Relevant History

As Dave Barry says, this is a thing that exists: Virtual Bikini Wrestling

Vannevar Bush's Memex, Ted Nelson's concept of hypertext, Paul Baran's invention of packet-switching, the TCP/IP protocol stack, Tim Berners-Lee's HTML... What do we do with all this? Do we create magnificent works of art? Finally achieve world peace and global happiness?

No, we create Virtual Bikini Wrestling.

Humans. Are. Doomed.

[Don't ask me how I got to it. Actually, I was buying an ebook about Twitter and churches, and the same online publisher was selling "pictures" from recent VBW matches. It's such a weird concept, I couldn't resist clicking through.]

Rockin' it old school: Atari Battlezone on the iPad

My brother, who's an acupuncturist in New York City, sent my kids an Atari game console for the iPad for Christmas. It's essentially a dock with a joystick and four buttons. Like many iPad games, the basic setup is free, and extra games are available as in-app purchases (i.e., not through the iTunes store, but through the app itself).

I downloaded Battlezone, and the kids spent some time playing it. I then gave them a little masterclass in how to play; put another way, I blew away all their high scores. Though I spent more of my college hours in front of one of those machines than I really want to recall.

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It's impressive how well the game plays on a completely different platform.

Quote of the day: Margaret Thatcher

Via Meryl Streep:

If you want something spoken about, ask a man. If you want it done, ask a woman.

On Gingrich's use of historical analogy: Was his failure to get on the VA ballot Pearl Harbor, Pickett's Charge, or 9/11?

Conor:

Everything must be made into a sweeping analogy. And his instinct for grandiosity is so pronounced that only a small group of recurring subjects are fit for the comparisons that he offers. Would anyone other than Newt Gingrich respond to failing to get on a ballot by asking, "Okay, what's the historical analogy?" Even the "the" is perfect -- as if there is one definitive analogy that fits….

Knowing Gingrich regards Pearl Harbor as "the analogy" for effectively losing Virginia, what comparison will he think appropriate if he loses the entire campaign. The Bataan Death March? Lincoln's tragic night at the theater? The fall of Rome? Or maybe he'll win, and God help us if so. Has there ever been a politician more inclined to make history? In a president of the United States, that is a dangerous impulse.

There's actually a serious point here, as Conor observes. For all his love of history-- or his love of himself as an historian-- Gingrich's use of history is remarkably shallow, and really consists of a kind of Mad Libs consisting of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (how many people has Gingrich challenged to "a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates"?), and the Cold War; comparisons of himself to Washington, Reagan, and Thatcher; and apocalyptic language that would have warmed the hearts of Leo Strauss or Nostradamus.

He truly is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person is like.

Also, this handy flow chart.

More on security theatre

A very good Vanity Fair piece on security theatre in our nation's airports. It features a walk through Dulles with security expert Bruce Schneier (who I once appeared with in an article)

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said…. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”...

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

James Fallows also has a Boxing Day roundup of security theatre. Beware terrorist cupcakes!

Homestead cat

I was out walking today, and passed the old home of Homestead, a Web site company that was bought by Intuit in 2007. It's not clear that there's anyone in the building now but the cat.

via flickr

A couple years ago I had the vague idea of doing a book of pictures of closed-down offices. If things don't pick up more, maybe there'll still be a reason to plan such a book.

Windy Hill Open Space Preserve

Yesterday we organized a Christmas Eve hike in Windy Hill Open Space Preserve.

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Windy Hill is a park bounded by Portola Road and Skyline Boulevard, and the hike we went on took us from the former to the latter. There are parking lots on Portola and Skyline. We followed the Ridge Trail to Spring Ridge, and hiked it to the top of the park.

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It's one of the few parks that allows both dogs and horses, so we saw a fair number of each.

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It also turned out to be rather kid-friendly, though it helped that there was a whole pack of kids. Of all the things you can take to keep kids from complaining during a hike, buddies are the most important.

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Unlike the ridge parks, where any trail will have lots of uphill and downhill, these are one way: either you're headed up to Skyline, or down to Portola Road.

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The view from the summit is really great, though there are lots of good views of the valley and East Bay as you go.

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Matt Taibbi on "skin in the game"

A fabulous recent Bloomberg piece quotes Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman on the unfairness of lower-income U.S. families, military retirees, pensioners, and others who pay no income tax: “You have to have skin in the game," he complains.

Matt Taibbi counters, if you're not paying federal income taxes because you're earning working-class wages,

you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck…. And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Best closing line in the history of marketing: "Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO's dissertation"

Even Newt Gingrich couldn't do this, but Lytro, the makers of the new light field camera, (its very first production model was delivered last month) can.

The camera, incidentally, looks pretty amazing-- an appealing blend of retro (it looks like slide viewers my dad had from the 1970s)-- and hyper-modern.

Here's the dissertation, if you're really interested.

And seriously, check out the interactive picture gallery. It's pretty amazing.

Christopher Hitchens

I'll be only the billionth person to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens. I have mixed feelings about his work: I found his writing right after 9/11 to be brilliant, but also found some of his later political writing blustery and straining to convince.

On the other hand, he was an awesomely productive writer, something that as a fellow craftsman I have to admire.

Of the various remembrances that have come out, I think Christopher Buckley's is my favorite.

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

This piece by Ian McEwan is also pretty remarkable for its description of Hitchens in the hospital in his last days:

this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library....

The next morning, at Christopher's request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher's journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Top CEOs working 30-40% harder than in 2009

I mean, if compensation for CEOs is up, as a new survey reports, that's the logical explanation, right?

CEO pay packages have boomed: the top 10 earners took home more than $770m between them in 2010. As stock prices began to recover last year, the increase in CEO pay outstripped the rise in share value. The Russell 3000 measure of US stock prices was up by 16.93% in 2010, but CEO pay went up by 27.19% overall. For S&P 500 CEOs, the largest companies in the sample, total realised compensation – including perks and pensions and stock awards – increased by a median of 36.47%. Total pay at midcap companies, which are slightly smaller than the top firms, rose 40.2%.

Working that hard makes losing a top job that much more painful:

Four of the 10 highest paid CEOs were retired or departing executives. Ronald Williams, former head of Aetna, a health insurer, exercised 2.4m options for a profit of $50.4m. Aetna's stock price declined by 70% from when Williams assumed the role of CEO in February 2006 until his retirement. At pharmacy chain CVS, Thomas Ryan made a $28m profit on his options. During Ryan's 13-year tenure as CEO, CVS Caremark's stock price decreased almost 54%.

As the Guardian comments, "2010 was a great year to lose your job as a CEO." Finally, the survey explains why bankers are in such a bad mood:

Bosses won in every area, with dramatic increases in pensions, payoffs and perks – as well as salary.

Still, there are no bankers among this year's big winners.

James Murdoch needs the phrase "Blackberry Bites"...

...and to put John Hagel and John Seely Brown on retainer to help explain how people really read on their Blackberry.

(Read about Murdoch's "I read this critical email on my Blackberry, so hey how could I have read it all the way through?" excuse.)

I wasn't ambitious enough in my Futurists' Guide to World Domination

Clearly in my Evil Futurists' Guide to World Domination I underestimated the ability of pathological behavior to claim rewards for itself, as Felix Salmon explains in his piece on Jon Corzine:

Corzine demonstrated virtually all of the pathologies of the rogue trader....

Lots of financial firms make big bets and blow up. But what we saw at MF Global was much more than that. In fact, as Corzine detailed at great length in his prepared testimony last week, his big sovereign-debt bet didn’t actually lose money at all. But MF Global died all the same, because the bet was so large and risky that it caused a fatal cascade of downgrades and margin calls….

A CEO wants to be paranoid about all risks; a rogue trader wants to hide them. It’s clear which one Corzine was.

The piece goes through the four major properties of rogue traders, and how Corzine fits them (though perhaps the systemic or cultural problem with the model is that nearly everyone on Wall Street demonstrates at least a couple of them to some degree.)

Vogue's entire catalog is now online, and why This is a Thing

New York Magazine has a piece on the opening of Vogue's new online archive that only narrowly misses fainting with excitement.

Vogue's much-hyped archive website goes live today, and as promised, it contains every single page from every issue dating back to the magazine's American debut in 1892. According to Vogue's press release, the site is searchable by decade, brand, designer, and photographer; you can also sort results by articles, images, covers, or ads. It's a wildly impressive undertaking to organize such a massive amount of information, and bravo to Vogue for providing a great tool for researching the historical context of moments in fashion and society.

Felix Salmon adds:

The ad content alone is hugely valuable: it’s almost impossible, right now, to follow the course of, say, Dolce & Gabbana’s ad campaigns from inception to date, or to follow the career of a star model or photographer as they move back and forth between expensive editorial shoots and much more expensive ad shoots. The Vogue database even allows you to search by individual garment — again, giving you the opportunity to see how a certain pair of shoes, say, is portrayed in different contexts.

The people who really need this kind of information are professionals who happily spend $131 on lunch and will be equally happy to spend the same amount on a month’s access to the Vogue archives.

It'll be interesting to see if there are institutional subscriptions-- will Fashion Institute of Technology or RISD give its students access.

My iPhone macro lens nerd moment

As a break from editing the latest chapter, I decided to try something I'd read about recently: creating a super macro lens for my iPhone. (Lots of people are doing it.)

I had an old DVD player in my car, and I broke it open, and dug out one of the lenses. There are two lenses, a curvy one, and a flatter one. You want the flatter of the two.

I took the lens, drilled a hole in an old Maker Faire badge, and cemented it in. The lens is just above the "2010."

via flickr

The results can be really cool.

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You do have to tinker with it a lot to get a good picture-- if the lens is off-center everything gets messed up, you have to be careful to focus it properly, and of course there's huge vignetting-- but that's part of the pleasure of it.

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Now on to making a pinhole lens for my Nikon D3100!

New category: Reviews

Because I have nothing better to do, I took a break and created a new blog category: book reviews. Given that I've written plenty of them, and work hard on them, I decided they deserved their own category.

I was also motivated to do so because a bunch of my older reviews no longer seem to be available online, and in the interests of historic preservation I've copied them here. You're welcome.

Why Felix Salmon is now essential reading

To me, Felix Salmon has become like a serious version of Michael Lewis. Like Lewis, Salmon writes about an incredibly important subject-- banking and finance-- in an entertaining way. Unlike Lewis (or even more, Matt Taibbi), you don't get the sense that Salmon's writing is skewed to tell a particular story.

Two posts today demonstrate why his blog is essential reading these days.

The first is on today's Eurozone summit, and how stupidly the central players-- in particular Germany, but also the ECB-- are behaving:

I thought disasters were all meant to happen over the weekend? Somehow, in Brussels, EU leaders have contrived to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory on Thursday night, leaving Friday for finger-pointing and recriminations and wondering whether anybody who signed on to this deal has any chance at all of even getting re-elected, let alone being remembered as one of the leaders who saved the euro.

Remember how Wolfgang Münchau said that the Euro zone had to get it right at this summit or it would collapse? Well, the Euro zone has most emphatically not got it right. Take any of the list of prescriptions of the minimum necessary right now — from Münchau, from Larry Summers, from Mohamed El-Erian — and the one thing that jumps out at you, especially in light of the most recent news, is that if you look at anybody’s list, there’s an enormous number of items which has zero chance of actually happening.

Yes, this is a good read, but Salmon also closes with a clarification of what's at stake:

A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief

Europe’s leaders have set a course which leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.

To paraphrase Churchill, Merkel Draghi & Co. had a choice between economic disaster and dishonor; they've chosen dishonor, and they will have disaster.

The second is a piece examining the roots of the animus wealthy people feel toward Obama:

[Recent studies show a] very strong correlation between tax cuts for the rich... and increased wealth for the rich (on the y-axis). This correlation comes as no surprise, of course. But… lower top marginal tax rates don’t translate into higher growth — which means that the extra wealth going to the 1% really is a zero-sum game, and being taken out of the pockets of the 99%.

But it’s hard for a gazillionaire to come out and say that he wants more of everybody else’s money.

Crows are smart!

Turns out that crows are as smart as Aesop claimed:

Aesop had the measure of crows.

In his fable, there was a wise old mother crow who finds a pitcher with only a little water in it.

Desperately thirsty, the intelligent bird drops small stones into the container, raising the water level until it is high enough for her to drink.

The story might be 2,500 years old, but the Ancient Greek author clearly understood how the crow’s mind works.

For when we recreated the experiment in our laboratory in Cambridge, the birds did exactly as Aesop described. Without being taught the details of the task, they picked up stones and dropped them into a tube of water — raising the water level.

This experiment is part of a research programme which has proved that members of the crow family, known as corvids, aren’t just among the cleverest birds, they are smarter than most mammals.

In fact, their intelligence rivals that of apes — who, along with crows, are able to do tasks that three and four-year-old children have difficulty with.

They also have a theory of mind, and can plan ahead.

These findings have fascinating implications.

People used to believe that the high level of intelligence we see in humans and apes evolved only once on the planet, but if it occurs in distantly related groups — the common ancestor we share with birds lived 300 million years ago — it suggests this intelligence evolved more than once.

This means that we may have other intelligent lifeforms on earth that we are not aware of. And because birds’ brains are very different from mammal brains, it raises questions about what kinds of brains support intelligence.

Michael Lewis' awesome ideas for the 1%

As usual, Michael Lewis nails it, this time in a Christopher Buckley-worthy memo "Re: The Counterrevolution:"

As our chief quant notes, “No matter how well we do for ourselves, there will always be 99 of them for every one of us.” Disturbingly, his recent polling data reveal that many of us don’t even know who we are: Fully half of all Upper Ones believe themselves to belong to the Lower 99. That any human being can earn more than 344 grand a year without having the sense to identify which side in a class war he is on suggests that we should limit membership to actual rich people. But we wish to address this issue in a later memo. For now we remain focused on the problem at hand: How to keep their hands off our money.

The ultimate answer: following the trailblazing example of Eastern European plutocrats. (Who says all innovation comes from America?)

We must be able to quit American society altogether, and they must know it. For too long we have simply accepted the idea that we and they are all in something together, subject to the same laws and rituals and cares and concerns. This state of social relations between rich and poor isn’t merely unnatural and unsustainable, but, in its way, shameful. (Who among us could hold his head high in the presence of Louis XIV or those Russian czars or, for that matter, Croesus?)

The modern Greeks offer the example in the world today that is, the committee has determined, best in class. Ordinary Greeks seldom harass their rich, for the simple reason that they have no idea where to find them. To a member of the Greek Lower 99 a Greek Upper One is as good as invisible.

He pays no taxes, lives no place and bears no relationship to his fellow citizens. As the public expects nothing of him, he always meets, and sometimes even exceeds, their expectations. As a result, the chief concern of the ordinary Greek about the rich Greek is that he will cease to pay the occasional visit.

That is the sort of relationship with the Lower 99 we must cultivate if we are to survive. We must inculcate, in ourselves as much as in them, the understanding that our relationship to each other is provisional, almost accidental and their claims on us nonexistent.

Stupid banking tricks, and the future

I'm thinking that before too long, I need to pitch a book proposal titled something like The Future: What We Know, What We Can Never Know, and What We Refuse to Know. It would be about the centrality of prediction in, well, absolutely everything that sentient species do; a look at the way the boundary between what's knowable and unknowable has changed over the centuries, and where it stands today; current efforts to forecast / predict the future; and why we do such a good job of either listening to the wrong people for Very Serious Advice, or repeating mistakes we just made.

Like this one:

The FT is reporting today that the new fiscal rules for the EU “include a commitment not to force private sector bondholders to take losses on any future eurozone bail-outs”. If this principle really does get enshrined into some new treaty, it will be one of the most fiscally insane derelictions of statesmanship the world has seen — but it certainly helps explain the short-term rally that we saw today in Italian government debt….

The impetus for this completely insane policy seems to have come from the ECB, which genuinely seems to believe that bailing in private-sector banks, in the Greece restructuring, was the “terrible mistake” which caused the current euro crisis. Talk about confusing cause and effect: it was Greece’s fiscal disaster which caused the restructuring and the necessary bail-in.

To understand just how stupid this is, all you need to do is go back and read Michael Lewis’s Ireland article. The fateful decision in Ireland was to take the insolvent banks and give them a blanket bailout, with the banks’ creditors all getting 100 cents on the euro. That only served to put a positively evil debt burden onto the Irish people, forcing a massive austerity program and causing untold billions of euros in foregone growth, while bailing out lenders who deserved no such thing.

Are we really going to repeat — on a much larger scale — the very same mistake that Ireland made? Does no one in Europe realize that this is the single worst thing they can do?

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that accountability-- the need to be responsible for one's actions, and to make decisions in the shadow of consequences for the value of your choices-- is one of the things that makes futures anything approaching necessary, and that the rise of "nobody could have predicted" rhetoric and the constant softening of elite decision-makers' landings after bad choices strikes at the heart of the field.

An essential addition to my wardrobe

Just in time for the holidays! The Renegade Futurist t-shirt.

Is the Mac blog editor market down to Mars Edit?

Hard to believe, but it looks that way. I poked around a little with Ecto this afternoon, and it looks like it's now abandonware. I like Mars Edit well enough-- the Flickr integration is nice, in particular-- but there are some strange elements to it-- no dedicated button for links, for example, which I shake my head at every time I write something.

But it seems impossible to me that Mars Edit is pretty much the whole game now. Can that be right?

And where the heck is the good blog editor for the iPad?