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Wednesday, September 05, 2007
I don't know what to title this post I was up in Maine with the family Labor Day weekend. Mini-golf was played. Lobsters were eaten (though not by me). Maine accents were attempted unsuccessfully. On the ride back, I read an interesting article in Newsweek about a book called "Super Crunchers." The idea is that statistical analysis -- data mining -- is replacing gut decisions in every aspect of life. It's sort of the anti-"Blink." Baseball scouts are being phased out by sophisticated spread sheets. Doctors' intuitions are yielding to evidence-based medicine. My favorite part, though, was that the author chose his book title by statistical analysis. He tested two titles using Google ads. The first was "The End of Intuition." The second was "Super Crunchers." More people clicked on "Super Crunchers," so that's what you see at the bookstore. Not a bad idea. Maybe I should start doing it. I never changed the title of my upcoming book The Year of Living Biblically. That's what it was called from Day One. I'm a fan of the simple, self-explanatory title, and this one just seemed to fit. No need to get too cute. "The Know-It-All," on the other hand, went through a raft of titles. First, I called it "From A-ak to Zyweic: One Man’s Journey Through the Encyclopedia." Rolls off the tongue, huh? Then there was "Thomas Jefferson Had Clean Feet (and other things I learned from reading the entire encyclopedia)." Or "John Adams Was a Lush (and other things I learned...)" The "Know-It-All" was in a list of about 20 other titles I brainstormed one afternoon; my editor thought it was provocative. If I were to test it on Google today, I'd run "The Know-It-All" against "The Walking Encyclopedia." I'd love to see how it fared. I also wish Melville had Google ads to test "Moby Dick." I can't imagine that was the most commercial of titles, regardless of whether the slang word was in vogue then. (Speaking of names, I have to say that the name Google is brilliant. It's just fun to say, like baby talk. But it also has a faint patina of intellectualism, since "googol," as you may know, is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes). I did some Googling to see if I could find some good discarded book titles from history, but came up empty. (Anyone know any good ones?) I did stumble onto this clever article about the original titles of movies. American Pie was originally called "Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under $10 Million." And Pretty Woman was originally called "3000," which was what Julia Roberts' prostitute character supposedly charged for one night. By the way, it's late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning. Which means I'm a day late with my self-imposed deadline of posting at least once a week. But I blame it on ancient technology. I finally replaced my four-year-old PowerBook today. The thing was in critical condition. Every morning, it crashed 20 to 30 times as soon as I clicked it on. I had to keep rebooting it. I felt like I was trying to start a 1972 Plymouth Valiant in January. Also, it was a laptop, but I couldn't move it or it'd crash. The disc drive was broken. So was the space bar (I had to press it three times to get a space). Many of the original Bibles didn't have spaces between the words, so I guess I could have typed in a Bible. But usually, space bars are a good thing. Anyone have a sadder computer than that? I'll send you a free copy of my upcoming book if you do (and if you're the first to tell me).
posted by A.J. Jacobs at 12:14 AM
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4 Comments:
Last year I had melting laptop experience.
Well, the whole laptop didn't melt, but some of the keys fell off and others had melded to the laptop frame (if that's what you call it) - the keys were forever stuck in the down position.
I left it running at the end of the workday, and it didn't hibernate as designed. When I came in the next morning it was hot enough to warm a small planet.
During two years of grad school recently I had a Dell laptop that was a never-ending source of frustration. For one thing, it would get really, really hot. Crotch-roasting hot. (I think I bought it just before Intel released its energy-efficient mobile chips.) My hot laptop would compensate by running a really loud fan. The fan would start running about 20 minutes into my morning class and would cause the person in front of me to turn around and stare. The person probably expected to see me blow drying my hair. The laptop had a power adapter that also got really hot and also had defective circuitry. One time during class, the place where the adapter cord attached to the computer started sparking, then smoking. The adapter promptly died, and that night I had to quickly move all the important files to my desktop computer while the battery still had juice. I probably should've replaced the laptop then, but I didn't have the money, so I ordered a third-party replacement adapter.
But the worst part about the system was the screen. A week after the warranty ran out, the screen refused to light up when I turned the computer on. From then on, to get the screen to light up, I had to slap the back of it several times and then wrench the top corners back and forth in opposite directions. As graduation approached, the left swivel bracket where the screen attached cracked and then broke off, leaving the screen hanging on to the rest of the computer by a single bracket on the right side. Apparently, the important circuits ran into the screen on the right side, so the laptop still functioned. But I'd have to balance the screen at just the right angle to avoid having it fall over. When I graduated last year and got a job, I bought a Sony VAIO, which I'm using right now to type this message. Thanks for giving me a reason to document this horrible experience.
and post the book online : ) offer it up in that manner, seems "oxymoronic" due to the subject of the book, ha
I wrote my 160 page master's thesis in Seville on an old clunker that typed an "r" when you pressed "d", an "8" when you pressed "u" and a "/" when you pressed "s". (and the other way around, of course) I returned to civilization and wasted hundreds of hours trying to decipher it, before quitting my degree and becoming a journalist.
Still have the laptop.
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