Whenever I can't find something - like the other day I was looking for measuring spoons or when I'm in the grocery store frustratedly looking for crap - I always think to myself "Let's just google "measuring spoons"" or "Why doesn't this store have a search feature? Oh yes. This is real life." But I know this is possible. Tag things with a tiny GPS locator to actually find them (Woznet is this). And in a grocery store (or bigger, like Costco) link the locations of related items together, because related items aren't always placed together. It would be like the Amazon "other customers who shopped for CHEAP BEER also shopped for HOT ROD MAGAZINE and TEAL SWEATPANTS" except it would be a little better than that. Because truthfully, that's what I want: a rich, deep, shopping experience that allows me to do things as fast as humanly possible because shopping in real life is a horrible activity that should be as quick as possible (if it's online, it should still be quick and painless even though no one else is around to get on my nerves). And imagine this: put your shopping list together before you go to the store (which would probably be put together automatically through a system that inventories your stuff and learns your consumptions patterns - like TiVo for food and household goods), be told the shortest path to get everything on the list and when you are done which aisle to go to so you get out of the store as fast as possible (but I think ideally you should just be able to walk out of the store and be charged for all the stuff in your cart automatically - no lines, period). How awesome would it be if you saw people grocery shopping with a laptop open in their cart? That's a future I want to live in.
Micro GPS! This could be applied to other places, too - like changing the way restaurants are laid out. And track the movement of individual plates across the restaurant to identify problems. And using a robot to mow your lawn in the right pattern (diagonal stripes? diagonal crosshatch? spiral? regular cross hatch?) instead of the bump and turn sort of random pattern that they use right now.
I bit into my sandwich. It smelled like roast beef and sarcasm, but tasted like mayonnaise and over floured bread.
Back to factual things: I went to the baseball game tonight with my brother. Playing a Canadian team, we were treated to a spirited rendition of "Oh Canada." That song celebrates violence a lot less than ours. Maybe we should change ours to something else. Recommendations: (in the vein of "Oh" songs as in "Oh Canada") "Oh My Golly!" by The Pixies. It's less than 2 minutes long! No one would complain about its length. "Kate" by Ben Folds Five is a little more upbeat, but its topic, while easy to identify with, is a little narrow. That means there's only one song left: "Freebird." Your national anthem is "Freebird."
Really, I mean it. Back to the factual: So we walking to the game (a nicely paced 2 hours and 15 minutes - the game, not the walk) and at a crosswalk two guys were talking (with generous use of swears, which clearly identified them as English literature or composition majors from Oxbridge) and one of them said, "If the game gets out early enough lets go find a tatoo parlor and I'll get the tattoo on my leg that I've been talking about for like 5 years." "What are you going to get?" "I don't know. I'll decide when I get there." I'm not going to break down this conversation more than it deserves, but these men already had a faint smell of malted grain and Willamette Valley hops on them. I imagine they'd continue to drink throughout the game and should he actually go get this - by that time he'd be pretty lit up. There you have it: I have explained the phenomenon of stupid tattoos. The function is described by this, where 'S' is the event that describes a person actually getting a stupid tattoo and 'B' is their BAC and a and b are coefficients: Pr(S) = exp(a*BAC + b*BAC)/(1 + exp(a*BAC + b*BAC)). Positive values for a and b indicate a positive relationship between a high blood alcohol content and the event where someone gets a stupid tattoo.
Finally, I heard the best 1/2 of a cellphone conversation today on my way home from work: "He was just taking some major hits off the houka" Nice, right?
Your reluctant author,
Sourdough.
