Dog in the Playground!Says: calm down. It’s only ones and zeros.

When you want to present a message, the first thing people see, before even the words themselves is how they look. Consider, for example the following picture. Imagine it’s part of an advert for some clothes. What sort of shop would sell them? Would you expect the salesperson to be young or old?

Consider also a second example, our good old friend Comic Sans. The following sign is, to my eye, absolutely terrifying and I would not set foot in here in a million years:

also I would just be plain confused by:

I think it’s an uncontroversial fact that the appearance of a piece of advertising (be it billboard, website or powerpoint presentation) has a great effect on how we interpret the message.

A while ago I heard about a documentary called Helvetica, which explores where Helvetica came from, and how it is used today. On the face of it this sounds like the most mind-numbingly dull bit of TV ever, but I actually found Helvetica to be incredibly engaging, and it managed to weave an interesting and understandable story. After watching the documentary I noticed that Helvetica is everywhere, from warning signs to shops. If you keep your eyes open, it’s almost like a secret code (“Hello. We want to look modern and/or unobtrusive”). Here are a few photos I grabbed from the web in about five minutes:

Helvetica clearly and unobtrusively gives us information and commands. We’re surrounded by Helvetica to the point that we don’t even notice it any more. Below I have collected together a couple of clips from YouTube, showcasing Helvetica. Firstly, here is a short and pretty but completely uninformative trailer:

^{The font used throughout this trailer is not Helvetic, but Arial, Microsoft’s Helvetica-a-like font designed to avoid paying licencing fees. I guess this qualifies as probably the most subtle joke I’ve ever picked up on}

And here is a very nice two minute clip from the film itself. The two designers who are interviewed do a really good job of explaining how the choice of typeface can drastically change how people are going to perceive a message:

Watching this film has made me actually pay a bit of attention to typefaces in the world around me, and upon reflection I realize that somewhere along the line my mind took a real liking to the ‘Helvetica style’. To me seeing facts presented in this way brings to mind the sleek, clean lines of a Mac (where Helvetica is actually the default typeface in a lot of programs) and the cheap efficient design of Ikea (where Helvetica is used in almost everything). Grey Helvetica on a white background is pretty much the de-facto “clean, modern” look at the moment.

I would recommend Helvetica to anybody who has even a passing interest in aesthetics, it really made me think about how our emotional responses are tied to how information is presented, and taught me that when I give a powerpoint presenatation I can’t go far wrong by using Helvetica.

Mostly, though, I am glad that in watching this documentary I finally had chance to think through and articulate exactly why Comic Sans is a pile of shit.

edit: nearly forgot: http://www.helveticamovie.com

Browsing YouTube this morning, I noticed the following comment on a music video:

i am a heron. i ahev a long neck and i pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. if you dont repost this comment on 10 other pages i will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans

That is pretty awesome. I hope posting the comment here counts as ten YouTube videos, because I don’t want my pots and pans to get messed up

comic source: xkcd

In the morning at work I usually take the lift to get to my office, recently I happened to glance at the writing on the lift control panel, here it is:

I’m riding in Schindler’s Lift!

I think I have a new favourite person in the world. He goes by the name of StSanders on YouTube and makes a very specialised type of video. StSanders takes videos of famous rockstars playing live and overdubs them with some absolutely atrocious (and very well synched) music tracks. These videos are then uploaded to Youtube with the title “[guitar player] shreds”, and the video comments explode as most people find it very funny, but a particularly stupid minority think it’s real and start defending their favourite musicians against all of the unfair attacks.

I know a lot of people will not ‘get’ this, and indeed the first time I watched them I was pretty nonplussed for the first minute or so, but they really do grow on you! With no further ado:

Carlos Santana

(highlights: the guy on the keyboards playing Europe’s Final Countdown, and the guy going mental on the snare drum)

Eric Clapton

(highlights: SAXOPHONE! (1:30 onwards))

Here is StSanders’ user page with loads more videos.

edit: Hahaha the Jake E. Sanders one is awesome. Ozzy Osbourne really makes it

Today I purchased a book on traditional Dutch cuisine, I really enjoyed reading through a few of the recipes and plan to make one or two soon. However, one recipe stood out in particular: “zure zult”, here are the first ingredients:

1/2 pig’s head (jaws removed)
four pig’s feet

and the start of the instructions:

carefully clean the pig’s head and feet and put them in a pan covered with water

Later on, the recipe instructs you to add 1 tablespoon of salt, 1/2 a teaspoon of grated nutmeg and a teaspoon of pepper.

Now this really reminds me of that scene in Red Dwarf where Lister painstakingly measures out half a teaspoon of chilli powder, then discards it and tips the entire rest of the pot of chilli into his curry. I can’t really imagine that the subtle aroma of half a teaspoon of nutmeg and a teaspoon of pepper will be all that noticable against the overpowering flavour of HALF A FUCKING PIG’S HEAD (JAWS REMOVED) AND FOUR PIG’S FEET

I noticed today that my knowledge of hats was pretty lacking, so I resolved to fix it. See how well you do on my hat mega-quiz, Name Dat Hat!

Answers to appear in the comments section soon.

It turns out there is a formula that can calculate the nth digit of pi without needing to know the previous n-1 digits!

Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the so called Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula,

Being back in the UK for a while I decided to visit the ruins of a nearby Roman fort called Housesteads. I have visited Housesteads before, last time it was a summer afternoon and I remember being distinctly unimpressed. Something about a pile of old rocks being swarmed by ice cream licking, screaming toddlers and crotchety stumbling geriatrics reminds me more of a day at Butlins than a nice hike around some history.

This week, however, it was the middle of winter (and bloody cold) and it was a weekday. We had the entire place to ourselves and it was really beautiful, pretty much unrecognisable as the midsummer tourist hole I remember. I’m really no photographer, but I am really happy with how these came out:

Really, this post is just an advert for the new Photos page on the blog, which automatically interfaces with my Flickr account and mirrors everything here!

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)

Today I stumbled over something absolutely, beautifully strange. It is the line of succession to the British throne. The rules for choosing our monarch are incredibly archaic and convoluted

• A person is always immediately followed in the succession by his or her own legitimate descendants (his or her “line”). Birth order and gender matter: older sons (and their lines) come before younger sons (and theirs); a person’s sons (and their lines), irrespective of age, all come before his or her daughters (and their lines).
• The monarch must be a Protestant at time of accession, and enter into communion with the Church of England after accession.
• Anyone who is Roman Catholic, becomes Roman Catholic, or marries a Roman Catholic is permanently excluded from the succession.
• A person born to parents who are not married to each other at the time of birth is not included in the line of succession. The subsequent marriage of the parents does not alter this.

This pretty much boils down to “No bastards, or catholics in our club please”. I think it really underscores how absurd the whole situation is if we look at a few entries in the line of succession to the British throne:

• 62: King Harald V of Norway
• 84: HRH Princess Margarita of Romania
• 93: HRH Prince Philip of Yugoslavia
• 111: Grand Duke George Mikhailovitch of Russia
• 135: HRH Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia
• 186: HM King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden
• 215: HM Queen Margrethe II of Denmark
• 228: HM Queen Anne-Marie of Greece
• 807: HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
• 1236:HRH Prince Boris of Bulgaria

I guess I’m a bit surprised that people care enough to calculate lists of the first thousand or so people in line for the British throne, but the really shocking thing is all of those different countries in that list. The heads of state of about a dozen European countries are all related by blood, one extended family living it up on the taxpayer’s money.

Holy crap.

One final thought, if the first 479 people on the list were to die in a horrible plane crash then we would get HRH The (hilariously racist) Duke of Edinburgh as our king.

Just imagine it! We would have a king who in 2002 asked an Indigenous Australian businessman, “Do you still throw spears at each other?”; Who said to a Briton in Budapest, Hungary, “You can’t have been here that long – you haven’t got a pot belly.”; Who after accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen replied, “You are a woman, aren’t you?”; Who when visiting China in 1986, told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”; and perhaps bet of all, in 1987, wrote in his book If I Were an Animal that “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

Seriously

I just want to know if he’s hardcore enough to try Swamootra Neti

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

SHIT

these guys are living the dream

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.