FeedMe

Edmund Pseudoscientific

As a science-minded boy growing up on a farm, I depended on mail-order for scientific tools and toys. The most coveted source was Edmund Scientific (or as they now call themselves, "Scientifics Online"). Even as an adult, I order from them still. I have been their customer for more than 45 years.

I was surprised to read a thread on Facebook, posted by Skeptical Inquirer, in which John S. Duckering, another customer, objected to their inclusion of a Ghost Meter in their present offerings. He said, "A reputable scientific products company selling Ghost Meters?! What in hell are you doing? With the pandemic of misinformation promulgated by paranormalists, spiritualists, Creationists, seers, and other quacks and con-artists, Edmund Scientifics is also jumping on the lunatic band wagon?! ... You thoroughly disappoint me!"

To the company's credit, Tim Burns, a brand manager at Edmund, replied, openly explaining that customer objections are leading him to rethink their policy. He later agreed to Mr. Duckering's request for permission to share the thread. He sais, "...I realize now that this is offensive to some the Edmund Scientific customers, people with very strong scientific sensibilities who look to Edmund for products that promote critical, empirical thinking, and real science as a hobby. I am currently rethinking my decision on this product line. I apologize for the offense."

Impressive. I am writing Mr. Burns to express my disappointment as well, and to support his willingness to rethink the policy, in public. I haven't found a direct e-mail address, so I used snail mail — letters (on paper) are a great way to be noticed in the electronic messaging era.

If you would like to write one, here's the address:

Tim Burns
Brand Manager
Edmund Scientific and X-treme Geek
60 Pearce Ave.
Tonawanda, NY 14150

Where Food Comes From

My articles here are usually happy little trees, singing about some delicious dish, a technique I like, or some culinary triumph. This article is different. It's about a serious topic: Where our food comes from and how it's made. If the darker corners of of our food supply disturb you, skip this article and I promise you a new happy little tree in the next day or three.

I think this is a wonderful time to be a foodie. We have access to greater variety and quality than ever, and food is quite a value. But we pay prices for our bounty, as documented in books like Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

A friend sent me a link to a video secretly shot at a chicken farm or, as they've become, a chicken factory. It's about how chicks are hatched and processed to become our egg suppliers. The males don't serve that process and are removed and disposed of in an efficient, but unkind fashion. Here's the link, but I have to warn you that it's a grisly, real look at something we would rather not think about. You don't need to view it, but if you're a foodie, you do need to think about what we eat and how it gets to us.

As it happens, this was not news to me because I grew up on a chicken farm. My uncles ran the hatchery, my Dad ran the chicken coops. It was 40 years ago and it was on a much smaller scale than what the video shows, but the practices had the same effect. It is true, the roosters are killed. Ours were tossed in a barrel, where they smothered each other to death.

The chicks were all "de-beaked" within a couple of days after they hatched. We didn't have laser-driven machines. Instead, a machine with an electrically heated blade sliced off the tip of the top beak. It prevented the birds from injuring each other by pecking.

We regularly killed injured birds by holding them by the legs (that's the way you carry a chicken), and pulling the head until the neck breaks. After a little practice, it took about a second to do. The bird flaps around like -- well, like a chicken with its head cut off -- that's not a myth. I was told they feel no pain.

The people who run these operations aren't monsters. They're farmers. On a farm, animals are products. Farmers don't go out of their way to be cruel. They're just doing their jobs.

It doesn't stop with chickens. Cows, pigs, squab, and lobsters all feel pain at some point between birth and dinner plate. And the people who work in the slaughterhouses aren't treated so well, either. But then, neither are the people who pick and process our vegetables.

If all this bothers you, what can you do? The video gave one answer: stop eating eggs and milk and meat. While it's a viable personal option, it won't stop these practices. It will make you feel good about yourself, perhaps, and it will reduce the number of farmed animals a little. It pretty much ruins a barbecue. Awareness and legislation can make a difference but it's not an easy fix because other people in other places will gain a competitive edge.

There is suffering in food, and it's not just at the hands of people. Ever see how a salmon dies to feed a wild bear? I watch the spiders in my garden. They make a web every night. I don't want to think about how their food dies. Nor how they die, when it's their time. What we see on National Geographic specials takes place a million times a day, in a million places. Mother Nature is as inhumane as any human.

Some day, we will manufacture proteins in factories without hurting anything alive. Until then, you choose what you choose and something, somewhere, shares the consequences.

Low Salt Law

The Accidental Hedonist's Food Journal reports that "the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has recently begun a campaign to encourage processed food companies to reduce the amount of sodium in their goods by more than 40 percent over the next decade." Not clear to me whether they are aiming to legislate, as they did for trans fats in restaurants. I hope not. Spending public funds to promote lower salt is fine with me, but making it the law is another matter. Here's the comment I posted.

Difficult question, but not new: Freedom vs. public good. I don't think the public benefit here is sufficient to tell people what they can buy and sell. But that said, I would enjoy seeing lower salt use because people are so used to overly salty foods that they can't taste it. Reducing all the salt use would make foods taste better for all. As it is, most reduced sodium products (e.g. chicken broth) are saltier than I like.

But that's just me and while I would like to see it happen, legislating it seems wrong to me. 

What do you think?

Steve Jobs: A Lesson for Strong Leaders

I posted a comment on this, but thought it merits a separate article, where others might wish to comment.

On a personal note, we all of course wish Steve Jobs the best and hope his health improves. But this is about the professional issue of how a prominent leader affects the organization's health. Jobs' leave of absence places the future of the company in question. The real question is, how could their management not have prepared for this?

Having a strong, well-known CEO is a double-edged sword. The company benefits from his fame and his "reality distortion field," which makes the company and its products into celebrities. But he is mortal and Apple has never made visible any structure to take his place. When Bill Gates stepped aside, he did so wisely and the company's direction (such as it is) was never in question. Apple (and Jobs's ego) has never allowed that. Oracle and Larry Ellison is another example. Starbucks and Dell are recent examples of companies that faltered so badly when their well-known leaders took lesser roles, that in both cases the CEOs took it back a couple of years later.

The company I work for was led by a force of nature not unlike Jobs, but he clearly and publicly had a couple of very able lieutenants. When he retired suddenly for medical reasons, they were ready. They stepped in and the company continued its course. His succession plan was an act of maturity, wisdom, and humilty that are apparently lacking at Apple and Oracle.

I expect Apple's stock will be clobbered until such time as investors see evidence that the company can weather his absence and they see if product and marketing strategy will remain as focused without Jobs at the helm.

Investors and the company management should have been considering this all along.

Read the Question? What a Concept!

OK, my new pet peeve: Customer support organizations that reply without reading the question. Today's is Long's Drugs. I asked:

Nature of Comment: Longs Web Site

Comment: My eFills prescription list has several old prescriptions that are irrelevant (e.g. an old antibiotic prescribed for a single illness years ago). How can I remove them?

The answer:

Please feel free to contact your local Longs pharmacy directly so they may further assist you regarding your prescription concerns. If you have any other questions, concerns, or need a pharmacy number please feel free to contact us directly at 1-800-To-Longs (800-865-6647).Hope you have a nice day.

Last week, it was PayPal. Three exchanges so far, and little evidence they are reading the question.

Grumble.

Just. Read. The. Question. Please.

Password Evil

Pet peeve: Idiotic rules placed on passwords. Current example: brightidea.com.

"Password must contain at least one upper case character"

"Password must contain at least one symbol (!#$%&()*+,-/?@{|}~)"

They make it maximally irritating by not telling you these rules until you violate them. So you type a password. Twice, of course.

They balk and you type a new one. Twice.

They balk again. You have typed the damn thing six times now.

Oh, wait, the rules are there. There are five rules!! Gray on gray -- way over to the right, not near where you enter passwords and only when you click on the password box:

And it even contains a typo.

This is not the stupidest. That award goes to the morons in IT at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas for the restriction that no password can contain the first three letters of any month!

IT people everywhere, please: We know you were the smallest one the playground and you never got your way. We know you like being in control. But your customers have hundreds of passwords and why should they need to have a separate Post-It with your site's password just because you think you're wiser than any banking or securities site and you have such smart rules for how to make a "stong" password.

Stop being an idiot.

Live, from New York

If you didn't see the Palin-Hillary bit on Saturday Night Live -- here you go. Brilliant, especially Tina Fey as Palin.

Windows Mojave: Better than Vista

Microsoft knows they have a reputation issue with Vista. Buggy, crashy, bloated, slow.

But what if Vista is really good and all of this is just perception?

In a high-tech version of the old Folgers commercial, Microsoft showed people who were critical of Vista a next-generation version of Windows called Mojave. They later reveal that it was really good old Folgers Crystals — I mean, Vista.

Can this slick campaign put Vista back on the map? See for yourself.

If Microsoft really believes that people will like Vista, if they would only try it, how about a money-back guarantee? (Of course, if you don't like it, you them have to figure out how to uninstall it and go back to your old system.)

Leo Laporte says Vista has had a bum rap, that it's actually quite good, and way more secure than previous versions of Windows. But you do need recent hardware — don't run it on your old 800 MHz Pentium.

And by the way, I admire the polish and skill of this campaign but worry not: I still hate Microsoft. None of those reasons have changed.

Microsoft

Why do I dislike Microsoft? They're really a great company, with smart people, and have contributed a great deal. As much as people dislike Bill Gates, I never did. I really admire his charitable work which is precisely what he said he was going to do a decade ago. Their trade practices haven't been pristine but for the most part in recent years, it's been legal and mostly ethical. They're ruthless competitors but that's not, in itself, evil.

I also credit them for fixing the Macintosh! If Microsoft hadn't launched Windows, the Mac would totally suck.

And yet, Microsoft makes me nuts.

Standards

This is their biggest offense, in my book. Microsoft pretends to follow industry standards and common practices, while really co-opting, or even sabotaging, them. Under the guise of enhancement, they add "features" in a way that damages competing products. The best example is their web browser. Generation after generation sought to derail web standards, adding elements (such as ActiveX controls) designed to get web developers to write sites that would not work well on other browsers. It is a pleasure now to see them outfoxed.

Another example: Their Exchange mail server uses a Microsoft-proprietary format for attachments and text formatting. Non-Outlook e-mail programs can't read them. There are standard methods for doing this, but Microsoft does not adhere to them. You can configure the server to not do this, but you should not have to.

One more: SharePoint is the most popular collaboration system for companies. It works pretty well if the user has Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Other browsers and systems are supposed to work but it's a hair-pulling experience. As far as I can see, everything they're doing could be done in an industry-standard way that works universally. I can't tell if the Explorer-dependence is deliberate sabotage or incompetence.

It makes me crazy because it is arrogant, anti-user, and predatory. It's one area where they exploit their leadership in a way that damages the community.

Taste

Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft that they "have no taste." Say what you will about Jobs and his arrogance (I would not argue) but he is right. They are successful — and Jobs does not begrudge that, a least in this video — even if their products and strategies are artless. He says, "they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture to their product."

It's obvious to me that engineers design their interfaces and graphics. I recently saw the new release of MS Office 2008 for the Mac. It was demonstrated for me by a Microsoft program manager, who proudly showed me 3D charts in PowerPoint. I was horrified by the amaterish 3D. They had added shadows and highlights that were blocky and unrealistic. The colors were Crayola basic. Labels were improperly centered on shapes. To many business users, I am sure these look fine, but any top-tier company would have them redrawn before using them in any material that goes outside the company.

There is nothing evil or badly intentioned about this: I think it's because they're unaware, like the engineer who dresses in plaid and dots and is honestly befuddled when it's pointed out.

Interface

Then there are the user interfaces. Microsoft has some of the most advanced user interface labs in the world and a large UI staff. Yet, their interfaces are consistently confusing and convoluted.

MS Office is a case in point. It has tons of functionality, but finding and performing a function is often painful. The worst part is that with each revision, it becomes more painful! Why? Because their UI labs are very good at identifying user complaints, very poor at fixing them. When they find a function people can't do, such as mail merge, they never seen to think that the user interface is fundamentally in need of ground-up redesign. Almost invariably, they think the answer is to add something. They added a mail merge palette. A help system. Then that paper clip animation. Then a wizard. Then a "ribbon." A sequential palette. Now they have a bar thing that has no name that brings up a series of icons that, um, does something. Like a wizard. But they can't call it that because the wizards, um, didn't help.

They seem to toss solutions at the problem, never quite figuring out that the problem is underneath all these wizardly layers.

The project manager who demonstrated Office 2008 for me showed me the wizard-like bar thing they had added for special user operations, like mail merge and templates. It takes up about an inch-high row of the document window. I asked if it could be made vertical. "We thought about that," he said. "Especially with displays tending to be wider. But no, it's horizontal only."

Duh. Even when they know they're making a mistake (and they usually don't), they proceed and make the mistake.

Code

And then, there is the underlying stuff: The code. It's bloated. It's buggy. Year after year, release after release, many bugs remain. It's slow and inefficient. The new Office 2008 for the Mac takes longer to load (a lot longer) and is not noticeably faster than the six-year-old, two-revs-ago version I had.

Someone did an interesting comparison between the open-source web server, Apache, and Microsoft's server, IIS. These "call graphs" hint at the underlying structure and you don't need to be an expert to see the difference.(thanks to Paul Rako's Anablog — which presents his own case against Microsoft — for showing me these.)

Is this typical? Meaningful? I wouldn't know, but I would bet it is.

I Don't Hate Microsoft

I don't hate Microsoft. I certainly don't hate their people. I don't even hate their products or what they have done for the industry. But I hate using their products, I hate being slave to their manipulations and incompetence.

Most of all, I hate it when I have no alternative.

Gaaaa! Microsoft!!!!

Morons.

In writing the article on HealthVault, I tried to log in. Won't let me.

I tried "Forgot Password" and it tells me the e-mail address I am using is not a valid login. So I try to register anew using that login. It tells me that it's already in use.

Click for help and I get a non-helpful FAQ that resizes the browser window to a tall, 1-inch wide window. Huh?

Anyway. It doesn't recognize my login except when I try to use it to register and then it recognizes that it's taken (yes, I know!!). Stuck. How much you want to bet their customer support doesn't respond?

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Postscript. I went back to request support. There is a Feedback link. Guess what it gave me:

OK, that's funny.

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P.P.S. Microsoft, to their credit, responded to my tech support request within the promised 24 hours. They suggested going to the Windows Live ID site and managing the login there, where I was able to reset the password. But that password is not strong enough for HealthVault and a stronger form (which I use on financial sites) also was not strong enough. In fact, a random strings of letters and numbers, like frt67h8j98I is not strong enough!

I clicked their tips for making a strong password and it goes to a Help page (after resizing the browser window to that ridiculously narrow window again) that did not talk about making a strong password.

Shrug.