Year: 2019

Defying continental drift

The Argentinean portion of Patagonia comprises five provinces, of which the northernmost one is known as Chubut. You have to fly about two hours southwest from Buenos Aires to get there, yet it’s still over 1,000km (about 600 miles) from the tip of the continent—just barely into Patagonia when you consider its overall scale. This impossibly dry, windy, and desolate area is as far south as Paul Theroux got in The Old Patagonian Express. He felt he was nowhere, and it was here that he experienced his much-quoted epiphany that nowhere is a place. Although I was to discover a much more varied and inviting landscape a few days later as we traveled deeper into Patagonia during a trip there in 2004, I have fond memories of the quiet, empty, and rugged steppes of Chubut.

Wonders Around Every Corner

Our guide had arranged for us to spend an entire day visiting one of the region’s most popular areas, Peninsula Valdés, a provincial park that is home to more wildlife than you can shake a camera at. This peninsula is really more like a large island connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. In certain seasons—though not when we were there—whale watching is the peninsula’s big industry, as migrating southern right whales and orcas frequent the waters just off the coast. We did see plenty of elephant seals and sea lions and a variety of birds, not to mention an astonishing number of sheep. But the thing I found most interesting on Peninsula Valdés was the view from a rest stop.

We had been driving for quite some time through an endless expanse of Nowhere on our way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else. We had a schedule to keep, but we could afford perhaps 15 minutes for a quick rest stop. As we pulled into a restaurant’s parking lot, our guide mentioned that if we walked down this trail to the right, we could see (still more) elephant seals; if we took the trail to the left, we’d be able to see a most unusual sight known as Caleta Valdés, or Valdés Creek. The left-hand trail was a 15-minute round trip, which meant that we were supposed to choose between using the restrooms and beholding a natural wonder. I opted for a hasty restroom visit and a jog down the trail on the left.

Catching the Drift

What we saw from an overlook at the end of the trail was a long, thin strip of land—basically an overgrown sandbar—running parallel to the coast. At the far end, about 30km (20 miles) north, this strip of silt is connected to the peninsula. Here, at the southern end, is the only inlet to the so-called creek—a channel about 150m (500 feet) wide. A couple of decades ago, the channel was 600m (2000 feet) wide, but it’s been shrinking ever so slowly. The strip of land that separates the creek from the ocean, known as a coastal cord, tends to trap a bit of sediment every time the tide goes out. For years, observers have predicted that it will close up entirely “any day now.” They were saying that back in 2004 when I visited, but (based on the most recent satellite images I could find) it hasn’t closed up yet. If it ever does, and if no other outlet forms, Caleta Valdés will change from a creek to a salt lake. Given the shallowness of that lake and the area’s extremely low humidity, it could dry out completely in several more years. But for all I know, this geological feature could persist indefinitely.

In any case, this accumulation of silt makes Caleta Valdés the only spot on the continent where the coastline is growing; everywhere else it’s either being eroded slowly away or receding due to rising ocean levels. It’s almost as though this little strip of land is thumbing its nose at continental drift, growing out toward the east as the whole continent slips slowly westward. This small wonder was well worth an abbreviated rest stop.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on January 25, 2005.

Yes, I know, today is also Mardi Gras. But if you’re going to be preparing for the start of Lent with excessive intake of food and alcohol, you should choose the right drink. And absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. If it causes you to hallucinate or burns your tongue, you’re doing it wrong. No theatrics are required, just an ounce of greenish liquid distilled from a mixture of plants that includes wormwood, plus some ice water and maybe a wee bit of sugar. It’s like pastis, only better.

Image credit: Ed Schipul [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr

Hello, my name is Joe

One day I received a package in the mail from a company I’d never heard of. Inside was a black T-shirt with the words “Joe’s Shirt” in huge, bold white letters. There could be no doubt that it was for me, but I certainly didn’t order it. I looked on the packing slip and found the name of the person who ordered it—an acquaintance of mine who would not ordinarily buy me clothing. I tried to remember if there might perhaps be some favor he was repaying or an inside joke we had shared, but I drew a blank. I sent him a note that said, “Thanks for the lovely theft-proof shirt, but…what’s the occasion?” He replied, “I saw it in a catalog and died laughing. I decided that you simply MUST own one.” That’s good enough for me.

As it happens, I’m a fan of name tags from way back. I usually try to have tags around when I throw a party, and Morgen and I even passed them out to guests at our wedding. Some people don’t understand why they should use them, and others decide to write in a nickname, alias, or silly comment. But to me, name tags seem like a simple and straightforward solution to the common problem of forgetting—or being unable to determine—someone else’s name.

Name that…Name

It can be uncomfortable to interact with people whose names you don’t know, especially if you see them regularly at work, school, or church. And for most people, a single mention of someone’s name is insufficient to imprint it on their memory. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been introduced to someone, or heard an introduction during a meeting of some kind, and then later forgotten the name or gotten the person confused with someone else. And every time someone comes up to me and says, “John, isn’t it—or Jim?” I know they’ve had the same experience.

This is not a trivial problem. Even if you’re a gregarious person who freely introduces yourself to everyone you meet, and even if you are blessed with a perfect memory, there’s no guarantee that everyone will remember your name. Whether it makes any difference to know someone’s name depends a great deal on the social context. If your job is selling popcorn at a cinema, arguably there’s little value (or even negative value) to learning the names of each of your customers; that would only slow down every transaction. But for situations in which you’re likely to encounter a person over and over again, a name is probably the most useful piece of information you can have about someone.

Meetings, conferences, and seminars are of course the places where you’ll most likely see people wearing name tags. I attend a fair number of tech conferences, where attendees are usually given name badges that hang around the neck. I’m always amused at these shows when I shake hands with someone I know casually but haven’t seen for a year. Instead of being met with eye contact, I watch the person’s eyes linger on my solar plexus for a second before bouncing up to my face. But I don’t mind, because I do the same thing; it helps ease a great deal of awkwardness, as appearances change and memories fade.

A man by the name of Scott Ginsberg made a significant stir in the media around 1999 when he started wearing a name tag that says “Scott” all day, every day—and even to bed. (He’s still at it, nearly two decades later, and earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for his accomplishment.) During college he wore a name tag at a convention and decided to keep it on afterward just to see what would happen. He found that he met more people, and those he met were friendlier to him. He also found that it made him friendlier and more approachable; there’s a subtle psychological pressure to smile more, to be more outgoing and polite, when you know people know your name. His experiment was so successful that he began wearing name tags all the time, and even wrote a series of books about his experiences, starting with Hello, My Name Is Scott: Wearing Nametags for a Friendlier Society. Scott says he’ll wear name tags to the grave—literally—he even had a name tag tattooed onto his chest!

First, Last, or Other

This may be an unfair oversimplification, but I think most people unconsciously divide the world into “people I have some sort of relationship with” and “other.” My own experience is that I tend not to take people in the “other” category as seriously; if I don’t make eye contact, or am not especially polite, it somehow doesn’t really matter. (I notice this especially when I’m in someone else’s “other” category.) When I know someone’s name, though, it makes that person seem like more of a human being, more deserving of respect and genuine interaction; this seems to be equally true when other people know my name.

Retail stores understand this principle. When you walk into a supermarket or clothing store and see employees wearing name tags, it’s not only a signal that this person knows where to find things and can answer questions; that need could be met by a generic tag that says, “I work here.” A name tag goes a step further by making the employee more approachable—this is Amanda, not “Gap salesperson.”

A Joe by Any Other Name

But customers should get to wear name tags too, at least in stores where clerks are expected to address the customer by name. Unfortunately, clerks usually don’t find out my name until the very end of the transaction when they read it off a screen after I’ve swiped a loyalty card or payment card, so the only time they can use it is as I’m leaving: “Thank you for shopping at Old Navy, Mr. [pause] Kissell.” But more often than not they mispronounce my name, and besides, using my surname doesn’t have the right effect, because that’s not how I like to be addressed. I’m not “Mr. Kissell,” and I’m definitely not “Mr. Kiss-SELL.” I’m not “Joseph,” either, except in waiting rooms or when my mother is angry at me. And only people who knew me when I was in diapers would ever call me “Joey.” I always prefer to be called “Joe.” But with only a credit card, driver’s license, or passport to go by, a stranger has no way to know that.

A couple of years ago at a conference, I saw a guy wearing a green LED name tag with a scrolling display that showed his name and various social media handles. I thought that was brilliant, and told him so. I also said I had to own one of those—were they available in purple? He said he was pretty sure they were. Sure enough, I eventually found one (they were hard to find at the time and are even harder to find now, sorry). It came with Windows-only software on a 3-inch CD, so it took quite a bit of doing to program it using my Mac, but I eventually did, and now I have an eye-catching way to tell people not only my name but also how to contact me (or whatever else I want to say). It’s pretty cool.

If name tags are such a great idea, why doesn’t everyone wear one all the time? Personally, I don’t think that’s such a bad idea, and if everyone did it, it wouldn’t seem goofy. But the usual objection is one of privacy, or at least anonymity. Some people simply don’t want others knowing who they are, and don’t want to give an opening for strangers to start a conversation. That’s fair enough, I suppose, in a crowd or on the street—or if you’re a secret agent, say, or a superhero. But for most people in most situations, I suspect the social benefits of knowing each other’s names would outweigh the inconveniences.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 22, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on January 12, 2005.

Pound cake, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is the world’s simplest cake recipe: you simply mix a pound each of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs, pour it in a loaf pan, and bake. To be sure, a lot of people in North America are unaccustomed to weighing dry ingredients like flour and sugar, but everyone should have a decent kitchen scale. Regardless, eggs are kind of a weird ingredient to specify by weight, because their weight depends on their size (it’ll take about 6–8 eggs to make a pound). Of course, it doesn’t really matter if you use a pound of each ingredient; the point is to use equal amounts by weight. (Hence the French term for pound cake, quatre-quarts, or “four quarters.”) Although that recipe will get you a serviceable cake, it’s not a very interesting cake, so pound cakes often have added flavors, toppings, and whatnot. But if you want the closest thing you can find to a foolproof cake recipe, today’s the day to try your hand at a pound cake.

Image credit: Foodista [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

Disneyland’s 1957 all-plastic house

I’ve always been intrigued by alternative building methods and materials. I know, for example, that domes (of the geodesic or monolithic concrete varieties) are strong, inexpensive, and easily built, and that straw bale houses provide excellent insulation. Were I planning to build my own house, I might consider any of these options, as well as adobe, brick, stone, glass block, and good old-fashioned wood. But when I heard recently that Disneyland had once featured an all-plastic house, I just boggled. It did not amaze me in the slightest that such a structure was possible, but I couldn’t get over one huge question: Why? Why in the world would anyone build a house out of such a gauche material? And who would want to live in such a house?

The Plastic House

When Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California in 1955, one of its most popular themed areas was Tomorrowland, where visitors could get a taste of what life would be like in the near future. At that time, commercial plastics were still new enough, and exotic enough, that they excited the public’s imagination—any vision of the future must contain a great deal of these futuristic materials. One of the largest manufacturers of plastic products at that time was Monsanto, a sponsor of numerous Disneyland exhibits. The company was looking for ways to expand its markets, and at the same time gather data on the practicality and desirability of various plastics as construction materials. At Monsanto’s behest, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had spent years designing an entirely plastic house; actual construction began in 1956. When Walt Disney heard about the house, he offered to let Monsanto display it at Disneyland. After the House of the Future was finished in 1957, it began attracting crowds at the rate of about 10,000 people per day.

The single-level house, whose exterior was fashioned from prefabricated fiberglass modules, looked like a giant white + sign. The center rested on a pedestal, while the four cantilevered wings “floated” above the ground. Each of the wings was a single room (master bedroom, children’s bedroom, living room, and dining/family room); the center of the house contained the kitchen and a bathroom. The house’s main attraction was that the building itself and virtually everything inside was synthetic—the furniture, the upholstery, the carpets, the dishes, and even the clothes in the closets. (The windows were made of glass, and there were of course some metal fixtures.)

Monsanto described the house as its prediction of what life would be like in 1987—an impossibly distant 30 years into the future. As such, the house naturally contained such marvels as a “revolutionary” microwave oven (which was functional). It also contained a number of non-functional mockups of devices that would surely be commonplace in 1987, such as an ultrasonic dishwasher, video intercoms, and a large, wall-mounted, flat-screen TV (missed it by that much). Because visitors could walk through the house just as a real family would, it seemed entirely believable—if one example could exist, there was no reason to believe others couldn’t be made as well. And apparently, guests frequently claimed that they wanted, and would pay for, such a house. But it was merely a proof of concept; Monsanto had never intended to get into the prefab house business.

What’s Not to Like?

According to the marketing materials Monsanto provided, the appeal of plastic was self-evident: it was durable, long-lasting, easy to clean, waterproof, impervious to rot, and so on. These claims are true enough. But Monsanto also described the house and its fixtures using words like “warmth,” “charm,” and “beauty”—as though they could will those characteristics into existence simply by stating them. Perhaps visitors really did think an all-synthetic living room could be warm and cozy 50 years ago, but I find it quite amusing that a comment like “Hardly a natural material appears in anything like its original state” was considered an enticing selling point. Far from being warm and charming, the pictures I’ve seen of the house strike me as sterile and soulless. But, well…that’s me.

By 1967, public expectation about the future had changed significantly. Some elements of the House of the Future had already become commonplace, while others seemed less and less likely. The overall shape of the house, too, had gone out of style and looked increasingly dated. So after showing the house to some 20 million visitors, Disney decided to tear it down. An oft-told story, which may be apocryphal, is that the house was so indestructible that a wrecking ball bounced right off it; it took weeks to dismantle the structure by hand.

If nothing else, the House of the Future epitomized the vaporware future of the 1960s—the shiny, labor-free, robot-assisted, flying-car lifestyle that, the media assured, was just around the corner. Ten years. OK, maybe 20 or even 30, but basically imminent—definitely in your lifetime. Modern visions of the future tend to be a lot more conservative, a lot grungier—in other words, a lot more like today, with maybe a bit more gadgetry. And as much as I mourn the loss of that once-imagined future, I fully expect the actual future to be full of lovely natural materials.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 3, 2005.

Image credit: Orange County Archives from Orange County, California, United States of America [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons