Why Van Halen Demanded "No Brown M&Ms"

I heard the story years ago -

In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed.”

- and like everyone else, I assumed it was a whimsical request reflective of celebrity hubris.  It wasn't until yesterday that I read about the reason for the request:

Here’s the thing, though: the band put the “no brown M&Ms” clause in their contracts for a very good reason.

Van Halen was one of the first rock bands to bring truly massive concerts to mid-size cities like Macon, Georgia. The staff that worked at concert arenas in these smallish cities were used to bands coming to town with, at most, three tractor-trailers full of equipment. Van Halen’s equipment took up 9 tractor-trailers. It was a lot of stuff, and the staff at these venues were frequently overwhelmed. And when people are overwhelmed, they make mistakes... mistakes can cause stage lights to fall from the ceiling and kill people… which is exactly what the band was afraid of.

At the heart of any major concert is the contract. Much of the text of these contracts is standard legal boilerplate, but each band may attach specific demands via something called a “rider”. Most of the contracts involving concerts at large venues are jam-packed with riders, most of which involve technical details specific to the band’s stage design. For instance, a rider might say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, spaced evenly, providing nineteen amperes total, on beams suspended from the ceiling of the venue, which shall be able to support a total gross weight of 5,600 pounds each, and be suspended no less than 30 feet, but no more than 37.5 feet, above the stage surface”. Van Halen’s concert contracts would have several hundred such demands, and their contracts ended up (in lead singer David Lee Roth’s words) looking “like a Chinese Yellow Pages”.

The staff at venues in large cities were used to technically-complex shows like Van Halen’s. The band played in venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden or Atlanta’s The Omni without incident. But the band kept noticing errors (sometimes significant errors) in the stage setup in smaller cities. The band needed a way to know that their contract had been read fully. And this is where the “no brown M&Ms” came in. The band put a clause smack dab in the middle of the technical jargon of other riders: “Article 126: There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”. That way, the band could simply enter the arena and look for a bowl of M&Ms in the backstage area. No brown M&Ms? Someone read the contract fully, so there were probably no major mistakes with the equipment. A bowl of M&Ms with the brown candies? No bowl of M&Ms at all? Stop everyone and check every single thing, because someone didn’t bother to read the contract.

I owe David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar an apology.  Further history and details at jimcofer.

via: TYWKIWDBI

The $300 Million Button

"The $300 Million Button," Jared Spool's 2009 article on usability and ecommerce design, is remarkable in that it a) articulates something that anyone who shops widely online already knows; b) is advice that would make a lot of money for sites if they adopted it; c) has been part of the literature for at least two and a half years; d) is roundly ignored.

Spool is recounting the story of an unnamed large ecommerce retailer who had one of those forms that made you register before you could buy anything, and to remember your login and password before you could shop there again. Removing this form, and allowing the option of saving your details with a login and password at the end of the transaction, increased the retailer's sales by $300,000,000 in the first year.

From a commerce perspective, the Internet's glory is reduced search costs for customers. When I was making my office coffee table, I decided I wanted to source some brightly colored anodized aluminum bolts, nuts and washers. I'd never bought these before, but I assumed they existed, and I was right -- a couple searches showed me that they existed and were sold to motorcycle modders. I found a site that supplied them, and ordered sixteen of each, plus some spares. It was the first time in 39-some years I'd needed brightly colored bolts, and it may very well be that long again before I need any more.

So while this specialist bolt retailer is visible to motorcyle hobbyists and can compete for their repeat business with other specialists, they're also tapping into a market to whom they were entirely invisible until the net came along. Periodically, someone like me is going to drop in and spend some money on a one-off basis, and make windfall cash for them. There are a lot of people who, at some time in their lives, want to buy some specialized component or good. Before the Internet came along, we'd likely have just got the non-specialized equivalent. But because of the Internet, businesses all over the world are getting sales from the unlikeliest of corners. And what's more, some of those one-time only customers might discover that they actually really enjoy whatever the specialist thing is, and come back for more. It's win-win.

But the fastest way to alienate those customers and scare away that free money is to make its owner establish a relationship with you before s/he can make a purchase. In the case of the company that sold me my bolts, I was required to create a login and password, and I still get a fortnightly newsletter full of information I don't care to know about bolts (I checked all the opt-out bits, but either I missed one or they just don't pay attention to it).

Spool's research showed that a substantial portion of ecommerce users are even more sick of this stuff than I am -- $300 million/year's worth, in fact. And what's more, of the repeat customers who might have benefited from the faster checkout afforded by creating an account, 45 percent had multiple accounts in the system because they'd forgotten their logins, lost access to the email accounts they'd used, and signed up again with a new address.

Repeat customers weren't any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn't remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.

When a shopper couldn't remember the email address and password, they'd attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can't remember which email address you initially registered with.

(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren't helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

The $300 Million Button (via Beth Pratt)

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Tom Waits

Federal Court Rules Human Genes can be Patented

by Eric W. Dolan

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in a 2 to 1 decision Friday that human genes can be patented because the DNA extracted from cells is not a product of nature.

The court held (PDF) that Myriad Genetics can patent two human genes used to predict the risk of breast and ovarian cancer in women, overturning a previous decision by a federal district court in March 2010. But the court ruled that the method used to determine a patient's risk of cancer was not patentable.

The lawsuit, Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., was filed in May 2009 on behalf of researchers, women patients, cancer survivors and scientific associations against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as well as Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The lawsuit was filed by the Public Patent Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, who claimed patents on human genes violate the First Amendment and patent law because genes are "products of nature."

The court disagreed.

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Black Sugar

How Plan B Found the Droid I was Looking For

[ed.  Here's an interesting, humorous, scary kind of story.  I'm not sure what to think about it.  On the one hand it's cool that there are technical options like this available, but the virtual tracking element seems open to abuse in any number of ways - not all by the owner.]

by Jon Barrow

I've carried a smartphone of some sort for nearly 7 years now without ever losing one or having one of those close calls that scare you into thinking carefully about recovery options. So when I collapsed into a cab at San Diego airport just after midnight last Friday, my Droid was enjoying the woefully inadequate protection it was accustomed to: a loose pocket in the front of my cargo shorts. At least that's where it was supposed to be.

I noticed it was missing as soon as I arrived in my hotel room and did my customary pocket dump. With the realization that I didn't have any recovery software installed, a receipt from the cab, or even any recollection as to which company I had used, I was certain I'd never see it again. I tried a few traditional recovery methods: calling the phone (it rang with no answer), taking a cab back to San Diego International (it was all but deserted in the wee hours of the morning), and creating lost property reports with each of the 7 taxi companies servicing the airport. After that, I decided I should at least look into after-the-fact recovery options.

A small seed of optimism sprouted as I read the Android Market description for Plan B from Lookout Labs. A remotely installable app which would instantly e-mail me the phone's location? It sounded too good to be true. I installed it immediately, sent the keyword "locate" via SMS from my laptop with Google Voice, and awaited the first e-mail. None came. Perhaps the phone had been powered off?
I called it again. No answer.

I sent "locate" a second time. Nothing. By now the adrenaline surge I felt when I discovered Plan B had worn off and I collapsed into bed, exhausted.

The following day I walked to the harbor and had lunch on the water. Pleasant weather, an ocean breeze, and some great seafood lifted my spirits, and I still had hope the phone would be returned. I flew home to Montana and the next morning I decided on a whim to send one more SMS, for some reason capitalizing the keyword as "Locate" this time. The reply came nearly instantly.

Lookout Plan B has started locating. You should have your location shortly.

This single message triggered a 16-hour game of cat-and-mouse, spanning half the country and involving a cast of disinterested bureaucrats, helpful strangers, and one witless would-be criminal. We'll call him Roland, because that's his name.

Within minutes I had received my phone's location with a reported accuracy of two meters.

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Willy Boers, Still Life with Leek.  1933.
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Hiroshige (1797-1858)
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Inside the Bubble

by Thea Johnson

QUITO—It is springtime in the capital of Ecuador, and that means everyone is celebrating Carnival, as are people all over Latin America. In the halls of the Fundación Colegio Americano—the American School—in the neighborhood of Carcelén, students are gearing up for the annual election of the school’s “princess.” This is no suburban prom queen selection. The election takes a beauty contest and transforms it into a grand display of wealth. One candidate is chosen from each of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Even in a school for the ultra-wealthy, filled with unusually attractive children, these girls stand out as the true beauties. As the three candidates campaign, six-foot photos of each hang in the school’s main foyer, greeting those who enter with a hint of cleavage and the come-hither expressions of fashion models.

Three days of Carnival festivities have led now to the climax—a school-wide dance where the princess will be named. At this grand finale, each class is charged with the responsibility of creating an elaborate dance routine before its candidate for princess is “revealed” to the audience. The routines involve elaborately choreographed theatrical numbers—intricate matching outfits, dancers moving in a harmonized bridge—in anticipation of the arrival of the entrant. Along with my fellow teachers, I sit watching the performance. The audience fills with parents, relatives, siblings and friends, as camera flashes create a circle of light around the stage.

As the music builds, the mass of dancing teenagers reaches a crescendo of movement. Then, with a wave, all the students point skyward with one grand gesture. The audience follows the movement with their eyes, craning their necks. And suddenly, above, there appears a giant glass ball. Eyes take a moment to adjust, but soon we can all see the first candidate, encased in the immense transparent ball, dangling dramatically from the ceiling. She is wearing a white dress with a corset bodice and a full skirt—quite likely purchased from Miami, or hand-made by a member of the small group of women in Quito who earn a living outfitting the rich. This year the candidates are limited to spending $500 on the gown. Before the school imposed the price cap, these young women could spend $1,000 or more on the chosen dress.

The first would-be princess waves at her audience, who cheer raucously below. She is beautiful. Her skin is tan, but not dark. Her layered, dusky blonde hair falls over her shoulders. Her figure is flawless.

As the glass ball descends slowly, majestically, few look past it to the ceiling. There, all but invisible to the wealthy throng below, dark-skinned men in blue uniforms are balancing from the rafters. They are the school’s janitors and grounds keepers. Standing precariously on the beams, without any safety net or belts, easily 30 feet off the ground, they are holding the rope attached to the glass ball and its cargo. The men brace themselves against the beams as they lower the ball as slowly and gracefully as possible. They are sweating, straining with all their might. The candidate smiles and waves inside the glass. Finally, mercifully, the ball lands and the men relax their muscles. On the floor, the door to the ball opens and the girl emerges. The crowd erupts.

Limited Mobility

Many outsiders would find this scene strange, if not downright troubling. But to the participants, and to most of the onlookers, it seems perfectly normal—and not just because it happens every year. The girls who vie to become princesses already are royalty of a sort, living out their entire lives in a glass bubble of tremendous wealth, a lifestyle of prosperity made possible by a permanent underclass that toils without the benefit of a basic safety net. In a country where it is not uncommon to see child “fire-eaters” earning pennies performing on street corners, this three-day extravaganza cost each of the students’ families and the school several thousand dollars. To them, it is a small price to pay to demonstrate—mostly to themselves—their own affluence, and to reinforce their self-image as a class very much apart and above the rest.

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Brute Force or Intelligence? The Slow Rise of Computer Chess

In 1770, a Hungarian engineer and diplomat named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a remarkable invention to the court of Maria Theresa, ruler of Hungary and Austria. It consisted of a mechanical figure dressed in (what Europeans saw as) Oriental garb, presiding over a cabinet upon which a chess board sat. Full of gears ostentatiously placed in a front side drawer, The Turk was cranked up by hand, after which an opponent could sit down and play a game against the dummy.

"Even among the skeptics who insisted it was a trick, there was disagreement about how the automaton worked, leading to a series of claims and counterclaims," writes author Tom Standage. "Did it rely on mechanical trickery, magnetism, or sleight of hand? Was there a dwarf, or a small child, or a legless man hidden inside it?"

The Turk!   Computer History Museum

Well, all of the above—or below, actually. In the rear bottom interior of the box sat a flesh-and-blood operative (by necessity a small one) who followed the human contender's moves from below and maneuvered The Turk's right hand across the table board. Nonetheless, the machine became "the most famous automaton in history," Standage notes, commented on by Charles Babbage, Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Franklin, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

More importantly, The Turk whetted the West's appetite for real devices that could do such things. Over two centuries later, this project culminated in Deep Blue—the IBM computer that bested Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

But what's most fascinating about "Mastering the Game," the Computer History Museum's computer chess exhibit, is that it frames the rise of the automated chess playing as a debate between two philosophies of computing. One emphasized the "brute force" approach, taking advantage of algorithmic power offered by ever more powerful processors available to programmers after the Second World War. The other has foregrounded the importance of teaching chess computers to select strategies and even to learn from experience—in other words, to play more like humans.

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Groundhog Decade

by Bill Wyman

What happened to the music industry over the last 10 years or so was a lot like the plot of The Hangover. Bad judgment and self-indulgence producing chaos, pain, blinding sun, dim but lacerating memories … and you wake up to find there's a tiger in your hotel suite. It's been more than 10 years since compression technologies and ever-faster online speeds started making it easy to move media around online. That's the development that put the plot in motion. For music fans, what was first the slow agony—and then the thrill—of emailing a song to a friend evolved with ever-increasing speed into a world in which we can easily swap discographies of 10, 20, even 50 or 100 albums.

What that meant for the music industry was painful: Its sales are about 40 percent of what they were 12 years ago, and there are even worse metrics than that. (There's a chart on this blog post, for example, which demonstrates that people are buying about one-fourth as many CDs as they were in the 1990s.)

Throughout, chaos reigned: The fall of the CD. The rise and fall of the DVD; the rise and fall of Napster. The rise and rise and rise of the file-sharing networks and cyberlocker sites. Thousands of legal attacks by the record industry on file-sharers; the coming of Netflix; the opaque future of streaming services and cloud storage. Indeed, Steve Jobs recently announced Apple's foray into cloud storage. The idea is that we'll be able to match our iTunes libraries—music for now, but eventually video as well—to online repositories, where they will be accessible to all of our computers, TVs, phones, and pads. (I'm not buying it, but that's a subject for another time.)

But note that this has come a decade after the introduction of the iPod. While many of the industry's humiliating Hangover-like pratfalls took place in public, a lot worse was going on behind the scenes. The labels knew something was happening, but they didn't know what it was, and scrambled wildly—and spent that way, too—to get a piece of it. (Remember Warners and Imeem?) It took more than 10 years of rights wrangling, much of it done personally by the irresistible Jobs himself, with the recalcitrant and stubborn levels of the music industry, from artists and their agents and managers, to the record industry with the various labels and corporate parents, and then songwriters and their various rights organizations, most of which resisted technological change in every knuckleheaded way possible.

Speaking of which, look at the New York Times today. Hollywood and the cable industry are teaming up to penalize illegal downloaders by taking away part or all of their Internet access after five or six warnings, the beginning of a new Whac-a-Mole game that, even if successful, will just see the downloaders move to new and more secure ways to move media around.

Right now, in fact, the movie and TV business looks a lot like the music one did in the early 2000s. And as we've seen, that decade didn't work out too well for the labels. So it's worth looking at the situation and wondering how things are going to fare in the TV and movie world in the decade ahead. It can all be summed up in one single sentence. I'll get to that in a minute.

The situation for watching a movie or a TV show these days is a mess. Here's a case study. If I want to watch some old episodes of The Office, for example, I have an extraordinary slew of options. But there are two problems with this. For one, I don't want a slew of options. I really just want one. And, as for the second, they're all hard to use or incomplete in one way or another.

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Booker T, Drive By Truckers, Neil Young

Friday Book Club - The Saddest Pleasure

by Dan Webster

I’m not the first book reviewer to say this: Moritz Thomsen is the best American writer than no one has ever heard of.

OK, so that’s an exaggeration. Certainly some people are familiar with Thomsen. He published four books, all memoirs, three of which are still in print a full dozen years after his death.

He won a 1991 Governor’s Writers Award (now the Washington State Book Awards), which was natural because he hailed originally from Seattle. The book honored that year, “The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers,” is the November read for The Spokesman-Review Book Club.

Thomsen’s best-known book, “Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle,” is considered one of the best Peace Corps memoirs every written. His memoir of his years in Ecuador is titled “The Farm on the River of Emeralds,” and his final book “My Two Wars,” which was published three years after his death, is a look at both his tempestuous relationship with his father and his experiences as a World War II bombardier flying missions over Germany.

It’s easy to see why Thomsen isn’t more popular. His works are unsparing looks at his own life, and they emphasize his struggles and all the emotional pain that made his such a tormented existence.

As Pat Joseph wrote in a Salon.com reminiscence of Thomsen, “(H)is books were grand and valuable and important for the simple reasons that he wrote well about important things and chose to live a life stripped down to its essence. He wrote about himself with such honesty, in the end, that just when you thought he had confessed everything, he would open a new vein and bleed some more.”

What most potential readers miss is how adept Thomsen is at portraying that existence in a way that transcends self-pity and becomes a prose art.

“I've come away from each of his other four books feeling exhilarated,” wrote “Lonesome Dove” novelist Larry McMurtry, “not because of what happens in them, but because the writing is so good.”

Simple Ideas That Are Borderline Genius

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Algae Could Solve World's Fuel Crisis

by Von Philip Bethge

Biochemist Dan Robertson's living gas stations have the dark-green shimmer of oak leaves and are as tiny as E. coli bacteria. Their genetic material has been fine-tuned by human hands. When light passes through their outer layer, they excrete droplets of fuel.

"We had to fool the organism into doing what I wanted it to do," says Robertson, the head of research at the US biotech firm Joule Unlimited. He proudly waves a test tube filled with a green liquid. The businesslike biochemist works in a plain, functional building on Life Sciences Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His laboratory is sparsely furnished and the ceiling is crumbling. Nevertheless, something miraculous is happening in the lab, where Robertson and his colleagues are working on nothing less than solving the world's energy problem. They have already created blue algae that produce diesel fuel.

Scientists rave about a new, green revolution. Using genetic engineering and sophisticated breeding and selection methods, biochemists, mainly working in the United States, are transforming blue and green algae into tiny factories for oil, ethanol and diesel.

Betting Millions on Algae

A green algae liquid sloshes back and forth in culture vats and circulates through shiny bioreactors and bulging plastic tubes. The first tests of algae-based fuels are already being conducted in automobiles, ships and aircraft. Investors like the Rockefeller family and Microsoft founder Bill Gates are betting millions on the power of the green soup. "Commercial production of crude oil from algae is the most obvious and most economical possible way to substitute petroleum," says Jason Pyle of the California-based firm Sapphire Energy, which is already using algae to produce crude oil.

The established oil industry is also getting into the business. "Oils from algae hold significant potential as economically viable, low-emission transportation fuels and could become a critical new energy source," says Emil Jacobs, vice president of research and development at Exxon Mobil. The oil company is investing $600 million (€420 million) in genetic entrepreneur Craig Venter's firm Synthetic Genomics.

The technology holds considerable promise. Indeed, whoever manages to be the first to sell ecologically sustainable and climate-neutral biofuel at competitive prices will not only rake in billions, but will also write history.

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Replacements

Centenarians Have Bad Habits Too

by Anahad O'Connor

For those of us relying on healthy habits to get us to age 100, the findings from a new study of centenarians may come as a bit of a blow.

The centenarians in the study indulged in smoking and drinking just as much as their shorter-lived counterparts. They did not appear to follow healthier or more stringent diets than others in the general population. They were also just as likely to be overweight, and may even have exercised less. So what contributed to their unusually long lives?

Scientists have long debated the roles of nature and nurture in longevity. Centenarians are, for example, far more likely than the average person to have long-lived relatives, suggesting that long life may be largely inherited. And yet studies have shown that identical twins separated at birth and reared apart can have vastly different life spans — with one living exceptionally long, and the other dying long before — indicating that genes have only so much influence.

The new findings, part of an ongoing look into longevity by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, focused on Ashkenazi Jews, a group that is more genetically homogenous than other populations, making it easier to identify genetic differences that contribute to life span. In the study, the researchers followed 477 Ashkenazi centenarians who were 95 or older and living independently. They asked them about their habits and the ways they lived when they were younger. Using data collected in the 1970s, the researchers compared the long-lived group with another group of 3,000 people in the general population who were born around the same time but who generally did not make it to age 95.

They found that the people who lived to 95 and beyond did not seem to exhibit healthier lifestyles than those who died younger. Forty-three percent of the male centenarians reported exercising regularly at moderate intensity, compared with 57 percent of men in the other group. About 24 percent of the men in the older group drank alcohol daily, compared with 22 percent in the other group. Among women, they found that the same percentage in both groups reported following low-calorie diets.

Almost 30 percent of the women who lived exceptionally long were smokers, slightly more than the 26 percent of women in the comparison population who smoked. About 60 percent of the older men smoked, and 74 percent of their shorter-lived counterparts did.

Men and women in both groups were also just as likely to be overweight as people in the general population. The one difference in that area was that centenarians were less likely to be obese. Only 4.5 percent of men in the older group were obese, compared with 12 percent of the other male subjects. A similar pattern was found among women.

So did all that hard living just make them happier, contributing to their extended life spans? Much has been made over the years about optimism and other social factors that may contribute to longevity. But in the latest study, only 19 percent of the people who lived past 95 said they believed a “positive attitude” played a role in their longevity, while just 6 percent credited their religious faith or spirituality.

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China's Black Market in Babies

[ed.  How terribly sad.]

by Sharon Lafraniere

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again. 

But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies.

Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.”

Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month.

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

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Erik Satie - 3 Gnossiennes (Ciccolini)