Andy Brett is an engineer, writer, and athlete

The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, opens with an amphibious mission to destroy an illicit chemical processing facility. After emerging from the water and planting the explosives, Bond strips off his drysuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo and calmly affixes a red carnation to the lapel.

It’s rare that the next step after “take off your wetsuit” is “attach carnation to lapel” — it’s not routine, even ignoring the exploding chemicals bit. The Bond franchise and other filmmakers succeed by mastering this device, by leading viewers along a path and then suddenly yanking them out of the context they thought they were in. In some cases it’s overused to the point of becoming a trope (and ironically, somewhat predictable).

Another example is natural language processing — what Google uses to guess what you’re searching for, like it did just now when I typed “natural la”. In most sentences that start with “he left the keys on the kitchen…”, the next word is “table”, or maybe “counter”.

The drysuit-to-tuxedo reveal is the word that you don’t see coming. It’s the equivalent of completing the sentence above with “ceiling” instead of “table”. When you read a sentence or watch James Bond, your brain automatically produces guesses and predictions for what’s going to happen next.

When our guesses are wrong, we become engaged, or upset, or we laugh. We feel alive. That’s because bucking routine, and the expected, is uniquely human — for the moment, anyway. Artificial intelligence bots like Watson or competitors in the Turing test are usually confounded by the absurd or unexpected. It’s conceivable that they could eventually do quite well with it though, especially given how quickly humans turn the absurd into the hackneyed.

Avoiding routine

Falling into a routine can diminish your potential, not to mention your sense of free will. Athletes know that if they maintain constant mileage, weight, or intensity for a long period of time, their muscles will eventually stagnate. Much better is constant growth, followed by recovery.

How can you avoid falling into a routine? It’s helpful to have an outsider’s perspective. If you’re the one that’s stuck in the rut, it can be hard to notice and break out. The path of least resistance is usually the one that doesn’t bend much from the current trajectory.

There are plenty of hacks to get around this. The oldest, low-tech approach is regularly talking to a good friend who is willing to act as a sounding board and give candid feedback. A more formal approach looks something like a life coach — regular checkins on stated goals and aspirations.

In the life coach situation you’re paying, often dearly, for personal attention from a real human being in order to keep you on your toes. But what you get from a life coach (or any outsider, really) isn’t all that different from what you might tell yourself to do. If only you could have your present self communicate effectively with your future, soon-to-be-present self and guide him through evaluating some things in the cold light of yesterday.

Even before we get AI bots that can understand subtle, even British, humor, software is eating the world[1] in this domain, all the way at the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

That may seem like a ridiculous conclusion, and contrary to everything I just said — that you could write software to make people more spontaneous, more human, and more fulfilled. I suspect, though, that this falls into the category of problems where the right combination of AI and UI proves to be incredibly powerful.

Notes

[1] I made a first attempt at an app that would add spontaneity to your day, with Whimsical — every day you get a new challenge to complete that will likely force you to break your normal routine. There’s also Everest, which is focused more specifically on goals that you set up for yourself and capturing “moments” as you progress towards them. Sort of a self-directed life coach. And of course there’s Beeminder, which is the ultimate way for your present self to get the attention of your soon-to-be-present self — through his wallet. Some kind of meta-beeminding goal could do the trick nicely.

Lance Armstrong taped an interview Tuesday to admit that he used banned substances when he won his 7 Tour de France titles in 1999 through 2005. In 2001 he taped a Nike commercial with the voiceover:

This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it; study it; tweak it; listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

Most people couldn’t finish a Tour de France stage if they were “on” a bike with an engine. That Armstrong was on banned drugs doesn’t negate the grueling work he put in just to get close enough where the medicine put him over the top. I can certainly imagine how sitting in a hospital bed, near death, and watching as all manner of chemicals are injected into your arm might make you very comfortable with the idea of “substance X goes in and has effect Y.”

But that’s not the point.

Lopsided progress

Paul Graham in “The Acceleration of Addictiveness”:

It’s the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. […] When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work.

Progress also yields EPO, and all of the other incredible substances that can alter the body and the brain. It would be impossible to develop the substances safely without developing incredible techniques in parallel for carefully studying their effects.

We usually only study carefully when we already know something abnormal is going on: testing a drug, or monitoring recovery from surgery. Like taking your car to a mechanic, there are a bevy of tools to diagnose any problems and just check on how things are running.

But once the car or human is back on the road, it’s back to operating with very limited instrumentation.

A car’s dashboard gives a readout of things like speed, gas tank level, engine temperature. These are roughly equivalent to the brain’s ability to convey things like hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. But in fact the car’s dashboard is more objective. It reports the actual levels, instead of just yelling “I want more” like a petulant child.

Let’s add the petulant child to our analogy – as the driver of the car. Your rational brain is mainly just making suggestions from the back seat, and can’t see the dashboard directly. He gets occasional reports on the dashboard from the child, who may or may not be telling the truth.

There are many ways to deal with a petulant child. You can guide him away from situations where he’s going to demand appeasement (not buying low quality but highly appealing food in the first place). You can buy earplugs that soften his screams (taking ibuprofen after skiing for 9 hours).

But what’s the equivalent of telling the child to “use your words”? Making him tell you why he’s asking you to do this? Or making him tell you the truth about what he can see on the dashboard?

This is where the progress becomes lopsided. There are all sorts of ways (drugs) to cause very precise and potent effects in the body. We have had ways of dealing with the petulant child, like ibuprofen, for decades. But we’re still only capable of muffling his screams or distracting him.

Our instrumentation, effectively, still sucks.

When you get a signal for “I’m hungry”, wouldn’t it be better to know why you were getting it? Are you getting it because something just reminded you of food, or are you bored and listening more closely for the signal, or are you actually low on reserves? What type of reserves are you low on? The human body isn’t just powered by a single chemical. It’s more like a hybrid car, except it can use not two but several different types of energy stores. Is my brain getting hungry signals because I’m low on glycogen? Maybe that’s fine if there’s a bunch of fat stored up and my rational brain knows that it actually wouldn’t hurt to use those reserves for a while.

People are more likely to be “on” a bad diet, or a new exercise routine, or too little sleep, than any serious drug. The effects of being on these more subtle “drugs” are far harder for the conscious brain to spot, and easier to ignore. Am I feeling lethargic around 3pm because I went with street meat for lunch? Ran 14 miles yesterday? Went to bed late two nights ago? Maybe it’s because I didn’t eat breakfast, or because I had coffee today and now I’m crashing, or because I didn’t have coffee today and I’ve become dependent on it. Or maybe it’s because I just read a pop science piece about how people often slump around this time, and everything else is perfectly normal.

So what am I on? I have no idea. But I sure would like to know, and it seems like getting this petulant child to grow up is a pretty interesting problem to solve.

The subway stops are numbered. The cars are numbered. The exits on the cars are numbered. The *doors on the exits* are labeled “A” and “B”. That last one might not do anyone any good except for the people doing maintenance on the cars, but the other labels sure do. There’s a sign in every station that tells you which car you should board based on the stop where you’re going or line you’re transferring to. In NYC there’s an app (Exit Strategy) and an entire subculture based on figuring that out. Tokyo just does it.

No one ever runs for the closing doors on the subway. That’s because the next train will arrive in about two minutes. This isn’t like the 1 train in New York where the conductor says “there is another train right behind this one” just so people don’t jam the doors when in fact the next train is 10 stops away and he knows it. No, the next train is always three minutes away, or less. It’s magical.

Speaking of magical, there is a magical card, the PASMO/Suica, that lets you ride *any* of the trains in Japan without having to buy separate tickets. This is the equivalent of the NYC subways and buses, NJ transit, the LIRR, the PATH, the Metro north, the T in Boston, and the Amtrak all accepting the same form of one-tap payment. It’s also accepted at vending machines and a lot of convenience stores, where you also just tap it against the card reader to pay. Not to mention the card’s mascot, which is a hilarious penguin.

There are machines to reload your penguin card *after* you enter the gate to the station, i.e. the most perfectly logical place to put one since it’s the place where you have free time. This seems really basic but SF and NYC both don’t do it. It’s good that it only takes about 30 seconds to add value to the card, because (see above) your train is arriving in the next 90 seconds.

The subway map looks like a bowl of spaghetti. This seems like a downside at first, but what it actually means is that it’s really easy to get to exactly where you want to go, usually with at most one transfer. There are also about 40 different maps of the various train systems. Again, seems bad at first blush. But each one is geared towards a person in a particular frame of reference, so if you’re looking at the one you need, it’s actually great.

There is cellular coverage on all the trains. But you never hear anyone yelling into their phone. Do you know why? Because there are signs that say “please don’t talk on your phone.”

Similarly, there are very few trash cans in the stations, or anywhere really. Some vending machines have receptacles built in for the stuff they sell, but that’s about it. If this were the case in the US, there would just be trash all over the place. But there’s not. Because people know not to throw trash on the ground.

Even apart from trash, the trains are *clean*. Both the cars and the stations. There are padded seats and about one strap handle every 8 inches (at two different levels on some cars). And these are the regular cars – a lot of longer distance trains have “green cars,” the equivalent of first-class cars, where I assume you can eat soba noodles off the strap handles. I actually noticed – and felt bad – when the condensation on a cold water bottle I was carrying started to drip on the floor.

Updated Sunday, March 11, 2012

A couple weeks ago I started toying around with Jekyll, an open-source, “blog-aware” static site generator. I really liked the idea of writing post content in Markdown with TextMate, and storing it in a git repository instead of a database. I got my old posts imported and transformed from html to Markdown, and pushed the site to GitHub. However, I also wanted to have images as part of the site, which seemed outside the scope of what Jekyll was designed for, so I waited to actually make the switch.

To be honest, though, the image capture/storage experience on my previous hand-rolled solution was never really all that great. It was cumbersome to upload photos on mobile, and you couldn’t see/manipulate previously uploaded images very well.

This got me thinking – what if I could just drop an image into a public Dropbox folder and have that publish it to my site? Dropbox has already made it easy to upload photos via their mobile app, so no need to reinvent the wheel there. Just like Jekyll has made it really easy to create and publish words, using Dropbox would make it really easy to publish photos.

The ideal solution would really be if Dropbox provided a way to just embed a photo gallery from a public folder. But alas – even with their shiny new release this week, there isn’t an easy way to do this.

So this morning I set out to kludge together a solution of my own. Using the ruby dropbox SDK gem, I have a script that pings Dropbox to see if any photos have been added to the “Public/Photos” folder (first checking the returned hash from Dropbox, and then checking each path for uniqueness against a local redis instance). If it finds anything new, it grabs the public link and uses that to create a new post in my Jekyll install. Then, using the ruby-git gem, it commits the new file and pushes to GitHub. When GitHub receives the push it regenerates the site with the new photo page.

Pretty Rube-Goldbergian if I say so myself. For all the gory details, or if you’d like to try this yourself, the code is on GitHub. I’ll be making various improvements as I have time. Pull requests welcome.

About a month ago I wrote about some of the issues I had with the Jawbone UP. I’m still using the UP, and happy to report that I’ve fixed the last item on the list – the lack of a web interface and data export.

It’s based on the unofficial api for the UP. When I saw this I published a little ruby gem for it and used that as the basis for an app.

I’ve published the (very primitive) app at jawbone.heroku.com. You can go there to see some demo data from my account.

If you put in your login credentials for jawbone.com in the upper left there, you should see your data displayed instead of the demo. You can also then go to jawbone.heroku.com/data.json to download it.

If anyone does try it out, let me know on twitter or email. I have a lot of ideas for how to improve this further.

Note: the app isn’t storing anything, including your login information. It literally does not have a database attached, so it’d be impossible to do so. Once you enter your login information the app gets a token that allows it to retrieve data from Jawbone and stores that token in a cookie. To “log out” you can just clear the cookie.

When I was younger I liked to read books about kids who were detectives, like Encyclopedia Brown. There was another series about a girl named Cam Jansen, who was aided in her detective work by her photographic memory. When she wanted to remember a scene, she simply said, “Click!” and it was permanently preserved.

Soon, anyone will be able to do this.

I have a feeling that Path realized this a while ago and is skating to where the puck is going to be. Their cutesy demo video shows seamless transitions between real life moments and the snapshots being captured in Path – in nearly every situation it would have been incredibly awkward to say “hold on, let me take out my camera to get a shot of this.” Path is executing on the ideal model for this future world in that these moments are “private by default”. No data is mined, no social graphs are monetized.[1]

There are several other situations where some sort of wearable device vastly improves an existing use case. I encounter one almost every time I go running – inevitably I’ll want to capture some interesting piece of scenery, but I never bring my phone with me, and even if I did I wouldn’t really want to stop to take it out. Put the camera on my sunglasses – boom. Problem solved.

Another use case in need of improvement is one of the “features” of the Jawbone UP – right now you’re supposed to take a picture of every meal you eat. Sites like Foodspotting have managed to get the early adopter set to make a habit out of photographing every dish before they dig in, but if it’s as effortless as saying “click,” suddenly it’s a lot easier to get people at risk for diabetes to keep a journal of what they’re eating.

Thanks to Sam Grossberg for unwittingly listening to a first draft of this post over a beer a couple weeks ago.

[1] Here is my plea to Path: Don’t let me be a free user. I know that I can buy filters and buy songs on iTunes via Path, but that’s not really tied to the value that I’m getting from the app. How about a voluntary subscription a la Instapaper?

There were actually two distinct themes at this year’s edition of Startup School, but the first makes for a better title. This is not a recap of everything that was said – for that, I believe you can watch the individual videos on justin.tv eventually.

Theme One: Do not, under any circumstances, start a startup.

This is, of course, tongue in cheek. But more than half the speakers said, in one form or another, do not start a startup. The summary went something like:

Don’t start a company just for the sake of starting a company. Don’t start a company because it’s cool. Don’t start one because you think it’s going to turn out like it does in the fictional movies, because it won’t – death is the default for startups. Don’t start a company because you want to be like the founders you see at startup school, or want to be the “next [fill in the blank].”

As one member of this chorus, Paul Graham offered one of the more analytical and level-headed critiques of the current landscape. He spent a few minutes before the Office Hours segment to give a mini-lecture on what he’s seeing with this round of YC applications – he described some of them as “what would happen if you did Markov chaining on a corpus of TechCrunch articles.” One startup that came on stage later was asked point blank, “Is this the biggest problem you could find?”

Paul noted that Bill Gates was trying to solve a problem he had when he wrote the BASIC interpreter for the Altair. He wasn’t thinking that it would lead to a giant software company or even a company at all. This was later echoed by Mark Zuckerberg who said that Facebook became a company in spite of his intentions – it got so much momentum behind it that it was going to happen whether he kept going with it or not.

In fact there was a palpable undercurrent of exasperation from a number of the speakers who had probably seen, heard about, or been pitched by one too many fresh-faced college students with billion-dollar ideas and an odd affinity for ramen noodles, hoodies, and caffeine. Ashton Kutcher, of all people, expressed this best when he said:

“I talk to these founders with these big ideas, and they jump from the problem they’re solving to who they’re going to be or what they’re going to get. I hear ‘It’s going to be a billion dollar company’ and I have this switch in my head that slowly shuts off. Because they’re jumping to the effect. You have to be the cause…If you want to be Mark Zuckerberg the best you’re going to be is second place. Because Mark Zuckerberg will always be a better Mark Zuckerberg than you.”

If Ashton’s distaste for founders trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg by following exactly in Mark’s footsteps sounds familiar, it’s because Paul Carr wrote about it back in March[1]. Here’s the conversation Paul had with such a founder:

More worrying was his answer to the question “What are your plans for the app?”.

Without a flicker of irony, he replied “we’re going to be a billion dollar company.”

“You realise that’s not just a thing you can decide to be?” I asked.

A glare this time. A shrug. And then again, as if he were addressing a simpleton: “We’re going to be a billion dollar company.”

“How?” I said.

“You’ll see,” came the reply.

It was only then I noticed his outfit. Everyone else was in smart-ish jeans and shirts, but the entrepreneur was carefully dressed in a hoodie and a pair of open-toed flip flops. Later investigation would reveal that his “billion dollar” app was a social network for people with .edu addresses. The secret sauce? The fact that it gave college kids a way to flirt around campus.

Any of this sounding familiar?

“Doing a startup” has seeped into popular culture as a “cool” thing to do. It may come from Aaron Sorkin (Oliver Stone revisited), or it may come from the cadre of mainstream news outlets who don’t want to appear foolish by dismissing the next big thing and who therefore cover companies and founders earlier than ever. I think McSweeneys puts it pretty well with their update on the opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an internet startup to call his own.”

So why should you start a company?

Because you’ve found your mission. When Mark Pincus took some time to think about what he wanted to do next, he asked himself what he wanted to be doing for the next decade (or three). He describes building a company as “building a house that you would want to live in” – the timeframe of building and owning a home was chosen deliberately, I’m sure. Many founders Mark talked to are willing to pursue something if someone else will fund it – they want to see if someone else thinks it’s a good idea. But that’s backwards, he says. You need to decide that it’s a good idea to be working on it first.

Work on a problem that you want to work on – but choose your subject wisely. If you’ve chosen correctly, the company will follow.

Theme Two: Design

The most overt reference to design was late in the day when Ron Conway launched a thousand tweets by saying that “Design and user experience is the new intellectual property.” There was a more subtle thread leading up to that. The very first speaker, Marc Andreessen, talked about the early days of Netscape when “nothing was instrumented” – echoing something Jack Dorsey said several months ago. Instrumentation isn’t what people normally think of when they think of design, but building systems that are transparent and convey important feedback to the right people in fact can require the most rigorous design discipline.

James Lindenbaum, one of the founders of Heroku, picked up the thread next when he discussed “Poka-yoke,” or preventing the user from making mistakes. To him, design is thinking through the emotional state of the user. He described Heroku apps as sitting in the middle of a huge ecosystem of services that, thanks to EC2, can ping each other in just milliseconds from around the world. Applications are being “decomposed” into services that they consume so that it’s completely clear how they can be valuable and solve new problems, rather than having to resolve old ones. This makes systems design and architecture essential.

Mark Zuckerberg also got in on the party. Jessica asked about the choices he made when scaling the company, which he described as just another engineering problem to solve. Getting a lot of teams working together is just another complex problem that you have to decompose and design a solution for.

It’s turtles – er, engineering and design – all the way down.

Drew Houston of Dropbox wrapped up the afternoon. Dropbox probably isn’t the first company you’d think of when it comes to design – their site is sparse and features mostly stick figures – but the whole point is that they’ve built something that actually works. Even the text file I’m using to write this is getting continuously backed up to Dropbox – seeing that little green check reminds me that I’ll have this text (and prior revisions) permanently.

It’s very easy to become jaded and have a cynical take on “startup advice” in general. To be honest when I walked out of the auditorium yesterday I thought I had come to the definitive conclusion that the content at the previous year’s startup school had been far superior, and that this year had been, to use the technical term, too platitude-y. But after letting the various talks percolate overnight I realized that the message just took a little longer to reveal itself.

[1] The irony here is that Ashton Kutcher is actually an investor in that founder’s company, but who am I to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Time: 1:06:03
Place: 625th/196th/69th (see below)

On Sunday I ran the 101st annual Dipsea, the oldest trail race in America. The 7.4 mile course starts in Mill Valley (30 minutes north of San Francisco) and finishes at the Pacific Ocean at Stinson Beach. In between is about 2,200 feet of climbing and descending over some very rugged terrain.

I got to the start well ahead of time, especially given that I was slotted to start in the very last wave of runners, 52 minutes behind the first wave. The Dipsea is unique in that it is a handicapped race. Runners are given up to a 25 minute head start on the field based on age and gender, and each wave goes off at one-minute intervals, starting with the largest head-start group: men ages 74+ and under 7; women 66+ and under 8. “Scratch” runners, males between 19 and 30, start all the way in the back of the pack.

In addition, there are two sections of the Dipsea, each of which follow this handicapping system – the Invitational section (which starts first) and the Runner section. To qualify for the Invitational, you have to run well in the previous year – if you start in the Runner section, this means the top 750 overall, including the Invitational runners who started well ahead of you.

As the Scratch wave of the Runner section was finally preparing to start, someone remarked that the “SCR” abbreviation on our racing bibs stood for “screwed.”

We all knew it was going to be a tall order to move from our starting position – 1328th place – up to 750th or better by the end of the race. It wasn’t until afterwards that I did the math – you need to pass one person every six seconds to make up that many spots.

Faced with that challenge, we were off. The first quarter mile of the race is really just a prelude to the famous Dipsea steps, and I took a fairly easy pace in light of that. We hit the first of the three flights of stairs (671 in all) and I realized that the major challenge was not the stairs themselves but rather the herd of people who were trying to make their way up at various speeds.

I don’t have the actual experience to back this up, but heading through that pack felt like trying to navigate rush hour on a major freeway on a motorcycle. Throw in the added variable of a constantly changing number of available lanes, a lot of other motorcycles darting in and out of traffic, and a shoulder filled with hazards. Bay area residents will no doubt recognize this as 101 on a good day.

The two breaks in between the three flights of stairs were therefore a free for all of runners finally liberated from the death march, trying to pick up as many spots as possible before the next flight. After the 671st step, the course actually opened up for the first time, but not for very long and with a decent uphill grade to still contend with. I was able to pick up some places here, dodging both runners and water cups through the first aid station.

The first technical downhill section began, and we were back to rush hour traffic. As perennial fastest-time winner Alex Varner has noted, this is possibly the most frustrating section of the course. It’s near enough to the start that you’re still dealing with a lot of traffic. Because it’s downhill, though, everyone thinks they’re going pretty fast, which results in a lot of people jumping into the passing “lane” (if you can call it a lane) on the left and causing pileups behind them. The section was thankfully short and we were unceremoniously deposited onto Panoramic Highway after a very steep final drop.

At this point we had given back about half of the elevation that you gained from the steps. The other half evaporated with the descent into Muir Woods – the infamous “Suicide” section. The organizers actually had the sign that’s been used for many years to let runners know what they’re getting into:

Naturally, I went left. The challenge here is that even though the terrain is just as steep as many other sections, there are no stairs or even much structure to speak of. Just lots of loose dirt and dust. The pack was still bunched up pretty tightly here and it was a challenge to keep a precise handle on your speed to avoid collisions.

We bottomed out in Muir Woods and began the second big climb of the race, this one up to 1,300 feet. For the first several minutes the trail was decidedly single track, which meant that we were once again in very close quarters and looking for any opportunity available to pass. This often meant a judiciously timed scramble up the more uneven sections of trail.

By this point I had realized that this is perhaps the most important skill to master in the early miles – the art of knowing when to pass, and executing the pass with minimal extra effort. You have to be very mentally engaged with your surroundings and make a thousand small but instant decisions about which energy expenditures will be worth it.

Luckily the trail soon split, offering some relief from the congestion but not from the uphill. It took a lot longer than I thought before the final incline, “Cardiac,” came into view. At the highest point in the race awaited a water station and another round of “dodge the water cups” – I have a vivid image of one of them exploding over my head as I ducked underneath someone’s outstretched arm to avoid being clotheslined.

At this point the Bay Area fog machine was in full effect and in fact made for ideal racing conditions – slightly overcast with a bit of mist in some places. You could look ahead and see a trail of runners fading off into the clouds. Very Scottish-moor-esque.

The only flat section of the race followed – it was here (or slightly earlier) that I really got into the rhythm of saying “on your left… thanks” as I passed people. In the first miles there really isn’t much point and you would just hear people yelling blanket statements about keeping to the right. By the “Swoop,” though, the pack was thinned out enough that it seemed like the polite thing to do. The Swoop is very similar to Suicide – very steep, and not a lot of structure. You find yourself weaving back and forth, cutting your own mini-switchbacks in an effort to not just skid down the whole thing on your butt.

We rejoined the main course after being unceremoniously dumped down a very steep final drop (for a second time). This marked the start of the Steep Ravine section, known for its stairs that are anything but regular in their reliability, incline, and direction. About halfway through this section I spotted someone on the ground up ahead – I thought that someone had misjudged their footing and taken a dive. But no – this was a photographer who had chosen to set up camp along one of the nastiest stretches of trail. Not exactly something I would have volunteered for but I bet he got some good shots. Here’s one – I’m in the back trying to decide if the stairs are wide enough for two people.

We hit the last real uphill on the course, “Insult Hill,” meaning there was a little over a mile left to run. I had absolutely no idea what place I might be in, but I figured it was a good time to start running as if I was outside the top 750, so I powered up the hill, onto Panoramic Highway and down into a very overgrown shortcut, pushing a lot of undergrowth out of the way. As we popped back onto the highway I caught up with a woman as she also passed a kid who turned out to be all of 13; he put on a pretty strong, if temporary, surge after she asked how old he was.

As I approached the final shortcut I sensed that someone was coming up from behind me, and I turned my head slightly to check and asked if he wanted to take the lead on the upcoming single track. He declined though, and that turned out for the best – I went flying through the narrow gap in the guardrail and didn’t see him again.

The race’s most famous spot, the stile before the final unceremonious dumping onto Panoramic, is famous for a reason. In addition to being easily accessible to spectators, it’s also been the site of some of the most spectacular wipeouts. The woman running immediately in front of me took a nasty dive onto the pavement, but was fully recovered by the time I leapt over the stile, down the hill, and proceeded to very nearly do the exact same thing.

The cowbells were in full effect by then, and certainly helped to supercharge the final sprint to the finish. Afterwards I contemplated taking a jump into the ocean but instead opted for a post-race burger and beer with Laura & co., who had arrived at the finish just in time to see me take the final turn into Stinson Beach.

Even after the race I had no idea whether I had made the top 750. I asked someone nearby and found out that my time was about 1:06. It was slower than I had been hoping for but I had also massively underestimated how much of a factor the congestion on the course would be. I found out later that the fastest time from my section was a 58:40, and I felt a bit better that I was only about 8 minutes off that pace.

As it turned out, I didn’t have too much to worry about – I finished 625th overall, including the 562 Invitational runners who all had between 27 – 52 minutes of a head start on my group. Based on time, I was #196 of the 1,327 finishers. The main goal was to qualify for the invitational next year. I’m hoping that being in the Invitational section will help make things a little less congested, and that having one under my belt will help in knocking some time off of this year’s result. I’ll still be starting in the back of the pack with the Scratch group, though – in approximately 625th place. It’s a two year race.

Right now that race is the only one on my calendar – dipsea.org has already begun the countdown to June 10, 2012. Between the marathon in April and this race it’s been about two months that I’ve had some event upcoming on the race calendar, so I’ll most likely be calling that a wrap for the season and taking some recovery time.

Things are really starting to pick up at Cake Health. We have an enthusiastic group of beta users and we’re letting in more people every day from our ever-growing wait list. We’re adding support for more providers and plans, and we haven’t stopped building features either.

I saw a question on Quora recently that asked whether “weekends exist” when you’re working on a startup. It reminded me of the “punchcard” graph on GitHub that I had taken a snap shot of a while back. It’s an approximation for when I’ve been writing code for Cake Health. Here’s that same graph, updated (bigger circles = more code):

Big chunks at 9 and 10 pm. At least some code written during every hour from 9 am to 1 am except Saturday, when I get started at 11 am – it wasn’t a huge stretch to realize that this was because Saturday mornings are reserved for long runs. If this graph is any indication, my answer to that question on Quora is pretty clearly “no.”

It’s not so simple though. I’m the first to advocate for making sure that you’re staying healthy and not becoming a martyr for the sake of your company (or at the very least, not wearing it as a badge of honor). You’re going to have to sustain this over years, not months or weeks. But if you’re doing it right, you’re also working on something that you actually want to be thinking about for the majority of your waking hours. I’ve never once felt like I had to be pushing code, or woken up dreading what I was going to do that day.

Lastly, as a side note (I swear this wasn’t the original purpose of this post), we’re hiring – let me know if you would also like to never work a day in your life.

Result: 51:28 (12k)
Place: 461 (of 43,414)

This will be a short one because of everything else that’s going on these days.

I woke up a little before 5 am this morning to get the super-express Caltrain to the 2011 Bay to Breakers. I had missed the race last year, but it’s been on my to-do list since moving out west and the 100th running seemed as good a time as any.

While waiting for the start I witnessed the somewhat bizarre tradition wherein racers throw tortillas into the air, a la graduation mortarboards. The great- grandson of the winner of the first Bay to Breakers in 1912 rang the starting bell and we were off through the streets of SOMA.

Things got sorted out after about a mile and I settled into a pretty good pace. At one point I narrowly avoided a Centipede that was preparing to make a sharp left hand turn.

The 2.5 mile mark and the Hayes Street hill arrived quickly. I decided not to completely attack the hill and aim for a more even effort, which worked out pretty well.

The hill served to thin the pack out pretty well and we headed towards the panhandle. By this point I realized that at regular intervals, I would hear one of two things from the spectators – “Elvis!” and “Hey, she’s naked”. Two of the people in my immediate vicinity were 1) in a full-on Elvis costume, and 2) completely naked. The shouts continued for the rest of the race.

The weather, despite the forecast, turned out to be beautiful, which highlighted what was already a great course. With about a mile to go a view opened up of the Pacific Ocean (and, yes, the breakers), which gave a nice little energy boost to the finish. I’m still waiting on pictures but will post them once they’re up. This one is pretty good – here’s me and Elvis.

After finishing I made my way back along the course to watch Bay to Breakers part II: the party.

I was happy with the time but I’ve pretty much been training through this race, as the Dipsea next month is the real target. If I were to post the same time there as I ran today, it would fare very well – there’s just the matter of the vastly more challenging course to contend with.

Result: 8th place. 3:10:48.

After the Summit Rock Half Marathon in December, I found my weekend long runs remaining solidly in the 10+ mile range, so after a particularly good 13-miler, I decided that this would be a good time to push things up to a full marathon. After looking at a few race calendars, the Muir Woods Marathon was the most suitable choice in terms of both its timing and its challenges – plenty of elevation change and technical trails to be conquered.

Training progressed nicely until about five weeks out from the race, when I got back from about 20 miles and slowly realized that it was now extremely painful to bear any weight on my left foot. I was meeting some friends later that day and I vividly remember getting there early in order to 1) conceal my pronounced limp and 2) secure a table where I could elevate my foot.

My amateur diagnosis was a metatarsal stress fracture, and my amateur treatment plan was two days completely off. The upcoming two weeks, however, were pivotal ones in terms of building strength before tapering. The solution I came up with was to reduce mileage but make every mile count – namely, by running uphill. I am now very familiar with the Rhus Ridge trail at Rancho San Antonio Park.

Race week arrived, and suddenly the fact that the part of the race was located in a national park became extremely relevant because of the impending shutdown of the federal government. We heard from the organizers on Friday that we would have to go with “Plan B” – an altered course that stayed entirely within Mt. Tamalpais State Park.

The new course would start – and finish – at about 2,000 feet, turning the last 5 miles of the race into an 1,800 foot climb up from the valley floor. Thanks, federal government!

Undeterred, I went ahead with my pre-race preparations, namely, a Super Burrito from the taqueria in Mountain View. In semi-scientific testing while training, I determined that a this was the ideal meal the night before a long run. The movie selection was “North by Northwest,” starring Marissa Mayer lookalike Eva Marie Saint.

Cary Grant also looked a little bit like John Boehner, but I think that may have just been the availability heuristic kicking in.

Saturday dawned clear and very crisp: 37 F when I left the house. It had warmed up by the time I crossed the Golden Gate into Marin, and I arrived a little earlier than I had planned.

Dave, the race director, shepherded us into an amphitheater and delivered a booming pre-race briefing. He went over the course – technically courses, as the marathon, 25k and 7 mile all shared portions of the same trails – and emphasized the steep uphill climb in the final miles and told us that we should blame him for it. We were led in the singing of “America the Beautiful” and we were off – or were we?

Dave had said “Go!” – but we were all standing on the seating rungs of a huge amphitheater. The herd began ascending, not really sure if we should be running yet. At some point, a consensus was reached, and I started weaving my way up through the pack. Luckily the first part of the course provided good visibility and I was soon able to spot the leaders and count how many heads were in front of me. By the time things had shaken out, it was in the low teens.

We made the first turn onto the Coastal Trail and some of the more incredible scenery on the course – a vast panorama of the Pacific all the way down to San Francisco and Baker Beach. I continued to keep an eye on the leaders cutting across the open hillside and at one point spotted several deer bounding alongside some runners.

The Coastal Trail was fairly flat but very narrow – literally not more than two feet wide in most places. As we worked our way back to Pan Toll we started to see some stream crossings and we had to pay more and more attention to our footing. This trend accelerated as we started the plunge into Muir Woods.

I had done a training run along this trail the previous week and done a Picard Face Plant after catching a root at full speed (thanks Laura for that neologism). No similar incidents this time, as the extra prep work paid off and I found myself gaining ground through the most technical sections. I was in a loose group of four as we hit the valley floor, though I believe the other three were all doing the 25k and not the full marathon.

As we began the first climb, some very amused hikers were headed the other direction and were nice enough to be keeping count of the runners going up the hill. They informed me I was in 10th, though I assume they were including everyone they saw in that total, including any 25k runners.

The uphills really strung the racers out, and by the time I entered the aid station I couldn’t even see or hear anyone else. I slowed down to eat a clif bar and water with minimal success, but I wanted to make sure that I got something down. As I was ramping back up, I was passed rather emphatically by someone who either hadn’t stopped for aid or ramped up a lot faster. By this point the 25k course had already broken off toward the finish, so he was definitely a marathoner. I put it out of my mind and settled back in with the aid of a long downhill stretch.

I got into a good groove that took me all the way to the start of the final five mile climb. With about two miles left I was really starting to hurt and I gave up another spot to a guy wearing Salomons (always a bad sign for your cause if they’re wearing Salomons), but I was able to stick with him for a while. As I started to lose contact, I spotted my friend from earlier at the aid station, a few switchbacks ahead.

I was gaining on him, but slowly. With about a mile left we hit some brutally steep hills and I realized that by walking the steepest parts, I was actually gaining ground, and I moved ahead on the next flat. I think he realized this and started doing it too. So here we were, like two boxers, staggering up the final hills too exhausted to deliver a knockout punch to the other.

At some point I made a bet that I was close enough to the finish to run the rest without my legs giving out. It turned out to be a well placed one and I finished a “full” six seconds ahead of him.

I only had a rough idea of the results at the time, but found out later that I was 8th overall and finished in 3:10:48. It’s not an official time, but it does just barely sneak under the current qualifying time for the Boston Marathon. That was a nice little +1 to take home, though I doubt I would ever enter that race for a number of reasons – for one, it’s way too flat [Edit – it actually drops in elevation! What kind of a race is that?].

After recovering a bit, the Sand Dollar restaurant was offering a free beer for all runners. I’m noticing this as a trend – great races have beer at the finish.

I continued to recover for a while in town and then took my time heading back down the coast to take advantage of the beautiful day.

It’s somewhat tempting to find a nice, flat course later this year and really go after a fast time. I really get a lot of satisfaction out of the technical trail running, however – it’s just flat out fun (pun intended).

I have a recovery week planned this week before getting ramped back up again for Bay to Breakers and (hopefully) the Dipsea in June. The good news is that the hills on those courses are looking downright flat by comparison.

As I’m building out the user interface for Cake Health, I’m constantly running into a problem that many people face when building an application: You know exactly how it works and how it’s supposed to function, but a first-time user is almost certainly going to be lost.

It’s so easy to say “I’ll use a wizard” or “I’ll add some helper text, or a tool tip” – but this is almost always the wrong decision. If you find yourself having to explain the interface, you’ve already lost.

One of my favorite scenes from “2001: A Space Odyssey” features the main character poring over a long list of instructions for using a Zero Gravity Toilet:

His pensive expression is presumably caused by the race between Nature’s increasingly insistent call and his rate of reading comprehension.

Similar instructions can be seen in other shots. It puts a subtle but poignant addition on the film’s theme that technology has advanced to a “magical” level and yet has also rendered its creators totally dependent on its sometimes flawed design.

Moral of the story: if you start to see instructions on your interface, stop. Pretend that understanding it is the only thing preventing your users from relieving themselves in zero gravity.

For this week’s mini-hackathon I decided to do a bit of work on the landing page for andybrett.com. It’s now displaying post excerpts, images, updates, and bookmarks there; it’s kind of a stripped-down, minimalist tumblr, minus the hipster theme. Hopefully this will encourage me to make it a bit less text-heavy.

Good progress this week on the main project as well. The core classes of the code base are really becoming robust and well tested. I finally hooked up autotest + growl notifications, which can be downright Pavlovian in their ability to make you want to get your test suite back to green.

Here’s the github punchcard for the project. Sunday/Monday and Thursday are big commit days; this makes intuitive sense as I usually find myself thinking about things over weekends and during the middle of the week, and then implementing after that, hence the concentration on Monday afternoons. Kind of neat.

I recently implemented three new features on this site that I’m pretty happy with. The first is the ability to store bookmarks, independently of any services that might be subject to “sunsetting”. I had been using Google Reader for this purpose, and soon I’ll create a similar bookmarklet to make it even easier for me bookmark a page without leaving it.

I’ve also fired up the excellent acts-as-taggable-on gem to let me add tags to all bookmarks, photos, posts, and updates. I’m mainly using this right now to keep some items private versus public, but I have some ideas for where I’d like to extend it.

I’m using the “public” tag (more precisely, the lack of a “public” tag) on posts created using the third new feature: a daily reminder email (a la Oh Life) that gets sent with cron and ActionMailer. The response gets parsed and creates a post that then gets tagged accordingly. Not too shabby.

Building out these little features is a lot easier than what I’ve been working on for the yet-to-be-released main project, but it’s nice to take an hour every once in a while to hack away on something and see instant results, most often with Girl Talk on in the background. It’s really easy to know what’s going to be useful to the end user when he’s the same person that’s writing the code. For example, I’ve made 3-4 tweaks to the source as I was writing this post to make my life a bit easier in the future.

Building something that’s useful to other people, though, is even more challenging, and hopefully even more rewarding when they start using it. We’ve been building some really positive momentum in that direction, and it’s definitely started to feel “real” lately. The foundation is starting to solidify and the first few attempts to build and extend upon it have gone pretty smoothly. Hopefully that continues to be the case.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the other day I looked back at the git logs and realized that the weekend that I actually started coding on the project was the same weekend that I last had a full, clean shave:

It was a coincidence, really.

Or: It’s actually sunny today, you just have to get up to about 3,000 feet.

In the past six weeks or so my long runs on the weekends have been hovering around 8-10 miles, so when I saw the date for the Summit Rock Half Marathon I figured it was time for a challenge. A challenge is definitely what I got:

I enjoy trail running more than road racing, and this course did not disappoint. Comprised mostly of single track trails, it was in remarkably good shape despite the regular rain in the area the previous week. Race morning arrived overcast and 55 degrees with some bits of light fog blurring the view down the trail into the redwoods. Perfect running weather.

The gun went off and it was immediately clear who was going to cross the line first. Within 100 yards he had opened up a noticeable gap on the rest of the field and we didn’t see him again until he passed us on the way back, on his way to a 10-minute win. He’s not even in this picture:

Behind him, though, a fluid pack began the 1,300' initial climb. The pace was measured as everyone was fully aware that at the top of that hill, a 10 mile trek remained. The ‘lead’ changed hands multiple times; I held it for a while, through the 2-mile mark, but at each switchback I could see the pack churning its way up the trail. I regularly forced myself to slow down, which proved to be a wise decision.

A welcome stretch of flat terrain greeted us at the 3-mile mark, as well as some views to the east. By this point they sun had come out, but I realized that it wasn’t really a matter of the sun coming out but rather the trail picking up enough elevation to get above the cloud cover, as the valley was still blanketed in gray.

It was around here that I began trading places with a super-friendly Australian woman, as well as the “Vibram guys,” as I had internally dubbed the two runners who were sticking close together and who were both wearing Vibram Five Fingers. The constant undulations and variety of the trail meant that there was a lot of passing and catching as runners' different strengths were emphasized.

A long, gradual downhill before the turnaround provided an opportunity to stretch out the legs but also a reminder that we would have to gain all of this back on the way home. After that climb, though, there would only be about three downhill miles left, and so on the way back I tackled the hill in earnest. I still felt okay at the top and starting really flooring it once gravity was in my favor again. We were back under the cloud cover again and there was now heavy fog mixing in with the redwoods, which seemed to accentuate the already-strong smell of the forest. I don’t know that I’ve ever flown past a 10-mile marker in such high spirits.

The strategy worked, but barely. At around 12 miles the course flattened out and suddenly even level ground was a challenge. The half mile from about 12.3 to 12.8 felt like the longest of the race, and I started desperately trying to remember landmarks from the opening mile. This picture is from that stretch. I am not a happy camper.

One landmark, a 100-yard stretch of grassy trail, had unfortunately turned to slop under the tread of a few hundred racers, making for some slow and painful going. Shortly after that, however, I could hear the finish – at that point I knew I was going to make it in.

In the finish area I managed to somehow accomplish my next goal, which was to not vom (inverse of “nom”) all over one of the volunteers or other racers. For a while it was equally uncomfortable to sit down or stand up, so I alternated between the two while doing my best to approximate a glucose drip using the sugar-water du jour. These guys also helped matters:

By the time I had recovered enough to care, the results had been posted and I found out that I had taken 10th in the men’s race (about what I estimated) and 2nd in the 25-29 age bracket (that one I didn’t bother trying to estimate, it’s impossible to guess most runners' ages, especially during a race).

A big thanks to Brazen Racing for putting on a great event. They did a superb job allocating resources – a minimal amount of people on a clearly marked course, and massive amounts of food afterwards. After doing this one I have a renewed desire to do the Dipsea next year – here’s hoping I get a slot.

Maintaining focus while working independently can be a daunting task. I’m slowly but surely ramping up my ability to be fully disciplined and focused on one thing at a time, for extended periods of time.

This advice from Caterina Fake has been invaluable. I have been unlearning the habit of constantly checking my email, and it’s probably the one thing that’s had the single greatest impact on my ability to focus. If you look closely you’ll notice that while you’re only checking email once every three hours during the day, you should “send anytime.” This is key – but how can you do that?

Like most people I know, I use the web client for Gmail, so in order to send an email you have to go to Gmail and at the very least you get a brief glimpse of your inbox. For me, that brief glimpse is enough to start consuming brain cycles. There are a number of Chrome extensions and little helper programs that supposedly let you send without seeing your inbox, but I’ve found the easiest thing is to just bookmark this link:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs;=1&tf;=1

Easy enough. Hopefully this saves someone some time.

As I mentioned a while ago, I eventually would like all the content I put online to “live” on this domain as its permanent home. This includes images, so I’m happy to report that after a bit of tinkering with Paperclip, I’m now set up to do just that with images.

It’s extremely bare bones right now, but it’s functional, and I think it’s better to ship the code and start using it rather than wait until it’s perfect (thanks Matt).

You can check out the (rather sparse) collection so far – I’ll likely be doing a mass import soon with what I currently have on Picasa.

I’ve mostly been trying to stay away from this whole TSA debacle, but the whole thing is just such a perfect shitstorm that it’s been hard to ignore. There’s obviously a lot being said, so I won’t repeat the arguments about what a joke the whole thing is. There is one point that’s been missed, however, or at least I haven’t found it noted anywhere. I don’t know if I would call it “lying,” but the TSA is at the very least bending the truth about the support they enjoy from the majority of Americans on the new scanners.

In an attempt to make it sound like the backlash is coming from a very vocal, very small minority, they are citing a CBS News poll that says 80% of Americans support the new scanners. One problem: the poll was taken starting on November 7th, well before the real backlash started. Below I’ve marked up a graph of the percent share that the #TSA hashtag has had on Twitter:

It’s not just Twitter, either. Search volume for TSA has tripled since November 14th after being flat up until that point.

The worst offense is actually the headline on the TSA’s homepage, which they are flashing across the top, breaking news style: “Poll: Most OK with TSA full-body scanners (USAToday.com)”

I’m not sure who would consider a poll from January to be worthy of a headline now.

Maybe the TSA does get this whole “internet” thing after all. They’ve realized that most people won’t actually bother to click through, or take the 30 seconds to think critically about the headline. It’s all about the sound bite. Even if it’s bunk.

Okay. Back to work.

As the title indicates, the following is an attempt to do a bit of reflection on the past 16 months that I’ve been working at TechCrunch as a developer. It started out as an exercise just for me to clear my head so I can start my next project fresh, but I decided to publish it because I think at least a couple people might be interested in the experience.

Headed West

Last May I got an email from a friend about an opportunity that he thought I might be interested in. TechCrunch was looking for a hacker to work on CrunchBase, their Ruby on Rails application that tracks (almost) everything that happens in the technology world in a structured format. I was pretty happy where I was, working for RecycleBank in New York City, but I had recently come to the conclusion that I wanted to move to Silicon Valley, and the timing seemed right for a few reasons.

After a couple of phone calls with Henry and Heather, I had the go-ahead to book a flight to SFO for an interview at the TechCrunch office in Palo Alto. At this point I decided that was good enough and put in my notice with RecycleBank. Edit: looking at the dates on the emails (always a fun exercise), it looks like I actually gave notice before even being contacted about the job at TechCrunch. Funny how the mind revises history.

The interview went well and I took the weekend to think about things while visiting some people in San Francisco and checking out the city. I vividly remember getting a phone call from Mike while walking along a trail in the Presidio – I stayed exactly in the same spot while we talked for fear of AT&T dropping the call (I honestly don’t know how it went through in the first place).

At the time, I wasn’t really aware of the place that TechCrunch had in the startup ecosystem. I was clearly aware that it existed, given that I linked to them in a post I wrote, but I probably couldn’t have told you who Michael Arrington was as opposed to the other writers.

Trial By Fire

I took the offer, and things started quickly as I dove into the code for CrunchBase. When I started, there was one other developer and between the two of us we were, ostensibly anyway, responsible for CrunchBase. We also had a part-time “strategic consultant” on special projects. However, it quickly became apparent that other priorities would take precedence over all of these. TechCrunch itself was having outages on a fairly regular basis, resulting in lost page views and therefore lost revenue. I hadn’t written anything non- trivial in PHP nor worked with WordPress at all before. To boot, I hadn’t done a ton of server administration, much less on machines serving up hundreds of thousands of pages a day. We put a number of short-term fixes in, but, after a particularly bad outage in August we began the migration to a new hosting provider who would provide a more managed hosting solution and take the lowest-level operations problems off our plate.

For a time it worked pretty well, and the outages became far less frequent. I even started to have time to devote to CrunchBase again, and started shipping some code. It was around this time when I remember having a conversation with Mike where I told him that we were “pretty close” to having the network of blogs “running on autopilot” – and he tried (not very hard) to contain his laughter. Looking back I realize that he was right to have that reaction. Even if the mission- critical stuff was taken care of, there would always be more projects, more requests, and smaller bugs to squash. Running the network would always need at least one person dedicated solely to that task, even if the server operations had been outsourced.

Actually shipping code on CrunchBase felt really good though, to the point where I would do that to relax during my “spare” time. The two hats were quite different, and I wound up separating them as a result. I would often get into the routine of waking up around 9, putting out fires and dealing with network requests until 3 or 4, and then taking a nap for an hour. After waking up with a clear head, I would work on CrunchBase until about 2 or 3. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For the most part, though, my schedule was completely irregular. On a lot of days I would wake up to a fire drill (or just a full inbox) and work from home. Before I knew it, it was 3 or 4 pm and I would head to the office just to see other humans. Or I would finally get going on something at the office late at night when things were actually quiet and walk home through some pretty empty streets early in the morning. For any given one-hour chunk of the day/night, there has almost certainly been a day where I either went to, or came home from, the office at that hour. It helped that I could walk from my apartment to the office in about 10 minutes.

At the start of 2010 things were looking pretty good as far as CrunchBase was concerned. We had increased the pace of edits by opening up account signup and had what looked like some pretty interesting tools for visualizing and analyzing the data in the works.

Army Of One

However, the amount of time I had to devote to CrunchBase had diminished severely. I was now the only developer working at TechCrunch, but I was undeterred and convinced myself that we would be fine, at least until we could hire more people.

But starting with the launch of the Nexus One on January 5th, the site stability issues were back with a vengeance. The 4,000+ comments that flooded the giveaway post in two hours brought the site to a crawl and then brought it down completely, and a number of smaller outages followed soon after. Within a few weeks we decided to move to the fully managed hosting of WordPress VIP. Shortly before the transition was complete, though, and about 48 hours before the iPad was released, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in one of the network sites to deface and redirect techcrunch.com. If they were able to do the same thing during the peak traffic for the Apple event, it would be, to say the least, very bad. We found out later that they fully intended to do so. I was awake and in the office for quite a few hours in a row leading up to that event. We did not see another defacement, and the event passed with only some minor performance issues (it was, after all, the launch of the iPad).

The move to WordPress VIP once again solved the core downtime and security issues, this time for good, thanks to Barry, Raanan, Matt, and the rest of the team at Automattic. I was no longer getting woken up, and could actually look forward to major tech events without fear of the site crashing. Problems further up the stack remained, however, and I was still splitting time between handling requests and fires on the network and actually building product with CrunchBase. Fortunately by the late spring we had doubled the size of the dev team by hiring Ben, a Rails developer who was making some great strides in the latter department. We also started moving towards a much-needed front-end facelift for TC proper and restructuring of the content across the network.

Almost

Over the summer I realized that I did not in fact want to be at TechCrunch forever. Part of it was the realization that it had now been a full year of “almost” being free of emergencies, and “almost” being out of the woods and able to really dig in and write great software. Even the site redesign was getting bogged down in non-technical issues. I could tell that even though staying at TechCrunch would let me do some pretty awesome things, it was always going to demand this overhead of putting out fires, and to put it bluntly, dealing with shit. Technical janitorial duties, if you will.[1]

Now as Good Will Hunting will tell you, there’s nothing wrong with being a janitor, and just like Will’s position at MIT, being a janitor in the right place can really have its perks. Working at TechCrunch is not just another job – it’s a full-immersion, full-contact introduction to the world of startups and technology. It was perfect for where I was at the time and I would do it over again in a second.

That overhead wears on you, though, particularly when you’re surrounded by people who are shedding that overhead and you’re seeing them passionately do exactly what they believe needs to be done in this world, even at the expense of a guaranteed paycheck. Generally speaking, the larger the company, the more you’re dealing with “overhead' and the less you’re doing what you actually need to be doing. Startups that don’t do what they need to be doing die.

There’s a deeper current running through that phrase – “what you need to be doing.” It’s rooted in something that Steve Jobs noted in his 2005 commencement address. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” Life’s too short to spend it doing anything except what you’re passionate about.

Pirates

For all of those reasons, and many more, I’ve taken the leap. I have no illusions about the fact that there will still be shit to deal with, but being in control of what shit you deal with makes a world of difference. Mike’s recent post rang very true. I would add one thing. Entrepreneurs do get utility out of the sense of adventure and the freedom from a boss that comes with starting a company. But they also get a tremendous amount from the sheer act of creation, out of making something tangible where before there was nothing.

So that’s what I’ll be doing – creating something. The details of what I’ll be working on are still in flux, so I won’t get into them here. I might try to force myself into taking some time to completely unplug, but I honestly don’t think that will last very long.

Lastly, I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for Mike and Heather. Heather has shouldered an incredible amount of the responsibility for making sure that TechCrunch is alive and well and what it is today, in the face of all obstacles. She is, simply put, an inspiration. Mike, for all of his infamously rough edges, is truly a good person. It would be impossible to write some of the posts that he does without fundamentally understanding entrepreneurs and this community. He thrives on conflict and I’ve certainly had my share of those with him. But it’s all rooted in his remarkable drive to create things, and I respect him for that.

And, of course, for the dogs.

[1] I picked this term out of the Hacker News thread on the AOL acquisition of TechCrunch. Many of the insights into the technical scene at TechCrunch on that thread were surprisingly accurate, especially given that none of the commenters actually worked there (though some are more accurate than others)

Thanks to Paul Carr and Ben Schaechter for reading drafts of this.

TL;DR:

Guess who wrote the TechCrunch post based on the headline with Crunchhunch.

Long version:

A few weeks ago I was out to drinks with some friends when the topic of TechCrunch headlines came up. I asserted that I could guess with “greater than 90% accuracy” who wrote a post based solely on the headline. It gets even easier if you can see the image used in the excerpt.

Fast-forward to last Saturday, when I found myself with an unusual amount of free time (funny, that). Having been reminded of the idea earlier that week after Paul’s suggested domain name turned out to be available, I decided to see what I could put together. A few hours later, and voila. Since then I’ve made a few tweaks, courtesy of the creative department (Paul), in the form of some copy edits and some additions to what appears after a right/wrong answer.

Just a fun little app. Enjoy. If you’re a designer and the site makes you want to gouge your eyes out with your photoshop license, get in touch :–)

If you’re an astute follower of this space, or a site crawler, you may have noticed some changes here recently. When I migrated the site last year from Blogger to a custom-built Rails app, one of the main motivations was that I would have complete control over the entire stack, and, perhaps more importantly, I would be able to use the app as a sort of sandbox to work with awesome tools that I might not otherwise have a reason to use.

Hence the rewrite. Rails 3 is out, and I wanted to give it a whirl. I’m happy to say that this site is now built on Rails 3.0.1. The routes and gem files really struck me as yet another example of the innovation that continues in that community. I had also not had the chance to fully dive into HAML and SASS until now. It took me all of about ten minutes to be fully sold on that new syntax. I firmly believe that the actual way that code looks on the screen has a profound effect on code quality, and damn does HAML/SASS look good.

Lastly, I made the source code for the site available about a month ago. There is something psychological about this that really gives you an extra push to make sure that what you’re putting out there is not only of good quality, but useful enough that someone might actually want to clone it.

Where This Is Going

In the interest of keeping the project road map open as well, here’s what I’d really like to do to make it useful. Eventually, I want all of the content I put online to live on andybrett.com, and live there permanently. I want the content types (photos, updates, posts, shares, etc.) to be handled and displayed differently because they are fundamentally different. I want the content to be social, meaning that I can tag people in the photos or copy people on an update, and that the two people who might want them can get push notifications for new content. And as a bonus, I want the ability to have some content that isn’t completely public. There isn’t a single service right now that comes close to having this functionality.

The desire for something like this is in part a reaction to a broader trend. Right now we are provided, free of charge, with well-developed tools for creating and sharing things online. It seems like there’s a new one every week or so. These tools are all “free,” and in many cases they provide real, tangible value on the upside, especially when they get large enough, like Facebook. But there is also a real downside in that we lose control over that content and the business decisions surrounding its use.

Eventually, for me, the downside outweighed the upside. I would have been happy to pay for a version of Facebook that didn’t have any display ads and didn’t otherwise sell my information, and I would likely still be using it. Such an offering is impractical, though, because it would have drawn attention to this tradeoff that we make in exchange for the “free” service. Not to mention caused quite a bit of hand- wringing and “won’t somebody please think of the children.”

Not all services follow the Facebook model. Pandora One is a beautifully simple transaction that uses actual currency. Three dollars a month. Unlimited streaming music based on your tastes. No advertising. No data mining that isn’t completely anonymous (Chris Dixon has some good points on the subtleties there).

Twitter currently provides value in that it is the only practical way for people to subscribe to a new message medium: short-form one-to-many. In theory you don’t need Twitter for this, and in the future you may not, but right now you do. I still think the tradeoff makes sense – they make it extremely easy to create and broadcast messages (not to mention consume them) and haven’t yet ratcheted up the negatives. They are staying much closer to being a protocol than, say, Facebook, and have made that effort since the beginning.

But Twitter isn’t without its own downsides. Long-time or frequent users of the service will notice that there is a limit to how many of their own messages they can retrieve, even through the API. I’m sure this content is sitting on a server somewhere, but the point is that Twitter is under no obligation to give it back to you, just like Facebook was under no obligation to provide the export tool that they recently announced. In this case the appropriate solution – which Twitter thankfully makes easy – is to publish the messages yourself and syndicate them to Twitter. For a while I used status.net but I’m planning to completely roll my own solution on this site soon.

And if huge, established services like Facebook and Twitter aren’t obligated to give you back your data, what about the smorgasboard of smaller services that seem to crop up every day? Anyone out there planning to export their photos from ‘twitgoo’ anytime soon? Instagram is a huge hit now, but is it going to be around in three years?

What I take away is that in addition to better tools, we also need better attitudes. Don’t just spew your lifestream into the ether. Focus on Quality. Produce (or at least publish) less content, but make it good! They say the difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur shows you every photo she takes, while the professional only shows you the cream of the crop. Hopefully this post is a step in the right direction.

Astute readers may have noticed a common thread between some of the apps that have been appearing on TechCrunch this past week – namely, that they were built in 48 hours. It’s not just a coincidence: those apps were just two out of nearly 200 that were built in 48 hours this past weekend during the fourth edition of the Rails Rumble coding competition.

Each team of up to four people was given a server from Linode and a private GitHub repository. From there, it entirely up to them what to create. There were 180 teams that made it through to the end of the coding session. From there, an expert panel of judges pared it down to 24 finalists who are currently being put through their paces by anyone who wants to head over and check them out. You can vote on your favorites and help determine who will win the grand prize – the Rails Rumble Championship Belt. No, really, it’s a belt. The winners also get a Chuck Norris autographed photo – though they might prefer a Ron Conway autographed term sheet instead. It might not be that far off – 38 of the projects from last year are still up and running, and some have even become pretty polished applications with revenue streams.

I’ve picked out five of my favorites below, but it was extremely hard to choose just five. Go check all of them out and vote for the winner before tomorrow at midnight.

WarSquare: This app reminds me of what FourSquare used to be like – an all out war for mayorships – but taken one giant step further. Instead of turning the city into your playground, WarSquare turns it into your Risk board. You’re given tanks, infantry, and other armaments that you can use to do battle and “capture” venues, and then reinforce them against defenders. For instance, I just took over Twitter HQ (looks like Dick Costolo’s reign turned out to be short-lived):

Beer Checkin: Keep track of what you’ve been drinking. Pulling data and images in from FreeBase, this app keeps your beer “collection” in a central location and lets you share it with other beer connoisseurs. It’s currently in the lead as well – wonder what the team will do to celebrate if they win?

GitWrite: Pitched as “blogging for nerds,” GitWrite delivers a simple, clean interface for managing an entire blog from within a git repository (if you don’t know what ‘git’ is, you’re not the target audience). This app managed to split the vote between people who think it’s amazing and people who are asking why anyone would want to blog like this. I’m definitely in the former camp – this thing is awesome. Who cares if there are lots of other ways to do something already. It’s okay to build something just because it’s cool. When I set this up for myself, it was immediately obvious what to do – the timestamps serve as evidence to that point. Plus they have robots as mascots.

Go vs Go: Fans of the addictive board game Go will want to check this one out – it’s a really easy way to play online against either a computer or your friends. It’s remarkably polished and responsive for something that was put together in 48 hours – kudos to the team for what must have been some well-disciplined hacking.

Commendable Kids: Geared towards parents and teachers, Commendable Kids brings the gold star into the digital age. Kids earn badges for just about anything that they might need motivation for – babysitting, cleaning their room, doing well on a test, etc. Another app that really has some nice graphic design:

Yesterday I spent the day at Startup School, an annual event hosted by Y Combinator. The agenda was packed to the brim with talks from some of the most well-known founders in Silicon Valley.

By the end of the day, I had the familiar sensation of thinking back to something that had happened early on in the day and feeling like it took place weeks ago. This typically happens on days when I’ve been mentally engaged for long periods of time – so it’s a Good Thing and a testament to the quality of the speakers.

I found myself scribbling down some notes, which by the end of the day had spread fully into any available margin on the agenda:

Rather than do a simple recap (there are a few of those already, and I recommend checking out the video clips of each talk as well), I thought I’d do my best to highlight some connections and themes that I noticed across speakers, as well as to dive into some of the topics and add some color.

Ideas versus Execution

Andy Bechtolsheim started things off and noted in a few different ways that big companies spend tons of time and money on the later stages of product development, but not as much on the idea stage. I jotted down a more colorful version of one of his points as “Throwing money at problems is LAZY. You should be throwing brains at them.”

Startups tend to focus much more on this idea stage, which is good, but it’s not limited to startups. Apple is an example of a company who spends comparatively little on R&D; but understands that you need to throw brains at this early stage in order to succeed.

Two speakers later inadvertently dished out some related pragmatic advice. We heard from Linus Pauling (via Tom Preston-Warner) that “the best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.” Reid Hoffman shared his view that startups are essentially a set of hypotheses, and that you should start testing those hypotheses as soon as possible.

The Evolution of Venture Capital

Paul Graham talked about how the VC industry is changing and the “battle” between VCs and super angels. My big takeaway was that it’s actually best to focus less on these terms and more on what is actually changing about the deals. Deals are no longer easily categorized into “angel”, “Series A”, etc. as VCs are taking the best of both of the categories in order to be the most appealing to founders (awesome).

Other highlights:

• “It might seem like these guys are just stupid, but, well, these guys aren’t stupid, so I thought more about this”. I would do well to repeat this to myself whenever I come to that conclusion about someone or something.

• We may see something with VC’s similar to what we’re seeing in journalism, where your personal brand is what matters most. I think this is very much already here.

• Funding rounds are no longer all or nothing. You know exactly where you are at any point, with no chance of something big falling apart at the last second (PG related some horror stories of this happening frequently in the past). This reminds me of the difference between so-called “agile” software development and more traditional, waterfall approaches.

• The question of board seats/control came up here, but I thought Ron Conway addressed it even better later when he said he had “accomplished 10 times more in a 10 minute meeting just now with Dalton than I would have over the last 4 board meetings. Board seats are a waste of time.”

No Permission Necessary

Tom Preston Warner: We didn’t need permission to build something cool. This reminded me of Lawrence Lessig’s point about the birth of Facebook and not needing permission there, either. There are some deeper philosophical underpinnings here about not needing the approval of any central authority (ahem, App Store) either.

No Guarantees, Either

Andrew Mason showed an image of the Groupon lobby, in which the Forbes cover featuring Groupon is surrounded by eight other magazine covers with the likes of MySpace, Napster, and AOL. This rang true with a few of the anecdotes in the most recent book I read – “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” by Sarah Lacy. A meteoric rise and tons of press does not guarantee anything.

The Commencement Address

Ron Conway gave a throughly inspiring talk that is better experienced than described.

Just Add Zuck

After starting with a brilliant takedown of The Social Network (it was actually pretty diplomatic in comparison to some of Ron Conway’s remarks), Mark Zuckerberg took off zigzagging through a wide range of topics. Some highlights:

• Regarding Hollywood’s need to create Facebook’s fictional raison d'être (a girl dumping him): “some people just can’t wrap their head around building something just for the sake of building something cool.”

• Right now Facebook is really just looking to break even. More revenue means more spending. Why turn a profit? Right now they want to just plow any revenue right back into the company.

• The first summer he came to Silicon Valley was just to “hang out” – there was no master plan. This reminded me of something that Reid Hoffman mentioned in his talk: that physically being in the Valley shows you how fast you should be moving. It’s very unsurprising that once they were here, they never went back. I think Mark recognizes this – he noted that the Valley is like “instant startup mix” since everything a startup needs is readily available. One attendee quipped: “Just add Zuck.”

• Coming soon for Facebook: Build once, experience anywhere. Social applications for all platforms.

• Facebook as the McKinsey of entrepreneurship. Similar to McKinsey’s program where you come to the company for two years and then go on to do incredible things elsewhere because of what you learn in those two years, you can come to Facebook and learn a ton about entrepreneurship and then go on to apply those skills. Exhibit A: Adam D'Angelo, former CTO of Facebook who founded Quora.

Birds of a Feather

As with just about any gathering, interacting with other like-minded attendees proved to be the ultimate highlight. You couldn’t throw your name tag without hitting ten interesting people to talk to. The social norms at both the reception and Startup School itself were noticeably different than anything else I’ve ever experienced. People have absolutely no fear of just walking up to a group of strangers, introducing themselves, and talking candidly about their ideas. If Y Combinator did nothing else but create this extraordinary environment once a year, that alone would be a contribution that outweighed many of the better known entities in the startup ecosystem.

This post was originally published on TechCrunch

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories – that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files – while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code snippets contained in a single file, like this one, for example.

GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup.

The profit comes from the paid plans that GitHub offers for those developers and companies who want to host their repositories privately. GitHub offers essentially unlimited hosting to anyone who is willing to make their code open source, but charges based on the number of private repositories and the number of contributors for other projects. This profitability has spurred the launch of a number of new features of late, such as Organizations, which offers more advanced workflow tools for projects with multiple contributors and varying permissions, and support for fifteen new languages.

GitHub is a key part of the software development ecosystem, hosting a number of notable code bases, including Ruby on Rails, the jQuery JavaScript library and the Linux kernel. Git, the distributed version control software that GitHub is based on, was in fact built by Linus Torvalds, the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, and the source code for Git itself is also hosted on GitHub. TechCrunch hosts a number of repositories using the service, including some that are open source, and Twitter has recently been publishing the source for several of their gems and other code, using GitHub to do so. Ruby and JavaScript are the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19 and 17 percent of the hosted code respectively, but there are currently projects in over 50 languages on the service: everything from Visual Basic to Go.

I’ve been using the HTC EVO for a full two months now, after a trial period of a few weeks where I was essentially carrying both the EVO and an iPhone. Quite simply I don’t see myself going back. The iPhone 4 announcement, while exciting, didn’t induce one iota of regret, and as others have noted, the acceleration (literally) of the Android platform implies that for the near future I’ll be sticking with Android devices. Many posts in this genre are accused of comparing the iPhone to what Android could be or might be in the future, which is unfair; however, I’m confident in saying that I’m happier on the the current Android platform than I was on the iPhone.

Battery

This is the most frequently discussed aspect of the EVO and of multi-tasking enabled devices generally. Here’s the thing: These devices formerly known as phones have morphed into miniature laptops. The EVO sports twice as much RAM as the laptop that I bought before starting college; it’s processor has about 80% of the speed of a coworker’s current machine. I’ve adopted a “plug it in when you can” mentality with the EVO, and I think it makes a lot of sense – you wouldn’t bring your laptop to the office, start using it, and only plug it in when the battery was completely drained.

Along the same lines, usage plays a large part in battery life (not surprisingly). Just like a laptop with the brightness cranked up and Flash video maxing out the processor, the EVO is going to lose charge well ahead of even the officially stated battery life, if you’re using a lot of battery- intensive apps. I haven’t attempted this, but my guess is that if you fired up all sorts of background apps, particularly ones that stream data (Pandora) or constantly track your exact location (navigator/maps), you could probably drain the battery in about 2-3 hours. In normal usage, however, you can probably go up to 24 hours on a single charge. Here’s what I’ve done to maximize the battery life:

• Turn off 4G (if you’re not in an area with coverage). Constantly looking for 4G and not finding it is what kills it here. If you’re solidly in a 4G area it’s fine to have on.
• Turn off Sense. You can’t completely turn it “off” but you can have the home screen use the stock Android launcher.
• Wifi: I have it turned off since most of the time I’m perfectly happy with the Sprint network speeds. Similar to 4G, if you’re somewhere that has a reliable signal, turning this on won’t hurt you much if at all, but if it’s constantly looking for the network anyway just turn it off.

If you really get down low and are trying to conserve, there are plenty of other tricks such as dimming the screen, turning off account sync, and killing all background tasks that you’re free to do in order to help matters.

Tethering and Cost

Part of the reason I’ve gotten into the habit of plugging in the phone whenever I have the chance is that I’m most often charging it through my laptop in order to use the tethering capabilities. I actually don’t have an internet connection at home and just use the EVO to get online. The speed is perfectly good; about 90% of the time I can happily stream Hulu and Netflix without issue, and otherwise buffering for a few minutes (max) will do the trick.

All of this usage means that I’m consuming a fair amount of bandwidth each month. Here’s the total so far for this cycle:

If I extrapolate out, I’ll be at 15+ GB by the end. Under AT&T;’s new data plans, I would be charged:

• $40 for the minimum voice plan
• $20 for tethering
• $25 for “Data Pro”: buys the first 2GB of data
• $10/GB after that = $130
• Total: $215/month. Compared to $70/month on Sprint.

Duh.

Android + Kindle beats iPad

Yes, the Android Kindle app isn’t quite as fully featured as its iOS cousin, at least not yet. But the huge screen on the EVO is plenty big enough to the point where reading books on it is perfectly reasonable. The portability makes it possible to read anywhere without any prior planning – with the iPad you have to make a decision to bring it along because you think you might want to read a chapter or two. I also like to read before I go to sleep, and reading on your back — impractical with the iPad and with most books — works very well with the EVO.

It’s Fun to Futz

As I’ve pointed out before, it’s fun to futz. Not only with settings, wallpapers, and behaviors – but with apps. I had “Hello World” up and running on the Android SDK and – more importantly – installed on my own phone in a matter of minutes. It was also a snap to download the actual source of the WordPress Android app and compile and install it myself. Google is attempting to make this even easier with App Inventor though I’ll most likely be skipping that route – it’s a little too Visual Basic-esque for my tastes.

Downsides

As you can imagine by now, I don’t have a ton. One thing I was a bit disappointed with was that it appears that data and voice don’t work at the same time – if you’re talking on the phone, you can’t say “hold on” and look up the nearest restaurant. I only rarely find myself in that situation though, so it’s not a huge issue. The other is the keyboard. It takes a bit of getting used to; at first I would say that I was at about 80% of my iPhone speed but that has since improved, probably up to about 90%. The screenshots I’ve seen of the Android 2.2 keyboard lead me to believe that with that release the speed will improve further. Part of the issue with the 2.1 layout is that there’s just so much stuff trying to fit into a small space that it’s difficult at times to know whether it’s best to bring up the secondary character set or try to find the character you’re looking for in the shift keys above the current one.

A few weeks ago I remarked on some of the differences I’d noticed between the people I was connected with on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz. Generally speaking, I’d noticed that people on Buzz tend to be quite a bit smarter/wonkier than your average joe – “the people who actually did the reading [in class] and got really into it.”

I now have some anecdotal evidence to back this up. Behold this excellent Charlie Rose interview of John Doerr from TechCrunch Disrupt, specifically the share counts on each network:

Charlie Rose is extremely talented at painting broad intellectual strokes and pulling out larger patterns, which is exactly what happened. Stimulating, but not really link bait – the retweet count is actually on the low side for a TechCrunch post. But the Buzz count is through the roof – higher than Facebook and nearly half of the retweet count.

Compare this with Exhibit B:

The post is much more controversial, but it’s not really hitting any intellectual high notes. Barely any buzz at all, while the twittersphere is up in arms in contrast.

Yes – we’re only talking about two data points. But my gut tells me there’s something here.

We’re done here. Five years after signing up for an account, I am quitting The Facebook. When I first filled in the profile information about my favorite books, movies, and music, it never occurred to me that this information would one day be made publicly accessible (without any option to make it private), not to mention fed in bulk to advertisers on the site. I’m pretty sure that five years ago, that was not the intention of the site’s creators, but today it very clearly is. The service has changed, as have the costs and benefits associated with participating, and that calculus no longer makes sense for me.

That constant change has been perhaps the strongest reason for deleting my account. I don’t mean the much-aligned aesthetic changes, but rather the changes to what it means to have an account, to be in a network, to list an interest, to connect to another site. I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, but these changes are being made with Facebook’s interests and bottom line in mind, each one more and more clearly aimed at that end. This is certainly their prerogative, but it’s no longer something I wish to be a part of. The changes are not making the world or the web a better place.

Yesterday at Google I/O, Dewitt Clinton said he would far rather have a federated network of a million tiny social networks rather than one with a billion users. Others on the panel drew parallels to the days when you could only email someone if they were “in your network” – in the literal sense. The implication, of course, was that Google is moving forward with the tools that will make cross-network communication as seamless as emailing between Gmail and Hotmail is today. Given that these are Google employees talking, he statement obviously has to be taken with a grain of salt. However, the argument is still strong and I do see this happening in the next five years.

Later tonight I’ll be deleting – not deactivating – my Facebook account. There’s a bit of irony, of course, in that I’m posting this one last item to Facebook, but it seemed like a good way to maybe encourage some others to take the same step. I’m taking one thing with me before I go, though – my content. Abandoning five years' worth of content was probably the biggest thing that kept me from doing this sooner. Luckily Facebook’s Graph API makes it very easy to grab everything that you’ve put on the site in a structured way, and I’ll be doing this shortly. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with it yet, but I do know that I want it to live some place where I’m in control.

Five years ago I had a job writing for Grist, an environmental news blog. I just came across this old post from way back then, when ‘blog’ was still a four letter word. It’s actually in response to an article by a colleague at the time. While the original topic was about the environment, I took things in a decidedly more philosophical direction, and the content is still relevant because of that decision.

I would throw this analogy out there. In the hypothetical, completely ideal world of globalization where people and nations do only what they do best (hold a comparative advantage for), everything gets divided up and specialized.

But in the real world, people and nations like to do some things themselves. On the national level, defense is one example. Producing a pretty fair amount of food and energy domestically is another. On the personal level, there are tasks and jobs that people just prefer to do, or at least be able to do, themselves, even if they aren’t that great at them. For example, most people like to have a certain degree of culinary expertise, usually extending beyond ramen, if only slightly.

I extend this analogy to the “thinkin'” world. There is absolutely no way for everyone to do all their thinking for themselves. They must learn which sources to trust, as you say. But there’s a certain level to which you have to be able to do your own thinking, a level which is different for everybody.

For a timely example: I am no legal expert, and probably would have never even seen the NARAL ad opposing SCOTUS nominee John Roberts had it not been for the online firestorm that resulted. Annenberg Political FactCheck is an organization that I have come to trust because of its work on other issues, so when they say something like “the ad is false,” that tends to convince me. It also means that on this issue, I did not dig through the legal briefs myself in order to be convinced that the NARAL ad was misleading.

This is also (warning: cliche ahead) the power of blogs: when there’s a new blog created every second, there’s going to be someone who is willing and able to blog in-depth about almost any particular topic there is, to become the expert on it. Does it really make sense for me to immerse myself and investigate fully a topic like land trusts if someone I trust, like Pat Burns, has already been doing a superb job for some time and will thus be much more efficient than me at analyzing news when it breaks?

The irrationality of some heuristics certainly throws a monkey wrench into this whole thing. The “price implies quality” bias can be a devastating argument against free markets with the exception of commodities markets, since it scuttles the assumption that people act rationally/have good information, since the information they are inferring is incorrect if it’s based solely on the “price implies quality” idea.

The idea of “perceived consensus” is also an interesting one, and one which contains elements of framing in it. If something starts to be referred to with words implying consensus, it won’t be too long before there is a perceived consensus. Of course, if the basic facts of the matter are incorrect, it won’t get anywhere, mostly because of blogs and organizations like FactCheck, but simply having the facts right isn’t enough. One potential problem then is the fact that those who are adept at getting the facts out and investigating might not the ones who are best at framing the issue and getting the message out.

Originally published on TechCrunch

Ruby on Rails is well-known for being a powerful tool to help developers quickly turn ideas into working code. Rails Rumble harnesses that power and drives it to its only logical conclusion: a 48-hour programming competition pitting more than 200 teams of coders against one another for some pretty serious prizes. Each team of up to four people is provided with exactly the same thing: a virtual private server from Linode, a private repository on GitHub, and a really tight deadline. BYO caffeine.

The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it’s time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that’s not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you’re a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night’s party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush.

Even the teams that don’t come away with any material prizes will have gained some very valuable feedback on whether their idea might have any legs in the long run. Fifteen of the entries from the 2008 competition are still active and available to users, including all of the prize-winning applications.

So head on over and check out the applications, leave some feedback, and vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday, at 5 pm PST. You’ll be deciding a grand prize that includes a netbook for each team member and a bottle of 12 year Pappy Van Winkle Whiskey (from GitHub – I knew those guys were classy), not to mention year-long bragging rights.

I’m a big advocate of the “Inbox Zero” philosophy of email management. I don’t have the merit badge, and I don’t think it needs to be quite so extensive, but I still like to keep things pristine.

My RSS reader is another story; I rarely clear it out entirely. When I go through the items (once per day), I’ll mark a few choice ones as unread for further perusal and keep plugging through the chaff. Once I start to hit things that I’ve seen before, it means I’ve finished the boring part.

There’s usually somewhere between 10 and 25 items, spread over a week or so, that remain marked as unread. These savory morsels get read, re-read, shared, emailed, or (theoretically) turned into fodder for blog posts. The best ones are approved by the Senate and become a law! get starred and saved for all time.

I prefer this system over the inbox zero method because it allows the ideas in the posts to seep a little deeper into the gray matter. It’s a fundamentally different mindset that you’re in; often if someone emails me an article I’ll use this handy bookmarklet to get it into Reader and then move it to a separate folder.

I still haven’t decided what to do with the new features the Reader team keeps rolling out, though.

Yesterday I subscribed to Pandora’s new ad-free service, “Pandora One.” The tipping point came when ‘Graceland’ was followed by an audio ad for Terminator: The College Years.

The service is, in my opinion, perfectly priced, at $36/year. I suspect that this figure was chosen (as opposed to, say, $40/year) because it prompts you to do the mental math and figure out – for yourself – that it’s only 10 cents/day. Brings you back to the days of pledge week on NPR, doesn’t it? And speaking of which, how great is technology that it can exempt subscribers from requests for money or ads? I remember that being my main mental counter- argument to Bob Edwards – if I send you money, I still have to listen to you solicit us for two weeks every few months!

Anyway, the service is great. No ads of any kind, really great audio quality, plus a sleek desktop app with built in growl-type notifications of what song is playing. I’m also hoping that, since it’s a stand-alone app, this means that I’ll be able to map the keyboard controls for iTunes to control Pandora instead. If anyone has already figured out how to do this, please let me know!

Tonido is a company after my own heart. They address many of the concerns that I have about the way that people publish and share their own content online. The short version of that post is that you should be able to publish content in one place, that you control, and easily choose how to share each individual item with your friends (as well as which friends to share it with).

Tonido takes a big step in that direction. By providing a low-cost, energy- sipping, user-friendly home server, they make it easy for people to take their data out of the cloud but not lose any of the associated benefits.

The other development in this arena that has me excited is Facebook’s decision to further open their API and make it even easier for third party sites to seamlessly integrate a user’s network into his experience on the site.

In other words, it allows me to do something like host my own photos on my own server (or Tonido if I so choose), and have any social activity (new albums, comments, tags) be posted back to Facebook just as if it had happened there in the first place. This is a huge shift (though one that Facebook has slowly been inching towards for a while now).

But we’re not there yet, which is the most exciting part. I could easily see Tonido, as much as I like them, getting overtaken by a fast follower who offers a more appealing combination of applications or even more seamless integration with social networks.

Maybe I’ll even give it a shot — after all, I have 10 spare hours a week.

With sincerest apologies to Meredith Wilson

Well, either you’re closing your eyes

To a situation you do not wish to acknowledge,

Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster

Indicated by the presence of the social web in your community.

Well, you got trouble, my friend, right here,

I say, trouble right here in River City.

Why sure I’m a Facebook user,

Certainly mighty proud I say

I’m always mighty proud to say it.

I consider that the hours I spend

With a mouse in my hand are golden.

Help you cultivate a network

And a personal brand and a social graph.

Ever take and try to find

An iron-clad link from yourself

To a Fortune 500 boss, in two connections or less?

But just as I say,

It takes judgement, brains, and maturity,

To score in this online game,

I say that any twit!

Can take and tweet a text from their pocket

And they call that Twitter!

The first big step on the road

To the depths of the Singularity –

I say, first, informational texts from a plant,

Then tweets from a baby!

And the next thing ya know,

Your son is bloggin' for money on a MacBook Pro.

And listening to some big out-of-town VC

Here to tell about somethin' called YouTube

Not a wholesome television show, no!

But a clip that you upload right there yourself!

Like to see some stuck-up Charlie-boy

Chompin' on his brother’s thumb? Make your Rick “roil,” well, I should say.

Now friends, let me tell you what I mean.

You got one, two, three, four, five, six connections in the graph.

Connections that mark the difference,

Between a gentlemen and a bum,

With a capital “B” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Cuil!

And all week long your River City

Youth’ll be twitterin' away,

I say your young men’ll be twitterin'!

Twitterin' away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!

Get the pix up on Flickr

Never mind gettin' blog feeds pulled

Or the software patched or the corners rounded.

Never mind sendin' any emails

‘Til your parents are caught with their inbox empty

On a Saturday night and that’s trouble,

Oh, yes you got lots and lots of trouble.

I’m thinkin' of the kids up on MySpace,

Shirt-tail young ones, peekin' at the lolcats

Website after school, you got trouble, folks!

Right here in River City.

Trouble with a capital “T” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Cuil!

Now, I know all you folks are the right kind of parents.

I’m gonna be perfectly frank.

Would you like to know what kind of conversation goes

On while they’re surfin' around that web?

They’re tryin' out Bebo, tryin' out Friendster,

Tryin' out Tumblr logs like Stumblin fiends!

And tweetin' all about

How they’re gonna delete all those photos on TwitPic from last night.

They leave the Ping hall, headin' for Netflix Watch Instantly,

CollegeHumor men and CuteOverload women!

And Pandora! Streaming music, that’ll grab your son, your daughter

With the arms of a jungle animal’s instinct!

Mass-participation!

Friends, the social brain is the devil’s playground!

Chorus:

Trouble, oh we got trouble,

Right here in River City!

With a capital “T”, that rhymes with “C”, and that stands for Cuil,

We’ve surely got trouble!

Right here in River City,

Right here!

Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones offline after school!

Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble…

Harold:

Mothers of River City!

Heed that warning before it’s too late!

Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption!

The minute your son leaves the house,

Does he resize his urls below the character limit?

Is there an overuse strain on his texting finger?

A porn cookie hidden in his browser history?

Is he starting to memorize facts from chucknorris.com?

Are certain words creeping into his conversation?

Words like “LOL”

And “icanhascheezburger?”

Well, if so my friends…

You got trouble,

Right here in River City!

With a capital “T” and that rhymes with “C” and that stands for Cuil.

We’ve surely got trouble!

Right here in River City!

Remember the meme, OK GO, and the series of tubes!

Oh, we’ve got trouble.

We’re in terrible, terrible trouble.

That site with the social network graph is a devil’s tool!

Oh yes we got trouble, trouble, we got big big trouble!

With a “T”!

Gotta rhyme it with “C”!

And that stands for Cuil!

That stands for Cuil!

Alas, poor Blogspot. I knew him well. That’s right – it’s time for bigger and better things, this time in the form of a shiny new (hand-crafted!) blogging platform.

More details are in the inaugural post. This final post here is mainly to say that if you are one of the brave souls reading this via RSS, please update your feed – and thanks for reading!

Welcome to the latest incarnation of Citing the Text, most recently hosted by Blogger. It’s been a long time since the days of Xanga; hopefully this latest version is a little easier on the eyes.

I recently wrote about how I decided to overhaul this site’s architecture. This new blogging platform is the first of many features that the redesign will enable.

In the spirit of getting things out there in front of real users and iterating in response to feedback, this blog is being released in a deliberately unfinished state. It is certainly not a design masterpiece by any stretch, but it’s something to build on.

Lastly, a million thanks to Ryan Bates and his always useful and inspirational Railscasts.

“Freedom to Tinker” is not only an apt title for a great blog; it is also an overarching theme that spans many of the thoughts that have been occupying my spare brain cycles over the past few weeks.

Freedom to tinker can be a wonderful, empowering thing. It’s at the root of every invention, every new business, every mashup (no matter how puerile). It’s at the root of the open source software that I’ve come to embrace more and more recently.

In other words: it’s fun to futz. But not only is it fun – it’s also important and valuable. Robert Pirsig paints a protagonist in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance who stands in stark contrast to the other characters in the book because of his ability and, more importantly, desire to understand every last ball bearing in his trusted machine. The trait is timelessly invaluable.

Letting the end users of a product tinker with it has a downside though. Facebook took a huge amount of flak from its users for their most recent changes, but as TechCrunch points out, they should probably just ignore it. “When you listen to your users, you get vanilla, feature creep, boring.” The Getting Real crowd would have similar things to say (about user feedback, not necessarily the UI design).

However, the tinkerers are probably not the ones sitting around whining about the new design. They are the ones building applications to interact with Facebook’s API, or building the next Facebook entirely. It’s important to engage these tinkerers and power users, for entirely selfish reasons. When you listen to your users, you get vanilla. When you listen to your power users, you get the App Store. Not only that, but you get an entire App Store’s-worth of developers who are interacting with your product instead of building a competitor.

Web browsers are another example. In theory, it’s great and completely reasonable to say that people should be able to tweak their browsers, choose different browsers based on their personal preferences and needs, write their own if they are so inclined and able. But it makes life very hard if you’re publishing content and have to worry about how it’s going to show up in 18 different settings. Even if you agree that you should make sure it’s minimally functional everywhere, it’s a giant hassle and takes a lot of the, well, fun out of content creation.

Sometimes it is a legitimate design decision to force a browser choice (or other choices) on the user – for example, the iPhone only allowing Safari. In some ways, it can be just as fun to have an implementation hidden and unavailable to you as a user – this is at the root (and is unfortunately a tradeoff) of the “it just works” approach.

Of course, mentioning browser wars leads directly to the idea of standardization. I won’t delve too deeply into that topic here, but I did have a particular quote stick with me from Stephen D. Crocker’s op- ed in the Times a couple weeks ago, on the early days of the Internet:

Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

So when is it best to practice strict enforcement of standards, versus letting users play around and “roll their own”? Or is that even the right dichotomy?

Editor’s Note: I am continually amazed by and grateful for the thousands of internet denizens who write about their problems and the solutions they have found. This post is one feeble attempt at contributing to that collective knowledge; hopefully many more will follow.

I decided to rework my home page as a simple Rails application, mainly to take advantage of the way Rails handles views/templates. Is this overkill? Probably. Are there a ton of other tools I could have used? Definitely. It’s a classic case of holding a hammer and taking a look around for nails. But I digress. I also decided to set up Enterprise Ruby/Rails, Passenger, and Git, all of which are totally overkill at the moment but will hopefully lay a groundwork for things to come. Again, I digress.

The first thing we’ll need to do, assuming we’re working with a fresh install of Debian (5.0 – Lenny), is install libraries for Ruby, Apache, and mySQL.

apt-get install build-essential apache2 ruby1.8 zlib1g-dev libssl-dev mysql- server mysql-common libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off apache2-prefork- dev libreadline5-dev

(I have no idea what a couple of those items are: I was prompted to install them later on in the process, so if you install them up front it will go more smoothly)

Get the most recent version of Ruby Enterprise Edition.

For me it was:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/51100/ruby- enterprise-1.8.6-20090201.tar.gz

Note the Enterprise Ruby version in red, we’ll need it later.

The Ruby Enterprise installer looks in /usr/bin/ruby for Ruby, which doesn’t currently exist; link up your install in ruby1.8 by doing

ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/bin/ruby

Now, using your own version of Enterprise Ruby from above in place of the

…:

Unarchive:

tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-########.tar.gz

Run the installer:

./ruby-enterprise-########/installer

Follow the prompts. Should be self-explanatory.

Next, remove the old link to ruby1.8:

rm /usr/bin/ruby

and link up to the enterprise ruby goodness:

ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/rake /usr/bin/rake

ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem

ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/rails /usr/bin/rails

ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby

Now install Passenger:

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

As you may have noticed, the Enterprise Ruby install directs you to add some lines to Apache’s config file. If you’re using Apache2, open that up with

vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

and add the following, replacing the gem version in red (2.1.2 at this time) with your own gem version.

LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/lib/ruby/gems/ 1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.2/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

PassengerRoot /opt/ruby- enterprise-1.8.6-########/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.2

PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-########/bin/ruby

That’s it for Enterprise Ruby and Passenger! Next up, Git:

aptitude install build-essential gettext zlib1g-dev

Get Git – right now it’s:

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.2.1.tar.gz

Unarchive; configure; make; install!

tar xvzf git-1.6.2.1.tar.gz

cd git-1.6.2.1

./configure

make

make install

You’ll likely want to set up Virtual Hosts on Apache as well; this gets a little bit specific for the purposes of this how-to so I’ll leave it at RTFM :–)

1. Create “Maximo Park Radio” on Pandora

2. Happen upon the song “We Don’t Think, We Know,” by Maritime

3. Catch the allusion in the lyrics: “All the days are just packed / And we’re asleep in the trees”

4. See if anyone else caught it — nope! (Well, they didn’t write about it anyway)

5. Write about it

6. Smile :–)

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, recently spoke at the 2009 TED conference. His talk was an inspirational glimpse into the life of someone who has clearly never stopped exploring and always done what was intriguing to him — it just so happens that his road wound up providing a tremendous benefit to society.

Some highlights of the talk were Tim’s sheer joy at the notion that he had made an addition to a collaboratively edited map; a new Three. Word. Mantra (Raw Data Now); and a shoutout to a previous outstanding TED talk on the power of making data useful and universally accessible (sounds familiar).

Tim also put up a cartoon that made fun of the fact that all of these different social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) exist in silos, incapable of fully interacting with one another.

This is certainly a problem that the major sites are aware of and are working to fix; Facebook, for example, allows me to import a feed of my activity on Picasa (Google’s photo storage/sharing service).

But it doesn’t quite cut it. Photos are a perfect example of my point. Let’s say I have an album, and I want to keep it on Picasa (or Flickr, or wherever) instead of Facebook because I don’t want the picture size reduced (or any other reason). However, I still want to tag my friends in that album, and if people make comments, I want those to appear below the pictures.

The current solution is broken — when’s the last time you clicked through on something like “John has uploaded new photos to Flickr” and left a comment on his picture, after finding it tagged with all of John’s Facebook friends?

The workaround hints at the solution. I have several photo albums that have “_facebook” appended to their names. These albums are duplicates or near- duplicates of albums that are stored elsewhere but that I wanted to share and tag using my Facebook network.

Such duplication of data should leave anyone who works with databases (myself included) banging your head against your keyboard right about now. ao;idsgja;sodijadosifj. That’s better.

We need to “normalize,” in database-speak (read: stop duplicating), the content that we put on the web. After all, it’s our content! Right now we’re jumping through all sorts of hoops because Facebook has our network but Flickr has more storage and better picture quality. Why should that matter? Why should we have to make this compromise?

Instead of duplicating and distributing content, it needs to be in one single place, accessible to those applications and sites that you give permission to. You provide the information; Facebook provides the social network, the display formatting, and the ability to easily allow others to make additions (e.g. comments) to that information. Your. Raw. Data.

It’s REST meets the social web.

Tim talked about how data is all about relationships (bing!). The most challenging part of all this is making it simple to manage these relationships. Let’s move away from photos for a second and talk about another piece of data that we would ideally keep in one place rather than duplicating it across multiple sites: basic profile information.

Things like name and email address are straightforward. Any site that is interacting with Your Raw Data probably requires one of these as their primary way of distinguishing an account. But what about something like “favorite books”? Or “professional experience”? I want the first to be on Facebook but not LinkedIn, and vice versa for the second. Or what if I want to have “homebrewing” on my list of interests on Facebook but replace it with “golf” on that same list on LinkedIn?

Connections are perhaps an even better example, and one that’s gotten more attention – I want to be friends with my co-worker on LinkedIn, but not so much on Facebook. How to manage those different relationships?

And to cite a far more useful example — Tim talked about databases for pharmaceutical companies and researchers, trying to find all the proteins with certain characteristics. One lab might do an experiment and determine that a protein does have the ability to do XY and Z – does that mean the connection should be made? What if another lab produces a conflicting result? Who decides whether it’s a valid connection?

While there are a ton of people working on the problem right now, none of the results I’ve used take the approach that I’ve outlined here. Many aggregate from the current smorgasbord, which is certainly the easiest thing to do, but not, in the long run, the most useful. If anyone is jumping out of their chair right now and interested in a little side project, let me know :–)

I’m going to cut this off here but hopefully will have more to write about on the topic soon. In the ultimate irony, these thoughts will be posted to my blog and then imported as a “note” to Facebook. Any comments written in either location will not be displayed in the other one.

I’ve had the same question work its way to the conscious part of my brain a few times lately, so I thought I’d share it here.

The question arises when I’m traveling through the underbelly of New York City on the subway at upwards of 30 mph (I know the speed because each subway train actually contains a speedometer, visible to any passenger riding in the exact middle of the train, right next to the conductor). I’ll be riding a local train as the express goes by (or sometimes, somewhat counter-intuitively, I’ll be on the express train as the local goes by…) when I happen to look out the window and see some of the passengers on the other train.

If the trains are moving at similar speeds this can actually be quite a fun little experience; for some reason, people are not as quick to avert their eyes from someone else who happens to be peering out the window.

Something about this brief connection with a fellow traveler makes me think: I am physically just a few feet from this person, and yet if I wanted to actually speak to him, or shake his hand, it could be nearly impossible. What if I happened to see someone I recognized? In a small percentage of cases, the local and the express are both stopping at the next station, so it might be as easy as walking across the platform.

But it could also be extremely difficult – what if, instead of two subway trains, you happened to be on a NJ Transit train moving side by side with an Acela leaving Penn Station, headed straight to Philadelphia?

So what’s the furthest you can be, in terms of effort, cost, time, and distance, from being able to shake someone’s hand, while still being just a few feet away?

Andy Brett, fashion visionary. A WSJ article on Wednesday highlighted an upcoming trend1 for the spring: bright, solid colors. A picture taken from the article:

And a picture taken from my apartment a few months ago:

1 I’m not really sure what the WSJ has to do with fashion trends, much less predicting upcoming fashion trends, but whatever.

On the day of my last post, the Dow closed at 11,516.92. I apologize for the amount of time that has passed; for the amount of “wealth” that has thus vaporized, I can offer no similar sentiment.

But that’s not the subject of this post. Much has happened since September 2, 2008, presidential elections and recessions aside. That’s right – this post is one of “those” posts. A navel-gazer. More diary entry than anything else, these posts are all too commonly spotted in the wild, often as the solitary entry in a defunct LiveJournal.

In December, I left my job at the Big Consulting Firm where I had been working since graduating in 2007. Once I realized that I would not be happy on the typical career path up that ladder, it was a quick exit. I was able to find another opportunity very quickly, and started on January 5th as a “Developer-Analyst” with RecycleBank. RecycleBank works with cities and private haulers to raise the recycling rates in the households that they service, by recording individuals' recycling habits and awarding points based on those habits. The points can then be redeemed for gift cards and other incentives. I’m working on the team that writes the software to process the data we receive from the trucks and allow people to receive their rewards.

I was (and still am) extremely excited about this opportunity, first and foremost because the company is a startup. “Startup” is a bit of a loose term, and RecycleBank is by no means a small company that is just starting to try out its model – we’re already in 15 states and serve over 200,000 households. However, RecycleBank still has what I would consider to be the distinguishing characteristics of a startup, or the ones that are meaningful to me. For one: rapid growth, with an eye on even more growth. For another: dynamic teams, high energy, and flexible work processes. In other words, the specifics of how the company is going to achieve its goals are still very much up in the air, but everyone is going like gangbusters to try out different ideas. It’s the kind of environment that makes me excited to go to work, which is never a bad thing considering how many of your waking hours you spend there.

These are all aspects of the company that I expected or assumed prior to joining, based on my interviews, research, and just knowing that it was a startup. To date its all been true to form, and I’m very pleased about that.

The other major draw was the technology that RecycleBank is using to build its applications. It’s been almost two years since I started working with Ruby on Rails, the framework that we’re using for the bulk of our work. It’s great to be in a position where we’re using it for something a bit more “mainstream” or “enterprise” than many Rails projects out there. Rails is still the new kid on the block, with a lot to prove to those who don’t think it will ever be a useful tool for “serious” business. Hopefully the work we’re doing with it can eventually be evidence to the contrary.

Pictures

More pictures

Video

The 2008 Coast Raid was without a doubt the hardest thing, physically, I’ve ever done. Four days of mountain biking, kayaking, intense trekking, orienteering, and ropes courses made for some serious “type two” fun. For those unfamiliar, “type two” fun refers to activities that are not actually that fun while you’re engaged in them, but in retrospect, are really fun to look back on. The Coast Raid is a prime example.

But let me back up. Before the race even started, our team undertook an adventure in itself in the form of the journey to Blanc-Sablon. After arriving in Deer Lake, Newfoundland and retrieving our rental bicycles from Cycle Solutions in Corner Brook, we loaded up the van to the brim. However, one thing was missing – our fourth teammate, who was arriving on a later flight. Somehow we managed to squeeze another body and her associated gear into the van.

Somewhere along the way (maybe it was over dinner and a Black Horse at the local dinner haunt in Deer Lake) we decided the best way to catch the ferry the next morning (four hours away in St. Barbe) was to drive straight to St. Barbe immediately, through the night.

There were three amazing things about the trip that ensued. The first was the fact that the main road to get there, Route 430, is also known as the “Viking Trail,” presumably because of Newfoundland’s past history of Vikings. There are few things that pick you up at 1 in the morning like seeing a sign for the Viking Trail and realizing that you are on said Trail. The second was the pit stop amid some very misty weather at two in the morning along a particularly desolate stretch of Newfoundland’s coast. The pit stop was made possible by amazing item number three, which was that in the course of the four hour drive, we saw exactly six other cars on the road. Newfoundland is remote.

After a fairly restless night, we boarded the ferry for Blanc-Sablon. Stormy conditions took over about halfway across the channel, and worsened on the short drive from the ferry dock in Blanc-Sablon to the school that would serve as the race check-in headquarters. The irony was palpable as we made several mad dashes to transport all of our gear from the car to the school’s gym without getting it wet, knowing full well that if tomorrow’s weather turned out like today’s, our efforts would have been in vain.

By the afternoon, however, the sun had come out, so we seized the opportunity to take a quick ride to test out the bikes and take in the beautiful scenery we’d be experiencing over the next four days.

As the other teams came in, we began to slowly gather bits of information about the race.

• We’d be staying in a different town each night, most of the time based at the local school, and could expect to be racing for about 11-14 hours each day, including a night section.

• Most of the other teams at the race were professionals or sponsored in some capacity; and they all looked like they had done this before. Yikes.

• The majority of the water on the course was completely drinkable, without any purification (minus the sea water of course).

• The first event the next day was to be kayaking; we then paid close attention to the demos on how to properly inflate the kayaks.

After receiving our formal race briefing, the race maps, and our itinerary for day one (as well as a welcoming song – very Quebecois I’m told), we cooked a team dinner over our stove and got some stories from the school’s janitor about the town.

The next morning saw another early wake-up call to get on the “special” school bus that would take us to St. Paul for the start of the race, about a 90 minute ride from Blanc-Sablon.

The race organizers wisely decided to make the first kayak inflation off the clock, so after we arrived in St. Paul, we were able to take our time getting set up, chat with the other racers (and, unbeknownst to us at the time, the mayor of the town), pose in front of the media helicopter, and test out the water temperature (a balmy 9 degrees C).

After a few words from the organizers and a countdown in French, we were off! The first kayak leg went smoothly if slowly, and after a few miles to wake us up, we were hoisting the kayaks onto our shoulders for the first portage. I got about three steps here before twisting an ankle in the bog (this will become a theme) and going down hard on a rock, opening a nice gash in my knee. We pressed on, however, and after a few more carries and another long paddle, we arrived at the first transition of the day, ready to drop the kayaks and head overland to the first checkpoints.

We hit the first incline hard and had actually pulled ahead of the other four- person mixed team by the first P.C. (Point de cheque, or checkpoint). We would trade leads with them throughout the rest of the day. It was quickly apparent that the trekking portions would be over some really tough terrain. Just about any path off the ridge line meant that with every foot plant you sunk down to mid-ankle at least. We stayed high as much as possible, but much of the time it simply wasn’t to be. These stretches were punctuated by swaths of undergrowth: thick, spiny, and unforgiving, ranging in height from mid-thigh to over our heads. These can really slow a team down.

This first day would also see our introduction to “coastering,” which is similar to trekking except it’s done along the coast, sometimes over some very sharp rocks and other times mostly in the water, if that happens to be the fastest way across a bay. It can get you pretty wet and sometimes turns into full-on swimming. In very cold water.

Speaking of new sports, here’s another one we did on the first day. It doesn’t have a cool name like “coastering,” but it’s pretty fun, and in some cases much faster than the alternative of riding your bike over crappy trail or on the beach. It’s called riding your bike through a lake.

At the race briefing the previous night, we had been informed that each day would have an “extreme” section with additional checkpoints. In order to attempt it, you had to finish the normal course before a certain time, to prevent teams from racing well into the night. Teams not attempting the section would be assessed a four-hour penalty. The race organizers made the mistake of saying that they only expected one quarter of the teams to qualify for the section, which meant that everyone was gunning for it from the get-go.

So when we finished the regular course with an hour and a half to spare on the cutoff, the choice was clear. We headed back to our kayaks and out to an island to hunt down the three “extreme” checkpoints. We wound up getting back pretty late, well after dark – but we had done it! The Extreme Coast Raid — Day One. Of four. Uh oh.

We ate dinner and plotted the checkpoints for the next day in haste in order to get as much sleep as possible for day two.

Day two was by far our toughest day. We had all done previous races of 12 hours, but nothing longer, so it was a new experience for all of us to get up the day after a really tough race and do another one. After a bike to our kayaks, we trekked our way around an island for the next four PCs. Our somewhat lagging energy was buoyed by a more relaxed pace and some stunning weather that served to accentuate the beautiful views we had already been experiencing.

We then kayaked back to the mainland to get a few more checkpoints and the Hike-A-Bike, wherein participants hike up a cliff with bikes in tow. It’s exactly as fun as it sounds.

Afterwards, however, we were rewarded mightily with a loooong downhill ride to the next transition: adventure swimming! The race officials informed us that we had a choice between actually swimming across the bay or trekking around it to get the last checkpoint of the day. Assessing the situation for less than five seconds told us that the trekking would clearly be the fastest route (especially after accounting for the time to don and remove wetsuits), but goshdarnit, we brought these wetsuits over a thousand miles just for this, and we were going to use them!

Upon departing the transition (and leaving some puzzled locals in our wake), one of us made the remark that after the bike ride back to town, dinner awaits us – after we cook it, that is. Turns out we were mistaken. The locals in St. Paul, like all the locals up and down the lower north shore, seemed to think that this race was the greatest thing since sliced bread. As a result, they cooked for us – not sliced bread, but fresh seafood! We were welcomed with a feast and some very friendly faces, as well as the realization that we were, in the words of Bon Jovi, halfway there.

Day three was the journey from St. Paul to Middle Bay, population 35. In between stood some gnarly hills on the bike, a 1 km kayak portage, and a circumnavigation of yet another island. The home cooking in St. Paul had really revived us though, and we were also treated to more spectacular views (including a whale rib) and some great coastering:

We managed to roll in to the finish right around the cutoff for the extreme section (a vast improvement over day 2). We were greeted with MORE home cooking and the news that, with a population of just 35, Middle Bay did not have a school to speak of, so some of the teams, including ourselves, would be spending the night in the local church.

The night was to be a short one, however, as the teams headed out at 10 pm for the night racing stage. This turned out to be a strong suit for us (somehow): we were 10th out of 19 teams here, our highest place in an individual stage.

After a short four hours of sleep, it was time to tackle the final day. Opening with a bike ride to the kayaks, we bid our inflatable friends adieu, but not without a tense fifteen seconds – I’ll just say that there’s nothing to get your heart rate up like the sound of an inflatable kayak deflating when you’re in the middle of the water and not really close to any shoreline.

After a long trek along the coast, were were back on the bikes to a Tyrolean pit stop:

After hopping back on the bikes, we started seeing signs for Blanc-Sablon again, but the wind off the ocean was becoming an increasingly angry nemesis. The first three bike PCs were inland, which offered a little respite, but the final two checkpoints of the race were directly on the coast and by this point the wind was absolutely howling. Someone said it was gusting to 60 kph, and I believe it – it was nearly impossible to ride in a straight line, even after we had secured the final PC and got back onto the gravel road back to town.

The excitement built quickly with our speed on the bikes as we progressed to smoother and smoother roads and the sounds of cow bells and cheering entered our periphery. The final 50 meters to the finish were uphill through a gravel playground, but we were determined not to walk our bikes through the chute. I continued my tradition of spectacular finishes by (accidentally) wiping out and diving across the line. There are several photos of this but I haven’t been able to get my hands on one. We did get a great team shot though, with our representative Canadian holding the American flag:

Almost immediately we were handed a 40 ounce bottle of Bud. I’m not sure what NASCAR is thinking with the milk thing — this is a far superior way to end a race.

From there the recovery began in earnest. Later on that evening we were awarded a “special” prize for being the team with the most smiles on their faces throughout the race, which came with some sweet hats and t-shirts from Endurance Aventure, “for people wilder than average.”

With a final time of 55 hours, 46 minutes and 11 seconds, I think we earned the description.

Tomorrow I will begin making my way to Blanc-Sablon, Canada, for the 2008 International Endurance Aventure, otherwise known as the Coast Raid. We’ve got a great team together for what should be a very exciting race.

The race organizers have informed us that the teams' progress will be monitored and posted online. Right now the site directs here, but right now it looks like last year’s teams are up there. There’s also a video feed that I’m assuming will be updated as the race progresses.

As Facebook-stalkers will have already noticed, I recently changed projects at work. Gone are the days of Amtrak’s train 2105, 6:50 am from Penn Station to Union Station; my commute to work is now just under a half-hour, door to door. The 20 minute ride on the 1-2-3 takes me downtown to the new gig, for the NYC Mayor’s Office, near City Hall. In addition to the shortened commute, some other perks and habits of my new routine:

• A great breakfast place, in Blue Spoon Coffee. They “import” H&H; Bagels from the Upper West side (and toast them too, a feature unavailable at the actual H&H;), so for $2.25 I get a bagel with cream cheese as well as eight cents left over to contribute to the tip jar poll of the day, or more if I feel strongly about the poll and wish to swing the outcome. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so simple and yet so effective at getting people (well, getting me, anyway) to come by each morning.

• Easy access to City Hall Park. A great place to take out lunch from one of the numerous buffets and delis nearby; my favorite spot might be over by the 4-5-6 subway entrance with the great view of the bridge. The office we’re working out of can be a bit cramped at times and short on meeting space, so we have held more than a couple of our less formal meetings out there.

• Speaking of the view, the view from the office is amazing, overlooking the park and with the Brooklyn Bridge and skyline in the distance. I have officially joined the legions of Verizion-building-haters.

• Farmer’s market on Fridays in the previously mentioned City Hall Park. Yum.

In other news, the RoR app for the volunteer project is moving along well, though it’s getting near crunch time. I will say that committing to give weekly State of the Application addresses, while burdensome at times, has been really helpful in keeping things on track (and also “agile,” but that’s for another post).

It’s also been a bit tough to focus on work items lately given the impending sense of doom excitement stemming from the fact that in a week I’ll be getting on a plane for the Coast Raid. Still a lot of last-minute details to figure out there, but I am very excited to get up there and start racing – or adventuring, as the case may be.

Remember: adventure, not race.

Let’s say you suddenly became completely isolated from the rest of the world, and decided, as your first task, to come up with a list of things that you would need to be happy and lead a good, meaningful, “productive” life. What’s on that list?

Of course, this is an unrealistic question – people derive satisfaction from the context that they are placed in and the things that they take from and contribute to society. It may be more useful to think about what characteristics a society needs to have in order for its members to be happy and lead meaningful lives.

In any case, the “isolation” that I’m trying to get at in the above scenario is not so much isolation from society as it is isolation from the elements of society that have a vested interest in convincing people that they “need” an item or a service in order to separate them from their money in its name – namely, marketing departments.

So what would we deem as “necessary” if marketing weren’t constantly running in the background of our lives?

It’s easy to vilify marketing and think of it as billboards and banner ads, designed to take advantage of the fact that many people are easily suggestible if the message is repeated enough. In a way, people have delegated, by default and without much conscious thought, much of their decision making when it comes to their spending to marketing departments, resulting in a kind of Darwinian battle where the most persuasive message — though not necessarily the most truthful or accurate one — wins.

On the other end of the spectrum, take sources of information, such as personal recommendations and word-of-mouth referrals, that might be considered as far from billboards and banner ads as one could get, in their degree of customization for their audience and their level of “authenticity.” These are still effectively “ads” for products — it just so happens that the products are good enough to sell themselves, and the company doesn’t directly pay for these endorsements. Have you ever seen an ad: “Google, for all your searching needs?” Of course not.

However, marketing departments have already figured out that a seemingly genuine, personal recommendation is far more likely to work than an impersonal ad that makes the user skeptical from the first claim. Marketers have probably have known for some time, though they lacked the tools (and, of course, the buzzwords like “astroturfing” and “viral marketing”) to act on it on a meaningful scale until recently.

It seems obvious to point out that viral marketing can be somewhat disingenuous at its root; after all, the originators are still trying to sell you a product. But I tend to be more impressed (and more likely to have a favorable impression of the brand) upon seeing clever, “viral” marketing that in the end reveals that it’s selling something as opposed to the kind of word-of- mouth marketing that, although it truly is genuine, has little to do with “truth?”

This is all heading back to the point that led me to create this post in the first place (I swear…). The inspiration for this was the bungled marketing of Vista (and, it seems, Microsoft products in general) that leads to the kind of blind Microsoft-hate that spreads by word of mouth and without regard to any form of “truth.”

I will first admit that, despite the fact that I have never used a machine running Vista for more than a few minutes, never tried to install any peripherals, never really explored the user interface that is so obviously bad because it’s new and different, I still find myself making negative, off-hand remarks to people about it. (“Oh, you got a new machine? Vista huh? Good luck.”)

And why? Solely because of the anti-hype that it’s gotten. I think what the Mojave Experiment (hat tip to Sam) shows, besides the fact that the issues with Vista are beneath the surface, is the rampant effects of anti-hype, much of which is generated by Microsoft’s direct competitors (I’m thinking of a fruit here). People get one message (Vista = Bad, or Microsoft = Bad) and allow it to completely color any shred of objective judgment they may have had.

I suppose the lesson I’m taking from this train of thought is a reinforcement of a lesson I heard a very long time ago in the context of Buddhism about taking a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking with you, no matter who the source is (in this case, no matter if it’s a banner ad or a buddy of yours). One of the teachings of Buddhism is that if you trust a lesson of the Buddha simply because it comes from the Buddha, you have missed one of the most important lessons of all, to find the noble path (and “truth”) by always asking questions and never taking anything as true unless you have personally vetted it yourself.

That’s it for the attempt at an intellectually stimulating post; up next, some navel-gazing in the form of a life update.

I’ve decided to try out adding this blog’s feed to my Facebook Notes application, in hopes that 1) I will post more regularly, and 2) Said posts will be more widely viewed.

So if you are reading this in note form, I will try not to get all up in your grill (i.e. your newsfeed) with lots of pointless posts. If you prefer to keep tabs in a more direct, non-facebook-assisted manner, the blog itself, with its beautiful custom design, can be found here.

Yesterday I raced in the Nautica NYC Triathlon. It was my second triathlon, and my second reminder that these things are really all about the bike.

My day started slightly after the scheduled start time for our wave, 7:03 am, on a barge near 98th Street in the Hudson River. The main goal here was to get down to the exit at 81st Street, 1500 meters away, without swallowing too much of the Hudson en route. Speed was actually the third priority; second was to avoid getting my goggles kicked/punched off my face, as I made the decision to do the swim with my contacts in.

The starting horn went off with very little warning; I was actually facing the opposite direction and talking to someone at the time. Not that it mattered – the first 50 meters were devoted solely to survival as the pack thinned out. Once I got some open water to work with I settled into a nice rhythm, stopping every once in a while to gauge distance and release some built up air pressure. A little over 20 minutes later, I staggered up the pier with all three goals accomplished, even holding my own in terms of speed. About 200 meters from the end I had felt a pinch on my upper lip. I didn’t notice any blood so I forgot about it and kept going.

Following the barefoot run to T1, I learned what had actually happened to my lip, as several other athletes were asking each other about jellyfish stings while everyone loaded up their bikes. As it turns out, the thing to fear in the Hudson is in fact the living creatures, and not the non-living garbage – all in all the swim was surprisingly pleasant, just a little salty.

Next came the bike, which, as I mentioned, serves as the bulk of any triathlon. This always frustrates me a bit since it’s definitely not my strong suit. Overall it was an enjoyable ride up the Henry Hudson – flying through the EZ-Pass lanes provided some comic relief as well. I managed to drop a chain shortly after coming out of transition and was more cautious switching gears on my rental bike after that. The rest of the ride was incident-free and I actually coasted on many a downhill section.

After a brief pit stop to drop off the bike and take care of some other business, it was time to head up a very well-placed hill out of Riverside Park to get to 72nd Street. Running across 72nd to the Park was probably the highlight of the race. Tons of fans, lots of energy, and familiar surroundings.

By mile 2 of the run, however, it was apparent to me that I was going to need to take on some energy in order to not be crawling the last half mile, so I mixed myself a little Accelerade/water cocktail (1:1) at a hydration station and took it down while walking. It seemed to sit pretty well and did the trick for the time being.

In the end, however, it turned out that my stomach was really not very happy at all about this mixture and decided that it was going to rebel approximately 25 meters from the finish line. Still waiting on the video of this, but the photographers did a pretty good job of capturing me donating my breakfast to the Central Park pavement.

I think one of the spotters at the finish noticed this because as soon as I crossed the line I had about 18 people surround me and cover me with ice packs and cold towels – I never thought it was possible to see steam coming off my body on a day like yesterday, but it happened. Before I even really realized what was going on, they had me laying down on a cot and were ready to stick me with an IV saline drip before I let them know that I was in fact okay and would just like some cold water to drink, please.

The main lesson I’ll be taking from this race is that if I’m going to keep doing athletic events that last longer than a few hours I need to come up with a better strategy for taking on energy in the later stages of the race without having my stomach do flips. This means finding a product (gels seemed to work pretty well at the Savage this year) and actually practicing with it on long training days. Oh – and actually doing the long training days will probably help as well.

Someone just walked by my desk and I overheard them say “out of pocket.” A few months ago I heard this phrase in its new context, and have since deduced that people are now using it NOT to describe when they are paying for something themselves, but rather to indicate that they are or will be “unreachable,” specifically if they will be in transit.

This drives me absolutely crazy. It doesn’t even make any sense. My best guess is that it is somehow derived from the fact that people can now be in contact and reachable by phone, text, AND email etc. on their smartphones in their ‘pockets’. But then, if someone says that they are “out of pocket,” it should be an indication that they are reachable, but just not at their desk. The other (completely unfounded and not probable) explanation is that it is a twisted version of “out of socket,” in the sense that if your phone is turned off and you are unreachable, you are not “plugged in” to the network.

Either way, whenever someone says it, I want to punch them in the face and/or gargle Drano. I also tend to make the assumption that the speaker is someone who cuts up buzzword bingo sheets and uses them as flashcards for vocabulary.

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My dad bought me a copy of Office Space when I was 17, soon after I got a job where I was dealing with a “boss” on a regular basis (caddying didn’t really fit that requirement and is about as far from the Office Space environment as a job can be). The movie has become ingrained in pop culture since it came out in 1999. In one scene, Tom, an employee at the “fictional” software engineering company, is being quizzed by consultants (Bob & Bob), who have been hired to analyze the company’s business processes and make them more efficient (in other words, fire the chaff).

Let’s watch, or follow along below (my emphasis added).

Bob Slydell: So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?

Tom: That, that’s right.

Bob Porter: Well, then I gotta ask, then, why can’t the customers just take the specifications directly to the software people?

Tom: Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

Bob Slydell: You physically take the specs from the customer?

Tom: Well, no, my, my secretary does that, or, or the fax.

Bob Slydell: Ah.

Bob Porter: Then you must physically bring them to the software people.

Tom: Well…no. Yeah, I mean, sometimes.

Bob Slydell: Well, what would you say… you do here?

Tom: Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can’t you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!

Annnd end scene.

As I kept the movie and that scene in mind (and as I rewatched the movie far too many times) throughout college, I tended to view the Bobs in a favorable light. After all, they were making things more efficient for a company, which was great! Even if some people “lost” their jobs in the process, it would be better in the end; if your job was redundant or could be done by a machine, wouldn’t it be better to lose it and move on to something more meaningful?

My identification with the Bobs, while it certainly wasn’t the sole motivator behind my post-undergraduate job search, did seem to jibe with the end result of that search: an entry-level position at a consulting firm.

However, my experience over the last year has led me to at least consider the possibility that there are many people in consulting who are actually more like Tom in the above scene than the Bobs. Consider:

• They aren’t the ones that have the actual technical skills to build the solution (the “software guys” in the scene)
• They deal with the customers/clients to determine what the specifications for the final design should be, but without a full grasp of what it takes to technically implement the solution.
• That solution (often in the form of a “functional design”), essentially has to be translated into a technical design which is what’s used to build the final product anyway.
• In order to produce a good “functional” design (i.e. one that will translate well), it’s more or less necessary to have the technical know-how such that you could write the tech spec and build it yourself anyway.

So what’s their purpose? What would you say… they do here?

And to tie this back in to my previous post about agile development, this realization that Tom and functional designs aren’t all that valuable seems to be at the root of the agile manifesto. Also at that root is the Bobs' rhetorical question: Why can’t the customers just take the specifications directly to the software people? Why are the engineers/developers necessarily bad at dealing with the customer?

According to the agile philosophy, they don’t have to be.

Matt over at 37 Signals has a recent post on the difference between a fifty- year-old carpenter and a novice. As 37 Signals is a software company, the parallel between software development and a construction project is thinly veiled. I’d like to think it supports my own assertion that these two professions are not all that unlike each other.

The excerpt from Matt’s post notes that:

Members can be moved around before they are firmly in place. All those detailed design decisions which can never be worked out in advance on paper, can be made during the building process.

Perhaps this is exposing my own naivete or lack of understanding about different approaches to development, but the parallel in software development that jumps to mind is that of agile development approach as opposed to a traditional or “waterfall” approach. Like the expert carpenter who doesn’t set anything in stone and is constantly able to adapt to changing requirements and be creative in every step of the process, agile developers are free from rigid requirements and processes.

On a related note, I’ve begun a small side project, a volunteer effort at work for a non-profit. I’ll have a decent amount of responsibility in most of the technical and design aspects of a web application. Already I’m beginning to see the stark contrast between myself and the members of the team that have been schooled in the waterfall school of thought – I think it will certainly be a challenge to integrate these two different philosophies.

If you saw the previous post and want an explanation, this should help you out.

“The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life, and the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don’t do that, though.”

-Warren Buffett

I recently stumbled upon this quote on a friend’s facebook profile. It’s yet another way of looking at the economy, and, in my mind anyway, it supports my idea that an economy can be thought of as the collective sentiments of the people that it encompasses.

But where do those sentiments come from? How has it happened that “green” has entered the mainstream consciousness over the last three-five years? It seems like many of these “collective” decisions are actually triggered by a relatively small number of people that have accumulated a tremendous amount of influence, wealth, power, etc.

So are we to assume that, just because some collective thought has reached a tipping point and won over a critical mass of people, it’s automatically right and should be accepted as what a society and an economy “should” be putting its resources towards? There’s at least one example of a pretty smart person who disagrees: John Tierney, whose NY Times blog is “guided by two founding principles”:

1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

2. But that’s a good working theory.

We could also get into the difference between a thought or a sentiment winning over a critical mass of a society as a whole (after all, the larger the group, the less likely it is that a really bonehead idea could take root… right?) versus winning over a critical mass of the small subset of people that can exert their own whims and ideas on the rest of society. A troubling thought, perhaps.

What are the implications of this? If you had the means to pay 10,000 people to do whatever you wanted them to do for the rest of your life, what would you have them do?

Regular Amtrak commuters received a surprise last week when a number of Acela Express trains that normally make the DC – NYC trip were taken off the timetables for the foreseeable future. The irony here is that these trains have been getting more and more packed of late and have been selling out faster, even without the recent reduction in service.

In another, perhaps related, move, Amtrak has raised its base fares by about $5 for the NYC – DC route. In any case, the two decisions were enacted at the same time, making for some disgruntled passengers. I’m writing this from the train right now and have overheard a couple conversations already this morning about the changes, accompanied by some unkind words for Amtrak.

My inquiring note to Amtrak’s customer service department has yet to be answered, though I’m promised a response within 24 hours.

The service reduction may have to do with summer construction and track work; last Friday the train was delayed for about 10 minutes near Philadelphia and we were informed that only one track was available and that this would be the case all summer.

I’m still a big proponent of the train over air travel, though; the worst I’ve been delayed in nine months of commuting weekly from NYC to DC is about 30-40 minutes. Compare that to air travel and it’s not even close. Still, high-speed US rail service is severely behind that of other developed nations. The primary problem is that it’s very difficult to purchase the land required to build a long enough stretch of straight enough track to accommodate bullet trains and therefore make it worth the investment. For example, the Acela “Express” from NYC to Boston take nearly four hours; an experienced driver (or somewhat reckless Chinatown Bus operator) can make it in approximately the same amount of time and at a fraction of the cost, largely because of the train’s non- linear route.

Some interesting commentary, including coverage of National Train Day and discussion of why high-speed rail won’t work (and shouldn’t be pursued) in the US, can be found here.

There has been ample talk over the last several months, in the presidental campaign in particular, about so-called “green-collar” jobs. These jobs, for the uninitiated, are loosely defined as jobs that are similar to blue-collar jobs, but that help in some way to further the cause of clean, renewable energy and manufacturing, either by researching new technologies or executing newly learned skills related to such clean technologies.

This rise in demand for “green-collar” jobs has coincided with a shift in public opinion and marketing campaigns that have brought “green” to the mainstream. Both of these shifts have helped to spur an overall willingness to invest in such technologies, as investors and venture capitalists feel more assured that there will be demand for clean technologies and processes in the future.

Take, for example, everyone’s favorite search engine. Google has not only pledged to become carbon neutral (by… five months ago…), but has also gone a step further and stated its sentiments that carbon is indeed a pollutant and in the future will be regulated as such, putting its money behind this opinion by behaving now as it believes it will have to in the future, when carbon is regulated and priced appropriately. From the site linked to above:

Additionally, when buying power for our data centers, Google will use a “shadow price” for carbon. This voluntary pricing of carbon will enable us to calculate a more accurate cost of power as one of the key criteria in site selection for our data centers. The cost of carbon is not yet recognized by the U.S. market, but may soon become so through legislation.

This is all independent of Google’s philanthropic arm, which has its own project for clean, renewable energy.

The point of all this is to note that any economy can be thought of as the collective sentiments of the population that it encompasses. This statement is, in a sense, a counter to the argument that all this talk about a “green economy” is nothing more than a dressed up version of the “broken window” fallacy. Let’s go a little deeper. For those not familiar, the broken window fallacy goes something like this: If I throw a rock through a window, someone has to come and repair the window, which increases GDP, and is therefore good for the economy. Ergo, we should all go around breaking windows.

Like I said, it’s a fallacy. But it’s commonly used to argue that the “green economy” is nothing more than a lot of people sinking a lot of money into something that really shouldn’t have to be fixed in the first place.

However, this idea that one should view an economy as the collective sentiments of the people that it encompasses runs against this argument. If that’s what an economy is, then all it takes is a groundswell of popular support (backed by people willing to pay of course) that green technologies and jobs are inherently a “good” thing for society and are worth something. There’s no one particular industry or activity that should necessarily be valued or promoted over another; once those sentiments change, that’s what the jobs and activities “should” be directed towards.

That’s not to say that things should be left completely to whatever whim the “ignorant masses” happen to come up with. There are definitely times when the government (ideally a libertarian paternalist government) can and should step in to give that “nudge” where it’s appropriate.

So come on, and join the groupthink! Just kidding – sort of.

The sun began to set over the mountains, which had been turned light green by the slowly advancing line of new spring leaves that had nearly reached its peak of the tree line. The second of two days of deck deconstruction and reconstruction was coming to an end, and looking around, I was secretly disappointed at how little visible progress we’d made.

At some point during those two days I’d had a flash of insight, the kind of moment when you can practically feel the synapse firing in your brain. This is just like a software engineering project. And not just because we got less done than we intended, either. The more I thought about what we had undertaken and accomplished, the more parallels I saw.

The project as a whole was a deck deconstruction (several supports and pieces of the deck itself were old and rotting) followed by a reconstruction. It may help to put a microscope on one specific example here. Since several supports had been replaced and had slightly different dimensions than the old ones, some of the deckboards were no longer completely snug with these supports. Definitely not a structural issue, but a minor aesthetic one; also, the boards themselves were certainly aging as well, but it wasn’t completely necessary to replace them. In other words, a tossup on whether or not to rip them out and replace them with new boards.

The owner of the deck, an elderly but still strapping gentleman who was also the foreman of this two-man work team, decided that there was reason enough to install new boards. Prior to making that decision, he probably did a quick cost-benefit in his head – how much better will it look with new boards? What about the fact that the new boards won’t match with the old ones? How long will it take to rip up the old boards and put in the new ones? Are there any requirements from the client (his wife) about what the deck should look like or how long it should take? What are the penalties associated with not meeting those requirements?

Further similarities emerged after I started to take the board out. The nails used to hold the boards in were very old and tough to remove; it was therefore taking much longer to finish the first part than anticipated. Do you continue on the current path? Maybe even reassess the situation and make another decision with the new information?

At another point we realized that the ideal tools/supplies we needed were in town, a 30 minute drive. Another decision – do we use a “workaround” (very common term on a software project)? Sacrifice the time to get the supplies? How does that impact the amount of daylight we have to work with, and is there anything else we could pick up from town while we are there to make it more appealing to go?

I also realized (again) that I tend to think in very general terms about things – this is part of the reason I make these far-flung connections in the first place when other people think I’m off my rocker. A “project” is therefore anything that one or more people put their time into (ideally with some sort of plan for it), a “client” is anyone that anyone has to answer to, “requirements” are the things that constrain the design and give the project a shape and direction. People that work as consultants have similar mindsets – which may be why very little “actual” vocabulary is required outside of technical vocab. But in some sense, everyone is a consultant, since everyone works with resources, such as their own time, skills, and wealth, in order to create something for a client. In the ultimate meta-thought: the term “consultant” itself has become vague to the point of meaninglessness.

Profound thought of the day: The nuances no longer come in the words we use to describe the world, but rather from our experiences as we interact with that world.

[Update: Discovered a related post and discussion over at the 37 signals blog recently.]

Starting with last year’s SAVAGE I’ve now done three adventure races in the past year. It’s practically enough to make one think about actually purchasing a yearly membership in the US Adventure Racing Association.

That is, unless your next race is in Canada. Today marked the more or less official christening of our team for the “Raid International eco Endurance Aventure 2008.” Held in the tiny town of Blanc-Sablon on the Lower North Shore of Labrador in northeastern Canada, the International Endurance Adventure Race (in English) entails trekking, orienteering, mountain biking, climbing, rappelling, cliff jumping, canoeing, kayaking, and something called “adventure swimming.”

As if that weren’t enough, there are many “surprises” promised along the way. Teams of two and four compete over four days and 180 miles of some of the roughest terrain that Canada has to offer. If it’s any indication, I couldn’t even find a major city close enough to Blanc-Sablon that had weather data available online so we know what we might be in for.

I’m not sure what possessed me to finally commit to doing such a race. I’ve obviously become mildly obsessed with adventure racing over the last year – so I’m going to try to articulate some of the reasons here.

The first is that adventure racing is a team sport. You are inherently reliant on your teammates to have good judgment (especially if they are navigating), to pull you along if you’re behind, and to keep their own cool during what can be a truly stressful event, in all senses of that word.

The second is that while adventure races are long, they don’t require nearly as much training as a single-discipline race of the same timeframe. The SAVAGE took us five and a half hours to complete, but the training was minimal. Doing a six- hour running race or even a bike race without doing extensive training for months beforehand is a good way to wind up in the medical tent, not to mention permanently damage some joints.

I’ve found many parallels between a team of adventure racers working to get to the finish and a team of people working toward a goal in the “real world” or just life in general. The team size in an adventure race is pretty reflective of what I would deem as an ideal team size to work with on a regular basis. The roles that people play on a team of racers also mimics the roles that develop on a goal-oriented team in real life.

I’ve been thinking about what life lessons can be taken from these races, since I think there are many. This past race taught me a lot about the kind of role that I tend to take in such situations and on such teams. I’ve noticed that I want to try to do everything myself – but I’m getting better at delegating. I still like to be the one that’s in the know about as much as possible, and involved in every decision. I like to think of myself as a field general, though I’ll be the first to admit that I’m far from that ideal. However, picturing yourself as one is the best way to start to become one.

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the matter in the months to come – many will likely be posted at our team’s newly-minted blog.

Up next, in the “other analogies” department: how deck reconstruction resembles a software engineering project, and why the whole thing makes me want to study design.

Three weeks in to my experiment in measuring my Google Reader stats, I have come to the conclusion that there is too much chaff and not enough wheat. This was mainly fueled by two observations:

• The average time devoted to a post lately has dipped under 6 seconds. As an average, this seems a little too low.

• I recently found an interesting article on the NY Times that I realized had been in my reader and yet I blew right past it. This is partially due to the fact that the Times only includes a one sentence summary in their feeds in an effort to get you to click through to the site. Still, I would have been more likely to click through if there were fewer items in the inbox.

I’m taking the following two actions:

• I’ve cut out a couple of high volume feeds (they shall remain nameless).

• I’ve been more specific with the feeds where I can be. For example, I unsubscribed to the NY Times Opinion feed and replaced it with the specific columnists (David Brooks) and blogs (TierneyLab, Olivia Judson, By Design) that I find myself reading/sharing most often. The author of post is a very useful filter – it’s a lot harder to decide whether to read a post or not based solely on the title.

Sunday marked my second year of participation in the SAVAGE adventure race. Put on by the Gibbons Outdoor Leadership Adventure School, this year’s event was held in Brandywine Creek State Park near Wilmington, Delaware. The race involves five miles of canoeing, five miles of trekking/orienteering/trail running, ten miles of mountain biking, and, of course, “fun team challenges.”

The order of these events is determined by your team’s passport, which also functions as the way that your team marks off each checkpoint found. There’s always an interesting way for the teams to get their passport – last year involved the passports being thrown from a canoe in a lake. This year wasn’t quite as interesting, as the passports were simply being held at a point, almost a mile away from the transition area, that one chosen team member had to run/navigate their way to, but I am proud to say that I was the first one out of the entire race to snag a passport for my team, thanks to a decisive choice about which way to go at a trail junction (in adventure races, the answer is always “down the trail marked as closed”).

I (unintentionally) wound up picking a very good passport. We had the “fun team challenges” first, so I was able to recover while my teammates carried me in a stretcher through a course of orange cones. Next it was on to the blindfolded scooter course. By this time I had recovered enough to be on point as one of the guiders for this activity. After hitting up the knots section we were back to the transition and on our way out to the real course…

The first section was on foot, which was good because it helped us get the lay of the land without zooming past trails and checkpoints on bikes first. After completing all the checkpoints we made a decision to bushwhack part of the way back to the transition area, which ultimately proved to be a time-saver.

From there it was on to the bike section. While it was not nearly as tough as last year’s course, there were definitely some pretty brutal stretches. Thanks to a slight navigational mistake by yours truly, there was an additional very tough stretch that really didn’t need to be in there. Oh well :–) Nevertheless, we hit all the checkpoints (including the adventure racing trivia/jeopardy!) and made our way…

…to the canoe. Again, this was another reason that we lucked out with our passport order – the canoe was last. We were battling an extremely tough current on the river and at times would even get out and have one person push/steer the canoe while the other two paddled. We headed upstream first and kept hearing from the teams coming back down that we still had a long way to go. We pressed on – until it started lightning and the rumbles of thunder started to get pretty close by. Now, I’m no expert, but a metal canoe in the middle of a river is not my favorite place to be in a thunderstorm, so we broke out the emergency phone to ask the race directors what to do. We were told to head back downstream to the canoe transition and we’d be credited with the checkpoints due to the lightning. Probably the best news we’d heard all day.

After that it was a simple but soggy run to the finish! Results and pictures to be posted shortly are now posted.

Results (we are Team 12, in the co-ed three division).

Photos.

I had a couple of thoughts about the design of two everyday things within about 30 minutes of each other today, so I thought I’d share…maybe this will become a regular topic.

The first was Facebook. When I logged into Facebook today, I was greeted with yet another feature: Facebook Chat. According to the Facebook Blog, this feature began to launch the week of April 6th and is still only available in some networks on Facebook. Naturally, my first reaction upon seeing the little popup in the lower right hand corner was “How do I get rid of this thing?”

Turns out, you can’t! Unless I’m really missing something, the engineers at Facebook decided that this was the one application that everyone would just have to have. Even some of the original, “core” applications (photos, for example) can now be disabled – but chat is here to stay, on everyone’s profile. At least I can still ignore requests to become a zombie or find out what Greek god I am.

My favorite part is the help page – I was relieved to see the question “How do I remove Facebook Chat or appear offline?” The answer is below – note the artful dodging of the question:

You can minimize the feature and stop receiving chat messages by going offline. To do so, open the chat menu in the bottom right of your browser. Click “Go Offline” to stop receiving chat messages. You will not appear in any of your friends “Online Friends” section and your friends cannot message you. Clicking “Go Online” will allow your friends to contact you again and see that you are online in Chat.

Three Google searches did not yield any results, so I proceeded to share my concerns with Facebook by leaving a comment on the original blog post, emailing them, and leaving a suggestion that they should add this little “feature” to the chat application.

The second design I interacted with was that of the Toyota Prius. The design there could be the subject of books, not just a blog post, but I want to focus on one feature in particular: the display.

Two things: When you change the display to look at the radio or the climate control, after a couple minutes it switches back to the consumption graph above. So what if I just don’t give a flying hoot about my gas mileage at the moment? Too bad. It’s there, in your face, whether you like it or not.

Point number two: Let’s take a look at the units on this graph, shall we? Miles per gallon on the Y axis and on the X axis? Time. Which means that the area under the curve has the lovely units of minute-miles per gallon. It also means that if the Prius is inching along in stop and go traffic for a full five minutes and not really using its gas engine, the bar for that five minute interval would be up around 100 miles to the gallon, despite the fact that you’ve gone about ten feet. It can make for a misleading graph.

Why not put gallons (or fractions of gallons) on the X axis? Or, another idea – flip the units on the Y axis to be gallons per mile and put miles on the X axis. That way the units for the area are in gallons, and the graph is truly a consumption graph. I think the reasoning against this is that people are more comfortable with MPG; but flipping the scale (low gallons per mile, i.e. good, at the top) as well would get the point across. It’s not like you’re looking at the units while you’re driving anyway.

On Friday I finally broke down and did the tourist thing in DC. Camera in tow (photos are online and at the end of the post since I wanted to try out the slideshow feature of Picasa), I headed into our nation’s capital and, with a little effort, found a place to park for free on the Mall.

From there, the spree was on. In a little over three hours, I visited:

• Roosevelt Island: Kind of peaceful, minus the commercial aircraft flying overhead every few minutes.

• The Museum of Natural History. The photo exhibit they have there now is really extraordinary – great photos from all over the world, from animals to landscapes. The live butterfly exhibit did not look as promising, and I did not pay the $6 to confirm that suspicion.

• The Newseum. After I saw that the grand opening just happened to be the day that I was in DC, I had to go. It got even better when I found out that the normal $18 admission fee had been waived for the opening; it got slightly worse when we were informed right before entering that the building was being evacuated. Well when life gives you lemons, you go to…

• …the National Portrait Gallery. My favorite stop of the day. The building is beautiful, inside and out, and the collection is vast. And it’s not all just portraits, either. The third floor has a great modern art collection. Admittedly, Stephen Colbert is no longer there – but I’m sure he’ll be back in there some day.

• After a pit stop at the International Spy Museum and a lovely chat with the attendant there who used to live in NYC, it was back to the Newseum, as they were letting people back into the building at this point. I really liked the Newseum. There are six floors (and a great view of the Capitol on the rooftop), all of them chock full of interesting exhibits. For the opening they had the front pages of all the major national newspapers on display; this idea was also used in the 9/11 exhibit, which had the front pages from around the world on 9/12/01, as well as part of the antenna from the north tower and the cameras and camera bag of the only journalist to die in the attacks (he was taking pictures right up until the time he died when the second tower collapsed). There’s also an exhibit where you can be a reporter in front of a green screen as well as news-related films. It’s worth another visit, even at $18.

• After spending so much time there, it was almost time to go, but not without a quick stop at the National Air and Space Museum, which, I must admit, was cooler when I was 10.

From there it was Reagan National and then home to Ohio to visit the family. Did the Sap Run on Sunday and was first in the 19-24 age group. Figured it would be good training for the upcoming SAVAGE adventure race.

The highlight of the weekend should have been an Indians victory over the Red Sox at Jacobs Field – unfortunately Joe “Blow” Borowski prevented that and is now on the “DL” for it.

Slideshow! Includes some cherry blossom-ing from earlier in the week.

And the moral of the story is: never start work on solving a common problem until you’ve done your due diligence to make sure there isn’t already something out there that will do the trick.

After noticing in my last post that the standard scatterplots available as gadgets in Google Spreadsheets did not allow for multiple values to be plotted, I contemplated spending some time to put together a gadget of my own to do the trick. While this would have no doubt been a great learning experience (maybe I’ll try it anyway), that plan was short-circuited when I realized that there was already a type of gadget that could be abused to serve this purpose:

Now the intended use of this gadget is way cooler than what I am using it for, but I’m also a little proud that I was able to hack it to serve my own purposes. It also has the nice feature that any viewer of this site can mess around and put different values on the axes (try it! you know you want to). These settings are not stored in the gadget in any way (try refreshing the page); however, Google has just introduced a way to persist data and presumably settings in a gadget. I wonder if it’s effectively creating a shared document or spreadsheet for each instance of the gadget and pulling the data that way, which would be a similar structure as these embedded gadgets, or if it’s a different way to store the data entirely.

Ironically, I’ll probably share this very post tomorrow when I go through my Reader, thereby altering the stats. How meta!

And speaking of meta: I was just reading about Googlegängers. A play on the German doppelgänger (another one of my favorite words), “Googlegänger” is a neologism coined to describe other people who share your name, preferably that you discover by Googling yourself.

Inspired, I decided to re-Google myself, since it had been a while. I came up with some really great hits. There’s Andrew Brett the model, Andy Brett the bird photographer, and, to coin a new phrase, my REVERSE-Googlegänger, Brett Andrew, the musician. So cheers guys, and best of luck.

Inspired by Atul Gawande’s advice to “measure something,” I decided to start keeping track of how long I spent each day tabbing through items in my Google Reader. Naturally, I have made this process a batch process, done once per weekday.

It has now been one week, so I have five data points. I wanted to see if any strong trends emerged, so I put the data in a Google Spreadsheet, publicly available here. I’m still tooling around with it, but I was also excited to try out the gadget feature, which should let me embed the two charts I came up with right on my blog as gadgets:

Nothing tremendously interesting or pretty, but for right now I just wanted to see if the pipes could be connected so to speak.

One thing I noticed was that the standard scatterplot falls victim to standard scatterplot syndrome: you can only display two values on it, i.e., you can’t make the points sized or colored based on a third or fourth column of values.

Thing is, there’s a developer’s API for these things, but currently there are no available charts that allow for this multi- dimensional type of scatter plot. I wonder if this is something that one could knock out in a weekend…

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things is the kind of book that inclines the reader to write his own thoughts in the margins. I opted for a more electronic medium – which was good, considering that the book itself, in keeping with the authors' principles of durable, reusable (not ‘recyclable’, which they call ‘downcyclable’) materials, is printed on a kind of synthetic glossy paper that doesn’t seem to lend itself to such scribblings. Ironic, perhaps, but who said notes had to be taken like that in the first place?

The basic principle of the book is that current processes for manufacturing things are completely out of step with what we know about the world around us. We know that many materials cannot be reused safely or broken down effectively, and yet we continue to follow such processes and buy things created by them because it is so easy to just throw something “away” after we have finished with it. We never have to think about the consequences of throwing something “away,” whether it be the wasted resources or the outright danger of the materials in the first place.

Instead of our current processes, the authors instead advocate for products that are designed with their entire lifecycles in mind – from cradle to cradle.

The idea that really inspired me most (but which the authors really didn’t devote all that much time to) was the concept of service-based use. It flies in the face of the current model but really makes a lot of sense. When someone buys something, a toaster for example, he is not actually interested in the materials in the toaster but rather the service that the toaster provides. After the toaster has passed the point where it is useful (it breaks, the buyer no longer likes toast, the buyer wants a better toaster), the purchaser’s plan is pretty much just to throw it out.

The purchaser has no incentive to find a toaster that is designed such that after its period of usefulness, the materials used in the toaster are still useful or valuable. He’s throwing the thing out anyway, and it wouldn’t make sense for the user of the toaster to be specialized to the point where he can make use of what he currently discards.

However, if he leases the toaster, (sounds odd, but bear with me) then the manufacturer of the toaster gets the toaster (and the raw materials) back at the end of its usefulness cycle. Now there is an incentive for the design to be one that maximizes the value of whatever materials are left over at the end of the cycle.

Kind of makes one feel good about renting car all the time, or about a system like ZipCar. But even that system/process wouldn’t cut the mustard with the authors – after all, it’s not like the rental car company would do anything different with the car after it breaks down than I would if I owned it myself. The authors would instead recommend a system where the car manufacturer gets the car back after it is no longer usable or wanted, again, so that there would be an incentive to design things well.

There are several other interesting points that the authors make about diversity, negative costs, and evolution-inspired design – but I won’t give the game away; or, as Levar Burton would say:

“You don’t have to take my word for it!”

Atul Gawande’s most recent book uses several situations in medicine to highlight the keys to being successful and effective. In this way, while the book is ostensibly about medicine, its lessons can be applied to many more facets of life outside the operating room.

One of the first situations that Gawande describes is a good example of this – the attempts to control a polio outbreak in India. While it is a medical condition, it’s easy to see how the problem has much more to do with logistics, coordination, designing processes, and quality assurance than it has to do with the actual medicine that is being practiced (i.e. delivering a vaccine).

Gawande next describes surgeons charged with taking care of the war wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan – a distinctly medical situation. But again, his focus is not on the medicine practiced there but instead on the ways that those doctors improved the process used to treat wounded soldiers. Doctors studied patient records to determine what resources were most needed and when in order to save more soldiers. In some instances, changes to equipment were made to help ensure compliance in wearing it, even though soldiers knew it was a matter of life or death. Interestingly, the doctors' success rate has helped to deflate the number of US casualties in the war – approximately 10% of the wounded now die, a dramatic decrease from previous combats. This means that the death toll (which recently exceeded 4,000) is a deflated estimate of the human cost of the war (not to mention the civilian casualties). This also means that we will continue to pay the cost of the war for years to come, as soldiers with severe injuries continue to require advanced care.

The doctors caring for the war wounded followed one of the pieces of advice that Gawande leaves his readers with: measure something. It doesn’t matter what you measure, just measure something. This advice appeals to the inner scientist and tinkerer in me – we have some results, now what happens to them when you change things?

Overall, a very good read. I found the parts on doctors' roles in executions to be less interesting than the rest of the book. My favorite part by far was the descriptions of childbirth and particularly the procedure of the C-section. It brings up very interesting points about medicine as a craft (delivering a baby naturally in the face of complications) versus an industry (the C-section) and what that implies for medical training.

I’ll be honest. The very first thing I did in front of my laptop today was to try to find Google’s April Fool’s joke. I quickly found the new “feature” of Gmail (Custom Time). Pretty good. And the “Wake-up Kit” in Google Calendar. Not bad. And the “I’m feeling lucky” button for events, which set me up on “dates” with Angelina Jolie, Anna Kournikova, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Alba, and (yikes!) Paris Hilton.

But I knew there had to be something… more.

And there was. Google Virgle.

I had to sign out of iGoogle and visit the classic home page twice before I found the link, but oh boy, it was worth it. Over the next one hundred years, Google and Virgin Inc. will lead an “interplanetary Noah’s Ark” to create a self-sustaining population of over 100,000 Martians, living on the first open source planet in the universe.

There’s an application to become a pioneer in the “adventure of many lifetimes” as well as an FAQ – the highlight of that might be:

How’d you learn all this stuff?

Reading. Surfing. Studying. Cramming. Arguing. Improvising. Special thanks to the brilliant minds at the invaluable Mars Society

There’s even a post on the Official Google Blog from Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Inc.

:-D

Well done, Googlers.

Couple highlights from the last two weekends here:

Pillow Fight in Union Square on March 22nd. Part of World Pillow Fight Day. My photos are posted on facebook and Picasa; Picasa also has a very special video featuring my roommate when we were in the thick of things.

The First Manhattan Cask Ale Festival at Chelsea Piers. Over 35 cask ales available for the tasting, all of them delicious. It’s a very interesting venue for a bar as well, especially when you’re there in the afternoon/early evening – it’s right on the Hudson, so the sunlight is pouring in from the entirely glass wall on the west face of the bar. Among the beers I sampled:

• Chelsea Brewing Company’s Frosty’s Winter Wheat. An interesting, zesty mix of flavors in a wheat beer. Not my favorite of the festival but still tasty.

• Chelsea Brewing Company’s Tsar’s Revenge. A “Russian Imperial Stout,” this was a very rich stout that embodies what I think of when I think of cask ale. Very earthy and smoky.

• Chelsea Brewing Company’s 1000 Gyle Imperial Mild. An English barleywine, I believe this had the highest alcohol by volume of any beer at the festival, but you wouldn’t know it. Very smooth, and almost sweet. They don’t serve full pints of it, for a good reason.

• Otter Creek’s Sea Otter. Brewed in Middlebury, VT, which is what caught my eye in the first place. Great dark, amber ale.

• Sly Fox’s Ichor. Belgian barleywine. May have been my favorite brew of the festival. A quadruple with German pils. Yummmm.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about health care and health insurance, partially because I’m reading “Better” by Atul Gawande (I’m hoping to post a review soon). The health care, or, more accurately, the health informatics industry, definitely has potential as an industry (or at least a project) that I’d like to work on next. Before I could do that, though, I’d have to learn quite a bit about How Stuff Works in that field. There are a ton of really interesting issues that are just starting to be dealt with as health care starts to become more modern. A few are mentioned in this post that I recently read.

There is also a shift toward giving the user a lot more control over their records and their health care plans – I recently heard a commercial on the radio for Kaiser Permanente that went through a litany of things that they want to give the average subscriber to their plan, for example, the ability to email their doctors and have access to their health information 24/7 were just two of the items mentioned.

This would certainly be a welcome change. I consider myself a pretty smart cookie, and I think I can usually figure things out if they are relatively straightforward. And yet I find it so complicated to file a claim and actually get money that I decided to just pay for my contacts myself, even though it’s definitely a benefit under my plan. The the hassle of filing for money and continually following up on it just wasn’t worth it.

If people took full advantage of their health care plan, would insurance companies go bankrupt? Or at the very least have to change they way they did business or their business model? How many people take ‘full advantage’ of their health care plan now? I don’t mean fraud, I’m just talking about taking the time to ensure that any time they have any sort of interaction with a doctor or pharmacy, their plan gives them what they are entitled to.

Google, of course is making a run at the health informatics game, setting up a pilot program with the Cleveland Clinic. Medical records are clearly going to get digitized, but what are the roadblocks to that happening? Are they primarily technical (integrating systems)? If so, that would be good for me since that’s likely how I would be able to find work in the industry. Or are the issues more social and political – Are people too scared to have so much medical information in digital form and accessible online? Are doctors too scared of such a situation because it will make the whole system more transparent and easier for people to self-diagnose (or think that they can self-diagnose)?

And also, a huge reason people even go to doctors in the first place is that they want to be reassured that someone with some idea of what he’s talking about and a decent bed-side manner is taking some time to listen to what’s wrong and make a recommendation. Because in many ways and in many cases, doctor’s recommendations are bested by very simple algorithms (I’m thinking of the APGAR score for newborns, the Glasgow Coma Scale, and Malcolm Gladwell’s thought on doctors diagnosing heart attacks – they use too much information). We’re always going to need surgeons, are we always going to need the people that tell us whether to get the surgery?

What might be the best use of non-medical technology for doctors – in other words, what would be really useful for doctors to have in terms of better data on patients and new medications? What area has the most room for improvement? Is it profitable to pioneer a product or service in this area?

Is it a viable business to charge people $4.95 a month (or a percentage of their health care premium) to help them ‘get the most out of their health care plan’?

Sigh. Much to ponder.

When I read David Brooks I generally agree with what he has to say – and every once in a while I come across an article that leads me to believe that he either has mind-reading abilities or very candid informants in many of the circles that I pay attention to.

His most recent column is one such piece. The person he describes in the opening paragraphs is, in short, what I want to be when I grow up:

“…typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

I’m not quite following the formula exactly in chronological order, but most, if not all, of those pieces are in place (especially if doing Americorps over a summer during undergrad counts). It’s really quite scary how well Brooks can peg a persona and then write about it. Maybe it says more about the persona than Brooks, i.e. maybe it’s a predictable one or one that lends itself to self-promotion and that any ear (such as Brooks') that is willing to turn towards such a person is bound to get an earful.

One reason why this persona appeals to me is its stark contrast with, to quote another Times article, the much-maligned investment banker:

“[M]uch of the wealth at the top is derived from financial instruments that merely move money around.

“It’s one thing if people are adding value to society,” Professor Frank said. “But there is skepticism that this is all a shell game and these guys are not adding value, at least to the extent that justifies their salaries.”“ (Emphasis mine)

Even if someone goes into that business of ‘moving money around’ with the intention of making a lot of that money for themself and then using what they reap to help fund the very institutions started by Brooks' “modern do-gooder,” why not just cut out the middleman? Life’s too short, and the problems are too great, to postpone this value adding or to do it in any sort of roundabout way. Get in there and get dirty, dammit!

The one concern with this sort of thing is that there is always the lurking motivation to do good so you can have a good story to tell over cocktails or to prove to yourself beyond a reasonable doubt that you are doing good. Many people motivated by the second (and to some extent the first) have already been siphoned off to start their “stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps,” or the Princeton equivalents, Princeton in X and P55. It will be interesting to see how many of my classmates continue on the David Brooks route afterwards.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the abstract concept of a “process.” Michael Pollan lambastes “edible food-like substances” for being processed; at work we created a process to prepare, coordinate, and execute test scripts, which are in themselves a process; Tim Ferriss talks about processing his inbox (or creating rules – a process, essentially – so that someone who knows nothing about him apart from the instructions is able to do it for him); and most recently, Atul Gawande ruminates on how mundane processes such as proper hand-washing are the key to eradicating infectious diseases in hospitals, and how wide-spread, well-planned, and coordinated processes can effectively prevent a polio outbreak.

So what’s in a process? And why do we come up with them? The major attraction of a good process is that it is repeatable and will produce the same, desirable results each time. In other words: think carefully about it just once, and you’ll never have to think about it again, and neither will anyone else. We are now free to think about other, presumably more important, things in your life.

A noble cause, for sure. But this line of thinking is what leads to Wal-Marts, four-lane causeways, automated call centers, and fast food. Taken to the extreme, the results are unpleasant to say the least. Henry David Thoreau went into the woods as a reaction to what he saw as the industrialization of everything, including men’s souls. I can’t find the quote online (I’ll have to find the book instead), but Thoreau writes about a person becoming simply a cog in the great industrial machine – and this is in 1854. Some things don’t change.

I first read “Walden” in 2001, and again in 2004, while in the woods in Vermont, which can give any book, but particularly this one, new meaning. The book and Thoreau’s thinking is deeply ingrained and intertwined with my own; this may explain a realization that I came to recently, though probably not for the first time: I am not very good at following a process. When I am the executor, I have terrible attention to detail, I question every step, ignore things that are crucial, get hung up on things that are not, and generally just make a mess of the entire situation.

I would like to think that I am far better at designing a process, ensuring that the desired results are achieved, that the process works in all situations, and so on.

I don’t think that this makes me unique though – after all, who wants to be the sucker sitting there manually reading through Tim Ferriss' emails or doing something else repetitive and boring, according to preset rules. No one! It’s mind-numbing and soul-sucking.

So should the end goal of process design include the assumption that eventually, no one is going to be willing to be paid a pittance to follow a process? That we’ll all have better things to do? I’m not sure. It seems that as long as there are young people still trying to figure the world out and make a little cash, or (comparatively) poorer or less skilled people who are willing to sacrifice mental stimulation in exchange for making a living (for now, anyway, to quote Avenue Q), that it’s a safe assumption to make that a well-engineered process will always have takers at some price point.

“The Four-Hour Workweek” is one part biography, one part self-help/advice book, and one part life philosophy. The personality and (admittedly cocky) attitude of Tim Ferriss drive and define the style of the writing; the writing itself conveys many useful and interesting ideas about how success is defined and achieved today.

One central thesis of the book could be summarized as: “People are wildly inefficient while they are at their jobs, and could do the same amount of ‘work’ in far less time, especially if they weren’t at the office.” Ferriss cites Parkinson’s law (tasks swell to take up the amount of time they are allotted), and the fact that people are paid salaries and are expected to be at the office during set periods of time, as a perfect explanation for why this is the case. Ferriss recommends a “low-information diet” and “selective ignorance” to boost productivity by single-tasking instead of multi-tasking.

The other major topic the book covers is the automation of income via businesses which are designed with the end of making the maximum amount of cash with minimum oversight and time. Ferriss refers to these businesses as ‘muses’ and gives several pointers and case studies to help the reader start milking her own cash cow.

As I said, the book is one part life philosophy. Ferriss does get directly philosophical at the end, briefly mentioning hedonism and nihilism; however, the entire idea of the four hour workweek and the choices that he recommends making throughout the book by that point have already laid out a life philosophy of sorts.

The book is an easy read, due in part to the fact that its parts are not so much woven together as they are soldered; this makes is particularly easy for me to pick out the parts which are applicable and will be useful to my life and leave the rest behind. The book did not, as promised in big bold letters on the back cover, make me “want to quit my job.” The two major desires I have after reading it are to make better use of my time (which may, eventually, lead me to quit my job) and to take more chances and risks, in nearly every aspect of my life.

The philosophy of Tim Ferriss will be fodder for future posts.

Long time no blog. The cause: a client deadline at the end of last week combined with the 2008 edition of the FRIGID INFLICTION, a 10 hour adventure race held in Bolton Valley, Vermont. I was participating with the rest of Team Sea Savage, who debuted last May at the SAVAGE adventure race in PA (and yes, the names of all adventure races must be in all caps).

The difference between the two races was night and day. At the SAVAGE we mountain biked, orienteered, and canoed, with our biggest concerns being sunburn and heat exhaustion; at the FRIGID INFLICTION we skied, snowshoed, and postholed, with our biggest concerns being frostbite and hypothermia.

However, both races had a few things in common. Navigation played a huge role in both. Both races contained disciplines that I (and other members of Team Sea Savage) had little to no experience in: mountain biking and cross-country skiing. As expected, in both races those sections of the course were by far the hardest, required us to carry the implements that were in fact supposed to aid us for a significant portion of that segment, and each section also contained some of the most spectacular wipeouts.

Both races, however, were ridiculously fun. This one especially provided a much-needed taste of winter, which I have not had in some time. After the race, the Princeton contingent, which made up a significant portion of the field, headed to upstate New York and Camp Pok-O-MacCready the Pok-O-MacCready Outdoor Education Center to spend Saturday night. We awoke to a delicious breakfast and a tour of the camp, including a walk on a very frozen lake on a very sunny morning.

More details about this year’s race can be found here; Tim Curtin, the race director, has a review that takes a bird’s eye view of the day. And of course there are pictures galore; still waiting on the facebook flood to arrive.

Next year – we train for it!

Last night around 6:15 a coworker and I were feeling spontaneous, so we decided to go to the National Portrait Gallery and see Stephen Colbert’s portrait. There was a bit of traffic so we got there at about 6:55 – the Gallery closes at 7:00. The conversation with the woman at the front desk went something like:

Woman: “You know we’re closing in five minutes, right?”

Me: “Right — we just want to see Stephen Colbert”

Woman: (rolling not just her eyes, but her entire head). “How did I know. I don’t even have to ask anymore. Go through the courtyard, up the stairs on your right. He’s by the bathroom.”

Me: “Thank you!”

I feel honored to have seen this national treasure before it is removed on April 1st. And to have used the bathroom that it stands beside.

…where all the children are above average.

As an alum, news about Princeton in the New York Times never fails to catch your eye. Princeton recently announced that they would be offering what they call a “bridge year” program for incoming freshman. The students, up to 10% of the incoming class when the plan is fully implemented, would spend the year doing service work abroad.

The program would be a formalization of what many Princeton students already choose to do on their own; several of my friends have done this, either between high school and college or between two choice years during school.

I think this is a brilliant plan. What a great way to offer some perspective on your four years of college and inspire you to use every last opportunity you can while you are there.

Two caveats, however:

• I’m wary of just how formal and structured it will be – after all, I’d say most of the benefits that my friends reaped when they had similar adventures came from the fact that they were fending for themselves. There is already a culture of study abroad, as this commenter points out. I agree with his statement though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “an improved version of summer camp.”

• When I was graduating (Spring 2007) there was a bit of a Cold War going on between the administration and the eating clubs. Shirley T. would never admit this, but I’d say this program aids her cause quite a bit. I said above that it’s a great way to gain perspective; no doubt part of that perspective will result in a greater aversion to drinking away the best seven years of your life at TI or the Street in general.

That first caveat is part of something that’s been rolling around in my head for a little while now, namely the whole concept of pre-defined structure and how it can be good and bad. Maybe that will my next post – or maybe it will be a book review for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I’ve almost finished and which has apparently been scanned by Google.

For now I’m out to take one last look at the lunar eclipse.

Reposted from Goodreads because I don’t think that’s searchable

I don’t think I’ll do a very good job writing a review for a novel, so I’ll say that I liked The Unbearable Lightness of Being and list some of the things I liked in particular.

• The characters are very easy to identify with, particularly Tomas and Tereza, but truly all of them.

• The book has some very interesting philosophical undertones. In a way it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

• The writing style is easy to read (though I understand it was translated into English from the original).

Though the writing was easy to read, at the end of the book I felt that I could read it again (more slowly perhaps) and pick up on a whole new level of detail that I didn’t before.

A related point: one thing I didn’t like so much were the abstractions and tangents that the author would invoke from time to time. I would sometimes wind up lost and, like I said, not really feel that I had grasped the full level of detail. But in general the discussions of the abstractions are what make the book interesting.

LiveMocha might just be the ticket to push me over the top in finally sticking with a new language. It was featured in the New York Times yesterday and also kindly emailed to me by Grace. I have completed lesson 1 in Espanol and am very pleased with the combination of audio and text. The site itself is aesthetically pleasing and you feel like you are playing a game, especially with the Magnet (“make a sentence”) section.

The site also allows you to submit samples of writing and even speaking in the language you are learning, and leverages the power of the masses to give you feedback – every time you submit something, you are given the option of reviewing another person’s submission in YOUR native language. Brilliant!

Side note for the record: I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (or one version of it, the one that popped up first on Google). It typed me as an ENTJ. To translate: Extroverted, not Introverted; iNtution, not Sensing; Thinking, not Feeling; and Judging, not Perceiving. I note this here only because I tend to forget quickly and then have to take the test again, and probably register a different result every time. Now I can test this hypothesis.

Tomorrow: the news from Old Nassau.

Michael Pollan summarizes his latest book, published January 2008, on the cover and in just seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He admits on the very first page that he has pretty much “given the game away” with that summary, but that he plans to complicate matters a bit in the interest of “keeping things going for a couple hundred more pages.” Since I began the book at the start of a four hour bus ride, I chose to oblige him and see what could possibly so complicated about such simple commands.

I came to realize two things by the time I got about halfway through the book – which, ironically, was about the same time that the bus stopped at a Burger King. The first was that there was much more to the book than simple recommendations; the second was that those seven words were not so simple after all.

Take, for example, the first two words of Pollan’s credo: Eat food. Not so hard, you say. False. By Pollan’s definition, much of the offerings in an average grocery story are not in fact “food” but rather “edible food-like substances.”

To understand this difference, Pollan sprinkles much of the first half of the book with discussions of the past hundred years of nutrition “science” and why it’s really not so scientific. Anyone who pays attention to the constant and conflicting admonitions about the latest nutrients that are both good for you and could possibly kill you will already be convinced of many of Pollan’s arguments here. He goes on to elaborate, however, citing the focus on individual nutrients as one major reason why these studies are so flawed. This is one area where reductionist science just seems to fail entirely. In many cases it is nearly impossible to separate the effects of a single nutrient on a person’s well being from the rest of their diet and overall lifestyle.

Studies nevertheless attempt to drill down to this level, for two reasons: the prevalence of reductionist thinking in other academic fields and the fact that, politically, it’s a lot easier to tell people to eat less or more of an individual nutrient or compound (trans fat, e.g) than it is to recommend that they eat less of a food, since the food has lobbyists on K Street in Washington. Nutrients, with the exception of sucrose, tend not to be so well represented.

Pollan then moves into his recommendations for what an average person can do to eat well without buying land and learning to farm for all of their needs. Many of these recommendations are easy to follow (I managed to resist the deep-fried mozzarella sticks at Burger King, but that wasn’t just because Pollan would classify them as “food-like substances”), but some are a bit trickier. It takes some real discipline to devote more of your day to preparing and cleaning up after meals – I can almost guarantee that I won’t be enacting this one, or doing much preparing of meals at all, as long as I am on this same project and without someone to cook with for three-four nights a week.

I will, however, be changing some choices when it comes to the meals that I do eat out – even eating out has a whole new feel to it after reading this book. My perspective now is that it’s an opportunity to seize: here are people who are willing to prepare lots of delicious options for you, many of which contain loads and loads of fresh fruits and vegetables, all in a portion that is more or less perfectly suited to your needs without having to worry about buying too many veggies and watching them go bad.

The one negative that I identified in Pollan’s recommendations was the fact that they seemed to be geared toward people who lived more or less inactive lifestyles. Many of the potential problems from diet go away if you just exercise a few times a week – if you’re really concerned about your health but are not willing to take that simple next step – it seems as though you could pour endless hours into researching, purchasing, and preparing foods and are very healthful (Pollan mentions a word to describe this situation – “orthorexia,” or an obsession with eating right, a disease still awaiting official confirmation) and only be fighting less than half of the battle.

I’m currently reading another book, which I find similar in its condemnation of the way the “system” works now and which offers advice on how to change things: “Cradle to Cradle,” by William McDonough & Michael Braungart. I’ll be posting that review (hopefully) shortly, I have about 80 pages to go.

Pictures coming soon

Yesterday I returned from a long weekend in the US Virgin Islands, specifically, St. John. The fact that I was greeted with sub-freezing temperatures and a lovely “wintry mix” in Washington D.C. only served as a reminder that earlier in the day I had arisen to an ocean view and seventy degree weather.

The majority of the trip was spent on St. John, and with good reason – it is the least developed of all the Virgin Islands, with a solid two-thirds being designated as national park land. It doesn’t have an airport, though, which means that to get to the VI, one has to fly into STT, St. Thomas Airport. The airport is a 15-minute, $10/person taxi ride away from downtown Charlotte Amalie, the main town on St. Thomas. Here you can find the lovely Miller Manor, run by some very kind folks, Marj and Harry, with the help of their young niece Susan and her husband Blaise – and of course the dog, Samson. Definitely not the lap of luxury but very hospitable. The honor bar with a fantastic view of the bay is a highlight.

Speaking of that bay, I must digress for a moment. Cruise ships are just about the most repugnant form of a vacation that I could possibly imagine, on so many levels. If I ever go on one… well, I just won’t, how’s that. Cooped up all day, let off for a few hours so you can shop in mall that is specially constructed solely for the cruise line and buy things that say “St. Thomas” on them… ugh. Not to mention that the local town is completely transformed by the doubling or tripling of its population that occurs daily with the swell of tourists, and not in a good way. The situation was very similar in Dubrovnik and, I’m sure, dozens of other coastal towns with ports large enough to allow cruise ships in.

Okay, digression over. From that cruise-ship-infested bay on St. Thomas you can take the ferry ($10/person) to Cruz Bay on St. John. The alternative route is to go overland by taxi to Red Hook ($12/person, 45 minutes) and then take a shorter ferry from there, but I would recommend the first option – traffic can be awful since, once again, the cruise ships dump about 30,000 people on land and clog up the streets from 1 to 5 each day. On the return journey this traffic nearly resulted in a missed flight; but only nearly.

Now for the good stuff: St. John. From Cruz Bay it’s a 30 minute shuttle with Mr. Frett up some very winding and treacherous roads to get to Maho Bay Camps. This is, in my humble opinion, THE place to stay when visiting St. John. The accommodations are somewhat close to camping, though definitely a step above that. The cottages have canvas tops, screen doors and windows, and a deck with a view. The restaurant that is located on the grounds is quite good; expect to pay about $20 for your meal (including the salad bar).

The camps are in a great location in the north-central part of the island, making it easy to get to Cruz Bay and Coral Bay, either via the taxi/shuttle service or a rental car (highly recommended because it’s really fun – more on that in a second). But there’s also plenty to do on the grounds themselves. Kayaking out to Whistling Cay and bringing along snorkel gear makes for a great morning.

There are some great restaurants on St. John – many are in Cruz and Coral Bay but there are two that I would recommend that are outside those two areas (and now that I think about it, one that is in Cruz Bay):

• Chateau Bordeaux. With amazing views of Coral Bay and a menu that changes daily, it’s an experience to be had. Entrees run about $35 a plate. The offer to try the seven-course tasting menu with wine pairing for $200 per person was politely declined.

• Miss Lucy’s. It’s fairly well known (and advertised as a “local favorite,” whatever that means) and for pretty good reason. Situated directly on the water, it can get a bit chilly at night, so bring an extra layer or plan to start off with a “Fufu drink” to get your liquid longjohns on.

• Sheila’s Pot. This is the one that’s in Cruz Bay. Make a left after you get off the ferry and Sheila will be there, cooking up some love. If you are less adventurous ask for the shrimp; if you are up for something interesting ask for the catch of the day. Whatever you ask for, though, that’s just the feature. The meal comes with plenty of side dishes built in, depending on what Sheila is in the mood for, and it can be easily shared by two people per order.

A grand total of zero out of those three establishments currently have a website – sounds like an opportunity to me…

I mentioned before that renting a Jeep (which translates as “car” on the island – other vehicles are rare) is a great idea. Pulling this off can be tricky for two reasons – during peak seasons very few rental agencies will have any left for you if you haven’t called ahead (so, call ahead, duh); but also, most places will only rent to the 25+ crowd. We hit paydirt unexpectedly at a scooter rental location named, appropriately, Scooter Rental. There they had one red Wrangler left and a more informal attitude toward the entire process. Check and check….

All in all, a fantastic five days/six nights. Anything much longer than that would have probably involved another island down there, many of which are just another short ferry away…

Since I didn’t register in NY in time to vote on Super Tuesday, I’ll vote electronically here, in the form that is best suited to casting votes in general: a preferential ballot:

1a: Mike Bloomberg

1: Barack Obama

2: John McCain

Beyond this point, if one of these three people are not running in the general election, I don’t know if I’d really want my vote cast in favor of any other candidate. Unless Arnold runs after terminating the Constitution (via amendment of course).

Super Bowl XLII was without a doubt the greatest I have seen. Two fourth- quarter drives, three lead changes, a defining play, and a coronation of a completely unexpected kind – Eli Manning as the king of New York.

I’m also glad to see that at least one national sports columnist has invoked Joe Namath and mentioned the prediction of Broadway Plaxico Burress.

So, I’m a little late in posting this, but last Sunday I did the New York Road Runner’s half-marathon. The race is one of five (one per boro) and was held in Central Park.

I did a minimal amount (read: zero) training for this race. I was going along surprisingly well, holding a 7:00/mile pace for the first 10 miles (first mile was under 6:30, yikes). After that though, I slowed down considerably after the combination of the cold (32 F at racetime), my attire (shorts), and the hills in the northern sections of the park started to take a toll on my calves. For the last two miles it felt like I was running with my quads only, and that large weights had taken the place of my entirely stiffened calves.

Pictures

… that lights a fire, under your ass.

Lately I have been thinking, as young twenty-somethings are wont to do, about what to make of this crazy little thing called “the rest of your life.” What follows is a not-necessarily coherent collection of thoughts that have been rolling around in my head over the past days, weeks, and months.

I see a rather sharp dichotomy between two career paths that have the potential to unfold before me. One path is the management path. This would likely involve staying with my current employer and working my way up through the ranks. This could conceivably be done on my current project but eventually it would be time for a change.

Another path is the developer path. Again, this could also be done by staying with my current employer. However, I have noticed that most of the people that make a career out of development are independent or sub-contractors. Most of them also know a very specialized skill and have been doing it for a very long time.

If I take this second path, I can’t really see myself continuing to be a developer that specializes in developing code for the big German software company that I currently am engaged with. I would instead want to be a developer that used more classic, less business-focused languages (C, Java, Python, etc.) to build solutions. I don’t see this happening with my current employer.

I feel a flow diagram coming on….

Before I do that though – there is yet a third path would for me to say to HR that I am ready for, in the words of Monty Python, “something completely different.” I have been trying to get a sense from other people I work with for the variety of projects that they are on and if there is perhaps another division that would be of interest to me. After all, I chose this job in the first place because I wanted to learn about business and how businesses are run. So option three is to switch fields and do more general management/business projects.

This would almost certainly be a move away from software and software development. However, it would be a good setup for some desirable jobs in the future:

• Project manager at large search engine company that rhymes with Boogle.
• Valuable contributor at a start-up of some (any) kind.
• Position at TechnoServe or similar organizations.

There are a number of personal development projects that seem like they would be a good idea to undertake. Some of them can be seen as direct preparation for some of the above jobs. Among these projects:

• Learn Spanish.
• Start learning Google’s APIs. Take their tutorials that they post on YouTube (for free!)
• Learn more languages (Python Challenge: get past level 6…)

I was watching a rerun of the Colbert Report and caught a segment on his portrait’s inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery for the next six weeks. Next to the bathroom.

When I finally do the museum thing in DC, this will be tops on the list.

I’ve been using Remember the Milk for a little while now and have been pretty pleased with the results. Today I stumbled across a service called Jott, which transcribes voice into text and can emails you the result. Two obvious uses: voicemails and transforming your phone into a personal voice recorder/to-do list generator. Since Jott will send an email to any address you specify as a contact, (e.g. your Remember the Milk inbox address), it’s pretty easy to integrate the two yourself by hand; however, poking around their blog revealed that the smart people over there have already thought of that and have automated the process. Kudos.

I just realized that you can also integrate Jott with Blogger, another Google service. I am testing it out now. This is test 3. I think, it’s going to work this time. listen

Powered by Jott

I am now fully 11 weeks into my first project. I think it would be accurate to say that I am just now getting the hang of things and reaching a comfort zone where I would honestly say that I am being useful and productive without an tedious amount of guidance and hand-holding from people who know more about the project and work than I do.

Is this a good way to do things?

In other, more specific words: Why would it ever be a good idea for a client to bring someone on to a project when that person has never done anything like it before?

The short answer is that it’s not, certainly not from the client’s perspective. (“Client” here can be a very generic term for anyone that is paying someone to do what they do.)

But does it make sense to bite the bullet and specialize? Learn a skill or an industry or a software package and know it inside and out? Be doing the same thing when you’re 50?

It’s a bit of a tradeoff, from your perspective. Specialization means you’re in higher demand (if you can find the people that need your specialty). It also means that if your specialty goes out of demand (or you can’t find your demand), you’re up a creek. The investment that you made of your time, energy, and money to specialize just went belly-up. You also could be facing the incredibly boring prospect of knowing one thing really really well. (This last point is probably more of a value judgment).

In my stumblings around the internet I came across a book called “Free Agent Nation,” by Daniel Pink. I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of it, precisely because of musings I’ve been having like the ones above. Hopefully it will have some insight into these ideas.

I would also like to know – if everyone’s a free agent, what makes a consultant special or different? Maybe not much…

Repost of some of my thoughts in response to Blair and Peter Singer on poverty. The basic question is whether we are “murderers” for doing things like going out to eat or to the movies instead of donating the money to starving children via a charity.

No, we are not murderers.

Objection number 1: I disagree with the proposition that donating money that would otherwise be spent on frivolities will directly result in someone’s life being saved. We’re not talking about me standing next to a switch on the train tracks here (or even riding a train to go out to dinner and not stopping because there’s someone on the tracks). The money has to go through a lot of hoops before it gets to the person that needs it. However, let’s ignore this objection and assume that I could take the $9.50 to go see “American Gangster” and buy someone $9.50 worth of food, saving their life. This leads right into…

Objection number 2: It’s not a solution. Maybe that money saves someone’s life for a day – it doesn’t solve the root cause of the poverty. Also – if I decide that the goal of my life is going to be to do the best that I can to do as much as possible to eradicate world poverty during my lifetime, the way to go about it is NOT to take a regular job in the States, live an austere life and blindly donate whatever you have left over to various charities. This is especially true for the people who will read this – because those people are bright young educated minds that have the potential to do so much more than that. You can’t achieve that potential by sitting in an apartment that’s in a bad neighborhood (so you could save on rent) and cooking rice every night (because you can get 1000 calories for 50 cents). So many of what Singer would call “frivolities” are actually how we learn about ourselves and other people and are actually tiny intangible steps toward doing great things.

Objection number 3: Not everybody is passionate about ending world poverty, or is the best equipped to do it themselves. What if Bill Gates followed Singer’s advice? And instead of doing what he loved to do he started at a very young age to take all his expendable income and give it away to “solve world poverty”? He’d be in middle management right now and even if he was the most compassionate human being alive he’d be sending about $50,000 a year to the cause. The world would be worse off in countless ways if Bill Gates had taken CHV 310 in college.

Objection number 4: As Monty Python would say – and now for something completely different. The first three points have been a little bit related; this one, not so much. Singer’s solution, taken to its extreme, means that everyone should have the same level of wealth, since theoretically you should keep giving until the person in need has as much as you. Even if somehow, everyone in the world could do this – and let’s take it even further and say that everyone can somehow “give away” their skills and knowledge so that everyone has an equal footing to stand on (this is starting to speak more to education than poverty). So everyone is perfectly equal in ability, wealth, experience, etc., through this magical transfer. And everyone has free will! Utopia.

What happens the next day?

People go back to work. And something I’ve come to realize is that whenever you work on anything, you’re making a bet. You’re betting that the training you take won’t be obsolete so fast that it wasn’t even worth your time to learn the skill. You’re betting that the industry you choose will continue to grow. You’re making all sorts of bets – and some people are going to lose them. And have less money. I am realizing now that this fourth point isn’t really related to the Singer solution at all, but I’m going to leave it because I think it’s kind of an interesting side track that someone might pick up.

That’s all I have on poverty. The other part, about dehumanization, is really disturbing because it took about a week of living in the bronx before I consciously realized that I was doing that every single day.

Hope this gets things started!!! Glad things are well (boring but well) in Kenya.

Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product. So each user’s news feed will contain items like “Bobby Smith is now a fan of Toyota Prius” or whatever.

Emphasis mine. Because this is not some blog using that choice phrase – this is the [New York Times Business Section].

Update: the choice phrase has been removed. Good thing I got a screenshot.

…at the New York City Marathon yesterday.

On the heels of Microsoft buying a stake in Facebook, I thought I’d create an account over at orkut, Google’s social networking site, just out of curiosity.

I have to say, I don’t like what I saw. I now have ‘close’ friends versus acquaintances? I’m asked to list my fashion sense (and am given a series of multiple choices)? Hmm. Doesn’t sit well. The sample pages I randomly took a look at weren’t too promising either. Facebook is also more aesthetically pleasing as well.

Perhaps things will start changing as Google’s social netwoking project starts to take off. For now my account with orkut will likely remain fairly defunct.

Historical note: first ever post via mobile phone.

Update: Google will open the orkut platform to developers.

The One Laptop Per Child program has the mission of bringing, you guessed it, one laptop to every child in the developing world. They haven’t reached their stated goal of a $100 laptop, but $200 still isn’t bad, and the laptops have entered “mass production” mode. You could buy one with the refund from your iPhone.

Starting November 12, they’ll be kicking off the “Give one get one” program – for $400, you can donate a laptop to a child in a developing country and get one for yourself to give to a child of your choice (or just keep, I suppose).

laptop.org

I do believe that this will be the first time in the history of this blog (if you don’t count NYTimes letters and writings on Gristmill) that I’ll be linking to something that I had a hand in writing:

Democracy, GDP, and Natural Disasters.

Frank Greve, a journalist who apparently writes for the McClatchey Washington Bureau and both the English and Spanish language versions of the Miami Herald, wrote an article about the original paper as well.

Not to quash the cross-continental conversation that’s been going on in the last two posts (especially given the recent press that it’s received), but there are two interesting columns in the New York Times from two very smart guys. The columns are currently jockeying for position on the most emailed list – since David Brooks is in the lead right now he goes first here:

The Odyssey Years

Of the new [life phases], the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood…During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another…Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.

And in the other corner, weighing in at a hefty 201 pounds (200 is his actual weight, the mustache adds the extra pound):

Tom Friedman with “Generation Q”

I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad…Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years?

Blair writes:

So how do you see this different richness operating in the consulting culture? Think about all that is consumed by Accenture on a given day. What do you think they could do to operate under a new paradigm? And how would we as individuals change our ways?

The first thing that jumps to mind is a conversation I had with a graduate student I was living with over a summer in Baltimore. She had a TON of hard copies of articles printed out that she was reading for the research we were doing, which was ironic because the research was on how deforestation in suburban watersheds led to more intense flood events. The response that I still remember was “Sometimes you have to cut down a few trees to save the forest.” I see a parallel here. My argument to justify the fact that Accenture consumes many resources every day is that the resources are being consumed for a good purpose, namely, to support the people who design business systems and processes that are more efficient and consume fewer resources once they are put into place. Accenture in particular can make this argument because of its focus on high-tech companies and technical implementations. Many of these projects provide the backbone for, say, a company to be able to host meetings with clients remotely instead of flying people halfway around the world to Japan.

The title of this post is a reference to the Letterman song, which is apparently a reference to Perry Como. In any case it makes me miss Rupert and the Hello Deli.

The previous post promised an update, which is obviously sorely overdue….

The assertion in the article that most strikes me is this: that “the best strategy…is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York.”

Is this not a physical impossibility? Every day in the dining hall at school we were reminded that if the rest of the world lived like Americans it would take five earths to support us.

The only way that this can happen is for people to subscribe to a new definition of what it means to be ‘rich.’ The definition must place a higher value on things that don’t a) consume as many resources, and b) produce as many carbon emissions.

I’m posting this now to make sure I remember to write about it later.

The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.

But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

From the NY Times Science section today.

Below is my first attempt at embedding a Google Map from MyMaps into a website. The tacks represent the locations of people that I know, some of whom are listed and linked to as “Fellow Travelers” on the right.

View Larger Map

Update on updating: Since the link is to a map in MyMaps, when I change that map, the map here is updated automatically. So if you don’t see your location, tell me and I’ll put it on there.

J'apprends français avec mon iPod tut le jour. J'emploie un podcast pour apprendre le français. J'egalement ai fait des flashcards. Bientôt je trouverai des leçons de vocabulaire.

My first game at Fenway and it happens to be a no- hitter by Clay Buchholz, a 23-year old rookie making his second major league start.

For all the flak that China is getting about ravaging its environment in the name of growth, when adjusted for purchasing power parity, it’s economy is remarkably efficient in terms of carbon emissions per dollar of GDP. Almost as efficient as the US. The key phrase in that sentence is, of course, “when adjusted for purchasing power parity.”

This and some other interesting graphics were on the sidebar of the very same NY Times article describing the terrible pollution problems the country has been having.

Continuing the long tradition of posts that focus on some cool new product or feature that has made its debut (or that I discover for the first time):

Google Sky

Well since it appears that:

• Blogger does not delete your account after an extremely long period of inactivity;

• Many many many friends and acquaintances are going to be (or are already) in locations of extremely wide geographical diversity;

• Much has happened since January of 2006;

I have decided to (hopefully) begin writing in this space on occasion. The subject matter may be more personal than it has been in the past, or it might be similar. We’ll see. Hopefully there will be more pictures, in any case.

My friend Laura is in a music class, and the other night they performed the songs they wrote. The concert was recorded, so go listen.mp3) to her song. Right now. It’s amazing.

_Yes, I care about the marsh and the woods. Albert was not gonna save them his way.

You don’t go through the back door with a poem and a bonnet.

You go through the front door with a tie, and you own the marsh and the woods.

That’s how you’re gonna save them._

Amen.

Clearly my lack of posts for the last, oh, 2 months has been the result of nothing interesting happening in the world, and the overall poor quality of the media coverage of said world.

Now, finally, there is something worthy of a post. Clearly the man who wrote the second letter down is a genius. His concision is remarkable, and his insights are so great that all world leaders should immediately turn their ears to him.

That man, of course, is yours truly.

I was at a talk/discussion with Dr. Allan Johnson last night, author of several books about white privilege. It was a good discussion overall, I got a lot from it, but one thing sticks in my mind.

He gave a story about a black man who founded and was now a partner in his own law firm in New York. The man goes into work on a Saturday, gets off the elevator on his floor and heads for his office. A junior attorney, recently hired and white, asks, “Can I help you?” The partner replies, “No, thanks,” or something to that effect, and starts moving toward his office. The junior attorney then asks again, more pointedly, “Can I help you?” At this point in the story the “aha!” moment is that the white junior attorney is questioning the black partner because of his race.

But as this story was being told I found myself questioning that conclusion. Maybe this is terribly racist, I don’t know, but I found myself thinking: Could a middle-aged white person walk into a partner’s office at a law firm in New York on a Saturday without being questioned at least once? Absolutely no way. And if you are a partner in a law firm and someone who is obviously a new employee stops you and asks, “Can I help you?”, wouldn’t this be a good time to limit this person’s embarrassment and introduce yourself, or at the very least say something wry like “Nope, just going to my office.”?

…just one very, very long lap."

…of the Seattle PI."

Pascal Lamy, Director General of the WTO, says today that “trade can be a friend, not foe, of conservation.”

I like this guy.

With Campus Club closing, “socioeconomics” are again a topic of discussion around campus. Well, around the Prince, anyway. Regina Lee, who stays on top of those sorts of things, writes this article which contains a good deal of information and interviews about the situation.

If the University wanted to make economics irrelevant in upperclass dining choices, it could do so easily. To explain, some basics.

Every Princeton student gets an expected family contribution (EFC) from the financial aid office. For students with families who are very unable to pay, that EFC is 0. For the 50 percent or so who don’t receive aid (or don’t apply), it’s $43,000. Each student then gets a budget, including a generous travel, books, and expenses allowance. The total is around $43,000. The University then makes up the difference between the student’s budget and the EFC, almost entirely with grants – no loans.

If the University wanted to do so, it could simply change each student’s budget to reflect the cost of whatever dining option the student chose, keeping the cost of the dining hall as the minimum that would be budgeted. This would wholly eliminate a student’s or her family’s finances from the decision, and would cost the University relatively little money.

Whether or not this is equitable – and whether it would change anything — is another matter entirely.

To ask the University for an even higher allowance for dining is in my mind nothing short of excessive. They already allot $4,200 per year – if more than that is needed, it probably should come in the form of a student loan. The interest is tax-deductible and doesn’t start accruing until after graduation. According to Regina Lee’s October 5th article, even the most expensive eating club’s board rate is only $2,600 more than the dining hall’s. Thus the absolute worst case scenario right now is a student graduating with something like $6,500 in loans for two and a half years of that eating club. Saying that you will graduate with just $6,500 in student loans would make about 15 million other American undergraduates green with envy — before you even mentioned where you got your degree.

Even if the student budgets were changed, and finances were no longer a factor, there might still be very little change on the Street. So many of the “problems” of the Street (if I may naively try to expound upon that subject in only a paragraph using cliches) are the result of people forming images, perceptions, and stereotypes and then only looking to confirm them. If you are looking to see stereotypes, you’ll see them. If you are looking to see people being exclusive, you’ll see that too. If you are looking to be excluded yourself, you probably will be. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it’s the real reason that people make the choices about dining options that they do, not the all-encompassing catch-all of “socioeconomic factors.”

No time to wallow in the……….Miers.

Sorry, couldn’t help it. Actually there should be a lot of hesitating going on. Who the hell is this person anyway?

The New York Times comments today on the country of Bhutan and how they measure progress not in terms of GDP but GNH — Gross National Happiness.

First, congratulations to the Times for picking up on this late-breaking story. . Bhutan has been doing this for years.

Setting that aside (it’s not really important), here’s an excerpt from the article:

In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.

About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.

Boy, I guess equality is really important, right? Equal-size slices of the pie are more important than the size of the pie itself?

That may or may not be true, but this often-cited survey doesn’t show it. The question is poor; it leads the respondent to make a number of assumptions, which may or may not be true. One is that in the world where the average salary is $200,000, or in any world where the average salary is high, that basic goods will cost more. Similarly, the respondent will likely assume that in the lower-average-salary world, basic goods will cost less. In either case, the person is inferring something about how much money it takes to live in this hypothetical world, so the question is essentially “would you rather live in a world where you had to spend most of your income on essential goods or a world where you spent only a little on essential goods?”

In that case it’s easy to see why most people might choose a society where they don’t spend that much time/money on essential goods. For fun, let’s say that a person in the 200,000/100,000 society spends one month/year on food, rent, etc., and that the person in the 25,000/50,000 society spends 8 months/year on the same.

Now let’s ask a different question to these people. Would you rather live in a society where it takes you one month to obtain basic necessities but it takes everyone else one week to do the same, or a society in which it takes you 8 months to obtain those same basic necessities but it takes everyone else 10 months? That’s the question that should be asked. When 50 percent of people come back and say “the 8 months/10 months society,” let me know, I’ll be surprised.

Even if the original question is prefaced by saying that the actual cost of living is the same, you are likely to still get a good percentage saying they’d rather have half the income but live in a world where you make more than everyone else. This can be attributed to people taking the information that is given and ignoring it, since it would be difficult to believe in this case.

Frosh Trip 2005, the year of LH 101, photos are up at my photo blog.

He wound up fifth in line at a Citgo station pump several miles away and happy for the relatively short wait for $3-a-gallon gas. With talk of gas prices climbing as high as $5 a gallon, “I might as well have a full tank,” he said.

From the now-free Wall Street Journal this morning.

But after Katrina, the trend reversed and the skeptics became a majority, with 56 percent viewing government as mostly wasteful.

That’s from John Tierney today. All you ProQuesters can find it here. The whole thing is good, better than that excerpt.

You’ll also notice that I now have to use ProQuest to read the NYT columnists, since they are jerks and it’s a paid subscription now. In (perhaps related) news, the Wall Street Journal is no longer subscription. Oh the times they are a-changin'….

So what career gives you the most potential to give back to society?

1. High-paying consultancy job where you are making $500,000 per year by retirement and thus paying something like $200,000 in taxes, or

2. Low-paying job in the public sector where you you are making $80,000 a year by retirement and paying $16,000 in taxes but, in theory, are directly serving society.

Discuss.

The correct (Mises) answer is 3, the high-paying consultancy job where you are making $500,000 a year by retirement and thus paying something like $10,000 in taxes.

Feeling a bit like this dog right now.

Leaving on a jet plane backpacking trip tomorrow, will have zero contact or internet starting at about noon today. Here’s to hoping that the world is still standing when we get back.

This is just about the greatest thing I’ve seen this morning. The choreographing is amazing. Four guys in suits in a backyard produce the best music video I’ve ever seen.

So last post was on…Sunday, ooh, not good. Been a fun couple of days, moving back up to school and jumping right into Outdoor Action. Fun continues tomorrow with the remnants of Katrina forcing us indoors…

With a hop, skip and a jump I’m now a Flippery Fish in the TTLB Ecosystem. Much better than Lowly Insect.

Katrina is bearing down on New Orleans, and is scheduled to arrive at about 9 am Monday morning. It’s been upgraded to a category five storm.

Chris C. Mooney has some thoughts over at his blog. His article from May which he cites also contains this ominous tidbit:

In the wake of such a tragedy [a “direct hit from a powerful hurricane on New Orleans”], some may even question the wisdom of trying to rebuild the city at all.

Very important and interesting discussion going on over at Environmental Economics on “Green vs. Poverty.” I’ve already thrown my two cents in — the professor was Oppenheimer this spring. John Whitehead has a good concluding (for now) remark.

I’m also going to have to look into this Bjorn character.

New blogroll/newsroll is up. CNN got the boot after this:

“Has controversial Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson gone too far? Or is he on to something?”

Hat tip: Daily Show

…to the East side.

I’m now a Lowly Insect in the TTLB Ecosystem.

I think I liked “Crunchy Crustacean” better.

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I’m having trouble with the FTP transfer with photos…and when I copy and paste in code from a blogspot hosted blog, the photos show up intermittently. I think the thing to do here is to set up a “photo blog” which will provide urls for photos and then just link to them, since even if I can get the FTP to start working I will not want tons of photos on my H drive.

“I know next to nothing about oil production [in Saudi Arabia] or anywhere else.”

But John Tierney is still willing to put up $5,000 to say that the price of oil will stay low.

He’s found a taker in Matt Simmons, the peak oil Cassandra featured in Sunday’s cover story of the New York Times Magazine. The terms are:

Both parties put $5,000 into a joint account. If the average price for a barrel of oil for 2010 is above $200 in current dollars, Simmons wins. If it’s under, Tierney wins. Winner takes the contents of the account, which will include interest by then. Rita Simon, widow of Julian Simon, the winner of a similar bet with Paul Ehrlich, has gone in with Tierney.

If I had to put up some money on this, I would side with Tierney. 2010 is a little too soon. And 200 (2005) dollars is a little high. But, then again, there’s a reason that I’m not the one putting money on this.

Peak oil made what might be described as its MSM debut today, and in dramatic fashion, as the cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Weighing in at just about 9,000 words, the article by Peter Maass qualifies as a quick read just about as much as it qualifies as uplifting.

After describing some of the effects of peak oil on life as we know it, Maass then asks: “But will such a situation really come to pass?” (Collective sigh). Like it or not, Maass then says, Saudi Arabia is the key to the if and when of peak oil. It’s difficult to read the article and not be, among other things, a little miffed about the practices of Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC, between the vague numbers about output and reserves and the outright refusal to be audited. Matt Simmons, the peak oil “Cassandra” of the article, is frustrated as well — if the Saudis issued the necessary data, he says,

“It would then take anybody less than a week to say, ‘Gosh, Matt is totally wrong,’ or ‘Matt actually might be too optimistic.’”

For better or worse, Maass presents both sides of the story throughout the article, leading off the concluding section with “So whom to believe?” After citing a US DOE report [PDF] that claims the peak oil will be “abrupt and revolutionary,” the article states (in the very next sentence) that “Most experts do not share Simmons’s concerns about the imminence of peak oil.” He does, however conclude by saying that,

When a crisis comes — whether in a year or 2 or 10 — it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.

For more on “PO,” check out Dave’s post handicapping the Hamilton v. Kaufmann, free-market v. intervention discussion.

More evidence that the letter editors at the New York Times have no standards ;–)

What could be even more appalling to James Howard Kunstler and company than the suburbs? The exurbs.

If the extension of government services to the suburbs is a huge money sink, the extension of those services to the exurbs is a black hole. This is one issue mentioned in the three letters to the editor in response to the NYT article.

KB Home is the big, bad developer in this story, and the exurb in question is New River, Florida.

They know almost to the dollar how much buyers are willing to pay to exchange a longer commute for more space, a sense of higher status and the feeling of security.

…

The answer, the company decided, is that a house in New River must be $12,000 cheaper than the same house in the north Tampa suburbs, 15 minutes closer to downtown.

Suddenly, the situation described in last week’s Washington Post article doesn’t sound that bad — many things are a five-minute drive, and everything is a fifteen-minute drive away.

The effects of three-dollar gas occur on different timetables in different sectors of the economy. The retail industry may be feeling the effects already. It takes longer for people to switch to more fuel efficient cars, and even longer for people to express that they value a shorter commute by increasing the demand for homes that aren’t “in the middle of nowhere.”

Might it be time to concede that people are unwilling to relinquish cars and instead promote communities where car use can be minimized?

I think I have discovered the word for a lot of what I’ve been mulling over lately: heuristics. See my rambling comment this morning for more.

It’s also a good feeling to see that Daniel Kahneman, who will be my professor this fall, is mentioned in almost all of the material related to the matter.

Matt Welch at Hit and Run comments on this New York Times editorial, which includes such choice phrases as “But blogs are often just a way of making oneself appear on the Internet” and “reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.” Enough to send most people running for the dictionary Merriam-Webster online.

Reminds me of a quote attributed to Gandhi:
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Right now it looks like they are in the ridicule phase. A futuristic vision of the fighting stage (New York Times sues Googlezon) can be found here by clicking on the EPIC 2015 link.

An excerpt from the comments at Hit and Run:

Now that newspapers are finally figuring out that bloggers are making an end run around their news monopolies, can the government be far behind?

After all, bloggers and gamers are making way more peaceful contacts with people from other countries than the State Department, and not even bothering with a passport.

Comment by: Larry A at August 5, 2005 03:30 PM

—–

and not even bothering with a passport.

Shhhh. Don’t give them any fancy ideas.

Comment by: Stretch at August 5, 2005 04:16 PM

Citing the Text has made the jump to a Crunchy Crustacean in the Truth Laid Bare Bear ecosystem, bypassing Multicellular Microorganisms and Wiggly Worms.

For all the hubbub about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London that eminent domain could be applied to cases where “economic development” was the public use in question, the response of the state legislatures has been swift. The decision did not prevent states from making their own laws regarding the scope of eminent domain, and public opposition to the ruling has been widspread and bipartisan. An article in USA TODAY detailed the states' response and had this to say:

In Washington, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said his office received more calls from constituents angry about this case than it did for the Supreme Court ruling that limited displays of the Ten Commandments on public property

…

“We don’t like anybody messing with our dogs, our guns, our hunting rights or trying to take property from us,” says [Alabama] state Sen. Jack Biddle, a sponsor of the law.

The Castle Coalition is a great resource for eminent domain issues and activism if you’re so inclined.

Tom Standage, technology editor of The Economist, writes in the New York Times op-ed pages on the lack of difference between bottled and tap water.

He also notes that for less than one fourth of the global annual spending on bottled water, clean water and adequate sanitation could be provided for everyone on earth. Standage therefore recommends that instead of buying bottled water, people instead donate the money to water charities to achieve this goal.

Bottled water does have one thing going for it, however. It’s price and distribution is much less regulated than municipal water systems, which tend to heavily subsidize water, making it available for free or very nearly free regardless of what has to be done to get it to the tap. The amount of water that gets wasted would drop dramatically if tap water prices actually reflected the costs of the water.

Standage also notes that much of the time the only safe water in the developing world is bottled water. This would indicate that the first world’s demand for bottled water (a “lifestyle choice”) makes it harder to purchase for those in the developing world, since the increased demand drives up the price. However, it is this very demand that makes it possible for bottled water companies to exist in the first place, and that provides a driving force for those companies to continually improve the methods they use to obtain and purify the water.

I’m now a contributor at the newly minted blog The Reasoned Right. I didn’t like the name at first, but I will admit, it’s starting to grow on me. The blog is….well, you might have to ask Rob about that, but my understanding is that it is a collection of libertarian thought.

Don’t you just love that new-car smell?

I watched Jon Stewart interview Rick Santorum last week on The Daily Show. I agree with the number of people who have called it a softball interview, but then again, there’s a difference between The Daily Show and Crossfire (thank god).

The flaw in Santorum’s arguments (which Stewart graciously allowed us to hear) is that he thinks that in order to build character in children as they are raised, we need to protect them from what he views as a corrupt culture that “surrounds” them.

Wouldn’t it take more character to calmly view the “corrupt” culture for what it is and reject it instead of never being exposed to it at all?

My two principles of tax reform:

• Make the return fit on a postcard

• Make people cut a check for the whole amount on April 15 Both of these are examples like I mentioned yesterday of policies that make sense but have no chance of being enacted, because

• The massive tax code and its pages of loopholes are a vehicle that delivers pork, which is the way politicians are reelected, and also keep tax shelters in business.

• If people had to write a check for 20% of their yearly income once a year, the government would see a huge rise in the number of people that just couldn’t pay the amount. The benefit to #1 is obvious. The benefit to #2 would be that people would feel the effects much more deeply and would be a little more interested in where their money was actually going.

*Title adopted from Jerry Taylor’s article on Chevron’s “Will you join us?” campaign.

The other interesting implication about the philosophy of libertarianism is that the stock answer when it comes to the question of “What we should do about [whatever]” is that “we” (which typically means the government) shouldn’t do anything. Government should be enforcing property rights, and that’s it. Previously, the government had a justified role in doing some things because individual citizens couldn’t feasibly get the job done themselves. Building a national highway system or postal system are examples.

But now there are two developments that argue for limiting the role of government strictly to property rights enforcement and maybe defense. That excludes evironmental regulation intentionally. One is the internet and the communication that it facilitates. People can now do the regulating on their own because of this. Markets are efficient in ways they never have been before, and internalize externalities (or at least have the capacity to) like they never have before. The second reason is that there is no longer any lack of companies with the necessary capital to tackle such projects that previously only the government could handle.

Let’s look at the phrase What “we” “should do”

“We” typically means the goverment. You know, that system where people elect other people to represent them even though they’ve never met before and then the elected ones ignore any input from the people they are supposed to represent, but then try to “help” those people by demanding 20% of their income to craft and implement policies that may or may not have anything to do with their constituents and do it in a room hundreds of miles away.

“should do” means what the government should do in order to bring about the best possible society, whatever the hell that means. Everyone’s going to have a different opinion on that, and they really are all equally valid, since everyone is going to put different values on different things, such as a place for the elderly or environment in society or a strong social net or schools that build that person’s definition of “character.” They are all based on the frame that you view the world through anyway.

When defined that way, “we” should do nothing at all. So what the other “we” should do is ensure that the government “we” does as little as possible beyond property rights and ensuring that “we” the people (!) are free to do whatever we want (*see monkey wrench for a small disclaimer). Any kind of tax is an imposition on freedom, because you are being prevented from selling/buying a good or service at the price you want to buy/sell it at. The more government functions that get the axe the more transparent government becomes, the more people understand it and the less people fear it. This goes beyond just keeping the “government out of the bedroom” as Democrats like to say, because of the implicit value judgement that the goverment makes whenever it taxes or subsidizes anything. I think I know where the founding fathers get their inspiration.

Something tells me I am not the first person to come to this realization. However, this brings me to the second question of “what to do”: what to do when you come to this realization? Do you convince others that this is the way to go? (But what if this position is just the result of the frame that I’m looking through like everything else?) Do you work to reduce the size of government? Do you propose ideas that are completely consistent with this philosophy but have a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted because of the inefficiency of government described above? Do you simply accept that government is always going to be this blundering thing that takes 20% of everyone’s income? (There are two certainties in life — death and taxes) Do you then leave the bumbling entity to its own devices and realize that the only way that things get done is through the private sector and start a company or get a job with one? This reminds me of a joke/saying:

The New York Times is read by people that think they should run the country, the Washington Post is read by people that think they do run the country, and the Wall Street Journal is read by people that actually run the country.

But back to the questioning. Do you take advantage of the fact that you’re in a position that makes it pretty easy to get one’s daily bread and water and use the plethora of the resulting free time allowed by the cumulative technology of 10,000 years of human existence? Do you keep reading Catallarchy and Cato? (Catallarchy is great. It really takes on a forum-esque feel, with people asking genuine questions and those who are more knowledgable politely responding except when amazingdrx gets involved (e.g.). Scott Scheule dropped by after my last rant — his comment seems to embody the spirit of the site). Do you content yourself with simply philosophizing all day? Or do you further said technology, out of a sense of duty toward the preceding generations who have served as the giants whose shoulders you stand upon? Let’s say you lose your mind and decide to go into government. Do you go as an independent and get nothing accomplished or do you compromise and join the party that is closest to your beliefs ® and dismiss things like fundamentalism and marriage bans as blips on the radar that are necessary to win elections? But if you choose (D), isn’t all you are doing framing your work differently anyway? I used to be convinced of that but now I’m now so sure, which is why ® is up there next to “closest to your beliefs.” Editor’s note: that’s still pretty far away.

My current pick is to work to further said technology. In the private sector. But still blog like crazy, satisfying the need to philosophize.

Jonathan H. Adler has a post over at The Commons about how we might interpret the classic Dr. Suess tale of The Lorax (full text).

He drills it. The reason that the situation ends in tragedy is not the greed of the Once-ler or the consumer society that buys up the thneeds. The reason, in fact, is that the Truffula trees are part of the commons, unowned. As one of the commenters at The Commons points out, someone who wanted to make money would have managed the forest of Truffula trees, not chopping them all down. But if the Once-ler had done that, someone else would have chopped the trees down instead of him. There would be no legal recourse against anyone who did this since the trees are not owned by anyone.

Ergo, property rights and private stewardship are the key to environmental protection.

It’s a conclusion that leads to institutions like The Nature Conservancy, whereby you can designate that land is not to be developed or used by humans, by donating the actual land or giving money to buy such land. Preservation has a price, in other words.

There is something peculiar about this, however. If I acquire some land and decide to donate it to the Nature Conservancy, is the guarantee that this land will never, ever be “developed” for the rest of human history, at least as long as the Nature Conservancy is around?

This same issue of legacy comes up in a myriad of other places (Social Security, the estate tax). It’s not a novel idea, either — The Odyssey largely deals with the idea of fame and going down in history and leaving your mark on the world for future generations to see.

If the up-front price that I pay to buy a piece of land entitles me to determine its use for the rest of the Earth’s lifespan, I’d say I should be buying up all the land I can get.

I got into an interesting if not heated IM conversation the other day about Laura’s post. (As an aside, Laura: GET A BLOGGER ACCOUNT. LiveJournal doesn’t have a permalink feature, so I’m hoping that linking to the comments page will work). Anyway, I’m going to copy the part of her post that we were discussing. It’s long so I’m going to bold some things for emphasis.

The second thing I’ve been struggling against is a growing feeling of disillusionment with the world in general, particularly American society, more particularly American consumerism and religious fanaticism and racism and the media. And apathy, maybe that one most of all. Most of this is a result of my experience with teaching social science classes (as I said already, a very positive experience) and with attending lectures and optional seminars at GS, and from hotseat conversations. We discussed a lot of issues that are really important to know about, and that I wish I had learned about at the students' age, but discussing so many in such a short period of time is discouraging. So many of these problems, like the injustices and human rights violations that go along with free trade; the racial inequities that have developed from a hundreds-year-long legacy of private and governmental discrimination; the objectification, sexism, racism, and heterosexism displayed by and transmitted through advertising; the inadequacy and misplaced values of American primary and secondary education; and the despicability of corporations in general require an entire transformation of our culture to be addressed or solved. They require changing the minds of an entire citizenry, as well as the unconscious assumptions, values, stereotypes, and priorities that shape opinions. I just feel so insignificant. More and more I realize I want to do something with my life that will make a difference; I want to fight injustice in some way. But there are so many injustices, and they’re so big and structural and systemic and fundamental, and I don’t know how I can even make a tiny dent. I’ve gotten more interested in being a teacher this summer. Even though it’s just a tiny part of the equation, I believe education is the best tool with which to approach a lot of these problems, and maybe I could give a few kids some moral outrage, if nothing else. One of my biggest frustrations is the apathy of the American public, including a lot of the enormously gifted students I helped teach (although not all of them, and a lot were much more aware by the end). There’s a refusal to accept responsibility for activities we are complicit in, as consumers (i.e. third world sweatshops), as citizens (who allow our airways and government and lives more generally to be controlled by corporations and a media that is the puppet of those corporations), as participants in a variety of unjust systems. If we are just passive participants, we don’t feel we bear any of the guilt. Acknowledging the failures of the systems is a good enough moral accomplishment (most don’t even do that much); actually changing the system is too much to ask. We refuse to recognize our obligations to others because we fear they’re too much for us to bear and that what we can offer is insignificant and that others won’t join in; of course, the problem with this thinking is that as long as everyone thinks that, nothing happens, and as soon as everyone stops thinking that, everything can change. But how to make everyone realize that our society is fucked up and we have the power to change it—that is the question. I have to content myself with smaller goals than an entire cultural transformation, maybe. I also have to avoid escapism, or at least that’s what I think at the moment. Anyway, look at me, I’m sounding like a crazy liberal socialist conspiracy theorist, so Governor’s School must have been a success. This is all I can handle at the moment. I will write more later. I’ve missed all you readers.

Whew, okay, now this is me again.

After calling me “Friedman” almost immediately in the conversation for saying that working in a factory was better than starving, Laura then asserted that if corporations “force” people off the land and into factories, the people might be going into a worse situation, with which I definitely disagreed.

The reason I disagree is that Americans seem to have a kind of romantic nostalgia about indiginous peoples living the same way their ancestors have for thousands of years and see anyone who would change that as evil. This is despite the fact that most of the ancestors in question probably died of disease at the age of 30, if they made it that far. Life on the farm in the countries where people are being “forced” off the farms is nasty, brutish, and short. They are coming to the cities because if you have a few bad weeks in the city, no big deal — if you have a few bad weeks in the country, you’re dead. The more people that are no longer living a subsistence farming lifestyle that depends on the weather, the better.

Laura then said that these companies are making huge margins and it wouldn’t hurt them at all to treat their workers a little better. I disagreed with this as well because

1. Going to the other countries to find cheaper labor isn’t free. The company still has to pay enourmous transport costs, so you can’t directly compare American wages to foreign wages when you’re looking at how much of a margin a company has.

2. If there’s a company that could be paying its overseas employees more and still be making enough of a margin for it to be “worth it” to make the move overseas in the first place, another company (perhaps with a different definition of “worth it”) would be over there paying its employees more. Which leads into…

3. Going overseas is not a risk-free endeavor. In order to counter the risk that the government in the country might suddenly decide to seize your assets or that some other catastrophe might occur, a wider profit margin is necessary to get the company there in the first place (to make it “worth it”).

All of this seems to back up the assertion that I am now a raging libertarian, as I first (and more fully) discussed here. I gave reasons and everything.

I’m going to post more but do it separately.

One thing that really throws a monkey wrench into my whole new libertarian philosophy is the fact that people don’t always behave rationally. Even decisions that we think that we are basing on objective reasoning are actually often just gut decisions that are far more instinctual.

This is why I’m glad that I’m taking The Psychology of Decision-making and Judgement with Kahneman next semester. I hear his Nobel Prize winning stuff is all about just that sort of thing.

The New York Times Magazine ran as its feature article a few weeks ago a description of the framing wars going on in Washington these days. A friend of mine referred the article to me since the article mentioned a lot about George Lakoff, author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant.”

The article highlights something that is really incredibly frustrating to me. In my view, the idea of framing, which I think is correct, says that it’s not facts that “inform” people about the world around them, it’s the frame that they view the facts within. And the decision of what frame you use to view the world with is somthing that is far more dependent on individual factors than anything else — how you were raised, etc. Most economic decisions that most people make on a day to day basis are not rational decisions at all but rather based on the frame that someone views themselves through, which, like all frames, is completely arbitrary.

It appears this blog is an insignificant microbe in the ecosystem of the blogosphere. I’ve put the link in the side bar, but of course still don’t plan to update my blogroll, which is ancient.

In principle, free trade is good. But the US has got to practice what it preaches. Every time I hear someone praise CAFTA because of the agricultural market that it opens up for the US farm industry, I cringe, since the US farm industry is so heavily subsidized.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer came out in support of the agreement, citing the vote of Steve Latourette (my representative) as the “deciding vote.” Sure, it was 217-216, but that makes everyone’s vote the deciding vote.

I’m a real Reagan revolutionary:

At least you have come out of the closet as a dedicated reagan revolutionary!! Kudos for your honesty at least.

:)

The highway bill passed Congress recently, bestowing $286.5 billion in pork on all 50 states. Over 6000 projects are delineated in the bill, including a bridge to an island with 50 residents. It’s almost enough to make a fella want to hand over control of the highway system to a private company (hmmmmm).

I like the idea of road privatization on the surface. The road system is similar to the mail system in that when it was instituted, there wasn’t really a private company that had the necessary capital to take on such a project themselves. Now, however, we have FedEx and other shipping companies that do have that capital for shipping, and which would undoubtedly have branched into mail delivery were it not for the government monopoly. Why not the same for roads?

There are a few considerations here:

One is that a well-oiled transportation system confers a large positive externality on everyone, like it or not. As long as the economy depends heavily on the transport of goods and people (which is becoming less true, but still), any company that invests in building and maintaining the road system would not be getting all the benefits that resulted. This quality makes the road system one that lends itself (again, like it or not) to being a government enterprise, since the government has the power to extract taxes in exchange for this benefit. However, everyone benefits from a well-oiled FedEx system as well, and while the two systems are no doubt related, FedEx doesn’t seem to need to exact additional taxes (hmmmm).

Let’s say I run a private company whose business is the building and maintenance of roads. Since, as I said, the government doesn’t tax gasoline to discourage its use, let’s also say that there is no longer a tax on gasoline. It is now my job to collect some sort of user fee as a revenue stream. Some considerations for Andy the CEO:

I set up a toll system for all of my roads, a la EZ Pass in the Northeast U.S. Rumor has it that the technology used here is getting better so that it’s no longer necessary to even make cars to slow down that much. Essentially the same thing as a gas tax, a user fee, but if I invest the technology, it’s no longer such a blunt object, so to speak.

As a side result, roads that cost more to maintain cost more to drive on. Makes sense. If the gas tax is like attacking the problem of user fees with a sledgehammer, this technique is more like a single jack. Much less blunt.

My revenue stream is directly correlated to the number of cars I attract. More cars, more revenue. As an environmentally conscious CEO, this makes me a little worried. My incentive is to just pave as much as I can and slap lane lines down, right? But I don’t have unlimited resources. Since this is a private enterprise, my company now has to pay the full costs of acquiring the land we want to pave. If it’s not worth the extra revenue it’s going to bring in, it doesn’t get done. In addition, many people are going to make sure that it is hard for me to just grab up all the land I can, especially if it’s ecologically important land, and also make sure that there is at least some kind of disincentive to account for the negative externalities that more and more cars bring.

This makes me study very carefully the effects of adding a road or a lane on the system as a whole, and more specifically, the effects on the profits of the company. If, and this is admittedly a big if, the negative effects of the road take the tangible form of a disincentive for me to build more, then the profits of the company will translate into the benefit of the system. Even if the negative effects aren’t completely accounted for, there will still be the incentive to grapple with the very difficult issues of whether adding another lane or road is really “worth it,” rather than just adding a few lanes, watching the traffic fill them, and then saying, “See, I told you there was demand there.”

I am still hopeful that privatization of roads would lead to, as biopolitical puts it, “less pollution, less asphalt, and less taxes,” though. The tough issues that would result would be smoothed out if the jump, which is a big one, is made, especially with the market incentives that would result.

“Fine points” :o)

I’ve said before that if the government is going to tax or subsidize something, there had better be a really good reason.

However, the one tax that has the best reasons going for it is the gas tax. Five minutes in a room with James Howard Kunstler will convince most people of this, provided they don’t walk out. There are a myriad of benefits that come from less automobile use: more demand for walkable cities and suburbs, decreased carbon emissions, decreased dependence on foreign oil, less need for offshore and arctic drilling, and so on.

But the federal gas tax isn’t really a tax at all. It’s not a tax in the sense that a tax is usually thought of: a tactic employed by the government to influence behavior. The gas tax is not a “sin” tax, but a user fee. The majority of the federal, (18.4 cents/gallon) gas tax goes to pay for federal highways. More money to federal highways pays for smoother, less congested highways that in the end lead to more driving, offsetting the effects of the increased price of gasoline.

It’s easy to say from the sidelines that there needs to be a “sin” style gas tax — much harder for a politician whose job rides on the performance of the economy to muster the courage to actually enact one. Especially when public opinion polls come back looking like this.

I want to be a Spartan.

Okay, so I know that this is the second post that I’ve used this title for. But I really have no idea where this one is going, so it’s kind of a profilactic title.

It’s July 16th, so more or less the midpoint of summer. And also more or less the midpoint of the time I have committed to at Gristmill. Writing there has really opened my eyes to how frutstrating it can sometimes be to just be writing about exciting developments. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing for Gristmill but sometimes I just want to get out there and start working for a company that is doing these great things.

This is related to another conclusion I have “come to” recently, which is that the best way to really know what you’re talking about is to get out there and actually do something yourself. I’ve known that for a while, but I have discovered it anew of late. More specifically, if you really want to know how stuff works, say you want to know how people get food and water because you want to make sure that we are batting better than .667 when it comes to getting food and water to 6 billion people, the way to do that is to get out there and DO IT. Even more specifically, get out there and work for a company, or better yet start your own company, that deals in that sort of thing. You can write all day on your blog about the benefits to water market privatization or of polluter pays regulation but it’s all going to be based on second hand information until you actually get out there for yourself and see what the issues are.

Related to that is the “realization” that if issues were simple and cut and dry, they wouldn’t be issues. Dave Roberts at Gristmill recently brought up some good points related to this about how corporations are not “evil” entities bent on destroying humankind. There have even been cases where corporations have hidden the fact that they are doing some good for the environment so that they don’t attract the attention of radical environmentalists who will demand that they do more, more, more even though the environmentalists don’t have a clue about basic business practices.

Related to this notion of radical environmentalists, I think this is what Shellenberger and Nordhaus are getting to in their infamous essay and that Jeremey Carl is getting at in his posts on the death of enviroliberalism. Environmentalist as a term conjures up so many connotations for people, most of which are negative, that it’s time to abandon the term. Let Rush Limbaugh and the others continue to attack the straw man, beat the dead horse.

Appending the term to be “free-market environmentalist” seems to help a little. It’s more nuanced than that, though. It’s being an environmentalist while realizing that some of the most basic tenets of economics are, in fact, true. That there’s no such thing as a free lunch, that life is all about deciding what to do in the face of scarcity, and so on.

This is why I get so excited when I see stuff like this, economic principles being applied to environmental problems, because that’s what needs to happen. Or blogs like Environmental Economics, and posts like this one in particular. The first commenter on that post has a good point, but that is the gauntlet as it’s thrown down.

Some of this “get out there and do it” stuff might seem like an attack on blogging itself. But it could also be an attack on academia. You can study and theorize and write paper after paper. Why not just take your hypothesis and go to a company with it? That’s how it’s going to have an impact. Legislation is not the way to do it.

That last line also highlights a trend that I have been noticing in myself as of late: a surprisingly strong and ever growing libertarian streak. I might even say anarchism is rearing its head based on my limited knowledge of that set of ideas but I don’t know enough. Funny thing is, no more than a year ago I would have dismissed anarchism (like most people do) because all I knew of it were its negative connotations.

But back to this somewhat disturbing turn toward libertarianism. I read Catallarchy and Hit and Run. I get the Cato Daily Dispatch. I don’t agree that The Commons is a “libertarian greenwashing pitch” as this reader put it. On the other hand, I get emails from truthout.org and the Center for American Progress. But at the same time I find myself agreeing more with John Tierney than The Nation, and not just because Tierney references Monty Python and the Holy Grail and not just on Karl Rove (a.k.a. NadaGate).

Part of this may be frustration with what I perceive as partisanship on both sides of the aisle. If you’re fed up with both parties and the senseless bureaucracy of government, libertarianism is the place to turn. Another part of this may be that I really think that people can think for themselves. Everybody’s better off if no one uses their position of power to impose their values on others. This is not just that “moral values” bullshit exit poll question from last November. Any time you tax anything or subsidize anything, the government is imposing a value on its citizens. The government is saying that “they” think that you “should” or “should not” do [this] and therefore “they” will pay you or demand payment from you each time you perform the action.

Now this could just be a perception on my part (which is why I want to get out there and do it), but I would say that as we move into the information age, government is needed less and less. Many of the tasks that were previously allocated to government because of sheer size and the huge capital investment that would be necessary to form a company to perform a task (like getting mail to all 50 states) are no longer out of reach of the private sector (FedEx).

The government is like a big black box. You pay your taxes to it, and you get back…..what? Services? Unlimited use of government infrastructure? What if I don’t want those services, or want to use the government infrastructure? Too bad, right? The government should have to be very specific about where tax dollars are going, and then get (a very small amount of) them from the appropriate place. This is what is supposed to happen with Social Security taxes (but it doesn’t). The other thing about this black box is that there is no incentive to improve what comes out. It’s guaranteed to continue getting that revenue stream. And so Uncle Sam figures, well, I guess the services I’m providing must be agreeable to people otherwise they would stop paying taxes. NO! People keep paying taxes because they aren’t forced to write a check for the full amount every April 15 but instead get bled dry via payroll deductions.

So what’s to be done? Same thing that you do with a large business that sucks. Break it up. Make it transparent. Transparency is becoming essential for businesses now — why not for government? Instead of a department of transportation under the huge branch of the federal government, assign the task of maintaining roads (and especially deciding when new ones are built) to a seperate entity with its own budget that has to be more or less balanced every year. If it tanks, it gets restructured or bought out, maybe even privately (Microsoft Buys Out US Government.)

I can see two objections to this right away, though. 1. A private company would charge user fees for its income, so it incentive would be to increase traffic, expanding highways and increasing pollution 2. This could lead to an even further stratified society, since some roads (in places where people can pay for them) will be nicer than others.

There’s a group on the facebook at Princeton called “Afraid of Libertarians”:

For people who fear Libertarians (not Librarians)

More specifically, for people who believe that unrestricted capitalism would destroy society as we know it.

I think a lot of the fear comes from concerns similar to the two above. First, society as we know it can be improved (creative destruction, anyone?). And second, it wouldn’t be unrestricted capitalism. Going back to what I said before, I think that the rapid pace of improving technology is enabling people, not government, to be the restriction on capitalism.

A big problem is inertia. The highway system is already built. The tax code is already 4 billion pages. There are already hundreds of thousands of people that depend on government and the complex tax code existing for its own sake, called politicians and lobbyists and tax houses.

Where is the point in this? Nowhere. Hence the title. But I do think I will post something else, nonpolitical, about work and things…soon.

Microsoft is coming around to this whole “RSS” thing…funny, Mozilla did that, oh, I don’t know, a year ago…I think by the time I die (provided it’s of natural causes) Microsoft will no longer dominate anything.

Work is going well. It is really nice of the EPA to just go and publish great software like their stormwater management model for free. Who knew?

This is why I love New York City.

While I don’t understand why “today” is all caps, I have a letter in that paper today. It’s the third one down.

It’s not that good. I like what I write at Gristmill much better. I get more than 68 words there.

That’s all I have to say. If you want to be in awe of what could happen in the next ten years, follow that link.

In other news, it’s been a good week of surveying, direct discharge measurements, rain gage collecting, and computer modeling.

Pictures of some of the field work we are doing can be found here, under the “Urban Hydrology” section.

An open source university. Now there’s an idea…

All you faithful readers might have noticed a drop in the number of posts relating to the environment lately. That is because as of today, I’ll be sending all of those musings over to Gristmill as a contributor there. As a result, this page will probably take on a slightly more informal feel, if that’s even possible, and topics here will likely be more un-environment-y in nature. Perhaps even more of those “Update” posts where I state where I am in the country and such things as what I’m doing. But kindly direct your browser to Gristmill.

Why is a university like a sudden flash of understanding?

Warning! Only look in the comments section if you want the answer! I highly recommend that you follow the link and actually give the puzzle the old college try before you do :–)

In today’s LA Times, from Michael Kinsley. I will admit, it took me much longer than it should have to realize the sarcasm.

I am moved in to the apartment in Baltimore, and for the most part pretty settled. Two full days of work under the belt, as well as a little bit this morning to take some rain gages from the day before, when we got a good deal of rain. The summer looks like it will be very fun, very productive, and very intense. Definitely getting the feeling of drinking from the firehose. Sometimes this is tangible. We’ve been taking direct discharge measurements in a number of tributaries in the Dead Run watershed just outside Baltimore, with the aid of some velocity measuring equipment, river waders, and waterproof paper, which is possibly the greatest invention ever (I don’t know how people did field work without it.) The watershed is notorious for how fast it turns rainwater into discharge, since it is such a developed watershed and has some unique topography to boot. The apartment is very nice, very spacious, would probably be an 8-person suite if it were a Princeton dorm. Plus it is carpeted, which I don’t think we have in any dorm at school. Very cool.

On the list of things to do: letters to lots of people. Visit to a cousin near JHU in Baltimore. Possibly an Orioles game. We’ll see…

I like Keith Thompson. Courtesy of Sean.

Matt Miller proposes just that today in his guest column. Read the whole thing ;–)

I don’t think persuasion is dead. This gets, if it is really taken to its fullest line of thought, into some issues about how the human mind actually works, (How We Know What Isn’t So, etc.) and is really starting to crop up over and over again for me, which makes me think that a salient argument against taking a year off of school next year is that I won’t be in this class I’m really looking forward to, The Psychology of Decision Making. That is still up in the air…

Since I could do it without messing around online that much, I entered this essay contest today. Not really expecting to win, but a chance at $2000 is a chance at $2000. Can’t hurt, and it was an interesting topic to write on.

To Baltimore!

LPDD, of course, stands for “limited posting due to dial-up,” a situation which will be remedied by tomorrow, hopefully, and certainly by the end of the week.

One thing that is still cool even over 40 kbps is that GM GE (whoops!) continues to provide “free passes” to the Economist’s premium content in exchange for you watching one of their ads. The ads seems loosely tied to their new Ecomagination campaign, which makes it even better. I’d include a link to my post on the Ecomagination thing, and to Joel Makower’s thoughts on it which are the most extensive and interesting I’ve seen, but it would be faster for all parties if you just looked for those links yourself. They aren’t hard to find.

So I am back, and by back I mean I’m in Ohio again. The trip to the Shenandoahs was amazing. Lots and lots of sims, which included me getting hypothermic, hypoglycemic, impaled with a stick, homesick, offended by my co- leader’s extravagant lifestyle, rambunctious, ASR, slower at hiking because I “didn’t realize my pack had a hip belt,” and a broken ankle. Good times. The “real” weather was not great, but not terrible either, mostly raining and cold, but one day of pretty constant sun.

I should know more about plans in early June. Which is good, since I think Princeton would appreciate me having it figured out by then, since after June 30th it looks like things get harder.

I did not get any comments under the last post with any exciting news developments. All of you, and by that I mean both of you, failed miserably. Unless, of course, nothing exciting happened over the past week. In which case you’re off the hook.

Since I am leaving tomorrow morning at 8:45 for the Shenandoahs, and I have an obscene amount of things to take care of before I lose access to email for a week, this will be my last post until at least next Friday and possibly longer. This, unfortunatly, means I’ll probably miss the resolution of the filibuster debate. Bummer.

This will also be the first time since taking my Wilderness First Responder course that I will be without internet access for an extended period of time. That seems so long ago. Hell, the post before this seems so long ago, I was surprised that I hadn’t missed a day or three between updates. If big news happens, leave me a comment about it. It’s better than sifting through 400 stories from the Guardian in an RSS box.

The filibuster has a new and improved blog. That’s all I’m going to say for now…

The End of Poverty, by Jeffery Sachs, has made my to-do list. Review courtesy of AlterNet.

After finishing up with “stormchasing” this summer in Baltimore, I am still trying to figure out what to do afterwards. At this point, of course, I have completed registration, housing, etc. as though I were coming back to school as a junior, but I am also seriously contemplating taking a year off. (I have been for a couple of weeks now; see parts one, two, and three.)

The primary target as far as what I’d be doing has thus far been Engineers Without Borders. I’ve been emailing with some people for them and if I did this it looks like I would wind up working on projects in either Macedonia or India. This would be great. The only thing is I don’t know if it would last the whole nine or twelve months that I would be off of school. I suppose I could say I’ll start in September and work as long as possible and figure out the rest when I figure it out. Figuring out if I would have living expenses covered is another huge question.

Doing something in the States would also be interesting as well. I am keeping an ear to the ground for anything that might seem interesting; however, this is serving to convince me that maybe I should plan to do this after junior year and spend the whole year feeling out opportunities until something really cool comes along. After all, I will most likely only take one year off, so it hypothetically really wouldn’t matter when I did it.

134 US cities have pledged to cut emissions by as much as the US would have had to had it signed on to Kyoto.

This is, obviously, great news. When I took apart Kyoto, it was as an international treaty that exempted some major players in climate change and thus strayed from the idea that a treaty should get everyone to “sit down together.” If individuals or cities want to take the first step themselves, more power to them (pun intended); many people it seems are starting to see the writing (or the thermometer) on the wall and realize that this is going to be dealt with eventually and it’s profitable to mobilize sooner rather than later.

I have completely finished three classes. At 10 AM tomorrow, but more likely much sooner, as in 2 hours, I will be done with four. Last exam is on Thursday. Then to the Shenandoahs for an LTT, home for 3 days, and then back to Princeton to drive a U-Haul to Baltimore.

Not cool, New York Times. Not cool. You are forcing me to think about actually subscribing. I don’t like that. It’s also probably not going to happen, so take that.

Is it me or is The Tory getting less offensive? Even a better publication perhaps? Ira Leeds' opening letter speaks of the Socratic method in high regard and makes legitimate points about academic debate. They publish a poignant letter to the editor even though it rants about their Rant (and whose author I agree with and whose point I take a step further: he says that there is a glimmer of good in the pages past the Rant; I would say that in this issue the glimmer is becoming a light). Follow that up with an article about tax reform, a Wilsonian world view, and some necessary concerns about PCAIR, and you’ve got some quality on your hands. The problem is that most people have already made up their minds about the content coming from the Tory and will probably pitch it with exams approaching. I would read it. You can get it online too if it doesn’t come to your mailbox.

I am currently talking online to Leroy, OH, via SKYPE! Or as I like to call it, (pun intended) the greatest thing since sliced bread. Take Tom Friedman’s advice. Go to Skype.com and download it now. If you are at Princeton and have one of those standard-issue Dells you don’t even need a microphone or headset or anything. It’s great!

This post at MyDD is really interesting. Not only does this study go, as promised, beyond red and blue, but it provides a questionnaire (one page) that you can fill out to determine which group you would have fallen into had you taken the survey. The questionnaire itself is a little lacking, since you only have four choices for each question and some of the wording is dubious. But very worth a look.

Apparently, I am an “upbeat,” which Chris Bowers is ready to throw in with the Republicans, and which one of the commenters has identified as the “mythical swing voter.”

GE launched a series of ads touting what it calls “ecomagination” two days ago. Since then it’s been mentioned at Gristmill and by Joel Makower, among others. It’s very exciting. And their sketchpad is cool as well.

The filibuster continues, in Washington DC now. Both NJ Senators are slated to speak.

My paper is cranked out; I now plan to sit on it for a few hours and then make some final changes before I email it in at 4. If you really want to, you can read it here.

In the meantime, I am going to start working on putting together my NGO proposal for wind power development in Turkey for NES 265.

“Screw Kyoto, Go Apollo.”

This is essentially my thesis for my GEO 339 paper.

Explanation later.

Continuing the streak of posts which require very little work on my part, my article is up on the Idealistic Nation’s website.

“The Dissident” made its campus debut today, and I have to say that while I was suspicious at first of a magazine that seemed to espouse dissidence for its own sake, I thought some of the articles were pretty good. One is by Bryan Caplan, who writes for EconLog if I’m not mistaken. His article on economic illiteracy was particularly good.

Working the filibuster tomorrow from 8-12. Come out! I am hoping that some of the people who have opposing views will be up by now. I heard there was a spirited yet extremely civil debate/discussion last night. Good stuff.

Filibustering went well this morning; the time really flew by. I wound up reading The Outward Bound Wilderness First Aid Handbook, one of my favorites.

On a non-filibuster topic (and I won’t even get into how ridiculous the HardBall interviews were), the Pacific Research Institute released their Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. It’s on my to do list.

One thing I didn’t really mention about the Death of Environmentalism essay was its section on “groupthink.” This is more or less a direct quote:

Engineers have a technical word for a system that doesn’t have any feedback built in: “stupid.”

Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that the environmental movement suffered from a severe lack of feedback, which has contributed to its decline. I don’t know enough to wholeheartedly agree or disagree with them, but it brings up an interesting point, that even if you really think that the authors have really hit the nail on the head, even if you think that they are absolutely right and should be hailed as the new leaders of the environmental movement, that doesn’t mean that whatever they say in the future should go unquestioned.

This reminds me of a saying I once heard about the Buddha, badly paraphrased: Do not believe what I say because I am the Buddha: go and find out for yourselves. Also insert cliched Socrates quote here that the unexamined life is not worth living.

On a further related note, Siddhartha (a great Hesse book by the way) held his own in the recent poll on Point:

Deathmatch!!!! Who would win?

Gandhi: 13%

Mother Teresa: 7%

Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha): 30%

Martin Luther King Jr.: 35%

Pope John Paul II: 15%

Couldn’t help throwing that in :–)

The Frist Filibuster Protest can be seen on HardBall tonight on MSNBC for those with cable at 7 EDT, as well as on CNN tomorrow, presumably on Inside Politics, but I don’t know what time.

I will be reading at 8 AM tomorrow morning, which you can watch live on the webcam. I haven’t settled on what to read yet, so if you have any suggestions for reading material, let’s hear them.

Currently being filibustered: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as performed by the “Filibuster Players.”

In lieu of the “liveblog” that obviously didn’t take place yesterday and which Laura found so amusing, I thought I’d attempt to distill the “Values in Nature” conference into this post instead, or at least the parts that I attended.

In my view, Shellenberger and Nordhaus have hit the nail on the head. Read their paper. It is seminal. Also read it because what I’m about to say probably isn’t quite an accurate representation of their views, so if you want to cite them, read the paper. Anyway. The challenge of climate change needs to be recast, and the usual suspects in the environmental world are not the ones to do it. This isn’t so much a reflection on these groups as it is a reflection of what gets across to people. As soon as people see that the source of a message is from one of the old school environmental groups, they tend to pigeonhole what the person is about to say. They also tend to make the assumption that in order to help the environment, we need to hurt the economy to do so. This is not true. I’ve pointed to them before, but I’ll do it again; The Apollo Alliance is helping to prove just the opposite. Regulation of the economy creates jobs since somebody has to, say, install scrubbers on smokestacks to catch SO2. The Apollo Alliance comes across really well in blue-collar areas of the country, ones that typically could not be bothered with the environment. But it’s not that these people don’t care about the environment. As soon as the idea is pitched and people realize it will create jobs, people start talking about the benefits that it will have for the local environment as well.

The assertion that environmentalism is dead comes out of this fact, that traditional environmental groups are not able to get their message across, primarily becuase they tend to insist on using the “louder and slower” technique. They say, “well, the American public just doesn’t understand the issues here, or the science. If we could just get them to understand that, then we’d be okay and they would change behavior.” Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that this is not the case. You need to cast things in an aspirational light, they say; there’s a reason that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an “I Have a Dream” speech and not a “I Have a Nightmare” speech.

When asserting that environmentalism is dead, the paper naturally drew some criticism from those working in environmentalism. I think that the title served to draw much needed attention more than it was an actual pronouncement. The authors certainly don’t want to see people stop trying on the environment. After this flavor of environmentalism dies, there will of course be some new form that comes out of it. The people who were probably most upset initially were the ones who have already realized what the authors are asserting, the ones who were calling the paper, as Michael Oppenheimer put it, “obvious”; however, these people are the ones who are going forward and becoming the new face of environmentalism, the face of an environmentalism that actually works. One of these groups is The Breakthrough Institute, closely tied with Shellenberger and Nordhaus, as well as George Lakoff and the Apollo Alliance, who not surprisingly, also has it right, although I don’t really think they were upset at the publication of the paper.

The whole thing is very exciting. The environmental movement is in good hands. While the whole thing does seem fairly optimistic, I really think that it’s got good reason to be. If the framing that they are using can inspire optimism in everyone, we’ve got the game won, since the technology is not what is lacking here.

I had a meeting about the plans for this summer in Baltimore, which are starting to really take shape. I am very excited about them, because the phrase that came to mind in the meeting was “drinking from the firehose” just because there are so many things that I am hearing and bookmarking to learn about later, just letting things wash over me and learning by osmosis as they say. This is always a very exciting feeling and in th past it has always worked out well in the end, so that is a good sign.

As I was thinking about that, however, it occurred to me that some of my concerns/ideas/worries/impulses that have gotten me to start thinking about taking the year off next year are related to this whole idea of drinking from the firehose. There are SO many things that I see all the time that I want to do something about, that I am earmarking for later exploration. While I know and am upset that going somewhere with Engineers Without Borders would only be focusing on a few specific things and completely ignore others, in another sense it is the epitome of drinking from the firehose and totally immersing yourself in a problem or issue.

On a related note, devoted readers (all three of you) will notice that the title has changed. After contemplating this for a while, and considering “What About Everything” as another possible title to reflect what I’m talking about, I went with “Citing the Text,” since I feel that is such an integral part of blogging and, well, everything else.

On an unrelated note, Laura is doing a great job at the Frist Filibuster; I’m watching via webcam. And I think that Shellenberger (see previous post on The Economist for who this is) just asked me to watch his laptop for him for a second while he went to the bathroom. I’m blogging from the panel discussion which is about to start with Shellenberger, Nordhaus, Oppenheimer, and Peter Singer: way cool, I might even “liveblog” it as they say.

So I am now blogging from the filibuster tent at the Frist Center Filibuster Protest. We’re listening to The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, as read by Katy Lankester. This is one of the times that I am really impressed with Princeton students, to keep this up around the clock. This is a really nice PowerBook G4 that they’ve got here, although I have no idea whose it is. Apparently I am now the organizer on duty…

…the interesting cut.

So I thought I’d give some reasons that I want to go work for Engineers Without Borders this coming year.

Initial reason that comes to mind (I am really shooting from the hip here, I have no plan for this post) is the fact that I can sit here in New Jersey and blog on and on and on about how we should be reaching out to the developing world and helping them to make the transition from the “gap” to the “core” (see Thomas PM Barnett) and how we should be doing it in a way that is going to be sustainable and environmentally sound and help to connect them with the developed world and all these other buzzwords. The bottom line is that I have no idea if this is actually something that works, that has real benefits, unless I go and do it. Theoretically, this should be a good thing. But right now all I am doing is framing scripting this whole story. There might be empirical evidence that this sort of thing is good, and it certainly makes sense. But I have become convinced that there are plenty of people out there who are watching this happen. This occurred a while ago, namely when we had our research workshop for NES 265 (Political and Economic Development of the Middle East) and they put together this research guide for us and I was blown away by it. At that point (March or so) I was thinking, wow, somebody should really go into these developing countries and look at all of these factors, and then maybe we can have a basis for acting on that data. Game over after I saw all this. People already DO. This was my first realization that I had vastly underestimated just how big a number 6 billion is. There are SO many people. Even if a small percentage of 6 billion people are concerned with and working on this problem, that’s still a lot of people, and they have already done a lot.

This leaves me at the next logical step, actually going and doing something. This is another area where a lot of people are working. There are a huge number of organizations that are working on this sort of thing. Engineers Without Borders is just one. The Peace Corps, if done right, can be one as well. I want to do something like this, find out what works, what is possible, and what is just empty, buzzword talk.

This is going to get refined, of course, but that’s the “short” and immediate answer. For now I am going to head over to the filibuster.

I would like to add to that list of interesting things before the increased talk about China floating the Yuan.

We interrupt this blog to bring you some musings from Andy Brett (skip this if you’re interested in more important events like the filibuster protest, or Bill Gates backing up Tom Fried man, or the very interesting prime time press conference: Dems cry foul, Tierny and FactCheck, another organization I’d like to work for, say otherwise, and that doesn’t even get into the other half of the speech on his energy policy).

The basic idea, which I have been rolling around in my head for approximately all of 24 hours at this point, is that I would take a leave of absence from university next year. The plans for this summer would still be on (research on hydrology in the Chesapeake Bay watershed), and so would Frosh Trip in the fall (hopefully). But what I’ve been thinking about is taking the academic year off to work for Engineers Without Borders. There is a Princeton chapter who will be going to Peru for a month this summer. I don’t know if this would really be through the Princeton chapter, though; it seems as if they focus on things that are shorter term or over the summer, understandably. On the national organization’s website it says they are looking for committments of 6-12 months, so maybe the student chapters are exceptions when they do shorter projects. I would definitely want something longer so that it would fill the entire time off, or at least nine months of it to get me to summer 2006.

I would graduate in 2008 if this happened, since this would be a leave of absence and not study abroad, so no official credit would be given.

As long as the program included “room and board” (tarp and pita) and travel, although that could be fairly expensive, I would have no problem working with no other compensation. Just staying afloat is fine with me; hopefully Alan G. will keep prices in check while I am gone so my bank account doesn’t become worthless :–).

Language: Potentially take a crash course in Spanish or French this summer? I will be working 40 hours a week, but that does leave a lot of time left over; if this turns into a real possibility, I think that any language barrier would be doable.

Other things to consider:

Passport, that’s $100, but it’s good for 15 years and I was thinking about getting one anyway, since you’re going to need one from Canada anyway now.

Financial aid: I don’t think this will be a big deal, since it will just be postponing things.

Insurance: I have to look into whether the University Health Plan would extend to me if I’m on leave, i.e. if I could purchase it and if it is good enough, since it might not cover a lot of things that might happen. This brings up two more things:

1. Vaccinations: Likely out of pocket expense, could get costly, and

2. “Things that might happen”: Keep checking the US State Department Travel Advisories.

Also, a primer on insurance would be helpful. This isn’t the type of thing you can just buy on the street, apparently.

In the interest of length, I am going to cut this off here. Next post is a continuation, focusing on some reasons why I want to do this instead of a stream of consciousness that’s only helpful to me in getting things cleared out of my head.

I know. Kos again. I don’t want this to turn into a Kos-watch blog. But I am finally starting to sift through the RSS boxes, and it’s not even the second one down before I get to this gem from Kos. Seems he’s got his hands on the story about the Patterns of Global Terrorism Report getting canned (which you could have read about on my blog ten days ago) and he’s all in a huff. Nowhere, not in the post, and not in the 102 comments that follow, does anybody mention the fact that a completely new methodology is being used, which has more to do with the increase than an actual spike.

I take that back. There is now one person who mentions it. :–)

Over the past 54 hours, there has been a filibuster going on at the Frist Campus Center to protest Bill Frist threatening to use the nuclear option to take away the filibuster for judicial nominees. The website with updates is here; the live webcam is here.

My understanding is that the plan is to go for as long as people are willing to read. This could be a very long time since classes are over this week. I am interested to see the interaction at about 2 AM tonight between the protestor(s) (hopefully plural) and the revelers staggering home, as the protest is right on the way back from the parties…

Just listening to students walking by, the protest is certainly getting talked about. In addition to just what I’ve been hearing, there have been two articles in the Daily Princetonian, and a mention on CNN’s “Inside the Blogs” (see above sites for links). However, it’s a little disconcerting that a lot of the comments I have heard have been along the lines of “What are they protesting?” or “So are they for or against the filibuster?” I don’t really think that it’s all that important what the initial reaction is-just that there is a reaction and that people are finding out about what is going on here.

I could see this thing easily going for a really extended period of time. As in weeks.

Attention, Clevleand Plain Dealer:

Before you publish letters like this, can you at least demand some sort of coherent argument from the writer? This is a quote: “Don’t even think about asserting that [global warming is] a direct result of me driving my SUV 12,000 miles a year.”

That’s how the writer ends the letter. Were you going to tell us why we’re not allowed to assert that, Carl? Or just leave it where it stands, which is an unfounded and misinformed reaction to the fact that Cleveland is under a foot of snow right now. If this writer had actually read some predictions about the subject, he would know that increased variability in weather (and thus, snowfall on April 25th) is a possible side effect of global warming. Climate change will affect all parts of the world differently as weather patterns change and become more variable. Maybe the solution to convincing people like this is to let them know that parts of the world (Cleveland) might get colder and snowier, probably the last thing that Carl wants.

I’d like to echo Mikhail’s statement. Semester is almost over; blogging with a vengence after that.

The Energy Bill that just passed the House contains an interesting little provision: daylight saving time would be extended by two months, one in the spring and one in the fall, saving about 10,000 barrels of oil per day. Every little bit helps…

The Economist ran as their cover story this week an opinion column called “Rescuing Environmentalism.” It was spurred by the recent Death of Environmentalism article by Shellenberger and Nordhaus. The Economist declares: “They are right.”

To some extent I agree with The Economist. The movement that was started in the 50’s and 60’s, the movement that is what is stereotypically thought of when the word environmentalist is brought up, the movement of saving the whales and forming human chains around trees and aspiring to “The Monkey Wrench Gang” is dead or at the very least dying. This may be attacking a straw man, but the straw man I’m painting is still what most people think of when they think “environmentalist.”

The death of that environmentalism, of the knee jerk response that anything nuclear, anything free market, anything grown farther than 25 miles away, anything corporate, is automatically bad, is a good thing and a step in the right direction. If you think that there is no one left who fits into this mold, please see the comments of jdhlax over at Gristmill.

The Economist gets it wrong, however, by assuming that the entire movement fits into this mold. There are plenty, in the US in particular, who are redefining the “movement” and incorporating free markets, an openness to nuclear power (or at least an openness to talk about it), a willingness to consider cost benefit analysis, and an understanding that little things such as, oh, I don’t know, the economy matter too. See the Apollo Alliance, Grist, The Commons, just to name and link to a few.

While I suppose that this is skipping Earth Day/Earth Week, I found an interesting discussion of TV Turnoff Week. This is an annual campaign run by Adbusters and others to get people to not watch television for one week. This year it’s April 25-May 1. In addition, Adbusters is now selling the TV-B-Gone (at cost until April 25th!), a device that acts as a universal remote and will allow the user to turn off any TV in any public place to help remind people of what week it is.

The discussion is at Hit and Run, run by Julian Sanchez, who kicks it off by saying:

Except, naturally, they’ve found a way to turn what had been voluntary and innocuous [TV Turnoff Week] into something intrusive and obnoxious [the TV-B-Gone].

I like Adbusters, but I have to say that the TV-B-Gone is going a little far. Is it a pretty funny prank? Sure. But it does reek of the whole imposing your values/choices on others thing if you make it the kind of cultural revolution that Adbusters espouses. If you don’t like TV, don’t watch it. Instead of TV Turnoff week, just don’t watch it. Ever. That’s your choice. Instead of foisting it on others, let people make their own decisions. As far as the argument that if the TV is on in a public place (airport, restaurant, etc.) it is being foisted upon you I would echo some of the comments in the discussion that follows at Hit and Run: if you don’t want to watch it, move. If it’s absolutely unavoidable, which I have a hard time believing, stop frequenting whatever place it is, and write a letter to the relevant parties explaining why you’ve stopped.

On a related note, some asshole just came into Wilcox and turned the TV on…I’m going to go sit by the other couches. :–)

This article in today’s Washington Post caught my attention for two related reasons.

One is the point MacMillan makes about how critical internet access is becoming, and how it is becoming assumed that everyone has it, which isn’t always the case. Hopefully, this point will soon be moot, as cities like Philadelphia go wireless (although that is facing some hurdles). You can make the point that the people who are lacking Internet access are the ones without laptops to begin with; hopefully (warning, the optimism meter is through the roof right now) the fact that computer capabilities rise so fast will help prices to go down as well as things like wireless capability to become standard.

The second reason it caught my attention is the style MacMillan uses, at least in the online edition of the article. The text is absolutely peppered with links. It looks like a blog. This no doubt has to do with his subject matter and audience, but this is becoming more and more common in columns and even articles. Maureen Dowd does it (or, more accurately, an underling does it when she puts it online). The NY Times news department does it. This is the way things are headed. People want to read things that they can immediately see backed up, or to go off on a tangent if a point really strikes their interest. I’m certainly not predicting the complete collapse of the print media, since, as someone pointed out to me today (about the aforementioned Washington Post, actually), there’s just something about the actual paper. I agree with this, I like reading the hard copy and am going to have to figure out a new way to get my hands on hard copies next year. But just another sign of the times, which I commented on extensively in my previous iterations, and which I am thinking about discussing again, since it’s been a while.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this wound up in my RSS inbox from the Mises Institute today of all days. This is by far the most persuasive argument for legalization in my opinon (the economic one). US $13.9 billion annually in savings and revenue? Let’s go. Rumor had it that Marlboro had patented “Marlboro Greens” for the day when this happened, but I have searched and searched and cannot find any hard evidence that this is any more than just a rumor.

I am so proud of my Senator. (for once).

This situation has been really interesting to follow. Initially, there were reports that Sunnis had taken up to 150 hostages in a town south of Baghdad, as it turns out, this never happened, but the Iraqi Security Force went into the town, which is now becoming a source of contention since it looks like it may have just been fabricated by the Shiites to flex their muscles. The Iraq Blogs have been covering the rise and fall of this “fake crisis.”

The House just passed an Energy Bill, which, among other things, amends the Clean Air Act so that “downwind” states don’t have to meet stricter regulations util “upwind” states do the same. While the issue of air pollution traveling from state to state is a big one, giving some states exemptions is not the way to deal with it.

After nearly four months of virtually non-stop coverage of the Social Security debate, by now, everyone has an opinion about how the current system could be fixed. Yet, for all the commotion, relatively little in the way of creating legislation or even concrete proposals has taken place, and at the moment it appears that little will be done as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle express doubts about whether reform of the system is immediately necessary.

The debate and proposed reforms have brought to the fore the strange accounting approach to which Social Security is subjected. Social Security since its inception has been an “off-budget” expense, separate from the rest of the federal budget. The rationale behind this was that since the system would ideally provide a collective retirement fund for workers, this fund should be kept separate to prevent the government from using it to pay off other expenses, like the cost of building an F-16, for instance. Keeping the system separate was important since ideally, money received from workers would be immediately paid out to those receiving benefits. Surplus dollars would be credited to a trust fund, so that those who paid into the system would still receive benefits later on when they retired in case the system did not receive enough in payments from current workers to do so.

These peculiarities constitute some of the flashpoints in the debate. One of the specifics is the trust fund. For most of its 70-odd years of existence, the system has been running a surplus, and thus the trust fund has been growing. However, in order to prevent the fund from being eroded away by inflation, extra money was put into government bonds, which earn interest, hypothetically offsetting inflation and maintaining the fund’s value. But by putting the surplus into bonds, this money has effectively been spent. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Although separate taxes are collected for Social Security, the money left over after benefits are paid is used to fund other government programs or to pay down the debt held by the public.” This statement from the CBO, generally regarded as a trusted source, is the root of the contention about whether the presence of the trust fund actually means anything. Leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel have responded that the trust fund holds are “rock-solid” investments that merit the “full faith and credit” of the US government. The problem, however, is not that the bonds will be defaulted on, but rather that the money is essentially not there in the first place. In other words, Uncle Sam spent the money on an F-16 (and sold it to Pakistan).

The second flashpoint, related to the first, is the date dispute. Is it 2018 or 2042? According to both the CBO and the Social Security Trustees, the system will no longer be running a surplus by about 2018, as the baby boom generation retires and starts to draw benefits. After this happens, the system will still be able to legally operate because it has built up a surplus in the trust fund; however, to do so, it will have to draw from the trust fund, demanding its money back from the other branches of the federal government that borrowed it before in exchange for bonds. Social Security will then start adding to the federal deficit instead of subtracting from it as it does now. (As a side note, even though it is an “off-budget” item, the Social Security surplus typically gets thrown in with the rest of the government’s deficit, reducing it from $567 billion in FY 2004 to “only” $412 billion.) In 2042, the trust fund is projected to run out and thus legislative changes will be necessary to keep the system legally operating, but 2018 is an important date too since it is the year when legislative changes must take place in order to keep the system operating in surplus.

The mere fact that the system runs a deficit is not in and of itself a major problem. The contradictory views the two parties espouse when it comes to a balanced budget are ironic. Republicans are running large deficits on the budget as a whole right now, and yet want to fix Social Security before it starts to do so. Democrats castigate Bush for running these deficits, and yet would let Social Security go so far into debt that it legally could not operate.

One step that would help untangle this whole mess would be to take a unified budget approach, including Social Security with the rest of federal receipts and outlays. Since the original intent to prevent the government from spending workers' retirement money has been abandoned, this seems like a rational move and has indeed been advocated previously for this reason and many others.

If Social Security were to be included with the rest of the budget, economists would presumably make projections about it in the way that they make projections about the rest of the budget. The CBO, however, does not make federal budget projections for the year 2042 or even the year 2018. An immediate explanation for this is that such extrapolation would be of limited use because of the difficulty in predicting something as complicated as a national budget that far in the future. When the Social Security Trustees came up with the 2042 estimate, this was actually the “middle” one. There were two other estimates as well, on either side of the 2042 number. One had the trust fund running out in 2031 or so, and the other one had the trust fund not running out at all, but instead stabilizing around 2040. This discrepancy in outcomes makes the point that all projections going out more than a decade or so are very uncertain.

Given this uncertainty, those who claim that we should refrain from immediate action have a point. There are some certainties however. One is that the retirement of the baby boom generation will put a strain on the system, forcing it into deficit. A second is that even after the baby boom “shock” to the system has passed, the demographics of the US population will necessitate a change eventually. While birth rates have not dropped as precipitously as in other developed countries, it is highly unlikely that the demographics will ever return to the state they were in when the system was founded, with 13 workers for every retiree.

Further evincing the soundness of the “wait and see” camp’s rationale is the fact that this problem differs from that of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere; there is comparatively little lag time between Americans realizing that there is a problem and Congress being able to do something about it. The only delay would be in the legislative process itself, which can be accelerated if circumstances are dire enough. Ideally, any changes would be phased in gradually, but to extend this over 35 years, again, is not feasible.

While starting to change the system now to increase revenues would create the benefit of helping to decrease the federal deficit, at least if a unified budget view is taken, there is still time before a gradual phase-in must necessarily take place, even if 2018 is the target year. This gradual phase-in of a solution could take many forms, such as a higher payroll tax or a higher cap on income subjected to the tax, to name two of the most common proposals. It would seem, however, that Bush and the Republicans see this as an opportunity to advocate and push through a “solution” that would be anathema to Democrats, that of personal accounts. If the trust fund facade is recognized, I suspect that more people would be more inclined to put some of the money that they currently pay in to the system into an account that is specifically earmarked for them. After all, the original idea was to earmark the funds paid into the system for retirement specifically for retirement. However, regardless of the solution proposed, (Bush’s “solution” is in quotes above because he himself has admitted that it is budget neutral), both the true nature of the “trust fund” and the timeline over which such a solution needs to be enacted must be realized.

This does not bode well, especially since the author is in my department.

John Bolton should have to explain this incident before he gets anywhere near a diplomatic position of any kind. I would be interested to hear what he has to say about allegations like this one:

Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel — throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman. For nearly two weeks, while I awaited fresh direction from my company and from US AID, John Bolton hounded me in such an appalling way that I eventually retreated to my hotel room and stayed there. Mr. Bolton, of course, then routinely visited me there to pound on the door and shout threats.

and

He indicated to key employees of or contractors to State that, based on his discussions with investigatory officials, I was headed for federal prison and, if they refused to cooperate with either him or the prime contractor’s replacement team leader, they, too, would find themselves the subjects of federal investigation.

In the interest of transparancy, I read this via truthout’s website.

Larry C. Johnson, whom I saw speak at the Woodrow Wilson School’s colloquium, Rethinking the War on Terror, last weekend first posted this little tidbit on The Counterterrorism Blog. It seems that because the new methodology that the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) used for the 2004 year caused the number of significant terrorist attacks to go from 172 in 2003 to 655 for 2004, the State Department has decided that they’d be better off just not issuing their annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.

This is the report that, for the year 2003, was not even complete and was riddled with arithmetic errors, which Alan Krueger first pointed out on June 10th, 2004, in the Washington Post and later in Foreign Affairs with David D. Laitin, and which Jon Stewart later ripped apart. I don’t have that link, but if you go to Alan Krueger’s lecture, “Misunderestimating Terrorism,” at 1:00:00, you can see it there. The talk is good in its own right.

This is fairly ridiculous. You would think that the State Department would not resort to not issuing the report entirely, but evidently it is so afraid of the backlash that might come if the Democrats can now cite that terrorism is clearly and sharply on the rise. Well, the backlash that it can expect now is even worse, since the numbers are out and it also looks like they are trying to push them under the rug. Larry C. Johnson was a good speaker when I saw him, and he puts it well in his post, calling for an “apolitical assessment.”

Just publish the thing and explain that the definitions have changed over the past year. This should not be a big deal.

The cuts to agricultural subsidies that were a part of the Bush budget don’t look like they will survive. The cuts would have saved $8 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO, by lowering the maximum subsidy a farmer could get from $360,000 to $250,000 and by cutting all subsidies by 5%. However, the cuts for the Department of Agriculture as a whole will still probably be between $2.8 billion and $5.3 billion, so something is going to have to go on the chopping block.

According to Senator Lincoln, a Democrat from Arkansas, lawmakers have heard the “roar from the heartland” and are responding to it. It “unfairly rests the deficit reduction burden on the backs of working families” according to her statement on the issue. The obvious counter to this is that if your income is more than $250,000 annually, most people don’t think of that as the “back of a working family.” However, there is a counter to this in that as I understand it, the limit is for a farm as a whole, so eliminating the subsidy for a big farm would narrow profit margins and lead the farm to reduce its wages for lower class employees or lay them off. The much BIGGER argument here, though, is one that I made on February 6th, after the budget came out, so in the spirit of transferring select posts, here is the 2.6.05 post, shortened:

The president’s fiscal year 2006 budget is out, or at least the most “newsworthy” bits have already been leaked, since I think it comes out tomorrow officially. The biggest item that I have seen so far is the reduction in the subsidies for farmers. Right now it’s a $15 billion dollar/year subsidy, according to the LA Times, which in my mind is fairly excessive; the maximum subsidy per farmer, which was $360,000 will be trimmed all the way down to $250,000 if the budget is passed. This is a good step toward the US actually practicing what it preaches in terms of free trade. It’s hard to get angry at cheap imports coming into the country when things like rice get subsidized here and then shipped to other countries, interfering with the economy there. Tim Johnson, chief executive of the California Rice Commission, said, in what I think was supposed to be an argument for keeping the subsidies in place, that “about 40% of what’s produced in the state is exported to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries.” He’s really shooting himself in the foot there. There is a very logical line of thinking that links agricultural subsidies to terrorism and/or general dislike for the US. It’s basically what I just outlined, but as the US government pays for rice production and other things, and those products get shipped abroad, the price of those commodities plummets, debilitating everyone else’s economy. This really gets everyone mad (think how mad the US gets when cheap foreign steel gets sent to the US, and multiply by several times over).

This is very irritating. An actual good idea in the president’s budget gets slashed by Democrats for special interest groups.

Usually I just read the Verbatim and maybe look at some of Arthur’s pictures, but this week’s Nassau Weekly is pretty good, especially the feature article, a methodical and thorough dissection of “Tangled Up in Blue” by Eleanor Barkhorn.

Happy Tax Day! In light of the occasion, I thought I’d repost something from before, since none of the old posts are available, which raises another question: should I import all of the old posts by hand? Feel free to share your thoughts on whether clicking through to LiveJournal or the old site is too much of a hassle. Here’s the (shortened) March 9th post:

Alan Greenspan discussed (here, here, and to a lesser extent here, although that article misses the point, I think) the possibility of a consumption tax in some incarnation. This is mildly interesting to me because if it gets passed anytime soon it could vastly change how much I have to send to Uncle Sam.&nbsp_place_holder; In general, and without getting into my personal finances, I would probably be better off under a consumption tax of some kind, although that seems counterintuitive…anyway, I’ll be watching you, Alan.

(End of March 9th post)

While on the subject of taxes, the estate tax, aka the death tax, has been in the news as well, so I thought I’d mention that. While I like the idea of everyone starting off with a level playing field, there is bound to be a disincentive to earn if you think it’s all going to get taxed away instead of left to your progeny, and a surprisingly high number of Americans do think that the estate tax will affect them. Whether this is the eternal optimism or misinformation, I don’t know.

Most recent post from the old site:

It is as if every time I mention Daily Kos on here, they manage to outdo themselves. Let’s take a look at this post. Now, I don’t know if the poor resolution is supposed to trick the reader or what. If you don’t look closely, you might think that the first line is something like November 2 or 3, as a reference to when Bush was elected, as you would expect since this post is allegedly trying to show that Bush’s election was actually bad for the economy. But no. That first line is March 11; the second one is March 31. I don’t want to infer anything, but someone had to deliberately take out the other lines in the original graph, which you can see by clicking on the image. These graphs don’t show anything. The first graph shows the last three months; but look at the graph for the last six months. Honestly, is this a joke, Kos? If this graph shows anything, it shows a strong RISE in the stock market after Bush’s reelection. This is evidence of “mining.” Are you trying to lose readers?

Well that was surprisingly easy…excuse the dust/lack of archives as we get set up here in Andy Inc.’s new home.

Well this is a little easier than writing an actual “Hello World” program, although those are pretty easy as well. I guess a more appropriate title might be “Hello Blogosphere,” but we’ll stick with the original.