I’m traveling during this week and next, so because of that, the next few Friday posts are going to seem…um…random. I’m typing this post on my iPhone (not really) in a cold European coffee shop (no), and the Internet connection is unreliable (not true). So before my iPhone battery dies (lie) or the dampness fries the wireless connection (totally false), here are some links with expanded commentary.

First: if this video doesn’t make you laugh, you are a monster. I’m being completely serious. If you or anyone you know has the power to watch this and not at least smile, be very afraid. Of yourself, or of your friends, of your colleagues. Doesn’t matter. This video should be part of some sociopath test that I’m just now making up in my own head in a cartoon brain-voice, which tends to happen a lot. I’ll pause for a moment and let the irony sink in.

Here is a dog balancing treats on its head. Dude is pretty Zen about it. There’s probably a lesson there somewhere.

Next time your doctor tosses some antibiotics at you in the hopes that they nip whatever it is that ails you, make certain you really need to be taking them. Why? A great deal of your immune system resides in your digestive tract and is comprised of ‘friendly’ bacteria, and antibiotics absolutely ravage it. In fact, Martin Blaser of New York University’s Langone Medical Center says “Early evidence from my lab and others hints that, sometimes, our friendly flora never fully recover.” Note the word never. Read more over at Wired.

Speaking of sociopaths (like that segue?), be very wary with people who don’t respond well to animals. Why? Because we’re wired to respond favorably to them.

Here is a woman with slabs of bacon tied to her feet standing in a gigantic skillet holding a huge spatula and smiling for a camera. The picture alone would be worth my linking to it, but there’s a story behind it too, one you should read. How can you resist?

Finally, here’s some seriously messed-up packaging design. Lemon-scented pancakes, anyone?

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Lots of good things for you today.  If you want some weekend reading and some guaranteed ammunition to make you look like the smartest web geek around, well, you’ve come to the right place.  Sit back and enjoy.

The perpetually-maligned font Comic Sans has an educational benefit.  How?  Because researchers at Princeton University have learned that making something more difficult to understand improves long-term learning.  More specifically, they found that changing a typeface from something clean and legible (like Helvetica) to something more difficult to read (like Comic Sans) increased learning in classroom settings.  (Ed. note: I expect a gloating email from a certain colleague who is a closet fan of Comic Sans any second now.)

A year of practical thinking: in 2010, Giles Turnbull promised himself he would learn one thing each day.  Here’s his full list.  Some sample entries:

• There are three million Arabian camels, but only one million Bactrian camels.
• When they say there’s sugar in nearly everything, they’re not kidding.
• Male otters are called meowters. Females are called queens.
• Rifles were invented in Germany.
• The name “Roger” means “famous for using a spear.”

Remember the hysteria about how the MMR vaccine might be linked to autism?  Remember otherwise sane parents opting out of MMR vaccinations for their children?  Well, it turns out that not only was the study that suggested the link wrong, but actually fraudulent. (Here’s the full paper from the BMJ, if you’re interested in a more detail-rich picture.)

Meet a former professional liar. Interesting exposé  of the luxury jewelry business from Clancy Martin, a tenured philosophy professor-cum-jewelry salesman.

If you let industrialized food companies make decisions for you, this might not sound like the utterly awful idea it is.

Finally, I don’t know why I find this sign so funny.  It’s as if he’s falling and yelling, “I’m fabulous!” at the same time.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

The first two Windows Phone 7 (WP7) ads have been released, and they are, in a word, excellent.

The first, called ‘Season of the Witch’, is set to Donovan’s song by the same name, depicts a post-apocalyptic scene of accidents caused by people with their heads buried in their phones. Very clever, and the music is a strong hook.

The second, called ‘Really?’ summons SNL’s Seth Meyers and is also pitch-perfect.

It’s funny because it’s true.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

I absolutely love this E*Trade campaign.  To my mind, the best of the bunch is Shankapotamus, then Creepy Clown, and then this one, called Time Out:

Which one is your favorite?

(Hat tip to Jim for the heads-up)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More humor posts.

Zach Golden, copywriter, has some really fantastic ads for TiVo:

Very clever.  And if you’re a TiVo user, you know they’re bang-on accurate.

(Via SvN)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More marketing posts you should read.

In anticipation of the 2010 World Cup (11 June – 11 July), Nike has released a promotional ad that mixes feature film, brand development and flat-out hype of an event that will captivate a good percentage of the world for a month.  The production value is absurd.

I’ve always said Nike is one of the best marketing companies in the world, and it’s the #1 sports brand globally.  CEO Phil Knight famously commented, “Business is war without bullets.”

The vision and dedication to production value are direct descendants of Nike’s ambition, aggressiveness and irreverence.  And for a company that crosses so many sporting chasms, every piece they make seems resonate with the insiders of any given sport.  Given the company’s size, this level of ‘getting it’ is pretty spectacular.

Can’t wait for June 11th.

Jerry Murrell, founder of the astonishingly good Five Guys Burgers & Fries, talks to Inc.’s Liz Welch:

The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill — a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order — you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs — it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it. [...]

When we first opened, the Pentagon called and said, “We want 15 hamburgers; what time can you deliver?” I said, “What time can you pick them up? We don’t deliver.” There was an admiral running the place. So he called me up personally and said, “Mr. Murrell, everyone delivers food to the Pentagon.” Matt and I got a 22-foot-long banner that said ABSOLUTELY NO DELIVERY and hung it in front of our store. And then our business from the Pentagon picked up.

The entire interview is just fantastic.  There’s a Five Guys about a half hour from the MIPRO offices, and it’s worth every bit of the drive.

The truth goes like this: it’s a big vacation week, opening day here in Detroit, and I thought — naively, as it turns out — that I could get away with not worrying about the Friday links post.

I was wrong.  Turns out some colleagues here in the office, while I was wrestling with the byzantine processes that govern streaming MLB games and the even despairingly more complex blackout restrictions guidelines, told me that if I didn’t put up a Friday links post, they would lie down on train tracks until I did.  That last part is a lie: they didn’t threaten any railroad sit in.  My unpopular indifference to baseball led me to prefer to write this post rather than listen to baseball audio, which is all we can get even though we subscribed to MLB.com and don’t even get me started on the relative uselessness of a product that (a) is supposed to enable live streaming but (b) cannot stream live games for local teams due to the aforementioned ridiculous blackout guidelines.

So without too much further ado (and the irony that the preceding paragraph was indeed a lot of ado is not lost on me), here is this week’s collection of very fine HTTP products.

Esquire has a great profile of super-rocket Usain Bolt.  Its hypothesis?  He is, capability-wise, ahead of his time, and it will take up to 30 years (given the rate of speed increases historically) for another man to beat him.  I call shenanigans on that conclusion, but the profile is incredibly interesting.

Video games attack NYC.  PIXELS is Patrick Jean’s latest short film, shot on location in New York.

John Gruber’s 4000+ word review of the Apple iPad.  One of the best I’ve read yet.

A great illustration of why we don’t see (or want) Flash on mobile devices.

Rats, after becoming accustomed to junk food, would rather die than eat healthy food.

Be bold and embrace your shyness.

And finally, here’s a master of business card throwing.  And it’s incredible viral marketing to boot.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

You might think that in our fragile economy companies that target the huge, amorphous mid-market would be thriving.  You’d be wrong.  The ‘mushy’ middle market — served by brands like Sony, Dell, GM and others — is getting cannibalized at the high end by brands like Apple and Hermes, and at the low end by Ikea and H & M.  The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki explains:

The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting tighter every day. Thanks to economies of scale, products that start out mediocre often get better without getting much more expensive—the newest Flip, for instance, shoots in high-def and has four times as much memory as the original—so consumers can trade down without a significant drop in quality. Conversely, economies of scale also allow makers of high-end products to reduce prices without skimping on quality. A top-of-the-line iPod now features video and four times as much storage as it did six years ago, but costs a hundred and fifty dollars less. At the same time, the global market has become so huge that you can occupy a high-end niche and still sell a lot of units. Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones last year.

From the UK’s Sussex Safer Roads comes perhaps the best public service ad I’ve ever seen. It’s cinematic, creative, paced perfectly and, in the end, quite poignant.

From concept to casting to photography to execution, this is nearly perfect. Love it.

(Via Jason F. over at 37signals)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.