When we toured Scotland we visited an ancient building with a curious design feature: it had a staircase that ran in a counterclockwise spiral, opposite to the standard design.
We were told that there are a number of such buildings in Scotland, all built by the same family. Apparently the Kerr family tended to have many left-handed sons, and they built a number of their castles and buildings (notably Ferniehirst Castle, in the 15th century) with counterclockwise spiral staircases, the idea being that a left handed person could defend them more easily (and perhaps also confuse the more common right handed enemies? although it seems that the latter would have some advantage on the attack).
Such a degree of custom design, geared to a genetic trait of one family, is interesting. It is also told that once they committed the architecture this way, they handled the fact that not all their fighting men were lefties by training those who weren’t to fight with the sword in their left hand anyway. Customize the building to the family, then customize the retainers to the building…
So, if quality is critical, how do we find the best tools?
One simple method is to go for the best makers; the ones the pros swear by. In my case I did that by interrogating my machine shop teacher in university, a master craftsman with decades of experience. Basically it went like this:
Me: what is the best make of hand files?
Master: why do you want to know? These are not for a hobbyist; they’d be too expensive for you anyway.
Me: Oh, I’m just curious.
Master: you aren’t going to buy them, Right?
Me: Perish the thought! I only want to know.
Master: You’re sure?
Me: Cross my heart.
Master: well, the best files are made by Nicholson; but you have to make sure it’s the Dutch Nicholson. Nicholson also has a factory in Canada, those are not quite as good.
Me: Thanks!
And then I’d rush off to buy some Dutch Nicholson files.
Those files serve me well to this day, though in all fairness, I suspect the Canadian ones would have served just as well…
Of all the everyday objects you will own, Tools deserve a place of honor, since they are the ones you use to make other
objects. In fact, tools are arguably what distinguished our hominid ancestors from the animals. For my part, as a maker of things for pleasure and work, tools - the workshop kind - have been my lifelong possessions and companions, so I will blog about them for a bit.
The first point I want to share should be obvious, yet as the massive commerce in low grade tools shows it certainly isn’t: when buying a tool, always go for the best quality available. It does make a huge difference.
Take the tool in the photo: a machinist’s square for metal work. It was made by Moore and Wright of Sheffield, a maker of precision tools since 1906. Now the first time I bought a machinist square (I was in my teens), it was much prettier than this one, and had a scale of centimeters along the edge too; it only had one drawback: it had an angle just short of 90 degrees. So I took it back to the store and got another, with an aluminum stock; this one was just over 90 degrees. Eventually I went to a better store and got the Moore & Wright: no scale, just an ugly lump of iron that tends to rust - but it still measures a precise straight angle after decades.
Or take the saw in this photo. I had a cheaper one, and it would use the same blades… only they would pop off the frame every so often. Only when I went and got this more expensive one, made by Eclipse, did the problem go away - and all it took was to have the little rods that go through the blade be longer! Little details like these make a big difference to tool usability and usefulness - and quality is all about the little details.
Recently I discussed how workers at customer call centers can turn into computer-like zombies. The other day I stood face to face with such a person.
I was trying to order two coffees at a fast coffee shop. My wife likes her espresso with a drop of foamed milk on top - “Espresso Macchiato”, meaning “stained espresso” in Italian. I take mine pure. So I order:
Me: Two espressos, one of them Macchiato.
Coffeeshop cashier: Huh?
Me: One short espresso, one espresso macchiato.
Cashier: what’s that?
Me: It’s espresso with a little foamed milk on it. It’s called espresso macchiato.
Cashier: you can order espresso, or you can order macchiato.
Me: OK, one espresso, one macchiato.
Cashier: [accepts the order without further comment].
You see, it wasn’t that he had never seen a Macchiato - he works in a fancy coffeshop that sells it routinely - it was that the expression “espresso macchiato”, which is grammatically correct and in common usage worldwide, had failed his string processing subroutine. His computer had a button for espresso and a button for macchiato; there was no button for the combined form. A customer ordering anything without a button dedicated to it could be served no more than a Klingon ordering a serving of Gagh.
Until now, we had paper money, and we had plastic - which meant credit cards. Well, now the distinction is blurred: as of April, Israel joined a growing list of countries that have plastic paper money!
See the two 20 Shekel banknotes above. The one on the right is the trusty ol’ paper banknote, showing the late Moshe Sharet. The other showed up in April, amazing many citizens and confounding countless vending machines. It is made of a tough polymer, and looks exactly the same except for the transparent window in the star of David at top left - a transparent area that is continuous with the paper itself, a superb anti-forging device. 
There is also a watermark of Mr. Sharet below the star, but in a resolution unheard of in ordinary paper watermarks. This did not scan well, but you can get the idea in the detail from a Romanian polymer note that fell into my hands - note how the transparency feature here is interleaved with opaque lines in the eagle, and see the bearded man in the watermark, visible only because the scanner shone a light through the thickness of the plastic paper.
These Polymer banknotes were originally developed in Australia, and have the advantage - in addition to making forgers miserable - of resisting the severe wear and tear that paper money must endure far better than their predecessors. They are entering service in a lengthening list of countries, and although at first they complained that they are strange to the touch, I already see people getting used to their unaccustomed smooth texture.
I’m getting to like the Lenovo blogs more and more. Consider this sentence, from an early version of an About page they had:
Finally, if you need to speak to someone, live, give David Churbuck, Lenovo’s Global VP of Marketing a call, his cell phone is 508 360 6147.
This was regrettably removed later from their main About page, but it’s still accessible in the archives, so we can see this Mirabile Dictu: a VP in a large corporation who shares his cellphone with his customers - us - on the blogosphere. Definitely wayda go!
Every commercial piece of software we use comes with an End User License Agreement (EULA), which we all merrily accept without reading. After all, who has time to read a rambling document of barely decipherable legalese that we can’t do anything about anyway? Sometime I do glance through them, and my blood pressure shoots up (the part I like best is where it says “Some states do not allow the exclusion of [bla bla], so the above exclusion may not apply to you”, which essentially says “we will abuse you all the way, but if your state prohibits this we will abuse you a little less”). 
So, I sometimes remember fondly the old (1980’s) Borland No-Nonsense License, which said:
You must treat this software just like a book …
…By saying “just like a book,” Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used at one location while it’s being used at another or on a computer network by more than one user at one location. Just like a book can’t be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be used by two different people in two different places at the same time. [you can find the full text here].
Sensible, isn’t it? And fair, too. An agreement decent people might freely enter, and have respect for (check the sentiment expressed here). Our world needs more of this sort of thing!
Incidentally, the distinction between the Borland style and the one prevalent today - what I call People language vs. Lawyer language - is what inspired my own legal blurb on Possibly Interesting.
A riddle: what’s rectangular and flat, can fit in your pocket, and can calculate six-variable functions?
No, not a pocket calculator; I forgot to mention - it has no electronic components whatsoever.
Here, check it out in the latest addition to the HOC collection on my Possibly Interesting web site.
I discussed a while ago how Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are being designed to be more human like. Well, the reverse is also sometimes true, with human operators becoming more and more computer-like. Consider:
Our car lighted up a “service required” lamp, so I called the 24×7 number provided by our garage, to ask whether the car was due for maintenance. A polite young lady answered:
Young Lady: How may I help you?
Me: Hi. My car claims it needs maintenance but has only 5500 Km on it. I want to know whether this model requires maintenance at 5000 Km?
YL: what is your name please?
Me: Zeldes. [I was assuming she plans to look up my car in some customer database]
YL: Is that your first name?
Me: No, it’s my last name. [Duh!…]
YL: What is your first name?
Me: Nathan. [Strange question: the database would be indexed by last name!]
YL: May I have your phone number? Someone will call you.
Me: [gave my cellular number].
YL: May I have your home number?
Me: No, use my cellular, it’s what I can be reached at.
YL: May I have your home number?
At this point it hit me: I was talking to a computer program! It was implemented in wetware, but the girl was following a preset routine and had no independent thought: a living computer. So I gave her my home number, and she exited that particular program loop and eventually hung up.
And it struck me that the moment she repeated the home number question is when I achieved certainty that there was no sense talking her out of the routine she was bound to; in essence, she had passed at that moment a reverse version of the Turing Test. A human would’ve said “OK, that’ll do then”.
Incidentally, the term “Reverse Turing Test” can be intepreted in many ways - here’s another, more often seen interpretation of this.
The wonders of the natural world are many, and the living body includes countless amazing features (and, admittedly, some not-so-amazing ones as well). Today I give due homage to a piece of truly elegant design: the perfect match of the outer ear to the iPod’s earphones!
The earphones’ convenient usage stems from the presence of those details of ear anatomy that form a perfect keyhole structure to hold the earbud in place just against the opening of the ear canal. The structure echoes (after a 180 degree turn) that seen on the backs of many wall-mounted household objects, like the fan seen in the photo below.
In case you wondered, the small folds in the outer ear’s convolutions that make this possible are called the Tragus and Anti-Tragus, as seen in this detailed illustration from Gray’s Anatomy. They hold the earphone’s round body in a snug fit against the suitably sized Concha.
We humans may not have the most impressive ears (just ask a bat, or a rabbit, or an elephant) but we certainly come pre-customized to hear our favorite music on the go!
