NAQ - Never Asked Questions
That's what most company FAQs really are. Easily answered questions that no one has ever asked.
These fake FAQs are useless. They are a turnoff to potential customers looking for reasons to buy, and an insult to existing customers troubleshooting. I now judge companies while shopping on how competent their FAQs are.
Most organizational FAQs are written by the marketing or PR arm. I think that is fine. It's actually okay to have the marketing folks write the answers. After all, why not have the organization present its best case? There might be nuances and selling points that should be covered. The problem is that the same folks make up the questions. The ones they make up are Easily Answered Questions that have never been asked. "Q: Is this the world's best product in this category? A: Why, yes!"
Behind that charade, real questions are being ignored. And if its a real problem, the real questions will be frequent, the same ones over and over. Ignoring FAQs is is dumb.
Answering real FAQs is smart for several reasons:
* It forces you to face the problem.
* It forces you to face your answer.
* It's an opportunity to sell (yes).
* It projects your character and brand.
* You can control the answer...
...because if you don't answer the FAQs, the internet tubes will. That's what forums are. Customers, both potential and present, bring their real questions to find real answers. Here people who don't work for the company will supply answers. Often these answers are good, but often the organization could supply a better answer, if it were really running a FAQ. Why not make it easy for everyone to find the best answer -- from the organization's point of view?
Sure, have an employee write the answers for FAQs. But keep the questions real. Need some real questions? Ask the help desk, or tech support, the mail room, or the receptionist!
You don't have to answer every question people will have. If you can answer the top 10 real FAQs (per subject) you can change the tenor of your feedback. One company claims that a decent FAQ (a half hour of work at most) can reduce calls to the help desk by 10%.
Real FAQs will often be difficult to answer. An answer may mean admitting mistakes, or acknowledge a weakness, or explaining something very complicated. It's okay. Take all the room and time you want. People WILL read it.
For maximizing the learning cycle let people also alert you if they feel you've answered the FAQ.
There are a couple of tutorials on how to write a good self-service FAQ. One reminds writers to give how-to answers for how questions, deep link to further info, and end with the great, "Where do I go if I have a question you have not answered?"
Hey, here's a radical idea: put the most asked questions up top!
And of course, your FAQ does not need to be in the form of a Q&A at all. You can cover the same ground by writing it in prose, or essay form, or even a story. For example, I took all the frequently asked questions about my book of photographs of remote and traditional scenes from Asia, and gave them all answers in this production note. It's all answers, no questions, but it works.
Loving Robotic Jellyfish
One one level, these autonomous robotic jelly fish illuminated the mechanism by which real jellyfish swim. Two kinds have been invented: one type that swims in water and one (shown in the video) that swims in air, via a small helium bladder. The parallels in their motions -- clearly visible in the video -- feel so organic that we immediately assign them life-like adjectives.
I think we are primed to find lifelikeness in machines. E.O. Wilson calls it our biophilia -- our intense attraction to living things. As we design machines to approach the complexity of organisms and mimic their behavior (as these do), we will be very quick to include them in our love.
Isn't it strange we rush to love these bots, but not to the same degree, say, automobile fuel pumps? The pumps are no less complex or capable. These mechanical jellies tell me that when we make artificial intelligences even 1/2 as smart as a dog, we will love it to pieces.
We marvel now at the love some guys have for their cars. This will pale to the strong emotional attachment we should expect to see towards really good automatons. People will cry when they are "turned off." Not just humanoid robots, but the thousands of other organismal bots that we can and will make.
These robotic jelly fish were built by the "automating technics" company Festo, and displayed at a fair in Hannover. Here are the construction details as reported in Design News by which their graceful conduct is unleashed.
Festo uses an electric drive, geared power transmission and linkages to actuate the tentacles. Alternating tension between the two external surfaces creates a wave-like motion that propels the robots through the water or air. Fischer describes the resulting movement as “peristaltic” since the waving tentacles seem to move by something like muscle contractions.
Whether they swim or fly, these two types of jellyfish steer themselves by carefully controlled weight shifts. As Fischer explains, their bodies contain a servo-driven swash plate connected to a four-armed pendulum that changes their center of gravity. “The pendulum shifts their weight, and they move in a new direction,” he says.
(Thanks, Zander.)
The Giant Pool of Money, Explained
By far the best explanation I've heard of the Housing Mortage/Credit Crisis is -- improbably -- a podcast from the motherlode of story-telling on NPR, This American Life. This podcast is a bit different from their usual slice-o-life stories in that they try to explain something extremely complex and abstract -- but in personal stories. The episode is called The Giant Pool of Money and it's worth at least an hour of your time on your next commute. Hearing the agents all along the "chain" of events describe what they thinking in their own words is about 100 times better than reading about it.
Tour of Asia Grace
Xeni Jardin, one the the Boing Boing quartet, visited me at my studio and filmed me giving her a tour of my Asia Grace book. I talk a bit about how I made the book and randomly dip into it to tell about some of the images. The audio level starts a little low, but gets better. She posted the edited, low-rent interview on Boing Boing.
For fans of Asia Grace, I've re-designed the Asia Grace website, and have begun posting *new* images of Asia, beyond the 400 or so that appear in the book. Some of the photos are from my previous nomadic life, and some are from recent trips. The usual process prevails. I'll add a very minimal caption, and I encourage others who know as much or more to post their own stories.
The image caught in the video below is from Ladakh, the Tibetan area run by India. I was lucky to visit it the first year it was open to travelers in the mid 1970s. To get a quick overview of the book, watch here:
Painted Films
Just saw the newly released Speed Racer film. It's a wonderful example of a painted film.
A painted film is "drawn" with photographs. It is painted, layer by layer, frame by frame not by hand -- as a Pixar annimated film would be -- but with manipulated photographic images. It is painted by cameras. These movies are the cinematic equivalent of photoshopped films. They are 100% special effects; virtual no frames are left untouched. However the "special effect" in most cases is to create something ordinary, or "realistic."
In this cool clip from Evil Eye Pictures, one of the artisan digital effects companies which produced Speed Racer, you can see how layers of images are painted up to form the final movie.
It is probably not a coincidence that most of the painted films to date are cinematic graphic novels. I don't mean films about or based on graphic novels, I mean films that are the visual equivalent of graphic novels.
The Matrix trilogy was among the first to exploit this style of cinematic photo-painting. The famous "bullet time" view was a trick appropriated from Japanese anime by special effects wizard John Gaeta. It contained aspects of both the free-wheeling imagination of drawn images and the found detail of photography.
Sin City, a graphic novel film based on a graphic novel was another example. At initial glance it appeared to be a one-to-one translation from comic book page to photographic film, but the methods and techniques the creators used to make this comic-book film went beyond comics. They were painting with cameras.
Then there was 300, a film so painterly, it signaled the arrival of something new. I think of 300 as comic-book kabuki. It was so stylized that it had the air of ritual in it. At the same time, it was obviously not photographed. But not drawn either. Yet it was constrained to the flatness of paper or canvas. Rather than try to mimic the realism of real life, it was imitating the realism of a comic book.
Now we have the newest and perhaps best illustration of this emerging genre in Speed Racer. Speed Racer has a weak story and cartoon characters (one tipoff is the pet chimp). TIME called it "aggressively childish" as a compliment. I think of it as "aggressively childlike." The medium is the message here. Besides its over-the-top poptimistic style, and its new method of making movies, it is pioneering the hybrid vigor of this new genre of painting moving images.
Junkyard Sports
My favorite fun guy, Bernie DeKoven, runs a site championing new sports using no-cost or low-cost equipment.
Office Olympics, Urban Golf, Mondo Croquet, Shoe Tossing -- how could these not be fun?!
Visit his Junkyard Sport Hall of Fame for some ideas. He also has a book ( "Junkyard Sports" ) on the subject.
Astounding Animated Wall Mural
Eat your heart out, Pixar!
Watch this amazing animation created by an artist photographing a very long series of his murals. The artist's name is Blu. He is an Italian graffiti artist, though it appears this series was painted in Brazil.
It's a big deal to paint a mural. There's a lot of paint to spread around. It's a superhuman feat to paint thousands of them needed for this not-insignificant animation. Even more remarkable is the wonderful whimsy and creativity displayed by the final work.
My life is enriched and my spirits lifted when someone spends such a huge amount of time to complete such a non-comerical work -- just for the pure beauty of it.
Thank you, Blu.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
To give you some sense of what is involved in painting murals -- just one!-- at this scale, here is Blu at work.
A gallery of his static murals can be found here:
(Thanks Michael)
Little People, Big World
A mixed family of dwarfs and tall folks stars in this reality program. The father and mother are both dwarfs, their daughter and one young son are not. They also have teenage twins; one is a dwarf and one is not. Two layers keep this multi-year show captivating. One is the how-do-they-manage curiosity about being a little person in a big world. How do they drive, work, date? The other attraction is the drama of the usual parent-child, husband-wife, and sibling relationships, but all raised up a notch by the stress of dwarfism. Emergency surgery, near-death accidents, and even arrests by cops keep it lively. The father is an ambitious, creative, hard-driving, bigger-than-life little guy, and his family struggles to keep up, or get out of his way. In the third season the father was cited, but acquitted after trial, for a DUI charge. Even his own father (normal height) can find his dwarf son's bossiness exacerbating. At one point grandfather tells the crew, "I've had it up to here with these dwarfs." It's that kind of candid honesty that is both entertaining and educationally compelling. Their dwarfism is neither romanticized nor overtly exploited, but is portrayed realistically. The series also benefits from its uncommon longitudinal stretch of 3 years, so you can watch characters mature and evolve. Because this unusual family is fundamentally likable, yet keeps overcoming obstacles both self-made and circumstantial, it's a joy to watch them march forward.
-- KK
Little People, Big World
(Season 1)
The Learning Channel
2006, 440 minutes
DVD, $20
Rent from Netflix
Available from Amazon
The Birth Clock
A nice piece of time art.
It's a clock that is dead, until you break its glass case. Then it begins ticking. You are now committed to whatever. The artist, Alex-vf, says "it helps you make up your mind." Here is the official description (via Seth).
The "Birth Clock" is a fragile glass object containing a digital clock that is not working; it is designed to help you to come to a decision when you're stuck at a specific point in life. Smash the glass, and the clock will start to work, leaving you with the broken object as a reminder of your dramatic decision.
Misty Yellow Mountain
Huangshan, China
Those old Chinese painters were not exaggerating. I had always thought their romantic depictions of fantastic rock formations, with tiny hermitages hiding behind swirling whips of clouds, were pure fantasy. But they were only painting what they saw! It is a four hour climb to the top of Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan). In the old days hermits and monasteries clung to the peaks. Now there are a couple of hotels, which require a constant stream of porters streaming up loaded with stuff to keep replenished with towels, food, and fuel.
Simultaneous Invention
In a New Yorker article about Nathan Myhrvold's idea factory, Malcolm Gladwell surfaces the scholarly work of researchers into the history of science who contend that simulatenous discover of inventions is the norm. In any period, ideas are discovered at the same time. Even big ideas. This is true for the past, present, and in different culturess. As Gladwell writes:
They found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:
The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.
Nathan Myhrvold runs Intellectual Ventures, which is essentially a patent machine. The chief employees are patent lawyers and clerks who win about 500 patents per year. These patents are generated by a loose group of innovative thinkers whose job it is to sit around and come up with novel ideas. Nathan hires these smart folks to brainstorm with specialty experts. So he may land his group at a small meeting of surgeons, and watch what happens when physicists and doctors blue-sky new medical instruments. They don't do the hard work of trying to make their inventions work; instead they describe them sufficiently to get a patent for them -- if there isn't already one filed.
The point is that there often already is a patent. It's not hard to come up with new big ideas. In fact it is so easy, that most big good ideas come to more than one person at once. That is why we have a patent office -- to assign priority since good ideas are 'in the air."
Gladwell's article is terrific, as usual, but there is a very odd absence. It lacks any reference to others doing exactly the same thing as Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. For instance it does not mention Jay Walker, of Priceline fame. Walker runs Walker Digital Labs, which does exactly what IV does. At the labs a bunch of interesting folks sit around with patent lawyers coming up with one idea after the next, which they patent at a furious rate. And then licence to others to develop. Thats' the entire business model of the outfit, just like IV.
But there is not even a hint in the piece that other outfits are mass-producing patented ideas as their chief product. And the reason this absence is so odd is that if Myhrvold's idea is so great, you would expect, as Gladwell correctly concludes, that other folks would simultaneously have the same great idea. According to the logic of the article there would HAVE to be others. And there are!
Recognition of other people who, like Myhrvold, got the idea to manufacture patents without physical research would have been a great way to conclude this wonderful introduction to simultaneous invention. It's a rare miss for Gladwell.
Testing Genetic Test Chips
Ann Turner, co-author of the best book on DNA-based genealogy: Trace Your Roots With DNA, wrote me to say that she too has been comparing results from the two big genetic test companies, 23andMe and deCode. She wrote in response to my earlier posting comparing results between the two vendors.
The big news is that places where errors are showing up are probably not random. Here's the argument, starting with her post on ancestry.com:
The two companies overlap on 562,532 SNPs. They agreed on 560,128 calls, or 99.6%. 23andMe didn't make a call on 1,970 SNPs where deCODEme did, and deCODEme didn't make a call on 399 records where 23andMe did. That leaves a mere 35 records where they actually made different calls [see the list below]. In all of those cases, one company would make a homozygous call while the other company made a heterozygous call -- there were no cases where they made a completely discordant call.
Here's the kicker from Ann's letter to me:
Four of those (rs11149566, rs4458717, rs4660646, and rs 754499) were also found in Antonio's list. That's more than you would expect by chance.
Four out of 23 from Antonio's list and four out of 35 on Turner's list of discordant results indicates that these regions (at least) are unreliable.
This is why sharing results is so valuable and a key to great quantified self understanding.
This is a micrograph of the bead array on which these tests are conducted.
Turner's 35 SNPs with different results, if case you also have done a comparison.
rs10435795 rs1045363 rs10743414 rs10945383 rs11149566 rs11179382 rs11707159 rs11915402 rs1209171 rs1221986 rs12907462 rs1303912 rs13422439 rs161381 rs17328647 rs1961196 rs1966357 rs2016461 rs2064034 rs2290516 rs2853981 rs3952469 rs4336661 rs4423481 rs4458717 rs4572718 rs4660646 rs6531490 rs6942478 rs7102702 rs754499 rs7812884 rs845217 rs9332128 rs9476380
The Cell Phone Platform
I am envious of Jan Chipchase. He gets paid corporate wages to hopscotch from one remote exotic destination to the next, taking pictures of local lifestyle details and interviewing local residents about their technology use. He is usually described as a '"user anthropologist" or a "usability ethnographer" -- either one would be a cool job. I often crib fantastic images of street use examples from Jan's site Future Perfect. Jan has always been very generous and will openly share not only his images but his annotations.
He was recently featured in a long New York Times Magazine profile that asked the larger question of whether cell phones could help cure poverty. They will certainly be part of the solution. But as this fine article points out, they are also becoming something more. The story has a lot of good news so I've sampled from it liberally.
Cell phone repair alley in Delhi, India
Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled “The Next Four Billion,” an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”
Chipchase annotates his photo of a Village Phone set up in Uganda.
Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues stumbled upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called sente. Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”
Chipchase invited local residents in Ghana to design their ideal cell phone.
As a joke, Chipchase sometimes pulls out his cellphone and pretends to shave his face with it, using a buzzing ring tone for comic effect. But there’s a deeper truth embedded here, not just for people in places like Kenya or Buduburam but for all of us. As cellphone technology grows increasingly sophisticated, it has cannibalized — for better or worse — the technologies that have come before it. Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well. That a phone might someday offer a nice close shave suddenly seems not so ridiculous after all.
What interests me most about cell phones is how fast they are displacing PCs as the center of mediated life. And how unpredicted this overthrow was when cell phones first appeared. No one forecasted these brick-sized appliances replacing personal computers, even when one could see they would get smaller. In Star Trek, where they had cell-phone like communicators, they still had mainframe terminals on the bridge.
Spammer AI
What if spammers come up with an artificial intelligence before Google does?
An early warning signal has been detected. The Washington Post reports that spammers may have control of computers that can decypher those letter puzzles on websites called CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are designed to be solved only by humans, since -- at least until now -- only humans could unravel distorted, distressed lettering. The problem with making CAPTCHAs more difficult is that humans have trouble solving them.
The computer scientists can't tell yet whether spammer bots or spammer-paid humans are solving the CAPTCHAs. That is the definition of passing the Turing test -- if humans can't tell.
VR Bubbles
A new way to shoot a film:
Use digital still cameras to take a full 360 degree panorama of a location, then stitch them together to form a VR "Bubble" which is used as a set for the action. Film action in green screen mode (not unusual by now). The movement of the camera filming the actors in the green space is coordinated with movement of the virtual camera within the bubble, so any action looks convincing. The technical term for bubbles is "spherically constructed location photography."
Since the bubbles are created beforehand, the director (but not actors) can see the action taking place in the virtual location on the green space monitor as the action is being filmed. This creates a more realistic shooting atmosphere. Spherical lighting domes confer exact lighting for the green space for any location/lighting situation.
Bubbles can be grafted and glued together to form extended locations.
There are several advantages of this way, one of them is that one can film in places where a movie crew would not be allowed to film, or manage to film. The movie Speed Race used 10,000 bubbles shot around the world -- covering far more locations than a movie crew could have afforded to go.
There's a pretty technical interview in VRMag with Dennis Martin who created the virtual locations for Speed Racer, and one with John Gaeta, special effects supervisor. He says:
We realized that we would need to create a department that had never existed inside a standard film production before, and we called this department "the world unit": its job was to basically capture thousands of these bubbles around the world. So...we set this up.
Eventually I can see a market for location bubbles developing. You want the inside of the Sistine Chapel ready to shooting? How about a location at sunset atop Machu Picchu. Either one is yours for $1,000, or $100 even - cheaper than any visit could be. Someday there'll be an istockbubbles.com.
Poptimistic
In a recent Boing Boing interview special effects guru John Gaeta dropped a fantastic new word: Poptomistic.
Poptimistic is not his coinage; it seems to be circulating in the design and style world, but I think it perfectly captures the upbeat, day-glo brightness of a technicolor future. It manages to contain many of the optimistic strands of the digiterati, and the pop masses. It says: technology that works!
The new pace-setting film Speed Racer (which Gaeta worked on) is poptomistic.
It is the opposite of the distopian Blade Runner, even though both are visually outrageous and seminal. The overlook sci-fi cult favorite Fifth Element was slightly poptimistic.
The book of Japanese street fashions called Fruits is poptimistic.
So were many of the early issues of Wired magazine.
And as far as I am concerned the entire instant city of Burning Man is poptimistic.
Poptimistic is super-saturated richness, hyper-realism, brightly lit in even the furthest corners, up tempo, and generally positive.
What else is poptimistic?
Total Personlization Needs Total Transparency
Writing in the Guardian, Seth Finklestein says:
We cannot expect that having large warehouses of data on individuals will be free from unintended consequences, especially when there are incentives to try to build highly detailed models of everyone's lives. The price of total personalisation is total surveillance.
I have a different phrasing:
The price of total personalization is total transparency.
Transparency suggests a more active role, rather than an imposed view. You have to BE transparent. And of course, it is impossible to have total personalization with perfect knowledge.
of us. 
800 CDS
Part documentary and part how-to. A struggling musician uses his PC to produce his own album and winds up with a stack of 800 CDs in his apartment. Now what? How does he get anyone to buy them? He turns his camcorder on, and records his journey into music promotion and small time marketing. He tries flyers, bar gigs, street corner handouts. Eventually he goes to a seminar for indie music promotion, and for the rest of the documentary he records the results of following what he learns at the seminar. It's a good crash course in Music Marketing 101, perfect for any indie band. You really should hear what works. I think there are enough general purpose lessons that any artist should watch this and learn. There's no formula. The film's seminar leader can't repeat too many times: it's all about tapping into the inner authentic you, doing things in a way that is appropriate for you and your creations. Following this injunction, the musician-filmmaker does sell out his 800 CDs by the end of the film. Now he has a stack of 800 DVDs of this indie film to unload, but he knows how to do that. For example, he got one to me.
-- KK
800 CDs
Chris Valenti,
2007, 84 min.
DVD, $30
Available from the 800 CDS website
Getting Paid
Making money from films
Scott Kirsner has compiled an online list of the best ways to sell your video creations online. Everyone is making video, but few figure out how to sell them. Kirsner gives you 21 different sites that pay videomakers and dissects the monetary deal each one offers. I haven't found anything as useful anywhere else. It is the equivalent of the first version of a "Writer's Market" for digital video producers. This list is free, part of a longer downloadable e-book he hopes you will buy, the Future of Web Video. I did; the rest of the book is a bargain for anyone serious about peddling a video of whatever length. I hope he keeps the list updated.
-- KK
Getting Paid: Sites that Help Filmmakers and Video Producers Make Money
Free
Available from Scott Kirsner
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Spiderbrace Video Camera Stabilizer
The Complete Animation Course * The Animation Book
How Accurate Are Personal Genome Tests?
I've had my DNA sequenced by 2 of the 3 companies now offering this service to the paying public. I purchased the tests for 23andMe and Iceland-based deCode. I am still plodding my way through the results -- it's sort of an education. One question I had was how well do the two results matched? I give the same DNA to both companies; the results ideally should be identical. DeCode claimed to test for 1,000,000 SNPs and 23andMe for 500,000, so the problem of lining all these results up to see what differs is not trivial. Luckily another user has just done this.
Antonio Oliveira also used both 23andme and deCode. He writes in his new blog:
In order to determine the accuracy of the genome profile provided by 23andMe and deCODEme I arranged to be genotyped by both companies and wrote a computer program to compare the results. The downloaded files contains 576,105 snips in the case of 23andMe and 1,013,349 snips for deCODE. After removing the no-calls and matching the two files by SNP identification, 560,299 snips were present in both files. The comparisson revealed 23 cases in which the results do not agree.
Oliveira made a chart of his results, categorized by chromosome.
The 23 errors makes the agreement between the two sets of data about 99.995% accurate, or an error rate of .005%, which is pretty good for medicine. A better test might be to repeat the test on the same DNA, but I assume the manufactures of the chip have done that. The 23 "unequal" SNPs caught here in disagreement are not SNPs currently associated with any diseases, so these particular errors are inconsequential. I don't know if there are location biases in the errors, but presumably errors can appear in significant locations -- at that very low rate. However if your computer had the same error rate, you'd notice.