How Chocolate Might Save the Planet

Saving the planet is good, obviously. But mmm… chocolate…

Okay, the logic in this piece from America’s National Public Radio is just that people prefer chocolate to sex and that if there are enough Mars bars in the world, we will therefore have fewer babies and the population won’t continue to destroy the planet with its demands for resources. Fine. Back to the chocolate – and how it works, how it actually works on us.

Plus statistics about that sex thing.

When you unwrap it, break off a piece and stick it in your mouth, it doesn’t remind you of the pyramids, a suspension bridge or a skyscraper; but chocolate, says materials scientist Mark Miodownik, “is one of our greatest engineering creations.”

How Chocolate Might Save the Planet – Robert Krulwhich, NPR

Go grab a Snickers and read the full piece.

You’re delusional – but stay that way

Posted by William Gallagher

We have no clue. I’m always surprised when someone remembers me, I’m regularly misjudging how meetings went, I haven’t the faintest idea about myself or what in the world I do. But apparently neither does anyone else – or at least, not apart from a very specific few – and apparently it’s also a good thing. It is good and even essential to be completely deluded:

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

You are Now Less Dumb – David McRaney (UK edition, US edition)

The quote is from McRaney’s book but I read it in a Brainpickings.org article about this topic which also pulls in advice from Helen Keller and comments from Hunter S Thompson/

Neither of whom are remotely as good a writer as what I am, like. Hmm. Not sure this is working.

Who needs Siri when you’ve a $10,000 phone and a real assistant?

Posted by William Gallagher

I would totally buy one of these. If I had $10,000 and no sense, if I had a need for an assistant more accurate than Siri, and if this new Vertu Signature Touch phone ran iOS. As it is, I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t and it doesn’t.

(Image from Vertu and via Wired.com)

Actually, I’m not even sure I like the look of it. For that cost – and please note that $10,000 is the starting price for the base model, you can spend up to $21,900 – I’d want to like looking at this plastic and metal embodiment of a bank loan.

Wait, I’m feeling the cost of this but only intellectually. Let me punch myself in the stomach with the Sterling prices. The base model is £5,972.41. The top one is £13,079.58.

Actually, that sounds reasonable. I’ll take two. Have you got them in blue?

Oh, wait, there is a tiny extra. Just £1,791.72 or $3,000 per year extra:

The Signature Touch’s Concierge service is what sets it apart from other phones. It’s free for the first year, then jumps to around $3,000 a year. Concierge makes the phone more like an American Express Black Card or a diplomatic passport. It works like this: You request (legal and somewhat reasonable) things via the Concierge app, and then a real, live person makes them happen. You basically have a personal assistant on call at all times. A little button on the side of the phone fires up the Concierge app directly. The assistant who helped me was Celine. She was great.

To commence my Vertu experience, the company offered to book me a dinner reservation at the members-only CORE:Club to show how the Concierge could gain access to exclusive places. I declined that offer, as I wanted to test the Concierge using my own requests.

Instead, I checked OpenTable at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday and found popular restaurants fully booked that day and on the weekend. There was nothing available for dinner at ABC Kitchen in a few hours or brunch at Red Rooster the next morning. I opened the Concierge app and asked for reservations at 7:30pm that night and noon the next day, knowing it would be tricky. No problem, reservations booked. Thanks Celine! On another Saturday night, I was a head-nod away from getting a group of five on the VIP list at a fancy club called Avenue. If we’d been willing to pay $200 apiece for a table and bottle service—and had any intention of actually going—we’d have been in. Coincidentally, $200 is the price of a normal phone.

What It’s Like to Use a $10k Phone with a Real-Life Personal Assistant – Tim Moynihan, Wired (5 June 2014)

Read the full article: Moynihan is very conscious of the cost yet also able to step away from that and see the benefits and the problems of the phone and service.

Technology brought to heel

Posted by William Gallagher

Two things I can’t look at. Ballet dancers and women teetering in high heels. I get it, I get it especially with ballet and the remarkable, unearthly beauty of dance – but have you looked at their toes? Standing on the tip of your toes. Walking on them. I feel queasy. And there is nothing that can be done to help them.

Whereas seemingly there may be something that can be done to stop high heels breaking ankles and generally keeping the medical industry in pocket. It is a little bit like the kind of solution you’d expect to see in Thunderbirds or concocted by Professor Branestawm but it’s from Silvia Fado Moreno, a graduate of the London College of Fashion, so it must be good.

That image, and more, are on Gizmodo’s site where writer Jordan Kushins says:

Check out the hydraulics on these babies! Moreno’s creations aren’t exactly subtle—at all—but they do offer an interesting take on the idea that the mechanics of our bodies are complex, and hey: That humanoid machinery deserves footwear that’s going to really and truly support it.

I Would Totally Wear High Heels Equipped with Hydraulic Springs – Kushins, Gizmodo (2 June 2014)

I came across this via Digg and an article in something called The Daily Dot which I think is the clearer, sharper read.

John Oliver gets trolls working for a good purpose

Posted by William Gallagher

At stake: the fact that you or I can create a website and people find it as easily and quickly as anything by gigantic billionaire-funded multinational corporation. The internet has always been a level playing field and that has been how it grew, it’s been how it’s great. But it genuinely is at stake.

Watch John Oliver’s piece about it on Last Week Tonight for exactly how and why. And then when you’ve heard him encouraging internet trolls to put their evil power to good, bask in the news that it worked.

What unemployed people Google and what that tells us

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m not sure this is a wonderful indictment of human society but if the number of searches for pornography goes up, it can mean that the searchers are back in employment. Out of it, they were spending their time searching for jobs. Once they’ve got one, they’re searching for, well, anyway, indeed. (Have you hired someone recently? Don’t ask them.)

Google found that rising unemployment was not only linked to phrases such as “companies that are hiring.” It was also closely correlated to searches for new technology (“free apps”), entertainment (“guitar scales beginner”) and adult content (“jailbait teen”). The company said its data can improve the accuracy of standard estimates of economic data in a current month as much as 10 percent.

At the University of Michigan, [University of Michigan’s Matthew] Shapiro and his colleagues scoured more than 19 billion tweets over two years for references to unemployment, hunting for phrases such as “axed,” “pink slip” and “downsized.” They indexed the findings and compared them to the government’s weekly tally of people applying for unemployment benefits for the first time.

Their results are remarkably similar — and where they do diverge, the Twitter index may be more reliable. Computer malfunctions and the government shutdown last year distorted the official numbers, while the trends in Shapiro’s index held firm.

The Weird Google Searches of the Unemployed and What They Say about the Economy – Washington Post (30 May 2014)

Read more of what this analysis can find and remember that BBC newsrooms now regularly have rolling displays of what people are searching for. I’ve always assumed that was an edited list, I never saw anything untoward. But maybe the only people who read BBC News Online are unemployed.

Ideas come from here. Exactly here. And here.

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m not a fan. “Oh, JK Rowling’s neighbour had a boy who went to a school, that’s where she got Hogwarts from.” If you can actually trace an idea back to a specific source then either bully for you or where’s the lawsuit? I think it diminishes art to disassemble its parts and claim this bit came from here, that bit was stolen from there.

But since I’m not fussed about Star Wars, bring it on.

HeySiri – so much for jailbreaking

Posted by William Gallagher

It was the one feature I liked on Android – though, as ever, that meant it was on one Android phone somewhere – and it was then the one thing that might make me jailbreak my iPhone.

OkSiri… makes Siri listen all the time. No pressing a button and waiting a mo before speaking to Siri, it is listening all the time. And specifically it is listening for a phrase such as “OK, Siri” that it then recognises as its cue to work.
This I Might Jailbreak For – William Gallagher (1 June 2014)

Glad I didn’t bother now. Maybe the one WWDC announcement that most grabbed me was HeySiri. (I don’t like that name any more than I do OkSiri, but.) It is exactly what that OkSiri is, except it’s official, it will work.