What the World Needs Now, Is Sarcastext, Sweet Sarcastext

Oh the difficulties of using sarcasm online! How are you supposed to get across the fact that you are being sarcastic when you can’t alter the tone of your voice, give a little wink-wink, or nudge-nudge? Anyone with a sense of humor that instant messages has surely encountered this problem first hand.

This week I was fooled once again. CNN published an opinion article on why Stephen Colbert’s bid for presidency must be stopped. Here is a sample that quotes Colbert and explains why he would be horrible running our country.

America’s role in world: “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Under a Colbert administration, it appears America would just attack other countries for no valid reason.

The whole time I knew that Colbert’s candidacy and stances are simply a joke, but I thought the person writing the opinion article was taking it seriously. Apparently I was wrong. Upon closer inspection, that little blurb at the beginning introducing the author can be quite important. Usually it just toots the person’s horn and gives you links to their other material, but this time it actually contained something of real value. “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian”. And in case that isn’t evidence enough, if you take a look at the Story Highlights in the sidebar, you will see “he channels Colbert, satirically calls his candidacy a threat to our way of life ”

So the author was being sarcastic and I had no idea. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone. This is an obvious problem. And when there is a problem, we need a solution. Enter sarcastext.

Sarcastext is a idea for a specific font to be used whenever you are being sarcastic. The font itself alerts the user to the sarcasm, just as bold, italics, and capitalization are used for emphasis. Thus, whenever the reader encounters sarcastext font, the joke will not go over their head, which we have seen can have embarrassing consequences.
 


 
This idea goes back to my early days of AOL IMing and I can’t credit myself as the one that came up with it. Neither can I remember who did. So junior high friends, if you are reading, take credit in the comments …

The article even makes some Hitler references, as previously mentioned in my post on Godwin’s law.

Photo: ManyLittleBlessings

Forget Bottled Water, Boxed Water is the Future

This is one of those ideas that just makes you wonder, why didn’t I think of that? Everyone knows bottled water is horrible for the environment, yet that doesn’t stop people from buying it. It’s just so darn convenient to grab a bottle on the go or from a vending machine. And then there is the extreme – the primadonas that refuse to ever drink tap water. With such a diverse marketplace, it sells even without sex.

Let me introduce you to BOXED water. Boxed water solves many of the problems of bottled water. The boxes are made from a renewable resource, ship flat to the filler, ship more efficiently when full, and are recyclable. To top things off, 10% of the company’s profit is donated to water supply charities and another 10% to reforestation foundations. Not too shabby.

Yes, drinking tap water is still better for the environment, but this is a pretty good solution to sate the world’s incredible demand for premium water on the go. What do you think?
 


 
For some reason they still haven’t started selling boxed water in the hippie capital of the United States, the San Francisco Bay Area. It could be fun to help the company launch and promote here and I’m sure they could use the help.
 
Embarrassing story alert: I found out about boxed water from a Hillary Duff celebrity tabloid photo. I guess I saw a link about her new tattoo and had to click it (wouldn’t you?). But then the nerd in me quickly got interested in boxed water …

Crunching the Data of Your Measured Life

heatmap

One of the first Pedantic Posts was about recording various data about your habits in the hopes of finding trends and improving your life. After hours of research, I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to record every aspect of my life. Sure there are tools that make this record keeping easier, but you still have to think about it. It is way too OCD to voluntarily start.

Today I bring the news that there have been great advancements in this field over the last 8 months. The most obvious gain is the ability to track certain activities passively – you just go about your life as you normally would and data is gathered automatically. This might not always be a good thing, but there is also a trend emerging to make this data more accessible to you. And since you have access to your data, numerous tools are popping up to help guide your analysis.

Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter have an incredible amount of interesting information about your life and they are now willing to let you use it. It is yours to keep (and share). But you don’t want to have to scroll through hundreds of tweets over the last few months. Rather, you want to see how they trend over time and splice the data any which way suits your fancy. Well now you can.

A recent Wall Street Journal blog post by Zach Seward opened my eyes to the possibilities. The author didn’t record any data on purpose – applications he was already using had plenty of data about him – Foursquare, Mint, iTunes, Last.fm, Google Earth, Google web history, and Twitter. All he had to do was use some third party tools to graph and analyze the data.

The results are astounding – a heat-map of where he spends his time (above), graphs of his temporary addictions to certain bands, how his music taste trends compared to other users, various graphs that show his most productive computer time and even his decline as an email potty mouth over the last two years. And these are just some of the possibilities.

What is next? It is still slightly too difficult for the general population to take advantage of this – most people don’t want to pull together various tools like Graph Your Inbox or Where Do You Go. But it will only get easier. Will your 2013 Foursquare heatmap become a lazy-man’s scrapbook that you can readily share and take with you anywhere? Only time will tell …


It is also a possibility that people will oppose having their data tracked automatically and actually do something about it. In other words stop using Google! Blasphemy, I know. Check out this “illustrated guide” as to why all this automatic tracking is bad.
 

Photo: Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal with the help of Foursquare, Google Maps, and Where Do You Go

A News Source That Exclusively Follows Up On Old Stories

There are thousands of news sources out there, all reporting on roughly the same news with their own slant. Sure, some are specialized like financial news sources, but all financial news sources are still reporting on the same events. If there are so many television channels, websites, radio shows, and newspapers all devoted to the same news, it must be worthwhile to add a new one with a slightly different twist.

As I researched posts for this website, it has become obvious that the same trendy stories run within a few days of each other on multiple news websites. If the story runs at the same time, they all report the same information. Even worse, since they already reported the story, they don’t revisit it again – they don’t update the information as time goes on. Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! Here is my idea: a news website that tracks these trendy news stories and provides updates in the following months and years. A cross between the real-time information of the internet age and “where are they now” (which everyone loves).

Let me provide some examples to reinforce the value of this “new old news” website (I am going to have to trademark that term). I posted about some places in Europe linking speeding ticket fines to the driver’s wealth. If you do a google search for this information, the majority of the results fall between January 7th and 12th 2010. Are more people receiving outrageous tickets? What is the current record ticket amount? Outsourcing drive thru – March 2005 and April 2006. How did those experiments work out? Did they expand the program or shut it down? Smoking two year old – May 27th, 2010 and November 5, 2010. Is this the last we will here about him? Does he have emphysema yet?

Stories change over time – they are alive. The stale information on news websites quickly becomes dated. We need a news service that is committed to keeping tabs on these old stories so that we always have the latest information. Will you create this for me?


I have been thinking about this idea for a while now, but hadn’t put my thoughts down on the web (or paper). It was recently brought to the front of my mind when I was looking through the search engine traffic that brings people to Pedantic Posts. One was for “outsourcing drive thru 2010” – exactly what this idea is all about!
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Photo: ShironekoEuro

Who Else Wants To Do Ridiculous Stuff?

Everyone needs a certain amount of craziness in their life. For some, it is simply enough that Glee does a random episode of Rocky Horror. I hope that is not the only crazy thing keeping your life interesting.

I have been traveling a lot on the weekends to introduce the right amount of hectic-ness and excitement in my life. Unfortunately winter is on its way and this approach is about to loose its excitement. So what other options do I have to throw in a little craziness? I see it breaking down into two categories:

Building Fun Things

I have a mechanical engineering degree for a reason: so that I can build toys for my own amusement. The toy itself will be fun, but the real joy comes from the journey itself – creating something real t(hat is also hopefully big and dangerous). This category falls somewhere in between Mythbusters and Junkyard Wars.


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Doing Silly Things Just Because

The other category doesn’t require any tools, junk, or money. All you need is the miraculous human body and a little creativity. Things like eating a ton of carrots to see if your skin turns orange or having a competition to see who can stay awake the longest. Two Canadians best friends, Kenny and Spenny, had a TV show with weekly competitions – hilarity ensues.


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Anyone Interested?

These types of things are always more fun with a friend. Who has an idea they would like to try? Or if I come up with something, who would be interested in joining in?

Flipper Committed Suicide – Not the Only Take Away From “The Cove”

Photo: Pug Father

The Academy Award winner for last year’s best documentary was The Cove. I recommend it to each and every one of my readers – it is a combination of a government conspiracy theory, undercover espionage, and educational-activist-type documentary. The film focuses on a small fishing village in Japan that kills over 20,000 dolphins a year.

I won’t give much away, but I wanted to write a little bit about the films main character, Ric O’Barry. Ric was the person that made dolphins famous back in the 1960’s – he was the trainer for the 5 dolphins used on the TV show Flipper. He also went on to become the most outspoken critic of dolphin captivity.

Why the change of heart? In 1970, the main dolphin used in Flipper committed suicide. Wait… what? Ric O’Barry was very close to the dolphins he trained and maintains he could tell their emotions through body language. The dolphin swam up to Ric that fateful day, looked him in the eye, and took her last breath, deciding not to take another. He believes the dolphin committed suicide because of its depression living in captivity.

How likely is this? Keep in mind we are not talking about humans who breathe unconsciously. Dolphins don’t always have access to air to breathe – they spend most of their time under water, unable to take in oxygen. They must consciously return to the surface to breathe. Thus, this is certainly plausible and I am inclined to give Ric the benefit of the doubt.


If dolphins (and whales for that matter) have to consciously tell themselves to take a breath when they are out of air, how do they sleep? My guess would be that they would draw in a large breath and take a quick nap before returning back to the top for more air. But how what if they don’t wake up in time? DEAD! Turns out they have a “semi-sleeping” state where they effectively shut off half of their brain at a time. They are still conscious enough to rise to the surface for a breath, but asleep enough to rest. Dolphins spend roughly 8 hours a day in this state.

Introducing Auctions in Unexpected Places

Google didn’t become the behemoth that they are by having the best technology. They didn’t invent a faster computer to retrieve the most accurate search results in .15 seconds. They became the leader in search and online advertising by being creative – and they did it through auctions. Yes, Google is the world’s largest auction company.

Have you noticed the advertisements that come up whenever you do a common Google search? They show both on the top and side of your search results (see image) and match incredibly closely to what you are looking for. Have you ever thought about how Google decides to place the accurate ads? Behind the scenes a genius little auction is held for every search that takes place.

Advertisers place bids for what they would be willing to pay to show up next to search terms that they believe are close to their product. Google also ranks the relevance of the ad using a complex algorithm. These two pieces of data are combined to rank each potential advertisement. Then a Vickrey auction is held to determine the price each advertiser must pay and the order of the ads. I highly recommend this extremely concise explanation from Wired magazine (only 226 words).

Well that isn’t so complicated, how much money did they make with that idea? Sure one step of the process is technologically complex, but even if their relevance ranking was created in one day, it would be able to get the job done. The real genius is applying an automated auction system to online advertising, optimizing for price and relevance while allowing the advertiser a high degree of control. So that begs the question – where else can I apply an efficient auction process that will make me billions of dollars?

Of course there are a lot of reasons Google is where it is today, I don’t mean to oversimplify things. But this simple auction is a good chunk of the $24 billion in revenue they made last year.

More:

  • Descending-clock auction for electricity – Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies
  • Terrific full Google article in the Wired magazine issue – Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

Rethinking Clothes – Fashion and Cleanliness

Photo: Chet Thomas

I watched a fair amount of the cartoon Doug on Nickelodeon as a kid. Doug wore the same outfit every day. In fact, he had a closet full of the exact same outfit. And the best part about this dream world – no one seamed to notice or care! *

Why is it that we change outfits entirely from one day to the next? Why is there a social stigma that you shouldn’t wear the same thing two days in a row, or even two days in the same week? I am blessed that I am not the smelly kid in the class (you know who you are, I hope) – do I have to play by the same rules as everyone else? If I put on clothes to sit in front of my computer all day, they certainly aren’t going to get dirty. Regardless, the next day I have to get out a completely new set of clothes that will once again stay perfectly clean while I sit still for 90% of the day.

I believe this is an antiquated approach – not so long ago people sweated a lot more than today. There was much more physical labor, but now we have machines that can do it at a push of a button. There was a time when clothes were made of heavy wool, but now we have incredibly breathable fabrics. There was a time when a hot day was unavoidable, but now we have air conditioning to keep our environment at a constant 72 degrees. We even have air conditioning in our cars!

If we don’t sweat as much, the clothes don’t get dirty nearly as soon, so we don’t have to wash them after every use. And yet isn’t this the norm for most articles of clothing? And if we don’t have to wash them at the end of the day, why don’t we just lie them out and wear them the next day? Assuming you are going to be in a similar environment, it doesn’t make any sense to put outfit A back into your closet, and scrounge around the next morning to come up with outfit B. Then you have the difficulty of keeping track of how many times you have worn outfit A to know when it should be washed. Alternatively, if you wore it 3 days straight, then you could just throw it straight into the wash!

I can see two main arguments against this – 1) fashion and 2) cleanliness. Some people enjoy picking out a cute new thing to wear every day to impress their coworkers. I don’t and feel I am in the majority, at least for guys. Rather than having the minority impose their will on the majority, why doesn’t the majority band together to make it socially acceptable to wear the same thing multiple days in a row? As for cleanliness, you are either washing your clothes too often because that is what you were taught to do OR you are the smelly kid. Smelly kids should continue to wash their clothes after every use.



I do remember one episode of Doug where they dealt with clothing. For some reason Doug’s characteristic green sweater vest ensemble became the hot new fashion trend. So hot in fact that the entire school showed up one day wearing it. Doug was just one of the crowd, and no one believed him that he had been wearing it for years. Then the next fashion trend came and the whole school ditched the green sweater vests – except for Doug! Everyone thought he was a dork for wearing the old trend, and no one believed him that he had been wearing it all along.

Genetic Inherited Trait Mapping – Would You Want to Know?

Photo: Horia Varlan

Here’s a common quandary for you – if you could know exactly when you are going to die, would you want to find out?  For me the answer is pretty easy – no way Jose!  I don’t want to live my life neurotically counting down to my death.  But what if you draw the line a little farther back?  What if you could know the likelihood that you will have a certain disease in your lifetime?  Or even the trivial: would you like to be told some of your insignificant traits that you may otherwise never even know?

Is this even in the realm of possibility?
If you recall from the pea pod example in junior high, each gene is made up of two alleles – with each allele either being dominant or recessive. To show the recessive trait both alleles must be recessive.  But for humans it is rarely this simple.  These genes combine in incredibly complex ways to make you who you are – most characteristics are determined by more than one gene.  Even though it is incredibly complex, I think it just a matter of time until every conceivable human trait is identified – it should be possible with enough data and large enough computers crunching the numbers. (geek tangent)

Affecting your lifestyle
What would I like to know?  Areas where I could potentially take action to prevent a calamity before it strikes, rather than just worrying for worrying’s sake.  The obvious example are lifestyle diseases such as lung cancer, skin cancer, heart disease, and stroke.  Am I in the top 1% of the population for genetic risk of heart disease?  If so you better believe I would be extra careful to watch what I eat and make sure I exercise.

Keep reading…

Open Source Development for Creating Laws – Introducing Wikilaw

Photo: Brian Turner

A couple days ago I posted about the intriguing notion that anyone can write bills, which with a little hard work and a lot of luck can become a law.

Open Source Movement
I just started reading the book “Drive” which examines the motivation for human beings to behave the way we do. The hypothesis is that a simple cost benefit analysis is not enough to explain human behavior – there are other factors that must come into play because we do not always act in our own best interest.

An obvious example of this is the current trend of open source software. Why would anyone spend 20+ hours a week of their free time to work on open source programs? THEY AREN’T PAID FOR IT! But they do feel challenged, get the feeling of contributing to something larger than themselves, and develop their programming skills. Sometimes this is enough to convince a software developer to contribute.

A Wiki For Writing Bills
Let’s take the whole concept of Wikipedia and apply it to laws. Anyone can contribute to bills on the Wiki and therefore the whole responsibility does not rest on any one person. A mother in Ohio may work on one section, a farmer in California another, and a retired lawyer in Florida can make sure the wording is correct. By combining our efforts we can accomplish much more than individually and hopefully patch up the holes in our legal system.

This is inherently more difficult than Wikipedia – whereas Wikipedia is based on facts, Wikilaw is based on opinion. But this could be the best part about it! Your goal should be to produce bills which both Republicans and Democrats support. This can best be achieved with a bipartisan effort working together online on the same bill. Once the bill is complete, the community can vote on it – if it passes it is time to find a sponsor, if not it is back to the drawing board. Continue reading