“The panel also backed the USPS’ proposal to offer a “Forever Stamp”, a stamp that would continue to cover the cost to mail a first-class, one-ounce letter even if the Postal Service instituted another rate hike.
Besides allowing consumers to hedge against future rate increases, the “Forever Stamp” would help eliminate the need to purchase 2-cent stamps and also help shrink lines at the post office, the Postal Regulatory Commission said.”
The bottled water business is amazing. Much of the bottled water consumed in the US is actually filtered municipal water. The same type of stuff we’ve bathed in and swallowed for years. When reduced to its elementary components one water should be little different than another. As with many things, you’re mostly buying an idea, the concept of health, taste, and purity. But, as a business, bottled water seems simple and the barriers for entry seem low, especially if you’re bottling purified municipal supplies. Some of the pieces:
Bottled water is good, but the best way to go if you drink lots of it is to invest in a good filtration system and filter your tap water. In fact, it would be a good experiment to take several identical plastic bottles and fill them up thusly: one bottle tap water, one bottle filtered water, one bottle distilled water, one bottle spring water, and one bottle of purified pre-bottled water. Refrigerate the group and then set up a taste test. I’d be curious as to the results in ranking.
Related:
I’ve just started reading the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son over at Project Gutenberg. I have not dug far into it, but the book is very interesting in several respects. One, as these are private letters to his son, the subject matter is candid and honest. Two, as Lord Chesterfield intends to educate his son on the finer points of manhood and engagement in society (ie. the role of the gentleman) he makes many noteworthy observations and presents essentially a work of practical social philosophy. From the very beginning, it is insightful and thought-provoking:
If care and application are necessary to the acquiring of those
qualifications, without which you can never be considerable, nor make a
figure in the world, they are not less necessary with regard to the
lesser accomplishments, which are requisite to make you agreeable and
pleasing in society. In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth
doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention: I therefore
carry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things, even to
dancing and dress. Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a
young man; therefore mind it while you learn it that you may learn to do
it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act. Dress is of
the same nature; you must dress; therefore attend to it; not in order to
rival or to excel a fop in it, but in order to avoid singularity, and
consequently ridicule. Take great care always to be dressed like the
reasonable people of your own age, in the place where you are; whose
dress is never spoken of one way or another, as either too negligent or
too much studied.
As a society, have we become so busy and preoccupied that we have forgotten how to live? Have we lost sight of what matters most?
I live in a neighborhood infused with Mexican and Central American immigrants. It is commonplace to see cowboy-boot-wearing Norteños pushing strollers with their families. It would be no stretch to say that the Mexicans are the dominant demographic in my little slice of Dallas. In fact, last year Dallas had one of the largest pro-immigration protests in the country with several thousand people marching to city hall, which gives you some idea of the environment here. Like any frontier town, Dallas is very diverse in every respect but also strained because of it. It is a place boiling with activity and competition…life.
Around my neighborhood, I get the chance to observe my neighbors whose lives seem very different from mine. Where white America seems spoiled, isolated, and decadent, brown America seems eager, united, and vital. I drive past a park every day on my way home. Every day it is packed with families and kids playing. Friends playing basketball or soccer under the live oak trees. Women walking together with their babies. Life. I compare this to when I visit my Uncle who lives in the suburbs near Fort Worth. In his neighborhood, the homes are lovely, but you never see anyone. Everyone is inside somewhere. Inside watching 300 channels on their plasma televisions, inside their SUV’s with the kids zoned out to the Finding Nemo DVD, inside the Starbucks loading up on $4 triple Venti lattes. Everyone tricking themselves into thinking that they are happy with all this crap, but maybe their eyes say otherwise.
Our society is crumbling and it will not be held together by Starbucks. It will not be held together by self-deception. Our task is to remember what is important, who we are and who we want to be. To feel hunger not for more, more, more, but for better, better, better… for ourselves and, most importantly, for others.
I was thinking about alien abductions the other day while I was driving around. It has always puzzled me that abductees seem to report similar accounts, especially when it comes to physical descriptions of the aliens themselves. Basically, these nocturnal, body-snatchers are always strangely humanoid in appearance: laterally symmetrical, bipedal, possessing large craniums, large stereoscopic eyes, and slender limbs with articulated hands and fingers. This has always seemed strange. After all, why would a being from another world possess a similar appearance to our own? It could easily look like a giant crab or something. It seems unlikely. Yet, this common description also suggests that there is some shared dimension to each individual abduction story. Either the abductees are making up or remembering similar experiences, or, the aliens, if they exist in any fashion manufactured or otherwise, are humanoid in appearance. There are two basic possibilities: abductees are wrong (for whatever reason) or these abductions occurred in some sense.
If we break it down further, these abductions, if based on memories, could be explained in order of increasing strangeness or practical likelihood by different theories. The reasonability of each theory is determined by your particular world view. For example, assuming the abduction memory is based on an actual experience you could posit multiple scenarios:
Scientific explanations:
In a typical sleep-paralysis episode, a person wakes up paralyzed, senses a presence in the room, feels fear or even terror, and may hear buzzing and humming noises or see strange lights. A visible or invisible entity may even sit on their chest, shaking, strangling, or prodding them. Attempts to fight the paralysis are usually unsuccessful. It is reputedly more effective to relax or try to move just the eyes or a single finger or toe.
Spanos et al. (1993) have pointed out the similarities between abductions and sleep paralysis. The majority of the abduction experiences they studied occurred at night, and almost 60 percent of the “intense” reports were sleep related. Of the intense experiences, nearly a quarter involved symptoms similar to sleep paralysis.
I found this especially interesting because I did experience an episode of sleep paralysis about ten years ago. The details here are very similar to my own experience. I did awake with fear into a semi-conscious dream state and did sense the presence of someone else, although in my case I thought someone was jiggling the handle of my front door and found myself unable to rise out of bed to investigate or fight them off. I struggled to move, but could only barely move my lips and a finger on my right hand. This inability to move while you think someone is breaking into your apartment is very disconcerting.
Since I’m reading Moby Dick, here’s an episode of sleep paralysis depicted in the book:
At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it – half steeped in dreams – I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, s%emed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm – unlock his bridegroom clasp – yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.
Unscientific explanations:
From a “Kids in the Hall” skit: Alien: “We’ve been abducting and anally probing these humans for decades now, and the only thing we’ve learned is that one out of ten enjoys it.”
One last thing, how do you reconcile the common alien descriptions with the sleep paralysis / recovered memory theories? One way is to attribute the common physical descriptions of the aliens to depictions in popular culture of alien lifeforms that may influence memory and recall in the group who report alien abduction memories. This is very plausible. However, what if another factor affecting these descriptions is related to how our own minds process the senses, especially vision. We know that our minds are attuned to faces and hands more so than other parts of the body like knees, etc. What if when we have to make up a person in our mind, we use a descriptive, visual shorthand: eyes, face, hands, and the rest that connects it all together?
What if when our minds are storing/creating these memories they focus mainly on information related to the face and hands? Human aspects that our brains are attuned to (see sensory homunculous). I don’t think most of us are internally creative enough to completely create a new type of creature completely foreign from experience. We use what’s nearby, our shared cultural / media experiences, and our normal shorthand for remembering people.
My voice mail at work is set up so when I get a message it’s sent to my email as an attachment. When I get back to my desk I just play the file on my computer to hear the message. No need to navigate the voice mail system via the telephone. It’s easy.
The only problem with this is if I’m on my Blackberry I can’t just open the .wav file from the email and listen to the message, although I can open other attachments. Wav files just don’t work that way in Blackberry OS 4.1. The Blackberry 8800 will have this ability supposedly, but the 8700 does not. Since I’d much rather open the recorded file on the handheld than call my corporate voice mail, this is not fun.
Ironically, you can play .wav files from the web browser. So, we can use a workaround. If you want to be able to get your voice mail .wav files to play on the Blackberry do the following:
Advertisement:
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The Blackberry is the best smartphone currently available. Period. If you’ve ever used a Treo, Motorola Q, and a Blackberry, you know this. There’s no point in even debating it. That being said, there are a few things that have been missing from the Blackberry that everyone else has, like a built-in camera, for example. There’s a reason for this, however. Since Blackberry is the dominant platform among big business and government they’ve been reluctant to include anything that could compromise security or even create this perception…like a built-in camera or removable storage.
One of the biggest selling points for the Blackberry is that it’s an integrated hardware-software solution. In other words, Research in Motion develops both the hardware and the software, rather than just making the device you could run Windows Mobile on a la the Motorola Q. This makes the Blackberry very stable and usable. Another cool thing about the Blackberry from the standpoint of large organizations is that they can be remotely wiped (like if you lost it) and each functional piece of the device can be locked down by the admin. In some organizations, you might disable web browsing or copy/pasting, for example. Even though each piece can be locked down, Blackberry couldn’t just release an enterprise-level version that came ONLY with a camera as they did with the prosumer-targeted Pearl. This could potentially alienate large, security-conscious customers who want mobile email, but don’t want anyone taking photos and leaking stuff they shouldn’t. So, with the Blackberry 8800 slated for Spring 2007 release they came up with the perfect solution: make two models of the same device. One with a camera, one without. Genius!
This makes me very glad since I want both a camera and the full-qwerty keyboard available on the 8800. And as someone who owns a few shares of RIMM, I also don’t want them to drive off large government contracts.
As an aside, I have to say that RIMM’s management has really been doing a great job. They’re crushing the competition and releasing great products.
Last Wednesday started out like any other day. I went to work, stayed a while, then I got in my car and went home. I drove about three blocks when I heard the telltale woof-woof-woof sound of a flat tire. Flats always suck, but it’s not a huge biggie to change one. I had run the rear tires bald hotrodding and driving all over creation so it was not a total surprise. I did chastise myself for my usual stupid procrastination. I’m apparently motivated more by necessity than a desire to avoid potential catastrophe and aggravation.
I limped into the nearest parking lot, took all the necessary crap out of my trunk, stripped down to my undershirt, and got to work. I had a couple floor mats in the trunk so I took one out to have something to kneel on as I changed the tire. A cold front started to blow through as I popped the hub cover out of the wheel. I noticed that in addition to the usual lugs, I had a locking lug in place. Locking lugs are a common anti-theft measure for alloy wheels. They cannot be loosened without a lug lock key. I had the same thing on my Saturn, so I started looking in the usual places. Glovebox, trunk, ashtray, console. Nope. Then I started looking on the ground around the car in case I had somehow dropped it out while removing everything from the trunk. Nope. Without the lug key, there was no way to change the tire. I was stuck.
I decided I’d better drive the car back to the parking garage at work, so I wouldn’t get towed from where I was. That’s where I left it. The next day I borrowed Jody’s car and drove around to various Ford dealers around Dallas to see what I needed to do. The consensus seemed to be that I had two options: order a replacement key and wait for it, or have the car towed to the dealer where they could remove the lug locks with a master key set or by brute force. The second option would have required getting the car towed and paying for a new lock set and the labor to remove the lugs. Ugh. I was going to try finding another key first.
At Bankston Ford off loop LBJ, I told my story to the older gentleman in the parts department. He nodded sympathetically and pulled a cardboard box out from under the counter and said I was welcome to look through all the spare lug keys he had. I had a digital photo of the lug in the event I had to find a key, and I ended up finding a couple that looked like they might work. He said I could take them with me to try out. There was an unspoken understanding that I would bring them back when I was done, but it reminded me that there are still people in the world who honor strangers with their trust. Almost as if my magic, my view of the situation brightened and I even started to think better of Ford as a company, since they must be alright to have such good people working for them. There’s a lesson there for business.
Even though the keys didn’t fit I was on the right track. I found out that instead of ordering through the dealership I could order directly from the manufacturer, a company called McGard, who specializes in lug locks and other forms of asset protection. This was a painless process. All I had to do was take a photo of the locking lug, email it to their customer support staff, and they would match it and overnight a key out to me. They got it to me in less than 24 hours. Once I got the key I changed the tire and went out to get all new tires and a full-size spare. The cost of the key and overnight shipping came to $30. Much better than a tow to the dealer, a new lock set, and an hour of labor to remove the locks.
Obvious lessons learned or remembered:
This might be BS, but it seemed funny anyway. This guy at work told me that it costs a dollar to have an unlisted number. Instead of doing that, he listed his telephone number under “Hugh Janus”.