Scott Adams's Blog, page 381

Name as Destiny

I've written before about the fact that a person's name can influence his choices. Studies show that people named Dennis become dentists at a higher rate than you would expect. People also prefer to live in places that sound like their own names. Names matter.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/susie.pdf

I was thinking about the naming of things while watching the debate over the iPad. And by the way, for the record, I would like to say I was wrong about the iPad being a n...

Earthquake Insurance

Where I live, about an hour from San Francisco, you have to think about getting earthquake insurance. I've always had it. But I looked into it again for our new house because the insurance is absurdly pricey. I learned, to my surprise, that most people in earthquake territory don't buy earthquake insurance. This made me wonder who the bigger fools were.

There are two popular schools of thought. One is that your house is (often) your biggest asset, and you can't take a chance of losing it. If ...

Creativity by Combination

A lot of what passes as creativity is just combining things that aren't normally combined. For example, my parents are in town this week, at the same time the iPad was launched, which made me think a lot about the physical form that products take. And because of the iPad launch, there's a lot of talk about the iPhone too. At 6:30 AM, all of those ideas combined in my head, somewhat automatically, and I drew a comic in which Dilbert invents a cell phone in the form factor of an old man's head...

iPad

I think you can predict acceptance of a new product by what people will compare it to. For example, the iPod was compared to all of the other ways you could organize and carry your music around, and the iPod was just plain better.

Then Apple introduced the iPhone. It was compared to other phones, and in that comparison it won easily, unless you expected to do a lot of e-mail.

Yesterday, Apple introduced the iPad. What do you compare it to?

The iPad borrows a little from phones, and a little fr...

Complexity

I keep getting unexplained bankcard services fees on my business checking account, somehow related to selling some of my original art a few years ago. I contacted my bank to clear it up. My bank could find no record that I ever had a merchant account with them. Nor could they find any record that I have a current checking account with them. They did acknowledge billing me for the services they say I don't have.

Allow me to say that again: My bank can't find any record that I have a checking a...

Like a Night Watchman

When you lack a particular skill, you are often curious what it would feel like to have it. For example, I marvel at people who can sing in key, or even recognize the right key when they hear it.  I suppose it's more about feeling the music than thinking it. So I wonder what that feeling is like.

My little window of talent involves selecting the right words to make things sound either funny or compelling. I'll get to that in a minute.

My job also involves drawing, but that's not so much a tal...

Bad Interfaces

The other day I tried to change my address through a company's web site and it wouldn't accept my new address because I "already have a phone number." WTF??? I tried various workarounds including no phone number, and a fake phone number, but it insisted that once you have a phone number, and the system knows it, you can never change your address. So I asked myself, am I the first person who ever owned a phone and wanted to change his address?

On a daily basis I am astonished by the bad desig...

Ambition and Imagination

I got the flu recently, with all of the usual symptoms. But one symptom fascinated me: I lost all ambition. I didn't want to work, eat, read, talk, or even exist. For several days I had no long term goals, no short term goals, and no desires whatsoever, except to nap.

I'm a goal oriented guy. I can usually tell you exactly what I want right now, in ten minutes, and in ten years. That's not always a good thing. It's more of an itch than a positive quality. Losing the itch, even temporarily, was...

Online Reviews

Lately I have been wondering whether online reviews should remain legal.
Yeah, I know. That just set off all of your alarms.

Free speech, etc., blah, blah.
It helped when I bought my barbecue, etc., blah, blah.
It’s easy to tell the useful ones from the bad ones, etc., blah, blah.
It keeps the seller honest, etc. blah, blah.

I will stipulate that all the obvious arguments in favor of online reviews are valid. But there are a few things you might not know.

Keep in mind that I get reviewed online ...

Triangle of Wickedness

I suppose it's the Dilbert cartoonist in me, but I can't help seeing world affairs as essentially a bunch of middle managers sitting around a rectangular table coming up with clever ways to convince the masses that turds are diamonds.

I assume that usually the bureaucrats produce rubbish, the same way it goes down where you work. But every now and then, the blind squirrel finds his nuts, so to speak. For example, the Axis of Evil is one of the best turds-are-diamonds ever. It sounds great roll...