Can you become more popular by making some people hate you?

In case anybody missed the latest blog post from the OKCupid dating site (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/), the general idea is that

The more men disagree about a woman's looks, the more they like her.

This revelation came after the staff found that if everyone rates a girl as being "quite attractive", she'll get fewer messages than a girl that some men have rated "ugly" and some men have rated "very attractive". The more diverse the opinion, the more messages the girl will receive.

I realised this is also true of television shows. My friend Richard and I occasionally have big arguments about the quality of television shows. We both happen to quite like Star Trek. It's not our favourite thing ever, but we do enjoy it.

I happen to LOVE Firefly, but he thinks it's terrible.

It always seems it's the TV shows and movies that some people hate that develop true cult followings. When was the last time you heard of a die-hard Simpsons fan? Never, right? Everybody knows The Simpsons is good (ignoring the oft-quoted old/ new Simpsons quality gap). But what about Twilight? Holy crap. It even has its own internal die-hard cult following thanks to the Team Jacob/ Team Edward rivalry. For the record, I'm Team Bella. Seriously.

So why is this? Well, one of my theories is that it's about identity. People love to differentiate themselves from others, and one of the ways they can do this is by having a "type" of girl they find attractive, or a genre of movie they enjoy, or a particular story or franchise to cling on to. It makes people feel unique.

When a person discovers a movie, tv show, girl, car etc. whose qualities make up part of their identity, that person might end up overplaying their attraction to it.

My title promised a tricky, unexpected parallel to business, so I'll deliver. OKCupid's final piece of advice to their female internet dating users was

Take whatever you think some guys don't like—and play it up.

Well, what if this applies to everything?

If you're looking for a job, instead of wondering if you're telling too many jokes/ talking too much/ not talking enough/ too scruffy, maybe just take those parts of your personality and showcase them to the point that you would if you were comfortable with a good friend.

If you're marketing your own product (whatever it might be), both you and the product have a personality that the customer is going to end up dealing with. Perhaps the same advice stands here. Play up the personality.

In both cases you're going to

1. Lower some opinions of you to the point that some might hate you
2. Raise some opinions of you to the point that you're a dream come true
3. Actually make yourself more popular overall!

Hard Drives and Bad Puns

Ever since I bought my motorbike I've been laughing at my inability to painlessly walk up my driveway. There was a time, when I was jogging and regularly attending the gym, that I didn't even notice the incline or the length, but these days it's a little daunting.

The aversion to that walk is a nice counterpoint to this little journey I'm preparing for. That horribly steep driveway is the first 80 metres of an epic four and a half thousand km journey around New Zealand.

For perspective, I normally do a little over 1000km every month, making this ride nearly 5 months' worth of vehicular and bodily wear-and-tear. 4,500km is the distance from Auckland to Sydney and back. Or just a little more than London to Baghdad. And about the same as Los Angeles to New York by road.

It's likely that more than one day of riding will involve high winds and torrential rain - very unpleasant on a bike. There's always a risk of dropping the bike, or being hit by another road user. We're far from home, and often far from any form of civilization (the South Island is 15% larger than England, and only has 1 million people, compared to England's 55 million. It rather endearingly has only one area code). And we're going to be exhausted from pushing a heavy machine around corners 5 hours a day for 2 weeks.

I know I never lost my childlike compulsiveness or naivety and I'm aware those things might be responsible for my next statement (rather than the thrill-seeking adventurer's spirit of some people I know), but all of the above sounds SO MUCH FUN. The more danger, and the more difficult the challenge, the better!

I can't believe that I could ever travel to these cities by coach and feel at all fulfilled. Sure the scenery is beautiful, and I'd see far more of it traveling at sane speeds, looking calmly out the window of the vehicle. And maybe the travel time would be less, giving me more time to explore the towns and cities. But that doesn't matter so much. The destination has never been of interest to me.

For me it's all about the journey. It's all about achieving something impossible that I never thought I could achieve (how sickeningly inspiring is that, huh?*). Every person who comments on the difficulty of our route, or the danger of traveling it on a motorcycle (or riding a bike in general!) just inspires me further.

Don't misunderstand me - I don't usually work for the credit, or the recognition that comes with success. It's just that life has never been truly fun unless somebody has told me I can't do it. Whether it's self-doubt or the doubt of people around me, it doesn't matter. I thrive on it.

My driveway is starting to seem really short. And I'm starting to appear very unfit.

* I am three fools - one for using a cliche, two for commenting on it, and three for paraphrasing John Donne in a footnote.

Just a Few Days Now

Sitting at work wading through emails asking us to refrain from putting non-compostable waste into the organic recycle bins, or notifying me that some unknown member of staff is currently away sick (or, "sick"), is making me yearn even more for the 13th of February.

At 10am, Ryan and I will be finished packing, strapped snugly in to our jackets and helmets, and heading up our driveway towards the Southern Motorway. 5 hours of riding and 366km (227 miles) later we'll be in Ohakune, at the base of Mt. Ruapehu. I'm not sure, at this point, what we're expecting from the mountain town. It's summer, so there's no skiing, so there are no people. In lieu of any obvious adventures to be discovered by wandering around, perhaps heading up the mountain would be feasible.

Ruapehu is 2,797 meters (9,176 feet) high, which makes it the highest point in the North Island, and (I believe) just about high enough to notice a distinct lack of oxygen. Certainly though, if it's a cloudy day, the top of the mountain might sit above the clouds.

The fun part is Ruapehu is a volcano. A volcano that erupted in 1996, 1997, 2007 and 2008. GOOD TIMES.

Well it's all conjecture at the moment, but I'd quite like to climb it.

Back to work.

Paul Fitts' Toilet

I was in the bathroom last night, thoughts amplified in the standard fashion by all the reflective porcelain and floor tiles (shock: I just cleaned it), and I realised that I have a pretty serious stand on which way the toilet roll should sit: over, rather than under. So I pensively pulled the roll out of its holder, rotated it, and returned it to the "correct" position.

"But why," I thought, "is that correct?" And then I realised: Fitts' Law.

Fitts' Law is a well known concept in user interface design. It states that:

The time taken to move to and access a target is directly proportional to the distance to the target and the size of the target.

More simply: large, close targets can be accessed quicker. Have a look at these two familiar scenes. The "target", in the case of loo-sitting, is "whatever you can grab that will allow you to pull off toilet paper".

In this situation, the target is small, and far away:

In this situation, the target is large, and close:

In over-the-top mode, the toilet roll is accessed much more quickly. This should be a no-brainer.

On top of that, I noticed that "over-the-top" allows you to use less paper. Whether you're over or under, you generally have to pull the last sheet to about the same location in space in order to get leverage to rip it off - if you go "under", you have to pull the roll further. Try pulling off just one sheet in each position, with just one hand. It's much easier in the "correct" position.

(Thanks to Current Configuration for these. Not that I asked.)

Edit: What's more (thanks for spotting this, Ryan), if you go "under", that toilet roll is touching a wall, which you could easily touch with your poo hand as you go to grab more paper. How many other people use that toilet, and have touched that wall with their poo hand?

Edit 2: I'm completely aware that Fitts' Law strictly applies to single-dimension amplitude of movement, and that the Accot-Zhai steering law would be more useful. Whatever.

A Loss of Faith

I've lost faith in the women's movement. In feminism. The movement started as a noise-making enterprise designed to gain equality for women. Not just in the workplace (even if a job wasn't advertised for 'men only', the role would usually advertise a different - lower - pay rate for women), but in social life, and in politics. And they succeeded admirably: women in New Zealand were given the right to vote in 1893, the US in 1920, and the United Kingdom in 1928. It is now illegal in Western countries to hire or differentiate pay based on gender (as far as I'm aware anyway).

The main battles have all been won, but there's still a long way to go for Western women (I'm ignoring the subjugated female populations of non-Western countries, some of whom still have to deal with despicable, unjustifiably barbaric genital mutilation. But then again so do most Jewish males, so perhaps that's a different topic). Sexism is still rife. The idea of "traditional gender roles" still exists, but when people say "traditional", I think they tend to be offering a tip-of-the-hat to feminists, while meaning to say "normal", or "obvious". I mean, when was the last time you saw a female tower-crane driver, right? That's a man's job, isn't it? Oh, yep, "traditionally", I guess it is.

So like I said, there is work to do. A lot of consciousness raising. People don't understand the issues, and I hope that when they do, progress can be made.

But, Jesus do the feminists make it difficult. I'm not stereotyping here. I don't refer to the "butch-dyke bra burner" feminist that I think is evoked in many minds when they hear the term. I refer to the normal, modern, everyday feminist. Your wife. Your girlfriend. Your coffee shop employee. Your punk singer. Your electrician. Your chef. It's these people that I've lost faith in.

I do not know one feminist (edit: I now know two three... perhaps my faith can be renewed?) who doesn't make sexist comments or jokes against men in one breath, and condemn innocent sexist jokes against women in the next. I don't know one feminist who isn't, by her own definition of sexism anyway, dramatically sexist.

Perhaps men deserve the comments from time to time, but the fact is, so do women. "Equality" means equal rights, and equal treatment. Nobody ever said that men and women do, or should behave in the same way as each other, and nobody ever said that one party shouldn't think that the other party's behavioural nuances are simply hilarious. In fact, I tend to find sexist jokes against men just as funny as the same against women.

This, I think, is another example of the "priviledged oppressed minority" phenomenon. A similar example is racism in New Zealand from Maoris against white people - even in the government - being quietly ignored, while I expect the whole of Maoridom would be up in arms if a white MP were to make a similar racist comment (and rightfully so). And that dichotomy just has to end.

Vrooom

Six weeks ago, Ryan Maxwell and I completed an 840km round trip on our motorbikes from Auckland to Cape Reinga (the top of New Zealand) and back, over two days. It was an excellent weekend: beautiful sun, scenary, perfect roads (aside from the 10km of boulders near the Cape).

It was so much fun, in fact, that for our next challenge we're going to do the rest of the country:

That's only the approximate route, but I definitely want to see Wellington, the South Island's west coast, Wanaka, Queenstown, Invercargill, Bluff (bottom of the country), Dunedin, Christchurch, and Taupo on the way back up.

• We're going to take it fairly easy and cap ourselves at 420km/ day (about 4 hours' riding)
• The 420km cap gives us about 5 days down and 4 days up.
• We might be able to check out Wellington's Webstock to see Jeff Atwood talk (except we won't be able to afford the entry fee, so I'll have to talk us in. I'm a little giddy at the prospect of this particular social engineering challenge).
• We'll be spending at least a full day in Invercargill, and probably more than a day in Dunedin.
• Each night will be spent indoors, in beds - no tents or sleeping bags to worry about.
• Yes, I will be taking my electric razor. We're not animals.

The Laundry

An innocuous comment: "you'll find the dog leads hanging up in the laundry."

Sitting in my friend Richard's study, the singer of Avenged Sevenfold (Shadows, I think. The guy with the neck vein.) was firmly reminding me that I am in fact free to label him if I wish (though apparently committing such an act would lead directly to a counteractive shift in his persona; something I actually find rather strange).

I'd agreed to dog-sit for Richard and his wife, Imogen, a couple of months before. One week away from home was manageable. Easy actually: I like dogs, and I thought I could use the break from humanity in their house out in Titirangi South.

Actually, if I'm honest, I hadn't realised it was a long weekend, and a number of days before said weekend I had to turn down a skiing trip, and long motorcycle trip to Cape Reinga. Well I'm not miffed - there's plenty of time for that later - but I know Richard realised I wouldn't notice that it was a long weekend until... well, probably when I watched the weather on the Sunday night.

Freya, Richard and Imogen's rather large white Pyrenean, was lounging pensively in the hall just outside the door, presumably hoping I would stop staring at the glowing rectangle and chase her through the garden.

I thought that a walk might be in order, and remembered the instruction on the immaculate notepaper left on the kitchen bench: "you'll find the dog leads hanging up in the laundry".

I jumped up, which kicked the dog into immediate action. She sensed impending activity, and relayed her interest by bumping into me and pawing my leg. It was only then I noticed that although I had been in the house countless times, I knew not where the laundry was.

So I searched. For about 30 minutes. I couldn't find it. I'm considering paying Waitakere City Council for the building plans, but I actually think there is no laundry, and Richard is taking the piss.

So that dog's going nowhere, and I'm going to have to buy new clothes to replace my dirty ones.