XKCD and the Dictionary of Numbers

There are probably a few poor lost souls out there who have never heard of xkcd, so I am reposting a link to the most recent blag here as I found it simply awesome and wanted to share.  XKCD is full of humour and interesting useful things including one of my favourites, the "What If?" and in particular, "Relativistic Baseball".  Science can be fun.

This post discusses a fantastic little Chrome extension written by Glen Chiacchieri, that helps put some context to the numbers you read on the web.  I agree with the author who said "I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own.".  It is true and annoying and this little extension solves the problem nicely.  This morning as I was reading through the daily news updates, I came across this: "…employing 1,500 people [≈ population of Christmas Island (nation)].".  That part I highlighted in red is the added clarification from the Dictionary of Numbers and it is very helpful.

While 1500 is not a hard number to visualize, 17Billion is.  So is $12 Trillion, the current approximation of the US Public debt.  Isn't it helpful to know that $12 Trillion is also roughly equivalent to all the Fortune 500 revenues for 2011, but that is a whole other blog and conversation.

Anyway, if you are a Chrome user, I recommend heading to the Chrome store and installing this extension.  I found it useful.  Here is a convenient link to take you right there. CLICK ME
I also highly recommend making XKCD one of your common bookmarks because, well, science should be fun.


Be awesome - Change the world.

Because Chickens Don't Drive Tractors

Have you ever witnessed (or been) a parent trying to explain to a 4 year old that cowboys don't wear tiaras or that chickens don't drive tractors?  Why interfere with that creative play in the first place?  Children learn through play and as we get older, we should continue to learn through play because it is the most efficient way to sync all your senses to one thought or concept.  Yet at some point we arbitrarily decide to tell our children that animals can not really talk, dragons only live in fairy tales and only farmers drive tractors.

Why?

Why is it so important for us to conform to a societal view of reality and shun any creative thought that conflicts with that? Why do we force our children to play and dream and be creative within hard boundaries?

We want our children to be creative as long as it is within the norm.  

     "You can colour the picture but stay in the lines."

     "You can paint the landscape, but make sure the sky is blue."  

     "You can play cowboy, but cowboys don't wear tiaras."

      But… Constrain… Shackle… Contain...

As someone who is currently sifting trough resumes trying to hire creative engineers, I am saddened by the alarming number of adults who are afraid to colour outside the lines.  I want dragon slayers and ninjas.  I want radical thinkers who are ok with chickens driving tractors.  Where are all the WIlly Wonkas?

In business  the common mantra is "think outside the box", yet most companies really do not want that.  They want employees who will find creative ways of doing business and making money that are not the standard, but they draw the line at radical thought.  If someone who worked for you said " hey, lets just give our product away to a bunch of people in order to drive sales revenue" you would likely think they were insane.  

Yet that is exactly what Apple did in the early 1980's and it was brilliant.  I lived through it and even as a teenager I saw what they were doing and thought it was brilliant then too.  Give schools free computers and outfit them with computer labs.  Schools never have any money and at that time they were screaming for this new technology, yet no one was willing to provide the tools. Apple saw an opportunity to create a market and took the radical move to provide schools with computer labs at zero cost or heavily discounted rates.  IBM had a fit, but they could have never been able to make that decision to colour outside the lines the way Jobs and Wozniak did.  The result was a whole generation of children who fell in love with computers, learned how to use them and went home asking their parents to buy one. Instant market place.

Nintendo threw out the rule book with the Wii when they said "why not just make the player the controller?".  Salesforce took on the entire software universe when they said (and I paraphrase)  "people should never have to buy software in order to use its functions".  Netflix upset the whole movie rental industry by offering on-demand services to a central library of entertainment for the price of a single movie rental.

So there are definitely collections of dreamers and dragon slayers out there, but they are rare and I think that is because we keep telling our children that dragons only live in fairy tales.  We passively crush their creative spirit into a neat package we can cope with in our busy, professional, reality-driven lives.  Blue sky we can deal with, but pink oceans don't make sense.  Green grass is okay, but cows with six legs are not. 

Someday some little girl or boy will grow up to become an engineer working for a company developing safety equipment for farm vehicles.  They will examine all the possible dangers but miss the fact that a chicken could possibly get into the cab and accidentally press important buttons.  He or she will miss the possibility because they they were told as a toddler playing with farm toys that chickens don't drive tractors.

Dream, Believe, Dare, Do!

Another day, another Baktun

In spite of the best efforts of Hollywood and shock media, December 21st came and went without catastrophe  or a bang, or even a wimper.  Nope - aside from a raft of humorous Facebook posts, it was not much more that the scheduled winter solstice exactly as predicted.  So the thirteenth long-count of the Mayan calendar comes to an end exactly 144,000 solar days (a Baktun) since the last one started, and we start counting again. This marks the end of the first Great Cycle and presumably the beginning of another. I want to believe the rest of their predictions are accurate as well, in particular the regeneration of the cosmos and the re-ordering of space and time.  It couldn't come soon enough - things have been a little chaotic lately, and not in a good way.

Really, what is wrong with people? Do we crave chaos, and drama so much that we have to twist every amazing feat of science and math into a horrific apocalyptic event?  Okay, well, I guess we know the answer to that is yes.  It is disappointing none the less to know that so much misinformation has clouded the fact that 3400 years ago, the Mayan people were able to build a calendar that accurately predicted every solar and lunar event in a repeating 5125 year time loop.  How did we miss that?  I mean as a society - how is that not the front page news?

There is a great post from NASA here with a commentary on what we should really be talking about.  The world didn't end because that was never the plan.  The calendar did not end, it just cycled, like the one on your office wall does every January 1st. The next 5125 year cycle in our history is just a few days old now and we should be celebrating the coming of the new age.  That is not fringe level crazy talk, that is science.

As we wind down the current version of our modern Gregorian calendar and turn the page on yet another one, I have to wonder how many other ancient sciences we have dismissed and forgotten because they were not convenient to our common religious or political views.  I have to wonder if there are technologies we buried a millennia ago in favor of less accurate, but more socially acceptable ones.  Maybe this Baktun we will set things right and figure it out.


EOF

$>ReadyPlayerOne__

OMG.

I finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline about one o'clock this morning and I would have blogged about it immediately if I was not seriously in need of sleep.  I just could not put it down.  I am already considering reading it again sometime this week.

This is the best cyberpunk novel I have read is quite a while and is likely the best book of any kind I have ever read.  I firmly believe Ready Player One is this generation's Neruomancer or Snow Crash.  Like those other two icons of cyberpunk, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Ernest Cline has completely captured the essence of the technology revolution.   The prose is easily readable, the references are relevant and the flow is perfect - every chapter is a cliff hanger.  

I seriously could not put this book down.  At one point on an earlier evening at about midnight, my eyes were blurry and I was fighting off sleep.  Just as I was ready to put the book aside for the night I read the line:

        I lie awake, staring out at the bleakness of Megadon.  

        City and sky become one, merging into a single plane, a vast sea of unbroken grey.

        The Twin Moons, just two pale orbs as they trace their way across the steely sky. 

Recognizing the stanza above from one of my favourite Rush albums, I got up, splashed water on my face and read for another 2 hours before finally being pulled unwillingly into the realm of sleep - book still in my hand.

Cline has managed to touch on the very heart of the technology revolution - not inventing an unimaginable future, but building a realistic model based on the real events of the past.  There are hundreds of references to 1980's pop culture, digital revolution, music, books, movies, and the general philosophy shift that was happening at that time.  That decade was a pivotal point in history on all facets and Cline has capitalized on that while speaking directly to the geeks of that generation.  From WarGames to Pat Benatar to Japanese Anime, this book touches every aspect of the 1980s revolution and does it with very close attention to detail.

That is the thing the bothers me the most about books and movies about technology - the accuracy.  When I watch a show or read a book that tries to sound technical, but their tech adviser is obviously uneducated, I get completely turned off.  Ready Player One has NONE of that, even down to the detail of serial numbers of console games.  This guy is a geek god.

If you are a geek and you lived through the eighties, drop everything and go buy this book now.  Seriously.  If you must actually walk to a physical bookstore, then do so as soon as possible, but as the book reminds us "Going outside is highly overrated".  Even if you have never heard of Zaxxon or Qbert, if you have any interest in reading an amazingly well written book and have any interest at all in technology, then you are welcome to wait a day or so, but then go get a copy and read it anyway - you will not be disappointed.

Okay, that is enough rant ... I have to go re-read that book now.

EOF__

Ode to the Dash8

This past week I was on a business trip that had me on six different flight segments.  That in itself is not all that unusual, but three of those flights were on "Dash8" aircraft.  I fly on these quite a bit and I started to wonder about the popularity of this aircraft, so I thought I would do and share some research.

I know that somewhere in my travels, I have heard that the "Dash8" (shown at left) was actually an acronym for "de Havilland Air Short Haul version 8 (D.A.S.H.8), but I have found no evidence that is actually true, however it certainly could be from the information I uncovered.  Officially the plane is called a "Dash8" because the official designation is DHC-8 (pronounced: Dee Aech See DASH eight) and it has no other nickname like most of it's predecessors the DHC-1 through DHC-7.  The Dash8's immediate predecessor, the DHC-7 was also referred to by a similar name, "Dash7" and was built as a commercial carrier with a very Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) capability.  Fully loaded, it could lift off in only 610 metres (about 2000 ft) which is pretty amazing for any commercial aircraft.

   

The earlier DHC-6 (image on right) is more commonly known as the "Twin Otter" which will be very familiar to people who often take short hauls from Vancouver to Victoria, or from Toronto to Ottawa.  These commercial "Short Hauls" are a difficult market niche for aircraft manufacturers because they have to balance agility with maintenance costs.  The Dash-7 was popular at the time, but was quickly replaced by the Dash-8 due to it's lower maintenance costs and comparable STOL capability.  The Dash-8 can lift off in only 910 metres of runway (about 3000ft) which is considerably less than the comparably sized CRJ200 which requires about double that (1835 metres).


The "short haul" legacy of the Dash-8 has a familiar successful legacy in the DHC-5 (left) which people in forest fire territory will recognize as the "Buffalo" as well as the DHC-4 "Caribou" (shown below) that earned a place in history for short haul work supplying troops in Vietnam.


The Dash-8 actually comes in 4 distinct flavours including the popular Q400 which is actually the "Dash-8 type 400", a 78 passenger version of the original.  Even Westjet, who's entire fleet consists of Boeing 737's, just placed a conditional order for twenty Q400s to add to their fleet.  Bombardier passed the 1000 unit mark of deliveries of "dash8" aircraft over 2 years ago and they still keep shipping.

An interesting note to this is that even though the Dash8-400 (AKA the Q400) is a brand new aircraft, the Dash8-100 first shipped in 1983 - Twenty Nine years ago - and many of those early birds are still in the air (I think I was on one today).

Anyway, I spend quite a bit of time in that particular make of aircraft and thought I might share some of the detail around why it is so pervasive in the short haul markets.

Hope you had fun reading about it :)

WAKE UP CANADA!

Adding my voice to the many thousands who are not being heard by our own government.


Are you aware your country was just sold to China?

Our government is about to pass a binding agreement that will extend for the next 31 years and give CHINA extensive rights inside CANADA to the point of potentially being non-constitutional. This was supposed to go into effect November 1, 2012 and you were never even asked your opinion. So much for 'democracy'.  Final ratification has apparently been delayed to November 11, so your voice can still be heard, but stopping this abomination is unlikely.

This '...will permit Chinese state-owned corporations to push through projects that fail to meet Canadian regulatory standards, to use Chinese “guest workers,” and to sue any government that gets in the way.' -Yukon News

This is the biggest trade agreement since NAFTA and you probably did not even know it was happening. The rampant corruption in the Federal government continues unchecked.

If you are Canadian, this should terrify you because your own federal government has just effectively given your job and your children's hopes for the future away to the Chinese.

If you are American, this should terrify you because this effectively sells out all Canadian business to the Chinese government so now the Chinese are ON YOU BACK DOORSTEP!

I fell like I'm taking crazy pills.

Read more and educate yourself then sign a petition, write a letter, call your MP.  This insanity needs to stop.

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/canada-china-fippa-agreement-unconstitutional-treaty-law-expert-says 

http://yukon-news.com/opinions/columns/30665/

http://www.change.org/en-CA/petitions/prime-minister-harper-stop-fippa-deal-with-china-now-and-allow-debate-in-house-of-commons

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/christophermajka/2012/11/resource-capitulation-fippa-fibs-and-canadian-sellouts-part-

http://www.watershedsentinel.ca/content/you-can-still-comment-environmental-assessment-canada-china-fipafippa

http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/agr-acc/fipa-apie/china-text-chine.aspx?lang=en&view=d

Managing White Space

Musicians get it.  

      Creative writers understand it.  

                   Marketing folks thrive on it.  

White space is a concept known in many fields for a number of reasons, but the underlying theme is always to give a mental pause.  In music, a phrase of notes, a movement, can be separated from another with a rest or a pause.  The pause gives your mind time to absorb the melody and accept a change of direction.  In creative writing, whitespace takes the form of blank lines, paragraph markers and tabs.  You can express a great deal in a written story by adding an extra blank line or space in just the right place.  Marketing people live by whitespace. This is why billboards are not crammed with images, but rather have a few select targeted images and words surrounded by clear space. Clarity. White space.

In the practice of people management, the concept of white space is also important.  Over the years I have made a great deal of mistakes and learned from them the hard way.  One of these things was an understanding that people need processing time, they need to gather information, sort it, sleep on it, let all the pieces fall into place.  Several times in my career, I have taken on a leadership role with a team of people who needed some redirection - usually because the company direction and goals were changing.  In these cases it is more important than ever to tread softly, but in all cases when taking on a new leadership role, it is important not to make sudden changes.  After all, the team already has one huge change to deal with  - you.

What I have found is that there is always some upheaval in the initial days, just because you have taken on this new role.  Even if the team knew you before, the relationship changes, the politics have to be recalculated, the pieces all need to be resorted.  What people need is some white space.  People need some mental time to process the change and understand that there is no threat to them or their families or station.  That is what it is really all about when you think about it - 60,000 years of evolution and we still think about tribe hierarchy and wether the new leader is going to cut off your head or leave you for jackal food in the desert.

So what to do in that first several days while you are leaving your new team with whitespace to clear their thoughts?  You ask questions, learn their strengths, research the landscape and do your best to understand the challenges that need to be addressed in the next steps.  No sane person expects a new manager to make immediate changes because that always leads to failure.  People need the clarity of whitespace in between the big announcement that you have taken on the job and the time you need to act on that responsibility, there needs to be some time for processing.  White space.

Another important lesson I have learned is that this pattern repeats when major changes occur even after you have been leading a team for a long time.  When there is a large adjustment to make, make it - but make it with clarity and with all the information, then leave people with time and space to process.  People need whitespace and your job as a manager it to keep it in it's place. 

Be awesome change the world.