Category Archives: Media & Culture
Your cremated loved one’s ashes can be pressed into a vinyl record
A profile on every American adult
idiCORE combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data and has built a profile on every American adult.
“Personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and timestamps.”
People think they follow advice but they don’t
“People think they follow advice but they don’t. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don’t waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do.” — God’s Debris
For most of the 40 years of my working life, I was what we used to call “middle management.” The person at the top decided what was to be done and my job was to get the people “under” me to do it. I can say unequivocally I never persuaded anyone to do something they didn’t want to do. Never. Ever. Which is a pretty good argument for the irrelevance of middle managers. (Or that I should not have been one)
Which reminds me of another favorite. I won’t put this in quote because I have no idea who said it but it has stuck with me for years. Unless you hear the following words, never offer an opinion: What do you think, Steve?
And you know what? I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve heard that question in my life.
23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain
- Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
- Opia: The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
- Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
- Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
- Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
- Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
- Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
- Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
- Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
- Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
- Vemödalen: The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
- Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
- Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
- Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
- Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
- Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
- Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone
- Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
- Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
- Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
- Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
- Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
- Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.
There’s a word for that
You know that feeling where you say a word so often that it stops — for a few seconds — having any meaning? It’s just a sound your lips and tongue make? I’ll bet there’s a word for that but I don’t know what it is.
I’ve been thinking about the word “computer.” I use that word a lot. But it really doesn’t have much meaning (for me) any more. The earliest computers were big old room-size monsters that… computed numbers. Add, subtract, multiply, divide (and probably some other math stuff). So we called the machines computers.
And I guess there are lot of folks still computing on their computers but doesn’t it seem like there could be a better name? We’ve got “desktop” and “laptop” but those are more about where and how we use the machine.
Our phones are computers now but I’m not all that happy with the term “smart phone.” Better than “device” but still not great. Shoot, “digital assistant” was a better term than most of these but that won’t be back. And why didn’t “communicator” catch on? Good enough for the Star Trek crew.
In a few weeks I’ll be talking to Siri via AirPods. And god only knows what we’ll call the glasses we’ll one day be wearing.
RepublicTigerSports.com
During the early days of what we then called the “World Wide Web,” there was a mood of “digital entrepreneurism.” Anybody with a minimum of technical skills could create a website. Later, when blogs became a thing, it got even easier. You could start your own newspaper or magazine or — when the bandwidth got better and the tools easier — audio and video. Anyone could create their own “content” and do so for fun or profit. That was the dream and a few made it a reality.
One of those was my friend David Brazeal. David grew up in Republic, Missouri, a small town just outside of Springfield in the southwest corner of the state. He earned a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and then reported news at a radio station in Jefferson City, MO.
That’s where I met him and then worked with him at Learfield Communications. David started in the newsroom but migrated to some of Learfield’s early, digital businesses. He was very good at what he did but eventually grew restless and longed to strike out on his own. His idea was to create a website that covered high school sports in his hometown.
With his wife’s blessing, he quit his very good job at a very good company and started RepublicTigerSports.com in 2009. David has defied the odds and made his “micro-site” a critical and financial success. I think it’s safe to say he covers high schools sports in Republic better than any traditional media outlook could or would. The town does not have a radio or TV station but does have a weekly newspaper.
I don’t think I could begin to describe the breadth and depth of the content on his site. If you are even remotely interested in what he’s doing, spend 10 or 15 minutes on the website. If you’re still interested, you might enjoy listening to the interview below. Runs about 35 minutes.
Would a bot ask you to show it your underpants?
Since retiring, I’m occasionally asked if I’d consider working part-time. Uh, no. But this afternoon I thought of a job that I might find interesting. If such a job exists. If some company/business/service was doing one of those “is it human or is it a bot?” things, that might be fun. Sort of a half-assed Turing Test kind of thing? But I’d want total freedom in my responses.
Q: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a…
Me: Did you think Ernest Borgnine was better in Airwolf or Escape from New York?
Yeah, I think I might do that for an hour a day. My friend David Brazeal had a similar gig for a while. He was the human behind the Barrel Bob Twitter account for the Missouri Department of Transportation. I think he lost the account when the suits couldn’t handle his insanely humorous tweets.
Japanese Boutique Sells Jeans That Have Been Worn for at Least a Year
“While used denim is generally sold at a discount, these particular jeans (The Onomichi Denim Project) actually get about twice as a expensive after being worn by somebody almost daily, for at least a year. […] They hand-pick the wearers from the local community and closely monitor their transformation over the course of one year. Wearers rotate through two pairs of jeans that they promise to wear almost every day for the entire period, and bring them to the shop every week, to be laundered at a special denim processing facility, which ensures that every pair retains the evidence of each wearer’s life and work. […] When the pre-wearing period ends, each pair of jeans is washed according to color, hang-dried or tumbled, checked for individuality, tagged with detailed descriptions and put on sale at the minimalist Onomichi Denim Project boutique for anywhere between ¥25,000 ($215) and ¥48,000 (415). That’s about twice as they usually cost when new, but these are not just any jeans, they are cultural artifacts.”
Yesterday I forced myself to toss the Levis below. The denim is so thin and soft you can poke your finger through the fabric. I keep thinking they’ll dissolve the next time I run them through the wash. Easily 10 or 15 years old. I think we’ll keep them a while longer. They are cultural artifacts, after all.
Five things you notice when you quit the news
I’ve been trying to kick the “TV news” habit for a while. I knew it wasn’t good for me but just couldn’t turn it off. If you’d asked me why I’d have been hard-pressed to tell you. But, once again, David Cain does a nice job of explaining things I cannot. He stopped watching for 30 days and shares some insights:
“If you quit, even for just a month or so, the news-watching habit might start to look quite ugly and unnecessary to you, not unlike how a smoker only notices how bad tobacco makes things smell once he stops lighting up. […] What you can glean about the world from the news isn’t even close to a representative sample of what is happening in the world. […] Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.”
And this little gem: “As it turns out, your hobby of monitoring the “state of the world” did not actually affect the world.”
This Friday will be 30 days since I watched TV news (or listened to NPR news). No Twitter and I never did Facebook. I still post a few things to Google+ (where I have some folks I like chatting with) but don’t get much “news” there and have muted all politics. I’ve never felt better.