Public Restroom Rules [PIC]

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought public restrooms were gross. Oh there are exceptions of course: I was at Disney World back in May, and the public restrooms there are so clean, they make you feel as you could almost drink directly from the urinals… almost! But if you’re NOT Disney World, here’s a sign you might want to put up on display in your restrooms. Who knows, it might actually make a difference.

POO-DOO-KEN!

[Via Nerdist]


Choose Your Own Adventure: The Case Of The Patent Application

1) You are an employee of the United States Patent Office. Early one sunny morning you are asked to examine a patent claim from IBM. Its first claim reads:

A method for selecting a logical branch in a storyline among a plurality of available storyline branches on a computing device, based on voters’ votes, comprising: obtaining and accumulating, the votes from the voters on a computing device for at least one of the plurality of available storyline branches, during the presentation of the storyline; selectively excluding votes, using the computing device, based on voter characteristics from the accumulated votes for a specific storyline branch; multiplying, using the computing device, at least one received vote by a weight factor based on voter characteristics, the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing; calculating, using the computing device, a total for the accumulated and weighted votes; and determining, using the computing device, a winning tally that corresponds to one of the plurality of available storyline branches; selecting and presenting, using the computing device, at least one of the available storyline branches with the winning tally as a future storyline branch during the presentation of the storyline, and generating, using the computing device, a media version matrix specifying a selected storyline having a particular set of logical branches selected by the voting for later use and retrieval, by recording each selected corresponding storyline branch of the plurality of available storyline branches on the computing device.

If you understand this, turn to 2. If not, turn to 3.

2) You now have to consider if this sounds at all familiar. Does it remind you of the popular children’s book series Choose Your Own Adventure? If so, turn to 4. If not, turn to 5.

3) Never mind. You ask the geek working at the next cubicle if they can help you. After debating the different approaches to the problem of the lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English, they explain that IBM is attempting to patent the idea of having audiences vote on how a movie should progress at certain stages, thus giving them a limited degree of control over the presentation. You thank them for their help. Turn to 2.

4) A co-worker walks past your cubicle and notes that you are reading the Wikipedia page for Choose Your Own Adventure. She asks exactly what type of Choose Your Own Adventure fan you are? If you reply “Just casual, used to read it as a kid”, turn to 6. If you reply “Hardcore geek level of course”, turn to 7.

5) Seriously, you’ve not heard of Choose Your Own Adventure? Man, I feel old today. Anyhow, after a little research you discover it is a series of books first published in 1979 that feature non-linear structures and instead allow the user to make multiple decisions as they read, creating a wide range of possible story paths. When you have finished laughing at how easily impressed children of the 1980s were, turn to 6.

6) After examining the similarities between the book series and the IBM proposal, you conclude that there is a difference: IBM is proposing to have an audience vote on the decision, rather than it being down to a single reader or viewer. If you think this sounds original, turn to 8. If you suspect its been done before, turn to 9.

7) Your coworker gleefully exclaims “Oh wow, you are going to LOVE this. There’s a site that has a graphical analysis of the organizational structure of each book!” You bookmark the site (or open it in a new tab), then turn to 6.

8) It appears that you have little reason to object to this patent. Before you can give it approval, the clock on your office wall strikes noon and you head out to lunch. As you wait for your order to arrive, you get chatting to the cute Texan blond behind the counter about your day’s work. They remember seeing something similar done before at SXSW. You head back to work with a mental note to check it out. If you remember to do so, turn to 10. If you just want to get the paperwork out of the way, turn to 11.

9) You are correct in your suspicions. For example, a play by British author Jeffrey Archer was based around a courtroom trial, with the audience playing the role of a jury. Their verdict decided which of two endings played as the final act. However, that was a play and this was a movie. Turn to 8.

10) You carry out a search on your favorite internet search engine and discover that an “interactive decision” movie, The Weathered Underground was first screened in 2007 with the decisions made by the live audience. It then had a 2010 DVD release. As well as decisions affecting which of 30 endings appears, the path chosen by the viewer or viewers also decides which genre’s style and tone has the biggest influence on the scenes that appear. You have a big decision to make. Turn to 12.

11) You rubber stamp the approval. IBM now has the patent on interactive storytelling. As you ride the subway home, geeks in their 30s point you out. You hear mutterings of “That’s the one who sold out our childhood.” You hang your head in shame. THE END.

12) Having researched the topic, you must now decide whether or not to approve the patent. If you think IBM’s claims sound perfectly reasonable and they have indeed created a truly new idea, turn to 11. If you think the claim is ridiculous and there are plenty of examples of prior use showing IBM is not a true originator, turn to 13.

13) You place the patent application on the reject spike. As you do so, IBM lawyers race into the room. This man informs you that your childish nostalgia does not outweigh the power of big business. He goes on to note that if IBM claims to have created an original concept, they should be given the benefit of the doubt. As he speaks of the lawsuit coming your way, your skin begins to feel dry. You turn to look in the mirror and, to your horror, discover that your face is turning wrinkled. Your hair lengthens, turns gray, then begins to drop away. Soon you begin to resemble a prune, and then a deflated football. Finally you turn to dust and fall to the floor in a pile before being blown away by the wind created by the lawyer’s monologue.

You chose…. poorly. THE END.

The price of love: two friends

Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and marks any heart not tough enough or strong enough to take a lot of pain.

But what the Everly Brothers, Nazareth, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons and Roy Orbison all omitted to mention is that love costs you two close friends.

That’s the conclusion of research at Oxford University that was presented at the British Science Festival this week. It came in a presentation by Professor Robin Dunbar, whose area of expertise includes social networking, whether that be in the stone age or the cyber age.

Dunbar is best known for his previous studies showing that the average person can maintain a basic level of active friendship with a maximum of around 150 people (which appears to be borne out by Facebook user statistics.) That’s not a social constraint, but rather a physical limit of the neocortex, the brain section that covers conscious thought.

He’s also argued that people have two inner circles of friends: those we see in person occasionally and would be particularly upset if they died, and those we see regularly and would turn to in a crisis. The latter group is usually around four to six people.

The new research looked at those groups among people who had begun a new romantic relationship. It found that on average those who had found love had four in the group, while those who didn’t had 5. Bearing in mind that the group of four includes the new partner, that means two people have been dropped.

According to Dunbar, the most likely explanation is that people spend so much time with their new partner that it reduces the frequency with which they meet with other close friends, to the point that that friendship degenerates. The people remain friends, but the relationship falls into the looser secondary category.

Dunbar also reported a possible reason why men are more likely to have a greater number of Facebook friends than women. He said that women tend to use the site to keep in touch with “genuine” friends from real life, while men are more likely to add people to boost their numbers. That isn’t just pure male competitiveness though: men are particularly likely to add women they don’t necessarily know well offline because having a lot of female Facebook friends may make them appear more attractive to women seeking a mate.

(Disclosure: The author’s wife is an employee of the British Science Association, which organizes the British Science Festival.)

Fake your online death and move to New Zealand

Okay, this is a weird one. Frank Ahearn, an expert in “disappearing” – the art of creating false paper trails and deleting your identity so that you cannot be traced – has written a book and conducted an interview with KiwiFM, a radio station based in New Zealand, on how, exactly, to “fake your death,” or more accurately, to sever all ties to the people who know you – not a literal faking of death. So long as you don’t travel using a fraudulent identity or defraud insurance companies or the like, “disappearing” remains an option for people who believe they have no other option but to start their lives over.

In the following video, the people from TVNZ’s “Close Up” interview Frank. At 1:39, he suggests that you could use disposable memory sticks with this advice:

“Not that I’d ever suggest this, but you could actually wrap it up and stick it in your anus and hide it.”

In fact, Ahearn suggests that the privacy-concerns of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and Google can, in fact, be used as a “double edged sword” – yes, people can use it to track you, but you can also use it to disseminate false information.

With the warning that “your old life and new life must never connect,” Ahearn’s advice is to run to New Zealand, which is an English-speaking country that is far away and has great beaches.

All this is true, of course. New Zealand takes at least 13 hours to reach from LA, it is primarily English speaking, and it does, of course, have beautiful beaches, including the beaches at Mt. Maunganui, which I can tell you from personal experience, are absolutely divine.

However, anyone expecting New Zealand to be technologically remote will find that the country remains just as much a technologically connected society as anywhere else, and in fact, since Kiwis do a great deal of overseas travel, they rely greatly on social networks to keep up with friends overseas and across the country.