I'm wondering if I can afford the $1 for the Droid version of this app:
Two doctors at Penn State University have developed Caffeine Zone, a free iOS app that tells you the perfect time to take a coffee break to maintain an optimal amount of caffeine in your blood — and, perhaps more importantly, it also tells you when to stop drinking tea and coffee, so that caffeine doesn’t interrupt your sleep.
I love me some Mark Twain. In a letter written to an editor in 1888 he explains why he doesn't want an interview of him published, and that letter includes this glorious paragraph:
For several quite plain and simple reasons, an "interview" must, as a rule, be an absurdity, and chiefly for this reason—It is an attempt to use a boat on land or a wagon on water, to speak figuratively. Spoken speech is one thing, written speech is quite another. Print is the proper vehicle for the latter, but it isn't for the former. The moment "talk" is put into print you recognize that it is not what it was when you heard it; you perceive that an immense something has disappeared from it. That is its soul. You have nothing but a dead carcass left on your hands. Color, play of feature, the varying modulations of the voice, the laugh, the smile, the informing inflections, everything that gave that body warmth, grace, friendliness and charm and commended it to your affections—or, at least, to your tolerance—is gone and nothing is left but a pallid, stiff and repulsive cadaver.
I could write for a thousand years and never come up with something that good.
Spend enough time at town council, planning board, or other various and sundry municipal meetings and you'll hear your share of strange ideas. Over in Wake County they're apparently worried that a sustainable development study is really a cover for the "one-world" folks to infiltrate the county (h/t to Ed for the link):
A work session of the Wake County Board of Commissioners on Monday turned into a debate about whether proposals to control the county's rapid growth are part of a one-world movement to deny individual freedoms.
What ignited the debate was the work session's first order of business: a task force report on "sustainability" that recommends how Wake should approach its future energy and resource needs.
Paul Coble, chairman of the Board of Commissioners, used the topic to propose a Wake County property rights commission. He said it would ward off any chance that United Nations-style notions of sustainability could infringe on individual rights in Wake…
Audience member John Markham, of Knightdale, said at the meeting that the "one-world movement" quietly infiltrates local governments to influence their actions. Markham was one of several members of the Wake County Taxpayers Association, an anti-tax group, who attended.
"They sneak around and don't go up front," Markham said. "They will not approach the federal government."
Prediction – Individual property rights will take a sudden trip to the back seat when someone tries to build a strip club next to a church (or vice versa).
Thanks to my Mom for emailing me with Jesse Kornbluth's take on Valentine's Day. He nails it:
We've all seen them – dying malls that blight suburban landscapes. According to this article in the New York Times the high vacancy rates at the country's malls have led planners to envision some creative uses for America's retail monoliths:
So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.
Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms.
Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.
Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.
I use Google Reader to follow the Google alerts I've set up for various topics and a few of those topics are things like "Lewisville + North Carolina", "Foryth County + North Carolina", "Winston-Salem + North Carolina", etc. Over the weekend I noticed a lot of headlines like West Salem Historic District Marker showing up and decided I needed to take a look. That's when I found what promises to be a huge timesuck, the Historical Markers Database, an online database of historical markers from around the country that provides a separate page for each marker that contains the GPS location, inscription, a list of other nearby markers and a map. Way cool.
Letters of Note, a blog I came across in my internet travels, has a letter written by a freed slave to the man from whom he was freed. As someone pointed out online at the beginning of the letter you're thinking "this poor man had a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome and then by the end you realize he's written a letter infused with sarcasm:
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance…
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire…
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
It's easy to make fun of advertising folks because, well, far too many of them produce some truly crappy work. On the other hand there are some tremendously talented ad professionals who produce truly inspiring work. In other words advertising is like every other industry out there, populated by the good, the bad and the ugly.
One of the paragons of advertising was David Ogily and this letter he wrote about his process for copywriting shows that his process was anything but painless:
1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.
3. I am helpless without research material—and the more "motivational" the better.
4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.
5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.
6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.
7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)
8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.
9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.
10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.
11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)
12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.
First the bad news:
Remember all that research about resveratrol, the compound in red wine said to help your heart? "Following a three-year investigation, a university review board has concluded that Dipak K. Das, Ph.D., the director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the university's school of medicine, in Farmington, manipulated research data in at least 145 instances."
Then the good news from one of the commenters on the post:
While scientific misconduct is a serious matter, it is worth understanding that this isn't about "all that research about resveratol" as the summary puts it, but rather just the research on it by a particular researcher in Connecticut, who was neither the first nor most significant researcher in the field.
I'm choosing to believe that red wine is still all it was cooked up to be.
Want to surprise someone? Admit you don't know the answer to a question, especially if it's a question about a topic on which you're supposed to be an expert. Personally I respect anyone who has the guts to admit they don't know everything, and I took to heart a lesson I was taught early in my career; if you don't know the answer to a question the right response is "I don't know, but I'll be happy to find out for you."
The guys at Freakonomics recently posted two interesting items related to "I Don't Know." The first was a response to the question “Why do people feel compelled to answer questions that they do not know the answer to?”. The answer:
What I’ve found in business is that almost no one will ever admit to not knowing the answer to a question. So even if they absolutely have no idea what the answer is, if it’s within their realm of expertise, faking is just an important part. I really have come to believe teaching MBAs that one of the most important things you learn as an MBA is how to pretend you know the answer to any question even though you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. And I’ve found it’s really one of the most destructive factors in business — is that everyone masquerades like they know the answer and no one will ever admit they don’t know the answer, and it makes it almost impossible to learn.
The second was a comment left by one of their readers:
In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point). The rationale is that if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess. “I don’t know” leads the questioner to ask someone who hopefully is knowledgeable.
Part of why “I don’t know is so hard to say” stems from an education system based on attempting every single question, whether you know the answer or not.
P.S.: End-of-year student survey showed students strongly supported the +1/4 point IDK and -1/4 point wrong-answer system.
If you think about it we do a lot of things that teach our kids to fear admitting ignorance, or making a mistake, and that inevitably leads to sending people into society who value being perceived as right more than they do actually being right. I don't even want to think about the mischief we've brought on ourselves as a result.
Befuddled 