Another sign that designer jeans may be making a comeback. What’s the sound of one child of the eighties screaming?

A must-see (long, but fun to skim): the official Internet-Draft for The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS). Choice quotes: “This draft describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of William Shakespeare or a good television show.” “Groups of monkeys are physically located in Zone Operations Organizations (ZOOs).” Reference [5] “Dough Re Mi,” The Brady Bunch. Original air date January 14, 1972.

Ever the observant one, Seth pointed out the irony in my pointing to the Tipping Point book on Amazon yesterday when Tim O’Reilly had mentioned that same book in his article describing his discussions with Jeff Bezos about that patent issue. Hey, at least I’m not using the Associates program. Oh wait, that’s not good because some people think we should take money away from them using their Associates program because they’ve patented it. Isn’t that a little bit hypocritical?

This Wired article on persuasive computing research was a little disturbing. Stanford researchers at the Persuasive Technology Laboratory “cook up the darkest technology they can imagine.” They design technology which taunts jealous wives, tracks if employees wash their hands in the bathroom, and, more positively, teaches men new vocabulary at the urinal. You know someone’s going to take that last one and use it to sell advertising instead of increasing male verbal skills. The study of persuasive technology is called “captology” and there’s a class at Stanford on it. It’s a marketer’s dream, but I hope these CS students use their knowledge for good and not evil. Their collaborative projects look promising: studying what makes websites credible, persuading people to take better care of themselves, and persuading people to take care of the environment.

I’ve been pondering the cumulative effects of small things. For example, people always get upset about how the sink in public restrooms becomes surrounded by water so that if you lean over it, you get a big horizontal wet stripe across your shirt. They grumble about how inconsiderate people are to leave all that water splashed outside the sink. Well, if you think about it a bit, you realize that there isn’t one person who spatters lots of water around the rim. It’s actually the accumulated effect of many small drops from lots of people washing their hands. Granted, if everyone was more careful and/or wiped around the sink after they were done, the problem would go away. However, not one person is responsible and you are probably just as responsible as anyone else. The same type of thing happens with the kitchen at work. Not one person is a big slob, but the small bits and pieces from everyone makes us all look like a pack of slovenly beasts by the end of the day. A similar topic, but from a different angle, is covered in the new book The Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (which I’m trying to get to if I can make a dent in the pile of books already on my nightstand).

Spotted in the supermarket yesterday: Yo Baby, Stonyfield Farm’s new yogurt for babies. This is a marketing ploy taken a bit too far, I think. Then again, I’ve never raised a baby. Maybe they do need their own specially formulated yogurt in tiny little disposable cups.

“She has been programmed as 28-years-old, 5-feet 8-inches tall, with a pleasant, quietly intelligent manner.” Who? Ananova, the virtual news anchor developed in England. She looks like she’s into heavy eyeliner, collagen injections (bottom lip only), and blue-green hair (I wonder if she has any tattoos). You can apply to be her lookalike. According to this MSNBC article, she’s fluent in XML, which is how they will be triggering her various emotional looks: serious, somber, surprise and fun. Hmmm…I wonder which one they’ll use for Presidental election coverage. Because traditional BBC English sounded too bossy, she has a “mid-Atlantic” accent. What the heck is that? I bet my geek friends would program their own virtual anchors for their digital devices. Just like how they gather and distill news headlines into their own web portals right now. And then celebrities are going to be upset because people have taken their images and used them to read the news to them on their cell phones!

This paper about Graspable User Interfaces is way cool, super-sized food for thought. Of course taking something like this too far could bring us back full circle to how people did things before computers (but with, I guess, instant electronic entry). We need to remember to still take advantage of the power and convenience of the more virtual UI. (via memepool)

Today someone said to me “Hey check out the cool design competition posted on Slashdot!”. Using my sixth sense I said “It’s the 5K isn’t it?”. Indeed it was, and it got on Slashdot because of a Wired article. I said in, I’ll admit, a bit of a snobbish tone, “I read about that WEEKS ago on tons of weblogs!” (OK, “weeks” may be exaggerating a bit, but not in Internet time). And the person said “Oh. So does this mean Slashdot isn’t cool anymore?” And I replied “You got it! Reading weblogs is WAY COOLER!!” (I realize some people call Slashdot a weblog of sorts, but it’s not what I mean when I say “weblog”.)

I solved the soap problem. The big clunky piece of Kiss My Face Olive and Aloe Vera soap is now half the size it was thanks to some clever wielding of my Chinese cleaver. I managed to slice it in half the long way, so it still looks like a bar of soap. But thinner. It’s not curvy, but it’s definitely more manageable. And I can say I got two bars of soap in one!