Here is what I learned from the Olympics that just finished, in no particular order:

Photos from NBC, who gathered them from various sources (mostly Getty, AP and Reuters).

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According to some useless rankings just released, Harvard is once again the top university in the US. It’s apparently been twelve years since they could make this dubious claim and, prior to that, they could make it only sporadically. I’m not sure what the administration thinks of such accolades, but having been enrolled as a student during one such year, I know the students don’t particularly care.

This particular year was early into the Clinton era, when grunge was trying to stomp out the memory of Big Hair and the last remnants of Nancy Regan-style anti-drug messages were getting more desperate. (Example: all of the phone books that year featured an ad on the back with a sign saying in thick, black, hand-painted letters “Mom and Dad, I do drugs”, with a kicker line below it saying something like “Real signs of drug use are not so easy to spot”.) Few students in that environment could have cared less what the U.S. News and World Report had to say about them.

Well, except the Harvard Lampoon, who staged a “we’re #1″-style rally on the grand steps of Harvard’s main library. A good number of the Harvard Band had been involved, so it was pretty festive, especially after the champagne started flowing. Like most Lampoon humor, it went way over the top, with speeches, massive posters and guys in mascot like costumes (one of them, for some reason, the “Mac Tonight” guy). The only reason I remember any of this, though, is that almost lost among a sea of huge banners with big “#1″s on them and messages like “Harvard: the Harvard of the U.S.”, was a small sign in thick, black, hand-painted letters saying “Mom and Dad, I do drugs”.

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Having made the mistake of mentioning on a forum that “on my list of top 20 U.S. cities, L.A. wouldn’t even be on it”, I’m now being called to task to produce such a list. So be it. Note that this is all done in the context of tourism. For example, since I have family in LA that would be good reason why I would want to go there, but such considerations would be irrelevant to a random tourist.

If I had to order this list tomorrow, I’m sure the ordering would be different. Also, I’m stretching the concept of “city” a lot here to mean more like “region a tourist might visit”. To increase the degree of difficulty, I’ve tried to capture a wide range of places.

1. Chicago, IL
2. Sedonda, AZ
3. Las Vegas, NV
4. Washington, DC
5. Vail, CO (summer only)
6. Memphis, TN
7. Flagstaff, AZ (or, rather, the Grand Canyon)
8. New York, NY
9. Cedar City, UT (or, rather, Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks)
10. New Orleans, LA
11. Portland, OR
12. Seattle, WA
13. Bozeman, MT (and nearby Yellowstone National Park)
14. Farmington, NM (or, rather, Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon)
15. San Fransisco, CA
16. Kihei, HI (Maui)
17. Boston, MA
18. Captiva, FL
19. Taos, NM
20. San Diego, CA

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I’ve made oblique references to my education before, but today calls for a slightly more specific recollection of one event that seemed to sum up what being at my college was like.

Graduation covers several days, with various events all over the place. Most are outside. In June. In Boston. So, everyone sweats a lot but pretends not to notice. The events are only tangentially related to the graduates, existing more to serve misplaced nostalgia and university status. (As an example, the main ceremony for undergraduates features a humorous Latin oration, for which the students are given are translation, but the spectators are not, allowing the university to look great as the students laugh at all the right moments.) Yet, completely as a side-effect, these events turn out to be pretty fun, even for someone who normally hates that kind of thing, because they connect people in a weird way. Generations reunite and connect with others. You reconnect with people you sort of lost track of along the way. One of them, maybe, goes on to become your wife. All these sort of funky people of all stripes gather and, importantly, drink. In the heat.

The event that prompts this post, though, came the day before the actual graduation, something called Class Day. This day is marked by gatherings that are decidedly less formal than others, with humorous speeches and so on. Weather was particularly good that day, sunny, but not too humid, so the largest of these events was well attended, though there were a scattering of empty seats in most rows. People tended to be in clumps within rows, couples, groups of friends, parents with their children, with stray seats between them. I sat next to my friend LG and we made whispered commentary on the events of the day (about which I remember nearly nothing). In front of us was this cute old guy, sitting alone, quietly watching the ceremonies. I didn’t pay him much mind.

As we were leaving, LG whispered to me, pointing to the old guy “Look.” I looked. I saw the same smiling old guy. She continued “that’s Solzhenitsyn.”

Something weird happens to you (or, at least, to me) in a situation like this. It’s a mental shift that feels in your brain a lot like a dolly zoom, that shot in a movie where the camera zooms out while approaching the actor, leaving the actor the same size in the frame, but bending the perspective on the the scenery. Looking again, I saw the same smiling old guy but, knowing he has seen and done more in his life than I ever will or would care to (solider, labor camp, literary giant, Nobel Prize), he seemed different, disconnected from the rest of the crowd somehow. He might as well have had a halo.

It wasn’t quite a satori moment (I’ve only ever had one of those, a couple years earlier), but it crystallized a number of things for me. One was that you never really know who is around you; that crazy guy on the train may be the greatest mind the world has ever seen. Another was that enthusiastically realizing the innocuous person next to you had done, was doing or would do great things that you wouldn’t was a constant experience at school, and may be the entire point of the Ivy League. (As a very minor example, I point to LG’s near-supernatural ability to even recognize Solzhenitsyn. Could you do that?) And lastly, the realization that even if I gain worldwide fame, even if I change the world, no matter how many might know my name, eventually I’ll just be an old guy in a park.

I hope that I’m smiling as much as you were, Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

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The year is 2035. Joe Smith stands in front of the United States Senate, subject of a confirmation hearing for the post he has sought all his life:

Camera cuts to Senator Archibald Huffenpuff [R], looking self-important and slightly bored.

Huffenpuff: Mr. Smith are you now or have you ever been a member of the web site called [checks notes] MySpace.com?

Cut to Joe Smith, in a sharp suit.

Smith: Yes sir.

Huffenpuff: In what capacity?

Smith: Well, while running for office several years ago, we used myspace.com/joe-smith-in-30 as part of our grassroots campaign to…

Huffenpuff: Have you ever used any other usernames on this site?

Smith looks moderately confused by the question.

Smith: I don’t particularly recall, Senator.

Huffenpuff: Have you ever used the name el-guapo-suave?

Smith smiles.

Smith: Ah, yes. I used that name during school.

Huffenpuff: Do you recall comments made then about circuit judge Mary Jones?

Smith blanches, clearly confused

Smith: Back then? I didn’t even know who she was then, Senator.

Huffenpuff: Let me refresh your memory. In 2008, she was fifteen years old and went by the user name meow1kittens15.

Smith: Uh…

Huffenpuff: You left comments on her page when she posted a picture of herself in her cheerleader uniform.

Sensing Smith’s discomfort, the camera slowly zooms in.

Smith: Uh…

Huffenpuff: Specifically, you said of the then underage Mary Jones, and I quote “I’d tap that” and “omfg u r so h0ttt!!!11!1″. Are these your words, sir?

Smith: Uh…

Camera cuts to a closeup of a white cat with blue eyes and a diamond necklace, being pet by Rupert Murdoch (indirect owner of MySpace) in his orbiting space station.

Murdoch: Bwah-ha-ha-ha! You should have paid up, Mr. Smith.

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are already being used for blackmail, but I can’t help but suspect that blackmail is actually their entire reason for existence. This is the only reason I can find to explain why Faceberg still gets investment capital in spite of having no visible business plan or prospects. It may also explain why Facebook removed a third-party application that let its users stab each other: it was cutting in on Facebook’s action.

Expect to see this type of thing show up in government more often, along with services that will eliminate incriminating web evidence. One interesting aspect of this will be the collateral damage created. For example, in my fictional example above, a plot intended to take down Smith would probably also take down Mary Jones by also exposing her teenage escapades.

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In what it calls “the craziest, most megalomaniacal scheme from the 20th century you never heard of”, Strange Maps reports on Atlantropa, a scheme in the 1920s to dam the various entries to the Mediterranean Sea. The idea, brainchild of Herman Sörgel, was to lower the elevation of the sea by as much as 200 meters, and then use the elevation difference to generate hydroelectric power. Oh, and do a bunch of Eurocentric rubbish to Africa (get in line).

One of the obvious issues with the plan is the havoc it would cause on the existing coastline. Venice is no longer really Venice when it’s 200 meters above sea level, for example. Also, the increased water salinity would probably kill what’s currently living in the water. These reasons, among others, are cited as example of why “Sörgel’s plan would be considered outdated today”. I, however, think now might be just the right time for damming the Mediterranean.

If global warming doomsday predictions are to be believed, global sea levels will rise by some non-trivial amount in the next century. You can find maps showing the effects of 100m rises, for example.* That being the case, if the Atlantropa plan could be recast as a way to keep the levels of the Mediterranean as they are now it might be more palatable.

The idea would be to build the dams assuming the ocean’s level will rise. As that happens outside the dam, make adjustments to keep level on the inside the same. Thus, the coastline of the Mediterranean is preserved, while the rest of the world drowns.

Alternately, using the same dam system, you could actually turn the Mediterranean into an elevated bowl, instead. By pumping water from outside the dam to fill up the bowl, you turn the Mediterranean into a large store of water, protecting the rest of the world from the rising sea level instead. This would come at the cost of drowning most of the cradle of Western Civilization, but it’s not like anyone would really miss, say, Greece. Later (much later), when the world starts cooling again and the ice caps start reclaiming water, you could gradually release the stored Mediterranean water and keep world sea level constant still.

* More realistic projections for the next century, however, are only in the range of tens of centimeters, making the plan I propose here less fun.

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When a coworker was recently comparing experiences with the iPod Touch, he mentioned how grateful he was to the Kids in the Hall, as emulating them had trained his finger muscles to use the device’s zoom feature. For the uninitiated, zooming out on the iPod Touch involves touching two fingers to the screen and spreading them apart, while zooming in involves moving your fingers together. This is basically the same motion used in a series of Kids sketches involving a semi-crazy guy saying “I’m crushing your head”, while making a similar motion from a distance, like this attempt to crush the head of a statue of Buddha:

All this head crushing and its relation to to the iPod Touch UI got me thinking about the perfect game for the device: iCrushYourHead. The idea would be that pictures of people would randomly drift across the screen at various speeds, and using the “pinching” UI gesture, you would have to crush their heads as they passed. The crushing would be animated with a cheesy accordion-fold type effect. As the game progressed, they would drift by faster and faster, and more would be on screen at once. Naturally, you’d need to be able to import photos of people who deserve head crushing.

The same coworker, hearing this idea, suggested another game, this one for kids. It is a port of those kids books where the page is divided into three sections, one for the head, one for the body and one for the legs, where the kid will mix and match various parts to make fun combinations. It would make use of another cool UI trick on the touch, the sliding scroll gesture where you can kind of “throw” a section of a screen and it will scroll with a sort of natural deceleration. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t used the iPod Touch, but it is very natural. In the case of this game, it would act a bit like the wheels of a slot machine, that you could spin independently with varying degrees of force. The number of choices for the body parts could also be vastly larger than a physical book would allow.

Feel free to send me royalty checks if you build these games.

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