In the United States – especially since 2011 – we’ve been hearing about “the 1%”. The US has 300 million people, give or take. Our “1%” is about 3 million people.

How big is 3 million people? It’s enough to populate a city the size of Chicago or L.A.. Or two Manhattans.

1% of the world population is about 70 million people. That’d be a country on par with the UK or Germany.

Here are some comments I saw on Youtube today:

What is it that makes “1%” not scale in our minds?

Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, nutritionist, herbalist, doula, or massage therapist. I am just some guy with a blog. Consult your own medical professional and/or megacorporate lobbyist before determining what is right for you, your heart, and your arteries.

Few topics irk me more than trans fats. Trans fats (specifically artificial trans fats which are my focus in this post) are what give tasty junk food an incredible shelf life. Chances are good that if you eat fattening prepackaged foods with creaminess or super smooth texture, you’re enjoying the wonders of trans fats. Many commercially fried foods, like chicken and donuts also contain trans fats.

What’s Wrong With Trans Fats?

There are an overwhelming number of things to worry about in my diet every day. There’s high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in just about everything these days. There’s even mercury in fish. What the hell am I supposed to eat?

Grocery shopping in our household is difficult. We’ve had to make compromises from time to time. There are several things we don’t eat. HFCS is one we absolutely avoid. We’re less radical about other ingredients, but still shy away from prepared foods with nitrates or soy-based ingredients. If you are in the habit of looking at the ingredients while shopping, you can imagine how many items we put back on the shelf.

Trans fats have a special place on our no-fly list though. Unlike many other troubling ingredients in foods, trans fats accumulate in the body. For example, if I eat something with HFCS I may have a crazy sugar high but then I’m done. The HFCS is metabolized and will leave my body. (Or turn into fat on my ass, whichever.) Trans fats, however, have a hard time leaving the bloodstream and even worse, trans fat molecules like to wedge into arterial walls, contributing to coronary heart disease.

This is very frustrating to me. From the time I had my own money to spend as a kid up until a few years ago, not a day passed where I wasn’t pounding trans fat crap into my pie-hole. Which means that not only was I eating poorly and packing on the pounds, I was doing direct, permanent harm to my arteries and my heart!

How to Spot a Trans Fat

Trans fats are delivered primarily in hydrogenated oils. Most often you’ll see the ingredient listed as “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil”, although sometimes the particular variety of oil will differ (palm, sunflower, canola, etc.). A few years back the FDA added a separate line item on the Nutrition Facts panel for trans fats. So now if you want to know if a product has trans fats you can just look at the Nutrition Facts and it will tell you. Well, sort of. See, there’s a catch.

The FDA Gets Metaphysical

Unfortunately the Nutrition Facts doesn’t tell the whole story. While it is true that trans fats have their own line item in the Nutrition Facts panel, it doesn’t tell the entire truth. I don’t know the full story, so I’ll try not to be judgmental of the FDA (see my disclaimer above). What I know is that the food industry was rightly concerned that no one would buy products with trans fats in them. Also, they were having a hard time eliminating trans fats from their products while retaining product consistency and shelf life. So the FDA made a compromise. Food manufacturers can claim that their food has “0g trans fats per serving” if the food has less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving. I think the FDA sees this as just a matter of rounding numbers down. As a numerate consumer it means zero != 0. Which is more than a little confusing.

Products can now proclaim “zero trans fats!” on the package, and what they actually mean is that their product has less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving. I’ve had several conversations over the past few years with people who tell me I’m crazy for not eating a product because the package clearly says “no trans fats”. When I point at the partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredients I just get a blank stare.

SOYLENT GREEN IS TRANS FATS!!

Can you imagine if the FDA had an equivalent rule for ingredients that caused allergies?

“0g wheat gluten!”
“no peanuts”

“I can’t imagine why I had an allergic reaction to these chips. They said no peanuts!”.

“Ah, that’s no peanuts *per serving*, sir!”

Where Is the Point of Diminishing Returns?

Certainly there are safe or near-safe levels of consumption for just about any bad thing. What is the safe level for trans fats? I don’t think it is 0.5g per serving. That’s just a hunch. Again, I refer you to my disclaimer above.

The real problem with the FDA rules for labeling is that we don’t get to find out how much trans fat is in any given product that claims to be “trans fat free”. All we are allowed to know is that the quantity is under 0.5g per serving. So it could be 0.4999g or it could be 0.0001g per serving. There is no way for the consumer to know.

My Wife Thinks I’m Crazy

And you may think I’m a bit crazy also. But I’m not alone. The country of Denmark is crazy too. Denmark outlawed trans fats 5 years ago. Switzerland is apparently also crazy, since they followed Denmark’s lead. And now local governments around the US are starting to ban foods with trans fats. So I may be crazy, but the crazy is spreading.

Let’s Zero In on the Problem

In a perfect world we wouldn’t be forced to ferret out fake food from our diet. Since we have to live with fake food for now, it would be nice if we could have a system where the exact amount of artificial trans fats per serving could be stated. It would also be nice if the “zero” was returned to it’s rightful state of literally meaning “none” instead of “a little bit”. At the very least we should make food manufacturers declare “very low trans fats” instead of “zero trans fats”. Specific numbers about trans fat content would be nice too. Then we would be on the right track.

The reason I remember that particular article is because of how much it frustrated me. At age 12 – when I read this article – I was fascinated by space, the idea of going to space, and all things involving space, robots, technology, robots, and space. Space space space. And this article was saying, in 1985, that if Congress had stayed on track with funding for the space program in the 1970s, NASA would have been on track for a Mars mission by 1986!

All that my 12 year old brain could think was: “SO WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE DOING THAT???”

Even now, as an adult, with full knowledge that we spent a lot of our money on winning the Cold War instead of going into space, it is hard for me to accept. It wasn’t fun living with MAD hanging over our heads, but sometimes it is abundantly clear that the Cold War cost us a lot more than stress and political inconvenience.

Let’s recap space policy since I was twelve years old:

Liberal deniers aside, Reagan spent our way out of the Cold War, so I’ll give him a pass. I don’t remember space being a top priority for Bush 41, so fuck him. Clinton did approximately jack shit with regard to the space program as I recall. BUT he did get a beej in the oral office, so… naw, fuck him too. And Bush 43 waved his hands and tried to get some attention for space projects, but I have a feeling that was only to get people to forget about gems like “they hate us for our freedom”. (That dude could have announced a cure for cancer or AIDS and no one would have been listening.) Do I even need to say “fuck him” about that guy?

So here we are with President Obama. And what’s this? The biggest economic crisis in generations? Record unemployment? And giant megacorps are faltering because of the stupid shit they’ve been pulling, and they need a bailout? Oh, and the Earth is dying too? And it can’t support our growing population?

JANE! GET ME OFF THIS CRAZY THING!

I was listening to Marketplace yesterday and they made the point that the auto companies need an economic recovery, not a bailout. Right now we’re just throwing cash at these companies but if the economy isn’t better in a year or two they are just going to fail anyway.

People are looking for ways the government can stimulate the economy. Fixing infrastructure and shifting to green energy are the big items on the agenda. And that’s great. But in the grand scheme of things, and in terms of the history and future of our nation, those are very short-term items. Why not focus on the one thing that will solve a bunch of this shit at once, in a serious way and for generations to come? Why can’t we have a serious space program again? Why not make space exploration – and colonization – the centerpiece of this recovery?

Please charge me $5 a month.

At a local tech discussion here in Portland a couple of weeks ago, one of the attendees said that if Twitter started charging money, he’d move to identi.ca. His rationale was this: software is easy to change but hardware is hard to change.

That thought has stayed in my brain for two weeks now. Is software easy to change? No. Absolutely not. That is a flawed premise. If software were easier to change than hardware, Microsoft would have crapped out a long time ago. Software being hard to change is practically the backbone of the software industry. There are entire vertical markets whose existence is predicated upon the near-impossibility of changing software.

As a recent example of how hard it can be to change software, just look at the people who got screwed by the sudden closure of I Want Sandy and Stikkit. And that was just a pair of websites that were free and hadn’t been around forever.

Certainly I can point to the series of social networking sites that I’ve used and abandoned with great ease over the years: Friendster, MySpace, Ryze, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two. But none of those were sites that I actually relied on. I probably invested the most time in MySpace (many years ago), but even after many, many years on that site there is nothing there that I can’t do without. If MySpace burned down tonight it wouldn’t phase me at all.

If Twitter burned down tonight, I’d go nuts.

Twitter has this network of people that I’m plugged into. Unlike other social networks, I get genuine value every day from Twitter. Sure, I could try to replicate that network on indenti.ca. But you know what I’d end up with? A network of only the alpha-geeks who bothered to switch over to identi.ca! Well that’s fine, but only to a point. I like alpha-geeks as much as the next alpha-geek. But those aren’t the only people I want to be connected to. And I sure as hell don’t want to have to straddle services like I already do with IM.

I’m afraid that if Twitter doesn’t figure out a good (read: non-evil) way to make money, that they’ll either experience the ultimate Fail Whale (run out of cash and close) or turn to the Dark Side (and ruin Twitter). Either way, I’d be stuck without this cool network of people.

So, Twitter, if you’re listening (and hopefully you’re too busy improving your service to be reading crap like this), please charge me $5 a month. Trust me on this. You don’t need to do any market research here. I am a user asking you to charge me. That is a sales person’s wet dream!

$5 is the limit though – you can’t get away with $10 a month. That would piss off too many people and then they really would leave for indenti.ca and parts unknown. And no, you can’t charge micropayments per tweet. If you charge me 2-cents per tweet, I’ll probably leave too. Pay-per-tweet is a stupid idea and I wish people would quit suggesting it. You don’t want to punish the people who create value on Twitter. A flat-fee is simple and fair.

Certainly let people have a free account if they want to receive Tweets. And let them DM their friends from their free account. Why not? That would be great. But please charge those of us who want to talk. Get some cash in your door before you run out of whatever fickle VC steam you’ve got and we lose you entirely. In exchange, as a paid subscriber I will receive no ads in my Twitter stream. (Or anywhere else!) And you’ll make twit-spam nearly impossible, since other users won’t be able to talk to me without my permission. You’ll effectively cut off the MLM and Get-Rich-Quick idiots who want to put me in their downline or have me put water in my gas tank.

Then you can start adding some more features to the cool system you’ve created.

Thanks for listening,

@built

Fortran would be Greco-Roman wrestling. You have to wear tights and there are a lot of lame rules. But if you’re good at it you can certainly pin a dude.

Lisp would be Aikido. It is philosophical. It is elegant. It breaks things down to their essential components. It is dripping with the Tao. Unfortunately the schools are splintered and the focus seems to be more on finding The Way than kicking some dude’s ass in the parking lot.

C would be plain old Karate.

C++ is Judo. It looks a lot like Karate until it throws you over its shoulder onto your head and your arm pops out of its socket.

VB would be Western boxing. It can walk right up to a problem and punch it in the face. Of course there will be some mandatory bobbing and weaving and some fancy footwork for no apparent reason. And it’s all over if it gets taken to the ground.

Perl would be Jujitsu. It isn’t as clear-cut as Karate or as elegant as Aikido, but it’s good on a battlefield when you run out of ammo. And it isn’t opposed to you using a rifle butt instead of your fist.

Java would be Tai Chi. Everything is very slow and very formal and OMG after you’ve used it a little bit your muscles hurt like hell. So you’d never actually use it in a fight. But the payoff comes later with how light you feel when you’re kicking ass in any other language.

Javascript would be Krav Maga. It isn’t just going to fuck you up, it’s going to kill you. It isn’t too particular about how and it knows a lot of ways to do it. Unfortunately it can only fight within 50 yards of its house because it’s on probation and has an ankle monitor.

PHP would be Tae Kwon Do. It’s that shit you learn at the strip mall when you’re 6 years old. You know, the place that puts the flag on your gi and their dojo name in huge letters on your back? Sure, you can kick someone’s ass with it – if they hold still and don’t fight back too hard. It is not a deadly killing system – but you can do a spinning back-kick like no one’s business!

Ruby would be Brazillian Jujitsu. It acknowledges that most real fights are messy and end up going to the ground, so why not specialize in winning that way?

Erlang would be Wing Chun kung fu. It has a pragmatic fighting philosophy and is very effective, especially against multiple opponents. There are some restrictions on how you strike and move, and there are fewer moves than with other styles. Eventually you realize that is for the best.

Haskell would be White Crane kung fu. There’s a lot of weird shit going on and no one seems to know it, but you just know that dude can fucking kill you with his death touch or whatever.

Please feel free to leave suggestions or to correct me in the comments.

Several years ago I finally got tired of this. I wanted to figure out how to be someone who could be on time. The answer I found isn’t glamorous or fun, and it may seem obvious to some people. It wasn’t obvious to me though, which is why I’m bothering to write about it.

Have you heard of the Powell Doctrine? If you look it up you’ll find a bunch of boring statesman-speak with bullet points, but the best and most concise summary of the Powell Doctrine that I have heard is this:

You go to war with overwhelming force.

This turns out to be the approach I took. I decided that I would be ridiculously early for appointments. If the doctor expected me at 10 o’clock I would be in his lobby at 8:30 or 9. I’d bring a book and wait it out. My overwhelming force was time.

This has worked remarkably well for job interviews. I don’t necessarily show up for the actual interview an hour early (which might seem desperate or at least odd), but I am not averse to sitting in the company’s parking lot for 45 minutes beforehand. If the meeting or interview is important enough the time is totally worth it.

A lot of common advice about punctuality talks about being 15 minutes early for your appointments. That shit just doesn’t work. Most people are smart enough to do the math and say “oh, I have 15 extra minutes so I can stop at Starbucks”. Then they stress out when it takes 12 minutes to get their coffee instead of the 5 minutes that they’d convinced themselves it would take. Since they were already running 10 minutes behind, big surprise, they’re late.

To make this work you need to stick with the term “overwhelming force”. If an hour isn’t early enough, try three. Seriously. If the appointment is that important, why not? Bring a book or your iPod or your laptop. Or convince a friend to come along and keep you company. Do whatever it takes to create that overwhelming force. Absolutely nothing short of death, serious injury, or a kidnapping will prevent you from being on time for an appointment if you leave for the appointment hours before any sane person would.

This isn’t just idle talk. I did this recently when meeting a prospective client. I was meeting someone in a new part of town that I wasn’t too familiar with and I was taking public transit. I planned my trip so that I would be in the area an hour early. All sorts of things went wrong that morning: I got out of the house late, I missed my bus and had to walk a mile down to the light rail station. Then I missed the first train and had to wait for another. Finally I was on the right train, heading in the right direction but incredibly late! The train was taking far longer than I expected. I finally got off the train and walked the rest of the way to the meeting, where I was about two minutes early. I felt like a total failure, but I was on time. If I had planned on being 15 minutes early I would have blown the meeting and probably missed out on a new client.

I should say that I don’t do this all the time. Just like a nation shouldn’t always be at war. But when force is required, you want to go all the way. I’m not always on time for every appointment in my life. But I know how to be on time when it counts.

What is it all about? It’s about bullshit. Seriously. Have you ever seen someone on the web assert something as fact and not be able to back it up? Well now they can. Because when they link their bullshit “fact” to researchedfacts.com it will automatically be declared a fact. The Internet says it is a fact, so it must be true!

You can make up any facts you’d like. Did you know that President Lincoln shot himself? Must be a fact, it says so right there.  Did you hear about bats? It turns out that all bats are vampire bats. Total fact! Andy Samberg will be directing and starring in a three volume completion of the originally planned Star Wars series. Undeniably true. (If only! sigh…)

Mostly this is for fun, but I think it also makes a statement about the veracity (truthitude) and referential worth (lookitupitude) of the web as a medium. Have you ever seen a page on Wikipedia that was in contention? Facts can change hourly if not faster. And that’s on a respected website with rather strict editorial rules. Speaking of editorial integrity, these days the traditional news media often rely on links as supporting material for articles. It is all kind of crazy, confusing, and a little scary. Might as well have some fun along the way!

More info is available on the Researched Facts main page.

Eventually I understood that it wasn’t about tech bubbles or market trends or technology. It’s a zeitgeist, definitely. But it’s more too. It’s something of a cultural revolution. I don’t yet know if it is going to be big or small. Doesn’t matter; you can’t judge a revolution from within anyway.

One thing I do know for sure? Web 2.0 is a stupid, stupid name for a revolution.

I have no suggestions as to what the name should be. But for some reason Web 2.0 reminds me of the first time I met Tyler Durden:

• We were finding out more and more that we were not alone. Used to be when I came home angry or depressed I’d just clean my condo or polish my Scandinavian furniture.
• It was right in everyone’s face. Tyler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Tyler and I just gave it a name.
• This kid from work, Ricky? Couldn’t remember if you ordered pens with blue ink or black. But Ricky was a god for 10 minutes when he trounced the maitre’d at a local food court.
• We all started seeing things differently. Everywhere we went we were sizing things up.
• You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Proofreading has also gone out the window. Again, I am not always the best proofreader. This very post almost certainly will get published with mistakes. But it’s not me I’m talking about. I’m talking about trained journalists. The other day on Reddit I clicked through to three professional news sites in a row and each one had missing or erroneous words in the articles. Obvious errors which any editor should catch as a matter of course. But if it’s online, mistakes are ok, right? Hell, maybe. That’s pretty lame, but sure, maybe there’s an exception to be made. Except I have been finding these same sorts of errors regularly in the New York Times. In the print edition! On Sunday! That’s right. El gordo, the Sunday paper. The paper that runs William Safire’s ‘On Language’ column.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that I see the deterioration/evolution of the language happening before my eyes. And I can only be quiet about it for so long before I have to say something.

First off, let’s talk about plurals and organizations. If McDonald’s comes out with a new Big Mac, you don’t say “McDonald’s have come out with a new Big Mac”. Do you know why? Simple: 1) Because you sound like a moron when you say it and  2) McDonald’s is a singular entity. They are not plural just because they have a lot of people who happen to work there. That’s the point of an organization: To be a single entity on behalf of a number of people. Companies, schools, unions, whatever. Singular. So when you refer to McDonald’s, you’re not referring to everyone who works at McDonald’s, you’re referring to the *organization only*. Get it?

Now, there seems to be some confusion about when to use ‘a’ or ‘an’. This one is really simple, because it is a rule designed to help people when they are speaking. Languages evolved to serve people and help them communicate. Your language wants to help you! So you only say ‘an’ instead of ‘a’ when you would otherwise sound like your ‘a’ was getting mushed into the next word. For example, “I want an apple” is much clearer than “I want a apple”. If you don’t understand, say that last one a few times fast and you’ll get what I mean.

And in that same way, saying “I listened to an history lesson” is wrong. But “I planted an herb garden” could be right if you are in North America where we ignore the ‘h’ in ‘herb’.

Speaking of English both inside and outside of North America, I believe there is wiggle room to allow for some honest misunderstandings. For example, Americans would consider an algebra class a “math” class while the British would consider it a “maths” class. Since mathematics really is a broad field of many (plural) disciplines, I can see it going either way. No big deal. But if you’re not British and you use words like ‘lest’ or ‘whilst’ you need to be punched in the face.

I have more to say on the topic of Engrish but since my blood pressure is rising to dangerous levels I think now would be a good time to draw to a close. Next time: Things to dangle your prepositions on.

Hollywood did such a great job adapting Fight Club, I’m almost afraid they can’t do it again.