Big Contrarian is a weblog by a designer and developer in Chicago. There’s an RSS feed available, if you’re into that type of thing.

Various New York chefs respond to the proposed “Obesity Tax” on non-diet soft drinks:

Pragmatically speaking, if we imposed a tax on the 50 billion places now hawking small plates, handcrafted artisanal cocktails with antique bitters, house-cured salumi, and featuring servers who call the customer “dude” or “bro” while texting on their cell phones, we could probably put enough dough in the state till to end obesity for generations.

I will never fully understand why people drink diet soda, eat low-fat cheese or use anything other than unsalted butter in cooking.

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Michael Idov used to run a coffee shop:

You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.

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Paul Boag on the hidden costs of a content-management system:

Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs.

Beware the off-the-shelf system.

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Things you’ll find in the stimulus package that you wouldn’t expect to be there:

$248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.

$75 million for “smoking cessation activities.”

$25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.

$850 million for Amtrak.

$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.

And by “wouldn’t expect” I mean, “have come to expect and accept as the price of getting laws passed.”

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PETA’s rejected Super Bowl ad claimed vegetarians make better lovers. Like many things PETA, that’s not exactly true:

Vegetarianism also may have some negative effects on sexual desire. Vegetarian diets tend to correlate with higher rates of zinc deficiency, which is closely associated with lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives. Vegetarian women are also more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), a condition that’s usually accompanied by low testosterone, vaginal dryness, and poor libido. Finally, the notion that overweight people are less sexually active isn’t entirely accurate (for women, at least): A recent analysis published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that overweight women might, in fact, be slightly more active.

This is the same organization that is attempting to label fish sea kittens, under the auspices of bringing attention to the cruelty of eating fish.

Sarah Hartwell on the cultural taboo of eating cats:

Cat flesh only becomes economical where the cat is fed on scraps or where it eats rodents. Otherwise the expense of rearing cats for consumption makes it an expensive delicacy. There is not much meat on a cat unless it has been specially fattened. Stray cats which rely on their own hunting or scavenging skills are generally very scrawny.

Includes a lovely recipe from 1529, “Roast Cat as It Should Be Prepared”.

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Presenting a not so governmental guide to the unemployment rate.

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A few notes Thelonious Monk gave Steve Lacy, as recorded by Steve Lacy:

What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.

Thanks, Neven, and Merlin.

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How a simple UI change can have drastic effects, part the first:

About 2 months ago Twitter changed the order of your Follower list. It used to list your followers, in order that they joined twitter. Now it lists the people that just followed you.

Soon the users figured out that ‘people that just followed you’ was a gold mine of people that just took the action of following someone. Open up a few profiles, follow the 10 people that just followed them. Repeat until you have 13k followers.

Part the second:

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year.

Unintended consequences are something of an art form in interface design. Small things can affect behavior, not just in your user, but across an entire community. Everything from button placement, to type size, to what features are exposed where, creates an environment that either encourages or discourages certain types of behavior.

About a year ago, I did a quick consult on a forum UI for a friend. Like many communities, the forum had a simple feature to mark a given user as either a “friend,” someone allowed to message you and whose posts where marked in a special way, or an “enemy,” someone who couldn’t message you and whose posts where hidden.

His first draft exposed the feature in an utterly sane way. Two links, next to any user’s name. “Add friend,” and “Make enemy”. Fast access to a useful feature. I’m sure he didn’t give it too much thought.

My first criticism? Kill the enemy link. Hide the feature somewhere deep in the UI. Get rid of it all together if he could.

It wasn’t just that the feature existed, but it’s prominent placement made knee-jerk reactions too easy. Someone post something you don’t agree with? There’s a nice quick way to get rid of them. Over time, the community would grow increasingly negative, myopic, and exclusive. All because of one link.

This may seem non-sequitur to the examples above, but they all sit in this neat boat of thinking about more than just usability when designing.

Everything is a trade-off. Everything has a consequence.

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The first political television ad, ever:

In 1952, there was no precedent in presidential elections for the use of television “spot” advertising—short commercials that generally run between twenty seconds and a minute. Governor Thomas Dewey, declaring spots “undignified,” rejected their use in his 1948 presidential campaign. In 1952, most campaign strategists preferred thirty-minute blocks of television time for the broadcast of campaign speeches.

Like most absolutely evil things, we have an advertising wonk to thank for it:

The idea for the spots came from Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves, who had created the M&M “melts in your mouth, not in your hands” campaign. Reeves convinced Eisenhower that spot ads placed immediately before or after such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more viewers, and at a much lower cost, than half-hour speeches.

The Eisenhower ad is amazingly positive, which led me to wonder when the first negative political ad aired. Daisy, Johnson’s infamous ad from his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, seems to be considered the winner of that race, though I think a few of the ads from 1952 could easily be called negative. Just not, “We’re all going to die!” negative.

While I’m down in this rathole, here’s a fun-fact I did not know:

The increasing use of negative political advertising has been promoted by two unrelated legal touchstones. First, the Communication Act of 1934 made an important distinction between candidate ads and product or service ads. It stated that broadcasters could refuse all deceptive advertising except for political commercials. Second, the 1976 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act allowed private individuals and political action committees or PACs, to spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates.

Ah, laws. Is there nothing they can’t accidentally do?

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It may be time to admit that acupuncture is little more than a placebo:

Entitled Acupuncture treatment for pain: systematic review of randomised clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups, [the study] appeared in the BMJ two days ago and was performed by Madsen et al at the Nordic Cochrane Center.

This particular meta-analysis examined studies of acupuncture for pain. The results were thirteen trials, with a total of 3,025 patients between them.

What were the findings?

In essence, zilch, nada, zip.

Well, not quite. Although it is statistically significantly different than zero, it is barely so. Indeed, it’s so small that that it falls below the minimally accepted threshold for a clinically noticeable reduction in pain.

That’s not to say a “just being a placebo” is necessarily a bad thing. The placebo effect is incredibly powerful, and in the right cases, can be harnessed for real benefit to people in pain.

There’s a full chapter devoted to the effect in Michael Brooks’ 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, though, for the lazy or those lacking an Amazon Prime account, a summary is available in the article that inspired the book:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

The article is a great read if you have an hour. The book is a much better read if you have a weekend.

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Daniel Lyons, he of previous Fake Steve Jobs fame, doesn’t think much of how reporters treat Apple:

The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama — a company that can do no wrong. Even in Silicon Valley, where much of the press corps are pretty much glorified cheerleaders (think of all those slobbering cover stories about the Google guys) Apple’s kid-gloves treatment stands out. Reporters don’t just overlook Apple’s faults; they’ll actually apologize for them, or rationalize them away. Ever seen reporters clapping and cheering at a press conference? Happens all the time at Apple events.

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Sir David Attenborough, mostly known for the BBC nature series “Life”, gets hate mail for not crediting God:

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

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Make Something Cool Every Day, a Flickr group devoted to doing exactly that.

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I love you more than blank, a well-timed project from Paperwhite.

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Derek Powazek on getting help from programmers:

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to print this up in 170 point Helvetica and staple it to various people’s foreheads.

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Dennis Overbye reflects on Obama’s call to “restore science to its rightful place”:

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

As a side-note, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to saying “President Obama.” He’s just Obama, and probably always will be.

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Mozilla Labs is asking students to design a web browser without chrome:

“What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

First person to submit the iPhone wins.

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When a volcano erupts through ice.

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Paul Carr is trying to stop the hate:

You simply can’t have a system which rewards nastiness over niceness and which offers no consequences for those who commit cowardly anonymous attacks and then act surprised when people don’t know where to draw the line.

I’m never sure what to think of the vitriol of the online world. There’s a bit in me, unshakable, the bit that donned a green mohawk in high school, smashed around in pits and fought cops, who threw rocks at the windows of midwestern skinheads and wrote manifesto’s in every notebook he ever head, that will not let the more civil bastard in me win. Passion, above all things, he says, is a sign you’re doing something right. Even when it’s something horribly wrong.

It’d be nice if passion only inspired positive reactions. If all the good it caused could be distilled, the bad it’s done removed. But they’re a pair. A set of conjoined twins; Kill one, you risk the other.

When I read bits like Carr’s column, or about why-in-the-fucks like Arrington’s spit take and death threats, there’s the bit in me, civil and educated, that stares slack-jawed at the stupidity of clearly loony people.

But, while I abhor the death threats, that stupid kid in me cheered the guy who spat. Something in me loved the protest of it, the simplicity of the action and all that it said. It wasn’t violent, no one’s life put at risk, but it was honest and fast, and probably said everything the man wanted to say. It was passionate.

And a bit of me excused him for that.

In Carr’s list of “utterly reasonable demands for a more civil universe”, he requests:

If you’ve ever considered spitting on someone because you don’t like something they’ve said online, kill yourself. Seriously. Do it now. The world will be a better place without you.

And there’s this bit of me that thinks that if you’re not willing to spit on someone, maybe you’re doing something wrong.

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A completely fake interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language:

Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought ‘I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers?

I fully admit to finding this funny.

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Clever anti-theft lunch bags from the same guys who brought you the chat bubble speaker set.

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The Pew Research Center takes a look at why people move, and why they stay in the same place:

Home means different things to different people. Among U.S.-born adults who have lived in more than one community, nearly four-in-ten (38%) say the place they consider home isn’t where they’re living now. But there’s a wide range of definitions of “home” among Americans who have lived in at least one place besides their original hometown: 26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.

Maybe it’s the nomad in me, but I’ve always thought of home as a place you go searching for.

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Mark Danner reflects on the lost power of the scandal:

Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped “breaking news,” beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.

It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that “the people,” that vaunted repository of public good—”the people always find out”—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with.

I’d counter that the recent election more than proved the public, at least the American public, has a more delicate relationship with scandal than Danner paints.

Still, Danner’s essay at times makes points quite large. Points worth considering.

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Shoji Ueda’s Self Portrait with Gorilla Mask from 1975.

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Mitt Romney’s editorial on why we should let detroit go bankrupt makes numerous incredibly solid points:

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

I still loathe the man, all that he stands for, and dream of the day I can punch him in his exquistely tanned, perfectly square jaw. But solid points indeed.

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30 years after the Jonestown massacre:

Many of the Jonestown survivors and their families find the Kool-Aid references and jokes insensitive and deeply hurtful — reminders of the tragedy they suffered and, worse still, the widely held perception that the men, women and children in Jonestown were a bunch of crazies who willingly committed suicide out of blind devotion to their leader…

Much more is known today about the inner workings of the Peoples Temple than was known in the immediate aftermath of Jonestown. For example, many of those who died that day were highly educated. And at least some did, in fact, commit suicide. But there is clear evidence that armed guards loyal to Jones forced mothers to poison their children and gave adults a choice: Drink the deadly potion or be shot. And it later turned out that Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, was mixed with the cyanide…

Was Jones a sadistic egomaniac who cynically abused his followers? Or was he a decent man who fell victim to the drugs, power and paranoia that finally devoured him and the 913 other men, women and children who died in Jonestown? Why didn’t more people resist when they were ordered to die?

What a very strange massacre.

Joe Golike gives me a freebie:

If you haven’t already watched the 2007 PBS film about Jonestown, it’s absolutely riveting. The official website is still up and has several video interviews with surviving cult members.

A bit of googling and I found the full-length film here.

Thanks, Joe.

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Buddhist Monks in the Sisaket province of Thailand have built a temple out of one million recycled glass bottles:

The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple is about 400 miles northeast of Bangkok in the city of Khun Han close to the Cambodian border. Using Heineken bottles (green) and Chang Beer bottles (brown) the monks were able to clean up the local pollution and create a useful structure that will be a visual reminder to the scope of pollution and the potential we can make with limber minds.

Thanks, Andrew.

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Joshua Davis’ work for our event this Friday showed up on his Flickr stream, and bits have been trickling into my office. Color me impressed.

If you’re in Chicago this Friday, and want to stop by the event, shoot me an email with your name. The last event had to be list-only due to sheer number of folks who showed up.

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November 19th is World Toilet Day, a holiday created by the World Toilet Organization to promote basic sanitation in developing countries:

So central are flush toilets to our lives that we easily forget how many people do without them, or any other kind of effective sanitation either. Nobody seems to keep toilet statistics per se, but the World Health Organization and UNICEF monitor access to what is called “improved sanitation” — which they reckon 2.5 billion people live without.

Contrary to what the term appears to imply, “it doesn’t mean anything indoors and it doesn’t mean water. It certainly doesn’t mean flushable toilets,” says Patricia Dandonoli, the president of WaterAID America, an organization that works to provide sanitation in developing countries. It does mean a private, covered pit latrine — which Dandonoli stresses is “several steps up the sanitation ladder” from open defecation.

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Long rumored, now somewhat confirmed: Hitler only had one testicle.

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After nearly two years of use, I’m finally retiring my desktop backgrounds. Not entirely sure what to do with them, I feel they should be archived somewhere. Made public. Maybe someone else will find them as calming and stabilizing as I have.

One for your left monitor, and one for your right one.

They really do work best in pairs.

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Joel Splosky is a bit sick of anecdotes as science:

Whether it’s Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

In my never-ending quest to be the king of all things pop-culture, and despite my better angels, I pre-ordered Gladwell’s Outliers. While I have little if any respect for his ability to construct a plausible hypothesis, the velocity of his anecdotes, the way Gladwell can pull from the arbitrary to create the grand, is something I can respect. Even envy.

But staring at the pile of books I’ve sworn I’d finish this year, and remembering how frustrating reading Blink was for me, shouting and pacing and fuming, it dawned on me how unnecessary reading the actual book was.

The best anecdotes will find their way into the conversations of my over-educated friends quickly enough. Within the next week, I’ll see no less than 25 posts dedicated the celebration or criticism of the book, and from the snippets I’ll be able to easily construct a mental abstract of whatever it is Gladwell is on about this time, without so much as cracking the spine.

If I only have so many hours in the day to devote to genuinely insightful things, Gladwell’s track record screams at me to ignore Outliers. At least for now. At least until I’m stuck on a cross-country flight, liquored up, and ready for a good fight.

I handed off the book to a friend, and will instead sit down with Rob Walker’s Buying In, which decried anecdotes over evidence in the first five pages.

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Brook Reynold’s immaculate photo series, We Are Sleeping Giants.

The series feels like a memory of a summer night, made perfect as the evening has gotten more distant in your memory.

Thanks, Matthew.

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Louis CK is a vastly underrated comic.

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The difference between lucky and unlucky people:

I gave lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to tell me how many photos were inside. On average, unlucky people spent about two minutes on this exercise; lucky people spent seconds. Why? Because on the paper’s second page — in big type — was the message “Stop counting: There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they’re too busy looking for something else. Lucky people see what is there rather than just what they’re looking for.

More importantly, “lucky” people tend to see themselves as lucky, whether they are or not:

I asked my subjects to imagine being in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters and fires a shot that hits them in the arms. Unlucky people tended to say this would be their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. Lucky people said it could have been worse: “You could have been shot in the head.”

No matter what happens, it could always be worse.

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A clever business card idea for a circumciser.

I’ll limit myself to just the one pun.

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JS-909 is a sound machine written entirely in JavaScript without any pre-existing libraries or Flash.

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Avinash’s weblog is precisely the type I’d like to see more of.

A mix of topics, passions, and links, with essays just thought-provoking enough to keep you scrolling down the page.

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Joey Pfeifer asks you to answer the age-old question: What is graphic design?

Merriam-Webster defines “graphic design” as:

The art or profession of using design elements (as typography and images) to convey information or create an effect.

The preceding definition is spiritless and boring. Graphic design is so much more than that…

I say, “No, it’s really not.”

But you’re welcome to email your own definition over.

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