Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

A Lego Surprise

Zaphod Beeblebrox in LegoI was busy putting the basement in order and found a box of much used Lego pieces going back to the kids’ childhood, and in it I found – as is – what you see in the photo.

Of course there are Lego kits today for anything from Rocket ships to Medieval castles, but Zaphod Beeblebrox?!…

🙂

Chimney sighting

Here is a striking photo I snapped in Tubingen, in southern Germany, showing a building with a tile roof… bearing a weird pattern:

Building with chimney in Tubingen

Chimney in Tubingen
The cause of the red circle on the roof is unmistakable, the air flows around the chimney… but it is the opposite of what you’d expect, and the details are a bit unclear (considering the darker soot circle around the cleared out area). If you care to speculate, do it in the comments!

The fading memory of arithmetic

Isaac Asimov once wrote a SciFi story named The feeling of Power, in which a future age has become so accustomed to computers that the rediscovery of how to calculate sums with pencil and paper – or in one’s head – is considered a major breakthrough.

That age may be nearer than we think. Recently we went shopping and were told by a pleasant young salesgirl that we’ll get a 10% discount on an item listed at 360 NIS. I figured the final price in my head, while the girl whipped out a rather large desktop calculator and proceeded to pound its keys, displaying the result a few seconds after I’d finished. Not that I claim any arithmetical prowess: it wasn’t like I had to figure 83.45% of 382.44 NIS. Taking 36 from 360 is no big deal.

But I was curious, so I asked the young woman whether she could have figured the result without the calculator; and she admitted she couldn’t have. She didn’t seem embarrassed about it; she sounded as if I’d asked whether she could read cuneiform script, or design a spaceship. Of course she couldn’t; that’s what calculators were for, after all…

Fast food, fifties style

We have a McDonald’s in downtown Jerusalem (of course!), but within spitting distance of it there is another kind of fast food restaurant, one that is dear to the hearts of the city’s old time residents. It is the Ta’ami restaurant.

Ta'ami restaurant in Jerusalem

Ta’ami is a tiny restaurant: one room, opening right onto the sidewalk in Shamai street, with a few tables inside. A working man’s eatery, it has no “wait to be seated” rule; in fact, you walk right in and sit on any free chair – not table: unrelated customers are expected to share the same table. No fuss, no niceties, but wonderful food, starting with Hummus that many say is the best in the land (and many others violently disagree; Hummus connoisseurship tends to run to high emotions).

Albert MajarSo why is this a fast food joint? Well, here’s how this works: you go in, spy an empty chair, and as soon as your behind hits it, the waiter is at your side, rattling a list of dishes (though most regulars know what they want). You order, and in a minute or so your food is placed before you. No time wasted. But it goes beyond that, thanks to the legendary founder of Ta’ami, the late Mr. Albert Majar, whose photo adorns the wall. Albert came from Bulgaria around 1950, and started his family-run restaurant soon thereafter. His techniques of customer management were famous and cherished in our town. He’d go around the tiny hall and urge the clients to eat faster, to make room for more people to eat. His favorite phrase, “Swallow, don’t chew!”, became so famous that it is now the restaurant’s slogan. He also used to compact tables by switching people from table to table in mid-lunch, thereby freeing contiguous seats for people who came in groups. And so business was brisk, profits presumably grew, and a legend was born.

Not exacly the way they do it at McDonald’s… but what Hummus!

No pigs in the dishwasher!

These days vendors have become masters of  trivial warnings, as seen in coffee cups that warn us their content is hot, and countless other examples. Recently I ran into an amusing case.

Not dishwasher safe!

The little piggy is yet another form of the classic kitchen timer. What makes it interesting is the inscription on its base: “Not dishwasher safe” – in two languages too, not to take any chances.

I suppose there may actually exist people silly enough to try and dunk this along with the dishes… it’s a large planet. Still…

How to keep your submarine straight

I was visiting the Intrepid museum in NYC (an aircraft museum housed in a retired aircraft carrier – a real treat!) and they had, as a bonus, a fifites-era submarine, the USS Growler, moored alongside the carrier. So I had to see that too (of course).

Submarines are always amazing from a design standpoint, given the intense constraints they have to accommodate. There were many complex pieces of machinery below deck, but one of them struck me with its simplciity. It was a “Ship clinometer, Type II – Heel”, and I snapped its photo for you.

Ship clinometer on submarine USS Growler

“Heel” is the inclination of a ship sideways, and this device tells the submariners how far their vessel is heeling away from the vertical. No need to explain how it works, of course… it’s a cousin of the humble (and equally useful) spirit level we have in our toolboxes. I imagine that today more sophisticated instruments exist, bristling with electronics and digital displays; but actually, this pair of curved glass tubes must’ve done just as good a job – the Growler carried nuclear missiles, and I’m sure its designers preferred its captain to know which way was up…

What is the Brain like today?

Anyone interested in the Brain – that ultimate piece of high technology – has seen the true but overused statement that each age in history sees the brain as analogous to the latest current technology: the ancients thought of it as a hydraulic system, our grandparents as a telephone exchange, our parents as a computer…

Well, I’ve just run into the next step in this progression. We were watching House on TV, and the irritating genius explained to a colleague that the brain is like the internet, where information packets flow this way and that.

I’m not sure at all that this is a good description – in fact I doubt it very much – but at any rate, we’re one step beyond the brain-as-computer now. Can’t help but wonder what the brain will be likened to next?…

Mr. Babbage’s marvelous engine

In the US, where I just gave a lecture at a conference on Information Load and Overload, and of course I found the time to visit the wonderful Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This is always a delight, but this time they surpassed themselves: they demonstrated the newly built Difference Engine #2 in action!

Charles Babbage’s incredible but never-built 19th century calculating machine was first realized in the nineties by the Science Museum in London, and now Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned this second replica. This one is complete with the printing mechanism; you crank the handle at one end, sequential values of 7th order polynomial functions are computed by the whirring mechanism, and ready-to-use plaster casts for printing the numbers in table form come out the other end, complete with multi-column formatting. The dance of the mechanism is really a thing of beauty; a visit to the museum is very recommended.

I saw it, and I have the photo to prove it!

Nathan and the Babbage Difference Engine reconstruction

Check out my new Infomation Overload blog!

Yep… I started a second blog, this time one dedicated to my work specialty and passion: fighting Information Overload. It’s called “Challenge Information Overload” and you’re most welcome to read it here.

I plan to continue posting here on the Commonsense Design blog, albeit possibly at a somewhat lower update rate (there are only so many hours in a day :-)).

Headup wordpress plugin – add semantic browsing to your blog!

I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever.

That was then. Now Semantinet, the start-up in Herzliya where I work one day each week, has packaged the capability as a WordPress plugin, which means that a blogger can add the capability to any WordPress blog in a mere minute or two. If you have a WordPress blog, you can download the plugin here.

What’s more, the product had evolved, and it now includes a tab called “friends” in addition to the ones for photos, videos, and the rest. This tab – once you connect it to your Facebook account – shows you how the entity being viewed is connected to the people you know, like which of your friends live in the place or work at the company.

Pretty powerful capability – and easier than ever to include. Which is what I just did – mouse over the marked up words anywhere on this blog and see it in action!

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