Flyover Country

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Well, it turns out I did get to have a little road trip in September. Not quite the leisurely exercise in relaxation I might have hoped for, but it was definitely some serious road-time. How serious? Oh, two back-to-back 17 hour days of driving, one day with a mere 4 hours on the road, then a day of standing for 15 hours, and finally another pair of 17 hour driving days. I almost felt like I was back in college. When I didn’t know any better…

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I just read a tweet from Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) about a foodservice issue.

jeffjarvis Fucking Starbucks. What’s so hard about keeping a pot of coffee full in a COFFEE STORE? I had 2 min. to get a cup. They wasted my time. Grr

What’s hard about keeping the supply of ready-to-serve product full is the actions of the customers. Lots of things come into play here. First, Starbucks has developed the expectation that when you order coffee, you’ll get it right away. Not a bad expectation to build, but it does set you up for problems when you don’t meet that expectation. And you will fail to meet that expectation at some point.

In this case, all it would take is for one or more customers to buy more than what the system (designed to build those high expectations) could accommodate. One customer ordering ten coffees for the office when there is only enough for ten coffees brewed means the next customer or next few customers is going to have to wait. There isn’t much that can be done to avoid that. There is, however, much that can be done to address it when it does happen.

The situation should have been explained to Jeff. “I’m really sorry, but we just had someone come in and order a dozen coffees to go, and it ran us out. We’re brewing more right now, and it’ll be a few minutes before its ready.” That would probably have blunted Jeff’s initial frustration at Starbuck’s not meeting his expectations. Any questions Jeff may have asked at that point would have been an opportunity to tell the Starbucks story of fresh vs. stale coffee and maybe the suggestion of an alternative that could have been made ready quickly – at the same price. In any case, Jeff should have been given a card for a free coffee at a later date, as a gesture of contrition for not meeting the expectations that they’d created.

Whether Starbucks has a policy where any employee can do that kind of damage control, I don’t know. If they don’t, they should. They had no idea that Jeff would tweet about it to his 2665 twitter followers, but his greater reach into the public shouldn’t matter. No customer should walk out of any store or shop angry that the expectations the store or shop has built for themselves weren’t met. Meet the expectations and make sure you can cover those rare times when you don’t meet them or work to build new, lower expectations that you can meet.

Sometimes the fates seem to conspire against fun. This weekend is Denvention, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, in Denver. I haven’t been to a Worldcon now for several years, and I’m going to miss it again this year. <sigh>

Next week is SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics/animation show, in Los Angeles. It would have been a perfect place to do some networking in association with Micoy Omni-3D, the technology I blogged about earlier. Omni-3D is the kind of thing that isn’t easy to grasp for a lot of people unless they can actually experience it, and it’s probably a safe bet that a lot of folks at SIGGRAPH would have been able to not only grasp what Omni-3D is, but grab onto it and run.

It will soon be September and that’s the perfect time for vacation. Still good weather, but outside the normal vacation period and far less busy because of it. I just have a feeling that this will be another September without a roadtrip. It’d fit the Pattern of Threes…

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I continue to be amazed at how many people either don’t understand just what evolution is, or don’t communicate what it is very well at all. The recent news of a species of E. coli bacteria that now ‘eats’ citrate is a prime example. Here’s an excerpt from the linked article:

In nature, there have been a few reports of E. coli that can feed on citrate. But these oddballs all acquired a ring of DNA called a plasmid from some other species of bacteria. Lenski selected a strain of E. coli for his experiments that doesn’t have any plasmids, there were no other bacteria in the experiment, and the evolved bacteria remain plasmid-free. So the only explanation was that this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own.

The way that’s stated, “this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own,” it sounds as if the line of E. coli had taken some action to develop that ability. E. coli didn’t take any action beyond living, reproducing, and dying. The citrate-eating ability showed up in one flask of many after more than 33,000 generations. Somewhere along those many generations, a mutation that allowed the cell membranes of one E. coli bacterium to pass the larger citrate molecule through took place. That one bacterium passed that genetic trait on to at least some of its offspring, who passed it along to some of their offspring, and so on.

In a closed environment (a lab flask in this case), the population of E. coli reaches a certain point and then maxes out because the environment won’t support any more. But as more bacteria gained that citrate-eating trait, the environment could support a higher population. The mutant bacteria could utilize both the glucose that every E. coli bacterium could utilize and the citrate that only the mutant bacteria could. They were better equipped, because of a random mutation, to utilize the nutrients in the environment than the non-mutant E. coli were, so their numbers increased while the non-mutant population decreased from lack of suitable nutrients to sustain reproduction. The bacteria didn’t do anything to cause the new trait. They just capitalized on its presence by surviving and reproducing.

What isn’t said is that there were undoubtably many, many other mutations that occurred over the 33,000 generations. But they were mutations that didn’t provide any advantages over the normal genetic makeup of the bacteria. Those mutant bacteria didn’t have a survival edge over the non-mutant bacteria, so they lived and died like the non-mutant bacteria. Evolution is survival of the fittest, and only occurs when a mutation provides some kind of survival benefit in the environment where it occurs. Having cell membranes that allowed larger molecules to pass through was a survival benefit in that environment where citrate was apparently the only ‘large’ molecule to be found. Had some other ‘large’ molecule that was detrimental to the bacterium’s survival been present, the mutated bacterium would likely have failed to live long enough to pass that genetic trait along and the ability to eat citrate would have died along with it.

So, a change in environment can end the advantage a particular genetic trait gives to the organism that has it. The evolutionary process is tied to genetic traits that provide certain abilities in certain environments. Change the environment and the process is altered, sometimes to the detriment of the organism involved. How many species died during an ice age because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at colder temperatures? How many species died when the climate got warmer because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at hotter temperatures?

The evolutionary process is also tied to the number of mutations that occur, which is dependent on the number of offspring produced. Number of offspring increases in two ways. More generations of offspring and more offspring per generation. It may be that had the E. coli been bred in a larger environment, the number of generations it took for the citrate-eating genetic trait to occur might have been smaller (larger number of offspring per generation), because an equivalent number of offspring had been produced.

Evolution seems to be the province of the winners of the cosmic crapshoot of mutation. There are untold billions of mutations that did not provide any survival benefit in the environment where they occurred. Only the mutations that provided a survival benefit in some kind of genetic trait that was passed along to the next generation are part of what ends up being called the evolutionary process.

One can observe the changes wrought by mutation along the way, but only when the changed survive and reproduce better than the unchanged can one describe it as evolutionary. Evolution is not a play-by-play one can report as it goes along. It is history, observed in retrospect.

I’m finding that bits and pieces of history are repeating themselves for me and I thought I’d dip my toes back into the blogging pond a little deeper with an observation or two about the deja vu moments I’ve been having.

Once upon a time, in the online days before the web, I found myself in an online community of science fiction and fantasy authors. It was the SF/F SIG on Delphi, back when there were only a handful of broad-based online places for sf folks to gather. Compuserve, Genie, and Delphi. There was a regular weekly chat session (all text-based back then) and authors like Mike Resnick, Gardner Dozois, Jack Chalker, George Effinger, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, and others I’ve lost to the fog of age would socialize, and maybe do a little business. It was a bit much for a mere reader like me to wrap my brain around. Here were a whole bunch of Big Name Authors, just a keyboard away. I have to admit I was a little awe-struck for weeks. These were the people who wrote the stories that I spent my hard-earned cash on, for pete’s sake. They had a different vocabulary than I did, they spoke about people and things that I was ignorant about, and I felt like I would never find my own voice among these masters of voice.

Then one week, Pat Cadigan sent me a hello, you’re awfully quiet kind of private message. Whoa. An author spoke to me! I responded and she replied. Woohoo! Things began to change. Pat fed me a lot of little bits of information that I would otherwise have never known, I did some research into sf fandom to learn its history and language, and my shyness about being among a bunch of Big Name Authors began to fade. (I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you for that, Pat. Well, better late than never. Thank you!) As I found my voice and started contributing to the conversations, an amazing thing happened. All those Big Name Authors turned into real human beings.

I’d learned online behavior back when ASCII was all you had, and part of that old school etiquette was to lurk long enough to understand the dynamics of the group you wanted to join, and only when you felt like you wouldn’t come across like a complete buffoon did you start making your presence known by contributing. (Not that there weren’t plenty of buffoons out there, but some people just never RTFM and dive right in…) I learned enough about the other participants and how their world fit together that one day I just started talking (well, typing) and I was welcomed into the group without hesitation. I have a lot of fond memories about that time…

Over the course of weeks and months, I realized that my earlier awe at being among Big Name Authors was, well, uninformed. Not that these folks weren’t Big Name Authors (they were) or didn’t deserve accolades for their work (they did), but that for the most part they were people who did one thing for a living, or part of a living, and that I did something else for a living. They had bills to pay, illnesses to deal with, relationships to maintain, anxieties, fears, joys, and all the rest that makes up the non-making-a-living part of life for everyone. They weren’t so much different than me, or anyone. The big difference was that they wrote and wrote regularly and wrote well. It was a revelation that has shaped my view of “celebrities” ever since.

You’re probably wondering how this little trip down memory lane relates to web celebrities. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Big Name Bloggers, like Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Jarvis, and many more, aren’t all that different than me, or anyone, either. The big difference is that they actually blog and do so regularly and blog well. And as much as I enjoy what they have to say (most of the time), I’m not in awe of any of them. And I don’t think I should be. Respectful of what they do? You bet. Thankful for their insight? Of course. Wide-eyed and starstruck? Nope.

Another observation about web celebrities is that, for the most part, they are big fish in a relatively small pond, just as genre authors are. Want a quick reality check? Go out and randomly ask a dozen different people who any of the above bloggers are. Or any of the writers, for that matter. Odds are that most of the names will draw either blank stares or complete guesses. For those of us who swim in the ponds, those names have meaning. But to the rest of the world, they’re just other people you don’t know. That’s not a judgement of any kind. It’s just a statement of the context and the reality. Sometimes it helps to step back and remember that life happens offline, too.

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Just saw this week-old tweet from @erniemosteller

I suppose meetings do serve one practical purpose: They spread blame.
08:40 AM June 06, 2008 from web

Blame spreading doesn’t seem like a valid goal for any group, but maybe that’s just me.