Scott Adams's Blog, page 383

Can You Pray Someone to Death?

I believe you can pray someone to death under the right conditions. What?
You skeptics don't believe me?

Lately the top guy in Iran, Ali Khamenei, is getting pushback from the faithful because the Supreme Leader's job description is feeling a bit too much like God's job, and polytheism is a big no-no under Islam. My theory is that if people in the United States start praying to Khamenei, his own people will stone him to death to protect monotheism.

It wouldn't take many people praying to him to ...

Timing

On December 2nd Dogbert stepped down as CEO of Dilbert's company and was replaced by a dried-up corpse. At about the same time, GM was announcing that CEO Fritz Henderson was stepping down and being replaced by 68-year old Ed Whitacker.

Here's my comic to refresh your memory:

http://dilbert.com/2009-12-02/

And here's a picture of Ed Whitacre:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/communications/news/stories/images/whitacre.jpg

The timing was just a coincidence. My comic was drawn and submitted several weeks b...

E-mail for Senior Citizens

What the world needs is software that makes it easy for senior citizens to use e-mail. Assisted living facilities for seniors already have computers. But how many 80-year olds can navigate Gmail or Outlook?

What we need is software that acts as a "mask" and sits on top of, for example, Gmail. Its main function would be to hide all the options that aren't relevant. All you would see is very large buttons labeled READ, WRITE, and OTHER. Seniors should never see more than three large, clear choic...

Job Satisfaction

There's a natural limit to how happy a person can be at work. If work becomes fun, your boss will stop paying you to do it and start charging other people to have that fun in your place. So let's agree that work has to be a little bit unpleasant, at least for most people. Still, despite this unpleasantness, many people have a feeling called job satisfaction.

My theory is that your degree of job satisfaction is largely a function of who you blame for the necessarily unpleasant job you have. If...

It's Getting Harder to Be a Criminal

Years ago, in my book The Dilbert Future, I predicted that someday it will be nearly impossible to commit a crime and get away with it. The technology for catching criminals is improving faster than the criminals are getting smarter. Just watch any episode of CSI and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Lately, it seems as if every time a kid gets abducted, or a plane crashes, someone produces security camera footage of the incident. It won't be long before all light fixtures have surveillance ...

The Bad Management Stimulus

I wonder if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management.  I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs.

Imagine a world where managers always recognized and rewarded their most capable people. It would be hard for a rational employee to leave a great job for a ten percent chance of creating something even greater. But leaving a boss who is Satan's learning-challenged little brother ...

Growing Your Own Food

There's a lot of chatter on the Internet about how much land is required to feed one person. You will not be surprised to learn that the answer is "It depends."  It's somewhere in the neighborhood of "a few acres."

On a related note, I wonder how large of a greenhouse you would need to feed a family of four. Could you optimize a greenhouse to the point where it would only take a few hundred square feet?

Greenhouses have a number of benefits. You have a longer growing season, and good control...

Picking Paint Colors

People warned me, but I didn't believe that picking paint colors would be the hardest part of building a home. For the exterior color, we drove around until we found a new home that was exactly the color we wanted. We queried the owner about what paint he used and asked our builder to duplicate it.

Easy, right?

That's when we learned that paint changes color if you put it on an "imperfect smooth" stucco versus the original home's bumpy stucco. With the bumps, the color becomes subtle and textu...

The Long Dilbert Tail

You're probably aware of the Long Tail concept. The idea is that technology makes it economical for companies to sell items for which there are only a handful of buyers in the known universe. The trick is to sell lots of different items to lots of different buyers. And if those items are manufactured with special features for each buyer, it's called mass customization.

The new Dilbert Store is a good example of both the long tail and mass customization. You can search for any Dilbert comic eve...

Worst Finder Ever

Now that I'm married, one of the questions I fear the most is "Can you look in the X and see if you can find the Y?" Oh, I try. But my wife refuses to learn that I will never succeed.

X and Y might represent, for example, the special cheese hiding in the fridge, or the "good pillow" hiding in the bedroom, or the yellow folder hiding in the kitchen. There are a variety of reasons I will not succeed in finding the desired item. About 25% of the time the item is not in the room, or pile, or conta...