NY Times: After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores. Tuesday’s decision means cloning technology could […]
January 14, 2008
The Game Was Completely Up
The Economist: In 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting […]
January 2, 2008
Handmeon Update
Here’s a status (promotional) update (flogging) on (of) my project (startup) to change the world, Handmeon. We got great press during the holiday season, including the Boston Globe, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and the Valley News (broken link; left here for posterity). Jeff had an epiphanette while in dialogue at GiftHub.org which we’re discussing […]
January 2, 2008
Iowa Caucus Closers
I had my hair cut today, and the stylist told me she supported Barack Obama in the NH primary. We chatted about that, and I asked her if she had considered Hillary Clinton. She said, “Well, it’s funny, because when I first heard she was running I got really excited. People came into the salon […]
January 1, 2008
MBA in Guesswork
Good quote from a commencement speech by Bruce Eckel: Management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It’s all guesswork, so if you don’t have good intuition you’ll probably make stupid decisions.
December 27, 2007
Shopping As Hero’s Quest
To complete my cultural survey, today we went to the mall. Had this been a comparative cultural survey, we would have also gone to this mall, where they have valet parking, which could be quite handy given the size of mall parking lots. Nintendo has done an amazing job marketing the apparently amazing Wii video […]
December 24, 2007
State of the Music
Wired Magazine has done us a public service by hiring David Byrne to report on the current state of the music industry. It results in two feature articles: David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music (with a striking photo!), and David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. Both […]
November 26, 2007
How the Housing Bubble Worked
If you want to cut to the chase on the “sub-prime mortgage meltdown,” or whatever we’re calling it these days, tune into this post by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong: Let’s look at the loan history on this property…. The property was purchased in January 2005 for $1,157,000. The combined first and second mortgages totalled $1,156,730 […]
October 10, 2007
Branding is Dead, part XCMXLLIV
I was thinking today that one reason branding was so important in the industrial age is that there were so many players in the chain. If you had any hope of having your “message” reach the end-user, you had to line it all up clear as a bell. And industrial organizations were so big, too. […]
October 1, 2007
What many people criticize
Adam Nagourney at the New York Times on NH’s independent voters: As a rule, they are middle and upper income, college educated, socially moderate, fiscally conservative, anti-Washington and repulsed by what many people criticize as the overly partisan atmosphere there. This is the first article I’ve read with any analysis that comes even close to […]
September 11, 2007
Apple’s .plan
In Unix culture there is the idea of the “.plan” (dot-plan) file. It lives in the user’s home directory, and is a place to write updates about your life or work. It pre-dates blogging and Twitter by nearly a hundred years, but was typically updated much less frequently than either. The id software founder and […]
July 18, 2007
What is beauty?
This Dove ad should be required viewing for anyone who has ever wondered about “manufactured beauty.” (1:30) Dig the photoshop work where they extend the neck, puff the lips, trim the shoulders, lower the eyebrows, etc. She looks totally normal at the start, and a super model at the end. Update: Sassy Pants points to […]
July 5, 2007
Toilet 2.0
If you’ve been thinking that you use too much toilet paper, the Washlet might be for you. It also claims to increase happiness. Bubblegen provides a good overview of the strategic challenge.
February 27, 2007
Compare and Contrast
Today in links: A $1,000 brownie Brûlee’s “Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis” is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is […]
February 22, 2007
Food Security
When I say that “the food supply is far more fragile than people realize,” this is what I have in mind. It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last […]
January 11, 2007
Results of Thinking Systemically
Finally found the quote I’ve been looking for: “He’s the only guy who has applied systems thinking to media,” said Paul Saffo, a consumer electronics industry consultant who is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. Paul is referring to Steve Jobs. Bonus: This is an interesting Google search.
January 11, 2007
Ryu at Dartmouth
Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org: And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere (“an ambient way to see your weather”) is […]
January 9, 2007
Completely Redefining What You Can Do
I will be one of approximately 143,215,697 people to mention this today or tomorrow, but this is as close as it gets to product-orgasm. Cell phones have sucked forever, and this is a whole new game. iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet […]
January 3, 2007
Design Is Good For Business
DETROIT, Jan. 3 — The Chrysler Group was the only Detroit carmaker to report a sales increase for December, while the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda both saw their sales grow last month, figures from the auto companies showed today. I assert Chrysler gained sales because of design, with a capital-D. Of the US automakers, […]