October 2009 Archives
I really like George Packer (I've linked to his writing quite a few times in the past). Anyway, his latest piece (at least I think it's his latest), is a nearly 15,000 word profile of Richard Holbrooke, special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's quite an impressive piece, painting not only a clear picture of a complicated figure in international relations, but also providing plenty of context for the situation that Holbrooke is trying to navigate.
One particularly fascinating part was the description of how Holbrooke runs his organization:
Holbrooke described his method to me as "a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy's decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don't air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other."
Read the whole thing (just give yourself plenty of time to do it).
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Tags: afghanistan, internationrelations, pakistan, politics
Back when I went to Hong Kong in June I got a warning from Elizabeth that I would likely smell the worst thing ever, and it was stinky tofu. Well, she was right, the smell quite literally stuck with me for two hours and I thought I was going to vomit. Not entirely surprisingly, stinky tofu has topped this list of the ten smelliest foods in Asia. Here's how the describe the scent:
Asian street carts sell this dish--aged, fermented bean curd soaked in a putrid, inky vat as a midday snack. The marinade can be made from bamboo shoots, herbs and dried shrimp, all perfectly aromatic ingredients--except when it sits in room temperature for 14 days (or more). The smellier, the better, but even when served with a side of chili sauce, it remains doubtful that the rancid bean curd tastes any better than decaying bleu cheese sitting in two-day old garbage.
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Tags: asia, food, hongkong, smell
I wish I could remember where I read it, but a few years ago, during the peak of the HD DVD/Blu-ray kerfuffle, someone made the point that it was likely Microsoft was supporting the less popular HD DVD because ultimately it was betting on digital video delivery and a format war that left consumers wary of physical media would buy some more time until that sort of thing was a reality. Anyway, it's stuck with me and I was reminded of it today reading John Gruber's response to what apple should do with Apple TV, which includes a suggestion to add Blu-ray. Gruber replies:
That would be nice. (I bought a PS3 just for use as a Blu-ray player; I would have bought a new Blu-ray equipped Apple TV instead if there were one.) But: Apple seems to have made a decision to ignore Blu-ray across the board, at least for now. Apple's answer for HD movies is the iTunes Store.
Which is funny, because when I read the specs for the new widescreen iMac I was very surprised it didn't include one, but this makes sense. Not that it's a nice thing, mind you. This is likely one of those examples of Apple being evil and getting away with it, which is fine, I get how business works, but let's at least call a spade, a spade.
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Tags: apple, microsoft, technology
I, like many of you I'd imagine, have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Twitter at the moment. While there are many great aspects of the service, it's become a bit overwhelming to deal with the constant flow of information coming down the pipe. Anyway, a few months ago I wrote a little script to help myself separate the signal from the noise a little. All it does is send you emails from someone you are especially keen on following. I guess I could set up device notifications, but this seemed easier.
Anyhow, I'm calling it Tweemail for now and it's hosted over at Google code.
It's made up of three files:
config.php: This is the config file. It's actually the only thing you need to edit. All you need to do is add the user you want to follow, your email address to send updates to and then their email so that when you hit reply you can reply right back to them.
lastid: This is simply a counter, you don't need to worry about it. It just writes the latest ID of your friend's tweet.
index.php: I should probably rename this, but it's the guts of the operation. Nothing to play with in there.
Anyway, I'm sure the code is pretty gross and could be written much better, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess), you'll need to have your own server to run it and you'll have to be able to set up a cron job, which just runs a script at whatever interval you want (I check once an hour myself).
That's it, hope you enjoy it and it's useful. I know I've found it to be.
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Inspired by this comic I was having a conversation with my co-worker Ryan, a devout Red Sox fan, about what it would take for him to root for the Yankees. I couldn't come up with a real scenario where that would make sense other than it being the last game of the season with a tie in records between the Rays and Red Sox with the Yankees playing the Rays for the last game. In that scenario, where the Yankees are already out of the playoffs, I imagine even a Red Sox fan could root for them.
But, what if by some strange turn of events it was announced that there were going to be two World Series champions in the year 2022 (no idea why that year, but bear with me). As a Red Sox fan the choice would go like this: Either the Red Sox AND the Yankees win the World Series that season or it goes to the two teams the Red Sox fan hates after the Yankees (I imagine there's a pretty big gap in that list). It's sort of like baseball prisoner's dilemma. For argument's sake, let's say neither team has won a world series since their last and that years win will carry the same level of prestige as any other year. What would a Red Sox fan (or a Yankees fan, for that matter) choose?
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Tags: baseball, psychology
For no reason in particular, here's the first result for every letter of the alphabet:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z
A couple notes: For a few letters, c and e for example, Google actually returns some math before the result, I left these out. For F, Google actually returns its own Google Finance listing for Ford (with chart) before the first result. For k it returns the Google Finance listing for Kellogs before the Wikipedia link to the letter (same for q, though that one is for Qwest and v for Visa). I think the most impressive branding jobs are probably e for E!, i for iTunes, o for Oprah, t for the Boston train and v for an ABC show that doesn't even exist yet.
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Tags: alphabet, google
Over at her New York Times blog, Olivia Judson wonders out loud: "Do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose -- in a subtle way -- their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?" For example, when you say "eee" your mouth curls up like a smile, and when you "ooo" it curls down like a frown (hence why we say "cheese" while taking a photo).
Anyway, she goes on to try to answer her own question:
As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn't mean no one has; it just means I haven't been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea's not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl -- the German vowel sound ΓΌ, for example -- you're likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.
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Tags: happiness, language, psychology
I've written a few times about my fascination with desire lines: "the unpaved paths that people wear down over time."
Anyway, Peter Merholz, who wrote the first post that exposed me to the idea, just wrote a new post on the topic:
Designers come from a tradition of figuring out the whole system, and putting it out there. But the success of Twitter has emerged from an approach that's nearly 180 degrees from that. Twitter began simply as a way to post 140-character messages, and allowed remarkable freedom in following. Almost no structure was placed on the system. It's through the paths that users have worn in the system (e.g., @ replies, retweets, hashtags, followfridays) that Twitter has grown to realize the value of the service, and they've made initial steps to "pave" those most popular paths (most notably replies, though Doug mentioned that they are considering how to more formally support retweeting as well).
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Tags: technology, ux
Good to know:
An "epidemic" is simply a proliferation of an infectious disease beyond that normally observed. A "pandemic" is an epidemic that spreads across regions or continents. The number of dead is not part of the definition. Indeed, a pandemic may kill no one at all.
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Tags: flu, health
This is too good an idea not to share. Sorry if everyone already knows this, because apparently it was reviewed by CNET in 2006, but Samsung's phone for the elderly called the Jitterbug actually plays a dialtone when the clamshell phone is opened.
Open the phone and you'll notice the first thing that makes this phone so great for seniors: An actual dial tone. With this simple innovation, you immediately know that the phone is active and ready to go, similar to a landline phone.
It's a really elegant solution to what I can only imagine is a big usability issue.
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Tags: mobile, usability
Right, so I'm back from vacation and ready to roll again. While away/home (I spent the second week of vacation at home training my new puppy) I consumed a fair amount of media. Out of that, I have three recommendations: One book and two movies.
First up is All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson. I would guess lots of you have read this already, but I hadn't and I liked it quite a bit. A few quotes to wet your whistle: "'Future' is inherently plural." and "He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography, was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept. History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we'd come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation." (I so love that the Kindle stores all my quotes online. Thank you Amazon.)
Great, now for the two movies. Harold and Maude is from 1971 and amazing. I sort of can't believe I never saw it. It feels like a Wes Anderson movie made two years after he was born. (It must have been an inspiration for him.) The other is equally odd: Battle Royale is a Japanese movie about a class of kids left on an island and told they're part of a game where they must kill each other. At the end of three days, if more than one person is emerging they will all die. It's not gory in a nasty sort of way, though there is blood, but more than anything else it's just an interesting "experiment" in game theory. Seeing the different strategies the different students take is a bit of a mind trip.
Right, that's all. Back to work.
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Tags: books, movies, reviews
Hey everyone, I'm off to Paris for a week and then London, so things will be pretty quiet around here. In the meantime, here are some random blogs from my blogroll to keep you busy: Felix Salmon, BBH Labs, Jay Parkinson, Snarkmarket, Consumerist and Bill Petti.
If you have any Paris tips please leave them in the comments. It would be greatly appreciated. See you in a few weeks.
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Tags: me, paris, travel
So glad to read someone arguing for shorter movies:
Some stories are better longer, of course. Even at three hours, The Godfather doesn't waste a millisecond. But lately too many directors are indulging themselves at the expense of your time. What they don't realize is that you might enjoy a short movie that you would hate if it were long. Say you come across Crank: High Voltage. It might be terrible, but it's only 96 minutes -- which is more or less three Family Guys. So even if it is terrible, it won't really be terrible. But if it were two hours? Not worth the risk. Might as well watch Old School again. It's only 90 minutes.
Say what you will about Zoolander, but it's 89 minutes long. I actually think this needs to be applied across the board. Despite the fact that the overwhelming trope of the world is that attention is at a premium, editing seems to have all but disappeared. Stories in the Times, for instance, consistently feel a few paragraphs longer than necessary and new books could knock off a few chapters. Come on people.
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Tags: editing, movies, newspapers
First, Choire Sicha from TheAwl.com on the whole FTC endorsement thing:
Stealth marketing, direct advertisement and product placement work only on the clueless, and our immersive, hippo-like wallowing in the marketplace serves only to make us resistant to these viral contagions. Because the more we are sold to -- and, believe it, we are being pitched every minute -- the more immune we are to it all.
To which Rob Walker "responds" in his linkpile: "That's exactly what the marketing industry experts always say. Probably because it's what they want you to believe it. And why not? It's certainly easier than thinking." I am with Rob on this one. If it were true that we become immune to these sort of messages than us in the marketing industry would never buy anything, right? I mean our job is to sit around all day and expose ourselves to advertising by choice. We purposely notice advertising and we still give into it's pull. I know we all say "people are getting more savvy," but I'm becoming increasingly unsure as to what, if anything, that actually means.
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Tags: advertising, culture, marketing
Marginal Revolution has a very interesting point about the economics of the film industry that I hadn't ever considered:
One interesting thing that I've always found about the film business from an economic point of view is that unlike in any other business I can think of, the cost of manufacturing the product has no affect on the purchase cost to the consumer. For example Honda can make a cheaper car with less features and cheaper finishes than BMW without losing all of their customers to the superior car because they sell their product for less. You spend less to make something, you charge less for it. Makes complete and obvious sense. Not so in the film business.
The comments are quite interesting as well as people puzzle over just how poorly theaters operate: They are constantly empty, all seats and movies cost the same no matter how popular they are and just how cheap the most profitable films in history were to make (thus why they're so profitable).
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Tags: economics, movies
Hey everyone, I'm going to be in SF tomorrow, October 7th and I'm doing a little drink-together with Rick and some other Barbarians.
So, if you're up for it, here are the details:
Date: Wednesday, October 7
Time: 7pm
Location: Lucky 13, 2140 Market Street, SF, CA 94114
Awesome, see you tomorrow.
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Tags: drinks, me, meetup
Ha! I love this. Some young economist named Patrick DeJarnette looked into what combination of coins would be more efficient than our current 1, 5, 10, 25 setup. As he explains, "What's a little surprising is how inefficient our current setup is! It's only the 2,952-nd most efficient combination. There are effectively 152,096 different combinations of penny + three coins. In other words, it's only in the 98th percentile for efficiency."
As the Stephen Levitt, the Freakonomics blogger observes, what might be funniest about that is that, "he [Patrick DeJarnette] finds that the current government solution for the coins we use is 98 percent efficient and thinks this is inefficient."
Anyway, he also figures out the most efficient combination of coins: 1, 3, 11 and 37 which would officially make the US the most obnoxious place in the world (the combo leads to 4.1 coins per transaction). In the realm of reasonable coin amounts, 1, 5, 15 and 35 wins out at 4.5 coins, which is not too bad (and 1, 5, 10 and 30 is only slightly worse at 4.6). Anyway, here's to the three-cent piece.
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Tags: economics, money
Interesting post over at Influx Insights about a company that's gone to building iPhone apps in 48 hours. It hits on two big points I've been throwing around in my head for a few months now: First, couldn't you keep down costs and fail faster if you gave yourself an artificial deadline? This recognizes that we're not launching final products after the first iteration, but rather prototypes with which we can judge whether there's a "there, there." Second, they mention that they actually spent more time working on the promotional video than the app itself. Marketing is incredibly underutilized in the tech world to this day. You can still create a ton of value for yourself by just creating a fancy-looking video. For all the talk about "product as marketing," there still seems to be a ton of value in "marketing as marketing."
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Tags: business, marketing, startups, technology
So I just got done reading Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
, which I'd highly recommend if you'd like to get a better sense of how we got to where we are with the economy. There are a ton of quotes I'll probably share over the coming days (I love that Kindle just sticks them online for you), but I found the following paragraph especially striking. As background, at one point, about a year or two ago I believe, there was a chance that a huge number of CDOs would be dropped on the market at the same time, finally giving people a "true" price.
That threat sent shock waves through the market. Nobody had ever tried to sell that many CDOs or mortgage bonds in public before. A fire sale of that kind threatened to produce something the CDO world had never seen before: "true," undeniable market prices. In theory, that promised to be a very healthy, long-term development. After all, the bankers who had invented structured finance had always claimed to be upholding the virtues of free markets and rational pricing. They were supposed to like transparency. In actuality, though, the prospect of an open auction had terrifying short-term implications. Even at the best of times, forced sales hardly achieve good prices, and by mid-June, conditions in the mortgage market were getting worse by the day.
It's just amazing. Those that espouse the values of free markets were doing their best to ensure that CDOs were anything but that.
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Tags: books, economics, finance
Hi, I'm 