That crusty intellectual rag Harper’s magazine once printed an exchange between a retired English teacher and the marketing department of Coca-Cola about their slogan for Dasani water, which confused the word “everyday” with the two words “every day”. The company’s response was pretty funny and luckily someone else scanned it in: http://www.laurajmackay.com/everyday.pdf
Lately I’ve been working on changing my behavior, and that’s brought me around to seeing Coca-Cola’s point. It’s easy to list some ideas for ways to take care of oneself: flossing teeth, getting more exercise, stretching, going to bed earlier. But it’s hard to follow through and actually adopt those behaviors and persist with them, as many people who make New Year’s resolutions discover. Recently I’ve had some better success, and I think the words “everyday” and “every day” can explain why.
Let’s take flossing teeth. At first I tried to floss about 3 times per week, but this lasted for only about 2 weeks before I stopped. By failing to floss up to my goal, I thought of myself as someone who just couldn’t stick with it, flossing wasn’t for me. Flossing was too hard to remember and too easy to put off until tomorrow - why get up out of bed to deal with such a small matter? A few months later I decided to try again, but with a target of every day flossing. This worked, and I’ve been flossing (almost) every day since. Why? It doesn’t make sense that a more ambitious goal would work, when seen through a lens involving the tradeoff between cost and a benefit with diminishing returns. But this isn’t a matter of selling a benefit for the price of a cost; it’s a matter of identity: I started with the attitude that one is a “daily flosser” and then just did it; no excuses were acceptable, I did it every day. To use Coca-Cola’s word, flossing is now everyday, and that’s the only way that works for me.
With all the attention taken by Kindles, iPads, blogs, twitter, RSS and other electronic reading options, it’s fair to ask: who cares about libraries? Haven’t we moved on to better things, “recontextualized for the Information Superhighway”?
It’s true, these new ways to read have much to offer. I love Amazon.com for books: its giant selection, reasonable prices, helpful reviews, and convenient shipping make it one of my favorite Internet places.
But wouldn’t it be better if reading books and movies was free? And still very convenient? If you could walk a few blocks from your front door to get the books you want instead of waiting for delivery? If this sounds good to you, then it’s time for you to catch up with your local public library.
But how can a little library compete with Amazon’s selection? When you search the library’s catalog online, you’re searching across the entire library system, and when you find that book you can have it sent to your local branch. When it arrives there, you’ll receive an email alert to tell you when it’s ready to pick up. Free! Instead of putting an item in my Amazon cart, I now request it be delivered to my local branch to be picked up next time I’m running errands around town.
Do you read obscure books? If it’s in a public library or university library in California, chances are you can have it sent to your local branch, too. They’ve built a combined catalog spanning many institutions that’s searchable, and then they’ve got a distribution system to move the books around to where you want them. Free!
Movies on DVDs? Netflix is $8 per month, but the library charges zero!
And a playground for kids? Wow, it’s as cool as a McDonald’s! Also free!
So what’s the catch? As always, you have to return the materials after a few weeks. And the library isn’t open at all hours of day and night. When you go, sometimes there are people coughing. If you can deal with that, get your card and get cracking.
From the UN, via The Economist:
What if the world population looked like this in 2100? It’s safe to say that much would have changed between now and then. Assuming this is an accurate forecast (unlikely, due to notoriously inadequate understanding of fertility trends), which of these countries would you want to live in come 2100? The US trend appears to my eye the best among these. China would have a huge set of problems in this scenario, especially a huge number of retired people in relation to the working population. Could India and (parts of) Africa become the next “workshops of the world”? Would it be appropriate for the UN security council to include only 2 of the 10 most populous countries? How gracefully might Russia and Japan fade from view?
Tonight I saw a PBS newshour segment on end-of-life care. It is a wrenching experience, full of strong emotions that are uncomfortable. Who wants to feel responsible for deciding when to end someone else’s life? It’s an awful position. But how many people prepare for this situation and do what’s needed to prevent putting their relatives through it? Beyond the impact on a person’s friends and family, this lack of planning shifts a huge amount of medical resources into end-of-life treatment which produce little benefit to anyone - not to the patient, and not to the family. Of course, no one wants a “federal death panel” but that’s not the only option. We can force people to take responsibility for themselves:
Require all citizens to have a living will.
Make it part of the process of getting and/or renewing a driver’s license (which is already considered risky enough to require insurance) and any federal entitlement program. Have a few standardized examples that people could choose if they don’t want to spend much time personalizing their own. Show the expected cost of each option based on recent spending and healthcare outcomes.
A few months ago, Google’s “Instant” search interface launched and got great press coverage. People were very excited - they claimed we would save 1 or 2 seconds every time we searched the web with it! pooh-pooh, I thought. Now I finally understand why it’s so great…
But it’s not about making web searches faster.
It’s about making Google better for browsing.
The way I see it, there are two modes of navigating information: searching and browsing (I wrote about this before when talking about music player interfaces). When someone knows what they want but doesnt know where to find it, they need a search interface. When someone doesnt know what they want and would like some help seeing what their options are, they need a browse interface. These two modes were very different, and led to very different ideas about how products should behave. For example, Yahoo was browse-centric with all kinds of information and links on their home page; Google was search-centric with a simple keyword entry box on their home page.
Instant search is a new middle ground between search mode and browse mode. It’s not a compromise, no! It’s better than either of the old modes: it’s faster and easier than search. And it’s faster and more relevant than browsing. Yes, it’s faster — but the other two advantages (easy, relevant) are more useful. It lets you explore a huge range of options and then narrow your focus to what interests you. You start from the most broad idea of what direction you want, and then can explore different avenues quickly, and then back up and try different direction. As I’ve used it, I’ve noticed that my original search terms would not take me down the right path, so I made a quick adjustment and found what I needed. Or I was able to see different items that were helpful but not exactly what I intended to find.
I think it should have been called Google Zoom. This fits its wide range of focus between broad and narrow. And yes it’s fast, too.
(And for those interested, here’s a simple music interface that can do instant search : muss)
