Miscellaneous | Idle Musings

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Time Lapse Trip From Ohio to Minnesota

In Miscellaneous on Jul-10-2010 with
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The trip was 674 miles. A still photos was taken every 15 seconds via a dashboard digital camera. This is what you get.

As Lost nears its final episode, George Lucas sent a congratulatory letter to executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

When Star Wars first came out, I didn’t know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you’ve planned the whole thing out in advance.

Busy As A Beaver

In Miscellaneous on May-8-2010 with
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Whomever came up with that phrase clearly had these critters in mind:

A Canadian ecologist has discovered the world’s largest beaver dam in a remote area of northern Alberta [....] researcher Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 metres (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

[....]

Construction of the dam likely started in the mid-1970s, said Thie, who made his discovery quite by accident while tracking melting permafrost in Canada’s far north. “Several generations of beavers worked on it and it’s still growing,” he told AFP in Ottawa.

Just to give you a little idea of how large this dam actually is, the The Hoover Dam is only 379 meters wide.

Business Lessons From Five Guys

In Miscellaneous on May-3-2010 with
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Just a wonderful interview with Five Guys Burgers and Fries founder Jerry Murrell. Their entire focus is on the product.

The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill—a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order—you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs—it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it.

When I first moved to the DC Metro area in the early 90s I lived just off King Street/Route 7 in Alexandria, VA. A couple blocks from one of the first Five Guys. Wow, they sure can make a burger. For the first couple years they didn’t even have any seating. Folks would just walk to the parking lot and eat the darn things in their cars. They were just that good.

I Thought Everybody Knew Powerpoint Is Evil?

In Business, Government, Miscellaneous on Apr-27-2010 with
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I can’t stand PowerPoint(PPT). It just isn’t an effective way to present complex data. Now it seems the military has clued into this basic fact.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers—referred to as PowerPoint Rangers—in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

You’d think somebody in the Department of Defense would have read or at least heard of Edward Tufte and his well known opinion on the use of PPT. Or at least picked up one of his books on the visual display of complex information, cause this is a chart used in one of their presentations.