Category: Ministrivia

There’s a trend in the schools to circumvent cellphone bans. Kids are using very high-pitched ringtones that most adults can’t hear (NY Times article).

Can you? Click here.

I know that PageMaker stinks, but can anyone explain why when I put a .tif file into PageMaker from Photoshop the CMYK gets completely thrown out of whack (a lot of red comes through). The color is fine in Acrobat, but the picture gets distorted. Can anyone give me some advice? I’m attaching the picture.

Have you ever gotten a bill with “Track This Bill – www.wheresgeorge.com” stamped on it? If so, you’ve been in possession of one of the millions of bills that have been logged in by the Great American Dollar Bill Locator community aka “Where’s George?”.

The site was started in December of 1998 as a way of creating a tracking service for following $1 bills as they circulate through the country. The guy that created it did it initially as a kind of a lark but it caught on. As of today, almost 88 million bills have been stamped and entered into the “Where’s George?” database.

The concept is simple. Anyone who gets a bill with a “Where’s George?” stamp can go to the site and look to see where the bill has been. At the site, the possessor of the bill is encourage to reenter the bill with the zip code of its current location. If enough people follow up, you can track the bill as it circulates.

The bills will typically have a stamp on them that looks something like these:

“Where’s George?” is an interesting phenomena. It seems to be reaching just about the right critical mass. It’s still enough of a rarity to run across one of the “Where’s George?” bills that it catches people’s eye. Yet there are enough people registered (i.e. around 150,000) and tracking bills (around 40,000 entries a day) that you can actually get a realistic idea of how bills are moving around.

A cult following has grown with some people devoting considerable time to stamping and tracking bills. A “Where’s George?” badge of honor among aficienados, aka Georgers is to achieve the “50 State Bingo”. If you are an original register of a bill, you get an email notice, considered a “hit”, when someone else reenters the bill. If a bill you have registered gets entered from a new state you are considered to have gotten a “hit” from that state and you add that state to your Bingo list. Once you get hits from all 50 states you have reached the “Where’s George?” hall of fame equivalent, the 50 State Bingo List which now totals 266 members (FYI – people who are on the cusp awaiting one last state to reach their 50 State Bingo are called “49ers”).

To get an idea of to what extent some people will carry this, here’s a list of the “Top Toms”. A “Tom” is someone who enterer $2 bills (Thomas Jefferson’s picture is on the $2 bill). The Top Tom has entered over 31,000 $2 bills into the system!!! That’s a little nuts.

“Where’s George?” seems to perfectly follow the psychological concept of an intermittent reward being the best way of reinforcing behavior (the same concept that makes slot machines so addictive). Typically, one must register dozens of bills before you have enough in the system that you are likely to get a hit from someone entering a found “Where’s George?” bill. However, the rarity of getting a return hit means that when it happens it’s quite rewarding. Georgers are definitely hooked on getting hits from their registered bills. Here’s a guy, John of Lower Merion, who has his own personal website that tracks his hits.

How did I learn all this stuff? Am I a closet Georger? Ans: I don’t think so – although I have registered and tagged a couple of “Where’s George?” bills. I simple learned a lot by reading The Encyclopædia Georgetannica.

Here’s a list of a whole bunch of other “Where’s George?” related websites that you might find interesting.

As silly as this all may seem, there has actually been some real benefit from the project. A German researcher used the “Where’s George?” data to model how people travel. That data helped his research team formulate a mathematical model that could help predict how epidemic diseases spread. Read more here.

So the next time you run across a “Where’s George?” bill, take a few moments and register it to find out where it’s been.

PS. There’s also a “Where’s Willy?” which is an affiliated website that tracks Canadian paper money. The name Willy refers to Sir Wilfrid Laurier – the first French Canadian Prime Minister whose portrait appears on the $5 bill (Canada has moved to using coins rather than bills for $1 and $2 demominations of their currency).

Google truly is an internet phenomena. Here’s a company that started with absolutely no business plan for making a profit but grew into a company with billions of dollars of cash on hand (As of March 30th, Google had $8 billion in the bank).

With so much cash at it’s disposal Google is free to play around with dozens of new ideas – some of which might turn out to be quite brilliant, others which will turn out to be real losers. The crazy thing about Google is that while many companies are extremely secretive about what they are working on, Google is quite open about many of their projects (don’t get me wrong, they are also quite secretive about bunches of them too).

You might think of Google Labs as Google’s sandbox. Google Labs, reachable at http://labs.google.com/ is where Google posts links beta versions of products that their scientist and engineers are working on – some of which are neat as hell, others of which will never see the light of day.

Many of Google’s current offerings started out at the Google Labs site. I first started using Google Desktop when it was a beta product at the Google Labs site and it’s changed the way I store and find things on my computer. I know longer have to worry creating folders or files with recognizable names to store things on my computer. I can just dump everything into My Documents then use Google desktop to search for them when I have to access the file.

Google Earth is another neat product. Google Earth is a collection of satellite and aircraft photos from all over the world that you can access on your computer. Most of the earth is covered and you can see enough detail to usually be able to pick out your own home. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you can get some pretty detailed views of your home for example (Marilyn, I can easily pick out the octagonal deck addition to your patio – the hottub is partially in the shade so it isn’t as easy to pick out). Google Earth is wild because you can take panoramic tours of various locations (the Grand Canyon and Chicago River tours are particularly interesting). Google Earth also has a community of users who use Google Earth’s forums to tag interesting items on the photos (talk about mundane – there’s a ton of people committed to finding flying airplanes and their shadows in the photos).

Google Earth turned out to be such raging success, that the Labs now have a Google Mars where you can zoom in on the Red Planet using photos taken from various Mars Missions.

Some others interesting offerings curently in beta include Google Video, where you can search for videos by keywords using the familiar Google interface.

One that I want to try out but haven’t gotten around to it yet is Google Page Creator which proposes to be an easy way to create your own website (Marilyn – you might want to look into this a bit as a possible way to build a site for Dawn).

That’s a quick glance at Google Labs. Try it out. Also check back every couple of months. New and interesting stuff shows up all the time.

Pandora, UncleLar’s mWow I, turned out to be a way practical contribution so this week I decided to go the complete opposite. I think I can comfortable say that no one will find this week’s honoree the least bit practical.

First a little background.

What exactly is a “Numbers Station”? The answer to that supposedly lies in the intriguing world of spies. I’m not talking about the Tom Clancy, John le Carré fantasy world of spying. I’m talking, at least supposedly, real world international spies.

Numbers Stations are shortwave radio frequencies that intermittently suddenly start broadcasting people reciting seemingly random streams of numbers, words, or letters. In theory, they are coded messages that governments use to communicate with their spies in the field.

England’s Irdial-Discs record label recorded a collection of these broadcasts and released them in a four CD set called the Conet Project. The set is available for purchase at Amazon.com.

Now before you think I’ve gone completely wacko and entered the world of conspiracy theorists, there is substantial evidence to support the theory that these stations are in fact spy based. Here’s some reputable journalists’ remarks re Numbers Stations.

The Washington Post: “The Shortwave And the Calling”
Salon: “Counting Spies”
Chris Brand: “Numbers Stations”
and, lastly, a real life spy, Thomas Wagner, mentions Numbers Stations in his tome about escaping from East Berlin.

Interesting you say (or maybe not – afterall the mundane has to come in some time) and you are even asking “Is there any way I can listen to these stations without paying the £39.99 for the CDs.

Yes, I answer, with UncleLar’s mWow II, The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Check out a couple – I’m sure you’ll find them quite mundane. 🙂

One interesting followup. Evidently, the band Wilco, is a fan of Numbers Stations. They sampled one of the stations for the album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. Wilco looped a female voice, supposedly a Mossad agent, repeating the phrase “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” for a minute and a half during “Poor Places” a track on the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album. That led to an interesting lawsuit. Irdial Records sued Wilco for copyright violations. Now I’m not exactly sure Irdial can claim ownership of an anonymous female reciting a phonetic alphabet over the public airways but the suit was settled before it ever went to court with Wilco was forking over some royalty payments to the record company.

While there’s little doubt that this mWow is mundane, I hope I’ve made it a little bit interesting. Now go “enjoy” the recordings.