Niche of One

In this article about A&F struggling to keep their customers engaged the author talks about a shift - young people no longer want to run with the herd they want to be indie and unique. The comments make for interesting reading. Labels and logos taking up too much real estate on clothes is a common peeve for people. This is specially gratifying because I have been trying to get J to this line of thinking for a while.

I tell her celebrities get paid lavishly to endorse labels, regular people don't. By wearing prominent brand labels, we are allowing ourselves to be used as a free, mobile ad space for brands who are making us pay them for our trouble. Not sure if kids see it the same way, but its good to know that they are breaking free. They have better options and could be a niche on one.

Life of Flies

Interesting article on the correlation between lifelong monogamy and intelligence - in vinegar flies. But the author also discusses what this means for humans. It got me thinking about the people I know that I find interesting. Almost none of them fit the monogamous for life profile. Those that do are actually pretty boring. Their mental growth appears to have stopped at the point they first got together to become a family unit. In my limited experience, I don't see a lot of social mingling between these two types - maybe they have too little in common. Whether being interesting has a lot to do with intelligence I don't know but boring and smart don't often belong together. 

Boring does not however preclude being highly proficient or skilled in certain areas. To that end, there could be professional and financial success, being able to raise good kids and generally live a productive life. Boring, predictable, safe and stable. Not the kind of people that inspire writers to create some truly unforgettable characters. If intelligence is measured by the ability to survive and survive well, boring is just fine. But it may hardly be the life lived in full color.

Stir Crazy

I think I am going to have to shoot light up my ear canals to beat out the winter blues. J has been out of school for close to three weeks now (off and on – not continuously) thanks to the crazy winter storms that have been coming our way the last couple of months.  I enjoy her at home but it does mess my schedule up completely. I suspect we get lazy together without the early morning madness that is a school day.

Activities are canceled in the evenings because of the weather so the kid is stuck home all day – and we don’t always have a plan for her. After the novelty of snowday wore off, it started to get to us. It may have been why there has been a sharp spike in both frequency and amplitude of conflict between J and I. 

Ofcourse, we argue about everything  these days – it’s that magical age. But with three weeks of snowdays, things got just a little out of hand here.  I knew that I might be in need of help when I left a bunch of nasty notes all over her room reminding her to clean up after herself.

J responded in kind and then accused me of “harassing” her by sending her “hate mail”. DB is generally able to broker peace. He “adjudicates” by giving us each a chance to air our grievances without interruption from the other and making us both promise to correct the error of our ways. Needless to say, we both carry on business as usual. J is back to leaving her room a mess and I am back to nagging her about it. I may reconsider the "hate mail" the next time I blow up.

Buying Privacy

Reading  this NYT article about how data privacy has become a luxury good reminded me of a client I worked for some years ago. A technical architect, F was a freakishly smart – able to out-produce a dozen seasoned developers all by himself. And he made it look quite effortless. He was able to communicate well with business and operations folk too – a very rare combination in my experience. 

He  told me once that he made it a point never to use a loyalty or rewards program, usually paid cash for his groceries and if that was not enough randomized his shopping  “habits”  to confuse any algorithm that was trying to learn about him. Each trip he bought a couple of things that totally did not “fit the pattern”.  

As part of his day job he had build a very clever search and recommendation engine that was making the company a lot of money. So there was some irony in his determination to not give his own data away.  He considered his efforts a form of citizen service too – he was adding noise in the mix that was helping the rest of us who were not nearly as fanatic about our privacy.

I can see how F might someday recruit a volunteer crew of “data noise makers” to muddy the waters just like him. It is a cause many feel quite passionately about.

Story Telling

Within my group in my workplace, I am probably the closest they have to an English major this article talks about. We have a ton of smart technology people and an equally talented sales team but often the client wants to hear a story that no one can tell very well. I am able to bridge that gap somewhat and have seen it make a difference. 

I used to work with a woman who studied industrial engineering, English and psychology. She was a consummate story teller. Our team supplied her with the data points on which to base her narrative but in the end it was the story she told that truly resonated with the customer. A good story has detail and is often well researched but the art of telling it well is about using those details effectively without diminishing the emotional impact of the story itself. This is where she excelled. She made technology and analysis come to life - she helped us make the human connection to the client.

Finding the Hook

I like the idea of being able to resume in place when I fall asleep while watching a movie. If enough people use it, Netflix can learn quite a bit about what where the plot line in a movie starts to sag enough that folks generally fall asleep. They maybe able to find the secret sauce for keeping story interesting and provoke binge watching like House of Cards does. 

There is obviously a certain Scheherazade effect that is at work in a series like Cards.The  Scheherazade effect refers to the possible tactics used by ancestral women to appeal to a man's conversational skills in order to keep them around.The medium is applying the same tactic on the viewer to keep them around. 

What works well for a season's worth of episodes does not readily translate to a two hour movie but there may be things to learn from movies that make people fall asleep and those that do not.

Period of Bliss

Reading these lines by Alice Walker oddly enough reminded me of becoming pregnant with J.

Creation is really a sustained period of bliss — even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it — you didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it, you did it just the way you had to do it. And that is what makes us us.

I was transitioning from a state of imagined happiness to a reality which was a sadder one. Coming to terms with big decisions that would follow her birth - in a sense the end of the creative cycle. My need for motherhood was stronger than anything else I have experienced before or since that time. It was to be (and has been) the life force that would sustain me no matter what happened. The conventional wisdom would have been to not embark on such a journey when the fabric of my marriage was fraying so rapidly but as Walker says - I did it just the way I had to do it. And that is what makes me, me.

Leading by Art

We were at the local fine arts museum recently to see an exhibit of award winning work by local middle and high schoolers. While there were some absolute stand outs, the quality was incredibly high across the board. The age of the artists ranged from twelve to eighteen. Not all of these young people will end up pursuing a career in art or even study it past high school. Whatever their eventual line of work, this talent will only serve them well. 

Browsing through the gallery, I was thinking about J's art program in school. Each year budgets are pared just some more and the teachers are begging for any help they can get so kids have supplies to work with. There is a certain cramping of freedom and expression that comes with such hardship. So an expensive project is substituted by a cheaper one. Oil paints are postponed for now and the kids make do with watercolors and charcoal. The thwarting of creativity in the art studio may well be impacting other areas of study. The desire to delve deep into a topic maybe the equivalent of the sculpture assignment that never got done for lack of supplies. Instead a simple pen and ink drawing of the would be object was produced. A kid may similarly simplify a complex research projects - skills and habits learned in one subject are somewhat transferable to others.

Blending In

I am all for women looking their feminine best in the workplace but have to say the blinding blue of Ms Mayer's outfit made it impossible for me to focus on the content on this article. I get that she is trying to prove that being a geek is not unattractive at all. Its cool that she is color coordinated with the company logo. But that dazzling dress gets in the way of what she has to say. Instead of this being an article on business and technology it became about her dress - a dozen more pictures could have anchored a fun fashion article and I would have gladly read it. But this thing has me visually and otherwise confused. Would it be okay if a man in her place wore a something that was just as distracting ? Would that be considered being fun and relaxed for him to do instead of being oddly out of place ? 

Curated Content

The entire Wikipedia printed into a thousand books sounds like a good cultural exhibit with some ways to make it interesting for buyers. For example, giving a movie buff, a curated volume using Wikipedia content about their favorites would make for very unique and personalized gift. This is an idea that can be extended in any number of ways. Converting content directly to a book seems less interesting. 

The curation can certainly be enabled and enhanced by software. You enter the broad themes and ideas someone is interested in, create a basic framework for the book, add personal notes on things that have common associations and memories for you and the one receiving the gift, and you get a personal Wikipedia book created. It would be fun to include content from books available in the public domain as well - blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction as you combine it all. It would be an art form creating these books and those that do it really well could sell their professional services. 

Sensitivity

Reading this post about cruel words said to or about adopted children made me think of my friend D who is adopted too. She has shared a lot of heartbreaking stories about her childhood - similarly insensitive. These come from regular people who in other circumstances may not be devoid of sensitivity - certainly nothing like these heartless remarks would indicate. Makes you wonder what about an adopted child specially from a different culture or disabilities could trigger such behavior. Maybe the generosity of spirit it takes for a person to adopt such a child is well beyond the ability of the average person to comprehend. 

So they may recourse to one of two ways to deal with the information - accept that the other person is a superior human being deserving their respect and leave it at that. The other way may be deny superiority and therefore question why they would do what they did - there is a presumption of naivete if not outright stupidity. One of my former clients and his wife had adopted two kids from across the world and also had a child of their own. B once told me that some people were uncomfortable with the composition of this family - something he and his wife were unprepared to deal with when made the choice to adopt. I learned quickly that how you well you accepted that choice determined your working relationship with B - I am sure that extends well beyond the workplace too.

Purposeless Length

So good to see Clive Thompson writing again. Collision Detection has been one of my favorite blogs to read for years and I was sorry to see him slow down almost to a stop for a couple of years. In this essay about 18th century books and smartphone screens, he talks about the mandatory 300+ page length of modern day non-fiction books. 

If you’re going to charge someone $25 for a hardcover nonfiction book and do it via industrial publishing, you have to make the customers feel they’re getting $25 worth, which means the book has to be loooooong … even if the author does not possess an argument requiring 300 pages. (Thus we find so many books that are really just magazine articles gasified to fill the container.)

I could not agree more. Maybe one in twenty five non-fiction books I read has a thesis that justifies its length. Between the blurb, introduction and conclusion, the time strapped reader can get all they need from the book. The remaining 200+ pages is the gasification Thompson is talking about. A serialized essay would be a much better way to go. Each edition would stand on it's own and the sum of them all would tell a larger story. 

Meditation

Often on weekends, I am the first to wake up and come into the kitchen. A plan for the day starts to form as the coffee kicks in - starting out nebulous and then shaping into something real. Last Sunday, I found myself making a batch of muffins. While they baked I unloaded the dishwasher and for a good twenty minutes my mind was nearly empty. The aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg filled the kitchen, I noticed that the coffee was weak and the silence complete - no birdsong no barking dog next door. 

I don't know if this counts as mindfulness but it was deeply relaxing - putting the dishes away, cleaning the counter top and not needing to have a plan. But the feeling of stillness inside reminded me of lines from a William Blake poem that I first read in high school 

To see a world in a grain of sand 
And a Heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

Later in the morning when J woke up she was surprised by what was for breakfast. I made her happy in a small and unexpected way. Later we baked a second batch of muffins together - a relaxing time for both of us. The day may have shaped up very differently if I had not been able to get that quiet early morning time to myself, unhurried to accomplish anything particular.

Presentism

Lot of great ideas and thoughts in this article about what should we be worrying about. One that stood out for me was about presentism by Noga Arikha

I worry about the prospect of collective amnesia.

While access to information has never been so universal as it is now — thanks to the Internet — the total sum of knowledge of anything beyond the present seems to be dwindling among those people who came of age with the Internet. Anything beyond 1945, if then, is a messy, remote landscape; the centuries melt into each other in an insignificant magma. Famous names are flickers on a screen, their dates irrelevant, their epochs dusty. Everything is equalized.

This rings so true when I think about how J is learning history in school and her general awareness of the history. Everything she could possibly want to know about is just a click away. The grandeur or the significance of a historical event does not afford it any special recognition in what a search result about it may yield. There are no markers to indicate that a certain event is worth pausing and pondering over. And the present is all consuming. In the deluge of information each day generates, it is easy to forget all about the last year never mind the last century or beyond. 

Timescale is a hard concept to grasp if it is measured by or corelated to the amount of available information. The last year could easily overwhelm all of what can be searched about a century in the past. 

Created Chance

Reading this line in an article about what we make algorithms do for us today made me think about serendipity. As one of the commentators noted the writer is referring to predictive modeling and not an alogorthirm

The leading dating sites use mathematical formulae and computations to sort their users’ profiles into pairs, and let the magic take its probabilistically predicted course.

It does not have to be that way. A good "algorithm" backed by user preferences and data can create and gamify serendipitous encounters. So boy does not need to meet girl the staged, managed and artificial way. Instead he can encounter the ideal person in the manner that he chooses and she likes as well. A host of service providers could help orchestrate this event and monetize it as they go along. A win-win for everyone. Boy bumps into girl at coffee shop, offers to re-fill her coffee, says all the things she says she'd love to hear on the first "date" and everyone goes home happy.