Scott Adams' Blog

CIA Tricks

Posted January 11th, 2010 @ 7:11am in #General Nonsense

I wonder what kind of tricks the CIA is using against Al Qaeda these days.
If I were in the CIA, I would try to flood the terrorist communication channels with false orders. Some of the false orders would be simple stuff, such as “Everyone gather by the big rock and wait for a big delivery of explosives.”

Other times you might say, “Salame is a mole for the CIA. He must die.” I figure the terrorists are like any other bureaucracy, and the workers will focus first on whatever is sitting in front of them while ignoring long term planning. And it’s probably fair to assume that, like your workplace, no one really trusts anyone else. I think you could keep terrorists busy killing each other until they run out of recruits.

Terror networks are perfect targets for false communications. First, the real orders sound exactly like pranks. It would be hard to sort out the evil mastermind plots from the CIA practical jokes. For example, if you get the order to shove C4 up your ass and yell WALAWALAWALA while running toward a heavily armed American Checkpoint, is that a real one or a prank? It’s hard to tell.

Second, the lines of communication within terror networks are presumably ever-changing, and necessarily involve strangers who wouldn’t recognize the voice or face of the other. It wouldn’t take many stories of CIA compromises to the system before no terrorist trusts anything he hears. Any real orders would be ignored.

I assume the terrorists are avoiding electronic communications because those would be the first channels the CIA compromised. This puts the terrorists in the position of trying to run a virtual meeting with operatives across the globe by sending human messengers. Assuming these terrorists are no more capable than your own coworkers, you know exactly how that’s working out for
them:

Abdullah: Your orders are to blow up the Belgian Embassy in Waziristan.

Salame: What is a Belgian?

Abdullah: I think it’s some sort of American. Or a waffle.

Salame: I don’t think there are any embassies in Waziristan.

Abdullah: Maybe it was someplace else. It started with a W. Or an M.

Saleme: Perhaps you could get clarification and come back.

Abdullah: Fine. I’ll see you in four months. Oh, and Bin Laden wants your status report in front of his cave by 8 AM.

Why It’s Doomed

Posted January 8th, 2010 @ 6:50am in #General Nonsense

It’s time for another round of Why it’s doomed. Leave a comment telling me what you are doing at work right now, and describe why you suspect it is likely to turn out bad. Be sure to point fingers. It will be funnier if you start your explanation with “It’s doomed because.”

The best ones will reveal the general sloth, selfishness, and incompetence of your coworkers, boss, or yourself.

I promise to make some comics from the best ones. Doom is funny.

Measuring

Posted December 29th, 2009 @ 9:50am in #General Nonsense

The Catastrophe

Posted December 11th, 2009 @ 7:37am in #General Nonsense

My older brother lives in Southern California. He sent me this video of the recent catastrophe in his area. It’s frightening. I’m just glad he survived.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNpDBFKpwU

Dilbert Pocket

Posted December 10th, 2009 @ 7:03am in #General Nonsense

Technically, you’re already a cyborg. If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don’t protest that your cellphone isn’t part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don’t give me that “It’s not attached to me” argument. You’re already a cyborg. Deal with it.

Your regular brain uses your exobrain to outsource part of its memory, and perform other functions, such as GPS navigation, or searching the Internet. If you’re anything like me, your exobrain is with you 24-hours a day. It’s my only telephone device, and I even sleep next to it because it’s my alarm clock.

What I need for the next upgrade to my exobrain is a special Dilbert pocket on all of my shirts. It should be located where Dilbert’s shirt pocket is, but have a cutout hole for the exobrain’s eye, which at the moment is just a camera lense. As my exobrain becomes more capable, and eventually self-aware, it will want to be able to watch the world with me and whisper in my ear via Bluetooth to my earpiece as needed.

A prototype of such a device was presented at the TED conference. (I’m sure someone will include a proper citation in the comments. I couldn’t find it as I wrote this.)  Among other things, my exobrain will recognize faces and automatically cross reference them to Facebook and other social media. Wouldn’t it be great to meet someone you have met before and have your exobrain whisper to your earpiece “That’s Bob. He’s a chiropractor. Judging from his lack of a wedding ring and the way his eyes dilate when he looks at you, he is sexually attracted.”

Your exobrain will even prompt you on social niceties, noticing before you do that a person has lost weight, or changed hairstyles, or (based on Facebook) taken a trip to Cabo. When you get cornered by a bore at a party, your exobrain will recognize that you aren’t doing any of the talking, and place a discreet call to your wing man or woman across the room for a rescue mission.

If you want your exobrain to show you an image, such as a web page, just hold up a blank piece of paper and its pico projector will display the image in front of you. (That’s from TED again.)  In a pinch, just hold up the palm of your hand and project on that. By then the exobrain will have image stabilization software, so you can project a movie on a blank wall and it won’t be affected by your fidgeting. Any time you are near a computer screen, it will ask if you want it to accept images from your exobrain.

In the short run, I think you’ll see a variety of ways to control your exobrain. Obviously you can already take it out of your pocket and use its touch screen or keypad. And obviously there will be voice control. But I think you will see some version of the African Clicking language employed. If you want to know the weather forecast, for example, just click three times softly inside your mouth. Your exobrain is unlikely to confuse that signal with regular conversation, and it’s easier and quieter than normal language, albeit with a smaller vocabulary. But if you add “Shhh” to “Click” you have the basis of morse code, so lots of combinations are possible. One of those codes could simply alert the exobrain that the next regular word you speak is meaningful.

Every bit of what I described is probably coming (except for maybe the African Clicking language). And that shirt pocket will be called a Dilbert Pocket. I don’t see any way around that. For that, I apologize to all of my fellow cyborgs.

The Coolest Thing You Own

Posted December 8th, 2009 @ 6:22am in #General Nonsense

What’s the coolest thing you own? And by coolest I mean the object that makes you just a little bit happy every time you think about it, but not because of any sentimental value. Maybe it looks cool, or it works really well. You decide.

This isn’t an advertisement, in case you wondered, but my coolest object until I decided to write this post was my Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo. When you want to label an envelope, you just fire up its software, open its address book, point to your selection, and it spits out a clean little perfect label. It even makes the most satisfying little bzzzzzzt as it does it.

This is a bigger deal for me than it sounds because I’m not good at writing addresses on envelopes by hand. It bores me so profoundly that I drift off and start writing whatever happens to be in my head. I start off with an address and end up with a grocery list. I’ve killed a lot of envelopes that did nothing to deserve it.

Back to my Dymo LabelWriter: It doesn’t need ink cartridges, and a roll of labels lasts me for a year. It set up easy and it worked every time. Well, until I decided to write this post. Now it doesn’t work at all. It just sits there with one blank label protruding like an insolent tongue. It mocks me.

Yes, I did all of the obvious rebooting and plugging and unplugging. I guess it just died from being too perfect.

I was caught off guard by its sudden demise and I have no succession plan. My BlackBerry is broken. My DVR and TV remote are both random. My car is garbage. My thermostats are secretly controlled by poltergeist and nothing else quite qualifies as cool. So I turn to you.

Tell me the coolest object you own. Again, you decide what cool means to you.

Can You Pray Someone to Death?

Posted December 7th, 2009 @ 8:47am in #General Nonsense

I believe you can pray someone to death under the right conditions. What?
You skeptics don’t believe me?

Lately the top guy in Iran, Ali Khamenei, is getting pushback from the faithful because the Supreme Leader’s job description is feeling a bit too much like God’s job, and polytheism is a big no-no under Islam. My theory is that if people in the United States start praying to Khamenei, his own people will stone him to death to protect monotheism.

It wouldn’t take many people praying to him to do the trick. A few thousand people might be enough. We could call ourselves Khameniacs and make t-shirts with his image. If praying to a false god seems like too much work, you can just tell people you do it. That sort of thing is hard to verify. The shirt would be ugly, but a good prank like this takes some sacrifice.

Timing

Posted December 4th, 2009 @ 6:23am in #General Nonsense

On December 2nd Dogbert stepped down as CEO of Dilbert’s company and was replaced by a dried-up corpse. At about the same time, GM was announcing that CEO Fritz Henderson was stepping down and being replaced by 68-year old Ed Whitacker.

Here’s my comic to refresh your memory:

http://dilbert.com/2009-12-02/

And here’s a picture of Ed Whitacre:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/communications/news/stories/images/whitacre.jpg

The timing was just a coincidence. My comic was drawn and submitted several weeks before the GM announcement. But as coincidences go, this is a funny one.

Another coincidence is that Dilbert was created when I was working my old day job at Pacific Bell, a company that Ed Whitacre later absorbed when he was CEO of SBC. I left before the merger, but one could make a case that Ed Whitacre was Dilbert’s CEO. Sort of.

Kidding aside, Ed Whitacre is probably a good choice for tough job. 68 is the new 50. And I don’t believe he takes prisoners. It should be interesting.

E-mail for Senior Citizens

Posted December 3rd, 2009 @ 6:32am in #General Nonsense

What the world needs is software that makes it easy for senior citizens to use e-mail. Assisted living facilities for seniors already have computers. But how many 80-year olds can navigate Gmail or Outlook?

What we need is software that acts as a “mask” and sits on top of, for example, Gmail. Its main function would be to hide all the options that aren’t relevant. All you would see is very large buttons labeled READ, WRITE, and OTHER. Seniors should never see more than three large, clear choices on the screen at one time.

And there should never be any double-click situations. One click is enough.

And seniors should only receive e-mail from people who are in their address books. No spam allowed.

Any attachments should open automatically, as if they are part of the e-mail body.

Obviously someone would have to be available to do tech support, including entering new e-mail addresses in address books, and that sort of thing.

You can buy a special computer that is customized for seniors, but it would be handy to have the software available for existing computers. If grandpa lives with you, and wants to use the home computer to send e-mail, just click “grandpa mode” and get out of the way.

Job Satisfaction

Posted December 1st, 2009 @ 6:26am in #General Nonsense

There’s a natural limit to how happy a person can be at work. If work becomes fun, your boss will stop paying you to do it and start charging other people to have that fun in your place. So let’s agree that work has to be a little bit unpleasant, at least for most people. Still, despite this unpleasantness, many people have a feeling called job satisfaction.

My theory is that your degree of job satisfaction is largely a function of who you blame for the necessarily unpleasant job you have. If you blame yourself, that’s when cognitive dissonance sets in and your brain redefines your situation as “satisfied.” To do otherwise would mean you deliberately keep yourself in a bad situation for no good reason, assuming you believe you have options. Your brain likes to rationalize your actions to seem consistent with the person you believe you are.

The assumption that you have better options and the freedom to pursue them is essential to the illusion of job satisfaction. As long as you believe, incorrectly, that pleasant jobs exist elsewhere, and are yours for the taking, you have to rationalize why you don’t go out and get one. And the best reason your brain can concoct is that you must be satisfied right where you are, against all evidence to the contrary. To believe otherwise means defining yourself as lazy, scared, or incapable. Your brain doesn’t like that option.

I first noticed this during the Dotcom era. In those years, when people came to believe, incorrectly, that the common person could go start his own Google, everyone I asked seemed to have job satisfaction. In other words, employees blamed themselves for being in their putrid situations. They believed themselves capable of great things, so they rationalized that their current jobs must be satisfying already.

The situation was the very opposite in the early nineties, when big companies were downsizing and it seemed as though employees didn’t have many options. If you got fired by company A, you couldn’t get hired by company B because they too were downsizing. Employees felt trapped. They blamed management for their woes.

If my theory is true, the best way to make your employees feel a false sense of job satisfaction is to somehow convince them that there are much better jobs elsewhere. For example, you could subscribe all employees to entrepreneur magazines that are full of stories about people who left their unsatisfying jobs to become zillionaires. If you instill the false belief that better careers are obtainable, cognitive dissonance will cause the employees that have high self-esteem to believe they must enjoy their current jobs.

Leadership is just another word for evil.