Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
My rating: 
Read in December, 2010
I had a hard time reading P&P a decade ago and failed. Retrying this time with the zombies twist made it a little more bearable but quite frankly I can't stand Austin. The only reason I read as much of it as I did this time was because I was always wondering what was originally written and intrigued with how the zombie segments were woven into the story. That said, it was not enough for me to endure to the end. As far as I can tell Austin is enamoured with "small talk" and writes about it from beginning to end. The language is interesting but the story line is mind numbing. I guess I'm just an uncultured swine.
Review: The Evolution of God
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
My rating: 
Read from December 18 to 24, 2010
Overall: a decent religious survey and contains an interesting idea that population size and globalization has caused the evolution of most (all) religions in a common direction. At times Wright is rather long winded and has a rather unnatural fascination for 'zero-sum games'. So unnnatural that I don't there there was a chapter where he did not reference it at least a half dozen times.
Wright seems to have two major thesis and one ambiguous thesis:
1) there are distinct characteristics of religion as it evolved with society. The role and purpose of the gods reflects the social evolution: hunter gather gods tends to answer why it rains, why there are no fish, why there are lots of rabbits, etc. Agrarian cultures transition to occupational gods (hunter god, haircut god, traveling god, etc) and ultimately as societies became larger and more globally focused, the role of these gods transitioned into satisfying political acuteness: it is easier to conquer by assimilating other religions than trying to rip and replace (which is the second thesis). Fundamentally, all forms of religion and god have roots in trying to explain the world around and using anthropomorphic projections to do this.
2) the abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all evolved similarly - starting from polytheism and only stumbled into monotheism. The religions of the book were not radical departures but slow evolutions. All three have evidence of synthesizing the religions around and then over time amalgamating the gods into a singular form. Over time as editorial processes occurred in the sacred texts a cohesive narrative is constructed.
His final ambiguous thesis is that the moral evolution of all religions are evolving to a common non-zero sum game. And that this common evolution is evidence for a moral designer. However he never quite commits to this generic 'god' idea but does spend a lot of time defending it. He could have skipped the last number of paragraphs and had a stronger finish.
Review: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins
My rating: 
Read from December 7 to 12, 2010
Review: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin
My rating: 
Read in December, 2010
The premise for Linchpin is excellent and sound, but I find that most of the book lacks substance and is more of a motivational ra-ra. The first 50 pages are inspirational as are the back 10. Maybe this might have served better as a series of blog posts instead of a book.
Review: Player One: What Is to Become of Us
Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland
My rating:
Read in November, 2010
Overall impression: Meh.
Coupland is good at setting the stage and introducing us to interesting characters, but just like Generation A, he has a hard time finishing the story. In fact, this book mirrors a lot of thoughts from "Generation A" that I would almost call this world a parallelquel.
The story line premis and back of the book description is interesting, but the story lacks any final punch other than to remind us of the precarious dependency that we have on oil. Even that seems to be a lost subplot.
Review: Generation A
Generation A by Douglas Coupland
My rating:
Read from June 21 to November 22, 2010
I read this book at the same time I was listening to Player One so I think I might have over done it with apocalyptic Coupland stories.
Much like Generation X, the story is about the characters and the stories they tell. The premis is interesting and the five principle characters are even more intriguing.
Alas, the momentum that the first half of the book delivers is squandered in the second half. The bee story line is discarded and ignored half way through like a dejected sub-plot that never existed. The second half of the book is really a collection of short stories from individuals in a post-bee world. However, even these sub-stories became mundane as they all seemed to have the same fatalistic and depressing punchline. Almost as if they were the same story recast with different settings.
Review: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath
My rating:
Read in November, 2010
Don’t buy a lawn mower – share one
Isn't it funny that each home owner in north america has somehow been convinced that we need to buy our own lawn mower? I bought mine right after I bought my first house. I checked out all the models. Shopped around for the best price and weighted the choice of gas v. electric v. push mower. In the end, I bought my one. After all, the lawn needed cutting!
But then, as all dutiful home owners do, I stored it in the shed, and pulled it out once a week for 45 minutes. It's kind of silly that I would spend that much money on something but only use it for so little time.
Here's my proposition - buy only one community lawn mower for all the houses on your street. One mower to share. Each person chips in a few dollars for maintenance and (gasp!) gas. When you add it up, that's a lot of money saved and one less thing to clutter your garage.
There are other benefits from sharing a lawn mower too:
- the number of lawn mowing gas engines leaking oil into the ground is reduced
- save space in the shed / garage
- you meet your neighbours
Think of all the other power tools that we could probably share amongst neighbours instead of each person buying their own!
Fixing the Usability of the Pause Button
The Pause button is broken. It's broken because you resume exactly where you left off. As more audio and video becomes available via on-demand, the usability of the pause/resume button will become more important and will become a distinguishing feature among players.
For music, where you resume the song is not very critical. However, for longer content, such as video or podcasts, the pause/resume functionality is much more important. When you resume, you often lose key plot points and generally lose time rewinding the content.
Typically, you Pause a video or audio because you are interrupted - you are switching tasks. When you return to your movie, tv show, or podcast, it takes you a few moments to get back into the frame of mind when you left off. This is called the cost of task switching. As a result you often end up having to rewinding the stream a few seconds into the past and then restarting.
Here are 5 ways to enhance the usability of the Play/Pause button:
- Paused Video and Audio content should automatically resume a few moments in the past - not at the pause position.
- The amount of automatic time shifting should be proportional to the length of the content. For example, A short podcast, should backtrack a second or two while a TV show should resume 3-5 seconds in the past. Feature length films might rewind even up to 30 seconds to a minute.
- The nearest a scene change or audio lull should factor into the auto time-shifting calculation.
- If the content is played on a computer, the Pause point should be set to when the mouse starts moving before the paused button is pressed.
- If available, the reflex time should factor into the Pause point. (eg: the time between moving the mouse over the pause button and actually clicking the pause button)
Timezones & DST Version 2.0
Timezones and Daylight Savings Time are antiquated ideas that need to be replaced. I propose that they be replaced with a new Universal Time that would synchronize the globe
Standard Time was an invention for the emerging global economy. A version 1.0 if you will. Of course it was never implemented with the order that Sr. Sanford Flemming originally envisioned. Standard Time solved these problems:
- each city had a different noon and midnight based on the local view of the sun
- communication and train schedules were complicated and convoluted
Standard Time introduced:
- 24 zones representing 15 degrees of latitude that would use a consistent time
- each zone would be exactly 1 hour different from the next
- colloquialisms such as 'noon' and 'midnight' remained with minor changes
Unfortunately, Standard Time had its own set of problems:
- confusing when a political region is divided into multiple time zones
- scheduling meetings and coordinating events are problematic since Noon is different depending on your local timezone
- Therefore timezones became organized using political boundaries instead of latitude zones causing broad inefficiencies of the use of solar time
Daylight Savings Time was finally enforced after WW2 as an attempt to reduce the use of incandescent light bulbs at night (the primary use of electricity) and ultimately maximize the sunlight for working hours.
However, DST has its own serious drawbacks:
- DST doesn't reduce electricity use but increases electricity consumption
- psychologically, people are more likely to go out in the evening if it is light after work - thus more automotive & gas consumption
- Schools and office buildings use more gas/energy to warm up in the morning because the ambient temperature is lower due to the darkness.
- DST is least efficient for central US states and Canadian provinces and benefit the East and West costs the most.
- In these central states and provinces DST is not observed causing switching costs and potential loss of productivity during the adjustment.
- Each country has its own DST rules
Ultimately DST is an inefficient attempt to recreate the solar efficiencies that local-time once had.
As we move to a more and more globally dependent economy, timezones still introduce complexity and communication hurdles when dealing with different organizational units spanning the globe. Often businesses will adopt a single timezone to communicate companywide (often choosing the timezone of the company headquarters) More importantly, we are looking for ways to optimize our daily routine to minimize utility costs. Heating big office buildings in the dark hours of the morning is less efficient than letting the sun heat them up and
To solve these problems, I propose a new Universal time. We'll call this Version 2.0 for timekeeping in a global environment. Here is what I propose for the New-Universal-Time:
- Globally adopt a single timezone for timekeeping. Ideally this would be UTC, but I'm fine with arbitrarily choosing NST too.
- Each region locally defines how to maximize solar time. For example, in Boston, the local hours of business could be 13:00 to 21:00 while in San Francisco it could be 16:30 to 00:30
Aside from the transition period, this will solve the two major problems: 1) communication consistency and 2) maximize daylight to minimize electricity/gas consumption (and minimize SAD). While each city/state/region will define their own business hours there will be a universal language to communicate the difference.
Now, when someone on the west coast proposes a meeting at 22:00 (middle of the local solar day) the person on the East will say, "sorry I can't make it, I'm putting my kids to bed then."
Of course, I realise that while the benefits might be many, getting wide spread adoption will be next to impossible. It'll likely happen right after the US adopts the metric system.
Next Generation Neilson Box – Using iSight to Track Advertising Reach
Let's be honest. The real reason that Neilson Boxes track TV watching patterns is to ultimately report Advertising reach to they people paying for the TV programs - the advertisers. Neilson reports to the stations what shows were watched and when. This data is correlated with the commercials and fancy charts are produced when the station is wooing a new advertising client.
The problem with the internet is, while we know a lot more about advertising impressions, we also know a lot less. When a commercial comes on the TV, consumers watch only the commercial. It's eyeball monopoly. When an ad is placed on a webpage, the ad is competing with the content on the page for attention. Eyes bounce over advertising with great ease.
But what if you could track a person's eye on the webpage? This would be valuable information. It would not only give feedback to the effectiveness of the placement and layout, it would also provide another valuable metric - eyeball attention.
There are two ways to track eyeball movement:
- indirect using the movement of the mouse. People read with their mouse, so just track the movements of the mouse
- Use the computer's built in iSight to track the person's eye movements on the page.
All Mac computers bought over the last few years come pre-equipped with a webcam facing the user. iSight is the colloquial name for this webcam. The webcam is present not just on Macs these days, but also on Dells, Lenovo's and most other home computers.
Why not pay users a small fee to watch them as they surf the net?
Sure it's more intrusive than a Neilson Box, but the information would be immensely valuable. Even today we don't know if the person was actually in the room when the ad played on TV. Tracking eye movement on a webpage (and correlating it to the window position and the contents of the viewport) is a relatively simple computational task. The big challenge will be getting user adoption.
Would you allow a third-party computer program to watch you as you surfed the net?
How to Save the Zune (by Conceding Defeat to the iPod)
The truth is that the Zune is not the success Microsoft hoped for. Even now there are rumors that Microsoft will look to shut down the Zune as the company tries to cut costs.
Instead of trying to beat Apple using Apple's trategy, Microsoft could beat Apply by conceding defeat. Instead of trying to build an eco system of proprietary adaptors and peripherals, Microsoft should make the Zune compatible with the ecosystem that Apple has already created. The Zune should be able to plug in and use every iPod enabled product already available.
Even if they have to pay a licensing fee to Apple, Microsoft needs to adopt the adapter standard. This will lower the cost of switching and consumers will be more willing to 'try' the Zune. Microsoft's greatest strength is embracing the existing ecosystem. This is how Microsoft won the first round of the OS wars.
Microsoft's strenth is compatibility, while Apple's strength is usability. Microsoft should bat to their strengths instead of trying to emulate the competition. As I see it, this is the only way that they can win the music player wars.
Preparing to Live Longer: Living to Eleventy-One
Over the last 50 years, the average life expectancy of a person has been increasing at a rate of 5hours per day. Tomorrow you are expected to live 5 hours longer than you were expected to live today.
Today, my life expectancy is supposed to be around 80 years of age. Once you adjust it, my average life expectancy is around 100 years. If I'm above average by even one standard of deviation I could easily expect to live to 111.
The problem with projecting life expectancy is that we don't have very many data points. The people that are dying now, are people that lived through the depression, used asbestos for their table clothes, and smoked like a chimney.
However, I'm willing to bet that the average increase in life is not a regular average, but an increasing average. Meaning, that I might very well expect to live until well past 120 years.
So what? If I can reasonably expect to live to well past 100, or 120 years old, then:
- I can't retire at age 50 or even at age 65 and have enough money to hold me out
- I should plan to work well into my late 70s
- I have another 45 years of my career ahead of me
- Retirement is not an option. I should be plan mini-retirements throughout my life now.
- While I might live longer, my risk of neurological degeneration dramatically increases! (near 100% chance)
- I should be "investing" my donations into research into Parkansans, alzheimer's, etc.
- The rate of global population growth is underestimated.
- A significant boom in the health care industry (especially palliative care) is set to boom.
Some interesting Ted Talks on the subject:
Public Transit Part 2 – Starting Fresh
I've asked before: can we fund public transit without Tickets, Tariffs, or Taxes? The obvious follow up question is: how can we reduce the cost for public transit?
The challenge for many of the old subway systems is that the technology has changed, and they are left with an infrastructure that must be maintained. For example:
- Boston, London and Toronto (to name a few) used to use coal engines. This meant that the tracks could not be enclosed in glass because the space was needed for ventilation.
- Without enclosed tracks, you can't automate the trains with robotics for safety reasons
- The ventilation system is based on the movement of the cars. Enclose the tracks and each subway stop needs to be redesigned and equipped with new HVAC systems. Very Pricey.
Unfortunately, public transit is typically built after the need is causing pain. Municipalities start with buses until they get overloaded, then they move to trolly cars, and then finally to rapid transit.
But if you were to build a new rapid transit or public transit system in a budding city, how would you build it? Here are my suggestions:
- Developers should band together and build corridors through new developments. In the short term it could be used for public parks. When the city grows, it can be resold to the city - at a premium - to make easy access to the suburbs.
- Focus on skytrains instead of underground subways. This makes it more subject to the elements, but substantially decreases in the implementation cost
- Use smaller cars of various sizes (2 person, 4, and 6 person) that are queued at each station and can be introduced into the transit system on-demand. This requires robotics and queue planning (so that empty cars are available at source stations at all times). The result is higher variable cost, and lower fixed cost.
Any other suggestions?
Virtualized Microsoft Office for Mac
Microsoft should stop developing Office for Mac and instead ship Office for Windows running on a Virtualized Windows environment on OSX.
Microsoft Office for mac is a paradox for Microsoft:
- Microsoft can't risk losing the income from Office for Mac - It's 10% of Office sales.
- Office for mac makes it easier for PC owners to switch to Mac.
- Microsoft makes money from office, regardless of whether the person is using OSX or Windows.
- Its cross platform support means 2X the cost of development
- Making sure it works consistently between OSX and Windows increases the cost substantially
- Features in Office Mac lag that of Office Windows.
- Feature adoption slows because of the lack of cross platform support - especially in enterprises.
So what should Microsoft do? Microsoft needs to get back into Virtualization.
At the same time that the Mac has risen in popularity, so has Virtualization technology. Virtualization allows you to run a different Operating System inside your primary Operating System. This way you can run Windows in OSX with very little performance loss. VMWare and Parallels are just two of many companies competing in this space. Unfortunately, Microsoft pulled its Virtual PC product for Mac several years ago.
Instead of developing a separate product called Office: Mac, Microsoft should develop one version of Office. The Mac version would simply be Office for Windows running in a virtualized environment of windows.
The benefits?
- single development cycle
- consistent user experience
- additional revenue from selling the virtualization environment as a standalone product
- Office for Mac would mysteriously runs a little slower than the Windows counterpart (because of the virtualization shim).
- The best side-effect? How do you speed up Office for mac - Use Windows.
Paying for Public Transit Without Tickets, Tariffs, and Taxes
Is there another way to pay for public transit? Could we even make it free?
There are three ways that most municipalities pay for public transit:
- Tickets - where each rider pays per trip
- Tariffs - where the people who don't use public transit pay a fee (see London, UK)
- Taxes - where everyone pays a portion whether you use the system or not
Unfortunately, public transit has a very inflexible cost structure:
- huge setup cost (sometimes >$20 million per km)
- large fixed cost - the buses and subways run on a schedule, regardless of ridership
- very low variable cost - a very small incremental cost for fuel per rider
This means that whether people use the system or not, the municipality has to pay the bills -including labour, fuel, and maintenance. Therefore, the public transit system needs to be efficient and valuable to attract the maximum number of riders.
This leads me to wonder: Are there other ways to pay for public transit other than Tickets, Tariffs and Taxes?
For example. While people pay for tickets to go to the movies, the revenue hardly flows to the movie theater - it goes straight to the producers. Instead movie theaters make their money on the value-ad, on the popcorn and soda sales.
Further, could you give away public transit for free and make money via another revenue stream? (Much like advertising to Google's free search).
These are just questions for now with no real answers. Some possible answers could include:
- targeted or focused advertising (such as forcing people to watch tv commercials)
- up-selling for cellphone or wifi coverage during the trip
- selling comfort or convenience on longer trips (such as padded chairs, etc)
- integrated restaurant ordering systems so your table is ready for you when you get to the restaurant or your pizza is waiting at your door by the time you get home
This is just the tip of the iceburg. What other ways can public transit be funded - without asking riders to pay more for each trip?
More to come.
Ideas. And lots of them. They're locked away in my head. Soon, these Ideas about life, business, technology and society will find a home here.
No filler. No Bull. Just Ideas.
Take 'em. Use 'em. Make them you're own. These Ideas are for everyone. Open to the public domain.
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