Author Archives: James Sherrett

Findings, Nerdery

The Urgency of Life and Gompertz Law of Human Mortality

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

Just in case you ever needed motivation to start doing the most important things in your life right now.

From Gravity and Levity.

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Findings, Nerdery

Fight Club rules people know

Fight Club rules people know.

The Rules of Fight Club

  1. You do not talk about Fight Club.
  2. You do not talk about Fight Club.
  3. Someone yells, ‘Stop!’ The fight is over.
  4. Only 2 guys to a fight.
  5. One fight at a time, fellas.
  6. No shirts. No shoes.
  7. Fights will go on as long as they have to.
  8. If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

As elucidated by Tyler Durden (AKA Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes):

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Travels

There and Back Again: a roadtrip

For the past week and half I’ve been travelling. On the road.

Starting in Vancouver, we drove to Calgary for a cousin’s wedding. Then we drove to Winnipeg to visit family.

Our family has a camp on Lake of the Woods, just east of Kenora. We drove out there for a few nights. We fished and swam and lazed about.

Then we returned to Winnipeg and Monique flew home. I stayed another few days then set out in the car, back west.

I drove to Calgary my first day and stayed with friends.

The next morning I drove south to Missoula, Montana, up and down the Road to the Sun in Glacier National Park. I stayed at a bed and breakfast on the shore of the South Fork river. I open all the windows in my room and slept to the constant sound of rushing water.

I met with a business contact the following morning, then headed west. I passed through the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, which is pronouced Coor Delane, without a hint of French.

I cross the border again back to Canada and drove up the Kootenay valley. I swam at a beach in Kootenay Lake. I rode the ferry across Kootenay Lake as the sun touched the tops of the mountains and tinted the world golden.

I now sit in The White House hostel in Nelson, BC.

The last leg of my journey is tomorrow, back to home in Vancouver along highway #3.

I created the map at the top of this post to guide me and thought it might be fun to share to show my route. Google Maps also tells me that by journey’s end tomorrow I will have travelled roughly 5,894 KMs.

A few recent photos are in my flickr photostream. I’ll add new ones once I’m back home and settled.

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Nerdery

A Suggestion for Google Analytics

I use Google Analytics for many sites and I use it pretty much every day. I’m not the world’s best user but I’m reasonably competent. I speak from some experience.

And here’s the single thing that would make the product waaay better: Annotations on the activity timeline.

Because you make changes on an ongoing basis to the reporting. So how about show those changes in a nice little annotation on the timeline. Where possible, make the annotations automatically added, especially if the changes are system defined or parameters.

Then let users add notes to the annotations. Create a logbook of those annotations so you can see the change you made over time in stream outside of the timeline. But also make them available in the timeline, because that’s where you want to see them, because that’s where you see the correlative results of the changes.

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Findings

Welcome to Our Branding House

If you’re interested, I’d like to see if you have what it takes to write copy for our branding den/ad grotto − and our progressive, independent-minded clients. We need a postcard written for a little neighborhood grill that just opened. It’s called Applebee’s®. They want to promote their Carside to Go™ service. Go crazy with it. Have fun. Push the envelope − and get some papercuts doing it. Ha-ha. But seriously, just make sure you adhere to “The Applebee’s®. Corporate Guidelines and Branding Policies,” which is a huge document. I’ll email you a PDF instead of printing it so I don’t have to write a post-Earth Earth posting on my blog. Damn, I’m clever.

Wonderful satire from the enduring McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Welcome to Our Branding House.

Surprised then didn’t go with BrandingHaus.

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Findings, Nerdery

In Texas, There’s No Business Like ‘Going Out of Business’

When Cyrus Hassankola moved to Dallas a couple of years ago, after successfully going out of business in several locales, he decided to settle down and go out of business permanently.

“The response was good from day one,” the carpet salesman says.

Customers rooting through the stacks of oriental rugs in the store he opened on a busy road in North Dallas would sometimes say how sorry they were that he was going out of business. “We’re not,” Mr. Hassankola told them. “It’s just the name of the store.”

Love the little insights into consumer behaviour, pricing tactics and salesmanship.

From the Wall Street Journal: In Texas, There’s No Business Like ‘Going Out of Business’.

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Findings, Nerdery

95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family

Like all of the best articles from The Onion, the headline tells the whole story, then the story keeps on giving. Peeling back layers, if you will. Adding details to delight.

95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family.

“No one in my family really gets my worldview, so I find it easier just to smile and nod and agree with everything,” Wilmot said Monday. “When I’m with them, I tend to be a lot quieter than when I’m hanging out with friends.”

Wilmot, who grew up in Kalamazoo and now lives in Chicago, described the visit as “seven hours of self-censorship.”

“We’re totally not on the same wavelength at all,” Wilmot said. “I’m not just talking about dangerous subjects like politics or religion, but pretty much everything they bring up–the shows they watch, the things they buy, the people they know. So if someone says Daddy Day Care was hilarious, I may be thinking, ‘I can’t believe Eddie Murphy was once respected as a subversive comic genius,’ but I sure as hell don’t say it.”

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Food, Travels

Cutter Ranch Lambs and Loon Lake Weekend

A sloping horse eats grass

Spent the weekend +1 day in the middle of BC, in gold rush country, in Clinton, with some very fine people.

We visited Tyler McNaughton and his wife Sacha and their lambs at Cutter Ranch.

We stayed at the Evergreen Fishing Resort on Loon Lake and had a wonderful time. I believe it’s ashamedly the furthest north I’ve ever been in BC.

Photos? Yes.

Mine: Cutter Ranch Lambs and Loon Lake.

Better yet:

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