I stopped watching The Simpsons after — oh, I don’t know — eight or nine seasons, and I never found myself intrigued by the oh-so-mysterious Banksy, but I nonetheless enjoyed the recent Simpsons opening by Banksy:
The Simpsons Explains Its Provocative Banksy Opening
Monday, October 11th, 2010How Bejeweled Happened
Monday, October 11th, 2010John Vechey of PopCap games explains how Bejewled happened:
I was in Indiana visiting family when I saw this simple solitaire game online — no animation or graphics, but I thought it was cool. So I sent an e-mail to Brian and Jason with an idea for a game, which Brian created the next day using different colored circles. Jason sent a bunch of gem graphics on Day Three, and by Day Four, Bejeweled — a really simple game where you match gems — was done.
We tried to sell it to Pogo, the online gaming site. Yahoo didn’t want it, either. We wound up making a flat-rate deal with Microsoft. It became phenomenally successful for MSN, with 60,000 users a day. But we were making only $1,500 a month.
Back then, in 2000, fans started asking for a downloadable version, because everyone was still using dial-up modems and didn’t want to tie up their phone lines. So we made one, with better graphics and sound — and charged for it. I had to convince Yahoo, MSN, and so on that people would play the free version on their sites and then download a better version for $20. And then we’d split the sale 50-50 with the host site. It was a new business model.
We launched in 2001 and made $35,000 the first month. The next month, we made $40,000. We were like, Holy crap! We’re finally making money, but it won’t last. So Brian and I hang out in Argentina and drink wine for four months. When Yahoo signed on, we moved back.
We didn’t know anything about business, so we hired consultants who said, “We’ll fix all your problems — just pay us $100,000 and give us 3 percent of your company.” That pissed us off — if you don’t play games, don’t give advice on how to make games. They did get us to hire a comptroller. Before that, my aunt was doing the bookkeeping.
Connecting human islands
Monday, October 11th, 2010An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, Matt Ridley says, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive:
World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world’s income has octupled. The richest places on Earth are among the most densely populated.
By contrast, it’s a fair bet that if you took a few million rabbits and let them loose on Manhattan island, they would starve, fight, sicken and generally peter out. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it can continue forever or not, you cannot deny that when people come together in dense swarms, they often get richer.
In this fact lies a vital clue to the nature of the human animal, one that has until recently been overlooked: namely, that what explains the sudden success of the human species over the past 200,000 years is not some breakthrough in individual ability, but rather the cumulative effects of collective enterprise, achieved through trade. A new study of fishing tackle in the South Pacific provides intriguing support for this notion.
Two anthropologists, Michelle Kline and Rob Boyd, collected information on the “marine foraging technology” used by native people in 10 different groups of Pacific islands at the time of Western contact. They assigned scores not only for the number of tools but also for their complexity. A stick for prying clams from the reef, for example, counted as one techno-unit, whereas a bamboo crab trap with a baited lever counted as 16, because it comprised 16 working parts, each a technology in its own right.
What they found was that the bigger the population, the more varied and more complex the tool kit was. Hawaii, with 275,000 people at the time of Western contact, had seven times the number and twice the complexity of fishing tools as tiny Malekula, with 1,100 people.
But it’s not just the size of the population on the island group that matters, but the size of the population it was in contact with. Some small populations with lots of long-distance trading contacts had disproportionately sophisticated tool kits, whereas some large but isolated populations had simple tool kits. The well-connected Micronesian island group of Yap had 43 tools, with a mean of five techno-units per tool, while the remote Santa Cruz group in the Solomon Islands, despite having almost as large a population, had just 24 tools and four techno-units.
Mr. Boyd and his colleague Joe Henrich think that cultural change happens when one person learns a specialized skill and teaches it to others. But if others are poor learners or the teacher dies young, there is a tendency for skills to fade, creating a “treadmill of cultural loss,” especially in small and isolated societies. Tasmania, for example, suffered a progressive simplification of its technology after its people were isolated by rising sea levels 10,000 years ago.
This tendency is counteracted by the sporadic innovation of expert specialists. Their ideas, embodied in technology, spread by trade and imitation. The greater the population and the connectedness between populations, the greater the pool of innovators to draw upon.
Archeologists suggest that the ephemeral appearances of fancy tool kits in parts of southern Africa as far back as 80,000 years ago does not indicate sudden outbreaks of intelligence, forethought, language, imagination or anything else within the skull, but simply has a demographic cause: more people, more skills.
I largely agree, but there’s a fair amount of circularity in a statement like the richest places on Earth are among the most densely populated. Did the density create that wealth or vice versa?
And humans aren’t homogeneous. Yes, the greater the population and the connectedness between populations, the greater the pool of innovators to draw upon, but the fraction of first-rate minds matters, too.
Also, I’m quite pleased to live in a society that has escaped the Malthusian Trap, but the recipe doesn’t seem trivial to follow, judging by the “success” of much of the globe.
Pop Psychology
Sunday, October 10th, 2010In Pop Psychology, Virginia Postrel makes the case that asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can’t cure:
For more than two decades, economists have been running versions of the same experiment. They take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes. (Sometimes the 24 cents is a flat amount; more often there’s an equal chance of getting 0, 8, 28, or 60 cents, which averages out to 24 cents.) All participants are given the same information, but they can’t talk to one another and they interact only through their trading screens. Then the researchers watch what happens, repeating the same experiment with different small groups to get a larger picture.
[...]
Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.
[...]
In an experimental market, where the value of the security is clearly specified, “worth” shouldn’t vary with taste, cash needs, or risk calculations. Based on future dividends, you know for sure that the security’s current value is, say, $3.12. But — here’s the wrinkle — you don’t know that I’m as savvy as you are. Maybe I’m confused. Even if I’m not, you don’t know whether I know that you know it’s worth $3.12. Besides, as long as a clueless greater fool who might pay $3.50 is out there, we smart people may decide to pay $3.25 in the hope of making a profit. It doesn’t matter that we know the security is worth $3.12. For the price to track the fundamental value, says Noussair, “everybody has to know that everybody knows that everybody is rational.” That’s rarely the case. Rather, “if you put people in asset markets, the first thing they do is not try to figure out the fundamental value. They try to buy low and sell high.” That speculation creates a bubble.
[...]
But people do learn. By the third time the same group goes through a 15-round market, the bubble usually disappears. Everybody knows what the security is worth and realizes that everybody else knows the same thing. Or at least that’s what economists assumed was happening. But work that Noussair and his co-authors published in the December 2007 American Economic Review suggests that traders don’t reason that way.In this version of the experiment, participants took part in the 15-round market four times in a row. Before each session, the researchers asked the traders what they thought would happen to prices. The first time, participants didn’t expect a bubble, but in later markets they did. With each successive session, however, they predicted that the bubble would peak later and reach a higher price than it actually did. Expecting the future to look like the past, they traded accordingly, selling earlier and at lower prices than in the previous session, hoping to realize a profit before the bubble burst. Those trades, of course, changed the market pattern. Prices were lower, and they peaked closer to the beginning of the session. By the fourth round, the price stuck close to the security’s fundamental value — not because traders were going for the rational price but because they were trying to avoid getting caught in a bubble.
“Prices converge toward fundamentals ahead of beliefs,” the economists conclude. Traders literally learn from experience, basing their expectations and behavior not on logical inference but on what has happened in the past. After enough rounds, markets work their way toward a stable price.
Smell Like A Monster
Saturday, October 9th, 2010Grover explains how to smell like a monster:
If you don’t get the reference, you need to watch the original The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ad for Old Spice.
Scratched glasses give perfect vision for any eyesight
Saturday, October 9th, 2010Scratched glasses give perfect vision for any eyesight — if by scratched you mean engraved and by perfect you mean in-focus but low-contrast:
Zeev Zalevsky at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, has developed a technique to turn a standard lens into one that perfectly focuses light from anything between 33 centimetres away and the horizon.
It involves engraving the surface of a standard lens with a grid of 25 near-circular structures each 2 millimetres across and containing two concentric rings. The engraved rings are just a few hundred micrometres wide and a micrometre deep. “The exact number and size of the sets will change from one lens to another,” depending on its size and shape, says Zalevsky.
The rings shift the phase of the light waves passing through the lens, leading to patterns of both constructive and destructive interference. Using a computer model to calculate how changes in the diameter and position of the rings alter the pattern, Zalevsky came up with a design that creates a channel of constructive interference perpendicular to the lens through each of the 25 structures. Within these channels, light from both near and distant objects is in perfect focus.
“It results in an axial channel of focused light, not a single focal spot,” Zalevsky says. “If the retina is positioned anywhere along this channel, it will always see objects in focus.”
Zalevsky has fitted one of his lenses to a cellphone camera to confirm the extended focus effect, and he has also tested the lenses on 12 volunteers (Optics Letters, vol 35, p 3066). He has now co-founded a company, Xceed Imaging, to develop the technology.
The approach is not without its problems, though: the interference pattern tends to cancel out some of the light passing through the lens, which reduces the contrast of images viewed through it.
Adjectives with Obscenities
Friday, October 8th, 2010In a f—ing piquant little cartoon, xkcd plots the frequency with which various adjectives are intensified with obscenities (based on Google hits):
Google Celebrates John Lennon’s Birthday
Friday, October 8th, 2010
Google celebrates John Lennon’s birthday — a bit ahead of schedule. His birthday is tomorrow.
Ridley Scott goes back to the well
Friday, October 8th, 2010Ridley Scott made his name directing the stylishly dystopian Blade Runner, which was loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Now he plans to executive-produce a four-part BBC1 mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle, the seminal alternative-history novel depicting an America that lost the war against Germany and Japan.
I expect it to be stylishly dystopian and only loosely based on the original story — which was itself stylishly dystopian and only loosely plotted via random I Ching selections.
The Secrets of a Passive House
Friday, October 8th, 2010A recent New York Times piece explains the secrets of a passive house:
A so-called passive home like the one the Landaus are now building is so purposefully designed and built — from its orientation toward the sun and superthick insulation to its algorithmic design and virtually unbroken air envelope — that it requires minimal heating, even in chilly New England.
Where possible, passive construction maximizes window and facade exposures toward the southern sun. Thick walls and abundant insulation are also cornerstones of the process.
Walls in a typical American home might be about six inches thick and insulated with fiberglass batting. The walls of the Landaus’ new home are nearly three times as thick — a citadel of insulation and tape-sealed construction intended to keep the cold at bay and to prevent costly heat from slithering out through cracks, holes and other imperfections common to conventional construction.
And more than a foot of rigid foam insulation sits between the earth and the concrete slab forming the Landaus’ basement.
Fresh air is continuously pulled into the house, and stale air pushed out through a sophisticated mechanical ventilation system that can serve double-duty as a heat saver: some of the thermal energy being carried by the exhaust air is transferred to the intake air, minimizing heat loss.
As for preventing pipes from freezing, the Landaus will rely on two heat sources — a wood-burning stove on the main floor and electric radiant floors in the bathrooms. When the house is occupied, the wood-burning stove is capable of heating the whole house. When no one is home, the electric radiant floors can maintain a minimum temperature throughout the house to avoid plumbing disasters. To heat water, the family will depend on solar thermal collectors on the roof.
Wringing out every last ounce of energy efficiency isn’t especially economically efficient:
Although the final price tag on the Landau home is yet to be determined, Mr. Landau’s back-of-the-napkin estimate in June was $200,000 for site work like installing the foundation and a septic system, digging a well and bringing power to the site. Another $200,000 would go to Bensonwood for the shell, and roughly $40,000 to ZeroEnergy Design for its design and consulting services.
The balance — an additional $110,000 for interior components like bathrooms, finishes and appliances — would bring the total to $550,000, although Mr. Landau recently suggested that his own exacting standards might drive up the costs quite a bit more.
Why Corporate Executives Get the Big Bucks
Friday, October 8th, 2010Shannon Love explains why corporate executives get the big bucks:
If you want someone to run your company for your interest you have to pay them more than they could make running their own company for their own interest!
Admittedly, this a concept as complicated as quantum physics for some people but I will try to boil it down.
If someone has what it takes to run a major corporation, they have what it takes to run their own business. If someone has what it takes to convince a bunch of investors to hire that person to run the investors’ business, they have what it takes to convince a bunch of investors to invest in that person’s private company.
High executive salaries trace back to investor groups buying private companies and then paying the original owner big bucks to stay around and manage.
The reason that American executives continue to pull down so much dough relative to the rest of the world is that in America you can walk out the door, start your own business and rise to the top of an industry. You can’t do that in corporatist systems like those in Europe, because the state protects large corporations from internal and external competition. It is much, much more difficult to grow a business into a giant in Europe than in American. That lack of freedom reduces the choices of executives and keeps executive compensation down.
If you want to live in a country where executive pay is low, you have to live in a country like France where the top 30 biggest companies in 1970 are still the top 30 biggest companies today. In America, 20 of the top 30 companies today didn’t even exist in 1970. As long as small companies are allowed to succeed big and big companies are allowed to fail, you will have high executive pay.
Autolib
Thursday, October 7th, 2010Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, wants to copy the “success” of the city’s bike-sharing program, Vélib, with an electric-car-sharing program, dubbed Autolib:
A total of 3,000 electric cars will be made available, distributed among over 700 stations in the city. Autolib is due to enter a test phase in June 2011, and Delanoë wants the scheme to be fully operational from September. Paris isn’t doing things by halves, says a spokesman for the city: “We want to make it a big success.”
An Autolib subscription will cost €15 ($20) a month, plus an additional €5 ($7) for every half hour that a car is used. The prices sound affordable, but the killer argument for users could prove to be the guaranteed parking. Autolib customers will never have to drive around the block again — a parking space will already be reserved for them at the depot nearest to their destination.
Three consortia are currently competing for the contract to operate Autolib on behalf of the city: the Bolloré and Véolia groups, as well as a group that includes the French state rail company SNCF and the car rental company Avis.
This analysis seems odd to me:
A car-sharing vehicle replaces, as a rule of thumb, 15 cars. So the Autolib fleet represents the equivalent of 45,000 private cars. The upkeep of a vehicle in Paris costs €7,000 a year, says Deputy Mayor Annick Lepetit. That means Autolib could save Parisians up to €315 million a year. In addition, there would be less road damage, less pollution and fewer traffic accidents, as in the medium term tens of thousands of cars would disappear from the streets.
Why would rented cars cause less road damage and fewer traffic accidents?
Anyway, the more serious concern is vandalism:
Of the 20,000 Vélib bicycles, nearly half have been destroyed. The project will turn out to be an expensive experiment for the city and the operators if the far more valuable electric cars end up in the Seine or dying somewhere along the roadside due to lack of range. That’s why, according to sources in the Paris administration, the companies bidding for the project have been asked to develop appropriate technical security measures.
Inside The Soviet’s Secret Failed Moon Program
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
The Soviet lunar program was covered up after it failed to put a man on the moon in time to beat the Americans:
Soviet scientists were well ahead of their American counterparts in moon exploration before President John F. Kennedy pronounced the U.S. would put a man there first. The Soviets had already landed the probe Luna 2 on the surface of the Moon in 1959 and had an orbiting satellite in 1966.
The Soviets developed a similar multi-step approach to NASA, involving a module used to orbit the moon and one for landing. Their version was decidedly less complex and lighter to account for inferior rockets. These photos show the LK “Lunar Craft” lander, which has a similar pod-over-landing gear structure but numerous key differences.
All the activities done by two astronauts [are] done by one. To make the craft lighter, the LK only fits the one cosmonaut, who was supposed to peer through a tiny window on the side of the craft to land it. After landing the vehicle the pod separates from the landing gear, as with the Apollo Lunar Module, but uses the same engine for landing as it does for take off as another weight savings.
The L2 Lunar Orbit Module designed to transport the LK into orbit around the Moon was similarly stripped down. There’s no internal connection between the two craft so the cosmonaut had to space walk outside to get into the LK and head towards the surface. When the LK rejoined the L2 for the return trip home, the now likely exhausted [cosmonaut] would then climb back out into the abyss of space. The LK would then be thrown away.
The lander never made it to the moon because the N-1 rocket designed to carry it kept failing.
Democracy is government controlled by the employees
Thursday, October 7th, 2010Democracy is government controlled by the employees, Mike Gibson says:
If governments were controlled by their customers, they would have strong incentives to decrease their operating costs as much as possible.
But governments aren’t controlled by their customers. Certainly not in authoritarian regimes. And not even in democracy. Yes, citizens are able to express their dissatisfaction through non-market institutional channels. They exercise voice. They vote. But the rub is that the citizen is less a customer and instead, as of late, increasingly an employee. Democracy is government controlled by the employees.
What does a business controlled by employees look like? Public schools. Employee-run firms tend to promote policies that ensure job security over productivity. They favor any policy that increases the number of jobs, unproductive or not, and they oppose any measures which reduce the number. Job security and advancement through seniority mean more than how effective you are. To fire any employee is nearly impossible. Costs are ignored in favor of maximizing size. And if the resistance to higher prices or taxes has any strength, they happily spend more than they take in. Customer service is poor, at best.
With each redistributive transfer payment, more citizens are put on the payroll. Why even bother to show up for work? Vote and get your paycheck instead.
What’s more is that, with an employee-run organization, you don’t even have to ask the customer how he wants to spend his money. Instead, ask other employees how to spend it. It’s easier.
Jaguar C-X75
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
The Jaguar C-X75 concept car is a turbo-electric hybrid:
The 330km/h (205mph) four-wheel drive supercar is capable of running in purely electric (zero tailpipe emissions) mode for 110km (68 miles) on a six-hour domestic plug-in charge. The innovative, lightweight micro gas-turbines are also capable of very quickly and efficiently recharging the Lithium-ion batteries, giving the car a theoretical range of 900km (560 miles).
This remarkable range-extension system is a result of Jaguar’s research engineers adopting a clean-sheet approach to the question of powering the supercars of the future. The C-X75 turns to the very latest evolution of a pioneering British technology: the gas turbine.
Developed in partnership with Bladon Jets, the miniaturised turbine blade – the first viable axial-flow micro-turbine – increases the compression and efficiency of micro gas-turbines to the point at which they can be viewed as a realistic power source. Each of the micro gas-turbines weighs just 35kg and produces 70kW of power at a constant 80,000rpm.
The energy created by the turbines and stored in the batteries is transmitted to the road using four independent electric motors. Using individual motors has benefits in terms of weight-saving and distribution, packaging and efficiency. Each motor weighs just 50kg but produces 145kW (195bhp) of power and an astonishing combined total torque output of 1600Nm (1180lb ft).
Because each wheel is driven by its own electric motor, the C-X75 is four-wheel drive – with all the traction, grip and safety benefits that entails – without the weight disadvantages of a purely mechanical set-up. Inherent in this drivetrain is the ability to independently vector torque to each wheel across the full speed range. This offers potential benefits in terms of stability and control, creating an infinitely and instantaneously adjustable traction and stability control system.
With the seats fixed, the steering wheel, controls, main binnacle and pedal box all adjust towards the driver. The seats are attached to the bulkhead as in a single-seater racing car, and air to feed the turbines passes smoothly around them via channels in the structure of the body.
(Hat tip à mon père.)