Wave your hands more, I can’t hear you!
I wonder if medical science has discovered the nerve that connects our hands to our vocal chords?

Some things are harder to describe “hands free” than others. If you are trying to tell someone how to navigate a series of left, right turns on a curly back-road, for example, a bit of hand action is almost mandatory. What is really funny is watching somebody describe this same route over the phone. The receiver of the directions can obviously not see their hands, and yet the direction-giver will still wave them about. It is even funnier if they try to describe which exit to take at a round-about. At this point the complex hand movements may result in inadvertantly dropping the phone.

The capacity to add meaning to words by swirling gestures is often credited to different nationalities, some more than others. An Italian friend of mine willingly admits his need to talk with his hands. It is almost a badge of honour, a treasured aspect of his heritage. Talking with your hands is something he savours like a good glass of wine. For him, talking without his hands would be like drinking watered down grape juice in comparison. It is a far richer communication experience, as it involves greater depths of physicality. More than hearing is involved but also kinaesthetic aspects of space and time, and the visual processing of movement and scope. Having a conversation where both people wave their hands is a deep and moving experience, about half way between talking and giving each other a big hug.

Basically anything swirly really needs at least one hand free if you want to describe it properly. If you were to tie string across both hands and ask someone to describe a spiral staircase you may find you’ve discovered a new knitting method. Either that or you’d have to free the person using scissors.

Can you imagine a world where everything could be discussed hands free? What a boring place it would be. You could never tell someone the distance between the pegs needs to be “about this big” or to stir the soufflé mix “sort of like this” (see, without my hands, you actually have no idea what I’m talking about!). We could never discuss soft serve ice cream cones, spiral staircases, and definitely not fishing stories. If somebody were to discover the secret nerve responsible for this phenomenon, maybe we could just short-circuit the fishing stories part and keep the rest? Now that would be a scientific discovery worth making.
Posted by A.Ready at 9:03 PM 0 comments
Sunday, January 6, 2008

Who decided shopping malls needed to be the size of a small suburb?

In Adelaide we have some shopping centres that are larger than many airports. These are not pleasant places to be, yet they seem to pop up at the rate of mushrooms across the urban landscape.

Sailors in years gone by would navigate by the stars. Stars were fixed objects that could be seen from anywhere. The same can now be done during the day by tringulating your position between the nearest three Westfield and Centro monoliths. The advantage of navigating by these structures is that you can do it in the daytime when navigating by the stars is slightly less reliable.

It isn’t just the sheer size of these places that makes a minor shopping expedition akin to hunting down a rare species of mosquito in the jungles of Africa. The real reason these places are so horrible to visit is the simultanous bombardment of evey single one of your body’s senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste and hearing are all working overtime as you try to find your purchase. The mind becomes overstimulated within about seven minutes, causing parts of the brain to begin shutting down. This is actually part of the management’s cunning plan. They realize enough of your brain will be overwhelmed with noise, advertsing banners and food smells that it will no longer be capable of rational thought. This is the point at which you are in danger of buying an automated egg whisk at 3% off, convinced you’ve found the bargain of the decade.

While I understand these methods are obviously working well, I believe more customers could be attracted if they considered some new approaches. I submit these here for your consideration, and suggest if you like them you forward them to the management of whatever super-shopping mega-plex you live closest to.

1. Make it mandatory for every shop to play the same music. I don’t even care how bad the music is, just so long as it is all the same. Listening to Billy Ray Cirus croon out “Achey Brakey Heart” is still better than having to listen to five rubbish songs all at once. I would also take this one step further and suggest that whichever politician promised to legislate single-stream listening material as mandatory for all shopping centres would be guaranteed the majority vote in any election.

2. GPS. These things are pretty advanced now. I want to arrive at the entrance, write “electric frying pan (stainless steel)” into the GPS navigator, and see which stores have them and where these stores are. A zoom function could then show you the exact location within the store so you don’t have to wander through the ladies underwear department looking like a bewildered pervert. Incidentally, why is it that whenever you get lost in a department store you end up in the ladies underware section?

3. Voice recognition boom gates on the carpark. You tell the gate what you want to buy. If your purchase is obviously cumbersome and heavy, such as a bed, you get assigned a car park close to the door. If you’re only buying sunglasses it won’t kill you to park in the spots that are a fifteen minute walk from the door, so long as the management also install drinking fountains along the way.

4. Marked lanes in all walkways. If you are a slow walker or pushing a pram or trolley you could then keep to the left, allowing quicker foot traffic to easily overtake on the right. On my calculations this would reduce the average length of time spent on any shopping mall visit by at least 13 minutes.
Posted by A.Ready at 3:58 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, January 2, 2008

I recently upgraded my mobile phone. This is always a very exciting time for me. As most phone contracts seem to last at least 24 months it is more exciting than Christmas or a birthday. These special occasions come along every year, whereas the biannual mobile phone upgrade is a much rarer occurrence.

I don’t know why, but I love mobile phones. The only thing that sometimes annoys me is the fact people can call you while you are doing something important. A few times it has rung when I’ve even been in the toilet. If mobiles didn’t interrupt so often they’d almost be the ideal gadget. This may seem contrary to the whole point, but what appeals about the mobile phone is its ridiculously high gadget quotient rating, rather than being easily contactable no matter what I am doing. Oh, also the fact that I can call other people even if they may be away from home in the middle of doing something important. That’s really handy.

Human beings are an intensely gadget-driven race. Just look at the space station. Not a great deal of practical use but, man, what a gadget! Or, take cutlery for example. It’s generally much easier to eat with your hands, but this wonderful tool means you no longer have to get your fingers covered in sticky barbecue sauce when you eat pork ribs. Unless, of course, you want to get messy so you can lick your fingers clean afterwards. This may not be entirely relevant to mobile gadgetry, unless you tend to clean your phone the same way. The coolest new gadget on my mobile is GPS navigation. This now means that whenever I get lost, I can work out just how badly confused I am. Unfortunately this still happens a bit as I tend to be half-way through most journey’s before the GPS has worked out where I am. I must get in the habit of turning it on sooner.

My new phone comes with many time-saving features. The calendar is great, it means I never need to carry a pen and paper because I can always jot a note or a date straight into my mobile. Not having a pen does make it difficult to sign cheques or paper forms, but I have thought of an even gadgetier way around this. I plan to emboss my signature on the back of the phone’s case. I could also carry a small ink-pad, thus allowing me to use my phone as an instant signature stamp. Another bonus of this fantastic new invention is that I will be able to sign my name in about one tenth of a second – I’d just whack my phone down on the piece of paper. This, of course, is so long as I don’t include the time taken to dig the ink pad out of my pocket, open it, moisten it under a nearby tap, rub the back of the phone on it, correctly orient the phone before stamping, and then also to wipe the phone clean after locating a piece of paper towel. Other than that it would make signing things a breeze.

By the way, you better not suggest this to Nokia before I do or I will personally call your mobile every time you are on the toilet, and pretend to be a wrong number from Finland.
Posted by A.Ready at 9:32 PM 0 comments
Thursday, January 31, 2008