Month: July 2008

Today I ran across this Time article that describes how researchers have bred mice to be jocks.  Heredity seems to explain 50% of the difference in the observed activity levels.  This suggests a similar genetic basis in humans.  I’d be curious to find out whether the less active mice also show increased interest in reading, math, and music.

The article naturally addresses the question of whether such genetic factors can be countered:

And maybe one day, [the researcher] speculates, there might even be a drug to compensate for what your genes won’t give you. A drug that makes you want to exercise? Now that’s a pill worth swallowing.

Don’t we already have several of these?  I think one is called ephedrine.

I don’t have much to say about this myself, but this patent article linked from reddit.com makes my head spin.  I found this sentence especially striking:

All these and many more fascinating questions will provide ample billable hours for patent attorneys even as inventors look on with utter horror and disbelief at the crucial importance the legal system is placing on distinctions that are technologically meaningless to the innovations sought to be patented.

After I wrote Monday’s blog post, I linked to it from Twitter, which now also shows up in my Facebook status.  Surprisingly, a few people even clicked on it!

Via Google Analytics, I can pull up the cities (roughly) where the visitors came from:

• Ankara
• Big Rapids
• Clawson
• Jackson
• Lansing
• Munich
• Oslo
• Southfield
• Boston

This seems both mundane and amazing.  The fact that people from all over the world visit one’s website used to be amazing, but I’ve gotten used to that over the past decade or so.  What I currently find amazing is that all those clicks came from friends and associates — these are people I know and who know me.  My post was just an anecdote, so it’s almost as if this were a globally distributed water cooler conversation.  (But, hey, nobody left a comment!)  Is this what the future looks like?

I started adding the ability to post comments to my website in 2004.  Since then, 919 comments have been posted.  Most of them are strange.  Many are disturbing and embarrassing to have on my website.  At one point, it appeared that two high schoolers appeared to being using my website comments as a chat room, probably because other methods of chatting were blocked by the school.  Surprising few comments are outright spam.  Finally, some comments are actually nice, thoughtful, and interesting to read, like this one: “I found your site over a year ago before we moved to Jackson.  It was so helpful then, and I just realized today that I still keep coming back.  Thanks for the time you put into it.  I really appreciate it!”

I’d like to keep getting the nice ones but discard all the crap.  I would also like to accomplish this with little upfront effort as well as little ongoing effort.  Comment quality is often enforced by CAPTCHAs and moderation.  However, CAPTCHAs protect against automated spam, which is not my problem.  They are also annoying to users.  Moderation would work to eliminate the chaff, except that means *I* would have to manually filter everything.  I’d also have to develop the moderation system or completely replace the homegrown commenting system.

While I do enjoy receiving the nice comments, I quickly forget about them.  I rarely visit my own site, so I rarely rediscover them either.  Maybe I should just remove the commenting system and instead let people send me an e-mail if they have something to say.  However, I think the threshold for deciding to leave a comment is lower than that for writing an e-mail, so I would be cutting down feedback.

Do you have any bright ideas?

A few weeks back, I ran into an old friend. When she asked me what I was up to nowadays, I explained that I make job application forms. She was thoroughly unimpressed and a bit amused. I can understand this, but it’s definitely an opposite reaction from that of others who know more details. It reminded me of an old sitcom where a short-lived boyfriend made aglets.

I was relating this on Sunday and heard a pretty good topper. I’m laughing as I type this and expect this to continue each time I think of it for at least a week. My friend explained that he knew a guy who specialized in photographing toilet seats! Apparently he started out doing it for one company but was able to establish a reputation and worked for several firms. He later branched out to toilet bowls!

Now, I think there is pride in virtually all work, and I know next to nothing about product or still-life photography. It also seems like good business sense to carve our your own niche. However, it’s just so lame to tell people you photograph toilet seats when they ask what you do for a living. Following up with, “But I recently expanded to toilet bowls,” isn’t going to garner any more respect. It probably pays to be somewhat vague if you want to impress the opposite sex.

Did I mention that I’m an Internet entrepreneur? 😉