So... Alright - Banana For Scale

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Geoff learns about QR codes, the amount of decisions we make in a day, and Steven Seagal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I needed to think about some ideas that I had and it was too hot to ride my bike. So I went to this little taco place that has a great happy hour half off tacos. And they have these. Their Alpastor tacos are so fucking good. But anyway, I was there and I sat down and this quaint cute little place, very Austin-y, picked up the QR code so I could scan it for the menu. And I thought, it's so funny, you know? Here I am scanning a QR code on my phone for a menu

and I don't remember the first time I did that. Like I don't remember how I learned to do that. I don't remember the first time I saw a QR code at a table and thought, I have to navigate this, you know? I have to interact with this in some way. And I guess it was probably pandemic related, right? I think pandemic probably accelerated a lot of that technology being used in everyday life

because nobody wanted to touch and clean menus over and over again. But I can't specifically remember doing it. I can't remember the first time I ever used a QR code. I can't remember the first time I ever saw a QR code. But I know for a fucking fact that a large portion of my life did not include QR codes, right? And so I'm thinking about all that, and I decided to look at the history of QR codes so I could find out a little bit

about what the fuck they are. Like, do you use QR codes in your everyday life? When you go to a restaurant, is it a given that there's a QR code instead of a menu? It's not a hundred percent in Austin, but if you told me it was 50-50, I'd probably believe you. I feel like I see them as much as I don't. And it just feels natural now. And I guess maybe at some point it'll only be QR codes or around the time that QR codes become synonymous with menus worldwide, they'll replace it with something else.

I don't know. It's just it's fucking weird that it felt so normal and natural to me. And I don't know when that that flip happened, where it wasn't even novel to me. Like there was a period of time when it was definitely like, oh, you get the QR code. And that was kind of weird and fun. You're like, oh, look at me doing something in a different way. But that's all gone. Now it's just fucking normal, like every day. And I don't know when that happened.

I also don't know when the QR code. OK, well, now I do. A QR code or quick response code. Just realized I don't know that I ever knew what QR code stood for. I bet that's one of those things that I did know once, you know, like you learn immediately and then you forget it because it doesn't matter. And then it's as if you never knew it. So I either never knew it or it's as if I never knew it. But okay, quick response code. I guess that makes sense. It's a type of two dimensional matrix barcode invented in 1994. All right. So, yeah, I had I was in the army at that point.

I was 18, 19. So QR codes have existed for more than half my life. I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have thought they'd come a little bit later. By Japanese company Densowave for labeling automobile parts. It features, well, you know what it features. Oh, interesting. I will read this.

It features black squares on a white background with fiducial markers. Fiducial markers. A fiducial marker, the fuck is that? It's an object placed, oh, like a banana for scale, right? A fiducial object is an object placed in the field of view of an image for use as a point of reference or measure. It may be either something placed into or on

the imaging subject or a mark or set of marks in the reticle. Let me look at the Wikipedia for that. That's kind of like a, here it is right here on the Wikipedia. Under fiducial marker, there's a banana for scale subheader. Banana for scale refers to an internet meme involving using a banana as a fiducial marker. The meme began in August of 2010.

Holy shit, they have it pinpointed. When a man posted to Facebook a picture of a safe with a banana beside it. From there, the meme spread primarily via Reddit. The Daily Dot remarked that the meme had become a hilarious game with Redditors, try to one up each other. It's a trend in the same vein as planking.

I'm actually surprised it's that recent, August, 2010. I would have put it more in the like 2004, 2005 range of the internet, so huh. Well today I learned what a banana for scale is. It's a fiducial marker. Fiducial marker. Feel very smart now. Huh.

Well, anyway, back to QR codes. So what does it do? It's the fiducial markers readable by imaging devices like cameras and processed using. Oh, OK. It's processed using Reed Solomon error correction, duh, until the image can be appropriately interpreted. That none of that helped me understand what this thing does. The required data are the extracted form patterns

that are present in both the horizontal and the vertical components of QR image. And this is the problem sometimes with my podcast. I was interested in a QR code and I thought, that should be fun to look up and look into. And then you start doing it and you realize the only interesting thing about a QR code is the QR stands for quick response and then it was developed in 1994 by hold on Denso Wave. Wonder what they're up to now.

Hold on. Another Denso Corporation. The global automotive components manufacturer headquartered in the city of Korea, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Huh. After becoming independent from Toyota, oh, they split off from, uh, reconcilable differences, I guess. Split off from, maybe they had creative differences, like how bands break up. Uh, after becoming independent from Toyota, the company was founded as Nippon Denso Company Limited in 1949. 25% of the company is still owned by Toyota.

Interesting. In 2022, Denso was listed as number 278 on the Fortune Global 500 list with a total revenue of 49 billion. Right in the middle there will be student there then so real be student They have 200 consolidated some city areas 64 in Japan 23 in North America 32 in Europe 74 in Asia and 7 in Oceania Let's all Forget that we just learned that because who's gonna bother to remember that okay?

So it was invented in 94 at by Denso Wave. Hold on a second. This is interesting. The initial alternating square design presented by the team of researchers headed by Masahiro Hara was influenced by the black counters and the white counters played on a Go board. The pattern of position detection was found and determined by applying the least used ratio, one by one by three by one by one,

in black and white areas, duh, on printed matter, which cannot be misidentified by an optical scanner. Okay, whatever. The cool thing there is that it was inspired by Go. Every time you look at a QR code, know that it looks that way because of the game, the board game Go. Maybe we can learn something interesting about it yet. As of 2024, QR codes are used in a much, I'm gonna fall asleep. I'm gonna fall asleep reading this. I can't do this. I'm going to fall asleep. I'm going to fall asleep reading this. I can't do this. During the month of June 2011, 14 million American mobile users scanned a QR code.

OK, well, that was a billion fucking years ago, so who cares? I got I want to I want this to be more interesting than it is. Can you how about this? Are there bad QR codes like could you get QR code hacked? Now, that's an interesting question. Can you, are there bad QR codes? Can be QR hacked? Hackers can create malicious QR codes

which send users to fake websites that capture their personal data such as login credentials or even track their geo location on their phone. Hey, that's on Kaspersky. QR code generating software does not collect personally identifiable information. The data it does collect and which is visible but to the code's creators includes location, number of times the code has been scanned and what what times, plus the operating system of the device which scanned it. The QR codes themselves cannot be hacked.

The security risks associated with QR codes derive from the destination of the code rather than the code itself. So this is why mobile users should only scan codes that come from a trusted sender because you could be just scanning a fake QR code that's going to steal your information Yeah, this is where I thought this was gonna go

Well, sometimes they're just and sometimes there's just not a lot of meat on the bone I guess Let's uh, let's make an executive decision and Look up something else. Let's look up executive decision look up something else. Let's look up executive decision. That was a movie with Kurt Russell. I remember that and Steven Seagal. When terrorists hijack a plane traveling from Greece to Washington DC,

US Army specialist David Grant, Kurt Russell and Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis, that's a name right there. Austin Travis, Steven Seagal, joined forces to bring the plane to safety. While terrorists on board the plane claim they hijacked the plane to force the US government to release their leader

who was captured by military forces, David and Austin discovered that the plane is carrying a bomb full of nerve gas to be released on Washington, DC. When did that come out? That came out in 1996 to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 62. All right. Budget was 55 million. Somewhere between 55 and 60 million did 122 million in the box office. Like it was a big hit directed by Stuart Baird. I wonder if that was the

best decision I'll make today. Pulling the cord on QR codes. What are many decisions? I mean, how many decisions? Do you make in it? 30th, holy shit. Thirty three to thirty five thousand decisions a day. The average human makes thirty three to thirty five000 decisions a day. Well, I guess that explains why Emily and I can never figure out what the fuck to eat for dinner. We're already exhausted from the at that point, probably 27,000 decisions

we had to make just to get to there. Look, how do you make I mean, I guess it's like sit, stand, breathe, drink, swallow, scratch, blink, poop, blink, crack your knuckles, say this out loud, think about saying it out loud. I mean, these are all decisions I'm making. What else do you do 30,000 times in a day? How often do you breathe a day? The average human being takes 22,000 breaths in a day.

So you think more, you decide more than you can think. The average human being takes 22,000 breaths in a day. So you think more, you decide more than you think. You decide, because decision is just a, it's a focused thought, right? You think more than you decide. But you decide 33 to 35,000 times a day, but you only breathe 22,000 times a day. So we're deciding way more than we're breathing.

What about blinking? What else do you do a lot? You blink, you breathe, you, oh, you walk, you, wait, we got heartbeats. All right, hold on a second. Let's go down the list. The average human blinks 13 to 14,000 times a day. So you're making two times the decisions

a day that you are blinking. The average person, how many heartbeats a day? Okay, there you go. That makes sense. 100, 100,000 heartbeats a day. So you definitely your heart beats about every three, you get about three heartbeats a decision and your your heart beats faster than once a second, right? How many seconds are in a day? There are 86,400 seconds in a day. So if you have 100,000 heartbeats a day,

your heart beats, I don't know, like 15% faster than a second? That's interesting. That means you're having, you're making a decision every 2.2 seconds or so. Maybe every 2.3 seconds you make a decision. That's a lot going on in a human. Huh.

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You know, it's funny because he's become such a lampooned and made fun of and kind of laughed at figure because he's, you know, the fucking weirdo and he's all over the map and he's all weirdly a pro Russian and like weirdly anti-American while being pro-American. It's just a bizarre dude, right? And he's famous for having this insane ego. He's just a whole like, he's a whole can of worms all to himself.

I'm not gonna, I'm not trying to go down a whole Steven Skull path here because that would, that's more than an episode. All that say, when I was a kid, like in the, when I was like, I don't know, 12, 13, he was really fucking cool. There was a period of time when like above the law and like Mark for Death and Hard to Kill came out where really up until like maybe Under Siege, I think, was maybe around the height of his success,

where he was, you know, at least by kids, considered kind of like an action star. And then he went off the weirdo deep end, but, and became, you know, the kind of lunatic he appears to be today. But I'm not gonna hold that against Above the Law, which came out in 1988, to a review of 6.0. That's Metascore 45. which came out in 1988 to a review of 6.0.

That's Metascore 45. That's his third highest. We'll do the five highest rated films. Okay, according to IMDB. Number five, Mark for Death. A retired DE agent is out to hunt down and take out a Jamaican drug posse that has targeted he and his family for murder. I remember that being the first time I'd ever seen,

this came at 90, so I was 15 maybe? Yeah, I was like 15. I remember it was the first time I'd ever seen Jamaican bad guys before. And I remember thinking like, why are these guys bad guys? They seem cool. I was pretty into bad brains at that point too. That movie had Steven Seagal and well, and Steven Seagal in it. His fourth most successful movie was

or highest rated movie was Executive Decision with Kurt Russell. Halle Berry was in that film. Got six and a half stars on IMDB, 1996. The third highest rated Steven Seagal movie 1988's hour and 39-minute classic above the law for some reason only has a rating of six stars but it's rated higher on this list that makes no fucking sense to me this list is a mess sort by IMDB rating god damn it. Oh, it must just be like generic popularity. Oh, no, this is way worse

All right. Hold on. We go backwards. This got out of control really fast I just wanted to know the highest rated fucking Steven Seagal movie. It's executive decision. Well, it's machete I guess he was in machete, but is that really a? Steven Seagal movie I would say no under siege six and a half stars executive decision six and a half stars under siege had Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones in it This fucking guy for a while there got some pretty good acting gigs He worked with Gary Busey before he was you know, Gary Busey Tommy Lee Jones before the accident Tommy Lee Jones Kurt Russell Halle Berry

Who else did he work with? Jerry Orbach and William Forsyth in Out for Justice in 91. Pam Greer in Above the Law. I wonder if, you know how, oh, Kelly LeBrock in Hard to Kill. That's cool. You know how celebrities, oh, plus he worked with DMX, RIP in Exit Wounds.

I don't remember if that was a good movie or not. I remember it was a movie though. You know how, oh, he was with, he was with, he was, he did a movie with Keenan Ivory Wayans, the Glimmer Man. I feel like I barely remember that. He was in a movie with Eddie Griffin in 2007 called Urban Justice.

Jesus Christ. Fire Down Below, Chris Christopherson, and Marg Helgenberger. Yeah, like these are some real fucking, there's a lot of A-listers in here, you know? You know how celebrities have celebrity friends and you find out that like, as an example, Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, very different comedians,

had very different routines, both comedians. Newhart went the TV route really and kind of became a beloved television figure, kind of pioneered that self-effacing, daughtery, confused in a hilarious stuttery kind of way where he's like poorly navigating his own story in such a heartwarming way. I don't know, there's something really charming

about the way Bob Newhart's comedy landed. And honestly, I know a lot of people hate her now, and I get it, but it's very similar to the style. I always thought Ellen DeGeneres, her standup was kind of like the, I guess the next evolution of Bob Newhart's style of comedy, right? And then Don Rickles is the original insult comic, right? Like the king of it.

He had this ability to say the worst shit about you and make you laugh at yourself and with him while doing it. Like it's a really unique and rare ability. And very different dudes. One worked very clean in Bob Newhart. One worked very dirty in Don Rickles, right? Yet they were best friends in life. They did all, I watched Don Rickles' documentary

a couple of years ago. I already known this, but it was highlighted a lot in the documentary. They were incredibly close. They went on vacations together. They were best friends for like 40 or 50 years. They really spent a lot of their free time together. They were like what I hope Gavin and I are like at that age,

you know, when we're down that far down the road. They're just always in each other's lives and just great friends and just enjoy being around each other and entertaining each other is the impression I really got. And you think that goes on a lot, right? Like you always hear about Jimmy Kimmel's famous parties where all of his celebrity friends are there and you realize that like they're all buddies, right? They all hang out. They all have a cell phone with a million celebrity phone numbers in it, right? And you'd be like, Oh, I'll just call up Matt

Damon right now if I wanted to. I wonder the numbers in Steven Seagal's phone. Does he have Marg Helgenberger's number in his phone? And if he does still, would he use it? Would she answer? Cause he, I want to know what his celebrity friend Rolodex looks like in 2024. I bet it's interesting. I'll say that.

How the fuck did we end up talking about Steven Seagal? Man, that's a rabbit hole for you, I guess. I should probably wrap this up, but now that I think about it, what is the most recent, does Steven Seagal still make movies? What is the most, oh God, look at this phone. What a weirdo.

What is the most recent film he was in? Oh, he's got two upcoming films, Above the Law 2 and the tip of the spear Above the lot to the movie I watched Oh No shit Damn it. Well, all right. What's actually out there? What's the most recent movie that's actually come out? 2019's Beyond the law where he played Augustino Finn a dare. Let's see

It's he was directed by James Cullen Brissac, stars DMX, Johnny Mesner and Steven Seagal. I think he did a couple of them. Maybe DMX would have been in his celebrity Rolodex then, I guess. Maybe Johnny Mesner, he did a couple of movies with DMX that same year 2019 he also had General Commander come out man he looks the fucking same in both of those posters uh directed by Philippe Martinez and Ross W Clarkson GRS operative Jake Alexander and his team of young

recruits go after the most dangerous and notorious criminals with the help of a Hong Kong Billionaire look at this fucking trailer who's in this movie Steven Seagal Sonya cooling Byron Gibson Mika Javier Okay, guy day Saraya Torrens can't say that I'm familiar with these people Sure, it's lovely film though general commander Is that a title is that like somebody's last name's commander and they're a general or they saying like he's a jet What is that saying like in general?

He's a commander or he is he general commander is his last name commander or is he the general commander? Is that a title see a general or a commander? Oh? Yeah, it's bullshit. That's not a thing okay cool. I didn't think it was a thing well now I want to see that stupid movie. Maybe I'll watch it. Maybe I'll watch it Maybe I'll watch general commander, and then I'll come back to you guys, and I'll do a book report on it a what a What? A what? Maybe I'll maybe I'll watch old General

Commander and then I'll come back to you guys and do a movie report. What? You know, maybe I'll maybe I'll watch old General Commander myself and then I'll come back to you guys and do a movie review on it. God damn. I'm fucking stupid in three ways. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe I'll watch General Commander, and then I'll tell you guys all about it

so you don't have to. QR code's not very interesting. Decisions, you make a lot more of them than you realize. Congratulations, and the next time you and your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or roommate or coworker can't figure out what the fuck to order or eat for dinner because both of your minds are fried and nothing sounds good, don't get upset.

Cut yourself some slack. It's because you already made 27,842 decisions today. All right. 42 decisions today.