Hustling
In the journal I kept during my long trip through Asia, there's a hand-drawn map on the back page. The map shows some local roads, a lake, a couple waterfalls, and other local features. It was drawn by a man I met in Ratanakiri province, a remote area of north-east Cambodia mostly populated by minority tribes, not visited by many foreigners. He used to lead tourists on treks through Ratanakiri's national parks. He showed me an album of photos from past trips: young Brits swimming under waterfalls, walking under forest canopy, clowning with him for the camera, smiling, laughing. He offered to arrange for a guide for me, offered to help me rent a motorbike, smiling in a hyper-forced way, as if nothing could be less natural for him than to smile, but also as if nothing could be more important. He used to lead treks but no longer did, and he demonstrated why as he stood up and walked, painfully. He was lame in one leg, had broken it, not received proper care, and it had never really healed. He walked away from the table, poling along on one stiff leg, quickly.
Superb presentation on getting a job in product management
There isn't a lot of good information online about product management, at least compared to related disciplines like engineering, design and marketing. This presentation by Shreyas Doshi is a straightforward, fearless look at what it takes to get a great product manager role.
ilx suggests films to watch on Ubuweb
Late night links
- What does 200 calories look like?
- The Cloud Player (build Soundcloud playlists, listen to playlists created by others, hot tracks, etc)
- RadioClouds (pick an artist and get an explosion of related artists - as watson puts it, "for rapid breadth first discovery")
Temporary service interruption, please stand by
Ladies and Gentlemen, Slavoj Žižek
Guardian interview
(apologies RSS readers, Zizek's name did not survive the transition)
He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."
He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."
Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."
(apologies RSS readers, Zizek's name did not survive the transition)
Run
Where our energy comes from and how it is used and wasted
Vague, hand-wavey, inspiring thoughts about why politics sucks
Alasdair MacIntyre wrote the last philosophy book I found compelling enough to finish. He recently talked about the failures of our politics, making these provoking if sort of vague points:
There are two types of 'shared deliberation' in contemporary society, one that's focused on resolving conflicts between individuals over competing goods, and another (which he's championing) that's focused on building the common goods that we need qua being a member of groups.Check the link for a bit more. I'm searching desperately for a video or transcript.
Because we're so good at the former, and so bad at the latter, we have virtually no resources in our politics for asking what we owe each other, and so we mostly talk about what we're owed ourselves.
Web comics that are not Achewood
Because I might need them someday.
- Axe Cop (written by a 7-year-old)
- Hark, a vagrant
- Cyanide & Happiness
- Pictures for Sad Children
- Wulff & Morgenthaler
Notes from Fault Lines talk
Went to a talk today by Raghuram Rajan, "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy." I quit taking notes before the end, but I think I got the most interesting stuff. Most of this won't be new to you if you've been following the commentary on the crisis.
My favorite part was at the beginning: I'd always thought of rising income inequality as a bad thing, but I hadn't thought about how, in the absence of a credible plan for reducing it, it leads to bad policymaking.
***
Fault line 1 - Rising inequality - tough to address underlying problem of high school and college graduation rates - so politicians try to up consumption, in this case home ownership. [But rising inequality has at least as much to do with the transfer of manufacturing overseas]
Fault line 2 - under-spending exporters - japan / china model - it worked! Rapid growth. But weak domestic sector - cartels that work well for manufacturing export not so good for domestic consumption growth. So: savings surplus that has to be absorbed elsewhere.
These exports are our imports. This causes us to run large deficits [really?] which have put us over a cliff financially.
Fault line 3 - jobless growth in the US and an inadequate safety net. Tremendous pressure on Washington to get jobs back. So Fed gives public assurance of easy money to encourage job creation. Globally we are the stimulator of first resort. Leads to excess. This is bad policy.
Putting it together - policy wanted to extend home ownership. Wall of money looking for a home. Financial sector responds with mortgage-backed securities.
"More generally, are bankers evil?" - no but we have an arm's length system in which actors don't see the consequences of their actions. Profit is the only metric of success; it's assumed social value is being created. That's fine, but if price signals are out of whack things can go badly wrong. So this wall of price-insensitive money comes in and ...
My favorite part was at the beginning: I'd always thought of rising income inequality as a bad thing, but I hadn't thought about how, in the absence of a credible plan for reducing it, it leads to bad policymaking.
***
Fault line 1 - Rising inequality - tough to address underlying problem of high school and college graduation rates - so politicians try to up consumption, in this case home ownership. [But rising inequality has at least as much to do with the transfer of manufacturing overseas]
Fault line 2 - under-spending exporters - japan / china model - it worked! Rapid growth. But weak domestic sector - cartels that work well for manufacturing export not so good for domestic consumption growth. So: savings surplus that has to be absorbed elsewhere.
These exports are our imports. This causes us to run large deficits [really?] which have put us over a cliff financially.
Fault line 3 - jobless growth in the US and an inadequate safety net. Tremendous pressure on Washington to get jobs back. So Fed gives public assurance of easy money to encourage job creation. Globally we are the stimulator of first resort. Leads to excess. This is bad policy.
Putting it together - policy wanted to extend home ownership. Wall of money looking for a home. Financial sector responds with mortgage-backed securities.
"More generally, are bankers evil?" - no but we have an arm's length system in which actors don't see the consequences of their actions. Profit is the only metric of success; it's assumed social value is being created. That's fine, but if price signals are out of whack things can go badly wrong. So this wall of price-insensitive money comes in and ...
Saturday
Thursday
Taking LA, circular style
Midnight Ridazz do group rides through LA. My bike is a POS and I'm probably not in good enough shape to hang with these guys, but Taco Tuesday meets five minutes from my house in ... two hours. So ...
A message from Banksy to the people of Berlin
May is a lean month it seems.
Really cool idea. Supports rural radio broadcasters in Africa. Almost every farmer's home I visited in Kenya had a radio. What a simple way to reach a massively under-served population.
All foods ranked by goodness
So this ranked list of foods by nutritional density is thought-provoking but flawed.
I just don't believe that salsa (what kind, anyway?) is better than me for beets, and the reason I don't is sodium. But that's apparently not factored in.
Different ways of preparing food will impact the nutritional value.
Also, and I'm basing this off a couple hours of fascinating discussion with Dylan when we'd already had a few, different people have different gut flora which affect their ability to digest different kinds of food.
But I like the idea.
I just don't believe that salsa (what kind, anyway?) is better than me for beets, and the reason I don't is sodium. But that's apparently not factored in.
Different ways of preparing food will impact the nutritional value.
Also, and I'm basing this off a couple hours of fascinating discussion with Dylan when we'd already had a few, different people have different gut flora which affect their ability to digest different kinds of food.
But I like the idea.
Berlin
Why all bloggers need to optimize their feeds for me if they want to get rich
So John Gruber makes money off his full-content RSS feed. There's a reason for that. If I open up Google Reader and see that Daring Fireball has a new entry, it's usually my first read. I even click on the ads. Part of that is because I'm a geek and an Apple fanboy, but on the other hand, I haven't bothered to subscribe to TUAW or Cult of Mac.
I read everything he posts is because his signal to noise ratio is very, very good. I'm interested in most of the posts he makes, and I'm interested in most of the words he writes. If he posts a link, he usually has just a few lines of commentary, where the other blogs listed above might pad their entry with a couple hundred words of "analysis". That's excusable, and easily skippable in any feed reader. But what's less forgivable is the number of posts they make I'm simply not interested in. I already subscribe to too many blogs, I don't need to add any junk.
There's a reason post-Gawker blogs work the way they do (post early, post often.) If your readers are web surfers, hopping from site to site, you want to make sure you have new content for them on a regular basis, to maximize page views and ad clicks.
The dynamic for someone using a feed reader is completely different. I have no problem finding new content. There's no way I can read everything in my feed reader, every day. I have to prune poor-performing feeds (poor signal to noise ratio) on a regular basis so I can make sure that I spend as much time as possible reading good stuff.
That means the sites that I'm most likely to subscribe to, read, and stay subscribed to, will be more concerned with quality than quantity. I can follow perfectly blogs that post only once a month, because I'll never miss their new stuff. If it's good, and there's not too much of it, I'll read it all. No offense to the talented pro bloggers out there, but that's not exactly the dominant model. (It's as if they've forgotten their original mandate to be filters of content; now they're just adding sugar and carbonation to the firehose.)
Now, I don't know how popular feed readers are going to get. But I hope they get very, very popular, because once publishers figure out how to serve them, I have a feeling we'll spend a lot less time searching for good writing.
I read everything he posts is because his signal to noise ratio is very, very good. I'm interested in most of the posts he makes, and I'm interested in most of the words he writes. If he posts a link, he usually has just a few lines of commentary, where the other blogs listed above might pad their entry with a couple hundred words of "analysis". That's excusable, and easily skippable in any feed reader. But what's less forgivable is the number of posts they make I'm simply not interested in. I already subscribe to too many blogs, I don't need to add any junk.
There's a reason post-Gawker blogs work the way they do (post early, post often.) If your readers are web surfers, hopping from site to site, you want to make sure you have new content for them on a regular basis, to maximize page views and ad clicks.
The dynamic for someone using a feed reader is completely different. I have no problem finding new content. There's no way I can read everything in my feed reader, every day. I have to prune poor-performing feeds (poor signal to noise ratio) on a regular basis so I can make sure that I spend as much time as possible reading good stuff.
That means the sites that I'm most likely to subscribe to, read, and stay subscribed to, will be more concerned with quality than quantity. I can follow perfectly blogs that post only once a month, because I'll never miss their new stuff. If it's good, and there's not too much of it, I'll read it all. No offense to the talented pro bloggers out there, but that's not exactly the dominant model. (It's as if they've forgotten their original mandate to be filters of content; now they're just adding sugar and carbonation to the firehose.)
Now, I don't know how popular feed readers are going to get. But I hope they get very, very popular, because once publishers figure out how to serve them, I have a feeling we'll spend a lot less time searching for good writing.
Leaving One Acre Fund
On March 11th I leave One Acre Fund and fly from Nairobi to Frankfurt, on my way back to the USA.
It feels a little like leaving Microsoft in 1982 might have if you had an inkling of the future trajectory of the company. The core model in Kenya is much more mature than it was eighteen months ago: we now have three districts with 3,000 to 4,000 clients each, all generating performance numbers that in aggregate are steady and predictable. We have very promising trials underway to achieve better economies of scale and more impact for our clients. When I first got here it felt like building a car - suspension, frame, engine, speedometer and steering wheel - while the car was already on the road. Now it feels like we have the platform and we're tuning for performance. We have incredibly ambitious growth targets (seriously. ambitious.) and I believe we'll reach them.
So it's obvious I have mixed feelings about this. But when I brought up the subject of leaving with our executive director in October, I mentioned that I've been overseas for two years, and working in operations management for, now, eighteen months. I've got a better idea of what I want in life, and it involves building a life closer to family and friends, and going back to a career with a heavier analytical component. One Acre Fund's strength is a laser focus on field results, which means living here and staying devoted to implementation. There are a lot of people that are happiest doing exactly that (did I mention how rewarding it is to see a good harvest?) so I'm not worried about One Acre.
It's not the end of my work on behalf of One Acre Fund, either. I'll be fundraising, blogging about their progress and in general not shutting up about it whenever the conversation turns to development. I'll also be doing some volunteer country scouting if the timing works out.
The next set of opportunities is looking exciting too, though. More later.
It feels a little like leaving Microsoft in 1982 might have if you had an inkling of the future trajectory of the company. The core model in Kenya is much more mature than it was eighteen months ago: we now have three districts with 3,000 to 4,000 clients each, all generating performance numbers that in aggregate are steady and predictable. We have very promising trials underway to achieve better economies of scale and more impact for our clients. When I first got here it felt like building a car - suspension, frame, engine, speedometer and steering wheel - while the car was already on the road. Now it feels like we have the platform and we're tuning for performance. We have incredibly ambitious growth targets (seriously. ambitious.) and I believe we'll reach them.
So it's obvious I have mixed feelings about this. But when I brought up the subject of leaving with our executive director in October, I mentioned that I've been overseas for two years, and working in operations management for, now, eighteen months. I've got a better idea of what I want in life, and it involves building a life closer to family and friends, and going back to a career with a heavier analytical component. One Acre Fund's strength is a laser focus on field results, which means living here and staying devoted to implementation. There are a lot of people that are happiest doing exactly that (did I mention how rewarding it is to see a good harvest?) so I'm not worried about One Acre.
It's not the end of my work on behalf of One Acre Fund, either. I'll be fundraising, blogging about their progress and in general not shutting up about it whenever the conversation turns to development. I'll also be doing some volunteer country scouting if the timing works out.
The next set of opportunities is looking exciting too, though. More later.
Some things I would like to know more about
Sohbet
My friend Ozge just started a blog on Turkish cuisine for American cooks.
In 2008, after five months of solo travel through Asia, I met up with Ozge on her home turf. (If you can travel with someone who is host, guide and friend together, I urge you to do so.) There followed a near month of highlights, as we ate and drank our way across Turkey, starting in Istanbul. It should always be nighttime, and we should always, all of us, be at rooftop restaurants near Istiklal, having meze with raki.
Aaand I can get the ingredients for the traditional eggplant dish locally. Yum.
In 2008, after five months of solo travel through Asia, I met up with Ozge on her home turf. (If you can travel with someone who is host, guide and friend together, I urge you to do so.) There followed a near month of highlights, as we ate and drank our way across Turkey, starting in Istanbul. It should always be nighttime, and we should always, all of us, be at rooftop restaurants near Istiklal, having meze with raki.
Aaand I can get the ingredients for the traditional eggplant dish locally. Yum.
World poverty is falling faster than expected
"From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa." And: because world inequality fell, welfare measured for the world as a whole grew even faster than world GDP did, and more than doubled over the period 1970-2006.
If you're in Boston and you want to directly assist Haiti, this is a great way to do it
Ushahidi-Fletcher Situation Room update - scroll to the bottom where it says "Contact us at".
We really couldn’t do this project with out the help of the Boston situation room. They are combing through the reports, getting updates via many different forms of media – basically making sense of a mountain of incoming data. On top of that, they’re coordinating with many more thousands of individuals all over the world to help find critical data on locations, needs and confirmations with the people on the ground in Haiti.And you can be one of those people!
SMS donations to Haiti might be delayed
Donations made to Haiti via SMS might be delayed 90 days. This may or may not be a big deal, but just to be safe, I'm donating through the Partners In Health website.
I used to love reading my parents' old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, my first introduction to what was techno-hippie culture. Anybody remember zomes?
I would love a good book of this kind, I hope this is the one.
I would love a good book of this kind, I hope this is the one.
Yesterday
Driving the RAV4 on the road near my house, a small Kenyan girl stands in the middle of the road, arms out from the her sides, chest puffed out. I just keep repeating to myself "I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar, I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar..."
Another dash of McCartney
A friend of mine was in the same NYC studio while Paul was putting together some of "Memory Almost Full" [album released 2007] and his story is Paul was super nice and asked him if he wanted to come downstairs and take a listen to some tracks he was putting down. My friend obliged and once they were in the room Paul proceeded to sit behind the drumkit and overdub some stuff, singing along. After they were done Paul supposedly asked for "your honest opinion" and my friend could only come up with "Yes, Sir Paul, sounds great!" I told my friend he probably wanted to hear "Could use a tighter snare sound" or something.From a thread entitled "I hate Paul McCartney so much".
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear."
America's secret immigrant detention centers
Ok that's sort of a downer. Let me find another Happy Holidays something or other.
Ok that's sort of a downer. Let me find another Happy Holidays something or other.
Happy New Year
Reason CCCLXXXXVI we are happy to revisit Los Angeles: the San Gabriel Valley
Real Sichuan food at Chung King.
How to make original content production profitable on the Internet
Fantastic Wired piece on Demand Media, a $200 million, profitable, growing-like-crazy company that produces original online content. And it's not porn. How? Algorithmically generated article ideas, written Mechanical Turk-style for about $15 apiece.
But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.Even the comments section has fascinating stuff. From a Demand writer:
We are paid in residuals, which means nickels and dimes trickling in over the long haul. But they add up. I clear about $1,000 a month at eHow, and as I build up my library there, I expect that income to rise by quite a bit.Which actually ties in with someone Demand's cartoon character CEO said:
Long term, we’ll make more money by increasing quality.And I bet he means it. Only, can a public company afford to think about the long term?
"I do not like [quantum mechanics], and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it."
- Erwin Schrödinger. Quantum mechanical quotes.
Wicked sci-fi from before you were born
"Hosts ELISHA SESSIONS and MARK SINKER and their astounding guests burrow insensibly into the pulp and avant-garde science fiction of 1935-1975." Readings from and discussions of a bunch of science fiction short stories. There's a podcast link to the completed series, but, irritatingly, no link to see a list of all the episodes. So:
Wish they'd done a Zelazny story.
- Episode 1: John W. Campbell, "Who Goes There"
- Episode 2: Fritz Leiber, "A Pail of Air"
- Episode 3: Isaac Asimov, "Segregationist"
- Episode 4: Donald Malcom, "Beyond the Reach of Storms"
- Episode 5: Donald Wandrei, "The Red Brain"
- Episode 6: Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder"
- Episode 7: Frank Herbert, "A Tactical Saboteur"
- Episode 8: Howard Schoenfeld, "Build Up Logically"
- Episode 9: Robert Sheckley, "Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead"
- Episode 10: J.G. Ballard, "Track 12"
- Episode 11: Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah"
- Episode 12: Arsen Darnay, "Such Is Fate"
- Episode 13: Brian Aldiss, "All the World's Tears"
- Episode 14: Thomas M. Disch, "The Squirrel Cage"
- Episode 15: Ursula Le Guin, "Things"
- Episode 16: Arthur C. Clarke, "The Forgotten Enemy"
Wish they'd done a Zelazny story.
Spot-on, unfortunately, e.g.:
The US public is rabidly opposed to paying higher taxes, yet the trend level of taxation (at around 18% of national income) is not sufficient to pay for the core functions of government.
Vorsprung durch Techno
In the interests of total uninhibited geeking out, I'm going to start doing all music-related Twittering from @lukasmusic. Don't get used to all the substantive news so far, it's mostly going to be me raving about new beats.
"... this isn't a left preparing to take power, but one that, in its heart of hearts, expects protest to follow protest forever ..."
Politically, we agree on nothing, but k-punk is never boring, and never more incisive than when he is critiquing his allies on the left.
The appeal of Los Angeles
It's simple: there are two big, exciting, diverse American cities that you can explore forever and never get bored. One has New York weather, one has LA weather. That's it.
I don't think so, but I'm glad someone's trying.
