[insert witty title]

Imagine for one second that you own a coffee shop (Not a Dutch coffee shop, just a shop selling cups of coffee). Assuming that after all costs have been tallied up it costs you exactly one pound to produce a cup of coffee, how much should you sell that cup for?

No matter what price you pick the result will always be suboptimal. Although a bleary eyed commuter may be willing to pay a high price, say three pounds a cup, for a morning caffeine fix on his daily stumble to work, you’ll miss out on the custom of the minimum wage employee, who may only be wiling to pay 1.10. Similarly if you price the coffee too cheaply, you’ll do a roaring trade, but all the people who would be willing to pay more end up keeping money in their pockets

In an ideal world you would find out how much an individual customer would be willing to pay and charge them exactly that much. This approach would maximise your profits, whilst keeping a maximal number of people happy. Unfortunately without a magical telepathic supercomputer at every checkout this will never happen. Coffee shops, therefore use a different way of allowing customers to self-select how much they pay, and the mechanism is choice. Take for example, Fairtrade coffee:

Cafedirect pay farmers an extra 40-55 pence per pound of coffee (enough to almost double their wages), however a typical cup requires only a quarter of an ounce of coffee beans, meaning that the additional cost to the coffee company is less than a penny per cup. For a time coffee houses were selling Fairtrade coffee at a premium of ten pence, and using the fairtrade label as a way of allowing customers who are willing to pay a bit more for a cup of coffee to do so.

Indeed none of the choices on the menu at a coffee shop have production costs that differ by more than a few pence (indeed, the actual raw ingredients are pretty cheap, it’s running a supply chain and nationwide stores that dominates the price), whereas the menu price will change by a factor of 2-3 between the cheapest and most expensive options. Choice provides a way for consumers to pay as much as they like. A spendthrift can get a black coffee for a pound or two, whereas a tourist looking to treat themselves can pay four pounds for a double mochalattechino. The cost to the actual coffee house isn’t too different.

This behaviour is pretty ubiquitous, for a time Amazon would track customer buying habits and alter book pricing accordingly (hey! he bought six harry potter books, lets stick a couple of quid on the price of the last one), but after customer complaints stopped this practice. Supermarkets sell about a billion different types of onions, from “cheep and cheerful value onions” to “deluxe, organic onions”, and on that note I have two last questions:

How much extra does it cost for a supermarket to sell organic food? How does this difference compare to the markup they charge?

Why do you never see ‘organic strawberries’ on display next to ‘normal strawberries’?

(This post inspired (i.e. stolen from) The Undercover Economist)

I have just read an awesome psychology paper, Cognitive Consequences Of Forced Compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; FG59). For the interested reader, the main results from this paper have been explained in this article and I would recommend that everybody reads it, it’s really interesting. FG59 contained details of the first experiment to show that cognitive dissonance is a real effect. Cognitive dissonance is defined to be what happens:

when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and values, and persuasive information that calls these into question. The discrepancy causes psychological discomfort, and the mind adjusts to reduce the discrepancy.

Various examples of cognitive dissonance are given in this article, titled “How and Why We Lie to Ourselves”, for example:

• When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.
• People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.
• People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that “Everyone does it” so they would be losing out if they didn’t, or alternatively that “I’m underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side.”

I’m trying right now to think of episodes of cognitive dissonance in my own life and am struggling very much. The obvious thing should be that I *ahem* ‘infringe copyright’ occasionally. I have heard all sorts of justifications from people who want to download free things (”It doesn’t hurt anybody”, “Information wants to be free, man”), but inside have never been able to shake the feelings of guilt. I also try in my professional life to remain as impartial and unbiased as possible, and to give every idea a hearing. Who knows, perhaps I succeed, perhaps I fail.

late edit: i fail

You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending to its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things

–William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Today’s post is inspired by this article, titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos”, which contains details on how one company takes short videos made by corporations and makes them go viral (that is: gets them hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube; gets them on blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Video and the rest).

This article was a bit surprising to me as I think I’m probably a bit naive about advertising and assumed that when things ‘went viral’ (oh how I loathe that phrase) it was because people thought they were awesome, told their friends about them, posted them to websites, etc. Just knowing that there is a whole business built around efficiently gathering enough pageviews to get onto Youtube’s most watched videos list spoils everything a bit for me. Here are a sample of the techniques used by companies to get vieos watched:

• Paying bloggers to post links to videos
• Having fake arguments in the comments section of the video to draw people in, but deleting all negative comments
• Spamming your facebook friends with links to the video you are being paid to promote

[insert witty subliminal advertising here]
As I sit here writing this blog post on my brand new ultra-stable Dell™ PC, running Microsoft™ Vista™ with an ice cold Coca-Cola™ in my hand I am beginning to wonder whether I can trust anything I read on the internet as being impartial.
[insert witty subliminal advertising here]
The irony is that, of course, this article was written as a piece of viral marketing to drum up business for the comotion group and this blog post is precisely what the author wants.

Yep, yet again I’ve beein thinking about political correctness. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that I’m reading Junk by William S. Burroughs, a semi-autobiographical account of the life of a heroin user in 1950’s America, and widely considered to be a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s. It makes for really interesting reading, but a few passages serve only to remind me how standards of acceptable speech and behavior have improved over the years.

Can you imagine the following passing without comment in a mass-market autobiographical paperback nowadays:

In the French quarter there are several queer bars so full every night that the fags spill out onto the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything that is living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquist’s dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist

He looked like one of those terra-cotta heads that you plant grass in. A peasant face, with peasant intuition, stupidity, shrewdness, and malice. He couldn’t have been anything but Irish

Weird, eh?

The the second thing is that it is almost Dutch Christmas time, when the antecedent of Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, arrives in Holland amongst much merrymaking and present giving.

Sinterklaas traditionally arrives each year in November by steamboat from Spain (which is odd as he is also said to live in a palace in Madrid - a city without a port!), and is then paraded through the streets, welcomed by cheering and singing children. Invariably, this event is broadcast live on national television in the Netherlands

the odd bit to me is that Sinterklaas’s helpers, the Zwartepieten (Black Petes), are all white guys in blackface, who are subservient to their white master (Sinterklaas)*

The Zwartepieten have a television show, and it actually makes me a little uncomfortable to watch blacked up men tumbling and clowning around trying to help their master. Here are a few pictures of blackfaced Dutchmen:

*I know that there are many stories of how the Zwartepieten became black, from being dirty from climbing down chimneys, or being freed slaves who stayed on as their master’s servants, to having their blackness as a result of being devils. Still, in the here and now it is hard to look at it in any way other than the obvious one

I noticed a Guardian blog post today about Jim Davidson getting kicked off some reality TV show for abusing a gay guy, here is part of the exchange:

“Why do shirtlifters pull that same face?” asked Davidson. “Please don’t say shirtlifters, it’s really rude,” replied Dowling.

“I don’t care. Gay men have the same look - some gay men have the same look… it’s a sort of preen.”

When Dowling challenged him again, Davidson accused him of playing “the homophobic card. You are a fucking disgrace.”

From the little I remember Brian Dowling was a whiny twat, but this level of abuse about his sexuality is utterly inappropriate and boils down to nothing more than bullying.

I always assumed that this opinion would be shared by the majority of people, and so was very surprised by the following link to the Sun newspaper (Think: lowest common denominator, right wing trashmag. Also Britain’s best selling newspaper). The Sun now has a discussion forum and one of the threads is about Davidson’s removal, check out some of the quotes:

“Jim, well done mate, [...] Well, he only said what the rest of us where thinking.”

If by ‘rest of us’ you mean ‘the rest of us homophobic fucknauts’

“I can’t see how you can criticise Jim Davison, he was invited on to the programme purely and simply because people knew all about the type of humour he delivered. He should not have been asked to leave at all….. Just ask the British troopps who they would rather be entertained by: Jim Davison or Brian Dowling.”

hahahaha, the troops?

I oculd understand if Jim was abusing one of the females but it was a man argument for gawds sake, and Brian ends up crying ?????

Yes it’s wrong to bully a woman, but perfectly fine to pick on a man!

Political Correctness has gone barmy.

Not allowing people to viciously lay into others on the basis of their sexual orientation sure is barmy!

On every ‘reality’ show there has to be the obligatory homosexual or lesbian. I refuse to use the word ‘gay’. They act like spoiled little children, bursting into tears or over react to every situation.

No shit? They pick emotionally unstable people to go on reality shows? I hadn’t noticed.

i felt sorry for jim, he`s just being victimised for being normal.

WHAT?

Why is tv full of sh..t stabers and god do they go one about it they are in your face and they think they are funny jim/d he just told him a home truth and what did we get boooo hoooo booo hooo how sad is that its the gays that can not take the stick lovey darling kiss kiss they make you sick

OK. I give up. I’ll just let the rest of the quotes speak for themselves:

U GOTTA LUV JIM!!!!!!!!! WHAT A TOP BLOKE!!!!!!!!!

If you’re not man enough to take some insults then you’re too emotionally unstable to be allowed to live.

All I said was Nice one Jim! and that I thought Gay means Got Aids Yet

I’m not even half of the way through the discussion and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

The most popular newspaper in Britain, indeed.

With the death of the racist bigoted fuck of a ‘comedian’ Bernard Manning we have ended up talking about political correctness on a number of occasions. In these conversations there is always something I’m trying to get over, but unfortunately I’m never quite eloquent enough to make people understand what I mean. Fortuntely the other day I heard one of my favourite comedians, Stewart Lee present my thoughts better than I ever could. It happened on a Radio 4 comedy show called Heresy.

Heresy is a show in which the audience is presented with statements that most people agree with (”tv is dumbing down”, “we are on the brink of environmental catastrophe”, “Christmas has nothing to do with Christ anymore”, “pop culture promotes violence”) and then a panel of speakers try to sway them to the other side.

In this case the statement was “political correctness has gone too far”, and over 80% of the audience agreed. Stewart Lee replied like this:

Stewart Lee on Political Correctness (mp3 link)

I really do like this reply. Especially like the bit where he calls the audience idiots.

In looking for a bit more footage to attach to this post, I stumbled over a whole documentary by Lee on Youtube called “What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?”. To give you a flavour, the question Lee is trying to answer is (as he asks a reverend):

“What if someone did feel, genuinely, that religion was inherently ridiculous and was setting out to mock it with a view towards hopefully dismantling it. How would you feel about that?”

The films charts the recent growth of religious attacks on art, the defeat of the recent “Incitement to hate…” governemnt bill, Stewart Lee’s experiences with religion and the massive fallout that happened around Jerry Springer the Opera (co-written by Lee). Anyway, enjoy:

Don’t Get Me Started part 1 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?
Don’t Get Me Started part 2 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?
Don’t Get Me Started part 3 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?
Don’t Get Me Started part 4 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?
Don’t Get Me Started part 5 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?
Don’t Get Me Started part 6 - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?

Don’t expect too much humour (although it does have its moments), as this is an actual serious documentary.

I like it when I see bits of advertising that elucidate an otherwise hard to grasp metaphysical truth. For example I remember thinking it very odd that a can of Dr Pepper contained the slogan

Can you handle the taste?*

I fully realize the truth of the statement that it is impossible to interact physically with a metaphysical concept. Taste, for example, is a sensory function of the central nervous system and as such its perception lies firmly outside of the realms of physics.

The answer to the question the can of drink asked is therefore obviously that no, I cannot handle the taste. I really hope that’s what the advertising and marketing guys had in mind when they thought it up.

In a similar vein I saw a removal van earlier today with a slogan on its front:

Distance no object

Now, A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists, including Kant, claim that space and time are mental constructs used to organise perceptions, or are otherwise unreal. Either way, distance is indeed not made from matter, and as such is not an object.

Sometimes I overanalyse things.

^{*I only saw a picture of this, but for the purposes of this post I decided to research it, and it turns out this was Dr. Pepper’s slogan in the Netherlands a couple of years ago}

I’m angry. I bought some flowers from interflora for my mum on the internet a few months ago. At the same time some company called http://shopperdiscountsandrewards.co.uk collected my card information and have been charging me £8 a month for no reason. Check your credit card statements and if you see £8 being removed periodically by them call them up and cancel. The woman on the phone was quite friendly and I managed to cancel and get a full refund by getting a bit shirty - beware!

Their phone number is 08082341539

JPS

Late additional edit from CMB: This may also show up on a credit card bill as WLI*SHOPPERDISC, either way it’s exactly the same thing!

In response to the recent cryptid article I thought I’d include my favourite - the Long Horse. Its basically a long horse. Some claim it is an extinct creature from a more innocent time others that it is an elaborate hoax.

Make up your own minds

If there is one field of study that will attract more nutters than even physics it is cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is the search for animals hypothesized to exist, but for which conclusive proof is missing. It is the domain of middle aged lonely men, who spend a lot of time in the garden shed. My thanks go out to JEG and JPS, who brought cryptozoology and more specifically the Wikipedia list of cryptids to my attention, it really does seem that some nutjobs believe absolutely anything. Let’s take a brief tour through the wonderful world of mysterious animals!

Humanzee (or Chuman or Manpanzee)

The Humanzee (also known as the Chuman, or Manpanzee) is a hypothetical chimpanzee/human hybrid. Chimpanzees and humans are very closely related (95% of their DNA sequence, and 99% of coding DNA sequences in common [1]), leading to contested speculation that a hybrid is possible

I like this cryptid because it is nothing but wild speculation by some (inevitably beard wearing) old man, who just got thinking about monkey/human mating and ended up writing a massive wikipedia entry about it.

Sky Fish (Flying Rod)

Rods, a rather new entry in the field of Cryptozoology, are creatures said to flit about in the air at such a high speed as to not be seen by the naked eye.

I include rods in this list of cryptids because they highlight how people are capable of ignoring scientific information. Pretty much all sightings of rods occur on video, this is because the low framerate of some video cameras (for example CCTV devices) means that normal flying insects can appear to trace out lines on the screen. People have even set up nets, watched rods fly into them and then found that they were actually moths. Despite this check out the batshit insane new age bullshit some people are still spouting!

Skunk Ape

The Skunk Ape or Florida Skunk Ape is a hominid cryptid said to inhabit the Southeastern United States.[1] It is named for its appearance and for the unpleasant odor that is said to accompany it.

It is an ape. It smells bad.

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz) is a semi-legendary plant of central Asia, believed to grow sheep as its fruit. The sheep were connected to the plant by an umbillical and grazed the land around the plant.

I can just imagine being a nineteenth century gentleman scholar and hearing reports of this most wonderous beast from the local peasants.

Road Trolls

Truckers have allegedly encountered this being along roadways throughout the United States, describing it as a seven-foot tall, hairy, limping humanoid with tattered clothes. According to Coleman, witnesses say that the being moves very slowly and stares at drivers as they pass by.

THAT IS NOT A PARANORMAL BEAST. THAT IS AN UGLY HOMELESS MAN.

The ArXiv.org e-print machine is a site where many scientists upload pre-prints of their papers for peer review by the community at large

Obviously it is a very useful resource for science, but it has a second (and I would argue just as important) use. The search engine on arxiv.org can be used to find scientists with awesome names! Meet the following physicists:

Dr. Boffin! His papers are published in The Observatory.

Professor Frink! Hardcore theorist.

Poindexter! brilliant stuff.

Sadly a trawl through the archive revealed no working scientists named Frankenstein or Nerdlinger.

—–

A while ago I talked about the two-body problem in academia; otherwise known as the fact that “it is hard for an academic couple to both find jobs in the same place”. Nature have recently published an editorial on this old problem, it makes for a really informative read:

female physicists struggle with the two-body problem more often than their male counterparts. A 1998 survey by the American Physical Society found that although only about 6% of its members are women, 43% of these are married to other physicists. In contrast, only 6% of married male physicists have a physicist spouse.

and

many scientific couples still opt for commuter marriages, at least at the beginning of their careers, rather than sacrifice one partner's dreams to the other's. A physicist friend of mine, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, says: "If you both want to be high-powered researchers, you are limited in your choice of jobs, because there may not be many places with strong programmes in both areas."

I think this article is absolutely brilliant, it brings to our attention some very interesting points and on a personal level the article really gives some timely advice.

Following Mark I thought I’d list all of the badges I have won during my membership in the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.

I think I can count my physique as above average, at least in terms of waist measurement. I do therefore fulfill at least 50% of the requirements to be a member of the OOTSSOERAAAR.

The “MacGyver” Badge

The “I Blog About Science” Badge

Look around you, man. Look around you. The science blog is a bit sparse because it has only existed for about a week and most of my science posts are still stuck as unlabelled in LifeBlog

The “arts and crafts” badge.

Is this art or craft? What about this? Am I just an idiot with nothing better to do in the kitchen?

I’d rather nobody answered that question as it would probably hurt my feelings.

The “inappropriate nocturnal use of lab equipment in the name of alternative science experimentation / communication” badge.

Used idle supercomputer cycles to generate a rather beautiful (and very computationally expensive) Buddhabrot fractal (this is not my example, but rather one I found on wikpedia)

The “I can be a prick when it comes to science” badge.

I can be a prick about most things…

The “I bet I know more computer languages than you, and I’m not afraid to talk about it” badge.

…which is why, whenever possible, I talk to computers and not people

The “I’ve done science with no concievable practical application” badge.

This is possibly the best scientology quote I have ever read (taken from this page)

"Rate of change is this mathematics known as Calculus. Calculus, it's a very interesting thing, is divided into two classes -- there's Differential Calculus and Integral Calculus. The Differential Calculus is in the first part of the textbook on Calculus, and Integral Calculus is in the second part of the textbook on Calculus. As you look through the book, you'll find in the early part of the book on Calculus, "dx" over "dy", a little "dx", and a little "dy" -- and one's above the other on a line -- predominates in the front part of the book, but as you get to the end of the book you find these "dx" and "dy"s preceded by a summation sign, or are equating to a summation sign, and the presence of this shows that we are in the field of Integral Calculus.

Now I hope you understand this, because I’ve never been able to make head nor tail of it. It must be some sort of a Black Magic operation, started out by the Luce cult — some immoral people who are operating up in New York City, Rockefeller Plaza — been thoroughly condemned by the whole society. Anyway, their rate-of-change theory — I’ve never seen any use for that mathematics, by the way — I love that mathematics, because it — I asked an engineer, one time, who was in his 6th year of engineering, if he’d ever used Calculus, and he told me yeah, once, once I did, he said. When did you use it? And he said I used it once. Let me see, what did you use it on? Oh yeah. Something on the rate-of-change of steam particles in boilers. And then we went out and tested it and found the answer was wrong.

I just tried to run through and highlight some of the funniest parts but the whole thing is pretty much awesome. Also bear in mind that L Ron Hubbard claimed to have a degree in nuclear physics.

By the end of that passage my face looked a little like this

One day I really want to join a ‘religion’ where I can just say Hey man! That’s far too hard for me to grasp and if I don’t understand it must be some sort of conspiracy. Seriously! who really gets all those dy and dx thingies anyway? And don’t even get me started on those summation signs. Oh man the integral calculus reaLLY GETS ME MAD.

late edit: I hope zombie-Newton escapes from his grave and destroys Tom Cruise in retaliation for this

Note! The import from blogger to b2evolution messed up some of the formatting on this post. Use the original version

.us, Digg, Reddit, Blinklist and Furl are so called ’social bookmarking’ sites, and are a popular way in which many people store and categorise their online bookmarks.

By a variety of different methods each of these sites can then show you other links you may find interesting and begin to build communities of likeminded individuals, as well as functioning as an online bookmark repository. I have seen a couple of blogs lately with ‘easy-add’ buttons on each post to allow single click addition of posts to any of these social bookmarking sites. I think this is a great idea but couldn’t find any explicit instructions for Blogger, so here is what I cobbled together

Step 1: Download each of the icons and re-upload them on your own hosting:

Step 2: Edit your Blogger template, paste in the following code where you want the buttons to appear (with [IMAGE_LOCATION] changed to the URL of the place you stored the images):

<center>Save this post<br>
<a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2
&URL=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”>

<img src=”[IMAGE_LOCATION]/digg.gif”
alt=”Digg it”></a>
<a href=”http://blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/
addblink.php&Description=<$BlogItemTitle$>&URL
=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”><img src=”

[IMAGE_LOCATION]/blinklist.gif” alt=”Blinklist”></a>

<a href=”http://furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$
>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”><img src=
“[IMAGE_LOCATION]/furl.gif” alt=”Furl”>
<a href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl

$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>”><img src=”[IMAGE_LOCATION
]/reddit.gif” alt=”Reddit”>
<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$
>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>”><img src=
“[IMAGE_LOCATION]/delicious.gif” alt=”del.icio.us”><

/center>

Step 3: That’s it!

I don’t know if these buttons will ever get any use, but I’ll leave them there for a trial period