Back in 2006, Netflix offered to pay $1,000,000 to anyone who can improve its movie recommendations by 10%.  A reliable supply of recommendations will keep a customer who’s otherwise run out of movies to watch from canceling his account.

For comparison, let’s analyze the technique Netflix is currently using to pick movies for me.  I’ve rated some genres in the past (comedy: 5 stars, horror: no stars), and this afternoon it crunched some numbers and recommended this new genre:

Romantic British Dramas
Your taste preferences created this row.

• British
• Dramas
• Romantic

Just imagine what a 10% improvement will do!

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport offers free wireless Internet access in addition to having abundant power outlets scattered throughout the waiting areas (at least in Terminal 2).  As with most such networks, users must accept the terms of service before gaining access to the Internet, via a page that looks like this:

Anybody else pause at that first question?  It reads:

How Friendly is Phoenix Sky Harbor today?

The possible responses are:

America’s Friendliest
Very Friendly
Friendly
Not Friendly

For the record, it was very friendly.  I can’t in good conscious declare it “America’s Friendliest” having not yet visited many of our nation’s major airports.

I’m shopping for new eyeglasses (or perhaps just new lenses), and Cambridge EyeDoctors got my attention with the advertisement “$89 complete eyeglass package.” I naturally went straight to their website to look for locations.  There, I found the single best line ever written in the entire history of marketing.

Depending on your lifestyle, personal preference, and vision needs, you may want or need an additional pair of glasses. One pair should be used to provide vision correction while performing your primary activities. A second pair can be used to compliment or provide vision correction for other activities in which you participate.

Depending on your humor preferences, you may want to read a punchline after that quote.  The punchline could be constructed by assembling words in an order you’d find favorable.

Wow!  I found an instance where Feynman turned out to be wrong about something!

The Textbook League (no, I did not just make that name up) republished the part of Feynman’s book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman describing his participation in the State [California] Curriculum Commission’s efforts to choose new textbooks.

The commission did some phenomenally idiotic things, up to and including rating one textbook that was “printed” with entirely blank pages.  (They rated it favorably.)  Of course, you already knew that, since you have already read Feynman’s books.

As I reread it online, this excerpt in particular stood out:

They would talk about different bases of numbers — five, six, and so on — to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten — something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: “Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five.” Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it’s entertaining; if you can’t do it, forget it. There’s no point to it.

When this happened in 1964, there was probably no point at all.  Today, however, every software developer has had (at least once) to convert base 10 into base 16 or base 2.  Those like me found the exercise frustrating at first.  If only there’d been some sort of practice for this in the mathematics textbooks of my childhood!

(I’m mostly joking — surely! — but I do find interesting how that analysis might be completely different today.)

Years ago, a group of people sat down in a meeting where someone asked, “How much frosting goes on a cake?”  Someone then answered, “sixteen ounces, of course!”  And now every single time I bake a cake I have slightly too little frosting.

Everyone’s so focused on the incorrect ratio of hot dogs to hot dog buns that the frosting to cake ratio has gone almost entirely unnoticed by mainstream complainers.

It’s time to put an end to this.  Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Duncan Hines, and the other makers of fine cake mixes and frostings need to reevaluate how much frosting belongs in a can.

(This message paid for by America’s committee for frosting re-regulation .)

I’ve gotten strange results from Peapod searches in the past.  Today, I needed to order new fabric softener sheets so I searched for “Bounce.”

The brand shows up correctly under “Looking for a brand?”

Then under “Looking for a category?” I had this (and only this) result:

Produce Cranberries

I think they’ve just invented the worst sport in history!

Hulu linked to an episode of a show called Superstars of Dance that it described like this:

Michael Flatley and Susie Castillo host week three of the international dance competition.

I won’t even link to the episode to lessen the risk that some poor, innocent person will inadvertently watch part of it.  Just after reading the description, thousands of my brain cells committed suicide to spare the rest of the mind from the trauma.

Let this serve as a warning.

The paper towel dispenser in my office is the kind with a bit of towel hanging down for you to pull.  Pulling it dispenses one sheet, and gets another started for the next person.  When there’s no towel hanging down to pull, one refers to the helpful knob on the side labeled:

FOR EMERGENCY FEED, TURN KNOB

Aren’t we being a little dramatic?  What emergency, exactly, do the manufacturers envision?  Moreover, what if I need a towel in a non-emergency situation?  There is no knob for “non-emergency manual feed” nor any instruction for emergency towel acquisition if the towel is already hanging there properly.

Did someone really consider the simple phrase “MANUAL FEED” insufficient instruction for that knob?

This is my favorite instruction (so far) for this year’s Form 1040 “U.S. Individual Income Tax Return” (regarding Line 33, found on page 30 of the instruction booklet):

If you were age 70½ or older at the end of 2008, you cannot deduct any contributions made to your traditional IRA for 2008 or treat them as nondeductible contributions.

First of all, didn’t most of us stop counting half-ages at around five or six?  Only our government still distinguishes between age 70 and 70½.

Disregarding that, this instruction tells the 70½-year-olds they simultaneously cannot deduct IRA contributions and cannot treat them as nondeductible.  They can’t deduct them, but they can’t say they’re “not deductible.”

Yeah… this will just be our little secret, okay?  We both know you can’t deduct this money, but if anybody asks you just tell them you could have deducted it, but chose not to.

Paraphrasing Galaxy Quest, “Didn’t you guys ever read the booklet?”

I had to interrupt a conversation with a colleague yesterday to ask why and when an alien spaceship and/or juicer had appeared on his desk, and whether we should consider it cause to evacuate the building.

The device, shown here, gives every impression that it could vaporize you with a laser beam, or change your molecular structure.  In reality, it’s a gadget from a company called Secure Software that’s supposed to curtail cheating in exams.  It records audio and a 360° view of the room, and requires thumbprint identification.

Before the advent of this technology, students could cheat effortlessly.  Now, they’ll need to think for at least 20 or 30 seconds first.

For example, instead of arraying her notes and index cards across her entire exam-taking surface, Alice might have to conceal her cheat sheet under the table, or even write lightly on the table surface itself.  The 360° camera can see the entire room, but it won’t be able to pick up that level of detail, surely.

Alice might also record some notes on an iPod Shuffle, leaving one ear-bud dangling from the ear facing away from the camera.  With the Shuffle controls inconspicuously hidden underneath the keyboard, who would ever know?

Of course, Alice might just not be smart enough to take the exam on her own, even with illegal references.  In the old days, she could ask her friend Trudy (an expert in the subject) to take the online exam for her, perhaps for some compensation.

Now, she’d have to give Trudy a copy of her thumbprint first, which Mythbusters confirmed is relatively easy to do.

Or, Alice could just run the USB cable for the Almighty Overseer device to a laptop Trudy’s using in another room.  She’d tap her thumb on the pad, and then pretend to take the exam while Trudy did all the real work.

High-tech cheaters could even configure a Remote Desktop client so that Trudy could control Alice’s actual computer.

According to an Associated Press article on MSNBC, the CEO is fully aware that the device is imperfect.  That won’t stop me from maniacally delighting in the futility, though.