Paying Attention to Complaints
One very cool innovation that I learned about in the last year: soft-close drawers for your kitchen and bathroom. You pull open each drawer, same as you would any normal one, but when you go to close it, you just push it shut as hard as you like. When it gets about one and a half inches from being completely closed, a little hydraulic cylinder slows it down and then gently closes the drawer the...
Intelligence Quotient
In my mind, a person's intelligence has nothing to do with how many facts a person has jammed into their brain, how opinionated they are, or how strongly they cling to those opinions. It has everything to do with how willing a person is, in light of new evidence or arguments, to consider new facts or opinions that conflict with their own. You don't have to change your mind. But cognitive biases tend to reinforce...
Walking a Mile
Whenever you go to a shoe store and try on new pairs of shoes, there's one thing that people always do: try them on and walk around to see if they like how they feel. By the same token, there is always one thing missing from every shoe store that I've ever been do: a designated walking area. The fitting room for a pair of shoes is not a closed and private area, like when...
Merrell Dress Shoes
My girlfriend's mom had foot surgery a couple of years ago. Her doctor told her, "You should wear nothing but Merrell brand shoes whenever you can. There's nothing better you can put on your feet." So she has four pairs of Merrell shoes that she wears most of the time. She told me about them, and now, I own a pair of them. They're very comfortable for all of the hiking and the walking I...
Always Get the History
I was talking to my cousin's wife on Christmas. She's an elementary school teacher who just graduated from college and is now on the hunt for her first full-time job. She was telling me about the tactics she used during her student teaching in order to make sure that the kids in her class behaved. One method she used was called "Gimme Five". You say this to their students, and then they're supposed to put...
Seeking Out One-Star Advice
I read a lot of books; the hard part is finding the good ones. Reading fiction is one thing, because you can just pick a story that sounds entertaining, but I tend to read business books and titles that contains general ideas about the world. I don't know about you, but in an age of an almost unlimited supply of books to read on Amazon.com, I have to use some kind of criteria in order...
Marketing the Myst Movie
Back in the early 1990's, some of us played a computer game called "Myst", which was a really more of a series of puzzles tied together around an imaginary world and a loose narrative. Either you played it because you loved games like that, or you were like me, and played it merely because you hadn't discovered the World Wide Web yet. (Actually, the game wasn't that bad; in an era of games like Halo,...
Loyal Companions
I live in a very small city which, according to the official census, only has about 90,000 people in it. There's more than that if you take into account the greater area, but it's still much different than where I originally came from: Detroit. There, in the land of sprawl, you feel lost in a system that's much larger than the community. In downtown Santa Barbara, you start to notice the same homeless people on...
One Characteristic of Great Innovations
If you're trying to create something that people will use, here's some advice that an aunt gave me a long time ago: "One of the main goals of invention is to make a hard thing easy." That may sound obvious, but at the time, for me, it was not. I had just spent a few hours rigging up a little ramp so that if a person wanted to turn off their alarm, they had to...
Up Next: White Collar CSI
We have lot of different kinds of crime shows: "Law & Order", "CSI: [insert city here]", "Numb3rs", "Castle", "The Shield"...which each one has a niche that makes it unique, most of these shows tend to follow the same format: episodes open with a crime scene, police officers spend the hour tracking a criminal, and in the end, they put together the puzzle and catch the bad guy. I'm sure detectives sit around in bars with...