Smallist

By 2040, according to a study I just pulled from my ass, 95% of the web will be tips or lists, or lists of tips. So here’s my condensed top ten list of tips.

1. Exercise.
2. Eat five portions of vegetables a day.
3. Wait 30 minutes after the five portions of vegetables before exercising.
4. Save 10% of your income.
5. When posing for photos, put one leg in front of the other. It makes you look thinner.
6. Imagine the audience in their underwear.
7. Think about baseball. Or England, depending on your problem.
8. Don’t cross the streams.
9. Never get in a land war with Asia.
10. Be excellent to each other.

That should cover just about it. Am I missing anything?

So I cleaned out my desk yesterday. These items were among the things within the mess. Notice the problem?

That’s right. Unless you’re running a kindergarten, you don’t need multiple scissors and tape. The screwdrivers are both phillips head, both the same size. I suppose the glue’s sort of excusable, since they’re different glues. Except, I’m a flash animator, and as we say in the trade, “If you’re using glue to animate Flash, you probably did something wrong.” They shouldn’t be in the desk at all. And it’s not just the desk: I know for a fact there’s two open Grey Poupons extant in the fridge.

There’s a catch-22 in play. The reason I have multiple items is that there’s so much clutter, I never remember what I have, or I can’t find something when I need it. So I buy another one. More clutter. And so on. It’s like heroin but without the weight loss. So from now on, three simple rules:

1. Supplies are to be kept in a separate area from active duty items. Always. No putting the new bag of disposable razors next to the nearly gone bag of disposable razors. It goes in a separate area. I went so far as to remove all but one pen from my top desk drawer. One day I’d like to use up a pen.
2. If it looks like I don’t have something, I will scour the apartment before buying another. Or resolve that, if I find the original at some point afterwards, I will give it away or sell it.
3. Most controversial: I will try to buy the highest quality items I can, so that I remember I have them. Obviously it didn’t work with the gray poupon, but imagine: if you had a red swingline stapler, would you misplace it?

On this last point I will make an exception for umbrellas, which will be lost no matter what.

Speaking of R2D2, I ran across this R2-D2 mailbox on 6th ave, I think at about 50th st. I assume it’s for the new commemorative stamps. Looks perfect for mailing Death Star plans.

On an editorial note, I think long after people forget all about Jedi and Sith and Anakin and Yoda, they’ll probably remember the R2D2 design. Smeared with dirt, slightly broken down, but lively and determined, R2D2 is a shorthand for the look and feel of the original movie, romantic and dystopian in contrast to earlier science fiction’s utopian modernism. The Millenium Falcon’s pretty cool too.

First time I ever got a post idea from American Idol. The school-in-a-box is a suitcase-sized kit containing materials to teach 80 students. It’s packed with pencils, erasers, exercise books, multiplication tables and alphabet charts. Even 100 little pencil sharpeners. Each costs around $180, and it’s all very low tech, so you don’t have to find a creepy A/V guy to run the filmstrips.

And on an editorial note: American Idol, your charity logo looks like it’s for mayonnaise.

I knew about shutdown day. I signed up for shutdown day. Then, yesterday, I forgot to shut down.

Like many of you in the blog world, I have been seduced by David Allen’s promise of personal productivity. But like many of you, I lapse more than a nudist Catholic on a casual Friday. (note: rework joke, it makes no sense) Actually I lapse before I finish the book. I start out hopeful, enticed by the Lockean promise of the phrase “fresh paper,” and I start setting up buckets and contexts and whatnot. Then a few pages later, he uses the word “actionable,” and I have to put it down, take ten seconds, and reaffirm my basic political affiliations and instincts.

The basic problem with GTD is that for someone starting from complete disorganization, it’s too grandiose. I’m a fan of baby steps — incremental improvements that reward you enough to keep you playing.

Whence, the Writing Shit Down plan. Here are the rules:

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Sigh. I suppose I must mention Wired’s “Snack Attack” issue, since it seems on-topic for a block about Smallist. My reluctance stems from Wired’s editorial tone, which has been like a fifteen year crack-fueled manifesto entitled Everything is Awesome. Manifestos exhaust me.

Be that as it may, they do get some decent talent to write for them, and there’s a few great little pieces here:

• The art of the TV recap, which have gained in complexity since the days of the occasional two-part Golden Girls. Art loves constraints! (More on this in a later post)
• A chart of the 23 ways — and 403 separate SKU’s — to market a single album.
• My brother swears by these Target clinics. They’re cheap and effective.

There’s some basic, no-nonsense diet advice that’s pretty much the undisputed consensus. Here’s the things everyone agrees on:

• Eat lots of small meals throughout the day.
• Eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Avoid excessive, unrefined carbs.
• Eat fewer calories altogether.

These are all good tips, but there’s minor catch 22 due to a hidden variable: Preparation time. To eat fresh food and fewer carbs tends to increase preparation time, because vegetables have to be chopped, and ready-to-eat processed foods tend to be high-carb. Meanwhile, the economy of scale favors larger meals: if you’re going to chop broccoli, you may as well chop it all.

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In Britain, the Cheshire police force is downsizing its gear to recruit more policewomen. Specifically, they’re going from a Glock to a Sig-Sauer. Lighter motorcycles will be considered too, although it wasn’t clear what models. From the article:

Liz Owsley, of the British Association for Women in Policing, said: “To introduce smaller guns and motorcycles takes a chief constable with gumption and wherewithal.

“There is no reason why police forces can’t have weapons with smaller handles and smaller motorcycles.

“Not all male officers are 6ft 6in hulks, some are small and they would benefit, too.”

Which raises the question, why would you want anything bigger than the minimum size and weight possible? Are you going to catch more bad guys with a heavier motorcycle? And don’t guns pretty much, as Homer said, kill whatever you point them at? All things being equal, you’d want whatever allows for greater mobility and dexterity. Here are the two guns in comparison:

Of course, if you really want to go small, there’s always the Lady Derringer. (warning: site contains lingerie images of the owner)

So Boeing is unveiling a flying wing, and an MIT / Cambridge design team has a similar design for a silent, fuel efficient passenger jet. In the latter case, the fuel efficiency was a serendipitous side-effect of noise reduction.

Both promise fuel efficiencies, per passenger, similar to a Prius seating two people: 120 passenger miles per gallon. And they claim to do so by increasing efficiency by about 20 percent.

This made me stop and think. If a normal plane is getting 100 passenger miles per gallon, how bad can it really be? If you do a carbon footprint calculation, you’ll note that air travel is a big component of your footprint. But it’s precisely because you travel so far in a plane. It turns out that driving to california would put out roughly the same amount of CO2 as flying.

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