Thing 12: A Friction-Block Thing with Topical Analgesic

The Bandaid Friction Block Stick is an awesome thing--I always have one in my purse, for when I realize my shoes aren't as comfortable as I thought. It does a nice job of preventing blisters, but only if you notice the rubbing fast enough. Even a little late, though, and whatever blistery soreness you acquired is there to stay.

So what I want this time around is: the Bandaid Friction Block PLUS topical analgesic. Keep blister from getting worse, and lock any blistery nagging it may have already achieved out of my brain.

Thing 11: A Nutrition-Tracking App with Flexible Values

I like data. You might have noticed. BRING ME ALL THE DATA! I keep a lot of data on myself, because I don't trust myself to notice changes; among other things, I use a nutrition-tracking Android app called Calorific. Which I love to pieces: I like its high-level approximation approach, which I think compares very favorably with the general frantically detail-obsessed approach taken by most nutrition-tracking apps. In Calorific, some foods are green (fruits, vegetables, whole grains), some are yellow (non-whole grains, fish, nuts), and some are red (beef, cheese, cake). Instead of entering what you actually ate, you enter its color and portion size--the app is set up to help you figure out what the portion size was and what color it was quite painlessly.

Two things I wish it did.

Thing eleven-A: I wish Calorific integrated MealSnap-type function; there's already a feature where you can save a picture of your meal. I don't understand why you'd do this in its current form (it just saves a picture of your food! who cares?)

Thing eleven-B: Calorific assumes your eating philosophy is sort of FDA-informed. That is, whole grains are always good in any quantity, fat is always bad--which isn't necessarily everyone's. If you're aiming at natural balance and variety (where anything unprocessed in small quantities is OK) or the Paleo thing (where carbs and dairy are minimized), this ain't necessarily so. So I want Calorific to be able to switch between eating philosophies, and change the color-categorization of foods accordingly.

In this case, "universe" is once again mispronounced--this time, though, it's as WorkSmart Labs. Come on guys, make this happen!

Thing 10: More Media with Funny Women

I saw Bridesmaids last night. It was as funny as I've heard. Since I'd never followed Saturday Night Live, I was pretty unfamiliar with Kristen Wiig. She's a talented physical and verbal comedienne, and I hope she gets as many opportunities as Tina Fey has recently. I hope this is the final nail in the coffin of the remarkable argument that women aren't funny. I hope we get more media about women where they act, recognizably, like people. Particularly where the friends act recognizably like friends--goofy, affectionate, and open.

This is a mainstream movie that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors: it's full of named female characters, who have conversations with each other, that aren't about men. There are problems with the movie, of course, from a gender-politics standpoint: it frames all of the women primarily by their relationship status, even if their relationship partners are all pretty much unshown. The main character, Annie, is also framed by the failure of her dream-business, but she's the only character with an explicit career; none of the other women mention working. It's notable that the one fat character's sexuality is shown as less vanilla and more transgressive than anybody else's. There are also problems with the movie from an entertainment standpoint--a couple of lines that feel like a poor fit for the character, the big gross-out scene that feels like it came from another movie, the completely unmotivated resolution of the romantic subplot.

But overall, IT'S FUNNY. Calling an unfriendly flight attendant "Stove" instead of "Steve" is gonna make me laugh for weeks. Its humor is a gentler variation on the squirm humor that's been so popular for a while now; instead of putting mortifyingly tone-deaf people in normal situations and watching the havoc unfold, it puts a slightly neurotic but mostly normal woman in stressful situations that aren't completely implausible, and watches her sweat. That's a lot easier to take.

It's a movie that mostly lets women be people in their own right--and funny people at that. MORE OF THAT, PLEASE.

Thing 9: "Play Random Album" Feature

I don't listen to nearly as much music as I used to. Myself, I think the reason for this is that I have too much music. My music library has grown exponentially in the last few years, and looking through my collection without defaulting to a few favorites is a daunting mental task I don't always feel like undertaking. Customized internet radio stations like Last.fm or Pandora don't reliably produce content I want to listen to.

I wish all music-playing platforms had a Play Random Album button predominantly displayed--and most specifically, I wish my Sonos had this, both for the local music library and the Rhapsody streaming music library.

I can't imagine adding that feature is so very hard.

Think 2: Irritation & Its Analog

This has probably been my most natural, and most productive, strategy: Notice irritation. Irritation says, This shouldn't be, and can the first step to figuring out what should be. It's probably why I've produced so many tweak-ideas here, modifying to things that already exist. Which is cool, but also somewhat limited. So I want to know--and so does everybody else--what's the new-idea analog? What kind of mental experience contributes to having ideas that are less tweaky, more new?

Here the experimental literature is not at all helpful. There's a fair amount of work on group and individual brainstorming, but since that's all in response to a clear task, it's not a very good analog for the actual in-the-wild having of creative ideas that aren't modifications of existing things, or at least are largely different from similar existing things.

The non-experimental literature is, as usual, full of advice. "How to be original" is probably second only to "how to be happy" in the allegedly nonfiction genre I hesitate to call self-help; some of it's good, most of it isn't. There are strategies for creativity, but most of it is about how to modify existing ideas to make them more interesting--putting things in a new context, changing perspective, etc.

What about ideas that are only minimally modifications of pre-existing things? Twitter's the best recent example: it's called microblogging by some, but it's more a whole new thing.

Conclusion: I need a better sample space of really original ideas. Suggestions welcome, but I think this is going to take some research.

Thing 8: Outlet-specific Energy Tracking

Smart energy tracking is all the rage, and my kindly old utility company keeps sending me statements that have graphs in 'em, over all kinds of time courses.

Here's the thing: I don't care. It doesn't interest me at all that we use more electricity in July & August than January & February, or that our personal energy demands tend to hit peak around 8 pm. Because there are obvious and not at all useful explanations for those trends; I could probably draw those graphs myself with tolerable accuracy. Time-based analysis of energy usage seems to me a complete misunderstanding of the energy consumer experience.

What I want to know is appliance-specific, or outlet-specific, energy use. How much a month is leaving the desktop on costing us? The cable box/DVR? Which of our lights are the most energy-greedy? That's actionable, and until they give actionable information, "smartmeters" are just more information noise.

Think 1: A Beginner's Meditation on Ideas

It is possible that every author, director, researcher, artist, or other idea-driven worker who does interviews has had to answer the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" It is a generally unanswerable question that the vast majority of these interviewees entertain with great good humor and tolerance.

I wish my colleagues in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience had more to say about ideas and having them. There's a little about "moments of insight", mostly using jokes (which I will probably talk about later), but so very little on how ideas happen. This is probably because it's hard to define "idea" without echoing Justice Stewart on pornography.

So I'm going to expand the scope of this blog; from ideas as such, to the science and experience of having ideas. This is where I say something appropriately "fasten your seatbelt"-y, but I'm going to yoink from Gary Larson instead.

“Where do you get your ideas?” has always been the question I’m most often confronted with. (“Why do you get your ideas?" is a close second.) I’ve always found the question interesting, because it seems to embody a belief that there exist some secret, tangible place of origin for cartoon ideas. Every time I hear it, I’m struck by this mental image where I see myself rummaging through my grandparents’ attic and coming across some old, musty trunk. Inside, I find this equally old and elegant-looking book. I take it in my hands, blow away the dust, and embossed on the front cover in large, gold script is the title, Five Thousand and One Weird Cartoon Ideas.I’m afraid the real answer is much more mundane: I don’t know where my ideas come from. I will admit, however, that one key ingredient is caffeine. I get a couple of cups of coffee into me and weird things start to happen.

–Gary Larson, The Far Side.