I’m testing a handful of highly-experimental new features on my personal website using multivariate (“A/B”) testing.
If you visit within the next day or so you’re likely to be randomly-selected to try out one of them. (If you’re not selected, you can manually enable one of the
experiments.)
I’d love to hear your feedback on these Very Serious New Features! Let me know which one(s) you see and whether you think they should become permanent fixtures on my site.
I was told Windows installation should take less than 20 minutes, but these ones have been sitting outside my house all day while the builders sit on the roof and listen to the radio.
Do I need a faster processor? #TechSupport
I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and
playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine1, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her
friend.
If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I
do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a
work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.
I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing
and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a
profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.
Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose,
and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device
is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.
The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???
Footnotes
1 Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out
of.
The other night, Ruth and I were talking about collective nouns (y’know, like a herd of cows or a flock of sheep) and came
up with the somewhat batty idea of solitary nouns. Like collective nouns, but for a singular subject (one cow, sheep, or whatever).
Then, we tried to derive what the words could be. Some of the results write themselves.1
Some of them involve removing one or more letters from the collective noun to invent a shorter word to be the solitary noun.
For others, we really had to stretch the concept by mutating words in ways that “felt right”, using phoenetic spellings, or even inventing collective nouns so that we
could singularise them:
Did I miss any obvious ones?
Footnotes
1 Also consider “parliament of owls” ➔ “politician of owl”, “troop of monkeys” ➔ “soldier
of monkey”, “band of gorillas” ➔ “musician of gorilla”. Hey… is that where that band‘s name come from?
2 Is “cluster of stars” ➔ “luster of star” anything?
3 Ruth enjoyed the singularised “a low of old bollock”, too.
You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet
connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?
Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:
Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features
unique to Emma Goldcoin include:
Using it doesn’t massively contribute to energy wastage and environmental damage.
It doesn’t increase the digital divide by helping early adopters at the expense of late adopters.
It’s entirely secure: it’s mathematically impossible to “steal”EGX.
Emma Goldcoin is so simple that you don’t even need a computer to use it: it “just works”.
Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what
those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!
A guy walks into a bar. It’s a low one, so he gets a raise within his first six months on the job.
Did you hear the one about the woman who reported sexual harassment? Of course you didn’t; she was forced to sign an NDA.
…
Louise Bernikow once wrote: Humour tells you where the trouble is.
It’s okay to laugh at these jokes. But only so long as you do so with an awareness that their comedy comes from the nuggets of truth within each and every one of them. Our society’s
come a long way this last century, but we’ve still got a long way to go.