Ingrid Zweifel, a student at Parsons The New School for Design, decided to do a thesis on this issue (or more broadly, on how technology has affected interpersonal communication). The conclusion was, unsurprisingly, that people are technology whores.

She ended up inventing a “Phonekerchief” that actually blocks cell signals, rendering a phone unreachable. For those that might use this as a pocket square, losing style points and wrapping your phone into an impenetrable gift bag would surely impress a date (although if you have an embroidered handkerchief, it would probably best be used to block the girl from texting anyone about how embarrassed she is).

Here’s Zweifel’s site – these are supposed to be available to order the day after Thanksgiving.

My solution (which is on my 101 in 1001 list) was to make a font out of my handwriting. After reviewing a few options at Lifehacker, I decided to go with YourFonts.com.

The process is very straightforward:

1. Print out a PDF template
2. Write the entire alphabet (capital and lowercase) in a bunch of specially formatted squares
3. Curse that you messed up the lowercase Z and start over
4. Get a phone call while perfecting your exclamation point
5. Scan and upload the completed document

Once the document is in their system, you get a preview to see how it looks. I decided to use Photoshop to fix up some imperfections in the document, which I highly recommend. Nothing major, but it helps remove ink trails and align the letters perfectly in the square. Once you’re happy, you can buy the font.

This site used to be free, but the standard rate here and elsewhere seems to be around $9.95 per font. Not bad for a fun project that will let me cross something off of my list. If anyone is interested, Fontifier offers a seemingly similar service at the same price. Always good to have options.

When I was all done, I installed the font (takes about 30 seconds) and wrote myself a letter in Word. Below it is in all its glory (click for a full version – where you can see what it actually looked like when it printed).

I’m not sure what I will use this for (if anything), but I’m happy with the results, and it was a fun diversion from my fantasy football team getting murdered. While my 5-game winning streak is over, at least I can now send personal handwritten notes to gloat about temporarily staying in first place.

Huge bonus points for the Toejam and Earl cameo!

(h/t to Brett for the link)

One of the questions that metaphysics examines is the nature of time. Wired Magazine currently has an interview with Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at CalTech who has attempted to understand the physics of time.

But the particular aspect of time that I’m interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.

And we sort of understand that half way. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.

So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low entropy unusual state?

This is one of the best overviews of the topic that I’ve seen, especially for the non-philosophers sane people of the world.

Worth a read if you want your brain to get a workout/squeezing.

BONUS! – many blog posts have discussed the anthropological wonder that is Google’s suggest. Whenever you start typing in a search, you can see all kinds of funny suggestions (here is a whole website devoted to the best ones).

While putting together this post, I saw the following. It looks like at number 7, the average Googler goes from intrepid scientist to hopeless romantic.

Just came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail. My two favorite parts:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

…

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

If Newsweek is as good at maintaining the journalism industry as they are at fortune telling, they should be around for a long time.

The Internet? Bah!

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.

In the meantime, I saw this terrific post on Gizmodo. NYC Is finally joining the 21st century. Starting with the L train, they are installing LCD screens that show where every train on the line is so you can know exactly how long the wait will be. This will cause an immediate increase in convenience and decrease in the annoying people that lean over to check on the empty subway tunnel every five seconds.

CantYouSeeImBusy.com is the latest in a long line of flash games to help you take a small mental break while at work. The catch is that unlike normal flash games, this one is supposed to seamlessly integrate into your normal work flow.

The game at left looks like a normal chart (although I don’t know how many people are reviewing prognoses), but you have to maneuver that rocket ship to a safe landing at the end of the chart. Each new “slide” on the left-hand side is a new level.

All of the games take place within things that look like Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents, so you at least appear to be working. The bottom toolbars (that normally show things like word count, page numbers, etc.) all show how many lives you have. None of the games are particularly great (not that I’ve tried them) but it’s a clever idea.

As far as the other online games go, there are two gold standards that can’t be topped in my book:

• Kongregate – Has thousands of flash games, including all the “classics” – desktop tower defense, penguin launching, mini golf and everything else you can think of. If you have played an online game in the last five years, chances are you can find it here.
• Nintendo8 – A site that let’s you play the top 100 NES games of all time, right in your browser (!). If you are between the ages of 6 and 30, I dare you not to click this link. I also dare you to start a game of Zelda and not get fired.

Courtesy of River Avenue Blues, here’s a quick video explaining the camera angles:

(Thanks Brett)