Copernicus, Where Art Thou?

Being a national parks fan I tuned to PBS this evening to watch the first episode of Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The preamble featured beautiful images from various national parks accompanied by a narrator explaining that the parks contain the "highest peak in the continent", the "oldest living thing", "the tallest tree", "the highest free waterfall in the continent", etc.

Interestingly enough the marshlands around the bay area have not been designated as a national park. Nor did that meadow in Massachusetts where I was eaten alive by mosquitoes, that thorny field nearby, or that boring hill by which we drove in Montana.

Indeed, even the national parks are not about preserving the environment. They are about preserving some environments --- those which awe mankind.

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It Takes Two To Tango

This morning JJ, one of the developers in my group, walked into my office weary eyed: he had been woken up by his toddler son Jonathan in the wee hours of the morning. It turned out that the binkie had fallen out of the crib. When JJ entered Jonathan's room he saw the toddler pretending to stretch in an attempt to reach the pacifier. "I decided to teach him how to fish," said JJ, "Quite literally; I held the binkie in the palm of my hand way down until he extended his arm and grabbed it. Next time he'll pick it up on his own."

This reminds me of one of Ephraim Kishon's stories, the one about his puppy. Despite all of Kishon's efforts the puppy kept wetting the carpet. Desperate, Kishon turned to the vet for advice. "Easy," said the vet, "dogs can be trained. Each time this happens you need to grab the puppy, shove its nose into the puddle and then kick it out through the window." And sure enough, this did the trick: within just a couple of days the puppy was trained. It would pee on the carpet, shove its own nose into the puddle and then proceed to jump out of the window.

We all teach what we want to teach and learn what we choose to learn.

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Necessary Condition Or Symptom?

Last week I started diving into some code at work and felt rather confused. It is a non-trivial piece of code, in a language I don't know well, written in a coding style that is new to me, etc.

This reminds me of a story from my grad school days. I needed to learn a new area for my thesis, and was in the process of reading several papers. Some of them were hard, and at the time they did not connect to a cohesive picture in my brain. I was confused, and must have looked accordingly.

"You look confused", declared my advisor while storming into the department one of those days.

"I am indeed", I said. "These papers don't make sense to me."

"Excellent! Excellent!", he said excitedly, without slowing even a tiny bit, "When you are confused, that's when you learn the most", and disappeared out of sight.

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At Least They Are Consistent

Guess what email landed in my inbox just a few hours ago. Yes, that's right, yet another message from Live Nation, the fine folks who brought us Dave Gahan the ventriloquist just a week ago.

Thanks for attending Depeche Mode at Shoreline Amphitheatre!
At Live Nation, we want to create great concert experiences. That’s where you come in - we want your feedback on Depeche Mode at Shoreline Amphitheatre. If you thought Depeche Mode was great, tell us. If you thought it was just okay, let us know.

I can't take the suspense: what will come next?

I'm finally beginning to get the sense that Live Nation is indeed in the entertainment business.

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P.S. Any creative suggestions for feedback in response to their survey?

Do PR People Care About Customers At All?

The following is an excerpt from an email that landed in my inbox some 3 hours ago (the emphases are mine):

Depeche Mode has been forced to cancel their scheduled appearance on Wednesday, August 12th at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California due to doctor's orders that lead singer Dave Gahan be on complete vocal rest for 48 hours.
...
"San Francisco is one of the most important cities to the band and we are devastated that we have been forced to cancel this date," said Dave Gahan.

Perhaps I'm overly picky when I'm bummed, but I find this to be an insensitive choice of words. Is there anybody out there?

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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.

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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.

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