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...

Bottom Up

Earlier this evening Bob, one of the developers in my group, was taking a picture of a fish in the aquarium in his office.

"Look how big he has grown!" Bob was all excited.

"How small was he when you got him?", I asked.

"The same size as the other fish", replied Bob pointing to the other fish in the aquarium, all of which were much smaller.

"How did he grow so large?", I inquired, "Did he eat the other fish?"

"No, he's an algae eater, he eats all the food that sinks to the bottom."

"Oh, so he's the garbage collector of the aquarium."

"Yes he is. Apparently garbage collectors win."

"Eventually they do, in the long term. And till then they eat garbage."

Zzzzz...

Tools Of The Trade

[Today a guest snoozer, written by my girlfriend]

Once upon a time, all people needed to do their jobs was a brain, a phone, a pen or a pencil, and perhaps an abacus. Then a typewriter was invented, and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their pens and pencils. Then a calculator was invented and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their abaci. Then the computer was invented and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their typewriters and their calculators. Then e-mail was invented. And everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their phones AND their brains.

Zzzzz...

Production vs. Consumption

My friend John sent me a link to Paul Graham's How To Do What You Love blog post. The following excerpt from this essay drew my attention:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing?

In the last few years we have witnessed a flurry of perosnal production, mostly fueled by the digital revolution. People take pictures. People film videos. People develop non-commercial software. People write snoozers... And more.

The affordable production and distribution tools are perhaps the most important contribution of computers and networking to civilization. In the TV age people were relegated to consumption. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with being a consumer; society, however, needs a healthy balance between consumption and production. Video games, while being interactive, may develop quick thinking and problem solving skills but still don't directly facilitate creation; they are just TVs on steroids. And as disappointing as it may be to some parents, board games are not much better.

For it is creation that makes the difference, not activity, interactivity, or hyperactivity. And nowadays creation is no longer confined to the realm of governments and corporations, but is finally within the reach of billions of individuals.

Perhaps there is hope after all.

Zzzzz...

Heisenberg Rules

My previous employer incentivized employees through quarterly bonuses which were tied to quarterly goals. The completion of these goals was assessed via measurements: if you accomplished 80% of your quarterly measurements you'd receive 80% of your target bonus, etc.

The company naively neglected to account for the little lawyer that wakes up in many of us when it comes to our income. It so happened that people paid much more attention to the measurements than to the goals. Logical, isn't it? After all, it was the measurements, not the goals, that determined the size of the bonus.

And so, just before the release of a critical product, we had the fortune of being visited by elves. We had a quarterly goal to GA that product, and one of the measurements was to have no more than 25 high-severity bugs. Alas before that night the number of such bugs was stubbornly higher. Luckily the elves realized the seriousness of the situation, came to our rescue, and downgraded 12 of the bugs to medium-severity overnight.

An even better story is that of another major product which formally GAed on time, though it was not available for customer shipments for several more months.

Be careful with the manner in which you measure people. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is noticeable at a scale much larger than that of quantum particles.

Zzzzz...