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While I could rant about Numbers and Excel some more, there’s another genre of formatting that has come to my attention due to some unfortunate circumstances. The way in which information is presented, formatting, is indescribably important for technical manuals, both textually and physically.

Take, for instance, the experience of opening a new Dell computer box. The Quick Start instructions are ready for you, get this, in the form of a map: a large, often near to 24 inch by 24 inch, folding map with color-coded instructions for how to quickly get to the point where booting is possible. Personally, I associate a slow traveling experience when I think of the word “map”. Colonial-era sailors with their maps making oceanic voyages; Renaissance astronomers huddling over their precious papyrus with inks steadily applied with hand-eye precision; the inevitable cross-country, National Lampoon-like, trip with the family where the map is finally pulled out in the desert when, not just the kids, everyone is wondering “are we there yet?” Maps are a bad formatting choice for a Quick Start guide. Dell might as well include some granola bars to re-energize you after the first few hours.

But, finally, and I hate to say this, yet, Trek chose a horrible choice of manual for their bikes. I randomly wanted to get some information about how to take off the bottom bracket on my bike. Though, I had available to me a separate book all about bike maintenance, I thought there could be some Trek-specific information available in the user manual documentation. Lo and behold, the user manual was remarkably thin. But why? This is a road bike, with thousands of parts.

The Trek user manual has in fact only a sleeve for a CD. You’ve. Got. To. Be. Kidding. There is truly no worse format choice for technical documentation for a bike than making it digitized. They should have just encoded the manual into Magic Eye 3D shots showing how to disassemble the rear hub or replace bar tape.

And worse. When I ran the CD, it contains nothing but information about regular maintenance and zip-nada-zero about tear-down. Bummer. In order to replace my bottom bracket, I suppose, I will be relying on the road bike maintenance encyclopedia in my living room and any tips the East Coasters guys pass along. No thanks to Trek.

Again, formatting is so very important. If it requires a half-hour extra on a PowerPoint presentation, it will be worth it. Or, just use Keynote. This article, though terribly too lengthy, is a great example of the physical and communicative advantages of spending some time working out the formatting kinks.

I think iLife ‘08 has some amazing potential, particularly that I finally have a reason to take simple movie clips with my point&shoot camera, but iWork ‘08 caught my attention. Read: Numbers, the application I have been waiting for. My copy is in the mail, at the moment, so the 30-day trial version will have to do.

I write a lot of technical documents for various technical courses and the research, requiring a hefty amalgam of charts and graphs. The first chore is always organizing the data and then making sure Excel translates it correctly into a graphical form. Then, the second chore is formatting it to no end to make sure it is not instantly distinguished as a generic, default Excel graph. But, Excel formatting is terrible, atrocious, and as generic-looking as faux table flowers at a 3-star Italian restaurants. People see Excel graphs and must glean the data. That’s simply the wrong way of consuming a graph.

So, let me take some quickly manufactured data that could supplement this type of inquiry and throw it into Excel for a basic 3-D bar graph. Whiz-bang, here we go.

The remarkable thing about that graph is that it’s not even 3-D. It uses parallelograms to make the bars look like they have a depth, when in fact shadowing, lighting, and textures define a third dimensionality. Numbers will take the same data and create something beautiful for me to throw into a report.

Sigh! What took Apple so long to get this in my hands?! Oh, wait, of course… iPhone. Somehow, Numbers was also able to spot my favorite font, Helvetica Neue, and made it my default. I’m not sure if other people come across this anomaly, but it made me grin. All-in-all, a graph should be formatted so that the data is digested and not excavated. The default formatting of Excel is so elementary that I might as well print my report on a dot-matrix system and retain the same quality of presentation and expect the same efficiency for those consuming my product. Numbers takes the pain out of formatting.

The true test of graphing is the pie chart - true, a dying form of plot, but nevertheless still popular and easy to digest. Here, Excel will take my previous data and make a pie chart. All default here…

Can’t you just hear Excel vomiting? Excel is not made for presentations outside of your cubicle, but for office pranks and medicinal subscription spam. Numbers knows the ropes, though.

While Excel was vomiting in the master bathroom over its attempt at a pie chart, I had to rush to the guest half-bath in order to not wet my pants from seeing the inspiring beauty of Number’s first pie chart plot. And check this out…

An explode slider bar! You haven’t lived until you manually explode a pie chart. Even better, clicking on an individual slice allows you to explode it separately. I can see myself using these types of chart-formatting options in lab reports or whatnot, screen-shotting the space and then drag-dropping into a report. So what if the chart lines are still visible? Instant Alpha in Pages & Keynote can instantly eliminate that stuff! Even leaving the lines there puts a peer’s Excel-based report to shame.

This is not what I was anticipating from Numbers; I actually had more conservative hopes. I use Excel frequently and understand its limits, often hitting them and, consequently, lowering my head in frustration, asking how long I care to troubleshoot the problems. The transition from Excel to Numbers seems to be analogous to my purchase of a semi-luxurious queen mattress after having lived for years on campus-owned twins. I have room to stretch and can land from the wrong direction and still be comfortable with the results.

Another summer is over. For all intents and purposes, given that tomorrow is the first day of on-campus move-in and that I have to do some Apple stuff related to that, I might as well scratch through my itemized summer to-do list. Most of it was unfinished or just plain unconsidered.

Luckily, I spent the time doing what I enjoy. In fact, I discovered that I really enjoy cycling, which I could have pieced together when I was a teen and biked incessantly off-road. Then, let’s call it a rediscovery. A treasure vault given time to ripen. Something having to do with aging to perfection.

Anyways, time passes quickly when you are having fun. It really does. You end up watching the clock - on every time scale, too. So, you first watch for 5pm, then for Friday, then for the 31st, then for the summer to be over so that ridiculous internship will expire. When June came, I realized I should number my summer days. When July arrived, I knew some prime was about to be reached. When August showed its face, I shuddered coldly, but braced for an acceleration of action in the final days. In each case, the time came to me; I had no intention on pursuing the following day, not even if it was likely to contain some exciting activities.

I have never savored a summer so much as this one. It helps that I have moved into a great house with a great roommate. It helps that I can make my own meals. It helps that I can purchase double-ply toilet paper for business purposes when I otherwise would have to put up with single-ply on-campus. It helps that a lot of friends have made this probably my best summer ever.

In order to perpetuate the summers, it’s good and appropriate that I am so interested in teaching at a university level (and have received tons of encouragement and advice towards that goal). A PhD summer isn’t the same as my current summer, but it’s close. It’s at least what you make of it.

I have been witness to dozens or more moving vans rolling around town in the past week, particularly today. Hand-me-down furniture, roped down mattresses & box springs, and some type of hutch-like bookshelf or desk complement all appear to be common features to those just now arriving. My rebel inside proudly declares I can get by without a hutch-like bookshelf or desk complement. Take that.

Having the correct supplement of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance under my belt, x2, my experience taking apart items on my bike is growing rapidly. A guy at East Coasters told me I have remarkably corrosive sweat, so much so that it had eaten up my rear brake cable, albeit the arrangement is of the exposed cable-setup species. Several people have recommended that I should immediately wipe over my bike upon returning from a ride, in order that I shouldn’t have to regularly pay for expensive components like the cassette. But the existing saline saturation over my bike allowed me to take much of it apart this weekend to replace and clean up many pieces that sit below, or slightly to the rear of, my saddle. I’m considering changing the sodium content in my diet to see what happens.

All of my automotive repair experience has been ill-received - looking into an engine compartment makes me peeved, contrary to how looking into a CPU makes me content. Yet, taking things apart on the bike is an indescribably therapeutic exercise. I am envious of Chase’s shop room in his new house, a few blocks from here; seeing completed bikes and spare parts strewn about is like peering into the used section of a local bookshop, a potential goldmine of experience and enlightenment.

I am still relatively new to bike maintenance, but it is truly enjoyable. It has the elements of wonder and thrill like those of Chuck E. Cheese’s, but the longevity of satisfaction and fulfillment like a holy pilgrimage. One day I’ll build my own fixed gear or something, but I will remain content with my toddler’s wonderment over the precision parts I can touch, smell, and see in my hands.

I am biking along Luster’s Cove Road when a black Ford Focus hatchback rolls by and the reclining passenger screams something to me. What do I hear? Some profanity? Praise for my cycling stamina? A garbled mess that doesn’t even sound like a human voice?

If you answered a garbled mess… you’re absolutely correct. The physics behind this touches on 3 separate principles of acoustics/fluid mechanics which require minimal background. Interestingly enough, the physics will also point out that no matter how loud the passenger screams, I will still never get the message.

The sound we hear is a result of minute changes in air pressure that travel like this. That GIF shows a perfect and ideal tone transmission - one for the textbooks. In reality, auditory signals are filled with an infinite number of tones, resulting in such a complex motion that it would appear entirely random to the human eye if it was slowed down enough. The shouting of a passenger is loud and therefore results in very large motion of those particles, but the voice is up against a brutal opponent.

Air motion around most automobiles today is entirely turbulent; meaning that a trail of smoke ingeniously emitted in front of that vehicle in a wind tunnel would show that the air travels in a multitude of directions around the body and windows and mirrors. In enough directions, in fact, that again we discover pure random motion. So, here we have the random pressure wave motion of a voice competing against the random air motion around the automobile. Is this as simple as randomly selecting a winner between Random VS. Random? Actually, it’s even easier than that.

In general home manufacture, to stifle the sound transmission from one room to another it is common to use a type of insulation that acts both thermally and acoustically. Or, if you have a loud piece of machinery in a factory, it’s just as common to put a box around it to deaden some of the harmful noise levels. This isolation works because the sound waves - pressure waves - have to travel through different materials before they reach our ears. It’s common to refer to these different materials, all having different densities, as acoustic impedances. Strangely enough, even though the passenger is shouting out an open window, there is a huge difference in the density of the air immediately inside and outside of the vehicle: a difference in acoustic impedance. These changes of air density significantly hinder proper sound transmission resulting in an enormous loss of volume. In this case, the passenger screams and the sound practically evaporates upon exiting the vehicle.

To put this all together: A passenger shouts, pushing air particles back and forth at a tremendous volume in a very random motion; the signal begins exiting the car where a huge resistance is discovered due to change in air pressure around the fast-moving car, resulting in a diminished volume; then, the turbulence around the car garbles up the message in a purely random fashion. The sound arrives at my ear a mess of noise. There is actually a chance that the passenger could curse to me, “get off the f***in road!” and I would actually hear, in a muted voice, “bring home the gold!” Really. A monkey could one day reproduce every line of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in proper order, given enough random probability. Random & random can sometimes make interesting melodies.

And that is the physics behind: why there is no possible way for me to decipher whatever it is that you are screaming to me from inside of your car when you race past me on Luster’s Cove Road.

A few RSS feeds that I subscribe to get a quick “Mark All As Read” press once a day after I glance over the article titles. Today, though, something decent fell through the line-up from Business Week. Is Starbucks Pushing Prices Too High?

The title isn’t what interests me here. The first point to catch my eye was the use of the term “cannibalizing” in reference to a supersaturation of storefront locations. Some time ago, I was in that mega anti-Starbucks mood, where I discovered that term appeared in their very own annual shareholder report. It has always intrigued me how cannibalizing sales is even possible when you consider the number of McDonald’s, 7-11s, Dunkin Donuts, etc, etc and how they don’t seem to suffer a similar epidemic.

I know that Apple doesn’t sell logo-clad attire (and it is ridiculously difficult for campus reps to get Apple-logo shirts for ourselves) in order to not saturate the brand image to the point of washing it out. Ironically enough, the iPod has engulfed the music player industry putting the Apple logo everywhere. Here me out, before long, Apple will stop putting those Apple stickers in iPod boxes and will instead reserve them especially for Mac purchases. Anyways, the point is that, perhaps, keeping your brand image intact and attractive boils down to allowing competitors room for making themselves look stupid. Starbucks had a period of rapid expansion so broad that they could have violated their own heritage and become the foolish coffee purveyors themselves. Thus the initiative to ramp back and curb the drop in sales.

Secondly, the article mentions the full offensive front that Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s are setting up to take a chunk out of the existing Starbucks coffee consumers that are indifferent to the image when compelled with the bottom line, as long as the bottom line tastes similar or better. On my latest spring break romp in NYC, I walked from Spring St. to the Empire State Building in 10º F weather, complete with frightful winds and runnyred nose. Just a few blocks shy of ESB, I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts to warm up and to guzzle some afternoon java. Once my tastebuds warmed up, I discovered I was drinking a fabulous cup of coffee. The table beside me eventually filled up with newly-freed schoolkids who shared donuts and coffee, as well as rumors about who is keen on who. It was an experience I had never thought I could have at a Dunkin. If Dunkin Donuts and McDonald’s can take a bite out of the Starbucks share, have at it. They deserve it. Quality at a fraction of the cost of the standard $bucks charge; plus, both establishments are cleaning up their atmosphere from the historically-degrading reputation of sloppily-mopped floors and messy condiments tables.

My distaste for drinking at Starbucks continues, but, though I may be purchasing their bagged coffee from discounters like Target, I have no particular wish that their profits perpetuate. If Starbucks can’t maintain competitive prices, forget about it. Their stockholders will drop like flies, employee perks vanish into the manager’s offices, and earthen-colored tiled floors will show signs of negligence and sloppy mopping.