Playmobil, that Lego-complementary, German bastion of many a plastic childhood fantasy world, is poised to enter the workforce!
Jason Wilson at the Washington Post trialed the innovation, called Playmobil Pro; a pared-down play set that can be used in a play-therapy-like business brainstorming session.
The Playmobil Pro set neutralizes the human figurines by making them all blank white (you can write identifiers on them with dry-erase marker), and provides heavily symbolic accessories — a jester hat, a superhero cape, flowers, a megaphone. Wilson visits 
Legoland Windsor, to contrast the Playmobil Pro experience with that of industry leader Lego Serious Play. He participates in an exercise where he decorates a figure that represents how he thinks others see him.
“I figured I may as well be honest and wrote ‘Troublesome’ on my figure. I attached a winter hood, suggesting that I’m too closed-off, a suitcase for all my baggage, and a tuba, representing that I often have too loud of a voice. I guess I was trying to be cheeky, at first, but I’d also arrived at some truth.
I found it strange how simply adding tiny accessories to a blank Playmobil figure had caused a level of introspection. Yet everyone else at the table was equally, surprisingly self-critical. […]
During the reflection period, there was great excitement about the applications for Playmobil Pro. ‘I had my reservations that Playmobil Pro might not have the same opportunities for riffing,’ [certified Lego facilitator Ben] Mizen said. “But wow, this is great for role play.’ […]
The only note of skepticism came from [fellow participant Greg] Stadler, who said, ‘This is great. But at what point do you put down the toys and start working?’
Wilson’s experience shows that play is important for childhood development, but is difficult to translate into the adult experience. We don’t play the way kids do; our brains no longer require it. So, it may feel weird sitting in a circle of grownups slapping accessories on faceless figures, and trying to shoehorn a clunky metaphor into our choices.
But who’s to say we shouldn’t try? Feeling like we shouldn’t — being told to “grow up” by authority — is how we lost that skill to begin with! Tell us, dear reader: Would you feel self-conscious, or creatively unleashed, playing with Playmobil Pro with your boss?
In this newsletter, we have encountered the many wonders of bees. But Texas Monthly has an account of another we can — possibly — add to the list: Lyme disease therapy??
Unfortunately, the science is murky, but that seems par for the course for anything involving Lyme — so named after a town in Connecticut where, in the early 1970s, residents began feeling feverish, achy, and intensely fatigued after being bit by deer ticks carrying the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. A course of antibiotics usually clears up infections caught early, but symptoms can persist afterward as “post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome”. Major controversy starts when people feel chronic fatigue and pain, without a conclusive b. burgdorferi infection in their past, and attribute their experience to “chronic Lyme.” Many experts don’t think chronic Lyme exists. But that doesn’t mean the pain and fatigue and disruption sufferers experience don’t.
One such sufferer was Tricia Gschwind, who believed she had chronic Lyme after spotting a bullseye rash on her ankle in 2009. Therapies from established doctors did 
nothing to alleviate her symptoms, so she approached alternative therapies. Soon, she was deliberately stinging herself with honey bees (!) — and, incredibly, started feeling better.
“It is possible — some would say probable — that these individuals are promoting a technique whose success is based more on psychology than pharmacology. There is little science to substantiate a cure by stinging. There have been two clinical studies investigating the link between bee venom and Lyme, and though they are compelling, they are confined to petri dishes. […]
Yet these in vitro experiments don’t translate to the human body. For starters, bees don’t carry enough venom to have more than a local effect. This is a good thing, experts argue, because if the venom did reach the bloodstream in a dose large enough to be effective against the bacteria, it could kill the patient. ‘Many things are antibiotic — like bleach,’ said Sam Robinson, a venom researcher at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. ‘Bleach is effective at killing any microbe, but you can’t use it as a drug.’”
Apitherapy — the use of bee products in human health management — has been part of folk medicine for millennia. How the bee-sting protocol operates for followers is up in the air: after all, the placebo effect actually works. I’d personally steer clear of any treatment whose side effects include sudden anaphylaxis, as well as honey bee murder! But that’s easy to say if I’m not at the end of my rope.
Humans are great at a lot of things — but one that we excel at most is being unconsciously biased towards how we see the world!
As such, we have created lots of so-called “intelligence” tests, designed to gauge how the non-human animals with whom we share our planet measure up in the smarts department. But, as we’ve explored in this space before, these sorts of tests are often favour human-like behaviour as the gold standard. For example, the classic mirror self-recognition test is a cinch for species that are heavily visual in their information processing — that is, us, and not, say, notoriously nose-smart dogs.
But even with that caveat, every once in a while an animal will beat us at our own (heavily rigged) intelligence game. Like the Atlantic puffin recently observed by Annette L. Fayet of Oxford University, who was the second puffin the scientist had observed using our most sacrosanct of intelligence markers, a tool.
“This time, the action unfolded in front of a camera: The bird spots a stick and grasps it with a cartoon-bright beak. The bird makes a burbling sound. It turns, as if to face the lens. And then it scratches its chest feathers with the stick’s pointy end.
This was not some nesting behavior gone awry. Puffins collect soft grass for their nests, then hurry into their burrows with beaks full of bedding. The puffin in Iceland dropped the stick after it finished scratching. Hours later, the camera recorded the stick, still discarded, on the ground.”
Puffins now join the 1 per cent of species worldwide that have been observed using tools, a group which includes their feathered brethren New Caledonian crows and keas (a New Zealand parrot). And they also join us; showing humans that, not only are our attempts to wall ourselves off from our fellow animals completely arbitrary, but that species-specific necessity breeds species-specific invention. Smart — “for an animal” — really is smart!
Happy New Year, and welcome to the future!
With the holidays over and done with, I’m sure plenty of folks are showing off what Santa brought them. The especially lucky may have found 2019’s trendy audio accessory, a pair of wireless earbuds, in their stocking.
But the proliferation of low-profile earbuds and headphones has some safety experts worried. Between the music pumped into our ears, phone screens hijacking our eyes, and winter hoods blocking our periphery, being a pedestrian in the winter can be fatal.
But a team out of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University is hoping to change the frightening statistics, by creating “smart” headphones. With (standard) ’phones in, many folks can no longer hear a honked horn or the whoosh of an approaching vehicle: The proposed headphones would sense those external cues, and then impose a warning sound right overtop of the user’s playlist or podcast of choice, in-ear.
“The research and development of the smart headphones is complex: It involves embedding multiple miniature microphones in the headset as well as developing a low-power data pipeline to process all the sounds near to the pedestrian. It must also extract the correct cues that signal impending danger. The pipeline will contain an ultra-low power, custom-integrated circuit that extracts the relevant features from the sounds while using little battery power.
The researchers are also using the most advanced data science techniques to design the smart headset. Machine-learning models on the user’s smartphone will classify hundreds of acoustical cues from city streets and nearby vehicles and warn users when they are in danger. The mechanism will be designed so that people will recognize the alert and respond quickly.”
Of course, the crank in me pipes up around now, demanding why we can’t just look up and pay attention to our surroundings to keep ourselves safe. But human beings are not perfect actors — and if we can rely on tech to remind our fallible brains that there’s a baby in the backseat, why not with walking distracted? (Besides, sometimes a driver just doesn’t see you; and in a battle between a 2-tonne chunk of metal and human body, guess who loses.)
Averting tragedy is a net good that has no moralizing value. And, really, walking is so much better with a soundtrack! Why not make tech work for we pedestrians this winter?
As a Canadian by choice, I freely acknowledge that my current home has a few advantages over the country of my birth, the good old U.S. of A.
But there’s one factor where the Land of Liberty has the Great White North beat: its linguistic crucible has led to the only second person plural pronoun our language has seen in hundreds of years. That’s right, I’m talking about “y’all.”
Y’all is a contraction of “you all” that came out of the American South, and as such has been unfairly maligned as a word used by stereotypes: cowboys and the above-linked (Beverly!) hillbillies. But it offers English speakers a handy way to refer to a group of people collectively (instead of the imprecise “you,” which is also singular). And, most importantly, it does so in a gender-neutral way: The most common workaround for lack of the appropriate pronoun is the term “you guys” which is increasingly inappropriate and insensitive to folks who identify as other than cisgender male. But “y’all” faces an uphill battle on several fronts towards widespread linguistic acceptance.
“For most […], pronouns fly under the radar. We repeat what we hear in the ‘linguistic ether,’ says [language, literacy and culture professor Christine] Mallinson, without much thought. And because we choose pronouns so automatically, it can be hard to change habits, even with strenuous mental effort, as those now incorporating the singular ‘they’ may have discovered.
For all the same reasons, however, doing the work to adopt new pronoun customs sends a strong message about one’s personal or cultural beliefs, Mallinson explains. So if someone values language that supports equality, but is unwilling to back away from you guys,’ they probably should be able to explain why. This is where this debate can get into sensitive territory.”
I think I’d feel like less of an impostor using “y’all” than some others (including the Canadian author of the above article), as I have my Americanness to fall back on. And I kind of like the fact it references being a rough and tough cowpoke — qualities that may be useful in certain meetings! Joking aside, English has a dire need for a word that refers to community, and especially a community that is diverse, and rich in the lived experiences of its members. The good news is, that fascinating word already exists. And the only thing I and all y’all, have to do is use it!
Despite our work-from-anywhere ethos plenty of DFC’s newsletter readers work in regular-style office jobs and have a boss, and a Slack channel, and a kitchenette with a sink that SOMEONE always manages to leave their dirty lunch dishes in. (When I worked in an office, that someone was Nikki. Man, it feels GREAT to finally call her out on it!)
So a big wave hello to you who are reading this on your work laptop! And a warning: According to a recent rundown in the Wirecutter, there are all sorts of things that we shouldn’t be doing on our work tech, including our laptop, many of which don’t occur to the average employee.
We all know that certain risqué web searches are best confined to your own smartphone. But what about storing a wee completed tax form on your work computer? Or taking ten minutes to side-hustle a vintage clothing sale? Not so much, writes Thorin Klosowski. But how about popping all your personal stuff into G Suite — that has to be safe, right?
“[It’s] easy to think of G Suite, which includes services like Gmail, Google Docs, and Sheets, as private productivity software. But the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes several reasons why you shouldn’t use a company-issued Google account to store your private data. Administrative users with G Suite Enterprise can search for specific phrases in an employee’s emails and documents, just like you can in your own account. Employers can set up audits to be notified of suspicious behaviour and create custom scripts for retaining data.
For example, an employer could establish a process by which your email drafts are saved even if they’re never sent. If you’ve ever considered drafting a resignation email calling your boss a jerk, do so elsewhere.”
This festive season, when so many office rules fly out the window like St. Nick (Bailey’s next to the coffee machine, anyone?), consider Klosowski’s tips a gift to future you. Come January, when the drudge returns, they might be helpful to remember… For your own peace of mind, let alone your boss’s!
Out in the boonies, we at the DFC offices rarely encounter unwanted noise. With rare exception, we work to a near-uniform soundtrack of crickets, the soft lowing of cows (link: photo of the neighbours?), and the wind in the leaves of the many maple trees.
But it’s hard to deny that the world is getting louder. We’re all used to cars, airplanes, and the occasional restaurant by now. But we’re getting deeper into an era of new technologies, with sound- and hearing-related fallout that is largely uninvestigated.
The Atlantic has one such tale, in which an Arizona homeowner named Karthic Thallikar had his sanity nearly destroyed by an annoying low-decibel mystery hum that took over his neighbourhood, and penetrated even his bedroom walls.
The culprit? A data centre owned by CyrusOne — that is, a massive building that houses hundreds of corporate servers, which each power up every time a client checks their bank balance online, for example, or looks up vacation destinations. This generates heat, which compounds with the heat from all the other servers, and requires massive cooling units (called “chillers”) mounted on the side of the building. The sound of the chillers drilled into Thallikar’s ears, and they drove him to nearly sell his house.
“Servers, like humans, are happiest at temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the chillers were crucial in keeping the heat-generating machines comfortably cool as they worked. In the fall of 2014, around the time Thallikar started noticing the whine, CyrusOne had had room for 16 chillers. Now it was getting ready to add eight more. […]
The city [had] essentially offered CyrusOne carte blanche to develop an area three times the size of Ellis Island into one of the nation’s largest data-storage complexes: 2 million square feet protected by biometric locks, steel-lined walls, bullet-resistant glass, and dual-action interlocking dry-pipe sprinkler systems. CyrusOne even has two of its own substations humming with enough energy (112 megawatts) to light up every home in Salt Lake City — or, more relevant to the matter at hand, to power several dozen 400- and 500-ton chillers.”
After a long fight, Thallikar and his neighbours were ultimately successful in getting CyrusOne to baffle the sound of their chillers with specialized nylon blankets. But Thallikar soon discovered a new whine in the neighbourhood — a different financial data centre, with its own phalanx of chillers. Welcome to the 21st century noise polluter, whose racket is directly tied to the tech in our lives! I say we need regulations against this new breed of invasive noise: We humans who live near these facilities can’t keep engaging in case-by-case struggles forever.
The DFC ranch runs on well water and a septic system, so we put a little more thought into turning on the tap than your average city dweller might. Also, water conservation is a key issue in our neck of the woods — so I was fascinated by a new invention that looks to cut bathroom water usage by half in one of the trickiest places: the toilet bowl.
A team out of Penn State has invented a spray coating, based on the science of the pitcher plant. When the rough interior of the carnivorous plant’s flower is saturated by rain, the surface becomes devastatingly slippery, spelling doom for insects that attempt to feed on its tempting nectar. What happens in a toilet bowl boasting this combo coating is, while similar, a bit… less glamorous.
“Like the plant, the design uses two separate coatings, which create a combination of roughness and lubrication. When the coating is sprayed on a surface, like a ceramic toilet bowl, it covers the surface in nano-scale polymer “hairs” — 100,000 times thinner than human hair — that permanently attach to the surface. A second spray coats the microscopic hairs with lubrication. In lab tests with synthetic poop, the researchers watched as the waste slid effortlessly off the surface of a toilet bowl, even though poop normally sticks to toilets, requiring large amounts of water to flush it away. The coating also repels bacteria.”
A startup will be bringing the now-combined-in-one sprays to market soon. This is great in so many ways: When a toilet doesn’t have to work as hard to flush sticky waste, users can get away with using the “low” setting on dual flush toilets for basically everything! (If you still have a single flusher, you can hack its capacity to reduce the volume of each flush.) Even more importantly, the coating could be a game-changer for waste disposal solutions in areas without much water or infrastructure. (It was initially developed for the Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.)
Since the flush toilet, as we know it, was invented by Thomas Crapper (I’m not kidding) in the late 19th century, nothing much has changed in the fundamental operation. But this new coating reduces — or eliminates, pun intended — the need for water, which is an innovation especially suited to our age of conservation. I’m interested to see where it goes!
At DFC, we are, always and forever Team Dog. So much so, that I almost let my enthusiasm run away with me when I first saw news of this fascinating discovery: Swedish researchers are studying the body of a two-month-old puppy, found in the Siberian permafrost and estimated to have died 18,000 years ago. The puppy is so well preserved that it still has its wee perfect baby teeth, a sweet little nose, and soft, fuzzy fur over most of its body.
But there’s so much more to the puppy’s preservation than making me coo “Sweet boy!” at my tablet screen for far too long. This puppy is genetically neither a full dog that we would recognize nor a wolf — and may ultimately represent an intermediary stage in the history of domestication that we can finally study up close!
“‘We have a lot of data from it already, and with that amount of data, you’d expect to tell if it was one or the other,’ David Stanton, a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, told CNN. ‘The fact that we can’t might suggest that it’s from a population that was ancestral to both — to dogs and wolves.’ […]
The origin of dogs is still not completely clear, hence the importance of the new discovery. The first domesticated dogs emerged in Asia around 14,000 to 16,000 years ago, but genetic evidence suggests the divergence date between dogs and ancient wolves happened at some point between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.”
As a dog owner and fan, my heart goes out to the little pup, that met a sad (but evolutionarily necessary) end so long ago and has been encased in ice ever since. But now that it has time-travelled to our era, I’m so excited about its potential gifts to science! I hope we can learn more about this pupper’s canine descendants, and why and how they chose us, through its story.
When we moved DFC from the Toronto suburbs to the deep wilderness of the Frontenac Arch, we downsized majorly. At the time, I drew inspiration from philosophies like KonMari (“Sorry, Jill, that chewed up stuffie that used to be shaped like a dolphin no longer sparks joy.”) and minimalism (“Do I really need a kitchen whisk? I could just use three forks!”).
I didn’t go to full extremes, though: While trimmed, our household still boasts all the necessities, including a whisk. And I’m glad — because a backlash against these streamlining trends is a-brewing, and it shows that they could really drive a person mad.
In one such account in Fast Company, Adele Peters writes of life in her “Tiny House”. (The Tiny House movement aims to reduce human consumption, minimize our dependence on private property, and solve the housing crisis by making homes out of structures under 400 square feet.) Peters confesses she’s motivated more by personal economic concerns rather than fears for the fate of the planet: She lives in the Bay Area, where a normal-sized apartment is frankly too expensive for her. But even so, she hates what her tiny house has — pun intended — reduced her to.
“It’s small enough that doing anything — getting the vacuum from a tiny closet or something out of a drawer in the kitchen — often involves a Tetris-like game of moving multiple other things out of the way. Right now, because I have one chair too many, lowering my Murphy bed from the wall means moving the chair, which then blocks something else. […]
My bathroom, a 3-by-6-foot ‘wet room’ with a walk-in shower, is so small that it doesn’t have a sink, and I have to use the nearby kitchen sink to brush my teeth. Though the apartment is fast to clean, it gets messy equally quickly. Invariably, I meet friends elsewhere, since there aren’t enough places to sit. Even as a minimalist who once happily lived with an ex-boyfriend in a space that was only a little larger, I think it’s too small.”
Most importantly, tiny house living distracts from other solutions that directly address the systemic nature of housing shortages. Why else should someone see a 240 sq ft shed as their only option in a city where, say, rents are artificially driven up by folks who own condos but don’t live there — *cough* Toronto *cough*?
There has to be an in-between solution: comically small tiny houses and monster manses that are more conspicuous consumption than the home must not be the future of the market. I’m interested in the debate, as the Tiny House develops from trend to bellwether.