The Gatorade Hangover Science Institute-- by Nate Winter

I was in the grocery store the other day with Gatorade on my list. When I found the aisle for sports drinks, a startling truth bombarded me: there is a MASSIVE variety of Gatorade. Too massive, in fact. Here’s what the supermarket shelf contained:

Gatorade All-Stars
Gatorade A.M.
Gatorade Fierce
Gatorade Frost
Gatorade High Endurance
Gatorade Rain
Gatorade X-Factor
Gatorade Xtremo
Gatorade Special Victims Unit
Extreme Makeover: Gatorade Edition

Oh yeah, and there were a few bottles of original formula Gatorade, too.

So I pondered to myself, "What is that people are doing that requires all these different Gatorades? What am I doing that requires Gatorade?"

Gatorade commercials show muscular people on treadmills with electrodes sucked onto their sweaty skin to prove that the sports drink manufacturer does research with professional athletes. Why? So they can make Gatorade better for people who work out relentlessly, have no jobs, and don’t sleep. Okay, Gatorade. We get it. You’ve got the athletic thirst-quenching thing figured out. Now stop ignoring the 800-pound gorilla and just acknowledge that half of your retail sales are because of drunks.

The Gatorade Sports Science Institute is all well and good for true athletes, but let’s talk about reality here for a minute.

I go to the gym once a week and ride the bicycle machine for an hour. (It’s probably not actually called a “bicycle machine,” but how the hell should I know?) I have no clue what the difference is between all these Gatorades, but my exercise regimen is so lame it probably doesn’t matter.

Of course, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute will continue to research exercise and optimal athletic performance for hard-core athletes, but the rest of us are interested in hydration from a different standpoint—the hangover. Exercise accounts for roughly 20% of my Gatorade consumption. Alcohol makes up the rest.

There’s a lot of us out there. We’re the reason that Gatorade is sold in every gas station and convenience store in America. Not athletes.

How much better off would we all be if Gatorade created a Hangover Science Institute and invested millions of dollars in research on kicking the Friday hangover when we passed out drunk at 2:30 a.m.? This is an innovation that interests me slightly more than Gatorade Xtremo in Mango Electrico flavor.

Think big, Gatorade! Professional sports are small-time. Let’s talk about some big league factors like Gross National Product. So what if electrolytes add another 5 points to Kobe’s game? Show America a Gatorade that makes you feel like sunshine and rainbows after a Tuesday night bender, and the increase in worker productivity could pay off the national debt in a decade. Gatorade could be the next Haliburton.

The drinking world needs better formulas, like Gatorade Hangover Relief. It will be packaged in a non-descript stainless steel commuter mug to avoid the suspicion incurred by having a regular Gatorade bottle at work. It will basically work like a full-body enema, wiping your entire muscular and circulatory systems free of toxins left over from drinking. Ingredients will include caffeine, electrolytes, aspirin, EGCG, Airborne, vitamin C, and a smidge of alcohol to take the edge off. If they can make it taste like my favorite hangover food, the Egg McMuffin, even better. A version that sprinkles into coffee like sweetener? Double plus good!

Naturally, even the Gatorade Hangover Science Institute won’t cure the common hangover over night. But, in the mean time, they could set us Week Night Warriors straight on some classic hangover minimization tactics.

Like this age-old conundrum: when you’re drunk and about to go to sleep should you A) drink a lot of water? (This results in waking up every 90 minutes to pee and feeling severely tired the next morning.) or B) just crash? (This results in sleeping through the night and waking up severely dehydrated.) Unless you're a camel or a bed-wetter, you can only choose one. So which is less torturous? People want to know.

Or the classic question of whether to eat before you fall asleep. Does food A) “soak up” excess volume of alcohol in your body, reducing your hangover? or B) sit like a lump in your stomach undigested overnight resulting in nausea? Give us the answer.

And, if you have to eat food before you pass out (because, yes, sometimes you HAVE to eat before passing out), which drunk food options are best at minimizing the hangover? Mexican? Pizza? Sub sandwich? Burger and fries? Test them all, Gatorade Hangover Science Institute, and text message me the rankings by 1:30 A.M. this Friday.

These are the problems we need science to answer. Any idiot could tell you that kids will like Gatorade in small bottles with more sugar. Stop wasting our valuable scientific resources on worthless formulas like Gatorade All-Stars! It’s not like we’re facing an orange slice famine here.

-- Nate Winter

Non Text-Based Searches-- by Nate Winter

When I was in grade school, the first source I learned to consult for answers was a parent. For 99% of bizarre questions, parents could usually be counted on for a satisfactory response. But for annoying spelling questions, the heavy, dusty, printed dictionary was the faithful standby. Many of us know from personal experience that when it came to a spelling question, the dictionary always seemed like an inefficient resource. How are you supposed to find a word in the dictionary, a reference organized only by proper spelling, if you don’t know how to spell it in the first place? It’s really just a scientific, wild-ass guess. The circular logic of this predicament has frustrated kids and liberated parents for generations.

In the internet age, you can reference anything organized based on whatever information you have available… as long as it’s text. As amazing and complex as web-enabled search is, it’s still based on 26 characters, ten digits, and a handful of other symbols (in English anyway).

This situation is just as limiting in web-based search as looking in a printed dictionary for a word you don’t know how to spell. While the possibilities of text-based search are still being discovered, a next generation of search is inevitable—one that allows a user to submit queries that aren’t text to a search engine.

Think about something visual and abstract, like a painting by Jackson Pollack or Piet Mondrian. If you didn’t know who the artist was or even that it was art, how would you search to find out what it was? In a text-based search, it would be nearly impossible. But in an effective image-based search, you’d have a much better shot.

The same goes for an anonymous instrumental audio track or a mysterious video clip. If you don’t have specific words to describe it, text-based search is useless.

The process for a next generation search would go as follows. The user uploads their image, audio, or video file. The engine then compares advanced quantitative data such as file name, file size, creation date, etc. to it’s index of knows files to find matches. This type of technology already exists, too. Apple’s iTunes software looks at data from an audio CD and compares it to a database of artists, album titles, and song titles suggesting the correct information. Currently this technology only works for exact copies of full albums, so it will recognize Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on CD, but not your Pink Floyd Party Mix. Although, this technology probably isn’t far off.

Admittedly this functionality is still text-based and the idea of uploading a file for the search engine to evaluate is not so far fetched either. The real challenge lies in a search engine having an index of images, audio clips, and video clips to compare with the user’s search file.

The next generation goes beyond text completely, into a realm where the search engine recognizes elements of the search file’s content.

Digital cameras already offer facial recognition technology, picking out human faces in the camera’s viewfinder and selecting them as auto-focus points. Now imagine what a search engine with advanced visual, and audio content matching could do when hooked up to a massive database. That’s essentially what government fingerprint scanners and facial feature matching systems can already do. It just needs to be repurposed to accommodate the infinite array of search files users would inevitably submit.

While it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it will take for search technology to get to this level, there’s little doubt it will do so. And probably in my lifetime. In the future, our children, when faced with a spelling question, will still probably ask their parents first. But when faced with the inevitable, "Look it up," they will simply speak the word they wish to spell into a microphone linked to an audio-driven search engine. There will be no guesswork, no frustration, no trial and error. The search results will be accurate and immediate, allowing our children to spend more time asking question and less time searching for answers. Great for our children, annoying for their parents.

-- Nate Winter

[This blog entry is not intended to be an entry in the Culture/Ed blog. It is posted for temporary purposes only as it is part of a blog on theoretical subjects.]

IKEA, Opiate of the Masses-- by Nate Winter

It’s big, it’s blue (and yellow), and it has filled the emptiness in my cerebral, hopelessly dependent, self-alienated, aimless soul. And probably yours, too.

In today’s world of remote, computerized interaction and corporate teamwork, where does one get the classically American, Marlboro Man-style satisfaction of rugged independence and hands-on self-sufficiency?

Different people will give you different answers: the army, country music, competitive eating, the list goes on.

For me, and I’m not alone on this one, it’s IKEA.

There are, of course, real men out there whose calloused hands, well-equipped with elbow grease and know-how, would rather spend almost as much money at Home Depot on raw supplies and build the furniture themselves. While I have no doubt that this experience is intensely more fulfilling, sadly the time and knowledge investment required for the rest of us to reach that level is too daunting. For the folks like me, IKEA meets us half way. It’s like camping at a campground instead of the real wilderness. Or going to Paris, the hotel in Las Vegas, instead of Paris, the hotel in Tokyo. It’s just enough of the real world to keep us grounded.

IKEA is more like a survival skill, like knowing how to stack logs in a camp fire. It’s a precursor to the “some assembly required” gauntlets we’ll endure in the name of parenthood on birthdays and holidays to come. That familiar soreness in the hands and mind that comes from a job well done. We dream of the glorious accolades showered upon us by mothers, children, and significant others. We tell ourselves, “No, it wasn’t the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but I’m handier than the average American idiot.” We commend ourselves using Olympics-style criteria such as total time, number of steps properly accomplished without instruction manual consultation, number of lifeline calls to the handy friend who builds custom furniture, and a few other factors.

As with any truly profound insight, there are unbelievers. But faith in IKEA’s reinforcement of self-sufficiency notwithstanding, the truth about IKEA is that everyone has a take on it. There’s always an opinion, never the dismissive, “Meh, whatevs.”*

There are “IKEA People” just like there are “Morning People,” “Hallmark People,” and “Save the Starving Navajo Children People.” My cousin Steve is 1 of those 4, and only because his wife puts the Navajo children donations under his name as a joke.

The major prohibiting factor for Steve with IKEA is his lack of patience. He is too easily frustrated by the metal parts that look the same and the wooden parts that all look too different. At age 27 he is so intimidated by IKEA that he won’t even open the box except under his father-in-law’s direct supervision. Thank goodness for Steve and his IKEA handicap. It’s guys like him that give value to the basic pre-fab assembly skills of the rest of us.

My hair stylist, Lisa, on the other hand, professes a satisfying love/hate relationship with IKEA assemblage. She’ll spend a couple hours cursing the furniture with its copious bags of parts and tiny allen wrenches, storming away in frustration 4 or 5 steps shy of completion. Just like after a bad date, the next steps are a hot bath, a glass or six of cabernet, and a thick shea butter for her particleboard-ravaged hands. The next day Lisa returns, ambition restored, ready to tackle the remaining pictographic steps and assert her dominance over Swedish engineering once and for all. IKEA: 1. Bad first dates: 0.

In college I witnessed a construction team of two University of Michigan Business School students and their father, a top securities analyst, tackle an IKEA project. I suspect that a spirit of male bonding persuaded them to venture outside their knowledge-based economic comfort zones into the situation characterized by uncustomary manual labor.

Over the course of witnessing roughly 2 hours of their head scratching, misplaced wood glue adhering, and vulgar expressions of frustration, I offered help once or twice, but was turned down. Rather than watch the rest of this degenerative assemblage, I excused myself to read on campus. I returned some time later to find them just wrapping up the project.

It took these three geniuses 6 hours to assemble a particleboard desk from IKEA with 3 drawers and a hutch. Six hours! My thought process goes like this: Have I ever built this desk or one like it? No. For no logical reason in particular, am I confident in my ability to build that IKEA set up in half the time, on my own, with no breaks? Hell, yes.

Few of us seem to be proud of it, but let’s face it. We’ve all had our moments with IKEA. We know it’s cheap. (If you’ve ever referred to it as “the Forever 21 of furniture,” you’re doubly guilty.) The magazines we read remind us that it’s not that stylish. So what’s the catch? Why do people love IKEA?

I blame the almighty dollar. Specialization drives our economy. Whether you’re an assembly line monkey hoping for a humane retirement before you die, or a knowledge-based economy inmate hoping for the occasional office scandal or pornographic pop-up window—specialization is stealing your sanity. It has you asking crazy questions like, “Does the term ‘renaissance man’ apply to a guy who can change my break pads and replace my air filter?” or “If it weren’t for a mouse and keyboard would we even need hands?”

With the complexity of career specialization, it’s increasingly difficult to know where we stand in the greater scheme of things. Are we just a cog in the big machine: functional as part of a large system, but useless on our own? How can we tell?

IKEA helps relieve the concerns caused by a specialized business economy in a number of ways. Self-sufficiency is the biggest one. Sure, you could share the credit for building your LEKSVIK buffet with top cabinet, but why? Do it yourself and show the universe what you are capable of: handling up to ten steps all by yourself instead of just one. You find yourself feeling handier with thoughts like, “When I get my hands on some wooden dowels and rotating cam locks, that leaky pipe is history!”

The physical nature of assembly is another important feature. For those of us chained to a computer all day and Grey’s Anatomy fan blogs all night, it feels good to do something physical for once. It goes without saying that your atrophied hand muscles will be sore. Curse the pygmy-sized allen wrench all you want, but that dexterity counts for a lot if all technological and civilized aspects of our culture collapse overnight. It could happen, so why not be ready? (And delightfully well furnished!)

This all important physical factor is the same reason some people rebuild the engines in their Trans-Ams or the reason my mother hard-boils her own eggs instead of telling the housekeeper to do it. We want to feel invested and physically connected to the things around us.

The third key factor is that IKEA happens to be one of the few common experiences left in our culture. Fragmentation has boiled the foundation of America down to McDonald’s, the super bowl, and IKEA (Wal Mart and Tickle-Me Elmo are on that list somewhere, too). Why is this important? Because it allows for an apples-to-apples comparison that determines one person’s superiority in pre-fabricated furniture assembly and, by extension, life in general. Bragging rights are vital.

Maybe I can’t change the oil in my Mazda hatchback, but I can whip out 2 chests of drawers from IKEA’s ANEBODA collection before my Franz Ferdinand/Modest Mouse playlist starts over. (That’s one chest of 5 drawers and one chest of 3 drawers. Not two chests of three, girly man!) Affirmation like that is better than a truckload of Sominex.

Those are the main features that make IKEA such a big hit for disenfranchised corporate types from coast to coast. It doesn’t hurt that the behemoth stores peppering the earth are from Sweden, relieving Americans of any globalization guilt. And the in-store experience is truly inspiring. It’s that same sense of unadulterated wonderment at something so much bigger than yourself: like Mount Everest, or a Humvee.

To look at it one way, the popularity of IKEA and the cultural work it does are a sad commentary on the state of our society desperately looking for evidence that we’re not totally helpless. We might be assembling deck chairs on society’s Titanic, but at least we’re not panicking.

On the upside, IKEA’s reign of terrifically-priced home furnishings will run its course and another equally embarrassing cultural icon will take its place (I smell a coup from Nutella). But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s only embarrassing, and not legitimately harmful like gambling, chemical dependency, or sudoku. Say what you will, at least we’ve found a pacifier. And the meatballs are good, too.

-- Nate Winter
Names used in this piece were changed to protect the identities of the incompetent. * “Meh, whatevs” has been used courtesy of Greg Rutter at whatevs.net