I just stumbled across this Winston-sponsored Flinstones episode. It begins with Fred and Barney sneaking a "Winston break" while Betty and Wilma do chores, and then later you see a piece where the announcer says the show is sponsored by Winston and then Fred sings a jingle. Here it is:
I came across this article about a company using a microwave ray gun to beam noises directly into peoples' heads and it stopped me cold. I mean after reading these paragraphs tell me you can't think of some amazing applications for this technology:
A US company claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads.
The device – dubbed MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) – exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognisable sounds.
The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses.
Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation in the US is working on the system, having started work on a US navy research contract. The navy's report states that the effect was shown to be effective...
Sadovnik says the technology could have non-military applications. Birds seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, he says, so it might be used to scare away unwanted flocks.
Sadovnik has also experimented with transmitting microwave audio to people with outer ear problems that impair their normal hearing.
I'm sure that many people would instantly think of noble uses for this technology, for instance helping the hearing impaired. Me? The first thought I had was how much fun it would be to mess with people with this thing. Have a boss you can't stand? Think of the turmoil you could cause him by beaming things like, "This is God. I am preparing to smote thee for being such a jerk to fill in your name and anyone else you like at work. Your only chance at redemption is giving them annual 20% raises. Oh, and I'm thinking of another flood so I need you to head to Home Depot to start your ark preparations." If you do this a couple of times a day for a week you'll either be rid of the jerk after he checks himself into the hospital or you'll have a much fatter pay check.
Lest you think I'm truly disturbed I won't tell you the things I thought of that I could beam to my kids.
Winston-Salem is the home to both RJ Reynolds and the North Carolina School of the Arts. Until now this seemed just a coincidence to me, but now I think the folks at RJR may have seen the future decades ago and worked behind the scenes to make sure the NCSA came to Winston. Here's why: to get around smoking bans in liberal states like California and Minnesota bars are starting to have theater nights. It seems that in these states actors are allowed to light up during live performances, and so bars are staging plays and calling all the patrons actors. Nifty!
Here's a piece about the smoking ban work-around on Boing Boing, and the article they link to in The Star Tribune, the newspaper of record in those other Twin Cities in Minnesota.
I'm thinking that RJR's marketing folks need to get hyper aggressive in promoting bar-plays AND their lobbyists need to get busy making sure this loophole doesn't close any time soon. To push bar-plays they should print and distribute free of charge every play that features multiple characters sucking on cancer sticks. Better yet they should commission students at NCSA to write plays in which every character smokes and have multiple crowd scenes.
And while they're at it why stop with bars? They should see if this work-around applies to schools. Those kids are always doing plays and I keep hearing how those commie-educators are constantly cutting back on arts programs so school plays offer a perfect opportunity for business/education synergy.
This'll show those rubes at truth who's in charge.
Lex points to a video on Youtube that basically says that the lemons in your drink at a restaurant are probably contaminated with all kinds of nasty bacteria. "Fecal" is part of the description which means that I'm pretty much done with the lemon thing for the next couple of weeks. FYI, my memory sucks so I'll forget all about this in a couple of weeks, thus no claim from me that I'll "never have lemons in my drink again."
I've always loved rules of thumb, but if you pressed me to define what they are I'd just flubber out something obtuse. That's why I was very pleased to find this on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:
(Tom) Parker has refined his explanation of what rules of thumb are, and why they are cool tools. He writes: "A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for a subject. A rule of thumb is not a joke or a ditty. It is not a Murphy's Law. Murphy says that things will take longer than we think; a rule of thumb says how much longer. While a proverb says that a stitch in time saves nine, a rule of thumb says to allow one inch of yarn for every stitch on a knitting needle."
Kelly also links to Parker's new website dedicated to rules of thumb which I think might be one of the most interesting sites I've ever come across. What makes it REALLY cool is that he solicits rules of thumb from readers and then asks other readers to rate the rules so he's probably going to amass an even greater treasure trove of wisdom in the near future. Here's a couple of my favorite rules from just a five minute perusal of the site:
- If you can't adequately and clearly explain a concept to a neophyte, you don't understand it clearly enough yourself. -- Adam, CIO, Perth
- For fatty foods, leave 40 percent of the grill exposed to avoid flareups. -- Gerri Willis, USA
- When you're playing blackjack, assume that any unseen card is an 8.
- For marketing purposes, elderly consumers think they are 15 years younger than they actually are. -- Tracy Lux Frances, Bradenton, Florida
- Advertising costs should not drop below 10 percent of sales until a business has been around 20 years. -- Captain Haggerty, animal trainer, actor, author, and philosopher, New York, New York
- The year you start growing dark hair on your chest is the year that the loss rate of your head hair exceeds its growth rate. (I must be the exception that proves the rule, because if this was true I'd be bald twice over by now; Jon). -- Mark Ryan, Dallas, Texas
- You are middle aged when your high school and college days are featured as nostalgia on TV. You are at old age when your wedding presents are sold as antiques. -- Margaret M. Day, Locke, New York
- When forced to estimate an adult woman's age in her presence, take the figure you think she is, divide by two and add 15 (add 20 for a woman presumed over 50) -- Jim Veihdeffer, PR pundit, Phoenix, AZ, US
- If you can touch the ceiling of your house with the palm of your hand, your ceiling is too low. -- Bob Horton, consultant and writer, Largo, Florida
- If friends ask you to help them move, remember that the work will begin an hour after you get there, you'll finish an hour later than expected, the pizza will be colder than the beer, and the beer will be in lesser quantities than promised. --Tom Sacco, West Des Moines, Iowa
- It takes as much time to paint the trim in a room as it does to paint the walls and ceiling. -- R. A. Heindl, design engineer, Euclid, Ohio
Per my post about Media General's reaction to bookofjoe's habit of pasting their entire articles on his site with links and full attribution I've been having an interesting debate with Esbee in the comments. One of the things that the debate highlights for me is the fact that old-media norms and rules are being challenged by new media tools and habits and the old-media owners are struggling with how to deal with it. In particular I think many of us are having a hard time grasping the evolution of what some call the internet and what others call the web. Just when most of us were beginning to get comfortable with how the web had changed information delivery and consumption the web was revamped and now readers have become cut-paste-sharers. This evolution has been stamped by some as "Web 2.0" and it's literally changing how people use information, but pity the person who tries to explain the "hows", "whats" and "whys" of Web 2.0. That's why I found the video below by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University so compelling (hat tip to Ed Cone for the link). It's the best explanation I've yet seen for what's going on in new media, and I think it highlights the challenges that folks at old-media companies are facing.
An improv group had 207 people simultaneously freeze in place for five minutes in New York's Grand Central Station and of course they filmed it. Very cool.
Ed Cone channeled George Will in the comments on one of his own blog posts. The post yesterday was about John Edwards withdrawing from the Democratic presidential campaign and it attracted Ed's usual crowd of commentors, a few of whom began questioning Edwards' championing of the poor (i.e. he's a rich hypocrite) and others who defended him. Anyway, here's an excerpt from Ed's comment that had me running to my dictionary (okay, looking it up on Dictionary.com):
Poverty itself demands structural approaches, beyond any eelymosynary remedies applied to individuals or small groups. (Emphasis mine)
I don't know what John Edwards gives to charity. I don't think he has to give most of his money away, certainly at this point in his life and his children's lives, to be considered charitable or to show genuine concern.
But his message as a politician is more about addressing poverty and its structural causes than proclaiming himself the charity champion.
I tried looking up eelymosynary but I think Ed misspelled it because Dictionary.com didn't find it but did suggest eleemosynary, an adjective which is defined as "of or pertaining to alms, charity, or charitable donations; charitable." I can't hold this one against Ed though since I can't pronounce the word, much less spell it.
Anyone who's read George Will more than once will recognize the phenomenon of having to keep a dictionary handy in order to wade through the article/editorial. I always felt this was a weakness of his since the point in his line of work (columnist) is to effectively argue an issue, not show off his vocabulary. If you require your readers to consult a dictionary you aren't really communicating are you? In other words whenever I read the guy I feel like writing him and telling him "We all know you're that kid who was always the smartest in the class, or at least sounded like the smartest kid in the class, so quit showing off and tell us what you think in terms that more than 2% of the population understands."
Anyway, Ed rarely whips out the Willian phrasing so he's actually a very effective communicator. This was a classic though.
According to this post on Tony Wilkins' blog the murder rate in Greensboro is twice that of Winston-Salem. His chart says that Greensboro's per-capita murder rate is 11.4 per 100,000 people and Winston-Salem's is 5.1 per 100,000. He also compares Greensboro to similar sized cities throughout America and Greensboro doesn't compare too well there either, falling well below Buffalo's outrageous 26.4/100,000 but above Jersey City's 9.2/100,000.
I'm fascinated by the difference between Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Greensboro is the larger of the two cities, but it's not like it's twice the size of Winston. And you'd think that two cities only 30 miles apart wouldn't be that different culturally, but what can explain such a large difference in murder rates? Both cities have their safe and not-so-safe neighborhoods, their pockets of haves and have-nots, their pockets of urban renewal and continued urban blight, so what really is the difference between the two?
Let's play a game and see if the US Census data gives us any clues. Below are the links to the pages for Winston-Salem and Greensboro. See if anything jumps out at you that might explain the higher murder rate in Greensboro. For what it's worth I didn't see anything real obvious so I'm hoping someone will be able to find something, but if there isn't an obvious demographic difference between the cities then what other factors should be explored? Government? Police departments? Water?
**Update** Here's something interesting, especially for those who look at everything through the race prism. The population breakdowns in the two cities are almost identical:
So what do these numbers mean? Maybe it means Greensboro's too white (they have a larger white population than Winston)? Maybe the so-called immigration problem is actually a good crime deterrent (note the greater number of hispanics in W-S)? Nah, I'm gonna call B-S on myself, but it is kind of fun to tweak some pre-conceived notions out there.
Here's how I know I'm a dork: someone took the Preamble to the US Constitution and diagrammed it as one would diagram a sentence and I think it's really cool. Let's forget the fact that I lost the ability to diagram a sentence as soon as I left 10th grade. It's still cool. The site is here and the diagram is below (click on it to bigify).
