Ideas

Car manufacturers are always trying to solve a conundrum; how do you make a small car feel less small? Everyone knows that big cars are associated with all the positive stuff; power, comfort, luxury, status, indulgence. Small cars are associated with practicality, frugality, compromise, convenience.  Worthy, certainly. But truly desirable? To overcome this car manufacturers do one of two things. They make small cars physically bigger until they reach a point where no one can pretend it’s still a small car. Then, at some point, they have to bring out a new model that really is small again. Or else their marketing tells us that their small car is really a big car in a small body so it’s OK to buy it and not feel bad. “Honestly”, they say, “you’ll never realise that this car is small once you’re inside.” Of course no one is suggesting that when they […]

Whilst I was listening to the final of the Australian Open on the radio a brief debate emerged between the two commentators, Jonathan Overend and Pat Cash. Overend, who does extraordinarily well keeping the listener in touch with what’s happening in the rallies, made a passing reference to the colour of Roger Federer’s shirt, describing it as “purple”. Cash queried this, suggesting it was more of a blue. Overend, with a delightfully flawed piece of logic, pointed out that, since the court was blue and since Federer’s shirt wasn’t the same colour as the court, the shirt could not be blue. For the record Nike, who make the shirt, describe the colour as “concord”, whatever that is! I’ve quite often experienced similar situations: one person innocently labels a colour and another counters with an alternative. It makes you wonder if we all see the same thing? With colour labelling being […]

A nice bloke called Jamie has just installed a heating system in our house and he’s done a wonderful job too. It’s particularly impressive given the scale of the task: he was replacing three separate heating systems, none of which worked very well and he did it, with two assistants, in just nine days. Only one thing doesn’t work as planned. The house is divided into three zones, with the office on its own heating loop so that we’re not heating 3000 square feet that we’re not using a lot of the time. Each zone has its own wireless thermostat, which controls the business end of the system down in the cellar. Despite having a theoretical range of 30m (presumably requiring the clear lines of site you tend not to find in houses with rooms) the thermostat can’t reach its base unit. Jamie phoned the manufacturer for advice. The first […]

“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.” Gregory House (MD) I’m a big fan of the Fox Television series House. There’s something about the way that Hugh Laurie’s character navigates his way through life that is as appealing as it’s unattractive. Perhaps it’s that for him wisdom is the panacea for life’s anguish, not wealth or love, although of course House himself appears as driven as people fixated on the more traditional goals. Or perhaps it’s that he has the sort of self-confidence and personal conviction that we’d all like to possess, and through watching him we can have a taste of how that might feel. I know that one thing I do share with this TV character is his firm belief that people don’t tell the truth. As someone who’s watched and interviewed more consumers than most people, it’s usual that there’s a wide […]