December 2011
“If you observe something long enough, you’ll see something peculiar. If you can’t see something peculiar, if you stare long enough, then that in itself is peculiar. And then you try to explain the peculiarity.”
—Thomas Dyer, a Navy code breaker stationed in Hawaii during WWII. (Via The Pacific Crucible)
Frontiers through the Ages
- Water, 1400
- Land, 1840
- Gold, 1850
- Wire, 1880
- Air, 1900
- Celluloid, 1920
- Plastic, 1950
- Space, 1960
- Silicon, 1980
- Networks, 1990
- Data, 2000
Two for Two →
jstn.cc
jstn:
It’s hard to believe Prometheus will only be Ridley Scott’s third science fiction movie. His record so far (Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982) is unimpeachable, and to say I’m excited is a gross understatement.
I watch Blade Runner at least a couple times a year because I’m obsessed, but…
I had not realized Alien and Blade Runner were the only two science fiction movies Scott has made. Is there any other instance of an artist dabbling in a genre and producing only canonical works?
Marketers are Now Targeting Drunk Shoppers →
nytimes.com
So says the NYTimes:
“The hang-ups of spending your hard-earned cash are so far removed from your life when you’ve had a bottle of wine,” Mr. Tansey said in an e-mail. The New Zealand trip was terrific, he said. But a pair of $3 sunglasses on eBay “turned out to be horrible fakes, with $17 of postage that I obviously didn’t see with beer goggles.”
Ah, modern life.
“[Teddy] Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States.”
—Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible
BBC:
Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after work hours
The carmaker confirmed it made the move earlier this year following complaints that staff’s work and home lives were becoming blurred.
Econ 101: If employers want email to be a valuable commodity to employees, it needs to have some scarcity.
Very interesting. I bet this will become an asset to woo top talent.
Slave Labor Makes You Look Great →
ryancbradford.com
My friend Ryan Bradford was fired from the Post Office for alluding to a small mailing list he maintained entitled, “Slave Labor Makes You Look Great.” The line made it into an interview with San Diego’s CityBeat after his photos of malicious dogs went internet big.
Sadly, Bradford didn’t win out and was recently handed his “Letter of Resignation.” So now, he’s unveiling the original zine:
Feb 23 – Pat, a regular, asks if I carried his route. I say yes and then he tells me all the things that I did wrong. Matt always seems irked. My poor job of his route does not suit him. “You see,” he says, “you don’t put ANY mail in the boxes labeled VACANT. And when you deliver the advos, do it like this.” He pantomimes folding paper. “Because when I’m out there, I like to jam.” He actually says this.
March 3 – Two girls holler “sexy mailman!” at me from a McDonald’s drive-thru. Makes/ruins my day.
I was lucky enough to be on the original list. His writing is captivating, endearing, and honest. Like Cometbus at its best.
On The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I really like that David Fincher follows The Social Network with a heroine whose talent is the ability to unearth reams of information about anyone.
Gorgeously shot film.
Debuzzing Buzzwords
Buzzwords are cheap. They’re vague and allow people to talk about things with an appearance of understanding.
This is both good and bad. Buzzwords are good because they help create momentum around a new idea or technology by allowing more people to participate than deeply understand the new concept. Eventually this benefit crosses a line: those who don’t understand concepts begin believing the hype and over promise what the concept can deliver.
At this point, it’s helpful to have some fallback words. Words which defang buzzwords and force you to pin down the vagueness of buzzwords to reality. From here, you can build and advance.
I propose the following changes:
- Instead of “data” say “history”
- Instead of “content” say “art”
- Instead of “social” say “relationship”
- Instead of “crowdsource” say “outsource”
- Instead of “optimize” say “focus”
- Instead of “engage with” say “care about”
In meetings and articles, start to swap these words in. Sentences that over-promise will become easier to spot and hidden gems will begin to emerge.
Any others to add?
“R. Kelly needs funding — AND QUICK — because the singer tells TMZ he’s ready to film THIRTY TWO new chapters of his legendary hip-hopera “Trapped in the Closet” … but he needs financial backing first.”
—
If there were ever a perfect, headline Kickstarter project, this is it.
“Most people thought Blippy’s biggest challenge would be getting users to share their purchases. Turns out the hard part was getting users to look at other people’s purchases. Getting people to share is a small hump. Getting them to obsess over the data—making it fun, interesting, or useful—is the big hump.”
—Philip Kaplan, co-founder of Blippy, which shared a stream of your credit card purchases. (Via Paul Boutin at Technology Review
Facebook's Ceiling: It's Easy to Scale Sharing but Hard to Scale Giving a Damn →
technologyreview.com
The ever excellent Paul Boutin nails it:
It’s not hard to explain why we seem eager to do our bit to maintain the march of Zuckerberg’s Law. Social sites are like Skinner boxes: we press the Like button and are rewarded with attention and interaction from our friends. It doesn’t take long to get conditioned to that reward. Frictionless sharing can now push the lever for us day and night, in hopes of drawing even more attention from others. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg and his law, not every part of that feedback loop can be so easily boosted. Frictionless sharing helps, but getting others to care is the bigger challenge.
… Facebook’s impending problem is that even if the company enables future pacemakers to share our every heartbeat, the company cannot automate caring—the most important part of the feedback loop that has driven the social Web’s ascent. Nothing can support exponential growth for long. No matter how cleverly our friends’ social output is summarized and highlighted for us, there are only so many hours in the day for us to express that we care.
So astute. Read the whole piece. (Via Technology Review)
“Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3, which is rock bottom low for even a developing market.”
—
In India, the “missed call” as a means of communication and interaction has developed into a cultural and business norm.
Also:
Missed calls are being incorporated into mobile apps and services as a standard type of messaging like a text or an answered call itself. For example, an Indian cloud telephony service provider startup called KooKoo has been working with a Bangalore-based company to create an information market based around missed calls. If you want to know the latest weather, the latest Groupon-style deal, or the real-time bus schedule, you can send a missed call to the designated number and get an automated or manual voice call back with the answers you need.
(Via GigaOm)
“For a small fee, tour guides will lead you through Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery, where mafiosi of means are buried – some under life-sized statues or headstones etched with a likeness of the deceased standing next to his BMW”
—The FT examines the political and cultural influence of organized crime in Russia.
