Radical Transparency

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March 9, 2009

Teriyaki Science

My grandfather took a bunch of us relatives to dinner tonight.  Hibachi-style Japanese.  The shrimp the dude threw to Hal (the grandfather) hit him in the forehead.

They give you heaps of food at those places.  Hal couldn't eat all his.  Or drink more than three sips of his non-alcoholic (or, as he calls it "decaffeinated") beer.

So I took his leftovers home (because I don't like wasting food) for the animals (because I don't eat meat).  Food leftovers, not beer leftovers.

He had ordered the beef chicken shrimp combo and left pieces of all three meats.

Noticing this fact, I decided to conduct a very important science experiment...

I put a piece of shrimp, a piece of chicken, and a piece of beef in front of Beans the kittencat (almost a year old: maybe still a kitten; maybe a cat now; unclear).

He licked the shrimp first, kinda bit at it, moved on to the beef, ate it, ate the chicken, and then ate the shrimp.

Then I gave him just beef and chicken (because that was clearly the next logical step in the scientific process).

He ate the chicken and then walked away from the beef.*

As you can tell, the results of the experiment were inconclusive.

But Beans definitely knows that I love him.

*Note: The dog was very happy about this.

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Filed under  //   beans the kitten   cats   dogs   experiments   hal   hibachi   japanese food   meat   science  

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December 13, 2008

On Mousetrapping and Uncooperative Kittens

I think they've built a better mousetrap.  And I think cheese, the old school bait, the one they use in cartoons, does slightly more efficient work than peanut better.



8 traps set. 

4 cheese.  4 peanut butter.

4 old school style.  4 newfangled.  Peanut butter and cheese evenly distributed between types.

3 caught mice. 1 old school with cheese.  1 newfangled with cheese.  1 newfangled with peanut butter.

2 had their bait taken without snapping.  1 old school with peanut butter.  1 newfangled with peanut butter.

1 snapped but caught nothing.  An old school trap with cheese.

2 went untouched. 1 old school with peanut butter.  1 newfangled with cheese.  They were clearly placed on the wrong shelf and will relocate tonight.

I should have graphed or tabled that.  But that might have been a little overkill for a mouse catching experiment.  Oh well.  Maybe next time.

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Filed under  //   animals   beans the kitten   cheese   experiments   hal   mice   mousetraps   peanut butter   poop   the startup life  

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November 7, 2008

Only Women Wear Long Hair

Bizarre day.

Started early.  4am.  The smoke detector fire alarm system spit the dummy.  Word from the alarm people is that there are "critters" chewing on wires and causing trouble.

Thought about sustainable linoleum.

Drank green tea, which is a way more manageable drug for me than coffee. 

Ate a vegetarian turkey sandwich.  Wondered if it might have been tofurkey, which would have been awesome.

Remembered how glad I am that one of the Carrot Project investors is a lawyer.

Wrote an unplanned blog post.  Enjoyed the spontaneity of it.  But feel a little bit sad that I wasn't able to keep my favorite thought in tact.  So I'm reconnecting it here into its original four sentence form.  Out of context, of course.

While we're tiny and experimental and close to zero cost. Which we are right now.  And maybe will be forever.  If we're good.

Hung out just my mother, my father, my sister, and me.  Which never happens.  Divorce, geography, work, and omnipresent (and welcome) cousins make it difficult.  Talked about what a pain in the ass little kid I was.

Talked to Australia.  Heard fish stories and jokes.  Remembered the sounds of freediving on the Reef.

Looked for a good picture from my last trip to Oz.  Wanted to post it here and write a story.  Found a poem instead.  Might post it someday.  Not tonight.

Started listening to The Who.  Think I might need a tattoo.  Because I'm sleepy and delusional and amused at the fact that I started this post with the word bizarre.  Amused and maybe a little bit proud.

Tattoo is track 4 on Live at Leeds.

  
(download)

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Filed under  //   australia   bizarre   caffeine   carrot project   critters   experiments   great barrier reef   hair   lawyers   more perfect market   poetry   spitting the dummy   stimulants   tattoos   the who   tofurkey  

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August 3, 2008

Neglected Tabs, Storyteller Microbloggers, and the Neverending Cycle

I woke up today wanting to write but not knowing what to write. I thought about diving into the creative capitalism conversation and seeing what I could find in there. I thought about responding to an email a friend sent me about meat and responsible consumption. I thought about digging into some Clay Shirky. But I figured I'd do some reading first and then make some decisions.

A couple of tabs that have been sitting neglected in Firefox the past few days beckoned. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.

I reread a great article about simplicity and ubiquity. I read another article about web services that solve only problems that the web itself creates. And, since both mentioned Twitter, I stopped there and wandered off to see what the people I follow have been tweeting the past couple of days.

As I clicked back through some history, I started thinking about why I post what I post on Twitter.

And I remembered what a friend wrote me when she first read my Twitter feed:

it sounds like you're a crazy person! wtf are you updating people on your minutia? eating stale chips? what???

I told her it was an experiment, that I wasn't sure if Twitter would ever amount to anything for me, but I was trying to figure it out. And I dug it, dug the weirdness, dug people's willingness to tweet just about anything.

But that doesn't explain why I experiment the way I experiment: why I post about stale chips, Art Garfunkel, narrowly averted cupcake disaster, or Mr. Empty Promises.

I remembered some thoughts I'd had about posts of the week.

I had a moment a few weeks ago when I decided I wanted more storyteller microbloggers in my life, and I figured I could make that happen if I could locate a Twitter-fiend blogger that posts his or her favorite tweets of the week. Not his or her own tweets. Not a self-published greatest hits. Lots of people do that. I wanted to find a blogger that posts the choicest tweets from the set of microbloggers that he or she follows.

Ten minutes of searching for such a blogger proved fruitless, so I went back to work.

Later that day, however, I started dreaming about becoming that blogger. Every time I'd check in on Twitter, I'd favorite the tweets I enjoyed most, and, once I'd accumulated five or ten favorites, I'd throw them up on the blog and thank my Twitter friends for posting them.

I took the situation's pulse. I made a point to use the favoriting function for a couple of weeks. I looked for stuff that I thought was top quality. I favorited and unfavorited. And I had a good time. But I realized as I did it that I just simply couldn't count on myself to devote enough time to tweet reading to consistently come up with favorite tweets posts and make them good.

So I shelved the idea.

But I left a little archive of favorites on my Twitter account, and, now that I'm thinking about why I post what I post, I figure maybe those favorites can explain. Maybe they'll illustrate what I love about Twitter and what kind of microblogger I aspire to be.

@loiclemeur Kids look great on Segways while adult men look like sexual deviant people because of their posture

@mriggen OH: (To toilet-mastering preschooler, who's been having, ah, "issues")Remember, you control the poop. The poop does not control you.

@robinbloor Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplinlook-alike contest

@joeyheadset Fistbook is a social networking utility that connects my fist with YOUR face.

@christinelu WTF. some old man from Turkey on FB just edited details of how we kneweach other saying we dated in '92. that would put me at 16 you perve.

What do you think? Is it the storytelling I love? The vivid images they all conjure? The fact that they remind us that funny is everywhere, that life's more enjoyable if we're on constant lookout for silliness and share it whenever we can?

Hmmm.

Well. I don't know. I'll keep tweeting. Someday it'll all make sense. And, when it does, I'll explain in detail on the internets somewhere. In the meantime, I'll leave you with what is still perhaps my favorite tweet of all time.

Thank you Marc Andreessen for posting select dirty tweets for a few days last fall. This one I've thought about, both seriously and for laughs, quite a bit since then:

@PandaFace Girls like her f*** up the good guys and good guys f***ed up by girls like her f*** up good girls.. Never ending cycle.

*Note: The original plan was to post this to moreperfectmarket.com and chalk it up as a dinosaur post. But then I figured why post total ridiculousness on the serious blog now that I have a catch-all crazythought barrel up and running. But THEN I remembered that Posterous, the excellent little simpleblogging platform on which I'm writing unconstrained, has a new feature I want to try. So, now, I'm going to send this email to post@posterous.com, and, automagically, I'll post to both A More Perfect Market and to Radical Transparency (the aforementioned Posterous blog).

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Filed under  //   clay shirky   experiments   posterous   storytelling   twitter  

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