Non-political things that make you say...WTF?!?! (Welcome To Florida!) **NOT CV RELATED** NO TALKY!

... and from the "woman with too much time on her hands" files...


How a Space Engineer Made Her Own Rotary Cell Phone



Justine Haupt never expected that a project she’d been working on for the past three years would suddenly cause her website to crash. But when Haupt published photos and schematics for her handheld rotary cell phone yesterday, that’s exactly what happened.

Haupt, who works as an astronomy instrumentation engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, detailed how she took the rotary mechanism from an old Trimline telephone, paired it with a microcontroller and an Adafruit Fona 3G cell transceiver, put it all into a 3D-printed casing, and built something that could replace her daily flip phone.

Correct: A flip phone. Haupt is firmly anti-smartphone, she told WIRED in an interview, and for a long time she’s used an LG flip phone for her basic mobile needs. But even that felt like too much, so Haupt’s goal with the rotary cell was two-pronged: She wanted to strip a mobile phone down to its absolute essentials, while giving her an even more legitimate excuse for not text messaging her friends. “The point isn't to be anachronistic,” Haupt wrote on her website. “It's to show that it's possible to have a perfectly usable phone that goes as far from having a touchscreen as I can imagine, and which in some ways may actually be more functional.”

In our interview, which has been edited for clarity and length, Haupt talks about tech products as novelties, the similarities between cellphone trends and ChapStick, and why she’s excited about our tech’s rapid release cycles, despite some obvious downsides to it.

Lauren Goode: Let’s talk about your background first. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you do at Brookhaven?


Justine Haupt: I’ve worked on mostly instrumentation development for cosmology and astronomy projects. For example, I've been working on a large ground-based survey telescope for dark energy and dark matter for the past 10 years; that's winding down. I’m working on a radio telescope now and and some other projects, including a possible NASA mission and a quantum information experiment, which is not astronomy-related but it's interesting so I've been getting more involved with that. So it’s, you know, basically building experimental hardware for those kinds of things.

LG: How much of your free time do you spend on your own experimental hardware?


The custom board Haupt created for her phone.

ILLUSTRATION: JUSTINE HAUPT
JH: It’s pretty hard actually, though I do make time for it. I'm also trying to start a company, so I reduced my time at Brookhaven to 80 percent so that I’d have an extra day a week to work on that. I'm pretty strict with myself about not taking too much work home with me.

LG: What kind of company are you trying to start?

JH: You know, it’s a shame because I was so surprised when this [rotary phone] went viral, I didn’t intend to do anything that would make that happen, I just put the thing up on my own website which I didn’t think anybody ever read, and then this happened. I would have made sure the website for my new company was up. My first product is basically a kind of two-channel brushless motor controller for domestic robots. And my next project will hopefully be an actual full-size domestic robot because robots are, you know—they’re awesome.

LG: You talk a little bit about this on your website, but why did you decide to make this rotary phone? What problem were you looking to solve?

JH: It’s funny, I usually love [having] problems to solve ... But this wasn’t intended to be a product or an invention or anything like that. I just thought for a long time that rotary dials are so cool, they don’t have a use in modern society, and I’d love to make myself some device that uses it for data entry. And then I thought, Well, it might as well be a phone. And if I'm gonna do this, it should be something that I could really use. It wouldn't just be a novelty. It would be something I could actually fit in my pocket, that I'd want to use as my primary cell phone.

And also, you know, smartphones are one thing—you have this finicky annoying touchscreen interface, it drives me crazy, it really does. But then even my flip phone does things that I don’t ask it to do, unexpectedly, because some weird button got pushed. I wanted physical keys or buttons I could push for every function and not having to guess whether or not it was actually going to do what I told it to do. You know, when you hold down the power button–is it turning on right now? Is it turning off? I have a switch. It’s a toggle switch, it’s either on or it’s off. That’s it. I just wanted to control the technology. I think people have gone too far acquiescing to the standards of dealing with smartphones.


LG: What kind of flip phone have you been using?

JH: Oh, OK ... Do I have it with me? This is so new, it’s only my third day of using my rotary phone over my primary phone, but I’ve been keeping my flip phone in my pocketbook. It is an LG branded flip phone, it’s on a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go-plan, but I don’t even know the model number.

LG: It sounds like what you’re describing is a kind of yearning for a tactile experience.

JH: Exactly. There’s something to be said for tactile interface, actual switches and buttons. Even simple things, like, a little FM radio that has a dial so you can listen to stations, even that’s been replaced by electronic keys that only let you increment left and right. I guess it’s fine, but it does come with its tradeoffs, and no one seems to care and I care.

LG: What would you say was the biggest challenge in building this? You were not only working with the rotary dial but also the 3D-printed enclosure and the micro controller and the cell transceiver and—was it a Raspberry Pi?

JH: Actually it was an Arduino custom board. First, I’ll say that this has been a back-burner project for a long time. I first had the idea years ago. Now if you Google rotary cell phones, a few other people have done it, but none I don’t think could be used as your primary phone. Adafruit has some stuff that makes this easier—for example, a cell phone radio development board, which I started with. I got it working in a very basic way on my workbench, without it being enclosed in the cell phone casing, and proved it wasn’t too crazy.


Testing the circuits on breadboards.

PHOTOGRAPH: JUSTINE HAUPT

But the hardest part was moving from that, which was minimally usable, to something that was truly compact and light enough and sleek enough so I could slip it into my pocket and really use it. And know that it would be reliable and have long enough battery life. That took awhile, I think about three years, and only in the past couple months did I pick it up again. It’s still a work in progress.

LG: What’s interesting is that you still have an e-paper display [on the phone] so that you can see messages and missed calls. Which is funny because, when you think about it, with the old rotary phones, you couldn’t see any of that. It just rang and rang, and if you missed it, you missed it.


JH: Right. The main point I think is that I didn’t do it just to be a throwback novelty thing, to reproduce a rotary phone for the modern era. I wanted it to be a usable, functional phone, and you can’t really do that without having some kind of display now, especially because of robocalls. You know, you want to be sure it’s a number you’re really interested in before you pick it up.

LG: It seems like an important point to make, because there is a lot of nostalgic tech out now. Motorola’s just resurrected the Razr. Of course, it has this new flexible polymer display, but it’s a clamshell phone that flips open and closed. Nintendo has resurrected the original NES in a new form. There was even an app for iPhone recently that mimicked the click wheel experience on an old iPod. What do you think all of this says about the way we’re looking back to tech from 10, 20, 30 years ago, right as we’re being inundated with new tech?

JH: I was just thinking about this the other day. You’re right about this resurgence of older-feeling technology. Even cameras, you know, mirrorless single-lens cameras are being stylized in this '70s and '80s film SLR style of camera, more bulky and boxy with more buttons. And in some ways it’s perceived as a kind of hipster mentality. I do like it, even though I don’t identify as a hipster. And then things like the Motorola Razr, which I just found out about today ... I think the point of these throwbacks is that novelty wins. People love novelty so much that they’re willing to overlook functionality.

Take, for example, a really simple thing: ChapStick. It’s been around forever. My parents used it. It’s not a technological thing. And then all of a sudden these egg-shaped ones appear, and everybody starts using them. If you think about it, an egg-shaped applicator is a lot less precise and annoying to use than the little pencil one. But gosh darn it, it looks like an egg, it’s colorful, people want it! And it wins. Given enough time, people circle around again and then the older stick-shaped ones become the novelty and then you go back to that. But none of it is really based in logic or how usable the thing is. It’s just trends. And you certainly see that with phones. I mean, maybe people are finally ready to explore a form factor for phones other than what Apple invented with the iPhone. And maybe with other things too. I don’t know if we ever stabilize, or if we keep oscillating between different styles.

LG: What do you think about the fact that production cycles for some of these new products are compressed, and not only that, but purchasing cycles are compressed? When I think back to the rotary phone, the family PC, the VCR ... people had those for years.


JH: I’m sorry that we always have this bias that your childhood, your nostalgia, is the deepest one. But also, being in technology and developing technology, I wonder how it might affect one’s ability to understand technology. When I grew up, I could easily take things apart. They were hard to understand, but at least there was something to take apart and you could see mechanisms and understand that there was circuitry inside. And now technology is increasingly like magic, so you really can’t disassemble things. So I do wonder how the next generation of engineers, how they’ll bridge the gap between being interested in something and being able to actualize it.

On the other hand, I’m so excited that release timelines are so compressed and how fast the future is coming. Just in the past ten years I’m seeing things I never thought I’d see and I’m recalibrating myself to expect even greater things. For example, things like gene editing and what biohackers are doing. And space exploration, which is a passion of mine. And all of that. So on the other hand I’m just so excited. I think we live in an amazing time.

 

That's a bold strategy...

Florida man ‘pulls over’ officer to ask for directions, gets busted for DUI


An alleged drunk driver in Florida initially declined a breathalyzer test, telling a deputy sheriff on Sunday, “You didn’t pull me over, I pulled you over,” a report said.

Juan Zamora, 63, gave the puzzling response after flashing his headlights at a Marion County Sheriff’s deputy’s squad car in Ocala in order to ask for directions to an auto parts store, an arrest report said.

The deputy stopped and smelled alcohol coming from Zamora as he asked the question. The driver, who had a 15-year-old passenger, also had bloodshot eyes, the deputy noticed.

Zamora allegedly admitted to downing two shots of bourbon earlier that day, according to the Ocala Star-Banner.

When he finally took the breathalyzer test, he failed, registering above Florida’s 0.8 legal limit, the report said.

Authorities later found a bottle of whiskey in his car and a white substance, which field-test positive for cocaine, in Zamora’s shirt sleeve.

He was charged with DUI and cocaine possession.

 

OMG, this is genius!!

 

I thought the same. A cell phone that only makes calls. What a concept. The rotary dial would confuse a lot of kids.

 

And a lot more adults. I haven't used a rotary phone since the 80s.

 

Good info....

The difference between a snafu, a shitshow, and a clusterfuck

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck.

Clusterfucks hold a special place in public life, one distinct from the complications, crises, and catastrophes that mar our personal and professional existences.

$13 The F-Word

The F-Word, former Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower’s comprehensive history of the term, defines a clusterfuck as “a bungled or confused undertaking or situation.” Stanford business professor Bob Sutton goes further, describing clusterfucks as “those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, impatience, and incompetence that afflicts too many decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident, and prestigious groups.”

The term dates at least as far back as the Vietnam War, as military slang for doomed decisions resulting from the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little on-the-ground information. (The “cluster” part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia.)

“I have a weird obsession with clusterfucks,” Sutton tells Quartz At Work. He and Stanford Graduate School of Business colleague Huggy Rao took on the topic directly in their 2014 book

$15 Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, though publishers demanded that the softer substitute “clusterfug” appear in the final text. (This was not Sutton’s choice: His other books include The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide.)

To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

The three main contributors to clusterfucks
Sutton and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures, they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck. They were:

Illusion. A clusterfuck starts with the decision maker’s belief that a goal is much easier to attain than it actually is. The expectation that two car companies with different languages and different cultures would merge together flawlessly, as the architects of the doomed Daimler-Chrysler merger apparently believed? Clusterfuck. The Bush Administration’s estimate that the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would take no more than a few months and $60 billion? A clusterfuck prelude of tragic proportions.

Impatience. A misguided idea alone does not produce a clusterfuck. The idea also needs a champion determined to shove it along, usually over the objections of more-knowledgeable underlings. Sergey Brin’s reported insistence (paywall) on introducing Google Glass to the public against its engineers’ wishes turned a potentially groundbreaking piece of technology into a stupid-looking joke.

Incompetence. When errors of information and timing meet blatantly stupid decisions by people who should know better, disaster tends to ensue. Bear Stearns wasn’t the sole cause of the global financial crisis, of course, but former CEO Jimmy Cayne’s decision to spend 10 days of the 2007 subprime mortgage loan meltdown playing at a bridge tournament without phone or email access contributed to the firm’s collapse—and to the worldwide disaster that followed.

All three of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t) acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know. Nobody likes to spoil the heady euphoria of an exciting new project by discussing the possibility of failure. The problem is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.

The antidote to clusterfuckery, Sutton argues, is a willingness to confront the possibility of failure and disappointment built into every new venture, and to plan accordingly.

He cites a favored decision-making tactic of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who in turn credits it to psychologist Gary Klein). Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure, outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.

“People make better decisions when they look into the future and they imagine that they already failed, and they tell a story about what happened,” Sutton says. With better planning, it won’t be a story that has to be bleeped out.

 

It's obvious it's not real, they aren't wearing goggles or N95 masks and one guy doesn't have his mask over his nose.

 

I guess its not hard to fool people on the subway

 

You mean the "carrying a biohazard on a crowded subway" part didn't seem odd?

 

Budget cuts maybe? That is suspicious too.

 

Raise your hand if you ever got a callus on your finger from trying to be "Caller number 5 wins tickets to tonight's game!"

Good, now put your hand down, cause you know that touch tone phones are VASTLY superior. Damn boomers

But that shit up there is cool!

 

......

 

Bam and DiCo did that on Jackass.

 

I thought I was looking at a baby calf with dog ears.

 

Doh!

'Scared of heights' injury claimant filmed on Europe's biggest waterslide

A bodybuilder who claimed an accident left him scared of heights was exposed when a video emerged of him careering down Europe's highest waterslide.

Ben Bardsley, 38, of Stockport, Greater Manchester made a personal injury claim after falling into a pond in 2015.

He said it left him with a fear of heights and unable to lift weights.

His case was dismissed as "nonsense" at Manchester County Court after footage was shown of him being propelled 108ft (33m) down the Verti-Go in Spain.

'Lost everything'
The gym owner had brought a claim against Warrington Koi and Aquatics which was digging a pond in his garden in July 2015.

As he inspected the work, Mr Bardsley was struck by the bucket of the digger and knocked into the pond.

The court heard he claimed in medical evidence he fell with his arms outstretched, which caused injuries to his neck and back and left him unable to lift weights and caused an anxiety of heights.

But insurance company Aviva, which acted for the pond supplier, was suspicious and instructed lawyers to investigate further.

The probe uncovered an array of posts on social media showing him lifting large weights after the date of his fall.



Mr Bardsley also posted a video of himself grinning as he enters a capsule on the Verti-Go slide in Benidorm which descends at more than 62mph (100kph) in just three seconds.

He is also seen laughing and flexing his muscles in front of a group of children as he leaves the ride.

Dismissing his claim on 23 January, Recorder Richard Hartley QC said the idea that someone going down such a slide would struggle with heights was "nonsense" and ruled he was guilty of "fundamental dishonesty in respect of his claim".

Damian Rourke of Clyde & Co, representing Aviva, said the claimant's damages were estimated at about £4,500 but by "exaggerating" his injuries to four to five times the actual amount "he lost everything".

He was ordered to pay £14,000 in legal costs.

 

Ever see a waterfall flow backwards?