Not A Mystery

This is part geek time-out, and part public service announcement.

We’ve add a neat feature to our blog, and want to explain how it works. It’s now appearing on thousands of other sites and blogs, so understanding it can save you a lot of time no matter where you are if you see that “Share” link.

And as we’ve said before, we are into time saving ideas.

The service is provided by a site called AddThis and if you look in the right column on this page you will see the button that accesses their features. Although the button is labeled “Share” it does much more than that, in fact there are so many functions it’s hard to capture with a simple label.

The button gives access to over 150 different services, and that list is growing. So for example you can use the button to:

• Create a Tweet linked to a blog post directly from your Twitter account,
• eMail a link to a blog post with your choice of email clients,
• Add a blog post to Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, etc. etc.
• Create a new item in your Evernote account,
• Print the post on your printer,
• Creat a .pdf file of the post,
• And the list goes on and on…

After you click the button you will see this box which allows you to scroll thru all the available services and pick the one you want to use. (Tip: if you choose to eMail, you have the choice to use your own account at AOL, Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail which is an additional time-saver.)

That’s all there is to it, click away and give it a try.

Tip Note: If you have some time on your hands (anyone?), an excellent companion post to read is our Blog Tips on “Landing and Leaving“, which is particularly relevant when you are sharing information on any blog (not just ours).  At this point I  think an even better title for that lesson would have been “Wherever You Go, There You Are”, but what’s done is done.

We don’t usually comment on Celebrity Events, but today will be an exception.

ZURICH (AP) (Published: September 27, 2009) – Director Roman Polanski was arrested by Swiss police for possible extradition to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl, authorities said Sunday.

Polanski was flying in to receive an honorary award at the Zurich Film Festival when he was apprehended Saturday at the airport, the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement. It said U.S. authorities have sought the arrest of the 76-year-old around the world since 2005.

WTF?

The only thing missing from this famous Swiss Tool, is a Brains attachment.

In Switzerland Blades Are The New Brains

If you can’t wait and need a quick news fix, here’s a NY Times report, but much better would be to get to know the story behind the publicity. For this your documentary is “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” which was released in 2008. Leslie and I watched this several months ago and awarded it 5 Stars.

A Do Not Miss Documentary

Here’s your link for the DVD at Amazon and your link to Netflix. Both of these feature a short video preview. As I write this the Netflix version can be streamed instantly.

By-The-Way-Note: If you are a Netflix subscriber and stream ‘instant’ films, then the Roku player is highly, highly recommended. At least in our case it provided much better quality than an HP laptop (Vista) connected to a plasma display via HDMI cable; and featured a vastly superior interface. It’s $100, but worth every penny.

It’s really not about the power. But everyone thinks it is.

From the NY Times we have hand-wringing over the population of electricity gobbling gadgets.

The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

But what they forget is that the same math applies to power bricks and wires.

My Wire Wallah

Let’s take a look at the chart accompanying the Times article:

What we see is that Gadgets represent only 7% of energy consumption. But if I walk around my house and look at the electrical sockets they plug into, I come up with the following info.

1. Refrigerator – 1 plug.
2. Washer & Dryer – 1 plug each.
3. A/C and Space Heating- zero plugs.
4. Cooking and Dishwashers – zero plugs.
5. Gadgets – 30+ plugs and ‘bricks’.

Whereas the gadgets consume 7% of the energy, they take up 93% of the sockets.

At this growth rate my problem is not that they will consume too much energy, but that they will take over ALL of my electrical outlets.

Then what?

Note: If you don’t know what ‘wallah’ means, then here’s your link. Also consider these books.

From the UK Telegraph, Prince Charles is urging people to abandon their cars in favour of walking and public transport.

I guess if your name starts with “HRH“, you can offer whatever advice comes to mind.

HRH The Prince of Wales in Walking Clothes

The Prince, who has two Jaguars, two Audis, a Range Rover and still drives an Aston Martin given to him by the Queen on his 21st birthday, said developers had a duty to put public transport and the pedestrian at the heart of their housing schemes.

I like this 60th. birthday portrait so much I’m willing to cut him some slack.

Besides, he means well.

In recent posts we have recommended two books for listening:

1. Rocket Men – The Epic Story of the First Men on The Moon
2. The Billionaire’s Vinegar – The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine

So if you are wondering whether we actually read books, the answer is yes. And to prove it, here are two recommendations for your reading pleasure. Actually I read both of these on my Kindle, but that still counts as a read.

Both books are set in India, and you will discover things you never would as a tourist.

The first is “The White Tiger“ by Aravind Adiga. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

Quoting from an Amazon review by Kerry Walters:

The plot centers around Balram Halwai, a laborer born and raised in a small village utterly controlled by crooked and feudally powerful landlords. The village is located in ‘the Darkness,’ a particularly backward region of India. Balram is eventually taken to Delhi as a driver for one of the landlord’s westernized sons, Ashok. It’s in Delhi that Balram comes to the realization that there’s a new caste system at work in both India and the world, and it has only two groups: those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out.

By coincidence I was reading this book when the Mumbai attacks took place. Although The White Tiger is set in New Delhi it still provided a multi-layered backdrop for current events.

The next book, on the other hand, does take place in Mumbai. “Shantaram“ by Gregory Roberts is a monster of a book at 944 pages.

From the Amazon.com and Publisher’s Weekly reviews:

Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means “man of God’s peace,” which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence … he arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident “doctor … Linbaba’s life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

But more than all that, this will give you a feel for India that I don’t believe is available elsewhere. Everything from the side streets of Mumbai, to village life, to prison life, to mafia life, to Bollywood life. And as an additional attraction, Afganistan. To be honest, parts of the ‘autobiographical’ story might or might not be true, but there seems no doubt that the tapestry into which it’s woven is the real thing.

A friend who spends time in Mumbai every year said he will never be able to walk past the Arther Road Jail again without thinking about what is happening inside.

Read on.

Not to beat a Dead Symbol, but here’s an update on Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” sales.

The Kindle version is outselling the Hard Cover edition on Amazon’s website!

Dragged Kicking And Screaming To Profits

We’ve been following the back and forth between the publishing industry and Amazon for several months, and this latest data point should really focus some minds.

Publishers worry that Kindle, or other e-book sales, will take share from the ‘fully priced’ Hardcover edition. They should instead look to the fact that their customers are more satisfied with a choice in format. And oh, by the way, the numbers seem to indicate that they make more profit on a Kindle sale thru Amazon than a print edition.

Symbolic, eh?

“The Lost Symbol“ by Dan Brown was published a few days ago. His last book, “The DaVinci Code” has more than 81 million copies in print world wide. With books sales down about 15% this year the entire publishing industry is hoping that “The Lost Symbol” will pull consumers into bookstores and boost sales for everyone.

If you follow our blog you know we were pleased that “The Lost Symbol” was released on the Kindle reader at the same time as the print edition.

At one point Random House said they “had not made a decision” on when to release the electronic edition. It sounded like they were going to use “The Lost Symbol” as a test case for challenging Amazon’s Kindle franchise.  Yesterday a little more came to light about this book and the decision to release the Kindle version.

Random House stands to earn $30 to $35 million dollars from “The Lost Symbol”.  To put that in perspective, the world wide Random House Publishing Group made an operating profit of $29 million dollars in the first 6 months of this year.

I’d guess that Random House will listen pretty closely to what Dan Brown requests.

Dan Brown, A Group of One

And here is what was said in the WSJ  interview:

Some publishing executives thought Random House might respond [to the Kindle pricing model] by holding back the e-book publication of “The Lost Symbol” until later in the publishing cycle, creating a direct challenge to Amazon.

But Mr. Brown, interviewed in midtown Manhattan, said he didn’t want his book to be a test case.

“As an author, you want your book to be available in as many formats as possible,” Mr. Brown says. “I know that some of my readers have e-book readers, and I wanted my book available for them.” He says it was ultimately a group decision.

I’d bet that it was a Group Of One, with the initials DB.

Do you know the difference between angst and anxiety?

Here’s a quote from our Definitons page:

An airplane crashes into the side of a remote snow-covered mountain; those passengers that worry about their lives without hopes of survival only face anxiety. In contrast, those passengers who worry about their lives with hopes of survival but do not know when the rescue party will arrive face angst.

Now let me change the wording a bit:

A Financial System crashes under the weight of a collapsed housing market supported by securitized mortgages financed with huge amounts of leverage; those investors that worry about their finances without hopes of improved financial regulation only face anxiety. In contrast, those investors who worry about their finances with hopes of improved financial regulation but do not know when the Politicians will respond face angst.

On the anniversary of Lehman Brothers collapse, I’m feeling anxiety.

Forget The Angst, It's Time For Some Real Anxiety

Having just finished reading a pile of articles in financial publications I’m not really surprised to find that the consensus of observers is that regulatory reforms are currently stalled. Everyone makes it seem pretty complicated, but I actually think the reasons are quite simple:

1. Regulators don’t understand the new “financial products”. Derivatives are mathematical constructs literally created by rocket scientists. The people who sell them don’t understand them, how are the regulators going to figure them out?
2. The Players don’t want regulation, and they are paying their lobbyists big bucks to slow down the politicians. Follow the money.
3. Regulators become sympathetic to their ‘clients’. They tend to take on the same world view, and it’s not unusual for people to move back and forth between the regulated and the regulator. This phenomenon even has a name! It’s called “regulatory capture”.
4. The US has one of the most fragmented financial regulatory systems in the world. Infighting between agencies is also slowing down any move to reform because nobody wants to give up their turf.
5. The public and most politicians don’t understand, nor do they want to take the time to understand, these complex financial markets.
6. As we’ve avoided Depression 2.0 the public’s pressure on politicians to force changes on the regulatory system fades.

As Jeffry A. Frieden, professor of government at Harvard, recently said:

Policymakers and regulators must be generally immune to political pressure from the financial services industries. Reformers have to have a broad and deep understanding of the great complexity of modern finance. Central policymakers need to be willing and able to override the opposition of existing, turf-protecting, state and federal regulators. And enough people have to care, and to be paying attention, to get politicians to focus on the topic and push it to a conclusion.

What are the chances?

That’s why I’m feeling anxiety.

I just finished listening to “Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon”.

Written by Craig Nelson and read by Richard McGonagle the audible.com edition was published just in time for the 40th anniversary of our first moon landing. It is by far my favorite audible book of the many I’ve “read”.

The book contains massive amounts of detailed behind-the-scenes information about the manned space program; its history, politics, science and engineering. We get detailed oral accounts in the astronauts’ and mission controllers’ own words. The narrative takes us into the spacecraft on the journey to the moon and the descent to the lunar surface.

To put everything into context, critical design decisions are described by the managers involved. For example, how do you decide the quality level required of the suppliers who will deliver the (literally) millions of parts that made up the spacecraft? Even with a 99.9% quality requirement there would still be thousands of parts expected to fail on the mission itself.

During the actual mission the narrative makes you feel like you are sitting with the astronauts, inside Columbia and then the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) as Armstrong and Aldrin descend to the moon’s surface; while Collins orbits the moon waiting their return. Because they missed the intended landing zone by about 20 miles Armstrong had to take over manual control of the landing and finally put it down with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining.

Starting with the end of WWII and the ‘recruitment’ of German rocket scientists by the USA and Russia, the book follows the development of the US and Russian space programs and how they symbolically ‘fought‘ many battles during the Cold War.

The book finishes with an account of NASA after-the-manned-missions. How the public became blase (at best) about manned spaceflight and NASA lost its way without the tremendous focus of the lunar program. It presages the threat that the US is on the way to losing our leadership position in science and engineering as we move into the 21st Century.

One haunting image painted by Nelson is the possibility of a Chinese or Indian team of astronauts returning to Tranquility Base, taking down the American Flag and putting up their own national flag.

Some final notes.

• This book is a fantastic listen partly because of the subject matter and partly because Richard McGonagle does an outstanding reading. Therefore I highly recommend the audible.com version of the book over the printed or Kindle edition.
• If you did engineering work during the time frame of the book you will enjoy it even more than the average reader, because it will remind you of what the field was like then, as compared to now.
• If you’ve ever used a slide-rule, programmed in Fortran or were awestruck with the first hand-held electronic calculator, then you must listen to this book.

Enjoy.

Go forth and Multitask!

Timing and Location, Dominick Dunne had them both in spades during his life.

But Dunne’s sense of timing failed him at the end. He died the day after Ted Kennedy.

[The] spokesman … initially declined to confirm the death, saying the family had hoped to wait a day before making an announcement so that Mr. Dunne’s obituary would not be obscured by the coverage of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s death.

Who was Dominick Dunne anyway? Well, if you’re like me and don’t live in Hollywood, follow Celebrity Trials, or read Vanity Fair magazine, you can still watch “Dominick Dunne, After The Party” and find out.

It's All About The Stars

Leslie found this documentary (made in 2008), and we are pleased to award it 5-Stars.

Here’s a short summary of his life from the NY Times Obituary:

Dominick Dunne…gave up producing movies in midlife and reinvented himself as a best-selling author, magazine writer, television personality and reporter whose celebrity often outshone that of his subjects…”

The film is fascinating for its voyeuristic look at behind-the-scenes celebrity and Dunne’s complete openness about his life and personal shortcomings. He presumes to hold very little back, although at times it seems he is pulling a few punches, at least to this reporter. But that just makes him more human.

For more info, here’s the Wikipedia write-up on the film.

And at the end it’s nice to know that even if his timing with Kennedy was a bit off, Dunne lived long enough to see Phil Spector put behind bars for the rest of his life.

In today’s crazy world we can’t know everything, so we depend on Experts.

But it seems to me, that like other things, Expertability is being dumbed down.

Enjoy Your 15 Minutes of Expertability

A number of public figures come to mind, among them,

• Politicians
• Cable News Personalities
• Radio Talk Show Hosts

They really are experts in their chosen fields, which is what made them successful and famous. But they are not experts in some of the important issues of the day such as Economics, Health Care or the Environment. But they will talk about them and offer opinions; that’s what they get paid to do, and that’s how they earn their living.

Because there seems to be less ‘fact-checking’ on whether these folks are really experts in what they are talking about it behoves each of us to do our own sanity check on their credibility. In effect, that’s been outsourced to the listener; like checking yourself (and bags) onto a plane, and checking out your own groceries.

Is there an alternative?

Wikipedia has demonstrated that huge numbers of contributors can bring together massive amounts of timely information. It’s mostly accurate, but users must still beware. This is sometimes referred to as the Wisdom of Crowds.

Burrrr; Is It Information, Wisdom or Expert?

Many in the New Media believe that “The Widsom of Crowds” will replace many of the functions traditionally performed by real Experts.

The Wisdom of Crowds … is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that … are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox … closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts.

Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts …

But it’s still early days and there’s a lot to discover when it comes to Crowded Wisdom.

In the meantime we’ll just have to make do.

Bring on the oxes.