Stray Hawkeye

The New York Times has a really interesting interactive chart showing the jobless rate over time, broken out by age, gender, race, and education level, where you can mix and match the different demographic categories.  Sort of draws out how much the usual reports saying that the unemployment rate is x% really gloss over a lot of detail.  The jobless rate (as of Sept 2009) ranges from 3.6% to 48.5% depending on your demographic.  Really interesting to see how much each factor affects it, and how they interplay.

Via Get Rich Slowly.

The end result of Pavlov’s diabolical plan to make everyone drool while Christmas shopping.

A quick programming note – I know it’s not Friday, but I forgot to hit “Publish” on this one on Friday before I left for the weekend, and since I’m probably not going to do a Friday post over the holiday weekend, I’m splitting the difference and officially declaring it Free Idea Tuesday Evening, though I’m keeping the title the same, just because.  Also, I’m not numbering Free Idea Friday (for example, “Free Idea Friday 6 – A better video slider”) any more because: 1. I have a hard time keeping track of what number I’m on, and 3. I don’t think it adds anything to number them.  Cries of anguish over the change shall be heartily ignored.  Anyway, the post:

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This one is more of a request than an idea.  So, the problem I would like to see solved is to have a better time / location slider in media players.  Most media players have at least figured out that the slider that shows how far in to a movie you are should go across the bottom, and span the entire width of the video.  This in and of itself is a huge improvement over the ones that have a fixed width slider that doesn’t expand when you resize the player.  The problem is that on really long videos (a 2 hour movie for instance) it’s still very hard to do a fine grain adjustment with the existing sliders.  For instance, if you’re 1 hour 23 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie, it’s hard to go back to 1 hour 23 minutes and 4 seconds just to catch that last word again- a single pixel is already a few seconds long so it’s extremely hard to move the mouse a single pixel with any accuracy.  So, I would like to see some mechanism to use the mouse for both fine and course gain position adjustments in the same control.

The best idea I’ve come up with (and it could probably use improvement) is to make it so the area right around the current location in the clip is warped, so that if you adjust it just a pixel or two in one direction, that pixel is only worth a second or two, but if you move it 100 pixels, it’s worth far more than 100 seconds.  That would let you make fine grain adjustments more easily while still allowing large leaps in the same interface, and showing about where you are in the clip.  More of a logarithmic scale than a linear one (I think).  I’m not sure if setting it up this way would make it more or less intuitive.  I think the warping would also have to interplay a bit with how quickly you move the slider.

So, using VLC’s slider for mock ups, the slider normally looks like this:

In my idea, when you click on the slider, it would bow out like this:

And if you move it just a little, it would only move the media a second or two, but quickly moving it past the bowed part would move it much further, at which point the new location would bow out.  To show the scale, if you added ticks, each showing an equal amount of time in the video/audio clip:

Or, to illustrate a little better, zoomed in, with 3 equal sections shown, with the assumption that each tick in the bowed section is one second, and outside the bowed section, each pixel is one second:

The length would still have to vary some depending on the length of the clip, or you could vary how large of an area is bowed out.  A little hard to explain clearly, but I think it would be fairly intuitive once you got it working.

• The Bloomberg Way – A short quote, but I’m pretty sure it proves I will never write for, or most likely, enjoy reading anything from Bloomberg News, however, I admittedly don’t know all that much about them.
• I like Wendy’s logo / brand, in no small part because of their total lack of modern update.  And as ultra cheap fast food goes, it’s not bad.
• What do you call someone who compulsively stores jars full of baby poop in a freezer for over 30 years, adding to the collection on a regular basis?  Um, a scientist.  They apparently also go for fruit bat blow jobs.  And hell, while we’re at it, growing rabbit penises in a lab.  Because really, that’s what the world needs, more rabbit penises.
• Brawndo begins it’s assent to world power.  Here’s the commercial they reference in that article:
  
  And, of course, where to buy it.

The news last night had this amusing clip of a cat climbing on a police officer while he was issuing a speeding ticket:

I started laughing really hard about half way through, when he keeps going with writing the ticket, because it made me think of this bit from Super Troopers (despite the warning, this is one of the most clean parts of the movie):

“Do you need some help with that cat, sir?”  “You just stay in the car, meow.”

This article / list from Field & Stream is interesting in a whole lot of ways, especially the bluntness and practicality of it.  It’s a list of rules for gunfighting.  My favorites:

23. Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.

That one, though probably the most useful and applicable in most cases, admittedly gets a bit lost among the other ones that are more towards the practical side once that has failed, like this one:

27. Regardless of whether justified of not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature.

A lot more truth than you find in the standard TV cop drama five minutes left until the top of the hour gun fight to wrap things up quickly scene.

They wore wigs.  They wore tights.  They wore ruffles.  That’s right ladies and gentlemen, our country was founded by drag queens. Fancy drag queens.

Start a bar simply named “Cold Beer”.  Bonus points if it’s in Minnesota or an equally fridged state.

Aren’t you glad we’ve forgotten about all those complex issues related to things like being at war in two countries, the $5,000,000,000,000 bailout, and torturing people we’ve unconstitutionally detained, and back to the things that really matter, like Kanye West and Balloon Boy?

A really good video demonstrating how advertising affects us.  I’d like to see a little more of the set up for it, but the overall idea is definitely there.  With that subtle of cues giving that strong of an effect- almost photographic duplication of something they didn’t even necessarily register seeing- just think of how much TV commercial breaks, billboards, and radio ads affect us all.  How it affects us not just in what we buy, but also in how we act and what things we think up and think are our own.

And that’s to say nothing of the brands and logos that are embedded in our everyday lives.  How far outside of the screen you’re looking at right now is the nearest logo/brand?  How about the ones already on the screen (Windows logo, Firefox, Word, the icon for this site, etc)?  Just think of all the logos all over all of the everyday products you use and never really look at.  For example, I counted and my cell phone alone has 9 brands/logos on it.  My watch has 6.

Via Ovablastic

Two cool articles on the art of forming a glob of mud into a shiny polished ball called a “dorodango” (Japanese):

• This one is more of the philosophical / metaphorical side of it, and is a really good introduction.
• This one is about someone’s first attempt to actually make one.

Is there some specific art term for art that’s meant to be temporary / transient, like these or the sand paintings that Buddist monks do?

• Career plans
• Groverfield
• Capitalists
• Elephants never forget

I’d like to see a website that consists of an interactive tree, displaying which company owns which other companies / brands. For instance, show that Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, and Tropicana (among many others), and then show that Quaker Oats in turn owns Cap’n Crunch, Aunt Jemima Syrups (but not frozen foods), Rice-A-Roni, Gatorade, and so on. Direct ownership would be considered a strong link.

You could also show weak links, such as person A sits on the board for company X and Y, or investment firm Q owns a large percentage of company J and K.  For instance, Indra Nooyi, who is the CEO of PepsiCo is also a Class B director of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, as is Jeffrey R. Immelt, who is the CEO of GE. GE owns NBC and Universal Studios. NBC co-owns MSNBC with Microsoft. Denis M. Hughes is a Class C director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve and he’s also President of the New York State AFL-CIO. And James Dimon is a Class A director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, and he’s CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, which owns Chase. And on, and on, and on.

Ideally you would show all of this in visual, interactive form (click on a company and it expands out its associations). Bonus points if you use corporate logos to represent each brand/company.  It could look something like this for showing the connections listed above, and a couple more:

In photo shopping that graphic, I’d say there’s already a need for a way to show/hide some things so it’s not just enormous, and the links probably need directional arrows to show who owns who, and maybe labels to show what exactly the relationship is.  You would probably also need a way to decide which way is up (market cap?), and how to space things, because in the above, it looks like Microsoft and Pepsi are closely linked since they’re next to each other, but they’re actually fairly far apart (as far as I can tell).

If you’re really ambitious, you could also show links through things like business partnerships (companies linked to Microsoft through large scale licensing deals), memberships in various professional consortiums (like the W3C or the IEEE), or ongoing advertising deals (Target Field / the Twins). You could also show who competes with who in what market. That would be really interesting.

You could also work in time phasing it.  Such as, when did Pepsi acquire Quaker Oats? Who owned it before?  Where did Indra Nooyi work before becoming Pepsi CEO?  It becomes a sort of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon after not too long.  Which is really a little scary in its own way.  Throw in political campaign contributions and we’re really cooking with fire.

I admittedly only know a very small subset of how different companies relate to each other, but I always find it fascinating and I think there’s a fair number of people who would like to know more about this kind of thing, so you’ve got an audience. I’m not sure how freely available this kind of information is, but I would assume it’s public knowledge for any publicly traded company (all the stuff I used to make this post is from Wikipedia and reasonably easy to trace).  It would just be a matter of finding and organizing the data, and then presenting it in a more understandable manner than how it currently exists.

Of my free ideas so far, this is the one that I’ve gone back and forth the most on actually doing, so if you do give it a try, let me know, I’d be glad to work on it some.  If I ever find myself bored or just in need of a break, I might work on it some anyway.  So, this one’s more of a “half free but I’m still holding on to it a little bit” idea.  Perhaps a “partnership idea Friday”.

“We’re All Gonna Die” by Simon Hoegsberg (I have no idea how to make the oh in his last name an empty set symbol) is a stitched together panorama of pictures he took of people walking across a bridge.  It’s sort of cool because:

• It’s the only time I can think of where I’ve seen a really wide horizontal scrolling web page that actually seemed like a good design choice.
• The huge variety of people and dress.
• The varying degrees of recognition on the part of the subjects of the fact they were being photographed.

Admittedly, I tottally don’t get the title though.

Two different environmental / tech items I kind of like.

Aptera is a company working on make an super, super efficient car.  It sort of boarders between glorified motorcycle and tiny coupe, but interesting as a thought experiment if nothing else, though I think they have a few working prototypes floating around.

FloDesign Wind has a very different take on wind turbines as well.  The video is particularly interesting, though it’s a bit of a commercial for them as well.  Interesting for thinking about the different pros and cons of traditional wind power, and making a little more sense of how they’re set up when you see a field of them.  Personally, I still think solar concentrators with steam engines are the way to go.