Use the green potion when you meet the elder dragon

A day of reckoning

On a recent train ride I heard a group of nearby women talking about someone's medical results. The woman whose results they were said something like "yeah, and my GFR was only a 53 so they were a little worried". Another woman immediately reacted with "oh yes, that is low, I'm glad they caught it", or something like that.

I totally just made up that abbreviation, because I forget what they actually said. As it turns out your GFR is something to do with kidneys, but that's not what she actually said. I'm just putting it in here as a placeholder, ok?

Anyway, I'm always amazed with people like this, because they are either medical doctors, or they are somehow familiar with random levels of stuff you're supposed to have. Someone could approach me on the street and tell me their GFR was like 600, or like 0.27, and I'd believe both answers as legitimate.

I think there was some sort of lesson everyone got about medical things you can measure and ranges they all are supposed to be in, and I missed that day.

Measuring the land-speed of a cheetah

Often when dealing with people selling various stuff on the internet, they'll start referring abstractly to things as "content", which sort of commoditizes whatever the thing is. You might use this word when referring to things like written essays, news articles, photos, videos, funny illustrations, and so on.

When you are in a conversation with business people and doing the business, this abstraction is fine and handy and can sort of shortcut your way to a "yeah we have this pile of digital stuff and how do we get money now?" conversation.

When you are in a conversation with the people who create this stuff, you shouldn't call it "content", you should call it "art" or "work" or "writing" or whatever is appropriate and whatever the person uses to describe their creative product.

You should also avoid putting the people in suits and the people in hipster shirts in the same room at the same time.

Making it up on volume

I like my house to run like a well oiled machine. Or maybe like an on schedule train. Both seem desirable. I was very disappointed in the collective shopping behavior of the household recently when I discovered that not only did we have two boxes of yellow raisins in the house, but that both boxes had already been opened, and were both "in service" to our diets, sitting on the shelf, ready to be consumed.

In the eight years where I worked as an efficiency expert, we'd often find companies who had an "inventory problem" just like this. For a business that sells perishable items, this is the worst, because inventory will spoil, and you'll actually have to throw things away. Even in a manufacturing business where you have parts sitting on a shelf or manufactured goods sitting around not being sold, inventory is the enemy. Every dollar you spent on something which you couldn't immediately sell is a dollar that could have been invested elsewhere, or a dollar that could have gone into selling more units of a more popular item.

So when I see such abhorrent waste in my own house, it's like a slap in the face to my efficiency expert status, and I'm embarrassed to see it. For all I know I'm the one who purchased the extra thing and opened it! There needs to be a better system around these things.

Imagine a world without gluten?

When the opportunity presents itself to go walk around aimlessly outside for a few hours, I usually take it. Since I live in a well-paved area, this means that my walks take me across many streets and sidewalks and intersections, and I get to observe the behavior of everyone else, and I notice when they do something wrong. Oh boy, do I ever!

Take stop lights for example. From a pedestrian perspective, many people will stop at an intersection and look up at the lights, and treat a red light facing perpendicular to them as an indication to cross, and a green light facing perpendicular to them as an indication to stop. This approach is not totally without merit, but it misses the fundamental thing about walking through intersections, which is this: a green light is not going to hurt you, but a 2000 pound car probably will. Similarly, a red light does not give you free license to cross the road ... but an absence of cars or the presence of totally stopped cars does give you this license.

I guess in the grand scheme of things wasting a few seconds while waiting too long before you cross isn't going to make or break a person, but I believe that the weak, sheep-like fortitude implied by this behavior isn't a good sign for the more important matters in their life. Thus, I'm somewhat disgusted with and embarrassed for these people when their decision making has more to do with the lights and less to do with the traffic.

We could develop a handsome logo too

No one likes to pick out what foods to eat, and most of us wish there was a simpler way to get the nutrition we need in a way that maximizes our physical performance and general stamina. I suspect that in the future there will be food scientists who talk to other scientists and are like "hey as it turns out some people have genetics that are really good at eating this kind of food and other people are better at eating this other kind of food". Then, they'll get together with the Big Food folks, and they'll all figure out some sort of test for us.

So you'll get a thing in the mail, and you'll shove it in your cheek or something, and then you'll wipe it on a thumb drive and upload it to the internet. The internet will review your cheeks and respond with an answer like "Thanks for the cells, based on those DNAs, you should have a diet of type TURBO/DELTA/NINER". Then you'll comb through some sort of answer key of diets, look up your type, and it will have an exact outline of foods that will kill you and foods that will empower you and what to avoid and what to focus more on and how to lose weight and how to gain muscle and how to gain weight and lose muscle and everything in between.

There will be kiosks out on the street where you swipe your DNA chip or lick an instant test or something, and it immediately dispenses a smoothie made of the perfect ingredients for your daily diet needs.