Advertising’s a Dirty Business

The postman delivered an Amazon parcel. As I was out at the time, they left it in a secure location. Using the wonders of GIMP and a couple of minutes of my time, I’ve replicated the most important parts of the sight that met my eyes when I went to recover it. What are your first thoughts about the box?

Bat(ttered)man

I’ve recently started playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. Overall, it’s a great fun game but there’s one niggle: saved games – or rather the lack thereof.

Obstacles Diminish Enthusiasm

I’m a firm believer in being better than you need to be just because you can. However, sometimes others go out of their way to make it less smooth than it needs to be.

Psychometric Trigger Locks

As Colleen Hoover writes trigger warnings can be a complex topic. How does one balance protecting people from traumatic reminders without spoiling books for others? Perhaps the answer, and other similar advantages, lie in expanding existing book-site technology.

He Knows… But He’s Got Problems

DiVinci-esque savants aside, humans tend not to be great at the total of all tasks. Which makes being good or bad at something a poor indicator of whether a person is competent as a whole.

A Very Dim Mirror

In one of my favourite scenes from Inspector Morse, Morse tells Lewis a little about his adolescence and how he promised himself that he’d never forget what it felt like; and then he delivered the kicker, that of course he did, that everyone does. There are many reasons I accepted the fallibility of memory, but that scene was probably my earliest introduction to it; and I carried the inevitability of that separation of present and past selves with me into later life. I still believe we lose touch with the experience of adolescence, but one thing exists that can remind us how it felt: the Windows 10 upgrade cycle.

One Copy For Each Hand

Why don’t online retailers offer an “already bought” filter on searches?

Peering Down The Road Untaken

Having worked on various business improvement projects over the years, this video on requirements gathering made me chuckle and wince at the same time. However, it isn’t just large-scale projects that suffer from the issue: even the most apparently simple aims can suffer from a strong bias to repeat what works.

As the almost fanatical resistance displayed by adherents of disproved theories shows, once the human mind has a solution to an issue it will hold onto it even when presented with almost overwhelming evidence it isn’t the best solution. And this tendency to accept the status quo is even stronger when there isn’t an external challenge.

So, as happened in the video, people can become fixated on the method rather than the outcome; rebuilding the existing world rather than taking the opportunity to build a more functional one.

Obviously, this favouring of an existing approach over a bespoke one saves time, so is helpful for non-critical tasks (such as the route to work on an ordinary day or where to buy more socks), but for the things that will have a large impact it’s worth taking the time to challenge our assumptions at least a little.

Shining Light Pollution in Dark Places

The stars turn again, echoing forward 313 days to that most urgent of festivals. And so the madness slips back into slumber, withdrawing back to the precincts of its cult. I speak of course of Valentine’s Day adverts.

For those who do not celebrate Valentine’s Day – or celebrate with gifts sought truly outwith the norm – adverts for beheaded flowers, shaped chocolates, and seasonal jewellery spatter the two non-Christmas months with aural graffiti; an irritant to be ignored. But for the scholar of the Mythos, the impact is worse.

(©Adrian Tritschler – CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Rising up in pastels and pins, the targeted advertising of LoveCraft handmade necklaces, Lovecraft sex guides, and other homonyms of Yog Sothoth’s prophet weave and surge across the results of automated keyword alerts. Already assailed by obscure porn, enclaves of the Mythos sink beneath the tide.

And worse, these micro-stores and relationship suggestions oft lack coherent metadata; so appear not as what they are, but as a shadowy label, easy to mistake for a scholarly snippet until a click strips away doubt to reveal them in their true inappropriateness.

But now the madness ebbs, and sanity returns to searches leaving only the horror of the endless churning at the heart of reality: can one enjoy a book without agreeing with the author’s politics?

A More Fluid Interaction

Sean Follmer’s idea is good just for the reasons he gives, and I can see others:

Being able to “pass” objects to people in other locations? Remote support and training gain most of the advantages of an on-site presence.

Furniture that changes shape in response to the user? No more fiddling with handles to obtain an ergonomic layout or guessing if you will be using someone else’s desk for long enough to justify adjusting the chair.

But, the real benefit isn’t in the workplace.