"t3" via Jay Kelly in Google Reader

A Better Queue Finds the Best Netflix Instant Streaming Content [Web Apps]

2012-05-07T21:00:00Z

Finding great content on Netflix Instant Streaming can be tough if you're not sure what you're looking for, but a clever webapp called A Better Queue helps you find great movies in the genre(s) you desire. More »

Driven to Drink

2012-05-02T14:00:00Z

How Beer Saved the World makes an entertaining case that fermented malt beverages are “the greatest invention of all time.” The 2011 Discovery Channel documentary presents evidence that beer triggered the agricultural revolution (since hunter-gatherers needed barley to make it), “built the pyramids” (since Egypt’s workers were fueled by it), and inspired “a host of inventions,” including the plow, irrigation, wheeled carts, measurement math, and writing.

We also learn that drinking beer saved “millions of lives” during the Middle Ages because brewing killed dangerous waterborne bacteria. In early America beer fostered a tavern culture that gave birth to the Revolution. Louis Pasteur’s curiosity about why beer spoils led to the germ theory, “the cornerstone of modern medicine.” Brewers’ need for bottles gave us the first automated assembly lines, a decade before the Model T.

“Without beer,” says historian Gregg Smith, “we’d probably still be living in caves.” And what fun would that be without beer? —Jacob Sullum

The Cure for the Common Hangover

2012-04-26T20:30:00Z

Drink too much booze on Saturday night and it doesn’t matter if you have a health insurance plan so comprehensive it even covers distance Reiki healing: The American medical establishment is going to leave you sweaty, trembling, and nauseous on Sunday morning. Oh, sure, you can hit up 7-Eleven for some Hangover Joe’s Recovery Shots . But it’s 2012, the age of bionic eyeballs and facelifts at the mall. While the imprimatur of the Warner Bros. licensing department lends Hangover Joe’s a certain medical authority, is this product really the best solution that 21st century medical technology can offer us?

Clearly Dr. Jason Burke doesn’t think so. A board-certified anesthesiologist with a medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Dr. Burke is, according to his website, the “first physician in the United States to formally dedicate his career to the treatment of hangovers.”

Earlier this month, he unveiled his new treatment clinic, a 45-foot-long tour bus emblazoned with soothing blue and white graphics and his business’s name, “Hangover Heaven.” Inside the bus, it looks like a cross between an ambulance and a conference room at Embassy Suites. IV drips hang from the ceiling, patients are swathed in blankets, but there are also spacious leather sofas with built-in beverage-holders and flat-screen TVs. EMTs administer relief to patients in the form of branded medical cocktails. The $90 Redemption package contains one bag of saline solution, vitamins, and an anti-nausea medication. The $150 Salvation package includes a double shot of saline solution, the vitamins, the anti-nausea medication and an anti-inflammatory as well.

In his day job as an anesthesiologist, Dr. Burke uses such regimens to treat post-surgery patients suffering from dehydration, nausea, and similar symptoms. Recognizing that they might prove useful in other contexts too, he experimented on himself after a night of revelry. The treatment worked, and soon he was wondering if he’d stumbled into a potential business as well as a cure. At first, he considered establishing a traditional office but ultimately decided the costs associated with that were prohibitive. “Being that this was a somewhat unique business idea, I didn’t want to be on the hook for a five-year lease if the thing tanked,” he says. So he decided to go mobile, purchasing a tour bus that already had most of the accommodations he needed. “This way, if it doesn’t work out, I can sell the bus.”

But if the risks of blazing new medical ground are high, so are the potential rewards. According to a study published in the November 2011 edition of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (AJPM), excessive alcohol consumption resulted in economic losses of approximately $223 billion in 2006. Moreover, the study elaborated, $74.1 billion of those losses resulted from impaired workplace productivity. Another $4.2 billion in losses resulted from workplace absenteeism. With so much money at stake, you’d think there’d be more efforts to find effective treatments. And yet because of the other costs associated with excessive alcohol consumption—in the AJPM’s estimation, it leads to 79,000 premature deaths a year and generates approximately $45 billion a year in healthcare and criminal justice costs—many medical practitioners believe hangovers function as nature’s own aversion therapy, a useful deterrent and punishment that discourages subsequent alcohol consumption. In the opinion of some researchers, a 2004 New York Times article reported , even just studying the efficacy of hangover cures “raises ethical issues.”

And yet what would happen if this prohibitionist mindset were applied across the entire spectrum of medical treatment? Should liposuction and bypass surgery be off-limits to anyone who ever ate a donut? Should ultra-marathoners have access to Ibuprofen?

In Las Vegas, the prospect of eliminating hangovers—and the productivity declines that come with them—is particularly compelling. While $20 cocktails are a major part of the city’s lifeblood, the fuel that keeps roulette wheels spinning and wedding chapels open around the clock, they also exact an economic toll. A tourist who spends all day in his hotel room, popping Excedrin and dry-heaving to Dr. Phil, is a tourist who isn’t staring slack-jawed at Criss Angel’s illusions or piloting race cars at Richard Petty’s NASCAR fantasy camp . “If you’re only here for three days, and you’re hungover one day, that’s a third of your trip that just went poof,” Dr. Burke says. “This service is all about getting people back to enjoying their vacation.”

Then there are the legions of radiologists, sportswear retailers, and adult video producers who converge on the city each year for trade shows. For them, a day lost to hangover recovery could mean a squandered networking opportunity, a missed deal, career sabotage. “There was a group of seven that came on our first weekend,” Dr. Burke says. “They were here for an oil and gas conference, and they

just brought their whole sales team on the bus. We treated them all so they could make it back to their conference.”

The Hangover Heaven treatments take about 45 minutes and Dr. Burke says that so far about 95 percent of his patients report feeling significantly better afterward—a few recent customers felt so good, in fact, that they went straight from the bus to the thrill rides at the Stratosphere Tower.

Still, these cures have their limits. They can’t undo a DUI. They can’t erase a facial tattoo. And as the Hangover Heaven website disclaims, the service isn’t intended for emergencies or serious medical conditions resulting from alcohol or long-term alcohol abuse. In addition, a semi-exclusive door policy is in effect. “We don’t just fire IVs and medicines into anybody that shows up,” Dr. Burke says. “This is a real medical practice. We don’t treat intoxicated people. We take a medical history and a consent. If people have complicating medical conditions, like diabetes or high blood pressure, we don’t treat them.”

Hangover Heaven also doesn’t take insurance. That means it’s that relatively rare medical practice where consumers pay directly for the services they desire. And because profit margins are thin, Hangover Heaven won’t prosper unless the bulk of its customers find the service effective, safe, and a good value. To ensure that they do, it’s more consumer-oriented than many medical businesses, emphasizing convenience, transparent pricing, and a commitment to improving the customer’s experience. For example, because some potential customers are wary of IVs, Dr. Burke’s exploring the feasibility of offering oral treatments. In addition, he’s thinking about converting the bus’s engine.

“I’m going to try to get the bus to run on biodiesel so that it smells like bacon,” he says. No doubt some nay-sayers will question the heart-healthiness of this move, but to Las Vegas visitors looking for the most pleasant recovery process possible, such touches no doubt bear the unmistakable scent of progress.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.

Do you have a people strategy?

2012-04-26T09:43:00Z

Hard to imagine a consultant or investor asking the CMO, "so, what's your telephone strategy?"

We don't have a telephone strategy. The telephone is a tool, a simple medium, and it's only purpose is to connect us to interested human beings.

And then the internet comes along and it's mysterious and suddenly we need an email strategy and a social media strategy and a web strategy and a mobile strategy.

No, we don't.

It's still people. We still have one and only one thing that matters, and it's people.

All of these media are conduits, they are tools that human beings use to waste time or communicate or calculate or engage or learn. Behind each of the tools is a person. Do you have a story to tell that person? An engagement or a benefit to offer them?

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

God's Matchbox

2012-04-23T06:00:01Z

I was in Reno this weekend with some friends and family, one of whom is widely recognized as the luckiest gambler in the universe. Let's call her Jane. Jane has reportedly won so many jackpots at slot machines that her track record seems to defy all reason. She's a gambling legend. I decided to put Jane's skills to the test in front of two witnesses: my wife, Shelly, and me. I gave Jane $50 and asked her to combine it with her own $50. Her assignment was to score a big win for our collective investment while my wife and I observed her technique.

Shelly pointed at the high roller slot machine room, where the $100 wouldn't last long without a win. Jane needed to feel the right vibe before picking a winning machine, so she asked us to follow her while she felt out the room. Jane is like the slot whisperer. I think the machines actually talk to her.

As you might expect, the high roller slots area was relatively empty. Far off in a darkened corner was a lone, bearded, creepy gambler. Jane walked straight over to the machine next to the creepy guy in the darkened corner and declared it to be a winning machine. I tried to wave her off, not wanting to spend more time than necessary in a darkened corner with a creepy guy, especially since the entire rest of the room was empty. Shelly stepped in and insisted that we let Jane pick the machine that spoke to her, without our unlucky influence. I reluctantly agreed. Jane sat down, inserted our $100, and started hitting win after win. Two minutes later, we split $600. WTF?

I took my $250 net profit and gave it to the control group for this experiment, i.e. me. I lost $200 on a variety of different slots in less than ten minutes. I didn't see another jackpot, big or small, that night. Jane had won about five jackpots in two minutes. I won none.

The freaky part happened the next morning. I was up early and took a long walk to a bagel shop. On my way back, I was crossing a huge empty parking lot, looking at the clear blue sky and snowcapped mountains. Suddenly a meteor crashed into the atmosphere directly in my view plane. The meteor streaked across the sky with a bright green trail of fire. It looked as if God had used the Earth to light a match. Seconds later, I heard the sonic boom. It was literally the coolest thing I have ever seen. Apparently this was the tail end of the Lyrid meteor shower. But unlike the nighttime meteor showers I've seen before, in which the meteors looked like fireflies in the distance, this meteor must have been relatively massive, and very near. Wow. It was a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

Across the street from me, facing the wrong direction, were four college students who missed the whole show. I was lucky to be looking in exactly the right direction. Wait. . . lucky? Lucky!!!

I decided this was a sign. I went back to the slots and hit them hard. I lost, and lost, and lost. I was down $200 in minutes. I tried one machine after another. I was confused. Jane had proven that luck exists, and I just saw my lucky meteor, so how could I keep losing? Then it hit me: There might be a pattern here.

If you recall, Jane picked the slot machine that no one else would have picked. Even if the creepy guy hadn't been in the far corner, how many of you would have entered a square room full of available slot machines and picked the one that was almost in the corner? Most people would probably play something nearer the middle of the room. If you preferred the corner, like the creepy guy, you would take the actual corner, not the machine one over from it. In other words, Jane picked one of the least attractive machines in the room, and it turned out to be "lucky."

From a business standpoint, it makes sense that the least attractive machine would pay best. If you're designing a casino layout, you know you can get suckers to play the losing machines in the best locations, and the ones with the most attractive lights and sounds, all night long. The casino can maintain whatever gambling odds are legally required over the entire body of slot machines while using psychology to steer people away from the ones that pay best. All of my losing spins involved machines that somehow appealed to me on a visceral or spatial level. What I needed was an undesirable machine. So I looked for one.

That's when I spotted a slot machine sporting the worst graphics I've ever seen. It was one of those full-screen types with a changing matrix of images. The artwork looked as if it had been created by a 13-year old for a school project. The graphics were so bad that you couldn't even tell what the images were supposed to represent. It looked intentionally unattractive. And I remembered from the prior evening that this machine had sat empty while most of the machines nearby were occupied. I had passed it up several times myself. If my economic theory of casino design was right, this was my winning machine. I sat down and fed it my last $100, which quickly turned into my last $25. And this is the part of my story that gets strange.

On what would have been nearly my last spin before quitting for the day, I hit a $400 jackpot. That was my biggest lifetime win at a slot machine. The machine's graphics went into celebration mode. At the end of the animation cycle, the onscreen image changed to a Western desert sky at twilight. The final animation was a meteor streaking across the sky, exactly like the one I had just seen. Freaky.

I don't actually believe in luck, or omens, or magic. I know that every part of my story can be explained by chance, or perhaps the economics of casino design. On the other hand, I also don't believe that reality is necessarily fixed and immutable. I can't rule out the possibility that we're experiencing some sort of Schrödinger's cat situation, in which all possibilities exist simultaneously until an observer intervenes. In any event, it was a fun weekend. I spent my winnings on a nice massage. And no, I didn't get lucky during the massage. But I like to think that in some parallel universe my twin did.

Extending the narrative

2012-03-23T09:18:00Z

Did you wake up fresh today, a new start, a blank slate with resources and opportunities... or is today yet another day of living out the narrative you've been engaged in for years?

For all of us, it's the latter. We maintain our worldview, our biases, our grudges and our affections. We nurse our grudges and see the very same person (and situation) in the mirror today that we did yesterday. We may have a tiny break, a bit of freshness, but no, there's no complete fresh start available to us.

Marketers have been using this persistence to their advantage forever. They sell us a car or a trip or a service that fits the story we tell ourselves. I don't buy it because it's the right thing for everyone, I buy it because it's right for me, the us I invented, the I that's part of the story I've been telling myself for a long time.

The socialite walks into the ski shop and buys a $3000 ski jacket she'll wear once. Why? Not because she'll stay warmer in it more than a different jacket, but because that's what someone like her does. It's part of her story. In fact, it's easier for her to buy the jacket than it is to change her story.

If you went to bed as a loyal company man or an impatient entrepreneur or as the put-upon retiree or the lady who lunches, chances are you woke up that way as well. Which is certainly safe and easy and consistent and non-confusing. But is it helping?

We dismiss the mid-life crisis as an aberration to be avoided or ridiculed, as a dangerous blip in a consistent narrative. But what if we had them all the time? What if we took the resources and trust and momentum that helps us but decided to let the other stuff go?

It's painful to even consider giving up the narrative we use to navigate our life. We vividly remember the last time we made an investment that didn't match our self-story, or the last time we went to the 'wrong' restaurant or acted the 'wrong' way in a sales call. No, that's too risky, especially now, in this economy.

So we play it safe and go back to our story.

The truth though, is that doing what you've been doing is going to get you what you've been getting. If the narrative is getting in the way, if the archetypes you've been modeling and the worldview you've been nursing no longer match the culture, the economy or your goals, something's got to give.

When decisions roll around--from what to have for breakfast, to whether or not to make that investment to what TV show (or none) to watch on TV tonight, the question to ask is: Is this a reflex that's part of my long-told story, or is this actually a good decision? When patterns in engagments with the people around you become well-worn and ineffective, are they persistent because they have to be, or because the story demands it?

The Boy With the Dragon Tattoo

2012-04-09T16:55:37Z

And other horrible ink in the NBA.

Comic for April 11, 2012

2012-04-11T05:00:00Z

Comic for April 8, 2012

2012-04-08T05:00:00Z

New book shows you how to make Lego guns

2012-04-05T21:47:19Z

[Video Link] Jack Streat, the 17-year-old boy who made the AK-47 out of Lego pieces in the video above, has landed a book deal. LEGO Heavy Weapons will be released in May by No Starch Press.

From LEGO guns mastermind and 17–year-old YouTube sensation Jack Streat comes LEGO Heavy Weapons, a collection of complete building instructions for four truly impressive, 1:1-scale replicas of the world's most iconic firearms.

LEGO Heavy Weapons will show you how to build brick-based models of:

- A massive Desert Eagle handgun, with working blowback action

- The compact but deadly AKS-74U assault rifle with folding stock

- A bolt-action Lee Enfield sniper rifle (a.k.a. Jungle Carbine) with bipod and scope

- A pump action SPAS combat shotgun

Each set of instructions includes a complete parts listing, so you can find (or special order) any hard-to-find bricks. The book's illustrated, step-by-step building instructions will be clear to anyone who's ever played with LEGO bricks, and the biggest models will challenge and delight even the most serious builders.

LEGO Heavy Weapons

Instructions on a smoke grenade: Don't be a dick

2012-04-06T13:14:29Z

An unnamed brand of smoke grenade includes "Don't be a dick with our products" in its instructions. Apparently this is Canadian (judging from the bilingual instructions).

Smoke grenade instructions.. (imgur.com) (via Lowering the Bar)

Blake Griffin Returned Pau Gasol To A Very Bad Place With Another Posterizing Dunk [Video]

2012-04-05T04:22:40Z

Okay, Blake. We get it. [ESPN]

Lebanese Basketball Player Has Career Night, Scores 106 Points Above His Season Average [Basketball]

2012-04-04T15:05:00Z

Mohammad El Akkari is a guard for Moutahed, Tripoli, in Lebanon's Division A League Final 8. He scored 113 points in Tuesday's 173-141 victory against Bejjeh, Jbeil—a slight improvement over his season average of 7.6 points per game. Akkari was 40 of 69 from the field, including 32 of 59 from 3-point range, though because there doesn't appear to be a boxscore, it's not known how many shots he took relative to his teammates. Akkari also made his only free-throw attempt, which clearly means he needs to work on drawing fouls.

Akkari breaks into the 100-plus point club! [FIBA Asia, h/t to Trace]
Lebanese basketball player scores 113 points in a single FIBA game [Ball Don't Lie]
Lebanese Basketball Player Scores 113 Points in FIBA Game [Hoop Doctors]

Sentry gun controller

2012-03-29T18:45:29Z

Thanks to Bob's open-source Sentry Gun controller, now anyone can build a gun that "autonomously tracks, aims, and shoots at targets using a webcam."

(Via Dangerous Prototypes)

Pure evil causes birth defects

2012-03-28T15:29:02Z

Unassailable evidence presented by the Institute for Dangerous Research's Department of Mad Biology.

UPDATE: This brilliant poster is the work of Allison Lonsdale. She made it for the 2010 San Diego ConDor. You can get a closer look at the poster and its text on the ConDor site. The photo is the work of Jerry Abuan. Thanks to all the readers who filled in the blanks on this amazing work of wonderous awesomeness!

Via penguinchris.

Borat anthem played for Kazakh medalists

2012-03-24T20:41:16Z

From the BBC: "Kazakhstan's shooting team demanded an apology after a spoof national anthem from the comedy film Borat was played instead of the real one at a medal ceremony in Kuwait." Best potassium in the world.

Are Bananas Much Better Than Cookies? Foods That Keep You Full and Prevent an Energy Crash [Health]

2012-03-22T15:30:00Z

Ever notice some foods, like oatmeal, fill you up quickly, but others, like rice, you can go on eating seemingly forever? Researchers have measured this "satiety" food index as well as how long a food will keep you full to help you choose better snacks. More »

The Man With a Plan to Rebuild After the Apocalypse

2012-03-18T18:56:03Z

Chris Hackett, a master builder and fabricator in Brooklyn, has a taste for showmanship and improvised technology, and a plan for when zombies take over.

Specific promises, kept

2012-03-16T09:32:00Z

We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. There are so many waffle words, so many equivocations, so many ways to sort of say what we kind of intend to possibly do...

In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate. And if you can do it regularly, on time and without a fuss, we will notice.

[If it's not working for you, perhaps you need to make and keep bigger promises. "Service excellence is our goal," doesn't count.]

Comic for March 18, 2012

2012-03-18T05:00:00Z