And I had to show off my new favorite t-shirt (“vegetarian because i love animals HATE VEGETABLES”), which my friend Alexis has made available at the Breadpig store, alongside his fortune cookies with spam subject lines inside, lolcat fridge magnets, etc.

In other news, the Mission finally has a real weekly farmer’s market! And in true Mission style, there’s Capoeira, foursquare (not the app), food carts, mural painting, etc. But I was there for the food, and very happy to see my favorite farm stand from the Alemany market:

Meanwhile, forageSF is hosting their monthly “Underground Market” this weekend — which judging by the lines last month is no longer underground. Calling something underground is clever branding, though. This will be mostly local prepared food of sporadic quality–but when it’s good it’s GREAT, like Pizza Hacker, who made for Karl and I the best pizza either of us had ever had.

Dean’s Spanish chorizo and queixo tetilla pizza, in Bushwick.

One of Karl’s favorite new discoveries: nacatamal — huge Nicaraguan tamales, steamed in plantain leaves. The filling is really surprising: aside from the regular masa and chicken or pork, it includes a fresh chile, rice, mint leaves, and tomatoes. To be eaten with a tortilla and a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning.

Speaking of things that are huge, we went here a few weeks ago:

We walked across it in four days, taking a super leisurely and fun route. It was an amazing trip that could not have gone better. We did lots of cooking on rocks tree stumps, and though we ate mostly rehydrated astronaut food, everything tastes incredible when you’ve been carrying a small apartment up a cliff all day, and when you get to cook and eat in places like this:

Fried rice is easy, but I never thought of it as a leftover. But it is as a leftover that fried rice reaches its full potential. Yes, I have had “fried rice” in restaurants many times, but most restaurants don’t actually get it brown and crispy — they don’t fry the rice long enough or hot enough. Or it steams up too much by the time it gets to you. Or they use long-grain rice or brown rice, which lack the starch to fry up properly. Or they use freshly-cooked rice, and it has too much moisture in it.

The kind of fried rice I’ve been making lately is totally different. I found it in a back issue of Simple Cooking. It must be fried by itself in a neutral oil, and it comes off of the pan (or wok) with the grains stuck together in a beautiful golden crispy sheet. You can almost fry it as a cake and flip the whole thing at once. The goal is to get a uniform brownness throughout the dish without burning the individual grains of rice, so you’ll need to adjust the heat to find that balance. Fried rice is best made with day-old sushi rice, and it barely needs any accompaniments, though you could add aromatics and soy sauce. And a fried egg on the side would be lovely.

While we are frying things, why not fry up some potato salad? The french, non-mayo kind of potato salad, I mean: Take 1.5 lbs of mealy potatoes, slice them into big cubes and boil them up in some well-salted water, drain them, and dump them into a sheet pan, in a single layer. Meanwhile, mix up a basic dijon vinaigrette. Pour an appropriate amount of the vinaigrette over the potatoes evenly while they’re still warm, and let them soak it up for a few minutes. Add salt and pepper and minced parsley to taste. Chill in the fridge and have some with dinner if you’d like.

Next morning, fry what’s left in olive oil over medium heat. It will take a while to dry the potatoes out, but give them time and they will brown up beautifully and shrink a bit. Fry up an egg or two to go on the side.

Another obvious leftover trick is the combo meal. The other day I mixed some lovely leftover beans into leftover African peanut chicken soup, with great success. This technique has its pitfalls, because sometimes the flavors just don’t merge well. But that is the nature of experimentation.

What are your leftover secrets?

To here:

We saw a lot along the way.

We did not eat here:

We also didn’t eat here:

That’s the San Francisco Food Bank. Volunteers do about 95% of the work at this place. We helped bag a 8,271 pounds of pasta.

We found new sources of good food:

(Same open. Whole new grand.)

We discovered Panorama Bread:

We assuaged New York longings with bowls of Momofuku ginger scallion noodles:

• 2.5 cups thinly sliced scallions (1-2 large bunches, green and white parts)
• 0.5 cup finely minced peeled ginger
• 0.25 cup neutral oil – grapeseed etc.
• 1.5 tsp light soy sauce
• 0.75 tsp sherry vinegar
• 0.75 tsp kosher salt

Mix it all up and let stand 15-20 minutes. Make some noodles and dump this stuff on top. Add more scallions and soy sauce. Eat with other fun things as desired—we had nori and pickled turnips on the side. The Momofuku cookbook suggests bamboo shoots, pickled cucumbers, and roasted cauliflower.

We discovered our new neighborhood:

We ate beans and cornbread:

We painted Easter Eggs with old and new friends:

We miss our family and friends back East. We’ll make frequent return visits, and we’ll entice them with Seascape strawberries and Point Reyes cheeses. And I think we’ll be OK.

2. Memes are 32 years old, while viral marketing is an impressionable 12 years old.

3-10. Memes transmit themselves through our culture via seven general patterns identified by Aaron Lynch. The seven patterns are:

1. If your meme convinces people to have more kids, it will spread faster because your kids tend to buy into your view of the world, at least until they realize that they know everything and that you are a just a hollow shell of a human, devoured by memes from the inside.

2. If you are a separatist in some cult in Utah, then your kids may not have anyone else to listen to, and your meme will stick for lack of a better meme, unless your kids invent their own better meme, which is very likely, especially if you invented your own meme.

3. Proselytism. That is, your meme needs to get outside the family, because if it’s just a family thing it ain’t gonna spread. And you want this thing to spread like the 1918 flu epidemic, don’t you?

4. Your meme’s hosts should launch a full-on war against any competing memes. All you have to do is make your meme the One True Meme, designed to weave itself into people’s sense of how the world works. This will put its hosts in automatic attack mode when any alternative memes try to get in the way or hijack your meme.

5. You need lock-in: tight rules, tithing, some sense of duty, or anything else your meme can use to keep its hosts from considering its alternatives.

6. How is your meme elevator pitch? Do people “get it” right away, or do they have to struggle to understand what the hell you’re talking about? Is your meme culturally unorthodox? Because it’s going to be a hard sell if you stray too far from the mainstream.

7. And finally but most importantly, why should people care about your meme? I mean, if they are going to allow their souls to be taken over by this thing you’ve designed, what’s in it for them? Preferably there are societal as well as personal rewards involved.

11. memepool.com is a site started in 1998 to track interesting web sites. It was actually kind of popular for a while, but I think delicious, reddit, and digg won out. Which puts into question the potency of the meme of memes, doesn’t it?

12. …until you realize you’re getting the hard sell on memes right now.

13. Memes can be cultural ideas, symbols, or practices.

14. They are spread via speech, gestures, rituals, or other “imitable phenomena” like alien hand signals, if you’re an alien and if aliens even have hands.

15. I invented a meme recently, it’s called the Flag of Equal Marriage.

16. The word actually is intended to be analogous to genes. Memes and genes, because memes self-replicate like selfish genes. Memes can block other memes as genes can block other genes, and so on.

17. Memetics is the field devoted to the study of memes. Which means you can be a memeticist, and I think a lot of us are, but we call ourselves something else like “director of viral marketing” or maybe “trend monkey”.

18. In fact, there was a peer refereed Journal of Memetics, but it died in 2005! I think if it were called Journal of Trend Monkeying, it might have held on.

19. Not only are there memeticists, there are radical memeticists! These folks want to put memes at the center of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.

20. Memes don’t really stand alone, because if they did they’d be irrelevant. They’re part of a larger ecosystem of memes. They are woven into this ecosystem, composed of networks of cultural associations, mental structures, etc.

21. These clusters of memes are called memeplexes, as in meme complexes. If you’re talking about the fashion industry, you might even say “meme industrial complex,” but good luck turing that into a cute portmanteau.

22. Memes can evolve, of course. They have to keep up with the Jones’ memes!

23. Language just might be the first and most important memetic infection in your life.

24. An internet meme is like an inside joke. Internet memes and internet fame are celebrated at the annual ROFLCon conference. (Will it last, or will it go the way of the memepool?)

25. Some people pronounce “meme” like “memory,” but I think it’s pronounced like “dream”.

(Thanks, Wikipedia!)

The other night I had a lively conversation about remote controls with a neighbor, Lynn. Lynn is a college professor, a spry woman in her 50s, and a self-described technophobe. She was complaining about how hard it is to use the TV she and her husband recently bought. Her husband, by the way, is a technophile. Last time I visited their house, his office had three computers and all kinds of half-working gadgets strewn about.

Lynn and her husband are Netflix subscribers, and they love watching movies after dinner. But as soon as she gets into the living room and sees the five remote controls strewn across tables and chairs, she’s petrified. She calls for help and suddenly no one is around. The room gets cold and dark. She wants to hide under the sofa. The whole system is a monster: Sometimes she can get the DVD to come up, after a half hour coordinated attack on the remotes, but there’s no sound. Another half hour to get the sound working. Once she sees the DVD on the screen and has sound, it takes a few more minutes to get past the main menu. And after she’s finished watching something, she can never get back to the cable channels. She got frustrated just describing this process to me–so it must be making her very upset.

She and her husband have a standard model TV they bought last year—a middle-of-the-road Samsung flat panel. Their DVD player, sound system, and VCR are all midrange models that you’d find at any electronics store. So why is it that in 2009 we still can’t make a television and DVD player that just about anyone can connect and use? Lynn isn’t the only one with this problem, I’m sure of that. Most people over 50 are baffled by their entertainment systems. I understand that home theater buffs want extreme versatility. But most people are not home theater buffs, nor are they looking for frustration when they turn on the TV.

Lynn’s TV has tiny buttons along the bottom, and she needs a magnifying glass and a flashlight to figure out how to turn up the volume. Why is she drawn to the buttons on the TV instead of the remote? There are at least three reasons. One, finding and using the right remote is annoying. Two, she’s going to need the magnifying glass for the remote, too, so why not go directly to the source? Three, and most importantly, she hates the idea of remotes in the first place. And in order to explain why, we have to take a step back.

Lynn recalled that many years ago, her grandmother refused to switch from a rotary to a touch tone phone. Lynn thought this was ridiculous, and she told herself she’d never be such a luddite when she got older—she would navigate new technologies gracefully. Putting Lynn’s failure to keep that promise (through no fault of her own) aside for a moment, why might her grandmother have preferred rotary? After all, rotary is much slower than touch tone, and what could be easier than pressing a button? Lynn guessed that because her grandmother’s generation centered around the mechanical part of the 20th century, they saw the rotary dial as a way of physically acting upon the telephone system. They relied on physical affordances. Lynn’s grandmother wanted to physically tug on the phone system itself in order to complete her call, because that was the metaphor, and if there was no labor involved here, then nothing was actually happening. The idea of touch tone broke her entire mental model of the phone system, and it dampened the romance of a phone call. Given how remarkable the telephone is, it kind of makes sense that you should have to do a little work (and pay a hefty rate) in order to connect to your loved ones far away.

The satisfying thing about mechanical tools is that they feel like an extension of your body. Think of cars with manual transmissions vs. automatic. By automating the system of gears, by removing the human from physically acting on the transmission system, we also remove a primal sensory experience. People who spend all day riding bicycles around town love fixed-gear bikes—which don’t coast and have only one gear—precisely for the same reason: there is a deeper sensory connection, the bike is truly an extension of the body. The body feels bigger.

We seem to have a deep sense of connection to our tools if they are simple enough. As hunters and gatherers, we used weapons, and the people who could really become one with their hunting weapons survived. Mechanical tools like the rotary phone tap into the exact same body sense. I’m arguing here that Lynn’s grandmother’s desire to use the rotary phone wasn’t just because of habit or culture, it was in part a primal desire for the mechanical experience.

If that’s true, then all great man-machine interfaces, physical or virtual, should take advantage of this mechanical sense. Our bodies want to “dial” phone numbers or “turn up” the volume. The manipulation is so clear and direct. Lynn’s TV remote, on the other hand, piles one abstraction (wirelessness) onto another (“pushing” the volume up) onto another (virtually “switching” between DVD and TV mode), and she freaks out.

People want to physically act upon the worlds using the most direct manipulator available: their bodies. In his diary, Brian Eno said, “Computers need more Africa in them,” and I think that’s finally starting to happen. For thousands of years, we had purely mechanical technologies and we refined our tools in service to our innate mechanical sensitivity. In the last 40-50 years we have abstracted and flattened our tools, and technology really traded away its soul. Today, I think things are finally getting small enough and smart enough that we can bring the soul back, thoughtfully merging mechanical and digital. And who knows—maybe in the future, when we are all seamless cyborgs, Lynn will finally be able to turn on a movie without going nuts.

You’re probably wondering where all the stuff is. The Target I went to growing up in Nashville would close out of shame if it looked this way.

But this is not the Nashville Target. This is one of Target’s biggest stores in the country, and the only Target in the New York area. This is Brooklyn Target. And I will admit that on weekends, it can be a zoo.

So much a zoo that the company doesn’t know how to handle it. When I first visited this store eight months ago, I thought they were undergoing a reorganization, because so many shelves were completely bare, and sometimes entire aisles were empty. The merchandise was frequently laid out on the floor of the shelving system. But I kept going back, and nothing changed. And it’s the same today. This place just gets pummeled every single weekend, and by Sunday night it is utterly ravaged. Sure, the prices are pretty good, so I can see how popular it is. And a big part of Target’s image is the price—while not on Wal-Mart’s level, it’s definitely cheaper than the corner bodega or convenience store.

But Target has failed to adapt to New York City. They clearly built this store without planning to cover the volume of business they’re seeing. It feels like a test run for them. They’re dipping their toes in the water. I’m sure they knew, going into this, that Brooklyn is not Nashville. But whatever they did to compensate for the New York market, they didn’t do enough of it.

The funny thing is, the shoppers seem unfazed—their carts are full, they seem content. It’s as though they haven’t had the experience of other Targets. They’re just happy to be here, happy to have the option to save some cash. And after all, who needs AA batteries? Or anything else that is extremely popular and always completely sold out?

I’m starting to get used to it myself. But I know it’s possible to run a retail store in New York and keep things in stock, so I’m tempted to raise my expectations. I really am. Yes, there’s a lot more people here. Yes, things get really dirty quickly. But look at the New York-area chains: Duane Reade, Fairway, Key Food, and so on. These companies were built upon the mechanics of the New York market. They’ve learned how to protect themselves from being ransacked every weekend. National chains that come to New York have to learn some lessons from these folks.

To find out, I had to go buy the phone and start using it. I have had the iPhone 3G for two weeks now, and during this time I’ve paid particular attention its impact on my everyday behavior. So I thought I’d summarize what I’ve found so far.

For me, the iPhone’s unwieldy keyboard and tiny screen provide its greatest behavioral benefits. Its embodied interface inertia has weened me from unhealthy technology habits and has improved my communication. With the iPhone, I write fewer and shorter e-mails, I call people more often, and I don’t browse the web as much.

Here’s what happens in practice. Walking around the city during the day, I’ve found only one way to hold the phone and type on it with more than one finger: cradle it in both hands and use your thumbs to type as you narrowly avoid walking into fire hydrants or other iPhone users. For me, this typing position starts hurting pretty quickly. My thumbs tighten up and get sore from all the flexing, and my wrists start to hurt. It’s true that the iPhone keyboard software is very polished, but compared to a desktop it is almost entirely unusable, even without the wrist problems. I can eek out short e-mails or enter calendar events, but for any serious writing I need a real computer.

So the iPhone is a huge time saver because it’s so painful to use. On a typical pre-iPhone morning, I would wake up and rush to the computer–before doing anything else–to check my e-mail. It’s a terrible habit, and I think it’s pervasive among the folks I hang out with. But the morning after I bought the iPhone, I woke up and checked my e-mail before even getting out of bed, and when I was finished I didn’t feel compelled to approach my real computer before breakfast. This morning, for example, I actually read a book! I spent an hour reading before even going near my desk. This habit has stuck since day one, and I’m loving it.

The iPhone has also encouraged me to find new ways to communicate. Let’s say I get an inspiring e-mail from someone that generates lots of ideas. On the computer, I would reply with a brain dump, maybe spending an hour crafting a message. But with the iPhone, I’m reluctant to type more than a sentence. Maybe I call the person instead. Voice conversations are so much more efficient and intimate than e-mail. And yes, sometimes a long e-mail is warranted, in which case I can sit down at the computer and really focus on it.

My web browsing habits have changed, as well. I’ve spent way too many days of my life staring blankly at random web sites. But Mobile Safari requires so much patience and determination that I don’t use it unless I really, truly need it. This is the feature I’ve always wanted in a web browser, and the iPhone delivers!

A side effect of these changing habits is that my computer is now reinvented as the place where only real work gets done. If I sit down at the computer, it is because I have a task in mind. As long as I can pull myself away when that task is done, I’ll be much more efficient with it. And it’s easier to pull myself away if the computer isn’t so overloaded with different functions in my life.

Google Maps invoke the other big behavior change. I needed to find a good cafe the other day, in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Normally this would entail 20 minutes of wandering around. But I quickly found something within one block. I’m always in the position to suggest something nearby, or to look something up, and I’m really happy about that.

Beyond that, there isn’t much. What about the amazing touch interface? The WiFi? The App Store? The iPod features? I suppose I can cite Terry Gross more often now, but in general these features haven’t had a big impact on my behavior, they’re just nice to have. Also, there are lots of iPhone games and other applications that I haven’t delved into yet, so I’m excited about opening up more good-behavior potential from this device. I’ll let you know what arises…

Shame on AT&T. From my perspective, their red tape is the reason there are such long waits for these phones. Once Karl and I got to the front of the line, we were ushered upstairs where an Apple rep helped us activate our phones. But when he brought up the price, it was $499, not $299. We weren’t eligible for an upgrade. As I pleaded for their help getting my account set up properly so I could start paying them twice the price for their lovely service, I looked around and noticed that many of the people I waited in line with were also on their phones, also wrangling with AT&T.

Shame on Apple. It is not at all clear from their web site that the phone is subsidized. Nowhere do they mention $499. The only prices they talk about are $199 and $299. And Apple doesn’t advise current AT&T customers to call AT&T and check upgrade eligibility. Apple’s what to bring page is silent on the issue. It seems as though they’d rather have me find out only after a long wait, at which point I might buckle and get the phone anyway, even at $499. So beyond the six hours we waited in line, I spent two more hours making three phone calls to AT&T to discuss eligibility. Then I was told I would have to wait 72 hours for an answer from AT&T. Apple gave me a “golden ticket” in lieu of a phone and sent me home.

Flash forward 72 business hours, 5 days later. AT&T approved me for the lower pricing. But the store I waited in line at is now completely out of iPhones. So I took my golden ticket up to the 5th Avenue store—practically the only store in the country with the phone in stock at this point—and got into another battle. This time, thankfully, I was able to skip the entire line. And I found an employee who worked for both Apple and AT&T. The entire time we talked, she had two iPhones up to her head, both connected to AT&T customer service on behalf of different people in the store. Even though she works for AT&T, she only has access to the same customer service number that customers do. She just knows the right keywords to say if she wants things escalated.

Two hours later I emerged, iPhone in hand!, having paid the full price because Apple’s system still wouldn’t recognize that I was eligible. The AT&T rep told me I have to call AT&T and ask for a $200 refund, wait another 72 hours, then call Apple and ask for my money back, then wait another 5 days, and I should get a refund.

Flash forward another week and a half. AT&T hasn’t done anything yet. My call with them was escalated up to the VP’s office, and they called me a couple times just to confirm what was happening. One person asked if they could call me back in 30 seconds, and didn’t call back. I missed two calls from them over the weekend, when I was on vacation. And of course they don’t leave a direct phone number, so I called back this morning, to the general customer service number, and the guy said he’d put in a reminder that I was waiting. We’ll see if that works. So far at least AT&T acknowledges that I am owed money, but who knows how long it will take for them to proceed.

Long story short, it will be a while before the conveniences of this new phone defray the time and money I’ve already spent on it. Oh, how the materialistic, selfish, foolhardy, spendthrift, oafish, uber-trendy halfwit suffers.

It’s called the Kapoosh and it holds a slew of knives without regard for shape or size. What a huge improvement over most knife blocks—I highly recommend it. Our other option was a knife magnet, but we don’t have the wall space for one, and it’s honestly not as easy to use. Our Kapoosh is situated right below the counter. Now I can whip out my steel in a moment’s notice.

What more do you need, right? So you can imagine my surprise when I saw exactly how much you could screw up this simple, elegant solution. I spotted this in a gas station in Crescent City, California a couple months ago:

The designers of this microwave really went the extra mile to be helpful. Instead of the usual numbers showing how much time you’re dialing in, which are just so confusing, they used letters! What a novel approach. And they provided a handy heating guide below the dial that maps the letters A through S to different foods you might want to cook. The guide evokes nostalgia, too. It is sure to bring a tear to the eye of anyone who remembers when we all subsisted on hamburgers, microwave popcorn, hots dogs, and pizza, before burritos and sushi ruthlessly invaded the culture of single-handed eating.

But the table is still quite applicable in today’s convenience stores, and the nice thing about this letter dial design is that the convenience store owner could augment the table with her own sign listing additional convenience store foods that were invented after this microwave. You know, “for Hot Pockets, dial F. For Easy Mac, dial H…”

But the bad thing about this dial design is that it sucks. Even in 1981, when some people were surely confused about how long it takes these magical ovens to cook common foods, they did not need letters on the dial. The letters only add myth to the magic. Here we have a new and exciting technology in our culture, and people honestly want to know how it works and how long things take to cook in it. But if all they remember is to dial E for their hamburger, they are not learning anything. This dial encourages a whole new mental model for microwaving that is redundant, confusing, and, worst of all, proprietary.

Now, I will admit this is a very old microwave, made during the “wild west” days of microwave oven dial design, an era when we still hadn’t reached consensus, an era of wild experimentation and lots of illicit drug use. And I am thankful that they used letters and not arbitrary numbers. But I still think they should have known better.

The saving grace is that there are smaller time indicators. You know, for compatibility with other microwaves.

Oh, you might have noticed one other thing. The dial markings are backwards! They go counter-clockwise, so when the microwave is off, you read “S, R, Q, P, O…” from left to right. I struggled with this for a minute, because you do actually turn this dial to the right, just like most other dials. But the difference with this dial is that the letters are actually marked on the dial itself, which is uncommon, and the indicator for which letter you’re on is in the space outside the dial.

Put another way, which of these kitchen timers would you rather use?

The apache config for Leopard is in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and to turn on virtual hosting you must uncomment line 461, which includes /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. While you’re at it, if you need PHP, uncomment line 114.

Then edit httpd-vhosts.conf. I wanted to still be able to use the Mac’s default DocumentRoot for requests on localhost, but turning on virtual hosting in Apache 2.2 disables the server-wide DocumentRoot and ServerName, and the first virtual host you define becomes the default instead. Here’s what I needed in order to get my specific name-based virual hosts working:

#
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#
NameVirtualHost *:80
#
# VirtualHost example:
# Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container.
# The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not
# match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block.
#
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myrailsapp.biz
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName wpclient.com
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/wpclient.com"
</VirtualHost>

This configuration should work for multiple virtual hosts, but for me it wasn’t totally successful until after restarting the system—a simple “sudo apachectl graceful” didn’t do the trick. It may be that I also modified /etc/hosts and the system wasn’t fully assimilating my changes. Also, since I had upgraded from Tiger, my user-specific configuration files had moved, so my userdir (http://localhost/~carl/) stopped working! The fix for this was:

sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/* /etc/apache2/users/

I love to play Scrabble. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten better at it is that many new Scrabble players start out with a broken model about how to win. People start out wanting to make long words, because naturally long words are good. It is assumed that if you’re a grammarian or amanuensis, you’ll naturally be good at Scrabble. But Scrabble is not about making long words, it’s about strategically placed, usually mundane words. In Scrabble, a well-placed two-letter word can score points in the upper 30s, while a beautiful looking 6- or 7-letter word may only score 10 or 15 points. Furthermore, Scrabble draws from a very specific grammar that Scrabble players memorize and that’s really pretty useless in everyday life. Unless you’re a civil engineer in the Middle East, you probably don’t talk about qanats very often. But if you’re a Scrabble player, this is a word you should know, because it may provide a brilliant play one day when you have a Q and no U. Who cares what it means.

Similarly, in Pac-Man, many people start out with the idea that success means gobbling up all those dots so you can reach another level in the game. It is so natural to want to do this. It doesn’t matter where you live or what language you speak—the first time you sit down at Pac-Man, you’ll probably be unable to suppress your desire to eat all the dots. But Pac-Mac is not about dots or levels, it’s about points! The levels are a trick. The real goal of Pac-Mac is to creatively lure the ghosts into one of the corners where you can eat them all up quickly after using a power pellet and score lots of points. If your focus is on this goal, the dots will take care of themselves. And if you can eat all sixteen ghosts on each level, then you’re on your way to a high score.

Not that Pac-Man and Scrabble are the only examples. Every skill has its broken initial models that lay waiting for the unsuspecting beginner. As people gain experience, they continually build, test, and rebuild mental models. I think this is why people who are very good at something will know it, because they have insight into their past incompetence.