Gizmodo is running a great contest asking for a scanned photo of readers “looking like the biggest dork in the world at age 10-18.”

Yes, I owned a thin tie with piano keys on it. Yes, I had parachute pants. But maybe I’m too close to this to judge.

What do you think? Should I enter? Be honest.

No, really. Be honest.

This piece of Internet humor never gets old. Every holiday season I stumble upon it and crack up. Not sure where it originated. I’m sure I’ve had it for at least ten years.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
   This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized LEGO set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

My wife and I are going to try an experiment this holiday season. We’re initiating a multi-year project to track the travels of a single bottle of party favor wine as it hops from party to party, host to host, forgotten cabinet to forgotten cabinet. How will we do this? GPS? RFID? Nah. Just gonna re-gift a bottle to a recipient who we know will play along and re-gift it to someone else, and on and on. A viticultural chain letter.

Since gift wine is almost universally crappy* it doesn’t get better with age and so, after a while, what gets shuffled in social circles is actually a container of steadily more noxious (and possibly dangerous, if consumed) liquid. A gift that depreciates in the giving.

What’s really interesting to ponder is the origin of a re-gifted bottle. Who actually starts the process? The quest to know is the equivalent of an epidemiologist searching for the origin of a mutant virus.

Also, can the re-gifted bottle jump the “holiday barrier” and enter the mainstream gifting community or — gasp — will it actually be consumed?

[*] An exception to this is the tier of really good wines that get shunted around. These bottles are re-gifted precisely because they are so good. Too good to drink yourself when they’d make a perfect re-gift. And thus the fine wines get finer in the same way that the re-gifted hooch gets hoochier.

This winter season if updates to this blog stop for an extended period you may plausibly attribute it to this cause: I have burned the house down. I really look forward to cold weather because I love building fires — stoking, proding, accelerating them. I had my cord of wood delivered in September when it was still 80 out. But, man, I screw up one out of every five fires. Usually I know why: too windy out, didn’t heat the flue up enough, ember torched the rug — that sort of thing. But there’s that one instance out of, say, ten when I can’t explain why the house is filling with smoke. Like tonight, when I had to scurry around ripping the smoke detectors from the ceiling. I did everything right. Might it have something to do with the fact that there are two fireplaces — one right below the other — that feed into the same chimney? Some sort of backdraft coming in through the other fireplace? Or something with starting a fire with a not-completely-burnt log from a prior fire? Perhaps the arsonist is just an idiot. Is that it?

Just a reminder that if you’re in the area I will be speaking this evening at UCLA. Logistics here.

Artifacts from the Future: Experience Design for Cultural Spaces

November 17th, 2005 • 7:00 p.m.
Melnitz Hall Sound Stage 1 (Room 1451)

I took a long weekend fishing trip to coastal Texas last week, which explains the brief posting hiatus. It was in almost all respects the very opposite of the fishing trip to Canada I took earlier this year — except that we were still catching large fish, thankfully.

This time, instead of a maniacal Indian guide who used his free time hunting moose with an axe, we had Larry, a weathered good ol’ boy with enough life experience stories to have our rapt attention during the lulls between finding fish. Larry was a native of Aransas Pass, Texas, a small nearby town whose economy, like most of coastal Texas, ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the energy sector and the abundance of catchable wildlife that swim in or fly over the intercoastal waterway. Tip: when talking to a guy about his experience working on a deep sea oil rig don’t make the mistake of jokingly asking him if he still has all his digits. To my mortification, he raised a hand and showed me that, in fact, he didn’t. Ha ha, bad joke. But he took it in stride and proceeded to tell us a horrifying story of being trapped in a cage elevator that had stuck under the drilling platform. Perfectly describing the universal fear of climbing partially out of an elevator only to have it begin moving again Larry told us matter-of-factly how the unstuck cage sliced off his finger as he grasped the ledge. Comes with the territory, I guess. He actually seemed more irritated at having been hooked in the nose by a huge spoon lure from a novice client’s cast on his guide boat. (This client, unbelievably, tipped Larry $5 and said he should get himself a beer after he removed the barbed tip from his face and continued to guide them the entire day!)

Of course, even with Larry, Mother Nature rules. Some houses on the coast were still boarded up from Rita, which thankfully missed to the north. The intercoastal waterway itself is an ever-changing expanse of extremely shallow water whose sub-surface topography is a constant challenge to boaters. The waterway with its dredged shipping channel for barges is more like a series of rivers that flow together and apart — except that the “land” between the rivers is water too. I’m glad I was drinking beer in the passenger seat. Navigation is the real reason to have a guide. Lifelong natives of the area can flit around the waterway at high speed deftly reading slight changes in the surface to know when three feet of water suddenly changes to six inches. The ability is uncanny and more than once our tag-along boat without Larry grounded itself suddenly, embedding its prop into the mud and spewing a halo of muck far into the air. (Incidentally Larry hates tag-along boats. He says it is “like dating a fat girl.”)

You too can experience the stories and marine life expertise by visiting Larry’s website. Be sure to check out the Blast and Cast special (hunting ducks in the morning, fishing in the afternoon). I don’t hunt, but I like the sound of it.

If anyone is in the LA area on Nov. 17 you’re hereby invited to attend a lecture I will be giving at UCLA. Here’s an abstract and logistics. The talk is part of series put on by the talented people at the Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance and the Experiential Technologies Center. Should be a lively evening. Drop me a line if you’d like to meet up.

Miniaturized for easy distribution.

I should have known when Craig ate his words about this guy, but only now do I understand the genius that is Four Tet. Folktronica is a silly term I will type only this once, though what it is trying to describe is accurate enough. I’d like to see Kieran Hebden and Amon Tobin go head-to-head in a sudoku tournament.

Further afield is Tadd Mullinix, an Ann Arborite with two beautiful, intricately glitchy albums to date. Good stuff, if you like abstract electronica.

Why I never thought of using power tools to carve pumpkins before this season is a mystery to me. For example, in addition to creating new patterns and being a lot easier than hacking with a paring knife, the power drill whirls pumpkin crud all over the kitchen when it pierces the pumpkin shell. How fun is that?

There is a doctoral disseration waiting to be written in probability theory about the certitude that the moment you begin futzing in a gym locker the person occupying the locker immediately to your left or right will return from the gym to do the same, causing crampedness and often nude crampedness. Which is uncomfortable. This happens in gyms where you bring your own lock and also in those that distribute keys (where, presumably, some sort of front desk intelligence could space out locker assignments over time).

This month’s Wired contains a short piece on the way technology itself is the ghostly medium in most recent horror films. Clearly the Wired staff reads Ascent Stage.

I have come to believe that the harder a company has to fight for customers the worse they treat those customers. Take cellular providers, a business with a high degree of customer turnover and which faces intense competition from rivals.

So I was screwing around with the data services on my Cingular phone yesterday. I noticed a thing called MobiTV which promised television broadcasts to the phone. Three day free trial. As is typical for non customer-focused initiatives like this, if you do not cancel in three days you will be billed. Oh and of course, unlike signing up, you cannot cancel via the phone. Well the service stunk. The video was jerky and pixellated as you’d expect for a non-3G network.

Great, so how do I cancel? Online, OK. First three tries, server error. When I finally got through I found that I was in fact charged $10 for the free trial. Now I’m not a linguist or an economist, but there’s something that seems, well, not free about a $10 charge. Anyway, there was a form to request a refund. Indignation rising — why the hell should I have to challenge a charge from a free trial? — I submitted the form, dutifully filling out the “Why are you requesting a refund?” text box. I refrained from using profanity.

That is, until the next screen informed me that my refund request had been denied because I had exceeded the refund limit and that I had to call customer service. Let the cursing begin! Actually I started the call composed, explaining that I thought it not terribly customer-friendly to make us jump through such hoops to cancel. The support representative, clearly a jaded, shrivelled, flourescently-tanned troll of a human being, informed me that I could not request a refund for a charge that had not yet hit my bill. She was, in essence, saying that I had to wait for the next billing cycle — which would clearly throw me over the three day “free” preiod — and then call in to ask for a refund. Insanity. I explained the illogic as clearly as I could and then she put me on hold for 15 minutes to run to a supervisor.

Do you know what she told me when she returned? I’m sorry, sir, the reason your refund request was rejected was because you need to select “none” in the “Why are you requesting a refund?” box. What the fuck?! Ah, yes, Cingular: where you only get a refund if you refuse to state why you want one. Makes perfect sense. GRRR!

Is there any cellular service provider that actually puts the customer experience first? No, really. I cannot continue to pay these people money.

mel·o·gram·mat·ic adj.
The deliberate, ostentatious use of non-standard grammar online to make it seem like you’re hip and casual but also smart enough to know better.

Idea: create Band-Aid type bandages that are pre-printed with arm or leg hairs on them, allowing a more seamless blending with the furrier individual.

Do beard trimmers with the little vacuum attachment actually work?