Category: Technology
The amazing tech required to pack on-line orders
I bought a lot of books on line in the run-up to Christmas, and I was struck by how much quicker Amazon was able to get them to me than Chapters. When I tweeted this observation, a fellow tweep chided me — of all people — for not patronizing local bookstores.
I like a nice bookstore as much as the next fellow. Who doesn’t enjoy wandering through the stacks at J. W. Doull’s, feeling the stairs creak underfoot, talking books with the marvellous staff he employs. But it’s no accident that John Doull can no longer afford the rent in downtown Halifax. Book buyers have voted with their feet, and Amazon is winning by a landslide.
Just as iTunes represents a much better way of buying music than the old customer-contemptuous, $20-album-in-a-record-store model, so Amazon beats the pants off the bookstore model.
That impression came early and easily to me, because I live in a bookstore desert. The nearest bookstore, a bedroom sized Coles, is an hour away, and rarely stocks the books I seek. So my normal bookstore experience is to drive an hour, go to an ill-stocked store where an ill-informed clerk will tell me they don’t have what I want, place an order, drive an hour home, and repeat the round trip a week or two later when the desired volume comes in, or fails to.
Or I can sit in my living room, tap a few keys on my laptop, and have the book delivered to my house a few days later, for less than I would pay in the bookstore. Sure, I’ll miss the creaky stores, and I’ll seriously miss the wonderful people who staffed these institutions. But I’m fine with the new method, and I get more books, quicker and cheaper, as a result.
On the Tuesday before Christmas, I heard an NPR podcast about a new biography of Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, who revolutionized modern commerce by introducing Arabic numerals to Western Europe, thereby enhancing the computing power of ordinary citizens more than anyone before Steve Jobs invented the personal computer. This would make a great present for my math-inspired son, but I’d never be able to get it by Christmas,
I checked on line. Both Amazon and Chapters had the book, but only Amazon claimed the ability to delivery it by Friday, the last delivery day before Christmas, and only if I paid an exorbitant amount for special shipping. I bit, and at about 4:30, hit Amazon’s buy button.
The package was delivered in Halifax at 10:30 the next morning, This was a miracle on a par with the Dollar Store. I’ve been puzzling ever since about how Amazon (or LL Bean, or Zappos, or Staples) can manage these feats of order processing. Today, a new TED talk appeared that explains part of the mystery.
The TED talker, Mick Mountz, founded Kiva Systems, a material handling company that is revolutionizing warehouse management by replacing conveyors with little orange robots shown at the top of the page. In action, they look like suitcase-sized Zambonis. Instead of stock pickers wandering around the warehouse, looking for products to assemble into orders, the bots bring the products to the pickers, who pack them into boxes for shipment.
They do this by moving whole shelves around the warehouse, their patterns controlled by algorithms that learn as they go, so the process continually improves. In effect, it turns a warehouse into a massively parallel processing machine, not unlike a computer. Watch the video for the fascinating details.
A tale of two shipwrecks
One in Brittany, France, the other in Cape Breton, Canada. One cleaned up in a month, the other untouched after four, with no cleanup in sight.
Here’s the TK Bremen shortly after it grounded on Kerminihy Beach, near Erdeven, Brittany, France, on December 11. 2011.
And here’s the M/V Miner after it grounded on Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, after a towing cable parted on September 14, 2011.
The much larger Miner was under tow, bound for a scrapyard in Aliaga, Turkey. Here are the two ships’ specifications:
| M/V Miner | TK Bremen | |
| Launched | 1965 | 1982 |
| Type | Bulk carrier | General cargo & bulk carrier |
| Built in | Quebec, Canada | Pusan, South Korea |
| Length (LOA) | 222.5 m | 109 m |
| Beam | 23 m | 16 m |
| Draught | 8.2 m | 6.74 m |
| Gross tonnage | 17,831 | 3,992 |
| power | 8,000 bhp | 4,000 bhp |
| Shipwrecked on | Sept 20, 2011 | Dec 16, 2011 |
| Shipwrecked at | Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada | Kerminihy Beach, Erdeven, Brittany, France |
| Flag | * | Malta |
| Owner | Pella Shipping Co., Thessaloniki, Greece | Blue Atlantic Shipping Ltd., Malta |
The Bremen was much more accessible than the Miner, having grounded on a mainland beach, while the Miner fetched up on remote, unpopulated, forbidding Scatarie Island. Though very different, the two areas share one thing in common besides shipwrecks: The dunes adjacent to Kerminihy Beach are a nature preserve, and Scatarie is a provincially protected wilderness area.
There the similarities end. As detailed in a photo spread on TheAtlantic.com website, 40 men worked day and night for two weeks to dismantle the Bremen and clean up the beach, at a cost of nearly €10 million euros (CDN$13.2 million).
“One month after the wreck,” reports The Atlantic, “the cleanup process is nearly complete.”
The French cleanup began:
The work continued:
Here’s all that remained of the TK Bremen as of Monday:
I won’t attempt to draw any lessons. I’m no expert, and the Miner is a much larger vessel in a much dicier location. But it may be worth noting that three weeks after the Miner went aground, NS Premier Darrell Dexter hadn’t been able to get any federal agency to take charge of the disaster. And I can’t recall any Canadian shipwreck being cleaned up the way France cleaned up the Bremen, let alone in two weeks flat.
Makes you wonder.
The website Boatnerd.com details numerous collisions, groundings, and accidents experienced by the Miner its previous incarnations as the Canadian Miner, the LeMoyne, and the Maplecliffe Hall. More information about the Miner here and here, and about the Bremen here, here, and here.
* According to Boatnerd, the Miner’s Canadian registry was cancelled last June. I was unable to determine its registry for the aborted trip to Turkey.
A.G. Bell-inspired flying art
Little Shining Man, a kite sculpture created by Heather and Ivan Morrison, takes flight from a beach at St. Aubin’s Bay, on the Bailiwick of Jersey.
Videography by James O’Garra. H/T John Hugh Edwards.
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation reconfirmed
In an almost perfect illustration of Donham’s Law, the New York Times reports this morning that New English fishermen are pooh-poohing calls from fisheries scientists for greater restrictions, or even an outright ban, on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine.
The scientists point to new data showing cod stocks in much worse shape than previously thought; the fishermen say there’s an abundance of fish.
“Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost to extinction. “Landing a lot of fish can mean the fish are very plentiful, or it can mean the fishermen are extremely efficient in scooping up every last one of them.”
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation states that All fishermen resolutely support conservation measures, except those targeting the species they fish for, and the gear types they fish with.
This is your brain on… ahem
Last year, we published a snapshot of Contrarian’s brain as he listened to Costas Halavrasos on Maritime Noon. Psychobiologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutger’s University in New Jersey has done me one better, by releasing a stop motion animation showing sequential MRI brain scans of 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist Nan Wise as she manually stimulated herself to orgasm.
It is not known whether Wise was listening to Halavrasos at the time.
The first portion of the video shows a sequence of 20 snapshot fMRI images, taken over a 12 minute period, during which Wise approached orgasm, achieved orgasm, and entered a refractory period.
The scan detects oxygen levels in the blood that reflect the varying activity in 80 different regions of the brain. The animation uses a “hot metal” colour scale, beginning with dark red (low activity) and progressing through orange and yellow to white (highest activity).
H/T: Vicky Salazar
Animation and the non-epidemic of ADHD
I don’t normally post videos that already have five million hits, but this animated version of a talk by educator and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson underscores a point made by Sunni Brown in her TED talk about the merits of doodling. There is something about the combination of speech and visual note-taking that enhances comprehension, especially comprehension of irony and ideas in conflict.
Robinson’s talk is about education, but the animated nature of the talk the talk is as arresting as the content.
[Educators] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, and along the way they are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.
When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that of you worked hard and did wel and got a college degree, you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that, and they’re right not to, by the way. You’re better having a degree than not, but it’s not a guarantee any more, and particularly not if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important about yourself….
[ADHD] is not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis, and for the same reason: medical fashion.
Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: Computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of channels. And we’re penalizing them for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school, for the most part.
RSA Animate, produced by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, has a series of similar animated exhortational videos.
H/T: Doug MacKay
Canadian cringe quote of the week — technology division
Jeff Jarvis speaking to Leo LaPorte on this week’s edition of This Week in Google:
I listen to Radio Canada — CBC — on Sirius all the time, because they have good programs, and they’re covering RIM like it’s really a story, ‘cause they have to, ‘cause it’s like a national requirement. It’s so sad.
Peter Rojas chimed in:
That company… Those two, the co-CEOs, should be fired. Those guys are in complete denial. Whatever they were able to lead the company to success before, they’re clearly not able to take it to where it needs to go now. They’re executing way too slowly, the products are not exciting, and I think they still completely overvalued their core asset which is basically how well Blackberries do email and the security stuff.
LaPorte:
I think that what they did not count on was that the employee would start choosing the handset, not the employer. I think that’s really what happened…. Employees said, “Nope, I’m not using that crappy phone. I’m using an iPhone.”
Shreddies
The internet has some peculiar websites. This one comes from Wilsonville, Oregon-based SSI Shredding Systems, Inc., a company that claims to be “motivated by one recurring question: What Needs Shredding?”
You can sign up to receive the company’s Shred of the Month video. I particularly enjoyed the impromptu bowling tournament.
H/T: Silas
Rare concision in airline safety prose
Air Canada flight attendant to passengers in Row 4 of a flight to Sydney Tuesday afternoon:
“You are in the emergency exit row, so I have to show you how to open the emergency door.”
[Gestures to door handle.]
“Pull it down. It opens in. Throw it out.”
[Pause.]
“Any questions?”
Airline safety instructions are so often wordy and prissy. How refreshing to encounter a no-nonsense pro who understands the value of brisk, imperative prose, and isn’t afraid to use it.
World’s largest photo library
1000memories.com, a website about organizing and sharing home photography, illustrates Facebook’s dominant role in photographic storage.
Digital cameras are now ubiquitous – it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.
