We've started a new Back To School campaign to raise $75,000 in student proposals for New York City by September 30th! Check it out. (I've also updated the Herebar to show the thermometer for this Back To School challenge.)
| Charity | Education | Philanthropy | New York City |
Colin's gang map, and CMOM's recent encounter with the Rock Star of Graphs, sparked a recent discussion about Tufte, which reminded me of something I'd been meaning to try: sparklines.
Starting this year, I've been tracking several variables for the DonorsChoose New York region on a weekly basis. You know, "what gets measured, gets managed" and all that. Namely, how many proposals are submitted by teachers, how many are posted to the website, how many complete their funding that week, and how much money has come in overall. Up until now, it's just been a list of numbers on a spreadsheet that I have tacked up to the wall of the office. But thanks to this nifty sparklines tool I can create mini-graphs for each variable. It requires .NET and the installation of their custom fonts. The tool will not only create sparkline images, but also a dynamic Excel function so as you add data the sparkline changes.
Just for fun, here's a sparkline graph of the number of postings on Ishbadiddle, by month, since January 2001. I grabbed the data from here, threw it into a spreadsheet, and out pops this:
The grey bar is one standard deviation; the red point is the minimum (May 2001, one post) and the blue the max (June 2005, 99 posts.)
Update: Since Chris asked, here are some other sparkline formats of the same data:
| Design | Sparklines | Freeware |
Guy drops his iPod in the airline toilet. Airplane gets diverted because of "a suspicious device." Guy has to explain just why he's going to Canada to meet someone he only knows through World of Warcraft:
I played WoW, I became a terrorist (story!)
They asked me why I was visiting Canada. I was to visit a friend I met on World of Warcraft, Cara. They took down her name and what I could remember of her address. They asked me how we met."In an online game."
"What online game?"
"Umm ... World of Warcraft," I responded meekly.
"What kind of game is this?"
"It's a fantasy game ... it takes place online."
"Fantasy ... like it's got wizards and warlocks?"
"Well, it's got warlocks." (And they need to be nerfed.)They asked me to describe my relation to Cara. I told them that people meet up in the game and go on adventures together, and that Cara and I were in a guild together that I was the leader of. They confused the concept of a guild with the game, however, and I had them believing that I was the Lord and Leader of all of WoW until I was able to correct them, and explain to them what a guild was.
So, when they put the pieces together; namely, that I was visiting a female person that I had met over a computer game, their next line of questioning went down an obvious path.
WoW + War on Terror, you know this story was getting blogged here. Just remember not to use the acronym "RPG" since they're more likely to think Rocket Propelled Grenade than Role Playing Game....
| MMORPG | World of Warcraft | Airplanes | Homeland Security | Games | Canada |
A month ago I had 250 messages in my inbox. Today I have 25. Here's how I did it. Perhaps this might be useful to you as well. The method is geared toward Outlook users.1
As I wrote in The Anxiety of Getting Things Done, one of the problems I have with the GTD system is the State of Grace:
In order for the GTD system to really work, you have to trust that your task list is comprehensive and complete. You have to capture everything that you have to do and organize it into projects. You (ideally) should have everything sorted, and filed. Take a few days to get yourself organized, the book advises. A few days? I thought, looking at towering piles of papers. Try a few weeks.The real problem is, if you aren't in this state of grace, the value of GTD drops precipitiously. Because you can't trust that your list of tasks and projects is actually complete. There's still the lurking anxiety that somewhere in that pile of papers you haven't attacked yet is something you really really need to do.
Maybe it's just me, but trying to get into this state is anxiety-producing in itself, especially if you're trying to get work done at the same time.
For many of us, one of the hardest places in our lives to achieve the State of Grace is our email inboxes. There's that constant inflow of messages, ranging from the important to the informative to the amusing to the offensive. There's spam. And there's our tendency, even after reading David Allen's book, to use our inbox as a to-do list.
So what to do? I've read up on methods like 43 Folders' Process to Zero. My main problem with this method (and David Allen's) is that your important messages, the ones you are supposed to actually do something about, are put into a folder (@Action or @Process or whatever). Which is fine in theory. In practice, whenever I try to use this method, I do not open the @Action folder. Why? Simple. Because I don't have to. It's Pandora's folder, and I know that all the things I'm anxious about lie within. So I don't touch the damn thing. The problem is worse instead of better.
My inbox, on the other hand, leaves me no choice. I have to open it. But I need a way to deal with a 250-message inbox. A way that won't cause me more anxiety than the third-rail folder solution.
So here's what we're going to do: we're going to temporarily hide the "Action" emails, enabling us to concentrate on sorting (or quickly dealing with) the rest.
What we will need:
The setup:
First you're going to create a new View for your inbox. What this View will do is hide all of today's emails. We're working on our backlog, so we're not going to worry about today's messages for the next half hour. The View will also hide any messages with Flags. More on Flags in a bit. Here's how to make the "Triage" View:
Once that is set up, close all other programs. No instant messagers, no web browsers, no nothing. Turn your cellphone off (or on vibrate, if you must) and if you can take your phone off the hook, do it.
Now set the timer for a five minute countdown. Your emails are now sorted by Subject, A-Z. You're going to deal with as many as you can in five minutes. For each message, you must take one of these five action steps.
The action steps:
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Once the five minutes are up, you're going to resort and repeat. You'll do six five-minute runs, each with the following sorts:
Why do it this way? First, breaking it into five minute chunks is easier than one half-hour slog. Second, the different sorts mix it up, forcing you to deal with emails that are scattered througout your inbox. (If there were a random sort function, that would be even better, but there's not.) And third, we've deliberately saved the sort by date ones for last. Presumeably, the messages you didn't deal with yesterday have a higher API (Anxiety Provoking Index, which I just made up). Same with those messages from eight months ago that are at the bottom of your inbox. So we'll deal with them last. Hey, even if you've only flagged them as emails you've got to answer, at least you've sorted with them.
So six sorts x five minutes = half an hour. You should be able to get through at least 30 emails, one a minute, in this fashion. More, once you get the hang of it. In your last five minutes, transcribe your To-Dos from your paper into your Task list. Switch back to your normal Inbox view. And if you're feeling especially virtuous, tackle one of your flagged messages. Or just take a break. You deserve it!
Update: You may also want to check out Adrian Trenholm's Tickling email in Outlook system for another use of views to manage your Inbox.
1
For a Gmail solution, check out GTDGmail.
| GTD | How To | Productivity | Organization | Outlook | Email |
Debbie knows me so well. "Have you heard about 'Come Out and Play'?" she asks me when I get home. I admit that I have not. She sits me down at their website. "Look, they're going to be playing Human Risk in Washington Square Park. Do you want to sign up?" Well, um, yeah of course! Heck, my obsession with this game was one of the first things I blogged about on Ishbadiddle.
So I signed up. Now here's where you come in: I need minions. And, as there are still seven slots open, I need nemeses. (I assume they'll fill all the slots, but wouldn't it be more fun to play with friends?) It is Sunday Sept 24th at 1:30 p.m.. Here's the description:
Human Risk represents the game for global domination that plays out on our screens every day. We see the bombs blazing….who is trying to take over who now? How do the real armies of the world stack up on the game board?We start with defense spending numbers from the World Bank data centers and assign empires their armies as fairly as possible given their resources spent in the real world. Over 1000 armies represent $1billion each invested in armies around the world, divvied up amongst empires from sea to shining sea. The park becomes our gameboard; our fiendish players duke it out with the fuzzy dice until one empire emerges victorious.
The rules are simple; armies can only be destroyed by a losing dice roll or by the game gods. Individual players choosing to torture or destroy their own armies for some sick and twisted jollies may be punished by janjaweed marauders, hurricanes, nuclear accidents or other cruel devices. There is no rhyme or reason in the game of Human Risk.
Players may be videotaped or otherwise recorded during the play of this game; virtual world visits to the gamesite are empowered through Second Life.
Props will be scavenged. Empire building players should dress as if they’re about to ride gloriously into battle!
OK, so it's political-theater Risk, not Hasbro Risk, but who cares?
Minions will be expected to protect my imperial personage, to crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and to hear the lamentation of the women! I will also divide spoils in a just and equitable manner that will sate your thirst for plunder while providing me with a lifelong lock on power.
Minion applications will be accepted in comments below, via email, or by engraved weapons sent in tribute.
| New York City | Distributed Culture |
Uh, guys, I'm pretty sure that's a Red Delicious and not a McIntosh. Of course, I'm sure the number of MTV viewers who are passionate about apple varietals is overwhelming.
| Apple | Errata |
PureText is a little Windows program that performs an essential function: it will paste your text as plain text. No formatting, no nothing.
PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.
PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.
It works in Word and Excel, which is great, because I'm constantly either 1) opening EditPad, pasting my text, and then re-copying it to remove all formatting, and 2) using the Paste Special > Values function in Excel, for which there is unfortunately no hotkey. Now I have Fn+V set to invoke PureText (you can set your own hotkey) and I've shaved milliseconds off my workday, which I can then use to blog. Everyone benefits. Found on Gadgetopia.
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In honor of Greg's birthday we bring you this long interview BEHIND THE PAGE: GREG PAK. Hey, is this an inside joke?
NRAMA: OK, so future dream projects?GP: This is going to sound so Pollyanna, but I'm actually living one of my dream projects now by writing the Hulk.
You'll always sound Pollyanna to us, Greg.
Oh, and if you haven't been picking up the latest of "Planet Hulk" you should. Great stuff!
| Greg Pak | Hulk |
Briefly in Big Ink! The VRWC tries to stick it to Big Al; DOD skulduggery; Conason on the neocon con; Columbia in reverse; terror alert raised to nutmeg; the Onion nails it; the Times does not; fear! it's not just for breakfast anymore; until HP7, enjoy the new Conyers report; let's play Hope/No Hope!; CSI: Mathmagic Land; courts are entitled to their opinion, I guess; the Daily Show Horrorshow; JonBenet versus Iraq; Newsflash: Schoolhouse still Rocks; How Right-Wingers See The NY Times; cheerleader of the free world; watch your back, hippies!; at 33% approval, the truncheons come out; Bush pretty much blames you for Iraq; and Pat Buchanan is totally trippin'! Ssssssss!
| Politics | Media | Culture | Journalism |
DWI? DWB? Nah, the latest crime is DWM, Driving With Money:
Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a CrimeA federal appeals court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.On May 28, 2003, a Nebraska state trooper signaled Gonzolez to pull over his rented Ford Taurus on Interstate 80. The trooper intended to issue a speeding ticket, but noticed the Gonzolez's name was not on the rental contract. The trooper then proceeded to question Gonzolez -- who did not speak English well -- and search the car. The trooper found a cooler containing $124,700 in cash, which he confiscated. A trained drug sniffing dog barked at the rental car and the cash. For the police, this was all the evidence needed to establish a drug crime that allows the force to keep the seized money.
Associates of Gonzolez testified in court that they had pooled their life savings to purchase a refrigerated truck to start a produce business. Gonzolez flew on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy a truck, but it had sold by the time he had arrived. Without a credit card of his own, he had a third-party rent one for him. Gonzolez hid the money in a cooler to keep it from being noticed and stolen. He was scared when the troopers began questioning him about it. There was no evidence disputing Gonzolez's story.
Here's the ruling (PDF). You supply the sputtering outrage.
I remember several years back discussing how the real class division was along the credit line: those who had access to credit vs. those who had to use cash for everything. I got more of an education in this when I worked for the Union Settlement Credit Union. I'm not especially surprised that the use of (lots of) cash should become criminal.
Oh, and lest I be accused of (gasp!) partisanship, the erosion of civil liberties in the name of the War on Drugs was brought to you by Bill Clinton.
| Civil Liberties | Law | Cars | Money |
Um, what? OK, I get it, we're going to take the first post-modern, "unfilmable" novel and make a "post-modern movie" out of it. And the beginning of this film is immensely enjoyable, a sort of post-modern (well, there it is again) Tom Jones that plays around with narration, the fourth wall, etc. In general, I never meta-movie I didn't like, but the second act of A Cock and Bull Story goes beyond just "hey, look, we're actors making a movie of this story" to "The Life and Opinions of Steve Coogan, Actor." The problem is, I'm not really that interested. The character of "Steve Coogan" (played of course by Steve Coogan, who's also playing both Tristram Shandy and his father Walter Shandy) is a philanderer, an egotist, is self-conflicted -- in short, an actor. So (I'm told) in the book Tristram is trying to tell his own story, and Coogan is similarly telling his own. But the whole of the film ends up being about film-making, and fundamentally films about film-making are of interest to film-makers (with of course lots of notable exceptions). I found myself wishing they'd just have kept on making the movie they started showing us in the beginning.
(There's a diagram I remember seeing reproduced in one of Tufte's works, showing the narrative thread of the novel:
)
2.5 stars. Maybe this all makes sense if you've read the damn book. Anyone?
After 2 Yrs, 303 Days, 11 Hrs, 36 Mins on the road, one of my Where's George? bills has been found, in Maryland. They have a Google map now showing the travels of this ten dollar bill since 2003. Only three points so far, but still kinda neat.
| Money | Distributed Culture |
A [Satirical] Lacanian Pre-Reading of "Snakes on a Plane"
The snakes will reveal themselves to be not a counter-Phallus, but rather an expression of the rage of the Medusa, the radical queer postcolonial feminine. What is at stake here is not a battle between "snakes" and the "plane," but rather the contest between transgressive Oedipalized subjectivity (memorably described by Jackson's line, "there's motherf---- snakes on the motherf---- plane") and the anti-Oedipal, serpentine, body-machine complex.
[Golf clap.] Bravo, Prof. Singh, bravo!
| Deconstructionism | Academia | Snakes on a Plane |
One of my co-workers asked me what FireFox extensions I was using; thanks to ListZilla it's easy to export the list. Here it is: My Firefox extensions. Any suggestions for others? And does anyone know how I can carry my extensions with me so I can use them on another PC?
Oh, and props to Kerim for pointing me to the Password Maker extension, it's replaced Key Maker as my password generator.
Update: There is a way to carry around your extensions, but it's a Windows-only solution: the FEBE-CLEO extensions will enable you to create one xpi file with all your extensions in it. You could then carry that xpi around with you.
| Stickware |
Ennis has an, um, tip for those who are interested in profiling Muslims.
| Profiling |
Before he concluded their meeting, Bush proclaimed to Dolores, "We won't know in our lifetime whether or not Iraq was a success."
If you'd like an actual (and free) way to support our troops, Xerox will send a soldier a card with your message on it.
| Iraq | Military |
Problem: Your three- and five-year olds touch stuff in the bathroom (cups, toothbrushes, etc.) after going to the bathroom, but before washing their hands. You are tired of saying "No, WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST!" every time they use the bathroom.
Fun solution: Put baby powder on your hands. Lots of baby powder. Say that the baby powder is "pretend germs". Then touch your face, cups, doorknobs, etc. etc. Look! Germs everywhere! Make a big show of washing your hands off. They will of course immediately demand to get "pretend germs" on their hands and make a mess of everything. Encourage this.
Warning: May cause general hilarity, sneezing.
| How To |
Good:
Hey, finally a Philip K. Dick adaptation that's worthy of its source material. Plus it looks really cool. And no one can play drug addicts like Keanu, Woody, and Robert Downey Jr. Why is that? Hmmm. 4 stars.
Eh:
V For Vendetta. Not as bad as I feared, but did they have to turn it into a love story? Also, Moore's V wasn't espousing "people shouldn't be afraid of their governments," but the far more radical / anarchist "people should have no governments at all." Still, half a point for Hugo Weaving, who can now add "terrorist" to his list of blind man, elf, dog, computer program, and drag queen. 2 stars.
| Alan Moore | When Bad Movies Happen To Good Comics |
| Malware | Batman | Superman | Your Blank of the Day |
I try to avoid Ann Coulter at all costs, but this interview is just to strange to pass up: Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be But Aren't: An Interview with Ann Coulter. Plus, she claims that the Dead invented rap.
Via 3 Quarks Daily.
| Grateful Dead |
Wow, the amount of chartjunk here is incredible. But it's pretty chartjunk: International Networks Archive \\ Remapping Our World.
Speaking of chartjunk, have you been reading the Junk Charts blog? Great stuff for all us infographics fans.
| Design |
Over vacation, I got several telemarketer calls for my in-laws, in whose house we were lounging. One was political -- I wish I could actually remember who was calling, but the conversation went something like this:
Shill: Hi, may I please speak to [redacted]?Me: Can I ask what this in reference to?
S: I'm calling from blah blah blah. We're seeking support for Congressman Blahblah's fight against the hated death tax.
M: What was that you said?
S: The death tax.
M: No, before the word "death tax."
S: Um, "hated."
M: Who hates it, exactly?
S: Well Congressman Blahblah feels that it's unfair that income is taxed twice...
M: Oh, so it's the Congressman who hates it, then.
S: It's just a word, sir.
M: No, it's biased language. And it's not the "death tax," it's the estate tax. If you're going to use such biased language I don't think I have anything else to say to you.
S: OK then. [Hangs up.]
I really do wish I could remember who the call was from. "The hated death tax" is a pretty great framing phrase, even better than calling the estate tax the "death tax" to begin with. It's hated! Oh, then it must be bad. Dr. Hemminger would cite this as an example of Passive Voice Abuse.
Now, had the shill had a better script in front of her, she might have done better with a doubter like me. My initial reaction was, is the estate tax really hated more than other taxes? If you surveyed folks and asked them which tax they hated the most, wouldn't income tax come first?
Well, yes and no. The source of the hated death tax phrase seems to be this survey (PDF) conducted by Luntz Research, which seems to have been conducted to prove that Americans really do hate the death tax.
Only they didn't ask what was hated and what wasn't. They asked what was fair and what wasn't. Check out the table on page 2 of the report. Taxes on Social Security, Death Tax, and Marriage Penalty Tax are the three that a majority consider to be "completely unfair." But there are only two taxes (Cigarettes and Beer/Liquor) that are considered "completely fair." Since we're only given the extreme data, and not the "somewhat fair" or "somewhat unfair" responses, it's impossible to come to any actual conclusions about American's opinions about these various taxes.
Plus, in order to make their "most hated" claim, they have to leap from "unfair" to "hated," which they do with this statement presented without any evidence: "When it comes to taxes, nothing matters more to Americans than the principle of 'fairness.'" Really?
Their other evidence is that most people want those taxes reduced. However, without comparative data (do you want income taxes reduced? Payroll taxes?) the data is useless.
I can come up with statistics too! Googling "Hated death tax" returns 22 pages, while "hated income tax" returns 47, and "hated property tax" also returns 47. Therefore 81% of Americans hate income and property taxes more than the "death tax"!
| Framing | Surveys |
DIY zombies with tetrodotoxin. Via digg. This is potentially useful research for the VSNP.
Also useful research, and just plain amazing: Physica Curiosa over at BibliOdyssey, by Kaspar Schott, "a Jesuit priest, scientist, mathematician, and student of Athanasius Kircher."
| VSNP | Ephemera |
I was surprised to see Marty Schriebman and his Brooklyn Tilapia get top billing on Yahoo! News. Dr. Schreibman was our main scientific advisor when I was at Project Renewal and putting together the business plan for an urban fish farm. Hence my now superfluous knowledge of the aquaculture industry.
Man, am I glad I didn't get into that business.
| Fish | Brooklyn | New York City |
The Sepia Mutineers dissect the latest from Mattel: Diwali Barbie!
Oh, yeah, Ennis has a serious post too.
| Barbie | India | Brown Culture | Sepia Mutiny | Toys |
From the upcoming Encyclopedia Brown And the Mysterious Presidency of George W. Bush:
On that fateful night, Encyclopedia and Sally sat in the Browns’ living room playing checkers while watching election returns with Chief and Mrs. Brown. As it got later and later into the night with no winner having been declared, Mrs. Brown stood up, stretched, and yawned and said, “I’m going to bed. I don’t know why I’ve bothered watching for this long anyway. Everyone knows that there’s no difference between Gush and Bore, anyway.”“Gush and Bore,” was a common joke during the 2000 election that was meant to indicate that there was very little difference between the candidates from the two major parties, Al Gore and George W. Bush. The people who used to make this joke should feel pretty stupid now.
Encyclopedia was a good child, and therefore would never think of his mother as stupid, but he did not share her perspective. He thought there were big differences between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the biggest one being that Al Gore was almost as smart as Encyclopedia, while even Bugs Meany would give George W. Bush a run for his money in the IQ department.
Encyclopedia knew that his mother felt this way because the campaign had focused on personality and soundbites instead of substantive policy issues. Soundbites are short passages of audio or video that contain no meaning whatsoever, but are still talked about endlessly on 24-hour cable news networks.
Nobody really remembers what substantive policy issues are anymore.
Mostly, Encyclopedia did not trust George W. Bush’s idea of “Compassionate Conservatism.” To Encyclopedia, this sounded like how it was before Sally became his partner, when Bugs Meany would pat him on the back and call him “pal” before giving Encyclopedia an atomic wedgie.
Encyclopedia worried that if George W. Bush became president, he was going to give America an atomic wedgie.
You can read the sample here. I always knew Bugs Meany was Bad for America! However, I had no idea Sally Kimball was a lesbian. Live and learn. Via Coudal.
| Parody | Encyclopedia Brown |
I said I wasn't going to read about the Terrible News Of The World, and really I'm not (must CNN be showing continuously at the car wash?) but everyone who's the least bit worried (yup, me too) should watch zefrank's take: "A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk."
Of course, I'll see you your rational behavior and raise you a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds.
Via Cynical C.
| Risk |
Ishbadiddle's own internet confessional has now surpassed 1,000 comments. I could close comments, I suppose, but the thing's taken on a life of its own. And hey, every day we send a few more people to seek professional help so perhaps we're doing some good after all. A strange chapter in the blog's history -- my gosh, has it really been 5 and a half years?
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Both via things magazine.
| Zombies | Legos | M.C. Escher |
Since I'm not reading about the latest, um, international incident, here's a safe story involving a group of masked men:
Packets create mess of confusion | Marion Chronicle Tribune - www.chronicle-tribune.com -
When a group of 10 to 15 people wearing masks enter a fast-food joint in the late evening, the first thing many people would think is that a holdup was about to begin.
But at about 10:46 p.m. Tuesday, when such a group entered a local Taco Bell, they weren't there to take - they were there to return.
The masked men were toting six 40-gallon trash bags filled with individual packets of taco sauce - about 25,000 in all, police guess.
A note left with the sauce - which likely weighed more than 400 pounds, based on data available on Taco Bell's Web site - said the group had been accumulating them for the past three years, storing them in the trunk of a car. They'd thought about using them for a practical joke or selling them on eBay, but conscience dictated their return to the 3244 S. Western Ave. store.
You know, when my Grandmother passed away, she had a lot of Jimboy's Tacos sauce packets in her kitchen. Free condiments, you know? But not 400 pounds of them. Puts things in perspective.
Via the Obscure Store
| Taco Bell | Pranks | Indiana |
