The something: two days ago, at the gym, my bag was stolen. It had my phone, wallet, and keys.

First reflection: Getting robbed sucks. I don’t recommend it.

After 36 hours, though, things are a lot better. First off, the bag was recovered–the guy stole my phone and my (small amount of) cash, but left my keys, cards, and clothes in a bag that he chucked somewhere on the property. So the whole event is a lot more finite now: I canceled all of the cards last night (before the bag was found) and changed all of my passwords, so I think the damage will be constrained to the property loss–basically, the couple hundred bucks to replace the phone.

There’s also some perspective: A few other people had things stolen, including one person who lost their car. So my victimhood, while real, is relatively minor.

I’m not going to claim that all is wonderful and perfect in my head after this incident. It’s a violation, and that has an effect on your mental state.

But…

The fact that this happened doesn’t mean that we’re living in a crapsack world. It just means that something bad happened.

I think there’s a tendency to assume that since something bad happened it justifies any action that you might take, no matter how bad. That idea has dominated some of my personal dealings in the past few years, and it’s dominated the national political discourse for at least a decade.

It’s lazy and it’s wrong.

I’m not saying that I plan to go through life pretending that this didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again. I’ve pieced together how the thief did it, so I know the loopholes that he exploited, and I can make sure that in the future they don’t still exist. I’m also not saying that I have renounced anger in general. I’m mad at this guy. If someone offered me him tied up and a large stick, I doubt I could resist taking a few whacks.

(I’ve heard that some teach that

But there is a line. I’m not going to assume that everyone I meet is bad like this guy. From there, it’s not even a step to thinking that since everyone is bad, there aren’t any rules of decency or humanity that apply. I think it would be easy to justify stealing, or much worse, if you first convince yourself that the person you’re doing it to deserves it. And if you convince yourself that all people deserve it, that step is already done.

And it’s factually untrue. The business where this happened, for example, has been behaving in a very human way, rather than endless referrals to a ‘customer service’ line. Or to bring this somewhat on topic: In my volunteer gig at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, I see a lot of the good side of humans. The annual Bugapalooza event is especially great–it brings in huge crowds, many kids, who are incredibly enthusiastic. They come in with some knowledge, but they’re eager to absorb more. Some of the most in-depth and intriguing questions I get throughout the year come during that day.

I guess what it comes down to is this: There is bad and good in life. The bad will find you on its own, while the good you have to seek out. Don’t do the bad a favor by seeking it out as well.

Which is, of course, objectively true. And yet, unsettling as well; it came from someone who I’ve long considered a strong proponent of innovation and change and all that. But that’s not the real issue.

The real issue (and it took several days of mulling for me to realize it) is that the post start from the supposition that this type of conversation is about what the conversation’s words are about.

In short: A lot of conversations about new stuff are not so much about the new stuff, but about the relative status of the participants in the conversation.

It’s hard to know how extensive this phenomenon is. I only know about it from observation in my own experiences. And I can’t offer much evidence apart from those experiences. But looking back at those experiences with the perspective of several years… It’s the only explanation that I can imagine, for example, for debating in 2005 about whether the internet is something worthwhile for a magazine to tap.

It is, incidentally. I think that was evident well before 2005. But plenty of arguments against it were made, and they wound up successful. It took 4 more years before we had a functioning web site. And none of those arguments proved remotely legitimate.

Another examplette, one that’s even wobblier: A few years ago, my employer had a president who made quite a bad stir by making some rather disparaging comments about the “blog people.” Fast forward to the present day, and said president was spotted commenting away on one of those blog people’s blogs.

Now, the president is a senior member of the profession, and the blog he was haunting is also written by a senior member. So I suspect (admittedly, completely without evidence to back this up) that there are generational factors at work: When the president was attacking the blog people, was he actually attacking the existence of blogs, or was he just declaring how valuable and relevant he was? And when he granted his seal of approval to his contemporary’s blog, was he recognizing the value of blogs, or just saying “You’re a person I consider valid.”

It’s unfair, of course, to claim to know the thoughts of others. And yet, I’m convinced that this type of thing happens in the workplace.

So how do you determine what’s about work and what’s about social status? That’s a tricky question, and I don’t have an answer. Some of it involves the work environment; some places catalyze status-based discussions in a way that others don’t. But I don’t have a foolproof plan for identifying specific instances.

What do you think? Share your ideas in the comments.

OK, not much, although I do get the day off, which is quite nice. So here’s the link dump:

Center for the Future of Museums has a well-done essay on science museums having to face the choice of tackling topics that can be politically radioactive like evolution and climate change. Should museums potentially alienate their audiences with those topics, at the threat to their futures?

I wasn’t able to comment due to the captcha system on the blog, so here is my reaction: I’m not thrilled to admit it, but I’d fall more on the pragmatist side than the idealist. While not in a museum setting, I have experienced a few audience revolts against things that were and are correct, and the results can be devastating for an institution and especially the people who are doing the work.

That said, I don’t think that “Our community won’t accept this” should be a final assessment for a museum. Instead, “Our community won’t accept this now” would be a more positive approach, followed by asking what we can do to create an environment that is more accepting of information about those views.

Evolution and climate change are especially tough; public discourse about them has almost nothing to do with science and everything to do with culture wars. So, in a community that is culturally hostile to those topics, how can a museum create a space where they can be discussed on their scientific basis? Does it require going back to the basics of science–what is a theory, how are they tested, and so on? Or perhaps focusing on scientists as people, rather than an abstract group that’s so much easier to demonize?

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think that’s a worthwhile place to start.

The rest of the link dump:

At Know Your Own Bone, some very worthwhile research: People go to museums for the experience, and more importantly, the experience of going with people they care about. Sell appropriately.

From The Awl, some good advice on dealing with ungood people at work.

From Beth’s Blog, a report on a panel about reporting the impact of social media to stakeholders.

From Treehugger: Bees have long been known to dance to communicate with each other. Turns out they also use it as a warning to other animals. Or as Treehugger puts it: “Giving the finger” to hornets.

It’s a fairly prominent facility–it’s in Lincoln Park, facing one of the major roads that boarders the park, and pretty much alone. The building once held the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum; in the late 1990s, the museum traded it with Lincoln Park Zoo for the museum’s current location, and the zoo now uses the Laflin Building for offices. I’ve seen it plenty of times, but never been inside until yesterday.

The occasion? A mixer for volunteers at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Zoo, and the Chicago History Museum.

It was a great time, organized by the Nature Museum’s fabulous volunteer coordinator Jill, as well as the volunteer coordinators at the other two institutions. (Who I’m sure are also fabulous, although I really didn’t meet them.) Nothing too complicated; a bit of food, a bit of conversation, some very cool historical photos from the three institutions, and a surprisingly cutthroat trivia game. (Which my group, ahem, won.)

It also gave an opportunity to learn about some of the other institutions — one of the zoo volunteers talked and shared photos from the enrichment activities they create for their animals. Also, my co-volunteer Claire won a stuffed panda.

There was talk of naming it after me, although that may have just been party chat.

Obviously, this event didn’t have anything to do with marketing. But there are a couple of applicable lessons that, while not shockingly original, are worth repeating. One is the value of meeting new people. The other, the value of showing–rather than just telling, or claiming–people you appreciate them.

CodeYear is a free online JavaScript course. Presumably it will last the year; every week, participants get notified of a new lesson to work through. It’s got a fully web-based interface; you type the code in a box on the lesson web site, and it evaluates it for accuracy before you can move on to the next part of the lesson.

I’m enjoying it a lot so far. There’s a cool factor–getting a free class in something technical and hopefully useful is nice, and the idea of doing it with almost 400,000 other people is unique. Even though that 400,000 figure is probably the number of total sign-ups rather than actual participants, it feels good to be doing this as part of a crowd.

It’s hard for me to gauge the class’s effectiveness. While I’m not a programmer by trade, I’ve taken enough programming classes that none of the concepts that have been introduced so far have been foreign. Some people at the meet-up said that the class was quite difficult for them, but even that’s hard to gauge: Is it because the teaching method isn’t all that effective or that the subject is difficult to wrap your head around.

I could come up with a bunch of other quibbles too. We’re learning the language, but we haven’t yet learned anything about implementing it outside the CodeYear interface. The lessons give step-by-step prompts, so we haven’t yet done a lot of algorithm creation. The lessons are short, and it’s easy to speed through, getting the right answer without fully understanding. Are any of these critical? It’s hard to say, at this point. My hunch is that they are all, at least, overcomeable.

One thing that I at least strongly suspect is the value of communities that have grown up around the class. My employer has an online group (which grew out of the meet-up) for its members to discuss and get help with the class. There are more generic ones as well–CodeYear even hosts a forum for just that purpose. I think that the lessons are pretty well written, but they do have the limitations of written lessons: Sometimes, you just need a human’s help to figure out a foreign concept.

How does this matter for marketers? Communications people and sciencey-technology-mathy stuff frequently don’t go together well. (I seem to remember that when I was in college, the journalism school changed the math requirement so that there was a class below algebra that would qualify for graduation.)

That’s too bad. Even though I’m not a programmer, viewing computer systems as something that I can manipulate to my own ends, rather than something that’s foisted upon me and never works right, has paid dividends. In my current position, I inherited the administration of the magazine’s Drupal-based website, and my only training was about an hour with the departing administrator. Anything I did, I had to figure out through exploration. My programming experience didn’t directly help with that, but without having some sense of how computers think (or, rather, don’t think), I wouldn’t have had anything close to the confidence to do that, and I probably wouldn’t have had as good a sense of the experiments that would likely be safe and effective versus the ones that would destroy the site.

From the other side, looking at colleagues who don’t have the comfort with computers that I do. Frankly, I shudder to think of what opportunities they (and the publications they have worked for) have lost because of their distaste for the computers on their desktops. Again, coding wouldn’t directly affect this, but I can’t imagine someone being frightened of or spiteful towards the internet when they know that they have power over the box they use to access it.

Ultimately, I don’t know that CodeYear is a must-do for marketers or for anyone. But the price is right, and the prospect of learning something new ought to excite anyone with a bit of curiosity and the time to devote to it. For me, it’s certainly enough to press on.

Enough whining: Here’s some cool stuff that I did find.

From Mission Paradox, an essay about respecting the attention that your audience grants you. Specifically: If someone is subscribing to your email newsletter or your YouTube videos, it’s important to give them something to educate, inspire, or entertain, rather than just sell them something.

This is What a Scientist Looks Like is a new-ish tumblr that aims to challenge stereotypical perceptions of scientists. That annoys me no end when librarians do it, because I think their strategy and intensity is poorly thought out. This site is, at least, understated, and focuses on scientists being unique people rather than on the stereotype.

And a horribly cheap laugh: Rude Birds by Habitat, by Stephen Wildish. When you’re stressed, animals with slightly naughty names are great for a laugh.

Still, there’s some:

@ZooKeeperRick has marked the Super Bowl in a cute way, seeking out the #Giants of the animal kingdom. The Cairns Birdwing, a huge and gorgeous butterfly from Australia, was my contribution.

At Huffington Post, a report on interactive technologies in exhibits at the Rubin Museum of Art, which uses QR codes to provide an interactive timeline with photos and video for an exhibit, and the American Museum of Natural History. While the phrase “First, technology is ‘cool’” is pretty horrifying to me–the only value in a QR code for a museum is if it improves the museum experience, and the simple novelty of using a phone doesn’t do that–it sounds like the implementation has the potential to do so.

The awesome Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s short, smart explanation of why he doesn’t want to be president.

And, speaking of scientific reason hitting the fore: An editorial from the Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier about teaching creationism in classrooms, and importantly a clever way to fight back. (A state bill that would have granted school boards the right to teach creationism as equally valid as evolution. A state senator, Vi Simpson, added an amendment saying that if Christian Biblical creation gets to be taught in science, then every other religion’s creations should as well.)

Time to go back to architecture-world. It’s a lovely world, although some people who live there believe that it’s acceptable to call a window a “vision portal.”

* It might be Bill Belichick’s fault. He is a genius.

I finally had the chance to play through it, thanks to my recent conference (or more accurately, the plane trip home). I think it has a few worthwhile lessons for museums interested in a similar promotional mobile app.

Let’s start with the pros: It looks great. The game uses computer-drawn representations of pieces of art from twelve periods as its background, which is a very cool effect. The enemies in the game are also based on noteworthy pieces of art or artists, which is also a neat touch. And it incorporates information well–every time an enemy kills you, you get a tidbit about the artist, and you can revisit each of the 12 pieces of artwork at your leisure when you’ve beaten the level it’s associated with.

The concept is more than good enough: It’s a fairly basic platform game, in which the player’s character has to walk along a path, jumping over gaps and enemies, to reach an end point. This isn’t terribly original, but that doesn’t matter: most games aren’t wildly original in their mechanics. (Each new generation of Super Mario Brothers adds some bells and whistles, but it’s still basically about jumping, stomping on enemies, and collecting coins like the original from more than 25 years ago.)

The backstory is perfectly sufficient — you’re a chameleon, the bad guy has created a device to steal all the color from the world, and you have to travel through time collecting color particles. Okay, perhaps not quite Of Mice and Men, but it’s plenty good enough for a casual game.

So why is it only “tantalizingly close” to brilliance, rather than brilliant without qualifications?

Gameplay.

Conceptually, it’s fine, but the whole package isn’t implemented well.

Most seriously, the game’s jump function doesn’t quite work right. You jump by simply tapping the screen–but the character doesn’t react very quickly. There’s a delay between the time you tap the screen and the time your character jumps. (I’m no expert, but I think it’s a coding problem: Objective-C, the language for iPhone apps, can trigger events when you tap or when you release a tap, and I think Race Against Time connected its jumping mechanism to the latter rather than the former.) This is small and pretty simple, but it’s also incredibly frustrating when you play.

The level design also leaves something to be desired: they get quite hard by about halfway through the game, and they require a lot of precision to get through successfully. In many cases, I found that I had done something wrong like missing a power-up or getting out of the proper position, which would inevitably lead to a death that wouldn’t occur for another half a level. It led to plenty of rage-quits on my part, which isn’t something a game designer ought to be going for.

That’s the rub: It was much more frustrating than it was fun. And if a game isn’t fun, no matter its other merits, then it has failed.

I think it’s worth comparing Race Against Time to a similar current blockbuster iPhone game, Temple Run. Why is that game so much more playable and replayable?

The controls are a big part of it. While occasionally your character might jump when you intend to turn, the controls for the most part work the way you expect them to. The game is randomly generated, and once in a while you’ll find yourself in situations that don’t seem possible to navigate successfully, but they’re rare. Each game is pretty quick, and there’s always the sense that you might as well try again because there’s a fair chance that you’ll do better.

Doing all of this is a tall order, and doing it all while also serving a museum’s mission is an even taller one. While I don’t think Race Against Time achieved it, it was a good effort: something for future museum game designers to build upon.

Library BoingBoing, as you might guess, is a partnership between my employer and the Boing Boing blog, a regular source for content in my Sunday Link Dumps. From the library end, there are a couple of goals: One is to put content on BoingBoing that promotes libraries generally by showing cool stuff that happens there. It’s also an Interest Group within the association, which will serve as an information clearinghouse for cool and forward-thinking services like hackerspaces and media labs that are currently in their infancy in the library world but poised to gain widespread implementation in the next few years. It also looks like it will be working to encourage libraries to host BoingBoing meetups, and it’s going to try to get 3D printer manufacturers to exhibit at the association conferences.

So… should the museum world seek a similar partnership?

Museums certainly fit into the site’s cool-stuff editorial mix. Conveniently for this post, BoingBoing has been running for the past week or so the “My Favorite Museum Exhibit” series. So Library BoingBoing is a valid precedent: This certainly could happen. And I have to think there’s value in a museum-focused innovation idea factory such as this could develop into for libraries.

There are some cultural matters, for lack of a better term, that I don’t have any real handle on, however. Do museums have the same interest in promoting museums generally that libraries do? Do museum professionals even form groups like this? (I can’t fathom a group having the affinity for creating subgroups like librarians, but there’s still a big range between “librarian” and “none”.) Is this something that the American Association of Museums (or some other museum association) might consider part of its mission? I did join AAM last year, but I really don’t have a strong sense of its activities yet.

What do you think? I’d love to hear others’ opinions.

* not its permanent official name, by BoingBoing’s request, but as an official name hasn’t yet been determined, I’ll use it.