You may have underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete a project today, which can wreak havoc on your schedule. Working harder is a sensible strategy to avoid looking like a fool on the job, but putting in more hours isn’t necessarily the best solution. Instead of exhausting yourself and still leaving loose ends, rethink your tactics and try taking a smarter approach.
That’s why I read my horoscope. It’s not because I believe in astrology. I don’t. It’s not because I believe in any mystical mambo-jambo. We’ve been over this before. However, often horoscopes are written in a way that they can be read within the context of your life. Also, they’re usually generally good advice. Finally, they’re designed to slip right into your own personal narrative.
And they make re-frame the way you look at your life.
Chance is valuable
Whatever Rick Levine writes has nothing, when he writes it, to do with my day-to-day life. Until I read it. Then it causes the trajectory of my day to change. Today, it caused me to rethink the processes that I take for granted at my workplace. Tomorrow, it may cause me to think about whether or not I’ve got the right perspective in terms of personal or professional satisfaction. But mostly, reading your horoscope introduces randomness into your life. It helps you get out of a rut if you’re in one, and it helps keep you out of a rut if you aren’t.
Think about other ways to integrate chance into your daily routine. Maybe you should flip a coin to decide which path to take to work in the morning. Or maybe, you should flip a coin to decide whether to go to work at all. Even seemingly innocuous changes to your daily routine can make you more mindful of the way that you’re living and can highlight ways to make your life permanently better.
Have you ever just sat on the can and thought about a word over and over until all of the meaning falls away and the word is stripped bare to its very etymological structure? Right! Neither have I.
No but really! Try it: convertible. At first, it’s a shiny red car. Convertible, convertible, convertible, convertible.
Maybe it’s a sofa now. Convertible, convert able, convert able, convert able; able to be converted.
From a car with a roof, to a car without a roof. And then from a car without a roof, to a car with a roof. Nothing is permanent. From a car to a truck? That’s ridiculous! Or is it?
Convert able. Convert able. Maybe a crusade is in order. Convert able. Unable to withstand an act of conversion. Convertible. Hot roofless cars. Unable to resist an act of transformation. Convert able robots. Maybe it’s just a weakness of faith. Do you believe… I mean really believe, in rooflessness? Robot Infidel!
The bed isn’t sure if it should be a sofa. Convert able. Or a bed.
Yesterday, I searched twitter for my “#thebigidea” hash tag. I was curious to see if any thing I was doing was interesting enough to warrant a re-tweet. Turns out, nothing I am doing was that interesting to people.
Cool. But what’s this? Another blog. Also called “The Big Idea.” Also with the same concept. Also launched in mid-August 2009. (Theirs was the afternoon of August 21st. Mine was the afternoon of August 18th.) I don’t suspect any foul-play or that their stuff is a rip-off of my concept or anything like that. If I did, I wouldn’t have linked!
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think that we both started “idea-a-day” blogs called “The Big Idea” because we are both lending our own voices to the spirit of the times.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in any mystical transcendent silver-thread mambo-jambo. At least, I don’t believe it in a literal sense. However, I do believe that we’re all acting and ideating in a shared context.
The most compelling art is the stuff that, when you see it, you realize that you were waiting for exactly that. The context of our time shapes our expectations for art, literature and even products. I believe that anyone who’s paying enough attention to what’s going on around them doesn’t necessarily have their own ideas. Our ideas aren’t our own. They come out of our context. They’re produced by the spirit of the times.
This is not a meme
Diseases can be viral and so can ideas. Much has been written about that. However, less has been written about how ideas can come from the environment. In the same way that asthma can be caused by localized air pollution coupled with a innate predisposition toward the disease, ideas can come from a predisposition and exposure to environmental factors. As we all breathe the air, we all breathe the ghost.
For instance, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin both independently developed theories of natural selection, both while studying biology in different tropical archipelagos.
You’re not inspired, you’re inspirited
Anyone struck by true inspiration should realize that they’re not creating anything out of thin air. They’re simply realizing something that the context within which they exist in has made obvious.
It’s no surprise that “inspire” and “zeitgeist” both refer to “spirits” or “ghosts”. Inspiration is the product of zeitgeist, never the product of just one mind.
Chaos has been embraced (or at least observed) by neo-conservatives and post-modernists alike. Both have observed that the world has exploded into a seemingly unmanageable plethora of actors and interactions and sight and sound and data. Both point out that central planning and the quest for ideal monolithic structures (political, architectural, etc) is not an appropriate response to the world we live in today.
The observation of externalities unraveling the best laid plans has been destructive to the very discipline of planning. Our loss of the war in Vietnam despite overwhelming capacity for logistics management and military force and the 1986 Challenger explosion were both touchstones in a developing culture of intellectual indifference to and retreat from complexity.
Dealing With Chaos
There have been two very different responses to these and other unexpected and unpredictable events. One has been to embrace the vast multitude of actors and interactions. This has resulted in confusion and experimentalism, but has not produced much that is real.
The other response has been to close our ears, eyes and minds to the madding rush. This response has led to the popular abandonment of society-scale engineering and responsible management of economic policy. Reagonomics, and even the Phil Gramm-inspired policies of the Clinton era were an abdication of our own faculties to the market. After all, why think about all of these individual actors when their actions can be rolled up into a share price, or maybe the price of an asset backed security? Since those prices always go up, we have nothing to worry about!
The abdication of control of chaotic systems has led to a lack of planning, even a lack of faith in planning. This lack of faith is evinced even in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war: It is now clear that no analysis of complex intelligence took place. It is now clear that there was never a plan to win the war. The whole thing didn’t tie out, and no one called that out.
The lack of analytical rigor has led even to our current crisis: individual mortgages were rolled up into easy to trade securities. This was the financier’s way of brushing the complexity and work of analuysis under the rug. Even those securities were rolled together into derivative securities! The market works in mysterious ways, they said.
Ian Malcolm Got It Wrong
If Vietnam and the Challenger disaster and the Great Society (and Jurassic Park, if it were real) were the death-knell for central planning and the quest for perfect structures, maybe the lessons learned from our current financial crisis and the 00’s Iraq war will spell the end of the era of indifferent non-interference with complex systems.
There are some signs that we are entering a new era- the new president’s policy suggestions have been a synthesis of chaos and control. Chaos from injections of dollars into the economy, control from the targeted nature of those injections.
The recent CARS program (colloquially known as “Cash For Clunkers”) is a prime example of this ideal. It’s a light touch, discounts for automobiles, but it’s targeted in a way that ensures that the money spent by individual actors will increase GDP. As an aside, this program multiplies the effect of every dollar spent: 100,000 more fuel efficient cars will help keep commodity prices lower, while $3 billion to American industry will surely tack a couple of points onto the GDP. Formerly, stimulus programs (like the 2002 and 2008 Bush programs) were un-targeted: that was beer and cigarette money and whatever else the market thought was best.
CARS was simple and compact. Practically algorithmic, it worked in the context of our current economy like a virus to push the behavior of many thousands of people toward a common, objective (or at least consensus) good.
It was more iPhone app, less urban renewal.
And it may be the dawn of a new age of chaos and control.
Throughout the better part of the last century educators, politicians and sundry hand-wringers have been bemoaning the lack of math and science education in the United States. Every year, it seems, Americans are pointed to another ranking that shows that the United States is number twenty one or number thirty seven or some other non number one ranking on an international standardized math test that I personally have no memory of having taken when I was a child.
Americans hear constantly that other countries are producing more mathematicians and and physicists than the United States is. Americans have been told that their science education has started, and then later continued, to lag behind the rest of the world. Americans believe this and worry about their protracted national decline until the next news cycle.
But so what?
There is little doubt that teaching Math and Science to students is positively correlated to the continuation of their education and higher salaries after they complete their studies. However, an education in algebra, calculus, biology, chemistry and physics does little to give students specific skills to compete in the 21st century job market and may do little to advance the prospects of society as a whole. We’ve figured out the technology that basic physics and the rest can bring us. We’ve mastered nuclear reactors, microchips, the universal computer. We don’t need to teach the fundamentals to everyone anymore.
The correlation between math and science education and continuing education can be explained by the fact that mastering math and science is hard. It requires discipline. Requiring discipline to succeed implies that the people who do succeed are either naturally disciplined or have learned it. Or, they’re just smarter than the rest of us.
Fundamental Sciences and Derivatives
Math and science education as we know it is, in some ways, a holdover from the post-World War II era. Much of the emerging fields of organic chemistry, nuclear physics and even computer science had not been researched yet. Each of those fields were just one derivative away from their fundamental form. Today, all of that ground has been covered. A student of high school physics has more than enough theoretical knowledge (but not quite enough practical knowledge) to build a nuclear bomb. A student of college level organic chemistry can brew up LSD, or easier, nylon stockings in his bath tub.
Today’s derivative sciences are built on top of yesterday’s – nanotechnology is a melange of materials science and quantum physics, which are both derivatives of organic chemistry and nuclear physics.
After a while, there’s too much to learn.
Tool Building
There is so much to learn, but we’ve gotten so good at technology that we’ve built tools to allow the less ingenious of us to partake technological miracles. Tools have become so powerful that we can use them, without understanding a lick of math or science, to create amazing things.
Let’s face it. We need to know math and science to build a computer. We don’t need to know math and science to use one to create incredible and nearly infinitely scalable value.
Teach Learning, Teach Craft, Teach the Real Fundamentals
Anyone can learn a technique. But what people really need to learn is how to learn, how to think, how to use logic to solve problems. The following video prompted me to think about these issues:
The people who produced this video are more prepared for jobs in the 21st century than a legion of math and science educated engineers. Why? Because they compiled the facts, they learned the tools needed to prepare a compelling presentation and they understood that if the presentation wasn’t well crafted, no one was going to pay attention. And not one of those skills is predicated on even a basic understanding of math and science.
Adaptation, Patience and Socialization
Because these things aren’t objectively measurable or testable, we don’t hear about whether or not the United States education system is trailing in adaptation, patience or socialization, but we should. Teaching children to be patient, disciplined craftspeople who can read, write and think well will help the United States be a leader in the 21st century, whether or not we produce the largest number of engineers.
Spoiler alert! His solution is market-based, with individual health-care savings accounts and federally funded catastrophic care insurance. Goldhill’s stance is that for expensive emergency care, individuals should have adequate insurance, but that for non-emergency health-care transactions, insurance is a wasteful and unwieldy financial instrument that should be abolished.
Goldhill argues, with somewhat spurious evidence, that Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement drives the cost of health care up, and that any further regulation is only a patch on an already too-complex system.
He uses the example of of LASIK surgery, which is typically not covered by any form of medical insurance, public or private. Goldhill points out that LASIK, and other cosmetic procedures, have typically fallen in price despite the fact that other procedures, like magnetic resonance imaging, have maintained their price or actually become more expensive:
So people who get LASIK surgery—or for that matter most cosmetic surgeries, dental procedures, or other mostly uninsured treatments—act like consumers. If you do an Internet search today, you can find LASIK procedures quoted as low as $499 per eye—a decline of roughly 80 percent since the procedure was introduced.
Goldhill incorrectly infers that people who get cosmetic surgery act like they’re buying a TV or a new laptop because that type of care is not covered by insurance.
The fact is that cosmetic surgery is a luxury good, exactly like a big-screen TV or a German car. That’s why your insurance plan doesn’t cover it. LASIK is almost never necessary. It is never urgent, and consumers can always wait for the price to drop or opt not to have the procedure at all.
Buying a cancer treatment is not like buying a big-screen TV in exactly the same way that buying a cancer treatment is not like buying LASIK surgery. Sure, there are doctors involved, but the stakes for a cosmetic procedure are a whole lot lower.
It stands to reason, in fact, that cosmetic surgery has dropped in price, not because there are no government disbursements, but because people will not get the treatment if it costs too much. They won’t mortgage the house to have have 20/20 vision.
Most people will mortgage the house to save their child’s life.
So, it’s basic economics: Is the price of a particular service elastic or inelastic? Are there viable substitutes, like glasses? These are the questions that inform healthcare costs, not some spurious datapoints about government disbursements or vague talk about ’structural distortions’ in the market.
In the end, Goldhill thinks that the root cause of spiraling healthcare costs are ’structural distortions’ introduced by medicare and health insurance programs and that the market just needs to be free from regulation so it can push costs down.
In the end, individual consumers will never put a cost on a cancer cure. Individual consumers will always bankrupt themselves to save their child’s life. The market, if left to its own devices, will bear that out.
Recently some bearish commentators have pointed out that the Great Depression didn’t get really Great until about six months after the first market crash.
They argue that the current recovery can’t really be happening already, because it takes time for all the risky loans to default, for all of the commercial real estate that’s falling in value to hit the ground. In short, it takes the body economic a long time to get the poison out.
Metabolic
Every transaction in the modern economy takes place more quickly more efficiently and with less friction than it did, say, eighty years ago. Does that mean that we can count on economic cycles to pass more quickly, more efficiently and with less friction too?
Maybe.
80 years ago, deeds to homes were written on paper, ledgers were literally ledgers, and it took days or weeks to get the mail from point A to point B.
Today, financial instruments are just records in a database. The same computing power that was used to create the derivatives that got us into this mess could be used to sort out the wheat from the chaff, price things out, figure out the losses, and move on. That’s happening already, unless it’s already done.
80 years ago, there were no fax machines, electronic funds transfers or instant exchanges of market data. Today, there are. It makes things more complicated, but it also makes all transactions faster. When all transactions are faster, it stands to reason that the ebb and flow of the economy will hasten as well.
Maybe we just lived through a second great depression and we didn’t even know it happened. Even if we haven’t, comparisons between today’s economy and the economy of nearly a century ago don’t bear any value.
Augmented Reality one of the trendier things going right now in the start up world. A quick review of my own Google Reader shows about 30 articles about AR this year.
It’s about blending computer generated, data driven (or sometimes – yawn – not data-driven) imagery with real-life. Some ambitious and adventurous advertisers have started adding AR tchotchkes to magazines – just install the special software, hold your magazine up to the web cam, cross your fingers and if everything went well, you’ll see a virtual windmill that you surely won’t be tired of in a few brief moments.
As rudimentary and tech-nerdy as this seems to those who don’t spend hours chasing web cam windmills, the commoditization of this technology is a big deal, and will be an even bigger deal once we figure out how to use it to provide compelling services to individuals.
Deep Reality
Advertisers and technologists are looking at this nascent technology and trying to figure out how to patch some 3d images and restaurant reviews into our visual stream, but they should be thinking more seriously about the derivative nature of reality. Reality is not just a live stream of the 5 senses. All of us live in a derivative reality of ideas. We are already steeped in a stew of the Internet, newspapers, books and 24-hour cable news cycles.
Augmented reality gurus should be thinking about how to augment the books and websites that I read. Can they provide me with historical context for the book I’m reading right now? Can they figure out what movie I’m watching and provide me with a list of other great films that I’ve been missing out on?
Or can they just spot a tag of shiny tape and throw an advertisement on it?
Compelling, Social and Beautiful
Right now, people seem to be really interested in location based services. One company demoed an iPhone application that showed tweets: “one over here, and one over there, because it’s over there”. Maybe once we can figure a reason for our tweets and restaurant reviews to be “over here and over there”, this will get more interesting.
For now, I prefer that my tweets stay conveniently located in a list. On my desktop.
It seems that most AR services could currently be more easily overlayed onto a map then they can be displayed on a heads up display. Isn’t a map with a cool overlay just as good or even better? For that matter, isn’t the sketchup data on a google map good enough to view with a AR browser on an iphone?
The sweet spot for AR will be to find an application that is compelling, social and beautiful.
To be compelling, your AR application must do something that requires AR. It can’t be easier for me to go to my web browser to get whatever content you’re augmenting my reality with.
It must be social (maybe not, but three rules are always better than two) — the nature of reality is shared experience, and whatever you service providers want to augment my reality with should be a shared experience, too.
It must be beautiful — if your app gives me eye-strain, then I’m not going to look at it. It’s possible that the hardware available right now will make mobile AR a slippery segment to find an effective application in, because it will be tough to build an effective AR app that runs on a cell-phone camera. Maybe when we get some bigger screens or refine what AR actually means.
The app I’ve seen that comes closest to meeting the above criteria is EyePet. And it’s a Playstation game:
Actually, many AR startups seem to be interested in compiling their very own data set and providing a novel browser, rather than hooking into Google’s map overlays or Yelp’s reviews (which surely have geo-locatable addresses associated with them) and building a game-ending AR browser.
Where is there opportunity?
It seems that the opportunities are in the following:
Build a game-ending AR browser. After all, maybe real-life is the new web.
Build a great, clean and valuable geo-tagged data set. It could be tourist destinations, it could be historical articles, it could be anything! Find your niche, and go for it.
Find another way to augment reality – maybe “reality” is different from a 3×5 inch rectangle of choppy video.
Find a better way to identify stuff to augment – shiny tape and geographic coordinates are one thing: how about smells and sounds? Is Shazam an AR browser?
Find a way to break the barrier between novelty and necessity, and you will win AR.
I moved the site to Wordpress! Actually, I’m moving the site back to wordpress. Since it used to be a wordpress blog years and years ago.
Before this, I had a home-brewed Django-based solution which was a really cool learning exercise, but I found that I was getting more interested in writing new content, and less interested in writing new administration tools and captchas and fun stuff like that.
I figure that Wordpress will be a more mature platform for me to write on.
I’m still eschewing Apache. Now I’m running Wordpress with php5 and fastcgi and nginx.
We’ll see how it works.
In the meantime, I’m going to import all of my previous posts from ksmooney.com to this site.
Hopefully, I’ll have the import done in a couple of days.
So, uh, thanks for chilling for a few months while the site was broken.
Kyle Brandt, a system administrator, asks Should Developers have Access to Production? A question that comes up again and again in web development companies is: "Should the developers have access to the production environment, and if they do, to what extent?" My view on this is that as a whole they should have limited access to production. A l […]
Includes two cans of beer and one self-inflating slide. The SlipQuit, by dialhouse.org, as featured on SF Weekly. The price? $51.50. (thanks, Andy Wright) JetBlue flight attendant arrested for his entertaining exit from ... Jet Blue "Epic Bail" attendant's fiasco covered by Taiwanese news ... JetBlue angry at Epic Bail jokes Jet Blue respo […]
Poster Series of the Day: Scary-adorable “Monster Friends” posters series from Familytree. Kraken, Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, and Sasquatch. $25/ea. 4 for $80. [quipsologies.] […]
