WordPress has a weekly photo challenge, and this week’s theme is Fleeting.
Curiously enough, I posted a photo with that title less than a month ago on my photoblog, Erudite Expressions. I captured it in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn a few months ago.
Have a great weekend!
In what may be one of the most cynical but tell-it-like-it-is posts I’ve ever read, Freddie deBoer offers some “Discouragement for Young Writers”. It’s a must-read, in my opinion. First, a cautionary note:
A third of this is tongue in cheek. You’ll have to decide which third yourself.
I’m not a writer; I’m just someone who reads and writes a lot. So you may take all of this in a “credit only to the man in the arena” sense, and I wouldn’t blame you. But I’ll tell you: there are advantages. Not being a writer is a wonderful salve for your writing. I sometimes read things that writers have written and say to myself, if only s/he wasn’t a writer, s/he’d be going places.
I don’t think this is the one third that’s meant tongue in cheek:
You probably can’t make it as a writer. That’s the very first thing you should understand. Start every day by looking into the mirror and saying: I’ll never write that novel. I’ll never write that novel. I’ll never write that novel. Hopefully after you’ve gotten it through your skull you can get to work on something that will put money in your pocket. (Spoiler: it won’t be a lot. Within a rounding error of $0 is a nice, conservative assumption.) You might, if you aren’t too hung up on writing that novel, write a novel. There’s a small chance someone will buy it, once you’ve written the one that isn’t the one that you think about writing that gets in the way of your work. There’s even a remote possibility it’ll be good. Even really good. But probably not.
But this most likely is:
Buzz is nothing. Getting your name out there is nothing. All of the positive mentions and trackbacks and Facebook hits from that piece you did for somebody’s vanity project website are nothing.
The best thing to do, sometimes, is to ignore the vapid advice. Spot on:
It’s a fact of life that writers, who always aspire to speak with specificity and go in fear of abstraction, tend to give the most vague, useless advice on writing. “Use concrete language! Write about what you know! Listen to criticism!” Thanks, coach. They mean well. They really do. But “be specific in your writing” has as much content as “make a profit in your business” or “score more points in your football game.” Useless. All useless.
This part is definitely tongue in cheek. Some people do care.
Nobody gives a shit that you used to cut yourself. Nobody gives a shit that your parents divorced. Nobody gives a shit that you have cancer. Nobody cares.
But this is a good sound-off. I do think writing is worth trying (I’ve tried and failed):
So do it for awhile and if you don’t make it find something else that’s good enough. Then you can get all nostalgic about when you tried it out. I’m a romantic at heart, and it’s a beautiful thing to attempt.
Again, a must-read. Especially if you need a dash of reality to go with all that enthusiasm you’ve been inhaling.
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(hat tip: @fmanjoo)
Caleb Garling, in an illustrative post on San Francisco Chronicle’s site, explains why Zynga is failing (and perhaps is destined to fail):
One, since its inception, most of Zynga’s revenue was from users on Facebook. If you are a business, and you have tied your success to another business — especially one with aspirations of world domination — you’re setting yourself up for heartbreak. Zynga tried to get people to go to Zynga.com to play — and avoid Facebook taking about a third of every dollar it made — but never really pulled it off. (And frankly, any app developers with big aspirations should take a lesson.)
Two, your attention span. Most casual gamers don’t want to wait to get to their computers to play. In fact, the best time to play games for many people — those with jobs — is between computer time, commuting or waiting for the dentist.
Three, building games for many different platforms is just hard! You have to deal with different screen sizes and technical requirements, not to mention deciding whether certain devices have a demographic that will create a positive return on investment for that particular game on that particular platform. And all the while, individual developers, that can be a little more nimble, eat away at market share for games on each one.
As for me? I am wary of games (and most apps, really) that are free but target you with in-app purchases. For instance, Real Racing was a great game for iOS, until they decided to ratchet it with in-app purchases.
I only play two of Zynga’s games: Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends.
The composer Joseph Bertolozzi is going to Paris, knowing no French. Why? He intends to make music banging on The Eiffel Tower. From The New York Times:
His mission is to “play the Eiffel Tower” by striking its surfaces, collecting sounds through a microphone and using them as samples for an hourlong composition called “Tower Music.” He eventually hopes for a live, on-site performance of the work to celebrate the tower’s 125th anniversary next year.
What a cool story. Mr. Bertolozzi has spent more than four years on his quest. He raised $40,000 from private donors and convinced the Eiffel Tower administration that he was a legitimate musician. And he’s dedicated:
In preparation for his Parisian experiment, Mr. Bertolozzi studied the design of the Eiffel Tower. He listened to the works of French composers like Ravel and Poulenc, whose pieces have elements of cafe music and street sounds.
The tower, too, serves as “a deeper inspiration for me to try to find new ways of creating sounds,” he said. “So it’s just constant reinvention.”
Adam Alter, author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, summarizes the surprising psychology of names:
In one study, the economists Bentley Coffey and Patrick McLaughlin examined whether female lawyers in South Carolina were more likely to become judges if their names were more “masculine.” Some names—like James, John, and Michael—are almost exclusively male; others—like Hazel, Ashley, and Laurie—are almost exclusively female. But a third group is shared almost equally by men and women—like Kerry and Jody—and women with those names were notably more likely than their nominally feminine counterparts to become judges. The researchers labelled the phenomenon the Portia Hypothesis, after the female character in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” who disguises herself as a man so she can appear before the all-male court. (Note that the experiment can’t rule out the possibility that the nominally masculine lawyers actually behaved differently from their nominally feminine counterparts.)
The most interesting point was the inherent biases that develop (I confess to thinking hilly implies going uphill, for example) in association to names:
Similar linguistic associations influence how we think and behave in other ways. For example, if I told you that I was driving north across hilly terrain tomorrow, would you expect that drive to be mostly uphill or mostly downhill? If you’re like most people, you associate northerly movement with going uphill, and southerly movement with going downhill. According to research by the psychologists Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons, this association produces some strange biases: people believe that a bird will take longer to migrate between the same two points if it flies north than if it flies south; they expect a moving company to charge eighty per cent more to move furniture north rather than south; and, as a different study concluded, they assume that property is more valuable when it sits in the northern part of town. Apparently these quirks stem from the decision of early Greek mapmakers to plot the northern hemisphere above the southern hemisphere—a decision that frustrated, among others, an Australian named Stuart McArthur, who proposed a corrective map that reversed the projection.
In a post titled “How the price of paint is set in the heart of dying stars,” Yonatan Zunger explains why most barns are painted red:
First of all, let’s think about what paint is. At a minimum, paint is a combination of a binder (some material that dries to form a film, like acrylic or oil) and a pigment, some material which gives it a color. A pigment is a material which absorbs some colors of light and reflects others; most pigments are minerals. (There are also organic pigments, such as the Imperial Tyrian purple made from the snot of the Murex snail, but not as many, and they tend to be much more expensive for the simple reason that there are a lot more rocks than there are animals and plants.) So for something to be a cheap pigment, it has to be a good pigment, and it has to be cheap. So let’s figure out what makes each of these happen.
To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color. The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry.
The detailed calculations, or even the not-so-detailed calculations, are way beyond the scope of this post. (There are even whole books about it, like Nassau’s The Physics and Chemistry of Color) But there’s one important pattern which I can at least tell you about, which is that if you look at the various atoms which form a pigment, and you look at their outermost electrons (not the inner electrons, which are so tightly bound to their atom that they don’t participate in chemistry; all of chemistry is determined by the behavior of the outermost electrons around an atom) then it turns out that certain kinds of outermost electrons form pigments, and certain ones don’t.
The magic property is what’s called “angular momentum,” which basically measures how fast these outermost electrons are rotating around the nucleus. Electrons in atoms get angular momentum only in fixed increments (there’s that quantum mechanics again, only fixed increments allowed) and for historical reasons, the first few increments are named “s,” “p,” “d,” and “f.” On the periodic table, (http://www.webelements.com) the elements whose outer electrons are “s” form the two tall leftmost columns; the “p” elements are the big square on the right; the “d” elements are the big block in the middle; and the “f” elements are the two rows off at the bottom. (If we ever make element 121, it would be the first “g” element)
Electrons with less angular momentum spin in more spherical (rather than deformed) orbits, and when multiple electrons are trying to fly in the same spherical orbit, they repel each other pretty strongly. The result of this is that two “s” electrons meeting will have very different energies — and it turns out that, in quantum mechanics, the amount of energy an electron can absorb is exactly thedifference between these energy levels. So “s” means a big gap, “p” a slightly smaller one, and so on. And it turns out that “d” electrons are right at the sweet spot where that gap corresponds to visible light.
Well, why are those particular colors of light visible? It’s because of the temperature of the Sun: our eyes didn’t evolve to see X-rays because there aren’t many X-rays to see around here. Instead, they’re very sensitive in the range of colors that the Sun produces, from red (around 780nm wavelength) to a peak brightness of yellow (around 600nm) all the way up to violet (around 400nm). Those colors correspond to energy gaps of about 0.3 electron volts (eV, a good unit of energy for studying atoms) which are right around the energies of chemical bonds involving d electrons. S- and p- bonds involve energies of 1-3 eV, corresponding to wavelengths around 100nm, in the far ultraviolet range.
Did we just get lucky that the Sun is yellow, and if we lived orbiting another star might the useful pigments come from p bonds? Surprisingly, the answer is no. The Sun’s color comes pretty directly from its temperature: it’s literally glowing yellow-hot, with a surface temperature of about 5,800K. The coolest stars, red dwarfs, are about 2,800K and glow red. The hottest stars, the type O stars, go up to about 40,000K, only 72nm; but it turns out that when a star gets any hotter than class F (about 7,000K, about 400nm — blue) its lifespan starts to decrease precipitously. This is because the temperature of stars is actually fixed by the kinds of fusion reaction going on in their core, which I’ll get back to in a moment, and those hotter reactions burn through their fuel a lot faster. The net result is that any star that’s going to last long enough to have planets with life on them might be a bit redder or a bit bluer than our sun, but not radically so: and it’s those d-orbitals that are going to make the best pigments for anyone whose eyeballs evolved there.
Red ochre (Fe2O3) is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green, and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red. It’s really cheap because it’s abundant. And it’s really abundant because of nuclear fusion in dying stars:
The only thing holding the star up was the energy of the fusion reactions, so as power levels go down, the star starts to shrink. And as it shrinks, the pressure goes up, and the temperature goes up, until suddenly it hits a temperature where a new reaction can get started. These new reactions give it a big burst of energy, but start to form heavier elements still, and so the cycle gradually repeats, with the star reacting further and further up the periodic table, producing more and more heavy elements as it goes. Until it hits 56. At that point, the reactions simply stop producing energy at all; the star shuts down and collapses without stopping.
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(via Smithsonian Magazine)
I’ve been following Julien Smith’s blog, In Over Your Head, ever since I heard him speak with Chris Brogan about their book, Trust Agents. Today, he announced the launch of a start-up Breather, a quiet space which you can rent by the hour. Julien writes the motivation for bringing this concept to fruition:
I was sick of walking around in cities everywhere, trying to find a place to go.
I was no longer willing to have meetings in coffee shops, either.
I was annoyed of having to take phone calls in the street, with sirens passing by me.
I was sick of having to scavenge for electrical outlets when my phone was dying.
More than anything, I wanted a place to rest.
I’m an introvert– but a very specific kind of introvert.
I’m an introvert that needs to talk a lot for work, that needs to meet a lot of people, and that needs to recuperate mid-way through the day.
Starbucks wasn’t cutting it. Hotel lobbies weren’t cutting it.
I wanted space I could go to, anytime.
Not just space, but nice space. Well-designed rooms. Rooms that werequiet. Rooms I didn’t need to ask permission to get into. Rooms I could just go to whenever I wanted.
So that’s what we made. That’s what Breather is.
This is a very cool idea and I hope it takes off. I think the launch is limited to Montreal (Julien’s home town) and New York City. Pando Daily has more:
Currently those looking to work or gather while on the go turn to coffee shops, restaurants, and hotel lobbies – none of which offer any privacy or much comfort. Those in need of a quiet place to make a phone call, however, have far fewer options. When the Breather network goes live, those in NYC will be surrounded by hundreds of carefully curated spaces, all of which were formerly but which now can be rented for an hour or for a day.
It’s not just residents and visitors to a city that stand to benefit from Breather. It also solves a major problem for property owners, who currently sit on vacant space for extended periods of time with little or no way of monetizing it in the interim. And in high traffic areas, adding a space to the breather network may be as profitable as renting it out long term.
The hourly rate of $20, at least in New York City, seems very affordable. I am guessing it will be cheaper in other cities. I wish Julien and the team at Breather success with the launch. I can’t wait to see how it expands.
Check out Breather and maybe sign up? I have.
The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, spoke at the 2013 Baccalaureate Ceremony at Princeton University. He titled his speech “The Ten Suggestions.” It’s worth a read. Three highlights below:
7. I’m not going to tell you that money doesn’t matter, because you wouldn’t believe me anyway. In fact, for too many people around the world, money is literally a life-or-death proposition. But if you are part of the lucky minority with the ability to choose, remember that money is a means, not an end. A career decision based only on money and not on love of the work or a desire to make a difference is a recipe for unhappiness.
8. Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.
9. I spoke earlier about definitions of personal success in an unpredictable world. I hope that as you develop your own definition of success, you will be able to do so, if you wish, with a close companion on your journey. In making that choice, remember that physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for beauty, romance, and sexual attraction–where would Hollywood and Madison Avenue be without them? But while important, those are not the only things to look for in a partner. The two of you will have a long trip together, I hope, and you will need each other’s support and sympathy more times than you can count. Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can’t imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion.
He’s got some bias in his rosy outlook on politicians in Washington. Nevertheless, if you neglect item 5 on his list, everything else he spoke about has merit.
An interesting scoop from Reuters on Amazon quietly testing/developing a grocery delivery business:
Amazon is now planning to expand its grocery business outside Seattle for the first time, starting with Los Angeles as early as this week and the San Francisco Bay Area later this year, according to the two people who were not authorized to speak publicly.
If those new locations go well, the company may launch AmazonFresh in 20 other urban areas in 2014, including some outside the United States, said one of the people.
Bill Bishop, a prominent supermarket analyst and consultant, said the company was targeting as many as 40 markets, without divulging how he knew of Amazon’s plans.
I already spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on Amazon every year. I purchase household items on a regular basis from the site. It would make sense that there would be ecstatic consumers who would want to buy fresh groceries from Amazon as well. I know I would.
I am beginning my morning by absorbing Adam Davidson’s fascinating piece in GQ on Kim Jong Il’s sushi chef. The intro should get you fired up:
North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader’s cook, confidant, and court jester. What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you’re never really safe. We sent Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson to meet the man who survived all the craziness.
The chef, who goes by the alias Kenji Fujimoto, is Japanese–a conflict:
Though the Japanese are considered an enemy in North Korea—for their brutal invasion, occupation, and subjugation of Korea from 1910 to 1945—Fujimoto’s outsider status had advantages: He didn’t speak Korean and therefore couldn’t betray Kim’s confidences. Fujimoto was also a stranger to the complex allegiances and shifting tides of Pyongyang politics. And because he knew so little about North Korea, he tended to accept Shogun-sama’s version of reality—that the Kims were benevolent leaders beset by jealous enemies.
These were good times for Fujimoto. During the day he trained his students, and at night the shouts of “Toro, one more!” kept coming. Beautiful women were always nearby, and interesting executives kept coming and going. When he spent leisure time with Kim Jong-il, they drank Bordeaux wines and discussed Shogun-sama’s favorite Schwarzenegger movies.
The title of the piece is a riff on a superb documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, available to stream for free on Netflix Instant (which I recommend seeing!).
Books I Read 