Junk Science

Two bits from a good article from The Guardian on wine tasting:

More evidence that wine-tasting is influenced by context was provided by a 2008 study from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The team found that different music could boost tasters’ wine scores by 60%. Researchers discovered that a blast of Jimi Hendrix enhanced cabernet sauvignon while Kylie Minogue went well with chardonnay.

and:

Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine– one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.

The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.

Elasticity

From an interesting piece on open-electronics.org titled "The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models." Emphasis mine.

A successful hardware design – being it closed or open doesn’t matter – will be copied once successful and – as Nathan Seidle often pointed out in interviews – market advantage resides in company elasticity and in the capability to innovate rapidly a product portfolio.

Doing what you love

Miya Tokumitsu, arguing (compellingly) against "do what you love" in Slate:

Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.

Rewarding Failure

From a BBC article on Google X's policy of rewarding failure:

You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won't take risks and make breakthroughs. If you don't reward failure, people will hang on to a doomed idea for fear of the consequences. That wastes time and saps an organisation's spirit.

This was published in the New York Times Today.

Yes.

Here's the original story. Full disclosure, I did *not* read the whole thing.

Authorship

Shia Labeouf (!) writing in The New Inquiry about the future of creative writing:

Careers and canons won’t be established in traditional ways. I’m not so sure that we’ll still have careers in the same way we used to. Literary works might function the same way that memes do today on the Web, spreading like wildfire for a short period, often unsigned and unauthored, only to be supplanted by the next ripple. While the author won’t die, we might begin to view authorship in a more conceptual way: perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and distribute language-based practices.

I found this essay's discussion of the difference between literature and art/music to be really compelling. 

Markets that don't exist

Marc Andreessen, from an old (now archived) blog post titled "The only thing that matters."

Hopefully a great team also gets you a great market -- but I can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. Markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are.

David Foster Wallace

From "Present Tense."

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (the actual information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It’s a function of the fact that there are uncountably many well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. “I was attacked by a bear!” to “Goddamn bear tried to kill me!” to “That ursine juggernaut bethought to sup upon my person!” and so on [...] “Correct” English usage is, as a practical matter, a function of whom you’re talking to and how you want that person to respond — not just to your utterance but also to you.

Chris Dixon

Chris Dixon, in an old post on his blog titled "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Emphasis mine.

Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions. As Clay Shirky explains in his latest book, Wikipedia is literally a process – every day it is edited by spammers, vandals, wackos etc., yet every day the good guys make it better at a faster rate. If you had gone back to 2001 and analyzed Wikipedia as a static product it would have looked very much like a toy. The reason Wikipedia works so brilliantly are subtle design features that sculpt the torrent of user edits such that they yield a net improvement over time. Since users’ needs for encyclopedic information remains relatively steady, as long as Wikipedia got steadily better, it would eventually meet and surpass user needs.

Hardware needs this too, and more and more it's possible.

Marc Hedlund

Marc Hedlund, in an excellent post mortem on his blog titled "Why Wesabe Lost to Mint." Emphasis mine.

You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about – even or especially by the participants – are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that.  If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.

Yet more Kahneman

From "Thinking, Fast And Slow," p.124. Emphasis mine.

In an experiment conducted some years ago, real-estate agents were given an opportunity to assess the value of a house that was actually on the market. They visited the house and studied a comprehensive booklet of information that included an asking price. Half the agents saw an asking price that was substantially higher than the listed price of the house; the other half saw an asking price that was substantially lower. Each agent gave her opinion about a reasonable buying price for the house and the lowest price at which she would agree to sell the house if she owned it. The agents were then asked about the factors that had affected their judgment. Remarkably, the asking price was not one of these factors; the agents took pride in their ability to ignore it. They insisted that the listing price had no effect on their responses, but they were wrong: the anchoring effect was 41%. Indeed the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school student s with no real-estate experience, whose anchoring index was 48%. The only difference between the two groups was the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence.

Given the choice between a professional who won't admit their faults and a man-on-the-street who will, I'll take the latter every time.

A very free interpretation

In a long blog post titled "The Lay of the Land," Peter Richardson discusses the way that humans experience landscape and how to best represent that in a relief map. It's a fantastic read. Below, emphasis mine.

Every representation, in every medium, is subject to procedural artifacts and the judgements of its creators. Some artifacts are more obvious, and some judgements less expressly intentional, but all of our attempts to process and describe our surroundings must contend with these forces.

This fact echoes life in a body made of sensors, all wired to a brain – our experience is the sum of heavily-processed and filtered inputs. There are no guarantees of absolutes in the information we are exploring, and every sensor is a filter. And the more we learn about physics, the more we understand that we are afloat in a sea of statistical likelihoods, and that our ability to group sensations into a world of coherent, individual objects is a very free interpretation of the available data.

So it makes sense that we gravitate toward models. Unless you believe you have direct access to the world of pure being, models are all we’ve got. I’d like to get better at working within these constraints, and in understanding and manipulating them to our advantage.

Via Alexis Madrigal.

Yes.

I love working on projects where it’s not a given that the idea is even possible.

— Jonnie Hallman (@destroytoday) January 8, 2014

My steez.

Burritos

Craig Cannon, from his poignant 2013 recap:

I’ve found it dangerously easy to mistake industry-defined success with what I actually want, which is, as always, more burritos.

True.

Writer's Block

From Jerry Seinfeld's recent AMA: 

Q: How do you deal with writers block?

A: Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

:)

Kevin Lynch

From The Perceptual Form of the City, Lynch's classic text on urban planning and "imageability." Via Bostonography; emphasis mine.

A highly imageable city… would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable, it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He would be highly aware of his environment.

Strategy Tax

From the second of Ben Thompson's posts on Microsoft's recent reorganization. Emphasis mine.

Let’s follow the typical path: Company A makes an amazing product, finds a great market fit, and starts to make a lot of money. They IPO. They continue to grow, and the stock goes up. And then the stock stops going up, because it’s not clear how they will continue to grow. A stock’s worth, after all, is simply the discounted sum of future earnings.

And so the company looks for another avenue of growth. They diversify, maybe successfully, but now they have two products. And soon, like DuPont, they see the wisdom in having two divisions.

Of course, those divisions are certainly related in some way, and it’s inevitable that considerations are given – or dictated, from the CEO – that decisions in one divisions favor the other division whenever possible. This consideration is called a strategy tax, and it’s a hindrance to product quality. So is the inevitable competition for resources, and the increasingly divided attention of the CEO.

Batteries

From Wired's (great) recent piece, "How Apple’s Lightning-Plug Guru Reinvented Square’s Card Reader."

But ditching the battery meant more than saving space. It was also a huge step towards that simplicity Dorogusker set out to achieve from the start. “With a battery, you have to somehow connect the battery to your circuit board,” he says. “You do that with two little wires. They have to be cut to length, stripped on both ends, tinned on both ends and hand soldered to the battery and then to the board. It’s a huge amount of labor.”

In my robot door life, we were lucky enough to have someone aboard to warn us of the physical danger of lithium ion batteries; we ended up finding some very powerful lead acid batteries to do the trick instead. But we spent a *lot* of time configuring our battery pack, which was a PITA to assemble and mount. Wires suck, and batteries often require them. Avoid if possible.

Marc Barros

From his very good post, "What Can We Learn from Beyoncé?" Emphasis mine.

Having a purpose in the startup world is hard. The culture is built around ideas instead of meaning. Which is best exemplified by everyone’s two favorite questions: What do you do? and How big can this be?

Surround yourself with creators who first ask why you do it.

I've been asking this question of more and more of the folks I come into contact with when discussing a possible collaboration. I'm always surprised how few people seem to question why they're doing what they are, though I can relate - I've spent much time pursuing things for totally backwards reasons. I explored this a few months ago in relation to my experience building bikes, and have spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about how I want to address the Why of the next steps in my career. I certainly don't have it all figured out, but I definitely want to work with people who are thinking along these lines.

The Algorithms that became the Google Car

Robert Scoble, in a good post on Quora about keeping up with technology.

I saw self-driving cars in 2007 at Stanford University, for instance, and interviewed the guy who built the algorithms for what became the Google car.

This may seem non sequitur, but I think it's remarkable. It really illustrates how much software is eating the world: a car ceases to be a thing with an engine and four wheels, and instead becomes an bunch of software. 

Pretty cool.