Remainders: From Maslow to Marshmallows

I’m a little late this week, but it’s time for another edition of Remainders, my chance to share all my favorite internet ephemera from the last seven days. In case you’re new to things, here’s last week and the week before. Before diving in, update on the book front is I finished off How to Think and quickly read the Ursula Le Guin short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (which is around 30 pages and definitely worth the time). I flipped back and forth on what to read next, but think I’ve settled on China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur Kroeber (who I first ran into on this amazing podcast episode a few years ago about China and the book, “Arthur Kroeber vs. The Conventional Wisdom“). As always, if you want to get these in posts in your inbox you can subscribe by email. Okay, now for some links.

My talk from Percolate’s Transition Conference in SF is online now. It’s all about applying the theory of constraints from the book The Goal to marketing’s bottlenecks. We’re putting on Transition London in two weeks. If you’re interested in joining us there, please get in touch.

One more thing from me: I was interviewed on Paul McEnany’s excellent Real Famous podcast (iTunes, PocketCasts, Stitcher). I can’t listen to my own voice for that long, but people have told me they enjoy it.

It was a great week for longform. Here are my four favorite pieces:

• The Cut had this totally crazy story of an NYC socialite grifter who went by the name Anna Delvey. “Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.”
• The craziest story in sports this week was easily this Ringer piece about Bryan Colangelo, President of Basketball Operations for NBA Philadelphia 76ers, being connected to a set of strange anonymous Twitter accounts. The handles tweeted inside info from the team and bad-mouthed Joel Embiid, the 24-year-old center they just paid $150 million. I legitimately can’t think of another story like this in sports. The Sixers are “investigating” and most expect Colangelo to be fired, although internet sleuths have zeroed in on his wife as the likely culprit, not him. (As an aside, the Sixers were also at the center of what may be the second strangest story of this NBA season: How Markelle Fultz, the number one pick in the 2017 draft, managed to forget how to shoot.)
• Speaking of the the NBA, I’ve been waiting for someone to write a definitive story of how the NBA came to be a “pace-and-space” league full of threes, layups, and free throws. ESPN’s Kevin’s Arnovitz and Pelton are the men for the job: “Through much of the ’90s, a basketball possession was commandeered by a coach on the sideline who shouted the set to the point guard, who transmitted that play call to the other four players on the floor. But today’s fast-paced NBA teams have tossed away most of the playbook in favor of a series of basic principles and patterns that empower the guys on the floor to make decisions based on feel. Gentry, whose teams were ranked in the bottom half of the league in pace five times in his six seasons as a head coach before his arrival in Phoenix to join D’Antoni’s staff, is himself a convert.”
• The New Yorker profile of John Feeley, ex-Ambassador to Panama, is yet another story of a smart and capable person who has left government because of a combination of incompetence and purposefully harmful policies from the Trump administration.

You know Maslow’s Pyramid? Of course you do. Well, it turns out that the pyramid didn’t come from him at all and, in fact, it disagrees with a lot of what his theory had to say. This comes from a new paper “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education” which Ed Batista highlighted on Twitter. Here’s quote from the paper:

We identity three specific negative effects in this regard: that the pyramid is a poor representation of Maslow’s [hierarchy of needs]; that the preoccupation with the pyramid obscures the context within which the theory was created and that by focusing exclusively on the pyramid, we miss the other contributions that Maslow’s thinking can make to management studies.

The paper’s authors even put together this handy video explainer.

Steve Kerr is back in the NBA Finals coaching the Golden State Warriors. Last week he had some strong comments about the NFL’s anthem decision. If you’re curious, the Times had a good profile of Kerr last year that tells the story of the assassination of his father in Beirut in the 1980s.

The iconic Ali/Liston photo turned 53 last week.

Favorite podcast episodes:

• a16z episode with Brian Arthur: Arthur is a Sante Fe institute guy and the author of the excellent The Nature of Technology, which offers a non-Darwinian evolutionary theory for all tech. It also turns out he’s the guy who introduced the idea of lock-in in his 1989 paper “Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events.” The episode is pretty wide-ranging and covers a lot of Arthur’s work (he’s also done a lot around what he calls complexity economics).
• Another interview of Adam Davidson in my favorites this week. This time it’s talking about Trump’s financial corruption specifically, and money laundering generally, on The Josh Marshall Podcast.

I ordered a copy of the Toyota Production System, which includes this great inside cover timeline:

Speaking of books, here’s every book Bill Gates has recommended over the last six years.

Twitter pointed out this photo of Rocket’s star James Harden looks like a scene from a renaissance painting and, of course, there’s a subreddit called AccidentalRenaissance.

The New York Times had a good op-ed on how segregation worked in the North. And here’s Jelani Cobb on “Starbucks and the Issue of White Space“.

Would you go to a republican doctor?

Some good stuff in this New Yorker book review of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies (the author, Ben Fritz, was also on an excellent episode of Slate Money a few weeks ago), a book about the history and current state of the movie industry. This bit about the size of the rental market really surprised me:

Suddenly, there were video stores all over America that needed to purchase at least one copy of every major new Hollywood movie. In “Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency” (Custom House), an oral history compiled by James Andrew Miller, Tom Hanks recalls the effect that this had on Hollywood in the eighties. “The industry used to be so flush with free money that it was almost impossible to do wrong even with a crappy movie, because here’s why: home video,” he says. By 1986, video sales and rentals were taking in more than four billion dollars. Income from home viewing had surpassed that of theatrical release.

TILs from this week:

• We bleed horseshoe crabs to test for bacteria in medication and Eli Lilly has announced they’re going to start using a synthetic for instead, reducing their need for crab blood by 90%.
• There’s a wasp that checks incapacitates a spider, checks to see if someone else has laid eggs inside it, removes if necessary, and lays its own eggs. (Strange wasps seems to be a thing I’m running into a lot. The Rebecca Solnit piece about Trump that I mentioned last week also included a bit about a parasitic wasp that was so diabolical it was named Set, after the Egyptian god of evil and chaos.)
• A “magic eye” poster is called an autostereogram: “An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one’s eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.”

My friend Tim Hwang launched the Trade Journal Cooperative, wherein you pay $60 a year to get random niche trade journals sent to you. I couldn’t be more in.

I was reminded of this great piece about Suck.com and its unique style of hyperlinking.

Mary Meeker presented her yearly state of the internet with lots of data.

From the China book I’m reading, thought this was an interesting nugget:

June 3, 2018 // This post is about: 76ers, bill gates, books, bottlenecks, brian arthur, bryan colangelo, China, economics, gladwell, horseshoe crab, how to think, james harden, kanban, markelle fultz, marshmallow experiment, mary meeker, maslow's hierarchy, MOVIES, NBA, nfl, NYC, omelas, percolate, podcast, real famous, remainders, segregation, software, starbucks, supply chain, tesla, toyota, toyota production system, ursula le guin, wasp

Seeing Through Games

Clive Thompson, writing about finding the cruise ship that crashed in Italy last year on Google maps (Maps link here), made a really interesting point about how we interpret strange visuals in the age of digital technology and video games:

I remember, back when the catastrophe first occurred, being struck by how uncanny — how almost CGI-like — the pictures of the ship appeared. It looks so wrong, lying there sideways in the shallow waters, that I had a sort of odd, disassociative moment that occurs to me with uncomfortable regularity these days: The picture looks like something I’ve seen in a some dystopic video game, a sort of bleak matte-painting backdrop of the world gone wrong. (In the typically bifurcated moral nature of media, you could regard this either as a condemnation of video games — i.e. they’ve trained me to view real-life tragedy as unreal — or an example of their imaginative force: They’re a place you regularly encounter depictions of the terrible.) At any rate, I think what triggers this is the sheer immensity of the ship; it’s totally out of scale, as in that photo above, taken by Luca Di Ciaccio.

July 23, 2013 // This post is about: Costa Concordia, culture, Google Maps, MOVIES, video games

Unified Theory of Pixar

Jon Negroni has an amazing unified theory of every Pixar movies. Apparently there are some theories, which he’s building on, that all Pixar movies are actually set in the same universe and, in his theory at least, it’s a massive fight between humans, animals and machines. This is exactly why the internet exists.

Here’s a snippet:

But why would machines want to get rid of humans in the first place? We know that animals don’t like humans because they are polluting the Earth and experimenting on them, but why would the machines have an issue?
Enter Toy Story. Here we see humans using and discarding “objects” that are clearly sentient. Yes, the toys love it Uncle Tom style, but over the course of the Toy Story sequels, we see toys becoming fed up.

[Via Boing Boing]

July 13, 2013 // This post is about: Animation, MOVIES, pixar, Theory

A little extra context

I haven’t seen Django Unchained yet (though I want to, and I loved Inglorious Basterds), but I found this insight into Tarantino’s process very interesting. From a New York Times interview with the director:

I have a writer’s journey going on and a filmmaker’s journey going on, and obviously they’re symbiotic, but they also are separate. When I write my scripts it’s not really about the movie per se, it is about the page. It’s supposed to be literature. I write stuff that’s never going to make it in the movie and stuff that I know wouldn’t even be right for the movie, but I’ll put it in the screenplay. We’ll decide later do we shoot it, do we not shoot it, whatever, but it’s important for the written work.

I think about this at Percolate sometimes and always err on the side of over-documentation. I like the idea of building a narrative around something that extends far beyond what’s necessary, as the additional context creates an important background for decisions. In Tarantino’s case, I have to imagine part of the reason he gets such good performances out of the actors in his films is that they’re given such a rich text to work with.

January 4, 2013 // This post is about: Filmmaking, MOVIES, Quentin Tarantino, WRITING

On Zero Dark Thirty

Before I left for my trip to Asia I went to see Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for, and ultimately killing of, Osama Bin Laden. Before, and after, seeing it I had read quite a bit about the raid, the movie and the controversy around both. I thought maybe it would be worth collecting all this stuff into a post, so that’s what I’m doing.

First, on the movie itself. A lot of people really like it (the most interesting point Denby makes in this podcast is the idea that this and Lincoln spell the end of auteur theory as they show the power of the writer/director combo). I thought it was pretty okay. In reading around, I think Roger Ebert sums up my opinions best in his review of the film:

My guess is that much of the fascination with this film is inspired by the unveiling of facts, unclearly seen. There isn’t a whole lot of plot — basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is. The back story is that Bigelow has become a modern-day directorial heroine, which may be why this film is winning even more praise than her masterful Oscar-winner “The Hurt Locker.” That was a film firmly founded on plot, character and actors whose personalities and motivations became well-known to the audience. Its performances are razor-sharp and detailed, the acting restrained, the timing perfect.

In comparison, “Zero Dark Thirty” is a slam-bang action picture, depending on Maya’s inspiration. One problem may be that Maya turns out to be correct, with a long, steady build-up depriving the climax of much of its impact and providing mostly irony. Do we want to know more about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and the history and political grievances behind them? Yes, but that’s not how things turned out. Sorry, but there you have it.

One thing that I found particularly interesting in the film was the very short sequence on the doctor who had gone around Abbottabad under the cover of vaccination who was actually collecting DNA. I remembered reading about him in the original New Yorker account of the raid and thought that had made clear he had been successful in collected DNA evidence (it turns out the article says he wasn’t, the same way it’s presented in the film). January’s GQ has a longer account of what happened to the doctor who helped the CIA and tries to get at whether he was successful in his mission. (The answers: He was tortured/imprisioned by the Pakistani government for assisting the Americans and, as to whether he got evidence, it’s still unclear.)

If you’re interested in more reading on the subject, No Easy Day, an account by a Navy Seal on the mission is a fast and interesting read. And although I haven’t read it, my friend Colin Nagy highly recommends The Triple Agent, which covers what happened at Khost, where a Jordanian triple agent beat CIA intelligence and security to bomb a military base and kill a sizable group of CIA operatives (there’s a scene in Zero Dark Thirty about it, though the film offers no real depth on what happened).

December 27, 2012 // This post is about: MOVIES, osama bin laden, terrorism, zero dark thirty