That’s incredible considering Angry Birds is by no means a technical feat nor is it an original game; in fact, it’s merely a remix of some old popular games. It’s popular because it wins on familiarity and on story. To wit, here’s a game that has similar play dynamics:

This is Breakout. Steves Jobs and Wozniak wrote this ‘original’ game for Atari. While your instincts may tell you Angry Birds and Breakout are night and day, you’d be wrong. They’re based on the same premise: send a projectile to destroy all of the static objects on a game board before you run out of lives. The game was rather successful and spawned sequels and hundreds of clones. (It’s been on every BlackBerry I’ve ever seen as “Brick Breaker”.)

Here’s another game of the same flavor: bowling.

Suspicious (yet probably still accurate) Internet data suggest that Angry Birds has about the same number of downloads (~200M) as the number of people who have bowled at least once in their lifetimes (~220M). And, given the proclivities of today’s youth, that number is increasingly in favor for the birds.

It leads one to ponder: if it’s basically the same game, why are the Angry Birds so ubiquitous? And yet, the answer is simple: emotion.

At the onset, you’re presented a problem: evil green pigs have stolen eggs from a cacophony of primary-colored kamikaze dodos. The outrage is enough to start a war, severe enough to forgo primal instincts of self preservation and use yourself as munitions; but, more importantly, it’s enough to stir, as the player, your latent need for righteous vengeance. Naturally, you are uniquely suited to aide the birds in their avionic havoc—and for which you are eager to comply.

Just watch the intro:

Damn those pigs. So smug. Ugh!

After this, sending a ball into a bunch of blocks isn’t nearly as exciting. This is because (for the non-autistic among my readership) you relate to anthropomorphic critters better than you can relate to a circle. You may have sympathy for the devil, but certainly not for a ball.

Behold:

Angry Birds is tried and true gameplay laced with emotion and familiarity: the story is familiar, the physics are familiar, and the only logical leap the game asks of the player is to forget that most birds can fly perfectly well on their own. But, in this case, they require a slingshot and your help, and don’t require a trip down to the bowling alley.

Like bowling and breakout and those before it, Angry Birds has been wildly successful, spawning sequels and dozens of clones. And toys.

But, for my time and money, I’d rather go bowling with friends—they tell better stories.

Glory begins in an “uh”—the involuntary spasm associated with confusion or unfamiliarity, it’s a commonplace verbal crutch oft extinguished with any formal public speaking training. It’s negative space before a cohesive thought, like a dial-tone waiting for instructions. And, with regard to “uh-oh”, this monosyllabic overture intonates a forthcoming thought still too primitive for higher linguistics or verbiage. To the poor souls who utter it, their minds grope at the ineffable harbinger with horrifying deftness.

Notice singularity in purpose of the “uh” and the “oh”: there’s no space. A space affords a pause… and if there’s time for pause, there’s time for action. But, in this moment, action is meaningless, so the a hyphen is used only to service grammarians and readers. It’s certainly not useful nor pertinent for its utterer who, clearly, has more pressing matters to attend to.

“Oh” is the moment of clarity when dire incomprehension shifts into sharp focus. “Oh” isn’t acknowledgement of a mistake—that’s “oops!”—or understanding that everything’s going to be ok. Quite the opposite, in fact: the “oh” is the implicit acceptance that this, whatever it is that is now harrowing down upon your consciousness, is not good. This much you know. There is little, if nothing, to immediately do or solve, and your mind accepts the eventuality. What will happen will happen, and the most amount of action you can muster is to vocalize your fantastic impotence with a word so fatalistic that it does not employ a hard consonant.

Revel in the uh-ohs. They’re the only moments when you can resign yourself to the fate of your circumstances.

Regarding written profanity, I don’t understand when writers X-out a few offending characters when they could talk around the idea with rhetorical wit. Profane words, regardless of obfuscation, still mean the same thing; and yet, for some reason, our internal censors let it go. Worse, writers miss an opportunity to impress their readers.

Personally, I’m not irked by dirty words (however salacious) but I am rather annoyed with the lack of creativity in that their scribes couldn’t find a better way to say it whilst maintaining the conservative sentimentality they clearly want to preserve.

It’s incongruous.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with peppering language with profanity, but it’s often uninspired and cliché. I think to myself, “what the fuck is this shit?” (which should provide some insight into my internal monologue’s maturity level). But, that’s the point: idle thoughts are fleeting; print is forever. And, as a writer, I expect others to put a bit more care into what they print than what they’re thinking about in a given moment.

If you’re going to get dirty and gross, be dirty and gross. Use the words the dictionary affords you. And, for those with the talent, make some up. But, in general, don’t be senseless—censoring your language doesn’t soften its meaning, it just makes you look lazy and, I daresay, stupid.

As the editor-in-chief of The Onion once told me:

There’s nothing like a well-timed fuck.

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Special thanks to Elizabeth King for inspiring this post. Her tolerance for my asinine banter is very much appreciated. Read her blog.

What I came up with is not strict nor restrictive, but rather a health guideline. I started adhering to these guidelines—because they’re certainly not rules or a plan—at the beginning of the summer and have since lost 4.5 lbs. A simple workout schedule and simple-to-adhere-to life choices accompany a simple diet.

Important to note is that these guidelines are sub-optimal: you’re not going to lose weight or gain strength or be physically healthier than you would following a strict regimen. But, it’s optimal in that it makes eating choices easy and I don’t really have to think about it. I can just do it and see the effects over time.

So, without further ado:

On Timing

• Eat 3-4 times a day. Every day, spaced out from 2-5 hours at a clip. Always eat breakfast within 30 minutes of getting up, even if it’s small.
• No eating 5 hours before bedtime. Don’t give yourself an energy spike before you try to go to sleep.
• Drink plenty of water before you eat and after you eat. Unless you have a long drive ahead of you, drinks lots of water. You’ll feel fuller for longer.

On Consumption

• No High-Fructose Corn Syrup [HFCS]. None. It’s in almost every processed food, so read the ingredients.
• No high incident of artificial crap. If you don’t know what half the ingredients are (and can’t readily pronounce them) don’t eat it. I can almost guarantee HFCS will be in there anyway.
• Eat meat no more than twice a day. Red meat only once, if not less. Make sure it’s from animals that were fed on natural diets and get to roam around on a field and would have been, in anthropomorphic terms, happy. If you don’t know, don’t eat it.
• Follow the same guidelines with animal products. Like milk and cheese and eggs. No more than twice a day. Look for 100% organic stuff from happy animals.
• Go vegetarian for two meals a day. Eat as many vegetables as you want. Don’t hold back. If you’re a man, go easy on the soy. Stay organic whenever possible, even if it costs a touch more.
• Whole-wheat whenever possible. This includes pastas.
• Limit alcohol intake. I shoot for two drinks or fewer when I do.
• Limit soft drinks. Make sure they’re made from Sugar Cane. Stay off anything labeled diet. The sugar calories won’t kill you, the artificial sweeteners might.
• Limit caffeine. I don’t drink any, save for the occasional green tea or PowerGel.
• Never deprive oneself of chocolate or candy. Unless it violates a previous guideline. (Read the ingredients! If you don’t know, don’t eat it!)

On Activity

• Be active 3-4 times a week, for 30-45 minutes at a time. Actually sweat something.
• Kick your ass once a week. Do some intervals or wind sprints. It doesn’t take much.
• Don’t stare at sun-mimicking lights late at night. This includes the TV and your computer. Need to use your computer late at night? Use f.lux.

On Sleep

• Get up at the same time every day. Weekends and weekdays. Nap later if you have to compensate for a late night out. Your body will go to sleep at night when it knows it has to get up at a precise time.
• Shoot for holes in your REM sleep schedule. For me, that’s at 4.5 hours, 6 hours, 7.5 hours, and 9 hours. I aim for 7.5 hours every night.

That’s about it.

For me, these guidelines are really easy to follow and don’t require any calorie counting or spreadsheets or any planning whatsoever. I don’t worry that I’m eating too much or too little or what I’m eating—by setting a healthy bar, my body will tell me when I’m being disobedient and point me in the right direction.

Lastly, feel free to break the guidelines at Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and Funerals. If you’re good to yourself most of the time, your body will be able to handle junk every once in a while.

–

I should also note I am not a doctor, nutritionist, or anyone with any state- or federally-sanctioned right to offer this sort of guidance. Your milage may vary.

French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once noted: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” If you want to write clearly, limit your writing time. Leaving any extra will sabotage your efforts. Leave less to take away.

While writing hastily might make you wordy, wordiness is easily corrected. Tangents, on the other hand, fed with your time and attention weave themselves into your prose and are much harder to remove. With a strict deadline, you simply don’t waste your time breathing life into these distractions: they’re dead on arrival. Remove them as you would any other word or phase that doesn’t directly contribute to your point.

Be generous with your time and you’ll over-think style choices when you should be focusing on clarity. Instead, force yourself to get to the point: your inner wordsmith will surprise you with its dexterity.

Lastly, remove any jargon or needless words. (Unless you can’t help yourself. Make sure to point out your hypocrisy.)

This post is an edited version of the previous post. I budgeted 5 minutes—it took 12. Forgive me, but I had to get a glass of water to debate whether or not to include this final remark. It ultimately made the cut because I’m tired and would rather go to sleep than ponder this any longer.

French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once noted: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” If you want to reduce cruft in your prose, limit your writing time. You’ll get to the point much more quickly when you don’t have time to do much else.

While haste yields wordiness, it’s easily corrected. You’re no longer reigning in ill-born concepts that have threaded themselves deep within your thesis: when you write quickly, those tangents don’t have time to stifle your point for very long. Eradicate them, ruthlessly! Take away anything that doesn’t directly contribute to your point. Rewrite if confusing.

Give yourself too much time to write and you’ll get cute—you’ll be more concerned with style rather than with clarity. But, pressure fosters creativity: force yourself to get to the point and your brain will wordsmith a clever way to express whatever it is you want to say. You might surprise yourself how artful you can be.

This post was rewritten from the former in 10 minutes. How’d I do?

Don’t think too hard—just write it. And publish it. In 10 minutes.

The most difficult part of writing is knowing when you’re done. There’s a famous quote (which this exercise prohibits my diligence in looking up the speaker and the exact quote) that says: “Perfection is achieved not when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.” If you want to reduce the cruft in your writing, limit the time in which you have to write it.

The result? Clarity increases. Your points, articulated cleanly, strengthen themselves.

While wordiness may increase due to your haste in expressing yourself, your thought process is not littered with tangents and ill-born concepts that get in the way of your message. Editing then becomes simple: take away anything that doesn’t directly contribute to your point. Rewrite if confusing.

When you give yourself too much time, you get cute. You write sloppily. You think: “oh, there must be a better, more colorful way of saying it.” There might be, but 9 times out of 10 you were better off with the first thing you wrote. Your brain is special like that: the magic comes from forcing yourself to express it quickly and thoroughly, and you will surprise yourself in how artful you can be when you limit the time in which you have to think about the language to use.

This post was written in 9 minutes. How did I do?

Technologists these days have been hard at work building 3D visual overlays, augmenting how you see the world. As it were, fanboys and fangirls have been hard at work telling us about our future in homemade videos; but, as technology advances, the real world will only get more real.

For the luddites and techies among my readership, please find the following video below and watch it as a point of discussion.

For the same reasons humanoid robots never seem to make the shelves of Walmart, this future vision (double-meaning intended) will never happen for the mass market—it’s too costly.

Let’s start with the cost of providing vision modification technology, enumerating by scenario:

Case 1: Camera Hacks. Some iPhone apps, like the Yelp application, have basic augmented reality features that overlay information over a video panel of whatever it is you’re looking at. The hardware cost is low, but the fact remains your augmented vision requires that you hold a piece of technology out in front of you like a goober. Offloading vision augmentation into a handheld device is clumsy and usually inconvenient; it’s a neat trick, but not much more.

Case 2: Super Glasses. Science fiction (e.g. Snow Crash, Accelerando, Caprica, Iron Man) often feature HUD-enhanced glasses that identify other people, overlay environmental information, or display text or video messages from others. Yet, fiction forgets that mobile embedded devices have (and will continue to have) issues trading off performance for reliable power. Modifying a scene in believable real-time 3D is difficult enough for an array of 3D rendering machines at Pixar, much less a pair of Ray Bans. The power and heat requirements would simply be too taxing to prove usable, and vision-augmenting would be limited to short bursts, not useful for regular wear.

Not to mention, glasses move around on faces throughout the day. The display would have to constantly correct for the minor, but highly sensitive differences as the glasses move around ever so slightly on the wearer’s moving head. And, like watching Avatar in 3D, you’ll develop a slight headache unless the optics are almost near perfect and consistent.

If—big if—you manage to mitigate these issues, how much is it going to cost you?

Case 3: Tiny Projectors. Imagine a micro-projector outfitted somewhere on where an image can be projected on your retina, fooling your eye into seeing things that aren’t actually there. Can’t imagine it? Neither can I—mostly for the reasons mentioned in Case 2.

Case 4: Optical Nerve Hacks. Imagine a device that could intercept the signal relayed from the retina to the optic nerve as it his the vision cells on the neocortex and offloads visual rendering and modification to a nearby machine, you still have to deal with the matter of bandwidth in rendering an enhanced vision for your neocortex so that it can make sense of it. But, if that technology were possible, why would you waste time, effort, and cost on only making things look more real or understandable. Why not make things simply more real or understandable at the fundamental level of understanding?…

…which brings us to

My Hunch: As technology moves forward, there’s little doubt that we’ll eventually find a way to make visual image enhancement commonplace. (Naysayers: thirty years ago, what if I told you that people would, en masse, elect to have lasers reshape their corneas, circumventing the need for glasses?)

If we’re at the point, as in Case 4, that we would elect to enhance vision directly to the neocortex, why not enhance the neocortex itself?

Strange as it may sound, the neurons in the neocortex that handle and make sense of your taste, your touch, your smell, and your sight, are identical. Instead, depending on what input they’re connected to, the neurons arrange themselves and adapt themselves to make sense of the signals coming into them.

Neurons are pretty neat in this respect. Watch how sensors on the tongue can help the blind to see.

Imagine, if you could, connecting a sensor to a portion of your neocortex (presumptively an area that was of very little use to you) and training your brain to make sense of that information coming in. What if it were a digital source, like the entire contents of Wikipedia?

As of January 2010, Wikipedia, including all of its images and all of its text, totals 2.8 Terabytes, or 2867 Gigabytes. If memory density increases 20% a year (as it has been) for the next 21 years, you’ll be able to fit Wikipedia into memory the size of the fingernail on your pinky. You could certainly fit a pinky nail underneath your skull.

So, if you could implant information directly on your brain and your neocortex could make sense of it, why would you need augmented reality? Your brain would do the work automatically. Say for instance that you, in 2010, wanted to look up “portmanteau”, you’d have to pick up a dictionary or type that word into the Internet, read the definition, understand the definition, and then apply it contextually. With a chip on your neocortex, you’d just know it. You would know it just like you can read this sentence without thinking too much about the character-by-character construction of its words. You would just know.

By the same token, when you looked at someone, you would just know their name. Or, when you looked at the Eiffel Tower, you would know when it was built, who designed it, who installed the elevators, and it’s mass in kilograms (or pounds) as easily as you see that it’s colored dark brown.

With deep vision into everything you were looking at, why in the world would you need something as crude as a live-drawn diagram to tell you how to make a pot of tea?

You wouldn’t— it’s too costly. And, as discussed above, you would just know the motions and the recipe by heart.

By the time technology capable of feeding modifications to your vision arrives, we should be able to augment your neocortex. This can, in turn, create real knowledge inside your head based on linked data pools. It’d be the end of visual infographics and the start of just data.

Linking data in your head, live, is cheaper, faster, more reliable, no matter how you slice it. And, until we can connect to the data inside your head, always-on Augmented Reality is too expensive—socially, technologically, economically—to become a reality.

Humanity’s problem-solving process is demonstrably flawed. When we attempt to solve problems, our first instinct is correct conundrums with fixes. However, fixes tend to ignore the causes and roots of problems. In this manner we treat symptoms, not problems.

I am not talking in abstract: people’s flawed approach to problem-solving shows up everywhere in modern life, ranging from mandatory drug cocktails to automobile design.

Example 1: Drugging the Youth

In recent years there’s been a marked increase of diagnosed personality disorders among students. Students with short attention spans are labeled ADD; those with gobs more energy, ADHD. In response, we medicate—sometimes without option—to “fix” chemically-imbalanced kids.

It’s an easy solution: medicate kids and they’ll behave “normally”. As a society, this is how we addressing the ADHD “problem”. But, we’re actually just treating a symptom.

Consider why a kid might score as ADHD: their energy levels might be out of whack due to a high-sugar and largely high-fructose corn syrup diet, or their physical inactivity might be leading to heightened stress levels, leading to social anxiety and poor behavior. Or, their environment at home might not be ideal.

…or, he might just be an 8-year old who’s extremely curious about the world and explores it on a bike and by poking inquisitively at the dirt. Maybe our idea of normal “order” as it relates to Attention Deficit Disorder is flawed, or that we’re doing things to our kids that cause ADD. Instead of examining this, we seek to medicate. We treat the symptom.

Without looking at the secondary effects of medicating kids (or looking in the mirror, for that matter) let’s look at another example where we treat the symptom instead of the problem—and what probably most people don’t think about as a problem at all.

Example 2: Starting and Stopping Cars

First, let’s reframe a car trip as a set of problems:

As designed, cars transport a certain number of people from one point to another. Since you can’t just put people in a box and expect magic to take you there, there are a number of problems that need solving:

1. The car won’t move! The problem: it needs to go.
2. The car is now moving! The problem: it needs to stop.

This is how we fix these problems:

1. The car won’t move! Let’s spend energy: The engine will get it to move!
2. The car is now moving! Let’s spend energy: The brakes will get it to stop!

In both instances, we treat each part of the process as a problem needing a unique solution. But, what if we were to reframe it? Let’s think of braking a “un-going”:

1. The car won’t move! Let’s spend energy: The engine will get it to move.
2. The car’s is now moving! Let’s give the energy back to the engine and we’ll stop!

You’ve heard this called regenerative braking. While the technology is primitive, the concept is not. Ideally, the transaction cost of moving a person from point A to point B should only require energy to overcome wind resistance and friction. (And even there—futurists will tell you—there’s room for improvement.) We, however, currently spend energy at every step of the process: we treat each stage as a discrete problem to solve, not a discrete problem to undo.

In our minds, starting and stopping are both problems. But, opposed to identifying and treating them like opposing problems where one is the solution to the other, we treat them individually like symptoms. Where the cost could have been simply the cost of initiating and managing the start, stop, and travel friction, our universal solution is pricey and costly at every stage.

In terms of energy output, it seems our cars were primarily designed to expend energy, and secondarily to transport us from one place to another.* Inasmuch, when we “fix” problems by treating its symptoms, we generate new problems to fix. Over time, these problems layer over each other into never-ending abstraction.

Feedback loops

Unfortunately, we’re addicting to solving problems, not undoing them. Our economy is fundamentally based on solving problems and pain points, and common perception is that it’s cheaper to address problems by patchwork than to rethink how problems arose in the first place and undoing the situation.

And, unfortunately, it is. Treating problems symptomatically is easier. It’s easier to describe and easier to act upon and easier to think about with a divide-and-conquer methodology. There are fewer moving parts in each part of the problem, and any externalities created through “solving” the problem are somebody else’s problem, or a problem we can put off until later.

Ultimately, we create more work for ourselves—problems beget more problems, and these ill-conceived “solutions” don’t adequately address underlying problems, if at all. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once noted, “Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Let’s stop fixing problems and start removing them.

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*On that note, hasn’t anyone else found it weird that we take up half of our available roadway in New York City for the storage of empty cars?

Despite private e-mail and private delivery services, The Postal Service remains top courier. However, as electronic correspondence increasingly cuts postage revenue and smarter private distribution centers enable Fedex and others to compete on cost and services, USPS needs to adopt modern messaging paradigms if it wants to protect its business viability.

I urge John E. Potter (current Postmaster General) to realize that USPS is in a unique position to do things that no one else can, and can accomplish them thusly: sell electronic post office boxes that take regular mail.

USPS e-mail: a certified, electronic, and virtual mailbox run by USPS which can get away with doing things that neither e-mail providers nor private companies can directly compete with:

1. Charge for Message Delivery. Credit card companies and healthcare companies, for example, need to notify you by mail of any changes to your service offering or plan. An official address that officially (as in governmentally-official) ties citizens to a mailbox. These companies are used to paying for this type of correspondence.
2. Charge Different Rates Depending on Message Type. Credit Card offers: $1.00 a message. Not-for-profits: $0.01 a message. Et cetera.
3. Strong-arm Government Agencies to Adopt Electronic Messaging Capabilities. Offer free message delivery for all government agencies, the cost reduction in the first year’s postage alone would likely pay for the entire implementation.
4. Automatically discard Junk Mail. I’d pay $20/year for that.
5. Automatic Package Redirection. Order something delivered to your e-USPS address and packages are automatically routed to the nearest facility for delivery, no matter where you move.
6. Official Mail Segregation. Identify and differentiate government/very important mail from everything else at delivery.
7. Certified Delivery. It can never get lost in the mail… and they can charge for delivery/opening confirmation. And you know it got to the right person.
8. Physical Address Privacy. I know where Elvis lives.

I’d also love it if they adopted a scanned-mail service offering similar to Earth Class Mail, so my experience with my mail is the same regardless of how the initial sender sent it. Backwards compatible mail.

I’m sure you can think of other things that could be accomplished with this setup.

Inasmuch, USPS’s unique features make this proposal particularly compelling. Firstly, they are one of the few agencies explicitly authorized by The US Constitution—the country’s politics (likely) won’t let it fail. Secondly, the government and agencies rely solely on USPS to correspond with its citizens—and the government’s co-dependence on it (likely) won’t let it fail, either. Therefore, it’s permanent and environmentally-friendly, to boot.

Unless USPS can’t find a way to stop borrowing from The Treasury to pay budget deficits, we’re going to have another persistent taxpayer liability on our collective hands. Ultimately, USPS needs to take a fresh look at how it can play within modern communications paradigms.

This is my suggestion.