What's the buzz? Teens can't stand it

What's the buzz? Teens can't stand it describes a new technology for dispersing loitering kids:

The device, called the Mosquito ('It's small and annoying,' Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

The grocery store we went to just used classical music.

The First Real Aphrodisiac Is a Nasal Spray

The First Real, Horny-Making, Body-Shaking Aphrodisiac Is a Nasal Spray:

Horn of rhinoceros. Penis of tiger. Root of sea holly. Husk of the emerald-green blister beetle known as the Spanish fly. So colorful and exotic is the list of substances that have been claimed to heighten sexual appetite that it’s hard not to feel a twinge of disappointment on first beholding the latest entry — a small white plastic nasal inhaler containing an odorless, colorless synthetic chemical called PT-141. Plain as it is, however, there is one thing that distinguishes PT-141 from the 4,000 years’ worth of recorded medicinal aphrodisiacs that precede it: It actually works.

And it’s coming to a medicine cabinet near you. The drug will soon enter Phase 3 clinical trials, the final round of testing before it goes to the Food and Drug Administration for review, and with the FDA’s approval it could reach the market in as soon as three years. The full range of possible risks and side effects has yet to be determined, but already this much is known: Putting that inhaler up your nose and popping off a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as few as fifteen minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel “genital warmth, tingling and throbbing,” not to mention “a strong desire to have sex.” Among men, who’ve been tested with the drug more extensively, the data set is, shall we say, richer.
[...]
Fast-acting and long-lasting, packaged in an easily concealed, single-use nasal inhaler, unaffected by food or alcohol consumption, PT-141 seems bound to take its place alongside MDMA, cocaine, poppers, and booze itself in the pantheon of club drugs. If the chemical is all it’s cracked up to be, the perennial pharmacological dilemma of the pickup scene — namely, how to maximize the fun when the drinks required to set the mood are always more than enough to dull the senses — would appear to have found its solution.

Some history:

Two years earlier, and just three years past its start-up, the company had bought the rights to develop a substance called Melanotan II. Originally isolated by University of Arizona researchers looking for a way to give Caucasian desert-dwellers a healthy, sunblocking tan without exposing them to dangerous ultraviolet rays, Melanotan II achieved that modern miracle and more: It also appeared to facilitate weight loss, increase sexual appetite, and — why not? — act as an anti-inflammatory too. Quickly dubbed “the Barbie drug,” Melanotan II seemed too good to be true.

In fact, it was too good to be good. A drug with so many effects, Palatin decided, was not an effectively marketable one. So Palatin’s researchers set out to isolate the individual effects in the laboratory, experimenting with variations on Melanotan II’s molecular theme.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

In Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, Daniel Hillis describes his time working on massively parallel computers at Thinking Machines with his buddy Carl's dad:

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

'We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.'

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. 'Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say echo.' Or, 'Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out.' Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

"The Movies": machinima for the rest of us

Chris Anderson looks at Peter Molyneux's The Movies, which he calls "machinima for the rest of us":

Which is why my kids and I were really looking forward to The Movies, a new game/machinima studio from Peter Molyneux, the legendary games designer of Black & White fame. We've now had a few weeks to play with it, and it's really quite wonderful.

At its core, it's a SimStudio game, where you have to build a Hollywood studio, operate it, make movies and the rest of the usual Sim-style resource management stuff. That's fun enough, but the really interesting bit is the 'Sandbox' mode, where you can make your own movies, pretty much from scratch.

You choose from a wide variety of sets, costumes and, best of all, pre-animated micro-scenes ('Walk in with ax', 'Discover body'; 'Slip on banana peel') many of which can be tweaked with more or less tension, humor, or whatever makes sense in context. You pick pre-created actors or create your own with the usual facial modeling tools. Then you string all these together in a storyboard with some gentle plot and pacing assistance, and when you're done 'filming' you can type in your dialog as subtitles or record a voice-over in a sophisticated post-production studio.

Hacking 101

Hacking 101 provides an introduction to UNIX development:

While I was working on an open source project, I recruited a number of university student volunteers who were interested in contributing to the development. These volunteers were no doubt talented and enthusiastic programmers — I knew that because some of them were A-grade students in a course I taught. However, there was a problem: most of them grew up in a Windows/Mac culture, and were new converts to the UNIX world. To them, the entire GNU/Linux development environment is totally alien: command shell, man page reading, software building with make/autoconf/automake/libtool, and not to mention emacs and cvs. I ended up spending a considerable amount of effort in initiating them into the UNIX culture, and in assisting them to become productive developers even when they only have limited exposure to program development on UNIX platforms. After a while, I began to realize that there is actually a gap that needs to be filled — these young hackers need a textbook to initiate them into UNIX hackerdom. And I intend this document to somehow fill this gap.

Special Relativity: Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?

I like Daniel Hillis's explanation of Special Relativity, in Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?:

You've probably heard that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but have you ever wondered how this rule gets enforced? What happens when you're cruising along in your spaceship and you go faster and faster and faster until you hit the light barrier? Do the dilithium crystals that power your engine suddenly melt down? Do you vanish from the known universe? Do you go backward in time? The correct answer is none of the above. Don't feel bad if you don't know it; no one in the world knew it until Albert Einstein worked it out.

The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation is to understand the simple equation that you have probably seen before: e = mc². In order to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: i = 144 f. The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (12² = 144). Another way of writing the same equation would be i = c²f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c² is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing.

The Next Magic Kingdom, Future Perfect

The Next Magic Kingdom, Future Perfect gives an example of long-term thinking:

Technology is self-creating. When I design a faster computer, it lets me create an even faster one. In science, this is called autocatalytic: every change increases the rate of change. So people are right to think they can't plan for the future the way they used to. In the Middle Ages, you could be in a cathedral and then figure that your grandchildren would finish it. Long-term projects made a kind of sense. These days, you can't imagine a three-generation project. No one believes that such a thing would remain relevant. I like the example of the oak beams in one of the dining halls at Oxford, which were put up in the sixteenth century. Several years ago, they had to replace the beams — twenty-foot oak beams, which are very hard to come by. They called the Oxford forester and asked if there were any such trees, and sure enough there were. In other words, someone thought far ahead enough to have planted the trees in the expectation of replacing the beams. You can't imagine that kind of thinking anymore. It just wouldn't occur to many people to make a centuries-long development.

The nuclear blitz that never was

According to The nuclear blitz that never was, recently published documents, originally written by the Hungarian People's Army 1st Group Directorate, describe what would have happened in a Cold War confrontation:

At 7am on 23 June, 1965, Vienna is hit by two 500 kiloton devices, and completely destroyed.

A single bomb falls on Munich, obliterating the city.

The Italian cultural centres of Verona and Vicenza — both cities with important American and Nato military connections — are devastated.

Airfields, armoured divisions and barracks are also struck.

In all, thirty nuclear weapons are launched.

At the same time, Nato bombs destroy Budapest and other cities in Hungary.

It is not clear who has struck first.

Adult Behavior on Projects

Tim Lister has "often said that risk management is project management for adults," and now he adds that "Agile Methods address many of the most common software risks," in Adult Behavior on Projects:

I think of software projects as journeys into the uncertain. As we begin we may not know exactly what we are to build, we may not know what is the most appropriate technology to build it with, and therefore we aren't sure what skills we'll need, and add that up and we are very unsure of how long a journey we will take. The odd thing is that many people are very certain of when we will be done. The deadline is very often set before the system is specified. At face value, this is comical, but what is happening is that the organization is trying rather clumsily to set a project goal or a project constraint.

South Park's tribute to Monty Python

Any fan of South Park and Monty Python must naturally watch South Park's tribute to Monty Python.

Dividends, Buybacks Set New Benchmark for Largess

This sounds like good news. Dividends, Buybacks Set New Benchmark for Largess:

This year, the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are on track to pay out more than $500 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases, or buybacks, according to S&P. That's up more than 30% from last year's record — and equivalent to nearly $1,700 for every person in the U.S.

But it also means that companies are effectively saying, "We don't know how to use all this money":

But there could be an economic downside to the cash glut. The fact that companies have been sitting on so much cash is, in some respects, a vote of no-confidence in U.S. economic prospects: At least some companies may be signaling they can't find enough profitable ways to reinvest their earnings, so they are simply returning it to shareholders.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

Evan Williams, co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs, makers of Blogger, shares his Ten Rules for Web Startups:

1. Be Narrow
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
4. Be Picky
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
7. Be Greedy
8. Be Tiny
9. Be Agile
10. Be Balanced

Benford's Law

According to Benford's Law, a number is far more likely to start with the digit 1:

Benford's Law is named for the late Dr. Frank Benford, a physicist at the General Electric Company. In 1938 he noticed that pages of logarithms corresponding to numbers starting with the numeral 1 were much dirtier and more worn than other pages.
[...]
Dr. Benford concluded that it was unlikely that physicists and engineers had some special preference for logarithms starting with 1. He therefore embarked on a mathematical analysis of 20,229 sets of numbers, including such wildly disparate categories as the areas of rivers, baseball statistics, numbers in magazine articles and the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book 'American Men of Science.' All these seemingly unrelated sets of numbers followed the same first-digit probability pattern as the worn pages of logarithm tables suggested. In all cases, the number 1 turned up as the first digit about 30 percent of the time, more often than any other.

To illustrate Benford's Law, Dr. Mark J. Nigrini offered this example:

If we think of the Dow Jones stock average as 1,000, our first digit would be 1.

To get to a Dow Jones average with a first digit of 2, the average must increase to 2,000, and getting from 1,000 to 2,000 is a 100 percent increase.

Let's say that the Dow goes up at a rate of about 20 percent a year. That means that it would take five years to get from 1 to 2 as a first digit.

But suppose we start with a first digit 5. It only requires a 20 percent increase to get from 5,000 to 6,000, and that is achieved in one year.

When the Dow reaches 9,000, it takes only an 11 percent increase and just seven months to reach the 10,000 mark, which starts with the number 1. At that point you start over with the first digit a 1, once again. Once again, you must double the number — 10,000 — to 20,000 before reaching 2 as the first digit.

As you can see, the number 1 predominates at every step of the progression, as it does in logarithmic sequences.

Tyler Cowen's Law

Arnold Kling cites Tyler Cowen's Law that no political party can be mass-captured by the intelligent and brought around to sanity:

There are passionate Republicans and passionate Democrats. But I agree with Tyler Cowen that neither party is likely to seem attractive. I can give a number of examples that for me illustrate Tyler Cowen's law. These are policies that neither party is likely to endorse, even though to me they make sense.

• a trade policy of unilateral disarmament
• surrender in the drug war
• separation of family and state
• creating an agency to audit the Department of Homeland Security

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives explains how the color images were created for The Empire That Was Russia, the Library of Congress Exhibition:

We know that Prokudin-Gorskii intended his photographic images to be viewed in color because he developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.

Googling For Gold

Entrepreneurs are now Googling For Gold:

The Google effect is already changing the delicate balance in Silicon Valley between venture capitalists and startup companies. Instead of nurturing the most promising startups with an eye toward taking the fledgling businesses public, a growing number of VCs now scour the landscape for anyone with a technology or service that might fill a gap in Google's portfolio. Google itself and not the larger market has become the exit strategy as VCs plan for the day they can take their money out of their startups.

Escherization

Escherization has been reduced to an algorithm:

Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination. Can we automate the discovery of tilings by recognizable motifs? More formally, we pose the Escherization problem:

Given a shape S, find a new shape T such that:

1. T is as close as possible to S; and
2. Copies of T fit together to form a tiling of the plane.

Theory of Anything? Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own

"Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience," and now he's shooting down String Theory. From Theory of Anything? Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own:

String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact. When I asked physicists like Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek and string theory superstar Edward Witten for ideas about how to prove string theory, they typically began with scenarios like, 'Let's say we had a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way …' Wilczek said strings aren't a theory, but rather a search for a theory. Witten bluntly added, 'We don't yet understand the core idea.'

Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big

Anne Thompson analyzes the economics of filmmaking in Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big:

In Hollywood, there's a studio price and an indie price. There's a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you're Peter Jackson coming off 'The Lord of the Rings').

Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. If you're George Clooney, you recognize the value of putting yourself in quality work that will stand the test of time.

No studio is going to admit the obvious: They can't afford to make all their movies at top-tier prices. And if they only make a few tentpoles a year, what are they going to do with the rest of their slate? None of the studios is willing to slash the fat from their motion picture divisions.

Baudrillard on Tour

Larissa MacFarquhar summarizes Baudrillard on Tour:

Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives individuals the illusion of choice while in fact entrapping them in a vast web of simulated reality. In 1999, the movie “The Matrix,” which was based on this theory, transformed him from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure. But Baudrillard was ambivalent about the film — he declined an invitation to participate in the writing of its sequels — and these days he is still going about his usual French-philosopher business, scandalizing audiences with the grandiloquent sweep of his gnomic pronouncements and his post-Marxian pessimism.

How to Fund a Startup

Paul Graham's How to Fund a Startup is "a complete summary of funding options for startup founders":

• Friends and Family
• Consulting
• Angel Investors
• Seed Funding Firms
• Venture Capital Funds

Even out of context his footnotes are interesting:

[1] The aim of such regulations is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be able to protect themselves. The unintended consequence is that the investments that generate the highest returns, like hedge funds, are available only to the rich.

[2] Consulting is where product companies go to die. IBM is the most famous example. So starting as a consulting company is like starting out in the grave and trying to work your way up into the world of the living.

[3] If "near you" doesn't mean the Bay Area, Boston, or Seattle, consider moving. It's not a coincidence you haven't heard of many startups from Philadelphia.

[4] Investors are often compared to sheep. And they are like sheep, but that's a rational response to their situation. Sheep act the way they do for a reason. If all the other sheep head for a certain field, it's probably good grazing. And when a wolf appears, is he going to eat a sheep in the middle of the flock, or one near the edge?

[5] This was partly confidence, and partly simple ignorance. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms were the impressive ones. We thought software was all that mattered. But that turned out to be the right direction to be naive in: it's much better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making a good product.

[6] I've omitted one source: government grants. I don't think these are even worth thinking about for the average startup. Governments may mean well when they set up grant programs to encourage startups, but what they give with one hand they take away with the other: the process of applying is inevitably so arduous, and the restrictions on what you can do with the money so burdensome, that it would be easier to take a job to get the money.

You should be especially suspicious of grants whose purpose is some kind of social engineering-- e.g. to encourage more startups to be started in Mississippi. Free money to start a startup in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which make investments rather than giving grants. For example, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns. They would probably be worth approaching-- if you don't mind taking money from the CIA.

[7] Options have largely been replaced with restricted stock, which amounts to the same thing. Instead of earning the right to buy stock, the employee gets the stock up front, and earns the right not to have to give it back. The shares set aside for this purpose are still called the "option pool."

[8] First-rate technical people do not generally hire themselves out to do technical due diligence for VCs. So the most difficult part for startup founders is often responding politely to the inane questions of the "expert" they send to look you over.

[9] VCs regularly wipe out angels by issuing arbitrary amounts of new stock. They seem to have a standard piece of casuistry for this situation: that the angels are no longer working to help the company, and so don't deserve to keep their stock. This of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what investment means; like any investor, the angel is being compensated for risks he took earlier. By a similar logic, one could argue that the VCs should be deprived of their shares when the company goes public.

[10] One new thing the company might encounter is a down round, or a funding round at valuation lower than the previous round. Down rounds are bad news; it is generally the common stock holders who take the hit. Some of the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to do with down rounds-- like "full ratchet anti-dilution," which is as frightening as it sounds.

Founders are tempted to ignore these clauses, because they think the company will either be a big success or a complete bust. VCs know otherwise: it's not uncommon for startups to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. So it's worth negotiating anti-dilution provisions, even though you don't think you need to, and VCs will try to make you feel that you're being gratuitously troublesome.

Unbelieveable 3D Pavement Drawings!

I have to agree that these are Unbelieveable 3D Pavement Drawings!.

Of course, they're only unbelievably 3D from just the right angle. Viewed from the wrong angle, they're wildly distorted and not-at-all 3D.

Arcadia's Furnishings

Derek Lowe explores the terrible state of academic labs in Arcadia's Furnishings:

I haven't worked in a US academic chemistry lab since 1988, so you'll have to take that into account as you read today's post. But I don't think that things have changed enough to invalidate this observation: many grad-school science labs are so depressing as to defy belief. This isn't universal, but I've seen enough examples to convince me. The atmosphere doesn't correlate well with the amount of money around, either, because I've seen some lower-level departments that weren't so bad, and a couple of Ivy League lab corridors that would pull the serotonin right out of your brain just to walk down them.

Many of the students and post-docs working at these places don't realize this, though, which is surely to their benefit. It's only after you've gone out into the Real World for a while and come back for a visit that it hits you. That's certainly how it dawned on me.

Five Men in a Limo

As Michael Blowhard says, "You know these men and their work, believe me": Five Men in a Limo.

Web 2.0

Paul Graham finally finds a common thread amongst the disparate elements of Web 2.0:

Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term 'Web 2.0' so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new — that it didn't predict anything.

But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The 'trends' we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

A VC explains Evolution vs. Intelligent Design — when it comes to startups:

For years, I have been fascinated by the fact that many of the very best startup companies come out of 'side projects'. They are accidents really. eBay, Google, and Yahoo! are all examples of this mode of starting companies. Delicious was born this way. One of my favorite web services, Sitemeter, started this way. So did Vimeo. I could go on and on, but like a Oscar speech, I need to stop. Sorry to all the 'side project' startups I left off this list.

Brad and I have been seeing a lot of 'one man bands' as well lately. Companies that have been single handedly started by one person with some outsourced development. These people see something they'd like to have and they build it. And all of a sudden, they are in our office with a pitch deck and the need for money to turn the thing they've built into a company.

So I was at breakfast a couple weeks ago with Nick Denton and we got to talking about this phenomenon. So Nick says, 'it's the evolution vs intelligent design debate'. And I about choked on my really great full english breakfast (which is not dead and is alive and well at the Coffee Shop in Union Square in NYC).

Nick is right, there are two ways to build a company.

You can design it from scratch, figuring out exactly what you want to build, getting it all down on paper, raising some money, and then building it. And there are plenty of success stories for that way of building a company.

Or you can just find yourself doing a startup because something you started as a hobby, or to serve your own needs, just took on a life of its own and you have no choice but to evolve it into a business.

Choking Krazy Kulo

Actor and UFC commentator Joe Rogan demonstrated a choke hold on a cooperative radio personality called Krazy Kulo on the Ramiro & Pebbles show on JAMN 94.5 in Boston — and it worked a little too well. Watch the video.

Why $5 Gas Is Good for America

Why $5 Gas Is Good for America looks on the bright side:

So rising oil prices are more than just an irritant or even an ominous nick out of the GDP. They're an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy — with no political strings attached. Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.

Google's Growth Helps Ignite Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy

From Google's Growth Helps Ignite Silicon Valley Hiring Frenzy:

One top-notch engineer is worth '300 times or more than the average,' explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.

One for 'The Birds': Wild Turkeys Attack Humans in Suburbia

The wild turkey bears little resemblance to its domesticated cousin. From One for 'The Birds': Wild Turkeys Attack Humans in Suburbia:

In April, Will Millington was riding his dirt bike down a narrow trail in Norman, Okla., when he stopped before a flock of wild turkeys. The hens scattered, but two toms flared their feathers and stalked toward him. Then they suddenly leapt in the air, beat Mr. Millington with their wings and tried to scratch him with the sharp spurs on the backs of their legs.

Mr. Millington frantically revved his bike's motor. Thirty yards down the trail he looked back. 'They were running after me,' says the 46-year-old property manager. 'That was kind of spooky.'

As Americans prepare to eat some 46 million domestic turkeys slaughtered for Thanksgiving, their wild cousins are fighting back. The explosion of the wild turkey population to nearly seven million from just 30,000 in the 1930s has put a growing number of humans in the face of angry gobblers.

In Year of Disasters, Experts Bring Order To Chaos of Relief

Logistics experts from the private sector are lending their expertise to non-profit relief organizations. From In Year of Disasters, Experts Bring Order To Chaos of Relief:

The first change was simple but crucial — halting the practice of unloading the planes directly into trucks. That's a classic recipe for tarmac tie-ups: It blocks the landing strips so other planes can't touch down. 'They think it's the most efficient way, but it's actually the slowest,' he says. He directed the planes to taxi off the runway to an area where they could be unloaded in a more orderly fashion — their contents transported into organized holding areas for later distribution. The other improvements amounted to the relatively prosaic inventory and warehouse management methods practiced by large shippers.

Why People Hate Economics

Arnold Kling explains Why People Hate Economics:

Paul Bloom's essay 'Is God an Accident?' in the latest issue of The Atlantic, suggests that humans' belief in God, Intelligent Design, and the afterlife is an artifact of brain structure. In this essay, I am going to suggest that the same artifact that explains why people are instinctively anti-Darwin explains why they are instinctively anti-economic.

Bloom says that we use one brain mechanism to analyze the physical world, as when we line up a shot on the billiard table. We use another brain mechanism to interact socially, as when we try to get a date for the prom.
[...]
The difference between analytical and social reasoning strikes me as similar to the difference that I once drew between Type C and Type M arguments. I wrote, 'Type C arguments are about the consequences of policies. Type M arguments are about the alleged motives of individuals who advocate policies.'
[...]
Economics is an attempt to use a type C brain to understand market processes in impersonal terms.

Upscale Experience, Downscale Prices

Upscale Experience, Downscale Prices examines trends in retailing, including the emergence of lifestyle centers — which I've been naively calling outdoor malls:

Open-air pedestrian walkways, dozens of small merchants, no large anchor store. Developers are embracing this format, known as the lifestyle center, as the replacement for outdated enclosed malls.

'There isn't going to be this one super-regional mall model that everyone' constructs, says Mr. Stanek. 'Consumers have said that rather than going into a one-million-square-foot mall, they're more interested in getting to specific stores.'

The International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade association, says there are currently 132 lifestyle centers in the U.S. that total nearly 50 million square feet. That's still small next to the 951 million square feet of enclosed mall space in the U.S. Still, more than 60% of the lifestyle-center square footage has opened since 2000. And 52 more lifestyle centers — totaling 7.3 million square feet — are under construction, according to the council.

Developers often build lifestyle centers in upper-income communities where older, upscale shoppers will be drawn to typical lifestyle-center tenants: Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Gap, Bath & Body Works, Pottery Barn and Victoria's Secret.

Taking the trend a step further, some developers are building so-called retail districts — which combine office, retail, residential and open spaces — on the sites of demolished older malls. Continuum Partners' Belmar development in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo., proposes one million square feet of retail space in the lifestyle-center format, 900,000 square feet of office space, nine acres of parks and 1,300 homes. Belmar would sit on the 104-acre site of Lakewood's former Villa Italia Mall.

'Once the retailers learn they can survive without the department store,' says Mark Falcone, Continuum's CEO, 'they move into more unconventional formats like these multilevel retail districts.'

What's Behind the Boom

What's Behind the Boom examines some of the longer-term forces that are reshaping the housing industry:

America still has lots of wide-open spaces, but many of them aren't where people want to live. And builders are finding it more difficult to get permits to put up new houses in many of the more economically vibrant metropolitan areas, particularly along the East and West coasts.

'The housing supply has been constrained by government regulation as opposed to fundamental geographic limitations,' concludes a paper released in December 2004 by Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, and two colleagues.

Homeowners share the blame. Prof. Glaeser's paper says they have grown savvier about organizing themselves to block proposals that would bring new and more densely packed housing to their neighborhoods — something that they fear could reduce the value of existing homes.

In the more crowded markets, home values no longer have much to do with the cost of building a home. In San Francisco, the paper estimates, the structure itself typically accounts for no more than 30% of a home's value; the rest of the value reflects the costs of land and obtaining regulatory approvals to build. That's why some people pay as much as $1 million for an old home, immediately tear it down and build a new one.

The Mayor of Ar Rutbah

In The Mayor of Ar Rutbah, James A. Gavrilis describes how his company of Special Forces soldiers established a functioning democracy in one Iraqi town:

As an alternative to Saddam’s regime, the particular form of democracy was not as important as the concept of a polity that provided for the individual. That was really what Iraqis missed under Saddam. Good governance had to precede the form or type of democracy. Because we were effective in providing services, were responsive to individual concerns, and improved their lives, the Iraqis gravitated toward us and the changes we introduced. However, we didn’t have to change much. Ar Rutbah already had a secular structure that worked. We just put good people in office and changed the character of governance, not the entire infrastructure.
[...]
In the end, I spent only about $3,000. This sum included the salaries of the police, the mayor, the army colonel, and a few soldiers and public officials. We paid for the crane and the flatbed trailers to move the generators to the city for electricity, and for fuel to run the generators. And we picked up the tab for other necessities, such as painting, tea, and copies of the renunciation form. But the change did not depend on the influx of funds; the Iraqis did a lot themselves. The real progress was the efficient and decent government and the environment we established. Without a lot of money to invest, we made assessments and established priorities, and talked with the Iraqis, exchanging ideas and visions of the future.

Hellboy Animated

Tad Stones describes his early efforts to get Hellboy Animated:

I first pitched Hellboy as an animated prime time show about ten years ago while I was still at Disney. (Hey, they claimed they wanted fresh ideas!) I even produced a little video reel on Adobe Premiere, complete with an animated Touchstone logo. No interest, of course. I was given several logical reasons why it wouldn't really fit on prime time television, most of which can be summed up in the sentence, 'It's not The Simpsons.' Ironically, I now work at Film Roman Studios where the entire first floor is taken up by artists working on The Simpsons.
[...]
Years later I got really close. [...] But as we worked on the show, it became obvious the executives wanted it safer, calmer and much more kid-friendly than the movie. My favorite exec quote: "Why do we need antagonists?" Finally, after the feature film disappointed at the box office, our production was shut down, fittingly, on Friday the 13th.

Now he's finally getting his chance to do it right.

(Hat tip to Drawn.)

Bad for Business

In Bad for Business, Hans Labohm cites the opening lines of "Doing Business in 2006 — Creating Jobs", a report cosponsored by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group:

If you were opening a new business in Lao PDR, the start-up procedures would take 198 days. If you were opening one in Syria, you would have to put up $61,000 in minimum capital — 51 times the average annual income. If you were building a warehouse in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fees for utility hook-up and compliance with building regulations would amount to 87 times average income. And if you ran a business in Guatemala, it would take you 1,459 days to resolve a simple dispute in the courts. If you were paying all business taxes in Sierra Leone, they would take 164 percent of your company's gross profit.

Outsourcing to the Heartland

Some American firms are outsourcing to the Heartland rather than India:

Rural Sourcing claims to provide information technology services at 30 percent to 50 percent below most U.S. consulting firms by tapping into the increasing number of IT professionals in rural America, where overhead and wages are lower than in metropolitan areas."

If you need work done in grammatically correct English, should you send it to Bangalore or Greenville, NC? Wait, don't answer that.

Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit

The Economist's Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit calls Peter Drucker "The one management thinker every educated person should read":

Along the way, he became increasingly convinced that the best hope for saving civilisation from barbarism lay in the humdrum science of management. He was too sensitive to the thinness of the crust of civilisation to share the classic liberal faith in the market, but too clear-sighted to embrace the growing fashion for big-government solutions. The man in the grey-flannel suit held out more hope for mankind than either the hidden hand or the gentleman in Whitehall.

Aspirin: Not Approvable

Derek Lowe points out that there's no way aspirin would be approved today if it were a new drug. In fact, it wouldn't even make it out of the lab. From Aspirin: Not Approvable:

Aspirin causes gastric lesions in rats and dogs, which are the standard small and large animal models for drug toxicity. This side effect occurs at levels which would raise red flags for any new compound. What would a present-day research organization do about it? If we stipulate that they could determine that aspirin worked by inhibiting cyclooxegenase enzymes, they would surely try to break the vascular effects of the drug apart from its anti-inflammatory effects. They would try to find new compounds that selectively inhibited only one of the enzyme subtypes. They would, in other words, produce Vioxx, and Celebrex, and the other COX-2 inhibitors, and this is just why these drugs were developed.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)

The Prodigy Puzzle

Ann Hulbert's The Prodigy Puzzle looks at the search for "genius" and how young prodigies have been discovered, researched, and trained over the years.

Now We Call It Marketing

The Wall Street Journal's latest "Eyes on the Road" column, Surf Lessons, has a great line:

Polite Americans no longer indulge in stereotyping. Now, we call it marketing.

Where the Bets Are

Where the Bets Are looks at the state of venture capital:

The technology world is revving up again as venture capitalists seek out a new batch of young start-ups they hope will become the next Yahoo or eBay.

Through the third quarter, venture capitalists have poured some $16.2 billion into 1,605 deals, according to VentureOne, an industry tracker owned by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. That's a far cry from the $95 billion that flowed into start-ups at the height of the tech boom five years ago. But it's on par with the $21.5 billion invested in 2004 and in keeping with the industry's historical norms.

This time around, the VCs aren't looking just to Internet start-ups or biotech firms for hot growth. Many are exploring new markets overseas, as well as underserved sectors such as alternative energy. Many also are placing their bets on more mature companies — start-ups that weathered the tech downturn and now boast a cool new product or, better yet, a profit.

Some trends playing out in VC:

1. The China Strategy
2. Clean Tech
3. Digital Living Room
4. New Kids on the Block
5. Rock Stars
6. Web 2.0
7. Older and Wiser
8. Adopting Orphans
9. Telecom Comeback
10. Late Exits

Where There Is No Doctor

David Werner originally wrote Where There Is No Doctor as "a village health care handbook" for rural Mexicans without access to modern medical care.

It has since been translated into English — making it a hit with survivalists preparing for The End of the World as We Know It.

Now it's available in its entirety on-line — but you'll probably want a paper copy in case of total social collapse.

The Bakeoff

In The Bakeoff, Malcolm Gladwell looks at a cookie-baking Dream Team and compares it to a nuclear power plant crew and an open-source software development team:

The strength of the Dream Team — the fact that it had so many smart people on it — was also its weakness: it had too many smart people on it. Size provides expertise. But it also creates friction, and one of the truths Project Delta exposed is that we tend to overestimate the importance of expertise and underestimate the problem of friction. Gary Klein, a decision-making consultant, once examined this issue in depth at a nuclear power plant in North Carolina. In the nineteen-nineties, the power supply used to keep the reactor cool malfunctioned. The plant had to shut down in a hurry, and the shutdown went badly. So the managers brought in Klein's consulting group to observe as they ran through one of the crisis rehearsals mandated by federal regulators. 'The drill lasted four hours,' David Klinger, the lead consultant on the project, recalled. 'It was in this big operations room, and there were between eighty and eighty-five people involved. We roamed around, and we set up a video camera, because we wanted to make sense of what was happening.'

When the consultants asked people what was going on, though, they couldn't get any satisfactory answers. 'Each person only knew a little piece of the puzzle, like the radiation person knew where the radiation was, or the maintenance person would say, 'I'm trying to get this valve closed,' ' Klinger said. 'No one had the big picture. We started to ask questions. We said, 'What is your mission?' And if the person didn't have one, we said, 'Get out.' There were just too many people. We ended up getting that team down from eighty-five to thirty-five people, and the first thing that happened was that the noise in the room was dramatically reduced.' The room was quiet and calm enough so that people could easily find those they needed to talk to. 'At the very end, they had a big drill that the N.R.C. was going to regulate. The regulators said it was one of their hardest drills. And you know what? They aced it.' Was the plant's management team smarter with thirty-five people on it than it was with eighty-five? Of course not, but the expertise of those additional fifty people was more than cancelled out by the extra confusion and noise they created.

The open-source movement has had the same problem. The number of people involved can result in enormous friction.

Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy 'Black Monday'

The times, they are a-changin'. Retailers used to gear up for Black Friday. Now Online Retailers Gear Up For Busy 'Black Monday':

With the rapid expansion of the Internet, the Monday after Thanksgiving has grown to be the all-important kickoff of the online holiday shopping season. On that day, consumers head back to work — and their computers — ready to shop after the long holiday weekend.

Last year, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the peak day for online transactions, according to VeriSign Payment Services, a unit of eBay Inc.'s PayPal that processes electronic payments for about 150,000 online merchants. Some 77% of online retailers said their sales increased noticeably that day, according to a recent survey by e-commerce company Shopzilla Inc. and industry group Shop.org, part of the National Retail Federation, which is calling the day "Cyber Monday."

Before computers, how did anyone look busy at work?

Throughout the year, Monday is typically the biggest sales day of the week for many online retailers, many of which have expanded their Web sites considerably, so they're more like online catalogs.

Some 30% of online jewelry seller Blue Nile Inc.'s weekly sales happen on Mondays, for example, and then sales taper off as the week goes on, says CEO Mark Vadon. "Our biggest time of the day is right at lunchtime," he says. "You can almost see the wave as it changes time zones."

Nutrition and crime? Sounds way too good to be true

In Nutrition and crime? Sounds way too good to be true, Steven Levitt cites a fascinating article:

The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26 percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the placebo group showed no change.

Theodore Dalrymple's The Starving Criminal makes a similar observation, noting that members of the criminal underclass rarely sit down to dinner, often go without food while on drugs, and even consider prison a good opportunity to fatten back up before hitting the streets again.

Top 20 Geek Novels

The Guardian did a small on-line survey to discover the top 20 geek novels:

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

I can maintain some geek cred by noting that I've read more than half the list — but I certainly lose some points by not having read any Philip K. Dick (yet).

Entrepreneurial Finance Around the Globe

Jeff Cornwall explains why looking at external financing isn't a good way to study Entrepreneurial Finance Around the Globe:

Almost four out of five start-ups in the US use some combination of self-financing and/or friends and family. The next largest source is debt financing. Less than one percent use equity financing.

Laser etched Powerbook

Phillip Torrone has this to say about his Laser etched Powerbook:

I didn't really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17' Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also the vi book cover image, from O'Reilly), but it seemed like it had to done.

UFC 56: Full Force

UFC 56: Full Force was held last night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Nevada. It pitted both of the coaches from this last season of The Ultimate Fighter, Rich Franklin and Matt Hughes, against lesser foes.

As you can see, Franklin knocked out — or KTFOed, as the fans say — Nate Quarry, and Hughes submitted Joe "Diesel" Riggs with a "Kimura" shoulder lock.

Tribal Yearnings

In Tribal Yearnings, Roger Sandall notes that Hawaiians are trying to be recognized as an Indian tribe, and he offers up Karl Popper's thoughts on tribalism:

In his account of Heraclitus, a philosopher whose motto was “everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest”, Popper claims that the very idea of ubiquitous change was “revolutionary”. At the time, hardly anyone thought of culture in this way, especially given “the stability and rigidity of social life in a tribal aristocracy.” Where hierarchic settings of this sort prevailed, everything “is determined by social and religious taboos; everybody has his assigned place within the whole of the social structure; everyone feels that his place is the proper, the ‘natural’ place, assigned to him by the forces which rule the world; everyone ‘knows his place’”.

It might be useful to point out that this exactly fits every Polynesian culture ever known, including that of old-time Honolulu. Before the retribalization of Hawaii gets much further its advocates should perhaps take a look where they’re heading. But joking aside, the fact is that an intense conservatism regulated and controlled an entire hierarchic social order, just as Popper said it did, and because of this social change took place very slowly—and rarely as a result of rational discussion. True, change did sometimes occur, but “the comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conversions or revulsions, or of the introduction of new magical taboos.”

He thought there was something of this quasi-religious character to be seen in the rise of Nazism and Communism too. Both grew from the same socio-psychological roots as the political theorising of men like Plato over two thousand years ago—the “strain of civilization”, a generalised anxiety about the drift of events, a feeling that cultural breakdown is imminent, that familiar things are disintegrating, that everything known and valued is about to collapse and we won’t be able to stop it.

“I suppose that what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in a footnote, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.”

The Relevance of Romance

The Relevance of Romance explains why a piece of light entertainment is pertinent to our times:

Historical romances are usually as much about contemporary times as about the past, and the new film The Legend of Zorro is a perfect example. Typically, historical romances center on the replacement of an unjust social and political order with a just one. Westerns and vigilante stories, by contrast, tend to concentrate on establishment of rule of law in areas that have either never been civilized (Westerns) or where civilization has broken down (vigilante stories).

The fascinating thing about Johnston McCulley's Zorro novels and stories is that they combine all three genres: set in Old California in the 1840s, they are simultaneously historical romance, Western, and vigilante story. As a result, they show establishment of rule of law as a central element in the replacement of an unjust social and political order and the bringing of justice and peace for the