Ok, this is pure fun. I took George Carlin’s 7 Dirty words (The only words you can’t say on U.S. television, or couldn’t), and put them into Google Labs Ngram viewer (which searches for usage of words in the entire google books archive). I made a guess before I ran the query – I expected all the words to rise in usage over the last 40 years. I was wrong:
As some of you know, big ranges in data hide trends. So I took out the big outliers (Shit and Fuck) and ran the same query, yielding the chart below (query here) – overall positive trend on all of them, but more interesting than the first chart:
Tons of good stuff this week:
The evolution of a project manager – Interesting take on the various levels of impact a project manager can have, from paper pusher to team leader (hat tip, Raven)
8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups – the problem with articles like these about accidental inovation is they overlook the important part. After the accident, all these people did tons of work to figure out why the accident happened, something few of us ever do.
Wall of Deliverables – I love the idea of a place for designers to share prototypes and work for critiquing and exchanging ideas. Hopefully this will take off. It’s funny to me how most dialog in the design community is over text based email – for all our tech, we still mostly describe our designs with words instead of showing them.
Mapping the Innovation Gap – This is the most important chart I’ve seen in months about understanding how innovation happens.
Abraham Lincoln: A Two-Way Innovator – Nice article about how important problem defining can be. Many creators I know can work either way, they might have a preference, but once they have an idea they like, or a problem they’re interested in, they don’t really care.
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club – Interesting website focused on writing reviews of books made into films. This review is about the watchmen (a book and film I liked in both forms).
Does this even need an explanation? Forget his philosophies, I’m just intimidated by his facial hair.
I’ve quit several jobs in my life, I’ve been re-orged into stupid positions I didn’t like, but I’ve never been outright fired. On the other hand, my friend C. had 25 jobs in less than ten years and was fired from many of them. He wouldn’t answer his phone, so I imagined a conversation with him on bad advice to give the newly fired and here’s what we came up with. The funny ones are mine. The unfunny ones are his.
5.On your last day, send the following hiaku out to every large email list inside your company : “worker bees can leave even drones can fly away, the queen is their slave”. You will get many references for future jobs this way. (If you like this, see Fight Club). Other quotes from Fight club people will like to hear you say for no reason include “These are not my khakis” and “”Do you want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise me of a status upgrade?” Inject them randomly into conversations, repeating them until you get a response, especially if talking to HR.
4. Paste your resume on your former bosses forehead. Walk right in, even if he is in a meeting, with a brush and a bucket of glue. Get a big stroke of glue across his forehead (or on the back of his head if he starts to run away) and then slap the resume on. You should be able to get one on there before s/he realizes what’s going on. If he resists, tell him “but you said you’d help me find a new job”. If he escapes, paste resumes to all of his items you can find. His briefcase, desk, chair, computer monitor, or his boat, spouse, dog, cat, or offspring. This is an excellent way to demonstrate both your initiative and your out of the box thinking.
3. Fire your manager. Nothing says you can’t fire your manager right back. When he says “You’re fired.” “You say No, you’re fired.” “No look we’re letting you go.” You say “No look here bossman, I’m letting you go”. Automatically negating what people say is not only entirely therapeutic, it’s a marketable skill used by many managers, some of whom you may have worked for.
2. Make a top 20 list of people at work you know are stupider than you and send it to them, including co-workers, superiors, executives. Make sure it’s in stack ranked order, with the review scores you think they deserve next to their names. And give each a nickname like “Stinky”, “Schmucko”, “Brickface” or “Smellster”. Print out 100 copies and post them on the walls in the hallway, bathroom stalls, and print another 100 for putting on the windshield’s of all the cars in the parking lot.
1. Start a mortgage bank. I’ve heard mortgage banking is the way of the future, especially this new thing called CDOs. Now that you are unemployed you are free to take all of your saving and start dishing out loans to people who have no savings of their own. It will work. I promise. A good friend of mine named Mr. Ponzi says so.
Bonus: Make sure to send out a final status report. The shortest one you will ever write in your life. One short sentence: I have no status!
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Ok. If you’re here and haven’t smiled yet, that means you think this list sucks, I’m an asshole, and not funny. All might be true.
If so, I I invite you to fire me from making top 5 lists. It’s the least I can do for you. Go ahead, give me your worst in the comments. But be warned, I may fire you from leaving comments. Then you can fire me from commenting on your comments. And the fun will continue! (Seriously, I hope you’re doing ok).
I’m a reluctant technologist. I have a latent love for technology, but 90% of what gets bandied about as “the wave of the future” is about productivity, which I find funny, since I think our problem is quality, not quantity. I often miss what whizzes by as the latest and greatest because I want what’s timeless. Things so good they last more than a year, or crazy as it might sound, a lifetime.
And one day, instead of ranting to a friend by just complaining I listed the I wanted to see. Sure, they’re impossible, but so what. I’m turning all the filters off to see what happens.
Here they are:
Annoyance teleporter: A device that teleports annoying people into a small, dark, damp room with someone they find as annoying as I find them.
ChildMinder: Gun you can fire at people that makes them instantly remember the happiest moment of their childhood. Also comes in hand grenade form.
Blabbermouth: Cell phone application that tells you what percentage of time you have been talking vs. listening per call, with lifetime and per contact stats.
Comprehendo: An e-mail program that prevents people from replying to a message until they’ve actually read the whole thing.
GarbageReality: A picture on every garbage or recycling container of where what you place inside will actually go.
Food Scan-O-matic: A wand you wave over any food item that shows you where it originally came from, how it got to you, and which, if any, major food conglomerates were involved in its production.
Treetalking: A language for talking to trees and stones so they can tell us everything they’ve seen.
TempColor: Pots, pans, plates and cups that change colors to show how hot or cold they are (spectrum of red for hot to blue for cold). Also for water faucets, coffee mugs, bathtubs, etc.
Travelrama light: A world travel stipend for every USA high school graduate. Sure, not an invention, but so what. Only 20% of Americans have passports. Is it any wonder we are often lost and clueless about how the rest of the world works? Most of us have seen almost none of it. We’d be collectively less stupid as a species if we all traveled more. And I’d start with the young: I’d make exchange programs cheap and highly incentives.
UltraTravelrama: Instantly teleports everyone in the world to the place they most need to go, and teleport them back in a day. (Yes, includes auto-safety feature that wont teleport people in the middle of doing dangerous things, or into the middle of highways, etc.)
Shop Idiot Remover: The requirement, by law, of a trapdoor at the front of the line of any busy Starbucks, bagel or sandwich shop, that auto-detects when the person at the front of the line is clueless, and moves them to the back of the line. (NYC does not need to install these – the staff thankfully do it themselves).
Worldo: A bracelet that tells you three things, updated in real time. 1) How much wealth you have 2) How much of the earth’s resources you consume 3) How happy you are. All are indexed against national and world averages (See GNH).
DreamPic: takes pictures of the things people see in their dreams. (I thought this was my own idea, until I realized I’d seen the movie Brainstorm, with Christopher Walken. So I’d want a dumb version of that device, that only takes pictures and only once per dream, ensuring people still have to interpret whatever they see in the picture).
Have some fun – forget constraints for a minute. What inventions are on your list?
As I’ve grown older my tolerance for humorless people has declined – but does everyone feel this way? What about team leaders and project manager types?
Some folks at Bremen University in Germany are doing a study to find out.
Wired magazine recently held a contest to see who had the most pathetic looking cubicle workspace. The winner, photo at right, works in the IT department and the University of Alabama, behind a rack of file cabinets.
btw: I’m looking to compile some innovation humor. If this made you think of other skits, cartoons or jokes, please leave a comment.
I’m on day 8 without power – I’ve become a local geek refugee, fluttering from coffeeshop to coffeshop in search of quiet places to work.
I’ve discovered the neurotic edges of my writing habits: I can’t write a word if I people are talking nearby, fiddling with newspapers within eyeshot, or if there is bad music playing overhead – escpecially the sonic evil that is bad Christmas music.
There is nothing festive about the relentless attack of dull, trite, treekly trash that passes for Christmas music in most stores and cafes. Who thinks this is fun? And do we really need to play it continually, on repeat, unless the goal is to get people to leave (or confess their sins). Can’t we mix it in? Like 1 holiday tune for 2 regular ones?
Or perhaps in the infinity of alternative and world music, there’s something more authentic than cheezy retreads of retreads of Christmas standards?
To my delight, every now and then the fine folks at slashdot or lifehacker mention an essay of mine, and waves of people swing by, read something, and send feedback mail through the contact form.
I respond to as much of the interesting and thoughtful as I can – but it’s the internet, and some of it’s creepy, incomprehensible or just plain bizarre. I don’t fully know how to respond to many of these little notes I receive.
So for fun, here’s some highlights from the mailbag for the popular essay Why smart people defend bad ideas:
“You sir, are clearly a case of bad person defending a bad idea. You should practice what you preach before preaching to the choir.”
“THIS IS AMAZING. So MANY CLEVEr Things. SO NOW CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH MY PARENTS?”
“I liked the essay but smart people are just better, right? So why shouldn’t they just defend whatever they think is best?”
“…loved this. Really loved it. Made me want to get a shotgun and shoot all the asshats.”
“Hey. If you’re so smart why don’t you know that spark plugs can’t cause fires? eh? Tell me that tough guy. You suck rat ass. I want the 5 minutes it took to read your turd back.”
“I printed this in big font and slid it under the doors of the executive floor. But it had no effect. What do I do now you think? Bigger fonts?”
“Perhaps you can help with this. I’m dating two girls at the same time, and keep thinking I want one, but then the other… well I don’t know how to LOGICALLY choose. Write an essay on this! yes!”
“How much can I pay you to stand in my boss’s office with a megaphone and read this essay every time he opens his mouth?”
If you work with ideas, you will hear these phrases often in your life. Often they contain no logic, but unless someone challenges them they are used to end creative conversations.
For example, a statement like “we don’t do that here” presumes that there is a good reason it’s not done. But is there? Maybe someone bad at their job forgot to do it when the organization started? Or perhaps the fact that it’s not done is hurting the company. The fact that something is or is not done says nothing about it’s value. You might as well say “the sky is blue” or “squares have angles”. They are merely observations.
But if a statement like “we don’t do that here” is said by a powerful person, it’s politically hard to challenge them about why this might be, or that it’s a problem. Progress is often based on doing something that has never been done in that organization before. But a leader’s pride in what might be a failed notion of tradition inhibits the examination of the tradition’s positive/negative values.
“We tried that already” presumes that the reason the attempt failed was because of the idea, and not the many other factors that might explain the failure. It could have been that the least competent people worked on the project, or that it was underfunded. The right question to ask in response is “Yes, but why did it not work before? What has changed now that might lead to a better outcome if we try again?” Unlike the idea killer, these questions lead to thinking, rather than preventing it from happening.
The basic method for defeating idea killers is to prepare, in advance, your responses to them. Convert any idea killer you hear into a question that examines the merit of the idea, rather than allowing the statement to presume there isn’t any. You can probably measure the open mindedness of a culture by how often idea killers are heard, and how well practiced people are in overcoming them.
Of course opportunity cost means that many ideas will need to be rejected to make any one idea possible. But when there is zero time allowed to consider new proposals, no new ideas are likely getting the support they need.
(Hint: its always easier to get a group of people to pull things like this off. Order a pizza, bring some beer, and you’ll be surprised what you can do in an afternoon).
I’ve seen my share of office pranks: filling an office 
