Isegoria

According to Breaking a Taboo, High Fashion Starts Making Goods Overseas, Italian craftsmanship has long held a certain mystique, but even luxury good production has moved to developing nations:

The ‘Made in Italy’ mystique dates back to the early 20th century when artisans throughout the Italian peninsula began exporting their products and know-how. Neapolitan shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo was one of the first to venture abroad when he hand-stitched shoes for Jean Harlow, Douglas Fairbanks and other 1920s Hollywood stars. Florentine leather-goods maker Gucci soon followed suit.

After World War II, Italian craftsmen developed a second expertise. Using new ways to wash yarn, the key to high-quality knits, Italy soon surpassed Scotland as the world’s best knitwear producer. By the mid-1950s, the ‘Made in Italy’ label had developed unparalleled snob appeal around the world. Even French companies such as Louis Vuitton and Chanel transferred some production to Italy.

The first shift came during the 1990s luxury-goods boom. Some high-end fashion companies quietly began moving production of secondary, cheaper lines to Eastern Europe to help meet rising demand. Italian handbag maker Francesco Biasia, whose purses sell for between $350 and $500, started shifting production to China and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. Creative Director Claudio Biasia says the company gambled on what it saw as shifting tastes. ‘Younger consumers don’t care where a product is made,’ he says. ‘They care about creativity.’

From Heavy Metal Makes Lighter Planes:

Qantas engineer Ian Salmon tested wing sections covered with a piezoelectric material that vibrates when a current is applied to it. When the tone of the sound was at its most effective pitch, Salmon’s wing panel achieved 22 percent more lift than it would have without the piezoelectric hum.

[...]

It’s all about changing the air flow from an unstable laminar flow to a turbulent flow that increases lift, Cummings said. The vibrations change the way the air behaves when it starts to break away from the wing’s surface, sucking it closer.

20:20 vision presents a long list of geniuses who died young:

Keats added to art’s martyrology by dying at 25. Shelley lasted until he was 29 when, recklessly eager for extinction, he drowned in a storm off the Italian coast. Byron, having reached decrepitude at 36, pointlessly perished during a chivalric escapade in the Greek war of independence.

Romantic writers worked with an almost crazed acceleration, aware that maturity was a death sentence. Georg Buchner, battling meningitis and depression while fending off political persecution, revolutionised dramatic form in plays like Danton’s Death (written in five weeks) and Wozzeck (part of the Barbican’s Young Genius season), which he hadn’t quite finished when he died of typhus in 1837, aged 23.

Pushkin single-handedly invented Russian literature, then died in the same year as Buchner in an inane duel; he was 38, and had disgraced himself by outliving his self-destructive idol, Byron. Baudelaire paid tribute to the artist’s stubborn refusal to accept inexorable time: genius, he said, was childhood recovered at will (and with the aid, although he didn’t say so, of hashish).

[...]

A Lancashire lad called Jeremiah Horrocks noticed errors in the calculations of planetary orbits while he was still a teenager, and correctly calculated the transit of Venus. Horrocks published his findings in 1639, and died suddenly two years later; he was 22.

In 1832 Evariste Galois challenged an acquaintance to a duel in order to avenge a woman’s honour. The night before the meeting, he sat up to record his mathematical testament, a prophetic exposition of abstract algebra. In those few hours, he invented what we call group theory. Galois was killed the next morning. As peritonitis from his wound wracked him, he said to his brother: ‘Don’t cry. It takes all my courage to die at 20.’

From Armed and dangerous – Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina:

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

[...]

The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

“All I want are frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lasers on their foreheads.”

Last week I noted that “Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, sounds unbearable.” That was after reading an article about him, which described him as juggling multiple cell phones and multiple PDAs. I don’t want to be anywhere near that guy — especially while waiting for my flight.

I’ve now seen him talk, and I can say that he is in fact…an engaging public speaker.

But this is what engaged my curiosity. After his talk, we were told that Home Depot — long story; they’re not connected to Ferrazzi — had sponsored the event and they were providing copies of Never Eat Alone — for some of us.

If you had a blue dot on the back of your program, you got a copy. If you didn’t, you stared longingly at the pile of crisp new books.

And that’s what we did: stare longingly at the pile of crisp new books. Everyone desparately wanted a book. That’s the power of artificial scarcity.

The second episode of NerdTV interviews Max Levchin, co-founder of ebay, after his third all-nighter of the week:

I think there’s something very special about the all nighter ethic, and some people dig it, some people don’t. So it definitely varies per person. There’s definitely something about the nocturnal lifestyle for engineers specifically that really opens up the chakras of creativity or code writing. And people get slightly sillier, but also maybe a little bit more creative. And they get tired and there’s some spirit and camaraderie that wakes up in those hours, and you get more done because you’re not afraid to tell people to shove it when they’re doing something wrong, and the interactions become more interesting.

But also I think there’s this massive value that you harness when you’re doing an all nighter where you’ve gone for presumably 7 or 8 hours of work and you’re really getting up to a point where something’s about to be born, and then you go for 8 more hours. And instead of stopping to go to sleep and let some of these ideas dissipate, you actually focus on the findings you’ve made in the last few hours and you just go crazy and do some more of that.

There’s definitely a downside, because as you get more and more tired your effective IQ probably drops some. And so you have to start being more careful. But if you’ve been around the block enough times you do things like mutual code reviews and you look at what you’ve done and make sure people are sane about it.