I went to the United States Post Office the other day to do $1.56 of first class business. Much to my amused surprise, in the coins I got back was a Canadian cent. It isn't exactly rare to get Canadian money mixed in change, especially in a Northern state like Minnesota, but it was a bit odd for a US government office to be using it!

When I sorted it out back home, flipping it resulted in a characteristic ~12kHz ring like an older US penny makes. In case you weren't aware, the US penny changed composition in 1982 and the mainly-zinc newer ones ring flat (if at all) while the mainly-copper older ones have a nice sharp tone. This particular Canadian cent was from 1979, and so I naturally wondered how much copper it had in it.

The reason it matters is that a copper penny's metal value exceeds its face value. Although it is illegal to do so currently, melting them down would net you more money than spending them; roughly 2 cents for every penny. The same should be true if a 1979 Canadian penny contains enough copper, plus I should be able to melt foreign currency with impunity! My go-to site for data on this is Coinflation, and they even helpfully have a page that lists Canadian coin melt values. Metal prices fluctuate, but as of this writing that 1 cent Canadian is worth 2.3 cents US. Thanks, Post Office, for the extra 1.3 cents!

If you've surmised by this point that my main point wasn't going to be about netting a cool supra-cent profit, congratulations. No, my greater point hidden in there is that it is dumb to have laws against doing sensible things. It used to be that the metal value of our money was the value. We had currency backed by silver and gold, but for some reason we not only switched to fiat value, we went and outlawed actually using the metal value for the lowest denomination coin we have. As if that weren't bad enough, even the Nickel has a metal value that often floats above 5 cents.

And that leads us to the reason this is in the Kill It With Fire section. There have long been calls to eliminate the Penny, but I'm going to take it the extra step and say we might as well do the Impossibly Stupid thing and eliminate 5 cent coins as well. The difference in value for most business transactions in truncating the total to the nearest 10 cents is going to be less than a single percent, and that's only necessary for paying in cash! They can still price individual items down to the cent, or even the sub-cent pricing that gasoline has long been sold at. Charge a credit card for as exact an amount as you wish but, from a coinage perspective, why not set the baseline at a dime?

Google may seem like they're riding high right now, but there are cracks in their armor that show more vulnerability than you might realize. In truth, this post isn't going to have much to do with Google. It's mainly about how impossibly stupid version numbers have become. Google is only the poster child for this insanity, as evidenced by their recent releases of Google Earth:

• 5.1.3506.3999
• 5.0.11733.9347
• 5.0.11729.1014
• 5.0.11337.1968
• 4.3.7284.3916
• 4.3.7204.836
• 4.3.7191.6508
• 4.3
• 4.2.205.5730
• 4.2.198.2451

One of those versions is not like the others, but I'm sure Google fired the person who was reasonable enough to mark a release with something as straightforward as 4.3. If Google is showing any signs of weakness it's in doing things like that; they don't fundamentally understand how normal people think about technology (version numbers, in this particular instance).

Google isn't quite the worst offender, either; not if length is the measure. Part of my day job is keeping a handle on software releases over on Mac Aggregate Tracker. Here is a database extract of what some software developers think is reasonable for version numbers:

• Abstracter → 1.2.0(tiger 10.4 compatible)
• X-Plane → 7.62.0-Release-Candidate-2
• OmniPlan → 1.0.0release candidate 1
• iLiner → 2.0.2(tiger compatible)
• yaced → 22.0.50(cvs20050428)
• iRemindU → 2.0.0beta [build 75]
• Whole Platform → 1.0.0.v20090206-1802
• PMX → 2.28.0build 20050928
• jGameBase → 0.27.0dev2007-05-19
• iSVN → 0.9.5a1 (build 427)
• ComicBookLover → 1.0.0build 13 (rc1)
• checkBox™ → 1.4.5_1051_update1
• Ventrilo → 2.3.2.prototype.14
• Tangelo → 1.5.0public beta 2
• Rhapsody → 1.0.0public beta 1
• RPL/2 → 4.0.0.prerelease.9
• Life Record → 2.01.0core edition

That's a lot to chew on, maybe enough for a separate post, so let's try to focus on what Google has done wrong in hopes that it will inform some of these other developers. So, back at the top, we had the last 10 releases of Google Earth. Here's how they could have looked if they were done by someone who actually understood people:

• 5.1
• 5.0.2
• 5.0.1
• 5.0
• 4.3.3
• 4.3.2
• 4.3.1
• 4.3
• 4.2.2
• 4.2.1

Seriously, would that have killed some engineer in Mountain View? Is there some kind of geek cred that I'm unaware of which is linked to the number of digits and/or points that are in there? Are we in the middle of some kind of underground version turf war? And lest you think that I'm only being a slave to the tradition of either major.minor.bugfix or year-month-day-revision, let me detail the reason why some of these outlandish version numbers are so dumb.

I don't care how you run your company!

As a software user, I just want to use the software that gets released and know whether or not the version I have is outdated. For that, I don't need a litany of minutia about every time you did a build or checked it into CVS or deemed it development/beta/release quality. At the point I get it, none of those things matter to me.

Even worse, I'm now in the position of having to figure out if whatever random internal representation you used is significant enough for me to care about. Should I really be expected to puzzle out whether the jump from 5.0.11729.1014 to 5.0.11733.9347 is worth the hassle of an upgrade, or maybe I'm good just sticking with 5.0.11337.1968 until you decide to release some version that contains pi or e or some other irrational number that looks downright rational compared to the numbers you are thinking up.

So for the love of all things human, start acting as if people matter before you flood them with meaningless data. Give us something useful, something reasonable, so that we can figure out where we stand on our own. If not for the reputation of your own company, then for the collective sanity of your older relatives who have a hard enough time trying to figure out this newfangled technology without you slapping on an extra 09f9110-29.d74 e35b.d84156(c5635688c0) for no good reason.

From a sanitary perspective, bathroom design is impossibly stupid. Especially public bathrooms. Here is an outline of the typical visit:

1. Open/close an outer door and, on occasion, an inner door
2. Open/close a stall door (optional)
3. Unfasten various buttons/zippers/buckles/straps
4. Pull/push clothing up/down/to the side
5. DO YOUR DIRTY, DIRTY BUSINESS
6. Pull/push clothing up/down/to the side
7. Fasten various buttons/zippers/buckles/straps
8. Flush (may optionally be done earlier/automatically)
9. Open stall door (optional)
10. Wash/dry your hands
11. Open the inner/outer door(s)

Even neglecting the fact that some other people might not wash their hands you still have 2-4 steps of touching things while UNCLEAN. And they're not just things in the bathroom, but things on your person that you leave the bathroom with! In the interest of improving the situation, lets take a look at the worst pieces of the puzzle from a stupid perspective.

Doors

How dirty they get depends a great deal on how much they have to be manipulated. If you have to twist knobs and locks, it's going to result in a lot more contact than a simple push door would. Also in question is how clean you can trust hands to be when entering and exiting the bathroom. If you can't trust everyone to wash their hands, I think most people would say the outside mechanisms are cleaner than the inside mechanisms.

Clothing, and yet not

Seems like too big a task to "redesign" how we undress, so we have to manipulate another part of the equation. The most obvious way is to introduce a way to wash up before we put everything back in place. This can be accomplished by using a toilet sink, although there doesn't seem to be a good urinal equivalent at this time.

So, for the most part, problem solved. Here is the updated procedure, which only required the most modest of changes:

1. Pull open the bathroom door(s), which close on their own
2. Close a stall door (optional)
3. Unfasten various buttons/zippers/buckles/straps
4. Pull/push clothing up/down/to the side
5. DO YOUR DIRTY, DIRTY BUSINESS
6. Wash/dry your hands
7. Pull/push clothing up/down/to the side
8. Fasten various buttons/zippers/buckles/straps
9. Flush (may optionally be done earlier/automatically)
10. Open stall door (optional) with a push mechanism that can (ideally) be operated by foot
11. Push open the inner/outer door(s), also (ideally) by foot

Of course, as far as dealing with the non-hand washers who are also off touching other things around the workplace, some parts are left as an exercise to the reader.

No, this isn't a post with my deep insights into an vapid teen show. It isn't even a post about how cheap I am to be looking for free shows on iTunes. What this is a post about is how awful fake lighting has ruined too many things. I blame Apple for starting it with their lickable interface, eventually resulting in this terrible result I saw last week:

Yes, what you see outlined in red is indeed one fake reflection that is again reflected by another fake reflection. Apparently ABC thought the effect was so cool that they slapped it on their own icons without giving any thought to how overused it is.

In yellow you'll see common examples of interface glare. I understand that it's a stylistic choice, but can we at least all agree that it's just a bit silly to add fake glare to a screen which we've probably put a significant effort into positioning so that it doesn't get washed out by real glare?

So until an OS supports genuine 3D widgets that properly ray trace user-defined light sources, let up a little on the fake stuff. I know I don't have a full 10 things outlined in this one picture that are deserving of hatred, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find at least 4 more. They need not even be in iTunes. What interface eye candy have you seen that is starting to look more like rot and decay?

Earlier this week Apple announced MacBooks now came with an SD slot. They still did not announce any Blu-ray support, despite being a major Blu-ray Disc Association member. Just like when they standardized on USB or when they ditched the floppy, this is telling.

Whatever you think of Apple, as a system company they sure have a history of doing a good job building things people (will) want. SD cards have done a pretty good job of taking over the flash memory market, second only to thumb drives. The addition of a slot on portables is a welcome start for Apple, and probably means similar support on other systems in the future.

So why is that a nail in the coffin of Blu-ray or, worse, all optical media? It's just Apple reading the writing on the wall. The reality is that optical media has not been keeping up with the rapid advances of other storage technology. Even if HVD were readily available today it would be lagging behind.

Let's put it into perspective using the Apple history timeline. The first Mac that shipped with a CD-ROM was the Performa 600. It also shipped with a whopping 80MB hard drive, making optical storage 7.5 times more dense than common magnetic technology of the time. By the time Apple was shipping Macs with DVD drives, hard drives were around 15GB, eroding optical to 1/3 the relative capacity. Today Apple ships iMacs with around 500GB hard drives, making Blu-ray (at best) only 1/10th the size. At $5 for a 25GB BD-R disc, you'll spend $100 on media alone if you wanted to back up that hard drive to Blu-ray, whereas a second 500MB hard drive would only cost you $60.

"But, Impossibly Stupid", you say, "isn't flash memory usually smaller and more expensive than Blu-ray?" Maybe. SD cards in their sweet spot range (currently 8-16GB) are around $2/GB compared to just $0.2/GB for the BD-R media. While the SD card can be used over and over, though, the Blu-ray disc is write-once and the burn could fail. That's something that adds up at $5 a pop. You also have to factor in the price of the Blu-ray drive itself, which is going to add $100-200 as an optional offering. You'd come out ahead after you burn your first 100GB, but only if you never want to save that data ever again.

As you can see, optical is just getting squeezed too much to have a place on the desktop. For a large volume of data, hard drives have it beat in cost. For portability, flash memory is going to keep making gains. For even smaller amounts of data, the Internet has filled the role that DVDs and CDs used to take. Apple hasn't yet killed optical media like it killed the floppy, but they did fire a warning shot this week, and without some breakthrough technology that'll put 10TB on a disc for under $100 in the next 3 years, optical storage needs to die.

How does a CEO prove themselves so terminally clueless that investors should sphincter-pucker on all funding? We7's Steve Purdham has the answer for you:

Why do you actually need to have something downloaded on your PC? The streaming idea is really the future.

Everyone who didn't try to stop him from saying that needs to be fired. And not the small kind of fired, either, but the should-never-be-in-a-position-of-authority-ever-again-and-would-you-like-fries-with-that kind of fired. On the off chance you don't know why, allow me to spell it out.

Streaming is downloading!

It's not just downloading, it's requiring a download every time you want to play something. It's requiring sufficient bandwidth to download everything in real time. It's requiring a constant connection to download without error. All because you don't want to use pennies in disk space? A whole lot of people have to be a whole lot of ignorant about the state of technology if that's the corporate mindset surrounding these services.

Isn't it about time we got rid of ZIP codes, and all locally-designated postal codes in general? Some of the work I've been doing recently involves GIS data, and the uniformity has been amazingly useful. Further, given the ubiquity of GPS devices these days, I think that people are ready for something that is more directly tied to the real world. Let's explore how impossibly stupid this might be.

In the USA, we use a 5 digit number that often is extended by 4 more digits (aka, ZIP+4) for reasons only the USPS cares about. That makes for, at most, a billion unique territories. The amount of area represented by the initial 5 digits varies, but in my local metro they seem to be about the size of a square arc minute. In decimal degrees, that would require upwards of 14 characters (-YY.yy,-XXX.xx). Not a win length-wise, but in the balance we get uniform global coverage.

Let's say we don't care about global coverage. A smaller representation is possible if we note that the continental United States latitudinal span is within 26 degrees (50 to 24 N) and the longitudinal span is within 60 degrees (125 to 66 W). That means the degree values could be encoded as A-Z (base 26) for latitude and 0-9A-Za-z (base 62) for longitude. If we then use the same range for minutes that we do for longitude, that allows us to compact the location down to 4 characters (YyXx). A mixed representation (YXyx) might be even more interesting, since it allows the precision to be easily adjusted by simply appending pairs of digits.

That seems a pretty arbitrary encoding to use for just part of the United States, so lets try to apply the same idea of encoding to reduce the length of standard geographical coordinates. The entire degree-space that needs to be covered represents 180 x 360 = 64800 distinct values. To represent that in 2 characters, we'd need at least a base 255 encoding; easy for computers, but not for humans. Even the base 62 representation used in the last paragraph is pushing it, because humans aren't that particular about uppercase and lowercase differences, nor are they universally able to tell the difference between 1 and l and I when written down without context. Base 30 is about the highest you should expect out of people with the regular alphanumeric character set, and maybe throw in a few punctuation marks to get up to 32 if you want to make computers happier. Going to 3 characters only allows for base 41, but the step up to 4 characters gets us to base 16 without that much waste, which is all kinds of awesome for both people and computers.

Unfortunately, just another character gets us back to something that can be represented in base 10, and in all cases the mixing of latitude and longitude into a single value would make it harder to figure out what the neighboring areas are. Plus we still need 100x100 more resolution in order to get down to the same detail that the current system handles. We've outsmarted ourselves into a swamp; time to go back to stupid.

If we can't exploit a compressed encoding, lets see how far we can get by looking at symmetry. Since we want to keep latitude and longitude split, we're back to the original 180 x 360 space. Even that is commonly further split from 90N to 90S (or 90,-90) and 180W to 180E (or -180,180). If we take 90 degrees as the base unit of symmetry, we have 3 combinations of division (north/south, east/west, far/near) that represent the global octants, all of which can be represented by a single base 8 character (probably best not alphanumeric). Within that area, we still have to represent at least 9000 points (hundredths of a degree) of accuracy. That would be exceeded by 3 times using 3 characters if we use the aforementioned base 30 (as opposed to 5 characters for 90.00).

Whew! So where does that leave us? A 7 character long world-wide postal code that is tied to geographical position with sub-kilometer accuracy. Seems like a pretty good scheme for all concerns, even without going into how the position is ordered and encoded. For example, New York City (at 40.716667, -74) could be represented as DH5^R20. If you need to see it in action to make more sense of it, let me know and I can create a reference implementation in JavaScript.

As a bit of a counterpoint to my previous post in this section, let me broach a topic that is also impossibly stupid: Proper English. Proper any language, really, including those wacky French with their use of courriel instead of just adopting email. I guess nobody told them that there was a difference between being cultured and sophisticated, and just being a pedantic dick.

The purpose of language is (or at least should be) to convey ideas. For that reason, I'll take issue with inserting empty words like actually, but I don't take issue with slang or "dirty" words, so long as they're used with purpose. I don't even take issue with words that are used with a non-tradational meaning (e.g., "Dude, that was sick!).

Linguistics is a far more reasonable approach to language. Instead of pretending to preach from on high what structure is "correct", you look at what is actually in use for communication. You consider the data first, and only then can you determine what is Proper English. As my Pappy once jawed, "I reads me some Shakespeare 's'boy, and y'all ain't soundin' nothin' like that."

By the title you might think this is going to be a posting about Valentine's Day, but actually you would be mistaken. It is actually more of a drinking game post. Unless you're actually impossibly stupid, you noticed the section this was actually in and actually figured out the topic. I'm calling for the death of a word: actually.

I use the word myself, so it's not an earnest assassination. When used sparingly and properly, it's actually a pretty nice word. In the last year, though, I've noticed it being used increasingly as a filler word instead of with the meaning "in reality" or "surprisingly". It's become the pseudo-intellectual's "like". The white-bread version of "ya know what I'm sayin'?" The hipster-friendly update of "...not!"

My latest run in with this verbal vomit was when listening to a story on a recent podcast of Quirks & Quarks. Be prepared to have a lot of alcohol handy, because I counted 24 uses of actually in that brief interview. Quirks & Quarks also gets the Actual Award for Contradictory Confirmation for an older story where we hear this exchange:

Q: Were you surprised by the findings?
A: We were, actually.

I don't mean to pick just on them or their guests, but they're a science show, so I expect a bit more from that crowd. It would almost be understandable by comparison to point back to Emma Roberts on The Tonight Show as she burns through actually more than 10 times in 4 minutes.

Unfortunately, I don't think actually is going to die any time soon. So grab some booze and actually join the party. If you have any other examples of actually being abused, please add them to the comments.

The first entry in my Kill It With Fire category makes a nice transition from my initial political focus. On Monday the US Senate voted in favor of delaying the cutover to DTV that was to occur in less than a month.^{[citation provided]} This was an impossibly stupid thing to do. Let me walk you folks at the House of Representatives through the reasons so you don't end up looking like idiots (although I realize it will be too late by the time anyone reads this).

People are lazy

What more really needs to be said? The main reason millions haven't switched away from analog is because 3 weeks is actually seen as a fairly long time to anyone who doesn't have to deal with things at the scale of a government bureaucracy. Seriously, you should have fully expected millions not to do anything at all until February 17 rolled around, at which time you should have fully expected them to curse for 2 minutes at their TV, then pop over to Walmart and finally get a converter or a new TV they knew they should have gotten 3 months ago. Problem solved, in all of 42 minutes, for most Americans who still bother with broadcast TV.

More troubling is that the chuckle-heads in the Senate actually seem to think a delay will in any way change the behavior of procrastinators. You can pretty much bank on the above scenario playing itself out on June 12; all that you've accomplished is delaying the inevitable. Speaking of the inevitable, you need to realize that by pushing the window out until after tax time means that many people will simply plan to use their refund to make the purchase. You sure as hell better make certain those checks get out well before mid-June, and you'd do well to also include a little pamphlet to remind them once again about DTV.

TV stations suck

I don't know if there is some FCC mandate forcing them to act like idiots, but TV stations around here are only adding to the confusion. I've personally been watching DTV for over a year, but I also have an old analog TiVo I still use to grab overlapping broadcasts. Here are the two most annoying things I've seen in that time that need to stop.

Analog broadcasts labeled as DTV

Stop it, just stop it. One particular local station likes to start their news broadcast by saying it is in HDTV. The problem, of course, is that they make that same claim over their analog broadcast, which is neither high definition nor digital! I wonder how many people think they're getting digital signals because their TV says they are, but aren't and instead are completely unprepared for what is going to happen whatever date the cutover happens.

Digital broadcasts telling me to get DTV

I also wonder how many people are confused by the fact that they've just gotten whatever was supposed to give them DTV, but they're still getting reminders they need to switch to digital television! Maybe the signal quality will be enough to tell the difference, but there really is no reason to confuse the issue by telling them they still have to do something that they've already done.

Doing it right

It shouldn't be hard to figure out a proper procedure that gets things like this done. Presented for your consideration is the impossibly stupid way of making this work, which somehow seems to elude the grasp of the dolts in Washington, DC. Keep in mind that this all should have been planned already for 3 months ago so you jokers wouldn't be scrambling now for a delay.

Stop mixing content

The medium is the message here. The message that needs to be going out over analog is that people need to act. The message that needs to be going out over digital is that they've successfully upgraded to the future.

Start degrading analog

It is not enough of a reminder to run a 30 minute show or a 30 second ticker every few days. What should have happened with less than a month to go is a 20% reduction in the analog picture size, with the empty area on every channel filled by a permanent scroll across the bottom and a red countdown timer along the edge of the screen. Decrease that by 10% every week, so with 1 week to go the show being broadcast would only take up a quarter of the screen.

At the same time, add suitable audio alerts. For example, give a small beep and flash the countdown timer every hour. Decrease that interval and/or increase the number of beeps as the deadline approaches. Nothing so annoying as to drown out what is being broadcast, but annoying enough to get people motivated to switch to digital.

Make it a converter rebate

I don't know what moron thought up the idea of reserving money for coupons when they get sent, but that person needs to be fired and never again work in a position of responsibility. Anybody with half a clue would have structured the converter box program as a rebate that can be requested after purchase. Not only does that keep funds from getting tied up, but just about any retailer can tell you that most people wouldn't bother with the rebate anyway.

How easy was that?

I may not be the most diplomatic about it, but I at least know how to get the job done. I have to say that supporting the delay does not really speak well to the new administration, either. It is pure hubris to think that a little extra time is all it will take to make things work. If you're going to put the brakes on at the last minute, at least show that you plan to do something with that time to improve the situation.