Anti-Social Flyers

Twice now I have sat next to plane fliers who don't care about flight rules and who distain authority. 

The clearest was the guy in first class who kept using his wireless-enabled iPad throughout the flight. Not only did he have it on during landing -- he had the cell phone connection on and was surfing the internet. 

I am skeptical about how much electronic interference can really crash a modern jet, but most people give the benefit of the doubt. ABC News did a report last summer on it, and there were anecdotes about interference with the aircraft's electronics. Sensor gear can detect the interference from electronics -- what is unclear is how seriously radar and aircraft computers are affected. Aircraft manufacturers try to design in protection, and Boeing does not say that there is a problem.  Landing is a critical time, and this person might be endangering people is a problem. 

The second, was a person who put her seat back into recline immediately after the flight attendent sat down for take off  -- thus she would not be caught.  Airlines keep the seat backs up so that people can evacuate the plane quickly, and the landing and tack-off portions are the most dangerous parts of the flight. This was an early morning flight -- I got up at 3:50 AM to get there, but her priority on her own comfortable sleep should not be at the expense of other people's risk of death.

Carpet Mis-Fire

We were waiting for the carpet guys to install a new rug today. We moved furniture to get ready, and have it stacked all over the kitchen, so we can hardly walk. Then five minutes before they are supposed to come, the call from the carpet guys: Oh! the brakes are out on our truck. We aren't coming. Forget the installation. 

Pretty bad. 

It was about the worst case. We did all the moving, and did not get the rug. Now we have to live without furniture until their truck gets fixed, or put the furniture away, and then move it again later. 

Wife Jenny, who helped move the furniture is livid.  She calls Lowe's which turns out to be a good idea. She gets hooked up with the carpet installation person, and she is mad at the contractor. She makes calls.  

When she calls back the excuse is a flat tire, and not bad brakes. Hmmm

Strange Loops in the Brain or Strange Loops are the Brain

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitroids/3746539068/in/photostream/

Two of my favorite books are I am a Strange Loop, and Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid both by Douglas Hofstadtler. These talk about the nature of thought and personality. The first is poetic and the second is more an essay.

Into this mix, are two great stories on Radio Lab on these themes. It talks about loops in life. Two relate to the themes in Hofstadtler's books.

One story is about a woman who has short-term memory loss, and she just repeats the same conversations over-and-over like a computer stuck in a loop. It suggests the brain has aspects of a mechanism. One can speculate about causality and free-will in this circumstance. How much control did the woman have over her actions?







The second story is about Godel himself. I thought Godel was a regular mathematician, but it turns out he was frequently mentally ill. The fact that mentally ill people make huge mathematical break-throughs should tell us something. More specifically, mentally-ill people may be more driven to proven revolutionary conclusions than more socialized mathematicians.

Anyway, listen to the episode.

Why was Jobs Successful with Such an Old Fashioned Management Style?

We know that Steve Jobs was a demanding boss, and that he insisted on his ideas. We know that he sometimes fired staffers who disagreed with him. This seems like pig-headedness.

Business guru have been saying these are BAD practices, but they worked for Steve -- Why?

Sara McInerney agrees saying "He was a "high-maintenance co-worker" who demanded excellence from his staff and was known for his blunt delivery of criticism."

Ironically, business gurus also say that Steve Job's is a business leader in the company of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. First, this proves how fickle business gurus are, and how they will use any example to illustrate their points regardless of how well it fits.

Eric Jackson, a blogger at Forbes, wrote  "Top Ten Lessons" from Steve.  I like it because it is fairly factual, and has some actual quotes from Jobs.   The lessons are in red, and are followed by my commentary.

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science. My comment: really enduring inventions arn't that arty consider the wheel, or the locomotive or pneumatic tires or penicillin -- none of these seem arty to me.  Let's think of an arty invention, how about fat, decorative bows on eyeglasses frames. Do you think fat frames are going to outlast locomotives?

2. To create the future, you can't start with focus groups. I tend to agree with this.  Groups of customers mostly give you nothing useful. First you start with a germ of an idea. Groups are useful in refuting bad ideas.

3. Never fear failure. It was a management fad to say this in the 1990's. This is not original advice. Is it true? For people with good job skills and a little bankroll. Failure is tougher on the poor and unskilled.

4. You can't connect the dots forward -- only backward. This is a cute little proverb. On the other hand, forecasting is best when it extrapolates from the past. The problem is it misses the revolutionary changes. I think this is something one says to consultants who disagree with you.

5. Listen to the voice in the back of your head that tells you if you're on the right track or not. I like this one, but normal humans need to persuade colleagues to go along. Only someone who has spent a whole life being the big boss, would think that listen to your heart is a strategy. Real people need to form arguments to support a behavior.

6. Expect a lot from yourself and others. There is nothing wrong with expecting a lot. The problem is getting belligerent when you don't get get it, so some say Steve did. It is unclear how much of this is actually true. Nonetheless, high expectations help achieve high results.

7. Don't care about being right. Care about succeeding. This is good advice. Too often people get trapped in being right, when it is better to be pragmatic. Always agree to another plan when it is better. This is about maturity. It is also about getting along well with others.

8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with. When I am hiring people, I always go for the over-qualified person if I can get them. Stronger people are always better. Stop worrying about looking weak in comparison -- that is all in your own head.

9. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. I truly don't get this one. He said this during a speech at Stanford. I don't even know what he means. Perhaps don't take yourself too seriously or too stuffy. Maybe someone could help me.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision. This is a nice inspirational proverb, and I like the focus one work & determination. I think that talent is an over-valued characteristic. However, in today's world some people are too disadvantaged for Anything to be possible.  This proverb is a good thought exercise, and the optimism and positive-thinking can only help.


As a big boss, Job once said to Steve Levy that about his role that "My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff, in all the details. That's my job, to make sure everything is great.”

A big boss can only have simple messages to a large organization, and does not have time for all the details. It is good for the boss to insist on fundamentals.

The worst Steve Jobs stories seems to be from his early career when he must have been a big asshole. Perhaps all the Buddhism soaked in, and he mellowed later.

QuasiCrystals Win Nobel

A very cool pattern of Dan Shectman's Quasicrystals.

Frederick Taylor -- Scientific Manager

Frederick Taylor was an engineer during the Industrial Revolution in the US working 1883-1906.  He was a practical man who wanted to make factory better by making it more efficient --often making it more efficient made the work ergonomically easier.

For example, he did work on the so-called science of shovelling. He determined that a worker should shovel 21 lb per shovelful so that he could go the longest time. He also coached workers to use their body not their arms to lift. Today we know that sore backs are a big chronic problem, and that sore arms are less serious.

Taylor wrote a large book called The Principles of Scientific Management, which happily is free on Kindle and on Google books. Scientific management is not the management of science, but rather the use of experiments to improve productivity.

Taylor's work is hard to summarize, but three principles:

Inefficiency hurts America

Systematic management helps efficiency, not hiring for extraordinarily good workers

Management is a science that has laws, rules and principles.

Some of what Taylor advocates might be called worker training today. That is, if we show people how to shovel, then they shovel better. In the 1890's workers were assumed to know how to do their work, and the bosses often did not.

When I was in business school I admired the idea that studying the work at hand could make accomplishing it easier. I particularly liked taking a detailed approach to relatively simple workplace problems.

Reading Taylor today,  social issues problems and class distinction are on every page. Taylor regarded himself as progressive in his day, and he tries to give what he says as a reasonable view. The country, and actually the industrializing world of the time, were all grappling with these issues. It may have taken another fifty years before some resolution is achieved.

More: Taylor writes about "soldiering" which means workers who slow their work-pace deliberately to get paid more or so that the employer needs to hire more workers. Maybe  we'd call that goldbricking or featherbedding today. Taylor understood that paying by piece-work only helped so much. He thought his system led to greater productivity, and the ability to pay higher wages which would motivate the workers to have a better attitude and work harder.

Even More: This an excellent web page on early management theorists. 

Wine Label Art

Cool bottle from Honey Moon Winery in Bellingham, Washington.
This is a bottle of mead, which is made from honey.

I came across a great collection of labels in Coolist.

Wine labels are probably the best commercial art out there.

This label was banned in Alabama as too revealing. It is
also pretty weird with the flying bicycle.

Fertilizer from the Air and Its Invention

Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch, who was a chemist for BASF, and developed a practical industrial process for making ammonia from the air. It is called the most important chemical process ever discovered making fertilizer that allows farmer to feed so many people. It is said that half of the nitrogen in the human body has been synthesized from the air.

Bosch was assigned to the project by his bosses, who bought rights to the invention of Fritz Haber. Haber was a Professor at Karlsruhe, when he developed a high pressure process to fix nitrogen using a ruthinium catalyst in 1907.

Haber had a number of collaborators including Le Rossignol for the pressure equipment, Nerst for the thermodynamics, and Ostwald for prior art in catalyst selection.

The point here is that Haber had a network, and Haber and his bosses at BASF were plugged into it. Networks and the interfaces between organizations continue to be important in transmitting ideas. The isolated genius is not a very important phenomenon in science.

Didn't Fritz Haber have cool glasses? Oh, that is
his lab set up in the hood.

A Bosch Reactor

Bosch's project was the biggest chemical engineering plant at the time. It is an early example of Big Science. Significant technical projects today are increasing efforts of hundreds of people. Bosch's project was fast. He had the plant up in just five year making 7 million kg of ammonia a year. Today BASF makes 110 times that much in Germany.  Bosch got that plant up in 4-5 years. He was motivated by the threat of a British naval blockade, but also things just moved faster back then.

Heimliched at McDonalds

I was at McDonalds killing time before a business meeting on the road. Just behind me woman started choking, and the women at the table were wondering what to do, then they said loudly, "She's Choking!" A guy the next table got up, and grabbed the woman and did the Heimlich maneuver on her. I was wondering what to do, but I didn't do anything.

The woman was chubby, and that made it hard to get good leverage, but the guy kept doing it. The women turned blue in the lips, and kept trying to gasp for air. They just kept trying to Heimlich her, every minute or so.

The McDonald's workers noticed, and soon the store manager was there. He was pretty tall, and he tried to Heimlich her too. He was fast; he just kept Heimliching over and over. He pulled her up in the air when he pulled, and hardly let her down to the ground in-between Heimlichs he was pulling so hard and so fast.

The poor lady looked really desperate, and tired and scared and blue. She fainted or maybe she fell. The manager picked her up and kept trying. She had foam at her month since she couldn't swallow either.

The woman's friend (her 16 year old niece as it turns out) got on the phone to 911, and was trying to work the 911 operators question tree -- no she is not unconscious; no she can't talk; she was eating chicken nuggets and french fries...

The second time she fell; it was all the way to the ground, and she laid back. This time her head was right next to me since she fell across the aisle. She lost strength in her legs or she fainted, and the people couldn't hold her up. She looked just terrible.

In 2-3 minutes, a fire truck is coming down the street, and a guy is hanging out of the doorway waving for the firefighters to come in. The fire captain wasn't tall, but he was beefy, and he stopped the restaurant manager. Then he said something to the woman's friends, and started Heimliching himself. He was slower,  smoother and more rhythmic than the others.

I don't know if the woman was breathing, but she much have been getting some air. Soon they stretched her on the ground, and they were giving her an abdominal message -- something like a Heimlich maneuver but lying down. It looked like a heart message, but actually it was in the abdomen not the chest.

The color in the woman's face got better, and I exited the restaurant.

After watching all this, I felt terrible. This poor lady had been thought this terrible ordeal -- frightened and choking. I felt worn out from just being there.

Lion Droppings (Issues with Mac OS 10.7)

Everyone knows that Apple issued a new OS, and it is the biggest re-write in years. It brings a more iPad feel to the desktop, and geeks say that it brings far more security. It drops support for PowerPC code; that is applications native to OS 8 or OS 9.


This means that lots of specialty applications don't work.  I deleted about eight old programs including a screen capture program,  and a font manager. Notably the driver for my ancient Canon scanner no longer works. Looks like I am going to start photographing documents.

Most important to me is accounting software that my wife uses in her business -- AccountEdge 2004. This no longer runs in Lion, and it needs to upgrade to AccountEdge 2011 for $300.  Jenny's business is a lean operation, and $300 is a lot of money.   The main issue is that she uses a few features all year, and then we need to make statements for income taxes at the end of the year. Now $300 is less than an accountant would cost, so I suppose that it is cheaper. I guess a dual boot system  is the way to go.

News reports are that Flash is not supported in Lion, but I can say that it is. It runs on my computer fine.


The so-called "iPad" feel of Lion is overblown to me. Notably the window dragging gesture has been reversed on the Mac to make it more like the iPad. This seemed weird at first, but it actually is more natural -- more like push a piece of paper across a desk. On the other hand, I expect I will always be confusing the direction with that on my Windows PC. There are some changes in the menus, and indicator bars. There is a default full screen option, that gets rid of the desktop clutter. Overall look and feel is not that different.