James L Adams—People and Products

Happy Holiday

Santa Claus was good to me — lots of books, bottles of alcohol-containing beverages, gift certificates to Home Depot, tools, home-made candy, and other wonders. I'll be posting on several of the books, since they have to do with products and people. But first I have to read them. And I think Christmas trees are a good product, independently of one's religion.

Also Christmas provides an always-satisfying gathering of the clan, as can be seen below.

 

Product Packaging/Marketing Madness

The marketing mania which surrounds us has caused products to often be overwhelmed by packaging.   Despite my safety glasses, I recently got a small piece of metal in my eye.  No damage, but the doctor who found it recommended that I use eye drops for a few days.  Since we didn’t seem to have any at home, and since my wife was going to the grocery store, I asked her to pick up some.  I expected the usual small bottle with stopper over drip end, but instead I received a 2 inch by 3 inch by 4-1/2 inch box, containing six complicated plastic moldings, each of which could be torn into four pieces, each piece containing a small amount of a fluid – must have been eye drops.  The box served the usual marketing purposes, pointing out that they were “high performance” (zero to sixty in four seconds?), and provided extended protection, fast symptom relief, and contain no preservatives.  Also that they were the “#1 doctor recommended brand”, and that they “elevate the science of dry eye therapy to a new level”.  And furthermore being markedly larger than the usual small bottles, and therefore being highly visible, they showed up on the counter and were able to contain a good bit of advertising. 

 And, the instructions as to how you tear the plastic moldings apart and drop the liquid in your eye included a warning that after putting one or two drops in the eye, one should throw away the container and definitely not try to use the remaining fluid—convenient for the seller of the eye drop fluid.  It would mean that the box of beautifully molded parts would only deliver two dozen doses.

 I was dazzled by the tooling necessary to form the moldings with the fluid inside of them,  and entertained by the attempt to promote eye drops to a more sophisticated medical product.  My grandfather was a blacksmith and farmer before the age of safety glasses, and was often getting foreign bodies in his eye.  My grandmother made him eye drops.  As I remember, a cup of water, a partial spoon of  salt, a pinch of baking soda, and a couple of drops of glycerine, boiled for a few minutes, and returned to room temperature, and voila—eye drops.  Undoubtedly the modern ones are manufactured with great precision in a sterile environment, but come on, the science of dry eye therapy?

  The photo shows the eye drops in contrast to a traditional small bottle.  The “kit” and the small bottle cost approximately the same, but the bottle contains much more fluid, and does not try to tell me I can’t reuse it.  The process of dropping the fluid in the eye is the same in both cases, so I don’t see any gain in convenience, and I would have to throw away all those nice plastic moldings (undoubtedly getting the unused fluid on the floor).  So I will happily stick to the traditional bottle, knowing I can get lots more drops for a buck and that I can feel good about not succumbing to marketing people trying to sell me another new “innovation”.

Good Product —Metropolitan Opera Hi-Def Simulcasts.

Marian and I discovered these productions a couple of  years ago, and I, to my amazement, have become a serious opera fan.  I have always liked certain music from operas, but live opera included such things as long drives to San Francisco, difficulty in finding a parking place, expensive tickets, cramped seats, and inability to see very well (the closer seats were more than expensive).  A theater in Palo Alto a few blocks from my house presents the simulcasts, and throws in free parking 100 feet or so from the door, extraordinarily comfortable seats with lots of leg room and usually empty seats on each side of you, $25 tickets, excellent coffee and ice cream as well as popcorn, and a very large screen and outstanding sound.

 And a presentation that puts you in the action both on and off stage.  I am still trying to understand how they do it.  Although the performances are broadcast live, the camera work is of movie quality, and the views of everything from singers to orchestra members, to scenery, to back-stage activities are seamless, shot from all angles and distances, seemingly perfectly integrated, and needless to say, up close.

 Before these simulcasts, I had not appreciated such things  as the acting skills of the performers (relatively cheap seats), or the effort spent to stage an opera.  The last one Marian and I saw was Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which entranced us for 6 hours (it is not easy to entrance the two of us for that long),  plus two long breaks in which we could watch the 100 person stage crews do such things as erect a full-sized section of old-time Nurnberg and scenery for the final act, which begins as a discussion in the interior of a house and ends with a huge pageant in the town park.  And sandwiched in between were the usual interviews with performers, which shows them to be regular people with excellent senses of  humor.

 One of the all-time great interviews in the Simulcasts we have seen was of a formerly little known tenor named Jay Hunter Morris, who grew up in Paris, Texas, and worked  his way from church choir to back-up roles in less known opera houses.  The performance was Siegfried of Wagner’s Ring cycle,  one of the most difficult roles in the opera.  Siegfried sings almost constantly through the several hour-long opera. Only a few tenors in the world are thought capable of performing this role at the top level, and eight days before the first performance the tenor scheduled for this production realized he could not do the performance.  In came Jay Morris, who not only performed it brilliantly, and loved the part, but when interviewed proved to be a more than lovable small-town boy-makes-good. I shall never forget him lying on a couch trying to recover for the next act, and excitedly saying things such as  “I am so tired, but this is so fun”, and “who’d believe someone from Paris, Texas could wind up singing at the Met?”. He had definitely been discovered.  Needless to say, he is now world famous and the receipient of many honors.

 I am usually a believer that live performances are superior to media ones (obvious exception of movies). But I am well aware that attendees at Stanford’s new football stadium are often watching the big TV screens hanging in the middle of the field rather than the live players, and such heresy even occurs at Giants baseball games.  And I certainly realize that the Met Simulcasts have made me lose my interest in attending the live opera in San Francisco, or in New York for that matter. And I am very happy to see technology remain quietly in the backround, which I think should be the case, and yet deliver a product with the value of these Simulcasts.

Flying Leafblowers—The Drone and Life

The media, perhaps looking for a cause, seems to be becoming increasingly interested in drones.  An example is an article entitled Free the Drones (here) and one entitled The Robot Overhead (here) in the December 6fh-12^th edition of The Economist..  The gist of the first article is that Congress should loosen the grip of the Federal Aviation Authority on commercial drone flights, since they are so useful to business.  Congress has ordered the FAA to come up with new rules for commercial drone flights by September 30^th, but the Economist is clearly worried that the rules will remain overly restrictive.  I certainly hope they aren’t wide open. The second goes into present and potential commercial uses of drones.  But are we setting about to produce the equivalent of automobile traffic in the air?

 The photo reflects one of my fears—noise.  My wife and I hate gas powered leaf blowers, even though she has a large garden.  In our area we can hear one or more of them being used much of the time. The ones powered by two-cycle gas engines are the worst, followed by those powered by four cycle gas engines.  Relative to the gas powered ones, electrical ones are okay, but not as good as rakes. Finally, manufacturers, goaded by local laws, are quieting the things down, but it has been a good while.  How  about drones?  What kind of restrictions will there be on noise.

 I am all in favor of airplanes,  the commercial and military ones of which are tightly regulated during their design and operation .  And as for noise, the military ones are usually based away from population centers, and attention is being paid to commercial engine noise levels (there are, of course, people who buy houses next to airports and developers who build them, so the problem will continue to exist).  Private planes seem to be only marginally muffled. And there are necessary exceptions, such as the helicopter that lives on the top of the Stanford University hospital and flies directly over my house on its errands of mercy—we have not figured out how to build a quiet helicopter yet.  Who is going to control the drone noise?  Hopefully, not the Economist.

 Since we live close to a football stadium, we are in the pattern taken by small planes noisily pulling large advertising banners.  They seem to fly around from tail-gating time until the game begins.  We are capable of reading the banners the first time around, and like many people,  the more times we see an ad the less we like the business sponsoring it.  Marketing seems to be uncontrollable in the U.S. at present.  Are drones going to be enlisted to further bother us with ads?  How about loud speakers?

 There is awareness and resistance to increasing drone traffic.  Despite Congress there will be regulations as to when and where various types can be flown and by who, and controlling such things as reliability  and even noise.  And the second Economist article mentions hunters shooting one down.  In fact I heard of a ballot measure in one state in the U.S. seeking to make it legal to shoot down drones.

I am not against drones in general,  But I see another example of technology coming faster than we can think through the consequences.  In a supplement to the 2013 Worldwide UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) Roundup, published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, there was a list of 57 nations and 270 manufacturers developing and producing some 960 unique type of UAV’s, 144 of them in the U.S.  I am personally glad the FAA is slowing things down.