free variable

I was delighted to read this passage in Massimo Vignelli’s The Vignelli Canon (pdf link):

The international Standard paper sizes, called the A series, is based on a golden rectangle, the divine proportion. It is extremely handsome and practical as well. It is adopted by many countries around the world and is based on the German DIN metric Standards. The United States uses a basic letter size (8 1/2 x 11”) of ugly proportions, and results in complete chaos with an endless amount of paper sizes. It is a by-product of the culture of free enterprise, competition and waste. Just another example of the misinterpretations of freedom.

This is my 900th post on free variable. Oh, and I defended my dissertation on Monday.

I had the Thanksgiving football games on while I was running some experiments. Amway ran ads in every game, explaining what a wonderful company they are. (They have run these ads regularly since, and I now have more time to finish writing short notes.) The ads included numbers that were, I suppose, intended to lend credibility to their claims. I found them to do the exact opposite: they merely strengthened my belief that Amway is some kind of cross between Mary Kay and Scientology.

The numbers that stuck out the most were these:

• Amway makes “3 million people” into “small business owners” with “$7 billion in sales” every year.
• Amway has 450 products and 700 patents.

The first of these basically tells you everything you need to know: the mean Amway “small business owner” has slightly over 2 grand in revenue every year? Yikes. I hope that they have some magical way to have more profit than revenue, or at least that Amway ships their cookware, cleaning supplies, and nutritional supplements to their small business owners for free.

I won’t address the latter number except to point out that most of the Amway products mentioned are shockingly pedestrian and seem unlikely to exploit inventions that warrant patent protection; certainly, not at the rate of more than one patent per product. This means that Amway’s portfolio is probably dominated by business method patents, which I suspect have titles like “Mechanism for paying ’small business owners’ at the top of the pyramid with fees from other ’small business owners’”

I’m really growing to like Warnock for the text of my dissertation, but my longtime complaint with it — I find the capital “W” sort of distracting — hasn’t gone away. I guess people with other names are probably more likely to notice different letters….

(Click to see the whole page at lower magnification — I think the “W” is still obvious!)

This amazing “want-ad” for an impossible task is maybe the greatest thing I’ve seen on the internet this fiscal quarter:

The purpose of this project is to create a debugger program. This program will take as input the source code another program, and will analyze that other program and determine if it will run to completion, or have an error, or go into an infinite loop.

Predictably, many “bidding contractors” are in on the joke — “KurtG” and “GeorgeCantor” make appearances — but the best part are the completely earnest, form-letter replies from contractors who are willing to get this done on time and under budget, like this fellow (all errors are in the original):

Dear Sir/Madam, I looked at your bid request and I am here to tell you that we are really interested in this project and we are exacatly the coders you are looking for. I assure you that we can really do it the way you want.In 15 days we can bring you high quality results to your complete satisfaction, along with 90 days of warranty upon the delivery of the final version of our product. We’re looking forward to starting this project as soon as possible. Just give us a chance , you will never be disappointed. Its not about doing it , its about doing it professionally exactly according to the requirements.

Just awesome. One wonders what other undecidable problems could be contracted out for less than a grand. It would almost be worth the money to get one of these firms — especially those with an ironclad guarantee — to produce a deliverable.

UPDATE: all of the comments are now gone. Fortunately, I anticipated this and saved a screendump (pdf link).

(thanks to mef for the link)

…but then I had to quit Safari.

From “Bits” at the NYT comes this tale of holiday cheer from Sony:

At a chat with reporters in New York, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, and Jay Vandenbree, the company’s president for consumer sales, discussed its new rule that bans retailers from discounting Sony’s Alpha digital camera line, its more expensive televisions and some other high-end products.

Mr. Vandenbree said that by having the price for these products be the same at all retailers, Sony had eliminated stress for buyers.

“Consumers don’t have to worry about whether I can get a better deal at retailer A or retailer B,” he said.

Another benefit is that smarter consumers now have one fewer overpriced consumer-electronics brand to worry about.

HOLY COW! I CAN MAKE A MUPPET THAT LOOKS LIKE ME^* AND USE IT TO TEACH MY SON ABOUT LETTERS, NUMBERS, AND SHARING!!!

(via benbrown dot com and then the rest of the internet)

^* pending (unlikely) spousal approval

Below is the lower part of a poster-sized advertisement in a local parking garage. Similar advertisements are on billboards, etc., throughout Madison.

I suspect it is impossible for others, as it is for me, to read the URL without immediately locking on to “infertility.com,” which is probably not what these folks want unless there are some Secret Branding Techniques that cover such subtle reverse psychology. (It could be worse.)

Thomas is fascinated by the guitar, and despite my best efforts with Bach transcriptions on the classical guitar, he seems to love the electric (”the orange guitar,” as he calls it, in particular) more than anything. A couple of days ago, I moved my amp up from its exile in the basement to the home office so that Thomas and I could play together, and we’ve since spent some time making sounds with the guitar in the evenings after I come home from work.

When I was just about to put him to bed tonight, he said “Downstairs, Daddy! Downstairs!” I asked him what was downstairs, suspecting that he heard the furnace or wanted to watch TV or something. Nope. “The other amplifier, Daddy. And the bass.” Oh, right. Should I bring that upstairs tomorrow, so we can play the bass together? “Yes.”

I guess if WT turns into a superdork, we’ll know who to blame. Sorry, sweetie.

Yesterday, I saw an enthusiastic young woman on State Street who was handing out stickers to passers-by. When I got within earshot, she asked me if I had “voted for change.” I had voted — and indeed, I had voted in favor of several specific changes — but more-or-less politely declined the sticker, since I am only willing to provide free advertising for burger joints, not particular candidates.

I know what she meant, but honestly, it strikes me as an abuse of language to think that one might have voted, but not “for change,” in an election with no incumbent. What would such a vote consist of? “Actually, no. I wrote in W. for a third term. Here’s hoping we can get that pesky term-limit issue ironed out in time for January 20!”

I just saw the much-hyped halftime interviews with the two presidential candidates. As you might expect, Berman’s quesions were largely breezy and insubstantial. Sen. Obama had a far better answer to the “What would you change about sports?” query (college football playoffs, vs. Sen. McCain’s concern about winning the war on performance-enhancing drugs) and seemed more vital overall, but he did egregiously misuse the first-person reflexive pronoun when he urged everyone to be sure to exercise their franchise “whether you’re supporting Sen. McCain or myself.” I’ll call it a push.

As much as each ad for Monday Night Football increased my dread for the prospect of ESPN injecting itself into the political process — it’s not hard to imagine the rush to the l.c.d. there¹ — I think the format worked well for both candidates and served as sort of a palate cleanser before Election Day. Each was offered an opportunity to banter, elevate himself above the sludge of the campaign season, and give a weary republic, for an instant, a glimpse of why anyone liked either of these guys in the first place.

¹ e.g. “What’s the most tired sports metaphor you can think of for your campaign?” “Next question.”, or an endless bracketed tournament of “Greatest Campaign Gaffes of All Time!” with commentary by Stephen A. Smith, Joe Thiesmann, and Eric Wynalda.

This BBC News article about a vacationing Welsh translator and a road sign is all kinds of awesome:

Swansea Council became lost in translation when it was looking to halt heavy goods vehicles using a road near an Asda store in the Morriston area
All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.

The Welsh translation, apparently, says “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

(Image credit to the BBC; article via Language Log)