The Scottosphere

Dear phar­ma­cies,

You have way too many prod­ucts on the shelf. It’s very con­fus­ing. Here’s how I’d fix it:

1. Elim­i­nate every­thing with phenyle­phrine as the active ingre­di­ent. This shit doesn’t do any­thing. Buy­ing pseu­doephedrine today is about as easy as get­ting an abor­tion in Mis­sis­sippi, but at least it works!
2. Don’t allow dif­fer­ent for­mu­la­tions of one brand to employ dif­fer­ent active ingre­di­ents. Imag­ine if Advil was some­times made of aspirin! Some­how this is accept­able for cold medicine.
3. Stop sell­ing so many 3- and 4-drug com­bos with ambigu­ous dif­fer­ences. For those peo­ple who get all 12 listed symp­toms simul­ta­ne­ously, maybe these are a con­ve­nience. I’d pre­fer to take a decon­ges­tant when I’m con­gested. I’ll take a cough sup­pres­sant if I have a cough. Thanks.
4. Seri­ously, why does every­thing have aceta­minophen in it? If peo­ple have pain, let them take a painkiller. Pretty soon, multi-vitamins and sham­poo are going to come with 1000 mg of aceta­minophen. I’d rather keep my liver.

By my esti­ma­tion, these changes would leave about 5 prod­ucts on the shelf. Much better.

My smart-o-phone (a Motorola Droid X) quit work­ing yes­ter­day. I turned it on in the morn­ing and it never made it past the manufacturer’s logo screen.

No prob­lem, I thought: I’ll just take the phone to the local Ver­i­zon store and they’ll sort it out. The cold and laconic rep­re­sen­ta­tive assigned to my case pro­ceeded to try the obvi­ous “fixes” (pulling out the bat­tery and replac­ing it!) before slouch­ing in his seat and star­ing word­lessly at his com­puter screen for what seemed like an eter­nity. Finally I asked, “So what do you think?”

(more…)

There are a lot of things wrong with self-checkout machines. They are every bit as unpleas­ant as a vend­ing machine. They are con­fronta­tional (“Item removed from bag­ging area!”). The speed and vol­ume of the recorded speech is cal­i­brated for the mildly retarded and par­tially deaf. Feed­ing them bills and coins is a frus­trat­ingly slow process. They don’t offer advice or tell you what’s on sale. They deprive you of a rea­son­able and pleas­ant human inter­ac­tion that might ordi­nar­ily ben­e­fit both parties.

By far the most annoy­ing fea­ture of self-checkout machines is the change mech­a­nism. I would like to meet the engi­neers who designed these things. Almost all human cashiers will dis­pense change in a way that max­i­mizes the coins of high­est value and thereby min­i­mizes the total num­ber of coins. This is called a “greedy algo­rithm” and it works because the denom­i­na­tions of US cur­rency were well-chosen.¹

The machine at CVS was dis­pens­ing 2–3 nick­els at a time, which will never result in a min­i­mum coin count. Per­haps, I fig­ured, the machine was using a dif­fer­ent but still customer-friendly algo­rithm: min­i­miz­ing the total weight of the change. How would that work? Using weights pub­lished on the US Mint Web site, I wrote a cou­ple of quick Python scripts to help me under­stand the dif­fer­ence between the minimized-count and minimized-weight approaches. It turns out that for val­ues between 30–34, 40–44, 55–70, 80–84, and 90–94 cents, they do dif­fer. But the improve­ment comes from higher num­bers of dimes, which are the light­est of the coins. In nei­ther case will an opti­mum coin dis­tri­b­u­tion con­tain more than 1 nickel.

This self-checkout change dis­penser is con­trolled by some other approach. But what? Max­i­miz­ing the time between refill­ing the machine with coins? Fur­ther study is required. But it’s clear to me that these machines are not work­ing with my inter­ests in mind. When you relin­quish a per­fectly rea­son­able job to a com­puter, I sup­pose one should expect no sym­pa­thy from the machine.

I tried to buy some more of my favorite film for available-light pho­tog­ra­phy, Neopan 1600. And guess what? It’s been dis­con­tin­ued! Come on, Fuji­film! There are alter­na­tives at this speed, like Ilford Delta 3200 and Kodak T-Max P3200, but I don’t like them as much.

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: too soon!

The New York Times’s lat­est piece on fem­to­cells, small cel­lu­lar base sta­tions that can be self-installed at one’s home or busi­ness, reflects an obnox­ious sense of enti­tle­ment among mobile phone users. The head­line screams it: “Bring­ing You a Sig­nal You’re Already Pay­ing For.”
Today’s cel­lu­lar net­work is out­ra­geously good—so good that we’ve will­ingly sac­ri­ficed clean tower-free sight lines, smooth protrusion-free archi­tec­ture, and low back­ground RF to get there.

Remem­ber when cel­lu­lar phones had speak­ers large enough so you could hear the other per­son on the line? (Back before half-rate audio became the default.)

Remem­ber when cel­lu­lar phones had micro­phones located near the user’s mouth, so the other party could hear you?

Remem­ber when cel­lu­lar phones had anten­nas that were large enough to do their job when the tower is more than 100 feet away?

Most peo­ple would rather buy some­thing shiny and new than con­cern them­selves with these prac­ti­cal details. Which is fine. But then to com­plain about it? Come on.

I was leaf­ing through the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion dis­carded, unread, by the doc­tor down the hall. The cover, as is the tra­di­tion for the JAMA, is a repro­duc­tion of a famous art­work: Jan van Eyck’s The Vir­gin of Chan­cel­lor Rolin. I was at a loss to explain exactly what about the image both­ers me—until I dis­cov­ered a note inside detail­ing just how (and pos­si­bly why) the con­ver­gence is incor­rect. Ha! The fig­ures in the fore­ground are too big to fit through the door­way behind them!

Why don’t my trade jour­nals have moments of Zen like this? Are doc­tors sup­posed to have bet­ter taste than engineers?

Tes­ti­mony before the NTSB on June 9 revealed an inter­est­ing sub­plot to the story of the USAir Flight 1549 ditch­ing ear­lier this year. After the evac­u­a­tion of the air­plane, the life rafts, which were teth­ered to the fuse­lage, could not be cut free. The sink­ing air­craft threat­ened to drag the pas­sen­gers under! Finally, a knife was tossed from a ferry, and of course the story has a happy end­ing.

Prior to the rule change in late 2001, I car­ried a fold­ing knife when fly­ing for exactly this kind of rea­son. I’m not a crazy sur­vival­ist and I don’t think I will ever expe­ri­ence a plane crash, but I’ve been in enough air­planes, boats, and the­atres to know that when things go badly wrong and duct tape won’t fix it, a knife prob­a­bly will. It doesn’t hurt to be pre­pared.

I can appre­ci­ate why, in the chaotic early days of the TSA, a ban on knives in air­craft made sense. But those days have passed. Air­planes are now for­ti­fied with bul­let­proof (hence knife-proof) cock­pit doors. Thou­sands of flights per day are sup­pos­edly guarded by air mar­shals. And frankly, atti­tudes have changed such that any­one who makes a threat in flight is likely to get a swift ass-kicking from fel­low passengers.

It is time for some­one over there to admit that knives, like bot­tled water and tooth­paste, are not a threat to national secu­rity. Let’s quit the secu­rity the­atre and get on with our lives.

P.S.—The House, led (incred­i­bly) by a fresh­man Repub­li­can from Utah, recently voted to block the TSA’s planned use of naked body scans at secu­rity check­points. Woohoo! Sur­pris­ingly, this issue has also attracted scant atten­tion from the press.