This includes the winter time, rainy days, cold days, windy days, whatever.

I’ve been thinking about some unintended side effects of this policy recently, and one nice thing for the recycling pickup guys (and snow plows) is that if I look outside and see like a foot of snow between my garage and the spot on the street near the curb that the recycling bins need to go, I’ll just decide not to even bother to bring it out to the street. This works well for a few reasons.

For one, even though I’m an utterly gritty person full of fortitude and pluck and gumption, it is a nice benefit to keep my littles piggies dry and warm and not have to trudge through the snow. I’ll admit that.

Beyond that though, the sort of day that has sufficient snow for me to decide to not bother to bring out my bins is also the sort of day that they might have cancelled recycling pickup on account of wanting to let the snow plows do their jobs and keep the recycling truck off the roads — but it’s also the sort of day where even if they haven’t formally cancelled things and they are doing pickup, I bet the folks on the trucks are not enjoying themselves, and having one or two fewer bins than usual to pickup is like my small gift to them which makes their slightly more tolerable in some marginal way.

Another side effect is that since I haven’t brought things out, we’re going to start piling up a backlog of recyclable materials in and near the bins. This is going to make me “flex” my logistical and organizing muscles to keep this area tidy and prepared for the pickup that will happen the next week.

On a side note, I once had like ~10 lawn bags full of leaves and grasses sitting out there at night to be picked up the next morning, and around like 2AM a group of youngsters — probably on their way home from a local watering hole — walked past our house and just utterly breached my bags by punching and kicking and throwing them. I woke up from being asleep and heard the noise and went over to my window and saw them doing the whole thing. In that moment I really wanted to own some sort of water cannon or massive NERF arsenal or collection of laser/paintball equipment or something which I had previously calibrated to work with a motion sensor and unleash hell onto this group of people, but alas I had not made those preparations. The next morning I went out there and re-filled an entire collection of new bags with the collection of leaves and torn old bags they’d left behind, and I shook my fist at the sky.

Anyway, there are times when I’m walking out barefoot with my recycling bins and I’m thinking about how my neighbors must all be staring at me thinking man that guy is so hardcore how does he even do that? He’s so dreamy. But I concede that there are only like five possible houses that could even see me doing this and they all know me and they’re probably just like ok yeah whatever, Matt’s taking out the recycling. They are just normal hard working Americans who pay their taxes and change their own oil and the last thing they have time for is to contemplate my recycling routine. But clearly I do have time to do that, and that’s one of the big differences between me and all of them.

A wall made out of other tinier walls

In Christian myth there was a garden of Eden which was a nice place and God was like hey don’t eat those apples and then Eve ate the apples anyway and was then punished for it, and we have a modern day metaphor of “forbidden fruit” which references that event. You might use it around someone who wants to do a thing but where doing the thing will have some bad effects afterwards.

I was thinking about how this would have unfolded if instead of not being able to eat some apples from the tree there had been like a head of lettuce or some other vegetable that she wasn’t allowed to eat. “Forbidden fruit” wouldn’t make sense any more because lettuce is not a fruit, it’s a leaf. Something like “Verboten Vegetables” might have taken hold because it has that same alliteration as forbidden fruit which is nice; but also it’s just slightly too many syllables to have the same impact. If it had been another vegetable maybe we’d have like “Banned Beets” or “Prohibited Parsnips” or “Taboo Turnips” or something.

Are people writing Bible fan fiction? That’s gotta be a thing. I’d love to see someone take this apple/veggie variation and do some cool world building to show what things unfold differently if we give Eve a different thing to stay away from.

In the classic era of landline phones, a popular move to execute when you got really mad on a phone call was to angrily slam down the phone onto its base station, ending the call. An escalation from there if you have like a really long cord on your handset and were standing across the room from the base station would be to just friggin throw your phone at the wall while you scream about the other person, or whatever.

FCC data shows that on average, from the early ‘60s to late ‘90s, 3.5% of all phones were destroyed annually due to phone slamming or throwing because of anger-related issues that came up on calls. All the phones being destroyed is too bad and all, but a nice side effect is that the upgrade cycle on aging phones was slightly accelerated by needing to replace a phone that had been destroyed after having been thrown into a wall.

Of course, in the smart phone era these numbers are way down. A landline phone could be had for relatively cheap once the technology was perfected. If you wanted a basic wired model without any advanced features, being required to periodically pay $19 for a new phone handset was a fair price to pay for the utter satisfaction of having thrown your phone into the wall. But now with some smart phones going for north of $1000 it’s simply too expensive to end your calls, in anger, with a slammed or thrown phone. Data through 2019 shows that phones being replaced due to anger have dropped down to 0.4% per year, the lowest it has been since the second World War.

Here’s a good product idea — make a plastic device with an accelerometer and a small bluetooth chip in it. This device looks and feels just like an old time phone handset, but it can’t make any calls. Instead, it just sits idly by connected to your actual smartphone via bluetooth, reading its accelerometer data. When it finally gets thrown and smashes into the wall, the sudden deceleration is detected and transmitted to your smartphone, which ends the call in progress.

Raising the standards by which one conducts a bake-off

Years ago in a conversation with a friend, when asked to name a song by The Who, I mistakenly said “The Wanderer”, when what I actually meant was “The Seeker”. This mistake has haunted me ever since. Actually, if I’m being honest, I don’t think anyone ever asked me to “name a song by The Who”. That sounds like kind of a dumb question and frankly beneath the sophistication of the intelligent and classy conversations I’m typically in. So let’s say the exact question and prompting escapes me, but the mistake (saying The Wanderer when what I meant was The Seeker) has stuck with me.

At first pass, the mistake seems sort of forgivable, right? Aren’t a wanderer and a seeker both general description of a person who is out and about looking for something? Sort of.

But when you dig deeper into the lyrics you discover that The Wanderer (apparently from the same catalog as “Runaround Sue”) is about a guy who is going around chasing ladies and who considers himself something of a ladies man, but ultimately there’s a certain sadness to the whole thing. He claims at one point to be in all the places that have pretty ladies, which is incredible! On the other hand, The Seeker is about a guy who has an (unindexed!) 50 million row table of fables in his SQL database, and he’s trying to find the key. He knows that he’s never going to find it (“until the day I die”) … and he’s honestly not even that happy on the journey.

Given hard drive technology of the 1970s, it’s going to take the guy from the seeker basically forever to find the row with the fable he’s looking for; and given the sheer number of pretty ladies out there, the guy from the wanderer is going to have to be everywhere all at once. I’d like to propose that these guys team up and travel around together! I think the approach of wandering as opposed to seeking is the course to take here. They should start in one place and just randomly move to a new place. When they get to each place they should run a few basic checks. Are there pretty ladies here? If so, kiss ‘em, love ‘em, hug ‘em, squeeze ‘em. Is the fable we are looking for here? If so, find it’s key (and index it).

Their ultimate fate will be the same. The one guy won’t settle down; and the other guy is resigned to never getting what he’s after … but at least they’ll have each other, and the stories they make along the way.