According to Mario Livio, 6 is the lowest perfect number.
Pythagoras and his followers spent their lives riffing about numbers and geometry. They decided that a perfect number was a number that was the sum of its factors. 1 x 2 x 3 is the same as 1 + 2 + 3. In case you were interested, the next one is 28.
So what?
Exactly. They didn’t realize that they should have been working on calculus instead of messing around creating and polishing stuff that no one needed or cared about.
March 16, 2006
So, the middle-aged American tourist standing next to me at the breakfast buffet asked me what I had just been handed by the lovely cook on the line. "This is a handmade corn tortilla with huitlacoche on it," I said, eagerly anticipating digging into it. "You should try some."
Huitlacoche is a fungus that grows on corn. It’s a delicacy, and quite good. The buffet was free, part of her trip. The portion was small. She could try one by investing about six seconds of her time.
Wanna guess what she decided to do?
There’s no way in the world she could know whether or not she would like it. Zero previous experience. No danger. No cost.
But she was seeing Mexico from a bus.
She doesn’t read your blog, either.
What’s interesting, though, is that in the last few years, she is finding herself on the internets. In fact, that’s probably how she booked her trip. Stuff happens. It just takes a while, sometimes. Pass the fungus.
1. There are tons of ads featuring blonde women. Yet I didn’t see any (blonde women). What happens when you create role models that are so out of touch/out of reach?
2. The air hurts. It hurts my eyes and my nose. Just a little, but all the time. What happens when your town has air like this?
3. The best restaurant I have visited in forever: Aguila y Sol. If you come here, please go. You can thank me later.
and a bonus: nice people. Everywhere I went.
March 15, 2006
Aaron Sagray shares the real scoop about the Microsoft ipod video I blogged earlier: The iPod Observer – Now Playing – Microsoft Confirms it Originated iPod Box Parody Video.
March 14, 2006
How much do you care about authenticity?
Years ago, Bill Evans walked off stage at a jazz club… and the audience applauded. Why? Even though they weren’t going to hear the jazz great and his group that night (even though they’d paid, hired the sitter, etc.) they were applauding how real he was. If the artist didn’t want to play, that was fine with them.
Reading an auction catalog tonight, I just discovered that Gene Roddenberry designed the phaser to be a profitable children’s toy first, a Star Trek prop second. And the only reason the
Klingons had a ship is that the Enterprise model kit sold so well… They even let the model company, AMT, build the prop so that they could be sure the model sold in stores would be the same. Does that make you think anything less of Roddenberry’s universe?
Jackson Pollock painted what he wanted and died young. Andy Warhol painted what would sell… and died rich.
If I write a book or a blog post or design a web page that’s designed to spread first and inform second, do you care about my intent? It’s pretty obvious that most of the online video stuff that’s running wild online was designed to do just that–run wild. And MySpace is a traffic triumph. Not because the pages are what you or I might design, but because they were intentionally built for that sneezing teen and post-teen cohort.
When David Chase built the Sopranos, he wanted to tell a great story first, and get rich second. It was authentic in its first goal, and he accomplished his second. But when you eat at the fifth or sixth restaurant opened by a celebrity mega-chef, it’s pretty clear that the goals are reversed. Does that make the meal worse?
Is it okay to set out to serve a predictable, reliable, impersonal meal in a restaurant that costs $100 a seat?
I thought of these countless rhetorical questions when the waiter came over and said, "Sangrias for the table? They’re really good tonight!"
Are they? Are they better than on other nights? Or is this part of the script, designed to easily improve profit per seat by 30%… By selling us on the smell of authenticity, the fact that the sangrias might in fact be special, it makes it more fun to eat there (for some). I noticed on the way out that the specials were painted on the mirror over the bar… I had a fantastic time in the restaurant, because the company and the conversation were terrific. But I couldn’t help feeling like I was a little cheated because nothing felt real.
It’s that bell curve thing again. Those of us on the left, call us the authentic fringe, value intent, sometimes even more than we care about the results. The middle, the masses, they want both, that blissful combination of authenticity (even if it’s well faked, or especially if it’s well faked) and popularity. Call them the "smells authentic" masses. And there on the right is the factory fringe, the people who don’t want even a whiff of authenticity… it reminds them of risk and inconsistency. [click on the picture to make it readable].
Like Rogers’ product adoption lifecycle, products can move along this curve. Starbucks used to be just one place, way out on the fringe… Howard, the founder, got yelled at by his father-in-law for being a nutcase about coffee. And then, it moved to the right. Same thing for Emeril and Bobby Flay.
Of course, I’m letting my Authentic Fringe biases show here. The reason that the popular restaurants are so popular is because people like them!
Blogs are different than most other forms of media in one key respect: they stretch.
TV and radio confront the reality that there are only 24 hours in a day. They can’t put on more content, because there’s no down time.
Magazines and newspapers have to pay for paper, and that means ads, but there are only a finite number of people willing to pay. So the length finds a natural limit.
Billboards confront zoning realities.
Junk mail is gated by response rates.
But blogs… you can easily post 100 times a day. With a team, it might be a thousand.
This wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that in many cases, volume leads to traffic. Take a look at the top 10 blogs and you’ll notice that many of them post dozens of times a day.
Just like the marketers of Oreo (now in 19 flavors of cookies) we’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter.
RSS fatigue is already setting in. While multiple posts get you more traffic, they also make it easy to lose loyal readers.
Without friction, without a gate on the clutter, we clearly face a commons problem. Here, though, instead of people taking too much of a shared physical good because they have nothing to lose, the problem is surplus. By writing too much, too often, we’re trouncing on the attention of the commons.
Thanks to Jouvenot for inspiring this the thought, but what should we do about it?
I think the answer is subtle and simple: over time, as blogs reach the mass market, the number of new readers coming in is going to go down, and the percentage of loyal readers will increase. The loyal readers are going to matter more.
Blogs with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying "making every word count") will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.
In the meantime, though, I don’t see the world getting any quieter.
Small addendum: some have rightly pointed out that filters and tagging mean that the commons benefits from as much noise as possible… that each blogger blogs all she wants, and the good stuff gets dugg or tagged and the rest disappears.
I have no real argument with that, except that it begs the question of who’s looking through the chaff for the wheat. If someone has a blog where every single riff is a good one, you can bet that the eager beaver taggers are going to be there, waiting for the good stuff. If, on the other hand, you have a one in a thousand hit rate, the odds of your good stuff being found are small indeed. I think what I’m suggesting (not proposing… I’m not asking you to post less!) is that if you want to have a larger voice, it may pay be to be your own filter.
March 13, 2006
Thanks to Jarvis who pointed me to Dave Weinberger who pointed me to:
Ian’s Shoelace Site. I am now tying my shoes differently.
Not because the laces used to come undone (they did, but not anymore… I use method 2 now) but because the act of starting every single day doing something that feels so different is a great subconscious reminder to reject the status quo.
And an even better reminder that the chances that 4 year olds will be taught this better way any time soon is pretty tiny. Good ideas spread, but old ideas stick around.
Last week, I had dinner with a senior TV exec. He was not only not nervous about the Net, but he was uninterested in hearing about how it might be a threat. Today, Saul Hansell has a great piece in the New York Times about slivercasts and the rapidly changing landscape.
There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s right about many of these issues, but the startling thing is the huge gap between the people with the incentive and resources to take advantage of the shift and the what the market is doing.
Been there, seen that.
March 12, 2006
Brad Kozak writes about the dilemma faced by Martin guitars. How to compete against the rising tide of low-cost import guitars without hurting their brand… novel thoughts.
Ever since my early warning shot about Powerpoint, I’ve noticed an increasing tide of writing about:
a. how much people hate giving presentations
b. how bad they are at it
I just came across a super new book on the topic, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. Even if the content wasn’t good (it is) the quality of the printing is so wonderful, it’s a pleasure to hold. (found it courtesy of the insight of Richard Pachter).
Part of what Andy points out is that presentations to groups of 50 or more are usually done by people who aren’t comfortable doing them, and they’re not usually very well received.
Which led to this thought:
The best presentation might be no presentation.
If you’re going to bother to do something, you ought to do it very well indeed. Otherwise, don’t. Don’t show up. Don’t waste your time (or mine.)
"But," you say, "I have to." I have to because my boss said I do, or because I can’t make the sale without it or, best reason of all, because it’s my best chance to be in a position of authority in front of a whole bunch of prospects/influencers/investors/media, etc.
But, if you’re going to do a lousy job…
So, here’s what I’d like you to consider:
Skip straight to the part that people seem to like the best, and that you’re the best at: the Q&A.
Step 1: get a confederate (a helper, not someone from Atlanta) to sit in the audience ready with the first obviously seeded question.
Step 2: Walk onstage. No laptop.
Step 3: "Any questions?"
Step 4: The seeded question is something like: "So, Seth, what have you been up to?"
Answer it. In English. Like the person you are, not the flat, stressed, boring person you become when you have a Powerpoint under your control.
At that point, five minutes into it, you’ve told me an honest human story about why you came and what you’re up to. Now, the audience, sufficiently engaged, will happily pepper you with questions for your entire alloted time.
That’s the way the world really works off-stage. Maybe it would work for you on-stage.
March 10, 2006
