Month: September 2009

Paul Graham makes an intriguing observation about the Segway and offers an explanation:

When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: “Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?”

Why do Segways provoke this reaction? The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug. You don’t seem to be working hard enough.

Someone riding a motorcycle isn’t working any harder. But because he’s sitting astride it, he seems to be making an effort. When you’re riding a Segway you’re just standing there. And someone who’s being whisked along while seeming to do no work—someone in a sedan chair, for example—can’t help but look smug.

A debate I bet no one thought we’d be having. Here’s the problem:

Electric cars that use 100% electric motive power generate very little noise of their own–which is a good thing, as noise constitutes wasted energy. But lawmakers and road-safety advocates are concerned that e-vehicles will thus pose a danger to pedestrians and other road users, used to checking for the sound of an oncoming vehicle before crossing the road…

Also for high-performance electric sports cars like the Tesla Roadster, the experience isn’t complete without the growl. So you can customize the engine sound a la cellphone ringtones:

The tuning house [Brabus] is seeking to give the Tesla a more exciting, albeit completely faked, running sound with electronically produced effects. Owners will be able to set their Tesla to make noises approximating a V-8 engine, a racecar engine, or “two futuristic soundscapes.” Those last two effects are named “Beam” and “Warp,”

Anil Dash concludes that great technology is built because “culture and art” stimulates creativity, and not for technology’s sake itself:

It happens because a vision is ambitious enough to capture the attention of artist and writers and creators of all sorts, not just other technologists or people within the bubble of the existing tech community. And cities like Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and, particularly, New York City, have a decided advantage when it comes to connecting to those in the tech community to the rest of the world.

What’s wrong with Silicon Valley? Simply that because of its evolution over the years, all it offers now is an “immersion in technology”.

[T]here’s so much else going on aside from technology — the valley might hold the title of the best place for start-ups in technology, but NYC is the best place for many things.

And why do we need more than an immersion in technology for a fertile culture of tech innovation? This essay by Paul Graham might have the answer:

What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. These aren’t so critical in something like math or physics, where no audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficiently straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do it reliably. In a field like math or physics all you need is a department with the right colleagues in it. It could be anywhere—in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example.

This seems to be in line with Anil Dash’s conclusion of what Silicon Valley has become today. But:

It’s in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren’t conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn’t need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It’s in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.

When the sound clip of his baby’s first recorded cry was no longer available online where he had posted it, Robert Scoble began thinking about how the stuff we put online just “leaks away”.

Sometimes you forget to pay the annual dues on a service like Flickr – where Scoble lost a bunch of photos. Sometimes the company goes bust. Sometimes all the stuff is there online but it’s hard to search for it.

I love the folks who say “you should have backed up.” How do you back up everything you do online? You can’t. Quick, back up all your Google Docs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos and all the metadata surrounding them (comments, tags, etc), your Facebook items, etc etc. You will die trying.

I know, I’ve been backing up like a crazy man lately since I got hacked. What’s funny is one of my brand new hard drives died. Luckily I had a backup of that. But what if I didn’t?

Original post is not too long, and it’s worth a full read.

This post led me to an annoying realization – on the one hand anything you put online stays online. You can’t delete every single copy even if you try, and it’s likely that something embarrassing will come back to bite you. On the other hand, it seems your most valuable online data – photos, old documents, email – is so volatile that you could lose it anytime.

It appears publishers haven’t quite come to grips with the e-book phenomenon:

…the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest thriller The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback on Amazon. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy’s True Compass, the other hot book release this week, can’t be bought via Kindle or Sony or as an e-book at all.

Most publishers fear cannibalization of their paper-based book sales by their e-book sales, because e-books are typically priced at or around $9.99, much lower than typical physical books.

Also, since publishers can’t, for the life of them, estimate how many electronic copies of a book they’ll sell, they can’t tell whether the increased volumes will make up for the lower price.

Proctor & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley, from an article on how he paces himself through the day:

I learned this in a program called the Corporate Athlete that we put on for P&G managers. I did the two-day program, where I also learned to change the way I eat. I used to eat virtually nothing for breakfast. Now I have a V-8 juice, half a bagel, and a cup of yogurt. And I eat five or six times a day. It’s about managing your glycemic level. You don’t want to boom and bust.

From a slideshow on how several personalities – from a Google VP to a fashion designer – manage their work day.

This time from a now-retired senior IBM executive:

I grew up with Spanish all around me for the first fifteen and a half years of my life back in Havana. But, ever since I came to the US in October of 1960, my education, my work and just about everything else have been in English. Over three quarters on my life have been lived in English, but most will agree that those early years represented by my Spanish quarter are pretty important years indeed.

While I speak Spanish fluently, my vocabulary and command of the language are much stronger in English than Spanish. I find it easier to read books and magazines or watch films in English. It would be very difficult for me to write this blog in a language other than English. On the other hand, for some inexplicable reason, I have trouble appreciating poetry in English, but I do enjoy Spanish poets like Jose Marti, Pablo Neruda, and especially, Federico Garcia Lorca. Maybe you have to appreciate poetry with the more primal parts of your brain, which in my case were formed in Spanish.

Also, in the second half of Wladawsky-Berger’s post, what worries Argentina and Chile:

Argentina and Chile are not competing for global leadership except in selected areas. Among their top concerns is their role in a globally integrated economy, feeling squeezed between wealthy countries like the US and countries with lower labor costs like China and India. Given their size and resources, how can they best find their uniquely differentiated positions or niches among the global giants out there as well as among the other mid-size countries around the world which are also competing to find their own niches?

(This post is somewhat of an update to this one from yesterday.)

The massively popular classified listing site still looks and functions like a mid-1990s web page.

The right side of the screen is devoted to an exhaustive list of cities and countries, although most users care about only the one they live in. Once you dive into a section, navigation requires more backtracking than a hedgerow maze. Locations aren’t sorted in sufficient detail, images aren’t available until you click through to a listing, and items can’t be flagged for side-by-side comparison. And that’s just the desktop version. On a mobile browser, craigslist is an interminable roll of links rendered in eye-crossingly minuscule text.

WIRED magazine asks (among others) Khoi Vinh – the designer of the New York Times website, and SimpleScott – the former design director of BarackObama.com, how they would redesign Craigslist to make it looks more up to date.

… shouldn’t we be making better use of all that space? One of the UI designers at Mozilla considers moving the tabs to the side of the browser.

Aza Raskin thinks there might be several reasons why you might want tabs on the side apart from better use of horizontal space:
– you could place bookmarks to your most visited sites,
– you could create ‘workspaces’, or live groups of tabs for specific tasks, or
– you could auto-hide it (it’s easier to auto-hide when the tabs are to the side than when they’re below the address bar.)

One of the members of the group that created Twitter, about the moment when it was born:

I was lucky enough to be in [Twitter’s first CEO Jack Dorsey] @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it.

Also from the article by Dom Sagolla: a screenshot of one of the very first iterations of the Twitter home page, then called twttr.

Note: “just setting up my twttr” was the first tweet on the system, according to a Newsweek article about the first messages on the telegraph, the phone, email, SMS and Twitter.