Remains of the Day

Common usage error

From this week's New Yorker.

Purchased song sync via the iPhone

Important science

Scientific American interviews an expert in kinesiology and neuroscience to ask if someone could really be Batman. The conclusion was that it might be possible, but only for a short while before your body broke down.

Was this really a deep question people needed scientific verification for?

Rock Band 2

A pic of a premium drum kit that will be available for Rock Band 2.

$299, so not exactly a mass market product. Here's a pic of the new Rock Band 2 wireless guitar, from a Kotaku article with some more details about what's new in Rock Band 2:

"The Last Lace-Up"

Image by Kelly Shimoda for the NYTimes for an article on 66 year old Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights, which closed last year.

Camus: "[the] one truly serious philosophical problem"

Illuminating article on suicide in this week's NYTimes Magazine. The key insight is that many suicides can be prevented by making it harder to carry out: make the act itself more work and the impulse towards suicide will often just pass. I'll just excerpt large portions as it speaks for itself.

To turn the equation around: if the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance.

But is it?

As it turns out, one of the most remarkable discoveries about suicide and how to reduce it occurred utterly by chance. It came about not through some breakthrough in pharmacology or the treatment of mental illness but rather through an energy-conversion scheme carried out in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s. Among those familiar with the account, it is often referred to simply as “the British coal-gas story.”

For generations, the people of Britain heated their homes and fueled their stoves with coal gas. While plentiful and cheap, coal-derived gas could also be deadly; in its unburned form, it released very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve or a leak in a closed space could induce asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. This extreme toxicity also made it a preferred method of suicide. “Sticking one’s head in the oven” became so common in Britain that by the late 1950s it accounted for some 2,500 suicides a year, almost half the nation’s total.

Those numbers began dropping over the next decade as the British government embarked on a program to phase out coal gas in favor of the much cleaner natural gas. By the early 1970s, the amount of carbon monoxide running through domestic gas lines had been reduced to nearly zero. During those same years, Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third, and it has remained close to that reduced level ever since.

More evidence.

In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 — an astonishing 515 individuals in all — he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.

“That’s still a lot higher than the general population, of course,” Seiden, 75, explained to me over lunch in a busy restaurant in downtown San Franciso. “But to me, the more significant fact is that 90 percent of them got past it. They were having an acute temporary crisis, they passed through it and, coming out the other side, they got on with their lives.”

In Seiden’s view, a crucial factor in this boils down to the issue of time. In the case of people who attempt suicide impulsively, cutting off or slowing down their means to act allows time for the impulse to pass — perhaps even blocks the impulse from being triggered to begin with. What is remarkable, though, is that it appears that the same holds true for the nonimpulsive, with people who may have been contemplating the act for days or weeks.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Seiden said, “people who attempt suicide aren’t thinking clearly. They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B. They get fixated. They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to go shoot myself.’ And that fixation extends to whatever method they’ve chosen. They decide they’re going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge, or maybe they decide that when they get there, but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don’t look around for another place to do it. They just retreat.”

One of the twisted features of this phenomenon:

Animating their efforts is one of the most peculiar — in fact, downright perverse — aspects to the premeditation-versus-passion dichotomy in suicide. Put simply, those methods that require forethought or exertion on the actor’s part (taking an overdose of pills, say, or cutting your wrists), and thus most strongly suggest premeditation, happen to be the methods with the least chance of “success.” Conversely, those methods that require the least effort or planning (shooting yourself, jumping from a precipice) happen to be the deadliest. The natural inference, then, is that the person who best fits the classic definition of “being suicidal” might actually be safer than one acting in the heat of the moment — at least 40 times safer in the case of someone opting for an overdose of pills over shooting himself.

As illogical as this might seem, it is a phenomenon confirmed by research. According to statistics collected by the Injury Control Research Center on nearly 4,000 suicides across the United States, those who had killed themselves with firearms — by far the most lethal common method of suicide — had a markedly lower history of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, previous suicide attempts or drug or alcohol abuse than those who died by the least lethal methods. On the flip side, those who ranked the highest for at-risk factors tended to choose those methods with low “success” rates.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” Hemenway said, “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.”

Inevitably, this approach means focusing on the most common method of suicide in the United States: firearms. Even though guns account for less than 1 percent of all American suicide attempts, their extreme fatality rate — anywhere from 85 percent and 92 percent, depending on how the statistics are compiled — means that they account for 54 percent of all completions. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, that translated into about 17,000 deaths. Public-health officials like Hemenway can point to a mountain of research going back 40 years that shows that the incidence of firearm suicide runs in close parallel with the prevalence of firearms in a community.

The article concludes:

In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. Along with Ken Baldwin, he is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall. Today Hines controls his bipolar disorder with medication and a strictly controlled regimen of diet and exercise and sleep, even while maintaining a frenetic schedule. Having recently married, he is frequently on the road lecturing for a suicide-prevention network while simultaneously working toward a psychology degree. One of his most intense ambitions, though, is to finally see a suicide barrier erected on the Golden Gate.

“I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late. Somehow I made it; they didn’t; and now I feel it’s my responsibility to speak for them.”

After having read this article and watched The Bridge (the documentary that captured footage of jumpers off of the Golden Gate Bridge and went back to interview friends and relatives to try an understand what led the person to that point), I wonder why they don't put up some wire fence over the railing at the Golden Gate Bridge to make it harder to climb up and over.

Weekendery

30 Tables of Contents

***

When I'm working on my computer on a project, like wireframes or sketches or just writing, one of my favorite CDs to pipe through my headphones is Ghost In The Shell: Original Soundtrack by Kenji Kawai. I'm not sure why it sells for $57 on Amazon. Perhaps because it's an import. If you can find a cheaper copy somewhere, perhaps on eBay or on your next trip to Tokyo, I recommend it.

***

Andrew Stanton consulted with Johnathan Ive, Apple design guru, on the design of Eve, the white robot in Wall-E.

A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

***

Speaking of Wall-E, a bunch of us caught the midnight showing Thursday night at the El Capitan theater. No surprise, I enjoyed it on many levels, in particular the early scenes on earth. With a score by Thomas Newman and Roger Deakins-consulted cinematography, the creative talent was A-plus-list. Comparing it to Hellboy II, which I saw Saturday night at the LA Film Festival, helps to illuminate why the latter fell flat for me.

Wall-E and Eve, though they are robots without mouths or noses or much in the way of facial muscles other than articulated mechanical parts and blue digital LEDs for eyes, respectively, move with a fluidity and expressiveness that was lacking in most of the characters in Hellboy II. Under all that makeup, Hellboy is working with a more limited facial muscle repertoire than a middle-aged actress on her tenth round of Botox. The fish character, Abe, and a new character, Johan Strauss, have even less expressive faces. Abe wears a rubber fish mask that can do little other than blink, while Strauss has no face at all, just a glass dome for a head. Voice work can only take you so far.

Hellboy II also suffers from what plagues stories for most sequels, which is a sort of character stasis. Sequels that are conceived of only after the success of the first installment tend to be "the further adventures of..." rather than stories with any character arc. From the first movie, we know Hellboy is a sarcastic, wisecracking brute who likes to pummel monsters first, ask questions later. In this movie, he still is. The screenplay has several storylines, including one about Hellboy's uncomfortable relationships with the humans he protects, but the mix of fantasy and real-life isn't organic and tightly woven the way it was in, say, Pan's Labyrinth.

I look forward to more work from Guillermo del Toro, but I hope it's original stories and not more installments of Hellboy.

When animals attack

I haven't seen the movie, but Is this the plot of The Happening?

Nevertheless, local and federal officials have advised citizens confronted head-on by a red wing to simply stare back into its eyes.

Which sounds like advice out of a Holiday Inn commercial.

New Yorker caption contests

Many on the web dismiss the New Yorker caption contest entries as neither funny nor clever, but I can never think of any good ones, even though the contenders selected each week seem obvious in hindsight.

Where the Hell is Matt?

R.I.P. Tim Russert

I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.

To higher ground we go

McSweeneys recommends us

Hulu made McSweeney's Recommends. It's one of those high fives that means more because it's a reference I often visit.

Yes, I recommend McSweeney's Recommends, which I guess makes it a meta recommendation.

SomethingStore

I decided to take a roll of the dice with SomethingStore.com since I'd read so much about it recently. Mail in $10 and receive a mystery item through the mail.

I ended up with an ugly Made in China pocketwatch, one that, had I purchased it in China, would have cost 10 cents. I guess if they were all winners it wouldn't be much of a business.

Remains of last weekend

I had my leg cast swapped out last week. When I walked into the office, the nurse who admitted me took one look at my leg and recoiled in shock.

"What the hell kind of angle is your foot set at?" he asked. My foot was pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer on point.

"I don't know! I woke up from surgery and my foot was set that way," I said, suddenly concerned.

"Man oh man," he said, shaking his head. "That's the most severe angle I've ever seen."

The guy who was responsible for recasting me looked like Milton from Office Space but about 200 pounds heavier. He had an exasperated "seen-it-all" weariness about him, as if he wished this train of patients with ruptured Achilles would stop appearing in his office but knew that it wouldn't. He looked at me and shook his head, and I felt judged, guilty of some hubris that had led me to this sorry state.

To remove the cast, he pulled out a small handheld circular saw and made two cuts from top to bottom on either side of my leg. The saw blade protruded about an inch, and my cast looked to be about an inch thick, so when Milton put saw to cast I strained as hard as possible to push my leg as far away from the blade as possible. I was terrified, and my leg cowered against the opposite side of the cast. Milton didn't seem concerned and pulled the blade straight down with an almost bored nonchalance.

He pried the cast off, and for the first time in weeks, I saw my leg. There was a four inch wound running up the back of my leg from my heel, stitched together with black thread in a cross-hatched pattern.

The surgeon came in, took a look, said the wound looked to be healing fine, and left. Milton asked him about the crazy angle of my foot, but he replied that my wound was healing and that was the important thing.

Milton had my lie on my belly, and then he rubbed some local anesthesia on my wound. Just as I started to feel it burn, he began (I think) removing my stitches. It felt as if someone was putting a soldering iron to my ankle, and I bit my arm to stomach the searing pain.

Then it came time to pry my foot up partway towards the normal 90 degree angle that feet are at when you stand normally. There was only one problem: after two weeks of being pointed down, my foot did not want to come back up. Milton asked me to try pulling it up myself, but despite urgent messages from my brain, my foot did not move.

I couldn't see Milton over my shoulder, but I pictured the slightest of grins on his lips as he grabbed my foot and a board of some sort and pried my foot up.

I let out a grunt as a violent pain shot up my leg. He continued to pry, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. If someone had walked in on us, it would've looked like a UFC fight, with Milton trying to break my foot to get me to tap out.

I didn't submit, but Milton did notice that I was in pain.

"You think this hurts? I just pulled your foot up like 20 degrees. Next time I'm pulling it up the rest of the way, like 40 degrees. You better take some painkillers before you come in." And then he cackled maniacally: "Bwahahahahaha!"

Okay, he didn't cackle. But after seeing the beautiful nurses in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can't lie, the walrusian Milton was a bit of a letdown.

I hobbled out of Milton's torture chamber with a new, slim cast on my leg but in enormous pain. I sat in the waiting room and immediately inhaled two Vicodin, which I hadn't touched in a week and a half.

The best thing to come out of this office visit was obtaining my doc's signature on a form authorizing me for a temporary handicapped parking placard. I mailed that off to the California DMV as soon as I got back to the office.

Milton, we will meet again soon, but I will be bringing my two friends, Percocet and Vicodin.

***

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb. There's an analogous videogame sensation. Whenever I hear a song from Rock Band on the radio, I feel a phantom guitar in my hands and see green, blue, yellow, red, and orange notes dropping from the sky.

***

After trashing his teammates in the preseason, Kobe Bryant goes and says he stayed with the Lakers because he tweaked his leadership to instill his teammates with his DNA. Arrogant, yes, but also maybe not the best thing to say given his, uh, personal history, both past and present.

***

Yes, the Lakers have Zen master Phil Jackson as coach, but let's not forget that Doc Rivers has the Celtics shouting "Ubuntu!" coming out of every huddle. Open source operating system? That seems pretty zen to me.

***

Sometimes it feels like the web is too big. Look at this list of sites of "Top 60 music websites that deliver the greatest free music."

60 sites! I'd be more than happy with, say, 10, but to be honest I probably use maybe 3.

***

Now that I'm on crutches, and now that a temporary handicapped permit is on its way to me in the mail, I flash dirty looks at any non-handicapped person I catch coming out of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.

If I hadn't had to pee so badly after the Indiana Jones screening that morning it opened, I would've stayed around until I caught whoever had occupied the handicapped stall at the Hollywood Arclight.

Speaking of the new Indiana Jones movie, I've read a lot of fans of the new Indy movie who dismiss anyone who didn't like the movie as elitist. Sorry, but those people are wrong.

I don't care if you did like the movie, but don't tell me about summer popcorn flicks. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great summer popcorn flick. This latest Indy flick...cost me three hours and $11.

***

This is old, but still worth posting. Chris Matthews obliterates a right-wing lunatic on TV. One of Matthews' finer moments.

The Body People

The NYTimes profiles Barack Obama's "body man" Reggie Love. Personal aide to Obama, Love plays hoops with the Presidential candidate, watches Sportscenter with him, and handles miscellaneous issues like food stains on the tie. Previously, Hillary Clinton's personal aide Huma Abedin garnered a lot of press attention--the NY Observer article titled "Hillary's Mystery Woman: Who is Huma?" practically described her as a superhero, a glamorous, cool, fashion icon.

Now that I'm on crutches, I'm ready to accept applications for my own body person. For the near future, the job will be more Driving Miss Daisy than pickup hoops, but the nightly Sportscenter viewing can commence immediately.

Rift between Sports Guy and ESPN?

Hmm. Maybe that explains the scarcity of his columns on ESPN recently. The timing of an appearance of his own blog is suspicious also. [via Deadspin]

If he chooses to part ways with ESPN, I'm sure he can find another sports outlet to foot his bills for flights out to random sporting events. Though it sounds like what he needs is to move from ESPN to the HBO-equivalent of ESPN, where he can drop the kid gloves on certain topics.

blah blah blah

I'm not picking sides on the debate about the impact of the web on journalism, but I do venture to say that stories like this would not have made the news prior to the rise of the web.

American Airlines to start charging $15 for the first checked bag. That's great, because I just adore flying those roomy coach seats. I I look forward to being charged to use the bathroom, charged to do the crossword on the in-flight magazine sudoku, and charged to rent an overhead bin for my carry-on luggage, too.

Eating vegetables raw is not always the healthiest way to consume them. Thank goodness. Also good news: eating vegetables with a bit of fat, for example in full-fat dressing, may help you absorb more vitamins.

Innovators and innovation

Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.

It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?

The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.

I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Also profiled: Grant Achatz, head chef at Alinea, one of the more famous restaurants in America, and perhaps the most famous outpost of the molecular gastronomy movement in the U.S. I ate at Moto many years ago, just before Alinea was set to open, and already there was a several month waiting list for Grant Achatz's first restaurant of his own.

Achatz is trying to fight his way back from tongue cancer, a particularly devastating illness for someone who depends so heavily on his sense of taste. I'd still love to eat at Alinea which, along with French Laundry and El Bulli, are the three restaurants that top my dining hitlist.

Achatz is putting out the Alinea Book, a cookbook, this fall.

Lastly, and not from The New Yorker, was this popular article (free registration required to read it) from McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Pixar's Brad Bird about how he and Pixar foster innovation.

A great interview, from which a few points stood out to me.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

This is true in so many walks of life, from the office to the film set to the locker room. What's difficult about achieving this, though, is that it's so easy for senior management/directors/coaches to be oblivious to the morale of their companies/cast and crew/teams. This is perhaps most true for the business leader.

The very nature of being senior management insulates one from the troops. The most common shape of a modern business org. structure is a pyramid, which is designed for efficiency of downward communication, but not for the reverse. CEO's sit in gilded offices on the top floor of ivory towers, and access to them is restricted by intimidating assistants. The power structure in companies means that even if morale is down, no one lower down on the org. structure is likely to be honest in front of the CEO or the head of their division for fear of being seen as a malcontent.

It's a real challenge. It's not easy for the top dog to be just "one of the guys" to use an old and somewhat sexually dated saying. I'm reminded of Henry V in Shakespeare's play, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, disguising himself as a commoner and walking around his camp to both gauge and raise the morale of his men. He does so with the recognition that it's the only way his men will speak honestly with him. In fact, the first question posed to Henry V as he wanders in disguise is from a sentinel, Pistol:

Discuss unto me; art thou officer?
Or art thou base, common and popular?

It's an interesting choice of words, "common and popular," and it speaks to the difficulty of being both powerful and popular, derived from the Latin populus for "the people."

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

On the Hulu development team, we've tried to counteract both the insulation and communication issue by all sitting in one communal cube farm. Everyone, regardless of title, has the same setup. So far it's worked out great.

First of all, there's a collegial feeling fostered by all sitting together. Communication is sped up; rather than fire off e-mails, many exchanges can be handled by simply strolling a few feet to a colleague's cube, or just by swiveling a chair. News travels really really fast in dev heaven, the nickname of our little office neighborhood. Many times, one of us overhears a conversation between some colleagues and can jump in with a suggestion or solution.

If our setup weren't enough to encourage interaction among the team, we also set up central snack or food areas in the center of dev heaven to encourage more foot traffic and casual encounters. We keep several rolling whiteboards in the area to allow for quick, mobile meetings or brainstorms.

We keep one or two communal offices nearby for those times when people need to do jump on conference calls or make personal calls. It's not the conventional setup for development teams, what with Peopleware extolling the virtue of private offices for every developer, or even for normal companies, but in a startup that needs to stay nimble and move quickly, it's been a plus for us.

One last point from the Brad Bird interview:

Brad Bird: Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Amen.

My first patent

Cool, I actually got awarded a patent. That patent is the basis of what is now Amazon's Flexible Payment Service. It's humbling to be on the same inventor list as some of those names.

A who's who of Achilles tendon injuries

A list of famous people who've suffered severe injuries of their Achilles. Gives me some comfort that most were able to come back strong.

The oddest entry on the list: Brad Pitt tearing his Achilles while playing Achilles in Troy. There you go. Yet one more thing that Brad Pitt and I have in common.

Mentos + Coke

~1,500 students in Belgium set a new record for Mentos-Coke fizz-fountains.

Smoking

David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

...

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

Speaking of smoking, season one of Mad Men comes out on DVD July 1. I've tried to kick the DVD-buying habit this past year, but hot diggity that is some tempting product packaging.

Disappointing that the Blu-Ray box art for the same box set is purely conventional.

Recommended

Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.

There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).

I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.

***

Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.

***

State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.

Applying diminishing returns

Arnold Kling offers some life advice based on broader application of the law of diminishing returns.

My tip is to pay attention to the law of diminishing returns. For example, the number of authors who write two books that are worth reading is at least two orders of magnitude less than the number who write one book worth reading. Most of the time, you should assume that if you've read one book by a given author then you do not need to read another. Too many people follow the opposite strategy--reading more books by authors they like.

Staying in the same organization for more than few years also puts you on the wrong side of the point of diminishing returns. Working in an organization is a learning experience. But, as with going to college, there comes a time when you need to stop taking their courses and proceed to graduate.

Teachstreet launches

Big congratulations to my friend Dave and his team for launching Teachstreet yesterday morning. Teachstreet is a service that connects people who want to learn something with local teachers. In its beta incarnation, the site lists over 25,000 classes in Seattle.

I worked briefly for Dave at Amazon, and he was my roommate here in Santa Monica my first year in LA when he was helping his friends with JibJab. Everyone knows him as, first and foremost, one of the all around good guys. He has a very genuine enthusiasm and honesty that is rare in the corporate world. It's a combination of qualities more common in entrepreneurs, so it's only fitting that he's now launched his own company. I'll bet anything that his team and colleagues love working with him.

It's good to see a new generation of startup companies spawning out of the Amazon.com alumni network.

More current songs

I wish Rock Band would add some more genres of music to its downloadable song lineups. There are too many heavy metal and classic rock tunes for my taste. Judas Priest? Boston? Do people in Rock Band's core demographic really know how to sing these tunes? I sure don't, and neither do my friends.

Elevators

Nick Paumarten's article "The lives of elevators" in last week's New Yorker offered a useful education on the basics of "elevatoring":

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.

Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.

An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts.

Confirming something I read somewhere else a long time ago:

In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power.

And then, an illuminating discussion of the science of personal space:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness.

I thought of this issue of personal space on my Virgin America flight back from NYC to LA this past Sunday. I was in the aisle seat of my row. The man in the middle seat was large, his waist flowing over the armrest into my negligible personal space. He wore only a tank top undershirt, and wore it a bit too comfortably for my taste. He coughed and cleared his throat and groaned incessantly, an audio tour of bodily function.

But the most horrifying realization, coming as it did at the start of a six and a half hour flight, was that my neighbor was, uh, malodorous, and the amplitude of his scent rose and fell in accordance with the raising and lowering of the arm closest to me. I donned my noise-canceling headphones but longed for equivalent technology for my nose.

I wonder, though, if some of NYC's energy isn't simply the result of its sheer human density. Just as taking a volume of gas at a constant temperature and decreasing the volume increases pressure, so does the difference in human density between LA and NYC explain much of the difference in the personalities of the residents of each city.

Extra extra

Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?

Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)

New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.

Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Fifa Street 3

Le foot.

Firefox 3 versus Safari 3

John Gruber with a great comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 beta browsers for the Mac. His preference is for Safari 3, though he notes that Firefox has some important advantages.

I've been using these two browsers (Firefox 3 b5) for a few weeks now as well. I prefer Firefox 3, for a few reasons. As Gruber notes, Safari is a memory hog, and given the number of applications I have open at once, Firefox's efficient memory usage makes a difference. I hate that Safari doesn't offer that option to open up with the tabs from your last session. Such a simple fix, I have no idea why they haven't added that after so many generations now.

And, of course, there's Firebug. Indispensable, and even better now that version 1.2 is in alpha. The Web Dev Toolbar is another useful plugin, and I use FoxiPod just about every day.

But Gruber is also right in that both are a step up from the previous generation: faster, more powerful and functional.

UPDATE: According to ZDNet, Firefox 3.0 b5 holds a slight speed edge on Safari 3.1, though both are faster than their previous versions, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

***

Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

***

One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

My life is complete

Hulu got a shout out from Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy.

Check out Hulu.com and be prepared to waste a ridiculous amount of time. That's all I'm saying. By the way, all the "Paradise Hotel 2" episodes are on there, and if you watch the first five episodes and don't consider Rahiem one of your top-five favorite reality TV characters ever by the time you've finished plowing through them, then I'm giving you a full refund for $0.00.

Last week we also got a plug in the newsletter Daily Candy, which, given how many women e-mailed us last week to point it out, seems to be as popular with the ladies as Sports Guy is with the boys.

The bizarre

Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.

Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.

***

The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:

Channing Tatum as Duke

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander

Sienna Miller as The Baroness

Ray Park as Snake Eyes

Dennis Quaid as General Hawk

Arnold Vosloo as Zartan

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty

Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President

Marlon Wayans as Ripcord

Things I Like

* Modern Love, the weekly column in the Sunday Styles section of the NYTimes. I enjoy the introspective, confessional nature of each installment. This past week's column, "Mom, It’s Me, Your Son, Finally," was a good example of its tone. It's interesting to me how my tastes for various sections of newspapers and magazines has changed over time.

* New Balance 1220 running shoe series, of which the latest incarnation is the 1223. My flat, wide feet are thankful for shoes that, unlike Nikes, aren't made for people with perfect feet, narrow, high-arched. I guess that's to be expected from a shoe company named after a Greek goddess. The 1220's don't change too much from generation to generation, so when I walked into the store looking for a replacement for my 1221's, the saleswoman simply handed me the same size for the 1223s, and I walked out and was running in them fifteen minutes later. There's something to be said for product continuity in the shoe market.

I loved the Air Jordan VIII. It was the first pair I ever owned, and the day my mom bought it for me from a sports store in a mall is still a tactile memory. But subsequent models of the shoe changed so drastically that they just didn't fit my feet anymore.

* Runner's high (proof it exists?). I'd always thought runner's high was the occasional feeling that one could run forever without getting tired, but the definition in the article implies that it's something you always experience during running. Which may be why I have not experienced it in so long.

* Taco trucks. Seemingly an LA institution, the Hulu dev team seems to find a new one every week, each better than the next. I have yet to find one comprehensive listing of all taco trucks, though partial coverage can be found at The Great Taco Hunt and this Google Map.

Anti-emo riots?

Actually a serious story, but the headline seems like it could be stripped from The Onion: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I had an image of frightened Death Cab for Cutie fans fleeing down the streets screaming.

South Park online

Every episode of South Park ever, online to stream for free. The amount of time a lot of people can spend online just went up a lot.

EW

Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).

Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.

How about an election every other year?

SNL isn't the only satire outlet energized by the election; The Onion has gotten a lot of mileage out of it, too:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

***

Army Holds Annual "Bring Your Daughter to War" Day

"There were lots of explosions, and...and I saw a leg."

***

Mitt Romney defends himself against allegations of tolerance.

Why I wasn't wearing green

Because I forgot. My life contains no visible markers of upcoming holidays other than the commercial ones from retail stores. The only reason I know Easter is approaching is because the grocery store carries a lot of egg dye kits and those yellow gooey rabbits made of some unknown substance.

If I had remembered it was St. Patrick's Day, and if I were a woman, I would have tried to find an opportunity to send this e-card from someecards.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

Bershon

It's wonderful when you discover that there's a single word for something that, until that moment, you could only describe with many words. The word crystallizes it, makes it singular and whole, and gives the feeling or phenomenon some permanence.

Sarah Brown introduced the blogosphere to the term and defined it thus:

...the spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers’, was permanently frozen in this expression.

A beautiful description, but if you're still unclear on the concept, the Flickr group I'm so Bershon will more than clear things up for you.

Walt

Walt Mossberg reviewed Hulu for the Wall Street Journal. Always a big milestone when someone like Mossberg or David Pogue in the NYTimes reviews your product. One reason they're so successful and important in the tech review space is their ability to write evaluations that are fair and useful to the widest range of consumers. His appraisal of our site is no different.

Some really cool free things

Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.

Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"

Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.

Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.

One benefit of LA weather

Headline, "stripped" of its context:

What can I say, LA has changed me.

Coming to a movie theater someday

Based on the true story: "I fell in love with a female assassin." A common movie plot (True Lies, La Femme Nikita, e.g.) finds a riveting real-world proof.

If adapted into a big-budget Hollywood film, likely Angelina Jolie as Marylin and, hmm, Ewan McGregor or Ed Norton or James McAvoy as journalist Jason P Howe?

Fortune

We (Hulu) got a write-up in Fortune today. It's one of the more detailed profiles of the company so far.

Ugly packaging, interesting goods

Fortune has an interview with Steve Jobs, who's always a good read.

Fortune is a reasonably well laid out magazine in print. Jobs is a design-obsessive. So there's some irony in the fact that this interview is stretched out across 15 pages so that Fortune.com can run more obnoxious ads that can cover up parts of the screen.

Technorati Tags: Apple, business, interview, stevejobs

Obama, the design element

Maybe one underrated strength of the Obama campaign is its design cohesion. Michael Bieruit analyzes Obama's branding campaign and comes away impressed, especially with his consistent typeface use.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

Meanwhile, Hoefler & Frere-Jones shudder at the typography of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?

Technorati Tags: barackobama, branding, design, gotham, typeface, typography

Can you hit floor 279 for me please?

I would like to visit Dubai sometime, if for no other reason than it seems like one of the most peculiar places in the world, a Las Vegas of architecture. If it's not Agassi and Federer playing tennis on the helipad of a hotel, or the world's tallest tower, the Burj Dubai, it's news that Hyder Consulting is designing a structure that will be twice the height of the Burj Dubai, or nearly one mile tall.

BLDGBLOG whipped up a graphic to illustrate how this building would fit in with the world's other tallest structures. It is sublimely ludicrous.

Technorati Tags: architecture, dubai

Notes from Buffett

Win-win

From here:

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all. Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Seems like the incentives are aligned all around on this. It's rough flying with kids, both on the parents and all the other fliers who empathize but really wish their noise-canceling headphones could filter out the high-frequency screaming of a distressed child.

Yes he can?

Dick Morris now thinks Obama will defeat Hillary.

What a slugfest between two political heavyweights.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, politics, hillaryclinton

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Sexual Harrassment and You

DFA

One of the better articles of 2007 was this Michael Lewis piece for Conde Nast Portfolio: "Evolution of an Investor."

Lewis profiles investment adviser Blaine Lourd, who went from a stock picker and salesman to a convert to the efficient market hypothesis. What caught my eye about the article was the prominent role played by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). Their mutual funds are targeted at investors who believe in buy-and-hold, passive index funds, diversified portfolios, the type of investing philosophy touted by people like Larry Swedroe. They don't sell direct to individual investors but only through select advisors who they feel espouse the same investing philosophies as they do.

I just happen to have most of my savings invested in DFA funds. I used to do a lot of individual stock investing, and I enjoyed it, but over time, I realized there were other things I enjoyed doing more keeping track of public companies. It's a lot of work to stay on top of a portfolio of individual stocks. I still keep a portfolio on the side of individual stock investments, but it's mostly for fun and invested in the only category I feel I have some more insight than most, which is in some premium Internet or tech brands. Other than that, I don't worry about my savings other than an occasional rebalancing.

DFA's funds are really low-cost, and they provide some very unique index funds that are hard to find on the open market, helping you to build a really broad, diversified portfolio. Being able to diversify into very particular markets has proven its value again and again. Last, year, for example, was not a strong one for U.S. equities, but my portfolio was helped by the strong returns in Emerging Markets.

If you're interested, you can find an investment advisor who has access to DFA funds through this webpage. I'm a firm believer that most people would benefit from not just DFA funds but the type of investment philosophy that their funds are associated with, and in making that statement I'm putting my mouth where my money is.

Technorati Tags: economics, finance, investing

Bill Clinton: "Screw It, I'm Running For President"

Hah.

Maybe money does buy happiness

The collection of answers to the annual Edge question for 2008: What have you changed your mind about? Why?

165 contributors, and some fascinating responses, as always. Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics:

To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.

The idea Kahneman had wanted to challenge was the idea of hedonic adaptation, that no matter how much our life circumstances change, whether we become wealthier, or get married or divorced, got