February 19, 2010

Live the Life Scientific

If you are reading this, then most of your daily life is likely brought to you through a filter of engineering.

Think of the steak you had last week, and the manner in which it was killed. Envision the corn in your soda and the corn in your corn. Ruminate on the glass I am drinking from, and the beverage I am drinking from it. All of these (even water) hold the stamp of our technology.

Maybe it’s the sound of your lover’s voice on your phone, or the wonderful friction of guitar strings reflected in your ears at 320 megabits per second. For many it’s a call to prayer on Allah’s scratchy megaphone, or faithful, penitent polyester-wrapped knees on velour kneeling pads.

It’s the dead virus in our vaccine, the culture in our milk and the techno-babble in our culture.

The comb you run through your daughter’s fine hair is likely the product of someone’s contemplation.

The stuff you rub into your own scalp is very much the same.

Somewhere in the world there are a team of people who know your toothbrush very well. They can tell you how it got its shape and why the bristles are made just so. They know how much pressure you are likely to put on it and how long it will probably last. If you ask more you might learn about the mechanical properties of dead bacteria and enamel. These are people like us. They are designers, engineers, writers, marketers, accountants and technicians.

Ditto with your toilet paper.

In the morning, as you drive your engineered vehicle to your engineered place of work, you are likely to pass over twenty bridges, most well hidden beneath the pavement. A gift from ancient India and Rome. Civil engineers started with a simple need: to cross over and reach someplace new–much like the chicken and that engineered road. But unlike the chicken, they understood that many more would benefit from their effort.

I don’t say this to scare you. Nor do I want to rob you of your idea of humanity. Rather I would say that your technology, our technology, is the supreme evidence of our humanity. The ideas of each person have been harnessed to expand the life of the next. That’s a noble gift. It’s not a story of individuals, it’s the story of a species. A species unique to this planet and perhaps to our universe.

Yes we need to tread carefully, but we needn’t be so afraid of our own creativity that we stand paralyzed, unable to act. Our best technology, our very best engineering, is that which respects our humanity. It is that which understands that even the basic toothbrush requires a level of art along, with the science. If we hold to this value, then so will our engineering. Why shouldn’t it? Every engineer is, first and foremost, a human. Why should her creations not reflect that?

February 14, 2010

Down on the FarmVille

Samuel just started a farm in FarmVille! He found the ground so hard he couldn’t even dig the outhouse. Now he’s crapping on bare ground and looking for the bastard who sold him the land.

Samuel needs three more boards to complete his barn in FarmVille! His neighbors are supposed to help but most of them think he’s an idiot for moving here in the first place. Damn city boys will never learn.

Samuel just knocked up his younger girlfriend in FarmVille! Now they are getting married! She’s excited by the romance of it all, he’s pretty sure they are going to starve.

A cute little lonely bull just wandered onto Samuel’s farm in FarmVille! He shot it, butchered it, and told the neighbors he never saw it. Now they have a freezer full of beef and the dog no longer looks so tasty.

Samuel needs a few more corn seeds to complete spring planting in FarmVille! Most of the neighbors still think he’s an idiot, but the nice guy who lost a bull last winter is happy to lend a helping hand.

Samuel’s doesn’t have enough fertilizer to feed his crops in FarmVille! He’s asking help from all his friends but it seems the whole town is pretty shitty at planning ahead.

Samuel is about to become Monsanto’s bitch in FarmVille! The corn seed he borrowed from his helpful neighbor last spring is patented. There’s no way he can afford a lawyer, so he’s going to have to grow whatever the hell they tell him to.

Samuel is having his best year ever in FarmVille! Turns out the way to get ahead is to take government subsidies, grow only monster corn, and continually borrow money you will never be able to repay.


Samuel tried to negotiate a steep grade and was fatally crushed by his new model 9630 John Deere tractor in FarmVille! His widow did so well with the insurance that she’s moving to Miami and buying all her young male friends a round of fruity drinks!

February 7, 2010

Shopping, One Man’s Perspective

For me, shopping is not an adventure, it’s a fucking mission.

Objective #1: Smartwool Socks

Store: Dick’s

Elapsed time: Under 10 minutes.

God would wear these socks. Dick’s is one of the few places I can get the hunting version. True, I don’t hunt (except for socks), but dam these suckers are comfortable, and they last for 5 years!

Objective # 2: Sweater

Store: Nordstrom

Elapsed Time: 16 Minutes

Nordstrom understands the American man and takes this into consideration when they design their stores. Meaning they typically locate the men’s department near an outside exit—no escalators, no hacking your way through a jungle of panties and no smelly trips through the cosmetics/perfume gauntlet. Easy recon, easy egress.

Objective # 3: Blu-ray DVD player

Store: Best Buy

Elapsed Time: 1 hr, 15 minutes

The Best Buy experience is kind of like entering a casino. No matter what you came to buy, you’re going to have to walk past a lot of distracting eye candy just to get to it. All this makes it difficult for a guy to reduce unplanned purchases. Still a man has to take responsibility for his own impulses. I figure if there are women who can enter a shoe store for sneakers and walk out with only that (as yet, an unproven hypothesis), then I can do the same with Best Buy.

The place looked like a retail war zone, with tags out of place, stock missing from the shelves, and a lot of dazed kids in blue shirts. Most of them shrugging their shoulders—even when I asked them something simple such as, “do you have any more of this model?”, or “where is the rest room?”. I didn’t dare go any more technical than that.  It’s a cycle I’ve seen with this chain many times. After Christmas, it seems to take the average Best Buy store 6 to 10 months just to clean up rebuild their stocks. This is a sad thing for me to watch, cause I could live in this place.

Objective # 4: A Burger and a Beer (or 4)

Store: Redacted

Elapsed Time: 5 or so hours

Said burger was the real reason I chose to actually venture out and not just order all this shit on the web. Had I been married, this would have been a successful outing. The wife would have thought an entire afternoon dedicated to shopping reasonable. Little would she know that the average guy can handle such mission in less than 2 hours and spend the remainder of that time drinking beer. Mission accomplished.

February 4, 2010

Uncommon Sense

I think about our business heroes a lot. Mainly because they have so much influence on our culture. Not only do they help mold the products and services we consume, they also influence the policies of our government in a very direct manner. Today, many celebrity CEO’s complete directly with authors, TV commentators, etc, in an attempt to influence our values, votes, and of course our pocketbook.

When I look at recent corporate leaders such as Welch, Fiorina, Murdoch, Buffet, Bezos, and Jobs. I see some people I admire and others I detest. On balance I know that some of these leaders are leaving the world better off than they came into it. They are net creators of jobs, wealth and opportunity for the rest of us. And even though there are some among this crowd that I feel are misguided, short-term thinkers, I also understand that at the deepest level each of them are just like me—people with friends, families and even nations they love and want so very much to protect. And to do this I know that each of them is exerting their understanding of this world through what they perceive as intellect and common sense.

Common sense is good, but it’s hard to put a specific definition to it. One of the best I’ve seen is: “Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge”. In essence it is the collected wisdom of our species. We’ve woven it into our parenting, our religions, schools, and government. To the human mind common sense seems mostly instinctual. It’s a known ‘good’ in a bad and hard world. A form of teaching which gives us comfort in its simplicity and familiarity.

Yes common sense is good, but uncommon sense is often better.

If you come to me with a ridged mindset and a notion that the whole of our existence can be summed up in black or white, then I would say that you are missing the essential element of uncommon sense. Uncommon sense means moving to the edge of your philosophical comfort zone. It is an acceptance that—no matter the subject—mingling opposing viewpoints will likely takes us forward, while wallowing in the comfort of like voices will likely hold us in place.

I call it uncommon sense because it does not seem instinctual for our tribal species. Long ago we found comfort in our family caves and jungle nooks. We ventured out because of necessity and we only did so in the safety of numbers. Outsiders were never trusted. Somehow, we learned that cultural homogeneity is good.

Today, we have access to so many options: in products, opinions, media, and culture. Yet it seems to me that most of us use these levers to narrow our exposure to new ideas, rather maximize it. We choose our news source based on ideology; listen to music stations geared for a specific generation or genre; visit the same chain stores and eat the same food no matter our geography. I once traveled with a guy who insisted on eating at McDonalds in Paris. Not Paris Texas, mind you, the real Paris!

The essence of uncommon sense is understanding that diversity, experimentation, and compromise are far better than homogeneity. In my view, the 227 year old struggle to realize the true vision of our U.S. Constitution has been a steady process of cultural diversification—from the abolition of slavery, to suffrage, to genuine civil rights. The main mechanism for this progress has been our willingness to respect each other’s humanity and learn from our differences.

Curiously, at the most basic of levels we learn there are no differences. In his excellent book, “Three Cups of Tea” humanitarian Greg Mortenson shows us how the simple act of building a $12,000 school in rural Pakistan can transform the local standard of living. He demonstrates how educating girls can make a fundamental difference to the health and safety of a community and do far more to discourage terrorism than a hundred half million dollar bombs.

Many Americans may read that and think “Duh! Education is just common sense”. I would encourage them to look back a few generations into their own family history. One of my grandmothers was illiterate, born in a time and place when most men didn’t see a need to educate their farmer sons, much less their daughters. But something happened. Somewhere along the way my grandma decided that her children would be educated. For a sharecropper’s wife, that was a pretty strong measure of uncommon sense.

© 2010 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.