A. Garrett Lisi Fanclub

So this is pretty cool: Guy gets his PhD in Physics. Guy likes to surf. So guy takes odd jobs after finishing his PhD, lives in Maui where he can surf, and works on Physics on his own. Guy publishes new theory of how the universe works on a wiki. Now guy is the keynote speaker at the TED Conference in Monterey.

I wish I'd gotten good enough at physics and math to understand what the hell a Lie Group really is, and maybe offer an opinion on what he's talking about. As it is, I'm passingly familiar with the vocabulary and I've read about E8 before (see below). But even if the theory turns out to be complete bunk, I think this guy is the big winner.

The final quote pulls together a lot of the way I think life should be lived:

"Surfing and snowboarding are what I do for fun -- to get out and play in nature. We live in a beautiful universe, and I wish to enjoy it and understand it as best I can. And I try to live a balanced life. Surfing is simply the most fun I know how to have on this planet. And physics, and science in general, is the best way of understanding how everything works. So this is what I spend my time doing. I do what I love, and follow my interests. Shouldn't everyone?"

Yup.

P.S. What is E8? It's a 248 point mathematical structure that looks something like this

Not So Lite After All

Thanks to Cardiff for pointing out this very good article in The New Republic on the ideological background to Obama's policy tendencies. I had a shot at summarizing the article, but it got a bit involved. Highly recommend you read it yourself. The key takeaway seems to be that despite the sweeping, idealistic note Obama has sounded on the campaign trail, most of his policy positions are in fact strongly pragmatic.

Ship-Rescuing Awesomeness

Another article in Wired. This one about the guys from Titan Salvage who fly around the world rescuing sinking ships. Just a beautiful, interesting, bad-ass example of good journalism.

Why Everything On The Internet Will Be Free

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail, lays out the case for why everything on the web will ultimately be offered for free. In a nutshell, he says the costs of computing, storage and bandwidth are dropping to the point of being negligible, which makes the incremental cost of any product or service offered online effectively zero. This, combined with the 3-way transaction model exemplified by paid advertising, will give consumers the ultimate five finger discount.

Sounds nice. And the economic case is compelling. But in my mind the most important point comes in this passage:

"From the consumer's perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you."

This marketing issue seems like a more important factor than dropping costs. Sometimes price is determined by cost of production plus a margin, but just as often it's determined by what the consumer is willing to pay. So even if your costs are zero, you'll still charge if someone is willing to pay for what you're selling. The big difference with free is that people don't need to think about it as a value proposition at all. So as a seller you need to do very little convincing.

The big bonus of free that Anderson doesn't talk about is elimination of the need for a payment mechanism. Despite all the internet's advances in the last few years, buying something online is still a huge pain in the ass. But as soon as you can get something to somebody online for free, the hassle of credit cards and paypals and whatever else goes away.

But Most of The Time...

... I'm not sorry I live on the other side of the world.  Anyway, T-minus 3 hrs til the big 28.  Time to get changed.

Sick New MoMA Exhibit

Damn. Sometimes I regret living on the other side of the world. Like when the MoMA comes out with something like this. Can someone check it out and tell me how it is?

The Guardian, The Idealist and The Artisan...

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See what Myers-Briggs personality Type Indicators reveal about Hillary, Obama and McCain. These tests are really interesting. Lots of companies use them to classify their employees (I know McKinsey uses it). I took one in college years ago and the diagnosis began with a passage from my favorite book. I think I was an ENTP then, but just took it again and apparently I'm an ENTJ... I wonder what changes these traits?

Take a free online version of the test yourself here.

Against Waterboarding

The former special prosecutor for Guantanamo Bay argues the case against waterboarding. Powerful stuff coming from someone who might have been seen as working for the bad guys on this issue. Fortunately, he resigned his commission in 2007 in an effort to fight the legal use of torture. Best quote comes in the lede:

"TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”"

Here's a description of what waterboarding actually is for anyone who's curious.

Of Booms and Busts

An article in the New Yorker describes how Wall Street tends to contribute to destabilizing boom and bust cycles.   The theory was put forward by Hyman P. Minsky in the late '80s.  It calls for more regulation on Wall Street to prevent things like the sub-prime mortgage crisis from happening.  In a nutshell:

"There are basically five stages in Minsky’s model of the credit cycle: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking, and panic. A displacement occurs when investors get excited about something—an invention, such as the Internet, or a war, or an abrupt change of economic policy. The current cycle began in 2003, with the Fed chief Alan Greenspan’s decision to reduce short-term interest rates to one per cent, and an unexpected influx of foreign money, particularly Chinese money, into U.S. Treasury bonds. With the cost of borrowing—mortgage rates, in particular—at historic lows, a speculative real-estate boom quickly developed that was much bigger, in terms of over-all valuation, than the previous bubble in technology stocks.

As a boom leads to euphoria, Minsky said, banks and other commercial lenders extend credit to ever more dubious borrowers, often creating new financial instruments to do the job. During the nineteen-eighties, junk bonds played that role. More recently, it was the securitization of mortgages, which enabled banks to provide home loans without worrying if they would ever be repaid. (Investors who bought the newfangled securities would be left to deal with any defaults.) Then, at the top of the market (in this case, mid-2006), some smart traders start to cash in their profits.

...The theory calls for increased regulation on Wall Street to decrease their contribution to the swings of the cycle. 

The Greatest Wine Ever

Even if you're not into wine, this article in Slate describing the story and experience of drinking a '47 Cheval Blanc is a great read. Basically a fucked up wine from a freak year that should have been undrinkable, but instead it's faults came together to create the best cup of grape juice ever bottled. There's an interesting metaphor for other types of genius in this passage:

"The '47s signature flaws—the residual sugar and volatile acidity—were readily apparent, but it was just as Lurton had said: In this wine, the flaws inexplicably became virtues... I realized that it was silly even to try to place the '47 in the context of other wines; it defied comparison, a point underscored when I tasted another legend, the 1945 Château Latour, later that night (yeah, it was a nice evening). The Latour was stunning—probably the second-best wine I've ever had—but it at least fell within my frame of reference: It was a classically proportioned Bordeaux that just happened to be achingly good. The '47 Cheval, by contrast, was an otherworldly wine—a claret from another planet. And it was amazing."

It's Complicated...

Very cool article from Wired describing Complexity Theory -- the emerging theory of evolution that deals with communities rather than individual organisms. Basic idea is that single organisms evolve linearly, but communities can make evolutionary leaps that arise from the interactions of many organisms.

Bill Baker of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill

This is the guy who figures out how to build things like the Burj Dubai.  If you're interested in architecture or structural engineering, it's a very cool read.  Money passage comes at the end:

"The initial scheme was for a building of about 1,800 feet, 317 feet taller than the Petronas Towers. Yet the clients made a request: Overengineer the foundation, just in case we change our minds. Which the clients did. Repeatedly. On trip after trip to Dubai — even after a hole was dug and giant caissons were set 150 feet into the sand, even after the building began to rise, a floor every three days, into the desert haze — the SOM team kept getting the same request: Can you make it taller?...

The final height of the Burj will remain secret until its completion in 2009. SOM's managing partner George Efstathiou brags that it'll be as high as the Sears Tower and the Hancock Center stacked on top of each other (about 2,600 feet). Others say it could be taller — more than 3,000 feet. Baker thrills at the growing reality of it, but every once in a while he raps his knuckles on the table. "Quite frankly, I often urged the client to, you know — We can stop here, right?'" Baker says with a chuckle. "But they kept on pushing for taller and taller, and they were looking at me to see when I turned pale — so they'd know where to stop.""

3 Facts For Those Of Us Born In A Leap Year...

1) A leap year is any year evenly divisible by four — except for century years, which have to be divisible by 400. It's not a perfect system: The Gregorian year is 27 seconds longer than the astronomical year. By 12008, we'll be three days off.

2) October 5-14, 1582, never happened in Catholic lands. Brits (and their American subjects) born September 3 to 13 had no birthday in 1752. Those days were dropped when the Western world switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

3) International Atomic Time — kept by ultraprecise clocks — is gradually out-pacing astronomical time, which is determined by our planet's rotation. (Earth's spin is slowing — what a drag.) So in 1972, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service began adding occasional leap seconds. They've done it 23 times, most recently adding an extra "one-Mississippi" on December 31, 2005.

How The iPhone Blew Up The Wireless Industry

Great article in this month's Wired about the process of bringing the iPhone into existence. More than just a cool phone, Apple's deal with AT&T changes the dynamics of the entire industry, making device manufacturers more equal partners of network operators. It's alse a very cool glimpse of the design and development process inside Apple.

A Little-Mentioned Motivation For Peace...

One of the most frustrating things about the current state of the world is that some amazing places are now off-limits for travel. See this article in CNN about the desert city of Yazd in Iran. Backpacking around the Middle East is a dream I've had for a while. Unfortunately, it will probably be many years before parts of it are safe enough. I hope we'll see a traveller-friendly Iraq in our lifetimes...

Body Language Does The Talking

Article in the NYTimes about people responding positively to subtle mimicry of their body language. Studies show you're more likely to empathize with someone, buy a product from them, etc... when they copy your behavior.

One Cloud to Rule Them All

Fake Steve weighs in on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, putting it in the context of Google's vision for the future.

Profile of Defense Secretary Bob Gates

Good article from the NYTimes. They've run a couple of these in depth pieces -- I think the last one was on Hank Paulson. The new crop of people in the administration is such a marked improvement over the original batch. I wonder what (or who) drove this change... and what might have happened if they'd been there seven years ago.

When's the last time you were excited about something in American politics?

... Now would be an ideal time to donate to Obama's campaign.  You can do it here.

Think Global, Teach Local?

NYTimes on American universities opening up campuses abroad. I love this idea in the context of global business and development. After all, American universities are basically big, complicated companies, albeit with a much broader set of goals. What does it mean for the universities to truly go global, and what will this do for students around the world?

* Another follow-up article in the Times on Education City in Qatar.