Category: Uncategorized

Glog ahoy! My friend Nabeel is always telling me about cool software and web sites. So much so that I finally said “You need to get yourself a blog.” Here’s what he said:

“I just don’t think I’m cool enough to have a blog [He’s just being modest. He’s almost certainly cool enough. -Ed.]. In fact, I sort of like living vicariously through others’ blogs. That’ll be the new trend I start. I’ll start a movement where people get mentioned on other people’s blogs, without actually blogging anything themselves.” He calls this vicarious guest blogging activity glogging. That’s the nifty neologism… but what’s the content of Nabeel’s glog?

He was talking to a friend about stay-on tabs for beer and soda cans. One thing led to another and they found a good story (that was heard on NPR during the “Engineering & Life” segment) about the inventor of the stay-on tab. The stay-on tab, so ubiquitous that it is practically invisible (can you picture how it works?), was not a simple thing to design.
This speech at the University of Illinois is a somewhat more detailed version of the same thing. I started poking around the EngineerGuy.com site and found all kinds of cool stuff. Thanks, Nabeel!

Are you smart? Do you work with people who are smarter than you? Malcolm Gladwell has written a fascinating piece for the New Yorker called The Talent Myth in which he discusses the smarty-pants phenomenon and the trouble it has gotten us into. Here is the premise: Enron (and others like it) went down the toilet by hiring smart people and letting them run wild. American hero-worship makes it hard to admit that maybe, just maybe, the system is sometimes smarter than the smartass. You might think that smart people would know when they’re in trouble and then do something smart to get out of trouble. But the problem is this label “smart.” If they admit they got into trouble, they’re not smart anymore, and anything is preferable to being not-smart, including bankrupting your company. I work at a software company where “he’s really smart” is one of the highest compliments you can pay somebody; what Gladwell says fits what I see every day. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, would really hate this article.

Here’s a long quote from Gladwell, discussing a study by a psychologist.

Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. […]
They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.

Be careful flinging around the word smart. The mantle of smartness is fragile, terrifying, and sometimes paralyzing. It should be reserved for clever people who write weblogs.

This just in: my top secret contact inside in the music industry pointed me to a National Record Buyers Study (the presentation slides are here) published by Edison Research that shows in the most alarming and emphatic way that it Really Is That Bad for the music business.

There’s no longer any debate about that downloading music is driving down music sales. And it’s easy to see how the industry is in a terrible bind. They can’t go soft on downloading, but they can’t stop the technology, and there is a widespread perception that music really should be essentially free (i.e. no more than the cost of a shiny CD plastic disk). As one teenager quoted in the study says, “The record companies are already assholes for charging an arm and a leg to buy CDs. That’s what drives people to burn them.” A slim majority (52%) of everyone surveyed thought there was nothing wrong with downloading music, but in the 12-17 year old age group it’s a whopping 74%. There’s a good Salon.com article on this same topic. As the soon-to-be unemployed staff at record stores across America constantly overhear: “Don’t buy that, man. I’ll burn it for you…”

So here’s a question. Downloading MP3s is wrecking the recording business. What about live music? Is there a chance that the undownloadable experience of live music will actually get a boost?

Discuss
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I have had flights cancelled before, sometimes mere minutes before the plane was scheduled to take off, but this is the first time an entire airline has vanished from existence just as I was about to step on the plane. They cancelled my entire airline. So my wife got up early this morning and stood in line at the airport to convert our worthless Midway tickets to worthful U.S. Airways tickets, and so long as U.S. Airways doesn’t go out of business in the next week, we’re in good shape.

In the meantime, the vacation was delayed by a day and I was able to get some damn good web surfing in tonight. For instance, take a peek at this lovely painting called McDonald’s Nation by Canadian artist Chris Woods. There’s an entertaining little audio commentary by the artist that runs along with the page.

I don’t see 21C Magazine on the newstands around me anymore; I had assumed they went out of business, but they have a web site and appear to be thriving. Their latest issue, all of which appears to be available online, has some good stuff in it. Most compelling to me was the piece about the documentary movie “The Devil’s Playground,” which is about the Amish concept of rumspringa. The Amish are famously strict parents, but at age 16, all the rules drop away and their children can do whatever they want until they make their decision (so goes the theory) to commit themselves to their church and community. The wild (and thoroughly modern) partying that goes on during the rumspringa is eye-opening, almost straining belief. Can it really be like this? But sure enough, a lot of the kids, though not all of them, exorcize the wildness and return to the fold. There’s something very civilized about this. It seems saner than either continuous cradle-to-grave repression or anarchic loosey-goosey upbringing.

We should all have a rumspringa. The word has pleasant connotations of a rum-soaked spring break, and the concept brings a certain sensible framework to the inevitable teenage rebellion and dissipation. The only way to avoid the corrosive seduction of the english world is to embrace it and then walk away. Makes sense to me. Here’s a long quote from the article.

The Amish …[prefer] their adherents to join the church when they are old enough to make an informed decision about committing to the religion for life. Therefore when each child turns 16 they can experience the outside “english” world with all its temptations -“the devil’s playground” – in order to make their decision. This period in their life is known in their Pennsylvania Dutch language as rumspringa, which literally translates as “running around”. It ends whenever an individual feels ready – typically between the ages of 18-22 – to make the decision that will determine the rest of their lives.

Nanotubes and other assorted things nano are shaping up to be the next big hype bubble to burst, but it’s fun to surf the wave of unreasonable expectations while it lasts. These nanotubes do have a touch of the alchemical philosopher’s stone about them, bringing magical transformations everywhere they land. As Feynman said, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Read about it in the New York Times: It Slices! It Dices! Nanotube Struts Its Stuff.

I’ll be on vacation for the next week, so no bloggo mucho till July 29th. I’m flying down to North Carolina on Midway Airlines.
Hey! Wait a second… as of Thursday, July 18th (that’s today) Midway has ceased to exist. The timing is perfect. Midway vanished (it was swallowed up by U.S. Airways, hardly a paragon of solvency itself) on the absolute eve of our trip. We have to go get paper tickets issued to us at the airport and walk to the U.S. Airways desk before they will consider changing them. Paper tickets… walking… no resolution by phone or computer. It all feels so nineteenth century. Perhaps I’ll dash over to the aerodrome first thing tomorrow on my velocipede. Wish me luck.

There was a time when R.U. Sirius and his wacky crew at Mondo 2000 were on top of the world. I was a Mondo 2000 reader, squarely in the middle of their young-geek-yearning-to-make-tech-cool demographic. After a few issues, Mondo began to smell of too much sweaty enthusiasm untempered by any graphical restraint or even genuine content. It was a shooting star, but it set the stage that Wired magazine went on to dominate. Still, what a show! How did they manage to pull it off? Here’s a profile of R.U. Sirius from Shift.com.

This just in: good friend Matthew J. Simoneau has started a weblog, despite the fact that he feels, as he says in his first entry, “a little embarassed to be jumping on the weblogging bandwagon so late.” Nevertheless, he jumps off to a good start with a report of his visit to the museum of giant artwork, MASS MoCA. What is MASS MoCA? Read about it here and on Matt’s blog.

Is there any truth to the rumor that Matt’s middle initial stems from the fact that Rocky, Bullwinkle, and all three male members of the Simpson family (Bart, Homer, and Abraham) share the middle initial J? A visit to his site may clear things up. Then again, it may not.