I wonder if there are categorizable styles for toweling off.

Every time I exit a shower, bath, or pool, I dry myself off in a consistent, particular manner. How did this come about? Do other people use their towels in as a consistent manner as I do? I hope so, because then we can compare towel-usage with heat maps. 

I use three sizes of towels: a bath sheet (60″ × 35″), a bath towel (52″ × 27″) and a hand towel (30″ × 16″). I was curious not only how I was using the towel, but if changing towel size changed the usage pattern. So, I took three showers and dried myself off once with each towel.

The darker areas indicate higher use. The patterns represent both sides of the towel, in aggregate.

Bath Sheet (60″ × 35″):

Bath Towel (52″ × 27″):

Hand Towel (30″ × 16″):

From the maps, we can see I’m a very symmetric towel user, with a focus on the center. I also tend not to evenly utilize my towel’s drying power.

Perhaps I could optimize.

How do you use your towel?

(more…)

Some stories wonderfully capture family tradition. This one frames mine nicely.

Last night, my family sat for passover seder. If done “correctly”, seders can last hours. Ours takes ten minutes– tops. We’re big on shortcuts. 

My grandfather distributes the Concise Family Seder, a tome used by nearly all secular jews. “Page 1.” He speaks to no one in particular. He motions to my aunt, “Janey, care to start?”

“Sure. Mine’s got annotations.”

“Oh,” I say, “that’s my copy. I crossed out all the boring stuff and condensed everything when I ran seder five years ago.” 

Beat. Part pinball machine, part middle-school volleyball player, my uncle lurches for the annotated copy and flings it over to me. No one is surprised. Looks like I’m in charge.

“Page one” I begin, ” is crossed out… as are pages two and three. Alright, Janey, bottom of page four, where it reads, ‘A participant continues’. You’re a participant. Continue.”

We read some, skip most, dip eggs in salt water, and charge through the ceremony. Though we unabashedly compress most of the seder, we pause for my grandmother’s speech. Probably the most important part of our seder, she reflects (at great length) on how wonderful it is that we’re together, the tragedy of the Holocaust, how the message of Passover reflects on modern times, and so forth.

As she often does, Grandma brings a prop. She motions to a brass cup, placed on the center of the seder table and filled with wine, found at a flea market in Germany.

“This cup of Elijah was an heirloom of a German Family. It’s engraved, dated [somewhere around 1930]. … It was cared for over all these years, and now we use it as our cup of Elijah.”

Janey examines the cup and whispers something in my uncle’s ear. My grandmother continues, “Why are you talking over me? Anyway, Daddy [my grandfather] insisted we have this seder. … He believes it’s an important tradition that we should carry on. … like that German family showed, seders are important. …” and so forth. After five minutes of this, she stops.

“Mom,” Janey says, “that cup is a first-place trophy for a ski competition.”

She was nearly right. The cup reads:

1. PRIES
SCHLITTLI RENNEN
ENGELBERG. JAN. [12th 1930]

Which roughly translates as:

1st Place
Toboggan Run
Engelberg. January [12th 1930]*

We’re big on shortcuts. The truth shouldn’t get in the way of a good story or powerful teaching.

Perhaps this is the true meaning of passover. 

More: Engelberg - Translation: “Angel Mountain”

–

*I forget the actual date. To boot, chances are good it belonged to a Nazi.

I wonder what the exchange rate is on Dunbar’s number.

Popularized by Tipping Point, Dunbar’s number suggests that there’s a limit to social cognition. Roughly speaking, 150 people can form a tight social group; any larger and closeness suffers. Inasmuch, we sacrifice intimacy and trade familiarity for breadth. Is there an optimal social mix?

I’m not critiquing Dunbar’s accuracy or claiming we cap our friendships at 150 people. (My 800 Facebook “friends” might think ill of me for saying so.) But, I inherently feel a physical limit to my intimate capacity: it’s impossibly difficult to know — to really know — a certain number of people. 

To achieve such feats in friendship, I trade intimacy for connectivity. There are ten people I have always been close with (family included), and another twenty or so that are close friends. Call it thirty.

Using 150 as a benchmark, this leaves 120 slots. Using my 800 Facebook-friends as an indicator of my extended network, this means that 800 fit into those 120 intimate slots. Very roughly speaking, I trade one close friend for 6.67 acquaintances.

By comparison, consider someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble. Assume each has thirty close friends. Both hit the 5,000-friend limit on Facebook. That’s at least 42 acquaintances per close friend slot. That’s a lot of people. Both are connected to thousands more.

I wonder at what point, between the 800 I have and the 5,000 (and more) they have, can they not keep track of, let alone remember, those acquaintances.

What if I were to try to know — to really know — those 800 people I’m connected with. How far could I get?

Or would I just lose intimacy with everyone?

Is that what we’re doing to ourselves?

More: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

It’s great that people blog– I just wish they’d stop saying the same thing.

Through school, students write papers to demonstrate subject knowledge, less so to articulate original thought. Old habits die hard, people start blogging, and in this age of instant worldwide publishing, we end up chewing on a lot of cud.

It’s not that people are boring, stupid, or have nothing to say– (though, that’s debatable…) Years of response-based writing inclines people to offer reactions than articulate their own, original ideas.

It’s much easier to write reactions than create ideas and be wrong. Save nothing of the social anxieties for being wrong, describing new ideas is a hard thing to do.

People tend to follow the path of least resistance and thus the blogosphere saturates itself with commentary. And, since the blogosphere moves with such great velocity, it’s near impossible to keep track of everything that’s been said. 

Unfortunately, all contributions — and I use that term loosely – are indexed and compiled into the same channel. We call it “Google”, and the signal-to-noise ratio goes up. Way up.

Responses typically fall into certain categories. (Ask anyone who grades papers or reads hundreds of blogs.) With blogging, there’s just more. It seems more people are interested in demonstrating knowledge than contributing new thought.

My theory is that this happens subconsciously. Years of response-based education create this need– it’s how we were graded by our superiors and evaluated by our peers. People need to show that they know something.

There’s no problem with that, except that this need generates millions of blog posts. In result, we saturate our knowledge space and make it near impossible to wade through.

I move next month. No roommates. No compromises. What ridiculousness will come?

Since college, I’ve lived with one of my best friends from high school. It’s been fun, but he needs to move in with his girlfriend and I need my own place. Shared living space means compromises and concessions; and now, for the first time ever, I have complete freedom.

I’m excited and have begun thinking about the implications.

1. More Nudity
   With the prospects of the roommate (or his girlfriend) arriving at any time, I found it good practice to wear pants at all times. No longer an issue, I’ll likely forgo pants around my apartment. 
    
2. Less Laundry 
   More nudity also means I’ll be doing less laundry as I’ll be wearing fewer clothes. Seems logical.
    
3. More Gym Time
   More nudity also means I’ll notice how out of shape I’ve become. I’ll likely go to the gym more, or spend more time on my two-cycle.
    
4. More Laundry
   Frequent gym time doubles my load, so I guess I will have more laundry after all.
    
5. No Cable TV
   My current roommate compulsively watches TV. (He gets antsy without the Trinitron’s warm glow.) I tend to watch shows without commercials on DVD, and entire series in one sitting. I suspect I’ll skip the Cable, Blockbuster and Netflix accounts and just buy an AppleTV. 
    
6. No Stuffed Animals In The Living Room
   The only fight my roommate ever won was the stuffed animal debacle. Right now, a Mr. Snuffleupagus and a Tux penguin (holding a hand-written “NO LOAFING” sign) [dis]grace the living room. While every girl who’s ever visited the living room thought they were adorable, I still can’t stand them. At least I relegated the stuffed amoebas to the roommate’s bedroom. (Yes, he owns stuffed amoebas.)
    
7. Cups Will Be Stacked Rim-Up
   When you live with someone, little lifestyle differences begin to crop up. I stack cups rim up; my roommate does rim down. I won that battle, but he still puts the silverware the wrong way in the dishwasher. (Two years and it still bothers me.)
    
8. Better Music
   My roommate discovers music through Volkswagen and Apple ads. ‘Nuff said.
    
9. More Home Cooking
   My roommate and I love ordering from SeamlessWeb. It’s our favorite thing. But, with a supermarket next door, I now have no excuse.

It’s like my own magical DisneyWorld. I’m too excited to sleep.

Jews need love too– but some sure do have a funny way of going about finding it.

In Times Square hangs a huge billboard advertising JDate, a jewish-only online dating service. It’s like match.com, but for Jews.

Singles create profiles to describe themselves, their perfect date, and what they expect out of a relationship. They include pictures, yiddish phrases, and statistics including religious denomination and astrological sign to woo potential mates. Though users are asked for a user name, many men and women opt to use their unique serial numbers, a number assigned during signup, in lieu of a name to identify themselves.

Let’s read that again.

Though users are asked for a user name, many men and women opt to use their unique serial numbers, a number assigned during signup, in lieu of a name to identify themselves.

To boot, user numbers are unique, assigned, and permanent. You’d think for a cultural group so greatly affected by the holocaust, certain members would be more aware of the irony. 

At least you can change your phone number.

–

Notes: The author identifies culturally as Jewish. The author is not on JDate. Friends of the author, over dinner, noted that it was hard to remember girls that used JDate-assigned numbers instead of user names. The author remarked how funny that seemed in historical contexts. Laughter ensued. Promises were made to produce a blog post. The author makes no apology.

More: Spark Networks (LOV), the parent company of JDate, uses the same technology for other niche dating sites such as aptly-named Interracial Singles, Big Beautiful Woman Personals Plus, and Indian Matrimonial Network. These names are so wonderfully descriptive.

There are so many people I’d like to rave on; but, to avoid an Academy Award faux pas, I’m going to keep this short. 

Extra-Big Thanks
My Parents and Family - Thank you for no longer freaking out that I’m off the beaten path.
Judith Gerberg - Thank you for validating my career.

Business Partners
Heather Lorentz, Tyler Scriven, and Eric Bowman - Thanks for rocking.

Future Partners
****
**** Names omitted as ventures not yet public. You know who you are.
**** Thank you for trusting me to work with you. 
**** 

All of Twitter
Particularly to my follows on Twitter, you’re all good people… with the exception of @micah (who’s a douche bag). Very special thanks to Laura Fitton (@pistachio) who not only introduced me to Twitter, has been a great friend all along the way.

Friends who put up with my shit more than anyone
Josh Brodie, Sara Bert, Jordyn Cosmé, Alex Bregstein, and Rana Sobhany. Especially Rana, who sought me out even after I totally dissed her when she first introduced herself to me. 

And the rest of you who don’t like to be named, much less depicted on the Internet, thank you.

It takes more than a good person to declare a flash holiday; it takes one genuinely good person.

Outside the SXSW Bloghaus in Austin last month, some guy was hanging near the door handing out wristbands. Me, a sucker for swag, approached the guy and said, “Hey, can I have one?” He turns to me, says ’sure!’, and hands me a wrist band. “Thanks!” I said, “My name’s Michael. Who are you and what’s your story?” 

And that’s how I met Gary Vaynerchuk. Up until that moment, I hadn’t heard of Gary or winelibrary.tv. We spoke for a couple of minutes about how crazy I thought he was for answering his thousands of daily e-mails in lieu of delegating. Then it struck me as not so crazy: here’s a guy who cared so much about his job (wine) and his community that he made it his lifeblood. (I’m omitting a joke about transubstantiation right here.)

I ran into him later that night in the lobby of a hotel where about a hundred people had gathered. I went over to say hello but before I open my mouth he puts bottle of wine in my hand, “Gruen! Take this!” (I wasn’t wearing a name tag), raising another bottle to toast mine. At 2am, this man has energy.

“Gary, we’re so hanging out when we get back to New York.”

“Definitely! Now DRINK!” [sic]

…

Three days ago, I went to New York’s NextWeb Meetup and ran into Gary. Though we hadn’t talked since SXSW, he remembered me and we went right back to shooting the shit, with me making fun of his e-mailing habits.

So, it should come as no surprise that Gary could galvanize the social media world and beyond in an unedited two-minute video clip. Today is Good Person Day 2008, so spread it on.

Does precise writing stifle creativity?

As a species, we communicate primarily through writing. Literacy has no doubt improved learning, but does the act of translating thoughts into words harden cognition and narrow our creative abilities?

For me, thinking is seldom linear: imagine shmoo-shaped colors, textures, and emotions rubbing, tugging, and mixing in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Somehow, that system produces a communicable idea. 

Whenever someone asks me a question, I immediately have a pinging sensation. Then, somehow I translate that into a response. Ask me again and there’s less pinging, but you’ll get the same or similar response (and perhaps a hint of irritation). It’s like my brain has created a record of the question and a shortcut for me to make thinking easier. 

I shall call it learning.

The problem is that precise writing is rigid. (Ignore creative writing, poetry, and other artful forms for the moment.) So, if we communicate our thoughts primarily with rigid tools, over time our brains create shortcuts and scaffolding that promotes rigid thinking, making things easier.

See the problem?

Thankfully, not all communication is verbal. Artists (as writers categorize them) use movement, imagery, sound, void, touch, emotion, and all sorts of sensory to (as they say) express themselves. So do athletes. (Not so much the mathletes.)

Generally, artists who excel visually, aurally, and spatially come up short linguistically. They’re called “creatives”, and their expressive mediums are far less rigid; but, that doesn’t mean they’re not useful for precise communication. 

But, that’s another post for another day.