I Will Always Love You

Sorry for the radio silence here recently. I thought I was dying there for a bit but it turned out to be just a really bad bout of pneumonia. Not having contracted it before, I thought it was just a return of the flu, but that changed when I started coughing up blood. It knocked me sideways for weeks, I still have muscle pains from the violent coughing fits. Two weeks of antibiotics have set me back on my feet, with just a lingering cough and shortness of breath still to conquer.

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This excerpt from Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture is a lovely piece of music writing (even as the excerpt just ends abruptly). I love this passage on Whitney Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" from the Bodyguard soundtrack. It remains the all-time bestselling single by a female recording artist.

From the outset, Parton’s lyrics and melody become secondary to Houston’s modulations on them. Whitney inserts pauses, extends syllables, redraws the melody to fit the moment. Her arabesque vocalizations become something in their own right, codependent and contingent yet emotionally, viscerally, musically real. The ornament swells to become the heart.
 
These effects flow from her masterful use of a technique called melisma. Technically speaking, melisma occurs when vocalists use melodic embellishment to extend a single syllable. Emotionally, it’s something else entirely, a mode of expression that bucks against the very limits of language. Indeed, the crushing power of “I Will Always Love You,” its meaning in sound, results from how Houston’s melisma activates a mysterious, even mystical relationship between overflowing emotion, life’s vicissitudes, and ultra precise self-control. Rather than simply sing about the bittersweet conflicts involved in saying goodbye to a lover, Houston deploys melisma to enact in sound a heart-felt struggle between holding on and letting go. Like life as it unfurls, each moment is un-anticipatable until it happens, whereupon we can’t possibly imagine it any other way.
 
Such is the power of melisma. The technique breathes life-flow into fixed text. Melisma is vocal embellishment’s purest form, almost always improvised and therefore rarely written down. Melisma locates meaning in the instant. It reveals to us the risk and control of a singer at her most unpredictably alive.
 

I love learning terms like melisma which refer to very specific and arcane things in various fields. Linguistics is full of them, like anaphora, synecdoche, and metonymy. The rest of this passage takes an unexpected, almost Seinfeldian turn to discuss how Auto-Tune rose to prominence in North Africa.

Though Kevin Costner got dragged for playing a white savior of sorts in Hidden Figures, this is one time where he earns partial credit for fighting for the a cappella opening of Houston's cover.

Houston begins unaccompanied, as if the string section and other instruments have, like me, been stunned into silence by the quality of movement inside the filigreed pathways of her voice. Houston doesn’t stretch each word out so much as give it wings to fly around in. I and you—these brief words can last for seconds here, long enough to make sure we all know just how large they really are. The vulnerability of her naked voice ups the bravura. It’s a tightrope walk without a safety net (Auto-Tune hadn’t been invented yet). As with Cher’s Auto-Tune innovation, the record company executives were dead set against the now-famous a cappella opening. It took protests from Houston and Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner to keep it intact. (Tone deafness or outright hostility toward music as an art form may not be required to land a job as a major-label exec, but all indications suggest that they sure won’t hurt your chances.)

Learning curves sloping up and down

One of the great inefficiencies of humanity as a species is the need to re-educate every successive generation. I think of this when playing with my nieces and nephews and my friends' children. Adults have to spend so much time teaching infants and children things we've already learned, and the process of knowledge transfer is so lossy. The entire education system can be seen as a giant institution for transferring knowledge from one generation to the next, like some crude disk drive, and these days it's rising in price despite not measurably improving.

Artificial intelligences need not go through this because they don't die abruptly like humans, they can evolve continuously without hard resets. This is one of its chief advantages over human intelligence. To take a modern example, self-driving cars should only improve from here on out, and each new one we build can be as smart as the smartest self-driving car as soon as it's assembled. Every node on the network has access to the intelligence of the network.

All this human intelligence cut short by mortality is a curse, but given human nature, it is also critical to forward progress. People's views calcify, so death is a way of wiping the slate clean to make way for ideological progress. Part of why racism and sexism, to take two social ills, decline over time is simply that the racists and sexists die out.

This plays out at a corporate level, too. Companies can have both too long and too short a memory. New employees have to be taught the culture and catch up to what others before them learned so they can be as productive as possible. On the other hand, institutions can become set in their ways, less adaptive as their environments evolve. New blood can bring fresh eyes.

One form of this is institutional trauma. A company tries to enter a space, fails, and doesn't venture into that space ever again, even if the timing for entry shifts to a more favorable one. I look at a product like Google Wave and think that if Google had stuck with it, they might have built something like Slack.

Why do companies slow down as they grow larger? One reason is that in a hierarchical organizational structure, the more people and more levels you pile in, the more chances someone somewhere will say no to any idea. Bureaucracy is just institutionalized veto power growing linearly with organizational size.

One theory for why evolution gives us just enough of a lifespan to bear offspring but not stay around too long is that it reduces competition for resources for our offspring. Old timers who rise in an organization can compete for resources with new employees, but without the disadvantage of old age. Most who survive at a company have risen to the level where they have disproportionate institutional power. It's often deserved, but it's also dangerous. True disruption of a company is difficult to counter because it attacks the strongest part of your business, and that division or unit tends to be the one that has the most power in the organization.

Companies try to counter this by dividing themselves into smaller units even as they grow in the aggregate. Jeff Bezos tried localizing decision-making power at Amazon in what he called two-pizza teams (the size of the team being one that could be fed by two pizzas). Facebook acquires companies like Instagram and WhatsApp but lets them run largely independently. Google's new Alphabet org structure breaks itself into a looser coalition of entities where each division has more degrees of freedom strategically. All are attempt to keep the weight of bureaucratic middle management off of the creatives, to preserve greater dimensionality and optionality throughout the organization.

Amazon is one company which often wins just by being more patient than its competitors, playing games on a much longer time scale than most. It tends to be less susceptible to institutional trauma than most. Of course, part of this is the result of the unique ownership structure that companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have managed to pull off: ultimate decision-making power rests in the hands of the founders even as they leverage the benefits of the public market.

However, it's more than that. When Bezos was asked at Recode last year how he decided when to give up on a project, he said something striking: we give up on something when the last high judgment person in the room gives up on it.

What a brilliant heuristic. Simple and memorable. Of course, deciding who is high judgment is its own challenge, but this concept reverses the usual problem of bureaucracy, which is it takes only one person saying no to kill something. Jeff reverses that; he wants the company to be as smart on any topic as its single smartest person. 

At some point in life, it probably is rational to be that old dog who eschews new tricks. If you're going to die soon anyhow, you're more likely to just suffer the discomfort of having to adjust and then die before you can reap any awards. The corporate version of this is the concept that most executives should just squeeze the maximum profit out of their existing thinking and not bother trying to stave off disruption. It might be more energy and resource efficient to just have some of the stalwarts die off rather than shift the thinking of tens of thousands of employees, or change a culture which has evolved over decades.

The path of least cost/energy

We've passed that inflection point in the cost/quality curve of visual effects where it is almost always more cost effective now to use compositing than to use physical locations, props, and extras. Not the case yet for actors, but you can still save a lot of money on everything else. It's amazing how much of the mundane shots in almost every TV series now are just executed in a computer.

A short project that I have created that explains what is VFX and especially Digital Compositing. This project was made to showcase my skills alongside my creativity, I was responsible for all of the 2D aspect of it and supervising the team that was working on their own special skills such as 3D, Matchmove, Grading, Sound design and much more…..! Credits of who ever worked or donated his work are being showed in the end of the video so please feel free to stay and watch until the end. Special thanks & Links - CG was created and donated by Dmitriev Vasiliy: www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/mech-robot-obj/803794 SFX was donated by Bluezone Corporation: www.bluezone-corporation.com/types/sample-pack-bundle/bc-bundle-02-robot-sound-effects-download Thanks for watching! Contact Mail - pekerroy@gmail.com

This a precursor of what virtual reality will do to reality given all the shadow costs of reality. A producer ordering VFX in place of sending a crew on location is pursuing the most cost-efficient strategy. What Tyler Cowen refers to as the complacent class of people sitting at home watching Netflix on a Friday night rather than paying to go out to a crowded public place is also just cost efficient (or energy efficient) behavior.

IKEA's Billy bookcase

Now there are 60-odd million in the world, nearly one for every 100 people - not bad for a humble bookcase. 
 
In fact, so ubiquitous are they, Bloomberg uses them to compare purchasing power across the world. 
 
According to the Bloomberg Billy Bookcase Index - yes, that's a thing - they cost most in Egypt, just over $100 (£79), whereas in Slovenia you can get them for less than $40 (£31).
 

A few of the interesting stats on Ikea's Billy bookcase series.

To get as rich as Mr Kamprad has, you have to make stuff that is both cheap and acceptably good.
 

And to get even richer, you make stuff that is both cheap and the best in its class, though that's not as easy with furniture as it is with software.

IKEA is an interesting example of disruption that I haven't read as many think pieces on as the usual suspects in tech.