| rwarg? |
[Jan. 18th, 2010|06:22 pm] |
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Just an FYI. I'll only be using LJ for distinctly private entries. Everything else will go on shanesrandomness.blogspot.com now that I've figured out the best way to ... blog ( hate the word still ) |
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| hmmm |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|09:01 pm] |
I've kind of been putting stuff on the main blog if you so care http://shanem.net/randomness/
you can't actually comment over there though :) I should maybe fix that. I kinda figure most of you see them on FB anyway, perhaps I'm wrong. |
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| Things of our Children's Fathers |
[Aug. 9th, 2009|06:57 pm] |
 We remember people in various ways, but when they've left us it is their things we have left. These things give us a physical hold on them through time, and through this we can maintain a grasp on our emotional ties too. This is perhaps even more so with our parents. We spend the most pivotal years of our lives with out parents and they ingrain themselves in us ways even lovers can not. Most of these things will be new from parent to child, we don't plan on our children making these connections to something specific, it just happens. The things that do persist from generation to generation become heirlooms, some even forced down through history; the jade statue perched on the corner of the mantel waiting to be set free.
The things children cling on to will be of their own choosing, for reasons we likely will never realize, especially at the time. However we will certainly try to influence them. Give them things we think they'll like, hopefully cherish, and even better if it's something we have an interest in. Heirlooms persist themselves, some as sand worms, through history but what about when we want to pass things down, and what about when those things may not exist when they're old enough to care?
This all comes to me from one of my interests. I'd almost call it a hobby though that seems wrong, a hobby feels like you should necessarily be creating something. I play board games on a somewhat weekly bases. These aren't typical American board games, but derived from Europe and somewhat dominated by Germany. They feature interesting game play, unique physical pieces, and usually nice artistic images. Carcassonne is an decent though perhaps simplistic example. One problem I have though is that most games I'm interested in are already owned by other members of the group I play with, and I don't tend to play with other people, so there is really little reason in me owning any games myself.
This is where we come back to the first bit. I realize however that some of these games I'll still want to play years from now, and some I will distinctly want my children to play; they're kind of like the Montessori of children's games, but furthermore they're so unique to what we usually experience. However, if and when I do ever have kids, some of these may not exist anymore. Games like these have fairly small markets and are to a large degree necessarily physical. While they do exist digitally and mostly online, they loose a lot in it, and there's nothing to say the electronic version will persist even then. The internet is fickle. So what do we do with things like this?
I certainly can't buy everything, but I've decided to actually buy games I think I'll still want to play in 15 years, even if I never punch the pieces from their cardboard holders until then. I'll have to lug them around until then, but I think it's worth it. The first one I'm buying is Thebes, a fun Archeology type game. It's got some interesting game play around how it handles digging over two simulated years, and I think it's probably pretty educational. My kids probably won't remember it, and I hear they tend not to like what you think they will or should, but all you can really do is try right?
I do wonder where else this kind of issue might lie; the niche market that doesn't lend itself well to digitization.
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| Passive Persistance |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|09:50 am] |
We are all way over booked. I don't know if it's actually worse now than say twenty years ago or if it's like child kidnapping statistics, just more obvious. The fact remains though, we have more that we want to do than we can. To make it worse it seems our minds want to do less than we ourselves want. We easily let those things which take a bit of work to get into and will benefit us drop off the radar, where those things close to heart will blip away in our consciousness.
Persistence is how we manage to break through these barriers. We make notes, we schedule time, we sign up for programs, we commit ourselves to making new endeavors break though the inertia of what already exists in our lives. This is a very macro approach, but it works. It requires we decide on and commit to one thing, then actively pursue it with regular time and usually money. But what if we just don't have the energy for that, or the time, or the desire to work this way?
Hold that thought. It has recently been shown that one's social circle affects them more than we may think. People with thin or overweight friends have a higher incidence of becoming the same. I think it's fairly obvious here that if your friends eat out a lot, you likely will too and will gain wait, as well as vice versa, however I think there's a subtler as well a finer point here. While eating out is a fairly macro aspect of this, consider the part where you instead get more exercise because your friends do active things and they invite you along. Or even finer, that you start basket weaving because your friends already known how to and not only teach you but have the right materials for you to borrow. These simple barriers are often the hurdles that keep us from entering new domains, and it is our friends who can easiest let us slip over them. If your friend asks if you want to weave baskets with them, you know you have that 'in' waiting for you if/when you're ready. ( I would argue that this is why a lot of successful people are successful. Networking, social nepotism, being with the right people at the right time. And sadly, being able to be with the right people at the right time. )
Now back to the first point. If the problem you have is getting into something you know you want to do, then just go find a friend right? It's not that hard to meet people.... hmmmm Ok Perhaps meeting a basket weaver and striking up a conversation that doesn't involve "Teach me to weave baskets!" is not really going to happen. But there's something to be learned from what would come from that connection. It's the small things that get in our way, and having a friend who can give us a leg up over the hurdles is great, but when we're left to our own devices I think there is still hope on our own.
By collecting small pieces of what we want around us I think we can create a simple path for passive persistence. By keeping your goal in mind through each and every day we're more likely to achieve our goals. When your bored we often latch on to those things at the top of our minds or even more so which we don't think will require a lot of work to just start doing. So if we have a steady influx of familiarity with what we want, we'll more likely let our minds wander to it and want to pursue it in our free time. What can constitute this? Pretty much anything I would think. If appropriate I think podcasts are a great tool. They auto update and get synced to your music player with everything else, so you always have a little bit of information just waiting for you. Magazine's can work, or even just setting your home page/portal to an appropriate site, preferably one that is dynamic so there's always something new for your mind to process. |
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| The Writing on the Wall |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|05:28 pm] |
I wrote this by hand a while ago when I was still in Dallas, it's the first story I finished in my writing book. There were some inconsistencies and perhaps some slow parts but I was pretty happy with it still. I tried to smooth out some of those, but this is still very much a Draft 1, I haven't even fully reread it, but it's good enough to share now.
( The Writing on the Wall )
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| The Usability of Supply and Use |
[May. 17th, 2009|02:33 pm] |
Imagine there's a service that allows you to rent DVDs through the mail. It lets you supply a list of movies you are interested in online and is 90% likely to always send you your first selection. Let's call this service NetFlix. Now Imagine there's a very similar service that let's you rent video games, and that they effectively copied NetFlix's queue system exactly. Let's call this service GameFly. Now imagine that from a user's stand point, NetFlix's queue is vastly superior to GameFly's, despite working exactly the same. Ok, you can stop imagining, because it's all true. In both cases when you return an item to the service the queue management is exactly the same. They start at the top of your list and send you the first item they can send to you in a reasonable amount of time. Here's the issue though. NetFlix has a lot more of each item than GameFly does. Here's the subsequent and much more damaging issue in my opinion. The overhead of renting a game is much much more than a DvD. The negative effects of getting a movie you don't want are less than getting a game you do not want. Renting a Dvd and a game are vastly different user experiences. A Dvd is like speed dating, there's not a ton of investment, you can do a couple at a time in a short period and there's not much consequence of taking interest in a few at once. Games however are like arranged dating. They require a month or so to complete, you can juggle more than one at a time, but you're probably better off not, and they take longer to 'set up' ( read get your game. NetFlix has the capabilities to have lots of copies of every DvD, coupled with the fact that the a single DvD is out for a short period of time they don't have to have as many copies of any given Dvd to satisfy demand. GameFly though suffers from users needing to keep the media for a month or so. Imagine the case of a hot new movie and game coming out. If there are 1000 users who want it NetFlix can probably get away with only buying 500 copies and satisfying all users in the first week. 500 people get it at the start of the week, watch, return, then the second 500 get it in the second half of the week. GameFly though, SoL, they need 1000 copies to make everyone happy in that first week. Now consider people will want to keep the game longer, so NetFlix can actually get away with saying they're going to take 2 weeks to satisfy everyone so they buy only 250 copies, but GameFly still has to buy 1000 copies. The usability effect with the Queue here though is that with NetFlix you have a high chance of getting your #1 item and then an even higher chance of getting your #2 item if #1 isn't there. With GameFly the effect is that you are much more likely to go deep within your queue when you are sent a new game. So here are the usability issues. We all keep Dvds we aren't really interested in 'right now' in our NetFlix queues, but that's OK because we push the stuff were more generally interested to the top and we know we're likely to get that stuff. With GameFly we really have no idea what we're going to get, it could be anything, so the only real way to ensure you won't get something you don't necessarily want is to REMOVE those other items. This is incredibly bad in my opinion because these are the items that are likely to be on the fringe of our interest. The Queue serves a dual purpose of telling the service what we want, as well remembering things we thought were interesting at a point. It's effectively a Queue and an Interest list at once. With Netflix this works fine, the things you really want stay at the top, the things you think you might want in the future stay at the bottom. This completely fails with GameFly. So GameFly's queue actually causes you to forget about games you otherwise want to remember. The secondary effect with GameFly's queue is that if you do maintain it as an interest list you then run afoul of the larger overhead of receiving a bad item. With NetFlix if you receive a movie you don't want, you might give it a try, waste 2 hours, or just simply return it. All in all a short investment. With GameFly though, you're likely going to invest many more hours before cutting the experience short. This too is very bad as with the movie you at least get the full experience, here you have basically wasted your time. ( I will mention though that this all is much worse currently in that it can take up to a week to get a new game, such that the investment and money lost are much higher than they necessarily have to be with a faster shipping system ). The solution to all of this? Game Fly should have a way in their Queue system to delineate between things you want and things you want to remember. Be it separate Queues or a dividing line in the single queue. I think this is a very elegant solution to their problem. Postscript I left out a side issue here to keep the above from being more convoluted. There are likely much fewer games a person is interested in than movies, such that if you only keep those games you really want to spend the next month on you are going to have few selections in your queue I think. I wrote Game Fly about this fact, that if you want a single game and you're willing to knowingly wait for it that you have to delete all those other saved items from your queue. This was their response. "By placing only your top game choices in your GameQ, you will be guaranteeing a shipment of those games. However, GameFly cannot guarantee a timeframe for those shipments and we, therefore, advise against this process [only having the 1 game you want in your queue] as you would miss out on receiving available games and we do not credit for unused service time." So basically they want you to rent something you may not really want over supplying a way for you to choose how to manage your queue. They did say they'd send on the suggestion though... |
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| Socialist Engineering |
[May. 13th, 2009|01:32 am] |
I had the great pleasure of seeing Sunday in the Park with George this weekend. It's an interesting love story around Georges Seurat as well a story of sticking to your guns and perhaps believing in yourself. I got pretty decent seats, row J, though the 2nd furthest seat on the left. The seat was fine, the closeness made up for any divergence from the center, however I ran afoul of that oh so typical issue, I got seated behind a fairly tall guy, and not just that, he too was seated behind someone tall. What's funny was, before the show when the less ideal situation was known to both of us, he kept complaining about not only the guy in front of him being tall, but also being wide. I found it amusing he found something beyond his own stature to find wrong in the other person. Though I never really figured out what he meant, the guy was maybe broader shouldered, but you're not trying to look around someone's shoulders to see past them, theaters are set up to mostly look over the head of the person in front of you.
While I eventually did settle down and the orb blocking the center of the stage became more blocked out by my subconscious I couldn't help but think that this was all solvable, so why was it still a problem?
There's no reason ticketing systems can't ask about height and take that into account. They could place tall people in seats where the row behind may be a bit higher than normal, or could place them at the back of sections, where there's extra space between them and the row behind. Theaters could even offer specially configured seats situated so tall people aren't blocking anyone. Extra seats on the end, for instance. All of this applies equal to short people, though the solution seems more mechanical there -- seat cushions. The wife of the tall guy in front of me even suggested I use one her husband decided not to, I declined so as to not chain the problem even further back.
Stadium seating is the real answer here, but with the arts, historical buildings are part of the flavor and even if they were willing, it'd be quite kitschy. The 5th Avenue Theater in particular certainly has its spice, decked out in a Chinese style from top to bottom. So with the performing arts, we're just stuck with the facilities we have, for better or worse.
Imagine we had a great reservation system that allowed people to specify their height and the system tried to organize everyone so it worked out. Would people use it?
I am inclined to say no. I think if someone were told they could only sit in certain seats they would not be so keen on the idea, even if they knew it would help someone else out. No one wants to have their options restricted. Especially if it's likely to be to worse seats: the back and sides of the theater. Also, what do you do for a tall couple?
An alternate system would have you select sections to sit in, where the seats in each section were more or less the same, and everyone was randomly assigned seats in the section. In this way tall people aren't being singled out, but the system would optimizing for theoretically everyone's height. Additionally the ticketing experience would be the same for everyone, you don't know your exact seat until the time of the show. I think people in general would be really turned off to this too. It's perhaps a bit too touchy feely? A little too much forced community? American's tend to be fairly thick skinned as such it seems.
It'd be nice if someone came up with a fair system though, and actually put it into use. It's not really right that you can pay $80 for a show and possibly not be able to see the show. This does bring up the philosophy side of things. Are tall people just mean?
Hardly of course, but there must be real considerations a tall person ends up making through their lives as such. They certainly know they're likely to block someone's view, so does such a person consider this when they go out? Is it right of them to just go to a show without making some special consideration for those behind them? Is it right for them to have to? Does such a person have a responsibility to somehow make amends or to alleviate the situation, or are they simply given the right to make others experiences less than their own?
I suppose this must be the consideration overweight people make with flights. No one wants to be forced to have to behave differently from others based on their stature, especially the overweight as it is certainly a sore point they live with. They especially don't want to have to when it is going to cost a lot more money to buy an additional seat, but obviously We have decided this is ok in some situations, as some airlines require it. The tall have few personal problems from their height too, and if anything they get a bit from it. So I guess here is one group double harmed by being physically excessive, where another is not. I'll say though, being of fairly average height, I'm quite fine with it.
(Coincidently, the fore-most tall person did not return for the second act. Though the shorter part, it was at least a better experience.) |
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| The Face of God? |
[May. 11th, 2009|09:23 am] |
 What Jesus looked like will never be known, but how it is presented in America is almost certainly pretty off. Jesus was from the Middle East yet we depict him as fairly Caucasian in almost all cases. We are certainly not alone, though, there are Black and Hispanic visages in those cultures too. Given that we know Jesus was not Caucasian though, I find it interesting that He is so often represented as so in our culture.
I can only assume this this is a form of assimilation many cultures have done. To adopt the one being who is important above all else to their own look. There are certainly many benefits from this too. It is easy then to claim God as your own, to apply a territorial ownership to God, to claim him for our country over theirs. From this then there's even the sub-conscious idea that God is somehow tied to your country, that He is in your neighborhood, town, state more than He is somewhere else. I see the appeal of this for sure. As well, if Jesus looks like you then there is less doubt that He is not like you, not a part of you. I certainly feel a little bit of these things, and I do not even practice.
Despite the good I'm sure ownership gives an individual, I wonder if it doesn't hurt us as a whole. The main thought I have here is that if Americans worshiped a visage of Jesus that was Middle Eastern, would we still be so bigoted as a country? Would we have so easily turned on the Arab citizens in and of our country after 9/11 if they looked like the savior we worshiped as a nation?
I don't know that it would have attenuated it completely, but I can't help but believe it would have been better than what we saw. I can't help but think it might make us all a bit more tolerant, to those elsewhere in the world and to ourselves.
Being from the South I've seen my fair share of deep rooted Southerners being horribly discriminatory whilst being overlooked by their Lord. This is certainly not the churches fault or influence, but the external culture of those who believe with every cell in their body since they were little, such that they have never had to believe with their minds. I can't help but believe that they would not be a little different at their cores if the one they worshiped all their lives, the one they hung on their walls, the one they payed homage to on Christmas was different from them.
( Having lived in Boston, Texas and Seattle I also know that this is not a Southern thing, so no harping on the South. ) |
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| 24 Heroes |
[May. 5th, 2009|08:51 pm] |
I've watched all of 24 from the beginning to last night.
24 gets vilified a lot, and I won't dispute it here, however it occurred to be a few weeks ago, that 24 does do something positive in the entertainment land scape.
On 24 there so far have been 2 black presidents ( before Obama came on the scene even ), 1 woman president and 1 white male president. Of those 4, the white male was the evil one and the rest have been held in fair praise on the show. |
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| B. Hussein O. |
[Jan. 24th, 2009|05:39 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  pleased | ] |
I was happy to hear on last Tuesday that President Obama was inaugurated with his full name as is tradition.
I was saddened when previously that day there was plausible speculation that he would break with tradition and just use 'H.' If ever there was a way to draw attention to his middle name, that would be it. We may not consciously know it, but I think we all have come to expect the full name of our president to be used during the inauguration, such that in any record of history it would stand out otherwise. It's ironic and short sighted that the goals of those in favor of 'H.' are to not bring attention to the connection with Saddam on this single day in history, when not using it is certain to bring attention to the baseless connection for all of history.
It was President Obama's decision and his alone, and I give him praise for his decision, despite it being an easy one. To fear a name is to give it power. I wonder if 'John' or Christianity fell out of popularity after Lincoln was assassinated. |
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