A comedy club in Barcelona is experimenting with charging users per laugh, using facial-recognition technology to track how much they enjoyed the show.
The software is installed on tablets attached to the back of each seat at the Teatreneu club.
Each laugh is charged at 0.30 euros (23p) with a cap of 24 euros (£18). Takings are up so far.
Speechless.
Part of me hopes that it’s astrologer Susan Miller. If she actually believes the utter garbage of astrology, there is a word for her and it’s “Goodbye”. If she doesn’t and this is preying on the gullible, there might be other words.
Though either way, someone who claims to be able to foretell the future really shouldn’t have a website that looks like it was designed in the 1980s.
But then, no, hang on, websites are technology and Miller says that this is a bad time to spend any cash on technology. Specifically now, as in some period of weeks around here: I refuse to indulge the nonsense by stating the dates she gives. There’s not a whole lot of point, really: it’s all bollocks and at the end of the period astrologers will says “see? told you” and everybody sensible will have forgotten this crap existed. The only ones left paying attention will be the aforementioned gullible and, you know, there’s just so much you can do to help people.
Such as quoting astrologers and laughing. Miller has been talking to Time magazine, which I usually rather enjoy, saying that we shouldn’t buy iPhones right now because Mercury is in retrograde. Uh-huh. I’m guessing that means we’re at the spot in Mercury’s orbit where because we’re also moving in an orbit we appear to overtake it so Mercury’ seems to fall back or something. Mercury’s fine. Orbiting away. It’s all in how you look at it, where you stand and how stupid you are.
But I can’t accuse someone of having no scientific basis without asking if they have evidence and there is some. There’s proof:
Miller says that her daughter — “an Aries, they never trust what you say and have to do their own little empirical research” — once bought a laptop during Mercury retrograde and had to sell it on eBay after realizing she hadn’t bought enough hard drive space.
Those Aries rascals. No possible chance that they cocked up and regretted saving some cash by buying a low-spec computer, no. It has to be that the stars and planets of the entire universe aligned across the infinite cosmos to tell her she shouldn’t have gone to Currys.
Talk about not taking responsibility.
If you want to read more then off you pop, the link is under the quote, I don’t want to go there with you. And the full article includes a link to that Website That Time Forgot too.
Here’s the thing. You’re driving using Siri as a Satnav on your iPhone. Since the phone is plugged into the car and therefore thinks it’s on mains, you can just say “Hey Siri” and ask it what you like, when you like. It is great.
Except.
You’re navigating along and you get a text. “Hey Siri, read my texts”, you say. And it does. That’s nice.
What’s a lot less nice is that your iPhone then sits on that grey-black Siri page waiting for you to press the button to ask it something else.
Don’t. Do this instead. Say: “Hey, Siri, what’s our ETA?”
Siri will tell you. Many people don’t realise you can do this at all but the trick is not that you can do it but that Siri reacts in a certain way. It tells you the ETA – and then it goes back to navigating. It goes back to the map and its turn by turn directions instead of the grey-black emptiness of the Siri page.
There will be other questions that work but the ETA one seems to do the job because it is related to navigating. Somehow iOS 8 knows to pop you back to navigating after you’ve asked this.
Bonus: when you do this a lot, as I do, you get to ask the ETA many times and you get to learn what your ETA is. I rarely care but now I’m very familiar with distances on the motorway.
An article on Listverse offers an interesting take on how sometimes it’s worth losing our cool. Though one reason it’s interesting is that it’s also pragmatic. Here’s one section:
Negotiating is all about being levelheaded and outsmarting your opponent, right? Not entirely. All of our interpersonal interactions function on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one. Research shows that sometimes getting mad can help your case. People are programmed to be cautious around someone who is angry. Therefore, it can make the person whom you’re haggling with more cooperative if you get upset—they’ll try to give you stuff to appease you.
However, there are a few caveats to all of this. First of all, this usually only works with Europeans and Americans. Asian cultures find displays of anger during negations to be rude, so blowing your lid may hurt your case. Second, if you do get angry, it has to be real anger. If the guy opposite you thinks you’re faking it, they’ll actually increase their own demands. Researchers say that faking anger erodes trust. If they find out that you’re trying to game them, they’ll be less cooperative.
10 Surprisingly Pleasant Things You Get from Anger – Monte Richard, Listverse (9 October 2014)
Go on. Read the full piece for the other nine points.
“[David] Nicholls, while writing his follow-up to One Day, used a particularly brutal app, Write or Die. Ponder too long over your next word and an ominous red glow descends over the page. Then your text disappears in haphazard fashion: This is what a sntnc lks lk ftr prcrstntng fr 20 scnds.
Nicholls likened it to “writing with a gun to my head”. Unsurprisingly he didn’t produce his best work and decided that two years and 32,000 words of work were to be discarded.”
The much-delayed war on procrastination – Tom Heyden, BBC News Online (11 October 2014)
I know what you’re thinking. He only wrote 32,000 words? In two years? That’s 16,000 a year. It’s 44 words per day. No wonder he wanted an anti-prevarication app.
No wonder it failed too: I can pump out 20 pages of script or 10,000 words of text per day for up to about 6 days in a row. But while they can be surprisingly good – in that when I go back over a manuscript I can’t always tell you what was considered and what was written that quickly – the truth is that it is all considered and it must all be. It takes time to write, time in which you are not writing.
So having an app that threatens you even more than I do just can’t work. However, the full BBC News piece has a lot more to say about beating prevarication and why this is an issue for us more now than ever.
It’s 00:14 on Saturday night, leaning over into Sunday. I had a terrific evening seeing My Big Fat Cowpat Wedding in the very darkest corner of Kidderminster – Kidderminster isn’t dark but we got there and the venue was another hour further on into the countryside.
But now I’m home and on the good side, the smell of roasting chicken coming from the kitchen is rather grand. I’m roasting one ready to make up into lunches and suchforth tomorrow. Wish I’d remembered earlier or really just been around my home long enough to do it earlier. Still, it’s a nice smell and it’s nearly enough to keep me awake while I wait for the oven timer to go off.
There is a bad side.
I’m listening to the sound of seven leaks, seven rhythmic drop drops of water in our hallway. They’re close enough to one another that I suspect there’s just a single leak that is sending water running out all over the place. But the plumber I rang isn’t close enough to do anything about it tonight. The certainty that I woke him up coupled to the triple certainty that anything with the word emergency in it costs triple means I’m officially happy waiting for the morning. I’m not really.
You can tell from the way I’m writing to you. I’m using the fact that I’m too worried about the water to sleep yet too tired to stay awake. I’m using it to give me time to talk to you, time to roast a chicken.
If nothing else, I’m using my time.
I’ve got one of these. But if I were also a famous celebrity, this is what would happen. You’d hear about me a lot on the news and each time I would’ve got a new book out. Or my shocking scurrilous sordid squid sex secret has been revealed. (Delete depending on what celebrity news outlet you read.)
My personal life aside – we’re all adults here, I don’t judge you, you don’t judge me or at least don’t judge me until you’ve tried it – I think that there is something interesting and something that gets forgotten. These people you see relaxing on the BBC Breakfast couch talking about yet another book, yet another success, they have two things going on that they don’t really talk about and that they are not really asked about either.
First, they need that publicity. I don’t mean that they crave it within their souls or that their lifeforce depends upon adulation, I mean that without you hearing about their book, the book doesn’t sell. They want to eat, sure, but they probably also want to keep on writing books and they need us, they need some floodlights put on their faces.
But the second thing is ridiculous. We listen to journalists asking people about their new book and yet we don’t really, consciously think: “They’ve written a new book”. Obviously they have but we tend to think more that it’s “They’ve got a new book out”. That’s subtly different and I think it misleads us.
To get on the telly talking about a book, you have to write the book.
We see celebrities relaxing, talking happily at events and in interviews, but they solely got there because they did the work. It’s back-breaking work but they have broken their backs and done it.
And tomorrow they’re off doing it again.
I’m not fussed about fame and celebrity, I am very fussed about getting enough sales that I can keep writing books. Do the work. Be productive. And you will produce things.
I have no idea whether that will get you on the telly but I know that you don’t get on if you haven’t done the work.
Just don’t. I have no way to know if this is as genuine as it seems – though it’s a pointless thing to fake – and one always likes to think that there are faults on both sides.
But that doesn’t matter.
When you’re fired or you are made redundant, let it go. Because it’s gone.
And we might all bitch to our friends about how unfair it is – spoiler alert: your friends are never fooled – and okay, maybe, if you must.
But read this to see what happens when you bitch about your employer and in particular when you employer runs a website and you bitch about them on their own site.
Prepare to wince as you read the full feature.
Eighteen months of work, hours of advice from many people, oodles of detail and my current project was just all so big that I was regularly derailed by it. I can’t tell you exactly what it is yet but at this stage the job was just to apply for Arts Council funding to get a project done.
The good thing is that I started the process bewildered and now I know we’ve got a strong application, I know that I did it as well as we could. One bad thing is that you obviously never know whether the bid will be successful. But even if it fails, the process taught me a gigantic amount. So that’s good. What’s really bad is that at this crucial point, I was derailed again. Knocked off the productivity train of mixed metaphors. And once you’re off, it is stunningly hard to get back on.
Yesterday at 10am, though, I set a timer on my iPhone for one hour. No way to finish the job in an hour, not even a chance of making a good enough dent. But at least I’d be doing something, I’d be inching along instead of panicking about it all the time like it was a dental appointment.
Do this for me. Do an hour. Whatever it is that is pressing on you, just take the next hour and work on it. Even if that is all you do, you are better off doing that than worrying about it. You are certain to feel better for being even an hour further along with it. And, not to scare you here, but I didn’t stop at the end of my hour. Five hours later, I’d done the application completely. I actually had finished the job. Well, it’s now with my partners on the project, it’s not submitted to Arts Council England yet, but I feel pretty fantastic.
One hour turned me from wanting to run away from this thing into wanting to do more. So try it. Just an hour. Okay?