When I heard from a friend that Stonyfield yogurt was now coming in 6oz sizes instead of 8oz, I didn’t believe her. “Are you sure you didn’t buy the organic yogurt by mistake?” I was still seeing 8oz containers at my store. She thought maybe she had. But then, more recently, I visited the Stonyfield website and was greated with disappointing news: “we reduced the size of our fat free cups to a 6oz. size that’s more appropriate for snacking.” Snacking? I eat these for breakfast! Apparently most people think yogurt is a snack and would prefer a smaller size. Hmph. Then, just yesterday, I was informed that Dannon was making the same changes. Their reasons are gone from their website and had to be retrieved from a Google cache of their FAQ:

Why have you reduced your product to a 6 oz size?
Dannon regularly reviews consumer feedback and preferences to stay in touch with our consumers’ needs. Our most recent market research indicates that most consumers prefer a 6 oz container. The smaller product is just the right size for consuming yogurt as a snack or as part of a meal.

Suddenly, I remembered that Dannon had purchased 40% of Stonyfield a couple years ago. Now both are going the way of smaller serving Yoplait. I may be going the way of the Brown Cow.

Weight-loss jewelry? Well, whatever works, I suppose. Balance Bands come in sets of five. You put all five on your right wrist in the morning, then move one to your left wrist for each serving of fruits and vegetables you eat. SlimmerBeads are calorie counting bracelets. One bead equals 100 calories, and you slide them over as you consume. Tali bracelets use a system of beads and charms to track calories, glasses of water, exercise, whatever you’d like to keep track of.

With the FCC relaxing the rules on media ownership yesterday, I started thinking again about satellite radio. If all my local media is going to start sounding the same anyway, why not just go for the full network radio effect? After a rocky start, XM and Sirius are making excellent headway. They are even talking about breaking even in the next couple years. XM has 500,000 subscribers and Sirius, a year behind due to technical problems, has 68,000. Car manufacturers are offering the receivers as optional equipment. You can buy the radios at electronics stores now, and even Wal-Mart. The two companies have slightly different tactics for their road to profitability, and the competition should be clean and healthy, a fun fight for both parties. Some critics say people will just use mp3 players instead, but getting exposed to new music, talk, and news is still a big draw for radio. And mp3 players still have some overhead for obtaining and arranging your music, whereas radio music plays without any fuss. Now a combo satellite, FM, AM, TV-audio, mp3 player with Tivo-like-capabilities…that would be perfect.

The phone number of the new Apple Store in Bellevue, WA is the same as that of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, except for the area code. Has Apple already reserved the 206 version of Gates’ (I assume) unlisted Medina, WA number for use when they open a store in Seattle?

Historical maps galore of New York City and Long Island. Think back to a time when maps of a town included the name of each property owner. You can see the pattern of families who divided up parcels or, perhaps, purchased adjoining lots. You can also marvel at the plethora of “Smiths.” (via Anil’s purple sidebar)

It’s the time of year to cull what wisdom we can from those commencement speeches that few college graduates remember clearly after they descend from their ivory towers. As always, I start with my own shiny tower where this year NPR’s Linda Wertheimer gave some election advice: “I would suggest, vote all women. Generally speaking, they haven’t been around long enough to be seriously evil.” At Trinity College, Garry Trudeau exhorted graduates to “go forth and raise hell” as “Civilization has always advanced in the shimmering wake of its discontents.” Opera singer Renee Fleming totaled up a statistic that Julliard students may not have wanted to sum up: “Those of you who perform – musicians and dancers – will have by now practiced perhaps 3,000 hours a year, times 15 years, which equals 45,000 hours.” As a group she calculated that the graduates had practiced 11 million hours. Thus she encouraged them to make it time well spent: “Challenge the idea that the arts are for a select few – teach, make more people love what you love, and help them to understand why you dedicated those 11 million hours in the first place.” (more commencement excerpts from the New York Times)

On Sunday the sluicegate of China’s Three Gorges Dam will be closed, ten years after work began on the controversial project. Water from the Yangtze River will begin to form a reservoir, eventually flooding 312 million square feet of land. 1.13 million people will be relocated by the project’s end in 2009. But the upside is electricity. Generators will be providing power as early as this year, and ultimately 26 turbines will create 18,200 megawatts of power, supplying the energy for China’s expected massive economic growth.

I have to quibble with two of the quotes in this article on the new gesture interface from FingerWorks. First, their CEO says “Unlike having to remember a sequence of keys, the gestures become part of your motor movements, so they are a part of your motor memory in your brain.” While I believe that gestures will be a nice, natural way of communicating commands to a computer, it is untrue that key sequences do not become motor memory. Typing is a very rapid means of communication, and much of it is motor movement memory. A better memory example would have been the gesture device’s improvement over the mouse. Mouse movement, because you can not guarantee where the pointer will be, is not as reliant on motor memory (though the best-designed mouse interactions with user interfaces like pie menus become motor memory gestures). The second quote is from interaction guru Don Norman who says “Having to move your hand back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse really is an unnecessary activity.” True indeed. But you can solve that easily with many alternate pointing devices that fit into your keyboard. Quotes taken out of context can be deceiving, I know, but let’s pull out quality reasons for why gestural interfaces will be so useful. How about: typing and mousing is unnatural, but humans gesture all the time!

Nagoya TV has a collection of 8000 Japanese wood-block prints and has scanned some into a lovely virtual museum. Most descriptive text is available in English (as well as Japanese of course). (via Yahoo New & Notable)

11% of the total weight of the cargo accompanying the San Francisco Symphony on tour in Europe is comprised of seven timpani. That’s 2,450 pounds of heavy duty percussion. Sheperding not only the musicians but also their most valuable possessions through a ten city, three week tour is a monumental task handled by the orchestra’s two operations managers. They are coordinating logistics for train, plane, and bus travel for the players, and truck, cargo plane, and ferry travel for the 11 tons of instruments and other necessities. Twenty-two violins arrived baked in Dublin (rosin cakes had melted and reformed), but no serious damage was found. Missed connections and airport security give the two coordinators much to worry over, but the show always goes on. (thanks Lynn!)