Lone Gunman

With my 25-hour flight from Syd­ney back to Lon­don fast approach­ing, my mind is wan­der­ing to the topic of jet lag–or desynchronosis, to use the med­ical term.

The most often sug­gested reme­dies for jet lag (where recov­ery times are gen­er­ally said to be 1 day per east­ward time zone or 1 day per 1.5 west­ward time zones) are fast­ing for 11–16 hours before the flight or wear­ing sun­glasses (the lat­ter is what the British Air­ways jet lag cal­cu­la­tor is based on).

Not par­tic­u­larly a fan of these meth­ods, I con­cur with Bryan Caplan’s advice as he frames jet lag (and infant night feed­ings) in terms of fixed costs:

My alter­na­tive: Do not sleep on the plane.  At all.  When you arrive, do not sleep — at all — until a locally nor­mal bed­time.  Pay the fixed cost with­out cheat­ing.  When you wake up eight to ten hours later, you will be refreshed and in sync with your new time zone.  In exchange for less than a day of sleep depri­va­tion, you will feel fine for the rest of your trip.

This tech­nique has served me well for many years.

After trav­el­ling to Syd­ney, I some­how man­aged to miss the spec­ta­cle that was the biggest dust storm to hit the city in over 70 years by going some­where else for a week.

While I was in Mel­bourne prepar­ing for a road trip down the Great Ocean Road (and gen­er­ally avoid­ing the earth­quake and the col­lapse of one of the Twelve Apos­tles min­utes before we arrived) The Big Pic­ture was on the case prepar­ing a fan­tas­tic set of pic­tures of the phe­nom­e­non.

Those I have spo­ken to in Syd­ney have attested that this is exactly what it looked like to the naked eye.

I’m now read­ing Wikipedia’s list of extreme weather events.

First seen over at Raul Gutier­rez’ Head­ing East, this Tim Berners-Lee quote on the role of the home page from 1996 or so seems to come from an inter­view with Rohit Khare and DC Deni­son:

With all respect, the per­sonal home page is not a pri­vate expres­sion; it’s a pub­lic bill­board that peo­ple work on to say what they’re inter­ested in. That’s not as inter­est­ing to me as peo­ple using it in their pri­vate lives. It’s exhi­bi­tion­ism, if you like. Or self-expression. It’s open­ness, and it’s great in a way, it’s peo­ple let­ting the com­mu­nity into their homes. But it’s not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself. Peo­ple don’t have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for orga­niz­ing their pri­vate lives; they don’t really put their scrap­books on the Web. They don’t have fam­ily Webs. There are many dis­trib­uted fam­i­lies nowa­days, espe­cially in the high-tech fields, so it would be quite rea­son­able to do that, yet I don’t know of any. One rea­son is that most peo­ple don’t have the abil­ity to pub­lish with restricted access.

It’s an inter­est­ing, yet now fairly obvi­ous idea: blogs as sig­nalling.

Neu­ro­mar­ket­ing has recently been look­ing at The Scarcity Effect:

WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked peo­ple to rate choco­late chip cook­ies. They put 10 cook­ies in one jar and two of the same cook­ies in another jar. The cook­ies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cook­ies were exactly the same! Not only that, but if there were a lot of cook­ies in the jar, and then a short time later most of the cook­ies were gone, the cook­ies that were left received an even higher rat­ing than cook­ies that were in a jar where the num­ber of cook­ies didn’t change.

In a follow-up post they look at the case of Knob Creek whiskey using scarcity in their lat­est mar­ket­ing cam­paign (after they announced that there’s a chance they “might run out of their sig­na­ture bourbon”):

If sup­ply is indeed short, why not cut back on adver­tis­ing, save a few bucks, and still sell 100% of your inventory?

The answer is brand­ing. Should Knob Creek be known sim­ply as a pre­mium bour­bon, or the bour­bon that was so good it became unavail­able? Should the stan­dards used in the cre­ation of Knob Creek be high, or so high that its mak­ers wouldn’t com­pro­mise their man­u­fac­tur­ing and aging process to make more available?

With the grow­ing preva­lence of ebook read­ers that can be updated remotely–such as Amazon’s Kin­dle–could the time of the book rid­dled with errors be com­ing to an end?

Errors are com­mon in all forms of media, but it is mis­takes in the printed word that are per­haps the most per­ni­cious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and mis­in­for­ma­tion will mul­ti­ply. The com­bi­na­tion of human fal­li­bil­ity with Gutenberg’s inven­tion of effi­cient print­ing in 1439 has, for all the rev­o­lu­tion­ary advan­tages of the lat­ter, proved (in some respects) to be a toxic mixture.

It’s not men­tioned specif­i­cally in the arti­cle (but is alluded to in the accom­pa­ny­ing image), but I’m inter­ested in how con­sumers will be used to iden­tify these errors.