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.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have a theory. Well, “theory” may be to grandiose. Call it a hypothesis. It suggests a reason for why incidents of road rage have been rising in America over the last few decades. There are a few logical explanations for this, such as the simple fact of more cars on the road, hormones, economic conditions, self-defeating child-rearing techniques. No doubt people have blamed video games, liberals, conservatives and who knows what all else. One observation I like came from a comedian (I don’t remember who) who said that he didn’t remember much road rage before people started drinking sixty ounces of Starbucks and Big Gulps of caffeinated sugar-water. That became my working hypothesis until recently, when another culprit suggested itself. My new hypothesis is this:

Road rage is increasing because Americans are being slowly driven insane by the nine-minute snooze bar interval.

You can find a lot on the web about why this interval is nine-minutes. Most of it is wrong, and there seems to be no definitive answer. In 1999, Cecil Adams waded through it, reaching the conclusion that it was originally a decision driven more by the gearing of the first mechanical clock that had the snooze feature than any rational choice. When other clocks copied the feature, they kept the interval without thinking much about why. It was the “convention”. (This is the same reason that we continue to be plagued with the idiocy that is the fax machine.)

There is far less to be found on the net about what the ideal snooze interval really should be. It doesn’t appear that anyone has studied this. There don’t seem to be many studies on the impact of using the snooze bar in general, only a general notion that “short bouts of sleep are far from ideal”. Proof that snooze is driving the country insane currently relies on anecdotal evidence:

The modern alarm clock, or more to the point, its confounded snooze button, has dramatically altered my personality and stolen countless hours of personal productivity. It seems that the point of the snooze button is to prolong the agony of having to untangle from your partner and slowly acclimate to the inevitable nip of the morning air.…the snooze button has left me less than satisfied. Given this, I naturally wanted to find a place to lay blame. Who better than the inventor of the snooze button: Lew Wallace. It turns out that this very same Lew Wallace is the Lew Wallace who wrote Ben Hur. This amused me, since Ben Hur is nothing short of prolonged agony in its own right…

Without formal studies of this important issue, little progress will be made toward saving the nation’s sanity. There is hope, however. Many alarm clocks now come with adjustable snooze intervals. I suspect the psychologically “correct” interval is closer to 25 minutes, but only home experimentation can save us. Feel free to post your results here. (When responding, remember to indicate if you are sane or not.)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Over two years ago, I suggested a way to destroy a modern record company, using their “pump and dump” strategy against them. The prime example of the strategy at the time was the handling of Britney Spears. Unfortunately, no one has implemented my advice, but evidently with a recent performance, Ms. Spears seems to have entered the “dump” part of the pump and dump strategy, with one reviewer claiming “it’s clear no one is telling singer how to fix career”. I didn’t see the performance, so have no idea if that is actually true or just the media being the media, but if it is true, it extends the case study of the pump and dump strategy. In my previous post, I quoted a prediction from Chris Johnson’s analysis suggesting there is “considerable evidence to suggest that when Britney stops being pushed on the market by her record company, sales will fall off a cliff.” Chances are this will happen fairly soon.

On the other hand, if the performance really was that bad, it actually kind of contaminates the experiment, because it might mean that fans are leaving because of taste (i.e. the bad performance turned them off to the star) rather than because the hype train stopped. Then again, you might see a double whammy effect, where both taste and the lack of hype contribute to a sales disaster of epic proportions.

Update: No mercy, though it sounds like they weren’t really “representing” her before the performance either.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Samablog’s recent mention of two articles with differing perspectives on the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq finds me returning to thoughts of a different comparison, one made before the war really started. To me, the biggest mistake made in Iraq appears to be the incorrect belief that that the Iraqis would be as active and willing in rebuilding their country as the Germans and Japanese were after World War II. They clearly haven’t been.

Up to now, I’ve gone along with the reasoning that this was because Iraq really wasn’t a nation to begin with, but rather an artificial imposition of Winston Churchill. While this seems reasonable, the articles Rob mentioned mixed in my head with a conversation I had with my wife’s uncle (a German citizen) about what life in the Fatherland was like after the war and with an article claiming (among other things) that suicide bombing is really about sex. The result suggests another key difference between post-WWII and Iraq: Immediately following the war, a large percentage of the young male population in Germany and Japan had been killed, so were not around to either help or hinder the rebuilding.

It’s hard to say what would have happened in those two countries had the young male population been around during that time. Certainly most of them would have been unemployed. You can imagine that this would have led to all sorts of things, such as increased crime, the rise of “gangs” or worse, and so on. Hitler, for example, was originally elected on promises of ending unemployment.

Iraq, however, and the Middle East in general, hasn’t recently suffered a World War to decimate its young males. While it’s tricky finding nuanced demographic information on Iraq, what figures there are point to more males than females, with a median age for males of 19.6 years. It’s likely that those in the insurgency now are the exact gender and age that would have been killed in something like World War II. Although a 1999 study by the U.S. Government on what makes a terrorist concluded that “there does not appear to be a single terrorist personality”, it mentions that 80% of terrorists world wide were male, and nearly all of them were under 30 years old. It claims that most suicide bombers “were bachelors aged 18 to 25″ and that “Arab and Iranian groups tend to use boys aged 14 to 15 for dangerous missions, in part because they are less likely to question instructions”. This report is to old to contain information from 9/11 and recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it seems clear that young men are a significant portion of the insurgency.

All of this, combined with the sectarian violence Iraqi’s seem intent on pursuing in place of rebuilding their country suggests a strategy for the US in Iraq. It is quite brutal, and probably unworkable, but I think you’ll find it has a better chance of success than any other concrete strategy you’ve seen voiced recently (any easy task, since there haven’t been any). It requires abandoning all pretense that the U.S. cares at all for Iraqi civilians, but with over half a million of them being dead already, I’m not sure this pretense is really believed by anyone anyway.

The strategy goes like this:

1. Withdraw all U.S. forces in Iraq into Afghanistan suddenly and without warning. Destroy any bases or airfields that would make the country harder to reconquer later.
2. Watch as the various factions in Iraq start to kill each other in increasingly creative ways.
3. Allow any arms dealers under CIA control to go nuts selling weapons that armies would use to fight each other, like tanks and artillery. The idea would be to encourage battles between semi-military forces, rather than soliders vs. civilians.
4. At some point, the factions will probably stop fighting each other in favor of ethnically cleansing areas under control, as this is safer than getting killed by an opposing army. When this happens, send in black ops missions to frame the other side, with the intent to refocus the factions on killing each other instead of civilians.
5. When one side gains the upper hand (probably the Shia, since they will be getting backing from Iran) send in some cruise missiles and air strikes to even the odds, claiming that we’re striking “terrorist camps” or something similar. No one will believe us, but fortunately that will no longer matter (a fringe benefit of Bush’s “middle finger” style of diplomacy is that we no longer even need to pretend).
6. Fighting will probably lead to fracturing of Iraq into three or more ethnically aligned “nations”. When this happens, recognize all of their governments, then sell them all weapons. Also, repeat step 4, with the idea of getting the whole region to fight until it is under the control of a single “government”.
7. While all this is going on, finish the mission in Afghanistan somehow.
8. Once the region known as Iraq is under a single group’s control, re-invade.

At this point, we’re back to where we started, with three important differences. The first is that it will probably be twenty years later, with a splendid excuse to fund the miliary-industrial complex for the duration. More importantly, however, all the young men in Iraq (and probably from a lot of neighboring nations) will be dead, and the local population will have a fresh taste of what happens when you don’t take a hand in making your own civilization better.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, OK, lots. In a mine field of wild cards, two stand out. First is that should an independent Kurdistan get formed in the process, Turkey would probably invade it, which would make things much scarier. Still, it would probably be possible to leverage their desire to join the EU and sacrifice some Iraqi territory to contain this. The second wild card is the third important difference mentioned above: more countries, probably including Iran, would now have nukes. This would be scary, but I still think may make the situation more manageable if handled well, not less.

On the other hand, Iran will probably invade as soon as we leave anyway, making much of the strategy moot.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Several years ago, I offered some perspective on the price of gasoline. It seems that some others have done the same with other liquids, including whiteout and pepto bismol, or even scorpion venom.

Popularity: 6% [?]

A commercial just reminded me of a question my sister raised the last time we were in John’s Pizzeria in Manhattan. At the time, there were a number of remakes of various hit movies. She wondered: why are only good movies are remade? Doesn’t this seem backwards? You’d think that movie makers would want to correct mistakes, not success. After all, of all the things that can go wrong to make a promising movie fail, there have to be any number of films that just missed greatness. If only that one big mistake could be corrected, you’d have a hit. Plus, hit movies usually spawn sequels, so why remake them?

There is, of course, a reasonable explanation: movie studios are among the most risk averse companies in the world, for no apparent reason. They only take chances if they are about to be eaten by lions, or if someone else has taken the risk first.

The commercial that provided a small sliver of hope that this might be changing pitched a new remake: a thriller called The Hitcher. The original, featuring C. Thomas Howell, Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, was not a great movie, but not the worst in the world either. It gets a middling 65% fresh rating and grossed under $6 million. Obviously, someone convinced the studio that “you know, that was an OK movie, but it had some problems. Here’s how we’d turn it into a major hit.” I’m not sure why the studios believed them, since this same team has already screwed up the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original = 87%, remake = 37%).

I can’t remember other examples of this phenomenon, though there might have been a few. I had thought that Never Say Never Again might qualify as an attempt to improve the original Thunderball, but evidently others don’t share my opinion of the lameness of the original. Also, it looks like the remake might have been more the result of legal battles than anything else.

For any studios looking for films with ideas that held great potential, but flawed execution, to remake into something great, a few suggestions:

• Gattaca
• The Arrival
• The Prophecy
• The Island. In fact, nearly any film involving Michael Bay (which doesn’t bode well for the Hitcher remake).
• Any film where Elizabeth Shue plays a scientist.
• All of the Star Wars prequels (although this has, sort of, been done).
• Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Eliminate Bunny and the movie is pure gold.
• The Siege
• King Arthur
• The Andromeda Strain

I’m sure there are many others. What would you remake? While you’re thinking, you might also want to look a various death scenes as well.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I love professional American football, but a number of new trends this year have been disturbing my calm since the season started. Now that the regular season is winding down, here are some suggestions on how to improve for next season:

• The four-man comments before the game, at halftime and after the game is a formula that mostly works, but there is no need whatsoever to fly them all to the game and setup the desk on the field. The only purpose this seems to serve is to make it harder to hear anything anyone is saying, and force the hosts to wail like Olympic swimming commentators.
• To Bryant Gumbel: learn what the phrase “take over on downs” means before uttering it again. Ask your brother.
• To Dick Vermeil: please refrain from lending your image to any company for promotional purposes ever again. Also, have some of the beefier members of your team hunt down and kill everyone responsible for your beer commercials.
• Chris Collinsworth wins for suggesting he get work with Court TV as it is the “only way to cover the Browns”.
• To the NFL: since you have set up your broadcast rules to force me to watch nothing but the New York Jets, the least you could do is force the CBS network to broadcast the game in hi-def. Buy the cameras if you have to.
• To CBS Sports: high definition is no longer optional. Catch up.
• An occasional Thursday game is fun. Every week is overkill.
• Stop giving a shit about Terrell Owens.
• To advertisers: When you repeat the same commercial over and over, it makes me actively hate both you and your products. Stop it.
• To Chevrolet: When you insist on running the same honky-intensive commercial over and over and over containing the phrase “this is our philosophy”, you might not want to put a picture under it depicting someone from a homophobic organization that illegally uses federal funds.
• To the NFL network: Give up on the idea of the NFL network. Unless you are intentionally trying to destroy the NFL, in which case: soldier on.
• Light beer in sweaty green bottles is not my girlfriend and, even if it was, I’m pretty sure I would want it to be neither “hot” nor “a freak like you”. I don’t know what either of those mean.

Popularity: 5% [?]