Scott Berkun took an improv class on a dare a decade ago and learned a lot. He also forgot a lot of what he learned, so he went back and took another class recently. First he disabuses us of some assumptions:
Then he shares his lessons learned:
I can still remember some grad students at a party years ago describing what their friends in the biology department had found while doing field work on birds, which they had to temporarily snare to study:
When researchers in North Dakota set up “nest cams” over the nests of song birds, they expected to see a lot of nestlings and eggs get taken by ground squirrels, foxes, and badgers. Squirrels hit thirteen nests, but other meat-eaters made a poor showing. Foxes and weasels only took one nest each. Know what fearsome animal out-did either of those two sleek, resourceful predators?
White-tailed deer.
These supposed herbivores placidly ate living nestlings right out of the nest. And if you’re thinking that it must be a mistake, that the deer were chewing their way through some vegetation and happened to get a mouthful of bird, think again. Up in Canada, a group of ornithologists were studying adult birds. In order to examine them closely, the researchers used “mist-nets.” These nets, usually draped between trees, are designed to trap birds or bats gently so they could be collected, studied, and released. When a herd of deer came by, they deer walked up to the struggling birds and ate them alive, right out of the nets.
This behavior is not limited to one species or one continent. Last year, a farmer in India made a video of a cow eating a recently-hatched chick. Some scientists speculate that herbivores turn to meat when they’re not getting enough nutrients in their diet. It’s possible. A biologist in Scotland documented red deer eating seabird chicks, and concluded it was how they got the dietary boost necessary to grow their antlers. The same researcher also documented sheep eating the heads and legs off of seabird chicks. And then there’s another cow in India, which reportedly ate fifty chickens. There may be a specific need that drives herbivores to occasionally eat meat. It’s also possible, experts say, that eating meat, when it can’t run away from them, is just something supposed “herbivores” do, and we’re finally getting wise to it.
What is the most played song ever?
Nobody famous sang this tune. It was never a hit single and got almost no play on Top 40 radio. There’s even a dispute over the exact title. Yet “It’s a Small World,” also known as “It’s a Small, Small World” and “It’s a Small World (After All),” is very likely the most played song in music history — nearly 50 million times. And it was first heard 50 years ago this month [April, 2014].
Various sources cite the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” (1964) as having more than eight million plays on radio and TV, and The Beatles’ “Yesterday” (1965) with at least seven million in the U.S. alone, and many more in the rest of the world. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” introduced by Bing Crosby in 1942, has inundated the airwaves ever since, but for only a few weeks each year. There’s little debate that Patty and Mildred Hill’s “Happy Birthday to You” (originally “Good Morning to You”) has been performed more than any other song, but not in public; if you do, and don’t pay royalties, the possessive copyright holders at Warner/Chappell Music will sue your pants off — and take all your birthday gifts, too.
That leaves “It’s a Small World,” composed by Disney staff writers Richard and Robert Sherman for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair pavilion ride officially known as “PEPSI Present’s Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ — a Salute to UNICEF and the World’s Children.” In his authoritative 1998 book Songwriters: A Biographical Dictionary with Discographies, Nigel Harrison proclaims the song “the most performed composition in the world.” Richard Sherman, the surviving brother, thinks so too.
If you were to build a city from scratch, using current technology, what would it cost to live there? Scott Adams thinks it would be nearly free, because we know how to build homes that use zero net energy, greenhouses could provide food, etc. His ideas sound rather utopian, but one of the less utopian ones occurred to me a while ago — only I wouldn’t want Astroturf:
Now assume the homes are organized such that they share a common center “grassy” area that is actually artificial turf so you don’t need water and mowing. Every home opens up to the common center, which has security cameras, WiFi, shady areas, dog bathroom areas, and more. This central lawn creates a natural “family” of folks drawn to the common area each evening for fun and recreation. This arrangement exists in some communities and folks rave about the lifestyle, as dogs and kids roam freely from home to home encircling the common open area.
That sort of home configuration takes care of your childcare needs, your pet care needs, and lots of other things that a large “family” handles easily. The neighborhood would be Internet-connected so it would be easy to find someone to watch your kid or dog if needed, for free. My neighborhood is already connected by an email group, so if someone sees a suspicious activity, for example, the entire neighborhood is alerted in minutes.
This is one facet of New Urbanist design, as in the Mueller Community, which sprang up to replace the Austin municipal airport after it closed 16 years ago:
A research team from Texas A&M University polled Mueller residents and what they found was striking. After moving here, respondents said, they spend an average of 90 fewer minutes a week in the car, and most reported higher levels of physical activity.
The poll results seem to validate new-urbanist gospel: good design, like sidewalks, street lighting, extensive trails and parkland, can improve social and physical health. Several mornings a week, a group of retired guys power walk through Mueller.
“We’ve lost weight. We’re certainly more fit than we used to be,” says Don Dozier, a retired accounting professor. He and his wife, Janelle, moved here in 2008 from a conventional subdivision south of Austin that had no sidewalks. “I think probably the main thing is that we have made an incredible number of friends,” he adds.
This social engagement is what a lot of residents mention. Frosty Walker, a retired TV cameraman, recalls the cul-de-sac where he used to live in northwest Austin.
“It was one of those situations that you would come into your house, and if a neighbor came, the garage door went up, the car went in the garage, the garage door went down,” Walker says. “You would see each other and wave every once in a while, and that was pretty much the extent of your relationships.”
You can never be progressive enough, NPR reminds us:
Mueller seems to have it all: electric cars, solar panels, green buildings, walkability and native landscaping. But what happens when one of Austin’s most progressive, welcoming neighborhood confronts racial incidents involving some of its own African-American residents who don’t feel so welcome?
Apple has gone to great lengths to secure Apple Pay:
It uses a “secure element” within the latest iPhones to store the encrypted payment data separate from the rest of phone. It uses a fingerprint reader to assure that the phone’s owner is making the purchase and issues a one-time code so merchants don’t see customers’ credit card information.
However, the weakness identified by Abraham occurs at an earlier stage, when a user is adding a credit card to Apple Pay. When a user adds a card, Apple says it sends information such as the type of phone, the last four digits of the user’s phone number and the user’s general location to the issuing bank, which decides whether to provision the card for Apple Pay.
Banks can ask for additional information if its information doesn’t match Apple’s. In those cases, a bank may ask a user to call in to answer additional security questions. Abraham says that some banks made it too easy for such customers to be approved, because they wanted to reduce the friction of adding their cards to Apple Pay. For example, he said some banks asked for the last four digits of a customer’s Social Security number, which is easy to answer if the fraudster knows that person’s credit history or personal information.
The Flow Hive simplifies the process of getting honey from bees:
Flow frames have a partially formed honeycomb matrix within a transparent frame. Bees complete the comb, fill the cells with honey and cap them. To harvest the honey, the beekeeper inserts a tool into the top of each frame and twists, a move that splits each cell in the honeycomb vertically, allowing the honey to flow freely. It is collected at the bottom through a tube. Presto! Honey on tap.
Traditionally, the beekeeper must split the boxes of the hive, smoke the bees to calm them, remove the frames, cut the wax caps from the honeycomb, then extract and clean the honey. It’s a long, tedious process with a lot of heavy lifting, not to mention the occasional sting. Given how messy it is to harvest honey from honeycomb cells, it’s easy to see why apiarists swarmed to the Flow Hive when it hit IndieGoGo earlier this week. It took just five minutes for the Flow campaign to reach its modest goal of $70,000, and the campaign has now passed the $3 million mark.
Fast Company praises hyper-hipster eyewear-retailer Warby Parker for its fanatical focus on execution and brand:
By designing and manufacturing their own frames and selling directly to consumers over the Internet, they’re able to charge as little as $95 per frame, a fraction of what a similarly nice pair of glasses would cost at a typical optical shop. That price also includes prescription lenses, shipping, and a donation to a not-for-profit such as VisionSpring, where Blumenthal previously served as director.
[...]
Last July, just four years after their launch, Blumenthal and Gilboa announced that they had distributed their millionth pair of glasses, up from 500,000 just a year before. According to a person familiar with the company’s finances, annual revenue is “well over” $100 million. The fashion press has been impressed and so have investors, who have put in more than $115 million to date, which Blumenthal and Gilboa are investing in an expanded product line that includes progressive lenses and, of course, a fast-growing retail presence.
[...]
“A lot of subtleties go into a brand,” says Sasha Tulchin, the company’s director of creative services, who came to Warby by way of Tory Burch and Cole Haan. Tulchin invokes the dinner-guest metaphor as well, imagining the Warby Parker brand as “quick-witted, but wears her intelligence lightly. Looks sharp without planning to. Takes a dare. Always offers to help with the dishes.” Tulchin goes on to cover Warby Parker’s preferences in graphic design, color palette, and serif and sans serif fonts (Utopia and Proxima Nova). “The Warby Parker voice is witty, intelligent, informative, playful, delightful. We are not trite, pretentious, sarcastic, long-winded,” she says. “Every time we create a piece of copy, every time we create something new for marketing — every time it’s either in our office or externally projected — we do it with these filters.”
This carefully cultivated persona is at least in part Blumenthal himself, who still reads (and rereads) every written word that his company puts out into the world. “This is five years in, a 500-person company, and the CEO is approving every marketing message the company puts out,” Lerer says with awe. “Every CEO does that in the early days. You do it with 10 people, and if you’re good you do it with 25 people. You don’t do that when you have 500 people. Neil still does it.”
Behold our new aristocracy:
Blumenthal has long been the company’s public face, but it was Gilboa who first landed upon the idea that became Warby Parker. Born in Sweden to a pair of doctors, Gilboa is even-tempered, quiet, and analytical, speaking with an uninflected precision that can seem at once removed and intense. As a teenager growing up in San Diego, Gilboa tells me, he’d often accompany his father to the hospital, hoping to learn as much as he could about various medical specialties. “I was 100% convinced I was going to be a doctor, and I was just trying to decide which kind of doctor,” he recalls.
While he was a premed student at the University of California, Berkeley, Gilboa learned about HMOs, which convinced him that he might want to look for other options. He wound up in business, first at the consultancy Bain & Company and then the boutique investment bank Allen & Co., before returning to school to enroll simultaneously at Wharton and in a biomedical engineering master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school. (“He’s the smart one,” Blumenthal says, chuckling, as Gilboa tells his story.)
A few weeks before starting school, Gilboa left a pair of $700 Prada frames in an airplane seat-back pocket. “I’d just bought the iPhone for $200 and it did all these magical things that people wouldn’t have believed even a few years earlier,” he recalls. “Meanwhile, a pair of glasses: The technology has been around for 800 years. It didn’t make sense that I was going to have to pay that much for a new pair of glasses.” He complained about this to Andy Hunt, his study-group partner, who was, like Gilboa, a former finance guy and a glasses wearer. “We started talking about why glasses were so expensive,” Gilboa continues. “Then we learned a little bit about Luxottica.”
Founded in 1961, the Milan-based company takes in about $9 billion a year, running the eyewear business for most major fashion houses, including Armani, Chanel, Prada, and Ralph Lauren. Luxottica markets its own frames too: Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, and Ray-Ban are all Luxottica brands. Consumers find these frames for sale at LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, and Sunglass Hut, all of which are (you guessed it) Luxottica subsidiaries. Luxottica also happens to own one of the top vision-insurance companies, Eye-Med, which, if you have coverage from Aetna or Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, is your carrier.
Luxottica is in fact so powerful in the $65-billion-per-year eyewear industry that Gilboa and Hunt likely would have moved on to other ideas had they not heard about a kid in their MBA classes who knew more than pretty much anyone else in the world about how to work outside of the traditional eyeglass-supply chains. “There’s always a moment of serendipity in any startup,” Hunt says. “For us, it was meeting Neil. The company couldn’t have existed without him.” (The fourth cofounder, Jeffrey Raider, happened to be sitting in the computer lab next to Blumenthal when Gilboa and Hunt broached the idea. He worked at an private equity firm after Wharton and eventually cofounded Harry’s, the Warby Parker of men’s grooming.)
In person, Blumenthal cuts an unusual figure. He has a tendency to speak in the looping manner of Woody Allen dialogue, and he’s physically goofy with a geeky affect that is heightened by the (nonprescription) glasses he wears every day. Yet he is remarkably light-footed in social settings. The son of a tax consultant and a nurse, he grew up in Greenwich Village — a savvy New York City kid with an entrepreneurial streak. As an 8-year-old, Blumenthal persuaded his parents to order him an As-Seen-on-TV food dehydrator and attempted to start a dried-fruits stand on Mercer Street. By high school, he was taking advantage of the city’s lax attitude toward underage drinking and moonlighting as a club promoter. “You partied for free, you got paid — and you got to deliver this amazing service to your friends,” he says, flashing a sheepish smile. “So maybe that was my first triple-bottom-line business.” (Since 2011, Warby has been a certified B Corporation, considering its environmental and social impact in addition to its profitability.)
In college at Tufts, Blumenthal double-majored in international relations and history and dreamed of becoming secretary of state. He took the foreign-service exam and did well, but not well enough and, a few months after graduation, and wound up with a fellowship in El Salvador, where he helped shape VisionSpring’s now-famous market-based approach to philanthropy: Rather than simply give away free eyeglasses, the organization supplies frames to entrepreneurs to sell to their neighbors. (The strategy has won numerous accolades, including three Fast Company Social Capitalist awards, and has been adopted by organizations such as Toms Shoes and Matt Damon’s Water.org.) “That’s when the entrepreneurial thinking kicked in for me,” Blumenthal recalls. “I was trying to understand how we could get entrepreneurs to spend more time selling glasses, doing margin analysis, going over to China to try to source glasses at lower cost.” In other words, Blumenthal’s experience was a perfect match for Gilboa’s idea. When Warby Parker launched, it included a buy one, give one feature through a partnership with VisionSpring.
Although Blumenthal technically oversees Warby Parker’s stores and marketing while Gilboa tackles customer service and technology, the duo are, in fact, jointly responsible for all major decisions. The arrangement allows them to be more hands-on than might be possible in a typical high-growth startup, but it also means that both men must be constantly in sync, a feat that is particularly impressive given that they are, in some sense, polar opposites. “Dave and Neil are left brain, right brain,” says Hunt, who is now a venture capitalist with Highland Capital Partners.
We can’t defeat “global extremism” without discrediting the ideology behind it, T. Greer argues:
At the turn of the twentieth century, China, Japan, and Korea saw vast changes in the shape of their society because the old Neo-Confucian world view that had upheld the old order had been discredited. In Europe both communism and fascism rose to horrific heights because the old ideology of classical liberalism that had hitherto held sway was discredited. As a global revolutionary force communism itself withered away because the events that closed the 20th century left it discredited. If Americans do not worry about communist revolutionaries anymore it is because communism was so thoroughly discredited that there is no one left in the world who is willing to pick up arms in its name.
We cannot “win” this fight, in the long term, unless we can discredit the ideology that gives this fight teeth.
Luckily for us, this does not require discrediting a fourteen hundred year old religion held by one fifth of the world’s population. It is worth reminding ourselves that the ideology we seek to discredit is a comparatively new one. It was born in the sands of Najd shortly before Arabia became “Saudi,” crystallized in its present form only in the 1960s, and was not exported abroad until the late 1980s. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict excepted, almost all “Islamist” terrorist attacks can be linked directly to this new Salafi-Jihadist ideology and the madrassas and proselytizing media used to spread it. It is an ideology that directly threatens the sovereign rulers of every country in the Near East, and one whose interpretations are not only opposed by the majority of Islamic theologians, but have little relation to the way Islam was practiced in most places a mere 30 years ago.
That an ideology is new or rebels against established world views does not make it less dangerous. Novelty also says little about a movement’s future success–once upon a time Protestantism was a novel ideology. I encourage people to use this analogy. Think of these Salafi reformers as you do the first wave of Protestant reformers back in the 16th century. The comparison is apt not only because the goal of the Salafi-Jihadists is, like the original Protestants, to bring religious practice back to a pure and original form, or because the savagery displayed by many of the Protestant reformers was quite comparable to ISIS at its worst, but because this comparison gives you a sense of the stakes that are at play. This is a game where the shape of entire civilizations are on the table. The Salafi-Jihadists want to change the way billions of people worship, think, and live out their daily lives. ISIS’s success in the Near East gives us a clear picture of exactly what kind of society the Salafi-Jihadists envision for the Ummah.
I will not mince words: humankind faces few catastrophes more terrible than allowing Salafi-Jihadist reformers to hijack Islamic civilization. Theirs is an ideology utterly hostile to human progress and prosperity, and their victory, if attained, will come at great human cost. The Protestants secured their Reformation with one of the most destructive wars of European history; there is little reason to think Salafi-Jihadist victories will be any less disastrous. Not every ‘great game’ of international power politics is played for civilization-level stakes. But that is exactly what is at stake here. We must plan accordingly.
Placing an obstacle in front of a crowded door slightly increases the flow rate and, more importantly, reduces the duration of clogs:
Ben Horowitz was facing a particularly tricky management situation, where two excellent organizations within his company went to war with each other, when he happened to watch the most insightful management training film ever made:
The very next day I informed the head of Sales Engineering and the head of Customer Support that they would be switching jobs. I explained that, like Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris, they would keep their minds, but get new bodies.
However, after just one week walking in the other’s moccasins, both executives quickly diagnosed the core issues causing the conflict. They then swiftly acted to implement a simple set of processes that cleared up the combat and got the teams working harmoniously. From that day to the day we sold the company, the sales engineering and support organizations worked better together than any other major groups in the company.
Games are to AI researchers what fruit flies are to biology. A new AI has mastered many classic video games by combining two types of machine learning:
The first, called deep learning, uses a brain-inspired architecture in which connections between layers of simulated neurons are strengthened on the basis of experience. Deep-learning systems can then draw complex information from reams of unstructured data (see Nature 505, 146–148; 2014). Google, of Mountain View, California, uses such algorithms to automatically classify photographs and aims to use them for machine translation.
The second is reinforcement learning, a decision-making system inspired by the neurotransmitter dopamine reward system in the animal brain. Using only the screen’s pixels and game score as input, the algorithm learnedby trial and error which actions — such as go left, go right or fire — to take at any given time to bring the greatest rewards. After spending several hours on each game, it mastered a range of arcade classics, including car racing, boxing and Space Invaders.
Only games with a simple and timely relationship between actions and score were amenable to reinforcement learning.
Alex Tabarrok shares his (and Tyler Cowen’s) latest video, on price ceilings:
In tech, intelligence is an important quality, but it is not the only important quality, and this was a difficult lesson for Ben Horowitz to learn:
I felt that it was my job to create an environment where brilliant people of all backgrounds, personality types, and work styles would thrive. And I was right. That was my job. Companies where people with diverse backgrounds and work-styles can succeed have significant advantages in recruiting and retaining top talent over those that don’t. Still, you can take it too far. And I did.
For instance, you can’t allow the heretic to continue blaspheming:
Any sizable company produces some number of strategies, projects, processes, promotions, and other activities that don’t make sense. No large organization achieves perfection. As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.
However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons. The smarter the employee, the more destructive this type of behavior can be. Simply put, it takes a really smart person to be maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody else will listen to him.
Why would a smart person try to destroy the company that he works for?
His example of the flake takes the archetype to another level:
Some brilliant people can be totally unreliable. At Opsware, we once hired an unequivocal genius—I’ll call him Roger (not his real name). Roger was an engineer in an area of the product where a typical new hire would take 3 months to become fully productive. Roger came fully up to speed in two days. On his third day, we gave him a project that was scheduled to take one month. Roger completed the project in 3 days with nearly flawless quality. More specifically, he completed the project in 72 hours. 72 non-stop hours: No stops, no sleep, no nothing but coding. In his first quarter on the job, he was the best employee that we had and we immediately promoted him.
Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused. I could not understand how such a stellar employee could go so haywire. His manager wanted to fire him, because the team could no longer count on Roger for anything. I resisted. I knew that the genius was still in him and I wanted us to find it. We never did. It turns out that Roger was bi-polar and had two significant drug problems: 1. He did not like taking his bi-polar medication and 2. He was addicted to cocaine. Ultimately, we had to fire Roger, but even now, it pains me to think about what might have been.
Norway’s National Museum of Art asked Nils Anderssen — a game developer and school teacher with a passion for re-creating historical artefacts in his spare time — to 3D-print a replica of its sixth-century sword:
The museum is in possession of a particularly fine sword — a golden-hilted ring-sword, probably used only by kings and nobles. The ring affixed to the hilt is believed to be the symbol of an oath.
The instruction that the museum gave Anderssen was that the sword should look and feel exactly like the original would have done when it was new. This would allow museum visitors to have hands-on time with the sword, as a complement to admiring the relic safe in its glass case.
Anderssen has no experience in blacksmithing or goldsmithing, but he does know his way around 3D-modelling software — namely 3D Studio Max.
Using photographs of the real sword to gauge the dimensions of the hilt, Anderssen modelled the shape into basic polygons before working on carving out the fine details of the intricate design. Then he sent the finished model to i.materialise to be printed in bronze. When the finished print arrived, he cleaned up the details and had the pieces gilded and fitted with wooden inserts for stability before being attached to the blade.
Garett Jones suggests we try 10% less democracy and see how that works out.
Politicians behave differently near the end of their term, when they play more to voters’ irrational biases, including their anti-market bias, make-work bias, anti-foreign bias, and pessimistic bias.
Jones cites an unusual source — Jennifer Hochschild, Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard — on epistocracy:
Three uncontroversial points sum to a paradox:
- Almost every democratic theorist or democratic political actor sees an informed electorate as essential to good democratic practice….
- In most if not all democratic polities, the proportion of the population granted the suffrage has consistently expanded, and seldom contracted, over the past two centuries….
- Most expansions of the suffrage bring in, on average, people who are less politically informed or less broadly educated than those already eligible to vote….
Putting these three uncontroversial points together leads to the conclusion that as democracies become more democratic, their decision-making processes become of lower quality in terms of cognitive processing of issues and candidate choice.
Jones recommends six-year terms for the House and more autonomous agencies like the Fed.