Drudge: I know you are but what am I?
Drudge: I know you are but what am I?. White House tells Drudge that ABC reporter is Gay, Canadian
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Entries for July 2003
New White House email system upsets Jakob Nielsen
New White House email system upsets Jakob Nielsen. Does the “I have a differing opinion” batch get bcc’d to John Ashcroft?
Business Lessons From the Donut and Coffee Guy
“Next!” said the coffee & donut man (who I’ll refer to as “Ralph”) from his tiny silver shop-on-wheels, one of many that dot Manhattan on weekday mornings. I stepped up to the window, ordered a glazed donut (75 cents), and when he handed it to me, I handed a dollar bill back through the window. Ralph motioned to the pile of change scattered on the counter and hurried on to the next customer, yelling “Next!” over my shoulder. I put the bill down and grabbed a quarter from the pile.
Maybe this situation is typical of Manhattan coffee & donut carts (although two carts near where I work don’t do this), but this was the first business establishment I’ve ever been to that lets its customers make their own change. Intrigued, I walked a few steps away and turned around to watch the interaction between this business and its customers. For five minutes, everyone either threw down exact change or made their own change without any notice from Ralph; he was just too busy pouring coffee or retrieving crullers to pay any attention to the money situation.
If you were the CEO of a big business — say, a movie studio, music company, or multinational bank — you’d have been tearing your hair out at this scene. He lets his customers make their own change?!?!! How does he know they’re making the correct change? Or putting down any change at all? Or even stealing the change? Where’s the technology that prevents the change from being stolen while he’s not looking? Surely there’s a machine that could be invented to keep track of it. Bad, bad, bad! Unclean, unclean! Does not compute…
Hold on there, Mr. CEO, don’t go all HAL 9000 on us. Ralph probably does lose a little bit of change each day to theft & bad math, but more than makes up for it in other ways. The throughput of that tiny stand is amazing. For comparison’s sake, I staked out two nearby donut & coffee stands and their time spent per customer was almost double that of Ralph’s stand. So, Ralph’s doing roughly twice the business with the same resources. Let’s see Citibank do that.
It’s also apparent that Ralph trusts his customers, and that they both appreciate and return that sense of trust (I know I do). Trust is one of the most difficult “assets” for companies to acquire, but also one of the most valuable. Many companies take shortcuts in getting their customers to trust them, paying lip service to Trust™ in press releases and marketing brochures. Which works, temporarily and superficially, but when you get down to it, you can’t market trust…it needs to be earned. People trust you when you trust them.
When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc.
And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
masturbation lowers risk of prostate cancer
masturbation lowers risk of prostate cancer. Gotta give those Aussie researchers a hand
FBI questions ATL man for reading FoxNews
FBI questions ATL man for reading FoxNews critique in coffee shop. i.e., someone REPORTED him for reading. via obscurestore.com
from the secret police files of mr Pablo Picasso
from the secret police files of mr Pablo Picasso. those crazy French.
Larry Wall’s State of the Perl Onion address from OSCON 2003
Larry Wall’s State of the Perl Onion address from OSCON 2003. mit Powerpoint slides!
The Tour moves on
Thanks to Mary for stopping by yesterday on her Virtual Book Tour for Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. The Tour moves on to crabwalk.com today; Josh is running an interview with Mary:
I have a very utilitarian bent. I think the things that people have ended up doing after death, however grisly, are great. It’s good to be helpful to others. So there is that message, that you can be useful after death. I’ve gotten letters from people who’ve said, “Now I’m going to donate my body to science.”
Particularly in the beating-heart cadaver chapter, I really came down strong on the side of being in favor of donating organs. It would be such a waste for someone in that situation not to donate with 18,000 people waiting for organs. But for the most part, it’s meant just as a fun and informative read.
(And I apologize to all the cycling fans who thought this post was about the Tour de France. Visit the Tour de France blog, the 2003 Tour de France page @ Wikipedia, or follow the action live at VeloNews if you’re into that.)
Bilbao, Rio, Taichung. Guggenheim announced for Taiwan?
Bilbao, Rio, Taichung. Guggenheim announced for Taiwan?. Zaha Hadid did the moving (literally) design. via Archinect
GameSpot reviews real life, gives it a 9.6/10
GameSpot reviews real life, gives it a 9.6/10. “combat actually isn’t a major factor for most players in real life, though players are bound to engage in a few skirmishes early in their lives”
news link collection: stupidnakedpeople.com
news link collection: stupidnakedpeople.com. a steady stream of people sorely lacking in embarrassment. note: site title legible at 10 paces
Artist Manabu Yamanaka explores Buddhist notions of pain, age, disease
Artist Manabu Yamanaka explores Buddhist notions of pain, age, disease. aka, nude portraits of 90+yo Japanese women. probably not for work.
Author Is a Cop-Out
[This is a guest post by Mary Roach as part of the Virtual Book Tour for Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.]
So I wrote this book (buy from Amazon) about the bizarre, amazing, heroic things dead people have managed to achieve in their careers as research cadavers. And I find it all quite impressive and inspiring. You would think, given how I feel and what I know, that by now I’d have contacted the local medical school to fill out a willed body donor form. I have not. I’m a cop-out. I tell people it’s because my husband is squeamish and would reather not picture me on a slab, in pieces. This is true, but it’s not the whole story. You know what it is? I’ll tell you. This is pathetic. I’m having a hard time with the thought of being old, withered, revolting and naked — did I mention naked? — in front of strangers. I don’t mind their taking out my spleen, cutting off a leg — none of that bothers me. I simply don’t like the idea of healthy young people looking at me and being quietly disgusted by my withered flesh and dilapidated hull. (I mean, I’m 44, and already it’s happening!) It’s embarrassing. Of course, you can’t be embarrassed when you’re dead. I’m presumptively embarrassed — the way I am when I come back from an aggressively hip party and imagine all the things that were said behind my back. Though I’ll never hear them, and quite possibly they were never said, they’re unsettling nonetheless. How disappointing to realize that even death isn’t free from neurotic insecurity!
Very few people donate their bodies to science. I’m curious as to the reasons. What keeps you from doing it? Surely most people have better reasons than mine!
Welcome Mary
The Virtual Book Tour is still chugging along and tomorrow (Wed.), author Mary Roach will be joining me as a guest editor here on kottke.org. She’ll be talking about subjects related to her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Welcome Mary.
On fame and graphic design
On fame and graphic design. “[fame will] change you, and not always for the better”
midwest farm listings to pick your own fruits and vegetables
midwest farm listings to pick your own fruits and vegetables. via Gaper’s Block
Bark Mitzvahs?
Bark Mitzvahs?. I swear, some of my best friends are dogs and/or Jewish, but this is inane.
poet Frank O’Hara killed in freak dune
poet Frank O’Hara killed in freak dune buggy accident on Fire Island, 7.25.66. there ARE worse things than wearing the wrong thing, so please, take care
ferry death from crystal meth on Fire Island
ferry death from crystal meth on Fire Island. no pun intended. via gawker
EU orders farmers to give toys to pigs
EU orders farmers to give toys to pigs. from the EU’s Euromyths collection
IMSTALKING documents AIM away messages compiled by a stalker bot
IMSTALKING documents AIM away messages compiled by a stalker bot.
Using the Memex
I’ve been reading a lot over the past few months, both online and in book form. Not unusual, but I’ve noticed that I retain a lot more from my online reading than from the offline. My recall of names, facts, circumstances, themes, and lessons from articles I’ve read online is excellent, but not so good when it comes to books. Part of it is that I approach book reading as a leisure activity and not as work or study, although I’m not sure the opposite is necessarily true for Web reading (partially perhaps, because I do use the web to brush up on design and programming issues — work stuff). But the bigger reason for the difference is probably due to the nature of what the task of reading entails in those two media.
Books are self-contained. There are 332 pages in my copy of The Selfish Gene (incl. endnotes). There might be a bibliography, but unless you’re in the library, reading up on any of the 200 or so references contained therein would prove challenging. Everything you get with a book is in between its front and back covers.**
With the web, you’re always in the library. It’s not always a proper library (some of the “reference” materials can be a little sketchy), but it’s better than nothing. And the materials you want are very often hyperlinked right in the material you’re reading for instant research gratification. Web reading is a deeper and more active type of reading. I can completely research a particularly interesting topic, jumping from site to site to Google to site and back to Google, hunting down exactly what my brain is jonsing for, and skim over the stuff I’m not so keen on. I’m not dependent on the author of the book to give me exactly what I want; I can “write” my own book of sorts, editing the subject matter as I see fit. It’s this active reading — researching really — that I think is responsible for the much higher rate of retention with online reading.
** “Ha ha, not quite!” you’re rightly saying to yourself. You’ve got your whole lifetime of experience and a healthy imagination to draw upon. Two covers my ass, books are as full as you want to make them. That’s one of the drawbacks of reading on the web for me. My recall is excellent, but I typically don’t stop to ponder like I do with books. There’s always that next thing to click on or research. I don’t have to work out for myself on which points Dawkins disagrees with Stephen J. Gould…I can just go and read for myself. I might recall more from web reading, but I think I get more from books. (Although, online research while reading a book is a very potent combination…if you remember to ponder before scurrying off to the web for easy answers.)
See also:
The internet is shit (seemingly arguing for libraries instead of the internet…like we should have either one or the other, but not both or the universe will explode)
The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? (NY Times)
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (James Gleick)
Project Gutenberg (reading books on the web)
Report: Online Training ‘Boring’ (Wired News, “Studies have shown that onscreen reading retention is 30 percent lower than with printed material.”)
Digital Divide (pbs.org)
As We May Think (Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly)
Matrix Reloaded thread passes 1000 comments
Matrix Reloaded thread passes 1000 comments. 931 in the old thread, 72 in the new one
Winged Migration
A beautiful study of life and of earth by way of some birds. The cinematography in this film is amazing.
Canadian gov’t now growing, selling pot
Canadian gov’t now growing, selling pot. it’s half the street price (is there anything national health care CAN’T do?)
Finding naked people, software will automatically find
Finding naked people, software will automatically find photos with large amounts of skin color. Can be used for porn filter
Vive Le… Minitel
Vive Le… Minitel. I can’t believe this story is actually dated July 14. 2003.
Hollywood tykes wresting power through email, msg boards
Hollywood tykes wresting power through email, msg boards. fametracker.com, baby
(How the mighty have fallen) CAA tyke
(How the mighty have fallen) CAA tyke to Page Six’ Elizabeth Spiers: ‘I’ll probably never use e-mail again’. Page Six’ Elizabeth Spiers ??!!
“You read the script: ‘Midget walks across
“You read the script: ‘Midget walks across stage.’ And that’s what I did.”. Bloodymidgets.com, via Obscurestore.com
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