Relevant History

Why I love Raymond Chandler

From The Long Goodbye:

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, expert perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home....

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up.... There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original....

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kinpin racketeers and marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and copilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats....

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

Something tells me she's going to cause Philip Marlowe some trouble.

Actually, this list would make a brilliant Facebook quiz: What Kind of Raymond Chandler Blonde Are You?

[To the tune of Concrete Blonde, "Little Wing," from the album The Essential Concrete Blonde (I give it 2 stars).]

My office mates today

Spencer Ackerman on Michael Gerson

I always like Spencer Ackerman, but his response to Michael Gerson's latest "these liberal Jews don't take antisemitism as seriously as the evangelicals" screed jumped out at me:

[S]eriously: Michael Gerson needs to shut his fucking mouth before he ever even thinks accusing a Jew of insufficient vigilance against antisemitism. I don't know what lack of self-awareness convinces right-wing evangelicals that they're the true guardians of the Jews, but that condescending and parochial nonsense is its own form of antisemitism. We Tribesmen do not need some wire-rimmed enabler of one of the most destructive and inept presidents in American history to protect us from the perfidies of the world. It's us and not him who will pay the price for antisemitism, so if Gerson wants to actually act like a righteous gentile, he can start by not accusing Jews of apathy to their own people's wellbeing for the sin of not sharing his politics.

[To the tune of Ric Ocasek, "Coming For You," from the album This Side Of Paradise (I give it 3 stars).]

Bubbles in the humanities

Philip Gerrands on bubbles in higher education:

The cause of the meltdown in global financial markets is obvious: leveraged trading in financial instruments that bear no relationship to the things they are supposed to be secured against.... The academy, too, is a market - a large one in which the value of any piece of research is ultimately secured against the world. If the world is not as described or predicted in the article or book, the research is worthless. A paper that claims that autism is caused by vaccination or terrorism by poverty is valuable only if it turns out to be a good explanation of autism or terrorism. That is why an original and true explanation is the gold standard of academic markets....

The academic market is also like the financial market in another way. Stocks trade above their value, which leads to bubbles and crashes. Brain-imaging studies, for example, are a current bubble, not because they don't tell us anything about the brain, but because the claims made for them so vastly exceed the information they actually provide.... [E]very week we read in the science pages that brain-imaging studies prove X, where X is what the readers or columnists already believe. Women can't read maps! Men like sex! Childhood trauma affects brain development! There is an Angelina Jolie neuron!...

[Much scholarship by] [h]istorians, anthropologists, linguists and even philosophers... is unsecured and highly leveraged. By this I mean that people in the humanities often do not write about the world or the people in it. Rather, they write about what somebody wrote about what somebody else wrote about what somebody else wrote. This is called erudition (not free association), and scholars sell it to their audience as a valuable insight about the nature of terrorism or globalisation or the influence of the internet (preferably all three). Almost every grant application in the humanities mentions these three topics, but the relationship between them and the names and concepts dropped en route are utterly obscure.

None of this would matter if the market were basically self-correcting like the science market, or erratic but brutally self-correcting like the financial markets.... [But] the main corrective mechanism in the humanities is reputation built on publication and, since publication is often based on reputation, the danger of a bubble is extreme. Someone who takes a supervisor's advice to base a career on writing about Slavoj Zizek is in the position of an investor deciding to invest in Bear Stearns on the advice of Lehman Brothers. The price is high and predicted - by those who have a vested interest - to rise further....

Compare the citation for a Nobel prizewinner in chemistry or physics with the way humanities research is evaluated. The Nobel citations are accessible to any intelligent reader.... Things sometimes seem to go the other way with the big names in the humanities. A problem (eg, terrorism) is misdescribed (eg, as an expression of subaltern response to modernity) and a raft of pseudo-explanation is recruited to leave everyone baffled.

Quote of the day: On managerial cosmopolitanism

From bookforum.com, via Crooked Timber:

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.

I suspect I'm being insulted in this paragraph, but I'm still too jet-lagged to figure out exactly how. No, wait...

Eeeewwww. Just... eeeewwww. (Or maybe not?)

From an essay in the Times Higher Education on the seven deadly sins in academia, when I first read it this piece on lust made my eyeballs hurt, and not in a good way:

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he is famously said to have replied, "because that's where the money is". Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are. Separate the acolytes from the scholars by prohibiting intimacy between staff and students (thus confirming that sex between them is indeed transgressive - the best sex being transgressive, as any married person will soulfully confirm) and the consequences are inevitable.

The fault lies with the females. The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades....

Normal girls - more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos - will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

Enjoy her! She's a perk. She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.... And in any case, you should have learnt by now that all cats are grey in the dark.

So, sow your oats while you are young but enjoy the views - and only the views - when you are older.

Crooked Timber comments, this is a "classic example of the sort of thing where having shown a draft to a single close female friend might have saved the day, and in the process offered a useful insight into the distinction between the concept 'refreshingly un-PC' and the concept 'creepy'."

However, the author answers his critics this way:

This is a moral piece that says that middle aged male academics and young female undergraduates should not sleep together. Rather, people should exercise self-restraint. Because transgressional sex is inappropriate, the piece uses inappropriate and transgressional language to underscore the point - a conventional literary device. At a couple of places, the piece confounds expectations, another conventional literary device, designed to maintain the reader's interest. Sex between academics and students is not funny, and should not be a source of humour. But employing humour to highlight the ways by which people try to resolve the dissonance between what is publicly expected of them and how they actually feel - not just in this context - reaches back to origins of humour itself. In his introduction, [editor] Matthew [Reisz] wondered how many of his contributors would enter into the spirit of levity that inspired the idea of the seven deadly academic sins (submitting a piece on prevarication late, etc) and I suspected that one could get to heart of all that is wrong with sex between scholars and students by employing the good ol' boy language of middle aged male collusion. I'm not sure I'm wrong.

If it's intended to be a piece whose style and tone exemplify its subject, I have to admit it does a decent job. Naturally the piece has generated a huge number of comments, though this one takes the prize:

Professor Kealey assumes that every male academic’s wife mustn’t be that attractive. How wrong! I, for example, I am far hotter than any of my husband’s young and inexperienced students could ever (unfortunately for them) hope to be.

Hear hear. When I was in Oxford, walking around in the evening and trying to navigate around the crowds of students in high heels and skirts, I'd sometimes think, "They might be interesting in twenty years." I can't be the only man who reacts like that.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves)," from the album Hail To The Thief (I give it 1 stars).]

Nudge in Britain

The New York Times' Idea of the Day blog reports on the appeal of Thaler and Sunstein's ideas in Britain, especially among conservatives:

“Behavioral economics has been embraced by the British right in particular,” writes Matthew Taylor in Prospect. David Cameron, shown here, the Conservative considered the country’s likely next leader, seeks to “refashion the Tories’ whole approach to regulation” based on the insights of “Nudge,” the book Sunstein co-wrote with Richard Thaler.

Ideas like “save tomorrow” — getting people to sign up now to make bigger pension contributions next year — appeal to the “conservative brain,” writes Taylor, because they preserve individual choice while leveraging human nature toward responsible action: “The fact that the financial sacrifice is in the future means people will sign up; inertia prevents them changing it later.”  

[To the tune of The Band, "The Weight," from the album Music From Big Pink (I give it 5 stars).]

Inexplicable bathroom designs

For a continent that's pioneered social democracy, good industrial design, and a generally above-average interest in social welfare, Europe seems to have some of the most dangerous bathrooms in the world. Let me give two examples, both from hotels that otherwise I thought were very good.

First is from my hotel in Vienna, which is in the center of the city, blocks from Stephensplatz, on a nice square, etc.. The main thing going on here is that the absence of a shower curtain-- just the half-wall glass thing-- seriously raises the odds that I'm going to get water everywhere, and then slip and break something.

k&k hotel, vienna, via flickr

The Royal Oxford is even trickier. I love the hotel in every other respect, but the bathroom is tiny, it's got the half-glass wall thing, and the bathtub is really high. Now normally I like deep tubs, but when it makes it hard to keep your balance in what's likely to be a slippery environment, I'm less of a fan.

royal oxford hotel, via flickr

Maybe people in the rest of the world can handle this kind of thing fine. Maybe shower curtains are the equivalent of Humvees with spinning rims-- unnecessary, wasteful, and uniquely American. Or perhaps the dangerous bathroom is like Europe's architectural equivalent of Inspector Clouseau's butler, Kato: by constantly trying to kill him, Kato helped keep Clouseau alert and in shape. Of course, it didn't go Clouseau's apartment much good....

[To the tune of Dixie Chicks, "Wide Open Spaces," from the album Wide Open Spaces (I give it 3 stars).]

The silliest thing I saw in London

When Jonathan and I were walking to dinner Thursday night, we saw two guys going into the window of a townhouse.

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As you can see, the guys are trying to get into an upper-story window, and the ladder isn't tall enough. So they have the bottom of it balanced on the wrought-iron fence, and the top of it against the wall of the building.

Part of me thought "Darwin Award," but maybe when you live in England you're taught that balancing ladders on wrought-iron fences is the safe way to work. And the guy made it in, so it worked.

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Plus, the guys looked old enough to have been doing this for a long time. If they could survive the Blitz, they're entitled to balance ladders on fences to make it easier to climb through upper-story windows.

Natural History Museum

Early Friday morning I made a quick visit to the Natural History Museum. I needed to get out to the airport to catch my flight, but I had a chance to meet Andrew Parker, a zoologist whose book on vision and evolution (In the Blink of An Eye) is a favorite of mine. Since the hotel I was staying at was pretty close to the museum, I was able to squeeze in a quick meeting.

We were meeting well before the museum opened to the public, so I had the rare experience of seeing the main hall when it was completely empty.

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It was as cool as seeing the NYPL's reading room when it was empty.

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The research wing and rooftop lounge is also pretty nice.

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Parker has a new book out called The Genesis Enigma, about the scientific accuracy of the book of Genesis. It's gotten mixed reviews in the UK-- Dawkins and the scientific atheist crowd don't like it for obvious reasons-- and it'll be interesting to see what reception it gets in the U.S.

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[To the tune of David Bowie, "Thru' These Architects Eyes," from the album Outside (I give it 4 stars).]

Owen and Darwin at the Natural History Museum

This won't be exciting to anyone but historians of science, but yesterday when I was at the Natural History Museum, I noticed something new. The statue of Richard Owen that had been on the landing of the grand staircase had been replaced by Charles Darwin.

Here's Owen in 2005:

And Darwin now:

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Nothing at all symbolic about the swap, of course.

Last night in London

Yesterday started in Oxford, with coffee at Blackwells and then a get-together with Alison Powell of the Oxford Internet Institute. She showed me a rather good coffee place near the bus terminus, which was handy, and we had an interesting talk about mobile devices, DIY, and social action. (Actually, I suppose the day really started the night before, and a globe-hopping friend just back from California and I got together around midnight to talk about the future of naval strategy. Still, that felt like Thursday.)

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Unfortunately, I had to leave before too long, to catch the train down to London and meet with some people in the UK government who do foresight and scanning.

After that, I met up with Jonathan Liebenau, a professor at LSE who was a number of years ahead of me at Penn, and whose dissertation I saw on the alumni bookshelf a thousand times, but who I only met a couple years ago. We got together at the Adam & Eve, a pub right beside the St. James' Tube station.

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From there we had a long wander around town, until we finally reached an Indian restaurant in Pimlico called The Akbar. It was a terrific place. Naturally, I had to try the Bollywood Blast!, a lamb dish advertised as using the hottest chilies on the planet.

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There's a scene in The Simpsons where Apu makes dinner for the Simpson family, and after the first bite Marge asks Lisa if it's too spicy for her. Lisa, a distant look on her face, says dreamily, "I can see through time." That's kind of how I felt while eating the lamb. It was intense, but very good.

After dinner we walked over to the Embankment, parted near the Tate, and I continued on to my usual walk to the Jubilee Bridges.

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It was an especially pleasant night, cool and clear, and lots of people were out. Because I was coming from Pimlico, I saw a part of the river I'd never seen before, and also came up on Westminster from a new angle.

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I also noticed-- and I don't know if this is a new thing-- a lot of people bicycling home. London had never struck me as a place where you could bicycle safely, but I suppose it is.

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This part of London is one of my favorites for walking. It's big-- you end up easily walking several miles-- but it offers a lot, and it's the kind of walking that's pleasantly distracting.

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You don't really notice how many miles you're putting in because you're too distracted by the London Eye, and then the cool bridges, and is that St. Paul's just around the bend, and before you know it you're at the Globe.

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I didn't quite get to the Globe last night; having started near the old power station (the one that's on a Pink Floyd album), I had had my fill by the time I got to Waterloo (kind of like Napoleon), so I caught the Tube back to Kensington.

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I'm staying at the Cromwell Crown Hotel, one of a thousand-- or maybe ten thousand-- hotels in Kensington. The place is... well, exactly what you'd expect for 45 pounds a night in one of the world's most expensive cities: tiny, and kind of uncertain in its basic cleanliness (not that they don't clean it and change the sheets, but a place this old and unrenovated never has the feeling of being pristine).

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I won't say it's badly decorated, because that would suggest that someone made wrong choices about the bedding and carpet: this looks like it was chosen by someone blind. All in all, it has the feeling of a two-star hotel in a provincial town that's passed back and forth between the rebels and government forces about twenty times in the civil war.

However, it's pretty much exactly what I expected, and when I travel i tend not to spend much time in my room: I would be okay with a Japanese coffin hotel most of the time (or even better yet, some Provigil and a vibrant all-night cafe that also had showers and secure lockers for your clothes-- or maybe something more like a club). That would actually be an interesting design exercise....

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Thru' These Architects Eyes," from the album Outside (I give it 4 stars).]

Pub crawl

Last night I met up with a friend of mine from Saïd, a recent MBA who's still living here in Oxford. I supervised a project when he was a student here, and we've kept in touch off and on since then. The last time we went out drinking I came up with some of the essential ideas in my Future 2.0 argument, so I had high expectations for our get-together.

We started out with a couple pints in the Oxford Retreat, a nice and relatively quiet pub just up the road from my hotel. It overlooks the stream, so it's a great location, but it's not popular with (as one of my friends puts it) the students who come here to learn English and have sex; so it was a good place to talk.

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I'm not sure what's happened to me, but in the last few months my relationship with alcohol has changed significantly. Until recently one drink would more or less put me out; but now, with my jumped-up metabolism (or something), I can drink a lot more, and not have it floor me. Not that I plan to start heavy recreational drinking; but it's always useful when your limits turn out ot be farther away than they used to be, especially when you're on the road and seeing lots of people, a disproportionate number of whom will propose a drink, toast, another bottle of wine, etc..

see-- i was working! via flickr

From there we went to the Eagle and Child. For those of you who don't know, the E & C was where J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and I believe T. S. Eliot hung out (I'm sure about the first two). It's right across the street from Balliol and St. John's, so it's pretty centrally located. At first, I couldn't believe I was hearing the name of the place right-- the friend I was drinking with is from Latin America, so I thought his accent could be getting in my way. But in fact, it is the Eagle and Child, and the pub's sign does have an eagle bearing away a swaddled baby.

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We had a couple more pints here, and I ordered some dinner.

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Originally I was going to go with the fish and chips, but after looking at the menu I decided to order the Game Pie. When it arrived, I asked the waiter what kind of game it was; I could imagine a big tin of something just labeled "game" in the back. He said, "Tonight sir, we're serving Monopoly."

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Served me right for asking, I guess.

After that I walked around to clear my head and take pictures. If I could be drunk for an hour, then switch it off, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about alcohol. But the fact that I need to essentially engage in an exercise regimen or take a hot bath to clear my head puts an upper limit on how much I'll ever enjoy it. Which is just as well. I've been addicted to enough things in the course of my life, and certainly don't need one more.

High Street then and now

Me in 2006:

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And me now:

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I think I'm wearing the same brand of jeans and style of shirt in both pictures, but that's where the similarities end. Thank goodness.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner)," from the album Hail To The Thief (I give it 4 stars).]

No words this time, but...

A picture of my daughter, in front of Brasenose College, Oxford:

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Tonight I was walking and realized I was along the same wall:

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[To the tune of Radiohead, "Reckoner," from the album In Rainbows (I give it 4 stars).]

In Oxford

I made it up to Oxford, and to my hotel room, which overlooks the business school, fittingly enough.

The event in London was quite interesting. I'm glad I went, and I met a couple people who it was nice to meet.

The guys who work the coat check desk were two elderly guys who, I swear, were the ones who taught Michael Caine to talk. These guys had accents that Americans would love-- not the posh accents used by people named Rupert and Portia, but by the cheeky butler. I had to wonder if they can switch it on for Americans. Maybe they just turn it to eleven, so to speak, when we Yanks are around.

The problem with forecasting

Lewis Grossberger on the whole 2012 thing, and a variation on the question that futurists often get: if you're so smart, why don't you still exist?

Nothing special is going to happen in 2012. The world isn’t going to end.... The [only] real catastrophe that lies ahead is we’re going to be inundated by a tsunami of Mayan apocalypse crap for the next three years.

I hate to sound anti-Mayan, because some of my best friends are extinct Mesoamerican rain-forest denizens, but I have a question: How come these ahead-of-their-time mathematical geniuses couldn’t foresee their own apocalypse? The Mayan civilization is kaput! And yet we’re supposed to believe they were able to look hundreds of years into the future and foresee ours?

[To the tune of Thom Yorke, "Analyse," from the album The Eraser (I give it 3 stars).]

In London

I'm now in London, at the Royal Geographical Society, waiting for The World in 2050 conference to begin. I got into London a couple hours ago, and even though I'm laden down with my bag, I spent a little time just wandering around.

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I'm really relieved to be here. Not being able to communicate with people in completely casual ways was getting a little oppressive: there's a weird, almost psychologically disquieting contrast between the vividness and brilliance of the conversations I have with people when I'm in conferences and workshops in places like Budapest on one hand, and my almost complete inability to talk to anybody outside those venues. Either I'm frantically trying to keep up with ideas and contribute my own, or I'm mute, and nothing in between. So being in London, and being surrounded by a constant buzz of English (with a little Russian, Italian, French, etc.), is... reassuring at a kind of cognitive level that's a bit unexpected.

I needed to do some work refining pitches I'm making over the next couple days-- even with very informal meetings it's good to know what you want to talk about-- so I went over to Kensington Garden, sat down on a park bench, and popped open my computer-- and immediately was able to get onto the RGS open wifi network. So as people jogged and biked home from work, I was sending thank-you notes and scheduling meetings. Strange. Strange to be here when just a few hours ago I was in Vienna. Strange to be in Europe. Strange to be sitting on a park bench with my laptop. But that's life these days.

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After the conference I'll go up to London. I look forward to getting to my hotel room.

Brilliant parenting advice

From the recent Values Voters Summit: "Coburn Aide: If Boys Knew Porn Will Turn Them Gay, They Won't Want Playboy."

This does not link to the Onion, I'm sorry to say.

[To the tune of Duran Duran, "Bedroom Toys," from the album Astronaut (I give it 2 stars).]

Strange signs

A couple curious things I saw walking around Vienna today.

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Is it just me, or do "Alter Schmuck" and "pullovaria" this sound like his and hers medical centers?

And I dislike sexism in that special way that fathers of daughters do, but...

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Space Invaders? Huh?

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "Back To Black," from the album Back to Black (I give it 2 stars).]

Jewish Museum Vienna

This afternoon I went to the Jewish Museum Vienna. The museum is located near Stephensplatz, in the center of the city, in a building that was once the residence of a Hungarian count, and later an art gallery. I had heard good things about it, but I was completely unprepared for how unexpectedly brilliant and moving it is. Of course, anyone who knows anything about the history of Europe should have some passing familiarity with the brilliant and tragic history of the Jewish community in Vienna. But the experience of the museum isn't powerful because it plays on your emotions in obvious ways: it's not a kind of material version of Schindler's List. It's an amazing experience for other reasons.

The bottom floor is dominated by a large room with selections from the Max Berger Collection of Judaica. The room itself has a curved wall that stretches to the top floor.

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It reminded me of Adolf Loos' Steiner House, one of the great milestones of early Viennese modernism.

steiner house, vienna

The exhibit is in one long case, with selections from the Torah etched on the glass in front of the objects.

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The placement of the words is unconventional to say the least, and the intention is twofold. First, it's meant to remind you that the objects were used in rituals that were communal and spoken, and were themselves representations of the divine: in a way, the words are what you should focus on, and the objects are their mere physical expression. Second, the words present a challenge: you have to choose to look past them to see the objects. Seeing objects and their history actually isn't easy, and the design of the exhibit highlights this fact.

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Now if this all sounds kind of postmodern, you're exactly right. Indeed, the whole museum is saturated with an awareness of the complex nature of representation: the current exhibit on stereotypes, for example, talks about this a lot (no surprise).

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It's hard to talk about stereotypes and not sound kind of saccharine or predictable: even if you try to apply some reflexivity or rigor, people who study stereotypes tend to conclude that "stereotypes are bad." I haven't seen someone (say) deconstruct Amos and Andy and conclude that black people really are awfully funny when they shuffle.

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But even the stereotypes exhibit-- inevitably titled "typical!"-- is saved by the amazingly good design. Everything about the exhibits is carefully constructed: the lighting is terrific, the artifacts are well-placed, the rooms flow into each other smoothly, and there are all kinds of interesting choices-- the scrims that hold the captions and gently divide rooms, most notably-- that make the experience a lot more compelling that I expected. Too often we associate this kind of perfectionism with a lack of passion and creativity: real creativity is messy and ragged and inspired, grunge rock rather than Chopin. But that's not at all true: perfectionism can communicate a level of reverence for craft and content that forces you to take its subject more seriously.

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That experience of consciously looking through-- looking through words etched in glass, through cloth, through one's own perceptions and limitations-- in the Berger Collection and typical! reaches a climax in the viewable storage room in the archive, on the top floor.

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Actually, that's not quite true. It's more complicated than that. In a normal museum, there are objects that are stored away and inaccessible to the public. The visible storage room, as the name suggests, makes the storage of objects... visible. There are map drawers, climate-controlled storage for textiles, and movable stacks, all the kinds of things that historians are familiar with. Even if you're not someone who's spent time in archives, you might find that infrastructure kind of interesting; but if like me, and you've literally grown up in archives (when I was a kid I went with my father to the National Archives in Rio, and sat in the reading room and read science fiction while he read notarial documents... or whatever), the experience is really striking.

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But the more I took in the storage area, the more remarkable it seemed. Some of the artifacts had been damaged in the attacks on Jews in 1938, and they'd never been repaired: you could still see the burn marks on some of the Torah covers. And the reason this collection exists is that the civilization that produced it was very nearly completely destroyed: Vienna in particular had one of the most prosperous and accomplished Jewish communities anywhere, and that world was eradicated almost overnight. The collection is a witness to that tragedy... and it exists in part because of it.

While it's described as a visible storage area, you can only see things on the outer shelves; the next shelves are faintly visible... but after that, objects recede into obscurity. Visibility shades into invisibility. You're aware of the objects, but just as aware of everything you can't see: tens of thousands of artifacts, boxes and boxes of material.

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So the collection is visible and accessible, but at the same time what you can see reminds you of everything that's invisible and inaccessible; it's dedicated to preservation, but some of what's being preserved is a record of destruction. Like the practice of history itself, it demonstrates how we can examine and ponder the records of the past, but never really get to the people and age that made them. It's like a beloved person who's physically close, but firmly and permanently out of reach. All these ideas are stock in trade among historians trained in postmodernism, and I've known them for years; but I've never seen postmodernism put to so serious a purpose, nor its ideas used with such gravity and grace.

There are times when you're confronted with something so brilliant and devastating it's almost overwhelming. Maybe it was the combination of jet lag and overwork, but the brilliance of the idea of the visible archive, the amazing care that went into it, the seriousness with which it uses concepts about history and memory that too often are used for merely clever and sophistic purposes, and the history of the artifacts themselves, made this one of those times for me. For minutes I stood there, not daring to move, not wanting it to end, amazed at how perfect and piercing it all was.

Vienna pictures

I've got lots of pictures from today's wanderings around Vienna.

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However, at this point I'm too tired to do anything with them besides put them up on Flickr.

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The photoset is here. Commentary tomorrow some time.

[To the tune of Joe Bonamassa, "So Many Roads (Live)," from the album Live from Nowhere In Particular (I give it 3 stars).]

The Laxenburg carnival

Tonight outside IIASA's headquarters I saw the carnival rides that were being set up earlier this week. This time, they were in action.

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It was delightfully surreal to see bumpers cars in this baroque square, and the kids were really enjoying themselves. There was a large tent with tables across from the rides, where parents could sit and drink beer. Though many of the riders were teens or adjults.

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The scene was a little weird, but I'm sure stranger things have happened there, sometimes involving people wearing powdered wigs.

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And given how quiet the town is, one cannot begrudge any entertainment....

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[To the tune of Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Little Wing," from the album The Sky Is Crying (I give it 2 stars).]

Thought of the morning

Amy Winehouse has a genius for taking a simple, usually innocuously positive phrase like "do me good" and make it sound both dirty and promising.

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "Do Me Good," from the album Back to Black (I give it 4 stars).]

Day 2 in Budapest

Today was the second day of the conference on ubiquitous communication in an intelligent world. It was one of the most stimulating conferences I've been to in the last couple years, and that's saying a lot: but it was small, intimate, really well-supported, and aimed for a high level of cooperation and productivity. And it worked. Something I'm going to want to replicate.

We finished up in the afternoon, and a couple of us walked over to the Buda side of the city, then climbed up to the castle. We went over to the historic district, which I'd never been to, and took in the Hungarian Telecommunication Museum. Don't laugh. It was actually really interesting.

via flickr

From there we walked through the castle, and made our way to the Elizabeth Bridge.

via flickr

After crossing it, I headed back to the hotel, hung out for an hour, then went out to the Central European Cafe for dinner.

via flickr

Apparently this was a place where a lot of the early Hungarian network theorists used to hang out and work, so naturally I had to go there.

After that I almost went back to my room and went to bed, but decided to go for a walk instead. As I was passing an outdoor cafe, I ran into one of my fellow workshop participants, and I talked him into coming with me to the Frank Zappa Cafe.

via flickr

For those of you who don't know, Zappa was actually a pretty powerful influence in Eastern European countercultural circles: Vaclav Havel described him as "one of the gods of the Czech underground," and Radio Prague explains that

Frank Zappa's popularity in Prague is closely connected to the dark days of the dissident era, when his music and that of the Velvet Underground were blacklisted by the censors. For example, Frank Zappa's second album, Absolutely Free was smuggled into Czechoslovakia within a year of its 1967 release, and critics claim that the music influenced the famous Czech underground rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe. Zappa's tunes thus came to represent freedom and independent thought to dissidents in Czechoslovakia. Reports have it that when young kids in communist Czechoslovakia played heavy rock music, the police would tell them to "turn off that Frank Zappa music."

So, in memory of Zappa and to celebrate the spread of democracy, we sat there and drank a substantial quantity of palinka. We agreed that the cherry was the most interesting, and plum was good but simpler.

via flickr

After that I wasn't quite ready to go to bed, so I walked around some more, and found Raday Utca (where this blog's old banner was photographed). I discovered another cafe that looked promising, so I had a couple more drinks and did some writing. I figure so long as I get up tomorrow, I'll be fine: I can sleep on the train back to Vienna.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "Autumn Leaves [Take 1]," from the album Portrait In Jazz (I give it 4 stars).]

The world is flat, and Cafes Zoë are unavoidable

There's one in Menlo Park that I go to a lot.

via flickr

Tonight I found another one in Budapest, on Raday Utca. Rather different, but still the same name (allowing for the fact that Hungarians, like Asians, put family names first).

via flickr

Now I need to look for them in Vienna and London....

[To the tune of Wynton Marsalis, "Autumn Leaves," from the album Live at Blues Alley (Disc 2) (I give it 3 stars).]

Evening in Budapest

We went to a village about 45 minutes outside the city, and had dinner at a traditional restaurant on the banks of the Danube. It was one of those dinners that started with grappa and palinka, proceeded to two wines with dinner, and something else afterwards. I haven't had this much to drink since Shrivenham.

via flickr

Dinner was marvelous. I didn't go for the jumbo plate of wild boar and venison-- I didn't think my system could take anything quite that outrageously heavy-- but still it was excellent.

via flickr

When we got back to the city, I decided I had to walk a little to get some of the alcohol out of my system. (For some reason I treat booze like going to the movies: after a couple hours, I'm ready to leave the state of inebriation, and if I can will either steam or walk it off.)

via flickr

So I walked over to the river, and took in the view of the castle and Chain Bridge.

via flickr

This is one of my favorite views in the whole world. I don't think I'll ever get tired of it. It's not as a big or spectacular as the Singapore skyline or downtown Manhattan, but it's beautifully proportioned, and it's the sort of scene you can stare at for hours.

via flickr

Eventually I walked back to the hotel, avoiding the main tourist streets.

[To the tune of Kate Bush, "Running up that Hill," from the album The Whole Story (I give it 4 stars).]

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

This is one of the reasons I like coming to Budapest: the chance to spend time in buildings like this.

entrance to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, via flickr

I think of all the academies of science I've visited, this is the one that has the best location by far: on the banks of the Danube, right beside the Chain Bridge, with the castle, Parliament, and St. Stephen's all nearby. Really something.

via flickr

And it's a beautifully-maintained building. The Hungarians take their science seriously.

[To the tune of Sarah McLachlan, "Fallen," from the album Afterglow (I give it 4 stars).]

Budapest train station

Thursday night I arrived in Budapest, on the late train from Vienna. After a steady diet of Alan Furst I kind of expected something more distinctively Mitteleuropa, preferably viewed entirely in black and white; however, the real thing is a lot more Long Island Railroad or Great Western than old spy thriller.

via flickr<

Still, it did the job, and was very reliable.

I got to Budapest around 11. Even if the trains themselves were modern, the station was pleasingly turn of the century. Like any train station late at night, it had that slight air of fatigued menace. It may have been quite safe, but I just haven't spent enough time here to recognize the social cues.

via flickr.

Just before we reached the station I realized I had very little Hungarian money, so I had so spend a little time wandering around looking for either an open exchange bureau or an ATM, and trying not to go to the guys who were hanging around offering to change money. I remember using them regularly in Latin America when I was a kid, but these days-- I don't know, it seems too easy in the digital age to be legit. Eventually I did find an ATM, got some money, and grabbed a cab.

via flickr.

This was smart, because it turned out that the train station was a lot farther away from my hotel than I'd realized. I ended up getting to the hotel around midnight.

[To the tune of Misia, "Sweetness," from the album Greatest Hits (I give it 4 stars).]

In the Frankfurt Red Carpet Club

I'm in the Frankfurt airport, the closest thing the modern traveller can come to being in one of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. (The happy ending is when you get to fly out of here.) This is one of the world's busiest airports, but I'm always impressed at how industrial and second-tier it feels: it's more like San Jose than San Francisco, the world's biggest business commuter airport. Even Heathrow in its old days (before Terminals 4 and 5) was nicer.

At least I'm in the Red Carpet Club. I've got a long layover between flights, so it's worth it to perch here for a little while. Though I confess whenever I'm allowed into one of these, I feel like the character in Sting's song "Take Me Dancing"-- that I'm the business equivalent of a poor boy in a rich man's car.

Which is kind of absurd, because for one thing I've put in plenty of miles and deserve to be here as much as they next person (who in this case is one a hundred thousand business travelers dressed today in white shirt and dark suit, sucking down Amstel Lights with a kind of blank determination). But more important, the fact is that this is only a privilege because the public spaces in most airports truly sucks. By comparison this feels nice, when it's really only human. And the free drinks are nice, but are a small reward for the amount of money and carbon the international traveler burns up before they're allowed in.

Yesterday was a pleasant, if somewhat hurried, start to the trip. I got into Philadelphia at 7 (and for once managed to get upgraded, escaping the rule that those regional upgrade award things are designed to make you feel like you could get something cool but also designed to be unusable-- sort of like health insurance for too many people), and spent a little time at Penn before heading downtown. Penn is pleasant, and has been on a steady upward slope for a while in terms of its safety and fresh-faced attractiveness, and I like visiting, but despite having spent some of the most intense and formative years of my life there, increasingly I feel removed from the place. It was central to my last round of self-fashioning-- intellectually I grew up there-- but I'm on to other things now.

From there I went downtown, checked in with my friends at Chemical Heritage Foundation, and then spent most of the rest of the day at Cosi, drinking coffee, working on my talk, and brainstorming with Darlene Cavalier about writing projects. Darlene is an interesting character, a former professional cheerleader turned science policy wonk and public engagement advocate. We've got an op-ed piece coming out in a magazine this fall, and are thinking about what we can work on next.

In the afternoon I gave a keynote talk at CHF's Innovation Day conference, then immediately bolted for the airport. I had a 7:30 flight, and was worried about getting stuck in traffic and security, but both were very smooth: there was virtually no traffic, and PHL has redesigned its security lines to be much more user-friendly.

After a brief layover in Dulles, it was on to Frankfurt. The flight was fine, though I didn't quite get to the level of intense, over-the-Atlantic creative thinking that's characterized some of my other travel; instead I slept more, and worked on business things. I just hope I can get in that mode on the flight home, because I've gotten a LOT of work done on planes, and would be bummed if my brain no longer responds to the combination of stimulus and lack of stimulus-- the prospect of being in another part of the world and facing the challenges of being on road, combined with the immediate reality of being sealed in a tube with only your thoughts and a couple hundred sleepy people-- that long plane flights provide.

I've got about three hours before my flight to Vienna. I think I'll see what the showers are like here.

Later. Feeling a lot more human after a longish shower. I've still got a couple hours until my flight, and I'm going to give myself a couple hours to navigate customs, get my boarding pass, etc.. I didn't put a change of clothes in my carry-on bag; maybe I should have, even though I'm pretty overloaded as it is.

One of the things I really enjoy about coming to Europe is the slight disorientation that comes from interacting with very ordinary, mundane things. Bathroom fixtures may be just different though to require you to think about how they work. Doorknobs may have different degrees of freedom than in America, and the auditory and tactile feedback is more pronounced. Signage is often clearer and more abstract. All in all, it requires you to think a little bit more about how things are made and why; they're material expressions of the fundamental contingency of our world. (On the other hand, dealing with customs agents and government bureaucracies isn't fun; if anything is amiss, you need a level of linguistic and cultural understanding that I usually don't have.)

I'll arrive in Vienna around 5:30 this afternoon, which means I should be in the city an hour or two later-- enough time to get checked into my hotel, then head out and find some dinner (something very light) and do some reading for tomorrow's conference.

On flight 932

I'm on my flight from Washington to Frankfurt. Everything looks good.

In some ways I was made to live in this age. My mind seems happiest in its own world of texts and ideas and writing, while my body has an irrepressible desire to throw itself around the globe. Today, I can do both.

I even scored a big exit row seat so I have a ton of legroom. An important perk.

Terminal D, Philadelphia International Airport

I feel like I was just here. No, wait....

Only at Peninsula

Elizabeth's new class

The dangers of travel

I never knew Britain was so dangerous:

Crumbs: half of Britons injured by their biscuits on coffee break, survey reveals

An estimated 25 million adults have been injured while eating during a tea or coffee break - with at least 500 landing themselves in hospital, the survey revealed.

The custard cream biscuit was found to be the worse offender to innocent drinkers.

It beat the cookie to top a table of 15 generic types of biccy whose potential dangers were calculated by The Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation.

Hidden dangers included flying fragments and being hurt while dunking in scalding tea through to the more strange such as people poking themselves in the eye with a biscuit or fallen off a chair reaching for the tin.

Yet another good reason to stick to my new diet. But given my usual food preferences when I'm on the road, it's a miracle I haven't hurt myself already.

[To the tune of Pearl Jam, "Little Wing / Maggot Brain," from the album Live 1995 (I give it 4 stars).]

"Blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug"

Adam Greenfield on craft, localism and infrastructure:

[O]ver the last several years, San Francisco in particular has become a field of premium and super-premium, small-run craft production: Ice cream. Bicycles. Coffee. Spirits. Clothing. An audience primed to expect, desire and demand the provenance of the “lovingly handcrafted,” and pitch-perfect retail tuned to that demand. Especially for someone like me, whose senses have become inured to the increasingly homogenized material landscape of Manhattan, it’s hard to escape the sense that the last decade’s activity amounts to nothing less than a local renaissance of craft and technique and pride.

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug....

The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 18 No. 3: III. Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets [Disc 3] (I give it 4 stars).]

Sign worth remembering

I saw this in a Palo Alto store window a few weeks ago, on my last day at the Institute:

via flickr

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "Op. 59 No. 2 In E Minor 'Rasumovsky': I: Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 5) (I give it 4 stars).]

Paul Graham on talent versus determination

Paul Graham on "the anatomy of determination:"

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

[To the tune of Yes, "Roundabout," from the album Keys To Ascension (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Thought of the day

For knowledge workers, is there really any such thing as "work?" Does the concept of work have any real utility if the boundaries between it and play, travel, networking, etc. are blurred? And when it's possible to spend a lot of time "working" on something, get 90% done, and never deliver?

Maybe "work" as a conceptual category no longer has much utility for organizing our days and time, and we should think in terms of what we've completed and shipped, not what we're "working on."

[To the tune of King Crimson, "The Court Of The Crimson King (including The Return Of The Fire Witch and The Dance Of The Puppets)," from the album In The Court Of The Crimson King (I give it 5 stars).]

Philips does sex toys

Interaction Design Umeå writes about the new line of Philips sex toys (note the term "relationship care" in the URL). Though Fast Company asks, "does anyone really want to buy a Philips sex toy? I mean, there are surely some Apple freaks that would love an iVibrator. But is Philips's brand versatile or sexy enough to pull this off?"

[To the tune of Duran Duran, "Bedroom Toys," from the album Astronaut (I give it 2 stars).]

Punishment, reward and cooperation

Harvard University postdoc David Rand recently published an article examining whether cooperation is encouraged more when people are able to punish bad actors, or reward good behavior. Ed Yong describes the experiment:

[Rand] asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two strategies, the carrot was better for the group than the stick, earning them far greater rewards.

Public goods games, albeit in a more complex form, are part and parcel of modern life. We play them when we decide to take personal responsibility for reducing carbon emissions, or rely on others to do so. We play them when we choose to do our share of the household chores, or when we rely on our housemates or partners to sort it out....

As Scientific American explains,

In a series of monetary interactions, individuals decided how much money to contribute to a common pot, and they could then decide whether to reward good contributors or punish bad—both of which would entail spending money.

Previous public goods studies had focused on one-time interactions and found that people were more likely to swindle or punish others. But in situations where interactions were repeated, people found greater success in reward-based structures—in which those that contributed were rewarded and those who didn't were ignored—than those in which costly punishment was doled out to those who didn't contribute.

Ed Yong comments,

Rand's results suggest that when people repeatedly cross each other's paths, carrots are far better than sticks at fostering behaviour for the greater good. Not only do they lead to greater payoffs for everyone concerned but they minimise the threat of antisocial punishment, where freeloaders vengefully castigate the altruists.

[To the tune of The Police, "Hungry For You (j'aurais toujours faim de toi)," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 3) (I give it 2 stars).]

Object permanence in babies, dogs and wolves

Interesting new research indicates that babies and dogs share a dependence on social cues in learning (or being led astray). As Ed Yong explains:

Like infants less than a year old, dogs fail at a seemingly easy exercise called the "object permanence task". It goes like this: if you hide an object somewhere(say a ball under a cup) and let the baby retrieve it a few times, they will continue to search for it there even if you hide it somewhere else (say behind the sofa) and even if you do so in front of their eyes. Piaget, the legendary psychologist who discovered this behaviour, thought that it reflected a wildly different way of seeing the world.

More recently, Jozsef Topal suggested that it's the influence of the adult experimenter that's the key. By repeatedly pointing at the ball in the first hiding place, the adult enshrines a generalised rule in the infant's mind. And infants, being programmed to learn from communicative signals, come to believe the adult's instructions over the evidence of their own eyes (some people apparently never grow out of this, but I digress). Topal demonstrated this by showing that infants were much better at the task if the experimenters avoided social cues like calling the child's name or eye contact.

And the same is true for domestic dogs. Topal tested a dozen adult dogs with a version of the hidden-object challenge, concealing toy behind one of two possible screens. If he called to the dogs by name, made eye contact and waved, the animals made the same errors that infants make on 75% of the trials. Without any of these signals, their scores improved and they only failed to realise the ball's new location on 39% of the trials. Their error rate dropped even lower in completely non-social situations, where the ball was moved by pulling on a transparent string.... [S]ome scientists have suggested that these [social] skills are adaptations that have developed over the last 10,000 years to allow dogs to better interact with their two-legged partners.

Interestingly, if you do the same experiment with wolves, they're not fooled: when Topal "tested 10 wolves that had extensive experience with humans, they passed with flying colours regardless of whether their human partners were gesturing and calling, standing impassively or entirely absent. "

[To the tune of David Bowie, "This Is Not America," from the album Bowie at the Beeb: Best Of BBC Radio 68-72 (I give it 3 stars).]

Are these your glasses?

We just found them, and wonder who's they are.

I know the feeling

Seen at Laser Quest.

Listen up, mice: It's not just what you eat, but when you eat it

We all know you should avoid the late night snacks, but this study suggests that-- for mice anyway-- the timing of meals matters.

A new study in mice suggests that it’s not just how much you eat, but when you eat it, that influences weight gain.

Researchers at Northwestern University wanted to test whether the timing of meals could influence body weight. Many diet books advise would-be weight losers to stop eating after 6 or 7 p.m. However, it’s never been clear if the strategy works as a behavioral change — we tend to overeat in the evenings in front of the television and the computer. Or is there some physiological reason late-night eating adds extra pounds?...

Turns out that mice who were fed when they would normally be sleeping gained a lot more weight than mice who were the same number of calories when they were usually awake.

Fred Turek, director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern and the study’s senior author, said human studies are needed to determine if timing of food intake influences body weight. The findings would be particularly important for shift workers, who are known to be at higher risk for obesity, diabetes and other health problems. But he notes that it’s not just shift workers who are eating late. Most people eat a large percentage of their calories in the evening and continue eating late into the night.

Dr. Turek notes that humans evolved from a situation where they ate and foraged between sunrise and sunset. “After sunset, there were no refrigerators, no food just hanging around,” he said. “You didn’t eat. But today, people eat most of their calories after sunset.”

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "In the Midnight Hour," from the album 1971-04-29 - Fillmore East (I give it 3 stars).]

What to do with those old CD cases

Use them in a building, like the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu.

The exterior structure is composed of hundreds of polycarbonate transparent recycled plastic tubes formed into a grid-like matrix. Recycled from used CD cases, the polycarbonate tubes will be able to be recycled again at the end of the building’s life. Multi-colored LED lights will be built into the exterior structure and be computer controlled to change the appearance of the exterior on a whim or based on a computer program.

[To the tune of Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)," from the album Cat People (I give it 3 stars).]

Quote of the day

Lawrence Krauss in the New York Times:

One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

I think ultimately I'd say no, but I'd be tempted.

[via Marginal Revolution]

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Stay," from the album Bowie at the Beeb: Best Of BBC Radio 68-72 (I give it 4 stars).]

Explaining why the Ikea switch to Verdana is a mistake

It's easy to dismiss the IKEA switch from Futura (a font I used in my e-mail when I worked at the Institute for the Future, for obvious reasons) to Verdana as much ado about nothing. But this Guardian piece does a better job than many of explaining why it matters:

Futura has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, as well as a much longer history linked to a political art movement. Futura, dating from the 1920s, is loosely Constructivist (only loosely, because the proprietary version that Ikea made its own – Ikea Sans – is slightly tweaked to distinguish it from, say, something Joseph Stalin might have used). Verdana... is one of the most widely used fonts in the world, and people who care about these things dislike the way our words are becoming homogenised: the way a sign over a bank looks the same as one over a cinema; the way magazines that once looked original now look like something designed for reading online. This is what has happened with Ikea: the new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age....

Verdana seems to have been chosen by Ikea by default, or at least by economics. An Ikea spokeswoman, Monika Gocic, has said that Verdana is for them because "it is more efficient and cost-effective". This is another way of saying: "We use it because everyone else does."

It's amazing to think that serious modernism is now a century old-- a hundred years ago, more or less, Peter Behrens was revolutionizing industrial design at AEG and training a generation of architects and designers who would shape the look of the 20th century (Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier all studied under him), Charles Rennie Mackintosh was finishing the Glasgow School or Art, Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Robie House-- and so IKEA can reasonably see itself as a company with a serious history that it should take seriously.

Further, IKEA matters in the world of design, not just because it's a company that has shown that (at its best anyway) good design sells, but because it has a disproportionate effect on the design market:

According to Swedish folklore, there are more copies of the Ikea catalogue printed each year than the Bible. It certainly has more Billy bookcases than either the Old or New Testatment, but its designers would do well to remember their history. The first movable type appeared with Gutenberg's Bible in the 1450s, and everything followed from there. In this strange way, the multi-million print-run of the Ikea catalogue has now adopted a cloak of heavy responsibility. But things could be worse. It could be in Helvetica.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4: II. Scherzo (Andante scherzoso quasi Allegretto)," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

Typepad Strangeness

There seem to be some issues with Typepad right now. Grrr.

[To the tune of Thievery Corporation Feat. The Flaming Lips, "Marching The Hate Machines (Into The Sun)," from the album The Cosmic Game (I give it 3 stars).]

Was the last bubble due to Prozac?

A couple days ago I posted a quote from Matt Yglesias about the danger bold predictors have of becoming cranks. Today, via the Freakonomics blog, I came across an argument about the relationship between the spread of antidepressants and stock market bubbles.

In 2000, Slate contributor Robert Wright noted that a "psychiatrist is now speculating that maybe Prozac and other antidepressants are being gobbled in such volume as to account for the stock market's seemingly unshakeable self-esteem." University of Michigan professor Randolph Nesse proposed "the possibility that this market is different because investor's brains are different."

What percent of brokers, dealers, and investors are taking antidepressant drugs? Wealthy, stressed urbanites are especially likely to use them. I would not be surprised to learn that one in four large investors has used some kind of mood-altering drug. What effects do these drugs have on investment behavior? We don't know.... From seeing many patients who take such agents, I know that some experience only improved mood, often a miraculous and even life-saving change. Others, however, report that they become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers. This is exactly the mind-set of many current investors.

Human nature has always given rise to booms and bubbles, followed by crashes and depressions. But if investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs, bubbles could grow larger than usual before they pop, with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences.

So, Big Money contributor Caitlin McDevitt asks, "Did Prozac cause the most recent market free fall? Seems like a stretch, but if so, then maybe the 'great recession' should have been called a 'depression all along."

Given that I work a lot with groups in workshops, it makes me wonder: if you could convince everyone in a workshop to take Prozac (or some other mood-altering drug), what kind of results would you get? Would people be more open to crazy scenarios? Would a map of the future be all about the Singularity or talking unicorns bringing world peace? Or-- the more interesting possibility-- would the results be awful because people wouldn't care about the future? (I doubt I'll get the chance to test the theory any time soon.)

However, there are other things I am experimenting with that don't require medical supervision, but which I hope deliver some improvements in workshops. Changing the food is one.

I don't buy the idea that if you feed people marinated tofu you'll make them smart; but we know a lot about how our brains respond to foods in general, and can design food into workshops in ways that keep people active and well-fed, but don't make them sated and sluggish. For a while I've suspected that caterers unintentionally undermine good meetings and workshops by serving so many pastries, bagels, and coffee. Turns out these are foods that tend to be high on the glycemic index, or sugary things that overstimulate people and encourage the production of memory-impairing hormones like cortisol.

So I'm not only trying to get different foods into my events; I'm also serving them differently, distributing them more evenly through the day so people aren't tempted to overeat and then crash. We'll see if it makes a difference in the energy levels of the workshops, and the results.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "New Angels Of Promise," from the album Hours (I give it 1 stars).]