29. January 2009 by admin.

According to one of the world’s leading scientists on climate and global warming, the issue is no longer whether we will suffer from severe global warming but rather how badly.

Here’s a particularly relevant excerpt from the article:

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet’s excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years."

It’s the reality of this future that makes it imperative we educate children around the world as well as we can–not only because a strong education makes a child’s life more rich and better in general, but because the next generation will have to pick up the mess our (and past generations) have created for them.

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29. January 2009 by admin.

Here’s another one of those things that makes you wonder if what you’re reading is real or a hoax.  However, in this case, the story appears legitimate.  There is already a beetle, being developed under a DARPA research grant (DARPA is the agency, via ‘DARPAnet’ that invented the original Internet)  which has radio controls added and can be remotely manipulated via electrodes.  The idea, I guess, is that these beetles could serve as reconnaissance mechanisms on battlefields and in covert operations.  They might also, eventually, include GPS transmitters which could help in the targeting of bombs by jetfighters.

You can read the full story here.

Here’s a picture of how this works:

Of course, this is a much more important use of American taxpayers’ dollars then, say, finding a way to halt the spread of breast cancer, or reducing the infant mortality rate in the U.S.?

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14. January 2009 by admin.

I came across this interview with Buffett from 02/15/2008, and expected it to be an ode to capitalism and a defense of the (theoretical) free market system that we supposedly enjoy in the U.S.  As I read through it, though, I was struck by a number of things that Buffett said which I found fairly profound;  perhaps if they had come from an ordinary civilian they might have seemed less so, but, coming from him, they had (at least for me) a greater significance. 

Buffett is undoubtedly a very smart man, but also a wise one.  I was also struck by his perspective on how society should work. If you get a chance, you should read through the whole interview–I think you’ll find it worthwhile. 

Here are a few extracts that struck me as particularly meaningful:

Austin:

What industry will be the next growth driver in the 21st century and what do you see that supports that?

Buffett:

We don’t worry too much about that. If you’d look at the 1930s, nobody could have predicted how much the automobile and airplane would transform the world. There were 2000 car companies, but now only 3 left in the US and they are hanging on barely. It was tremendous for society, but horrible for investors. Investors would have had to not only identify the right companies, but also identify the right time. The net wealth creation in airlines since Orville Wright has been next to zero. If a capitalist had been at Kitty Hawk and shot him down, would have done us a huge favor. Or look at TV manufacturers. There are hundreds of millions of TV’s, RCA & GE used to produce them, but now there are no American manufacturers left.

If you want a great business, take Coca-Cola. The product is unchanged, they sell 1.5 billion 8 ounce servings per day 122 years later. They have a moat; if you have a castle, someone’s going to come after you.

Gillette accounts for 70% of razor sales at 80% gross margins and it is the same over time. Men don’t change much. Shaving might be the only creative thing they do, like painting the Sistine Chapel.

Snickers has been the #1 candy bar for the past 40 years. If you gave me $1 billion to knock off Snickers, I can’t do it. That’s the test of a good business. You don’t knock off Coke or Gilette. Richard Branson is a marketing genius. He came in with Virgin Cola, we’re not sure what the name means, perhaps it turns you back into one, but he couldn’t knock off Coke. We look for wide moats around great economic castles. Growth is good too, but we prefer strong economics. In the upcoming annual report I have a section titled “The Great, the Good, and the Gruesome” where I talk about these.

Emory:

How do you define happiness and what about your life makes you most happy? When you make good on an investment, do you allow yourself to enjoy that success by getting excited - and on the flip-side, when an investment turns down, do you find yourself equally disappointed - or do you try to remove emotion from your work, as much as possible?

Buffett:

I enjoy what I do, I tap dance to work every day. I work with people I love, doing what I love. The only thing I would pay to get rid of is firing people. I spend my time thinking about the future, not the past. The future is exciting. As Bertrand Russell says, “Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.” I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you. We’re all successful, intelligent, educated. To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.

I know a woman in her 80’s, a Polish Jew woman forced into a concentration camp with her family but not all of them came out. She says, “I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind; would they hide me?” If you get to be my age, or younger for that matter, and have a lot of people that would hide you, then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life. I know people on the Forbes 400 list whose children would not hide them. “He’s in the attic, he’s in the attic.” Some of them keep compensating by joining board seats or getting honorary degrees, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one will give a damn when they are gone. The most powerful force in the world is unconditional love. To horde it is a terrible mistake in life. The more you try to give it away, the more you get it back. At an individual level, it’s important to make sure that for the people that count to you, you count to them.

What if you could buy 10% of one of your classmates and their future earnings? You wouldn’t buy the ones with the highest IQ, the best grades, etc, but the most effective. You like people who are generous, go out of their way, straight shooters. Now imagine that you could short 10% of one of your classmates. This part is usually more fun as you start looking around the room. You wouldn’t choose the ones with the poorest grades. Look for people nobody wants to be around, that are obnoxious or like to take all the credit. If you have a 500 HP engine and only get 50 HP out of it, you’ll be beat by someone else that has a 300 HP engine but gets 250 HP output. The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.

 

Emory:

What do you think of aggregate infrastructure investment to stimulate the economy?

Buffett:

I think the best way to stimulate the economy is to give money to the poor. They will spend it. Don’t give it to guys like me. Infrastructure investment makes sense, but we haven’t done it in a while and it won’t do anything for the next 6-12 months. Infrastructure is not big relative to GDP. We are a consumer-driven society, spending 106% of production.

Emory:

It seems that the worldwide trend is towards lower corporate tax rates. Do you think that the US risks becoming less competitive if it maintains its current corporate tax rate?

Buffett:

Relative to GDP, government taxation is 18.5% and spending is 20%, so we borrow the balance. The national debt should not be a scary topic and the fact that it’s gone up is fine as long as it’s proportional to GDP. Where do we get that 18.5%? There’s 2.7 trillion in government revenues. 2.2 trillion comes from individuals, and less than 1% of that comes from the estate tax. 1.1 trillion comes from income taxes, with payroll taxes consisting of 900 billion, but it’s capped at the first $100,000 of salary. We want a tax system that encourages greater prosperity, but it needs to take care of the family.

We did an informal office survey by looking at the total tax footprint versus the total income. I earned 46 million and paid a tax rate of 17.5%. My rate was the lowest, the average was 33%, and my cleaning lady paid 40%. The system is tilted towards the rich. The Forbes 400 total net worth has gone from 220 billion to 1.54 trillion, an increase of 7-to-1. You see in legislature that there is lobbying carried on by the powerful over issues such as the estate tax and carried interest for private equity investments. We need to flatten income and payroll taxes, and those making under $30,000 shouldn’t be bothered.

Let’s imagine that 24 hours before you are born, a genie comes to you and tells you devise a social and economic system. The only catch is that after you designed the system, you would choose a paper from a barrel which would determine your demographics. What objectives would you want? You need to devise a system that creates prosperity. It needs to be a meritocracy, to put the right people in the right place. It needs to have a strong education system, and throw off lots of goods and services. It also needs to not discriminate against women or minorities. Even though the per capita GDP is $47,000, 20% of the population makes less than $20,000. We need to eliminate that fear of sickness or old age. A tax code is the codification of a country’s values. But you can’t kill the golden goose of prosperity.

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9. January 2009 by admin.

Britney Spears may not be entirely sane, nor is she one of the leading performers of her generation (though, I suppose if Charlize Theron could go from Playboy pictorials to Best Actress Oscar-winner, anything is possible), but, man, does she generate a lot of moolah on an annual basis: Portfolio Magazine, in this analysis, estimates she generates a combined $120,000,000 a year for various record labels, tour promoters, perfume manufacturers, etc.  Not bad for someone who literally cannot speak a sentence that I can make sense of.

This is the $120,000,000 a year woman in action:

What this says to me is what Michael Goldhaber talked about in his article on ‘The Attention Economy’ –essentially (and I’m grossly simplifying), that there are people in the public eye who attract our attention and that this attention will/is becoming the currency of the 21st Century.  No where is this more true then in the case of Britney Spears. She, like the Olsen twins, Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, etc., attracts far more attention than her work may deserve and she is able to monetize it in significant ways.

Further proof of Goldhaber’s theory is reflected in many others on thelist of most popular search terms on Yahoo for 2008 (excluding Obama, of course, who should be on the list, IMO):

1. Britney Spears (Entertainment)
2. WWE (Sports / Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama (Politics)
4. Miley Cyrus (Entertainment)
5. RuneScape (Online Game / Entertainment )
6. Jessica Alba (Entertainment)
7. Naruto (Anime / Entertainment)
8. Lindsay Lohan (Entertainment)
9. Angelina Jolie (Entertainment)
10. American Idol (TV Show /Entertainment)

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8. January 2009 by admin.

I found this quotation on the site, ConversationAgent, run by Valeria Maltoni.  It made me laugh (Ferrari builds high performance engines AND beautiful aerodynamics) so I thought I would post it for you.  It strikes me as particularly analogous to the tech industry. 

"Aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines."

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7. January 2009 by admin.

Scientists in Japan (yes, I know, yet another mention of Japanese innovation–but is it my fault that the Japanese are doing so many cool things with science and technology as we sit by and debate who should be America’s Next Top Model?) are now able to reconstruct the images inside a person’s brain and display them on a monitor.  Let me say that again–scientists can intercept images in your brain and see what you are dreaming about using a form of MRI technology. It’s currently limited to black and white, but the researchers say that as the accuracy of the technology improves over the next 10 years, they will be able to reproduce color images from your brain as well as, ultimately, reproductions of other sensory data and emotions.

The article appears in Neuron Magazine, Volume 60, Issue 5, 10 December 2008, Pages 915-929.

Here’s the abstract:

Perceptual experience consists of an enormous number of possible states. Previous fMRI studies have predicted a perceptual state by classifying brain activity into prespecified categories. Constraint-free visual image reconstruction is more challenging, as it is impractical to specify brain activity for all possible images. In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns. Binary-contrast, 10 × 10-patch images (2¹⁰⁰ possible states) were accurately reconstructed without any image prior on a single trial or volume basis by measuring brain activity only for several hundred random images. Reconstruction was also used to identify the presented image among millions of candidates. The results suggest that our approach provides an effective means to read out complex perceptual states from brain activity while discovering information representation in multivoxel patterns.

The first thing I think about when I see this research is "Oh no, we’re getting closer to ThoughtCrime police".  The next thing I think is: "wow, job interviews are going to get really interesting".  The third thing I think is: "Will people in the future get paid to sell movies of their dreams?"  Gives a whole new application for YouTube.

Every time I think something really amazing is happening, I find out something even more amazing is happening.

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7. January 2009 by admin.

Though I am very interested in technology and especially in technology that optimizes the creation of art and the enjoyment of art (video, images, audio, etc.), I am not an early adopter of technology by any means.  I didn’t buy a DVD player until they had been on the market for several years, didn’t buy a flat screen HDTV until they had been on the market for a number of years, etc. 

I finally got a Blu-ray player, the Samsung BDP-2550 for $349. You can read a CNET review here. It’s equivalent to the BDP-2500, except that it’s exclusive to Best Buy; you can buy the BDP-2500 almost anywhere else.  There are a couple of reasons I got this one in particular: a) it has the REON HQV processor in it which is like a supercomputer-on-a-chip for upsampling standard definition DVDs to close to High Definition quality–no other Blu-ray players that I know of have this processor, though it does appear in several very high-end AV receivers; b) it has an ethernet port which allows you to (if you already have a Netflix subscription like I do and have a broadband connection) stream movies directly from your Netlifx queue to your TV in real-time and c) you can stream Pandora internet radio directly from the InterWeb to your stereo.   I was able to update the firmware over the ethernet connection and it added some audio decoding and the Netflix streaming capability as part of the update.

So, do Blu-ray discs live up to the hype? No, they exceed the hype.  Rarely in consumer products of any kind, much less electronics, does this happen, in my experience.  However, if you pair a good blu-ray deck with a great TV (I have a Pioneer Elite 50" Pro 1120, which I purchased 4 years ago for more than I would like to admit), you get something which is truly beyond all reasonable expectations in improvements in quality.  It’s like you’ve been watching something through a piece of gauze (standard definition) and you don’t realize it until it’s been removed (blu-ray).

The first movies I got on Blu-ray were 2001: A Space Odyssey (also the first movie I got on DVD when I bought my first DVD player, and my favorite film) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which I raved about earlier on standard definition DVD.  Both look amazing.  However, as great as they are, they pale in comparison next to the BBC documentaries Planet Earth, The Ganges, Wild China and Galapagos (which I was able to get as a boxed-set through Amazon for $99–remember you can buy things at Amazon through the portal on this site, and I get 4% of your purchases–wouldn’t you rather give it to me than to Amazon?).  I have never seen anything better in the home.  It’s the closest thing to looking through a window that I think you can achieve on a display at this point.

Will you notice a difference? Yes, unless your vision cannot be corrected to 20/20.  Is it worth buying now vs. later?  That depends upon whether you watch DVDs (vs. watching broadcast/cable/satellite TV).  If you mainly watch TV (I don’t get any kind of broadcast signal in my home, so all I watch are DVDs and AVI files), then it’s probably not worth it.  If you watch primarily movies like I do, it’s very worth it.  Netflix rents blu-ray now, so you can watch almost all of the new releases in a far better format than previously possible.

Also, if you have sufficiently decent AV receiver and speakers, Blu-ray delivers sound quality which is audibly better than that delivered via AC3 on DVDs.  In fact, there are a number of famous musical artists, like Neil Young, who are going to release strictly audio recordings on Blu-ray because the sound quality is so much better.

The best blu-ray players at this point for under $500 (and unless you’re rich you shouldn’t pay more than that) are: PlayStation 3, Panasonic DMP-35K, and the Samsung I bought. The Panasonic is the least expensive of the three–you can get it for as little as $249. 

I’m currently watching Pan’s Labyrinth in blu-ray and it is amazing.

Let me know what you think of blu-ray once you get it.

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7. January 2009 by admin.

This is from the ‘what won’t they think of next’ department–a wearable toilet for astronauts that is being developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.  Although targeted at space explorers for obvious reasons, it doesn’t take a genius to think of many practical and hilarious applications for this. 

For instance, if you’ve ever tried to find any public restroom in downtown Berkeley, California, much less one you would want to use, you might not find a wearable toilet such a bad idea.

Think of the possibilities for software engineers at startups who don’t want to take a break from their programming, or MMORPG players who don’t want to leave their clans even temporarily or long-haul truckers who don’t want to stop their rigs for bio breaks. The possibilities are endless (no pun intended). 

Clean and easy to use, the envisioned space toilet is designed to be worn like a diaper around the astronaut’s waist at all times. Sensors detect when the user relieves him or herself, automatically activating a rear-mounted suction unit that draws the waste away from the body through tubes into a separate container. In addition to washing and drying the wearer after each use, the next-generation space toilet will incorporate features that eliminate unwanted sound and odor.

You can read the whole story here, at PinkTentacle.

In the 1950s, the Russians beat us in the race to Space…in the 2000s, the Japanese are beating us to the race to eliminate waste in Space…oh, how far we’ve fallen.

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6. January 2009 by admin.

In case you haven’t seen this (or past) Web 2.0 presentation by Mary Meeker, it’s worth checking out.  She presents a lot of good info in one deck with more cogency than most anyone else. She does these presentations every 6-7 months, and they always serve as a good update on trends in the tech space.

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