Russell Davies

IT conversations on Thursday 6

A quick interview this week, with Dr. Katrina Firlik, neurosurgeon and author of Another Day In The Frontal Lobe, I just like the way she describes the texture and feel of the brain as being soft, like tofu. I never knew that. I kind of thought the brain would be more like meat.

ivory coast 3-2 serbia & montenegro

holland 0-0 argentina

long term greedy

There's a post at the Re-imagineering blog aching with sadness at the way the Disney theme parks herd you into a shop at every possible opportunity. This is, apparently, exactly contrary to what Walt himself wanted when he built the parks. Sure he was happy to sell you stuff, but he didn't want to dislocate the theme (the point of a theme park, after all) so the stores were discrete and appropriate. Theme came first, retail second.

This reminded me of a disturbing recent trend in UK retaillers - the annoying upsell. You get to the counter of a WH Smith and the poor assistant has to say - 'since you're buying a magazine you can also buy this bar of chocolate at half-price'. (I've yet to discover a product that doesn't qualify you for an enormous bar of chocolate at half-price.) They do the same thing at HMV with half-price DVDs. I'm sure some clever management consultants have demonstrated that this yields significant ROI from the odd person that says yes. But what the model presumably doesn't reveal is that it really irritates the hell out of the rest of us. It slows the transaction down a bit, which I guess isn't the worst thing, but it just sends this horrible 'we're always selling' signal to the customer, at the point where you thought you'd already made all your decisions. They may as well just wave a big sign saying 'to us - you're just one big wallet'.

Doesn't anyone in these companies remember the old Goldman Sachs thing about long-term greedy versus short-term greedy? It's Goldman Sachs after all, not Naomi Klein, but even they recognise the value of short-term sacrifice bringing longer-term gain. ie leave your customers alone sometimes, so they'll like you a bit and come back.

pink air

I notice a few people have been rediscovering Howard Gossage recently, like Iain, and Faris. I was first introduced to his works and thoughts by a planner called Jeffre Jackson who was a strange and brilliant man I met at wieden in Portland. He's still strange and brilliant and now he's started a blog called Pink Air in tribute to Gossage's most famous campaign. Although Jeffre's a friend I have to say I hate his blog. Because every post is genius - thought-provoking, precise and bursting with interesting and contrarian ideas. The bugger.

It's worth starting with his intro on interestingness, then move to interestingness II. Then read everything he's written, but especially people_not_ready, hooray for ignorance, creative rebar and we are glass. He's got a way with words.

brilliantly pointless

Stuart at w+k pointed me at this brilliant computer/art site which has implemented a way of watching world cup games as ASCII streams. If there's a game on you can go to the site and click on one of the links at the bottom with some telnety programme, like terminal on the Mac. If you can't get it to work, or you're too late for a game, or you can't be arsed, this is a few seconds of video of it here. (About 500k) It's fab. Thanks Stu.

angola 1-1 iran

portugal 2-1 mexico

paraguay 2-0 trinidad and tobago

sweden 2-2 england