But the most interesting part of Steffen's post is its conclusion, in which he offers an improvement to the equation Gates unveiled at TED.
]]>Now we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to provide is the very definition of what I call The Swap. The Swap doesn't work.
And we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.
We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.
The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't designing a better car, it's designing a better city. The answer to the problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green shopping, it's changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use and live with is designed for zero waste, and either meant to last ("heirloom design" and "durability") or to be shared ("product service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had is waiting beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side of zero, looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new thinking can flourish.
Cities are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can build zero-impact cities, and we need to. Any answer to the problem of climate change needs to be as focused on reinventing the future as powering it.
On the other hand, in its current incarnation, it's a great party drinking game. Open two laptops, set two people against each other with Chat Roulette open. The first person who ends up seeing another guy, uh, doing what I believe the French refer to as a "menage a un" has to down a beer.
Or how about Chat Roulette Roulette? Matt Haughey explains:
]]>ChatRouletteRoulette: Four people in a room with laptops, everyone connects to ChatRoulette, first one to see a cock is out!
The joy of having your first novel reviewed by the New York Times Book Review quickly turns to horror when it turns out to be a succinct dismissal. Ronlyn Domingue writes about what that feels like.
Although the advice to have a thick skin was well-meant, it is emotionally dishonest. Sharing one’s writing is a naked act not intended for the meek. Harsh words can—and sometimes do—undermine the most confident, successful writers. It’s human. It’s okay. It will pass. Now, my guidance to myself, and others, is to have a permeable skin, one that doesn’t resist or trap the good or the bad. Reviews, critiques, comments come in, then move on. Then there’s space, inside and out, for something new.
Every artist experiences the little deaths that come with work in a creative field. In fiction writing seminars in college, every story you wrote would be read out loud, and then the others in the class would take turns offering their critiques. In film school, the same was done for our scripts, rough cuts, fine edits, final works.
Professors always counsel everyone to be civil with their criticism, to keep it about the work and not the person, but I suspect it's impossible to ever accept even the most even-tempered of criticism of one's work without suffering the smallest of deaths (the French use la petite mort in another sense, of course, but it's always felt more accurate here).
But even if your classmates and peers are respectful and professional, and for the most part I'd say my creative writing and film school peers were very much so, at some point if you're to succeed in your field you'll have to put your work out there for an audience that isn't in the same room with you, that isn't operating under the potential collateral damage of your potential subsequent feedback on their work. Then the gloves come off.
The internet has only accelerated that. It's given everyone a megaphone, and even if they're shouting into the wind (2 followers, one his mother, the other is Candy327, 5 tweets), Google or Twitter is saving their shouts for you to summon with a few mouse clicks. Before the internet came along, the cliche that "everybody's a critic" may have been true, but for the first time we can hear them all at once, all the time, one massive and stern Greek chorus of disapproval.
But whereas the chorus in a Greek tragedy at least spoke in meter, with a certain poetic eloquence, the anonymity of the web has reduced us to our most savage and bitter. We are all cavemen, all id. Civil debate and discourse isn't the norm in any large and open community online. 4Chan bullies prowl the hallways of the web like the high school thugs every awkward teenager dreads running into.
As a creator, you have to balance receptivity to criticism with the conviction of your creative choices. It's not easy withstanding the constant, withering glare of a million critics, but just in taking those steps to cross over from the darkness of the peanut gallery to the bright lights of center stage you've set yourself apart.
As for the millions of judges out there, I urge you, the next time you go to murder someone's book with your poison pen, try to write a book yourself. The next time you leave a movie theater ready to dismiss what you watched for two hours, try to direct your own short movie. What the world needs is not more judges. As the old saying goes, everbody's a critic.
]]>]]>
Anyone who has followed fantasy football or an eBay auction at the office — and gotten away with it — knows that many of our everyday activities now look like work. Typing and scrolling and peering at a computer, you could be doing anything: e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced.
This odd accident of life online — the increasing visual homogeneity of our behaviors — may be a boon to procrastinators, hobbyists and multitaskers. But it has some victims. I don’t mean bosses concerned with productivity (who cares about them?). The crowd truly stymied by the merging of human activities are filmmakers. If fighting now looks like making up now looks like booking travel, as it does when people conduct their affairs online, how do film directors make human action both dramatic to viewers and roughly true to life?
Another anachronism that drives me crazy in the movies is continued reliance on analog answering machines so that either the audience or some other person in a room can eavesdrop on a voicemail meant for another person. Who owns one of those machines anymore? It's a crutch for unimaginative storytellers.
]]>[via Scrawled In Wax]
Though I work at Hulu, part of the vanguard in the transition from linear programming to a video on demand world, I'm not immune to the power of collective experience. Part of me misses those days before DVRs and PPV and HBO and VCRs, when you could only catch movies on network TV live. The other people around the country watching that exact moment with you were invisible but palpable, and every moment of the movie seemed more important because of that.
Thus the huge value that accrues to events that still demand live viewing in this world where synchronous viewing has become so unnecessary. Sports leagues are sitting pretty.
]]>Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies.
...
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
...
The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all.
What's perhaps even more intriguing, though, is Kasparov's recount of the results of a chess tournament hosted by a chess website in which players were all allowed to play against each other with the aid of computers.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
Can this result (weak human + machine + better process as superior option) be replicated in other areas of human-computer partnership? While Kasparov is talking about chess in this article, the fact that so many people now carry phones that are more powerful than the earliest personal computers has elevated the importance of human-computer collaboration. We are not yet the cyborgs of sci-fi imagination, but in some aspects of life, we're closer than we may realize.
The gap between those who can work in partnership with computers and those who cannot (for whatever reason, socioeconomic or generational or other) is evident in so many ways. Even among those who are computing-enabled, there are differences in ability. When I'm out with a group of people and we're looking for a restaurant, or directions, the people with smartphones with Yelp and Google Maps are more capable than those without. We can go further and observe that even among those with smartphones, some are better at using them to their full potential than others. Is that a result of superior process, or a stronger human?
]]>Here are the 18 movies that enjoyed the distinction of making both lists, along with Amazon links where available (all except Colossal Youth were up there, and that one is coming out on a Criterion DVD which isn't on Amazon yet but which I linked to at the Criterion website):
I've seen 11 of these and need to Netflix the rest. ]]>Similar backlash occurred after 9/11 in the U.S., when any attempt to analyze whether U.S. policy had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda was treated as heartless political pandering. It's just another instance of the tyranny of the OR, where it's assumed one can't be both analytical and sympathetic. I would hope we're able to appreciate that real-life is more nuanced than that, even if we can't tolerate that level of complexity from our mass entertainment.
]]>Besides, I’m a consumer of information just like everybody else, of serious, sometimes cataclysmic front page news that bleeds into entertainment news and back again, a phenomenon made even more pronounced by the design of Web pages and aggregators and by the nature of hypertext if, like me, you get most of your news online.
In that environment, it is quite natural that James Cameron should accept an award in the name of a people that is indigenous only to his head, and that it should be greeted at best with a collective smirk or shrug or guffaw, since after all it was done in the spirit and logic of the times, while actual political statements of demonstrable historical urgency, like Peter Hallward’s, attract offense and derision. And this same spirit and logic will dictate that an immense human tragedy that weighs on the shoulders of the international community should be consumed as an act of God, outside of history, in the same present tense as entertainment, asking of us only that we fill that void with as many random quick fire donations - think of the convenience of texting for relief - as we can fit in the course of our normal activities and in the time allotted for caring for such things.
There is only one thing worse than white liberal guilt, and it’s white liberal guiltlessness, demanding that history not be ‘brought into it’, that memory be erased. We must fight that. And, yes, give, and give discriminately.
Onion AV writer Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Kristen Dunst's character in a scathing review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.
Natalie Portman is usually trotted out as Exhibit A in MPDG litigation.
I liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and endorse Beyerstein's defense against said charges. But I also enjoyed adding MPDG to my vocabulary.
***
A touching Roger Ebert story. No, not that one, though that is a great one that's gotten a lot of coverage recently, and deservedly so. In losing his voice, he found a new one in his online journal (his output has expanded into Twitter as well). I have my own Roger Ebert stories from having chatted with him a few times at Sundance, but I'll share those another day.
I DVR'd Ebert on Oprah today, but I'm not sure tonight is the night to watch. I must brace myself for the emotional impact.
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"All the Good Stuff Always Happens in the Ladies Room" by Paulina Porizkova
It's a funny read, honest and not ironic. It evokes my sympathy when I read about her "frequent bouts of self-doubt and the occasional humiliation of being a celebrity past her prime" and I don't often feel sympathy for supermodels, the title granted her in her byline.
I link to it mostly because it reminded me that we live in an odd age when celebrities are writing at us in an unmediated fashion more than I can ever remember. Celebrity Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, and iPhone apps. I'm not sure what I should feel when a celebrity tweets from their high life: what other celebrity they just ran into, what it's like on the red carpet or on the movie set or the exclusive party they're at. It seems like vanity, or perhaps insecurity, or maybe they have nothing else to write about because their lives are really one long string of parties punctuated by an occasional gig that resembles work. I'm not sure how I feel about this other than it should be the subject of a Chuck Klosterman essay.
***
Shawn Blanc makes his plea for a good iPhone feed reader. I made a similar wish earlier this month.
I use three newsreaders on my iPhone today: Byline, Reeder, and NetNewsWire. Use might not be the right word. I bounce between them depending on my mood, but none of the three thrill or delight me yet.
I differ from Shawn a bit in my primary complaints about the three. Byline is the fastest of the three and allows offline reading which I love, but a few things about its UI irk me. One is that after loading its initial set of items, you have to click a link at the bottom to load more stories from your feed. But that link is placed right below a Mark All As Read link which I hit by mistake all the time. The second is the inability to select stories from an individual feed. Sometimes I don't want my full newsfeed, I just want the latest from one feed. I'd also love the option to save state the way Tweetie does so i can start browsing forward from the last article I was shown in my previous Byline session.
Reeder allows me to select individual feeds, but it doesn't save state. The worst problem is that it chokes on syncing all the stories from all my feeds. I spend a lot of time waiting for Reeder to register my screen gestures as it syncs; those long delays drive me crazy. I can't tell if my iPhone has frozen or if Reeder is just constipated (I have syncing turned on at startup so every time I launch the app I'm waiting around for something to happen). I've had to all but turn Reeder syncing off to use the app which is too bad because it has a lot of other features I appreciate.
As for NetNewsWire, on the iPhone it is essentially unusable for anyone with any healthy number of feeds. It feels as if my phone has just frozen.
My hope is that someone solves this on the iPad because that has the potential be a fantastic newsreader device, especially as the Kindle is not great in that area. An iPad with a great Google Reader app and access to browsing all the usual news websites through mobile Safari and a great ebook reader would be something I spend a lot of time with on the toilet. Did I say toilet? I meant "around the house."
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Is this the same old woman who looks like a little girl from Orphan?
]]>[linking to an article that is several months old feels embarrassing for a blog, it's like receiving the "Microsoft will donate $1 for every copy of this e-mail that is passed on" from your parents, but I'll do it when it's good.]
On the topic of photography, it's long been said that an artist's tools affect the art created by it. What has been the impact of the last decade of photography technology on that field? Looking at some of the major technology changes.
As for what's on the horizon, I predict that in time, with storage space cheap and video sensor resolution growing every day, we'll just all shoot video and extract the stills we want. It removes the burden to capture the decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson termed it, and that's something most amateur photographers struggle with. We already have magazine covers like the Megan Fox Esquire cover which were shot this way.
]]>The day a particular label is on Gilt, traffic to that brand's site increases, across the board. Anecdotally, so many people have told me, "Oh my god, my new favorite designer is ..." because they were able to try a new one at a price that felt comfortable. If I'm going to drop $3,000 on a jacket, I'm probably going to do it on one of my old favorites, a smaller universe of brands that I know and I'm comfortable with. Starting this year, we're going to be selling exclusive items and capsule collections from emerging labels such as Trovata and Yigal Azrouël.
This is always the challenge for luxury brands who work with discounters. If you see a Prada suit on discount for 50% of retail price over and over, will you ever pay full price for a Prada suit again, even if your move up the socioeconomic ladder? Perhaps, but it's always a risk. The one thing Gilt has going for it is that the supplies of their goods are so limited that their argument that they're offering limited opportunities to sample designers is more credible than sample sales and other luxury discount websites that seem like endless bounties of luxury goods that were duds at their original price (I went with my sister-in-law to the Barney's Warehouse Sale in NYC a few years back, and because there were no dressing rooms, I saw people stripping down in aisles in a sterile, fluorescent-lit basement to try on samples grabbed from numerous bins that contained designer clothing that had been hand tossed into a sort of fabric salad, hardly the most flattering light in which to present those luxury brands).
When will someone make a Gilt Group for typefaces? That's something I'd appreciate when wearing my individual and not corporate budget hat.
]]>But as it turns out, after all these years of happily giving it up for his favorite filmmakers, Tarantino has become deeply conflicted about discussing the sources of his influences, in large part because Tarantino's honesty has often been used against him by critics and bloggers when they want to belittle his films or blame the filmmaker's endless parade of movie references for the swarm of mindless Harry Knowles-style fanboys who now dominate the online movie scene. In the course of a long conversation the other day, Tarantino managed to go--in a matter of minutes--from saying he "loved having influences" to saying that he was "unbelievably annoyed" with critics who used his reliance on influences as a way of trashing his movies.
After checking out some of the critical feedback to Tarantino's films, I began to feel his pain. In the course of an otherwise admiring review of "Basterds," Roger Ebert argued that judging from the way Tarantino photographed Melanie Laurent near the end of the film, focusing on her shoes, lips, dress and facial veil, "you can't tell me [that] he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano." (Cackling with laughter, Tarantino's response was a resounding: "No.")
But the critic that really got under his skin was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, who in the course of reviewing "Kill Bill" said the movie felt as if Tarantino "were holding us captive on a moldy postgraduate couch somewhere, subjecting us to 90 minutes worth of his favorite movie clips strung together, accompanied by an exhausting running commentary along the lines of 'Isn't this great?' "
To say that Tarantino finds this aggravating would be an understatement. "Here's my problem with this whole influence thing," he told me. "Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making. It feels like the critics are IMDB-ing everything I do. It just rubs me the wrong way because they end up using it as a stick to beat me down with."
This is a classic critical analysis dilemma: can we, should we, guess the artist's intent? I side with the thesis of W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that argues that interpreting a piece of art based on knowledge of the artist's life or factors external to the work itself should not be the primary type of criticism. That type of criticism is not replicable, and as is clear from the article above, is often fallible. Many movie critics are taking wild guesses, often wrong ones, about what Tarantino's influences are.
A closely related problem is one that is hinted at in a line near the end of A.O. Scott's review of Shutter Island, and that is whether critics bring too much historical appreciation of director to their later works. Maybe we can label this the "auteur delusion"?
Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.
There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt.
This has been a common addendum to many critical reviews of the movie, which I have not seen. Those who don't like the movie imply that many who do are Scorsese fanboys who see art in even his weakest movies.
It's hard to argue with the idea that each movie should be approached on its own merits. For me, the tendency I must combat is the reverse, and that is my attraction to contrarian opinions. People whose opinions offer differ with me and who seem like bright thinkers intrigue me. It's the Sherlock Holmes mystique, the idea that there's a thinker out there so logical and unemotional that his thinking clarifies your own.
]]>In this synposis of an HBS case on El Bulli, Adrià offers a hint as to his restaurant's financial situation when he says, "I should charge 600 euros [for a meal at elBulli] but I do not cook for millionaires. I cook for sensitive people."
The article ends with HBS professor Michael Norton noting, "Adrià says he doesn't listen to customers, yet his customers are some of the most satisfied in the world. That's an interesting riddle to consider."
That's not actually puzzling. At Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos used to say that you can't build a product just by listening to customers. They're good at telling you what they don't like, but not so good at telling you what they want. As an entrepreneur you have to innovate on their behalf. We knew at Amazon that perhaps the most significant barrier to buying online was shipping charges. Customers would tell you again and again that they hated to pay shipping fees, even when they were offset by not having to pay sales tax. But they couldn't tell us what solution we could offer since shipping is not free.
That's where Amazon innovated on behalf of the consumer, first in the form of Super Saver Shipping, then in the form of Amazon Prime. We traded in some of the gross margin efficiencies of the business model to subsidize shipping and offset it with revenue volume from the increased orders that resulted from removing the massive psychological hurdle of shipping costs.
The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. "Adrià's idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know," Norton observes. "If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I'll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can't listen to the customer."]]>