Brilliant Marketing

Heinz takes special pride in the thickness of its ketchup. So much, in fact, that their web site sports a trivia page which includes the following nugget:

At what speed does ketchup exit the iconic glass bottle?
Ketchup exits the iconic glass bottle at .028 miles per hour. If the viscosity of the ketchup is greater than this speed, the ketchup is rejected for sale.

What they forgot to mention is that achieving the .028 mph speed requires an equally iconic attack by a coordinated team, with one person holding the bottle upside-down and hammering its base while another is prying the ketchup out using a knife.

How they managed to take the most annoying feature about their product and turn it into a selling point is beyond me.

Zzzzz...

P.S. Food cools down much faster, at an average speed of 0.57 mph.

Digitized Concepts

Earlier this week, on July 20, 2009, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. To commemorate this event the Google code blog published transcriptions of the original Command Module and Lunar Module source codes.

Thus 40 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon I found myself browsing the Apollo 11 source code and downloading the open source emulator of its computer. I was in awe; it was a truly humbling experience. Those lines of carefully crafted assembly instructions felt like precious artifacts, and I was grateful to the people who made my experience possible.

And then it hit me: the web sites hosting the Virtual AGC project and the Apollo 11 source code were museums. Wikipedia confirmed this observation:

A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment", as defined by the International Council of Museums.

Indeed, it was all there: conservation, communication, heritage... And the sites are open to the public like no museum has been before.

Yup, these were museums alright, of the digital age kind. But museums of what? Of Apollo 11? Of moon exploration? Perhaps. More than anything, however, these sites felt like museums of the human spirit.

Zzzzz...

Democracy

On June 25, 2009 Michael Jackson passed away.

Following his death people rushed to the internet by the millions to follow up on the news. It was such a sudden frenzy, in fact, that Google News' protection scheme kicked in and blocked related queries for fear of attack on its servers.

Last night Coldplay, one of the hottest bands of this generation, performed in front of a sold-out crowd in Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA. Half way through the concert the band abandoned the stage and shifted to a tiny stage located in the middle of the surprised crowd. After explaining that they were "going to go into a song that is far better than any song we could ever write" the band played Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, unplugged. I had never seen such an earthy homage before.


Michael Jackson may have been the King of Pop, the queen of pop, both, or neither. His music may or may not last. For now none of this matters; the people have spoken.

Zzzzz...