Posts Tagged With: Today’s World

I Couldn’t Care Less about JonBenet Ramsey…

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She was a cute six year old, she did beauty pageants, she died, and it was mysterious. This is all very sad. But it happened ten years ago, and there's nothing we can do about it. There were 94 homicides in Oakland last year, and papers outside of the Tribune could care less. People are getting slaughtered daily in Darfur, and we're worrying about a girl that died ten years ago, because one guy in Thailand confessed to the murder, and he might not even have been the killer? Of course it's extremely sad to see any six year old die, and the circumstances are mysterious. But I cannot believe that we are giving this story front page news coverage ten years on, when there are many more sadder, preventable things we could be covering in the news. JonBenet Ramsey is dead, let's give the story the brief mention it warrants in the wire section, and move on.

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Has anyone else noticed that automatic sinks/flushers don’t work?

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I remember when I was about six or seven, automatic sinks and flushers were the coolest things ever. "No hands!" I remember the Beavis & Butthead episode when they stand in front of a urinal, move to the next one, and laugh while the urinals flush in a line. If only automatic flushers worked as well as that. I walked into the bathroom today and stepped up to the urinal when it flushed. I did my deed and it flushed again as I exited the area. That's twice as much water as if I just did it myself. Ostensibly, automatic flushers/sinks were implemented for three reasons: to save you the trouble of pushing the handle, to save yourself from germs on the handle, and to save water. To paraphrase Cal Naughton from "Talladega Nights," these are three pretty good things. Problems arise in implementation, with the sinks being a bigger issue than the toilets. On about a third of sinks the sensors don't work, and on the ones that do, you usually have to keep your hands about an inch from the sensor for the sink to release water, which comes out in a lukewarm dribble. Until we can get automatic sinks that work reliably I'll pass on the benefits and gladly incur the small cost of getting germs for a tap that works.

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More Efficient Checkout Times

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At supermarkets, I'm one of the people who will walk back and forth searching for the shortest line. Usually I find it and usually I can bypass about half of the people standing in line to check out. Often the shortest line is a regular checkout even if I have few enough items to qualify for the express checkout line. Instead of having twelve separate checkout lines, clogging up room at the front of the store and taking away valuable real estate, stores should follow the European market example: have one queue and multiple counters close together serving the one line. The primary benefit here is that customers will be helped in the order they entered the checkout line, ensuring that everyone waits roughly the same amount of time. This is an effective way to help prevent shoplifting, if everyone is leaving out of only one exit. Furthermore, you can put the counters closer together, opening up more of the floor for products. Go to a Tesco in Britain and you'll see what I'm talking about. This will never happen in the US, but it would be nice.

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Airport Security

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John Tierney writes in the NYT about reducing wait times and improving security at airports (subscription req'd). About a security experiment in Dulles:
The screeners at Dulles stopped worrying about pen knives, shoes and laptops, allowing passengers to pass through more quickly. The speed of the line increased by nearly a third. The screening process required fewer workers, but they detected more problems because they worked smarter. Instead of looking for things, they looked at people. Borrowing techniques from Israeli airports and the U.S. Customs Service, screeners observed a passenger as he entered the airport, checked luggage and stood in line at the security checkpoint.
This is an altogether sensible policy that I hope can be adopted on a wide scale. There are two components to any successful air attack - an instrument of death and someone to use the instrument. As US security can't prevent a determined bomber from putting explosives on a plane, keeping an eye out for suspicious behaviors could be the only way to stop a terrorist at that late a stage.

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I want to move to Singapore

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Alan Webber with a dumbed-down editorial in USA Today about Singapore that nevertheless gets the point across - Singapore runs government the way it should be, as an entity conducive to economic development and long-term growth across the country. While Singapore is busy subsidizing hybrids and making energy conservation a priority, we're busy discussing flag burning, extending the Voting Rights Act, and defeating a gay marriage amendment.

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Amazon.com Similar Items

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I was looking on Amazon.com at Maddox's new book, The Alphabet of Manliness. The book is fine, maybe shocking if you're unfamiliar with Maddox, but sounds like it captures the best parts of his work. The most surprising part is in the "Similar Items" category. According to Amazon, after viewing 'items like this,' 74% of people end up buying Freakonomics, which is an economics book that's not at all funny or manly.

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What Robert Baer said

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By far the most interesting thing Baer said at the meeting was about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad believes that the twelfth and final Shia imam, named Muhammad al-Mahdi, and who disappeared sometime near 860 AD, is still alive. Furthermore, he believes he can talk with the Mahdi, who's prophesied to be the ultimate savior of humankind. According to Baer, Iran's prime minister communicates with the Mahdi by dropping post-it notes down a sacred well. The first thing Ahmadinejad did upon taking office was donate $17 million of government money to restore a shrine to the Mahdi, and there's talk of building a direct rail line from the shrine to Tehran, so when the 'Hidden Imam' returns, he can make a grand entrance. This is collaborated on the internet, here, here, and here. Patton Oswalt joked that he hated Bush, but deep down had a sick fascination with the president because Oswalt thought only he could bring about the biblical Apocalypse. It appears we now have a world leader who's serious about doing it, and is actively seeking the weapons to do so.

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What about Darfur

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Nicolas Kristof makes a good point in his latest column, that we've basically ignored Darfur but we sure raise a giant stink about Israel and Lebanon. The solution is easy enough - just get important people to notice what's going on and publicize it to death until the weight of public opinion crushes the administration into action. This isn't as easy as it sounds though, which kills, literally. Murders are committed daily because of inaction. If anyone knows a good place to donate money to or a way to help besides making the murders known, please let me know. Maybe we need to think of a term with worse connotations than genocide. Something like "the slaughter and rape due of hundreds of thousands of humans due to indifference" and use that instead of the word genocide.

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