December | 2006 | Cloud Comedy, Cloud Tragedy

After the 12% temperature rise, I recently ran into another creative use of percentages. Since I expect to run into many more of these (based on how many I’ve noticed in the past) and since they’re fun to point out I’ve created a new CrazyStats category.

This instance comes from a print advertisement for Samsung TVs, stating that their TVs with a 16:10 aspect ratio offer 30% more viewing surface than a 4:3 TV. Sorry, I don’t have a link but this advertisement (for computer monitors instead of TVs) repeats the “larger than 4:3 monitor” claim several times, albeit without quantifying it. This comparison makes no sense until you fix one dimension. And obviously it is to the advantage of the 16:10 screens to fix the height as being common between the two screens and then compare the surface (but even then, you only get a 20% advantage for the 16:10 compared to the 4:3, I don’t know how they came up with 30%). But if you fix the width as being the same then it’s the 4:3 that offers 20% more viewing surface…

Not that I don’t agree that 16:10 is a more useful aspect ratio (that’s what I bought for my monitor at home). But the “larger than 4:3” claim is meaningless. Next thing you know, people will start marketing 4:3 monitors as “16:12” to make them seem “bigger” than 16:10 monitors.

There seems to be a micro-culture of people involved in internet standards. If you measure a micro-culture by the number of its private jokes, then this is definitely one. And there are other signs. A while back, I wrote about the mnot standard geek index. Now Umit has captured the essence of standards interactions in verses. And, according to Umit’s blog post, Jonathan is the Claude Levi-Strauss of this culture (I wasn’t at this presentation, Jonathan please send me the slides if you won’t post them).

One aspect that Umit doesn’t cover in her poems, is the always-entertaining issue of naming things. I don’t have her talent for verses, so here is in plain terms what the discussion often sounds like:

Bob: I think we need to be able to (…). And the best way to do it is by adding an element. I’ll call it Foo for now in my description of how it would work, but I don’t care how we end up calling it as long as the feature is supported.
(30 minutes of discussions about element Foo and how it works, which ends with an agreement)
Chairperson: Great, so we agree to add element Foo.
Alice: Yes, but we need another name. I am not one to argue about names but, Foo makes it sound like (…). We should call it Bar.
Bob: No, we can’t call it Bar, people would think it is used for (…). I don’t really care about names either, but in this case Foo is the best name.
(4 hours of discussions about the name, that end up with a resolution that will be overturned a couple of times before the spec is completed)

If you think I am exaggerating, I know of a set of patterns for which we had all agreed on the definitions but we could not agree on the names. Since there happened to be 7 of them, we almost ended up naming them after the 7 dwarfs as a tie-breaker. Those are the WSDL 2.0 message exchange patterns. And in retrospect it’s good that we didn’t go with the dwarfs since an eighth one was later added (after I left the group). They now have names that sound like they come out of the Kama Sutra: In-Only, Robust In-Only, In-Out, In-Optional-Out, Out-Only, Robust Out-Only, Out-In, Out-Optional-In.

Harlequin and Pantalone would be proud.

Monthly Archives: December 2006

A larger (smoke) screen

Commedia dell (stand)arte