371. A Pot Doesn’t Know

This is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, Find Connections. It stop it just stopped recording and now Oh fuck me Do you want me to reinstall Chrome? Oh no. Is there a different web browser you'd like to meet me to have running so I could record this for my work? Oh Also, I'll just remind you at this juncture there's no backup because I don't have a way to record this. Didn't record in the cloud. It rec recorded locally for me, but we now the episode has started. We are 57 minutes. in and you can see uh on your thing it's it's 99% uploaded and like that everything is good now. Oh So so angry. And um so just so I know, like like did you see like a red light disappear or something?

You see do you have at the top next to Do by Friday, do you have a lozenge with a blinking light that says REC? Yes. And so you saw that not be there? Yes. That's weird. See, this is one of those things that drives me nuts. Like, people who design interfaces come up with things like Or somebody says, well, it's sometimes difficult to know whether or not it's recording. And they go, Well, there's a r lozenge that is red and blinks when it's recording. You're like, what could be more obvious? You want me to make it bigger? You want me to make it brighter? Without ever really thinking about what it is that they're saying. And you're like, okay, but if it's not recording, especially if I've never seen it recording, how would I know or notice that it's not recording?

And this is my Apple TV problem. We're like it we're it you know it's a bad interface if you have to move the cursor to see where you are. Oh you shouldn't need contrast to know where you are. Contrast is useful for other things, but like there should be a you know what I'm saying? Like There should be a big thing in system recording. And I know that I I danger, danger, stop talking. We're not recording. I don't like that When you said uh I need to move my cursor to know where I am, I'm like, wait, what? And that's what I do in every single Apple TV. I'm just saying on Apple TV. I don't No, you're right though. That's not something I should have to do. On your own homepage or whatever, and I mean it's not impossible, but it's not glanceable.

You you will see that whatever is the currently selected button. selection is slightly larger and I I have uh higher contrast and everything turned on and I still don't see it but I guess there's a slightly different uh ring to it. You know what I mean? Like a border. But that's but like you still you say this you sound crazy when you say this, but you're like in the like in in if you're from the US you know what a light on switch or switch with the when the light is on, you know what the switch looks like. Unless it's one of that minority of switches that's reversed. In England, it's the opposite way, but you know what I'm saying? Like if it's flicked and pointing up like a dick, you know that the light switch is turned on.

That doesn't mean the light is on. Because the bulb might be burned out or but you know that at least in that troubleshooting, you can immediately without with if you've got enough light to see the light switch, you know whether it's on. So but if you had 11 light switches. And like one of them was a slightly different color and it was dark, that's not a good system for seeing whether which one you use to turn the light on. This is why uh it becomes so frustrating with modern software, specifically I think Apple modern software. The the muscle memory you have with light switches if uh y you like you said, they're uh placed appropriately and they're in the appropriate direction. I mean have you have you ever flipped on a light switch while your power's off?

Uh oh indeed. Because that's what we're talking about. Is like you know if you've got to go a bust a tinky, you know how to walk into the door, you know how to close the door, you know how to look turn on the light, lock the thing, all those things. And like you just you you know you're on the one hand your brain it's kind of like a condiment thing, your brain knows that the power's off and the lights won't turn on. It does not stop you from walking in the room and flicking the switch. I consider that successful. That's a mature system. If the worst part of that is the power will be off for half an hour, in your case six years. You know, it's it's but it's you know what I'm saying? Like it's just weird 'cause I think when you talk to interface people they roll their eyes a little bit and you're like, Well, it's not as clear as you think it is.

Or like the very funny one, like in I think you should leave and my life, where you think you hit the button to start recording video. This happened to me on Rectifs a few weeks ago. But you know, the classic. You take out your phone, you want to record video, the violin, you know, um recital, you hit the button and you hold it for eight minutes. And then you hit after eight minutes you hit the button to turn it off. Okay, first of all, w what what did I just do? What did I just do that that I that's different from what I thought? I believe you uh took a m bajillion pictures is the right term You held it down so that I b doesn't that take a bunch of things. My mistake is I thought I started recording, but I didn't know I had not started recording until I stopped recording.

It's just that when I stopped recording, what I actually did was start recording. And now I've got a half a second video of not the part I wanted. an age old thing with any type of recorder. Uh uh might it might be. People like when you talk about computers. Um this is we we are recording. We got edited in six weeks. Yes. We are recording and uh I there there's another issue with a bunch of professional audio and video recorders, which is the flashing light problem. It Especially with the Zoom family of products, not the software. Okay. No. Although that's a oh yeah, that's another The other Zoom, the audio. Physical Zo the physical uh just our listeners know there's a company called Zoom that makes a popular line of digital audio recorders that a lot of podcasters use as a second or third backup.

Yes. Or you know them from TikTok videos, the little ones that are clipped on the shirt. Yes. Yeah that's that's perfect. That's why people know. Yeah that'll Help a lot. Do you want to explain what a lavalier mic is too? If that's not germane, but you can explain that as well. The recording What about a mixed minus? You want to describe what a mixed minus is? Because that doesn't have anything to do with it either. Honestly, I don't think I could anymore. I would be like, it sounds like this, but not like this. Anyway, if you enjoy TikTok, it's like that. Go ahead. The recording the record button is flashing when it is ready to record. That's like standby mode, right? Yeah, yeah. And then you need to push it again.

And it will just be a solid red. And it has I have seen very t talented, experienced people miss like an entire interview's worth of footage because of this fucking industry standard that's like, well it's been here so long, so we we can't we can't change it. Well, I mean you know what I think about I this this is something that goes all the way back to well I mean I this the example I can think of right off the dome is the problem the s this the problem statement is if you're using a camera and that camera has uh digital, you know, compact flash or similar storage in it. Um, like if you forget to put uh a compact f compact flash in or you didn't realize it was full or whatever, but especially if you forgot to put it in.

If you're taking a lot of photos like I have in the past and I've got a whole bunch of those and I'm swapping them around and maybe you're at uh maybe you're at BodyCon twenty five And like you've to been, you know, you're getting a lot of photos down the show floor. Uh Canon, my S my f my uh SLR, DSLR, every Canon I've ever had as an SLR has a setting that's in that horrible menu, but it's something like you're like don't don't even pretend to take photos unless there's a flashcard in here. And you think like, well, that's weird. I mean like so what should you get a pop-up interstitial menu if you got to put bullets into your pistol? And it's like, well, but the thing is if I went around going ka chink ka chink ka chink chink and acting like I'm, you know, in blow up or something, like I'm trying to be like a cool photography guy going k-chink chink ka chink ka chink, well it'll keep making that noise, but I ain't getting no photos.

The sound the sound is amusing, but really it's the photos that I want. And so you can have it sounds dumb to even need that as a setting. But you haven't said it, then we're like can like I forget what it's called, but the I would call it, don't even pretend like we're taking photos right now. You know what I'm saying? Sounds insane. It does and it's almost like I mean, let's take it to a v an absurd example. that I don't know is not that absurd, which is like your car doesn't know how far you're gonna drive unless you well, I mean I guess today cars. Can whatever. What normal cars of the past can't tell. And like, you know, if you're somebody who's running around, you're doing lots of errands, you gotta drop kids off for things, da da da, and you're like, oh, I gotta get gas.

I forget to get gas, keep forgetting to get gas. It's like your car doesn't warn you. That you don't have enough gas to get to Florida because it doesn't know you're driving to Florida. Right? That it doesn't it can't know that you you know what I mean? You can't expect Let me put it in a way that will be less problematic to young people. If you I don't know if anybody out here has ever had pasta, but you usually make it by boiling water and then cooking it for for an amount of time. The pot in which you boil your water has no way of knowing how many people you want to serve. That's one thing a pot doesn't know. Title Another thing the pot doesn't know is like what to do. Like when you boil, it boils super, super hard, and then it starts boiling over and it gets all over your range and it's like that's because the pot has no sense of how tall it is.

let alone like how many people you plan to serve for dinner. They're just all those different kinds of things. And like it's just that that we accept that in life that our shoes we don't blame our shoes because they're on the wrong feet. And that's the pot's a user error. But there's a lot of electronic stuff that I kind of wish would know better. Or like let me just let me just say I'm dumb. I'm dumb and I forget things. Like I'm a I'm a corrupted piece of wetware, but I still gotta do stuff. It's just why don't we try to make it so I don't unintentionally do something that's really stupid? And can't you build that in a little bit? The gun analogy is really good because I thought, why in the world would it even let you pretend?

to take photos and I realized oh because g yeah when I had an an analog l like literal just straight up film camera. It does go. Yeah, like in Hot Fuzz, one of the little tourney. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's skew morphism going like a bit too far. And so I I love I think I can't believe I'm gonna say this, l loved past tense a lot of Apple's software because it uh had an i i an opinion and usually the opinion it was we're gonna keep you from doing something dumb and uh sure that you'd bump up against a bunch of things with uh Power user apps, famously audio hijack, which is uh what I used to virtually. You can't like you can't just click a button and eject an SSD if something's writing to the SSD.

If you want to just jerk the USB C cable out of it, that's on you. But like if you use the software, Apple software in the Finder to try and eject an SSD when there's something happening, you'll get a little pop-up that says, we can't do that. I can't do that because you know, um there's a process that's still going on, right? Like that's if you know you can do if you know how to, you know, go in and do sudo, you can like go in and do an RMRF. But like they're not gonna make that hopefully too easy for you and you're gonna get warnings about it. But I think you're right. I think a Apple has historically been pretty good to the point where it's considered nannywhere, I think, to some people. But I'm I'm grateful for it not letting me do something.

dumb. I'm grateful I ran I ran and cleaned my Mac this morning and one of the things that it does is it does stuff involving I don't know if it's I I know it involves Safari, but I suspect it has to do with not the app that's running, but you know, the technology behind it and Clearing out caches and stuff. And so it says we're gonna quit all these apps that are like I guess webkit apps. We need to quit D script. I need to quit Safari. Do you want me to do that or do you want to just skip that part? Because I can't do my job if you don't quit Safari. I'm also not going to quit Safari unless you say it's okay. Uh uh that's all annoying to somebody who's like, why can't the computer just read my mind?

But that'll save your bacon, honestly. It does. And that's why I uh but but that is yes, and uh that's why I say loved past tense because the the classic one you just said uh g can can't restart safari is uh you need to manually quit safari and usually it's when I am uh updating using the app store to update Safari extensions and I get a a little bit worried because I'm like wait wait can you tell me what it what it's doing because I don't I I love reader but I'm like wait it's running right now why do I need to quit. Why do I need to quit? So it's it's it's there. Thanks for catching that, but why is this? Why you know not don't tell me that. Tell me why. No not not that it's happening, but also why it's happening.

Yeah. I I think that the uh little lights in the corner that y you mentioned that indicates what uh like um you you were talking about hey just so you know something's recording or something has access. This started because hello listener this started because Alex and I There was a problem with r with recording. Uh and and it it wasn't anybody's fault, but like I think it was Alex's fault. It it was Explain to the listener who doesn't know what you're talking about, how it was your fault, because it wasn't. Explain Um I What did you do wrong? What did you do incorrectly? I turned off my webcam because there were. And so it stopped recording the podcast you told it to record? Yeah. Yeah, you really fucked up by turning off your camera.

It's my job to know the brokenness of software. And does it make you better? D do you feel like it makes you better at your job um to have taken the blame for something where the computer obviously fucked up? Mm yeah. And um the well the the Moo we're we're or m I I thought I was the one going through th the mind maze and what's bad about you, Alex. Uh yeah. I mean you can try. Other people will be fine to go, yeah, you're right. You fucked that up. No, I know what's really wrong with you. And you are not getting closer to the thing you'd like to be if you keep claiming uh that you did something wrong that wasn't your fault that doesn't fix the thing that's wrong about you. I s I still Mm-hmm.

That's true. I still think it's m my fault it didn't record. But the the blinky light in the corner of the at the top of your iPhone And or any any Apple product now, right? It is yellow if the audio is it no no no this is this is great. It's really helping clarify what happened Uh well it doesn't it doesn't matter. The uh we're talking about this because we were recording this podcast and Alex had not realized that it wasn't recording. And I don't think that's your fault because however it happened, what I was trying to say is the absence of an affordance is not an affordance. Yes. Yeah. Only for designers does that seem like if you're just sitting there with layers in Photoshop or Illustrator and flipping them on and off, it seems very easy to you.

And your boss might say, well, actually change that to CC000. Like CC000. Like we want a different red for that or whatever. You're like, okay, all right. Well now, haha, we got him this time. They'll never be confused because now the recording light. that isn't turned on if it's not recording is redder. Well if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass a hoppin'. I just always want to know what blinking mean. If a light is blinking Well you said bl I think you said blinky. He said blinky lights that's you when they're yellow And then that's when I jumped in because I could tell we were going nowhere with it. Are there other colors of lights you want to explain on a Mac? Uh this is uh this is important th though.

No no no. No, no, no. Sorry, sorry. Well, you just put it in the outline and I can just have the day off. Doesn't it fr frustrate you when a little light shows up on the top of your computer that is yellow? And you you're like, all right, I'm gonna press on that little light. And until recently, it didn't sh show your computer and or phone did not tell you what was being recorded and then oh just kidding. Can I say can I just put this differently because you're so fucking killing my brain right now. No, no, I took I'm just not I'm just explaining it so like you I think what you I think what you're trying to say is Colored lights appear in Apple devices and it's not clear why or what I should do about it.

Yeah, and no, you want to talk about colors, but what I'm saying is what is right now, why is there a camera icon? in my menu bar. Why is that camera icon r have a round recked green around it? And what am I supposed to do about it? And now now a very, very smart Mac user or computer professional will say, why don't you go click on it? And you're like, well okay, I could do that. But like I I've told this app I never want to use my video camera ever. Like, I mean I I don't know what more I can do to tell it. The the I the the default for this should not be your mic is on and your camera is on. That's really a terrible practice. I ran into this last night with Zoom. Like it's just it's just a thing everybody does now and we just act like it's normal.

Well, if those are if there's lights and here's another thing. If you see a light, let's say it's green. What does green mean? Does green mean that you're safe, that you're good? Well let's wait, hang on. That was a trick question. Because how do I even know that there are other colors? And how do I even know what the blinking or change of color means? You know what you do? You go and you Google it. And you say, why is my Smart Me P1 air purifier? doing a different thing now. Why is the power light blinking? And I and you can go and you can look that up. But mainly you first of all in that case you notice something's not working and then you notice something is blinking. Well right now everything seems to be working.

But I've got a green light and I can't figure out what it is until I go and I click on it. Oh Merlin, you're okay. Well, what does green mean? If that light up there, that green round rect around the outline of a camera that I never wanted turned on, if that were to suddenly say fade into a purple round rect. What should I do differently? And just to play along. It's a Socratic question, it's a Socratic method, but like, what the fuck does it mean? And then somebody would say, Well, you can go find out. But like Okay, and so if I don't see a camera and I don't see a round wrecked, does that mean everything on my computer is fine? Well, that's a dumb question. But you judge the bitter by the sweet.

You you contrast is what makes anything useful in life. And it just is I guess what I'm getting at is it's just it's just funny to me how much in this case you blamed yourself for like five different things. If you include the hour we recorded that we can't use. You've blamed yourself for so many things that I think were are not your fault. And you you you're trying to be very funny about it and say like, well, part of my job is to not make that error, which I I agree, like we all make mistakes, but like It's it's just I I do and I'm beating up on designers here or user experience user interface people because I feel like sometimes they're really, really smart and really really dumb in some ways.

You know what I mean? Like You know what I'm saying? Like just it's hard to know the state. If you have if the way only way to find out what the state of something is is to change it, that may be a good opportunity for improvement in that interface. That's what it comes down to. I uh hope that the uh sort of uh tide is ch changing with design because more people are aware of uh accessibility in UI. And it's like, no, no, no, it's not like just just a woke thing. Accessibility is Like, yeah, someone can't see the difference is like colorblind person can't see what the heck is going on. It's a good point, but it's a completely different issue. Well it's uh it's also you start a stop. What if you pulled up what if you pulled up to a stoplight?

Like when I was a kid, like all there was always red on top, yellow in the middle, amber as they say, and green on the bottom. And then sometimes there'd be a fourth one. below that was for a left turn, a protected left on green, right? But I mean I'm using this is a dumb example that you could you've probably heard in like any class, but like No mat if you go if you it if you um have colorblindness, you can probably I think they mostly try to make it so you can still figure out what happened to the light. Well, here's the thing. What if So like we've seen blinking red lights. Blinking red light has a meaning. Blinking red light means four-way stop, at least in California and Florida. Blinking red light means four-way stop uh for everybody at this intersection, correct?

N in Illinois, it depends on which county you're in. But this is not currently being Okay, forget it. It's just that, but we understand there's three or possibly sometimes four lights. Most of us can see what the color differences are, but here's a really critical part about that. Like what would happen if the green arrow was blinking and the yellow light was pulsing? God, I just So stressed out and absolutely. Well don't really answer, but just but like I'm saying, like there's certain states where like you don't know what that means. Another big let's just get to the biggest part of it. You there is no uncertainty if you are able to see changes in the amount of luminance coming from a light source.

There's no mistaking which of the three states that traffic light is in right now. And you know why? Because you can see there's in the top position, there's red, middle position, there's yellow. Bottom position of their screen, right? You don't see all three of those illuminated. You don't see them in like some kind of rave style running pattern. Like you can immediately grok immediately what you need to do differently because you see three lights and like one of them is on. And I think that that kind of clarity that most designers cream their jeans about is not reflected in something where a recording button doesn't show up and so it's not recording and you would never know. It's not like like a recording button on the Zenith tape recorder we had as a kid.

It worked fine. One of the failsafes was that you had to press down, you didn't want to accidentally record over something, so they made it a little harder. You had to press down the record button and the play button together. That's kind of cool, right? You gotta put the keys in the car to turn it on, you know, like Um but I'm sorry, I'm going on. I just I just I don't know. I think it's weird. When I was m blaming myself, like you yes, yes It's not really my fault, but I think that the designers get frustrated and uh then that like animosity almost starts to bleed in to the software of like, yes, well let's just add more lights, because then it will be it'll be clearer and I I get fr uh even more frustrated then because it's like n uh people don't want to feel stupid when they're using your your product, not even if it's for for their job.

Don't you want to have people like see a bouncing icon and know what that is. I think anyone who has used a Mac after like 15 minutes will know what a bouncing icon in the dock means. It sh it. But it it means something is happening in the Okay, no, but here me But but but you know what I I I gotta say that's a really good point. They're if there's a if there's an icon bouncing in your dock, something is happening. That's a good point. Isn't it that's what I'm saying? Sometimes it means you're f sometimes it means something finished downloading. Something it means sometimes it means if you have your doc flipped on. Like uh not just hidden. Uh if it's bouncing, it means that something is loading and sometimes it bounces because there's something wrong that you need to do something about to continue.

And then it is the job of the application to make clear what is r wrong, whether that I mean In my opinion, usually a d dialogue box or a clear notification. Not a the top in the right hand corner notification, but like like I've been trying to download all my music from Apple Music and it's running into all kinds of problems where it's like this is a duplicate file or blah blah blah or this problem and there's no way for me to say like, you know, dismiss all. Just keep doing all of these and then give me a report. of what didn't work. No. Every time it has any problem at all, I have to stop and hit okay. It's modal. That's okay. No, I'm not complaining, but that's that's what we're talking about, right?

Yeah, no, I uh Uh uh agree. Just want things to work. What? Wait, wait, so it won't Oh, that's even worse So it won't continue downloading uh music? It just okay. I don't think it has anything left to download. I think it's just lost everything. And at this point it's just it's just giving me some exercise Here, practice your fingering. Move the move the mouse over here. Let's start the show. Okay, hello. Hello. Hello. Ooh, we do need to make a spreadsheet of your different hellos because they're I I think the way that they vary across podcasts continues. It it did. Just because it's not interesting to you doesn't mean it's not interesting to other people. Uh the the Episode that we recorded eight weeks ago that hasn't hasn't come out, I believe.

Um oh no, it might have been You should have a light that lets me know whether the podcast is not exactly And then if that goes out, I'll know we're in trouble. It's a little like how you can't talk about nuclear war while you're worried about it. Or divorce. Oh. Divorce from nuclear war. Oh, poor Oppenheimer. Okay. The it might have been on the It doesn't what do we challenge. We'll start again in in six weeks. What's the challenge this week, Alex? Uh uh This week's challenge is to make connections. Make connections. Do it. And you showed me uh a introduction to a video last week. What what? No, tell us they're just they're just funny to me. I I I can tell you're distracted by something, but I just sometimes you just make me laugh.

Like, you showed me some Introduced to me. What I did last week was suggest you watch a 70s TV series hosted by James Burke called Connections. And in particular, I suggested that you watch the first episode and I think the seventh episode. Uh, but just You know, it's a it's it's old from a long time ago. I think it's it's really still oddly, like extremely almost impossibly modern, but um it's the kind of thing that I grew up on that show and I loved it and I thought you'd think it's neat because of the titular connections. That was my idea that you might like it. And James Burke, I just like his style. Does he li like produce this show along with just hosting? I Well it it seem I watched a couple other videos from him and he also did the day the universe changed.

Uh he's also the guy who was their sort of anchor for the Apollo mission landings and kick offs and stuff. So he's like people in England would know him as you know, a well-regarded science reporter from a decade earlier and then he comes up with, you know, he does see I think he's worked with BBC, the BBC for a long time, done lots of things. But yeah, his his wheelhouse is uh Such a dumb word. We need to retire that. I think his specialty, or as he would say his speciality, is looking at unexpected connections in uh language cult well, obviously Culture, technology, um really I don't know. When I say language, there was a school, there was a class at New College called I think it was called language, culture and technology, that I really wish I'd taken.

That was about the connections between those three things. And in his case, like it like you could tell his favorite piece of technology of all or his most interesting piece of technology of all time, because it comes up constantly, the plow. He's always talking about the plow. It comes up over and over and over again. There's never been a bit even more than the wheel. There's probably never been a piece of technology that changed the world more than the plow. And so you say, well, geez, Merlin, how could it possi look at there's wheels everywhere here? I don't have any plows in here yet. But like you would not have a road on which to drive that car with wheels if we hadn't figured out how to go from being a hunter-gatherer nomadic society into settling down, having agriculture that was sustainable and then cre having wars over who owned the land where the food was made.

Well that's kind of a that's kind of a lot Yeah. That's the thing. That's this show. And it's it's usually done in a more subtle way than that, but just a lot of times where his his basic thesis is we live in nineteen seventy seven, we live in a society that is so much so technically sophisticated but also so fragile be not bec there's a robustness to the technology but there's also a fragility to the connections and I just think he did a really nice job he does a great job with talking about that I started to sort of hear the Merlin voice when he began to present the alright the society is ending how do you survive and almost exactly what you said like uh You need to find a safe place to travel.

Oh yeah, that's how you get there. Yeah, yeah. That's the most of the first episode, a lot of the first episode. It's kind of unusual for this show. It's not the best episode of this season, but it's an interesting way to start it, which is like there was a blackout in in New York in 1965 that was caused by a failure of one piece to do the right thing. But owing to the connections in this world, not just to that piece, but the connections of like this lady, uh, who I think was all the people play themselves. from a decade earlier, which is kind of weird. But like there's this woman who's giving birth. Like she when she went under or got an epidural, she had no way of knowing that when she was going under.

uh there was gonna be a failure of a piece of equipment hundreds of miles away that would take down all the power on the eastern seaboard. Or a woman who happened to have birthday candles and a cake in her bag would be able to entertain people on a subway. You know, it's just that that kind of thing. And like it's to me it's just it is really it can be very intoxicating. But the second half is then about like, okay, so this this all goes away tomorrow, what do we do? What do you need to know how to do? And like all those podcasts people do about Wikipedia and uh apocalypses and things like that, I mean, it's all right here. He's like, Well, boy was the very first thing. you need to know. To survive after all this technology, if this technology goes away, was the first thing was it was plow the first one?

It yeah. It it became just you you need to you need to find and be able to use plow shares. Yeah, and it just was such a twisting turn of how like, oh you have seeds, but how are you? It becomes overwhelming where you're like, okay, you uh definitely made a connection between like You know, and Ainna, we've all had these conversations, we've all had these thoughts, I imagine, like of like or like even now watching we're just up to the terminus part on The Walking Dead, and you're like Well, you gotta have food, clothing, shelter, right? You have to have a place to be. You can't just be out amongst the zombies all the time. One of the things was so great about the prison was the ability to raise food, to like, you know, have crops.

And um, but like you realize this cascade of, oh yeah, you know what it's like? It's a game I've never played, Minecraft. If you're in survival mode, don't you start by punching a tree? Yep. Title, Alex, punching a tree. Why can't you just go get a sword? And you're like, okay, well, how'd you get a sword? And you're like, well, I don't know. It's a game. They're like, well, no, first you gotta punch a tree. Well, why do you have to punch a tree? And the reason you punch a tree is because you need to build a workbench. Is that right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Tell me just really quickly, the the the the short succession of non-obvious things that you need to do in Minecraft. Tell me what those are. uh brought this up but yeah it game just opens no explanation you need to uh punch a tree.

Oh, there's these little blocks. You need pick up those blocks and you need to build a t a table. How do you know you'd build a t how to build a table? You d you don't, you don't. I in more recent versions, yes, there is some explanations, but it r I mean it reminds Well it's just or really just thirty seconds of it making sense to be good. But but you say to somebody like, okay, well I I'm gonna invent the martini And it's like, well, how much do you know about the process of silica? You're like, why would I need to know that? Because what are you gonna put the martini in? Like, oh, I don't know how to make glass. Yeah, well you're kinda fucked. Uh how's your Mediterranean agriculture? Huh? Well, if you're not it's not in the Middle East or the Mediterranean, your olives probably are not super good.

Oh, but you don't really have to have an olive. You could have what's called a vodka martini, which is not a martini. Well what's that made out of? Potatoes. Oh, so you can make your potatoes into vodka? No, I don't know how to do that. What about quinine water? Do you know how to do that? What's quinine water? Oh, sorry I should have explained that as a result of British colonialism the people of the British Empire found themselves in lots of places in the Empire that were tropical to because, you know, they needed to steal their resources. I mean protect their resources. And so for example, they discovered that they were in a lot of places where m mosquitoes thrived. So they needed to coin and watch Wait a minute, what does it have to do with a martini?

Or what does that have to do with a in this case a gin and tonic? Didn't he talk about this in one episode? I think he did. Well, what the fuck are you talking about? I just want a gin and tonic. Okay, well that started because they discovered the quinine put into water could help people um with the symptoms of malaria. And that by adding gin to that, it made it actually weirdly a little bit more palatable. So you would not have gin and tonics if it weren't for mosquitoes. And that's the show. I'm telling you the one the one with weaving I don't know if you ever got through this one. Did you get to the weaving and punch cards one? Punch cards come out of the ability to replicate patterns in weaving from hundreds of years ago.

And I I had kind of uh I thought, ah, I know I'm excited to watch this, but I know the story. But it uh you know, he goes in like seven uh seven different d directions and it's just a for nineteen seventy seven especially. This is five years before MTV. Four years before MTV. Um, not that it matters, but you know, this is a very unusual show, I think even for the time. Where like you'll you'll do those things that like became a joke on like Money Python and not Money Python, but you know, like a like a match cut or a jump cut. Where like he walks out of the frame, it's like a taskmaster thing. He walks out of the frame on once in once out walks out of the frame in Surrey and walks into the frame in Egypt, you know?

Oh, those kinds of cuts. Uh, I I still think that there's something about his presentation style that doesn't I Maybe I don't find it uh uh like anxiety inducing because this is just how m my brain works, but the way that i his e explanations also like mirror my frustrations of how people go about uh not just product design but the like R relationships. Do me a favor. I I'm I I'm super interested in this. Can you tell me that again, not using so many negatives? What what is the thing you're saying? Because it sounds really interesting. I uh I you you you are you find it like um um uncomfortable that he presents in a certain way? No, I uh the way he uh presents it because it's how I uh wish a lot more people would go about product design specifically about you know, uh blinking lights and what does that blinking light mean and uh w wh what's the history behind the blinking light?

And uh I I also envy w the way he does it, 'cause he can pull it back together in a way that made me think this guy must I did not have an app I did not have a thought that he was uninvolved in it. I just I don't have a ready hand. I mean if you asked me to guess, I would guess that he's Uh probably like an executive producer who has decided a lot about it and then has a staff of people. But yeah, I mean I don't think he's just a purely, as they say, a presenter. This is a fairly short series, but you said the you know, he's uh hosted a bunch of stuff in the UK. Did you did you watch this series when you were a kid and this was like the only thing that you were? I remember when I first puffing myself up.

It might have been on like VHS or Laserdisc when I was in college, because there was stuff I'd go to the media center, the library, and like, God, I watched Eyes on the Prize all the way through twice on Laserdisc. Like there's just all these things that you know. Um, so I don't know, but I my my best friend Michael was a huge fan of his also and loved his book, The Day the Universe Changed. Um and yeah, so uh yeah, anyways, so he He he has such an interesting curiosity and I think he's very he's very entertaining without pandering Ooh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't even think of that because it was just so uh wrapped up in the the The mind mazes the he goes d d d down and uh the I I I think the explanation it's i it's not pandering, nor is it um scolding.

I I c I don't know what I'm trying to say with that, but but you know how I'm very confused. You know how uh there's It's it's good. It's it's interesting, it's fascinating. It's also paced in a way that is very lively, but it's neither difficult to follow um nor uh spoon feeding you. You feel like I I feel like anyway, like I'm really on the adventure with them personally. Yeah, and doesn't make you feel dumb for not knowing that oh punch cards have a connection to weaving. it has this sort of in the I think I that's certainly true. I would say potentially just the opposite. It's much more turns out of like would it surprise you to know that the computers you have today come out of the need to replicate That we wouldn't one aspect of why we have computers in 1977 was the need to have um to have ways where where where great crafts could be made that did not require the same high skill level for every single person conducting it.

In that instance, I mean I don't know if you said that, but what I'm getting from was, yeah, somebody designs this amazing pattern. So what we're describing here is there's a did you watch this episode? You can watch this one, right? No. There's a loom. You got a loom. And there's this to make these rugs and like tapestries that were in demand at the time, it's not as simple as just like obviously you're not running a sewing machine. But there were these fairly intricate patterns. If you think about like the way like a like a Turkish rug, an Oriental rug looks, that pattern. Well like you know, there's probably not a lot of three-year-olds to pick that that up on the first day. But what they discovered was that you could do these things that make the equivalent of what we would think of as a punch card.

Or really we we're as a kid, were you ever around a player piano? It's just a big roll of paper with a succession of dots that represent which key should be pushed and how hard. You know that, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's one kind of binary. Sorry? uh duration. Yeah, like in the player, but it's also yeah, but I mean it's it's it's got dynamics too. That's why well I don't know I don't know if people get that. I think people think oh player piano. You go and you put this roll of toilet paper in it and it plays a Scott Joplin song. No, George Gershwin sat down at a piano, because this is how it works. You sit down at a piano and start playing, and if it's the kind of writing uh read once write once read many a worm piano that's not a title uh it play so it's basically looking what at what George Gershwin played And punching that in.

So like how long was the note held? I don't know if it has pedals and stuff like that, but it's more than just binary. It's not just a zero and a one. It's extremely analog in that case. And that's why today You can find a recording that's or you could if you had a player piano at your house, you could basically have George Gershwin play at your house because they have the piano role of him doing Rhapsody and Blue. The I I the like only reason I had uh access to a uh player piano was because my g great grandma had one. Yeah, yeah. Compared to like uh could compare to like a spin-it, like an upright. Right. It had been like passed down uh for years and years Ye years from or generation. That's w whatever.

And the the fur the We pass it down every year. Yeah, but yeah. I don't have the back for it anymore. The uh the the in the pedals did indeed move, which was the first thing that I noticed. That's one of the three. Oh five. There's there's muting, there's well no, the one I always do, I would do the one on the right that made uh that basically took the dampers off the notes so it would hold longer. Uh-huh. What's that called? Um I don't like. The it's called the pedal that's furthest to the left. And uh it it caught my eye because At that point, you know, I'd been to uh Disney and whatnot and uh and the hot and mansion they have uh like a little joke play player piano, but uh the pedals don't actually move.

And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So th this is indeed actually playing along with the bits of paper that I had made the assumption that the different Um like the the the little depth of the dot was just because like they they were older or something, you know, like it had just degraded. And then you've got to be a good thing. But people who had them would have a bunch. I mean it was like putting on a record. Yeah. We knew somebody that had one. They had like they had probably fifty different piano rolls. Yeah. There was a whole a whole little bookcase and I am shocked that I didn't break any of them, but I used to pull it back and like it b back and throat. You're the one who killed Gershwin's legacy.

I know. I was just thinking about it Oh, talk about privilege. Who controls the British pound? We do. Okay, so you also watched this in college or something. Was there any yeah, w was there any um concrete or any specific things that you could point to that influenced you uh when it came to your work and your uh talks and all that because it just so much feels like I'm listening to this guy. I see you're doing pick interviewing No, um I know I don't I don't I don't I don't think I don't think so. Um except for the just the I don't know, the the the the thing about connections, I've I said before that one reason I'm such a harsh um critic uh nemesis of turns out journalism is that as much as I despise what became turns out journalism, it comes from a place where I love learning something new that's a near inversion of something I knew.

before like that has not always annoyed me that in fact my whole life I've loved learning a new fact where I go well did you know that actually that was invented by blah Or, you know, Lady Godiva actually was wearing extra clothes or like whatever. Like you learn some fact and you're like, oh, that's so different from what I thought. It's just that that's been weaponized by turns out people rewriting press releases. But uh that had a huge impact on me, all stuff like that. The unexpected like another way to put it is unexpected or unexpected or unintended consequences. are fascinating to me. I can give you an example from college of of one of those. I mean, I guess I'm trying to say I no, this did not have an impact on inbox.

as far as I know. But like I'm it's I'm very it was very formative to me to learn that like by pursuing a topic With historical respect but a historical criticism, like you can go in, like don't be bound to the story you read in the book. Instead, like look at what really happened. And remember how stories get told and you end up learning a lot. And this is why I can't wait to get to the Eat Drink and Be Merry episode. Did you watch that one? Nope, nope. Oh fuck you. Really? It's okay. Yeah. Did you watch the one though, all the way through? The f the first one? Yeah, I actually watched the uh first one twice because it was on YouTube and just was on my phone and I was I loved the guy's voice.

And I genuinely was not thinking about inbox zero or anything like that. I was thinking about Rec, like how you and John go about Rec Diggs. Well, and how uh just the the uh fucking Waffle House thing. Like there's definitely some crazy stories behind uh why ham means one, but Uh uh no one. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Okay, but look here's here's the thing though that's fascinating, and this is what he's doing better than either of us would be able to do right now, is that so we all know about the kinds of I don't say we all know. I'll speak for myself, because I fucking hate everybody else. Uh we know that Eli, things were rotten in the land of cotton until Whitney made the cotton gin. Like if you watch Schoolhouse Rock, if you read a book.

You know about stuff, right? You know about things. And you know that you know these things that are um two-thirds to one-eighth true. The Civil War is because of slavery. I mean, the civil part, absolutely, the war part kind of, like it was a quote, because of slavery. Uh it was there was more to it than that. Like w watch a different movie. Like there there's more to it than that. But one thing we do know is that an incontrovertible fact that I think uh Uh a a less controvertible fact is that the in co the economies of the South in specifically and the United States in general were have heavily would be heavily damaged by changes in law that people were looking at starting in like the 1840s especially So what everybody knows is hey, they took my slaves away and now I can't have cotton.

Well, cotton is a really, really difficult thing. There's a reason we didn't make cotton so great for a really long time. It's a lot of work. You know how they like this is gonna sound boy, please take this in the way I intended, folks, but like there's a thing that people have said about spam for years, which is if if spam cost anything to send, it would almost go away in a day. It's just we don't have a way to do that. And like any way we did that would just be the worst. But spam, people don't do spam because it's w a worthy investment that eventually pays off in the long run. They do it because they only need a few people to respond and it costs nothing to send. If you had to pay a living wage to the people who worked on your cotton plantation, that would not be sustainable for you as a farmer.

Now that's a very woke and interesting and progressive idea after the eighteen forties or fifties, but w that would be like asking if you should like I don't know, let your dog have your power of attorney. Like are you gonna I'm gonna what? Like first of all, I'm already an attorney. I'm already an attorney. I don't need my dog to do that. But you'd be like, well no, but like you have these people that you consider essentially subhuman in a lot of ways, or not fully subhuman, but certainly not fully human, let alone citizens, and if you did not have the free labor of them and their children And have com almost complete control of their lives, that would not be sustainable. Like we get those kinds of connections.

We get that. We wouldn't be able to have so much fast fashion that we throw away or or you know, the the Tom Brady Super Bowl shirts we leave in Namibia. Like we wouldn't have all that stuff if it wasn't you know, uh built on the backs of a lot of child labor, less now. But like nobody's nobody's fooled about that. We all you know what I mean? We almost understand those kinds of connections. It's just that it does go deeper than that and it does get more interesting than that. But like if you're uncomfortable pursuing things like, boy, I bet somebody with not very good human rights probably made that made that iPhone case. Like if you're not prepared to interrogate that, then don't bother because you're gonna run into instance after instance of something where to stay alive.

people had to find a sustainable way to do something. Can I also just mention that we wouldn't have had we may not have had the civil war without slavery. But we wouldn't have had so much slavery for so long, so uncontested, if it weren't for free labor or nearly free labor. labor laborer. I'm not I'm not trying to apologize, but I'm saying, yeah, you have to buy them a ramshackle house. But but guess but but but hang on. It all goes back to the plowshare. You wouldn't have cotton without plows. You wouldn't have war without plows. I mean, I'm not trying to sound like some kind of hippie, but honestly, why do we have wars? Well, I mean, if you really, really keep producing it down, what it comes down to a lot of times is I want your land.

Well, why do you want my land? I need your land because I need a place to grow food. Look at how so many of the wars in the last 200 years, including some of the big ones, think about how much of that has to do with the ability to have either mineral rights or arable land. That's what colonialism is. It's taking away your food and your rocks and then finding a way to for me to make lots of money with it. And that all does go back to the posh era. When he he I could see that there was, you know, the real al almost obsession around uh uh around plowshares, I w went and looked up uh the the um verse Swords, you know, like swords into plow shares. And I was like, Yeah. And I was like, is um I'm like, is that is that Uh is that real?

But apparently, yes, that i is a direct translation because it still was that uh valuable. And uh it uh but also there is the turns out thing of like, yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean full-on peace. It means that, you know, we're gonna have some people using those plowshares and we don't need to fight over our slaves. We just need to agree how to use them in one specific way, which maybe go, ah, uh, uh Which and it's, you know, not surprising if you even if you don't want to consume this as the chicken problem here causes me to say things like, Well, I think this show is shockingly ahead of its time in a variety of ways. um about issues that would become so important for us that people weren't really thinking a lot about at the time.

Um I think the the fast-paced for the time editing style is very cool. I think he's utterly charming. But like even if you don't choose to look at this as a thing where you like put on put on your good glasses and like learn a little history. Well, let the liberal arts guy be here to say, yeah, but like couldn't we all use a little bit more of this kind of thinking from time to time? But not I don't mean like go act like you're smart because you watch something from PBS. I mean more in the sense of like, wow, James Burke has sure brought a lot of connections to my attention. Is there a chance that there's more connections today that I just don't have the ability to see yet? Or I'll have the ability to see next month but can't see now?

Like do I need the time away from that to see how um how the ability to can foods has had a huge impact? You know, I mean just like just all this stuff. So yeah, the canning one. You gotta watch Heat Drink and Be Merry. If you like that one, you gotta watch this one. And I I don't want to spoil it by telling you why I want you to watch this one, but I will spoil it if you want. Yeah, you know what? S uh spoil uh spoil it because I'm sure I'll enjoy it anyway. Alright, well in this case we're gonna do something that is uh that is that is death, which is we're gonna watch a video on the main episode together. Hmm. Alright. Can I can I read you what this says? Can you do a favoring to the extent possible use your hands to cover up every part of the screen except where it hits where you hit play?

Yes. Like don't even look at the don't even look at the title or anything. Oh that's my wife. Um no one's sending her. I think we've established. Eat Trick Could Be Merry is the eighth episode. And uh it has a lot to do. So this is one of those ones that's like um Let me see if I can find the actual description. Oh shit, it's on I forgot these were all in Internet Archive too. I forgot about that. Um, but it's one of the it's a really good one and has to do with food things. Uh I just sent you a link. to a video that is a minute it's a minute and eleven seconds long. I don't know. I took out my took off my glasses so I could not see the title. But it's a good thing. Um scrub back to the beginning.

It's a one minute and eleven second video. And we'll still go ahead and we'll drop in the audio when we do this, and then um we'll describe what it is you saw. All right. Uh this is the this is the concluding Part of episode eight of Connections. Call it Eat, Drink, and Be Merry. Call it. Alright. Three, two, one, play. You see, all three men had understood that certain gases ignite and that the thermosflask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely in the frozen liquid form. until you want to ignite them. At which point you take the top off the flask, the gases evaporate, you apply a light and boom. Now two gases do that better than any other And it was Obert's assistant who put them together most efficiently.

His name was Werner von Braun, and the two gases that he released from his particular version are a thermos flask, the one lying on its side behind me now. were hydrogen and oxygen. If you release those two gases into a confined space with a hole at the other end of it and mix them as you do so. And then set light to them, you get that. My motors are functioning perfectly for this thing. Destination the moon or Moscow? The planets or P King. Oh, that's really good. I mean they got they timed it. They basically timed it. And it's just just this one part at the very, very end when he walks up was live. But he walks up and he points and after he says you get that. He points and across a body of water, you see a rocket taking off.

They nailed the timing so that a rocket took off right as he turned and pointed. A remote rocket that they did not control. I was I I was gonna say I just didn't I did not appreciate it. You gotta sit with this. You gotta sit with it that they had one opportunity to get this. And he plays it off legit. He wa he walks over, he points, and that's why some people consider this the greatest live shot in television history. Holy shit, because I did not see the the title and just assumed, oh, like a green screen, but th like visual effects, but in nineteen seventy-eight on PBS that was That would not have indicated The way the way he just sh uh so so uh c casually in like, ah, yes, here, oh Jesus Oh my god.

But that's why Thermos is that's why Thermos is gave us the Saturn V. That's really good. I I got nothing. That's so that's so good. And and yes, he produced uh so much of this, which makes me Very happy. Hey God, he's still alive. Damn. He's on Nebula. Uh Oh! Oh! Oh! I have one. Oh, oh I'm not looking I'm I'm not looking up now. No, I just put it for notes because I'm really excited. Sounds like you just discovered a bird lives with you. Oh, hello. Oh no, no, I'm not saying the birds. It's you saw Oh, oh, oh, hello, hello there. I've been here I've been here since last August. I'm a bird. Turns out. raw transcript