“experiments”

Philosophical experiment: everytime you hear a purpose or goal, rephrase it in terms of the underlying need or desire using the word “itch”. Report.

Game: 2 players take turns to say a number between 1 and 9. Numbers may not be repeated. The goal is to be the first to say 3 numbers which add up to 15.

Sounds like fun? Try it with a friend!

Fun it ain’t.

It’s hard to remember the said numbers and “playing” is a chore involving many additions in your head. Maybe it’s fun for the better short-term memory endowed or those who enjoy arithmetic but that ain’t me.

Turns out that game above is none other than the beloved tic-tac-toe. You see:

2	7	6
9	5	1
4	3	8

This is what I love about information design (and what I tried to do in my calendars) this is its art, its magic: it can turn a chore into a game! It recasts our weaknesses —linear, verbal processing— into a form suitable for our talents —gestalt visual processing.

In math words: it finds useful language-graph same-shapes (isomorphisms)!

This just in (via KurzweilAI.net), I can hardly believe it myself:

What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.

I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.

Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?

OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?

But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.

The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.

Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.

Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%

A math experiment was carried out recently when Alex Smith —an Electronic and Computer Engineering undergraduate with “a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages”— proved that the Turing machine below is in fact universal, making it the simplest universal Turing machine possible. In other words, the cute graph below are the instructions for an abstract symbol-manipulating machine that can in principle do anything your computer (or any other computer for that matter) can do.

Stephen Wolfram, who made the conjecture and offered a $25k reward for proving it, reports:

Now, ain’t this just breathtaking?

If you are in a hurry, jump ahead to the 3-minute screencast to see what this is all about.

Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.

Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.

Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.

The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.

For marketing-minded friends.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to produce an ordered list of all the reasons you can think for Starbucks’s use of cash cards. (They’ve just been introduced in Mexico, though they’ve been around in the US for some 6 or so years). Something like:

One-line items are enough, we’re aiming for breadth. Keep it simple.

Remember, this is about why Stbx does this, not why customers buy the cards (which is another mystery onto itself).

Submissions will be accepted until Sunday midnight, September 23th and should be sent to ely.parra@gmail.com. I, elzr.com, shall decide the winner based on the following criteria:

Submissions are accepted in English, Spanish, or French. English is of course preferred but the choice of language will have no bearing on the judgement.

The winner will be announced at elzr.com/posts/Marketing-Challenge on Monday, September 24th. All lists shall be published in said post. The prize will be 25 dollars in Starbucks card credit.

You’re encouraged to resend this challenge to anyone who might have interesting thoughts on the subject. Anyone may participate. (Though Stbx card credit will probably not be very valuable for those living in countries where the local Starbucks don’t accept it yet, not to mention countries without Stbx.)

It may prove a fun marketing challenge. Happy listing!

Resolution:

Julio Sangabriel

# For creating Customer Databases  for CRM efforts.
# Offers a gigantic opportunity for Conjoint Advertising
# It makes easier for Customer tracking.
# Psicologicaly customer believe it to be easier to buy if they have a shop card… (which is no ttrue… you can still buy In SB the same easy way) and thus they buy in SB.
# It gives one or more channels for contacting directly the customers.
# It Will become customizable (people will start making them as they see fit)
# It Gives the people a sense of belonging and exclusivity.
# It Makes people believe to be VIP for having a club card from the most expensive coffee in the world.
# Creates Fashion.
# World Control… haha

Adolfo Rodriguez Navarro

# Crear lealtad- le permiten al consumidor sentirse mas involucrado con la compañia y de paso aseguran que el dinero que tiene planeado gastar en cafe solo lo use en ella.
# Abrirse a nuevos mercados- Al ser usada como gift card, la gente que la recibe que antes no consumia el producto se ve alentada a hacerlo, asi que los que la regalan terminan funcionando como agentes de starbucks.
# Financiamiento a traves del consumidor РPara que pedir creditos si tus clientes te pagan por servicios no demandados a un peque̱o costo para ti?
# Dinero gratis- tarjetas que se pierden, personas que dejan de usarla, gift cards que nunca son usadas, al final ellos se quedan con el dinero sin dar nada a cambio.

So the winner is… Julio Sangabriel! I particularly enjoyed his #1, #2, #3, #5, #6 (it becomes an always-with-you embodiment of the brand). I must confess that the reason I started this challenge was because upon reading this Economist article on algorithms
, I had the epiphany that Julio’s #3, customer tracking, was Stbx’s true reason. It was not an opinion of anyone with whom I bounced the idea (nor did they thought it remotely important once I told them about it) so I can attest to it’s originality. Adolfo’s, I particularly enjoyed #2 and #3—I had thought myself of something like his #4, that is, credit lost-and-found money, thinking of it as finance money is an intriguing possibility.

I rather like this challenge-making thing, it’s like outsourcing thinking! Besides, it’s just nice to give things away.

Thanks a lot to those who participated and the many more who told me they thought this an interesting challenge (I was frankly afraid people would thought it stupid).

‘Till the next challenge! %(p)(But if you come up with more reasons—it is so much easier once you have somewhere to start—, then by all means add them in the comments.)%

It’s watermelon season here in town. Which means the cheapest, sweetest sandias of the year. The green bellies crack open at the slightest cut, roar, and out bulges sweet, sweet candy-cotton. I tell you friends, it’s a good time to be a frugivore^WP mammal.

Why, if white is the coolest “color” (it reflects all the light) and black is the hottest one (it absorbs all the light)—just compare walking in the beach with a white vs. a black t-shirt—, are people in sunny regions darker than those in less sunnier ones?

In other words, why isn’t being white (i.e., more light-reflecting) in sunny regions an evolutionary advantage? Whatever melanin^WP does (I think it’s supposed to be a sun-blocker), shouldn’t it do it better with the advantage of a more light-reflecting skin?

That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.

Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux Tapestry^WP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)

I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.

(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )