The ideas are the easy bit

How much is a good idea worth?

Sabeer Bhatia, one of the founders of Hotmail, was so convinced that free web-based email was the best idea ever ever that he became terrified he might blurt it out to a passerby before he could incorporate. He later sold his business to Microsoft for $400 million, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. On the other hand, he didn’t sell the idea for all that money. He sold a thriving business. How much was the idea worth?

Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware takes a different view. In his opinion, the idea is secondary to the execution. Good ideas are cheap as chewing gum. As he puts it:

The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works. The trouble with build-a-better-mousetrap is that there’s not a lot of evidence that it works.

We have some sort of in-bred predisposition to overvalue the idea and undervalue the work required to do anything remotely useful with the idea. I once heard an interview with chameleon-comedienne Tracey Ullman in which she said she based her cab-driver character “Chic” on a self-inflation phenomenon she had witnessed in LA. On more than one occasion, cabbies told her stories about how, for example, they had given Spielberg a lift and gave him the idea to make a movie about dinosaurs, or World War II, or whatever. And then he goes and makes a million dollars! The bum! He stole my idea! He owes me big time!

As writer Neil Gaiman says in an excellent essay called “Where do you get your ideas?”

Every published writer has had it – the people who come up to you and tell you that they’ve Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It’s such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It. The proposal is always the same – they’ll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

The real question for Gaiman and other talented and productive creative types like him isn’t “where do you get your ideas?” The still more vexing question is “where do you get the ability to overpower blank pages day after day after day and create stories that people will pay good money for?” The ideas might not be the magic part, but that doesn’t mean there’s no magic in there.

Serendipitous alphabetic encyclopedia juxtapositions

One of my good friends from high school I knew mostly because of home room. Home room at Paisley High School was a strictly alphabetized affair, and my friend Jon’s last name came right after mine. Similarly, some of the most interesting things I ever learned in an encyclopedia came from the article just before or just after the one I was supposedly looking up.

Online encyclopedias are wonderful resources, but one thing you lose is the ability to turn the page and see what’s next. Sure, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you were looking for, but you never know when a quick peek at the entry for Paracelsus will turn up the fascinating fact that the Paracel Islands, just north of the Spratlys in the South China Sea, were seized from Vietnam by China in 1974, or indeed that paracetamol is the international nonproprietary name of Tylenol. As you might suspect, the name comes from para-acetyl-amino-phenol.

But since all things are possible on the web, so is alphabetic serendipity. Try searching Wikipedia using the
LookAhead feature from WikiWax. Just start typing and it will quickly show you everything in the neighborhood. Nifty.

Paragliding is dangerous (watch this)

Small, cheap cameras are everywhere these days, and as a result, we get to see more of the weird and terrifying events that would previously have evaporated into an unsubstantiated mist. Increasingly we have better answers to questions like “What was it like that time when you lost control of your paraglider 1200 feet over Valle de Bravo, Mexico and went into that nearly fatal spiral?” In fact, if you read on you’ll find a video that provides an exact, if disturbing, answer to that very question. Better still, the camera is helmet mounted, so you see where the pilot is looking and when.

Way back in 1998, this site hosted a piece by Mr. A, a friend of Rob “Coffee Czar” Mauceri. Strangely enough, the piece is the prose answer to the question “What was it like that time when you lost control of your paraglider 1200 feet over Valle de Bravo, Mexico and went into that nearly fatal spiral?” Give it a read here: Caterpillar Club.

Mr. A is still friends with Rob, and so it was by way of Rob that I came by this forwarded message about the helmet-mounted video. Mr. A (A stands for Adrenaline, by the way) was kind enough to let me post his explanatory note to Rob below. Mr. A says:

Remember my description of being up at 15K paragliding in Mexico? I had flown this site at Valle de Bravo, Mexico back in 1996 and had an accident. My wing was collapsed in turbulence and got tangled up. It was really my fault to some extent — I was flying a high performance wing that was fine for western Washington air in high altitude desert turbulence. I was out of my skill zone but didn’t really realize it. I ended up throwing a reserve and crashing down through trees.

Since then I took a few years off from the sport, gained a lot more flying experience and now fly (and love) a beginner wing in only smooth air.

On this last trip to Mexico, a nice guy named Joe Parr was “me, circa 1996.” He took off in his high performance wing with about the same experience I had back then. He flew on a day that was ‘big.’ I was watching from the ground because I decided it was too rough for me to fly even though my wing is way more stable. Joe hit the same nasty air in exactly the same location and rode his reserve down to an exciting evergreen conclusion. He could have recovered from the spiral he was in but basically just froze up. The difference is that Joe had a helmet cam on at the time. This video was sold to real TV and has now found its way out on the web.

He’s at 9000 feet deciding to head “over the back” of the mountain on the cross country route. When he is in the tree you can hear me on the radio asking about his GPS.

Here is the video, and here is a link to a discussion board on this topic.

Synthetic Genomics

Craig Venter has finally gone public with his latest venture, synthetic genomics, inc. Just as with the synthetic biology company Codon Devices, there’s not much specific information about what they plan to do, but the non-specific version of the story is that they want to make (!) a simple bacterium by subtracting circuitry from it, and then reprogram it to do useful things, like making hydrogen for your fuel-cell roadster.

As wacky as it all sounds, I’m a believer. Humans currently use extraordinarily energy-intensive processes to build things, process that also generate greenhouse gases. A lot of what we melt, burn, and grind into useful products can be grown quietly at room temperature. For instance, the process for making computer chips begins with heating silicon up to 1600 degrees F so that a giant single crystal of silicon can be grown. A sea urchin, on the other hand, sitting in cold seawater and working with whatever materials float by, manufactures its sharp spines by growing single crystals of calcite. Calcite is not silicon, but still! As Laurie Gower, an expert on biomaterials at the University of Florida in Gainesville, says:

The real goal of biomimetic engineering is learning how to draw on nature’s ideas. If you could take any material and learn how to mould it or shape it in this way, you could gain far more control over its optical, electronic or mechanical properties.

Programmable biological material generation. It won’t happen tomorrow, but it’s already in the mail.

Paper, pixels, and the news

This is definitely cool, but I can’t decide if it’s simply cool in a retro backwards-looking kind of way. PressDisplay lets you read 225 newspapers from 55 countries as though you had the actual paper spread in front of you. They’ve got a nifty interface that lets you flip through paper, almost to the point of including the virtual coffee stain circles from your coffee cup. I’m betting that most of the 225 newpapers included here already have web sites, which means that PressDisplay is not only competing with these web sites; it’s also saying that the old newspaper format that evolved across a hundred years of smearing ink on big pieces of paper is still the best, even when viewed on a small pixelated screen (albeit with the help of some magic cyber-shoehorns). Fascinating, but ultimately you have to conclude it’s for print junkies and not people who simply need the news. It’s as if Google Maps included crease lines and made it hard to fold up your map and put it away. PressDisplay is betting on the wrong horse. Call me back if they’re still here in two years.

Mathematical sculpture


Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who sculpts with a computer. She makes mathematical models of 3-D objects that never were, and then prints them in three dimensions using new solid printers. In every age, artists are enabled by technology, and a new age is dawning for sculptors like Grossman. Two things are new here. First, her subjects are sculpted by computer in a virtual studio. Second, although she also makes large commissioned works like thousands of sculptors before her, she also has the capability to “print” lots of small copies of popular pieces, just as a print maker can run off dozens of prints from a wood block. The picture at the left (called a Soliton) is one of her sculptures that I bought. The small models are relatively inexpensive, because she prints them in batches using direct metal printing.

I was showing off my Soliton sculpture at work, and someone pointed me to another artist doing similar work, Helaman Ferguson. Grossman also has some excellent links to both technical resources and other mathematical sculptors on this page.

Which side of the road?

The British drive on the left; Americans drive on the right. Simple enough. Since you can’t drive directly from here to there, you don’t have to worry about switching in mid-road somewhere. The Channel Tunnel goes from England to France (where they drive on the right), but you don’t actually drive through the tunnel, so no lane-switching problems ensue. If you look at a list of all the places in the world where they drive on the left, you’ll see that it’s a fair indication of the former extent of the British Empire. Islands like New Zealand and Sri Lanka, like England itself, can be self-contained zones of left-driving. But what about India? Left-driving India is connected by the Eurasian landmass to right-driving France. If you get in a car in Hyderabad and drive to Marseilles, somewhere you have to switch. What is that like?

I found the answer on an excellent site called Which side of the road do they drive on? Put together by Brian Lucas, it even has a world map that reveals the thing I was curious to see: there are enormous frontiers between countries that drive on opposite sides. At the Khyber Pass on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, you have to switch sides. What are these border crossings like? Lucas is kind enough to have compiled some answers.

It’s so satisfying to be puzzled about an obscure topic and find an extensively documented well-maintained web page about that very thing.

Self-publishing comes of age

One of my favorite books of all time, Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox, went out of print soon after it was published in 1989. A friend of mine happened to own a copy, but when I went to buy one for myself, only expensive collectors’ editions could be had. Recently the book was finally picked up again by South Mountain Books. The publishers of South Mountain Books were… Charles Murray and Catherine Cox. This book had rave reviews and a core of dedicated fans, but because of its position down the long tail of all books, no publisher would take it until the authors themselves took on the job. Go buy it now.

Most happily, publishing your own book isn’t so hard anymore. Murray and Cox may have a few more resources at their disposal, but you can use Lulu.com. It’s hard to beat their value proposition: just-in-time vanity press. No need for expensive set ups and big speculative print runs. Lulu lets you publish and sell your book on a print-only-as-needed basis. Charge whatever you want; as long as you cover your per-book costs, the rest is yours to keep.

This kind of publication will change the world as surely as Gutenberg did. Even so, it’s only half of the print-on-demand problem. Lulu addresses books that have never existed before. We still need good solutions for the Apollos out there, the orphaned books that have gone out of print.

Chris Lydon returns to radio

Interesting things afoot in radio these days. Boston folks may remember talkshow host Christopher Lydon from his old show “The Connection” (which still exists, only without him). He feuded with his host station WBUR and was shown the door. He has wandered in the wilderness for a few years, maintaining a part-time blog at Harvard Law School, but now another Boston station, WGBH, has given him a new show called Open Source. The show, which embraces the blogospherical world of information tech, is naturally available as a podcast, and is featured at Apple’s iTunes site.

I learned all this from ITConversations guru Doug Kaye on his Blogarithms site. In this post he observes that, while the old-school thing to do is encourage your local NPR affiliate to pick up the show, internet podcasts mean that he doesn’t care anymore about his local radio station. It’s no longer in the loop; already it’s fading into dim obsolescence. Ouch!

I find this attitude interesting because I’m sure Lydon only got the show because of an old-school radio deal. He gets a nice studio, fancy equipment, syndicated distribution, stuff that costs real money. We haven’t yet reached the point where it’s easy to do something this elaborate from your basement. And yet the podcasts new radio proclaims are slicing through old radio’s Achille’s tendon. Still, Doug Kaye knows whereof he speaks, sitting as he does atop one of new radio’s prosperous properties. I don’t think anybody knows where the money is going to come from, but Chris Lydon is having fun on the air again, and that’s good news to me.

Radio nostalgia from South Africa

One of the standard birthday gifts you can get for someone, particularly as they start to get a little, er, older, is a scrapbook of what happened the year they were born, or a fake newspaper of events that happened on the day they were born. But really, who cares what was going on when you were born? You don’t remember any of it. It don’t signify.

What I really want is a service that can provide an uninterrupted hour of music from WKZL, FM 107.5 from about 1982. I want it with commercials, DJ chatter, and everything. Or maybe two hours of Sunday night TV from 1977, including Disney and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom hosted by Marlin Perkins. I would pay good money for that, because I was old enough to remember it.

My friend Roy has found exactly what I’m describing, only it’s from where he grew up: South Africa. Someone is assembling podcasts of old radio shows from the Capital 604 station, some going as far back as 1981. Want to know what the weather was like along the eastern Cape coast on October 1st, 1984? Listen to this. Capital 604 was hugely popular because they had good music, good DJs, and perhaps most of all because they were the first truly independent radio station in South Africa, operating with relative impunity from the hinterlands of the independent black homeland Transkei. Since it shut down some years ago, and since it is so fondly remembered by so many who grew up in South Africa during the 70s and 80s, people are pooling their old recordings of the station and making them available via podcast.

Anybody out there want to dig up some old WKZL tapes?