Category Archives: Nerdery

Findings, Nerdery

The Economics of Buying Local

Why buy local? Infographic information on where your money goes if you spend it with a local company.

Buying from local merchants means $.73 of every dollar stays in your community’s economy. Buying from an outlet of a non-local merchant means only $.43 of every dollar stays in your community’s economy.

Ever dollar spent therefore provides either $.30 contributed in bonus to your local economy, or $.30 that goes somewhere else.

Buying from non-local merchants may save you a small amount of money today. But it impoverishes you and your neighbours tomorrow.

And when you’re impoverished, price becomes the most important factor in purchase decisions. Then you’re way more likely to buy from a non-local merchant. The cycle continues and worsens.

It’s like the opposite of compounding interest: compounding deficit.

And once you get beyond the simple economic benefits of buying local, these additional 10 effects weigh in favour of supporting local businesses (in this case, in Grand Rapids, Michigan).

1. Significantly More Money Re-circulates In Greater Grand Rapids.

When you purchase at locally owned businesses rather than nationally owned, more money is kept in the community because locally-owned businesses often purchase from other local businesses, service providers and farms. Purchasing local helps grow other businesses as well as the Greater Grand Rapids tax base.

2. Non Profits Receive Greater Support.

Local business owners donate more to local charities than non-local owners.

3. Unique Businesses Create Character & Prosperity

The unique character of Grand Rapids is what brought us here and keeps us here. Our tourism businesses also benefit.

4. Environmental Impact Is Reduced.

Local businesses make more local purchases requiring less transportation and usually set up shop in town centers rather than on the fringe. This generally means contributing less to sprawl, congestion, habitat loss and pollution.

5. Most New Jobs Are Provided By Local Businesses.

Small local businesses are the largest employers nationally.

6. Customer Service Is Better.

Local businesses often hire people with more specific product expertise for better customer service.

7. Local Business Owners Invest In Community.

Local businesses are owned by people who live in this community, are less likely to leave, and are more invested in the community’s future.

8. Public Benefits Far Outweigh Public Costs.

Local businesses require comparatively little infrastructure and more efficiently utilize public services relative to chain stores.

9. Competition And Diversity Leads To More Consumer Choices.

A marketplace of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10. Investment In Greater Grand Rapids Is Encouraged.

A growing body of economic research shows that in an increasingly homogenized world, entrepreneurs and skilled workers are more likely to invest and settle in communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character.

Originally found on PSFK, who found it on Local First.

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Findings, Nerdery, Stories

Placenames in Books Through History

Where a book is set is important. Settings can reinforce the centre of power or they can undermine it — the empire seeing itself or being seen from outside.

And places matter to how a story can be told too. Stories have an inheritance if they’re honest. They come from a place, a time and a culture.

The following maps, generated from Google Books, show the names of places in books over the years.

Placenames in books in 1800

Placenames in books in 1800


Names of geographic locations in books in 1830

Names of geographic locations in books in 1830


Names of geographic locations in books in 1860

Names of geographic locations in books in 1860


Names of geographic locations in books in 1890

Names of geographic locations in books in 1890


Names of geographic locations in books today.

Names of geographic locations in books today.

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Findings, Nerdery

Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail Opening Credits

The video:

The excerpts:

  • Moose Trained by
  • Special Moose Effects
  • Moose Costumes
  • Moose choreographed by
  • Miss Taylor’s Mooses by
  • Moose trained to mix concrete and sign complicated insurance forms by
  • Mooses noses wiped by
  • Large moose on the left hand side of the screen in the third scene from the end, given a thorough grounding in Latin, French, and ‘O’ Level Geography by
  • Suggestive poses for the moose suggested by
  • Antler-care by

No! Realli! She was Karving her initanals on the moose with the sharpened end of a interspace toothbrush givin to her by Svenge-Her brother-in-law-An oslo dentist and the star of many norwegin movies: “The hot hands of a Oslo Dentist”,”Fillings of passion”,”The huge molars of Horst Nordfink”

Mynd you! Moose bites can be pritti nasti….

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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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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, 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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Nerdery

Anyone Can Do It But Few Do It Well

Gartner's Hype Cycle shows the pattern of adoption of new technologies.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle graph.

Grandiose claims have accompanied the spread of the Internet like wetness accompanies water.

Variously, the Internet was going to democratize production and distribution. Was going to disintermediate incumbents. Was going to revolutionize this or that business and business process.

Sometimes these claims came true. More often, they partially came true. Most often, they partially came to fruition and scared the hell out of people. And always, they remain evolving works in progress.

So when I read an article full of triumphalism like Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest about the failure rate of blogs, I know I’m reading a writer who’s missing the story.

  1. Because the failure rate of any new human activity is incredibly high. Diets, anyone?
  2. Because the pronouncements sound so tone deaf to history. They aspire to authority but it’s a trick. They don’t know. They’re guessing too.
  3. Because the best way to get perspective on the way media cover stories is to read old stories. An edition of the NYTimes from a year ago provides way more insight into the way the news gets covered than today’s fresh copy.

As an example, a year ago you could have read that Consumers were facing shrinking lines of credit from banks.

Washington Mutual, one of the nation’s biggest issuers of second mortgages, said in May that it had reduced or suspended about $6 billion of available credit under existing home equity lines. Countrywide, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have made similar moves.

You could also learn that tomatoes contaminated with e-coli bacteria were sickening people in 16 states. But nothing will change and more shit (literally) will get shipped in food.

A mediated worldview emphasizes the far over the near, the exceptional over the mundane and the sensational over the practical.

As a result, people fear dying from terrorist attacks instead of car crashes. We watch reality TV while our natural world degrades.

So while technology has made many things more accessible to us, human nature remains stubbornly resistant to lasting changes. And the changes that get incorporated into our lives seem like they’ve been there for a long time.

The truth remains that anyone can start a blog but few persist. The truth also remains that many people now read and keep blogs and don’t have as much use for the NYTimes.

And this will change too.

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