Scott Adams' Blog

National Discard Day

Posted December 6th, 2010 @ 7:09am in #General Nonsense

Christmas is an excellent holiday for children. But we adults need our own holiday - one that is something like the opposite of Christmas. Let’s call it National Discard Day. It could be in June, just for symmetry. The concept for this holiday is that each of your friends and loved ones gets to decide which of your current possessions you have to get rid of. It’s like reverse gift-giving.

In December, people say “Happy holidays!” and “Happy New Year!” In June, around National Discard Day, you might hear something more along the lines of “Lose the Crocs, dipshit. You’re not Woody Harrelson.” National Discard Day would be cruel but practical.

I came upon this idea after hearing stories of old people’s houses that are cluttered beyond all reason. The elderly often have three of everything. I always assumed that the packrat impulse comes from growing up during the Depression. There’s no point in giving away something that you might need to barter for food.

I was thankful that I’m not like that. Then one day I noticed that we have three vacuum cleaners in the garage. One is lightweight, and good for quick jobs, but it has no hose attachment. The other is useless except for the hose attachment. We need both of those vacuum cleaners, obviously. The third vacuum cleaner is the “good” one that does everything well, but it is literally too complicated to operate. It’s like the bastard son of Iron Man and Optimus Prime. I can’t tell if I’m preparing to use the hose attachment or giving it a goddamn happy ending.

Topping it off, our new home has a whole house vacuum system. You just plug a hose into the wall and go. And not long ago I owned a Shop-Vac, until it lost a cage fight with me in the garage, may it rest in pieces. I’ll probably get a new one for Christmas. If you’re keeping count, we will soon have something like 5.5 vacuum cleaning systems, assuming the Dust Buster counts as a half.

Apparently The Great Depression isn’t the cause of hoarding. There is always some perfectly good “reason” for keeping stuff. For example, you can’t throw away an old chair because someday you might need it for a party. You can’t throw away an ugly knickknack because it was a gift. You can’t throw away your stained sweatshirt because nothing else is quite as comfortable.

That’s where National Discard Day comes in. You need the help of other people to make the hard decisions for you. In a perfect world, once your home reaches some point of possession saturation, one item must be discarded for every item that enters. No exceptions. If you disagree, I label you a hoarder.

In my case, our loved ones would presumably force us to get rid of our Dust Buster and our two semi-crippled vacuum cleaners. The only downside is that trying to figure out how to use the “good” vacuum cleaner looks a lot like porn for gay robots. But I can live with that.

I discovered a contributing factor in the clutter problem when I visited my old home town of Windham New York. At the local dump, a sign said it costs $7.50 for any “appliance” that you discard. That includes anything from a toaster to an old bed frame. For that price, and in this economy, it makes more sense to move a broken appliance out to the porch and just leave it there. Better yet, use duct tape to strap your half-broken toaster to your new one and be the first person in town with a three-slicer. My point is that Windham’s dump fees are not helping to beautify the town.

Who’s with me on National Discard Day? I think it could be big.

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Two Conspiracy Theories

Posted December 2nd, 2010 @ 6:27am in #General Nonsense

I’m a fan of conspiracy theories. I’m fascinated by the fact that any wild story can be engineered to sound feasible to some portion of the public. Let’s call this the ordinary kind of conspiracy theory, such as the idea that a small group of rich people are secretly running the world, or that aliens are abducting people and implanting chips in their necks. These conspiracy theories are hugely unlikely by their nature.

But there’s another category of conspiracy theory that is way cooler. These are the theories that are far more likely to be true than not, although no smoking gun has been found. I give you today, two conspiracy theories of my own design. I’m not saying these are true. I’m just saying they are far more likely to be true than false. We’ll probably never know.

Conspiracy one: The stock markets of the world are manipulated by highly sophisticated and undetectable software viruses. Some group is forcing its own automated trades to the front of the line just before every market move. Or perhaps the program is causing market fluctuations on its own. You might have noticed that for the past ten years, the stock market fluctuates quite a bit, often in an opposite direction to what the news would predict. Analysts explain it away by saying, for example, “The market was hoping for even better news than the good news they got.” A simpler explanation is that the market is being manipulated.

This conspiracy theory wasn’t as plausible sounding before we learned of the Stuxnet virus attack on the Iranian nuclear facility. (See my earlier post on that.) We learned that experts can indeed create undetectable viruses that can penetrate computers that are not physically attached to the grid. Now throw in a trillion dollars of incentive, and the odds that it has already happened to the financial markets approach 100%. In fact, the likelihood is that a dozen or more viruses are running loose in the financial networks, probably laundering their gains through hedge funds who claim to have top secret algorithms for predicting market moves. Compare these two claims and tell me which one sounds more likely:

1.       Our hedge fund has a secret algorithm.

2.       Our hedge fund is using existing technology to steal your money.

Conspiracy two: The recent Wikileaks about the United States were intentionally leaked by our government. Have you noticed that nothing in the leaks is news? It’s everything we already knew. Pakistan isn’t a reliable ally in the war on terror? Shocking! Saudis hate Iranians? Shocking! Saudi Arabia funds Al Qaeda? Shocking!

Maybe it’s the artist (sort of) in me, but I always think empty space in real life is just as intentional as it is in landscape compositions. The lack of bombshells in the Wikileak materials looks mighty suspicious to me. Some observers are going so far as to say that the report does little more than show that U.S. diplomats are doing a fine job. Compare these two theories and tell me which one sounds more likely:

1.       U.S. Diplomats are the only group of people on Earth who are all doing a fine job. And they never write down anything that is worse than just baaarely embarrassing. And someone risked being executed as a traitor to release this non-news.

2.       The U.S. government leaked the information itself, after taking out the good parts, because somewhere buried in the pile is an idea that they want “accidentally” released to the world.

I give this theory a 60% chance of being true because it would be easy for the government to pull it off, there’s a good chance it would be useful, and it is well within the normal political bag of tricks. If you see a “leak” revelation in the next few days that seems to help the government’s strategy more than it hurts, I might raise my estimate.

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Impractical Solutions to Intractable Problems

Posted December 1st, 2010 @ 7:47am in #General Nonsense

Today’s impractical suggestion is to make all voting online. My theory is that this simple change could solve just about every major problem in the world. Is that an exaggeration? You be the judge.

Imagine we set a target date for online voting, five years out. That’s enough time to solve any voter identification issues and other logistics. For voters who have no computers of their own, the local high school could provide iPads and human helpers for walk-ins. In ten years, that service would be phased out. By then, if you don’t have access to a computer, voting is probably going to be low on your list of priorities.

The first benefit of online voting is that more people would vote, especially the young. When you can vote from your cubicle, or from your bed, you might bother to take the time, at least for the issues that you care about.

When young people become a larger voting force, change becomes easier. For example, it would be easier for politicians to support cutting the military and Social Security budgets if they had lots of young voters on their side. The young have a natural tendency to shake up the status quo, and that’s necessary for a society to evolve and prosper. The alternative is the deadlock and death spiral we seem to be in.

Imagine that this future online voting interface has links to the best arguments for each issue, with simple supporting graphics. Voters could peruse the candidates’ voting records and positions. All relevant information that a voter needs would be clearly presented, and compared and contrasted, in a way that traditional media can’t handle. As a result, voters would become far more informed, even if it only happened minutes before the actual vote.

My observation is that voters often unwittingly vote for candidates that disagree with their own positions. Imagine that voters could answer questions about their own political preferences and then the system would color code the candidates that most closely match their own views. Such a system would alert voters when they are voting against their own interests, while still allowing the option to do so. Online versions of what I’m describing already exist but they aren’t integrated with the actual voting interface. That’s a big difference. Convenience matters.

Imagine, as part of this voting interface, an online model of the national budget that you can tweak on your own, so you can see how much difference it makes to raise taxes on the rich, or cut specific budget categories. (Such models exist online, but I haven’t seen a great one yet.) Before you vote, you could fiddle with the online budget model to get a visceral feel for what sorts of budget cuts and tax increases make the biggest difference. In my view, understanding the budget, at some high level, is the minimum knowledge a voter needs to cast an informed vote.

In our current political model, candidates take advantage of what I call (usually in a business context) a confusopoly. They make general philosophical comments about the budget that are logically and mathematically impossible. Everyone else is doing the same, and because the budget is complicated and confusing, candidates can get away with it. But a viable third-party candidate with a specific budget plan would make the confusopoly candidates seem like empty suits.

In our current system, viable third-party candidates rarely emerge. But online voting would make third-party candidates more viable. Voters could easily see each candidate’s background and views on the issues, plus video clips of speeches. A qualified candidate could run for president on a shoestring budget. All he’d need is a lot of Facebook friends to get things started. Social networks would replace primaries.

Our current system, which features massive traditional advertising aimed primarily at older voters, would become obsolete. With online voting, the average age of voters would shift dramatically lower. The young are less susceptible to advertising because they use technology such as DVRs and ad-blocking software to avoid ads. And they avoid traditional print media altogether. When big advertising budgets become less effective, special interests become less powerful because their money can’t help politicians get elected.

I started this post by claiming online voting would solve almost every problem in the world. My observation is that our planet doesn’t suffer from a lack of resources, just a lack of competence in managing those resources. Online voting could replace a broken government with one that allocates resources efficiently. And that one change, in time, could stimulate and release the economy to solve almost every problem in the world.

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Unions

Posted November 29th, 2010 @ 6:42am in #General Nonsense

Imagine members of the U.S. military forming a union to improve their working conditions, job security, benefits and compensation. Right, you can’t imagine it. Military unions are illegal for a good reason. The military is designed to optimize national defense. You don’t want soldiers going on strike when they should be attacking. Homeland defense is clearly the highest priority. Or as Spock says, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

Now imagine that U.S. schoolteachers form a union to improve their own working conditions, job security, benefits and compensation. Right, that already exists. But why is it legal?

In the long run, education is as critical to national defense as the military. Education is the engine that drives our economic wellbeing. And a robust economy gives us the means to fund every element of defense, from Homeland Security, to research and development, to the military itself.

A strong economy, along with active foreign trade, turns potential military rivals into customers and suppliers. It’s unlikely, for example, that China and the U.S. would get into a war anytime soon because our economies are too dependent. China and the U.S. have literally educated their respective countries out of potential war with each other.

Obviously one can argue that unions have a useful role in some types of industries. Without unions, or the threat of unions, business owners would drift toward abusiveness. And obviously one can argue that unions cause problems of their own. It’s an imperfect system. But for now, let’s ignore the question of whether unions are good or evil in some general sense and focus on the question of why teachers can have unions but soldiers cannot. Why the difference? Spock would not see the logic in this.

At the moment, education is treated about the same as the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s something the states should worry about. Imagine how things would be different if education were treated as a national defense issue. In a world where education is branded as the foundation of national defense, if we didn’t get enough high quality volunteer teachers, a draft would be instituted. If parents didn’t ensure that their kids finished their homework, the entire family would be deemed unpatriotic.

I assume we can’t get to that imagined place from here because of the political clout of unions. But just for fun, imagine a third-party candidate for president who cleverly brands education as a national defense issue, and labels anyone who disagrees with him as both unpatriotic and soft on defense. That would be some fun.

Here I remind you that cartoonists don’t know much about education, politics, unions, or national defense. And if you happen to know my sister, who is a teacher, please don’t tell her I wrote this.

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Shopping Tips for Men

Posted November 24th, 2010 @ 6:37am in #General Nonsense

Men, this holiday season, when you find yourself in your automobile with your wife or girlfriend, returning from some sort of entertaining event, watch out for any of these early indicators of a shopping bait-and-switch:

“I just remembered something I need to pick up.”

“We’ll be driving right past…”

“This will only take a minute.”

For a man, shopping with a woman is a state of existence that is neither living nor dead. It’s a shadow world. Technically, you still have a pulse. But like a corpse, you have no control over where you are or what you’re looking at. You might try to settle the ambiguity by trying to contribute to the shopping experience, in a way that you imagine a living person might, but it won’t work. That looks something like this:

Man: “How about this one?”

Woman: “No.”

Repeat.

So you try to go the other way, slumping into a chair if you’re lucky enough to be in a furniture store, or sleeping on your feet like a horse if not. That’s called “not helping,” and in the long run it is a worse option than death. You know you’ll pay for it later, but sometimes you can’t help it. Shopping drains you. Your vision narrows until it seems as if you’re viewing the store through a hose. And your heart stops circulating your blood because it just doesn’t see the point of it. Before long, you’re full of stale blood. You reach for your phone, like smelling salts, to give you some stimulation, but dear God there is no signal in the store.

Maybe you think you can find relief by pushing the shopping cart. To the ignorant observer, that looks like helping. And you hope it will be enough stimulation to keep your brain above room temperature. But it’s a rookie mistake. In the context of couples shopping, pushing the cart is a process of relocating your selected products from one wrong location to another. For example, you might move the cart from a position of not being close enough to the shopper-in-chief to a new position that is crowding an old lady, or blocking a popular shelf. Repeat.

Sometimes, for reasons involving senseless cruelty, your shopping companion will ask you which one of two items you prefer. You know it’s a trap. But you also know there’s no way to wiggle out of it. Now you have two choices. You can either be an unhelpful and indecisive wimp, or you can be a frickin’ idiot. There are no other options. I recommend the frickin’ idiot path because it’s more masculine. That choice goes like this.

Woman: "Which one do you like?“

Man: "Definitely this one.”

Woman: “Why do you like that one better?”

Thus begins your chance to prove that you have not been listening to anything she has said about this entire category of her life, beginning with your first date and continuing all the way through the car ride that got you to this horrible, horrible place.

Husbands have been trying to weasel out of this trap since the dawn of time. Your best bet - the Hail Mary play - is misdirection. Try changing the subject. At the very least it can buy you some time. For example…

Man: “I like the yellow one because it reminds me of your eyes.”

Woman: “What the hell? My eyes aren’t yellow!”

Man: “They are a little bit. Have you had your liver tested lately?”

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Scan or Pat Down

Posted November 22nd, 2010 @ 6:55am in #General Nonsense

I was traveling this weekend, and for the first time had to choose between an airport pat down search and an intrusive full body scan. Did you know that those TSA guys don’t have a sense of humor? The conversation at the security checkpoint went something like this.

TSA Guy 1: Do you want a pat down or a full body scan?

Scott: They both sound good.

TSA Guy1: What?

Scott: If I do the full body scan, am I allowed to twirl?

TSA Guy1: Excuse me?

Scott: Can I see who’s doing the pat downs before I decide?

TSA Guy1: It’s that officer (pointing).

Scott: (sexily) Ooh, yes. That will do nicely. Grrrrrr.

TSA Guy1: (Dirty look) Step over there.

Scott: Can you help him? It will be twice as fast…for both of us, if you know what I mean.

TSA Guy2: (angry look)

The pat down guy waves me into position and tells me to put my arms up. I let out a creepy moan of delight. He sneers at me with a “Let’s just get this over with” attitude and starts in.

TSA Guy2: This will only take a second.

Scott: What if you find a suspicious package?

TSA Guy2: We don’t search for packages, sir.

Scott: That’s not what my scanner says.

He ignores me and starts patting my right leg, from low to top.

Scott: (creepily) That’s it…oh yeah…That’s what I’m talking about.

The TSA guy stands abruptly and motions over his supervisor, a woman in her early forties. By this point, I’m all in. Before she gets to us, I say one last thing to the TSA guy in a hushed voice.

Scott: Now it’s a party. She can do from my waist up.

He ignores me. The supervisor comes over.

Supervisor: (sternly) What is the problem here, sir?

The TSA guy tries to explain what’s happening, but he discovers that it doesn’t translate when repeated in a serious monotone. So he changes his approach and says something vague about me not taking the process seriously. His supervisor decides to back him.

Supervisor: Sir, if you don’t take this seriously, I’ll have to have you handcuffed.

Scott: Can I choose the handcuffs and the full body scan at the same time? I’ve been practicing some dance moves at home. Can they burn a DVD for me?

At this point in my story I should confess that none of this actually happened. And I don’t recommend that you try anything like it.

I’m fascinated by the fact that humor and reality are intertwined. The only thing that made this story funny (if you saw it that way) was your assumption, to a point, that it really happened. This same story in the context of a fictional novel wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. That’s why you rarely see humor books on best seller lists. Fictional humor doesn’t interest modern readers, and real life is rarely rich enough to fill a book. Case in point, the best humor writer of our time, David Sedaris, apparently has the triple advantage of:

1.       Immense talent

2.       An astoundingly dysfunctional childhood

3.       No shame about embarrassing loved ones.

The reality-as-humor trend is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least in its fullness. In my opinion, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series wouldn’t have been successful if it came out today. In its time, it was a treasure. Society’s notion of humor evolves.

I have a theory that kids of this generation don’t laugh at manufactured humor, even though they consume it in great quantities on TV and in movies. The exception is any sort of fart joke. But for kids, farts are about reality.

If you have kids, do they laugh out loud at humorous TV shows or movies that do not depict reality? You might think they do, or assume they do, but pay close attention over the holiday. You might be surprised.

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The Waiting Room is Your Doctor

Posted November 18th, 2010 @ 5:12am in #General Nonsense

I wonder if someday the doctor’s waiting room will be a giant MRI device, or whatever technology replaces it, that can scan you, diagnose your problems, and write prescriptions without human intervention.

Imagine that someday you have a tiny chip inside you to monitor your blood chemistry on an ongoing basis. When you enter the room, the computer recognizes your face, and matches it to the identity information on your chip just to be sure. The computer reads your blood data from your chip and begins scanning your body. You don’t have to be motionless because the computer is fast enough to compensate for your movements.

The computer has your entire medical history, along with the genetic information that was taken from your umbilical cord. It also knows your lifestyle because your bank records and your location data (from GPS) are available by law to the medical establishment. The computer can even scan your Facebook pages and other online sources to see what social situations you’ve been in lately. By then, privacy will seem like a quaint custom from our primitive past. Children will learn about it in history class.

The computer then compares all of your information with a vast database about other human beings and looks for anomalies. Based on this information, the computer diagnosis you and prescribes treatment. At that point, a human nurse might be involved to remove a splinter or apply a bandage. If you need surgery, a robot does the hard part while a human doctor supervises.

In the next stage of healthcare, the MRI-like device shrinks to the size of an airport screening device that fits in the doorway of your home so you get a full and instant physical every time you pass through. Every problem is diagnosed early.

What part of that future is unlikely in 200 years?

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What is the Universe Made of?

Posted November 17th, 2010 @ 7:19am in #General Nonsense

Scientists have identified a number of elemental particles that are not known to be made up of smaller particles. But how do you wrap your head around the idea that something is made of nothing but…itself? Is it absurd, illogical, or just hard to understand?

Now suppose we someday determine that these elemental particles are indeed made of something else. It just pushes the question down a level. The moment we discover the new and smaller substance, we wonder what that is made of, and so on forever, or until…what?

Consider the possible answers.

Maybe everything is made of something else in some sort of infinite series that literally has no start, or it forms a loop of some sort. I can put words to that thought, but does it make sense?

Maybe the elemental particles are indeed made of themselves. But how can a component and the whole be the same? What keeps it all stuck together? It seems irrational.

Maybe there is one undiscovered substance that is the building block of the elemental particles and everything else. This idea has the advantage of simplicity, but it begs the same question: What is that one substance made of?

Or maybe reality is all just one big hologram or illusion that is impossible for the participants to fathom. But who created the hologram? Those guys must be part of a reality that is made of something. The question is inescapable, even if we literally don’t exist.

You can even throw God into the mix and it doesn’t help because I wonder what he’s made of.

There’s plenty of scientific evidence that reality is created on the fly by the act of observation, at least in the small world of physics. So perhaps the elemental particles literally did not exist until the first scientists detected them. And so it follows that we can cause the elemental particles to have substructures, or not, by how hard we try to detect that sort of thing. And that process of looking for, and therefore creating, substructures of substructures can be infinite. The problem you might have with this idea is that it implies people are like God, creating reality as we go.

And there’s your infinite loop. God is made of people, at least in part, and people are literally creating, through their experiments and observation, the universe. God is creating the universe, while the universe is simultaneously creating God.

Here I remind you not to get your science or religion education from cartoonists. Read the comments to see what parts I got wrong.

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Facebook Killer

Posted November 15th, 2010 @ 7:20am in #General Nonsense

Suppose a company offered you a billion dollars in exchange for a portion of your privacy. To make this arrangement palatable, imagine that the company promises that your data will only be used anonymously. You don’t totally trust them, but it’s not as if you rob banks in your spare time. You don’t have much to hide.

Now imagine that you can selectively leave out of this deal any future plans that are deeply personal. And you can leave out anything that might get you fired, embarrassed, or injured in any way. Those exclusions would be allowed by contract. And you could leave out any mention of your past, where most of your misdeeds happened anyway. Now do you accept this deal?

Most of you probably said yes, although you might have more questions about this arrangement just to be sure you’re not dealing with Satan. Now suppose instead of a billion dollars, the company only offered a million. Some of you would walk away at that price. How about $100,000?

My point is that your privacy has an economic value. Or it could, if such a market was created. Today you give away your privacy for nothing, in dribs and drabs. Your credit card company knows some things about you, your phone company knows others, and FaceBook knows a lot.

One thing that all of those companies have in common is that the private information they possess involves mostly your past, and not so much your future. When you post pictures on Facebook, it is a record of where you were, not a prediction of where you will be. Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next.

Privacy about your past is so cheap that you literally give it away. Privacy about your future plans is another matter. That has real value.

Obviously the past has some utility for predicting the future. If you enjoy a certain activity today, you’ll probably like it tomorrow. But predictions based on the past do not have the same economic value as, for example, knowing that you plan to buy a truck in the next month. Or perhaps you are planning a trip to Europe, or planning to find a new job. Private knowledge of your future would be worth a lot to advertisers. You wouldn’t give away that sort of privacy for nothing.

Here’s the Facebook killer part of my post. As I mentioned, Facebook is primarily a record of your past. Imagine a competing service that I will name Futureme for convenience. It’s an online system in which you post only your plans, both immediate and future. As with FaceBook, you decide who can see your plans. You might, for example, allow only specific family members to see your medical plans, but all of your friends can see your vacation plans, or your plans to buy a new couch.

The interface for Futureme is essentially a calendar, much like Outlook. But it would include extra layers for hopes and goals that don’t have specific dates attached.

For every entry to your Futureme calendar, you specify who can see it, including advertisers. If you allow advertisers a glimpse of a specific plan, it would be strictly anonymous. Advertisers could then feed you ads specific to your plan, while not knowing who they sent it to. The Futureme service would be the intermediary.

Now imagine that you never have to see any of the incoming ads except by choice. If you plan to buy a truck in a month, you would need to click on that entry to see which local truck advertisements have been matched to your plans. This model turns advertising from a nuisance into a tool. You‘d never see an ad on Furureme that wasn’t relevant to your specific plans.

The biggest benefit of the system could come from your network of friends and business associates. Suppose you post on the system that you would like to see a Bon Jovi concert sometime in the next year. Now your friends - the ones you specify to see this specific plan - can decide if they want in on it. Maybe someone you know can get free tickets, and someone has a van and is willing to be the designated driver. Maybe someone has a contact that can get you backstage passes. By broadcasting your plan, you make it possible for others to improve your plan.

Conversely, if you plan to do something stupid, your contacts have time to talk you out of it or suggest a superior alternative.

Your plans could be very general at first, such as a desire to go out next Saturday. Click on your Futureme entry on Thursday and perhaps you will see that three of your friends have the same general desire, and one of them has an idea of what to do. It’s like Evite, but it allows you to move from a general plan to a specific one.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re worried that this system allows the stalkers and mooches in your network to ruin your future plans. But remember, you are only broadcasting your plans to people you specify. If you choose to tell a stalker where you’ll be, don’t blame the application when you get stabbed.

Almost any kind of plan can be improved by your network. If you plan to buy something, it would be handy to automatically receive ideas, opinions, links, and relevant ads. If you plan a vacation to the mountains, your friends and business associates would tell you the best place to stay and the fun things to do. Your biggest vendor might throw in some freebees to keep you happy. Almost everything you plan to do could be improved by advertisers and friends.

Gift-giving would suddenly be easy. Just check what someone is planning to do, then plan a gift around it. Advertisers could automatically provide gift ideas around every planned activity. It would have the same utility as a bridal registry, albeit less filtered.

If you have kids, you’re continuously matching their planned activities with that of their friends so you can arrange car pools, play dates, birthday gift-buying and more. It’s a logistical nightmare. It would help a lot if mothers knew what the other mothers were planning.

Facebook succeeds in part because it is addictive. People like to talk about themselves, and people are nosey. But if you think people are nosey about what you did last weekend, imagine how nosey they would be about what vacation you are planning. It’s a whole new level of nosey.

Yes, people already discuss their plans on Facebook. But doing so has a small payback because the system isn’t optimized to improve your plans. You might discuss only 10% of your plans on Facebook, but 80% on Futureme, because the payoff would be greater.

It would be a pain to enter all of your plans into the system, and keep it updated, but it would save you a huge amount of time in the long run. That would be your payoff for “selling” your privacy.

Imagine how different society would be if most people started sharing their plans. I think it’s a world changer, on par of importance with the invention of capitalism, and the rule of law.

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Breakfast is Overrated

Posted November 12th, 2010 @ 7:08am in #General Nonsense

I have many crackpot theories. Today is no exception. Let’s test today’s theory, unscientifically.

First, think of someone you know who is unusually creative. It should be someone who almost can’t stop creating, whether that involves painting, sculpting, starting new businesses, rebuilding cars, whatever. But don’t count knitting or anything that involves following directions. I’m only talking about creating from original ideas. Pick someone for whom the need to invent something new as often as possible almost defines the person. Okay? Now hold that thought.

Second, think of your best friend who does NOT have a creative streak and is about the same age as the creative person you chose. Okay, do you have both people in mind?

Which one has more body fat?

My prediction is that the creative person is usually thinner than the non-creative person.

My theory is that when your body experiences the early stages of hunger, you become more creative, and more energetic. (Obviously at the later stages of hunger you become sleepy, cranky, distracted, and probably less creative. Let’s call that starvation and not hunger.)

This makes sense from an evolutionary view. As soon as you feel hunger coming on, your body is designed to put you into your most creative and energetic mode for the purpose of hunting and gathering. If you can’t outrun your prey, you have to outthink it. And if there are no bananas in your usual tree, you’d better have a creative idea where to look next. It makes sense that the onset of hunger would stimulate your brain to its highest operating level.

I came to this theory after two decades of watching how my own diet influences my energy and personality. One pattern is remarkably clear: My creativity and energy are highest when I haven’t eaten much lately. Is that a coincidence?

The highest period of creativity in my life coincided with the period in which I became a vegetarian and felt hungry all the time no matter how many carrots I ate. I joked about it at the time, but there was a very real sense of clarity that coincided with my change of diet. It was as if a fog lifted. That was the period in which I created Dilbert, along with about five other business ventures. (The other ones suffered from, um, poor timing.)

During those same years, I discovered that my most creative time was in the morning. I assumed it had something to do with alleged circadian rhythms, coffee consumption, the proximity to REM sleep, or the fact that there were fewer distractions. By the afternoon, I was lucky if I had enough brainpower left to operate my car. My new theory is that I have very little food in my stomach during the morning, and the onset of hunger is spiking my creative energy. I’m in hunter/gather mode. Then I eat lunch, and it’s nap time.

Often, from about 8 PM until noon the next day, I eat no more than one banana and a protein bar. That’s about 356 calories, or around 18% of my daily allocation spread over two-thirds of the day. I’m almost always a little bit hungry during that 16-hour period, but for reasons of health, energy, and productivity, I usually resist eating more. And when I absolutely have to eat, I eat peanuts. They don’t give me the foggy headed need-a-nap feeling that carbs generally do.

There are days when I experience floods of creativity that are almost overwhelming. I noticed recently that those times coincide with periods in which when I’m trying to lose a few pounds to get back to my target weight.

By now you’ve probably seen the CNN story about the nutritionist who lost 27 pounds and became generally healthier by eating mostly junk food, but limiting his calories. We don’t know if it raised his risk of cancer in the long run, so no expert is recommending his diet. But it calls into question how much we really know about the link between food and health.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html

On a final note, have you ever wondered why famous musicians write their best songs when they are young? Maybe it’s because young brains are more creative and less cluttered, or because they are more tapped into the youth culture, or maybe it’s because they are doing more drugs. But maybe it’s also because young musicians don’t eat as much as their bodies require. Musicians tend to look underfed during their most creative years. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.

I remind you not to get your health and nutrition advice from cartoonists. But I’m curious if your own creative moments have coincided with low caloric intake.

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