Author: smartpeopleiknow

The Power (and Danger) of Failure

Kevin Kelly has a short and eloquent blog posting on failure here: Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

The best presentations, the best speeches, the best advice are usually about what people learned from their failures. Steve Jobs’ legendary Stanford commencement address lifted so many hearts because he talked about his failures. A few days ago J.K. Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard that also emphasized the power of failure. It is a good read (watch or listen).

While I largely agree with this, what it doesn’t address is the mental and sometimes physical damage failure can bring. Failure is like fire: if used properly, it’s power is very beneficial. But like fire, the power of failure can be highly destructive, too.

Failure has not (visibly) damaged Jobs and Rowling. The same is not true of everyone.

Eat better or eat local? How what you eat has as much of an impact on the planet as where it comes from

For those interested in eating locally to help environmentally, you should consider this article: Do food miles matter?

Consider this quote:

“But it’s how food is produced, not how far it is transported, that matters most for global warming, according to new research published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es702969f). In fact, eating less red meat and dairy can be a more effective way to lower an average U.S. household’s food-related climate footprint than buying local food, says lead author Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University.”

It comes down to eating better and eating local are good for you and good for the planet too. But read the article: there are lots of good details in it.

The Fall of twitter (and the rise of tumblr)?

I have been a fall of twitter for sometime now, but they are having serious problems due to their architecture .
(See here Twitter Technology Blog: Twittering About Architecture). I hope they get it resolved soon, before it is too late.

I have also been a fan of tumblr for some time too. So I thought it was interesting that twitter is updating their
Twitter Status using tumblr. Perhaps more people will start using tumblr as a result. Tumblr is great and worth considering.

The use of web 2.0 in American politics

Katharine Q. Seelye of The New York Times had a good article on how Hillary Clinton — and others — are using blogs, twitter, and other approaches on the campaign trail. For example, Clinton…

“…held her first blogger-only conference call on Friday, phoning in to about 40 bloggers from the campaign trail in Oregon.

And the campaign has stepped up its use of Twitter, a social-networking service that sends short, text-based posts, to make real-time calls to arms.”

Businesses and other organizations could take lessons on how American politicians use social computing for their benefit.

P.S. For all those asking “why use twitter?”, you now have at least one (of many) answers.

Annoyed by ad spam on Facebook? Here’s how to turn it off (2008 edition)

2013 update: note, this may no longer work. I am keeping the post, but you may want to look for a more current blog posting on this topic.

You might not be able to tell from this title, Silicon Valley Users Guide: How to avoid being a Facebook shill like VC David Sze but this article tells you how to modify your facebook settings to turn off annoying ads.

Don’t worry, most people won’t. And even if they did, well don’t worry: coming up with new ways to direct advertisements to you keeps marketing folks in work.

Errol Morris and W.G. Sebald or Art and History


David Byrne has a good review of Errol Morris’s new film, Standard Operating Procedure. (David Byrne Journal: 05.03.2008: Objective Truth)

I initially was disappointed by the film, since I thought it was going to be shattering in what it revealed. I hoped it would be like Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line”. As it was, the story it told through the voices of those involved didn’t appear new or interesting. However, as I thought about it afterwards, and I considered some of the ideas that Morris has been writing about, I began to think that that wasn’t the only point of the documentary. For the documentary is also a study of the question: what does photography signify? It is a question that Morris doesn’t answer so much as explore. It’s the study of this question that makes the film interesting, more so than the (hi)story of American involvement in Abu Ghraib.

It reminded me of the reviews I read about W.G. Sebald’s book, “On the Natural History of Destruction”. Many of the harshest critics of the book appeared to take it to task solely as a work of history. But Sebald is first and foremost an artist, and in this work, as in his fiction, he is exploring ideas and themes almost independent to the (hi)story at hand. To criticize him solely on his historical qualities is to miss much of the point of the writing. Likewise, to watch Morris’s film and criticize him as if he is Seymour Hersh is to also miss much of the point of his filmmaking.

The death of captcha, and what is next

Kevin Kelly , in his blog, The Technium talks about how spammers are using artificial intelligence to defeat captcha, the hard-to-read letters you are sometimes asked to fill in when doing an online transaction.

Harder captchas could be devised, but then people may not be able to solve them, either. You could show three pictures of flowers and have someone type in “Flowers”, but eventually computers will recognize this. Even subtler forms of recognition will eventually be defeated.

We may end up with the V-K machines in Blade Runner after all.

On what is wrong with vengeance

Over at (kottke.org) is a really good review on Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article on vengeance. What struck me was this quote from Vengeance:

“Diamond argues that the New Guineans’ everyday open embrace of such a strong emotion is not necessarily a bad thing and that modern society can circumvent people’s need for vengeance, resulting in feelings of dissatisfaction that can create unbalanced emotional lives.”

At first I read that and for a moment thought: yes, vengeance could be good. Then the moment passed. I thought of Shakespeare instead. I thought of Romeo and Juliet and how much unhappiness and suffering come about as a result of vengeance. Vengeance appears to be seeking justice, but its partiality prevents it from being seen that way. What is necessary is for justice to occur, not vengeance. Vengeance is the justice of the gutter. Our culture and civilization is about getting above that, for everyone’s sake. Even the sake of those who, like the relative of Jared Diamond, lost so much.

Student “twitters” his way out of Egyptian jail at cnn.com

There’s a great story on cnn.com today about the effects and use of Twitter. From the lede:

“James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held.”

It’s a great story, and a great come back to those who think Twitter is about nothing more than endless versions of “whazzup”.

Australia, Global Warming and Hunger

I’ve been reading a number of recent news stories about recent problems with food –and especially, rice –shortages. This lead me to this fascinating article in the New York Times that gave a new (to me) perspective on the problem. I didn’t realize how much rice that Australia produces. To give you an idea, there is a story about:

“The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.”

And drought is only one factor in the loss of rice. See this article for much more: A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice

Well worth reading.

Slavery in the 21st Century

Sadly, it still exists. From the globeandmail.com:

“Former slave Adidjatou Mani Koraou, 24, poses with her baby Friday outside a court in Niamey. In a historic first, she is suing the government of Niger for failing to implement its anti-slavery laws, rekindling a row between the authorities, who deny the practice still exists, and activists, who say that Niger is home to some 800,000 slaves. Ms. Koraou was sold to a Tuareg slave trader when she was 12 for the equivalent of $543 Canadian and then sold to be the fifth wife of a traditional healer in central Niger, said Ilguilas Weila, who heads Timidria, Niger’s only local anti-slavery group.”

Faces of the living and the dead, who are one in the same


Over at the Health blog of the New York Times is a write up of an “art exhibit” in London showing Faces of Life and Death.

It is both remarkable and common. While the faces and the comments of the people are not unexpected, the overall effect of the photographs and the quotations are. You have to see it.

The photo is from Walter Schels/Wellcome Collection and shows one woman just before and just after she dies.

Heart rates and heart rate monitors


The nytimes.com has a great article on exercise, heart rates, and heart rate monitors here: The Flutter Over Heart Rate – New York Times

I am glad I read it. I have always been embarrassed about my heart rate when I run, because it gets really high. The formula of 220 – my age gives me too low a rate. In marathons I like to get it around 180, and in 5-10K I can crank it up to 200! But I always thought people would see it and say: whoa, that’s crazy! Or you are out of shape. So I kept it a secret! But when I read the article, I thought: ok, there is a wide range of possible rates, then.

I have a HRM from Polar, it’s basic (like the one above), but that’s enough to help keep me focused. If I feel tired, I will tend to slow down, and sometimes I don’t want to. The HRM helps there. But in a race, it does the opposite: it helps me keep my pace. It’s too easy to go too fast in a marathon or a half. The HRM monitor keeps me in control.

What is great about this video of Desmond Dekker and the Aces singing “The Israelites”?

Well at lest two things. One, there is the greatness of that band singing that song. And two, for those of you who miss 45s and those of you who have never seen a 45, here is your chance!

Actually, seeing 45s made me think that the process of manually playing music has an effect on how you listen to music. Then, finding music, selecting it, putting it on, putting it away…all those steps to listen to a song made you think about what yo uwere going to listen to. There was deliberation. Now there are so many songs at my fingertips, and I can easily pull them up…it changes the way I listen to music.

The difference in movie trailers from today and yesterday (1977 – Star Wars)

I came across this trailer and was struck by how slow paced and detailed it was compared to trailers nowadays. It’s hard to imagine this was a good trailer, but it must have been, to help lure people into the theatre.

I also thought: where is the voice of the GUY who does all the trailers now? 🙂 It does seem like most movie trailers now are done by the same person. It is certainly a different voice than this one.

Check out the original trailer for Star Wars and see. (Also, notice the title font for Star Wars is different).

How Do the Scams (Fake lottery winning notifications, Advance Fee Frauds, Etc) Work?

I received an unintentionally funny email today, telling me I won a two million euro prize. Woo hoo! I thought. Actually, the first thing I thought was: this is an obvious scam. But how do such scams work? Well, if you go here:

How Do Scams Work (Fake lottery winning notifications, Advance Fee Frauds, Etc)

you will get a better idea.

(Thanks to my friend Norbert for the tip)