Think twice before accepting a lifetime guarantee on a pacemaker. — Dan Rosenbaum

My friend and colleague Jeff Duntemann has been kind enough to make Over The Edge one of three blogs linked from his own long-running weblog. One of the others is written by Jim Mischel. I have no idea who Jim Mischel is, but I’ve had a ton of fun reading his stuff. Jim’s major contribution to my day, however, has been a link to The Flo Control Project, wherein, well…:

The guy’s using a digital camera hooked to a computer to take a picture of his cat Flo on the way into the house.  If the picture compares favorably with a picture on file, then the cat’s door is unlocked.  If the cat is carrying a mouse or a bird or other present, or if the cat at the door isn’t really the cat, then the door remains locked. 

My friend Paul Schindler (whose blog is cited below) has left the technology publishing business to do what he’s long threatened: get his California teaching ticket and become a high-school math teacher. He’ll be terrific at it.

The current issue of his weblog contains, down at the bottom, a long-ish e-mail from a friend regarding public education and what it’s good for. The correspondent, Peggy Coquet (a wonderful name, that), echos the views of the author Neil Postman, in his book The End of Education. Coquet talks about the twin roles of schools: the training of children to be citizens, and the training of children to be economic units.  Postman argues that the pendulum has swung far to the second view, as business has become ever ascendent in our society.

Not surprising, really. It’s fairly easy to measure an economic unit. You spend X dollars per student and test the output. If the output score is sub-par per dollar spent, there’s something wrong with the process. Fixing a process is made easier by reducing the process to standard set of steps, each of which can be examined and tested. Of course it works: there are more McDonalds than four-star restaurants, and more people can go to them, besides. Isn’t that good?

A friend of mine used to work for AT&T. They used to say, “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” The corollary is “if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” The base assumption is that everything can be measured, which is fine if you’re worried about the reliability of a telephone network. It’s less fine if you want children who are capable of running their own town, nation, and world.

Of course everything can’t be measured. It’s hard to measure the key things that demonstrate success in a citizenship oriented school. It’s hard to measure critical thinking, creativity, social involvment. It’s hard to teach them. Simpler and more reliable to produce economic units trained to perform to a test. Five onions on the burger, and 2 ounces of ketchup. Salsa is outside the box.

Lord knows that kids need to know how to add, and spell, and show up on time, and sit still in their seats. But even if schools were doing a good job of that, it would only be the start. It’s what comes after that that’s important. A citizen unit is more than an economic unit — harder to teach, harder to live with, and vastly more powerful and subversive.

I have two five-month-old boys, and I live in an affluent neighborhood with one crappy public school and five excellent and expensive private schools. This subject is not only not closed, it’s barely open.

My long-time colleague, erstwhile boss, and good friend Paul Schindler has, for the last four years, been writing a weekly weblog. It touches most parts of his life, and is therefore as wide-ranging and interesting as the author himself. He hand-coded he thing, so it’s not on any of the major blogging communities or aggregators. Pity — it’s quite good, and something I hurry to check out every Sunday evening or Monday morning.

You should, too: https://www.schindler.org/psacot

And more to the point, he’s inspired the next item.

Video Game League on the Verge. The Cyberathlete Professional League receives a much-needed $45 million cash infusion, a commitment from Intel and exposure from ESPN. But will anybody watch?

We have digital cable. I live in the city where they invented the televised Yule Log. Apparently, some people will watch anything. I understand that the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry. I even understand that video games are fun (though I myself come mostly from the pinball generation).

But a professional league with spectators? Color me “He Hate Me.”

Stop the Frickin’ Presses Dept:

Washington Post: Why Won’t We Read the Manual? And so it has come to this: Americans buy the most sophisticated computers, the coolest digital cameras, the most advanced automobiles, the most versatile cell phones and handheld organizers, and then . . . and then we forget, or decline, or flat out refuse, to read the directions. [Tomalak’s Realm]

In a long piece — and God knows it’s a fruitful topic — here’s my favorite blip:

In the not-too-distant future, many of those questions may prove unnecessary, at least for frozen dinners and such. Some microwaves are being designed to read a bar code that will be printed on the side of the package and cook it automatically. “The consumer won’t even have to read directions on how long he needs to cook the meal; he’ll just have to eat it,” Laermer said.

And people will learn to use this feature, exactly how?

There is no shortage of Dumb User (a/k/a “Luser”) stories. They are more than amply balanced by all the tech support people whose very first line of defense is to tell you to format your hard drive and re-install Windows.

I’ve written a few manuals, many for products that didn’t actually ship. I’ve also written some “after-market” books; unfortunately, before publishers got the idea that technology books could actually be entertaining.

My favorite user manual stories came from when I was Director of Documentation at Headstart Technologies — one of the first computer companies to sell through consumer electronics stores. We produced a computer called the Headstart Explorer, an easy-to-use XT clone with a custom graphic interface, the first-ever implimentation of DOS on ROM, and a couple of interesting problems:

There was a small problem with the hard drive. The bay in which it sits does not have adequate ventilation. If you left the drive running for a long while, it would really heat up. Eventually, it could heat up to the point of softening the plastic around it. If you weren’t using the monitor stand, and had just set the monitor on the main unit, that side could start to smush down. 

We generated an extremely simple “words-of-one-syllable-or-less” kind of manual that people seemed to enjoy and was a major pisser to produce. One user in Los Angeles didn’t think much of it. Less than pleased with the machine or the docs or his coffee that morning, he pulled out a .45 while on the phone with tech support, and in the blessed name of Elvis put a hole in the monitor. Crude, but an effective critique. I’m pretty sure that he didn’t get his money back.

Back in the day at winmag.com, I wrote a few times about Echelon, a supposedly top-secret project by the NSA to monitor all international communications to and from the U.S. Echelon, it was said, could pick out key words from among the flood of information traversing the American border.

I expressed my doubts about whether something like Echelon could exist, or whether it was the product of Oliver Stone-fevered minds.

Danish journalists Bo Elkjaer and Kenan Seeberg, who apparently have been following the Echelon story for a while, landed an interview with a gent named Bruce McIndoe, the lead architect for Echelon II. He basically confirms the whole thing.

Of course, he could be lying, too.

From [bOing bOing]:

Roger Kaputnik: kaput at age 81. Here’s an obit for Dave Berg, the pipe-smoking guy with the Reed Richards-style two tone hair who wrote and drew “The Lighter Side of…” cartoons for Mad. His sense of humor was quite a bit different from the rest of the usual gang of idiots, and it is strange that he was even in the magazine. I like his stuff though.

My mom’s mom used to save her pennies to give her two grandkids when they came to visit her in The Bronx. I don’t remember what my brother did with his, but I would invariably march down to the corner store and buy the latest copy of Mad. It was a true high point of my adult life when I ran into Dick DeBartolo on a commuter train to New Jersey; I still have his Mad Magazine business card.

Dave Berg’s drawing was much more mainstream and realistic than, say, Jack Davis’s or Al Jaffe’s (let alone Don Martin’s), and his humor was more rooted in suburbia and adulthood than in parody.  More than other artists and writers, Berg gave kids a clue into how adults really thought. It didn’t matter that he recycled ideas nearly as much as Milton Berle.

I took a college course on Satire back in the mid-70s. On the first day, in order to fix the idea of what satire was, the professor asked the class to places one might find it. I suggested Mad, and some snotty sorority girl said, “You mean people read that?”

Several weeks went by. Responding to something or other, the sorority girl mentioned something she’d seen in Cosmopolitian. Sez I, maybe slightly louder than I meant to (but maybe not), “You mean people read that?” I don’t think she spoke to me for two years….

You know those fish magnets you sometimes see on the backs of cars? You’ve seen them — cars driven by Christians who feel the need for some kind of identifier in case the Rapture comes and the archangels look for a tag as if they were cosmic AAA towtruck drivers?

Anyway. Some of you might have seen a similar magnet, with the word “Darwin” inside and small legs coming out the bottom. Blogspace has alerted me to this new one (and some others):

The Shifted Librarian also finds a luscious piece in Darwin Magazine. Prepare to rethink your analogies: it turns out that apples and oranges are actually pretty similar.

Scott Sandford gives the impression he wishes he never did the damn apples and oranges paper. He admits to having nightmares about his own obituary: He has devoted his life at NASA to studying how chemicals that rained down on the earth billions of years ago may have seeded the world with the materials to create life; he’s published 200 scientific papers on astrochemistry and the delicate intertwining of stellar dust and human existence. Comparing his serious work to that one stupid thing he did years ago on a lark, it’s a joke. It’s like comparing apples to quartz.”