Trevor’s Bike Shed

During episode #66 of This Week in Tech, host Leo Laporte reminded his fellow pundits that August 2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. It cost $1565—a fairly inexpensive computer in those days—but Leo noted that’s because it didn’t come with a hard drive, only a cassette port. John C. Dvorak immediately asked, “Does anyone remember if that used the Kansas City standard?”

My reaction was the same as Leo’s: Kansas City standard? Is that a joke? I grew up in K.C. and have lived there most of my life, and yet I’d never heard of such a thing.This thirty year-old standard was actually fairly revolutionary. According to Wikipedia, it was one of the first standards to allow consumer-quality audio cassettes to store computer data. It was thus a catalyst in the rise of the personal computer, offering home users inexpensive data storage at a time when floppy disk drives cost around $1000.An example comes from personal experience. I recall my dad’s old TI-99/4A having a cassette port to which he had hooked up an even older portable tape recorder. I’d use it to save my little BASIC programs and whatnot. I could turn off the computer then come back the next day, playback the tape, and pick up where I left off…hopefully. (As Leo says, those cheap tapes weren’t particularly reliable.)Despite reliability issues, the Kansas City standard remained influential. It even spawned a completely new type of computer data storage: vinyl records! That’s right; old-fashioned 33⅓ RPM records were once used for recording high-tech digital data—formatted according to the Kansas City standard, of course.

And all this time I thought my home town was known only for its barbecue and jazz…

The Peace Corps is a household name. You can ask almost anyone in America if they’ve heard of it, and they’ll probably answer in the affirmative. I’ve always wondered how this small federal agency could have such a huge impact on American culture, but I think it comes down to three basic factors:

1. It’s exotic. Although many have heard of the Peace Corps, most don’t know exactly what it’s all about. There seems to be a romantic stereotype that Peace Corps volunteers are sent to some tropical village to live in a mud hut and teach the natives animal husbandry or some such skill. (The reality these days is that volunteers are more likely to end up in a city teaching computer literacy, but the stereotype lives on.)
2. It’s old. Established in 1961, America has had plenty of time to learn about the Peace Corps, and nearly 200,000 returned volunteers have had ample opportunity to spread the word around. In fact, the Peace Corps has been around long enough that it’s even had its own postage stamp.

3. Hollywood loves it. I suspect this factor has had the single greatest impact on making the Peace Corps a household name. I’ve lost count of how many references to it I’ve seen on TV and in movies, each one helping to cement a place for the Peace Corps in American culture. My favorite is this segment from the movie Airplane! (click to play).

Filmed in 1978, I had thought that Airplane! was perhaps the earliest pop-culture reference to the Peace Corps. Last week, when I happened to rent The Pink Panther from GreenCine, I discovered I was wrong.

Playing a supporting role in the film was Robert Wagner, better known to today’s audiences as Number Two from the Austin Powers series.

In the scene below (click to play), note how Wagner casually mentions the Peace Corps. Moments later, David Niven enters and also drops the Peace Corps name as if it were common knowledge.

What shocked me about this scene was the date: The Pink Panther was filmed in 1963, just two years after the Peace Corps was established! It could very well be the first reference to the Peace Corps—ever—in mainstream popular culture. Perhaps even more surprising is how nonchalantly the Peace Corps is mentioned, as if everyone knows what it is.

So, contrary to what I had assumed, the longevity of the Peace Corps may have had little to do with its status as a household name. Judging by this clip, it became well-known almost as soon as it was created.

It’s not every day one hears about Ghana. Most Americans don’t know where it is, and many don’t even know it exists. The only mainstream media that gives Ghana any attention is the BBC News, but their stories are almost always soccer-related: a Ghanaian player transfers to a European club, a coach for the Black Stars gets fired, that sort of thing. As a returned Peace Corps Ghana volunteer, I’m a little disappointed the country doesn’t get more press.

That’s why, when watching ABC World News Tonight last December, my mouth dropped open. Charles Gibson suddenly started talking about Ghana! The story, from London-based correspondent Mike Lee, was all about Paga, a small town far in the northeast that is famous for one thing: crocodiles.

Note that Mike mispronounces the town’s name: It’s pägä, not pāgä. (Surprising, given that he actually visited the place.) Otherwise, it’s a nice segment that provides a fun glimpse into Ghanaian-style tourism. If you’re interested in even more scenes from Paga, check out the videos Straddling a Crocodile and sight n sound from the jungle.

These videos are especially fascinating for me because I’ve never actually been to Paga, even though I lived for twenty-six months in Tumu, a town less than 100 kilometers away. And I would often pass through Navrongo, a town just 10 kilometers from Paga, for my trips south. (If you use Google Earth, see just how close I was.)

So why did I never end up in Paga? At the time, I was much more interested in using my vacation days to head down to Accra, the only place in the whole country where a guy can get a burger, a shake, and a movie! But the next time I visit Ghana, I’ll definitely be swinging by Paga.

UCI often makes headlines in local media like The Orange County Register, but it rarely shows up on international news outlets. That’s why I’m always surprised when I see articles mentioning UCI, such as a recent BBC News piece on the water cycle in Africa that included quotes from UCI’s Jay Famiglietti.

Even more surprising was the news that UCI placed ninth in Wired’s geek beauty contest. 124 people voted Hans Keirstead, anatomy and neurobiology professor at UCI, the “Sexiest Geek for 2006.”

So does this mean our rankings will go up next year?

Apparently the developers at 1 Infinite Loop like to keep their code cheerful. An example posted to the Apple Developer Connection uses bunnies—yes, cute little bunnies—to demonstrate the power of frame buffer objects in OpenGL.

If you have a Mac, go ahead and download the example. Run it, then hit the Spacebar. You’ll see some very trippy effects that remind me of Dumbo’s pink elephant hallucination.

The frame buffer object, in case you were wondering, is a relatively new feature in OpenGL. It provides hardware-accelerated offscreen rendering of a texture. FBOs improve upon the older pixel buffer (PBuffer) technique, which was basically the same but required an evil context switch that hindered performance.

Inspired by a recent MacRumors article about a Japanese version of the “Get a Mac” campaign, I wondered how many foreign-language ads Apple had made. I found five:

• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Japanese

Unfortunately, the Japanese version is the only one with actors other than John Hodgman and Justin Long. The rest are simply dubbed.Still, if I had to choose anyone to replace John and Justin, it would be these guys.

Hello. My name is Trevor Harmon.

“Trevor” comes from a Welsh surname that originally meant “big village” or “great settlement.” It’s derived from the Welsh words tref (“village” or “homestead”) and mawr (“large”). “Trevor” is also a name of Irish descent, an Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Treabhair, meaning “wise” or “prudent.” Alternate forms include “Trefor,” “Trevar,” and “Trever,” and it is closely related to the names “Trevis” and “Trevin”. Here it is in Chinese:

Famous Trevors include baseball player Trevor Hoffman, actor Trevor Howard, television presenter Sir Trevor McDonald, and pro wrestler Trevor Murdoch. “Trevor” is also the star of a cartoon and is saving young lives. As a baby name, “Trevor” was virtually unheard of in the United States until the 1950s. Its popularity grew rapidly in the 70s and 80s, hitting a peak in the early 90s.

“Harmon” is an Anglo-Saxon name, originally derived from the Old French hermant and Old German Herreman, both meaning “warrior.” A common spelling variation is “Harman.” Famous Harmons include model Angie Harmon, cyberneticist Leon Harmon, and actor Mark Harmon. The Harmon Trophy is a prestigious aviation award. The Irish coat of arms for the Harmon family looks like this:

My pirate name is Black Tom Flint.

My rap star name is General Killa.

My scammer name is Sithole Tungay, a high-placed officer of a Prime Bank in Africa, Lome Branch.

My bunny name is Humphrey Bogart Stretch-Hop-A-Long.

My cyborg name is Transforming Robotic Exploration and Vigilant Observation Replicant (T.R.E.V.O.R.).

My monkey name is Fingers Knuckle-dragger.

My Japanese name is 猿渡駿. (“Saruwatari shun”, monkey on a crossing bridge, fast person.)

My Mormon name is Trevier Caramon.

My poet name is Oberon Dingleberry.

My spammer name is Gratis F. Griddle.

My spy name is Trevor “Intrigue” Harmon.

My squirrel name is Nibbles Smallnuts.

My Star Wars name is Treha Taola, Nommaxima of Halls.

My vampire name is Count of The Great Oceans.

My fluffy kitten name is Sprinkles Merryweather.

My Santa’s little helper name is Lovable Dancing-Tummy.

One of the things you learn as a Ph.D. student is how to do research. Though I’m still far from mastering that particular lesson, there’s something I’ve discovered along the way: Academic researchers love coming up with long titles for their papers. In fact, a colleague’s recent 27-word Ph.D. thesis had me wondering, “Just how long do these titles get?”

I decided to find out. I wrote a little script that scans the DBLP database and spits out the longest titles it finds (based on number of characters, not words). Excluding non-English titles, here’s the top-ten list:

Of course, a trivia researcher’s work is never done. For future analysis, I’ll focus on papers with the highest number of authors. (I’ve already discovered a potential candidate.)

After reading a recent Slashdot article about a Star Trek Ph.D. thesis winning an academic prize, I wondered how many other theses involve Star Trek. According to Digital Dissertations, the answer is no less than fourteen! Here’s the list so far, from oldest to most recent:

• Video Values Education: “Star Trek” As Modern Myth
• A Critical Examination of the Mythological and Symbolic Elements of Two Modern Science Fiction Series: “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who”
• “Star Trek” As Cultural Text: Proprietary Audiences, Interpretive Grammars, and the Myth of the Resisting Reader
• Phenomenology of Communication and Culture: Michel Foucault’s Thematics in the Televised Popular Discourse of “Star Trek”
• The Final Frontier: Critical Theory and the Star Trek Phenomenon
• Teaching Towards the Twenty-Fourth Century: The Social Curriculum of Star Trek in the Schools
• Communication Contexts on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
• The Wrath of Whiteness: The Meaning of Race in the Generation of “Star Trek”
• Jung and Picard: Archetypes and the Modern Myth of “Star Trek: the Next Generation”
• To Boldly Go: A Hypermodern Ethnography of “Star Trek” Fans’ Culture and Communities of Consumption
• The Best of Both Worlds? Examining Bodies, Technologies, Gender and the Borg of “Star Trek”
• Star Trek: Return to Paradise. The Research, Treatment and Screenplay (With Original Writing)
• To Boldly Go Where No Other Has Gone Before: The Construction of Race and Gender in “Star Trek”
• “Star Trek” and the Anthropological Enterprise: Cultural Relativism and Tolerance in Contemporary America

And this list includes only Ph.D. dissertations in English that have the phrase “Star Trek” in the title. I’m sure there are many more theses that involve Star Trek in some peripheral way, not to mention journal articles, conference papers, and non-English publications.

As a Star Trek fan, I’m rather pleased that my favorite sci-fi franchise is considered worthy of serious academic study.

Have you ever wondered why you can buy almost anything over the Internet and it will show up on your doorstep in a few days, but if you place a magazine subscription, your first issue might not arrive for three months? Well, I have. I always thought that if you start a subscription for a monthly magazine, having to wait any longer than a month for your first issue to arrive means the publisher is just being lazy.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Brian D. Foy, editor of The Perl Review, explains that the long delay is due to the extremely short shelf life of magazines. Unlike books, DVDs, and other products you can buy online, magazines can’t be stocked up in a warehouse somewhere. If a publisher prints too many copies of an issue, the unsold copies are money down the drain. To avoid this problem, publishers give a long lead time for each issue so they know exactly how many copies will actually sell.

Foy describes the situation in more detail in his response to Erica Sadun’s blog posting:

What you’re seeing is the long lead up in the production cycle to actually preparing an issue. Big magazine publishers typically have their subscription lists processed a couple months before an issue is due to be mailed. You’ll notice the same lag if you try to change your address. This is also why they start sending you renewal notices so early. Several other factors impact this, too, none of which the publisher likes.

For the two weeks, that’s probably just the normal batch processing. Instead of sending every new transaction immediately, they send a bunch at once. Not only that, there are several middle men. You buy the subscription through Amazon, but Amazon is getting it from a distributor. The distributor in turn has to then pass that stuff on to the publisher. There are a lot of market inefficiencies in the process. Publishers hate all of this but have to tolerate it because they can’t do it themselves. Amazon doesn’t want to deal with publishers individually, so publishers are stuck with distributors. Distributors want to make as much money as possible, so they do things as cheaply as possible. This is the same situation for buying a book through Amazon too, although distributors such as Ingram can stockpile books in warehouses. Magazines can’t do that, as I’ll explain in a moment.

If you want something faster, order it directly from the source to cut out the middle men. Mother Nature can send you things quickly because they have the product ready to go. Magazines don’t work the same way since they have to rely of all those middle men, making their margin quite thin. Their business model is completely different. That’s also why the direct subscription rates are so low: the money that would go to the middle men is taken off the price.

Along with that, various postal regulations come into play. If you look closely at most magazines, you’ll see a declaration outlining their print run, how many copies went to subscribers, how many to newsstands, and so on. The percentages of those numbers relative to the total print run matters to the Post Office, so the publisher tries to keep them as high as possible. That means they don’t print more than they are going to need (plus a little extra) and that there isn’t a big stack of them lying around. The lifespan of a copy of a magazine is very short, unlike books or other products. If you don’t buy it within the period that it’s current, it’s no longer sellable. That’s part of the reason they process their lists a couple months ahead of time: they have to plan their print run. Unsold magazines cost them the same as the sold ones, but bring in no revenue. Publishers have to minimize that cost if they want to survive.

Now, once they have their print run planned, they have to report their rate base (that’s basically how many people pay to get the magazine) to advertisers. Advertisers care about how many people are going to see their ad, and most magazines can’t live without the ad revenue. When I sell an ad, the advertiser wants to know how many people are going to see it. It’s one of the first questions they ask. Of course, advertisers want to pay as little as possible. Along with that, there are auditing organizations (such as the BPA, that verify all of those numbers. Again, there’s some lead time there because they have to know the subscriber base well in advance to sell the ads.

So there you have it. The mystery of delayed magazines has finally been solved! Publishers aren’t being lazy; they’re being frugal.