Solipsism Gradient

Scoble linked to this great story about how JetBlue‘s CEO now and then works as a flight attendant on his own airline:

…Beginning in the first row, he slowly made his way through the plane, stopping to chat with anyone who cared to talk to him, answering every question people asked. I was sitting in the 11th row, and it took him more than an hour to reach me. “Nice airline you have here,” I said. “Where do you come up with all these great ideas – like the televisions?”

“I get most of my ideas on flights like this one,” Neeleman said. “The customers tell me what they want.”

“Oh, listening to your customers,” I said. “What a novel idea!”

Well worth a read. If all CEOs did something similar to keep in touch with their own customers, the world would be a better place…

The J-Walk Blog spreads the word regarding the dangers of Dihydrogen monoxide, an odorless, tasteless chemical that can be fatal when inhaled.

…Although the U.S. Government and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) do not classify Dihydrogen Monoxide as a toxic or carcinogenic substance (as it does with better known chemicals such as hydrochloric acid and saccharine), DHMO is a constituent of many known toxic substances, diseases and disease-causing agents, environmental hazards and can even be lethal to humans in quantities as small as a thimbleful…

This lethal chemical should be banned forthwith! City officials in Aliso Viejo (CA) nearly banned foam cups after learning that DMHO was involved in their manufacture.

The Presurfer (hey, no permalinks!) steered me to Robert Delaney’s Cross-cultural comparisons, by way of Mark Rosenfelder‘s American Culture page. There are links to dozens of other culture descriptions. Here’s a sample from the description for Brazil:

• You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights if someone is around; otherwise you slow down. If you’re a pedestrian and cars are anywhere around, you better watch out carefully before crossing the street.
• You think of Argentina as a pleasant country with two cities: charming, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, and beautiful Bariloche (where the Brazilian ski championship takes place). You think Argentinians as a people are arrogant and conceited, but you often like individual Argentinians.
• When you were younger, you considered the Volkswagen Beetle a dream car.
• The police are armed, sometimes with submachine guns. You are afraid all police are violent and crooked, but at the same time you would rather have them around.

If you’re interested in cultural differences, this is fascinating reading. If I find the time, I may write some comments for the Brazil page.

While I’m being nibbled to death (or at least to distraction) by lots of little incidental unrelated-to-each-other problems and racing to finish my new application, the nice folks at Boing Boing side-tracked me to what may be the best lab report ever: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass:

…The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order”.

…Now, let’s look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don’t. I see a bunch of crap.

Christ, this was such a waste of my time.

Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered…

The report is by Lucas Kovar, who also says:

I have recently removed my old stuff in the interest of not looking like a twit.

Heh…

Hold everything, you must read this: Make me one with everything:

…Margret then tried Steve’s problem. “Computer crashes every day sometime between noon and 1PM, but never the exact same time.”

“Lunching colleagues use coffeepot in adjacent room. When heating element turns off, a minor electrical surge induces a magnetic field in the extension cord Steve has wrapped around the steel leg of his desk next to the computer. The solution is to unwind the cord.”

The omniscient Indian friend on the other end of the phone line placidly answered all of Margret’s questions, until she came to the last. This one had been given to her by Adam, who taught computer science at the local university. His problem wasn’t a technical support issue, really, but during the flow of the dinnertime conversation it seemed a funny thing to add to a list of ponderables; what if you gave them a problem you knew was impossible to solve? Adam had reassured Margret that this one was the worst of the bunch, unsolved since 1936 when it was invented by one of the earliest of all computer scientists, and mathematically proven to be unsolvable…

Thanks to Derek Woolverton for the link…

In a recent post, I said:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…I recommend the Spherical Object Collectors community, created by my friend (in several senses) Mario AV, which already pointed me at this fascinating page about Hikaru Dorodango, or Japanese shiny mud balls.

Now I read at Jonathan Peterson’s way.nu that there’s a more up-to-date article available; it even has videos of each step of the process of making a dorodango!

Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil. It was settled in the 1800s by Italian and German immigrants, and the effects of that are still very much in evidence today. Gramado, where we’ve stayed over the Carnaval weekend, is a small town with 28,000 people that now lives mostly from tourism and hosts a famous South American film festival.

In most other parts of Brazil you can expect a town this size to barely have paved streets. In contrast, Gramado has dozens of first-class hotels, broadband Internet everywhere, upscale boutiques and many well-kept tourist attractions. It feels much like a prosperous tourist town in, say, Southern Germany.

Except for the sun and the tropical plants, this photo of an apartment building looks very European. Here’s a shot of the downtown shopping district:

The tree on the left is a “Paraná Pine” (Araucaria Angustifolia), the local variety of pine. I’ve seen much larger ones in the nearby parks. The fellow walking towards me is clad in the common clothes of the rural gaúcho (pronounced gah-OOsho or, by the locals, gah-OOtsho).

A well-known gaúcho specialty is the chimarrão, the local variety of mate tea. It’s traditionally drunk in a special cup made from a gourd and with a metal straw that has a disk-shaped strainer at the end. Here’s the chimarrão set our bus driver carried around with him:

Once the gourd is properly set up and packed, it’s replenished periodically with hot water from the thermos bottle. It’s very tasty and invigorating. Since it has high caffeine content it ought to be useful for programming…

OK, we’re back from Gramado. Photos came out quite well, I’ll post a few during the week. Nearly 1000 e-mails had piled up, over half of which seem to be spam. Surprise! 😆

While I work my way through urgent items, learn all about Fainting Goats. Really.

…With a Fainting goat in the herd if coyotes or dogs

threatened the sheep, the sheep could run away while the Fainting goat fell over, providing the predator with an easy meal while the sheep escaped.

…The name “Fainting” goat is a bit misleading because they do not actually faint. They have a genetic problem with relaxing

muscles. When they are startled or surprised their muscles lock up and the goat then sometimes falls over.

Update: Oops. Forgot to thank Ben Hammersley for the link.