Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

Information Overload Research Group launched!

July 16, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 5 Comments

Quite off topic, but how exciting! After months of preparation, the group I co-founded is now alive and kicking!

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is a non-profit association of researchers interested in solving theglobal problem of Information Overload. It prides itself on bringing together key people from industry, academia, consultancies and software vendors who bring their diverse points of view to bear on the problem – thereby creating a collaboration that far exceeds what each can do alone.

So, I’m in New York City now (quite a city, that!) and yesterday we’ve held a wonderful conference at the Penn Club where we formally announced and launched our group, and delighted in meeting some scores of like-minded researchers and practitioners, and listening to some fascinating lectures. Jonathan Spira of Basex , my fellow director on the IORG board, gave a perspective on the nature and extent of the problem; Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy, shared his approach to attaining an empty Inbox; Maggie Jackson lectured and then signed her new book, Distracted; and Prof. David Levy of the university of Washington spoke of his research into the phenomenon of ” No Time to Think”, giving us a scary historical perspective into the degradation of Contemplative Scholarship in academia in recent times.

There were also two panels, one to discuss what corporations were doing about it all (that was where I spoke) and one for visionary vendors who presented amazing new products they’re introducing.

I usually blog about my work elsewhere, but I thought I’d share this!

Pillboxes and Clay balls: inside and outside

July 10, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

I recently bought this box of vitamins, and noticed it had a life size outline of the pills’ actual size. This makes sense, since the box is “safety sealed for your protection”, so people can’t see what’s inside before they buy.

Vitamins box

This reminded me (wonders of associative memory!) of something rather different, yet following the same idea, from the History of Computing (one of my favorite hobbies). I read about it long ago, but recently was delighted to run across the real thing in a small showcase in the Pergamon museum in Berlin. Back in ancient Mesopotamia, around 9,000 years ago, people had this neat idea of recording commercial transactions with clay tokens. Different shaped tokens might represent a sheep, a jug of beer, or a sack of grain… and so you could represent a loan or tax payment by a collection of tokens (SAP was far in the future then, as was Excel; in fact they had yet to invent writing, so they couldn’t use that for their records). Here is a sample of these tokens:

Mesopotamian Clay Tokens

Then, around 3,500BC in ancient Sumer, the idea occurred that it’s better to keep all the tokens in an “envelope”, a hollow ball of clay that could be signed with the parties’ seals, then fired to harden it. These balls of clay are like an authenticated, signed record; their content can’t be altered without breaking the ball. The museum had some of these balls cracked open, with the tokens still in them:

Mesopotamian Clay Balls with Tokens

Mesopotamian Clay Ball with imprinted tokens

And since the clay is not transparent, they would sometimes press the tokens on the outside of the ball before sealing them inside – so you’d know what each ball was about. And now we have an accessible copy of the record on the outside, and a sealed version on the inside… just as with the vitamins box!

The next step is obvious in retrospect: who needs the tokens on the inside? So around 3,300BC they dispensed with the tokens, flattened the ball into a clay tablet and made do with the indentations on this, as in the next photo.

Mesopotamian Clay Tablets

And lastly… surely you can see where this is going? Once they could Early Writing on a Mesopotamian tablet represent stuff in the real world by abstract marks on a tablet, they were on the path to real writing, starting with pictographs and ending with true cuneiform. Here is another exhibit from the Pergamon, which seems to be halfway through the transition. Wayda go!

More of the science behind this fascinating history can be found on the web site of Prof. Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the university of Texas, a leading researcher of the origins of writing and counting .

Intelligent freeway signage

July 7, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

In recent years the freeway system in Israel is applying some pretty good leading edge technology (including truly transparent wireless toll collection that is still missing in many countries I visit).

One interesting system can be seen in the Ayalon highway in Tel Aviv. This road has electronic signs that give precise real time information of the driving conditions ahead, including which lanes are jammed and how fast the traffic moves (when it does). Perhaps most impressive are the signs that give a taste of the despair lying ahead, as in “Traffic jammed through La Guardia exit”… not that there’s much you can do about it, admittedly, but at least you know!…

Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv

Photo: Wikimedia commons.

Of course, behind this capability lies a network of sensors and cameras, and an expert system that integrates them and recommends to the human operator at the road’s control center what messages to send to the signs (I thought the system was entirely automatic, but actually it does give a human final override). The information on the signs and the video from the cameras are also accessible on the Internet: the traffic flow conditions are updated every few minutes, and you can click the camera icons to see the real time video stream – and mouse over the “i” icons to see what text appears on each sign.

The left-handed staircases of the Kerrs

July 4, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 1 Comment

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…

Tools 2: Choosing your supplier

July 2, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 5 Comments

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:

Nicholson File

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.

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…

Tools 1: Quality matters!

June 27, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

Of all the everyday objects you will own, Tools deserve a place of honor, since they are the ones you use to make other Tools 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.

machinist's square

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.

metal saw

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.

metal saw - detail

Computerized humans, take 2

June 9, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

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.

Polymer banknotes are here!

June 6, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

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!

Polymer Banknotes

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. Polymer Banknote detail

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.

If you need to speak to someone, live…

June 4, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 2 Comments

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!

Don’t you miss Borland’s no-nonsense EULA? (sigh)

May 30, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

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.