Midas Touch

At a super bowl party last year I had a bottle of Midas Touch and was impressed. Since then I've had it a couple times and thought it was good, but had no idea that when the bottle says Handcrafted Ancient Ale it's serious:

Midas Touch Golden Elixir, currently marketed as Midas Touch, was first marketed in June 2001. The recipe for this beverage is based on the chemical analysis of residues found in clay vessels believed to date back to the 8th century BC. Originally discovered in Gordium, Turkey during a 1957 dig by archaeologist Rodney Young, the content of these vessels was left unknown for 40 years. In 1997, molecular archeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern received a phone call from a former student of his informing him of a residue on clay jars from the tomb of King Midas. Dr. McGovern quickly did chemical analysis finding all aspects of the drink except for the spicing agent but made an assumption of saffron due to regional availability.

Now I really want to try Chateau Jiahu.

Ok, end beer commercial. Why am I drinking Midas Touch on a Thursday night? Because I'm celebrating that the project I've been working on at work for the last year is finally coming together!

Shop Class As Soulcraft

Today I finished Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work by Matthew B. Crawford.

The book makes the argument that separating knowledge from being able to work with the physical world is bad for workers in many ways. It is push back on the knowledge economy. The story is based on his own experience working as a motorcycle repairman after getting his PhD and working some office jobs.

If the subject makes you think of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are a few shared ideas, but this book isn't insane.

I have mix feelings about this book.

First some good:

Sections of the book are clear articulations of thoughts that have guided my career and education. If anyone wants to understand why I chose electrical engineering over computer science and engineering over other fields, this book would be a good place to start - the core idea being working within the constraints of the physical world and seeing ones efforts cause something to actually work both theoretically and practically. Even though he does makes some comments about repair being superior to design (I think most of those comments are based on ignoring several aspects of design).

He even made some comments on creativity that very nearly matched my own.

Some ok:

He makes some good points about the modern office. Especially about how when people work in teams on poorly defined tasks it is difficult to evaluate the success of both the group and individual, vs in repair where either the repairman gets the motorcycle to work or doesn't. And how this puts managers in a strange position. Also how the knowledge of success vs failure is key to satisfaction in work. He also gets into how demoralizing it can be when the goal is something monetarily based, such as number of pages written, instead of working towards quality.

He also discusses how advertising and marketing reveals people's desires to build and repair their own stuff. He discusses marketing campaigns such as the Scion where they have people purchase options to make them feel like they are working on their car, when they are really just buying more stuff.

Some bad:

He takes most of his points to extremes - such as I toned the comments about the office way down.

My biggest issue with the book is that he encourages people to consider vocational school over college, especially since for some people they can make more money if they are willing to accept blue collar jobs. First, I question if that's true, much of the recent discussion of the labor market I've seen is about how recently those with college degrees are pulling even further ahead of those without. Second, even if it was, there are other reasons to go to college, such as just being an education person. Also this is one of the most "academic" books (outside of science and textbooks) that I've ever read which seems somewhat ironic given its subject matter. It's also a bit odd that a book suggesting going to votech made me feel like I should have taken a philosophy class before reading it.

The author doesn't bother at all with balance. He's all about getting away from specialization of labor as well as other aspects of corporations, but doesn't address what would happen if there was actually a major shift back to engineers doing their own building and writing their own user manuals. It never comes up that products would be significantly more expensive and the economy would tank. Not to mention that he does not suggest how reasonably complex projects would be designed or built. A good example of the lack of balance is when I made comments about creativity on this blog several people made good counterpoints and that's my personal blog - this book did nothing to address that there is more than one side to it.

Finally the size:

I really like the size of the book - it isn't a little pocket book, but still fits in a pocket so as I read through the wheel of time at home, I've been reading this book while doing laundry and hanging out on castro st. All books should be this size and if they need to be longer they can be split into multiple volumes. Also makes me wish there was a mini-kindle that bends a little.

Time Travel

There's a particular view of time travel that seems to be preferred by tv and movies. This view is that someone can travel back in time and change something which alters the future. Let's say the character lives till 2010 then travels back to 1980 and changes stuff then travels back to 2010. In the show his time line is continuous from 1980 to 2010 then jumps to 1980 then jumps to 2010. The "first" time he is in 2010 in the past there is only one of him in 1980, the time traveling him hasn't visited that time. The "second" time he's in 2010 in the new history of the world there were two of him in 1980, one the normal and one the time traveler.

Ok, before we go further we have to allow physics to be broken in order to time travel, and even bigger we have to allow causality to be broken. It is difficult to proceed with a logical argument once we're allowing causality to be broken, but logic minus causality is one more thing we'll have to allow for this post to proceed.

It's always seemed to me that if someone time travels from 2010 to 1980, then in 1980 there are two of him and all of the resulting consequences, no matter if it is the "first" time he gets to 2010 or the "second" time, since there aren't two 1980s. (Sometimes shows touch on the idea of switching to a different universe when the time traveling occurs - that would solve the problem, but then the person is both time and universe traveling, not just time traveling*). So that's not a new idea. But what finally occurred to me is why the two different 1980s view of time travel is so natural for TV - you are following the character who time travels and time is progressing based on his view of time so it is possible to see each moment in time more than once as soon as he starts time traveling. Even in a story with many characters, the story will take the view point of only the time traveler for that part of the story. (Heros may be an exception to that rule, but Heroes' time travel rules were really wacky, remember the crazy mesh of strings they called a timeline?)

If a TV show had to draw a time line (based on the reference of a third party - or a non-time traveling character) they would be hard pressed to make it work with this view of time travel. It would be equally difficult to make this work if they also showed events from the perspective of a non-time traveling character. Especially since the time traveler's friend's memory contains one set of events during the "first" 2010 and a different set of events during the "second" 2010.

So I blame the linearity of story telling and the tendency to perceive the story through the view point of a single character for this persistent view of time travel.

Although since we've dropped causality maybe I blame this persistent view of time travel for the linearity of story telling.

(*The universe hopping version of time travel is also somewhat less satisfying since if the character goes back in time to save someone they're not actually saving the person in the original universe, but rather just choosing to live in a universe in which the person survives - that seems to make the story much more shallow. Although I guess if they're not sure how time travel works they could still be well intentioned...)

Two Ideas

Here are two ideas:

1. Trilingual travel books. Lots of people both in and out of the US speak the language of their home country and English as a second language. When they visit a foreign country it is likely they will speak English there since they will find more English speakers than speakers of their primary language. So it is useful for their tour book to have English names and descriptions. However, even if the person is very fluent in English it is likely that there will be many places in the foreign country they learned about growing up in their primary language and don't know the English for it. In addition to sites, this would likely be true for foods and other aspects of travel. So it is useful for the tour book to also include names in the reader's primary language. And of course any good tour book will include the names in the language of the destination country.

This isn't just a crazy theory - a coworker borrowed a tour book and mentioned how he had a tough time find what he's looking for because he only knows the Chinese name (and his English is approaching native speaker). When I suggested a tour book in Chinese he pointed out that he'd be speaking English in the country so a Chinese tour book wouldn't do it either.

I think the major obstacle is a company that has all the content would have to do this or give someone permission to use their content. Also tough would be that this would require the creation of a huge number of books - perhaps it is an idea better suited to a website that allows the user to pick a destination country and all the languages they want the information in - or maybe ebooks are the answer.

2. Certified store for Android apps. Any app going into the Apple app store has to be approved by apple which is both the store's biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage. My understanding is basically anything can go up on the Android store. Seems like an opportunity for someone trusted to check Android apps for security issues (and if trying to mimic apple - occasionally dismiss apps for no reason) and then put them up for sale in a special store. I was thinking that the developers might have to send them the source code, but iOS developers don't send the code to Apple so it should be possible to do the security checks with binaries only.

Semi-related idea - why isn't there an app store equivalent for desktop/laptop computers?