Change of Venue

I have started hosting my own website and all of my blogging will be over there now...  please visit

ShoelessTim.com

to keep up with my posts.

Branding

With TWTR launching their IPO yesterday lets discuss branding...

While it may seem cheap to mock my own creative failings, I do have a business that I want to develop and products that I want to sell.

The most interesting part of creating something is how to build what we now call a brand.

An interesting term because branding, usually by means of charring, comes from livestock.  The act of marking [by branding] livestock with fire-heated marks to identify ownership has origins in ancient times, with use dating back to the ancient Egyptians. Among the ancient Romans, the symbols used for brands were sometimes chosen as part of a magic spell aimed at protecting animals from harm.

So over the years branding has transitioned to other types of goods. The brand being a name, a logo, a slogan, and/or a design scheme, which becomes associated with a product or service. A good product with superior branding is something customers can identify with. The key is the ability to build a relationship with your consumer and drive that repeat and subliminal business.

A good example of superior branding is Kleenex. People by default in the United States of America ask for kleenex when they need a facial tissue. We are so deeply ingrained with the idea that we blow our nose with Kleenex that their brand is an almost subliminal choice.

The synonymous use of brands vs. products is from fantastic marketing.  Good marketing and good branding is the result of understanding people and how they think. If you can successfully build an image that becomes a long lasting and irreplaceable part of a cultures psyche, then you can establish product dominance. Some things are so iconic that they simply don't need marketing. For example,  Post-It Brand notes.  What to I need to say about these?

I want to create a great design for my company and myself, but how do you compete with multi-million dollar design firms?  How do you make a way for yourself in an industry that is saturated with brilliant marketing.?

#TWTR

Todays IPO is huge, possibly larger than the facebook IPO.  At least for @Twitter who is launching in to a new market. Already possibly the fasted social media venu,e twitter draws real relevance across Klout and much of the SMM sphere.

The big deal of the day their IPO lead off at 0830 EST this morning and hopes are high for a better start than the other social media giant.

Update: With in hours of the stocks opening at $25 there has been a huge growth to numbers as high as $49.73. Keep watching to see what happens. Updates to follow.

The Social Media Toolkit

If you have Facebook, you probably have other social media outlets which means if you want to hit all of your info-sphere then you have to copy post to each of your outlets. Some outlets will post to other sites for you like:

• Foursquare is good because it will post out to Facebook and Twitter.
• Instagram will Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, email, Foursquare and Tumblr.
• Amazon will also link up to your Facebook and Twitter, but the process is complicated.

 This is time consuming and irritating as well as pointless. BECAUSE NOW, there is IFTTT.  The process could not be easier. You build a recipe:

with your social media outlets to feed each other with content. With 70+ connected Channels you can tie together your google drive with your twitter and have a spreadsheet of all your tweets. or have your iPhone Camera dump picture straight to Facebook when you take a picture. the possibilites are in the thousands now, and growing daily.

Pintrest...

I have to say, Pintrest is probably my least favorite social media venue. Mainly because there is not a lot of controls, the content is spotty, and its repetitive.

The problem with its content is this. Its user built and driven. Whats wrong with that, Tim, you might ask. because it is an outlet that is predominantly used by women (ok so thats unfair), in reality theres not a lot of attention to detail. If I were to put up a link of a rain barrel like this:

I would make sure like I have here to link the crediting source and to have some kind of a comment for this item...

However the problem that I have is that some of the time when i click on a link it I get this:

Where there is no link or amplifying information. Realistically its a large visual search tool but instead of drawing information into it people are posting things which to me seems to be the reason for its spotty information.

KLOUT

It would seem that there are even analytics on people. Klout is a data analytics tool that rates People on their social media (sm) presence. I currently am at a 46 our of 100, but most of my social media activity is from the past 3 months.

 Erie Brewing Company who has a great beer, has little to no web presence. Some minor modifications to their  Facebook, Twitter and own company web page could significantly increase not only their presence but their revenue streams. A few hours of work a week could yield major dividends.  Simple things like direct and rapid responses to tweets and status could draw big follower ship on sm. Here is a  post from me on their Twitter:

@ErieBrewingCo Are you guys brewing anything for Turkey Day? #seasonal #localbeer #brewers #beer
— Tim May (@shoelesstim) October 28, 2013

If all goes well their Virtual Assistant (VA) is getting a notification on their phone or device and formulating a response. I will comment that response when I get it.

In the past year I have had extremely positive response from @Jockey, @Sterilite_Corp, and @GrandTrunkGoods. All I did is tweet my complaint and within hours their VA got back with me and arranged a positive experience with their products and brand. These are three companies that I will spend money with again.

 Other companies that I have contacted with simple tweets have not acknowledged them at all making me wonder if they even understand the purpose of sm.

These simple factors can have a massive and damaging impact on business because weather they want to admit it their Klout displays how accessible their business is in the sm world. Social Media drives business now, not the other way around.

@shoelesstim Not sure yet! May do something exclusive for the brewery for the tasting room! Keep you posted!

— Erie Brewing Company (@ErieBrewingCo) October 29, 2013

Community Service

Items 

• garbage
• soup
• clothes
• beds
• good deeds
• sense of community
• giving back

All great things, and I encourage people to give back. Unfortunately, personally I don't have a large heart to give up my time. 

Its not that I don't care. I do care, and i am deeply vested in Erie, and the surrounding communities. 

I think i have earned the right to say no. 

Let me explain before people get the wrong idea. On September 26, 2001, days after September 11th, I joined the Navy. Not because of problems in my own life but because I already felt a requirement to serve. As a high school student I talked about service in the military as something that every able bodied man should do. My patriotism is exceptional. I am proud of all the great things we have accomplished in our 200+ years of freedom, recently we have made some stupid decisions but thats not the point. 

Fast forward (a phrase that will soon have no relevance) to 2013, July 23 to be precise, my contract with the Navy ended much to my disappointment. After almost 12 years in the Navy learning what is is to be a sailor, man, husband, and father the end had come. The Navy in their wisdom decided that I was no longer needed (downsizing is everywhere). 

That greater than a decade of time spend defending peoples right to judge, loathe, believe, and do whatever they want was worth it. I have a sense of entitlement regarding my time. I am going to spend it in the manner in which i have been unable for so long. I know that I will be judged by some but I KNOW what I have contributed to this great nation. 

Stingy some may say, but I have my satisfaction and thats enough for me to know that I have served my community, and that box has been checked more then mosts.

Cyclical Evolution, Power Costs

Many things come into and fall out of fashion on a regular basis, some might say that there is a cyclical pattern to these trends. Daisy dukes, tie died, and bell bottoms, have come and gone and come and gone again, but trends in fashion are completely different from trends in technology. Bag Phones, 512k RAM and 800 Mb Hard Drives aren't on the list of things to make a come back.

Centralized computing however, is. In the pioneer days of computing everything was hosted on your organizations main frame. These computing behemoths, with massive processing and storage, were a centralized computer that would rival my 2007 Macbook.   Servers hosted terminals all over the infrastructure, allowing users to slice out parts of the power to do their work. As hardware became cheaper it was proliferated out to users more or less indiscriminately. This shift  can be seen from the movie TRON to the movie Hackers. As such terminal based computing all but vanished (hat tipped to Gates, Woz, Jobs and the like). 

Enter 1998: VM Ware, a virtually (yes, I did) unheard of company selling a great piece of tech. computing with in computing. Virtualizing platforms on anything from workstations to dedicated servers. This paradigm shift is making its way into organizations across the globe. It is becoming common place for organizations to restructure their infrastructure to only hold their computing on server and place Multi Layer Thin Clients (terminals) at each users desk.  

The other advantage to centralizing is power cost reduction, both with regard to servers and workstations. If you are able to reduce the power consumption of you server stack by say 10% you also reduce the load on your HVAC reducing over all power consumption in your facilities. If this is implemented infrastructure wide you can have massive gains both in resource management and utilities cost. In the long run everyone likes to save money.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets

give me the ability to do wonderful things in HTML anytime all the time with so much possibility its a but crazy

there are all sorts of things that I can do with a css document

however its hard to explain these things

so i chose to show you instead

Cascading style as you can see is really just the ability to take formatting and place it n a readily available format for all of your pages instead of on each sheet, it reduces overhead and increases cohesion in a site.  Gone are the days of copy pasting your style on every sheet of your site, now all you have to do is link the style sheet to your page and bang presto you have instant style...  for some maybe.

For a clearer understanding of how powerful CSS is check out the CSS Zen Garden

Sven

Sven, tall gangly, ill-fit, crafter of ill phrased speech.

From the Swedish lake country on the earth colony of Marth, Sven is currently, as usual between employers. His unfortunate lack of employment is this time fortunately not his fault. His first few weeks at Olaf's Tacheon Drive Repair Shop were good. He was just starting his first accelerator cowling repair job, when Michael came by for lunch. Sometime during his sanctioned 20 minute, turned 3 hour, break the shop had been reduced to glass and ash. The officer at the barricades wouldn't even let Sven look for his favorite hat. He'd had that hat for 10 years it was his favorite, the rustic steel blast visor he had bought of that walking carpet had been with him what felt like a lifetime.



Todays creative writing exercise in my English Lit Class.

Have you had enough INFOgraphics and the wiggle effect.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

Something about this seems relevant to social media....  however, I cant seem to figure it out.  It will come to me...

This world is a great wiggle-effect. The clouds are wiggling. The waters are wiggling. The clouds are wiggling, bouncing. People— but people are always trying to straighten things out. You see, we live in a rectangular box, all the time; everything is straightened out. Wherever you look around in nature you find things often straightened out. They’re always trying to put things in boxes. Those boxes are classified. Words are made from some boxes. But the real world is wiggly. Now when you have a wiggle like a cloud, how much wiggle is a wiggle? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere, so people come to sorts of agreements about how much of a wiggle is a wiggle; that is to say a “thing.” One wiggle. Always reduce one wiggle to sub wiggles, or see it as a subordinate wiggle of a bigger wiggle, but there’s no fixed rule about it.

- British philosopher Alan Watts

The Body Tag

The <body> tag is used to hold the content of a web page. This tag is probably the most important and least talked about tag in all of web design. Without it you can not display any of your design.

<body>

all displayed design must fall with in these two tags

without them your site is useless

without your site they are useless

body can't do design with out it

</body>

Facebook ReOrginization

In the ever changing landscape of social media, people now have one more thing to mind. The scrutiny being paid to Facebook (fb) is something that should not be taken lightly. With media, law enforcement, and the corporate world taking a vested interest in the content of fb, users should be careful with whats in their profile.

Denver man fired for complaining about work on Facebook is just the first Google search result that I found when I searched: facebook fired profile. It probably wouldn't take much for me to find various specific examples relating to other corporate issues, crime, or media saturation when it comes to the fb arena.

I know that my fb is different than most because my wife and I share a page. She is the business end of our fb and I occasionally reconnect with old friend or whatnot. A redesign for us would not be required. Most of our content is boring parenting stuff. If I had to do anything it would be to de-friend a few people that are obnoxious, but besides that theres not much on our fb that I'm not proud of.

Photoshop Tool

The channel is probably the best tool in Photoshop, the ability to stack images on top of each other and use them to create your final piece is probably one of the stand out features of Photoshop.

From the Adobe web help portal:
About channels

Channels are grayscale images that store different types of information:

• Color information channels are created automatically when you open a new image. The image’s color mode determines the number of color channels created. For example, an RGB image has a channel for each color (red, green, and blue) plus a composite channel used for editing the image.
• Alpha channels store selections as grayscale images. You can add alpha channels to create and store masks, which let you manipulate or protect parts of an image. (See About masks and alpha channels.)
• Spot color channels specify additional plates for printing with spot color inks. (See About spot colors.)
  An image can have up to 56 channels. All new channels have the same dimensions and number of pixels as the original image.
  The file size required for a channel depends on the pixel information in the channel. Certain file formats, including TIFF and Photoshop formats, compress channel information and can save space. The size of an uncompressed file, including alpha channels and layers, appears as the right-most value in the status bar at the bottom of the window when you choose Document Sizes from the pop‑up menu.
  Note: As long as you save a file in a format supporting the image’s color mode, the color channels are preserved. Alpha channels are preserved only when you save a file in Photoshop, PDF, TIFF, PSB, or raw formats. DCS 2.0 format preserves only spot channels. Saving in other formats may cause channel information to be discarded.

Basically what this tells us is that you can break your image into 56 distinct parts and use them to create different effects with each subtle portion of your design. Which in turn opens a huge level of possible creativity.

Start layering your ideas to create something new.

Value Proposition, the selling yourself argument...

Value Proposition 

Its essential to break down somethings into relevant pieces, a value proposition for example is a great thing to dissected into the If, Then argument. In this case I have displayed the argument below:

If:
Consider that you were a organization in need of training or development, what kind of a person would you be looking for? 

• Capable
• Motivated
• Passionate
• Relevant
• Experienced
• Articulate
• Versatile 

All of these might be just words, however when applied to a person they portray an individual who has real down stream experience with front end consumers, in house training environments, rapidly changing and diverse platforms, multiple organization models and leadership structures. An individual who has a passion for data validation, security both digital and physical, and maximum up time. 

Then:
After 12 years of serving our country in some of the most extreme environments, learning how to rapidly assess the needs of each platform and user requirement, I have developed a skill set that has prepared me for the relatively stress free environment of graduate school. 

 I have proposed a specific skill set and a persons traits, with a possible outcome. I did all of this with out begging or the popular, "Hi my name is Tim and I want to attend your graduate school."

IFTTT

While we are on the topic of if then statements, I have discovered IFTTT thru lynda.com. IFTTT takes approximately 40 social media sites and ties them together with simple if this then that statements in a minimalist and simple graphical interface. This allows a user to attack social media from all sides with tweets, Facebook posts, images, videos, and blogs simultaneously. Its powerful.

Beautiful Day

Today is beautiful. Forty's this morning, a crisp clear sky. 

Unfortunately more violence here at home this week. 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/17/us/navy-yard-shooting-knowns-unknowns/index.html

My fear is that this is simply a distraction from the presidents failure with the Syria situation. I pray that these killing are not a political tool. 

While I do enjoy my classes I was extremely irritated today with my English Literature professor. On two separate occasions while discussing Angela Carter's "Snow Child" with the class, she incorrectly cited events in the two page story. This drove the dialogue down a different assumption path than the facts  were indicating. 

The story is Angela Carter's prose on the fairy tail of Snow White. Her thoughts seem to indicate that women are valued only as sexual tools and are devoid of any real substance. However, the hour we spent discussing the minuscule text seemed to lead us around the central point without actually discussing it.  

When the professor made her second incorrect statement I interjected that she had the details incorrect. She responded with, "that is what the text says."  I was more than happy to read directly from the text. 

The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife; when she touched it, she dropped it. 

'It bites!' She said. 

The professor was trying to insinuate that the countess refused to accept the rose. But clearly the text says the she takes possession of the rose even though the rose hurts her. The professor asked me what I thought Angela Carter was trying to indicate with my supposed difference without any sort of correction or acceptance of the information that I presented. My only real concern was accuracy to the original text, without any concern with the fine intricacies of this specific point.  We then spent five minutes discussing the countesses lack of or acceptance of the rose. I am so baffled as to the intentions of this class and its direction. Onward and upward. I'll pass this class regardless. 

Capitalizing on Technology

Besides the humor in this text, "There's a widely shared image on the Internet of a teacher's note that says: "Dear students, I know when you're texting in class. Seriously, no one just looks down at their crotch and smiles..."  a valid question being addressed in this article over on WSJ: Should Students Use a Laptop in Class? I seriously love my iPad, iPhone and '07 Macbook. These devices have been my tools for the past 5 years, they allow me to do everything. As a career MIS professional who has been in the industry for 12 years, I doubt that I could be as effective with out all the interconnected apps and programs.

I am going back to school at Penn State, The Behrend College. I am exclusively using legal pads and pens in class for my notes. Everything I do gets written down and then later I transposed to digital medium. The reason for this is my thought process, I find that my hand/pen/paper combination is not as efficient at to attempt to do the same thing digitally.

A good example is outlining, I may be writing down unassociated items in class and writing down key words in the margin (something I haven't figured out how to do on my devices). I realize that the items are associated. At this point I start outlining them by adding the relevant leading letters and numbers with quick simplicity and a few short strokes.  However, this same task digitally would take all of my concentration on the laptop or iPad. WHich would prevent me from focusing all of my attention on the professor. 

I don't know if there is a reasonable, effective, direct and precise note-taking tool as there is with paper and pen. I am also comfortable with that.

This is not yellow, and other things on the internet

Our brain is able to be misled.
Please watch the video to see what Vsauce has to say about it...



How class could have started for some of us...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wqks_R90ykI

Oxford Dictionary Online, Twerk, words and lazyness, food baby, srsly...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3oGYIBJdGjc

See you monday!

Tuesday Trends: 'Indie Cindy', Nokia/MSFT, Stephen Elop, Isreal Missle-X, Diana Nyad

My morning started with a quick 2 mile run, a walk in the rain, and a look at the trends on social media. Let me explain, "trends" refers to the trending or most used topics on social media. Twitter is my go to for this but I am researching a better analytic tool to see a more broad range of social media. Today's topics include:

• 'Indie Cindy" a new track from the Pixies is out today for your viewing pleasure, I feel like there is some anti-american sentiment in it so if you don't like that then avoid it please. 

• Nokia just confirmed a sale of a small portion of their business to MSFT (Microsoft),  small being $7.2 billion, and just the cell phone device portion of Nokia. Bloomberg - Microsoft to Buy Nokia's Devices Unit for $7.2 Billion
• Also at the large firm of MSFT, Stephen Elop is going to be named the new "devices" guy.  Stephen Elop Returns To Microsoft
• Our Conservative friends in the middle east are ready to go on the offensive with their missile test over the Mediterranean sea. Not ones to mess around, the Israelis are showing their muscle with joint missle tests with our military in the Med Sea. Unannounced Israel-U.S. missile test fuels jitters over Syria
• Daina Nyad talks about her experiences swimming from Cuba to Florida. 'Never, ever give up:' Diana Nyad completes historic Cuba-to-Florida swim

MSFT seems to be making big changes in their design as they try to remain the top of the mass market software and solution provider.

Target Audience, Color Pallet, and Sociological Response

Target Audience

Identifying a target audience is vitally important to determine that basis of content on a web page. A target audience might be children 2-10 and parents, in the case of DisneyJunior. A broad target audience might be United States Veterans of all ages and genders as in the case of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Target audiences can be extremely specific as in the case of Olay as they are marketing to the demographic of women 15-40, with their anti-aging products and beauty skin care lines.  My target audience is the governing body for acceptance into the Penn State Graduate Program, and to capture the attention of potential future employers.

Color Pallet and Sociological Responce

Personally the color of deep ocean water before a storm is one of my all time favorite colors. It is impossible to capture in photographs and hard to describe without first hand experience.  The color is a deep royal blue with this rich gray hue to it and my recollection of it always manifests with thoughts of all the other mariners that have seen those waters and kept their course knowing that trouble could be over the next wave. It speaks depths to me about character, fortitude, and heritage.

However, without an understanding of how people are emotionally connected to colors using my favorite color could be damaging to the traffic on my site. Because human thought is not simple nor linear, there are many aspects to social engineering and sociology that have to be taken into account when designing a multimedia product.  The first connection to emotion and color that needs to be discussed is how culture in a whole may view a color. For example, in his autobiography Chuck Yeager tells a story about being stationed in Pakistan and working to help with issues regarding reducing STD’s in the area. He attempted to address the issue by trying to give out condoms to the local population.  All of the condoms were white, to some this is no big deal, however to the Muslims and other Pakistanis in the area, white is the color of purity. To use a white condom during pre-marital sex is a  social taboo.  To remedy this issue Yeager and his wife got colored condoms shipped in country and the local population began using them. Listed below is a chart of common colors and their associations taken from aboutsociology.com

Color	Positives	Negatives
Red	Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, leadership, masculinity, power	Danger, fire, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, aggression, stop
Blue	Seas, skies, stability, peace, unity, harmony, tranquility, calmness, coolness, confidence, water, ice, loyalty, conservatism, dependability, cleanliness, technology, winter	Depression, coldness, obscenity, conservatism, technology, ice, winter
Green	Nature, spring, fertility, youth, environment, wealth, money (US), good luck, vigor, generosity, go, grass	Inexperience, envy, misfortune, jealousy, money, illness, greed
Yellow	Sunlight, joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, wealth (gold), summer, hope, air	Cowardice, illness (quarantine), hazards, dishonesty, avarice
Purple	Elegance, sensuality, spirituality, creativity, wealth, royalty, nobility, ceremony, mystery, wisdom, enlightenment	Cruelty, arrogance, mourning, profanity, exaggeration, confusion
Orange	Energy, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, flamboyance, playfulness	Warning, danger, fire
White	Reverence, purity, snow, peace, innocence, cleanliness, simplicity, security, humility, marriage, sterility, winter	Coldness, sterility, clinical, surrender, cowardice, fearfulness, winter
Black	Power, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery, style	Evil, death, fear, anonymity, anger, sadness, remorse, mourning, unhappiness, mystery

Various cultures see color differently. In India, blue is associated with Krishna (a very positive association), green with Islam, red with purity (used as a wedding color) and brown with mourning. In most Asian cultures, yellow is the imperial color with many of the same cultural associations as purple has in the west. In China, red is symbolic of celebration, luck and prosperity; white is symbolic of mourning and death, while green hats mean a man’s wife is cheating on him. In Europe colors are more strongly associated with political parties than they are in the U.S. In many countries black is synonymous with conservatism, red with socialism, while brown is still immediately associated with the Nazis. Many believe that blue is universally the best color as it has the most positive and fewest negative cultural associations across various cultures…

Another interesting part to color is that not only do cultures see representations of color meanings differently but they also have a different perspective on color completely.

“…cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different parts of the spectrum, or have a different color ontology: for instance, the Japanese color aoi can be interpreted as meaning something between the Western color terms of "blue" and "green": green is regarded as a shade of aoi. more…”

With all of this in mind we are able to take a good look at what we should actually do with color in our websites. Fortunately, there is a good accepted practice that applies to a lot of things in life: everything in moderation. Ways that I could incorporate my favorite color in my site could include within my logo, in the font of my pages, or as an accent to some part of the interface. In reality, the possibilities are endless as long as you are consistent and subtle with your color pallet.

First Day of Class

As someone studying Management Information System I am interested in taking my twelve years of experience and proving to a peer group that I have the skills and tools to potentially be a revenue generating employee.

Knowledge and experience in a collegiate setting is a positive leg up, many questions were asked today in the beginning of the class today and I embarrassingly felt like I was answering a lot of the questions. Application of knowledge can be the difference between intelligence and wisdom.

[[A venn diagram. The left circle is labeled "things on the front page of a university website" and contains "campus photo slideshow," "alumni in the news," "promotions for campus events," "press releases," "statement of the school's philosophy," "letter from the president," and "virtual tour." The right circle is labeled "things people go to the site looking for" and contains "list of faculty phone numbers and emails," "campus address," "application forms," "academic calendar," "campus police phone number," "department course lists," "parking information," and "usable campus map." The only item in the overlapping section is "full name of school."]] {{Title text: People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!}}

Knowing how to be relevant is the task of this class...



Hopefully we wont miss the mark like this.

Comic Corner - Trebuchet.

I have often found that its not the actual comic that makes me laugh but the hover text that is associated with the comic, today's "XKCD" is a prime example. The Comic is funny, but the below hover text is the meat of the joke.

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle

method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.

Weekly Wanderings - Kilo, Gladiatorial Pursuits, Edible Flatware.

So normally I would have something valuable to post, that would increase your knowledge or strengthen your week. However, I have some questions that are unanswerable, mainly because they involve asking sociological questions.

1) The United States of Gluttony and the Metric System:

Something that I have yet to comprehend now that I have returned to my country of birth is why we are still suck on the Imperial measurement system. There are just to many units alone, much less their accuracy. Take, for instance, units of volume. In imperial, you can take your pick from:

gallon, liquid quart, dry quart, liquid pint, dry pint, fluid ounce, teaspoon, tablespoon, minim, fluid dram, gill, peck, bushel, cubic inch, cubic foot, cubic yard, cubic fathom, cubic rod, cubic furlong, cubic mile, cubic league, cubic mil, cubic pole, cubic perch, cubic hand, cubic link, cubic chain

In metric, that list is a little shorter:

liter

Let's take a step back. Imperial measurements have roots which can be traced back—sketchily—though Egyptian and Persian history, though the first occurrence of a measure we all know can be found written out in the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, that reads:

"There shall be one measure of wine throughout our whole realm, and one measure of ale and one measure of corn—namely, the London quart;—and one width of dyed and russet and hauberk cloths—namely, two ells below the selvage…."

The imperial units we now know slowly evolved over next 600 years, being added to as and when required. Eventually, they were gathered together and made official in the United Kingdom in 1824 by a Weights and Measures Act. US weights and measures are—very subtly—different to those in the UK, and were made official in the Mendenhall Order of 1893. It was updated in 1959, sure, but its roots are in a bygone age and, as a result, they now make little sense.

I mean when is the last time you heard about people worrying about the weight of the standard pound, well is the weight, currency or a slang body contact. But look people are positively in a twitter (see what i did there) about the IPK

There's long been debate over the accuracy of the standardized kilogram. Now, though, scientists have shown once and for all that the lump of metal defining the unit of mass has been putting on some weight.The original kilogram—the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, made of platinum and iridium alloy—is the standard against which all other measurements of mass are set. So, it's quite important. Forty replicas exist across the world, and the UK is in possession of replica 18. Researchers from Newcastle University, UK, thought they'd take a look at—and they found something amiss.  Using a state-of-the-art x-ray photo-electron spectroscopy machine— the only one of its kind in the world—they were able to analyze the block with unprecedented accuracy. Turns out age hasn't been kind. The x-ray measurements show that there's a build-up of hydrocarbons on the surface—weighing up to 100 micrograms.

Wouldn't it be nice to use a measurements system that actually cared about things like a few micrograms?

---

2) The Roman Model, Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt:

So the other day I was watching football (more accurately post game coverage of football), they were covering the fourth or fifth injury and all i could think was why don't we just let people kill each other on television, it would be wildly popular and dominate peoples attention. say what you want about the Romans, they figured it out. We do not really care about the player we want to know how bad they were hurt. Same thing goes on the highway we don't slow down to see if everyone is OK we are looking for the carnage, we are a base and vile species, a warrior race bent on the destruction of anything that gets in our way. So the question needs to be asked, Why do we not have a blood sport yet? we could use hardened criminals from death row at first, or something.

---

3) The Hershey Kiss:

How do you eat your Hershey kisses, do you consume them like a chewable item or are the to be savored like a hard candy?

---

4) I ate the Plate too:

Seriously why are there not more foods like the ice cream cone where you use it and get to eat it too? No fuss no mus, when the food is gone there is no clean up! How cool is that?